Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“It’s time,” Shahruz said, their throat and lips stretching uncomfortably around his still-unfamiliar voice. “See to the Cold Fire, sister.”
Saadet let herself smile. Al-Sepehr had entrusted her with the blood-soaked spell stones, the sacrifices meant to commence weakening the bonds that sealed the ancient fire-mountain and had since the reign of the Sorcerer-Prince. Now, she manipulated the long reins, directing the rukh down into those seething mists.
It moved uncertainly on the ground, for all its strength, picking its way blindly through fog to reach the bottom. Stones scattered from its talons as it waddled, chickenlike, down the slope. Here the air was warmer, almost comfortable. Heat soaking from the earth pushed the mists up, making it possible to see barren terrain.
When Saadet signaled it to stop, the rukh plucked hewn stone after hewn stone from the carrier pouches at its breast. It laid them one atop another to form a stone table. They had been carved and fitted according to the instructions found in grimoires of ancient Erem; the twins were not surprised to see that the rukh’s beak grew friable and rotten where she touched them. Nor were the twins surprised that the slabs fell together perfectly: the masons who had made them were probably dead by now, but while they lasted they had wrought well.
Saadet let her brother feel her sense of satisfaction, rejoicing as he echoed it. She stretched into his approval, warmed, and gave him control of the reins. It was he who guided the rukh back to the crater’s rim, though it scrabbled and fluttered the whole way. They paused there, overlooking the world, while their mist-damp hair froze in crackling serpent-strands about their face.
“For the Nameless,” she said.
She knew what he answered, though the wind of their falling snatched his words away. Lifting his hands, urging the rukh to drop from the parapet into flight, he cried out, “For the world!”
* * *
It was not the Wizard Hong’s first execution, nor even his first burning. But it was the first one where he had stood in wizard’s weeds behind an empress, bearing witness to the execution of her junior husband, with her senior husband painstakingly expressionless beyond.
Flanked by attendants and guards, Emperor Songtsan wore the funeral white and crimson his senior wife had eschewed. The crown rested on his head, a latticework circlet carved from a single round of translucent green-gold crystals embedded in iron-gray matrix. Not just iron-gray, Hong-la knew: iron, most simply, studded as thickly as currants in a cake with peridot and olivine. The Bstangpo’s crown was carved from a piece of a skystone, and between material and craftsmanship it hummed with enough hoarded
otherwise
strength to make a wizard’s skin tingle.
The pyre had been raised in the square before the palace, constructed of seasoned sandalwood and cedar as befitted a prince of the empire. Beyond, spray rose above the tossing river as it leapt between stones. Hong-la had been hearing the noise of the emperor’s subjects arriving to witness the execution for hours now. It rose into the windows of the Black Palace, mingling with the river’s roar and hiss, while he wasted the afternoon dancing attendance upon the empress and her women—and seeing to their entertainments.
Now he stood above that crowd on a balcony with the family and executors of the condemned, and wondered how many of the commoners below came to rejoice in the suffering of one of the ruling class, for a change. Pestilence—or infestation—aside, there were hundreds in the square. There might have been thousands, were it not for the demonspawn.
Most of the crowd wore ghost white—or “white,” anyway, some scrap of natural fabric bleached as pale as they could make it with stale urine or stranger concoctions—but Hong-la wasn’t the sort to be fooled by a public face of mourning. Oh, some would feel pity for the doomed prince, he was sure. And some would feel kinship to him, no matter how wretched their own status, because if one thing about human nature was universally true, it was that there was always somebody who was willing to support an oligarch in contravention of his own best interests. But there were plenty in the crowd who bore the marks of the law’s draconian intervention in their lives: a man with his lips severed there, a woman wearing a hook in place of her right hand here. And those—or at least many of those—would be here to watch a prince burn, and imagine for an afternoon that someday it might be all princes.
Barriers and soldiers kept the crowd at a distance that Hong-la estimated might be safe, once the flames rose; it would not be comfortable. He guessed he would feel the heat even here, on the palace balcony, and half-pitied the courtiers in their endless layers of robes.
And the emperor? Hong-la watched Songtsan-tsa from the corner of his eye, noticing the gray, set face and the lift of the emperor’s chin.
A man who would burn his own brother might deserve to feel the heat of those flames. But given Songtsan’s expression, Hong-la suddenly wondered if perhaps he actually believed his brother guilty of the murder of their mother. If that was so, it would mean that Songtsan had not, as Hong-la had assumed, poisoned the dowager himself and hung the frame around Tsansong.
And that … was politically interesting.
The empress, by contrast, appeared utterly cool and sorrowful in the colors of a gloaming sky, as if she had performed her mourning already. Either she believed in her junior husband’s guilt or she was a consummate actress.
Among all that white splashed with red, she—and, Hong-la assumed, he himself—stood out like ravens in a crowd of doves.
She leaned sideways for a word against her senior husband’s ear. The wizard turned away.
The sun had already drifted below the shoulders of the mountains, leaving the city below still brightly lit, though indirectly now. Within the embrace of the Steles of the Sky, twilight was a lingering affair. Hong-la could still make out the silhouettes of several hawks circling against the blue twilight. One soared high enough that the last rays of the sun illuminated its pale belly.
The imperial company had not been summoned to the balcony until preparations for the execution were complete. Hong-la did not have long to wait before a surge in the crowd below alerted him—and the others—that events were proceeding. Imperial guards with their splinted armor bound in white cords came forth from the palace courtyard, lining the route left open for them by the barricading soldiers with another rank of bodies, three deep. They must have nearly concealed the next cadre of guards from the eyes of the crowd, and though Hong-la’s view from the high balcony was unobstructed, he could not imagine that anyone on the ground could clearly see the doomed prince.
Tsansong walked calmly in the midst of his killers, his head high and his hands unbound. He wore green, the shade of jade and early summer, a leafy iridescence visible even from this distance giving evidence of expensive imported silks. Cries rose from the crowd—jeering, an echoing hiss of half a thousand angry voices that rumbled in the cavity of Hong-la’s belly like the wrath of dragons—but the prince did not respond. It could have been the smoke of the torches that left Hong-la’s eyes burning. He thought rather it was exhaustion.
Tsansong’s executioners paralleled him inside the hollow box of guardsmen. A common criminal mounting the scaffold would have been pelted with dung and rotten food, but the soldiers must have searched the crowd before allowing them to assemble. No foul missiles arched through the air now, and Tsansong-tsa reached the pyre unsullied.
The guards peeled away then, in precise formation and lockstep surrounding the square base of the latticed pyre. Tsansong did not check his step, though he ducked his head a little as he climbed. There must be steps built into the pyre, because he ascended smoothly, and the executioners followed.
The wood looked seasoned and dry. It would burn with little smoke to hasten the prince’s end and ease his suffering. Hong-la wondered if Songtsan-tsa would have arranged for his brother to be garroted before the torches were applied.
Four guards followed Tsansong up the back of the pyre. While he had been accorded the dignity of walking to his execution, his wrists were now locked to a chain at his waist. Another chain trailed behind him, where it was controlled by two of the executioners. Anyone who faced burning might be expected to seek a cleaner death by fighting his guards—but Tsansong’s composed dignity made Hong-la suspect either that he had been promised a garroting if he behaved or that he was determined to preserve as much face, dignity, and honor as possible.
The executioners backed him against the upright post and encircled him, winding the chain about his torso six times before securing it at the back. The prince bore it proudly, his eyes raised to the balcony upon which Hong-la and the imperial family stood. From the hushed tension in the crowd, the way they stood pressed together, their hands upraised to cushion their bodies from those of their neighbors, Hong-la guessed that it must have appeared from below as if Tsansong were staring at his brother. But Hong-la had the better vantage and could read more accurately the angle of Tsansong’s gaze.
He was staring at the empress, his wife.
The executioners withdrew. They had not been unnecessarily rough, and one placed a hand on Tsansong’s shoulder before he walked down the steps. A shaman passed them, ascending, the bells trimming his raiment shimmering with every movement. Hong-la swallowed to ease a dry throat, blinked to ease eyes dry with exhaustion. He might as well have dragged handfuls of sand across the tissues. It seemed there would be no mercy granted Tsansong after all.
The shaman blessed the prince; the prince did not acknowledge him, or the six small white stones daubed with red that he placed around the prince’s feet. Or the joss sticks—trailing banners of scent that Hong-la could only detect at this distance because of those selfsame powers of suggestion so often useful to the manipulations of wizards—that he thrust into the bundled wood between them. That seemed an unwarranted cruelty to Hong-la—smoke in anticipation of the smoke to come—but this was not his tribe, and these were not his customs.
There was a moment when Tsansong might have spoken. He seemed from the lift of his shoulders to take a breath, though the distance was too great to be sure. Those same four executioners came forward with torches. They stood at attention, their stations each corner of the pyramidal pyre.
With a glance at Empress Yangchen, Emperor Songtsan raised his hand. The empress did not seem to notice his regard. She had eyes only for her younger husband, who stood like a blade in the spiral of his chains. Her hands tightened on the balcony railing, though her face smoothed—as expressionless as it had earlier failed to remain.
The emperor’s hand fell.
As did the torches.
As did … a shadow, blurring from the height of mountaintops with the speed of a stooping falcon.
The pyre must have been soaked in a flammable fluid, because the flames caught instantly and leapt upward, whooshing over the surfaces in a reverse cataract. The blaze roared toward its apex—and then was knocked flat by the snapped-open downbeat of enormous wings, as something vast and dark filled the square below as if it had apparated in. The buffet of wind knocked Hong-la back a step. He had a confused perception of feathers, of a human-seeming figure entirely clothed in white except for an indigo head wrap perched between gigantic pinions, of the wave of sharply heated air that blew the petaled skirts of his black wizard’s coat between his legs.
The feathers snapped down again and the bird was gone, lofted on heaving wingbeats. The flames of the pyre rebounded, higher and brighter, slamming closed over the space where the stake to which Tsansong was chained had stood and stood no more.
Faintly, Hong-la thought he heard a rising sound, blown away by the wind and the cries of the crowd—only now reacting. A sound that could have been laughter, or could have been a scream.
* * *
The snatch was as unexpected and deft as the twins could have wished, the rukh striking from above and lifting the stake—and the chained prince—clear of the flames in a fortuitous instant. Now he dangled by his shackles from the pole in the rukh’s talons, the great bird laboring not at all. She could carry off an elephant—and her killing stoop could snap the spine of an Indrik-zver. The weight of two moderately sized people was nothing to her.
The rukh’s wingtips brushed tile roofs; its long neck strained and bobbed like that of a rising goose. Its musculature surged beneath the saddle. The twins raised the third rein, urging the rukh into its steepest ascent. Saadet sang encouragement, aware of her brother’s amusement that she would so cosset and chivvy a thing that had no choice but to serve. But would not even a slave work harder for a kind master?
Upon the thinning air they rose. The rukh labored now—not from exertion but from the suffocation of altitude. The twins felt the sting of cold, insufficient air in pained lungs. The chained prince, swinging below, must be gasping and freezing—but he had been born to the Steles, and the twins believed he would bear the deprivation well.
Tsarepheth was a sinuous line of shimmering lights behind them. The elegant cone of the Cold Fire rose to vanish in clouds that still caught a shadowy edge of day. The twins lofted into those concealing mists, lost except for the wingbeats of the rukh, the occasional creak of the twists of chain in which the prince hung.
They broke from clouds into twilight, the Cold Fire’s sharp black rim rising like a stone circle from a misty sea. It was matched on the far side of a fog-filled chasm by the ragged peak of the Island-in-the-Mists, which dwarfed even the mighty volcano.
The twins guided their mount toward the Cold Fire, bringing the rukh down gently. It had been trained to land carefully with quarry—or passengers—in its claws. It settled between wing strokes that curled clouds at its feather tips, balancing at last on one foot as the other held the stake upright. The prince did not scream; it would be a pity if he had been killed in the rescue.
The twins uncoiled the saddle ladder and slid down it without touching the rungs.