Authors: Elizabeth Bear
The dragon winked, each great papery eyelid scrolling down in turn along its right side, and vanished as if a strong wind had blown through and scattered it.
Tsering-la stood staring, one hand outstretched, until someone behind her cleared his throat and she almost jumped out of her boots. She spun in place, that hand smacking into the battlement, and clutched it to her chest with a pained—and embarrassed—wince.
“Yongten-la,” she said. Of course it would be the elegant little head of her order who stood before her, hands folded inside his threadbare sleeves to ward away the evening chill. “I was just—”
“Talking to Great Compassion Turquoise Stone?”
Tsering forgot the sting of her hand. “You know him? You know his
name
?”
Yongten-la shrugged. “Shall I order you to sleep, Tsering-la? Your eyes rattle in their sockets.”
“No,” she said. “Not yet. I was looking for Hong-la, to ask his opinion…”
“Will mine do?”
She nodded. How this little man could so intimidate her—
“Ashra, the Aezin and Qersnyk woman … she is not yet dead. And her healing beer will be ready in three days. I was going to ask Hong-la if he thought we should start more surgeries, on the worst affected, the closest to—”
—
hatching.
It stuck in her throat; she couldn’t choke it up. Barbed as one of those demonspawn.
His hands emerged from his sleeves; his fingers laced together. “Yes,” he said. “Ask for volunteers. I suppose there will be many, so also begin organizing a surgical corps.”
He turned away.
“Yongten-la!”
Looked back over his shoulder. “Tsering-la?”
“Me?”
He tipped his head and left words hanging behind him as he walked into the mist again. “Are you not a Wizard of Tsarepheth?”
* * *
Tsering’s initial contact with the Qersnyk and her friendship with Ashra had made her the unofficial liaison between the Citadel and the refugees, so it was no surprise when Tsareg Altantsetseg sent a pony-mounted child to summon her. A Qersnyk never walked where he could ride. Tsering suspected there were some whose feet might never have touched the earth, having gone directly from cradle board to saddle.
She returned with the young messenger, walking while he rode, his feet sticking out as he straddled the pony’s roan barrel. The horse betrayed no uncertainty in shuffling across the Wreaking, hoofbeats muffled by the drifts of ash, and the child was as fearless.
Tsering still had to concentrate on the dignity of her black coat and collar to make it across without carefully edging one foot in front of the other—and what she really wanted to do was get down on her hands and knees and crawl.
As they approached the Qersnyk camp, however, she noticed something new: a narrow person on horseback, his saddle decked with eight elaborate blue knots, was riding the edge of the camp. His snowflake-spotted bay was obviously accustomed to the strange pastimes of her human companion. The mare stood solidly as the rider dabbed symbols on rocks, wielding a long pole with a horsehair pad on the tip. Whatever he was using for paint looked like fresh blood and smelled of mare’s urine. Each rock he daubed had evidence of previous symbols layered underneath. Judging by the number that had appeared since the last time Tsering visited the camp, he or his coreligionists must have been updating them daily.
Tsering remembered reading that the Qersnyk shamans—they had a different term for them: shaman-rememberer, that was it—were all third-sexed. She glanced with a scientist’s curiosity at the person painting what she took to be wards about the camp as she passed, but he looked like any lean, clean-shaven young man to her, eyes already crinkling to a Qersnyk squint against strong sun and far horizons.
He glanced at her—appraisingly, or wondering what she thought of his work. Tsering rapidly jerked her eyes front again. He would not know from her clothing that she had no power and thus no otherwise sight and could not judge the effectiveness of his sorcery. This was intentional—the Wizards of Tsarepheth were careful by no outward design to show which of their number had quickened to their power and which had not.
Though she avoided the shaman-rememberer’s gaze, he fell in behind Tsering and the child and walked wordlessly with them all the way to where Altantsetseg sat beside a fire of animal waste, enthroned on a battered old saddle that was all but hidden in the robes in which the old woman had wrapped herself. An enormous heavy-headed mastiff shaggy as a haycock lay beside her feet, tufts of undercoat fluttering in the breeze. Brief summer was ending in the Steles of the Sky, but it was still not more than cool, and that only at night. Tsareg Altantsetseg’s drawn-in posture and evident sense of chill served as a painful reminder that she was old, and that she had endured an arduous journey that many younger women would not have survived.
Altantsetseg summoned the child down from his pony with a wave of her hand and directed Tsering and the shaman-rememberer to sit on rugs by her side. Although they were on the upwind side of the smoky dung fire, eddies of wind blew acrid fumes back in Tsering’s face now and again. She accepted the tea Altantsetseg pushed on her and settled herself on her haunches. The shaman-rememberer chose to hunker, buttocks resting on elevated heels, showing boots worn almost through the soles where the stirrups pressed. He too sipped steaming tea without comment.
Altantsetseg passed a few moments fussing with saddle stitchery before aiming her shrewd, bright squint directly at Tsering and saying—through the child, who spoke Uthman very well—“This is the shaman-rememberer Jurchadai. He believes he has developed a ward against the demon-sickness that will prevent new cases. He would like to share it with you, and he would like the opportunity to place wards himself around the city and around the hospital where your sick ones are.”
Tsering considered. She might have deferred to Hong-la or Yongten-la: in fact, a part of her was very sure she should. But then she remembered Yongten telling her to take charge, and nodded. Speaking to Altantsetseg while the child translated, she said, “I will speak to the head of my order. I believe what you suggest can be done.”
* * *
The passages of ancient Erem stretched endlessly, iteratively, through the red rocks of the canyon walls. They were not plain hewn rock. Oh, they were hewn rock, indeed, but here there were grand stairs and echoing halls, stone pierced and pieced until it seemed to hover on moth wings in the vaulted shadows. Shrines and stone chairs lined the walls, benches carved from the floor of each atrium. Some rooms had counters, fireplaces. Some had frames that must once have supported mattresses for the elevated beds that Edene had seen once or twice in the parlors of rich foreign merchants in Qarash. But now rope and fabric and ticking had long since rotted away, crumbled to dust in the dry desert air.
As she walked, she talked with the djinn. As good as his word, he would not tell her from whence he came—but he told her that Temur lived, that Temur still sought her, that Clan Tsareg had come among the Steles of the Sky and now bargained for safety there and fought pestilence. He would not go to do her bidding—she would have sent him with messages, with warnings, with reassurances—but he told her that al-Sepehr supported Qori Buqa, and he told her that Qori Buqa rebuilt Qarash.
“Djinn,” she said. “Would you remove the ring from my hand, if I asked you to?”
He paused, startle-still, and regarded her with bottomless eyes. “Are you requiring such a thing of me?”
The ring burned on her hand. “Why would I give it up?” she said. “That would be foolish.”
“So foolish,” he agreed, his tone lightly mocking. But then, his tone usually was.
Edene wasn’t sure why she was driven to pace, what she was looking for. The restlessness seemed to emanate from the taut bulge of her womb, from the ring on her hand. A shadowy army of ghulim followed and preceded her, their horny curve-nailed paws clicking and scuffing on stone. Edene’s footsteps did not echo, and neither did the djinn’s, though the twisting light that wreathed him cast her shadow before her, behind her, and off to every side. It writhed among the silhouettes of the ghulim.
She wondered which was Besha Ghul—they all looked gray and twisted in these shadows. As she wondered, one ghul detached itself from the mass and came to stand before her. “My Queen?”
“I want to go outside,” said Edene.
“The suns are high,” said Besha Ghul. “They will burn you.”
The ring pricked on Edene’s finger. “They will not harm me.” She stated it with the certainty with which she knew it. “I am the Ruined Queen. Nothing of Erem can harm me. And we must drill, my soldiers. You must practice for war.”
At Edene’s right hand, the djinn blazed silently, observing.
“Not in the daysuns of Erem,” said Besha Ghul.
Edene raised her hand. She imagined them, thousands of ghulim in ranks, gray-skinned, flews skinned up from yellow teeth and slaver flying when they shook heavy heads. What man would not quail before such an army as that? “No harm will come to you, by my command.”
Could a ghul look doubtful? That long dog’s face rearranged itself in ways that struck Edene as fraught with doubt. She felt a catch of rage in her throat and swallowed it: did a good master show anger at a hound because the hound was uncertain? Punish a dog or a horse for fear, and they only grew more fearful. Would it be any different with a man—or a ghul, for that matter?
The ring squeezed on her hand.
Punish disrespect, O Queen.
“You are a thing,” she told it. “You do not command one born under the Eternal Sky, one swaddled in the veil of Mother Night.”
When she looked up again, both ghul and djinn were observing her with identical quizzical head tilts. They reminded her of her dog, Sube, and a pang of longing for the animal struck her like a blow to the chest. The babe thrashed in response. She felt the pressure of its head against her lower back and winced.
Not long now,
said the ring.
No, not long. Soon she would be delivered. Soon she would go to find Temur and bring an unholy army to kneel at the feet of his mare. She imagined him in the Padparadscha Seat and smiled.
“Djinn,” she said. “We go to review the troops. Clothe me as befits a queen.”
“Silks and satins?” he asked, eyes sparkling like sapphires. “White brocade?”
“Armor,” she said. “And flame.”
14
Samarkar pulled hard light around herself running, around the running monk, the running Cho-tse, around the running mare and the would-be Khagan hunched in her saddle. Smoke and flames licked up from the buildings on both sides, groping across the scorched street to stroke the hemispherical shell of clean air Samarkar held close to them. She filtered smoke and the searing toxins from combustion, cooled the air to make it breathable, and made sure all four of them had room to spread out and run.
It was … exhausting. Not the hardest thing she had ever done, she who had swum the straits of the White Sea, she who had survived her own neutering, she who had sat three days in the dark and cold to find her power. Not the hardest, perhaps, but one of the most strenuous. She wished she could just uncreate the process of the fire, but there was too much of it: a conflagration of this scale was beyond her abilities to summon or dispel. This azure shell protecting them was the best available compromise.
Her feet dragged. She staggered. Brother Hsiung caught her elbow and hauled her up, giving her one hard shake.
Keep running.
Nothing would follow them through this fire—nothing sane, anyway, nothing without the peculiar magic of a Wizard of Tsarepheth—but since it
was
the city that burned, against all odds, they still might beat the flames to the docks. They still might find a ship there, waiting, unless Captain Kebede had done the sane and sensible thing and cut his losses.
Well, if worst came to worst, Samarkar thought, they could swim for it. Between Bansh and herself, they could probably keep Temur’s head above water. And did tigers not swim?
She let Brother Hsiung guide her and ran.
The cobbles were searing hot underfoot, and though she bled energy from the superheated surroundings to feed her protective mantle, there was less and less breathable air for her to filter in. The flames consumed it as surely as did she and her friends—and far, far faster.
Bansh charged before them, her hooves clattering wildly on the cobbles, her sparse tail flicking in distress. She respected the wall of light, however, and though Samarkar would have expected any horse to panic amid all that fire, Bansh held her head and kept moving forward.
Well, they had known already she was not like other mares. Samarkar, raised in the land of the Six Thousand, knew how often spirits intervened in human existence. This one, at least, had proved herself uncompromisingly benevolent.
Corpses lay in the gutters, human and animal, charred and curled into flexed positions by the heat. Whether the smoke had killed them or the flames, the result was the same: they cooked on hot stones in the heart of the blaze. Samarkar fixed her eyes on the middle distance and pushed forward.
Bansh’s constrained rush was slowing to a stagger as well, her sides swelling and falling like the bladder of a bellows as she fought for breath. Samarkar felt Hsiung’s feet dragging. He leaned on her now as much as held her up. Hrahima dropped to all fours, her heavy tail counterbalancing her body, her hands not so much bearing her weight as pushing her forward.
There was nothing but flames before them. Samarkar could not see the end of the blaze.
A black vortex threatened to close around her vision. Wheezing, Samarkar felt her knees under her hands, pushed upward, could not straighten. The safe blue light of her spell wavered, sagged, reformed closer after admitting an eyelash-curling pulse of heat—pushed in upon the little band by her exhaustion, her suffocation, the unbelievable ferocity of the fire.
The idea came to her on a breath that seemed to do her no good at all. The flames were breathing all their air, suffocating her and her little band of allies. But there was heat in the stones beneath her feet, and heat was energy. What the fire could breath, she and the others could breathe as well. And could she not suffocate the flames as surely as the flames suffocated her?