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Eternal Sky 01(49)

By:Elizabeth Bear


Eyes still watering with pain, she reached into one of her many pockets and found a pair of black silk gloves. They were inside out from hasty removal, but that suited her purpose: carefully, she worked one over a small prayer stone and knotted it into an insulated bag. Through the protective silk, the stone felt air-temperature, neither warm nor cool, and no more or less weighty than it should be.

Uneasy nevertheless, Samarkar slipped it into her pocket.

She began again to climb. Now the silence in Qeshqer seemed even more oppressive, the emptiness more terrible. There should have been teeming streets, children at play, shaman-monks at prayer on street corners rattling their drums for offerings. Monkeys and birds should have filled the trees overhead, swinging down to filch food or scream at intruders. A storyteller should have shaken his ringed staff and cried aloud his wares.…

Instead, Samarkar walked through a tomb. A tomb without bodies, through which she mounted ever higher.

Finally, she paused before one particularly great house, so large it sat on three levels beside the street and reached four stories high. Like all the others, it was whitewashed stone. Its pillars and the tile roofs over its broad patios shone a red as wet as blood, and the gold leaf on the details of its eaves was real. It was spotlessly maintained—and completely dead.

Samarkar stood in the quiet for a moment, regarding its red-and-gold door, until she gathered herself and stepped onto the patio. She marched up to the door like a mendicant, back stiff, feeling the weight of jade at her throat, as if the collar could somehow support her courage or authority. It isn’t me doing this. It is the wizard Samarkar.

Amazing how bold one could be in a uniform.

She raised a hand and thumped solidly on the barred door, proving only—by its lack of so much as a rattle—that it was soundly barricaded and locked as well. But she was the wizard Samarkar, and what was a lock to her?

She felt inside the lock for the pins and tumblers, imagined the shape of the empty space, and with greater ease than she would have imagined, opened the lock. It clicked, and the handle turned easily in her hand. Then there was only the bar to deal with. Samarkar reached through the door and felt it, the heavy, smooth outline of solid leadwood, ornate dog heads carved in gilded detail gracing each end. She felt the shape of it outlined in emptiness, and with the process of air and its quality of motion, she shifted it.

It was harder than pins and tumblers; a great whoosh rattled the door against the frame, and she almost jumped back. But the rush of air was followed by a sharp clatter, and the door swung in her hand.

The fallen bar scraped across the floor as she pushed the door open. Inside the house it was cool and dim. And silent—as silent as all the city so far. No babe in the crib, no children in the garden, no mother in the kitchen going over account books or supervising the servants while they worked the dough for noodles, no father hard at work treadling his lathe, spinning the fine wood for the finer furniture that paid for this great house.

And no sign of how they might have left, from foundation to rafters, or what might have become of them. Until she reached the stairs to the attic—even these were finely finished—and realized that the door at the top stood open and she could see the blue sky above and feel the cool wind from beyond.

Something had torn the center of the roof away. Samarkar, standing on the roof beams, careful not to step on the fragile ceiling between, craned her head back and reached up with both hands to touch the cracked and shattered tile and felt the same chill—although lesser, attenuated—she’d felt burning through the prayer stones.

She grasped the crumpled edge of the hole and, with a kick and a heave, hauled herself up. Her feet swung and her forearms burned with effort, but she slid an elbow across the tile—red dust smearing her coat—and crawled out onto the roof. Here, she stepped carefully. The tiles were slick, the roof greatly sloped, but she scrambled up to the ridgeline and made herself stand.

The house was one of the taller buildings in its neighborhood, and through the pines and cypresses she could see several streets up and a good way down across the sweep of the city below.

Every roof had a hole.

* * *



She climbed through the rest of the city to be sure, not certain what she was looking for but remembering Temur, ill unto incoherence, asking for Edene. It sounded like a woman’s name, she thought, and a painful memory of her widowhood drove her on—so, if nothing else, she could tell him she’d looked, and there was nothing else he could have done.

Assuming he lived long enough for her to tell him anything.

Assuming she got out of this cursed city alive.

It was on the highest plaza, before the temple to the Mother-God of Qeshqer, that she found her answer.