Beneath the Twisted Trees

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  She raised both hands in a placating gesture. “Do this, and I’ll wonder when the blade will be taken to my father. I’ll question my every step, and it will undermine everything we’ve already worked for. The balance is already so delicate.”

  “You have enough hatred?” he asked her calmly. “You have enough power?”

  For the first time since her mother’s death, she allowed her contempt for him, a thing that burned inside her like molten rock, to show on her face. “Oh, have no doubt of that.”

  Sukru considered Banu. He lifted the kenshar, placed the tip against her temple, and dragged it roughly along the skin of her cheek. Anila had never seen her sister look so scared. Sukru, meanwhile, looked like a fishmonger bored of his work. “See that you are.” He handed the knife back to the Spear and swept toward the door. “We start with your mother tomorrow.”

  The Silver Spears followed, taking Banu with them. She only had time to give Anila one look that was half relief, half terror before the iron door boomed shut.

  Anila stared at her mother’s still body. She’d been delivered to the cavern inside a wooden crate. As Sukru’s brother, the Sparrow, had been, she was wrapped in oiled canvas, cradled by ice. Her skin was ashen. Her face slack.

  “Enough of your bloody reunion,” Sukru said as he approached her over the spongy surface of the cavern. “It’s time to begin.”

  Anila ignored him. She looked up at the tall, glowing crystal, then ordered the Silver Spears to shift the crate so that her mother’s feet were pointed at it. When it was done, she stood at her mother’s head, ran the backs of her fingers over her mother’s cold skin, touched the smile lines along her cheeks. How rarely her mother used to smile, Anila mused, how lovely she was when she did.

  Come to me, Anila said to her. Come near, for I may only have one chance at this.

  “I said begin.”

  Anila lifted her gaze. “If you wish your brother to be whole, you’ll grant me the time I need.”

  For the first time in all their time together, Sukru seemed taken aback—not out of concern for Anila, nor her mother, but for his brother. In that moment the trappings of the Reaping King were stripped away, leaving only the brother of a man who’d died. He became human. Mortal. And it made Anila that much more furious with him, that he would cause so much pain to get what he wanted, like the fables of the petty child king of Kahram La. In her mother, Anila saw her sister, Banu. Saw her own childhood: growing up in and around the halls of Goldenhill. And she saw Sukru strip it from her with the thrust of a shard of wood.

  Her anger was a pile of embers waiting to be awakened. She would see her mother reborn. She would bring her back from that distant shore to live the life she was meant to live. And then she would see Sukru dead. She would never have a better chance at it than this. Sukru would be wary, but he would also want to see how her mother woke. And he would be calm in the knowledge that he had Anila’s father and sister hostage. It was merely a matter of striking quickly, before he had a chance to react.

  When Sukru was a ghul in service to her, she would force him to kill the Silver Spears. The same ones had been here all along; the same ones who’d beaten and tortured Banu. They would die, and then she would raise them too, and force them to bring her to Banu and her father. And if any stood in her way, she would take their lives as well. Of all of this she was certain. As certain as she’d been of anything in her life. All it took was her will. And her will, Bakhi as her witness, was as vast and deep as the Great Mother herself.

  So it was that Anila began the ritual. So it was that she followed the dim thread of her mother’s soul to the world beyond. So it was that she gathered it, cradled it like gossamer, and bore it toward her mother’s cold, lifeless body. It was a ritual performed in slow increments. Often the currents of life and death carried her farther away, or threatened to tear her mother’s soul in two, but Anila was ready for it all.

  When at last the soul was near, she felt her mother’s awareness expand. A world she thought she’d left behind was hers once more. There was pain. She had no desire to return, but Anila coaxed her. Remember your daughters. Remember your husband. Remember the feel of the desert sun on your face, the feel of the wind as the Great Shangazi stirs. Remember the glow of the twin moons, their beauty as they shine over the desert’s Amber Jewel.

  It was enough. Her soul returned. Filled its former vessel.

  Her eyes twitched. Her lips parted, and she took a shallow, rasping breath. Sukru rushed in and Anila stepped away so he could tip a vial of the softly glowing elixir over her mouth. He allowed only drips at first. Like parched earth that shed rain too quickly, she could only take so much at one time.

  Anila watched, rapt, seeing color return to her mother’s cheeks, her lips, then her forehead and hands. She heard her mother’s breath change from a terrible rasp to something like normality. Saw her fingers begin to twitch. Her eyelids begin to flutter.

  The elixir was nearly gone. It was nearly time.

  Anila breathed deeply of the cool cavern air. The scent of decay was strong from both Sukru and her mother, but she isolated Sukru’s. The scent of the adichara was strong in him, a hint of the elixir’s incredible healing powers, but she sensed another part as well, the decay the elixir had been masking for four hundred years. That was what she needed to intensify. It would accelerate the rot within him, and once it began, there was nothing he could do to stop her.

  She’d just begun when she sensed something else in the cavern. Something other.

  She paused her efforts. Peered deeper into the cavern’s darkness. Was there an outline there? A man hidden in shadow?

  Her mouth went dry and her skin prickled, starting at her scalp and running down her back, arms, and legs.

  There in the darkness was a well of power, a thing as old as the Shangazi itself. A thing that had had a hand in its making, or surely in its shaping once forged by the elder gods. It was no mortal that studied her from the darkness, no demon of Goezhen’s making, but a god. Bakhi had come, though why, she had no idea. Perhaps the ritual had drawn him. Or her desire to kill Sukru. He might have come to take Sukru by the hand and lead him to the farther fields himself.

  But what if he hadn’t? What if he’d come to watch over Sukru instead? What if, after granting the Twelve Kings protection those centuries ago, he’d come to ensure that nothing ill befell Sukru?

  All the confidence she’d had moments ago drained from her like wine from a broken ewer. Her hands shook terribly. She gripped them tight lest Sukru see. The worry that Bakhi would stop her, or that he would wreak his vengeance upon her and her family, had taken hold, and once it had she couldn’t shake it. What could she do but watch as Sukru finished? What could she do but stand by as he stepped back and gave her one sharp nod, allowing her to approach her mother’s side?

  She did, and all the joy she should have felt at seeing her mother reborn was instead a cold pit of terror yawning inside her, because at any moment Sukru might change his mind and take her from Anila all over again.

  “Anila?” her mother said with chattering teeth.

  “Yes, memma. I’m here.”

  Anila helped her out of the cold wooden crate and wrapped her in a thick wool blanket. She held her mother tight, knowing her last, best chance to escape had just passed her by.

  “I feel so cold,” her mother whispered.

  “I know, memma,” Anila whispered back. “I’m sorry.”

  As she huddled within her blanket, shivering terribly, Anila led her from the cavern, refusing to look back toward that veiled corner. She felt the god’s stare on her back, though, felt her own awkward movements more acutely because of it.

  She might have sensed amusement. Or perhaps it was a deep-seated pleasure. She couldn’t be sure. And then she was gone, down the darkened tunnel, the cavern’s purple light dimming behind her.

  Bakhi watch
ed from the recesses of the cavern. He waited while the woman left with the soul she’d returned from the land of the dead. What a strange thing to behold, to feel in his bones. So near to the crystal, it had felt for a moment as if he were on the other side. How sweet the feeling. And then the soul had crossed and the way was closed to him once more.

  Ancient grudges stirred within him, but he suppressed them immediately. He hadn’t given up yearning for the touch of the elder gods—none of them had; none of them could—but he’d long since given up trying to justify the actions of the elders. They’d done what they’d done, and that was that.

  When the King and his soldiers in silver left the cavern, he stepped from darkness and approached the crystal. As his footsteps faltered, then stopped altogether, he had the strangest feeling. Moths in one’s chest, mortals called it. Before this wondrous thing, an artifact crafted from the blood of mortals, he felt new again. Full of hope and wonder but fear as well, just as Iri and Annam and Raamajit and all the gods of creation had prescribed.

  He longed to touch it, especially after what he’d witnessed, but he’d grown accustomed to halting undeniable urges. Instead, he lifted his right hand. Cradled within was a bird. This creature, the very thornbill the necromancer had raised, had found its way to the surface, desperate for food, desperate for water.

  Its desires had changed, however.

  It fluttered, tiny within the cage of his hand. When he spread his fingers wide, the bird remained, resting on his palm. It blinked, turned its head this way and that. Then flew straight toward the crystal.

  He heard a soft thump as it struck. The bird’s dead body fell lifeless to the roots, but Bakhi hardly noticed. Like a ripple in a pond, the bird’s soul had returned to the land beyond, and the waves of that event were still emanating slowly outward. He reveled in each one until he could feel them no more.

  He stood staring down at the bird’s body. The roots opened, drew it down, until it was gone.

  He left the cavern, taking one of the many winding passages, and as he walked felt traces of the trees that rimmed the city. He wondered at all that had happened since the night he and his sisters and brothers had granted the Kings their power. Walking the knife’s edge of fate was difficult for any length of time, but they’d managed it for over four hundred years, and now their careful curation of events had led them here. Things were nearly at an end, with so many elements positioned just so: the Kings themselves, Mirea and Malasan encroaching on the city, Qaimir ready to enter the fray, Kundhun stirring, the tribes riling. A thousand thousand threads, all interweaving, telling a greater story, not that of mortal man, but of the gods themselves.

  He left the tunnels choked with roots and eventually came to a cavern of crystals, the very one that Macide and the Moonless Host had traveled through on their way to King Külaşan’s hidden desert palace. He took the same path and reached the catacombs, a set of stairs, and finally the palace itself. Soon he stood in the spot where Çedamihn Ahyanesh’ala had killed Külaşan the Wandering King. In that grand space, beneath a dome of wondrous mosaics, stood another, a woman as tall as Bakhi with silver hair and skin of palest blue.

  “Were you sensed?” she asked in the old tongue of the desert.

  “I was,” he answered in the same tongue, “as you foresaw.”

  “And still you went . . .”

  “How could I not?”

  “I tell you, it is unwise.”

  “It changed nothing.”

  “So you say, but even you cannot see the threads the fates themselves now weave. Do not make the same mistake as Yerinde.”

  “A course you approved.” The sound of his laughter filled the space beneath the high dome. “Old enmities die a slow and painful death, do they not?” When Tulathan chose not to respond, Bakhi went on. “Come, there’s no part of you that wishes Yerinde might be left behind?”

  It was an ancient theory to which all the gods subscribed: the notion that to meddle directly in the lives of mortal man was to bind oneself to them, to bind oneself to this earth.

  “I bear no ill will toward her, not any longer, but if she so desperately wishes to forge the fate of this world, then so be it. And I don’t recall you arguing when Yerinde put forth the idea, nor when Thaash provoked her into making the effort herself.” Yerinde had seemed desperate, almost blinded, when they’d talked of stopping the Kings from investigating the crystal. It was Yerinde who’d put forth the notion of its creation after all, she who’d spent centuries creating more primitive versions of it.

  “Well”—Bakhi shared a wink with Tulathan—“she always has had difficulty weighing the consequences of her actions.”

  Tulathan’s smile was somehow both pleasant and wicked. “That she has.”

  The two of them walked, falling in stride with one another with an ease that felt ancient as the dawn. “What now?” she asked. “Have things been set aright?”

  Bakhi nodded. “I believe they have. The doorway works.”

  “And is it strong enough?”

  “No. Not just yet.”

  “When?” she asked as they followed the stairs up toward the desert.

  “Not long.”

  Chapter 49

  WHEN IHSAN CRACKED his eyes open the thing that registered first wasn’t the pain. The pain had become a constant, a thing akin to the heat of the desert on a late summer voyage, a thing that plagued him day and night. The pain was his enemy, but it was an enemy he knew he couldn’t be rid of, and so it wasn’t that, but the sound of his own moaning that entered his mind first. Moaning helped soothe the pain, helped him forget the ruin of his mouth.

  As he pushed himself off the cell floor within the Malasani prison ship, spit gathered. It made him swallow, which made the pain soar, which made him salivate more. Then the coughing started. Each one felt like swallowing a lit torch. On and on it went. He buried his head between his knees and pulled himself tight. It did little to stop the coughing, but it kept his body from convulsing so much.

  Slowly, the coughing fit subsided and the pain diminished, but it was slow as the sunset. He smelled the blood trickling down his throat. He even tasted it a bit, but only barely. His mouth felt vacant and pathetic, like the temple of a forgotten god. As if to prove to himself that it had actually happened, he rubbed the jagged remains of his tongue against the back of his throat. It burned, but like a canker he couldn’t stop working it.

  Two days had passed since that day on the Malasani capital ship. The image of Surrahdi crouching over him played over and over again in his mind. The Mad King’s face had been crazed. Eyes wide with that terrible grin that showed each and every one of his long, yellow teeth. And the smell! Goezhen’s balls, Ihsan would carry it to the farther fields. A fetid stench that accompanied the sawing motions of Surrahdi’s arm as he used Ihsan’s own knife—Ihsan’s own knife! He nearly laughed at the irony—to take his tongue from him.

  “For the love of all the gods,” came a woman’s voice, “close that tireless mouth of yours.”

  For a moment, Ihsan did. He’d forgotten he wasn’t alone.

  This deck of the prison had a dozen small cells along its central passageway, each set aside from the others with iron bars. In the cell across from him was a bedraggled woman. She leaned against the hull, hands hanging over her propped-up knees, staring at him as if he were the cause of all that had gone wrong in her life.

  “You lost your tongue. Fine.” Her Sharakhan was heavily accented by the more guttural Malasani language. “Do I have to suffer for it?”

  He stopped moaning.

  “Good. Now keep it that way.”

  With that she closed her eyes. Even with her cut lip and black eye and all the other contusions and cuts marring her face, even with exhaustion weighing on her, Ihsan could tell she was beautiful.

  Despite his troubles, despite his pain, he was curious. What combination o
f events had led her here? For the first time since Surrahdi had skipped away with his tongue, Ihsan tried to speak. The pain it summoned brought tears to his eyes, and caused another coughing fit.

  It was starting to subside when the woman’s eyes shot open and she spoke with the tone of an oud parlor doorman. “What did I tell you?”

  He realized he was moaning again, and stopped.

  She tried to sleep once more, but perhaps felt Ihsan’s gaze on her because she soon gave up on it. “Is it true, then?” she asked in Malasani. “You’re King Ihsan?”

  What point was there in denying it? He nodded, then pointed to her and tilted his head just so, a gesture in Malasan which was synonymous with asking a question.

  “I’m Haddad.”

  Though the movement pained him, Ihsan bowed his head in greeting. She didn’t return the gesture.

  “It must be difficult seeing everything you love taken from you.”

  Part of him felt like he should be angry at this turn of events. And he supposed he was, but more for Nayyan’s sake than his own. Nayyan and their unborn child. This felt like a reckoning that had always been coming. A reckoning he and the others all deserved. If anything, he was surprised it hadn’t come sooner. He couldn’t explain to Haddad, however, so instead he pointed to her in her cell and raised his eyebrows in an expression of irony.

  She looked about at the other cells, which were empty save for the one at the end, which held a figure dressed in rags with a rat’s nest for hair. “Yes, I know how it feels, but I was never a King. I didn’t have so far to fall.”

  He crept closer to the cell bars and reached out into the passageway between them. Into the dust he drew—upside down so that Haddad could read it—the Malasani sign for how?

  She stared at the sign, then laughed a bitter laugh. “The better question is how you got here.” When he pointed to the dusty boards again, she shrugged. “I listened to the wrong man. You?”