The Kingdoms of Dust

by Amanda Downum

  Tracks in the dirt. Dust recently disturbed settled slowly. Adam breathed in, and that bland brown scent filled his nose. Close.

  “Why are you following me?” Isyllt asked softly, speaking to the wall.

  No. Adam tilted his head and saw the shadow against the bricks. The outline that didn’t quite blend. Sorcery, cunning as a chameleon’s changing skin. His sword hissed free of its scabbard; the sound made his blood sing. Instinct, at least, hadn’t atrophied.

  Isyllt held out a hand. Pale light flickered in her diamond. “I want answers, not blood.”

  The shadow wavered and resolved into the brown man. He drew a long dagger from beneath his cloak. The blade was painted matte. “And if I wanted your blood, I would have spilled it by now. Let me pass.”

  Isyllt had spoken in Selafaïn and he answered in the same tongue. The words were muffled by the dun scarf across his mouth; Adam couldn’t guess his native language.

  She didn’t budge. “Why are you following me?”

  His eyes creased. “Can’t you guess?”

  “I’m tired of guessing. Enlighten me.”

  He stepped forward, slow and cautious, hands wide and nonthreatening. “If you must know—”

  A flare of nostrils, a shift of weight. A heartbeat’s warning.

  The man moved like water, his blade a black blur. Adam lunged, swung. Too slow. Too weak. At least he was a distraction; the brown man twisted mid-strike, only inches from Isyllt, to block Adam’s blow. Steel rang. A twist, and the hilt wrenched from his fingers. In one smooth move the man drove his knee home, and Adam fell retching.

  Through watering eyes he watched Isyllt collide with the assassin, black hair flying as her scarf fell away. She hadn’t drawn her knife, but she could kill with a touch.

  So why, heartbeats later, were they still scrabbling in the dust? Adam pushed himself up, groping across packed earth for his sword.

  Isyllt’s hands were around the man’s neck, his face already a mess of scratches. Blood smeared hers. She held on like a terrier, but he wedged a boot into her gut and flung her back.

  “Bitch,” the man choked, a note of admiration in his voice. He rolled to his feet, still graceful despite his purpling throat. “I would have made this easier—”

  He choked and stumbled sideways, a scarlet bubble bursting on his lips. A dark stain spread down his shoulder. Adam knocked Isyllt aside as the man’s knife thumped against the dust. The man followed a heartbeat later, knees buckling. As his bloody hand fell away, Adam saw the weighted dart that pierced his throat. Red mist sprayed from his nose and mouth as he tried to breathe.

  Black cloth swirled on the rooftop and was gone.

  They waited, breath held, pressed against the cool plaster while the brown man kicked and gurgled his last, his dun scarf soaked red. His dullness faded as he did—the smell of blood and shit filled the narrow alley, as strong as any death.

  For a long moment Isyllt lay still, Adam’s arm pressing her into the dust. As the shock of battle faded, her pulse pounded in scrapes and bruises. The chill in her diamond numbed her right hand.

  It was only when Adam pulled away that she realized the chill was greater than a simple death would cause. Her eyes narrowed, looking otherwise, and she saw the pale, smoke-tattered shape of a fresh ghost lingering beside the corpse.

  “Kastanos!”

  A Selafaïn word that meant only “dark-haired”—hardly a name to conjure with, but it was the best she could do in her haste. All the same, the ghost paused, swaying toward her. As she focused on him, she felt a shivering connection between them, frail as a spider’s web.

  Names were best for binding souls—knowledge took the place of consent—but other things formed a connection that a clever vinculator could exploit. This man had followed her for decads, chosen to risk his life to murder her. He had tied himself to her through his actions, and she’d be damned if she’d let him escape a second time. Her right hand rose, clenched in the ephemeral gossamer ice of his soul. Her ring blazed white and blinding.

  He fought. Even in the confusion of death his will was strong. But she had years of training and the strength of anger. Her grip held and the diamond opened, swallowing the brown man into its crystalline depths. Her arm ached to the shoulder with cold.

  When she could feel her fingers again, Isyllt searched the cooling corpse while Adam kept watch. She had already contaminated the scene, but she tugged her right glove on before touching him again. It helped hide her shaking, and the nails she’d broken in the dead man’s flesh.

  The dart was a wicked thing, barbed and weighted with lead—made to kill mages. Copper and silver and other metals could be used in spells; lead held no magic, and weakened any that came near it. If the assassin was a mage herself, she was either very careful or very foolish.

  Isyllt wished she could blame her own failure on the lead.

  She should have killed him. She’d wanted to, answers or no; her hands still tingled with nerves and rage. She could stop a man’s heart with a touch, or worse. The last mage who’d tried to kill her had crumbled to dust in her arms. But when she called for the magic, the nothing that lived inside her, all that answered was a choking helplessness.

  The feel of his soul stirring in the depths of her ring soothed her pride a little.

  With his spells faded the dead man’s face was clear, though still ordinary—rounded features and heavy-lidded hazel eyes. A small scar nicked his upper lip, and thoughtful lines creased his dusty skin. He might have been handsome with the right smile. His brown-on-brown coloring had the look of no particular nation, but he could have come from any of the mongrel port cities. He carried nothing but a purse half full of small coins and a partially eaten lunch tucked into one pocket—no incriminating letters or signets or foreign coins.

  His hands and forearms were clenched solid with death-spasm, fingers curled as if they still gripped a knife. A familiar bulge under his left glove caught her attention, and she cut the thin leather away. A topaz glittered on his smallest finger, sand-colored and square-cut in a plain gold band. A lesser mage stone, not as sought-after as rubies or sapphires or soul-binding diamonds, but a useful gem all the same.

  “Valuable?” Adam asked.

  “Worth a few lir.” She’d received a parting payment from the king and much of Kiril’s estate, but six months of travel had eaten into her resources. Still, stealing mage stones was never wise, and she’d have to break his finger to get the band off. Anything she might discover from the stone she could more easily learn by questioning his ghost. She emptied his purse and slipped the coins into her own pockets.

  “Are you all right?” she asked belatedly as Adam helped her to her feet.

  “Just my pride.” He winced with every step, giving lie to the words. “No worse than your face.”

  She hadn’t stopped to notice, but her lip and cheek stung and the taste of copper filled her mouth. She touched her upper lip and winced; her fingers came away smeared red.

  “We should go,” Adam said. “You’ve been framed for murder before.”

  Her mouth twisted. “I remember.”

  She would find no sympathy among the caliph’s agents, nor a comfortable house arrest. And neither her king nor Kiril was waiting to ransom her safely home. Pressure swelled in her chest, a sharp hitch of panic.

  I can’t do this alone.

  She quashed the thought. She had no choice. Every wirewalker learned to work without a net one day. Or died broken.

  The sky glowed orange and violet when they returned to Mulberry Lane, and the last light slanted warm and heavy across the rooftops. The aftermath of violence left Isyllt stretched taut and brittle. They had to leave town, but whether that meant the docks or the northern road she couldn’t decide. First she had to retrieve Moth and their luggage.

  Her unease grew as they neared the ochre house. The street was much too quiet for the hour. Adam paused with her, nostrils flaring. “Trouble.”

  She stopped in her
tracks at the gate, boots scuffing heavily on paving stones; a man sat on the doorstep. Lean and hawk-nosed, dressed in professionally nondescript clothing. She might have run, but other ordinary-looking men drifted from shadowed nooks along the street. The caliph’s Security Ministry. The euphemism on the streets was “the friends of the family,” or more simply the Friends.

  “Hello, Lady Iskaldur.” The man rose, the westering sun gleaming on his shaven scalp. “Or is it Kara Asli?”

  The name under which she’d entered the city and rented the house. Isyllt sighed; so much for that set of papers. “Either way,” she said, “you have me at a disadvantage.”

  The man bowed low. “My name is Ahmet Sahin. I would be delighted if you would come with me.”

  CHAPTER 6

  She ought to feel something.

  Melantha stared down at Corylus’s slack face and waited to feel regret, sadness, even anger. Nothing came. They had been…perhaps not friends, but she had enjoyed his company once. Now a fly crawled across one half-open hazel eye and she felt nothing but confusion.

  He should have known better. He should have listened to her.

  She hadn’t meant to do it—to stop him from killing Iskaldur, yes, but not like that. Then the necromancer’s companion moved from sun to shadow and she’d seen the copper-green flash of his eyes, and the sense of familiarity that had nagged her all day snapped into place.

  Adam.

  It shouldn’t have mattered. She’d been another person when she knew him, and that woman was dead. He would bear no love for her memory. But when Corylus attacked him, she’d moved like a person possessed.

  The thought chilled her. She was warded against spirits and specters, but what defenses did she have against the ghosts of people she had been?

  She couldn’t leave Corylus here, no matter what she did or didn’t feel. The dust of Iskaldur’s footsteps had barely settled when she came down from the roofs, but she didn’t have long. Already a brindled dog circled at the mouth of the alley, licking its muzzle hopefully.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, bending down to grab Corylus’s ankles. She wasn’t sure if she meant it for the dog or for him. The smell of cold blood and waste rose up as she tugged him, and her nose wrinkled. His left hand bounced in the dirt, claw-curled. Her breath came hard through clenched teeth by the time she dragged the corpse into the deeper shadows at the back of the alley. Mages and scholars speculated on the weight of the soul, but as far as she could tell the lack thereof had never made a body lighter. Especially when she was the one disposing of it.

  Melantha dropped Corylus and laid a hand against the warm bricks, catching her breath and gathering her magic. This would be easier at night, or at the height of the noon—the brighter the light, the darker the shadow—but the fading afternoon would suffice.

  Many mages learned simple skiamancy or skiagraphy—viewing through shadows, or casting them into illusions. Even making them solid for heartbeats at a time. Melantha knew better tricks.

  Darkness gathered beneath her hand, pooling like tar. Rough brick smoothed to glass, and slicker still. Soon what had been a wall felt like oil, a patch of black that rippled at her touch. Sweat chilled on her scalp and neck.

  She hooked her fingers in the crawling shadow and yanked. Darkness tore like the husk of rotten fruit, with a sick wet sound she felt in her chest. She braced against the dizziness that always came. Shadows were natural, even the black of a moonless night. This was something more, unreal in its intensity. A gift from her mother, double-edged like all the rest.

  She tensed as the fabric of the world parted for her. She hadn’t opened shadows so deeply since she’d murdered Zadani. The ghost wind had been waiting for her even in the dark paths that day, had nearly swallowed her before she could escape. Today, however, she faced only empty silence.

  Melantha took a deep breath and grabbed Corylus by the ankles once more. He would have no burial or burning, even if he had kin or friends to perform the rites. Nothing she took into the abyss came out again, once she let it go. Every time she crossed the threshold she feared she’d trip over memories, tokens, corpses—all the things she left behind. It hadn’t happened yet, but how much could the dark hold?

  Quietus wouldn’t mind the absent corpse—they weren’t sentimental—but she’d have to explain it to Nerium. She hoped her mother was right and Iskaldur was worth this much trouble. Closing her eyes, she heaved herself backward, hauling the corpse with her.

  Like falling into a pool whose depth she couldn’t measure. She floated in lightless cold, with no sense of up or down. The urge to struggle was overwhelming, the urge to open her mouth and scream, but practice had taught her better. There was no air for her in the dark, and the thought of taking the blackness into her lungs terrified her. She could only move through shadow for the span of a held breath.

  Her hands tightened on Corylus. Soft boot leather, flesh and muscle and bone beneath. The dark drank the last of his warmth greedily. She ought to have something to say, but there was nothing.

  She let go.

  An hour later, she found Iskaldur’s apprentice in a tavern called The Three-legged Dog.

  The building was low and dim, wedged into one of Kehribar’s oldest and least reputable neighborhoods. The air smelled permanently of spilled beer and scorched onions, burning olive oil and sweat. Lamp-smoke blackened the beams and the horn windows, enfolding the common room in a permanent gloom no matter the hour. Not the sort of place for tourists, but the girl who called herself Moth sprawled comfortably across a booth in the back, laughing with a boy her own age.

  Melantha smiled behind her scarf.

  She had learned a little about Moth from her mother’s notes and more from Corylus—too much wine left him gossipy. Before the girl took up with Iskaldur, there had been little to tell. Her name in Erisín had been Dahlia, the mark of a prostitute and a mother’s cruelty. According to Corylus, she had been a thin sparrow of a girl, lost in Iskaldur’s shadow. That changed in Thesme, when a pimp thought the name gave him leave to lay hands on her. Iskaldur left the man in a pool of his own guts, but the next day Dahlia had cut off her long dark hair and taken a new name.

  Melantha understood such transformations all too well. She quashed a feeling of kinship; nostalgia was as dangerous as regret.

  Her quarry paid her no attention as she paid for a beer and slipped into a dark corner. The drink was only cover, but the house brew turned out to be rich and malty and bittersweet, good enough to overlook the dubious cleanliness of the mug. In between sips, she shuffled shadows till she found a clear view of Moth and her boy.

  Moth’s lips were swollen from kissing, and the fevered sparkle in her eyes couldn’t be entirely the work of the half-empty bottle of raki on the table. Trouble of the adventurous sort—her companion looked like the type. A thief or a hustler, cocky with youth and careless with success. Not that Melantha would know anything about that.

  She might not have time for this; she might have too much time. She’d searched for Iskaldur in time to watch Adam and the necromancer taken into custody by Kehribar’s secret police. Either they would talk their way out, or Melantha would have to devise a cunning rescue. She hoped Iskaldur was a fast talker.

  Distracted by quarry and quandary, she nearly missed the mutter that rippled through the room. The afternoon crowd thinned like smoke in a draft; one of the bartenders vanished as well. Melantha had seen enough raids to recognize this one. Sure enough, a shift of shadows showed city guards in the street outside.

  Light and heat spilled in as the door swung open, and conversation died. Five men stepped inside, swords and pistols at their belts, the sigil of the watch on their breasts. Moth’s companion sobered at the sight of them, his interest in the laces of her shirt abandoned. As the guard captain stepped to the bar, the boy slumped against his bench, melting out of his seat and under the table, motioning Moth to follow as he slunk toward the rear door.

  They almost made it, but the guards turne
d as the door swung open. A shout rose up as they gave chase. Melantha grinned; she was always better at acting than planning, anyway.

  The shadows of the booth turned cold and liquid, swallowing her. It had taken her this long to shake the chill from her bones, too. At least this time all she needed was shallow darkness.

  She writhed quicksilver from shadow to shadow, through walls and over obstacles, keeping pace with the fleeing children. The Friends would have sent their own agents, not city guards—this was a separate trouble. Heavy footsteps drew near as Moth and the boy reached the back door—the alley beyond was clear, for the moment.

  In the heartbeat’s pause while the thief wrestled with the barred door, she struck. Reaching through the shadow that lay like a skin over the walls, she seized Moth’s arm. The girl yelped once before the dark stole her voice. Back and up Melantha swam, dragging Moth behind. Only a few yards separated them from a shuttered room on the second story, but they were both chilled and breathless when they emerged.

  “Easy,” she whispered, one gloved hand over Moth’s mouth. “Stay quiet and the guards will be gone soon. And sorry. It’s always vertiginous, the first time.”

  Sure enough, the girl’s shoulders convulsed. When Melantha let go, she fell to one knee and fought not to retch. She didn’t scream, though.

  “Who are you?” she asked at last, voice rough with suppressed coughing.

  “The patron saint of clumsy thieves. Can you make a light?” The single stripe of daylight burning between the curtains was enough for her, and she could feel the contents of the room through the dark besides, but there was no point in telling Moth that. She wrapped her scarf across her face.

  Sparks blossomed, rose-pink and shimmering. By their glow Moth found a candle, and witchlight kindled to real flame as it touched the wick. The light reflected in her eyes, and along the blade of the little knife in her hand.