Twelve Kings in Sharakhai

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  She wished she could have gone to speak to Emre right away—gods, the look on his face—but there was nothing for it. She had to finish what she’d started, and then she would go to him and try to apologize.

  Voices came from outside the room. They grew louder, and Çeda could hear Osman speaking with someone, perhaps Pelam. Unfortunately they were quiet enough that Çeda couldn’t make out their conversation. Eventually Pelam’s footsteps receded, and Osman strode into the room and walked behind the rich walnut desk in front of Çeda.

  Osman’s black beard hung down the green silk kaftan he wore. His hair was tied into a tail, the loose curls falling down to his shoulders. He did not sit, however. He stared at Çeda with his bright, expressive eyes—eyes she’d been sure would be full of anger but were not. He looked at her with something akin to amusement. That, and—dare she say it?—pride. He motioned to the patio behind him. “Come,” he said with that low timbre of his, and strode through the peaked archway ahead of her.

  She followed and joined him at an ironwork railing with filigreed balusters. He made no move to face her. He merely stared down upon the pits, so Çeda moved next to him and did the same. Together they watched one of the matches as the crowd cheered. It felt strange to be standing there with him, as if they were equals. She knew they weren’t, but the gesture felt like a small nod of appreciation for what she’d done in the pits.

  “Pelam is furious,” Osman said calmly, as if he were commenting on the cloudless sky.

  “I imagined he would be.”

  “I can’t let you continue in the tourney.”

  She was surprised to find herself disappointed by those words. She had killed a man today, and in some ways that made her feel more mortal than she had since the days and weeks following her mother’s death, but there was no denying how freeing it had been to fight in the pit, just her and the man upon whom she’d sworn to gain revenge. “But I beat him. Neither you nor Pelam can deny that.”

  “Yes, we’ll get to that. In the meantime, do you know why I’ve brought you here?”

  “I’ve a few good guesses.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Why do you need me to tell them to you?”

  “Because if you haven’t guessed, I’d like to know your perceptions of the situation, and by extension, how perceptive you are. Humor me.”

  “You’re concerned that I went behind Pelam’s back and snuck into the tourney.”

  “I am, yes, though I don’t know that I’d use the word concerned. Go on.”

  “You feel betrayed by Djaga for helping me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re upset that I killed that Malasani dog.”

  “I am that as well, yes. Anything else?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s quite enough, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more.”

  She paused, hoping to get him off track, for she was starting to suspect the real reason he was questioning her this way. “I’m too young to have entered the tourney.”

  She watched Osman from the corner of her eye, but Osman continued to stare down at the pit. The crowd had risen to their feet as the two combatants locked shields and fought for the upper hand, turning and shoving and trying to sneak in a blow from their heavy-headed flails. A collective groan followed when they broke apart and began circling one another warily once more.

  “Do you know how often those of royal blood come to the pits?”

  “Often enough. I see them from time to time.”

  “Then you know that some follow the dirt dogs quite closely. Most are not as keen as you, but there are a good many who know their way around a brawl in the pits. There’s something else about the nobility that we can say with certainty as well. Do you know what it is?”

  “They eat antelope while we scrap over goat? They sip wine from chilled glasses while we drink from dirty wells?”

  He laughed ruefully, but chose that moment to turn toward her. She faced him squarely, willing the hummingbirds fluttering inside her chest to quiet themselves. Almost to spite her, they grew worse, partly from the fading effects of the petals, which always made her jumpy, but more so from the hungry glint in his eyes, the subtle smile, as if he were about to enter the pits himself.

  “A bit melodramatic,” he said, “but in essence, you’re right. There are different rules for royalty and those like you and me.” She could hardly believe her ears. To her, Osman was nobility, no matter that he used to fight in these very pits. “They might have wine, but they’ll begrudge you yours. They might eat venison, but they’ll snatch away your plate should you manage to find some of your own, or grant you that one small boon and act as if it were the greatest gift in all the world. But there are certain things, certain laws, over which they are particularly vigilant. You and I might not see the reasons for every verse in the Kannan, but they do, for they are the eyes and ears of the Kings in Sharakhai. They watch for those who wander the streets on the holy night. They watch for those who take forbidden fruit from their gardens.”

  Çeda swallowed before speaking again. “What does this have to do with me?” she asked, perhaps too calmly.

  “They know the signs of the adichara, Çedamihn Ahyanesh’ala. Some know them very well, and you won’t always be able to tell when someone is nobility and another is not, and you certainly won’t be able to tell those who go through the city looking for the sort of infractions you committed today. Believe me, if I can see the signs, so can they.”

  Çeda swallowed, hoping it wasn’t obvious how nervous she suddenly was. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because if you wish to fight in the pits again, you’ll promise right now that petals will never be a part of it.”

  Çeda blinked. “I can fight again?”

  “Isn’t that the arrangement you have with Djaga? She pays your way in, you scrap to pay her back?”

  But how did he know? The crowd below roared. Çeda glanced down as one of the fighters fell from a heavy blow, then pulled her gaze back to Osman. “I didn’t think . . .”

  “No. But even you must see that your legend will now grow. The White Wolf of Sharakhai defeating a Malasani brute three times her size? What sort of fool would I be to keep you from the pits?”

  Osman was more than twice her age, but he didn’t seem so old to her just then. There were the marks of the pit about him—small scars, a bend in his nose where it had been broken, a chipped tooth. It all served to make him more striking, like a ram who’d survived the black laughers and the jackals, who’d been wounded once, but was all the wiser for it, all the stronger.

  “I mean what I say, Çeda. I’ll not risk my interests—the pits or anything else that’s mine—over a girl who doesn’t know when and where to draw the lines.”

  She nodded to him.

  “I must hear it from you.”

  “I’ll not use them again.”

  “Use what?”

  She took a deep breath. It felt like a betrayal to say it aloud, but he’d already guessed, so what did it matter now? “I’ll not use the petals in the pits again.”

  “Ever,” he said.

  “Ever.”

  A change overcame Osman then. He became the black laugher, transforming from the regal ram with a knowing wink and a wicked grin. “We wouldn’t want your friends to find you face down in the Haddah, now would we?” He said these words with nonchalance, but the look in his eyes was so fierce and untamed that Çeda’s stomach churned at the thought of crossing him.

  “No,” she said at last. “We wouldn’t.”

  “Good,” he said, slapping her on the back and returning his attention to the pits, where one fighter was now mercilessly beating at the other’s upraised shield with a two-headed flail. “Djaga was serious, you know, about getting her money back before you can start making your own.”


  Gods, he must have spoken to her before coming here. “What of it?”

  “Unless I’ve missed my mark, you’ll need something to tide you over until that happens.”

  “Djaga will give me some of it, won’t she?”

  Osman reared back and laughed, an honest laugh, from the belly, as if she’d truly surprised him. “Let me tell you something about Djaga. She grips her money so tightly it cries at night. She can stretch a sylval from here to Kundhun. Her purse strings are cinched tighter than mine ever were, and believe me, my life is not an extravagant one, even now. If she says she’ll keep your earnings until she’s been paid three times over, then that’s exactly what she’ll do.”

  “What would you have me do, then, work in the pits?”

  “Nothing so mundane.” He paused for a moment as the fight below came to a thrilling conclusion, the man with the flail breaking his opponent’s shield, forcing him to concede or have his head caved in by the next swing. “Have you heard of shading, Çeda?”

  She had heard of shading. She had indeed.

  Osman was true to his word, and Djaga was true to hers. In the weeks that followed, Çeda began running packages for Osman. Collecting a box from Roseridge and taking it to the foot of Blackfire Gate. Delivering a short message from a man as old as the desert to a Malasani caravan master with a wicked tongue and a penchant for pinching Çeda’s backside. Taking a ring—nothing at all remarkable about it—from a reed-thin woman in the bazaar to a certain captain of the Silver Spears. Çeda earned a few copper khet for each delivery, and she didn’t mind doing it, but she had the distinct impression that Osman was merely testing her. Giving her simple assignments to see how she handled herself before he gave her anything challenging.

  She also learned that Tariq had joined Osman’s group of shades. Tariq intimated as much when she and Hamid were out running the Trough one day, and then she began to notice him hanging around the pits more often. He acted oddly around her now. They still ran the streets from time to time, but he’d become territorial, asking her when she’d shaded last, what she’d run, how much Osman paid her. When, in return, she asked what he’d done, he offered few details, waving her questions away and changing the subject. So she stopped sharing anything related to shading.

  Djaga continued to train Çeda in the western harbor where Djaga lived and worked. They drilled beneath the piers, partly to avoid the sun, but also to avoid too many observers. Djaga was as skilled a fighter as Çeda had ever seen, but she knew how to teach as well. She was strict and never let Çeda go beyond what she thought she could handle, but she pressed Çeda at times too, in order to bring her along quicker, to expose her weaknesses. She taught Çeda not just how weapons might be used, but how they could debilitate, slow her opponents, how she might fool them into thinking she was unskilled in a particular weapon when in fact she was preparing a finishing move.

  “Your size,” Djaga said, “will work to your advantage for a time. People will think Saadet was a fool to let you to beat him. We’ll play to those expectations. You’ll not win bouts handily, girl, even if you might. You’ll show yourself skilled, but not overly so. You’ll fight to the level of your opponent right up until you’re ready to end it.”

  “Why wouldn’t I finish them as soon as I can?”

  Djaga pointed her shinai, a slatted bamboo practice sword, eastward toward the heart of Sharakhai. “If you merely wish to win you can find that sort of bout any day. If you want to rise in the ranks, then there are more games to play than the ones you wage with these.” She waved her shinai, then came at Çeda with a furious sequence of blows that Çeda barely managed to fend off.

  When the tourney ended, Çeda was entered into her first arranged bout. Pelam scheduled her for early in the morning—the first bout of the day—against a woman who’d been fighting in the pits for so long it was child’s play for Çeda to beat her. It was a message from Pelam. He was still annoyed at what she’d done. Her next bout a few months later, however, was much more challenging. An acclaimed swordsman from Mirea had returned to Sharakhai and wanted a bout before returning home. With the flip of a coin, Çeda had been allowed to choose the weapons, so she chose a three-sectioned staff, something rare in Mirea, but that Djaga was particularly gifted with. They’d spent days training with it. Çeda could have beat him easily, but as Djaga had instructed her, she’d held back until Djaga gave a short nod from the stands.

  The crowds grew for Çeda’s bouts. More and more began to howl when they saw her in her white armor and wolf-pelt helm, both of which she was starting to fill in as she grew and gained muscle from Djaga’s merciless regimen—running in the mornings, swords before high sun, lifting stones after a short lunch, and more weapon sparring with anything under the sun except swords before finishing a few hours before the sun went down.

  She was given every Savadi to herself, and more time if Osman needed her, but even her free day she spent walking around Sharakhai, learning more of its ins and outs, for there was no telling where she might pick up or drop off one of Osman’s packages. She was gone from home so often, in fact, that she rarely saw Emre.

  She did from time to time, though. She made sure of it. She’d thought he would be angry that she killed Saadet, for taking his revenge into her own hands. She wanted to apologize and practiced a speech for days at a time. But whenever she found herself in the same place with him, whether in their home or in the bazaar or in the streets, the words all fled, leaving her speechless until Emre started talking about how Tehla the bread baker had made moon eyes at him again, or the things Hamid had pilfered from a caravan wagon, or anything besides the thing they needed to talk about most.

  It was like a wound between them, festering. It needed to be lanced, but Çeda didn’t have the right words, and Emre never brought it up, so she assumed he simply didn’t wish to speak of it.

  Osman drew more of her friends into his shadow empire. He gave Hamid a proper knife and sent him to act as a lookout for Brama, a second story man. Tariq and Hamid could do whatever they wished, but she worried when Emre started to run packages, too.

  Thankfully, though, Emre didn’t stick with it. He began picking up odds and ends to make a bit of coin—a breaker in the quarry to the northwest, a stevedore lading and unlading ships in the northern harbor, shaping wheels for a wheelwright near the Trough. Anything to keep his body busy, he’d said. That’s what he needed.

  She followed him one morning when he headed off to his latest job, wandering the desert with a craftsman named Halond, looking for lightning strikes. He would dig up the rootlike structures from the sand and sell them as art. Rhia’s trees, he called them, though what they had to do with the lesser of the two moon goddesses Çeda had no idea. They were haunting, treelike shapes the lightning made of the sand, more like something Goezhen would make than Rhia. But she supposed that idea was bad for business—one didn’t want a totem above their hearth from the god of twisted creatures. But a sculpture touched by the goddess of dreams and ambition? Now there was something to treasure.

  “Are you well?” Çeda asked Emre as they shared a pear, a luxury she’d bought in the bazaar yesterday.

  He crunched into it and chewed noisily, his breath misting momentarily in the chill morning air. “Of course I’m well. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She really should have asked him months ago. They were growing apart. She could feel it. And she knew this was the reason why. “I want to talk to you about Saadet.”

  He handed her the pear. “What of him?”

  She wanted to slap the pear away, but she didn’t want him to know she was upset, so she took a bite and handed it back. “I should have told you.”

  He shrugged. “But you didn’t. And it’s over now. What need is there to dredge up the past?”

  “It’s only . . . the look on your face, Emre.”

  “What? I was shocked, Çeda. Wouldn’t you have been?” />
  “It wasn’t just shock I saw on your face. It was anger.”

  Emre stopped walking, forcing Çeda to do the same. “What do you want me to say? The world is a better place without Saadet ibn Sim? You did Sharakhai, and me, a favor that day. I probably should have thanked you for it before now.” He bowed formally. “Thank you, Çedamihn, oh White Wolf of Sharakhai, for saving me. Is that what you’re looking for?”

  “No, I—”

  “Then please, for the love of all that’s holy, leave it alone.” He turned and strode away, leaving Çeda standing there.

  She let him go. He was still angry, and if she pushed him, it was only going to force him into further silence. She could only hope that one day he’d tell her. Except he didn’t, and eventually her hope withered, and she wondered if she would ever know his true feelings that day of her first bout.

  Emre’s flightiness continued. The next year saw him move from cobbler’s apprentice to a delivery boy for a west end cooper to a butcher in an open-air abattoir—a shambles, he corrected her once when she asked him how long he would stay there. He brought home fresh meat from this job, but there was something in his eyes when he returned home at night, a sickening gleam that sometimes lasted for hours. His work in the shambles lasted surprisingly long, nearly a year, but he eventually moved on, this time to a florist who had him fetching bunches of wildflowers from the banks of the swollen Haddah.

  Emre’s income was unsteady, but Çeda eventually paid off Djaga’s investment, and then began earning good money. Some came from the pits, some from Osman, some from teaching children at the pits, a ruse Osman had come up with to hide her identity and give her reason to be near the pits at all, so that no one would suspect she was the White Wolf. Eventually they moved to a flat in Roseridge, close to the bazaar and the spice market. It surprised her that, initially, Emre didn’t wish to go. It was too expensive, he said. They’d be better staying where they were. But she suspected it was only so he could be near the place he’d once shared with Rafa. Although they’d moved after Rafa had been killed, they could afford very little at that time, and they’d ended up not far away.