Range of Ghosts (34 page)

Five hands and a day after leaving the mountains, they intersected the great road that led from Song to Messaline.

The Celadon Highway was named not for any quality of its own, but for the color of the rare and valuable pottery brought along it from the east.

It looked, Temur had to admit, somewhat unprepossessing—two ruts through the long grass, running to the east and west—until you stared at it long enough to realize that the ruts faded into blue distance in either direction without showing a bend or a curve.

Samarkar stood up in her stirrups, craning along the length of the road. “Surely they don’t use … wagons?”

“Carts,” Temur said. “The clans use this road as well as traders. And our women’s carts can go anywhere on the steppe. Some of the caravans use carts as well. Some use beasts of burden.”

Payma said, “The ruts are overgrown.”

Temur nodded. “No caravans without the peace of the Khagan.”

The princess reached down and scratched the ear of the mule nosing along her saddle. Temur, too, was growing fond of the mules—they were sturdy and steadfast and smarter than most horses.
Besides Bansh,
he corrected himself.

The mare snorted as if she could hear him thinking. He would not have been particularly surprised. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s ride.”

“Wait a minute,” Payma said, swinging her awkward belly over the saddle to dismount. “While we’re stopped, I have to pee.”

*   *   *

After the first storm, there were no others, calming Temur’s fears. As the nights warmed, they made cold camps except when there was meat to cook, and so they covered ground faster than he had dared hope despite the need to rest and graze the horses. Payma’s belly swelled like a puffball mushroom, and her ankles swelled like sausages. She had to be suffering, but she made no complaint over long days in the saddle, confirming Temur’s ever-more-favorable opinion of Rasan royal women.

She did let him and Samarkar take over more of the work of setting camp as days went by. Twice they were awakened in the night by the territorial cough of the great steppe lion. Twice Hrahima replied, then they heard nothing more. The grass faded to ashy gold as the summer’s true heat manifested. The little party refilled their water at stagnant shallow lakes gone jewel-green, straining it through folds of cloth to remove the algae and the threat of cholera. Sometimes they went so long between water sources that Samarkar had to pull it from the air. In providing for three people, the Cho-tse, and five equines, she exhausted herself, and Temur worried what they would do when they reached the desert.

They met no caravans bound for Qarash—a sign Temur welcomed, for it hinted that Qori Buqa was having trouble consolidating his rule. No sensible caravan master would lead his train into the teeth of war or banditry. Indeed, Temur and the others did find the charred remains of one cart train led by a rash or desperate master, thus proving the wisdom of the others.

Safe roads had been another gift of the Great Khagan’s peace. Temur found himself half satisfied that Qori Buqa had not yet made himself Khagan in fact as well as name, and half sorrowful to see his grandfather’s achievement crumble within the lifetime of his sons.

Perfect flatness gave way to rolling countryside, brown and treeless, and the westernmost horn of the Steles of the Sky edged up over the horizon.

“We turn south here,” Temur said, trying to hold a half-remembered map before his mind’s eye while imagining how it would look seen as a landscape. “Nilufer’s stronghold is somewhere among the roots of that range.”

“Good,” Samarkar said.

Payma only sighed. Relief, he thought, and Temur could in no way fault her for it.

15

When they noticed the first
talus,
they knew they could not be far from Nilufer’s Stone Steading. Payma and Samarkar had been scanning the steepening hillsides with focused attention, alert to the legendary living boulders—as well as their legendary bandit tribes, which were probably growing larger and more dangerous again with the death of Mongke Khagan and the civil war among his relatives.

But it was Hrahima who spotted one first.

It resembled nothing so much as a shaggy, lichen-coated slab, moving as slowly as the sun, so its progress was impossible to track unless you glanced at it repeatedly and noticed it shifting against the background. But there was a trail in the rock behind it, and if Samarkar listened very intently, she could hear the grinding noise as its mouth parts wore away the stone.

It was not as large as she had imagined. In her head, the
talus
were more like small hills than boulders. But this one was perhaps ten paces long and two men tall—gigantic for a living thing, but not too big as rocks went.

Temur swung down from the saddle when they drew abreast of it and led Bansh over. Samarkar would have imitated him, but Buldshak being what she was, she handed the reins to Payma before she followed. She might have felt bad about it, but Payma evinced no interest in going close to the beast. Which was probably more sensible than Samarkar’s combination of audacity and curiosity.

When she came up on him, Temur was walking speculatively around the great, placid living stone. Samarkar heard the grinding from within it. She had read that the
talus
were docile. Now she extended her hand to touch its flank, testing the theory.

It paid her no heed. The rough gray skin was as hard as the stone it resembled. It did not dent like flesh under her touch, and it was the temperature you’d expect of sun-warmed rock.

“This is a wild
talus,
” Temur said, having completed his circuit.

“How do you know?” Samarkar stepped back to save her toes as it inched forward, chewing away.

He gestured to its flanks. “No marks. The herdsmen file symbols into the skin so they can identify their beasts.”

Men cultivated—could you say domesticated?—the
talus
to use for mining. They consumed stone, excreting the metal, and their guts tended to be full of hard jewels—diamonds, sapphires, rubies—that they swallowed, much as a chicken pecks up gravel.

“Still,” Samarkar said. “We must be close.”

“Yes. And finding this one so close to the track unmolested tells me the bandit armies have not yet returned to claim these lands. Which is very good news.”

“Indeed.”

Samarkar knew from his discourses on the subject that the Great Khagan had first driven the bandit tribes from these lands. These mountains had long been a holdfast for lawless men who preyed upon the caravans of the Celadon Highway and upon the
talus
for their precious bellyfuls of jewels.

As the Great Khagan aged, those lawless men had tried to reclaim supremacy, but his son and daughter-in-law had driven them out, though the skirmishing had cost the life of Nilufer’s mother, the Dowager Khatun. Samarkar might have initially thought Temur a simple barbarian, but she was starting to realize that his head was as much an encyclopedia of sophisticated family politics as her own.

“What gods do these people observe?” she asked, as they made their way back to the horses. “Surely Nilufer is no Qersnyk name.”

“It’s Messaline, I think. Before your ancestors pushed them back and made a crack for the Uthman Caliphate to expand into, their empire reached this far.” Temur shrugged. “My grandfather had no interest in forcing conversions. He conquered for wealth and to gain scholars and artisans. All faiths are equal under the Eternal Sky.”

Samarkar hid a smile.
All faiths are equal, under mine.
Not such an uncommon sentiment.

It wasn’t actually the differences between tribes that caused wars. It was the ways in which all people were alike.

She said, “This is the borderlands.”

He said, “It was also Uthman once, but the Great Salt Desert lies between Stone Steading and the Uthman cities. And the Steles of the Sky fence it away from the steppe and from your people. If it weren’t for the
talus,
no one would live here at all. But as it stands, though this is a small kingdom and isolated, it is wealthy.”

“And friendly.”

He smiled. “We hope.”

*   *   *

When they finally came within sight of Stone Steading, Samarkar was surprised at how much it looked like home. By the richness of the air, she could tell they were far lower than any Rasan city except perhaps the southern capital itself—but what she
saw
as they rode down into it was a broad valley surrounded on three sides by mountainous foothills terraced for agriculture. The fields there were green with summer rice; Samarkar suspected the paddies were fed by qanats bringing water from the glaciers above. The rice fields could then be drained and the water used a second time—to irrigate the apricot and almond trees below.

Little crofts and stands of trees scattered the dished valley floor, surrounded by fields of wheat and cotton and hedged pastures flocked with fat-tailed sheep. She saw the glint of water in irrigation ditches, and the cackle of hens rose up on the dry air, carrying who knew how far. People went about in clothes dyed homespun colors, hauling fat bundles or driving oxcarts.

Beyond this richness, closer to the mountain, stood a pillared stronghold with a pair of tall white towers and a hall between, capped with an onion-shaped dome such as Samarkar had seen only in paintings. The dome glinted in the afternoon sun, reflecting sparks of crimson and cobalt like light shining through a diamond. Samarkar could tell even from here that it was decorated with glass tile, though she could not make out the pattern.

Buldshak huffed around her bit, scenting water.

“Well,” Payma said. “We’re here.”

*   *   *

They had only begun their descent into the valley when a group of ten riders broke from the stronghold’s gates, coming along the high road at a brisk canter. Ten was a good number, Samarkar thought. Enough—and responding quickly enough—to make a point, not so many as to startle a peaceable group into flight. Peasants came out along the road to watch Samarkar’s party ride in, which also felt familiar, but these folks did not wear the lined vests and flap-fronted shirts that Samarkar’s folk preferred. Their faces were more angular, the eyes rounder, the noses higher bridged. She could see the evidence of Rasan and Qersnyk blood in some faces, and western heritage—Uthman, Messaline—in most.

When the riders came closer, she could see that their armor, too, was in a western style—conical helms and studded leather cuirasses—and their swords were scimitars. But what made Samarkar blink and turn with raised brows to Temur was that two of them were women.

And one of those women was the leader.

She dressed unlike the others, in a breastplate over monkish robes dyed orange-red with madder and with barberry. She was not young, but she carried herself with a straight back. She seemed like the curved blade at her hip: The hilt was worn, and Samarkar imagined the blade would show scrapes of honing along the edge, but she would not care to fence with the woman who carried it.

She glanced from left to right and saw Temur and Payma both hanging back. Hrahima stood at the rear of the group, so still your eye could skip over her.

Isn’t this supposed to be Temur’s family?

Samarkar sighed and raised her hands, showing them empty except for the reins. “I am Samarkar-la, a wizard of the Citadel of Tsarepheth. With me are my brother’s wife Payma, the Cho-tse Hrahima, and Re Temur. We seek sanctuary and your mistress’s indulgence, by way of Temur’s kinship to her.”

She stood aside so Temur could come forward. He moved Bansh up without visibly shifting his weight or moving his hands, as if the bay were an extension of his body. She halted shoulder-to-shoulder with Buldshak, shying a half step as the gray nipped air near her neck.

Temur controlled her without seeming to notice that she’d shifted. “I am Re Temur,” he said. “What Samarkar-la says is true. Nilufer Khatun, the Dowager Regent, was married to my uncle Re Toghrul. I wish to throw myself upon her mercy.”

The monkish warrior woman looked them up and down. Her hair had once been black as a bay horse’s mane. Her piercing eyes were still sharply contemplative. She considered the rise of Payma’s belly, the bulky shoulders of the Cho-tse. Samarkar could almost see her adding columns of benefits and disadvantages behind the impassive mask of her eyes.

“Ride ahead,” she said at last. “We will follow. The way should be obvious.”

And of course it was.

*   *   *

They entered the stronghold through the main gate, after a trio of grooms came to relieve them of their mules and horses. Temur was reluctant to let the animals and baggage out of his sight, and even more so his bow. He kept his knife, and he imagined if worse came to worst he could relieve one of the guards of his or her weapon.

The local bows were different. They were longer, of a pale amber-white wood rather than laminate, and he could see from the position of the arrow rest that they were meant to be shot with a tab or fingertips rather than a horn thumb-ring. But Temur was confident he could get inside one if necessary and make it sing.

Now the four of them crossed the packed-earth yard to the main doors. These were tall edifices of polished wood, peaked at the tops in order to fit snugly in the arched doorway. One stood open, and people came and went through it in great profusion. They gave way for the guards escorting the small party.

Inside, a wide corridor led across mosaic tiles to the arched and echoing space below the dome. It was decorated inside as well as out, the colors resolving into bright geometric patterns.

The height and the weight of all that stone lofted overhead made Temur dizzy. He glanced down again in time to keep himself from tripping as they passed from small bright inlaid tiles to larger flagstones. It seemed the dome was just for show, a kind of grand entryway, because no one was at work there except the guards standing at attention beside each set of doors. Just as well, Temur thought. He’d hate to spend too much time under those bizarrely suspended stones, waiting for the sky to fall.