“I’m sorry I couldn’t free you before you reached Onur. Had I known . . .”
Çeda shook her head. “You couldn’t have known.” She gripped Beril’s hands and said, “Thank you.”
“Thank me by fulfilling your vow to kill the Kings of Sharakhai. Now come.” She motioned to the hatch that led down into the bowels of the ship where, surely, she meant for Çeda to leave through the access hatch along the bottom of the ship’s hull.
But Çeda refused to follow. “I can’t leave without Kerim.”
“He is lost to you.”
“No he isn’t, and he’s leaving with me.”
Beril looked to the other woman, who merely shrugged. “Very well, but take this.” She unwrapped her turban and quickly wrapped it around Çeda’s head in the Salmük style. Then they were off, Beril leading the way up the ladder, to the deck. Çeda followed, her heart beating fiercely in case they were seen. But the ship was nearly empty. Four crewmen stood on the foredeck, throwing sand on a fire still raging over the deck. One man stood on the vulture’s nest atop the mainmast. When he saw Beril and Çeda heading for the captain’s cabin, Çeda thought they’d been found out, but the man merely nodded.
They entered the cabin and found Kerim, still nailed to the hull. They rummaged through Onur’s desk until they found an old sextant, which they used to pry the nails free. Çeda tried to be careful with Kerim’s skin, but there was simply no way to avoid harming him, so she pulled harder.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she laid Kerim down, the black blood oozing from his wounds staining the bright golden carpet. Kerim, eyelids heavy, his breath terribly weak, made no reply. She wasn’t even sure he could.
Leaving him there, she returned to the desk and hunted through the lower drawers, then the nearby shelves. “Beril, I need the bracelet as well. The one with the onyx stone.”
The two of them tore through the cabin as quickly as they could, opening the chest in the corner, looking through the drawers in the desk and beneath the bunk. But it wasn’t there.
“He must have taken it into battle with him,” Beril said.
She’d no sooner spoken than Çeda looked up. She could feel something—small and dark and angry, like a secret door to an oubliette. She felt along the cabin’s roof, moving the boards. The closer she came to it, the more certain she was of its location. One of the boards popped loose, revealing a hidden compartment. Within was a bag with coins, a woman’s ring, and the bracelet.
“How . . . ?” Beril asked, but then shook her head. “Never mind. We must hurry.”
Çeda stuffed the bag inside her dress and rushed to Kerim’s side. She lifted him up and carried him to the shuttered windows at the rear of the cabin. He hardly moved. After setting him on the sill, she gave his weight over to Beril, then climbed out of the window and leapt to the ground. Beril lowered him down, and Çeda caught him as best she could, the two of them collapsing to the sand.
“When you see Ishaq,” Beril said, “tell him Onur was hunting for something in our tribe. He never told me what, but I believe he hopes to find it among the treasures of Tribe Masal.”
“Very well,” Çeda said, wondering what it might be. As quickly as she could, she bore Kerim away from the conflict, praying to Nalamae for the darkness and the blowing sand to hide her. “Hold on, Kerim. We’re nearly safe.”
It was a horrible lie—they were anything but safe—but soon enough they were beyond the next dune. And soon after that, the sun had fallen. She headed southwest, walking as far as she could manage before laying Kerim down in the trough between two dunes.
As the stars brightened on a moonless night, Çeda held Kerim as he shivered.
* * *
Çeda took the stairs down into the earth, unwinding her turban and wrapping it around her shoulders. The earth’s chill embraced her like a lost love, welcoming after so long in the desert. It was quiet beneath the tower Beril had described. Lonely. It felt as if she were walking into a catacomb to find her own tomb.
The stairs led to a natural cavern, utterly black save for the stairwell’s faded smudge of ash-gray behind and above her. She moved slowly, warding her way forward, then heard it. The drip of water. It came rhythmically, oddly timed to her every third footfall, as if a lost god were weaving a spell to draw her near. When her boots splashed into water, she crouched and reached out, finding a shallow pool, cold to the touch. She took a small mouthful. It tasted of minerals and sulfur but was drinkable all the same. With her knees in the water, she drank deeply, then cupped the water and splashed her face over and over, cooling her skin and washing away the dirt and grime of the desert.
Stepping deeper into the pool, she lay in the water, rolled over, soaked her dress in it before simply floating, arms out, staring into the darkness. It felt like the passage to the farther fields to simply sit here and pretend she was not a part of the world above. But then the dripping seemed to come louder. It was only a trick of the mind, as if the lost god had grown bored with her presence, and was telling her to return to the sun, to leave this place or suffer his wrath. As much as Çeda might wish to sever her ties to the troubles of the world, she had no choice. She was woven into the desert’s story as much as Onur, as King Ihsan, as Macide and Queen Meryam and Kiral, the King of Kings.
And Kerim and the other asirim.
She stayed a long while, but thoughts of Kerim, who waited for her above, alone and in pain, sobered her, and she made ready to return to him. She drank more water, filled her water skin, then made the climb back up to the surface, where she found him lying exactly where she’d left him, in one corner of the tower’s square interior. He was facing her, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. Nor did he move as she knelt by his side and placed a hand on his shoulder.
She knew better than to offer him water. The asirim neither ate nor drank. Except when forced to by the Kings.
“My mother used to go to the blooming fields,” she said, if only to take her mind from the grisly curse the desert gods had lain across the shoulders of the asirim. “She’d bring back the blooms and press them in a book.” A book Çeda had lost when she’d fled Sharakhai.
“How I miss it. The heft of it was so like the weight of my mother’s hand in mine.” Çeda reminisced, flashes of memories playing in her mind’s eye—holding her mother’s hand as they went to the well, or watching as she bartered for salt and lemons from Seyhan, or shivering by her side in their shared bed, trying to fall asleep while the asirim howled their way closer to Sharakhai. “But it’s gone now. Given back to the desert.”
She stroked Kerim’s bald head. His eyes were slits, the pain within him great.
“Still,” she went on, hoping to draw his mind away from memories of his torture at the hands of Onur, “that book held three of the riddles the gods gave to the Kings on Tauriyat the night of Beht Ihman. I found them years after my mother died, and they led me to Sehid-Alaz. Led me to the asirim.”
She took a drink and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Glancing through the gutted window on her left, she wondered if the Moonless Host really would arrive tonight as Beril had promised. She had no great desire to delay her return to Sharakhai, but she had to admit that the chance to speak to Ishaq, her grandfather, was strong. And taking a bit of time to gather some support, any support, would be welcome.
“After pressing the petals, my mother would store them in a necklace.” She slipped the necklace over her head. It was silver. A bit tarnished, but not terribly so, and shaped like a candle’s flame, with an intricate desert design etched onto its surface. “This very one.” She opened the locket and breathed in the scent of the adichara blooms. “There are no petals left, but you can still smell them.”
She held it to the twin slits of Kerim’s narrow, desiccated nostrils. His eyes closed. He breathed deeply, like one might a bouquet of flowers after having being lost for years in the desert. When he ope
ned his eyes once more, they seemed to have gained a bit of clarity.
“My mother carved.” His wheezing, rattling whisper reminded Çeda of a sandstorm—the shriek of it, the rattle of the sand. “She carved wood. But later, stone. Trinkets to sell in the bazaar or far out in the desert during our pilgrimages.”
“What did she like to carve?”
“Buhrr—” Kerim swallowed. Tried again. “Birds. Amberlarks. Finches. Blazing blues. Herons wading in the Haddah, like your sword. And other animals. Word spread, and she was commissioned by those from Goldenhill. She was asked to create a bronze sculpture of Beşir for a fountain in the merchant’s quarter, near Hanging Gardens.”
“I know the one,” Çeda said.
“She made it”—Çeda could hear the pride in his voice—“and it was glorious. Perfect. Beşir claimed it had not captured his likeness well enough and refused to pay. Two months of work gone, and debts stacked high after borrowing against what she was promised by the House of Kings, and still they put the statue up, removing her sign from the base so that no one would know it was her work.” Kerim’s eyes were intense, angry. “When trouble began to brew with the desert tribes, there were rumors that our tribe would bear the brunt of the battle. My mother harbored a naïve belief that our family might be saved, that we might ask one small favor of Beşir to protect our family.”
He went silent. They both knew the folly of such a hope.
“Does she yet live?”
“No, but you met her before she died. She was killed by Sehid-Alaz when he was nearly driven mad by Mesut.”
Dear gods. Çeda remembered. An asir, who had been a woman once, had taken Çeda into the strange cavern beneath Sharakhai, where the glowing stone had been. Sehid-Alaz had been there and, in his grief and near madness from Mesut’s torture, had killed that asir, beaten her head in against the glowing stone, then come for Çeda and nearly killed her too.
“What was her name?”
“Her name was Verahd, and she was kind until the last.”
“She was kind,” Çeda echoed, taking one of Kerim’s emaciated hands in hers. She kissed his fingers as a tear rolled down Kerim’s cheek. “Oh, Kerim, I owe her my life.”
He swallowed hard. Shook his head. “Fighting the will of the gods is no easy thing.”
He meant the urge to return to the blooming fields, to join the others hidden beneath the adichara. “I will find a way to free you.” It felt right the moment she’d said it, like it was something she’d been avoiding for years, though in truth she’d learned the true nature of the asirim only a year ago. “I will find a way to free you all.”
Kerim was shaking his head. “I warn you, through us, the Kings can reach you.”
She already knew it was so. Kerim was right. She had to be careful. But the asirim had to be her priority. If Sharakhai were to be freed, the Kings’ greatest weapon must be taken from them. Sensing movement, she turned and saw the white knife of a sail cutting along the horizon. Standing, she saw a blue pennant twisting in the breeze atop the skiff’s lone mast. It looked like a snake, freshly pierced by a spear.
The scene was so striking, and her relief so palpable, it felt as if this moment had been preordained, a vision in one of Saliah’s hanging glass prisms.
“Don’t worry, Kerim. Help has come.”
Chapter 8
THE TWIN MOONS WERE BRIGHT scythes in a star-filled sky as Emre waited beneath an archway, the crumbling entrance to an old boneyard. He watched the way ahead for the signal Macide said would come when the moons were high, but he was spending nearly as much time watching the ranks of crumbling pillars behind him for telltale signs of the dead rising from their graves. He would have waited elsewhere, but the truth was that most in Sharakhai were as leery of the dead rising from their graves as he was, and these days it paid for a scarab of the Moonless Host to be in places where other people were not.
Things had only grown worse in the days following Galliu’s betrayal. At least a dozen scarabs had been found murdered. More had been taken. The Kings had been finding their safe houses with such frightening frequency that Emre feared there were more traitors in their midst. Some believed Hamzakiir’s honeyed words, believed that he would lead them where Ishaq had not been able to. Was the Night of Endless Swords not proof? Many thought so, ignoring all the work Ishaq had done to build a coalition among dozens of warring factions. A surprising number had already thrown their lot in with Hamzakiir, but those pockets still loyal to the old guard were vulnerable to spying, treachery, and assassination.
A hulking wagon with bars across its windows trundled past. A hunched, angry-looking man sat atop it, whipping the horses. It looked like a slaver’s wagon heading for the blocks, and Emre feared the driver was his contact. For a moment he was sure the wagon would stop and the driver would bark at Emre to jump in the back, but thankfully the man never turned, the wagon was soon gone, and Emre was back to glancing at the boneyard for unexpected company.
Nearly an hour passed while the moons marched westward. Occasionally, small groups of men would file into the oud parlor up the street—laborers from the quarry, most like. A few stumbled out, often singing in slurred verses, an old woman yelling from the building across the street whenever they did. Finally, as a pair of cats began hissing on a rooftop, a man with a cap sitting at a jaunty angle came strutting down the street. He paused as a cluster of dirty gutter wrens flocked past—he warded them away from his purse with a hand on his knife—and then headed toward Emre.
He was Emre’s age, a touch over twenty summers, and handsome. His clothes weren’t what one would call finery—he was no east-end lord—but they were rich for this part of the city. Still, he wasn’t the usual sort Osman—who owned and ran the most popular of Sharakhai’s fighting pits—would hire to shade information across the city. He was about to tell the young man so, give him a ribbing and see what he was about, when he recognized him. Suddenly all the words Emre had at the ready flew up and away like a flock of blazing blues.
“By the stars above, if it isn’t Tariq Esad’ava.” He said it in the tone of a mother who hadn’t seen her son in years.
Tariq’s face screwed up in annoyance as he glanced to the darkened windows along the street. “Announce it to the whole fucking city, Emre.”
He kept it up, running his hands over Tariq’s clothes as if he couldn’t help himself. “It’s only, I haven’t seen you in ages. And now you show up at my doorstep.”
Tariq slapped his hands away.
“Has Osman demoted you?” Emre went on. “Sent you back to shading?”
“No, I’m not bloody back to shading. I’ve got my own crew. I’m practically running the pits now. But your . . . employers are paying a pretty pile of rahl for this, so he thought it best I come.” He paused. “Wipe that ruddy look off your face. This is serious.”
Emre sniffed, pretended to wipe a tear from his eyes. “My baby, all grown up.” When Tariq shoved him back into the boneyard, Emre smiled all the more. “Never could take a joke.”
“And you never knew when it was time to stand up and act like a man.”
Emre shrugged off Tariq’s annoyance. It did his heart good to be with someone, anyone, from his days before the Moonless Host. He wished they could sit awhile, talk of things other than Kings and killings and the cruel realities of life in the city, especially since he was about to leave Sharakhai, perhaps for good. But he guessed it wasn’t meant to be. Tariq may have felt the same—he knew Emre was about to leave as well—but if he did, he said nothing and the awkward look on his face was soon gone.
“You’ve got the name of the ship, then?” Emre asked.
In answer, Tariq handed over a folded piece of papyrus with a wax seal on one side. It looked like a rearing Malasani lion. The note would contain the name and location of the ship that would smuggle many of the remaining scarabs in Sharakhai to the desert. Emr
e was desperate to read it, but Macide was the one who would break the seal.
It was a desperate step they were taking, but these were desperate times. Those trying to hide were dying by the dozens while those who tried to escape aboard ships had been found by the Kings’ warships, or by the Silver Spears before the ships set sail. It didn’t seem to matter if they posed as crewmen, paid for a cabin, or stowed away belowdecks. Even skiffs were being hunted down with cruel efficiency, leading to more and more hangings at the foot of Tauriyat.
“When?”
“Dawn, but be there an hour before. No later, or you’ll not be allowed on.” As he spoke, Tariq reached up and tapped his cheek with two fingers. It was a signal shademen used to indicate that they were being watched, and to act normal. They’d used it years ago, primarily when the Silver Spears were near but hadn’t caught on to whatever it was they were up to: a drop, a pickup, whatever Osman had asked them to do.
“Very well,” Emre replied. He turned and nodded toward the oud parlor. “You want to get a drink? For old times?” He’d scanned the street, marking the alleys, trying to spot anyone who might be watching, but if anyone was there it’d take better eyes than his to spot them.
Tariq paused, unsure how to voice his thoughts, but then he shook his head. “You know,” he said, his voice so low Emre could barely hear it, “Osman’s always looking for good men. Might be you could still find a life here in Sharakhai.”
He was suggesting that Emre abandon the Moonless Host and remain in Sharakhai. Emre had heard it often enough from friends from his old life and dismissed it out of hand. But to hear Tariq say it only moments after a signal that they were being watched . . .
“What would I do?” Emre asked, just as softly.
“A man like you would need to lie low for a while. It’s dangerous these days, especially around the harbors. But we’d find a place for you.”
As a fucking shademan, Emre thought, work he’d done when he was fifteen. Those had been simpler times but ultimately empty. He’d been reborn when he’d joined hands with the Moonless Host, and he wasn’t ready to give it up, certainly not to become an errand boy for Osman.
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