Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Half a year gone. But he had not failed Edene.
“Right,” he said, and hoped she caught the blur of his smile.
* * *
They followed the baleful winking eye of the western star all night and sought shelter when gray washed it out of the sky. They bivouacked in the shade of an overhang bordered by scrub and cactus he did not know the names or uses of. Temur had half-expected the Rahazeen desert stronghold to be a vast sea of sand, a great trackless erg, and he was relieved to find instead a hard, ragged red-and-yellow land, for all its gullies and washes made for rough, unpredictable travel. At least there was water to be found, even here at the end of summer—though Hrahima had to show them how to dig for it in the backs of shallow caves and at the feet of cliffs hung in this season with brown rags of moss. That meant that Samarkar did not need to summon water from the air and could save her strength.
They spent the long day sleeping curled in what shade they could find. It was both a needed rest and a frustration. Temur forced himself to lie on his blanket and sweat and rest tired muscles, even if his mind would find no quiet. Hsiung and Samarkar both resorted to meditation. He was not sure what Hrahima did.
He did see, far overhead, the lazy gyre of the steppe vulture, turning in slow circles upon the foreign sky.
A little before nightfall, they chewed dried rations and washed sparing sips of water around their mouths and began to walk again. It was hard going—loose rocks stubbed Temur’s toes and threatened to turn underfoot, and repeatedly he walked into some thorn-guarded shrub that left deep jabs and scratches in his flesh. His feet ached; he knew he would lose toenails to this march.
As they sought shelter in the gray morning that followed, the dawn breaking behind a ridge on the other side of the valley they paused above cast the silhouette of a five-fingered hand against the western skyline. Temur knew from the maps and plans—and poor dead Juvaini’s descriptions—what that must be.
He set his gaze upon the curving towers of Ala-Din.
* * *
Crouched beside a boulder upon a rock-strewn slope in the Rahazeen wastelands, Samarkar thought,
This is all wrong.
The stronghold of an evil wizard should be sighted at sunset, not in the rising light. It should not be limned in shades of persimmon and gold upon a clear pale sky, but outlined against black torn clouds in sullen, sepulchral crimson. Honeyed light flared behind the towers as the sun crested the rise, touching the peak behind Samarkar’s head and leaving the valley below a well of cool blue shadow.
Hrahima made a questioning noise, as if Samarkar’s distress scented the air.
Samarkar said, “It should not be so bright.”
“Fear not,” said Hrahima. “They’ll fix that in the ballads. Besides, the damned thing looks like a talon.”
The aspect of a clawed hand was undeniable, and the sort of detail a storyteller could not help but love. Then the wind shifted, bringing the reek of ammonia and rot strongly enough to make Samarkar’s eyes burn and tear. A swarm of something indistinguishable with distance churned from the cliffs and towers like banners of smoke, indistinct dots that crawled across the bright horizon in flocks that rose and tore and tattered only to writhe and rejoin as if twisted by the wind.
“Oh, no,” said Samarkar under her breath. She darted downslope, out of the shelter of the boulder, and caught Temur’s wrist. He had stood rapt, watching the creatures rise, still safe in the well of shadow and lost in his own thoughts. As Samarkar dragged him back beneath the greasy red rock, he seemed as if he would have struggled, but stopped himself out of trust.
“Spies,” she said, gesturing upward. “Come on. We have to hide until nightfall.”
* * *
Hide, yes, but that did not stop them from lying in the sparse shade of the boulders, sipping water and studying the passage of the long-necked birds that came and went, memorizing the features of the valley that lay between them and the promontory upon which stood Ala-Din. It was a spare and terrible spire of rock, so stark that Temur could see why generations of Khagans and caliphs had decided to let the Nameless
keep
the blasted thing.
* * *
At sunset, the swarms of creatures returned to Ala-Din. Shortly thereafter, Temur and the others set off down the slope as dusk dimmed to true night and the shadows concealed them. They could risk no light beyond that provided by the stars, and within the valley’s walls that was limited. The distance was not great, which proved fortunate, because the going was uneven and slow.
Temur found himself timing each step to the brightest pulse of the Demon Star, which surprised him by offering enough light to make a difference. Its pattern was erratic, so his footsteps grew rhythmless in response. Samarkar and Hsiung fanned out to either side. He could make their shapes out dimly against the lighter-colored earth and hear their occasional curses as they stubbed a toe or slid in sand. The going was particularly hard on Hsiung, with his clouded vision—but, true to his oath, he made no sound. Hrahima had gone on again, vanishing as utterly as if she had turned to a draught of night air, as old stories claimed was possible for the Cho-tse.
Perhaps a memory of those old legends explained how Temur managed to avoid stabbing Hrahima—or at least attempting to—when she appeared before him as suddenly as if she’d stepped out of a rip in the night.
“Guardians ahead,” she muttered. “Can you smell them?”
Temur sniffed, but got nothing above the pooling smell of ammonia and corruption. It seemed to rest stronger here in the valley.
“I smell something dead,” he said. “And the biggest bird cage the Sky has ever seen.”
“They’re not dead, exactly,” Hrahima muttered. “And the chains are quite long. Have a care as you advance.”
He would have asked, but she was off to warn Hsiung. Anyway, he could guess: his stomach lurched as he remembered they were dealing with a thearchate of necromantic cultists of the Scholar-God. The Rasani called the historic Sepehr al-Rachid the Carrion King. Temur’s own experience with the blood ghosts summoned by the modern necromancer-priest who styled himself
the
Sepehr suggested that the epithet had been well-earned.
He drew his long knife from his belt and reached for the soft-leather, folded packet of violet salt he’d taken to keeping always at hand. He spat down the fuller on each face of the blade and sprinkled gritty crystals down it. To either side he could hear Hsiung and Samarkar making their own preparations.
Then, without a glance or a signal beyond the understanding of long familiarity and close journeying, they collapsed into a knot and moved forward—Hrahima leading, Samarkar at the center.
Temur had rarely been grateful for the time he’d spent on battlefields, but he was grateful now. A slither of metal chinking against stone warned him a moment before the guardians of the valley lurched out of the dark, preceded by a wave of eye-watering rankness. He swung, aware of Hrahima to his right side picking something only dimly seen up and hurling it to the ground with bone-shattering force. The thing stabbed for him with a straight, wickedly tapered dagger and Temur’s blade struck its arm as he riposted.
It was like striking bamboo or some other soft wood. The blade sank in but stuck, and Temur had to twist it loose again, one boot against the thing’s chest for purchase while he dodged its other claws.
When he raised his eyes from its weapon, he dimly made out a humanlike shape clothed in rags. Al-Ghul flared on the horizon, low beside the jutting stone tower upon which stood Ala-Din. In its dim blue glow Temur glimpsed the face of a dead man.
The hardest shadows he had ever seen filled empty sockets, lay below the gaunt promontory of cheekbones that glimmered pale in the gaps through stretched, leathery skin. The cheeks had cracked apart; the mouth gaped like a snake’s, showing snapping teeth nearly back to the mummified ears. He recoiled, and as the thing lurched after him he saw the steel chain—scoured shining by constant dragging—fastened around its waist and snaking behind it into the dark. Another mummified swordsman lurched up behind it, armed with sword and shield and dragging another bright chain …
Someone had set these men here as defenders, and chained them so they could never retreat. And had left them, shackled in place, until they died of thirst or exposure—then kept fighting beyond what should have been the grave. Pity nauseated him—or perhaps that was the stench—but Temur hewed again, this time as if chopping wood. The night was a chaos of shadowy limbs and thrusting blades, but he felt his long knife crunch into a neck and danced aside as the dead man stabbed at him in return. Hsiung moved on the far side. Temur heard a brittle thud as the monk engaged and then the stick-snap fracture of dry bones.
Nothing mummified should smell like this. There were no soft organs left; the eyes had long since shriveled and the flesh dried. He heard Hrahima make a thick, choking noise like any disgusted cat as she tore an arm from the poor creature she was ripping apart, and he decided that the miasma was as much in his mind as in his nostrils.
There was a peal like thunder and something cracked off stone by Temur’s foot, sending sparks and chips flying. Behind him, he heard Samarkar curse.
“Carbines?!” she demanded of the night. Temur felt her outrage as his own; as if reeking undead weren’t bad enough, some had guns?
“Wards?” Temur suggested, ducking a swishing blow of the mummy’s blade. The second one was catching up to the first. They weren’t fast or nimble, but they were aggressive and seemingly nearly indestructible. Unless you were a Cho-tse and could just disassemble them—
He heard Hsiung grunt in pain, the rattle of more shaken chains in the dark. At least two more were coming at Hrahima, and he couldn’t see what lay in the other direction.
“Wards glow,” she answered, and he knew she was thinking of observers on the parapets of Ala-Din. “And I am not a strong enough wizard just to set the stones themselves against them. But wait, if these things aren’t alive—”
A faint azure light swirled about her hands, as if she had coated them in mica dust and waved them in a shaft of sun. And that easily, on every side, the dead men—they didn’t stiffen, because they were already stiff—
ceased,
one and all, between a moment and the next. They tottered and collapsed, the momentum of their attacks pulling them over when they no longer controlled it.
“—then my magic can touch them directly,” Samarkar said, and even the light dripped away and dried up as she lowered her hands.
“Was that all of them?” Hrahima asked, dropping a dismembered arm.
A rattle of chain in the night answered before Samarkar could. Temur’s ears ached with listening for the scrape of a ramrod, the click of a hammer being cocked.
“Just these,” she said. “Let’s hurry, and hope that one missed because they can’t aim well in the dark.”
* * *
Hsiung limped with a gashed thigh. Samarkar worried about poison in the wound but couldn’t clean and bind it until they found a place to hide a light. Fortunately, they reached the bottom of the spire of stone without further interference. While Hrahima set about looking for the entrance to the promised tunnels, Samarkar pulled Hsiung into the shelter of a tumble of boulders and made a small witchlight. Fortunately, the wound was open, and, though she removed a few shreds of foreign matter, it seemed mostly clean. While they waited and Temur stood uneasy guard, she stitched it, wondering if it were some sort of portent that they had left Asmaracanda with Temur being wounded, only to arrive here and have Hsiung take a similar injury. At least she had sense enough to keep the question to herself.
When she was done with the leg, she cut the string, then handed Hsiung the needle and let him stitch up his trousers himself.
Hrahima returned before he was quite finished, sliding down rocks like a spill of oil. She crouched in their makeshift shelter and said, “At least they don’t seem to have heard, or if they heard they don’t seem to have thought much of the gunshots. There’s activity on the parapets, but no more than last night.”
She pointed with a pink-palmed hand, the claw fully retracted. “I found a tunnel. It’s protected by a steel door and a lock.”
“A padlock?” Samarkar asked.
“Self-lock. Looks like a big bolt, too.”
Samarkar’s belly clenched on anticipation. “My turn.”
* * *
Temur watched as Samarkar crouched before a handleless black door that could have guarded a king’s vault or dungeon, a blue spark shaped like a miniature firework floating before her finger within the cavernous space of the keyhole. She could have poked her entire finger into the gap, but instead she just leaned her forehead against the steel straps and peered within.
“Stand back,” she said at last. Temur withdrew a few more steps as Samarkar leaned to the side and stretched her arm out, keeping her face well clear and her fingers more than a hand span back from the lock, outlined in the sickly blue glow. She pinched air as if she held the head of a key, and Temur saw her eyes close in concentration.
The witchlight blinked out, leaving him dazzled in the darkness—but he saw Samarkar’s hand rotate and heard a click exactly as if she had turned a key.
“Heh,” she said. “Thought so.”
The light shimmered into existence again, this time slightly larger and off to the side. Its drooping fronds were made of thousands of softly colored sparks, just as if scraps of something hung and burned in the sky after a rocket’s explosion.
What it revealed was less beautiful: a glistening needle as long as a finger protruding from the lock. Its filament-fine tip—greased with some thick, translucent substance—had stopped a fingernail’s width from Samarkar’s hand. She smiled at it quite smugly.
“This wasn’t meant to be opened from without,” she said. “But the lock and hinges are well-maintained. I’d say we should be alert for guards within.”
She stood, and with a wave of her hand gestured the door—too thick for Temur to have grasped the edge of—silently open.