Range of Ghosts (8 page)

The woman with the bow loosed arrow after arrow futilely. Her clanswoman’s face ran rivulets of blood where the ghosts had clawed her. The archer shouted, too, then she screamed like a peacock as one of the ghosts reached into the stuff of her face and dragged an eyeball down her cheek.

Temur, unthinking, planted his feet. At much too short range, he nocked, drew, and loosed.

The barbed arrowhead passed through three ghosts as if they had no substance at all, and he had the momentary satisfaction of watching their faces—the dead of Qori Buqa and the dead of Qulan, fighting as if they had served one army—as they shattered and drifted into shreds, like the mist they seemed to be.

The half-blinded woman sagged, her bow forgotten in one hand, palms on knees. The other struggled still, lashing out with a knife at four more mocking evil spirits that toyed with her, reaching around her to the child she struggled to protect.

“Salt!” he yelled, and threw a handful over her. It struck her like a scatter of small hail, grains bouncing here and there—but she and the infant were damp with mist, and some grains adhered.

Her dark eyes widened. She laughed a warrior laugh and stroked the side of her knife against her tongue, then her sleeve.

Now the ghosts drew back, wary. Temur dumped a handful of salt on his own head, shaking it down inside the collar of his coat. He advanced upon them, yelling, hoping someone else in the camp could hear him and take up the cry:
“Salt! Salt! Fight them with salt!”

A snarl, and suddenly a dog tall as a young horse was at his hip, lips skinned back from teeth like yellow tusks, long matted hanks of undercoat swaying about it like an armor of quilted rags.

Sube, the Needle’s-Eye, the best of Tsareg’s great dogs, had come to defend his mistress. Temur upended the salt pouch over the dog’s wide shoulders, throwing a handful into his jaws. Whether the dog understood his purpose or not, he never knew, but at the moment Sube lunged forward, ponderous and elemental in his fury, and sank his teeth into the misty fabric of the nearest ghost.

It opened its mouth as if to scream, but no sound emerged. Its mouth grew horribly to encompass and consume its whole head—and the head came apart in shreds. Temur fired a salted arrow through the next two, and Sube ripped the fourth to pieces before he could nock another shaft. Bansh screamed in a fury behind him, and he heard the thunder of her hooves as she whirled and kicked out; he did not have time to turn before another ghost came before him, rearing up suddenly, only to shrivel around the blade of the nearer Tsareg cousin’s knife.

“Temur—” the cousin said, reaching over her shoulder to touch her child. It was still wailing, which Temur took to mean it was still all right. Behind her, the other Tsareg woman choked with pain but forced herself to stand. With fumbling fingers, she shoved her trailing eye back into the ravaged socket, swaying as she did so. She managed it, then she folded down, bloody hands on the earth, her bow forgotten behind her.

The woman with the knife crouched over her. “I’ll see to Toragana. Get Edene—”

He turned, saw Edene lash out with her salted knife. The ghosts were piling up outside the salted circle like water behind a dam, and as Temur stepped forward, the pressure of the ones behind pushed the first ones over. They shredded, slipped apart, came to pieces and mist. But others rode that bank of mist up, up, towering until, like a snow cliff crumbling into avalanche, they washed into the circle.

Bansh whirled again, tearing up her picket, and kicked out with hooves that tore through the first rank of ghosts like hammers hurled against silk hangings. Edene must have salted her hooves, and Temur blessed smart women even as he leaped forward, Sube bristling and snapping at his side, into the midst of the wave of ghosts.

Edene lashed out, opening the belly of a ghost wearing the plumes of a private of Qulan’s guard. Temur—too close now for bowshots—lifted an arrow to stab the next ghost, whose plumes were those of a ranking officer, through the eye as it turned to him.

He froze.

His brother’s face was hewn from brow to jaw by the blow that had killed him, and in the bloodless bottom of the wound Temur could see brains, bone, the fibers of severed muscle, the fat of Qulan’s cheeks.
He’s dead and cursed,
Temur thought, and almost brought the arrow down. But then he remembered, as Qulan’s one remaining mute eye stared at him, the tongue flopping through the ruined jaw.

He knew his brother’s true name. “Go free, Re Sha-kharash Arslanjin, called Qulan. Go to the Eternal Sky now.”

The ghost dissolved into mist. Behind it stood another, and this one—a one-armed, broken-backed soldier of Qori Buqa’s army—was not Temur’s kin. But now he had it in his heart what he was destroying, that these were the shades of men left unmourned on a battlefield, and some of them Temur might have left that way himself. His battle rage was broken.

He thrust his arrow into the dead man’s face, not in fury but in pity.

Sube began to bark, frantically, lunging in place like a dog bouncing on the end of a tether, and Temur turned.…

Edene reached for him through mist and morning, his knife in one hand and the other outstretched, her body pulled back as the ghosts surrounded and lifted her. She shouted—she didn’t scream—and Temur lunged after her as they pulled her into a sky they vanished against. His fingertips brushed hers. She twisted like a squirrel in a wolf’s mouth, lashing out with the blade, hacking at the gray hands that dragged at her.

Bansh was there. Temur vaulted up her flank, dropping his bow, using her mane as a handle until he crouched on her shoulders.

He leaped.

This time he did not even touch Edene. The ground was a long way down. He landed, rolled, heaved himself into a crouch. Arrows fell around him, shaken from his quiver. His bow was there, just beside the circle of salt that glittered amethyst and obsidian on the grass. The mist was burning off, the sunlight starting to cut and sparkle as it shone through.

“Edene!”

She wailed, lifted higher, vanishing into the sky. Still fighting.

Temur snatched up his bow. He swept an arrow through the salty-wet grass, nocked, drew back.

Temur raised his left arm. Found the roughness of the serving with his right fingertips. Let the string pull back into his gathered strength, the bow’s leathern grip settling into his palm. Spread the fingers of his left hand, reaching so his grip would not shake the bow. Raised the bow above his shoulders and waited until he felt it surround him, felt himself fall into the bow. Felt the pressure of the string at his thumbtip, unprotected by the flat horn ring he would have used to draw if he’d had time to find it.

The fall might kill her. But would that be worse than whatever the ghosts intended?

He bent his knees, tucked his tail, and the bow enfolded him. There was a moment when its balance encompassed his and the jouncing breasts of rising ghosts bounced up and down past the point of his arrow—or the point of his eye.

The arrow was the intention. There was no difference.

When Temur breathed, the bow breathed. When Temur waited, the bow waited.

When the fingers of Temur’s right hand drifted open, the bow killed.

The arrow flew true. True and high, piercing the sky, piercing the ghosts that threw themselves into its path, shredding them, passing through them as if they were nothing.

But they were not nothing. There was something to them. Some presence. Some substance.

The arrow crested its arc an arm’s breadth below the ghosts that held Edene, and began its long smooth descent back to earth.

Temur forced himself not to look down until he could not see her anymore, until Edene’s cousins came to pry the bow from his stiff hands and tend the wounds and bruises he had not even noticed he’d acquired.

5

Despite what her other brother, Tsansong, had said to her when she returned in disgrace from the nominally Song principality of Zhang Shung, Samarkar had striven all her years to be a dutiful daughter and a dutiful sister. She had even been a dutiful wife, in as many of her duties as her husband Ryi had permitted her to perform. And so she sent word ahead to the palace that Samarkar-la,
aphei,
would call after midday, and that she would be most pleased if her brothers would receive her.

She could have summoned a litter, but pride had something to say, even if pride was something a wizard should set aside. So instead she dressed herself with care in the clothing of her new office—the pearl and jade collar, the black trousers, the black coat—and pulled high-topped boots lined with the fleece of black sheep onto her feet. Winter might be ending, but rime and ice still lingered on the stone banks of the Tsarethi. She clothed her hands in gloves and was ready to walk the length of Tsarepheth.

It was a test for herself as much as anything, and she gritted her teeth until she could be sure no sudden weakness would overcome her.

A gorgeous day in early spring rewarded her. Though the air was crisp, the sun hung warm in the sky, and all the city’s market streets bustled. Samarkar kept to the promenade along the river’s west bank, following the flow of people—women with market baskets, herb girls selling what they had gathered in high meadows at the first light of morning, prostitutes sacred and profane.

Some of the whores were men, but not so many as the women. A few of both were maimed. One woman had had her nose and upper lip sliced away; she had probably been pretty before, and Samarkar imagined some powerful man had had her punished for refusing him. Now she could refuse no one with coin, if she wished not to starve. And who would pay much for a scarred prostitute?

Samarkar gave the whore alms, forcing herself to meet the woman’s eyes. Better to be a neutered wizard than a woman.

A beggar with his right hand severed for some infraction caught her eye. She tossed him a coin, wondering what his crime had been. Once, she would have considered his punishment only what he deserved. But that was before she learned quite so much as she knew now of the ways of the world.

The city’s white walls and red tile roofs rose on her right hand, and the river poured down smoothly on the left, filling its chasm and the whole of the valley with the sound of rushing water. The railings rustled with prayer flags; the eaves of houses rang with strings of prayer bells. Samarkar drew the air deep, delighted, for a moment setting the nagging thought of her task aside.

An hour or so of walking brought her to the Black Palace. She approached the towering black gate boldly, as if she belonged there still; it felt strange to come home to a place that was home no longer. The guards at the gate recognized her anyway, despite her black wizard’s garb and her hair dressed plainly in two shining dark braids over the green and pearl collar.

Ushered inside the palace, she was greeted most formally by a chamberlain and a series of functionaries, all of whom she knew by name. One or two had been warm acquaintances when she was princess. But now, they treated her as an honored stranger—with absolutely correct dignity and deference, and not even the shade of a smile.

It should not have stung. She had made her choice to serve Rasa as a wizard and not as a princess—in some ways, a matter of preserving her own life and freedom, because as a wizard she could neither be sold off in another marriage to serve her brother’s ambition (assuming he could find a man who would take her, after the last debacle) nor would she eventually find herself and any heirs murdered by a cousin to clear a line of succession.

It should not have stung. But Samarkar knew enough by now to understand that things were rarely as they
should be.

“Will my brother see me?” she asked, as they swept her down the halls. Given the pace the functionaries set, she was glad she had waited to come here. Although the long strides and the wind of their passage made her wizard’s black-on-black brocade coat and broad trousers—designed to set off the pearls and jade of her stiff high collar—flare out around her dramatically. She was adapting to the collar—not so different from court garb, after all—but despite her two years of novitiate, it felt strange to walk about bareheaded. Probably because now she was bareheaded in the
palace,
and she had not done that since she was old enough to toddle upright after her nursemaids.

As she asked the question, it occurred to her that she should have phrased it more positively, to make the functionaries work harder to deny her. Had all the learning of a lifetime of politics been snipped from her body with her stones?

“His Highness is unexpectedly detained,” one of the functionaries—old Baryan—said, managing to walk sideways and backward like a river crab and still bow so low his headdress scraped the floor. “The princesses will entertain you while you wait, Samarkar-la.”

Samarkar-la smiled and congratulated Songtsan silently. No one could claim he had not done her honor, and yet he could keep her waiting indefinitely to demonstrate his disappointment in her delays.

“Then we are going to the solar?”

“Yes,
aphei.
”

“Never mind, then. I know the way.”

The wizard’s trousers allowed a person to move at a pace an old man reduced to scuttling in court robes could hardly be expected to keep up. Samarkar lengthened her stride, letting her bootheels hit the flagstones with a force she would not have dared when she whispered through this palace in narrow slippers that never kept her feet warm. She cruised down the hall like a great golden eagle, the wind of her passage filling her coat like dark wings, and the functionaries flocked behind, ineffectual and hurried as mobbing crows.

She had spent many hours in the women’s solar. It took her two minutes to walk there, hustling up stairs two risers at a time, and even though her side caught a stitch in half-healed muscles partway up the final flight, she did not show it. When she paused in the doorway, she did put a hand out to the frame, but that could have been to show off her bare hands and bare fingertips as much as because she needed the support.