Empire of Sand

by Tasha Suri

  “Oh, my dear one,” Lalita said. Her voice trembled with joy. “What are you doing here?”

  This had to be a dream—a mirage. But the pain in her chest, the ache in her feet, told her this was all too real. Lalita was here. Lalita was well.

  “I thought you were dead,” Mehr said, in a voice that trembled like a leaf. “I went to your haveli and I thought …”

  “No, no,” Lalita said, shaking her head. “I am sorry you saw that, so very sorry, Mehr. But I’m safe.” Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. She managed a smile. “You didn’t come here to find me, did you?”

  “No,” Mehr said softly.

  “Look at her clothes,” Kamal said in a low voice. “She’s come from the temple.”

  Lalita was still looking into Mehr’s eyes, her face full of wonder. She barely seemed to hear him. “That isn’t possible.”

  “Perhaps you can’t see what stands in front of you, but I see one of the Maha’s creatures.”

  Lalita laughed faintly. “Mehr’s father is Ambhan,” she said. “She doesn’t have the gift. The Maha would hardly trouble himself with her.”

  It was astonishing, how love could blind someone. Lalita was looking right at her, and yet Mehr had a sense that Lalita was not seeing her at all, that hope and love had reshaped Mehr in her eyes into someone softer, someone safer to love. Perhaps that was why she had never warned Mehr about amata, or sensed the gift that lay under Mehr’s skin. Perhaps some part of Lalita had sensed the truth and shied away from the knowledge, far too aware that the only future that awaited most amata-gifted women lay at the end of a knife.

  Mehr swallowed. “Lalita,” she said. “Look at me.”

  Mehr’s voice finally dispelled the wonder in Lalita’s eyes. She took another step closer to Mehr, her gaze sharpening, taking in the sight of Mehr’s faded clothing, her gauntness. Finally, her gaze settled on the marriage seal around Mehr’s neck. Her mouth thinned.

  “I’m sorry, Lalita,” Mehr said quietly. “But I do. Have the gift. When the dreamfire came to the city, it showed itself. And the Maha, he …” She paused. Touched the edge of her seal. “He found me.”

  “She’s been sent here to trap us,” Kamal said, more loudly now. “I’m sure of it.”

  There were uneasy murmurs from the circle around them. She saw hands move back to their blades. For a long, painful moment, Lalita was silent.

  Finally, Lalita spoke up. “Mehr is telling the truth. She has a good heart. I trust her completely.”

  “She belongs to the Maha,” Kamal said. “She doesn’t have a choice. Do you?”

  “I’m not bound to the Maha any longer.” A ripple of utter disbelief ran through the Amrithi at that, but Mehr held on to her courage and rallied on. “I don’t expect you to believe me or—trust me. I don’t. But I am not his property, and I am not subject to his whims. I’d never let harm come to my mother’s people.” She spoke fiercely, pushing her heart into every word, hoping he would believe her. “Never. But you needn’t believe me. Just let me go, and I’ll bring you no more trouble.”

  “Let you go so you can lead the monster directly to us?” Kamal said angrily. “We’re not fools, girl. We’ve not survived this long by being half-wits.”

  Mehr laughed. She couldn’t help it.

  “Lead him where?” She raised her hands helplessly into the air. “I don’t know where I am! Even now, I can’t see a thing through the storm.” She shook her head. “I have lived my entire life in the city. I know nothing of navigating in the desert.”

  “How can we trust your word?” Kamal said, just as Lalita snapped, “You think I’ll let you wander off after a statement like that? You’ll die out here on your own.”

  “Be sensible,” Kamal said. “Think with your head, Lalita.”

  “I could say the same to you!”

  A figure on the edge of the circle yanked their hood away from their face and said, “Must we watch you argue all day? Let her go, kill her, bring her with us—we don’t care.”

  “No one is killing her,” Lalita said sharply.

  “That’s good to hear,” Mehr said faintly, but no one was listening to her.

  “Fine, fine, no killing. But …” Kamal raised a hand to his head, massaging the groove between his eyes as if the entire situation pained him physically. “A blindfold. We’ll walk her away and let her go. That’s all I can offer, Lalita, and far more than I should.”

  Lalita shook her head, mouth pursed.

  “We can’t let her go.”

  “She’s the Maha’s creature.”

  “Maha’s creature or not, she’s Ruhi’s daughter.”

  That stopped him short. He gave Mehr an unreadable look, then drew his hood down over his face and walked abruptly away.

  Lalita took Mehr by the shoulders.

  “Ah, Mehr,” she said, her voice choked. “I am so sorry, dear one. If I had known, I would have warned you.”

  “It isn’t your fault,” Mehr said gently. She touched Lalita’s shoulder in return. Behind Lalita, she could see the Amrithi watching her with wary eyes.

  “There is a place—an outpost—near here. You’ll be safe there for now.”

  Mehr nodded, slowly. Then she said, “Lalita. Why did you mention my mother’s name?” Mehr asked.

  “Because Kamal—the others—they belong to her clan, Mehr.” Lalita said the words gently enough, but they still dropped through Mehr like a stone. “Your mother is here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Perhaps the veiled daiva hadn’t been there to take her to her final rest after all. Trudging after the Amrithi, blinded with a cloth that Lalita had tied carefully around Mehr’s eyes, Mehr only knew for certain that the ancient had been a harbinger of a great change in fortune. After months of living to a set routine of prayer and rites and service, her life free from the Maha’s control was a whirlwind, a storm within a storm. She felt adrift. Only Lalita’s hand on her arm, gently guiding her forward, kept her tethered.

  “We’re here,” Lalita said. She didn’t say where, or what, here was. But Mehr heard the heavy rustle of cloth, felt the ground change from giving sand to the firmness of pinned fabric, and knew they had entered a tent even before Lalita removed the blindfold from her eyes.

  The tent was a low construction, barely tall enough for Mehr to stand without stooping. Its fabric was the same dun color as the world around it. It was likely easily concealed; from a distance, it probably looked like no more than an eddy of sand. It was a clever construction, but clearly not the home of all the Amrithi. It was barely larger than the tent she’d slept in, alongside Amun, on her journey to the temple.

  She and Lalita were alone now, although Mehr suspected Kamal was still waiting just beyond the tent entrance. Lalita sat cross-legged on the floor, and Mehr sat across from her. Lalita pulled a skin of water from her robes and offered it to Mehr, who drank the warm water in careful sips, trying not to gulp it down greedily as she wanted to.

  Lalita watched Mehr drinking for a moment, then began to speak. In a quiet, measured voice she told Mehr how she’d come to be in the desert with an Amrithi clan. She told Mehr that the restless nobility, stirred up by the Emperor’s missives, had become suspicious of her. Even though Lalita had changed her birth name to a Chand one to hide her origins, even though she had embraced life among Ambhans, the truth of Lalita’s origins had made it somehow to their ears.

  Lalita had planned to move somewhere else for safety. But nobles who called themselves devotees of the Saltborn had come for her, and she’d been forced into Irinah’s deep desert instead. She’d found her way to a place where she had known she would be safe.

  “Mehr,” Lalita said carefully, hope folded up in her voice. “Do you know—that is, did you see Usha? Is she well?”

  Mehr’s stomach dropped like a stone.

  “I’m sorry,” Mehr said, her voice soft. “I am so sorry, Lalita. The mystics killed her.”

  Grief flitted across Lalita’s face. The
hope in her eyes died away. “I should have known,” Lalita said. “And yet, I hoped …” She swallowed, holding her grief back. “I hoped she had escaped somehow.”

  “On the night of the storm, I was looking for you,” Mehr said. “I walked through the dreamfire, and I asked it to help me find you. I begged it …” She trailed off, squeezing her eyes shut, embarrassed at her past naïveté. “It brought me to Usha. I was with her at the end, Lalita. She wasn’t alone.”

  “Ah, Mehr, I’m glad of that,” Lalita said, her voice thick. “I’ll dance a rite for her. A proper death rite. She would have liked that.”

  “She would have,” Mehr agreed.

  They sat in silence for a moment, both of them thinking of Usha. Grieving her. Mehr pretended not to notice when Lalita wiped her eyes, slowly calming herself.

  “Tell me about my mother,” Mehr entreated finally, breaking the silence.

  “She’ll be here to talk to you soon. You know we were friends once, when she lived in Jah Irinah?” When Mehr nodded, Lalita continued. “When she left, she asked me to watch over you and your sister. So I did. But when I ran, I knew she would take me in. In this clan, your mother is Tara,” Lalita said, using the title for an Amrithi clan leader. “She took the mantle when she returned, after her own mother—your own grandmother—passed on.”

  “Tara,” Mehr repeated. Stunned. “I hadn’t expected that.”

  “She’ll be very glad to see you, Mehr. Of that, I’m sure. But she will have questions too. We can’t truly trust that you’re free of the Maha. It isn’t a thing that can be done, the breaking of vows.” Lalita’s voice was gentle, slow, as if she wanted to soften her words. “The vows we make are inviolable. When they are made, they bind forever.”

  Mehr shook her head. “In my case, the Maha made an error. He couldn’t risk the ire of the nobles. To simply take me—my father would have revolted. It would have offended his honor. He realized I could not be bound as Amrithi are, although I have the gifts, without causing fury among the nobles. So he bound me the way Ambhan women are bound: marriage.” She heard Lalita’s sharp inhale. “He wed me to the last Amrithi he had, whom he’d bound as a child. That man … Amun. Amun is the reason I’m free.”

  She told Lalita about her life among the mystics: about the endless rote prayers and practice, about the Maha’s cruelties, large and small; about Hema’s kindness, and Hema’s brutal death; about Amun and the mercy he’d shown her. She spoke until her voice cracked, then stopped to take a sip of water. When she paused she realized how heavy the silence was, and how closely Lalita was hanging on her every word.

  Then she began speaking again. There was so much to tell, and the telling was an act like forcing poison from a wound: painful but utterly necessary. She told Lalita, haltingly, that she and Amun had made their own vows to each other. Vows of love and flesh and choice, more sacred than any other vows they’d ever had inflicted upon them. And Amun had known: Amun had risked everything to set Mehr free.

  “I ran,” Mehr finished, when she had no more words. “In the end I ran, and you know the rest. You found me.”

  She didn’t mention the daiva and her strange fever-dream of its veiled face, its humanness, its hunger for her tears. Somehow, despite the fact that she’d bared her soul to Lalita, the daiva felt like a secret. Even the thought of speaking of it made the words wither on her tongue.

  “I want to believe you,” Lalita said.

  “Do you think I’m lying?” Mehr demanded.

  “I think you believe your own words. But trusting that the vows you made to the Maha are shattered—Mehr, it’s more than I dare hope for.”

  Mehr nodded. She couldn’t argue with Lalita’s belief. She could feel that the vow holding her to the Maha had been cleaved through, just as she could feel the ache of the bond between her and Amun, but these things were invisible to Lalita—to anyone but Mehr herself.

  Lalita’s gaze was soft with compassion. “I must leave you now,” she said. “But your mother will be here soon. Prepare yourself, if you can.”

  “What is she like?” Mehr asked.

  “A great deal like you,” Lalita said.

  For some reason, Mehr didn’t find that particularly comforting.

  It was Kamal who entered the tent first, carrying a lantern. He gave Mehr a level look as he settled the lantern on the ground in front of her and moved to sit to her left. His presence felt like a warning. Mehr wasn’t to be trusted, not yet, and certainly not with their clan’s Tara.

  Tara. Mehr’s mother. She couldn’t quite believe it.

  A moment later, a woman entered. The first thing Mehr noticed, as her mother ducked inside, her form half hidden by the shadows thrown by the lantern light, was how unassuming she was. She was average height, dressed in dun-colored robes, her face hidden by her hood. She wasn’t dressed in the finery Mehr had come to expect of a leader, and there was nothing proud or regal in her bearing or in the way she looked slowly around the tent, head moving from side to side, before carefully lowering back her hood. She could have been any of the Amrithi who had circled Mehr earlier.

  Then she stepped into the lantern light, hood lowered, and Mehr’s heart nearly stopped. She was frozen between breaths, looking into the face before her.

  Ruhi, her mother, Tara and Amrithi, was not exactly beautiful. Her face lacked the idealized Ambhan delicacy that beauty required. Instead she had the kind of bold looks that caught the eye and held it. Her cheekbones were high, her nose strong, her mouth full; her skin had the richness of soil after rain. There were hints of silver in her curling hair, and fine lines etched around her mouth, but that made the resemblance no less striking.

  Mehr had seen her own reflection: in mirrors, in the oasis, in the dreamfire when she had seen through Amun’s eyes. But she had never seen herself as clearly as she did in that moment, looking into the face that had shaped her own.

  The Tara smiled tentatively. Her eyes were sad.

  “Hello, Mehr,” said her mother. Her voice was rich. It was exactly the voice Mehr remembered from her childhood. It was the voice that had sung her to sleep and told her stories she’d held dear all the long, long years since her mother had left her. Listening to her mother’s voice made Mehr feel like a child, small and hopeful and helpless, heart an ache in her chest.

  “Mother,” she whispered.

  Her mother’s dark eyes traced every inch of her face.

  “Oh, Mehr,” she said. “You’ve grown so much. I knew you would, of course. But … you are a grown woman now, aren’t you?”

  Mehr swallowed. “Yes,” she said.

  “And Arwa? How is Arwa?”

  “When I left Jah Irinah, she was—well.” She thought of Arwa’s warm weight in her arms. The smell of her hair, her curiosity, her solemnness and her playfulness. How could she possibly describe all of what Arwa was, to a woman who had not seen her since she was a baby? “She’s a bright girl. Very sweet. Good-hearted.”

  “Good,” her mother said, nodding. “That’s good.”

  A brief silence fell. After a moment of hesitation, Mehr’s mother kneeled down across from her. Mehr watched the way she clasped her hands tightly together on her lap.

  “Lalita told me what became of you, among the Saltborn,” her mother said. “Mehr, I am so very sorry.”

  “It isn’t your fault, what was done to me.”

  “If I had known you had my gift …” Ruhi shook her head. “Ah, it’s too late now. I won’t force you to ease an old woman’s regret.”

  “You have it too, then? The—gift?” Mehr asked. “You can move dreamfire to your will?”

  Her mother nodded. “My mother had four children, and I was the only one to inherit it.”

  “I have aunts and uncles? A family?”

  “We are depleted,” Ruhi said, her voice subtly strained. “There have been difficult times. A great deal of hunger and suffering. Some vanished. Others chose to leave Irinah and never returned.” She paused. “There are few of us
left now.”

  Mehr clasped her own hands, letting that answer settle within her heart. She couldn’t imagine how difficult life had been out here in the desert. The Amrithi had been hunted, their culture and their way of life decimated, their people stolen and forced to choose vows to the Maha or freedom at the end of their own blades. No wonder her mother didn’t dress in finery; no wonder Kamal continued to stare at Mehr with narrow-eyed suspicion. They had so little hope left.

  “Why did you leave us?” The question escaped her almost without her say-so. But now that she had spoken, she couldn’t unsay it. She didn’t want to. “You would have remained safe in Jah Irinah.”

  “Your father exiled me,” Ruhi said. “I couldn’t return to you.”

  “But you could have stayed with us. Arwa and me. He would have allowed that.” Mehr stared into her mother’s eyes, which were so like her own. “I remember.”

  Ruhi shook her head at that, her mouth thinning.

  “I couldn’t, Mehr. I was afraid.”

  “Of the Maha? His Saltborn?”

  “Of many things,” said Ruhi. “When I fell in love with your father … Mehr, I was an idealist. I had great dreams of what we could accomplish together, a Tara’s daughter and the Governor of Irinah. I believed we could make the world better for the Amrithi. But I learned, soon enough, how little power an Ambhan nobleman has. Your father loved me, but he still obeyed his Emperor. When his nobles attacked my people, he turned a blind eye—for my sake, he told me, and yours. A Governor who refuses to obey the Emperor’s will, he told me, does not remain a Governor for long. And what would become of us all then? What would happen to you and Arwa, without the protection of his title and power? The thought terrified me, Mehr.”

  Ruhi leaned forward, her gaze intent. She spoke as if she didn’t care what Kamal heard—as if there were no shame in it, airing their family’s grief before an audience. Mehr, raised behind walls and protocol, was frozen by her mother’s honesty.

  “I was afraid,” Ruhi said frankly. “Afraid of what your father and I had done by loving one another. Afraid that no matter how well your father obeyed his Emperor and his Maha, one day their eyes would turn on him and they would see me, his amata-gifted Amrithi mistress, and steal me away, or punish him for loving me. And worse still, I feared they would punish you and your sister for existing at all.”