Steles of the Sky (5 page)

“If you can call them people,” she muttered, watching Hrahima’s ears flick before the Cho-tse decided to politely pretend that Samarkar had not spoken. But the more she thought about it, the more Samarkar thought the point had merit. Their language blistered human mouths. Their books blinded human eyes. Their very suns were poison—

If the people of Erem had not been people, exactly, but something older, something … tougher. Or trickier. Or versed in arts no modern wizard knew—

That explained how a civilization could live under those skies and leave such relics.

But what could destroy a race with the power to walk beneath the light of the suns of Erem?

… Or were what she knew as the suns of Erem, in fact, the suns of Erem’s conquerors? She imagined Tsarepheth under their actinic light, the triple shadows cast in blue and gray and orange, the earth burned sere on every side.

The chill Samarkar felt was no doubt just the rivulets of mist condensing in her braid, rolling down her back beneath the collar of her coat. Suddenly, she regretted not wearing her relief-carved jade wizard’s collar, which was still tucked safely into her bag. It would have meant nothing in practical terms, but she could have touched it—she jerked her fingers away from the notch of her collarbone—and been reassured.

These people. Whoever they were. The Rahazeen we’re fighting have access to their power.

Stone branches of trees that would blossom again come nightfall arched over the path, looming out of the fog and rain before vanishing into it again. They had no scent now. Samarkar found herself flinching from each shadow, each echo—dripping water, her own footsteps. She steeled herself—
I am the Wizard Samarkar!
—and walked on. She could trust Hrahima’s senses. Blind in the fog, the tiger would be only little diminished. Her senses of hearing, of scent, so improved upon the human that Samarkar knew Cho-tse considered their monkey cousins all but deaf and anosmic.

The jungle had reclaimed this part of Reason as well, though not as comprehensively. The streets were tightly cobbled, and not much grew between them. Vines draped from the overhanging branches, but Samarkar could make out the clear outlines of streets, of structures, of gaps in the masonry.

Of doorways, here and there.

The one Hrahima at last stopped before seemed darker than most of the others. She stepped aside with a beckoning gesture—but when Samarkar moved to take the lead, Hrahima stopped her with an outstretched hand. Samarkar’s head barely reached the Cho-tse’s mid-chest. It was a large hand.

Samarkar said, “I don’t understand.”

“Wizard,” said the Cho-tse. “Is there magic here?”

Samarkar stroked her face in contemplation and found the skin clammy and damp. “Magic,” she said. “It isn’t … one thing, Hrahima.”

The tiger regarded her. Hrahima’s eyes were like heat-crazed jewels, chips of green and turquoise and amber all interleaved at random, with darker lines between. They gathered what light there was and so seemed luminous on their own.

“What I do,” Samarkar continued. “The science of a Wizard of Tsarepheth, it’s not the same as your Immanent Sun, or even the science of a Wizard of Song or Aezin. It’s definitely not akin to the artifices of Messaline. Or the Curses of Erem, via Danupati or otherwise. Not the same as the gifts of a … of a shaman-rememberer or the intervention of a god. But they’re all called magic.

“I cannot just … look at a thing and say
this is magic
or
this isn’t magic,
as if I were identifying a mushroom.”

Hrahima’s whiskers luffed. Her thick tail twitched—perhaps impatiently.

Samarkar ground to a halt. She looked down at the backs of her hands, raised to gesture emphatically, and hooked the right one through her belt beside the square-hilted utility dagger any Rasani carried there.

“Actually,” she qualified, “mushrooms aren’t that easy to identify either.”

“If they were,” Hrahima agreed, “no one would ever die of poisoning.”

Samarkar didn’t think she was talking about mushrooms, exactly.

Hrahima said, “It’d be a poor sort of magic that followed the same rules no matter what the sky it grew under, don’t you think?”

Samarkar picked the wet drape of her coat away from her thigh. As soon as she released it, it swung back and stuck again. She could channel a little of the process of fire into it, or air, and dry it out—but in this atmosphere it would be instantly wet again. A long straggle of the hair that had escaped her slept-on braid dripped now in front of her eyes. She scraped it away and instead it stuck to her hand.

“I think that would be a very exemplary sort of magic indeed. Friendly. Useful, belike.”

Hrahima snorted, a sound like a sneezing cat writ large. “Will you trust me to step through the door?”

“When you put it like that … without explanation?” It wasn’t distrust. It was more … curiousness? An ingrained distaste for surprises? A moment more, and she was angry that Hrahima might have risked herself with no one around to watch her back. “Have
you
been through it?”

Hrahima’s tail flicked, just the tip. “Easier to show. I’ll go first—”

“No.” If Hrahima were to betray her … the tiger would have just killed them all in their sleep, last night or a hundred nights previously. “I’ll not play the churl with you, of all the Mother Dragon’s creatures, tiger sister.”

Samarkar stepped forward, toward the dark unsettling doorway. Now it was her turn to pretend she did not hear as the Cho-tse murmured, “I do not take it as a personal affront that you learned well and hard not to trust, monkey-wizard.”

But she smiled, ducking her chin, though it made the cold rain trickle through her lashes and sting her eyes. She was not the only one who forgot, now and then, to trust. To make it easy for others to watch over her.

For two creatures so dissimilar, Samarkar thought that she and Hrahima were actually a great deal alike.

When she stepped through the doorway, she felt no chill, no tingle—nothing unexpected at all. Except there was no mist on the other side. The air was warm and still, the sun angling sweetly down to stretch a long shadow beside her. And when she turned back, there was the wall behind her, the empty doorframe—and beyond it she could see only darkness: not mist, nor Reason, nor Hrahima.

At least, not for an instant—a long instant, but only one, before Hrahima’s stooped shape filled up the doorframe and straightened again as she emerged. She blinked, eyes slitted against brightness. Drops of cloudy water scattered from her fur to dot the dry gray surface of the broad stone apron that marked the threshold.

A yellow forest stretched to every side, slender trees with white and silvery bark angled like splinters, haphazardly. The ground was deep in golden leaves, each shaped like the head of a spear. The house behind them was a ruin, only the wall with the door in it standing. The stones of the rest tumbled over the foundation and, half-lost in drifts of leaves, they emerged here and there, glimpsed gray between the mosses. It was breezy and bright and smelled of loam and compost. A bird as blue as lacquer flew calling raucously between those haphazard saplings. The sky was cobalt and unfamiliar between the sun-glazed leaves still bright on the trees above them.

“Where are we?” asked Samarkar.

“I cannot be certain,” Hrahima answered. “But we’re not in Reason anymore.”

“Can we go back?”

“I did before.” Hrahima turned where she stood and vanished into the doorway again—vanished literally, as if something cast an impenetrable shadow that she stepped into swiftly, the line of its occlusion moving across her body sharp as a knife. Samarkar followed. They found themselves once more in Reason, wrapped in mists, with the cold rain drumming in their ears.

Samarkar leaned against the doorpost, panting, as Hrahima turned back to regard her. The tiger said, “Anything could sneak up on us through that. There’s a whole—a whole
empire
there we have no idea about.”

“Bones of the mother,” Samarkar said, the flush of excitement—a plan, a gamble, the familiar sense that what she was about to do just might make all the difference in the world. “Do you suppose there’s
more
of them?”

Hrahima stopped, mouth open, tips of her peglike yellow canines just showing beyond the velvet of her flews. Her third eyelids slid closed and she tilted her head for a moment as if she looked within. “You think we can find out where they go.”

Samarkar caught herself nibbling a thumbnail and forced her hand down. “There will be a price. And it will be awful.”

“It’s a thing of Erem,” Hrahima agreed. “Assuming it
is
a thing of Erem, and not something Reason itself was built around.”

“Something older than the first Erem.”

The tiger shrugged. “Why not?”

Samarkar needed a moment to think that through. “Erem, Hrahima. These people. Whoever they were. The Rahazeen we’re fighting have access to their power.”

“Some of their power.” Hrahima rested a hand on the doorframe.

“How much? A lot, it seems.”

“Well,” the tiger said. “Now we, too, have access to some of their power.”

“Six Thousand forbear,” whispered Samarkar. “Let’s see what rots off our bodies from using the damned thing before we get too cocky about it all.”

4

Jurchadai led Tsering back into the camp, insisting that if she wished to know what the refugees would do, she should speak to a representative of Clan Tsareg. Although the clan’s matriarch, the venerable Altantsetseg, had recently been killed, Tsareg was still a family of great status among the Qersnyk, claiming fistfuls of Khans, Khagans, and Khatuns among its ancestry. And Temur’s kidnapped woman, the one whom he had left Tsarepheth seeking, was a Tsareg girl—so they had a familial stake in the outcome of his bid for the Padparadscha Seat.

Tsering noticed that the Qersnyk were obviously much more prepared for and comfortable in this refugee lifestyle than the Rasan farmers and townspeople. The Qersnyk normally brought their herds from a summer range in the foothills of the Steles of the Sky down to the steppes for winter, living in semipermanent seasonal camps on each end and planting crops that could be harvested when they returned the next year. Although they had been traveling much longer and with fewer provisions than they were accustomed to, they had cozy organized camps with livestock hobbled or picketed to graze on the dry grass of summer’s end. Buckets of water had been hauled up from the stream and here and there an animal too old or tired to continue the trek was being butchered, the meat and bones and hide shared out among dogs and households. Since it could not be preserved, it must all be eaten. Tsering guessed the clans took turns feeding themselves and their neighbors.

By contrast, the Rasan households were disorganized and ill-supplied. Many of them had obviously not known what to pack, or had time or the skill to pack it intelligently, and they didn’t know what to do with it now that they were out here. Cooking without a hearth, trying to rig warm beds for the night—there would be a frost, and she hoped no one would freeze in their blankets. The refugees included infants and the old. Their pack animals and one-wheeled wagons—some drawn by yaks, some pushed by men—were heaped haphazardly with objects grabbed at random. The Qersnyk women could lay a hand on any item in their packing within minutes; the Rasani must hunt through jumbles.

Not all of them would make it. Wherever they wound up. Kashe, which the Qersnyk called Qeshqer, was out of the question—a city left emptied by blood ghosts was too unlucky for anyone to inhabit. Which meant the steppes, or Song.

Tsering wondered if she should have pushed more of the Rasan refugees to go south, with the Dowager Empress Regent. But that bird had flown and they needed to be out of the mountains before winter locked them in for eternity.

Tsering’s palms stung; she found herself peeling fingernails from her own flesh as she thought of the Emperor Songtsan and his refusal to arrange for an orderly evacuation while time permitted.

Well, he was probably dead now himself, and raging against him was a waste of energy. Or perhaps a source of energy: she felt abruptly lighter. The leadenness of exhaustion fell away. Beside her, Jurchadai lengthened his stride to keep up.

“I hope that scowl is not for me,” he said. “Although if it puts that bounce in your step, it might not be so bad to see you angry.”

Well, Tsering was guessing on the words for “scowl” and “bounce,” but she was confident she had the context close enough. “Songtsan,” she answered. When he nodded in commiseration, she realized she did not want his pity and added, “How much further?”

“Right here.” He pointed with his elbow, the Qersnyk way, to an encampment guarded by two of the enormous steppe mastiffs, who lay alertly alongside a woman with a scarred face. The woman had a babe at her breast, tucked into the open front of a good coat, embroidered, with a fur collar. She wore lambskin boots sewn with the wooly side inward and seemed at her ease. Tsering recognized one of the Tsareg cousins descended of Altantsetseg.

Just then, she realized with surprise that Jurchadai hadn’t been setting the wards from horseback as she would have expected, but walking his flags and stones around. She mentioned it to him as they stepped between the barrels that marked the edge of the campsite.

He smiled with one corner of his mouth. “Mares need rest too.”

The Tsareg woman did not rise as they came up to her, but the nearer of the two great dogs did. Although his winter coat had not yet come in, he was still a massive, shaggy thing—as matted as a yak, mostly black with golden-brown paws and eyebrows, the paws as big as Tsering’s hands if she doubled the fingers under at the first joint.

“Four-eyed dog,” Jurchadai said fondly, extending his hand for the dog to sniff. “They see ghosts. We say the souls of dead monks go into these dogs.”

The gold marks above his eyes did resemble a second set of irises. Tsering, too, held out her hand and let him sniff. His coat smelled of old grease and woodsmoke, and even in the chill of deepening twilight his thick tongue lolled. She thought he was the same dog she had seen several times before at Altantsetseg’s side, and after a few good huffs he seemed to accept her as inoffensive.