Song legend said that the first Cho-tse had been made by powerful spirits from the body of a tiger who fought an evil Song god. The Rasan people believed that Cho-tse were tigers so canny they had learned to walk upright, like men. What the Cho-tse thought of their own origins, however, Samarkar had never heard—though there might be a book or a scroll in the Citadel that could tell her. There was one thing of which she had no doubt, however.
Tiger eyes saw very well in the dark.
Still, she was glad to let the light lapse when the western sky began to gray, and a mist rose up around her. Her own breath streamed back into it, and there was brightness enough to see her path the few steps ahead she could see at all. Her legs and lungs burned; her feet ached with the impact of hard ground.
She heard the horses stamp, and one mare’s welcoming—or questioning—neigh long before she caught sight of the camp. But they were close, very close, and when Samarkar called back to them, she heard Tsering’s glad cry. And the voice of the plainsman, crying out in his own Qersnyk tongue: “Hurry, hurry!”
There was a glow through the mist overhead, the first rays of the crowning sun breaking across the western peaks behind Samarkar. She smelled fire and horse and soup, and saw a dark shape moving through the mist. A moment later, she burst into the small campsite amid the bodies of mules and the bay mare, who bugled a cry of challenge past Samarkar and laid her sharp ears back.
Tsering was crouched by an improvised pony drag, set up now between rocks as a cot, with the Quersnyk man lashed into it. She was restraining him, hands on his shoulders, while he half sat and struggled to release himself from the cloths that bound him down. She glanced up as Samarkar appeared, making no attempt to disguise her expression of relief. “There’s something out there—”
“Let him up,” Samarkar said. He might be feverish and weak, but if a tiger-man came slaughtering his way into the camp, she wanted any hand that could wield a knife free to do so. “There’s a Cho-tse out there, and I don’t know what it wants.”
Eyes wide, Tsering reached under the cot and yanked loose her knots, then stood.
“Temur,” Samarkar said. She spoke in his language, aware as never before how flawed her accent was. “Do you know anything about the Cho-tse following us? Or following you?”
He extended his legs gingerly over the frame of the unsteady hammock, balancing on one of the rocks Tsering had wedged its poles against. Tsering retrieved his dagger from a mule pack and pressed it into his hand before leaning his bow and quiver against the rock beside him. He looked at her in patent relief. She nodded, her hair a shadow across her cheek in the indirect and growing light.
“It’s not the cat you have to worry about,” he said, pushing down on his knee with a palm to stand. He looked better—much better. Tsering’s attentions had broken his fever, at least. Willow-bark, Samarkar thought with approval. “It’s the blood ghosts.”
It wasn’t the mist that chilled Samarkar’s cheeks; it was the blood draining from them. “Sweet mother mountain,” she whispered. “Nobody tended the Qarashi dead?”
He licked his lips and lifted his chin, and for the first time she saw the raw, fresh scar across his throat and realized how he must have come by it. And that he would take what she had said as a personal judgment.
“There were a lot of dead,” he said. “Do you have salt? We must salt the earth, the animals, ourselves. Our weapons—”
“Of course,” she said, comprehending. And realizing that Tsering was watching them with a line of concentration drawn between her eyes, understanding not one word in ten. “We’re from Tsarepheth. Tsering, salt—salt everything. Temur says that there are blood ghosts on the loose, and maybe that’s what destroyed Qeshqer.”
Samarkar had hardly said the words blood ghosts when Tsering was moving, pulling a slab of salt from the same mule pack where she’d stowed Temur’s knife, dragging her own knife from her sheath and scraping the rock—near-black in the gray light—into a pile of dust and chips on the surface of the nearest boulder. Temur grabbed it up by handfuls and dumped it in the leathern bucket. It must still have held some water, because his next action was to start pouring the stuff over the restive, calling mares and mules, splashing it all over himself in the process.
It seemed like a good idea. Samarkar threw a handful of salt in Tsering’s hair, then started broadcasting it in all directions, sowing it more thickly than rice. In the morning damp, it stuck to the grass and her hands and the hides of the animals. She performed the work almost automatically, her every natural and wizardly sense straining out into the fog for any sign that danger approached them.