Temur, unthinking, planted his feet. At much too short range, he nocked, drew, and loosed.
The barbed arrowhead passed through three ghosts as if they had no substance at all, and he had the momentary satisfaction of watching their faces—the dead of Qori Buqa and the dead of Qulan, fighting as if they had served one army—as they shattered and drifted into shreds, like the mist they seemed to be.
The half-blinded woman sagged, her bow forgotten in one hand, palms on knees. The other struggled still, lashing out with a knife at four more mocking evil spirits that toyed with her, reaching around her to the child she struggled to protect.
“Salt!” he yelled, and threw a handful over her. It struck her like a scatter of small hail, grains bouncing here and there—but she and the infant were damp with mist, and some grains adhered.
Her dark eyes widened. She laughed a warrior laugh and stroked the side of her knife against her tongue, then her sleeve.
Now the ghosts drew back, wary. Temur dumped a handful of salt on his own head, shaking it down inside the collar of his coat. He advanced upon them, yelling, hoping someone else in the camp could hear him and take up the cry: “Salt! Salt! Fight them with salt!”
A snarl, and suddenly a dog tall as a young horse was at his hip, lips skinned back from teeth like yellow tusks, long matted hanks of undercoat swaying about it like an armor of quilted rags.
Sube, the Needle’s-Eye, the best of Tsareg’s great dogs, had come to defend his mistress. Temur upended the salt pouch over the dog’s wide shoulders, throwing a handful into his jaws. Whether the dog understood his purpose or not, he never knew, but at the moment Sube lunged forward, ponderous and elemental in his fury, and sank his teeth into the misty fabric of the nearest ghost.
It opened its mouth as if to scream, but no sound emerged. Its mouth grew horribly to encompass and consume its whole head—and the head came apart in shreds. Temur fired a salted arrow through the next two, and Sube ripped the fourth to pieces before he could nock another shaft. Bansh screamed in a fury behind him, and he heard the thunder of her hooves as she whirled and kicked out; he did not have time to turn before another ghost came before him, rearing up suddenly, only to shrivel around the blade of the nearer Tsareg cousin’s knife.
“Temur—” the cousin said, reaching over her shoulder to touch her child. It was still wailing, which Temur took to mean it was still all right. Behind her, the other Tsareg woman choked with pain but forced herself to stand. With fumbling fingers, she shoved her trailing eye back into the ravaged socket, swaying as she did so. She managed it, then she folded down, bloody hands on the earth, her bow forgotten behind her.
The woman with the knife crouched over her. “I’ll see to Toragana. Get Edene—”
He turned, saw Edene lash out with her salted knife. The ghosts were piling up outside the salted circle like water behind a dam, and as Temur stepped forward, the pressure of the ones behind pushed the first ones over. They shredded, slipped apart, came to pieces and mist. But others rode that bank of mist up, up, towering until, like a snow cliff crumbling into avalanche, they washed into the circle.
Bansh whirled again, tearing up her picket, and kicked out with hooves that tore through the first rank of ghosts like hammers hurled against silk hangings. Edene must have salted her hooves, and Temur blessed smart women even as he leaped forward, Sube bristling and snapping at his side, into the midst of the wave of ghosts.
Edene lashed out, opening the belly of a ghost wearing the plumes of a private of Qulan’s guard. Temur—too close now for bowshots—lifted an arrow to stab the next ghost, whose plumes were those of a ranking officer, through the eye as it turned to him.
He froze.
His brother’s face was hewn from brow to jaw by the blow that had killed him, and in the bloodless bottom of the wound Temur could see brains, bone, the fibers of severed muscle, the fat of Qulan’s cheeks. He’s dead and cursed, Temur thought, and almost brought the arrow down. But then he remembered, as Qulan’s one remaining mute eye stared at him, the tongue flopping through the ruined jaw.
He knew his brother’s true name. “Go free, Re Sha-kharash Arslanjin, called Qulan. Go to the Eternal Sky now.”
The ghost dissolved into mist. Behind it stood another, and this one—a one-armed, broken-backed soldier of Qori Buqa’s army—was not Temur’s kin. But now he had it in his heart what he was destroying, that these were the shades of men left unmourned on a battlefield, and some of them Temur might have left that way himself. His battle rage was broken.
He thrust his arrow into the dead man’s face, not in fury but in pity.