Race the Sands

by Sarah Beth Durst

  He felt a hand land heavily on his shoulder. “You all right?” a man asked.

  Yorbel blinked at him, and for a moment could see only the soothing gray of a balanced soul. He forced himself to concentrate on the silhouette of the man until it resolved into a bearded man with a tuft of gray hair around his ears, a bulbous nose, and a wide mouth. “It’s been a while since I’ve been to a market.”

  The man chuckled. “You had that look. Can I point you in the right direction? That way”—he gestured to the left—“you’ll find some of the best pastries in all of Becar. My wife bakes them, so I have to say that, but it happens to be true.”

  “Tell me, please, where can I find the recordkeeper for the kehok auction?”

  “Ah, you’ll want Overseer Irin. She keeps tabs on this section of Seronne.” The man pointed her out—a tall woman in a red robe who strode between the cages. She carried a leather-bound book tucked under one elbow and had the imperious look of someone in charge. I should have spotted her myself, Yorbel thought.

  “Thank you,” he said to the man. He wanted to repay him with words of comfort about his aura, but he remembered that he was here as an ordinary traveler. “I’ll be happy to buy from your wife, once my business is complete.” The man smiled at that, and moved on to his own business.

  Yorbel trailed behind the red-robed woman, trying to catch up with her, but she was crossing the market at a fast clip. He was breathing heavily by the time he got within a few cages of her—a life in the temple hadn’t prepared him for a day of exertion. She’d paused to examine three stacked cages, making notes in her book.

  The seller, a shorter woman with scars on her arms, watched the overseer anxiously and then heaved an obvious sigh of relief when Irin tore a piece of paper from her book and handed it to her.

  As the seller scurried away, the recordkeeper lingered by the triple-stacked cages as she updated her book, which gave Yorbel a chance to catch up to her. Before Yorbel could introduce himself, though, she spoke. “You’ve been stalking me. Poorly.”

  “Apologies, Overseer Irin,” Yorbel said with a slight bow. “I did not intend to alarm you, but I’d like to take a look at your records.”

  She raised both eyebrows. “No.”

  “It’s important.”

  “To you, perhaps.”

  “To the family who hired me.” Yorbel reached into his tunic and displayed the augur’s pendant, then tucked it back in. He was proud of himself for the discreet phrasing. He’d given the matter careful thought on the journey to the market. Lots of families hired augurs for various reasons.

  “Oh. One of those.” Overseer Irin did not seem impressed or even surprised. He wasn’t sure what reaction he expected, but it seemed he wasn’t the first augur to come to this kehok auction. He’d planned a more elaborate lie, but maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. “Revenge or mercy?” She sounded bored.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Look, there are only two reasons a family hires an augur to search for a kehok: either its former self was one of their loved ones, and they wish to show off the so-called greatness of their own souls by forgiving him. Or its former self wronged one of their loved ones, and they wish to exact their revenge. Which is it?”

  Neither choice was exactly it, but Yorbel was relieved that Overseer Irin hadn’t immediately guessed his true purpose. That meant he wouldn’t have to hide his identity as closely as he’d feared.

  It was an interesting yet simple ethical dilemma: deceiving people blemished his aura, but the harm he’d cause by revealing his true purpose would cause far worse damage. Shading the truth harmed no one but himself and made that the obvious choice.

  Didn’t it?

  It was important that people didn’t realize he was looking for the late emperor’s soul. He might not be connected to the daily concerns beyond the temple, but even he knew it would be bad if people lost faith in the augurs’ ability to read a soul’s future. And the augurs having misread the emperor’s soul would be a disaster.

  And we thought we were seeing riots now . . .

  “Suppose it doesn’t matter. Their gold is just as good either way.” Overseer Irin held out her hand, palm up, and waited.

  Belatedly, he realized she expected him to pay her.

  He had no idea what the standard bribe of a kehok auction official was, but he knew how much gold he carried and how many markets he had to visit. He laid a gold quarterpiece in her hand and wondered how badly bribery scarred his soul and hers.

  She didn’t budge.

  He added a second gold quarterpiece.

  She closed her hand, and she passed him the book.

  “I’m taking a break,” she informed him. “If you don’t know how to read, that’s your problem.” She then strode off, away from the kehoks and toward the enticing aromas of market food.

  She should not have required a bribe, and he shouldn’t have acquiesced. But the alternative . . . It is remarkable what a person can justify. First deception, then bribery. He had devoted a lifetime to the study of ethical behavior, but had never had the opportunity to test it in himself. It was shocking how easy it was to feel moral while committing acts he’d previously labeled immoral. And how easy it was to feel smugly self-righteous while doing so.

  He wrestled with his guilt for a moment, and then he leafed through the book, deciphering her scrawled handwriting.

  By the time Overseer Irin returned, he’d found the information he needed: this market had two new-soul kehoks and six whose auras had not yet been checked. Luckily, none had been sold. He jotted down the names of their sellers and cage numbers in his own notebook, and he returned the records to her.

  He then consulted his list and walked with more purpose through the rows of cages until he found it: a massive crocodile with thick, powerful legs. He’d make a great racer, Yorbel thought. He didn’t know much about the races, beyond what all spectators knew, but it was obvious this one had impressive leg muscles.

  Yorbel spread his feet in a wide stance and settled his breath. Peering into a creature’s past life was more challenging than viewing the current state of its soul. It required a higher level of concentration and the ability to sort through irrelevancies—

  “You wanna buy?” A woman’s voice cut through his thoughts.

  “Just looking,” he replied.

  “If you’re just looking, then keep moving. Others want to look and buy.”

  He spared her a glance. She looked as deadly as one of the kehoks, with daggers strapped to her muscled arms and ankles, as well as a sword dangling from her waist. “I may want to buy, after I look. A minute to contemplate, if you please.”

  She fell silent.

  He focused on the kehok. The aura was the usual swirl of gray, red, and white streaks. Layer by layer, he picked that apart, looking for the shape underneath the shadows. Even though the new vessel retained no memories of its own life, the soul remembered. Its imprint was there, so long as he could sort through the present and future enough to see the past—

  “Fast runner, this one,” the seller said. “See those hind legs? Sign of a winner.”

  “Do you mind?” he said icily.

  “You trying to win a staring contest? Fancy yourself a rider? Pardon me for saying so, but you don’t look like one.”

  “One moment, and I will answer all your questions.”

  The seller quit talking.

  He focused again on the kehok. Gently, he sifted through the shadows until he saw the shape: a human with evil threaded through her soul, who had done terrible things, who had—

  He pulled his mind back from the maw of darkness.

  It didn’t matter what this kehok had done as a woman. She hadn’t been the late emperor.

  Yorbel left the seller without answering a single one of her questions.

  By the time he had completed testing all eight kehoks in Seronne Market, the sun had eaten the day. The sellers were tossing thick black sheets over the kehoks’ cages, shielding
them from the night. Other vendors were closing their stalls.

  Of the eight, five were not new souls. The other three had been, respectively, a murderous woman, a traitorous man, and a former child whose soul was so twisted that it had made Yorbel physically ill to view. He’d vomited behind a barrel.

  Viewing all eight in one day had left him drained. It was more than he’d ever tried to see at one time, far more tiring than reading auras of ordinary people.

  He made his way to the bakery that the kind man had told him about and purchased a bag of sausage-and-onion rolls. He’d planned to visit two markets a day, but he’d be lucky if he reached the second before all the inns closed for the night. He wouldn’t be able to view their kehoks until morning.

  At this pace . . .

  He didn’t want to think about what that meant. Or about how much he’d be slowed if any of the kehoks with new souls had been sold, which they likely had been. He’d been lucky here, in that all the new or untested kehoks were still at the auction, but that wasn’t going to be true everywhere he went.

  I’ll work as hard as I can, as fast as I can, he promised himself. He could do no better than his best. But telling himself that didn’t help. He was beginning to feel an urgency he hadn’t felt before. This wasn’t so much an adventure as a race. And that held a certain irony, seeing how kehok-racing season would be starting soon. Because then the countdown would begin.

  Two weeks. Can I visit them all that quickly?

  For Dar’s sake—for the empire’s sake—he hoped so.

  He caught the final ferry toward the next town with a market large enough for an auction, Strak. It was as crowded and odiferous as the morning ferry, but this time he was so weary and frankly odiferous himself after spending the entire day in the muck by the kehok cages that he didn’t notice. He let the sound of the evening bells sweep over him and tried deliberately not to see any of the auras of the fellow passengers.

  Landing near Strak Market, he disembarked, paid an innkeeper for a room, slept until his head quit aching, and then repeated the day. This time he was not as lucky: Strak Market had only three new-soul kehoks, but two had been sold. He obtained the buyers’ addresses and visited two of the three training grounds before he ran out of daylight.

  He finished his visits the next morning, continuing with the same lie he’d told Overseer Irin in Seronne Market. The only surprise was how easily the lie was accepted.

  Except it wasn’t a surprise. People wanted closure. So hiring an augur to find the shame of your family was, apparently, far more common than Yorbel ever imagined. Though it pained him each time he told the lie, no one questioned it.

  Midday, he took the ferry to Esmot Market. He decided to wear his augur robes and display his pendant, since the explanation for his presence had proved so plausible. He paused to speak with the recordkeeper when he heard a disturbance between the cages—raised human voices, not kehok screams.

  The recordkeeper, a squat, sweaty man whose name Yorbel had already forgotten, heaved a sigh. “Third time this week. Can’t even keep the troublemakers out. ’Cause it’s everybody these days.” He waddled toward the shouting, which was starting to set off the kehoks.

  Yorbel followed, smoothing his robes and straightening his shoulders. He felt almost excited. At last, here was an action he could take that wasn’t morally problematic!

  One of the sellers was red-faced and spitting as he shouted at a customer. He jabbed a beefy finger into the customer’s shoulder. “Don’t care about your sob story! We all got problems! Blame it on the pretend emperor!”

  Before Yorbel could reach him, the customer grabbed the seller’s finger and twisted it back. “Hands off, you greedy, twisted kehok lover!”

  With a roar, the seller launched himself at the customer, and they hit the ground, landing at Yorbel’s feet. Seeing him, the seller’s eyes went wide. The customer twisted to see what had distracted the seller, and then he scrambled back up.

  “Is this the best way to resolve your problems?” Yorbel asked in his best teacher voice.

  “Uh, um, no, Your Holiness,” the customer said.

  “Resolve your differences in a civilized, empathic way,” Yorbel instructed. “Kindness will benefit you both in the end.” He then turned to the recordkeeper. “We have unfinished business, sir.”

  As the customer and seller began haltingly to come to an agreement, Yorbel stepped aside with the recordkeeper. He managed to keep from crowing in satisfaction. For the first time in days, he felt more like himself.

  “Wish I could keep one of you around all the time,” the recordkeeper said. “People have trouble remembering their best selves in times like these. No offense meant, but wish you augurs would hurry up and find that River-drowned vessel.”

  Ignoring the recordkeeper’s comment, Yorbel concluded his business, learning the names of the trainers who owned the kehoks with new souls. Even after visiting them, he couldn’t stop thinking about the fight he’d witnessed—the combatants had blamed Dar.

  If the government stasis didn’t end soon, would they all blame Dar? Was Gissa right? Was Becar so fragile that it couldn’t weather a little waiting? Maybe it is, he thought. Maybe stability and peace were flimsy things that had to be nurtured and protected.

  Now he kept his ears open as he visited market after market. He overheard hundreds of such anxious conversations: The poor were suffering while the government was suspended. Halted construction projects meant hundreds of out-of-work construction workers. Unsigned trade agreements meant shortages of spices, textiles, and other goods. It was one thing to hear it in the abstract; it was another to see the fear and worry on the faces of men, women, and children. They needed the late emperor’s vessel to be found as badly as Dar did. Yorbel helped whenever he could, soothing tempers and spreading serenity.

  A week later, after visiting multiple markets, training grounds, and racetracks, he’d examined so many condemned souls that he felt as if he would never be clean. He felt stained within and without, to the point of worrying about the state of his own aura. He understood better why the council encouraged augurs to keep their distance from kehoks—they feared the spread of the monsters’ depravity. And they hated what the kehoks represented: their collective failure to save every soul in Becar.

  The longer Yorbel searched, the more unlikely he thought it was that the late emperor could have been reborn as a kehok. These souls were so shriveled and damaged. If the late emperor had a propensity for this kind of pure evil, then one of the high augurs would have detected it. The corruption he was seeing among these monsters was so absolute that Yorbel knew he’d been naive to think it could happen in a moment.

  I’m wasting my time. He should be with the other augurs, scouring the nests and burrows of more pure creatures, instead of wading through the dregs of society while Becar crumbled around him.

  But he’d committed himself to this task, and he couldn’t return to Dar and tell him he was probably wrong but that he hadn’t thoroughly confirmed it. He had to be absolutely sure.

  Others will search those purer creatures. This task is mine and mine alone.

  By the time Yorbel reached Gea Market, it was two days before the first of the qualifying races, and the kehok auction was abuzz with gossip, predictions, and excitement. It was also nearly empty of kehoks. Most had been sold to trainers with wannabe riders.

  Worse, Gea Market had no version of Overseer Irin. Their recordkeeper was collecting bets on the qualifying rounds—he didn’t care about tracking the past lives of the kehoks. He cared about which racers were fit and ready for the first set of races. Everyone seemed to be gambling this year, and the whiff of desperation around the season made Yorbel feel sick.

  “Apologies, Your Glorious Holiness,” the recordkeeper told him, as he accepted yet another bet from a woman who looked as if she couldn’t afford even enough for her own dinner. “Can’t help you.” He then smiled slimily at the poor woman as he marked her down for five gold pieces
.

  Yorbel left him and resorted to interviewing the sellers directly. It was both tedious and time-consuming, and by the end of the day, he had a low opinion of kehok sellers. Without any direct profit, they were singularly uninterested in helping him.

  Getting fed up, he approached one more seller, a man with arm muscles so massive he could have arm-wrestled a kehok and stood a fair chance of winning. Glaring at everyone, he was standing in front of two caged kehoks, one coated in slime and the other in spikes.

  Yorbel felt a headache squeeze his skull. Sending his mind across the two kehoks, he could tell immediately that neither were new souls. He considered moving on without talking with the muscled man, but duty propelled him. “Sir, I’m searching for a kehok bearing a new soul.”

  “Don’t have one,” the man grunted, without even looking at him.

  “Yes, I know,” Yorbel said testily. “Have you sold one within the past three months?”

  “Maybe. Don’t know. You people charge so much for aura readings that I didn’t have a chance to have my catch properly tested.”

  “Then you did have one that was potentially new? Would you mind sharing with me the name of the owner who purchased it?”

  “Are you going to buy one of my kehoks?” The muscled man shifted his weight, like an elephant leaning to his side. He finally looked at Yorbel.

  “I’m not. All I need is information.”

  “If you’re not buying, I’m not giving out.”

  Oh, for River’s sake. The sun was nearly down. The market would be closing soon. He didn’t want to spend another second here. “Fine. If your information leads me to a kehok I want to purchase, I’ll pay you a twenty percent finder’s fee. Charge it to the Augur Temple in the Heart of Becar.” He yanked out his medallion so the seller could see it.

  The man inspected it. “Been a long time.”

  Yorbel stuffed his pendant back into his tunic. “Excuse me?”

  “Augurs buying kehoks. Used to be they’d buy them for the emperor. Last two emperors didn’t like the races much, but in the old days, they say the Becaran emperor had the fastest kehoks on either side of the Aur. You buying kehoks for the emperor-to-be? Is he reopening the royal stable?”