A Veil of Spears

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  Emre’s old instincts kicked in as he padded toward him. He moved with liquid ease. And yet Tariq still sensed him. He’d always been the best of them at sensing danger. No sooner had his head swung toward Emre’s position than he was leaping the last story and a half, dropping and rolling, and coming up in a dead sprint.

  Emre was ready, though. He was running hard to intercept. Tariq tried to change tack. He stopped and went for his sword, but Emre closed the gap too quickly. He caught Tariq around the waist and brought him down like an oryx being felled by a black laugher.

  Tariq grunted, rolling with the tackle, trying to throw Emre off. Emre caught an elbow across the jaw in the midst of it, but held tight. “Stop fighting, Tariq. I only want to talk.”

  Tariq still struggled to get away so Emre levered his weight over him, being careful to not let Tariq’s shamshir clear its scabbard. Then he struck Tariq across the face. “I said stop fighting. I’ll release you, but you have to answer some questions.”

  “I’d sooner lick my own sack.”

  “That can be arranged.” Emre lifted him, then drove him back down with everything he had. “Hamid’s on your trail too. And believe me, if he finds you, what happens next is out of my hands.”

  Silence followed. Tariq finally relaxed. “I’m supposed to believe you’re my bloody savior, then?”

  “I’m the one who decides whether you live to see the sunrise, Tariq. Now tell me why you betrayed the Host.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  Emre punched Tariq hard in the mouth. “By now they’ll be coming down the stairs, Tariq.”

  Tariq squirmed, reeling from the pain. “I didn’t betray the Host.” Emre pulled back his arm to strike him again, and Tariq blurted, “It was Pelam!”

  Pelam was Osman’s second, who ran the pits on a day-to-day basis. “Go on.”

  “They took Osman, Emre. Five of those bloody Maidens walked right into his home in the dead of night and took him. A man came to the pits the next day, told Pelam that Osman would be returned and his businesses left intact as long as Pelam did what they said.”

  “When was this?”

  “A week ago.”

  “Don’t lie, Tariq.”

  “I’m not lying. It was a week ago today.”

  “I said don’t lie. A week ago we hadn’t even contacted Osman.”

  “They knew everything. They said you’d come, that you’d be desperate, that you’d ask for a way out of the city. They even said I had to deliver the message and that you’d be the one to meet me.”

  A sliver of ice formed and grew inside of Emre. “Me?”

  “They said my oldest friend would meet me.”

  “But how?”

  “How else? It must be the Jade-eyed King!”

  “But he’s dead. Everyone’s saying so.”

  “You believe everything you hear on the streets now?”

  Was it true, then? Did Yusam live? Or was this something he’d passed on before he’d died? What does it matter? Emre thought. We’re in for it now. Emre heard Hamid calling for him.

  “It’s a trap?” Emre whispered.

  “They’ll take every last person who shows up at that ship.”

  Gods. Fucking gods. Macide and the rest, they’re all going to die.

  “I meant what I said, Emre. You could lie low awhile. We can get past this.”

  Emre heard the others approaching. He pulled Tariq up to his feet. “You’re the one who needs to lie low awhile.”

  “I’m not afraid of Hamid.”

  “You should be. He’s as savage as the Confessor King when his blood’s up. And it will be when he hears this.”

  “Emre, you can’t help them anymore.”

  “I need to try. Now hit me, quick.”

  Tariq just stood there. His eyes saucers in the darkness.

  “Do it, Tariq.”

  And then he did. He punched Emre across the right eye. It was a hard hit, but not as hard as it might’ve been. Emre fell—only an act, but he had to make it look good for the others. Tariq was gone in a flash, sprinting down a darkened alley as Hamid, Darius, and Frail Lemi came running around the corner.

  “Where were you?” Darius asked.

  “I saw him escaping.”

  “You were supposed to call,” Frail Lemi said, punching one hand into the other.

  “If I’d called, he would’ve escaped.”

  “He did escape!” Hamid spat.

  Emre sent an ineffectual wave in the direction Tariq had run. “I thought I had the drop on him.”

  “You were supposed to call,” Frail Lemi repeated. It was dark, but Emre could still see the great furrow in his brow, the one that came when he couldn’t piece things together.

  “He let Tariq go, Lem,” Hamid said before Emre could reply. “Gods curse you, Emre, I knew I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

  “Me?” Emre cried. “I was the one who spotted him! I took him down while the three of you were holding your cocks upstairs.”

  Hamid strode forward and shoved Emre back so hard he fell to the street. Hamid’s knife was out the next moment. “You decided to let your old friend go. The only thing I’m not sure about is why.”

  “Hold on!” Emre shouted, scrabbling away. “Hold on! I know what to do!” He knew no such thing, but Hamid had that look in his eye. Why did I let Tariq go?

  “Wait, Hamid,” Darius said, grabbing Hamid’s sleeve.

  Hamid ripped his sleeve free. “Don’t think to deny me, Darius.” He pointed the knife at Frail Lemi as well, who was walking forward with arms raised in a placating gesture, as if he hadn’t seen Hamid fly into a murderous rage like this a half-dozen times before. Hamid shoved the knife at Emre. “He betrayed us.”

  “I betrayed no one!”

  “He said he knew what to do,” Frail Lemi said.

  Hamid made a show of flourishing to Emre. “Well then do go on, Emre! Tell us this brilliant plan of yours.”

  Frail Lemi shuffled his feet and wrung his hands. He always became this way when his friends fought. “Go on, Emre.”

  Emre had no earthly idea what to do. How could he possibly navigate the Host to safety when the Kings had stacked so much against them?

  “You see?” Hamid said, pointing at Emre with his knife.

  And then it came to him in a flash. But sunrise was near . . . Gods, the horizon was already beginning to brighten.

  “All of you, follow me.” He tried to run wide around Hamid but Hamid imposed himself.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Adzin. We’re going to Adzin. He’s the one who betrayed us.” When Hamid remained still as a statue, Emre clasped his hands and shook them, pleading, “Quickly, Hamid. While we argue, the night is wasting away.”

  It took Hamid a moment. He looked to the others, then back at Emre. Then he slammed his knife into its sheath. “Better be right, Emre.”

  And then they were off, running for the western harbor.

  * * *

  From the darkness of a tavern pergola, Emre, Hamid, Darius, and Frail Lemi watched as the crew of a ramshackle sloop prepared to tow back from the pier and into the harbor. Lanterns cast a meager golden glow over the rigging and deck of a ship that was in such disrepair it looked about to take its final voyage. Five crewmen worked the tow ropes. At a call from a giant of a man, a dark-skinned Kundhuni standing on the pier near the prow, the crew pulled the ropes taut and heaved while the Kundhuni held the gunwale and used his legs to power the ship back along the pier.

  Tariq had come here to Adzin, perhaps to offer him a bribe, perhaps to coerce him under threat of harm, perhaps both. Adzin had agreed, of that much Emre was certain. The ritual he’d performed in front of Macide had likely all been for show, leading them to the answer the Kings themselves had preordained: that Macide and th
e rest should embark on one particular ship the Kings knew about, making it all too easy for them to intercept and either kill or capture them all.

  That wasn’t what Emre cared about most, though. Explanations could come later. What he needed now were Adzin’s particular gifts, and this time, Adzin would either use them for real or Emre would kill the man himself.

  “Now,” Emre whispered.

  The four of them moved quickly across the quay and rushed down the pier like a pack of wolves, making sure to keep the stern of the ship between them and the men pulling at the tow ropes. The Kundhuni straining along the gunwales heard them, but by the time he’d turned, one of Frail Lemi’s studded leather gloves was already rushing toward his jaw. He fell across the gunwales and was lost in a heap on the deck.

  The crew shouted. They dropped their ropes, most sprinting for the pier’s ladder, a few heading toward the ropes hanging down over the stern. Emre and the others, meanwhile, rushed onto the ship and down into the open hatchway. Darius and Frail Lemi closed the hatch after them and barred it.

  Ahead of Emre and Hamid, golden light spilled from a cabin doorway, bathing a passageway lined with odd, grisly assortments nailed to the walls. Braided hair, baby’s sandals, strings of blackened teeth, rusted iron forks with some lumpy, brown residue coating the tines, a papyrus doll in the shape of a woman wearing a crown of thorns. Emre rushed past it all just as the cabin door ahead began to close. He charged and struck it like a battering ram. A thump and a high-pitched scream came from the opposite side just before he burst into the cabin.

  Adzin lay on the carpeted floor, wincing and tenderly probing his forehead, where a gash was starting to well and drip a river of crimson. He stared at the blood on his fingers, then took in the looming forms of Emre and Hamid, with confusion and anger and something else. Resignation?

  “Have I not given the Host enough?” he said.

  “You know,” Emre said as he grabbed two fistfuls of Adzin’s robe and hauled him to his feet. “You’d think he would have seen this coming.” And then he punched Adzin in the stomach.

  Adzin doubled over, his breath wheezing from him in one long whoosh. For several long seconds, the sound of his aborted attempts at breathing filled the cabin. After one long, wet breath he started coughing like a man in a losing battle against consumption. “Who says I didn’t?” he managed.

  The crew had reached the hatch door. There were shouts, and something hard crashed against it.

  “No,” Emre said. “You wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble, setting up the Moonless Host only to have us track you down, if you’d known.”

  “That depends, doesn’t it?”

  “On what?”

  “On the other choices, you bloody fool. On the other choices.”

  Hamid’s face turned to stone, an indicator he’d heard more than enough. He grabbed Adzin and shoved him into the passageway, making a dozen things fall and clatter against the warped floorboards. Hamid pressed Adzin’s face onto the nails until Adzin began screaming from it.

  Hamid yelled in his ear. “Order your men to help us or I’m going to gut you like a desert coney!”

  The pounding against the hatch came louder, and something gave.

  “Enough!” Adzin cried. “Okzan. Cenk. Let us be awhile!”

  The pounding at the hatchway door stopped. “Adzin?”

  “I said let us be!”

  “Good,” Emre said, then motioned to the low table in the cabin. “Bring him in here.”

  Hamid did, shoving Adzin so hard he tumbled over the pillows and struck his head against the hull.

  As Adzin righted himself and straightened his robes, Emre knelt and stared him in the eye. “Here’s what happens next. We’re taking your ship, Adzin, and then you and your crew are going to help us free Macide and the others.”

  Adzin swallowed, again with that strange look of his. This time Emre recognized it for what it was. There was resignation, but it wasn’t anger or confusion that mixed with it. It was sorrow.

  Chapter 13

  “I REMEMBER MEETING YOU when I was young,” Çeda said to Salsanna, the woman who’d come in the skiff to rescue Çeda and Kerim from the tower.

  A glimmer of recognition had plagued Çeda since they’d started their journey, but she’d only just remembered where they’d met that morning, when Salsanna had woken early and practiced sword forms along the top of a dune. She was a tall woman with rust-colored hair. She was muscular, the small scars she sported somehow complementing the blue tattoos on her chin and cheeks and forehead. She was beautiful in the way ebon blades were beautiful, in the way the curve of a perfectly balanced spear was beautiful.

  Salsanna, choosing not to reply, adjusted the tiller to take a steep rise along a dune more easily. They were sailing west, and had been for three days now. Ahead, tall and imposing, were the Taloran Mountains. The ground had become steadily more treacherous as they’d neared the foothills, which loomed not so far ahead. Rocky surfaces were becoming difficult to avoid, forcing them to occasionally sail over them, and the small red boulders that littered the ground had become massive and much more numerous.

  Çeda grew annoyed by Salsanna’s silence. “You watched me while my mother spoke with Leorah.” Çeda didn’t know it when they’d first met, but Leorah was Çeda’s great-grandmother, the mother of Ishaq, leader of the Moonless Host.

  “Watched you fumble your way around your sword more like.” She said it with a humorless smile, glancing at River’s Daughter with a look like she’d caught something unpleasant between her teeth. She’d been doing so over the course of their journey, and always with a similar look of distrust, even of anger.

  “I was six.” Çeda still remembered how intimidated she’d been. Then, as now, Salsanna had projected an intensity no one could fail to recognize.

  Salsanna shrugged. “It was clear how well you would take to the sword.”

  “Oh, this?” Çeda put her hand on the pommel of River’s Daughter. “Would you like to see it?”

  “Why would I wish to see a blade that has tasted the blood of my people?”

  “Because you seem to be spellbound by it. Perhaps it will help you understand that I was trained in the House of Maidens, that while I obeyed some of the Kings orders, I also sought to bring them down.”

  “Did you?” She pulled the skiff easily around a standing stone. “Seek to bring them down?”

  “Two Kings have fallen to this blade.”

  Salsanna sneered.

  “You doubt me?”

  “The Wandering King died when he succumbed to adichara blooms. Hardly a wondrous victory. And the Jackal King Mesut died on the Night of Endless Swords. Who’s to say you had a hand in it? Especially since you fled.”

  “The Confessor King witnessed Mesut’s death. As did the gods themselves.”

  Salsanna snorted. “As you say.”

  Çeda grinned while nestling herself into the prow, her arms resting along the gunwales. “If you wish to test my skill, you need but ask.”

  Salsanna eyed River’s Daughter again, then Mesut’s golden band on her wrist. She looked about to speak, but was interrupted by Kerim, who lay in the skiff’s bottom. He stirred, and Salsanna looked at him with naked revulsion.

  Çeda ignored her and knelt beside Kerim. “Are you well?”

  Kerim managed with great effort to lift his gaze and look at her. Onur’s presence is lifting at last.

  Her head jerked back involuntarily. Kerim hadn’t spoken to her in this way since she’d left with Beril to join Tribe Salmük. Indeed, she could feel his anger once more, his misery, the love for his mother whose memory had been rekindled as Çeda had talked about her own. Rest, she bade him. Soon we’ll be in the mountains.

  To her surprise, his heart lifted.

  Have you ever been? she asked him.

  Never. His ey
es blinked. Tears slipped from them. And then he said aloud, “I’d always hoped to.”

  Salsanna started, ready to draw her blade at the mere hint of movement from Kerim. She stared at him with annoyance but said nothing as they sailed on. Soon they were crossing patches of stone regularly. The scraping sound of the skis made Çeda wince. It reminded her of her mother, Ahya, who’d had much the same reaction when Çeda had scuffed the skis. It reminded her of Djaga as well, her old mentor in the pits, from whom Çeda had borrowed skiffs from time to time, fouling them more often than she’d meant to. Djaga was furious when she did, but she always let Çeda take a skiff when she needed it.

  The way opened up after hours of Salsanna’s careful navigation. The rocks became fewer, and then suddenly they were on open sand once more. It was a natural place for the Host to hide, Çeda reckoned. Most larger ships would grind to a halt before they reached this area of open sand, and their hulls and masts would be masked by the standing stones. Near nightfall they came to a grotto, where Salsanna anchored, and Çeda carried Kerim to a good place to build a fire. She’d no sooner set Kerim down, however, than she found Salsanna with her sword out, the tip wavering beneath Çeda’s chin.

  “What are you doing?” Çeda asked.

  “I’ve thought on it, and I do wish to test your mettle.”

  “You’re acting like a child.”

  “On the contrary. I take great care over the welfare of the Moonless Host, and in you, I sense only lies.”

  “You are your people’s judge, then? You’ll know the truth of my words at the very crossing of our blades?”

  “I’ll know if you’ve told the truth about your skill with a sword, and that alone will tell me much about you.”

  Çeda’s hand was hurting, she realized, the poisoned wound on her thumb flaring up. She rubbed it, feeling the familiar pain. Feeling her anger rise as well. When Salsanna took one more step and slashed with the speed and force of a woman who meant to draw blood, Çeda drew River’s Daughter in one swift motion and blocked the blow.