Authors: Elizabeth Bear
When Tsering, furtively, kissed her forehead, patches of skin adhered to Tsering’s lips as if she had kissed sunburn.
The next morning, having snatched a few desperate, desperately needed hours of sleep in the safety of the Citadel, Tsering returned to find Ashra’s pallet occupied by a man in his middle years, still well enough to prop himself on his elbows and call for water in a weary tone. Tsering brought him his water, felt his forehead, inspected his chest. When she was done, she found the lay brother who had charge of this ward and asked where the Aezin woman had gone.
She had to ask three times before he understood her.
“To the pits,” he said finally, and Tsering’s eyes closed. It made no difference, she supposed, if a body went to mass burial. Everyone here dying was someone that somebody had known.
But then the lay brother blinked bleary eyes and said, “No, wait. Hong-la had left a note that if she died, he wished to autopsy her. She’s been taken back to his surgery.”
“Thank you,” she said, turning before the words had quite left her mouth.
She didn’t have the strength to run to the pavilion that Hong-la was using for dissections and as a laboratory, but she trudged as fast as her feet would bear her. When she came upon him, Hong-la was laying back the sheet to begin his first incision. He caught her eyes across Ashra’s body and frowned.
“I am a wizard,” Tsering said, amazed at her own temerity. “I have a right to be here.”
Silently, he reached out to the tray his assistant was holding and extended a scalpel to her, handle first. He waited until she accepted it to say, “When we’re done, she must be buried with the others. We’ve not enough wood to burn them all, not if we burned all Tsarepheth.”
“What does it matter?” Tsering said. “She’s gone on ahead. And she followed the Scholar-God or the Eternal Sky anyway, if she followed anyone. I don’t think she’d wish to burn.”
* * *
Temur and Samarkar sought Juvaini Ala-Malik in the Museum of Man. An imposing edifice, it offered a forbidding façade to the street, glittering white and windowless five times Temur’s mounted height. Only a grilled gateway broke that expanse between the road and the blue-and-violet tiled roof. Beyond the arch, a long tunneled entryway could be glimpsed, leading to a sort of paradise. A cool draught blew from that inner courtyard, air with enough moisture in it to lay the dust of the street. Green leaves rustled on the other end of the passage and one star-shaped white flower as big as Temur’s palm glowed translucent in filtered sun.
Temur felt a painful pang of homesick longing for the lush gardens of Song, where so much of his youth had been spent—fighting, often, but in other pursuits as well—and in the company of his brother, mentor, protector. Their father being dead, Qulan had been more a parent to Temur than any man. And Temur had been able to repay him only with release from a terrible undeath.
It was something, at least, and usually that was a comfort. But at this moment, with the odor of sweet flowers and sweet water heavy on the air, Temur felt a pain in his chest more than the equal of any pain in his leg.
It is for Qulan I do this, as much as anyone.
Samarkar, without looking at him, laid a hand on his calf above the boot. It still surprised him to find her alert to every nuance of his moods, even when he tried to hide them—but then, he found he could tell a lot from the pinch of her forehead or the smoothness of her cheeks, as well. “Do you need help dismounting?”
He shook his head. The wound would stiffen, and tomorrow he’d be limping—but, for now, the leg would bear his weight. He swung from Bansh’s saddle, her reins looped loosely in his hand, and approached the gate.
In Uthman, he called for the porter.
The man who approached was green-eyed above his veil, giving Temur a bad moment, but the veil was white, and the porter was too tall and angular to resemble the Nameless assassin in more than that one detail. He paused within the grille—an arrow would have reached him, but Temur’s bow was on the saddle, and a blade would not—and said, “Your business, please?”
“We come with a message from Ato Tesefahun,” Temur said, as his grandfather had instructed. “We are to deliver it to Juvaini Ala-Malik and no other. I was told to give you the following words: flame, flame, stone.”
“Wait within,” said the doorkeeper, stepping forward to slide the bolts that held the grille closed at top and bottom. They were as long as Temur’s forearm, as thick as bones. He shared a glance with Samarkar above their veils, wondering what sort of a museum this was that needed a castle’s defenses within a walled sacred city where only the faithful were supposed to come and go.
He might have hesitated, but Bansh exhaled softly and stepped forward, lowering her head to enter the tunnel. She seemed to nod to the doorkeeper—standing behind the gate—and surely Temur could show no less courage and no less courtesy than his mare.
He hurried to keep up, and paused beside her before a second gate as the first was closed and bolted behind them. Samarkar stopped right behind him, close against the side of the mare.
“Wait here,” the porter said, and disappeared behind a door in one side wall. If he noticed the blood revealed on Temur’s trousers when he moved, he gave no sign.
At least they could get out again if they needed, for now they were on the same side as the bolts. And the shade was blessedly cool.
Temur leaned against Bansh’s warm side, easing his wounded leg, and let the cool air fill his lungs while he waited. He wanted to sing her a soothing song, but that would have been for him more than her, given how calmly she stood—with relaxed neck and one hoof cocked. And it certainly would have given away his ethnicity to anyone who hadn’t already noticed his saddle, his accent, and the distinctive breeding of his mare.
Although it wasn’t as if he would be the first Qersnyk to convert to the Falzeen sect.
The wait wasn’t long. Just long enough to make it a challenge not to shift and twist with tension while he waited. The quick patter of footsteps heralded the porter’s return before the door to the passage opened cautiously—in deference to anyone who might be standing behind it, Temur presumed.
The porter had brought a bucket of water. He set it beside Bansh’s head and said, “The mare will be well enough here. Professor Ala-Malik invites you within.”
* * *
Temur did not like leaving Bansh, but he saw little choice now: he liked even less the idea of letting Samarkar go into the museum without him.
They ascended a stair that turned back on itself every few feet. On every second landing, there was a door, and at the third of these the porter paused. He drew a ring of keys from his belt and unlocked the passageway, then beckoned them onward. Temur shared another glance with Samarkar, who remained silent still—protecting her pose as a man.
Few would guard a place so well unless there were something to guard it from.
This door opened on another white-walled corridor, the stone underfoot grimed with untold centuries of ground-in dirt. They paused before an aged wooden door that had once been painted red, and the porter raised a ringed hand and knocked in the western fashion—with the back. He must have heard something through the thick wood that Temur did not, because a moment later he depressed a brass lever and swung the door open inward, then stepped aside to allow Temur and Samarkar access.
Before Temur even rounded the door, he smelled slightly rotten meat and stale blood. He might have recoiled, but Samarkar was right behind them, and the messengers they were playing—the messengers they were in fact—would not be put off by a sorcerer’s experiments.
Or perhaps anyone would have, because when they stepped into the room, the first thing Temur glimpsed was a skinned cadaver laid on its back on a stone-topped table. A round man wearing a butcher’s leather apron stood over it, his right hand clutching a pair of heavy secateurs while his left lifted open a plate of the corpse’s severed ribs as if it were a trapdoor. Horn windows let the room be bright and yet still cool; a shadowless glow bathed them all as Temur paused within the door.
“I am Temur,” he said. “This is Samarkar.”
“Ah,” the man who must be Juvaini Ala-Malik said. “Come in, come in.” He beckoned—unfortunately, with the hand still holding the bone-severing shears. A gobbet of pink flesh flipped off the blades and the man set the shears down hastily. “Shut the door behind you.”
Samarkar did, while Temur waited for her. Only when she had returned to his side did he start forward.
She seemed utterly unperturbed by the bloody mess on the dissection table before them. Temur thought he’d seen worse, but only on the battlefield. That was different than this, from a man whose skin had been cleanly and comprehensively peeled from his flesh. Or perhaps it was just that Temur had seen this in his dreams.
“Is that the work of the Sorcerer-Prince?” he asked.
Juvaini laid his shears down and let the chest-plate hinge closed. “It’s certainly the work of someone who wants us to
think
of Sepehr. But if anyone is wearing this poor bastard’s skin—well, you would think they would have done something else with the corpse other than leave it in a market square. Killing and impersonating a man would be more effective if nobody knew to be on their guard, wouldn’t you think?”
Samarkar’s shoulders rose and fell under her robes. “It depends,” she said, stepping around Temur to get a better look at the corpse. “Who’d want to believe their own loved one had been replaced by a monster?”
“A woman,” said Juvaini. “Rasan.”
He moved as if to draw a veil across his face, and then seemed to realize both that his hands were daubed with gore and that he was not wearing a head wrap. His thick shock of hair and luxurious goatee had probably been glossy black once. Now they were silver-bright. He seemed to have been composed of fat fruits pushed together on straws—round shoulders and a round body set atop round legs, each joint of his fingers plump as a berry. Nevertheless, he moved lightly on the balls of his feet as he stepped away from the cadaver, stripping his apron off, and crossed to a basin by the wall.
“A wizard,” said Samarkar. “And that is why I accompany Re Temur here and we intrude upon your research. Ato Tesefahun told us you might be able to tell us how to breach the defenses of Ala-Din.”
“Ah,” he said. He paused, frowning at a dry waterspout as Samarkar moved to operate the pump handle for him. She churned it up and down; on the third stroke a spurt of rusty water rewarded her efforts. Professor Ala-Malik dipped a brush into a pot of slimy brownish lye soap and began to scrub the blood from his fingers and arms. As the pink, frothy water ran away, he said, “And you think you can take a stronghold that has withstood the intentions of such conquerors as Temusan Khagan and the first Uthman Caliph?”
“I don’t want to take it,” Temur said. “I just want to get into it and get something back out again.”
The round-bellied scholar considered. “For a friend of Tesefahun—”
Temur lowered his veil. “I am his grandson.”
Water splashed his cuffs as Juvaini whirled. Concentration creased his face a moment, and then the man nodded. “Kebede’s son?”
“Ashra’s,” Temur said.
That got a longer, sterner stare, then a curt nod. “Ancient history, then. It’d take a clever swindler to unearth that. Open the second drawer in the map chest, wizard, and remove the bottom map from the tray. My hands are still too moist.”
Temur watched as Samarkar stepped up to a chest of drawers marked by wide, shallow apertures and began to do as Juvaini directed. She jerked her gloved hands back as she reached into the drawer, though, and cursed softly.
Wet hands or not, he rushed to her side. For his bulk, he moved as if he weighed no more than an inflated bladder. But she was already waving him back.
“Museum beetles,” she said disgustedly. She hovered her hands over the drawer, and Temur saw the blue fire of her craft surround them. Something rustled and clicked within, and a moment later she gingerly insinuated her hands once again. She drew out a ragged-edged sheet of vellum, translucent and mottled in even this indirect light. Temur could see the damage the beetles had done to it, the gnawed channels and nibbled edges. But the ink on its scraped surface was black and fine, the lettering laid on by a certain hand—he could tell that much, even if he could not read it.
Samarkar brushed dead beetles a bit bigger than a grain of barley from the surface and laid the map upon a table that did not currently bear a partially dissected body up.
“You killed the beetles,” Juvaini said, drawing back from her.
“Wizardry cannot create or destroy the process of life,” Samarkar said primly. “I did, however, evaporate the water from within their bodies. They’re quite desiccated now.”
Temur limped forward, feeling Juvaini’s eyes fasten on his awkward gate. The bloody trousers flashed red beneath the hem of his jacket with each stride. “You should have that seen to,” Juvaini said.
“After we look at the map.”
“Humor me,” said Juvaini. “Tesefahun would hardly forgive me if I let his grandson’s wound take a fever while I was standing within arm’s reach. Sit on that stool and pull your trousers down. Madam—”
“She stays,” said Temur, unwilling to let them be out of each other’s sight in this potentially treacherous environment.
“It’s all right,” said Samarkar. “I am his woman. I’ve seen that thigh before.”
Juvaini paused in his bustling about, silk thread and a pair of forceps balanced in one hand. “A Wizard of Tsarepheth,” he said, while Temur was still contemplating how he felt to have her so plainly state the relationship, and in such blatant terms.
“The one does not preclude the other.” Samarkar glanced significantly at the wealth of soft flesh ringing Juvaini’s wrists. “Do you take an oath of poverty?”
He smiled. “Not as such,” he answered. “So. Samarkar. That’s the name of the Rasan rogue once-princess, if I have it right.”
“I am the once-princess,” Samarkar said. “Whether I’m a rogue or not is … more a matter of opinion.”