Shattered Pillars (6 page)

“You cannot tell her yourself?” Samarkar asked, with that slow care that told him how deep her incomprehension truly was.

“I do not know it,” Temur said helplessly. “If I knew it, the demons could use it to trick me with.”

She glanced back, and the conquering wizard was gone, fallen into a proud woman with drawn cheeks and a sun squint beginning at the corners of her eyes.

“It is true,” she allowed. “You have got a problem.” Then, conversationally: “Empires are filthy things, you know.”

He knew. He had grown up in the war camps and on the borders of one. And he knew, too, what happened when empires fell. “But are they so filthy as the lack of them?”

She tipped her head. Acquiescence. Or at least acceptance of a valid question. “Better you than my brother Songtsan,” she said. “Better you than this al-Sepehr.”

He touched her shoulder. “Can we fail?” he asked her.

Uncertainty flickered across her expression, but her lips grew tight. And what she said was, “Being what we are? Not if there is any substance to the stuff of legends, sir.”

*   *   *

“We will need allies,” Ato Tesefahun said, as sunrise angled across the open top of the courtyard and steam rose from eggshell cups of thick, bitter coffee, its surface gilded with iridescent oils. “Your uncle will not be dislodged by righteousness or harsh language, and if he has allied himself with the Nameless, then there is every reason to see him out of the Padparadscha Seat with all haste.”

Temur pushed unleavened bread through salted oil, but hesitated with the dripping scrap poised over his plate. “You want to go before the caliph.”

Ato Tesefahun sipped coffee and made a satisfied noise. “Uthman Caliph is not without political liabilities of his own. It’s possible we could sell him a war as a solution to some of them. Especially if we can come up with an elaborate moral justification. As much as I hate to say it … blood ghosts
will
help.”

“The destruction of Kashe,” Samarkar said.

Ato Tesefahun nodded. His eyes flicked to the drawn, livid scar on Temur’s neck. “Which you have seen with your own eyes. And it will not hurt our case—excuse me, Temur—that my grandson bears the marks of hard fighting. You being a woman will present some difficulties, Samarkar-la, but you are a foreigner and a wizard. You will not be expected to behave as would a daughter of the Scholar-God. Still, we must consider our strategies.”

“I will wear a veil if I must,” said Samarkar. “It is not the first time I have made such concessions.”

Ato Tesefahun tipped his head at her. “Oh,” he said. “Not a veil, I think.”

*   *   *

No, not a veil.

What Ato Tesefahun produced from some deep of his storehouses was the battle armor of a Wizard of Tsarepheth—a coat of boiled leather dyed black as ink, the six-petaled skirt laid over chain mail that rustled and rang with each stride. It had been made for a man, but Samarkar was a large woman, and it did not fit too poorly—though the leather creaked with the expansion of her bosom at each breath. Samarkar felt like a martial wizard indeed, with the armored boots laced up to her thighs. But Ato Tesefahun’s true genius was apparent in the helm—black leather over steel, with a lacquered faceplate like the face of a snarling cat.

It hid everything but her eyes, which glared unnervingly from the shadows below the brim of the helm as she regarded herself in a looking glass bigger than any she’d seen outside a palace.

Ato Tesefahun, who had been adjusting the laces of her shoulder plates with his own hands, peered around her head for a look at the reflection. “There,” he said, smugly satisfied. “That will serve modesty.”

“Yes.” The helm made her voice echo with portent. And it hid it when Samarkar smiled with pleasure at the effect. “I dare say modesty will be served.”

*   *   *

It was a measure of Ato Tesefahun’s status in the court of Uthman Caliph, fourteenth of that dynastic name—not all of them related by blood—that he had sent the messenger requesting an audience with sunrise and that reply returned before he, Temur, Samarkar, and Hsiung had finished lunch. It happened to return simultaneously with Hrahima, Ato Tesefahun’s Cho-tse ally who had accompanied Samarkar and Temur from Tsarepheth.

The Temur of the previous winter would not have believed he could feel so relieved—so encouraged—to see a doorway filled upright to upright with the massive shoulders of a tiger who went on two legs. But he had come to rely on Hrahima, to trust her—and her absence had been more of a worry than he’d realized until she returned.

She had let the messenger with his note enter first. Now, while Ato Tesefahun read it, she paused in the shade of the awning beyond the door and, with a damp cloth brought to her by one of Ato Tesefahun’s men, sponged away the red road dust obscuring the char-colored stripes on her feet and lower legs.

Temur rose to meet her, glancing at his grandfather for permission before filling a drinking bowl with water.

“You’re a Khagan in waiting,” Ato Tesefahun said.

Temur could not miss the paternal warmth in his tone. It sparked a heartache that Temur, fatherless, did not know how to control.

“And you are my grandson. The hospitality of my house is yours to share. Especially when you’re sharing it with my friend.”

Hrahima, ducking beneath the lintel, chuffed: a tiger’s laugh, laying her whiskers along the sides of her muzzle and revealing streaked, yellowed teeth.

“Employee,” she argued, accepting the water.

Temur wanted to ask where she had been, and on what errand—but if Ato Tesefahun would not share the information, Hrahima was unlikely to undermine him.

She drank from the cup like a woman, except she curled up her lip and poured the water into herself rather than sipping. When it was empty, she handed it back to Temur with a nod. “Samarkar, Temur, Hsiung—well met. What news?”

Her gesture took in the scroll ribboned in the Uthman Caliph’s personal and imperial colors of crimson and indigo that Ato Tesefahun was carefully cracking open with his thumbs.

“We are invited to present ourselves before Uthman Caliph in the third hour after sunrise, tomorrow,” he said. “We are advised that this will be a private rather than an open court.”

“That doesn’t actually mean private,” Samarkar said, as Temur reseated himself beside her. “Not in the sense somebody who wasn’t caliph might use the term. It just means that only his closest advisors and current favorites will be present, not every minor functionary and courtier who wants to demonstrate an obligation or allegiance to the court.”

“Fewer favor curriers,” Temur said. Power was power, the world around. Though the trappings differed, the politics were the same.

“The important point,” said Ato Tesefahun, “is that Uthman’s war-band will not be present in force, although I doubt if we can avoid having to placate them entirely.”

Temur tapped his fingertips against one another. “Are relations so … uneasy between the caliph and his war leaders?”

“Where power is shared,” said Ato Tesefahun, “there is always tension. Uthman will no doubt use our quest—and the prospect of your future allegiance, Temur Khanzadeh and Samarkar-la—to solidify his authority.”

“Your human politics,” said Hrahima, prospecting through a plate of lamb in sharp-smelling sauce with her claw tips. She selected a nugget and pushed it into her mouth, wrinkling her nose at the spices. “Is not your caliph a priest-king of the Scholar-God? And yet his position is so precarious?”

Samarkar looked up first, the opportunity to discourse on politics too much for her. While Ato Tesefahun waved a servant to the kitchens—for raw meat for the Cho-tse, Temur presumed—the wizard smiled tightly and began. “The caliph is, indeed, a sort of priest-king. He is elected from the priesthood by the men who serve the Scholar-God, and often the courses of these elections follow bloodlines and dynasties. But the men who may compete for the role raise warlord-bands, like any would-be Khagan”—Samarkar raised her eyebrows at Temur, and he swallowed hastily; better get to work on that—“and they must keep the will of those warlord-bands behind them, or … the usual repercussions follow.”

“Civil war,” said Hrahima.

“Regime change,” said Ato Tesefahun.

Samarkar said, “Sometimes the elections do little more than confirm the outcome of the fighting.”

“And if they do not?” Temur asked.

Samarkar’s smile was tight. “More fighting.”

5

Al-Sepehr’s youngest wife read aloud while al-Sepehr sat in close-lidded contemplation. Through the discomfort of hearing the words, he focused on their meaning—hands folded, head tipped back—until a sense of presence roused him.

Someone watched from the doorway. Al-Sepehr thought at first that he was seeing a ghost. Not one of the Qersnyk blood ghosts, but a proper Uthman haunt, a soul rejected by the Scholar-God and yet unable to find its way to Hell.

Just within the door stood a slender figure in breeches and a sashed knee-length robe woven in the dusty colors of hard-baked desert. Two wheel-lock pistols were thrust through the sash, the long chased barrels angled carefully down and away from the body. They shared space with a scimitar and a dagger.

The figure’s face was obscured by the wraps of an indigo veil, but even from across the room, even with his own failing eyesight, al-Sepehr could see the striking lightness of the eyes that fabric framed.

Shahruz:
that was the name al-Sepehr’s lips framed—but Shahruz was dead, head caved in by a Qersnyk war mare as he had been about to finish that steppe-born boy nuisance Re Temur for good and all.

Al-Sepehr’s youngest wife had ceased reading. In the silence, al-Sepehr glanced around the chamber, seeing its empty spaces, few cushions, heavy lap desk resting on short legs propped on the golden stone floor. His wife was looking up at him from behind it; seeing his gaze upon her, she quickly and demurely ducked her head. Her eyes were still clear brown. She had not yet begun to stumble over the ancient words. That was good. It meant a while yet before al-Sepehr must again remarry.

It was then that he realized that he was standing, and that she had stopped reading because he had come to his feet. “Go, beloved,” he said to her, with an encouraging smile. He did not wish her to think she had displeased him.

Head still bowed, her robes twisting in the wind of her passage, she scuttled for the door. The figure in desert garb and the indigo cowl of the Nameless stepped aside fluidly to give her room. Now that his startlement had passed, and as he moved a step or two closer, al-Sepehr could see that the flare of hip and swell of bosom outlined under the man’s garb were anything but masculine and that the figure was some inches shorter than Shahruz. The cuffs of the trousers had been skillfully hemmed up. The cuffs of the sleeves were rolled.

Al-Sepehr stopped a man’s height from the figure: close enough to speak without shouting—a bit immodestly close, in fact—but not so close as to be an immediate affront to a woman. Or at least, not any more immediate affront than merely being in her presence must be, but that was beyond helping, and it was far from the first time for that sin.

“Saadet,” he said, averting his eyes. As if she had been forcing herself to look forward against some inexorable weight, her gaze dropped, her neck twisted: her cheek pushed almost to her shoulder. In the gaps of her veil, her skin flamed burnt umber with shame.

She did not answer. Of course she would not; he must speak. It was his burden as a man, no matter how uncomfortable.

“Saadet,” he said again, making his voice gentle. Children and women were easy to frighten. “I know you mourn your brother, my sweet. But it is not modest to dress in his clothing.”

The flush was fading from around her eyes, leaving her skin its more usual almond color. Her fingers, long and tidy and so slender al-Sepehr sometimes found it hard to believe she belonged to the same species he did, fretted the edge of one cuff, rolling and unrolling it to flash the back and fingers of the opposite hand.

“Master,” she said.

He did not recoil, but that was because he was al-Sepehr and had long since trained himself away from any such outward evidence of human frailty. He had grown accustomed to hearing Shahruz’s tones layered over his sister’s. Now, though—

“Shahruz,” he said. “Saadet, you said that what he is—persists.” He had thought she meant that she retained his memories, his experiences. The remnants of that unity of mind that al-Sepehr himself had forged between the twins. He had not understood that she meant Shahruz had not passed into the libraries of paradise and the presence of the Scholar-God.

“He is with me,” she said, in her own voice. “He will not leave me. Not until we can go on together. Al-Sepehr…”

Al-Sepehr waited.

It was Shahruz who finished the sentence—or rather, who began it again and this time chased it to the end. “Al-Sepehr, give me leave to train this body, that I may serve you again as one of the Nameless.”

“You are a woman!” al-Sepehr said with force. “Would you profane the Scholar-God’s semblance?”

“That is only the form,” said Shahruz. “Only the shell. Return me to your councils.” He raised his eyes, and in the set of his shoulders, the lift of his chin behind the veil, al-Sepehr could see no hint now of the self-effacing female. The stiffness of his posture betrayed great discomfort, however, to find himself clothed in a woman’s sacred flesh. “Al-Sepehr. You have not the strength to accomplish our liberation alone. Saadet and I have both seen how your wreakings in the service of the Nameless have exhausted you. The Nameless need you; without you we shall never escape the oppression under which we’ve toiled these centuries.”

“I have the ghosts,” said al-Sepehr. “They will feed me.”

“They will feed you until you must send them to fight again. And then they will draw the life from you until you are even less than they—a wraith!”

Al-Sepehr’s lips pressed thin with amusement; here indeed was his old friend Shahruz, lecturing him on taking care of himself and his priesthood. It was love, and it warmed al-Sepehr more than he could express.