The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  And, because she would have done anything ai’Jihaar asked in that hour, Anghara accepted a chunk of flat waybread baked in the embers by the women, and another steaming bowl of lais tea; and then she rose and went into her tent, her hair rippling around her. She stretched out on the thick rug that was her bed and wrapped herself in a light but warm woven blanket ai’Jihaar had given her in the serai in Sa’alah. Her mind was still sharp—bright and burning in the desert night like a candle—as she began to think back once again on the events of that night…

  …And woke, blinking, into the pearly light which came just before dawn, at the whispered summons at the tent flap and ai’Jihaar’s softly murmured response.

  “Wake,” said ai’Jihaar to her companion. “It is time.”

  And Arad Khajir’i’id was also waking with the heat, watchful and full of purpose as a living thing, waiting for the rising of the sun to release it into the yellow sands.

  By the time the first long fingers of the sun touched the place where Anghara of Roisinan had been raised into the ranks of Kheldrin’s sen’en’thari, they were already too late to find anything but cold campfire ashes half buried in the sand and a trail of splayed ki’thar’en tracks leading west. And the desert heat, freed from the shackles of the night in a silence a thousand times louder than any roar, uncoiled and stretched, and sprang to follow.

  17

  Nothing she had ever known could have prepared Anghara for the life she was plunged into in the desert of Arad Khajir’i’id. The caravan rolled on relentlessly, resting through the hottest hours of the day and travelling, to compensate for lost time, into the night. During the night camps, while the women prepared the evening meal, ai’Jihaar never failed to snatch an hour or two to drill Anghara in what she called the Way. And if Bresse had been a hard school, the Kheldrini Way was infinitely worse. It had to be absorbed with a tired mind and a body aching with the unaccustomed punishment it was being subjected to every long, desert day as the sun pinned them down for the heat to hunt them.

  But there were reserves in Anghara she had never needed to tap before. She did, now, and held her own—only once, as she had slid off her ki’thar in an evening camp, did she wince at a twinge of liquid agony in a strained muscle, and remember something of the softer world she had left behind.

  “Kerun and Avanna!” she breathed, her hands at the small of her back, trying to stretch the knotted muscle into quiescence and back into the obscurity it usually dwelt in. Near enough to hear, ai’Jihaar turned with a ghost of a smile hovering around the edges of her mouth.

  “They cannot hear you here,” she said. “Ours are the older Gods, jealous of their dominion.”

  Even that exchange, innocuous as it sounded, had thrust them into the Way with an inevitability Anghara had come to accept as inexorable.

  “Older? The Elder Gods?” Anghara queried, her mind winging back to the Dances in Roisinan, where the Elder Gods were said to be summoned with offerings of blood by those acolytes left unfulfilled by the worship of Kerun and Avanna.

  And, once again, ai’Jihaar answered both the spoken and the unspoken. “The same Gods have ruled in Kheldrin for a thousand years,” she said. “Perhaps longer. They existed when the Dances were young. Perhaps it was to them that the Stones were raised. But the knowledge was lost long ago, when the builders of the Dances passed away, and the Elder Gods withdrew into the Twilight Country where they had been born.”

  “Why?” Anghara asked, skating off at a tangent. “Why the Twilight Country? I have never seen a place where the sun shines more brightly than it does in Arad Khajir’i’id.”

  “But not beyond it,” ai’Jihaar murmured.

  And Anghara suddenly understood. “It is hidden,” she whispered. “A shadow on the edge of night…”

  The older woman nodded. “What did you know of Kheldrin ere you came here? Only that it was a desert country, which bred swift horses and strange people. And on those people your countrymen always looked askance, partly because they were…different, and perhaps, as they might say, inhuman—and partly because there is an old belief that there are witches in Kheldrin with powers equal at the very least to those of the Elder Gods.”

  This was ai’Jihaar’s own brand of brittle humor, but it was a dangerous joke; Anghara gave a small dry laugh. “I have heard of them,” she said. “But they are rumor, legend, every tale about the Kheldrini witches always begins with ‘it is said,’ never ‘I have seen…’”

  “Faith needs no proof. They knew enough to think that they never wanted to know any more,” said ai’Jihaar. “And Kheldrin, to Sheriha’drini, shrank to the plain around Sa’alah, where some, a brave few, came to do trade for those things only Kheldrin could give them. There, and no further—and even that, for some, was too far. Beyond the mountains was another world, one which was guarded against them by their very fear of it. And so we were content, also, for the twilight is the essence of the Way.”

  “Then how can it be right for one not born of it to take the Way?” asked Anghara, suddenly troubled.

  “You are sen’thar,” said ai’Jihaar evenly. “Kheldrin is an old land, the oldest, perhaps; it is your own Gods who have called you home.”

  And Anghara learned of the Old Gods: al’Zaan, Sa’idma’sihai, Lord of the Empty Places whose realm Kheldrin had been from the beginning of memory, the God who could not be worshipped within any constricting walls but who lived in every grain of sand in the open desert; al’Khur, who wore the head of the desert vulture on his human body and vulture’s wings springing from his shoulders—al’Khur, Lord of Death, but also, in gentler guise, Lord of Little Death that was sleep and of the dreams and visions which were its gifts; ai’Dhya of the Winds; ai’Lan of the Sun, with her bowl and her crooked knife, and the power and protection bought by bloody sacrifice; gentle ai’Shahn, the Messenger of the Gods, who was also ai’Shahn al’Sheriha, spirit of the waters, holiest of them all. Sen’en’thari were not bound to any one God but served them all—and knew every invocation, every sacrifice, every word of power that was ever sacred to any God. Every God spoke to them, and they had to learn to understand them all.

  Kheldrin was not, never had been, a populous country; even had their version of Sight been as widespread as it was…had been, Anghara had to remind herself bitterly…in Roisinan, there would have been relatively few who had the gift. But there were even fewer sen’en’thari than this, fewer than Anghara could have imagined. The white circle, to which ai’Jihaar had named Anghara, was the first rung in the sen’thar hierarchy, just above the novitiate, and it consisted of no more than perhaps two hundred people in all of Kheldrin. The second circle, the gray, boasted less than eighty initiates—for not all of the whites would go on to take the gray robe. And the third, the highest, circle was the gold—ai’Jihaar was one of only five an’sen’en’thari, the High Ones, and the oldest of them. And the only one—Anghara trembled with pride and with a strange fear when ai’Jihaar made this confession—to have never taken a novice since she had become an’sen’thar. Not until her path had crossed with a lost princess in the Land of Running Water.

  Four days out from the Desert Gate, beside the pahria palm-fringed pool of a small hai’r, the caravan met up with another, larger one, also on its way south. Waiving the usual night-camp session of Way lore, ai’Jihaar had released Anghara to watch the dancing around fires built in the space between the two camps. Anghara saw her teacher draw aside the leader of their own caravan and stand speaking with him quietly for some time. When she was finally done, ai’Jihaar turned to pick her way delicately and unerringly to where her pupil sat with her back against one of the huge palms, and Anghara scrambled to her feet. There was a tranquillity on ai’Jihaar’s unveiled face, the tranquillity which comes in the wake of having finally made a difficult decision.

  “The caravan leaves us tomorrow,” she said without preamble when she reached Anghara, offering the first tangible information concerning their destination since they had left C
alabra. “They are to join with this other and turn south, to Beku. And we have still a long way to go before we see the dunes of the Kadun.”

  Kheldrini geography was still hazy in Anghara’s mind. She frowned, trying to remember if she had heard the name before. “Kadun?”

  “Kadun Khajir’i’id. The Northern Desert.”

  Anghara was abruptly reminded of a street in Sa’alah, just off the pier. A ship newly arrived from Roisinan; two passengers disembarking, one rooted deeply into the land they had just stepped upon, the other a leaf adrift on a storm. Home, ai’Jihaar had answered when Anghara had asked where they were going.

  There had been something in ai’Jihaar’s voice when she had named the Northern Desert which was very similar to the way she had answered Anghara’s question back in Sa’alah. Kadun Khajir’i’id was home. But patience had not been amongst the least of things which ai’Jihaar had taught Anghara; she waited, in silence, until ai’Jihaar was ready to go on.

  “I had thought to make it easier for you,” ai’Jihaar said after a pause, “to take the High Road and cross the Kharg’in’dun’an into Kadun. Even the Arad has made you suffer; I did not want to make you face the Khar’i’id before you must. But in Beit el’Sihaya, the Empty Quarter, where the Stone Desert sunders the sands of Arad and Kadun, there is a place which waits for you, and the only way to reach it is the hard way. It might mean nothing at all, and yet it might mean everything—and something is telling me the time to find out is now.”

  “Where?” said Anghara. It was all she could do to say even that much; a great silence had bloomed in her at the name of Beit el’Sihaya, a silence broken only by what seemed to be the whisper of a distant wind in her mind.

  “Gul Qara.”

  And of course that was where they had been meant to go. Anghara knew as soon as she heard the words spoken. The white flame and the gold, that first night in the desert; all the questions that had arisen, clamoring for answers; and the Gods had been silent.

  Silent also, for years uncounted, had been the Oracle of Gul Qara. It had once, so the legend said, spoken with a human voice—but it had been haunted by nothing except the desert winds for almost as long as the Records could remember.

  I know this…how do I know this…

  But the white flame was twined in the gold; these were ai’Jihaar’s memories. And now she withdrew, leaving the Oracle in Anghara’s mind.

  “Perhaps it is for you,” said ai’Jihaar. “Perhaps it will wake for you.” She suddenly lifted her face into the still night air, as though she were scenting something. Anghara could see her mood flow into something different, less solemn, more quicksilver. “Pahria nuts,” she said, correctly. There were four around Anghara’s feet, one cracked open by the little woman—her name, Anghara had learned at last, was ai’Sahli—who had once offered the gift of a carved bone comb. She had come over to Anghara when she’d seen the Sheriha’drini girl was alone, but had prudently withdrawn when she had seen ai’Jihaar approaching. A thin streak of milky juice was oozing out into the sand from the split nut, overturned in ai’Sahli’s strategic retreat. “Has ai’Sahli been bearing gifts again?”

  It was a light moment, leavened with laughter, one Anghara would recall with something like nostalgia in the days which followed.

  They parted company from the caravan the next morning, and Anghara watched it meander away southward toward the city called Beku. The night before ai’Sahli had been the only one to offer some kind of farewell, but nobody, not even she, had turned to wave goodbye at the caravan’s departure. During the short duration of their shared journey, theirs had been a quiet, gracious, if rather distant acceptance which Anghara could not see Roisinani offering a solitary Kheldrini traveller, no matter whose protection he travelled under. The caravan leader had voiced his unease at Anghara’s presence back at the Sa’alah end of the Desert Gate, and after that had bowed to ai’Jihaar’s superior judgment and never, by word or deed, offered any objection to Anghara’s presence. In fact, he had paid her the highest compliment of treating her no differently from one of his own people; and if one or two of them chose to make overtures to her, offering the gift of a comb or helping with readying her ki’thar, that was their own concern and no business of his.

  But he was gone, with his people, and Anghara and ai’Jihaar turned their own ki’thar’en west once again. Later, after a day or two, ai’Jihaar angled a little more southwest, back into the Arad, when the ground began to change into a thin layer of yellow sand over stone which marked the beginning of the Khar’i’id—not yet, the gesture seemed to say, not until we must. Later still they came upon a tiny, deserted hai’r. Although it was only mid afternoon ai’Jihaar called a halt, no more than an hour or two since their midday break. With new-honed senses she would not have known the existence of only a few short weeks ago, Anghara looked through the solitary pair of pahria palms flanking the little pool of brown water, and saw the air was different in the direction in which they were headed. Heavier, somehow; where the heat of the Arad was a swift wildness released by the sun every morning and confined again at sunset in the cool cage of the desert night, the heat that shimmered ahead was solid, smothering, and had a disturbing air of permanence.

  Warned by a sudden stillness in her companion, ai’Jihaar came to stand beside her. “You feel it?” she asked quietly. “That is Khar’i’id. That is where we are going tomorrow. We must make sure all the waterskins are full; this is the last water from here to the Kadun.”

  “You said water must be bought,” said Anghara, glancing around for any sign of this small hai’r’s water-keeper, to whom payment had to be made.

  But ai’Jihaar shook her head. “Not here. This is the Shod Hai’r, the Last Oasis; this water is a gift from the Arad.”

  “There are still a few hours of light left,” said Anghara. “Why don’t we fill the skins and go on? We can make a start, at least, in the cool of the evening, and tomorrow…”

  “That is Khar’i’id,” said ai’Jihaar again. “There is no cool in the Khar’i’id night. And no one walks the Stone Desert in darkness. Not when there is a choice.”

  And the rich golden light of an afternoon by a Dance of Standing Stones in a different land came pouring into Anghara’s memory, and within it, the first instant when she had heard the name of the desert at whose threshold she stood.

  The Stone Desert of Kheldrin, where nothing thrives except se’i’din and diamondskins, and both of these are death.

  She turned away abruptly, back toward the small muddy pool in the midst of Shod Hai’r. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

  The ki’thar’en were more reluctant than usual to move the next morning; beasts of the desert, they were even more finely tuned to the atmosphere around them and knew Khar’i’id held nothing good. It was blighted land. The only thing that grew there was thorn-spurred se’i’din, a poison from which there was no reprieve. It was hard to obtain in Roisinan—if Kheldrin traded for it, it was not on the open market—but it was not unknown; a number of feuds had been settled by means of what the Roisinani knew as rosebane. There would be nothing wholesome for ai’Jihaar and Anghara to eat or drink in Khar’i’id until they emerged on the other side except that which they carried with them.

  And yet, Khar’i’id held one of the holiest places in Kheldrin, and the journey to Gul Qara was simply the penance required to set foot on hallowed ground. The ki’thar’en were overruled, and pointed into the cauldron.

  There was a boundary between the Arad and Khar’i’id; Anghara sensed when it was crossed. Between one breath and the next it was as though she suddenly had to gulp air through a hairy blanket. The burnoose felt as if it was choking her; she was already lifting a clawed hand to release it, her reason dulled by the solidity of the heat around her, when she felt ai’Jihaar’s urgent touch in her mind, no less sharp and clear in this place than it had been in the open sands of the Arad.

  Resist it. It can be resisted. It must be resisted. This place kills with
out trying. Do not let it force you into doing something foolish.

  Anghara’s hand dropped. She squared her shoulders to endure; but in that moment she would have given anything for one breath of the high, clear air of Miranei.

  All too soon ai’Jihaar’s repeated references to walking the Stone Desert became painfully clear. They had started out on the sand-covered stone shelf, which they had encountered before, no more than a condescension toward metamorphosis of the one desert into another. But as the last of the Arad’s yellow sand faded away, the true face of Khar’i’id unveiled itself—a black stone plain of loose sharp rocks the ki’thar’en would have trouble enough negotiating while led, but which they had no chance at all of walking with a rider. The ground was hot beneath the two women’s feet as they dismounted, and even the animals, ready under normal circumstances to grumble and complain at the smallest things, were grimly silent at the spectacle of the purgatory which awaited them. Anghara exchanged an eloquent glance with the blind, white eyes of ai’Jihaar, which had been turned toward her—and stepped forward first.

  They didn’t stop at midday—there was no point, as there was no peak to the heat, it just seemed to burn on and on at the same impossible, blistering, eternal high. Soon it seemed as though they had been walking forever, Anghara having turned into a plodding automaton whose only tasks in life were to remember to breathe and keep putting one foot in front of the other. When ai’Jihaar eventually called a halt, she had to do it twice before Anghara responded, looking up in surprise to realize the sun was already well on the way to setting. She tried to speak, but her dry mouth could not seem to form the words.