“A wise wizard keeps all her fingers,” Tsering-la said with a smile. “But what if you asked the principles to combine? These are principles of earth, after all, but they combine to form principles of fire and water—”
“Ask them?” Samarkar frowned. “Just like that?”
Tsering-la held up the mortar. “It helps to put them into contact, first. First make the black powder, then add the silver.”
Slowly, Samarkar emptied the sulfur into the mortar and ground it fine. She cleaned the mortar and repeated the process with the saltpeter and the charcoal. Sun warmed her shoulders and neck; when she pushed wispy locks off her sweaty forehead, the surface of her hair felt hot.
She glanced at Tsering for reassurance.
“Use your hands,” Tsering said.
“A balance would be better.”
“So it would,” Tsering agreed. Her smile made little valleys up the sides of her nose.
“And once it is constructed, how am I to grind it fine enough to burn swiftly?”
“Are you a wizard or an alchemist?”
“Right.” Samarkar ground the iodide of silver as well, just to have it done, and cleaned the mortar one last time. Slowly, pinch by pinch, trying to send her awareness into each particle, she began to build the black powder. Combine, she told it. Three things make one. Three things make one.
She thought she felt it happening. A creeping, prickling sensation, then that familiar warmth …
“No heat,” Tsering said. “You must ask the fire to stay itself. Ask the heat to wait; bring in emptiness. Create the absence of fire.”
“Emptiness,” Samarkar mumbled.
“Emptiness,” Tsering said.
She found the fire in the powder and coaxed it softly. Not to leave the powder, but merely to wait, to hold its warmth until a time of need. She stirred it with the pestle and realized that she did not need to grind it to powder; she could merely ask the flakes to pull themselves apart, smaller and smaller.
She lost herself in the process. When she looked up, she realized that the sun rode the shoulder of a mountain whose name she did not know, and the stuff she stirred in the pestle was fine as ash. “Good,” Tsering said. “Now add the silver. And bear in mind, the silver carries the process of water, and you are adding it to a substance that carries the process of fire. If they are not kept separate, they will counteract one another.”
“Right,” Samarkar said. She looked up in surprise as Tsering stood, groaning a little with stiffness. “Where are you going?”
“To start a fire,” said Tsering. “And heat some dinner.”
“Don’t forget to feed the shrine,” Samarkar said, and turned back to her experiment.
* * *
Samarkar learned to create other things as well. Water in a bowl, though Tsering said that really they were just refining it from the moisture in the air, like dew or frost. She learned to create the semblance of solid objects from the force of her concentration—small ones: a key, a knife.
They practiced as they walked. For the first quarter-moons, when they set out in the mornings, they had kept their pockets stuffed with greasy rocks heated in the embers of the fires, for warming their fingers. But the road to Qeshqer led them down the back slope of the Steles of the Sky, and as summer advanced and they lost elevation, they needed water more than warmth. Fortunately, the streams were flush with glacial melt. The only problem was reaching them when so many ran deep in the bottoms of crudely bridged gullies. Tsering, though, proved able with a hide bucket and a length of rope.
The road between Tsarepheth and Qeshqer was not a graded thing wide enough for a cart—or, in places, two—like the Imperial Highway that led from Tsarepheth to Rasa. It was a trade route, a track worn over hills and through narrow passes by the hooves of innumerable mules and yaks and ponies and herds of wiry, wild-coated mountain sheep. Samarkar was grateful for the mules, who scrambled up hairy boulders without so much as leaving a hoof-scrape in their shrouds of moss and lichen and who seemed able to eat anything. She wasn’t sure how she would have made it herself with a pack, but the mules were unfazed by anything, including bridges Samarkar hesitated to trust with her own weight.
It reminded her a little of her only other long journey—ignoring the ones to the winter palace in Rasa and back to Tsarepheth. But when she had gone to Song to be a bride, she had been borne in a horse litter, and when she had come back she had ridden astride behind her brothers, head held high and cheeks burning with wind or shame.
This was a very different passage. When they met other travelers, Samarkar might have been nervous for her safety and that of Tsering, except without fail, traders and entertainers and priests alike treated the black-clad women with a deference bordering on terror. She had been accustomed to the obsequiousness of servants when she was a princess, and she had learned to efface herself and perform menial tasks without complaint during her novitiate, but this was alien. It was as if she moved in a bubble of silence, so conversations died away before her and resumed behind.