“A beautiful sight, is it not?” The Zeerani warrior and her horse, glowing in the sunlight as they prepare for a great quest. She does not have the braids for it, of course, but they will grow back.
“Unlike your tongue.”
Hannei tensed beneath the hand that was laid on her shoulder in a false show of sympathy. Sharmutai laughed and went on.
“They say that little golden mare was one that had been taken from her? How touching, and how fortunate for your pretty friend. I do not suppose you will ever see your own horses again, your weapons and leathers, those things you barbarians hold so dear. Certainly you will never again gaze deep into the eyes of—oh, you never told me his name, did you? The father of your brat? So much has been taken from you, my poor little pit slave. I know how you feel.”
Anger rose in Hannei’s gut with every word that fell from the whoremistress’s rouged lips. She jerked her shoulder from the touch, risking a beating. Sharmutai laughed again at Hannei’s broken growl. The laugh was a beautiful sound of honey and venom.
“Oh, but I do know how you feel, little pet. I know just how you feel. To have everything you love stripped from you, to have your body savaged and torn for the amusement of men.”
Sulema stood with Atemi by the river, oblivious to all the world. Hannei turned from the sight of her onetime sword-sister and stared with surprise at Sharmutai. She had a mymyc’s voice—now soft and low, then seductive, then harsh, but always dripping with deceit. Never had Hannei detected the faintest ring of truth from this woman, but she heard it now.
“Yes, even so,” the whoremistress said. “I was not always as you see me now, you know. Powerful, wealthy beyond imagining, untouchable…” She raised her hands high, salt-stained blue silk shivering in the hot wind, and fixed her eyes on the sky. “No. I was young once, and I was owned even as I own you. In my case, however, I was not sold. I gave myself away, and freely.” Her beautiful face stilled into a mask of perfect hatred. “I gave myself to a king’s son, body and heart, sa and ka. I walked in his footsteps as if he were the sun and I no more than his adoring shadow. When I was scarcely more than a child myself, I grew round as the moons with his child. My child.” She lowered her arms, her eyes, and smiled such a smile that Hannei recoiled.
“Nnnnh,” she said, cupping one hand protectively over her abdomen. Please. Please. It is all I have left.
“Round as the moons,” Sharmutai repeated, ignoring her garbled plea. “The child grew and slept in my belly, beneath my heart, even as Sajani sleeps and grows in the belly of the earth. He loved me, or said he did, and I was happy.”
“Nnnnnhhh.” Please.
“His name was Pythos ap Serpentus ne Atu, and he was the son of the Dragon King of Atualon. He was so handsome—he could be an ass, of course, but he was very handsome, and he was kind to me. Our child would grow to be a king, or a queen, and I was happy.
“Do you know what they do to the prince’s mistress, little slave, when a new king takes the throne and replaces the old? Do you know what they do to the child in her belly? Would you like to see the scars?” Her face twisted, terrible with wrath and old sorrow long gone to poison.
Hannei dared not move, dared not even breathe. Would Sharmutai kill her babe, then, as some sort of twisted revenge? Or would she allow Hannei to bear Tammas’s child, only to claim it as her own?
Sharmutai stilled then, gone all to cold stone draped in fluttering silks, with eyes hard and shining as river stones. Terrible was the grief that poured from her, a bitter wind that had seared the land of her soul till nothing could ever grow there that was good or true.
“I see you, Kishah,” she said at last, in a voice Hannei had never heard from her. It was low, and ragged with grief, and unlovely, but it was the woman’s true voice at last. “I see myself in you. I might save you, if I could. Return your life to you, and hope, and love, but I have no hope or love left to me. Do you understand? None. They killed it when they killed my little one. All that is left for me in this world is vengeance, and I will have it. So I will give you what I never had. I will give you a chance.
“They left me to bleed and die in the rag pits, holding my dead babe in my arms. She was a girl child, you know, a little daughter. I named her Tatiana, and gathered up her little torn… her little torn… I…” Sharmutai closed her eyes and drew a ragged breath, long and slow. When she opened them again, she was once more the whoremistress of Min Yaarif. “I made a little cairn for her on the slopes of Atukos. I vowed that I would live, and I vowed revenge. One of those promises I have kept quite nicely. The other…”
She stepped close and laid a small, hard hand on Hannei’s cheek. She was trembling with fury.
“…the other promise I will achieve now, and you will help me. You will journey into Quarabala with this pretty friend of yours, my vengeance, my Kishah. The Seared Lands will be as nothing after my fighting pits.” She laughed. “Go on this quest, help your friends here to achieve their goals. Save the shadowmancer’s brat, by all means. Save every miserable person in the Seared Lands, if that is your wish, only help find this Mask of Sajani and return it to Min Yaarif—to me. This, and do one other thing.” Her lips curled into a cruel smile and she stared pointedly at Sulema.
Hannei’s heart died in her chest. No, she whispered, deep in the part of her that still believed in love and truth and happy endings. No.
It seemed to her that she stood at the heart of a storm, the sands of time and vicious regret stripping flesh from bone till there was nothing left but bitterness. Then the gentle sound of Ani’s voice came to her on the winds.
Remember who you are, girl, it said. You are Hannei Ja’Akari, daughter of Deaara and of Mazuk Ja’Sajani. The blood of queens flows hot in your veins and your bones sing of honor. Remember.
I am no one, Hannei replied to the ghost-voice, and spat bitterness upon the sand. I am nothing. I am Kishah, and my heart is hollow.
Sharmutai continued, unaware of the storm that raged. “That mask should have belonged to my daughter, the daughter of Pythos, son of the true Dragon King. It would have been her birthright, so I claim it as her blood price. The mask—”
Sulema stood with her arms around Atemi’s neck, her face buried in the mare’s wind-whipped dark mane.
“—and the heart’s blood of Sulema an Wyvernus ne Atu. Wyvernus who killed my child has escaped my vengeance, so I will have the life of his daughter just as he took the life of mine.”
She turned again to Hannei. “I give you this gift of a second chance at life, Kishah-whose-name-is-lost. I can see your heart, and I know you do not wish to do this thing. You will betray me, if you can. I respect that.” She smiled. “I will send Rehaza Entanye with you, to make sure that you do not. You are still Ja’Akari in your heart, still bound by honor and ehuani. You promised obedience to me in return for the life of your child. Obey me now. Fulfill your promise, your purpose, and regain your life. Return to me with the Mask of Sajani, and the blood of the spawn of the dragon upon your swords. Then you and your child will be free.”
Even as these words settled like a shroud upon her heart, Hannei watched as Sulema leapt upon Atemi’s back and leaned forward, urging her horse to fly, laughing as the golden mare broke into a joyful run that carried them both away. Sulema never looked back at the one she had called “sister.” She had not seen her standing there, wearing a cold iron collar and the swords of a pit slave.
Sulema sees only herself, Hannei thought bitterly. She would make a fine Dragon Queen, after all.
Sharmutai reached out and affectionately tousled Hannei’s short curls. “You are a smart girl, Kishah,” she said. “I trust you to make the right decision.” She turned and walked away, silk robes fluttering like the wings of a bird.
Sunlight poured across the Zeera, sweet and warm as mead poured from a pitcher of gold. A playful wind laughed before the ebony mare Mutaani, kicking up little sand-dae and erasing the tracks of a herd of tarbok.
It seemed to Ismai that the desert was ageless as the sky, ever-changing never-changing as the stars, and that he was nothing more than a character in one of his mother’s stories, soon to be forgotten by sand and sun and time.
The sand will fill my mouth, my eyes, he thought. My bones will dry and crack; they will be ground down to sand beneath the hooves of the next journeying hero…
…or perhaps a villain.
He glanced behind him. The host was, to his dead eyes, clearer and perhaps more beautiful than anything in the land of the living. Here and there at the fringes of this great force the desert’s skin rippled and split. When the Lich King called, those bits and pieces of dead things which were too destroyed to be of real use would sometimes join and create a new, foul creature. Never sleeping, ever hungering, these newborn bonelords swam just beneath the sand’s surface and followed the army, eager to devour the spoils of war.
My children, Ismai thought. The only children I will ever have, now. Had his eyes not been dead, had his heart been more than cold stone, he might have wept.
Nor were the undead Ismai’s only followers. He could feel Ruh’ayya trailing them to the south and east. Through his connection with her he could feel, as well, the presence of other vash’ai. Their number and intentions were hidden from him—hidden, he thought, by his own bond mate.
Kithren, he remonstrated, what is this? I have been betrayed by the prides, my heroes, by the very blood in my veins. Surely you do not turn against me as well?
I, Kithren? Her mind’s voice was haughty as only a cat could be, and he imagined the tip of her tail twitching. I have betrayed nothing. It is you who brought this abomination into our lives, and I will save you, if I must—
If you must… what?
There was no answer. Whatever his Ruh’ayya and the other vash’ai were planning, he would not be privy to their counsel. Ismai looked about him. There was Char—Naara—erstwhile friend, sometimes daughter, staring at him with brown eyes wide and innocent as his sisters’ had been. Warriors and sorcerers and revenants dragged back from peaceful death through their bond with the Lich King. He knew in his own bones they would turn on him the moment that bond was severed.
There is no loyalty here, Ismai thought to himself. No fidelity, no honor, only fear and mutual need. Certainly there is no love—not here, perhaps nowhere in the world. The foundation upon which he had built his life, he knew now, was a lie. How had he ever believed that the world was a good place, and just? That warriors were honorable and such a one as he could love and be loved in return? We are all monsters, every one. Even Sudduth, the companion of Kal ne Mur’s childhood, who in life had burned so bright and clear.
Ismai pursed his lips thoughtfully as he looked at the woman who strode beside his horse. She was tall and lovely and strong as any Zeerani warrior. Kal ne Mur recalled, and Ismai had no reason to disbelieve, that this woman had once been famed for her temper and was known to have fought the least imagined insult to her honor. In life she had been a stone-cold killer, and death had not made her warmer.
And yet, as she walked, Sudduth crooned over the clay pot in which she had planted her precious cacao sprouts, and which she held close to her heart as if they were little green children. The sprouts were thriving under her care, and Sudduth demanded that they stop at every oasis and well and watering-hole so that she might tend them.
There, Ismai thought, there is honor. There is fidelity, and love. Those little sprouts had nothing to offer Sudduth; the chocolate she recalled so fondly would be harvested years from now, if ever, and if any of them survived so long. Watching her stroke a tender leaf with one long finger, he smiled. Sulema would like her.
Sudduth looked up, caught his expression, and frowned.
“My king?”
“Nothing. Only… you remind me of a friend.”
Sudduth’s clouded eyes flashed red, reminding him of her true nature.
“I am beyond friendship,” she said stiffly. “My king.”
“Of course.” He looked to the horizon and saw the wavering image of Aish Kalumm as it had been before the Mah’zula burned it, as it ever would be in his dreams. It was only a mirage, an illusion. “Forgive me.”
“I cannot.” There was no more regret in Sudduth’s voice than there had been love. “I will fight for you, and die for you, and obey when you call me back from the peace of my grave yet again. But one must live in order to love, and one must love in order to forgive. These things are for the living, not for such as you or I.”
Is this true? he wondered. Am I unable to love? Certainly Kal ne Mur, who shared and sometimes commanded his body, was corpse-cold and unfeeling. But he, Ismai, still felt the pain of betrayal, the weight of regret. Was that not part and parcel of love?
You yet live, Ruh’ayya interjected gently, though her voice was pricked through with pain and anger of her own. You yet love. I will it so.
I wish you would go, Ismai told her miserably. I do not wish to hurt you.
I know, she replied. That is why I stay.
Ismai closed his dead eyes, which changed nothing, and turned his face up to the sky. The sun was warm on his face, the wind still tugged at his cloak, and the shifting sands still sang their low, mournful song of ages. These things had not changed, the world had not changed.
“The world has not changed,” Ismai said aloud. “It is I who have been sundered, I who no longer belong to the world of the living.” Or to the dead, he added silently. Though perhaps it was best not to mention that in present company.
“Then we will remake the world in our image,” Naara said. Ismai felt her small, warm hand touch his calf, and then pull away. “In your image.”
“A world remade,” Sudduth said. “A world where cacao grows.”
“A world where I can make beautiful things,” Ibna agreed.
Ismai opened his eyes. The mirage of Aish Kalumm had disappeared, but another image was forming in his mind, and a dangerous notion. The city of his youth rebuilt bigger, grander, stronger than it had been. His mother, his brother and sisters, brought back from the Lonely Road—
No, Ismai thought, pushing the vision aside, horrified at the turn his own thoughts had taken. No. It would be an abomination. He glanced again at Sudduth, who had brought the clay pot close to her face and was singing to her plants.
There is loyalty, Kal ne Mur whispered within him, there is love, pure and good. If this is death, there is indeed beauty in it. What might your mother Nurati do, if given another chance? Or Tammas, Neptara, little Rudya? What beautiful world might we make together, you and I?
First we must free the Zeera from these false Mah’zula. After that—
“Mutaani,” Ismai said, “there is beauty in death. Might there not be beauty after death, as well?” He turned his most winning smile upon Sudduth. “We travel to Aish Kalumm. There we will find ships, left behind by the Dragon King’s son when he came to lay claim to Sulema. These we will sail down the Dibris and across Nar Bedayyan to Atualon, where I will reclaim all that is mine. And when we have finished— when the false Mah’zula have been destroyed, and the usurper Pythos, when I rule in Atualon and once more sing the song of all times—then, my sweet ones, then you may live such a death as you might dream for yourselves.
“The Mothers had a grove of trees in Aish Kalumm, precious trees. Sandalwood and sant—we could replant them, when this is done. Your small plants would be safe among them. I see no reason to stop living just because we are dead. When all the world is mine again I will give these groves unto you to tend as you will, and none will ever dare to disturb you or your green children.”
Sudduth looked up at him, and this time she smiled back.
“Mutaani,” she agreed. “It is good.”
Naara skipped ahead of them, singing.
* * *
As they neared the wardens’ encampment, Ismai was neither surprised nor particularly pleased to find a small force of Mah’zula waiting for them, bright beneath the sun in their wyvern-scale armor. They would have been poor warriors and blind to have missed the signs of such a large force on the move. The presence of two of Thoth’s priestesses he had also expected, though the sight of the snake-women caused a growl to rise from deep in his belly, a sound that was echoed in his mind by Ruh’ayya.
More surprising to him was the sight of a dreamshifter, hair in a mass of tangles and pale staff upraised so that for a moment Ismai thought Hafsa Azeina had returned from Atualon to smite him. The old guilt flushed through him— had that fearsome woman ever learned of his true feelings for her daughter, she would have tanned his hide for a dance drum. Closer inspection revealed this dreamshifter to be an older man, somewhat squat and unremarkable.
Besides, Ismai reminded himself, Hafsa Azeina is dead. As Lich King, he knew the list of newly dead as if he read the names from a book. Mastersmith Hadid’s name was written upon those pages, and Tammas. Fat, sweet little Sammai who had been named for him. Rudya and Neptara, his sisters, and Nurati his mother. The book of dead read like the book of his life.
Hannei yet lives, Ruh’ayya reminded him. Also Daru, and your Sulema.
With great effort Ismai pushed her words aside. They made his heart leap, and this was not the time for feeling alive. He looked upon the golden warriors, the twisted and unclean perversion of his mother’s stories. At the priestesses of Thoth with their snake faces and snake plumes, their bright bottles of venom. And the rage grew hot in his breast.
This, he thought as he felt Kal ne Mur rise within him, this is a day for death. Thus, when the Lich King came darkly into his mind, Ismai did not resist.
The dreamshifter and one of the snake-women rode closer, palms out in the traditional gesture of peace. They were accompanied by a handful of others. Ismai was relieved to note that they did not have bells braided into their hair. That small breach of Zeerani protocol, the refusal to declare themselves of peaceful intent, was excuse enough to forgive himself for what he was about to do.
He drew Mutaani to a halt. She tossed her head and snorted, dancing beneath him like a hot coal. Sudduth stepped closer, shrugging into the harness she had fashioned to snug the little clay pot securely between her shoulder blades. She would not abandon her plants, not even for war.
“They seek to treat with us,” she said. Her eyes were glazed and red, knuckles pale on the hilt of her short sword. “What would you have us do?”
Let me do this thing, coaxed the Lich King. Let us be one.
Ismai, looking upon the Mah’zula, gave in to vengeance. As you will.
A shudder took him head to toe. When it had subsided, Ismai looked down upon his friend, and smiled Kal ne Mur’s smile. Sudduth smiled back, a feral expression, and bared an inch of her sword. “My king.”
“These women,” he said, raising his voice so that it would carry, “these false Mah’zula defile the name of Zula Din, the memory of her warriors. These snake-women foul the memory of Thoth. What would I have you do?”
A jagged cheer rose from the ranks of the undead as the Lich King leaned down to caress Sudduth’s cheek.
“I will listen to their words, and consider them wisely,” he told her. “And then you will kill them all.”
* * *
The snake-woman spoke first, as Kal ne Mur had expected. These women were not priestesses of Thoth as he remembered them from old, but humans greedy for power. Power was a language that was understood in every age and every tongue, and none had spoken it longer than he.
“Who are you,” the priestess asked, “to ride into our lands girded and armed as if for war? A boy I see before me, mounted and dressed above his station, and he rides with… an abomination.”
The abomination that was Sudduth chuckled and spun her sword. Before she had become his captain, Kal ne Mur remembered, she had been an acrobat in a troupe of fools, and fond of putting on a show.
“If my face is not familiar to you,” he answered, forcing this youthful and untrained voice to be more than it was, “perhaps my name will be. I am Ismai son of Nurati.” He had not meant to say that. “And I am Kal ne Mur, risen to ride among you once more.”
“He is your king,” Sudduth asserted in a voice as hard as the sword at her hip. “Kneel to him or die.”
“There is no king in the Zeera,” the false Mah’zula said. She looked as if she wished to spit but did not quite dare.
“Sweet golden child,” Ismai purred. He was rewarded as she flinched from the death in his voice. “How short your memory, and how very wrong you are. Indeed there is a king in the Zeera, and always has been. You may not remember me, but as you can see”—he spread his arms, indicating his undead armies—“I do exist. Indeed, I have never left.”
The dreamshifter stepped forward.
“A king you may be,” he allowed in a quavering voice, “but you are no king to the living. The dead have no power here, unclean spirit. Begone!” Thus saying, he brought a small whistle to his lips and blew.
A sharp note thrilled through the air, sweet and commanding. Shadows fled before the dreamshifter’s magic, shadows Ismai had not realized were there, and the day became terribly bright. It rose and fell in a song of warning and dismissal.
Had he indeed been a spirit, Kal ne Mur would have been obliged to return whence he had come. Had he been a living man, Ismai would have been terrified as the music tugged at his soul and threatened to tear it loose. But they were neither spirit nor flesh, living nor dead, and Ismai threw back his head and laughed. Then he reached out with one hand, seized the music, and pulled.
The dreamshifter stiffened all over and collapsed upon the sand, breathless and blue.
“The dead,” Ismai informed the remaining supplicants, once he had stopped, “have power where I say they have power. As you will learn.”
“No,” the snake-woman whispered as she stared in horror at the corpse. “No!” She reached for the small bottles of venom strapped to her chest.
“Sudduth?” Ismai said casually. He stretched, enjoying the feel of sunlight on his shoulders. It had been too long.
“My king?” She all but danced beside Mutaani, and her eyes were rubies.
“Kill them for me.”
“Yes, my king!” Sudduth raised her voice in a joyful ululation and charged forward.
“Papa?”
Ismai looked down, surprised. “Yes, Naara?”
The living began to scream as Sudduth and her sword danced among them.
“I want to kill them, too.”
“There are hardly enough for Sudduth, let alone… oh, very well,” he relented, seeing the disappointment on her sweet face. “I suppose you all want to play?”
A hungry roar rumbled all about him, and the Lich King sighed. He had never been very good at denying his children their hearts’ desires. Raising his right hand, pointing to Akari, Ismai bid him witness the dawn of a new day. Then he brought it down, pointing to Sajani, that she might take the souls of the newly dead under her wing.
“As you will,” he said. A howl rose round him, a shout, a canticle of death, and Ismai closed his eyes.
The world is made of music, he thought as the horde surged past, screaming for blood, and never have I heard a song as sweet as this.
* * *
The false Mah’zula died well, Ismai would grant them that much. In the end, however, it meant no more than footprints in the sand. They were grievously outnumbered—would have been so, ehuani, had they faced Sudduth alone. The bloodlust was upon the horde, so the golden warriors were swept up and away in the killing wind, leaving behind nothing more than memories and the sharp smell of blood.
The remaining snake-woman was a hindrance. She had bound to her three young lionsnakes, and these rushed forward shrieking, spitting venom, and slashing the Lich King’s forces with wicked claws. Three of his warriors went down beneath their assault, white bone and red meat exposed to sun by the burning venom. These would have to be raised again, Ismai knew, and they would not be best pleased.
He raised his hands to call his forces back, grimacing as Sudduth strode toward the bright monsters. Her face was enfilthed with her enemies’ gore and she was laughing, but Kal ne Mur’s memories bade him be wary. If this one died and had to be raised again, she would be in a foul mood for moons, and not even his status as her king would be proof against the sharp side of her tongue.
One of the lionsnakes struck. Sudduth danced to one side and slashed at it, drawing an agonized bellow and a face full of acid. She shrieked, and the Lich King raised both hands, prepared to end the thing himself. Then he hesitated. Interfering with a fight Sudduth had chosen may well piss her off more than being killed again. Whichever choice he made—to save her life or give her another—it would likely be the wrong one.
Women, he thought. Living or dead, I will never understand them.
Before he could call upon atulfah, however, another king entered the fray. The singing sands vomited forth a monstrous tangle of bones, dead trees, and horror as Arushdemma rose from the sands between Ismai’s fighting force and the lionsnakes, bellowing his bloodlust. With his great maw stretched wide, the bonelord whipped around fast as malice and snapped up two of the lionsnakes. A cluster of wicked eyes turned toward Sudduth and the third lionsnake, locked in mortal combat and oblivious to all else, and a foul gurgling laugh rose from his sulfurous depths.
“No!” Ismai shouted. “I forbid it!”
But it was too late. That toothed cavern gaped wide enough that three horses abreast might have ridden into that mouth and down the throat. Arushdemma undulated across the Zeera faster than a dead man could blink. He snatched up the lionsnake, and then he snatched up Sudduth for good measure, sinking away into the sands still gurgling with terrible laughter.
Again, a small hand touched his leg. Again, Ismai looked down upon the wide-eyed face of his only daughter, his fiercest love.
“Father,” she said. “I am sorry.”
“So am I,” he sighed, closing his eyes. “Sudduth is going to be so angry.”
* * *
After the incident with the bonelord, the undead army lost enough of its blood frenzy to be manageable. They marched on for another day and a half, never stopping to rest, until they encountered a fist of wardens that stood between the horde and the camp.
Stern-faced and proud, though with eyes showing big and white as those on spooked horses, they stood ready to die in defense of their people. One, a strapping young man still in the first flush of manhood, tugged at Kal ne Mur’s memories. A descendent, perhaps, of an old acquaintance…
No, thought Ismai. I know him. I know him from this life.
“Jasin,” he said. “Jasin Ja’Sajani.”
“Ismai?” The young man stepped forward, his face a mask of fear and astonishment. “Ismai Ja’Sajani?”
“Ja’Sajani no more,” Ismai answered. “Though Ismai was my name, once.”
“Who are you?” an older warden called, no less frightened than Jasin, and no less determined to die. “What are you? What do you want from us?”
Your love, Ismai thought, your loyalty. The part of him that was Kal ne Mur pushed those emotions away and banished, too, the vash’ai whose passions threatened his control. Silence, he scolded. This is war, and in war there is no time for love.
“Only this,” he answered the Zeeranim, smiling and holding both hands palm-up to show that he meant them no harm. Not today, at any rate. “I require no more than that you ride to the prides and bring them my message.”
“What message would that be?” a third warden asked.
“Ride to Nisfi, to Urak and Shahad and Rihar.” Naara stepped forward and raised her arms, letting the wind whip her robes around her skinny little figure and carry her voice. “Bring them glad words, for your king has returned.”
“The Zeeranim have no king,” Jasin objected, but his voice was unsure.
The Mah’zula rode out, Ismai thought, and only the horde returned. Surely they know it is futile to resist. Do not resist, little warden. For the sake of your people, do not resist.
“Here rides your king,” Naara corrected him, gently, kindly. “Kal ne Mur, who once was your friend Ismai, and now is both. Bend your knee to him and share in his glory. Bend your knee to him, and let us remake this land, to raise up the Zeeranim into the glory of Akari once more. Bend your knee to him—
“—or die.”
Kal ne Mur could feel the horde behind him gathering itself, could feel their misery and their weariness and their battle-lust. Above all, they longed for rest… but in the absence of rest, they longed to kill.
The wardens could feel it too, it seemed. One after another they sank to their knees in the sand. Jasin was not first, but neither was he last, and Ismai breathed a sigh of relief. He had not wanted to slay a friend.
“Ride now, my faithful,” he called out to them, “ride forth in joy! Carry this news to every corner of the Zeera, and let the people rejoice. For unto them—unto you—the king is risen.”
Kal ne Mur, the dead whispered. Ismai, Kal ne Mur.
The king is risen.
Sulema and Hannei sat at ease in Hannei’s quarters, deep in the heart of one of Sharmutai’s estates. Sulema could not help but stare at the walls, the pools, the slaves in their bright garments. Everything was red, the red of life-giving and precious salt from Quarabala. It seemed to her that the amount of salt used to dye a slave-boy’s robes might have been enough to sweeten the water of a pride for a year.
She reached out and picked up the salt-clay mug one of the boys had set before her and took a polite sip of dragonmint tea.
Red salt clay for a mug, she thought, indignation rising, when the prides go without sweet water. Red salt clay used to build slaves’ houses, when we do not have enough in Aish Kalumm to preserve our meat so that the mothers might bear healthy children. How many lives were spent to make this mug?
Still, she could not deny that the tea was delicious.
Scouts had been sent into the foothills, to spy out the best paths to take—or at least identify the worst paths, as Leviathus had said, laughing—and emissaries had been sent by him and by Hannei’s owner, the whoremistress Sharmutai, to negotiate safer passage with the mountain clans. He had offered them the use of the pirate clans’ palace while they waited. Sharmutai had refused to let Hannei spend so much as a night away from her until the day of their departure, and Sulema would not leave her friend alone, so they slept and ate and trained with Hannei’s whoremistress and waited, and waited, and waited some more.
Hannei stared out the small round window. Sulema could not read her friend’s expression, but she seemed neither content nor ill at ease in her surroundings. It seemed as if she was neither heartened by Sulema’s presence, nor bothered by the slave’s collar about her throat, nor excited at the prospect of adventure. Sulema burned to ask her about the scars on her back, about how she came to lose her tongue, about the alarming whispers she had heard in the market regarding goings-on in the Zeera, but Hannei had shut her out completely, declining even the crude hand-talk of hunters. She had locked herself away more effectively than if Sharmutai had shut her into a whore’s room and thrown away the key.
Sharmutai, Sulema thought, and felt her lip curl in half a snarl. Hannei’s owner. The thought of any Ja’Akari beaten, savaged, raped—enslaved—was a call to battle-fury worth dying for. That it had happened to Hannei was unmistakable. That it had happened to Hannei and Sulema, her sword-sister, had let so much time go by without avenging it was unthinkable.
Yet here they sat, sipping tea from red salt clay, waiting for someone else to tell them what they might or might not do with their lives. She set her cup down with such force that the cup chipped, throwing out shards of red clay. One of these struck Hannei high on the cheek, drawing blood.
Hannei turned her face fractionally, just enough to glance out of the corner of one eye, and for a moment Sulema saw a beast peering out at her, a deadly predator waiting for the cage doors to spring open. Just as quickly the impression was gone again, and Hannei looked back out the window. The last rays of a dying day glinted dully off her collar and caressed her face with golden light, shining on the blood that dripped down her cut cheek like a tear.
* * *
It was almost a small-moon before the scouts and emissaries returned, the trips to market were successfully completed, and they could finally be on their way. Sulema had reluctantly parted with her Atemi. Even if the mare had been able to traverse the mountain passes, Yaela had explained to her, the shadowed roads to the Edge and then the heart of Quarabala would be death for any horse. Sulema had found a girl from Uthrak, a newmade merchant’s apprentice, who had vowed to care for the mare as a child until Sulema could return to claim her.
“If I die,” Sulema told the fierce-eyed youth, “and Hannei as well, Atemi is to be given to Aamia, half-sister of Saskia, who died for me.” The merchant’s apprentice nodded her assent, and Sulema watched as the better half of her heart walked away.
Jai tu wai, she promised Atemi silently, caressing the hilt of the fine shamsi with which the Uthraki had gifted her. We will ride together again, my love.
The party gathered beneath the shade of an enormous tent, a riotous patchwork of colorful fabrics that came, Leviathus had told her, from ships the pirates had captured.
My brother is the pirate king and my sister is a slave, Sulema thought.
Yes, Jinchua barked in the back of her mind, but who are you?
Not a dreamshifter, Sulema barked back, and she slammed her mind’s door on the Dreaming Lands. Not ne Atu, she thought to herself, shutting out the dragon’s song as best she could—and certainly no slave to the reaver’s venom. The pain in her shoulder had subsided to a dull ache, a cold spot scarcely as big as a thumbprint. Sulema pushed away, as well, the knowledge that Yaela’s supply of medicine was nearly depleted. There was every likelihood that she would die before that ever became a problem.
Not far away Yaela spoke to Leviathus of the paths they might take through Jehannim, the supplies they had to hand, and the dangers of sun-sickness, mountain-sickness, and the likelihood of being eaten by greater predators. It seemed to Sulema that the sorcerer’s apprentice, whose mad quest this was to begin with, had absented herself too much from these preparations until Leviathus had appeared. Leviathus, for his part, argued that they were under-supplied and under-prepared. To Sulema, who was used to riding out into the desert with nothing besides a weapon, some water, and her horse, their preparations seemed endless. And she was weary of watching the two of them fighting their too-obvious mutual attraction.
I wish Sareta was here, she thought. Or Istaza Ani. Or my mother. Or—
They had no seasoned warriors, no dreamshifter, nobody here who could lead them safely to Saodan and back again.
I will just have to pretend that I am such a leader and take charge of this goatfuckery. Otherwise we will be standing here until the dragon wakes, still arguing about whether we have enough rope.
“Is it true,” she said, interrupting their endless debate, “that the mountain clans have been paid not to interfere with our passage?”
“Yes,” Leviathus said, “but you will still need—”
“We have purchased weapons? Water? Pemmican?”
Her brother and Yaela both made faces at that. Let them. Nobody liked pemmican, but taste was beside the point.
“Yes, but—”
“Good,” Sulema said, holding up a hand to fend off any further discussion. “Let us go to the merchants’ house, retrieve our supplies, and be off at latesun.” Leviathus opened his mouth to argue, but Sulema scowled him into silence.
“My quest,” she reminded him, “my rules. We are going to the Seared Lands to retrieve one young girl, not riding to Atualon to wage war upon Pythos. The fewer mouths we must feed, the less equipment we have to carry, the better. We are not churrim. Let us stop chewing our cuds and go.”
The pirates who flanked Leviathus grumbled a bit at this, but Leviathus waved them to silence. Even so he did not look happy about it. Hannei pursed her mouth and nodded approval.
“Good,” she signed. “We go.”
Sulema let out a long breath. Her heart pounded in her ears as if she had been running. She had seized control of the group, and they had accepted her command. They had a plan, such as it was, and Leviathus would no doubt pack enough supplies for them to survive an apocalypse of the risen dead.
Then why did it taste like the kiss of doom?
* * *
Sulema shook her head at the size of their party. A fist of pirates had insisted upon providing an honor guard for their king, Sharmutai had sent a handful of slaves to keep an eye on Hannei, and three white-cloaked Salarian merchants had somehow convinced somebody that they should tag along as if this was a journey to procure salt and other rare goods from the Seared Lands. There were slaves to bear their packs, others to tend their beasts, a painted boy gifted to them by the whoremistress to tend to their clothes and makeup.
“No,” she said firmly, though the last caused her a pang. Surely the boy reminded her of her mother’s lost apprentice, Daru, and would have been better off with them than he had been in the comfort house. “The mountains are no place for merchants, or softlanders, or children. So large a group will attract bandits and greater predators. No. We will number only as many as are needed—myself and Yaela, Hannei, Leviathus, and the shadowmancer Keoki. We will take one churra, and only as many provisions as we can carry ourselves.”
Sharmutai was not pleased, and it looked as if she was not used to hearing the word “no.”
“You must at least take Rehaza Entanye,” she insisted. “Or I will not allow you to take my Hannei.”
“Agreed,” Sulema said. “Another fighter will be welcome, but no more. No more.” She held up a hand to forestall the dozen arguments that bloomed around her like flowers after a rain. “A small group has better chance of success.”
Better than one bloated by incompetents, she thought.
Leviathus puffed out his cheeks, no more used to being thwarted than the whoremistress.
“You have never crossed the Jehannim,” he pointed out. “You could hardly find them on a map.”
“No,” Sulema agreed, “but while you were learning to read maps, I was learning to survive in harsh conditions. We were,” she added, indicating Hannei, who nodded. “This is our world more than yours, ne Atu.”
“I am no more the dragon’s son these days than you are the dragon’s daughter,” he replied, mouth twisted unhappily, “but perhaps you are right.”
“I am right,” Sulema said firmly, wishing she was half as confident as she sounded. “Six of us, and no more.”
“Still—”
Hannei clapped her hands loudly, forestalling further argument, and pointed. Sulema turned her head and smiled.
“Oh, good,” she said, happy for the interruption. “Our supplies are here.”
Indeed they were. The merchants’ guild had been as good as their word to Sharmutai. Slaves arrived leading three very fine churrim of a type Sulema had never seen, brown as coffee on top, white as river sand underneath, shorter-legged and heavier-built than those she was used to.
They look like goats, she thought, though I suppose that will be helpful in the mountains. They do look hardy, at that.
“We will take these three animals,” she said, “and let us see what supplies they—”
A low growl from Hannei stopped her short. Sulema looked at her, startled, then followed her sister’s stare toward the fat little merchant who stood chatting amiably with the whoremistress.
“Hannei—” Sulema touched her friend’s shoulder. The other warrior was so stiff with outrage that she was trembling. “That man—was he one of those who hurt you?”
Hannei shied away violently, baring her teeth in a rictus snarl and never once looking away from the merchant.
“Ah,” Sulema said, soft as the singing desert. “Ah.” She turned her back on her shaking sister and walked to where the slave-merchants stood.
“You,” she said, addressing the man. “Who are you? What is your name?”
“My name is Ovreh,” the little man answered, puffing himself up in an attempt to meet her height. “I—”
Sulema drew her shamsi and ran it through his middle, using all the strength in her arms and back to push it through skin and innards and muscle. She twisted the blade and wrenched it from his belly with a sharp sideways slash, spilling his stinking guts upon the ground. The man’s eyes went wide and he screamed, clutching at his own steaming entrails and falling heavily to his knees. He screamed again, and Sulema swept him sideways with one foot, then slashed his throat wide open.
The smell of death blossomed in the hot air, sweet as flowers.
“I am Sulema Ja’Akari,” she said, kicking him in the face for good measure. “You touched my sister. For this you die.” She unfastened the fine silken cloak which he had worn fashionably over one shoulder and which was free of blood and gore. This she used as a rag to clean her face and hands, and her befouled shamsi.
“What—” Sharmutai gasped. “What?”
Sulema glanced up, locked eyes with the whoremistress. The woman’s face paled and she took a quick step back, slipping and nearly falling in the dying man’s blood. “Take your collar from Hannei’s neck,” she told the woman in a soft, low voice. “Do it now.”
The woman moved to Hannei’ side, lifting the large ring of keys she wore upon her belt. “You cannot do this,” she gasped, even as the collar dropped from Hannei’s throat. “This is my property. The law—”
“I do not give a rat’s ass about your laws,” Sulema told her. She continued wiping her blade on the fallen man’s robes as he twitched his last, and tried to hide the shaking in her hands. Moments before, this had been a living man, and now he was a pile of meat and stinking offal. My hands did this. Hannei reached up and touched her own bare throat, face unreadable.
My hands did that, too, Sulema thought. I helped my sister be free. It is good. She let out a long breath. “To touch a Ja’Akari is to die. That is the only law I need. Best you remember it as well.”
A crowd had gathered to gape at the dead man, the travelers, the barbarian warrior sheathing her barbarian sword. Sulema ignored them all, breathing deeply and feeling better than she had in many moons. She finished cleaning her blade, sheathed it, and dropped the man’s cloak atop his head. Finally she gathered the lead rope of the nearest churra and tossed it to Keoki, who stood gaping at her with eyes as wide as a tarbok’s.
Sulema turned from the sight and smell of death and looked up at the mountains.
“Well,” she said to her companions, “what are you waiting for? We have mountains to cross, and an impossible quest before us. Like as not we will all be dead before dawn— but it will be an interesting death, at least.”
Hannei made an odd, strangled noise. Sulema looked at her sword-sister, at her bared teeth and the tears rolling down her cheeks, and realized that she was laughing.
The scouts for which Yaela’s salt had paid advised against going south. Some failure of nature or magic was causing water to sour in the Zeera, and it seemed to worsen in that direction. Besides, the mountain folk held those lands sacred.
They consulted the salt merchants, and Leviathus’s maps—and Yaela gazed long into a spider’s web, though Sulema saw nothing there besides a dead bug—and a way into the Jehannim was at last decided upon.
If only, Sulema wished, the way back might be so easily foreseen. Yet “If wishes were water,” Ani had been fond of saying, “the desert would bloom.”
Ani was the one person in all the world she might have added to their expedition. Sulema missed the youthmistress terribly—her sharp tongue and sharper wit would have been a welcome change from this gloomy group. Wherever in the world she might be, Sulema hoped she was happy.
They loaded their gear into the churrim’s packs and set off, leaving the good people of Min Yaarif to clean up the mess she had made of the slavemaster. It would be good for them, she thought, to remember what happened to those who tried to enslave a warrior.
Indeed, she was happy to be clad once again in a warrior’s garb: a warrior’s vest and trousers, and a shamsi at her hip. She missed her long braids bitterly and kept running her hand over the strip of scalp where her hair was growing back, as if she could hurry it along. Leviathus strode by her side wearing an odd assemblage of loose, bright clothing which flapped in the hot wind like the sails of one of his boats. He bore an Atualonian-style short sword at his hip, a long knife strapped to his thigh, short knives strapped to either forearm, and in sheaths on his tall boots as well. Sulema shook her head at him.
“A sword and five knives! How many blades does one man need?”
Leviathus glanced at her, grinned, and winked. “Ah,” he told her, “those weapons are only the ones you can see.”
She laughed. “I have missed you.”
“And I you. Family should stick together. Even,” he added in a whisper, “if they are heading off to certain death.”
“Especially then,” she agreed. “It is good to be with you.”
Finding her brother again helped, a little, to ease the sting of losing Hannei. Her sword-sister was avoiding her, choosing to walk at the back of the pack instead of at her side. It was not the same Hannei she had left behind just a few short years ago.
Two warriors; a soft Atualonian prince—a pirate, now, and able to talk to sea serpents, but a soft outlander all the same. A slave trainer no doubt loyal to the whoremistress, and two Quarabalese sorcerers. Surely Akari himself has never seen such a mismatched band of travelers. All we need to complete this spectacle is Mattu Halfmask, his odd sister, and maybe her troupe of fools.
It was a torrid day at the peak of summer. The land around them lay still under the gaze of Akari, still as a hare beneath the hawk’s gaze. A dry and fevered wind breathed down upon them from the mountaintops, abjuring their desires. The Jehannim were so severe, so hostile to human life, that their peaks were sometimes referred to as an earthly level of Yosh. Few were those travelers so foolhardy as to attempt this crossing, and fewer still by far those who lived to tell the tale.
A motley troupe of fools indeed, and they were perhaps following the greatest fool of all. Despite her earlier actions, Sulema knew herself to be too inexperienced, unprepared to lead such an undertaking. Unprepared and unfit, as the pain in her arm and shoulder reminded her. Her foolishness with the lionsnake had all but gotten her killed. This mad gamble was likely to end all their stories, and badly.
Sulema gazed up toward the peaks of the Jehannim, knowing all of this, knowing the mountains mocked her absurd human striving, and knowing as well that the whisper of wisdom that was trying to make itself heard would not be enough to stop her.
Surely I am casting my fishing net at a dragon, she thought to herself, and felt her lips curl in a grim little smile. But just watch me catch the damned thing.
* * *
After several days’ journey through the foothills and ruins of abandoned towns, they reached the head of the upward path upon which they had decided. Days spent swatting gnats, sweating, and cursing the day she had ever left the tedious safety of childhood.
I would rather muck a thousand churra pits than endure another day of this, Sulema thought, slapping at one of the bloodsucking bugs and leaving a smear of red on her upper arm. I would rather wash dishes for the Mothers for the rest of my life. I would rather watch over a horde of toddlers—
Well, no, she had to admit. Maybe not toddlers.
The spare dark trees of the sere foothills gave way to sere brush and jagged red rock which cut at leather boots and turned treacherously underfoot. Game was scant; hares and rockbirds, ochre-tailed lizards with big glaring eyes, or the occasional hawk might be seen, but not much else. On their second morning a handful of scrawny goats bounced along the steep face of a far cliff as if gravity held no sway over them; Sulema laughed at their antics, but would have been glad of the fresh meat had they been within range.
They turned sharply westward at the Cairn of the First Men, a necropolis marked by pillars of stone and bone. This was the site of a great battle—or slaughter, depending on which story she believed—around which had been built a wall of red salt and white. There was wealth enough in those bricks to have sustained life in the Zeera for generations.
The dead had never held much dread for Sulema, young as she was and unsure of her own mortality, but there was no desire in her heart to take so much as a chip from that precious wall, much less peek over it. Flags of colorful cloth had been tied to sticks and left to flap in the wind, a warding and a warning against wicked shades, but these hung lifeless. The very air held its breath and tiptoed around that place. Such a pall hung over the Cairn that it was almost a relief to set foot upon the stone road that wound its silent, steady way toward the looming peaks.
Almost.
The churrim snorted and gnashed their short tusks at the presence, and did not seem much happier to be heading higher into the mountains. Neither was Sulema’s heart lifted, though she tried to tell herself that the sooner this journey was started, the sooner it would be finished. She could not help but think she was stepping into a viper’s pit with two bare feet.
Yaela, however, stepped so lightly and with such good cheer that her little feet danced pitter-pat pitter-pat upon the flat stones, and shadows cavorted in her wake.
“You seem in a fine mood,” Sulema said to her finally, trying without much success not to sound like a petulant child. Their food sacks were growing too light too quickly, and she was already tired of pemmican.
The shadowmancer’s apprentice glanced over her shoulder. She was not smiling, but her eyes were soft and wide, and seemed lit from within as if by delight.
“I do not expect you to understand.”
“You are happy to be going home,” Sulema guessed. She herself was homesick enough that the smell of horse shit would have been welcome. “But you are not returning to Quarabala, not really.” The plan was for Yaela to remain at the other side of the mountains, just shy of the Edge of the Seared Lands, with the churrim and their gear and whomever of their party would not be capable of the three-day run to Saodan.
Yaela shrugged, and the movement became part of her dance.
“You do not understand,” she said again. “I am closer to home than I have been in years. Years and years. So close I can taste it.” She stuck out her tongue and crossed her jade eyes at Sulema, who was so shocked at this display of playfulness she stopped dead in her tracks, and Leviathus trod upon her heels.
“Sorry.” Sulema looked up and into her brother’s dawn-blushed cheeks. The shadowmancer’s apprentice chuckled, a breathy little almost-laugh. Leviathus watched her twirl away, and his eyes were filled with a wistful hunger.
“As well love a rock as love that one,” she said to him. “Yaela is hard as the stone at the bottom of a well, and as cold.”
“You are hot as a new-forged sword,” he retorted, reaching out to ruffle the short fuzz of her hair, “and twice as sharp. But I love you.”
Their quick laughter was swallowed by the mountains. Sulema hoped it would give them indigestion.
* * *
The first two days of climbing were an uneventful slog of tedium, burning leg muscles, and wrestling with unwilling pack beasts.
The third day started out usual enough. Breakfast was a handful of cold pemmican, three swallows of tepid water. Sulema was so hungry she would have attempted to eat the stinking cheeses of Atualon.
“If these goatfucking churrim do not cooperate,” she said between gritted teeth as she heaved at a lead rope, “I will eat one of them, as a warning to the others. They act as if—”
A roar from the rocks overhead cut her short. The lead rope was yanked from Sulema’s grasp and the lead animal bolted back down the path, dragging its companions behind. Sulema might have turned to chase them, or drawn her sword, or shouted for help, but she did none of these things. The timbre and depth of that roar gripped her very bones, and she could no more move than if she had been turned into mountain stone.
Lionsnake, she thought, and her mind went cold with terror.
Indeed it was a lionsnake, though not like any she had ever seen. The beast which hauled itself down the path toward them was a smallish, lumpy, gray-scaled and ugly thing with stubby legs and a thick wattled neck. Instead of the bright blue and red plumes of a Zeerani beast, this one had a bright yellow crest that rose high above its blunt head as it hissed at them, venom sacks swelling, reptilian eyes fastened greedily on Sulema.
If Sulema could have breathed, she would have screamed. Images flashed through her mind, flick-flick-flick like a bad dream. Azra’hael, snarling and broken. The grandmother bitch lionsnake rearing above her. A… a man… a man with a spider…
“Your father will be so disappointed.”
Shadows devoured the edges of her vision. She dropped to her knees, sword-arm dangling limply at her side.
Someone shoved her roughly aside. As she dropped to all fours, Sulema caught a glimpse of rough linen trousers, bare brown feet, brown eyes bitter-dark with contempt. Hannei’s dark blades hissed like iron in the fire as they left their sheaths and she sprang upon the predator, silent as wrath, quick as death. The beast snapped at her, but it hardly had time to blink in surprise as the shadow-blades hacked through the bone and gristle of its neck.
Blood fountained through the air, stinking, glowing like a handful of gems in the last rays of sunlight, as Hannei painted the story of its death upon the gray mountain rocks. Within instants the lionsnake lay still. She looked down upon this masterpiece of gore, frowning as if the fight had been too quick for her liking, and then shot Sulema such a look of contempt that for a moment she could not breathe.
For a moment, she did not want to breathe.
That my sister should look at me so, her wounded heart cried, after all we have been to one another.
The lionsnake finished dying, and the sun finished setting, and Sulema swayed to her feet as the rest of their group gathered and Hannei wiped her blades clean. Leviathus had caught the churrim before they could get far, and no one had been harmed.
“Well,” Keoki said, after taking a good long look at the dead creature, “this could have been worse. Do you mind if I—” he gestured toward the sagging yellow plumes.
Hannei shrugged and turned away.
Yaela grimaced as she stepped over the knobbled gray tail. “This was hardly more than a whelp. There are likely to be others nearby, and much bigger.” She glanced at Sulema. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” Sulema answered. Almost to herself, she added, “I hardly know her at all. Back home, we were close as sisters. Closer.”
Yaela watched Hannei’s retreating back and shrugged.
“You are not in the Zeera.”
No, Sulema agreed silently as Keoki strode past, whistling, with yellow feathers in his hair. We are not in the Zeera.
The road to the Palace of Flowers, the emperor’s grand residence at the heart of the Forbidden City of Khanbul, was said to have the heart of a river. Though human lives might sail across it, the road itself was untouched and untroubled.
The azure bricks beneath Jian’s bootheels gave off a pleasant ringing tone as he strode beside Mardoni. They were said to be made of a secret mixture of clay, powdered sapphire, rice water, and the cremated remains of tens of thousands of soldiers who had volunteered to protect the emperors of Sindan from the afterlife. Shaped like the scales of Sajani, the bricks were polished clean as a new-hatched dragon.
Though the walls of every other building within the palace complex were tiled in yellow and deep gold which darkened to crimson as the buildings reached up into the sky, the Palace of Flowers itself was the deepest red of heart’s blood. In this way the palace was meant to symbolize a unity of earth and heaven through the intercession of its daeborn emperor.
The complex was vast enough to have swallowed Bizhan several times over, and teemed with vibrant life. Though he knew ordinary citizens of Sindan were not permitted to remain in Khanbul past dusk, such a place required the same foodstuffs, goods, and services as any village, though on a grander scale.
Merchants and artisans, couriers, priests, and scribes bobbed along in the road’s current like colorful little boats, making way for and swept up by the power of Jian’s entourage. Straw hats fell like petals from the branches of flowering trees as the procession was noticed and people dropped to their knees in its wake, lowering their white and frightened faces lest they accidentally catch the eye of a Sen-Baradam or, worse, a member of the royal court.
Jian had never been in the midst of such a throng. As he passed a squad of yellow Daechen, who bowed before him like wheat in a storm, he reflected that never in his life had he felt so alone.
“They honor you,” Mardoni remarked.
“Mmmm,” Jian grunted, though he thought, This honor looks too much like fear. In his experience fear was a path which, like the deep river, flowed only in one direction— toward death. In observing the interactions between Dae, human, and daeborn he had concluded that it is in the nature of man to fear that which he does not understand, and to kill that which he fears.
He strode through the people of Khanbul like a farmer through the fields, fingering his scythe and considering where and when he should begin the harvest. Though on some level he pitied the people of Sindan, no longer did he love them. His love was reserved for those of his kin in the Twilight Lands, and for his little family here—Tsali’gei and their son. Everyone else he considered a threat to him and to those he loved.
Save your compassion for those who can do you no harm, his father Allyr had advised him. And understand this: only a dead enemy can do you no harm. Allyr’s heart was as cold as the sea which had birthed them, and as true. His words had become Jian’s law.
No weakness, he reminded himself as they passed a group of children playing hoop-toss and chanting as the colored circles flew through the air among them.
When the Dragon wakes at last,
Who will rise and who will fall?
Shaman, sorcerer, lover, liar,
Who will rise and rule them all?
No quarter, he thought further, hardening his heart as he watched a young merchant’s apprentice scramble to hide behind a food cart. No mercy.
At last they reached the palace.
Though Jian had spent five long years in the Twilight Lands, surrounded by magic and beauty and grace unthinkable in the lands of men, still he caught his breath at the sight up close of the Palace of Flowers. It shone beneath the tourmaline sky like a crimson lotus blossoming in still waters, serene and beautiful. The golden-tiled roof rivaled Akari’s gaze in its brilliance, and the many-colored windows dazzled even eyes grown accustomed to wonder.
Flowering trees—tended and twisted by dedicated gardeners whose tongues and eyes had been put out so that they might live only for their precious charges—lined the wide, steep steps that led up to the palace. The way was illuminated by magical lanterns of wormsilk and spidersilk, and as they mounted the stairs soft petals were crushed beneath the feet, fresh-cut flowers by the tens of thousands sending up a fragrant dying prayer.
Lashai of a kind Jian had never seen—red-clad servants with faces pale and beautiful as candles—opened the massive gold doors, and a score or more of young women and men, naked and exquisite, emerged from the palace bearing wide woven baskets. Laughing silently, they flung yet more petals before Jian’s feet. Their smiles were wide and perfect, and their eyes shone dark and lovely and empty as obsidian.
As Jian crossed the threshold at Mardoni’s side, white light bloomed around them painfully bright and pure. The doors closed behind them with a soft, deep, mournful sound like an enormous golden bell, tolling the empire’s doom.
Jian squinted against the brilliance of the luminists who lined the long hall and the steps up to the dais of the emperor’s throne, but he never slowed his stride. Neither did he bow head or bend knee in the emperor’s presence. He was the daeborn son of the Sea King, and the sea bowed to no man.
Daeshen Tiachu sat upon a massive throne, higher than the tallest man’s head. It was carved of blackthorn and polished till it gleamed like a live thing. The symbol of the white bull rose over his head, wrought so cunningly—of human bone, it was said—that it seemed the beast would break free and trample them all underfoot. More luminists clustered about the throne like brilliant flowering trees, clad in sunlight, stern-faced and sun-eyed, each of them beautiful as a faceted gemstone, deadlier than a thousand swords.
The emperor himself was imposing even by daeborn standards: broad-shouldered and with the bull’s neck of a fighting man, with dark eyes shadowed by a pair of massive bull’s horns. He made no move to stand and did not address them as they approached.
Mardoni stopped at the foot of the dais and dropped to one knee, then bent so low that his forehead touched the bottom step. Jian merely inclined his head, drawing an angry hiss from some.
“Your Illumination,” he said, in a voice meant to carry to the far corners of the wide hall. “I have come as you asked.”
Daeshen Tiachu sat still and silent for many long moments, staring down at Jian and the rest of the entourage. His face showed no more emotion than a dancer’s mask, and his eyes showed less than that.
“So,” he said finally in a voice like soft blue thunder, “the sea has come to the mountain. Come, Tsun-ju Jian, son of the Sea King. Sit. We have much to discuss.” He indicated a place at his side.
Jian took a deep breath and set one foot upon the lowest step, feeling that the moments of his life till this one had been raindrops in a river, and that this was the sea.
* * *
The emperor proposed, through Mardoni’s mouth, that the problems of Sindan be laid neither at the feet of the Daechen nor the twilight folk—for were they not kindred?
“It is the self-proclaimed Dragon Kings and Queens, who would style themselves as leaders of the world,” the emperor’s proxy argued, and the other Sen-Baradam muttered agreement. “The Dragon King claims to sacrifice his very life to keep Sajani asleep lest she wake and destroy us all, yet who is to say the atulfah could not be wielded as well—or better—by his Illumination? Surely the wisdom of Khanbul is better suited to the civilized use of magic than the barbaric singing of some western king.”
The greatest threat, he pressed, was Atualon itself, long gripped by internal wars of succession, and this eternal bickering threatened to destroy all the lands, not just those in the north.
“It is the duty of the Sindan daeborn,” Mardoni said, “spawned man and magic, to take charge of this holy duty.”
Not a word was spoken of coastal raids, or the winnowing of daeborn youths, or of wives and children held hostage. These unspoken words threatened to drown out all other arguments in Jian’s mind.
In the end he agreed, however, as he and his father had intended, to set aside the difference between Dae and daeborn and humankind, for the good of the empire and the peoples of the world. An illuminated scroll was presented and described to those present. Written in ink and iron, it was a treaty between the Sindanese empire and the twilight lords.
Those in the hall held their collective breath, like a man dying on the battlefield not ready to let go of hope, as Jian dipped a bear’s-hair brush into ink mixed with his blood, and the emperor’s, and the light of Illumination.
He signed the document.
Tsun-ju Jian de Allyr
Son of Tiungpei the pearl diver of Bizhan
and
Allyr the Sea King
In this year of Illumination
The emperor smiled at last and wrote his own name with a flourish. Tiachu leaned back into the hard back of his throne and raised a massive hand above Jian’s head.
“It is done,” he intoned. “Let there be light.” The illuminists in the hallway glowed with their emperor’s satisfaction, highlighting the bloodthirst of those assembled.
What he also meant was: Let there be war.
Jian saw that it was good. And it was terrible.
* * *
After the treaty had been signed, the doors were opened and a festival commenced. Gifts were presented first to his Illumination the emperor, and then to Jian. Practical gifts of horses, swords, books, even a full set of exquisite raptor-hide armor, presented by a young woman whose face was vaguely familiar, and who was introduced to Jian as a commander of one of the empire’s new battalions of raptor fighters.
Most interesting was a torque of gold and red iron given to him by a pair of young daeborn who had walked all the way from Salar Merraj. Sea-bear’s eyes, faceted bits of dragonglass, glittered at the ends of the torque. It was not a practical thing, but it was beautiful. One of the sea-bears, he thought, looked female, where the other was decidedly masculine. It reminded him of Tsali’gei. He smiled at the antlered young girl as she placed it around his neck.
“I am no one,” she answered in a hollow voice, lifting her chin in an arrogant manner.
“We are Kanati,” the youth who had accompanied her said, a bright-eyed young man. “And Awitsu.” Though his voice and manner were soft, almost apologetic, the hairs on the back of Jian’s neck prickled when their glances met. Son of the Sea King or no, Sen-Baradam or no, he had the distinct impression that were he to raise a hand against the girl, this youth would tear him flesh from bone.
More than you appear, are you? He favored the lad with the sharp-toothed smile of a predator. You are not alone in this, youngling.
The boy met him stare for stare, and a small smile formed at the corners of his mouth. He nodded, and the two backed away, bowing in the proper manner of emissaries.
Overhead the moons and stars could be seen through panes of colored glass, and the hours swam by like silvery fish. When an emissary from some far province was in the middle of a long speech—about honeybees, Jian thought, but perhaps it was meant to be a metaphor of some sort—the emperor raised his hand again, and the gathering went silent. Even the candles seemed to cease sputtering, the shadows to hold their breaths.
“Enough,” Tiachu said. With no further explanation, he rose to his feet, and every person in the room fell bonelessly to the floor.
All save Jian. He stood, ruefully figuring that it would be a breach of etiquette to rub his numb-tingling hindquarters and wondering what sort of obeisance—if any—he should make. Groveling was out of the question, but as he had agreed to limited service under the emperor, perhaps he should at least take a knee? Never would Allyr bend, he was certain of it, but Jian was his father’s son, and not a Sea King himself.
Not yet, anyway.
Just as he had settled on a deep nod of respect and a slight bend at the waist—enough to indicate honor without servility—the emperor turned to him. As he stepped closer, Jian was forced to look up, up, up to meet those too-bright, too-knowing, too-old eyes.
“You are tired,” the emperor said. “It is time for you to rest.”
Jian stifled a yawn, suddenly and completely fatigued. Was it magic of some kind, he wondered, or just the late hour? In the end it did not matter. The emperor’s dark gaze swept across the room, sending the crowd tumbling backward through the door. When they had all gone—all save Mardoni, still on his knees at the foot of the dais—the emperor turned away from Jian, dismissing him as a man might a glove dropped and forgotten beside a muddy road, there to be trampled in the empire’s march to war.
* * *
“Well,” Tsali’gei said when he returned to their chambers, “I can see that the emperor has not had you killed yet.” And then she proceeded to kiss him half to death. Jian began to wonder whether she had it in mind to conceive a second child then and there when a soft sound drew his attention. He turned toward it, and his heart stopped short as he all but dropped his beloved on her pretty little butt.
“Mother,” he breathed.
Tiungpei stood poised in the doorway to an adjoining room, one hand on the half-open door and the other pressed over her heart as if to keep it from flying away at the sight of him. She was smaller than he remembered, older, more bent, and more frail, but in her eyes and the proud way she held her head lay the strength of a woman who had loved the sea.
“Jian,” she said, and her voice cracked his heart.
“Mother,” he answered, his voice the small echo of a sea-bird calling to the waves. “I have come back to you. I did not forget.”
Tiungpei loosed her hold on the door and moved quickly across the room. Jian held out his arm and enfolded her, enfolded both of them, clinging to his lost ones and filling his heart with their presence.
In that moment, he knew, the fate of the world was sealed.
* * *
At the end of his third day in the Palace of Flowers—three days filled with assemblages, and decrees, and false jeweled smiles—Giella, the White Nightingale, flew to land at his side.
She seemed to him to have flown in truth. The feathered print of her red robes, hiked up and tied at the waist to display red silk pants, the crest of feathers at her temples, even the bright laughing intelligence in her strange eyes gave the impression that she could spread her arms and take flight. That she had left the wild skies to come to him filled Jian with a foreboding kind of pleasure.
Birdlike, too, was her stance as she perched on the delicate rail of the balcony upon which he stood. Balanced on one foot, arms outstretched, long red sleeves fluttering in the evening breeze.
“That seems risky,” he commented, leaning upon the railing and pretending to himself that he was not trying to steal a peek as the wind plastered the silk robes close to her body. The White Nightingale laughed, her pale throat arched against the indigo-bleeding sky.
“What, this?” she teased, hopping from foot to foot light as a wish. “Or the color of my robes? Or our meeting here, now?”
“All of these and more,” he said. “If you were seen wearing the emperor’s colors—”
“If I am seen in the city at all, it will be my head,” she chided softly. “No comfort girl is allowed in Khanbul at all after dark, and a comfort girl who is also a trained assassin?” She sat back on her haunches, paying no mind to the cliff-sheer drop beneath her, and waggled a finger in his face. “My being here would likely cause both of our heads to roll, O Son of the Sea King.”
“Why have you come, then?”
“Because I can,” she quipped. “Who is this emperor”— she made a rude noise with her tongue— “to tell me where I may and may not go? What colors I may or may not wear? I am Giella, daughter of the Twilight Court. As I was promised to this world, so was this world promised to me. It is mine, to travel where I will, wearing what I will, and…” She leaned close, so close her red lips brushed Jian’s ear and made him shiver. “…loving whomsoever I choose to love.”
“Giella—”
“Also,” she went on, ignoring him, “I have come to warn you about Mardoni. He is not your friend, Jian. He smiles to your face, while sharpening his knife for your back. Rumors are cropping up in Khanbul and in Sindan beyond, falsehoods he has planted like mushrooms in his dark and shit-filled mind, that you seek to set yourself on a level with the emperor. Already it is known that you refused to bow before the throne of the White Bull. Many of the Sen-Baradam whisper in dark corners that your intent is to make the bull bow before you.”
“Ah.” Jian sighed. “I wish I could say that I was surprised.”
“Let me grant your wish, then!” Giella said with a girlish laugh. She sprang down from the balustrade and before Jian knew it, kissed him full on the mouth.
He kissed her back. Knowing he would regret it later, regretting it even then. He wrapped his arms around the White Nightingale and drew her close, reveling in her bright heat and lithe body, the dangerous strangeness of her, the intoxicating scent of Daezhu.
“Now you can say you are surprised,” she murmured against his chest. “I have granted your wish.”
“Giella,” he said too late, drawing back just enough to pretend that he was resisting, yet not far enough to be believable. “I cannot. Tsali’gei—”
“Is your wife and your true love,” she finished, placing a finger upon his mouth. “I know this. I am just—” She looked up and into him, then changed what she had been about to say. “Just here to tell you to be careful. It would be safest for you to take Tsali’gei and the child back to the Twilight Lands, and forget the world of men.”
“Would that I could,” he answered, and he meant it. “But the oracles have spoken, and they all say the same thing. That Sajani is indeed waking, threatening the Twilight Lands as well as this one. The chance to unite all lands—Twilight, Sindan, and Atualon—under a single power is simply too great an opportunity to pass up. Besides, the ink has not yet faded on the treaty. Were I to be harmed while here in the Forbidden City, the armies of twilight would fall upon them like iron rain.”
“All lands united under a single banner, hm?” Her lips brushed his again, and then she pulled away. Jian let her go, reluctantly. “Under whose banner, I wonder. The white bull? Your father’s silver seashells? Or perhaps you think to unite the world beneath the banner of the blue bear?”
“Hush,” he scolded, watching with some regret as she leapt gracefully back to the knife’s edge of the balustrade. “Your mouth is too big to speak of such things. I do not care what banner the world chooses to march beneath, so long as it is united and kept safe for us. For all of us,” he added, thinking not only of himself and the other daeborn, but of the Twilight Lands, the common village folk. Even the peoples of Atualon, he supposed, deserved a chance to raise their children in peace.
“Hush,” she mocked, “your mouth is too pretty to speak of such grand dreams.” And she leapt backward into the night sky, laughing.
With a cry Jian leaned out over the railing, but she was gone. Only her laughter, the scent of her hair, and the warmth of her kiss upon his lips lingered as proof she had ever been there.
Morning burst upon the Edge hot and dry, with a hint of spice in the dusted air that mocked the refugees with memories of hearth-bread and pies. Maika worried as she climbed the wide stone steps to the rooms into which her counselors had insisted upon settling her—she did not want the bakers to be digging new hearths in this place; she did not want her people to get comfortable and attempt to resume some semblance of their former lives. As terrifying as she found the prospect of leading a doomed march aboveground with too few shadowmancers to shield them from the deadly sun, Maika knew that to remain here was folly. Even now, runners returned from scouting missions with wounded from an encounter with a greater predator, or with a voice shakily recounting tales of reavers hunting the road behind them.
Sometimes the scouts set out and did not return at all, or they returned bitten and were put down by their sisters and brothers before the change could take them.
The lives we had are over. There is no hope for us now but to leave the Seared Lands forever.
She knew this, felt it in her bones and fingertips, heard it in the empty wailing wind through the passageways. If we brave the shadowed roads, many of my people will perish— but if we attempt to remain here, we will all die. But how to convince her people of this truth, when they had followed in her footsteps the first time and had come so near to ruin at the hands of mere Edgelanders? How could she make her own counselors see the naked truth, when she herself did not yet reach past any of their chins?
That very afternoon Counselorwoman Lehaila had been caught trying to bolt with the remaining three shadowmancers, and Maika had had no choice but to call for her execution. Now she must, as was her duty, bear witness to the death of a woman whose greatest crime was giving into the fear they all shared. She could almost wish that the Araids would find and kill them all before she was forced to do this thing.
Counselorwoman Lehaila was dressed in the sky-blue and gold of one who was to be surrendered to Akari. A blue hood covered her head, and golden slippers graced her large feet. Those feet were splayed and strong, in the proud stance of a woman who had run miles in a youth spent in service to her people. In the end, she would have abandoned them, though, and such an offense no queen could pardon. Most especially in such dark days as they faced now. The woman had left her no choice.
No choice, she repeated firmly to herself as they bound Lehaila hand and foot to the red iron rings that had been set into a cobbled stone courtyard in ancient times, perhaps for this very purpose. She clenched her jaw and widened her eyes to keep them dry, lest the silent, grim crowd see her grief as doubt, and take tears for weakness. I have no choice. She did this to herself, not I.
Never, she knew, never would those words ring true. There was always a choice, though seldom, it seemed to her, much joy in the choosing.
When offerings of oil and meat, salt and manna water had been piled around the counselorwoman’s feet, when Lehaila’s weeping children had been led away, Maika took the last few steps to stand by her side. There, finally, she hesitated. She had been advised to give a grand and stirring speech—had been up all day and half the night composing it, in fact—about courage and sacrifice and remaining together as a people in the face of danger. Now that she saw the woman trembling in fear, Maika found she had no heart for queenly words or wise remonstrations.
Her eyes followed the thick manna-root rope that snaked up the rift walls all the way to the bare, burnt surface of her ancestral lands. Standing here in the Edge, the rifts and canyons and tunnels that made a world for them were much closer to the surface than those in Saodan; Maika could, if she raised her face to the sky, make out the stars high above and the faint bruise-purple edges of a dying night.
Unbidden a memory came to her of a day, not many years past, when she was small and alone. She had broken her arm in a fall down some stairs. She hurt, and she missed her auntie Yaela, and the nurses found her inconsolable. Counselorwoman Lehaila had come to her rooms, though she was a busy woman with duties to Quarabala and children of her own. Lehaila had brought sweets, and a doll carved of manna root, and a book written by the warrior-poet Maika, for whom she had been named.
“Forgive me,” Maika whispered to the condemned woman, “I cannot do this.”
“You must,” Lehaila whispered back harshly. “You cannot turn back now, not if you are to lead our people. And you must lead them, you must. I was wrong and I knew it. It was wrong of me to—” She choked on the words, chest heaving. “Please just… just get it over with. My queen. I am sorry. I—”
Maika held up one hand, begging the woman to silence. Then she beckoned Tamimeha and her grim warriors forward and they came. The hood was drawn over Lehaila’s weeping eyes, and the end of that long rope fashioned into a crude harness and tied about her torso. Finally Tamimeha kissed the counselorwoman on both cheeks, a formal farewell. She stepped back from Lehaila—they all did—and the rope went taut as unseen hands hauled at it. Like a bird in the stories Lehaila began to rise, slowly at first, twisting this way and that as they hauled her up to the surface of the world, and to her doom.
“Forgive me, my queen!” she wailed. “Forgive me!”
Maika made herself stand and watch as Lehaila rose to meet Akari, refusing her eyes the comfort of darkness, refusing her heart the comfort of a turned cheek. When Lehaila reached the surface she would be free to cut her bonds with the small knife tucked into her waistband and run, though it would do her no good; dawn would bring her death by fire. Or she could choose, as was more usual, to end her own life by the blade instead.
There is always a choice, Maika reminded herself. She clenched her fists till the nails dug into her palms, as if sharing the condemned woman’s agony might somehow absolve some small portion of her crushing black guilt. She made hers, just as I have.
The crowd roared in horror as Lehaila made her choice: she plunged to the ground wailing, clawing at the air as if she might catch it, bright blade of her knife falling before her like an omen. She had chosen neither death by fire nor by the blade, but had sawed through the rope as it hauled her to the surface. She hit the ground with such a sound as would haunt Maika waking and sleeping for whatever time remained to her. Lehaila’s bright life burst forth to spray upon the stones, splattering Maika’s robes and staining her golden slippers a dull red. The horrified crowd of witnesses gasped, or wept, or turned away. Many of them glanced at their queen as they did so, with looks of respect, of awe, of fear or anger or a combination of the emotions of which human mouths are too small to speak or hearts to fully encompass.
Maika stood sick and stunned, whispering to Lehaila that of course she forgave her, that of course she would not do this terrible, unthinkable thing.
The young queen did not return to her temporary rooms immediately after the execution, but wandered listlessly down the corridors of the ancient city, trailing her fingers along the gritty walls and sneezing at the stone dust. She was trailed by a handful of Iponui, their painted bodies glowing dully against the gloom. There were no torches here, no kitchens or dancing rooms; the Edgelanders seemed to lack the imagination necessary to build a life of comfort for themselves, preferring instead to leave the world as drear and joyless as they found it.
“Your Magnificence?” A warrior whom Maika did not know jogged up from the group.
“Yes?” Maika did not stop or turn her head to either side, but continued to stare straight down a long and narrow corridor half filled with the rubble of recent earthquakes. A chill wind caught at her ankles, and she suppressed a shudder.
“Are you… are you well, my queen? Would you not care to return to your rooms and rest? If you are unwell, I can send a… a healer, an Illindrist—”
They think me weak, Maika thought. Too weak and too young to fulfill my duties as queen. The idea saddened her, but her tutor Aasah would have said that the illusion of power is power, so she continued forward as if she knew where she was going.
“No,” she said. “I wish only to commune with my ancestors, to be blessed and cleansed by their presence. You may leave me.”
“But your—your Magnificence—surely some few of us should remain with you—”
“I said you may leave.” Maika cut her eyes sideways at the woman and allowed her irritation to show. “Who would dare to attack me as I speak to the shades of those queens who have gone before me? Would you?” She shook her head fractionally and increased her pace, letting the woman fall behind her. Let them whisper, let them think me mad. Maika had no time for their political games. The Iponui drew back, muttering among themselves.
Maika turned a corner and was alone at last. She took a long, shuddering breath, finally allowing herself to feel the fear which had gnawed at her heart since Lehaila had been brought before her, and since she had sent the woman to her death. Though she had spoken of the ancestors only to rid herself of the warriors’ presence—she truly wanted nothing more than to be left alone so that she could have a good cry—the desire rose in Maika to do just as she had said; to call upon the spirits of her ancestors, brave queens who had survived much worse than this, and beg their intercession. As the notion took hold of her, Maika’s steps quickened till she was nearly running. She ran from the guilt and horror of Lehaila’s execution, and ran, so it seemed to her, toward a desperate hope.
It did not occur to Maika, for she was still young and new to the ways of the world, to wonder whether she was following the desires of her own heart or the lure of a greater will.
My ancestors will know, she thought as she ducked beneath a low arch and wound her way through dust and rubble. The dawn had come, searing the land high above, and though unlit by torch or fire or magelight the path was clear enough for Maika to follow. Surely they will know the way. Surely if I ask, help will be given.
The others would perhaps assume that she had gone to the ancestors to seek forgiveness, but Maika told herself— again—that her soul bore no guilt. Lehaila had tried to save her own hide, and in so doing had imperiled not only those shadowmancers she had persuaded to flee, but whatever thin hope there was of saving her people.
Lehaila will be the last of us to die. I will save all of my people, she thought, to the least and last of them, to the newest and weakest of suckling babes, to the tiniest white-haired grandmother. This time, there would be none left behind. Whether they wished to join the exodus or no, whether Tamimeha attempted to forbid her or no, Maika was queen of Quarabala, and her will would become truth. I will lead my people to safe lands, she vowed in the halls of her ancestors, or I will die trying. Die trying.
Die trying.
Die trying.
A whisper stalked the narrow passageway like the echo of her own thoughts, or the laughter of some ancient and awful thing. It surprised Maika, jolting her from the tranced daze through which she had run and causing her to stop short, nearly tripping over her own feet. She stood bent at the waist, gasping for air and trembling as if she had run for hours.
When Maika came back to her senses she found herself staring at a wall inlaid with a silvery spider’s web so bright that artisans might have laid it into the stone that very day. Beneath the symbol was etched a name: Na’eth. Illindra’s web, she thought, studying the gleaming web. This was a holy place, once. Aasah had showed her such a symbol, when she was very young, and had told her what that name meant. Indeed, he had warded her eyes against the glamour which would have hidden it from ordinary folk and had instructed her as to what a queen might do, had she courage and a desperate need.
Her palm where it had touched the web stung, and her stomach felt queasy. There was magic here, dark and sticky; a deadly trap. Maika knew that she should turn back and run all the way back to the rooms in which she was housed, but her feet refused to move. She swallowed the bile of growing terror. Knowing the magic was there did not make it easier to withstand.
Touching her fingertips to thumbs she linked her hands together in the symbol of Illindra’s unity and pressed them to the web’s center. That portion of the wall into which the web had been set slid silently back a pace, the magic still fresh after these many years of men. Maika took a shuddering breath and then stepped forward, into a narrow passage, dark and deep and secret.
The passage led only one way, for a short distance, and ended in a smooth round chamber with a small arched doorway in the far wall. Directly before her, the thin and wavery light of an ancient mage-torch revealed the statue of a woman, stern-faced and lovely, with hair in tidy locks that extended nearly down to her feet. She was armored as if for war. At her belt she wore six knives, the hilt of each fashioned after some bird or animal the likes of which Maika had never seen. A lyre was strung across her shoulders, her booted feet were set shoulder-width apart, and both hands were held up, palms out toward Maika, in a clear warning.
Go back. Do not pass.
But pass she must; if Aasah’s teachings were true, this sorcerer’s path—for such ways were used only by those blessed of Illindra—might reveal to her some power or tool which would help lead her people to safety.
Maika edged around the statue of the ancient queen, wondering if perhaps this was some ancestor of hers whose name had been written in the dust of time. Drawing a long, shuddering breath, she hunched her shoulders forward and stepped through the narrow doorway, pausing only to snatch up the mage-torch. It brightened at her touch, giving off a wavering red light which did little to dispel her dread.
When he had told her of Illindra’s silvery web and what might lie behind such a symbol, Aasah had given her a warning.
“Old ways lead to old things,” he had told her, “and many old things are best left undisturbed.”
Maika continued down a path trodden by who-knows-what and who-knows-whom in ages past, looking neither to the left nor the right. It grew narrow and wild, as the stone beneath her feet rough. The walls and arching ceiling closed in and the air was sharp with secrets and the spores of dark fungi. A sudden right, and then right again, and without warning the passageway opened into empty space over her, and under her, and to either side, as if some great thing had taken a big bite out of the flesh of the world and left a jagged void.
Maika paused on the threshold of a dark place. Her breathing was fast and raggedy, her heart bounced around inside her like a child’s ball. Her voice trembled as she called out, “Na’eth, it is I.” For so were named all the daughters of Illindra whose ancestors had fallen to this world from Illindra’s web in time long lost, and with whom the Kentakuyan queens of Quarabala claimed ancient friendship.
For what seemed like a very long time there was no answer, no noise save the blood pounding in her ears, nothing to see save the dark and the trembling torchlight. Then came the wind whispering down the passageways, thin and dry as cobwebs. It rose in volume and passion, shishhhing and shusssshing and swirling with noises like words.
Closer, closer the wind howled, and Maika realized that the air was not moving; her torchlight never wavered but for the shaking of her hands. It was not the wind at all, but the whispering of Araids, and they were coming for her.
Maika shuddered as the light of her torch picked up a faint gleam, there and gone and there again. Glittering orbs bigger than her hand, her head, in clusters and rows and circles they appeared, steadied in the irresolute light, and approached. There was a noise like swords and knives clashing, and the gleam of light on cold metal as three lesser Araids crawled into her circle of light.
Monstrous they were, taller than many rooms, wider than doors, red-and-black striped legs gleaming metallic and hard with living armor. Their eyes twitched horribly as they focused on her, mouth parts moving as they considered the savor of her human flesh. Each had raised a pair of brass-haired legs and were rubbing these against their abdomens. This was the source of the not-wind sound she had heard.
The Araids spoke in whispers.
Whispers and death.
“It is I,” Maika said, and it came out as a squeak, courage failing as it always did. This time, she knew, there would be no reprieve; this time she would be eaten by these spiders made of swords. “It is I, Maika, queen of Quarabala. I am come to speak to Na’eth.”
At the mention of that name, the three monstrous forms rose up, forelegs waving madly, whispering and chittering. One of them, the largest and most fiercely striped, scuttled forward, needle fangs longer than her legs poised to strike—
“Hissssst. Hissssssst. Ach, my children, be still. Be gone. Na’eth would speak with this small beast.”
The voice that rolled across the void was no wisp of wind, no hairy scratching, but a low rumbling growl like sweet water rushing over rocks. The three Araids froze as if they had been turned to stone, and then with a scuttle and a scrape and one last lingering glance backward they were gone.
Maika could not help it. She dropped to her knees, and then to her face in the dust, shaking from lock to toe in the grip of black terror. When the cold wind came, she cried out, and when one foreleg as big around as a child reached out to touch her hair, she wept.
“Hisssst, hisssst, little humanling. Ach now, ai now, no need for that. Na’eth will not eat you.” Laughter like fire through parchment. “Not this day. Not for many days, perhaps, perhaps.”
Maika lay trembling in the dirt, unable to stand.
“Enough, humanling. Rise with courage and face me, if you would call yourself Kentakuyan. Tell me why you have come to tempt the hungers of my children, and why I should not let them eat you.”
Maika dragged her knees across the rock, forced her splayed hands to push her body upright, and at last stood on shaking legs. “I have come,” she said, “because I need to help my people. The Araids of the deep came for us with their Arachnists and reavers, so I have led my people here to the Edge. But we were attacked and now we are trapped. We do not have enough shadowmancers to lead all my people across the shadowed roads and into the green lands, and I… I have no power of my own.”
Here her courage failed. What she thought to beg was forbidden, it was sacrilege. She screwed her eyes tightly shut.
“Ahhhhhh, humanling. I know what it is you would ask. You wish to see.”
Maika drew a deep breath, the deepest she had ever taken. She stilled the shaking in her knees, the quivering of her heart, and reminded herself that she was a queen. She opened her eyes and looked up, up.
Up.
Up.
Into the face of a monster.
To call Na’eth a spider was to call a sword a knife, or to call death a respite. This was a being of stars and nightmares, fallen to the center of the earth and there to abide for all ages, a thing of black malice and bright laughter, whose children fed on human flesh and whose mercy might—just might— save an entire people.
“Yes, Na’eth,” Maika said at last. “I come to beg the gift of Illindra’s sight.”
“Do you know what it is you ask, Kentakuyan?”
“I do.”
“Do you know the cost of that which you ask? Such a gift is not granted without sacrifice. A terrible price, for one such as you.” Maika imagined—surely, she imagined—that the nightmare thing spoke with pity.
Years ago, when Maika was very small and foolish, and trying to find her place in the hot, dark world, she had made her first decree, one which had set all the courtiers to laughing: that no spider might be smashed or harmed in any way. It was for this reason, perhaps, that the queen of spiders now granted the darkest wish of her heart.
Quicker than death, darker than shadows, Na’eth reared up. Her fangs glistened red and wet, and Maika froze in terror.
They will stab through me, she thought, and I will die here in the dirt—
Her mage-torch died, plunging them into darkness. A soft touch, gentle and loving as she had always imagined a mother’s might be, brushed the nape of Maika’s throat.
“Is that all?” she asked.
“Little queen,” said Na’eth in a voice like dead things, “it is done.”
Pain blossomed in her throat and raced through her veins like wildfire, weaving trails of searing agony across her skin and bones and blood. The Araid’s icy fire consumed her.
She fell.
* * *
“You are bound now, child. You are bound to us.”
It was her mother, who had died birthing her.
It was Yaela.
It was Aasah.
It was Na’eth, spinning her empty webs into the darkness and keeping the stars at bay. Of all the Araids, Na’eth had told her, only the great daughters of Illindra believed that humans were more than food, more than skin and blood and bile. When she herself was a spiderling, she had heard a human singing an old song, and it had warmed a corner of her sword-touched heart. It read her poetry and sang a child’s rhymes in a dreadfully untrained voice, and showed her a child’s drawings of home.
So she had not yet devoured the little humanling who came to her, in the dark place at dark times, bearing torchlight which hurt her eyes and food she could not eat, and allowed this small thing to ask a boon.
“Little Maika,” the voice crooned, “you are bound to me. Wake. See.”
Maika opened her eyes and would have screamed, but her mouth was bound. She hung suspended by a strand of web around her feet, head down, hair trailing back and forth across the cavern floor as the web sagged and trembled with Na’eth’s weaving.
The great spider—if a sword is a knife—was moving with a delicate grace as she fastened tiny globes of magesilver to her web, weaving a grand design. Maika craned her neck to see, bound as she was, terrified as she was, because the web of forever was a thing of such beauty that it would be worth death to have experienced it.
Her breath caught in her chest as she saw at once that each globe held the image of a person’s face. There was Aasah, and Yaela, and Tamimeha—there she was, Queen Maika, lovelier than she had ever seen herself, prouder and more regal. There was Lehaila, mouth and eyes open wide in death’s agony. And there, before her face in a glowing orb twice the size of the others, she beheld a figure clad all in shadows, bright and terrifying. It threw back its hood, stared into her eyes, and laughed. “You see,” Na’eth whispered, endlessly pitying. “You have paid the price, and now you can see.”
I do not understand.
“Of course you do not understand,” Na’eth snapped, a spider if death is but sleep. “I gave you vision, not the wisdom to understand what you are seeing. That is for you to earn, little humanling. I gave you what you asked for—I gave you sight. There is your savior; now you can see him. Only call, and you will be delivered from this land, you and yours.”
Yes, Maika thought. Of course. It was what all the old stories called for—a hero in times of darkness, to lead the people forward into the light. She reached out, not with her hands, which were bound, but with sa and ka, the heart and breath of her soul, and touched the glowing orb. It burned— how it burned!—but it was a good pain, a true pain, the pain of a queen’s sacrifice for her people.
The face in the orb smiled, a brilliant smile which brought her to tears, and winked out.
“You have seen, you have called,” Na’eth said. “It is done.”
Maika closed her eyes and prepared to die.
I am ready, she thought. I will pay the price.
“Hissssst, hisssst, silly humanling.” Na’eth laughed like the clash of knives. “The price has been paid. You are free to go.” She stretched one foreleg out and brushed the single strand that held Maika to the web. The strand broke.
Again, Maika fell…
Forever.
* * *
When the web-marked door slid back again and Maika stumbled forward into the light, Tamimeha was waiting for her. The warrior yelled with surprise and delight, dropping her torch and scooping her fainting queen up to cradle her in her arms like a child.
“Oh, my queen!” she cried, patting her hair and rocking. “Oh, my heart, where have you been? I feared you were—” Her voice broke.
“Tamimeha,” Maika rasped. Her voice was raw from screaming, and she hurt everywhere. “There is no time. We must go. We must ready the people to leave this place.”
“Hush now. Are you harmed?” Tamimeha stood Maika up and held her at half an arm’s length, just far enough to search her with hungry, anxious eyes. “Your tracks led here, and no further. Where have you been? What happened to—oh. Oh! Oh, my queen, your eyes!” The horror on her face broke Maika’s heart all over again. “Pelang!”
“Gather your warriors,” Maika repeated, softly so as not to hurt her raw throat or reveal the depth of her emotions. “A savior is coming to lead us all from the Seared Lands. I have seen it. You must gather your best warriors and meet her upon the shadowed roads, and bring her here to us.”
“Eyes of Pelang!” Tamimeha wailed again, as if Maika had not spoken. “What have you done?”
“I needed to see into the future,” Maika answered with quiet dignity. The horror on Tamimeha’s face hurt; it took an effort of will for her not to hide her eyes from the sight. I have nothing to be ashamed of, she reminded herself. I did only what I had to do. “So that I might find a way to save my people. And I have seen it, I have found it. The price was mine to pay, and I have paid it.”
“But, my queen—Maika—it is forbidden for one to hold the throne who has eyes of Pelang. It is too much power— this is forbidden by laws as old as time.”
“Laws change.” Maika smiled, though she was weary to the song in her bones. “Times change… I have seen it.”
Killing the lionsnake had been easy. Hannei had faced her kind more than once in the fighting pits of Min Yaarif. They were slower and less cunning than their desert cousins. Their venom was milder. The trick was to kill the beasties before they could wrap those powerful coils around limb or midsection.
If heat and thin air and slow, stupid snakes are the worst these mountains have to throw at us, Hannei thought to herself, this journey may prove easier than a day spent gathering spiders’ eggs for the Mothers.
Such good fortune was unlikely, she knew—would have been unlikely had she been riding with a fist of sisters, rather than this band of idiots, thieves, and pirates. So she kept her watch with as much vigilance as if she were guarding the pride’s bachelor herds.
There was a new voice of the winds. The mountains had been laughing at them since first they set out—sometimes wheezing, sometimes howling with a thousand mad voices, even hissing like foul breath through rotten teeth—but since Hannei had been unable to talk, she had learned to listen better. Thus she was the first who noticed that the howl of mad laughter was not coming from one direction, as winds from on high, but from points all around them, above and below.
She roused Sulema, and the others. In haste they seized what weapons were to hand and piled their fire high with sage-brush and dead branches so that it blazed up into the night, sending a shower of sparks flying to meet the stars and warning the predators that this group of humans was no easy meat.
The mymyc came as a rush of dark water down the moonslit and cruel face of Avolk Tohn, first among the Jehannim in height and in wickedness. They also rose as a black mist from the foothills below, red-eyed and ravenous, rending the air with the cackling laughter they had stolen from men and which raised the chillflesh along Hannei’s arms. From a distance they seemed as fine black horses, sleek and slender and lovely, but their movement was catlike, predatory, as they crept along the jagged rocks and the moonslight glinted off of scaled hides, revealing them as dragonkin.
One of them screamed like a human woman and the others laughed. Being predators, mymyc would hunt rabbits or goats or even a lone vash’ai, if they had to, but they took the greatest delight in the taste of manflesh.
Hannei stood naked but for her trousers and sister-swords, still and silent between Rehaza Entanye—who shifted impatiently from foot to foot, panting heavily in the thin, hot air—and Sulema, whose golden eyes glinted in the pale light, as hungry for this fight as the mymyc were for her bones.
She still loves the thrill of the hunt, Hannei thought, because she still has a love of life and holds it precious.
In that moment, Hannei hated her sister.
In the next the mymyc were upon them, and there was no time to ponder. One beast, larger and thicker with muscle than the rest and with a torn ear, wrinkled its lips back from long white teeth and growled in a tongue so human that it seemed to Hannei that she could almost understand it. Other mymyc crouched, dragonish eyes glowing red in the firelight, and as one they leapt, howling and screeching and laughing to frighten and confuse their prey.
Laughing her own mirthless, tongueless laugh—a scarred sound born of the cruelty of men and the betrayal of women—Hannei leapt to meet them. Her swords, forged of black iron by slaves and thrice quenched in blood-salted oil, did not throw back the fire’s blaze but burned rather with their own dark fire, as if they drank deep of the night’s sorrow and belched it forth as fresh death.
Azdafani, she had named one sword, a name which meant beauty in sorrow, and Idbataani the second, or beauty in treachery. With laughter the citizens of Min Yaarif had debated which was the lesser of two evils. The mymyc learned that, in the hands of Kishah, treachery was followed by sorrow and sorrow by pain and death. As she slashed and hacked her way through the snarling mass of claws and fangs and scaled hide that hungered for her flesh, there was little beauty there by the light of the fire, under the eyes of the moons.
Battle was who she was by then, killing was all of her— growling and grunting as if she were more of a beast than the mymyc, dark blades flashing till her shoulders and belly and back screamed with it. Her companions fought well, sword and spear and bludgeon sending sprays of blood to dance with the embers and the stars. Soon the corpses of mymyc were piled all about them, some twitching, all stinking of death and offal, but it was not enough.
There were too few of the humans, or too many of the foe, however you counted it.
We have come to the mountains to die, she thought, and was surprised that the thought did not aggrieve her. More, it was a comfort. She had vowed to kill her sword-sister in these mountains, and so buy her freedom. Here at the end of her life’s road, Hannei Ja’Akari—who had named herself vengeance and killed without hesitation or pity—discovered too late that there was yet more honor in her heart than murder.
Blood sprayed into her eyes, and Hannei skipped back a two-step, shaking her head to clear her vision. A bright swirl of robes dazzled and confused her before she recognized Keoki, the shadowmancer from Quarabala.
“Ware!” he shouted to her. “Fire!” He bellowed something else, something she could not quite catch, as he shook a drinking horn at her, a drinking horn plugged at one end with scraps of red cloth. She had seen its like, once only, in the fighting pits…
Balefire!
Hannei turned and ran as the shadowmancer drew back his arm and tossed the horn into the heart of their campfire. She took two long strides toward Sulema, and another toward Rehaza Entanye. Grabbing them both by the shoulders, she bore them to the ground even as the mymyc closed in, laughing. Hannei covered their bodies with hers as best she could, even as claws tore into her shoulder and teeth tore a chunk of flesh from her ruined back.
Sulema went still, covering her head with both hands as they had been taught. Rehaza Entanye struggled to rise, fighting her hold even as Hannei squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath.
The world went red.
Balefire!
Even as he wrenched his short sword from the still-thrashing carcass of a mymyc, Leviathus shouted in alarm at the sight of a plugged horn tumbling through the air and into the bonfire they had built. He had seen its use before, once deep in the catacombs beneath Salar Merraj as the Salarians sought to open a new salt mine, another time by his father’s imperators to collapse a colony of soldier beetles grown too close to the city.
It seemed as if a blast tore through his body before the horn had even completed its deadly arc, inspiring his legs to move more swiftly and strongly than ever before. As he bolted he caught a glimpse of silken robes and dark mystery, of wide green eyes sharp and deadly and beautiful as his sword.
“Yaela!” His shout was drowned in the blood and pain and tumult of battle, but not before it had reached her. The apprentice turned, her eyes widened, pupils dilated like shadows swallowing the moons. Spinning on her heel she fled into the dark, scrambling over rock and brush, clinging to the sheer face of the cruel mountain with Leviathus close behind.
The explosion was a dragon’s roar, searing the backs of their heels and singeing Leviathus’s hair as the flames sped past. The hot air was sucked from his lungs and he gasped, choking on ash and deafened by the terrible noise. Yaela’s pale and fluttering robes were his only guide.
If the blast had frightened the mymyc they did not much show it. The greater predators chased their prey like hunting cats after a flushed hare. Claws scrabbled on the rocks so close behind that Leviathus expected every moment, every labored breath to be his last. He imagined those claws tearing into his back, those bright teeth rending the flesh as they tore mouthfuls of meat from his bones.
Yaela disappeared.
Leviathus stumbled in surprise and would have fallen, but a strong hand grabbed his shoulder and wrenched him sideways. Yaela dragged him through a narrow opening between two large rocks—nearly too narrow for his frame. He left most of his tunic and much of his skin behind as they tumbled together into a depression in the stone, almost a small cave.
The mymyc were still outside, just beyond the narrow passage that had scraped him raw, scrabbling at the entrance and snarling their frustration. The thin moonslight dimmed as one of the beasts sought to follow them, but its too-broad shoulders made passage impossible, and it withdrew, growling in its own fell tongue.
The son of Ka Atu sucked in ragged breaths of air, stale and thin, as a man dying of thirst might drink from a worm-riddled mudhole. Sweat poured from his body and was wicked away at once, leaving his skin dry and sticky with salt.
A fine seasoning for our pursuers, he thought with wry humor, should they have their way with me. The calls and howls and scrabbling at the cave entrance made it apparent that the night-skinned predators had not given up, not by any means.
A hand on his shoulder sent Leviathus jumping half out of his skin. Yaela. Her laughter floated round him, rich and warm and sweet.
“King’s son,” she said to him, “we need to make a fire. Build it big and hot, ta? Burn their eyes, singe their hides if they get in, turn their thoughts to softer prey.”
“An excellent idea,” he agreed. “Unfortunately for us, the mymyc are between us and our blaze. Unless you would like me to ask them politely to stand aside while I fetch a few embers?”
“Fortunately for us, I do not walk about the world unprepared,” she answered. Her pale eyes gleamed soft in the night, jade lamps filled with starslight. Leviathus heard a sound of rustling, and of rocks, and she turned her face from him. Presently came a sharp clack-clack and a scattering of miniature stars burst forth on the cave floor.
“Flint?” he asked, astounded. “You have flint?”
“Yes,” she answered. Clack-clack, more stars.
He tried, and failed, to stop his mind from guessing where she might have kept the flint concealed, and what else she might be hiding beneath those silk wraps.
“Also knives, a mirror, a bit of rope, and…” Clack-clack, a shower of tiny sparks, and a tiny ember came to life, breathing a tiny sigh of gray smoke. “…other such things as may come in handy. We have lived different lives, you and I.” She breathed upon the ember, and it leapt dancing into bright flame under the glory of her attention.
“Different, yes,” he said, “but surely that does not mean that—”
Whatever he had been about to say died in Leviathus’s throat.
“Divines save us.”
Yaela’s tiny fire illuminated more than her comely face and alluring figure. As the shadows fled, a great hulking form was revealed at the back of their cave. Eyes each as big as his face blinked at them in the firelight, teeth longer than his sword revealed themselves as the monstrous beast yawned, flicking a scarlet tongue into the air.
“Wyvern,” Yaela whispered. Her eyes were as frightened as Leviathus felt. She drew herself up into a dancer’s pose, attention fixed on the creature as shadows pooled about her feet, eager to do her bidding.
A thrill of hot fear licked Leviathus’s bones as the thing in the back of the cave unfurled itself. Scaled hide scraped audibly against stone as it loomed above them, and a carrion stench filled the air as it flared its nostrils and sucked in their scent.
“Hass ish lurren hir?” it hissed, head weaving back and forth even as behind them their pursuers laughed and scrabbled at the cave entrance.
Then he realized that the wyvern had spoken.
And that he could understand it.
“Lurren hir,” he hissed back, the dragonkin words strange and uncomfortable in his soft human mouth. “Lurraith ish. Felsithoth ish kharrahen.” Humans are here. Two of us. We are being hunted by mymyc.
The wyvern thrust its head toward him, paying no mind to the fire. Its tongue flicked out again, licking the air between them, and a curious cinnamon-musk scent filled the tight space.
“Drach-alar,” it named him. Friend to dragonkin.
Drach-alar, Azhorus agreed in the back of his mind. The king of leviathans was far away and concerned with other matters—eating, sleeping, and showing off for a beguiling young female—but the warmth of his affection washed over Leviathus like the ocean’s caress.
The sound of falling rocks came from the cave’s mouth. Leviathus spun, grabbing Yaela and thrusting her behind him—toward the wyvern, whether that was a good idea or not. A mymyc thrust its head and shoulders through the entrance. It screamed in victory, and then screamed again in an entirely different pitch as it saw the wyvern behind its intended prey. The beast’s forward push became a desperate backward scramble as it sought to escape.
The wyvern narrowed its great luminous eyes and hummed low in its throat.
“Kharnoch essa,” it growled. “Shukos, drach-alar.” Good hunting. My thanks, friend. With that it pushed Leviathus and Yaela out of its way, sending them tumbling, and dragged itself across the cave floor, extinguishing their infant fire. Leviathus would not have believed that such an enormous creature would have been able to fit through that small passageway, but fit it did, squeezing and pushing like a snake through a too-small hole, scrabbling with wing and claw, its barbed tail thrashing at the last so that the humans had to dance out of the way.
Then it was gone hunting, bugling its delight at the prospect of mymyc for its dinner.
Something touched his leg in the darkness. Leviathus yelped, and then gave a shaky laugh when he realized it was just Yaela. He allowed her to help him to his feet and they stood shoulder to shoulder, pressed together against the shadow world.
“Well, king’s son,” she said at last, “that was a surprise. Have I died and gotten lost in the Dreaming Lands, or did you just speak to a wyvern and command it to go chase the mymyc?”
“I spoke with the wyvern in its own tongue,” Leviathus admitted in an awed voice. “I suppose it has something to do with my bond to Azhorus. I assure you, however, that I commanded it to do nothing. Well is it said, ‘Do not cast your fishing net at a dragon.’ I would say the same of dragonkin. Their minds are… vast.”
Far away, in the darkling sea, Azhorus laughed.
Yaela’s hand found his in the dark and squeezed. “I will build another fire,” she announced, “and then you are going to explain to me how it is that Leviathus ap Wyvernus ne Atu, magic-deaf son of the late king, just happens to be able to speak to wyverns.”
* * *
Yaela’s fire danced, sending shadows flickering about their cave, which did not seem so small now that it was not filled with wyvern. The smoke twisted itself into braids and curled lazily up to swirl and eddy about the roof.
They certainly did not need it for its warmth. Whereas night in the Zeera brought cool winds and relief, in the Jehannim there was no respite from the heat. The rocks themselves seemed to radiate, and bent their will to suck moisture and life from the air, as if the land were a forge and Akari meant to temper them within it.
It galled Leviathus not knowing what had happened to their companions, his sister. Yet there was nothing to do as long as the mymyc stalked the night. They would have to wait.
Yaela sat on her heels beside the fire, so close to Leviathus that he could feel the dark energy of her body shivering across his skin like the rhythm of an intoxicating song. She stared into the fire, never meeting his eyes. Still he could not help but feel that she was peering into his soul.
“So,” she said, “you can speak to dragonkin.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “Some of them, at least. I was not able to speak to the mymyc—that I could tell—though they are kin. Others I have not tried, save the leviathans.”
“The… leviathans? You mean serpents?”
“They prefer the name ‘leviathan.’” The echo in his name had not escaped Leviathus’s notice. His mother, like Hafsa Azeina, had come from the Seven Isles. When this current strife was ended—if he survived, and if Sajani did not destroy them all—he thought that he would like to seek out his mother’s kin.
We prefer another term entirely, Azhorus informed him through their link, but your ridiculous little human mouths are insufficient for pronouncing our words.
Forgive me, o prince, for my inadequacies, Leviathus responded.
You are forgiven, the prince of serpents allowed magnanimously. I like you. With that, he was gone again. Leviathus shook his head. Whenever Azhorus spoke with him, it felt as if bubbles were creeping through his brain.
“Do you speak with them now?” Yaela cut her eyes at him. They were not slit as usual, but wide and glowing with their soft warm green.
“Just with Azhorus,” he told her. “My… friend. We are bonded, he and I.” Though “two made one” would have been more accurate. His link with the prince of deep waters had changed Leviathus on the inside every bit as much as Hafsa Azeina’s link with Khurra’an had changed her, he supposed. His senses had sharpened, for one thing.
Yaela shifted, reaching out to the fire, and he was enveloped in a cloud of feminine musk. She turned to look at him over one shoulder, eyes both enormous and amused.
“Did you just growl at me?”
“I am so sorry—” he began, but Yaela turned to face him, and whatever he had been going to say dried to ash on his tongue. Backlit by the fire she was shadow and flame, moonslight and starslight and dawn. She was all things beautiful and unreachable. She was—
“Beautiful,” she said, reaching out to touch his face. Strong fingers brushed the hair from his eyes, and her gaze was solemn. “I have always thought so.”
“You what?” Leviathus stared. “But you… but I… I thought I was invisible to you.”
“Of course you did.” She laughed, and the shadows fled in terror. “You are male.”
She is correct, Azhorus agreed, as far as I can tell. Though you humans have such tiny—
Leviathus shook his head again to clear it, with little success.
“I am so confused.”
Yaela leaned forward, so that her weight was on her knees, and rested both hands on Leviathus’s shoulders. They were small, and strong, and hot.
“It is a good start,” she murmured, so close to his lips that the skin tingled. Then Yaela wrapped her arms around Leviathus ap Wyvernus ne Atu, surdus son of the Dragon King of Atualon, king of pirates, friend to dragonkin, and kissed him.
She was all he had ever wanted.
Beautiful as the dawn, strong as a mountain’s roots. He was not sure when he had known, exactly, only that the shadow she cast made all other women seem pale and insignificant. Leviathus leaned into that kiss and was lost as he had never been in the desert or upon the sea. Her tongue found his and they danced. Her arms wrapped about him and pulled him tight—
—tight, too tight, he could not breathe—
Heart pounding in his ears, Leviathus pushed Yaela away and fell to his hands on the cave floor, sucking air in jagged, gasping breaths. He could not stop shaking, and his mouth filled with the taste of Mariza and memories of her teeth, her tongue, her body. Leviathus hung his head, let his hair fall as a curtain about his shame, and wept.
After long moments he heard Yaela move, felt the dark energy of her closeness, but she did not touch him, for which he was pathetically grateful.
“Leviathus,” she said at last, and her voice was soft sorrow.
“I am sorry.” He wept, and could say no more.
“Fffft,” she hissed. “Sorry does not belong on your tongue or in your heart. There is no sorry between us.” She touched his shoulder, and he was comforted.
“I am broken,” he whispered.
“You have suffered a great wound,” she said, words falling like gentle rain, “and you will never be the same again. But you will heal, with time, and you will become stronger. It gets better.”
His heart clenched so painfully that he almost cried out. Leviathus sat up, balancing in a hunter’s crouch so that they faced each other, knees nearly touching. Yaela’s face shone with tears, wet as his own, and he thought they must be as mirrors unto each other.
“You, too?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered simply. “I was… very young.”
“I will find that man and kill him.”
Yaela threw back her head and laughed. “Silly boy. Silly boy! Do you think that I would allow one such as he to live and gloat over his victory? No, no. I fed him to a bintshi.” She wiped the tears from her face with the palm of her hand, still snorting with laughter. “But I thank you for the sweet thought.”
Leviathus reached out, tentatively, and she met him halfway. Their hands clasped, fingers twined, and they remained like that for a long while. Finally he spoke.
“We should go before the wyvern returns. Friend to dragonkin or no, I do not wish to tempt his palate. We need to find Sulema and the others.”
“What if we do not find them? I have braved the shadowed roads thrice already; I cannot set foot upon the Seared Lands, and do not mean to go further than the far foothills that lead toward Quarabala. Sulema and the others are meant to travel that road without me; if the others are lost to us, will you do the same?”
“No,” he said without hesitation. “I will not travel to your people’s lands without you, whether we find our companions or not.” His fingers tightened on hers, and he felt the truth in his own words. Ehuani, his sister would have said. “I have no mind to travel anywhere without you, ever again.”
“It is good,” she said softly. “King’s son, it is very good.”
Hand in hand they squeezed through the narrow passage. The mountains were still blanketed with long shadows, though the moons had rolled far overhead, and the sky grew pale about the eastern edge. It was quiet. They began retracing their steps as best they could. In the moonslight Yaela could see nearly as well as during the day, so he followed her lead. They had not gone far before they heard voices calling, calling his name.
“Leviathus!”
“Here!” he answered, and again. “We are here!”
They were joined in short order by a small group of his river pirates, two of whom were limping and looked ragged about the edges, though none seemed seriously hurt.
“Well met!” they called, and laughed upon finding him alive. “We thought you had been eaten by the mymyc, or by that wyvern. That was a bit of luck, to be sure—though whether good luck or bad remains to be seen. Still, we are not dead yet, and neither are you, it seems!” They did not comment on Yaela’s presence, or that the two were still holding hands.
“You were supposed to await my return in Min Yaarif,” Leviathus scolded halfheartedly. “Mamouteh had agreed to this.”
“We are pirates, and pirates are notorious for being disobedient scoundrels,” answered a young man by the name of Orunio. “Besides, we did not ask her permission. We simply went for a hike in the mountains and found you here. So fortuitous!” The others laughed.
“I cannot say that I am displeased to see you, at any rate. Where are the others of our party?” Leviathus asked, and braced himself for the answer.
“Alive, last we saw,” Orunio answered. “They had used a rope to cross a chasm, and the mymyc chewed through it before we could cross.” He shrugged. “The mymyc climbed down into the rift to escape a wyvern that came out of nowhere and began hunting them. We could see no other way to get across, so decided not to tempt fate any further and make our way back to Min Yaarif.
“Thank the Divines we have found you,” he added, brightening. “None of us can remember the way back out of these mountains, and you are as good as a walking map.” They all laughed.
Leviathus sighed. “Even if we could find another way across the chasm, we will never locate the others in this forsaken wasteland. And I will not leave Yaela. Indeed, our best path is back to Min Yaarif.” His heart ached to say it, though. He had failed Hafsa Azeina, and her apprentice Daru, and now he was failing his sister, as well. Unless…
“If anyone can pull off this mad scheme,” he said slowly as the thought occurred to him, “it is Sulema. The shadowmancer Keoki is with her, but he can only shield so many from the burning sun; our presence would be more hindrance to her than help.”
“It is true,” agreed Yaela.
“If she is successful in finding the Mask of Sajani,” Leviathus continued, warming to the idea, “well, then she will return with the Quarabalese queen—not an insignificant ally—and the ability to wield atulfah using the mask. All she will need is an army, and a way to get them across the sea.”
“She will, at that,” Orunio agreed.
“We have little salt, less manners, and no common sense,” Leviathus said, giving voice to an old pirate’s joke. “What we do have are bodies, and…”
“Ships!” the pirates shouted in unison.
I have faith in you, sister, Leviathus thought fiercely, certain she was still alive. And when you return, we will be prepared. We will see to it that your destiny is fulfilled. You will be the Dragon Queen of Atualon. Feeling lighter of heart than he had for many moons, Leviathus brought Yaela’s hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles as he looked deep into her wide jade eyes.
“Let us make ready to receive your people,” he said to her, “and then we will cross the wide sea and dethrone a king.”
“Yes,” she said, her face a mask of determination. “Let us do exactly that.”
Deep silence rolled down upon them from the cruel peaks of the Jehannim, enshrouding Sulema and her three remaining companions in despair much as the song of the Zeera had once enfolded her in joy.
Hannei, Keoki, and Rehaza Entanye lay sleeping near the remains of a fire, leaving Sulema on guard. She listened to the voices of silence and shadow, the hollow echoes of starslight and cold rock, and let grief take her. She wished for her mother, her father, her friend Hannei whole and unbroken. She rubbed the cold and throbbing wound at her shoulder, trying to ignore the painful tingling numbness that radiated out from the center of it, trying harder not to think about what it meant that Yaela and her medicines were beyond her reach now.
If the venom reached her heart, her brain, what would become of her? Would she simply die, or would she become as the reavers, bound to wickedness? Would she turn upon her companions and attack them, like a mindless beast? She did not think Hannei would shy from duty, if it came to that.
I wish I had never left the Zeera, she thought, or that this was all a terrible dream, and I would wake and tell my sisters all about it over coffee.
The memory of coffee brought tears to her eyes.
Sulema did not wake Hannei at the appointed hour, but watched through the night, letting the hot wind dry her tears and the mute dirge of the moons lull her heart to a semblance of peace.
They woke well before dawn and shared a mean breakfast of salted fish and precious sweet water. Afterward Keoki sat on his heels, fussing with the strings of a lute, the sounds and sight of which were beautiful—painfully so in that wretched land. Finally having tuned the instrument to his satisfaction, at last the young shadowmancer stood and faced the warriors, though he did not meet their eyes.
“It is time,” he told them. “Dawn grows near, and I would be well down the road and into my trance before Akari shows us his true face.”
He shed his cloak and trousers as the warriors packed what little they had planned to take with them upon the shadowed road—mostly weapons, water, and dried meat— and Sulema tried not to stare at his exposed flesh. Though she had seen Aasah striding about the fortress in his scraps of red spidersilk, she was not accustomed to men flaunting their bodies so openly, and she was certainly not yet used to skin that was studded in bright and glittering gemstones.
“Did it hurt?” she asked at last, curiosity overcoming both good manners and the dread of what lay ahead of them. Keoki glanced at her, surprised, and then down at his own scarred and bejeweled hide.
“Yes,” he told her. “It is supposed to hurt. The pain… binds you to the Web of Illindra.” He shrugged, sparkling in the growing light of dawn. “I would gladly suffer it again, for my people.”
That much she understood. “Why is Yaela’s skin not marked, then? Is it because she is still an apprentice?”
Keoki hesitated. When he answered, it was with obvious reluctance.
“No. Yaela—” His mouth worked for a moment, as if he tasted the words before choosing which ones to swallow and which to spit out. “Yaela has suffered in other ways.” He stroked his glittering scars. “This I survived. The pain she has had to bear… I am not so certain I could endure that.”
If you do not want an answer, Istaza Ani had told her more than once, do not ask the question. Sulema nodded and pressed no further. Keoki seemed relieved.
Night was dying, morning not yet born, when the three of them left the Jehannim behind and set foot upon the shadowed road. They did not run, as Keoki could not play while doing so, but jogged along at a pace meant to eat the miles. They would make camp the first night in the ruins of Min Yahtamu, which had once been the heart of commerce for the whole world and was not the final resting place for any foolish or desperate enough to brave the shadowed road. After that they would run. If they did not falter they would make the journey from Min Yahtamu to the Edge of Quarabala—and there find shelter from the killing heat—in three days.
Unless, of course, they died in the attempt. In that case their bones would bake to a fine dust and their spirits become angry shadows, the better to harass and hinder those arrogant enough to tempt a similar fate.
This end of the shadowed road, Keoki told them, was known as the Leavings. He was not sure whether it was because the traveler was leaving the livable world for the Seared Lands, leaving the Seared Lands, or because it was littered with the leavings of unnamed, unsung travelers who had attempted this same desperate journey in order to bring the life-sustaining red salt found only in Quarabala to the rest of the world. There were bits of clothing scattered about, rags of silk and linen and leather. Tools and weapons of various make, necessities that had become unnecessary. The bones of a horse made Sulema fiercely glad she had sent Atemi to Uthrak.
If I die in this place, she silently asked Akari, let my good mare lead a happy life. Give her stallions and foals to love, and a girl wiser than myself to love her in return.
Here, it seemed to her, was the story of humankind written in trash. The chronicle of people willing to shed everything in a desperate attempt to flee an inhospitable land in search of new life, and others willing to risk life to travel into the Seared Lands in an equally desperate bid for red salt and wealth. Only refugees and merchants would be foolhardy enough to attempt this crossing.
Refugees, merchants, she amended silently, and one reckless warrior. She grimaced as smooth stones rolled underfoot to reveal themselves as a rib, part of a shoulder blade, the head of a femur.
She, Hannei, and Rehaza Entanye bound veils across their faces like the touar of Ja’Sajani, and these were soon caked with the pale gray dust. Sulema’s eye burned, her small ruff of hair grew heavy with the stuff, and her skin itched. She prayed to Akari, as he rose in the sky above them, that there were no strong winds in this land akin to the violent dust storms of the Zeera.
Sulema sighed into her veil, already hating the chafe of fabric against her skin and the taste of stale air, and plodded on.
* * *
The air grew hotter, drier, and more hateful, the ground harder underfoot, and the eye of Akari more baleful with every step until Sulema could have screamed in frustration—had she been able to catch her breath. They had scarcely left the foothills of Jehannim, and already Sulema felt as if she would burst into flame at any moment.
It burns my lungs, she thought between gasps. What kind of people would choose to live in a land where the air burns your lungs?
They did not stop for food or drink, but took mouthfuls of water from skins as they jogged on toward Min Yahtamu. Sulema managed to choke down a bit of salted tarbok and wished she had not, as the salt seemed to immediately leech water from her mouth and throat, leaving them burning worse than before. Neither did she nor her companions speak to one another. The only sounds were the soft thut-thut-thut of their feet on the unyielding ground, occasional gasps for air, and the soft music that flowed forth from Keoki’s lute.
As Keoki played, shadows boiled up from the road itself, a dark tide of malignant interest which washed over them with each note, each stride, shielding their thin skins from Akari’s hungry gaze. The shadows brushed against Sulema as she moved; they played with her short hair and whispered obscene suggestions into her ears, just beyond her hearing. It was all but intolerable, but the Quarabalese paid it no more mind than they paid the heat and the dry air and the silence of a dead land. Sulema supposed they were used to it, just as she had been used to her mother’s dreamshifting; in a world of darkness and dangers, some evils were necessary.
Rehaza Entanye led, Hannei had settled into the rear, and Sulema loped along beside Keoki. The shadowmancer moved as if through a dream with his eyes half open and mouth working. It reminded her of her mother’s dreamshifting. Sulema assumed he was as vulnerable in his unaware state, so she positioned herself as a vash’ai might have done, eyes darting this way and that, as vigilant as she could be in a land where nothing grew, or moved, or lived.
I will never complain about the tedium of guard duty again, she vowed silently, or the heat of midsun in the Zeera. I wonder if death is this boring. An image came to her mind then, of herself as a shade, haunting this very road, of long ages spent doing nothing but waiting for a feckless traveler to pass so that she might hinder and harass them. It seemed to Sulema that this would be the deepest and worst level of Yosh.
Eventually Akari tired of trying to roast them through the veil of shadows and flew on toward tomorrow. Their shadows stretched long behind their weary feet. Sulema’s legs burned like meat in the campfire, Rehaza Entanye staggered and nearly fell, even Hannei struggled to keep shuffling along. Only Keoki, thinnest and weakest of them, seemed to have no difficulty with the pace. His music wound on, over and through their little group, urging them forward to life, to life.
Sulema shot the boy an admiring glance, and only then did she see the streaks of red and black blood smeared across the face of his lute like war paint.
They reached the tumbled rock bones of Min Yahtamu just as Akari dipped his wings and dove beyond the horizon. Though the crumbling walls and collapsed tile roofs afforded no real shelter, Sulema could not help feeling that they had achieved something grand, and let out a dusty yell of victory. Keoki jerked at the sound as if startled from a bad dream; his legs and music faltered to a stop. Tremors wracked his thin frame and he dropped to his knees before the broken gates.
“Water,” he whispered. She raised one of her own waterskins, bringing it to his mouth, and held it as he sucked it half empty in one long, greedy, desperate pull—without spilling so much as a drop. His wide, pale eyes rolled up and stared through her, unfocused.
“Thank you,” he managed. His hand spasmed across the strings of his lute, striking a discordant note. The shadows which he had ensorcelled dispersed, spitting in disappointed wroth. Sulema meant to take a scant mouthful of water from the skin, but when the liquid touched her tongue, she found herself seized by a violent thirst and emptied the other half.
Rehaza Entanye stumbled to stand beside Sulema. She tore the veils away from her face and breathed in long, ragged gasps as she gazed upon the ruined city.
“Min Yahtamu,” she whispered. “The city of lost souls.” And she laughed as at a bitter joke. “This was the heart of the world, once; all of the wealth of known civilization flowed through here. Salt and spidersilk, wine and spices, slaves and sweet water. The queen of commerce, they called her. Now the queen is dead, and her sister Min Yaarif is nothing more than an ugly old whore that gives all her customers the pox.”
Hannei jogged to a halt beside Sulema and regarded Rehaza Entanye in a long, unreadable stare. She did not hurry to remove her own veils, or partake of meat or water, but touched Keoki’s shoulder, startling him again. She gestured at the buildings, the sky, and then back at the road behind them; he nodded and followed her into Min Yahtamu. It seemed to Sulema as if the shadows of Min Yahtamu reached out to greet him.
“Hannei has the right of it; we need to find what shelter we can, and quickly,” Rehaza Entanye said. “And build a fire with whatever brush we have left. The nights are likely to be cold, even so close to the Seared Lands—and the smell of blood will bring predators.” She followed Hannei and Keoki into the darkening ruins.
Strangely enough, these words gave Sulema new strength. Hunger, thirst, and greater predators—these were dangers she had faced before, honest and straightforward enemies that she knew how to fight.
They found a squat, square building which seemed solid enough, and which was too small to house any unpleasant surprises. It had a narrow doorway, no windows, and a roof that was mostly intact; as good as a palace for travelers in need. Smaller and less grand by far than its wretched neighbors, the building had been used for storage in days gone perhaps, or housing for animals, or some such humble thing. Soot-stained walls and the leavings of fires told them that these stout walls had sheltered travelers in recent days; again Sulema found reassurance in this proof that they were not the only ones mad enough to make this journey, though the sense of comfort was born of her own wishes; she had no way of knowing whether those who had gone on before had made it to their destination in one piece.
Keoki swayed on his feet as if he had drunk more usca than was good for him, mumbled something incoherent under his breath, and then collapsed upon the dirt floor. Sulema and Rehaza Entanye both rushed to kneel at his side, but he seemed unharmed.
“He is just exhausted,” Rehaza Entanye said, and Sulema agreed. They arranged the sleeping sorcerer upon his cloak, covering his exposed skin with another, as Hannei pulled sticks from her pack and built a fire.
Sorcery, treachery, and dragon’s magic, Sulema thought as Hannei’s fire set the shadows to dancing. These are things I can neither fight nor control. But thirst, and weariness, and the threat of predators in the darkness? Bring them on, world. Show me yours.
Foolish child, Istaza Ani would have scolded. Do not taunt an enemy until you have learned the reach of her sword.
* * *
The women broke the day’s fast on dried meat, dried cheese, and cruelly rationed water, and this mean meal was shared in an uncomfortable silence. Sulema did not trust the slave-trainer any further than she could have thrown her after the day’s run and had no desire to speak to her. She kept sneaking looks at Hannei, who mostly stared into the fire or into the growing dark.
That one, it seemed, had no desire to communicate with her and likely would not have spoken even if she could. The shadowmancer lay where they had rolled him in his cloak, occasionally letting out a long, low moan in his sleep, like a child suffering from nightmares. Sulema would have welcomed the company of Leviathus, or Ani, or Daru. She wondered where her mother’s apprentice might have gotten to, and feared he had met an unkind fate.
This saddened her. The world had never seemed to want the boy around, and he had deserved better from all of them.
A rustling interrupted Sulema’s reverie, along with a chittering. The women leapt to their feet, swords drawn, forming a wordless shield between the sleeping sorcerer and the world outside. Sulema understood—they all did— that any of the rest of them were expendable; without one, the others might survive. Without their shadowmancer, however, they would be burned to smoking husks at the first light of day.
The chittering grew loud, louder, and finally its source was revealed. It was an enormous insect like a soldier beetle but longer and flatter, its shiny black carapace marked in red like a splatter of fresh blood. It skittered out of the night and came at them through the narrow doorway, mandibles gaping. Sulema skewered the thing with her shamsi and flung it back out into the darkness, grimacing at the crunching sounds that followed, and wiping yellow ichor from her sword.
Clusters of tiny, glittering eyes appeared in the darkness outside their shelter like stars caught in Illindra’s web, and Rehaza Entanye spoke at last.
“It is going to be a long night.”
* * *
The beetles were no more than the first wave of things that wanted to dine on human flesh, and they were not the worst. The lizards, Sulema thought, were the worst. When killed they smelled of human excrement, and they were the most persistent. The besieged women used an alarming amount of the fuel they had brought with them from Jehannim to build their fire so high and so hot that their little shelter seemed a sweat lodge.
Finally even the lizards abandoned the attack, either daunted by the defenders’ fierceness or—more likely—sated by the flesh of their own fallen comrades. The crunching and slurping noises continued almost till dawn, but by then Sulema was too weary to be horrified and drifted off. She fell asleep between one breath and the next straight into a dream of masks and murder—
And it was time to wake, to stand, and to start the whole thing over again.
Keoki woke last and hardest; Rehaza Entanye had to shake the shadowmancer to his senses. He ate a little food and drank a little water as if neither held any interest. When he had finished he ran tattered fingers across the bloody strings of his lute, winced, and began to play. Shadows once again sprang from the ground, weaving themselves into an unwilling protection as they danced to the shadowmancer’s tune. The three weary travelers shouldered their packs and steeled their hearts as they made ready to leave the wretched husk of Min Yahtamu and begin the desperate run for the Edge.
“Guts and goatfuckery,” Sulema grumbled as she stared out across the shadowed road. “The Jehannim are a blight and last night was a misery. Surely a bit of a run cannot be worse than what we have already endured.”
“Ahhhhhh,” Rehaza Entanye sighed, “I wish you had not said that.”
* * *
Hands gripped Sulema’s shoulder, digging into the half-healed flesh where she had been bitten and sending waves of agony rippling across her back and arms. She sucked in a breath to scream, but the air burned worse than her wounds, and she managed only a strangled wheeze.
“Sulema.” It was Rehaza Entanye. Her words swam up to her like bubbles from the bottom of the river. “Sulema, it is time to stop. Sulema, stop.”
Sulema forced her legs to cease moving, her lungs to keep sucking air, and willed her heart to keep pumping as someone squirted water between her clenched teeth. Water. Water. So cool and wet and good she nearly wept.
She was struck in the face once, twice, three times, so that she reached out and grabbed the hand that was doing so, blinking an angry eyeful of sand away to glare through the deepening gloom into the face of her attacker.
It was Hannei.
Sulema growled at her once sword-sister, and Hannei growled back.
“Stop it, both of you,” Rehaza Entanye said sharply. “Get some meat and water into your stupid mouths and get ready to fight. They are coming.”
Sulema spat sand and blood upon the seared earth, narrowly missing the collapsed form of the shadowmancer, and stared into the rapidly growing darkness. Already she could see pale eyes staring at them from the deepening gloom, scavengers eager for the taste of her flesh. From somewhere far away, a harsh voice screamed, the sound rising higher and higher till she could not hear it, though she knew it was still there. The eyes winked out as that voice was answered by another, and then a third, much closer now.
“Reavers!” Rehaza Entanye shouted, voice high with panic. “Ware reavers!”
Sulema drew her shamsi, willing it to shop shaking, and spat again.
“Show me yours, you goatfucking sons of… goats.”
Hannei drew her own swords, dark blades seeming eager to drink in the night. Her shoulders shook, and a terrible raw laugh came from her open mouth.
Well, Sulema thought, I suppose it is better than crying…
There came to Sulema’s ears a terrible hissing, as if all the spiders in the world had converged upon the small group and meant to make an end to them. These malevolent voices grew closer, closer, until Sulema could see the creatures to which they belonged.
What might have once been human loped toward them, now and again leaping forward or scuttling sideways like pale two-legged Araids, mouths gaping wide in hungry grins devoid of humor or soul. The sight of them kindled the pain in Sulema’s shoulder into a white-hot agony, and she screamed in terror and in fury.
Their faces, the way they moved, the way the rising moonslight shone upon their chitinous white skin roused Sulema to a visceral wrath. She screamed again, choking on her desire to kill these things, to fall upon them and chop the abominations into pieces so small their own mothers would not recognize them.
Hannei stared at her, surprise upon her face, and then her face broke into the first real smile Sulema had seen since their meeting in Min Yaarif. Their gazes met across drawn blades, and the two of them shared a moment of bloodlust and bravery.
Rehaza Entanye attempted to rouse the shadowmancer, to no avail. She straightened from a crouch, glanced at her companions, then at the advancing line of fellspawn. She drew her own sword and set her feet in a fighter’s stance, baring her teeth at their enemies.
One of the pale shadows sprang toward them, and Sulema’s world shrank to a pinpoint of pale hides, burning eyes, and clawlike hands grasping at her skin. She ran to meet the foremost of the creatures, so caught up in battle-lust and hatred that all her training, Ani’s wise words, and endless battle drills fell away like shed skin. There were only the dark, looming shapes and hated faces to cleave and rend and smash.
Driving the point of her blade through one throat, she dodged a spray of ichor and spun to sweep the legs from beneath a second assailant, cleaving that one’s spine between its shoulder blades as it tried to regain its feet. Hannei danced beside her, hewing limb from torso with her dark and dancing blades, mouth open in a terrible silent laugh as the two of them cut a path of destruction through the advancing line of monsters.
For monsters they were, unnatural things born of unclean magic. Though they wore the faces and tattered clothing of the people they once had been, Sulema felt no kinship with these foul beings, no sorrow for what they had suffered in life. She embraced the flames of hatred and revulsion which engulfed her, driving her on even when the remaining reavers hesitated and would have pulled back. Passion sent her into the night in pursuit of the retreating enemy when common sense and years of hard training would have held her back.
She skewered the last of them with her shamsi, turning her blade so that it grated between the thing’s ribs, and felt no pity in her heart as a monster with the pale face of a young boy fell in pieces at her feet.
Not human, she told herself as she came to a halt at last, far from the sight of her companions and with nothing left to kill. These are things. Monsters. Not human. Chest heaving, muscles in her arms burning, her shoulder a cold inferno of agony, she was so overcome with dark frustrated anger that she threw back her head and howled.
“…Sulema?”
Rehaza Entanye’s voice floated through the thick night air, recalling her to her senses. Sulema frowned at the twitching pieces of offal at her feet. She bent to wipe the worst of the gore from her blade and then turned, weary beyond all words, and made her slow way back to her companions.
* * *
“That is the last of them,” Rehaza Entanye said, wiping her hands on her begrimed tunic and grimacing as she stepped into the ring of firelight. “I hope. I count nearly a score of them; this was a largish swarm, too large to be independent, though I found no sign of any Arachnists. I think this was a feint of some sort, a test of our defenses, and not some random attack.” She glanced sideways at Sulema. “It was stupid of you to take off after them like that. Brave, but stupid.”
They dragged any foul corpses they could see away from their camp and into the night. The thought of predators feasting in the dark sent them hurrying back to build the fire higher, higher, heedless of their dwindling supply of firewood. As Rehaza Entanye took first watch Sulema closed her eyes, wishing that she could as easily close her ears to the sounds of crunching and snarling.
Lying on the unforgiving ground, she was struck with a longing for the land and the people she had left behind. She missed the small sounds of a warriors’ camp—the squabbling, gaming, even snoring and farting of her sword-sisters. The soft singing of the dunes as winds born of poetry and hardship caressed the face of the Zeera. The sounds and smells of horses and churrim, the roars and grumbles and grunts of the vash’ai. She even missed the moons and stars; the night sky looked the same here—was the same, surely— but somehow left her feeling cold and bereft.
I even miss lionsnake jerky, she thought. I must be sick.
* * *
Hannei shook her from troubled dreams at the stirring of dawn. Sulema leapt to her feet, staggered, and nearly fell as waves of weakness and pain radiated from her bad shoulder. She peered around her, but not so much as a scrap of cloth or bone could be seen in the mean, thin light that presaged Akari’s wrath.
Keoki was already awake and beginning in his musical trance, raw fingers dancing across his lute as he played for the shadows, played for the darkness, played for the chance to live one more day in a world that wanted to suck their bones dry. The shadows rose to his bidding, spitting imprecations and promises of treachery even as they rose to protect the travelers from the killing sun.
Sulema reached for her waterskins and found, to her deep dismay, that they had been pierced some time during the battle. There was a scant mouthful left in either of them. Without hesitation, Hannei detached one of the remaining two skins from the belt at her waist and handed it over.
Rehaza Entanye stared at them for a moment, opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again and shook her head.
That woman has never known the embrace of a sword-sister, Sulema thought, and she spared a momentary pang of pity for a life lived in such isolation. Then it was time for a handful of salted meat, time to rub ochre-tinted fat on their exposed skin, and time to run.
Sssssulemaaaaaa, the bones mourned. Hhhhhhhannnnneiiiii…
Ani’s body sat straight-backed in the middle of Askander’s tent, but she was not there. Even as her physical form breathed and twitched, her shade crawled among the bones and dead things of the mountain passes, watching over the daughters of her heart.
More than that she was listening. Rumors spread in ripples across the burned and tormented earth. A jikjik had been killed for meat, his bones left to desiccate in the sun. A lionsnake had been routed from her den and slain. A skull had been kicked from its long resting place and now mourned the loss of three teeth. And the reavers…
Not even the bones long dead liked the reavers. These were foul things sucked dry of self, cobbled together of defiled corpses, nameless and songless and dreaded. No predators would come near the thrice-slain and they lay bloated beneath the naked eye of Akari, rotting with a foul stench.
My girls did this, she thought. They have killed prey, predators, and reavers. They have crossed the Jehannim and fly for their lives. That had become all the more important, because the scent and savor of human flesh had drawn the attention of those greater predators who lived by feasting upon those who would dare the Bone Road.
This was what the dead called it—the Bone Road—a trail not marked by cobbled stones or cairns, but by the husks of those who fell on this perilous path, never to rise again in this world. Bones long dead and fresh, of humans and beasts of burden, horses and churrim and vash’ai. Most of the bones were content to remain as they were, or where the wind chose to blow them. Some were unquiet, fretting about that which had disturbed them.
There were bones here which had once been sorcerers, dreamshifters, kahanna—or the beloved of such powerful priests of the world—and whose stories had been magically graven into the very core of their being. Ani’s bones, she knew, glowed with the faint silvery-blue light of her own power, and could be used by a bonesinger to do great things. Great and terrible things, such as the spell Ani began to work.
If I do not help them, they are dead, she thought as a bintshi cried out, and a wyvern turned its eyes toward the fleeing shapes.
She sang to the bones of the dreaming dead, calling them all by name. Mutaani the youth, Kishahani the vengeful, Kulaishkum—all of you—she called, and they answered. Long bones and short, fingers and claws and ribs, skulls and vertebrae rose from the blasted earth at the bonesinger’s bidding and dragged deep furrows in their haste. These she gathered up in her spirit-hands as a child might scoop up handfuls of mud, and she merged them, she molded them, making the bits and detritus of life into a plaything for her folly.
Bonesinger, Inna’hael warned her from far away. Bonesinger, do not do this. It is abomination.
You leave the bones of your prey to your cubs for them to play with, she responded, her mind’s voice strained and tart. You let them break their teeth upon the shoulder-blades of tarbok. How is this any different?
Inna’hael growled.
My cubs cut their teeth upon the thick and empty skulls of your kind, he replied. Such is the dance between predator and prey, of moons and stars and dragons. This is outside the dance, outside the song, and well you know it.
She did, and well she knew the cost.
Sulema is my girl, Ani told the vash’ai, the daughter of my heart. I could not love her more had I birthed her myself. Would you not have broken the old laws, given the chance, if it would have saved your Azra’hael?
There was a long silence, dark as distant thunder.
I had that chance, Bonesinger. I made my choice, as you have made yours.
Then he was gone.
Ani turned her focus to regard the thing she had cobbled together out of forgotten sorcerers and a bonesinger’s whimsy. It had a great skull, formed of many lesser skulls, and the shell of a giant turtle. A knobbed and spiky spine, a long tail, thick limbs. There were ribs and tusks where teeth would be, and even great wings spread wide, with shadows stretched between them like membranes. All it needed was a little…
Far from the construct the bonesinger lifted a child’s skull to her mouth, puckered her lips, and blew. Such a small thing, the birth of a wind. A small thing, a tune both forbidden and terrible. It whistled between the missing teeth of a little girl who had kissed her mother one night and never woke in the morning. It sang of sorrow and fear and pain. This wind sang of mutaani, and in its wake swam a dark and silent beast that was death.
High it soared, speeding across sunlight and water and sand till it found Ani’s plaything and settled upon the bones, filling the void between death and undeath with the silence of Eth.
It was forbidden.
It was done. Far away the bintshi wailed a hunting song, its beautiful voice thick with the anticipation of blooded meat.
In a hidden place at the edge of the Edge of the Seared Lands, a dragon lifted her head. She was a foul thing made of bones and broken promises, of lives and honor lost, of hunger. Crimson flame appeared deep in the shadowed pits that served as eyes. Wings that seemed insufficient knacked and rattled as they beat against the ground once, twice, three times, and then she rose into the sky, hunting and hungering, knowing only that she had to devour everything that might wish Sulema harm. Opening her mouth she shrieked, belching great gouts of pyre flame and ash—
* * *
Pain blossomed on Ani’s face. A second blow and she cried out, lifting her hands to protect her eyes. A third and she was on her feet, swaying drunkenly, a knife in one hand and the skull in the other, blinking ash and fat from her stinging eyes and snarling at her opponent. Had Inna’hael come to put a stop to her magic and to her? Or perhaps—
“Askander?” she asked as the figure came into focus. He had drawn back his hand for a fourth blow, and now with his arm raised, was staring at her with a look she did not want to understand. “Askander? What—”
“I should be asking you ‘what’ for a change,” he answered, eyes and voice hard, lowering his hand halfway. “What in the name of guts and goatfuckery do you think you are doing, girl?”
Ani’s mouth dropped open at the sound of her own words falling from Askander’s mouth. Never, in all the years she had known him, had she ever heard Askander curse. As she tried to gather her wits, another thought occurred to her, and she frowned.
“How did you know it was me?” In truth, she hardly recognized herself anymore. Bonesinging changed the wielder’s face and body with each use, and she had been overly free with her magic of late.
He lowered his arm and now stood with both hands on his hips and snorted a humorless laugh.
“How many girls do you know who would be sitting in this tent, working bonesinger’s magic. Ah-ah,” he held both hands up as she opened her mouth to respond. “Do not tell me what you were doing. Best that I remain ignorant. Better still if you would set aside this folly, but Atu himself could not change your path, once you have decided upon it.”
“You did not answer my question.” Ani wanted to raise both hands to her head, which ached abominably. She wanted to weep, to put down her knife and skull, and to drink a bottle or three of usca. She did none of these things, but swayed on her feet.
“How did I know it was you?” Askander Ja’Sajani closed the distance between them so quickly that Ani sucked in a breath and would have stepped back, but his hands gripped her shoulders and held her fast. “How do I know the sun? The sky? How do I know my own song? Foolish girl.” With those words, he pulled her closer and kissed her.
Ani sighed and relaxed into her lover’s heat. After a while, he lifted his face from hers and smiled a small, triumphant smile.
“You dropped your knife.”
“Mmmmmmmhuh,” she answered, dazed. “Have you come to sweep me away then, like a hero in the old stories? Are we to run off toward a new tomorrow and leave the cares of the world behind us?” She wished. Oh, how she wished.
“That is, indeed, the fitting end to a hero’s story,” he told Ani, stroking her cheekbone with one finger. “Alas, we have not come to the end yet.”
“Oh?” She reached up and held his hand, stopping him before his touch could distract her further. “What part are we in, then?”
“The shit part,” he replied, almost cheerfully. “I have come to take you back to the Zeera, because a new terror is upon us, and someone of your—talents—might be able to stop it.”
“A new threat.” She sighed all the way to the marrow of her bones, impossibly tired. “What new threat is this?”
“The Lich King has risen,” he said. “And he has raised his armies of the dead. They are taking over the world.”
“Guts and goatfuckery indeed,” she groaned. “I am too old for this shit.”
They came for him in the small hours of night, when hatchling birds nestled safe beneath the soft wings of their parents, and not even snakes dared the hunt. Jian did not fight, for his tiny son lay between him and the warm body of Tsali’gei, whose eyes were wide with terror as a blade pressed against her throat. From the next room came the sounds of soft voices, the harsh sound of flesh striking flesh, and an old woman’s angry cry of pain.
“Come with me,” Mardoni growled close to Jian’s ear, “or watch them die.” Jian nodded silently.
A sack of coarse cloth was thrust over his head and snugged close about his throat, blocking all light and muffling all sound besides his own harsh breathing. It smelled strongly of some sweetish spice and made his eyes water. Jian sneezed, and someone grabbed him roughly by the shoulder.
“Quiet,” an unfamiliar voice growled. “Do nothing to draw attention, or things will not go well for you.” Inside the cloth hood, Jian bared his teeth. Had he been alone, he would have taken the form of a sea-bear and ripped that one’s throat out. Had he been alone—
His son wailed, a pitiful and helpless sound that was quickly muffled. Jian threw his head back, desperate to see, and jerked half out of his captor’s hands. The grip on his shoulder tightened till it dug into his flesh. Jian welcomed the pain.
“If you come quietly,” the voice said again, “your family will not be harmed. If you fight…”
“Jian,” Tsali’gei whispered, her voice strained with terror. “Jian, please.”
He let himself be led, tears of frustration dripping into the hood and fighting with every step not to break free and kill them all. There was no doubt he could do it, but not before one or more of those he loved had been harmed. Which of them might his captors take first? Tsali’gei? His mother? His little son?
Which of them would he be forced to sacrifice?
* * *
Though he tried at first to track the route they took, Jian was soon lost in the twists and turns, ascents and descents. Twice he thought they might be in tunnels, for the echo of their footsteps indicated stone underfoot and all around them. Then for a while it seemed as if they were outdoors. The air was cooler on his naked arms, tile and stone and wood gave way to soft earth. Then a heavy door closed behind them, audible through the cloth, and his captors led him down, and down…
And down.
And down.
They were taking him to a dungeon, Jian thought. That had to be true. He had spent years leading his own captives to cells beneath his father’s holdings.
I never led any of them out again, though.
It was best not to think on that.
Abruptly they came to a stop. Hands on his shoulders forced Jian down so that his knees barked painfully on an uneven floor. He was bound with thick ropes, trussed as tightly as any beast fresh-caught for a menagerie, and cool air eddied around him. The sounds of footsteps receded, slapping against cold stone. A door clanged shut like the pealing of bells.
Jian knelt, counted his breaths, wriggled his fingers to keep the blood moving through his hands, and wondered when the man who had stayed behind with him would speak. Even through the sweet-spice smell of the cloth Jian could scent him, sweating and nervous. It was an oddly ungulate smell that brought the sea-bear in Jian’s heart too close to the surface.
“Well, my young friend, a fine mess we find ourselves in.”
“Mardoni,” he said, keeping his voice even and calm, though he swallowed hard at the thought of Mardoni’s hot blood in his mouth. He was the son of the Sea King, after all, newly come from the Twilight Lands, and the company to which he had grown accustomed was somewhat—open-minded—in their culinary traditions.
“No use hiding from you.” Jian heard the other man’s approach and tensed, but Mardoni simply yanked the hood from his head and then retreated a few steps as if unsure what his captive might do. Jian squinted against the mage-lanterns and sat back on his haunches, flaring his nostrils again at the other man’s fear scent.
He smells like prey.
“Perhaps I should have said ‘my not-so-young friend,’” Mardoni said, also sitting back on his heels and studying Jian’s face. He wore splendid white robes embroidered with the images of leaping stags and bulls, and a golden flower sigil at his breast. “How is it that you have been away from us for only a few moons’ time, Sen-Baradam, yet seem to have aged years since just this spring? You were barely able to win a training fight with that young bull Naruteo, yet you have managed to become a formidable opponent. How? I would very much like to know.”
Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “There are rumors that you somehow managed to slip through the veil and escape to the Twilight Lands, to live among the Dae. Tell me, Tsun-ju Jian de Allyr, what is it like to walk beneath the gray skies, in the lands of our fathers?” His eyes were bright.
Too bright.
“Our fathers?” Jian mused, pursing his lips as if deep in thought. “Our… oh! Do you speak of the lands of Allyr, my father, the sho’en? Or do you speak of the lands of your father?”
Mardoni rocked back on his heels.
“My father?” he whispered.
“Of course. He is a master archer—I studied under him, for a while—and a watcher in the woods. A fine man, and prideful… no doubt he would feel obligated to seek an early death, were word of your dishonor to make it across the veil. Imagine—a son of Yrnos, licking the emperor’s boots.”
Mardoni’s face went as white as his robes. Jian did not move or let the pounding of his heart show in his expression or manner. He had, after all, spoken truth.
When the blood had returned to Mardoni’s cheeks, he shook his head dismissively and stood, though he no longer met Jian’s eyes.
“It does not matter,” he said. “It has been decided. It is done. It does not matter. You, Tsun-ju Jian de Allyr, Daechen Jian Sen-Baradam, have been sentenced to death.”
“For what crimes?”
“For crimes against his Illumination and the peoples of Sindan. Fomenting unrest. Raiding. Murdering his Illumination’s troops and property. For daring to think that you, a lowly yellow Daechen, are fit to stand in his shadow. Need I go on?”
“What of my family?” Jian asked softly. “My mother, my wife Tsali’gei? My son?”
“Ah,” Mardoni said. “If you agree to come willingly and peacefully to your own death, their lives will be spared. Tsali’gei and the child will be banished to the Twilight Lands—assuming the Dae do not kill them outright, of course—and your delightful elderly mother will be escorted to the borders of Sindan. Let her throw herself on the Dragon King’s mercy, if she will.”
Jian’s mind raced. He did not believe for one moment that his family would be spared his fate.
“What happened to you, Mardoni?” he asked. “Your fine plans to change the empire and lead the daeborn into a brilliant new future. Have you given it all over to lick the emperor’s arse, or were those empty words all along?”
“Oh no,” Mardoni answered. His words were soft as doeskin, but the light in his eyes was that of a fanatic. “Oh no, de Allyr, not at all. Your death is to be a glorious beginning for us. When your blood mixes with the still-wet ink of the emperor’s new treaty—”
“War,” Jian’s heart sank. It would work, he knew. When his father learned that Jian had been killed, he would tear the veil asunder. He would ravage both worlds with tooth and claw, and to Yosh with the consequences. “You expect that the twilight lords will kill the emperor for you.”
“Shhhhh,” Mardoni said, a finger to his lips, and he winked. “Such words as those would send other heads rolling besides mine, you know… Your son’s would be first, I think. Die quietly and know that by doing so you are freeing us all.”
“You are mad,” Jian said flatly. “Thousands will die. Tens of thousands. And the veil—” Nobody knew for sure what would happen if the veil was destroyed, but most agreed that it would mean death to them all. “You are insane. Mardoni—”
“No.” Mardoni cut the air between them with the palm of his hand. “Not another word. What is done is past, Sen-Baradam. It has all been decided. There is only the future, and that future lies with the dawn of a new empire.”
“And a new emperor, I suppose,” Jian replied. “Is there no mercy in your heart for the innocents who will be slaughtered? How can you live with yourself?”
“Well, for one thing,” Mardoni answered with a sardonic smile, as he plucked a small golden bell from his sleeve and rang it, “my head is still attached to my shoulders. Come the dawn, you will not be able to say the same. You should have learned your lesson with that peasant girl you did not slay, Daechen Jian. Mercy is for the weak.”
A trio of soldiers entered the room, and he turned.
“Take this guest to his new quarters,” he ordered, “and see to it that he remains unharmed. Give him food, water, and bedding.” Mardoni turned back. “This is your last night among the living, Tsun-ju Jian de Allyr. Try and get some rest.
“I hear the Lonely Road is a long one.”