Tsering fell in beside her.
This close to a city, they should have heard noise, smelled smoke. There was nothing—the scent of the sewers and midden heaps, the rustle of grasses and leaves. As they crested the rise of the foothill, Samarkar found herself looking down into a sweep of valley patchworked by lines of trees and broken into neat fields curved to fit the contours of the hills.
The road wound down between the fields, and the fields were empty. Not of crops—spring greens and the shoots of young grains poked through tilled soil, a translucent haze of green and peach and red seeming at this distance to hover above the earthy browns—but empty of the women and men and children who should have been engaged in weeding, transplanting, nurturing the crop.
Beyond the empty fields, the red-and-gold-roofed white buildings of Qeshqer heaped up one atop another among the roots of mountains that continued climbing behind them. Forested slopes gave way to stark peaks, and no haze of smoke obscured any detail. Tsering made a low noise and shifted from one foot to another, restive as the mules. Hand trembling, Samarkar drew her lens from her coat by its cord and raised it before her eye.
Across the intervening difference, through lucid air, Samarkar could see every window, every building whitewashed and framed by trees—rhododendron, mulberry, and cypress. Where the city mounted into the Range of Ghosts, she made out the metallic gleams off the clustered steel-and-silver trunks of lacebark pine and the darker colors of the Stele pine, with its conical habit and sweeping, open spiral of branches.
No sound carried across the valley, and nothing moved across Qeshqer’s narrow plazas or along its stair-set roads. Through her lens, Samarkar could see the wind rippling oblong rhododendron leaves and hair-fine pine needles, but not a single animal crossed her field of view.
When she lowered the lens, Tsering must have read what she saw in her expression, because she didn’t ask. She licked her lips and rocked back on her heels and said, “Not even refugees? How does that happen?”
“We don’t go down into that valley,” Samarkar said. She was already reining the mules back, considering how much food they were still carrying. It would be short rations back to Tsarepheth, even if they raced as fast as they could. She touched the collar at her throat for reassurance. “We have to get word back to Yongten-la and my brother.”
She was tucking the lens back inside her coat for protection when she noticed Tsering staring over her shoulder.
“Samarkar—” the other wizard said. She pointed; Samarkar turned.
Somebody was moving along the road, just silhouetted now against the sky as he came through the high pass that flanked Qeshqer on its right side. Somebody? No. Something. Puffs of dust showed it was moving, and in a moment whatever it was had dropped below the ridge.
Samarkar clawed for her lens again.
Two horses, one pale and one dark, moved tiredly down the track. Their heads hung; their steps were plodding. And across the back of the darker one slumped an outlandishly dressed person, hands flopping at his thighs in a manner that indicated borderline consciousness at best. Behind and above them, as if it had followed them down from the pass, the black wings of a vulture drifted.
“Correction,” Samarkar said dryly. “If that’s a survivor, I guess I’m going down into the valley. Stay here with the mules?”
She saw Tsering consider arguing; Tsering was the senior wizard, after all. But Tsering, however knowledgeable, could not wield the magic she understood so well. Which left it up to Samarkar—dry-mouthed and cold-handed with fear as she was.
Tsering nodded. “Go on, Samarkar-la.”
Samarkar divested herself of pack and goods and wizard’s coat and collar. She stepped out of her boots, after considering, and stood barefoot and bare-armed in the wind. Whatever was down there, if it had silenced a city, she could not fight it. Her only chance was to be silent and swift.
And empty.
She let herself fall away, made herself nothing. Quick, light. A space in the air. No thought; no intention. Just action.
She was not aware of the decision to run. One moment she stood poised on the ridge with the cool dust between her toes. The next she was in motion, running on the balls of her feet, plunging forward wrapped in her veil of emptiness.
It was good to run. Good to feel the strength in her body, won back with such effort since her surgery. Good to feel the road vanishing between strides. It was a long run, and there was time to feel it—the whole width of the valley to cover, first in a downhill plunge, then the toil upward toward Qeshqer, which shortened her stride and burned her chest with the thin, dry air.
But she was Rasan born, and the air of Tsarepheth was thinner still. She breathed deeply, letting her body take what it needed of the process of air, imagining that energy spreading through her with each pump of her bellows chest. She dropped to a walk as she came up to the horses—mares, she could see now, the lanky light-boned steppe breed, thin and weary with travel. And the man on the bay one’s back …