Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“What if I could find it for you? Or my father could?”
“The woman who brought my father’s saddle to me?” His breath warmed her hair. “That woman, I would marry.”
* * *
Later, when Temur had broken out his harness to clean and inspect it, Samarkar came and folded herself up to sit cross-legged beside him. Silently, with absolutely no ceremony, she held a silver cup of wine up where he could reach it.
He set his needle aside and accepted. “Thank you.”
She leaned her shoulder on his. “Sunset?”
“Ato Tesefahun says the tide will be high three hours past. He has secured passage for us.”
The streets were not secure—factions still fought house to house. Though the changed sky showed the Rahazeen had carried the day, soldiers and others loyal to the Caliph struggled on as if they could reverse it. Despite this, Hrahima had won through to the docks and handled arrangements.
Once the sun went down, Samarkar and Temur would try to duplicate her feat in order to find and board that one particular vessel that would bear them safe to Asmaracanda, ahead of the Rahazeen revolutionaries. For now, they bided their time and fretted … until a scratching at the door heralded Hrahima and Brother Hsiung, both looking defiantly sheepish and toting parcels.
“What are you doing here?” Temur said.
The Cho-tse glanced at Hsiung, who shrugged, and huffed with her whiskers back before answering. “I’ve always wanted to see relics of ancient Erem-of-the-Pillars. It seems likely your al-Sepehr has a collection.”
Hsiung shifted his bundle over one shoulder. When Temur met the mute monk’s eye, he merely shrugged. Temur wondered if that meant that he went where Hrahima went, or Samarkar, or that he was pursuing al-Sepehr for reasons of his own.
Samarkar looked up from her own cup of wine. “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry you’re coming.”
“And what about me?”
Temur turned. His grandfather stood dwarfed in one of the other leaf-tipped doorways of the bedroom. He wore desert-traveling robes kilted above the knees of his trousers, and a cowl lay loosely over his shoulders.
“Honored Grandfather,” he managed before pausing in confusion.
He wouldn’t argue with a Qersnyk man of Ato Tesefahun’s age who wanted to embark on a ride of thousands of
yart
across mountains and blasted lands. But Temur’s great-grandfather had died in a fall from horseback well past his eightieth summer—he was said to have lost track—and Ato Tesefahun was no Qersnyk man.
“Have no fear, Temur. I’ll be traveling, yes—but by ship to Ctesifon. Though it pays tribute to the caliphate, it is by treaty still a free city, and I should be as safe there as anywhere. If your war finds me still, so far away as that…” Ato Tesefahun shrugged and smiled. “I am not without friends here, there, in Kyiv, and in Aezin. Word that you mean to challenge your uncle will spread.”
He raised his hand and Temur realized he held something in them—a cloth parcel that he had previously held in the folds of his robes.
“You’ll need one of these,” Ato Tesefahun said.
Temur set his wine down and stood to accept it: silk, heavy, rippling. It snagged on his roughened hands. Samarkar put her cup aside as well and reached up to accept one tasseled end as he backed away.
It was a horse banner, twice as long as Temur was tall and spangled silver-bright on midnight blue. Within an outline of gold thread a bay mare reared, one white foot flashing where it had been embroidered silver.
“Oh,” Temur said. It was the most he could manage.
Samarkar looked up at him with eyes jeweled by emotion. Another man—another prince—might have taken their shining for pride or anticipation. Temur knew the once-princess well enough to recognize resignation.
And so it begins.
“Where will you raise it?” asked Ato Tesefahun.
Temur forced his hands to stay gentle on the stretched cloth. Perhaps some part of him had been considering this, because he knew the answer at once. “Lake of Dragons,” he said. “It was my grandfather’s summer palace; now it lies in the disputed borderlands near Song. It is in ruins…”
“You’ve seen it?”
“It was in lands that once belonged to Song that I honed my craft as a soldier.” Temur walked toward Samarkar, folding the banner as he came. “You could say I grew up there, after a fashion.”
“Good,” said Ato Tesefahun. “In Asmaracanda, there is a friend who can help you, a scholar of the Rahazeen Nameless cult and faith who serves at the Museum of Man. His name is Juvaini Ala-Malik, and if anyone can help you infiltrate the fortress you call Ala-Din, it is he. I shall draw a map of the city, so you may the better find him…”
* * *
Edene pushed her belly out before her like the blade of a plow parting the rich soil of the mountain meadows that were her people’s summer range and garden—and as if before a plow, the ghulim parted in its path. She paced their tunnels, knowing the paths in her marrow but driven to walk them still. Besha Ghul—and others, all of whose names she knew, all of whose company chafed her—walked beside her, straightening the braid of beaded red wire that was Erem’s crown, offering tidbits of meat she was glad to make no attempt to identify.
Sometimes she still caught that reek of al-Sepehr’s attention—but she knew it now, and knew how to push it aside as easily as a curtain. The ring showed her, if she would listen. This was the seat of her power. No Nameless warlock could touch her here.
Here, too, the scorpions followed her—as did other poison creatures. And the ghulim—a gaunt, shadowy horde whose exact numbers were difficult to ascertain, even though it seemed her new knowledge should encompass them. But they bled away at the edges, into the shadows, so Edene felt as if ragged bits of them washed into the mass of the whole and also out again, like foam where a sea pounded against stones. As if they were created and uncreated alike out of the stuff of darkness, perhaps drawn into concrete form and then dissolved by their own will, or some will imposed from without.
Only some time (she could not say exactly) after the image occurred to her did she remember that she—Tsareg Edene, rider of the rose-gray mare Buldshak, lover of Temur of no clan—she had never seen the sea.
In any case, the ghulim came and went around her, sometimes fewer, sometimes more. But Besha Ghul was a constant, until Edene came to rely on her. Besha’s cool touch soothed the increasing struggles of Edene’s unborn child; it soothed alike the increasing pressure behind Edene’s eyes.
The days in Erem were not like other days. The light of the daystars could cook the flesh from unwary bones: human bones. It was not merely the ghulim’s essential sympathy with darkness that rendered them vulnerable. Edene knew herself protected by the ring. It whispered its assurances, and the ring would not lie. Could not lie. Not to her who bore it.
The protection extended to her unborn child, but Edene found herself loathe to trust it fully. For herself, she would take any risk at all. For the babe—
—it was different.
Even when the ring whispered,
trust. You must trust us, Edene. You must trust us to rescue your lover, to ride again with your clan. You must trust us to be Queen.
Gravid as she was, she knew her time was approaching. Her breasts leaked a watery, milky fluid. As she walked she felt sharp spasms through her flanks and back, around the great curve of her belly. Not yet the driving pulse of labor, which she had witnessed many times, but the twinges of her body preparing itself. It didn’t seem as if enough time had passed for the pregnancy to be so far advanced—but here she was, and the year not yet turned to autumn. She didn’t believe so, anyway. But what was autumn in Erem?
She thought she might have entered myth. She might have been pregnant for a thousand years. She might have become a spirit of eternal bearing, someone expectant mothers and breeding mares might have talismans lashed around their bellies to protect against. She’d met a woman once, a Tashq clanswoman, who had been pregnant for twenty years, her belly taut and hard as a blown-up sheep’s bladder.
Someone had told Edene that the child had died, and rather than being expelled as a miscarriage, it had turned to bone or stone in the mother’s womb—where it would remain until she died. Song and Rasan wizards were supposed to be able to cut such a child from the mother and leave her alive, at least some of the time. The Qersnyk shaman-rememberers had no such art.
Although she stood under different heavens, Edene prayed to the Eternal Sky that she would not suffer such a fate.
The babe kicked, though. Hard enough that its feet might be stone, and weren’t there supposed to be living rocks in the foothills of the Steles of the Sky? Nonetheless, Edene was relatively certain that nothing made of stone could move with such force and decisiveness.
“He has his mother’s temperament.”
It wasn’t a ghulish voice, but it came from directly behind her, where only ghulim should be. She spun around even as her eyes were registering the dancing glow of fire … except flames were not blue.
She faced a small man, of Uthman or perhaps Messaline features. He stood on bare feet and wore pantaloons and a vest over an open-collared shirt. His hair was not long, and he would have been of unremarkable appearance had it not been indigo in color and his skin a particularly startling cerulean that echoed the flames dying away beneath his feet.
The ghulim had withdrawn from his presence, crouching on their horny paws, balanced like dogs that do not know yet if a lion plans to attack them.
Djinn,
she thought, surprised at how little the recognition perturbed her. Whether it was the confidence and ambition that had come more easily to her since she escaped Ala-Din, or whether she had just seen so many weird and mythic things of late that one more could scarcely break her equilibrium, she could not have said.
She thought of what Altantsetseg would have done, and drew herself up until her spine cracked. The weight of the babe in her womb pulled her off-balance, but she straightened anyway.
She asked, “Who are you?”
The blue man scuffed one bare foot against blinding stone. “If you know not my name, I am not constrained to tell it to you.”
“What are you, then?”
“One of the tribes of air and fire,” he said. “The desert stone, and the hot wind that blows over. I have come to assist you.”
“Who sent you?”
“Perhaps I come on my own behalf; perhaps I am not permitted to say.”
“Then why should I keep you?”
He smiled. “Because you cannot make me leave.”
* * *
The last red glow of the sun painted the eastern horizon as Temur swung up into his bay mare’s saddle and made sure his bow was strung. The other three were on foot, which would attract less attention—if a Cho-tse could ever be said not to attract attention—but meant also that if they had to make a run for it, their best option was to scatter and try to meet again at the docks. It would have been less obvious to have everyone walk, or perhaps have Bansh pull them in a cart … but there was no disguising the mare’s breed, stamped in her every elegant bone. And if it came to a fight, Temur would be far more effective on horseback than afoot.
He hoped they could reach the waiting vessel without shed blood, but it was sensible to be prepared for the other options. And so Temur rode, and Samarkar wore her armor—albeit under a concealing robe—even though there were less obvious ways of doing things.
Hrahima knew the ship and the sailor they sought personally, but everyone had been told the slip number of the vessel and for whom to ask when they arrived. Captain Kebede was one of Ato Tesefahun’s countrymen—perhaps even a relative.
Though their path was the same as the route that had brought them in, it seemed entirely different in the dusky streets. They were not quite empty—even the specter of a revolution under way was not enough to keep the shopkeepers and water sellers of Asitaneh in their homes, and people were meeting at corner wine shops and coffee bars to huddle together and trade what news they had—but they were emptier than Temur had ever seen them. To Temur’s gratitude, they at first met no soldiers other than one company of the caliph’s Dead Men jogging at double time in the opposite direction, who seemed to have no pressing interest in them, but the people they did see passing through the streets were most often furtive or armed with cudgels and moving in groups.
The strangest thing was the lack of dust. It never would have even occurred to him to imagine this port city without its red haze—as soon imagine a city without streets, without houses!—but now the air was clear except the smoke of fires, the smells of cooking. And a sound that Temur did not at first recognize, in the unwonted silence of the streets, but which he soon identified as voices, some distant and some nearer, raised in a series of arguments. Normally the sounds of the city would have covered any such shouting match to anyone beyond the immediate neighbors, but in the current hush it carried clearly.
“I don’t like this,” Samarkar said, her voice hollow and strange within her helm. “This is how massacres start. Too many ethnicities, too many old grudges in a city like this. Somebody thinks to take advantage of the political instability, of the security forces’ being busy, to avenge some ancient slight, and the next thing you know there are mobs roaming the city disposing of their hereditary enemies and people are being raped or beheaded or both.”
“Go up,” Temur said to Hrahima. After their months of traveling together, he knew Samarkar didn’t need coddling. He was the more experienced in military matters, and she would understand from his choice of action that he had accepted her counsel and chosen accordingly.
The Cho-tse seemed to trust his decisions too, as she responded without so much as a cough of argument or agreement. She crouched, her heavy tail held out behind her, and when she uncoiled it was into a tiger-colored blur that cleared the wall of the closest building and reached the rooftop in a single prodigious bound.
Brother Hsiung moved up to Bansh’s shoulder on the left, Samarkar on her right. Temur sent the mare forward, asking for a trot as his escorts jogged alongside. The less time they were in the streets, the better—and they had to cross almost the entire breadth of Asitaneh to reach the docks. Occasionally, Temur glimpsed the shadow of Hrahima leaping from one rooftop to another, on the left or the right and once directly overhead. He was aware that this was only because she allowed it.