Eternal Sky 01(54)

“Ghosts,” Hrahima said. “Ghosts summoned from among the dead of the steppe tribes by rotted sorcery, and by that same sorcery set upon the city.”

Samarkar translated for Tsering. Tsering rubbed her eyes in exhaustion. Temur knew enough Rasan to follow when Tsering said, “So why Qeshqer? And how?”

Samarkar’s hand slipped into a concealed pocket. “How, I may have an answer to.”

She pulled out a glove, inside out and knotted, and began working it open with her teeth. When she upended it, a Rasan prayer stone rolled out into the trampled weeds. Temur would have reached for it, but Samarkar gestured him back. “It’s cursed.”

Tsering crouched beside it, pressing her cheek to the grass. “Roll it over.”

Gingerly, using the glove to shield her hand, Samarkar turned the stone. A scraped-looking chalk mark smudged the back. She did not recognize the alphabet.

Tsering, however, made a small noise of dismay. “Rahazeen,” she said. “And not just Rahazeen. The Nameless.”

“Murderer’s cult,” the Cho-tse said. “It’s one of their curse words. A Nameless sorcerer entered your city and twisted your priest’s blessing into an invocation of the hungry dead.”

Hrahima reached one hand out, fingers spread. Like any tiger, she had five digits on her hands and four on her feet. The bare skin on her palms was an inhuman shade of pink-white, mottled with irregularly sized and spaced round black dots. The claws that extended from her broad fingertips when she flexed them were as long as two joints of a man’s finger, white with dark streaks like marble, translucent at the tips. She paused, her hand cupped as if cradling the stone but a span above it. Temur thought the expression that drew her whiskers back and lifted her flews from ivory-streaked canine teeth as big as tent pegs was a frown of concentration, but it could have been a snarl.

Whatever it meant, Temur found himself leaning back as if he could remove himself from her attention. Her arm could have taken the place of his leg for size and muscularity, but the delicacy with which she moved her fingers made him imagine she traced something tender and palpable with the needle points of her claws. Her nostrils flared, the long white whiskers slicked back against her cheeks, and she made a sound in her chest—hrrh hrrh hrrrh—that trembled his body like a drumhead.

“Oh, yes.” Her mottled orange-and-tourmaline irises filled the whole aperture of her eyes; only when she looked up at him from a crouch could he see the rims of white sclera at the bottoms. Her pupils were round. “It’s cursed all right. A prayer stone to deflect harm, suborned to draw it. Filthy magic.”

Samarkar protested. Temur could imagine the meaning of her words, even if he didn’t quite understand them: Sorcery can’t do that.

He allowed himself to settle back on one of the rocks where his travois rested, trying to hide how exhaustion made the whole valley and all its stones and junipers and early wildflowers seem to spin. Tsering, coming from beside the fire, pushed something warm into his hand; he took it. A wooden cup, full of still more willow-bark tea. He drank it quickly, stoic before the acrid sourness, and thanked her in her own tongue. It might taste like mare’s piss, but he knew he had it to thank for breaking his fever and leaving him even as clearheaded as he was.

“So,” he said, across the bitterness, “either some Nameless assassin entered Qeshqer and altered the stones by night … How long would such a task have taken, Hrahima?”

“Quarter-moons,” she said.

“… Or,” Temur continued, “an agent already within the city did it, and made it look Rahazeen.”

“An agent who knows Rahazeen sorcery,” Tsering said, cautioning, after Samarkar translated. “Or it could have been a long-term Rahazeen agent, of course, or—”

“It’s curious,” Temur said, “that this should happen so soon upon the fall of Qarash.”

“And perhaps using the dead of that battle,” Hrahima said.

Samarkar shifted uncomfortably, but when Temur looked at her, she shrugged. “My brother will have his quarter-century soon.”

“Regime change.” Temur’s mouth dried unpleasantly.

Tsering moved away abruptly, thrusting odds and ends into saddlebags and piling each beside the appropriate mule. Samarkar spoke quickly in her own tongue, not pausing now to translate her words for Temur’s sake.

Whatever else Samarkar said, Hrahima crouched and listened to the whole of it. She had a trick of stilling herself, whereby she could vanish like a stone among scrub. This despite the fact that she made more than three of Temur; she was easily two-thirds of Bansh’s weight.