A Veil of Spears

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  For long moments, it was all Çeda could do to keep the knot in her throat from getting worse. “Why did your mother never tell you of your heritage?”

  “A question I’ve asked myself many times. There was no time to ask her then”—Zaïde shrugged—“and she would have refused to answer in any case. I suspect she hoped to protect me from it. She felt the fight was just, but one that had little to do with her. Like so many in Sharakhai, and even the desert, she was part of the silent horde. Were they to rise up, they could overthrow the Kings tomorrow, but they will not. Their fear neuters them.”

  Melis had grown more and more restless. “Not everyone on Goldenhill is like Onur,” she said.

  “Perhaps not,” Zaïde replied, “but they’re not the ones in power, are they?”

  “They could be,” Melis fired back. “The cause of the thirteenth tribe may be just, but that doesn’t mean everyone on Tauriyat should be hung for the Kings’ crimes.”

  Dardzada scowled. “You’re suggesting their heirs should take their thrones?”

  “Why not?” Melis replied. “They have a legitimate right to them.”

  Dardzada lifted the lizards he’d been roasting and turned them over. “You speak of rights. What of the new tribe forming in the desert? What of the asirim?”

  Usually Çeda would stand right beside Dardzada and join in, but she was weary of fighting, and the last thing they needed was an argument, so before Melis could respond, Çeda asked Zaïde, “Ihsan shared Onur’s bloody verse with me, that he’s weakened after he feasts. Is it so?”

  Zaïde considered it awhile, then shrugged. “He’s long been known for taking days, even weeks, to hide away, allowing none near him. Perhaps that’s due to his verse, but it could also be because he hates everyone he lays eyes on.”

  “Ihsan also said he’s a skin changer?”

  “I’ve heard rumors.” Zaïde waggled her head, an expression of impotence. “I should know more. He’s my father. But after my mother . . . I couldn’t bear to be near him.”

  As Zaïde spoke, Çeda felt something strange. A sense of worry had been growing inside her, and it now felt markedly worse. She wasn’t even sure why, but she felt suddenly unsafe.

  She reached out into the night. She easily found the others around the fire: the kettledrum of Dardzada’s heart, the other women’s hearts playing a lighter rhythm around it. There was something else, though. A beat on the edge of perception. She thought it might be a drake hidden beneath the sand’s surface.

  With sudden clarity, she understood.

  The heartbeat was faint because it was being concealed.

  Danger, Çeda whistled as she stood, River’s Daughter in her hand.

  She heard a rapid patter of footsteps moments before she saw a figure resolve from the darkness. It was a woman, dressed in black, an ebon sword held in her hands, a turban and veil hiding her face.

  Melis and Sümeya were already up, ebon blades at the ready. Zaïde had turned the opposite direction, perhaps sensing another. Dardzada was lumbering to his feet as Çeda moved to intercept the Blade Maiden.

  “Traitors!” cried the Maiden as she came.

  Gods, it was Yndris!

  Çeda had no time to wonder how she’d found them. “The skiff!” Çeda said to Dardzada.

  He was already on the move as Çeda’s sword met Yndris’s. The two of them traded blows, Çeda’s fueled by desperation, Yndris’s by hatred.

  Yndris had been masking her heartbeat—inexpertly, or Çeda would never have sensed her—but Çeda knew that where there was one, there would be more. Beyond the drumming of her own heart Çeda felt them approaching. Four more, each trying to mask themselves.

  She was about to warn the others when Sümeya whistled: Enemies! Surrounded!

  Sümeya intercepted the first of the newcomers. Melis took another. Zaïde met a third. As the sound of clashing steel filled the night, a fifth came rushing toward the skiff.

  “Dardzada!” she shouted without turning toward him.

  As she swung River’s Daughter up in a sweeping block, Dardzada’s heavy grunt came from behind her. A moment later there was a pop and then a flash of light that was so bright it drowned the feeble campfire. A sizzling sound was followed by a muffled scream from the Blade Maiden.

  Again and again, Yndris tried to slip inside Çeda’s guard. She found no openings, but neither did Çeda, and she backed away. Yndris had grown in skill. She’d become stronger in the ways of the heart as well. Çeda tried to press against her heart, but was unable to pin her down. Yndris did not attack Çeda in this way, but she’d grown adept in defending against it.

  From the corner of her eye, Çeda saw a Blade Maiden rolling over the sand near the skiff. She was screaming, her hands pressed tightly against her eyes. The skiff itself was just beginning to shift. A high-pitched moan accompanied the movement. It was coming from Dardzada as he leaned his bulk against the rear of the skiff and pushed backward with his legs. His heartbeat was spiking. It was pounding faster than Çeda’s—he was clearly wounded, but how badly?

  Yndris tried to rush toward him, but Çeda cut her off. She blocked Yndris’s high swing and snapped a kick into her midsection. When Yndris dodged left, placing the fire between them, Çeda kicked the coals into her face. Embers flew up and Yndris reeled, her arms going up to protect her face as Çeda turned and ran for the skiff. It was heading down the far side of the dune, picking up speed.

  Orderly retreat, Çeda whistled. Toward me.

  Sümeya, Melis, and Zaïde moved into a rough line and began backing up toward Çeda. There would be no easy escape onto the skiff this time. Not until they’d managed to slow the Maidens.

  As a mighty groan came from the skiff—Dardzada lifting the mast into place—Zaïde released a loud kiai, then another. She was engaged with an imposing Blade Maiden. Kameyl, Çeda realized, who towered over Zaïde. Zaïde, who had only a small buckler to defend herself, was using it with ever more desperation. Çeda knew as well as anyone how powerful Kameyl’s swings were.

  Çeda lost track of Zaïde as they began to retreat more quickly. As the fire was lost from view behind the dune, however, and their opponents were outlined by the firelight, Çeda heard a muffled cry. Tall Kameyl dropped to one knee then fell face first onto the sand.

  Zaïde came flying toward Melis’s opponent. She blocked the Maiden’s ebon blade and struck two fingers blindingly fast to the Maiden’s neck, then inside her thigh, shouting with each blow, so loudly that Çeda could feel them thump inside her chest.

  The second Maiden went down, and Zaïde rushed toward the third. Çeda could feel Zaïde’s heart pattering like a skin drum on Beht Revahl, and the lack of rhythm was alarming. There were long pauses then rapid, inconsistent beats.

  As Zaïde charged, the next Maiden shifted her stance, preparing her defense, but Sümeya and Melis were ready. They quickly closed in and delivered two precise cuts, one to her side and one across the back of her leg.

  Yndris knew she’d lost her chance. She ran to Kameyl’s side shouting “Get up!” Kameyl, however, could do little more than roll her head from side to side. “Get up!”

  Zaïde staggered back, breathing like an ox. Her heart was tripping over itself. Then she simply collapsed, her right hand over her chest.

  In the distance, northward, a horn sounded several distinct notes. It was the sort the Kings’ navy ships used to call to one another. To the south, the blast was repeated. It came a third time from the west. Çeda hadn’t learned all their calls, but she knew this one: converge.

  While Sümeya guarded against Yndris, Çeda and Melis cradled Zaïde and carried her to the skiff. They lifted her inside, but their hold was tenuous and she slipped from Çeda’s grasp and collapsed to the bottom of the skiff, striking her head against the thwart. Melis leapt in and began hoisting the sail, Çeda helped Dardzada push, and Sümeya was sp
rinting across the sand toward them.

  “Get in,” Çeda said to Dardzada.

  He ignored her and kept pushing, using his stout legs to move the skiff faster.

  “Get bloody in!” she shouted as Sümeya reached them.

  At last he relented, and soon they were sailing with speed. Yndris had given up the chase. Kameyl was only just back on her feet, her legs wobbly as a newborn foal’s. They spotted the moonlit sails of three other skiffs, but Çeda and Dardzada had taken the time earlier to plot their route out from the rocky oasis. Çeda used it now, skirting sections of stone carefully to keep their speed up. They sailed swiftly, and soon had slipped free of the noose.

  Zaïde and Dardzada were in a bad way, though. Zaïde’s heartbeat was still a strange pitter-patter, and her breath was coming in short, quick gasps. And Dardzada . . . Gods, his shoulder was a mess. He’d been cut deeply. Blood soaked the front of his thawb, and the wound, lit by moonlight, had bits of white bone showing near the center. How he’d managed to push the ship at all was beyond her.

  Sümeya and Melis lay Dardzada onto the bottom of the skiff—it was crowded, but his head fit between Zaïde’s legs. Then Sümeya sat on the thwart, her legs straddling his chest. “I’ll need light,” she said, grabbing the small bag where she kept her stitching thread and medical salves.

  It would be seen by the trailing ships, but there was nothing for it. Melis struck a light and held it so that Sümeya could see the mess the Maiden’s blade had made of Dardzada’s shoulder. She went to work, and Çeda guided them through the night.

  Chapter 51

  EMRE MADE HIS WAY to the gunwales of Tribe Kadri’s capital ship, a caravel named the Autumn Rose. He carried his most trusted friend these past many days, a crude-looking but surprisingly powerful spyglass. For the part he’d played in the battle with Onur, Emre had been asked aboard by Tribe Kadri’s new shaikh: Mihir’s young cousin, Aríz, a boy of only fourteen summers. He was a handsome boy, though gangly and awkward at times. He had hazel eyes and a head of closely shorn hair except for the braided tail that hung from the back of his head. Emre was glad to be on the same ship with him. He wanted to be able to gauge the young man’s mood. Aríz had not yet committed to help the thirteenth tribe, but Emre still held out hope that he would.

  Lifting the spyglass to his eye, he completed the same ritual he’d conducted every hour over the past ten days: he studied the horizon, noting any malformation, any cloud of dust, any misshapen cloud. He spotted movement two points off the port bow, but realized moments later it was only a flock of low-flying birds. Blazing blues, maybe, though what portent they might be—birds of peace that hadn’t deigned to fly near their fleet—he wasn’t sure.

  A dozen other times he’d been sure he’d spotted the hint of a sinuous body lifting high into the sky and flying toward them like an eel through water. But it had only been his nerves. He couldn’t shake the image of the wyrm’s cold eyes as it had flown toward the ship. Most animals lived to feed and defend their territory or their young. The look in the sand wyrm’s eyes had been malicious, as if it hungered to inflict harm. Emre had no doubt that Onur had summoned it using the strange orange stone, the one he’d used to crush Mihir’s skull. Just how much control he had beyond that, Emre wasn’t sure. What he was sure of was that he never wished to see the thing again.

  A choice now left to the gods, a voice inside him said.

  “It’s licking its wounds,” said a woman’s voice from behind him.

  He turned to find Haddad leaning against the mizzenmast. She was holding a massive purple radish, and was slicing pieces of it off with a small knife and popping them into her mouth—a peasant’s meal if he ever saw one. The sort a farmer in Malasan might have beside a burbling river before returning to work in the fields.

  She wore a bright dress made from a patchwork of colorful cloth. The stitching was rough, the pieces misshapen. A peasant’s dress to match her meal. And yet her many long necklaces, the silver bangles on her wrists, the large, swaying earrings, somehow made her look as rich and stylish as any of the women from Goldenhill.

  “You’ve come to see the sun,” he said to her.

  “It’s infernally hot down there,” she said while chewing. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  She’d come aboard the Rose to be close to Aríz, but the loss of Zakkar and two more of her crew in the battle with Onur had struck her hard. She’d taken to staying in the bunk she’d been given below decks, rarely coming up to see the sun. Today, however, she seemed to have regained a bit of her old self. She had that crooked smile of hers that was equal parts chiding and endearing; and if her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, well, Emre could understand.

  He motioned with the spyglass to the rolling dunes behind them. “The wyrm was hardly wounded by the ballista bolt.”

  “Wounded enough, it seems.”

  “Perhaps. But I suspect Onur is holding it back until his ships can find us. No sense sending it out alone, where it might be crippled.”

  Haddad shrugged. “For all we know it might be dead from infection. What good does it do to wonder over it now?”

  “Because the answer might mean our lives.” He waved his arm to the other ships that sailed alongside and ahead of the Autumn Rose. “All of our lives.”

  Twenty-three Kadri ships had escaped the battle; two had been abandoned due to damage sustained from the wyrm’s acidic breath, leaving twenty-one ships in all, including the Autumn Rose and Haddad’s dhow, Calamity’s Reign. They’d been sailing ever since, hoping to stay ahead of Onur’s fleet while heading for a meeting with the thirteenth tribe, should Emre convince Tribe Kadri to join them.

  Haddad shrugged again. She cut off a fresh slice from the radish and held it out for Emre. He shook his head. “It tastes like lizard vomit.”

  She shook it at him. “They help fight night coughs.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  Again she shook it. “Not yet.”

  She sounded like Emre’s mother, what little he remembered of her. Hiding his smile, he took the piece and bit into the sharp, crunchy flesh. It wasn’t so bad as he’d made out, but he made a show of it anyway.

  “Baby . . .” Haddad said, hiding a smile.

  They sat, their backs to the mizzenmast, and finished the radish together.

  After a time, Emre asked the question that had been burning inside him for days. “What was Zakkar?”

  Haddad took some time before she responded. “He was my bodyguard.”

  “I didn’t ask what he did. I asked what he was.”

  She whipped the radish’s inedible stem over the side of the ship. “Ask what you really mean to ask.”

  “Was he a golem?”

  “He was.”

  “Who made him?”

  She turned to look him in the eye with an aggrieved expression on her face. “They aren’t made,” she said fiercely. “Life is shared with them.”

  “Can . . .” He wasn’t even sure how to ask it. “Can you make another?”

  Now she stood and rounded on him properly, stabbing the air between them with the knife she still held in her right hand. “Do you know anything about Malasan?”

  Feeling suddenly edgy, he stood as well. What could he say? He knew the Malasani people were brash and cocksure. He knew they’d coveted Sharakhai and the desert for generations. He knew of a cruel man who’d murdered his brother when he was young.

  “No, I cannot make another,” Haddad went on. “It is a sacred ritual. My brother gave his own blood, his own breath. He gave a piece of his soul that Zakkar might be my protector here in the desert.”

  “He died to do this?”

  Haddad closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She adjusted her footing as the Rose tipped over a dune. “No. He didn’t die to give life to Zakkar. Golems are given life by those who grant it in a sacred ritual. Life is shared with
them, not taken,” she said again. Then she went silent. “But Harind died three months later.” She shrugged, looking as lost as she had when they’d fled Onur. “I was here in the Shangazi when it happened but hoped to see him when I returned. I knew I was giving up much of my life in Malasan when I decided to treat with the tribes for my king, but I never thought I’d lose him so early. It may seem foolish to you, but Zakkar was my only remaining piece of him.”

  “It’s not foolish,” Emre said, “but Zakkar wasn’t your last remaining piece of him.” She looked as though she were about to argue, so he quickly went on. “We are given the flames of our mothers’ love. And our fathers’, for as long as we might have them. So it is with everyone we meet. In the desert we say they kindle us, and we kindle them. Our flames are exchanged.” He waved a hand to her. “The woman I see before me is not merely Haddad of Malasan. She is Haddad and some small spark of her brother. And her family. And her friends. Is it not so?”

  At this, she seemed to soften slightly. “That is a facile notion.” Despite the words, a small portion of her smile returned. “But one I rather like.”

  The captain called for a northerly turn, and all over the ship, the crew made ready. Emre and Haddad shifted over to the gunwales to make way.

  “The golem . . .” Emre continued. “Zakkar.”

  Haddad sighed. “And I was just beginning to like you.”

  “It’s only”—he waved to the western horizon—“Onur . . . He’s a grave threat, and more dangerous than I gave him credit for. I would give anything to wipe him from the face of the desert. I would give my blood if it would help. My breath.”

  She turned and stared into his eyes, as if trying to judge his sincerity. Then she looked away, crossing her arms beneath her breasts. “We would never share such things with a drylander.” She paused, and when she went on, it was with a softer tone. “And even if I wished to, it’s not a gift I possess.”

  “You could try.”

  “I cannot simply try, you stupid Sharakhani goat. It isn’t will I lack, but the ability, the training. We lack the proper materials”—she waved, the simple motion somehow encompassing the whole of the desert—“out here in this bloody wasteland. Now leave it be.”