Range of Ghosts (23 page)

By the time he arrived, though, they had been cared for and even curried gleaming, their pale muzzles and dark masks like glossy heartwood. He leaned on the wall of their pen with folded arms and watched them drink water and munch hay, wondering what should happen next. He was hungry himself, and filthy and tired; if Samarkar had spoken truly when she said he would be her guest, he should find some servant or slave to show him to a washbasin and a set of clean clothes.

He set out back to the mares, hoping serendipity would provide another stable hand along the way. What he found instead was a male wizard, leaning folded arms on the door of Buldshak’s stall and watching her pull hay from the net. Temur paused a few steps back and cleared his throat.

The man turned, but not as if startled. He smiled. He was a bit older than Temur, with the roundness of cheek the Rasani thought handsome. His black satin coat was cut close to a narrow body, making him look as slender as a girl, and when he moved, Temur could see that it was lined in blood-red satin, the petals of its hem linked by golden chains.

He made a slight bow, however, and seemed to offer Temur every possible courtesy one could expect—more, in fact, if one were pretending to be a landless, exiled soldier of no family.

And some pretense it is. For which of those things does not describe you?

“I am Anil,” the man said, in reasonably competent Qersnyk. “I had never seen a steppe pony, so I asked to be the one to come and find you. I hope you don’t mind.…” He gestured at the horses diffidently, apparently unaware that Temur’s regard was already won over by something as simple as curiosity about his mares.

“I am Temur, Anil-la,” Temur said. “Please, can we speak in Rasan? I need the practice.”

“Not as badly as I need to practice your tongue.” Temur laughed. “You’re here surrounded by it, and will be for at least a little while.”

Temur forced a smile. That sounded like a sign that he might not be thrown summarily into a prison cell or across the nearest border. “You said I was summoned.”

“Yes, of course.” Anil gestured Temur to fall in beside him. Temur did so, trying not to mince on travel-sore feet. “First a bath and some clothes, I think, then Yongten-la will see you. I happen to know he has sent for food—or did, once he heard that you went straight to the stable with the animals and would not have even had a bowl of tea and noodles. Come on; wait until you see the bathing chambers.”

Temur had expected to be led upward; instead, Anil brought him ever deeper into the bowels of the Citadel. The bathing pool was indeed unlike anything he’d ever imagined, even in his grandfather’s famous and now-sacked provincial capital in Song, a city so full of wonders that poems had been composed in praise of its singing mechanical birds, its eternal gardens crafted of jewels and metal, its tame lions who lay about the court like cats in a granary, wearing jeweled collars.

The water was warm, the pool wide and deep enough to worry him about the danger of drowning. He stayed in waist-deep water and scrubbed the road filth from himself with handfuls of soap and scented sand and purple salts. Anil, he noted, stripped down and flung himself promptly into water so deep that he had to kick to stay upright, his head bobbing up and down above the surface as he spoke. Temur hid a flinch and tried not to watch. Was the silly fool trying to drown?

No, apparently he just swam like an otter. Temur had heard of such things in stories, but he had also heard of men flying in stories. Was he going to have to credit that now, too?

He turned his shoulder to the wizard and began to scrub the blood and sweat and filth from his hair. He knew the scar on his throat would have gone livid in the bath chamber’s heat; he could feel its swelling by the softness when he touched it. It held his head rigidly, tilted a little to the left where it had contracted, but now the last flakes of dried skin and ancient scab came away from it, along with the itch he’d never quite been rid of since it started to granulate.

“That must have been quite a wound.”

“I had it when Qarash fell,” Temur said. He would not lie—his name might be lost and his soul with it, but that was no reason to stain his honor. “They left me for dead.”

“I can see why.” Anil stopped bobbing and walked forward through the water, coming up to where he could see better. “It was untreated?”

“I was alone,” Temur said, reflexively touching the damned thing again. He could still feel the cramp in his fingers, the pain of pinching it closed and not daring to open his hand. “It saved my life. And it might have killed me anyway; there was heat in it when Samarkar rescued me, though I had thought it healed by then. But sometimes the heat takes a long time to kill.”

“Sometimes it does,” Anil agreed. And then he said, “Samarkar-
la,
” with a heavy emphasis.

“I am sorry?” Temur turned, realizing that his modesty in hiding the scar was only drawing attention to it.

“You should use her title,” Anil said. “She is Samarkar-la, the wizard Samarkar.”

Temur resisted the urge to tell him that Samarkar had never corrected him. He hadn’t Qulan’s sense of politics, but he had enough of the common sort of sense to hold a wet finger up and feel which way the wind was blowing. “I know this thing.”

“You may know it, but I doubt you understand.” Anil ducked down, wetting his hair, and swam to a rack for soap with which to wash his hair. As he scrubbed, eyes closed, he said, “Do you know that she is also the Once-Princess Samarkar?”

“She said on the trail that the Emperor-in-Waiting is her brother,” Temur admitted. “But did she not have to renounce rank and succession to become a wizard?”

Even on the steppe and in Song, there were stories of the wizards of Tsarepheth and what they sacrificed for their powers.

Anil snorted and ducked his head again to rinse it. When he came up, he said, “She is a new wizard. Does it strike you that she is a little older than the general run of novitiates?”

“I have not seen enough to know,” Temur admitted. “So she came to it late? Is this the nunnery to which she was sent to get her out of the way, then?”

“No,” Anil said. “It is the nunnery she chose in order to protect herself. You see, in her childhood, Samarkar was the only child of her father, and so was raised his heir. When she was seven years of age, though, her brother Songtsan was born, and she became just another princess to be dowered off for alliances.”

“My people invented the practice,” Temur said, allowing a tight smile. “Or at least, the practice of demanding princesses to wive as surety—and to give a conquered people a stake in the Qersnyk tribes.”

“I had guessed,” Anil said dryly, “that your mother was not born on the steppe.”

“She will die there,” Temur said with a shrug he could barely force across his shoulders. “If she has not already. That makes her a Qersnyk woman.”

Anil nodded. “Samarkar-tsa, for that was her name then, was a true Rasan woman. At the age of fourteen, when her father the king died, she was sent to the court of Prince Ryi of Zhang Shung, a principality of Song. She was to be fostered there and raised as his bride, until such age as it was appropriate for her to marry. And in the fullness of time, marry her he did.”

“So she is a widow? Or did he set her aside?”

“She is a widow,” Anil said. “But not after the fashion you imagine. The prince, you see, refused to consummate the marriage. It was said that he feared offending Samarkar’s brothers, so he married the woman, but he feared even more getting an heir on her and giving them a claim on his lands, so he would not cover her.”

Temur rubbed at his cheeks, where the heat and itch had spread. He said nothing, gathering his thoughts, embarrassed to hear the proud, courageous woman he’d traveled with all the way from the Range of Ghosts spoken of as if she were a mare. “So what happened?”

Anil smiled crookedly. “She wrote to her brother the Emperor-in-Waiting and his mother the Dowager Regent and complained. And Songtsan took an army to bring her back, claiming the honor of his family was denigrated when Prince Ryi made no true wife of Samarkar at all. Samarkar said her loss of face could only be avenged in blood, and he came to take that for her.”

Temur remembered something of this dimly now. He had been no more than a boy when it happened, but he’d heard of the bloody sack of Zhang Shung, and even then, the ferocity of the stories had impressed him. “She’s supposed to have lit his funeral pyre,” he said. “At least, that was the story we heard on the steppe.”

“She lit it,” Anil agreed. “There is some question as to whether Prince Ryi was entirely dead at the time. And Songtsan-tsa annexed Prince Ryi’s kingdom, to clear away the insult to family honor.” He reached out and grazed Temur’s wet, naked shoulder with his fingertips. The bath chamber steamed with warmth, but the touch made him shiver.

“She is once-princess,” Anil said kindly. “She is above you, even if she were not a wizard.”

“I see,” Temur said. He rubbed his hands together at the water’s surface. As it happened, he was not entirely innocent of court politics himself.
Anil-la is jealous.

Well, that might be useful to know, some day.

“Thank you for the warning,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

Anil smiled. “We—the wizards of the Citadel, I mean—can help with that scar. There are unguents that will soften it and render it easier for you to move. If it is not too forward of me to suggest that.”

“No,” Temur said, forcing himself not to touch it again. “Not too forward at all.”

*   *   *

When she had bathed, Samarkar sat with brush and paper, considering and discarding actions. The problem with childhood codes and family means was that anything Samarkar could do to get a message to Tsansong, Songtsan would be able to interrupt and understand.

At last she wrote, in plain calligraphy on plain paper, a single sentence:
If there is anything I can do, I shall do it.

She left the note unsigned. She summoned a novice to act as a page. When the girl had gone, Samarkar leaned her elbows on the writing desk and her head against her fingertips, feeling how they dented the skin of her temples, her eyelids.

She did not exactly expect an answer, but that could not keep her from hoping.

*   *   *

After Temur was clean, novices brought him fresh clothing and helped show him how to fasten it. The quilted trousers were simple enough, fastening with a wrap across the front that tied on one hip, but the ivory-colored linen jacket at first defeated him. It tied with a string that went around the waist and through a slit to knot with another string, and even when it was properly fixed, it gaped in a long triangle at the collar. Temur did not like having his chest so exposed, although he had to admit he did not feel cold, and he saw others in the Citadel—non-wizards, at least—wearing similar styles.

When he was dressed and put on slippers and his own clothes had been carried off to be laundered—or burned—he hung his knife from the wide cloth belt they also gave him. Anil led him through more seeming
yarts
of passage until they came up from the bowels of the Citadel into sunlit corridors.

There, Anil stood him before a door that was barely ajar, leaned in enough to say, “Remember: Yongten-
la,
” and faded off to the left.

Temur squared his shoulders.
I am the grandson of Temusan Khagan. Nothing in this world can intimidate me.

… And you claim you’re not a liar.

Still, his chin was up as he entered the room.

He had known from the corridor that Hrahima was either just within the door or that she had left recently. He could smell the civety musk that surrounded her, and so he was not surprised to step within and find her looming over. “Hrahima,” he said, and made a slight bow. “Yongten-la,” he said also to the old man behind the desk, and this time his bow scraped the floor.

He hoped he’d remembered correctly that the Rasani expected to be greeted in ascending order of rank. What hadn’t seemed so critical when he’d had rank of his own to fall back on was now a matter for attention and concern. If he’d failed some point of etiquette, at least the old man seemed unconcerned.

“Temur of the steppe,” the old man said. “Please just push that door shut—thank you. Now. Hrahima and Samarkar-la tell me you come with news of grave import and that you wish to exchange it for a favor.”

I do?
But of course, Samarkar had covered for him and had found a way to tell him how to bargain. Perhaps she took her oblique promise to help him reclaim Edene as seriously as any Qersnyk.

Temur glanced at Hrahima. The Cho-tse folded her arms across her enormous chest, showing the musculature of her forearms. She looked down at him impassively. No help there, but at least no opposition, either.

He raised up his flagging courage and said, “If we are right, and Qeshqer was attacked by ghosts, then I know from my own experience that they are the ghosts of my people, and it is my duty to release them from their bonded state. Someone must stand for the dead. And more: On the steppe, they took someone who mattered to me, a woman named Edene. She was alive when I last saw her, being dragged into the sky, and I must either find her and win her back or know that she is dead.”

Yongten-la leaned back against cushions, steepling his fingers. “Even if all you come to know is that you held her bloody bones in your hands?”

Hrahima made a huffing sound while Temur considered. Perhaps another man might have recoiled from the vividness of Yongten-la’s image, but Temur had seen enough bloody bones in his young warrior’s life to shrug away the memories, in full knowledge that he would pay for it later. These things had their own chilly logic. Right now, it was as if they had happened to someone else. Someone else had fought in those wars, lain among those dead.

“They say that what will be will be,” Hrahima said. “I myself have little use for destinies.”