Range of Ghosts (41 page)

The gust of wind struck the rukh just as it was folding its wings tight to stoop.

*   *   *

Temur saw the bird dive, and he saw it slew sideways as if something equally massive had struck it from the flank. The rukh’s feather’s gusted and flattened from the blow, and the veiled man on its back rocked side to side and clutched what must have been the harness, though distance and angle made it difficult to see.

Him,
Temur thought, and felt the bow grow around him like the limbs of an ancient tree. He felt his breath; he felt himself fall into it.
That man, there.
That one who flew above the battlefield, so cowardly.

He was the man Temur needed to kill. For Edene and for everyone.

His fingers relaxed on the string. The arrow snapped forward.

Before it left the bow, someone struck him—and Bansh—from the side.

*   *   *

The great bird tumbled. Samarkar hit it again and again. She watched its laborious wingbeats as it righted itself. She watched it catch the wind properly and become the master of the air again.
Not enough,
she thought, as the yellow eye found her, as the bird came about into the wind.

“Get back,” she yelled, knowing she did not have enough time to run for cover. “Get back! Everybody get away from me!”

*   *   *

Temur rolled sideways, the mare staggering as another horse charged into her side. If he’d had a saddle, he might have stayed on his mount; as it was, he slipped sideways from his perch atop her back and fell.

Fortunately, he had a good deal of experience falling off of horses. He hit the ground and rolled, one hand scrabbling for his borrowed short sword.

All the breath left him, and the pain of old bruises awakened. Someone landed atop him. He heard the squeals as Bansh fought back against the horse that had attacked her. He would have levered himself up and gone to cripple the beast, but whoever straddled his chest hit him sharply across the face.

Temur hit back. Once and again, punching with his empty hand and with the hand clenched on the hilt of the sword. He should have drawn it and used it properly, but there was no opportunity. The enemy was too close. He hit, was all. He hit and hit again.

The man fell back, and Temur clung to his collar and let him pull them both together as they rolled. He lost the sword and struck barehanded, only half cognizant of the blows that landed on his own body and face. He had the assassin’s collar in both hands when he realized he recognized the other man’s eyes: hazel, dark-ringed, bright-centered.

His grip must have softened, because the assassin was atop him. A sharp blow knocked Temur prone; dizzy, he fought to focus his eyes. Horses squealed nearby; the thud of hooves on flesh. Mares fighting.

The assassin pulled something from his belt—a pistol, an unreliable but destructive western weapon that used black powder to hurl a lead ball at the target with shattering force. In the struggle, the Nameless one’s indigo veil had pulled free. Temur found himself looking into the face of the man he’d fought three times now, making an effort to focus past the black pit of the barrel to see, finally, the features of his enemy.

It was a bland, ordinary Uthman face, except for those extraordinary eyes.

“We would have kept you alive,” the Nameless said, in Qersnyk, “if you hadn’t proven so difficult. But your woman will serve as well. Better, if she’s biddable.”

Temur lay sprawled under the gun, the Nameless kneeling over him. “My woman,” he said, the knowledge that Edene was alive and captive a numbing shock.
“Edene?”

The Nameless smiled. He swung his pistol up, to sight between Temur’s eyes. “Die with it,” he said—

Bansh kicked the assassin’s skull in from the side.

*   *   *

All the heat and all the wind Samarkar had pulled into herself, she unleashed it now. The rukh screamed. She saw its great bronze-colored feathers shriveling like flower petals before the heat. She saw it ignore the pain and beat its wings hard to align itself above her, when her winds would have pushed it away.

She saw the flock upon flock upon flock of birds that suddenly surrounded it, mobbing it like songbirds mob an eagle, pestering and pulling and diving at its head. One bold one even pulled the plumage of its crest.

They were vultures and ravens, carrion beasts, and Samarkar had never been so glad to see them in her life. The rukh swatted at them, snapped and snatched—but it could catch none, and before long they had it running.

*   *   *

The sound of the gunshot shattered Temur’s mind. He lay stunned, certain he was shot, as the assassin slumped atop him, his temple caved in, blood and gray jelly oozing across the ruin of his face. Bansh was there, then, pushing her pink-spotted nose against Temur’s cheek,
whuff
ing sharply. She might have whickered. Temur felt a vibration but did not hear her. He lay still, panting, as she shoved her muzzle under the dead assassin and pushed him off Temur.

Only then did Temur find the strength to sit up, to draw in a breath that hurt enough to convince him that he was not dead. He knelt; the mare dropped her neck beside him. He threw an arm across it, behind her ears, and clung while she lifted him to his feet. She was filthy and wet with blood and sweat, scraped and battered; he leaned against her and tried to turn so he could watch for anyone that might approach to hurt them.

Smoke drifted on the sky; people—lizard-folk, not Nameless—stood here and there, turning slowly, looking at one another as if expecting an enemy. Temur shook his head; through the ringing, he faintly began to hear the sound of the wind, of the fire, of people talking.

Samarkar came up behind him and spoke softly, said his name, summoned him back from the place he had drifted to. He turned to her, the blood and soot on his body streaked with sweat, eyes aching with smoke and unshed tears.

The wizard put a hand on his shoulder. He slumped against Bansh and closed his eyes. Samarkar was scratched and exhausted, smoke-stained, her hands blistered as if she had been handling naked fire. Who knew? Maybe she had been.

“Come back, Temur,” she said. “We’ve lived through it.”

18

Tzitzik feasted them again, but this time it was a somber affair. There were too many dead and too much to consider for anything to be otherwise.

They ate under the setting sun and the open sky, gathered around campfires, because the ancient hall had burned and many of Tzitzik’s sworn band had burned along with it.

The few who remained—among them Saura, for a mercy—no longer seemed inclined to take offense at anything the easterners did or said or any attention they received. Nothing, though, could alleviate the sorrow of the woman-king over her losses. And to Temur’s distaste, it became his task to further burden her.

“The kurgan of Danupati,” he said, “has been desecrated.”

Saura translated, and Tzitzik turned to Temur with eyes afire with rage. Quickly and down the bare bones, he outlined what had been done to him and what he had discovered—the warlord’s skeleton with its missing head, the infestation of gut-worms. He did not ask what would be done to those who had tried to murder him, but he noticed a significant glance from Samarkar when he brushed past the topic.

“Someone came here to sow war,” Tzitzik said, finally, through Saura. Her chin rested on her fingers. A wooden trencher lay on the grass before her, food untouched. “To sow war all across our ancient domain. Someone incurred the curse, intentionally.”

Hrahima snorted. “You know I have my theories.”

The woman-king pushed a morsel of baked grain around with the point of her knife. “Do you know how Danupati died?”

Temur glanced at Samarkar, who shook her head. “I think not.”

Tzitzik looked about herself. Her sworn band sat close, and Temur knew some of them were probably those who had tried out of jealousy to kill him. But that had been before the battle, in a time that might as well be the width of the world away. He set aside his anger.

She spoke, and Saura translated. “He died not in battle, but of an illness. The Black Bloat, some say, but the truth is no one knows. Except that when he took ill, he mounted up his best mare and rode her into the desert, where he died in the saddle. The mare brought his body back.”

“That is a sad story,” Temur said.

“After a fashion,” Tzitzik said. “Some say he could not sing his death song, being too weak, and so the mare sang it for him. But of course, who could have witnessed such a thing?”

“That would be some mare.”

The woman-king smiled. “They say she was a liver-bay with one white hoof,” she said. “You tell me.”

Their gazes locked. A peculiar shiver ran up Temur’s spine. He sat back, suddenly no more interested in his dinner than Tzitzik was.

She could have asked him where he would go, what he would do. But she knew the answer: He would go and get Edene and bring her home again. He would hunt down the man on the rukh, and if that man was not the master of the Nameless, he would use him to find whoever was.

The woman-king looked back at her neglected plate and said, “When you are done with that bird rider, Qersnyk, I want his skull to wash my hands in. You can count on my help in making it so.”

Temur said, “It will be yours.”

*   *   *

In the morning, Samarkar, Temur, Hrahima, Bansh, and Brother Hsiung made for the coast. Two days’ fast ride, Tzitzik said. It would have been five, if they went easy for their own sake and the battered mare’s, as they should have. As they could not, when they were hunted. Despite the chaos of her household, Tzitzik pushed supplies upon the travelers—camel fat, measures of grain for Bansh, a little of the local beer.

Samarkar knew they should have traveled by night. But she also knew that there was no easy way to avoid the rukh and its rider if it returned, and sleeping out by day in these endless grasslands would not hide them much better than walking.

They would rely on speed, instead, and resting as little as possible. They would walk by moonlight and the light of the sun. Although, she thought with irony as they staggered through darkness that night, it was possible that rukhs, like owls, could fly by night.

At least what Tzitzik had told them about the Hard Drinker emptying into the White Sea was no exaggeration. Samarkar had known they must be drawing closer, because the trees that lined the Hard Drinker’s banks grew more squat and twisted. Samarkar had heard that seas were salty, and she wondered if that was the cause of it—or if it was the increasingly poor and sandy soil.

In any case, nothing could prepare her for the sight of the White Sea itself.

They’d been forced farther and farther from the channel of the Hard Drinker as she flattened and broadened into a swampy delta. Samarkar had already been expecting water for half a day when they crested a little rise among stunted conifers. The branches were swept to the east by the same ceaseless wind that lifted Samarkar’s unbraided hair and—despite the summer’s heat—cooled her face. That wind smelled of nothing she’d ever experienced before: tangy, rotten, sweet and salty both at once, strong and bitter. She sneezed, and Bansh flattened her long neck, tossed her head, and sneezed as well.

When Samarkar opened her eyes, the blue stretched to the horizon. It moved, too—she’d heard of waves, of course, but reading of them or studying Song prints could not prepare her for that vast, white-capped expanse, or the way the sun glittered off it.

“Mother,” Temur said. Hrahima laughed behind her whiskers.

Samarkar could barely see a smudge at the horizon that might be land. Thirty
li
at least—and this was supposed to be the narrows, the place where a natural dam separated the White Sea from an arm of the Western Ocean.

“Tzitzik said to light a signal fire.” Samarkar could see a rocky promontory from here, and the soot-stained fire ring at its tip. “And a ship would put in eventually.”

She wondered exactly what a ship looked like, if this was an ocean. At least there was wood enough in the stunted forest behind.

But on her left, Brother Hsiung made a throat-cutting gesture and rolled his eyes. When Samarkar glanced at him inquiringly, he pointed to the skies.

Of course. A fire would summon enemies as well as allies. Samarkar bit her lip and comforted herself that she’d have thought of that before calling down the devil on their heads.

Temur said, “We cannot walk around. I suppose we could follow the shore northeast, until we come to a village.”

He sounded dubious. Hrahima shook her head. “Or Asmaracanda,” she said. “That could take a moon or more.”

“And Asmaracanda is under Qersnyk control, unless it, too, has fallen. Do you want to risk your uncle’s men, Temur?”

“No,” he said.

Samarkar took a deep breath. Calmly, she stretched up on tiptoe, measuring the distances against her hand. Of course it was hard to do, but if she could
see
land at all, and what lay on the other side was not mountainous …

She dropped to the ground and began stripping off her boots.

Temur frowned down at her, needing no explanation. “You’ll never make it.”

The set of his mouth warmed her. They hadn’t spoken alone or touched except in passing since the morning when they kissed, but she felt his regard in his concern. Still, she was the only one who could do this.

“Of course I will,” she scoffed, tugging her heel free. “I’m Samarkar. I’ve been swimming in the Tsarethi since before I could walk. Just because
you
can’t swim…”

*   *   *

Temur wanted to reach out and grab her strong arm above the elbow, where the flesh dimpled in to show the bone and the scars of the Nameless arrow lingered. Instead he stayed his hand and made a fist of it, hiding it in the folds of the robe he’d been wearing off and on since Nilufer gave it to him for protection in crossing the desert.