Range of Ghosts (40 page)

Someone shouted back. A muffled voice, but one he knew. A woman’s voice.
Samarkar.

“Blessings on a wizard,” he muttered, as the old door gritted on stone. It pulled away from him, and he all but fell through it into her arms. She was strong; she caught him. The first thing she did after that was lean him against the wall and put a skin of water in his hands.

While he drank, she checked his injuries and he told her about the gut-worm and the desecrated corpse of a dead conqueror. “Somebody took his skull. At least, I assume it was his skull. The other skeleton was wearing women’s garb—”

“Huh,” she said. “There’s supposed to be a curse—”

“I know.”

Only then, when she was satisfied that he could walk, did she lead him outside. A liver-bay mare with one white sock waited there. To his chagrin, Temur found himself hugging the mare with all the fervid affection he suddenly could not show for Samarkar. But the mare was warm and solid, and she blew softly against his hair while he clung to her neck.

Until, when Samarkar came up and touched him on the shoulder, he could turn to her without collapsing and say, “Thank you.”

It was the gray part of morning before dawn, and he was shocked that so little time had passed. At first he asked her if he’d been trapped a day or more, but she shook her head. “One night only. I can imagine it seemed like more.” She paused. “Which ones did this to you?”

“I’d know their voices.” He shrugged then paused. “How did you know I was missing?”

“I … came to find you. And did not. Bansh led me to you.”

There was a space in what she said. He thought he would come back to it. Maybe when his head wasn’t spinning so much, his body aching. “Bansh?”

“She was waiting outside. She seemed to know where she was going.”

“You should have brought Hsiung and Hrahima,” he said. “What if there had been a fight?”

“I…” She looked down. “I didn’t think of it.”

In the gray morning, he sought her gaze. She seemed to fill herself with a resolute breath and turn her eyes deliberately upward. There was not so much space between them. Bansh stamped a hoof. It echoed in the cool dawn air. Some birds that Temur did not know were singing.

She leaned over and kissed Temur on the mouth. He kissed back, ignoring all the wisdom in his head about what a bad idea this was. He forgot, for a moment, the pain of bumps and bruises and a night spent hunched in the cold, the grit of grave dirt on his skin.

They pulled a little apart, but not fully.

“What an odd custom that is.”

Her breath brushed his face. “Do you dislike it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s try it again.”

17

By the time Samarkar and Temur had worked out to their satisfaction that however odd a custom kissing might seem, Temur was willing to experiment with it, the sun was lifting with slow dignity above the horizon, its pale rays trickling between the wind-tossed stems of grass. The whole steppe seemed to roll out before them, endless and vast. Temur leaned an aching hand on Bansh’s flank and soaked in the warmth of the sun.

He might be filthy, nearly naked, and bruised black in all his limbs. But he had a purpose and he had a goal.

When the sun had lifted its belly clear of the grasses, he turned back to the west to see where they must go.

He must have gasped aloud, because Samarkar turned at once, a hand on his naked shoulder. She reeled back against Bansh’s side as if struck. Without tearing his eyes from the western sky, Temur cast a muddy, bloody hand out to her.

She grasped his and held it.

A trail of gray-brown wood smoke crossed the turquoise sky. Temur knew with a plainsman’s instincts that it came from the direction of Tzitzik’s wooden hall. Before he knew what he was doing, he had a double handful of Bansh’s sparse mane and was slithering across her bare back, belly down like a serpent until he could swing his left leg over and sit upright. She snorted and stamped a hoof with a sound like a wooden clog. Temur turned and offered a hand to Samarkar.

She needed it. Between them, they hauled her onto Bansh’s back. Once she was settled she rode bareback well enough.

Temur let his hands rest, open, on the mare’s shoulders. He knew she felt the shift of his weight, the pressure of a thigh as he urged her around. She broke into a trot, then a smoother canter, moving in a great easy circle until she faced the rising pall.

Samarkar said, as if begging him to disagree with her, “We caused that.”

Temur said, “I know. Hold on.”

Her hands tightened on his waist. He leaned forward, and the bay mare broke from a canter into a flat-necked run.

*   *   *

If Samarkar had experienced doubt during their wild flight back to the lizard-folk’s hall that she and Temur were responsible for bringing disaster upon these people, she lost that reservation when they passed the gates of the burning hall and found the indigo-veiled body just within. One blue-veiled body, only one. And half a dozen of the woman-king’s warriors, some gutted, some beheaded, one split like a boiled egg from bottom to top.

All around them, chaos reigned. The hall was burning. Men and women ran around it, screaming—some in combat, some weeping, some clutching children or valuables. Horses screamed in the stables, a sound so horrible Samarkar wished herself deaf. There were grooms; someone, surely, was trying to rescue the animals. Bansh stared in that direction, ears flat, eyes rolling white. Steady as she was, battle-hardened, she danced a step or two. The sweat that soaked Samarkar’s trousers crotch to boot was not entirely the result of exertion.

“A bow,” Temur said, looking over his shoulder. “A blade. Anything.”

She slid down, realizing suddenly that he was all but naked on his equally naked mare, brown legs paler than Bansh’s glossy brown barrel, his stocky body streaked with her sweat and the clinging dust of the dead emperor’s tomb. But there were bows and arrows here, blades and bucklers. She threw him a helm, a pair of quivers. The bow and short sword she handed up.

He took them without looking at her, scanning the sack of the hall, watching skirmishing lizard-folk and assassins charge from place to place. His fingers brushed hers. He neither looked at her nor made a comment but pressed his hand to his mouth before raising the bow.

“I will see you again,” he said to her, a soft promise. “In the Eternal Sky if not under it.”

“We’ll be reborn twinned stones,” she answered, and saw him glance and smile. Then he lifted the bow and nocked an arrow, and Samarkar watched him kick his mare into the thick of battle.

She called up the sharp light of magic, aware that she was marking herself as a target. Clad in her borrowed brown coat, she moved toward a knot of men in indigo veils who were assailing the barricaded doors of a structure she did not know the purpose of.

*   *   *

Temur had no tab or thumb-ring, and the bowstring cut his fingers. The draw was unfamiliar, and the weapon itself overlong to use from the saddle—if he had even had a saddle to use it from. But it was a bow, and there was no bow made he could not kill with.

Into the storm of battle he rode his bay mare, aware that he was risking her, risking himself. That they were in no way prepared to fight. And aware also that this was his battle, and he could not leave the woman-king’s people to fight it without him.

So he rode Bansh bareback by leg-grip and balance, laying down arrows on every side where men fought under the dragon banner. He saw Saura beset, back to the wall of the burning hall, and put an arrow through one of his attackers and into the other. He saw the woman-king herself—in a breastplate and wielding a lance from the deck of a chariot, shouting orders as her fighters regrouped around her. Hrahima fought beside her, hurling human bodies through the air as a man might hurl kittens, her arms red wet to the shoulders, her face a tiger-demon’s mask of concentration.

And Temur saw the hordes of assassins, who must have attacked at dawnlight, swarming over the walls on ropes that still dangled there. These he killed at every turn, mostly with arrows. Bansh with her hooves and teeth shredded every one that came within striking distance of her, and Temur shot down those that would strike from afar.

His stolen quivers ran dry of arrows. He was groping for the hilt of the short sword when the mare turned and swung another quiver into his hands, the strap gripped between her teeth.

In surprise, Temur caught it. His surprise was not enough, though, to keep him from drawing an arrow from the quiver, nocking it, drawing, and loosing.

And again. And again.

*   *   *

Some of the raiders came on horseback. Fine Asitaneh horses, like the ones the two mounted men in the pass below Tsarepheth had ridden, stormed past in clusters of two or three, the men on their backs raining fiery arrows. So much burned, everywhere the arrows fell. More than should have, Samarkar thought. The flames seemed … virulent.

Sorcerous or not, flame was something she could cope with. She strode through the courtyard, the heat and winds of her wards gusting about her, and into those wards she pulled the properties of fire when she passed close to it. Heat, tumult, and the need to consume. No arrow that flew toward her survived, and in the burning dwellings she passed, the flames guttered and died.

Samarkar felt more than heard the cries. A white-house stood in flames; outside it, someone restrained a young girl who wept and whose arms waved wildly. An assassin whose indigo veil had slipped in the struggle was attempting to drag her away, while others waited with bows to shoot anyone who ran from the blazing building. Samarkar did not need an interpreter to tell her what
Mami!
meant.

Samarkar ran between scorched piles of once-homes and heaped and bloodied bodies. She pulled a burning stick from a fallen house as she passed, and advanced upon the men.

Suddenly, someone was there beside her, just beyond the wards. From the corner of her eye, she recognized the chunky form and barrel body of Brother Hsiung. Whether he had come for her or because of the child’s screaming she did not know. But as the assassin lifted the girl-child up and began to swing her around, Brother Hsiung entered the field like a stalking wolf and suddenly, effortlessly, took her from him.

The assassin sprawled on the ground, stunned for half a moment before he rocked up and rolled to his feet. In that moment, Samarkar hit him across the back of the head with her flaming club. She hit him twice more, for good measure. When she looked up again, she was surrounded by four dead or incapacitated assassins, and Brother Hsiung was thrusting the girl at her.

She tuned her wards so they would not burn the child, and grabbed her. A little thing, maybe eight summers, and some of them lean. Samarkar propped her on a hip and turned back to Hsiung.

He was running toward the burning house.

Samarkar cursed like a priest and ran after him, carrying the child, groping outward with all her strength to find the fire and draw it down.

*   *   *

They were winning, that was the hell of it. The assassins were each worth several of Tzitzik’s men, but there were not so many of them. And Temur, on Bansh’s back, was winning through to Hrahima and Tzitzik when the vast, unspeakable shadow passed over.

The mare froze like a rabbit; Temur would have sworn he felt her very hide chill. He cowered unintentionally, dropping an arrow, and twisted to look up.

Its wings blotted out the sky.

“Rukh,” he said, remembering. He could not see the end of it; it came and seemed to keep coming, and the wind of its passing swirled garbage from the packed earth, guttered flame, and blew his hair straight forward across his face.
How can we fight that?

From the look on her feline face as she tipped her head back, Hrahima was thinking the same.

Tzitzik did not pause to think. She drew her strong hand back and hurled her silver-headed lance high, higher, so it should have glinted in the morning sun had not the rukh’s shadow eclipsed it. It peaked, though, and began to fall back, and Temur checked frantically to make sure he would not be under it.

Arrows.

He fumbled the bow, lifted it, and with his right hand checked the quiver. Three arrows left, and it would be like shooting cactus needles at a water buffalo. Like trying to shoot down a dragon. He drew one from the quiver anyway and fitted it to the string.

His good mare shivered under him. He drew his knees up, came to his feet on her broad back. He stood, arched his head back, and lifted the bow.

Not an impossible shot, not with his
own
bow. Just a horribly unlikely one. Here, with this alien weapon—who could say?

Temur drew the string back to his jaw and found his anchor point. At that moment, the rukh’s yellow eye looked straight at him. He saw clearly the indigo-veiled man it bore skyward, straddling its neck like the barrel of a mare.

The rukh folded wings too broad for comprehending and stooped into a dive.

*   *   *

When the rukh passed over, Samarkar was helping Hsiung drag a seared but living woman from the deadly shelter of her ravaged home. The child clutched to her bosom was entirely unharmed, and Samarkar thought that the woman would be scarred, but might live. If there were only one small triumph in this butcher’s morning, she would take it.

And then the shadow fell across her face and she almost dropped to her knees in despair. She looked up; she saw the wings dark against the morning sky.

How did you fight something like that?

With wind, Wizard Samarkar.

She looked down at her hands. With wind.

She knew a little of wind.

She gathered it up, what she could. Pulled it into her hands. Coaxed it, coached it. For a moment, she remembered bitterly and too well that she was not Tse-ten of the Five Eyes. And then she closed her fingers tight to make fists and did it anyway.