Steles of the Sky by Elizabeth Bear Read Free Book Online

guessed the clans took turns feeding themselves and their neighbors.
    By contrast, the Rasan households were disorganized and ill-supplied. Many of them had obviously not known what to pack, or had time or the skill to pack it intelligently, and they didn’t know what to do with it now that they were out here. Cooking without a hearth, trying to rig warm beds for the night—there would be a frost, and she hoped no one would freeze in their blankets. The refugees included infants and the old. Their pack animals and one-wheeled wagons—some drawn by yaks, some pushed by men—were heaped haphazardly with objects grabbed at random. The Qersnyk women could lay a hand on any item in their packing within minutes; the Rasani must hunt through jumbles.
    Not all of them would make it. Wherever they wound up. Kashe, which the Qersnyk called Qeshqer, was out of the question—a city left emptied by blood ghosts was too unlucky for anyone to inhabit. Which meant the steppes, or Song.
    Tsering wondered if she should have pushed more of the Rasan refugees to go south, with the Dowager Empress Regent. But that bird had flown and they needed to be out of the mountains before winter locked them in for eternity.
    Tsering’s palms stung; she found herself peeling fingernails from her own flesh as she thought of the Emperor Songtsan and his refusal to arrange for an orderly evacuation while time permitted.
    Well, he was probably dead now himself, and raging against him was a waste of energy. Or perhaps a source of energy: she felt abruptly lighter. The leadenness of exhaustion fell away. Beside her, Jurchadai lengthened his stride to keep up.
    “I hope that scowl is not for me,” he said. “Although if it puts that bounce in your step, it might not be so bad to see you angry.”
    Well, Tsering was guessing on the words for “scowl” and “bounce,” but she was confident she had the context close enough. “Songtsan,” she answered. When he nodded in commiseration, she realized she did not want his pity and added, “How much further?”
    “Right here.” He pointed with his elbow, the Qersnyk way, to an encampment guarded by two of the enormous steppe mastiffs, who lay alertly alongside a woman with a scarred face. The woman had a babe at her breast, tucked into the open front of a good coat, embroidered, with a fur collar. She wore lambskin boots sewn with the wooly side inward and seemed at her ease. Tsering recognized one of the Tsareg cousins descended of Altantsetseg.
    Just then, she realized with surprise that Jurchadai hadn’t been setting the wards from horseback as she would have expected, but walking his flags and stones around. She mentioned it to him as they stepped between the barrels that marked the edge of the campsite.
    He smiled with one corner of his mouth. “Mares need rest too.”
    The Tsareg woman did not rise as they came up to her, but the nearer of the two great dogs did. Although his winter coat had not yet come in, he was still a massive, shaggy thing—as matted as a yak, mostly black with golden-brown paws and eyebrows, the paws as big as Tsering’s hands if she doubled the fingers under at the first joint.
    “Four-eyed dog,” Jurchadai said fondly, extending his hand for the dog to sniff. “They see ghosts. We say the souls of dead monks go into these dogs.”
    The gold marks above his eyes did resemble a second set of irises. Tsering, too, held out her hand and let him sniff. His coat smelled of old grease and woodsmoke, and even in the chill of deepening twilight his thick tongue lolled. She thought he was the same dog she had seen several times before at Altantsetseg’s side, and after a few good huffs he seemed to accept her as inoffensive.
    By the time she had been sufficiently sniffed and investigated, another woman had emerged from beneath a stretched hide tarpaulin screened with blankets. She too wore a Qersnyk rider’s long coat and breeches. As she straightened, Tsering saw a beaded