Eternal Sky 01(68)
She turned her hand over and caught his. “Be king or be carrion,” she said. “The future is a monster either way.”
He squeezed her hand, then tried to pull away. She held him tighter, and now the bones of her face looked wrong as well.
“Temur.”
He yanked, but his arm felt numb, heavy. Paralyzed. Her grip was still brutally tight.
“Temur!”
She was pulling, still squeezing, until he thought she would drag him onto the horse. He didn’t want to go with her. He twisted against her grip, but it was inexorable, and the paralysis was spreading now, numbing him from neck to feet.
“Temur!”
His eyes popped open, his body still foreign and numb with sleep. Samarkar had hold of his hand and was shaking him gently. Gold morning light filtered through the window, casting rainbows on the far wall, where it broke against the mist from the waterfall. He struggled to push himself upright as Samarkar let go of his wrist, but though he was clear-minded, his body remained alien and slow. At last, with effort, he managed to raise his head from the smooth wooden pillow.
“Wake up,” she said. “We have an appointment with the naturalists. We’re due to see Master Hong-la, and it’s best not to keep wizards waiting.”
“I was dreaming,” he said. “I think I dreamed of the Sorcerer-Prince.”
The urgency to be moving deserted her, replaced by another kind of urgency. She sat down on his bedside and said, “Tell me everything. Now, before it fades away.”
He had no desire to elaborate on what he’d already said, but he realized the necessity of her request. Quickly, in as much detail as he could, he sketched the dream for her, feeling it already tattering out of recall. She listened solemnly, with folded arms, while he rose from his nest of blankets and began dressing in fresh clothes all but identical to those of the previous night. After more than a moon on the road, there was not much modesty lost between them anymore.
By the time he’d remembered how to tie the wraps on the jacket, he was finished recounting the dream. He did not tell her that the Veil of Night had called him Khanzadeh, and he did not repeat what she had said about king or carrion.
Samarkar rose, tugging her blousy trousers into place and smoothing the creases. “That’s not reassuring. Have you been given to prophetic dreams?”
He shook his head. “But my grandfather was supposed to have the power. Are such things believed in, here?”
“Sometimes a tendency to dream true can indicate potential gifts as a wizard.” She paused and snorted at some thought that seemed to bitterly amuse her. “I’ve never had the knack of it.”
“Knack.” It struck him funny, and he answered her huff with a chuckle. “Well, it’s never happened to me before. Assuming this is a true dream. Which I’d rather it wasn’t. But they’re supposed to be allegorical, and this was certainly that.”
She looked down at her hands, clasped before her. “Do you still think your woman is alive?”
He felt his lips thin, felt the muscles of his jaws tighten. “If she’s not, can I leave her spirit captive to someone who will wield it as a weapon?”
She nodded—reluctant but resigned.
* * *
It seemed to Temur that Samarkar led him through corridors for the better part of the morning, but really it could not have been much more than the time it took the sun to move the width of two fingers across the sky. The length of the walk did more than the endless winding corridors to give him a sense of the scale. The place was practically a city unto itself.
He could tell when they were approaching the laboratories and quarters of the natural historians, because the corridor decor began to include a great many cabinets full of insects inexplicably mounted on pins and animal skins preserved whole with the heads.
“Your Master Hong-la,” he asked, leaning close. “What is he like?”
“Shh,” Samarkar said. She paused at a door framed on one side by the black-on-black rosette skin of a panther, on the other by a boulder that came to knee height. Its exterior looked like foundry clinker, melted and almost metallic. But some stonemason had cut into it and polished the cut smooth as a blade so that you could see the inside was composed of yellow-green crystals imbedded in an iron-black matrix.
Temur reached out hesitantly and stroked the cool surface. “I have never seen such a stone.”
Samarkar paused in her knocking to glance sideways. “It’s a skystone,” she said. “Mostly iron. Some god hurled it to earth from the heavens. You should see the crater they pulled it out of.”
Skystone. He remembered the storm-colored mare of his fever dream, the red-black dust of his moon under her running hooves. He wanted to ask her if she thought maybe the heavens were made of stone. If this was true, a chip could be knocked loose somehow.