Shattered Pillars(7)
But for Uthman custom inviolable as law that said a guest must not speak of evil things before a night had passed. It was Ato Tesefahun himself who had kept the conversation to trivialities and diverted any attempt to redirect it. He could scarcely complain now.
He just nodded, and wound his right hand in a spooling motion.
Samarkar looked at Temur. “It’s your story.”
Even if he was not the sort to have a lot of comfort in telling it. He breathed in once and sighed it out again. Slowly, in spare but precise detail—recounting the story as he once would have reported the outcome of a raid to his now-dead brother Qulan—Temur told Ato Tesefahun how he had been barricaded into Danupati’s tomb by a rebel faction among the People of the Dragon Banner, and how he had discovered while there that the tomb had been desecrated.
Remembering now, Temur felt the chill fear that had crushed him then rising once more. You survived it, he told himself. It cannot hurt you now.
When he had finished—with Samarkar and his bay mare, Bansh, riding to his rescue, and the following attack by the Nameless Rahazeen—he paused and waited for Ato Tesefahun to refill his glass. The teapot was empty, however, and so Temur’s grandfather pulled a woven silken cord that hung beside the door.
Temur heard the chime of a distant bell.
When Ato Tesefahun turned back, the lines of concern on his forehead had graven themselves even deeper. “I think,” he said, “given the timing of the assault, we have to assume that al-Sepehr is in possession of the skull of Danupati. And that possibly what we felt, what caused Brother Hsiung’s reaction”—he bowed slightly, and Brother Hsiung returned the courtesy—“was al-Sepehr calling upon the legacy of Danupati’s curse. For Danupati conquered Erem, and knew well its powers … and the powers of Erem are a sort of contagion—”
“Like plague?” Temur asked, thinking of Hsiung’s stories of the far east and how sickness might be sweeping west along the Celadon Highway even now.
“War,” Samarkar said. “That is Danupati’s curse, anyway.”
Ato Tesefahun kissed the air like a grandmother. “The two are not … mutually exclusive.”
“There’s more,” Temur said, but was interrupted by the scrape of slippers in the corridor.
He bent his head, studying his knuckles while a servant whisked the old tea tray away—with the unused ink and paper, as Hsiung had not required them—and supplied a new one. In addition to tea, this one contained pastries—some laced with jam, some jellied rosewater—the smell of which made Temur’s stomach grumble anxiously.
Ato Tesefahun waved the servant away and slid a plate of pastries in front of Samarkar. As he served Hsiung and Temur, he said, “Continue.”
“There is a woman I care about,” Temur said. “She was captured by the Nameless, stolen away by the blood ghosts they command. Her name is Tsareg Edene, and I have reason to believe that she is still alive and captive.”
Ato Tesefahun, who had just placed a fragment of pastry in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully. Temur took the opportunity to eat as well. He and Hsiung and Samarkar had not yet recovered from the privation of their long journey. Flakes crumbled in his mouth, releasing richness, the sweetness of glaze, the pungency of rose petals.
He imagined the pastry was good; the truth was, he was too hungry to have noticed if it wasn’t.
Ato Tesefahun rinsed his mouth with tea and swallowed. “They will have taken her to Ala-Din,” he said. “If they wish to hold her securely … they call it the Rock. And the Rock has never been taken. Not even by the Khagan, your grandfather.”
My other grandfather, Temur thought. He said, “How do I get there?”
“Getting there is the easy part,” said Tesefahun. “Getting in will be trickier.”
“I see,” said Samarkar. “So how shall we get in, then?”
Ato Tesefahun showed his brown teeth in a narrow grin. “Magic, Wizard Samarkar. Magic shall see you within. The magic of architecture.”
3
In the Red-and-White Citadel of Tsarepheth, in the Rasan imperial second city of the same ancient name, the Wizard Hong leaned aching hands on time-smoothed white stone battlements, his head fallen below his shoulders. His exhaustion weighed on him like old heartbreak, like everything and everyone he had left behind when he fled Song. When he found the strength to lift his face, his gaze fell down the long misty river valley toward the summer palace of the Bstangpo—the Emperor Songtsan, forty-second of that name.
And perhaps, Hong-la thought, the last to bear it—given the plague that had come to Tsarepheth. Not from the west, through the Range of Ghosts and the Steles of the Sky along the Celadon Highway—for that fabled route was all but closed with the civil war that had raged between would-be Khagans of the Qersnyk people of the steppe—but from the east, overland from Song and through the capital, Rasa.