Authors: Elizabeth Bear
The song dropped away to a whisper, a falling air of shadows undermining the narrator’s lingering words of hope and loyalty. Only when the echoes had died did Samarkar, transfixed, notice that Hrahima too showed every sign of being in the grip of some tremendous emotion: ears forward and whiskers fluffed. Her claws had popped from their sheaths to draw creases in the striped fur of her thighs.
Samarkar laid the back of her hand against the Cho-tse’s arm and leaned in close to whisper, “Does she speak for you too?”
Hrahima looked down at Samarkar. Tigers did not weep, but Samarkar did not think anyone could look into those mottled eyes, like heat-crazed tourmalines, and deny that a Cho-tse could grieve.
“The Sun Within links us all,” Hrahima rumbled. “No cub or mate can ever truly be lost.”
But you deny the Sun Within,
Samarkar would have argued, had she not seen the amused, arch look the caliph turned on her and Hrahima. Thus did the Wizard Samarkar comprehend the genius of the interlocking sky of domes and Ato Tesefahun’s unprecedented architecture. It was a whispering vault. The caliph could hear any word spoken in his audience chamber, no matter how low the voice was pitched.
And Samarkar and Hrahima had been muttering in Uthman.
Samarkar winced a quick apology before she remembered the helm that entirely concealed her face. Instead, she bowed low, boiled leather creaking, and heard the rustles and scrapes and rattles as her companions echoed the gesture.
A pointed silence dragged on while they waited for the caliph’s acknowledgment. Samarkar heard the patter of bare feet moving with the lightest of steps over stone, the oiled slide of long poles through locks, as if someone shipped oars.
The sandalwood box,
she realized, a moment before bearers silently lifted it up—slave poetess and all—and bore it away.
Like a songbird in a cage. Samarkar wondered grimly if Ümmühan was ever suffered to leave it, and was grateful for her helm once again.
Her back ached with the depth of her obeisance and the weight of her armor before someone cleared his throat and said, “Grandfather architect! That is quite a menagerie you’ve captured.”
“Your serene Excellency,” said Ato Tesefahun, with the air of one sidestepping confrontation. “May I present Re Temur Khanzadeh. His father was Otgonbayar Khanzadeh. He is the grandson of Re Temusan Khagan. His traveling companions are Samarkar-la, a Wizard of Tsarepheth and sister to the Rasan emperor; Brother Hsiung, of the Wretched Mountain Temple Brotherhood; and Hrahima, a warrior of the Cho-tse. They have come with grave news from afar and to offer an alliance with your serene Excellency.”
There was a pause, and then: “Rise,” said a second man. “Approach.”
Lifting her head, Samarkar was surprised to discover that the caliph—Uthman Caliph Fourteenth, Commander of the Faithful, Viceroy of the Scholar-God, Successor to the Prophet—had spoken himself. She would have expected one of the men surrounding his chair to serve as his voice—as, apparently, one had begun to. The disgruntled-looking one on his left, her right, most likely.
She advanced with the others, halting on an invisible demarcation a hand span or two behind Ato Tesefahun. When the Aezin wizard bowed again, so did she. And remained so until she noticed Temur straighten in response to some gesture she did not see around the restriction of her helm.
“Re Temur Khanzadeh,” said the caliph. His tone was playful, light. It put Samarkar’s guard up at once. “Your family has been a plague upon the borders of my nation since my great-grandfather’s day. And now you come to me as a supplicant? I know your family wars against itself, and the moons fall from your sky. Why should I offer you assistance, princeling?”
Temur stood proud, his shoulders square and his hands at his sides in the posture Samarkar had seen him use to pray. From the rear, she could see that his head rode strangely on his neck. Sadly, sickeningly, contracting scar tissue was beginning to twist his posture out of true. Samarkar cursed herself for a poor wizard and a worse physicker—and a bad lover, most of all.
“My usurping uncle has allied himself with one of your own rebel warlords, your serene Excellency,” Temur said. “They have resorted to carrion sorcery, the raising of blood ghosts, and perhaps more dire witchcraft yet. They have sent those ghosts against refugee trains and at least one city that had taken no part in the battles. Qeshqer is fallen, your serene Excellency, the city my grandfather took from Rasa, which is also called Kashe—”
Samarkar would not let herself bristle, not before this caliph who might yet prove an enemy. Temur was Qersnyk; it was natural he should use the Qersnyk name first. That he even thought of the conquered Rasan city’s Rasan name was either a sign of more diplomacy than she’d expected from him or a concession to her sensibilities.
As once-princess, as wizard and as woman, she wasn’t sure which she would have preferred. She turned her head aside and found Brother Hsiung’s blue-shadowed gaze regarding her steadily. He tipped his head and winked. She bit back on the slightly hysterical chuckle that wanted to answer. Mute the monk might be, but half the time she thought he needed language less than did a dog.
“This rebel warlord,” said Uthman Caliph. “Name him.”
“Mukhtar ai-Idoj,” said Ato Tesefahun. “Called al-Sepehr of the Rahazeen Nameless.”
Samarkar saw the caliph glance to the left before he spoke, taking the temper of the man there—the man on her right who she thought had spoken those first, mocking words. She shifted her attention as well. The helm concealed her eyes: another unanticipated benefit.
He wore a blue kaftan sewn with stars, perhaps some mark of the caliph’s favor. He was younger than she would have expected—fresh-faced and pretty, his beard as black as if drawn on with a pen and steadfastly refusing to cover the center of his chin. Samarkar imagined from the lift of his head that he thought well of himself. He met the caliph’s gaze boldly, and while Samarkar would not hazard to guess what communication passed between them, she knew she had shared such gazes with her brothers on occasion—though never with her husband.
“Devotees of some medieval just-so story,” the caliph said. “He has no armies. His cult clings to the caves and fortresses of the mountains because they dare not descend. And I should find them a threat? If you think me so weak, why would you even seek my patronage?”
“We do not think you weak,” Temur began. “This al-Sepehr commands a rukh, great caliph, and the armies of the dead. I believe…”
The silence stretched heartbeats long. Samarkar was startled that no one filled it, but perhaps the shaking intensity in Temur’s voice held even the caliph and his black-bearded advisor in thrall for those few moments.
Temur controlled his voice and continued. “I believe he may try to raise the Sorcerer-Prince himself.”
This silence
rang.
Even the caliph leaned forward, expectantly—until the black-bearded advisor broke it with a muffled chuckle, quickly—perhaps ostentatiously—stifled.
No one glanced at him, because the caliph uncurled one hand from his untouched coffee cup and half-raised it. “What the Scholar-God put down, no man can raise up again.”
Hrahima and Ato Tesefahun might have been shadows cast by the falling radiance within the palace, for all the noise they made—but Samarkar heard Brother Hsiung’s clothing whisk against itself as he shifted his weight, though his feet made no sound on the stone. She too winced inwardly, though her face—she hoped—showed none of it.
Temur was inexperienced yet. But he was no fool; when the side of her gauntleted hand drifted to touch his, he seemed to realize he had come to a logical stopping place … and stopped there.
Samarkar said, “Great Caliph, I have seen the destruction of cities with my own eyes, and so has Temur Khanzadeh. The blood ghosts left naught of Qeshqer but heaps of sucked bones in the market square, neatly stripped and sorted. Those skulls will bleach there, your serene Excellency—the skulls of the toothless elderly side by side … heaped each upon each … with the skulls of newborns, equally toothless and no bigger than my fist. This is not just a war that can be waited out, with the hope that our neighbors will weaken each other and we can chip some land away from them. I believe your lands are in peril too, as are those of my brother.”
“My caliphate is in peril if we lose the mandate of heaven,” he answered, with another sidelong glance. The black-bearded man regarded him, simply expressionless now. “I rule by the will of the Scholar-God. The entrails speak of avoidance of war, Wizard Samarkar. Not rushing headlong to it. You speak as if you have some knowledge of politics?”
How astute,
she thought, when Ato Tesefahun had told the caliph her family and her history.
“Some,” she said, keeping from slipping into sarcasm mostly by dint of breath control. If her years as a political hostage in Song had given her nothing else, they had left her with the ability to control her tone.
“Then you know that the longer war rages on the steppe, the worse my trade situation becomes. A stable Khaganate benefits my cities.”
“A Rahazeen rebellion will not benefit you, your serene Excellency.”
To his credit, he looked her in the eye—or the general direction of it, given her helm—as he said, “The Rahazeen cannot feed their children. I am not afraid of any army they might raise.”
“Serene Excellency,” said Hrahima, the titles smooth on her rough cat’s tongue, “you have the power to deny al-Sepehr the use of the Qersnyk army, whereas so long as Qori Buqa remains unopposed he serves as al-Sepehr’s cat’s-paw. No other power in the world can do this thing. You alone have the strength.”
The caliph did not preen under the flattery. He regarded the Cho-tse from beneath brows drawn shrewdly together. “Cute,” he said. “But no.”
As they left the palace, the
kapikulu
and the Dead Men taking no more notice of them than they had on the way in, Samarkar heard music rising behind them once again. This time, the singer was a man.
* * *
“If you want the caliph’s troops pushed out of Ctesifon, why did you build him a palace?” Temur whispered in his grandfather’s ear as they left the building in question.
Ato Tesefahun sighed. “He paid,” he said with a shrug. “And … he commanded. You noticed, of course, the man in the starry caftan?”
“Kara Mehmed,” Hrahima said.
Black Mehmed.
She swept them out onto the steps of the palace and into the bustle of the street. As they descended to join the throngs—of water sellers, of camel drivers, of hurrying, veiled women in groups, each clutching her market bags—she continued. “He’s one of the faction leaders in the war-band.”
“He’s young.” Temur was not quite able to ignore the irony of being the one to say so enough to get it out without stammering. When the others turned to him with dubious expressions, he clarified. “What I mean is, isn’t he too young to have voted to install this caliph?”
“He’ll install the next,” said Hrahima. “If he lives.”
Ato Tesefahun, the more patient teacher, explained: “His grandfather did. The position is hereditary.”
Temur boggled. “But if there is no personal loyalty between war-band and leader—”
Hrahima interrupted. “Exactly. Uthman Caliph’s not afraid of the Rahazeen,” she mocked. “Just the political pressures of his war-band or anything that might restrict trade.”
Samarkar pushed irritably at her helm. Her voice echoed eerily within. “Those are the same thing. Whose treasure houses do you suppose are furnished by the trade that passes along the Celadon Highway? By the oxcarts, the spindle weights, the glass beads, the saffron, the aloes, the myrrh? By the sandalwood, the dates, the silk, the porcelain? There were kilns along the road when we came in from the port—convenient to shipping, and at least a little out of the city traffic in the case of a disaster. The merchants trade cedar, malachite, electrum, jade … look here!”
She caught Temur’s wrist and whirled him to face a shop. The awning was raised, and through the lattices Temur could see that it was a stoneworker’s. Within, shelves and benches supported examples of the work of more than one artisan. There was eastern jade in several styles, including one reminiscent of the steppe, and soapstone carved after a manner that drew inspiration from the whimsical caricature animals of Song. The subjects, however, ranged the known world.
The rhinoceros was out of scale, wearing a flat Song saddle as if it were a chubby pony—but Temur had seen one in the menagerie at Qarash once, and he was impressed by the knobbled detail of its armored hide. The flirtatious look and curve of smile the artist had given it, however, were pure fantasy.
“Trade,” he said. “You’re not telling me anything I didn’t know, Wizard Samarkar.”
She spread her hands, asking for another moment to make her point. “But ask yourself who collects the taxes and the bribes. I think you’ll find Black Mehmed’s name fairly high upon the roll. So it’s to his good—in the short term, anyway—to return the steppe to tranquility as soon as possible.”
“Even if the long-term outcome is a wider war?”
“Empires,” Ato Tesefahun put in, “have always sustained the Celadon Highway. It is the longest road in the world, and it has persisted and connected through the reigns of Erem, of Aezin, of the Lizard Folk, of Song, the caliphate, the Khaganate…” He shrugged. “The road feeds the kings and the kings feed the road.”
“What if we convert the war-band?” Temur asked. “Bring them to our cause?”
Brother Hsiung shifted his weight, shaking his head so the sweat ran down his shaved scalp in rivulets.
“Figure out how,” Hrahima said. “And you’ll already be a better Khagan than your grandfather ever managed.”
* * *
“Let me look at that,” Samarkar said, as Temur stripped his shirt off over his head.
He had turned his back on her, which she would have found charmingly, ridiculously shy if she had not been so intent on examining his scars before he blew the lamps out. She was reminded again of how young he was—by the way he hunched to hide the injury from her when she stood stripped to the trousers before him, her own scars evident in the flickering light. She should have sighed and shaken her head; instead, she found it charming.