As they stepped around a dray plodding its way forward against the flow, Ibrahim couldn’t hide the momentary knitting of his brow. “No, Çeda, I don’t believe knowledge of a name is sufficient. There are dark rituals that surround the summoning of an ehrekh, and they all deal in blood. Liberally.”
“Can the ehrekh die?” Çeda asked as the crowd shouted at the driver of the dray to move to the far side of the street, where the flow was heading west.
“There are stories of their deaths, yes, though most of these have been at the hands of the gods when the ehrekh stood in their way.”
“How? How can they be killed?”
“Now there’s a question. Why do you wish to know, Çeda?”
“I’m not ready to tell my story yet.”
Ibrahim considered her, then waved them on, into the path of five young men carrying patterned yellow carpets over their shoulders. “They can fall to the blade. They can fall to fire. They can fall to the will of the gods. But they do none of these things easily. They are cruel, wicked beasts that love to toy with us, with the tribes and others who stumble across their homes in the corners of the Great Shangazi.”
“And do they have souls?”
“As you and I have souls?”
Çeda shrugged. “I guess so.”
Ibrahim paused. “Shall I tell you a tale, Çeda?”
“Will it cost me?”
He laughed. “No more than you had already planned to give.”
“Very well,” Çeda said cautiously.
“You know that Goezhen the Wicked created the ehrekh.”
She nodded.
“Well, it is said that he did so while Tulathan was imprisoned by Yerinde. You know the tale?”
She nodded again. Ages ago, Yerinde, a winsome goddess taken by fits of passion, had stolen the moon goddess away. For love, she had professed when Tulathan had eventually been freed by her sister, Rhia. It was always for love.
“Goezhen stole into Yerinde’s mountain fastness,” Ibrahim went on, “and there he found Tulathan hidden deep underground in a lightless oubliette. Tulathan begged him to free her, but Goezhen refused, and stole her tears when she wept for her lost freedom. He went to Rhia then, and told her the tale of her lost sister. Rhia raged, and Goezhen stole her screams. The gods didn’t know why Goezhen had done these things, but they found out much later that when he left Yerinde’s tower and returned to the desert, he made the first of the ehrekh. He gave them Tulathan’s tears that they might have blood. He gave them Rhia’s cries that they might have voice. They are rage-filled things, Çeda, and not to be trifled with. And that is all I will say on the subject. Now tell me why you’ve come to me with haunted eyes, asking of the twisted creations of the god of chaos.”
Çeda considered as the roar of the Wheel at the city’s center rose up around them. Thousands were leading wagons and horses and mules and children around it, moving from this part of the city to that. Çeda and Ibrahim flowed with traffic and headed south along the Trough. Çeda might have spoken in the anonymity of that roar, but she waited until the tumult had settled before speaking once more. “There are ehrekh hidden within the walls of the city, did you know?”
“I’ve heard whispers,” Ibrahim said.
“One has been known to whisk unfortunate souls away to some hidden place and sift through their memories like so much sand. It holds these memories up for others to witness, to relive as if they were their own.”
Ibrahim’s sweaty brow furrowed, and his eyes grew instantly worried. “Rümayesh,” he breathed.
Çeda nodded. “But the ehrekh are not so powerful that they can’t become victims themselves. There are those who might take them, hide them away.”
“Çeda—”
“And if that were to happen, the ehrekh might reach out, speak to one through her dreams.”
“Çeda, who? Who has done this?”
Çeda stopped and looked up to Ibrahim, traffic parting and passing around them like storm-blown sand. Gods, how she wanted to tell him. He might well be able to help her if she let him. But it was so much bigger than the two of them, and dangerous besides. It had nearly killed her once already, and a man like Ibrahim, a man who’d always been kind to her, didn’t deserve to get drawn into it. “It’s only a story I’ve heard.”
She turned and walked the other away, back along the Trough, but called over her shoulder, “Fair payment for what you’ve given me.”
It was sunset by the time Çeda reached her home in Roseridge. A fragrant braiding of floral scents drifted down as she took the stairs up from ground level. She knew the scents well: ashwagandha and passionflower and schisandra. She ought to. They’d been her constant companions this past month, when she’d finally given in and begun steeping an elixir she’d hoped would quell the dreams that plagued her.
When she opened the door, she found Emre kneeling on the carpet before the small oven in the center of the room. A pot sat atop it. Emre stirred the contents methodically, all but ignoring Çeda.
Bless you, Emre. The scent was so strong she nearly closed her eyes and fell asleep standing. “You didn’t need to do this,” she said as she closed the door behind her.
Emre, his dark eyes looking up to her with concern, tapped the wooden spoon against the lip of the pot, then laid it across the top. “It’s almost ready.” He stood and wiped his hands self-consciously, eyeing Çeda. “And yes, I did. You’ve looked like death himself this past month.”
“You’ve looked like a horse’s ass your whole life, but you don’t see me making any elixirs for that.” Weeks ago he might have laughed, but today he stared at her with an uncomfortable expression. Gods, he’s truly worried. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “It’s only a few nightmares.”
“At first, maybe. Then it was just a shout in the night. Then it was blood-curdling cries. But last night, Çeda, you screamed and screamed, even after I woke you.” His eyes narrowed. “You don’t even remember, do you?”
A knife’s edge gleaming, coming ever closer. The smell of burnt flesh. “I remember the dreams.”
“Because you’re fully in their grip.”
He’d said as much before, that she’d been captured somehow. He was asking her without words—after his endless queries had gotten him nowhere—what had happened those months ago. She’d never told him of the ehrekh, Rümayesh, of her time with that ancient creature who had managed to hide herself among the warp and weft of life in Sharakhai. It had felt like a dream. It still did. She’d thought it a memory that would pass. But then the nightmares had come, and she’d lost sleep. They’d remained, and she’d begun mixing an elixir to help shake them. And now Emre was brewing them so she wouldn’t have to. What was next? Would he be spooning it to her while she babbled in her bed like old Ghiza across the way?
“It’s ready,” Çeda said, nodding to the simmering pot.
“What happened, Çeda?”
“They’re only dreams.”
“And they started days after you’d gone missing. Quite the coincidence, don’t you think?”
She couldn’t really say why she wanted that experience to remain a mystery to Emre. Perhaps because she’d been so helpless, subject to Rümayesh’s every whim. Or perhaps because she’d come so close to dying. Or perhaps because the godling children, Makuo and Hidi, had made her fear to come near them again. It was all of those things to some degree, but she knew the primary reason she was hiding it was because she was embarrassed to admit it all to Emre. She knew it wasn’t so, but it felt like a thing she had done to herself. And there’s nothing you can get yourself into, her mother used to tell her, that you can’t get yourself out of as well.
“You’ve made a good batch.” She motioned to the pot, breathing in its scent. “I can tell.”
He stared at her, clearly struggling with just how hard he should push her, but th
en he let out a breath and shrugged. “I ought to. I’ve watched you make dozens of them.”
“Let’s try it then.” She winked. “See just what sort of apothecary you’d make.”
He sneered at her, then shook his head and fetched an earthenware mug and used a small piece of cheesecloth to sieve the solids from the pot and allow the bright red liquid to filter into the mug. It steamed as he handed it to her.
She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”
She collapsed into bed immediately after finishing the draught.
Far into the desert, well beyond the borders of Sharakhai, a woman lies on a bed of stone.
The sound of skittering comes. Of stone shifting.
To her right, an open window yawns. A cold morning breeze steals into the room, the smell it carries like the cooling of the world after its making. The woman rolls her head toward the window and sees through it a steep ridge with rank after rank of trees standing sentinel along it. The trees are strange, though. They have no boughs, no branches, for they were turned to stone on the day of her making in this, the very place of her birth.
Even the simple effort of turning her head is painful, so she turns away from the window until she stares once more at the stone ceiling and the ghastly light now splashed across its skin. Its surface reads like a map, charting her life over the course of aeons in the desert. She sees within its topography her awakening when Goezhen himself placed his lips to hers and granted her her first breath. She sees in it her wanderings after her birth, years untold in which she trekked along the vast mountain ranges that ring the Great Shangazi. It is a circuit she completed seven times in order to assimilate within her very soul the borders of the desert and all that lay within. She sees in the stone her first steps as she returns to the endless sands, the first time she’d ever disguised herself. She posed as a lost traveler and sailed with the desert tribes for generations, often moving from tribe to tribe.
An amberlark calls in the distance, little more than a gentle cooing, but to her it sounds like the screams of the women and men she lured away from their brothers and sisters into the desert deep, where she picked them apart, bit by bit, to see what they were made of. These are ancient memories of days she’d nearly forgotten, days that brought her no particular pride, but no particular sense of shame, either. She was inexperienced then, and curious about these humans that Goezhen seemed both to love and to hate. How many souls has she toyed with in the ages spent wandering the desert?
Many . . .
The sounds of footsteps approach.
Many, indeed.
In the corner, a dull red flame ignites like a beacon fire.
And now the sands have turned.
“She’s awake,” came a voice in the darkness, speaking the rolling tongue of the Kundhunese.
“I feel her,” replies the one near the brazier.
The glowing coals outline his form in ruddy light. He looks like one of the first gods working with the protean stuff of the stars to forge a new world. It’s probably how he views himself, though he and his brother are nothing more than a twinkling of Onondu’s eye—childling gods come to torment another childling god.
We are cousins of a sort, we three. The thought makes her smile. Isn’t pain dealt by family the deepest pain of all?
From the darkness, a form approaches. “Are you ready?” Makuo says.
She says nothing in return.
“I know it mean much to you,” he says in stilted Sharakhan, “but what is that compared to what we do to you? What we will do to you?” He reaches her side. The pale morning light casts his eyes an icy blue. His dark skin looks sickly.
Her voice is an ancient door opening. “This is senseless.” Despite the ages she’s lived, despite all she has done and might yet do, there is fear in her heart for the pain that is coming. The boys are gifted in this if nothing else. “I’ve told you. I don’t know where it is.” It is the truth, but she sees the disbelief in Makuo’s eyes. She sees that he will never believe her.
From her prone vantage his arm distends strangely, his hand reaching toward her. As his fingers brush her cheek, she feels herself falling away, down, down, deep as she’s ever gone. Away from the light. Away from the touch of Makuo’s fingers. Away from the pain.
“She trying hide again,” Hidi says by the brazier.
“I know,” Makuo says as he stares into her eyes, trying to prevent her departure, “but she cannot escape the pain. Some will still reach her.”
Hidi steps away from the brazier, a curved knife held in one hand. The blade glows dully. The edge gleams a violent red. As he reaches her side, he speaks to her in Sharakhan, as if speaking the tongue she’d adopted these past many centuries would endear him to her. “Tell me now. Tell me where you hide it, and we will end this river of pain.”
But she is well into her hidden place now. His form is dimming. She can barely hear his words. She can see the knife, though, wavering before her like a battering ram, a mouth aflame, set to raze the walls she’d built brick by painstaking brick.
“No?” Hidi asked. Then he shrugs. “Soon or late, you will come see things as we do.”
The blade lowers. She feels Hidi’s cold hand on her ankle, just above where the cold iron shackle bites into her skin.
A searing pain enters her body just above it. “Kadir!”
Hidi laughs, his eyes now filled with glee. “Your man long gone. Him think you dead. But I am here. My brother here.”
The pain broadens, tearing at her world until it is all that is left. “Kadir!”
Çeda’s eyes shot open. Her body was rigid as a spear, shuddering from the white hot pain in her right leg. “Kadir!” She thrashed, trying to throw off whoever or whatever was holding her.
“Çeda, it’s me!”
She stared wildly around the small room with the plastered mudbrick walls. It was Makuo, standing over her.
Or Hidi, with that cruel scar on his cheek.
“Çeda, you’re dreaming again!”
She blinked.
Hidi’s face faded, and she recognized Emre at last. He hovered over her, his hands clamped against her arms, pressing her down.
The glowing blade. The searing pain as it drove into her legs, into her ankles and knees, through the walls of the tower she’d so carefully constructed.
Her nightdress was drenched in sweat. The breeze blowing through the windows was chill. She shivered horribly, from the memories, perhaps, or the sleepless nights, or the directionless fear that now surrounded her.
Emre’s eyes took her in, assessing her. When he was sure she’d fully risen from her dream he released her and reached for the mug on the bedside table. Emre, bless him, had refilled it. Steam, lit silver by the moonlight, rose from the elixir, twisting and drifting before vanishing altogether. Çeda could smell its complex bouquet of floral scents, which somehow did more to ground her to this place and this time than Emre’s shouting.
“I can’t go back to sleep, Emre. Not tonight.” She pulled herself up in her bed and propped herself against the wall behind her. “Some proper tea instead? I feel so very dry.”
He looked ready to argue, but when he stared into her eyes, he must have seen something that convinced him she wouldn’t fall back to sleep, for he visibly deflated and set the mug down. “Of course, just wait here.” He left the room and returned a short while later with tea. As she held the hot mug and breathed in the loamy scent, Emre scraped the nearby chair over and sat down. “Blood of the gods, what’s happening, Çeda?”
“I . . . It’s hard to explain.”
“Try. Please. Because this can’t go on.”
She nodded, sipping gratefully from the honey-laced tea. She didn’t want to lay her troubles at Emre’s feet—this was her problem to solve—but she admitted the mere thought of someone else, anyone else, knowing the sto
ry would be a huge relief. “Two months ago,” she finally said, “after the fight with Brama, I was abducted by an ehrekh.”
Emre’s eyes narrowed and a smile tugged the corners of his lips as if he suspected a joke, but then his face grew intensely serious. “You were?”
“Her name is Rümayesh, and she became . . . interested in me. She tried to take my memories from me using irindai, cressetwing moths, but before she could, two godling children came and took her.” Çeda wanted to laugh at how ridiculous it all sounded. “Where they took her, I don’t know, but her dreams have haunted me ever since.”
When she closed her eyes, she could still see Hidi’s dark silhouette against the backdrop of the glowing brazier.
“But why?” Emre asked.
She blinked, banishing the memory. “I think she’s pleading for me to help.”
“Help? Why would she ask for help from you?”
“Perhaps there’s no one else to ask. Hidi and Makuo are children of Onondu. I knew little enough about them then, but I’ve made a point of reading more since. Onondu is a wrathful god, very powerful in his homeland, Kundhun, powerful enough that it’s not unreasonable to believe that two of his children would come all this way to subdue the likes of Rümayesh, even as powerful as she is.”
“Gods, Çeda, what have you gotten yourself into?”
She tried to smile but felt only fear for the next time she would fall asleep and dream those terrible dreams.
Emre’s eyes had gone distant. “Maybe you should leave.”
“What? Sharakhai?” She wanted to laugh. “And where would I go?”
He focused on her once more. “Who cares as long as it keeps you alive?”
“Who’s to say she wouldn’t try harder? Who’s to say I could ever escape those dreams? I might travel the world and never be free of them. At least in Sharakhai I have friends.”
“And a fat lot of good we’re doing you.”
She sipped at her tea. “It helps, Emre. All of it helps.”
“Who is Kadir?”
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