Shattered Pillars(4)

“Hail,” she said.

The guard must have heard them coming, because he turned quietly in the gloom. Temur could only tell that his hand rested on the hilt of his scimitar by the outline of his silhouette.

“Who passes?” he asked in the Uthman language.

Temur’s use of it was still raw, but he managed to say, “The guests of Ato Tesefahun,” without choking on his tongue.

“To what purpose do you creep in the dark?” Though the guard’s tone was suspicious, no scrape of steel on sheath revealed him to have loosened his sword.

“Someone’s in the garden,” Samarkar said. “We thought we’d go and see who.”

Her sarcasm—Temur could see the raised eyebrows and one-sided smile that went with it in his mind, if not through the dark—seemed to ease the guard. “I shall raise the alarm—”

“Wait,” said Temur. “Just wait a moment, is all, and watch us from the door.”

He stepped up to it, allowing the guard to check suspiciously through the peephole before pulling the door aside. The guard kept it chained at top and bottom, so Temur and Samarkar had to sidle through a narrow gap to pass one by one into the garden.

Outside, the starlight less filtered, Temur’s eyesight showed him a stark world of blues and silvers outlined in shadows that could have been cut from black silk. The graded paths of the courtyard seemed treacherously uneven, the plantations along their edges shrouds of vegetation over some bottomless pitfall. Temur’s breath came fast and light, his hands cold with anticipation and his heart whirring like a chariot wheel. A motion beyond the screen of pomegranates caught Temur’s gaze; pale light sliding on pale cloth. He watched for a moment, some of the anticipatory tension falling out of his shoulders and the weight from off his heart.

It was Brother Hsiung, the sworn-to-silence monk of Song. He stood in a clear patch of the central court, practicing the strikes and parries of his weaponless war form, moving with a fluidity no less impressive for the force with which he threw each kick or punch.

He must have heard Temur’s or Samarkar’s tread upon the path as they approached, though, because he let his hands fall to his sides and his flurrying feet rest on the gravel.

“What woke you?” Samarkar asked as they came up behind him.

Temur knew she wasn’t really expecting an answer, not until they were inside and Hsiung could reach ink and paper. But Brother Hsiung turned, light on his feet for all the bulk of his barrel body, and Temur—hardened to war and death since his eighth summer—took a quick step back.

The monk’s eyes blazed poison-bright as green glass held before a fire. The flickering light cast Temur’s and Samarkar’s shadows out long behind them, like coils of rope unreeling.

“Well,” Temur said, in his own language. “That’s not a good sign.”

* * *

Brother Hsiung held up his hands as Samarkar stepped forward. She heard the crunch of footsteps behind them—the door guard coming at a run—but she reached out to Brother Hsiung as if there were no hurry in the world. Her own hands were blurred by a dim azure glow as she—reflexively—called her power. Hsiung backed away slowly, head shaking, holding eye contact the entire time. He did not seem ensorcelled—well, no, of course he seemed ensorcelled, Samarkar corrected herself—but he seemed in control of his faculties. So she paused where she was and lowered her hands to her sides, sweeping Temur and the guard back with the left one as it fell.

It was eerie to hold Hsiung’s gaze while his eyes crawled with radiance, but she did it, watching for a glance or an expression that might offer a clue to what he wished of her. Brilliant green sparks chased one another through the space between his iris and the surface of his eye—a membrane that should have been transparent but by daylight would show the blue clouds of incipient blindness. Samarkar could see them now, lit from beneath. Her stomach tossed, her long muscles weak with fear. She thought it ought to subside when she reminded herself that she was a trained Wizard of Tsarepheth, who should be observing this both as sorcery and natural history.

Perhaps it ought to—but it didn’t. It didn’t matter; she forced herself to focus anyway.

She was leaning forward for a better look when Temur, beside her, caught her hand.

She squeezed his fingers and did not let him draw her back. “Wait.”

The man-at-arms brought up a lantern from within the door. Samarkar did not see how he lit it, but it gleamed suddenly, flaring and then dimming, casting a natural light across the scene.

“Go,” Samarkar said. “If you must raise the alarm, pray do it quietly. But above all, I bid you bring the master of this house.”