Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Standing over the second flayed corpse of the morning, Hong-la rinsed caked blood from his fingers and implements. Tsering-la rattled her tools in the basin on the other side of the dissecting table. The steam smelled of sulfur—the hot water rose from the depths of the mountain raining ash and cinders over the struggling city—and iron, from a source closer at hand. The reek of bitterness suited Hong-la’s mood.
“What use are princes…” Hong-la began to ask, and checked himself.
Tsering did not even glance his way. “What use are princes when the early evidence would suggest that the mountain is cracking open, and the Carrion King stalks the streets of Tsarepheth itself, garbed in the skins of his prey?”
He snorted. It was nearly a laugh. “Something like that, yes.”
She shrugged. Her tone without judgment, she said, “Yongten says Songtsan still has not agreed to evacuate—but that sources close to him will argue for it.”
And he did not choose to pass along how he knew that.
Hong-la wondered if the head of the order was protecting the empress, or someone else. He lifted his dripping hands from the basin and waited until the circulating water ran clean. “The sick can’t travel. Does he realize who must stay to nurse them?”
Yongten-la knew that, of course. And so did Tsering, still avoiding his gaze as he turned to her. The dead woman between them stared from lidless eyes, her face rendered forever a mystery.
“Would you desert the Citadel?” she said. “Tse-ten of the Five Eyes did not, in his time.”
Hong-la picked up his clean scalpel, steam still rising from it in curls. “The sky was higher in those days,” he quoted, “and beneath it giants strode.”
“Well, our sky may sag a bit, but that makes up for the difference in height,” she said tartly. “Maybe Songtsan thinks a good decimation will teach the rebellious wizards a lesson about not standing up to the Bstangpo?”
“Fear of the wizards is half what’s keeping the populace from dragging him and his wives through the streets.”
Tsering showed no squeamishness as she began flexing the dead woman’s fingers, her wrist joints, examining the degree of rigor. “He’s got plenty of guards and soldiers.”
“Until the demons claim those too.” Hong-la was arguing just to argue, a character trait in which he took no particular pride … although that, coupled with the desire to
win,
was probably closely related to his success both as a bureaucrat and as a wizard. At home, and here among these peculiar, wise barbarians of whom he had grown so fond, despite their unnatural attachment to square-hilted sheath knives perpetually stuck through their belts and their tendency to worship rocks. “And more will grow ill on the journey. Will they bring the infestation down on the winter capital, then, like a dog sick with fleas?”
“Tool marks,” Tsering said, all weariness and every trace of banter dropping from her tone.
“Excuse me?”
“Tool marks,” she repeated. “Tool marks along the bones and in the muscle. The kind you’d get from a skinning knife. Does the Carrion King use a skinning knife?”
“I’ve never met him,” Hong-la admitted. “But to a preliminary approximation … no?”
When Tsering looked up, her eyes shone. “So stop grumping, old man, and give me a hand lens.”
* * *
By afternoon, the twins and the others had lunched in the saddle on airag and jerky—and each of those saddles had a fox and an antelope or two slung from its bow. They had finally left behind the evidence of recent war and the constant drone of the flies, though the warmth of the sun lay drowsily enough on Saadet’s veil to make up for it.
They had glimpsed a great steppe lion, tall at the shoulder as the mares, his matted black mane appearing and disappearing between stems of long grass as he paced them for a little while—but he was too much even for the Qersnyk eagles, and the dogs were adamant in pretending they had seen no such animal passing. As the lion apparently thought discretion the best approach to seven armed riders, they parted ways each unmolested by the other.
Saadet had ceased expecting any wolves. Weren’t they night hunters? She found herself trusting Shahruz to handle the reins and trusting the mare to stay with her sisters while Saadet drifted in the welcome quiet.
The wolves must have been denned in the long grass, because when a pair broke away from the riders they started up almost under the hooves of the leftmost mare. The dogs had not even noticed them until they bolted—perhaps they were still too busily engaged in ignoring the lion—but once the wolves broke cover the dogs rounded and fell together in the ragged teardrop shape of a coursing pack.
The wolves—yellow and buff, stippled gray, moth-nibbled and lanky in their summer coats—vanished among the grass. The twins could track them only as a ripple in the grass, which they slipped through with greater facility than did the surging, baying dogs.
Qori Buqa crowed with delight, turning his horse into the wind. The wolves, wise to the hunt, had swung wide to run straight downwind—the most difficult direction for the eagles to fly, as the twins had seen demonstrated again and again that the massive birds’ awe-inspiring mastery of the air was dependent upon a stiff headwind.
But now five eagles were airborne, wheeling up on the rising currents of the afternoon, and the sixth was heaving itself into the sky behind them. Where to lesser game the falconers had flown one bird at a time, now they all rose skyward. The twins noticed also that this time the birds flew up, circling overhead like a vortex of vultures, and waited on overhead. They wondered how the trainers kept them from attacking one another—
Qori Buqa sent his bloodmarked mare into a canter, her pale head with its dark-ringed eyes like a bobbing skull. The twins’ mount followed, a thunder of hooves to echo the fading thunder of wings, and the falconers fell in behind them.
Three strides, and the pursuit was all. The twins crouched close to Thistle’s neck, letting her choose her own path over the unfamiliar terrain. It was easier than riding a rukh; at least a mare was unlikely to eat you. A confused welter of impressions rattled the twins: the hard breaths of the charging mare, the cries of men and hounds, the whip of grass against thighs insufficiently protected by cotton trousers. Ahead, the wolves running flat-out, the pack of dogs strung out in single file behind them. The sudden break in Thistle’s stride as she turned aside to follow Qori Buqa’s mount.
There was exhilaration in the run, the rush of air through their veils—and yet Saadet could not help but feel a certain kinship for these wolves, harried and hounded.
An eagle yelped. A shadow brushed the twins’ face. The twins turned, grabbing at mane as they unbalanced in the saddle, and saw the folded wings, the twist in the air, the dart-sharp projectile of the first eagle strike the trailing wolf.
She cried out as its talons pierced her loins, the force of the blow driving her hindquarters to earth. The twins heard the thud of impact, the snap of shattered bone. She came around, snarling, and her mate whirled, too.
His break in stride saved him. The second eagle missed, striking the earth beyond, a cloud of yellow dust dulling the shining pinions. The dogs circled, bristling, tails low, ears flat, and the male wolf lunged for the grounded eagle.
It fanned its wings, hissing. He jumped back as it struck with its beak. The female screamed as a second eagle—the Khagan’s bird, which the twins recognized by the crimson jesses—struck her neck, and the male spun around again. A fourth eagle barreled into his side, clinging with hooked talons and wing-flapping to drag him away from the female, but he was not—this time—distracted. Yellowed teeth, hooked like daggers, latched into the upper part of the Khagan’s eagle’s wing.
The wolf’s head whipped around. The female wolf screamed again as the eagle was torn away from her, and the eagle screamed as the male wolf tossed it against the ground. Qori Buqa and one or two of the falconers shouted—
Saadet could not have said later if it was calculation, reflex, or something else—but one of the twins’ pistols was in their hand, the sights lined up slightly above and behind where the male wolf’s elbow pressed his rib cage. Past milling dogs, past beating wings—the whole center and attention on the target. A difficult shot. Not impossible.
The trigger press, the click, the scrape of the wheel—the splash of bright sparks as steel scraped pyrite.
The thunder of the gun against their palm … the start of the horse, who reared and neighed sharply. War mare or not, she was not hardened to the explosive sounds of such exotic weaponry.
The male wolf fell with a shriek, releasing the eagle as he cried. As if the report of the gun had been permission, the circling dogs lunged in. The she-wolf managed one more cry before she was overwhelmed, and then the falconers were swinging from their horses, wading in among dogs and dying wolves and eagles, separating the combatants. Qori Buqa himself vaulted from his mount with the agility of a younger man and ran to his wounded eagle.
Saadet sat her sidling, snorting, slowly calming mare in a wreath of acrid smoke, watching the falconers drag yapping, frothing dogs out of the fray with heavily gloved hands and felt as if they—as if she—had been party to the murder of a friend.
* * *
Qori Buqa came to the twins’ chamber that evening. He knocked on the door frame with his own hand, and when she pulled aside the curtain amid a chiming of silver rings, he stood framed in the doorway, alone, dressed in shearling boots and an open-fronted coat trimmed in pewter-brown fur. Somewhere else in the keep, a woman was singing—a throaty, ululating wail from which Saadet could not decipher a single word.
Silently, Qori Buqa held out his hands. Clutched in them, draped over his wrists, was the perfectly tanned hide of a wolf.
Not one from the hunt that day—for those were not yet cured—but the silver-stippled black coat of a winter wolf, deep and soft as snow.
“She will heal,” he said. “If she does not take a fever in the wound. She will fly again, thanks to you. She took this prize last winter, and I wish you to have it.”
Saadet did not wish the pelt—she did not really
wish
Qori Buqa’s
regard
—but she was constrained to seek it. She allowed him to drape the pelt over her shoulders, and likewise allowed him to switch the curtain closed. Shahruz was absent from her head; she was alone now.
I don’t want to be here for this any more than you do,
she cursed inwardly, but he was silent.
Men could be so squeamish sometimes.
“Thank you, Khagan,” she said. She glanced to the corner where the twins had been practicing their knife drills—Shahruz had certainly had enough to say about that—and then to the samovar heating water on a brazier beside the bed.
“Tea?” she asked him.
He smiled.
* * *
In the haunted hours of night, the twins—awake in the darkness—heard the man who would be Khagan struggle with a dream. Bound by sleep, his limbs only trembled, and the words that left his throat were converted to a whine and a throaty rumble.
The twins sat up, drawing a veil across their hair and face. They laid three fingers lightly upon Qori Buqa’s brow, and Shahruz whispered a swift phrase couched in fluid syllables. Saadet yearned after those words, but they vanished from her ear as quickly as from the air.
Qori Buqa did not quiet, but he turned, questing. He muttered another distorted word or two and one hand clutched at air. He muttered in his dream, a response to Shahruz’s spellcasting.
Gently, the twins reached down and shook the Khan’s shoulder.
His eyes flew wide. As they focused, he was reaching for a weapon he was not wearing.
“Saadet,” he said. And then, “I was dreaming of you.”
“My lord,” she said through her veil.
“Or of us, rather.” He laid his hand over hers on his shoulder. He spoke with fervor, abrupt and impassioned. “The Eternal Sky came to me in my dream,” he said. “He said I should be Khagan. He said that there was no difference between the Eternal Sky and the Scholar-God, that they were different ways to address the same God. He said that you and I should be allies, and that the world would long remember our names.”
Saadet smiled. “The Scholar-God’s caliph would call what you have just said blasphemy.”
He hitched himself onto his elbows, half-sitting. “And you?”
She shrugged. “What sky did he address you under, your Eternal Sky?”
“An Uthman—no, a Rahazeen sky.”
The twins considered, and replied, “I see no reason your Eternal Sky cannot also be Rahazeen.”
Out in the hall, the guard was snoring.
* * *
Ashra’s cough was not improving. Not that Tsering expected improvement: she had seen this happen too many times, to too many victims. She knew the inevitable end.
Still, Ashra moved among the sick, both Rasan and Qersnyk, coughing into her mask and ministering where she could. She was a competent physicker, and as courageous a healer as any who claimed affiliation with the Citadel. Watching her bend over one dying man or woman after another, Tsering felt a bitterness that pierced even her deadening fatigue.
It was grief, she realized, that she would not get to know this woman better, learn from her, and teach her in return.
The beer was brewing, but no one now sick would live to benefit from it. Ashra had been perfectly plain that if it were drunk before reaching full strength, its only effect might be to strengthen the infection so that a second, full-power infusion would have no power to drive it away. So they waited, and Tsering watched her new friend sicken and minister to others as she did.
The solution that came to her at last was born out of frustration as much as wizardly inspiration. The afternoon of the morning on which the first blood shone on Ashra’s lips, Tsering was assisting Anil-la in necropsying yet another demonspawn. She held a steel dissecting pin in her left hand, waiting for him to reach a hand out for it—they were taking turns wielding the scalpel, from one postmortem to the next—and she found herself staring at the wickedly glinting thing, as long as her forearm and as sharp as a skewer.