Range of Ghosts (15 page)

And then he was gone, the energy of his presence replaced by an emptiness behind her.

Samarkar stood for a long time listening to the music filtering down the colonnaded walkway, the party in her honor carrying on in her absence. It was not so different, after all, from being a princess. Except now she could walk off alone, and there was no one to say otherwise.

The long gallery led to a stair, and the stair led down to the river. Its rush and hiss spoke to Samarkar. It summoned her as surely as a voice calling her name.

And so she descended, down to the river she had loved all her life. Here beneath the Citadel, it ran tight and fast, a boiling current that could dash an unwary swimmer against the boulders or suck her under in a boiling eddy. Samarkar had swum it—she had swum the whole length of the Tsarethi where it passed through Tsarepheth, and the calmer waters far downstream—and she knew just how easy it would be to die in its embrace.

She didn’t strip off and dive in now. Strong as she felt, she also knew that strength was an illusion and could fail her at any moment. Instead, she climbed up amongst the jumbled boulders near the shore, skipping from one to another with well-timed leaps until she sat on a flat stone a body length from its closest neighbor in the midst of the churning water, the spray of its plunge dewing her cheek and jeweling her hair.

This boulder—and all the others that touched the water, and back from the water as high as the flood-waters rose—was carved all over with intricate sigils. Words. Prayers—prayers for luck and prosperity and good harvest and fertility and safety. Prayers for wellness and prayers for peace, all carved here in this hard gray granite so that the water might wash them downstream to Tsarepheth, to the fields that bounded it to the south, to the broad wide world below the Steles of the Sky, and eventually to the mythical sea beyond.

Samarkar stood there for a moment, hands fisted inside her black sleeves, and watched them go.

She imagined them shedding peace and grace on everything they touched—righting little evils, ameliorating great ones. She wasn’t sure she believed in it.

But she wasn’t sure she didn’t, either, and the roar of the white water plunging past was cleaner than anything inside her head. Where had the peace and certainty she’d known in the dungeon gone?

“It’s beautiful,” Yongten-la said, beside her.

She never knew why his voice did not startle her back into the water, to plunge to her death.

“It is,” she agreed. She glanced sideways. She was always surprised at what a compact man the master was; he was bigger inside her head. “I was going to come back.”

“I know.”

He waited; she waited too. Eventually, she imagined, the time would be right. Eventually, apparently, it was.

“I’m sending you and Tsering-la to Qeshqer the day after tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry?” She turned, startled, sure she’d misheard. But he stood there comfortable, hands behind his back, boots comfortably apart on the wet stone.

“To Qeshqer,” he said. “If there is war, they will need you. If there are refugees, they will need you. You have some power.…” He paused, considered, and shrugged, as if deciding to speak the whole truth. “You have
some
power. You may not be a mighty wizard, but you are patient and you study hard. You have the potential to become a crafty one. Which is in some ways better.”

She nodded. It stung. Of course every novice dreamed of being revealed as another Tse-ten of the Five Eyes. But then,
every
novice dreamed it, and that meant that almost all of them would be disappointed. “Thank you, master.”

“You have some power,” he repeated, as if she had not spoken. “And Tsering has great craft and no power. She will continue to teach you. And you will stretch into your power better if you must use it for real.”

She turned. He was not looking at her.

“This is a test,” she said.

“Tests are games,” he answered dismissively. Crouching, he trailed the tips of his left fingers in the water. “Lives will depend on what you do next. This is no test, Samarkar-la. This is your first assignment as a wizard of Tsarepheth.”

*   *   *

Packing was both easier and more complicated than she had anticipated. She had always had servants to handle such things for her—even when she packed up the few rags of clothes she had considered appropriate for her new station in life. (It had turned out she was wrong; the Citadel provided clothes for its novices. Only an elevated wizard bought her own coats and trousers, but the Citadel also employed tailors and seamstresses who knew well the cut of the ritual garments.)

But now she faced a journey of a moon or more, with only a single companion, and she had no idea what to bring. It would have to be light, of course, and durable. She would need a bedroll, and blankets were heavy, but this time of year a chill could still easily turn to storm. She would need water and travel rations; she could ask in the kitchens for that last, and the stables would have water for women and animals both. She would need extracts and herbs for a medical kit. She would need …

“Oh,” she said tiredly, and sat on her bed, black clothing heaped on every side. Samarkar had long since stopped thinking of herself as a spoiled princess, but just this once, she had to admit that it would be easier if someone else would make the decisions. At least then, when inevitably something that later turned out to be critical was forgotten or dismissed, you had somebody other than yourself to blame.

She heaved a sigh and stood, trying to find the quiet within that had sustained her through the long cold vigil. But mostly now she was tired and ached in every bone from sitting so long in the cold. The wizardry could keep ill effects at bay while it held one’s total focus, but there was always the hangover to deal with. And Samarkar suspected with ironic mirth that the majority of those who sat in the cold, waiting for their power to come, were considerably younger than she.

She was weighing underthings in her hands, deciding how many she really needed, when a diffident knock shivered the door. “Come,” she called, turning to face the sound.

The door opened no more than a crack, and a nervous, splay-fingered novice stuck his head in. “Samarkar-la, there is someone here to see you.”

He took a breath, stepped all the way through the door, and bowed with stuck-out tongue. “It’s your brother the second prince,
aphei.
”

The young man trembled with excitement. His straight black hair was skinned back into a ponytail, and Samarkar could see the pale-brown tips of his ears flamed as red as if he’d been dipped in ink.

She took pity. “Thank you,” she said, glancing around at the chaos of her small chamber with a prickling of dismay. She could not meet Tsansong here. Not that Tsansong would care about her housekeeping skills, but he would care that she seemed to be kept mewed up in a room no bigger than a monk’s cell. And how could Samarkar admit to him that she found it cozy and admired the view? He would see only floors dished with many footsteps, velvet draperies that had been threadbare when the last occupant of this room died and that were probably already moldering a bit when she moved in, walls dark with centuries of fires.

“Which parlor would be best to receive him?”

The novice smiled. “Perhaps the Room of Butterflies?”

Samarkar nodded. “That would be perfect. And please bring him refreshment; I need to dress and clean myself up somewhat.”

The novice vanished; Samarkar made the best toilette she could with a damp cloth and a pitcher of water. Her wardrobe was still limited—she’d only had three outfits made before she went for her surgery, as it seemed foolish to lay out too much money on clothing she might not survive to wear—but she found a clean coat and trousers and pulled them on over her halter and loincloth. This coat was black silk, appliquéd with bright patterns in orange and turquoise, cut longer than the brocade one. She combed and dressed her hair—no time to wash it, but the coarseness of the strands would hide the oil and dirt as long as it was braided—and stomped into her boots.

Then she squared her shoulders and went downstairs to meet her brother.

Tsansong had taken his ease while awaiting her and sat cross-legged on—or rather,
in
—a large cushion, reading a small scroll in his lap. As Samarkar approached, he glanced at it to fix his place in his mind and slipped it into his sleeve, rustling only slightly. Then he rose, before Samarkar could gesture him back to his seat, and took her hand.

“I am glad you survived, sister dear,” he said. “Both the surgery and the ritual. Although I am slightly peeved that when you came to the palace, you saw Songtsan and not me.”

“It was a professional visit,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. “And I wanted to wait to see you until I knew if I would have magic or not.”

He squeezed her hand and let go. “And?”

“What?” she said. “Your spies haven’t told you every detail of my movements?”

“You mistake me for Songtsan.” Impulsively, he hugged her tightly, then stepped back. “But I am me. And
I
know you wouldn’t be teasing if you hadn’t excelled. So out with it. Let me see!”

Silently, Samarkar held up her hand and willed the blue light into being. It washed the color from her skin, from Tsansong’s overawed face, from the embroidered tapestries thick with the images of the room’s eponymous butterflies. “Satisfied?”

“I knew you could do it!” With a glad sound, he hugged her once more, and she let the cold light die to hug him back. “So, about Songtsan? What was the business?”

Samarkar shrugged. She didn’t know how close to his breast Songtsan was playing this, and it certainly wasn’t her space to spill the news to Tsansong. Instead she crossed to the window and leaned out. “He’s jealous of you.”

“Jealous of our wives, you mean,” Tsansong said. “Especially Payma, because she is closer to me than to him.”

Samarkar might have nodded. Her head felt so heavy she was not sure.

“Hey,” he said, coming up behind her. He put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m proud of you, you know.”

“I ran away,” she said.

He squeezed. “From here, it looks like running
to.
”

*   *   *

Two women in wizard’s weeds afoot, leading a trio of cat-agile pack mules not much bigger than large dogs, could make good speed even through the mountains. As Yongten-la had promised, Samarkar’s studies resumed, and the new learning was different. What had been theory became practice, and that which had been rote practicality clicked with slow precision into an elaborate set of theoretical scaffolds that began to take shape in Samarkar’s head.

She learned to call forth that light and warmth that had flooded from her with consistency and refinement. She learned to do it while concentrating on her foot placement on a rocky trail at the edge of a cliff a hundred man-heights tall. She learned to finesse it to just warmth, to only light, then to focus both to cutting intensity using the lens of her will and also a lens of flawless rock crystal that Tsering gave her to hang upon a chain about her neck.

“Earth,” Tsering said, “is the closest process to life, and so earth is the one of the five elemental processes that cannot be created by a wizard. And so it is the one we use to control the others—fire, air, water, and emptiness. We can
manipulate
earth. We can manipulate life. But we cannot create either.”

“How do you manipulate earth?” Samarkar asked.

Tsering glanced from side to side. It was afternoon; they were in the midst of a plateau, and the long shadows were crawling across earth that blew with grass and flowers between bare rocky scrapes. There were no other travelers in sight.

“Here,” she said, and moved the mules off the track, where they could graze in peace for a while. The mules, who had been snatching mouthfuls of roadside herbs at every opportunity, seemed contented with this solution.

She found a flat stone—not too much of a trick, as all Rasa abounded in them—and clambered up on it with a pack in her hand. “Here,” she said. “Come. Sit.”

Samarkar settled down cross-legged before her. She noticed the other end of the boulder housed a shrine to some traveler’s god, and resolved to make him or her a gift of a pinch of salt and millet upon arising. A polite bribe to the local authorities had never hurt anyone.

Tsering-la set out soapstone bowls sized for pickles or relish in a line before herself and filled each one with powder from a different oiled leather pouch—sparkling white, sparkling yellow, silver-gray, dull black. She set a mortar and pestle out beside them and looked up at Samarkar with a familiar, challenging expression.

“Saltpeter,” Samarkar said, touching the first bowl. “Sulfur, iodide of silver, charcoal. For a rocket to bring rain from a cloudy sky.”

Tsering handed Samarkar the pestle. Samarkar accepted it with trepidation. It weighed heavy and cool in her hand—smooth on the haft, rough on the bulb. “And if I asked you to construct a rocket now?”

“Without a balance?” Samarkar hesitated. “I’d blow my hand off.”

“A wise wizard keeps all her fingers,” Tsering-la said with a smile. “But what if you
asked
the principles to combine? These are principles of earth, after all, but they combine to form principles of fire and water—”

“Ask them?” Samarkar frowned. “Just like that?”

Tsering-la held up the mortar. “It helps to put them into contact, first. First make the black powder, then add the silver.”

Slowly, Samarkar emptied the sulfur into the mortar and ground it fine. She cleaned the mortar and repeated the process with the saltpeter and the charcoal. Sun warmed her shoulders and neck; when she pushed wispy locks off her sweaty forehead, the surface of her hair felt hot.

She glanced at Tsering for reassurance.

“Use your hands,” Tsering said.

“A balance would be better.”

“So it would,” Tsering agreed. Her smile made little valleys up the sides of her nose.