The last and largest, though, was blacker than the night that lay behind it, visible only as a silhouette and a lazy gleam of opalescence. A semicircle loomed above the cliff edge, so heavy and present that Edene had to force her eyes down to counteract the fear that the swollen great thing would drop on her.
The green ring weighed warm and heavy on her hand. She touched it with the opposite fingers and wondered for a moment if she should pull it off, toss it away. But it was strength; it was power. It was her route to reclaim her family and her home.
Sand sifted across her worn slippers, filtered in through the holes. Her eyes adapted to this dark as well, and to the sharp, dueling shadows cast by moons and stars. When she looked up again she could see the dwellings carved into the tawny rock, the windows and doors black as the holes in a rank of skulls, the short sandy rise leading up to them. And she could see too the dozens or hundreds of gaunt shapes arrayed before those hollowed cliffs, standing not in ranks or lines but in ragged bunches, straggles, and clusters.
“Erem-of-the-Pillars,” said Besha Ghul.
“An army,” breathed Edene.
* * *
It was easy to sleep in Samarkar’s arms. Too easy, Temur thought, drifting, her fingers on his hair and the curve of her bosom pressing his cheek. He could reach the anxiety and outrage that had driven him this far, but he had to reach for them. They were somewhere else, at arm’s length, and the warm ease and comfort of the woman breathing against his scalp was here, now, present and real. The scent of her warmth filled his awareness. Her sweat dried lightly on his skin.
Well, he thought, at least you shall be rested.
He wasn’t sure why he fought the relaxation. His misery made nothing better for Edene in her durance—but in an obscure manner it comforted him. He thought Samarkar was asleep, but in his head he could hear her measured tones, the mountain accent with which she’d say It comforts you because it comforts your grief, Re Temur. Your grief wants you to live for nothing else. Will you fight less hard for Edene if you do not allow it to cripple you?
He thought, I will fight harder.
Ato Tesefahun must have ordered that lamps be hung in the courtyard tonight, because their light trickled through the louvers like dawn, golden and fragile, moving with each breath of wind that flipped the garden’s leaves. Temur watched it play along Samarkar’s hair that lay unbound and sleek across her shoulder and breast, watched the shine on the small hairs of his own forearm where it lay across her rib cage, lifted and dropped by the rhythm of her breath. Her head was toward the window; the gold light limned her silhouette: the downy edge of her cheek, the eggshell curve of an ear, her princess-stern face in shadow. No moist gleam of slitted eye suggested she was anything other than deeply asleep.
The glow from outside brightened. Fire, Temur thought, confusedly, but there was no tang of smoke, no crackle of burning. Had he slept after all, without knowing? Was he drifting awake again, the sun on the rise?
It was too silent for dawn. Where was the cacophony of birds and insects, the irrigated desert stirring awake? Where were the morning sounds of Asitaneh? All he could hear in the failing dark was the easy blur of his own breath, the more-and-more stentorian rasp of Samarkar’s. If not for the unease tossing in his belly, Temur might have closed his eyes and smiled against her shoulder.
The once-princess was snoring.
Except the sounds grew sharper and harder, rising to a wheezing whistle, a rattle, that made Temur’s fingers cold with fear. Her belly heaved, her body convulsing as if in a spasm of pleasure, and something rigid and smooth pushed her flesh against his arm. Temur recoiled, clutching at her shoulders as he rolled to his knees. He saw with horror the white foam at the corner of her mouth, the pregnant bulge of her abdomen that made her scars stretch shiny-taut in the daylight brightness. She is the Wizard Samarkar, he thought ridiculously. She cannot get with child—
She gasped, then, or tried to gasp—but no air filled her. She strained and strained, face gray, eyes bulging, her hands pressing clawed nails frantically to his chest below the collarbone. Sweat beaded on her skin and ran into her hair. He watched the blood vessels burst in the whites of her eyes.
Something heaved inside her. That hideous creaking sound, the sharp greenstick snapping—those were her ribs, bowed up by the struggling of something within.
They were not alone in the room. Someone was behind him, a shadow at his shoulder, looming over them. The certain cold of a stare pierced his shoulders, but he could not turn away from Samarkar.
He reached out to her, laying his hands against her chest. An unfamiliar pins-and-needles tingle numbed him fingertips to wrists, chill soaking his flesh as if the life and energy rushed from his body into Samarkar. He had a sudden, vivid memory of Mongke Khagan laying hands on a leper, of rotten flesh growing supple under the Khan of Khans touch—and of the Khagan, afterward, shaking his hands as if his fingers had been frozen or burned.