Tariq was seventeen, a year older than her, but just then he looked half that age, a boy lost in a city too large and much too dangerous for the likes of him. “So I’ve come, Çeda. He wants to speak to you, and I think you should obey, for all you owe him if nothing else.”
For all I owe him.
I owed him much already, but now I’ll owe him much, much more, for surely this is more of Rümayesh’s doing.
Osman had recognized that, else why ask for her, of all the people in Sharakhai he might call for help?
She thought of all the stories she’d heard of the ehrekh, how twisted they were, the games they liked to play. She felt like a fly caught in honey. The urge to flee was great, nearly overwhelming, but where could she go in Sharakhai to hide from Rümayesh? Where could she go in the Shangazi? Besides, she owed Osman too much to simply abandon him. At the very least, she would try to draw Rümayesh’s gaze off him and onto her, lest more people she cared about be noticed and killed.
“I’ll come,” she finally said.
Tariq was visibly relieved. “Good,” he said. He smoothed down his kaftan, running over the bloody spots several times, for all the good it did him. “Good.”
With the sun now risen, Çeda took the steps up to the stone porch that ran along the front of Osman’s rich manor house in the northeast quarter of Sharakhai. The servants, a dozen of them, all stood away from the house, some near the stables, some in the garden, all watching her as she neared the front door.
Çeda found Osman in the parlor, sunlight slanting in on the two dead bodies. They were just as Tariq had described them. Sim crumpled near the hallway to the rear of the house, Verda lying face up, hands splayed ineffectually over a dozen stab wounds.
“Osman?”
He was sitting in that chair, head bowed, the bloody knife lying across his lap. He was staring at something in his hands, and of course Çeda knew exactly what it was: Rümayesh’s sapphire, hidden from view, cupped like a nestling in Osman’s large, battle-scarred hands.
“Osman, you should come outside”—she waved toward the dead bodies—“let us take care of them for you.”
“I’ve known Sim since I was a dirt dog, Çeda.”
Çeda did her best not to let her gaze slip to Sim’s unmoving form, but failed. She took two steps deeper into the room, feeling as though she were walking into a lion’s den. “I know.”
“And Verda I met shortly after I left the pits, weeks before they were married in the desert.” He looked up at last, but in the darkness of the room his eyes were hidden in shadow. “They were beautiful, those two. Together, I mean. Like lemon and lamb, Sim used to say.”
“And Verda would always say no, like lemon and oil, grudging companions.” She took one more step, ready should Osman do anything strange. “Why don’t you come outside? See the sun. Breathe the morning air.”
“I don’t know what happened, Çeda.”
“It wasn’t you, Osman.” She was by his side at last. She reached slowly down. She could feel her heart hammering like horse hooves in her chest. She reached her fingers between his hands, gripped the blue sapphire, now splattered with blood, and lifted it. “It was this.” She held it in a beam of sunlight, allowing both the facets and the blood to show.
Osman stared at it, tears streaming down his face. There was worry there, perhaps some remnant of the fears he’d had last night that this treasure might be stolen from him, but as Çeda stepped away, he merely watched her, a look of deep sorrow on his blood-splattered face.
Finally, his gaze lifted and met hers. He shook his head. “It wasn’t cursed.”
“It was, Osman. By Rümayesh. You’ve heard her name in Sharakhai. You know her nature. What you may not know is that she’s real. No legend. No myth. She’s an ehrekh, and she holds the power of Goezhen in her hands.”
His gaze held hers as if he was afraid to look anywhere else. “I held the knife.”
“No,” she said. “It was Rümayesh all along. She was Blackthorn. She cursed that gem. And she was the one holding that knife, not you.” Çeda wasn’t sure why she did it, but here was a man who had always projected an indomitable strength, and here he was, fragile, nigh to breaking. She reached out and ran a hand through his hair, as her mother used to do when she was young and afraid of the cries of the asirim on the holy night of Beht Zha’ir. After a time, she leaned down, kissed the crown of his head, and whispered, “This is all my fault, and I’m so very sorry it happened.”
The rest Çeda left unsaid, but in her mind it was a damning refrain: She was after me. She was trying to prove a point, that I can’t escape her, that I’ll do as she wishes no matter what I might try, that in the end I’ll be cupped in her hands like a gemstone, powerless.
Çeda held out her hand to Osman. “Come. The sun is shining bright. It’s time you return to it, let it see your face, lest it forget.”
Osman glanced to his right, to the sunlight as it played against the drawn curtains that were billowing in the morning wind. He looked back to Çeda, then lifted himself from his chair. The knife clattered against the floor, fallen from his lap. He ignored it, and took Çeda’s hand.
By the time Çeda arrived home, it was midday and she was more tired than if she’d fought three back-to-back bouts in the pits. She collapsed into bed but not before hiding the sapphire in a small bag and putting it in the alcove hidden behind the horsehair blanket above her bed. Çeda had wanted to stay to help Osman, but Tariq had reasoned that it was more important to get the stone well away. Çeda hadn’t argued. As she fell asleep, she tried to think what she might do, how she could free herself from Rümayesh’s clutches, but all she could think of was the look in Osman’s eyes.
She slept fitfully and woke only a few hours later, hungry and thirsty, so she left her home and wandered up the lane toward the bazaar. The sounds of barter and trade grew and then enveloped her, the embrace of a dear friend. It felt marvelous to be nameless for a time among so many other nameless faces—part of a grand collective but lost in the same breath. She came to a small eatery that served flatbread slathered with rosemary goat cheese and drizzled with a reddish oil that was as spicy as anything she might find in the bazaar. Under the sour look of the wizened woman who gave her the bread, she skipped over to the next aisle to get some rosewater lemonade, which they ladled into the drinking cup she’d brought with her. She wandered the bazaar for a time, watching the people from a dozen different kingdoms, melding with one another like individual flavors in some grand, sumptuous broth. Çeda envied them their lives. Most were oblivious to the ehrekh, or thought them little more than fanciful tales born of the desert they found so exotic.
Maybe she should follow Emre’s advice and simply leave Sharakhai. Would wandering the desert be so bad? She and Emre had talked about it. They could both go, perhaps return one day when Rümayesh had moved on to brighter and more interesting baubles.
She’d no more had this thought than she realized someone was standing ahead of her. He wore rope sandals and a simple, belted kaftan with a hood that was pulled up against the sun. She’d nearly walked into him, and the crowd was so thick she couldn’t yet slip past. That’s when the face within the shadows of the hood registered.
Bright green eyes stared at her from within a ruined landscape of scars and still-healing wounds. “Perhaps we could walk awhile,” Brama said.
It was still so disorienting. It was Brama’s voice, but Rümayesh’s words. He made a half-turn, as if waiting for her to join him by his side.
“You murdered two innocent people last night,” Çeda said.
A woman in the crowd turned, but kept walking, eyes cast downward after she’d caught a glimpse of the man within the cowl.
“I did not murder anyone. I believe it was your employer who held the knife.”
“After being ensorcelled by you.”
“Do you know what that st
one does?” Rümayesh folded Brama’s arms across his chest. “It merely tugs on one’s more basic emotions. Greed most often, but others as well. Anger. Jealousy. Lust. It depends on the man. If you say murders were committed, then I believe you, but I would look to the heart of the man who held the knife. Like a blackened vine, the heart is the place from which the foulest urges bloom.”
“Love, too,” Çeda said. “And kindness. And patience. And temperance.”
Rümayesh laughed. “Perhaps, but tell me which of those wins out when man is threatened, when his fleeting life is nearly gone?”
“Many great things are created when the world is dark. Things of light and beauty made all the more so for the darkness that surrounds them.”
With Brama’s hand, Rümayesh waved to a stall across the way that sold mawkish, treacle-laden poems to the unwitting. “You can’t believe every verse you read, dear girl.” Rümayesh seemed suddenly interested in them, and began walking toward the stall.
Despite the desire welling up to pull the kenshar from her belt and stick it between Brama’s shoulder blades, Çeda followed, falling into step. “What do you want?”
“Why, I want you, my little wren, but I’ve not come empty-handed. I can offer a girl like you much. A life of riches. A life without fear. A life filled with pleasure. All you need do is give me your heart.”
“How could I ever do that after what you’ve done?”
Rümayesh bowed her head while staring at Çeda with a gleam in her eye. “You mistake me. I speak of a compact. One in which you do as I ask, and in return the rest of your life—your city, those you love—will go untouched. It will not be a willing compact at first, but when it is done, believe me, you will never look back. You will see only wonder in your eyes.”
“I will see only what you wish me to see.”
“You’re quibbling. There’s much I wish to see, that I would share with you. Be content in knowing that your Osman will be safe. Your Tariq. Your Ibrahim and even your Emre.”
The name hung between them like a bloody blade, all threat and malice and dark satisfaction.
Don’t think of Emre. Don’t think of Emre. She’ll smell it if you do. “You say you want my heart,” she said quickly, “but I still wonder why. Why not simply take me as you took Brama and be done with it?”
Rümayesh looked through the poems, many of which were hung from tall wooden frames, swaying in the hot desert breeze. She read a few, even pinched some of the frames between thumb and forefinger to keep them still before moving on. “When you saw me in the desert I was filled with rage. Knowing what you know of me now, you can understand why. I was perhaps . . . rash with Brama. I would not normally have done what I did. I haven’t for a long time. But the twins . . . My heart was full of fire, more than it had been at any time since my awakening.”
She stopped at one poem in particular. Over her shoulder, Çeda read it.
The soul is a flame that can never be extinguished.
Blown by wind it may gutter;
hidden by veils it may darken;
and yet it will remain,
waiting for all who seek it.
Rümayesh soon finished and moved on toward the aisle between the stalls, but her hand caught on a frame. It slipped from its hook and fell to the earth with a thump, but Rümayesh walked on as if she hadn’t noticed. The poet was a gaunt, dark-skinned woman who squinted and smiled as she looked up from her work on a new one. Rümayesh ignored her, and did something most strange. She reached up her left hand and scratched behind her ear. She used her pinky finger, a signal shademen used to indicate that a mark was home, but to beware, danger was near. Çeda realized now it was the same thing Rümayesh had done in the pit after they’d fought. Çeda had thought it a coincidence before, but to do it again? Brama would certainly have known such a signal, and it made Çeda wonder if there weren’t vestiges of his soul that remained.
Çeda picked up the frame and replaced it, sending a look of apology to the woman. The woman seemed half confused, half annoyed, and then scowled at Çeda as she left and caught up to Rümayesh.
“To use someone in this way”—Rümayesh swept one hand up and down along Brama’s body—“well, there’s little satisfaction in it. It’s like taking a hare by the throat. They scream when frightened. Did you know? That’s what it’s like. The sound of glass breaking. An incessant peal. But if you find someone who might join you of their own free will, the two of you become like one. You dance with one another. It’s like a symphony, not merely beautiful, but a thing that resonates within your very soul.”
“And yet you would be the dominant one.”
They passed through a group of strangely short, light-skinned men who all seemed to be haggling at the same time with a carpetmonger. They came to the edge of the spice market, where a narrow alleyway at the back of a building met the old wall of Sharakhai. Çeda knew that it stopped twenty paces in. It was a favorite haunt of the gutter wrens who plagued the market and the bazaar. Today, though, it was strangely free of children. Rümayesh walked along it even though she could see it led nowhere, and Çeda followed, confused but curious to know what Rümayesh would say.
Halfway down, Rümayesh stopped. The two of them were cloaked in shadow now. She was staring at Çeda through Brama’s eyes with a look that spoke of desire, as if Çeda were a dish she’d long wanted to sample. “In any relationship,” she said, taking a step forward, “there is one who is dominant, but do not think I would control at all times and in all ways. There would be times when you will do as you please, and times when I will.” She took another step forward. The two of them stood a hands-breadth apart now. “Very often, however”—she reached out and took Çeda’s hand—“the two of us will join hands.”
The moment Brama’s hand touched hers, Çeda’s eyes rolled up in her head. There was a feeling of her mind expanding, of its moving beyond her mortal frame to fill so much more. She felt the press of humanity moving about the city, speaking, haggling, arguing, holding one another, making love, meeting one another for the first time. The scents of fear, lust, ambition, and crushing depression came to her, but like the rush of the Haddah in spring it came in a deluge, a thing she had no hope of controlling.
There was a sense of something drifting through Sharakhai, a sense she’d never known. It felt old, like a rose sculpted from the stuff of stars, a thing plucked by the hands of the first gods well before man had set foot upon the earth. It was so beautiful tears welled in Çeda’s eyes to run hot along her skin. The petals of the rose spread as Rümayesh leaned in. Its scent, a heady thing redolent of the tempering of the world, filled her senses as Rümayesh’s lips touched hers. In that moment, something blossomed between Çeda and Rümayesh, a desire to link hands, that together they might rule this city from the shadows. It was a thing akin to love, akin to lust, like the moments of sex as one crested, though it was drawn out like thread being spun from a tuft of perfect, gossamer fleece. When Rümayesh pressed Brama’s body to Çeda’s, the feeling intensified, so much so that Çeda cried out in surprise and pleasure and something akin to pain.
How long she stayed like that she couldn’t say. The span of a breath, the span of a call from a maned wolf baying at the twin moons, the span of a special meal spent with the dearest of friends.
When Rümayesh pulled away, she whispered, “This is how it could be.” She moved to Çeda’s other ear, placing one kiss before speaking again. “Should you wish to speak again, drop a golden coin into a well, any in Sharakhai you choose, and I’ll be there before the ripples cease.”
And then she walked away, footsteps crunching against the sandy street, leaving Çeda in that dead-end alley to fall alone from the heights she’d taken her.
Days passed. Çeda went to the bazaar or to restaurants along the Trough for food. She taught swords to her class of students at the pits. She attended the funeral rites for Sim and Verda. They�
��d come together from Tribe Halarijan, who burned the bodies of their dead and spread their ashes to the wind. And so that was what they did, allowing the wind to blow their gray ashes against the tops of dunes so that sand and ash were carried as one, mingling, forever traveling the expanse of the Great Mother.
Osman stood at the rear, away from the others, a place of shame, not by others’ choice, but by his. Çeda came to stand by him after a time. They did not speak beyond mere pleasantries, but twice after the funeral she went to visit him, once at the pits and once at his estate. She wanted to see how he was coming along, but she didn’t really wish to touch on the subject of the gem, nor Rümayesh. He didn’t seem to, either. Both times he asked if she’d like some araq. “To honor the dead,” he said, though she noticed just how much araq he poured into his own glass compared to the modest helping he gave her. He seemed ready to leave the subject alone, but as they were sitting on the porch of his estate, talking, having downed a second healthy portion of the anise-flavored liquor, he blurted out. “Where is the gem?”
“It’s safe,” she replied, watching him with care as the setting sun exploded along the western horizon.
“It’s mine, you know, paid for entry into my pits.”
She could hear the desperation behind the bullying words, and also the fear. “It’s yours no longer. You gave it to me.”
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