Eternal Sky 02 - Shattered Pillars by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear [Bear, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2013-03-19T06:00:00+00:00

12

Several days passed while Samarkar and Temur waited for the caliph to return the countersigned treaty. Temur and Samarkar both thought it best not to wander about Asitaneh unescorted, but that did not mean they were idle.

Samarkar took on logistics and provisioning, poring over maps with Ato Tesefahun and Brother Hsiung. The best route to Ala-Din was by ship to Asmaracanda—well, the best route to Ala-Din was by ship directly across the White Sea, but no ship’s master would gamble enough to accept the future regard of a would-be Khan and a defrocked princess as payment for carrying them to a coast bereft of major ports and infested with pirates and Rahazeen—and no amount of coin was likely to suffice.

And so by ship to Asmaracanda they would go. They would find some way to enter the holy city—taxes were prohibitive to anyone not there on a pilgrimage, and Hrahima had uncovered intelligence suggesting that now that the city rejoiced under Uthman skies again, foreigners had been lynched in the streets.

“Charming,” said Samarkar, when the Cho-tse related that particular fact.

But Asmaracanda was where they could purchase supplies and mounts for the trip through the Shattered Pillars. And so to Asmaracanda they must.

Temur’s bay mare Bansh would be coming with them—after their attempts to leave her in safety on the trip to Asitaneh, Samarkar suspected that even if they abandoned her with Ato Tesefahun, she’d just be waiting for them, flicking her ears impatiently, upon the far shore. So there was the issue of what they would do with the mare while they entered the city—or perhaps they wouldn’t enter the city at all, but merely visit the caravanserai.

Samarkar had just decided that, yes, that was precisely what they would do, when Ato Tesefahun appeared beside the bench upon which she was drawing up lists of supplies. The Aezin wizard was disheveled, out of breath, a dew of sweat across his forehead.

“Grandfather,” she said. “It must be dire news that brings you at a run … with a tiger behind you.”

For Hrahima had just materialized through the door, her tail lashing.

“There’s a skinned corpse in the Convent Marketplace,” Ato Tesefahun said. “It fell from a clear sky, they say.”

“Skinned?” Samarkar felt like an idiot with her jaw hanging open, and her inability to say anything cleverer than a repetition of Tesefahun’s words did not relieve the sensation.

She knew the legends as well as anybody, the stories told to chill one’s blood—pleasurably, or to frighten the gullible into obedience to whatever church you preferred. She knew that at least one history of the Citadel claimed it had been erected to keep watch on the Cold Fire and that the Cold Fire had been erected by no less an architect than the Goddess-Mother-of-the-Universe, over the pit that had been left when she hurled the (undying, unkillable) Carrion King from the broken heavens for his arrogance.

She knew that the Carrion King was said to have been able to raise the dead—in a variety of forms—and

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