Eternal Sky 01(80)

Samarkar wanted to close her eyes, but she would not. If she would condemn Tsansong to the flames, she would do it while meeting his lover’s gaze. “If we had an army, it might be possible.”

Payma wiped the runnels of makeup off her cheeks, smearing the apricot sleeve of her gown. She lifted her chin and put her free hand on the belly that Samarkar could not yet see beneath her robes. “I will save his scion,” she said, and Samarkar heard the ice in it—and how thin that ice was over the pain.

“If we can.” Hrahima, of course, had heard it all. Now she came striding back, her feet soundless as the wind through her fur. “Samarkar-la, this was your home. Tell us how to proceed.”

There were secret ways, of course—the palace at Tsarepheth was no different from any other palace in this regard. And while Samarkar was confident she knew them all, Songtsan was by no means more ignorant. Still, the first thing they must do was get Payma out of the corridor and start moving. And they could not take her out a guarded door, not unless they were prepared to fight.

The good news was that the Black Palace of Tsarepheth was like all fortresses; it was designed to keep enemies out, not in, and if one would keep certain ways within its walls secret, that meant they must also be kept secret from the majority of the men at arms.

Heart pounding against her collar, showing in the hollows of her wrists, Samarkar dimmed the green light of her wards and led her party quickly, by devious routes, into a lamplit servant’s hall and from there to a concealed stair. In the stair there was a wall that seemed solid until one touched a particular block and muttered an incantation consisting of the lineage of the Rasan imperial household for eight generations. The wall angled in, silently, and silently Samarkar brought her companions through. She sealed the wall behind them and drew one free breath, scented with the tallow smoke from the lamps that had seeped into everyone’s hair and clothes.

The light of Samarkar’s wards revealed a corridor wide enough for two to walk abreast, low enough that it brushed Temur’s hair, while Samarkar had to walk hunched and Hrahima just dropped down to all fours and scuttled like a frog crossed with a tiger.

“We need to keep moving,” Payma said. She minced on slippered feet as if they pained her, but made no complaint.

Samarkar took her hand. “We are.”

“This could not smell more empty,” Hrahima said. “There is not even dust.”

“That is why we must hurry,” Samarkar said. “There is no ventilation in these corridors. If we stood and waited, we would breathe all the air and suffocate.”

Temur reached out to put one hand on the wall, his face dewed in sweat although the passage was chill as a grave. He set off in advance, moving quietly, supporting himself as if the presence of the walls and ceiling were a weight he carried, which made him stagger. Of course: No steppe horse-lord would love this place.

But their only path out was through.

* * *



The weight of the palace itself seemed to press down on Temur’s chest, shortening his breathing and closing his vision to a tunnel. His people believed it ill luck to spill blood at an execution, and so they sewed criminals into leather bags and heaped stones upon them until they died. He knew this was not the same—not even remotely the same—but for the moment he imagined that each breath grew shallower than the last, his lungs exhausted with pushing out against all that stone.

The space was not silent. It should, he thought, be as close as it was still, but every breath and every footstep rang around them until the sound fell in tiers, like thunder echoing from distant mountains.

It is only a corridor. And Samarkar knows where you are going.

She walked behind him, her green light casting forward so he could see to place his feet and see his own shadow stretching out front. The princess in the silken robes shuffled beside her, and each breath came with a squeak. Someone was as terrified here as Temur. The cat was as silent as mist, but she, too, breathed more quickly than was her wont, and the long tunnel took up the echoes of her breath and made it seem like a whole tribe of tigers panting.

Temur heard Samarkar take a quick breath, make a small noise of assessing, and start to speak.

He thought at first she was asking a question, but before long, the rhythm of her words lulled him, and he realized she was telling a story. A children’s tale, the sort of thing you soothed a babe with.

“Long ago,” Samarkar began, “there was a woman of the borderlands, a princess who was the daughter of a Dowager Queen. Their demesne lay at the foot of the Steles of the Sky, and it would have been a poor land, except that by good fortune it was inhabited by a race of great stone beings called talus, who mined for the people there and produced metals and jewels.