Shattered Pillars (35 page)

A bright line of pain wrapped Hrahima’s throat, a weight on her back, and she staggered. She opened her mouth to roar. No sound escaped her, not even the hiss of breath, and suddenly her lungs burned with the need to empty. The camels thundered past, choking dust swirling around them. A man pulled a scarf across his face and pushed the veiled gambler aside. She shrieked and would have gone sprawling if the press of crowd had not caught her—but the crowd was rapidly pulling back. As Hsiung spun, reaching for whoever clung to Hrahima’s back, the man with the scarf dropped a shining garrote over his head as well.

Hsiung had had warning. Hrahima saw him get a forearm up, between his neck and the wire, and then she was distracted by her own problems as another assassin in street clothes came at her, wielding a leather sack stitched up—she would guess—with sand or shot inside.
They do not mean to kill us.

It was a small comfort as the wire and her rage dimmed the edges of her vision.

The monkey clinging to her shoulders had thrown his whole weight back on the wire; the one coming at her from the flank was committed. Hrahima somersaulted backward, dropping her hands to the shoulders of the one who had garroted her. She closed her claws and vaulted off again, ripping flesh and yanking her head clear of the wire when his hands jerked wide. The garrote scraped her face, leaving a burning welt and costing her several whiskers. She landed behind him and kicked out, disemboweling the assassin with the sap, but it cost her a blow that numbed her thigh. Better the leg than the skull. She could still force herself to stand on it, though it dragged.

The crowd melted away from her and Hsiung, if frantic pushing and shoving and screaming was melting. A few ranks back, race spectators shouted, irritated, too distracted by the heaving mass of camels surging by to turn and discover why the people behind them were shouting and shoving. The reek of blood and opened bowels rose in the sun—but the crippled and the mortally wounded assassins kept coming. The one Hrahima had gutted pushed slick gray bulges back into his tunic with one hand, a forearm-long knife curving from the other. The other had drawn a wheel-lock pistol and now clutched it low in a hand soaked with his own blood. He probably couldn’t raise the arm any further, given the damage to his shoulder.

“So,” said Hrahima in Uthman. “So much for nonlethal force, huh?”

Hsiung too had slipped his head from the noose, but it had entangled his fist, and now he and his opponent feinted at one another from opposite ends of the wire like duelists with hands bound together. The crescendoing noise of the crowd and the race tossed and crashed all around. Someone among the tents screamed in pain and surprise, and Hrahima saw more veiled men clad in tunics and loose trousers running from the alleys—running on the heads and shoulders of the crowd as if they skipped over boulders in a stream.

Oh, goat guts,
thought Hrahima disgustedly. Her eyes met Hsiung’s for a moment as he blocked a blow. A tremor shook the arm of the crippled assassin and his hand whitened with intention and pain. She had to finish this fast, before the ruckus brought Mehmed Caliph’s troops of liberation—of occupation—running.

Hrahima dropped to the ground, leg-sweeping, just as Hsiung swung his own partner around and soundly into the back of the man with the gun. She had flattened her ears in exertion and anticipation; even so, the report left her head ringing like a struck bell. Fire lit her already-welted cheek and notched the ragged edge of an ear, but the man she’d disemboweled took the ball in his chest and staggered backward, the thick, glossy black blood pumping from a bubbling hole. White shards glinted in the gray of the flesh.

Hsiung had dispatched his man and the one with the knife, then swung to put his back to hers. Now Hrahima could see assassins coming from every side—except the road become a race track. She glanced at Hsiung.

He was already moving.

She darted after, stumbling on her her numbed leg—toward the rope, toward the road, toward the lashing legs and pounding feet of fifty giant, charging camels.

The boundary rope dipped as she vaulted it, but she was already bounding into the air again. She found herself among the tail end of the pack of stampeding camels, heard one of the child jockeys cry out as she rose up before his beast. Camels were not jumpers, like horses, but Hrahima twisted aside and took the buffet of the beast’s impact shoulder to shoulder, rather than trampling feet into her belly, rib cage, head. She leapt, but not far enough—the leg failed her—and found herself perched atop a terrified, plunging animal. She was briefly conscious of soft wool beneath her pads, the surge of muscles. The animal twisted to strike at her, fouled its own legs, began to fall. Somewhere below her, Hsiung spun and dropped and dodged like a bat caught among a flight of arrows, and somehow kept his feet.

Hrahima leapt. Not down, but across, onto the back of another camel while the first collapsed beneath her feet. The child jockey, with more presence of mind than the first, cut at her with his whip. She bore the lash across shoulder and face, leapt again.

Hsiung had found his balance, nearly across the street, and turned now to face the remaining few camels. One bore down on him directly, froth flying from its dangling lip. He glanced right, where three assassins waited with drawn swords—

Hrahima hit the dust beside him with a sharp impact, scooped him into her grip, and leapt again—over the heads of the waiting assassins and into the crowd. She thought of running, but—no.

Spectators were scattering already. The assassins whirled, advancing as a well-drilled unit, and Hrahima was not naive enough to believe they’d left no friends at her flank. Hsiung put his back to hers; she drew one deep breath, her throat burning.

They were on her. Flats of the swords, still fighting to subdue. It was an advantage. She parried a blade with her forearm and broke the wrist of the man who’d dealt her no more than a stinging slap. He cried out when she swung him by that broken wrist into his partner. Behind her, she heard and felt Hsiung engage. Now the camels were past, and more were coming from the other side of the road—skilled, skilled beyond any usual measure, but only monkey-men.

A
lot
of monkey-men.

And the one advancing on her now was better than the rest. She could see it in his stance, in his sidling steps, in the elegant angle of his blades, long and longer.

“Here, puss,” he said. “Try those claws on a son of the Scholar-God.”

His allies flanked him. She could see that he meant to draw her out, away from Hsiung, to expose and surround her. Even an Hrr-tchee might find herself pulled down under odds such as those. But Hsiung was against her, moving calmly, his shoulders pressed to her back.

“Hsiung,” she murmured.

He grunted, which might or might not be a violation of his vow of silence—but under the circumstances, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“That caravan thing. I don’t think it will work out.”

Shift of his weight against her back. Agreement?

“What if we just kill these and take their supplies and horses?”

He rocked away from her, into a fighting crouch. Agreement.

Good enough.

Hrahima lifted one hand and, with a wiggle of her fingers, beckoned the assassin leader in.

*   *   *

Samarkar was pulled upright into a vast white space that smelled of incense and the nervous sweat of a dozen Rahazeen, and Temur’s heart squeezed hard.

Temur had faced a pistol before. He hadn’t realized there would be a qualitative difference in watching someone point one at Samarkar. On his own behalf, the tunnel vision and humming whiteout of battle mind might have taken him. He might have hurled himself at the woman dressed as a Nameless assassin and trusted his own strength and quickness to outfox hers.

For Samarkar … he froze.

Samarkar, standing in her coffin as Temur clambered upright in his, seemed smaller and more vulnerable out of her wizard’s weeds. The billowing linen draped in loose folds about her as she withdrew reflexively from the gun muzzle, her hands raised, her body curled as if to protect her chest, throat, abdomen. No simple flesh could stop a bullet, nor any armor of which Temur was aware, but instinct was instinct. He had seen men hunch so from a sword or arrow, too—or a leveled lance. For all the good that it had done them.

Samarkar reached slowly and drew a corner of her veil up to hide her face.

The woman shook her head in—disgust? Though he could only see her eyes, Temur was surprised at how much emotion they revealed. And he was surprised, too, to realize that he recognized them—distinctive variegated hazel irises, with a dark chip out of the bottom of the left-hand one. He’d last seen
those
eyes across the snarling muzzle of a pistol, too—the man’s hand darting to the touch-hole with a smoldering bit of slow match clutched between the fingers.

“Impossible,” said Temur. “That was a man, and he’s dead.”

Too late, he realized he’d spoken aloud. But just as he was feeling a wave of relief at the realization that he’d used his own native tongue—and the Qersnyk words were starting to sound strange and clipped to his own ears—the woman with the gun said—also in Qersnyk—“Yes, he is. And soon you shall join him.”

Her aim had not wavered from Samarkar’s belly. “As if your heathen offenses were not great enough, you must count blasphemy among them? On top of all your other evils, to come into the sacred city, disguised in the garb of the faithful…! Is there no desecration so base you will not undertake it?”

Her voice gave Temur pause. In it he heard not the ranting denunciation of a demagogue—but a blistered, despairing tone. How strange, to find oneself touched by the sorrow and helpless outrage of an enemy. To recognize it—to feel the small chill of it within your breast.

And to know that understanding that grief, apprehending it, even feeling the deepest sympathy for the griever … would not stop him from doing whatever must be done to keep safe his women, his tribe … and to make himself king.

Around the woman—around the room—the Rahazeen shifted. But for the sound of their breathing—the steady, disciplined regard of their eyes—Temur and Samarkar and the Nameless woman might have been alone in the room. Of the bearers who had carried them into the qanats, there was no sign.

“How did you find us?” Samarkar asked. She stepped carefully over the edge of the coffin, keeping her gloved hands in sight. Temur could tell she was making conversation—stalling for time—and it stunned him that he had come to know her so well already. That she could extemporize—he was sure she had some plan—and trust him to follow without an explanation, after only a season or so of association.

If she had hoped to also garner some useful information, she was thwarted—although Temur suspected that the absence of smugglers from the scene was a clue.

“My master,” said the woman assassin in Qersnyk, “wants you alive. None of my friends speak your tongue. I say this to you now so you will understand that that is not to be, and I will be making some very profound apologies to him I follow. You will not leave this place, Re Temur, who is so bold as to style himself
Khagan.
”

“You know,” Temur said, “if your brother hadn’t spent a quarter-year trying to kill me, he’d be alive today.”

Samarkar shifted beside him, her shoulder pressing his as she leaned across the small space between their coffins. He felt the tension in her, though he did not glance at her. If she had a plan, he would do nothing to suggest it to their captor.

He would stall.

Although perhaps, judging by the shaking hands and the narrowed eyes, provoking this woman was not the best way to secure his own safety, or Samarkar’s.

He had no bow—not that a bow would have been useful under these circumstances—and the long knife thrust through his sash was not his favorite weapon. But if he could get to it, he stood a chance. The room was large, but even a large room wasn’t much space for somebody with a pistol to control somebody with a knife.

“I know you are a wizard, woman,” said the assassin. “Rest assured that I am warded against such things.”

If the woman assassin’s attention were to waver only for an instant, it would be sufficient for Temur to skin his blade. Or perhaps it would be better to go hand to hand, though then he must be confident of his ability to disarm her and turn the weapon on at least one of her supporters.

Through the chill of trained assessment, over the contradictory thunder of his heart, Temur felt the familiar focus of his battle rage rising. He shuddered like a fly-stung mare, a great muscular flinch that jerked his hand toward the hilt of the long knife. He restrained himself a moment before his fingertips brushed the hilt.

The assassin raised her gun. “Try it,” she said, “and the wizard dies here as well. I’ll shoot her in the gut. You wouldn’t like to watch that.”

It was a vortex within him as powerful as if he stood at the center of a storm on the steppe and drew all the fury of the lashing rain and thunder down. He saw a world tinged with crimson, felt his lips curl in a grin curved and red as the scar that puckered his throat. His fingers flexed with desire for the knife hilt, frozen in a grasping claw.

He held them still.

“Spare her,” he said. “I will go quietly if you do.”

“Temur!” Samarkar said, as if shocked. She turned to him; he saw the puff of cloth over her lips, saw one dark eye wink above her veil. Her hand went to her hip, where she wore no weapon beyond the short dagger without which no Uthman man would leave his bedchamber. It replaced her usual square-pommeled Rasan knife. Nevertheless, Temur took her meaning and in that instant skinned his own blade. There was a scraping sound of stone on metal as the Nameless woman pulled her trigger, a reek of gunpowder, and a concussion too sharp to be sound. Temur’s head thundered as if lightning had struck beside him; the ground rocked under his feet like an unsteady mount.

The Nameless woman stared down for a moment at the ruined pistol clutched in her bloody hand.