Struggling up the same rock, careful of the lead lines she was trailing, Samarkar said, “That’s not how we tell it in Rasa.”
Temur snorted like his mare and said complacently, “Of course not.”
10
No party rode out from Tsarepheth to meet them. Once Tsering rode on ahead, Samarkar had expected to be greeted halfway by her brothers’ men or by wizards. Instead, she fretted and worried the entire way that Hrahima had been wrong about the salt deposits offering protection and that they would come to Tsarepheth to find a city empty of life and heaped with bloody bones.
She and Temur crested the last rise in the pass above the city to find no one waiting for them except Hrahima, crouched on a ledge halfway up the cliff like a hunting snow leopard. Her red-orange, black, and ivory fur was no camouflage against lichen-spotted basalt. The Citadel spanned the pass ahead of them, wrapped in rainbow-raddled veils of steam and fog. Before it, the headwaters of the Tsarethi plunged from the glaciers of the Island-in-the-Mists to meet the hot upwelling of the Cold Fire’s mineral waters. The moderate temperatures of the river, Samarkar knew, kept Tsarepheth extraordinarily mild in the brutal winters of the Steles.
The white wall behind those veils of mist could have been forged from them by sorcery. Prayer flags and banners in every bright color flapped from the battlements, and even at this distance Samarkar could see the black outlines of wizards against alabaster as they stood sentinel or scurried to and fro. There were too many of them overall, and too many of those were motionless, watching—awaiting war. If Tsering’s warning had not reached them, some other portent had.
The city of Tsarepheth lay beyond.
Temur had stopped dead, transfixed. Samarkar came up beside him. Not without satisfaction, she whispered, “Tsarepheth.”
He nodded. His breath came rapid and shallow; she could tell from his grayish color and the way he stood that the thin air pained him. It had slowed them, these last days, but at least he hadn’t succumbed to headaches and vomiting.
“I see,” he said, “why it has never been taken.”
Hrahima descended from her aerie in three bounds, sensible enough to come to earth well away from the mules. Bansh seemed to have accepted her, but Samarkar had never met a mare as steady as the bay.
“I waited for you,” Hrahima said. “The bridge is guarded.”
“Always,” Samarkar said. “It’s called the Wreaking, by the way.” She led them forward, her feet light for the first time in a moon of traveling, but her heart stone-cold with apprehension.
* * *
What Hrahima termed a bridge qualified in Temur’s mind as a temple. Rivers on the steppe were forded. They ran broad and shallow over gravel when they ran at all. Many dried to trickles in the dry season, while in spring flood they were demons that no more could be bridged or forded or swum than a dragon could be chained. Now he stood on a white stone arch lost in mist, rainbows mounting one above another like jewels piled upon jewels, and listened to Samarkar coaxing the restive mules forward. He would go and help her in a moment, he thought. But just for this instant, he could not pull himself away from what he saw.
The bridge described an arc a hundred ayl long, graceful as a woman’s white-clad arm, anchored only at the ends because there was nothing in the middle to which an architect could drop a pillar. It was so long in proportion to its width that it seemed frail and slender, even though it was wide enough for two carts to pass abreast. There were railings—stone balustrades to waist height—along the edges, and Temur found himself clutching reflexively at the hand rail.
He had seen waterfalls in the parts of Song that his grandfather and uncle had conquered. There was terrain there where the water melted the very stone from beneath the earth, so rivers vanished into yawning yellow-white pits draped at the edges with webs of roots; where measureless caverns made awful labyrinths under your feet; where alien towers of limestone netted with jungle-green thrust up from flat verdant fields. But he had never seen a waterfall like this.
The river Tsarethi plunged a distance he could not estimate—a hundred ayl, five hundred?—down a sheer granite cliff to a pool below, bouncing and splashing and scattering spray. In the tight canyon, the thunder was like the thunder of a thousand hooves when the herd was all around you. Louder—booming—so he could not hear Samarkar a few spans away calling to the mules.
The spray drifting against his face was cold as ice—so cold he could imagine it freezing to ice in his patchy, unshaven beard. But the mist that rose from below was warm as summer rain. Temur had to turn his shoulders to follow the water down. The stiffness of his scar made it hard to twist his neck away. He was fortunate the wound was on his left side. Otherwise, it would have interfered with drawing a bow.