Range of Ghosts (17 page)

Samarkar would have extended her illusions to wrap horses and men, too, but as she came up she saw him lolling in the saddle, liver-red with fever and dewed with sharp sweat. She hesitated. By his clothes and the shape of his nose and eyes, she guessed him one of the Quersnyk plainsmen, though his complexion was very dark. Just the horses would have been sufficient evidence, in light of what Songtsan had told her about the fall of Qarash and the likelihood of refugees.

Plague?
A pestilence could have come in with the refugees, if refugees there were.…

But no. No plague could have silenced an entire city so quickly that no one fled it—and left no bodies lying in the fields. And Samarkar was wizard enough now to recognize the signs of influenza. A serious illness, one to fear—but one she was trained in caring for. She reached out to take the bay mare’s sagging reins.

The plainsman lashed out—more at random than at her—sweeping with his knife. She jumped back, deflecting the blow with air, and watched him slide out of the saddle with slow inevitability. She would have tried to grab him, to cushion his fall or keep him from impaling himself, but even when she would have helped him, he warded her back with the knife.

He fell with a thump, boneless as a sack of wet laundry. The bay mare turned her head dully, swaying; the gray one managed a back step, a head shake, and a snort.

“Sir,” Samarkar said in his language. “I am the wizard Samarkar of Rasa. You have come through the”—she searched for a moment for the Quersnyk words—“the Range of Ghosts. You are ill and your horses are exhausted. I wish to help.”

She crouched, feeling the flex of bare toes, ready to spring away at any moment.

The plainsman drew his right hand to his chest, the knife pointed down along his sternum. It was the spasm of fever; as Samarkar watched, a great ague shook him. He mumbled something; the word she heard was
ghosts.

“You’ve come through,” she said. “You’ve come through the mountains. Let me help you.”

Maybe her words reached him; maybe it was the concerned nosings of the bay mare. But the plainsman managed to relax his hand, and the curved horn hilt of his dagger slipped between his fingers.

“Good,” Samarkar said. She glanced left and right, uphill and down, but there was no sign of anyone else. She was slightly stunned to realize how close she’d come to the outskirts of Qeshqer. She could smell the blossoms on the fruit trees in walled gardens, and the lowest tiers of buildings were no more than a stone’s throw away.

“Can you stand? We have to hurry—”

He nodded. He found the knife again with groping fingers, this time managing to sheath it on the second try. “Temur,” he said, which she thought was a name, because she couldn’t imagine why he’d be calling for iron now. And half the men of his people in his age range must have been named for the Great Khagan. “Ride—”

Samarkar looked dubiously up at the bay mare, who was still
whuff
ing at the sick man’s hair while the gray waited anxiously at the limit of her lead line. She couldn’t drag this plainsman five
li
back up the hill to where Tsering waited. And while she could walk—or run—it was obvious he couldn’t. It would have to be the ponies, then.

“I’ll help,” she said, and bent down to lift him to his feet.

He wasn’t a big man, and she thanked her luck for that. And she thanked her ancestors that she
was
a big woman, broad-hipped and broad-shouldered, with strength in her arms and thighs. He was wasted with sickness and hard travel, as well, and so she managed to stand him up to where he could grab the bay mare’s saddle, then help him heave himself back into it. The mare stood like a statue, her master slumped forward over the waist-high pommel, and Samarkar steeled herself to approach the nervy gray.

She stepped up to her gently, holding an aura of calm and still, and extended the palm of her hand. She wished she had a sweet or a piece of fruit. In her experience, horses bribed well.

But the mare watched, ears pricked rather than back, and let her approach. She might be cautious, then, rather than fearful. Samarkar could make friends with a cautious horse.

But could she do it with the blank windows of the empty city staring at her back? She knew by the hammering of her heart that her posture was not calm, and the idea that anything at all could come pouring down the hill from Qeshqer left her sweating cold and shaking.

Calm,
she told herself.
You are a wizard of Tsarepheth. Where is your serenity?

Here, at her core. With the warmth and the strength and the shadowless flame of her magic, bright and still. She must be calm for the horse. She must be loose and relaxed without being saggy.

She soothed herself, and in so doing, soothed the mare. The gray lipped her palm, let her smooth it along her cheek and down the high lean curve of her neck. Compared to the mountain ponies Samarkar knew so well, the steppe horses were almost naked of mane—but under the dust, the gray’s coat glistered in the sun. “May I ride?” she asked.

The mare turned to observe as Samarkar walked down her side, maintaining contact, but did not object. Samarkar leaned lightly across a saddle so high to front and back it seemed you would have to work to fall out of it, and the mare did not step away. At least she wasn’t tall, even if her saddle was.

Samarkar reached under her head to unhook the lead line, lowered the stirrups to where she could use them, and swung up into the saddle as lightly as possible. The mare was well trained; once Samarkar’s weight hit the stirrup, she stood like a wall.

Samarkar found the other stirrup, lifted the reins, and sent the mare forward. The sway of a good horse under her was no different, and the ridiculous saddle made it easier to reach out and take the bay’s reins as she went past. Not that she seemed to need to do so; the bay dropped in willingly on her right as soon as the gray came up even with her. Once they were walking—not fast, but every step taking them farther from the cursed, eerie silence that was Qeshqer—she fought the urge to glance over her shoulder constantly to see what might be coming up behind. She was superstitiously certain that whatever it was, as soon as she looked it would spring the ambush.

“Safe,” Temur said, lifting his chin and opening glass-bright eyes. He turned to her, his hands flexing feebly on the saddle. He stretched a hand back toward the empty city. “
They
don’t come until morning. I have to … have to go there. Please. Edene…”

Samarkar didn’t know who
they
were. But she was afraid the dead city at her back held the answer, and whatever the sick man wanted would have to wait until she could afford to have it answered.

*   *   *

All the long walk back up the road, Samarkar could see Tsering standing taut in the shade of a tall pine, one hand laid on the trunk as if for support. If their positions had been reversed, Samarkar knew she would have been leaning forward, breathless, as if she could urge the exhausted ponies faster with the rocking motion of her shoulders. Instead, they toiled up the hill at a snail’s pace, and Samarkar kept her eyes fixed on Tsering.

She didn’t know why she was so superstitiously convinced that the danger lay in the valley and safety on the ridge. Maybe it was the quiet of the unattended fields blowing softly in a low wind, the tender young vegetables curling in from lack of water, or the silence of the city at her back. But she could not shake the sense of malevolent eyes watching, and every creak of stirrup leather went through her like a blade of ice. The irons bit into her bare feet; the reins grew damp in her hand.

Finally, at the top of the ridge, she let herself relax and turn back over her shoulder. Nothing but the peaceful valley lay below, the mountains at its back.

Leaving the mules, Tsering hurried over. She showed the gray her hands and held her reins while Samarkar slid down, the saddle bumping across her belly. It took both of them to ease Temur down, especially as in his delirium he tended to cling to the saddle and fight them. At least he didn’t draw his knife again, and eventually they managed to make him comfortable on the grass of the roadside.

“We’ll have to rig a pony drag,” Tsering said, while Samarkar slipped the mares’ bits so they could crop the grass more comfortably. They didn’t want to wait for her ministrations; Qeshqer was on the wet side of the mountain range, and Samarkar imagined that they’d had no fresh food in days. As soon as she had their mouths freed, they fell on the grass more like wolves than ponies.

Samarkar nodded. It was obvious Temur had ridden as far as he could. “The man’s name is Temur, I think. These horses need water.”

Silently, Tsering pulled the folding bucket from the mule pack and crouched over it with a water skin. It would take most of what they carried to water the mares once, and it was obvious from the stamping that the mules were envious. Samarkar could make more, though it would take time—and there was water in the valley below, if they dared it. And water back the way they had come.

Samarkar wanted to pull the gear from the two mares and check them for galls, but she didn’t dare. If they had to move quickly …

Well, at least they seemed sound. She checked their feet and ankles for heat or swelling and found nothing. Neither one could be bothered to lift her head from her meal.

“We’ll rig the drag,” she said. “In case you have to run.”

Tsering looked up, the fine wisps of dark brown hair that never seemed to stay in her braid, blowing about the oval of her face. She was pretty in the dappled shade, Samarkar realized, and wondered what exactly had driven this capable and charming woman to risk her life on wizardry.

“You’re not going back down there.”

Samarkar smiled. She rose from her squat beside the mares. “I need to see what’s in the city, Tsering-la. Are we going to return to Tsarepheth only to tell Yongten-la and Songtsan-tsa that Qeshqer is fallen, and we—two wizards of the Citadel!—were too frightened to look within? And Temur said it was safe until morning.”
How he knows, don’t ask me.

She made herself meet Tsering’s eyes as Tsering stood. “I could order you to stay with me.”

Samarkar pulled her coat from the back of the mule, where it was draped. It was amazing how secure the fall of the hem against her legs made her feel. “I sort of wish you would. Now, what did you do with my boots?”

Silently, Tsering pointed her to them.

In equal silence, Samarkar began to put them on. She could feel Tsering watching, but she was still stomping her left foot into the proper place in the boot when there came a sudden, exasperated sigh, and the gray mare shied slightly as Tsering threw her arms up. The grass was too much of an enticement, though, and she buried her nose again by the time Tsering said, “Fine, go on. I’ll start back as soon as I can rig the pony drag. You can catch up if you live.”

“I will,” Samarkar said. “Hand me my collar while you’re over by the mule.”

“I’ll hide a pack in the tree for you,” Tsering said.

*   *   *

It takes a special kind of idiot to walk back into a dead city.

And yet here she was, dust rising from each stride, picking her way up from the road to the gardens that surrounded the lowest tier of buildings. She stepped at last onto cobblestones, but the dusty track had already glazed the black silk of her trousers beige.

It was cooler in the shade of the rhododendrons, which had been pruned to form an arching bower. The cobbled path mounting the hillside merged into stairs as the slope grew steeper. Samarkar found herself skirting the edge of the walk, as if to make way for downward traffic that never materialized.

These were beautiful streets—bounded on each side by the ranks of close white buildings with their scarlet roofs and pillars, overhung with the graceful sweep of pine boughs. There were marks of plainsman conquest and occupation here and there, but not so many—the unfortified city had surrendered without a struggle, and so its people had been spared. It suffered a Qersnyk governor and men-at-arms and paid Qersnyk tribute. The plainsmen conquered for trade and tribute and open roads, not to spread their social or religious hegemony. In this, Samarkar preferred them to the Uthman Caliphate. Qeshqer, despite its name change, remained in many ways a Rasan town.

The houses had broad patios and gardens mulched with pine needles, which should have offered inviting refuge in the shade of many trees. But windows on each side were sealed as if against the night; doors bolted closed. She could tell the homes of tradesmen by their wide-shuttered shops, but all those shutters stood closed. There was no scent of fire anywhere—not even cold char. No dogs or hens scattered through the streets. No birds sang in low branches. No prayer bells rang, and where the low bridges of horizontal walkways crossed the stairs Samarkar climbed, no paper flags fluttered.

She reached up to touch a prayer-etched stone set below the railing on one of those bridges, expecting to feel the shiver of protective energy. She snatched her hand back as a chill shock jolted her, numbing her fingers to the knuckles. When she pulled her hand down, she was half surprised to see it hadn’t frozen solid, but when she worked it, she saw it fist and extend normally. Pins and needles attended each gesture.

She stepped back, forcing herself to straighten up and examine the stones.

They were rounded, pulled from rivers, and small enough to rest neatly on the ledge below the railing—but there, any resemblance between them ended. Some were white and some were black, some earthy shades of russet or pink. A few were gray as the mountains, but mostly people chose unusual stones to hold their prayers. Some had been scratched with knives or pins, some etched with expertise and care. Some were merely scribed with charcoal or black or white paint.

Each of them, to Samarkar’s trained senses, glistened with a film of sorcerous malevolence.