Shattered Pillars (3 page)

This was a large chamber, red-walled in stone and clay like most houses in Asitaneh. But in this house the stone was worked with every contrivance of the mason’s art. A counter-relief of vines wriggled up alongside each of the many narrow windows, intaglio flowers picked out in pigments so brilliant as to be visible even by lamplight. The room held little furniture—just a second low table in addition to the one around which Ato Tesefahun seated them. It bore a laden tea tray and four glasses. Ato Tesefahun fetched those himself and brought them back.

The black-and-red enamel of the tray was protected from the heat by a folded towel. Steam coiled from the chased silver pot as Ato Tesefahun lifted and poured through a long spout into each glass. His motion drew Temur’s attention to the small roll of paper and the brush and the well of western-style ink beside it, but Ato Tesefahun made no gesture toward them when he set the pot down again and served the tea.

Only having done so did he seat himself beside Samarkar, with some fussing of old joints and drawing out of his striped kaftan to make room for his knees. For a moment, Temur was struck by the incongruity of it—the four of them, all sleep-mazed and half-dressed, their hair uncombed, preparing to sip tea. Ato Tesefahun raised his glass, and so did they all.

The tea was minty and sweet. It did a great deal to return Temur to calm wakefulness from his state of high alert.

No one spoke except for pleasantries until the first round of tea was drunk and the glasses refilled. Although their earlier conversation—nearly yesterday, now—had been marked by a stunning adherence to the social niceties and very little actual business, Temur was not yet accustomed to the stately procession of events demanded by Uthman polite custom. But on pain of being seen as a barbarian by his grandfather, he watched the old man’s hands and face and waited for his cues. He watched Samarkar too, with his peripheral vision, aware that her court manners were second to none.

Hsiung drank his tea in predictable silence.

Finally, Ato Tesefahun turned his glass around with his fingertips and looked from each of them to the next. His impression of quiet expectation emboldened Temur, but Samarkar must have been biding her time, because she spoke first. “Has anyone seen Hrahima, I wonder?”

That was Uthman politeness too, that indirectness.

Ato Tesefahun refilled the tea. “Who can keep a cat in at night?”

But he winked, leading Temur to understand that the Cho-tse scout might be on some mission for the old man. When Tesefahun smiled, his strong, worn teeth were revealed. They had bands of brown and amber color like tortoiseshell; Temur’s mother’s teeth had been similarly stained, and he had never seen it otherwise.

Temur shivered with unaccustomed nostalgia. To shake it off, he leaned into the table, his hands in his lap, the edge pressing his arms. Ato Tesefahun met his regard for a moment before looking away and nodding.

“Perhaps,” he said, “it is time to address the issue of the Nameless after all. Although I fear that at this point, it’s bound to ruin all our breakfasts.”

“One meal or another.” Samarkar looked drawn from their long journey, her bones showing too strongly through the fine flesh of her face. Temur wondered if he’d ever see her face round and plump as a ripe fruit. “That was not a Rahazeen spell.”

Ato Tesefahun, a wizard in his own right, though of a different tradition than Samarkar’s, shook his head. “No.”

“What was it?”

With uncharacteristic directness, he turned to Hsiung, who sat—hands folded—and gave them all a face as deceptionless as an egg.

“You have read from a book of Erem,” Ato Tesefahun said in the language of Song. “It is the reason you are going blind, Brother Hsiung, is it not?”

Hsiung’s air of relaxation seemed not all that different from his air of deliberate readiness—until one saw him shift states suddenly. He pulled his hands into his chest, steepling the fingers together. Slowly, twice, he nodded.

Samarkar began, “How did you know—” but Ato Tesefahun’s raised, tipped hand made her rein herself in.

He said, “Is it the reason you took a vow of silence?”

Again, the nod, although this time with a head tilt that Temur took to mean
somewhat, but not exactly.
It was accompanied by an incremental softening of Hsiung’s shoulders, as if he began to set down some load.

Temur wondered what—in a book—might lead to such a vow.

Ato Tesefahun poured tea again, and each of them drank it—even Hsiung, though Temur could see his hands shaking as he raised the glass to his mouth. He swallowed, or Temur presumed he did. In the lamplight, there was no chance of seeing that bull’s neck ripple.

“Was it the glass book?” asked Temur’s grandfather.

No,
said Hsiung’s gesture.

“Not the Black Book of Erem?” said Ato Tesefahun.

Again, the headshake. Whatever the Black Book of Erem might be or might presage, Temur almost feared to know, because the relief that softened Ato Tesefahun’s face was powerfully unmistakable. “A minor text, then. That’s a small mercy.”

He poured more tea, sipped, and continued. “What we witnessed tonight was an effect of the rekindling of some deep magic of old Erem.”

Temur felt Samarkar sit straighter. “Danupati,” she said, her knuckles whitening, fingers pinkening as she knotted her hands together.

Ato Tesefahun tipped his head, suspicious as an old wolf. “Pray,” he said. “Continue.”

“We would have told you last night,” Samarkar said. “But—”

But for Uthman custom inviolable as law that said a guest must not speak of evil things before a night had passed. It was Ato Tesefahun himself who had kept the conversation to trivialities and diverted any attempt to redirect it. He could scarcely complain now.

He just nodded, and wound his right hand in a spooling motion.

Samarkar looked at Temur. “It’s your story.”

Even if he was not the sort to have a lot of comfort in telling it. He breathed in once and sighed it out again. Slowly, in spare but precise detail—recounting the story as he once would have reported the outcome of a raid to his now-dead brother Qulan—Temur told Ato Tesefahun how he had been barricaded into Danupati’s tomb by a rebel faction among the People of the Dragon Banner, and how he had discovered while there that the tomb had been desecrated.

Remembering now, Temur felt the chill fear that had crushed him then rising once more.
You survived it,
he told himself.
It cannot hurt you now.

When he had finished—with Samarkar and his bay mare, Bansh, riding to his rescue, and the following attack by the Nameless Rahazeen—he paused and waited for Ato Tesefahun to refill his glass. The teapot was empty, however, and so Temur’s grandfather pulled a woven silken cord that hung beside the door.

Temur heard the chime of a distant bell.

When Ato Tesefahun turned back, the lines of concern on his forehead had graven themselves even deeper. “I think,” he said, “given the timing of the assault, we have to assume that al-Sepehr is in possession of the skull of Danupati. And that possibly what we felt, what caused Brother Hsiung’s reaction”—he bowed slightly, and Brother Hsiung returned the courtesy—“was al-Sepehr calling upon the legacy of Danupati’s curse. For Danupati conquered Erem, and knew well its powers … and the powers of Erem are a sort of contagion—”

“Like plague?” Temur asked, thinking of Hsiung’s stories of the far east and how sickness might be sweeping west along the Celadon Highway even now.

“War,” Samarkar said. “That is Danupati’s curse, anyway.”

Ato Tesefahun kissed the air like a grandmother. “The two are not … mutually exclusive.”

“There’s more,” Temur said, but was interrupted by the scrape of slippers in the corridor.

He bent his head, studying his knuckles while a servant whisked the old tea tray away—with the unused ink and paper, as Hsiung had not required them—and supplied a new one. In addition to tea, this one contained pastries—some laced with jam, some jellied rosewater—the smell of which made Temur’s stomach grumble anxiously.

Ato Tesefahun waved the servant away and slid a plate of pastries in front of Samarkar. As he served Hsiung and Temur, he said, “Continue.”

“There is a woman I care about,” Temur said. “She was captured by the Nameless, stolen away by the blood ghosts they command. Her name is Tsareg Edene, and I have reason to believe that she is still alive and captive.”

Ato Tesefahun, who had just placed a fragment of pastry in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully. Temur took the opportunity to eat as well. He and Hsiung and Samarkar had not yet recovered from the privation of their long journey. Flakes crumbled in his mouth, releasing richness, the sweetness of glaze, the pungency of rose petals.

He imagined the pastry was good; the truth was, he was too hungry to have noticed if it wasn’t.

Ato Tesefahun rinsed his mouth with tea and swallowed. “They will have taken her to Ala-Din,” he said. “If they wish to hold her securely … they call it the Rock. And the Rock has never been taken. Not even by the Khagan, your grandfather.”

My other grandfather,
Temur thought. He said, “How do I get there?”

“Getting
there
is the easy part,” said Tesefahun. “Getting
in
will be trickier.”

“I see,” said Samarkar. “So how shall we get in, then?”

Ato Tesefahun showed his brown teeth in a narrow grin. “Magic, Wizard Samarkar. Magic shall see you within. The magic of
architecture.
”

3

In the Red-and-White Citadel of Tsarepheth, in the Rasan imperial second city of the same ancient name, the Wizard Hong leaned aching hands on time-smoothed white stone battlements, his head fallen below his shoulders. His exhaustion weighed on him like old heartbreak, like everything and everyone he had left behind when he fled Song. When he found the strength to lift his face, his gaze fell down the long misty river valley toward the summer palace of the Bstangpo—the Emperor Songtsan, forty-second of that name.

And perhaps, Hong-la thought, the last to bear it—given the plague that had come to Tsarepheth. Not from the west, through the Range of Ghosts and the Steles of the Sky along the Celadon Highway—for that fabled route was all but closed with the civil war that had raged between would-be Khagans of the Qersnyk people of the steppe—but from the east, overland from Song and through the capital, Rasa.

It was like no plague that Hong-la—who had once been a bondsman in the southern principalities and who was now a surgeon deemed skillful even among those legendary healers, the Wizards of Tsarepheth—had seen before. The news riding in advance of the illness had called it the Black Bloat, and some of the symptoms were similar. But Black Bloat it was not.

Whether it
killed
like the Black Bloat still remained to be seen.

Hong-la stroked the sun-warmed stone, feeling its age and substance with the layered awareness of a trained wizard. Generations of master stonemasons and master wizards had devoted their lives to the construction of the Citadel. They had built it from the exhumed bones of the earth, its foundations intertwined deep with those of the mountains whose flanks it bridged. And all the strength of their lives and knowledge and intention, and all the strength of those mountains, was still set in its blocks. That was strength a wizard could use.

In addition, the sacred river Tsarethi forged through channels beneath the Citadel, its stream bearing the blessings wrought by wizards down through all of Rasa—and several other kingdoms—until it reached the sea. This close to its headwaters, the Tsarethi still ran with distinct currents: some warm from the sulfurous hot springs that trickled from the roots of the volcano called the Cold Fire; some frigid with ice melt from the heights of the Steles of the Sky. There was power in that too—both in the sources and the mingling.

Hong-la opened himself to the stone and let the strength it contained trickle into the emptiness of his exhaustion. It started with a fingertip tickle, the sensation of running one’s hands across a boar’s-bristle brush. The feeling of pins and needles crept up his fingers joint by joint, pushing the bone-tired ache before it so a band of soreness ringed his wrists, then his forearms, then his upper arms. Behind the pain and the tingling came fresh strength, vitality, a sense of new life as seductive as water to a man worked dry.

It wanted to be a cataract, a wall of energy that could have slammed the Wizard Hong up against the walls of himself, splashed him aside and crushed him under its roil. To tap the reserves of the Citadel was not a thing done lightly: Tsarepheth’s was an antique and weighty strength, and sipping its flow was not unlike dipping into the flood with a drinking goblet without being swept away.

Hong-la constricted the eager push of energy to a thread and let the new strength push his elongated frame upright. His black wizard’s coat was limp with too-long wearing, stained with sweat and worse things. It hung on his already spare, square frame with new space against the ribs and underarms. The jade-paneled wizard’s collar had worn galls on his clavicles. His hands no longer ached with exhaustion, because the counterfeit strength of his borrowed vitality concealed it, but the skin was raw and peeling from constant bathing in antiseptic chemicals, which had begun to bleach out the cloth of his rolled-up sleeves. He knew he stank of those antiseptics, and also of old sweat and sickrooms, and he wished he had time to adjourn to the bathing chambers below and come back to his patients with a fresh body and fresh will.

Like sleep, it would have to wait.

His hands wanted to clench, to clutch at the wall and keep the flow of energy coming until it burst him like a blown-up bladder. It was so
good
simply not to be tired that it took all a wizard’s discipline to control the desire for more. The power, given its own devices, would use him as a conduit: he would blaze with it, burn like a candle, and it would flood through him to equalize from the great storage cell of the Citadel into the cold mountain air beyond. He’d incandesce before he died.