Empire of Sand

by Tasha Suri

  The mystics had proven to be far more human than Mehr had expected. Only the Maha was completely beyond her understanding. Only the Maha was an evil fire under her skin, setting his fingers like a stranglehold around her will and her soul.

  “You have duties, Mehr,” said Kalini. “Sacred duties.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you? You shouldn’t be allowing yourself to grow distracted. Especially so soon. I will have to speak with the Maha about you,” Kalini said calmly, still dragging Mehr roughly after her. Mehr resisted the urge to scowl at Kalini’s back.

  Kalini led Mehr to Amun, who was standing in the shadow of a doorway. Kalini shoved Mehr forward, abruptly releasing her arm. “Take your wife, Amun. You misplaced her.”

  Kalini walked away. Mehr rubbed her arm absently, as Amun took a step out of the darkness.

  “Did she hurt you?” Amun asked. His fingers twitched at his sides.

  “What could you possibly do if she had?” Mehr asked, then bit her lip. That had been cruel and entirely unnecessary. Her only defense was the fact that she could feel the unkindness of her world pressing down on her from all sides. Mystics who showed her gentleness, who showed her humanity, couldn’t change the unforgiving shape of her circumstances. If anything, the friendliness of the women had only made the hurt of it all sting afresh.

  But Amun didn’t need her to make her excuses. She brushed past him, still gently massaging the skin that Kalini had bruised with her hand. “She didn’t hurt me. I’m fine.”

  Amun caught up with her. She could hear the soft thud of his footsteps.

  “We’ll need to train a little longer.”

  “Outside?” Mehr asked.

  Amun shook his head.

  He led her to another hall, already prepared with a couple of oil lamps. A burly older mystic was napping in the corner. He cracked open an eye when they entered, then closed it again.

  Amun stood across from her. He pressed his feet to the ground, straightening his back and turning his knees to a diamond angle. “Mehr,” he said softly. “We only need to practice until the bell tolls. Then we sleep. If you need a moment, if you can’t continue …”

  Amun fell silent. Mehr faced him. Heart heavy, soul heavy, she met his dark eyes.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  When she danced, her body moved as light as air.

  Arwa was standing in the desert, barefoot in the sand. She was holding a weapon in her two hands. Mehr’s dagger. Their mother’s dagger. The opal at its hilt glowed like a small moon. Her face was still and smooth, and no matter how hard Mehr reached, she couldn’t touch it.

  “You killed me,” Arwa said. “It’s your fault.”

  Mehr finally brushed her fingertips to Arwa’s cheek. Just her fingertips. Arwa’s face crumbled and scattered to the wind. In its place a black veil remained, a veil of dark smoke that coiled around Mehr’s wrist with curious fingers. The veil fluttered in the wind, ragged at the edges. Through its mesh, Mehr saw a gleam of gold.

  A daiva’s eyes met her own.

  “Greetings, sister,” it said.

  Mehr shot awake. She didn’t look at Amun as she slipped out of bed, still dressed in her tunic, her old green shawl from her pack wrapped around her for cover. She let the shawl slither from her shoulders to the floor and stepped over to one shuttered window.

  This one didn’t face the desert. She unbolted it and felt the cool air brush her like a caress. She leaned forward and stared down at the oasis that lay at the heart of the temple. Its clear, calm surface reflected the light of the moon back at her.

  She didn’t return to sleep for a long time.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mehr slept again, eventually. When she next woke, she saw pale dawn light pouring in through the shutter she had left carelessly open during the night. Amun was gone. He had smoothed the sheets on his side of the bed down flat, making it look like he had never lain in the bed at all.

  Mehr stood and stretched her limbs, curling and uncurling her toes against the ground. Even though her sleep had been restless, she felt less like the burden of her circumstances was going to crush her. She’d eaten a good meal and slept in a warm, comfortable bed. Those were small things, but at least they were good things. As long as she focused on them and pushed the knowledge Amun had given her to some far corner of her mind, she could breathe easily. She held on to those small comforts as she stretched her hands above her, preparing her body for the familiar motion of a rite.

  Falling into the Rite of Sunrise felt like coming home. Dancing alone, cool floor beneath her and the heat of the sun on her face—this was her place of solace and safety. She didn’t need music to accompany her. She didn’t need the sound of other footsteps striking the ground along with hers, creating a music of their own. She found the rhythm of the rite in the beat of her heart, the thrum of her blood, the in and out of her breath from her lungs.

  She heard it when Amun returned. His footsteps echoed up the stairs. She considered stopping, then decided against it. He’d already seen her dance. What did she have to hide?

  He entered the room as she moved her body through a flourishing arc, her arms tracing the path of the sun through the sky, her fingers shaping sigils that transformed, one to the other, with each punch of her heels to the ground. He said nothing. He was silent even after she moved into the last stance.

  “Good morning,” Mehr said, a little breathless. She saw that his hair was damp, his clothes fresh, robe gone. He must have gone to bathe. He was already sitting comfortably on the edge of the bed, his elbows pressed to his knees.

  “You look happy,” he observed.

  “I am.” The rite had left her peaceful. She no longer felt like vanishing into darkness. She could look at Amun without wanting to flinch away from his guilt-stricken eyes. She didn’t know how long her renewed strength would last, but for now she held the warmth of it close like a blanket. “The rites comfort me. They always have.”

  “How strange,” he murmured.

  She stretched her arms, her neck, working the kinks out of her muscles. “At home, I danced rites every day.” Memories rose up in her mind’s eye. Lalita leading her through steps, patient and smiling. Arwa peering into Mehr’s room, watching for a few brief moments before one of her nursemaids found her and snatched her back up. Bittersweet memories. “I’ve missed them.”

  She thought of telling him about Lalita. About how Lalita was a mentor, an almost-mother to her. About how she’d lost her. But Amun had a faraway look on his face, a shadowed look, and Mehr found she wanted to peel back his layers instead. “Why do you find it strange?” she asked.

  He gave a shrug, his broad shoulders rising and falling. “I only perform the rites because I’m bid to,” he said. “They have never made me happy. They are just a duty I have to fulfill.”

  “I find that strange,” Mehr said. “I’ve always found dancing to be a comfort.” She drew closer, forcing him to look up at her. “So you’ve never performed the rites simply for the joy of it?”

  As he stared up into her face, some of the shadows seemed to vanish from his expression. He shook his head. “The first time I danced with the dreamfire I was a child. When the dreamfire responded to me, I was … happy.” He shrugged. “But I didn’t know what having the amata gift meant. I know better now. There’s no joy in the rites for me. But I’m glad …” He paused, then said, “I’m glad they comfort you. You look … different, when you dance.”

  “How do I look?” Mehr asked.

  Amun looked at her face like he was reading it, like her expression was ink and her skin the page it lay upon.

  “You look strong,” he told her. “You look sure of yourself.”

  “I haven’t been as strong as I’d like,” Mehr admitted, sitting down beside him. “I wanted to lash out at you yesterday. You gave me what I wanted, but more than anything, I wanted the truth to go away. I apologize.”

  “Don’t,” Amun said instantly. “I expected you
to be angry. Who else can you be angry with? I would have preferred it if you had lashed out at me, Mehr. Instead you were silent.” He huffed out a breath. “I wish you hadn’t been silent.”

  “Sometimes it’s wise to be silent.” Surely Amun, of all people, knew that. He was always silent around the mystics. With the Maha, he had shaped his words carefully, artfully. “I would have been cruel to you. Cruel without reason. I didn’t want to be.”

  “I didn’t know how to help you,” he said.

  Mehr felt an unfamiliar tenderness well up in her, looking at the stubborn shape of his jaw, his hands clenched over his bent knees.

  “Oh, Amun,” she said gently. “You couldn’t have helped me. But next time I’m upset, I promise to shout at you. Is that fair?”

  He shot her a sidelong glare that spoke far more loudly than words. Mehr smiled back.

  “Mehr,” he said. His voice was halting. “What I told you last night. If you have any questions …”

  Her insides were tight, panic unfurling in her heart again. She took a deep breath. “I can’t talk about this yet.”

  He murmured an acknowledgment. Then he said, “Tell me about your old home. Tell me what it was like to dance in Jah Irinah.”

  His words were an obvious attempt to distract her, and Mehr accepted the opportunity gratefully. She told him about her old quarters, about the perforated screen facing the desert, about the way she had danced and danced, hours spent in joyful loneliness under the checkered light that poured through it. She told him that her mother had taught her, that another Amrithi had taught her when her mother had left. She told him how the love of the rites had sustained her like air. She told him more than she’d intended to. But she was lonely, lonely and scared, and Amun was kind.

  “I’ve never been able to dance like you,” she admitted. “Your knowledge far surpasses mine.”

  When he performed the rites his movements weren’t beautiful. His dancing had none of the poetry of Lalita’s, or the wild, raw abandon her mother had possessed when she’d performed a rite. Amun was economical, powerful—there was a precision in his performances Mehr had never seen before. In his dances, Mehr recognized the flaws in her own.

  “I’ve had a great deal of practice,” he said. “Every waking hour not spent in prayers, I have spent on the rites. For most of my service, it has been the one duty the Maha has tasked me to focus on.” A shrug. “Anyone would grow in skill under that regime.”

  “What does make you happy, then?” Mehr asked. “Surely something must.”

  She was afraid for a second that he would tell her nothing made him happy. But instead he ran a hand through his damp hair, setting the curls into absolute disarray. She recognized that gesture now, from all the times he’d caught her dressing in their shared tent, or trying to untangle her long hair with her fingers. He was embarrassed.

  “Come now,” Mehr cajoled. “Everyone has something that they enjoy. Perhaps you’re a secret painter, hm?”

  Amun was clearly amused despite himself. “What would I paint here, Mehr? Sand or more sand?”

  “You see more women than most painters would ever dream of,” Mehr said with a laugh. “You know my stepmother had her miniature painted for my father once? She commissioned one of the finest artists in Jah Irinah. He couldn’t see her face, of course—my stepmother is too well bred to reveal her face to a stranger—so the poor man worked entirely from her description of herself.”

  “Was it accurate?” Amun asked, in a tone that told her he already knew the answer.

  “Of course it wasn’t. So my father was blessed with a miniature of a stranger’s face to carry around with him. A stranger who was a good deal more sensuous than my stepmother has ever been, I might add.” Mehr clucked her tongue. “What an imagination that man had.”

  Amun grinned. The flash of his teeth, the crinkling of his eyes, left Mehr startled. He guarded his expressions so vigilantly that the curve of his mouth struck her with the force of a physical blow.

  “And you, Mehr. Did you ever demand to be painted?”

  Mehr snorted. “Me? No. I wasn’t ready to wed, so I didn’t have anyone to impress. Besides, any painter given my description would still have insisted on making me moon pale with hair like a fall of silk.” She made a dismissive gesture. “I don’t need false flattery.”

  “They paint what they think you want to see,” Amun noted, with insightfulness that—again—struck Mehr.

  “They paint what they think I want the world to see,” Mehr said. A woman beautiful in the eyes of the Empire. A woman with purely Ambhan flesh. “But they would be wrong about me. I like myself perfectly well as I am.”

  “You don’t want to look Ambhan?”

  “Me? No.” If Mehr had looked Ambhan, perhaps her stepmother would have looked at her and seen a child she could mold to her own ends, instead of an Amrithi heathen and living reminder of Suren’s exiled mistress. If Mehr had looked Ambhan, perhaps she would have lost what remained of her heritage to Maryam’s manipulations. The thought viscerally sickened her. To be Ambhan in an Ambhan world, to have light brown skin and lighter eyes, and straight hair and fine bones, was to be beautiful and to belong. But Mehr had never wanted to belong to that world. She’d simply wanted a place to call her own. “I’m content with what I am, Ambhan and Amrithi and all. Would you want to look Ambhan?”

  “You’re half Ambhan,” Amun said. “I am not.”

  “Answer my question anyway,” Mehr said. “Humor me.”

  “It would be nice to vanish in a crowd,” Amun said after a moment of thoughtful silence. “But no. I am what I am.”

  I am what I am. He hadn’t said that he liked himself, and in a way Mehr was glad for that honesty. She remembered the fractured hatred she’d seen on his face that night in the desert. She knew like would have been a lie.

  But she wanted to see his smile again. She wanted to see his face—that dark, serious face, inked in fluid blue lines—crack open with emotion that wasn’t bloodied and sad.

  “Amrithi or not, you’d never vanish in a crowd,” Mehr said, absently. “You’re too …” She made a vague gesture with her hands, trying to encompass his broad strength, the way he towered over her even when hunched over and seated. “You take up a great deal of space.”

  “Space,” Amun echoed.

  Mortification flooded her. What had possessed her to say that? She knew how much Amun hated to be noticed. She knew how he held his strength back carefully, how he tried to fade into the background. She’d let her words run away from her. She’d spoken without thinking.

  Amun was giving her a level look, expression unreadable. His arms were held stiffly at his sides. She was sure she had offended him. She looked back at him blankly, trying to frame some semblance of an apology, when she saw his lips twitch.

  He was trying not to laugh at her.

  “I am what I am,” he said again, softly now, almost fondly.

  The sound of a loud bell echoed throughout the temple. Mehr nearly jumped out of her skin. Somehow, for a single moment, she had forgotten where she was. She had forgotten how dire her circumstances really were. For a single moment, there had been nothing but her and Amun, and Amun’s smile.

  Amun’s expression shuttered quick as lightning.

  “Time for prayers,” he said. He stood and went toward the stairway.

  Mehr grabbed her shawl and raced down the stairs after him.

  It was Kalini who led the morning prayers, standing before the effigy of the faceless Emperor with her head lowered and her hands clasped. Mehr was glad that there was no sight of the Maha. Kalini’s voice didn’t have the power to curdle Mehr’s blood the way the Maha’s did. In her presence Mehr could contain her fear. She kneeled with her hands clasped and tried to ignore her aching knees until prayers ended.

  Breakfast was not as elaborate as dinner had been. Mehr joined a queue of mystics and was handed a flatbread and a handful of sweet, dried dates, which were rich with flavor but tough as
leather. Mehr ate hurriedly as she walked through the corridors by Amun’s side.

  Amun led her up the stairs of another tower to a room where, he told her, Edhir would be working. Mehr had grown used to the bareness of the temple, so she took in the chaos of the room around her with wide eyes.

  The room was crammed from end to end with books. Charts and maps covered every spare inch of space on the walls. Mehr’s father, wealthy and privileged though he was, had never owned so many books. Her fingers itched to trace the spines. Instead she took them in with her eyes. Books of alchemy, of weather, collections of maps of distant lands. Maps of Irinah. There were scrolls, too, laid out on a table and bound shut with long lengths of silk.

  There were mystics scattered all over the room. At the edge of one table sat Edhir. Without his heavy robe, hunched over a scroll unfurled to its full length, Edhir looked younger than ever. The hands holding the scroll were gloved. As they approached him, he raised his head and gave Amun an uneasy look. For Mehr, he managed a smile.

  “Emperor’s grace upon you this fine morning,” he said to her. His gaze slid nervously to Amun. “And you,” he added.

  Mehr looked at Amun along with him. His face was as hard and cold as a thing carved from rock. His eyes were dark hollows, with none of the softness in them that Mehr had somehow grown to expect. She looked away quickly. If she hadn’t experienced his gentleness earlier and seen that smile tug the corners of his mouth, she never would have believed he was anything but the cold brute he appeared to be in that moment.

  “Emperor’s grace upon you also,” she said to Edhir. He gave her a grateful look as she stepped between. “What is this?” she asked, pointing at the scroll in front of him.

  “A map of the Empire,” he said.

  “How beautiful,” Mehr breathed. It was highly detailed, colored in lush blues and golds, marking the Empire from Irinah to Ambha and beyond. Even lands beyond its borders were inked in. She had never seen such a fine piece of work before—certainly no map as vast and detailed as this one.