“Yes, see but not touch. Do you know how maddening that is?”
Davud’s mind drifted to an oud parlor, where the two of them had spun candlelight. “Esmeray, if you can feel it, then you can guide me.”
“I told you, I can’t work magic.”
“No, but you could provide the structure, the framework.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” She spoke the words, but they were soft, uncertain as a sand mouse.
“Try.”
Esmeray’s bright white eyes cast downward. She stared at the lock, her hands gripping the iron bars of her cell window, her expression turning to one of sorrow. “I’m scared, Davud.”
“I know.” The admission revealed how staggeringly deep her fear ran—Davud didn’t know her well, but he knew her well enough to know it took a lot for her to admit a thing like that. “But you’re not alone, Esmeray.” He reached out with what little power he had from his own blood. “Guide my hand.”
The power was there, raw and unformed. It was the sort that could harm him if he wasn’t careful. But he’d grown adept at summoning and holding power before its use.
For a long while she remained perfectly still. He was sure she’d decided against helping him, that the combination of the loss of her magic and her fear of the Kings was too much to bear, but then he realized she was trying.
He felt it, on the very edge of perception: a skeletal framework so diaphanous, so frail, it might crumble the moment he lent power to it. It didn’t, though, and he found it hungry for more. Esmeray was the trellis, he the verdant growth, each helping the other, becoming stronger over time, until finally the spell’s potential reached the point where they had to use it or suffer the effects of its feedback. Davud wasn’t adept enough to do so, but Esmeray was, and guided it against the lock’s inner mechanisms with a deft hand. Davud felt the tumblers shift. Felt each lift to the proper height. Felt the lock itself turn, the metal creaking softly as it did. The steel tried to foil the workings of the spell, but Esmeray was a master craftsman, guiding all until it was done and the door shifted on its hinges.
Doing the same to his manacles was trickier, but they managed it together, then unlocked her cell door as well. By then Davud was standing there, waiting. He could see the fear and doubt warring within her, which was sobering after the joy and perfection he’d felt while weaving spells with her. Esmeray’s reality is not yours, he told himself. He wasn’t dependent on other magi to walk the red ways. Esmeray now was.
It struck him then how callous he’d been, how uncaring of her feelings. He was still new to magic, yet it had already become a part of him. What must it be like for her, a woman who’d known magic since she was a child, whose entire family knew its touch? Magic had defined her, and it had all been stripped away.
He squeezed her hands. “We’ll make Sukru pay for what he’s done.”
Esmeray squeezed back. “And see Anila freed.”
He wasn’t sure if she was ready for it, but he was grateful that she’d be by his side. “Yes,” he said, then led her down the hall toward the dungeon entrance.
They worked together to cast a sleeping spell on the gaoler. It was morning, but the man was halfway there already, leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling. After unlocking the door, Esmeray took the gaoler’s knife and used the tip to carve a shallow wound along her wrist.
When she held it out to him, Davud paused. She seemed both vulnerable and powerful in that moment. He placed his lips to the wound, felt the rush of power. But he wasn’t thinking about spells and escapes. He was thinking about Esmeray. Without knowing when he’d made the decision to do so, he leaned toward her and pressed his lips to hers.
She stiffened, surprised, then backed away and held two fingers to his lips. “We’ll have time for that later,” she said, offering the blood once more, though not, Davud noticed, without a quickly hidden smile. He took more, then healed the wound with a sizzling swipe of his finger.
After Esmeray guided him in another spell to make attention slip from them—a more refined spell than the one Davud had used to make it through the checkpoint at the city walls—they were up and into the palace. They passed many in the halls of Eventide, and yet the two of them walked calmly, hand in hand, and no one stopped them. Few even looked their way, and those who did turned away as if they’d seen Davud and Esmeray every day of their existence in the palace.
Soon they came to an ancient door, iron-barred and peaked at the top—the one Hamzakiir had shown Davud in his dream world. It was Meryam’s shrine to Alu, where they would find her book of sigils.
“She won’t have left it unattended,” Esmeray said.
“No,” he agreed.
This spell, at least, Davud knew well—a way to perceive the traces of extant magic—but Esmeray still helped, adding slight modifications to the sigils he drew upon his hands, which had the effect of broadening the search and intensifying the results. Davud passed his hands over the door and saw it, a dull red glow.
“The trick”—like Davud, Esmeray was staring closely at the door’s surface—“is to unweave the threads of the spell without breaking them.” Working together, they unraveled the spell of detection, holding the threads in place as if the spell were only half-cast, then unlocked the door and stepped inside. “Then we retie them as they were.” She did exactly that, with a skill that made Davud blink in awe.
Inside, they found a room of stone walls and stark decoration. There was a marble pedestal with a basin of salt water—water from the Austral Sea, no doubt. On the walls, banners depicted the crest of Qaimir and Alu’s symbol, a wave crashing against stone. There was a padded bench to kneel upon and pray before the altar, which was a simple block of granite.
Of Meryam’s book, however, there was no sign. Not that either of them had expected anything else; Queen Meryam wouldn’t have left it just lying about. They searched the room more closely, looking for hidden compartments in the padded bench, in the walls, in the floor, and the massive piece of granite. They even tried to look under the bowl of water, but the blasted thing was fixed to the pedestal beneath. They searched for spells as well, as they had on the door, but found nothing.
Exasperated, and more than a little nervous, Davud said, “Could she have woven a spell too fine for us to detect?”
Esmeray shrugged, looking behind the Qaimiri banner for the tenth time. She let it slip through her fingers to lay against the wall, looking as intense as Davud had ever seen her. “She might have.”
Suddenly they heard several sets of footsteps in the hall outside. A woman’s voice accompanied them. A self-assured voice. An angry voice. “A full council,” she was saying. “The greater Kings and the lesser, or their vizirs if they’re unavailable.”
“Of course,” came a man’s voice.
“You’ve found King Kiral?”
“Not yet.”
“Then find him,” she was saying, “and tell him to wait for me in my apartments.”
There was a pregnant pause. “I’m to tell King Kiral to come and wait for you,” he said, “in your apartments?”
“Just so.” And after a brief pause, “Now!”
“Yes, your Excellence.”
One set of footsteps stopped, then resumed and dwindled, while the other approached the door.
Esmeray waved Davud close. He moved toward her as silently as he could. She was already casting a net outward, a new framework for a spell. With an ease that surprised him, he added his power to it, and followed her guidance, feeling the complex sigil as it burned within her mind, to cast the spell that was meant to mask their presence. Davud felt it fall about his shoulders like a cold, heavy cloak just as the door opened.
Queen Meryam, a small woman in a dress that might have been sky blue were it not so filthy with dust, swept into the room and closed the door behind her. She had tiny, half-healed wounds all over her face, a
s if she’d lost a fight with an exploding pane of glass. She smelled like a campfire.
She didn’t move to the altar, as followers of Alu often did after travel, but to the pedestal and the basin of water atop it. Without preamble, she slid one hand into the water and reached far deeper than the depth of the water would seem to have allowed. She reached so deeply everything up to her armpit was submerged. Except the water hardly made a ripple, nor did it spill over.
When Meryam withdrew her arm, she held a book in her hand. Her arm, the cloth of her sleeve, and the leatherbound tome were all perfectly dry. She took the book to the pedestal and flipped it open to study a dozen different pages, peering at the sigils carefully, reading the notes beneath. She drew several in the air before her and they glowed until she wiped a hand through each, banishing them so that she could start anew. She remained in place for nearly an hour, with Davud and Esmeray only two paces away.
Suddenly Meryam stood. She shivered violently—a thing that made her skeletal features stand out—then cast her gaze about the room. Davud’s skin prickled and Esmeray stiffened in his arms. He swore he felt something lick the surface of the spell that hid them. But then Meryam’s suspicions seemed to pass. She closed the book with a snap, shoved it back into the water, and left the room with the sort of stormy look that didn’t bode well for whomever she was about to see next.
They both breathed a sigh of relief as her footsteps diminished.
“Goezhen’s sweet kiss,” Esmeray whispered.
“Please don’t invoke the name of the gods,” he whispered back as they moved to the basin.
Even knowing there was a spell upon it, it was difficult to find, much less unravel. But they did, and eventually Davud felt confident enough to reach in and retrieve the book. It felt heavy, not merely due to its considerable weight, but its importance to the events unfolding in Sharakhai.
“Where now?” Esmeray asked.
“We can’t stay here,” Davud replied.
Remaining in Eventide would be dangerous. Meryam could return at any moment and when she found the book missing she’d likely scour the palace to find it. And they couldn’t just go to Hamzakiir now. They needed time to study the book, to find the sigil Meryam had used on him.
“We need time to think,” he said.
“Time to plan,” Esmeray added.
They both looked at each other, remembering what Meryam had said. She’d called a full council, which gave them the perfect place.
They said it together.
“The Sun Palace.”
Chapter 60
THE SMALL DUNGEON beneath the Qaimiri embassy house had only two cells. Cicio slept in one of them, leaning against the corner formed by the metal bars. He might have lain near the walls if it weren’t for the rats. The farther he could get from their holes, the longer it took them to pluck up their courage and nip at his clothes or his skin. Even so, it only afforded him a few minutes of sleep at a time. He woke to the feel of scuttling and kicked them away with a long, frustrated shout.
“You need to be faster,” a young man said in Qaimiri from the cell across from him. Cicio didn’t know what he’d done to land himself in a cell, but he seemed to have been there a while. “Break their necks. Leave some lying about. They won’t bother you after that.”
Cicio stared at him closer, realizing the dirt had made him look older than he really was. “That’s a load of shit.”
The boy shrugged and lay back down. “Suit yourself,” and he lapsed into silence.
Cicio gave up on finding sleep. His head against his knees, he listened to the wealth of sounds coming from the floor above: clomping footsteps, crisply barked orders, the thud of furniture being moved. Over the past few days, the servants who’d come to bring food and change the chamber pots would occasionally linger with the gaoler and talk, spilling news of Meryam or the assault on the city or other, more mundane tales. Through these small exchanges, Cicio began to glean a better picture of the state of things. The war was ready to boil over again. After a strange pause in their offensive, the Malasani were mobilizing once more. But it might not be so easy as they’d thought. Duke Hektor had arrived only the night before with the vanguard of the Qaimiri fleet. And now King Kiral had summoned a war council, surely at Meryam’s behest.
It gave Cicio some small hope. The necromancer, Anila, had refused to accept their help, choosing to remain in Sukru’s bloody palace when escape stood before her. The entire, stupid, risky operation had been for nothing, and ended up allowing the Enclave to surprise them when they returned to the workshop attic. Cicio laughed silently. Maybe Anila hadn’t been so shortsighted after all—had she come, her leap from the pan would have landed her right in the fucking fire.
There were only two bright spots in this whole mess. First, Ramahd himself was free. He’d struck Prayna across the face, stunning her, then ran down the street. The Enclave had tried to stop him—Nebahat had even managed to strike a glancing blow with a flickering green ball of energy released with the wave of his hand—but after that, Ramahd had been too quick, too adept at cutting them off from their spells. Perhaps more importantly, Mateo was free as well. Surely he’d spoken to Duke Hektor by now? If not, he soon would. And once Hektor was on their side, everything would change.
Footsteps clomped heavily down the stairs, making the steps groan. Cicio turned, expecting to find the gaoler, but instead saw the silhouette of a man, portly around the middle, broad across the shoulders, and bald save for a strip of reddish-brown hair that wrapped around his head.
“Come to gloat?” Cicio asked as he stood and faced Basilio, Qaimir’s primary ambassador in Sharakhai.
“After all you’ve done, I think a bit of gloating is in order.”
When Basilio stepped closer, Cicio noticed the finery he was wearing, the sort one would use for a formal function. He had a smug look Cicio wanted to drop kick off his face. “You’re back from the Enclave,” Cicio said, starting to understand what Basilio’s return to the embassy house might mean. “The Enclave has bowed to Meryam’s will . . .” It was only a guess but he could tell from Basilio’s satisfied reaction that he’d hit the mark.
“Yes,” Basilio said, “and your gambit has failed.”
Cicio felt cold. He’d returned to the city with Ramahd, the head of a King, and a plan, but Meryam had undone them at every turn, and now she’d secured yet another piece of the power structure here in Sharakhai. Making it all the more bitter was what Basilio was hinting at with their failed gambit. He hardly dared think it, lest it turn out to be true, but it was right there on Basilio’s smug face. Something had happened to Mateo or Hektor or both.
“That’s right,” Basilio went on, “Duke Hektor was caught spreading your lies. He, Mateo, and a dozen co-conspirators were found to be traitors to the crown and hung last night.”
Shit, Cicio thought. Fucking shit. There had been a flurry of activity last night. Horses arriving. Muffled conversations in the courtyard. There might have been a struggle. The boy in the cell was giving Cicio a look like he understood. But he couldn’t understand. They’d come so close, only to fall short in the end.
“Mighty Alu,” Cicio breathed, “you were King Aldouan’s man once.”
There might have been shame in Basilio’s eyes, but before he could reply a voice called out, “Yes, and now he’s my man.”
Footsteps took the stairs down, sounding crisp and light, hardly making the old boards creak. Meryam, dressed in a fine, hay-colored gown cut in the flaring Qaimiri style, reached the grimy dungeon floor and strode toward Cicio’s cell. Her hair was pulled into a tight bun with stylish wisps hanging just beside her temples. Tiny white pearls accented the dress, echoing those strung on the bracelets and earrings she wore. Clashing with the refined look was a simple, red-beaded necklace, some childhood memento given to her by Meryam’s sister, Yasmine, who’d died at the hands of Macide Ishaq�
��ava and the Moonless Host.
Basilio, his mouth working soundlessly, seemed as surprised as Cicio at her sudden presence.
“Leave us,” Meryam said.
The look on Basilio’s face, deflated as a child caught stealing, was enough to make Cicio smile. His smugness was short-lived, however. As Basilio bowed and took the stairs up, Meryam’s state of health registered. There’d been rumors, even down here in the dungeon, of how badly she’d been wounded in her battle against Queen Alansal, yet here she was, thin as a beggar girl, perhaps, but otherwise looking perfectly healthy.
“You’re using the elixirs.” She had dozens of the fabled draughts at her disposal, perhaps hundreds. There was the cache Hamzakiir had stolen from King Zeheb’s palace, plus any King Kiral had managed to secret away. It was how she’d been able to push herself so hard these past many months.
“To the victor the spoils,” Meryam said as she paced before his cell. As the light struck her at different angles, he noted the tiny, faded scars all over her face. “Did Ramahd tell you about the man King Sukru had in his employ, the one who could unravel spells, who could cut them off before they even began?”
Ramahd had never mentioned him, but Davud had. “Some fellow named Zahndo.”
“Zahndr,” Meryam countered, “and he had some utility.”
Some utility? Cicio thought. And then understanding dawned. “You want Ramahd by your side. And you want me to help you get him.”
She held up her thumb and forefinger and peered at him over the gap. “We’re this close to taking the Amber Jewel, Cicio. Sharakhai is nearly ours! What use is there in fighting me anymore?”
She might be doing this only to get to Ramahd, to capture him and have him killed, but he suspected there was more to it. She was trying to hide it, but there was a tightness to the way she was talking, like this was more important to her than she wanted to let on. In the end, it was a matter of looking at the greatest threats to her obtaining what she wanted. With the Kings in hand, who was left, and who was Ramahd best positioned to help her defeat? “It’s the Enclave. You want him to protect you against the Enclave. You don’t trust them.”
Beneath the Twisted Trees Page 57