It could have been the whole world spread out before them, if the world were only a bruised ring of sunset swirled around the rim of a wasteland of iron-colored rock and pallid ice. Forbidding, shattered, the mountains receded from the summit upon which the twins perched with their mount, marching to the twilight horizon on every side—except where the Tsarethi broke from beneath the span of the Citadel, leaping from stone to stone the length of a narrow valley picked out in shimmering lights. Lamps burned below, and witchlights, and torches.
The twins shivered, and Saadet pulled the white-bleached lambskin close about their shoulders, fingers clumsy in unaccustomed kidskin. It still wasn’t enough, though in fairness no coat could have proved sufficient. To keep out a cold such as this was beyond the technologies of men. The twins’ lungs ached with cold as much as want of air.
Shahruz lifted the spyglass from the twins’ saddle and raised it to their eye. Saadet saw what he saw: down at the far end of the valley, men and women were stepping out onto the balconies of the Black Palace, before which crouched an unlit pyre.
Three Nameless warriors had arrived on rukh-back with the twins. Those three warriors were infiltrating the city below in accordance with the long-term plans of al-Sepehr. The twins were alone now. Perhaps that aloneness contributed to a sense of unease, of being regarded. The twins glanced over their shoulder, where mist coiled in the caldera of a quiescent volcano. Saadet suppressed a hard shiver—fear, this time, rather than chill.
If it were mist-dragons, surely the eyes would give them away? Wasn’t it most likely that what poured like water into a cauldron, to seethe and swirl, was merely clouds trapped by a trick of topography and colder air settling?
If it was mist-dragons … would even they dare to ambush a rukh?
“It’s time,” Shahruz said, their throat and lips stretching uncomfortably around his still-unfamiliar voice. “See to the Cold Fire, sister.”
Saadet let herself smile. Al-Sepehr had entrusted her with the blood-soaked spell stones, the sacrifices meant to commence weakening the bonds that sealed the ancient fire-mountain and had since the reign of the Sorcerer-Prince. Now, she manipulated the long reins, directing the rukh down into those seething mists.
It moved uncertainly on the ground, for all its strength, picking its way blindly through fog to reach the bottom. Stones scattered from its talons as it waddled, chickenlike, down the slope. Here the air was warmer, almost comfortable. Heat soaking from the earth pushed the mists up, making it possible to see barren terrain.
When Saadet signaled it to stop, the rukh plucked hewn stone after hewn stone from the carrier pouches at its breast. It laid them one atop another to form a stone table. They had been carved and fitted according to the instructions found in grimoires of ancient Erem; the twins were not surprised to see that the rukh’s beak grew friable and rotten where she touched them. Nor were the twins surprised that the slabs fell together perfectly: the masons who had made them were probably dead by now, but while they lasted they had wrought well.
Saadet let her brother feel her sense of satisfaction, rejoicing as he echoed it. She stretched into his approval, warmed, and gave him control of the reins. It was he who guided the rukh back to the crater’s rim, though it scrabbled and fluttered the whole way. They paused there, overlooking the world, while their mist-damp hair froze in crackling serpent-strands about their face.
“For the Nameless,” she said.
She knew what he answered, though the wind of their falling snatched his words away. Lifting his hands, urging the rukh to drop from the parapet into flight, he cried out, “For the world!”
* * *
It was not the Wizard Hong’s first execution, nor even his first burning. But it was the first one where he had stood in wizard’s weeds behind an empress, bearing witness to the execution of her junior husband, with her senior husband painstakingly expressionless beyond.
Flanked by attendants and guards, Emperor Songtsan wore the funeral white and crimson his senior wife had eschewed. The crown rested on his head, a latticework circlet carved from a single round of translucent green-gold crystals embedded in iron-gray matrix. Not just iron-gray, Hong-la knew: iron, most simply, studded as thickly as currants in a cake with peridot and olivine. The Bstangpo’s crown was carved from a piece of a skystone, and between material and craftsmanship it hummed with enough hoarded otherwise strength to make a wizard’s skin tingle.
The pyre had been raised in the square before the palace, constructed of seasoned sandalwood and cedar as befitted a prince of the empire. Beyond, spray rose above the tossing river as it leapt between stones. Hong-la had been hearing the noise of the emperor’s subjects arriving to witness the execution for hours now. It rose into the windows of the Black Palace, mingling with the river’s roar and hiss, while he wasted the afternoon dancing attendance upon the empress and her women—and seeing to their entertainments.