Range of Ghosts (13 page)

Buldshak followed on like a patient pack mule, content with Bansh’s lead. The day warmed. The ice melted into ankle-deep mud. Swarms of biting flies arrived with the heat, and Temur clung grimly to Bansh’s saddle while she plodded on. The sun slid behind the peaks again. The long shadows of the mountains plunged the pass into shadow. Temur knew he should stop: The mares needed rest and food—though Bansh, in her wisdom, was stopping to water herself and Buldshak at every stream they passed. A few swallows only, then onward. He knew he should stop, but he couldn’t lift his hands to draw the reins, and he thought if he slid out of the saddle he’d never make it back up again.

The heat was a blessing as he shook with chill. The stones on every side had soaked up the sun’s warmth; now, in the drawing dark, they gave it back. Behind the mountains to the west, the sky blazed amber, crimson. To the east it grew as dusky as a bruise.

Temur roused himself from his fever-dream. There had been a man in golden armor, and a woman on a horse. She had taken him somewhere.…

He pushed back his cowl of blankets to see. They fell about his thighs; the cool evening air soothed his sweat-matted hair. A mist was rising, and Temur looked at it through the glaze of fever and shuddered. If the ghosts he sought came now, he and the mares stood no chance of survival.

He had to get to Qeshqer. There might be help there, treatment for his fever, and perhaps even someone he could ask for guidance on where to find the ghosts—and the woman he desperately hoped they still held captive.

Even as he thought this, something stirred the mist. Something flitting, sparkling even in the gloaming, like chips of mica on the wing.
Thousands
of somethings, smaller than the span of Temur’s palm, their pale or dark wings largely robbed of color in the dusk.

Butterflies.

Thousands and thousands of butterflies.

Bansh stood stolidly as they swirled about her like windblown leaves. Buldshak snorted and shook out her tail, tossing her head when they landed between her eyes and crawled up her ears to take flight again. Their wings brushed Temur’s skin like falling petals. The delicate prickers of their feet tickled his face when they lighted briefly, then took off again. The wind of their passing was comprised of a thousand shifting currents.

He sat Bansh’s back and watched them pass until there was no light with which to watch them, and he merely heard and felt. There were so many he could smell them, a papery, dry-feather kind of smell he didn’t exactly have a name for. When the sky grew silvery again in the east, Temur expected moonrise to reveal them as flitting shadows in the glow of thirteen orbs.

The glow did reveal them, but not as he expected. Or rather, the butterflies were exactly what he had thought to see—but the sky was not. One lone moon rose over the ragged silhouettes of the mountains, fat and copper-red shading to silver as it climbed.

One moon. Alone.

This was not the sky of the steppe. And it was not the sky of Rasa, either, or of Song. He had never seen this moon before, in all his travels, and he had not seen the constellations that shimmered behind it.

He had left the Qersnyk lands—and yet there were still miles to go to Qeshqer. Which could only mean that Qeshqer, too, had fallen and was no longer vassal to the Khaganate.

*   *   *

Temur would never know how all three of them came alive from the Range of Ghosts, except that Bansh brought them safely down. He had no memory of days or nights passing, just a jumble of fever and pain and the patient lurching of the mare as she descended the narrow switchback road step-by-step. There were moments of clarity in the nightmare blue-and-white, some of them more nightmarish than the fever-dream itself. The mist coiled like serpents in the mornings, and there were times when Temur was sure it blinked enormous lambent eyes and brushed his face with salty tendrils. There were supposed to be mist-dragons in Rasa, but if that was what these were, they seemed content to let him pass.

Another time, he had the sense of something huge and silent pacing him during the dark before sunrise, and when there was light to see by, he made out pawprints in the sandy verge of the road, big as a stallion’s hoof and shaped something like a tiger paw and something like the foot of a man. When the fever left him able, he searched the dark for the shimmer of yellow eyes. When it did not, he dreamed their existence and came back to himself clutching his knife in his hand, as if that could protect him.

But the worst by far was the figure he glimpsed again and again at the corner of his vision: a man, a strange leathery man naked as a prisoner, his belly caved in and carved out until there was nothing below or behind the ribs, his back and his skull caved in and scooped out like a polished wooden bowl, his buttocks and sex like empty sacks, his thighs and arms hard and shiny as polished brown twigs.

The man never came close. He never attacked. He never even showed himself plainly but always appeared for an instant, perched on a boulder, vanishing into mists, glimpsed as he strode between outcroppings of rock. But in Temur’s fever, he seemed the most terrible thing in the terrible mountains, and Temur greeted his appearance each time with wracking coughs and shuddering chills.

Finally, when he doubled over the belly-high pommel hacking, clutching at the front-boards to keep himself from toppling sideways, Bansh raised her head and craned back to regard him with one big brown eye.

“Foolish child,” she said. “He doesn’t exist. He can’t hurt you unless you let him.”

Temur’s gasp of surprise set him coughing again. And when he could force himself to stop, there was nothing but a plain bay mare, thin and weary, plodding forward along a descending trail. He reached out to touch her shoulder, reassuring himself of her solidity, and the pressure of the pommel against his stomach sent him into a fit of coughing and a fever-dream once more.

7

Whatever Songtsan feared from the Qersnyk, in the next quarter-moons it took second place for Samarkar to her training in wizarding ways. As a novice, she had read from books and attended lectures. She had studied chemistry and natural history, surgery and healing. As a novice, she had tended the stinking saltpeter beds; there was no special status appended to her as a once-princess. As a novice, she had learned the blending of explosive compounds and those that produced brilliant fireworks and those that were useful to bringing the rains—and she had learned the meticulous care necessary in working with them.

Now she was expected to begin the manufacture of such rockets. But the primary focus of her training became physical and practical: Once she was healed from her surgery, the emphasis was on making her talent manifest.

If
it was going to.

*   *   *

As Tsering-la led her through the warren of passages hewn from the rock below the Citadel, Samarkar wondered if the failed wizard had been tasked with helping Samarkar find her magic because she could serve as a warning of the price of failure or because she was an assurance that even if everything went wrong, there would still be a place in the Citadel for Samarkar.

It wasn’t such a bad place, Samarkar thought. Teaching, studying. Building fireworks. Tsering-la seemed content—not even merely reconciled, but happy. Her stride was confident; her boots clicked with purpose. And for the moment, she had it better than Samarkar: Tsering was not lightheaded with fasting.

Samarkar, walking behind and bearing the lantern for both of them, was drawn to the way the hems of Tsering-la’s six-petaled wizard’s coat of black brocade swished against the bloused black silk of her trousers. Another might not be so sensitive to the sartorial details, and might find a wizard’s costume timeless and interchangeable with that of any other wizard. But Samarkar had grown up in courts and among courtiers, and she was infinitely sensitive to the nuances of style and construction.

Yongten-la wore the plainest coats of anyone: black cotton, fine-milled, quilted for warmth with a layer of wool felt between facing and lining. Their simplicity was a statement of such power as needed to make no statement. Tsering’s coat was costly silk brocade imported from Song, and it bore a pattern of intertwined blossoms in silver, steel gray, and glossy black on its matte-black ground. The six-petal cut and collar meant it could never be mistaken for anything but wizard’s weeds. Still, Samarkar wondered at the other woman’s confidence, when she had no magic of her own, to wear anything other than plain black.

Tsering stopped before an enormous double door of plain rough wood and waited until Samarkar drew up beside her. Samarkar must have given the train of her thoughts away when her right hand came up to clutch the placket of her coat. Tsering reached out gently and made a show of dusting off Samarkar’s shoulders, her calloused, short-nailed fingers whisking over Samarkar’s more-sober Rasan brocade decorated with neat rows of matte eternal knots on a glossy ground. “Whatever happens, it will be well.”

“Am I obvious?” Samarkar asked.

Tsering smiled, a quick flicker of her mouth corners. Samarkar was much taller, but the fact that Tsering had to tilt her head back to meet Samarkar’s eyes did not seem to rob her of any authority. A serpent of silver coiled through the black river of her braid, and in the lantern light it matched the decorations of her coat.

“I remember,” Tsering said. “Now give me your coat, Samarkar-la, and go and earn your power.”

Go and earn your power.

Samarkar handed over the lantern, then put her chilled fingers to her knotted buttons. The sacrifice demanded of a wizard was one thing; barrenness merely paved the road for magic. The would-be wizard still had to walk down it.

She stripped off her coat, her blouse, her boots—hopping on each foot in turn for that last. She peeled off her felted socks and stood at last before Tsering in her quilted trousers, jeweled collar, and the black-bound scarlet wrap-vest that cinched her breasts. The cold air prickled gooseflesh up across her shoulders. Her feet curled, trying to minimize contact with the icy floor.

She reached up and pulled her collar open, the edges scraping the sides of her throat. She felt far more naked without it than without her coat, though she’d been wearing coats for so much longer. She handed it to Tsering fast, before she could weigh it in her hands. “Any words of advice?”

“Advice is the last thing you need.” Tsering stood on tiptoe and kissed her forehead. “Go on, then,” she said, having spoken the ritual words already.

Steeling herself with a deep, cooling breath, Samarkar heaved open the door. The chamber beyond was dark, lit only by the stray radiance of the single lantern, and it echoed with the sound of trickling water.

Samarkar trailed a hand along the wet wall as she entered. The floor, too, was moist and slick under bare feet. With groping steps she circled the perimeter until intermittent drops splashed her arm, her bare shoulder, the part of her hair. The water felt like the ice of the glaciers it melted from.

She folded her legs beneath her and sat.

“I am ready,” she called to Tsering, just out of sight beyond the wall.
Please let this happen. Please let me show them.

“Then commence, Samarkar-la!” Tsering said. And shut the door.

A thin vein of light flickered beneath the door edge for a moment, then receded with Tsering’s hesitant footsteps until she rounded a corner, and light and sound died as one. Alone in the dark, dripping water trickling down her neck and plastering the silk of her breast-binding to her skin, Samarkar closed her eyes.

It made no difference to what she saw.

*   *   *

Samarkar knew the things that wizards know, the things that monks and ascetics have taught them. One of these things was how to live in cold.

Though by the standard of Yongten-la, she had barely begun her practices, she at least understood the theory—or understood it as much as one so insufficiently practiced could. The insufficient practice was part of the test; one must come to the understanding in the end that one was always insufficiently practiced, and yet one must sometimes act anyway. Practice itself was an act.

Samarkar sat in the cold darkness, the chill creeping into her muscles, then her bones. She folded her legs one atop the other and brought her hands before her groin, where the center of creation had once lived and lived no longer. There was the essence of wizardry. It was an act of creation; it was a pure delight in defiance of hunger, and thirst, and sorrow, and the inevitability of death and devouring. As she had sacrificed the power of creation with her body, so she gained the power of creation with her mind.

So it would be.

She was resolved. This thing for herself, who had given so much for others.

She emptied herself, emptied her mind. The thoughts came nevertheless:
I am cold. I am hungry. I am thirsty. I need to urinate.

See the thought. Allow it. And then allow it to pass. Let the space behind be empty.

*   *   *

I will do this thing.

No.

And no, too, was identity. She felt something flicker, briefly, gone like a fish in the cold savage water of the Tsarethi, but it was her that thought it. And that was enough to drive it away.

*   *   *

Drifting. Warmth within, as there was none without. Warmth filling a void, a void with no center.…

Some time passed.

Eyes opened. Or did they? All was darkness, darkness and the warmth of steaming skin. There was a space bounded by walls, and a space within the space, bounded by flesh. They were equivalent.

There was nothing.

More time,
the space thought.

It considered the thought and let it pass.

*   *   *

Eyes open in darkness. What was warm grows cold; what was comfortable grows stiff and chill. Heart slows, breath rattles in time with plashing water.