Steles of the Sky (45 page)

“Just be careful,” Samarkar said.

*   *   *

Samarkar would have liked to have had Hrahima present for the experiment, but no one could find her. They’d had people looking since Nilufer and her Cho-tse emissaries arrived, but it was not unusual for Hrahima to vanish for days on end. The Cho-tse’s big paws carried her over drifts like snowshoes, and like any cat she came and went as pleased her.

Temur and Samarkar had argued more folk and fewer, armed men and no one as his backup in this endeavor. Eventually, they’d settled on magical support as the most likely to be useful. So it was Samarkar, Hong-la, Jurchadai, Tesefahun, and Tsering who gathered to cover Temur in his attempt to reach through the cracked geode and assassinate the theocrat of the Nameless assassins. Hong-la and Jurchadai created a warded circle in a white-house they set up just for this purpose, and Tesefahun arranged the space within to create a place of safety from outside influences. He assured Samarkar that he could sever any magical connection between Temur and the outside world instantaneously, if need be.

Said Samarkar, “Even if it’s based in the magic of Erem?”

“Theoretically,” he said. “Do you want to trust Edene with that task as well?”

Samarkar shook her head. “It’s not Edene I don’t trust. And would you risk a bearing woman on unknown sorcery?”

So it was the five of them that gathered one Soft-morning when the temperature rose and the impossible lushness of everything in Song was unveiling itself. Meltwater ran down icicles to refreeze on their points until the whole encampment was jeweled in icy teeth. Each of them, whether wizard or shaman-rememberer, adopted one of the cardinal points of the compass. Jurchadai opined that he would have preferred eight, to cover the eight sacred directions. Tsering argued that there were six sacred directions, and she did not know how they would station someone at “down.”

“Bury them in the earth?” she asked acerbically.

Jurchadai laughed and tugged Tsering’s braid. Samarkar hadn’t missed that Tsering and the shaman-rememberer were sharing a white-house these days.

Tsering, having no magic and better theory than any of them except perhaps Tesefahun, would observe—and be ready to intervene, if it seemed that one of them were in trouble, or falling under some foreign influence.

Samarkar settled herself in her position of East, back to the door—which in a white-house traditionally faced the rising sun, conveniently perpendicular to the prevailing north-south winds of the steppe—and began slowing her breathing, listening to her heartbeat, gathering her energies about her. It had been a long time since she had the luxury of slow, collected wizardry. Since she met Temur and began traveling with him, she’d used her power almost exclusively while under attack, throwing raw magic at enemies without subtlety or planning. She’d shoved processes about rather than manipulating them delicately.

It was a relief, a reassurance, to reach out with her
otherwise
senses and find Hong-la there, steady and meticulous, as balanced and aware a mind as any in the Citadel. She could sense Jurchadai and Tesefahun too, their strengths confusing and mysterious, as if she watched a dance she did not understand the movements or symbolism of.

They probably felt the same way about her magic, and that of Hong-la.

She wondered sadly if she would ever get a chance to bring the insights and knowledge she was collecting back to the Citadel at Tsarepheth. If there would even
be
a Tsarepheth to bring it to. She allowed the grief a moment, then slid it aside, rendering her mind open and empty. As empty as it could be, anyway—which was only ever empty for a moment.

She had not been practicing her meditations regularly since Hsiung had left them.

“Bad wizard,” she muttered.

Tsering caught her eye and flashed a quick, crooked smile, so Samarkar knew she’d heard her. “There are good ones?”

“Some of us more dutiful than others.” Calm breathing, slow and deep. An empty heart, an empty mind. Or the closest she could manage under the circumstances.

Temur had seated himself in the center of the warded circle. A faint glow surrounded him, when she kept her breathing calm and her focus steady and watched him only from the corner of her eye; the remnant of his blood-vow, perhaps. Samarkar let the thought move through her, observed it, let it go.

She heard Jurchadai chanting under his breath, and observed that as well, and also let it go. Temur unwrapped the geode and held it in his hands, a bit of chamois shielding his palm from direct contact with the stone. He bent over it and Samarkar guessed he was frowning, though her position was such that she found herself looking chiefly at his frizzed, wooly braid.

He trusts me with his back.

A stab of anxiety adhered to the thought. This too, she let pass away. She concentrated on the moment, on feeling for intrusions, on maintaining the protective envelope of energy that would keep all of them, and Temur in particular, safe.

Temur straightened his spine. He laid a bare-bladed dagger across his knees. Over and over again, as Hong-la had suggested, he began to mutter the name and title of their enemy:
Mukhtar ai-Idoj, al-Sepehr. Mukhtar ai-Idoj, al-Sepehr. Mukhtar ai-Idoj, al-Sepehr.

Mukhtar ai-Idoj, al-Sepehr.

The air before him clouded, as if a faint mist had blown into the white-house. And then it cleared, attaining that peculiar limpidity that water can sometimes have, seeming even more transparent than the atmosphere. Beyond it, over Temur’s shoulder, Samarkar glimpsed a flurry of movement as someone hastily, fumblingly drew an indigo veil up to cover the lower half of a face.

The person on the other end of the connection was not fast enough to conceal the fact that she was a woman. And so—or so Samarkar guessed—Temur hesitated, though the dagger was in his hand.

Samarkar had a moment to register the white knuckles of the hand that pulled the blue veil taut across the bridge of a proud nose. Above it gleamed bright, chipped hazel eyes, the striking spear of black in the corner of one of them. She knew those eyes; she had faced them over the barrel of a wheel-lock pistol in a dry water cellar in Asmaracanda.

She knew the voice, too—dry and soft, speaking Qersnyk with a liquid Rahazeen accent. “Re Temur Khagan. We meet again.”

Samarkar saw the shudder of decision snake up Temur’s arm, the swift dart of his arm behind the dagger. She saw that it pierced the vision before them as if piercing water, and that Jurchadai, opposite her, lunged back from the point.

Within the image, the woman—Saadet ai-Mukhtar, Samarkar assumed—did not even flinch. Her eyes narrowed. “If that worked,” she said, “I’d have shot you the moment you appeared.”

Samarkar’s lip lifted from her teeth. She reached out
otherwise,
but that path too was blocked. The snarl came out between her teeth half-moan.

Across the invisible but palpable distance between them, Saadet laughed. And then she dropped her veil, showing a perfectly ordinary, perfectly strong-featured and regular face. She took a breath Samarkar could hear even over Temur’s ragged panting. As if pronouncing sentence on a criminal, she said, “Re Temur. This I curse you: that no horse will bear you. That your endeavors end in death. May you be the proof that a man can endure anything!”

Her left hand moved as if she were slamming something against the stone wall beside her—and the bizarre super-clarity of the air rippled, shattered, and drifted apart. Temur was left half-risen, the dagger still extended, his other hand clenched on the stone. Frozen, almost—until he breathed out heavily and settled back.

Only then did Samarkar go to him, feeling the tingle of the wards as she stepped over their line. They knew her, and would not hold her out. She knelt and placed a hand on Temur’s sleeve. The ridged muscle of his forearm slowly softened as he peeled his fingers from the dagger’s hilt.

“Temur—” she said.

He looked at her. His smile was stiff, forced. It lasted half an instant too long. “All endeavors end in death,” he said. “Eventually. Not much of a curse on those terms, was it?”

But when she took his hand, his fingers were ice cold.

*   *   *

Hrahima knew who had come before her companions told her. She read it in the wind. And she knew that it was out of cowardice that she chose to vanish.

Cowardice, and an inability to sit still.

She jogged up the hill over the camp, the spring crust on the snow bearing her weight but only just—it held for a moment, then dented with a creak. Her thick pads and the hair between them was enough to protect her from the chill, but every so often she leaned forward and rested some weight on her fingertips, and then the cold burned the softer pads on her hands.

She did not know what she was running to.
Which means you are probably only running
from
. Never a well-considered plan.

Well, it had suited her, off and on, so far. And she might have kept doing it more or less forever, if she hadn’t—quite literally—almost run into Hryorah’s broad chest as the white tigress stepped from between trees in front of Hrahima. Her color might have camouflaged her in the snow, but even upset Hrahima knew better than to run downwind. And Hryorah’s scent and presence rolled from her with an abruptness that told Hrahima unequivocally
how
she had been hiding it.

Hrahima set her feet and stopped, so short the snow crust broke under her feet and she planted both hands in the drifts before her. It was an undignified end to her flight, crouched at Hryorah’s feet, glittering veils of dashed-up snow slowly settling around both of them.

Behind her, she sensed the emergence of Faranghis as he released the Immanent Destiny and permitted his presence to once again affect the course of the world.

Hrahima remained crouched, as if springing away—leaping over Hryorah’s head, for example—would accomplish anything. Hryorah could match and double Hrahima’s best leap, could intercept her in midair. Hryorah had not abandoned the power of the Sun Within.

For a moment, they crouched facing each other—Hryorah’s ears pricked, Hrahima’s ignominiously flat against her skull. Cold ached in Hrahima’s canine teeth as her face wrinkled in a snarl.

Hryorah just stood there, smaller than Hrahima and with her black-striped white coat vanishing into the shadows of tree branches on snow. She held out her left hand, palm up, fingers balled loosely. When she opened it, piled gold glinted loosely in the chilly light.

Hrahima felt no surprise. Not at the heap of earrings. Not at Hryorah’s next words, formal and measured: “Hrahima. Feroushi sends his regards.”

No honorific, as humans would use. The very nakedness of her name on this stranger’s tongue was the mark of regard. Younger Cho-tse might fence themselves in with hedges, veritable briars of titles. Those who had attained a full adult education had no need of such things.

“Feroushi is dead.” Hrahima stood, dusting the snow from her knees and shoulders as if it were the most pressing matter in the world. “I have no wish to pretend otherwise.”

Hryorah kept her hand outstretched. “I see you’ve replaced these,” she said. “Still, here are the ones Feroushi and the tribe awarded you. If you would rather have them back.”

Hrahima’s ears flicked in distress, making her freshly aware of how the gold in them chimed, and how ragged and beaded with scar the edges were.

“I pulled them out.”

“Minds change.” Hryorah’s voice soothed, a rumble that was almost a purr. The consummate Hrr-tchee diplomat. “You earned these.”

“I earned
these,
” Hrahima replied. This time her ear-flick was deliberate.

By contrast, Hryorah’s ears stayed perfectly still, the gold rings in them not even wavering in a breeze. She wore perhaps half as many as were represented by the little pile on her palm. Faranghis was a male. His ears—of course—were unpierced and smooth at the edges.

Hrahima wondered how many earrings his mate wore.

“Hrahima,” Hryorah said.

She paused, the wind ruffling her pale pelt, her glacial eyes focused as if she could look right
through
Hrahima and see what lay at her center. In that moment, with the light sideways through Hryorah’s irises as if they were two cabochon aquamarines, the other Hrr-tchee’s youth and her optimism shone from her like beacons.

It made Hrahima want to leap over her and run, and run, and run some more.

The moment passed. The white tiger continued, “You are missed. You are mourned. The Immanent Destiny is hollowed by your absence, and our cubs and the cubs of our cubs will regret the loss of your experience. Your wisdom.”

My experience. My wisdom. My mate’s blood on the leaves, clotted thick.

“My cub is dead.”

For a moment, she thought Hryorah would tell her she could have more cubs. Or that cubs not her own needed her as well. But the white northern-born Cho-tse was not so young as that. Or perhaps the Sun Within told her to be wary, that this was not a safe path to tread.

Her ears still pricked, her eyes still bright, Hryorah said, “She is waiting for you, too.”

Hrahima opened her mouth and then closed it again, before her gape-mouthed astonishment could be misconstrued as showing her fangs. How would one explain to this Hrr-tchee, not so far gone from a cub herself, the simple unabridged agony of gazing into the Sun Within and feeling that reminder of a presence that would never grace you again? How was it possible to face daily the conviction that those deaths
meant
something, that they were a
destiny
? And not meaningless, brutal: the simple grinding of the wheels of the world?

“It’s not real,” Hrahima said tiredly. “It’s all a damned delusion, do you understand? The Immanent Destiny, the Sun Within. The voices of the ancestors and their damned useless wisdom. A lie and meaningless, every bit of it.”

Hrahima could hear Faranghis shifting his weight behind her. And Hryorah was still looking at her.
Looking
at her. Not moving, not speaking. Hrahima could already hear every argument she might make—but she did not make any of them.
How can you refuse to take your rightful and ordained place among the ancestors, when the time comes? How can you deny the power of the Sun Within?