"And who does Lluka serve?"

They both knew: his intentions might be honorable, but Lluka had placed his own will above Llesho's quest, and the Shan Empire might still fall for his decision. Adar might die.

"He wasn't alone." Balar defended their brother, as he must. They had spent years together studying at the feet of the Dinha. "The dream readers of Ahkenbad wanted me to bring you to them as well."

"And now they're dead." He couldn't help it, the anger he'd been ignoring since they'd left the ruined city spilled out like acid, burning him as much as it burned his brother. "Shou knew the danger he was facing. He's courting the goddess of war, for mercy's sake! But none of you had any idea of the destruction Markko is capable of. You interfered anyway, and now Ahkenbad is dead. Harlol will be dead soon, and the Wastrels who ride with him, who never would have left the Gansau Wastes if Lluka hadn't decided his will was more important than Lleck's quest."

"He wanted to protect you."

"I'm the king. It's my quest. If Lluka wants to be regent, let him fight ChiChu for the privilege. And if he should win against my combat instructor, let him take it up with the Lady SienMa!"

"Do you hear yourself, brother?" Balar reached over and grabbed the bridle of Llesho's horse, nearly losing his seat in the process. But he was determined to have his say, and Llesho was growing as skittish as his mount. "You consort with the most dangerous of mortal gods and are surprised that we worry-"

Llesho's answer was a brittle laugh with no joy in it. "Mischief and war have trained me with a harsh hand across all the li between the grasslands and the sea, brother. What do you think they have made me, if not dangerous?"

"What they have done can be undone," Balar pleaded, "I want my baby brother back."

Eyes bleak with the suffering he had seen, Llesho shook his head. "That child is dead." There was nothing left to say, so he kicked his horse into a canter and left his brother glaring at the dirt.

"Welcome, young prince," Yesugei greeted his return with a solemn nod, and "Good evening," Llesho answered as he fell in at the chieftain's side.

Lluka said nothing, but with a clenched jaw challenged the captains for his place at Llesho's right hand. Neither Kaydu nor Bixei would give ground, however. With a venomous glare, Lluka fell back to ride with Balar who seemed, after his recent conversation, to have grown thoughtful in the face of his brothers' anger.

As they rode, the tents grew bigger, but the distance never seemed to lessen. Llesho shot a wary glance at his host, who returned it with a knowing smile.

"Few outlanders have seen the tent city of the Chimbai-Khan," Yesugei offered by way of explanation, "Tales judge us by what the tellers see of us: our grazing parties, and the hunt."

"They judge you by your raiding parties, too." Llesho shivered in the rising chill. The Harnish chieftain had tested him among the baggage handlers, or so he thought. Now, with the hidden might of the Harnish clans eating up more and more of the horizon, Llesho brought out his grievances for an airing.

"The horror in the eyes of the dead and the weeping of the slaves you carry away speak louder than the songs of wandering herders."

Yesugei's head snapped back as if he had been struck. "Not every ulus rides against its neighbors," he reminded Llesho, "But peaceful folk rarely inspire songs."

"Thebin did, until Harnish raiders laid it waste." Llesho returned cut for cut in this duel of words.

But Yesugei had the sharpest return, an almost lethal blow: "A Harnish riddle asks what prize for a man who raises his head too high above his neighbors. The answer is an ax at his neck. The Cloud Country set its sights above the concerns of smaller men, breeding miracles the way the clans breed horses."

Llesho had never heard Thebin called the Cloud Country before. The name conjured images of the clinic Adar had kept high in the mountains. He remembered waking from a fever to a window laced with clouds. The memory hurt, but his heart opened to the name and took it in. Yesugei saw the pain that flitted across his face, mis-guessing its cause.

"Chimbai-Khan does not concern himself with the South," the chieftain claimed in defense of his ulus' honor. "If he'd been the Gur-Khan of the Golden City, however, he would have set a watch for axes at his neck."

The Golden City was a common name for Kungol, carried with the legends wherever the caravans passed.

According to the tales, the city was so rich that even the houses of the lowest street sweepers were made of gold. They weren't, of course: not that rich, and not made of gold; the color came from the plaster on the houses. The plasterers had more work than they could handle during the season when the caravan road was open, repairing the corners of buildings where the foolish had broken off pieces to spend.

"There was no gold," Llesho said, No one had profited from the legend except the plasterers, and even they did not escape the Harnish raiders. "It was just yellow mud."

"And the miracles?" Yesugei asked.

Llesho smiled, no humor in it, but no bitterness either. More like the serendipitous discovery of wild nettles blooming in the snow: too beautiful to ignore, but too painful to touch. "Yes, the miracles were true."

His answer didn't seem to surprise Yesugei, but it didn't please him either. "Outlanders see all the Harn-lands as one country, with one scattered people in it. But that isn't so."

"No." He accepted that Yesugei believed what he said, answering questions Llesho didn't know to ask. Llesho had to find the truth for himself, but he wondered why Yesugei was giving away what he could trade. Impulsively, before Yesugei could continue, he asked a question he should have been figuring out on his own: "Are you a teacher?"

"To teach a dream?" Yesugei eyed him thoughtfully. "Perhaps, in a small way. Your masters would make you a king. The gods would make you a miracle. Who will make you into a human being?"

"I thought I was one of those already."

Yesugei ignored his retort. Weighting his words with importance, he asked, "Do you know where the term 'Harn' comes from?"

Llesho's formal education had ended in his seventh summer, and this was something none of his masters since had bothered to teach him. He shook his head, again reserving judgment on the explanation Yesugei gave.

"'Harn' is a name the Tashek have given, and which they take everywhere the caravans go. It refers to the wind blowing on the grass, and names us not for who we are or where we come from, but for the fact that we never settle, always following our herds as they graze. In the South, the Uulgar people share that name, but are no friends to the North."

Llesho had heard of the Uulgar before. The explanation came as no surprise, therefore, though he didn't believe it was that simple. "These Uulgar killed my parents, my sister? Sold my brothers and me into slavery?"

Yesugei shrugged. "I don't know. The ulus of the Qubal clans never travels the Southern Road. I wish you only to remember, when you meet Chimbai-Khan, that he wasn't there at the death of the Golden City."

That sounded like something Master Den would ask of him. "I'll remember," Llesho promised. He would have asked more questions, but with a jerk of his head, Yesugei signaled a rider from his band to come forward.

"We stop here for the night," he said, and added, for the rider, "Take word to the khan's tent that we bring the stranger of old Bolghai's dreams."

The rider bowed his head in salute before wheeling his horse and galloped away toward the distant tents.

"Who's Bolghai?" Llesho asked.

"You will meet him in the morning." Yesugei let his horse amble away toward the small band setting out the frame of a felted ger-tent. He hadn't answered the question, and Llesho wondered why.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

IN a dream, Llesho sat at a low, mahogany table set with tea things under an arbor twined with vines from which heavy purple grapes hung in bunches bursting with juice. It didn't feel like a dream. The breeze, heavy with the scent of warm grapes and honeysuckle, swept his cheek while sunlight played hide-and-seek between the grape leaves and the arbor slats. But he had seen no arbor, no grapes, in the vicinity of their camp. Emperor Shou, two days' gone in the opposite direction, sat at his right pouring spiced tea into small jade bowls, while on his left, Pig snuffled daintily at a dish of plums. Across from Llesho at the table a large white cobra curled its body into the seat of a basket chair, flared hood swaying above its long neck.

"Is this a true dream?" Llesho asked. He hoped some jumble of memories and old stories had stewed the strange visions in his tired mind, but the emperor dismissed that notion with a soft unhappy laugh.

Pig looked up from his plums in surprise. "Of course it's a true dream, Llesho. The question you have to ask is, who dreams it?"

"You?" he asked Pig. It seemed unlikely, but Shou stared into his wine as if it were a scrying bowl that might tell him how he'd arrived at this tea party hosted by a serpent. Llesho didn't want to think about the alternative.

"Not mine." Pig confirmed what he didn't want to hear.

The snake fixed a cold and deadly eye on him. "Lleeeshhhoo," she hissed in a high, clear voice he recognized even from the throat of a serpent.

"Lady SienMa," Llesho bowed his head to honor the mortal goddess of war in the form by which she appeared to him in the dream. At the same time, he muttered a little prayer under his breath that the great white snake keep to her side of the table. Lady SienMa had taught him to pull a bow at her own hand and had fed him fruit from a silver bowl at her feet. She made him nervous at the best of times, though, and in her present form she scared him nearly to death.

"Whyyyyy are you heeeeeerrre?" Her ladyship slithered in undulating waves against the rich grain of the mahogany table. Her flicking tongue glanced off his cheek and Llesho shuddered, frozen with dread while a frantic little voice in his head gibbered at him to run, right now, as far and as fast as he could. But she was too close. If he moved, she would strike and he would die. He knew that, just as he knew Shou couldn't and Pig wouldn't stop her. Fresh out of escape plans, he answered her question. "I don't know. Where is here?"

"Mmmmyyy Dreammmmmm."

"Oh." Llesho'd figured that out for himself, much as he hated to think it. He remembered her face in the waking world, white as the scales of the serpent and framed with hair black as the serpent's dead eyes. But which was her true form: the woman or the serpent of her own dreams?

"Both. Neither."

He hadn't actually asked the question, only thought it. Fine. She was a mind reading snake and the god of war, and he had invaded her sleep to muck about in her dream. Instead of leaving like he properly ought to do, he was asking questions in his head that he didn't really want answers to at all.

"Aaaassskkkk," she said, again reading his mind. Or, he wondered, was he reading hers? The forked tongue flicked again, touching his lip in a mockery of a kiss and he barely held himself from a shudder.

"What happened to Shou?" He didn't mean just now, in the dream, but what had happened to him in captivity that had left him moving dreamlike through horrors only he could see.

Pig cut an uneasy glance in his direction. "The magician," he said between slurps at the dish of plums.

"Poisons?"

Pig shook his head. "He invaded the emperor's dreams in captivity and stole his memories for clues to where you had gone."

"Ahkenbad is dead." Llesho stared with barely contained horror at the emperor. How had Shou survived, when the dream readers of Ahkenbad had died of Markko's attack on their minds?

However he'd done it, all that courage and determination seemed about to be lost to the venomed tooth of the white cobra. The Lady SienMa, in her serpent form, had coiled glittering loops of her white body around the emperor. Shou seemed not to hear the conversation going on around him but absently stroked the scales of her back as the goddess of war writhed against him, around him, tongue darting over his face, her fangs never far from his neck.

Llesho held his breath, afraid to even think of weapons when the snake had read his mind already in this dream. Don't kill him, don't kill him, Don't kill him, don't kill him, the prayer ran through his head as he considered seizing the snake in his bare hands to free the emperor from her deadly coils. She would strike him dead if he touched her; he knew that and could only sit very still and hope that she would hear his plea. the prayer ran through his head as he considered seizing the snake in his bare hands to free the emperor from her deadly coils. She would strike him dead if he touched her; he knew that and could only sit very still and hope that she would hear his plea.

"Her ladyship would never hurt Shou." Pig snuffled up a plum and added, as an afterthought, "She loves him."

"And Shou?"

Pig gave a little shrug. "Who better to love the goddess of war than a soldier?" he asked.

"Does he?" he whispered back and meant, How can a mortal man, even an emperor, love the goddess of war. How can a mortal man, even an emperor, love the goddess of war. It felt like an unspeakable breach of the emperor's privacy to be here, in this garden, seeing something that he'd never wanted to know. But he knew better than to ignore a message from the Lady SienMa, even in dreams. It felt like an unspeakable breach of the emperor's privacy to be here, in this garden, seeing something that he'd never wanted to know. But he knew better than to ignore a message from the Lady SienMa, even in dreams.

As if responding to Llesho's question, Shou turned his head and laid a gentle kiss on the back of the serpent where it lay in a coil over his shoulder.

So that was . . . love . . . not murder he was watching from across the mahogany table. Between her coils, the emperor's armor had taken on the texture of living shell, marked all over with the patterns of a turtle, but Shou didn't seem to notice his transformation.

"She has an odd way of showing it." Too sharp. Llesho winced, waited for the poison tooth to strike, but the lady merely pulled herself back to her basket chair, leaving the emperor of all Shan bereft of her chill comfort.

"Fiiiind hiiiiim. Killllll him," she hissed.

Master Markko, of course, who had turned her lover's mind inward. He thought to tell her, "I'm trying," but it came out, "I will."

Stretching the flared hood of her head high on her tall neck, the lady opened her snake mouth wide. Out of it came the most terrible scream that Llesho had ever heard. Trembling, he fell from his chair onto the loamy ground and covered his head with shaking hands. "Goddess, save me!" he cried, though jumbled in his heart he also meant, "Save us all, it hurts me, too." He woke bathed in sweat to the bloody light of the false dawn stealing through the red tent cloth.

"Wake up, Llesho, wake up!" Bixei shook his arm.

His voice sounded raspy and hoarse, as if he'd been calling for a long time.

"I'm awake." Llesho freed his arm and half-sat on his pallet, but he wondered if he had awakened all the same. The dream remained too vivid, and his flesh crawled with the memory of the great snake caressing Emperor Shou. "Oh, Goddess, please," he muttered, but couldn't say what he asked for. Peace, Peace, he thought. he thought. Only peace, for one night. Only peace, for one night.

"What is it? Was it a dream?"

"I saw Shou with the Lady SienMa." He couldn't tell what he had seen, the lady as a white cobra, and Shou with the shell of a turtle where his armor ought to be. But the the meaning of it-"Pig says she loves him."

"Oh, that." Bixie didn't seem surprised. "I hope she can bring him back to his senses."

"She's the mortal goddess of war!"

"I prefer a more peaceful partner myself," Bixei conceded, "Of course, I'm not a general or the emperor of Shan.

"But come outside-you have to see this. You won't believe what happened while you were sleeping." Bixei drew a little apart to give him space to roll off his pallet and scrub the stiffness out of his face.

He wasn't sure he was ready to confront any more surprises-Shou with the Lady SienMa was more than enough. Bixei was waiting, however, so he straightened his spine and walked with more firmness than he felt to the open tent flap.

On what had been an empty plain when he went to sleep, a town of white felt tents had grown up and surrounded their little stand of red. This close, he realized he'd been as wrong about the size of the tents as the legends had been about the towers of Kungol. Not gold, in the khan's city, but white felt, the same matted wool used in the raiders' campaign tents but without the black dye that made the raiders' tents so ominous. These were immense, with round roofs banded with elaborately woven eaves, and draped all around with walls of heavy felt. Here and there a column of smoke rose through a hole in the center of a great round roof.

In front of Llesho's camp a wide avenue ran, with Harnish riders passing with brisk purpose or returning weary from some task that kept them busy during the night. Huge white tents squatted on either side, like glowering giants over a game of dominoes. Lesser tents scattered widely to left and right covered all the land to the horizon.

"How is this possible?" Llesho muttered under his breath. It didn't seem to be an attack, since weapons remained sheathed. Like a dream, the tents had come out of nowhere, however, and unknown magics made him nervous.

"The great khan has come to call." Master Den stood to the side of Llesho's tent, his legs planted and his elbows jutting out at his sides, his huge fists resting at his waist. To his right and left were Llesho's three brothers and the emperor's dwarf, and after, Llesho's captains. Behind him, all his small band of troops waited nervously to see what command he would give them.

"By what spell?" Llesho asked.

Before his advisers could comment, a stranger darted into sight around the corner of his tent, with Carina, the healer, following him. Llesho had seen many unusual things in his travels, but the little man was by far the oddest in human form. He was clearly Harnish and, though taller than Llesho, he was short for his own people. He wore his hair not in one plait or two, but in too many to count, all springing from his head at every angle. From the tail of each braid hung a talisman of metal or bead, or the tiny bone of a bird or small animal.

He wore robes cut in strips to show many layers over rough leather breeches that ended above boots wrapped close to the legs. Bells and amulets hung from silver chains sewn onto the layers, and from the collar around his neck the pelts of stoats hung by their sharp little teeth. When he moved or shook his shoulders, which he did in quick, jerky gestures, the pelts flew about in a little stoat dance. In one hand he carried a flat skin drum and with the other he reached for the thighbone of a roebuck that Carina held out to him.

Carina herself wore a costume similar to the stranger's, with many silver utensils and embroidered amulet bags hanging from fine chains sewn to her waist and shoulders. The end of a long hide belt hung down in back, finished at the end with a thick black fringe like the tail of a jerboa.

The stranger peered into Llesho's face, as if he could read the Way of the Goddess there. Then he gave a little nod.

"Small as my thumb, yet he carries a stinging barb," he said, as if confirming something for himself.

"I'm sorry, but I don't understand." Llesho figured he wasn't meant to, but Carina seemed to think highly of the odd creature, so he tried to be polite. Lluka, however, sniffed as if he scented something rank in the air. Probably the stranger, who smelled of old sweat and rancid fat.

"He's a shaman," Lluka explained, "A riddler."

"A healer and teacher," Carina corrected him softly as her fingers busily investigated the stranger's talismans. "This is Bolghai." Her nose nearly touched a tiny bone that she held up for inspection. "He's an old friend of my mother. Bolghai, this is Llesho."

Bolghai gave a little nod. "By the light of Great Moon the pack goes hunting in dun-colored boots."

Llesho sensed the shaman had just answered his question, but once again he didn't get it. Carina, however, seemed to have no trouble interpreting the strange riddles.

"The first, 'small but with a stinging barb,' is a wasp; In spite of his size, Llesho has the power to bring down a great man with his sting. The second compares the tent city to a wolf pack, which has travelled by night to find Llesho."