Eternal Sky 01(50)
Somebody had polished all the bones clean of meat and sinew—so clean the marble plaza showed no stains beneath them—but six days was not enough to dry them. They had been sorted and mounded in the neatest piles imaginable—sightless skulls pink and air-dulled in a monstrous pyramid beside vertebrae like stacks of coin, femurs crusted red on the ends from the ooze of blood laid one atop the other like cordwood, knucklebones in baskets and barrows as if brought out for a market day. Sucked clean, Samarkar thought, and wished that particular phrase had not occurred to her.
She imagined herself staggering back, clutching at her face in horror, vomiting through the narrow confines of her sorcerer’s collar. She imagined it, but it did not happen, though the bones smelled warmly of rancid marrow in the afternoon sun. Too many years of her father’s instruction; too many years as a princess in a hostile realm; too many years as a novice wizard.
No. Samarkar paced the length of the pyramid and measured the height of five or six skulls with her palm. She counted the number of tiers and hunkered down on her heels to sketch numbers in her saliva on the white stone. She almost wished for the buzz of flies, the flocking of carrion birds.
She went through them three times before she believed them. Crude as her measurements were, that pile of skulls must represent every man, woman, serf, slave, herdsman, and child in Qeshqer. No human or natural force could have managed this, she thought, walking around the skulls again, careful to edge past the heaps of other bones. No wizard, no sorcerer—unless there were further limits to the powers of magic than she had ever heard of.
She needed to speak to Yongten-la, to tell him of this and see what he knew of the supernatural perils that might kill twenty-five thousand in a night.
She stood, regarding the pile of the dead, and made a deep obeisance.
She could not recite the Orison for the Dead twenty-five thousand times before nightfall. But she could say it for an hour, she thought, before the press of her other duties pulled her from this place and from the horrors left to bleach here in the sun.
* * *
After a long ride, Temur remembered the Veil of Night returning for him, all in black and barefoot—but this time he saw her face, for she went about plainly and by day. Still, he knew her by her eyes, by the muscle in her arms, by the breadth of her shoulders, and by the bounty of her belly and her breasts. He knew her because she lifted him up and set him on Bansh’s back when he could no longer cling there himself, and he knew her because she wore black cloth darker and softer than the night, and he knew her because after she had led him and the mares out of danger, she girded herself in her coat of night and her collar of stars and went back into the cold valley to seek Edene.
Her companion was another woman in black, and Temur did what he could to help her as she loaded him into a pony drag—drawn by sensible Bansh, not Buldshak—that she seemed to have made from tree limbs and blankets, and began hauling him away. She bound him in place with blankets wrapped tightly, and to his shame, he didn’t have strength to prevent it.
It was not the most comfortable mode of travel. But when she brought Temur bitter water and bathed his cracked lips with oil, he did not complain. He asked for Edene, and he asked for the Veil of Night, but she did not seem to understand him. So he knew she wasn’t a goddess, even though she accompanied one.
Sometime toward evening, his fever broke. Whether it was the astringent, musty-tasting mold-and-willow-bark tea the woman in black fed him, or the blankets she tucked around to warm him, or if the thing had just run its course, he could not have said. But his mind was clear for the first time in he knew not how long, though his body felt wasted and weak. The heat had gone out of his head and his wounds, and now when he coughed he brought up mouthfuls of musty-sweet phlegm.
He lay his head back in the travois and tried to rest, but he could not keep himself from noticing how the sun slid down the sky and the shadows grew long. And how the woman who had gone back for Edene had not yet returned.
* * *
Samarkar came down out of the city at sunset, leaving marks warning of plague on the walls behind her. The eastmost curve of the Range of Ghosts lay branded black against a red weal of dying light. Under a Qersnyk or a Rasan sky, Qeshqer would have lain in shadow already, shielded from the afternoon light by the mountains at its back. But this alien sun rose in the wrong part of the sky and set in the southeast over Rasa and Song, not west in the Uthman lands where any proper sun should come to rest.
So as Samarkar descended the tiers of Qeshqer, she walked from the gold light of evening to the blue gloom of twilight, passing through sunset along the way. When she reached the road again she hesitated, her hand on the buttons of her coat, and watched the red light slide up the white walls of the city.