Range of Ghosts (32 page)

Temur did as she asked. A span or so away, Hrahima stood. She held up a crumpled scrap of rice paper, stained with red where she had touched the edges. There, sketched in confident, even flattering brush strokes, was a portrait of Temur.

“I think Qori Buqa knows you’re alive,” she said. “These dead men are not Nameless. They are mercenaries dressed as Nameless. But the one who fell or the one who fled—they might have been the real thing.”

“How do you know?” Payma asked.

“The Nameless tattoo their hands,” she said. “These have no marks.”

Temur’s face did a number of interesting things before he thought to press it against the gelding’s neck. He took a breath, and when he turned back to them his voice was steady. “A good thing they didn’t know I was traveling with a trio of warrior women. I wouldn’t have stood a chance alone.”

*   *   *

The mercenary dead—when Temur had a chance to examine them after helping Samarkar with her horse doctoring—did not resemble men of the east. They might not be Nameless, but like the Rahazeen he had met in his uncle Mongke’s court, they were taller and of a leggier build, and when he unwrapped the black gauze veils that covered their heads and faces, their skin was a warmer shade of brown. They wore bronze helms under the veils, and leather armor under their flowing tunics.

The veils too were a hint that they were imposters, being black and not true indigo.

They had high-bridged noses and high-arched cheekbones, and their staring eyes were brown as tea. Tea going milky, as death began to cloud them.

They stank like any dead man, of urine and voided bowels. Their bows were of a different manufacture than his own, longer than the span of his arms, and so he could not use their arrows. Of the ones he’d fired, he could reclaim none. Two had been spent for nothing, one was gone with a bolted horse, and the other had plunged over the cliff. He’d lost a fifth himself when he nearly fell, and he mourned it bitterly. There would be no new arrows unless he made them.

Thoughtfully, he examined the western fletchings. There was nothing
wrong
with the shafts or the heads—or even the fletchings, which were the undyed feathers of some bird Temur had never seen. His own people fletched arrows with the feathers of vultures, the birds that carried souls to rest. But there was no reason he could not rework these.…

He gathered as many as he could, bundling them up and hanging them from the packs of one of the mules when Payma returned with them—two of them, anyway; she had been unable to find the third, and Temur hoped for all their sakes that the wizards had overpacked.

They threw the bodies off the road, first searching them for unspoiled food and other useful objects. While they worked, all five animals crunched grain in nose bags. The gelding wore an awkward bandage on his hip, but the poppy seemed to have eased his pain.

Samarkar sat on a rock nearby, darning her trousers where the arrow had cut them, having already packed her wounds with a bluish powder and wrapped them tightly in white cotton gauze. It shone against the sturdy curve of her thigh, and Temur had to keep reminding himself not to stare. She winced as she pinched the needle, leading him to wonder if she had hurt her right hand, too. Payma slumped against a rock, snatching a few moments of sleep, and Hrahima stood sentry at the outside curve of the road, where she could see a distance in both directions.

Finally, Samarkar heaved herself up, struggled into the trousers, and stood painfully. She’d tied a sling for her injured arm but was not using it now. He knew that her wounds—especially the deep puncture in her arm—would stiffen overnight, the insulted muscles knotting hard as wood around them. Tomorrow, moving her leg or arm would be an agony. He’d have to massage the gelding’s leg tonight, if he was going to be able to walk tomorrow. Temur did not fancy leading a lame horse through more mountain roads, but they’d need the gelding if he healed. In the meantime, Payma could double up on Bansh or Buldshak, but that would wear the mares out faster, and they did not have remounts so the horses could rest on alternate days.

They were—unavoidably—going to do some walking. And Payma’s feet would not stand up to much of that until they healed, then hardened.

It would have been a hard enough journey with all of them sound and hale. Starting the trip exhausted and injured …

Temur shook his head. He was making things worse, not better. He gave Samarkar a small smile of encouragement and said, “Come on. Let’s put some more ground under us before sunset.”

Samarkar nodded. But she touched his hand and drew him toward Bansh’s saddlebags. “All right. But you have to eat something while we ride.”

Her palm was cold; her fingers trembled. “I will if you will,” he said.

14

In the days that followed, they never found the other rider or his horse, and Temur was forced to assume—despite the arrow, despite the Cho-tse—that he had survived. But neither did they encounter any more Rahazeen assassins—real or feigning—nor Rasan men-at-arms, and under Samarkar’s care their various wounds healed rapidly. There was something to be said for wizards.

They followed a road through passes that lead more west than north until the mountains flattened enough that they could pick their way across forested foothills, and then they followed the sun—the Rasan sun, and then the sun of the Eternal Sky. They came out of the Steles of the Sky into the western reaches of the steppe, rather than passing through the Range of Ghosts. They descended the last foothill of the mountains at midday, as summer was sweeping the plains. The smell of sweetgrass was a balm to Temur. The Eternal Sky above shone a blue like the turquoise beads adorning the eight blue knots on a shaman-rememberer’s saddle. Other than birds, the first steppe wildlife they saw was a herd of ten or so Indrik-zver. These were long-necked, dust-colored beasts so massive a mounted man could ride under their rotund bellies. They took no notice of the people or the equines, even when the party’s route brought them within four or five
ayls,
though one great female with a cow-sized newborn gamboling about her feet turned to watch Hrahima pass. She made a sound of alarm or threat, a deep-chested huffing rumble combined with a hollow boom, which brought the ears of all the mules and horses up and had them scanning the horizon for predators.

The mules and horses had grown accustomed to Hrahima, apparently deciding that she did not eat horses, and in return she was careful to stay away from them when she came back from a hunt bearing fresh meat. The steppe ponies were used enough to dead animals, but it seemed wise not to force them to deal with a
bloody
tiger.

Temur could tell from Payma and Samarkar’s wide eyes and the way they turned to stare that the women had never seen an Indrik-zver.

“What is that?” Payma asked.

Temur was glad to explain. “They only live along the edge of the steppe, where they can retreat among the hills when the rivers dry up. They’re named for a magic beast of the far west,” Temur said, “where the mushroom people live.”

“‘Mushroom people’?” Payma pointed to the ground.

Temur shook his head. “Their faces are pale, like mushrooms, and they burn in the sun, as if you held them beside a fire. They call themselves Russhi or sometimes Kyivvin, as if anybody could get a tongue around that.”

Samarkar snorted laughter. Temur let himself meet her eyes and smile.

He said, “My grandfather conquered them before I was born. They have a beast of legend called the Indrik, which is like those”—he pointed with his chin—“but it has a horn on its nose. It dwells in a sacred mountain where no other foot may tread, and when it moves, the whole earth trembles. I knew a mushroom person in Qarash, an old man whom my grandfather took as tribute when he was young. He was a goldsmith. He told me about the Indrik.”

“Huh,” Samarkar said. The set of her shoulders was uncomfortable, hunched up to her ears, but Temur did not think she was upset with him. “We say the earth moves when the Dragon Mother stirs inside the Cold Fire.”

“Different skies. Different gods,” Temur said, repeating the wisdom of his mother. Now that they were under Quersnyk skies again, he still checked the moons every nightfall, and every nightfall they remained the same. And every morning, he arose before the sun and guarded the others against ghosts—but they, too, did not come.

In some ways the lack of change was worse; it was both a hammer over his head and a peace that might lull him into complacence.

He waited until Samarkar nodded before he looked away.

“Anyway,” she said, “we should pick up some of their dung for burning.”

Temur breathed easier to find himself no longer hemmed in by mountains, foothills, and forests. Here in his homeland, you could see an enemy coming as clearly as you could see the vultures that circled overhead until the sun set and the sky darkened. The grass crushed under horse hooves smelled of sage, and there were herbs to boil for tea growing among it.

Where they stopped for the evening, the pale disks of datura blossoms shone through the dusk like small moons, nodding on vines that bound and bowed the long grasses. He made sure to hobble the horses well away from the poisonous plant. When that was done and they were all rubbed down and eating lazily, he made his way back to the fire circle. The women had prepared it by yanking up turf so the grass could not catch fire in the roots and set the whole steppe ablaze. Now Payma was sorting their supplies. Samarkar was piling dry Indrik-zver dung up with air spaces between the clods, so a fire could catch easily. Hrahima had slipped into the dusk to seek prey.

Temur hunkered down beside Samarkar. He drew his flint and steel from inside his vest and began kindling a spark on a flat stone she’d heaped with dry grass. Her shoulders were still hunched protectively, her chin dropped.

As the flint scraped down the file, shedding sparks, he said, “You’re as stiff as butter in a cold house. Is something wrong?”

The tinder caught immediately, and Temur muttered a thanks to the spirit of the fire while Samarkar considered his question. “It’s hard for me to leave the mountains,” she said at last, quietly. “The sky is too big.”

And he could appreciate what Anil-la had left unsaid, to know that she had not enjoyed her last sojourn away from Tsarepheth. He nodded to direct her attention to Payma, who had paused in assembling dinner preparations to lift her face to the wind and take deep breaths of the wide space spread all around them, except to the south where the mountains loomed still.

“She enjoys it,” Temur said. “But I understand—sort of—how you feel. In the mountains everything was too thick and close, and the sky was heavy overhead.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s higher out here, too.”

The tinder was burning merrily as Temur slid the flat stone carefully into the air space under the dung. He watched flames bathe the underside of Samarkar’s pyramid, igniting glowing embers, and hunkered forward to blow gently across the fire.

When it caught solidly, he leaned back, satisfied, and rubbed his hands together. “If you think this is bad, wait until we reach the Salt Desert.”

*   *   *

When Saadet appeared at the door of the scriptorium during al-Sepehr’s prayers, al-Sepehr knew the news was ill. Through twisting apprehension, he forced himself to remain calm. To copy to the bottom of the page before he stood and left the scriptorium. Saadet turned and walked beside him, matching his pace with a man’s stride.

“We failed,” Saadet said crisply, in her brother’s tones. No excuses. “Re Temur fled Tsarepheth before we made it. He is traveling in the company of a Cho-tse and a Rasan witch. And a runaway princess, who carries the dead prince’s child. I imagine there is a bird en route from your Rasan ally—”

“Too slow by half,” al-Sepehr said, doubling his fists inside his sleeves. He forced his hands to open. He paused before the balustrade surrounding the courtyard and laid his hands on white stone, forcing himself to focus on the words of scripture written black across their backs. “Aban?”

“Dead,” said Saadet for her brother. “I saved his hands.”

“His family will be grateful.” A wave of exhaustion blurred al-Sepehr’s vision: He could summon the ghosts, but could he survive the summoning?
Not so soon after Qeshqer,
he thought. They were hungry things, and though they did not draw so much from their summoner as from their prey, to raise ten thousand of them had cost more than he’d anticipated. “Follow,” he said. “If he’s traveling with a gravid woman, he will be slowed. Overtake him. I will send the birds to find him, and Saadet will show your path. That is all.”

“Thank you, al-Sepehr.” Saadet bowed like a man and arose with a woman’s grace. She looked up at al-Sepehr from behind her veil. “Have you further need of me?”

He waved her away so she would not see him leaning heavily on the rail. Once she was gone, he drew a breath or two and made sure his veil was neat across his face. Then he turned his back to a featureless wall, so as to afford Qori Buqa as little intelligence about Ala-Din as possible, and pulled the appropriate stone from his pocket.

He held it up and concentrated on it while the dried blood flaked onto his fingers. A moment later, the ghostly visage of the Qersnyk usurper swam before him, wavering like rising smoke.

In spare words, al-Sepehr sketched the situation. “My man is in pursuit of Re Temur. I believe we will have him soon.”

Qori Buqa sighed like a tired horse. “There are rumors everywhere that Otgonbayar’s brat means to raise an army against me. I cannot raise my banner while he lives and can be seen to oppose me. The clans will not gather if I call them now, and I will lose any chance of ever uniting them. I cannot be Khagan while Re Temur lives, unless he bends to me. So send your ghosts, al-Sepehr! I am tired of waiting!”

“It’s not that simple,” al-Sepehr said. “You must trust me to deal with him my way. Have I not earned that?”

Qori Buqa clasped long hands before his mouth, then let them drop out of sight. “You have,” he said. He glanced away, as if looking over his shoulder. “But I beg you, al-Sepehr. Make haste. Make haste, or there will be no Khagan.”