“You have your own gods here,” she said, understanding. “And your sky is stone.”
“It is the realm of my kin,” the ghul answered. “As the steppe is the realm of yours.”
Edene let her fingers trail across that strange, cool, welcoming stone. “And would you spread your stone sky over all of us?”
Besha Ghul, padding silent as a piece of the dark beside her, paused long enough that she knew it was considering carefully what next to say. Her own footsteps, no matter how light and careful, echoed down tunnels that also murmured with ceaseless chiming, trickling, the hushing of water falling and flowing against stone. Echoes built and layered, an intoxicating and alien music with her own heartbeat, the ineluctable rhythm around which it all wound.
The air that filled Edene’s throat and lungs and the spaces in her skull with each breath was moist and cool. She would have called it odorless, except she had not realized before now that rock and pure water had odors of their own, when concentrated in such a confined space. She knew the metal-and-mold scent of rain on dry ground, of an oasis carried over an arid landscape. This was different: less … dusty, somehow, no matter how strange it was that water should smell dusty. More like the spirit or essence of the thing.
The truth of water and stone lay in that smell as if it were a name.
At last, Besha Ghul drew an audible, echoing breath and answered, “We have held empires, and served them, and lost them. Now we mind our sunless realm, and live safe here. If we come forth again to conquer, it will be in service of the ring you bear and not our own ends.”
That ring swung chill and heavy on her finger. “You are thrall to it?”
“Those who built the wizard ways of Erem care little for the desires of things that live and breathe,” Besha Ghul answered. “We—the ghulim—are children in an ancient universe, Mistress of Secrets. And your race is even younger. We may seem very different, your folk and mine. But we have this in common: we are warm, and we must eat, and we must create our children alive and fragile and pulsing with the hot blood that is so easy, so terribly easy to spill.”
It paused, leaving Edene with a breathless sense of this antique race, surviving, burrowing, hunched against the weight of torchlit centuries. Then it continued, in a tone that might be awe or fear or—worse—reverence. “There are powers and sentiences so old, and alien, and terrible, that to them we are of less significance than an infestation of insects would be to us.”
Edene touched the ring with her thumb and said, “And yet we bind these ancient powers.”
Another silence followed, not so long this time. At the end of it, the ghul simply sighed, and said: “Do we?”
* * *
One night, Temur had promised himself. A single night to give entirely to Samarkar, to the exploration—no, the affirmation—of the affection they had discovered between them.
They would not have it, and he felt selfish and small that he mourned it bitterly.
The tea was drunk, the pastries devoured before the flat yellow Uthman sun found the edge of the flat turquoise Uthman sky. The council done—at least for now—Samarkar, Hsiung, Ato Tesefahun, and Temur each returned to their own chamber to prepare for the day. In predawn chill, Temur washed himself with a rag and cool water, thinking that at least for now the smell of Samarkar lingered in the tight bends of his braided queue.
Temur’s grandfather’s servants had laundered the clothes from his saddlebags, including the ones Temur had preserved by avoiding wearing them. He dressed himself now in breeches and a shirt, sparing himself the padded coat that was self-mortification in the heat of Asitaneh at the end of summer. His felted boots were worn almost through at the soles and across the arches where the stirrup pressed, but his grandfather’s people had left him some sort of shoes composed, like open-work baskets, of a weave of leather straps fixed to soles. Temur took some time to work out how they fastened, and the straps felt strange between his toes … but they would be unimaginably better than boots once the sun rose.
A foot scraped in the hall, presaging an eastern-style scratch against the frame. When the bead-weighted curtains of his room were pushed aside by a woman’s broken-nailed hand, Temur was already on his feet—but not because he anticipated a threat. Instead, as Samarkar permitted the hangings to drift closed behind her, he put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into an embrace.
She—steel-spined, spire-straight once-princess and Wizard of Tsarepheth—buried her face against his neck for a moment, a gesture that made his heart swell against his ribs until he would have sworn he could feel each one like a brand. She breathed in deep and out again—just once, stirring his beard at the corner of his jaw—before he felt her body firm in his arms.