Range of Ghosts (22 page)

He had seen waterfalls in the parts of Song that his grandfather and uncle had conquered. There was terrain there where the water melted the very stone from beneath the earth, so rivers vanished into yawning yellow-white pits draped at the edges with webs of roots; where measureless caverns made awful labyrinths under your feet; where alien towers of limestone netted with jungle-green thrust up from flat verdant fields. But he had never seen a waterfall like this.

The river Tsarethi plunged a distance he could not estimate—a hundred
ayl,
five hundred?—down a sheer granite cliff to a pool below, bouncing and splashing and scattering spray. In the tight canyon, the thunder was like the thunder of a thousand hooves when the herd was all around you. Louder—booming—so he could not hear Samarkar a few spans away calling to the mules.

The spray drifting against his face was cold as ice—so cold he could imagine it freezing
to
ice in his patchy, unshaven beard. But the mist that rose from below was warm as summer rain. Temur had to turn his shoulders to follow the water down. The stiffness of his scar made it hard to twist his neck away. He was fortunate the wound was on his left side. Otherwise, it would have interfered with drawing a bow.

Reluctantly, he pulled himself away from the view and went to help Samarkar chivy the mules forward. So many feet had worn the incline that you could see the dished places. As each person had leaned into any given depression to use it as a step, they had worn it deeper. Temur climbed them as if they were steps, and used them to slow his descent on spray-slick stone on the opposite side.

Hrahima waited with Bansh on the far side, flanked by four spear-armed guards in red and two in the same black coats and jade collars Tsering and Samarkar affected. These were men, though, and they wore long knives at their belts in addition to whatever wizarding weapons Temur could not see.

Samarkar’s coat won them past the wizards. The red-coated men, however, were chilly until she shouted her name above the rumble that shook the stones on which they stood. Then frost melted to an excess of deference bordering on obsequiousness.

The mules were likely to prove more intransigent. But Temur was familiar with the minds of mules, and it did not take him long to bribe and cajole them into moving. Their unshod hooves echoed on the stone span as he and Samarkar led them forward. He leaned in to shout into her ear.

“Who built this?”

“Wizards.” There was no mistaking the pride in the set of her shoulders.

He offered a mule another bit of leathery fruit to keep it moving, and watched Samarkar’s straight back as she walked ahead.
Wizards.

He thought about bones bleaching in an empty city. He thought about Edene. He thought about Qori Buqa, and he pressed one fist to his belly over a sudden, painful knot of emotion. He wanted revenge. Revenge for Edene, if she was dead—and no matter how he pretended to himself that she wasn’t, some part of him knew it for a pretense.

Revenge. Wizards could help him get it.

*   *   *

Tsering did not meet them at the Citadel’s northern gates, and the wizards at the Wreaking would or could tell Samarkar nothing of the results of her message—though she thought the extra bodies on the battlements an unsubtle hint. Someone else did, though. Anil, the wizard who had kissed her at the celebration of finding her powers, waited just within.

His face was furrowed with concern. He took no notice of Hrahima or Temur, and the first words he said were, “Yongten-la wishes to speak with you.”

Samarkar looked to her traveling companions. “I need—”

“We’ll see the animals cared for,” Anil said, “and your friends accommodated. Go, run, Samarkar-la. He awaits.”

The head of the wizards of the Citadel had never had a particular title or rank. Everyone knew who held the post; everyone knew under whose authority they lived. Once or twice in the history of the order, there had been internecine war, but most often the trouble was finding somebody who was willing to take on the burden of the job. Wizards tended to be more interested in their spells and chemicals than administration.

Samarkar paused long enough to explain to Hrahima and Temur that she was summoned by the master of her order and that they should accept whatever comfort the wizards could offer, then she took off—as Anil had suggested—at a run. The petal hem of her coat fluttered around her legs, fabric filthy and stiff with travel. The boots rubbed new raw places on her feet where the felt wrappings had worn thin.

Within two hundred heartbeats, she stood before the open door of Yongten-la’s chamber. Light and the sound of falling water reached her through the windows. Two wizards and two novices waited in the hall, ready to attend any errand. Samarkar was taking a moment to compose herself when Yongten-la’s voice emerged from within.

“Samarkar-la,” he said. “You have returned. Come inside, and shut the door behind you.”

The words chilled her innards. If he meant to chew her out for some infraction, he would not hesitate to do so in front of witnesses. Which meant he had some news to impart that he did not wish to become public knowledge just yet.

On raw feet, Samarkar stepped forward. She pulled the door closed after.

Yongten-la’s chamber was spare and neat. His private workbenches, topped with slate and granite, lay to Samarkar’s right, and all the equipment on them was clean and orderly. Even the chalk-scrawled notations on the surface of the slate beside the scale were precise enough to read from a distance, despite their economical size. His desk was before her, under the windows, raised on a little platform padded with rugs and cushions in deference to old bones. Yongten-la sat cross-legged behind it, bent over a sand tray from which he appeared to be transcribing notes to a wax tablet. When he was satisfied with them, Samarkar knew, the tablets would go to a scribe, who would transcribe them again, onto paper for binding and preservation in the archive.

He looked up and set his stylus aside. “Samarkar-la,” he said, when she had bowed low. “Be seated. I have some unfortunate news for you.”

Tsering,
she thought, like a claw of ice. But she came up beside him and sat, pushing aside cushions so her head would be lower than his. Wizards did not stand on such ceremony, but court-bred Samarkar could not quite break the habit.

Seated, she bowed her head and waited for him to continue. He was kind and had the directness of age; he did not draw it out. “The Dowager Regent is dead. It is said she was poisoned, and Songtsan-tsa has arrested your younger brother for the crime. It seems likely Songtsan will burn Tsansong.”

Samarkar put a hand out behind her for support, or she would have slumped backward against the cushions. “Tsansong is no killer.”

Yongten’s eyebrows rose. His hand moved idly on the rim of the sand tray. He smiled bitter approval. “If you believe so, then we are in agreement,” he said. “And the new
bstangpo
is very clever in his timing. You will now produce no heirs to challenge his, and by removing his brother he removes also his only adult rival for the throne.”

Samarkar nodded, feeling her head move as if on rods in another’s hands. She remembered what Temur had said about the instability of regimes, and wondered. “Songtsan’s ruthlessness is renowned.”

The mildness of her own tone surprised her. She should know Songtsan’s ruthlessness, having used it to remove the husband who would otherwise have set her aside.
Oh, Tsansong,
she thought. Whatever her face revealed, Yongten-la nodded in sympathy and sorrow. In the face of his kindness, she allowed herself to close her eyes. Briefly, just long enough to soothe the sting.

“Indeed,” the old man said. “Now tell me in your own words what you discovered in Qeshqer. I have it from Tsering, but I would have it from you as well. And, when we are done here, from your traveling companions.”

She took a breath. “The Cho-tse Hrahima has a message for you as well, Yongten-la. One that bodes ill for us all. She meant to deliver it to my brother, and I will go with her to do that—but I think you should hear it in her own words, too.”

The lines in his face could not hide the hard sharpness of his eyes. “Thank you. Now. Tell me what you found in the north, Wizard Samarkar.”

*   *   *

The Qersnyk harlot paced and swore in her velvet captivity. Al-Sepehr caused drink to be brought to her, delicate ices against the heat. At first she hurled everything at the servants and raged. But al-Sepehr knew that any hawk can be gentled by hunger, and he persevered.

At last, driven by thirst, she drank a little tea with mint in it, and sugar. And having drunk, it was easier to eat the next time. And so he worked to tame her, bite by bite.

She had a delicate stomach, which frustrated him. He must dine with her to tame her, and so he made time in his schedule. But the foods she could tolerate—and keep inside her—were only the blandest offerings. Those ices, such fruits as were in season at the advent of summer’s heat, plain yogurt, and pearls of wheat flour rolled small between the hands and steamed.

He heard reports of her behavior when he was not with her. She was watched at every moment: It was good practice for his young assassins to spy on her without her knowledge, and if she thought herself alone, she might let slip something useful. Al-Sepehr valued the harlot for what she contained, not what she was—and one of the things she contained was information. She was safe; she was immured in her cushioned mews until such time as al-Sepehr required her. It would serve.

He was the only visitor she was permitted, and that, too, wore at her. At last, in desperation, she spoke with him. Not at length and of no more than trivialities. Or what must seem to her trivialities, but there were chips and bits in what she said that al-Sepehr could put to use.

While he was not attending the woman, he spent a great deal of time on communication. Not with the stones in his pockets, for those were a finite resource and best reserved for emergencies. It was not as if virgin twins bloomed from the desert every time it rained, after all. Instead, al-Sepehr penned letters, coded and intentionally cryptic. These, he entrusted for delivery to the offspring of the rukh.

The young could fly in their first year but were not at that stage much larger than eagles. From a distance they could be mistaken for eagles, but eagles did not have snowy crests tipped blood-red. The immature rukh grew slowly. Even al-Sepehr did not know how long it would take them to reach the size of their mother, the adult that had carried the Qersnyk harlot to Ala-Din from the outermost east.

Or how long it would take to reach the size of even her smaller mate, which al-Sepehr kept mewed up like the girl. It was through the male’s captivity that al-Sepehr assured the obedience of the female.

The rukh’s children brought him letters in return, which was how he learned of the successful destruction of Qeshqer, and also the safe flight of that damned Qersnyk warlord’s son to Tsarepheth in Rasa.

That last was not bad news, exactly. Al-Sepehr had agents in Rasa, and Qori Buqa would be easier to control if his attention was bent on a presumed enemy. And if the boy did turn out to be something special after all, well—al-Sepehr had his mate and unborn child to hand. What worked on a rukh would work on a man.

When a letter came to al-Sepehr by means of the same bird in whose talons he’d dispensed a deadly poison only a fortnight before, he thought long and carefully before he found paper and took up his pen to answer.

O most noble ally,
he wrote.

News of your success reaches me through divers channels, and I rejoice to hear of it. You should find your path more clean going forward. A victory begets a victory. You must never underestimate the power of conquest to raise the morale of your folk. When Qeshqer is Kashe once again, you will be the most beloved of rulers.

Know then of a favor you can do me in return. I seek a Qersnyk man, not tall or especially well favored, got on an Aezin mother. He is a survivor of the fall of Qarash. It is likely that he will riding a bay mare of the steppe breed with one white-splashed foot and asking after a woman named Edene. He may be using the name Temur, which is hardly uncommon.

If you find him, do not harm him. I have uses for him.

Yours,

Mukhtar ai-Idoj, al-Sepehr

*   *   *

The walls were too close, the sky too far away. Temur could not smell the wind or sense the movement of the air—which was thin, and left him feeling as breathless as if kicked by a horse. The light he worked by came not from the golden sun, but from cold, pallid lanterns that burned on the walls without any smoke or flame.

But here inside the wizards’ Citadel, he found at least one thing that smelled and felt of home. And so, once Samarkar and Hrahima had left him, he bent his back steadily to the business of finding Buldshak in her stall and locating the stable boy. Temur arranged in his broken Rasan to have Bansh quartered beside Buldshak, then going over each of his mares from one end to the other with eyes and hands and soft brushes made of pigs’ bristle.

He was relieved to discover that the rose-gray had been well cared for and was sound—even beginning to hide her bones beneath a layer of flesh again. She had whickered when he led Bansh up; now, while he worked on the bay, the two mares spent their time communicating softly through the worked-stone filigree that separated their stalls.

The air was still, but not close, and it smelled comfortingly of animals. Temur was not sure from whence the ventilation came, but he suspected it had as much to do with Rasan wizardry as did those strange cold lights. In any case, the bedding was deep underfoot and the stalls clean enough that he could find no work to do with a pitchfork, so after one last pat—and communicating with that same stable boy in further pidgin to make sure Bansh would be fed small, frequent quantities at first and checked on often—he took his leave of her and Buldshak to find the mules and see to them as well.