The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1) Read online

  Gyaltsen spent some time examining the table, with its schematics of armies and troops, which aides had set up in preparation for the royal meeting. He rehearsed his Five Comets offensive—adapted from the Gardener strategists’ Three Comets, a technique developed to oppose an army of invasion—and could detect no flaws in the conception.

  He then spent some time in contemplation of the matter of the Undersecretary. Both insult and threat were clear enough; the question was what action the huge mandarin’s master had expected to provoke—for the mandarin himself, though subtle in an artless way, seemed passing unlikely to be the author of whatever plan he now implemented. Gyaltsen, for his part, prided himself on a reputation that balanced ferocity with prudence, and, more, a history of action to support such a reputation. It seemed implausible that anyone would think to provoke immoderate reaction from him, nor yet that he would take a threat as anything other than a piece of relevant intelligence.

  The bolt turned in the mortise; a shaft of light and noise breached the wall. Gyaltsen turned to see Mother-of-Daughters, whom he must of course call Queen Pema, at the door.

  “My apologies, General,” said Mother-of-Daughters. “The Regent and I betimes would meet here, when I was worried about the King’s siege. It comforted me to be shown his understanding of maneuver. Although, of course, most of those maneuvers were not of his origination.”

  “Nor should they have been,” said the General. “Your once-husband had higher concerns, or thought he did. He apprehended well my humble stratagems, which is all a King could be obliged to do.”

  “Higher concerns,” said Mother-of-Daughters. “Those are what bring me to this room, Gyaltsen—if I may be familiar.” The General nodded his assent. “Can you break through to free the King? Or will this Pretender hem him in until the Priestkiller Worm has sated his appetites on the periphery of Uä and turns his talons to the Great South Plain?”

  “I can break the siege,” said Gyaltsen. “It has always been a possibility. But the harvest was good, and the soldiery not fully refreshed from the King’s bid. We thought to see whether winter would do our work for us.”

  “Has it?”

  “It has not been idle. But the Pretender has friends in the provinces, and seems well supplied with basic logistical sorcery. Our well poisonings and food thefts have not had much effect.” Gyaltsen reached over to a region of the foothills and pressed his forefinger on the token of a tower, spinning it on its base like a top. “And the Glib Ape has a will of steel. His aspect does not betray his true footing. Some clever strategists fall in love with deceit, and become predictable: Their apparent intentions are always the opposite of their true ones. But with the Ape, I can only rely on good generalship, and try to make him do what I would do if I knew what he knew. Luckily, our spies make this an easier project than it might be.”

  “How long,” said the Queen, “in your estimation, will it take?”

  “That depends on the will of the King,” said Gyaltsen, more bluntly than he meant. “Have you some urgent business in the provinces?”

  “My eldest is gone,” said Mother-of-Daughters. “She has been for some time. I know where she went; generals are not the only ones with spies. I planned to beg her not to go, but I dithered too long and she left. And now the First Blight comes from a cave in a ditch in Degyen, and she is alone.”

  Gyaltsen had, in truth, been listening to Mother-of-Daughters with only half an ear—for, though we might forgive him for it in light of his fate, he was not accustomed to listening to women, never having married or raised a daughter and never hearing the contributions of a woman in a professional capacity. But this disposition toward neglect, noxious though it was, was nonetheless untethered to any deficit of goodwill or concern, and the mention of the former Princess in danger captured all his attention. “Has she fled to Imja?” he said. Mother-of-Daughters’ face gave all the response that was needed. “The Red and White, why?”

  “Her suitor was awarded a stipend from the University of Heavenly Ordnance,” she said. “He has gone to study and be with his family, and taken her with him.”

  “You said she was alone.” The contempt in Mother-of-Daughters’ gaze withered that line of inquiry on the very vine of Gyaltsen’s thought. “How did they escape the Pretender’s army?”

  “For weeks, I did not know if they did,” said Mother-of-Daughters. “I have just had news from a Green Morning brother out of Imja, one of their master mountain guides. He took them over the Cradle and out to Pongyo Gorge. They were buried in a snowcrash on the far side for an hour, and she lost the small finger of her left hand, but both are well.” She blinked once, then again. “But for the huge moths that must carpet the Gorge like rotting snowflakes, and the Priestkiller Worm.”

  “My Queen,” said Gyaltsen, “I would not stoop to estimate the anguish that your concern for the Lady Sonam must cause you. But you cannot think to make the voyage without a retinue. The puissance of a lady of the court—once senior wife to a King, no doubt, but a King no longer, and demoted by the man on the Orchid Throne—cannot marshal the sort of force that moves Worms and other demons. Here, you armor yourself in respect; hard men would lay down their lives for you, and I would fight to be the first to claim the privilege. But in Imja, where you are not known… you would leave your armor behind, my Lady. And, myself, I would not venture to guess whether the Duke or the Worm has the longer fangs.”

  Mother-of-Daughters smiled, but it was a brittle smile that did not reach the eyes. “That is a solicitous admonition, General, and I appreciate its spirit if not its content. I will be protected; the Green Morning guide has agreed to take me and an escort, though the First Blight has rather escalated the fee. And I have other, useful associations. The issue is only this: The guide’s service to my daughter was undertaken on furlough. Now he has returned to duty.”

  “Ah,” said Gyaltsen. “My Queen, I know the man of whom you speak, and you must believe me when I say I wish I had not let him go free to do this thing. But I cannot release a mountain man from the ranks. Not now, when the Ape and I squabble for position in the foothills.”

  “I will not require his services all the way to Imja,” said Mother-of-Daughters, “merely to the other side of the Cradle. My escort will provide all additional assistance.”

  “My Lady,” said Gyaltsen regretfully, “the duration of your need is immaterial—however short the time, we cannot spare it.”

  Mother-of-Daughters walked to the table, surveying the scene. “The King is not even here. How do you know he intends to break the siege, even if you offer him the hammer?”

  “That is none of my affair.”

  “I have heard enough about men’s affairs,” said Mother-of-Daughters. “Give the order, General.”

  Gyaltsen opened his mouth to speak, but the words died on his tongue. He leaned his forehead on his thumb and forefinger, wrinkling the skin of his forehead, pushing the flesh over his cheekbone almost into his eye.

  “I’ll show myself out,” said Mother-of-Daughters, and did so.

  There were errands enough to occupy Gyaltsen the rest of the day—a stop at the Logistics Bureau, an inspection of the parapets, a Green Morning brother found dead outside the Wind Horse Wing. All was quiet on the parapets, though there were columns of black smoke from new farm fires, and the survivors of those fires lined up at the Tiger Gate. The streets were mostly free of moth carcasses, though their wing-dust had rendered the cobblestones ghostly, and uncertain in their grip on the boot soles. He did not visit the Bat Gate. He had been told by more than one man that his life was worth little there; and although he did not plan to put up with such insubordination from the Versicolor Guard for long, he would allow their grief and anger time to bleed away. It seemed all the Lama’s forces had lost brothers at the massacre on the Pavilion. That those brothers evidently intended a massacre of their own would not salve the survivors’ pain—not yet, if ever. Gyaltsen was glad that the vintner’s daughter and her côterie had fl
ed; the girl had not meant to start a blood feud, nor could she have avoided it, and Gyaltsen would have hated to arrest his friends. The huge Green Morning brother with the rifle, well, that was another matter. He had put more than one bullet through a guardsman’s skull at range, and he was rapacious in his other appetites—or so the telling held. His sacrifice might have helped heal the rift between the Guard corps, had it come to that. But he was gone; and if it was in defense of the vintner’s daughter that he had bloodied the Pavilion, well, perhaps he deserved better than sacrifice.

  The Green Morning brother’s body would have been a police matter anywhere but the Orchid Palace, and anywhere but the Orchid Palace the police would have ignored it, for Green Morning brothers die with inexhaustible gusto, in all places and manners, and rarely by agencies they do not invite. But there was no evidence of battery, nor yet of poison—and now, having cluttered and scented the Resting Place Between Heaven and Earth Pavilion with the fetishes and censers of his divinations, the King’s Lama himself had ruled out magic.

  The man had been one Lin Ormog, styled the Cold Water Salmon for his ruddy complexion; as the local onomast of the Green Morning had it, it was only after taking this style that he had taught himself to swim upstream for long distances on few, prodigious breaths. An obscure boxer who plied his talents in strange but lucrative mercenary enterprises on Uä’s periphery, he was barely known in Rassha—and now he was dead by means unknown, which compounded Gyaltsen’s unhappiness.

  Gyaltsen left the scene before the King’s Lama, but he did not go far, and managed to intercept the brothers who had come for the corpse. “Do you know a sorcerer who can detect the trace of deadly magic?” he said.

  “Not one better than the King’s Lama,” the onomast replied.

  “Of course not. Well, find the best you know, and submit your brother’s remains to his inspection. The crown will pay a quarter again the usual fee if he is brought to me with evidence of his determination.”

  “A third again,” said the Green Morning onomast.

  “A fifth again,” said Gyaltsen, “and if you dicker once more, the Cerulean Sword will have the man’s name from you for no cost but your greedy blood.” From its baldric on Gyaltsen’s back, the Cerulean Sword emitted a muffled yap and squirmed with palpable impatience.

  “A fifth again, then,” said the onomast, and though he quavered in neither form nor voice, nonetheless Gyaltsen could detect the traces of defeat. “Since it is the crown, and we are loyal.”

  A fifth again because that is where I set the price, Gyaltsen nearly said, but let it go.

  At this point, the sun was lower in the sky and the day was cooling, and Gyaltsen went to the Afternoon Courtyard to watch the King practice at the Rigors. But, although the sun was at the perfect point to throw a soft light on the courtyard and infuse it with a pleasant warmth, there was no one there—no King, no advisors, no lamas, no masters of the Rigors. Even the usual audience of commoners had dissipated. But, still, the light was perfect, the temperature exquisite, and the primrose and gentian of the peripheral garden just beginning to breach their buds. Gyaltsen took a brief tour of the courtyard, looking up into the corridors that framed it—one in the Wind Horse Wing, two in the Imja Wing, one in the Garden Wing. The Dawn and Twilight courtyards, it occurred to him, were by necessity at the palace’s periphery, that the sun could be seen the very moment it quested or sank below the mountains. The Noon courtyard was, like the Afternoon, nested in among the corridors, but within the City Wing. Only from the Afternoon Courtyard could so many faces of the palace be seen at once.

  A mark on the flagstones caught his eye at the center of the Afternoon Courtyard. Only as he stepped toward it did he remember the marks’ provenance (for there was more than one). They were strokes cut in the stone, all but one parallel, each fascinatingly different: The first straight and wide, the second shallow and wavering, the third delivered with almost machine precision; the fourth bowed out, almost a crescent moon, and charred black at the points; the fifth longer than the rest and wider, the sixth calligraphically tapered, the seventh deep-bitten but terse. The eighth was strong but wild, slightly aslant to the others, and a hairline crack extended it to the north edge of the flagstone.

  All were familiar, even that eighth. It was a new stroke, cross-cutting them, that had caught Gyaltsen’s eye. That ninth stroke was slender but as deep as any of the others, its path sinuous, starting well before its cross-strokes and ending well beyond them. The end nearest Gyaltsen had cut into some small deposit of a glittering mineral in the stone, and the afternoon sun flashed briefly in it, like a diamond.

  The husbandry of livestock

  etten had thought to cross Dhakamma by the route direct: follow the Road of Reason to Red Tenshing’s Road, barely skirting Dhaka, the province capital, on a bypass route known as the Footsore Corridor. The proposal sat uneasy with Datang. The closer they drew to the Road of Reason, the more she was nagged by a ringing, as of tin chimes, in her ears, which no amount of head-shaking or ignoring seemed to cure. At last, she spied a footpath whose width and trajectory struck in her mind a note so true that the ringing could not stand against it. Netten was skeptical of the rerouting, which Datang could only defend in vague terms, citing the success of her journey to Rassha on ill-favored trails and byways rather than the prestigious roads from which epics and operas took their names. But Lin Yongten observed that the footpath would, if it persisted for an hour’s walk or perhaps two, deliver the four fellow-armsmen to the frog-infested Stream of Twilight Melody, from which he had once drunk (and, it must be admitted, eaten) as a young campaigner. That stream could be followed west to the Road of Indigestible Lin, named for a Green Morning brother whose reputation is now lost to time, and thence to the Road of the Opal Hills, which ran on a southerly course well past Dhaka; in exchange for a covering a small amount of rough ground, they could gain hours, perhaps a half-day. Netten seemed prepared to engage this objection on the merits, but before he could begin, Lin Gyat solemnly admonished him that the wisdom of the moon must not be gainsaid—and, smiling, the ex-King conceded, and the ringing in Datang’s ears faded.

  The view of Shigya from the Opal Hills, some hours later, made her grateful for that ringing. There were fires, more than there should have been on a damp spring morning, and pilgrims streamed like ants away from the city on every road. “That is unenterprising,” said Lin Gyat when his attention was called to it. “Civil unrest affords rich opportunities for plunder. I have never eaten better than I ate during the riots after the Lotus Fragrance Father was killed.” He frowned. “Though it did swiftly grow tricky to find wine.”

  “What do you imagine has happened?” Lin Yongten asked Netten.

  “Dhakamma has always been plagued by cults—not dissimilar to the cult of the Lotus Fragrance Father in Degyen, on whose career my father kept me closely apprised. But the cults of Dhakamma are more forceful than those of Degyen, and the local theologies rather more single-minded. Where we know that the Blackmother underwrites the power of women in all forms, their Black Deity is preoccupied with death. And she prefers great deaths—the death of the world, the death of time.”

  “Where will they go?” said Datang. “The country cannot have harvest enough to feed them—it is nearly planting season, the silos are empty.”

  “Some of them will live off the land, for a time,” said Lin Yongten.

  “If by ‘some’ you mean ‘not all,’” said Datang, “then, yes, we agree.”

  “Well,” said Lin Yongten, “some of those who cannot live off the land will rob others. Some will no doubt emigrate to cities with less fraught religious climes.”

  “And the rest?”

  “The Lion Rider, Left Hand,” said Lin Yongten, “how many improbable salvations must I invent? You and I both know the answer. The Worm’s business is killing; are you surprised it has gotten an early start?” He looked to Netten, not happily. “That is why we are on the road.”

  “I know
it,” said Datang. “I only wanted you to say it.”

  “Why should I say it? It is plain as the day.”

  “I think on that Colonel Lamto from time to time,” said Datang. “His fate is as plain as that of those refugees, if not plainer, and there is less that can be done for him, but I think on him. The dead should not be forgotten, not while anyone lives who knew them.”

  “They are not,” said Netten. “The Thousand Arm Deity remembers all men, and will never die.”

  Lin Yongten smirked. “I think that is a more facile solution than the Left Hand intended.”

  “There is no ‘solution’ to starving children,” said Datang.

  “What,” said Lin Gyat, “can they not be fed?”

  To hear the question put so plainly sent a pall over the other three, and the conversation faded.

  The Road of the Opal Hills gave way to the Road of Gentians and then the Road of Unstinting Application. Toward nightfall, they drew up on a farm—a small homestead on a creek, with a chicken coop, a few rows of berry bushes, and two fields, one fenced, in which stood a dzo calf and its underfed-looking mother. In the other field, a farmer sat atop a smoke-belching tractor; even in the dwindling light, Datang caught sight of a simple mouldboard plow propped up on the fence. Netten led the three up to the farmhouse at a slow walk, waving down the plowman as soon as he could see them. The plowman waved back but continued his work. The farmhouse was candlelit, and figures could be seen moving around in it, but no one came to the door when the four pulled up and dismounted. At last, the plowman jumped off his tractor, covered it with an irregular tarpaulin, and approached. When he was close enough for discourse, he made the freeman’s abasement to several strangers of equal rank; they all replied in kind, though using the military flourish.

  “Two brothers of the gallant fraternity, a hairy Grasslander, and a woman,” he said. “You do not hail from Shigya, I surmise.”