Temur said, “Yes.”
“Hmm,” Hong-la said, and bounced up off the rug with the energy of a much younger man. He crossed his chamber in five long strides, reached a rack of books and scrolls beside the door, and began searching through them, muttering under his breath. Temur glanced at Samarkar.
She had quite a vocabulary of those head gestures. He thought this one meant, “Go over there, you idiot.”
So Temur, too, rose, and more hesitantly crossed the room. He was still a few steps from the door when a tapping came upon it.
“Come in,” Hong-la barked irritably. A servant apparently well used to his moods carried in a covered tray and set it down on the small table without inquiring, then made himself vanish again.
Temur paused at the wizard’s elbow, Samarkar a comforting presence at his back. “Can I help somehow?”
“Sit and eat,” Hong-la said, without looking up from the armload of scrolls he was sorting. “You’ll only be in my way here.”
So he sat, and Samarkar also sat beside him. He thought he should serve the food in deference to her rank, but when he lifted the cover she was already there with spoon and tongs. There was the famous red mountain rice, steamed with some other hard grain he did not recognize and studded with bits of preserved lemons. Yak butter melted over the top. When she spooned it into a bowl over green leaves, she topped it with a generous portion of some flaky, snow-white meat he did not recognize. It was sweet and mild. Better tasting than snake, anyway.
It was farmer food, grains and greens with only a little meat beside, but it was filling and warm and tasted surprisingly good. He ate slowly, forcing himself to taste everything despite his body’s desire to bolt it.
Samarkar, of course, ate like a princess. “There would be wine,” she said. “But without the caravans…”
She shrugged.
Temur gestured to show he understood, but his mouth was too full of food to answer.
By the time they were done and had washed down the last lingering butteriness with mouthfuls of bitter tea, Hong-la came back with three scrolls and a book balanced between his chest and the crook of his left arm. He set them down on the rug and applied himself to his food with the concentration of someone who often forgets to eat. Between bites, without looking up, he asked, “Can you read?”
“Some,” Temur said, setting his bowl down. “Song characters. My people did not have a written system until the Great Khagan adopted Uthman letters, but I can read and write my own language in those. I grew up with them.”
Samarkar poured more steaming tea into Hong-la’s bowl. He picked it up and blew across it. She set the teapot down without refilling her own cup, but something about the slight, expectant glance she gave Temur made him realize that there was a hierarchy at work here—younger to older, or apprentice to master? He wasn’t sure.
He lifted the black clay pot and filled her cup and his own while Hong-la opened a scroll on the crumb-free end of the table and weighted it with dry, clean odds and ends. “Well,” he said, “this is neither Qersnyk writing nor Song, but one of the ancient tribal languages of the people who would become the Uthman Caliphate. I will translate.”
He did, slowly and with slight awkwardness, pausing once or twice to look up a word or a phrase in the lexicon he’d also carried over. “This is a history of the Carrion-King’s war, which goes into detail about the dead armies of Sepehr al-Rachīd ibn Sepehr and the tactics he used to raise them. Now, this scroll is very old: It claims to be a copy of one written when the Carrion-King was still a living memory for a few of the most aged souls, which would make it—conservatively—better than five hundred years in age.”
Temur looked at the thing with a fair reverence. One thing his grandfather had instilled in his sons, which had been passed down to Temur by way of Qulan, was a deep and abiding appreciation of art and craftsmanship. This scroll was both, and history, too—a thing of great beauty to Temur’s eyes.
“It seems,” Hong-la continued, “that al-Rachīd was most feared for his ability to send the dead of any conflict back into it, arrayed on his side.”
“This al-Rachīd…” Temur hesitated until Hong-la nodded, granting him permission to continue. “Is that the same person as the Sorcerer-Prince?” He remembered his dream and the stalking corpse of the mountains. “You are suggesting that he’s involved?”
“He is the same person. Al-Rachīd means ‘the Brave.’ Anyway”—Hong-la tapped the scroll—“this contains an account of the fall of fabled Erem, the city upon whose ruins Messaline was built and from which, it seems, it inherited the epithet City of Jackals. The anonymous historian”—he tapped again—“seems uncertain if it became known as such before or after it was overrun—but it was the second city named Erem. That much is sure. The first fell five hundred years before the second. In any case, the scroll recounts several stories of folk later witnessing attacks by their dead loved ones from Erem on other battlefields. Listen: