Book of Iron by Elizabeth Bear Read Free Book Online Page B

face.
    Salamander looked at her. “Should we be taking cover?”
    “We’ll have a little while no matter which sun it is,” Bijou said. “I’d rather find your mother before she…”
    …has time to kill your friend.
    Salamander nodded.
    Bijou said, “Pray one of the white suns rises first. If your gods are the amenable sort, pray that it’s just the nightsun, and we’re in a year where it rises far in advance of the others.”
    “How many suns are there?” Riordan said.
    “Four,” said Maledysaunte. “Three daysuns—the blue, the orange, and the white—and the nightsun, which is white also. The daysuns rise and set together; it is the blue one whose light is so feared. Sometimes the orange sun eclipses it, which is safer. A little. The nightsun is a wanderer. Like the moon of Messaline and the moon of Avalon, sometimes it shines alone in the dark, and sometimes it shines with its sisters. There is a pattern to its meanderings,” she finished. “But it lasts a little over 1,864 years. And I’m not sure where we are within it. Once I get a look at the suns, I’ll know better…”
    The others had paused to stare, the dead stallion tossing his head in impatience as he checked his stride to avoid trampling Kaulas.
    “Of course,” the prince said to break the silence. “It’s all in the book.”
    “The Book. The burning Book, the Black Book. The Book of flame. The Book, the Book, the Book.” Her child-soft lips twisted apologetically. “My head is full of it. I could tell you their names in the Ancient Tongue—”
    “Thank you,” Salamander said hastily. “All the same.”
    Despite the pale light creeping up the sky, Bijou smiled. These foreign wizards had a sense of humor after all. Even if it involved a language whose every syllable was murder.
    The adventurers rounded the end of that sandstone tongue and found themselves looking down into a deeper, narrower, and more shadowed canyon. Serried ranks of broken-topped pillars marched its width and length, showing that the whole thing had once been roofed in stone to form a hypostyle.
    “They built in the valleys to stay out of the suns,” Riordan said. “Gods, what a life.”
    “And what a death,” Kaulas added. “They’re all gone now, and what they built….” He shrugged.
    They could not see a sun yet, but a pale brightness—like the light of four moons—crept down one canyon wall: the first light of the nightsun, Bijou hoped. The sky had not paled much beyond that dusty mauve they’d seen on arriving, and she thought it was not yet bright enough to herald the white daystar. Also the air still held the morning cool.
    “I think we’re in luck,” said Prince Salih. “Or the gods are with us.”
    “You trust them not to change their minds?”
    “I think that ghul was trying to trick us,” Riordan said.
    Bijou shook her head. “Why should it, when it could lead us to our deaths simply by telling the truth?”
    She broke into a shuffling trot, her kaftan trailing in the air behind. Running on dry sand was no joy: her calves ached within strides and the sand that had sifted into her boot gritted between the sock and her sole. But she concentrated on steadying her stride and her ankles as the others fell in. She could see the lakebed now, baked dry, with the fragments of stone roof that had once protected it half-embedded in the hardpan. It was difficult to judge how far away objects lay in such a desert, with no haze to blur distant things, but Bijou guessed the hardpan ended no more than an eighth of a league on—in the long, low arch of a cavern behind it. In that deep shade, Bijou could just discern the glisten of water.
    Limping heavily, Riordan was falling behind as they ran until Kaulas stopped the dead horse and let him mount. The bard might have been dubious before, but it wasn’t because he didn’t know how to ride. He vaulted onto the stallion’s back with the same agility he’d shown exiting the roadster, and then he