Authors: Elizabeth Bear
A horse has four legs, Qori Buqa, and the sky has four pillars. You must unite my children. You and your brother al-Sepehr. I have chosen you.
“I have chosen you,” Saadet mouthed mockingly. The stream of incense faded; the woman’s soft, persuasive voice as well. Qori Buqa relaxed against her hip.
Gently, she disentangled herself and slipped from the bed. In her trouser pocket was a stone drenched in blood; she could use it to contact al-Sepehr. It was time for her to spend a little time away from Qori Buqa, to allow his desire for her—and his greed and narcissism—to be watered by her absence.
That, and there was word from Asitaneh. The city was Nameless, and Qori Buqa’s rival, the man who had killed Shahruz in the body, had escaped … and Nameless agents in Asitaneh believed they knew what ship he had taken.
The twins had someplace else to be.
The twins went to the window and leaned out it, into the cool night air, Qori Buqa’s snores a reassurance of continued privacy. They drew the blood-caked knot of stone from their pocket and clenched it in a bare fist.
They whispered, “al-Sepehr.”
A moment, and he was there before them, as if they saw two realms at once—the night of Qarash, and the ivory stone of an impossibly ornate palace behind al-Sepehr. Both, for the moment, seemed equally, simultaneously real.
“I have learned something interesting, Master,” said the twins—very softly. Qori Buqa had a stone of his own; if he should overhear, he would know exactly what was occurring.
“I am alone,” said al-Sepehr. “Has Qori Buqa consented to the marriage?”
“He has set a condition,” the twins said. “He will marry your adopted daughter, Master, if you can set him in the Padparadscha Seat.”
Al-Sepehr’s head rose. “The Qersnyk regalia is missing?”
“If he knew where it was,” Shahruz said dryly, “you can be sure his fanny would be in it.”
The twins reveled in their master’s dawning smile.
For the Nameless. For the world.
“Master, a question?”
“You can ask me nothing it will not be my privilege to explain, my Shahruz.”
The veil hid their flattered smile, for which the twins were grateful. “This Qersnyk conceit that a horse has four legs as the sky has four pillars—”
“Yes?”
“The Range of Ghosts, the Shattered Pillars, the Steles of the Sky. All the bastions destroyed when the first Sepehr strove with the gods.”
“What is the fourth?”
“What is the fourth, O Master?”
“There is a range near Messaline called the Bitter Root, Shahruz,” said al-Sepehr. “Possibly that is the fourth pillar of the sky. Possibly the saying does not refer to mountains at all. Perhaps someday we shall learn the answer and drink what power flows from the knowledge. Or … perhaps the Qersnyk mystics are full of shit and obsessed with horseflesh as a metaphor for everything.” He shrugged. “The Padparadscha Seat, on the other hand. That
is
real. And I think I have a source that can help us find it…”
* * *
Over the course of the voyage, Samarkar, Temur, Hrahima, and Brother Hsiung dined with Kebede many times. They learned that the crew called him Ato Kebede; when Samarkar questioned him, he laughed his dragon’s deep laugh and said, “Who is more a wizard than a man who can wield compass and sextant to find his way to Song across a trackless sea?”
And in truth, the tools of navigation fascinated Samarkar. She tried not to pester to be taught, but she might as well have tried to rein in a herd of charging horses as her curiosity. Fortunately for her, Kebede seemed to find her enthusiasm engaging, or at least amusing, and he allowed her to spend time with the pilots, although his largesse did not extend to showing her his charts. He did prove a font of information on the natural history of the sea, however. She learned the names of a dozen types of gull, and what a crab was after all, and how unusual it was to see a steppe vulture circling over the ocean, seemingly following the dhow as it beat westward crookedly, often tacking into a wind.
Hrahima, quite shocking everyone, took beautifully to life aboard ship, bending her enormous thews to haul rope and set sail and work winches so great Samarkar would have expected them to require the strength of oxen rather than men. Temur did well enough, once Samarkar convinced him that he could share her cramped bunk. In the tight spaces of the dhow, he had originally offered to sleep in Bansh’s stall. Samarkar could imagine too clearly his skull split open by staggering hooves, should the ship pitch in a storm.
Brother Hsiung suffered greatly from seasickness, the more so—Samarkar thought—because he did not complain. She’d have said “could not,” but by now she had more than enough experience with the mute monk’s communication skills to know that he was perfectly capable of getting his point across as necessary.
So she doctored him, and made herself available to Captain Kebede—whose largesse
did
extend to counseling them on how to enter Asmaracanda.
“It’s a controlled city,” said he one morning, over a breakfast of salted rice, eggs from the hens that lived in cages near the stern—fresh, and boiled in seawater—pigeon peas, and pickled vegetables that Samarkar was still learning the names of. “Especially given your intelligence that it’s returned to the caliph…”
“Whoever the caliph may be,” Temur supplied.
Kebede flashed them a wide-mouthed grin. His teeth were tortoiseshell-banded like those of Tesefahun. Samarkar had thought it a trait common to all Aezin until she had met Temur, whose teeth were as white and strong as any Qersnyk’s.
“It’s a holy city,” Kebede said. “One sect or another of Father’s religion holds it’s where their Scholar-God bodily assumed Her Prophet into Heaven.”
“I thought Ysmat of the Beads was martyred,” Samarkar asked.
Kebede shrugged, charming Samarkar. “Depends on who you ask. Can your priests always get their story straight?”
“In fact, we wizards can’t.” She scooped up egg diced over rice and peas with her fingers. A bowl of rosewater for rinsing the grease away between mouthfuls sat beside her plate, in a shallow depression carved into the table for that express purpose—lest the ship pitch and roll. “You would think a God who sends out Prophets would have a little more investment in Her worshippers getting their story straight.”
She wouldn’t have blasphemed so in front of Ato Tesefahun—being polite about other people’s deities was a survival skill she’d honed in Song—but it was obvious Kebede was an apostate, if Tesefahun had ever managed to instill belief in him at all.
“Maybe they’re all right,” Kebede said. “Who’s to say only one version of events has the truth in it?”
Samarkar almost choked on her peas. It was a sentiment she might have expected to hear from another wizard, not from a sea captain. But then she remembered that he was Ato Kebede, and swallowed. “As the spirits of Rasa can hold sway in my homeland, and those of Song in the Ten Hundred Kingdoms, you think perhaps all the sects of the Scholar-God are equally valid?”
“The Rahazeen have their own sky,” he reminded, gesturing toward a porthole. It was overcast beyond, but Samarkar took his meaning anyway. Somewhere above the clouds, a pale Rahazeen sun moved from west to east across faded heavens.
A frustrated silence dragged until Hrahima—who was not eating, except to pick at eggs—reminded, “Asmaracanda.”
“Ah yes,” said Kebede. “Whether Ysmat of the Beads was bodily translated into Heaven, or whether she was stoned to death for refusing to remove her veils—it remains a closed city to all but religious pilgrims, scholars in the service of the Scholar-God, and certain dignitaries. It is said to be one of the greatest bastions of learning in the world, but that wisdom is locked away behind white stone walls. It is full of universities and scriptoriums, and only the faithful may enter.”
“So how does it manage to be a center of trade?” Temur asked.
Kebede scooped his food up bite by bite in kishme leaves, keeping his own fingers cleaner. He chewed one such morsel thoughtfully while he considered the question. Samarkar, not caring for the kishme’s texture, preferred to use her fingers.
“There is a caravanserai without the walls,” he said. “And merchants. And a whole trade city, frankly, to support the sacred city within. Are you sure you need to get inside Asmaracanda proper?”
“There is a man there,” Samarkar said, “who Tesefahun thought could help us.”
“One of the sacred scholars, then.”
Samarkar nodded.
Kebede swallowed more rice, another leaf. “Well,” he said. “That’s simple, if not necessarily inexpensive or easy. Another feature of the sacred city is the crypts. The faithful will pay a heavy tax in order to be buried in Asmaracanda. But spaces are limited, you see, and the waiting list is long—”
“They smuggle in
bodies
?”
“They? I have two in the hold, packed in salt. It’s very simple: we dock, I unload, we buy a couple of coffins and bring them aboard under cover of other cargo. Temur and Samarkar can pose as pilgrims once they get inside. They conduct what business they must, and meanwhile Hrahima and Brother Hsiung outfit for the rest of your journey. If we make landfall on a morning tide, you could be ready to set out the following dawn, all your business accomplished.”
He smiled, chewing beatifically. Samarkar stared.
“Madam?” he asked, when strong tea had washed down the mouthful.
She shook her head as if to rattle the words loose. “You know a lot about smuggling.”
The beatific smile widened. “Hazard of the profession,” Kebede said.
* * *
I have no right
, thought Edene, and the ring whispered,
You have the right of queens.
And there were the ghulim, scattered, crying, being chased down from above by these creatures with the cold of mountain peaks and perhaps even higher places upon their wings.
They come from somewhere alien.
Beyond the sky? Edene had never before wondered what lay above the canopy of the Eternal Sky, the veil of Mother Night. And she did not have time to wonder now.
The Green Ring of Erem shone chill on her hand as she raised it, a wide band of verdigris-stained gold. She reached out with it, through it, and felt the fear and disarray of the ghulim. How could she ask them—command them—to fight and die?
Because you are their Queen, Mother of Jackals.
They are only dogs. How can they stand against these nightmares from beyond the sky?
Her answer crouched beside her, dripping blood from a lolling tongue. If Besha Ghul could rally on its own, surely these others could rally to a leader.
With a thought, Edene brought her army to heel. With a gesture, she arrayed them and sent them forward.
They could not fly, but the cold enemy must come to them to attack, and when they did, they faced three or four ghulim for every beast. The djinn ripped one from the sky with a gesture; it exploded into raining shards with a sound like crockery thrown on a stone, littering the sky and sand with knives that cut one ghul to ribbons and blinded another.
He held his hand from destroying more. Two more went down to the ghul-pack, at the cost of five ghulim. In the following heartbeat the rest wheeled and withdrew on a shimmer of shadowy, chiming wings.
Her clawed back burning now, Edene stood amid the slaughterhouse reek of spilled bowels and blood curdling on warm sand … and found no tears would come.
* * *
Kebede proved as good as his prediction, and several days later they came upon Asmaracanda with the dawn. Samarkar joined Temur and Kebede upon the forecastle to watch as the sun revealed it. The breeze had freshened; it blew the tendrils of her hair that had escaped her braids forward into her face, the edges of her mouth and the edges of her eyes. The dhow slipped up the face of pitching waves and plunged into the valleys behind them, and each time smacked glittering spray into the sky, where the wind caught them and tossed them forward. Wet sapphires gleamed in Temur’s wooly hair and splashed his beard. Samarkar knew herself similarly bejeweled.
Like Asitaneh, Asmaracanda rose from the edge of the sea. Other than that, Samarkar thought, on superficial acquaintanceship they could not have been more different.
Where Asitaneh was red stone on humped land, backed by rusty hills, Asmaracanda rose domed turquoise as peacocks and walled white as bone from a pale green land. It perched like a fishing bird above the water. The sea beat against the base of the city’s walls, which encircled the entirety of the headland upon which it rested. From that initial advantage, Asmaracanda mounted a steep hillside until it seemed one single broad-based tower, incomprehensibly vast, rising toward a shining peak.
The east behind the city glowed azure where the light ran around the rim of the world; higher, the sky was a blue so dark Samarkar despaired of finding an enamel to match. The city seemed to hover as if before a backdrop of some semiprecious stone, painted with an otherworldly light. Its pale walls reflected gold from the sun rising aft of Kebede’s dhow; its thousand thousand glass windows sparkled.
Samarkar wondered if the city had been so beautiful when Ysmat of the Beads came here to die, or to be transubstantiated—or if its current glory was the result of a thriving tourist trade and a good tax base. She could make an argument for the forbidding loveliness either way, she supposed: cause, or effect.
“There’s no place to land,” said Temur. “There are no docks.”
“The whole thing is a fortress,” Kebede agreed. He stood with them on the elevated prow, one hand upon the many-mouthed figurehead. “We’ll come around the headland to a harbor in the trade town. The harbor’s a good one but the straits are trapped. They’ll send out a pilot to guide us, so you’ll have to appear to be able seamen if you want to get a look around.”
“How do you trap a strait?” Samarkar asked, and then felt self-consciously as if it were the sort of thing a wizard should already know.
But perhaps Kebede forgave her for being an inland wizard, because he said, “Only narrow channels are navigable. Elsewhere, they’ve hauled out boulders and planted iron spars that would hull this boat faster than you could piss out a match. The caliphs were serious about defending it.”