ILLINDRA’S WEB

Born of salt and laughter and love of the long, slow night, the wind danced down the streets of yesterday. It sang as it danced, painting pale stone with dried-blood dust. It was a small magic and sly, power enough to raise a little army of shadows best left dead and gone but not to keep them.

Shadows thus summoned, feckless and fell, found themselves caught in the sticky web of time and death and infinite thought. They faded away as they had come, weeping lullabies of apathy and rage.

Fainter than memory, pale as filtered sunlight from the world high above, the mistral capered and laughed between the shining strands of an Araid’s lair, hung with traps and songs and dreams of fresh blood. The spider slept, as the shadows slept, dreaming of the day it would rise and feast upon the bodies of men.

Soon, soon.

Not today.

Aasah the Illindrist’s apprentice lifted his face to feel the breeze, breathed deep its song of blood dust and salt dust and the sorrow of lost mates, and smiled in gratitude as it caressed his skin, drying the fear-sour sweat.

If I die today, I die, he thought, but the wind will live on.

It was a comfort.

The song in the wind beguiled his heart, fanning the embers of youth. The dust beneath his bare feet was cool, here in the belly of the world. The bone walls and ventricular halls of the long dead sea-thing into which his ancestors had carved this city were as cold and still as any forgotten thing, Yet the stirring air spoke to him of life, and hope, and a’a pua’a oneho—the heart of a dragon at the heart of the world.

He turned his face toward the dreamed-of surface, closed his eyes and smiled, imagining what must it be like to gaze upon a world of sunlight and rain, breath and bone and blood, in days before things were cursed? Thus dreaming, so blind, he let his feet choose his way in blessed darkness.

The breeze lifted its voice in prayer, and his heart beat tha-rum tha-rumble, and his bare feet shushhh-shushhhed along the pounded sand, and joy lifted him up. It cajoled his limbs to dance, raised the breath from his lungs and up, up through his chest, his throat, his singer’s mask, till he was a note in the song, a twirl in the dance of life. Thus did Aasah the Illindrist’s apprentice, on this day of his naming—this day of his death— dance blind down a road best left forgotten, down and out of the world of man, down and out of now and here.

Into the Web of Illindra.

He sang and danced, for he was a two-soul man. Male and female, sa and ka. Gifted and cursed, he sang and danced, laughing as the tears coursed down his dusted cheeks. Clothed in courage and terror he leapt, chanting an exaltation of life even as he left life behind. Aasah stepped once, twice, three times into the footprints of his own ancestor who had fled in terror from the very thing he sought—

Seeks, would seek, had sought, he thought, as his master had taught him. For every thing, every action exists in all times and all places at once.

Infinite and bold as a dragon, infinitesimal as dust he flew—

flies, would fly, had flown

—and in the end, as both dragon and dust are wont, he was—

is, would be, had been

—caught.

Long he hung in the spider’s web, a sacrifice come to the knife. He had been raised for this, trained and anointed and blessed for this. Every mouthful of food he had consumed, every breath sighed, every kiss denied, had been a step in the dance that had brought him here, a note in the long song of his people’s atonement. The sins of his ancestors had led him here, and he would accept with a grateful heart whatever may be.

Or so he thought, until the web began to tremble.

A great weight descended from above, a heaviness in time and space, mind and heart. The web that stung and held him to this time and place shivered, sending ripples of chillflesh along his bare and hairless skin. Aasah had dreamed of this since the night he first slept alone, had thought himself prepared.

I know, he thought—

knows, will know, had known

—nothing.

It took all the strength he had, heart, body and mind, to remain still and willing as the thing crept nearer. The web swayed and then shook till his bones rattled and his head whipped back and forth. Blood poured red and molten through the stone caverns of his heart, heat enough to burn himself free, should he so choose. The wind swept his arms, his legs, pulling at his hands and feet, promising to show him the way to escape, should he so choose. He could abandon this mad and futile quest, give his people over as sacrifice in his place, should he so choose.

The world went still and the thing stood over him, legs as long as three men laid head to foot stretching up to the stars. Clusters of eyes like wicked stars glittering with their own pale light all turned toward his pliant form, fangs like polished dragonglass curving out and down as it prepared to strike. He had seen this—in every dream he had seen this, and in every dream he had been faced with the choice. Live, or die?

Life, or death? sang a voice in his mind, his heart, his bones. Life, or death? sang his ancestors. Life, or death? sang the shadows. Choose, choose, choose.

He chose—

chooses, would choose, had chosen

—death.

—and life.

Aasah stared straight into the eyes of death and life and all things in between. He hung suspended from one ankle in the Araid’s web, a model of the Illindriverse so vast his mind could not conceive its scope, so small his soul could not find it. At each joining of this web hung a glistening, shimmering drop of atulfah—pure magic, dragon’s song manifest. In the act of falling into this web, Aasah saw, he had torn the fabric of time and space, had rent an ugly wound in the flesh of the everything.

Ah, he thought.

Thus seeing, thus knowing at the last, Aasah made his choice.

He flung his arms wide, so that they stuck fast to the strands. The web burned as it touched his skin, branded him traitor and sacrifice, betrayer and hope. Aasah flung his head back to scream, but a song came out instead as the Araid waved its vast forelegs over his human flesh. Once it passed over him, sending a cold chill through his blood. Twice again it passed over, and his soul quailed. Thrice, and Aasah let out his final breath in a long, slow hymn, begging and granting forgiveness for the pain he had caused—

causes, would cause, had caused

The spider’s myriad eyes flashed, its forelegs stilled, and drops of venom formed on the needle tips of its curved fangs. Though he had come as a willing sacrifice, though every step down the path of his life had led him to this meeting of webs, Aasah trembled beneath the enormity of his own death, and dread burned through him in a thrill akin to lust. Fear smote the self his training had not fully eradicated and brought with it the final revelation any man needs in order to survive his own death, and become wise.

Oh, he thought—

thinks, would think, had thought

Oh.

A drop of venom fell, as a star might fall through the midsummer sky, and as it fell it burned. Aasah opened his eyes wide, so as not to miss a moment of what was to come. Opened his arms wide, and his heart.

“Yes,” he whispered to the spider, “for my people. Yes.”

Swifter than grief the Araid struck, fangs sinking into his flesh. Aasah opened his mouth to scream but nothing came out. There was no air, there was no time, there was—

is, would be, had been

Nothing.

BITTER SWEET

“Sssssst,” Etana held out a hand, blue and gold and glittering against the soft night sky. The small caravan behind her halted. Someone at the back of the line coughed—a youth, no doubt, unaccustomed to choking on the red salt dust of Quarabala’s hard-baked surface. “Sssst!” she hissed again, viperish and sharp. She had neither the time nor the patience for soft-footed fools new to the run.

Long ago the fires of Akari had destroyed the grand cities of Quarabala, so that the people had been forced to shelter far underground in the rifts and rents in the earth made by Sajani’s attempts to wake. When the days of the Sundering had passed, the Quarabalese had found themselves isolated from the rest of the world by a road made practically impassable by the deadly heat. As they recovered, the people had made a life for themselves far from Akari’s wrath. They fashioned cities from the bones of the world, far less grand than those they had lost, but not without grace and beauty, and mined the mineral-rich red salt which sustained all life and which could be found nowhere else in the world. Eventually they learned to travel overland in small groups, shielded from the sun by shadowmancer magic, though such travel was risky at best and only undertaken by small groups of individuals driven by need or greed.

As the population of Quarabala grew, their fertility rates buoyed by easy access to red salt and at a safe distance from the wars that ravaged the far green lands, settlements pushed farther and farther from the queen’s city of Saodan. These settlements served a noble purpose, as well; they served as a defense against the Araids, great spiders who had dwelt in caverns below the world’s surface and to whom the priests of Eth paid foul homage.

But Araids were not the only danger, here at the heart of the world.

Amalua’s fingers drummed against her arm in a quick tattoo, runner’s code for those times when silence meant life.

Hear something? the younger woman asked.

Etana reached out and made her reply against her companion’s taut flesh.

No. Feel something. Close. Close.

Run? Amalua asked, with two fingers pressed hard.

Proximity to any settlement meant predators, and the recent earthquakes which had brought them to check on the outer bastions would have roused some of the nastier ones from their deep homes. Etana had no desire to become a runner who had almost made it to her journey’s end.

No, she answered. Wait. Listen.

The travelers stood for a long while, quiet as deep shadows. Etana and her swift companion were beacons against the endless dark, painted as they were with whirls and sworls of glow paste in shades of green and blue. The palms of their hands and soles of their feet had been smeared with a thick paste of honey and gold dust—and other, less pleasant, things.

Such brilliance marked them out to one another as they made their way from city to settlement and back again. It warned lesser predators that they were dangerous—or at least unpleasant to taste—and gave greater predators easier targets than the salt caravans or settlers whose lives they were sworn to protect. They were the Iponui, swift-footed, stout-hearted warriors of the Quarabala, marked out as the lights that would one night guide their people home.

One night, but not this night.

On this night, Etana let her ka flow light as a mother’s song, searching for bright, hot life against the burned-out husk of their world. Prickly-sharp she could feel the bright souls of the small knot of salt guildsmen and healers who traveled in her wake, and sharper still the soul of the shadowmancer who trailed them, ready to give magical assistance if it were needed. Etana fervently hoped it would not be needed—a shadowmancer’s fees, were she required to perform, would be astronomical.

Beyond the shadowmancer, she felt nothing.

In the shallow crevasses that mocked the true path, nothing. But high above their heads, faint and fluttery as a new babe’s cry, she could feel a hundred tiny lives hungering, hungering. Etana let out her breath in a laugh, though she kept it silent. More than one of the greater predators knew how to mask their soul-scent from one such as she. Still, it was a relief to find that the disturbance she had felt posed no danger to them.

“It is nothing but a flock of hali’i,” Amalua whispered, and her voice was thick with suppressed mirth, as well. “Shall I tell the others that my mother is frightened of birds?”

“Impertinent brat,” she laughed. “Would you prefer to make the return trip by yourself?” Etana squeezed her arm affectionately and let her hand fall away.

“Shall I run on ahead?” Amalua said.

“You just wish an excuse to stretch those long legs of yours.”

“That I do.” White teeth flashed. The night was loosening her cool grip on the Seared Lands. “I hate crawling along with these soft-feet. Morning is near, and I have no wish to burst into flame.”

“Run then, and tell them we are coming. We will be there soon.”

“As you wish, Mother.” Amalua bowed, deeply and with no hint of her usual teasing, and then she was gone, a streak of blue and green, leaving gold-dust footprints for those who would follow.

Etana shook her head, smiling inside her heart. “Come,” she whispered to her charges. It was as loud as a shout after the long, slow silence of their journey. “Come quick. We are nearly there. Food waits for us, and baths, and bed.”

“And profits!” one of the healers shot back, eliciting a chorus of soft chuckles.

“And warm bodies!”

“Your bodies will be warming the bellies of a bintshi if you do not hurry your soft asses along,” she scolded, though her heart was not in it. For she was at the end of the road—this road, at any rate—and Etana dearly longed for the delights of the flesh that would be her reward. Bath, and food, and bed…

Paleha.

* * *

“Sweet as manna wine, bitter as black salt.”

These were the words the poet Saouda had used to define love, and described perfectly this final meeting between old friends. Etana stepped down the cool and shallow steps and onto the red sand floor, smiling in delight and irony at the grandeur of Paleha’s rooms.

“You have done well for yourself.”

The stout figure in the middle of the room turned slowly, slowly, absorbing the shock of this unexpected visitor so that by the time she faced Etana only the whites of her eyes showed her surprise. Tiny bare feet peeked from beneath robes as red as the sand floor, and a large seer’s bag hung at her waist. Dragon’s-eye lanterns hung all about the room. Tiny hands stretched toward her in greeting and supplication.

“Etana,” she whispered, as if horrified. Eyes round and pale as golden moons glistened with unshed tears. “On this day, of all days, why did you have to come to Mawai?”

It stung. “Our new queen sent us with her greetings, and to see whether those of you in the far settlements needed Saodan’s assistance after the recent earthquakes. But if our presence is unwelcome…” She turned to leave. After all they had been through together, this was the greeting she had earned?

“No, no, you do not understand. How could you?” Paleha drew nearer, so near that the warrior could smell book dust and salt dust and the woman’s own musk. “How could you know?” she continued. “But it is cruel, too cruel even for this world.”

“You still speak in riddles.” Etana snorted but allowed her hand to be taken. Paleha’s grip was not as strong or as sure as she remembered. She pulled away, frowning. “Are you not the least bit happy to see me?”

Tears spilled down Paleha’s round cheeks, like stars fallen from grace.

“A moon ago, I would have been happy to see you. Had you arrived yesterday, I would have fallen at your feet and kissed them. But today?” She shook her head as tears welled and flowed, welled and flowed. “Today it breaks my heart. Come, I will show you.”

She turned and Etana followed. Silence and dread stretched between them like the darkness between candles.

* * *

Paleha had a shrine to Illindra, as was usual and proper for those who had answered the call to priesthood. Hers was set in an alcove nearly large enough to be considered a room, floored with soft red sand denoting her high caste, tiled in red salt and black glass and beaten gold. The room was bare save for a pedestal of black glass lit from within, and upon this pedestal rested an Illindrist’s threefold loom.

Etana shuddered at the sight of it. She had never understood the seer’s craft and, like many warriors, feared magic more than she feared death. Death she understood— predators, raiders, monsters, these things she knew how to fight—but how, she had wondered before, could she fight that which she could not see, or smell, or touch?

The Illindrist reached toward the closest petal of the loom. Gems set like stars in her dark skin glittered in the dim light.

“This is was,” she said, which explained nothing. “You see how the web is full and shining? This is our path, this is Quarabala in the long ago, when we were young and strong, and the world was good.” Indeed, the web was shining and full, a breathtaking tapestry spun of silver and starslight. Tiny beads of magic hung suspended here and there, constellations which spoke volumes to one such as Paleha, though to Etana they were just a pretty design.

“I remember being young and strong,” she tried to joke, “but I do not remember a time when the world was good.”

“Do you not?” A quick smile, quickly hidden, and Etana felt her face heat with a girlish blush.

Ah, she thought, she does remember.

“This world was before your lifetime, or mine, or even that of our grandmothers’ grandmothers,” she explained. “By ‘we’ I mean ‘we the people,’ the Quarabalese. Before the—the Night of Sorrows—” here her voice faltered, “—before the Sundering, even. In the long ago.”

“I… see.” Etana shrugged. “But what does this have to do with us, now? The past is the past, dead and gone. It is dust.” She slapped her thigh, raising a small cloud of red salt dust for emphasis. “The past cannot touch us now.”

“Can it not?” Paleha shook her head. “You know better. See this? This strand right here.” She reached out and pointed at a single strand of the web, which glowed silverish in response. “This strand is is—”

“Your hand,” Etana whispered in horror. Only now did she see that the fingers which had once been so deft and strong were gnarled as manna roots, thickened at the joints, twisting back upon themselves. Her own hand twitched in sympathy. “What happened?”

“What happened?” Paleha smiled wryly. “What happened is that against all odds I survived my foolish youth. As have you. I notice that you, yourself, favor the left knee.”

Etana stared for a moment and then stuck out her tongue. They shared a girls’ laugh, which echoed oddly beautiful among the golden tiles and spider’s web. For a moment in time the world was, indeed, good.

Paleha looked at her with eyes of sorrow, of regret.

“There is no time,” she whispered.

“Did you not once tell me that now is all time?” Etana said. “If now is all time, we have all the time in the world.”

“Still the impertinent brat,” Paleha said, and Etana smiled at the words. “You are right, of course, but even so we are bound to the web. For us, in the here and now, the road has come to an end.” Paleha gestured to the middle petal of the threefold loom. This web was a sad shadow of the first, a very few irresolute strands clinging to the edge of the wooden structure. It was still lovely, but where the first web was lively and bright and strong, this one held the translucent beauty of a dying child.

“You asked how then affects now, which is—forgive me—a stupid question. Then is now, in more ways than one. See here…” She pointed a knotted finger, and yet again one strand was illuminated.

Etana pursed her lips. “That is the same strand as in the first web.”

“Yes, and no,” Paleha said. “Same, not same, then, now— it is all one. And look—”

Etana gasped as Paleha rotated the loom’s third petal to the fore. This web was tattered and dead, as if some monstrous thing had torn through it with malicious intent.

At the bottom of the tray, curled upon herself like a skeletal brown fist, lay the spider who had been Paleha’s companion since she was a child. O’oraids were known to live exactly as long as their human seers, and Etana’s heart stopped cold at the sight.

“Is this…” Her voice trailed off.

“This is will be.”

Etana’s breath caught in her throat. “Did the quakes…”

“She died before the quakes,” Paleha said in a rough voice. A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Just before. I fear that Sajani’s stirrings—you know this is the cause of these disturbances, do not pretend as if it is not so—have rent the defenses we have spent so long building. That Araids are coming with their foul priests and their hungry reavers. It is over, for us.”

Silence hung between them, dull as the dead magic in this third web. Somewhere in that silence, Etana came to understand that they had no moments left to waste.

She was pleased to note that her hand did not shake. After all, she reminded herself, Death is a warrior’s only true lover.

“There are no tomorrows,” Paleha continued, “not for us, at any rate. This is why I wish—” Her voice broke.

Etana turned to Paleha and gathered the small, warm, soft woman into a tight hug.

“I am glad I have come,” she whispered into the fluff of graying hair. “I am glad.”

Soft arms crept around her waist and squeezed back. “Well, you are a warrior,” Paleha said finally, voice muffled in Etana’s robes. “And warriors are known to be mad.”

“Is there nothing we can do?” Etana asked.

“There is one thing we can do. One thing we must do. Though I wished you would not come, I dreamed that you would, and so I made ready.” She reached into the seer’s bag and drew forth a package wrapped in precious spidersilk, blue as the daytime sky, green as the grass in stories.

“Paleha!” Etana gasped, shocked by the sight of the heavy bundle.

“It is necessary, and it is time.” Paleha thrust the bundle at Etana, who took it unwillingly, and turned back to her trifold loom. “See here—” She rotated the three petals so they lined up perfectly, one behind the other—is, was, and will be. The strand she had caused to illuminate in each web shone like a beacon, and Etana imagined she could hear, very far away, the first notes of a travelers’ song.

She knew a map when she saw one. “This is us, here in Mawai!” she exclaimed, pointing to a tiny globe of magesilver. Her finger traveled further down the illuminated strand, not quite touching it. “This is the Huanoha settlement, which was our last stop before this one. Here is Epaha, and A’apela, and…” She described the path with a wave. “There, that big one, that can be none other than—”

“Saodan,” Paleha agreed. “The City of Queens.”

“I have never been,” Etana said in a hushed voice.

“Nor I.” Paleha sounded as wistful. “We should have gone. It would have been—”

“—glorious.” Etana shook her head, clearing away the cobwebs of regret. “You mean for us to take this…” She clutched the bundle to her breast as if it were a girl child. “…to Saodan, and then to the lands beyond?” The shining path continued past the City of Queens, to some mysterious destination beyond the limits of her imagination.

“No,” Paleha said. “Not us. I am old, and fat, and slow.” She held up a hand to forestall an argument. “Ah, now, it is true,” she scolded. “You are, well, you are not so old as I, but you are still slow.”

Etana grimaced, and a twinge in her knee seemed to mock her.

“For you and me, beloved, there are no tomorrows.” Paleha tapped the edge of the third loom, and the dead web trembled. “But your daughter—”

“Our daughter,” Etana whispered, and was rewarded with a smile so brilliant that Akari Sun Dragon himself might have fallen in love.

“Our daughter,” the Illindrist allowed, “if she succeeds at this, if she lives, might weave a new web of tomorrows for our people.”

“The last road.” Etana stared at the web, at the fragile illuminated path, scarce daring to breathe lest she shatter the delicate strands.

“Our last hope.”

* * *

Amalua fidgeted irritably as Etana again checked the straps that bound the precious bundle to her back.

“They are fine, First Runner. You fuss so much one would think I had a child strapped to my body. I am good! Ow!” She shrugged the lingering hands away, laughing good-naturedly.

“You have water enough?” Paleha fretted.

“Illindrist,” Amalua replied. “I have one mother, thank you, and she is quite enough. I hardly need two of you fussing at me.” She smiled to take the sting from her words. “This is not my first run, you know.”

Paleha ignored this. “You remember the map? You know the way?”

Amalua rolled her eyes. “What is in this pack, anyway?” She shrugged at the straps that ran across her shoulders, across her back and chest, and beneath her breasts. “Salt bricks? It is so heavy.”

“Not so heavy that my daughter cannot carry it.” Etana’s voice was thick with hidden emotion, and with pride. Amalua peered at her, suspicious at last.

“Why am I leaving before the caravan… and before you?” she asked. “What is so important that you would have me run all the way to Saodan, by myself, and without stopping?” She stopped her fidgeting and stared straight into her mother’s eyes. “Answer me true, First Runner. What is this burden I carry?”

Paleha smiled. “It is—”

“The Mask of Sajani.” Etana ignored the Illindrist’s angry gasp. “She carries the hope of our people, Paleha. She has the right to know.”

Amalua’s eyes went round as the moons. Etana took advantage of her daughter’s shock to grab her by the shoulders and kiss her soundly on each cheek. “Run well, my sweet. A mother’s blessings upon you.”

“And a daughter’s upon you,” Amalua answered. Her mouth trembled, but her voice remained steady. “Will I never see you again?”

Etana would not end this day with a lie.

“We are runners. Swift as the sunlight.”

“Silent as the night,” Amalua answered. She dropped to the ground, kneeling, and kissed her mother’s feet. Tears fell fat and warm upon her skin; a powerful magic. Then she leapt to her feet and was gone, the gold dust on her soles and the blue-green glow of her runner’s camouflage painting a mural of courage against the night.

“Run well!” Etana called, breaking tradition and drawing a few disapproving stares from those few passers-by who had risen before the sun was fully down.

At her side Paleha sighed heavily. “I wish—”

The still air was rent by a shriek of despair.

“Reavers!” a man screamed, somewhere high above them. “Reav—” The scream cut short, horribly so. Etana gripped her spear and set her jaw.

“There is no more time,” Paleha mourned. “There is no hope. We cannot stop them.”

More screams, nearer, as people woke to death and horror.

“We cannot stop them,” Etana answered, voice grim. “But we can slow them down.”

Paleha clutched at her robes. “I am glad you are here,” she said. Etana turned and looked down, surprised to see her friend smiling through the tears. “Despite everything, I am glad.”

Etana loosed a breath that she had been holding in for a lifetime. “How long has it been,” she said by way of reply, “since we have faced an enemy together?” With that she smiled, and that smile lifted her spirit up, up through the city, through the webs of rope and magic and dreams that for so long had held this place safe, up over the seared flesh of the world and into the sky, where it startled a late-hunting nighthawk.

“Too long,” Paleha answered. Gnarled fingers tightened on her Illindrist’s staff. “Shall we join the dance, my love?”

“Yes,” Etana breathed, “but first—” She drew Paleha close and bent her face down. Their mouths met, light as a hummingbird kissing a flower.

Was was gone, and will be would never come, not for them.

But they had now, and it was beautiful.

ONE

“The ancestors will show us the way.”

Night fell sweet and mild. A cool breeze, carrying the faint notes of jasmine and dragonmint, caressed Maika’s upturned face. The wind had been wild once, a howling, killing thing. Quarabalese engineers had caught it in their wind-traps, caressed and beat it into submission with their tunnels and cunning blades until it was a lesser, gentler version of its true self.

It was not, she thought, unlike the process by which an unruly girl might be bent to the will of her people and molded to serve their needs.

Maika hesitated at the bottom step, savoring the moment, and let the tamed breeze lave the nervous sweat from her brow. She urged her features to solemnity as befit the serious nature of this outing—a young runner had nearly died to bring her a message from the outer bastions—but the yet-untamed girl at her core wanted to run and shout with delight. Surrounded as she was by an entourage of counselors, guards and wise women, still she walked at their head rather than in their midst. As princess and heir to the Kentakuyan throne, she had spent her waking hours trapped in a prison of well-meaning shoulders and backs. On this day, having experienced her first moons-blood and having been deemed ready by the oracles, she walked at their fore as queen.

It seemed a silly and arbitrary measure to Maika—as if a woman’s blood had anything to do with governance!—but this thought she kept to herself. It would not do to give the counselors any reason to stuff her back into the protective cocoon, just as she might break free.

It was a short trek across a wide road, between the brightly painted doors and sculpture gardens of Saodan’s elite families, and the worst danger—that Maika might stub a slippered toe upon a cobblestone—did not come to pass, but it felt like an adventure all the same. She wished that they had timed this visit during the morning or evening hours, so that she might have seen more citizens going about their mysterious daily lives, but chided herself for this selfish thought. It was not as if the Iponui had chosen to arrive at midday, after all.

Midday. Maika paused at the wide red gates before the healers’ tunnels and shuddered at the thought of her own skin exposed to raw sunlight. Her life—and the lives of her people as far back as the history books remembered—had been lived far underground, safe from the wrath of Akari Sun Dragon. This runner must have been driven insane by the sun, as the rumors said, to risk death by immolation. Maika hoped it was sun-sickness. Because if the messenger was not mad, the message she bore must be dreadful.

The gates were hauled open, and Maika stepped through them. A healer’s apprentice in a red and white apron bowed low, eyes cast down and away from her magnificence, then spun on her heels and led them along a narrow corridor that smelled of bitter herbs and sorrow.

The runner they had come to see had first been taken to the priests for emergency healing. She had been “burnt to salt,” as the saying went, so lost to exhaustion and dehydration that she had not been expected to survive the night. Yet the Iponui were known to be as tough as manna roots, and this one seemed to be no exception. She had lived and was aware enough to insist on delivering her message to the queen.

The apprentice rapped on a white-painted door, which swung inward to reveal a thickly bandaged woman reclining on a healer’s cot. Her limbs were long and thin, her glow-painted skin raw and blistered, her head wrapped in layers of fine gauze soaked in ointments and herbs so that everything above her nose was covered. They had said that she was fortunate not to have lost her eyes. Maika winced in sympathy. What burden could be so important, she wondered, that this woman would give her eyes to bear it?

The runner lay with one arm protectively curled about a bundle as large as her own head, wrapped in blue-green spidersilk as fine as the robes of state. Maika ignored Counselorwoman Haoki’s hissed warning and hurried forward as the stricken warrior tried and failed to raise a mug to her cracked and bleeding lips.

“Here,” she said as she steadied the woman’s hands. The mug was cool and the water smelled strongly of herbs. “Let me help you.”

“My thanks,” the runner whispered in a voice as cracked and blistered as her skin. She drank but a little, and then pushed the mug away, settling back into the pillows with an exhausted sigh. “Are you another healer? I do not recognize your voice.”

“No…” Maika began a bit awkwardly.

“You have the honor of addressing your queen, Kentakuyan a’o Maika i Kaka’ahuana li’i,” Counselorwoman Lehaila informed the runner.

The runner attempted to rise. Precious water sloshed over the mug’s rim, wetting her hands and Maika’s. “Your Magnificence!” she gasped. “Forgive me—”

“Nonsense,” Maika protested, trying to press the woman back down again without causing further pain. Despite the splendor of her new robes of state, she did not feel particularly magnificent. Next to this heroic runner, she felt positively dull. “Nonsense. Lie back now, at your ease, and tell me why you have come.”

Awkward, she thought, and she scolded herself, but the runner lay back with a sigh.

“Magnificence,” the runner said. “Forgive me.”

“Forgive you?”

“Forgive me,” she repeated, “for I come bearing terrible news, and a heavy burden. Our outer strongholds and settlements have fallen. The Araids have mounted an attack, and we could not… we could not withstand them.” Red-tinged tears slipped from beneath the gauze, leaving tracks in the runner’s streaked glow paint. “I ran as fast as I could, but I—” Her voice broke, and her breathing became ragged. “I fear I have come too late. You must flee, sweet queen, you and all our people must leave the Seared Lands. We must go now. I will show you the way. I know the way, I have seen it—”

The runner would have attempted to rise again, but a healer stepped forward and pressed her back, scowling at the queen.

“She needs rest,” the healer snapped.

“I need to tell you—” the runner gasped. “I need to give you—” She groped for the bundle at her side, fretting and pushing at it until Maika reached across her body to pick it up. Whatever it was, it was heavy.

“Who sent you?” Counselorman Kekeo asked. “Who sends us these words?”

“My mother,” the runner replied in a broken voice. Now that she had passed her burden on to the queen, she seemed to shrink in upon herself, to grow weak and thin before their eyes. “My mother, First Runner Etana, and Illindrist Paleha of Mawai. You must leave now,” she insisted, as another wash of tears streamed down her face. “There is no time for talk. I know the way; I will lead you—”

“Nonsense.” The counselorman frowned, staring at the runner’s bound face as if he sought the truth in her eyes. “We cannot just cease our daily lives and run, as greenlanders might. Even if we were to convince all our people to leave the Seared Lands, and ushered them all to the Edge, what then? It is a three-day run from Min Yahtamu at the very edge of the Edge to Min Yaarif in the green lands, and that is assuming a strong young runner with a shadowmancer to assist. What of our children, our infirm, our elders? How could we possibly cross the shadowed road? There are not enough shadowmancers to shield our people from the dreadful heat of Akari’s wrath; many of the people would die at first sunrise. Would you sacrifice many, many lives in an attempt to save a few, based on the words of one sun-sick Iponui? It is impossible. Impossible.”

Once again Maika’s counselors talked over her head as if she were a child, playing with her dolls while they made decisions for her. She only half listened, however, as she tugged loose the cords that held the bundle together and began to unwind the silk. The wrappings fell away to reveal a magnificence of gemstones and precious metals, and she choked on an indrawn breath that was nearly a sob. She held, in her too-young and insufficiently powerful hands, the dreaded treasure of her people—the Mask of Sajani. If they had sent this to her, it could mean only one thing.

The Araids had breached their outer defenses. The spiders and their horrid priests would be moving upon Saodan— Quarabala would fall.

Maika’s heart sank.

“Impossible,” Kekeo said. “Even if what this runner says is true, and even if she has been shown the way, none can expect our people to simply abandon our cities and take to this unknown path. Few runners, even with the aid of shadowmancers, are strong enough to reach Min Yaarif, and that is the closest greenlander city. What of the elders, the children?”

“Nevertheless…” Lehaila stroked her face, and her eyes were troubled. “First Runner Etana is known to many of us here, and she would not send such news lightly. If, indeed, this is the counsel of Illindrist Paleha, as well, we must consider taking some action to defend ourselves. We should gather the council and take these matters into serious deliberation.”

Kekeo nodded. “Yes, yes, we must convene—”

Maika stepped forward, and held up the mask, letting the light play upon the faceted gems. Instantly, the counselors fell silent.

She took a deep breath and held it, closing her eyes. When she opened them again, when she breathed the dry hot air, she had set the last of her childhood aside.

“First Runner Etana and Illindrist Paleha have sent us the Mask of Sajani,” she said. “The Mask of Sajani. They send word that the outer defenses are failing, that we need to leave or we will all die, and this is exactly what we are going to do.” She kept her voice steady, and the heavy mask in her hands, though her heart fluttered wildly as if it wished to fly away without her.

“Your Magnificence,” Kekeo protested, “we cannot simply—”

“Mana’ule o ka enna i ka pau,” Maika snapped. Aasah himself had taught her how to speak with force, and it worked. The small crowd fell silent. “I invoke my authority as queen.” Her heart pounded. Would they listen to her? Could one turn overnight from girl to queen merely by bleeding between her legs? It seemed utterly ridiculous.

The counselors and chiefs went to their knees, though some moved less quickly than others. Kekeo was slowest of them all.

“What is your will, Magnificence?” he asked, as if the words tasted bitter.

“The people of Saodan—of all the Quarabala,” she amended, “must leave immediately. It is time for us to abandon the Seared Lands and seek a new home for our people.” Even as she said the words, Maika felt the enormity of them falling from her lips. “We must work quickly, and save as many people as we can.” As many people as we can—but not all. The unspoken words hung heavy in the air between them.

Please stop me, she wanted to beg the assembled leaders. Tell me I am wrong, send me to bed with a story, let me wake up to find this has all been a terrible dream.

The mask in her hands seemed to mock her. What kind of queen leads her people into certain death? it might have asked.

“Leave our homes?” someone said harshly. “Leave our homes and go where? How are we to cross the Seared Lands, and the Jehannim, as well? There are not enough shadowmancers to protect us, and we are not all runners. We do not know the way!”

Maika closed her eyes. She knew the way by heart, though never in her worst dreams had she imagined that she, herself, might one day take it. The traders’ road ran, like the blood vessels in a human body, from the life-giving red salt mines deep in the heart of Quarabala, up through the tunnels and rifts which had shielded the people from Akari’s wrath for a millennia, across the deadly shadowed roads and the equally hazardous Jehannim, and finally into the hostile city of Min Yaarif. A trained runner or salt merchant might take this road once in a lifetime, with only the dream of wealth and a life in the green lands urging her feet to fly. For an entire people to attempt such a journey was utter madness.

And their only hope.

“There is only one choice open to us. We must take the traders’ route to the Edge, and from there over the Jehannim and into Min Yaarif. The ancestors will show us the way,” Maika answered, with more assurance than she felt. It was the right thing to say. “Our Iponui will guide us to the green lands, and they in turn will be guided by the ancestors.”

Lehaila nodded slowly, glancing at her fellow counselors from the corners of her eyes as if gauging their reactions. “The ancestors will show us the way to a new home.”

“A new home.” Maika smiled and nodded, holding up the Mask of Sajani for all to see. “A better home. We will see the sun rise upon our people at last.”

A murmur of assent rose among those assembled, though no few of her counselors exchanged doubtful looks. Maika, clutching the dreadful mask so tightly her knuckles had gone pale, took a deep breath, looking at each face, trying to commit them all to memory.

These are my people, she thought, more precious to me than my own life. I pray to the ancestors that I have not just condemned them all to death.

TWO

Akari Sun Dragon soared high above Atualon, bathing the city in golden splendor so that the walls of the meanest hovel sparkled like salt, and colored windows winked like jewels. Children laughed as they chased one another in the narrow alleys between buildings, heedless of the shadows that nipped at their heels; bakers piled high their rounds of soft white bread, never guessing at the source of heat for their ovens. Sunlight poured as sticky sweet as spilled mead across the land and people laughed as they lapped it up, bawling and dumb as golden calves fattened for the slaughter.

Yet Atukos rose frowning above the city. The Dragon King’s fortress, named for the living mountain from which it had been carved, crouched brooding and cold. Call as he might, the sun dragon in all his glory could not warm the walls as Atukos mourned her dead king.

Neither could he reach the king’s daughter.

She who had once been a Ja’Akari warrior, who had ridden and fought and loved beneath the gold-scaled belly, lay stiff as a corpse on the cold dead stone even as her father the king had lain, broken and defeated. Her fox-head staff had been broken and burned, her sword fed to the forge; even her warrior’s braids had been shorn away. Sulema lingered in the dark, sinking into the bed of lies her elders had laid down, and waited to die as voices rolled over her like thunder.

“Is there nothing more you can do?”

“She will not eat. She will not drink. She will not wake— if, indeed, she is truly asleep. No, Meissati, there is nothing more I can do for her.”

“Just as well, I suppose. If she cannot properly wield atulfah, and if she is no virgin—”

“She is known to have bedded Mattu Halfmask.” This last was whispered, as if the speaker did not wish to be overheard.

“Then she is of no use to us.”

“Shall I…?”

“No!” The reply was quick. “No, she is bound to the fortress. Spilling her blood here would be… unfortunate. No, if the girl is willing herself to die, let her do so. There is another who can take her place. A bit young, but—”

An indrawn breath. “Abomination!”

“For you and me, perhaps. For a king, who can say? The powerful are not bound by the same rules as lesser folks. Would you tell Pythos Ka Atu that he cannot do as he wishes?”

“No, not I.”

“Nor I.” There was a long pause. “Pythos wishes to be rid of this one, quietly and without bloodshed. So. Have this cell bricked up and forget about her. Go back to your family and die in bed as a physician should, with a skin of wine in one hand and a woman in the other.”

“It is a pity. Such a beautiful girl.”

“Fire is beautiful, too,” the first voice reminded. “Let us snuff this one out before it burns us all.”

“As you say,” the physician said, his voice becoming softer as they departed. “Oh, speaking of the false king’s get, do you know whether they have found Leviathus, or…” Sandals scuffed against the stone floor, shuffled away, and left her in silence.

A rat or some other poor creature skittered across the floor. Closer it crept, closer, till its whiskers brushed Sulema’s calf. The little beast let out a thin squeak and fled.

Some time later, the stonemasons came.

The harsh light of torches and scrape of stone against stone, the smells of men and smoke and mortar, assaulted the outer shell of she who had been a warrior, but even these things could not reach her spirit. What little of the world as was left to her—torchlight and lantern light, the sighs and cries of other prisoners, the faint redolence of bread and old water and urine—retreated from her senses as a stone wall was raised into place.

Eventually the rough voices and noise of work ceased, and she was left finally, blessedly, alone.

In the dark.

To die.

After an age had come and gone, long after Akari had abandoned his attempts to rouse his love, after dinners were eaten and dishes washed, after lullabies and lovemaking and the last oil lamp burned low, Sulema opened her eyes and regarded the long, slow night. Though her eyes could not pierce the gloom, she knew that her stare was met and answered by the cold golden eyes of the portrait her father had commissioned, the one that showed her as a princess of Atualon, lovely and serene.

Those painted eyes had watched impassive as her mother and father had been slaughtered, and as she had been forced to confess to their murders. Beneath the painting’s surface, concealed by the artist’s magic, lay another image, this one truer to its subject. That hidden Sulema was a warrior, a true daughter of the Zeera.

“Life is pain,” her mother had said. “Only death comes easy.”

“But I am Ja’Akari, am I not?” Sulema asked, though it was now and forever too late to seek her mother’s advice. “A warrior is no easy meat. They expect me to die here, quiet and neat, and make their lives easier.”

She smiled in the dark.

“Fuck that,” she said.

THREE

The wind was born of a long-dead king, singing forgotten songs. His name, which once had rolled across these lands as thunder, was lost to memory, robes and jewels and fine horses long gone to dust and bone and the tattered pages of history books.

He sang, and the song was still the same, however, pouring down from the heart of Akari Sun Dragon as a blessing, welling up from the dreams of Sajani Earth Dragon, sweet as well water.

The song swirled deep in his heart, this beating borrowed heart of a Zeerani youth. It swept around and through him, rousing him to life. Through him also rose the hordes of living dead, those who in life had foolishly loved their liege more than they loved their souls, and who had pledged to him fealty beyond the Lonely Road. They stirred now in his mind: loyal monsters, doom’s companions, his to command. All he had to do was stretch forth his hand and whisper words of command and intent.

And yet…

Long he had lingered in the dark of the moonsless cavern, presiding over an endless feast of souls, ever hungering and thirsting and lusting for life. This life was his, now—this flesh, these desires, the hot blood racing through the veins of one willingly come. A vessel filled and overwhelmed by the dark passions of the dark lord. A new life, a new world to command, his for the taking, ripe and sweet as a low-hanging fig.

And yet…

The Lich King sat cross-legged by the banks of Ghana Kalmut, wearing the body of Ismai, son of Nurati. The river’s song accompanied his own, and in it he heard the slow, sweet refrain of death, of ease, songs of hope’s end and a surcease of sorrow. For an age, and an age after that, he had bidden his time—

Life was his once again.

He was not sure he wanted it.

Perhaps, he thought, my time has passed. Might he not, after all, choose instead to slip free of this human body as one might shed a robe, to leave it crumpled and abandoned at the river’s edge and decide instead to set foot upon the Lonely Road? For surely the road had been singing to him, too, of passings-on and passings-over and adventure in strange new worlds. This world was dying, and all the dead knew it. Sajani Earth Dragon stirred in her sleep even now, restless with the need to wake, to fly, to break free and seek solace in her mate’s embrace.

The world would not survive the dragon’s ascendance any more than this broken body would survive his abandonment. Why choose this—this dying earth, this dying body—when he, king of kings, could instead elect to master death? Surely that was the only realm he had yet to conquer.

His blood boiled at the thought.

Even as he sang, as he called the wind and the rain and the sand, as he called death to life, the song mocked him. He had journeyed across the face of the world, had stretched forth his bare hands and bade Atukos rise from the living stone, had soothed Sajani to sleep and roused Akari to smite his enemies. He had bound the warrior mages of the Baidun Daiel and thrown back the fell sorceries of his enemies. He had known the world and every living thing in it by name, and in knowing, he had owned it.

Now, sitting at his ease beside the untroubled waters, he heard the strains of a strange new song, smelled the dust of an unfamiliar road—

The Lich King frowned.

“What troubles you, Father?”

She was a flash of sunlight on dark waters, his Naar-Ahnet, sweet and deadly as mad honey. The years had tainted her, the pain had poisoned her, he knew, but the fault was his, and she was his sweetest love.

“Death,” he answered honestly, and she laughed.

“Death?” she said. “After all this, you fear death?” She sat beside him, rested her head on his shoulder, and her small hand found its way to his. “You have mastered death. You are death’s king.” She squeezed his fingers. “And mine, Father.”

“I do not fear death,” he said, frowning again at the youthful sound of his voice. “But neither have I mastered it. Death is as yet unknown to me. It might be… peaceful…”

“And it might not,” she finished, guessing his mind.

“True. Why would death be any more peaceful than life?” he said. “Why would the dreams experienced in death be any less horrific than those of the living? Why should the roads be any easier, any less… lonely?”

“You miss her.”

“I miss her.”

“You loved her so.” Naara snuggled close. The story of her mother’s passion for her father, and his for her, had ever been a favorite.

“I love her still,” he said, wrapping an arm about her small form. “Ahsen-sa Ruh a’Zeera was the most maddening, the most skilled—”

“The most beautiful—” she urged.

“The most beautiful and the most beloved of all the Zeera’s daughters. ‘Spirit of the desert wind’ she was named, and from the moment I first laid eyes on her…” His voice trailed off. An image came to him, unbidden, of a flame-haired girl with skin too pale, too freckled to ever be his Ahsen-sa, a girl with eyes of gold and a wide, troublesome smile.

“When you first laid eyes on her?”

“You favor her, you know,” he said. Kal ne Mur turned his face and kissed the top of his daughter’s hair. She smelled of deathblooms and grave dust and other, less pleasant things.

“I do not, and you know it,” she said, “but I thank you.”

Sulema, he thought, her name is… Sulema. He shook his head, trying to clear his mind, and shoved the boy Ismai deeper into the shadows of their shared mind. “Your time is done,” he said irritably.

“Will you take it up?” Naara said, playing with his fingers. “Take up your crown, reclaim what is yours…”

“You would see me raise my faithful, and wage war upon whomever dares call himself Ka Atu now. To ride down the people of this land and seize that damned throne, but why? For a thousand years I have thought about how I might have lived my life differently. We all have,” he added, waving his free hand toward the caverns, the canyon, the thousands upon thousands of undead. “Never would one more war have made my life better, let alone the world. The people of Atualon do not wish for the return of a long-forgotten king… any more than that king wishes to return.”

“You do not wish to return?” Her fingers dug into his arm, and Naara’s voice grew very soft. “To claim what is yours?”

“Many asses have parked themselves on the Dragon Throne while mine sat here and grew dusty,” he answered. The wind played a short riff across the dead waves, causing the spirits trapped beneath the waters to moan. “Many men have called themselves Ka Atu and forgotten their own names, even as the world has forgotten mine. Shall the pages of the book turn backward, then? I have no wish to return to the land of the living, any more than I wish to join the trek of the dead. My faithful do not wish to be disturbed. They cry out against it, in their sleep.”

“You wish neither to live nor to die,” she said. “What, then, do you want, Father?” In Naara’s voice he could hear the dry fire that was Char, guardian of Eid Kalmut, and he smiled into her hair. She was very much his daughter, after all.

“I do not know,” he confessed.

“I know what I want.”

“What is that, beloved?”

“Vengeance,” she told him. “They killed my mother. They… hurt me. They took in vain the name of Zula Din and perverted her warriors, the Mah’zula. They killed Sammai, and Ismai’s mother, and they hurt Ismai—” Her voice rose as a litany of hurts became a chant, a song almost, and this tugged at his borrowed heart. Surely the youth Ismai had cared for Char, though he had not known what she was. And the name Mah’zula had kindled the embers of his soul to fury. “I want justice,” she said. “I want revenge.”

“The Mah’zula,” Kal ne Mur repeated, tasting the name as if savoring a dish long forgotten. “The men of Atualon. Upon whom would you have me unleash my wrath, little one?”

“All of them,” she replied in a choked voice. “All of them.” She was crying. They had hurt his little girl, had turned her into this monster—and now they had made her cry.

A dirge, low and slow and full of ill omen, rose from the depths of the Lich King’s soul, and flared in his heart. He gathered his daughter up in his arms and held her against his chest.

“I can do that,” he said.

* * *

Kal ne Mur sang again. This song was born of a dragon’s love and tuned to the heart of a boy. Its rhythm was the bridge of a spider’s web, a chorus of stories, a sorcerer’s verse, and at its climax…

Death.

The web unraveled, the song was sung, the story told as the Lich King stood knee-deep in the Ghana Kalmut and raised his voice in command. The magic was his, pouring through his veins like sweet water, like sunlight, like mead. From the cavern behind him, the canyon walls around and above him, came the cries of the wakening dead. The sounds of rocks falling, of swords unsheathed…

Of sobbing. Though the Lich King hesitated in the face of death, his fell hordes felt no such compunction. They longed for death, they wept for death, with every ragged indrawn breath they begged for the release that only he could give them. And with every note dredged up from the bottom of his sorry soul, he denied them.

The magic, the atulfah, swirled about his feet like sand-dae. The sa and ka beat with the rhythm of his heart and carried the dragon’s canticle up, up, from the heart of the world to the breath of the heavens, in and out like the tides, waxing and waning as the moons, deep as the darkness between stars.

Come, he sang.

Wake, he sang.

And they obeyed.

By the tens, by the hundreds they came, his faithful dead. Fell they were, nightmares made flesh, flesh made whole. Sinews knotted and knitted along long white bones, muscles grew fat and red and were covered with sleek, pliant skin. Eyes blinked, mouths worked, shattered limbs were made whole again as the horde drew near their king.

Kal ne Mur did not look upon them, but he knew they were there—he could feel them. Feel their despair and their pain, their horror as he dragged them back from the Lonely Road to serve once more at his pleasure. The atulfah he could summon here, in the Valley of the Dead, was a weak thing compared to the power he had once commanded. A shadow of the power he might wield were he in possession of the Mask of Akari.

Still it was enough to unmake this world, as once it had unmade him.

Live for me, he commanded, and they did. They would die for him, as well, again and again until the dragon woke, or until he died, and with his death released them.

He opened his eyes.

Ah, he thought as he beheld his terrible host of the undead. They knelt before him, heads bowed. Some were naked, some in tattered and tarnished armor, still others in finery or funereal rags. All were whole, and all were his.

Deep within him, Ismai son of Nurati cried out in fury and in horror, beating against the prison of his own flesh like a bird in a cage made of bone. Far above a vash’ai sang of loneliness, and fury, and defeat.

A fitting tribute, Kal ne Mur thought, as he surveyed his monstrous horde. This was a small force, compared to the massive armies he had once commanded.

But it was a beginning.

FOUR

Bonesingerrrrrr…

Istaza Ani sat cross-legged with her back against a large rock, eyes closed, face turned up to the sun. Many times she had sat just so, while guarding her adopted people or their flocks or their children. Ever the bones of the earth, the bones of the dead and living, had whispered to her, their voices entreating her, begging her to listen, listen.

Always before she had disregarded them, but it had taken great force of will, knowing full well that some paths, once chosen, can never be unchosen. The path of vengeance was one such, the path of magic another, and the path of the dead most especially so. Once a soul had set foot upon the Lonely Road, those steps could never, must never be retraced.

Such laws were written upon the bones of the earth and stars. Life and death were to be immutable, the distinction between them sacrosanct. The living lived, the dead remained so, and only the foulest of sorcerers would dare to challenge the way of things. Any who broke the laws would become a necromancer, a lich.

A bonesinger.

Bonesingerrrrrrrrrr…

She ignored the voice, a low rumble that trembled up through the ground, and resisted the urge to conjure the speaker. It would be easy to do and so very, very gratifying. After a lifetime of denying her own nature, of turning from the magic that was her birthright, would it be so wrong just this once—

Stop.

Without opening her eyes or moving so much as a finger, Ani thrust aside the compulsion. Whether it came from within, or— as she suspected—from some ancient bonelord was immaterial. Often in the past she had enjoined the younglings under her command to think before they moved, to avoid stepping into a dark hole before determining whether it contained snakes or vipers. This particular hole was filled with foul and venomous things, and she would not give in to foul temptation.

Not for anything would she—

Not even for Sulema? Daughter of your friend, the daughter of your heart? Would you not do this thing for her?

Ani hesitated, and the voice laughed.

Tell me, then, she commanded the speaker. Or show me, if you would. What is this great disturbance of which you howl; what danger is so great that I should disregard the peril to face it? And what, she asked most eagerly and most reluctantly, do you know of Sulema’s fate?

Ssssssulemaaaaaa, the voice hissed, a sound like a cavern full of serpents and old bones. By this sound, Ani knew she had guessed correctly. It was an ancient bonelord, powerful and wicked and hers to command. Come, Bonesingerrrrrr, come, I will sssshow you…

Ani sighed, and gave in to the bonesinger’s wheedling, to the song that whispered like sand deep within her body, to the sound of sunlight on stones, and set foot upon the wild and reckless path.

* * *

When at last Ani returned to her own bones, her own body, she found herself slumped in a tangle of limbs and hair, and her mouth tasted foul. She sat up painfully, rolling stiff shoulders and grimacing at the fire in her spine. Her neck was stiff, her ass numb.

The hot stink of carrion breath swept over her, and she froze.

Hrrrrrrrrrh hrrrrrrrrh, came a low grumble, along with another wave of wet heat. Carefully Ani opened her eyes, blinking away crusted sand and worse, and found herself staring down the throat of death. Broken-tusked, old as a mountain’s roots, as filled with dark secrets as the river’s dreaming.

You are weak, Inna’hael snarled in her head. Weak and thoughtless as others of your kind. I should kill you now.

Though they were not bonded—by his choice, not hers— the words stung. She ignored the thread and stretched, rolling her head and waving away the stink of his breath.

You have been rolling in carrion, she accused.

And you have been running with a bonelord, the vash’ai countered, wrinkling black lips back from his tusks in a show of disgust. You reek of filth and maggots. Reckless—

There is singing in Eid Kalmut tonight, she told him gently.

The massive feline closed his mouth and regarded her with slow yellow eyes.

Bonelords lie.

Bones do not, she insisted. They cannot. They have shown me Eid Kalmut; they have shown me the armies of restless dead. Even now they march from the Valley of Death, and Kal ne Mur rides at their head.

She did not add that the face of the Lich King, ruined as it was now, was more familiar to her than her own. Her heart wept for Ismai—he had been a good boy, and this fate was ill-deserved.

Inna’hael was silent for a long while. When he spoke, his mind’s voice was subdued.

So. Perhaps you are not as stupid as some others of your kind. By vash’ai standards, it was an apology. Long have your kind been foolish, worse than cubs pawing at a hornet’s nest in search of honey. Now the world reaps what you have long sown. No longer, human. It is time for my kind to put an end to this foolishness, however we may.

Ani’s blood ran cold.

She did not know what strength the wild vash’ai had kept hidden, or upon what powers the kahanna—vash’ai sorcerers like Inna’hael—could call, but she had the distinct impression that they might, if they so chose, bring about an end to humankind. Many kithren bonded to human companions, but she suspected they were only a small faction among the vash’ai, a quiet voice calling for peace among the roars of war.

“Sulema will fix this,” Ani said, as if hearing the words aloud would make them ring with truth, ehuani. “And Hannei, and Daru—if he yet lives—our cubs will succeed where we have failed. Sajani will be soothed back to restful dreams, and the magic of atulfah tamed,” she continued. I will help them, she added silently, whatever the cost to my own soul.

Beg your dragons to make it so, Inna’hael warned softly. His voice was not without pity, but his resolution was absolute. Because if you humans do not clean up this mess you have made, we will clean it up for you. He turned and sauntered away, the black-tufted tip of his tail twitching back and forth. Only then did Ani see what the massive paws had been hiding from her, the gift he had brought to lay at her feet.

A human skull, fresh and white in the sunlight, lay staring up at the midsun sky. Tusks had pierced the forehead and one eye socket, and most of the flesh had been torn from bone, leaving only a bit of scalp, a scrap of skin, and a cluster of warrior’s braids drying in the wind.

FIVE

Home.

Despite the weight of his armor, the dragging weariness in his limbs, Jian’s heart lifted at the sight of Dal Moragheirthi rising like a jeweled mountain above the pale trees. Delderrion picked up the pace, and Jian leaned forward to stroke the gelding’s dark neck.

“Innu bar nederiach, Delderrion,” he whispered. “We are nearly there, my friend.” While not strictly true—here in the Twilight Lands, his father’s castle could be seen from many leagues’ distance, and they should not expect to arrive for a couple more days—it was as close to home as the army had been for nearly five years, as men reckoned time. Jian sent up a silent prayer of thanks.

“General!”

He turned at the voice and smiled at the sight of Telloren trotting up on his fat little horse. Lifting his demon’s-face visor, he addressed the bard.

“Hai, Tello! What news from the rear?”

Telloren pulled a face. “That is a loaded question, Highness, considering that I have been subsisting on a soldier’s rations since we ran out of goats.” So saying, the little man leaned to one side and farted loudly enough to spook Jian’s horse.

“Augh! Tello!” the nearest soldiers yelled in unison. Tello laughed and brought his placid beast up alongside Delderrion. The gelding eyed Tello with some trepidation, doubtless wondering whether the Dae’s hindquarters might resume bellowing.

“What news?” Jian asked again in a quiet voice, guessing that the bard’s antics were a ruse to get near the prince. Telloren still wore a fool’s grin, but his eyes were serious.

“Your father wishes you to make all haste to the palace, Highness.” The morning’s peace melted away like visions in a mere.

“Did he say why?”

“Somewhat. A delegation of your people has come to the ocean’s edge, and they demand to speak with you.”

“To speak with me?” Jian said. “Surely they intend to speak with my father.”

“No, Highness. They asked specifically for you. They called you Prince of the Red Tides.”

“Ah.” Jian smiled grimly. For five years he had been leading his bloodsworn against the troops of Daeshen Tiachu, emperor of Sindan. His handful of followers had swollen into a respectable-sized army, of which this contingent was a small number.

Most of his soldiers were youths born into the Twilight Lands by Dae mothers who had taken human lovers during Moonstide, and who had withheld their children from the lands of men. Such a thing was, strictly speaking, a breach of treaty. Within the laws of the Dae, however, mothers governed all the matters of their children’s upbringing until they reached maturity at fifty-six years of age. None among the twilight lords, not even the king himself, dared challenge the mothers in their own land.

Mixed in among the twilight-born, however—and growing in number—were those who, like Jian himself, had been born in the lands of men and who had chosen to forsake their homelands to join the army of their fathers. These tended to be among the fiercest of his troops. Having pledged themselves to treason, they gave no quarter and asked none. As Jian mounted his campaign against Sindan, more and more daeborn youths were found by the sea-side, waiting for their chance to join him. No few of his troops were former Daechen soldiers and officers who had defected during battle.

The twilight lords, being bound to their land, could not themselves wage war upon Sindan. But the daeborn, having signed no treaties and with the ability to walk in either world, fell under no such constraints. They came from the farms and fishing villages, from cities and shanty towns, and from the Forbidden City itself, ready to swear their blood and their lives to Jian as it became clear that his intention was to overthrow the ruling parties of Sindan, and free the daeborn from the emperor’s tyranny.

Jian had not been able to save his wife or their child, and so he had vowed to bring to its knees the empire which had stolen them from him.

Telloren was Dae, not daeborn, and a lord at that, but he had sired a daughter one Moonstide, and the girl had been slain during the winnowing of her sixteenth year. A high bard with dreadful power at his command, he rode in Jian’s train as if he were some lowly camp follower. Jian did not know how he could have managed without him.

“What does my father say of this?” he asked. “Did he promise that I would meet with these people, or tell them to go piss up a mountain?”

“The king,” Tello replied with a meaningful glance at Jian’s other followers, “told the delegation that Tsun-ju Jian de Allyr is a grown man and no longer needs his father to speak for him. They await your pleasure, Highness.”

Jian’s throat clenched and he stared skyward lest surprised tears fall from his eyes. “In that case,” he said finally, voice a little rough, “we should continue without stopping. Tell the troops that we will not camp this night. If the wounded need to stop and rest they may, and the medics with them, but those of us who can, will ride on.”

“Your will, Highness.” Telloren’s eyes flashed bright blue with approval, and his smile was wider and sharper-toothed than a human man’s would have been. He wheeled his stout gray horse and rode back to give the captains their orders.

“Tsun-ju Jian de Allyr is a grown man and no longer needs his father to speak for him.” It seemed that some time in the past five years, during which Jian had endured countless battles, terrible injuries, and the loss of beloved friends, his father had grown to trust and respect him.

He lifted his face to the morning mist, let it kiss away his fatigue and tears. A new day, a red day, and his doom had come to call at last.

* * *

In the end, they had not ridden to the palace; the palace had ridden to meet them. They came with lutes and dancing boys, with banners and horns and laughter—

—most importantly, they came with food.

The Sea King himself came, splendid in his moonscale armor, with a crown like starslight and his arms held wide to receive his son. He showered the daeborn with words of praise and with gifts both magical and practical—six-legged horses from the Nether Isles, swords and halberds bound with glyphs of luck and warding, mail armor and black arrows and scrying glasses. Those soldiers who were newly come from the lands of men and had never experienced the splendors of the Twilight Lands were wide-eyed and stupefied. Those who were hardened campaigners rushed through the ceremonies and fell upon the food train like starvelings, knowing that a king’s true wealth is kept in his kitchens.

Thus feted, fed, and hastily bathed, Jian rode with his father grim-faced at the head of a massive and formidable force down to the sea’s edge.

On this side of the veil the sea was darker and, to Jian’s mind, more beautiful than it appeared upon the shores of man. It glistened not with the sun’s light—for Akari Sun Dragon did not venture into those gray skies—but with starslight and moonslight and magic.

The stars were different from those that lingered in the skies above Sindan. There were more of them, brighter and more colorful, clustered together in constellations so detailed they might have been paintings. Yet the moons were the same, hanging low and lovely in the never-bright, never-dark skies. During Moonstide, which lasted one night only in the human world, the waters seemed darker and angrier than ever.

The Sea King signaled his armies to a halt. He and Jian dismounted, and signaled that their troops should remain as they were.

This created an outcry. Though the Dae and daeborn were loyal to the death, this did not translate into cowed deference, as it might among men.

“Nonsense!” Hounds milling about her feet, the Huntress’s dark horse pushed through the wall of cavalry and she glared down at the king and his son. “You would go alone to face these honorless rats on their own soil, and not expect treachery? This stinks of a trap!”

“Of course it is a trap,” Jian’s father replied, expression unperturbed but eyes gone as gray as the storming sea. “We are going to see what kind of trap it might be.”

The Huntress was joined by Maug, whose pied crest was raised in agitation and whose birdlike black eyes glittered as she glared at the king. Her wings were folded and dragged on the ground behind her like a glossy black robe.

“And if you do not return, brother, what then?” the Huntress demanded. “Who will lead the ladies and lords, when your blood has been sucked up by the dry lands?”

“Dear sister,” the king said, laughing, “you will lead them, of course!” Many of the host laughed. The worst-kept secret in this kingdom of gossips was that the king’s sister feared nothing so much as the thought of being forced to rule.

“If you get yourself killed,” she rasped, “my crows and I will peck out your eyes and hang your head to rot upon the Gates of Yosh.”

“I love you too,” he said, and he winked. “Come, Jian. Telloren, if you would?”

Telloren dismounted as well, pulling an urchin’s-bone flute from its leather case.

“Majesty,” he said, and his eyes flashed scarlet.

The Sea King and his son, the Prince of Red Tides, walked slowly along the moonlight path, over the foaming waves. Bard Telloren played a sad song, a mad song, firming and calming the waves so that the waters did not so much as lick the soles of their feet as they walked across the water to the veil and, beyond that, to the shores of men.

* * *

Jian reached the distant shore sooner than he had expected, though that in itself was hardly surprising. The moons-path sometimes took weeks to traverse, but other times only a few strides, and there was no predicting the length of a particular journey. Suddenly the night sky was too bright, the air too thin and filled with the stink of dying things.

“Jian,” his father warned as they neared the pale shore, “do not leave the sea. Stand in the shallows.”

“Yes, Father,” Jian answered, bowing his head.

When they were still some distance from landfall, he could see that there was, indeed, a delegation from the emperor waiting for them. It was a large enough party to be called respectful, though not so large that it might be threatening. Colored silks and threads of gold winked like saucy stars in the moonslight, and a constellation of cookfires sent up a savory smell that recalled to Jian memories of his own childhood. Unless his nose deceived him, they were preparing the special hot-sweet spiced goat stew that was a specialty of Jian’s province, fragrant cinnamon rice, and goose-heart dumplings.

“Ugh.” The Sea King wrinkled his nose. “They are ruining good meat.”

“Humans like their food cooked and spiced,” Jian said, without mentioning that his mouth was watering at the thought of stew and potatoes. He had come to appreciate the savor of tender, raw flesh, but human fare still appealed to him.

“And their women veiled?”

“No, why… oh.”

As they halted near the water’s edge, Jian could see that among the throng there were indeed two women, both veiled, one in white and the other in a dark blue that rivaled the midnight sky for its beauty. A new fashion, perhaps. The one in white stiffened as if she had seen them, then bent hurriedly toward the other woman, who also went still.

Curious, Jian thought. I wonder who…

The notion died unfinished as one of the cookfires blazed suddenly bright, revealing the white armor and antlered brow of a man Jian had known well.

“Mardoni,” he whispered. “What is he doing here?”

“The Sen-Baradam of whom you spoke?” The Sea King frowned, and frothing waves pulled at their feet. “I thought you said he was one of those who wished to diminish the emperor’s power? What would he be doing here, with the imperial troops?”

“I do not know,” Jian answered, “but we are about to find out.”

Horns sounded up and down the beach as their presence became known to the emperor’s delegation. Mardoni rose from his seat by the fire and strode toward them, bathed in moonslight and firelight, looking for all the world like some felldae from a hearth tale.

“Jian?” the figure called as he came closer, arms outstretched to show that he bore no weapon. “Daechen Jian? Praise the emperor, it is you! Welcome home, my old friend!”

“Home,” Jian’s father snorted.

“Old friend,” Jian echoed, every bit as skeptical. “We will see.”

“It is good to see you, Daechen Jian,” Mardoni said, his voice as hearty and bold as if they were village youths challenging each other to a drinking game, not seasoned veterans of forces at odds with one another. “You have been missed.”

“Is it?” Jian asked. “Have I?”

“Do not use the title ‘Daechen.’” Jian’s father spoke in a voice like sea rocks, hard and unforgiving. “There are no half-children, only Dae and others.” His tone left little doubt as to which group he believed Mardoni belonged.

The general brushed it off. “Forgive me, your Majesty,” he said, bowing deeply, “but that is not entirely correct. Certainly there are the Dae, and then there are humans. I would not argue this point with you. However,” he added, standing proud and straight once again, “there are ‘others,’ and it is to these outsiders we should turn our minds and swords.”

“You speak of Atualon,” Jian guessed.

“I do,” Mardoni agreed, and his face was as earnest as any suitor’s. “Come, sit with us by the fire, and we will speak of these things.”

“Yes,” the Sea King said, “we will do this.” Jian lifted an eyebrow in surprise. Behind them, Telloren’s flute raised in pitch like an angry mother’s voice, warning them away from danger.

“It is all right, Tello,” Jian called over his shoulder, even as he stepped from sea to shore. “If they try anything, I will kill them all.” His father chuckled. They walked some way toward the fire, and Mardoni turned.

“Do you really think you could defeat all of us, Daechen Jian? I have over a hundred men here, and more within earshot were we to blow our horns.” He seemed curious, not threatening, but Jian’s hackles rose at the suggestion of treachery. He stopped, held Mardoni’s eyes, and allowed himself a long, slow smile.

“If you tried to betray me, I would kill you all,” he said, “and I would eat some of you afterward. Starting with you… ‘old friend.’” Mardoni looked shocked for a moment, but then shrugged it off and resumed walking toward the fire.

“It is a good thing I do not intend to betray you, then,” he said. “My wife would be very disappointed.”

* * *

The son of the Sea King and the Voice of the Emperor— so Mardoni styled himself—sat upon logs near a fire on the beach, swatting at ants and slurping goat stew.

“I did not think I would like this,” Mardoni confided. “Simple village fare is so…”

“Simple?” Jian said.

“Yes,” Mardoni agreed, “but filling, too. Wholesome, I guess.” He grinned. “Like village girls, I suppose.”

The Sea King snorted and shook his head.

Jian did not take the bait. The night was becoming long, and Telloren, though powerful, could not hold the moons-path open for them forever.

“Say what you have brought us here to say, and we will be gone.”

Mardoni raised his eyebrows in surprise and glanced at the Sea King, who paid him no mind. This was his son’s world, his son’s war.

“As you will,” the general said at last. “The emperor has a gift for you, Dae… Jian, and a proposition. Which would you like first?”

“A gift and a proposition.” Jian glanced at him from the corner of one eye, but Mardoni’s slight smile betrayed nothing. “Which would you take first, I wonder?”

“Well,” Mardoni answered cheerfully as if he had been expecting the question, “when I was a small boy, I used to take my medicine first, and then the spoonful of honey. But we are not boys anymore, so,” he shrugged, “it is up to you to decide, I guess.”

Jian pursed his lips. He did not glance at his father, though he would have given much to know the older man’s thoughts. Neither did he look again at the Sen-Baradam—it seemed to him that Mardoni was playing some kind of riddle game, and Jian had not been told the rules. Then again, even as a child Jian had known that life was not fair.

He was no longer a boy, either.

“Both at once,” he decided.

“Both at… hm, interesting choice. Very well.” Mardoni held up a hand and gestured. The two veiled women strode toward them unhurriedly. “The Red Tide Prince wishes to have both offers presented to him at once,” Mardoni told them, “so I guess it is up to you to figure it out.”

The white-robed woman moved first, drawing back her veil so that Jian could see her face. He nearly gasped with surprise when he recognized Giella the White Nightingale, looking as if she had not aged a day since last he had seen her.

Of course she does, he scolded himself. Time moves differently for them than it does in the Twilight Lands. Years have passed for me, while here they have seen but a few moons roll by. He had used this to forward his campaign of terror against the forces of Daeshen Tiachu, letting Jian and his armies seem to be attacking everywhere at once.

“You look well,” he said, composing himself quickly.

She snorted. “I look like gull’s shit,” she countered. “I did not have time for a proper bath before this son of a goat— herder—dragged me from my rooms and told me that I could either deliver a message to you or lose my head.”

“Ah.” Jian shot a dark look at Mardoni, who shrugged.

“Have you ever tried to hurry this woman from her bath?” he asked. “Our kingdoms might have crumbled to dust before that happened.”

“What is your message?” Jian asked. He tried not to stare too curiously at the second woman, the one covered head-to-toe in dark blue. What gift does she bear? he wondered.

“The emperor wishes to strike a new treaty with the twilight lords,” Giella answered.

“A new treaty?” he asked, and he suppressed a laugh. “Why would the Twilight Lands sign a treaty to end a war when we are winning? Unless Tiachu wishes to surrender his throne to us, we do not wish to hear what he has to say.” He made as if to rise.

“Wait,” the White Nightingale said, her voice so urgent it gave Jian pause. Why did she care, when she had been forced to deliver this message in the first place?

If she has been forced, a voice whispered in his mind, but he would not believe that she had been untrue to him. Besides Perri, this girl had been the closest thing he had to a friend in the lands of men.

Even if she was an assassin.

“There is a new king in Atualon,” she told him, “and rumors of others besides him who can wield the power of dragonsong. If they raise an army of gold-masks and march upon Sindan… it might be better, Jian, for you to set aside what differences you have with the emperor. Side with him instead, so that we might stop this new threat before it takes hold. Daeshen Tiachu is offering to cease all hostilities with the Dae, and put an end to the winnowing, if you and the twilight lords will join with him and throw your combined might against the fortress of the Dragon King.”

“They would stop the winnowing.” Jian sank back down. Staring into the fire, he saw not flames, but wagons loaded with dead boys like so many lengths of firewood. It was not a believable offer, and yet—

“If we march upon Atualon while the country is embroiled in internal war, and seize the power of atulfah from the Dragon King, we might rejoin our two lands as one,” Mardoni added, leaning forward as if by sheer force of will he could persuade the young prince to believe his words. “Wielding the power of atulfah and of the Twilight Lands, the emperor of Sindan would be as bright and glorious as Akari Sun Dragon himself, exalted above all others in history. Join us… join me,” he coaxed. “I have put aside my grievances with the emperor—so have all the Sen-Baradam—as we face this new threat from the west. Are we not brothers? Should we not unite against our common enemy in Atualon?”

“What exactly does the emperor want from me?” Jian asked bluntly. “Simply to cease hostilities against Sindan? Or does he expect me to urge the twilight lords and ladies to cross the veil and spawn a bigger army of daeborn for the emperor? The Twilight Lands are not Sindan—I cannot simply tell the people what to do, and expect them to bow and obey me.

“Nor would I, if I could.”

“The emperor wishes to have you at his side, Jian. You would be his advisor and honored guest—a high warlord, set above all the Sen-Baradam. Moreover, as the emperor has not yet been blessed with a living child, he has sworn that, should you aid him thus in destroying our enemy in the west, he will name you as heir to the Forbidden City. In time, you might unite three lands—Sindan, the Twilight Lands, and Atualon—and usher in an age of peace. Is this not a thing worth setting aside our differences? Is this not a thing worth dying for? Such a world we could leave to our children—”

“Our children.” With those words Jian was dragged back to reality, and to his decision. He stood up abruptly. “You side with Tiachu, who killed my wife and our child, and speak to me of our children?” Such was the fury in his voice that Mardoni moved away from him. Even the White Nightingale stepped back.

The woman in the dark veil, however, did not. She strode forward as Jian spun to leave, blocking his path.

“You have heard the emperor’s offer,” she said, soft voice wounding him as no sword of man ever could. “Will you accept his gift?”

The voice was one which sang to him in his dreams. With one slender hand she drew back her veil. Eyes round as Jian’s, deep as the seas, looked into his. Teeth white and sharp as a sea-bear’s smiled up at him. Tsali’gei stood before him with her feet planted wide apart as a warrior’s, a daring gleam in her eye—

A tiny infant, black-haired and beautiful, was asleep in her arms.

Jian fell to his knees.

The trap snapped shut.

SIX

Think, girl, think. Mother escaped from this shitforsaken place before she was a dreamshifter. Before she was anything, really—how did she do it?

Hunger gnawed a hollow in her belly, but she had been hungry before. Thirst scoured her throat, as well, but she had been thirsty before. The bite in her shoulder and not-quite-healed bones in her arm throbbed and itched, but she had felt pain before. These things were nothing to a warrior, and it was high time that Sulema Ja’Akari remembered who—and what—she was.

What she had never been, not for a day in her life, was alone. Her mother, her youthmistress, her friends, her pride had always been there, infuriating in their meddling, stifling in their interest. Even when she had faced the lionsnake, she had not been truly alone. First Warrior had known where she was, after all, and Sulema had known in the depths of her heart that if she needed them, if she wished for them, her people would come. But now—

Tears are not rain, her mother’s voice scolded. They will not cause the desert to bloom.

Sulema stood, as best she could judge, in the center of her walled-up cell.

Think!

The air was still but not stifling. Small cracks and holes in the dragonstone let the air and the rats come and go, yet she was neither air nor a rat, so there was no escape for her that way. Nor did the newly laid stone wall give beneath her hands, push though she might.

If I had my staff, maybe I could—but no, her mother had not wanted to teach her to dreamshift, any more than Sulema had wanted to learn. If I had learned more about wielding atulfah, perhaps—

If I had armies to command, they could storm the castle and set me free. She shook her head and grunted a laugh. Strangely enough, that made her feel better. “If you can still laugh,” Ani would say, “there is yet hope.”

She is laughing.

A woman’s voice.

Why is she laughing? Is she mad?

The voice was soft and smooth and strong. Sulema froze as the words whispered through her cell, faint as footprints upon the Lonely Road, thin as shadows in the deep of night. Had she imagined it? Was she mad?

No, not mad, a man answered. Not yet, at any rate—no more than any other of the Zeeranim, who are all a touch insane. Too much time spent under the sun; it bakes their brains.

Sulema’s mouth dropped open, and she spun about, as if turning circles in the dark might help matters.

“Who is there?”

There… there… there…

Her voice echoed, and Sulema thought she heard a response, deep in the heart of Atukos. Now that she was aware of them, the voices were clearer.

They should have killed her, the first voice said. It is foolish of Pythos to leave such a weapon lying about, where I might pick it up and use it.

A weapon he may yet bring to bear against you, my queen, the male voice replied. Better to kill the girl and be done with it than take this foolish risk.

I am no fool, ta. The woman’s voice rang cold and hard with power. Sulema thought she must be a warrior. Neither am I your queen. We will not kill the girl today—to do so would tear a hole in the web big enough for Eth to crawl through. I have seen it. I would pick up this weapon and wield it. She is her mother’s daughter, and her father’s. She can be a powerful ally.

As you wish. Remember, however, that this is the City of Lies. An ally made here is surely doomed to become your enemy. As for its usefulness, perhaps this sword is less than the sum of hilt and blade. The girl is afraid to confront her potential. She is weak, and a weak weapon may be worse than no weapon at all.

“Het, het!” Sulema shouted a challenge into the dark. She tensed, expecting an attack. “Show yourself, you goatfucking coward. I am Ja’Akari, and I am no easy meat!”

In each possibility where I choose to aid the girl, the woman continued, unfazed, she returns from Quarabala with Maika. My Maika, alive and well.

Do not let the yearnings of your heart blind you to reality. We both know this is impossible.

You forget yourself, Illindrist. I have seen it. Do you doubt me?

Sulema controlled her anger in the dark and waited for these voices to decide her fate. She knew to whom the voices belonged now, and they possessed the power to snuff her life as easily as she might pinch the flame from a candle.

If you are no queen, I am no Illindrist. Do as you will, then, my… apprentice, but if the girl becomes a threat to you, know this. I will kill her myself.

I would expect nothing less… Master.

Safe travels, then, little one. I will go to the new Dragon King and make some excuse for your absence. It should not be difficult. The man is an idiot.

Sulema knew then that she was alone again, straining eyes and ears to no avail. Alone in her cell in the belly of Atukos, where there was only silence, and darkness, and the occasional hopeless rat.

“Hello?” she called, and again Atukos answered with an echo.

Hello… hello… hello.

“Well, fuck!”

“My akamu always said that a foul mouth is a sign of a weak mind. Do you have a weak mind, girl?”

Sulema spun, half crouching as a light flickered, flickered, flared to life. Once again she could see the details of the room, including the painting on the wall. There, in one corner of her cell, stood the Illindrist’s apprentice. She held a glass oil lamp in one hand, a small glass bottle in the other. She was clad in robes the color of road dust, had a pack slung over one shoulder, and on her face she wore the most disapproving frown Sulema had seen since leaving home.

Her name is Yaela, she remembered. Sulema bared her teeth as if the other had challenged her to a fight. “I do not have a weak anything, girl. I am Ja’Akari.”

“Good.” Yaela nodded, strange eyes slit against the faint illumination. “You promised that if I were to help you escape Atukos, you would travel to the Seared Lands and bring to me my little niece. Did you speak truth?”

“I am Ja’Akari,” Sulema said again, standing straight so that she towered above the newcomer. “My words speak only truth, ehuani. I will do this thing…” She hesitated, and because there was beauty in truth, she added, “or I will die trying. I am no Zula Din.”

“No, you are not,” the sorcerer’s apprentice agreed. “It is not possible for you to do this thing.”

I have no wish to do this thing, Sulema thought. Still, she stiffened at the insult. “Impossible for an outlander, perhaps. For one who is Ja’Akari—”

“Impossible,” Yaela insisted, unmoved. “I have seen the scars you bear from fighting a single lionsnake. You were nearly broken beyond repair in the course of a single day, Ja’Akari, and in your own lands at that.

“There are worse things in the Jehannim than snakes and spider-men,” the apprentice continued. “Bonelords, mymyc, and bintshi are only the beginning. The mountains would chew you up and spit you out like a handful of your pemmican long before you could ever dream of reaching Quarabala. You are no shadowmancer, able to weave shadows into protection from the sun and walk the Seared Lands, nor do you have the salt to hire one. You are no bonesinger, to sing the bones upon the shadowed roads into quiescence. You are not even a dreamshifter, as your mother was.

“You are just… just a girl.” Yaela sighed.

“If I am so weak,” Sulema asked, jaw so tight with affront that she could scarcely force the words out between her teeth, “then why do you ask me to do this thing?”

“You are no Zula Din,” Yaela answered after a long pause, “but you are what I have. Here.” She held out the bottle. Sulema eyed it suspiciously, even as she took it and brought it close to her face. A familiar stench wafted to greet her, and she wrinkled her nose.

“Did you get this from Mattu?” She tried not to feel anything as she said his name. Tried, and failed.

“I stole it from Rothfaust’s quarters. There were only a few bottles left, and I took them all. I thought to ask the loremaster to make more, but he is nowhere to be found. Many people besides your brother and your mother’s small apprentice have gone missing since Pythos has returned— Rothfaust is probably dead in a pit somewhere with the rest of them.” She shrugged. “This will help against the reaver venom, but I do not know for how long.”

Sulema froze, with the bottle against her lips.

“You know about the reaver venom?”

Yaela rolled her eyes. “This is Atualon. Everybody knows everything.”

Sulema wrinkled her nose, held her breath, and swallowed the contents of the bottle. The loremaster had refined his medicines—or so he had assured her—but it still tasted like churra piss. Maybe worse.

“Gaaaah,” she said, and she spat. “Surely turning into a reaver cannot be worse than drinking this shit.”

“Oh,” Yaela said, “but it is. Worse than you can know, child of the sunlight.” Every word as slow and dark as a stone dropped into a well.

“You have seen a reaver?” Sulema had not believed that they existed, not really, until that day at the Bones of Eth—

Her mind fled from the thought.

“I was a child,” Yaela answered, “a little child, on the Night of Sorrows.”

“The Night of Sorrows?”

For a moment, Sulema thought that Yaela’s little oil lamp had flared like the sun. When she realized that the shadows had fled the room in terror, all the hairs on her arms stood up.

The sorcerer’s apprentice, she thought, is more than she seems.

“Forgive my ignorance,” she said. “The shadows flee your wrath, and my… my father’s shadowmancer… calls you ‘queen.’ Why do you not simply return to Quarabala and retrieve your niece yourself? Why send someone unfamiliar with the land, someone who—as you say—is no Zula Din?”

“I cannot,” Yaela answered, her face smooth and hard as stones in the river. “I have run from the edge of the Seared Lands to Min Yaarif three times. Three—when no other living shadowmancer had passed the shadowed roads more than once and lived to tell the tale. Shadowmancy leaves a trail, a smell of sorts, and that scent draws all manner of… unpleasant attention.”

“Ah.” Sulema remembered something Leviathus had told her. “Like the magic slick left upon the Dibris by the Baidun Daiel? That was why they had to take me overland to Atualon, rather than taking the shorter river route.”

“Much like,” Yaela agreed. “Each shadowmancer has a unique… scent, I suppose you could say. Travel the road once, and if you survive you have left a taste of yourself. Attempt a second pass, and…” She shook her head.

“Yet you have made that journey three times? Why not a fourth?”

The fleetest of smiles crossed Yaela’s face, there and gone again.

“I am very fast, but a fourth time?” She shook her head. “I survived my third run by the thinnest of luck and do not dare another attempt. Another shadowmancer will have to shield your path into the heart of Quarabala, one who has escaped the Seared Lands without using his own magic. There is one such I know of. His name is Keoki. He lives in Min Yaarif and has let it be known that he is willing to provide escort… for a price.”

“So.” It was Sulema’s turn to smile. “I can choose to die horribly here, or I can die horribly in Jehannim, in a futile attempt at an impossible quest.”

“Sometimes a death of our choosing is the best for which we can hope. But I offer you more than certain death, Ja’Akari. The thinnest hope, less than a mouthful of water to a woman dying of thirst.”

Sulema swallowed. She had almost forgotten how dry she was, and how hungry.

“I am listening.”

Yaela swung her traveler’s pack to the fore, unfastened the flap, and rummaged about inside. After a moment she pulled out a round bundle bigger than a man’s fist and handed this to Sulema as if it were of little note. Curious, Sulema let the wrappings fall away, and gasped to see the rose-rock globe her father had shown her in Atualon. Veined in lapis and set with jewels, the globe, as Ka Atu had explained, was a miniature of their world; anything which affected the land might be reflected upon the stone’s surface. It was possible, he had added, that damage to this artifact might in turn wreak havoc upon their lives.

“This…” She breathed. “My father said it was too powerful for me to handle.”

“Your father is dead,” Yaela said, sharp and short. “This is my offer to you, should you return from the Seared Lands with my Maika.”

“You offer me… this globe?” Sulema wanted to laugh, but she remembered how the shadows had fled Yaela’s presence. “You have already given it to me.”

“I offer you the world, Sulema Ja’Akari. I offer you freedom.”

“But… how?” Sulema stared longingly at the globe. Freedom. “Even if I was not locked in a dungeon—which I am—I am bound to Atualon by blood and honor, and I am bound to weakness by the reaver’s magic, as well. How can I ever be free?”

“I can use shadowmancy and the magic in Cassandre’s painting to free you from this place. That is a simple matter. Crafting a medicine that will cure you of the reaver’s venom for good will cost me a great deal more, and the risk will be… considerable. If I am to perform such a dangerous task for you, you must repay me in kind. As for the ties of blood and honor, you will have to learn to sever or live with them yourself, just as we all do. I am an Illindrist’s apprentice, not Illindra herself.

“Here is my offer, then. Agree to bring to me my little niece, my Maika, daughter of my twin who died birthing her, and I will give you, Sulema Ja’Akari ne Atu, the greatest treasure any person can hope for—a chance at freedom. Freedom from Atualon, from the reaver’s venom, to become again who you once were. A warrior blessed to ride the desert sands, beneath the gaze of Akari.”

Free of the Dragon’s Legacy at last, Sulema thought. Is such a thing possible? She knew only that she had to try.

“Yes,” Sulema said simply. “Yes. Show me the way.”

Yaela rocked back on her heels and let out a long, low breath. Shadows flowed back into the room like the river after spring rains.

“That is the easy part,” she said. “You already know the way, truly. Here, touch this, here…” she moved Sulema’s finger to a tiny jagged chip like blackened bone upon the globe, not far from the gem that was Min Yaarif. “Yes, just like that. Now, look at the painting Cassandre made of you. The real painting. Close your waking eyes, open your dreaming ones, and look.” Even as she spoke, Yaela struck a dancer’s pose, one arm above her head, hand twisting like leaves in a summer wind. Her spine arched, and she flowed like dark water. “Look!”

Sulema closed her waking eyes, just as her mother had taught her, back when the world was sweet and Hafsa Azeina immortal. She drew in a long, slow breath and as she let it out again allowed it to resonate through the singer’s bone deep within her face that Aasah had been teaching her to use, the one he had referred to as her hidden mask.

“Ohnnnnn,” she sang, feeling a bit foolish. “Ohnnnnnn…”

Her dreaming eyes opened slowly, slowly. Shadows writhed like snakes in every corner; they dripped like black blood down the walls. Yaela was, oh, she was beautiful, and how she danced—

The painting Cassandre had presented to the dragon court, of Sulema as an Atualonian princess, wavered and fled like a mirage. The true image, hidden by the artist’s magic, flowed from the canvas hot and real as the desert sun. She gazed upon herself as she had been, as she would be again. Sulema Ja’Akari, true daughter of the desert, fierce and free. It seemed almost as if she could reach up and tug at the warrior’s braids that she had worn, which had been cut away from her to mark her shame.

A hot wind caressed her shorn scalp—

The dunes were so cunningly, so lovingly depicted it seemed as if she could almost hear them singing. Sand burned gold beneath Akari’s gaze.

Her feet burned—

The river, the sweet Dibris, was a shining ribbon of blue in the distance; she could all but smell it.

Somewhere in the distance a serpent sang, sweet and low, and was answered by another. Its mate perhaps, or a sister, welcoming the lost one home.

“Sulema. Sulema! Wake. Wake now, aiwa! We are here!”

There was joy in the young shadowmancer’s voice, and it startled Sulema so that she opened her eyes. Opened them and blinked against the hot blue sky. When had she fallen asleep? And how?

She pressed her hand against the ground and came up with a handful of sand. How—

A shadow fell across her. It was Yaela, face split in two with the most beautiful, most brilliant smile Sulema had ever seen.

“I did it!” The shadowmancer’s apprentice exulted. She threw her head back and laughed. “It worked!”

“What?” Sulema sat up, faint from long captivity and from shock. “What?”

She was sitting upon the sand, beneath a hot blue sky, in the shadow of a twist of standing stones like and not like the Bones of Eth. In the distance she could see the shining blue Dibris as it snaked across the Zeera, with a belly full of life, a belly full of death. A harsh wind stroked the dunes and they curled upon themselves like waves, roused to dance and to song.

Sulema closed her eyes and her heart broke at the sound of the desert singing. Singing her home.

SEVEN

The Great Salt Road began at the heart of the world and went on forever, glittering with the sung bones of heroes, cobbled with the unsung bones of ordinary people, bitter with the red salt dust.

Born in the aortic tunnels of the red salt mines of Quarabala, it flowed through the land like blood through a person’s body, bringing the life-sustaining red salt to every corner of the known world. From the deepest mines and canyons in the subterranean queendom of Quarabala to the easternmost reaches of the Sindanese empire and beyond it rang with the hooves of mounted warriors, sang with the voices of merchants, and bound them all together even as Illindra’s web bound all worlds.

A book had been placed in Maika’s hands before she could walk, and she had spent her childhood with a coterie of tutors whose collective goal was to stuff every bit of Saodan’s massive libraries into the stuff between her ears. She knew that the Great Salt Road led up through the shallow cracks in the earth that marked the Edge of Quarabala, across the seared flesh of the earth on a portion of the route known as the shadowed roads, through the once-thriving merchant city Min Yahtamu, through the Jehannim and to the green world beyond. She knew the names of the engineers who had delved deep and wrought the road from living rock, could recount its history and the value of trade goods that followed Quarabalese shadowmancers into the green lands and back again. Yet knowing of the road was not the same thing as understanding its perils.

Only now, as they ran from the Araids and their fell priests and toward the surface lands with their surfeit of wicked creatures or wickeder men, was Maika beginning to understand that this thing of wonder was also a thing to fear. And even if they survived the road, what then? Where would her people lay their heads at night, name their babies, make their music? Would the greenlanders welcome a people with no home? Maika was a student of history; she knew the ways of queens and kings. And she thought not.

A bit of something beside her foot caught Maika’s eye. She stooped and picked it up, glad for the distraction. Bone, she thought, though it glittered in the torchlight like mica-filled rock.

“What is this?” she asked Akamaia, holding it up near her tutor’s face. The woman peered nearsightedly through the shadowmancers’ gloom and pursed her lips.

“It is a proximal phalange,” she replied, wiggling her own thumbs at the young queen. “Human.” Leave me in peace, her eyes added, I am tired.

Maika stared at the bone as she walked, trying to imagine the person to whom it had once belonged. Had it been a woman or a man? she wondered. Bandit or bard? It glittered like a precious thing; someone had sung this person’s story into their bones. Whoever this bone belonged to had been loved, then, and had died long ago when Dzirani bonesingers still walked the world. She wondered who had loved this person, whether they had a good heart or bad, and whether they might have written a book she had read or painted a mural she had seen.

She wondered how many of the people she had led here would leave their thumb bones to lie forgotten for a thousand years, and if hers might be among them.

Eventually she tossed the bone aside, and then rather wished she had not. Was it disrespectful to the dead, to so casually discard a piece of their body? Or would it have been worse to keep it? She would have liked to ask Akamaia, but the Illindrist had turned aside. The old woman was weary and in pain, and Maika did not want to bother her any further. She turned instead to Tamimeha.

“Tell me, Grand Princess” she asked, “have you walked to the Edge before?” Tamimeha frowned, and the glow-paste of a high-caste warrior frowned with her.

“No.”

Maika waited for more, but Tamimeha strode on, glaring around them as if some mother or grandmother might suddenly decide to assassinate their queen. So Maika sighed and turned with reluctance to Amalua, the young Iponui who had brought them the Mask of Sajani. The young queen thought she would have liked the runner, but the young woman’s eyes were full of horrors and shadows, and she never smiled. Ever. Rumor had it that runners were full of salt and mischief, but this one had a face and a heart hard enough to break rocks.

“We are drawing near the innermost boundaries of the Edge,” Maika said, eager to show this youth that her queen was not ignorant of the world. “Are we likely to be attacked?” As she said this, she fingered the hilt of a long, sharp knife Tamimeha had bidden her wear at her hip. Maika had never been armed before.

“Perhaps,” the runner said with only the briefest of glances. “I would very much like to kill something.” Though Amalua’s face, shiny with healers’ ointments and fresh scar tissue, was half-healed from the terrible burns she had suffered, the grief in her eyes ran too deeply to ever truly mend.

It had taken them two full moons to leave Saodan. Half of her counselors moaned that this was not enough time to gather all the people together, while the other half— notably those of the outermost bastions, most pressed by the Araid threat—shouted at them to hurry, hurry. For her part, Maika had leaned her hopes against the pillars of Tamimeha and Akamaia. She trusted that they would know what best to do, and wished that she could share their combined confidence and experience.

Far beneath the scorched surface of the Seared Lands the people of Quarabala crawled like a thick black snake through tunnels and along the bottom of rifts that had been hewn and cobbled and worn smooth over the course of a thousand years. Woman, man, child, elder—all of the people who could walk, be carried, be pushed in a cart. There had been a few souls foolish enough to remain behind and clutch at their worldly possessions. Maika had wanted even those few rounded up and forced to march.

“My people are my people,” she had insisted through tears, “even the stupid ones.” But Tamimeha just shook her head.

“They would only slow us down,” she had said as gently as she was able, “and we must make haste. Three more runners have come in with reports of Araid incursions.” The warrior had not wanted to bring along those people who could not walk on their own, viewing their lives as an acceptable sacrifice to speed, but Maika had invoked her privilege as queen.

“We will not bring the prisoners,” Tamimeha had insisted, “and that is within my authority to decide. Those who have broken the queen’s law have forfeited the queen’s protection.”

“Besides,” Akamaia had added—sweet, gentle Akamaia who wept when she fed moths to her o’oraid—“they will slow the reavers down, when our pursuers break through the walls and into the city.” Akamaia’s favorite husband had been murdered, years and years ago. She had no pity in her heart for criminals.

The black snake rattled with wagon wheels and hand carts. It wept with the voices of children and scolded with the voices of mothers. But mostly it sang the song of Quarabala, the Seared Lands—of love and regret, of leavings and homecomings, of weariness and wonder and hope. This song sustained Maika as no food or drink ever could; it kept her moving forward after her second pair of sandals fell apart and she grew so tired of spitting red sand that she just gave up and let it cake upon her lips and teeth.

* * *

If I make it through this alive, Maika promised herself for the thousandth time, I will never take another walk as long as I live. I will remain at home in a palace, eating sweetmeats, and growing fat upon my throne. I will change my clothes twice a day, and take twice as many baths. Pshew, I stink!

She had hoped that once the people were convinced to leave they might have finished their journey in a moons’ time. But it had been a full two-moon since they had left Saodan and they were just now coming to the innermost boundaries of the Edge, those lawless lands where the strong preyed upon the weak and the sky was so close you could see it. She had walked through three pairs of sturdy sandals, lost a great deal of weight, and lost more than a few of her people too as they slipped away by twos and threes and whole families during each midday rest, preferring the possibility of reavers and Araids to the very real struggles of walking day after day after miserable day.

Four times during that two-moon span, Maika was called upon to give her blessings over the body of someone whose spirit had chosen to take the Lonely Road instead. The third was an infant who had been born too soon and whose grieving mother refused to look her queen in the eye. Maika had returned to her travel tent after that one and had cried until she threw up. The bodies were burned, as there was no time to bury them properly and nobody wanted to leave them for the reavers.

For the first time in her short life, Maika knew despair. This journey seemed as wretched as any tale she could remember hearing about the Night of Sorrows, and they had not even made it to the surface yet, nor faced the enemy from which they fled. How, then, did she dare hope that any of them would survive the shadowed road?

The great black snake made of people had wound its slow way through the greater and lesser towns of the Quarabala—Oloulou, Ameha, and Leakala, Ehana, Ia’u, and Ni’ipau—past the empty merchants’ stalls and alleyways thick with vermin. It grew bloated as stragglers joined the whole, more than making up for those who fell away. They slept through the heat of day and every night traveled under the glow of lanterns and starslight and the carved faces of the ancestors, until finally they had reached the border between the civilized lands of Quarabala and the Edge, marked by the Starfell Gates.

Fashioned in days of old by the Hammerfall Smiths, forged of stars-fallen metal and precious gems, the gate glittered like the heavens above, reminding the people of Quarabala of the ancestors’ promise: that some sweet day in the far-off, they would once more walk beneath the night sky and the day, with water and sand beneath their feet, and the wide sky overhead.

Today is that day, Maika thought, and her heart pounded hard against her ribs. I am not afraid. Yet her hands shook as she walked forward on trembling legs to hand the queen’s key to the gatekeeper. This gate had not been opened since the Night of Sorrows, and on that night—

No, Maika told herself firmly. I will not invite black luck into the night by entertaining such thoughts. She breathed deep to banish the trembling from her limbs, the trepidation in her spirit, and forced a smile as she handed over the heavy, cold key. On this night of all nights, her people needed her to be strong.

The gatekeeper, a woman as broad and strong-backed and possibly as old as the gate itself, bowed to Maika and pressed the key to her reverent sunken mouth. Her starsilk robes flowed about her thick ankles as she made her slow way up the last steps, thrust the key home, and turned once.

Twice.

Three times.

For a moment nothing happened, and Maika wondered if perhaps the gate had died of dust and hopelessness. Then came a coruscation of tiny, glittering lights as a thousand miniature spiders, cunningly crafted of silvery metal and each set with a single precious stone, dropped from holes concealed all along the top of the gate like stars falling from the heavens. They darted this way and that across the face of the gate trailing strands of precious magesilver, each a wonder of color, so that within moments the gate was veiled in an intricate weaving of light and magic.

Their task finished, the spiders scurried back up the webs and into their holes again, for all the world like living things.

Brilliance rippled across the gate, glowing brighter with each wave, until Maika’s eyes watered to look upon it. She raised a hand to shield her face from the glare, but the gate gave one final, massive burst of brilliance.

Then winked out.

Maika sighed, and the people sighed with her, in the absence of beauty. She opened her mouth to ask the gatekeeper to turn the key again and bring back the light, but a soft glow began to emanate from the gate, and this was not so kind. A great spiders’ web glowed blue and cold. At each meeting of strands hung a silvery globe as big as a man’s fist, and each of these held the image of a different face. Dark faces and fair, women and men, slaves and queens, alike only in their expressions of agony—these were the enemies of Quarabala, caught in the moments of death, a warning to those who would oppose her queens.

A warning to my enemies, Maika realized. It was a frightening thought… and satisfying. Each of these screaming, dying people had been a threat to the ancestors of her line, to the people whom she had been bred and born to lead, and she was glad—suddenly, fiercely glad—that they had suffered.

A hand settled warm and heavy on her shoulder; Maika started and nearly yelped out loud.

“Do not be afraid.” It was only Tamimeha, looking down at her with grave concern. Maika rolled her eyes and shrugged off the warrior’s hand.

“I am not afraid,” she insisted. “I am a queen.”

“So you are.” The old warrior’s lips twitched into a rare smile. She inclined her head. The dreadful web flared bright as moonslight, then a darkness fell upon them so swift and terrible that it hurt their eyes, and the Starfell Gates swung outward.

“It is time,” Akamaia whispered. “Time for us to leave our home. Have courage, my child.”

Maika did not need to be told twice—nor, she realized, did she need courage. She simply needed to do her duty. She tilted her face upward, let the pride of her ancestors fall upon her like stardust. Then she led her people through the Starfell Gates and out of Quarabala forever.

EIGHT

They were no more than a half-day’s slow walk into the Edge when a commotion near the front of the line brought them all to a standstill. Warriors’ spears bristled round Maika and she strained to peer over them, to see what was happening.

There was a runner, an Iponui who was almost as short as Maika herself. The runner was followed by a man. A raggedy, rough, low-caste man with missing teeth, brought into the presence of his queen. This was the first Edgelander Maika had ever seen, and she could not help but feel a twinge of disappointment. She half expected to see a giant, wild-eyed and with his teeth filed for tearing at human flesh; instead she found herself entirely too close to a low-caste ragtag who smelled of piss and whose unkempt mop of hair made her itch just looking at it.

The Iponui dropped to one knee, bowing so low her nose almost touched her thigh. “Your Magnificence,” she said through a veil of spears and hard-faced warriors. “This man begs audience of his queen. He would ask—”

“Makune does not beg,” the man said. “Especially some little buta thinks she queen, eh?” A low hiss ran through the warriors, but he just laughed, showing a mouth full of rot. “Makune demands.”

He probably thinks himself brave, Maika thought. But I think he is just stupid. Tamimeha is ready to knock his head off. Indeed, the older woman’s eyes narrowed with hard contempt.

“Demands.” Tamimeha frowned. “You make demands of your queen?”

“Not my queen,” the man said, setting his feet shoulder-width apart and throwing his chest out in a belligerent manner. “I am Edgelander, and this is my kingdom.”

“A charming kingdom it is, too,” Maika said in the chilliest voice she could muster. She did not like the way this man stared at Tamimeha’s tits, even though the warrior could beat him to death using nothing more than her sandals. “You wish to speak with me? Speak. Do so quickly, before I have my buta poke you full of holes and let all the shit out.”

The Seared Lands fell into a shocked silence.

Well, Maika thought, that was effective.

The coarse man burst into coarse laughter. “Ah! Ah! You got balls, little buta. Maybe you are queen after all? Maybe after you grow some mamouleh.” He cupped both hands over his chest and leered. “You want to be part of my nag?”

Maika opened her mouth to answer, but Amalua stepped in front of her, somehow making that a gesture of respect for her queen, contempt for the man facing them, and a threat, all in one smooth movement.

“Speak to my queen like that one more time,” she said softly, “and you die.” A promise, not a threat.

The man’s smile faded, and he shrugged. “Just talk,” he said in a petulant voice. “Just man talk is all.”

Maika pursed her lips and waited. Her first meeting with an Edgelander was proving disappointing. She very much wanted to ask the man why he had come, then she wanted him gone.

Be patient, she told herself, taking a long, slow breath. She knew that the first to speak in a parley ceded power to the other. Be patient. In the end, the low-caste man spoke first, and Maika felt as if she had a victory.

“We have built a barricade,” he said, puffing his chest out again. “You cannot pass.”

Maika breathed through flared nostrils, refusing to speak or bite her lips or clench her fists, any of these things her body urged her to do. The man went on in a petulant voice, obviously frustrated by her lack of reaction.

“You cannot pass unless you pay.”

“And what is your price?” Akamaia demanded, coming up behind Maika and sounding badly out of breath. This journey had been hard on the Illindrist, not least because she had insisted on bringing with her every book in the Queens’ Library. “What price for safe passage by your queen through her own lands?” Her voice was hard and clenched as a fist.

“Her lands.” The man laughed. “The Edge is no man’s land, no girl’s neither. This land”—he spat—“is for those who are strong enough to take it. You strong enough, girl?”

Maika strove to ignore the man’s taunts, and the threat that lurked behind his words. Were they strong enough? Every Illindrist would be needed if they hoped to provide what shade and safety they could to the evacuees; they could not afford a battle, not now. This journey would stretch the sorcerers to their breaking point, some to the point of death, and every moment wasted was a moment more than they could spare. She judged that they were strong enough to take this land, and that doing so would be the end of them all.

“We are strong enough to take this land,” she assured the Edgelander, “but we do not want it. We seek merely to pass through these parts unhindered. Pass through, and never return.”

“Never return, hey.” The man’s eyes flashed in the gloom. “Saodan is empty?” he craned his neck and looked down the river of people.

“We have left Saodan,” she said. The memory of those few who had been left behind was a stone dragging at her heart. Honor bid her add, “But it is not safe for you to go there. The Araids come, with their Arachnists and hordes of reavers. You should follow us, those who may, lest your lands are overrun as well.”

“Safe.” The man stared at her for a moment, lip twisted upward in an ugly sneer. “Safe is for queens. Not for the likes of us out here, living on the Edge.” He spat. “Not for the likes of us.”

“Then what is your price?” She repeated Akamaia’s question. “I will not ask again. Tell me what it will cost for us to pass through this—kingdom—of yours unmolested, or we will raise spears against you and take what is mine to begin with. You say this is the Edge, and that these lands are yours. I say this is Quarabala, and these lands are mine. But in the interest of making haste, I will listen to you, and I will decide whether to play your silly game.” She pulled herself up to her full, if unimpressive, height, mustering all the dignity she could. “Or to have my spears thrust through your stupid bellies and leave you for reaver food.”

Tamimeha grunted surprise. Amalua thumped her spear down once, twice, three times in respect, and in the next moment the ground was shaking as warriors drummed their approval of this fierce young queen.

The man bristled at her insulting words, but spears bristled back at him, and finally he backed down with an ugly laugh.

“Not worth the fight, you,” he said. “Little girls and old women not fit for my nag. When you are gone, I will shit in your bed and eat your food.”

Maika imagined an Araid wrapping this man up in spidersilk, and smiled.

“The price for passage is—” He looked around him, at the people, the warriors, the counselors, and licked his lips. “Sweet water, and red meat, and your nubile women.”

“Unacceptable.” As Akamaia had taught, Maika did not elaborate or allow outrage to show in her voice, but merely waited for his counteroffer. I should let my nubile women kick his ass, she seethed. As if I would buy my safety with the bodies of my people.

“Girl children—” he began again. Maika raised her hand and cut him off.

“No,” she told him. “Not one woman, nor man nor child. Name another price. You try my patience.”

Makune hit her with a black scowl. “Sweet water,” he growled. “Red meat, and—” He glanced at Akamaia with greedy eyes. “An Illindrist. Make magic for us. Keep safe.”

The seer sucked breath in through her teeth with a sharp whistle, and Tamimeha’s grip tightened on her spear. Maika held up her hand again, and pitched her voice to carry.

“Manna water,” she offered, “not sweet. Dried meat, as much as you alone can carry. Not a single Illindrist or shadowmancer, but”—she ignored Akamaia’s hot, hard glare—“my own Illindrist will cast a blessing on you and yours, a protection against reavers. That is my offer. That is my only offer.”

The words hung between them like a body in a spider’s web, and the man remained silent for what seemed like an eternity. Finally he shrugged, face unreadable.

“Manna water, dried meat—packed tight, no cheat—and magic blessing for me and my chiefs against our enemies.”

“Against reavers,” Maika corrected.

“Against reavers,” the man agreed, and a sly smile stole across his face. “What other enemies do we have out here on the Edge, hah? Surely not you. You are our queen.” He laughed, his hard round belly shaking as if they were the cleverest words ever uttered.

Maika let her hands drop to her side, resisting the urge to rub at her throbbing temples.

A headache, she thought ruefully. Now I really do feel like a queen.

* * *

After the queen’s ransom had been delivered, the people of Quarabala resumed their slow and wretched exodus. Tamimeha and her strong women encouraged them to move as quickly as they were able, and for a time the pace quickened, spurred on by the Iponui’s shouts and deep-seated fear of the Edgelanders, but soon the weariness which clung to them all tight as clothes dragged at their feet. Somewhere nearby a child sobbed, a thin, hopeless sound that wrung tears from Maika’s eyes. She despaired that even the fittest citizens would be hard pressed to keep up the pace, and that the frailest would soon be lost.

“My queen,” Amalua murmured to her, “you must understand—some of these people will die. Perhaps many of them will die, but if you survive this journey, and a greater portion of our people as well, you will have succeeded. We have our books, our songs, our seers—you will have saved the heart of Quarabala, if not our cities.”

The horrifically scarred runner had shadowed Maika since the day she had faced down the Edgeland leader, sleeping curled at the edge of Maika’s bedroll as she slept, even insisting on tasting food and drink before it passed the queen’s lips. Maika suspected that the young Iponui felt as if she had failed to save those at the outer bastion, and wished for a chance to redeem herself.

She nodded reluctantly.

“I know,” the young queen said. “I just wish—I wish I could save everyone.”

“You cannot,” Amalua answered, and a cold wind blew through her words. “I cannot. No one can.”

They had been moving quickly for some nights’ time, sleeping during the hours of heat so that the shadowmancers could rest in preparation for working their magics when they reached the shadowed roads. These lands had been the outer bastions when Maika’s grandmother had been a queen, and they had been part of the inner city in her grandmother’s grandmother’s time. Now it was the Edge, the half-dead shallows of a sea of salt and blood and frightened people drying and dying under the wrathful eyes of Akari.

This land has been shrinking in on us all along, she thought, like a spider’s web unraveling at the edges, till nothing is left but the spider and a few sad strands. Had we remained, we would have died anyway, in my time or my daughter’s, perhaps. It is good we left when we did—perhaps I have saved my people, after all.

Or perhaps, whispered the dark voice of doubt, you have simply hastened their deaths.

“How do I know?” she whispered, anguished. “How do I know?”

“How do you know what?” Akamaia asked, not as lost in thought as Maika had guessed.

“How do I know if I have done the right thing, leading my people from their homeland? What if we all die here? What if we die when we are on the naked earth, and Akari flies above us? What if—”

“You will never know,” Akamaia interrupted gently, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Not until the historians write the books of these times and the ink dries, not until you are old as dust and your name is used to bore a schoolgirl to tears. Maybe not even then.”

“Yet you know,” Maika insisted. “You with your eyes of Pelang and your o’oraid, you can see the future.”

Akamaia shook her head. “I can see a short way,” she amended. “It is like staring into a clouded pool: you see a fish flashing by, maybe, or a bit of moonslight shining upon the water. Mostly you see your own face reflected up at you, puzzled and confused and lost.”

“You said the Araids are coming,” Maika said, “that they would overrun Quarabala and kill us all if we remained.”

“I did, and they are,” the seer agreed. “Likely the Araids rule in Saodan now, and would be feasting on our flesh had we remained. Yet I cannot tell you with certainty whether we survive this journey, or this day, even this hour. That which is seen does not always come to pass, and that which comes to pass is not always seen. This is why we have sa and ka—to sense the land about us, the song of earth and sky and wind. It is also why we have Iponui and warriors, and our own strong eyes.” She patted Maika’s arm. “And strong, smart young queens who question everything. With these tools, we may have hope.”

“It is not much.”

“No, it is not,” Akamaia agreed. “But it is something. And it may be—if we are lucky, and smart, and brave—it may be enough.”

They walked on in silence after that. Maika listened to the shushhh-shushhh of the warriors’ feet padding along the path, to the crunch and whisper of bone and dust beneath them. To the dry hot wind that sucked through the rifts like the air through an angry old woman’s lips. They were closer to the surface than Maika had ever been, so close the path and the walls were hot to touch, though the shadowmancers strove to shade and cool their steps. She strained her eyes upward, hoping—though she knew better—to catch a quick, far-off glimpse of this sun dragon who had banished her people to lives of exile and darkness.

Bright as gold, they said of the sun, hot as fire. Though it was folly to look upon the sun here, in the Seared Lands, to have one’s flesh melted away and bones crisped to dust. Maika had always longed to turn her face to the sun’s warmth, just once, to look upon the dreadful splendor of Akari Sun Dragon.

To ride beneath the sun, as those horse-warriors of legend, she thought, closing her eyes and walking blind, must be glorious.

Urged by Akamaia’s words, she unfurled her ka up toward the seared surface of the earth, let the tongues of sa taste the wind. She sensed the moving body of her people like a great mass of life and light and brilliance, a lovely low chorus of vibrance defying the silence of rock and dust. They burned bright as stars, the souls of her people, like hearthfires on a cold night, or—

Above them, in the cold faces of a forgotten city, bright lights winked and shone. They moved furtively, in twos and threes, above and before the seething mass of humanity, closing in from all sides. Maika’s eyes flew open and she gasped.

“Ware!” she shouted, breathless, pointing up and up into the canyon walls above. She could not see them with her eyes open, but she knew they were there: enemies, armed enemies, waiting in the dark. “Ware! We are betrayed!” For she had no doubt that this had been the Edgelanders’ plan all along; to lure them into this quiet place and kill them all.

Makune ducked away from the warriors and would have run, but Amalua caught him by the hair. She dragged him down to the ground at her feet, and without a word or a glance at her queen she drew a long knife and stabbed him in the eye with it. The Edgelander screamed, horribly, heels drumming against the sung bones of heroes, raising the dust and shadows of the dead as his soul flew to join them.

Maika stared. She had seen animals butchered, had attended executions of prisoners, but she had never seen death like this. Raw and ugly and stinking, spraying blood and eye fluids as it went. Amalua wrenched her knife free and wiped it on the Edgelander’s filthy robes even as he gasped in the dirt.

“Araids take him,” she said, spitting upon his ruined face. “I knew he was a liar.”

Maika opened her mouth—to say what, she had no idea—and laughter bubbled out; loud, clear laughter like a child’s. She clapped both hands over her face.

A man died, she told herself. His blood is on my feet! And I am laughing—

Even that thought was torn from her as, in the next moment, men swarmed down the cliff face, screaming, blades flashing in the dim light. She drew her knife and held it before her, trembling like a moth in a spider’s web.

A queen is not afraid, she told herself. A queen is not afraid.

“Spears!” Tamimeha cried, and warriors clustered thick around their queen, bristling outward, grim-faced and ready to die. “We are betrayed!”

And then there was no more time for fear.

* * *

The Edgelanders attacked the shadowmancers first, and the women with children next. Perhaps they wanted to take them as prisoners, or perhaps they guessed—rightly—that the warriors of Quarabala would not resist the urge to protect the most vulnerable, at any cost to themselves.

Men poured down the sides of the canyon like the spiders of Starfell Gates. They were armed mostly with clubs, knives, and crude spears, but what they lacked in weapons and training they made up for in numbers and sheer savagery. Maika watched in horror as one of these low-caste men threw himself upon Tamimeha, teeth snapping like a reaver as he tried to bite her throat. He was cast off, and the next as well, but looking up at the swarm of Edgelanders and listening to the screams of her people, Maika knew they would be overwhelmed. She gripped her knife with a trembling hand, drew a breath, and prepared to die.

There was an odd whistling noise, like the wind in a narrow canyon, and Maika’s first thought was that it might be bats, or birds. Then something brushed across the top of her head, as if death itself had reached a hand from Eid Kalmut to ruffle her hair, and she let out an involuntary squeak of fright.

“Archers!” she cried. “Ware archers!”

Another arrow whispered overhead, not so close this time but still terrifying, and Amalua shouted as a third landed with a soft clatter at her feet.

“My queen!” she shouted. “To my queen! Ulukau i ka Peleha o’e!” So saying, she scooped Maika up in her strong arms—knife, mask and all—and began to run toward an overhang in the rock.

Perhaps her shouts had drawn the attention of the archers, or perhaps they knew to look for a young girl who had the foolish arrogance to have been born a Kentakuyan queen. Maika would never know. Arrows fell about them thick as secrets as Amalua ran for their lives. Maika clung to the Iponui and felt the woman’s shoulders jerk, her footsteps falter, felt the body jerk again, but she did not stop or slow her pace until they had reached scant shelter. Even then she curled protectively around the queen, shielding her body. Her arms tightened, and she breathed into Maika’s ear in long, shuddering, warm gasps.

“Mother,” Amalua whispered. “Tell my mother—oh, my queen—tell her—”

And then there was nothing but the gentle fall of arrows, the singing screams of the wounded and dying, the long empty silence between the breath that was and the breath that would never be.

* * *

“She is here! I have found her!”

The voice came from far away. The world shifted and a weight, a great and heavy cold weight, was lifted from her shoulders.

I will die now, Maika thought. They have discovered me. She shivered in the cold and dark, waiting for these crude men to hack her into pieces, or worse. In the end, it was her own warriors who had found her.

The Edgelanders had been defeated, beaten back, chased to their mean camps and put to the spear. Akamaia had lived through the attack, though one arm had been badly broken, and her trifold loom smashed to pieces. Tamimeha had survived as well, without suffering so much as a torn fingernail, much to her shame. Too many of their own citizens had been killed in the attack, but they had lost a great many more warriors.

Their greatest loss was the loss of hope. The shadowmancers had been hit first and hardest, their sparse numbers decimated. Only four remained alive—four, when two dozen had scarcely been enough to protect the people in their exile and exodus. Four surviving, their scent now carried in the winds and wounded flesh of the Seared Lands, a lure to shadows and greater predators of the worst sort.

It was the death of all hope. The hopeless men of the Edge had not hoped to gain anything through their actions so much as they desired to drag the lives of others down into the same miserable pit they had dug for themselves.

Maika trembled and wept as the body of her faithful Iponui was dragged off her. Beautiful, bright Amalua had died protecting her queen. When they rolled her over, Maika could see her eyes, flat and dry and blind, staring up toward the sky.

A low wail rose from the bottom of the young queen’s soul. It wound its way like a dark snake through her gut, her heart, her lungs, and finally burst through her mouth into the dangerous world. She screamed, and screamed again, jaw cracking and chest heaving as she could not force the utter wrongness of what she was feeling out and away from her body fast enough.

“Hush, sweet girl, hush, my queen,” Tamimeha murmured as she helped Maika to her feet. She glanced around them and leaned in to whisper. “Be still. Have courage. The people need to see you alive and well and confident. We will survive this. We will. Have no fear, my queen.”

Maika closed her mouth and clenched her teeth hard, so hard her jaw ached, in an effort to hold the screams back. A shudder shook her thin frame and tears rolled like thunder down her face as she stared into the empty eyes of the Iponui. Amalua, she thought, would have understood. It was not fear she felt, not for her person or even for the fate of her people.

It was rage.

NINE

The sand beneath her bare feet was white as bones, and softer than the sands of home. The wind that swept down from the peaks of the Jehannim to the foothills where she stood whispered of early berries and sage and wyverns’ eyries. The mountains’ passions were clutched in stony fists and held up to the sun, not buried and secret like the heart of the desert or locked away in dark places like the daughters of dragons.

Sulema wiggled her toes, luxuriating in the sensations on her unclothed body, of wind and sunlight and freedom. It was not home, but neither was it a dungeon.

“I thank you,” she said, and meant it. “Had I remained in Atukos, likely I would have died of thirst. I might have worked out a way to escape”—she thought specifically of the Dreaming Lands— “but I thank you.”

“If you had remained in Atualon, you would have been dead before tomorrow’s dawn,” Yaela said. She dug through her bag and pulled out articles of clothing to toss to Sulema. “Bashaba plans to have poisoned gasses pumped into your cell through the drain-holes. Here, you cannot go naked into the mountains. I did not rescue you from the Dragon King’s dungeons to lose you to sun-sickness.”

“Bashaba. I do not even know the woman. How can she hate me enough to want me dead?” Then Sulema looked, really looked at the clothing Yaela had tossed at her feet. “My vest! You brought my vest! How did you…?” She turned her face away, to hide shameful tears.

“Bashaba does not hate you. You are a threat to her son, and she would see you eliminated. Surely the daughter of Hafsa Azeina understands this.” Yaela rolled her eyes at Sulema’s stupidity. “Cassandre still had your clothing from the last time she painted you, and I thought you would prefer them than slippers and gowns, or a golden crown.” Her lips twitched. “Certainly they are more sensible.”

“Ah, my thanks, this is much better.” Sulema wriggled with delight as she laced up her vest. It felt like home. She hoped that she would not have to bare her breasts on this day. She wanted a meal, and sleep, and another meal before she was forced to fight so much as a stray thought. “Cassandre knows of this?”

“When the magic in her painting is discovered—and it will be discovered—her life will be forfeit. She and all who loved you in Atualon will fall under suspicion, and if Bashaba has her way, they will fall under the sword, as well.”

Sulema’s breath caught in her throat, and she shut her eyes against an upwelling of grief and shame. That sweet, bright, joyous Cassandre would die because of her was unthinkable; that she would not be the first to die for her was horrifying. What about me is worth dying for? she asked herself. Nothing. Nothing. She had grown up Ja’Akari, and knew a true thought when it came to her.

She thought of Daru, her mother’s little apprentice who had gone missing and was almost certainly dead, and of her brother Leviathus. Of Saskia, and others of the Ja’Akari whose bones lay unburned in foreign lands because of her birth or her folly. She could not yet face those deaths which lay so near to her heart, and which could arguably be laid at her feet: those of her mother and father. Too close, too new. Neither did she mention aloud the name of Mattu Halfmask, her lover and the younger son of Bashaba. Sulema refused to think of him, that ten-faced bastard, or give a damn whether he lived or died. And she most certainly did not miss him.

But Sulema had grown up Ja’Akari, and knew a false thought when it came to her.

“Will your master Aasah be in danger?” she asked, more to take her mind off her own grief than out of real concern. She had studied under the man but had never really known him, and had not particularly liked what she knew.

Yaela’s mouth twisted as if she had bitten something bitter. “Aasah,” she said, “can take care of himself. As can your lover.”

I do not give a dead goat’s ass what happens to Mattu Halfmask, Sulema thought fiercely, but she knew that to be another lie. “My former lover,” she said aloud, “can go piss on an itch bush, for all I care.”

“Your former lover,” Yaela mocked, “is the one who told Aasah of Bashaba’s plans, and fortunately for both of us, my master saw fit to tell me.”

Sulema slumped, weary of it all. Her head hurt, her arm hurt, and her heart hurt most of all, but she would not admit any of this to a woman she hardly knew. Yaela had saved her life, but she was hardly a sword-sister. Sulema shook the weakness from her mind and body as a horse shed sand after a long roll.

“Men,” she declared, “whether they are lovers or liars, sorcerers or kings, are all a pain in the ass.” Then she asked, “Do you have water in that pack of yours? Or food?”

“Neither,” Yaela said with a shrug, “but I have salt to buy both for our journey, and there is a good watering hole not far from here.” She turned and walked away from the twisted stones, and Sulema followed.

The air smelled sweet, if Sulema herself did not. It had been long since she had bathed. Her skin itched, her scalp itched where the hair was growing back, and her teeth felt sticky and abominable.

“How big is this watering hole? Big enough to bathe in?”

Yaela glanced over her shoulder, a look that said idiot.

“Bathe in a watering hole? As if this were an Atualonian pleasure hunt in the spring sunshine.” She rolled her eyes. “What do you know of the Jehannim, Ja’Akari?”

“Not much,” Sulema admitted. “I know the winds blow so hot and dry it can be dangerous, and I know that wyverns nest in the heights. Other than that…” She shrugged. “We Zeeranim do not venture often into the mountains. There are too many slavers prowling between the pridelands and the peaks, and there is no desire in our hearts to travel through them, much less into Quarabala. The Seared Lands are not fit for woman or beast, so there is no reason for us to ride west at all.”

“No,” Yaela agreed after a long pause, “I suppose there is not.”

“I do not mean to offend.”

“You cannot offend. You speak in ignorance.”

Sulema opened her mouth to argue, but in that moment, she was too weary and heartsore to bother.

* * *

The watering hole was indeed big enough to bathe in—big enough for a fist of warriors to bathe in all at once. Sulema took her cue from Yaela’s alert stance—and her own senses, which sang in her blood like shofarot along the riverbanks—and kept her clothes on. She crouched on her heels at the water’s edge and scooped handfuls of sweet, cool water to her mouth.

It was good. Good beyond taste, or smell, or even the sensation of cold liquid in her parched mouth. It was good in that she was free, with the wide world about her, road dust on her feet, and a song in her heart. It was—

It was a song, she realized, a sweet slow canticle like the earth rousing to the rain after a long dry winter, or a warrior rousing from her sickbed long after she had been given up for dead. Water dribbled between Sulema’s fingers back into the still pond. She stared, fascinated by the ripples and whorls that disturbed the water’s surface, dancing to the aria that wound through her sa and ka, black-thorned tendrils delicate and deadly tearing her to pieces with its loveliness. The ripples spread from the heart of the pond outward and small pebbles capered at the water’s edge as the ground beneath her feet heaved and shuddered.

Earthquake, Sulema thought, and a cold frisson of terror dribbled between the song’s lovely notes to chill her heart. Sajani! Sajani stirs!

The song stopped abruptly, and with it the trembling of the earth, but not Sulema’s fear. All the little games of her life— the struggle between her desire to be Ja’Akari and her dread of dreamshifting, the tangled knot of anger and grief that was all she had left of her mother, love and lust, even her imprisonment and escape—were no more important than a game of aklashi in the face of this absolute threat. Sajani was waking; she could hear the dragon’s thoughts in the stillness of the earth, could feel Akari’s anticipation in the warmth of the air.

“Ja’Akari?” Yaela sounded breathless; as good as a shriek of terror from any other woman. “Was that—”

Nearby, a woman screamed.

Sulema froze, a new terror rising in her heart as she remembered every frightening story ever told to her about Jehannim.

“Yaela,” it was her turn to ask, “what was—”

“Ssst!” Yaela hissed. She stood poised on the balls of her feet. Her face was calm, but her slit pupils had gone wide, giving her a feral look that set Sulema’s nerves even more on edge. The scream was answered by another call to the north, and a third to the north-northwest. Neither of these sounded remotely human.

“Mymyc,” Yaela said calmly as if she had not just declared both of their lives forfeit. She pivoted with such grace and beauty that it took Sulema’s breath away, tucked her chin in to her chest, and ran.

“Escaped a dungeon to be eaten by mymyc,” she muttered bitterly, leaping awkwardly to her feet. “Unless the dragon wakes and kills us all first. Story of my life.”

Where there is life, there is yet hope, whispered a voice cold with the winds of the Lonely Road. Run, Kithren, Run!

The woman screamed again. Though Sulema knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was a greater predator’s mimicry, it still sounded like a woman, which made it somehow even more horrible. Sulema dropped her horror, the dragonsong enchantment, the sick-weak feeling of having been imprisoned away from the sun, and ran.

* * *

Yaela was a woman of Quarabala. Though Sulema had heard little of those Seared Lands, sun-cursed and deadly, she knew this: to be aboveground at first light was to die a horrible death. The Quarabalese people were known, therefore, for their ability to outrun even the dawn.

Knowing and knowing were two very different things.

Though less time passed than it took to drop a handful of sand, already Sulema caught only the barest glimpse of the shadowmancer’s apprentice as she ran down the hilly path. Swift as the wind she raced, seeming unhindered by the heavy bag slung over her shoulder or the pale sand that rose behind her in soft little puffs.

She does not have to outrun the mymyc, after all, Sulema thought. She just has to outrun me.

Even as she followed, Sulema could hear the predators calling behind her, yelping and cackling and screaming. Sometimes one of their voices would mimic a human’s scream, or a horse’s whinny, or the low fluting call of a wyvern. Mymyc, it was said, had no song of their own, and so had to steal the voices of those they killed.

And mymyc would kill anything. Not even wyverns or bintshi were safe from a pack of the creatures. Judging from the sounds closing in at her heels, they would soon be singing with the voice of a Ja’Akari who was too stupid to stay in the desert.

It is only trouble if you get caught… Sulema thought, as her legs screamed and her lungs burned …and it seems I am well and truly caught. If I get out of this alive, I am going to run all the way to Aish Kalumm, and never look back.

She had always wanted to see mymyc. It was said that, from a distance, they appeared as beautiful black horses. Only when a traveler was too close might she discover that they were fanged and clawed as any greater predator, and that they were covered in iridescent black scales. As if knowing her thoughts, claws scrabbled behind her, and a low coughing laugh spurred Sulema to even greater speed.

Guts and goatfuckery, she thought in a rising panic, I am about to see what a mymyc looks like on the inside.

The path took a steep dip and turn to the right and ended among twisted stones that reminded her of the Bones of Eth. Sulema dodged into the small circle as a hare might take cover under a tangle of blackthorn, knowing the shelter was insufficient but clinging desperately to hope. As she passed between the stones, shadows roiled up from the ground and engulfed her. She yelped, and the sound was swallowed by the darkness.

“Stop.”

It was Yaela’s voice, soft and low, and it seemed to come from every direction in the dark.

“Stop, little warrior. Stay still.”

Sulema skidded to a halt, arms windmilling, afraid that she was going to bash her head into one of the rocks before the mymyc could eat her. Or before she could catch fire and die screaming in the Seared Lands—or die in the mountains, or in the hold of a slaver’s ship, or—

Guts and goatfuckery, she thought again as she caught her balance. The entire world competes to see which horror can kill me first.

The shadows roiled into a sinuous solid shape that coiled itself protectively around her and the shadowmancer’s apprentice. Yaela was dancing, arms outflung and feet pounding the sand, a soft little tattoo that seduced the heart and ensnared the soul. Hips swiveling, feet pounding, head thrown back and face suffused in joy, she was lost in her magic in a way Sulema could only envy.

That, she thought, is the soul of ehuani.

The shadows heeded Yaela’s commands. They joined into a serpentine whole and reared over the women’s heads, hissing, red eyes glowing, smokelike plumes rising in a crest above a lionsnake made of shadows and fear. It was huge, impossibly so, many times bigger than the old grandmother bitch that had almost killed her, and Sulema found herself paralyzed with fear as it loomed above her.

The mymyc felt no such terror.

Sulema could see them through the shadow-snake. A pack of five or more, they were indeed horselike in appearance, but a second glance was all it took to dispel the illusion. Bigger than horses and more thickly muscled, their iridescent black hides shone in the sunlight. They moved with a quick, reptilian grace, fanged mouths open and tongues lolling as they called to one another in borrowed voices, and lizardlike tails whipped behind them as they swarmed down the path, intent on eating these humans who had dared invade their territory. No illusory snake, it seemed, would deny them their rightful prey.

Sulema grabbed a fist-sized rock and held it high. I am no easy meat, she reminded herself. It is a good day to die. She knew that the lionsnake, frightening though it looked, was shadow and illusion; it could not—

The lionsnake struck, snapping the lead mymyc up in its jaws. It thrashed its head back and forth like a vash’ai with a pig. The predator squealed, a terrible grating sound that made Sulema drop her rock and clap both hands over her ears, and then its neck broke with an audible snap and it went limp. The illusory reptile tossed its head back, unhinged its jaw, and swallowed the mymyc whole before whipping back around and striking at the rest of the pack.

The remaining mymyc spun about and fled, wailing, into the foothills.

The lionsnake twisted around and regarded the two women who were neatly trapped inside its coils. Shadow-claws curled into the sand, and its shadow-plume stood out in a stiff mane as it swayed in the air above them, preparing to strike.

The sight froze Sulema’s heart. It did not seem to her that the magical beast was under Yaela’s control, not by half.

“Enough,” Yaela said. She brought her dance to an end, one leg pointed before her in almost a fighter’s pose, arms raised above her head, wrists poised in the air so gracefully she looked to Sulema like a poem come to life.

The lionsnake opened its mouth, venom sacs bulging, and hissed.

“Enough!” Yaela cried, and her voice was a thunder that rolled across the low hills, echoing in the world of Shehannam, as well. The lionsnake bowed its head in submission and faded away like black mist.

I can hear echoes of the Dreaming Lands while I am awake, Sulema thought. That is interesting. Terrifying, but interesting. She did not mention this to the shadowmancer’s apprentice, however. To Yaela she said only, “I thought that your shadowmancy was illusion.”

“It is real if you believe it so,” Yaela said. She brought her arms down and swayed where she stood, as if exhausted beyond caring.

“But it—it ate that mymyc.”

“The mymyc believed it was real.” Yaela smiled, an unpleasant little smile that had Sulema taking half a step back. “Remember this, Ja’Akari, if you think to betray me, or break your vow.”

“Ja’Akari do not break their vows.” Sulema scowled so hard it hurt.

“Everyone breaks their vows, eventually,” Yaela said. “Even you. Even I—” And then those brilliant jade eyes went dull and blank and she fell to the ground, senseless.

Sulema regarded the still form at her feet for a long moment. She thought of earthquakes, and lionsnakes, of kings and consorts, of a world delicate as eggshell and a dragon singing herself awake. It is a good day to die, she thought, but let me not die here in these cursed mountains, or among the sung bones on the road to Quarabala. Let me die Ja’Akari, shoulder to shoulder with my sword-sisters, protecting my people until my last breath. I want to go home. I want to go home!

From the deepest well of dark wishes in her heart, Sajani’s voice whispered forth, I want to go home. Let me wake. Let me live. Let me go, Dreamsinger!

Sulema stamped the voice from her heart as she might stamp out a campfire that had grown too wild.

I want to go home. Her wish, or the dragon’s? Sulema decided that it did not matter. She had given her word to Yaela; but what beauty remained in honor, in ehuani, when all the beauty of the world was about to end?

“I wonder,” she said at last to the unconscious Yaela, “if you have any weapons in that bag of yours, sorcerer.” Her voice was strange in her ears, as if she, like the mymyc, had stolen it from another. It was, she thought, the voice of a woman who could lie, or steal, or break a vow. The voice of a woman who could murder another in cold blood, and run from the scene of her dishonor, run without stopping, without looking back.

All the way to the Zeera.

TEN

I want to go home.

Ismai froze as he was, crouched beside the river of the dead, cupped hands halfway to his mouth. It had happened again—one moment he had been trapped inside the Lich King, fighting to get out, and the next moment he was himself again.

More or less.

The earth had trembled, and then the river had spoken to him with Sulema’s voice, sure as he lived—

Well, perhaps lived was not the word he wanted. Ismai plunged both hands into the turgid waters, grasping, groping, as if his lost friend were a fish and he could pull her out alive. It seemed to him that if he could find her, she could in turn find him, and they might indeed go home.

Home. I want to go home.

“What are you doing?”

It was the warrior Sudduth, tall and lissome, she who had been so feared and celebrated in life that upon her death, he had bound her to him—

Not I, Ismai reminded himself. That was Kal ne Mur. I am Ismai, son of Nurati. I am Ismai!

“I thought I heard the voice of… a friend,” he said. “Singing.” He rose, feeling more than a little foolish, and tried to wipe his wet hands on his touar only to remember that he was wearing the Lich King’s armor. He grimaced and settled for shaking the drops from his fingertips. “It was only the river, I guess.”

“Perhaps not, your Arrogance. The Ghana Kalmut sometimes sings with the voices of the dead, and the nearly dead. Perhaps your—friend—is in mortal danger.” Sudduth did not look as if she particularly cared. She knelt in the black mud, cradling something carefully against her belly.

“What are you doing?” Ismai said, echoing her question of moments before. The woman narrowed her milk-dead eyes at him, pursed her lips, and shrugged.

“I found some cacao beans in my tomb. I thought to wash them and see if they were still edible.” She opened her hands, revealing five smallish, oddly shaped dark beans. Shriveled things they were, as dead as Sudduth herself had been just days before. “Not enough to make chocolate, but I thought perhaps a drink…”

“Chocolate? What is that?” Ismai wrinkled his nose at the sight of the dead things. “They do not look good to eat or drink. Maybe you should just throw them away.”

I am talking to a dead woman, he realized, and sighed. How strange his life had become that this was normal. His head itched and he raised a hand to scratch at it, wondering whether Kal ne Mur had ever had to deal with head lice.

Sudduth froze. Her dead eyes widened, and she stared upon him with horror.

“What is chocolate?” she asked, voice rising as if he had uttered blasphemy. “Chocolate is everything! Chocolate is life.” She turned and called out, “Naara!”

“Yes?” Naara—Charon—was there, flush and whole as any healthy young girl just risen from a long night’s sleep. Ismai resisted the urge to run. Daughter, he had called her, Naar-Ahnet, and so his heart named her. He had considered her a friend, and perhaps she was… but she was also a monster.

“You claim this… this boy… must be our king, and yet he does not know anything. The fool does not even know what chocolate is.” Scorn dripped from her words as the river water had dripped from Ismai’s hands. “Explain!”

“Oh.” Naara sighed. “There is no chocolate, not anymore.”

“What.” Sudduth’s milk eyes, Ismai noted with some alarm, began to glow red at the very center, where a pupil should be. “What did you say.” She cradled the seeds to her belly, as if to shield them from such blasphemy.

“There has been no chocolate for generations, not since the Sundering,” Naara explained. “Those beans that were buried with you are likely all that remains—”

Sudduth threw her head back and howled, which was especially unfortunate as she had had her throat slit from ear to ear, and Ismai could see the ululations in her exposed throat. He supposed he was not afraid—being, as Naara had said, more than half undead himself—but it was disconcerting at the very least. And more than a little bit gross.

The warrior’s anguished rage drew the attention of several of her companions. Uruk, Fatheema, Amraz, and several others whose names Ismai had not yet learned, shuffled over to stand with their companion. Uruk put his hand on Sudduth’s shoulder and his eyes gleamed bright and bloody as he glared at their commander.

“What have you done?” he grated. His other hand, as big around as Ismai’s thigh, tightened upon the haft of his spiked war hammer. Ismai swallowed.

I am not afraid of the undead, he reminded himself. I am their king. I think. He shook his head, which made his scalp itch again. “Nothing,” he assured the fur-clad hulk of rage. “Naara told her there was no chocolate. I do not even know what that is, but I guess it was important to her.”

“No chocolate?” Uruk gaped at him and squeezed Sudduth’s shoulder in sympathy. “You raised her into a world with no chocolate? Are you mad, boy?”

Sudduth’s howl grew louder and more strident. More of the undead were gathering, and all of them faced Ismai now, ember-eyed and indignant.

“Help her,” Naara hissed between gritted teeth. “Fix this.”

“Fix this? Fix it how?” Ismai moved toward the keening warrior. Her wails of agony were as hooks in his heart, dragging him to her side, demanding his attention. “What can I do? I—”

As abruptly as Sudduth’s cries had begun, so they stopped.

“Make them live,” she whispered, voice hoarse. She held out both hands to him, dead seeds cradled in them as if she held her beating heart. “Make them live, my king… make them live. Please. I lived for you, I have died for you, and I will do so again. Only… only do not expect me to abide in a world where there is no chocolate.

“Please.”

It was that please, the brokenness of it, that was Ismai’s undoing. The despair and sorrow in her voice, the lost pleading in her dead eyes, and the abrupt realization that she had sat here in dust and emptiness, caught between death and undeath, just so that she could be dragged into the harsh light of day and denied even this simple comfort.

All for Kal ne Mur.

For me.

Can we help her? Ismai closed his own dead eyes and reached deep into the shards of his shattered soul. When he opened them again, the undead host—all save Sudduth— drew back with a sigh of reverence, and he knew that he was not Ismai.

“My king,” Sudduth murmured.

“My beauty,” he replied in a deep voice, a voice accustomed to being heard. He reached out and brushed the backs of her knuckles, feeling the harsh rasp of calluses grown in his service, seeing the ragged edges of her wounds. “Sweet Sudduth who died for me. I am here. Live. Live.” He cupped her hands between his, and breathed deep, pulling the living air into his seared lungs. Her faded beauty was a testament to his power, and a remonstrance.

See what I have done, he said to Ismai. What I have wrought. And now see what I can do, little warden.

He let the air become a fire in his belly, let the fire become a dragon, and then Kal ne Mur, once and future king of Atualon, lifted his face to Akari and sang.

Had the body he rode been his own, had the life he had lived not been cut short—or had he the Mask of Akari—such magic as he wove would have been a grand thing, a great work. Forcing the bodies of those who had sworn their blood and souls to him was easy, as easy as pumping blood through his own veins, air into his own lungs. These seeds, however, small and shriveled and dead as they were, owed him no fealty. Their small lives were woven into a new song, small sparks long gone dark and cold, and they resisted his call, his pull.

Yet he was Kal ne Mur, the Dragon King, the Lich King, and he would not be denied. They were dead, and the dead belonged to him. He sang, he commanded, and eventually…

angrily…

reluctantly…

they obeyed.

Kal ne Mur let the song fade from his lips, the fire from his heart. When he released Sudduth’s hands again her skin was brown and pliant as a young girl’s, the slash at her throat had been mended, and her eyes sparkled wide and brown. She unclasped her hands and fell to her knees before him.

“Oh,” she cried in a voice as soft and sweet as a nightingale’s. “Oh, oh, my king.” She bent her head and wept, live tears falling from living eyes upon the soft green of new leaves; the boon she had asked had been granted. All five of the beans she held cupped in her palms had sprouted.

“You gave me your life, ages and ages ago,” he told her. “In this I hope I have repaid a small portion of that debt.”

A wind rose then in the heart of Eid Kalmut, born from the tears of the grateful dead.

“Kal ne Mur,” one whispered, then another, then another.

“Kal ne Mur.”

“Kal ne Mur.”

“Father!” Charon cried. Naara, his beloved child. “It is I! It is you! You have returned to us, at last!”

And so he had.

Ismai tried to wake from the dream, tried to reclaim his body, and found with rising terror that he could not. As he began to panic, to fight, to scream, his arms were raised high, his mouth formed into a smile by a will not his own.

Sulema, he cried, reaching out to the river. Help me! Find me! But Sulema did not answer. From the Ghana Kalmut came only the voices of the dead, raised in a hymn to the glory of their king.

The voice that issued from his mouth now was not his own, and never again would be.

“Who am I?” he cried, low and ringing as a call to battle. “My friends, my faithful soldiers… who am I?”

As one, the host of the undead went to their knees and raised dry voices in exultation:

“Kal ne Mur!” they cried, they howled. “KAL NE MUR!”

“Indeed,” he answered. Ismai opened his mouth to scream, but Kal ne Mur smiled upon his faithful instead.

Kithren, Ruh’ayya wailed, far away and helpless. Kithren, come back, come back to me.

I cannot, Ismai answered. I—

“I am home,” said Kal ne Mur, and smiled with Ismai’s face.

* * *

“I have no wish to go to war.”

Ibna sud Barach stood before him, tall and proud and straight as the blood-iron spear he bore. In life he had been Iponui, one of the running warriors of Quarabala. Deadly with spear and sword, able to outrun a horse—many a soldier had made a small fortune betting on Ibna’s legs, or lost one betting against him—and with a laugh like healing rain. He had never been one to back away from a fight.

Until now.

“I have raised you to fight for me.” Kal ne Mur rubbed a hand over his aching dead eyes. “And you say to me now that you have no wish for war. What, then, do you wish to do with this life I have given you?”

“I will fight for you, my king, and die for you. Again.” Ibna’s face was smooth and devoid of emotion. “But my heart is no longer in the fight. I wish, if I would—”

“Yes? You would what? You might as well say it.” Ibna was not the first of his soldiers to approach him this day, to express both undying loyalty and a wish for something— anything—other than warfare. “Husna wishes to be a farmer. Aydna would like to spend an eternity fishing. What would you do with your time, pray tell me?”

“I would make things. Beautiful things, with my hands. I would shape clay, or rock, or perhaps wood… I would like to make beautiful things, instead of dead things.” Ibna clenched his jaw. “If I had your leave to go.”

“You do not have my leave to go,” Kal ne Mur replied. Any more than you do, Ismai son of Nurati, he said to the screaming boy who shared this body. “You wish to make something beautiful, Ibna? Then help me retake this world, and we will make it over in our image. We will reclaim the Zeera and teach these false Mah’zula their place. We will take the river, and Min Yaarif, and send word to our allies in Quarabala. Together we will raise Atukos over all the world, and these kings and emperors of loving men will bend the knee to us. That will be your thing of beauty, my friend.”

“War.” Ibna spat. “War does not make the world beautiful, your Radiance.”

“I know,” Kal ne Mur answered. “But war is what we do.”