Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Saadet caught her breath to see her.
The twins would have expected the eagles to protest this sudden appearance, but not one bated. Their young handlers deftly hooded each bird, and each bird was handed up to Qori Buqa or one of his falconers. The jesses—soft leather bands attached to the birds’ ankles—were made fast to the padded bars of every saddle except the twins’.
With a wave of his hand, Qori Buqa summoned Saadet up beside him. The twins’ mare responded to their shift in balance like a soldier to welcome orders. Qori Buqa’s eagle mantled as the mare shifted, then balanced itself with a switch of its tail. Up close, they were still impressive—even to one inured to the presence of the rukh and her young.
“Saadet,” said Qori Buqa, as the twins fell in beside him. “We are pleased at your companionship.”
She nodded, eyes downcast. “Thank you for the loan of the mare.”
“You will enjoy her.” He laid a hand possessively on the neck of his own mount, just above where the so-called bloodmark began. “When we are out of the city, I would say we should race … but it would be unfair to Khongordzol, and she’s too good a horse to break her heart running her against Syr.”
“Syr,” the twins echoed.
Desert.
“She is of the line of the varnish-colored mare Temurbataar. In her time, there was no fiercer.” Lightly, Qori Buqa touched the bright cords knotted into her mane. “She is my heart,” he said.
Saadet watched, and steeled her heart against him. He was a tool, no more: a useful contrivance whose proper application would be one of the elements combining to bring the Nameless out of the desert, out of exile and privation, into their rightful place in the world.
She could not like him.
Well, perhaps a little. It would make certain things harder, it was true. But others … so much easier.
“What’s the eagle’s name?” she asked him.
He gave her a strange, wary look. “They have their own names,” he said. “They don’t tell us, and we don’t pretend to know.”
Her lips formed an O. He looked at her curiously, but she could not tell him what it was she thought of.
For the Nameless,
she told herself, and heard her brother answer:
For the world.
* * *
The empress wore gray: silk noil, roughly lustrous, embroidered with peacocks up the front, their tails sweeping around the extended hem. Her hair was coifed and oiled, the pins pinching her scalp and drawing the skin of her face taut. But as she stood beside her husband in the audience chamber, listening to the pleading of wizards, she felt like a lost child rather than a queen.
She watched Hong-la and Yongten-la kneeling on the carpet before her, as prone as dogs with self-abasement—and all their appeasing could do nothing to lift the chill from her belly. Her kingdom—so hard and so newly won—crumbled in her hands, and there was nothing she could do to fight that dissolution.
“Your august majesty,” said the Wizard Hong without raising his eyes, “I must beg you to reflect, to consider … is there anything you could have said or offered—in a secret trade agreement, in a letter to a brother king—that might be construed as permission to enter the city? We cannot find a flaw in the wards; they have not been broken. The only other possibility our theorists have been able to offer is that, somehow, inadvertently—”
“Are you suggesting,” Songtsan said coldly, “that I am ill-educated enough to have committed such an error? Were my tutors in matters of thaumaturgy and state not wizards of your very own Citadel? Were you yourself not one such?”
Yongten-la shifted on the rug, but it was Hong-la who replied.
“It is as your majesty says,” Hong-la agreed silkily. “But if an assassin enters and if the locks were not broken or picked—it must be that someone has thrown a window wide.”
“Perhaps it is your own art that is lacking,” said Songtsan. “Perhaps you cannot heal the breach because of your own inadequacies.” Yangchen thought it was only her own intimate knowledge of the emperor that allowed her to notice the strain in his voice when he said, “Perhaps if I started burning wizards, you might achieve some results.”
Yongten-la began to speak now, but Yangchen did not hear beyond the gist that he was arguing—again—for evacuation. She could hear nothing over the howl of her own blood, the sudden wave of miserable certainty. Someone had indeed left the door wide to the demonlings. Someone had indeed invited them within.
She put a small cold hand out to her husband to steady herself; he took it in his large warm one but did not glance at her.
Hong-la, however: Yangchen felt his eyes upon her, although he glanced away before she recovered herself enough to check.
Yongten-la was saying, “Refusing to evacuate undermines your authority with the peasantry, your majesty. Peasants are rioting and sneaking away in the night—even when your soldiers turn them back, it eats away at your appearance of unassailable power.”
“My brother!” Songtsan cried, his voice finally rising. “Is it not obvious? My treacherous brother Tsansong is an accomplice of the Sorcerer-Prince. It is he who has made these pacts, he who has taken every possible step to overthrow me, and he who has made vile bargains with dark forces in order to rule in my place. You were there!” His trembling finger indicated Hong-la.
Yangchen swallowed bitterness.
How could he not feel her guilt through her trembling palm, read it in the pinch between her eyes? How was it not blazoned on her face in scarlet, like a whore’s cut mouth?
By all the horned kings of the underworld,
she thought.
O, not Tsansong. Not Tsansong.
Me.
* * *
Emperor and empress dined alone that night, seated at a hardwood table on the woven rectangular seats of yoke-backed chairs. The servants who whisked things from sideboard to plate and back again moved like ghosts in the rustle of their livery. It was all Yangchen could do to place each morsel between her lips and chew.
She did not raise her eyes to her husband’s face when at last, hesitantly, she said, “I could go among the sick, my emperor. That would be seen as evidence, at least, of our goodwill.”
“Can you change a dressing?” he said, after a silence so long she knew mockery would follow. “Can you wield a lancet?”
“I can hold a hand,” she said.
Something, anything, to ease the pain I have engendered.
He shook his head in exhaustion. “I forbid it.”
* * *
They rode out without guards, without guides, without soldiers. Five falconers, a man who would be emperor, and a Rahazeen assassin, all mounted on gray mares. With them ran a dozen milling dogs that dodged expertly around the feet of unperturbed horses. The sun shone on the horses’ jingling fittings, on the banners the riders were handed as they passed through the gates of the keep and into the city proper.
The banners insured that people made way before them, and not one made a gesture against the Khagan. On every corner stood men in armor, helms bearing the three-tiered falls that proclaimed their loyalty—but they were on the corners, not surrounding Qori Buqa with their bodies.
It was a grand gesture, Shahruz understood. And in itself it might help build loyalty. The Qersnyk respected a leader who did not give himself airs.
But nothing would silence the little voice that said, with wonder,
It would be as nothing to assassinate this man.
In the cool of morning, before dust began to rise, the reborn city was different than it had been in the afternoon. The streets were not yet so crowded, and the slanting rays of sun cast deep shadows beneath the awnings of street vendors. It was speedier traveling in the retinue of a man for whom everyone else made way. They reached the edge of the city before the sun had shifted a hand’s span up the sky, while apricot color still stained a bright horizon, and they passed through hastily spliced and rehung gates that remained sharp with splinters.
The steppe beyond was gilded, too. Grazed short between the heaps of dead, the clumped grass snagged the light and shredded it.
There was conversation as they rode, jokes and casual banter. The falconers spoke to their lord as if to an equal, and these bare-faced women showed no hesitation in bandying words with the men. The twins did not join in. Saadet could feel Shahruz’s stoic disapproval, and while she wondered how she was supposed to win the Khagan’s interest by effacing herself, she did not have the strength to disagree with her brother.
At least he was kind enough to keep his distaste at the weakness of her flesh, which he was forced to share, to himself.
Not a hundred cubits from the city wall, they started a hare. The animal bunched and leapt, scattering puffs of dust with every hop. One of the dogs—a lean-barreled thing the color of dust—yipped and gave chase, but a sharp whistle brought it reluctantly to heel. The twins tensed, expecting to see Qori Buqa or one of his attendants unhood an eagle, but though one man half-reached for a bow before thinking better of it, they took no further action.
The twins looked at Qori Buqa curiously. He must have read the glance accurately, because he said, “The eagles are for nobler game.”
It was an hour more (and the carnage of the battlefield still spread around them) when the riders fanned out into a broad arc with perhaps five minute’s ride between. The dogs wore back and forth before the horses, carving patterns through the grass. The riders could still see each other plainly, horses standing shoulders and neck above the grass as if they swam through it.
The twins, having no hawk of their own, remained with Qori Buqa. He rode silently, gaze fastened on the horizon. Saadet wondered what it was, exactly, that he was looking for.
The falconers had lifted their eagles onto the fist when they commenced to hunt. The twins tried to imagine holding up that stolid, living weight for hours on end. Their arm ached just contemplating it.
On the left, one of the falconers cried out. Turning, the twins saw her unhooding her bird while all the others, even the man who would be Khagan, refrained. So precedence was established by whosoever saw the prey first, and even a king respected that. It was interesting to know.
The falconer held the bird up for a moment, allowing it to orient itself. Saadet saw it raise its wings and lean forward like a racer crouched to start. Then the falconer turned her mare away from the prey—whatever it was, the twins could see it only as a rippling line crashing through the grass—and into the light wind that lofted the twins’ veil and the horses’ unbraided tails sideways. She drew her arm back and punched the air, hurling the eagle into flight.
Its wingbeats sounded like the heavy flapping of a banner in a stiff wind. From feathertip to feathertip, the twins thought it spanned the length of a horse, and she was not surprised that at first it struggled to gain altitude. But then it caught the wind and its flight smoothed, dexterous pinions grasping the air to draw it forward. It banked and came around with the breeze at its back now, still climbing. Craning back, the twins could see its head swivel as it sought whatever unfortunate animal it had marked previously.
It mounted the sky, and Saadet could not help herself: she gave a little gasp of fear and wonder as it stooped.
Of course she could not have heard the clap of its wings as it folded them, the rush of wind against its feathered body. But she imagined them, and what she did hear was the thud and crack—quite simultaneous—as the eagle vanished behind the veil of waving grass, striking its prey to earth with all the force of its dive behind it.
Its handler had already kicked her horse into motion. The twins watched as she charged forward, reining up just shy of where the eagle had struck, within the ring of circling dogs. She whistled high and sharp, raising her glove. The twins could see a bloody chunk of meat upon it.
Laboriously, the eagle heaved itself into the air again, settling on the falconer’s gauntlet after beating the air with a half-dozen strokes. It pounced on the meat, pinning the meal against the glove with one taloned foot and tearing gobbets free with that hooked beak.
“The eagle would rather have skinned meat than go to the trouble of ripping its own prey apart.” Qori Buqa’s smile was only in his voice. It did not lift the corners of his moustache at all. “Everything is lazy.”
Before the twins could answer, he reined forward—along with all the other falconers (and the twins, who closely followed) closing the gap. One of the others swung down in the saddle—he did not dismount, just hooked a leg over his horse’s back and performed a casually acrobatic feat that left the twins blinking—and came up again with a blood-spattered red fox limp in his hand. He paunched and bled it there on the back of his mare, while the mare appeared unmoved by blood and the presence of a dead carnivore.
“A good omen to start,” said Qori Buqa. “The fox is clever and preys on lambs. Now let us see if we can run a wolf to ground.”
* * *
It wouldn’t do to say revolution was brewing in the streets of Tsarepheth. Not yet, in any case … not quite. But Hong-la was not a naïve man, nor one new to politics. He saw the grainy stares, quickly hidden, when he passed through the streets. He saw the evidence of filth hurled by night against the palace walls and heard of the midnight assemblies that melted into the drifting ash when the emperor’s soldiers arrived—or, on a few occasions, were broken up with killings and arrests. Most saliently, he saw the graffiti chipped or scribbled on walls and the handbills that younger wizards and novices brought to his attention and that of Yongten-la.
Even the suspicion of sedition would be enough to see the perpetrators dismembered or burned, assuming they made it into custody alive. That so many were willing to take that risk so boldly told him how badly Songtsan’s authority had slipped.
Rumors of Tsansong’s survival abounded, but it was more than that. People believed in princes because princes were magic. They were talismanic protection against the wolves and wickedness of the untamed world. When the caravans did not arrive, when the demonspawn clawed from your lover’s mouth, when the young prince escaped a trumped-up death sentence—or so more and more were whispering—when the Cold Fire was cold no longer: what use were princes then?