Steles of the Sky (42 page)

In a tight voice, he said, “Al-Sepehr calls on me, my swan.”

“Will you break your alliance?”

He shrugged. “I should. I
would.…
”

“Except?”

His arm came up around her shoulders, the scrap of message crumpled in his hand. “There are songs in the city that celebrate him, you understand. Celebrate that he is bringing the true faith east, to the heathen tribes, and casting a Rahazeen sky over the steppe. Some even say it was he, and not I, who won Asmaracanda back from the Qersnyk overlords. If they call him a prophet next…”

“That’s infuriating,” Ümmühan said. “Who would write such nonsense?”

She did not have to put the outrage in her voice. Even if her pen had scratched the words celebrating al-Sepehr, her initial attraction to him had turned to a kind of fascinated loathing. That she had given the people songs about the man made her hate him more. That she fully intended Mehmed to march to his support did not remove the disgust she felt for both of them.

“Come with me,” Mehmed said. “Come to war. Be my comfort. It will not be pleasant—”

He asked rather than commanded. Once it would have made a difference to her, warmed her breast under the golden collar. Now it made her smile, but it was not a smile of affection.

“Of course, lion of my heart,” she said.

20

They found no books, search through the eerily deserted library—or museum—as they might. But Samarkar found a desk, and in the bottom drawer of the desk she found the greatest tease of all: an Uthman-style ledger with a stitched binding, into which somebody—some several dozen somebodies, to judge by the evolution of the hand—had recorded a catalogue of the great library which had once graced these shelves. Some of the entries at the front of the book were so old that they were in the most ancient Song writing, completely—to Samarkar’s eyes—opaque columns of symbols and characters.

Edene, exploring further, called back to her, “Look here!” and Samarkar trotted over the parquet floors to reach her.

Edene stood just within another set of doors—ceremonial, Samarkar thought, by their size. They dwarfed Edene; they would have dwarfed Hrahima. An indrik-zver could walk through them without much ducking its great head. And they were ruined. Something had wrenched them from the hinges, scarred them with great axes and mauls, and then carefully leaned them back into place to seal the library up again.

When they walked around to the outside—Samarkar wading through snow and wishing she had Hong-la’s trick of levitation, Edene moving light as a wide-pawed manul cat—they could see that the patchwork repair had been fixed in place with quantities of melted lead.

Samarkar turned around to find Edene staring at the back of her head, a hand pressed to her mouth. Samarkar almost startled with realization, and hoped she hid it under court manners.

“When we came through the Grave Roads,” Edene said, carefully lowering her hand, “there were paths we did not follow. One such was lighted for a great distance by those paper lamps that are not paper, nor lamps.”

“Who’d pillage a library and carefully seal it up again?” Samarkar asked.

Edene shook her head. “I say one of us goes and finds out.”

“I say I do it,” said Samarkar. “Does Temur know yet that you’re bearing again?”

Edene jumped guiltily, then shook her head. “I can’t be. I’m still nursing Ganjin.”

“You’re young,” Samarkar said, once she could be sure her tone would sound not strained but pleased. “And apparently … very fertile. Congratulations.”

Edene licked her lips and pressed that same hand to her belly. “If it’s a girl, I’ll name her for you, Samarkar.”

*   *   *

That night, in the corner of Edene’s white-house reserved for her, her books, her table and experiments, Samarkar stood beneath her witchlights and opened the ledger they’d brought down from the pillaged library. She turned the pages while Edene made dumplings and broth, puzzling over a Song syllabary that sometimes formed words in titles she did not know even enough to guess at—she, who had lived in a Song court as its princess for years.

As Edene set the dumplings in the boiling broth, a delicious smell rose. Samarkar saw her gag, and thought she would hurry outside to vomit—but Edene controlled herself and merely sat back on her haunches, blinking tearing eyes.

Samarkar went to her anyway. She laid a hand on Edene’s shoulder. “Tea?”

Edene shook her head. “This didn’t last long, last time. I’ll be fine. I seem to be a brood mare bred. And you have work to do.”

Samarkar sighed. “Well, I want tea. This catalogue is esoteric enough that I’m going to have to trouble Hong with half of it. Some of this vocabulary, I’m not sure I have in my
own
language.” As she reached for the heavy iron kettle, already filled with melted snow, and set it on the unused side of the brazier, she said, “Even without him, I can tell you we need to reclaim those books.”

“You found something.”

Samarkar nodded. “The catalogue lists one as a map of the ways of Reason. What does that sound like to you?”

*   *   *

The caverns below the Qersnyk tent city were measureless and strange, and Samarkar was forced to argue with Temur for the better part of a morning before he’d agreed to let her lead an expedition into them. She knew part of his reluctance was the hatred for confined spaces he’d learned in the barrows of the Lizard Folk, though neither of them spoke of it. It was more important for her to convince him that it wasn’t just her wizardly curiosity at work, though if she were being honest she must admit—at least to Tsering’s knowing smile—that that was part of it. But the real motivating force—and the main thread of her argument—was the knowledge that
anything
could be lurking down there—any enemy, any trap, any relic of the old empire. Any Eremite, Song, or Qersnyk artifact. Any ghost. A war engine of ancient design. A trapdoor by magic into some other lost city of Erem. A way for Nameless assassins to dance into all their bedchambers—not that a white-house
had
bedchambers—by night.

Possibly even the books missing from the floating library, whose bridge Temur had now set Ato Tesefahun, Hong-la, and their choice of strong backs to repairing. It was defensible, and they might need the room.

Samarkar had seen enough mysteries to make her cautious. She wasn’t leaving their back unguarded. Edene and her ghulim had followed the Grave Roads through part of the caverns, but there was a whole other branch left unexplored. And it was that which eventually convinced him.

That, and the appearance of a new moon in the Qersnyk skies they could not see from here.

It was pale blue and mysterious, called the Bull Moon, Jurchadai told them. “I’m sure you can guess who belongs to it.”

It made Temur nervous. Which made him amenable to Samarkar’s requests—considered along with her not-as-reluctant-as-she-made-herself-out-to-be acceptance of Temur’s demand that she bring along Hong-la, Tsering, and Hrahima. As if she could have kept Hong-la, Tsering, or Hrahima out of those caves with a boar spear and a dozen men-at-arms, once they knew she was going.

To her surprise, Jurchadai volunteered to come with them as well … though when she thought about it, she admitted that perhaps her surprise was unwarranted. He had quite plainly attached himself to Tsering. And there was nothing to say that a Qersnyk priest could not have a scientific or military curiosity of his own.

Despite that, Samarkar wondered at what point in a relationship it was appropriate to threaten to break a suitor’s kneecaps if he should prove insufficiently respectful of one’s friend.

The approach to the cave was easy, and the initial descent only a matter of engineering. As the eternal, floating swarms of paper lanterns led into the sinkhole, so they followed. They rigged rope-and-dowel ladders, though Samarkar secretly hoped to find an easier way to come out again, and alongside the swaths of will-o’-the-wisp lights they descended into the depths.

In short order, the little company assembled itself on a sandy beach beside a lake so perfectly still it might have been a glass-faced mirror. Shafts of Hard-day sunlight, crisp and brutal, penetrated the dusty air above them—but they seemed to glance off the impossibly placid surface of the lake without illuminating its depths. Somewhere, water ran, its echoes trilling and clear. But that flow did not affect the lake before them, which showed not even a ripple from the currents of air.

That one simple incongruity disconcerted Samarkar as much as any of the diseased sorceries she had glimpsed in the Nameless stronghold of Ala-Din.

“The Grave Roads entrance is that way, according to Edene,” Samarkar said. Not being ghulim, nor carrying the Green Ring, her party could not go that way, of course. She continued, “So our path lies to the right.”

The square paper lanterns hung at head-height, marking a path deeper into the earth, away from the water. Along with the slanting sun, they illuminated only a portion of a cavern that stretched away on all sides, into shadow. From the shimmer of light on water, Samarkar could trace the bed of a little stream that seemed to be outflow from the lake. It, at least, rippled and babbled naturally, giving her much less of a shiver than the stillness of depths that led her to wonder what slumbered beneath.

A trodden path led down beside the stream, many footsteps having worn a pale, slightly depressed path over clean limestone. Samarkar picked her way toward it and the others followed. Every breath, every step, every rivulet echoed through the caverns with a liquid, layered, glassy sound. The musicality of it encouraged the wizards to move in a sort of reverential hush—as if it were an orchestra, as if there were performers to be respected.

Every few strides, the little streamlet had built itself a fragile, lacy dam of precipitated limestone, so it descended through calcite pools terraced as if they were rice fields climbing the slope of a hill. The stone’s colors shone soft golds and ivories, muted shades that were lovely in the pure light of the paper lanterns. Samarkar had thought she would need witchlights by now, but the lanterns warmed and illuminated everything.

The ceiling and walls of the cavern, meanwhile, oozed and flowed like wax. Ranks upon ranks of evenly spaced stone icicles dribbled along each wall, reminding Samarkar of the teeth of a smiling beast—the crocodiles of Song, or perhaps the larger cousins of the feather-lizards that were said to roam some deserted highlands of Rasa.

Who knew what monsters lived among the remoter reaches of the Steles of the Sky?

The cavern narrowed, the ceiling lowering. Side passages split off, some great and some small, at varying heights. Hong-la, sketching in the air with a stub of pencil, drew a translucent, faintly glowing map of where they had been, indicating the ways they had not explored. They ducked under stone draped like swags of hanging cloth, and edged around pillars. Some of the curtainy stones glowed softly, illuminated from within. Lime had accreted and grown over certain of the floating lanterns, and from within translucent calcite they shone still. Samarkar rested her fingertips on a moist wall, lightheaded with wonder. When she pulled them back they were damp, too. She touched them to her lips and tasted earthy water, musty lime.

Several times the party jumped back and forth across the water. Once they were forced to wade it, making Samarkar very glad of her sturdy boots. They walked half-hunched over, elbows bent and heads ducked. Samarkar did not regret her hours in the saddle now, for the strength it had given her thighs.

Something flickered in the miniature ponds formed by the natural terraces. Samarkar bent close, reflexively summoning her own light to compensate when her shadow fell across the water. Whatever made the depths of the lake opaque did not apply here. This water was transparent as air, only the sheen of the surface revealing its presence. Pale fat fishes hung in it, their fleshy fins stirring sand grains on the pool’s bottom—or, at least, Samarkar thought they were fishes, until she realized that one and then another had hind legs ending in clawed feet.

“Tadpoles,” Tsering said, peering over her shoulder. “Cave frogs?”

“You’d think we would have heard one jump by now.”

Finally, the banks vanished between narrowing tunnel walls. The path they followed simply led into the stream and did not come out again. The paper lanterns continued, though their light from ahead was often reflected around intervening obstacles. It gave a wet, many-directional shine to the irregular surface of the flowstone.

Tsering leaned out to glance down the descending streambed. “I think we’ll have to walk through the water.”

“That happens in caves,” said Hong-la. “I wish I could paint this.”

“You could bring an easel down,” Hrahima said. “At least this far.”

“I could,” said Hong. “But I still wouldn’t be able to paint.”

The tiger’s ears flickered. The faint chiming of the gold in her ears echoed as profligately as the dripping of water. Samarkar realized with a little surprise that she had known Hrahima long enough now to recognize laughter. And that this was the first time she had seen the tiger laugh in a long while.

Hong-la’s amusement was more evident. The tall wizard, bent more double than any of them except the Cho-tse, grinned with boyish excitement. Samarkar had never seen him like this, playful and extravagant.

I wonder if it’s something new to explore, or not having to be in charge anymore … or if it’s just being home in Song. Even if it’s Qersnyk-claimed Song, the sky says otherwise.
She knew he was an exile; as a past and present expatriate herself, she also knew that even when you made a home for yourself elsewhere, if it wasn’t your true home you could always feel the contradictory weight of that emptiness.

Samarkar found herself walking behind the shaman-rememberer for a while, watching him scramble nimbly over uneven terrain. As he turned to give her a hand over an awkward gap, she took her opportunity and asked, “Jurchadai, what is a Sacred Herd?”

They separated and began to walk forward again, so as not to impede those behind them. He slowed, so she could keep up easily, and he said, “There are sixty-four sacred colors, to which all horses to a greater or lesser degree correspond. For each color, there is an Ideal Mare, she who typifies all that is best in the favorite animal of the Eternal Sky. These mares rarely descend to earth; sometimes a great hero will be blessed by the companionship of one. They are the Sacred Herd of the Eternal Sky. He guards them jealously. They are the soul of all horses in the world.”