Authors: Elizabeth Bear
18
Beyond the black door lay a winding stair.
Temur might have expected rough-hewn steps, or slabs laid unevenly to make a terrace up which one could scramble. But this was a grand flight, polished shining, the sweep of its curve echoed up ochre stone walls by fluted banisters of mahogany-veined red marble made violet by the light. The glow from Samarkar’s witchmote spilled up it as she sent it high, revealing work that would have seemed rich in a Song prince’s palace.
Samarkar turned over her shoulder so Temur saw the light shining sideways through her irises, remaking their near-black in gold and warm brown. “Step inside,” she said. “I guess we’d better close the door.”
Their footsteps did not echo as they climbed, for they took care. Hsiung went barefoot, and Temur and Samarkar each swaddled their boots in a layer of felt from the leg of Temur’s well-worn trousers. It made the slick stairs treacherous, but their footfalls soft.
Hrahima’s footfalls were—of course—as silent as any cat’s. She bounded past Samarkar and led them, pushing the edge of Samarkar’s light. Though the stairs were clean and dusted, fresh unlit torches set in the sconces that lined hewn walls, there was no sign of anyone—not even guards. Emptiness and perfect order gave the place an air of eeriness subtler and deeper than the horror of the dead men guarding it.
“Wasn’t this supposed to be a labyrinth?” Temur asked at one point, in a whisper that nevertheless carried.
Hsiung shot him an aggrieved look, but Hrahima answered. “I think we’ve left the maps behind, Re Temur.”
They came at last to a chamber—a landing, really, as it was no more than twice the diameter of the stair—from which there seemed no exit. Temur turned in place, fretting with the string of the bow slung across his back. “Have we been decoyed through the wrong door?”
“I can ask the stones—” Samarkar began hesitantly, but Hrahima raised a paw. “There’s scent this way.”
The chamber was round; it had no corners. Temur followed the Cho-tse to a wall and paused as she cast high and low. Finally, she extended the claw of one thumb and scratched lightly at the stone with it.
Something curled away, leaving a level-edged gouge at eye level. “Putty,” said Hrahima. “Colored to match the stone.” Quickly, she sketched out a shape less tall than Temur, and no more than half again his width.
Temur looked from it to the massive Cho-tse dubiously. “Hrahima—”
“A cat can fit through anything that will admit its head,” she said carelessly. “Though for my dignity I beg you allow me to go last.”
“Has it a lock like the other?” said Temur, looking at Samarkar.
She shook her head. “There are no mechanisms within. But there is magic.” Lightly, she touched the groove that Hrahima had cleaned. “I wish Juvaini were here now.”
“To complain about his map?”
She smiled, though it looked like an effort. “He might know what the pass phrase is.”
“Sepehr al-Rachid?” Temur said hopefully. But the stone sat in place, obdurate, leaving Temur to frown back just as stubbornly.
Samarkar laid her fingers against the stone and said, in the Rahazeen dialect of Uthman, “For the Nameless. For the—ow!”
She snatched her hand back. When she raised it to inspect, it dripped red from the fingertips. A tiny perfect lozenge shape of pinpricks marred each one, as if a minuscule snake had bitten her. “Not that,” she said disgustedly.
Hsiung touched Temur’s sleeve. Startled, he looked at the mute monk, struck by the way his blue-clouded eyes shimmered like milky moonstones in the inconstant light. Hsiung mimed covering ears and moving back. When Temur cocked his head at him, the monk did it again, more emphatically.
Temur glanced at Samarkar and Hrahima. “He wants us to move back.”
Hsiung patted his arm, and again placed his palms over his ears and squinched his face to close his eyes.
“Move back,” said Hrahima. “And make ourselves deaf and blind.”
* * *
They crouched around the top curve of the stair, hands over ears, hunkered together as if expecting an explosion. And perhaps it was like that—whatever happened, even through blocked ears there was a sound like a human voice, like a tolling bell, like a braid of hot barbed wire drawn through Temur’s head by way of his ears. He gasped aloud and regretted it: the sound got into his mouth and scorched his tongue like lye—bitter, burning, while he struggled to spit it out again. It faded fast, though when he pulled his hands from his ears he felt as if the skin on their backs was blistered by the sun.
They climbed up the stairs to find Hsiung before a stone block that had moved into the chamber and slid aside, his eyes glowing green as he spat a tooth onto the floor. His lips were blistered; he probed them gently with his tongue.
“The tongue of Erem,” Samarkar said. “I am sorry.”
He shrugged, and did not speak again.
* * *
Now the stair gave way to a corridor crossed at regular intervals by other corridors, this one constructed of mortared boulders rather than hewn from the earth’s old stones. Hrahima led them again, whiskers flicking as she sniffed and listened. “Women this way,” she murmured at last. “Do you suppose he would have put her in his harem?”
“I do not pretend to understand him,” Temur whispered. “We will go first where there are many women, and then we will see what other women there are—in cells, I imagine, or the high places of the tower. I assume you cannot tell a Qersnyk woman from a Rahazeen?”
“In the field?” Hrahima asked. “Of course. Here, where they eat the same meals strewn with the same spices?” She shook her head, her heavy ruff rippling, disturbing the order of her stripes until she stopped and they lay sleek again. “Your flesh stinks the same.”
* * *
The emptiness of the corridors made their task easier, but Temur’s skin shuddered with every step. Once, Hrahima pulled them into a side room to avoid two old men in white robes who laughed and argued in Rahazeen accents as they walked, their indigo veils draped loosely about their necks here in this their stronghold. Other than that, they saw no one.
“This place should be crawling,” Temur said at last, when he could stand it no longer.
“It was,” said Hrahima. “By the scent of things.”
“Where are all the Rahazeen?”
She looked at him sadly. “Asitaneh, Temur Khagan. Asmaracanda.”
* * *
They had left their old and their women behind, though. Hrahima led them down a polished corridor, along the margins of a courtyard shadowed by night, and at last over a wall into a thorny garden. She leapt the roses that lined the stone fence easily, as did Hsiung; they snagged on Temur’s tunic and the hem of Samarkar’s black coat. She—Samarkar—reached out to him while he was disentangling himself, silently and in haste, and squeezed his shoulder softly.
It was all she offered.
It was enough.
The garden and its wall ringed and shielded a long room pierced by airy windows. There were arches without glass or paper, pieced and pierced and open to the cool air of the night. Long drapes in pastel shades hung before them, a few pulled to one side, all lit like jewels from behind with the light of lanterns. Music in quarter tones floated limpidly from within, but there was no singing, although Temur glimpsed the sleek dark heads of unveiled women seated amid cushions.
Paths sealed with pale stones led to several of the windows, which were tall as Hrahima—and reached almost to the ground so there was only a low sill to step over. Temur felt his hands shaking as Hrahima allowed him the lead. But so many of their backs were to the windows. They faced a slender girl who bowed over the bent neck of an oud, her fingers moving effortlessly as she played within the veil of her unbound hair.
He could wait, observe. See if he spotted her. Surely these women would raise the alarm if they noticed him. These were likely to be wives, here in this open gallery, and not captives. He
should
wait. But the night was wasting, and he could not leave and seek Edene elsewhere in the compound until he was sure.
The lutenist came to the end of her song.
While Hsiung and Samarkar remained flanking him, Hrahima vanished to the roof of the gallery. Temur stepped up into the window and crouched upon the frame. “Edene,” he called.
His voice was too soft. He drew a breath and yelled, “Edene!”
Forty faces turned to him, women as young as Edene—as the lutenist—women older than Samarkar, with gray streaks in their hair. They pivoted in place, from the waist, without moving their hips. They did not reach out their hands.
Every one of them stared at him with blue-white, unblinking eyes. The lutenist, her hands tightening on the neck of her instrument, opened her mouth and made a garbled, inchoate noise.
Temur stood frozen, the window frame biting his fingers, as her china-blind eyes began to flare with the crawling green glow they had seen so many times in Hsiung’s. Hers, and those of every other woman in the room.
Temur fell backward from the window frame, recoiling as he scrambled to get away. Samarkar was beside him, hauling him to his feet. Hsiung stood behind her, his eyes too blazing with that unholy light. Something. Something the al-Sepehr was doing
caused
that glow.
Temur turned to Samarkar; even night-blinded by the brightness within, he could make out her stricken face. She had seen what he had seen.
She jerked his arm as if it was his fault.
“They read to him,” Samarkar said fiercely. “Don’t you understand? They read the books of Erem to him, and they wither
and go dumb and blind.
”
He might have remained there, horrorstruck, forever—except from the roof behind them, Hrahima said, “This way. Climb. Run.”
* * *
Temur scuttled over roof tiles on all fours, grateful he’d paused to kick the scraps of felt from his boots. Samarkar, raised to a childhood scrambling over cliffs and among river stones, was considerably more nimble, but at least he had the advantage of balance developed over years in the saddle. Unsurprisingly, Hrahima moved like mist over stones. Hsiung kept up surprisingly well for such a barrel-bodied man, leaving Temur wondering not for the first time what the training of a Song monk entailed. He’d seen a few in court or along roadsides; even fought them, when he and his brother were serving as his uncle Mongke Khagan’s daggered hand in the south and east. He had never before
known
one. It seemed to him a great loss.
He wondered briefly, bitterly, how many people at the borders of his grandfather’s empire he would be able to say the same of before all his killing was done and the Eternal Sky turned his nameless soul away to drift aimlessly, ineffectually through the world.
“This way,” Hrahima whispered. “There are windows up the tower here. The scent is cold, but these rooms have had two women within.”
The terraced roofs brought them within thrice Temur’s height of the window she indicated. Samarkar seemed willing to climb it, testing the crevices between the stones with fingertips and toes—but Hrahima simply jumped up, and a moment later a thin rope slithered down. It was a simple enough matter for Temur to climb up, feet on the wall and hands on the knotted line, while Samarkar and Hsiung remained behind to guard their escape. The last grab and heave over the ledge taxed him, but not so badly that he made a sound.
For the second time that night he crouched in a window frame, but this time the room he faced was dark and stale. He knelt, rubbing life back into his forearms, aware that he was silhouetted against the star-strewn sky—but if there had been an enemy in this room, Hrahima would have already dealt with it.
He hopped down when his eyes had adjusted and he could be sure of not landing on any furniture. A moment later and with a chinking sound light flared, dazzling him again. Hrahima had kindled a small oil lamp with flint and pyrite. He turned in place as the yellow light spilled across the floor, a dim glow but sufficient.
“A woman stayed here,” Hrahima said. “Another visited her from time to time. The scent is cold. Since then, the room has been uninhabited.”
“How long?” Temur asked.
“Months,” said Hrahima. She went to a chest beside the bed and knelt, and opened it, and began removing things. Women’s Uthman veils, and desert robes … and folded at the bottom, a pair of Qersnyk trousers and a patchwork, skirted coat, mostly in shades of green and ivory. Temur came to her—even hunkered on her heels, she was nearly as tall as he—and touched the braid at the standing collar.
“Hers,” he said.
Hrahima’s whiskers smoothed back against her face. “I cannot smell her blood.”
“You would, if she had died here?”
“If she had died in Ala-Din,” Hrahima said. “And not in some sealed place. And in such a manner as to spill her blood.”
“She is nowhere, then.”
“She is not in Ala-Din.”
He nodded. “There would be no tracking her across the sand after so long?”
“I am sorry,” said the tiger.
He touched her shoulder, her fur slick and dense and soft. Her earrings chimed with the distressed flicker of her ragged ears.
“There’s something else,” Hrahima said. “She was with child.”
Temur flinched.
Hrahima rose from her crouch with effortless power. He did not move away from her, though the rise and fall of her breathing brushed their arms together and she loomed over him, even stooping so the tall ceiling did not brush her head. Hesitantly, as if offering a gift she thought unwanted, she said, “I know what it is to lose a mate and child, Temur Khagan.”
His eyes burned; he let the tears flow. There was no shame for a man in weeping for lost family. He had seen his brother weep so, for a father Temur had not known. He turned his face to the window so the night breeze could cool his cheeks.
“His name was Feroushi. Hers…” Tigers did not cry, so that grunt could not be a sob. “Hers was Khraveh.”
He had no answer, so he paused to let her know he had heard. What did you say?
I’m sorry? I am honored by your trust? So much is suddenly made clear?
All of it, inadequate as the rain that fell in droughts and evaporated before reaching and quenching the thirsty earth.