Authors: Elizabeth Bear
The depths of the Qersnyk sky spread over her, heavy and oppressively blue. She longed for her own horizons, but kept the homesickness to herself. Shahruz, increasingly withdrawn and sharp as the days progressed, would only have mocked her for it. She was aware enough of her womanish weakness without him to remind her.
When she brought her animals to the corral, she simply lifted the saddle down from the pack pony and gave instruction that the blankets and gear were to be taken to her room.
The twins had ridden a week from the border farm where their Master had bought the ponies for them. They were dusty and road-stained, face bare as a Qersnyk woman, hair braided about their throat to keep the wind off. It was the end of summer, and the skies were growing torn.
“Where is the Khagan?” Saadet asked a Qersnyk man without lowering her eyes. Her arms were full of saddle; he neither rushed to take her burden from her nor looked away from her naked face. Shahruz frowned inside her, but if she were going to live among barbarians—if she were going to play their Khatun—it was as well she learned their ways.
Having received enlightenment—at least in regard to her lover’s whereabouts—Saadet bore her saddle into the hall and from thence to a council chamber. She did not knock, but entered.
Qori Buqa sat behind a knee-height table that supported a sprawling heap of maps. On his right was a shaman-rememberer in its layers of bright blue silks; arrayed around the rest of the table were four of the Khagan’s war-band. They leaned forward in Song-style ox-yoke chairs designed so one could lift them by the back and they would fold together. A filigree screen of dark wood stood behind Qori Buqa, supporting a streaky panel of gray and amber agate that framed his head.
He started to his feet as Shahruz thrust aside the beaded curtain that filled the doorway. He entered the room on two big strides and stopped there.
It was Saadet who bowed her head, extended the saddle across her arms—above the young curve of her pregnant belly—and said, “As you bid. I have fetched your throne, my husband.”
* * *
It was easier getting out of Ala-Din than it had been getting in. The dead men didn’t seem to be ensorcelled to stop anyone leaving, and the interlopers were out of the valley by dawn. This time, they just kept walking while the sun was low enough to permit it, eager to get as much clean earth between themselves and Ala-Din as possible.
Temur had planned to make sure they found shelter before noon, when the sun would be at its fiercest. They could sleep, ration out some of their water, and—he hoped—be back to the canyon where they had cached the horses by the following morning. Then they faced the challenge of the mountains, and the impending winter, and the steppe. If he meant to raise his banner at his grandfather’s former summer palace at Dragon Lake in the spring—as he had told Ato Tesefahun—they would have to ride hard and find remounts.
But as the pale Rahazeen sun climbed the sky, both sun and sky began to vanish behind a gold-lit pall. The wind freshened, rising dry and hot from the west, and each breath Temur drew frosted his throat with grit.
When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw a wall of yellow ochre like a bellying sail rising to the drape of heaven behind them. The leading edge groped across the earth as lightning crackled through and around it, lacing the atmosphere with blue-and-violet fire.
“What,” said Samarkar, eyes wide, “on earth is
that
?”
“Haboob,” Hrahima muttered, as Temur said, “Devil wind. A dust storm. We need to find shelter now.”
But they were halfway up the bowl-shaped slope of a baked plateau as featureless as—if considerably smaller than—any stretch of the steppe. The storm didn’t appear to be moving quickly until Temur glanced at its bottom edge and saw how it consumed standing rocks and thorn trees as quickly as a good mare could run. They had no canvas with which to make shelters, only the thin blankets in which they had shivered each night and the coil of rope at Hrahima’s hip.
She pulled that loose and began linking them together, belt to belt. “We stay upright; we stay together; we keep moving. Maybe the afrit is just passing.”
Temur bit his lip. “Afrit?” He was afraid he knew before he asked. There were storm-demons that rode such winds when they came across the steppe. Of course, the desert people would have their own name for them.
“Like a djinn,” the Cho-tse said, snugging the last coil of rope around her own midsection and winding the tail over her shoulder to keep it out from underfoot. “But air rather than fire.”
“That’s an
afrit
?” Samarkar asked.
Hrahima shook her head and started walking. “It’s an afrit’s chariot. Pray it rolls us by.”
“What do you suppose the odds are that it has no connection to al-Sepehr’s magic, and this is just a coincidence?” Samarkar said.
“No bet,” Temur answered, a moment before Hsiung’s deep brown eyes began to glare and coruscate jade-green.
* * *
In the morning, Saadet stood in the window of her bedchamber, both hands resting on the slight curve of her abdomen, and watched her husband to be go out among the afflicted on his blood-shouldered mare with only two of his war-band beside him. The ill and infirm came to their Khagan, clustering at his stirrup.
Saadet smiled as Qori Buqa leaned down from his battered saddle and—one by one—pressed their foreheads with his hands.
Shahruz shuddered from his citadel of loathing within her. She leaned her forehead on the windowsill and thought,
I have borne all this, brother dear.
You
may concern yourself with the next part.
Gladly will I redeem your whoredom,
he answered.
* * *
On through the dust, through the blindness. They muffled their mouths and noses in folds of their desert robes and breathed through cloth. Their eyes they wrapped as well, groping their way often on all fours, by means of Samarkar’s arcane senses and Hrahima’s inhuman ones. Even if the dust had permitted them to open their eyes without agony, its pall would have utterly blinded them. They lost nothing through binding their faces, and at least they could breathe.
Temur tapped the ground ahead with his fingers and toes, wishing his midnight encounters with the local vegetation had better inured him to the barbed and prickly flora of the Rahazeen wastes. Apparently no matter how many times you got stabbed by a thorn tree, it still hurt. He heard Samarkar exclaim occasionally too, and could only assume that Hrahima and Hsiung suffered in silence.
His hand found warm hide, a long hard cannon bone, the unmistakable leg of a mare. She snorted and stamped; her tail smacked the side of his head. The hard-muscled curve of her rump was familiar, and so was the throaty whinny with which she greeted him.
“Oh, Dumpling,” he said. “Have you come to lead us out of this?”
“Temur?” asked Samarkar.
“The mare is here,” said Hrahima. Which was good, because Temur’s throat was too full of emotion for words to squeeze through it.
He ran his hand up her side while the others gathered behind him, keeping the ropes from tangling. When he touched Bansh’s belly, it felt taut as a bow. A great shudder ran through her, the ripple of muscular contraction.
She was in labor, though not yet straining hard.
She stepped forward. Temur walked beside her, one hand hooked in the girth of the saddle she was—inexplicably, yet again—wearing. As the ropes tugged, the others came with him. “We follow the mare,” he said.
Through a world of close air, of filtered darkness, of the rasp of breath through breath-wet cloth, Temur followed Bansh and the others followed Temur. She moved purposefully, and even when the contractions took her she did not stop. One foot lifted, slid forward, came down. Another. Another. A hesitation-march as slow as if she bore her rider in his funeral parade.
No,
thought Temur.
She’s leading him out of it again.
The storm had a sound, a kind of sighing hiss. Though what hung on the air was dust and not sand—it was not whipped by wind but hung in the air like smoke, and it felt like silk where it coated one’s fingers—still, there was a soughing noise where so many tiny particles brushed against one another. It infiltrated into all the gaps of Temur’s clothing, worked into the creases of his armpits and his groin, chafed and rubbed him red with every step. But the mare walked on and so did he, and so did those who followed.
He only knew from the silence that they had come out of the storm. There was no shifting hiss, no scour of dust soft against his hands. Bansh stopped, groaning like a bellows at the strongest contraction yet.
Samarkar walked into Temur. He staggered, caught himself, and realized that layers of dust were not dragging his feet. Hesitantly, he touched the wrappings across his face. There was light beyond them; despite the still air, she had not brought them to a cave.
Ochre scales cracked away as he unwound the bandages, ready at any instant to snatch them closed again. A crack of light came through his gritty, clotted eyelashes. It was clean light, bright as many moons, white and pure.
“The storm is done.”
He pulled his crusted wraps and over-robes away, drawing a full breath through lips smeared with mud that tasted of iron and salt. It was night, but no night such as he had ever seen; the sky was deep violet between stars as thick as seeds strewn on a cake. A vast moon as black as his bay mare’s mane floated half-occluded by a shattered horizon, and two other moons gleamed the colors of rust and ivory. Directly overhead one star shone so bright and white that it would have been no challenge to read by its light.
Mountains rose on every side of them, green and forested at the base, stark white at the peaks. One forked summit seemed familiar but strange, as if Temur had seen it from a different angle. The season was mild and moist, and between the stones of the road they strode upon, thick moss dimpled underfoot.
They stood at the mouth of a valley flanked by two trees as great as any of the forest giants of Song—except the trees were long dead, bark peeled back almost to the spreading, knotted roots to leave their trunks and their wandering tributary branches bare. Their lowest boughs meet to form a great peaked arch above a stone-paved road that led deeper into the valley beyond them. Something was carved on the foremost branch—a word in twisting letters that glowed with their own viridian light. They made Temur ill. He glanced away, and realized that the trees were grown not of wood, but white stone.
Beyond the trees, the ruins of a shattered city stretched as far as the eye could see, twisted with vines and ferns and shining in the glow of that brilliant star and the two moons that gave light.
“I do not know how we’ve come here, but this is the sky of ancient Erem,” Hrahima said. “We must find shelter before the daystars rise.”
Hsiung’s eyes still flickered with a changeable light. His desert veils hanging about his neck in limp, stained coils, he looked up at the word that Temur could not abide and then glanced away and crouched down on the stones. With one thick finger he began to write in the syllabary tongue of Song. His finger trailed a wet stain.
Temur looked down at his own hands and realized that—scoured by the dust until there was not a finger width of intact skin left on them—they too were bleeding.
Samarkar bent over Hsiung, to read what he wrote in the light of his eyes and of the moons.
“Reason,”
she said. “Is that this place’s name?”
The mute monk nodded. Something welled in Temur—grief, exhaustion, the relief of survival, and the numb discomfort that was all he could muster. He had reached the end of his endurance.
Temur stepped past Samarkar and Hsiung, brushing Samarkar’s elbow with his own. He put his arms around the neck of his laboring mare, pressed his face to the velvet skin there, and—for Bansh, for Edene, for everything brave and indomitable—he wept.
Bansh’s flanks shuddered again. She snaked her head around and snapped irritably at his shoulder as if to say,
I have no time for your histrionics, inconvenient man. I have a foal to get born.
19
Temur and the others walked through the bright night into Reason, following a laboring mare. Bansh’s tail swung, knotted and matted with ochre dust. Temur’s raw fingers itched with frustration. He should have braided it for her before the birth pangs started. He should have—
He had done what he could to keep her safe. Perhaps there was still time. And she had come back to him, had she not? And led him to a place of safety as well.
Well, safety of a sort. Ruins of any sort had a nasty tendency to harbor ancient magics and forgotten monsters. And he could not ignore Hrahima—
Hrahima!
—and her nervous glances at the sky.
We must find shelter,
she had said.
Bansh would not have brought them here if there were not a place of safety. Two and two abreast, they trailed her down the stone-flagged road that hugged one edge of the fern-hung valley. Great trees such as Temur had never seen—like massive ferns themselves—bowered crack-faced, roofless dwellings that stared with empty eyes. Here and there, where a wall had fallen recently, he could see that they were built of white and peach and golden stone, but elsewhere the moss and heavy-flowered vines had covered every inch.
On the right, a drop continued down to a stream that danced from stone to stone, but the valley was narrow enough, the light of the sky bright enough, that Temur could clearly see more ruins on the other side. Bridges, arched and golden, had once spanned the stream. Now their stubs branched off from the road he and the others followed—and then crumbled away into empty air.
“Who do you suppose keeps the road clear?” Samarkar asked.
No one answered.
The scent of flowers and fruit saturated moist air, and great blooms like pale trumpets competed for space with tiny sprays of delicate petals as red as the heart’s own tide. Tiny frogs in all the colors of embroidery silks hopped amid stones and ferns, and birds flickered among the tree fronds. One bough drooped ahead of them, bobbing under a moving weight. Temur caught a glimpse of a climbing serpent, thick as his wrist and green as jade, so brightly colored that even in the dim light it seemed translucent. It paused to flick a wax-pale tongue at Bansh, eyes catching light as if it were some jeweled automaton with garnets set in their place. Picked out in scales along its length were elegant, intricate black interlocking cursive symbols Temur knew must be calligraphy—though in no tongue he’d ever learned.