Range of Ghosts (14 page)

Cooling like embers.

Eyes close in darkness.

*   *   *

And all is quiet and still.

*   *   *

One could be content.

Content with this.

Content to die in the cold?

*   *   *

Content in a life devoted to the pursuit of perfection and the compassionate understanding that it is unattainable.

She was what she was and what she would be. She was imperfect and full of striving. And that would be all right.

Whatever she was would be enough. Or it would not. She had what she had to use, and she would use it to her best ability, and she would allow the silence within her to persist and inform. She had that much and no more.

You cannot fool the magic into entering you. You have to release control. You must let the world choose.

You must let the world choose. All the while understanding that this is not helplessness. It is choice. Openness to the stream of what is possible.

Openness to all the possibilities of the world, in the understanding that some of those possibilities are terrible. Openness to grace.

What is, let be.

Thus do victims become heroes, Samarkar.

Heroes?

Now, Samarkar. Now it is time to open your eyes.…

*   *   *

… On a room bathed in light.

The floor around her was dry; the water dripping from overhead evaporated before it touched her shoulders, her hair, the dry silk of her breast-wrap. Farther away than the reach of her arms, the walls of the small chamber glistened with wet and hoar; water drizzled from above.

She lifted her hands from her lap. Fingers still interlinked. Each one limned with a glacial fire.

She put a finger in her mouth and licked it.

Fire, still, though the inside of her mouth felt chill.

*   *   *

Samarkar-la sat on the cold stone floor of a dungeon and began to laugh.

8

She came up out of the earth by the light of her own hands. She cast no shadow, but all shadows streamed away from her.

She found her coat and blouse and boots around the corner, where Tsering had left them. She clasped her collar around her throat. She saw by the lay of the light across her chest and shoulders how she shone through the translucent jade as if she were a sun and the collar were a window.

She had no concept of the hour of night or day. When she emerged, she half thought it would be midnight, and she would sulk back to her chamber and curl up in bed to sleep the sleep of the chilled and exhausted. But of course her people would not allow a ritual to pass without acknowledgment, and when she stepped blinking into the early morning light, a crowd waited in the courtyard at the top of the stairs to greet her.

Tsering was there, and Yongten-la, and every wizard who had passed initiation. They handed her from one to the next with hugs and cheers, a break in their formal reserve that left her blinking tears. A newish wizard with his long moustache draped over his ears to clear his mouth for drinking passed around cups of millet whiskey sweetened with mulberries. The
raktsi
tasted like fire going down, and her head spun and her ears rang and the world whirled about her until Yongten-la thrust a sweet red rice cake into her hands and said, “Eat. You need that more than whiskey.”

She broke off a piece and put it in her mouth, surprised by the sudden growl of an awakened appetite. She would have crammed the whole cake into her mouth if he hadn’t laid a finger on her wrist, beside the bone, and said, “Softly now. You need to start slowly.”

Samarkar remembered hearing such parties before, during her own novitiate, and wondering what was occurring that she was not invited to. “Slowly?” she asked. And then she paused. “How long has it been?”

Yongten-la smiled, sweet and sudden, the creases around his eyes and mouth standing out like a landscape seen from a height. Samarkar was not sure she’d ever seen him smile like that before.

“Three nights,” he said. “Not so long, as such things are reckoned.”

The light that she had forgotten had wreathed her flickered and died, left her blinking as its blue glacial purity was replaced by the slowly warming grayness of morning. No wonder the
raktsi
made her head spin.

Slowly, she took a second bite of rice cake. Cardamom and coconut, spices from the faraway tropical coast. Someone had brought out instruments, and the first tentative sounds of improvised music trailed through the distant, habitual noise of the river. A round-faced wizard a few years younger than she but more advanced in his training—not the one with the pampered moustache—came by as she finished the rice cake. She wondered if Yongten-la had subtly waved him in; deviousness would be like the master wizard.

His name was Anil. He took her hand and asked her to dance, and when she would have demurred—she knew dances, but they were court dances, not these bawdy country things—he showed her the steps over and over, until laughing, her head spinning, she halfway got it.

She was the guest of honor today. She could do no wrong, and dancing drunkenly with a handsome child—unthinkable in her past life—was suddenly no disgrace. Freedom made her more giddy than the whiskey.

She should not have been so strong, so full of energy after three days sitting on a cold stone floor. She knew that, and she understood intellectually that there would be a price to pay later. But for now she let Anil swing her into a line of men and women holding hands, and let the wailing of voices and shawms and strings pick her up and carry her in a whirling of six-petal coats and joyous laughter.

She was alive. She was alive, and she had found her power—or it had found her.

Tomorrow’s problems she’d take care of tomorrow.

*   *   *

Edene knew she was not dead. Not unless death meant stinking (possible) and itching (unlikely) in a filthy shirt and trousers while a thin, icy wind cut her to the bone and burned her lungs with altitude. She didn’t think ghosts suffered nausea or aching bones. She didn’t think they quailed with terror at the unspeakable drop beneath the bars of the cage they huddled in. She didn’t think they clung to those bars until their hands ached and their fingers locked in place.

Ergo, she must be alive.

She dangled below the hooked yellow talons of a bird with wings so wide she imagined it could have carried off an Indrik-zver. It certainly had no difficulty with her weight, iron cage and all. The wind of its wing beats buffeted her. Her tears did not quite freeze on her face, but it was a near thing.

She squinted through waterlogged lashes to see where the bird carried her. Below, the golden sweep of the steppe gave way to glaring white—sand or salt flats, she did not know—then the endless wrinkled blue that Edene knew must be the sea, though she had never seen it before. She had water in her cage, but no food, and her feet ached from balancing on the bars until she gave up and sat, whereupon her haunches ached instead. The sky overhead changed several times while the bird bore her—night and day, many moons and one, a sun that rose in the east and one that rose to the west—but she had a sense its direction had not changed.

“As the crow flies,” she muttered, as the sea fell behind and a brown desert unscrolled below. If the bird were to carry her to the Eternal Sky, it was not doing a particularly good job. They were dropping now, and she could see some details of the land—the dry riverbeds, the sinuous ridges.

She saw stones standing high above the valleys, and one stone in particular—a stark rock upon which a castle of five mismatched towers perched. It must be their destination, because the great bird banked and came around to the tallest tower, landing into the wind.

Someone waited there, so tiny with distance that Edene at first saw only windswept robes and a veil of deepest indigo. Her cage scraped stone as the bird released it. She hastily made sure her toes and fingers were pulled within.

Sparks flew, metal bumping to a halt on stone. The great bird landed beyond, hopping to halt before it reached the battlements, and resettled itself facing inward with a flip of wings. The blue-veiled man tossed it meat—a leg of goat, she thought, that disappeared into the bird’s great maw like a grape into a man’s mouth. The bird gulped it like a crow gulping a locust and looked around for more.

When the man came to open her cage, she could barely stand. She pushed herself upright with her hands on her knees, her thighs and back screaming protest. She breathed out through her nose, fighting the cramps, telling herself they were no worse than the cramps of a day in the saddle.

It might be a lie, but it comforted her.

He thrust something into her hand—watered wine, she realized as she drank, and her head spun. There might be something else in it too—beef broth? She should cast it to the stones, but she needed it so badly, and was she not in his power anyway? If he wished her dead, all it would take was a knife.

The wine didn’t settle her nausea—if anything, her stomach cramped more viciously—but it did lend her strength and numb her pains. She finished the draught and let the cup slip from her fingers.

The man in the rust-colored robes caught it before it touched the ground. She stood blinking, wondering if exhaustion and wine had blinded her.

Carefully, he set it down.

“Honored guest,” he said in her own language, his words thick with a western inflection. “Welcome to the Rock.
Ala-Din
is its name in our language.” He waved a hand to the massive bird that rocked from foot to foot behind him. “Some call it the Aerie, but they are wrong. I am Mukhtar ai-Idoj, called al-Sepehr of this place.”

Edene blinked. She had fallen into a story, she thought, but that did not stop her from drawing herself up tall in her filthy, tattered sleepwear and squaring her shoulders before she spoke. “I’ve heard of you,” she said. “You’re the prince of some murder cult. You worship the Sorcerer-Prince.”

“You may have heard of us,” he said with quiet dignity. It bothered her that his face was hidden. “But it seems you have heard a great many lies. My God is the Scholar, and she speaks to us directly. As for Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d ibn Sepehr”—she could not see the smile behind his veil, but she could imagine it by the way his eyes crinkled at the corners—“whom the ignorant call the Sorcerer-Prince, or the Carrion-King, or the Joy-of-Ravens…, while it is true he was the founder of my order, he is not a prophet. Nor do we worship him.”

His words were calm enough—calmer than she would have expected for a man who had had her snatched by ghosts and flown for days across the world, dangling in the shadow of a bird as big as a caravan—but the set of his shoulders unnerved her. That, and the way he said the Sorcerer-Prince’s name so lightly. With such comfort.

As if he did not fear to be overheard.

She would not take a step back. She folded her arms across her chest. “What do you want with me?” she asked.

He came no closer. “Oh,” he said. “It’s not you. But don’t worry. You will be made quite comfortable.”

*   *   *

Later, Samarkar leaned against a white pillar of the Citadel, the sun warming her collar, and let Anil press his cheek against her cheek. His arms were strong and slender, and he smelled of musk and sweet cinnamon, like something you should put in your mouth and suck. Maybe he had the same thought, because he turned and brushed his mouth over hers. She did not pull back; he looked in her eyes, as if seeking permission, and slowly drew her lower lip between his teeth, nibbling lightly.

A thrill ran up her spine, down her belly. She found herself hanging on him, pressing her thighs together. A heat burned her that was like the heat of magic, but lighter, tighter, more focused.…

She startled, jerked back, and found herself pinned between him and the pillar. He stepped back, giving her room. Though she felt the tug of disappointment when her hands fell away from the warm stone of his collar, she took the space he offered. “I—”

“You’re one of us now,” he said. “No harm can come of it.”

Every novice knew that the elevated and the masters were not chaste. Samarkar, once-princess, wedded, widowed—had been too old and alien to giggle behind her hand with the rest of the novices, but she knew, just the same. There were advantages to what they lost besides the wizardry. A man gelded as an adult could set as straight a branch as any other; a neutered woman lost only the ability to bear.

But she had somehow never made the connection that the enforced—and policed—celibacy of the novitiate would come to an end for her as well.

She pressed her collar to her throat, feeling the reassuring cage of its stiffness. “This is fast.…”

He nodded, and let his hands hang by his sides. “You were widowed.” He said it with sympathy, as if he did not know it was she who had called on her brothers to come avenge the slight to her family and wash it clean in her husband’s blood.

She laughed, though. She turned away and pressed her hands to the pillar to support herself and laughed the harder, shaking her head like a horse shaking off flies—in irritation rather than denial. “He wouldn’t have me,” she said, bitterly. “Not once. Either he was afraid of women or he was afraid of getting an heir on me that Rasa might someday use to claim a part of Song. But either way, I went to my husband’s pyre as virgin as I went to my marriage bed. So it’s not that.…”

She couldn’t look at him. She’d only once put this into words before, when she’d come to plead with Yongten-la for a place among his wizards, three years before, and begged him to consider her despite her age. She cringed, expecting to be reviled.

It was what her husband would have done. What he
had
done when she had tried to entice him to what should have been their marriage bed.

Anil put his hand on her shoulder. He sighed. He squeezed softly. “I do not care about him,” he said. “When you don’t care about him, either, you know where to find me.”