Authors: Elizabeth Bear
The tension of racing through these strangely vacant streets in the failing light was like the fear before battle. His heart felt as if hung suspended inside an empty cage of his body, swaying to and fro and banging his ribs with every swing.
He had the advantage of the mare’s height, and so he was the first to notice that the glow limning the buildings before them was increasing, not fading. The smell of smoke grew stronger. The wind was from off the strait, and Temur didn’t need anyone to explain.
“Tell me they’re not burning the ships in harbor,” Samarkar said.
“That would be stupid,” Temur replied. He might not know much about seafaring, but he understood the need for trade as well as any soldier. If you were fighting a war against your own people, destroying their livelihoods was unlikely to make for a long reign for the winner, or to ensure a contented and supporting populace under the new regime.
“People do stupid things,” she panted, grasping Bansh’s chest strap to hold herself alongside the trotting mare. Brother Hsiung waved agreement from the other side.
“Maybe it’s the warehouses,” Temur said, aware that he was kidding himself.
“It’s a stone city,” Samarkar said. “Can it be burning?”
Maybe it’s a mob.
Edene, we are coming for you.
“We need to be sure.”
Samarkar released Bansh’s saddle and remained silent, jogging grimly. Asitaneh had grown out from the port like a spiderweb, like the branching of tree limbs from a trunk. Now, as they reversed that ancient expansion, one street emptied out into another like tributaries into a larger river until they found themselves running along the broad boulevard that had been their first glimpse of the city proper on their way in. A group of soldiers wearing the uniform of the regular army were herding any pedestrian they found inside the nearest building, will they or nil they. Down the long street, shops were barred, windows shuttered, lamps within being extinguished so occupied buildings could not be told from vacant ones.
One soldier lunged after Bansh, Samarkar, and Hsiung, shouting “In the name of Mehmed Caliph, stop!” which told Temur everything he needed to know about what was going on in the palace. He lifted his bow and nocked an arrow, but before he could turn in his saddle and loose—he would have aimed it against the stones before the soldier’s feet—Samarkar raised one hand and whipped a rising wall of green light around the soldier. He struck it and bounced backward, landing on his ass inside the glowing ring.
“Run for it,” Samarkar gasped, breaking from her jog into jarring all-out flight. The hood of her robe fell back. She broke the fastenings at the collar and let it drop away like the cheap disguise it was. Soon it would be dark enough that the black armor itself would hide her—and while they were running, nothing would make them look less suspicious.
Her wizard-wall fell again as promptly as she had raised it, but she cast another behind them, stretching shop to shop across the street’s width, which bought them time to vanish into the gloaming and the veils of smoke that began, like mist, to crowd and obscure the dim, unlit road.
A dark shape and then another dropped from the rooftops on either side. “Rahazeen,” Temur said, not entirely sure of the identification until one shape reeled backward, Temur’s arrow protruding from its chest, and he glimpsed the silhouette of a veiled head outlined against a white latticed shutter.
There were more. Temur felt the cold battle-focus rising up in him, the tattoo of Bansh’s hooves punishing his body as her flight became a charge. He rose up from the saddle, crouched above it in the stirrups, and let the mare bring him into the center of the enemy. She left the sprinting monk and wizard behind as she leapt into battle, a furious neigh of her own ringing from close stone walls.
He’d seen two Rahazeen jump from above; at least a half-dozen more barred the road before him. They knelt, couching a row of lances. Temur could have hauled on the reins, pulled his mare around and away from those murderous spear points, but he saw the improvised pike line as if through a haze of blood. It was not merely the mist and the dark closing the edges of his vision in a tunnel.
He loosed twice as Bansh closed the distance. One arrow found its target and a Rahazeen pitched over, leaving a hole in the line. An assassin snatched the other arrow as if plucking a butterfly. He threw it to one side. He and the pike man on the other side of the gap leaned their spears inward, covering as much of the break in the line as possible. And now it was too late to rein Bansh down.
Temur nocked again as Bansh hit the line and—rather than hurling herself upon the lances—hurled herself into the air, up and over, a leap worthy of a horse in a shaman-rememberer’s tale. Temur loosed to the other side and took one more Rahazeen assassin through the forearm as he tried to bat the shaft away.
Then Bansh’s hooves struck red cobbles again, chips of stone flying, and Temur was hurled forward against her neck. He lost a stirrup; he lost the reins; he nearly lost his bow. But Bansh, as if she understood his danger, kicked up her front feet and tossed him back into the saddle as neatly as flipping an egg.
Now they were beyond the Rahazeen line, and Hsiung and Samarkar were behind it. Bansh, still dangling her knotted reins against her neck, turned her half-rear into a sort of pivot, wheeling on her back legs as neatly as if she were heading cattle, and gave Temur a moment to recover the stirrups and his dignity. She did not shy when something horrible landed at her feet—another Rahazeen, torn open by enormous claws from balls to rib cage, still making faint paddling motions with useless hands after he bounced.
Hrahima would seem to have the rooftops managed.
Temur would have expected any other foe to react to the hurled near-corpse with confusion and failing morale. But the Rahazeen behaved as if they had been reading their own propaganda: they surged forward behind their lances, shrieking. One ran through the pumping blood that spread in a shallow pool all around the first man Temur had shot. The pool gleamed black in the growing brilliance. The Rahazeen assassin’s white robe, sodden at the edges, left dark brush marks on the cobbles with every stride.
Running shapes broke from the smoke all around them: men and women, livestock, children—all fleeing the rising flames. A hot wind rasped Temur’s face: the fire at his back drew deep breaths, feeding itself, rising against the night. Bansh snorted and shook, fear-sweat lathering beneath Temur’s knees.
Temur raised his unready bow, the horn ring slipping around his thumb as he groped for an arrow. There were too many of them, and he was still off-balance—
Brother Hsiung piled into the two on Temur’s left with outstretched arms, a simple and inelegant bull’s rush that flattened one and left the other spinning away. Meanwhile, a column of viridian light encircled the one in the middle. Its jade-bright glow combined with the flickering orange of flames to create a nauseating, disorienting vortex of shadows. The assassin struck it with his lance and the lance shivered from his hands. Temur clearly saw his green-lit expression of pain and surprise as he glanced down at his palms.
Then the column of light yanked him backward, spinning off down the street like a dust djinn to vanish into the smoky haze.
Two uninjured Rahazeen and two moderately wounded were left of the eight—two jumpers and six others—Temur had glimpsed originally. Hsiung kicked the downed man in the knee and the temple to keep him down, raising his hands to beckon and challenge the one he’d merely knocked staggering. Temur leveled an arrow at the closer of the unhurt two. He thought it was the one who had caught his previous shot, but the veils made it hard to be certain.
The rush of people fleeing the flames had stopped; the few who passed now staggered. Temur thought of other burning cities, of the toll of war. He knew too much of the truth of this, of how many had been trapped behind and burned. He couldn’t smell the bodies now, but he could remember the smell, and that was enough to raise his gorge.
He swallowed nausea and opened his hand around his bow, so the shakiness of a tight grip would not rattle his aim.
“We can kill you all,” he said, trying to imagine how fierce his uncle Mongke Khagan would have looked and sounded in this moment. “I am Re Temur Khan, and you cannot stop me. Let us pass!”
The Rahazeen paused for half an instant—and then all four of the remaining ones, injured and uninjured alike, threw themselves forward in the kind of ferocious silence that Temur associated with starving wolves, or rabid ones. He loosed, but the arrow went wild as Bansh reared, striking with windmilling fore hooves. A pale-and-dark blur fell from above, Hrahima landing in a tiger’s crouch so briefly that Temur’s eye had not identified her until she was already leaping again, in among the Rahazeen with disemboweling swipes of her enormous claws. Two went down, Temur thought, before they knew that anything had hit them, let alone what. The third—the one Temur thought had caught the arrow—managed to drop his lance and draw a wickedly back-curved scimitar. While Temur threw his weight up on Bansh’s neck to bring her down, the assassin swung.
The tiger, barehanded, must have parried with her massive forearm. With a snarl more of exertion than rage, Hrahima tore the man in half.
Temur still had no reins. He could have clawed in Bansh’s meager mane for them, but she had all four feet on the earth again and was answering his knees. His nocked arrow lost, he didn’t trouble with another, just urged the mare forward hard and recklessly fast over cobblestones.
Hsiung’s second opponent met the monk in a flurry of blows that Temur could not follow. For the first time, he heard Hsiung’s voice—a sharp grunt, as the monk’s breath was punched from his lungs by a knee to the sternum. Hsiung had traded it for an uppercut; as he staggered backward, his opponent wavered and shook his veiled head.
The assassin reached for his scimitar. Bansh ran over him without breaking stride, and Temur heard the horrible soft crunching thuds of hooves pounding flesh, breaking bone—and the hollow thump of a skull struck once.
Bansh slowed and wheeled before he could ask for it. Scrabbling in her mane, he found the reins. The man she had trampled lay unmoving. Bansh paused, stamping, her black forelegs splashed shining with gore when he glanced down to check her soundness.
Samarkar arrived at a run, her hands wreathed in blue light, her armor gleaming lurid in reflected colors. “The soldiers are coming and there are more Rahazeen archers on the rooftops—”
“Run,” Hrahima said succinctly, pointing forward into the fire.
Into a rising orange hell, they ran.
13
It was bruisingly obvious, once Hong-la thought of it. And once thought, he could not unthink it, though the implications made him wish he had never fallen in love, never fled that love, never chosen the life of a fugitive, exile, and wizard. Made him wish, in fact, that he had stayed a slave in Song.
The emperor wasn’t the betrayer of his people, the monster who had invited the demons into his own home. The empress was.
Could not the woman of a house open its door to a killer as easily as the man?
The evidence was there, even the motive. He had seen the horror on her face when he and Yongten-la had accused her husband. Had she not become empress, and first among wives in the time immediately before the arrival of the pestilence? As a wizard, Hong-la knew a little of the ways of demons. As a bureaucrat, he knew a great deal of the ways of contracts. How easy would it be for a young woman, even one raised to the halls of power, to be deluded by something infernally clever?
Hong-la had been floating in the baths, letting the volcano-warmed water ease aching bones, a spine that seemed it might never uncurve itself to stand straight again. It was only when he felt a chill across his shoulders that he realized the revelation had left him standing upright, water dripping from his earlobes, his hands clenching at his hips.
You are about to challenge an empress for treason. When her husband has no love for wizards at all.
* * *
There were things much worse than fever. And as Ashra lay scarlet-faced and sweating, tossing in incoherence, Tsering contented herself that if this ended in death, it was at least a better death than the slow suffocation and quick mutilation that would have resulted otherwise.
The fever started a day and a half after the surgery. It came in waves and while the soy mold could not break it, it could ameliorate, as could baths in the snowmelt off the Island-in-the-Mists. Some of the time Ashra was aware. By the fifth day, her constant cough was productive, her mouth filling with streaky gobs of greenish-yellow pus.
Tsering had dozens of patients to attend to: she could not stay and nurse Ashra, and her obligations pulled at her, making her heart itchy with anxiety whenever she paused too long. But Ashra herself was an important obligation, a proof of the validity of their approach. And when she lived through the sixth day, Tsering started to feel something she would rather not. The faint tickle of hope.
Hope, that mist-demon leading you into even worse betrayal and despair.
She cupped Ashra’s shoulders in her arm as the Aezin woman wracked and retched around the foulness rotting inside her. “You must sit up,” she counseled. “Sit up, so it can come out.”
She couldn’t tell if Ashra heard her, or if she struggled to hold herself upright because it felt slightly less awful. She didn’t have the strength to clutch the stained cloth to her lips; Tsering did that for her, while Ashra choked so hard she vomited the froth of an empty stomach.
Tsering caught that in the cloth, too, heat and moisture she’d rather not think about. When Ashra’s racking ceased—or rather, abated, because it would not be long before another bout ensued—in heaving gasps, Tsering examined the product. She was hardened—a wizard didn’t survive her apprenticeship turning guano piles for saltpeter and dissecting corpses quickly before they could rot too much with a weak stomach.
Her gorge still heaved.
There in the yellow froth of bile, the strings of rot-scented pus, were tiny irregular scarlet shapes that Tsering at first—heart dropping—took for clots of arterial blood. She poked them with a corner of the cloth, though, and found them firm, not jellylike. Rubbing one clean, she amended that opinion. Not just firm. Hard.