Shattered Pillars (30 page)

Samarkar reached down into those stones and tapped that strength as a tree grows deep roots to tap water. She still couldn’t breathe, but she used the borrowed energy to draw herself up strong, to spread her arms like straining branches. She was dying—dying faster now, as her body used up what reserves it had—but she would meet that eventuality on her feet, as a Wizard of Tsarepheth.

Ancient disciplines of meditation slowed her heart, her breath. She held the emptiness within her, the darkness before her mind’s eye. She held her memories of her instruction in patience and silence at the hands of Tsering, of Hong-la, of all her other teachers. At the hands of her father, her brother … her husband, of whom she told herself—this once—to feel no wrath and no bitterness and no grief. It had happened. It was done. She had lived and remained Samarkar.

Intention and the lack of intention; mindfulness and no mind at all. Magic lay in the tension between those spaces, in the otherwise senses and the esoteric understanding of two things that did not admit of one another at all.

Air, like fire, was one of the five elemental processes. Of all of them, only earth could not be created by a wizard. Samarkar could make air—but it was a self-limiting process. She was already wretchedly tired. She would exhaust herself before this conflagration did.

And when she failed, they all would die.

She needed a more permanent solution. The heat dried her skin before sweat could form on it. Her throat felt as desiccated as the Great Salt Desert. A voice rang through the emptiness of her awareness, her receptivity.
When a fire burns up air, Samarkar, where does the air go?

The voice was that of Tsering-la. Samarkar wanted to strain after the answer, but she made herself quiet again. Distantly, she was aware that Temur had circled Bansh around within the hemisphere of hard light she still—somehow—sustained. That the mare had gone to her knees, and that Hrahima had caught Temur’s hand when he would have reached for Samarkar.

“She is doing all she can,” the tiger gasped.

The flames were mindless, spiritless. Though they roared and crackled like living things, you could not call them hungry: They had no intention, no will. They just were. They consumed to exist, they existed because they consumed. Like any living thing, but they were a mock life at best.

She thought of the delicate work of combining sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal into black powder with all its potential to burn at a rate ferocious enough to send a rocket into the sky or a flintlock ball through a man’s head. But even black powder would not burn under a bell jar, if most of the air were removed by a bellows fitted with a one-way valve.

When a fire burns up air, where does it go? When a lung breathes in air, where does it go?

It wasn’t destroyed, because when you breathed in, you breathed out again. But some essence was consumed from it, some vital sustaining component. It combined with something. Air, like fire, was an essential process.

And what was combined, magic could take apart again.

Samarkar reached out through her wards—not into the fire this time, but through it, beneath it, to the char and crumpled ruins. She could feel now that it wasn’t the stone houses themselves that burned, but the wooden joists and rafters and furnishings within, roofs thatched with reeds from the silted, marshy mouth of the river that emptied into the Strait of Asitaneh opposite the city. There: the air she needed was there. The process had combined itself with the process of earth, releasing the processes of fire and—Samarkar was surprised to notice—water, and producing as a by-product ash and char.

Samarkar thought she could release the process of air from ash: it was a simple enough procedure to manipulate earth to control the other processes. That was the foundation of most wizardry—that, and the wizard’s trade of the ability to generate life for the ability to manipulate it. But she also thought—and this was a new principle, at least to her, though there was no telling what Hong-la and Yongten-la knew and had not yet shared—that she could convert the process of water back into the process of air, at least partially.

Those operations would expend a good deal less of her energy and concentration than creating air. She could sustain them for longer and keep walking the while. She would just have to keep the fire from flaring up in response to the fresh source of air—

It was a chance at survival.

“Guide me,” she gasped to Brother Hsiung, groping toward him. She felt his meaty hand on her elbow again, the grip of callused fingers. He stepped forward. He staggered, gasping, but he drew her after.

Samarkar was blind within the glare of her otherwise sight. She groped with senses that weren’t, exactly, and felt the process of air trapped within the substance of ash. She took the bonds within fingers that weren’t, exactly, and though those linkages resisted at first she inserted her awareness into them and asked them to separate. They snapped as easily as she would have snapped a twig.

The space within her shell of light began to fill with sweet, sweet air. The first breath burned scoured lungs; the second rushed in cool and healing. Strength filled her and purpose came with the strength. Her flagging endurance rekindled and her protective shell of hard light pulsed outward, growing. More, more. She surrounded them all with safety, built a haven, let Hsiung lead her at a sedate walk now. They were no longer running before the flames, under the embrace of the flames.

The flames were dying back. With her otherwise sight, Samarkar could see that they were fading, that the process of fire was returning to a potential.

“Sun Within,” Hrahima whispered.

Samarkar had heard the tiger sarcastic, angry, weary, worried. She had never heard her sound overawed before, but she could not allow herself to be distracted. Not now, as the flames flagged, as the path before them opened.

“Go,” she whispered. “Just go.”

They went, the baked and shattered cobblestones crumbling beneath their feet, heat rising to sear feet in boots. Samarkar leaned heavily on Brother Hsiung; after a little time, Hrahima simply picked her up in arms like young trees and carried her as if she were a tired child—armor and all.

She did not know how long Hrahima bore her up; she did know that she struggled when the tiger would have set her on her feet. But Hrahima soothed her, a rough hand combing her hair, and said “Tcha, Monkey-Wizard, you have done the thing. We are safe. Let it go.”

Samarkar opened her eyes and closed them again. The world spun. She leaned heavily, her feet on the stones that were not, now, crumbling. She could not tell if the nausea caused the dizziness or the dizziness the nausea. She could not tell if she was—exactly—conscious. She was determined in the very least that she would not vomit now, and perfectly aware of just how ridiculous that determination was. As if these people would think less of her at this point, just from watching her barfing up her toes.

Surely, they were beyond all that. But she was once-princess, and princesses were not seen to puke.

“See what you have done, Monkey-Wizard,” Hrahima said, gentle claws beneath her chin.

Samarkar shook her head gingerly. “Can’t.” The world behind her eyes spun.

“Samarkar,” Temur said. “You have to look.”

His encouragement did what Hrahima’s touch could not, although Samarkar herself found it ridiculous. Was she a love-struck girl, that something so simple as the fact of a lover could make her step beyond what she thought herself capable of?

She opened her eyes. She blinked. The night above was garish with stars, a half-moon reflecting off the black water of the vacant slips before her. A broad avenue separated the façades of shops and warehouses from the harbor, and through the acrid stink of smoke rose the bitter-sharp tang of the sea.

“Oh,” she said, and let the magic splash from around them, its light falling to earth to run in lazy rivulets between cobblestones before dissipating into faintly luminescent curls of mist.

“Not that,” Hrahima said, and turned her.

The moonlight fell over a city that was not in flames, over corpses that were still curled in horrid flexion but were not charred, were not blackened into unrecognizable horror. They lay not in drifts of ash and cinder, but in rubble that had fallen under its own weight—and shone clean, whole beams protruded from the collapsed tile roofs.

“You unmade the fire,” Temur said. “You put it out. You saved Asitaneh.”

Samarkar—wobbling—nonetheless pulled herself from Hrahima’s grasp. She crossed to the nearest body—a veiled woman, her black robes reconstructed as surely as her flesh. Samarkar crouched there—more fell to her knees, if she were honest—and placed a hand on her neck beneath the cloth.

The flesh was cool. No pulse beat on her fingertips.

The nausea rose again.

“Can you…?” Hrahima asked.

Samarkar didn’t dare shake her head. She lifted her chin. A princess or a wizard was not seen to cry, either.

“A wizard cannot generate life. That is the power we relinquish in order to obtain access to all the others.”

It was only when she heard the hollow echo of her own voice that she remembered that her helm would have hidden tears.

“Tomorrow people will stand here,” said Hrahima, laying a heavy hand on her shoulder plate. “They will look upon this place as a wonder, and they will say, ‘The Wizard Samarkar did this.’”

“Did it too late,” Samarkar said.

“Not for everyone,” Temur answered. She heard him through the acrid sting of pain, of failure—

“Grieve on the ship,” said Hrahima. “Captain Kebede is waiting.”

Samarkar looked up, following the line of Hrahima’s pointing finger. The docks were deserted, but off the end of the long stone quay a ship waited under oars, sails stripped from skeletal masts. A silhouette raised a lantern at the prow.

Her eyes were so raw with smoke that the tears soothed them rather than stung.

*   *   *

Temur knew nothing of ships, and he learned nothing that night. He was too caught up in his pride of Samarkar and his worry over her as he assisted her up the gangplank, then returned for Bansh. The mare took to her second time on a ship with dignity, seeming pleased to be allowed to walk aboard this time rather than being hauled with a band under her belly.

Samarkar had leaned against the side of the ship, watching the mare walk confidently up a plank no wider than Temur’s spread arms. She lowered her nose once as if to inspect the footing, then continued on her way, not even shying when he led her through the gap in the rails. Her hooves clopped hollowly on the decking. Temur leaned against her warm side, breathing in the musky sweetness of hot horse that rose from under the reek of filthy smoke from the unburned city. As sailors closed the gap behind them, he dug in his jacket for a few slivers of dried fruit and the mutton-fat sweets he’d had Ato Tesefahun’s cooks make up for her. He offered them to Bansh on an open palm.

She whuffled them up, her whiskers tickling.

Samarkar had pulled her helm off once they were safe aboard the ship. Her wizard’s collar caught the moonlight, or perhaps Samarkar herself was still emitting a faint residual illumination.

“She’s not real,” Samarkar said, shaking her head. Her braids had uncoiled from their pins and moved across the shoulders of her armor.

Temur scratched under Bansh’s mane, grit and ash wedging beneath his nails. “You’re telling me.”

Hrahima and Brother Hsiung were helping the crew cast off, although it seemed that the lines had already been untied and were only held in readiness to leave by pairs of sailors. Temur would have moved to assist, but from the muttered instructions of one large, dark man he understood that he would be best disposed managing the horse for now. The mare didn’t need much gentling, but after that run through the burning dark Temur was content to stand quietly for a while. Soon enough he’d have to lead her into whatever stall had been provided—he hoped it wasn’t in the hold—but for now he could watch limber, half-naked men scramble over the railing and drop into what must be a dinghy below.

Someone threw down a line. Temur watched as it went taut, and the much larger sailing vessel began to edge hesitantly away from the pier, out into the dark water dotted with other vessels. The aftermath of the fire benefited them in this way: it would be no trouble at all to slip from the harbor in this confusion of ships.

He looked up when he felt Samarkar beside him. She let the back of her gauntleted hand brush his naked one and said, “What sort of a vessel is this?”

Temur turned his head to look the length of it. They’d discovered on the brief voyage across the strait that she knew no more about sailing ships than he did, but this one looked large to his uneducated eye. Assuming the crew were all in sight—which seemed likely, the last few scrambling over the rail to come aboard as it moved with majestic slowness from the dock—there might have been as many as thirty men working and living aboard.

The ship rose to ornately carved finials fore and aft. Temur had thought the Aezin folk subject to the Scholar-God, She who could not be represented in art—but this black wood, adorned with beaten gold, showed a dozen or so semihuman faces bearing expressions ranging from a fearful snarl to tragic weeping. As they came through the bobbing vessels that had withdrawn from the quay for fear of flames, the men who had been rowing scrambled aboard and the dinghy itself was hauled up and made fast to the rail.

The ship had three masts, each supporting a long frail-seeming yard rigged parallel to the line of her hull. The mariners—every color of the rainbow, from burnished Aezin copper-black to one who might have been an albino, his light hair shone so in the dark—bustled about unfurling the sharply angled triangular sails. Those of the ship that had brought Temur, Samarkar, and the others to Asitaneh had been off-white, the color of bleached linen. These were painted richly with scenes that rippled and tossed and seemed to come alive in the light from the deck lanterns and those lanterns hauled aloft.

The sails bellied; Bansh snorted as the ship surged beneath them like a startled mare. As easily as that, they were under way north and east, toward the port of Asmaracanda.