Realm of Ash

by Tasha Suri

  “Most likely,” he said.

  “Well, let’s find it. I want to look across the city.”

  They climbed a ladder to the roof. Then they stood at its edge and stared—between the buildings—at the true Irinah that lay beyond the borders of the city.

  The desert.

  In the dark it was almost blue-gold, great rolling waves as night-dark as an ocean. The sky above it was a deeper black, and beneath it the desert seemed to shine.

  This was the true Irinah. Not the dilapidated, half-abandoned city of Jah Irinah that pilgrims had populated, walking its ruins like bright ghosts. Irinah was the desert.

  “My father’s armies were all driven away from this desert,” Zahir murmured, staring out at the waves of darkness with something like awe. “By daiva, by the very sand—they said it flung them back, and those that weren’t flung were consumed.”

  He leaned forward, dangerously close to the edge. He stared at the sand.

  “Arwa,” he breathed. “I have never seen anything like it.”

  The wind caught her shawl, ruffled her hair. She held her shawl still.

  “I have something to tell you,” said Arwa. “While we’re alone.”

  He dragged his gaze away from the desert. Took a step back, giving her his focus.

  “Go on.”

  “I taught Sohal a rite,” said Arwa. “The rite I used in the House of Tears. He’s…” She hesitated. “Zahir. He’s like me.”

  “How so?”

  “In the way of blood, Zahir,” she said sharply. Then she bit her lip. Ah. She hadn’t meant to snap so. “It isn’t an easy thing for me to say. It is a sign of my trust in you that I am. Being part Amrithi—well.” She curled her fingers tighter in the cloth. “When I was small… once, my mother took me in the palanquin to watch an Amrithi family being driven from the edges of our hometown in Hara. The family had traveled far. They were just a mother and father—two children. They had their heads shaved and were beaten. And then they were driven off with sticks. And that was considered kind.

  “She wanted me to see,” Arwa went on, “so I would understand why I had to be better than my mother’s Amrithi blood. Only barbarians, she told me, scrape at the edges of the civilized world. Only heathens are not allowed in.”

  He touched a hand to her sleeve. She took it. Held it tight and turned to him, resting against him. She felt him exhale and wrap an arm around her, ever so gentle.

  “Sometimes those who love us harm us,” he said. “I am sorry for it, Arwa.”

  “Don’t be. I’m well enough.”

  “Who am I to argue?” He pressed his face to her hair. “It is only that—well.”

  Only that she was so visibly in pain. Only that her mother’s love was both a comfort and a forever wound.

  “I know,” she said. “But I am glad I have met Sohal. I’ve given him what little knowledge I can. Of—nightmares. Of a rite to manage them. I am glad that… I am not alone. I knew there had to be others like me in the world, Zahir. Other Amrithi living and thriving in the Empire. But to meet one—to truly know, with your own eyes and your own heart, that you are not alone—it’s beyond words. There are others like me, Zahir. Somewhere. Everywhere. I am not alone.”

  He said nothing, only held her against the brush of the wind, the ash raining behind the closed lids of her eyes. The distant glow of the desert welcoming her home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  After a night’s rest, they decided they would enter the desert proper at sunset. Enough time to obtain something to help them sleep, and something akin to a firepit.

  “There’s a guide who claims to be Amrithi,” said Eshara. “He said he can get you safe into the desert to the Maha’s grave, for a price. He’s taken plenty of people before.”

  “You believe him?”

  Eshara shrugged.

  “Believe or not, I have a very sharp and convincing sword, if he tries to trick us.”

  “We can go alone,” said Zahir. “We don’t need to find the Maha’s exact resting place, after all. It’s Irinah’s nature that is the key to our work, not his physical remains.”

  “The desert can be a dangerous place, or so people say,” said Eshara. “I’ve heard all the tales from your worshipful retinue.”

  “We don’t need to go far,” Zahir said firmly. “And this is—personal. We don’t need a guide present.”

  “If we’re lucky,” Arwa said, meeting Eshara’s eyes, “whatever makes the desert dangerous will avoid harming me, and will avoid harming Zahir too because he’s in my company.”

  Eshara’s mouth thinned, but she didn’t argue further.

  As night fell, they donned thick robes, bought from one of the local stalls. They were a pale gray, heavy and hooded, well suited to the sudden storms and bitter night cold of the desert.

  Eshara donned her own, her scimitar in the sash at her hip, bow slung over her back. As Zahir prepared their supplies, Eshara turned to Arwa.

  Arwa braced herself, expecting more criticism. Instead Eshara took her hood. Held the edge of it with great care.

  “I don’t hate you,” said Eshara. “I thought you should know that.” She met Arwa’s eyes. “You remember, I called you a puppet.”

  “I don’t need to be reminded,” Arwa said.

  Eshara shook her head. “I’m not sorry,” she said. “But, I will say, I don’t know what you are anymore, Arwa. I don’t think you’re a puppet any longer. And I’ve found I care, somewhat, whether you live or die.”

  She adjusted Arwa’s robe.

  “So try not to die.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Arwa.

  They left the boarding house in the dark of night, she and Zahir and Eshara. They walked through the littered streets toward the desert.

  “Where are you going, then?”

  Arwa knew that voice.

  Diya strode toward them. She had another widow with her and a couple of pilgrims, looking equally determined.

  “You’re walking into the desert,” she said, looking between them, “the three of you, all alone?”

  “We have work that must be done in isolation,” said Zahir, voice even and smooth. “Eshara will protect us. You have no reason to follow us or fear.”

  “You and her?” Diya said, looking between Arwa and Zahir. “A widow can’t be alone with a man, oh great one,” Diya added, striding forward determinedly. “We will accompany you in order to protect her honor.”

  “I’m already there to do that,” Eshara said dryly.

  “There’s strength in numbers.”

  “Sister,” said Arwa, “my honor isn’t at stake.”

  “Well, we’re coming anyway,” said Diya.

  When Zahir gave Eshara a helpless look, she shrugged and said, “They know the risks. They’ve come here to see the place where the Maha died, but I suppose they’ll settle for watching you perform a miracle.”

  “It won’t be an impressive miracle,” Zahir said, looking hunted.

  “I’ll make them keep their distance,” Eshara said, amused.

  They walked out onto the sand.

  True to her word, Eshara kept the watchers a respectful distance back. Zahir and Arwa made their way down into a valley in the sand, a basin surrounded on all sides by faint outcroppings of rock and vague, wizened trees. It felt like an appropriate place to begin.

  Zahir kneeled down to start a fire. He began setting it in place. Paused.

  “Arwa,” he said. “Look down.”

  She looked.

  The sand had flared out around them, gleaming like it was full of jewel-toned flame. They stared down at it in awe. She kneeled beside him and pressed her hands into the sand, sifting it between her fingers. It fell like an outpouring of light.

  “Gods,” she breathed. She felt shaky. He was staring at the earth, eyes wide and wondering.

  She touched her hand to his. Felt the blood roots, distant, ash-blooded, pulsing between them.

  “Start the fire,” she said.
“I have my dagger.”

  She removed her dagger from her sash. It was the dagger her sister had given her so long ago, when she was just a girl. She made a cut, adding her blood to the flames. He did the same.

  Here in Irinah—the desert where the worlds of the living, dead, and immortal touched—they placed their blood in the flames. It took no more than that. The realm of ash dragged them in.

  And it was nothing like it had ever been before.

  The realm unfurled around them, melding with the mortal world. The sand lost its color, fading to rich silver. The sky darkened further, ink black, pricked with glaring white stars. This was Arwa’s path of ash and the true desert of Irinah entwined into one. In snatches she saw the storm of her path, carving the air with winds that turned like white blades in the air. Around them she saw Zahir’s ink-black trees unfurl, their great grace of branches curling against the air.

  Irinah was a gate binding three worlds. Arwa should not have been surprised by the sharpness of the realm around her—the sheer richness of it, as if it were a place of flesh and not echoes. But she was.

  She looked at Zahir’s face. All the hewn, glittering edges of it, the way it tilted toward her.

  He offered his hand. She took it.

  “Let’s find the Maha,” he said.

  They stepped away from the flames. Their flesh remained where it was, slumped by the fire. But their souls walked. Beneath their feet the sand shivered and settled and turned, as if it lived and breathed, marking the way in rippling waves before them.

  “I think this is my path.” He paused, silent for a moment, then said, “I suppose we follow it.”

  Arwa squeezed his hand.

  “Lead the way,” she said.

  They walked and walked, through the shadows of trees that sprouted from nowhere, through the strangely real hills and eddies of the desert. They walked a familiar path, passing the shadows of the dead, the stars stitched upon a ceiling, the ink of lost books.

  They walked through Arwa’s own dead. She felt the roiling thud of her own heart and stomach, a deep reflexive grief, but this time she didn’t let go of Zahir’s hand, and she didn’t look down.

  “Do you feel any pain?” Zahir asked.

  “No.” She felt as if she could walk forever here, in a place that was mortal ash and immortal dreaming both, walk until the end of time, until she’d forgotten her flesh and her self entirely. The idea was both exhilarating and terrifying. “Do you?”

  “No,” he said. He was staring forward. Through his glass skin, she could see the dark of the night, and glow of the sand, far brighter than it should have been, and far too alive. Through his skin, she saw the shadows of the dead. “But I think we’re nearly there. I can feel him.”

  They took a step forward. Another.

  And there he was.

  The Maha’s ash stood at the end of his desert of dead. Beyond him was nothing but howling darkness, a storm without color, as if dreamfire had thrown a great shadow across the realm. But the Maha’s ash glowed despite the dark, as if each inch of it were suffused with the desert, drunk with the magic of Irinah.

  The lamp of truth, Arwa thought. Ah, how bitter truth could be. Awe and love and grief welled up in her, unbidden and unwanted.

  Where the past figures of ash they’d seen in the realm had been fractured, only partial shadows of the people who had left them behind, the Maha’s ash was eerily perfect. He was not unusually tall or broad, and not as old as she had thought he would be. His face was unremarkable, austere. His eyes were closed.

  Zahir walked toward him. Arwa held tighter to his roots and her own, and followed.

  The sand moved beneath them, wavering like water in the wind’s hands, like a pale and cold fire. They crossed it. And Zahir stopped before the Maha and looked into his face.

  They were the same height, he and the Maha. They had the same sharp bones. Everyone had told Zahir that he had his mother’s look, but standing before the Maha’s ash, it was as if Zahir stood before a dark mirror. His reflection, carved by the smoke of the dead.

  Zahir reached his free hand out, nearly touching the Maha’s. But not quite. Not yet.

  “We look alike,” Zahir said shakily. “I’d hoped we wouldn’t.”

  “You look nothing alike,” Arwa managed to say.

  “Thank you,” said Zahir, “for lying. I appreciate it.”

  His hand moved up, tracing the air around the Maha’s ash. His arm. His shoulder. His close-eyed face.

  “Here,” he whispered. “Here at last.”

  He steeled himself, his face as resolute as it had been on the day he thought his father would strike him dead. Then, abruptly, he crumpled to his knees.

  His head was bowed.

  “Zahir,” she said, alarmed. She kneeled down with him, their roots a great slash of red across the desert floor.

  “I can do it,” he gritted out. “I can. I am only afraid.” Then he shook his head. “No. Not afraid.” He looked at her, face fierce with feeling. “I told you, to fix a broken tool you must understand the intent of its maker. But he built with the purpose of breaking the natural balance for his own ends. He built with an unforgivable intent by unforgivable means. What can I take from his ash, but another way to break the world? But how can I leave his ash here, and say that balance is enough, and let the people of the Empire suffer and die?”

  “You need not do this now,” she told him. “We can stay in Irinah and consider what to do… or. Or we can try to find another way.”

  “And waste all our work, our sacrifice, on my cowardice, my fear of becoming too much the scion of my father’s blood?” He shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Zahir.” She spoke his name as if it would quell him, comfort him. She did not remind him of the price the realm of ash would demand of him. She did not tell him she feared seeing him lost. Her heart ached.

  They both knew the risks that lay before him. They had come anyway.

  She pressed her forehead to his. They remained like that for a long moment, no breath between the hewn glass of their souls, the Maha’s silent ash towering above them.

  She felt him freeze. Felt him pull back, just a little, eyes open.

  “Arwa,” he said. “Do you hear that?”

  Her storm was wavering about them. Silent, wheeling. But…

  Yes. She heard it.

  “Is it the sound of the trees?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. He stood. “No. Those are voices. And I… I think I can hear my mother’s, among them.”

  The wind was moving through the trees, setting the skeletal branches wavering. But the wind was not simply wind. It was a great, sinuous blade, paring the trees down to ribbons of darkness. The dark unfurled, liquid as water and just as river quick, streaming across the sand in great skeins of words that moved and whispered. Arwa recognized those words: They were poetry of the Hidden Ones. The poetry of a lineage that lived in Zahir’s blood and in his soul.

  Zahir hesitated for only a moment. Then he placed a hand to the sand. He raised his palm up, and watched the words slip between his fingers. The voices shimmered, sweet echoes that fell to the sand and curled into silence once more.

  She stared. They had walked so often among the ink-dark trees of his path, his neem and peepal and ashoka. She had not realized, all this time, that they carried his grief within them, just as her desert carried her own.

  “Of course I would find her here,” he murmured. He raised his head, looking at the sharpened, richer beauty of the realm of ash in Irinah’s palm. His smile was sad. “I hear so many voices, and yet I still recognize hers among them. I thought I had forgotten it, Arwa. But I remember now.”

  The voices whispered and shook and tangled about them. Words bloomed through the sand, and seeped like great pearls of sap from the trees of ink. The whispers rose and rose, the words spilled and unfurled, and Arwa and Zahir kneeled beneath the Maha at the nexus of it all, haloed by the roar of a thousand voices.

 
Voices. So many voices, and all of them like a single wave. Perhaps it was the voices that whispered in her ear, then. Perhaps not.

  She thought of the tale of the Maha’s heir: how it had slipped free of the Emperor’s grasp, taking on a vicious life of its own, reared and fed by the faith and discontent of a thousand whispering voices. She thought of the widows and pilgrims who had softened a nightmare, saving themselves unwittingly with worship and grave-tokens alone. She thought of the prayers of Zahir’s followers, their voices rising together and winding and winding into a sound greater than the sum of its parts.

  Their voices had sounded like hope.

  It hit her like a great fist to the stomach:

  The flat, resigned acceptance of death in Zahir’s eyes, when his father named him Maha’s heir.

  The leaden weight of her own heart, when she’d pressed a flower behind Zahir’s ear, and tried to forget what was to come.

  This is wrong.

  Together, they rose to their feet. They had to rise together, bound as they were by blood roots, but Arwa rose numbly, helpless in the grip of her own thoughts.

  Zahir, the first moment she’d seen him. Already entombed, his home wrapped around him like a promise of death, the moonlight a blade upon his neck.

  Zahir standing before the pilgrims as they prayed, his hands in fists, his eyes fixed on her as if she were his guiding star, and without her he would be lost.

  “Arwa,” he said. Just her name. As if it would give him the strength to go on. Then he kissed her forehead, one brush of cold lips, and took a step toward the ash. “All will be well.”

  He reached out a hand. The Maha’s ash was a reflection before him, deep and dark. One touch—the barest touch of his hand—and they would be joined.

  There was no more time to be numb. She sucked in a sharp breath, her distant lungs aching, and wrenched at his arm. She pulled him back, throwing her own body in front of his.

  Behind her, she heard the whisper of ash falling to the earth. Zahir hissed, startled.

  “What—”

  “No.” She hadn’t known she could sound as she did in that moment: so furious and so very afraid. “No, you may hate me for it if you wish, Zahir, but you can’t. You can’t.”