Throne of Ruins (The Powers of Amur Book 5)

by J. S. Bangs

  “I see,” Kirshta said. “And where is your son now? And the rest of the lineage of Am here in the great city of Majasravi?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said quietly.

  Kirshta made an expression that might have been a smile. “I don’t know where your son is, but I can tell you about Am. I have broken him. The Power you served is helpless before She Who Devours.”

  The woman stood stiffly and said nothing.

  “Sister,” Kirshta said, “did she have anything with her when you took her?”

  Vapathi shook her head. “Neither I nor the Devoured saw anything other than a little food and silver.”

  “I’m looking for a book,” Kirshta said. “A book that I heard some dhorsha saw. Do you know about it?”

  Teguri hesitated. Vapathi put her hand on the woman’s shoulder, but the old woman stiffened and brushed Vapathi’s hand away.

  “I saw the book,” she said. “I don’t know where it is.”

  “Ah,” Kirshta said. He leaned back against the cushioned throne and let his hand fall across one of the serpents coiled on the armrest. “You’re the first person who’s actually seen it, though many had heard of it. Tell me what was in it.”

  The woman glanced at Vapathi, then began to speak slowly. “There were two thikratta, survivors of Ternas, who brought it in with a number of other books from the monastery’s treasury.”

  “Survivors of Ternas,” Kirshta said contemptuously.

  “The ones we were looking for,” Vapathi said. “If we had caught them—”

  “We went into the mountains instead,” Kirshta cut her off sharply. His glare turned back to Teguri. “What was in the book?”

  Teguri bowed her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  The woman sighed heavily. “The book was written in a script that none in the palace could read. Neither I, nor anyone else among the dhorsha, nor the thikratta who brought the book in.”

  Vapathi laughed. “Am I supposed to believe that? Two thikratta escape from Ternas carrying a priceless book, which neither of them could read?”

  “Believe it,” Teguri said bitterly, “or refuse to believe it. I saw the book, turned the pages myself, and understood not a word.”

  Kirshta groaned deep in his throat. The Red Men and Devoured scattered throughout the throne hall were watching them now, the hall gone silent.

  “Where are they now?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I escaped the Ushpanditya while they were still inside.”

  “What did they look like?” Kirshta demanded.

  The woman hesitated. “One tall, lanky, head shaven. Spoke seldom and softly. The other small, younger, big-nosed, garrulous. Both always wore the orange of the novice thikratta of Ternas.”

  Kirshta looked at Vapathi. She shook her head. “I don’t think we found anyone like that in the Ushpanditya. They must have left with the Emperor.”

  “Probably,” Kirshta said.

  “The Emperor was eager to know what they found,” Teguri agreed. “If he escaped, he might have taken them—”

  “He escaped,” Kirshta agreed. “And he hides in Davrakhanda.” He closed his eyes and rested his head in one hand, the other hand scratching slowly at the surface of the armrest.

  The woman fell silent. The expression on her face suggested that she, too, would rather be in Davrakhanda.

  “You’ve been helpful, Teguri-dhu,” Vapathi said. “We’ll give you pity.”

  “Pity?” the woman asked incredulously. “You know of such a thing as pity?”

  “Everything I do is for pity,” Kirshta growled. “Pity for the peasants, servants, and slaves that you and your type abused. I’ve chased off the khadir, kings, dhorsha, and emperors so that they can be free.”

  The woman resumed her stoic silence, but a shadow of fear crept across her face.

  “But as for you,” Kirshta went on, “you’ll get the pity of a choice. Will you be Devoured?”

  “What does that mean?” Teguri said. “To join you and your army of peasants?”

  “Deathless peasants,” Kirshta corrected. “I will eat your name, and your death with it. You will not die as long as She Who Devours still hungers. But I expect you to serve me.”

  The woman was quiet for a long time. Her hands folded before her played with the fabric of her sari. “And otherwise?”

  Kirshta waved dismissively toward the south. “You can run away, if you insist. I’ll tell the Devoured not to pursue you. But you take your own chances with the famine. And the roads, I hear, are treacherous. Full of desperate, starving men whom I don’t control.”

  “I’ll go,” the woman said. “Let me go.”

  “Fine. My sister, give the word.”

  Vapathi nodded. She took the woman by the elbow and turned her with a gentle nudge toward the entrance of the Green Hall. An entourage of Devoured formed up around them. Vapathi waved them away and gestured for one of the living Red Men to come and follow her.

  The red-clad captain approached. “Give her an escort as far as the south gates of Majasravi,” Vapathi whispered. “Let any Devoured you see know she’s supposed to be unharmed. After that, it’s her own skin.”

  The captain nodded. He barked an order and a few of the other soldiers rose and fell in behind him. The woman gave Vapathi a nervous, desperate glance.

  “Are you actually going to let me go?”

  “Yes, Teguri-dhu,” Vapathi said. “Do you think that the Mouth of the Devourer doesn’t keep his promises?”

  Teguri pinched her hands together and took a long look at the throne in the front of the hall. “Am curse him,” she hissed.

  “You tried the power of Am,” Vapathi said sweetly. “It didn’t work.”

  Teguri shuddered. She left the chamber in the escort of the Red Men.

  Vapathi turned back toward the throne and saw Kirshta standing on the steps, his hands on his temples. She approached him as he descended. At the bottom of the dais he fell into her arms.

  “My sister,” he muttered. “Bring me to the tower.”

  His skin felt clammy and cold. The growing feeling of dread that Vapathi had battled over the last weeks stirred again in her stomach. “My brother,” she said. “You aren’t well.”

  “Bring me to the tower,” he repeated testily.

  She pulled one of his arms over her shoulders and helped him stand, and they left through the side door of the hall. It was a short walk through the outer halls of the Ushpanditya, filled with ruined treasures, across the sun-washed courtyard to the entrance of the Emperor’s Tower.

  No Devoured entered the tower except for Basadi. None of them had fixed that rule, but by silent consensus everyone knew that the Emperor’s Tower was for the Mouth of the Devourer and his friends: Apurta, Vapathi, and Basadi.

  When the shadow of the doorway fell over them, Kirshta collapsed to the ground. He put his hands on his temples, ground his teeth, and curled into a tight ball. A groan rumbled in his throat.

  Vapathi knelt and put a hand on his shoulder. If there were anything she could do for him—but there wasn’t. She sat holding his shoulder, guarding him silently.

  A moment later his muscles relaxed. His breathing became more regular. His eyes opened.

  “I have mastered her,” he whispered.

  “My brother,” Vapathi said. “What’s wrong?”

  “She Who Devours,” Kirshta says. “She stirs. It becomes… harder to resist her.” He shook as he spoke the words and reached out his hand toward her. He crushed her hand in his grip. His teeth clenched together, and another spasm took him.

  “I need to find that book,” he said when the spasm had passed.

  “Why?” Vapathi brushed aside Kirshta’s hair where it had stuck to the sweat on his forehead. “How could they threaten you? You can devour anything. You broke the Dhigvaditya—”

  “But I can’t,” Kirshta said. “I can’t… I can barely control She Who Devours at all
. It takes so much effort of will to keep her from destroying everything I look at. You, my sister.” He smiled at Vapathi feebly, but his smile was pierced with pain. Then he bit his lip. He began to cry.

  Vapathi pressed him to her chest. Tears ran silently down her face as she held Kirshta, who was shaking softly, his breath coming in broken jags between his tears.

  After a while he stilled. She kissed the top of his head. “So why do you need the book?”

  “They could undo everything,” Kirshta said softly.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” Kirshta said. “But she does. She remembers. I have to find it. It hurts me, my sister. My wound hurts and my will is winding down and I don’t know what to do. I could feel the thikratta take the poison to Majasravi. It had a… a smell that I could follow. But now it’s not here. And I still want it. I lost it, in the fall of Majasravi, and I don’t know where it went.”

  “Now at least you know,” Vapathi cooed. “You can go to Davrakhanda.”

  “Can I?” Kirshta asked. “Will it help?”

  “You say that She Who Devours wants it.”

  “She Who Devours is afraid of it. I don’t know that she wants it. I must get the book, because it’s the only thing that could ruin us.”

  Vapathi considered for a moment what sort of thing could make the nameless devourer afraid, and she shivered. She took a deep breath and spoke the thought which had lain just under her tongue for many days.

  “What if you cast off She Who Devours?”

  Kirshta jerked and pushed her away. “Cast her off? What are you saying?”

  “My brother, listen. You say that your will keeps her in check, keeps her hunger directed. So couldn’t you just… dismiss her? Purge her? I don’t know how you would say it.”

  “I would die,” Kirshta said, hissing with eyes wide. “She devoured my name, and her deathlessness is what keeps me alive. You want me to die?”

  “No, listen—”

  “Get away from me!” he roared, and with a sudden burst of power he leaped to his feet and scrambled up the stairs of the Emperor’s Tower. After climbing halfway to the next floor, he turned, shaking with anger. His hands clawed at the stone rail.

  “We never, no, never will put away She Who Devours. She gave us everything we have accomplished. She keeps me alive, delivered us from our oppressors, threw down the Emperor. You want—no, get away from me.”

  He stopped suddenly and covered his face with his hands.

  “Get away from me,” he whispered. “Before I…”

  He bolted up the stairs.

  Vapathi ran into the alcove beneath the stairs which entered into the imperial library, pulled aside a curtain, and threw herself onto one of the cushioned reading benches. For a moment she lay there in silence, gasping. A pain so deep she could not name it throbbed in her chest. She lay there, unable even to weep, waiting for her body or her heart to give out.

  Kirshta, she thought. Her brother. And finally, the black sorrow which she had felt like a stone beneath her skin resolved itself into words.

  I’ve lost him.

  MANDHI

  The harbor of Bhurnas was a square of seawater protected by a jetty of stone, its middle filled with little fishing boats and the deep-bellied trade dhows. The towers of the majakhadir’s palace rose over the calm waters at the western extremity of the harbor. The two ships that the Kaleksha sailed into the harbor were among the largest that Mandhi saw.

  But rather than being laden with trade goods, they were filled to the brim with the os Dramab, fleeing from their ruined home in Kalignas. Kaleksha spilled onto the decks, and not just men—women, children, infants. And a small half-breed child, the future Heir of Manjur and patriarch of the Kaleksha clan. Mandhi held him in her arms.

  Nakhur stood beside her with his arms folded across his chest. Jauda stood on the other side, pulling at the edges of his oiled beard.

  “It’s not Davrakhanda,” Nakhur said sullenly.

  “It’s not,” Mandhi agreed. “But it is Amur.”

  The Kaleksha congregated on the rails of the dhows to catch their first glimpses of an Amuran city. Murmurs of amazement and dismay mingled with the sound of the waves against the hull.

  “It’s as close to Davrakhanda as we can get,” Jauda said. “And it’s only temporary. We won’t be here long. I hope.” He sniffed and scratched the end of his nose.

  They had agreed not to sail to Davrakhanda. Too dangerous; Ashturma would almost certainly be waiting to behead them for having stolen his son’s ransom. Mandhi wanted to sail directly to Uskhanda, and from there to go to Virnas, but Nakhur and the mercenaries wouldn’t agree. They were all from Davrakhanda, and if they couldn’t go home, they wanted to be nearby.

  Bhurnas was an acceptable compromise. It was part of the kingdom of Gumadha, out of Ashturma’s reach, but only a few days of sailing from Davrakhanda. You could even reach Davrakhanda on foot from there if you needed to.

  They weighed anchor a hundred yards from the piers that jutted into the center of the bay. There was merry jostling and shouting among the Kaleksha sailors and the Amuran mercenaries as they let down a coracle into the water to row up to the docks.

  “I’ll go ashore to speak to the harbor-master,” Jauda said to Mandhi. “Shouldn’t take long.”

  He shimmied down a short rope into the coracle with two rowers. In a moment they were scooting across the surface of the water toward the docks.

  Mandhi dropped down from the foredeck, clutching Jhumitu to her chest, and found Aryaji and Hrenge standing near the rail in the middle of a knot of other Kaleksha women. She caught Aryaji saying adla kard and pointing to the shore. The girl had taken it into her head to learn Kaleksha during the trip from Kalignas to Amur, and she had picked it up frightfully fast. She could be heard talking with the pale women on the decks in halting, hesitant Kaleksha, certainly not fluent, but dextrous enough to carry on a conversation.

  Mandhi had learned a handful of words in order to talk to Hrenge at need, but the Kaleksha tongue felt like chewing rocks. Mostly she relied on Aryaji and Kest to translate for her.

  “How do they like it?” Mandhi asked as she sidled up to Aryaji.

  “They like the buildings, at least,” Aryaji said. “There isn’t a house in all of Kalignas as big as the majakhadir’s palace. They want to know which clan has its clanhome there.”

  “Did you tell them it’s the majakhadir’s?”

  Aryaji winced. “I think that explaining majakhadir is beyond what I can do in Kaleksha. One of the men will have to come by and help me.”

  “Maybe you can teach them the Amuran word,” Mandhi said. “We’re here in Amur. They’ll have to learn the language some time.” She didn’t mention what a relief it would be to her if the Kaleksha learned Amuran and spared her the difficulty of her embarrassing problems with their tongue.

  “They’ll learn,” Aryaji said, slightly stiffly. “Some of them. For others… they were low on choices when they came here. It’s very hot for them.”

  “You should tell them that we found Kalignas almost intolerably cold.”

  Aryaji grinned. “I have.”

  Jauda was returning from the dock in the coracle as they spoke. He pulled up next to the largest of the dhows and shouted up to them.

  “We’re cleared to unload, though they’re asking an exorbitant tax. He doesn’t like our cargo,” he said, gesturing to the Kaleksha women.

  “Too bad,” Mandhi said. “We’re coming ashore.”

  Unloading took a surprisingly long amount of time, with everyone climbing down into the coracles and being ferried to shore in small parties. Mandhi was among the first, leaving Jhumitu with Hrenge, so she and Aryaji could go into town and find a place for them to stay.

  Guesthouses in Bhurnas were few, and the first two refused her outright when she mentioned her party of several dozen Kaleksha. The third had the largest building and was short on guests, and he named an exorbitant price for their n
ight of good lodging.

  “You can’t be serious,” Mandhi said. “I could buy half your house for that price.”

  “First, you could not,” the thin, mustached house-master said. “But more importantly, I doubt you’re going to find many other places in town where you can house that many Kaleksha. And women? What are you doing with them here?”

  “Not your concern,” Mandhi said.

  The man raised an eyebrow and scratched at his acne-scarred cheek. “What you bring in my guesthouse is my concern. Not slaves, I hope.”

  “One of them is my mother-in-law, and the other is my husband,” Mandhi said icily. “So no, not slaves.”

  “Well, so long as they don’t make a mess.”

  “They won’t.” Mandhi turned to Aryaji. “Tell the others the way to get here. In the meantime,” she said, turning back to the housekeeper, “tell me what you’ve heard from Davrakhanda.”

  “Davrakhanda?” the man said. “How long have you been gone? The Emperor is there, now.”

  “The Emperor? Why would the Emperor be in Davrakhanda?”

  The man laughed. “Because he had to flee Majasravi.”

  “What?” Mandhi felt a swirl of confusion and dismay. “When did that happen?”

  “How long have you been gone?” the man asked, a smirk hiding under his mustache.

  Mandhi counted on her fingers. “About… nine months.”

  “Well if the stories are right, it was nearly three months ago when the Mouth of the Devourer came to Majasravi.” The man made a sign to ward off evil as he said the name Mouth of the Devourer. “Don’t know exactly when Sadja-daridarya came to Davrakhanda.”

  Mandhi’s head swam. “Mouth of the Devourer? Sadja-daridarya?” She had left Amur for less than a year, and the entire Empire had been overturned.

  “Are you well, my lady? Which part of that disturbs you more?”

  Mandhi rested her head in her hands. “I don’t know. When did Sadja-daridarya become Emperor?”

  “Oh, that,” the man said. “Don’t know, many months ago. Great rumors came out of Majasravi about how he pulled it off. Killed the whole imperial family, except the youngest daughter whom he wedded. Lovely stuff.” Then his voice dropped. “But they say that the Powers don’t favor him. The Mouth of the Devourer rose up as his punishment.”