But toward the rear of the chamber there was one thing that stood out. A heavy stone table hung suspended from the ceiling-beams on iron chains, insulated on every side by air. Al-Sepehr crossed to it, measuring his footsteps, and looked down at the single thing it supported.
A book. Or what could have been the ghost of a book, perhaps—its covers translucent gray, marked with letters white as bone; its binding rings silver; and every transparent page within etched with the gorgeous serpentine cursive letters and diamond-shaped accents of the dialect of ancient Erem.
The glass covers chimed softly as al-Sepehr drew on a kidskin glove and opened them with infinite care. Some of the page edges were chipped, and he was too well acquainted with the illness that followed when he let this dire old thing taste his blood. One by one, he turned the crystal leaves, watching as transparent letters cut in transparent pages caught the sunlight.
Every word twisted in his head and made his eyes ache and burn. He found the page he wanted and settled down to study the spell inscribed therein.
To raise the enemy’s dead and bind them to your bidding, he read, in a book that had been ancient, a language that had been dead, when the founder of al-Sepehr’s order—Sepehr al-Rachīd—first unearthed it from the tombs of a crumbled city and spoke its phrases aloud.
* * *
Temur was awake still at sunset, checking his mare’s legs, bribing her with the last of the mutton-fat sweets. He worried for her condition, on the spare diet of wintered-over hay and first spring shoots of grass, when they had so far to go. Bansh was steppe-bred, and now that she was properly groomed, even by starlight the bay hide stretched over her long muscles and prominent bones showed the characteristic pearly glow of her ancestry. The steppe horses were legendary for it; in sunlight, they gleamed like hammered metal, like jewels, like mirrors, in shades of silver or brass or pearl or steel no animal should reflect. There were legends of how they came by those colors, but Temur thought it was probably some trick of the shape of the hair shaft. Not all the steppe horses exhibited it, and it never endured in preserved hides.
Temur hobbled Bansh loosely while she lipped his shoulder, hoping for more sweets. The smell of honey, cinnamon, and grain clung about her breath, laced with the slightly rancid mutton fat. Temur’s stomach grumbled; his marmot supper, stewed with coals inside a bag sewn of its own skin, had been long ago and fairly insubstantial once divided with Edene and her seven-year-old brother.
He had pitched his bedroll some distance from the Tsareg tents. Now he stood in the cool calm and the firelight, watching the stars prickle out across the darkening veil. They faded away in the still-lit west, their light the silver and pale gold of ghost-colored horses.
Slowly, methodically, Temur brushed Bansh’s hide and combed out her mane and tail until she gleamed like a horn bow in the firelight. The long slice along her ribs had healed completely, with no sign of proud flesh—unlike the distended, livid scar that bulged across his own neck—but the new hair was coming in white across the scar.
He heard the footsteps behind him. And this time he did not reach for his knife, because he knew them well.
He tossed the brush and the wide-toothed wooden comb towards his saddlebags and turned. “Edene—”
She wore a long white shirt that closed up the front over trews of rough, undyed wool. Her hair was down over her shoulders, combed out and oiled smooth. In the firelight, it gleamed with almost the luster and depth of a steppe mare’s. “Hush,” she said. “I said we could still be friends.”
She stepped up close, her face tucked into the curve of his shoulder, her warm breath bathing his neck. When she leaned forward, her hair made a drape all around her face and shoulders; she smelled of civet and sandalwood and vetiver, rare treasures from the reaches of the empire. The Tsareg clan had indeed come away from ruin with certain of their riches intact.
Her fingers slid under his coat and under his tunic, gliding over flesh that shivered at her touch as if her hands were the hands of the rain.
Temur closed his eyes. He placed his hands upon her hair. The warm curves of her ears filled his palms. He knew what to do, of course. He’d grown up surrounded by it. But knowing what to do and knowing how to go about it to her satisfaction were different things indeed.
His heart raced so loudly in his ears that he barely heard his own voice. “I haven’t done this.”
“You’re no beardless boy,” she said. She looked up at him, her eyes huge and black, and pressed a finger to his lower lip.
“I’ve been ten years in war camps,” he said, and saw her doing the sums in her head. “I could have gone to camp followers or captive women.…” He shrugged. Some did, some didn’t. But his own mother Ashra was a captive, one lucky enough to be taken as one of Otgonbayar Khanzadeh’s wives, and every time he looked at the captive women, he’d seen her.