Something was wrong.
Temur shook Edene’s shoulder, crouched, reached for his trousers, and pulled them on in haste. She rolled on her back, saw his face, and instantly sat up, pushing her hair behind her shoulders as she groped for her clothes. As she slipped her shirt on, he stuffed the long plait of his hair under his coat and cinched it on. The knife was still sheathed on his belt; he unhooked it and handed it to her.
She took it wordlessly and clenched it between her teeth as she tied her hair into a knot. Then she stood, stepping into her trousers, while Temur went to his pile of gear and lifted his quiver and bow.
A cold wind blew across the steppe. Bansh stamped a hoof, and across the breadth of the camp another mare answered. Temur saw heavy shadows moving against the grass around the perimeter; the Bankhar, awake and alert, scenting the darkness, their huge heads almost lost in the weight of their coats. In the mist, they looked like boulders shaggy with lichen, like molting bears, as they waited, silently, noses to the wind.
Bansh tossed her head once restively and stamped again. Edene put out a hand to the liver-bay’s shoulder. Temur had just decided to risk slipping her bridle on when out in the grayness a mastiff began to bark.
First once, sharp and deep. A warning. Then savagely, heavily, a hard angry sound over a rumble like rolling thunder.
Temur knew that sound. Edene did too, by the look she shot him as she skinned the blade he’d given her. Then every dog in the camp was barking, shepherds and mastiffs both, horses stamping and circling, a stallion squealing threat and outrage.
There was no time to bridle the mare. He set an arrow to his string but did not draw, saving his strength for when he would need it. Around him, the camp was stirring to life, Edene’s cousins and sisters and aunts rolling to their feet, finding weapons, checking on children or elders.
Temur saw two strong women he knew from the campfires start toward him, each shouldering a bow as they strode across the short soft grass, the mist that softened everything curling tenderly about their bodies. They never made it.
What came out of the mist seemed at first the mist itself—gray as a dove-colored dun, as immaterial and cohesive as smoke. But mist never went clothed in a warrior’s quilted coat and trousers, and mist never showed the deep, unbleeding gashes of death wounds below the perfectly ordinary faces of staring dead men. Mist never wore helms bannered in the three-falls tiers of Qori Buqa, or the horsehair twist of the soldiers of Qulan.
Ghosts. The ghosts of the dead of the fall of Qarash. So many who had not had their remains commended to the carrion crows and the sacred vultures. So many who had not had anyone to speak their true names aloud to the wind, that they might pass to the embrace of the Eternal Sky.
So many doomed to haunt the steppe, hungry and lost and crying out for any scrap of warmth that might feed them a brief memory of what it had been to be living.
Temur heard Edene’s sharp intake of breath as the ghosts closed around her cousins. He found himself searching the faces fruitlessly for ones he recognized, his heart savage behind his ribs. He took a step forward, then another, as the ghosts closed on the Tsareg women.
One woman nocked an arrow; the other drew a knife. They stood back-to-back, and Temur saw now that one had a baby on her shoulders, strapped into a cradleboard. They were Qersnyk women; they would fight any way they could.
There was no way to fight ghosts with a bow.
Temur watched in horror as a captain of Qori Buqa’s army reached out his transparent hand and scraped it down the face of one of the Tsareg women. She was the one carrying the infant. She did not scream; she shouted, instead, and struck out, lashing around her with the knife. The child’s outraged shriek joined the rising cacophony of fruitless battle.
“Salt!” Edene cried.
He looked at Edene. “Salt,” he said, as the sense of her word penetrated his despair. Salt and iron. Iron alone couldn’t harm a ghost.…
She was already scrabbling through his saddlebags, squeezing and discarding pouches until she found one that must have gritted between her fingers in the right way. She cut the knot with Temur’s knife, then spat on the blade so grains would adhere when she plunged it into the gritty purple-black salt that came all the way from Tsarepheth.
Temur snatched a handful of arrows from his quiver and imitated her, then cast salt by the handful in arcs around Bansh and Edene to form a circle.
It might work. “Stay with Bansh,” he said to Edene, not waiting to see if she nodded.
He snatched up the bag of salt, turned away, and hurdled over the protective circle. A pair of bounds took him almost to Edene’s embattled cousins.
The woman with the bow loosed arrow after arrow futilely. Her clanswoman’s face ran rivulets of blood where the ghosts had clawed her. The archer shouted, too, then she screamed like a peacock as one of the ghosts reached into the stuff of her face and dragged an eyeball down her cheek.