The Gates of Heaven (Seven Brothers, 3)

The magnificent Seven Brothers series continues with The Gates of Heaven...Even as Prince Llesho's hard-won alliances are threatened, he is caught in a race against time and the evil sorcerer Markko, as he struggles to complete his prophecy-fulfilling quest. Will the price of Llesho's quest prove too high to pay? For every step forward must be paid for with the lifeblood of those he holds dear. And even with gods and legendary creatures championing his cause, will he reach his goals too late and too weakened by the struggle to stand against both the enemies he knows and those who have not yet been revealed?

Chapter Three

LLESHO watched, taking in every step in the process of electing a new khan. For something so important-the khan would lead the clans, including their army of ten thousand-the method proved disappointingly simple. As the ceremony progressed, however, he found himself drawn into the gravity of even the simplest act.

Bolghai was summoned and came at the call. He wore his hair in a mass of plaits from each of which hung a talisman of metal or bead or bone. His robes, cut to show their many layers, still bore the bloodstains of the sheep he had slaughtered for the khan's pyre, but he had cleaned the pelts of the stoats that hung by their sharp little teeth in a collar around his neck. He did not walk with a stately pace to the dais as a Thebin priest might do, but scampered and pranced like his totem animal, setting the pelts to kicking at his shoulders in a little stoat-dance. His clothing jingled at each step with bells and amulets that swayed on silver chains sewn onto them.

The first time Llesho met him, the shaman had shocked and repelled him. But Bolghai had helped him to find his own totem, the roebuck, and had taught him to control his gift of dreams for his own ends. Sometimes at least. Now, he watched with interest as the shaman hitched and hopped to the dais in the persona of his totem stoat. Bolghai carried a flat skin drum and the thighbone of a roebuck that he used as a stick. He wouldn't be creating totemic magic, so he wouldn't use his fiddle. Rather, he'd need the drum to set the pace of the coming ceremony.

When he had reached the fur-heaped royal dais, the shaman grasped the thighbone in the middle and tapped with first one end, then the other, in a rapid tattoo on his drum.

"When is a prince not a prince?" he demanded, confronting Tayy with more beating of his drum while he waited for the answer to his riddle.

If there was no khan, there could be no prince. Tayyichiut bowed his head, accepting the judgment dictated by custom and the sacred nature of the riddle. Allowing himself to be ritually driven off by the beating drum, he left the dais to sit with Bortu and Mergen of his clan.

"When is a wife not a wife?" the shaman asked next, subtly changing the rhythm of his drumming. It wasn't what she expected. Llesho, watching Tayy carefully, saw the surprise in his eyes as well. Bortu's features, however, relaxed in grim satisfaction. Her son was dead, but she was no fool.

"I am no barren tree, but bear the khan's heir in my belly." she clutched a hand below her unbelted waist and spat at the shaman's feet. So, the riddle had set her aside not as the widow, but as one who had not truly blessed the marriage bed of the khan. Llesho figured that much. Sort of. And she objected. He wondered not for the first time what, if anything, the Lady Chaiujin did carry in her womb.

Bolghai accepted her correction, more or less, with the smallest of stoatlike gestures and adjusted his drumming accordingly. "When is a queen not a queen?" he amended.

A wife remained a wife even at the death of her husband, but with no khan there could be no queen. Lady Chaiujin bowed, as Tayyichiut had done, but with less grace, and let herself be driven from the dais. She took a step toward her husband's clan, but Bortu turned her back, and the Lady Chaiujin hesitated, finally taking up a position alone, though closest to the dais. No one challenged her for the assumption of that right, but no one came to support her either. While few might guess her part in the death of their khan, she had made no friends among them.

Alone on the dais, Bolghai let the thighbone hang by a cord that tied it to the drum. Holding up his open hand, he asked another riddle: "Apart they are weak, together they smite their enemies." As answer, he closed his hand tight and raised it high over his head: the separate fingers were each fragile, but made into a fist, they made a powerful weapon. So, Llesho figured, the clans, joined in the ulus, became strong.

Bolghai's next words confirmed Llesho's guess: "Who here gathered would make a fist?"

A huge roar rose out of the gathered clans, aided by the shaman's drum. When he settled into a slower rhythm, the clans began the process of electing a khan. No one outside of the clans had ever been privileged to see the like before, and Llesho held his breath, his eyes darting everywhere to see everything, as two guardsmen came foward and set a low table down in front of the fur-covered dais. Bortu came forward first and set a bowl on the table while Bolghai drummed and danced so energetically behind it that Llesho wondered how he managed not to kick it over. Bortu's bowl, of simple wood but inset everywhere with precious gems, he recognized for its great age. When she set it down, she raised her chin in challenge at her son's wife, who had no clan to bring to the ulus but must put herself forward as the regent of her husband's unborn child.

Bortu retired to sit again among the leaders of her clan, a signal for Great Mother to follow Great Mother, each rising to place her bowl before the drumming shaman. Every bowl was made of a precious material-worked silver or gold, porcelain, or alabaster, and each was elaborately decorated with some sign or sigil prominently marked to indicate the clan of origin. None showed the age of Bortu's, however. Chimbai's clan was the oldest, then, and Bortu, by chance or destiny, was the oldest of the Great Mothers. When he looked into her eyes, something moved, and for a moment the whites vanished into the hard black light of a bird of prey. Not a snake like her daughter-in-law, but he wondered what magics lay hidden within the old lady.

In a contest, he would have placed his bets on Bortu and he wondered why she had not used her skills to save her son. When he looked again, however, he saw only a sad old woman, grieving for her precious child. He thought of Lluka, his brother who saw all futures falling into chaos, and wondered if the old woman sacrificed her line to some future that none of them could see. He was pretty sure he didn't want to, all in all.

The procession of the Great Mothers had ended with seven bowls placed upright on the table at the shaman's feet, and three placed upside down as some sign to the gathered clans. Master Den leaned over with a brief explanation that confirmed his guess: "`Up' means the chieftain will accept the khanate for his clan if he is chosen. `Down' means the clan has no wish to rise to khan right now. Not wealthy enough, or not united among themselves enough, or perhaps just wise enough to know they presently count no generals among their younger men."

"Or waiting out the killing before stepping in to pick up the pieces, and the wealth of the losers," Kaydu suggested. They'd both seen as much in the far provinces of Shan, where Lord Yueh had hoped to reap the benefit of Pearl Island's fall and had been gobbled up himself by Master Markko. Llesho determined to pay more attention to those who had turned their bowls down. But now the Qubal clans focused on those who would be khan.

"One a hand may brush aside," Bolghai intoned to a slow and steady drumbeat, "Many lift their heads to heaven with a glittering crown about their brow."

Tayyichiut was the first to rise in answer to this riddle. In his hand, Mergen had placed a pebble-easily swept away, but many became a mountain with a crown of glaciers. He went to the table and set the stone inside Bortu's bowl with a bow to the shaman, who had stopped his dancing and shivered in place in a fit of ecstasy, and another bow to the ancient bowl. After him, Yesugei rose and, performing the same bows, set his stone in Bortu's bowl as well.

Master Den let go of a little sigh as their friend sat again among his clan. At Llesho's raised brow of inquiry, he whispered, "Yesugei was the most likely candidate if the clans decided against Chimbai's...