Range of Ghosts (18 page)

Like the rocks washed by the Tsarethi in the channel below the Citadel, these stones were prayers, meant to impart blessings and good intentions on all that came under their influence. Something had poisoned that, perverted it. And Samarkar had no idea what it might be.

Eyes still watering with pain, she reached into one of her many pockets and found a pair of black silk gloves. They were inside out from hasty removal, but that suited her purpose: carefully, she worked one over a small prayer stone and knotted it into an insulated bag. Through the protective silk, the stone felt air-temperature, neither warm nor cool, and no more or less weighty than it should be.

Uneasy nevertheless, Samarkar slipped it into her pocket.

She began again to climb. Now the silence in Qeshqer seemed even more oppressive, the emptiness more terrible. There should have been teeming streets, children at play, shaman-monks at prayer on street corners rattling their drums for offerings. Monkeys and birds should have filled the trees overhead, swinging down to filch food or scream at intruders. A storyteller should have shaken his ringed staff and cried aloud his wares.…

Instead, Samarkar walked through a tomb. A tomb without bodies, through which she mounted ever higher.

Finally, she paused before one particularly great house, so large it sat on three levels beside the street and reached four stories high. Like all the others, it was whitewashed stone. Its pillars and the tile roofs over its broad patios shone a red as wet as blood, and the gold leaf on the details of its eaves was real. It was spotlessly maintained—and completely dead.

Samarkar stood in the quiet for a moment, regarding its red-and-gold door, until she gathered herself and stepped onto the patio. She marched up to the door like a mendicant, back stiff, feeling the weight of jade at her throat, as if the collar could somehow support her courage or authority.
It isn’t me doing this. It is the wizard Samarkar.

Amazing how bold one could be in a uniform.

She raised a hand and thumped solidly on the barred door, proving only—by its lack of so much as a rattle—that it was soundly barricaded and locked as well. But she was the wizard Samarkar, and what was a lock to her?

She felt inside the lock for the pins and tumblers, imagined the shape of the empty space, and with greater ease than she would have imagined, opened the lock. It clicked, and the handle turned easily in her hand. Then there was only the bar to deal with. Samarkar reached through the door and felt it, the heavy, smooth outline of solid leadwood, ornate dog heads carved in gilded detail gracing each end. She felt the shape of it outlined in emptiness, and with the process of air and its quality of motion, she shifted it.

It was harder than pins and tumblers; a great
whoosh
rattled the door against the frame, and she almost jumped back. But the rush of air was followed by a sharp clatter, and the door swung in her hand.

The fallen bar scraped across the floor as she pushed the door open. Inside the house it was cool and dim. And silent—as silent as all the city so far. No babe in the crib, no children in the garden, no mother in the kitchen going over account books or supervising the servants while they worked the dough for noodles, no father hard at work treadling his lathe, spinning the fine wood for the finer furniture that paid for this great house.

And no sign of how they might have left, from foundation to rafters, or what might have become of them. Until she reached the stairs to the attic—even these were finely finished—and realized that the door at the top stood open and she could see the blue sky above and feel the cool wind from beyond.

Something had torn the center of the roof away. Samarkar, standing on the roof beams, careful not to step on the fragile ceiling between, craned her head back and reached up with both hands to touch the cracked and shattered tile and felt the same chill—although lesser, attenuated—she’d felt burning through the prayer stones.

She grasped the crumpled edge of the hole and, with a kick and a heave, hauled herself up. Her feet swung and her forearms burned with effort, but she slid an elbow across the tile—red dust smearing her coat—and crawled out onto the roof. Here, she stepped carefully. The tiles were slick, the roof greatly sloped, but she scrambled up to the ridgeline and made herself stand.

The house was one of the taller buildings in its neighborhood, and through the pines and cypresses she could see several streets up and a good way down across the sweep of the city below.

Every roof had a hole.

*   *   *

She climbed through the rest of the city to be sure, not certain what she was looking for but remembering Temur, ill unto incoherence, asking for Edene. It sounded like a woman’s name, she thought, and a painful memory of her widowhood drove her on—so, if nothing else, she could tell him she’d looked, and there was nothing else he could have done.

Assuming he lived long enough for her to tell him anything.

Assuming
she
got out of this cursed city alive.

It was on the highest plaza, before the temple to the Mother-God of Qeshqer, that she found her answer.

Somebody had polished all the bones clean of meat and sinew—so clean the marble plaza showed no stains beneath them—but six days was not enough to dry them. They had been sorted and mounded in the neatest piles imaginable—sightless skulls pink and air-dulled in a monstrous pyramid beside vertebrae like stacks of coin, femurs crusted red on the ends from the ooze of blood laid one atop the other like cordwood, knucklebones in baskets and barrows as if brought out for a market day.
Sucked clean,
Samarkar thought, and wished that particular phrase had not occurred to her.

She imagined herself staggering back, clutching at her face in horror, vomiting through the narrow confines of her sorcerer’s collar. She imagined it, but it did not happen, though the bones smelled warmly of rancid marrow in the afternoon sun. Too many years of her father’s instruction; too many years as a princess in a hostile realm; too many years as a novice wizard.

No. Samarkar paced the length of the pyramid and measured the height of five or six skulls with her palm. She counted the number of tiers and hunkered down on her heels to sketch numbers in her saliva on the white stone. She almost wished for the buzz of flies, the flocking of carrion birds.

She went through them three times before she believed them. Crude as her measurements were, that pile of skulls must represent every man, woman, serf, slave, herdsman, and child in Qeshqer. No human or natural force could have managed this, she thought, walking around the skulls again, careful to edge past the heaps of other bones. No wizard, no sorcerer—unless there were further limits to the powers of magic than she had ever heard of.

She needed to speak to Yongten-la, to tell him of this and see what he knew of the supernatural perils that might kill twenty-five thousand in a night.

She stood, regarding the pile of the dead, and made a deep obeisance.

She could not recite the Orison for the Dead twenty-five thousand times before nightfall. But she could say it for an hour, she thought, before the press of her other duties pulled her from this place and from the horrors left to bleach here in the sun.

*   *   *

After a long ride, Temur remembered the Veil of Night returning for him, all in black and barefoot—but this time he saw her face, for she went about plainly and by day. Still, he knew her by her eyes, by the muscle in her arms, by the breadth of her shoulders, and by the bounty of her belly and her breasts. He knew her because she lifted him up and set him on Bansh’s back when he could no longer cling there himself, and he knew her because she wore black cloth darker and softer than the night, and he knew her because after she had led him and the mares out of danger, she girded herself in her coat of night and her collar of stars and went back into the cold valley to seek Edene.

Her companion was another woman in black, and Temur did what he could to help her as she loaded him into a pony drag—drawn by sensible Bansh, not Buldshak—that she seemed to have made from tree limbs and blankets, and began hauling him away. She bound him in place with blankets wrapped tightly, and to his shame, he didn’t have strength to prevent it.

It was not the most comfortable mode of travel. But when she brought Temur bitter water and bathed his cracked lips with oil, he did not complain. He asked for Edene, and he asked for the Veil of Night, but she did not seem to understand him. So he knew she wasn’t a goddess, even though she accompanied one.

Sometime toward evening, his fever broke. Whether it was the astringent, musty-tasting mold-and-willow-bark tea the woman in black fed him, or the blankets she tucked around to warm him, or if the thing had just run its course, he could not have said. But his mind was clear for the first time in he knew not how long, though his body felt wasted and weak. The heat had gone out of his head and his wounds, and now when he coughed he brought up mouthfuls of musty-sweet phlegm.

He lay his head back in the travois and tried to rest, but he could not keep himself from noticing how the sun slid down the sky and the shadows grew long. And how the woman who had gone back for Edene had not yet returned.

*   *   *

Samarkar came down out of the city at sunset, leaving marks warning of plague on the walls behind her. The eastmost curve of the Range of Ghosts lay branded black against a red weal of dying light. Under a Qersnyk or a Rasan sky, Qeshqer would have lain in shadow already, shielded from the afternoon light by the mountains at its back. But this alien sun rose in the wrong part of the sky and set in the southeast over Rasa and Song, not west in the Uthman lands where any proper sun should come to rest.

So as Samarkar descended the tiers of Qeshqer, she walked from the gold light of evening to the blue gloom of twilight, passing through sunset along the way. When she reached the road again she hesitated, her hand on the buttons of her coat, and watched the red light slide up the white walls of the city.

She had lived under two skies, Rasan and Song, and passed through the lands ruled by Qersnyk skies on her road between. This one, she did not know. It unsettled her, as if its backwardness were somehow a personal transgression.
Whose sky is that, anyway? From what cradle has this evil sprung?

Whose conquest is marked by this sun?

She readied herself for another run. The coat would be worse to carry than wear, she decided. But the boots—the boots would have to go.

She pulled them off, balancing on one foot then the other, and stuffed the felt liners back inside them. A bit of cord she found in one pocket made a sling with which to bind them to her back. They’d thump, but not too badly, and the quilted fabric at least was soft, even if the soles were not.

She tested the road with her feet. The track was worn smooth by many hooves, and on the trail here, she had regained a lot of the callus she’d lost during her convalescence. Yes. By the light of her own wizardry, she could make this run.

She risked one more glance behind her. Now sunset dazzled on the last tips of the city. Soon it would glide up the mountains and fall into the sky and be gone. She remembered Temur saying they came with the morning. Whoever
they
were.

Samarkar lifted her gaze to the ridge where Tsering had waited for her just a few hours before. She drew one breath. Another.

She leaned forward into the sweep of the hill and began.

*   *   *

At first it was easy. Light lingered in the sky, one foot followed another, and she’d come along this road three times already. Before long, she crested that rise. Under the tree where Tsering had waited, she greeted the calls of insects and night birds with an immense and ragged relief. She found the water and food that Tsering had left for her. She found her stride, she found her breath. She found her light as the track faded into dim blueness before her, and one by one the unfamiliar stars and planets gleamed bright in the dark.

She ran. She breathed. She ran.

The chill of night fell around her. Her breath plumed in the air. Her bare feet left perfect outlines in the frost as she called warmth into her limbs. Her own summoned light was cooler and bluer than the clipped sliver of moon that rose late and set early and hardly drifted higher than the reach of the mountains. As she climbed, the fields she ran through gave way to trees then low scrub scattered with boulders as tall as a house.

Ten
li
in, the other set of footprints in the frost first crossed hers. Samarkar hurdled them on instinct and was three steps beyond when she realized it would be wise to investigate. She slowed, dropping momentum with floating steps, and turned back.

From a height, they might have been the marks of a man—a big man, barefoot—but when Samarkar crouched beside them she saw the four toes, the pinprick marks of retracted claws. Her own running steps showed the ball of her foot, the spring of toes; this one was more like an animal’s pad. But an animal’s pad if the animal in question ran on two legs, like a man.

Still crouched, still bathed in her own cool light, Samarkar brought her awareness of the surrounding empty—or more precisely, air-filled—spaces to the fore. Outlines of scrub, rock, small moving things. Nothing of a size to leave a print like this—a print fresh since the frost settled.

“Hrr-tchee,” she said under her breath, trying to force her human voice to make the snarl and chuff of the ancient warrior race’s name for itself. Her people called them Cho-tse. She’d seen one once, in Song, when it came to treat with Prince Ryi’s father. It was an enormous person, with the ruff and ears of a beast, a striped coat, lambent eyes, and a heavy lashing tail. She did not relish meeting another in the moonless night.

Samarkar rose to her feet. Could the carnage in Qeshqer be the result of Cho-tse action?
They come with morning.