A Desert Torn Asunder

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  “I’ll need the help of my friend, Esmeray—”

  “Granted.”

  “—and even then, I don’t know if we’ll succeed. But I’m willing to try.”

  For long moments Alansal stared at Chow-Shian, but then she took in a sudden, noisy breath. “Then try we shall, Davud Mahzun’ava.”

  In less than the turn of an hourglass, Queen Alansal was leading Davud and Esmeray into the cavern below the Sun Palace. Behind them were the old physic and a cohort of soldiers, two of whom were bearing Chow-Shian on a stretcher. The cavern had completely changed from the root-filled space Davud remembered. Only a handful of the roots now remained.

  “They shriveled and dried,” Alansal told them. “A few days later, the dead ones fell from the walls and ceiling. I had them cleared away.”

  The few that remained wound their way in from the tunnels, up the walls, and connected with one another until they formed one lone tendril that hung down from the cavern’s roof. The crystal was gone, but the tendril remained, a drop of clear liquid falling from it every so often to land with a soft pat on the stone below.

  From that spot, where the crystal had once stood, a piercing column of light shot upward. It was bright enough that it lit the entire, vast cavern, though not so brightly as the crystal in the moments before its shattering. A fog fell from the column of light and spread outward along the uneven floor, collecting here and there in pools.

  Davud stared at the cavern’s roof, where the column of light tapered slightly. “Does it emerge above? Can it be seen in the Sun Palace?”

  Alansal’s brow furrowed. “The cavern doesn’t lie directly below the Sun Palace.”

  “From the slopes of Tauriyat, then?”

  She shrugged. “Not that I’m aware.”

  “Have scouts search the mountain at night for signs of it.”

  Alansal nodded to a soldier, who bowed his head in turn. “I’ll see to it myself, my Queen.”

  Chow-Shian roused again as she was laid carefully on the cavern floor a few paces from the light. The golden irises of her eyes shone as she stared upward.

  Davud knelt beside her. The cold was intense so close to the gateway. His skin prickled from it—or perhaps it was from the gateway’s nature, a doorway to another world. Above them, sheets of light broke away from the central column. They would drift like leaves caught in an updraft, then fade away or recombine with the main body.

  “Are they souls?” Esmeray asked as she knelt beside him.

  “I imagine so,” Davud said as he took Chow-Shian’s wrist. “Esmeray will ground us,” he said to Chow-Shian in Mirean. “You and I will enter the gateway together, but we won’t go far. Today we go to learn, not to do, all right?”

  Chow-Shian nodded, and Davud pierced her skin with his blooding ring. He drank from the wound, quickly closed it off, then repeated the ritual with Esmeray.

  Since the crystal’s shattering, souls near the gateway could easily separate from their mortal shells, becoming wights. He suspected Chow-Shian was on the verge of doing just that. With his arcane senses, he saw her soul glowing from within, while her physical self seemed more like a chrysalis she might shed at any time.

  Esmeray drew a sigil in the air before her, the sign for anchor, over which she laid corpus. Davud drew a more complex sigil that combined soul, pursue, gateway, and reveal. Using the energy derived from Chow-Shian’s and Esmeray’s blood, he allowed both spells to blossom. New senses were opened to him. He became aware of the soldiers, Esmeray, Queen Alansal, and especially Chow-Shian. Her soul was like a skein of wool with one spinning thread being drawn toward the land beyond. Davud followed it and entered a place of deep calm. His breathing, his heartbeat, slowed. He lost feeling in his fingers and toes. Soon he felt as if he were the one being drawn to the land beyond.

  He blinked, and found himself standing before the souls of three others. One he recognized as Anila, his fellow collegia scholar, who’d gone to the farther fields to keep the gate open. He dearly wished he could speak to her but feared that doing so would take him too far—indeed, it felt as if speaking to any of them would risk giving himself over to the farther fields.

  As he waited, hoping Anila would speak to him, the other two souls gained clarity. It came as no surprise that one was Brama, the witty and sometimes cruel street thief Davud had grown up with. The other one did surprise him. It was Rümayesh, the ehrekh who’d tricked the fates into allowing her entry into a place forbidden to all demonkind. Davud thought Brama would be freed from her after passing to the world beyond, but their souls, as they’d been in the mortal plane, seemed inextricably linked.

  “Davud?” he heard a distant voice call.

  It was Esmeray. She sounded worried. But somehow that didn’t seem to matter. As fearful as he’d been only moments ago, he was becoming more and more convinced that speaking to Anila and Brama, perhaps even Rümayesh, was vitally important, for surely that was what Chow-Shian’s visions had intended him to do.

  “Davud!” Esmeray’s voice sounded not just fearful, but panicked.

  He ignored her and stepped closer. She didn’t understand how close he was.

  He felt himself being shaken a moment later. “Davud, come back! You’re dying!”

  Only then did it strike him how far he’d gone. He’d told Chow-Shian they were only going to explore, but he hadn’t counted on how disorienting the experience would be. He was drifting away—from his own world, from the people he loved, from the problems that plagued his home and the desert beyond. Esmeray was right. If he didn’t do something soon, he would die.

  He turned away from Anila and the others and tried to use the thread of Chow-Shian’s soul to pull himself back, but it was so thin . . . and then it was gone. He despaired. For Chow-Shian. For himself.

  Then he felt something tighten. The anchor, the tether to Esmeray. It was holding him. He felt himself being drawn back toward the cavern, but Chow-Shian herself was nearly gone. Her former brightness had dimmed.

  As quickly and precisely as he could manage, he combined the sigils of soul and graft and attached his own soul to Chow-Shian’s. As he felt himself being whisked away, he wasn’t at all certain the spell had worked. He lost sense of her as the rush of blood filled his ears. He felt his chest broaden with breath. He felt the ache of muscles clenched for too long.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw the column of light stabbing upward. He turned his head to find Esmeray, blinking away tears as she held his hand. His fingers felt terribly cold. And his skin was a startling shade of blue.

  Next to him, Alansal’s old physic was bent over Chow-Shian, listening to her heart.

  “Is she alive?” Davud asked weakly.

  Long moments passed before a relieved look spread across the old physic’s face. “She’s returned to us, thank the small gods of Tsitsian.”

  Chapter 17

  Since retrieving the Blue Journals, the Miscreant had sailed many days.

  “Ships, ho!” Ihsan heard the lookout call from the deck above. “The Royal Fleet approaches!”

  He sat at his desk in the captain’s cabin, a journal laid open before him. Sunlight knifed through half-open shutters, casting bands of honey-colored light across the pages, while the Miscreant swayed rhythmically over a stretch of blessedly light dunes.

  Nayyan lay in the nearby bunk, her eyes closed.

  Ihsan spoke to her softly. “Did you hear the lookout?”

  Nayyan shifted, finding a more comfortable position. “I heard.”

  Ihsan glanced at Ransaneh, swaddled in blankets beside Nayyan. Their child squirmed and smacked her lips, then fell back to sleep. “Thank the fates for small kindnesses,” he mumbled.

  Ransaneh had been suffering from colic. She’d hardly slept more than an hour at a time, which broke Ihsan’s and Nayyan’s sleep into interminable pieces. It grew so bad that Ihsan
had offered to watch Ransaneh while Nayyan slept on another ship, thinking they would take turns. But Nayyan had declined, fearful Ransaneh would pass in the night.

  “I would be with her,” Ihsan replied.

  “I know, but”—she blinked languidly, the dark bags beneath her eyes making Ihsan feel more tired than he already did—“I need to be by her side.”

  Ihsan didn’t fault her for it. Mothers and nagging fears were often stalwart companions, particularly with their firstborns. Thankfully, the Miscreant’s rhythm had eased yesterday evening, allowing all three of them a measure of deep, satisfying sleep.

  Even as tired as he’d been, Ihsan’s worries had woke him halfway through the night. Ever since digging up the Blue Journals, he and Nayyan had combed the entries and compared notes, identifying passages from Yusam’s visions that might shed light on the days ahead. The search hadn’t been fruitless, but it was hardly a treasure trove. Yusam saw far, but it wasn’t uncommon for his visions to illuminate some alternate path of fate. It had led to their setting most entries aside as irrelevant, either because they referred to events that already happened or because it was clear they would never come to pass.

  Ihsan had lain awake for nearly an hour, trying to will himself back to sleep. But the more he’d stared at the slats along the cabin’s ceiling, the more he felt the need to get back to the journals—a single clue could mean everything.

  Giving up on sleep entirely, he returned to the desk and continued reading. In a red, leatherbound journal of his own, he had jotted down passages that required further reflection. He returned to one of these as the ship’s skis sighed across the sand.

  In the desert shall five falcons meet. Two are real, three are pretenders. As they sit around a candle flame, a ruby-throated raptor descends upon them. (In the marginalia was written: a kestrel?) The raptor speaks, sharing a tale of how it slew a flock of emerald-crested loons. Before the tale is complete, however, a grinning demon invades, making straight for one of the falcons—the one with the faltering call, the one who is meant to die. The falcon is saved by the ruby-throated raptor, after which the falcon flies west over the city, making for a great gathering of nests among the rocks, where it searches high and low for a heron.

  The passage had drawn Ihsan’s interest because of the first of its symbols, the falcon, an ancient symbol for a tribal shaikh. In the early days of Sharakhai, well before Ihsan’s time, the symbol was coopted as a sign of the Kings of Sharakhai. Two are real, three are pretenders. Ihsan was set to meet with King Husamettín in only a short while. It seemed likely that they were the two falcons. The other three likely alluded to the lesser Kings and Queens. Nayyan, one of the new guard, would be in attendance, which meant there would be two more. What the rest of the entry might mean, he wasn’t sure.

  On deck, Captain Inevra began calling orders, routing them toward the remains of Sharakhai’s once-mighty fleet. Nayyan pushed herself off the bed. She was bleary-eyed, but less haggard than she had been.

  Naked, she washed herself from head to toe with a clean cloth and water from a ewer. She looked over his shoulder while toweling her hair dry. “You would call me a pretender?”

  She was referring to the phrase two are real, three are pretenders—not being one of the original Kings, Nayyan naturally fell in to the latter camp.

  “Of course not.” Ihsan closed his red journal with a thump. “But think of it from Yusam’s perspective. Only your father was dead at the time. Yusam still felt, we all felt, that the Kings would rule over Sharakhai forever.”

  The smile she gave him as she pulled the dress over her head was unsteady. Her comment had been a quip, but behind it lay the nagging doubt that Ihsan didn’t consider her a proper queen. “The heron is a sign of Qaimir, you know.”

  “Of certain houses, Lord Amansir’s among them.”

  “It’s a sign of royalty as well. Like the falcon in the desert, the heron was once used by the Kings of Qaimir.”

  The Miscreant began to slow. They could hear the sounds of the larger fleet: soldiers drilling to the sharp calls of officers, hammers pounding and saws rasping as work crews made repairs to ships.

  Ihsan, meanwhile, sat before the Blue Journal, stunned. Nayyan was right. How could he have forgotten? The entry was from early in Yusam’s reign, nearly four hundred years ago, when the Qaimiri kings used the heron. It made perfect sense that it might refer to the newly crowned King Hektor or, as Ihsan now suspected, the recently deposed Lady Meryam, a woman on the run from her accusers.

  The story of her escape from Amansir’s custody in Mazandir was most strange. She’d clearly had help, which was not strange in and of itself. A fallen queen would still have plenty of allies. But he was concerned that, shortly after she’d escaped, Goezhen’s corpse had gone missing.

  The desert gods were to blame, Ihsan was sure. They continued to play their games. They’d likely arranged for Meryam’s escape and then for her to take Goezhen’s body. The question was why? And what had they asked Meryam to do with it in return for her freedom?

  Soon they dropped anchor, and Ihsan and Nayyan received a captain of the Silver Spears who updated them on a few skirmishes with the Malasani fleet, and on general news of Sharakhai. Soon after, as the sun was setting, Ihsan found himself seated across a fire from Husamettín. Like a meeting of two shaikhs a thousand years earlier, they sat in a trough between dunes. Beyond them, barely visible in the light of the fire and the stars above, stood a circle of twelve tall galleons. More were anchored beyond—over a hundred warships, the remains of the royal navy, once the mightiest force in the desert, now considerably weakened by the war with Mirea and Malasan.

  In addition to the navy proper, they had re-tooled fifty ships to caravan supplies, to scout, and to raid enemy lines. All were outfitted with battle-hardened soldiers. It was not an overwhelming force, but neither was it one that could be dismissed out of hand.

  All is not yet lost in the desert, Ihsan mused—though one would hardly know it from the grim look on Husamettín’s face as he poked the fire with an iron. The King of Swords was often the last to arrive at such meetings, not from rudeness, but because he kept himself so busy. The sheer focus he gave to his work often made him seem unapproachable, but just then it seemed as if Husamettín welcomed Ihsan’s company.

  “I’ll admit,” he said while shifting one glowing log onto another, “sometimes it feels like the others are still out there in the desert, and that one day they’ll come and sit across the fire from me.”

  Ihsan knew precisely what he meant. He’d felt the very same thing. However difficult it might have been to imagine only a few short years ago, the twelve original Kings were now down to two. “Our road has wound in peculiar ways.”

  Husamettín seemed to be staring through the fire. “We should have foreseen more of it.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  Husamettín lifted his head. “You have another way?”

  Ihsan shrugged. “Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that our reign lasted as long as it did.”

  “Lucky?” He practically spat the word.

  “We ruled the desert for centuries, my good King.”

  “We rule the desert still!”

  Ihsan waved to the carpets around the fire, the galleons encircling them. “You call this ruling?”

  “I call it a temporary withdrawal.”

  Though he knew how a prideful man like Husamettín would take it, Ihsan couldn’t help it. He laughed. “I’ve never known you to be such an optimist.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know me as well as you thought. I’ve always been clear-eyed about you, though. I always knew you would betray us.”

  Ihsan shrugged. “Betrayal is such a harsh word. I was looking out for my best interests, as were we all, in our own ways.”

  “Yes, well, my interests are still with Sharakhai.” He stabbed th
e iron into the fire, sending embers skyward. “Mark my words, Ihsan. The city will be ours again, then you and I will have our reckoning.”

  Ihsan was saved from responding when Nayyan entered the circle of light. She stopped immediately. “What’s wrong?”

  Husamettín sat in stony silence.

  “Nothing to worry about.” Ihsan patted the space on the carpet beside him. “A brief discussion of the straits we’re in, which was bound to stir up a raft of emotions.”

  Nayyan didn’t seemed convinced it was as simple as that, but she took her place next to Ihsan just the same. Soon King Alaşan, the son of Külaşan the Wandering King, joined them. Next came Queen Sunay, the daughter of Sukru the Reaping King.

  Five falcons, Ihsan mused.

  Queen Sunay, who’d inherited her father’s vulpine looks, opened with a report of her dealings in Sharakhai. She’d been working with several militant groups, people loyal to the Sharakhani Kings. With their help, she’d orchestrated a series of attacks against Queen Alansal’s forces. “We’ve been thwarted at every turn,” Sunay said with disgust. “Alansal’s soldiers root us out. She’s slain many. More have been taken to the camps inside the House of Kings, our camps, for questioning. We’ve been unable to loosen her grip over Sharakhai. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the weeks since her forces stormed the city, she’s managed to cement her command over the House of Kings, the temple district, and the Fertile Fields.”

  The young, charismatic Alaşan flicked some sand from the carpet before him. “It’s her water dancers.”

  “Well of course it is,” Sunay shot back. “The question is what we’re going to do about it.”

  Husamettín motioned to a woman in a battle dress standing beyond the light of the fire behind him. “I have some fortunate news to share.”

  As the woman approached, Ihsan realized she wasn’t a Blade Maiden, as he’d first assumed, but a Kestrel in a red dress. Instead of greeting the gathered Kings and Queens, she was staring at Ihsan. She looked familiar, but Ihsan couldn’t place her.