Chapter Thirty-one

IN HER SERPENT form the false Lady Chaiujin left the comfort of her nest for the grassy surface. Great Moon Lun had set, but Little Sun had not yet risen; she moved by starlight too pale to aid a human eye, and the vibration of the air, which she sensed with her flicking tongue. Wrapped around her green scales she wore the golden thread, with the fragment of smooth round jade balanced on her back.

Once that fragment had formed the bottom of a drinking bowl, the match to a wedding cup carried by the god-king Llesho. At the bottom she had incised her image, a coiled rune that tied her demon soul to his more godlike one. He’d used her badly in his war against the demon-king, but that was over now. The cup was broken, her mark carved in skin instead of jade. A new war began; if she moved the stones on the board just so, she might go home or, barring that, place on the dais of the khan the son now growing in the egg she carried. What that child would be she did not know. Already, however, she felt the power of his demon kind stir within her womb.

But first she must remove the obstacles to his ascendancy who littered the ger-tent palace: the khan’s heir, and the khan. Then Qutula, her lover, must die to make way for his own demon son. She thought perhaps she would eat him when the time came, and feed bits of him to his son, to give him strength in the nest. And, of course, the girl who stood to defend the heir, and who might produce her own offspring of power to contest the dais with Qutula’s son—first, she must be rid of the girl.

She had come to the place she had intended and, hidden by the darkness, returned to human form. Around her the painstakingly slow process of rebuilding, stone by stone, hand by hand, the shrine of the khan her former husband, had begun. No one had touched the tumble of shards from which the sliding hiss of a thousand serpents whispered on the night air.

Before she rested, she must rid her nest of the human she had used to fertilize her egg. Then she had one last task. Drawing the round flat circle of jade from between her breasts where it had fallen, she called to her serpent brethren, summoning a demon of her own kind. “Brother serpent, sister snake, my father bids you come to me.”

She repeated the incantation not once but a hundred times, until the ground beneath her feet seethed with snakes, coming not only from their nearby nests within the ruin of the khan’s shrine. Far across the grass she saw the undulation of their backs, so that the grass itself seemed to blow against the wind. All of these were mortal snakes, kin with the power to kill, but not the skills of a demon to block the magic of the shamaness. These she sent to find the human hidden in her underground nest and carry him on their backs to the surface, to the cover of sharp upthrusting rocks where he had thought to await her. She forbade them his murder, but commanded that he must be gone before he awoke. He must never find her nest.

When they had slithered away to do her bidding, she took up her chant again, searching the fading night with more than sight for one of her own kind. Most of her demon kin had been cast back into the underworld by the combined armies of gods and humans during the great battle high above the Golden City. Finally, however, when she feared the loss of darkness to the dawn, an answer came.

“Mistress.” A snake, thick and black, with markings on its back, rose up on its tail to salute her. “I bow before you and your child.” He dipped his head to her belly and continued, “What would you have of me?”

“Your power, for a day, a week,” she answered, imperious in command. Her father was a king in the underworld, and she would soon be mother to a khan in this. “A girl, to be hidden, her power muted for a while.”

Qutula had promised to kill the prince soon. She would have done it herself more efficiently, but needed something by which to control her lover. Murder of his father’s heir seemed a likely tool, and he had promised that his plan would escape suspicion, or a costly war. But just in case he failed, she added, “We may need her later, so don’t do any damage.”

“As you wish,” the serpent answered with another bow of his wedge-shaped head on its long neck.

With that, she took him in her hand and with his own sharp fangs carved the coiled rune into the bottom of the shattered cup, which like a coin now lay on her palm. He grinned at her and poison dripped from his fangs onto the fresh carving.

“You may go now,” she told him, setting him down in the grass. “You’ll know it when the token finds its way onto the throat of the girl, and you will come to my bidding as if I had summoned you that very moment. She must not use her powers, nor may shaman or magician find her. If any human comes near who is not bound to myself, or to my Lord Qutula, they must see only grass where her tents are raised, and only sheep where her guards stand watch. None may find her by magical or earthly means.”

“As you wish, my lady.” The black serpent writhed into a knot of courtesy as a lesser demon to the daughter of a king, and when she released him, sidled away in the grass. He wouldn’t go far, she knew. There were gaps among the broken stones where he might rest and many female snakes who wriggled enticingly nearby.

The wan light of Little Sun had begun to touch the sky with false dawn. She quickly made her way to her sleeping lover, now lying among his scattered clothes in the grass where the snakes had left him, and replaced the jade token on his breast. Then she adopted her serpent form again and returned, unseen, to the borrowed comforts of her nest.

Languorous in satisfaction, Mergen, great gur-khan of the Qubal and the Uulgar clans, yawned and scratched absently at his crotch. “If we are to wed,” he told Sechule, “I should start wooing you with presents.”

Sechule smiled with downcast eyes as she handed him a cup of tea. He had already forbidden her the prize she wished, and now he proposed to buy her with trifles. But scorn would come later, when her son had won for her the place her lover had refused her. Now, she gave him a flirtatious smile through gritted teeth and teased, “A fine silk coat then, or, no, two fine silk coats, with the most elaborate embroideries.” She could at least replace the finery that had vanished lately from her tent. “And a jewel bead for my hair. I must at least compete with the other noble wives.”

“You will be the most elegant of wives,” he promised, “All the coats and gowns you wish, and I’ll choose the beads personally to enhance the glory of your hair.”

He was teasing her, she knew, as well he meant it, too. She kissed him and helped him dress, thinking, she would have all the silk coats she wanted, and the headdress of a khaness if not a wife, when her son defeated him and took the dais and the ulus with it from his father’s dead hands. The thought of murder lit her eyes with pleasure that he took for admiration. With one arm he drew her close and kissed her while she thought, poison, or perhaps a dagger to his kidney, once Qutula had begun his war.