Range of Ghosts (21 page)

Temur felt something harden within him, as if the iron of his name took a temper from the ice in her tone. “She’s not dead,” he said stubbornly, even as he doubted. “If she were dead, I would know it somehow. I would—”

Only when she laid her hand on his arm did he realize his voice had gone shrill. He breathed in, breathed out, and calmed himself. Trembling urgency filled him—the need to be
doing.
“I must ride back to Qeshqer,” he said. “My people may seek shelter there.…”

Samarkar squeezed his bicep. “I left it warded with plague-sign,” she said. “They will not enter. And if you truly believe your woman lives, you will not find her by returning to a city where the ghosts have already torn everyone limb from limb.”

“And I’ll find her in Tsarepheth?” he mocked. He regretted the sarcasm instantly, knowing it for the ineffectual, misdirected anger of a thwarted child.

“You’ll find wizards in Tsarepheth,” she said, continuing as if he had spoken in a much milder tone, which made him feel all the more shamed. “And if anyone can find a woman stolen by ghosts, it is my master Yongten-la. Besides, I have the poppy juice, and I have the extract of willow, and I have the blue-gray mold that saved your life this time—and if you sicken again when you are alone, I cannot guarantee that you will live through it. And you will be no good to your Edene dead of a fever.”

He stared at her. She stared back.

Slowly, so she could not mistake his capitulation for agreement, he placed his hands palm to palm before his breast and bowed to the wizarding woman. He would have turned away, but she cleared her throat and said, “What are the horses called?”

He almost said,
horses.
But she was trying to mend a trespassed boundary, and it would be childish—and churlish—to stop her.

“Her name is Buldshak,” he said, gesturing to the rose-gray. He pointed to the liver-bay with his chin. “And
her
name is Bansh.”

“
Bansh?
It’s not a word I know. What does that mean? Something like ‘Fearless’ or ‘Sword of the Wind’?”

Temur looked down at his feet. “‘Dumpling,’” he said. “It means ‘Dumpling.’”

But Samarkar didn’t laugh—or she didn’t laugh cruelly. Instead she looked at the bone-thin mare and said, “She likes her dinner, I take it.”

*   *   *

With Temur’s infirmity and the time it took to exchange news with Hrahima, they weren’t walking until the sun was a handspan into the sky. At first, Tsering led the mares and mules, and Samarkar walked ahead with Temur and Hrahima, out of the dust. But after they had been walking and filling the gaps between strained silences with even more strained conversation for some time, Samarkar dropped back beside Tsering. She held her hand out for the lead rope, forcing a smile.

“I talked to Temur,” she said.

Tsering handed her the rope, stepping more quickly for a moment in order to pass in front of her and change places so she would not be between Samarkar and the bay mare. “What about?”

“I pointed out that one rider could move faster than four walkers and five animals. He’s agreed to loan you the gray tomorrow, when she has had a night to rest, so that you can ride on ahead and warn Songtsan and Yongten-la of the danger.” Samarkar looked down at her hands. “We agreed it should be you, because you are lighter than I am, and he is still weak and ill. He begs you, however, to care for the mare.”

Tsering looked down at her hands in that way she had, hiding a smile. But when she glanced back up, her brow was quizzical. “He’s a plainsman,” she said. “What’s in it for him? Why would he want to protect a Rasan city?”

Samarkar paused to consider what she would say next. “The ghosts are his people,” she said. “Or so Hrahima thinks. And I think they attacked the refugees from Qarash, too, before they destroyed Qeshqer. They”—she lowered her voice—“took somebody from him. A wife? I’m not sure. Anyway, he’s determined to find her. I convinced him that Yongten-la was his best resource, and who knows? Maybe it’s true.”

“I see.” Tsering folded her arms before her for a stride or two, then let them swing at her sides to mark her pace. “You are right. Word must reach Yongten-la as soon as possible. And you are also right that I am the most able to carry it.” She turned her head slightly. “What if the ghosts beat me there?”

From farther up the road, as if speaking to herself, Hrahima said, “The Steles of the Sky are underlaid by salt.”

“Pardon me?” said Tsering.

Hrahima’s ears flicked back to them. Samarkar wondered just how good her hearing was. “Under the Steles of the Sky, wizard. There is salt. Salt in great quantities. The ghosts will not pass through.”

Tsering looked at Samarkar. Samarkar raised her eyebrows.

“Of course,” Tsering said. “Still, I think some haste is called for.”

*   *   *

Once Tsering left them, the days of the journey began to blend together mercilessly. Thanks to Hrahima, who spent most of the days ranging out away from the horses in order to keep herself awake, and who did not sleep well by night, they ate more meat in more varieties than Samarkar had ever considered possible, even as a princess of a royal house. This was a blessing, because she and Tsering had not brought food enough for a round trip, Temur’s supplies were exhausted, and what little they
had
had, she had insisted Tsering take, for swift travel. But the rich diet did not sit well with her; it bound her up and led to other troubles. Temur seemed to adapt to it well, though, so she chewed the meat and drank the broth and comforted herself that when they reached the Citadel, she would be able to fill her tea bowl not only with tea but with butter and noodles.

She amused herself with fantasies of food as she walked, between the time spent teaching Temur whatever Rasan she could. He was a quick study, at least—he told her that his father had had many wives, from many lands, taken in the wake of conquest. They had taught the sons of the house their tongues, that they would have someone to speak to in it. He knew the Uthman tongue, as did Samarkar, quite a lot of Song, and some Aezin.

Samarkar was fluent in several dialects of the Song language. But she did not know Aezin—had, in fact, heard almost nothing of that land except that it lay to the south of Ctesifon, of Messaline, of the Celadon Highway that connected them all, and that it was rich in gold and jewels, and the people who lived there had skins burned black by the fierce light of their desert sun.

She’d never credited that last, but she found herself studying Temur’s face, finding elements of it familiar and others exotic. His color was dark, even for a Qersnyk, but the plainsmen had such a reputation for intermarrying with every nation they conquered that one could not exactly say that a steppe warrior looked like this or he looked like that. His eyes seemed wide open to her, his chin pointed and small, lips full and cheekbones high on either side of a nose tidy enough for even Rasan ideals of beauty. He wore his hair in a long plait, coiled up under his hat after the manner of his people, and as his health returned, he found the strength to unbraid, wash, oil, and comb it. When he did, she saw that it had a soft texture—more like fleece than her own hard, straight locks.

They practiced languages, conversing in Aezin when they did not speak in Rasan. The Rasan was not so different from Qersnyk or Song. The Aezin was more foreign, but Samarkar at least learned a little—and there was not much else to do besides walk.

On the fourth day of their journey, as they were ascending a switchback trail into the first of several high passes that would lead them eventually through the Steles of the Sky, Temur touched Samarkar’s arm and, with a gesture for silence, drew her attention up the slope. Something moved among the stones there—a stocky, long-furred feline, ocher in color, its pelt marked with spots and its tail barred with rings. She slowed and stopped the bay mare and the mules, all of which she was leading single file.

“Manul cat,” she said, giving him the Rasan word. The shadow of a circling vulture skipped down the stony slope at racing speed, passing between them.

“I wonder if Hrahima has seen it?”

Samarkar laughed. “I hope for its sake it’s seen her, or it might wind up baked over coals tonight.”

“The hide makes good hoods,” Temur said. “But they’re better to watch, living.”

It was true, and so Samarkar smiled, nodding. She tilted her head back, enjoying the wind in her hair and the first sight of an honest Rasan sky in eight days. The blues were bluer, she thought. It made her think of something. In Rasan—for his practice—she said to Temur, “Your folk worship the sky, do they not?”

Temur scuffed a foot on stone, climbing. His hands chafed each other. “He is not merely the sky. He is the Eternal Sky. And I would not say we worship him. We send the dead back to him; we tell the ravens and the vultures their true names, and the sacred carrion birds carry them home. And then anyone who knows the name can call you back when they wish your counsel.” He waved absently at the vulture that had just skimmed by overhead again in its hunting pattern of overlapping circles.

“A secret name,” Samarkar said, considering. “But others know it?”

“Not secret,” Temur said. “I mean, yes, secret. I do not know my true name, so the demons cannot use it to deceive me. But my family would know it.…”

He frowned abruptly and bent his efforts to faster climbing. Samarkar pretended she had to work to keep up, but at these heights, Temur’s best effort was nothing she couldn’t better.

His family is dead,
she realized.
When he dies, there is no one to tell the birds his name.

She wondered if that meant he, too, was doomed to walk the earth as a hungry ghost. Maybe it was time to change the subject. “Have you heard of the Carrion-King? Before I left, one of my brothers’ wives was reading about him. A kind of demigod, supposedly a Qersnyk.”

“Of course,” Temur said, bracing a foot on a stone and standing up on it. “But he wasn’t a Qersnyk; he was a sorcerer from Song or maybe one of the western horse clans. We call him the Sorcerer-Prince. In my homeland, they say he fought the Warrior-Gods of the Uthman Caliphate, and Song, and Rasa, and Messaline, and defeated them all. But they also say that the sky was hung much higher in those days. In the battles, the four ranges of mountains that supported the Eternal Sky’s pavilion were damaged, so the Sky’s roof sagged. And then the Sky came out to see what was the matter and put the Sorcerer-Prince in his place.”

Struggling up the same rock, careful of the lead lines she was trailing, Samarkar said, “That’s not how we tell it in Rasa.”

Temur snorted like his mare and said complacently, “Of course not.”

10

No party rode out from Tsarepheth to meet them. Once Tsering rode on ahead, Samarkar had expected to be greeted halfway by her brothers’ men or by wizards. Instead, she fretted and worried the entire way that Hrahima had been wrong about the salt deposits offering protection and that they would come to Tsarepheth to find a city empty of life and heaped with bloody bones.

She and Temur crested the last rise in the pass above the city to find no one waiting for them except Hrahima, crouched on a ledge halfway up the cliff like a hunting snow leopard. Her red-orange, black, and ivory fur was no camouflage against lichen-spotted basalt. The Citadel spanned the pass ahead of them, wrapped in rainbow-raddled veils of steam and fog. Before it, the headwaters of the Tsarethi plunged from the glaciers of the Island-in-the-Mists to meet the hot upwelling of the Cold Fire’s mineral waters. The moderate temperatures of the river, Samarkar knew, kept Tsarepheth extraordinarily mild in the brutal winters of the Steles.

The white wall behind those veils of mist could have been forged from them by sorcery. Prayer flags and banners in every bright color flapped from the battlements, and even at this distance Samarkar could see the black outlines of wizards against alabaster as they stood sentinel or scurried to and fro. There were too many of them overall, and too many of those were motionless, watching—awaiting war. If Tsering’s warning had not reached them, some other portent had.

The city of Tsarepheth lay beyond.

Temur had stopped dead, transfixed. Samarkar came up beside him. Not without satisfaction, she whispered, “Tsarepheth.”

He nodded. His breath came rapid and shallow; she could tell from his grayish color and the way he stood that the thin air pained him. It had slowed them, these last days, but at least he hadn’t succumbed to headaches and vomiting.

“I see,” he said, “why it has never been taken.”

Hrahima descended from her aerie in three bounds, sensible enough to come to earth well away from the mules. Bansh seemed to have accepted her, but Samarkar had never met a mare as steady as the bay.

“I waited for you,” Hrahima said. “The bridge is guarded.”

“Always,” Samarkar said. “It’s called the Wreaking, by the way.” She led them forward, her feet light for the first time in a moon of traveling, but her heart stone-cold with apprehension.

*   *   *

What Hrahima termed a bridge qualified in Temur’s mind as a temple. Rivers on the steppe were forded. They ran broad and shallow over gravel when they ran at all. Many dried to trickles in the dry season, while in spring flood they were demons that no more could be bridged or forded or swum than a dragon could be chained. Now he stood on a white stone arch lost in mist, rainbows mounting one above another like jewels piled upon jewels, and listened to Samarkar coaxing the restive mules forward. He would go and help her in a moment, he thought. But just for this instant, he could not pull himself away from what he saw.

The bridge described an arc a hundred
ayl
long, graceful as a woman’s white-clad arm, anchored only at the ends because there was nothing in the middle to which an architect could drop a pillar. It was so long in proportion to its width that it seemed frail and slender, even though it was wide enough for two carts to pass abreast. There were railings—stone balustrades to waist height—along the edges, and Temur found himself clutching reflexively at the hand rail.