Authors: Elizabeth Bear
4
Besha Ghul was quick and quiet, its long head hunkering between angular shoulders on a long, thick neck. It paced like sidling smoke on the pads of thick-clawed paws, heels or hocks moving high, like levers, as it led Edene into the shadows of the derelict hut. A smell of carrion reached her as she ducked the cracked and slanted lintel—the ghul’s supper? Or the remains of a nest left by some temporary inhabitant?
The rich, rotten smell did not nauseate her as it once would have, though her child struggled in her belly as if in response.
Inside the crumbled hut, her eyes adapted quickly to shadows. She stepped carefully, ducking to avoid the spindled timbers that slanted from wall to hearth like so much carelessly tossed kindling. Somebody had brought those timbers here, Edene thought, at great effort or great expense. Somebody had hauled them from whatever wet hollow grew trees—even slight, contorted trees—in this desert.
Somebody, no matter how poor, had thought this a place worth living in.
The walls were daubed stones piled course on course. The floor was earth only. It slanted back to a well dug in the rear corner of the hut, which they found by skirting the edges of the ruin. The walls still bore up the outer end of the roof timbers, making a passage where a ghul and a woman who crouched down upon her heels could creep through.
Edene had no problem seeing in the dark. The well was edged in stones, a pavement set into the earth for an arm span around it. You might build your house over your water, in the desert, to protect it from heat and from wanderers—but no one would want the earth of their floor made mud every time they needed to haul up a drink. Edene crouched beside the ragged semicircle of the pit, staring down into a darkness even her eyes could not pierce.
“Water?” she asked Besha Ghul, when it crouched beside her.
“There is no water in this well,” it said. “It drained into the tunnels long ago. We claimed it.”
Edene stayed where she hunkered, and stayed silent. The curve of her belly pressed the tops of her thighs, hard and yet resilient, like a drumhead. She considered the ghul, the well, the cramped angle under the collapsed roof, and the daubed stone beyond.
“You want me to climb down.”
The ghul blinked at Edene, round-pupiled eyes no longer lambent in this close darkness—though she could make them out, still. “It’s an easy climb.”
She let her left palm rest on her belly, highlighting the arch of it under her stained robes. The ghul had no problem in seeing her: she watched its eyes focus. But it seemed to attach no significance to the gesture.
“How easy?”
Besha Ghul shrugged and showed her hooked fingers, long claws. “A scamper.”
She touched the edge of the well. The stone was rough, lipped. She could hook fingertips behind its edge, brace her palms against the roughness. Her shoes were little more than soft-soled slippers, laced tight, meant for scuffing about the fortress Ala-Din in pursuit of the duties a captive had been assigned. Edene’s nose wrinkled involuntarily as she remembered the ammonia reek of guano, the slick sound of primary feathers, each as tall as she was, as hard as steel and as light as spider silk, sliding against one another.
It was irrelevant.
The shoes would serve.
“You first,” she said, and waved Besha Ghul forward.
* * *
Edene had no difficulty in climbing down; her toes found ledges and her fingers holds as if she had come this way a thousand times. And in truth, it was little more of a scramble than she had managed all the years of her youth among the broken slates and granite of the foothills of the Steles of the Sky.
In those days, her belly hadn’t pressed her hips away from the cliff and her center of balance hadn’t seemed to slosh precariously from side to side with every incautious movement—not to mention changing with each passing day. She knew she climbed clumsily, awkwardly, clinging and panting in a manner that shamed her. But she did it nonetheless, and despite her awkwardness found her strength and agility burgeoning. Sand rasped between her fingertips and the stone beneath, scattered and pattered beneath her when her kilted robes brushed the wall.
It was a long climb, some seven or eight times her own height, and Edene found herself admiring whoever had dug so tenaciously to scrape water from this desert soil. But when she was twice her height from the bottom, her eyes pierced the darkness enough to see earth and stone below.
A voice seemed to speak to her from the darkness.
Leap.
Leap, if you would be Queen.
That wasn’t so hard. Easier than it had been to sling her leg over the stone lip of the well and lower herself into penetrable darkness. Edene uncurled her fingertips from their surprisingly solid grip and kicked off the ledge. The fall whipped brief wind through her hair, and when the bottom of the well stung her soles, the shock traveled pleasantly up her body. She bounced on her toes, vitality and joy suffusing her until she raised her arms and twirled for the sheer pleasure of it.
A moment later, Besha Ghul landed gently beside her.
“Come, mistress,” it said, lightly flicking dust from one velvet shoulder. “We have far to go.”
* * *
In the darkness, in the tunnels, they passed by secret ways. Secret, that is, except to Edene. At first, the ghul led her, but soon Edene realized that she could feel the tunnels spread out around her in a convoluted labyrinth. Besha Ghul and others of its kind moved through them, and Edene could sense them all. They were like fish moving through a weir, shadowy—translucent. Edene did not see them with her eyes but sensed in some other fashion, as if she were a spider and the passages were her web.
She laid her fingertips on the wall and felt it—not moist, gritting stone. Or rather, yes: stone, and chill, and damp … but somehow simultaneously giving the sense of something soft and alive, as if she touched a loved one’s shoulder at the same time she touched the labyrinth wall. It welcomed her. It leaned into her.
She leaned back as if into the embrace of a friend.
She thought of all the suns she had seen or heard of—the changing moons of the Qersnyk night, the backward flight of the Nameless sun.
“You have your own gods here,” she said, understanding. “And your sky is stone.”
“It is the realm of my kin,” the ghul answered. “As the steppe is the realm of yours.”
Edene let her fingers trail across that strange, cool, welcoming stone. “And would you spread your stone sky over all of us?”
Besha Ghul, padding silent as a piece of the dark beside her, paused long enough that she knew it was considering carefully what next to say. Her own footsteps, no matter how light and careful, echoed down tunnels that also murmured with ceaseless chiming, trickling, the hushing of water falling and flowing against stone. Echoes built and layered, an intoxicating and alien music with her own heartbeat, the ineluctable rhythm around which it all wound.
The air that filled Edene’s throat and lungs and the spaces in her skull with each breath was moist and cool. She would have called it odorless, except she had not realized before now that rock and pure water had odors of their own, when concentrated in such a confined space. She knew the metal-and-mold scent of rain on dry ground, of an oasis carried over an arid landscape. This was different: less … dusty, somehow, no matter how strange it was that water should smell dusty. More like the spirit or essence of the thing.
The truth of water and stone lay in that smell as if it were a name.
At last, Besha Ghul drew an audible, echoing breath and answered, “We have held empires, and served them, and lost them. Now we mind our sunless realm, and live safe here. If we come forth again to conquer, it will be in service of the ring you bear and not our own ends.”
That ring swung chill and heavy on her finger. “You are thrall to it?”
“Those who built the wizard ways of Erem care little for the desires of things that live and breathe,” Besha Ghul answered. “We—the ghulim—are children in an ancient universe, Mistress of Secrets. And your race is even younger. We may seem very different, your folk and mine. But we have this in common: we are warm, and we must eat, and we must create our children alive and fragile and pulsing with the hot blood that is so easy, so terribly easy to spill.”
It paused, leaving Edene with a breathless sense of this antique race, surviving, burrowing, hunched against the weight of torchlit centuries. Then it continued, in a tone that might be awe or fear or—worse—reverence. “There are powers and sentiences so old, and alien, and terrible, that to them we are of less significance than an infestation of insects would be to us.”
Edene touched the ring with her thumb and said, “And yet we bind these ancient powers.”
Another silence followed, not so long this time. At the end of it, the ghul simply sighed, and said: “Do we?”
* * *
One night, Temur had promised himself. A single night to give entirely to Samarkar, to the exploration—no, the
affirmation
—of the affection they had discovered between them.
They would not have it, and he felt selfish and small that he mourned it bitterly.
The tea was drunk, the pastries devoured before the flat yellow Uthman sun found the edge of the flat turquoise Uthman sky. The council done—at least for now—Samarkar, Hsiung, Ato Tesefahun, and Temur each returned to their own chamber to prepare for the day. In predawn chill, Temur washed himself with a rag and cool water, thinking that at least for now the smell of Samarkar lingered in the tight bends of his braided queue.
Temur’s grandfather’s servants had laundered the clothes from his saddlebags, including the ones Temur had preserved by avoiding wearing them. He dressed himself now in breeches and a shirt, sparing himself the padded coat that was self-mortification in the heat of Asitaneh at the end of summer. His felted boots were worn almost through at the soles and across the arches where the stirrup pressed, but his grandfather’s people had left him some sort of shoes composed, like open-work baskets, of a weave of leather straps fixed to soles. Temur took some time to work out how they fastened, and the straps felt strange between his toes … but they would be unimaginably better than boots once the sun rose.
A foot scraped in the hall, presaging an eastern-style scratch against the frame. When the bead-weighted curtains of his room were pushed aside by a woman’s broken-nailed hand, Temur was already on his feet—but not because he anticipated a threat. Instead, as Samarkar permitted the hangings to drift closed behind her, he put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into an embrace.
She—steel-spined, spire-straight once-princess and Wizard of Tsarepheth—buried her face against his neck for a moment, a gesture that made his heart swell against his ribs until he would have sworn he could feel each one like a brand. She breathed in deep and out again—just once, stirring his beard at the corner of his jaw—before he felt her body firm in his arms.
She stepped back.
He had a moment to look at her in the dim but steady lamplight. She too had dressed in her own clothes, the silk of her best six-petal wizard’s coat only slightly frayed and faded but folded by the belt where she had cinched in a waist that now floated around her. Her hair floated too—clean, and slept on damp and loose after their exertions, and brushed out without oil, it waved and crinkled and drifted to the tops of her thighs. He’d never seen it all clean and unbound and in good light before. Her wizard’s collar might have been lost in it if she hadn’t tossed the mass behind her shoulders. Instead, her hair made a black, silken backdrop for the figured panels of translucent jade that encased her throat, hinged and framed with gold and bordered with the baroque silvery twists of river pearls.
Someday, Temur thought, he would have to ask her to explain the delicate carvings on those panels—impossibly proportioned women in sweeping robes, dancing skeletons, flames or clouds, a writhing dragon and a twisting qoroos, all intertwined or counterpointed with symbols he knew were words but that he could not read. But not now, when she was looking at him intently, seriously, beneath a conscientious frown.
“Edene,” she said.
He might have flinched. He thought he limited it to a quick, tight press of his lips. The careful words he’d thought about the night before deserted him, and rather than stand there stammering he said, “I care for you—”
She nodded.
“I care for
her
too. And I owe her safety, a rescue if I can manage it—”
“Re Temur,” she said, not needing to raise her voice to silence him as utterly as if she’d drawn a knife across his vocal cords. “I cannot bear your heirs. I cannot be your queen—or even one of your queens. I am the Wizard Samarkar, though, and you would not be the first emperor to keep a Wizard of Tsarepheth as consort and confidant.”
She paused. His mouth gaped, but whatever he had meant to say was utterly lost. If ever he had thought to look upon a queen, a khatun, an empress—on the image of his own imperial mother, in spirit though not the least in form—this was she, strong and stern and viciously pragmatic.
Her expression broke into the faintest curve of smile. “Do not think I begrudge you Edene. Or any of the other women you will marry, if we do not die. Re Temur, I am Samarkar, and I will win you back your queen, and I will set you in a golden saddle as Temur Khagan, and I will see your brother avenged and this al-Sepehr of the Nameless put down in your name.”
The moment stretched, tore, spilt. She looked away, pride still in every line of her shoulders and throat. Her hair drifted across her face and hid it now. With her eyes off him, suddenly he could speak again.
The saddle is not gold.
But this was not the time for petty corrections.
“Samarkar,” he said. “I know what you are. And I am not the only one with a brother in need of avenging. But I … I cannot marry
anyone.
”
She blinked at him, and he wondered if he had jolted her out of her martyrdom. “I don’t understand.”
“Anyone,” he said. “You, Edene. Any woman of the clans. My family is dead. I have no mother, no sister, no brother to whisper my true name to a wife and make us family.”