Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“Forgive me,” Temur said, his ears burning. “I overslept.”
Hong-la laughed and shut the door behind them. “Food can always be sent for,” he said, and crossed the room to a small brass cover set flush with the stone wall. He opened it—it lifted on a cunning hinge—and leaned close to it to speak. Having finished, he set his ear to it. Temur could faintly hear a voice floating back, like an echo. He watched, entranced, as Hong-la put his mouth back to the aperture and said one short word: “Yes.”
The wizard’s black coat was unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows to show the linen shirt he wore beneath. His thick jet-black hair was cropped short as a slave’s, and Temur tried to keep himself from staring at it.
Unsuccessfully, apparently. Because as Hong-la picked up the apron he must have flung over the edge of a table when he came to answer the door, he caught Temur’s eye and rubbed a hand across his scalp self-consciously.
“Some of the substances I work with,” he said, “are not things you’d want your hair trailing through.”
“Of course,” Temur said, acutely aware of his own locks flowing down his back unbraided, awkwardly flat in places from being slept on. “I take it Samarkar—Samarkar-
la—
or Yongten-la has told you what help I seek?”
Hong-la pulled the table out from under the bed and set it on the rug so that there was room for all three of them to sit around it. “The ghosts and the fate of Qeshqer are common knowledge now and have been almost since Tsering-la returned.” He sighed. “We have not yet had much success in convincing the emperor-in-waiting that the situation requires his immediate attention, however.”
“Ghosts don’t respect frontiers,” Temur said.
“Sit, please.” Hong-la showed them places on the rug. Samarkar dropped into hers quickly. Temur found his with only slightly more trouble. “So what is it, specifically, that you want?”
Temur looked at Samarkar. Samarkar gestured him on with an exasperated head-tilt.
“I want to find a woman who was stolen by ghosts,” he said.
Hong-la stared at him. He pulled a pair of lenses in a wire frame from his pocket and set them on his nose, then peered at Temur through them with furrowed brow. “Stolen alive?”
Temur said, “Yes.”
“Hmm,” Hong-la said, and bounced up off the rug with the energy of a much younger man. He crossed his chamber in five long strides, reached a rack of books and scrolls beside the door, and began searching through them, muttering under his breath. Temur glanced at Samarkar.
She had quite a vocabulary of those head gestures. He thought this one meant, “Go over there, you idiot.”
So Temur, too, rose, and more hesitantly crossed the room. He was still a few steps from the door when a tapping came upon it.
“Come in,” Hong-la barked irritably. A servant apparently well used to his moods carried in a covered tray and set it down on the small table without inquiring, then made himself vanish again.
Temur paused at the wizard’s elbow, Samarkar a comforting presence at his back. “Can I help somehow?”
“Sit and eat,” Hong-la said, without looking up from the armload of scrolls he was sorting. “You’ll only be in my way here.”
So he sat, and Samarkar also sat beside him. He thought he should serve the food in deference to her rank, but when he lifted the cover she was already there with spoon and tongs. There was the famous red mountain rice, steamed with some other hard grain he did not recognize and studded with bits of preserved lemons. Yak butter melted over the top. When she spooned it into a bowl over green leaves, she topped it with a generous portion of some flaky, snow-white meat he did not recognize. It was sweet and mild. Better tasting than snake, anyway.
It was farmer food, grains and greens with only a little meat beside, but it was filling and warm and tasted surprisingly good. He ate slowly, forcing himself to taste everything despite his body’s desire to bolt it.
Samarkar, of course, ate like a princess. “There would be wine,” she said. “But without the caravans…”
She shrugged.
Temur gestured to show he understood, but his mouth was too full of food to answer.
By the time they were done and had washed down the last lingering butteriness with mouthfuls of bitter tea, Hong-la came back with three scrolls and a book balanced between his chest and the crook of his left arm. He set them down on the rug and applied himself to his food with the concentration of someone who often forgets to eat. Between bites, without looking up, he asked, “Can you read?”
“Some,” Temur said, setting his bowl down. “Song characters. My people did not have a written system until the Great Khagan adopted Uthman letters, but I can read and write my own language in those. I grew up with them.”
Samarkar poured more steaming tea into Hong-la’s bowl. He picked it up and blew across it. She set the teapot down without refilling her own cup, but something about the slight, expectant glance she gave Temur made him realize that there was a hierarchy at work here—younger to older, or apprentice to master? He wasn’t sure.
He lifted the black clay pot and filled her cup and his own while Hong-la opened a scroll on the crumb-free end of the table and weighted it with dry, clean odds and ends. “Well,” he said, “this is neither Qersnyk writing nor Song, but one of the ancient tribal languages of the people who would become the Uthman Caliphate. I will translate.”
He did, slowly and with slight awkwardness, pausing once or twice to look up a word or a phrase in the lexicon he’d also carried over. “This is a history of the Carrion-King’s war, which goes into detail about the dead armies of Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d ibn Sepehr and the tactics he used to raise them. Now, this scroll is very old: It claims to be a copy of one written when the Carrion-King was still a living memory for a few of the most aged souls, which would make it—conservatively—better than five hundred years in age.”
Temur looked at the thing with a fair reverence. One thing his grandfather had instilled in his sons, which had been passed down to Temur by way of Qulan, was a deep and abiding appreciation of art and craftsmanship. This scroll was both, and history, too—a thing of great beauty to Temur’s eyes.
“It seems,” Hong-la continued, “that al-Rach
ī
d was most feared for his ability to send the dead of any conflict back into it, arrayed on his side.”
“This al-Rach
ī
d…” Temur hesitated until Hong-la nodded, granting him permission to continue. “Is that the same person as the Sorcerer-Prince?” He remembered his dream and the stalking corpse of the mountains. “You are suggesting that
he’s
involved?”
“He is the same person. Al-Rach
ī
d means ‘the Brave.’ Anyway”—Hong-la tapped the scroll—“this contains an account of the fall of fabled Erem, the city upon whose ruins Messaline was built and from which, it seems, it inherited the epithet City of Jackals. The anonymous historian”—he tapped again—“seems uncertain if it became known as such before or after it was overrun—but it was the
second
city named Erem. That much is sure. The first fell five hundred years before the second. In any case, the scroll recounts several stories of folk later witnessing attacks by their dead loved ones from Erem on other battlefields. Listen:
‘The ghost of my father beckons
But in his left hand conceals a bloody sword.…’
“Well, the scansion is better in the original, but you get the point. And
sword
might be
knife,
just as easily—”
“That’s what I saw on the steppe. Ghosts that could mutilate humans at will, but only be hurt by salted weapons.”
“And something broke through every roof in Qeshqer,” Samarkar added.
“According to this,” said Hong-la, “al-Rach
ī
d was known to dress himself in the flesh and skin of his victims, and go out so disguised.”
Temur’s teacup rattled when he set it down. Samarkar was staring at him; quickly, as he noticed, she lowered her eyes.
“I saw that in a dream,” Temur said around the ice in his heart. “It was terrible. But Hrahima said that one of the Rahazeen murder cults—al-Sepehr, she said, a leader of the Nameless—”
“They need another name,” Hong-la said dryly. “They take that title, al-Sepehr, from the proper name of al-Rach
ī
d.”
Temur snorted. “Hrahima thinks the necromancy is
his
doing. She thinks, or her patron thinks, I suppose.”
Hong-la contemplated his food for a moment before poking morsels into his mouth and chewing slowly and steadily, swallowing before he spoke again. “This al-Sepehr you mention is, as you say, the leader of an outlawed Rahazeen splinter group. One of the murder cults. One of the doctrines of the Nameless is that the Carrion-King was the true prophet of their Scholar-God, not Ysmat of the Beads or her Daughter. This is the same Scholar-God the Uthmans and the Aezin worship, though each tribe proclaims its own prophets. The Nameless believe that one day al-Rach
ī
d will rise from the grave. As you can imagine, that doesn’t make them … popular with less-radical sects.”
A bit of the white meat found its way into Hong-la’s mouth, followed by a sip of tea. Temur found himself spindling his fingers together, one over the other.
But it was Samarkar who answered. “I can’t imagine why.”
* * *
This time, it was al-Sepehr who summoned Saadet. The young woman came at a run, her slippered feet scuffing on stone, the skirts of her robes trailing about her. She had been in the women’s quarters, al-Sepehr thought, because she held an unpinned veil before her face in a hand still stained with turmeric.
Al-Sepehr still held a broken stone in his hand, rapidly cooling, the blood that linked it to its mate all but worn away. He slipped it into his pocket and regarded the young woman’s eyes. “Your brother,” he said, with less ceremony than he might have normally offered her.
“He can hear you,” she said.
Not for the first time, he wondered what it was like—for two bodies, two minds, two
persons
to share one set of knowledge and sensations and memories. When he’d made them, he hadn’t thought of Shahruz and Saadet as people. They had been infants, twins exposed in the desert because twins were unlucky. Especially fraternal twins: It was too easy to work magic through them, and the nomadic tribes wouldn’t suffer them to live.
It wasn’t much better in towns. Al-Sepehr never had much expense securing twins for his spell casting. Sometimes the greatest trouble was finding a set alive.
“I have spoken with my ally in Tsarepheth,” al-Sepehr said. “Re Temur is there, in the company of a wizard. He is being kept at the Citadel.”
Saadet exhaled softly and said in Shahruz’s clipped tones, “Do you wish him dead?”
“I can bring his woman and unborn heir against Qori Buqa as easily,” al-Sepehr said. “And Re Temur is … troublingly lucky. Yes. Be rid of him.”
Saadet pressed a fist across her chest with warrior crispness. “It shall be as you command,” she said.
11
Samarkar watched Temur groping his way around the edges of his nightmare for the second time, and found it no easier than the first. Hong-la, however, watched intently, nodding encouragement now and again when Temur faltered. When the last faltering stretched into silence, Hong-la picked up the teacup that Samarkar had refilled yet again and cupped it before his face. He glanced at Samarkar, and Samarkar followed with a brief description of what Hrahima had told them about Qori Buqa and the tiger’s patron, Ato Tesefahun—just to confirm that it jibed with what she’d revealed to the elder wizards.
The last name drew a blink, perhaps the most surprise she’d ever seen Hong-la register.
“Well,” he said, “that makes things even more interesting. Master Tesefahun, as you may or may not know, is a wizard in his own right. A well-respected one. I have some of his works here. It would be interesting to speak with him in person regarding this issue, but if he has seen fit to warn us”—Hong-la sighed—“we must take that warning seriously.
“Especially when, based on the evidence of Qeshqer and Temur’s experiences, we can only speculate that al-Sepehr has managed to reconstruct al-Rach
ī
d’s techniques for enslaving ghosts. If Temur-tsa’s dream indeed proves prophetic, it suggests metaphorically that you may face an old enemy clad in new skin.”
“Or literally,” Samarkar said reluctantly.
Temur held very still, and she avoided looking at him.
Hong-la favored her with an encouraging grimace that smoothed away again in an instant. “Indeed,” he said. “Still, it’s early days to speculate on that. And it does not precisely answer your friend’s question.”
“What does answer the question?” Temur asked, leaning forward. Samarkar could see hope and fear at war in his face, but she did not pity him. Instead, she felt a strong new respect for his focus and determination.
“Well, if Idoj has her—which is speculation, too, because I know not what a Rahazeen warlord would want with a Qersnyk girl of no great alliances—then the thing Temur-tsa must do is find a way to get her back.”
When he paused, as if waiting for an answer—or a protest, Samarkar thought—Temur held his tongue and nodded.
Gently, Samarkar asked, “Do you have any suggestions?”
Hong-la stood, gathering his scrolls. “The first thing you’re going to need is an army.”
“An army that can fight ghosts,” Temur said. “That won’t be easy to come by.”
* * *
When Samarkar led him from Hong-la’s chambers, Temur seemed to have turned inward, chewing over what Hong-la had said—or perhaps simply chewing himself to ribbons. She thought she should respect his silence, but she also thought it would be unkind to force him to interact when he was so deep in contemplation. They climbed steps, and he leaned on the rail heavily, chest heaving so he wheezed, but he seemed insensate. Or perhaps he was stubbornly ignoring his discomfort.