Range of Ghosts (24 page)

“It would be an answer,” Temur said, helplessly. “I would know she was not waiting for me.”

“
Humph,
” the old wizard said. “Very well. After you leave here, I will arrange for you to visit tomorrow with the wizards who study the natural history of ghosts. Hrahima, I will see whether Songtsan-tsa can be convinced to give you an audience”—he hesitated—“although I fear you have come at a bad time. In the meantime, though, you both come and have tea and noodles. And while you eat, you will tell me everything you remember of the ghosts, and of your journey, Temur.”

Temur bowed. “Not much, I fear. But what I have, I will give you.”

*   *   *

That night, he dreamed of the end of the world—and Edene.

After an intricate round of questioning—during which Yongten eventually took pity on him and shifted to Qersnyk dialect much more accomplished than Temur’s rudimentary Rasan—Yongten-la had arranged for Temur to be shown to a bedchamber. It was strange to lie down on a raised platform, trapped like a grub in a cyst between four walls, floor, and ceiling—but the bed rustled as if it were stuffed with dry husks, and it was softer than even grassy turf. There was a carved wooden pillow, padded along the inside of the arch with grass-stuffed leather, and the covers were warm. The hiss of falling water came attenuated through the window. Despite his discomfort at the enclosed space, Temur slept soon and hard.

Since his wound had turned hot, his dreams had become garish and strange. And memorable, which was unusual for Temur. This time he knew he was dreaming, whether it was the strangeness of the landscape underfoot or the fact that that landscape was roamed by vast herds of horses in vivid mineral colors mortal horses never approached—lavender, yellow, vermilion, indigo and sky blue. His eye was caught by a stallion the color of lapis lazuli, streaks of sparkling gold threading his haunches and withers like stars in a midnight sky, his mane and tail blown forward by a bitter wind.

“These are the sixty-four sacred colors of horses in their true incarnations,” Edene said on his right. He had not heard her come up, and when he turned to face her, he could see the terrain behind her, as if she were made of the finest silk held up on a bright day.

And it was a bright day, a bright and beautiful day, with all the steppe stretching out before him, and the ragged mountains rising at the edge of the world to hold up a cerulean sky. The indigo stallion called; far away, another stallion answered him.
I am here with my mares, and a wise horse would avoid me.

Perhaps both stallions were wise, because Temur saw no sign of another herd approaching. He opened his mouth and cupped his hands to his ears, hoping to hear the second one again and locate him, but there was only the rustle of the wind blowing through the long green stalks of new vegetation.

“Temur Khanzadeh,” Edene said.

He turned to correct her—
I am not a prince
—only to find that she had become far more solid and real in his moment of inattention. Something was wrong with the bones of her face, though, and she seemed too tall, as if she had been stretched like leather for drying across a frame.

“Edene.”

She turned away. He saw the thick black cord laddering her neck, the undersides of her arms. In his time, Temur had cooked enough cleaned and deboned marmots in pouches of their own skin to recognize the thick, whipped stitches for what they were.

He took a breath. Because it was a dream, he was calm and rational, rather than reaching already for his knife to plunge it through the monster’s breast. “Who are you, to wear my woman’s skin?”

The monster turned, and now he could see it was not Edene. The eyes were wrong, a luminous hazel brown flecked with gold. It laughed, showing teeth too large and sharp for the mouth that stretched to hold them. The skin at the corners of the lips and across the chin split; what blood trickled out was gelatinous, honey-thick, and slow.

Temur recoiled. This time, his hand did find his knife, and when he struck out he put his weight behind it.

It entered Edene’s breast with no sense of pressure, as if he merely passed it through the smoke of a rising fire. But then it struck something hard and stuck as fast as if he had planted it in the heartwood of a tree.

The laughing monster stepped back, dragging the knife from horrified Temur’s hand. It reached up, grabbing the hilt with a hand whose flesh split like a too-tight glove along the seams. Temur thought it would pull the knife free, but instead it seemed to anchor itself to the blade, to use it as a stable point and haul itself out of the stolen skin.

Temur didn’t think leverage actually worked that way, but then, this was the world of dreams.

And then the thing stood before him, blood-slick as a newborn, and he recognized it—the hollow-bellied, sunken-eyed creature he’d seen in the Range of Ghosts and thought a fever dream.

It shook itself, and the rags that had been Edene fell around it.

“You,” Temur said.

It tugged his knife from its chest, working the tip back and forth to free it as if it were an arrow stuck fast in bone or wood. The knife came loose with a pop; the monster weighed it in its hand and tossed it idly off to the side. “Very well, Temur Khanzadeh. You are not a prince. Then you have no hope of opposing one who is not ashamed to call himself one. Observe!”

The thing gestured—out across the steppe, the herds, the mountains. Temur saw a sweep of storm-shadow follow the sweep of its hand, boiling clouds mounting along the horizon and breaking over themselves to flood forward. Thunder rattled the earth so hard that Temur abruptly, unexpectedly, found himself sitting. Lightning flashed from a sky like a bruise, striking the earth in the midst of the herd. Terrified horses whinnied and were flung this way and that. Darkness followed, as complete as any moon-filled night. When the lightning flashed again, Temur imagined he could see the horses’ very bones beneath their hides. Rain fell in drops as big as Temur’s thumbnail, hammering his head, washing his hair across his eyes.

When it flashed a third time, he saw the vast crack that had opened up across the plains—a crack which was racing to meet him as he was swept forward to plunge into it, the steppe and the horses and the grass pouring into it like water draining from a tub. Ghosts rose from the chasm, arms outstretched, howling out loneliness and pain.

Something touched his chest.

He looked down and saw a hand, an arm draped in black veiling, a woman’s black-clad body below a face draped with a sequined scarf. She sat above him as if her storm-colored mare were a throne. “Temur Khanzadeh,” she said. “Take my hand.”

He started to reach up, to grasp the fingers that lay against his chest. But something stopped him. He hesitated.

She turned her hand over and caught his. “Be king or be carrion,” she said. “The future is a monster either way.”

He squeezed her hand, then tried to pull away. She held him tighter, and now the bones of her face looked wrong as well.

“Temur.”

He yanked, but his arm felt numb, heavy. Paralyzed. Her grip was still brutally tight.

“Temur!”

She was pulling, still squeezing, until he thought she would drag him onto the horse. He didn’t want to go with her. He twisted against her grip, but it was inexorable, and the paralysis was spreading now, numbing him from neck to feet.

“Temur!”

His eyes popped open, his body still foreign and numb with sleep. Samarkar had hold of his hand and was shaking him gently. Gold morning light filtered through the window, casting rainbows on the far wall, where it broke against the mist from the waterfall. He struggled to push himself upright as Samarkar let go of his wrist, but though he was clear-minded, his body remained alien and slow. At last, with effort, he managed to raise his head from the smooth wooden pillow.

“Wake up,” she said. “We have an appointment with the naturalists. We’re due to see Master Hong-la, and it’s best not to keep wizards waiting.”

“I was dreaming,” he said. “I think I dreamed of the Sorcerer-Prince.”

The urgency to be moving deserted her, replaced by another kind of urgency. She sat down on his bedside and said, “Tell me everything. Now, before it fades away.”

He had no desire to elaborate on what he’d already said, but he realized the necessity of her request. Quickly, in as much detail as he could, he sketched the dream for her, feeling it already tattering out of recall. She listened solemnly, with folded arms, while he rose from his nest of blankets and began dressing in fresh clothes all but identical to those of the previous night. After more than a moon on the road, there was not much modesty lost between them anymore.

By the time he’d remembered how to tie the wraps on the jacket, he was finished recounting the dream. He did not tell her that the Veil of Night had called him
Khanzadeh,
and he did not repeat what she had said about king or carrion.

Samarkar rose, tugging her blousy trousers into place and smoothing the creases. “That’s not reassuring. Have you been given to prophetic dreams?”

He shook his head. “But my grandfather was supposed to have the power. Are such things believed in, here?”

“Sometimes a tendency to dream true can indicate potential gifts as a wizard.” She paused and snorted at some thought that seemed to bitterly amuse her. “I’ve never had the knack of it.”

“Knack.” It struck him funny, and he answered her huff with a chuckle. “Well, it’s never happened to me before. Assuming this is a true dream. Which I’d rather it wasn’t. But they’re supposed to be allegorical, and this was certainly that.”

She looked down at her hands, clasped before her. “Do you still think your woman is alive?”

He felt his lips thin, felt the muscles of his jaws tighten. “If she’s not, can I leave her spirit captive to someone who will wield it as a weapon?”

She nodded—reluctant but resigned.

*   *   *

It seemed to Temur that Samarkar led him through corridors for the better part of the morning, but really it could not have been much more than the time it took the sun to move the width of two fingers across the sky. The length of the walk did more than the endless winding corridors to give him a sense of the scale. The place was practically a city unto itself.

He could tell when they were approaching the laboratories and quarters of the natural historians, because the corridor decor began to include a great many cabinets full of insects inexplicably mounted on pins and animal skins preserved whole with the heads.

“Your Master Hong-la,” he asked, leaning close. “What is he like?”

“Shh,” Samarkar said. She paused at a door framed on one side by the black-on-black rosette skin of a panther, on the other by a boulder that came to knee height. Its exterior looked like foundry clinker, melted and almost metallic. But some stonemason had cut into it and polished the cut smooth as a blade so that you could see the inside was composed of yellow-green crystals imbedded in an iron-black matrix.

Temur reached out hesitantly and stroked the cool surface. “I have never seen such a stone.”

Samarkar paused in her knocking to glance sideways. “It’s a skystone,” she said. “Mostly iron. Some god hurled it to earth from the heavens. You should see the crater they pulled it out of.”

Skystone.
He remembered the storm-colored mare of his fever dream, the red-black dust of his moon under her running hooves. He wanted to ask her if she thought maybe the heavens were made of stone. If this was true, a chip could be knocked loose somehow.

Instead, he touched a translucent, glassy crystal and asked, “What’s the green?”

“Olivine,” she said, as the door swung open. “The piece that was removed to make the facet is now … now the
bstangpo
’s crown.”

The
bstangpo.
Not “my brother.”

So they were not close, then, the wizard Samarkar and her blood kin. Whatever else Temur might have asked would have to wait, though, because the open doorway was filled by a man of middle years, broad-shouldered and thick-necked. He had a square jaw and the fair, sand-colored complexion and dramatic, extremely willow-leaf-shaped eyes of the southern Song people. He was exceedingly tall, but he did not stoop, as tall men so often did. Instead, his shoulders were set like the planks of a great brassbound door.

“Hong-la,” Samarkar said, bowing low. “Thank you for seeing us. This is Temur-tsa, an emissary of the plainsmen, who is seeking his wife.”

Temur too bowed, remembering belatedly to thrust out his tongue in respect to the elder wizard.

“Your wife,” he said.

“My woman,” Temur said, unwilling to mislead this man. He met Hong-la’s gaze. “I would have married her, in other times.…”

The wizard regarded him steadily, lips pursed, and seemed to come to some abrupt decision. Whatever it was, Hong-la stood aside, beckoning them into his chamber.

It could have been a workroom, sleeping quarters, or any combination of the two. There was a framed bed in one corner, the covers pulled taut and the wooden pillow tucked away underneath it so the surface could be used as a reading couch. This purpose was attested to by the small heap of scrolls at one end and a cup of tea cooling on the flat headrail.

The rest of the room had the long slate and granite tables that Temur was coming to expect of every room in the Citadel. These labored under the weight of minerals he could not begin to identify, a small fire-stained crucible, piles of shells from the far ocean, cruets and flat dishes of glass, metal, ceramic, stone. The floors were largely bare of rugs, except one small one sized for sitting or meditating. A low wooden table like Yongten-la’s desk was pushed beneath the bed.

Temur presumed that was where Hong-la took his meals, when he did not eat in the dining hall which Samarkar had shown Temur the previous afternoon after the meeting with Yongten-la. The thought of supper reminded his stomach that it had yet to break its fast today, with predictable results: a sharp growl.