Shattered Pillars (11 page)

“Pardon?” He turned over his shoulder, shirt clutched to his bosom as if he were a maiden. She saw that he turned to the left to regard her out of his eye corners, and it clawed at her. Yes, he compensated—but that was no excuse for her not noticing how the healing injury had begun to restrict him.

She wished Hong-la were here, or Tsering-la. But she was what she had, and so she would have to suffice.

“Your scar,” she said. “I want to see it.”

He said, “I don’t think—”

And she answered, “I have saved your life once, Re Temur. Do you think my curiosity idle? Will you still think it so when you are too twisted to stand within a bow?”

He still held the crumpled linen clutched to his chest, but the expression on his face had changed. He was looking at her now—
at
her, regarding her, with a focused, transfixing awareness.

“Once?” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“You have saved my life
once,
Wizard Samarkar? Say rather you saved it at Qeshqer, and between the Steles of the Sky, and in the salt desert, and among the Lizard Folk of the woman-king Tzitzik—and eight more times besides. If it’s life debt you’d claim, claim all of it.”

She blinked at him. He stared at her. The lamplight cast sideways shadows across his face—soft beside the broad shallow bridge of his nose, sharp above the cheekbones. They did not move: the oil was too clean, the wick too trimmed for the lamp to flicker, and Samarkar realized that Temur was not breathing.

“Idiot,” she said at last, when she’d finally managed to parse through what he was implying.

Then he turned to her. The lamp lay behind him and the shadows hid his face. “I’m sorry?”

“Idiot,” she said again, fondly. She came to him and pushed the shirt aside. “I’m not claiming debt. I’m trying to prove I will not harm you. Lie down. Head toward the light. We have work to do, Re Temur.”

He pushed her unbound hair—still kinked from the pressure of the helm—behind her shoulder bemusedly, but obeyed her order. He composed himself upon the pallet like a corpse upon a bier—hands crossed at his belly, spine as straight as the scar would allow.

She knelt on the floor behind him and placed her hands upon his shoulders. They made lighter silhouettes against the brown of his flesh. She let herself pause there, feeling the warmth of his body press against her palms.

She leaned down and kissed his forehead.

“Is that something all your patients have to look forward to, Wizard Samarkar?”

“Only the sarcastic ones.” She let her hands touch his neck. “Since somebody already tried the obvious remedy—”

It got a laugh, albeit a grim one. When her hands began to move, the laugh became a sigh. Temur fitted his fingers over hers. Gently, she pushed them away. “You cannot defend yourself from this. Not if it is to help you. You must resist the urge to protect the injury, even though that urge is perfectly natural.”

He forced his hands away. “My mistress commands.”

That was a defense too, but for the time being she let it stand. “This will hurt,” she said.

She carried emollients in her kit, oil of coconut and other things. And she would use them before the night was through. But at first, she just outlined the scar with her fingertips, pressing under the edges, feeling adhesions and the way it bound up the skin, the way it drew tight into itself like badly cured leather. She should have been doing this all along, keeping it supple and flexible … but like badly cured leather it was not completely beyond repair. It would never be as soft as if she’d been treating it properly since they left Tsarepheth but that was just one more minor failure she—and Temur—would have to live with.

She went to work. He bore the prodding stoically. She limited the amount of pressure she brought to bear, but it was on his throat—and you could break a man’s collarbone with your thumbs. She knew she was hurting him.

“Without the caliph’s help,” she said, “it will be best if we find ways to spread the word that you will be returning to claim the Padparadscha Seat among your people.”

“Rumors?” he asked.

“A promise,” she replied. She laid her palm flat against his cheek and turned his face, stretching against the contraction of the scar. He grimaced but made no protest. “So they know Qori Buqa is opposed. So they know there is a choice, and those who would oppose him have a banner to rally toward. Just the—yes, rumor—of your return can conjure support among your uncle’s enemies.”

“More war,” he said. “More dead. More famines. More blood ghosts—”

“To do otherwise,” said Samarkar, relentlessly, “is to allow him to consolidate his power.”

A scowl pulled Temur’s mouth crooked, but she felt his muscles move as he nodded, reluctantly. “If I tell the tribes where to meet to support me, I also tell my uncle where to bring his army.”

“That is the flaw,” she agreed.

He raised his hands again, this time reaching past her arms to touch her waist, cup the sides of her breasts.

“You’re distracting me.”

“I’m distracting myself,” he replied. “I need it. Beside which, there
is
a topless woman leaning over me.”

“An issue we can address later.” She winked.

“I cannot be Khagan,” he said, “or even Khan, if my partisans do not know where to meet to proclaim me. I must raise a banner if they are to flock to it.”

She pushed and stretched him again. This time, his breath hissed between his teeth. “There are some old magics—I don’t know them, but some of my masters would. Knowledge bindings. Perhaps we could find a way to knot the knowledge up so that only those sympathetic to your cause could understand it.”

He pushed against her hand to look her in the eye then. “That’s a mighty magic.”

“It’s one that’s beyond me.”

“I will need a shaman-rememberer. What one knows, they all know. They could spread the word.”

Samarkar hesitated, considering. “What if a shaman-rememberer were among the blood ghosts?”

“I don’t know,” Temur said after a silence. “But one thing I cannot do is call for the support of the clans with foreign monks and sorcerers arrayed at my side and none of the shamans of my own folk.”

“I shall efface my—”

“You shall do no such thing,” he said sternly. This time he touched her face, upside down, cupping her cheek and holding her gaze through the dim light. “Are my people not famed across the width of the world for having no concern for which gods a man—or a woman—worships, so long as their skills are of use and they live under law? It is just that for my own people, I must be seen to have the mandate of the Eternal Sky.”

“You believe you do?”

A curious expression crossed his face—faraway, swiftly flitting. “I do.”

She nodded, and left off his neck for the time being, turning to fit herself by his side. He opened his arms to pull her close and she settled into his warmth with a sigh.

Before him—without him—she never would have known this comfort of skin on skin. The enormity of it silenced her for a moment. They lay in the lamplight, breathing together, until she recovered herself enough to say, “One thing wizards know, Temur Khanzadeh, is the power of words. To say a thing is to make it so.”

“Princes know that too,” he said.

Samarkar, once-princess, snorted in the most indelicate manner imaginable. “Wizarding and kinging are not such disparate trades.” She paused, her silence hard-edged enough that Temur stirred against her.

“What?”

“The caliph,” she said. “He may not give you men or arms. But it would cost him very little indeed to offer you something almost as valuable.”

She felt him still again. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. Recognition. His war-band won’t like it, if you and Hrahima are right.”

“I shall see him tomorrow,” she said.

“Will he see you?”

“I am a Wizard of Tsarepheth,” she scoffed. “He’ll see what I tell him to.”

She paused; she saw him considering her silence. He said, “Whatever brilliance is upon you, Wizard Samarkar, pray share it.”

“Is there a…” She didn’t know the Uthman term. “An empress dowager, a valide sultan? The mother of the caliph? If I could infiltrate the harem—”

“Cocky.” His tone shifted along with hers: what had been hushed and serious became banter, flirtation. “But then you’d be stuck in the harem, and what if you could not gain the sympathy of the valide sultan?”

Samarkar sighed, frustrated. Despite that, she was startled anew by just how
easy
it was, lying here in the arms of someone who cheered and comforted her.

She turned her face to his and breathed in his breath, let him breathe hers. He leaned his forehead against hers and smiled at her. “Stay out of the harem. They’d keep you if they got you, and I wouldn’t trade you for eight good mares, Samarkar.”

“So show me again,” she said, gazing deeply into his eyes, “what you’ve learned in the saddle, Re Temur.”

He drew in a breath and held onto it, fighting giggles. Until she poked him in the ribs and he collapsed into laughter in her arms.

That laughter—and their pleasure in it—was a little frantic, uncertain in her ears: a shine off a bitter edge. Edene still lost, their allies fragile and scattered, an army at their face but no army at their backs … and yet. Samarkar touched Temur’s face in the shifting dark, his downy beard snagging her travel-rough fingertips. The skin of his shoulders, which never felt the sun or wind, was supple and soft. His breath tautened as she traced the line of the bone and turned her head to press her open lips to the soft hollow between his neck and collarbone. His scar was rough and hot—and slick with grease—against her cheek. He gasped; his thigh slid between hers. She felt the press of his sex through fabric, against her hip. His mouth passed over her eye and cheek to find her lips, his fingers beneath her chin to lift her face. The kiss was soft at first, nibbling. She did not bite, but caught his lip between her teeth so gently. His mouth opened. The slippery, velvet roughness of his tongue found hers for long moments before he broke it off and pulled back the width of her hand, panting.

“You see?” he said. “Very adaptable to your foreign customs, my folk.”

She pulled him down to her again. His hand skimmed her breast, the softness of her belly, dimpling flesh as it slipped inside the waist of her trousers. Now she caught her breath and held it.

He paused, perhaps concerned. “Too soon?”

There had been blood, that first time. Not much, but enough for irony. She, widowed and barren, had offered up a virgin’s sacrifice to the six merciful immortals of fertility. She’d laughed brutally at it then; he had been horrified he might have done her harm. And here he was, worried still.

She put her hand over his. “The surest way to expertise is practice.”

He hesitated still but found her gaze with his own, and she made sure to hold it. Her tone, she thought, could have been more confident.

“I want you,” she said, adjusting her tone to that of a wizard—or a princess—who gave orders meant to be followed even when her heart quailed with uncertainty and misgivings in her breast. At least there were no misgivings this time … and the only uncertainty was that of inexperience.

His, as well as hers, she thought, watching relief smooth the hesitation from his face. He had not said, but she thought his Edene had been his only lover. It made her like him better, and she already liked him very well.

If he needed her to be certain for him—she was Samarkar. She could seem as certain as anyone.

“Touch me,” she urged, finding a smile for him that was fierce and sincere and more passionate than she herself would have believed she had the heart for, back in Tsarepheth. And he did, gently and slowly, until they both forgot themselves again and the awkward carefulness dissolved into a messier and more enthusiastic sort of awkwardness altogether.

7

The twins huddled in their insufficient coat and boots, dizzy with altitude and glad of the feathered warmth of the enormous bird whose neck they bestrode, glad too that the rukh was perched and not beating into the savage winds that had borne them this far. Though it was high summer below and beyond the Steles of the Sky, they had flown up into the depths of eternal winter. Only the rukh and the bar-headed goose could fly so high.

It could have been the whole world spread out before them, if the world were only a bruised ring of sunset swirled around the rim of a wasteland of iron-colored rock and pallid ice. Forbidding, shattered, the mountains receded from the summit upon which the twins perched with their mount, marching to the twilight horizon on every side—except where the Tsarethi broke from beneath the span of the Citadel, leaping from stone to stone the length of a narrow valley picked out in shimmering lights. Lamps burned below, and witchlights, and torches.

The twins shivered, and Saadet pulled the white-bleached lambskin close about their shoulders, fingers clumsy in unaccustomed kidskin. It still wasn’t enough, though in fairness no coat
could
have proved sufficient. To keep out a cold such as this was beyond the technologies of men. The twins’ lungs ached with cold as much as want of air.

Shahruz lifted the spyglass from the twins’ saddle and raised it to their eye. Saadet saw what he saw: down at the far end of the valley, men and women were stepping out onto the balconies of the Black Palace, before which crouched an unlit pyre.

Three Nameless warriors had arrived on rukh-back with the twins. Those three warriors were infiltrating the city below in accordance with the long-term plans of al-Sepehr. The twins were alone now. Perhaps that aloneness contributed to a sense of unease, of being regarded. The twins glanced over their shoulder, where mist coiled in the caldera of a quiescent volcano. Saadet suppressed a hard shiver—fear, this time, rather than chill.

If it were mist-dragons, surely the eyes would give them away? Wasn’t it most likely that what poured like water into a cauldron, to seethe and swirl, was merely clouds trapped by a trick of topography and colder air settling?

If it
was
mist-dragons … would even
they
dare to ambush a rukh?