Of Sand and Malice Made

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  He looked ready to argue, but then he took a deep breath and looked around his estate, a beautiful plot of land with an old stone-and-wood house on it, a stables, even a small vineyard. It was the fruit of all his labor in the pits when he’d been a fighter and afterward, the place from which he’d begun to build his now-considerable empire. He looked at Çeda with an expression of gratitude. “And the ehrekh? Have you rid yourself of her?”

  Osman had seen enough pain, and she hadn’t yet decided what to do about Rümayesh, so she lied. “She’ll bother us no more.”

  “Good.” He nodded, as if the matter were settled. “That’s very good.”

  More days passed, and Çeda continued on, waking, working, training, sleeping. There was a part of her that worried that Rümayesh would come for her. Surely at some point she would. But there was another part entirely that was petrified of the decision she had yet to make. She knew she was avoiding it, but the way Rümayesh had touched her. The way she’d made her feel. The memory had remained, like the aftertaste of the finest liquor. The very feeling was still so sharp in her mind, like she could reach out and touch it. Dear gods, that kiss. It terrified her. It made her want to run to Rümayesh to experience it again.

  Twice she found herself taking a golden rahl with her on a walk. The second time she’d ended up at a well, staring down into its depths. All she need do was drop it and everything Rümayesh had promised would be hers. To touch so many, to reach beyond the boundaries of flesh and blood. To become like to a god. That was what Rümayesh had offered and, gods help her, how tempting it was.

  She’d held that coin over the well for long minutes. Tulathan and Rhia were high in the night sky. The coin glinted as she twisted it this way and that. She had but to open her fingers and all that Rümayesh had promised would be hers.

  But then she saw the image of the King on the coin—it was too dark to tell which, but of course it was one of the Twelve who ruled Sharakhai—and she was returned to herself. In that moment she turned and threw the coin away, into the darkened streets. She saw it winking over and over as it caught the light of the moons.

  As she breathed, blinking away the vision of the spinning coin, the door of a nearby oud parlor opened, spilling music into the night. The sound diminished as the door closed, but Çeda was drawn to it like a moth to a midnight flame. She entered and laid down money and drank until she could no longer see straight. She danced with a man who looked like Emre, but wasn’t, the perfect companion for the night. She left with him and they made love on the roof of a packed tenement where he lived with his family and nine others.

  She had hoped it would show her that Rümayesh was nothing, that she could live without her and have no regrets. But it only made her want the ehrekh’s touch all the more. Laying with that nameless man, as pretty as he might have been, only served to highlight just how small she was, how enclosed, how trapped.

  Had she her gold coin still, she would have gone straight back to that well and thrown it in. She didn’t, though. She’d only brought the one.

  But she had another at home.

  She returned home as the sun was rising. She stopped in the entryway, the sitting room, looking toward the archway that led to Emre’s room. How dearly she wished to speak with him. She hesitated, though. She didn’t want him drawn deeper into this. He’d already come close when he’d helped her to find Adzin and the strange ifin in the desert and, later, Kadir. Still, she could simply sit with him, couldn’t she? Perhaps they could go for morning tea, dine on pastries from Tehla.

  She took one step toward his room but stopped when she heard something coming from the archway standing opposite his. From her room.

  She walked in and found Emre sitting on her bed. The horsehair blanket above her bed was askew. Just next to him on the bed lay a small jewelry box, its lid open, and Emre was holding a clear blue gemstone the size of a falcon’s egg.

  Çeda felt her mouth going dry. “Emre, what are you doing?”

  He looked up. If he was embarrassed at having been caught in her room he didn’t show it. He merely looked at her, and then back to the jewel, as if he could hardly bear to take his eyes from it. “I . . . felt something in here. I thought it was you.”

  “That isn’t yours, Emre. I want you to give it to me.”

  He swallowed hard. Licked his lips. He looked up at her, then back to the stone. “Where did you get this, Çeda? It’s beautiful.”

  “I know it is. But it’s mine. Now give it to me.”

  Emre blinked. “But you’re gone so much. It’s not safe leaving it alone. I could watch it for you while you’re gone.”

  “Emre, give me that fucking jewel and get out of my fucking room.”

  His eyes lifted from the stone at last, cold. “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll knock you so hard your children will feel it.”

  He had no children. Neither of them did. It was an old joke she and he had told a thousand times—to one another, to their friends as they ran through the streets and the aisles of the spice market. She’d wanted to bring him back to who he’d been, not who he was now: a man holding a jewel that threatened to tear them apart.

  Emre smiled. Then he laughed, flipping the jewel into her waiting hand. “Better put it somewhere thieves can’t find it.” He walked past her, then left their home. And finally Çeda could breathe again.

  By the gods, this had been another message. The gem was cursed, and anyone near it, near her, would be affected. She thought of taking it out to the desert, throwing it to the sands as an offering to Nalamae. But the stories never worked that way. It would find its way back into Çeda’s life and, sure as the desert was dry, fate would return with a vengeance. And even if it didn’t, Rümayesh would still be out there, waiting.

  Rümayesh had made a terrible error. For these past many days, the threat of Rümayesh doing something to Çeda hadn’t seemed so dire, but the image of a spear hanging over Emre’s head, ready to drop, had shifted something insider her. Shifted it for good.

  The temptation of going to Rümayesh had evaporated like so much spilled water on the sunbaked streets of Sharakhai. Like a city catching fire, the feeling was replaced by a burning desire to give that creature everything she deserved.

  By dark of night, Çeda strode into the small yard of Ibrahim the storyteller and up to the small porch of his mudbrick home. She held a book in her left hand, tight, like a talisman against evil. She should be tired, and in truth she hadn’t been this tired since the nightmares of Rümayesh’s torture by the godling twins, but anticipation and excitement over the passage she’d found kept fatigue at bay, at least for now.

  She knocked on Ibrahim’s door, knocking again when she heard no movement within. It was very early still—several hours before sunrise—but she couldn’t wait. The time to be worried about manners had long since passed. When she knocked a third time she heard a groan, heard shuffling steps nearing the door. “Who’s come to my door before even the gods have awakened?”

  “It’s Çeda, Ibrahim. I need your help.”

  “With the same problem you brought to me twice before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Three is an ill portent, Çeda. It may very well bring your problems to my door next.”

  “Three is also a blessed number. Three times did rain fall when Nalamae touched her finger to the desert to create the River Haddah. Three times did Iri call before the sun awoke in the heavens. Three may free Sharakhai from the taint of Rümayesh.”

  His only reply was silence.

  “I’ve found a story, Ibrahim.”

  The span of three breaths passed, then six, then nine. Finally the door creaked softly open. Ibrahim stood there, frowning, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “What story?”

  She lifted the book and shook it. “A wondrous story.”

  Ibrahim’s face screwed up as though he’d just stuffed a
rotten prune into his mouth, but he left the door open as he shambled his morning pains away toward the kitchen. He lit a lamp from the oven’s embers and set to making tea. When he’d poured a cup for each of them and sat across from her, he inhaled the scent for a good long while before speaking. She could see the worry in his eyes, if not his face. Eventually, though, his curiosity seemed to win out. He nodded toward her book. “What’s this story?”

  Çeda opened the book to a certain page and set it before him.

  She’d found it after days of searching. She’d scoured the bazaar, gone to one of the more expensive bookshops in the city, pulled in favors to be allowed into one of the collegia’s libraries—finding so much she’d paid a hefty bribe to stay another day and night. In the end, though, she’d found what she’d been searching for in a small, nondescript book she purchased in the Shallows. The shop owner and scribe was a woman who specialized in documenting stories from those freshly arrived in Sharakhai, those who’d come from the desert. The oral tradition in the desert tribes was vast, and many stories had never been recorded. But the woman had been documenting such stories for twenty years. She’d pointed Çeda to a particular book, which Çeda immediately bought and devoured that night.

  Ibrahim ran his hand down the page. Then he went back a dozen pages and flipped through the entire story in as little time as it took Çeda to blow on her tea and take a sip of her own. Nalamae’s teats, no wonder he knows so many stories.

  “This speaks of an ehrekh being captured,” he said.

  “Yes,” Çeda replied.

  “Ehrekh aren’t caught. They catch others.”

  “So the stories say, but now I wonder. The one who wrote it said it was one of the oldest from their tribe.” Çeda motioned to the open book. “Perhaps this is the true story from which the others were born.”

  The story told the tale of a mage, the shaikh of Tribe Kadri, whose people were being haunted by an ehrekh. Night after night the ehrekh came, slipping like a dark shadow, twisting through tent flaps, ghosting around spears and swords, to take whoever it wished. They would hear the screams in the desert afterward, and though they ran to rescue the one who’d been spirited away, they would find only empty patches of sand, a bit of blood. Minutes, sometimes hours later, the screams would start again.

  The shaikh prayed to Tulathan, for she had reason to hate Goezhen and his children. Tulathan did not come for many nights, but when her moon was full, she came to the shaikh, who had affixed to his turban an incredible ruby as large as an eye, one of the treasures of the tribe. Tulathan took it from him, kissed it, and told him that he might capture the ehrekh when it came again if only he obeyed her word. He blessed the gemstone as Tulathan had bid him, and spilled his own blood in augury to learn who the ehrekh would come for next. He gave the ruby to that young woman, and that very night when the ehrekh came again, the girl held the jewel in the palm of her hand, and the ehrekh was drawn into it, never to be seen again. The ruby had been buried in the mountains shortly after, and the tribe never returned to that place.

  Ibrahim’s only response was to raise one bushy eyebrow. “You think this true?”

  “Do you?”

  Ibrahim shrugged. “So why have you come here if you know what needs to be done?”

  “I’ve come because I don’t know. The story doesn’t say. I need to know how to perform the ritual.”

  “The story speaks of a gem.”

  Çeda reached into her shirt and pulled out a cloth bundle. She unrolled it and caught the sapphire in her hand. Even in the dim light of the lantern it was brilliant.

  Ibrahim tried not to show his surprise, but his eyes widened, his jaw worked. He swallowed, one hand reaching out for it, suddenly shaking, whereas before, while he’d been reading, they’d been steady as stone. “You said it was large”—his fingers stopped just above it, then his hand withdrew—“but truly I had no idea gems could be like this, so flawless.”

  He stared at it a while, but Çeda was growing anxious. “Well?”

  It seemed to take a great amount of effort for him to drag his eyes off the jewel and regard her once more. “You want the ritual.”

  “Yes.”

  After one last look at the gem, Ibrahim sighed, as if with that breath he’d given up the hope of owning something so fine. “What the tales say of the ehrekh, how they hide the souls of man in such jewels . . . This story makes me think those might indeed be the same ritual. When Tulathan is brightest, one burns blood. Only the blood of man will do, as much as will fit in the palms of both hands. Burn it in a censer with the gem hanging above it. The smoke will coat the gem. When it’s done, you will polish the largest surface with the wool of a newborn lamb. Show that surface to the ehrekh and it will be drawn into it.”

  She wrapped the gem up and stuffed it back inside her shirt. “That’s all?”

  “The stories I’ve heard and read are the same in this respect. Some others have the ritual performed deep in the desert. Others say it can only be done when the Haddah is flowing. Others still call for the gem to be buried in the sand for twelve days before the ritual begins. But they’re all embellishments, I suspect. So, yes, if you mean to go through with it, that would be all.”

  “Tulathan will be full tomorrow night.”

  Ibrahim nodded, his eyes wary, worried.

  Despite Ibrahim’s fears, relief of a sort flooded through her, and with it came a deep and contented lethargy. Still, she was not safe. A river raged around her, threatening to carry her away, but she had reached a rock she could cling to for a time.

  “Ibrahim, might I sleep here awhile?” She couldn’t go home. She’d promised herself she would bring the stone nowhere near Emre until this was all done.

  Ibrahim’s forbidding expression told her all she needed to know. She was ready to leave his home and find a place in the streets to rest for a time when a voice called from the next room. “Of course you can.”

  Ibrahim’s wife, wearing an ivory nightdress, her long gray hair unbound and flowing down past her knees, smiled at Çeda while squinting from the light of the lantern. “Come now, dear. You can sleep in my bed.”

  “I don’t want to—”

  “Shush, now. I’ll have none of that.” She waved Çeda to follow her. “I need to be up anyway. Ibrahim leaves early for his treks, don’t you, my dearest love?” As Çeda followed her down the narrow hallway, she turned and whispered, “Can’t stand the brightness of my sun.”

  “Can’t stand the heat of your anger!” Ibrahim called from the other room.

  To this she only smiled, ushering Çeda into her bedroom and the bed that lay within. By the gods, it was still warm. It cradled her like a mother would a newborn child. Exhausted, clutching the gemstone beneath her shirt, Çeda fell plummeting into sleep.

  Çeda stood at the edge of a well. Since Ibrahim’s, the day had risen and fled with the coming of night. Somewhere in the distance, an oud played over the Shallows, low and mournful.

  She wore her black fighting dress. It was loose and easy to fight in while still protecting through the boiled leather strips sewn into it. She wore a black turban, the veil drawn across her face. Her shamshir hung loose by her side, a dear companion who’d rarely failed her. Wrapped in a cloth, secreted away inside a leather pouch at her belt was the sapphire, prepared as Ibrahim had said. The smell of the burning blood still lingered. She’d used her own, and truth to tell she was still a bit lightheaded from letting so much of it, but she would take no other for such a ritual—Ibrahim hadn’t mentioned one way or another, yet it felt not only important but paramount that it be her own.

  Seven avenues met in a drunken rush here at the well, the center of a twisting, misshapen web of streets known as Yerinde’s Snare. It was the most populous district in the entire city. The tall tenement buildings loomed, standing five, six, even seven stories high. Each of their low floors was subdivided
into the simplest of dwellings—one-room homes that housed seven or eight each. Those who lived there slept cheek to jowl or in alternating shifts.

  Çeda lifted her hand and unfurled the fist she’d held for the past half-hour. A gold coin glinted in the palm of her hand, lustrous beneath the gauze of the heavens, as if it knew how very potent this night was, as if it knew the part it was about to play. She’d held its sister not so long ago. She felt that same desperation, the seductive draw toward Rümayesh, but this night she was buoyed by seething anger over the threat Rümayesh had made on Emre’s life and a sense that by the time the sun kissed the eastern horizon this chapter of her life will have been completed one way or another. With a glance up toward bright Tulathan and her gentler sister, Rhia, Çeda whispered a prayer to each of the goddesses, then dropped the golden rahl into the well. It glinted downward. She heard its distant entry into the water.

  Immediately she felt something tug inside her, like the feeling of worry one gets when the truest of friends is in danger. She swallowed, turning from darkened street to darkened street, her hand on the hilt of her shamshir. Rümayesh had said she’d arrive by the time the ripples ceased, so Çeda knew if it worked at all it wouldn’t be long.

  There.

  In the darkness.

  A form walked down the street from the southeast. She’d guessed Rümayesh would come along one of the eastern avenues, but she hadn’t known for certain, so she’d had Osman set traps on all of them. Thank the gods, though, they’d decided to station more along the eastern avenues.

  Çeda saw them along the roof of one of the tenements, dark forms moving carefully. Something dropped toward the approaching form. Çeda closed her eyes just before she heard a soft thump. Then, as if a star had been born right here in the rough and tumble streets of the Shallows, a flash lit the night.

  Brama reeled away, shouting in surprise. Shadowed forms closed in. One clouted Brama over the head and he went limp. As simple as that. Like the snap of a finger.