They edged around a knot of men that crowded the street in front of a coffee seller’s. The conversation in the queue was mostly local politics—the aging caliph’s reputation in contrast to that of one of his popular lieutenants, as near as Temur could gather with his fractured Uthman. Most of these men seemed to be partisans of the charismatic up-and-comer, but one—Temur guessed from his leather apron that he was an employee or the proprietor of the glassworks—was defending the caliph at length, and another appeared to be preaching anarchy.
Temur snorted to himself. So it was the world over: Asitaneh no different from Qarash. Nevertheless, he slowed to listen … and for his trouble heard little more, except a torrent of abuse heaped by two men who seemed to belong to the dominant Falzeen sect upon one whom Temur assumed to be Rahazeen. It broke off, however, as soon as the men noticed the Cho-tse jogging past and listening.
Temur and Bansh and Hrahima won their way through with only a little delay and exited a lightly guarded gate, which seemed to have stood wide overnight. People came and went; there were villages without the walls and farmers were arriving with loads of chickens, of eggs, of melons and dates and other such produce as could be coaxed to grow in the dry plain and rubbled hills behind the city. The angled light showed details in the landscape that Temur had not previously noticed. He was used to glimpsing these hills from the windows and yard of Ato Tesefahun’s house and seeing them baked flat by the fierceness of afternoon. Slanted illumination and shadows revealed textures to the landscape that he had never suspected—wrinkles, gullies, and ridges in sharp relief.
Temur, Bansh, and Hrahima veered off the road after a few strides so they could stretch out and run.
Temur wished Samarkar were with them. He wished they could just keep going until they reached the horizon and then choose another horizon and run some more.
He wouldn’t. He would choose to face the tasks that fate had set him.
But he couldn’t make himself not want to run.
* * *
As they entered the court of the caliph, Samarkar was greeted by the ethereal scent of frankincense and the equally ethereal sound of a soprano voice, floating unaccompanied upon the fan-stirred breeze. The armor, no matter how impressive, restricted her field of vision. She glanced from side to side, but though the motion reassured her of the exact locations of Ato Tesefahun, Hrahima, Temur, and Brother Hsiung, she could not locate the source of the singing.
Those glimpses did encourage her to slow her stride and take in the design of the caliph’s palace. The once-princess Samarkar had seen many a royal dwelling, and resided in not a few of them—in Rasa and in Song—but this was like something out of a traveler’s book. She tipped her head back as subtly as she could manage, permitting herself to be all but swayed on her feet by the grandeur of the domed and vaulted spaces above. She—who had seen the impossible span of the Wreaking in Tsarepheth, who had slept and worked within the white-and-crimson walls of its impossible Citadel, who had lived as a prince’s wife in one of the famed—and equally impossible—paper palaces of Song—even she, the once-princess Samarkar, was overawed.
The walls of the palace were massive blocks of gold-chased lapis lazuli, a blue so fine and true as to defy description. There were no skies in all the civilized world that color. Graceful words—passages of the Scholar-God’s scripture—carved fingertip-deep in the walls seemed cut from black shadows, while the walls themselves glowed in the light that fell through glass-finished windows taller than three men standing on one another’s shoulders. The stone filigree holding the glass cast articulated shadows across the cream marble floor as if flowers of light were strewn by giant’s handfuls for any foot to tread upon. Overhead, a lofty chain of vaults and domes seemed to hover, higher and finer than anything Samarkar had even envisioned in dreams. More script adorned it: words everywhere, even worked in gold into the marble underfoot. Even cast by the shadows through the ranks of windows. Even drifting in the air through that unbelievable, acoustically perfect space.
Samarkar noticed that Temur, who tended to hunch uncomfortably under a stone roof, was leaning back and staring about himself in wonder.
“It’s not so humble,” Ato Tesefahun said effacingly. “But it is for the glory of the Scholar-God.”
“Who was the architect?” Samarkar marveled aloud.
Ato Tesefahun looked down at his feet. Samarkar blinked at him from behind her helm’s slatted mask and winced when Hrahima cuffed—gently, by a Cho-tse’s standards—the old man.
“Not so humble,” the tiger scoffed. “Yes, so says a great wizard of Aezin. Not so humble, indeed.”