Empire of Sand

by Tasha Suri

  They walked out into the light.

  The air glowed beautifully. The storm was unlike any she’d seen before, huge and wild and deep, its jeweled light a thousand shards that glimmered like broken glass. The sight of it made Mehr want to stand and simply stare, overwhelmed by its strangeness. It put her guards on edge. The guards—Abhiman among them—tightened their grips on their weapons, watching the surroundings carefully.

  Mehr could feel the power of the storm. It was fire in her skin, her bones. She swallowed. It was time. She straightened, bare feet curling in the sand, and tried to slip free from Amun’s grip. But his hand was iron on hers, and when she tugged, his grip only seemed to tighten.

  She looked up at him sharply. In a movement that was almost imperceptible, he shook his head. No.

  “We need to be deeper in the storm,” he said. His voice was loud but calm. His eyes said, Trust me.

  “You can perform right here, boy,” Abhiman said coldly.

  “The storm isn’t strong enough here for our needs,” Amun said.

  He was lying. Mehr could feel the strength of the storm like a weight draped over her shoulders. She was shaking beneath it. All he had to do was let go of her, and the storm would swallow them both. Why was he lying?

  What are you up to, Amun?

  She didn’t ask. She waited.

  “The Maha wants you to stay close,” Abhiman said, mouth thinned. “Those were his orders.”

  “The Maha knows we have a task to perform, and that we can be trusted.”

  “Can you?”

  “Emperor’s grace, we wear our loyalty in our skin,” Mehr snapped. “Isn’t that enough? Let us do what we’ve been ordered to do, or may the Maha’s mercy for your error when we cannot serve be swift.”

  There was some muttered counsel, as Abhiman’s eyes narrowed and he turned to his fellow mystics for assistance. They didn’t have time to seek the Maha’s permission. The storm would soon reach its peak.

  “Go, then,” Abhiman said, gesturing. “Fan out,” he snapped to the others.

  The mystics moved slowly, not quite keeping up to Mehr and Amun’s faster pace. They weren’t at ease in the storm. The whirling sand was gold and red, rose-ash and fire, turning the mystics into shadows, and Amun had still not let go of her hand.

  “Mehr,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

  The storm was wailing around them now, a loud and mournful cry, but she could. “I can,” said Mehr. “Amun, what are you doing?”

  “I made vows to you. Remember, what did I promise?”

  “Amun—”

  “Please. I need you to remind me.” His voice was suddenly raw, wild. She bit her lip and held his hand tighter in return.

  “To love me. To be kind to me. Amun, what are you—”

  He released her, only to take hold of her again, her upper arms in the vise of his grip, her feet barely touching the sand as his grip and the wind-lashed fire held her aloft. It should have hurt, should have scared her, but his eyes were dark and soft and she was helpless, weightless.

  “I vowed to give you a good life, Mehr. I promised you. I can’t forget that vow, Mehr. Can’t forget, and so—I have to try. Please understand.”

  “Stop begging me,” Mehr whispered, uncomprehending. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “I love you,” Amun said, as if he couldn’t, wouldn’t, hear her. “And I can see that this life will erase you. I can see it happening already—”

  “Boy,” barked Abhiman. “Get on with it.”

  Amun flinched but didn’t stop. “I’ve felt it happen to me. But you—you make me feel like a whole person again. I can never thank you enough. But I can try. Try.” He squeezed his eyes shut tight. Opened them. His sigils were burning so very bright.

  “What are you doing?” Abhiman demanded, yelling as the sand whirled around them, higher and higher. He snarled an oath, only the words disobedient and Maha audible to Mehr’s ears, and strode toward them.

  “Remember, you vowed to trust me,” Amun whispered. “And run.”

  When Abhiman touched his shoulder, Amun turned and struck. He wrenched Abhiman’s scimitar from his grip with one hand and slammed his fist into Abhiman’s face with the other. Abhiman crumpled instantly. He didn’t even have time to defend himself. Amun took hold of the scimitar in a two-handed grip, shoulders squared, feet planted hard against the ground as if he were performing the first steps of a rite. He was panting. His sigils were bright, bright fire on his skin. Mehr felt her own mark flare, livid with the pain of disobedience.

  The other mystics yelled, swords drawn. They began to run over. And Mehr was—frozen.

  “Run!” Amun yelled. “I’ll hold them off!”

  “I can’t,” Mehr yelled back wildly. Shocked still. “My vows to the Maha—”

  “You made vows to me! Not him.” He doubled forward, letting out an audible groan of agony. He held on to the scimitar for dear life. “So run and be free for both of us. Mehr, go.”

  The mystics were closing in. But Amun was drawing the scimitar in an arc through the air one-handed, shaping sigils with the other. She felt the tug of dreamfire following his call, watched as a wall of sand flared up into the air, as jagged as glass, keeping the mystics temporarily at bay.

  They had practiced that sigil together, when they’d first decided to defy the Maha and use the storm to set themselves free. Mehr had set that hope aside.

  But Amun clearly hadn’t.

  “Run!” His voice was scratched raw with pain.

  Everything in Mehr screamed at her to stay where she was. Her soul was bound. She had a duty, a calling. Like it or not, she wore a cage in her skin, and it kept her at the Maha’s face. And Amun—oh.

  Amun.

  She could not leave him to suffer alone. She knew it was wrong.

  But Gods help her, Amun was screaming at her, telling her to go, to be free for the both of them, and Mehr had to try. So she drew all her meager courage around her, sand stinging her eyes, her chest burning as if a coal had been shoved between her ribs, and turned. And ran.

  She ran as the sand turned smooth and slick beneath her feet. She ran as the storm grew and grew, reaching its apex. She felt the tug of her vows grow and grow, setting its thorns deep into her skin. The sand was smooth, but she felt as if she were running on broken glass. Her mouth was full of the taste of blood. Every vein of her body, every beat of her heart, told her she should turn back. The mystics were praying, and their prayers were inside her. The Maha’s soul was inside her.

  She had vows. She had to obey them.

  Your vows are to Amun, a voice inside her said. And it was true, a true voice, a true thing. She had married him first, before the Maha had marked her. And even after that, even after the vows had been twisted into chains, they had made new promises to one another. Promises sealed in flesh, in tears, in love.

  Those promises had been greater than all the rest. Even as the Maha’s chains burned inside her, she felt the truth of that—clean, sharp as a blade, cutting her free.

  She’d vowed to trust Amun, so she did. She ran and ran, ran until the storm swallowed her, until she was flying, until everything was light.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The nightmares were following her. They drifted after her under the cover of the dreamfire’s light, their brittle bodies skittering along, their flat, lidless eyes watching her. She didn’t have to look back to know they were there. When she’d stumbled she’d felt their fingers reach inside her skull, settling darkness inside her. So she ran faster. Around her the dreamfire grew wilder and wilder still, its howls a cry of fury.

  In the dark inside her own mind, Mehr saw Amun and nothing but Amun, his sigils livid, his face warped with pain. Her own scarred chest ached. If she closed her eyes she could see the vow tying them, golden and strong. If she let it, it would lead her right back to him.

  But she wouldn’t go back. Amun had asked her to run, and she would. She had.

  Eventually she stopp
ed running. She kneeled down on the ground, hands flat against the sand, and struggled to breathe. The nightmares had faded bodily behind her, but Mehr could still feel their darkness clawing at her skull, threatening to drown her. She breathed shallowly, and oh so carefully pushed the fear away.

  Beneath her the sand rippled softly, like water.

  Her fear was not misleading her. She was sure now.

  The storm was wrong.

  Mehr had danced with the dreamfire enough to know what it was supposed to feel like. This storm was far too fierce, far too bright. It was as if the storm had thinned the wall between the world of spirit and the world of flesh, bringing the Gods and their fury close to the surface of the world.

  She had not danced the rite. Amun had not danced the rite. The Gods were dreaming around her, dreaming freely, for the first time in centuries. Their nightmares crept around her, within her, their rage made brittle flesh. The world around her—sand, sky—wavered around, fragile and weak as glass.

  Mehr lowered her head to the ground. Tears stung at her eyes. She cried because she was tired and she was afraid. She cried because she had left Amun behind. Breathe, she thought. Breathe. Be strong. Don’t stop running yet.

  The world rustled again. She heard the nightmares draw back even farther, skittering under the cover of the light. But it was the silence that followed—deep as the beat of a dream—that made Mehr look up.

  A veiled woman sat before her, hands folded primly on her lap, legs crossed neatly under a skirt of voluminous white silk. Her veil fluttered in the breeze of the storm; beneath the thin mesh of cloth her eyes were the only features that were visible. They glowed with the steady constancy of prayer flames.

  It took Mehr’s fevered mind a moment to realize the woman was no woman after all.

  Daiva.

  The daiva looked more human than any daiva Mehr had ever seen before. Its shadowy hands, clasped so neatly in its lap, were utterly mortal in shape, with fine nails and creases at the knuckles. Only its eyes revealed its true nature. Its eyes reminded her of the ancient daiva she had seen in the desert so long ago. She wondered if it was the same daiva after all, all its billowing edges transformed into the neatness of the human form.

  The daiva gazed at her tranquilly, its candle-flame eyes flickering. There was no urgency in it.

  She had never seen a truly ancient daiva, only had heard people speak of them in hushed, fearful whispers, in tales of time long gone. Perhaps this ancient one had come to take her, to carry her away to the place beyond the sand where the Gods slept. Perhaps it had come to grant her peace. More likely, it had come to exact the suffering she deserved for all the heresies, large and small, that she’d committed in the Maha’s service, and to save herself from it. The thought should not have comforted her, and yet somehow it did. An end. At least it would be an end.

  Mehr raised a hand to touch her chest. She touched her seal, Amun’s seal, hanging on frayed thread. She touched her scar, which was livid and aching. The screaming inside her, the sound of the Maha trying to draw her back to servitude, had quieted. But it was still there. The pain was a sign, at least, that she was still alive.

  The daiva raised a hand, carefully mirroring her movement. Then it slowly uncurled its fingers and held them out to her. Mehr was reminded, ridiculously, of the little bird-daiva that had rustled its wispy wings on Arwa’s window ledge. Just as she’d known what the bird-daiva wanted from her, she knew what this daiva wanted too.

  “I have no knife,” Mehr said. Her voice was nothing but a rasp, thin and tired. She shaped her hands into the sigil for blood, drawing her left hand back in a negation.

  The daiva held still for a moment. Its little finger twitched. Then in a quicksilver motion it moved, darting across the sand until its hand was a hairsbreadth from Mehr’s cheek. She barely stopped herself from flinching. It was only then that she realized she’d been weeping.

  “You want my tears?” she asked, uncomprehending.

  The daiva waited, watching her with its soft flame eyes. It did not move.

  Tears were not blood. They were not the sacrifice of the knife, the reminder of shared blood and an old, old vow passed from progenitor to progeny. What could the daiva want with tears?

  “Why?” Mehr asked. She bit her tongue, suddenly angry with herself. She tried to raise her hands, to speak respectfully in the daiva’s language, but it was already leaning back, shaping sigils with quick fingers.

  Flesh. Blood. Tears. A fist held to the daiva’s chest. Heart.

  The daiva shaped a circle, cinched with a flourish by fingers shaping a knot. Mehr knew that sigil. It was the sigil for that which could be made, but couldn’t be broken.

  Vow.

  Mehr nodded.

  “Take my tears, then,” Mehr whispered. “I hope they are as good as blood to you.” She shaped the sigil for gift, laboriously, afraid her suddenly trembling hands would fail her.

  But she needn’t have been afraid. The daiva leaned forward again, catching her tears on a fingertip. It held the hand in front of it as if marveling at it.

  Gift, it echoed back at her.

  Mehr felt the world shift again, sand reshaping beneath her. The storm howled fiercely, falling low upon them. She saw the veil flutter again, and the daiva reached out as if to hold her.

  There was nothing after that.

  Mehr woke up with the pale dawn sunlight beginning to pour across the sand.

  The storm still swirled around her, dying as the sun rose. Through falling wisps of jeweled light she could see the horizon, set against a flat expanse of desert. Wherever she was, her feet and the storm had carried her a long way from the temple.

  She climbed to her feet, scraping sand off her face. She was tired and thirsty, and the scar of her marriage seal hurt terribly. She touched a hand to it and felt a sudden, sharp pain run through her entire body. She heard the shadow of Amun’s voice in her ear again, all bitten-off agony and desperation.

  Run, Mehr!

  She snatched her hand away. Mehr would have wept again, if she’d had the strength. Instead she covered her own face with her hands and breathed. And breathed.

  The vows she’d made to Amun, when they’d held each other and hungered through the dark night, had been sacred things. They’d been vows of flesh and blood and heart, vows made for mortals with daiva blood, but they had been vows of hope too. Amun had risked everything for the sake of that hope.

  Amun had saved her.

  Mehr lowered her hands. She looked at the desert around her. She could feel the pain still, a constant tug between her ribs. If she followed it she would find her way back to him. She wondered if he could feel that bond in return, that knot like a circle without an end.

  “I’m here, Amun,” she said, speaking into the air. “I’m here. Look what you’ve done. You’ve managed a miracle. You’ve set me free.” She took a step into the pain. Another. “I don’t know what made you take the risk. But Gods help me, I’m glad you did.”

  It was hard to resist the urge to walk back to him. She thought of him still in the grips of the Maha, surrounded by mystics who hated him, crushed by the vows to her he’d obeyed and the vows to the Maha he’d defied. She took hold of her marriage seal, holding the circle tight in her hands. Then she gathered up her will and forced herself to turn away from the way back to him.

  “Wait for me,” she whispered. “Survive, Amun. I’ll come back for you. Somehow, I will.”

  That day, Mehr used the lessons she’d learned from her first journey from Jah Irinah to the Maha’s temple. When the sun was nearing its peak, she sought out shade and slept in snatches. When she grew thirsty, she used a little strength and performed the Rite of Fruitful Earth, snatching new green life from the earth, eating it fast to catch its moisture. She tried not to think about what she would do when true thirst and hunger inevitably came for her. She’d spent so much of her time at the Maha’s temple preparing for survival after her escape, and now all her careful planning
had gone to waste.

  The desert hadn’t been like this when she’d first traveled through it with the mystics. The sands had been clear and arid under a glaring blue sky. Now, with the storm still spinning, dying away, every surface seemed to be a trickery woven out of shadows and light. She couldn’t trust her senses. More than once, she found herself walking in circles, drawn back to where she’d been hours earlier by the movement of the sand.

  The storm had misled her so utterly that when she saw the shadow of a man through the dust, she thought it was no more than another mirage and kept on trudging forward. Then the shadow stepped forward into the light, boots crunching against the ground, and she realized the man was no illusion after all.

  The man froze when he saw her. Under the hood of his robe his eyes widened visibly in his deep brown Amrithi face. He hadn’t expected Mehr any more than she’d expected him.

  Mehr moved first. She turned, breaking into a run. More figures emerged from the air around her. Until that moment, their brown robes had hidden them from sight. She stopped sharply, realizing with despair that she was surrounded. There was nowhere to go.

  “Don’t harm me,” she said, holding her hands out, palms open. “I have no weapons.”

  Her words didn’t stop them from drawing their own blades. The man who had first seen her strode up to her and held his dagger a hairsbreadth from her throat.

  “How did you find us?” he demanded.

  Mehr swallowed back her fear and said, carefully, “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to be here. The storm led me astray.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?” The man’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me who you are, or so help me—”

  “Stop. Lower the dagger, Kamal.”

  That voice. Mehr knew that voice.

  “But, Lalita—”

  “Lower it.”

  As the blade lowered, Mehr turned her head. And Gods above, it was Lalita after all. Lalita was striding toward her, hood lowered. Her robe was faded, her dark hair loose over her shoulders. There was silver in her hair, no paint on her lips and no kohl around her eyes, but there she was, undeniably alive and whole.