Range of Ghosts (37 page)

He watched himself gather to charge the knife again, and would have drawn a breath to shout if he’d had lungs to draw it with.

The door of his sleeping chamber burst open, and a blaze of brilliance flooded the room. He saw his own stark shadow, the assassin’s hazel eyes lit through as if by the sun. He saw the indigo of the assassin’s veil and the fluidity with which he threw himself back into a handspring and was gone out the fourth-story window as if he had never been.

“I heard the fight. You’re bleeding,” Samarkar said from the doorway, as Temur fell back into himself.

Suddenly there was pain, sharp, drawn in lines across his arm and shoulder. Pain and the stickiness of blood.

“I’ve been cut,” he said, and put out his empty hand to the wall as he swayed.

16

Nilufer Khatun turned out her garrison, but they found no trace of the assassin. Temur thought it was the same man they’d fought in the pass, though it was hard to tell in the dark. Still, something about the way he moved was familiar.

It was some days before they were well and rested enough to travel on. In that time Nilufer saw to it that they had new boots, provisions, and enveloping robes to protect them against the glare of the desert sun.

For Temur, the hardest part was leaving the mares behind: for Samarkar it was Payma. But neither mares nor princess could come with them across the Great Salt Desert, and so eventually they made their farewells, shouldered their packs, and joined Hrahima and Brother Hsiung on the road below.

When they walked away from Stone Steading, it was all Temur could do to keep himself from looking back over his shoulder every few strides. By the stiffness of her own spine, Samarkar felt no different.

The desert lay five days’ march beyond, according to the map with which Nilufer had provided them. By the fourth day, it was desert enough to meet Temur’s not terribly exacting standards; scrub struggled through hardpan baked to cracking, and their footprints left no lingering trace.

They used their food sparingly, and Samarkar took time in the evening before sleep to supplement their water with what she called out of the air, seemingly from nothing. They were coming into the heat of summer, when caravans avoided crossing the desert at all. Temur had a sense that they all feared the crossing. The days were passed in trudging forward, discussing their worries in low tones. The nights were passed staring awake on watches or sleeping hard, as they did in shifts. Even Hrahima must sleep sometime, and Temur was not an experienced walker, though he was slowly adapting.

But as they came up to the range of low hills where they planned to spend the night—preferably by the shores of a seep oasis, if they could find one of the ones the map suggested should be there—Temur’s measured step faltered. Because he saw green ahead, yes, a patch of grass and huddled trees, and from behind them he caught the glint and the scent of water.

But in the grass by that water stood something impossible: a liver-bay mare, head down, cropping the grass in the shade of a bush burdened with unripe pomegranates.

“I’m imagining things,” he said.

He would have rubbed his eyes to clear them, but Samarkar touched his wrist and said, “If you are, I’m imagining them too. That’s Bansh.”

She started forward, about to break into a jog despite the lingering ache in her thigh, but Brother Hsiung threw his arm in front of her. She checked sharply. When she glanced up at him, he shook his head.

She blinked and nodded. “If Bansh is here, it’s because someone rode her here. And that person is waiting for us.”

“And possibly does not have our best intentions at heart.” Hrahima crouched, bringing her face close to the earth, and sniffed. She stepped a little sideways, a movement that should have seemed crablike but was instead powerful, and sniffed again. “Nothing,” she said, standing. “The wind blows over the hills, from the east. The curve of the bluff could be holding the scent in a pocket of dead air, I suppose. But I can smell the mare.”

Temur drew his knife. “Carefully, then.”

As a group, they advanced, Brother Hsiung and Temur to the front—Temur holding his knife, Hsiung barehanded. Hrahima ranged out to the side, and Samarkar followed them, every sense straining.

But no matter how they searched, they found nothing. Nothing except Bansh, curried to a shine like afternoon sunlight, her tack hung neatly on the branches of a nearby pomegranate tree.

“Somebody brought you your horse,” Hrahima said, at last, tail lashing. “And I cannot smell on her—or her furniture—who.”

Temur had already come up to her and was rubbing her velvet nose, feeding her chips of dried fruit that he’d been intending to eat himself. Overhead, a drifting vulture circled.

A gift of the Eternal Sky, before we leave his lands entirely?

“Well,” Temur said. “I guess we work with it.”

*   *   *

In the morning, they topped the bluffs and looked out over the salt pan of a dead ancient sea. Temur wondered how he had thought the cracked lands behind them a desert, when all to the horizon this one stretched off-white, featureless, infinite.

Beside him, the others too stood and stared.

Bansh now carried most of their gear. What had been heavy packs for four humans and a Cho-tse was a moderate load for the mare. Temur was worried about water—how much, realistically, could Samarkar create?—but if all went well, they should be out of the desert in a hand of days and a little more. The mare could live on very limited food for that long, if Samarkar could keep her watered.

If all went well.

It was a faster route than rejoining the Celadon Highway, and Temur thought they’d have less chance of meeting up with assassins or Qori Buqa’s men. The attempt in Stone Steading left no doubt the killers were seeking Temur in particular. And of course, the blood ghosts could not cross the salt flats. They hoped.

The glare was eye-splintering, and salt dust rose up from their footsteps to coat their faces and mouths. After the first half day, they sheltered under canvas from late morning until evening, and walked by moon and starlight through the night. The hard-baked salt reflected even the sparsest starlight, giving them light to walk by. At least the pale hot sun crossed the sky in the proper direction. These were Uthman skies and not Rahazeen.

*   *   *

Every evening when she awoke and dragged herself from her hard bed, Samarkar found Temur leaning close to the bay mare, singing into her ears and stroking her mane. Well away from him, the barrel-bodied monk, stripped to his trews, was practicing the forms of his martial art in the still warmth and waning light.

The first thing Samarkar did was create water. With practice, she’d gained dexterity. Now she looked back at her fumbling first attempts with a kind of awe for how far she’d come in a few moons.

The deeper they traveled into the Salt Desert, however, the harder it became to summon water. Her eyes dried and her lips cracked, despite all the balm of fat and herbs she could muster from the contents of her medical bag. There was just too little moisture in the air to make a difference.

At least Samarkar’s wizarding disciplines could be used to keep her from baking in the unforgiving sun. Hrahima, who did not sweat, suffered more. She did not complain, but Samarkar did not need an interpreter to read the slouched posture, the open-mouthed pant. On one particular afternoon, as Hrahima lay flat in the shade, Samarkar came and crouched beside her with a bowl of water brimming in her hands.

Hrahima cracked an eye.

“I might be able to help,” Samarkar said, as the Cho-tse reached out for the water. “There’s a meditation against the heat—”

“I know one,” Hrahima said. She pushed herself up on one elbow and took the bowl gratefully. Though Samarkar had diminished the process of fire within it until it almost smoked with cold, the air here was so dry that no moisture beaded on the outside. Hrahima cupped both broad hands against it, savoring the chill.

“And you will not use it,” Samarkar said.

A tiger’s sigh was a mighty thing. Her chest rose and fell; her whiskers blew forward. “Have you heard of ‘soldier’s heart’?”

Guiltily, Samarkar’s eyes crept to Temur. But what she said was, “I have it a little myself, I think.”

Hrahima drank deeply. When she looked up, transparent droplets shivered on her whiskers. “War begets fear. Fear begets rage. Rage propagates hate. Hate draws rage. The Sun Within abhors hate; hate is inharmonious. Hate is the weapon of entropy.”

“The Sun Within.” Samarkar fought her smile, but she wasn’t any better at keeping it inside than Temur. “That god you don’t believe in.”

The Cho-tse huff of amusement was becoming as familiar to her as a sister’s sigh. “Yes, well. He drops by once in a while and we hash it over. It’s never going to be resolved, but we’re still friends.” She spread her hands. “It is what it is.”

Samarkar thought about that, thought about this idea that one could … disagree philosophically with a force of nature. With a deity.

If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?

She said, “You’re a warrior. So how do you kill without rage?”

“In compassion. Because of necessity.” Hrahima set the empty bowl back in Samarkar’s hands. “The same way you carry water.”

*   *   *

Day fell into day, night to night. The silver earth bled into the silver sky so Temur could scarcely find a horizon, and the pale sun seared down through the haze. In the dark, the salt below seemed brighter than the heavens. The wind was ceaseless, blowing delicate rills of salt in winding bands, like the first snows of autumn.

Temur sang to his mare, the milk-letting songs and the soft-muscle songs. His own muscles hardened in new ways. His feet broke into the new boots, or possibly the other way around.

The sun did not kill them.

They walked on.

*   *   *

After three days in the desert, Bansh’s milk let down. It was an art of the Qersnyk to coax their mares to lactate so early in the pregnancy, he explained, when Samarkar expressed surprise that she was bearing.

Temur showed her how to make
airag
and explained to her that the mare’s milk was too strong for humans until it fermented. “It will make your bowels loose,” he said. “Which would kill you, here. But in three days, it is good food.”

Samarkar looked at the mare, standing patiently while Temur crouched before her hind legs, streams of milk jetting into the leather pail of white froth by his feet.

“She’ll need more water, then,” Samarkar said. “We can get some of ours from the milk, when in turn we drink it.”

If his hands hadn’t been milk-covered and busy, Temur would have put an arm around her then.

*   *   *

On the fifth day of the desert, Samarkar joined the mute monk in his forms.

She did not excel. Her body felt bulky, awkward, badly shaped for what was expected of it. But he was patient with her.

At dawn on the sixth day, when they had been walking all night, they found themselves climbing out of the salt basin, blistered and exhausted.

Samarkar would have hugged the first scrubby tree she saw, if it had not been so thorny.

*   *   *

That afternoon while the men and Hrahima slept and Samarkar kept watch, Temur dreamed again. She’d become used to his nightmares by now. Some might be prophesy, though he had not spoken of such since Tsarepheth, and the rest were likely “soldier’s heart,” as Hrahima diagnosed. He regularly mewled and kicked in his sleep, scrabbling at something Samarkar could not see and that she knew he would never explain.

This time, though, she got up and moved over beside him, laying his head against her thigh. She thought he’d awaken fighting. She was prepared for it.

Instead he curled up to her, made one last noise, and sighed into relaxation.

That evening, when Temur uncased his bow and strung it, she saw that the meat he’d also packed in its case for moisture had dried to leather.

*   *   *

The sun that rose in the morning was an Uthman sun. As they approached the sea, they found themselves in sparse grasslands again—a rocky sort of terrain fit for goats but not cattle. When the first band of riders approached, heralded by much whickering from Bansh, Samarkar turned over her shoulder and glanced at Temur, who was leading Bansh along in the rear of the group. Her face showed concern and chagrin. He nodded.

“Score a point for the witch,” he said, as six mounted men circled them. They had arrows nocked, but the bows were not drawn. Temur noticed that the design of the bows was different from either the long Song bows or the back-curved Qersnyk variety, though he thought they were—like his—of laminated construction.

The men wore armor coats made of scales cut from horse hooves. The coats covered them to their knees. Beneath, they wore baggy pantaloons in bright colors. Their horses were grays, except for one black and one sorrel; they were dish-nosed and short-backed like the famed Asitaneh bloodlines. They were beautiful—bright-coated, bright-eyed, with deep nostrils and luxurious manes—and the rugs they wore under their saddles were all the bright, clear colors of jewels and fruits.

The men on their backs carried lances as well as their bows, banners snapping bright with crimson dragons. The leader, on the palest and tallest of the grays, put his horse a step forward. Their saddles were low, by Temur’s standards, and he noticed with a start that they had no stirrups. The men rode by balance and the grasp of their legs.

That is why they go to war in chariots,
he thought, remembering the words of the witch.

“You are off the road,” the leader said in broken Qersnyk. “But you do not look like bandits. What is your intention in our lands?”

He spoke to Temur, and as he glanced from side to side, Temur understood that they would consider him the leader of this group. Just as Temur himself tended to look to Samarkar to fill that role.