“I am no more the dragon’s son these days than you are the dragon’s daughter,” he replied, mouth twisted unhappily, “but perhaps you are right.”
“I am right,” Sulema said firmly, wishing she was half as confident as she sounded. “Six of us, and no more.”
“Still—”
Hannei clapped her hands loudly, forestalling further argument, and pointed. Sulema turned her head and smiled.
“Oh, good,” she said, happy for the interruption. “Our supplies are here.”
Indeed they were. The merchants’ guild had been as good as their word to Sharmutai. Slaves arrived leading three very fine churrim of a type Sulema had never seen, brown as coffee on top, white as river sand underneath, shorter-legged and heavier-built than those she was used to.
They look like goats, she thought, though I suppose that will be helpful in the mountains. They do look hardy, at that.
“We will take these three animals,” she said, “and let us see what supplies they—”
A low growl from Hannei stopped her short. Sulema looked at her, startled, then followed her sister’s stare toward the fat little merchant who stood chatting amiably with the whoremistress.
“Hannei—” Sulema touched her friend’s shoulder. The other warrior was so stiff with outrage that she was trembling. “That man—was he one of those who hurt you?”
Hannei shied away violently, baring her teeth in a rictus snarl and never once looking away from the merchant.
“Ah,” Sulema said, soft as the singing desert. “Ah.” She turned her back on her shaking sister and walked to where the slave-merchants stood.
“You,” she said, addressing the man. “Who are you? What is your name?”
“My name is Ovreh,” the little man answered, puffing himself up in an attempt to meet her height. “I—”
Sulema drew her shamsi and ran it through his middle, using all the strength in her arms and back to push it through skin and innards and muscle. She twisted the blade and wrenched it from his belly with a sharp sideways slash, spilling his stinking guts upon the ground. The man’s eyes went wide and he screamed, clutching at his own steaming entrails and falling heavily to his knees. He screamed again, and Sulema swept him sideways with one foot, then slashed his throat wide open.
The smell of death blossomed in the hot air, sweet as flowers.
“I am Sulema Ja’Akari,” she said, kicking him in the face for good measure. “You touched my sister. For this you die.” She unfastened the fine silken cloak which he had worn fashionably over one shoulder and which was free of blood and gore. This she used as a rag to clean her face and hands, and her befouled shamsi.
“What—” Sharmutai gasped. “What?”
Sulema glanced up, locked eyes with the whoremistress. The woman’s face paled and she took a quick step back, slipping and nearly falling in the dying man’s blood. “Take your collar from Hannei’s neck,” she told the woman in a soft, low voice. “Do it now.”
The woman moved to Hannei’ side, lifting the large ring of keys she wore upon her belt. “You cannot do this,” she gasped, even as the collar dropped from Hannei’s throat. “This is my property. The law—”
“I do not give a rat’s ass about your laws,” Sulema told her. She continued wiping her blade on the fallen man’s robes as he twitched his last, and tried to hide the shaking in her hands. Moments before, this had been a living man, and now he was a pile of meat and stinking offal. My hands did this. Hannei reached up and touched her own bare throat, face unreadable.
My hands did that, too, Sulema thought. I helped my sister be free. It is good. She let out a long breath. “To touch a Ja’Akari is to die. That is the only law I need. Best you remember it as well.”
A crowd had gathered to gape at the dead man, the travelers, the barbarian warrior sheathing her barbarian sword. Sulema ignored them all, breathing deeply and feeling better than she had in many moons. She finished cleaning her blade, sheathed it, and dropped the man’s cloak atop his head. Finally she gathered the lead rope of the nearest churra and tossed it to Keoki, who stood gaping at her with eyes as wide as a tarbok’s.
Sulema turned from the sight and smell of death and looked up at the mountains.
“Well,” she said to her companions, “what are you waiting for? We have mountains to cross, and an impossible quest before us. Like as not we will all be dead before dawn— but it will be an interesting death, at least.”
Hannei made an odd, strangled noise. Sulema looked at her sword-sister, at her bared teeth and the tears rolling down her cheeks, and realized that she was laughing.
The scouts for which Yaela’s salt had paid advised against going south. Some failure of nature or magic was causing water to sour in the Zeera, and it seemed to worsen in that direction. Besides, the mountain folk held those lands sacred.
They consulted the salt merchants, and Leviathus’s maps—and Yaela gazed long into a spider’s web, though Sulema saw nothing there besides a dead bug—and a way into the Jehannim was at last decided upon.
If only, Sulema wished, the way back might be so easily foreseen. Yet “If wishes were water,” Ani had been fond of saying, “the desert would bloom.”
Ani was the one person in all the world she might have added to their expedition. Sulema missed the youthmistress terribly—her sharp tongue and sharper wit would have been a welcome change from this gloomy group. Wherever in the world she might be, Sulema hoped she was happy.
They loaded their gear into the churrim’s packs and set off, leaving the good people of Min Yaarif to clean up the mess she had made of the slavemaster. It would be good for them, she thought, to remember what happened to those who tried to enslave a warrior.
Indeed, she was happy to be clad once again in a warrior’s garb: a warrior’s vest and trousers, and a shamsi at her hip. She missed her long braids bitterly and kept running her hand over the strip of scalp where her hair was growing back, as if she could hurry it along. Leviathus strode by her side wearing an odd assemblage of loose, bright clothing which flapped in the hot wind like the sails of one of his boats. He bore an Atualonian-style short sword at his hip, a long knife strapped to his thigh, short knives strapped to either forearm, and in sheaths on his tall boots as well. Sulema shook her head at him.
“A sword and five knives! How many blades does one man need?”
Leviathus glanced at her, grinned, and winked. “Ah,” he told her, “those weapons are only the ones you can see.”
She laughed. “I have missed you.”
“And I you. Family should stick together. Even,” he added in a whisper, “if they are heading off to certain death.”
“Especially then,” she agreed. “It is good to be with you.”
Finding her brother again helped, a little, to ease the sting of losing Hannei. Her sword-sister was avoiding her, choosing to walk at the back of the pack instead of at her side. It was not the same Hannei she had left behind just a few short years ago.
Two warriors; a soft Atualonian prince—a pirate, now, and able to talk to sea serpents, but a soft outlander all the same. A slave trainer no doubt loyal to the whoremistress, and two Quarabalese sorcerers. Surely Akari himself has never seen such a mismatched band of travelers. All we need to complete this spectacle is Mattu Halfmask, his odd sister, and maybe her troupe of fools.
It was a torrid day at the peak of summer. The land around them lay still under the gaze of Akari, still as a hare beneath the hawk’s gaze. A dry and fevered wind breathed down upon them from the mountaintops, abjuring their desires. The Jehannim were so severe, so hostile to human life, that their peaks were sometimes referred to as an earthly level of Yosh. Few were those travelers so foolhardy as to attempt this crossing, and fewer still by far those who lived to tell the tale.
A motley troupe of fools indeed, and they were perhaps following the greatest fool of all. Despite her earlier actions, Sulema knew herself to be too inexperienced, unprepared to lead such an und
ertaking. Unprepared and unfit, as the pain in her arm and shoulder reminded her. Her foolishness with the lionsnake had all but gotten her killed. This mad gamble was likely to end all their stories, and badly.
Sulema gazed up toward the peaks of the Jehannim, knowing all of this, knowing the mountains mocked her absurd human striving, and knowing as well that the whisper of wisdom that was trying to make itself heard would not be enough to stop her.
Surely I am casting my fishing net at a dragon, she thought to herself, and felt her lips curl in a grim little smile. But just watch me catch the damned thing.
* * *
After several days’ journey through the foothills and ruins of abandoned towns, they reached the head of the upward path upon which they had decided. Days spent swatting gnats, sweating, and cursing the day she had ever left the tedious safety of childhood.
I would rather muck a thousand churra pits than endure another day of this, Sulema thought, slapping at one of the bloodsucking bugs and leaving a smear of red on her upper arm. I would rather wash dishes for the Mothers for the rest of my life. I would rather watch over a horde of toddlers—
Well, no, she had to admit. Maybe not toddlers.
The spare dark trees of the sere foothills gave way to sere brush and jagged red rock which cut at leather boots and turned treacherously underfoot. Game was scant; hares and rockbirds, ochre-tailed lizards with big glaring eyes, or the occasional hawk might be seen, but not much else. On their second morning a handful of scrawny goats bounced along the steep face of a far cliff as if gravity held no sway over them; Sulema laughed at their antics, but would have been glad of the fresh meat had they been within range.
They turned sharply westward at the Cairn of the First Men, a necropolis marked by pillars of stone and bone. This was the site of a great battle—or slaughter, depending on which story she believed—around which had been built a wall of red salt and white. There was wealth enough in those bricks to have sustained life in the Zeera for generations.
The dead had never held much dread for Sulema, young as she was and unsure of her own mortality, but there was no desire in her heart to take so much as a chip from that precious wall, much less peek over it. Flags of colorful cloth had been tied to sticks and left to flap in the wind, a warding and a warning against wicked shades, but these hung lifeless. The very air held its breath and tiptoed around that place. Such a pall hung over the Cairn that it was almost a relief to set foot upon the stone road that wound its silent, steady way toward the looming peaks.
Almost.
The churrim snorted and gnashed their short tusks at the presence, and did not seem much happier to be heading higher into the mountains. Neither was Sulema’s heart lifted, though she tried to tell herself that the sooner this journey was started, the sooner it would be finished. She could not help but think she was stepping into a viper’s pit with two bare feet.
Yaela, however, stepped so lightly and with such good cheer that her little feet danced pitter-pat pitter-pat upon the flat stones, and shadows cavorted in her wake.
“You seem in a fine mood,” Sulema said to her finally, trying without much success not to sound like a petulant child. Their food sacks were growing too light too quickly, and she was already tired of pemmican.
The shadowmancer’s apprentice glanced over her shoulder. She was not smiling, but her eyes were soft and wide, and seemed lit from within as if by delight.
“I do not expect you to understand.”
“You are happy to be going home,” Sulema guessed. She herself was homesick enough that the smell of horse shit would have been welcome. “But you are not returning to Quarabala, not really.” The plan was for Yaela to remain at the other side of the mountains, just shy of the Edge of the Seared Lands, with the churrim and their gear and whomever of their party would not be capable of the three-day run to Saodan.
Yaela shrugged, and the movement became part of her dance.
“You do not understand,” she said again. “I am closer to home than I have been in years. Years and years. So close I can taste it.” She stuck out her tongue and crossed her jade eyes at Sulema, who was so shocked at this display of playfulness she stopped dead in her tracks, and Leviathus trod upon her heels.
“Sorry.” Sulema looked up and into her brother’s dawn-blushed cheeks. The shadowmancer’s apprentice chuckled, a breathy little almost-laugh. Leviathus watched her twirl away, and his eyes were filled with a wistful hunger.
“As well love a rock as love that one,” she said to him. “Yaela is hard as the stone at the bottom of a well, and as cold.”
“You are hot as a new-forged sword,” he retorted, reaching out to ruffle the short fuzz of her hair, “and twice as sharp. But I love you.”
Their quick laughter was swallowed by the mountains. Sulema hoped it would give them indigestion.
* * *
The first two days of climbing were an uneventful slog of tedium, burning leg muscles, and wrestling with unwilling pack beasts.
The third day started out usual enough. Breakfast was a handful of cold pemmican, three swallows of tepid water. Sulema was so hungry she would have attempted to eat the stinking cheeses of Atualon.
“If these goatfucking churrim do not cooperate,” she said between gritted teeth as she heaved at a lead rope, “I will eat one of them, as a warning to the others. They act as if—”
A roar from the rocks overhead cut her short. The lead rope was yanked from Sulema’s grasp and the lead animal bolted back down the path, dragging its companions behind. Sulema might have turned to chase them, or drawn her sword, or shouted for help, but she did none of these things. The timbre and depth of that roar gripped her very bones, and she could no more move than if she had been turned into mountain stone.
Lionsnake, she thought, and her mind went cold with terror.
Indeed it was a lionsnake, though not like any she had ever seen. The beast which hauled itself down the path toward them was a smallish, lumpy, gray-scaled and ugly thing with stubby legs and a thick wattled neck. Instead of the bright blue and red plumes of a Zeerani beast, this one had a bright yellow crest that rose high above its blunt head as it hissed at them, venom sacks swelling, reptilian eyes fastened greedily on Sulema.
If Sulema could have breathed, she would have screamed. Images flashed through her mind, flick-flick-flick like a bad dream. Azra’hael, snarling and broken. The grandmother bitch lionsnake rearing above her. A… a man… a man with a spider…
“Your father will be so disappointed.”
Shadows devoured the edges of her vision. She dropped to her knees, sword-arm dangling limply at her side.
Someone shoved her roughly aside. As she dropped to all fours, Sulema caught a glimpse of rough linen trousers, bare brown feet, brown eyes bitter-dark with contempt. Hannei’s dark blades hissed like iron in the fire as they left their sheaths and she sprang upon the predator, silent as wrath, quick as death. The beast snapped at her, but it hardly had time to blink in surprise as the shadow-blades hacked through the bone and gristle of its neck.
Blood fountained through the air, stinking, glowing like a handful of gems in the last rays of sunlight, as Hannei painted the story of its death upon the gray mountain rocks. Within instants the lionsnake lay still. She looked down upon this masterpiece of gore, frowning as if the fight had been too quick for her liking, and then shot Sulema such a look of contempt that for a moment she could not breathe.
For a moment, she did not want to breathe.
That my sister should look at me so, her wounded heart cried, after all we have been to one another.
The lionsnake finished dying, and the sun finished setting, and Sulema swayed to her feet as the rest of their group gathered and Hannei wiped her blades clean. Leviathus had caught the churrim before they could get far, and no one had been harmed.
“Well,” Keoki said, after taking a good long look at the dead creature, “this could have been worse. Do you mind if I—” he gestured tow
ard the sagging yellow plumes.
Hannei shrugged and turned away.
Yaela grimaced as she stepped over the knobbled gray tail. “This was hardly more than a whelp. There are likely to be others nearby, and much bigger.” She glanced at Sulema. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” Sulema answered. Almost to herself, she added, “I hardly know her at all. Back home, we were close as sisters. Closer.”
Yaela watched Hannei’s retreating back and shrugged.
“You are not in the Zeera.”
No, Sulema agreed silently as Keoki strode past, whistling, with yellow feathers in his hair. We are not in the Zeera.
TWENTY - FOUR
The road to the Palace of Flowers, the emperor’s grand residence at the heart of the Forbidden City of Khanbul, was said to have the heart of a river. Though human lives might sail across it, the road itself was untouched and untroubled.
The azure bricks beneath Jian’s bootheels gave off a pleasant ringing tone as he strode beside Mardoni. They were said to be made of a secret mixture of clay, powdered sapphire, rice water, and the cremated remains of tens of thousands of soldiers who had volunteered to protect the emperors of Sindan from the afterlife. Shaped like the scales of Sajani, the bricks were polished clean as a new-hatched dragon.
Though the walls of every other building within the palace complex were tiled in yellow and deep gold which darkened to crimson as the buildings reached up into the sky, the Palace of Flowers itself was the deepest red of heart’s blood. In this way the palace was meant to symbolize a unity of earth and heaven through the intercession of its daeborn emperor.
The complex was vast enough to have swallowed Bizhan several times over, and teemed with vibrant life. Though he knew ordinary citizens of Sindan were not permitted to remain in Khanbul past dusk, such a place required the same foodstuffs, goods, and services as any village, though on a grander scale.
Merchants and artisans, couriers, priests, and scribes bobbed along in the road’s current like colorful little boats, making way for and swept up by the power of Jian’s entourage. Straw hats fell like petals from the branches of flowering trees as the procession was noticed and people dropped to their knees in its wake, lowering their white and frightened faces lest they accidentally catch the eye of a Sen-Baradam or, worse, a member of the royal court.
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