Range of Ghosts (16 page)

“And once it is constructed, how am I to grind it fine enough to burn swiftly?”

“Are you a wizard or an alchemist?”

“Right.” Samarkar ground the iodide of silver as well, just to have it done, and cleaned the mortar one last time. Slowly, pinch by pinch, trying to send her awareness into each particle, she began to build the black powder.
Combine,
she told it.
Three things make one. Three things make one.

She thought she felt it happening. A creeping, prickling sensation, then that familiar warmth …

“No heat,” Tsering said. “You must ask the fire to stay itself. Ask the heat to wait; bring in emptiness. Create the absence of fire.”

“Emptiness,” Samarkar mumbled.

“Emptiness,” Tsering said.

She found the fire in the powder and coaxed it softly. Not to leave the powder, but merely to wait, to hold its warmth until a time of need. She stirred it with the pestle and realized that she did not need to grind it to powder; she could merely ask the flakes to pull themselves apart, smaller and smaller.

She lost herself in the process. When she looked up, she realized that the sun rode the shoulder of a mountain whose name she did not know, and the stuff she stirred in the pestle was fine as ash. “Good,” Tsering said. “Now add the silver. And bear in mind, the silver carries the process of water, and you are adding it to a substance that carries the process of fire. If they are not kept separate, they will counteract one another.”

“Right,” Samarkar said. She looked up in surprise as Tsering stood, groaning a little with stiffness. “Where are you going?”

“To start a fire,” said Tsering. “And heat some dinner.”

“Don’t forget to feed the shrine,” Samarkar said, and turned back to her experiment.

*   *   *

Samarkar learned to create other things as well. Water in a bowl, though Tsering said that really they were just refining it from the moisture in the air, like dew or frost. She learned to create the semblance of solid objects from the force of her concentration—small ones: a key, a knife.

They practiced as they walked. For the first quarter-moons, when they set out in the mornings, they had kept their pockets stuffed with greasy rocks heated in the embers of the fires, for warming their fingers. But the road to Qeshqer led them down the back slope of the Steles of the Sky, and as summer advanced and they lost elevation, they needed water more than warmth. Fortunately, the streams were flush with glacial melt. The only problem was reaching them when so many ran deep in the bottoms of crudely bridged gullies. Tsering, though, proved able with a hide bucket and a length of rope.

The road between Tsarepheth and Qeshqer was not a graded thing wide enough for a cart—or, in places, two—like the Imperial Highway that led from Tsarepheth to Rasa. It was a trade route, a track worn over hills and through narrow passes by the hooves of innumerable mules and yaks and ponies and herds of wiry, wild-coated mountain sheep. Samarkar was grateful for the mules, who scrambled up hairy boulders without so much as leaving a hoof-scrape in their shrouds of moss and lichen and who seemed able to eat anything. She wasn’t sure how she would have made it herself with a pack, but the mules were unfazed by anything, including bridges Samarkar hesitated to trust with her own weight.

It reminded her a little of her only other long journey—ignoring the ones to the winter palace in Rasa and back to Tsarepheth. But when she had gone to Song to be a bride, she had been borne in a horse litter, and when she had come back she had ridden astride behind her brothers, head held high and cheeks burning with wind or shame.

This was a very different passage. When they met other travelers, Samarkar might have been nervous for her safety and that of Tsering, except without fail, traders and entertainers and priests alike treated the black-clad women with a deference bordering on terror. She had been accustomed to the obsequiousness of servants when she was a princess, and she had learned to efface herself and perform menial tasks without complaint during her novitiate, but this was alien. It was as if she moved in a bubble of silence, so conversations died away before her and resumed behind.

After the third or fourth time, Samarkar raised her eyebrows at Tsering, and Tsering answered with her usual sidelong smile. “It saves money on escorts,” she said, with a shrug.

Samarkar laughed hard and heartily and went back to trying to open the small lock Tsering had given her to practice on while Tsering simmered rice over their small fire and sliced dried vegetables. She held it flat on her palm, letting the shape of the emptiness within tell her the shape of the pins and tumblers. It was a simple matter to fill that emptiness with strength, to focus her will within. Turning the key her mind constructed, though—
that
defeated her. Over and over again she strove, and over and over again the thing shredded itself when she imagined it twisting.

Finally, as Tsering sat back from the soup, Samarkar threw up her other hand and said, “What on earth am I doing wrong?”

“Here,” Tsering said. She rose up, her hems whisking her calves, and came and sat beside Samarkar, all without touching the earth with her hands. She grasped Samarkar’s wrist and pulled her palm out flat between them, the lock resting heavily on its arch. “What are you doing?”

“I can feel the lock. I can feel the key. But when I try to lift the pins—”

“That’s the problem, then,” Tsering said. “Don’t lift the pins. Just be the key, and turn.”

Be the key, and turn.
Right.

Well, maybe. Because if the key was an extension of her will, not an object … She didn’t think of turning her hand, did she, and how the muscles and tendons and bones made that happen? She just turned it.

Samarkar closed her eyes. She imagined the key; imagined it solid. Felt its surface fill the empty space in the lock.

Imagined it turning.

She heard a scrape, felt resistance. The key shredded in her awareness.

She would have cursed, but Tsering’s hand was on her shoulder. “There,” she said. “Much closer. Now do it another thousand times.”

*   *   *

Maybe not a thousand, but Samarkar sat and practiced until Tsering brought her soup and water. She opened the lock twice and made it scrape three or four more times. It was progress, she told herself, and she should not expect to perform perfectly without practice.
Perfection does not exist.

Still, she was grateful to tuck the lock into one of her wizard’s coat’s many concealed pockets and take the bowl and spoon from her teacher’s hands. Only after she had eaten a few bites—and expressed her appreciation—did she look up at Tsering and frown. “Forgive me—”

“How do I know so much about theory when I have no magic of my own?”

Samarkar looked down.

Tsering shrugged and bent over her bowl. “I still love wizardry,” she said. “If, as a wizard, I am a technician and a teacher rather than a spellwright, then that is as fate ordains. We each serve given our ability.”

“You are the best of teachers,” Samarkar said. She tucked her chin in shame and wondered how long it had taken Tsering-la to achieve such peace and resolve, when Samarkar still felt a sting at Yongten-la’s pronouncement that she would not be a great power.

*   *   *

When Samarkar and Tsering came out of the Steles of the Sky into the high cold plateau they must cross to reach Qeshqer—the city that had been called Kashe, before the Great Khagan Temusan the Terrible conquered it—the sky changed over them. Not as Samarkar had anticipated, not to the deep azure of the Qersnyk sky—but rather to a faded turquoise, framing a pale sun that moved from one corner to the other in alien directions.

So they knew something was wrong in Qeshqer long before they came within sight of the city. Then on the second day, they found themselves passed over and around by a seemingly endless swarm of butterflies, as if butterflies migrated like birds. It came upon them with the sunrise and did not flag until the moon was high in the sky. Samarkar lay awake in her bedroll, listening to the whisper of myriad papery wings, wondering what they portended.

They reached the waystones that marked a boundary three days out from Qeshqer, and from that point forward no further outbound caravans crossed paths with them. The road was well worn, the bridges maintained, but suddenly there were no other people along it. On the first day, this was unusual; by the third, it had become eerie.

By the time they passed the final set of waystones, Samarkar and Tsering were exchanging nervous glances and had stopped joking about the lack of people. “It should be just up this rise.” Tsering traced the script on a stone.

Samarkar knew she should say something, but a silence so thick and ominous it felt like an effort to grunt agreement defeated her. She shifted a wet palm on the lead of the first mule and dug in, climbing.

Tsering fell in beside her.

This close to a city, they should have heard noise, smelled smoke. There was nothing—the scent of the sewers and midden heaps, the rustle of grasses and leaves. As they crested the rise of the foothill, Samarkar found herself looking down into a sweep of valley patchworked by lines of trees and broken into neat fields curved to fit the contours of the hills.

The road wound down between the fields, and the fields were empty. Not of crops—spring greens and the shoots of young grains poked through tilled soil, a translucent haze of green and peach and red seeming at this distance to hover above the earthy browns—but empty of the women and men and children who should have been engaged in weeding, transplanting, nurturing the crop.

Beyond the empty fields, the red-and-gold-roofed white buildings of Qeshqer heaped up one atop another among the roots of mountains that continued climbing behind them. Forested slopes gave way to stark peaks, and no haze of smoke obscured any detail. Tsering made a low noise and shifted from one foot to another, restive as the mules. Hand trembling, Samarkar drew her lens from her coat by its cord and raised it before her eye.

Across the intervening difference, through lucid air, Samarkar could see every window, every building whitewashed and framed by trees—rhododendron, mulberry, and cypress. Where the city mounted into the Range of Ghosts, she made out the metallic gleams off the clustered steel-and-silver trunks of lacebark pine and the darker colors of the Stele pine, with its conical habit and sweeping, open spiral of branches.

No sound carried across the valley, and nothing moved across Qeshqer’s narrow plazas or along its stair-set roads. Through her lens, Samarkar could see the wind rippling oblong rhododendron leaves and hair-fine pine needles, but not a single animal crossed her field of view.

When she lowered the lens, Tsering must have read what she saw in her expression, because she didn’t ask. She licked her lips and rocked back on her heels and said, “Not even refugees? How does that
happen
?”

“We don’t go down into that valley,” Samarkar said. She was already reining the mules back, considering how much food they were still carrying. It would be short rations back to Tsarepheth, even if they raced as fast as they could. She touched the collar at her throat for reassurance. “We have to get word back to Yongten-la and my brother.”

She was tucking the lens back inside her coat for protection when she noticed Tsering staring over her shoulder.

“Samarkar—” the other wizard said. She pointed; Samarkar turned.

Somebody was moving along the road, just silhouetted now against the sky as he came through the high pass that flanked Qeshqer on its right side. Somebody? No. Something. Puffs of dust showed it was moving, and in a moment whatever it was had dropped below the ridge.

Samarkar clawed for her lens again.

Two horses, one pale and one dark, moved tiredly down the track. Their heads hung; their steps were plodding. And across the back of the darker one slumped an outlandishly dressed person, hands flopping at his thighs in a manner that indicated borderline consciousness at best. Behind and above them, as if it had followed them down from the pass, the black wings of a vulture drifted.

“Correction,” Samarkar said dryly. “If that’s a survivor, I guess
I’m
going down into the valley. Stay here with the mules?”

She saw Tsering consider arguing; Tsering was the senior wizard, after all. But Tsering, however knowledgeable, could not wield the magic she understood so well. Which left it up to Samarkar—dry-mouthed and cold-handed with fear as she was.

Tsering nodded. “Go on, Samarkar-la.”

Samarkar divested herself of pack and goods and wizard’s coat and collar. She stepped out of her boots, after considering, and stood barefoot and bare-armed in the wind. Whatever was down there, if it had silenced a city, she could not fight it. Her only chance was to be silent and swift.

And empty.

She let herself fall away, made herself nothing. Quick, light. A space in the air. No thought; no intention. Just action.

She was not aware of the decision to run. One moment she stood poised on the ridge with the cool dust between her toes. The next she was in motion, running on the balls of her feet, plunging forward wrapped in her veil of emptiness.

It was good to run. Good to feel the strength in her body, won back with such effort since her surgery. Good to feel the road vanishing between strides. It was a long run, and there was time to feel it—the whole width of the valley to cover, first in a downhill plunge, then the toil upward toward Qeshqer, which shortened her stride and burned her chest with the thin, dry air.

But she was Rasan born, and the air of Tsarepheth was thinner still. She breathed deeply, letting her body take what it needed of the process of air, imagining that energy spreading through her with each pump of her bellows chest. She dropped to a walk as she came up to the horses—mares, she could see now, the lanky light-boned steppe breed, thin and weary with travel. And the man on the bay one’s back …