Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“You’ll have heard that Prince Tsansong escaped the flames, then—no? Well, then, news of your family. When the emperor made to burn him, a great bird descended from the heavens and snatched him from the flames. Half the world seems to be engaged in making book on where he’ll reemerge, and if he’ll have an army at his back. I don’t suppose you have any inside information … no? Pity.”
“It’s a greater surprise to me than anyone,” Samarkar said. “We’ve been at sea some time.”
Juvaini searched her face, but seemed satisfied with what he found there. He nodded briskly and turned to Temur. “All right. Let’s see this wound.”
* * *
Juvaini picked over the wound while Samarkar observed and handed him implements, leaving Temur feeling as much a specimen as the dead man stinking on the next table over. The two or three threads of cloth he retrieved before he stitched it up made Temur feel better about having it done, however. Such foreign matter in a wound could—would—fester, take heat, take poison, and kill.
“A half-moon and you can pull the stitches,” said Juvaini to Samarkar when the line was knotted. “You know how to pull a stitch?”
Temur wasn’t sure how he could tell so plainly that Samarkar smiled behind her veil—something about the shape of the eyes. “I’m wizard enough to rid you of vermin,
and
Temur of catgut. Now can we look at the map?”
“We can,” he said, eyes narrowing as his thick silver forelock fell across them. A disconcerting spatter of blood adhered a half-dozen strands together. “But I’d like something of you in return.”
* * *
Ala-Din, drawn in plan and elevations on Juvaini’s damaged vellum by some long-dead architect, was as forbidding as its name—the Rock—suggested. And as lacking in weakness, even to Temur’s siege-trained eye. He could see why his grandfather and his uncle had both spurned to conquer it—not only was it nearly unassailable in its fastness, atop a spire surrounded on all sides by many
yart
of barren, broken land, which would make any approach painfully obvious—but there was nothing much there worth having once you got it. The Sorcerer-Prince Sepehr’s genius for an unbreakable citadel: put it somewhere nobody would have any interest in taking.
Juvaini noticed the way Temur measured the map with his thumb, figuring crossing times from the nearest terrain that would offer cover, and said, “It’s said the al-Sepehrs keep a giant bird captive, a rukh, and use its offspring as spies.”
“Funny,” said Samarkar. “That’s the second time in this conversation that a giant bird has been mentioned.”
Juvaini winked. “Care to lay odds on it being a coincidence?”
“It’s said,” Temur said, “and it’s true. The only crossing would be by night.”
“Or by magic,” said Samarkar. “But once we’re there—how do we get
in
?”
“Ahh,” said Juvaini. “Here’s where I can help a grandson of Tesefahun.” Carefully, he shifted the bowls of sand and the ink-pots and the lumpy jade toad that held the map flat, and even more carefully he turned it over. The sketch lines on the rear side were in graphite, faint and thin, and the beetle damage had rendered many of them illegible. Temur bent close, his queue falling over his shoulder beneath the disarrayed veil. He could just make out—
“Tunnels,” said Samarkar. “Tunnels in the stone under the Rock.”
“Just so!”
“But what’s to have kept al-Sepehr from sealing them up?”
Juvaini shrugged. “The grace of the Scholar-God?”
Temur smiled tightly. “In that case, I hope She doesn’t like fanatics any more than I do.”
* * *
Hrahima had thought—foolishly in retrospect, but the heat of battle was never the best place for careful decisions—that she might induce the Nameless sergeant (or commander or whatever they called their field officers) to reveal where their horses and gear were stowed. Of course it didn’t work out that way. He was Nameless, which was to say fanatical, and even a display of Hrr-tchee teeth wasn’t likely to convince him. And having escaped reliance on the Sun Within to save Hsiung’s life, she was even less inclined to bow her neck to the Immanent Destiny merely to obtain information. She thought she could have overpowered the Rahazeen assassin’s will and intellect fairly easily—though it was possible (even likely) that the Nameless had disciplines that would protect them—but …
No. It would take more than that to break her convictions.
Also, there was no good place among the caravanserais of the trade town in which to question a detainee quietly. Or rather, there most likely was, but she didn’t have access to it, or even the local knowledge to find out where it was. So she did what any sensible Hrr-tchee would have done.
She rather thought Hsiung wouldn’t approve of her tearing the Nameless’s throat out, so instead she pinched his carotid closed until he fainted, then left him in a heap in the dust and followed her nose. Or, more precisely, her exceptionally keen sense of smell.
Hsiung at her heels, she took off at a fast trot, casting back and forth through the bazaar until she picked up the scent of the Nameless leader carried on the dusty air. Hsiung jogged along behind her, nimble on his feet for all his barrel chest. He tapped her upper arm three times before she turned to him, dropping to a walk. Her earrings jangled discordantly—irritatedly—when her ears flipped flat.
He was undaunted. He tapped his chest, tugged his robe. Pointed to her.
She flipped her tail and turned away. But he wasn’t about to let her brush him off so easily, even when her hackles raised in threat. He did the same, again—the tug at the sleeve of his robe, the finger jabbed at the center of her breast.
You’re like me. You’re a priest.
“No,” she said. The roads—the dusty paths between the blocks of corrals and tents—forked ahead. A picket line held a dozen horses of Asmaracandan stock, grays and a chestnut and two bays, their luxurious manes braided along crested necks to keep them from tangling the picket lines and everything else in sight. The scent of the Rahazeen leader lingered here, and there were near-black banners strung up around the site—a warning to anyone with eyes that these animals belonged to the Nameless. There might be a guard or two anyway, and anything that looked like a fight would certainly draw the attention of nearby caravan guards. Their one advantage was that dusk was drawing near—but the merchants looked out for each other, and Hrahima wasn’t ready to take the chance that anyone would ignore a theft in progress just because the victims were Rahazeen. Especially when the new caliph’s men had liberated the city and could be around any corner—and the Rahazeen sect appeared to be in favor of the royal court again. Anyway, she didn’t want to be arguing with Hsiung when she walked up to the tent and informed whoever the Nameless had left in charge that their horses and supplies belonged to her now.
She stopped hard, so Hsiung overshot her, and stood staring at him, tail lashing, while he turned back.
He raised his eyebrows.
“No,” she said. “I’m not a priest anymore. I lost my faith. Now I just kill things with my hands.”
He held his own hands up, the knuckles split with punching.
Despite her irritation, his persistence made her huff into her whiskers with amusement. Her heavy tail tip slapped the earth painfully as she crouched on her haunches, lowering her hands, retracting her claws. “I don’t believe in God. She drops by once in a while and we argue about it. Now can you stop yammering on with your questions long enough for us to steal a few horses?”
* * *
The favor Juvaini wanted involved Samarkar’s opinion of a female patient. As a servant of the Scholar-God, he was prohibited from examining women directly, and under Rahazeen rule the city of Asmaracanda was currently not a welcoming environment to the Hasitani—the order of female mendicant scientists and physicians who would normally see to the ills of a woman. But Samarkar—as a woman and a heathen who was still a wizard and a physician of sorts—Samarkar could do something about it. And so, with Temur still unwilling to leave her side, she went with Juvaini down to a room divided by a screen, with a chair on one side and a cot on the other. Temur waited with Juvaini behind the screen while Samarkar went around it.
Juvaini had already sent for the patient. She waited on the edge of the cot, her body tucked together neatly in the encompassing folds of her robe until she took up almost no space at all. She was not just veiled but hooded, her hands gloved, her ankles wrapped with bandages above her shoes.
From behind the screen, Juvaini gave the woman direction, ordering her to remove her glove and show Samarkar the lesions on her skin. Samarkar bridled at his peremptory tone, but the woman obeyed silently, with bowed head. What was revealed beneath the wrappings made Samarkar bite her lip to keep from wincing and withdrawing.
Yellow-white margins of dead, peeling flesh surrounded seeping red lesions. It looked as if someone had burned her with an ember, over and over again, and scoured the resulting charred skin away.
“How did this happen?” Samarkar asked.
The woman startled at her voice, and Samarkar realized that though she’d been told that Samarkar was a woman, she’d believed it was a polite fiction to allow them to be in the same room together. But Samarkar’s voice was unambiguously female.
Samarkar stopped herself and went back. “What is your name? I am Samarkar.”
“Laili,” the woman said, nearly a whisper.
As she peeled Laili’s loose sleeve back, Samarkar found herself making horrified little clucking noises with her tongue, as if she—Samarkar—were the wet nurse who had replaced the mother Samarkar had never known. The burns were everywhere. “How did this come about?”
“It just started to happen,” Laili said, her voice soft and uncertain. “One day there were blisters, and the next more blisters, and then the skin began to peel. There’s pain, but … it’s not as bad as it looks.”
Of course not,
Samarkar thought.
The skin is dead.
“Is there any other pain?”
“My bones,” she said. “My knees and hips.”
Samarkar would have closed her eyes in pity, but it would have stolen all hope. She kept them open, and dry, and was not sure how. But she suspected she knew the answer.
“Anyone else in your family showing symptoms?”
Laili shook her head.
“Where have you been that they have not?”
“The glass sea,” the woman said. “I am a widow, and I walk out to the sea to collect treasures to sell in the market.”
“Professor Ala-Malik,” Samarkar asked, raising her voice, “what is the glass sea?”
“Do you know the story of Danupati and the dragon?”
“No,” she said.
He cleared his throat and spoke through the screen. “There is a place beyond the hills—they say it’s where the Emperor Danupati rode out to battle the dragon, under the suns of Erem … before they set forever. The sand there is fused into glass. Some people collect ‘treasures’ there, historical artifacts. Mostly old coins, beads. There is supposed to have been a city there once, before the dragon came.”
She described the lesions and said, “Have you heard of such?”
“Seen them often,” he said. “Although never to the extent that you describe.” He paused, and said in Rasan, “We have no effective treatment.”
“I was afraid of that,” she answered through the screen. “Neither do we.”
Temur asked, “What is wrong with her?”
“We call it dragon-burns,” Samarkar said. “There are places in the earth, in the caverns under the Cold Fire, where a man can walk and emerge unscathed … until days later, his skin blisters, his teeth fall out, his eyes cloud. It is a poison dragons leave in the earth where they have bled. There is no cure.”
“Oh,” he said.
A brief silence followed, and then sounds of an argument and a brief, not too strenuous scuffle. Samarkar was on her feet when Temur shoved the screen aside and came in, his veil drawn across his face. Laili pulled back from him, snatching after her glove where it lay on the cot. But he put his hand over it and raised a finger admonishing, and she froze.
“Temur!” Samarkar said, not so much scandalized as worried that he was endangering all three of them—all four, if she counted Juvaini. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“You called me Khagan,” he said in Qersnyk. “Let’s see if you were right.”
“By the Six Sacred Vows,” Samarkar said, “don’t you
promise
her anything—”
Softly, he took Laili’s hand, though she froze when he touched her. “Peace,” he said to her in his awkward Uthman.
He closed his eyes.
Samarkar saw the strain on his face, the gentleness with which he curled his dark fingers around her sore-spotted, tawny ones. She saw him take a breath and let it go again, the fold deepening between his eyes. The depth of his concentration—and the moment when that concentration folded and his eyes flicked open again, a gasp of effort escaping him.
Laili watched him with concern first, and then consternation. When he released her hand finally, reluctantly, she snatched it back and began working her glove on again, finger by finger, wincing where it rubbed injured skin.
Temur clenched his hand into a fist, then rippled the fingers as if massaging blood back into a limb that had fallen asleep.
“My apologies, madam,” he said to Laili, standing from where he had crouched beside her and turning his back. “I am sorry.”
“Did you hurt yourself?” Samarkar asked, too bemused for the moment to ask even what he had hoped to accomplish.
“No,” he said bitterly. “I didn’t feel a thing.”
17
Once night fell, Juvaini led Samarkar and Temur through a city made wondrous by torches. Flames stained the white stone in shades of gold and orange, so it glowed like amber or carnelian before the sun, and Bansh’s hoofbeats echoed in streets that were not deserted but much quieted from the traffic of the day. Samarkar thought of the great university at Rasa, the Citadel of Tsarepheth. This cloistered city of learning had the same hushed air of concentrated scholarship, as if knowledge hung like a pall in the very atmosphere.