Chapter Thirty-six

“WHERE’S BEKTER?” Qutula stormed into his mother’s tent, his Durluken following. The serpent-demon he carried as a tattoo on his breast burned, inflaming his rage.

Sechule glanced at him in the mirror over her worktable. Her face tightened and he wondered which image of his lady she had seen there. She said nothing of the demon in the mirror when she turned to address him, however.

“Your brother is out with the rest of the camp, searching for the girl. Or so he told me, though you might find him with the shamaness he’s been bedding.”

For a moment his heart stuttered. But Eluneke wasn’t the only shamaness in the camp. “Toragana?” whispered a familiar hissing voice in his ear and he repeated the name.

“She dresses in feathers and honors the raven.” Sechule waved a dismissive hand. She gave no sign that she had heard the whispering voice. “Her name may be Toragana; he doesn’t talk about her.”

“Bitch.” Qutula swore quietly under his breath, consigning the shamaness, his mother, and his half sister all to the underworld. He didn’t trust any of them, not even the lady who rode as an inky serpent over his heart. Certainly not his mother. At a gesture, his Durluken began turning the bedding over and jabbing the points of their spears into all the likely hiding places.

“What are you doing!” she cried when Mangkut plunged a sword into her most elaborately painted chest. “Get these men out of here! They’re destroying everything!”

“As soon as I’m sure you’re not hiding him, they’ll go.”

“Why should I hide him?” Sechule wrapped her new silk coat more tightly around herself, as if she feared he might tear it from her body and rend it in two before her eyes. Which he might, if she had lied to him.

“I just want to ask him a question, that’s all. If he gives me the answer I want, he’ll be fine.”

Who would Bekter serve? The prince or his own brother? If he was with the shamaness, Qutula didn’t expect the right answer from him. But he had to ask it. And much as he would regret it, if Bekter stood against him, his brother would have to die.

Bekter wasn’t there. He dismissed his men with a curt order, “Find him,” and waited until they had filed out and he heard their horses departing at a gallop.

“Explain yourself,” he demanded between gritted teeth, “or I will cut your heart out with my own hands.”

“I don’t know what you want. Your brother doesn’t answer to me—”

“Fool,” the voice of his lady whispered in his ear.

Qutula knew better. She hadn’t misunderstood him, but answered the question she preferred. Those games might work with her lovers but not with him. “Don’t push me,” he said, and saw in her eyes when she abandoned the pretense. “Why now? My father had already named me son in private! I could have had his name!”

“He meant to acknowledge you all right.” Scorn dripped like poison syrup from her voice. “He offered to marry me, but not until after he had given the ulus to the prince.

“I would have been wife of nothing! You would be son of nobody! I’d have done better to accept Yesugei’s offer. He will, at least, hold onto the title of khan in the South under your cousin, who will be gur-khan over us all as soon as the chieftains have thrown their pebbles in the cup!

“Should I have accepted the insult and done nothing! Can you, who came to me for the means to murder the prince, say that you would not have done the same to avenge your honor?”

He couldn’t believe she didn’t understand what she had done. “If you had saved his life, he would have owed you his gratitude,” Qutula gritted out between his clenched teeth. “You could have asked him for anything!”

“Beads!” She screamed back at him. “He handed me trinkets and thought himself generous! Not even for his life would he have named you his heir. You would have had to kill him for the dais; I just saved you the trouble with none the wiser for it.”

“You’re wrong,” he said.

“We are betrayed,” the voice in his head whispered. The serpent sank her fangs deep into his flesh, and he felt the demon’s complex emotions, her rage and her triumph, mingling with his own sense of betrayal. The demon wanted Mergen dead for his attempts on her life. But not yet. And not at the hand of the human woman. She’d wanted to do that herself, after he’d been forced to name Qutula his heir. Now she’d lost everything. War made an uncertain path to the dais. And death had taken her enemy beyond her reach.

“You stupid bitch. You’ve ruined everything.” Qutula found, without quite knowing how they had come there, that his hands were around his mother’s neck. He clenched his fists, her throat caught between his convulsively tightening fingers. “How can he call me his son if he’s dead!”

“Qutula! Stop!” Her long, sharp fingernails etched bloody tracks across the backs of his hands but he scarcely felt them. She thrashed and kicked and tried to pull away. His arms were like bands of bronze, however, holding her rigidly before him and feeding strength to the hands which seemed not to belong to him anymore. Acting on their own volition they squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.

Presently, Sechule stopped trying to command him, or to reason with him. Finally, she stopped trying to escape him. By then her tongue hung loose in her head and her eyes had rolled until only the whites were showing. Her arms hung limp and blood-streaked at her sides. His blood, he realized.

“Bitch,” he muttered, and dropped her to the carpet. “Bitch. Now I’ll have to find Bekter myself.”

The scratches on his hands and arms were beginning to ache, but he scarcely noticed them for the feeling of sated lassitude that swept him. His lady was pleased and, joined to his flesh by the ink of the tattoo, she shared with him her pleasure of the kill.

He seldom experienced her unguarded thoughts, but in the afterglow of murder he felt satisfaction bursting sweet as a juicy peach in her mind. No mother-in-law would complicate her position on the dais. She would be the khaness truly, answering to no one. She made no exception for Qutula, but until the war was done he could count on her to remain at his side. After, well, she wasn’t the only one with plans for after. In the meantime, he had to find Bekter. But first, he had to do something about the seductive pleasure that coursed through him like venom. His mother didn’t need Mergen’s silk coat anymore so he took it to sweeten his lady’s temper.

Leaving the tent, he found Mangkut had remained behind to stand guard, the reins of Qutula’s horse in his hand. This closest of his Durluken said nothing of what he had heard from the other side of the door but bowed his head in his usual show of respect.

“Orders, my lord?” he asked.

Qutula jerked his chin at the tent where Sechule lay dead on the carpets where he had crawled as a babe.

“I’ll take care of it,” Mangkut assured him, needing no words to tell him to clean up the murder. No, not murder. In this war he now waged, Sechule was just another stone he had cleared from the board.

“I’ll be back.” Qutula’s gaze drifted, unfocused, to the grassland where the Lady Chaiujin would wait to reward him. “When my Durluken find Bekter, bring him here.”

He trusted that the body of their mother would be gone by then. Mangkut bowed again to accept the command and Qutula took the reins from him. His horse was restive, scenting, perhaps, the demon who let her presence enfold him as he rode.

Hidden beneath the shirt of her lover, the emerald green bamboo serpent willed herself to assume material form. It took more than the usual effort to hold the snaky shape she liked best. The child growing within her bore too many human traits, stretching her serpent’s egg out of the bounds of her serpent’s body to hold him. She was unwilling to give up the familiar comfort of her form, however. And her human lover, she thought, would find the danger an appealing spice to add interest to the ride, at least until they had come to the place where she wished him to carry her. His desire rose like a mist off his flesh and she flicked a forked tongue out to taste it on the air, on his skin.

She must thank him for the silk robe he brought her, she thought, and scraped his breast lightly with her fangs. It would hurt just a little, and he would wonder, did she mean to kill him now as she had killed Chimbai-Khan, his uncle. She needed him alive, of course, and he would know that, too. Threat became a game between them. A serpent cannot smile, but she licked the salt from his belly with her forked tongue, teasing.

They had come to the tumble of rocks that had once been Chimbai’s pyre and Qutula dismounted. Unknown to him, a thousand serpents and more had made their homes in the ruins. None would harm him as long as the lady their demon-queen had need of him, however. And she did need him, she thought. Now.

He dismounted and gathered up Sechule’s new coat. Then he opened his own shirts and rubbed the purple silk enticingly on his own breast.

“Come to me, my lady,” he coaxed her, “One snake between us is enough.”

She flicked between his legs with her tail, but the aura of desire that scented him excited her own desires as well. In a green mist she lifted from his flesh and reshaped herself before him as the Lady Chaiujin. She had many other faces she might have worn, but his blood grew hotter when she took this form.

“My lady khaness,” he said, and bowed deeply to lay the silk at her feet. It pleased him to think that he could hold what Chimbai-Khan could not. He was a boy, of course, and didn’t believe in the mortality of his own flesh.

“My lord,” she answered, smiling, and took his face in her hands to kiss him. As she did sometimes, she let him taste her serpent tongue, narrow and strange to his human mouth.

“Let me see your body,” he tugged at the ties of her coats, releasing her breasts. “Come to me,” he moaned into her mouth and drew her down onto the purple silk.

She was a demon and a serpent, suffering no human emotions to cloud her purpose. In all their former encounters she had held her lover a little apart, even in the heat of passion, turning him away at will or calling him at her pleasure to exert her dominance over him. She controlled him still, with her cool thighs and her soft breasts. But where he touched her now, his fingers left trails of longing. Her own desires swept her like a wildfire.

How could this be? She demanded his touch and he gave it, demanded his mouth there, and there, and his body, fitted to hers, the cloud of purple silk like moonlight on her skin. She wanted, wanted, and it would have frightened her, that desire, except that her lover groveled between her thighs, more lost in the heat even than she.

Finally, when he had exhausted himself, she turned him away. “You have to go,” she said. “The prince will lead out his armies soon. You need to be ready.”

“I’m ready,” he assured her, but he rolled over and began to pull on his clothes. “One last kiss,” he demanded and, when she gave him her human mouth, he asked for the serpent. “For all your forms are pleasing to me.” He breathed the words on her skin and would have fallen down beside her when she licked a trickle of sweat from his throat with a long, forked tongue.

“Go,” she said, before finding his mouth and tasting out its contours. “Our army awaits.”

She withdrew her touch from him then, and gave him only a mocking smile when he would have demanded more. When he had gone, she gathered up the purple silk coat and carried it to her nest, where she added it to the other she had stolen. Sleep beckoned in the cool chamber hidden among the stones. She shaped scales and fangs in her mind and willed the transformation into her snaky form.

A fluttering as of bird wings rippled deep in her belly, but her form stubbornly remained human. Her egg had grown too large to be contained by the serpent’s body, she thought, and hated the changes fast coming over her. But, as a mist, nothing could hold her . . .

Again, nothing. The egg bound her to her human form as surely as chains bound the slave to the whipping post.

“Nooooo!” she wailed.

Tearing her hair, she fell, screaming her rage onto the heaped silks. With demon strength she tore the purple coat to shreds, screaming, “No, no, no!” with each rending tear. But none of her imprecations or any of her skills would break the curse of flesh that bore a child of human blood.

“If we don’t turn around now, we may be too late!” Jumal broke off a piece of hard cheese and dipped it in his tea while Yesugei considered for the hundredth time in a week how to answer his young captain. No matter how he counted up the stones, his place on the board never changed.

“We are under orders to proceed south. If we turn around, we commit treason, a crime punishable by a more horrible death than I hope you ever see, let alone suffer.” He’d seen Mergen use the threat of such a death to wring a confession out of a prisoner and he had no doubt it would destroy the gur-khan to carry out such a sentence on the boy, but he kept that part to himself.

“And if we’re too late?” Jumal knew better than to speak his fears by name in front of all of Yesugei’s captains, but they both understood his meaning. What if Qutula murdered the prince? What if civil war had already broken out? Could they save the ulus without destroying the khanate?

Yesugei hadn’t trusted the boy at first. He’d roundly cursed Mergen under his breath for burdening him with a Qubal problem as well as the young Uulgar chieftain whose father had died at Mergen’s own hand, a gift with teeth and claws if he’d ever seen one. The gur-khan had sent Jumal south to get him away from the prince, and Yesugei had wondered what kind of danger the boy might represent to his own party. Over the weeks of travel south, however, he’d come to know both young men better. He now trusted them as far as their experience permitted.

Gradually, he had drawn out Jumal’s story. The weight of their combined suspicions had caused him to slow their progress, in case they might be needed nearer home. To turn around against Mergen’s direct orders, however, would set him in opposition to his gur-khan. With the one exception of the woman Sechule, that was something he would never do.

“My lord Yesugei-Khan—” His second challenge, the Uulgar boy who had taken the name of Otchigin to honor Mergen’s dead anda, burst into the command tent and skidded to a halt on the carpets. In taking on the name, he’d taken the devotion to the gur-kahn as his own as well. And as the living heir of their executed khan, he had pledged the loyalty of all his fellow prisoners, who he now named Uulgar-Qubal.

He’d been on duty guarding the perimeter. His sudden appearance, breathless and anxious, could only mean one thing. Yesugei didn’t have to look at Jumal to know the young captain had come to the same conclusion even before the young Otchigin had finished his announcement: “A messenger from the gur-khan to see you, my lord khan.”

The messenger hadn’t waited but had followed the young captain into the war tent and gave his own precise court bow. Otchigin bounced nervously on the balls of his feet, his hand drifting to the hilt of his sword. No defense was required, however. Yesugei knew this messenger well.

“Chahar!” He rose to greet the newcomer at once, clasping the messenger’s arms in a welcoming embrace. “Rest here beside me,” he said, bidding the messenger to take a seat on the thick carpets layered to make a soft floor for the war tent. “You look like a man ten years older than the last time we met.”

Chahar sat heavily and accepted a damp washing cloth from a servant. In the few weeks since Yesugei had left the gur-khan’s court, worry had creased new lines in the familiar face. The muscles in Chahar’s arms quivered with a fine exhaustion when he wiped the dust from his face.

“First your message, then food,” Yesugei instructed his old friend, glad that he hadn’t made greater haste southward.

His young captains waited at attention with their blue-coated backs to the lattices as proper guardsmen to a khan. He trusted them, and their companions who defended him, to follow any command and to take to the grave any secret they heard in his tent. But the gur-khan hadn’t offered such trust when he sent his messenger, and so he dismissed them with a command he knew would soon be necessary. “Prepare the camp to move out. Send the hunters ahead—we’ll need to feed a hungry army on the march. We head north when Great Sun leaves no shadow.”

Jumal cast a doubtful glance at the messenger, but they both knew Chahar would never serve the enemies working against the gur-khan. With a calming word to his Uulgar second, he gathered his guardsmen and left his khan to his private report. Yesugei had no doubt he would remain to guard the door, but no one else would hear what went on in the command tent.

“Tell me why you look like the hunting hounds of the underworld are on your heels,” Yesugei said when he was alone with the messenger. His weeks in discussion with Jumal had shown the new khan greater dangers within the ger-tent palace itself, so he felt prepared for whatever he might hear.

“My message—” Chahar stammered and stopped, his eyes suddenly empty of the deep intelligence Yesugei knew in him. At first he thought the man suffered from an exhaustion so extreme that he had temporarily lost control of both memory and senses. But with a bitter little laugh Chahar pulled himself together.

“The gur-khan sent this message: ‘Tell him that his gur-khan wishes his company, and that of his armies.’ ”

With that Chahar handed him a tourquoise bead, the signal for a threat of war, though not an imminent one. It was clear the man had missed more than one meal reaching the southbound camp at speed, however. A handful of steps brought him to the door where Jumal waited, as he had expected. The servant with a tray of food, already standing just beyond the carrying of their voices was a welcome surprise.

“He didn’t look fit for much.” Jumal passed off his foresight with a little shrug. “I thought this might help.”

“I’m sure it will.”

The servant followed him into the tent and set his tray on the floor in front of the newcomer, leaving Yesugei and the gur-khan’s messenger alone. Chahar helped himself to a cup of tea and a chunk of hard cheese, chewing for sustenance but also to gain time. He would have had the weeks of travel to order his report, so this continued hesitation knotted the breakfast in Yesugei’s belly.

When he had gathered his senses, Chahar began to tell his tale. “After you left on your errand to subdue the Uulgar South, Mergen revealed Eluneke, the apprentice shamaness, to be his own daughter . . .”

The news about Mergen’s offer of his daughter to the Tinglut-Khan and his emissary’s subsequent refusal came as little surprise. Yesugei had known about the girl since her birth and had shared her father’s dismay that she had apprenticed herself to a shamaness. He remembered the day of the hunt, when Prince Tayy had first set eyes on her. That they might have grown to love each other, while unfortunate, came as no surprise after such a fateful meeting. It was just more bad luck, perhaps, that Prince Tayyichiut and the princess had appeared at their absolute worst in front of the ambassador. But Yesugei was certain that Mergen’s ill fortune had a darker purpose behind it. Chahar’s next revelation confirmed all of his and Jumal’s suspicions.

“Last night, as I lay sleeping, my father came to me in a dream. He wore his totem form and wept, but in the way of dreams I understood him. The worst has happened. Mergen himself is dead, murdered by his own son Qutula, perhaps with the assistance of the Lady Sechule, whom the gur-khan had lately agreed to wed.”

The air went out of Yesugei’s lungs, as if he’d received a blow to the chest. “Sechule?” he repeated. Though he had believed Jumal that Qutula was dangerous, he could hardly credit that Sechule would aid in his schemes. Except, she had always championed her older son.

The jealousy he expected at the thought didn’t come. It seemed some part of him had already accepted the truth of Bolghai’s message and he mourned the loss of his dreams about Sechule almost as much as he mourned his gur-khan. How could he have been so wrong?

“But why? If Mergen meant to marry her . . .”

“He meant to hand the khanate to the prince and then marry. Which would have removed all hope for Qutula to win the dais for himself, or for his mother to become khaness. Or so my father deduces. Qutula has fled; his mother likewise cannot be found, but my father says he saw her spirit roaming lost and bitter between the worlds and that she, too, must be dead. He says that Eluneke has been missing since the Tinglut left, and he can find no trace of her in any of the realms open to his shamanic senses.”

“Is she still alive?” Yesugei was having trouble processing it all, but one thought rested uppermost in his mind: his duty to defend and protect the legitimate gur-khan and his family, whoever that might be. Eluneke was part of that.

“Bolghai has found no sign of her among the dead.” Chahar picked a cautious way through his point. “But he can’t find her among the living either. He is at a loss to explain it, but fears that Qutula may be conspiring with demons.”

He hadn’t thought it could get any worse. “The prince?” he asked.

“Safe when last I heard. But he searches for the shaman princess while there is light and mourns his uncle in the dark. My father worries for his health as well as his safety.”

Yesugei accepted this report and recalled his captains. If Tayy still lived, he was gur-khan now, or would be when Yesugei arrived to uphold his position. And he was determined to do so before Qutula had shed more royal blood. “Leave a small force to support the camp followers,” he told the captains when they had rejoined him in the command tent. “We ride to war in the name of Tayyichiut Gur-Khan.”

“Tayyichiut Gur-Khan!” Jumal’s exclamation carried equal parts of dismay and devotion. Like the new Otchigin at his side he understood the terrible loss the ulus had suffered. More than any of them, however, Jumal owed his allegiance to the new gur-khan.

“And the Uulgar prisoners?” the young Otchigin asked, with more questions than he dared ask in his eyes. Mergen had spared his life and the lives of the ten thousand Uulgar taken in the recent war for the Cloud Country. He had pledged his people and his life to serve the gur-khan, but Mergen reigned no more.

“There are no prisoners in this camp,” Yesugei assured him with a clasp on his arm. “We are all Qubal now and we ride together to defend the gur-khan.”

“As my khan orders.” Otchigin bowed so low that the crown of his cap brushed the floor. When he followed Jumal from the command tent, his face had flushed deep wine with pride.

Trust, Yesugei thought, was a dangerous weapon. Mergen’s trust in his son had led to murder and war. He hoped his own faith in the boy chieftain was not so misplaced.