Eternal Sky 01(53)
“When do they attack?” Samarkar gasped.
“Sunrise,” Temur said, cupping up the last handful of salt sludge from the bottom of the bucket and smearing it into her hair. The touch jerked her attention home, and she found herself staring down into his eyes from a few handspans’ distance. She pulled her attention away, cuffing salt water from her forehead before it could trickle into her eyes, a knotting but not unpleasant unease twisting in her belly.
Samarkar craned her head around. Just mist. Mist and lots of it. And a shadow cutting it as the sun finally crested the horizon and scraped across the land. A very black shadow, narrow and long.
And a great hollow grumbling huff of laughter.
She looked up across the muscled expanse of red-orange, fawn, and black-striped chest to meet the shadowed eyes of the figure that loomed nonchalantly out of the mist, arms folded, ears pricked, head cocked to one side like any curious cat. The gold rings in her ear leather jingled with charms and pendant jewels; the ears themselves were ragged-edged with scars, as if older piercings had been ripped out by violence. The horses and mules had stopped their braying and stamping and now stood stock-still, snorting deep breaths of air, on the verge of panic and blind flight.
Samarkar realized with a shock that the Cho-tse she had met in Song was, perhaps, not such a large example of his breed after all.
“Monkey-men,” the she-tiger said, in a voice like sandy velvet. “The mist will not kill you tonight. But you have other worries. I am Hrahima; I have traveled from fabled Ctesifon to warn your monkey-kinglet of a great evil.”
9
“I’m sorry,” said the larger of the two women. Wizards, Temur realized, now that his head was clearer. Her words were one of the phrases he knew in Rasan. Her politeness suggested to him that she was high ranking, indeed; he remembered the same excruciatingly gentle assurance of obedience in his father. “I did not see you there. Please…”
Whatever she said next was beyond him, but she gestured to the last coals of the fire, and Temur understood that she invited the tiger to sit. The tiger nodded. Temur remained somewhat overawed by her massive head, her shoulders like a bull’s, the thick striped orange hide that covered the knitted sinew of her forearms. She wore only a satchel slung diagonally across her body and a tangle of beautifully cured leather straps with gold and amber fittings that supported three curved daggers.
Her rows of pale dugs—the color of skimmed milk—were how he knew she was female, because the shape of her body was not like a woman’s and her female parts were tucked away behind fur and the thick diameter of her tail.
The bigger wizard-woman introduced them all; Temur must have told them how he was called when he was delirious, because they shared it now. He learned that the bigger woman was Samarkar and the smaller was Tsering.
Meanwhile, the tiger—Hrahima—crouched before the fire, holding long fingers tipped with retractable claws out to the embers. The mules watched; the mares stamped and edged into one another. The muscle across Hrahima’s thighs and haunches rippled. Her legs were curiously made—longer than a man’s, with the knee higher on the leg and the heel levered up like a dog’s hock, so she stood on only the ball and toe pads of feet Temur could not have spanned with his fingers stretched.
The structure of her lower leg reminded him of the design of a spear-thrower. She could probably leap like a tiger, too.
As he watched, Hrahima pulled a charred stick from the firepit and began to sketch on a nearby stone.
“You did not see me,” she said carefully, “because I did not wish to be seen.” She glanced about, frowning from Temur to Tsering to Samarkar, and switched to Temur’s language. “Do all of you speak the same languages?”
“No,” Tsering said. “I don’t know Qersnyk.”
“I know very little Rasan,” Temur admitted.
The tiger sighed—a rumbling sound, which Temur only identified as a sigh because of the irritation with which her shoulders rose and fell. Her tail lashed like a granary cat’s. “Then I shall say everything twice.”
Her ears were large and mobile. The charms and rings in them jingled when she flicked them to and fro. Temur found himself staring into her textured, transparent golden eyes. He nodded.
She turned back to her sketching. Samarkar said, in Qersnyk, “When you say you bring news for the king—do you mean Songtsan-tse? He will be bstangpo—emperor—soon, but he is not yet.”
“Him,” Hrahima agreed, “or his regent. Are you a subject of this monkey-king?”
“After a fashion,” Samarkar said. “I am his sister. But more importantly, right now, I am a wizard of the Citadel and tasked with discovering the fate of the city of Qeshqer.” She repeated herself in her own language, glancing at the other wizard—Tsering—to make sure she understood.