Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Hong-la’s mouth worked in memory of the acrid flavor he had not previously identified.
Watching him, Tsering-la continued, “The hatchlings…”
His throat closed; his stomach soured. He let the teacup drop to his knee.
She closed her eyes before she could continue. “The captive hatchlings
speak,
Hong-la.”
He would have asked,
What do they say?
He would have made it easier on her. But he couldn’t remember, for long moments, how to shape a word, how to push air from his lungs.
The Wizard Tsering was brave enough to get there on her own. “They speak of the Carrion King, of Sepehr al-Rach
i
d. They prophesy—” She shook her head. “I’ll take you to hear for yourself. But there’s … other evidence.”
“Evidence more convincing than a city overrun by blood ghosts?”
Lamplight shone off her collar, the satin of her wizard’s coat as her shoulders rose and fell. She had been there, seen silenced Kashe with her own eyes—albeit from a distance. Hong-la had merely taken her report, and that of Samarkar-la. “A skinned corpse,” she said. “His head blown out. Fresh, and found above the Wreaking yesterday. It was … very neatly done.”
As if by a practiced hand.
“Left for carrion,” he said.
She lifted the cast-iron teapot from the warming plate over the brazier, and despite the heat she was clearly feeling, poured her own strong cup of tea. “That is the name we gave to al-Rach
i
d in this land.”
Hong-la held out his teacup for more. “Here’s something else to work on. You’re the best theorist I know—”
Tsering-la ducked her head and covered her face with her palms. Her jeweled collar pressed the flesh around her chin up oddly. “I cannot so much as light a candle!”
“Does that render your learning less valuable?”
She busied her hands with her own tea, avoiding his eyes and the answer. He continued, “As a theorist, Wizard Tsering—ask yourself this. How does a demon enter a warded house?”
“Someone who has the right to do so invites it,” she said promptly. “Or is fooled into inviting it.”
“So how does a demon enter a warded city?”
She stilled. Her hand did not tremble as—carefully, precisely—she set her cup down. “Someone who has the right to … invites it. Or is fooled into inviting it.”
“Songtsan-tsa?” he asked, when she had been silent long enough. “Tsering, we must find the flaws in the wards.”
“The demons are inside now. How do you get them out again? How do you revoke their permission to enter?”
“I thought,” he said, “that you might know.”
Her head stayed bowed, her hair hiding her expression. “The wardstones of Qeshqer had been intentionally defaced. If that had happened here, we would have found it now. There is a different source.”
After a pause his answer did not fill, she changed the subject. “Yongten-la has been working to convince the emperor that he must evacuate Tsarepheth, that he must relocate to the winter capital early.”
“And Songtsan is
against
this?”
She shook her head. “The emperor may not believe that the Citadel had nothing to do with his brother’s escape. He may not believe that the awakening of the Cold Fire is … not our doing.”
“Curse of the stones,” Hong-la muttered in Song, watching Tsering’s eyebrows rise in amusement. “So—let me guess—the emperor suspects that his own wizards are involved in a conspiracy to usurp him. So he’s afraid that if he does the sensible thing and allows his people to leave the vicinity of
an active volcano,
he’ll be handing us an advantage?”
“Your grasp of politics is nuanced,” Tsering said dryly.
“My parroting of the obvious is pretty good even when I’ve just crawled out of a coma, you mean.” He sighed. “Perhaps I can … talk to the empress.”
She said, “There is also news that a refugee train is en route through the mountains from the steppe. Having found no succor in Kashe, they come to plead with Songtsan-tsa for asylum from the reign of Qori Buqa.”
“They should not have come here.”
“They had nowhere else to go.”
“Songtsan will use them as cannon fodder,” Hong-la said. “Human shields.”
Tsering cupped her fingers downward, caging every side of the cast-iron cup. “Not before I interview them, he won’t.”
* * *
Tsering-la walked out of the postern gate at first light, flanked by novices and guardsmen, into a familiar landscape rendered unknowable. The white-and-red hulk of the Citadel of Tsarepheth curved behind her: gravity incarnate. The sacred river crashed in the gorge below. Bands of steam writhed from its surface where hot water and cold intermingled.
Those things had not changed—and those alone.
Gray ash lay like drifts of dirty snow across the road, across the high white arch of the Wreaking—that impossible bridge that spanned the impossible gulf where the headwaters of the Tsarethi tumbled from the glaciers of the Island-in-the-Mists—across the flanks of the mountains. It looked as soft as snow, but where Tsering wiped it from her cheek incautiously it drew blood and stung. She thought of it sifting down inside her boots, the mischief it could work with every step, and shuddered.
The Qersnyk refugees camped beyond the Wreaking had made no attempt to cross; they had merely stopped before the guarded bridge and waited. They had no more protection from the ash than their tents, and they would not huddle inside those when there was work to be done. As Tsering moved toward the bridge with her entourage, she saw people—mostly women and children—dusting the backs of livestock, hauling water, sweeping the ground and creating makeshift shelters where animals could eat clean fodder untainted by ash.
Her approach triggered a sudden bustle as one child—boy or girl, she could not tell—looked up from grooming and took off running back into the encampment. He (or she) vanished between tents while Tsering was cresting the Wreaking.
She paused at the bowed height of the bridge, like a vast white rib, and took a moment to enjoy the view of the river surging far below. She was stalling to give the Qersnyk leader time to prepare, but it was still valuable to fold her arms and lean on the waist-high wall, organizing her own thoughts.
After a stir among the tents, she straightened again and continued on.
She was met at the bottom of the bridge by two women. One was so old that her age had become indeterminate. She was a withered apple doll of a person, hunched in thick robes despite the summer’s warmth. She leaned on a stick, but for all that she had moved nimbly across.
The other emissary was a surprise, physically speaking: a younger woman, but not young, compact and sturdy-seeming with motherly hips and the brown skin and broad nose of the Aezin nation. She rested one hand in the crook of the older woman’s arm, though neither of them seemed to need the support.
She lifted her head as Tsering-la approached, and said in the Uthman tongue, “I don’t suppose you speak Qersnyk?”
“I brought a translator,” Tsering answered, gesturing to the novice on her left. They had stopped well back, and she made no move to close the distance. “But I am comfortable in this language. I am the Wizard Tsering. You have reached Tsarepheth, the white-and-scarlet Citadel. You may camp here, but you may not enter. There is plague within.”
“This is Tsareg Altantsetseg,” the Aezin woman said. There was a whistle on her breathing that sent a chill of unease across Tsering’s chest. “She does not speak your tongue, or this one either. But I will translate for her.” She paused, and did so—accurately, from the little Tsering could follow.
“What is your name?” Tsering asked in the pause that followed.
“I am Ashra,” said the Aezin woman. Her teeth flashed when she spoke. They were banded like old ivory, shades of brown and bone. “This plague—”
Ashra looked at Tsareg Altantsetseg. She said something in Qersnyk. The old woman responded.
Ashra placed a hand upon her chest as if easing pressure within. Tsering felt the sickening drop of an unpleasant suspicion confirmed.
“We know it,” Ashra said. “Some dozen or more have sickened, since we came into the mountains. Our shaman-rememberers and surgeons have no physic for it. We had hoped, with the fame of the Wizards of Tsarepheth—”
Tsering knew from the other women’s expressions that she had failed to keep her dismay from coloring their own. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We have studied the course of the disease…”
She could not continue. But if she had expected Ashra to let the silence stretch into awkwardness while Tsering struggled to express some futile sympathy, the Aezin woman surprised her.
“I see,” Ashra said, queenly and unperturbed. “Then it is rather as I expected. My father was a wizard in Aezin, Tsering-la, and I know something of his strategies. Perhaps we can work together?”
Tsering found herself smiling in unwilling sympathy. Ashra’s dignity and charisma were hard to resist. “That … might buy you asylum. If you can prove your expertise.”
Ashra glanced at the clan-mother beside her. She said a few words. Tsareg Altantsetseg considered them—and nodded.
“Show me to a laboratory,” Ashra said. “I will prove what I know.”
* * *
The Wizards Anil and Hong had caused a sort of field shelter to be built near the tent city of the infirmary. It was a structure such as might have housed the blacksmith’s forge and anvils on a military campaign. Open-sided, though tapestries had now been hung to keep the worst of the falling ash at bay, it was made of lashed timbers sunk in the earth and braced. The turf where it was erected had been peeled back and used to roof the structure, and within it were dissection slabs, a kiln, crucibles and chemicals, sand tables, alembics, flasks, mirrors (silver, brass, and glass), and glassware of more mysterious purpose and provenance. Mortars, pestles, racks of scalpels, tongs and forceps. Quicksilver, oil of vitriol, the fine dust of powdered sapphires, blocks of white salt and violet. And from their cages—each within a crystal dome that had been created open at the top to permit stale air to exchange with fresh—half a dozen demonspawn stared out with baleful intent.
It was here that Tsering brought Ashra, or—as Tsering was already thinking of her—Ata Ashra: the Wizard Ashra. Hong-la was at work here, looking less gray-faced for his enforced rest but not significantly less weary or frightened. He bent over a small wardstone with a hand lens. Tsering, having spent hours at the same work, could not locate any hope in herself that this time he would find the flaw.
He was surrounded by Anil-la and several other junior wizards, all bent over magnifiers or wax tablets to which necropsy specimens lay pinned. Anil-la, wearing a face shield and a butcher’s apron, was using glass blades to vivisect a quivering demonspawn. Glass, Tsering knew, for its sharpness … and because the spawn’s fluids would dissolve mere metal.
A flayed human body lay on one of the dissection tables, flesh red and raw. The whole corpse had been pared like a persimmon and the head lay against the table with unnatural flatness. Another, beside it, had been opened from collarbone to belly button, the ribs sectioned, the flesh peeled back in layers. One lung had been opened, and Tsering could see evidence of bruising in the swollen flesh. She suspected that the spawn pinned to Anil-la’s dissection board had found its origins there.
Reassured though she was as to the strength of Ata Ashra’s will and purpose, Tsering had nevertheless warned her of what she would find here, and what it meant. She had told Ashra that she could not be allowed within the Citadel itself, and why—and now she paused at the edge of the work space to let the Aezin woman take it in.
Ashra pressed a fist against her chest. Tsering heard the whistle of her breath going out, saw her nostrils flare with effort as she drew another in. Hong-la winched his great height up from where he had hunched over his workbench and hooked them toward him with a bony hand.
“Hong-la,” Tsering said, and made her decision. In Uthman, she continued, “This is Ata Ashra, from the Qersnyk train. She has some ideas on how we can fight the plague.”
Ashra gave her a sidelong glance. “It was my father who was the wizard, Tsering-la. I have not studied architecture or music, and what I know of tactics I learned from my husband and father-in-law, not in a college of wizardry.”
Tsering had heard of the great Aezin universities and the scholars they trained. She opened her mouth to reply, but Hong-la beat her.
“If you have some insight into the infestation, you’re wizard enough for me.” He cocked his head. “Forgive my forwardness, Ata Ashra, but … I detect a hesitation in your breathing.”
Her small smile tightened. “I am infected, yes. These are examples of the organism?”
Both Hong-la and Tsering-la turned at her gesture. Ashra might be facing her own horrific death—but her face and posture revealed curiosity and intensity of focus. She paced from glass bell to glass bell, leaning close to each cage. The skirts of her sleeveless fleece coat tapped at her ankles as the spawns’ heads swiveled to follow her. Tsering expected them to break out into one of their choruses of poisonous prophecy, but they only stared. One mantled its wings like a threatened owl; one hissed with a flickering tongue and spat. Viscous, transparent, rust-colored venom smoked against the bars of the cage and trickled in strings down the glass.
Ashra straightened and turned her back on the beasts. “I assume the emergence is similarly hideous?”
“You’ve lost no one so far?” Hong-la asked.
“The first infections came only a few days ago.” She wet her lips. “How long is the…”
“Incubation?”
“Gestation period?”
When the others hesitated, it was Anil-la who took a strengthening breath and said, “Without treatment? Fourteen days. Precisely.”
Ashra nodded. “Not long enough, then. But I can at least get you started.”
Anil-la glanced at his seniors as if seeking permission to go on. Hong-la tipped his head in acquiescence. Anil-la continued, “We believe some weakness has sundered the magical protections that kept demons from Tsarepheth.”