Shattered Pillars (43 page)

He touched Hrahima’s hand with the back of his own. “She escaped,” he said. “She is a Qersnyk woman. I will go home and raise my banner, and she will find me.”

“Temur—”

He raised his hand to silence the Cho-tse. “She will find me. She is Edene.”

*   *   *

The women they had disturbed did not seem to have raised the alarm. But then, Samarkar thought, sliding her hands fretfully across roof tiles in the dark, how could they?

She and Hsiung hunkered like gargoyles near the wall of the upper story, where they would not be silhouetted against the sky or easily visible from below. They crouched back-to-back, keeping watch in opposite directions while they waited for Hrahima and Temur to return—but Samarkar found even the sound of his breathing comforting.

She had lain enough nights awake in a virgin princess’s broad empty bed—hostage to a foreign kingdom, wondering if the morning would bring her husband-in-name’s wrath—to appreciate the simple presence of an ally. It was something not to be alone in the dark.

The compound spread out around them, still nerve-wrackingly empty. A few lights burned here and there, but there were none in the long building she presumed to be the barracks and only a few glowing warm and dim in the various high rooms of the five towers. A guard walked a desultory circuit around the parapets of the turrets, each in turn, gleams of his lantern flashing this way and that. She watched him scurrying across the courtyard as he moved from one tower to the next, his silhouette craning its head from side to side. Conscientious as he was, that light would blind him to anything outside its beam.

That he was needed made her realize that all the Nameless assassins were busy elsewhere. She wondered how many of the ones she and the others had been meeting were sell-swords playing a part in blue veils, like the mercenary actors they had killed in the high passes of the Steles of the Sky when they escaped Tsarepheth.

She supposed it should be a comfort that the Nameless resources were drawn so thin … but the small size of this stronghold instead filled her with wonder. Samarkar had some experience estimating the size of a force from the quarters available in which to garrison. That this man, this al-Sepehr, had created so much chaos, so many dead, with only these resources at his command—

We have killed a significant fraction of his men.

And yet he—he and his sorcery, he and his cat’s-paws—had destroyed two cities and conquered at least two more, and all through manipulation, indirection, and bloody magics. It was an evil kind of statecraft, but wickedly effectual.

We might come back here. It would be good to have a better idea of the lay of the land.

She paused in the midst of shifting her weight.

I wonder if I can find this sorcerer’s library.

There, at the center of the compound, was something that looked like a chapel—but it was the brightest place in Ala-Din. It glowed with a steady light as if a thousand lamps burned within, and Samarkar did not feel up to taking on however many Nameless might be attending services within. But books …

A wizard should be able to find a shelf of books anywhere, Samarkar.

She reached behind her, touching Hsiung’s bare foot to let him know she was edging away. He turned and caught her eye, made sure he had her attention before he nodded. The green flicker in his gaze unnerved her and she quickly averted her eyes. Slowly, testing each step, she moved away.

What was a book? Not just ink and fiber and stitchery: a series of processes. To a wizard, it was not a static object—but human thought caught and bound, made concrete through a sacred technology. Magic, then, and a deep form of it.

Gently, Samarkar reached out with
otherwise
perceptions, all too aware of the possibilities of arcane traps left waiting for the blundering of an unsuspecting wizard. She found the edges of a few, but since she wasn’t launching an attack, she skirted the defenses rather than attempting to undo them.

Books. Somewhere here there should be rather a lot of them. The Nameless might be a cult, but they were a cult of the
Scholar-God,
with all the implied worship of knowledge. Oh, of course; the long hall so lit up would be the scriptorium, and any actual monks of the Nameless would be involved in their prayer rituals of copying books out by hand. So that was one thing, and there
were
books there. And the whole stronghold reeked of dire old magics. She sensed something in another tower: a brooding, leaden presence with no pretense of humanity … and everywhere the
otherwise
world hung moss-heavy with the sense of lives incomplete and bound to remain uncompleted. Deaths in abeyance; quietus withheld.

Samarkar thought of what Temur had told her of the blood ghosts. Perhaps when they found Edene, she could free them. Except, not knowing their names … what would freeing them do? It would prevent al-Sepehr from using them as a weapon (she thought of the sucked bones of Kashe, piled in meticulous pyramids), but it would not prevent them from ravaging anything they came into contact with, simply because they were blood ghosts and the hungry dead.

Somewhere in the darkness, she heard the rustle of great wings.

The rukh.
But if it knew she was there, it made no sound of alarm. Perhaps like other birds it slept in the dark. Perhaps—

The blood ghosts. The dead men chained in the valley.

Perhaps the rukh was not a willing ally to the Nameless after all.

She found the library. And blinked a moment in surprise: it was immediately on her left, within the tower.

Just above the women’s quarters. Of course.

Hsiung was still glancing at her occasionally. The next time he did, she gestured to the windows. These were of a casement type, definitely added since the ancient construction of Ala-Din. Though they latched and were glazed, they were no trouble for a wizard to open from without. She worked the lock by magic, pivoted the sash, and slipped within.

The room was dark and still and sweet with the smell of old paper. Taking a breath, Samarkar summoned a small witchlight low above her hand. It took a little extra effort, but she shaded the color to gold: more like a lamp. Less likely, she hoped, to draw the attention of a casual observer.

The walls were covered in bloody, severed hands.

She didn’t scream because her breath stopped. When it started again, she had had a moment to observe and realize that what she was looking at was not hands … exactly. It was just the skin, dissected and tanned and hung in frames so that anyone who cared to could read the verses of Ysmat of the Beads tattooed upon them in inks of black and red.

Between the macabre wall hangings, the long room was full of cases of books and racks of scrolls, stretching the length of the tower. Samarkar fixed her eyes on those. How hard would it be to start a fire here? Paper harbored the process of flame …

But something damped her attempt. She reached for the fire, encouraged it—and there was a brief flickering sense of smoke, then nothing more. As if she attempted to burn wet rags.

“There are books of Erem in this library,” Hrahima said from the window behind her. “They protect themselves. You will burn nothing here.”

Samarkar turned. “We could burn the compound—”

“If it were as easy as that to destroy the writings of Erem,” said Hrahima, “do you think any of it would have endured this long?”

Samarkar thought about it. “The blind women are innocents. And the ones we wish to destroy are not here. But I thought I could take their weapons from them—”

The tiger’s head filled the whole of the window. “Are you ready to go, Wizard Samarkar?”

“Did you find Edene?”

The tiger’s earrings jingled.
No.
She held out her hand through the window frame.

Samarkar let Hrahima lift her from the library to the roof. Temur was just behind her, back against the wall, arms folded across his chest. Samarkar touched him in passing.

He raised his head and looked at her. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go raise an army.”

*   *   *

The surgery—and Ashra’s brew—worked. They could not save everyone, but nearly half was more than none. And as Jurchadai and the other shaman-rememberers taught the wizards their new wards, the rate of infection slowed.

And yet Tsering found herself no better rested. Without Altantsetseg to lead them, the few young men among the Qersnyk refugees often found their way into the city even though it was forbidden, either out of curiosity or the daring of adolescence. She heard rumors that they were mingling with the revolutionaries.

Meanwhile, Songtsan-tsa still refused to evacuate the city, although Hong-la said the empress too was working toward that solution. Songtsan seemed sunk in a hysterical denial of the necessary, as if by refusing to admit the danger he could by sheer force of will make it not be. Tsering would have bet on Yangchen-tsa’s ability to move her husband to any decision … but on this he seemed obdurate, and Hong-la said that even appeals to the safety of their son accomplished nothing.

Tsering found herself unable to do much to help the wizards involved in placating the Cold Fire. They needed magic to draw down its strength and energy, to siphon off the tensions in the earth that made it shift and crack. And magic … was the thing Tsering did not have.

She had been a peasant woman once, though, and there was use in seeming so again. She let her grief for Ashra and for Altantsetseg line her face. She dressed in ragged woolens. She went out among the people of Tsarepheth as one of their own, and she
listened.

She was not the only one. Other, younger wizards and novices risked themselves in gathering intelligence: Anil-la, Elevarasan-la, others she did not know so well.

The teahouses and the noodle shops and the wine sellers were supposed to be closed by order of the Bstangpo, but Tsering—with her hair braided plainly down her back and her throat feeling naked and soft without its collar—found many a narrow room with sealed windows where
rakshi
could be bought or bartered. And in most of those rooms she found young men and a few older men and women who were scarred by imperial justice, and who were drinking. And talking about how the emperor would seal them all up in this city to die of the plague or the smoking mountain.

It might be a boy with one hand here; a woman with a slit nose there. But every one of them had anger, and a story.

And Tsering … Tsering found that she kept their names to herself, even as she visited them more and more.

*   *   *

The
rakshi
bar served wine as well, and millet beer, and something that might have been tea after a few less steepings. Whatever—it was really just to water and warm the
rakshi.
The bar was close and noisy and it stank of urine. Tsering sat with her back propped in the half corner between the wall—which was swaddled with quilts on the inside to absorb light and sound—and one of the ribs supporting the wall and the ceiling.

Tsering held a warmed cup of millet whiskey in her hands and made a show of nodding as she listened to men spread rumors about the return of Prince Tsansong and how the Bstangpo was in league with the Carrion-King. Over the past month, she’d been easing into the regular haunts of the disaffected, and she thought now they accepted her as part of the scene. At least, if they were censoring themselves in her presence, she couldn’t imagine what they were not saying.

Then her eyes fastened on a young man slipping in through the door, and she felt the wrongness of his presence like the stab of a knife. He wore the clothing of a farmer or journeyman, and his hair was bound back in an unprepossessing queue—but he moved with a warrior’s grace and ease and the rolling gait of someone who had spent his life in the saddle.

Qersnyk.

The tavern didn’t hush as he entered, and his boots made no sound on the mixed sawdust and sand of the floor. But he crossed to one of the older, quieter men who was always sitting near the outspoken firebrands calling for revolution, and Tsering felt a chill radiate from her center.

She drank her
rakshi
down in a swallow and stood, dropping the bowl under the server’s table as she passed. A brisk wind pricked her cheeks as she passed through the door into evening; autumn was settling over the mountains.

Head down, walking like a woman on an irritating errand, she passed a dozen of the emperor’s men moving in formation. A flock of some ill or dead herder’s tooth-birds, left unattended, scattered in all directions before their boots, clawed fingers scrabbling on the ends of brightly feathered arms.

She heard the cries of alarm, the violence beginning behind her as she lengthened her stride for the Citadel.

*   *   *

The twins’ hand healed without disability, in large part due to the intervention of al-Sepehr. He had brought them to the ghost city of Qeshqer and made a nest there, refusing to allow Saadet and Shahruz to return to Qori Buqa until they were again strong, and he had sent one of the young rukhs bearing messages to inform Qori Buqa that Saadet had been needed by her father but would be returning soon.

Saadet herself wrote notes—or dictated them at first, until her fingers could crimp together to hold a pen—and was surprised to receive replies. Unsentimental replies—but the ones she sent were businesslike as well. She could not bring herself to flirt in front of her father, even
if
flirting had been an art at which she excelled.

When she rode back into the keep at Qarash, it was through the front gate, mounted on a fat dish-nosed Song mare. The saddle for which she and the Master had gone into the Steles of the Sky was on the back of a pack pony behind her, hidden under blanket rolls and sacks of grain. She wasn’t sure that was entirely necessary—the Padparadscha Seat, it turned out, was a battered old war saddle, blackened with age and sweat, sword-cuts lovingly repaired across its skirts. But she still found herself running her hands across it wonderingly every time she dismounted to sleep or urinate.