Daru stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Hannei, the corpse of a slain enemy still warm at his feet, and watched as—once again—Sulema began to wake the dragon Sajani from her eons-long slumber.
He could feel it in his bones. They itched, worse than his arm had itched those many years ago after he had broken it in a bad fall. His skin crawled exactly as if thousands of tiny spiders were crawling over him, and his vision had that strange flat-and-double quality that could mean only one thing.
They had come to a crossway.
He had known as much already, of course. There was that sense of having been here before, of knowing what was going to happen next, a vague dread and anticipation. Pakka was glowing that weird rose-gold hue that she only got when they had come to one of those perilous bubbles in time and place where the events of a world might be altered with ever so slight, ever so careful a push.
If one was a waymaster. He was, and Daru had long since proven himself incapable of following rules with which he did not agree. He touched the medallion he wore about his neck, took a deep breath, and opened his aetheron eyes.
“There you are,” he whispered, “nasty thing.”
The spiderling that had fastened itself to Sulema’s flesh was no spider at all, but a renderer, meant to separate soul and song and free will just as a flensing knife might separate meat and sinew and bone. If Daru’s actions here were unsanctioned, the actions of he who had created such a thing were utter anathema, a violation of all the laws of nature and punishable by termination with prejudice.
Daru reached out in the aetherlands and touched the thick ropes of unlight that wove like fell spiderwebs between the creature and her master.
Nightmare Man, Daru thought, that is what he is called here. It hurt his soul to touch the strands, much like the sound of metal scraping against slate or the smell of rotting flesh pained the body’s senses. Such utter wrongness, such discord, the antithesis of beauty and life that was a dragon’s song.
So very, very unnecessary.
Daru drew one of the knives from the harness he wore across his chest. Its blade glowed a perfect blue-green in his aethersight, the color of emeralds and amethysts in the light of a young sun, the color of elves’ song. With it he hewed through the burning, sticky stuff. Several strands of it snapped free and rebounded, striking the Nightmare Man full in the chest, causing him to cry out in pain and turn his maddened eyes.
Ah, he thought, that got your attention. He smiled to show that he was unafraid—a silent lie—and sketched the sigil of Illindra in the air between them. The ruined man’s eyes widened behind the ruined mask, and lips pulled back in a feral snarl. He gestured, and the spiderling returned to its resting place on the pommel of his knife. This he raised before his face and, holding Daru’s stare, answered the challenge with a spell of his own.
He traced the sigil of Eth in the air. It hovered for a moment, spitting and hissing, burning an open wound across the soft skin of time itself. A smell of sulphur and burnt things filled the chamber.
Sulema cried out in pain, then resumed singing.
The world flickered, and Daru beheld with his dreaming eyes a clearing in Shehannam, quiet and untroubled by the worries of the world of men. In this clearing lay a fennec fox, her fur stained red with blood, eyes half-closed, panting in pain as dark bonds wrapped tightly around her delicate body. Fewer than they had been before Hafsa Azeina, Ani, even Sulema herself had hewn them, still they threatened to tear flesh from spirit and send Sulema hurtling down the Lonely Road.
Back in the waking world, the city of Atukos shuddered in the first throes of death. A crack ran lengthwise across the chamber floor between Sulema and those who would support her, and black grit fell from the ceiling like corpse dust. Smaller cracks branched out from the first as the schism grew wide and deep, and the chamber’s floor began to fall away into the void. The walls of Atukos trembled and heaved, groaning in extremity, as veins of red and green and gold snaked up through the living walls to pulse violently before his eyes.
Daru saw both worlds at once now, juxtaposed upon one another. In one, Sulema stared at the Nightmare Man through the Mask of Sajani and sang, sang the dragon awake, compelled by his foul magics. In Shehannam the fennec lay bound and dying. Bright eyes closed and she whimpered, a pitiable thing abandoned to death.
In both worlds the Nightmare Man smiled, seeing at last the fruition of the darkest dreams of his heart. Jinchua would die alone in this dark place, and Sulema; thus Sajani would wake, the world would end, and he would be free. Free to sleep, to die.
Oh, but you are wrong, Daru thought. You are a foul and friendless creature, and you cannot hope to understand. Jinchua is not alone, because Sulema is never alone. She is loved. He turned his head and caught Hannei’s eye. She nodded. Despite everything, her face softened and she smiled at him. We are loved, he amended, and none of us will ever truly be alone. That thought helped him to breathe more deeply and fully.
None but you, Nightmare Man.
Daru hardened his heart against knowledge and pity. He knew the histories of their enemy, his sufferings, the paths he had trodden to bring him to this place and time. Some of the choices had been his own, but many had not.
There but for the roll of the dice go I, Daru thought. Still, he would do what needs must. He slipped his free hand into the pouch at his belt and drew forth his old bird-skull flute, long concealed from his teachers at the Academ, worn smooth and delicate with a young boy’s tears. As the Nightmare Man’s eyes widened in panicked understanding Daru brought the flute to his lips, and he played.
He played a child’s tune, a lover’s song, a lullaby. He played flowers in the springtime and a mother’s sacrifice, he played dry wind and sweet water, and stolen kisses beneath the stars. He played friendship and love, and the laughter of children, and a grandmother’s dying smiles. He drew a breath into his strong young lungs, and he played.
It was a song of love, a song for all times and all places. As the music wound round and round the room, seducing them all, Sulema’s breath hitched and her own song faltered as she hearkened to Daru playing. Horses in the sunlight, and aklashi, and a belly full of mead. Hannei’s hand rose to touch Daru’s shoulder as he played lovemaking in the morning hours, a young boy’s first crush, a warrior’s laugh for no reason at all.
He played for them singly, for everyone in the room, for the world. He played for the children, most of all, the children in each of them and those who had been stolen away. As he played, and as those assembled mid-death stared rapt, the Exceptional Children were called forth from passageways long forgotten. They danced. Most of them were shades, unquiet souls fell and deadly with eyes like dark stars, but some were living children, thin and feral-eyed but still breathing, still real.
A very young girl of perhaps six summers, clad in a filthy gown of indeterminate color, half-stumbled, half-skipped to Daru and stood, looking up at him with hollow, hungry eyes.
“Play,” she commanded, then she looked around at the other exceptional children, and at the adults who had failed them. Her voice rose high and piping as Daru’s flute. “Play!” she said again, smiling a fox smile, sharp white teeth and a taste for blood, then she ran laughing to touch a bigger boy on the arm.
“Play!” he shouted, and then the room was full of children skipping, running, dodging between pillars and over dead bodies in a frenzied game of not-it. They howled, voices rising like the Wild Hunt, and one by one the adults began to join in.
Watching them over his wicked flute, Daru saw the dead Sudduth and a white-cloaked Salarian sit cross-legged, facing each other to begin a game of bone-dice. Two Zeerani warriors drew a hoti and began to spar, while others watched and cheered. Yaela threw back her head, ululating, and threw her body into a dance that sent all the shades in the room to spinning with delight. As his own magic, world-born and star-trained, began to take hold, every soul living and dead joined in the game of life.
Screaming they ran, they danced, they gamed and sang, compelled to show their love of and to the world. Only the Nightmare Man stood apart, the only one among them who was truly and forever alone and unloved.
Ah, Daru thought, how his eyes burn! He played on, and on, even as his heart wept at the man’s wretchedness.
The Nightmare Man lifted his knife again, hand shaking, and pointed it at Daru. A long tendril of darkness broke away from its binding of Sulema and her fennec, and swayed like a venomous snake seeking a rat. Finally, it scented Daru and struck, quick as thought, quick as death.
Pakka was faster. She launched herself with a shriek at the dark thing, and her furious light flared blinding bright, burning the tendril away to smoke and ash.
“PIP-PIP-PEEEE OH!” she screeched, triumphant.
Again and again the Nightmare Man struck, trying to silence Daru’s song, the gorgeous, terrible reminder that of all things everywhere he was least loved. Again and again Pakka trilled and flew, striking the shadow-webs with her serrated forearms, snapping them in half with her powerful mandibles, blinding them with her butt-light. Little queen, Daru thought, how I love thee. How far they had traveled together, and through such perils. The Nightmare Man could never comprehend such a love as theirs, and so he could never hope to combat it.
At long last, the assault accomplished what Daru had hoped. The Nightmare Man’s strength and attention had been diverted enough that Sulema’s little fennec slipped her dark bonds and darted away into the green forests of Shehannam. This in turn enabled Sulema to break free. She stopped singing to the dragon Sajani and turned to face the Nightmare Man, and her golden eyes behind the jeweled mask burned hot with an inhuman wrath.
“YOU,” she said, and her voice sent shimmering tremors through the fabric of the world. “YOU!” She raised her golden sword, and it shone like the heart of the sun.
“Ahhh,” the Nightmare Man said. The knife fell from his trembling hand, but before Sulema could move he reached up to grasp the medallion he wore at his throat.
Daru started, and his music skipped a beat. No, he thought, no. It cannot be. Then the Nightmare Man turned his terrible tortured gaze upon him. When he held up the medallion in anguished defiance, Daru knew that yes, it was so.
“Akhouti,” ground the nightmare voice. “Salhach a akhoutek. Anneh akhoutek! Salhach a hei!”
Never in all his endless years of hunting had Daru heard a more heartfelt plea. Tears stung his eyes, but he shook his head. “It is too late for forgiveness. I am sorry, akhouti,” he said. Brother. “I am so, so sorry.” He reached for his knives.
“Eh na mutaahna kulkem!” the Nightmare Man spat. He made an obscene gesture with his free hand—a fist opened and shut, a flick of the wrist—and the greater part of those humans who had moments before been fighting, playing, or dying fell motionless as old bones to lie upon the rubble of the floor.
The Nightmare Man had lived long, long beyond the reckoning of men, of vash’ai and even waymasters, though not perhaps in the reckoning of dragons. He had been fighting, and he had been running to fight another day and another, since the days of Zula Din, of Ishmalak and Devranae and Kal ne Mur. He ran now, tearing open a door between worlds as casually as a warrior might flick open the flap of a friend’s tent. The Nightmare Man stepped through, and it began to close with a flash of dark light.
But Daru, who was much, much older than he seemed, had hunted prey nearly this dangerous and desperate, and was not easily taken by surprise. Grasping his own amulet he reached out in three worlds, holding the way open. Sweat sprang up on his brow and he trembled, though to untrained eyes it would appear as if he simply stood in the middle of a broken chamber with one hand held upraised. A dark shimmer of air like a small cloud hovered just beyond his fingertips.
Shadows began to pour into and out of the dark place. In the belly of Atukos, buried and forgotten to the world of men, he could hear—or perhaps feel—the thousands upon thousands of not-dead Baidun Daiel as they began to moan and stir.
Sulema had not fallen, nor Ismai, nor—strangely—had Sulema’s half-masked lover. “Sulema,” Daru called to her in a strained voice. The medallion clenched in his fist began to hum, then grow hot, and finally to crack. “Sulema—GO! Follow him!”
Sulema turned her face to hiss at him, and in that moment, she seemed more dragon than woman. Then she turned toward that doorway through which her enemy had stepped, and which Daru held open only through great strength of will. She nodded to herself and seized her fox-head staff. With his dreamshifting eyes Daru watched her spirit self, her intikallah, step out of her earthly body and into the portal through which the Nightmare Man had escaped.
The dark doorway wrenched itself free from Daru’s grasp and slammed shut.
Sulema’s body slumped to the ground, pale and lifeless.
The stones and bones of Atukos one by one began to tear loose and fall to the ground, threatening to crush the humans within. In the catacombs far below the Baidun Daiel—those once exceptional children who, like the Nightmare Man, had been betrayed, buried, and forgotten by the Dragon Kings of Atualon—began to scream.
“Sulema!”
The sight of her dropping lifeless to the cold floor was more than Ismai could bear. Crying out, he fought the invisible web of the Nightmare Man’s weaving, straining forward till he could feel the cords in his neck standing out. It felt as if he would tear muscle from bone.
The pain was exquisite—worse than dying, worse even than living—and he halted to catch his breath, blinking bloodied tears from his dead eyes and shuddering in agony. Just then Pythos, released from the Nightmare Man’s spell, cut his magical song short and shook his head as if waking from a dream.
Then the Dragon King smiled to find his bondage lifted, the Nightmare Man gone, and his enemies unable to move. When his eyes lit upon the still form of Sulema he laughed aloud, staggering to his feet and reaching for the sword scabbarded at his waist. This he drew and started down the steps to where she lay helpless, one arm folded unnaturally beneath her, hair a tangle of sunset wizard locks, and her face—
I love that face, Ismai thought. I love her. I have always loved her.
As do I, Kal ne Mur agreed. She is… everything… to me.
To us.
Even as sand and wind combined become a storm, Ismai and Kal ne Mur roared with fury and with one last great effort burst through the bonds of magic that held them fast. Moving slowly as if in a dream he hefted his own sword and pushed forward to meet the usurper king. When Pythos brought his sword down for a killing blow, it was met and blocked by Ismai’s shamsi—the very blade his mother had given him, marking him out as the favored son of her heart. The ring of steel on steel was as a bell tolling.
The shock of that blow traveled up Ismai’s arms to his shoulder, to the very core of his being. Shaking him, waking him, making him whole. Filled with a sudden fire that was half joy, half rage, he threw his head back and laughed at the surprise on the Dragon King’s face, and then used the blade’s momentum to wheel round, pivoting on the ball of his foot as he had seen the warriors do a thousand times. As he had done himself as Kal ne Mur. He brought his blade round again to slash across Pythos’s sword arm just below the shoulder.
Blood sprayed in his face hot and salty and good. Pythos ap Serpentus ne Atu, first of his name, dropped his sword and yelled in pain. He did not have time to recover, or run away, or even turn from the next attack. So swiftly did Ismai’s shamsi turn about, hissing through the air and whispering of death, that Pythos still had a look of surprise and the beginnings of anger on his face when his head toppled free of his shoulders to roll and bounce across the floor of his throne room.
His headless body, spraying blood in all directions, jerked in a death-jig before folding at the knee and waist to flop indecorously close to Sulema.
Ismai flicked his blade, sending thin ribbons of blood to fly across the chamber, then drew it across his tunic and sheathed it as if he had all the time in the world. Crossing the room he bent over the bleeding head of his foe and seized the Mask of Akari. It was surprisingly light in his hands and regarded him with sober intent.
Deep within him, Kal ne Mur shuddered in pleasure and dread.
It begins again.
So it does, Ismai answered, and gently—gently—he placed the dragon’s mask upon his face.
It burned. Ah, it burned. In his mind’s eye Ismai saw again the snake-priestess of Thoth as she sprayed venom into his face, his eyes. This, however, was a fresh torment, hot and new, searing the skin and bones, stabbing into his eyes like knives heated in a smith’s forge. Ismai clenched them shut, which availed him little, and ground his teeth together against the agony, allowing only the smallest, softest hiss to escape. It was worth it. Sulema was worth it—if by this he could gain some small hope of saving her, he would pay this price a thousand times over.
There was a flash bright as the birth of a new sun. Ismai staggered but did not fall. As the light faded slowly, slowly, it took with it the searing pain. The mask grew cool against his skin, comforting. It accepted him as a rider chooses a new mount and worked to train him to its will.
Kal ne Mur, still and forever part of Ismai’s song, was no stranger to the dragon’s magic and pushed back against it, setting boundaries so that he would not be suborned.
Thank you, Ismai whispered deep within his soul. He opened his eyes carefully, braced against the pain, expecting to see only those things the dead king might show him.
He stared about the room with surprise.
His living eyes had been restored to him.
No, he thought. Not restored. Akari has taken my eyes from me and replaced them with his own.
Never had he seen the world like this. Colors for which he had no name leapt out at him, heartbreaking in their loveliness. So keen was his sight, so sharply defined, that it almost seemed as if he could see through things into the heart of them, the essence.
A sound disturbed his fascination. A soft sound filled with anguish, it pierced the dragon’s spell and brought him back to the world of men. He glanced down and beheld his love, his Sulema. Mattu Halfmask had gathered her limp form into his arms and was bent over her, weeping.
Ah, Ismai thought. Ah. Sympathy for the man filled both his hearts, but it was the pity of a rich man for the poor, for someone who never had and never would claim his own golden fortune. Mattu was the second son of a forgotten king, and he was a man who loved a dragon. For these sorrows Ismai would forgive this trespass. Lowering himself, Ismai crouched beside Sulema and her grieving lover and pulled her into his arms. Mattu was loath to let her go but Ismai’s strength would not be denied.
“Give her to me,” he said as gently as he was able. “I can do what you cannot. I can help her.” Reluctantly, Mattu surrendered Sulema’s limp and still-warm body into Ismai’s care.
“If I thought you meant her harm,” he said in a choked voice, “I would kill you.”
Ismai smiled, then stood, clutching Sulema to his breast. Precious she was to him, beyond salt or breath or all the beauty of the world. Life radiated from her, hot and wild, belying the stillness of her face and pale cast to her skin. It seemed in that moment that he held everything in his arms that was right and good, every true thing that made life’s next breath worth fighting for.
Chaos still reigned in that chamber. Paying no heed to the blood at the steps of the throne, to the dead and the undead and the unwholesome things which had once been Baidun Daiel, to whom he owed a soul-debt, Ismai strode out through the broken door. He shone with the light of Akari, and so dreadful was his masked face that none could bear the sight of him.
The secret ways of Atukos were known to him, above and below. Kal ne Mur had caused many of these same hallways and passages to be carved from the living stone, shaped as the sleeping dragon herself would have them. Down and around and up he hurried, moving faster as he went, unhindered by battle fatigue or the dear weight in his arms, till at last he reached the mountain steps. Steep and slick, treacherous to those feet not meant to climb them. To Ismai they were welcoming as a garden path, and he ran up them two and three at a time.
Finally he reached the lake of dragons’ dreams and kings’ songs, and only then did he stop. His chest heaved and he trembled, not from exhaustion, but from some nameless excitement. The lake smoked and boiled with Sajani’s disquiet and Akari’s wrath. Walking slowly to the very edge, he saw clearly that this was not water but the fine, clear stuff of magic. Any stone thrown into this lake would dissolve and be lost forever.
Sulema was not breathing. Though the Mask of Sajani glittered with the lively light of a thousand green stars, her eyes behind the mask were half-closed and dull, and her flesh was cooling.
She is lost already, he thought, and I am lost without her.
“Sulema,” he whispered, and bent his face to her. The masks met, and a single clear note pierced the cool morning air like a bell.
Ismai gathered his courage, the audacity of hope, and stepped into the lake.
“Sulema…”
His call was a chain, a thorned vine, a binding web, trying to trap her in place and in time. She flitted aside gossamer-light, death-quick, content to forget and unbecome and simply be.
Sulema rose up on the wind, spreading herself out thin as a dragon’s wings, and let the skinned man’s dreams of agony bear her up, up, pressing like a kiss against the blissful dark. She burst into candescent song, and lost herself in the wonder of her own creation. She was light, she was love, she was song and story and color, she was—
“Sulema!”
His voice trapped her; her name wrapped her within the limits of a human skin. The song shattered into words, harsh and atonal. The words became flesh, and the flesh became pain, and she remembered who she was.
“I am,” she whispered, and she wept at the sound of her own voice, at the human mouth too small to speak of big things. “Sulema.”
The infinite became finite. Nothing thickened, quickened, creating a Sulema-shaped void which she filled with tears and blood and pain until she had arms, legs, and hair, and a beating heart. Sulema opened her eyes and saw far above her a thin and wavering light.
Sun, she thought. Sky.
Air.
She moved her arms, her legs, sluggishly at first but with purpose as she became reacquainted with flesh and bone, thought and need. Her lungs remembered that she needed air, her legs remembered how to kick, and her heart remembered everything else. Ismai, she remembered. Daru, and Ani. Mattu Halfmask.
Hannei.
Kishah—vengeance.
Love for her sword-sister smote her, pierced her, made her whole again. In the end it was not vengeance, but love, which drove her to kick and thrash her way back to the surface, breaking through the Dibris with a gasp and a wail as the air burned her lungs, as the pale moonslight burned her eyes, even through the mask…
She brought her hands to her face, wondering. Indeed, she wore the Mask of Sajani, comfortable as her own skin, cool as starslight. Her fingers remembered its ridges and facets, and her soul remembered what it had been like to be a dragon, outside of time and space and the confines of human life.
I am so small, she thought, dismayed.
So limited. So… human.
The thought slipped away with the current, washing over her, bouncing away down the river like debris after a cleansing storm. With a grunt of effort she struck out for the shore, wishing—not for the first time—that she had paid better attention when her mother had tried to teach her to swim. Not that there had been much use for it in the desert.
Her bare feet found purchase at last, and Sulema pushed herself up through the strong waters onto the river’s edge, shivering a little with cold and exertion. She wished for clothing, and a weapon, and for a horse—
A soft whicker made her jump halfway out of her sodden skin. Further up the river’s edge stood a horse. Not just any horse, but Hafsa Azeina’s snarky little gray mare, who had thrown Sulema more times than she could count, and who had died during the attack on her mother in Eid Kalish.
“Keila,” she said, “what are you doing here?” She walked warily to the mare, who stood with one leg cocked, placid as any gelding and real as Sulema herself. Beside her, neatly folded as if laid out by Atualonian servants, lay a warrior’s garb—trousers and vest blue as a warden’s touar, embroidered all over in gold, and a headdress of lionsnake plumes grander even than Sareta’s had been.
Thrust into the soft sand, laughing at her—Sulema was sure of this—was the fox-head staff.
“Jinchua,” she said, shaking her head. “I might have known. Am I dreaming, then, or is this real?”
Yes, her kima’a laughed, deep in the forests of Shehannam. Also, yes. Life is a dream, and human life is a nightmare. Have you learned nothing at all, then, in all your travels?
“Neither so much as I should have, nor as little as you might think,” Sulema answered, donning the warrior’s garb. It was light and comfortable, and fit perfectly—of course it did—and Sulema ran a hand over the thread-of-gold. Despite the odd circumstances, she wished for a hand-mirror. Snugging the headdress firmly into place atop her wizard locks, she took up her staff with a sigh of long suffering, then eyed Keila askance.
“You are not going to throw me this time, are you?”
The little mare huffed as if she had been insulted, but made no protest when Sulema leapt easily onto her back, nor gave one of those sideways hops for which she had been so famous.
“Okay then,” Sulema said, still mightily suspicious. Dream-clothing and a dream-staff were all well and good, but she was not going to trust the illusion of a placid dream-Keila.
“Let us be gone.”
Do you know where you are going? Jinchua asked. Sulema could see the little fennec in her mind’s eye, pink tongue lolling, laughing at the world. She smiled at the image.
She really is my kima’a, she thought. Churra-headed brat.
“Back to the beginning, of course,” Sulema replied. “Het het!” She put her heels to Keila’s sides and the gray leapt to life, sweet as a song, swift as the wind. Sulema gave an exultant “Ai-la-la-la-la!” brandishing her staff and leaning forward into the whipping mane.
It will be a beautiful day, she thought as the first pale fingers of dawn parted the sky above them. A beautiful day to die.
* * *
He was waiting for her in the Madraj, as she knew he would be.
Standing upon the hallowed grounds, long the living-and loving- and dying-place of the Zeeranim, defiling their memories with his foul presence. The late light of the moons, the early light of dawn kindled on his dull and ruined mask, setting it aflame. There in the arena he leaned on a hammer, mocking her with his stance, his eyes, his very presence, as he watched her dismount and approach. Sulema’s heart clenched and her stomach churned as she saw the ring he had laid around himself—a ring of burned-out skulls. Some of them had been children, she saw, and others still had the remnants of charred braids clinging to them, leaving no doubt as to their identity.
He draws a hoti of death, she thought, with the faces of my people. She stopped mid-stride to glare at him, and he smiled a beautiful smile at her reaction.
“Welcome, Sulema an Wyvernus ne Atu,” he said, holding his arms wide, hefting the great war hammer as if it weighed less than his conscience. “I have been waiting for you.”
“Nightmare Man.” She spat upon the ground. “I have come to kick your ass.”
His eyes lit on the staff she bore, on the mask she wore, on everything she was. His lip curled in a sneer of such contempt.
“So.” He nodded. “You have become your mother’s daughter after all. And your father’s. You have become that which you hate.”
“Not at all,” she replied. There was no anger in her voice, none in her heart. “I have become that which I am.”
“And what is that, Sulema?”
She laughed at the Nightmare Man, then again at the flash of fury in his eyes.
“Khutlani,” she told him. “Do not say my name. Your mouth is too small to speak such big things.” With that, she stepped over the small, sad skull of a child, and into the fighter’s ring.
There was no play, none of the feints or posturing that would have marked a match between two warriors. The hammer whistled through the air with a thousand-voiced howl. Sulema crouched and drove up into the blow, snarling like a vash’ai behind the dragon’s mask as she spun the staff from hand to hand. Their weapons met, slid, rebounded, whirled and met again.
Sulema was strong.
He was stronger.
The hammer shaft thrust at her belly, the head smashed through the air and Sulema leapt, legs churning, staff singing a song of sand and fire as the hammer failed, again and again, to find its target. But only just. Sulema was fast.
The Nightmare Man was faster.
She landed solid blows on his wrist, his upper arm, his ribs, and one on the back of his knee, but to no avail. The Nightmare Man stalked her around the hoti, hammer shrieking its bloodlust as it missed her face, then her leg by the breadth of a bad dream, a shadow’s kiss. His smile told her this was a game to him, and the obsidian chips of his eyes said that it was only a matter of time before his blows landed.
Akari Sun Dragon spread his wings across the desert sky, kindling the Zeera to light and life, the sands to song. A blow Sulema did not see coming took her in the gut and she stumbled back, gasping, hunched about the pain and trying to keep her guard up. A low moan of fear rose up from the ring of skulls as her heel brushed the edge of the hoti.
“Leave, and you die,” the Nightmare Man told her. He held his hammer easily and turned his face to the morning, closing his eyes as if nothing she might say or do could possibly matter. Sulema straightened as best she was able and brought the staff back up.
“I am going nowhere,” she said. Her voice was a low growl that echoed in the empty eyes of the Madraj. “You will die this day.”
“I will not die this day, daughter of the dragon,” he replied. “I cannot die, nor sleep, nor escape the dream of this mortal horror, not till the end of this world.” He turned his face and looked upon her with eyes that were ancient and terrible with grief.
“The nightmare is your own,” she murmured.
“It is—and do you feel a moment’s pity for me, beautiful child? Would you put down your staff if you could, and heal my pain?” He took a step toward her, and Sulema’s breath caught in her throat as his gaze caught hers and held.
All the stars in the sky are in his eyes, she thought. All the worlds in Illindra’s web.
The Nightmare Man lifted a gloved hand and gestured her nearer. Sulema’s feet dragged against the sand as she took a step toward him. Another… and another. A low growl rose in her throat, again to echo among the empty seats of the Madraj. Then she glanced over the Nightmare Man’s shoulder, beyond the hoti, and saw the eyes.
Gold eyes and green, yellow eyes and amber, they stared. The vash’ai had come, wild sires and queens with tusks ungilded, spirits untamed, untrammeled, free and deadly as the Zeera herself. The great cats sat and lounged and prowled among the seats and arches, peering at the combatants and singing a low, growling, monotone song unlike anything Sulema had ever heard.
Her steps dragged her ever nearer to the Nightmare Man, so close she could feel the cold heat of his body, hear his breaths. He smiled, reached out and took her fox-head staff, dropping it upon the ground. Next, he tore the Mask of Sajani from her face and tossed it aside as one might a trinket.
“Sulema,” he purred, cupping her cheek in one hand. He raised his hammer high with the other, and it laughed at her in the cold morning light. She could not tear her gaze from his, not even to witness her own impending death. The Nightmare Man gave off waves of grave-cold, bone-cold, drowned-in-the-river cold. She shivered, and he smiled to see it.
“You,” he said, drawing her closer, the hammer higher. “You have caused me such trouble.”
The song of the vash’ai rose about them, and Sulema smiled between chattering teeth.
“You f-forget one thing.”
He hesitated, eyes flashing. “And what is that?”
“It is only t-t-trouble if you get c-caught.”
Quick as cat’s claws she struck, reaching over the Nightmare Man’s shoulders with both hands, taking hold of his cloak, and yanking it up over his head so that he became entangled in it, just as Hannei had done to her in the fighting pits. Dishonorable, she had said then, and dishonorable it was.
But it worked.
She twisted the cloth so that the Nightmare Man’s face and arms were well and truly tangled, and then wrested the hammer from his hands. She dropped her grip on his cloak and took a step back, swinging from the leg, from the hip, with all the strength in her wounded shoulder and all the kishah in her heart, and when that blow landed the sun—
Just for a moment—
The Nightmare Man’s skull crumbled like a fistful of eggs. His hideous mask flew end over end to land outside the hoti and the hammer shattered with a high, metallic shriek. He fell to his knees, and then to his face in the sand, and the ground beneath Sulema’s feet opened to receive him.
She stumbled backward, away from the widening crack, snatching up the Mask of Sajani and her fox-head staff lest the gaping maw swallow them both. As she and the vash’ai stared in silence, the limp dark form fell from sight, one arm sliding and flopping in a grim parody of a farewell wave as he disappeared.
“Jai tu wai,” she called, and then wished she had not. Dead or no, she had no wish to see that face ever again, not in the least of her dreams.
The sunlight flashed again, or perhaps it was her. Sulema remembered, now that it was too late, that she had used her mother’s tricks to get to the Madraj. She was in this place in spirit only, and could feel the connection to her body growing thin and weak. Too late she realized that although her mother had taught her how to leave the corporeal form, she had never learned how to get back again.
Perhaps if I dove into the river? But even as the thought surfaced it swam away again, leaving not so much as a trickle of bubbles to show her the way home. A wave of dizziness overtook her. Sulema raised a hand to her face and realized that she could see through herself. She was fading, blowing away on the wind, lost like a bad dream in the light of a new day.
Perhaps it is best, she thought. Perhaps it is best that I die. Ani herself said that none should hold the powers of dreamshifting and atulfah in the same body. It is too much power for one person to wield. I am too much.
A glint of sunlight on twisted metal caught her attention and she thought she smiled.
At least he died first. I accomplished that much, at least— and the Zeera is singing, she is singing me to sleep.
Then she realized it was not the Zeera.
The vash’ai stirred from their perches and lounging spots in the sunlight, left off their circling and posturing, and came to her. Young cats dark as soot, old queens with yellowed eyes and hanging bellies, and greatest of all, the pale broken-tusked form of the kahanna who walked with Ani but claimed her not.
“Inna’hael,” she said, recalling his name, and smiled as the sunlight flowed through her to stain the dirt. “I am glad you are here. I would not want to die alone.”
Nor shall you, he replied in her heart and mind. His voice was stern and deep and all things good, and Sulema wept with joy to have heard the words of a vash’ai before she died. He sounds like Azra’hael, she thought. My Azra’hael. My everything.
Azra’hael was my son and heir. Inna’hael drifted closer, until his face eclipsed the sun in her eyes. He was one of our greatest warriors. I forbade his leaving the prides, I forbade his bonding you. I did not think a human worthy of one such as he.
Spirit though she was, and dying, Sulema’s heart cracked and bled.
I am sorry. And she was. Had he remained in his place and not come seeking her, Azra’hael would not have died.
I am not, he replied, purr-soft. My son was right: you are worthy. I was wrong. A flash of broken tusk, a cat’s laugh. It will not happen again.
She is worthy. Another voice, deep but lighter than that of Inna’hael, and a bright light that hurt her weary eyes. A young vash’ai, thick-maned and powerful, stepped up to stand beside Inna’hael. I will have her. She smells of blood and fire, and I am hungry.
And I, a third voice said, light as a spring breeze and full of laughter. This male was dark and heavily scarred, with a torn ear and laughing blue eyes. She smells of mischief, and I am bored.
There you are, Inna’hael said, displaying his tusks in a cat’s grin. Long you wished to be Zeeravashani, little one— you should have been more careful of your wishes. These sons of mine are trouble enough to make even one such as you have second thoughts.
They are beautiful, Sulema protested, reaching out her fading hands toward the vash’ai. They are perfect.
So be it, the broken-tusked sire said. He opened his mouth wide and breathed upon her face. The hot carrion stink of his breath enfolded her. He opened his mouth wider, and roared, propelling her away, away, away.
Sulema swam again, but this time she was not alone. Two beings of light supported her as she rose through Illindra’s web, the worlds glistening and tickling her skin like bubbles as she drifted out of time and mind until at last she was caught up in the swirl of song, a riff, a chord of the discordant, beautiful, gorgeously messy life that was her own world, her own time and place and bonds of honor.
Newly born, the Song of Sajani swept her up in a rising tide, swirling and rolling around her, dragging her over reef and wreck and casting her at long last on the sands of the same beach and into the same life, the same body from which she had wandered.
So the Song of Akari called her, as well, called her home whole and alive. Sunlight warmed the mask she wore, falling once again upon her face. It warmed her throat, her skin, her hair, her eyelids. Strong arms held her in the here and now, and a voice—a man’s voice—chanted her name like a prayer.
“Sulema. Sulema,” it said. “Oh, Sulema, oh my love…”
Stirring, she opened her eyes and looked into the other half of her soul. She reached up to touch his face, knowing at last that his wounds were a prayer of love and that she was the answer.
“Ismai,” she whispered. “Ismai, I am here.”
“I see you,” he whispered. His arms tightened about her, and hot tears washed her face. “I see you.”
The Mask of Akari gazed down upon the Mask of Sajani, and Sulema could feel them, could hear them—dragons beyond all thought of here and now, beings of such magnificence that life itself was just a dream to them, this world a passing fancy. Akari sang to his mate, calling her to wake, to live, to come to him, to love.
Sulema was swept away in the beauty of their joy as Sajani, roused from her dream of ages, answered. The ground beneath her trembled, then shook. Ismai released her from his embrace, stood, grasped her hands and pulled her to her feet.
“Come,” he said in a voice that was not wholly his own. “It is time.”
“No, you come,” she corrected him, none too gently, in a voice that was deeper and richer than hers had ever been. “This is my world.” She led him down the mountain path and into the forest as the lake began to boil, the fog to rise, the ground to ripen, to tremble and swell as if it would burst open.
She sang as she walked, as powerfully and as naturally as a human babe taking in its first breath, and he sang with her. Their voices rose in prayer, in exultation, in the mating-song of dragons, the dirge of a dying world come to its rightful end. Their path took them down into Atukos, her dragonstone walls lit in a boreal display of scintillating greens and blues and golds blazing in ecstatic welcome at the return of the queen.
Sulema-Sajani trailed her hands along the walls as she took him down into the heart of Atukos and then into the great hall. She ran up the steps to her throne. There was blood there as she claimed her rightful seat, and Ismai-Akari took his place beside and behind her.
“It is time,” she told him.
“Yes,” he agreed, bowing his head. “It is time.”
The dragonstone walls of Atukos began to coruscate with flames of gold-green and sea foam, the floors to buckle. A fine mist rose about her feet, thickened to fog. A storm of magic rose in answer to the dancing of her heart. The dragon would wake, as dragons must, and this world, this finite pearl, would be strung in the web of her memories, to live on only in the infinite heart of a dragon.
Ismai went to his knees and lifted his arms high. His mask glowed as brightly as the desires of her heart and he sang, of life and love and poetry, of strife and betrayal and war, of all the doings of kith and kin he had witnessed unfolding on this tiny, bright world beneath his wings as his love slept on.
Something dragonish appeared in Sulema’s heart, then— the fierce and jealous love of life. She wished to wake, to sing to the infinite her adoration of humans, of sisters and lovers and vengeance. She opened her mouth to sing, to wake Sajani fully, to break the bonds of slumber and set her free.
A single note caught at the edge of her soul and tugged.
She paused, mid-breath, to listen.
It was a delicate sound, dark and lovely, thin as birdsong and strong as a young girl’s determination to live. It rose into a trill like a sweet-throated exultation and fell with a clash like the breaking of swords. This was a new music, limited and imperfect, but for all its imperfection it had a rough, wild beauty.
* * *
The world was a song—an exciting song, born of the loves and stories and tears of countless tiny lives. Old as rock it was, and yet—and yet, there was a new voice on the wind, a refrain she had never yet heard. Sajani stopped mid-stretch to listen to this new sound, this delightful cacophony, and thus her soul was trapped. A web was woven around her not of balance and purity and perfection but of strife, and pain, of the fool’s song of courage to press on when all hope has failed. The laughter of a sword-sister with no voice; the lament of a mother over a lover she has killed with her own hands; the wails of a sea-thing child caught between wave and wind.
The bonesinger sang to the dream eater sang to the waymaster and they all sang to her, called to her, called her to hearth and home and sleep, sleep, sleep…
The bonds of life and love steeled over her, the most delightful of traps, the sweetest of prisons. Sajani, content to have been caught once more, settled her heart and her claws, closed her tourmaline eyes, tucked her nose beneath her wings, and drifted back to dream once more of warriors and wardens, of lovers and liars.
After all, she reasoned, the story was not over… and she wanted to know how it ended.
* * *
Sulema.
Sulema.
SULEMA!
Let me sleep, she snarled. Let me be. Sulema rolled over, scowling in annoyance. She had been enjoying her dreams and did not wish to be reminded that she had a body, at least not just yet. I am tired. Let me dream!
This is not your dream, Kithren. You do not belong here.
Wake, Kithren. Wake now.
But the dream…
Are we always to rescue you? The voice was teasing, gentle, but there were teeth to it as well. These fastened upon her soul, lifting her from the dragon’s dream like a sire carrying his precious cub. They carried her home.
* * *
Sulema woke.
The first thing she noticed was that her shoulder did not hurt.
The second was that her mouth tasted of week-old corpse.
The third thing she noticed, as she came fully into herself, was that she was bare-ass naked and twined about an equally naked, very male body. She jumped, rubbing sand and salt and blood from her eyes and trying to push away.
“It is okay,” a deep voice said, familiar and yet… not. “Shhhh. You are safe. You are safe.”
“You are not!” she growled, breaking free and sitting up. She shook her head to free it of cobwebs, and looked down upon the lean, dark body of Ismai. “Where are we? What happened?”
“We are—I am not sure where we are,” he said, sitting up and drawing his knees up to his chest. He sounded young and unsure of himself, but not nearly as young as he had been just a few moons before. His voice had changed, and his face—
“Ismai!” she gasped. “Your eyes!”
Ismai reached up to touch his face. Though he still bore the hideous scars of burning, his eyes were clear as a summer sky—and as golden as her own. They regarded her with wary amusement.
“Your skin!” he replied.
Sulema looked down at her naked body. Her skin, though still as freckled as ever, was so deeply mottled that she thought she looked half vash’ai. She craned her neck and gazed around with a growing sense of wonder and confusion. Somehow, they had managed to wake up naked as babes on a white sand beach within sight of Atukos. Thick plumes of clean white smoke billowed up from the fortress, and she could smell the odd tang of burnt magic. They were alone, unharmed.
Completely bewildered.
Memories surfaced, faint and sweet.
“I was—I was caught in the dragon’s dream,” she said. Faint sounds of music were there in her heart.
“So was I,” Ismai answered. Then he bolted upright.
Snarling forms, golden and glorious and fierce, burst from the sedge grass a short distance from the dreamers. Sulema shrieked with surprise, and Ismai tried to scramble to his feet before falling hard on his butt, legs splayed and eyes as round as moons. Three young vash’ai—two sparse-maned sires and a dusky queen—leapt to the beach, tumbling round their humans like overgrown kittens, tusks gleaming in the bright light of day.
Got you, Mai’hael the laughing exulted. Sulema knew him instantly; knew his name, his heart, the color of his bright soul. He was hers, and she his. Got you, Kithren.
Little cub, Ga’hael the serious chided, padding toward her like the fires of dawn and ignoring the rambunctious play of his brother and Ismai’s Ruh’ayya. You need to be more aware of your surroundings, lest you become meat. Were you a tarbok, my teeth would be in your belly!
I love you. That was all Sulema could manage before her kithren bowled her over with their paws and their adoration, even as Ruh’ayya wrapped her forelegs around Ismai, bearing him to the ground and licking his face half off.
Drunk on new love and the surprise of finding themselves still alive, the five of them rolled and played and laughed on the beach as the day grew long and old. Loath to seek out their companions, even to find out how much of their world was left standing, they found themselves content to chase the waves and each other and let the great gray waters wash away blood and ashes and the taste of memories. Awareness woke slowly in Sulema’s heart—that they had nearly destroyed the world, that they may have saved it. That neither they nor their lives could possibly ever be the same. Soon enough the world would come looking and it would find her, shackle her once more with the bonds of friendship and honor, pin her down with the weight of a dragon’s legacy.
For these few moments, however, she was content to simply be.
More than content. She was complete. She was—
“Sulema!” Ani’s voice sounded, recalling them to here and now. “Ismai!”
“Dreamshifter!” A deep voice she knew was Daru’s, clear and strong as the call of a golden shofar. Then a sharp whistle sounded once, twice, three times. It was Hannei’s hunting signal. They had been found.
“We are in trouble now,” Ismai whispered. He grinned, winked one golden eye, and Sulema knew him in that instant as a man and a king and a lover. She walked to him, and he enfolded her in his arms.
Let come what may, she thought. I am ready.
“It is only trouble if you get caught,” she reminded him.
“Then we are in trouble, sweet warrior queen,” he said, “for surely I am caught.”
Ismai bent his face to hers, and they kissed.
* * *
Far below them, in the dark and deep…
The dragon smiled in her sleep.
He found her in the healer’s rooms, seated cross-legged beside the body of Aasah. His late father’s shadowmancer lay still, the bier around him piled high with white flowers, hands crossed over his chest in the manner of their people. The stars set into his skin glittered even in the dim light of a single oil lamp. For a mercy the sorcerer’s eyes were closed, his face peaceful in death as it had not been in life.
“Yaela.”
Her face when she turned it to him was tear-streaked, wild and dreadful in her grief and impossibly beautiful.
“I loved him,” she said without prompting, “and I hated him. He was my friend, my master, my brother. He brought me forth from the Edge and made me who I am, and then he broke me. He was everything I had in the world, and he betrayed me.” She bent her head over the dead man, hair falling like a shroud. “He gave his life for me. How can I still hate him?”
“Yaela.” Leviathus crossed the floor to stand by her, heedless of the jagged stones, the still-rumbling mountain, the bitter-sharp smell of death. “Yaela, come away. We will see him buried, or burned if that is your wish. Come away.” He reached a hand to her and she took it, let him pull her to her feet.
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” she answered. “Are you?”
“I will have a few new scars,” he admitted, “but none worth writing a book about.” She looked at him in surprise at that, and laughed, startling both of them with the sound. Together they walked from the sad room, leaving the empty shell of Aasah behind them.
Free of the Draiksguard, whose services Leviathus had politely but firmly refused, and unhindered by the imperators, whose confusion he could not help but pity, he wandered with Yaela through the halls and rooms of his childhood home, marveling that a place could feel familiar and alien at the same time.
Then again, he reasoned, I myself am changed.
I have made some improvements, Azhorus noted in the back of his mind. Though you are a work in progress, to be sure.
At last they came into his suite of old rooms and stood upon the balcony, looking out over Atualon and the sea beyond. A red day was dawning, sharp with hope and foreboding. Yaela laid a hand upon the balustrade and Leviathus covered it with his own. She did not pull away but sighed deeply. Leviathus thought that he had never in his life seen a woman so lovely, or so sad.
“What is wrong?” he asked, for it seemed to him that they had grown close enough that she might answer, where before her heart and mind had been closed to him.
“The people of Quarabala, such as would flee their homes, have been saved,” she said at last. “Their future is yet uncertain, and the danger they face now is no less than before, only different. Aasah had treated first with Wyvernus, and then I suppose with Pythos, to aid the Dragon King in return for lands where my people may abide, and wherein they may build homes and cities.
“But Aasah is dead. Who now rules in Atukos? And with the thoughts of Atualon turned inward, who now might speak for the Quarabalese, now that Quarabala is lost to us and Aasah fallen into shadow? What future have I given my sister’s daughter—a homeless people to lead in rags, as beggars with no homeland and no hope?” She sighed again.
“My sister rules in Atualon, or will once she is elevated to the throne,” Leviathus told her. “Sulema is fair-minded and soft-hearted, for all that she was raised by barbarians. More so for having been raised by barbarians, perhaps. A childhood spent in Atualon might have simply molded her into one more golden-tongued liar. Sulema has spent time and shed blood with the warriors and leaders of Quarabala; surely she will grant them a boon of land.”
“Grant them a boon.” Yaela made a face. “The women of Quarabala do not accept charity, king’s son. Should the Dragon Queen offer land in return for nothing, Maika will refuse it. To accept another queen’s charity would be to lose face before the people, and then she would be no queen at all.”
“Ah. Well.” Leviathus hesitated. Her hand beneath his was so warm, so precious, and her face so grave and strong, that his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, making speech difficult. He drew a deep breath and went on, though he was in that moment more daunted by the prospect of her rejection than he had been by the likelihood of death in battle. “Well. I have a proposal for you, if I may.”
She looked at him, and it seemed to him a strange light was in her eyes. Strange, but not unfriendly. “Go on.”
“Well, ah. The river pirates and I, some of us at least, are of a mind to found a city of our own. Land was promised to us by the Dragon Queen, fertile land near the mouth of the Dibris, land which has never been settled because the leviathans claim those beaches and have never suffered the presence of men. But Azhorus has been speaking with his people on my behalf. Many of them are of a mind to parlay with us, as there are things we two-leggeds can offer them. They have a taste for land-meat, and a love of pearls and jewels, and—what?” he broke off at the look on Yaela’s face. Her eyes were bright with mirth, and dimples appeared deep in her soft cheeks.
“You have maps drawn up already, I would wager on it,” she told him.
“Well… yes,” he admitted, and felt his face flush warm. “Maps help me envision things, you know. There will be a place for a great library, greater than the world has ever seen. We can lead expeditions into Quarabala some time hence and retrieve the books and scrolls of your people. It will be wonderful,” he finished. If only I could make her see, he thought. Perhaps if I showed her my maps…
“A place for my people. A place for my Maika to grow into her power. A place for our books,” she said, and the dimples deepened, by some magic making Leviathus’s knees go weak.
“Yes,” he said. “For all those things.”
“And what of me?” she asked, pulling away and placing both hands on her hips. “Shall I have no part to play in this new world of yours?”
His tongue clove fast to the roof of his mouth again. “What? I, uh, of course, you—”
“I suppose,” she went on as if he had not attempted to speak, “I should have to make a place for myself.”
Then Yaela the shadowmancer stepped close, twined her arms about his neck, brought his face down to hers, and kissed him as if no woman before her had ever kissed a man.
Thus was Leviathus ap Wyvernus ne Atu—son of a king, brother of a queen—conquered.
Before the sun had fallen far from the moon, a great ringing voice rose out of the east, powerful as the dawn, sweet as birdsong. The White Nightingale raised up a canticle of joy for all the people of Sindan to hear:
“Sing now, O people of the Forbidden City,
for the days of your slavery are ended for ever,
and the Shining Walls are thrown down.
Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Sundered Lands,
for your deepest wish has been answered,
and the veil is torn,
your emperor has come through the Twilight Lands,
and he is victorious.”
Jian stood alone upon a balcony of the Palace of Flowers. He could see below him, spread out like an embroidered cloak, the cities and towns and farms of Sindan, and beyond them the Kaapua, sweet River of Flowers. Beyond that, away to the west…
“What are you doing?”
The soft voice of Tsali’gei broke through Jian’s reverie. He turned slightly and smiled, gesturing so that she might come stand by his side and look out upon the land. He held out his hands for his son—the small one was sleeping, for a change. Holding him close, he kissed the impossibly soft and sweetly fuzzed little head.
“What are you doing?” his wife asked again, regarding him with wide and too-knowing eyes.
“Look,” he said, pointing with his chin. “The wall is nearly down. Soon all the people of Sindan will be able to come to Khanbul without fear of punishment. They are free—free to go as they will, to love whom they will, and to dream of a better tomorrow. We have done this.”
“I hope the people remember it when there is little but dreams in their bowls,” she remarked somewhat dryly. The war had, indeed, made a mess of things. The harvests would not be robust this year, maybe not for many years to come. “And you never answered my question.”
Nor did he now, but Jian put his arm around her waist and drew her close, and she let it be. Though his sword had been washed clean of an emperor’s blood, nevertheless his eyes were drawn inexorably to the west, and it seemed to him that the peace in his heart was no more than the stillness between one breath and the next.
The Dragon Queen of Atualon, he thought, holds the chains that bind Sajani in one hand, and atulfah in the other. Until those chains have been broken, none of us can be truly free. Tiachu’s crown will not be the last to fall at my feet.
For the moment, however, Tsali’gei was there, and their little son Tiungren, and the sunset was beautiful. Let tomorrow come tomorrow; for now, he would have peace. He stood with his arm around his wife in the rose-gold light of a dying day as the White Nightingale sang on.
“Sing and be glad, O ye children of the East,
for your Daeshen emperor has come to you
from across the veil,
and he shall dwell among you.
Caring for you as a son
as a brother
as a father
all the days of his life.
The lands that were sundered shall be renewed,
and the deep magic returned to the world of men,
and Sindan shall be blessed
above all others
in the dreams
of Sajani.
Sing all ye people!”
In his mind’s eye the people of Sindan lifted their long-bowed heads and looked to Khanbul. When they saw that the shining wall of swords was being torn down, that the Forbidden City would be forbidden to them no more, and that the chains of slavery had been lifted from their shoulders, they sang.
He heard the song rising up from below. With all their hearts, they sang.
All things had been made new and ready in Atukos, the queen’s fortress at the heart of Atualon. Kentakuyan a’o Maika i Kaka’ahuana li’i’s own Iponui had run themselves to exhaustion in order to spread glad tidings to all corners of the known world, from Min Yaarif in the west to the Sindanese empire in the east.
The new emperor of Sindan had sent emissaries and gifts of goodwill to the new Dragon Queen and her consort Ismai ne Mur. From every land known to humankind and Dae the people came, women and men, soldiers and scribes, to stare in wonderment at the sparkling city and her now-legendary queen. The flame-haired warrior from the Zeera—she who had inherited the gift of dreamshifting from her mother and the gift of dragonsong from her father, she who had raised armies of the dead and sang the dragon Sajani back into eternal slumber, and in so doing had saved them all. She had become a hero from the old stories, her shadow grown longer with each minstrel’s retelling.
Of the Quarabalese queen, made a refugee along with those of her people who had escaped the Seared Lands, there were a few mentions, a few wondering glances, but these Maika brushed aside with a humble smile. “Let the night be eclipsed by the bright new dawn,” she told her aunt Yaela, “as it always was, as it should be—for the best stories, the best plans, are woven in secret and told in whispers.”
Now the imperators in their splendid armor led their host toward the shining fortress, and every eye of Atualon shone with tears of wonder as they advanced, line upon line, their ranks swollen with the braided and antlered and horned heads of those who had been Zeerani warriors, Salarians, and pirates of river and land. Dragon helms of gold and lapis glowed in the sunlight, sword and spear flashed bright with pride as the Dragon Queen flexed her claws for all the world to see.
Such an impressive display of force had not been witnessed for ages, not since before the dark days of the Sundering. They came to the Sunrise Gate and halted in front of the walls. There stood women and men in the new blue-and-green spidersilk robes of the Divasguard, armored with snarling helms of Sajani and armed with newly made shamsi, single-edged swords of rare red iron, a gift from the queen of Quarabala as a gesture of goodwill and gratitude.
Maika smiled when she saw them and smiled again at the many Iponui woven in among the imperators, the shadowsworn standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Sulema’s newly bonded Baidun Daiel.
In front of the gates stood an assemblage of persons most of the celebrants at best knew by name. Bretan il Mer, who had been named king of Salar Merraj now that his mother and the wicked Bashaba were among those whose bodies decorated the outer ramparts. He was accompanied by his brother Soutan Mer, and a score of Salarian troops all wearing the blue-and-green badge of those sworn to Sa Atu.
Gaia, daughter of Davidian, had been raised to the position of imperator general in honor of her father’s sacrifice. In her blue mail she had the bearing of a hero of old, and stood beside Umm Nuara First Mother, Askander First Warden—and the bonesinger Ani, whose magics were no longer forbidden under Atualonian law and who appeared now younger in age than her former students.
The parens of Atualon, emissaries from Min Yaarif and even from the distant city of Sindan, all vied with one another for positions of importance. Leviathus ap Wyvernus ne Atu—the pirate king—stood near his lovely new bride. Yaela herself was the center of a great deal of gossip and speculation as the erstwhile apprentice of Aasah, aunt to the refugee queen, and newly named Illindrist in her own right.
Yaela caught Maika’s glance and smiled. Those jade eyes, which had been watching over Maika from the moment of her birth, shone with fierce pride and determination.
Kentakuyan a’o Maika i Kaka’ahuana li’i stood amid the personages of Atualon, unremarkable in borrowed finery, accompanied only by Tamimeha and Akamaia. Wide-eyed and waifish she appeared, and knew it—she had perfected the look well.
She met Yaela’s look with one of her own and inclined her head slowly.
A hush fell upon the crowd as from the host the Divasguard appeared in their green dragon’s helms, red shamsi raised in salute. Beneath these strode the Dragon Queen, stern-faced and splendid, looking neither to the left nor the right. At her side walked Ismai ne Mur, the Lich King and king consort, fearsome and glorious. Each bore a dragon mask—hers of blue and green gems, his of gold—and were robed in white-and-gold. If ever a pair of lovers were fit to inspire hearts to song and to deeds of glory, Maika thought, it would be these two.
Bretan il Mer strode forth from the assemblage and met them. He bent his knee and his bare, horned head in obeisance, took the thin golden circlet from his brow, and held it up to them.
“The king of Salar Merraj begs your forgiveness, your Radiance, your Arrogance,” he said to them, “and mercy for his people, if not for his person.”
Sulema took the golden circlet from Bretan and placed it back on his head. Then she raised him to his feet and kissed either cheek before slapping him so hard that the big man’s head snapped back with an audible crack.
“Mercy is granted, where it was not asked,” she replied, “and you shall be our steward in the east, to keep our roads safe, and the hearts of our people true.” The king of Salar Merraj bowed again, and the crowd erupted in roars of approval, understanding that a civil war had been averted ere it had begun, and that an empire had been born, both in the same day. Then Bretan faced the crowd and spoke in a clear voice.
“Peoples of Atualon, of the Zeera, of Salar Merraj,” he said. “Peoples of the west and east, listen to my words and rejoice! For the queen has come among you, the Dragon Queen of Atualon. Raised in the harsh Zeera by her mother, the formidable dreamshifter Hafsa Azeina, trained by her father Wyvernus Ka Atu, forged as a blade upon the anvil of Quarabala, in the deadly Seared Lands.
“Before you stands Sulema an Wyvernus ne Atu, warder of the long sleep of Sajani, guardian of the Dreaming Lands, keeper of the Song of Dragons. Sulema Firehair, first of her name.” He paused, then added, “Long may she reign! Shall she be known to you as your queen and dwell among you, above you, keeping watch and faith from Atukos on high?”
Before the crowd could react to his words, Atukos itself answered for them all. The dragonglass walls erupted in green flame and blue, a scintillating display so profound that for a moment the brilliance of the queen’s fortress eclipsed the sun itself, and it seemed as if Akari Sun Dragon cried out a welcome to his daughter.
As quickly as they had burst forth the flames subsided, but where the walls of Atukos had been dark and forbidding, they became bright with the promise of abundance.
It would be seen as a blessing from Sajani, Maika knew, and that was just as well. The land that had been sundered was made whole, and the world that had been broken was made good by the coupling of the Dragon Queen and her consort, the twining of the songs of Sajani and Akari, as should have never been torn asunder.
“Yes!” someone shouted, then more joined in, until the host cried out with one voice, then fell to their knees, overwhelmed by the tableau before them.
Hannei, first warrior of the Zeeranim, stepped forward and set a golden casket by her feet. She drew forth a headdress of lionsnake plumes the likes of which Maika had never seen. The plumes were of purest white chased with gold, blue, and green. These were set in a crown of red gold crusted with diamonds and precious jewels. She held this above Sulema’s bowed head, and grinned, and spoke to her queen in hand-speak. They both laughed, and it pained Maika to hear the sound that came from the first warrior’s throat.
Tamimeha grunted. “They are using Zeerani runner signs,” she whispered. “The silent one says to her sister, ‘I have killed this little thing for you.’” She looked impressed. “That must have been the grandmother of all lionsnakes, to boast such plumes. I have never heard of such a feat.”
Maika looked long at Hannei, who wore two swords upon her back, the beaded vest of a Zeerani warrior, and a medallion around her neck that looked more than a little like stars hung in the Web of Illindra.
That one merits watching, she thought. Perhaps even eliminating. But she said nothing, not even to Tamimeha whom she trusted, for a spider’s secrets were best kept to herself. Her own web was yet unfinished.
Sulema knelt, and her sword-sister placed the crown upon her brow. Then Hannei raised a circlet of white gold and yellow and placed it upon the bowed head of Ismai ne Mur, at which point the crowd again erupted in a deafening roar. Horns were blown, flowers thrown, and babes raised high in the air by parents who wished their small new souls to be lifted and blessed by this grand moment.
And when will our moment come? Maika thought. When will we set foot upon the lands we were promised, and raise our own flags, and our own babes to be blessed in peace under the sun? When will our sundered lands be made whole again, and good, when will the tears from the Night of Sorrows be dried? When? She looked upon the face of joy, and bit back tears of despair, of anger.
Lost in the tumult, Yaela—swathed in spidersilk of gold, weighed down in precious gems as befit a high princess of Saodan and beloved of the pirate king—appeared at Maika’s elbow, leaned close, and whispered in her ear,
“Long live the queen.”
Maika turned, stared into her aunt’s cursed, all-seeing eyes, the eyes of Pelang—so like her own.
She smiled.
“Long live the queen.”
Akari Sun Dragon had long since flown beyond the horizon crying for his lost love, and the night unfurled silken-soft. Those warriors and wardens, mothers and craftmistresses—indeed, every member of the prides who could walk or ride, had left their homes before daybreak and traveled to the Madraj. Only a handful had been left to guard their borders.
Dreamshifters were there, most of them newly raised too soon from apprentice or journeyman. Their youthful faces were hard and determined, nonetheless. Moonslight and starslight shone upon the faces of the Zeeranim, a remnant of a remnant, little more, but they yet breathed. “Where there is life,” old Theotara would have said, “there is yet hope.”
In the days of their glory, hordes of mounted Ja’Akari had rolled across the Zeera like thunder and the songs of the Mothers had fallen like gentle rain. Hannei had looked upon the census books, upon the thousands and thousands of names of the ancestors, stretching back in a proud line back to the dawn of days and the first ride of Zula Din. Time, and war, and the Dragon Kings of Atualon had worked their fell magics upon the people. Had almost driven the Zeeranim to extinction.
Almost, but not quite.
The voices of their ancestors echoed in the halls beneath the seats of the Madraj. They called for kishah, for vengeance. They called for her. Hannei, alone in the deep heart of the Madraj, looked up at her people and allowed herself a small, hard smile.
They have not killed us yet, she thought. We are stronger than they know.
The sword-sister of her childhood had argued that the people might someday regain their former glory, that the young riders and young vash’ai might again form bonds of kinship and blood, that they might once again breed great herds of asil, take up bow and shamsi, and work their will upon the world.
“Saghaani,” Sulema had argued, years ago, “there is beauty in youth.” They were young, they were strong and unconstrained by the failures of their elders. They would find a way to secure a future for the people. If there was no way to be found, they would make one.
“Ehuani,” young Hannei had countered. “There is beauty in truth.” She had seen neither beauty nor wisdom in an attempt to deny the inevitable. The time of the Zeeranim was over and done, and the world would move on without them.
They had both been right, if only through ignorance. There was beauty in all things. In truth, in youth, in death…
In vengeance.
The clouds to the east glowed an angry orange-red, seared with torch and bonfire, and the night was rent with sound. Hard sounds, angry sounds, hammer and anvil, whip and shout. The Zeeranim, who had never in their history traded in human flesh, had refused honorable deaths to Ishtaset’s people, the Mah’zula, choosing rather to enslave them and bend their backs to labor. From the ashes of Aish Kalumm a new city was rising, one with walls and towers for archers, with narrow stairs and deep dungeons, with armories and forges and stables for war-horses.
Aish Kalumm itself was no more, nor ever would be again. Aish Kishah, this city would be called, the City of Vengeance.
She stood upon the very ground where Tammas had once danced with Azouq and Dairuz, beneath the moons, in those lost days when the world had seemed a good place in which to live. The sky grew dark as a bruise, dark as old blood. Dark as a scream with no tongue to give it voice. The moons Didi and Delpha raised themselves in the sky thin and sharp as pale shamsi, and they were pointed toward Atualon. It was an omen of death if ever Hannei had seen one.
Khutlani, she admonished herself. Your mind is too small to hold such big thoughts.
Hannei could hear the breath of the people of the prides, hot with long-suppressed anger. She could feel their heartbeats shivering through the air like the drums of war, could feel the silent horn-blasts of their impatience. The wind shifted and she could smell the cat musk, stronger than ever. Eyes flashed in the deepening dark, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds. Low growls and soft snarls punctuated the silence, and a warm presence curled heavy in the back of her mind. They were there, in the night, watching and waiting.
For too long have we watched from the shadows, a voice snarled in her head. Too long have we waited. It is time to hunt.
A great fire roared to life, shattering the night. Hannei’s heart leapt in her breast like the flames, hot and hungry. A gasp rippled across the assembly like wind through sand, and somewhere a baby cried. Even this far from the people Hannei could feel the tension of held breaths, of bellies hungry for what crumbs the Dragon Kings and Queens in Atualon had left for them.
The prides’ most powerful dreamshifter stood before her, above her, wreathed in flame. Once a sickly boy, weak and shy, he had been claimed by the moons as their own child, had walked among the stars and through time.
“I have seen the future,” he had told her, touching her face, “and it is us.” Now he stood hale and whole and powerful, naked skin gleaming gold in the firelight, eyes dark and deep as the furious stars.
Daru held in one hand a horse-head staff of some strange metal, and a pale stone globe in the other. As he raised the staff above his head, Inna’hael—first kahanna of the vash’ai—bled out from the shadows to stand beside Daru. He threw back his head and roared, and the desert sang in answer to his call. No vash’ai had ever seemed so magnificent, no dreamshifter so formidable, as they.
Nothing in Hannei’s short, brutal life had prepared her for a moment that felt so right. As she stared up at them, man and vash’ai, dreamshifter and kahanna, the tears streamed down her face hot as blood.
The child chose that moment to announce herself with her very first kick. Hannei laid a hand over her belly and stared unblinking into the fire, into the future.
Remember this night, little warrior.
Hannei felt her sa, the breath of her spirit, quiver like a star trapped in Illindra’s web. She refused the fear that would have risen in her soul, consigned it to fire and smoke and the memories of childhood.
This is our world now, she thought, mine and my child’s. And his.
As the newmade slaves hurried to light torches all around the Madraj, Hannei felt hope—wild, fierce, and terrible—rise from the ashes and curl itself around her heart. This was the night she had dreamed of, fought for, lived for. No longer would the Zeeranim be as children seated before a stranger’s fire, fed on crumbs and pity and denied their birthright. No longer would their children be hunted, their warriors dismissed, their voices go unheard. They were born of the desert, bred of the blood of Zula Din, beloved of Akari.
We are not alone.
Never alone, the soft and deadly voice agreed. Never again.
The wind picked up, and the Zeera sang, and Hannei’s heart sang with it.
Three Zeeranim stepped into the light. One was Ja’Akari, tall and proud, and in her hands she bore the Book of Blood. The second was Ja’Sajani, straight and true, and in his hands he bore the Book of Asil. The third was a mother, gravid with child. In one hand she bore a stylus of bone, in the other a bowl made from the fresh white skull of a woman. Hannei looked upon this, noted the broken nose, and smiled.
Rehaza Entanye, she thought. I would recognize that face anywhere.
The three were naked, even as she was naked, for under the moons and stars all women, all men are equal. Their faces were painted to honor the vash’ai, their skin deeply dappled as well, for each of them had long been Zeeravashani, and their kithren had not abandoned them even during the recent troubles.
Their heads were bare, new-shorn, and what little hair had grown back had been rubbed with ash and fat so that it sprang up from their scalps like pale manes, in the old fashion. These three were among the first to have been made Aulenui, the First People come again, a new and stronger pride born from the ashes of the weak.
The Ja’Akari and Ja’Sajani opened their books, each to the first blank page. Hannei held her arms out from her sides, like the wings of a bird, and stared without flinching into Daru’s eyes as the young mother jabbed the stylus into the flesh of Hannei’s inner arms and let the blood drain drip, drip, drip into the broken-nosed bowl. When enough of Hannei’s life had been drained away the mother dipped the stylus into the skull of her slain enemy and wrote in the Book of Blood with a tidy, deft hand.
“Nazmah Din,” she intoned, “born Hannei of the Shahadrim, daughter of Deaara and of Mazuk Ja’Sajani of the line of Zula Din. Also, Hannei Ja’Akari, champion of the Zeeranim under Sareta Ja’Akari Akibra, also—” She glanced up, and with Hannei’s nod of approval she finished. “Also known as the slave Kishah, renowned among the pit fighters of Min Yaarif.” She went on for some time, naming skirmishes in which Hannei had fought, and the battle in Atualon, and those people whom Hannei had killed and whose names she could remember. Her dalliance with Tammas son of Nurati was noted, and his bloodlines, and that he had died, and that she had loved him and of that love had conceived a child.
When the mother had exhausted the story of Hannei’s short life she used the blood, now cooling and congealing, to write in the Book of Asil. In this book she named those horses which Hannei owned—her mares Mekkia and Lalia among them, as well as Zeitan Fleet-Foot and Ruhho the brave-hearted black, and Azouq, and others whose owners had gifted them to her as tokens of goodwill. Last named was Atemi True-Heart, who had once belonged to a sword-sister. That sword-sister had passed into Atualon, never to return, and so care of the fine golden mare had been passed to her.
Hannei pushed aside the pain in her heart. Though Sulema an Wyvernus ne Atu yet lived and ruled from Atukos, Sulema Ja’Akari was gone from the world. Atemi belonged to the people, and with them she would remain.
By the time they were finished, Hannei had stilled her pain and stifled regret. The books were carried away with reverence—of all the treasures in Aish Kalumm, these alone had been spared by Ishtaset and her riders, and they were precious—and Hannei walked, alone, up to the roaring fire and to Daru.
Dark eyes old and wise peered out at her from a stranger’s face, a stranger who smiled with Daru’s smile and spoke from Daru’s heart. They burned like stars, as though they would sear away the layers of her names and find her worthy. The words, when they came, were deep and resonant, and the shadows leaned in close to hear them.
“Hannei Shahadri.”
“Nnnnh,” she refuted, shaking her head. There are no Shahadrim here, only the people, now and always.
“Nnnnh.” Again she shook her head, more vehemently this time. The truth of the world has broken my heart. I am a warrior no more.
“Kishah of Min Yaarif.”
“Nnnnnnh!” There are slaves here, but I am a slave no more.
“Umm Hannei.”
She laid a hand over her belly again, and for a moment said nothing. The singing sands fell silent. And then, reluctantly, Hannei shook her head and said softly,
“Nnnh.”
A mother must have love in her heart and healing in her hands, she knew with bitter regret, and I have neither. This child would be raised by the Mothers, as was good and proper.
Daru’s eyes flickered in acknowledgment of her pain and sacrifice, or for some other reason, Hannei was not sure. Inna’hael growled softly as Daru raised his horse-head staff and touched Hannei’s forehead, softly, just between her eyes.
It felt, oddly enough, like a kiss.
“Who stands before me?” he asked, and then, for her ears only, he added, “Who stands beside me?”
Hannei brought her hands up and replied in hunter-speak.
It is I.
“Nazmah Din I name you before the people, of the line of Zula Din, first of your name. I see you. The heart within you, the sa and ka burning bright.” As he spoke, more of the Zeeranim gathered around them. “Ehuani I name you. Mutaani I name you. Saghaani I name you. Kishahani I name you. Nazmah Din you shall be to us now, in our hearts and on our tongues.” He took a deep breath and held it, and then in a voice that roared like the wind he went on.
“I name you Nazmah Din, first of your name, first among sisters, first queen of the Zeeranim.” He brought the staff down once, twice, three times on the ground between their feet.
Even as his words rang across the Zeera, even as those who stood around them responded with a chorus that rolled and swelled and sang like the very desert from which they had come in the long ago, Paraja padded from the fallen night to stand at her side. Beauty she was, and death. She butted her head against Hannei’s—Nazmah Din’s—chest, looking well pleased with her new-bonded kithren.
The stupid humans take a queen at last, she purred. There may be hope for you yet.
Inna’hael threw back his head and roared, a sound that made her feet tingle where they met the earth, and hundreds— perhaps thousands—of vash’ai added their voices to his, a sound which had not been heard in the Madraj for long lives of men. Paraja did not deign to answer. She was a queen, herself, and answered to none, but she dug black claws into the soft sand and purred.
Nazmah Din had been found worthy. Her heart burned fierce in her breast, hot with love for her people and the night and the sweet singing sands of home. She met Daru’s eyes. He smiled and bowed low.
“Long live the queen.”
His name was Ba’esh, son of Perthor son of Iftallen the Damned. “Nightmare Man,” they called him, and “Shadow King.” For a thousand years he had existed— he would not have called it living—without song, or sleep, or hope of death. These things had been stolen from him, as punishment for another man’s crime.
The tattered cloak swirled around his ankles as he bent forward and climbed the steep path into the Jehannim. Though the day was as harsh and unforgiving as any other, he did not feel it. The searing gaze of Akari avoided him, just as the Lonely Road was closed to him. He was, of all things that had ever been, singularly alone.
A harsh cry, and a fall of rocks. He glanced up, peering through the ruined mask that hid his ruined face, and caught the flicker-flicker of harsh shadows as a herd of mymyc fled before him. He was a man with no song in his bones, no dreams, and no hope for tomorrow.
He was the Nightmare Man, and the world was his nightmare. All he wanted—all he had ever wanted—was to sleep.
Ba’esh lifted his face into the wind, opened his eyes wide to the dawning of yet another day that should not have been—
—and screamed.