Range of Ghosts (11 page)

If the monk had been able to see from the perspective of a falcon or one of the black birds to which he commended the dead, he would have known that each butterfly flitted into existence over the lips of a dead man or boy or occasional woman. That each one then beat wings to gain altitude and joined the general migration.

If the monk had seen from the perspective of a falcon, he could have seen that the butterflies numbered in the tens of thousands, and that all their myriad beating wings in myriad brilliant colors marked a general migration south.

He couldn’t see that, but he could guess at it. It was the scarlet butterflies that gave it away.

Because all over the steppe, deep into the Rasan Empire, all across the lands of the Song, it was known that scarlet butterflies were the souls of witches. And it was said that they would whisper secrets and magic into your ears if you were silent and listened hard.

No one was more silent than the monk. But no matter how he strained his ears, the butterflies kept their peace, as silent to him as he was to them.

*   *   *

Edene’s cousins led Temur into the camp, to the fire that had been allowed to die to embers overnight and was now being coaxed to flame for the boiling of tea. One of them—the one who’d all but lost her eye—kept bloody fingers pressed to the socket as swelling puffed the lid closed and pink-tinged fluid ran down her face. She
might
keep it. She might even keep some of the sight in it: Temur had seen worse healed, with time and good nursing, but he wouldn’t care to wager a mare on it.

The other cousin—her sister, Temur thought, though he still had trouble keeping the Tsareg clan girl-cousins straight—pushed her down on a rolled hide and waved Temur to sit beside her. “You take care of Toragana. I’m going to fetch great-grandmother.”

The swaddled babe on her back was visible as the girl disappeared between tents.

Toragana seemed not to require any extensive caretaking other than a prop to lean her shoulder against, so Temur did as the other girl had asked. He knew from hard experience that a wound that would not prove fatal by itself could put a chill in the bone that
would
bring down a wounded warrior—even before the wound could take heat and fester. He shrugged his coat off and threw it around Toragana’s shoulders, adding an arm over it to keep her warm.

Around them, others were straggling to the fireside, some wounded or aiding wounded, some dragging the dead. Temur wanted to close his eyes against the faces of still more people he had known gone lifeless and empty.

Toragana, he thought, did. Or close the one eye that wasn’t torn and swollen shut anyway. After a stiff moment, she leaned against him, burrowing her shoulder into his chest. She sighed, hard, then began to sob. “Edene…”

“I know,” Temur said. “I’ll get her back. Wherever they’ve taken her, I will ride after.”

He said it with the force of a vow, and the vow filled him.
Yes,
he thought, suddenly certain.
I will go after her. To the Range of Ghosts and to Hell itself.

Determination felt good in his mouth, like a round stone. Toragana took his hand; he squeezed.

*   *   *

When Temur told Tsareg Altantsetseg of his plan, she agreed that he must leave at once. The Tsareg clan, she said, would stay behind and sky-bury their dead. Temur would ride ahead. He would take Bansh and he would take Edene’s rose-gray mare, Buldshak, as a remount—“and because Edene will need a horse, when you find her”—and the clan would give him food.

He insisted they keep their stores of salt in case the ghosts returned. Altantsetseg retaliated by handing him an
airag
-skin full not with mare’s milk but with salted water.

As he threw a leg over Buldshak’s back—Bansh snorting jealously by his knee—Temur found himself shaking his head at the ridiculousness of what he was about to undertake. Here he was, riding off to rescue a woman from ghosts as if it were as everyday a matter as stealing a kidnapped wife back from an enemy clan.

But they had taken her alive. Her and her only, when they had been killing everything else they touched. Surely if they had a reason to take her alive, they had a reason to keep her that way?

The remains of the Tsareg clan had assembled to see him off. He raised a hand to them; they waved as he made his mare bow. Altantsetseg called out, “May you ride comfortably and tirelessly on the road you travel!”

Gently, Temur reined the mares away.

He hadn’t gone a
yart
at a canter when he realized that the shadow in the grass behind him was Sube, following at a ground-eating lope. He brought the rose-gray to a halt with his weight, letting a hand rest on her shoulder when she snorted and shook her slender neck. The dog stopped five paces off, tongue lolling, the felted shreds of his matted coat hanging about him like a coat of rags.

Temur’s heart broke a little.

He understood the offer, and he was confident the dog understood it too: They were going raiding, to steal back what had been stolen from the clan. But what the dog didn’t know—couldn’t know—was that Temur had no idea where the trail would take him. To the Range of Ghosts, surely. And then what? How would he feed a dog? If he came to a place where he had to let the horses run wild, well, steppe ponies were half wild to begin with, and after sixty-odd days he had a good opinion of Bansh’s good sense.

Sube would track. He would guard Temur and the mares from ghosts in the night. Temur had already seen that he would fight like a demon. He would be a companion by the fire, a sharp nose and sharper ears and fierce teeth. Temur longed to call him.

The clan needed him to guard their flocks—and their lives. And Temur was leading him into death if he took him.

“No, Sube,” he said. He pointed back along the track, the faint trace of two mare’s passage through the grass that already swished calf-high. “Go back.”

Sube whined. He dropped his head and ears.

“No,” Temur said. “Go back.”

The big dog sat, obdurate.

Temur turned away. He urged the mare on.

Behind him, he was aware of the dog’s eyes watching him out of sight.

*   *   *

In the morning, Temur glimpsed the mountains, just a dull finger smudge on the horizon. It would only be the front range he could see so far, the smaller peaks called the Range of Ghosts. Beyond them, reached by way of a perilous pass, lay a high plateau and the city of Qeshqer—with the even higher and more treacherous peaks of the Steles of the Sky at its back.

It was possible that Temur’s path would lead him so far. But beyond that boundary lay the unconquered Rasan Empire, home of a people whose language he did not speak and whose customs he did not know.

Would he follow Edene there? Even assuming she still lived—he was taking a wild chance to suppose the ghosts had taken her to the storied (and purportedly haunted) mountains. But he had to do something.

And it was better than waiting for Qori Buqa’s men to find him and kill him and probably kill the whole Tsareg clan for daring to shelter him, too.

*   *   *

For a long time, each day’s passage seemed to bring that blue-smoke smudge at the horizon no closer. By the end of the first five-day, though, he could measure against his fingers that the mountains had grown. By then, Temur had outridden the refugee horde, burdened as they were with worldly goods. Another five-day and he could see each day that the Range of Ghosts stood closer, taller. In the third five-day water became more common, and the gazelles and antelope of the high steppe gave way to deer and hares. Temur still saw, occasionally, the broad angle of a vulture’s wings circling overhead, but the bird never drifted close enough that he could tell which type it was.

As he chased the heights, he was leaving spring behind. Here among the gentle foothills, ice still lingered at the stony margins of streams and in the deep shade under evergreens. Temur supplemented his diet of rabbit and marmot with pale buds pinched from the ends of spruce boughs. He tucked these into his cheeks and sucked for their tangy flavor and power to prevent the winter sickness that sometimes made scalps bleed and teeth fall out. It was a good trick for the cold months when the milk of weaning mares dried up and that of the pregnant mares had not yet let down.

Buldshak had her season while they climbed; Bansh did not, and when Temur greased his hand with marmot fat and palpated her, he felt her womb as large and hard as a man’s skull, buried deep in the muscle of her body. She twitched and stamped, but tolerated his indignities.

She was likely in foal, but it would be many months yet before the filly was born. Still, he felt a thrill of excitement; his luck in this mare was amazing. Here she was, the potential foundation of a herd that could be a new start for him—and she’d brought along a foal—if it came to term and all went well.

It struck him as a nakedly encouraging portent. For a few hours, as he rode the bay and led the rose-gray into wooded glades now, he allowed himself to dream that he would rescue Edene and make her his wife and that they would live to an untroubled old age with all their children and her cousins and her cousins’ children.

It was a fantasy, and he knew it. But he was soldier enough to know that such fantasies were all that carried men through the supposed glory of war.

The mountains made their own weather. He knew these hills as well as he knew the steppe: They were the summer range of his folk. So he also knew how dangerous and unpredictable the springtime storms were. His rate of travel slowed, as one of the mares had to carry bundles of fuel—wood for fire here, where there were no casual piles of dry dung at every turning—and each night, he must seek out pasturage for them. The grass here was richer but found in meadows rather than vast sweeps of plain, and the mares needed time to crop and chew. Horses could not bolt their food like dogs or men.

Twice more, the ghosts found him, though not in such armies and vast numbers. Each time, Temur was wakened by the restlessness of the mares in time to cast a circle of salt water around them. Each time, he spent the night uneasily alert, seated comfortably on Bansh’s broad back with the salted arrows on his hip, his strung bow resting comfortably before him. Each time, the ghosts drifted around the borders of his secured circle, wailing soundlessly, displaying the gaping horrors of their bloodless wounds. Each time, they vanished with the mist, so Temur could almost convince himself in the exhausted blur of morning that he’d seen nothing at all.

Forest gave way to high alpine meadow, a lacework of harsh, hardy groundcover around tremendous scattered boulders. The green flanks of the mountains stretched up to stark, knife-blade granite, and Temur at last rejoined the road. There was only one pass through the mountains to Qeshqer. He would have to risk being recognized, if any of his uncle’s men had come this far.

By the equinox, Temur was deep among the Range of Ghosts, their great shadows rendering the Eternal Sky finite. As if in mockery of his fears, the pass was deserted. He imagined caravans waited below for the warm days to come, his people forced early into their summer ranges and hoping there would be no late storm or snow.

Temur pushed on. For this, he’d been hoarding his dried rations, and the salt and sweets and grain for the mares. There was water aplenty at least. It tumbled down the mountainsides in streams so clear and cold his teeth ached just to look upon them. They would run north between the hills, and from there feed the sparse and necessary rivers of the steppe. The cold high air made his head spin, and for three days they climbed. The nights held clear, and the mares were eating from nose bags now, so by the light of thirteen moons they walked late into the night.

Thirteen moons. No less and no more, every night from rise to set. No matter how many times he allowed himself to count them.

Maybe somewhere, nine hundred
yart
behind him, the killing was over.

*   *   *

One day, Temur first noticed that the streams were running south now, to eventually twine into the wild Tsarethi, thence to the ocean he’d heard described, but could not begin to imagine. That night, the killing ice came. The wind roused him from his cold bivouac between stones—the wind and the distress of the mares. He craned his head back in time to see the leading edge of the storm grope black and threatening across the scattered band of moons.

He cursed.

There were stones here, at least, great broken boulders leaned this way and that against each other as if they had tumbled from a great height. One rock slab slanted out from the cliff it had slid from, a narrow passage dark at its base.

There had been no fuel for a fire for days, but he still had some tallow and wicks in his pack. A hurried search found a hollow-surfaced stone that would do. Cold rain spit, freezing to a glaze where it struck, by the time he’d kindled a lamp with flint and steel. He cupped it in his left hand, leading the snorting and uncertain mares into the damp crevice with his right.

Though born under the watchful expanse of the Eternal Sky, the steppe horses were familiar with enclosed spaces. Clans regularly sheltered the most valuable livestock in their white-houses during the worst storms of winter, and the mares could smell the weather coming. So they were discontented and disconcerted, but not terrified. Still, it took time to coax them within, and by the time he had them under shelter, both mares and man were ice-coated and chilled to the bone. The frozen fur at Temur’s collar scratched his throat.

Hastily, Temur set the lamp down and sidled back past the mares, squeezed hard against stone when Bansh shifted unexpectedly. He’d have to back the mares out when the storm ended; there was no way he was turning them in here. He hadn’t retied their gear—just tossed the packs hastily across their withers for moving. Now he heaped the packs behind them, jamming a blanket into crevices to drape over the opening, weighting the bottom with saddlebags and stones. It didn’t keep much wind out, but it was what he had.