Range of Ghosts (2 page)

Temur would take his rest sitting. He propped the coil of his broken bow in the lee of the corpse of a horse, not yet bloating because of the cold. Tottering, muddy-headed with exhaustion, he scavenged until he could bolster himself with salvaged bedrolls, sheepskins, and blankets rolled tightly in leather straps.

He should build a fire to hold off the cold and the scavengers, but the world wobbled around him. Maybe the wild cats, wolves, and foxes would be satisfied with the already-dead. There was prey that would not fight back. And if any of the great steppe cats, big as horses, came in the night—well, there was little he could do. He had not the strength to draw a bow, even if he had a good one.

No hunger moved him, but Temur slit the belly of a war-butchered mare and dug with blood-soaked hands in still-warm offal until he found the liver. Reddened anew to the shoulders, he carved soft meat in strips and slurped them one by one, hand pressed over his wound with each wary swallow. Blood to replace blood.

He would need it.

There was no preserving the meat to carry. He ate until his belly spasmed and threw the rest as far away as he could. He couldn’t do anything about the reek of blood, but as he’d already been covered in his own, it seemed insignificant.

Crammed to sickness, Temur folded a sweat-and-blood-stiff saddle blanket double and used it as a pad, then leaned back. The dead horse was a chill, stiff hulk against his spine, more a boulder than an animal. The crusted blanket was not much comfort, but at least it was still too cold for insects. He couldn’t sleep and brush flies from his wound. If maggots got in it, well, they would keep the poison of rot from his blood, but a quick death might be better.

He heard snarls in the last indigo glow of evening, when stars had begun to gleam, one by one, in the southern sky. Having been right about the scavengers made it no easier to listen to their quarrels, for he knew what they quarreled over. There was some meat the sacred vultures would not claim.

He knew it was unworthy. It was a dishonor to his family duty to his uncle. But somewhere in the darkness, he hoped a wolf gnawed the corpse of Qori Buqa.

*   *   *

Temur waited for moonrise. The darkness after sunset was the bleakest he had known, but what the eventual, silvery light revealed was worse. Not just the brutal shadows slipping from one corpse to the next, gorging on rich organ meats, but the sources of the light.

He tried not to count the moons as they rose but could not help himself. No bigger than Temur’s smallest fingernail, each floated up the night like a reflection on dark water. One, two. A dozen. Fifteen. Thirty. Thirty-one. A scatter of hammered sequins in the veil the Eternal Sky drew across himself to become Mother Night.

Among them, no matter how he strained his eyes, he did not find the moon he most wished to see—the Roan Moon of his elder brother Qulan, with its dappled pattern of steel and silver.

Temur should have died.

He had not been sworn to die with Qulan, like his brother’s oath-band had—as Qulan’s heir, that would have been a foolish vow to take—but he knew his own battle fury, and the only reason he lived was because his wounds had incapacitated him.

If he never saw blood again … he would be happy to claim he did not mind it.

Before the death of Mongke Khagan, there had been over a hundred moons. One for Mongke Khagan himself and one for each son and each grandson of his loins, and every living son and grandson and great-grandson of the Great Khagan Temusan as well—at least those born while the Great Khagan lived and reigned.

Every night since the war began, Temur had meant to keep himself from counting. And every night since, he had failed, and there had been fewer moons than the night before. Temur had not even the comfort of Qori Buqa’s death, for there gleamed his uncle’s Ghost Moon, pale and unblemished as the hide of a ghost-bay mare, shimmering brighter among the others.

And there was Temur’s as well, a steely shadow against the indigo sky. The Iron Moon matched his name, rust and pale streaks marking its flanks. Anyone who had prayed his death—as he had prayed Qori Buqa’s—would know those prayers come to naught. At least his mother, Ashra, would have the comfort of knowing he lived … if she did.

Which was unlikely, unless she had made it out of Qarash before Qori Buqa’s men made it in. If Qori Buqa lived, Temur’s enemies lived. Wherever Temur walked, if his clan and name were known, he might bring death—death on those who helped him, and death on himself.

This—this was how empires ended. With the flitting of wild dogs in the dark and a caravan of moons going dark one by one.

Temur laid his knife upon his thigh. He drew blankets and a fleece over himself and gingerly let his head rest against the dead horse’s flank. The stretching ache of his belly made a welcome distraction from the throb of his wound.

He closed his eyes. Between the snarls of scavengers, he dozed.

*   *   *

The skies broke about the gray stones of high Ala-Din. The ancient fortress breached them as a headland breaches sea, rising above a battered desert landscape on an angled promontory of wind-eroded sandstone.

Ala-Din meant “the Rock.” Its age was such that it did not need a complicated name. Its back was guarded by a gravel slope overhung by the face of the escarpment. On the front, the cliff face swept up three hundred feet to its summit, there crowned by crenellated battlements and a cluster of five towers like the fingers of a sharply bent hand.

Mukhtar ai-Idoj, al-Sepehr of the Rock, crouched atop the lowest and broadest of them, his back to the familiar east-setting sun of the Uthman Caliphate. Farther east, he knew, the strange pale sun of the Qersnyk tribes was long fallen, their queer hermaphroditic godling undergoing some mystic transformation to rise again as the face of the night. Farther east, heathen men were dying in useful legions, soaking the earth with their unshriven blood.

And that concerned him. But not as much as the immediate blood in which he bathed his own hands now.

Twin girls no older than his youngest daughter lay on the table before him, bound face to face, their throats slit with one blow. It was their blood that flowed down the gutter in the table to fall across his hands and over the sawn halves of a quartz geode he cupped together, reddening them even more than the sun reddened his sand-colored robes.

He stayed there, hands outstretched, trembling slightly with the effort of a strenuous pose, until the blood dripped to a halt. He straightened with the stiffness of a man who feels his years in his knees and spine, and with sure hands broke the geode apart. Strings of half-clotted blood stretched between its parts.

He was not alone on the roof. Behind him, a slender man waited, hands thrust inside the sleeves of his loose desert robe. Two blades, one greater and one lesser, were thrust through his indigo sash beside a pair of chased matchlock pistols. The powder horn hung beside his water skin. An indigo veil wound about his face matched the sash. Only his eyes and the leathery squint lines that framed them showed, but the color of his irises was too striking to be mistaken for many others—a dark ring around variegated hazel, chips of green and brown, a single dark spot at the bottom of the left one.

Al-Sepehr had only seen one other set of eyes like them. They were the eyes of this man’s sister.

“Shahruz,” he said, and held out one half of the stone.

Shahruz drew a naked hand from his sleeve and accepted the gory thing with no evidence of squeamishness. It was not yet dry. “How long will it last?”

“A little while,” he said. “Perhaps ten uses. Perhaps fifteen. It all depends on the strength of the vessels.” The girls, their bodies too warmed by the stone and the sun to be cooling yet. “When you use it, remember what was sacrificed.”

“I will,” said Shahruz. He made the stone vanish into his sleeve, then bowed three times to al-Sepehr. The obeisance was in honor of Sepehr and the Scholar-God, not the office of al-Sepehr, but al-Sepehr accepted it in their stead.

Shahruz nodded in the direction of the dead girls. “Was that necessary? Saadet—”

“I cannot be with your sister always.” Al-Sepehr let himself smile, feeling the desert wind dry his lips. “My wives would not like it. And I will not send you into the den of a Qersnyk pretender without a means of contacting me directly. All I ask is that you be sparing of it, because we will need it as well as a conduit for magic.”

Shahruz hesitated, the movement of his grimace visible beneath his veil. “Are we dogs, al-Sepehr,” he asked finally, reluctantly, “to hunt at the command of a pagan Qersnyk?”

Al-Sepehr cut the air impatiently. “We are jackals, to turn the wars of others to our own advantage. If Qori Buqa wants to wage war on his cousins, then why should we not benefit? When we are done, not a kingdom, caliphate, or principality from Song to Messaline will be at peace—until we put
our
peace upon them. Go now. Ride the wind as far as the borderlands, then send it home to me once you have procured horses and men.”

“Master,” Shahruz said, and turned crisply on the ball of his foot before striding away.

When his footsteps had descended the stair, al-Sepehr turned away. He set his half of the stone aside and bathed his hands in sun-hot water, scrubbing under the nails with a brush and laving them with soap to the elbow. When he was done, no trace of blood could be seen and the sky was cooling.

He reached into his own sleeve and drew forth a silk pouch, white except where rust-brown speckled it. From its depths, he shook out another hollow stone. The patina of blood on this one was thin; sparkles of citrine yellow showed through where it had flaked away from crystal faces.

Al-Sepehr cupped his hands around it and regarded it steadily until the air above it shimmered and a long, eastern face with a fierce narrow moustache and drooping eyes regarded him.

“Khan,” al-Sepehr said.

“Al-Sepehr,” the Qersnyk replied.

The stone cooled against al-Sepehr’s palm. “I send you one of my finest killers. You will make use of him to secure your throne. Then all will call you Khagan, Qori Buqa.”

“Thank you.” The son of the Old Khagan smiled, his moustache quivering. “There is a moon I would yet see out of the sky. Re Temur escaped the fall of Qarash.”

“No trouble,” al-Sepehr said, as the beat of mighty wings filled the evening air. “We will see to it. For your glory, Khan.”

2

The
whuff
of soft breath across Temur’s cheek awakened him. His hand clenched on the knife hilt; he nearly drove the forged blade into his own belly before he realized that what stood over him, filthy in the morning light, was a liver-bay mare whose sparse mane was still braided down between her eyes with red war ribbons.

She
whuff
ed again, not startled by his sudden movement, and resumed lipping the fleece that Temur huddled under. She was sucking up the frost from his breath, which hoared his blankets. When Temur pushed himself out of their warmth, cold water ran down his back—melted by the residual heat seeping from the bulk of the dead horse. Every movement ripped pain through the tight muscles of his neck and along his spine. The edges of his wound were hot and thick, stiff as unstretched leather. He pressed his left hand over the cloth he’d used to cover it and felt the wetness of lymph and blood, but there was no reek of pus. The wound was still seeping.

The mare must have been numb to the smell of blood by then. As Temur rose, she ambled a few steps off and paused, head hanging, cropping winter-dry grasses where she could find a patch untrampled. Her tack was complete, though her reins had been broken and her quilted chest armor swung from a tangle of straps, whacking her brown-and-black-striped forelegs with each step. Temur could see the dings and abrasions on her knees and cannons where the furniture had struck her.

That was why she was still here, among all the dead. She was effectively hobbled.

The knife was in his hand. He dragged a worn whetstone from the slash pocket in his quilted trousers and scoured the blade to hone it. The barding had to come off, and he didn’t think the mare would stand still long enough for him to release the knots and buckles—assuming his hands were strong enough for the work. And assuming she didn’t knock him over.

She stood steady as the gray morning when he came up to her, humming low in his throat.
I’m here,
the noise said.
I’m not sneaking. I’m a friend.

When he got close enough, he just stood beside her for a moment, speaking nonsense. He told her she was pretty and asked her name. Her ears flicked, but she didn’t lift her nose from the grass. He didn’t recognize the pattern of triangular nicks cut from their edges—without a shaman-rememberer, there was no way for him to know to whom she might have belonged. She had a good look about her, though—a short straight back, sharp angles, and dense muscles under the hide. She was thin and long-boned after the manner of steppe ponies, not fat with muscle and thick-necked like Song horses.

Gently, Temur slipped the blade beneath a tangle of her harness, edge out, and began to saw the leather. It parted well enough: In a few breaths he had the strap severed. She stood for it, nonchalant, and the next as well. After that, he could slide what remained down her skinny neck one-handed, saving the injured side, and let her shake it off her own ears.

She didn’t like that, snorting and backing away precipitously until her hind hooves thumped on a dead man’s outflung arm and she startled forward again. Temur opened his arms gently and tried to reach her with his voice. “Hush, now, dumpling, little brave one. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be fine now.”

It was a good thing everything on the steppe smelled like blood, because she didn’t shy from the reek all over him when she picked her way forward. She shoved her nose into his chest, not too hard. Her unchipped hooves, planted stubbornly in the grass, were banded tawny and black. Her eyes were large and clear. Temur felt tears spring up in his own as she pushed him again and whickered.