Range of Ghosts (39 page)

Temur found himself uncomfortable with the attention. Or perhaps with Samarkar’s evident amusement, because every time he looked around King Tzitzik, there was the wizard, smirking at him from over the collar of her borrowed coat, her jade and pearls still hidden away in the bottom of a saddlebag. Their own clothing, while not quite worn to rags, was definitely in need of laundering somewhere where it could be boiled with soap.

They were sent to sleep, not along the walls of the hall, as Temur had half expected, but in smaller white-houses scattered within the walls of the stockade.

*   *   *

Temur awakened in the dark, fighting too many hands to count.

He would have shouted, but a black hood covered his face, and someone larger and stronger twisted his arms behind him. The hood was filled with some muffling fabric. His shout sounded flat and close, even to his own ears. He could tell it had not carried.

They did not drag him but carried him out and slung him over the back of a horse. His head bounced against its hay-smelling ribs, and though he fought and the horse spooked and sidestepped, there were enough hands to hold him in place until the ropes made it impossible to flop himself free. Hemp burned his wrists, his bare ankles. He wore only a breechclout and the hood, but the night was not too cold. The horse’s rough hair pricked his skin.

Someone mounted: He heard the hooves beside his own unwitting steed. Someone jerked the horse into motion from the front, and they were running. His ribs bruised and burned with every bounce. His abdomen was scoured. The horse was unhappy, fighting the lead, fighting the unbalanced weight across its back.

Temur finally gave up struggling. He had to concentrate on his breath and on not giving voice to the whimpers that wanted to bubble from his lips. Crying would only make it worse.

After a long time, they jounced to a stop.

The trot was worse than the gallop, but it was over sooner. Temur lay in wait, feigning docility, until they came and unknotted the ropes that bound him to the horse. He thrashed, fishtailing his feet, and caught someone in the chest hard enough to knock him over. When he toppled backward, though, Temur suffered—the fall from the horse’s back was more severe than whatever he’d dished out to his assailant.

He gasped a mouthful of cloth trying to regain his breath and almost vomited.
That would surely improve things.

But he got his knees up, rolled on to them. Would have hopped himself upright with the same move you’d use to leap to the saddle of a running horse, but someone struck him across the chest—it felt like a kick—and he went down. Choking on fabric, light-headed, thinking
After everything, this is a pathetic way to die.

They dragged him. He couldn’t have walked anyway. That long grass whipped his legs and ankles at first, but fell away. And somewhere in the dragging, the texture of the air changed.

It became cool, moist. Earthy. A smell he half-remembered through fever dreams, from when he and the horses had cowered behind stones while the ice rained down.

They’re burying me,
Temur thought, and could not keep this wail of fury and terror within. To rot inside the earth, forever out of the sight of the Eternal Sky—if there was a fate worse than becoming a blood ghost, this was it.

Someone whispered in his ear, rough Uthman words, an accent worse than Saura’s. “This is the grave of Danupati,” he snarled. “His curse should keep you busy.”

Something heavy groaned. Temur struck a clay floor and lay still.

The footsteps receded.

There was the sound of a door shutting, with weight behind. He barely heard it over the thunder of his heart, the ragged rasp of his terrified, panting breaths. He had to calm himself, slow his breath. He had to get control.

He counted breaths in the darkness. He counted heartbeats. He closed his eyes so he could imagine he controlled the absence of light.

Slowly, he calmed himself. He listened, lying perfectly still.

Silence followed.

Then the sound of something wet and heavy slipping over stone.

*   *   *

The blindfolding sack was not so hard to scrape off against the stone floor. It still dragged from the ropes at his throat, but he could worry about that later. Even with it off, Temur found he could not see.

Wherever he was (
buried alive
), there was no trace of light. It was not just the darkness of night that surrounded him. It was a blackness so absolute that he imagined he saw motion where there was none.

But something scraped in the darkness, and it was not the villains who had dragged him here wedging the doors.

His hands were still bound behind him. But that was a small problem. He stretched his arms around his hips, wincing as rope wore into flesh that was already torn and burned, and pulled his feet through the hoop of his arms.

Now the ropes at his ankles. But his fingers were already slick with blood, and the knots had pulled tight from his struggles. It took only a few moments work to convince him that this was futile.

If this were a barrow, though—what had Saura called it? A kurgan?—then there would be grave goods. There would be knives, perhaps.

Temur felt his breath quicken, and forced the terror back with reason. He had heard of this Danupati. A great king, a conqueror like the Great Khagan Temusan. He had ruled a realm that swept, as Saura had intimated, from the White Sea to the Eastern ocean … a thousand years before. Farther, even: For it was he who had conquered the first Erem, long before the Sorcerer-Prince razed the second one stone from stone for daring to stand against him.

There was said to be a curse upon his tomb, such that should his bones be stolen, war would rage unceasing across every land he had called his own until the damage was put right. Whatever obligation of hospitality the woman-king Tzitzik felt to Temur, it was obvious that her men had no intention of allowing him to leave this place.

His bound hands held before his body, Temur groped forward a few inches at a time, in a hop that was also a shuffle. It was painstakingly, maddeningly slow progress, made worse when, between his own scuffling movements, he heard that scraping again.

When the darkness seemed to lessen incrementally, at first he thought his eyes were still fooling him. But then he realized that he could make out the hulked shapes of biers—one higher than the other—and the shadows of ranks of lances leaned against the earthen walls.
Those.

The pale light had a moonlit quality, and it was so faint that if he had not just been in pitch blackness, he would have hesitated to call it light at all. But there it was, faint but slowly brightening.

And there among the crumbled remains of the others was a lance with an obsidian point, chipped glass sharp and ready no matter how many years it had lain below the earth. Now that he could see where his feet landed, Temur cast aside caution and hopped frantically to the wall.

The shaft had been wood, and it was fungus-eaten and crumbling. The glass head of the lance, though—that drew blood when he brushed his fingers across it. He clutched his prize.

He bent to reach his ankles and overbalanced, toppling to one side. He groaned; his head spun with the stink of sorcery or lightning. Sharp agony numbed his left hip and left arm.

One more scrape, one more rustle. And the source of the moonish light crept into view.

It was a fat worm, a grub big as a man, dull red in color and surrounded by a crackling blue light. It humped forward, damp and horrible, dragging its fat abdomen with three pairs of short, pointed legs. A trail of moisture glistened on the stone behind it.

Temur’s throat closed on his breath.

“Gut-worm,” he whispered soundlessly.
Gut-worm,
because it looked like an enormous intestine spilled on the floor. At least until it reared up on its viscous-looking rear end and clicked its sharp-tipped legs together.

A chill of terror numbed Temur’s limbs. It was one thing to face an armed man or a hungry beast of prey. Another to face a beast whose touch could melt flesh, that was reputed to carry the spark of lightning in its skin.

You do not die this way,
he thought, and tightened his fingers around the shard of obsidian. Blood flowed fresh again, and the worm’s head—black, glossy, ridiculously tiny on the bloated shape of its body—swung too and fro.
You do not die this way.

Hadn’t Nilufer’s witch said that Tzitzik’s ancestors had something to teach him?

No. He would not die here.

He lacerated his fingers again turning the lance-head, and did worse sawing away at the ropes. Each strand parted easily, but there were multiple wraps to cut through.

And as soon as he started sawing, the gut-worm stopped swaying side to side like a casting dog and humped its bloated body toward him. It did not move quickly. Each jerk of its form took two motions—the lunge forward of the upper parts, then the heave up of the hindquarters. Slap, then scrape.

As a method of locomotion, it would have been hideously fascinating if Temur had not been experiencing it from eye level and the perspective of a target. His hands free, he gathered himself. They could spit acid, it was said, as well as hurl miniature lightning. He would have to move fast.

And his ankles were still bound, but no time for that now.

It reared up one last time, towering an arm span over the floor where Temur lay. He saw its body swell.

He heaved himself up and dove behind the nearest bier, trying to roll as he fell, trying to keep his grip on the dull end of the lance head. A pool of glowing yellow bile splattered where he had lain, smoking on the stone floor. A brief sharp crack, thunder’s little brother, followed.

Clay pots rocked and shattered as Temur kicked through them. He slashed his ankles free—an easier task than the hands. The stench of the gut-worm’s poison vomit brought water to his eyes and stung his skin. More tamed lightning crackled around it. He could not get close to that thing. And yet here he was without bow, without arrows, in a tomb full of crumbling weapons and dead men’s bones.

Meanwhile, the gut-worm turned to seek him again. It dropped down and dragged its front another span. Temur stole a glimpse across the top of the bier and cursed as the thing spit again. Acid splashed against the crumbling armor of the warrior laid out there, eating into what remained of his bones.

Can’t touch it,
Temur thought.
Can’t let it see me. Have to kill it somehow.

There was the lance head, but no shaft. There was the scrap of sacking still stuck in the ropes around his neck.

There were the stoppered clay pots of grave goods he crouched among.

He tucked the lance head into his loincloth and hefted a pot the size of his head. Heavy. Heavy and full of something that rattled. The clay stopper was sealed in with pitch.

He stood fluidly, sidearmed the pot, and hurled. The worm clicked furiously and whipped its upper body aside, but Temur had been aiming for the fat, half-fluid body it dragged behind. The pot shattered, spilling coins that might have been gold this way and that. The worm shrieked, its body splashing away from the point of impact in visible waves.

Temur winced and ducked again. That had hurt it, but not enough. How many pots of coins were available?

Not, he suspected, enough.

There had to be a better way. He slung another coin pot and dodged from the closer bier behind the farther, taller one, nearly knocking himself prone on a support column along the way.

Support column.
Carefully, he peered over the edge of the bier, hoping the worm’s eyesight was not good enough to notice eyes peeking through a headless dead man’s dusty ribcage. And yes, there were more columns, scattered here and there throughout the room. Which had to be maintained, because if the wood of the lance shafts had crumbled to dust, would not the wooden columns that bore the very weight of the earth piled overhead do the same?

The only problem with his plan was that he’d have to close with the worm to put it into practice.

There were more coin pots here. He snatched one up and hurled it, sidestepping as he did. This time he did not throw it at the worm, but rather at the wall behind the worm.

As he had hoped, the worm jerked at his motion. Then it whipped around, wasting its venom on the empty space where the jar had shattered. Temur vaulted the bier, scattering dry bones, and dodged around luminescent venom. He ran not
for
the worm but past it, closer to the wall where the sealed-up entrance lay, and struck the wooden column there with all the strength of his shoulder.

It creaked and slipped halfway from its footing.

The gut-worm was turning back, seeking. Temur thought it took a few moments to work itself up to spitting. Its body swelled now as it had before. Temur threw his arms around the pillar and heaved. Once, twice—the worm’s head reared up—and Temur hurled himself backward, his whole weight against the pole. It slid from its footing and hit the floor with a crack as Temur flew from his feet and tumbled hard against the wall beside the door.

He was pushing himself up on his elbows in the sudden darkness when the roof fell in.

Temur ducked, shielding his head with his arms, but he was in the shelter of the wall and no timbers struck him. Instead he huddled in a triangular gap like a lean-to. The crypt was plunged in darkness. Temur did not know if he’d crushed the worm, or merely brought timbers and earth down between them. Dust and particles of earth coated his skin and made him wheeze. But it was no longer trying to eat him, and that was enough for now.

He tested the door and could not move it. Cleaner air flowed through the gap beneath; he would die of thirst before he suffocated. It was not a cheering thought.

He did not know how long he crouched there—not pinned, but constrained—before he heard the hollow ring of footsteps and saw the flicker of torchlight below the great stone door. At first he feared it was the scrape and glow of another gut-worm, but it was too rhythmic and too bright. The crisp, smoky sharpness of burning pitch reached him, and he stood up behind the door and began to pound against it with his fists.