Authors: Elizabeth Bear
They spent no more time in the streets than it would take an egg to boil, but for every step of it, Samarkar was too aware of the high walls surrounding them, the possibility of Nameless around every corner or simply Asmaracandan scholar-priests looking down from their cloistered windows to wonder what two on foot and one mounted on a steppe mare were doing in the street.
She was grateful enough not to have to climb back into a coffin that she was not about to complain. But that did not prevent her from having to force herself to walk normally, eyes front, rather than staring about in all directions for potential threats. The pose of normalcy took all her political experience to maintain.
Juvaini took them not to any of the main gates but to a narrow, iron-strapped portal no wider than the door to a house, close by the Museum of Man. He produced a key as long as a hand from his pocket and fitted it into the lock. “When I have the pins turned, lift the bar and haul the door back. It takes two.”
“This place is as secured as a fortress,” Temur said.
Juvaini paused long enough to cock a curious eye at him. “Don’t academics and academies war upon each other where you’re from?”
Samarkar smiled. Temur shrugged, and held his tongue.
Temur was dismounting from Bansh painfully, testing his injured leg—Samarkar eyed the mare and the narrow door dubiously, but she supposed she’d seen this particular horse do weirder things than not shy at close confinement—so Samarkar stepped forward. Juvaini leaned a little away from her, but made no remark.
Samarkar put her shoulder under the bar and heaved.
It was a rod of blackened, iron-shod hardwood as thick as her arm, hinged at one end and sliding through a guide at the other. She pushed hard, finding it as stiff as she’d expected. It showered flakes of rust and withered spider’s-egg cases, but at least it gave a little, creaking … and then broke loose and jerked up abruptly with a horrible shriek.
“You should get a novice to oil this thing.”
Juvaini shook his head amusedly and pushed, the door grating open on hinges that protested as volubly as had the bar. He stepped through, pulling the door wide—
And went to his knees with a crossbow bolt through the throat.
Samarkar swung back through the door, flattening herself against the stone wall beside it. There was no second bolt, though Temur threw himself to the side, dragging Bansh with him. In a few moments, he found his bow and nocked an arrow, but didn’t step into the door or draw. He limped. Samarkar pushed down worry, fear, and rage for Juvaini. They would not help her calm the thunder of her pulse. They would not help her concentration as she called the power of her wizardry.
She drew upon her wards again and found them sluggish to respond, patchy and incomplete. She was still tired from earlier, her focus not what it should be. Still, she risked a glance around the doorframe, jerking back as another bolt sizzled past, striking sparks off the stones.
Juvaini was beyond help. He lay facedown across the threshold, just visible in what light fell through the doorway. That light caught on the streaked head of the bolt, protruding from just below his skull—steel-gray amid the silver hair. Blood spread dark from beneath him.
Samarkar caught Temur’s eye and shook her head.
“One crossbowman,” Temur said. “If that’s how long it takes to send a second bolt.”
“Or they’re shooting staggered.”
“The second one would have taken a shot at me or Bansh.”
A good argument. She hoped it was also a correct one. “They might not have had enough men to cover every gate,” she said. “If so, he’s hoping to keep us pinned down until reinforcements arrive.”
“So we go now,” said Temur. “Mount up.”
“The door’s too narrow—”
“It is,” he said. “We won’t be using it.”
He stepped into the doorway before she could protest again and sent three arrows singing into the dark. She didn’t know if he aimed them, somehow—perhaps back along the trajectory of the one that had killed Juvaini? She just darted across the open space while he filled it, feeling the itch of a bolt that did not strike home between her shoulder blades. A moment, and she was pressed to Bansh’s warm barrel while Temur fell back beside her. The mare turned to nose her, seemingly unperturbed. Samarkar stroked the soft nose with gloved fingertips, wishing she could feel the mare’s velvety breath.
Temur gave her a leg into the saddle and handed her his bow before swinging up behind. She heard him grunt, felt the unwonted heaviness with which he settled to Bansh’s back—but those were the only signs of his injury. That courage would cost him later, she thought.
Then he reached around her for the reins and turned Bansh in a tiny, mincing circle.
“All right, Immortal,” he said. “I’m convinced. How are you going to get us out of this?”
The mare straightened her head out and broke into a canter, then a gallop: terrifying in an ill-lit, winding street so narrow Samarkar could have torn her palms on either wall just by holding her arms out straight. She didn’t do that. Instead, she reached around the high pommel in front of her and grabbed on tight.
A wall loomed before them, shadowed by the torches, a turn too sharp for a running horse to navigate. “Oh,” Samarkar said, hunching reflexively for the impact—
It never came. With a surge of powerful haunches, the mare kicked off as if running down a hillside with great, sweeping strides. But in this case each leap bore her higher, mounting dark air that rang like solid stone beneath the impact of her hooves until she crested the wall and—still running, shaking her sparse mane—began to descend the other side. Finally, her hooves struck earth again, among the tents of the caravanserai, with men and boys spilling from every doorway to shout and point.
Bansh kept running, and in a moment the commotion had vanished behind. She slowed, snorting, her neck lathered beneath the reins, kicking each foot up like a parade horse as she settled into the trot.
Samarkar leaned back and turned her head to speak in Temur’s ear. “Did you expect that?”
“I expected something,” he said with a shrug. “You would think I would have caught on sooner, really.” Shifting behind the saddle, he patted Bansh’s rump with an open palm. Somehow, he’d both stayed on her back and held onto his bow, though Samarkar had the saddle and the stirrups. “I owe Buldshak and Edene an apology. It wasn’t exactly fair to ask them to race you, was it, mare?”
Her tail swished, stinging Samarkar’s thigh—and Temur’s too, by the way he grunted.
“Juvaini,” she said, craning backward.
“Nothing we could have done,” he said. “Not that that helps.”
“It should help,” she said. There was a pause as Bansh wove down the narrow thoroughfares. Behind them, she could hear the cries of surprise and excitement dying away. Somebody would be drinking on this story tomorrow, but there didn’t seem to be any pursuit. “How do we find Hsiung and Hrahima?”
“I give the pony her head,” he said. “She seems to be able to find
me
anywhere.”
* * *
“Our verdict from the autopsy? It would have worked,” Hong-la said, one hand on Tsering’s shoulder. “If we had access to the ale a little sooner, if the embryos had not been so developed … I believe she would have survived the process.”
Across Yongten-la’s study, the leader of the order paced slowly beside a shelf, picking objects up, turning them with his fingers, setting them down again. It might have seemed like distraction, unconcern. Hong-la knew Yongten-la well enough to understand that what he was seeing was exhaustion and despair.
He turned an obsidian carving of a contorted warrior over and over, wiping dust from its creases with a damp fingertip. His frown, his hesitancy, hurt Hong-la to see. This was not the master he knew, who led by example, through tireless energy, by doing what needed done and making room for other hands beside his own. This was an old man with a mottled pate, his face creased deep behind the stringy fall of his white moustache.
They were all so very, very tired.
He looked up. “Start with those less than a quarter-moon along the course of the infestation.”
And left the rest unsaid.
We can save the most that way.
* * *
Temur’s instincts proved good. In only a few moments, the mare had brought them to the edge of the caravanserai and into the olive groves beyond. She continued on as unerringly as if she were returning home to a stable, eventually leading them out into a clearing where Hsiung and Hrahima waited, accompanied by three geldings and a mare.
Hrahima was on foot—the only reasonable choice, since she massed half as much as one of the horses, and even a Qersnyk all but born on horseback wouldn’t want to try to convince a mare to carry a tiger on her back. Hsiung rode the largest of the geldings awkwardly, legs stuck out to each side. Two of the other horses were laden with gear, the fourth and final one saddled for Samarkar.
She slid from Bansh’s back, leaving the saddle free for Temur to heave himself into, and walked across the clearing to the others. “How much did you pay for the horses?” she asked Hrahima, with the air of one accounting necessary supplies for a long journey.
“We couldn’t pay for the horses.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The trade town was too hot for shopping and no caravans are moving until the wars are settled. Also, they were looking for us,” Hrahima said. “So we stole these from the Nameless. The gear too. Come on; we’d best get as far as possible from Asmaracanda.”
“Oh,” Samarkar said—as Temur, slowly, began to laugh.
* * *
Their right hand twisted in a club of bandages, the twins awaited their master with bowed head. They had been waiting since sunrise, here out of sight of Asmaracanda, on a cliff overlooking the White Sea. Now the sun was high.
It beat on the veil swaddling the twins’ head and cast the racing outline of the rukh’s wings into a rippled shadow skimming the wrinkled waves below. Saadet forced herself not to step back as the vast bird plummeted to earth, backwinging at the last moment and landing, light as a ghost, on the cliff edge. The feather tips just brushed the twins’ cheek; there was no pain, but a wet trickle told them blood had started below the eye.
They did not flinch. As the rukh settled her wings, the twins walked forward. They grasped the bottom of the knotted rope ladder that allowed access to the stable and steadied it as al-Sepehr descended. Having guided his foot to the ground, they straightened and moved back, only then remembering that, as they were wearing the body of a woman, it was inappropriate to have touched his shoe.
Al-Sepehr tugged his veil up to shade his face from the sun. “So,” he said. “They elude you again.”
Saadet bowed her head. Was it the frailness of a woman’s form that limited her? Had she been mistaken to claim that she could stand in her brother’s shoes?
“They have help,” she said. “They are aided by a spirit, an afrit or some demon in the form of a horse. It is this beast that killed Shahruz, and it is this beast that foiled us today.”
Al-Sepehr folded his hands inside his sleeves. “We must accept that if they still go free, they do so by the will of the Scholar-God. That She has some greater fate in store. Our efforts must be bent elsewhere. Perhaps She knows, as we cannot, that this Re Temur will only sow conflict on the battlefield and help to bring about Her greater glory.”
“Master,” the twins said. “It is possible that we should not serve you. Not in this … body.”
Al-Sepehr waited a moment, in silence, while the twins bowed lower and lower before him, until their head nearly brushed their knees.
“Shahruz,” he said. “Stand up.”
The twins stood. Saadet could not make herself raise her eyes to the master’s, though, as he obviously expected. “Master.”
“I believe that the Scholar-God has transformed you in this way so that you may better serve Her,” al-Sepehr said. “Now come with me. We have an errand to run, and when it is done, you will be ready to rule the Qersnyk tribes and bring them under Her dominion.”
* * *
There was something different about the relationship between Hsiung and Hrahima, and it took several days for Samarkar to distill it down to its essence. Whatever had happened while Samarkar and Temur were in Asmaracanda, it had made Hsiung solicitous of the tiger.
At first they traveled by night, under the light of the moon, camping in draws and the shade of trees by day. But they saw no sign of pursuit, or the rukh, and began to hope that the Nameless had assumed they were making for the steppe again, perhaps to challenge Qori Buqa directly. Then they traveled harder, eating light, living off the land.
At least it was easier terrain than the Great Salt Desert they’d crossed on the way to Asitaneh. The stolen horses were hardy and nimble, and the four of them were well-seasoned to one another’s company after previous hard travel, aware of their own capabilities and weaknesses and those of their companions.
Before a ten-day passed, though, Temur was increasingly aware that they hadn’t sufficient supplies to take them through the mountains called the Shattered Pillars in safety—and that the season for safe travel was ending, even if they could find a pass. While they had the maps that Juvaini had provided, there was a reason that the Celadon Highway tended to run south of the White Sea and that only the hardy Kyivvans—who hadn’t much choice, geographically speaking—used the northern shore. It was true, the Kyivvan traders could have taken riverboats to the White Sea—but river pirates, Rahazeen, and rogues made caravans—large, defended caravans with many Indrik-zver—the safer if more strenuous choice.
Bansh swelled with her foal, and as their supplies dwindled Temur reluctantly shifted one of the pack saddles to her and rode the bay gelding that Hrahima and Hsiung had secured. He was a nice enough horse, but Temur missed a good mare under him—Bansh, or even Edene’s rose-gray Buldshak, left behind at Stone Steading for her own safety.
Hrahima supplemented their rations with meat, and the horses—fed from the saddlebags at first—graduated to forage as they climbed into soft alpine meadows. But, working as hard as they were, the horses needed grain. And the humans could not subsist indefinitely on rabbit and antelope.