The Diviner (golden key)

by Melanie Rawn

  —HAZZIN AL-JOHARRA, Deeds of Il-Ma’anzuri, 813

  23

  It was maddening, the question of how Sheyqa Nizhria had learned that there were Shagara within her grasp.

  Qamar could only postulate that someone, or several someones, had been extremely curious and extremely clever. After Ra’abi’s marriage to Zaquir al-Ammarizzad, his cousins and his friends had visited, and of course he had brought servants with him, any one of whom could have been gathering information. And of course there were the Geysh Dushann. They would not hesitate to share knowledge of the Shagara with those in Rimmal Madar who considered themselves more al-Ammarizzad than al-Ma’aliq.

  But few had ever tried to learn why the Shagara were such renowned healers. Rare plants in the desert, ancient lore, talents given by Acuyib the Merciful—there were explanations enough. No one had ever connected the trinkets and jewelry, the wind chimes and charms, with the healing arts of the Shagara.

  Qamar was certain that now someone had.

  And when he learned that Sheyqir Reihan, the poetic son of Nizzira, had been the power behind Nizhria’s seizure of the Moonrise Throne, he had a fairly good idea of whose curiosity and cleverness had made the right connections. Reihan’s poetry had indeed changed after Azzad al-Ma’aliq had exacted his vengeance. For one thing, he became obsessed with the ring that had been placed onto his finger, which he had worn to the end of his life. Scholars had many pretty things to say about this “symbolism” within his poems. None of them guessed that when he wrote that he was unable to remove the ring from his hand, he wrote the literal truth.

  It mattered nothing that Reihan could not possibly know the exact methods of the magic. Qamar guessed that he had guessed. And if not him, then someone else. All that mattered was that Sheyqa Nizhria, positioned by Reihan and now in possession of the Moonrise Throne, unable to lay hands on the Shagara of Tza’ab Rih, had targeted the Shagara within her reach. The Shagara of Cazdeyya.

  “This is for you.”

  Qamar followed the mouallimo’s gesture to a book lying on the table. A beautiful book, folio size, bound in plain dark green, it was so new that the scents of paper and leather and glue clung to it still. There was no tooling, there were no symbols stamped into the covers or the spine. The most remarkable thing about it was the lock: made of gold, so much more precious here than in Tza’ab Rih, delicately wrought and fitted with a small key.

  “The paper is all of your making, of course,” said the crafter, Miqelo’s brother. “Solanna gave it to me when I asked. Eight different kinds, fifty pages each. I hope that will be enough.”

  “Enough? Enough for what?” He reached a reverent finger to stroke the cover. “Yberrio, what is this for?”

  “The book, of course. The one you will write that preserves everything we are.” He sat wearily in a cushioned chair, rubbing absently at his swollen fingers. “All that we have learned since we came here about the plants, flowers, herbs, trees—how to make ink and paper—eiha, the talishann, those are safe with our kinsmen in the desert. But you must finish the work you began years ago. And this is the book in which you will do it.”

  Qamar nodded slowly. “It has been decided, then.”

  “Yes. Perhaps tomorrow, certainly within the next few days. As soon as everyone is ready.” He paused for a grim smile. “And even if they are not.”

  Qamar weighed the book in his hands, looking at it so he would not have to look at his friend. Yberrio was one of the unlucky ones; he was a year Qamar’s junior and looked twenty years his senior. “You haven’t asked if I’m certain that they will come for us,” he said abruptly. “Everyone else has asked if I’m certain.”

  “Everyone else wants it all to go away. And you forget that I have a reason for believing that others do not. Even if I didn’t trust you, I trust Solanna. She has no reason to lie. Not that you do, either. If all you’d wanted was to steal what we know, you could have done it and left years ago.” Leaning back in his chair, he waited until Qamar met his gaze, and chuckled. “I was one of those guarding you, when you returned to us from the seaside. By Acuyib, how I hated you! Never once did you set foot inside either of the taverns. And on cold nights, after you’d finished late with your work, I could have used a nice cup of mulled wine.”

  “So could I,” he admitted wistfully. “Were you one of those who made sure I’d think thrice before ever really wanting one again?”

  “Ayia, that was Zario.” Yberrio raked the graying hair from his brow and said, “You know the present one is resisting. Doesn’t want to leave his parents.”

  “He has to come, and all the other Haddiyat boys with him.”

  “And their mothers.”

  So that even if Sheyqa Nizhria succeeded in taking the fortress, she would find no useful Shagara within it.

  That the fortress was indeed her aim became clearer with every city ignored on the march northward. Small groups of her soldiers peeled off from the main force every so often to burn a few villages as a warning. When, at one night’s camp halfway to Cazdeyya, a well was found to be poisoned, every human being within a day’s ride was slaughtered. There were no more attempts to interfere with the advance of the Sheyqa’s army.

  “I keep wondering,” Qamar said suddenly, “how much Allil has revealed.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Joharra has been spared,” Qamar said. “Allil bought this with maps and advice, that much is obvious. But I wonder how much he told her about the Shagara of Tza’ab Rih. That they provided hazziri to my grandfather, Sheyqir Alessid, when your people would not.”

  “You mean that we shall be easy for them to take and use, whereas our kindred of the desert would not?”

  “They would defend themselves with the arts. You will not. They would aid the Empress in any attack against invasion—but you will not.”

  It was a major point of contention. Some of the younger Shagara here wanted to abandon their principles and create hazziri for war. Their elders utterly forbade it. But the Sheyqa could not know this, and so she marched northward as quickly as she could, to take the one place that she was certain would win her everything.

  Including Tza’ab Rih. Solanna had seen it. Not in the smoke that deliberately incited visions, but unexpectedly one morning while helping him sort herbs in the Inkwell. The crash of glass as she leaped from her chair and backed into a table had brought other people running in time to see the stark unreasoning terror on her face. Qamar carried her upstairs, grateful that these attacks of sight had been rare these last dozen and more years; nobody knew what that look in her eyes meant except him.

  And, it turned out, Miqelo. Someone had mentioned to someone else that Solanna had been taken ill, and Miqelo had heard of it, and by sundown he was in their reception room asking with brutal directness exactly what she had seen.

  “A map,” Qamar had answered for her. “Not of this land, but of Tza’ab Rih. All the towns and cities, the desert, everything.”

  “Labeled in Tza’ab script, not ours,” she added. “And I saw a hand, a woman’s hand thick with rings, and one of them was of silver and carnelians.”

  “I don’t see—”

  Qamar interrupted with, “Each sheyqir my great-grandfather gelded was given a ring. Carnelians set in silver, with rows of tiny ants etched into the bands. You know the symbolism, of course.”

  “Harvest,” said Miqelo. “Izzad. Whose ring, do you think? All of them are dead by now, of course, so the rings would be no longer binding—”

  “Reihan’s, at a guess. He worked to put her where she is. What’s obvious is that Nizhria intends to use you Shagara against those of Tza’ab Rih. She can’t hope to conquer that land without you. I will wager that her troops in Ibrayanza are even now scouting the best place to do battle against the Empress.”

  “But we will never help her. Never.”

  Solanna, still very pale and shaken, said, “Do you know what that hand was doing? Stroking the map, like it was the naked skin of her
lover. You can tell her No until the sun turns cold, and all she will do is laugh—and start killing your families until you cooperate. And the first hazziri that doesn’t work precisely the way she orders it to work, she’ll kill more.”

  “Her armies destroy without mercy. She’s showing herself as ruthless as her great-great-grandmother,” Qamar added. “And that, my friend, is ruthless indeed.”

  The Shagara here would not use Al-Fansihirro for war and destruction or even self-preservation. Qamar admired their adherence to their beliefs but deplored their stubbornness. What little he had seen of war, he hated; these people hadn’t seen war in over eighty years. They didn’t even paper the fortress walls with talishann drawn in appropriate ink. Once the paper was slashed or burned the protections would be nullified, and the men who had worked them would die. Paper was frangible; it made the Haddiyat vulnerable.

  And so . . . this book he held in his hands. In it, he would record everything these Shagara knew of magic.

  To do this in safety, he must find a haven. Solanna had sent messages to every Grijalva connection she could think of, but it had been many long years since they had seen or even heard of her. Only a few wrote back, and only one did not berate her for abandoning her people. This one letter, from an elderly aunt, told her that if she needed a place to go, there was a valley three days from the great river, a box canyon where no one lived because it was useless for farming or cutting lumber or indeed anything but hiding in. It was to this lonely place that Qamar, Solanna, all the Haddiyat boys under the age of fifteen, and their mothers were preparing to go.

  At least, this was what they told everyone. Qamar was under no illusions about what would happen to any Shagara left alive in the fortress after Nizhria’s ballisdas had demolished it and her troops had overrun it. When they talked—and they would talk, the Geysh Dushann would make certain of it—they must speak what they thought to be the truth.

  The only person who knew where they would really go was Miqelo. Twenty-five years of roaming these lands, first with his father and now with his son, had made him a living map. He assured Qamar that there were several places he had in mind, and he would decide only when they were at least three days away from the fortress.

  Qamar walked back through the zoqallos, the green leather book cradled to his chest. The Shagara were learning why their forebears in the desert traveled light. He walked past buildings where paper was made, and ink, schoolrooms and forges, storehouses and binderies and the healer’s quarter—each little street and narrow alley was congested with people doing one of three things. They carried items that would be taken out of the fortress, or ones to be hidden in hopes that they would survive, or ones that must be destroyed rather than fall into the hands of the Sheyqa. Qamar could always tell when someone had been assigned to that task: Their faces were either grim with purpose or bleak with sorrow.

  There were armfuls of paper to be dumped into the slurry, even though no new sheets would be made from them. Metal dies to be melted in the white-hot forges, never to stamp talishann into tin or brass again. Crates of glass bottles and ceramic flasks to be emptied outside the walls and the containers smashed, some containing medicines, others full of inks. Bins and baskets of herbs, flowers, leaves, all the tools this land had given to the healers, burned.

  And books. Beautiful, precious books, some of them as old as the Shagara’s time here, many more made and bound since. Qamar held to his chest an empty book, and vowed to Acuyib that he would fill it.

  They left at dawn two days later. Three wagons laden with food and other supplies followed thirty-seven horses carrying fifty people—most of the boys were small and light, and so could double up on horseback. The women rode in and sometimes drove the wagons. Tanielo and Solanna led the way out the gates. Miqelo and Qamar left last.

  Yberrio saw them off. “Miqelo, my brother, we will not meet again this side of Acuyib’s Great Garden, but it had better be many long years before I welcome you there. As for him—” He glanced up at Qamar, then at his brother once more, fiercely. “Miqelo, make sure this man lives.”

  Qamar was still thinking about those words when they made a rough camp that evening. Saddle sore after so many years when riding was only an occasional recreation, he came close to breaking his vow and asking for a flask of wine. But all he drank was strong, bitter qawah, and for the first time in a long time considered what life had made of the youngest and favorite son of an Empress, a Sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih.

  “How delightful to hear you laughing,” Solanna said in sour tones as she sat down beside him at the small fire.

  “Qarassia,” he said, slipping an arm around her, “there is laughing, and then there is laughter. Just as there are women, but only one woman.”

  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t understand you,” she replied, nestling close to him.

  He tilted his head to look her in the eyes. “You know what my name means in my language. I know the meaning of yours. I always found this significant.” When her brows quirked, he told her, “The moon has no light of its own. By itself, it’s all in darkness. It’s the sun’s light that makes the moon shine.”

  Solanna’s eyes filled with tears. “Qamar—”

  “Ayia, none of that,” he whispered, pulling her nearer again. “I will finish the work, and you will help me. When all his family died by poison or the sword or fire, Azzad yet lived. When his father was betrayed and murdered and his mother and sisters and brothers burned alive, Alessid yet lived. I—”

  “Azzad was spared to wreak vengeance,” she said tightly, “so that the souls of his family could be at peace. Alessid—”

  “—threw out the usurpers and built a nation so that his family could never be destroyed again,” he finished for her. “Think who it was who saved the lives of Azzad and Alessid. Shagara. They have done the same for me. I am in their debt, and they have told me how I must repay it. But I have been given what my forefathers did not have. And it is this land that has given it to me, given me you.” Pressing his mouth to her fragrant hair, he finished, “I would truly be lost in darkness without you.”

  Miqelo, his son Tanielo, and four young men who regularly guarded them on trading journeys: These were all that stood between the Shagara and anyone who wanted a look at what might be in their wagons. The women, some of whom had never been farther from the fortress than the riverbank, wept or fretted or rode in stoic silence as their characters prompted. The boys, resentful at first that they were not allowed to stay and fight the invaders, awoke to the unaccustomed freedom of travel and could barely be restrained from galloping off in all directions. Qamar and Tanielo spent a lot of time chasing after them.

  On the fourth day—one day after the proposed day of decision about their destination—Miqelo approached Qamar and Solanna very early in the morning and asked them to walk with him for a way.

  “The more I think about it, the less I like it,” he said. “We all know what will happen to those we left at the fortress. We have with us the hope of the Shagara. Those boys must be protected at all costs.”

  “I recommend poppy syrup in their morning qawah,” Solanna said. “It’ll make it easier to throw them in the wagons.”

  “I’ve been tempted,” he replied with a brief smile. “But it seems to me that we have two separate aims. First is to keep these boys and their mothers safe. The other is the work you must do, Qamar. I think we must divide our group in different directions.”

  It was decided that the women and boys would travel as far and as fast as possible, find a place to hide—though not the box canyon recommended by Solanna’s aunt—and wait until it was safe to return to Cazdeyya. The guards and Tanielo would go with them. All of them, schooled by Solanna in the basics of the family, would call themselves “Grijalva.”

  “Our tile makers have gone to many places,” she explained. “Some of them came home, some stayed. You will be refugees from the conflict, returning to our native villages for safety. They will take you in. Your Shagara
coloring can be explained by a generation or so of marriages in foreign towns.” But they were never to mention her name, for the letters she had written earlier in the year had yielded no help they could actually use.

  That left Qamar, Solanna, Miqelo, and a woman named Leisha, who volunteered to assist Solanna, and her thirteen-year-old son, Nassim, to assist Qamar. Leisha was quite frank about her reasons: she was convinced that she and her son would have a much better chance of survival with Qamar.

  “I think,” she said, “that Miqelo will work very, very hard to be sure you are not found.”

  The fourth day was spent making arrangements. Wagons were unloaded, the goods sorted evenly, and packed again. By sundown all was complete, and Miqelo recommended that everyone sleep soundly, for the next days would be difficult.

  Qamar sat cross-legged in the dirt beside a small cookfire, listening to the sounds of the camp settling. Familiar to him from his year in the desert, yet there were differences—primary among them being the rustle and slur of the tall pine trees. He reached over to stir the pot of qawah, pleased to find there was still some left for Miqelo, who came to talk with him every night before rolling himself in a blanket to sleep.

  Solanna joined Qamar by the fire, kneeling at his side. She had abandoned long skirts, as most of the other women had done, for riding clothes: snug trousers beneath a tunic that fell to midthigh, cut almost like a workingman’s smock. The outfit concealed all feminine curves, and she had concealed her hair within a scarf to protect it from the dust of the road. For all her blonde hair, she looked like a woman of Tza’ab Rih.

  Miqelo crouched down on the other side of the fire, not looking at either of them. Qamar was about to offer hot qawah when all at once Miqelo tossed a little woolen pouch into the heart of the fire. His dark eyes fixed on Solanna’s face with a piercing intensity. Smoke billowed up from the fire, as fragrant as it was stinging. Qamar coughed. Solanna gasped—and in doing so inhaled a full lungful of smoke.