Morning was a given—just as the sky, just as the sand, just as the moons and stars and a river’s endless journey to the sea were given. But life… life was never a given. Every morning upon which a warrior might gaze with clear eyes, a heart beating in her chest, and lungs filled to bursting with sweet desert air was a gift, rare and precious.
So Ani reminded herself when she woke with her face next to a horse’s ass, sand in her nethers, and a mouth that tasted as if she had licked the churra pens clean. She lay for a while, loath to wake either of the snoring creatures that shared her tent. Talieso was likely to wake in a panic, feet-first, knocking the whole tent to Jehannim. Never mind they had been camping like this since he was a suckling. And Leviathus…
Let him sleep, her mind urged. Let him have these moments of peace.
It was not to be.
Someone yanked at her tent, as if the flaps had not been properly tied against last night’s storm, and yanked it again. Talieso thrashed, instantly trying to regain his feet in the small space, and whinnied so that her ears rang. Leviathus went stiff all over, as if by doing so he could separate himself from this world entirely, and sink into the next.
The tent jerked again, and Mariza’s shaking voice croaked out.
“Istaza! Come look at this!”
“Shit from a pox-riddled goat’s arse!” Ani yelled. “Give me a minute!”
“Hurry,” the other woman said, her voice low. “And bring the prisoner.” The tent shook again, and Talieso almost hit Ani in the face with his head as he tried again to stand.
“Of all the shit-brained, cheese-assed daughters of a half-brained goat rapist… stop that!” she snarled—at Mariza and the horse both—and of a wonder they stopped.
Ani unlaced the tent flaps, and urged Talieso to scootch out backward as he had done most of his life. Of course, the moment he was free her idiot stallion took off bucking and farting as if he had just survived a reaver apocalypse. She nodded to Leviathus as he emerged from the stinking tent, as well. He stood shaking the sand from his clothing as best he could, still not meeting any of the women’s eyes.
“Come,” Mariza said, reaching out and nearly touching Ani’s arm. “Come on.” She turned and hurried up the side of the nearest dune, which had crept closer as they slept out the storm.
She is afraid, Ani thought, and a slow smile crept across her heart. No, she is terrified. The youthmistress of the Zeerani prides did not let the smile touch her face, though, nor did she reach down to the flute still tucked into her waistband. She followed the false warrior up the sand mountain to see what she could see. Leviathus came after her, and Talieso as well, for he had got the foolishness out of his system, and was hoping for breakfast.
Three of the Mah’zula were waiting at the top of the dune, vash’ai by their sides, and the women’s faces showed even more fear than Mariza’s. Ani’s heart gladdened to see it.
I will welcome whatever it is that puts such a look on their— Then she looked down, and her blood turned to river water, cold and full of serpents.
What have I done? she wondered again, far too late. What have I called? But she knew. Any child of a bonesinger would recognize the tall spiked figures that stood far below. Untouched by sun or wind they stood, shadowless and motionless, branches outstretched like limbs, narrow leaves longer than her arm sprouting from their tops like a warrior’s headdress, ragged and broken.
What have I—
“What have you done?” Mariza snarled, but she was staring past Ani at the king’s son. “What fell luck have you brought upon us, Outlander? What foul magic is this?”
Leviathus froze where he stood. Though they had been so long under the sun, he looked pale and haggard, and the yellowing bruise on one cheek smote Ani’s heart. In that moment, she regretted nothing. Inna’hael padded up the dune to stand beside them, flanked by two of the smaller vash’ai queens. He stared down on the still figures, then turned his hot yellow gaze upon Ani.
So, you have chosen an especially interesting death.
“Tell him, Istaza,” Mariza said.
It is Istaza, still, she thought. They turn to me as to a teacher, and do not yet realize it. Ani let her voice harden. These stupid girls thought they wanted a teacher, now, after all they had done? She would be the teacher they sought, and gladly. She would teach them a thing or three about what it really meant to live as a warrior. And die as a traitor.
“Those are na’iyeh,” she explained to Leviathus, raising her voice so that all might hear. “Greater predators from the beginning times, and they are stalking us.”
“Na’iyeh means… to weep?” Leviathus blinked. He shaded his eyes with one hand and squinted down at the unassuming shapes. “Those just look like some kind of cactus to me. Are you sure those things are predators? They do not move, that I can see.”
“Stupid.” Mariza spat, but her face was stark with fear. “Stupid male.”
“Na’iyeh means ‘mourners’,” Ani answered, “because they look like weeping warriors standing at a pyre, and because once they are on your trail, it is only a matter of time before your family is weeping. You will never see them move.” She softened her voice, drew them in with a storyteller’s cadence. That, too, she had learned from Hafsa Azeina. I am more like her than they know. More than I knew, even.
“You could stand here all day, watching them, and never see them move. But you must sleep eventually. We all must sleep eventually, and when we do…”
One of the Mah’zula let out a long, shuddering moan.
“The na’iyeh do not flower like trees or herbs, they grow no fruits, produce no seeds. They catch you in your sleep—it is said they feed only on humans—enfold you in their thorny embrace, and dissolve your flesh. Slowly. Even as they do this, the na’iyeh coat your still-screaming corpse with a kind of slime, and this slime eventually hardens to become the flesh of a new mourner. All that is left of you will be your bones, deep inside a newborn na’iyeh. You will grow branches, and leaves, and spikes, and hunt human flesh with your new brothers and sisters.”
“If you cut one open,” Samiyeh whispered, “you will find the bones of a man, or woman, or child. They say that its mouth is open, screaming for eternity.”
“If you cut it in half,” another said, “those two pieces will become two new na’iyeh. You cannot kill them by chopping them up like plants. You cannot kill them with water, or poison, or any weapon forged by man.”
You cannot eat them, Inna’hael added. Around him the smaller vash’ai crouched, snarling. You cannot end them by claw or by tooth.
“How do we kill them, then?” Leviathus asked. All eyes turned toward Ani. The youthmistress smiled, deep in the pit of her heart, in that hidden room where the bonesinger’s child yet lived.
“You cannot kill the na’iyeh, save perhaps by fire hot enough to turn human bone to ash. Nor will they turn aside from the hunt. Once the Mourners have your scent, they will chase you to the very corners of the earth, never giving up their prey, never sleeping. There is only one thing for us to do.”
“And what is that?” Leviathus asked, though Ani could see the answer waiting in his eyes.
“Run.”
* * *
And run they did, under a clear sky and a benevolent sun, on little water, less food, and no hope, till their horses stumbled and the churrim spat, till the Mah’zula were too weary and strained to bother making sport of Leviathus.
Aftha, their best scout, stood in her stirrups and let her ka unfold. She cast about for any hint of shade or water till she was half-fainting in the saddle. Ani, who was nearly as deaf to sa and ka as the king’s son, could have told them that the search was in vain. This route to Min Yaarif was known as Haz Qurut—the Dry Road—for good reason.
But she did not tell them, nor did she see fit to explain to these—Kha’Akari—that there was no running from the na’iyeh, once a pod had your dream scent. The fleetest foot, the swiftest steed could never outrun Weeping Dreamers, as the dre
amshifters called them.
“Eventually you will have to sleep,” Hafsa Azeina had explained, “and it is then they will catch you. For though they remain rooted in this world, they travel in Shehannam. The moment you enter the Dreaming Lands, they will find you by your scent. With every dream they draw closer to you in the world of flesh, until you are caught.”
“Is there no escape, then?” she had asked.
“For me, it would be possible. For one or two other dreamshifters, perhaps. For one such as you?” Hafsa Azeina had shaken her head, great golden eyes half-lidded. “Better you should steer clear of the na’iyeh, as all greater predators.”
Here I have done exactly the opposite, Ani thought, and drawn them to us. Truly, I am more like Sulema than either of us knew. There were, indeed, ways in which one might escape or even kill the na’iyeh, but they were beyond her power altogether, and she would not have shared this information with Mariza and her ilk, had they thought to ask.
No, these arrogant young idiots would not think to ask a used-up youthmistress—and impure of blood, at that—what she might know.
Age and treachery. She grinned.
Exactly so, youngling, Inna’hael remarked. Exactly so.
They struck camp that night far from shelter or water. For the second night in a row, the horses were on grain-and-butter rations, and the churrim on none. Neither were the prisoners given more than a scant mouthful of water. It was “prisoners” now, not “the prisoner and the youthmistress.”
When she and Leviathus sat shoulder-to-shoulder in her tent, however, and she was reasonably certain they would not be disturbed, Ani picked apart a bit of the tent’s hem and retrieved a waxed paper packet of lionsnake pemmican. He accepted half with a silent nod of thanks, though his eyes flashed bright in the tent’s dim interior. They flashed again when she took out the flute and began to play.
King’s son or not, he is no fool, Ani thought. Although he is a fool to believe that any mad plan of mine might do anything but get us killed.
Inna’hael, for a change, said nothing.
Soon enough, one of the Mah’zula shook her tent and yelled for silence. Ani tucked the flute away and lay down, heart pounding, and waited for sleep to come.
* * *
Sleep did come, eventually, and it brought terrible dreams. Umm Nurati, first mother of the Zeeranim, lay dead, legs split open like a fresh-caught fish with the bones gone. Tammas and her other children—save Ismai—were arranged beside her on a pyre that would not light. Hannei, the young Ja’Akari warrior, stood over them all, dry-eyed and silent, hacking at her own flesh with a pair of grey steel shamsi.
Hannei turned from the sight only to find herself surrounded by—
* * *
“Na’iyeh!” one of the Mah’zula screamed, in a voice so shrill it was scarcely human.
“I feel nothing!” another shrieked. “Nothing! There is nothing! Ai yeh!”
Ani burst from her tent, Leviathus close behind her. The Mah’zula were running about like a swarm of russet ridgebacks, undisciplined as children.
Just as Hafsa Azeina had warned, the pod of na’iyeh were closer now than they had been the previous morning, so close Ani could see the daggerlike leaf-crowns swaying as if in a breeze. So close she could smell the carrion stench of them. Though she had been warned, though the dreamshifter had explained why doing so might be deadly, Ani could not help but reach out to them, unfurling her ka…
Nothing.
There was nothing, not even the faint water sense or life sense that she had always taken for granted.
“What?” Leviathus asked, frowning. “What is it?”
Of course you would not know, she thought. You are surdus. You never had what we have lost. For a moment, she almost envied him his deafness.
Ani cast about in a panic, every muscle in her body, every sense straining outward with the effort, but still there was nothing. No life sense, no breath sense, not a whisper of warmth from human or beast, not even the slow trickle of fire or water deep underground. It was as if a music that had been playing before her birth had stopped. As if the world had stopped, as if Sajani Earth Dragon curled tight and silent.
“Sa and ka,” she whispered to him, heart pounding. “They are gone. The world has gone silent. As if we are all surdus.” Her heart, her soul kept reaching out, but there was no answer. Truly, they had been forsaken.
His indrawn breath was a low whistle.
“My father—”
All around her, warriors began to cry out as one by one they realized what had been lost. What had been taken from them. Some of them wept, hands over their faces. Two of them erupted in a flurry of blows and screams. One of those drew her shamsi, and when a third tried to intervene, that blade bit deep into her flesh, nearly severing an arm. Even those screams were not enough to fill the silence that rang in all their hearts. In vain, those bonded Zeeravashani turned to their kithren—
—and as one, the vash’ai turned away from the Zeeranim, as if that bond had never been. The old queen was first, a lovely elderling with a coat so pale it was more silver than gold. Green eyes blinked lazily as the warrior with whom she had ridden and hunted and played for years—perhaps half the span of the young woman’s life—threw herself upon the sand at the queen’s feet. Those eyes were as flat and indifferent as those of any wild vash’ai. Ears pressed against her head, the great cat yawned a toothful yawn, stood, and walked away with an irritated twitch of her tail.
When the warrior cried out and clutched at the vash’ai’s paws, the great queen whipped around, snarling. Ani had never seen such murderous eyes, such a deadly face. Not even the dreamshifter could have managed that look, for she was human. The vash’ai, they were reminded in that sudden silent moment, were not.
A paw as wide as the girl’s face lashed out, cat-fast, and those black claws laid her throat open to the bone. The silence was broken—not by the young Mah’zula, who died without so much as a whisper, but by the vash’ai. The old queen roared, the other vash’ai answered her, and they turned and walked away as if waking from a dream they had no wish to revisit, leaving their hearts’ companions to fend for themselves against the world—and the na’iyeh.
Inna’hael went last. Ani thought for a moment that he might speak with her, but the broken-tusked shaman could not—or would not—answer her heart’s muted pleas. When the other cats had gone he, too, turned and disappeared into the yellow haze of morning.
“What have you done?” Mariza screamed. “What have you done?”
What have I done? Ani turned, but the leader of the Mah’zula was not looking at her. Instead, the woman raised a shaking hand to point at Leviathus, face twisted into a mask of hatred nearly as frightening as that of the vash’ai queen.
“You will die for this, Outsider,” she spat. “You will die.”
TEN
“You will die.”
Those words wrapped round Leviathus like the coils of a sea serpent, squeezing the breath from his lungs. Blood pounded in his ears, deafening him to the rest of Mariza’s words. His hands shook, bowels turned to water, and he was drenched all over in a sudden cold sweat, despite the oppressive Zeerani heat.
So that is what it feels like, an odd, quiet voice in the dark of his mind remarked. Leviathus had read about fear-sweat, of course, but he had never experienced it himself. Now I will be able to write about it in my memoirs. If I live.
The odds, he had to admit, were not in his favor.
It occurred to the son of Ka Atu, in that moment, that he very much wanted to live. This in itself was a surprise. For days now—days so long and bleak they had bled together into a single endless nightmare—he had expected to die. As the women beat and caressed him in turns, as they mocked his body’s shameful responses to their cruelty, he had come to think that he would welcome death.
Better to die a king’s son, he had told himself, than live as a slave. Surely death would be a gentler mistress than these hard-eyed women. Yet as th
e fear-serpent loosed its coils, as breath filled his lungs once more and the shadows drew back from his eyes, Leviathus thought that the air had never tasted sweeter. Nor had the sunlight felt so sweetly warm as in that sharp moment. The desert shone rainbow gold beneath the gaze of Akari. It sang sweet and low in the dying wind.
One of the horses snorted. How had he never before noticed the perfection of the horse, the way its neck arched with graceful power, the gentle poetry in its eyes? How had he thought the churrim, shaggy-haired and sturdy, was anything less than wonderful? Even the na’iyeh, as still as cacti in the rising light, seemed marvelous. And the Mah’zula, famed warriors of the days before the Sundering…
Well, the Mah’zula can go fuck themselves, truly, he thought. But the rest of this world is wonderful, and I am not yet ready to leave it for the Lonely Road.
A dark voice grated in his mind. Ah, but what does life hold for you? This voice had woken sometime during his first night of torment among the Mah’zula, and Leviathus had not yet been able to force it to silence. What do you have that is worth living for?
“Books,” he muttered. There were books in the world he had not yet read—books that had yet to be written—books that he, himself, longed to write.
“Books?” Mariza barked a laugh. “All you can say is ‘books’? Truly, King’s Son, you are mad.”
“Those poets who speak of the Zeeranim,” Leviathus answered, words an awkward tangle, “speak thusly of your warriors…
“‘…and Zula Din sent them forth as a mercy upon the world…’”
Mariza snorted. “Your books are not complete, Outlander. The rest of that verse died in Saodan, burnt to ash in the Sundering. But we remember, we daughters of Akari. ‘Verily, Akari has one thousand grains of mercy. One of them is to stay the warrior’s blade, and the rest are reserved for the Day of Waking.’ Mercy will not stay my blade this day, Outlander. It is more merciful by far that you should die. Ehuani, it is justice.”
She drew her sun-bright blade.
The Forbidden City Page 9