After the third or fourth time, Samarkar raised her eyebrows at Tsering, and Tsering answered with her usual sidelong smile. “It saves money on escorts,” she said, with a shrug.
Samarkar laughed hard and heartily and went back to trying to open the small lock Tsering had given her to practice on while Tsering simmered rice over their small fire and sliced dried vegetables. She held it flat on her palm, letting the shape of the emptiness within tell her the shape of the pins and tumblers. It was a simple matter to fill that emptiness with strength, to focus her will within. Turning the key her mind constructed, though—that defeated her. Over and over again she strove, and over and over again the thing shredded itself when she imagined it twisting.
Finally, as Tsering sat back from the soup, Samarkar threw up her other hand and said, “What on earth am I doing wrong?”
“Here,” Tsering said. She rose up, her hems whisking her calves, and came and sat beside Samarkar, all without touching the earth with her hands. She grasped Samarkar’s wrist and pulled her palm out flat between them, the lock resting heavily on its arch. “What are you doing?”
“I can feel the lock. I can feel the key. But when I try to lift the pins—”
“That’s the problem, then,” Tsering said. “Don’t lift the pins. Just be the key, and turn.”
Be the key, and turn. Right.
Well, maybe. Because if the key was an extension of her will, not an object … She didn’t think of turning her hand, did she, and how the muscles and tendons and bones made that happen? She just turned it.
Samarkar closed her eyes. She imagined the key; imagined it solid. Felt its surface fill the empty space in the lock.
Imagined it turning.
She heard a scrape, felt resistance. The key shredded in her awareness.
She would have cursed, but Tsering’s hand was on her shoulder. “There,” she said. “Much closer. Now do it another thousand times.”
* * *
Maybe not a thousand, but Samarkar sat and practiced until Tsering brought her soup and water. She opened the lock twice and made it scrape three or four more times. It was progress, she told herself, and she should not expect to perform perfectly without practice. Perfection does not exist.
Still, she was grateful to tuck the lock into one of her wizard’s coat’s many concealed pockets and take the bowl and spoon from her teacher’s hands. Only after she had eaten a few bites—and expressed her appreciation—did she look up at Tsering and frown. “Forgive me—”
“How do I know so much about theory when I have no magic of my own?”
Samarkar looked down.
Tsering shrugged and bent over her bowl. “I still love wizardry,” she said. “If, as a wizard, I am a technician and a teacher rather than a spellwright, then that is as fate ordains. We each serve given our ability.”
“You are the best of teachers,” Samarkar said. She tucked her chin in shame and wondered how long it had taken Tsering-la to achieve such peace and resolve, when Samarkar still felt a sting at Yongten-la’s pronouncement that she would not be a great power.
* * *
When Samarkar and Tsering came out of the Steles of the Sky into the high cold plateau they must cross to reach Qeshqer—the city that had been called Kashe, before the Great Khagan Temusan the Terrible conquered it—the sky changed over them. Not as Samarkar had anticipated, not to the deep azure of the Qersnyk sky—but rather to a faded turquoise, framing a pale sun that moved from one corner to the other in alien directions.
So they knew something was wrong in Qeshqer long before they came within sight of the city. Then on the second day, they found themselves passed over and around by a seemingly endless swarm of butterflies, as if butterflies migrated like birds. It came upon them with the sunrise and did not flag until the moon was high in the sky. Samarkar lay awake in her bedroll, listening to the whisper of myriad papery wings, wondering what they portended.
They reached the waystones that marked a boundary three days out from Qeshqer, and from that point forward no further outbound caravans crossed paths with them. The road was well worn, the bridges maintained, but suddenly there were no other people along it. On the first day, this was unusual; by the third, it had become eerie.
By the time they passed the final set of waystones, Samarkar and Tsering were exchanging nervous glances and had stopped joking about the lack of people. “It should be just up this rise.” Tsering traced the script on a stone.
Samarkar knew she should say something, but a silence so thick and ominous it felt like an effort to grunt agreement defeated her. She shifted a wet palm on the lead of the first mule and dug in, climbing.