ETERNAL

PROLOGUE

The Oath I Am Breaking

I swore to the Eternal Blue Sky that I would carry this to my own grave. I am an old man now, and my grave is nearer than the next winter, and I find at last that I cannot carry it there. So I set it down here — on skin, in ink, where the wind cannot scatter it and where the Khan's grandsons, who would kill me twice if they could, cannot burn it.

I know where he lies.

I am the last man who does. There were others — the diggers, the escort, the boys who drove the horses across the turned earth until the ground itself forgot it had ever been opened. But I saw to it that they would never speak, exactly as I had been ordered to see to it. That is a thing I will tell you before the end, though it costs me to write it: what I did to the men who helped me hide him. The years have since seen to me the way I once saw to them, one by one, until only I am left. A single old throat that still holds the secret. A single hand that has decided, against every oath a man can swear, to open.

You want the place. Everyone wants the place. Kings have emptied their treasuries and sent good men to die in the cold looking for a mound that does not exist, because I made certain it would not exist. That is the one thing I am not going to give you. Not because I have grown loyal in my old age — I have grown many things, but not that — but because the place is the least true thing about him. A hole in the ground the size of a man. He was never the size of a man.

What I will give you is larger, and it is the reason I am breaking faith with Heaven to write at all. I knew him. Not the bronze Khan of the storytellers, the one who springs fully armored from between a wolf and a doe. I knew the other one. The boy who was left to starve on the grass when his father was poisoned and his people rode away and did not look back. The boy who killed his own brother over a fish and a lark, and never once, in sixty years, spoke the dead boy's name aloud. The man who wept — I saw it — when the anda he loved more than any woman turned and made himself into the one enemy the Khan could not forgive.

I saw the cities too. I want you to understand that I am not going to spare you the cities. I stood outside the walls of places whose names you will never have to learn because we unmade them so thoroughly that the names went into the ground with the people. I have smelled what a great city smells like on the fourth day. If you have come here for a hero polished clean, close this now and go read one of the lying books; there are many, and they are comfortable, and they are false. I am going to hand you the awe and the atrocity in the same hand, because that is the only honest way to hold him, and because he held them that way himself and never once pretended otherwise.

They say his soul went into the horsehair when he died — into the banner, the Sülde, that we planted before his tent for forty years so the wind of the sky could pour its power down the shaft and into him. They say the body was only ever the scabbard, and the banner the blade. I was there when the body stopped. I can tell you the banner did not.

So here is the bargain, the only one I have left to strike. I will not tell you where the Khan is buried.

I am going to tell you something far more dangerous. I am going to tell you who he was — and then I am going to ask you the question he asked me on the last clear night of his life, the question I have not been able to put down in all the years since, the one I am now, finally, handing to you.

Let me begin the way he began. With nothing. On the grass. Under the only thing that never left him — the sky.