Range of Ghosts (19 page)

Surely, Cho-tse warriors would come not with dawn, but with the dark.…

In the darkness, something snarled. A purring rumble was followed by a series of chuffing booms, distant but loud enough that for long moments after, Samarkar listened to echoes ring from the surrounding cliffs and stones. She felt the coughs in her chest; they rattled her like the sounding chamber of a drum. Somewhere ahead of her Tsering had probably made camp for the night by now, and that cry in the dark wouldn’t make the horses any easier to handle.

Samarkar began again to run.

The coughs chased her, sometimes close and sometimes far, and twice more she passed over Cho-tse footsteps on the trail. She had never been fleet of foot, but now she tried, aware as she did so that she had no idea how far she had yet to run, and that she risked exhausting herself. She knew also that the light she needed to see her path marked her for anything that cared to track her through the night, and yet running in darkness would be an advantage only to the Cho-tse—if it stalked her.

Song legend said that the first Cho-tse had been made by powerful spirits from the body of a tiger who fought an evil Song god. The Rasan people believed that Cho-tse were tigers so canny they had learned to walk upright, like men. What the Cho-tse thought of their own origins, however, Samarkar had never heard—though there might be a book or a scroll in the Citadel that could tell her. There was one thing of which she had no doubt, however.

Tiger eyes saw very well in the dark.

Still, she was glad to let the light lapse when the western sky began to gray, and a mist rose up around her. Her own breath streamed back into it, and there was brightness enough to see her path the few steps ahead she could see at all. Her legs and lungs burned; her feet ached with the impact of hard ground.

She heard the horses stamp, and one mare’s welcoming—or questioning—neigh long before she caught sight of the camp. But they were close, very close, and when Samarkar called back to them, she heard Tsering’s glad cry. And the voice of the plainsman, crying out in his own Qersnyk tongue: “Hurry, hurry!”

There was a glow through the mist overhead, the first rays of the crowning sun breaking across the western peaks behind Samarkar. She smelled fire and horse and soup, and saw a dark shape moving through the mist. A moment later, she burst into the small campsite amid the bodies of mules and the bay mare, who bugled a cry of challenge past Samarkar and laid her sharp ears back.

Tsering was crouched by an improvised pony drag, set up now between rocks as a cot, with the Quersnyk man lashed into it. She was restraining him, hands on his shoulders, while he half sat and struggled to release himself from the cloths that bound him down. She glanced up as Samarkar appeared, making no attempt to disguise her expression of relief. “There’s something out there—”

“Let him up,” Samarkar said. He might be feverish and weak, but if a tiger-man came slaughtering his way into the camp, she wanted any hand that could wield a knife free to do so. “There’s a Cho-tse out there, and I don’t know what it wants.”

Eyes wide, Tsering reached under the cot and yanked loose her knots, then stood.

“Temur,” Samarkar said. She spoke in his language, aware as never before how flawed her accent was. “Do you know anything about the Cho-tse following us? Or following you?”

He extended his legs gingerly over the frame of the unsteady hammock, balancing on one of the rocks Tsering had wedged its poles against. Tsering retrieved his dagger from a mule pack and pressed it into his hand before leaning his bow and quiver against the rock beside him. He looked at her in patent relief. She nodded, her hair a shadow across her cheek in the indirect and growing light.

“It’s not the cat you have to worry about,” he said, pushing down on his knee with a palm to stand. He looked better—much better. Tsering’s attentions had broken his fever, at least.
Willow-bark,
Samarkar thought with approval. “It’s the blood ghosts.”

It wasn’t the mist that chilled Samarkar’s cheeks; it was the blood draining from them. “Sweet mother mountain,” she whispered. “Nobody tended the Qarashi dead?”

He licked his lips and lifted his chin, and for the first time she saw the raw, fresh scar across his throat and realized how he must have come by it. And that he would take what she had said as a personal judgment.

“There were a lot of dead,” he said. “Do you have salt? We must salt the earth, the animals, ourselves. Our weapons—”

“Of course,” she said, comprehending. And realizing that Tsering was watching them with a line of concentration drawn between her eyes, understanding not one word in ten. “We’re from Tsarepheth. Tsering, salt—salt everything. Temur says that there are blood ghosts on the loose, and maybe that’s what destroyed Qeshqer.”

Samarkar had hardly said the words
blood ghosts
when Tsering was moving, pulling a slab of salt from the same mule pack where she’d stowed Temur’s knife, dragging her own knife from her sheath and scraping the rock—near-black in the gray light—into a pile of dust and chips on the surface of the nearest boulder. Temur grabbed it up by handfuls and dumped it in the leathern bucket. It must still have held some water, because his next action was to start pouring the stuff over the restive, calling mares and mules, splashing it all over himself in the process.

It seemed like a good idea. Samarkar threw a handful of salt in Tsering’s hair, then started broadcasting it in all directions, sowing it more thickly than rice. In the morning damp, it stuck to the grass and her hands and the hides of the animals. She performed the work almost automatically, her every natural and wizardly sense straining out into the fog for any sign that danger approached them.

“When do they attack?” Samarkar gasped.

“Sunrise,” Temur said, cupping up the last handful of salt sludge from the bottom of the bucket and smearing it into her hair. The touch jerked her attention home, and she found herself staring down into his eyes from a few handspans’ distance. She pulled her attention away, cuffing salt water from her forehead before it could trickle into her eyes, a knotting but not unpleasant unease twisting in her belly.

Samarkar craned her head around. Just mist. Mist and lots of it. And a shadow cutting it as the sun finally crested the horizon and scraped across the land. A very black shadow, narrow and long.

And a great hollow grumbling
huff
of laughter.

She looked up across the muscled expanse of red-orange, fawn, and black-striped chest to meet the shadowed eyes of the figure that loomed nonchalantly out of the mist, arms folded, ears pricked, head cocked to one side like any curious cat. The gold rings in her ear leather jingled with charms and pendant jewels; the ears themselves were ragged-edged with scars, as if older piercings had been ripped out by violence. The horses and mules had stopped their braying and stamping and now stood stock-still, snorting deep breaths of air, on the verge of panic and blind flight.

Samarkar realized with a shock that the Cho-tse she had met in Song was, perhaps, not such a large example of his breed after all.

“Monkey-men,” the she-tiger said, in a voice like sandy velvet. “The mist will not kill you tonight. But you have other worries. I am Hrahima; I have traveled from fabled Ctesifon to warn your monkey-kinglet of a great evil.”

9

“I’m sorry,” said the larger of the two women. Wizards, Temur realized, now that his head was clearer. Her words were one of the phrases he knew in Rasan. Her politeness suggested to him that she was high ranking, indeed; he remembered the same excruciatingly gentle assurance of obedience in his father. “I did not see you there. Please…”

Whatever she said next was beyond him, but she gestured to the last coals of the fire, and Temur understood that she invited the tiger to sit. The tiger nodded. Temur remained somewhat overawed by her massive head, her shoulders like a bull’s, the thick striped orange hide that covered the knitted sinew of her forearms. She wore only a satchel slung diagonally across her body and a tangle of beautifully cured leather straps with gold and amber fittings that supported three curved daggers.

Her rows of pale dugs—the color of skimmed milk—were how he knew she was female, because the shape of her body was not like a woman’s and her female parts were tucked away behind fur and the thick diameter of her tail.

The bigger wizard-woman introduced them all; Temur must have told them how he was called when he was delirious, because they shared it now. He learned that the bigger woman was Samarkar and the smaller was Tsering.

Meanwhile, the tiger—Hrahima—crouched before the fire, holding long fingers tipped with retractable claws out to the embers. The mules watched; the mares stamped and edged into one another. The muscle across Hrahima’s thighs and haunches rippled. Her legs were curiously made—longer than a man’s, with the knee higher on the leg and the heel levered up like a dog’s hock, so she stood on only the ball and toe pads of feet Temur could not have spanned with his fingers stretched.

The structure of her lower leg reminded him of the design of a spear-thrower. She could probably leap like a tiger, too.

As he watched, Hrahima pulled a charred stick from the firepit and began to sketch on a nearby stone.

“You did not see me,” she said carefully, “because I did not wish to be seen.” She glanced about, frowning from Temur to Tsering to Samarkar, and switched to Temur’s language. “Do all of you speak the same languages?”

“No,” Tsering said. “I don’t know Qersnyk.”

“I know very little Rasan,” Temur admitted.

The tiger sighed—a rumbling sound, which Temur only identified as a sigh because of the irritation with which her shoulders rose and fell. Her tail lashed like a granary cat’s. “Then I shall say everything twice.”

Her ears were large and mobile. The charms and rings in them jingled when she flicked them to and fro. Temur found himself staring into her textured, transparent golden eyes. He nodded.

She turned back to her sketching. Samarkar said, in Qersnyk, “When you say you bring news for the king—do you mean Songtsan-tse? He will be
bstangpo
—emperor—soon, but he is not yet.”

“Him,” Hrahima agreed, “or his regent. Are you a subject of this monkey-king?”

“After a fashion,” Samarkar said. “I am his sister. But more importantly, right now, I am a wizard of the Citadel and tasked with discovering the fate of the city of Qeshqer.” She repeated herself in her own language, glancing at the other wizard—Tsering—to make sure she understood.

“Ghosts,” Hrahima said. “Ghosts summoned from among the dead of the steppe tribes by rotted sorcery, and by that same sorcery set upon the city.”

Samarkar translated for Tsering. Tsering rubbed her eyes in exhaustion. Temur knew enough Rasan to follow when Tsering said, “So why Qeshqer? And how?”

Samarkar’s hand slipped into a concealed pocket. “How, I may have an answer to.”

She pulled out a glove, inside out and knotted, and began working it open with her teeth. When she upended it, a Rasan prayer stone rolled out into the trampled weeds. Temur would have reached for it, but Samarkar gestured him back. “It’s cursed.”

Tsering crouched beside it, pressing her cheek to the grass. “Roll it over.”

Gingerly, using the glove to shield her hand, Samarkar turned the stone. A scraped-looking chalk mark smudged the back. She did not recognize the alphabet.

Tsering, however, made a small noise of dismay. “Rahazeen,” she said. “And not just Rahazeen. The Nameless.”

“Murderer’s cult,” the Cho-tse said. “It’s one of their curse words. A Nameless sorcerer entered your city and twisted your priest’s blessing into an invocation of the hungry dead.”

Hrahima reached one hand out, fingers spread. Like any tiger, she had five digits on her hands and four on her feet. The bare skin on her palms was an inhuman shade of pink-white, mottled with irregularly sized and spaced round black dots. The claws that extended from her broad fingertips when she flexed them were as long as two joints of a man’s finger, white with dark streaks like marble, translucent at the tips. She paused, her hand cupped as if cradling the stone but a span above it. Temur thought the expression that drew her whiskers back and lifted her flews from ivory-streaked canine teeth as big as tent pegs was a frown of concentration, but it could have been a snarl.

Whatever it meant, Temur found himself leaning back as if he could remove himself from her attention. Her arm could have taken the place of his leg for size and muscularity, but the delicacy with which she moved her fingers made him imagine she traced something tender and palpable with the needle points of her claws. Her nostrils flared, the long white whiskers slicked back against her cheeks, and she made a sound in her chest—
hrrh hrrh hrrrh
—that trembled his body like a drumhead.

“Oh, yes.” Her mottled orange-and-tourmaline irises filled the whole aperture of her eyes; only when she looked up at him from a crouch could he see the rims of white sclera at the bottoms. Her pupils were round. “It’s cursed all right. A prayer stone to deflect harm, suborned to draw it. Filthy magic.”

Samarkar protested. Temur could imagine the meaning of her words, even if he didn’t quite understand them:
Sorcery can’t do that.

He allowed himself to settle back on one of the rocks where his travois rested, trying to hide how exhaustion made the whole valley and all its stones and junipers and early wildflowers seem to spin. Tsering, coming from beside the fire, pushed something warm into his hand; he took it. A wooden cup, full of still more willow-bark tea. He drank it quickly, stoic before the acrid sourness, and thanked her in her own tongue. It might taste like mare’s piss, but he knew he had it to thank for breaking his fever and leaving him even as clearheaded as he was.

“So,” he said, across the bitterness, “either some Nameless assassin entered Qeshqer and altered the stones by night … How long would such a task have taken, Hrahima?”