Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Normally there would be resupply points along the trade road, other travelers with which to trade—but those had dried up and blown away with the caravans. They had trade goods, but no one to trade with. They had gold, but nothing to buy.
The vulture Temur had begun to think of as
his
bird still circled behind them. More and more, he began to direct his prayers to it—or through it, because though he still stood to pray to the Eternal Sky, the wind pulling tendrils from his queue to whip about his eyes, the sky he saw was someone else’s. Not the azure depths of his own sky, but the shallow gray-turquoise of the sky of the Rahazeen. The vulture at least was familiar, sacred, significant. It was a thing of home. It was a messenger that could bear a dead man’s soul home.
If that dead man had a name, and someone knew it to whisper it to the birds when they buried him in the sky.
Temur pushed the thought away. Hrahima leapt among the rocks up the trail, seeking their route between the stones and the delicate, curling flowers that grew in their shade. He turned and smiled at Samarkar, leading her gelding as she, too, toiled upward. He had what he had, and it was more than some men—most men—got.
* * *
In the evening, Tsering combed out her hair so it lay in sleek ripples over her shoulders, black as the satin of her best wizard’s coat. She closed her collar about her throat because it would force her chin up. She passed through the Citadel and across the Wreaking and presented herself before the fire of Tsareg Altantsetseg as a messenger bearing unpleasant news.
News that would not come as a surprise, she saw, for though Altantsetseg sat, as usual, enthroned on a battered old saddle and swaddled in bear skins, she was surrounded by her clan—the shaman-rememberer Jurchadai, a Tsareg woman with recent scars upon her face and a baby in a cradleboard, and an old man Tsering-la had not seen before. One of the shaggy mastiffs bigger than most men lay at her feet, his coat gray with falling ash.
There were ritual phrases for delivering bad news, portentous circumlocutions steeped in millennia of tradition. They circled in Tsering’s brain, studied until they’d become reflexive—and she chose to abandon them all.
She bowed her head, dropped a knee on ground still blurred and gritty with ash despite a recent sweeping, and said, “I’m sorry.”
Perhaps there was no need to translate so simple a phrase, because there was no pause before Altantsetseg answered, a string of syllables that banged together so that Tsering could not tell where one word ended and the next began. She waited, and the older man said for her, “Jurchadai informed the clan mother that Ashra died bravely.”
“Her sacrifice will save the lives of many,” Tsering agreed. “We would like permission to begin treatment of those of your folk who are infect—”
There was no warning. The gray drifts of ash that buried the sky blew in tandem curls as a thing too vast for Tsering to see and comprehend its shape struck the ground before her. The earth jumped up and struck her hands and breast; she had been knocked flat on her face. A great sharp pressure seemed to fill her ears, as it sometimes did when one climbed down from the mountains. It muffled the sound of something that might otherwise have been a thunderclap. She had a brief, blurred impression of scaly gray legs, talons like fishhooks as long as a man—there was another mighty buffet of wind and the enormous bird was gone, sailing down the pass away from Tsarepheth. Bent and reaching feather tips brushed the slopes on either side.
Tsering pushed herself to her knees, pushing gingerly at her scraped face with scraped fingers. She heard nothing but the ringing in her ears—and a keening wail thinned behind that pressure but still audible.
She turned from the waist, supporting herself with one hand.
The woman with the cradleboard knelt, curling Altantsetseg in her arms and wailing, her head thrown back and her throat bent to the sky. Even from here, Tsering could see the dark blood welling thickly from the old woman’s nostrils and mouth, the crushed and twisted outline of her lower body.
A wizard should rise, should go to her. Tsering’s legs would not bear her weight. She raised her hands to her mouth and moaned behind them.
The saddle Altantsetseg had been seated on was gone.
* * *
Temur and the others climbed toward winter.
The Shattered Pillars had a different character than the Steles of the Sky or even the Range of Ghosts. These were desert mountains, though tall enough to hold ice at the peaks. The slopes of high valleys sustained coniferous cloud forest cut by grassy glades, but the ridges were bare and dry. Water flowed through the passes, clear and sweet as it leapt from stone to stone, melt from the glaciers that glittered between branches every time there was a break in the canopy. The space below the trees was clear of undergrowth, carpeted by thick beds of feathery brown needles, and they slept soft on those at night beneath trees as big around as Temur and Samarkar could have spanned if they linked hands on either side.
The pines smelled of resin and cinnamon, spicy-sweet when you leaned close to their honeycomb-cracked trunks. Hsiung picked the gummy sap to chew and gathered pinecones that they toasted over fires at night for the fat seeds within. Hrahima took to the trees, moving through them as fast as the humans and horses covered the ground below.
Every time they broke out of the canopy, Temur caught himself scanning the sky for evidence of the rukh. It would have been smarter to travel by night, by moonlight. But that would have halved their rate of progress, and they were so close now to Edene—he could feel it. He could taste it in the back of his throat.
They pressed on.
On the thirty-fifth day, Temur slaughtered a gelding whose saddle packs hung empty. He divided the meat between Hrahima and the fire. Cooked, it would keep for several days in the cool of these high altitudes, and the grain they saved could go to the mares.
* * *
Sleep eluded Temur. He dozed in the saddle by day, through the level parts of the passes where the gelding could bear him. At night, he kept watch while Hrahima disappeared into the darkness and Hsiung snored in the shadows just beyond the glitter of the coals. At first Samarkar came each night to lure him to her blankets, and he went—but once she muttered in dreams, he rose again and went to stare into the embers.
On the forty-fifth day, riding below a forked peak, they crested a pass in starlight and Temur saw no more mountains. The crumpled earth dropped away before him as if here a wave had broken, and the sky fell in lustrous, star-strewn drapes of ebony to a horizon as level and unbroken as the steppe. He drew the first free breath in a season. Though there was no moon, the sky above was big and free enough again, and he realized how much of his anxiety and distress since entering the Shattered Pillars had been the sense that at any moment the weight of the mountains might fall on him from every side.
Hot tears greased wind-chilled cheeks. Temur let them burn.
Beside Temur, Hsiung leaned awkwardly from his saddle—at least he was riding less like a sack of grain with two bolts of cloth stuck out on either side—and laid a hand on Temur’s sleeve. Temur turned to see him pointing.
Low on the western horizon, a strange star burned. It flared bright, a sharp blue flicker, then dulled to sullen orange as if a fire guttered before a gust of wind and then flared white-hot again. As Temur watched, it flickered so dim he thought for a moment a cloud had drifted over it, then shaded from violet to brilliant blue once more. Stars twinkled; that would not have been stunning. But this one flashed like a diamond spun before a shaft of sun.
“Oh,” Temur said. He looked over at Samarkar, but she was as rapt and—for once—as silent as Hsiung.
“Al-Ghul,” said Hrahima. “The Demon Star. We are truly in the lands of the Nameless now.”
* * *
And having met with winter, they climbed down again before summer was done.
* * *
On the fiftieth day, Samarkar came to Temur by the fire while Hsiung practiced his forms—his eyes shining dimly green in that fashion to which they had almost, uneasily, grown accustomed—and while Hrahima did whatever she did out in the darkness. She crouched, elbows draped over her knees, sleeves of her too-big wizard’s coat rolled up to show forearms ropy and tough with the hard work of traveling, and said, “I was wrong, Re Temur. You must marry me.”
He came close to toppling over into the fire. “Samarkar—”
“
Yes.
Under the customs of your people, you cannot marry. Under the customs of mine, your true name means less than nothing.” She breathed deep, bit her lip, and stared into the fire for a moment before shaking her head. “There was news of my family in Asmaracanda.”
“Your brother’s escape from the fire.”
She stared into the fire. He thought it was so she would not have to meet his gaze. “You know what it means.”
“Civil war,” Temur answered—because he knew his own family; he knew his own people; and he knew that no empire was truly all that different from another.
“One of them will want to use me against the other.”
“You are not a princess anymore—”
“Do you really,” she said, with such ponderous dignity that he fell silent, abashed, “think that matters in the slightest, Temur Khagan? One of them will use me against the other. Both of them will try. But if I am your wife—”
She sighed. He saw where she was going, but let her work around to it.
“—If I am your wife, then whichever wishes to use me must acknowledge you. Do you see?”
He did. Too clearly. He laid his fingers on her arm. She turned her hand over and captured his.
He said, “The whole world is going to war with itself.”
“On Mukhtar ai-Idoj al-Sepehr’s bidding. Do you suppose that’s an accident?”
He held her hand in the silence, her palm sweating in the warmth between them. She said, “There might be a way to learn your name.”
He blinked twice before he believed he’d heard her. He should have turned to her, but felt as if an unyielding giant gripped his skull. He couldn’t shift his gaze from the leavened dark above the dying coals. Barely, convulsively, he managed to squeeze her fingers.
She knew him well enough to wait his moment of quiet out before continuing, “Do you suppose it’s an accident that a steppe vulture has been following you since—what, Temur? Since Qarash, I would guess? If the souls of your ancestors go back to the Eternal Sky in the bellies of carrion birds, whose soul do you suppose rides in it?”
“No,” he said. He couldn’t let go of her hand. She didn’t try to make him. “No, that’s—that’s blasphemy, that’s an abomination. I could call, yes, but to learn my own name—” He swallowed twice before his voice returned. “If I knew it, what would prevent al-Sepehr or any of his devils from using it to bind me?”
“Temur Khagan.” She avoided his gaze as much as he avoided hers. “It is time for you to think like a king.”
* * *
The weathered old peace of the mountains called Hrahima, and she yearned to embrace it. It rang in the empty places inside her and would have filled them if she allowed it to. But she knew what warmth it awoke: the fire of the Sun Within. The power whose purpose was to fulfill the Immanent Destiny.
Whatever you want, I deny it.
So she ran in the night, when she could have stood and nourished that energy, and she killed with her claws, and she did not listen to the wide silence within her breast where peace and certainty reigned. Instead, she embraced the wide, uncertain silence without—the emptiness, the foreign stars, the chill of trees against an uninhabited sky.
The old world hovered on vast indifferent wings above the thrust and intention of new gods. Tigers and men had created them, imbued them with needs and agendas. This night desired nothing; it offered nothing.
Hrahima found it soothing in its apathy.
* * *
Mountain surrendered to foothill; forest gave place to scrub. Where a spring bubbled amid the last grassy meadow, Temur slipped Bansh’s halter and pulled the pack saddle from her back. Hrahima had made herself wisely scarce by scouting ahead. While Samarkar and Hsiung stood with the two remaining geldings and the silver-muzzled Asitaneh mare, he patted Bansh’s swollen belly. The foal pushed sharply against his palm in return.
Hsiung had painted symbols of protection on Bansh’s hooves; the ink shone glossier black against the dull surface of the right fore as she pawed a clod from the earth.
Temur straightened her sparse forelock between her eyes. “I’ll be back for you. Be safe.”
Maybe she understood. Because when he turned away, she dropped her muzzle to the grass and made no move to follow.
Temur rode into the furrowed badlands on a skinny mare he did not expect to ride out again, praying to a sky that was not the one he moved under.
* * *
They left the horses in a blind canyon two nights’ walk from where the map said Ala-Din should lie. Shade from the canyon walls and a concealed seep meant there was water and grass. They could survive here for the few days it would take Temur and the others to return. And if Temur and the others did not return … they were Asitaneh-bred. They would last in the desert, or they wouldn’t.
Though it pained Temur to admit it, it was out of his hands.
Hrahima moved ahead like a striped ghost in the starlight, a blur to Temur’s vision even once it had adapted to the dark. He found himself checking his bow, his knife, the arrows he had brought from Asitaneh and those he had made in the mountains with obsessive little pats. They were still nights from Ala-Din, but his heart sang in his ears as it should before a battle.
You must be calm,
he told himself.
Edene needs you to be calm.
But to be so close, after so long—
He almost shrieked aloud when Samarkar laid a gentling hand on his shoulder. Only years of the discipline of raids and military maneuvers stopped his tongue. Then he turned to her, met her shadowy regard, felt the flex of her fingers, and felt the curling tension in his belly ease.