Eternal Sky 01(55)
When Samarkar had finished, Hrahima glanced at Temur and said, “There is a man called Re Qori Buqa. ‘Twenty bulls.’ He is the chief living claimant to the Khaganate.”
“I know him,” Temur said, fingers knotting through fingers in his lap until his bones creaked with pain. “His army marched on Qarash as if it were a foreign city and not the seat of the Khagan himself. The defenders were the Great Khagan’s grandson Qulan and his warriors. They rode out to meet Qori Buqa on the steppe a day’s ride from Qarash.”
Temur took a breath. No one interrupted. “But the army of Qori Buqa rolled over them and sacked the city, like they would sack any conquered western town. Only a few of the people escaped. Qori Buqa used the Great Khagan’s tactics against the Great Khagan’s own city. Some of the refugees said that he could not have made the sack of the town so complete without sorcery.”
He hesitated, plunged ahead.
“But I have seen a city sacked, and it does not take any magic to destroy in hours what is built over centuries.”
“I too have seen a city sacked.” Samarkar said. “And what you say is true, Temur.”
Tsering said something; whatever it was, Samarkar didn’t bother to translate. It sounded like a question.
Hrahima laid down her stick. She covered her knees with her tremendous paws and seemed to hover in her powerful crouch. “Nevertheless, there is necromancy at work here. Because it is due to signs of necromancy that I came to warn your people before the worst happened. Alas that through the fault of long travel, I have arrived too late.”
“Better a storm crow than a carrion bird,” Temur said. Judging from the quizzical look Samarkar gave him, it was an idiom that didn’t translate. He spread his hands. “Better to come in warning of crisis than scavenge the remains of disaster to survive?”
“Oh,” Samarkar said. She pushed her braid behind her shoulder and straightened her back, moving back over to help Tsering finish packing the camp. “So Qeshqer was destroyed by the ghosts of a steppe war, and you’ve come from beyond the Uthman Caliphate to warn the people of Rasa, out of the goodness of your heart? Forgive me, Hrahima. I know your people have a reputation as tricksters to maintain.”
But the Cho-tse did not lie. Even Temur knew that; it was in every story.
The tiger chuffed, a great hollow sound that made her throat swell like a bellows. Her ears flicked back and forth, and Samarkar could not shake the suspicion that she was forming an opinion. When she spoke again, it was as if she had decided to grant them candor.
“Hardly,” she said. She opened her hands at shoulder level and raised them high, so they spread out as if describing the shape of a growing plant. “Do you see this sun above you?”
Temur tilted his head back. It was large and golden and indisputably in the wrong part of a strange, dusty, turquoise sky that had a look of blue cloth washed too often and left to dry in the light. The edges faded to a buff that was almost yellow; the center seemed shallow rather than deep. It was not the sky of his homeland—not the blue Eternal Sky his ancestors honored—and it seemed impossibly high and dry and far away.
“I see it,” Samarkar said. “It is not the sky of Rasa.”
“It is not the sky of the steppe,” Temur said. “And since the Great Khagan claimed Qeshqer and the Qeshqerian plateau for his own, that is the sky that should cover it.”
“It is the sky of Ctesifon,” Hrahima said. “It is the sky of the Uthman Scholar-God, of which the Nameless cult of the Rahazeen sect is a part. And as your stone demonstrates, it is a rogue Rahazeen warlord-priest who has allied with your Re Qori Buqa, Temur. That is what I have come to warn your monkey-king of. The leader of the Nameless, ai-Idoj, what they call al-Sepehr, is working with your man who would be Khagan. In return for ai-Idoj’s help, Re Qori Buqa has given the murder-cultist sovereignty over the city of Qeshqer, and the heap of skulls within is only the beginning.”
Temur leaned forward, stomach churning with apprehension. He caught himself rubbing his chin left-handed and made himself stop, but the hand naturally strayed to the flaking skin along his scar. He stretched against it. When the constriction would have twisted his head to the left, he held his gaze straight. “Rahazeen?”
Temur knew who the Rahazeen were, of course. Too many of his family had fought them for their existence, to be a mystery. A sect from within the Ctesifonin lands—some lapping over into the Uthman Caliphate—they had for many years been engaged in a power struggle with the Falzeen, another sect of the same god.