FORTY - ONE

The best thing about being a queen, even a queen without a throne, was that no one expected her to take a turn on guard duty. The worst thing about being a queen with a sense of honor was that she expected it of herself.

Long into the hours that felt most like night—for there was no true night in the Dreaming Lands—Sulema sat with her back against a tree with strange, soft bark and gazed over the huddled forms of sleeping people. Occasionally someone would cough, or sigh, or a baby would cry. At one point a man farted so loudly that the people about him muttered in disgust and moved away, leaving him laughing in a small space of his own. Sulema sniggered. Even in times of fear and war, she realized, farts were funny.

This vigil was no different from any she had maintained back home in the Zeera. Were it not for the strange trees, the alien birdcalls, the occasional howl of a hound at the hunt, it might have been… boring. Sulema leaned back, closed her eyes, and imagined herself back home. Warriors would be playing stones and bones, and the sands would be singing…

I thought you would never fall asleep.

Sulema sat upright with a start. She reached for her sword but found only her staff.

You have forsaken the way of the warrior, the laughing voice reminded her. Though you might have chosen a less warlike time in which to do so. You humans are a curious lot.

Sulema looked down and saw a tiny, pale fox with enormous ears sitting primly near her knee, one paw on an ugly obsidian knife that looked suspiciously like the one her mother had borne. Sulema inched away from it, and from the fox. She was a spirit beast and a trickster. She was also the embodiment of Sulema’s soul, and her tie to Jehannim.

“Jinchua.” Sulema took a deep breath and tried to slow the racing of her heart. “You startled me! What are you doing here?”

What am I doing here? The fox looked around them with exaggerated puzzlement. I am of this place, Dreamshifter. What are you doing here? In the flesh, and with what appears to be the entire populace of Quarabala? The Huntress will not be pleased. At the best of times, she does not like visitors, and these are not the best of times.

“I am… Daru is leading us all to safety outside the Seared Lands. I went there to get one small girl, and she turned out to be their queen. And I had to agree to rescue all the people of Quarabala… what?” She frowned at the fennec’s response. “Stop laughing at me, it is not funny.” She felt her own mouth quirk, though, as she thought back on the ridiculous nature of her quest and the way she had been duped. “It is an odd tale, I suppose. And I have not decided whether or not to kill Yaela for lying to me. Retrieve her niece, indeed.”

Remind me never to send you to fetch a lizard, the fox teased. Likely you would return with a dragon. Ah, Sulema! I have missed you, and I will miss you even more when you have been killed.

“When I have… what?”

Pythos knows where you are, now. Since you spied upon him with that mask—you may as well have tweaked his nose and told him. And he is working with the Nightmare Man—how do you think he was able to regain his throne? Your throne, my apologies, your Radiance. Jinchua bowed, foxlike. This enemy is beyond your abilities to fight, little warrior. Mask or no mask, it is likely this is the last time you and I will meet.

Unless…

“Unless?”

Do you know how your mother gained her powers, young queen? The fennec curled her bush-tail about her tiny feet and tipped her head to one side, enormous ears twitching. She was more than a simple dreamshifter, you know.

“She was a dream eater.”

Do you know what that means?

Sulema considered the question. “No,” she admitted at last. “Though I know it is something… wicked.”

“Wicked” is not quite the word, Jinchua said. “Unfortunate” is more like it. A dream eater is a dreamshifter who has sacrificed everything in pursuit of great power, usually out of a desperate need. Occasionally there will be one who desires power as an end, and not as a means to an end—that is wicked.

“I do not see the difference,” Sulema protested.

No. The fox smiled. You do not. Therefore I hold hope for you.

“You are speaking in riddles again.”

I am a fox. It is my nature to speak in riddles. Jinchua laughed again, showing bright white teeth. A dream eater is a dreamshifter who has killed her own soul, eaten her own dreams.

“But… I do not understand. I thought my mother killed her enemies?”

Oh, child. Oh, sweet child. Your mother killed your enemies—and in order to do that, in order to become the monster she needed to be to keep you safe, she first had to kill herself. In a manner of speaking.

Dreamshifting is in nature a gentler, weaker magic than that used to wield atulfah. Had she not become Annu, she would never have possessed the strength to snatch the two of you out of the dragon’s maw and into the safety of the Zeera. She killed Basta—her kima’a—and ate her heart. In so doing she became the Dream Eater Annubasta.

Sulema’s heart went cold. My mother did this… for me. Annoying as she found the fox, she could not imagine life without her soul-self, now that they had found each other. She looked at the staff. Then at the wicked obsidian blade— there was no doubt that it was the daemon-possessed instrument her mother had wielded. She looked last at Jinchua, who sat gazing up at her.

“You are saying I could—”

Kill me, the fox agreed calmly. Eat my heart. Become one of the Annu—Annujinchua, a being of two worlds with power you cannot imagine. With the magic of a dream eater, and the Mask of Sajani through which you might wield atulfah, you would become the most powerful being your world has ever known.

“None could stand before me,” Sulema said wonderingly. Such power was unthinkable. For her to wield it—

None could, Jinchua agreed. Not the usurper Pythos, the Nightmare Man—not even the armies of the Daeshen emperor could withstand a dream eater with the song of atulfah upon her tongue. With such power, you could move mountains…

What are you doing? Jinchua demanded. This is serious. Pay attention!

Sulema could not take it anymore.

She burst into laughter.

“Me, a dream eater! With the power to move mountains!” She clutched her ribs and rolled to one side, bent double in her mirth. “Sulema Firehair the Freckled, first of her name! Who smites her enemies with brimstone and churra shit! Oh! Who—who—” by now she was laughing so hard she could hardly speak. “Who incites men to such lust that their kilts melt! Their touar ignite with passion!” She howled as the fennec looked on. “All shall love me and… and… disrobe!”

This is hardly a laughing matter, kima’a.

“Oh, but it is. Oh, my gut hurts.” Sulema’s hilarity subsided and she was able to push herself upright, though every now and again she would erupt in a fit of giggles and snorts. “Me, queen of the world, with the armies of mankind kneeling at my sandaled toes. You are funny, kima’a. Blind, but funny.”

Blind? How?

“My heart desires none of these things.” As Sulema said the words, she could feel the truth in them, and relaxed. I have passed the test. She continued aloud. “Not power, not armies, not a golden crown on my head or a golden throne under my arse.”

What, then, does your heart desire, O Humble One?

“A fine horse. A good blade. My sword-sisters beside me, sunlight upon my face—and a good man to warm those parts of me the sun cannot reach. These are the treasures I covet, this is wealth without measure.” She smiled—at last she knew her own true self, though she had hidden from this knowledge her whole life. Now that she had stopped running from her truth and turned to face it, she knew what she must do. “I wish to be Sulema, nothing more. And certainly nothing less.”

The world does not need another warrior, Jinchua argued. The world needs another Zula Din. You know what you must do. You must save the world from the Nightmare Man. You must convince the dragon not to wake. No simple warrior can hope to do these things.

You know this.

“Yes,” Sulema agreed. She did know. “There is only one way to save the world.” She reached out and took up the blade—Belzaleel, her mother had called it, and warned her never to touch the foul thing. Jinchua closed her eyes and turned her head away, baring her pale throat.

Do what you must, kima’a. It has been an honor to love you.

Sulema could feel the demon stirring deep within the blade. Use me, it called to her from some unfathomable world. Wake me. Feed me. She held the blade in front of her with both hands, as if it had the weight of the world. She brought it up high over her head.

“Forgive me, Jinchua,” she said. “I have to do this.”

Yes, Jinchua agreed, trembling like a leaf in the wind.

Belzaleel screamed in victory.

The blade screeched again, this time in fury and pain, as she brought the obsidian knife down hard upon a rock.

“I abhor you,” she told the daemon, smashing it down a second time, grinding the words out between her gritted teeth. “I repudiate you.” Belzaleel’s shriek of fury rose to an ear-splitting, world-splitting screech as she raised it one final time and brought it down with all her might. “I refuse you,” she finished. “Begone! Fuck off, daemon! You stole my mother’s soul away, but you will not have mine!”

The blade shattered in a thunderclap. Sharp fragments buzzed like hornets in all directions, stinging Sulema’s face and arms. She held up both hands before her eyes to protect them, but as the wicked chips of rock cut her skin, drawing blood, a curious thing happened. They also cut away the last of her bonds, chains and cords and strangling vines she had not known existed. Bonds of magic, bonds of love and of enmity, of friendship and honor and duty, all fell away like a warrior’s vest, baring her soul to the world.

Belzaleel’s scream rose to a wail, thin and impotent. It was caught up in a playful breeze and carried away.

Jinchua opened one eye. It is done, then. Sulema could not decide whether she sounded relieved or sorrowful. Perhaps a bit of both.

“It is done.” Sulema stood and rolled her shoulders. She felt lighter, freer than she could ever remember feeling.

You will never become Annujinchua, Jinchua said. Never wield the power that is your birthright.

“I will be Sulema,” she replied, running her fingers through her short wizard locks. She took up her fox-head staff and smiled as the dream faded from her vision. “And it will be enough.”

FORTY - TWO

Min Yaarif was a city with two souls, neither pure. Legend held that the First People had stopped here and, finding the waters of the Dibris sweet to drink, had built homes in which to abide. Houses of red salt for themselves, houses of mud for their slaves.

So it was still; those few upon whom fortune had smiled lived in splendor beyond belief, while the greater masses of people lived in squalor, trying to scrape the life-giving red salt from the mean dirt. Min Yaarif was a magnificent city of salt and steel, but it was also an ugly place of mud and blood and death.

As a boy Ismai had never been to any place more populous than the Zeerani city of Aish Kalumm. The bustle and otherness of Min Yaarif threatened to overwhelm his senses, and the Lich King stared through his eyes with surprise and amusement.

How small your world has been, Kal ne Mur thought.

No smaller than yours, the youngling replied, centered as it has been on yourself. Who loves you? Whom do you love in return? Sudduth and the others follow you because they are bound by magic, not by love. Your own daughter uses you for her own ends, and she is mad with the lust for vengeance. You could count your true friends on one hand and have fingers left over.

I have friends, Kal ne Mur responded, surprisingly stung. Then the absurdity of the situation hit him—he was standing on a rough-cobbled road at the edge of a backwater nothing of a town, arguing with the ghost of a boy who had needed to die before he could live.

“I am the Dragon King,” he said aloud, shoving the boy and his troublesome thoughts aside. “A dragon has no need for the love of sheep.”

“Are you arguing with yourself again, Father?” Naara asked. “I had thought that you and the boy would be at peace with each other by now. Certainly you need to be of a single mind if we—if you—are to retake Atualon.”

You see… Ismai began.

“I am hungry for mutton,” Sudduth grumbled. “When will you feed us real food, your Arrogance? I tire of the Zeerani pemmican. We should not eat food that tastes like shit just because we are dead.”

“Enough, all of you!” Ismai snapped. “Do I have to destroy the entire world to get a moment of peace?”

I come, Kithren, Ruh’ayya sang. I have swum the river for you.

“Atu take you all,” Ismai growled under his breath. He kicked a rock, which ricocheted off a nearby cart and struck him painfully on the shin. Sudduth chuckled, but when he turned on her she made her face carefully blank.

Sometimes, he thought, being a king is a pain in the ass.

* * *

It was not as difficult as he might have imagined to find lodging, or food for the ungrateful undead, all of whom seemed to have developed a desire for sheep’s meat. The largest inn in Min Yaarif was wholly abandoned at his approach.

The people of the town must have discovered that the horde would remain outside the city proper as long as they were fed, for it fairly rained mutton and mead on the banks of the Dibris.

Ismai claimed a suite of lavishly appointed rooms, partly because they smelled of cinnamon and honey and sandalwood, but mostly because an entire wall of one room was laden with shelf upon shelf of books. He and his young host shared a love of reading, and the thought of a warm bath followed by a long read by firelight was more tempting to both of them than all the crowns of all the kingdoms.

He bathed, and supped—on leg of lamb, though he would not admit it to Sudduth—and was well into a book of stories about dragons, spiders, princesses, and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons—when a knock came at the door.

“Enter,” he snapped. Yosh take them all, could he not even read a book in peace?

The door opened. Sudduth, who had been guarding it, stuck her head into the room. She had a strange expression on her face, a mixture of consternation and hunger.

“Someone to see you, your Arrogance. He claims to be…” She seemed at a loss for words. “He has many claims,” she finished lamely. “Each more outlandish than the last.”

“And each of them more truthful than the next,” a man added as the door widened and he stepped into the room. He was tall, and broad-shouldered, and wore an elaborate half-mask like a serpent’s face. “My name is Mattu ap Serpentus ne Atu, brother of the Dragon King—my apologies, the current Dragon King—teller of lies, wearer of masks, beloved of… well, my sister still loves me.”

Ismai frowned, marking his page carefully and setting the book aside.

“Do I know you?” Ismai frowned, searching both his minds but coming up blank. “And do you know whom you are addressing?” Few people, his memories told him, would dare approach the Lich King in so flippant a manner if they knew his true nature.

“I have no idea whether you know me, or know of me,” the newcomer admitted. “I am rather a small player in a vast game, to be honest. I remember seeing you, during my short stay in the Zeera. Only your face was not… well, you know…” he gestured to his own masked face, “and my brother Pythos was still believed to be dead. I was the flippant ward of the Dragon King, you were a young man named Ismai, and the world—flawed as it was—still made sense. Does anyone know anyone anymore? It seems to me that someone has shuffled our cards in the middle of the game and mucked up the lot of us.”

“Mattu… Halfmask,” Ismai said, as he dragged up a vague memory. “Of course. The dreamshifter Hafsa Azeina knows you.”

“Knew me,” Mattu corrected gently. “We have much to discuss, I fear, you and I.”

“You have admitted to being a liar and the brother of my enemy. Why should I discuss anything with you?” Ismai felt Kal ne Mur quaking with rage, but he was curious. Why had the man come?

“Because,” Mattu answered, taking a seat much too close for Ismai’s liking, and leaning close as if they were friends, “we love the same woman, and she needs our help.”

* * *

Sulema.

The name, as whispered by Ismai, was warm as the golden sands, rich and sweet as mead poured from a pitcher of gold. No woman had ever been as beautiful, the Lich King thought, could ever possibly be as beautiful as the girl he beheld with memory’s promise. She was as firmly rooted in Ismai’s heart as the Lich King’s soul was rooted in the boy’s body, and there was no escape.

The girl is echovete, his treacherous heart whispered, and ne Atu. She could wear the Mask of Sajani, and I the Mask of Akari. Together—

Even as a longing for the life and love he had left behind stirred in Ismai’s heart, desire welled up that part of him that was the Lich King—the desire for power. This new development was… invigorating. Ismai picked up a horn of mead and stared into the golden liquid. Sulema was mead and honey-bread, he thought, laughter and life. She was all things good and beautiful—

And she was Sa Atu, the Heart of Atualon.

Together we could take Atualon, he thought. Together we could weave sa and ka in equal measure and send the restless Sajani back into her deep and dreamless slumber.

Or together, the dark shadows of his soul whispered, that part which had slept through ages and should never have been roused. Together we could wake the dragon, and watch the world end. It would be something new, after a thousand years. Something… interesting. It would be glorious.

Ismai raised the horn to his lips, and drank.

FORTY - THREE

The Lich King was a man with two souls, neither pure. Legend held that Kal ne Mur, the greatest Dragon King ever to rule from Atualon, was descended from both the First People and from the Dae. The old stories held that he was more than a man, more than human, and the very fact that he had risen from the dead was, Ani thought dryly, proof of that.

While Ismai…

Ismai, she thought, and her heart was wretched with grief. Sweet boy, what have they done to you? What have you done to yourself? She could feel pain in his bones that went beyond charred skin and ruined eyes. He was all wrong on the inside, desecrated by misuse and betrayal, strayed so far from his soul’s intended path that Ani could not see how she might ever light his way home. To attempt it, she was certain, was to risk becoming lost herself.

And the Lich King…

Ani shivered. Nothing in her life—not being sold away from her family when she was a child, not her first battle, not even her own wicked magic terrified her as deeply and utterly as did Kal ne Mur. His face, to her magicked eyes, was a column of black flame and a pit of a mouth endlessly screaming. To others he no doubt appeared charming, handsome even, with the face of a fine youth overlaying that of a king. To her he was the epitome of horror.

She could not simply drive the Lich King from Ismai’s body, as if he were a song that needed to be unsung. That tenebrous soul had permeated the boy’s body as the smoke of battle might cling to a warrior. More deeply still. Even the foulest ash might be steamed from the face and skin, whereas Ismai’s bones were steeped in the stench of undeath until not even she could tell where one left off and the other began. If she attempted to separate the two, certainly Ismai would perish. And if she did nothing, this war they waged for Ismai’s body would leave them dead sooner rather than later. Dead, or worse.

What of the undead legions, Bonesinger? Inna’hael asked, his voice a soft snarl. What of the monstrosities your kind have called into existence? If the Lich King is killed, will their unhappy shades be banished in his wake, or will they be loosed upon the world to wreak what vengeance they might? I rather think it is the latter.

Ani rather thought so, too, but kept it to herself. She could feel the struggle within Inna’hael, whom she knew was powerful among the vash’ai—how powerful, she could not guess, though she had her suspicions—and whom she feared might yet side with those of the greater predators who wished to simply wipe out humans and their incessant abuse of the world’s magics. Faced with the horror that was the Lich King, and for which humans were wholly responsible, Ani could not entirely disagree.

Ani could not cure Ismai from the Lich King’s taint, but she could not simply let the two of them remain as they were, locked into a single body and with a war raging between them. Neither would the danger be mitigated—even had she the heart to do it, which she did not—by slaying Ismai’s body, corrupted as it was. Ani could see only one way through this goat-shit-laden path, and that was to use a bonesinger’s deepest and most strictly forbidden power: she would have to fuse the two souls into one, erasing both songs from the music of the world and creating a new one.

Any other bonesinger would have been obliged to kill her for entertaining such a thought.

Fortunately for me, she thought as she readied herself to the task, I am the last of my kind.

She breathed deeply, taking in and letting go, taking in and letting go. Let the scents of the inn imbue her senses, acknowledged that her stomach was empty and her bladder full, that the smells and sounds of riverboats and their captains vied for her attention with an itch at the tip of her nose, and then just… let it all go. She sank deep as if into a lover’s kiss, or a pleasant dream, or a warm bath, or a well-deserved and honorable death.

There!

Listening to the songs of the bones of the world, she beheld them both, the Lich King and the youth, like the flames of two candles lit too close together. The fires burned too hot, too close, but there might be a way, if she was as foolish and reckless as she had always accused her girls of being. With a great deal of unearned luck, if she just…

Istaza Ani sang, low in her throat and her rib cage she sang of raindrops joining to become a river, of rivers joining and flowing together, together into the ocean. She sang of lovers twined, of flowers and bees and sweet spreading warmth. She sang of letting go, and letting be, of drops of ink taken into paper to become a mother’s book. Of letters joined into words, into poetry, into song.

Ah, she thought.

Almost…

Almost…

There! I have them.

The twin flames began to ebb and swell in time to her music, her song, to flicker and flare and dance as one.

As one, she thought, making it so. She imagined reaching out to two candles and pressing, pressing them together into a single column of flame. High it burned, and white-hot, a flash of heat furious enough to sear all the lands of men to dust and bones.

Ani withdrew her dreamhands, withdrew her song slowly, slowly, and with some trepidation surveyed her handiwork. Where there had been two flames, two candles in her imagining, there was now one. A single column, imperfect and twisted but whole, and from it burned a clear, clean flame.

It is finished, she thought, for better or for worse. I have killed their songs and written a new one. It was a small thought, scarcely more than a whisper against the great maelstrom that was Kal ne Mur, but he heard her. The flame twisted and turned, and in it now she saw a face—a man’s face, strong and severe and bearing upon its brow an antlered crown.

Bonesingerrrr, he growled, and the flame crackled. She felt the searing heat. What do you do here?

Ani longed to flee, but her bones were deep as the mountains, a legacy passed down to her through a line of powerful women, her flesh strengthened by a lifetime of true living. Had she not called Hafsa Azeina friend? Had she not, in turn, raised a girl who would become queen? She stiffened her knees and her spine, and stared death in his fiery face.

I am helping you, you goatfucking idiot, she replied.

A flickering.

Istaza Ani, is that you? Ismai’s face peered out from the flame.

Yes, she replied, wishing that she could draw him whole and unharmed from the heart of the fire. Wishing that she had enough truth left in her bones to apologize for killing him. As much of me as is left, I guess.

You called… the Lich King… a goatfucking idiot. His astonished laughter was lost in the next swirl of flames but would burn forever in her heart.

This magic… is forbidden. The Lich King roared, threatening to engulf her.

But Ismai held it back. His song rang true still, cool and sweet, and it kept the world from burning in the wrath of Kal ne Mur.

The Lich King looked surprised, and then thoughtful.

So… you have joined us together, he said. His voice was odd, swinging back and forth from youth to man and back again as the two halves merged into a frightening new whole. You have made me… less… than I was.

That remains to be seen, she answered. It was the only way to save both of you. As it was, sooner or later your struggles for dominance would have torn the heart you share until it stopped beating, and you would have both died—or become something worse. This world cannot risk such a sundered soul, not at this time.

Did you do this to save us, then, or to save yourself from us? Ismai’s bitter laughter rippled forth.

Both, she answered, stung by the truth in his words. And the world, maybe. I do not care for the whole world to become as the Seared Lands—or for the living to become meat for the dead. What I have done here, I have done for love.

Perhaps. Ismai frowned. And it is possible that you have done us a great service, on this day. Yet such magic is forbidden. It has always been forbidden. To tear a song from the web of the world is worse than murder, as it erases a soul from the fabric of life. You have done this not to one soul, now, but two. Even among bonesingers, this would be seen as anathema. You have broken the ancient laws and must pay the price.

No! Ismai wailed, but his voice deepened, even as that of the Lich King grew smoother in timbre. Soon where there had been two faces, two thoughts, two souls, there would be only one—and that one would want her dead.

Not dead, the voice said, gentler than she had expected. Not dead but gone. Banished from the lands we claim— Dzirana Ani, last daughter of the deep magic, Keeper of the Song of Souls, you are hereby banished from every land we have claimed or will claim. In no city of mine may you show any of your faces, from Quarabala in the west to Eid Kalmut in the east you are hereby banished upon pain of death. In consideration of this service which you have rendered us, and at risk of your life, I give you four moons’ time for your preparations and farewells. After such a span of days—and not one day more—you must absent yourself from my lands.

It is done.

The Lich King pursed his fiery lips and blew. Ani’s world went dark.

* * *

“Ani, Ani! Oh, sweet girl, do not go, do not leave me here alone…”

Ani’s heart broke to hear Askander’s voice thick with weeping, and so she decided to open her eyes and live. She drew a great breath as she imagined a fish must when thrown back into the river, and it burned.

“I am not dead,” she rasped, and was seized by a fit of coughing fit to crack her ribs. “Ow! Help me up. I—” Another fit of coughing, worse than the first, and for the next little while she could do nothing but fight to keep her lungs on the inside where they belonged. All the while Askander held her as if she was precious, as if she was fragile, as if she was the last good thing in the world and only he could keep her safe.

Finally the terrible coughs subsided. Askander offered her a waterskin, which she drained in one long pull.

“That helps,” she said, and she relaxed back into his familiar embrace. “Ugh, I feel half dead.”

“You smell half dead,” Askander said into her hair, muffling a sob and a laugh at once. “You smell like… smoke. Like a funeral pyre. What happened?”

“Well, I either helped to save the world, or to doom it,” she said. “At this point, I may be too tired to care. I need a bath, and a meal, and a good night’s sleep, and then I need to get my girls out of one last mess before I leave these lands forever. I have been banished from all the cities of men between here and Eid… Eid Kalmut.” The enormity of this hit her at once, and her voice broke. Was she never again to set foot in Aish Kalumm, to rest beneath the trees? To ride with the warriors of the Zeera, to see Akari Sun Dragon spread his wings across the desert sky?

Was she never to see Sulema again, to hold the daughter of her heart? It was too much, too much. Tears flowed like the river in springtime, washing away all traces of hope.

“Ah well,” Askander said slowly, as his arms tightened around her, “I never much liked cities anyway.” Her heart leapt, but Ani tried to shake her head, to pull free.

“You do not have to come with me.”

“Of course I do.” His arms were a tight band, strong and unyielding. Ani knew then that he would not let her go, not willingly, ever again. “Silly girl. You are not alone. You have never been alone—do you hear me?”

“I do,” she said, and she meant it. In that moment, tired as she was, in pain, and sorrowing, Ani smiled through her tears, finally seeing for herself the beauty in truth. She would never be beautiful as Nurati had been beautiful, or wield such power as Hafsa Azeina. But she was Ani.

That was, and always had been, enough.

FORTY - FOUR

The young man walked at first ahead of her, then behind, shadows dancing at his feet and his lovely mantid trilling a harmony as he played the bird-skull flute. Waymaster, he called himself now, and smiled a silent refusal whenever she asked what he meant by that.

Sulema had often found herself resenting the attention paid to her mother’s frail apprentice, scant as that had been. He had not been so much like a brother to her as a shadow and an unwanted one at that; his disappearance from Atualon had scarce raised any more fuss than had his birth, and grieved her less than it should.

Daru had vanished from the world moons ago, pop! like Mad Perian in the old stories, and pop! here he was again, full-grown and with eyes full of secrets. He wore strange, soft clothes of shimmering fabrics and walked with strength in his step. Daru played his flute as he led them through Shehannam, and shadows fled. Dreams begged for attention like children at his feet.

Sulema was made happier than she would have guessed by his odd and wonderful reappearance into her life, and not simply because he had come back from the moons—or wherever he had been—to lead them through the Dreaming Lands.

Shehannam was not a place, she had come to understand, that one wanted to wander through in the flesh without a guide. She had traveled to Shehannam in her dreams, but walking these woods in her waking flesh was not the same thing at all.

Even more than she had resented Daru’s presence in her life, Sulema had begrudged the time her mother spent wandering the mysteries of Shehannam; she had imagined it a place of beauty and deep mysteries. And it was; beautiful as a sandstorm, mysterious as the Lonely Road. But it was a perilous beauty, a terrible mystery, and if it was a dream it was the kind of dream you might wake from and be glad of the light. There were voices in this place that belonged to no body, winds that blew with no sound, and birds that were no more than clusters of eyes and wings.

The worst were the trees. They moved, she was sure of it. Sulema’s eyes ached just from watching the trees, waiting for one of them to drop a branch on her head or try some other wicked trick. Daru had warned them not to pluck so much as a flower or leaf from the trees in Shehannam, or to even gather dead sticks for a fire, but they had scarce needed to be warned: nobody wanted to touch a tree that growled, the bark of which felt like human skin.

I love Daru more than I had expected, Sulema mused, and Shehannam rather less.

Sulema did not know how long they had been walking through the Dreaming Lands. More than an hour, she thought, less than a day. But it could have been a day and a half for all she could tell, or they might only have come a mile. The sky overhead—if such a thing could be called a sky—was cottony-gray and drear, giving no indication of the hour. The only shadows in this place were the ones they had brought with them, and Daru did not let them stop to eat, or drink, or answer any call of nature.

“Stray from the path but a little,” he had warned, “and you will be lost.”

None of them, not even the children, needed to be told a second time. The trees crowded oppressively close to the path, while the odd eye-birds careened through the air above them.

From somewhere deep in the woods there came a wail that was half-howl, half-scream; Sulema was altogether certain that she did not want to meet whatever foul thing made that noise. A horn sounded, two short blasts and one long, and a chorus of dream-rending howls sprang up behind them and to either side.

“We are being hunted,” Tamimeha remarked. She spoke the words in a matter-of-fact tone, but her eyes shone white round the edges.

Hannei slapped the back of one hand sharply into the palm of the other, and jerked her chin at the long line of people moving in a slow huddle like frightened sheep along the wild road. Hurry, she signed. Hurry. Though it was hardly necessary—the blood-chilling howls had encouraged even the most wretched and road-weary of them to greater haste. Daru’s music leapt into a livelier tune: pip-pip peeeeeeee, pip-pip peeee-ohhhh!

Daru did not need to sleep while dreamshifting as her mother had; he simply half-closed his eyes and played the little bird-skull flute as he danced along, choosing this path or that seemingly at random. As he played now the trees seemed to press in on either side, moving closer together on some paths and clearing the way for others. Daru invariably took the closer, darker, more difficult paths.

“Who made these roads?” Sulema had asked him earlier. “Do humans live in the Dreaming Lands? My mother spoke so little of Shehannam.”

“There are people who keep dwellings here—but they are certainly not humans,” Daru had said. “And these are not roads.”

“Not roads? What are they, then?”

“Game trails,” he had answered.

Game trails and traps, she thought now. The trees were trying to herd them as hunters might herd tarbok into a ravine for easy slaughter.

“Hurry!” Sulema bellowed toward the end of the line, and heard the cry taken up by the Iponui. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

A branch crashed to the ground so close that had Sulema not jumped back, she would have been crushed.

Somewhere in the glooming woods, something laughed.

“It smells like a trap.”

Sulema looked up into the brilliantly painted face of Tamimeha. The older woman stared straight ahead, grim-mouthed, but glanced at Sulema out of the corner of her eye.

“It probably is a trap,” she allowed. “The trees—”

“Not the trees. Not just the trees, ta?” She nodded at Daru. “That one. You are certain this man is the same boy you lost?” It was not the first time she had asked.

“Yes,” Sulema told her, and it was true. She was not sure that the trees in this place were really trees, or that the birds in this place were really birds, but Daru was Daru, sweet and true of heart, and always had been. “I am certain. He was my mother’s apprentice. I trust him with my life.”

The tall woman snorted. “You trust him with all our lives. Too easily, I think. At your word we have followed this stranger through a strange land, following blind as cave rats. What if he is leading us into a trap, as I suspect? Or… what if he leads us back to our own world, but we emerge into our world years older, as you say he has done?”

“Well,” Sulema told her as the chorus of screaming howls sprang up behind them with renewed vigor, “I suppose you could try to retrace our steps and somehow make your way to the Seared Lands to be eaten by reavers. For my part, I am going to follow Daru to Min Yaarif. The food is better there, for one thing.”

Tamimeha’s lush mouth quirked and she almost smiled. “Beg your dragon you are right, greenlander. Because if you are not—”

The howls grew closer.

“—we are food. I believe we are being hunted.”

“We are being hunted,” Daru agreed, “and the hounds are quite close. We should hurry. But we are nearly there, if the place has not moved.”

“Nearly where?”

“Nearly to a place where a door opens into the foothills of the Jehannim, not far from Min Yaarif. I have used this way before, many times—” He sighed wearily. “If the place has not moved this time. When we are close I will open the way, and you must gather the people and send them through quickly. Very quickly—we will not have much time. When the last of them has left Shehannam I will see to it that the way is shut, so that nothing might escape.”

“Escape?” Sulema asked. That did not sound promising.

“What do you mean, ‘this time’?” Tamimeha asked, frown deepening.

But Daru did not answer their questions. He simply raised the flute back to his lips and played on as he led them through the hostile forest toward an uncertain future.

* * *

The clearing to which Daru led them seemed small at first glance—too small to accommodate the throng of weary and frightened people—but either the trees made way, expanding in an ever-widening circle, or things were not as they appeared to her eyes.

Either way, Sulema would be glad to leave Shehannam as quickly as possible. It had not been so terrible a place to visit in her dreams, when Jinchua was there to guide her, but she could live the rest of her life without stepping upon these strange and shifting roads, and never feel a moment of regret.

Yet when they emerged once more into the waking world, what then? It had been a simple plan—somehow she would travel to and then escort a girl through the Seared Lands, retrieve the Mask of Sajani, and—again, somehow—use it to overthrow Pythos, retake the Dragon Throne, then figure out how to wield atulfah so that she could soothe the dragon’s waking dreams and save the world.

“I wanted an easier path for you,” Hafsa Azeina had said.

Sulema touched the pouch at her waist, which held the mask, and tightened her grip on the fox-head staff.

I would have liked an easier path for me, too.

She missed her mother.

Her mother’s apprentice—a man full-grown now, powerful and strange—played his bird-skull flute. As he did so the air rippled like water, shuddering and pulsing to the tune of his music, at last parting like the lids of a blind eye. This doorway—for so it seemed to Sulema—grew wide enough that several people might walk through it at once. When Daru stopped and tucked the flute back into its ornate pouch, it seemed to Sulema that the music played on, tangled in the air like beads braided into a stallion’s mane.

The way steadied and held, as real as a tent-flap or doorframe in the waking lands. Daru opened his eyes, saw her and smiled, but it was a distracted expression, as if his mind had already flown beyond this small matter of walking between worlds.

As he has outgrown his clothing, Sulema thought, so has he outgrown us.

“Is it done?” Maika’s high voice broke through her reverie.

“It is done,” Daru answered, “and will hold until I close it again. Gather the people and send them through.”

“Yes, let us be finished with this place,” Maika said as she moved toward the door.

“I will go ahead of you,” Tamimeha said, stepping before her queen, “and the Dragon Queen with me. You may trust this sorcery, Sulema an Wyvernus ne Atu, but I have my doubts.”

“As you wish.” Sulema schooled her face to politeness. “But we should—”

A long, low wail rose into the wind, a cry of such loneliness and despair that tears prickled at Sulema’s eyes. The sound stirred her heart to pity, and to fear; her mother had told her stories, warned her of the dangers she might find if ever she was to enter Shehannam.

Of this peril, she had warned most vehemently.

“The Hounds are here,” Sulema breathed. Another cry joined the first. This one sounded… hungry. “We need to leave now.” She had not realized how unquiet the Dreaming Lands were. Between the wail and woe of the Quarabalese, the sound of the hounds, the wind in trees, the song of Shehannam was a paean of pain—

Until it stopped, and the silence came.

The wind stopped whistling on the heath. The weary travelers held their breaths. The hounds stopped howling among the trees.

The Dreaming Lands went quiet as death. All went still; the woods became nothing more than a gathering of trees bearing dumb, blind witness.

The silence settled upon them like fog. It stole the air from their lungs, stifling the sense of urgency that had brought them all from the deep heart of Saodan through the Edge of the Seared Lands and across the bone-strewn smoking length of the shadowed roads—

the silence had a name, it was sleepless, it hunted them

—to die.

The silence was broken by a fennec’s bark—Fly, foolish girl!—but it was too late to run.

Three figures emerged from the mute woods. The first was a man, or man-seeming; broad-shouldered and tall with a ragged blue touar sagging round his face. He stopped an arrow’s flight from Sulema; even at such a distance she could see the pale and shining skin of a reaver.

The second was a boy, perhaps, just shy of manhood. He was dressed in rags that had once been the robes of an apprentice dreamshifter, and stood with his head canted horribly to one side, one arm dangling loose and long as if it had been partly severed. The third figure…

Sulema stifled a yell. The third was a man she recognized. Had been a man she recognized; dreamshifters from the other prides would often come to consult with her mother, and Hamran of the Nisfim had been no exception. His robes billowed, though the wind had died. Then in the next moment he moved, raising his dreamshifter’s staff as if to greet them, and she saw that the dreamshifter had corpse arms sewn down his sides and back. These twitched and flailed and flopped about so that her stomach heaved at the sight.

Hamran—the thing that had been Hamran—leveled its staff at her.

“You sssshall not—”

The sun rose over Shehannam, warming Sulema’s back. She spared a startled glance over her shoulder and froze in shocked wonder. Maika, the child-queen of Quarabala, had thrown off her robes and blazed with the lights of a thousand worlds. She was the night sky and the stars, eyes round and bright as hunting moons, and her voice when she spoke sent tremors through the land.

“You dare,” Maika thundered. “Foul thing of Eth, you dare turn that face to me?” The stars on her skin shone so brightly that Sulema could not bear to look upon her any longer. She looked back toward the dark figures who, faced with the splendor that was Maika, seemed to shrink back upon themselves.

Then the tormented thing which had been a dreamshifter raised his staff, and his many arms, and hissed. Shadows boiled from the trees and dropped like spiders to fall burning among the massed people.

Hannei brushed past Sulema and rushed at the corrupted dreamshifter, dark blades drawn, her face a mask of beauty and courage. Daru ran after her, seeming to grow larger with each step, his face hard and fearsome as any warden’s. Maika’s voice raised in a shout—“A’olek hanolo o’aino o’ ainakane au!”—heat seared Sulema’s back, and a burst of incandescent light lit the Dreaming Lands, leaving her half-blinded.

Sulema shifted her own dreamshifter’s staff to her off hand and reached for the hilt of her shamsi, but froze as a sweet voice whispered in her ear. Little sister, it sang to her. Let me see.

Sulema had put the mask away when they had come into Shehannam—through the eyes of Sajani the place looked even stranger than it had with her own, and it spoke to her here too sweetly, too convincingly for comfort. As if in a dream she drew the precious thing forth now and pressed it upon her face. It felt warm, as always, and fit better than her own skin.

A jewel of time lay frozen in her sight, sparkling and pretty and precious. The dreaming shadows of this place had been raised and came against them as an army; Daru stood between these and Hannei, bird-skull flute raised to his lips. Hannei was poised like a dancer on the balls of her feet as she prepared to charge toward the reft Zeeranim, dark blades naked in the half-light. Tamimeha and her warriors were herding their people through the opening Daru had made between worlds, placing their bodies between their countrymen and danger.

All this she saw in one moment, and this she knew as well: they would die, all of them, their quests and lives come to naught as they fell into shadow. For it had been a trap deftly woven by the Nightmare Man, baited by the loves of her life, and it held her fast. Sulema could, if she so chose, run through the portal and into the waking world, saving herself.

No, she refused, countering the mask’s unspoken suggestion. No.

Very well, replied the mask.

The next moment in time took a breath, setting the world to motion.

The big reaver, who had once been a warden, rushed sideways and leapt toward Hannei. His insectoid eyes shone with delight—

—but so did hers.

Hannei was beauty in youth and beauty in death as those blades danced to meet the reavers. She moved with all the deadly grace and speed of a wild vash’ai; Sulema knew in that instant that their match in the fighting-pit had been nothing, a child’s game. Hannei Two-Blades, vengeance made flesh, was not playing now; her blades whistled through the air, calling for the reaver’s second and final demise.

The smaller reaver, who had once been a boy even as Daru had been a boy, stretched his mouth impossibly wide and crouched, burnt eyes fixed on Sulema, hissing a death-rattle at her. But before he could leap Maika stepped into Sulema’s line of sight, and she had been transformed by the moons-and-stars of an Illindrist’s magic. The young queen’s arms were raised as if in supplication, and she held the oracular spider cupped in her small hands. A seething mass of shadow boiled in the air before her. Tendrils of the stuff tore loose, whipping toward the boy reaver. He squealed, leaping back and away.

There was no time for wonder. The Arachnist-dreamshifter’s many arms twitched, reaching for Sulema, and he screeched. Tangled webs of twisted weaving poured forth from the dark forest. This conjuration rose high, higher than the trees, obliterating the wool-gray sky. A plague of shadows rained down to land between the people and the wide doorway; they flew on wings of fear and crawled on legs of wrath and they were legion, they were endless, they were the death of all hope.

Even now you can save yourself, crooned the Mask of Sajani in Sulema’s mind. You have only to leave your companions behind, and they are going to die anyway. Their flesh will slow the advance of our enemies, their blood will slake the shadows’ thirst for yours. You have only to run through the doorway and you will be safe, you will be free.

Sulema drew her sword and laughed. “You do not know me,” she said aloud. “I am a churra-headed brat, rash and foolish, and my faults are many. But I would never, never, abandon those I love.”

Nor, it seemed, would those who had loved Sulema abandon her.

From the deeps of the dreaming forest came a ringing call, golden and pure as the reavers were foul. A bright light rose from behind the shadowed trees; it came with cleansing fire as no dawn ever could in the Dreaming Lands, driving out the unclean shadows before it. Hounds poured into the clearing, red-eyed and terrible, their slavering jaws flecked with bloodfoam and joy in their bass bayings as they fell upon the befouled shadows.

The reft warden had fallen to Hannei’s blades, and the reft boy had been smothered beneath the weight of Maika’s weavings. The Arachnist-dreamshifter raised his arms, raised his staff, and the putrid pulse of his power trembled through the thick air as he raised nightmares to life in the Dreaming Lands—

You have passed the test, little one, the Mask of Sajani sang. Her voice was a light in the dark places of Sulema’s heart. She raised her own voice in song, like her father’s yet unlike, green and cool and full of life where his had been hot and wrathful. Green things sprang up at the feet of the corrupted dreamshifter; vines wove about his feet, up his legs, winding round and round his many arms, trapping them against his side. The wide fanged mouth and burning eyes were lost to sight as a profusion of foliage smothered the nightmare thing, circling it as a forest might creep round an abandoned tower in a thousand years’ time. Sulema sang, and Sajani laughed, as a green mound rose up to stand where the reft shadowmancer had been. It burst into bloom, a riot of colors for which Sulema had no names. As the dreamshifter came to this final verdant end his shadows burst into black dust which disappeared before it hit the ground.

The horn sounded again, a single clear note of victory, and the hounds faded back into the woods whence they had come. One of them, a massive pale beast with golden eyes, paused to regard Sulema for a long moment with eyes that held a mother’s measure of suffering and love. Sulema took a step toward the beast, hand outstretched, as a terrible certainty rose in her heart.

A wail of terror rose up from the people of Quarabala. Daru touched her shoulder. His face was streaked with blood and soot, and his eyes were bright with grief.

“Sulema,” he said. “We need to go. We need to get these people out of here; these lands belong to the Huntress. She suffers our presence for now, but if we linger—”

“My mother,” she protested, turning to him. “Daru, that hound is—”

“Shhhhh,” he said. “To speak of this is khutlani.”

“You knew…?”

“Khutlani,” he said again, and there was iron in his voice. “We need to leave now, Sulema. I cannot hold this Way open indefinitely, and if any are still here when it closes—”

Child, Jinchua urged, and her voice was not laughing. Sweet child. You must do as the waymaster says; there is nothing more you can do for your mother. She knew the price, and paid it willingly.

“We will go,” Sulema said. Her voice cracked on that last word, and she hardened her heart. In this, she was her mother’s daughter. “Tamimeha!” she called, seeing that the woman had survived and was walking toward her. “The way is open—we need to get these people out of here as quickly as possible.”

Tamimeha gave a quick, short nod and raised a shout; the people of Quarabala began to pour out of the Dreaming Lands and into whatever future lay before them.

“This is not over,” she said to Daru. “If my mother is being held here in some form—”

“Beware of promises made in the Dreaming Lands, Dreamshifter,” he warned. “There are forces here beyond your understanding.”

Sulema snorted a laugh. “There are many things beyond my understanding, Daru,” she told him. “But you should know this—if my mother is a prisoner here, I will return, and I will free her. I swear it.”

“Sulema—”

“I swear it,” she insisted, and brought her staff down hard upon the ground once, twice, three times. “By my blood I do.”

Somewhere deep in Shehannam the Huntress raised a golden shofar to her lips, and blew once, twice, three times.

It is done.

* * *

Those who had survived the exodus from the Seared Lands emerged wounded and weary into the waking world not far from Min Yaarif beside the twisted pillars of stone so like the Bones of Eth. The russet earth was hot as yesterday’s embers, the sky a thin and angry blue, and Sulema could smell the city’s shit-pits even from a distance. She was so glad to be once again in the waking world, and away from the Seared Lands, that she could have wept.

Rehaza Entanye took a deep breath of the foul air.

“Ahhh,” she sighed, “thank Atu, I am home.”

“Uh!” Maika twisted her tear-streaked face. “It stinks!”

Rehaza Entanye spat. “You think this stinks, you should smell the slave pits, eh—”

Abruptly Hannei reached for her swords.

“Ware!” Daru cried in a voice like that of a hunting eagle. He pointed at the twisted stone pillars, from between which a hooded figure emerged.

Nightmare Man, was Sulema’s first thought. She had half expected him to be waiting for her, him and Pythos, to snatch her up before she could lay claim to the wretched throne. At second glance, however, she saw that the figure was female, slight of build and bold in manner. She had a warrior’s swagger, though she wore no vest and bore no sword. Her dark arms were mottled from bonding, though there was no vash’ai at her side. She led a chestnut stallion, older but fine enough to—

Sulema jerked, and Hannei’s jaw dropped open.

“Thief!” Sulema shouted and started toward the woman, staff upraised as fury and grief bloomed in her heart. It was too much; after the golden-eyed hound, it was too much. The old chestnut stallion could be none other than Ani’s Talieso, and there was no way short of murder that any stranger might claim him. Behind her she heard Hannei’s blades whisper free of their sheaths, eager for blood. “Step away from that horse. Do it now.” She raised the fox-head staff and felt atulfah stir in the ground beneath, the sky above, the air in her lungs. “I said—”

“I heard you the first time.” The woman stopped. Brown hands reached up and pushed the hood back, revealing the laughing face of a young woman. She was deeply striped and spotted, marked more strongly Zeeravashani than any warrior Sulema had ever seen, and her grin was pure mischief. “I may be old, but I am not deaf.”

That voice!

Sulema froze in place, even as her sword-sister brushed past her at a dead sprint. Hannei dropped both swords as she ran, laughing and crying horribly, and swept the woman up into a crushing embrace. Talieso snorted and tossed his head, dancing to one side, pretending to be spooked. Sulema stared from the stallion, to her sword-sister and this… stranger… and back again.

“Istaza Ani?” she asked finally, as Hannei set the woman back on her feet, patting her and grinning from ear to ear, tears streaming down her face. “Istaza Ani? Is that you? But how…”

“It is just Ani now, brat,” the woman said. “I am too young to be youthmistress now, I think.”

“But… but…” Daru had grown old, and their youthmistress had grown young. Next thing we know, she thought sourly, the moons will rise in the daytime, and Akari will fly at night. Men will be warriors and women will wear veils. “I do not understand,” she wailed at last, feeling every minute of five years old again.

“That has not changed, at least,” the not-so-strange stranger laughed. “Though I see that you are a dreamshifter now, and you—” She broke off, looking at Hannei, and her face darkened with anger. “Ah, my Hannei, you have not been well treated at all. I would like a word with whoever has done this to you. You have both changed.”

“We have changed?” Sulema squeaked. “You—you—I thought you were a stranger, leading Talieso. I might have killed you!” she finished lamely, though in the next moment she realized this woman would not be easy to kill.

“Ah well, it is a beautiful day to die.” Ani laughed, arms outflung, her snarling cat’s face turned up to the sky as if she would drink it. “But it is a better day to live. Come! We have much to discuss. I have food ready for you, and usca!”

“Usca?” Sulema exclaimed. Her eyes met Hannei’s. They shared a grin, and for a moment—a moment only—all was right in the world.

* * *

They made camp there, under the shadow of the Bones of Illindra. So Sulema named them, having no better idea for what to call the stones and mindful of the stories she had heard of the spider-goddess who gave birth to all worlds and hung them all in her great web.

The people of Quarabala broke off in small groups to tend their hurts, to tend their young, to tend their hungry bellies with meager dried meat and gulps of water. For so many people to descend upon Min Yaarif at once would have been seen as an act of aggression. It would be best, Ani suggested, that they send a small contingent to the city to negotiate passage through and onto other lands.

Which other lands, she did not say, and Sulema hoped someone had an idea. Her father, she knew, had promised lands to Aasah in return for the Illindrist’s service, but that was as far as her knowledge stretched.

Yaela might know, she thought, and sent up a fervent wish that the shadowmancer’s apprentice had survived Jehannim and would meet them, perhaps as early as tomorrow. And perhaps, she thought wistfully, my brother will be with her. Perhaps one or the other of them might have a plan to resettle the people of Quarabala—for certainly the citizens of Min Yaarif would not be willing to accept so many refugees into their midst, and the proud warriors were unlikely to accept a life of slavery. Sulema also wanted to have a word or three with the green-eyed bitch for not mentioning that her little niece was also queen of Quarabala.

Her arm was a hot mess of fiery pain, and she had been having odd dreams of spiders and dark places filled with the restless dead. She needed the reaver anti-venom, and she needed it yesterday.

She stood beneath a carved spider’s leg of twisted stone, rubbing her shoulder absently, when she heard footsteps approaching from behind. She turned and was surprised to see Ani, carrying something cradled in her arms. The youthmistress had always moved in silence.

Either my hearing is getting better, she thought to herself, or Ani is getting old, no matter how she appears.

“Where have your scars gone?” she asked. The youth-mistress had been as proud of her battle-scarred hide as Askander had been of his.

Ani shrugged. “Gone,” she said. “When I sing my bones into another shape, and then back again, there can be… changes. I am never quite the person I started out to be.”

“Sing your bones into another shape. So it is true—you are a bonesinger.”

“I am.” She stared at Sulema over the dark bundle. “Does it matter?”

“You knew my mother was a dream eater.”

“I did.”

“Do you know what that means?”

Ani regarded her for a long and solemn moment.

“I do.”

“Friends do not judge one another for practicing forbidden magics.”

“No.” Ani smiled at her, and Sulema saw the shadow of a much younger Ani, one whom she would have liked to call “sister.” “Friends help friends bury the bodies. Here, help me with this, would you, daughter of my old friend?”

“Certainly I will,” Sulema said, taking the bundle. For all its bulk, it was lighter than she had expected, and sent a strange cold tingle up both her arms. “Mother of my heart.” For so Ani was, and so she had always been. It was past time Sulema acknowledged all this woman meant to her.

Ani stared at her, and tears filled her eyes. “Daughter of my heart,” she said slowly. “Let us camp here tonight in this dark place, shall we? Beneath the shadows of the stars. Let us eat, and drink usca—you and I, and Hannei, as well—and let tomorrow bring what it may.” She reached out, took a corner of the bundle, and tugged.

“Nothing would please me more… oh. Oh!” Sulema gasped as the cloth she had been holding billowed out into the windless night. It filled the night sky, writhing and rippling like the sides of some tormented creature. Scales gleamed, teeth flashed, claws grasped, and eyes—dozens of them—stared out at her from the sides of her mother’s tent.

“What? How did you… what?”

“Best not ask,” Ani replied easily. She grabbed a corner of the unruly shelter and used a bone peg to set it firmly into the ground. “I will get this set, while you fetch Hannei. I want drink, and sleep, and my man Askander, but two of the three will do for this night, I suppose.”

Sulema turned on her heels and trotted off in search of Hannei. She wondered whether her sword-sister would agree to join them, and how Ani had come by her mother’s dreamshifting tent, and whether there was usca enough for all of them. In the end, she was gifted with answers to two of her three questions, and counted herself well satisfied.

She lay that night beneath the moons, beneath the humbled stars, beneath the eyes of her mother’s vanquished enemies, and let herself be spun into darkness.

* * *

Upon waking the next morning, Sulema realized three things, and in quick succession.

Usca still gave her the worst hangovers.

Hannei snored worse now that she had lost her tongue.

Ani had slipped away some time during the night.

The first realization—the dull throb of her head and the hare’s-ass taste in her mouth—was so all-encompassing that it took Sulema a moment to fully realize the import of Ani’s absence. When at last it sank in, she shook Hannei awake, dodging fists and feet. Apparently usca was no kinder to her sword-sister than it had been to her. Then she struggled free from her tangled vest, which was sorely in need of a good wash, and ducked out the tent flap into the thin light of a new day—

There she found the whole world waiting to greet her.

Ani stood at the fore. Sulema’s heart leapt in the presence of her erstwhile youthmistress, and she pushed away any notion of treachery. Forbidden magic or no, the song in Ani’s bones was a true one and loyal. A vash’ai stood at the bonesinger’s side, nearly as big as Khurra’an, pale as the dawn before a storm. He was a broken-tusked wild king of the desert, and the sight of him filled her with an equally fierce pride.

We are Zeeravashani, she thought. My people and his. Wild or no, bonded or no, we are one. The great sire looked at her, into her, and grunted his approval.

“Instead of bringing you to Min Yaarif,” Ani said with a grin, “I brought Min Yaarif to you.”

Sulema’s eyes widened with surprise. Leviathus was there, resplendent in the striped trousers of a river pirate and the white vest of an Atualonian princeling.

I knew it would take more than a mymyc to bite through his stubborn hide, she thought with pride for her brother. Even so, a wave of relief surged through her. A crown of sea-bears’ claws graced his brow, and a pair of long, thin blades were sheathed at either hip.

Then the smile dropped from her face. At his side, swathed in spidersilk the color of new leaves, eyes wide with dancing delight, stood Yaela.

Yaela may have freed me from Pythos’s dungeons, but her manipulations and half-truths nearly got us all killed, Sulema thought. She has much to answer for. If she gives me the cure I was promised, and the world for which we bargained, still I am not sure I will forgive her. She sent me on a quest into the Seared Lands to bring back a girl, and instead I have walked into a nightmare and returned with her people.

And Sulema was not the only one with a mind to vengeance.

From the corner of her eye she saw Hannei start forward, swords drawn, a snarl contorting her beautiful face. Her eyes were fixed on Sharmutai, who in turn was staring at Sulema with an expression of naked hostility. Rehaza Entanye stepped toward Hannei, hands upraised, as the whoremistress turned to a swarthy woman behind her and that woman hefted an iron-tipped staff, ready to fight.

“Guts and goatfuckery,” Ani spat, “put your weapons aside, all of you. No bloodshed before breakfast.” When it became clear that her words were not being obeyed she repeated, “Put your weapons down.” There was a power in her voice, old as the roots of hills, of a kind that Sulema had never felt before. Weapons were sheathed and hate-filled eyes averted… for the moment.

“Wise choice,” the bonesinger noted dryly. “I will set the lot of you to shoveling churra shit—do not think I would not. Now! Let us break our fast together as we decide the fate of the world.”

“We are missing a player,” Leviathus noted. “The Dragon Queen is among us,” he nodded to Sulema, “the queen of Quarabala—and the pirate king as well, or so I am told—but where is the Lich King?”

“Lich King?” Sulema stared. “What, or who, is the Lich King?” He did not sound like someone she would care to meet.

“A horror from the old stories.” Maika’s voice rang out as she took her place beside Sulema. She had dressed in Quarabalese finery, orange and red, black and yellow— hastily, it seemed, as her braids wanted straightening and her robes were wrinkled. A jeweled filigree like the Web of Illindra bound up her braided hair, and a crown of pale jewels graced her smooth dark brow. “Do you claim now that those stories are real?” There was an edge of fear in her voice.

“All stories are real,” Ani smiled. “You of all people should know that, queen of a lost people. Welcome, young Maika. I am delighted to see that you and your people have made it to safety.”

“There is no safety in this world,” Akamaia said. She had taken her place beside Maika. “You of all people should know that, Bonesinger. And you will address Queen Kentakuyan a’o Maika i Kaka’ahuana li’i as ‘your Magnificence.’”

“There is no safety in this world,” Ani acknowledged with a slow nod, “but the Dziranim, like our Zeerani cousins, give no honorific to queen or king. Still, empty bellies make for hard heads. Let us fill ours, that our minds may be open and our words soft, shall we?” Her eyes were bright and her smile wide, but Sulema knew the threat behind her words. Tension built beneath the twisted rocks like thunderclouds in the spring. Silence fell upon them.

Hannei’s stomach snarled like a vash’ai.

Snickers broke out among those close enough to hear, and the tension was broken.

“It is settled, then,” Ani said. “Let us eat!”

* * *

The servants and slaves of Sharmutai laid out pillows and cushions, dining-cloths and bowls of sweet water, and the assemblage settled down to break their fast. Sulema chose a particularly beautiful purple cushion for her own, and leaned close to Hannei, who reclined nearby.

“You did that on purpose,” she accused. That had been one of her friend’s oldest tricks, swallowing air so that she could make her stomach rumble loudly at inopportune times, to the delight of her pride-mates and the disgust of their elders.

Hannei stared at her, the very picture of youthful innocence.

“Ehuani,” Sulema whispered to her friend, and touched her arm. “You were right all along.” There was more beauty to be found in facing the truth than in dreams and wishes.

Saghaani, mouthed Hannei, touching her heart and pointing. You. Right. Also.

Then Sulema knew that all was well between them. As voices rose and rumbled all about them, as introductions and alliances were made, two warriors of the Zeera exchanged mugs of sweet water and a solemn, silent vow.

Sisters.

Forever.

* * *

All that remained were crumbs, and a third mug of coffee had just convinced Sulema that she might, indeed, be able to conquer the world, when the Lich King joined their party.

Her first warning was a low rumble, nearly inaudible. Ani leapt to her feet, Inna’hael following. Only then did Sulema realize that the pale sire had been growling. The party’s attention was turned from the thin niceties of people who were politely—but with growing impatience— avoiding a necessary and ugly discussion. Sulema raised a hand to shield her eyes from the bright midmorning sun and gasped.

A man moved toward them across the hot sands. The way he strode spoke of a warrior-king—of that there could be no doubt—conquering and claiming all around him with every step. Broad of shoulder, loose and narrow of hip, he wore an antlered helm and gold-chased armor, and the sword at his side was long and broad.

A fell light was in his eye, and his mouth was hard; grim was his face and grim his companions too, and these could be none but the armies of dead roused somehow from their ages-long sleep in Eid Kalmut. At the king’s left side walked a young girl, dark and darkly lovely and no less formidable than the antlered man. At his right hand, wearing half a mask and all the confidence of youth, walked the last man Sulema might have expected—or wished—to see.

All thoughts of fear or wonder were driven from her mind as fury bloomed hot and dry in her breast.

“Mattu Halfmask,” she hissed, making as if to rise to her feet. He said he loved me, she thought. That he could not live without me. Then he left me to die in his brother’s dungeons. “That half-faced, half-witted, half-dicked son of a diseased goat, he—”

A hand clamped hard on her wounded shoulder, drawing a surprised yelp of pain. Sulema shook free of the grip and rounded on her attacker but froze at the look on Hannei’s face. Her sword-sister had gone pale with shock and was pointing toward the Lich King, mouthing something that Sulema could not quite catch.

“What?” She looked at the king, then back at her friend. “Yes, Ani—Bonesinger Ani—seems to know him. So what is it that—”

She stopped, struck dumb with her mouth hanging open.

“What!” she shouted. “Is that…! Is that…!”

It was Ismai, as Hannei had been trying to warn her. The younger son of Nurati was also—somehow, impossibly—the Lich King of Eid Kalmut. Sulema moaned and bowed her aching head, cradling it in both hands.

“If I am dreaming,” she said to Hannei, “please wake me. If I am not—ow. Ow!”

Hannei punched her again, hard, in her wounded shoulder. She glared at Sulema, hands flowing into the quick, harsh hand-language of hunters.

Sleep. No. Wake. Everything—here she gestured around them, at the entire assemblage, the land and river and sky above—everything. Gone. Shit.

Then all eyes were on the two Zeerani warriors, as disapproving scowls appeared on every face, and they offended allies and enemies alike.

By bursting into uncontrollable laughter.

* * *

The world had indeed, as Hannei had said, gone to shit. The dead walked again, and Ismai—Tammas’s sweet little brother—was their king. The Lich King! Pythos ruled from Atukos, and the Nightmare Man was working to wake Sajani through him. She had helped to lead an entire people onto the very doorstep of Min Yaarif, and she had no idea where they might go from here. Hannei was a cold-hearted killer, Ani was a mistress of dark forbidden arts, and Sulema—

Sulema would have torn her way back into Shehannam and run all the way back to the Seared Lands if it would get her away from the endless talking. The sun set, food was brought—three meals in all, plenty of food if not of the best quality—and still the planning rolled on and on.

She supposed it was necessary, but Sulema was a warrior, not a general. The rush of their final battle had worn off, and Sulema mostly just wished for sleep.

Now and again the ground would rumble and that would cause a momentary lull in their discussions; the reminder that if they failed here, if their desperate plans to topple Pythos and put Sulema on the Dragon Throne were unsuccessful, the whole world would pay the price.

Finally, the edges of the sky went to red, and an agreement was reached. Though it seemed at times like madness, they would combine their forces, meeting on the banks of the Dibris in a two-moons’ time, and set forth for Atualon. Together they would wage war upon Pythos, upon the Nightmare Man, and any who dared oppose them.

They would place the Dragon Queen on her throne.

* * *

Sulema had agreed to alliances and concessions which she only half understood, looking to Ani, to her brother, and to Yaela for guidance. She promised lands which may never be hers to give to the Quarabalese and to the river pirates; her brother and the sorcerer’s apprentice dreamed, it seemed, of building a splendid city at the mouth of the Dibris. She even conceded lands and riches to Sharmutai the whoremistress, though in Sulema’s estimation that woman deserved no more land than would be needed to build a funeral pyre. Much as it galled, Sulema had to admit that Yaela had not precisely lied to her about her niece, and that the whoremistress had access to fighters and weapons that they sorely needed. She had to temper her anger and focus in ways her training had never prepared her to endure.

The fate of the world depended on it.

By the time they were done, though, round and round in her head like sand-dae, there swirled the words of a poem— or the end of one at least. Ani had forced her to recite it when she was young and the world was full of hope.

When the Dragon wakes at last,

Who will rise and who will fall?

Shaman, sorcerer, lover, liar,

Who will rise and rule them all?

Sourly she thought, If I had ever suspected that the poet might be talking about me, I would have run away, far away, and never looked back. The only thing that could possibly be worse would be if the dragon were to truly wake.

The earth rumbled again, mocking her and all her grand plans. If the dragon woke, all the planning in the world would not save them.

FORTY - FIVE

Jian could not have said for how long he stood in the tiny cell he shared with his dead mother, his Issuq eyes cutting through the gloom. He could feel the passage of time, the ebb and flow of it, moons rolling overhead like waves over a coral reef. Several times the world around them had been gripped in a violent shaking, as if it, too, shared his grief.

The dragon is waking, he thought. Only let me avenge my mother, my Tsali’gei—and my son, my murdered son— before Sajani destroys the world, and I will be at peace.

The sharp stink of death burned in his nostrils as the indignity of Tiungpei’s unwashed, untended body burned in his heart. These things were to him as the flames of a funeral pyre, cleansing his spirit for the fight ahead.

His ears twitched. There were footsteps in the hallway, furtive and soft. Not the iron-nailed bootsteps of imperial soldiers, but the hurry-scurry-shush of sandaled feet. So it was to be a secret assassination after all, and not a public execution. He growled low in his throat, skin prickling.

Cowards.

He bared his teeth but breathed softly, gently stifling a snarl. If this was to be the end of him, let him make such an end that poets could only speak of it in hushed tones, and scribes would write his name in blood ink. Let him die not as his mother had, a bright flame pinched out without so much as a wisp of smoke to protest the dying of her light, but as Sajani herself, whose waking would consume them all.

Metal scraped against stone and there was a faint snick as a key was turned in a lock. The door cracked open, so carefully as to be silent to all but an Issuq’s ears.

Come for me, then, he bade them silently. I am ready. The door swung wider and he sprang—then twisted midair, giving a soft yelp of surprise at the pale face which stared up at him, dark eyes wide. Giella stepped quickly to one side, and Jian landed in a crouch at her feet, bristling and trembling all over.

“Hush,” she said in a voice softer than a flower’s death. “Hush now. Come with—” She took a deep breath, and let it out again in a long hisssssss. Her eyes widened, flashing crimson in the netherlight.

“Oh, Jian,” she whispered. “Oh, Jian, I am so sorry.”

She reached out a tentative hand to touch his shoulder, but he flinched back. Turning instead to the still and shrouded form of Tiungpei, he stooped to gather her into his arms. Giella said no word—not to hurry him along, or to suggest that he leave his mother’s body behind in their haste to be gone from that place. She waited for him to do what he must, as if they had all the time in the world.

For this act of kindness, Jian would be forever grateful.

There was a faint light in the hallway, effective as the midmorning sun to Jian’s preternatural eyes. He stopped short, clutching his precious bundle, when he realized that Giella had not come alone. A girl was with her, dressed in raptor-hide armor, young but hard-eyed. She flashed a quick smile, and Jian saw that her teeth had been filed to sharp points. She made hand-signs to him and the White Nightingale, signs with which Jian was not familiar but which clearly said, Come. Follow me. This way.

He glanced toward Giella, but she had already fallen into step with the girl, moving at a fast lope down the hallway. What choice had he, after all? Hugging his mother’s body close to his chest, his heart, Tsun-ju Jian de Allyr followed.

They did not travel upward, in reverse to the direction Jian’s handlers had brought him, and from which they would soon come to drag him to his death. They moved down into a maze of twisting, narrow passages, all of which seemed alike.

Deeper they went as the passage became narrower, the roof steeper till Jian had to jog bent nearly double, the robe that was his mother’s shroud dragging on the ground between his feet. On they ran till it seemed to him that they must have been swallowed by Sajani Earth Dragon from the old stories. Perhaps he was sleeping and caught in a nightmare— or perhaps he had already been executed, and this was one of the levels of Yosh, in which he would run forever carrying his mother’s dead body.

Holding onto his Issuq-form as they ran began to exhaust his energy, so he let it slip. Once he had shifted, however, it felt to him as if he could do so again with far less effort than before. It was there, part of him, swimming beneath the surface of his flesh as the creatures swam in the sea.

Padding near-silently along the stone floor, passing hallways on this side or that, they were joined by people the likes of whom Jian had never seen. They came singly or in pairs or even small groups. Most, but not all of them were young, grim-faced, no few of them scarred, all of them dressed and armed for battle. If they glanced at him at all it was with the kind of look used by one hunter to acknowledge another, without indicating deference or challenge. One older man grimaced when he saw what Jian carried, and made a hand-sign near his heart that might have indicated sorrow. Aside from that brief gesture, Jian might as well not have been there at all.

Eventually the path ended in a wall. The girl with the raptor armor held up a hand, indicating that they should stop—though with no passages to either side, there was not much else they could have done. Then she held her hands up to her mouth. Jian noticed with some surprise that she was missing the middle finger on either hand, and that these wounds appeared to be recently inflicted. Her cheeks puffed out and she blew gently, so that a high warbling trill almost like a bird’s call rose up and danced around them.

A crack appeared in the wall and widened. Cool air curled in to meet them, as a cleverly hidden door swung wide. What looked like a small round room lay beyond. When they had all gathered together in that space, the door shut again. The air eddied around them and up, drawing Jian’s eyes toward the pearl-gray sky of first dawn high above their heads. They were at the bottom of a pit, or—

“A well,” Giella whispered, her words quiet and dark. “A witching well, long covered and forgotten.” She reached out and grasped the end of a long, thick rope and gave it a tug.

“Witching well,” Jian said, and he shivered. “Wicked.”

“Yes,” Giella agreed. She waited for Jian’s nod of assent before beginning to wind the rope about his waist, securing Tiungpei’s body to his as she did so, and then giving the cord a series of sharp tugs. Jian fought the urge to struggle against them as they tightened and then began to draw him slightly upward. “Very wicked. Let us go now and grant the darkest wishes of our hearts, shall we?”

Jian bowed his head so that he pressed a kiss to Tiungpei’s cold, enshrouded forehead, and allowed himself to be raised up into the dawn.

Heart of Illindra, Soul of Eth,

Blood of the innocent condemned to death.

Under the moons, combine the three,

Coin enough to set you free.

* * *

As it turned out, the witching well had been bricked up, buried, and lost beneath the garden path of one of the emperor’s most exclusive comfort houses. Ancient and fell-hearted, Jian could hear it talking to him, wicked whispers that tickled the back of his mind, but he was Issuq, not human. Such things held no sway over him unless he wished to let them. Still, Jian was aware of what the thing was, what it could do to him.

What it could do for him.

“Vengeance,” he murmured as he reached the mouth. He sat on the edge and the rope was removed. Hands reached to take his mother’s body and he let them, the fabric of her shroud slipping wetly through his hands, anointing his palms with her blood.

Blood of the innocent, he thought. There was not a child in Sindan who did not know that rhyme. He grasped the object that he wore threaded on a thong about his neck, a trinket gifted to him upon his arrival in the Twilight Lands. It was a red disc a bit smaller than his palm, taken from the carcass of a shongwei. It was a powerful talisman worth more than the combined wealth of three or four villages the size of Bizhan. Enough that it would have bought his freedom from the emperor, were he still a slave. Such a thing was called daes-olouru, in his father’s tongue. In the lands of men, it had a different name.

Blood penny.

Jian held the blood penny up to the light of the full moons. They were fading with the dawn’s first light, but his need was great, and he called to them with all the power of his sea-born soul. He paused, ignoring the hands that still tugged at him, the voices imploring him to hurry, hurry. Closed his eyes and flung his challenge.

“Vengeance best served hot,” he growled. The blood penny burned in his hand with a hungry, eager heat.

“Vengeance best served cold,” he continued, louder now, and his voice broke as he thought of the cold, still body of Tiungpei. My mother. The blood penny shifted in his hand like a live thing, and then burned his flesh again, this time with a searing chill.

“No!” Giella cried, as if from a great distance. She grabbed at him, but he was stronger than she, and determined to do this thing no matter the cost to himself.

“Serve it up with meat and wine,” he finished, opening his eyes and staring into the horror-stricken face of the White Nightingale. “One day old.” For that was how long it had been since they murdered her.

One day old, the well crooned. One day cold.

One day dead.

Jian held his fist over the well’s hungry mouth and forced his fingers to uncurl. Even in the dying moonslight the blood penny shone bright and eager with malicious intent, a thing of terrible beauty. It pulsed for a moment and then burst into light like blood made fire, a living flame that seared his heart but not his flesh. The witching well burst into song, a dirge, a canticle of bone and ash.

Then Jian smiled at Giella, a smile that tasted as bitter and sweet and full of promise as the last dawn of Khanbul. Bitter as his mother’s blood, smeared on his lips with which he had kissed her. Sweet as the innocent child she had raised, and who had died with her in the emperor’s dungeons.

Giella let go of his arm and nodded.

“I see you,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said. The moonslight and the bloodlight of a new day floated across the surface of the blood penny as he turned his hand over and let it fall down… down… down into the blackness, carrying with it the darkest wishes of his heart.

“Let them burn,” he said, thinking of his mother, of Perri, even of Naruteo, who had only been what they had made of him. “Let them all burn.”

* * *

Though such things were generally expected of the Daechen, Jian had never been inside a comfort house. His mother had been wealthy by village standards, but he had had no experience with things such as magical colored lanterns of spidersilk and wormsilk, of fine robes and golden harps, of sandalwood floors soft as a woman’s skin.

All these things and more he would have traded for one stern look from Tiungpei, and in that moment none of them was worth a handful of goat shit to Jian. For she stood there, bathed in light, surrounded by beautiful girls and boys like a lotus among lesser flowers, and she was holding their son in her arms.

“Tsali’gei!” he cried aloud, not caring who heard, not caring about anything but that she was alive, alive, she and their son both. He crossed the floor in half a dozen strides, swept her up in his bloody arms, buried his face in her neck, and burst into great gulping sobs fit to tear the heart from his chest. His son, displeased at being dislodged, burst into howls of outrage.

“Tsali’gei,” Jian said again, this time a harsh whisper. “Tsali’gei, oh my love, oh my heart, you are alive.” It had not occurred to him that this might be so. He had buried all thought of her fate and that of their son deep in the bitter soil of his heart.

“I am here,” she answered. “We are here… but you are squishing the baby.”

Jian pulled back a little. Not much.

“The baby,” he said, and frowned at a distressing thought. His son might have died without so much as a name. How could they have found one another along the Lonely Road, if his son had had no name? It was a ridiculous notion, perhaps, which once lodged in his mind would not let go. He reached up and stroked the infant’s fat little cheek, grimacing at the smear of blood he left behind on the innocent skin. His son met him stare for stare, bared his gums in defiance, and wailed all the louder.

Tsali’gei laughed a little, despite their circumstances.

“He howls like a storm out to sea,” she remarked. “He is your son, blood and bone.”

“My son. My little son. The delight of my heart.” That he could even feel joy at such a time was a wonder. It felt like treachery.

“And of your mother’s, as well. Jian…” she began.

“I know,” he said. His eyes met hers, storm and sea, and the world around them disappeared. He was there, she was there, and their tiny son, who had remembered he had a thumb and was sucking it noisily. “She died in my… in my arms.” His last word broke on a sob and he was weeping again, hot tears dripping down his face and soaking the thin undershirt. He thought of the yellow silk robe she had made him so long ago—just this past spring, in the world of men. The realization that even that was lost to him now was more than his heart could bear.

“I have nothing left of her,” he said. “Not even a pearl.”

“You have you, and you were her greatest treasure,” Tsali’gei said, gently as morning in the Twilight Lands. “And him,” she continued, bouncing the child on her hip. “And those two damned goats, still back at her house.” She was trying to tease a smile from him, Jian knew, but her big eyes were red and deep with grief.

They clung to one another like humans who had been lost at sea, with no shore in sight. Finally he pulled back a little further and held his arms out for the child, who came to him willingly.

“My son,” Jian said again. The words still felt strange to him. He had been but sixteen when the child was conceived, and though he had spent five years fighting his father’s wars in the Twilight Lands, still he felt much too young to be a father. How much worse it must be for Tsali’gei, he realized, who bore and cared for him all alone?

“I was not there,” he began.

“You are here now,” she said firmly, putting one hand on his shoulder and the other on their son’s. “You are not alone. We are your family.” Her eyes held every treasure Jian had ever wanted.

“We will not forget Tiungpei,” Tsali’gei went on. “I loved her, too.”

Jian looked from her to their child, and back again. “Maybe…” he began but then stopped, unsure how to go on. His heart was heavy.

Tsali’gei looked at him and said nothing, waiting for him to continue.

“Maybe,” he said at last. “I was thinking… thinking we could name him Tiungren,” he finished all in a rush. “I know it is too early for a name, but—”

“Tsun-ju Tiungren,” Tsali’gei said, gazing thoughtfully upon their son. “First of his name.” She looked up at Jian, and there was fire in her eyes. “It suits him.”

“First of his name?” Jian stared at her. His Issuq-self growled approvingly at the fierce look she gave him. “You make him sound like an emperor.”

“Do I?” she asked. “Perhaps I do.” She turned to look over her shoulder and clucked her tongue at one of the painted girls, who hurried over and took little Tiungren up in her eager young arms. “Do you mind watching him for me?” she asked unnecessarily as the courtesan was cooing and gurgling in an attempt to charm a smile from the baby.

“Where are you going?” the girl asked, never looking up from her charge’s face. He had Issuq eyes, like those of both his parents, and she was obviously smitten. “Will you be long? Shall I heat some goat’s milk?”

“Yes,” Tsali’gei told her, “and take him to the estate, the one in Bizhan. Wait for us there. Take as many guards as you like, and protect him well.”

“I will guard him with my life,” the girl proclaimed solemnly, glancing up. Jian saw that her eyes were golden-green, much as a cat’s, and that her face had a faintly feline cast to it. She was Daezhu, then, not human. This notion was borne out when she smiled a predator’s smile. “If anyone but me touches him, I will eat them.”

“You do that,” Tsali’gei said approvingly. “We will meet you at the estate when we can. There are servants there, and guards… You and Tiungren will have everything you need until we can join you.”

“Tiungren?” the girl’s voice rose with delight. “He has a name, then? So soon!”

“Yes. He is named for Tiungpei, his ah-ma.”

“Tiungren.” The girl’s voice softened to a contented purr, and she cast a quick look at Jian. “Hai-bao Tiungren de Jian. A warrior’s name. It is good.”

Tsali’gei nodded solemnly, and Jian grunted his approval. The girl had given Tsali’gei’s family name, as was proper, and she was right. It was good. It was, perhaps, the only good thing about this night. And then the words Tsali’gei had been speaking all came together, and Jian peered at her.

“You are not going with them?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Tsali’gei said. Her voice was calm and sure, but all the pain in the world was in her eyes as she bent to kiss her infant son goodbye. “We are going to war.”

* * *

As the sun rose in the sky, the comfort house became a staging ground. This was to be war, not some skirmish led by a handful of malcontents ill prepared and quickly crushed beneath the emperor’s heel.

The White Nightingale, it seemed, had been singing a song for discontent for some years, and enough people had listened to her tune that a formidable force was ready to come dancing to her tune. Blacksmiths she had, women and men who worked by day to make swords for the emperor and by night to forge swords which might be used to bring an emperor down. Stockpiles of weapons and armor had been building, waiting for a day that might never come, a day when the citizen-slaves of Sindan and those of the Daechen who longed to break free might unite under one banner and throw off the shackles of tyranny.

Or die trying, Jian thought, which seemed a much likelier outcome. He had seen the emperor’s forces, and his luminists, and truth be told he did not believe with all his heart that they could do this mad thing. Certainly, it is a thing worth fighting for, worth dying for. But Tsali’gei—

“Stop,” she growled at him as one of the serving-girls helped lace up her lacquered armor. “For the third time, stop thinking that I should run to safety with Tiungren. If you so much as hint at it again, I will bite your ear off.”

Jian risked his ear. “I am thinking it,” he grumbled. “And where did you get that armor, anyway?” It fit her as perfectly as any lady’s gown.

“Your mother made it for me.”

Jian gaped. “She did not.”

“She did. It was my bride-gift.” Then she huffed. “Are you going to stand there and say Tiungpei did not know what she was doing?”

“But—”

“Jian,” she said, placing her hand against his cheek, “let us not fight, today of all days. My place is here, with you, fighting this fight. Let us not take the risk that our last words to each other will be said in anger.” Jian’s heart squeezed painfully in his chest, but he bowed his head to her.

“As you wish.”

“That is better.” She laughed a little, patted his cheek, and pulled a helmet on over her hair. “Just remember to end all of our arguments with those words, Tsun-ju Jian, and you may yet survive to a ripe old age.”

Jian smiled as the maidservants giggled, wishing he could preserve this moment like an insect in amber, safe from the marches of time. He glanced up and caught Giella’s eye. She was staring at him, at him and Tsali’gei, with a look on her face that said this is all I’ve ever wanted.

Do not envy us, Jian wished at her silently. Not until the sun has set on this day, at any rate. It might seem to the White Nightingale that Jian and Tsali’gei had found great good fortune in their love for each other—and they had—but it felt to Jian that they had far too much to lose.

FORTY - SIX

Genzhou Field had been many things over the course of its history. Orchards and crops had been planted and harvested here, according to the whim of the day’s rulers. Peach trees had spread their arms wide to the summer sky, fields of grain had covered the ground, and for a while there had been a mill with a wheel-house and a colorfully painted wheel which combined all the magics of earth and air, fire and water so that priests could bake rice-cakes for the emperor’s feasts.

Had they known the place’s deeper secrets, its darker magics, men might not have been so eager to eat the fruits which grew in this rich soil. Great battles had been fought here, in the days of the first empire. The bodies of the dead, too numerous to bury, had been left to find their own way back to the earth. Those farmers who tilled too deep, who spent too much time looking at the round stones and long bones unearthed by their labors, knew well that the sweet fruit of their harvest held a dark and bitter truth.

That the best things in Sindan grew from the remains of the fallen.

It was in this place that Jian met his army. Not his entire army, but a select few of those who had pledged to fight and die for him. There were bands of wild daeborn whose parents or villages had hidden them from the emperor’s clutches, or who had escaped on their own. These were represented by the girl Awitsu and her strange dark-skinned, moon-haired companion Kanati.

Others came from the sea tribes and forest peoples, the plains folk and even members of the raptor clans, strange mountain folk who so rarely came down from their jagged peaks. These had elected as their champion another girl who seemed too young to be a warrior of any kind, but whose eyes were filled with ancient pain. This was the eight-fingered girl with the raptor hide armor who had come with Giella to bring Jian up from the emperor’s dungeons. Jian had seen her before—he was certain of it— but could not for the life of him remember when, or how, they had met. The confusion must have been written upon his face for, when presented to him, she burst out laughing, startling the chinmong at her side so that it raised its crest and hissed menacingly.

“I am Holuikhan,” she said, staring into his eyes. “You do not remember me.”

An image came to him then of a young one, face streaked with dirt and tears…

“The girl in the field!” he exclaimed. “The one who saw the yellow Daechen training—I remember you, now.”

“Yes,” she said, “the girl you did not kill.” She brought both fists to her chest, mountain-style, bowed low from the waist and held it, indicating deep respect. The raptor at her side, however, drew the scaled lips back from its sharp teeth and issued a series of whistles.

“Jijao!” the girl hissed. She straightened, and Jian could see that her face had gone as red as sunrise. “Do not be rude!”

Jian laughed, causing the raptor to cock her head and give him a skeptical side-eyed look.

“Fortunately, I do not speak raptor-tongue,” he said, “but no doubt she is right in her assessment of me.”

Near the end of the line stood a man, young and proud in stance, wearing armor unlike any Jian had previously seen. Boiled leather lacquered in blue and studded with white steel, it shone like silver and sapphires. The hairs at the nape of Jian’s neck prickled as the man came near, and the scent of bullhide filled his nostrils. The bull was sacred to Emperor Tiachu, the use of its hide an offense punishable by death. To fashion armor from the hide of a bull was to declare war not upon Sindan, but upon the emperor himself.

When the crowd between them parted, and Jian got his first full look at the armor, the full impact of what they were doing hit him like a massive wave, destroying the villages and cities of the world in his heart. Upon his chest, this man wore the image of a blue sea-bear, Jian’s own sigil.

I have declared war upon the emperor, he realized. It was a thing he had known, of course, but seeing his own blue bear made it real, somehow. The young man strode up to the little knoll where Jian stood and gave a shallow, stiff bow as from one general to another.

“Daechen Jian.”

Jian gasped when he recognized the voice which echoed from behind the lacquered helm.

“Chei!”

“Your Illumination.” The boy who had once befriended Jian, and once tried to kill him, held his bow a moment longer than was necessary. “The blue Daechen have come. We stand ready.” A rumble, then a low roar rose from the assembled crowd. Human and Dae alike, fierce-eyed and proud, raised fists to the sky as this Daechen prince spoke aloud those words which had grown up in all their hearts like the fruits of a bitter harvest.

“We stand ready.”

As first Tsali’gei and then Giella climbed the hill to stand beside him, Jian turned in a slow circle, trying to see every face, every banner. If he was to send these people to war, if they were all going to die for him—the likeliest outcome of this morning’s events, no matter which way he looked at it—Jian owed them this much, at least. That he had looked upon their faces.

He had studied the words of the great generals, had read the stirring accounts of heroes as they rose up from the dust of old parchments. Many times he had sat in his father’s study, bent over scrolls and books and stacks of loose paper, dreaming of the day he would wage war upon Khanbul. Of the fine words with which he would stir his troops’ hearts to bloodlust and victory. Looking at these people before him, Jian found that his dreams, his words, were too small to have captured this moment.

Nothing he could say now, or do, would ever repay the blood debt he was about to incur. He closed his eyes and bowed deeply to them all, letting the tears fall from his eyes, to better express his gratitude.

Giella, the White Nightingale, unfurled a banner which she carried in her arms, and raised it high for them all to see. It swam upon the wind like an Issuq in stormy waters—the blue bear on a field of pearl, calling them home. Jian held up one hand for silence, only then knowing the words he would say.

Ehuani, he thought, savoring the desert word in his mind. It suited the moment. I give them the truth.

“We ride to Khanbul,” he said so that his voice would carry. “We ride to war. It is likely, my friends, that we ride to our deaths.” He thought of his mother, windblown and ruddy-cheeked, in love with the sea. Of his own son, who would grow up an orphan, if fate allowed him to grow up at all. And he thought of Perri, his friend, who like so many Daechen before him had been killed for no reason at all.

“Whether we live today or we die,” he told them, and realized that he had at last found the heart of the matter. “Whether the emperor and his palace fall to our swords, or whether he rises tomorrow morning as if none of this had ever happened, we are planting a seed here today. A seed which, soon or late, will grow to a tree whose roots will tear down the walls of those who live in the Forbidden City. Let our blood sweeten the soil of this planting, that the tree of new life may rise from our bones and spread to give shade to our children.

“Yesterday the Daechen emperor in his palace of flowers sat upon his powdered arse, content in the knowledge that he could do with our lives as he wished, forever. Today is the day we break him free of that dream, my friends. Today we take the first steps along the long road to our peoples’ freedom. Today we ride to Khanbul, and to war!”

“To war!” Chei bellowed, and he went to his knees before Jian. The movement spread like ripples upon a pond as those assembled also fell to their knees and raised their voices as one.

“To Khanbul!” they shouted. “To freedom! To war!”

To death, Jian thought, raising his hands to the sky.

He smiled.

* * *

Three times Jian had come to the shining wall that surrounded the Forbidden City. Once as a prince, once as an ambassador.

Now he came to conquer the shining Wall of Swords, or to die upon it.

The army had swelled in size as they moved toward the city. Peasants and soldiers, raptor hunters and wild daeborn, they came singly, or by the tens, or hundreds. Teams of ghella lowed as they pulled carts laden with the engines of war. Soon the ground trembled at the news of their coming.

A pair of figures broke from the trees and dashed toward them. Jian, recognizing them as Holuikhan and her chinmong, held up a hand. Shouts of “Halt, halt!” rang up and down the line, and slowly the great machine of war ground to a stop. The ground, however, did not stop trembling. Rather, it grew in power and volume, louder and louder. Wind howled through the trees with the sound of a thousand trumpets of war, and through it all Jian heard, or thought he heard, the laughing whisper of the witching well.

Vengeance best served hot,

Vengeance best served cold.

Serve it up with meat and wine,

One day old.

“Your Illumination!” the raptor hunter gasped. “Forgive me, but—the Dae—” Face red with the effort it had taken her to run to him she bent double, hands on her knees.

“The Dae?” Giella said, voice sharp and hard. “What about the Dae?”

“They have set foot upon the shores of Sindan, my—my lady! The veil is no more! The twilight lords have come to the world of man!”

A cry went up from those near enough to hear.

“The Dae! The Dae! The Dae are come!”

“Is this true?” Jian demanded. Surely with his father beside him, victory was assured.

“It is true!” the girl cried. “I have seen this with my own eyes.”

Several among them cried out in fear. If Jian did not do something, and quickly, he might lose his army to panic. He held up a hand for silence.

“My father has come to our aid!” he roared. “The Sea King rides to war!” A murmur ran through the crowd nearest him; not acceptance or jubilation, but a permutation of panic into something watchful, waitful.

It would do.

Giella leaned in, her mouth close to Jian’s ear. “The darkest wish of your heart might yet come true, Tsun-ju Jian de Allyr,” she whispered. “I hope you wished that some of us might survive this day.”

Jian’s heart went cold. Had he? What had he wished for… exactly?

Deep in the back of his mind, the witching well laughed.

The land around the Forbidden City was empty and dead as if the war had already been fought there, and every living thing slain. Not so much as a rat or stray dog scurried across the red-stone road. The merchants’ stalls were closed or gone, and the sound of marching feet rang like the brass bells of priests in a funeral procession.

The sounds and smells of industry rang out as Jian’s followers built a siege camp bigger than the village in which he had grown up. Towers and ballistas were assembled, tents struck, fires lit, units organized. Jian nodded at a lean raptor handler running with her clutch of chinmong, and sighed to himself as she passed him by, glancing wide-eyed over her shoulder. Was I ever so young? he wondered. And in the next moment, I hope she survives this day.

He and a chosen few of his generals walked a short distance from the organized confusion toward the city proper and stood close enough that they might see and be seen, not so close that a lucky arrow might find their flesh. Still the ground groaned and shook as if it wished to shake them off.

The shining walls of Khanbul seemed higher, wider, and more ominous even than he remembered from just days before. And the stone giants—the hairs on Jian’s arms stood stiff. It felt as if the hair on his head did, too.

“Do you see that?” Tsali’gei asked, voice echoing oddly from the warrior’s helm that covered most of her face. “Jian, look! The giants… they have moved!”

It was true. The red giant had gained his feet and stood facing the golden giant, hands balled into defiant fists. The smile on the golden giant’s face was gone, replaced with a grimace of anger. Or was it fear?

“How can this be?” he asked Giella.

“Old magic,” she told him, eyes huge and bright in the light of an early day. “Stone magic. Magic as old and deep as mountains.”

“Dae magic,” the girl Awitsu said, appearing out of nowhere. “Dark magic and deep. Can you hear it, Kanati?” She turned to her dark-skinned, moon-haired companion. “A well. A witching well. Can you hear it?”

“Yes,” he said. Silvery eyes glittered oddly as he regarded Jian. “Someone has made a wish, I think.” His teeth, when he smiled, were fox-sharp and impossibly white.

“The giants!” someone cried nearby, breaking the tension that had sprung up between Jian and this daeborn boy. “The giants have moved!”

As Jian stared at them, he realized that both the red and golden giants were staring not at each other, but at him. Though he did not detect a shadow of movement, if he so much as glanced away or blinked it seemed as if they had moved lightning-quick, in a heartbeat’s time. Was it enmity he saw in those stone faces? When he drew abreast of them, would those enormous stone fists smash down upon him?

The trembling in the earth grew louder, nearer, as if an invisible army would trample them at any moment. Skulls shook loose from the red stone road and rolled away, mouths gaping in silent laughter. Swords tumbled like rain into the waters of the emperor’s moat which boiled like an angry sea. As Jian stared, trapped like an insect in amber, the rumble grew to a crashing shriek, as if Sajani had succeeded in waking from her long slumber to tear the world asunder.

Behold, the witching well whispered. Behold, son of the eastern winds, child of the shimmering seas. I grant you the darkest wish of your heart. Then it laughed deep in his bones, a sound that made the ground shake and his soul tremble.

A few paces from them the ground buckled and split. Deep fissures shot toward Khanbul, growing in number and in depth, laughing in crackling stone voices as they raced one another to the city walls. The ground sank, and rose, and sank again, and a sulfurous stench rose to engulf them.

There was a series of deafening explosions, and a wall of dust rose to obscure their view. When it settled, Tsali’gei gasped and pointed.

“Jian!”

He looked where she was pointing and cried out in amazement. Both giants were kneeling, heads bowed—to him.

Where the gates of Khanbul had been there was only a low mountain of rubble. Beyond that, rising from the dust like rocks rising from the ocean mist, the emperor’s army could be seen picking itself up off the ground. Banners whipped about like sapling trees in a storm. There was the black three-headed serpent of Saimonju, the silver dogfish of Hoen, the red and orange sabre-tusked tiger of Shimendo. Over them all rose the shimmering white bull of Daeshen Tiachu.

Where is the white stag? Jian wondered, squinting to peer through the dust. Where is Mardoni? He did not want to hesitate and lose this advantage, but neither did he wish to launch headlong into a trap.

“If you must bring war to your enemy in his own fortress,” the great poet and general Zhao Quan wrote, “do so in a time or place of upheaval, when you are not expected. The key to victory against great odds is to use a surprise attack.”

“Seize the dream,” he whispered to himself, and hardened his heart. The disarray of the imperial soldiers was no sham. His own troops stood but a few paces behind, white-faced with shock but already armed and armored for war.

“Gather your troops,” he shouted, though there was little need; no general would be so foolish as to waste such an opportunity as this. “To arms! To arms! To war!”

Jian held up his war fan. It flashed blue and white, and his force went to point like the Huntress’s hounds scenting blood. Then he brought it down sharply, pointing straight at the imperial troops and the emperor beyond.

“To the palace!” he cried, and was lifted up, carried along on the tides of war, a child’s toy in a maelstrom.

They poured into the once-immaculate streets of the Forbidden City as a muddy river pours into the sea, and were met by rank upon rank of the emperor’s soldiers—daeborn princes who had survived the great wheel, every one, ready beneath the banner of the white bull.

Arrows hissed down upon Jian’s forces like a rain of vipers, and pikes lowered as they were met with a high, thick wall of shields and iron that would seem to the untrained eye as impenetrable as the scaled hide of a dragon. But Jian’s eyes and heart were not untrained. He had trained with, then led, his father’s armies during his long years in the Twilight Lands. Every moment of that time had been spent in preparation for this moment.

Lifting his fan, he turned it to the south three times— and sent the raptors forward. Each of the chinmong, those creatures with which the mountain tribes lived and hunted, was half the height of a tall man and nearly twice as long. Lithe and quick, they did not slow at the sight of the shield wall and bristling lances. Obeying their handlers’ whistles they rushed at the imperial troops with great leaping bounds, quicker than the human eye could track, then set upon any exposed flesh they could reach with tooth and claw.

Men who were used to facing human enemies—or at least half-human enemies—were not trained for the alien ferocity of such a maneuver. Precious minutes passed before the shield wall began to show gaps as men fell, screaming, and the raptors tore into them. The tortoise-shell formation—so effective against arrows and light infantry—was no defense.

Human soldiers rushed in and the battle unfolded in the streets of Khanbul as a flower opening to the first light of spring, no less beautiful for being expected.

“The outcome of a battle,” Allyr had told his son, “is decided in the first ten heartbeats of the fight. One side will have an advantage over the other, be it the high ground, strength in numbers, quality of force, or the element of surprise. An effective general will exploit this advantage without hesitation and smash the enemy before they have time to work out an effective counter-strategy.

“This does not mean,” Jian’s father had warned, “that a general should presume the outcome of any battle, no matter how predictable it may seem. For every trick you have up your sleeve, assume that your enemy has ten, and you will never be disappointed.”

Directing the course of a battle was much like captaining a massive sea vessel through the heart of a storm. It was necessary to separate the heart from the mind. Necessary also to control as best one could the larger course of events without losing sight of the many smaller incidents playing themselves out within the larger drama. A slip, a misstep, a moment of inattention on the part of the field general might spell disaster for them all.

Jian felt suspended in time as he called the chinmong back, ordered the archers to hold, and the ghella handlers to loose their heavily armored, long-trunked beasts among the hapless defenders. He could not afford to listen to or care about the screams of his own men as the emperor’s arrows found their targets, nor those of the imperial swordsmen as they were trampled and gored. Nor could he rejoice as a massive force of crudely armed human peasantry came to join the rebel army.

Giella and her country bards had long worked to shape his years-long campaign against the emperor’s troops, transforming it into a hero’s story, framing him as a champion to the common people. Quickly the emperor’s troops lost ground. Fear bloomed in their hearts. It appeared in the whites of their eyes and sang in the pitch of their screams. Defeat showed in the way they stood, the uncertain fashion with which they held sword and spear and bow, in the way they clung to their tiny, meaningless lives rather than throwing themselves wholly into the fight.

The battle, Jian knew, was already won.

Then a light rose up from the Palace of Flowers and moved toward them like the dawn of a dying day. Bright it was, lovely, and terrible. Jian had seen the likes of it before, many times.

“Luminists!” he bellowed. “Ware luminists!” and across the field of battle a cry went up from all sides.

“Luminists!”

The emperor’s light-sorcerers spared none when they came with their killing light, and they cared not. Yet Jian’s forces were prepared for this, having faced the threat before. Most of them wore helms with silken gauze affixed over or under the eye-slits. Those who were helmless made haste to tie strips of spidersilk over their eyes and the eyes of their beasts. Others, who were less prepared—mostly the common folk—drew clothing up over their heads in a frantic effort to spare their sight, or ran for cover.

The light came striding down the emperor’s path, fanning out like a plague of fire, naked women and men soulbound to the emperor, sworn to the heartless flame. Too brilliant to look upon, too terrible to imagine. All those pieces of them which had been woman or man, Dae or human, had been stripped away—they were scooped hollow as an old skull and filled instead with a killing flame that revealed and destroyed all truth.

The sorcerers spread out, raising their arms and chanting with voices like the crackling of wildfire, the strike of lightning from a clear sky. Screams rose from those who were nearest to them—imperial troops and rebels alike—as the clothing beneath armor began to smolder and smoke, flesh began to char, and hair to singe.

Jian raised his fan, flicked it this way and that. His archers had overtaken the ramparts inside the shining walls, and their arrows arced overhead, a shroud of death which caught fire midflight and fell like smoking rain. Raptors, maddened by the searing light, turned shrieking upon friend, foe, even their own handlers. The heavy armored ghella also broke free and ran trumpeting, bellowing in agony and fear, leaving trails of broken soldiers in their wake.

Those hapless fighters too slow or unprepared to withstand the terrible faces of the emperor’s wrath screamed in burbling agony as their bodies turned to ash, their voices to smoke, their dreams to naught and they dropped dead at the feet of their fellows, no more now than heaps of cooked flesh. Jian’s stomach growled and then turned at the smell of roasted meat.

But he was long used to this, as he was to disregarding the softer corners of his own heart. There would be time to mourn the dead later, if later ever came. Now there was only war, and an enemy to kill. He closed his heart, and his eyes, raised his own arms in mocking mimicry of the luminists’ stance, and called upon his own magic—deep magic, dark and cool, magic sung deep into his bones by the voices of his ancestors. It was knowledge and fear of this magic which had led Daeshen Tiachu to purge the Daechen of those whose blood sang with the song of the sea. It had led Xienpei, Jian’s trainer, in her ambition to spare his life.

Come, he called to the sea, to the river, to the rain. Hear me. See me. Feel my need and come to me, for I am your son. He opened his heart, his soul, bared the very essence of his nature to the water that slept deep and dreamed of dragons. The water heard, it woke—and answered his call.

The air thickened as if preceding a rain, dimming the baleful eye of Akari and depriving the luminists of some of that power. The sound of his own heart thundered in his ears even as scores of his enemies reeled and fainted, the water in their blood and bones answering his call, as well. The ground trembled and stirred, softening under the feet of the sorcerers so that they became mired in mud.

Furious, the luminist at their center—a woman whose face Jian vaguely remembered—turned her deadly gaze upon him and began to chant. Feeling the air around him begin to heat, Jian matched her chant with one of his own, a thing he had learned from his father.

“Auri auri thunrenothel beno beno falrevoi!

Sharra sharra Danuroshev vel a rassa soloroi!

Vel a rassa soloroi!

Soloroi! Soloroi!

Danu rassa soloroi!”

So he sang to the heart of the sea, that which exists in the soul of all things that live or have ever lived. The water in the emperor’s moat broke loose with a roar so loud it seemed as if Sajani must surely be roused from her sleep. The waves rose high, higher, till they cast a shadow upon the wall. A black mass rose up within the face of the water—the zhilla, poor captive that it was, writhing silhouetted against the sun’s dimmed rays, singing a watery song as its tentacles burst forth. Several of the emperor’s pikemen were snatched up like sweetmeats and carried, screaming and flailing, to a watery grave.

The luminists redoubled their efforts, all of them staring now at Jian, pointing as if to single him out for scorn. Their leader blazed so white-hot in her wrath that scores of men writhed weeping upon the ground, clawing at their eyes. A voice rang out from the center of this inferno.

“Three words thrice shall stay the prince,

Three names twice shall slay him.

Three drops once shall bind his heart

Lest that heart betray him.”

“Dammah!” the high luminist cried, as if calling for blood to be spilled. “Dammah, dammah!”

Jian’s breath caught in his throat, and his song faltered. Three words—the weakness bound to his bones at his inseeing, chains woven around his soul by the emperor himself. He had thought only the oracle knew these words, and his yendaeshi Xienpei, dead these many years.

“Tummohai!” another luminist cried, as if in longing for the ocean. “Tummohai, Tummohai!”

“Issuqan,” a third cried, as if naming Jian a sea-thing child beneath the eye of Akari. “Issuqan, Issuqan!”

No, Jian cried deep in his heart. They cannot know these things. No… no no no… But surely, surely they did not know the names. Names of those he had killed, or of those who had died for him—it was not possible that the luminists would know those names.

“Perri!” one of the luminists cried. “Naruteo!” another cried.

“Tsun-ju Tiungpei!” their leader howled, and Jian’s heart faltered, the song cracking between his teeth like a pearl.

“Perri!” the luminists cried in unison. “Naruteo! Tsunju Tiun—”

“No!” Jian screamed, outraged that such small mouths would ever dare to speak his mother’s name. The darkness in his heart rose up like a wish, like a dark tide, like a curse upon all the land beyond wrath or reason. Water in the air, in the land, in the bodies around him rose up in a mist, licking at the feet and legs and bodies of those who would dare defy the son of a Sea King.

The zhilla raised her sweet voice and danced as the mist thickened into a cold black fog, swirling and rising, rising like a black veil drawn over the face of the sun.

The veil parted, and the armies of the Sea King poured forth, star-eyed and monstrous. With the spilling of Tiungpei’s blood, the stilling of her heart, the treaties between the Sindanese emperor and daekind had been broken, and the horde was let loose upon the land. At the front of this nightmare army rode the Sea King Allyr, at the back rode the Huntress with her mad-eyed hounds, and between them the imperial army was crushed like pearls beneath the booted feet of soldiers. The emperor’s luminists were devoured as candle flames in the wind, for between the Huntress and the sea rode Death, and Hunger, and Wrath— but never Mercy. On this day of days, it seemed, Mercy had stayed home to tend her gardens, and she was not to be found anywhere in the Forbidden City.

Not on this day, this day of blood and water.

And Sea Kings.

FORTY - SEVEN

Sulema was surprised to learn that she had a love of the sea.

In two moons’ time an army had been raised. It was a patched-cloak army of Zeeranim and Quarabalese, citizens and slaves of Min Yaarif, pirates and mercenaries and the walking dead. Her brother’s ships carried them up the Dibris and into the tourmaline waters of the vast inland sea Nar Bedayyan.

They sailed up the eastern coast, past the roiling tributary of the Kalish river and parallel to the Great Salt Road. Tarbok bounded along the white cliffs to one side, dolphins leapt from the deeps on the other. On three occasions great shadows lingered beneath their boats, forms so monstrously large Sulema’s mind could not imagine what might have cast them, but each time those Baidun Daiel who had chosen to join them chanted and sang, and the guardians of the deep let them pass.

After one such incident Sulema stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her sword-sister at the prow of her brother’s greatest ship, which he shared with her and Yaela, with Ismai-who-was-not, and Mattu Halfmask, to whom she still refused to speak. Her brother and a handful of his crew had stripped down to loincloths and dove into the waters where the serpents—greater predators of the sea—lay in wait.

Rather than eating the sailors, the serpents crested the surface and bore them upon their backs like water-steeds. The women and men of Leviathus’s group whooped with delight, standing upon—and often falling from—the broad scaled backs of the sea-beasts, who seemed to enjoy this odd sport every bit as much as their tiny companions.

“I wonder if they could learn to play aklashi,” Sulema said aloud. It looked like great fun, and she wanted to join in, but she was no more allowed to ride one of the serpents than Leviathus would have been allowed to touch an asil. The kings of the deep had an accord with the pirates, but any other human would become a tasty morsel.

Besides which, Sulema had never really learned to swim. If she were not eaten, it was likely that she would drown, and then this entire venture would have been for naught. Too much had been invested in this budding war for her to get herself killed doing something foolish.

“It is not worth the risk.”

At the sound of Ismai’s voice, Hannei stiffened and strode away without looking at either of them. Sulema watched her go, heart heavy, wishing she might mend the chasm that lay between her two old friends.

But some wounds, she knew, ran too deep to ever truly mend. She turned to face Ismai.

“You used to be a lot more fun,” she complained. “What happened to you?”

“What happened to me,” Ismai said. He stepped closer— when had he grown so tall?—stared down at her with his ruined face, his burned and blinded eyes which somehow saw her, and frowned. “The same as happened to you, Sulema an Wyvernus ne Atu. The same as happened to turn Hannei into Kishah. The world turned, and the world burned. We burn with it.”

“No,” she said. “That is not you speaking, not our Ismai.” Sulema stepped closer. Ismai shifted almost imperceptibly to a fighting stance, as his undead followers shifted behind him, muttering. Most of the Lich King’s soldiers were on another ship or belowdecks, utterly still as only corpses could be.

Ismai had been Sulema’s friend, had tried to hide a crush on her since childhood in fact, so she ignored her misgivings and took another step toward him.

“What happened to you, Ismai?”

Ismai—really Ismai, this time—closed his opaline eyes, and a shudder ran through his lean frame.

“Ishtaset, rajjha of the Mah’zula, happened,” he answered at last. “They came upon us in the night and burned Aish Kalumm to the ground. They killed mothers. They killed children. They killed—they killed little Sammai.” His ruined face contorted with grief. Sulema had heard parts of this story already, but not from Ismai himself.

Aish Kalumm, gone? The city, the trees, all of it, gone? She had not wanted to believe any of it. Those few vash’ai who had not left their kithren, she had heard, had turned as vicious and unpredictable as their wild brothers and sisters. She wanted to scream, or to throw up, but instead she laid a hand on Ismai’s arm, soothing him as she might a half-wild colt.

“Ishtaset and her riders claimed the right of rule over all the Zeera,” Ismai went on, opening those eyes again. He looked out across the river but did not pull away from her touch. “She claimed rights over me. Because of my blood.” He touched his chest, frowning. “Mastersmith Hadid, he—he—he sacrificed himself, so that I could get away, but not before her snake-priestess of Thoth did this.” He brought his hand up to his face, stroking the shining, twisted scars.

“I am sorry, Ismai. I wish I had been there.”

“You were busy being held in your brother’s dungeons, I guess.” A hint of the old Ismai leaked through the cracks in his mask, and he smiled. A little smile, a start. “It all worked out in the end. Char saved me—she is Naara now, my daughter. The Lich King’s daughter, anyway. And Ishtaset is dead.”

“Dead-dead or walking dead?” Sulema could not help glancing at her friend’s dead-but-walking soldiers. “I am sorry,” she added lamely to the beautiful Quarabalese corpse that shadowed Ismai’s every step. “I do not mean to give offense.”

“None taken,” the woman answered solemnly. This one, as far as Sulema had seen, never smiled. “Ishtaset is dead-dead. I ate her myself.”

“Oh. Ah, thank you?”

The woman nodded acknowledgment and turned away. It was, Sulema thought, the strangest conversation she had ever had.

“Ishtaset wanted to return to the old ways,” Ismai told her. “I returned the old ways to her, but not as she might have hoped.” There was a dark, sweet satisfaction in the words, as if he spoke around a mouthful of mad honey.

“I used to dream of meeting my father,” Sulema said slowly, “and to be free of my mother’s influence. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. Sometimes it is the darkest wishes of our heart which come true.”

“Yes,” Ismai agreed. “But, Sulema—”

Here he turned to face her. He placed both hands on her shoulders and peered into her face. As if he could not get enough. As if she were the last beautiful thing in the world.

“I used to dream of you. I still dream of you,” he told her. “Sometimes it seems that thoughts of you are all that connect me to this world. And I will never be sorry for that. I believe that we have come to the end of our world. That nothing we may do or say, no wars we may win or lose, will be enough now to stop Sajani from waking. It is too late for us to save the world.”

She could hardly breathe. “Why follow me, then, if this is what you truly believe? Why try at all?”

“Why not?” He shrugged, and for a moment Ismai, her Ismai, stood before her. “I would rather die by your side than anywhere else. It is not a bad thing, to die chasing a dream.” He reached up and touched her cheek, the barest caress. “And love is a dream worth chasing.”

With those words, Ismai—who was still Ismai, Lich King or no—turned and walked away from Sulema, leaving her with a heart as troubled and clouded as the angry sea.

“He does love you, you know. And who can blame him?”

Sulema spun to face her once and only lover, voicing a snarl which would have made Khurra’an proud.

“Halfmask!”

“Guilty as charged. Oh, wait, there is no need to get—” Her fist struck his sternum. “Oof! For the love of—” Another grazed his jaw. “Oh, Sulema, sweet Sulema, light in my heart, please do not cry.”

“I am not crying,” she snarled again, shaking the pain from her bruised knuckles. “These are tears of anger. I should kill you here and now and feed your worthless carcass to the serpents. I should—”

“You should kiss me,” he urged gently. “Because the night is short, and tomorrow is for war.” He reached up a hand to brush away her tears, and his mismatched eyes shone like the sea. “Because the dragon is waking—Ismai is right in this, as well—and tomorrow may be a fool’s dream, though I have ever been a fool for you.”

“You left me!” she cried, then bit her lip. How was it that her voice sounded so cursed weak when she spoke to him? She did want to kiss him, damn him, and that made her angrier still.

“As a matter of fact,” he replied, smiling that crooked smile which had gotten her into such trouble in the first place, “I came looking for you, and was captured by my brother Pythos’s men. They threw my ass into the darkest hole they could find and left me to rot.”

“So how did you—”

“Matteira, of course. My twin sister and I used to play in the dungeons when we were small and it was safer for us not to be seen about court. There are ways in and out of that place, and we know them all. She and two of her fools dressed as ragtag men came to collect the day’s bodies from the dungeons, and somehow one of the bodies and I swapped places. He was recently deceased, and a reasonable likeness to me, after certain—adjustments—were made to the face.” He grimaced. “The unfortunate man and I swapped clothes, I was rolled out of the dungeons and dumped out with the rags and offal, and here I am, begging for a kiss.” He batted his eyes at her, and Sulema snorted a laugh in spite of herself.

“Are you not worried that Matteira’s role in your escape might be discovered?”

“I am not escaped, I am dead. And do not trouble yourself with worry over my sister—she is more dangerous than you know. It would not surprise me to find her on the Dragon Throne one day, with all of us sitting at her feet wondering what in Yosh just happened.”

“So you came to the dungeons looking for me?” she asked. “If you know them so well, how did you not find me?”

“How could I hope to find you, when you were within me all along?” he said. His hand lingered on her cheek as if he could not bear to stand so close and not touch her. “My whole life, you have been here.” He touched his chest with his other hand. “You are my heart and my soul, Sulema. I could not find you before I found myself.”

“And did you?” she asked, swaying closer to the heat of him, even as she cursed herself for a fool. “Did you find yourself, Halfmask?”

By way of answer, Mattu reached up and took hold of the white fennec mask he had been wearing and pulled it up over his head. This he tossed into the sea as casually as a boy might throw flower petals into the wind on the first day of spring. Sulema watched the mask spin through the air and then disappear beneath the waves with a soft splash and a little spray of sea foam.

“Your mask,” she protested. She had never thought his scars hideous, but she was a barbarian, after all. “Though I suppose you have more of them…”

“I do not,” he told her, and smiled. His smile was beautiful. “I do not need to hide behind a mask any longer, sweet girl, now that I know who I am.”

“And who is that?”

Mattu stepped close, so close that only the whisper of wind lay between them, carrying the heat of their bodies back and forth like messages. He reached up to cradle Sulema’s face in both his hands—

—he was taller than she remembered, his eyes more piercing—

—and bent his mouth to hers.

“I am yours,” he whispered against her mouth, stealing her breath away, “my queen.” Then the Queen took the Thief to her own tiny cabin and let him steal her heart. For liars make the best lovers, she decided, when they tell the truth, and warriors know that trouble is especially sweet if you get caught on the eve of war.

FORTY - EIGHT

Leviathus listened to the talk of war, of kings and queens and sorceries, with one ear and half a heart. The rest of him, the better half, soared the deeps as a hawk commanded the air, king of a vast domain. The wind danced upon the waves, crafting castles and stories on the wave crests as it went, never regretting the loss as they faded away to naught. It was a lesson, a warning, an omen of the doom of men.

A gust of wind tugged at his windlocked hair, bringing him back to here and now, to dry air in his lungs and two feet planted securely on the hot sharp boards of a ship. Cruelly it reminded him that he shared the world’s fate, whether or not he had a hand in shaping it.

As if in concert with the mourning wind the voices of war-horns wailed out across the water, deep and fluting like the bellowing of wounded beasts, and were in turn answered by the joyful calls of leviathans. Huge triangular heads thrust from beneath the waves, mirror-scaled and sleek, jewel-crested and more beautiful in his eyes than any creature had a right to be. The sea between his boats roiled with the great forms as the sea prince and his court gave escort to the frail vessels floating upon the water bearing tiny, precious lives.

The sailors brought down the striped sails and lowered masts, while oars thrust from the sides like slender fins. The ships’ eyes and carven faces stared toward the approaching shoreline, as snarling and eager as their human crews who even now readied siege engines and horses, donning armor and preparing weapons.

Azhorus Ssurus az Lluriensos himself breached the sea’s skin, jewel eyes gleaming in mirth as he beheld the tiny two-leggeds preparing for war. His head, nearly as big as the ship upon which Leviathus sailed, briefly blotted out the sun and threw dark shadows upon them.

Little human, he sang in Leviathus’s mind, you are nearly arrived. I have brought you safely to the shores of your kind, that you may seize this territory and breed with the queens therein. Enormous self-satisfaction rolled from him like water drops. You may thank me now.

Thank you, Leviathus replied, shading his eyes against the sun’s angry glare as he looked up and up and up, a fond and foolish smile on his face. Never had he loved a thing in this world as he loved this incredible, silly, terrifying prince of the dark waters. We never would have made it this far without your kind assistance.

This is true, the sea prince allowed. Were we not bonded, you and I, my people would have taken great delight in crushing these tiny vessels and dining upon sweet manflesh.

Truly you are gracious. Leviathus bowed, not at all ironically. Azhorus dipped his head in acknowledgment and slipped beneath the waves with hardly a splash.

The war horns cried out again—or perhaps it was the serpents. When Leviathus was in his smitten state, sometimes he could not tell the difference. Oars flashed down toward the water as the drums began to boom—thrum-thrum-thrum, thrum-thrum-thra-rumble—like the beating of a thousand great hearts beneath the waves.

“Magnificent,” Daru breathed, standing at his shoulder. “Simply marvelous, and none of the books I have ever read so much as mentioned the serpents as anything other than beasts. I wonder what else we do not know about our own planet?”

Leviathus looked at the boy and frowned. “No more than I have heard of a child becoming lost in the catacombs beneath Atukos and reappearing half a world away as a grown man.” He could not help mistrusting this grown version of the boy he had once known, any more than he could help liking him. Daru—if indeed his impossible tale was true, and this was Daru—was every bit as sharp-eyed and quick-witted and kind of heart as Hafsa Azeina’s young apprentice had been.

Most likely this is an impostor living a ridiculous lie, a spy in the employ of Pythos, he thought. Certainly, it was likelier than Daru’s strange cut-short explanation of a life lived among the stars.

“The Web of Illindra is woven of wonders,” Daru replied, undisturbed by Leviathus’s naked distrust, “too great for you or me to comprehend.”

“That much is true,” Leviathus agreed as the ships sped toward Atualon, crammed stem-to-stern with undead soldiers and painted warriors from the Seared Lands, escorted by serpents, and bearing the would-be Dragon Queen to claim her throne. “Divines know we live in a strange world, and in strange times.”

“Ehuani, and well said.” Daru smiled, and in that moment Leviathus knew that the youth’s story was, indeed, true. However impossible it might seem, this powerful young sorcerer was Hafsa Azeina’s frail apprentice, returned to them as a hale young man who had walked roads they could not imagine.

The excitement aboard the ships was a palpable thing as they drew nearer to the shores. None of the soldiers or warriors or sorcerers, and few even of his river pirates, had been especially happy about journeying over the deep blue waters, fearing that the serpents’ friendliness was feigned, and that a watery death awaited those who dared the open sea. Such had been the fate of any such venture for time immemorial.

Yet here they were, scant heartbeats away from Atualon and the fight of their lives. The last fight of many lives, to be sure, and the greatest of all. These events would be dutifully recorded in history books and passed down through the ages. All that remained was to determine how that history would be written, and by whom.

“Victors or vanquished?” Daru asked, correctly guessing his mind. “I guess we will know soon enough.”

“Ehuani,” Leviathus agreed, then he fell silent. There was a time for talk, and a time for action. As far as he was concerned, the time for words had passed.

* * *

Three days hence, Sulema summoned the captains of water and of war to a council aboard their father’s ship as the fleet lazed upon still waters. The great dragon-headed vessel had carried Leviathus to Aish Kalumm in search of his long-lost sister, setting in motion the chain of events which had brought them all here, and he agreed that it was fitting. Leviathans ferried them from vessel to vessel at Azhorus’s request and the sea filled with their bubbling laughter at the humans’ excited fear. Leviathus, aided and advised by Mahmouta, assigned places in battle to each ship and complement of fighters according to their strengths.

A thrill ran through him—fear or excitement, he could not tell which. Probably a bit of both, truth be told, and he made no apologies for either. Half his life and more had been spent in preparation for this moment, reading about war, writing about war, training first as a soldier and then as a commander, all in anticipation of one day leading his father’s armies in their defense of Atualon. Therefore, he was in a unique position to know all of her weaknesses, and to appreciate her defenses.

“If we attack from the bay,” Leviathus warned, “the tide will run red with our blood. It is true that the Dragon King has only a token navy—and his best river ships are returning from their voyage into the Zeera with an unwelcome surprise. It is true also that the leviathans are no friends to Pythos, and keen to hinder any effort he makes to attack us—”

Here he was interrupted by the high, fluting laughter of serpents.

“Still, my father and Aasah laid layer upon layer of traps, both magical and physical, against the unlikely event of a Sindanese attack from the sea.” He grimaced. “Mostly at my urging.”

Therefore little effort had been spent on stealth. The usurper Pythos had no sea fleet to speak of, and Atualon’s own river ships were manned by the undead and sailed now against him. Two hundred and thirty ships Leviathus commanded in total, ten times perhaps the size of the Dragon King’s navy, and the alliance of the leviathans besides. Unless Pythos had by some trick of foresight girded the northern shores against them, the motley armies were likely to face little real opposition until they set foot upon the white beaches. Perhaps not until they had begun their march on Atualon.

Still, Leviathus was uneasy.

“Never count upon luck in war,” the great Sindanese poet and general Zhao Quan had warned, “unless it is to count upon bad luck, in which case you will never be disappointed.” Their alliance with the leviathans had made their sea passage too easy. He could not allow himself to slip into complacency and expect their good fortune to continue unabated.

Already the first line of ships—eleven in total—had peeled away from the main group to weigh anchor before the harbor’s mouth. Well beyond the reach of those tricks and traps about which Leviathus had warned them, still they would be close enough to act should Atualon issue forth a surprise navy or magic of some sort. Leviathus had no doubt that the usurper Pythos had gained control of the Baidun Daiel, nor that he commanded the shadowmancer and the Salarians as well.

The bulk of the fleet would disgorge fighters and siege engines upon the northern shore, under cover of archers, and from there they would launch an attack upon the city. The slower fat-bellied merchants’ ships in the rear would deliver a second wave of troops even farther to the north to act as a vanguard on the off-chance that Pythos or Aasah had hidden forces in the trees or foothills.

It was a fine plan, on paper.

Leviathus had read too many papers concerning war to believe in his heart that it would proceed so smoothly.

As they drew nearer the shoreline, the cloud-crowned peak of Atukos loomed above in their eyes and their minds, and Leviathus beheld the great fortress of his childhood, set upon the mountain’s face like a massive dark jewel. Set also in darkness it seemed, refusing to reflect the bright light of day, choosing rather to drink it in and vomit forth shade and shadow, as if it brooded still over the loss of Wyvernus.

Even as the thought swam across Leviathus’s mind he watched as Sulema, standing warlike and golden upon the deck of the nearest ship, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Lich King and her sword-sister Hannei, raised up the glittering Mask of Sajani. It settled upon her face and flashed in the sunlight like a blue-green jewel with the heart of a star, blinding in its brilliance and cold as winter snow. Sulema lifted the fox-head staff of a dreamshifter and brought it down once, twice, three times upon the ship’s deck.

The leviathans went silent—until that moment, Leviathus had not realized they were singing in his head— and a wave of atulfah, discernible even to the magic-deaf son of a Dragon King, burst forth as his sister raised her voice in song, causing ripples like small waves to shudder out from the ship until the wave lapped at the foot of Atukos. Sulema sang as surely Aasah or their father had taught her, wielding atulfah.

Atukos sang back.

The fortress blazed in response, a golden inferno captured in black diamond, and the dragonglass walls roared to life. The mountain shuddered and groaned, a low sound at first almost impossible to discern, and then louder, stronger, till the timbre and pitch was a deep throbbing in his bones. The ground trembled and shook, trees dancing upon the shore as if caught in a tempest, and the waves of the sea grew dark and fell, tossing their ships like a child’s toy boats.

The leviathans grew wild and frenzied, throwing themselves full length from the sea’s embrace as if trying to fly, till it seemed the fleet was in danger of being swamped before they could make landfall. A final mighty blast seized Atukos, and the mountain’s top was lost in a plume of thick gray ash and smoke that boiled upward to the sky, rent with flashes of silver and gold and green.

The ship lurched beneath Leviathus’s feet and he flung his arms out to steady himself. One flailing elbow struck something soft and solid, and a small hard fist punched him back. Leviathus turned to see Yaela, locked hair streaming about her in the rising wind, wide-eyed and laughing in wild delight. Leviathus grinned back. Despite everything, it occurred to him that he would not be anywhere else in the world, at that moment, given a choice.

“Yaela, my dear,” he shouted to her, even as she snugged herself under his upraised arm and he pulled her tight to his side, “we are home.”

FORTY - NINE

Beyond the white-capped waves of Nar Bedayyan, Hannei could see the black face of Atukos looking down on them from on high, quiet and brooding in the high hot sun. Lines of tall dark trees flowed down from the mountain’s sides like a mother’s skirts.

Those ships that had been sent to the north had landed first and disgorged their forces in preparation for the main landing party. Flags and banners which had been sewn in haste were raised and glittered like cloth-of-gold—bright Akari and lovely Sajani twined in a lover’s knot around the black form of a rearing horse. That was Sulema’s standard.

Hannei’s mouth twisted at the thought of it, and she spat into the stinking sea. The bloodlines of Tammas had stretched back to the first light of the first dawn, and her own were nearly as remarkable. Did the blood of the ne Atu run thicker than that of Zula Din? Sword-sister or no, Sulema had done little more to earn these accolades than be born of the sweat of man and woman, same as any other babe.

Still, she reasoned, someone must sit on high in that black tower and sing the cursed dragon to sleep, and I have neither the will nor the tongue to do so.

Horns sounded from among those already massed on the shore, low and mournful calls like the shofarot of Aish Kalumm, and these were answered by the low hooooo-hoooo-arooooo of the serpents who roiled in the water all around their ships. Dragonkin, they were, nearer to dragons even than bintshi or wyverns, and the smallest of them was thrice the length of Sulema’s own dragon-headed ship.

That Sulema’s brother could talk to the dragonkin was shocking enough—one of them had bonded him, as vash’ai to warrior! Even more astonishing, from time to time the pirates would lower themselves from the great boats and stand upon the broad scaled backs, laughing and fearless as if they rode horses across the golden sands.

Such merriment was short-lived, however. Pirates and warriors, sorcerers and walking corpses all shared the grim look of those who like as not had eaten their last meal and said their final farewells to sun and sea and sword-sister. The drums beat tha-rumm tha-rummm tha-rummmble like her heart, urging the rowers to dip their oars faster, harder, shepherding them that much more quickly to their doom.

Hannei had faced death and far worse for longer than she cared to remember. Since the night Tammas had died she had not much cared for life. Yet excitement akin to fear surged through her, hot as blood. It sharpened her senses so that she could smell the serpents, feel the vibration of their shrieks, taste the war to come.

We live today, or we die today, she thought, and either way the world will never again be the same as it is now. It was the ending of an age, she knew, and not at all untimely.

Then the ship thrust itself shuddering into the soft flesh of Atualon’s shoreline. Hannei staggered and nearly fell as Rehaza Entanye, ever at her side, grabbed her shoulder and only just saved her from plunging headfirst into the serpent-boiled waters.

“Easy now, girl,” Rehaza Entanye said, laughing. “You do not want to die now and miss the war, do you?”

Planks were steadied and lowered, and those on board the ship made ready to disgorge. Shouts and the ring of sword on sword sounded from the tree line. Hannei drew her own blades as she took her place among those others eager to kill and to die. Akari Sun Dragon kissed her face, and Hannei found herself grinning up at him.

If I die today, she decided, I will die facing my enemy. There is beauty in this, at least.

Ehuani, whispered a voice across the sands of her heart. Ehuani, little warrior.

* * *

From the woods and the mountain above them came those bearing the Dragon King’s banner—a serpent biting its own tail, coiled about the sleeping form of Sajani, with Atukos soaring above. Hannei had been stung in her heart when first she beheld it.

The serpent king has no right to Akari, she thought then. We warriors of the Zeera are his children. She was not truly Zeerani anymore, but as the opposing forces pounded into each other there on the beach, she ceased to care one way or the other. Surrounded by tightly packed bodies, with the sound of steel upon steel ringing just ahead, Hannei only had time to launch herself toward the enemy. Here there would be pain, and death, a never-ending feast.

Those who had come to seat Sulema upon the Dragon Throne crashed upon the defenders like the waves upon the shore. Archers had been hidden in the tree line, and these loosed volley upon volley of arrows which fell among them like a rain of hissing black snakes. Many in the first wave fell, so that when the second wave of attackers ran they stumbled up the shoreline over the fallen bodies of those who had gone before. Even so, they hardly slowed at the sight of the mangled carcasses of women and men with whom they had broken fast just that morning.

No few of those corpses rose to fight, then fell, and rose again. The Lich King’s armies paid no more mind to dying than Hannei might have paid a stubbed toe. The enemy pulled back in horror from the sight of armies of the risen dead, only to be whipped forward again by lash and spear and force of magic.

The two sides were well-matched, as those who rode for Sulema found themselves facing a wall of white-cloaked Salarians with their bright silvered steel. Her warriors matched swords with Draiksguard and Atualonian soldiers. A knot of shadowmancers faced off against a knot of Baidun Daiel, each side wielding such magic that the sky flashed light and dark, light and dark, as if the battle took place in the heart of a storm.

Swinging her blade right and left, sending up sprays of blood and viscera, Hannei fought and killed women and men whose names were forever hidden from her. She could not help but think back on her time in the fighting pits of Min Yaarif. There she had faced and slain strangers and beasts, but she had also fought—and killed—pit slaves such as herself, some of whom she might have thought of as friends in other circumstances.

But the world was not as fair and true as her mother’s stories, or Akari as just. There was irony, however, in the fact that she fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Rehaza Entanye, the woman who had saved her from and fed her to the slave pits, and whose fortune depended upon delivering her back into slavery.

Life is dark and inexplicable, she thought in a rare moment of calm as she wiped blood from her eyes with the back of a hand. She tripped over something soft, looked down, and saw the bloodied face of Mahmouta’s son, who had snuck aboard the ships and was not supposed to have come ashore. He was not meant to have died this day. Hannei stooped to close the youngster’s staring eyes, and to jerk free the shell necklace he wore, so that she might return it to his mother.

Life is odd, and it is short, and less beautiful than we are told.

Light, dark, and light again. There were screams in the tree line and a blossoming of fire, and then the defenders broke and fled for the fortress. Those around Hannei roared and surged forward, a many-faced beast with a thousand voices and no heart, eager for blood.

Ahead of her Hannei could see Sulema’s banner and that of the Lich King streaming in the wind as their bearers made for Atukos. Rehaza Entanye snatched at Hannei’s torn tunic and pointed after them.

“Follow,” she panted. Hannei nodded.

Mutaani, she thought, even as she ran, bloodied swords drawn and eager. If I cannot find beauty in life, I will find it in death.

* * *

The beautiful gates had been torn down before Hannei reached them, shattered by the machines of war, by the near-constant shaking of the earth, or by treachery, she knew not which. The battle flowed up the slopes of Atukos, into the narrow alleys and even the houses of her citizenry. They fought and killed and died till the golden streets were as slick as stones in a foul red river.

Again arrows hissed from wall and battlement, interspersed with crashing stones or the plummeting bodies of defenders, of attackers, alike in death. The Atualonians fought well and bravely, but the sheer numbers of Sulema’s forces and the horror of the army of undead pressed them up and back till finally the line broke, and the Dragon King’s armies were scattered or slaughtered.

They shrank in fear too from the sight of Hannei as she danced among them, gluttonous blades drinking deep but never sated. Had she truly wished to die, just that morning? She could not remember. Her only wish now was to kill—perhaps, after all, that was all she had ever wanted. Forward and on she pressed, hacking face and throat and limb as she climbed the steep and narrow ways of the city, eyes fixed on Sulema’s flag as if it were the only whole thing left in her life.

Rehaza Entanye fought at her side, but she hardly noticed. Neither did she heed the ache in her arms, the hollowness in her breast as every life she claimed stole a mouthful of what was left of hers. She could no longer have said why she followed the banner at all, only that she had to do so.

There was a brief glimpse of fiery locks and golden shamsi as the Dragon Queen’s guard and Ismai the Lich King disappeared through a hole that had been blown in an inner wall. The dead followed, as did a knot of pirates whose bright silks were rent and bloodied. Hannei followed as well, swift and silent as a vash’ai engaged in the hunt. Up they went, at times running, then fighting back-to-back with Rehaza Entanye or a pirate or a corpse that had forgotten to lie still and be dead. Ever on and ever up, through winding narrow roads cobbled with stone and bone and littered with the shattered glass of a thousand broken windows.

At last they came to Atukos, the fortress of the Dragon King.

Or the Dragon Queen, Hannei thought, awed by the sharp black stone. The brooding black towers leapt to incandescent life as just ahead Sulema passed through them. Indeed, the gates swung inward almost of their own volition and the dragonglass walls shone blinding bright in welcome, leaving none to doubt with whom the loyalties of the fortress lay.

The inner courtyard was thick with white cloaks, and golden and red. These last—the Baidun Daiel—moved as if of one mind and faced Sulema’s banner. It was such a strange, inhuman ripple of movement, so unnaturally coordinated, that the chillflesh on Hannei’s arms stood up even through the blood and gore and myriad tiny wounds of the day’s battle. Golden masks flashed bright and expressionless in the sunlight, and then the blood-cloaked sorcerers sheathed their black swords and stepped back from the battle to stand aside, still as statues.

Good fortune, Hannei thought, even as a white-clad Salarian soldier ran screaming at her. She slapped away his spear almost contemptuously and hacked into the meat at either side of his neck with a quick wet thuckk-thuckk, then spun to the side to avoid the spray of bright lifesblood as he collapsed at her feet. How many times had she practiced that very move? How many times drained a life with it? More than she cared to count.

Good fortune for me, and good riddance to him.

Hannei did not fear death, but she did not care to die blasted to bits by fell magics that she could neither understand nor fight. She heard Rehaza Entanye grunt and curse, and nearly fell as the woman slammed heavily into her and then fell away. Hannei did not spare a glance backward as she followed Sulema through the wide doors into Atukos.

Good riddance to you too, she thought.

It was odd, odd and horrible, to fight within the confines of the fortress. The narrow halls and doorways reminded her too much of the Mothers’ rooms and kitchens, too much of comfort and laughter. Women and men sprang bellowing from doorways or down staircases and were hurled screaming to their deaths, torn by spear and club, rent by Hannei’s blood-glutted blades, or—twice—thrown from a high window to fall wailing to the streets below.

Such a place should smell of cinnamon bread and sweet rushes, it seemed to her, not of blood and shit and death. But blood and shit and death were all the gifts she had brought, and she doled them out with a generous hand. The dead swept before her, fighting even as she fought, and the dead lay behind her torn and bubbling. A river of death, a sea of blood; it was all she could do to swim.

They burst from the hall into a wide room so abruptly that Hannei crashed into the undead called Sudduth and they both nearly went sprawling. Rehaza Entanye fell through the doorway behind her, blood streaming from a crushed nose and eyes wild but not nearly as dead as Hannei had hoped.

Sulema had come to a stop at the heart of the chamber and stood with her back to them. She was panting with exertion, gripping her staff in one hand and a golden shamsi in the other. Her sunset locks were drenched in blood, her skin streaked with gore, and she had long since lost her warrior’s vest.

Her back straight, she faced the man who sat on her father’s throne, one leg thrown over the arm in an indolent and insolent pose. The Illindrist Aasah of whom Hannei had heard tell stood behind him, arms folded over his massive chest, jeweled skin aglitter like a scattering of stars. He twitched when he saw the Lich King, and his pale blue eyes narrowed, but he did not move or speak.

The golden Mask of Akari glittered bright on the seated man’s face, and waves of heat pulsed from it fit to sear the flesh from their bones as he stared at those who had come to kill him, if they could.

“We have visitors,” he said, his voice resonant with dragon’s magic. “Aasah, why did you not tell me? I would have had wine brought. Or a headsman, at least.”

Sulema lifted her fox-head staff and brought it down once, twice, three times on the dragonglass floor. The walls about them, the floor beneath her feet, the arched ceiling flared blinding-bright with joy as Atukos welcomed her home. Sulema, daughter of Hafsa Azeina and Wyvernus.

Truly she is the Heart of Atualon, Hannei thought. Though she had grown up with Sulema, though she had bested the girl in combat more times than they had fingers, this woman before her was a stranger. Never had she seemed more like her mother, more like a warrior from the old stories.

More like a queen.

The room about them went silent. Even the sounds outside seemed very far away. It seemed to Hannei, in those moments between the death of one dragon and the birth of another, that the world held its breath. Into that silence a voice hissed close to her ear.

“Kill her.”

Hannei turned her head fractionally and met the eyes of Rehaza Entanye. That woman’s face was hard as stone. The pale cast of her skin and smashed, bloodied nose made her look more like one of the Lich King’s horde than the living woman with whom Hannei had trained these past moons.

As she turned her head, a wound near her shoulder pulled and stung, and a hot wash of blood spilled down her side. When had she been cut? She could not remember. Her muscles trembled with exertion, now that she stood still, and breath came in shallow gasps.

“Kill her,” the pitmistress repeated, voice low as a shadow’s breath so that it carried to no ears but hers. “Kill the red-haired bitch and be free. This is Sharmutai’s command, and her revenge. This is the price of your freedom and the hour of your vengeance. Kill her.”

Indeed, as luck would have it, nothing but a couple of short strides lay between Hannei’s drawn blades and Sulema’s naked back. Her eyes, the eyes of Ismai the Lich King, indeed every eye but hers and Rehaza Entanye’s were fixed on the glittering mask of the Dragon King, waiting for his next words. In two strides, three, Hannei would have her revenge for the death of Tammas and all that had been taken from her. She would buy her freedom from Sharmutai, and that of her child. It was equally possible that she would perish in the deed, but would that also not be just?

Was she not Kishah, whose blades sang of vengeance?

No, she thought, and no, she mouthed. Whether Sulema was her friend or her enemy, and even if her blood was the only coin with which Hannei could buy back her life, she would not do this thing.

No, she mouthed again, and this time Rehaza Entanye saw it. Her features darkened with rage. The older woman moved quick as a striking lionsnake, and Hannei felt the point of a blade press against her skin.

“Then you die.”

Before the world could draw its next breath, Hannei closed her eyes, and let go of life.

Better I should die with an enemy’s sword in my belly, she thought, than I should live with my sword in a friend’s back.

The point of the pit-trainer’s sword sliced a burning gash down the front of Hannei’s stomach, shallow but painful, and the hot blood welled free. Then came a clatter as the sword fell away, and a soft gasp. Hannei opened her eyes and her breath caught in her throat.

Daru stood behind Rehaza Entanye, a knife pressed to the woman’s throat. His eyes were dark and beautiful as he met Hannei’s shocked gaze, and he smiled.

“You will not hurt her,” he murmured into the woman’s ear. “She is stronger than you know.” Then in a single powerful stroke he jerked the sharp blade. Hot salty blood sprayed into Hannei’s face, her eyes, her mouth. It washed down her front and filled her nostrils with the sweet stink of death and freedom.

Daru let Rehaza Entanye slide, lifeless and limp, to lie twitching at their feet. He grimaced at his knife, cleaned it somewhat on his tunic, and slipped it back into his sheath before meeting Hannei’s eyes with a saucy wink that reminded her of the boy he had been.

“Now,” he told her, “we are even, you and I.”

A voice soft and dark as midnight caressed Hannei’s mind, there and gone again.

It is good.

The world expelled its held breath in the form of the Dragon Queen’s voice. It carried across the room, rich with the tones and power of Sajani Earth Dragon who slept fitfully far beneath their feet.

“It is over, Pythos,” Sulema said to the man on the throne, as the undead horde and her borrowed armies filed into the chamber behind them.

“Surrender.”

FIFTY

“It is over, Pythos,” she said. “Surrender.”

Sulema could smell sweat and blood, hear the grunts and heavy breathing of weary women and men as the room behind her filled with fighters live and undead who had brought her to this moment. She burned with fatigue and the small voices of a thousand wounds, and blood rushed in her ears like a rain-flooded river singing, singing.

No, she realized, and the breath caught in her throat. It occurred to her that this new voice, a low sweet sound at once new as green leaves and familiar as a mother’s breath, was not the singing of her own heartbeat. Neither was it the song of the sea, the sands, the harsh whisper of hot winds across golden sands.

This was the song of a dragon.

Sajani slept fitfully in the belly of the earth, far below their feet, and as she slept, as she dreamt, she sang. She sang of rivers and seas and life-giving mud, of trees and moss and small, precious lives. She sang of the first steps of making, the first words, the first songs.

The first wars.

She sang of mothers and daughters, fathers and kings. She sang of lovers and sisters and hard, jagged rocks. Of fire in the moonslight and cool sweet water. She sang of life, and the stories humans told one another in the long dark.

She sang of love, and of loneliness.

She sang of a flame-haired warrior riding across the sands with her sword, her good horse, her sister. Sulema reached for that song, yearned for it. This was her heart’s desire, her life’s purpose, the one thing she must have or die, and she stretched, gasping, like a child reaching for a fruit that was tantalizingly out of reach. Like fingertips her sa and ka brushed it, the slightest touch, and then—

“Surrender?” Pythos laughed, a harsh sound that wrenched her back into the present moment and all its ugliness. “What is this? You would have me give this throne and these people into the hands of an usurper’s half-tamed and half-trained daughter. Who, then, would stand between Atualon and the fell armies of Sindan? Who would shield my people from the priests of Eth, the river pirates of Min Yaarif, the undead hordes? Most importantly, who would sing Sajani to sleep, when even now she rouses and threatens the existence of our world? Surrender? I think not… unless, of course, you wish to surrender to me.” He laughed again, swinging his leg as if none of the dangers he had just named might threaten him, and certainly not as if death faced him with a thousand swords.

The Mask of Akari glinted hard and gold.

“Sa Atu offers you mercy.” Ismai spoke in a voice rich with wrath. “You should take it. Mercy is more than I will offer you, I and my soulsworn, you stinking dung-maggot.” The dead pressed forward as he spoke. Little now did they look like living women and men. The skin had drawn tight on their faces as they bared yellow teeth like feral things, eyes glowing red in the tired light, and a fell air hung about them.

“It is not I who stinks of the grave,” Pythos answered, eyes gone hard behind the mask. He straightened, booted feet striking the ground and hands tightening on the arms of the golden chair. “It is not I who stinks of betrayal.”

“Who have I betrayed?” Sulema demanded.

“I am not speaking to you,” Pythos sneered. “You know of what I speak, do you not, Kal ne Mur? Or perhaps you need a reminder?”

Ismai growled in reply. Sulema glanced at him in surprise, and saw that his stare was fastened straight ahead, his face a mask of fury. She followed his line of sight and gasped aloud before she could catch herself.

Arachnists!

Arachnists… or something worse.

From the low doors behind the throne, Atukos disgorged a host equal to Ismai’s in size, and perhaps in number, as well. Women and men in all shapes and sizes, from elderly grandmothers to youths scarce out of childhood they came. They were many-limbed and walked with a horrible sideways shuffle, as the Arachnists did, but wore the black leathers, crimson cloaks, and faceless gold masks of the Baidun Daiel. In their midst walked a tall man, narrow-waisted and arrogant. Power and command radiated from him as if he were Akari made flesh. Sulema knew him at once, by his layers of shadowy robes, his massive hammer, his ruined mask—

—and by her response to him. Something grabbed her arm, and she looked down to see Yaela’s hand gripping her so hard the knuckles were pale. She met the girl’s jade eyes.

“No,” Yaela whispered. “Stay.” Only then did Sulema realize that she had been trying to move forward, and she could not have said whether she meant to kill him or kiss him.

Perhaps both.

She shook off Yaela’s restraining hand, and cried out in a voice made strong and clear by years training as a warrior in the Zeera:

“I know you!” she drew a deep breath. “Nightmare Man.”

“Indeed you do,” the tall figure agreed as he took his place beside the golden throne. “Perhaps you would care to know us better?” And he winked at her.

“Perhaps,” she allowed, “I will use your guts to string a lyre and you can sing me to sleep at night.”

“Oh, my dear,” he laughed. “I think not. Your mother might have threatened me so, once. You might have, had you grown to be half the woman she was.”

“But she has not, beloved.”

Sulema started. Though his mouth yet moved and his eyes never left hers, the Nightmare Man spoke now with another voice, soft and cringing. The voice went on.

“She has neither her mother’s heart nor her father’s song,” it said. “She has nothing. She is nothing.”

“Perhaps not nothing, sweet one.” His voice was smooth and low again. “We shall see.” It sounded oddly as if he was arguing with himself, or as if more than one person inhabited his body.

Like Ismai, Sulema thought.

“In any case,” he continued, “whatever you are, whatever you have, you are mine.” Thus saying, he drew a knife and held it point-down before his face, smiling. It was a golden thing, heavy and ornate. A silvery spider crouched atop the pommel, its body a shadow-jewel the size of a plover’s egg.

Sulema staggered and would have fallen if not for the fox-head staff. The knife in his hands grew closer in her mind, brighter. It slashed across her throat and she was choking—

No, not I, she thought, even as she fought for breath. Not I. Azra’hael. He killed my kithren. My Azra’hael.

The spider moved, a living thing. It waved its forelegs in the air, and Sulema knew that it sought her. She could not tear her eyes from it, or move, or speak.

“You are weak, and you are mine,” the Nightmare Man said in a voice dark and sweet as mad honey. “Your parents would be so disappointed. Join with me, little queen… or die now.”

Even as the ruined man spoke, however, there was movement behind him. Shadows curled around the foot of the throne like dark waves, or thick smoke, lapping at the gold and the king’s robes. Dark tendrils like writhing snakes tasted, tested the air in the room. These twisted and twined back upon themselves and rose up, a great dark angry funnel of nothing that engulfed Aasah until it seemed as if he wore robes of shadow and sorrow, stitched together with bursts of black lightning. His pale eyes glittered with fury and he spoke, biting off each word as he might bite through an enemy’s throat.

“You ally yourself with Arachnists, those foul priests of the Cult of Eth,” he spat. “You dare.”

Pythos drew himself up at that, frowning, brows drawing together in the beginning of an angry scowl.

“You forget yoursel—”

“You. Are working. With the Cult. Of. ETH!” Such was his fury that Aasah shook, his voice shook, and shadows flew about the room like wicked birds. It almost seemed to Sulema that she could hear them shrieking with delight.

“You should not have done that,” Yaela added in a voice that was as smooth and still as her master’s was enraged. From the corner of her eye, Sulema watched as the shadowmancer’s apprentice raised herself up on the balls of her feet and began to dance. As she did so Aasah burst into song like thunder, like a fell prayer. Shadows rose about them in a black tide and rushed at the throne.

Pythos drew his booted feet up away from the shadows, and his eyes flashed snake-green behind the mask. His own voice rose, filled with the bright power of Akari Sun Dragon. The corrupted Baidun Daiel took a step forward, and another, corpse arms flapping and writhing, pitiable moans escaping from behind the smooth golden masks.

Behind her Sulema could hear moans and cries of pain from those of the Baidun Daiel who had chosen to ally themselves with her. Yaela and Aasah fell to their knees, then to all fours, and the shadows fled in terror from the bright face of Akari. But Sulema had seen what Pythos was doing and heard the command in his song. It seemed to her much like those exercises Aasah had forced upon her, when she was his student.

I can do this, she thought. Command the Baidun Daiel. She drew a breath as the shadowmancer had taught her, imagining that the power of Sajani flowed emerald-green and river-blue from the heart of the earth up into her lungs and from there—

Pain exploded in her shoulder, then her head, and Sulema’s song was broken. Her arm went icy, and then numb. She dropped the fox-head staff and reeled, nearly fainting. The shadow-jewel spider on the golden knife weaved and bobbed, dancing her into its fell web, binding her to the Nightmare Man’s will.

He smiled to see her pain.

“Sulema,” he crooned, “Sulema. Sweet little princess, dear little queen. Why fight your destiny?”

Ismai raised his sword high and prepared to charge, but the Nightmare Man pointed the hilt of his blade at Sulema and she fell to her knees, crying out as fire boiled through her veins, licked the back of her eyes, gnawed on her mind.

“One more move,” he said in a voice as cold as the void, “and she will beg me for death.”

Gold flashed across the Mask of Akari and the Baidun Daiel stood rigid as statues, or corpses. The shadows winked out and both shadowmancers collapsed senseless upon the dragonglass floor.

“Excellent,” Pythos intoned, voice resonant with dragonsong. “Sulema, there is no need for this… strife. We are not so different, you and I, nor do our goals have to be at odds. Join me as my queen consort—no, as my queen— and we will rule together from Atukos. Together, we will sing Sajani to sleep for all time, and the world will know peace. Peace, instead of this pointless war! Our people—all our people—will rest easy at night, knowing their leaders are there to protect them. Is that not what you want? Is this not the legacy you fight for?”

With every bit of strength she could scrape up, everything she had ever learned, every bit of stubbornness honed through a childhood at the feet of a powerful and indifferent mother, Sulema reached for and grasped the fox-head staff.

Jinchua, help me, she thought.

Mother, help me, if you can.

Father, help me.

She used the staff to push herself to her feet and stood tall and proud, a warrior staring death straight in the face.

Sulema spat.

“Your words are pretty,” she forced out, voice thick and slow as if she had a belly full of usca. “But they stink of lies. I am Sa Atu. This is my place, not yours. You know it, I know it… Atukos knows it.” Ehuani, the walls and floors shone with a green-gold light which pulsed in time to her own heart.

Pythos’s face darkened with rage. “You!” He pointed at the Nightmare Man, stabbing as if his finger was a knife. “Bring her to me! If the little puta will not sit by my side, she will rot in my dungeons—but I will have her, either way!”

The Nightmare Man laughed.

“You think you command me?” He laughed again, harder, a great deep belly laugh of genuine amusement. “Little king. Little man. You do not control so much as the dust at my feet. You think I am here to help you sing Sajani to sleep? I have been awake for a thousand years, caught up in the fate of that seven-times-cursed daemon Kal ne Mur. I cannot rest, I cannot die, not till the last days of this world… and I am weary. Weary beyond imagining. It is time for me to end this. It is time for me to sleep. If the only way I can get a bit of peace and quiet is to destroy the world, that is what I will do.”

As the Nightmare Man spoke, tendrils of shining darkness flowed from the air about him to wrap like spiders’ webs about the usurper king. He gestured with his knife, the webs went taut, and they—yanked—some bright and shining thing from the man on the golden throne. Pythos screamed, a thin and weak sound of utter terror. Then his eyes rolled back in his head till only the whites showed; he sat stiffly upright, and began to sing.

This was no sweet song meant to soothe Sajani’s dreams and keep her still. This was a harsh discordance, filled with the clang and clamor of war. A breaking song, a waking song, a call to death and fire.

The world shuddered and bucked as Sajani stirred.

The Nightmare Man laughed again, more softly now, as he pointed the pommel of his knife at Sulema. The spider leapt, flew shining through the air, trailing a shining gossamer strand behind it, and landed light as dreams upon her shoulder.

“No!” she shouted, but it was too late. Needle fangs plunged deep into her flesh, pumping venom beneath her skin, filling her with blackness and poison and death. Sulema drew a long, shuddering, agonized breath for one last scream, but felt her body go stiff all over. She was frozen as stone, unable to so much as blink under her own will.

“Now, sweet Sulema,” the Nightmare Man whispered, “sing for me.”

Sulema raised her voice and began to sing, to sing Sajani awake.