It creaked and slipped halfway from its footing.
The gut-worm was turning back, seeking. Temur thought it took a few moments to work itself up to spitting. Its body swelled now as it had before. Temur threw his arms around the pillar and heaved. Once, twice—the worm’s head reared up—and Temur hurled himself backward, his whole weight against the pole. It slid from its footing and hit the floor with a crack as Temur flew from his feet and tumbled hard against the wall beside the door.
He was pushing himself up on his elbows in the sudden darkness when the roof fell in.
Temur ducked, shielding his head with his arms, but he was in the shelter of the wall and no timbers struck him. Instead he huddled in a triangular gap like a lean-to. The crypt was plunged in darkness. Temur did not know if he’d crushed the worm, or merely brought timbers and earth down between them. Dust and particles of earth coated his skin and made him wheeze. But it was no longer trying to eat him, and that was enough for now.
He tested the door and could not move it. Cleaner air flowed through the gap beneath; he would die of thirst before he suffocated. It was not a cheering thought.
He did not know how long he crouched there—not pinned, but constrained—before he heard the hollow ring of footsteps and saw the flicker of torchlight below the great stone door. At first he feared it was the scrape and glow of another gut-worm, but it was too rhythmic and too bright. The crisp, smoky sharpness of burning pitch reached him, and he stood up behind the door and began to pound against it with his fists.
Someone shouted back. A muffled voice, but one he knew. A woman’s voice. Samarkar.
“Blessings on a wizard,” he muttered, as the old door gritted on stone. It pulled away from him, and he all but fell through it into her arms. She was strong; she caught him. The first thing she did after that was lean him against the wall and put a skin of water in his hands.
While he drank, she checked his injuries and he told her about the gut-worm and the desecrated corpse of a dead conqueror. “Somebody took his skull. At least, I assume it was his skull. The other skeleton was wearing women’s garb—”
“Huh,” she said. “There’s supposed to be a curse—”
“I know.”
Only then, when she was satisfied that he could walk, did she lead him outside. A liver-bay mare with one white sock waited there. To his chagrin, Temur found himself hugging the mare with all the fervid affection he suddenly could not show for Samarkar. But the mare was warm and solid, and she blew softly against his hair while he clung to her neck.
Until, when Samarkar came up and touched him on the shoulder, he could turn to her without collapsing and say, “Thank you.”
It was the gray part of morning before dawn, and he was shocked that so little time had passed. At first he asked her if he’d been trapped a day or more, but she shook her head. “One night only. I can imagine it seemed like more.” She paused. “Which ones did this to you?”
“I’d know their voices.” He shrugged then paused. “How did you know I was missing?”
“I … came to find you. And did not. Bansh led me to you.”
There was a space in what she said. He thought he would come back to it. Maybe when his head wasn’t spinning so much, his body aching. “Bansh?”
“She was waiting outside. She seemed to know where she was going.”
“You should have brought Hsiung and Hrahima,” he said. “What if there had been a fight?”
“I…” She looked down. “I didn’t think of it.”
In the gray morning, he sought her gaze. She seemed to fill herself with a resolute breath and turn her eyes deliberately upward. There was not so much space between them. Bansh stamped a hoof. It echoed in the cool dawn air. Some birds that Temur did not know were singing.
She leaned over and kissed Temur on the mouth. He kissed back, ignoring all the wisdom in his head about what a bad idea this was. He forgot, for a moment, the pain of bumps and bruises and a night spent hunched in the cold, the grit of grave dirt on his skin.
They pulled a little apart, but not fully.
“What an odd custom that is.”
Her breath brushed his face. “Do you dislike it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s try it again.”
17
By the time Samarkar and Temur had worked out to their satisfaction that however odd a custom kissing might seem, Temur was willing to experiment with it, the sun was lifting with slow dignity above the horizon, its pale rays trickling between the wind-tossed stems of grass. The whole steppe seemed to roll out before them, endless and vast. Temur leaned an aching hand on Bansh’s flank and soaked in the warmth of the sun.