Range of Ghosts (10 page)

The Eternal Sky fought him almost to a standstill and might have defeated him, but time was passing. The Eternal Sky had to take up his veil so night could fall over the land and the Eternal Sky’s hot face would not burn it sere.

In that battle, the mountains called the Range of Heroes were shattered, and the Heroes themselves were burned to ashes by the Eternal Sky before he thought to veil his face, and so that place is known now as the Range of Ghosts.

And that corner of the sky, too, sagged earthward.

So there was only one Warrior-God left, or so all the other gods of the world thought. They turned to Song, and from among the Holy Ancestors they cajoled the Old Master to stride forth, to stroke his white beard and pick up his staff and come and join the battle with the Carrion-King.

Wearily, the Old Master did. The Old Master and the Carrion-King fought each other up and down the sagging sky. They fought with staff and spear, and never could one get the better of the other, though one was ancient and one was new. But slowly, slowly, the Old Master wore the Carrion-King down, until it looked inevitable that the Old Master would win.

The people of Song and Rasa looked on with terrified fascination.

Until with one great sweeping motion of his spear, the Carrion-King, who had seemed almost defeated, knocked the Old Master’s staff from his hands and the Old Master himself from the sky. The Old Master tumbled down, and when he fell, he fell among the mountains called the Steles of the Sky and broke them off jagged and fierce as dragon teeth.

The wizards of Rasa wailed, for they were sure this was the end, and the emperor made plans to have them all executed before the new city of Tsarepheth itself could be destroyed by the Old Master’s struggles.

But that was not what happened.

Instead, as the Old Master heaved himself wearily up, pushing the collapsed sky above him with his staff, something came forth from the mist that collected around the broken pillars of the world.

It was the Mother Dragon, and she was angry, for the gods fighting in the skies overhead had awakened her.

First she went to confront the Old Master, but he pointed his staff to the Carrion-King, and the Mother Dragon, being a mother, could tell that he was not lying. So she flew up and took the Carrion-King in her talons, and she buried him deep in the rubble of the mountains he had shattered, and raked heaps of stone over him.

*   *   *

Yangchen let the scroll ease closed. The women were sewing, and Samarkar was staring into her tea. After a long gap, Payma said, “But I thought he wished to rule the world.”

“He did,” said Samarkar, when no one else answered. “But he did not ask to rule it forever. So now he waits under the mountains for his chance at vengeance, and the Mother Dragon guards him.”

Slow applause sounded in the doorway. Samarkar turned, startled as the rest of the women, to find her half brother standing there snapping his fingers gently. “Well told, Honored Wife,” he said, as she settled the baby against her chest and began to rise. He brushed her face. “You should have been a storyteller.”

“I have all my stories here,” she answered, and leaned her cheek against his hand. Samarkar swallowed a spike of envy. If Yangchen’s affection was feigned or dutiful, she had never seen any sign of it.

Samarkar gathered her legs under her and rose, aware of the skirts of her coat falling around her legs like petals furling for the night. “Honored Brother,” she said, bowing low and extending her tongue. “I understand you wished to see me?”

Songtsan bowed, too, more shallowly. When he stood, Samarkar stood with him. “Walk with me.”

Samarkar bowed her farewell to the ladies, reminding herself that she was a wizard now and not a princess as she followed Songtsan from the room. He walked slowly at first, as if favoring a woman hobbled with impractical shoes—or perhaps in deference to her presumed infirmity. But when she kept stride easily, he soon lengthened his pace.

He spoke in low tones, in the Qersnyk language, and they moved and kept moving. Samarkar was not surprised; there was no true privacy in a palace, and they had spoken so many times before.

But never of such things as he said now.

“Samarkar-la, I need your counsel. Qarash has fallen. The Old Khagan is dead, and our sources report that his sons are at war over the remains of the Khaganate.”

“Songtsan-tsa,” she said, and hesitated. They had seen each other through many troubles, her brother and herself, and together found the means to wrest advantage from more than a few. But he had also used her shamelessly as a pawn of empire, and she had no illusions that he would not do so again. He had not approved of her choice to go to the wizards, but he had not quite gone so far as to forbid it. And from his words now, it seemed she still had his confidence—as much of his confidence as he extended to anyone. “When you say Qarash has fallen…”

“News from afar is only as reliable as the wings of the birds that bear it.” He shrugged, the gold brocade on his shoulders exaggerating the gesture. “But you know we had agents in Qarash. One managed to get a pigeon away while the city was falling around her. It seems that Re Qori Buqa Khanzadeh, one of the brothers of Mongke Khagan, has claimed the succession—and that this claim is contested by some of his nephews and cousins. Most notably by Re Qulan Khanzadeh, who claimed primacy in that
his
father was named by the Great Khagan as heir before dying under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Qulan by rights should have inherited then, but he was ten years old, his heir a brother still on the cradleboard. And so, eighteen years ago, Mongke Khagan stepped into the void.”

“And now Mongke Khagan is dead, and those brothers are adults?”

“The older, Qulan, would have been a man of twenty-eight winters, near enough. The younger is eighteen or nineteen, by my count. Which is adult as the steppe folk reckon things. He’s accounted quite the warrior, having fought at Mongke’s behest across half of Song.” Songtsan spread his hands with a grimace. He was not yet twenty-five and still subject to the whims of his regent mother for a season—though of late, Samarkar knew, he had been concentrating more and more power in his own hands. It wasn’t coming fast enough to keep the Song from chewing away at the border, though.

He continued: “Qulan, by all reports, is dead. When I say that Qarash fell, to answer your earlier question, I mean it was razed to the ground.”

Samarkar nodded. She knew her face was impassive; she could feel how it hung slack across her bones, a mask over thinking she had learned well as a child. Right now, it kept her brother from knowing how she feared him.

As they swept side by side through long galleries and echoing halls, she said, “So it remains to be seen if Qori Buqa can consolidate power into his own hands and resurrect the Khaganate from its ashes.”

“It is the drawback,” Songtsan said, with a dry little smile, “of a political system whose basis is essentially, ‘because I said so.’”

Samarkar laughed low, wondering why she had been dreading this meeting so.
Because his charm conceals not goodwill but a knife. Because there had never been anything in Songtsan’s plans for me, except duty. Please. Please let me find my magic.
Her laughter chilled quickly when she let herself consider consequences. “If we act now, we stand a chance of liberating Kashe. And you can bet the Song rulers are thinking the same thing with regard to their cities—or will be as soon as the news reaches them.”

“Qersnyk civil war is an advantage for us,” Songtsan agreed. “But we have to be ready to grab it. Empires are not built and maintained without the taking of the odd city.”

“And then there is the issue of the refugees.…”

“Yes,” Songtsan agreed. “No doubt the Qersnyk herders will head for their summer ranges early. And when winter threatens and they know there is no grain on the steppe to feed them and their herds until summer—”

“—They will come to Kashe. Or Qeshqer, as they call it. By which I mean, they will come to us.”

He nodded. “They will come to us. The steppe folk are falling. But as our father promised, we have outlasted them, and we will take back what they stole and more. Rasa is not finished as an empire yet.”

He extended his hand and made it into a fist. But Samarkar saw how he glanced back the way they had come. A chill settled over her as she contemplated what, exactly, would have to take place before Songtsan could put his plans in motion—and what it would cost to all concerned.

*   *   *

Saadet came to al-Sepehr while he stood in prayer before the altar of the Scholar-God, transcribing the God’s sacred words from an ancient tome onto crisp, bound sheets of vellum. It was a meditation and a practice as well as a prayer, for the work had to be done mindfully, patiently, as perfectly as possible.

A devotee might spend years on the transcribing of one book, a lifetime on seven or eight. And in turn, each devotee himself became a copy of that perfect book—an imperfect copy, as flawed as human memory, but as close as one could approach to the divine.

Al-Sepehr’s sect did not believe in the intermediation of prophets between the Scholar-God and the mortal world. Rather, they believed in study as the only sacrament.

So he finished the sentence he was scribing before he set his brush aside and—beckoning Saadet to follow—stepped out of the domed chapel into the light. There were five half stones in his pocket, each wrapped in its own silken pouch. The one he drew forth was still palled thickly in blood, only a few flakes missing despite all the use it had been put to a day or so before. Al-Sepehr still felt himself shaky and weak from the magic that had raised so many dead. It would be days before he found himself strong again.

The stone was cold, but Saadet nodded, making the sunlight flash in her striking eyes. “He does not need to speak with you directly now. I will speak for him.”

“I listen, Shahruz,” al-Sepehr said, returning the rock to his pocket.

Saadet straightened. Her posture changed, became that of a bold man, wide-stanced and cocky. “Your ghosts,” she said. “They failed to bring Qori Buqa the death he craved?”

Al-Sepehr shrugged. It was as he had anticipated. For thirteen years, his Rahazeen believers had been at work fomenting rebellion, muddling dynastic succession, and unsettling regimes. That led to weak kings, and weak kings led to war. “They failed also to capture Re Temur for our uses,” al-Sepehr said. “The surviving son of Otgonbayar is protected. He defeated them.”

In his sister’s form, Shahruz straightened. “Qori Buqa thinks he can bid you, and you will send your ghosts to do his murders.”

“For now, he is right,” al-Sepehr said, though he still swayed with exhaustion. He added wryly, “within the limits of my strength.”

Qori Buqa could think what he liked, but al-Sepehr had raised the ghosts, and al-Sepehr’s will alone dominated them. It was convenient to allow the would-be Khagan his illusions for a time, however.

Shahruz cleared his throat and said, “So whose arrival am I awaiting?”

“Not his,” al-Sepehr said. “But we found his woman. With that, we can bring him to us. Until then, I will send you back the rukh. The wind will bear you to Qeshqer. I will have the woman brought there. You can send her on to me, and it’s possible we’ll have another opportunity at Re Temur soon. Qori Buqa cannot be permitted to win his war so easily. We do not have the armies to oppose generals who would rather fight us than each other.”

Shahruz-in-Saadet nodded, his/her eyes revealing nothing but concentrated intensity. “For the Nameless,” he said, his intonations making a woman’s fair voice into a dark and knifelike thing.

“For the world,” al-Sepehr answered.

6

No one could have tended to so many dead. But that did not stop the mute monk from trying.

He should have raised scaffolds, lifted the dead into the air, where the carrion birds could come for them in convenience, unharried by the earthbound predators who squabbled and snarled all around. But there was not enough wood in the whole of the steppe for this many bodies, not if the monk could hew each tree that huddled in every river valley or climbed every sacred hill, where the dry and endless sea of grass could not choke the life from its seedlings, and enough deep water remained to feed deep roots.

So instead, the monk laid out each dead man—or boy, or in a few cases woman—anointed the eyes and mouth with a vulture’s pinion soaked in sweet oil, and gestured a brief prayer. The first day it wasn’t so bad, in the cold. By the second, the bodies were stiff with frost and age.

By the fifth, they were rotting.

That was the day on which the monk began to see the butterflies.

It was unseasonable for butterflies, and so he turned to watch the first one beating strongly into a headwind, its pale green-gold wings shimmering like a mare’s hide in the sun. As he watched, the wind lashing his stringy hair about his face, it dipped down and lighted on the face of a corpse, a boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen who had fallen with a red-fletched arrow through his throat.

The monk had chosen silence, and he respected that vow even now, when there was no one to hear but the dead. He had
not
chosen to lose his sight, but it was failing him anyway. The dark irises of his eyes had a blue sheen in sunlight, and he saw the world—already—as if through dirty glass.

But he was not so blind yet that he could not see the color and motion as another butterfly flitted past—this one brilliant orange—then another, and another, and one more, until they filled the air with a tumult of wings so thick one could hear them whispering and smell their dusty scent. His fingertips crept to his lips and pressed there, as if to hold the exclamation in.

The butterflies swirled around him, shimmering changeable colors like rare jewels: blues and golds and greens and vermilions, pearl-whites, purples verging on blacks, reds like the heartsblood that twined slender vines up the steppe grass to wave above it, throwing its bright heads high into the ceaseless wind. He felt the brush of their wings. He breathed between his fingers so as not to inhale one.