The God-King continued in that unearthly voice. “Higher they drove the shores and the sea. Greater they grew, the youngest gods, clawing at the sky, rising toward the Sun and the Moon and the Stars. When they could grow no more, when they stood taller than any other mountain gods, the sea drained away between them, seeking its ocean mother. The immense shoreline forests of palm, cactus, and fern withered. Only firs, spruces, larches, junipers, and hemlocks thrive here, and rarely on the open plateau. Here the gods see everything. Gyongxe has nowhere to hide from the gods of this world.” He slumped. Briar was almost afraid to breathe until the younger boy blinked and straightened. Rubbing the back of his neck he looked at Briar sheepishly. “Did I go off? They never give me any warning, you know. I’ve told them and
told them that it frightens people when they grab me, but gods and spirits don’t really understand fear.”
“Do they do that to you often?” Briar whispered, goose bumps rippling all across his skin.
“Often enough. The land is crowded with them, what with one thing and another, and I can never tell when one of them will work through me.”
A large crash split the air. The God-King jumped to his feet with a whoop. “There we go!” he cried as if he had just won a wager.
Briar remembered what had brought them to this cold ledge on a chilly morning. Setting aside the boy’s tale to ponder later, he looked across the river.
Rock tumbled from a rectangular hole at least twenty feet high in the cliff’s face, cascading around a solid shape at its center. The shamans continued to dance and the musicians to play as they backed toward the place where Evvy and the other observers stood. Briar whistled in silent admiration: He knew
he
couldn’t dance and walk backward, yet the shamans and their musical helpers never faltered. Only Evvy moved, walking forward around the line of shamans. Dokyi lunged to grab her again and missed. Evvy took a place on the riverbank, in front of whatever was going on in the cliff, and held out her hands.
Briar fought to stand, spilling the tray of ink. He ignored it, but he could not ignore it when the God-King grabbed one of his arms.
“Stop,” the younger boy ordered in a voice that froze Briar where he stood. “She will be
fine.
Watch.”
He released Briar, who instantly found he could move again. Rather than continue to try to reach his student, Briar waited.
He wasn’t quite sure if Evvy made any noise. The racket caused by the grinding, collapsing wall of rocks drowned out any other sound except, of course, for the God-King’s voice. Briar wondered if Evvy might not be chanting a spell, though. He knew she was working her magic, because the tumbling rock split on either side of the opening it made, like curtains before a window. That was pure Evvy. Neat piles of broken stone grew from the falling rock on either side of the rectangular gap in the cliff. At its heart stood a pair of embracing, human-like, stone skeletons. As the heaped boulders and chips in front of them shifted to either side, the twenty-foot-tall skeletons walked out of the cliff.
Evvy wavered. She was trying to do too much at once. Worried, Briar stepped up to the edge where the tent was pitched, then halted again. Dokyi had reached the girl. He stood next to Evvy, writing signs on the air as he worked spells of his own. She straightened, able to control the falling stone again with Dokyi’s help.
The skeletons, which had paused when she seemed about to fall over, resumed their walk away from the cliff. One of the two skulls looked curiously at Evvy and Dokyi while the other scanned the riverside behind them, the gap in the cliff, and then the shamans and their musicians. An arm from that skeleton reached around to tap the skull that had cocked its head as it stared at Evvy. When that skull turned to glare at the other, the tapping hand pointed to the shamans. Both skeletons lumbered toward the dancers.
Briar looked at the God-King. “What are they for, the statues? I don’t think you said.”
The God-King squinted at the dancing skeletons. “Such things are a promise from this realm to those who build their temples here. They are our blessing on the temples, and a sign of our protection. They tell invaders that the temple is guarded by the gods of Gyongxe as well as the gods of the temple where the statues stand.”
Seemingly unafraid and without missing a step, the dancers and musicians continued to back up, dancing or playing as they went. The warriors mounted horses to form a half circle around them. Other members of their group that handled the wagon they had brought helped the musicians into it. As smoothly as if they often traveled this way, the warriors and wagon set off in the lead, their half circle ending with the dancers just inside. The two skeletons, arms around each other’s stone spine waist, came last of all.
Dokyi turned to Evvy and bent until they were face-to-face. He grabbed her by the ears and pressed his forehead to hers. Briar wasn’t sure if he was trying to scold Evvy or just knock two rock heads together. Thinking that he ought to intervene before Evvy said or did something rude, he turned to excuse himself to the God-King. The boy was scowling at the message he had just received.
“You don’t look very happy,” Briar said.
“I have not heard from the king of Inxia.” That was the realm to the northeast, a country that stood between Gyongxe and the Yanjing empire. “I often do by now. Our mages who deal in conversations at a distance have not heard from his mages in several
months. No horse messengers have come through the Green Pass, either.”
“It
is
only the third month of the year,” Briar reminded him. “It’s probably frozen solid.”
The God-King gave him an absentminded smile. “The Green Pass is in hill country, beyond the mountains of the Drimbakang Sharlog. Usually it is open by this time, though the weather has been very harsh in the hills this year.” He stopped speaking as he stared off into the distance.
Briar waited longer than he would have waited for anyone else to resume talking. When he was sure the God-King had simply forgotten what he’d begun to explain, Briar asked, “So what has this Inxia fellow to do with how well you’ll sleep tonight?” He could tell the God-King was worried.
“All three kingdoms north of Yanjing have been fighting the empire for the last five years,” the God-King explained. “Since Inxia is our closest neighbor, we have sent mages and soldiers to their assistance for four of those years. We should have heard what they will need for this year’s fighting by now.”
Briar nodded. Now he understood. “Because if Inxia falls, Gyongxe is next.”
“I would like to think not,” the younger boy replied, but he did not sound convinced. “We have very little to interest the Emperor Weishu. Except the gods and spirits, who are closer here than anywhere else in the world, and you can’t pay soldiers with those. There are the temple treasures, but surely Weishu’s mages do not believe they can take the curses from temple goods. We do spread word that there are curses on anything stolen from the temples of Gyongxe, and we cannot remove them.” The God-King
sighed. “I would feel better if I knew the Yanjingyi armies were denting their teeth on my neighbors again this year.”
A surge of pity raced through Briar’s heart at the expression on the God-King’s face. That’s not the look any boy his age ought to wear, thought Briar. I’d even feel sorry for a man of twice my years in his shoes.
It was at moments like these that Briar understood why the gods of Gyongxe had told their priests to choose this boy to rule over the many different tribes, villages, cities, faiths, and temples of Gyongxe. There was something great inside the God-King; something larger than Briar was. He wouldn’t have spent a day in the God-King’s skin for all the pretty girls between there and home.
“Briar, did you see it?” While they had talked politics and war, the rest of the statue-raising party had crossed the river bridge to join the God-King’s group. Evvy raced over to the tent. The pockets of her orange wool tunic sagged with what Briar knew were more stone fragments. “You aren’t even looking!”
“We watched the statue raising,” the God-King told her. “I’ve seen such things before, you know. Briar was impressed.”
“I was,” Briar assured the girl.
Evvy stopped at the open doorway and bowed to the God-King, then braced her hands on her knees while she struggled to catch her breath. They had been in high mountain country for nearly two years, but Evvy and Briar would struggle with the thin air if they tried to run. Rosethorn had trouble breathing all of the time. Although their entire journey had been Rosethorn’s idea, she had been forced to spend much of it resting. She had chosen to work on the spring gardens instead of taking the awkward
journey down the cliff into the river canyon with Briar and Evvy that morning. Briar looked forward to getting back to lowlands again, so his Rosethorn could breathe more easily.
“Could you see what
I
did?” Evvy demanded. “I kept the scrap rock from falling on anyone!” She grabbed the pack she had left with Briar and emptied her stones into it. “Do you know it’s going to take them at least ten
days
to walk back to their home temple? They only had the five shamans who could do the spell, so there’s no one to keep the magic going at night. If they aren’t dancing, the statues won’t move. They’re going to be awfully tired — the shamans, not the statues. I offered to clean up the loose rock, but Dokyi said the Drimbakang Zugu have their own way of dealing with it. What does that mean?” She gathered the stones she’d left with Briar and stowed them in her pack as well.
Evumeimei Dingzai was a skinny former slave who never missed a meal if she could help it. She was five feet tall with a strong Yanjingyi face: wide cheekbones, sharp chin, and long black eyes. Briar liked to tease her that she’d smacked her face into a door once, since her nose was flat at the tip. Her hands and nails showed scars and scratches from two years of hard work as a stone mage and a lifetime as a cat owner. He had found her scraping for a living in a slum. Although her magic was different from his, he had learned that he would not give her up to a teacher of her own power who would be unkind to her.
The God-King stood and moved off the giant pillow where he and Briar had spent the morning. “Wait a moment, Evumeimei.”
Evvy scowled. From the very beginning the God-King had treated her as a beloved sister. She had soon lost any shyness she
could be expected to feel in his presence. “You always tell me to wait. I’ll have you know I am older than you —”
“I am the two hundred and ninety-eighth God-King in a straight line of choice from the first God-King,” he replied as he did whenever she brought up their difference in age. “You will have to be as old as —”
The stone beneath Briar’s feet had begun to shake. He sat hurriedly and pulled at Evvy’s arm. She signaled for the God-King to join them. Everyone outside was sitting as well.
Briar heard the kind of grinding noise that brought landslides to mind. Looking across the river, he felt his stomach roll. He clapped his hands over his mouth to keep his very good breakfast where it was supposed to be. Stones that had fallen, gravel that had dropped off a cliff, dust that had settled after the skeletons had gone for their walk belonged on the ground. All of these things had no business rising into the air in front of the gap in the cliff. None of them should be entering that gap, nor should any of the boulders on the riverbank or the stones between the water and the cliff be rolling to it and climbing over one another in their eagerness to fill in the hole left by the skeleton statues. Now more stones rattled down the slopes of the mountain that stood behind the cliff. They hesitated only briefly on the edge of the drop, then rolled over. In a maneuver that left Briar feeling as if he had been inhaling strange smokes, the new stones fell not straight down, but in a curve, dropping into the hole where the rocks from below had still left gaps. Now, except for a few openings, the rectangular space that had provided the statues was filled.
“Who did that?” Evvy cried. “Is that what Dedicate Dokyi meant when he said the mountains would clean up the loose rock?”
“That is what he meant,” the God-King said, getting to his feet. “And I am glad the work is finished. I don’t like to leave before the cleaning-up is done. There have been accidents in the past.” He went to the edge of the rock slab and held his hands out palm up. Tilting back his head, he opened his mouth. Sounds came out, spoken in something other than the
tiyon
language that he’d used all morning with Briar and Evvy, the common tongue of the east. These words rolled along the canyon, grating on Briar’s bones. He pulled his tunic over his ears, willing to do nearly anything to make them stop. Evvy rose, her face alight, and listened until the God-King lowered his hands.
Briar uncovered one ear. Normal sounds were returning to the canyon. He cleared his throat and got up. “What was that about?” he asked the God-King.
“I was thanking the canyon,” the younger boy replied. “The shamans did it, of course, but the little gods appreciate it when I say something, too.”
Evvy was slowly coming back to herself, her joy being replaced by her usual liveliness. Dedicate Dokyi found her as they waited for the servants to gather their tent and the cushions. He was a gnarled and sun-wrinkled man in his fifties, with dark eyes buried under heavy lids. His wide-lipped mouth, like his eyes, was framed by laugh lines. His knotted legs and muscled arms showed he was no stranger to hard work and plenty of it. Even his brown dedicate’s habit didn’t soften the hard shape of his body.
“Nicely done back there earlier, Evvy,” he said, tweaking her nose. “I don’t suppose you could teach me how you made the stones overhead fall backward into the opening?”
Evvy reached out with her hands, opened and closed them,
then shook her head with regret. “I asked them to go that way,” she explained.
Dokyi looked at Briar. “She asked them. I see them as tools to be set in place along the frame of a spell pattern, and your student treats them as partners in the work.”