Range of Ghosts (31 page)

Samarkar gasped, lightheaded, mocked from within by Yongten-la’s voice saying
You will never be a powerful wizard.
This was the first real test of her powers. Was all she was good for calling light, gusts of air? The toys of apprentices? The world spun around her, and it took all her strength to cling to the saddle and ride Buldshak’s rolling gait.

An arrow sizzled past her from behind, invisible in the gloaming, and a few more pattered like sharp rain all around. The one Temur must have loosed would have slain the veiled horseman on the right, but like a storybook hero, he caught it in his hand.
Nameless,
she thought, and wondered if it was he who had called the fire. And even more, she wondered where they had come from. Had they pursued Hrahima this far, or was there something still more subtle going on?

But another arrow followed, and this one took the horseman through the throat. He rose up in the saddle, toppling back, hauling on the reins, and the horse beneath him reared in confusion and fear. It stepped wide, the road-edge crumbling under its hoof, and Samarkar wished she dared close her eyes as it tottered, toppled, and fell.

The dying man fell silently. The horse screamed all the way down. The line of fire—burned on.

Where in the ten thousand hells was Hrahima?

When Samarkar glanced back over her shoulder, she saw Bansh at a run and gaining on Buldshak, having passed Payma’s gelding somewhere along the way. Temur stood sideways
atop
the saddle, a third arrow on his bowstring, the nock pulled back to his ear.

Hair blown free of Samarkar’s braid lashed her face, stinging the corners of her eyes. Temur loosed; his arrow flew toward the second horseman, and this one did not trouble himself to catch it. He batted it from the air negligently, without seeming to turn his eyes. He sat straight in the saddle of a dark, elegant mare of evident Asitaneh bloodlines. When he lowered his right hand again, Samarkar saw the flash of a small blade. He shouted something in a fluid, quicksilver tongue she did not know.

The five archers still standing crouched to lay down their bows and—as one—stood again with heavy spears couched against the road behind.

No horse would charge against that, not without the weight of a hundred others pushing it from behind, especially when coupled with the fire. Buldshak broke stride and whirled, her haunches nearly touching the road, turning in twice her own length, as another flight of arrows from above spent itself harmlessly against the road where she would have been. Samarkar was thrown hard against the pommel and the left stirrup, losing the reins as she scrabbled at wood. Her fingers strained, and something in the palm of her right hand popped with a sharp, lancing ache. She caught a squeak of pain between her teeth and swallowed it just in time to see Bansh and her rider loom out of the dim light.

There was just room for two horses to pass. Not at a gallop, and not when one rider was balanced on the saddle as if it were the branch of a tree, half crouched, swaying, reaching into the quiver for his fourth arrow. Temur heard the hooves, looked up, and Samarkar saw his gaze lock on hers in the instant before the horses drew abreast.

Buldshak was on the inside of the road. Bansh came up over her forefeet, her own trim forehooves clattering on the crumbling edge of the road. Stones rattled; the mare wobbled. Samarkar reflexively reached out with her left hand even as she knew there was nothing—
nothing
—she could do to keep horse and rider from the long emptiness below.

But Temur did not fall, though his feet skipped on the saddle leather. He lost the arrow. His right hand caught the tall cantle, and he swung beside Bansh’s haunches for a moment while Samarkar frantically clawed after her own reins. Down the pass, riding hard on her stockier mount, Payma was coming, standing crouched over her stirrups, braid bouncing against her shoulders with each stride. More arrows from above feathered the road around her and her gelding, but through some grace none seemed to strike home.

“Come on, girl, come on,” Samarkar whispered, leather cutting her hands. She drew back slowly, fearful for her own mare’s balance, dreading that at any moment she would hear the sound of Temur and Bansh plummeting to their deaths.

But she got Buldshak quieted before Payma drew abreast—in no small part because Payma saw her coming, and the wall of spears behind her, and reined the gelding in.

There were cries of fear and wonder from the spearmen. When Samarkar risked a glance back, she couldn’t believe what she saw: Temur had regained the saddle, and he and Bansh were beyond the line and had turned to flank the mounted man, his bow once more drawn. The man whirled his dark mare in place. She was a dancer, one dainty hoof falling where another had rested a moment before, and now Samarkar saw that the man on her back held not a blade, but a mirror. He raised it high just as Temur loosed. Though Samarkar could not see where the arrow struck, she could see that he did not manage to knock this one away.

The veiled man sagged sideways in the saddle. His horse bolted past Bansh and, in a thunder of hoofbeats, was gone.

Now, at last, the violet flames guttered and died, leaving the ozone stink of sorcery behind.

The spearmen struggled to reverse their unwieldy weapons, hindered by the cramped space that had protected them a moment before. Samarkar could not understand how Temur had passed them, unless Bansh could run on air.

The air was growing brighter as the sun crawled up the sky behind the caging mountains. Another flight of arrows whistled around her as she turned Buldshak back to the fight, one piercing the meat of her left arm. There was a sharp and sudden shock; it knocked her forward, bruising her belly against the pommel yet again, but she felt no pain. She trembled, yes, but it was with weariness and fear.

Calm.

If she could walk into the belly of the earth in her underthings, she could face an assassination attempt on the highway. She had the strength within herself. Or if not the strength, she had the stamina. She had the craft.

She touched the protruding arrowhead with her fingers. Even that light touch sent nauseating agony through her. But she gritted her teeth and stayed upright. She stayed in the saddle, and she did not scream.

She was Samarkar-la, and she was far from finished yet.

She reached down within herself and found the spark, the quiet, the flame in the darkness, and the darkness at the heart of the flame, paradoxically where the fire burned hottest. Payma drew up beside her, face grimly stoic, her gelding favoring a rear leg. Samarkar reached out and put her hand on Payma’s thigh, feeling rough wool. Samarkar’s wards flickered into tattered brilliance again, thin and worn in places, moth-eaten, threadbare—but there. If more arrows fell, Samarkar never saw them.

“We should charge them from behind,” Payma said. “If your mare will fight.”

“She’s a steppe horse,” Samarkar said. “Have you ever heard of one that wouldn’t?”

The princess nodded, her lips bitten thin. She touched her gelding’s neck. He snorted, mincing. When Samarkar turned her head, she could see the dark wetness that streaked his flank.

“Go,” Payma said, both hands on the reins, and touched her gelding forward as Temur loosed the first of three arrows shot in such quick succession Samarkar barely saw his hand move.

It was only a half hundred strides or so to the spearmen. They had learned already tonight that Buldshak was faster over a distance, but the dun gelding had sharp speed in his chunky rump. In three leaps, during which his body bunched and extended like that of a frightened hare, he drew ahead, blood streaking his wounded haunch. Buldshak, irritated to be shown his hindquarters, shook her head and stretched out to compete, nibbling at his lead.

He was still ahead when they swept into the disorganized spearmen, snorting and kicking out. Buldshak bulled into one of the men who was still standing, knocking him aside. He clutched at Samarkar’s wounded leg, trying to drag her from the saddle. She kicked him hard in the chest with the edge of the stirrup; Buldshak struck out with a hoof in passing; he let go and sat down.

Something fell past her from above, a russet blur in the morning gloom, silent as the grave. She heard the thud as it struck the man she’d knocked aside, and no other sound but the tearing of flesh.

This time, when she brought the mare around, no one remained to fight. Hrahima, her arms red halfway up the forearm, bleeding from new wounds, stood over one downed man.

Temur was rising from the side of another, his knife dripping in his hand. In the wash of green from Samarkar’s wards, she saw his face twisted into a grimace, saw the way he moved without seeming to see.

He came straight toward her.

“Payma,” she said. “Stay back.”

She’d read of this before, men caught up in war rage, and she knew only one answer. Flexing her left arm sent showers of agony through her, and moving cloth against the arrow shaft was worse. Still she fumbled her jacket open, wincing through tears. Buldshak backed away as Temur came closer, as unnerved by him as was Samarkar. There was no time to unlace her halter; she simply grasped the lower hem in her right hand and yanked it up over her breasts. Fabric cut across her spine, burned her hooked fingers.

“Look at me, Temur,” she called. “I am no warrior.”

He faltered, staggering to a stop as his hind foot caught up to the fore. The knife lowered, and lines formed in his brow as he considered her. The light of intelligence flickered across his visage once more.

“Samarkar—” he said. And then, steadier, “Samarkar-la.”

She nodded. He turned his gaze aside. Samarkar tugged her halter down, bruising the tops of her breasts this time. It was as much a need to busy herself as modesty. She felt waxen with pain. She swayed in circles over the saddle while Temur, chest still heaving, wiped his knife on a scrap of black cloth.

He had parted company with Bansh, and she stood three span away, square and stubborn as the mules.

“Archers?” he said, his voice rough and unsteady. The edge of the sun crept beyond the side of a mountain whose name Samarkar did not know. She squinted into the dazzle, shuddering, her nervous reaction or the smell of blood making Buldshak dance.

“Handled.” Hrahima shrugged. “There were only three. I didn’t manage the Nameless assassin, however.” She touched a gash across her chest with more irritation than dismay. “He looked like he had an arrow in him, but it didn’t slow him down much.”

She snarled in distaste at the sticky fur of her arms, and tore a rag from a dead man’s shirt to mop the worst of the blood away. Samarkar suspected she did not lick the fur clean mostly out of respect for the sensibilities of weak-stomached humans.

Payma had swung down from her mount and was examining the gelding’s injuries. The harsh morning sun cast everything in stark shadows. Temur shaded his eyes. Payma made an irritated sound and said, “He took an arrow. We’ll have to cut it out.”

Temur looked at his knife. Samarkar said hastily, “I have a scalpel.”

“You’re wounded,” Temur said, gesturing.

She glanced down; the tails of her coat hid the wound on her leg, but the wetness soaked her trousers to the knee, and the wound where the arrow had passed through her arm was finally starting to hurt as her heart slowed and her breathing came less like a bellows. She curled the arm up carefully and relaxed it, feeling sting and strain and a sharp throbbing. Trying to close her hand brought a worse gasp of pain.

“I won’t be able to use the arm tomorrow,” she said. “But it missed the bone and the artery. If I can keep the heat out of it, it won’t kill me.”

Gingerly, she moved to dismount. Hrahima was crouching to examine the clothing and implements of the dead men; Temur came forward to hold Buldshak steady while she got the foot on her injured leg out of the stirrup.

When she was grounded, she gently pinched the arrow shaft that pierced her arm below the fletching and thought of fire. Heat gathered in her fingertips, a slow process, measured in hundreds of heartbeats. But when she released it, it charred the width of the shaft to coals in a breath, and the fletching tumbled away.

“Temur,” she said.

Understanding, he came forward and grasped the arrow by the head. “Ready?”

She nodded, and before the motion was complete, he pulled. The shaft was smooth, at least; it moved without snagging, and so she managed to scream between her teeth, muffled against her knuckles.

When she drew a breath in again, the morning wheeled around her. She put a hand out, and Temur steadied her.

“I’ve seen generals who didn’t handle that so well,” he said. “Now what?”

“I’ll let this bleed for a little. The gelding next, unless—Payma, are you hurt?”

The princess shook her head. “Scratched,” she said. “I’ll go see if I can catch the mules.”

“Take Bansh,” Temur said, shaking his head. “She’s not hurt. And she’s sure-footed as a goat. I thought for sure we were going over the edge, but she must have glue on her hooves.”

Samarkar showed the flat of her hand to the gelding. He snuffed her, and she stroked his velvet, porridge-colored nose, cupping his warm breath in her palm. “What’s his name?”

Payma, turning away, stopped and laughed lightly. “I never asked,” she said. “I guess we’ll have to ask him what he wants to be called.”

She nodded to Hrahima as she passed, and kept going. Samarkar trailed her hand along the gelding’s shoulder as she walked back to the broken arrow jutting from his haunch. It had struck deep in the muscle, and blood still welled from around it. He favored the leg, holding it awkwardly off the ground. Samarkar didn’t touch the wound, but she leaned close to it.

Payma was right; the arrowhead was barbed and would have to be cut free. But she could smear the cut with poppy to numb it. That would help.

She didn’t relish doing the surgery here, on the edge of a cliff, surrounded by dead men—but asking the horse to move on with the arrow still imbedded in the wound was asking him to continue shredding his muscle. “Come hold his head?”