Chapter Forty-two

 

STILL EXHAUSTED, General Jochi rose from a brief nap in his campaign tent. He demanded proper rest periods for his soldiers and tried to set an example. While he pretended to sleep, however, his mind replayed the events of the battlefield behind his eyelids. Mergen’s misbegotten blanket-son fought with demons at his side. The Qubal fallen lay running blood from eye and ear and mouth until they died in agony, blackened and swollen as if they had been dead for many days. Jochi shook his head, but he couldn’t dislodge the images that stole his rest. Warriors went happily to their death, knowing they would fly to their ancestors in the bellies of the birds. But how would the spirits of their dead find peace when even the birds refused to eat from their battlefield?

He remembered a story about the Uulgar, who roamed a land without forests and set their noble dead, not just those of lesser rank, for the birds to take their souls to rest. It was said that when they feasted on the poisoned khan of the Uulgar, the birds died in a dark and stinking blanket that covered all the grasslands around it. He feared the same doom for his own fallen souls.

When he returned from relieving himself, Chahar was waiting. The scout had brought news that Yesugei had turned back with half the Qubal and all of his Uulgar horde to defend the ulus, but so far—

“Anything?” Jochi asked, and gestured for a drink of strong kumiss.

“The Tinglut prince sends his regards,” Chahar told him, bringing no good news of Yesugei’s reinforcements, then. “He’s pulling out of the field with three of his thousands to rest. You have two thousands of his still to command.” The captain had already stated his disapproval of joining forces with their conquerors and he didn’t hide his feelings now.

“Choices?” Jochi threw the challenge at him. His officers and field servants were accustomed to this argument and went about their business preparing him for battle without comment. “Give me choices. Prince Daritai’s withdrawal, even to refresh his troops, leaves us vulnerable.” Like his own horde, the Tinglut had to rest. Demons, apparently, had no such weakness.

“He doesn’t serve you,” Chahar insisted. “His ten thousands will answer to your command only as long as Qutula remains a greater threat to his own security. Once we’ve dealt with the Durluken, what will prevent this Prince Daritai from turning his army against us?”

Alone, Qutula would not have stood against Jochi’s forces for even a single battle. But he had seen for himself the Lady Chaiujin shrouded in a green mist and riding among the Durluken. Where she rode, the ground seethed with vipers that rose up larger than a man to sink their poisoned fangs into the warriors who rode against them.

Alone against such supernatural forces, Jochi’s army would have fallen long ago. He didn’t delude himself that Prince Daritai had become a friend, however.

“Just because he’s polite about it, don’t forget that he has taken the ger-tent palace by force of arms,” Jochi reminded his captain. “The Tinglut prince holds the Lady Bortu hostage, with the Princess Orda and all the noble fathers and Great Mothers.

“Right now we need him against Qutula. And we need his goodwill toward the hostages.”

A rumor was spreading that Prince Tayy had died of the bite of a serpent-demon and another that Qutula had stabbed him through the heart. The prisoners he’d interrogated spoke freely, more terrified of their allies than their enemies. They told both stories, among others. In all the tales, however, the prince was dead. If the reports were true, Daritai held the last recognized blood of the khanate.

He understood Chahar’s anger. Who did they fight for, with the khan and his heir both dead? Certainly not for the Tinglut prince who had seized the ulus and only sent his men to fight in defense of his own interests. But General Jochi would fight to the last living breath in his body against Qutula, the murderer who had brought down the Qubal ulus.

Later, when Yesugei arrived with his combined forces and they had ended the usurper’s war, then they would sort out the Tinglut prince. A niggling doubt rippled across all his assumptions, however. Lady Bortu did not seem to disapprove of the conqueror and, as his captive, she’d observed the Tinglut prince more closely than any of them. Jochi needed time to think, but Qutula gave them no respite. He’d slept with his sword still clasped to his side, so he had only to pick up his spear and let his servants put his helmet on his head. His captains were ready, his horse saddled and pawing the ground, anxious for the battle. The general kept them waiting no longer.

 

 

 

Yesugei-Khan sat astride a mare the faded gold of autumn grass, watching from a low-rising swell in the rolling plain. All seemed peaceful in the afternoon light of Great and Little Suns, but looking down on the shadows that crossed the ger-tent palace he had served all his life, he knew that for a lie. Chahar had delivered the message from his dream and departed at speed while Yesugei had prepared his army and swept down on the tent city a day behind the scout.

Mergen was dead, according to the shaman Bolghai, who had appeared to Chahar in his dream: murdered by his blanket-son Qutula with the aid of Sechule, who had agreed to be his wife. Yesugei was surprised the news hadn’t shocked him more. Grief, yes, he felt a terrible pain at the loss of his khan. But when he thought of Sechule without the presence of her beauty to blind him, he realized that her treachery came as no surprise at all.

Jumal had predicted Qutula’s betrayal and the reports of his scouts had only confirmed the worst. But Yesugei-Khan hadn’t expected to find the Tinglut installed in the palace while the Qubal fought each other for a dais they no longer owned. His scouts had counted a shifting number of Tinglut warriors, no more than eight thousands in the tent city at any time and half of them sleeping or moving to and from the battlefield.

It was clear that the Tinglut were present as an occupying force, however, and not merely as an ally. Tinglut guarded the wagons that formed a protective barricade around the tent city, and Tinglut scouts moved back and forth from the ger-tent palace to the front. His spies sent to report on the conflict had not returned, so he was left to guess what part the Tinglut played in the Qubal civil war.

But time, he had determined, was running out. His captains were ready, and he raised his arm, ready to alert the drummers and the trumpeters to sound the attack. His vastly larger army, combined of his Qubal forces and former Uulgar prisoners, would fall on the Tinglut as Prince Daritai had likely done to the Qubal. When Yesugei had driven out that threat from the rear, he would . . .

“A message!” Otchigin, who had once been a princeling among the Uulgar, but who had given his devotion and the loyalty of his horde to the gur-khan, galloped toward him. “Delivered from the Qubal city under a white banner.” At his side came a rider whose beaten leather armor bore Tinglut decorations.

“I’m only interested in one message,” Yesugei informed the messenger. “If Prince Daritai wishes to see Great Sun rise tomorrow, he’ll return all that he has stolen from the Qubal. Including the dais of the khan.”

“The Lady Bortu sends me, not my lord Prince Daritai,” the messenger met Yesugei-Khan’s baleful glare with wilting courage. “I bring the words of the khaness to her general, the esteemed Yesugei, named khan over the Qubal-Uulgar by her own son Mergen, who has returned to his ancestors, may they grant him rebirth fitting his station.”

As greetings went, it was a mouthul, but it contained the necessary elements to confirm the sender. “Go on, then,” Yesugei instructed him. Mergen, after all, had failed to listen to Jumal, and now the gur-khan was dead.

“The Lady Bortu sends this message: ‘I would have my beloved general beside me. At my behest, Prince Daritai grants safe passage to Yesugei-Khan and his captains and a guard suited to his position. The prince would have me give you also his reminder, that he holds the Princess Orda in his hands and, I would hesitate to add, my own worthless life as well.’ ”

Insolent colt! Safe passage indeed, when Yesugei had twice as many warriors as the Tinglut. The Qubal were furthermore fighting for their home. But Prince Daritai had the princess and the old khaness, as he pointed out. He would doubtless cut their throats if Yesugei-Khan defied him.

If he were a different kind of man, Yesugei-Khan would feint an attack and let the Tinglut remove the last obstacles between himself and the dais. His own army would easily defeat the Tinglut. Too late, of course, for the prisoners, but it would add gur-khan to his title and put the grasslands in his hands, from the Shan Empire to the Cloud Country.

He was not that man, however, and dismissed the unworthy thought without even a twinge of desire. Mergen was dead, and the Tinglut prince would soon meet his own ancestors. Yesugei had no wish to follow in their ambitions or their fates. He would do as the khaness bid him, and spy out for himself how best to take back Mergen’s city for the Qubal.

The young Otchigin had remained at his side and Yesugei gave him instructions. “Gather five hundred warriors under my banner, divided equally between Uulgar and Qubal. Captain Jumal has command in my absence. We pay a visit.”

The tent city of the gur-khan had sadly diminished in the few weeks since he had left it. Even the most detailed reports couldn’t prepare him for the sight of Tinglut warriors sleeping in a tangle of weapons and leather half-armor in the tents of the Qubal army. They could not have prevented the chill that gripped his gut as he rode down the wide avenue to the ger-tent palace behind a thousand Tinglut warriors. Columns of Tinglut brandished their swords as he passed between them and fell in at the rear, cutting off any escape.

A light rain had begun to fall, but servants had set up a dais in front of the ger-tent palace. On it, he saw forty or more of the most aged of the nobles who had stayed to guide the gur-khan in his tent city. They sat with their fine clothes beaded with raindrops, their heads raised watch-fully to the Tinglut prince. At their center Daritai awaited him, a child in his arms.

A cut roughly stitched above his eye began to leak fresh red blood when he drew his brows together, leaving a lurid streak down one cheek. The prince looked hollowed out and weary as men do who have spent too long in a battle they have no hope of winning. Which was strange, Yesugei thought, because his supremacy over the Qubal city could not be doubted. He wondered what it was they fought out there where his scouts went but didn’t return. The Lady Bortu stood at the prince’s side but gave away no answers by glance or expression.

“Welcome, my lord General Yesugei,” Prince Daritai said, reducing him to his military title. “I understand from these men and women who know you that you are an honorable man.”

“I hope that I am,” Yesugei answered. He hadn’t expected the interview to take this direction. “Certainly I value loyalty to clan and ulus. As do my captains.” Let the Tinglut invader take that as a warning. If he survived, Yesugei would fight. If he didn’t, Jumal held his army and would avenge their deaths.

The child in Daritai’s arms lifted her head and he saw that she was indeed the Princess Orda, though she clung to the Tinglut prince’s shoulder as if she found all her comfort and safety in her captor.

Lady Bortu put out her arms, but the princess refused to go to her. “Bad man!” she insisted.

Yesugei was on the point of agreeing with the child when her grandmother chuckled.

“You have it backward, little lamb. Yesugei-Khan would rescue you from Prince Daritai.”

The little girl seemed to think that was very funny, but she still wouldn’t let go of the Tinglut’s coat. Even slaves sometimes grew to love a harsh master, he knew, for the times when the beatings did not come. How much more might a child love her captor for ending the chaos begun by his own conquering army?

Prince Daritai sighed and rolled his eyes. Then without ceremony he dropped a little kiss on the top of the child’s silky dark head. The princess snuggled in more comfortably, not in the least surprised by the kiss. “Is he going to rescue Tumbi?” she asked.

Yesugei didn’t know who Tumbi was, but Daritai’s eyes darkened with a pain he would have wished to keep private, it seemed.

“I hope so,” Daritai answered the princess. “But first, we have to rescue General Jochi and his army.”

It seemed unlikely that Jochi would bend his knee to the Tinglut. With the khan dead and Qutula in league with demons, however, Yesugei conceded he might not have had a choice until now. He had much to think about.

But the light rain had grown more persistent and the mother of two khans was getting wet. “Explanations can wait until we have allowed the old among us to get in out of the rain,” Lady Bortu reminded the Tinglut prince tartly.

“As you wish, my lady khaness.” Even conquerors bowed to the will of old Bortu. “If you will join us, General?”

Daritai turned and entered the ger-tent palace. One by one the elder nobles entered behind him until only the Lady Bortu remained to watch Yesugei dismount with his five hundred behind him. No Tinglut warrior moved to stop her when she came to him and put her hand on his arm. “You had your differences with my son, but I know you loved him and the ulus he led.”

Yesugei nodded, accepting her words. “I won’t leave his mother in the hands of an enemy,” he promised, but she patted his sleeve as though he were a child and she wanted him to pay attention.

“The ancestors in their wisdom sometimes make plans for us that we wouldn’t have chosen,” she said. “We create nothing but grief for ourselves even to our children’s children when we set our will against Fate.”

“I will not believe that fate has meant the Qubal to bow to old Tinglut-Khan!” he muttered.

“Fate thinks long, my dear Yesugei. Fate thinks very long, and Tinglut-Khan is old already. Be patient. Listen. More than mortal men are moving the stones on this board. Our world may hang in the balance.”

The Lady Chaiujin. Yesugei bowed his head, accepting that the greater fight would come against the khan’s own blanket-son. Qutula rode with a horde of demons at his call. In the meantime, Daritai held the princess. He could do little to oppose the invader now, but he could wait, and watch, and move when the opportunity came. “I trust the Lady Bortu in all things,” he assured her. She would know when he should move against the Tinglut prince.

The khaness sighed, however, and patted his arm. “We’ll see,” she said, and led him to the feet of the conqueror.

 

 

 

Guided by the spirits of his parents, Eluneke had come for him. Prince Tayy took her hand and allowed her presence to push back his terror. He had awakened surrounded by hungry spirits, unable to defend himself from their horrible mouths. Then she was with him, driving off his tormentors with her horse-head stick. Suddenly he discovered hope in the midst of his despair, and a terrible sorrow.

“Has Qutula murdered you, too?” he asked Eluneke. How else had she come to him in the underworld where his cousin had trapped him?

“Not yet,” she promised, “but I don’t know how long I can stay here.” The toads on her costume added their opinions in urgent croaks and dainty bellows.

“Then go. Don’t risk yourself for me. I’m already dead.” He could move his head and his arms now and reached out to embrace the spirit of his mother. He hadn’t figured out how to stand yet, but he managed to sit up. Eleuneke was upside down, hanging in the night air above him. Closing his eyes helped a little with the disorientation, but he couldn’t keep them closed forever.

“I won’t leave without you.” Eluneke took his hand and gave it a tug. “But I’m not going to wait around for the hungry spirits to come back either.

Suddenly Tayy was moving, though he didn’t know how, or how to stop the soul-stuff that he leaked from a dozen tooth-shaped rents in his flesh.

“Gather it up in your hands and put it in your shirt,” Eluneke suggested.

At first his fingers ran through it as water through mist, but gradually he got the hang of it, letting his spirit tangle itself around his fingers and wiping them off on the inside of his shirt. His success gave him more confidence.

It seemed to have the same effect on Eluneke. “You’re looking a bit more substantial,” she said. “That’s a good first step, I think.”

The toads seemed to agree, but they were still lost.

“This way,” Chimbai said, and turned his mount around. Tayy, however, had no horse and couldn’t follow.

“Come with me.” Eluneke still had his hand, but she sat astride a pale horse. He climbed up behind her and they were off, across a landscape that would have turned his stomach, if he still had one, with its upside-down confusion. It wasn’t only the underworld that was making him feel strange, however.

“Something is happening to me. Someone is digging up my body!”

“I should hope so,” Eluneke replied tartly. “Bolghai was supposed to have started as soon as he was sure I had crossed into the underworld.”

That was good news, or he knew he ought to think so. Tayy hadn’t expected to be aware of his body after death, though. The implications made him queasy.

“Will it hurt much?” he asked. When she turned in her saddle with a question in her frown, he added, “The pyre, I mean when they burn me. I can take it—anything is better than being stuck here, turning into a hungry spirit myself—but I’d rather know . . .”

A little shiver passed through her, trembling against him. “I’d rather not find out.”

Prince Tayy dreaded the pain that awareness would bring when the clans burned his body, but he thought he might prefer it to this. Eluneke was going to abandon him to face the fire alone. He figured he should be grateful she hadn’t left him for the hungry spirits, but it hurt more than dying had.

She was still talking, though. It took a moment for him to catch up with what she was saying. “The visions are very clear that you’re going to be my husband. Since I don’t plan to marry a dead man, I have to get you back to your body.”

“Husband?”

“Ribbit,” a small toad answered from the basket on her head. “Of course,” Queen Toad said, with the toad version of a superior sniff. Tayy was surprised to discover that as a spirit he understood her.

Married. To Eluneke. Even death hadn’t changed that, it seemed. He ignored the toad’s condescension. Great Sun didn’t shine in the underworld, but suddenly it felt like sunrise on the plains above.

He thought the light that blossomed like the bright hibiscus of Pontus was only in his mind, but the khan and khaness had drawn up their horses with wary glances around them. Eluneke brought her pale horse to a halt as well. “What is it?” she asked. The red glow on the horizon snapped like a banner of fire, growing closer as they watched.

“The court of the demon-king, on the hunt,” Chimbai said. Spirits flew before the growing flame, screaming terror and despair in the windless darkness of the underworld.

Run. Tayy felt the message from the fleeing spirits and would have joined them in their race with the doom riding down on them, but Eluneke kneed her horse forward at a stately pace. His parents hesitated, fighting their own dread. Chimbai had lost none of his bravery in battle, however, and his khaness refused to leave her child. They brought their mounts around and followed the shaman-princess.

 

 

 

 

This was it, the third test that would complete her initiation. As she waited for the demon-king with his hunting party to reach them, Eluneke thought ruefully that she’d have preferred not to have the fate of worlds depend on this meeting. A minor demon she might have browbeat into revealing the secrets of the dead, and how to protect them from the hungry mouths of trapped spirits and the demons themselves, who hunted them for sport. She would have risked no lives but her own. Instead, she had to face down the king of the demons himself, with her own dead around her.

“Could be worse,” the queen of the toads muttered from her perch on Eluneke’s brow. “We are all of a similar rank, at least. Kings and princes all. No need to knock one’s head on the ground. I would not debase myself before these malevolent creatures.”

The khaness had heard and she added her own advice. “We must hold onto our dignity, but afford the king of the demons the respect due a monarch in his own realm.”

“I thought the king of the demons was dead.” Tayy’s voice rumbled in Eluneke’s ear, doing unaccountable things to her concentration. “I was there when King Llesho killed him.”

“For which the new king should show his gratitude, since he owes his present status to your war,” the queen of the toads agreed.

“He won’t, of course,” Chimbai warned them. “Any human who can kill a demon-king must be a threat to his successor.”

“But I didn’t do it,” Tayy objected in that rumble that turned all Eluneke’s insides to trembling flowers. “The god of Justice did, and he needed the help of a dragon.”

“Don’t tell the king that.” The queen of the toads did the little bobbing thing she reserved for repeating the obvious. “It’s always better to be a powerful enemy than to be the prey in a soul-hunt.”

Eluneke couldn’t disagree with that. She thought that was the last of it, but Tayy leaned forward to whisper in her ear, “Leave me if you must. Don’t lose yourself on my account.”

“Never.” Her own happiness mattered little in her answer, though she refused to imagine a life without him. All of her training had taught her that she could show no weakness when she faced the demon-king. He would feed on her fear if she let him. And he would know the value of the prince to the survival of the ulus, maybe of all the grasslands.

The prince fell quiet then, which was a good thing. They had crested a rise made of the insubstantial cloud-stuff beneath them, and saw ahead the hunting party of the king of the demons drawn up against them. The demons rode in a blazing nimbus of flame, orange and yellow at its edges and a deep blood red at its center. Mountainous figures like shadows rose over steeds whose legs stretched out thick as uprooted tree trunks. Each mount had many long necks spilling from its shoulders like a writhing nest of snakes. From each neck rose a head with beady red eyes peering over a snout full of long sharp teeth curled out in all directions to tear its prey with a shake of its head.

Demons, Eluneke knew, could take any shape they wanted, or no shape at all, so she was not surprised that among the court facing her not one bore the characteristics of any other. Serpents rode coiled in saddles, and monsters rode against them that made Nogai’s Bear look like a child’s toy. Some took on no substance at all, their malignant consciousness glowering out of eyes of flame. She had not prepared herself for the shape the king of the demons took, however, and had to bite down on her lip to keep from crying out when he rode forward to meet her on a tall black mare breathing fire from her blowing nostrils.

“Father,” she whispered, and heard Tayy whisper, “Altan!” at her back.

“No,” she said firmly, to assure herself as well as the prince who rode with her. Mergen had successfully passed out of the reach of demons and the hungry spirits. The khaness Temulun had told her so. She trusted in the pyre and the prayers of the shamans who had sent Altan to his ancestors as well. And logically, she understood that the demon-king could not be two of their dead, so he was likely to be neither. But it almost shattered her when he lifted a long hunting spear over his head, pointed at her heart.

“Why have you come here, little girl?” he asked. The voice was a little off, but close enough if his face had taken her in. “Whatever your reasons, I appreciate the gift.”

He was looking at the prince when he said that. With the instincts of a father, Chimbai set his steed between the demon and his dead son. “You are no brother of mine, nor are you any of our beloved dead.” He no longer carried the spear of the sky god’s daughter, nor could he risk further dissolution of his charred and tattered arm, but he drew the sword that he had worn on his pyre and charged.

The chaos of battle broke out then, and Eluneke would have thought they were too outnumbered for hope. But the khaness had her husband’s bow and rode like a soldier, with her horse between her knees. She drew again and again, releasing a never-ending supply of ghostly arrows. A demon-steed careened past. Tayy caught the reins and flung himself into the abandoned saddle. The monster’s hunting bow remained in its place at the stirrup and Eluneke saw the prince take it up and join his mother in laying down cover while Chimbai fought sword to sword.

Eluneke had her own defenses against the demon-king: her totem animals around her and her own powers as a shaman. “More valuable than iron or bronze,” she riddled, and reached into her pouch for the silver dragon spear as answer. Uttering the chant the sky god’s daughter had taught her to drive out demons, she set her pale horse against the king’s horrible mount.

Sharp hooves rose and kicked, teeth bit. Imbued with the blessings of the sky god’s daughter’s horse-head drumstick, wherever her pale horse made contact with the demon-steed, it opened a terrible wound as only a prayer might do.

“Ayay-aeee!” she chanted, and her totem animals joined their croaking to her spell. The silver spear flashed in her hand, its heavenly light shining over her like a lamp in the darkness of the underworld. Wherever demons looked at it they flinched and covered their eyes.

Chimbai was down, crushed under his fallen mount. The terrified night-mare writhed and kicked, but could not escape the horrible smoking wound bleeding spirit-stuff out of her courageous heart. The khaness dropped from her roan to stand over her husband, firing and firing her arrows while the prince took up his father’s sword and drove his demon mount among the onrushing soul-hunters.

Eluneke saw the fight out of the corner of her eye. They were outnumbered, and would soon be overrun, but her own battle took all her concentration. The demon-king was too powerful to be repelled by her spell alone, but he backed away from the silver spear that she wielded against him. When he saw that she would attack even when he took the form of her father, the demon transformed himself into a monster taller than a tree with horn for skin and empty pits for eyes that gleamed with a promise of agony and despair.

The pale horse, which was no creature of light or dark, but a gift of heaven and an instrument of her office, carried her close under the writhing tentacles of the demon-steed’s many heads. She slashed and chanted, but he pressed her back. Soon he would be joined by his court against her.

“Remember what you are.” Clinging to the basket on the shamaness’ head, Queen Toad whispered a reminder.

A toad. When Eluneke discovered her totem form, she had appeared in the shape of a very small and harmless member of that species. New at her skills, she’d hesitated to claim them as her own. Since then, she had visited the dreams of the living world and the daughters of the sky god in his heavenly realm. And she now challenged the very king of the underworld for the soul of her lover, who would be both khan and husband if she succeeded. So the queen of the toads expected more from her than the paltry creature she had been.

The demon-king sat back on his fire-breathing steed, watching her with a sneer on lips already stretched by black and tangled fangs. He could have had her then, she thought, if he’d respected her enough as an opponent. But he thought of her as prey in his hunt, and preferred to play with his food. Well.

Calling on her totem animals gathered about her, Eluneke turned into a hideous toad so huge that her pale horse couldn’t carry her. She leaped clear of it, remembering to keep hold of the reins when the beast turned again into the horse-head drumstick.

In her new form Eluneke stood taller than the fire-eyed beast, and she glistened all over with the poisonous exudations of her totem race. “Excellent!” Queen Toad applauded from where she sat between the poison pits atop Eluneke’s toady head. All the toad harem added their praise. But she was just one, and the demons were many. Soon the prince would be overwhelmed.

Eluneke focused her attention on the demon-king. He pretended to a condescending indulgence with her efforts to escape his clutches but she thought she detected an uneasy fear in him now. Which told her exactly what to do.

With a shouted prayer to the queen of the toads, she turned all the gathered harem into monstrous versions of themselves, an army of giant toads, each with poison ripening in the pouches above their eyes.

“Aaaayyyeeaaahhh!” she cried as her totem horde scattered against the hunting court. And then she turned and faced the demon-king, clenching the muscles that controlled her poison glands.

A hot stream of venom shot across the short distance between them, into the black wells of the demon’s eyes.

“AAAhhhh!” the creature screamed. His mount reared and plunged, stung by the poison where it spattered steaming on the many heads. Eluneke fell to her knees, exhausted but in human form again, the gifts of the sky god’s daughters held loosely in her hands while around her the toads, enlarged to monstrous proportion, attacked on every side. They might hold the forces of the underworld at bay a little longer, but she had failed.

She had hoped to kill, but it seemed she had only blinded the demon-king. Another attack might have succeeded, but she didn’t have the strength to shape her totem form again. To escape his injury, the demon-king need only turn himself into a mist.

The demon’s shape wavered.

“Nooo!”

Prince Tayyichiut plunged past her with his reins between his teeth. He slid sideways, hanging off his saddle, and with one hand he plucked the silver dragon spear from Eluneke’s numb fingers.

“Aaayee-yaa!” the prince cried. His hand smoked and burned from its heavenly touch, but he plunged the spear into the fading heart of the beast.

Nothing happened.

The demon blinked, began to smile. Then confusion crossed his face. His monstrous steed bucked uneasily.

“Oh!” the demon-king exclaimed, staring in horror at the spirit-stuff boiling out of the wound. Then he was silent, already rotting before he hit the ground.

“I think the boy killed him.” The queen of the toads loomed over her for a moment, then, with a little shudder, shrank down and down, until she fit into the basket-crown on Eluneke’s shaman headdress. “I think we’ve won.” Around them, the battleground had fallen silent, except for the moaning of the blinded demons running from the toads who slowly returned to their own shapes. The dead made no sound at all.

“Will he—” Eluneke stumbled on the question she started to ask the khaness. “Live” wasn’t right. Chimbai-khan, and Temulun herself, had died long ago.

“His spirit remains intact.” The lady rose from where she crouched, defending her fallen husband with her ghostly bow and arrow. She didn’t leave him, however, but watched with drawn bow as a prince of demons in the shape of a flame urged forward his nightmare steed. He seemed uninjured, and his followers who surrounded him likewise looked fresh to the battle.

“I mean you no harm,” he said, and took on the solid form of his own kind as a courtesy.

Eluneke took no chances, but clutched her horse-head drumstick in her hand, marshaling her spells to cast him out. No more convinced of the demon’s goodwill, Tayy came to her aid with the dragon spear clenched in a fist of cinders. She could feel him trembling at her side, but he faced with a clear, grave eye the demons who had surrounded them. For herself, she felt as though the least breeze would pick her up like a leaf and carry her away.

“You have indeed killed the king of the demons. You have my undying gratitude for it,” he said with a bow from the saddle.

“Not so undying, it seems to me,” Tayy answered, and no demon among them could miss his meaning. Certainly not this one, who planned to usurp the place of his fallen king.

“The pair of you do seem to have a talent for killing my kind,” the pretender admitted, admiring Tayy’s handiwork with a nudge of his boot. The little that remained of the demon-king disintegrated into mist and blew away.

“I didn’t kill the last one,” Tayy demurred, but added, “I had good teachers. And we both learn fast.”

The new king acknowledged the hit with a nod, but had his own riposte, “Not fast enough, it seems, or you wouldn’t be here.”

That was enough for Eluneke. She was sick of the underworld, sick of demons, and sick of fighting, whether with words or spears or her own venom. “We will be happy to leave,” she said, “if you will just show us the way.”

“I can send you home easily enough,” the demon agreed, adding, “you don’t belong here anyway. I don’t even mind whispering in your ear all the secrets that shaman come here to find. Call it a gift.

“But these others are mine. They’re dead, after all, and have lingered long beyond any hope of joining their ancestors in the underworld.”

“The prince goes with me,” Eluneke insisted, and clasped the prince’s charred hand, still holding the dragon spear. “Given why we are having this conversation at all, I don’t think you want him around anyway.”

“I’ll grant you that,” the new demon-king answered, with half a smile lurking at the corner of the lips turned back by his curling tusks. “I suppose you want her, too.”

They all looked at the khaness then. When it had become clear that there would be no further attack, she had dropped again to hold her husband. Chimbai’s soul had almost ceased its struggle against the monstrous weight of the dead steed that held him down.

“I won’t leave him,” the khaness insisted.

Eluneke closed her eyes, searching within herself for a healing spell that would revive the fading spirit. Several came to mind, but none that would help her lift the weight that pinned the old khan down. When she opened her eyes again, the khaness had leaned over in a lingering kiss. Eluneke knew she ought to look away, to give the loving wife some privacy for her farewells. But she couldn’t. And while she watched, the Lady Temulun took a deep breath.

At first, her lips remained pressed to those of her husband. Then, Chimbai-Khan drifted out of his ghostly form, becoming a breath. When she stood up again, the khaness held within her the vaporous spirit of her beloved khan.

“I think we’re ready to go now,” she said. When she smiled, a tendril of soul-stuff escaped her lips. She licked it up again and joined them before the new demon-king.

“All or nothing, then,” the king bargained. “A contest of riddles. Answer this: a string of jade beads, hidden in the branches.”

“A snake,” Eluneke answered, “The emerald green bamboo snake.” The old king’s daughter, who had murdered Chimbai and his wife, took the shape of a bamboo snake. Eluneke willed her horse-head drumstick into the form of a pale steed and posed her own challenge from the same height as her opponent: “Brindle-legged among the Qubal, red among the Tinglut.”

“A toad,” the king answered, with a tilt of his head to acknowledge the warning, and a riddle to issue another of his own: “The camel calls to its mate; far away, a light glitters.”

“A bow and arrow,” Eluneke answered, and countered, “Another camel opens his mouth and the tether flashes.”

“Lightning,” the king of demons answered and paused to think about the meaning of the riddle. Though shaman often came demanding the secrets of the dead from the demon world, he had never met one before who had climbed to heaven on a bolt of light. It said something for her skills as well as her courage. “But enough of games. Something more difficult: “Three things full at a distance, empty in the hand.”

Behind her on her ghostly horse, Eluneke heard Prince Tayy gasp. The riddle was harder than the others, but her teachers had trained her well. “A dream, on waking,” she said, “a greeting, returned by an echoing mountain, a tent city reflected in the dust of a mirage. And for you, three joys.”

The demon king bowed his head to acknowledge her answer, and her riddle. “Though such things are foreign to my kind, I have heard the voices of the dead speaking of their lives on the path to the realms of their own spirits. Three joys must be, the rapturous sigh of a lover, victory cry in wrestling, the first squall of a newborn child. And now, for you, three lacks.”

“Pillars for the sky,” Eluneke answered, “A stone to cover the sea, and a girdle for the mountains.” She didn’t give her next riddle right away, but thought for a long time, until Prince Tayy shifted cautiously in the saddle and the Lady Temulun’s eyes shadowed with despair. Then, the shaman-princess said, “A she-goat drags a tether through the gate.”

The khaness blinked at her, amazed, it seemed, that Eluneke had chosen such a homely riddle. But she was counting on exactly that.

The demon who ruled the underworld frowned, thinking. He took a breath, as if to answer, and let it go again. “This is no fitting riddle,” he complained, “I have heard no spirits talk of such things on their way to their ancestors.”

“It’s a riddle for the living, not the dead,” Eluneke conceded, though she held him to his bargain. “What would spirits have to do with threading a needle?”

The demon-king’s face suffused with his anger, but he gave her his secrets as he had promised, and when she demanded the way home, he said, “Rain or river, find it yourself. And don’t count on my good nature if you should come back.”

She bowed her head but didn’t make any promises. Not if I can help it, she thought as he drove his spurs into the sides of his nightmare steed. Then the hunt was sweeping by them. They had left the river far behind, but Eluneke had an idea. She spat onto the ground and stepped where her spittle had fallen. Sinking upward, she found that they had traded one battlefield for another.