“Witch,” Nilufer said.
The old woman grunted. The movement of her arm as she reached for a bit of carnelian set swinging a row of charms stitched to the lumpy breast of her cloak. But she did look up. The monk, meanwhile, bowed, and Nilufer met him with a nod that Samarkar copied.
He seemed calmly accepting of the ragged Rasan princess, the bowlegged Qersnyk warrior, and the towering Cho-tse, but his focus was definitely on Samarkar. He bowed low.
In the speech of northern Song, she said, “I am Samarkar-la, a wizard of Tsarepheth. I am here to serve as your voice. You have ink and paper?”
He backed away, gesturing her to the table. He moved with a fluidity of balance, reassuring Samarkar that he was exactly what he appeared to be. The martial discipline showed in his straight spine, the set of his head, the watchful eyes.
He was a round man: round of head, under the stubble of his shaven hair; round of feature; round of shoulder; and round of belly. She could see the muscular bulge of his thick arms and legs under the fall of his robe, the calf muscles like knots in sheets as he moved. He found paper and a brush and settled cobbler-fashion on the floor, leaning over the small bare area that the witch’s sorting did not cover.
Despite his relative youth, his eyes were clouding blue around the iris edges. Samarkar frowned; she knew what that meant, and she knew as well that even the wizards of the Citadel had no cure for it. No permanent cure, anyway. She knew there was a surgery that could drain the fluid from the eye and give a few days of clear sight—but then the eyeball collapsed, and the blindness became total.
He wet the brush in a water glass and stroked it against the block of ink. Then quickly, with a practiced hand, he wrote.
Like Nilufer’s tongue, the written language of Song was a kind of incantation in itself. Samarkar knew that these border peoples had once ruled great empires of their own. The word-picture spells and blessings of those ancient days still adorned some of Rasa’s oldest temples, a memorial of when the sky that stretched over Rasa—and over Stone Steading—had been a sky no one had seen for hundreds of years.
But the Song language did not rely on word-pictures. Instead, it was constructed of sound-glyphs, each word built by layering the glyphs of its consonants one over the next in a harmonious shape. It was written from the bottom of the page to the top—from foundation to heavens, as buildings are constructed. In the hands of a scholar, the act of writing was a sort of performance—an ephemeral art that produced a permanent record.
But the monk was not performing. He wrote with a spare efficiency, a speed that was in itself beautiful, his head bent close to the paper so he could read his own work through clouded eyes. Samarkar read the columns of words aloud as fast as he could construct them, sounding out a few unfamiliar words.
His name (he wrote) was Hsiung. He was a mendicant, a journeyman monk who went forth from his order for a period of twenty-one years to learn and to be of service in the world.
Samarkar had walked into the room to read over Hsiung’s shoulder. But as she read his words aloud, Temur stirred in his place beside the door.
“You are from the Red Forest,” Temur said, more fluent in Song than Samarkar would have expected, though he spoke a more northeastern dialect. Of course, his grandfather had conquered a great deal of the kingdom that called itself the Heart of the World. Temur had probably fought there.
Samarkar thought Rasa, barricaded deep in the Steles of the Sky, had more to recommend it as the Heart of the World. But no one in Song had ever asked her. And the ones she might have expressed that opinion to, full of scorn, were all dead now.
Meanwhile, Brother Hsiung was still writing. Yes. You have been there?
“I served the Khagan,” Temur said. “When there was a Khagan to serve.”
Then you know of the fall of Qarash.
“We do. And also the destruction of Qeshqer.”
He paused. Samarkar saw his hand tremble, a droplet of ink shivering at the tip of the brush. I did not know Qeshqer had fallen.
“Blood ghosts,” she said, as softly as she could. She felt more than saw Nilufer stiffen. There was a rustle of filthy silk as Payma pressed her hand to her mouth.
One quick tear rounded the plump curve of the monk’s cheek. Then another. He leaned back to keep them from splashing the page. Samarkar saw him squint against his clouded vision. Writing at arm’s length, he scribed: I myself saw flights of butterflies, some of them red. I traveled with a caravan and heard from the caravanners that in the east, many were dying of—his hand hesitated, then he wrote hastily, as if to get by the words as fast as possible—the black bloat.
Samarkar tasted bile and disbelief. She’d read histories of the plague years, accounts by survivors, wizards, physicians, historians. She knew that it could sweep from Song to Messaline along the Celadon Highway, that it would keep going beyond the borders of the known world and into strange realms, where it would kill stranger people. That when it came, whole tribes died. That villages starved, everyone too ill to harvest. That in cities too decimated to bury their dead, piled corpses rotted in market squares. But there had not been an outbreak of the bloat in her lifetime.