The Forbidden City

by Deborah A. Wolf

  Ishtaset’s voice broke and she took a deep breath. As one the Zeeranim in the stands, in the arena, leaned forward and took a breath with her. He frowned and looked from his people, to Ishtaset, and back to the people.

  Have they forgotten our dead so soon?

  The golden warrior cleared her throat, straightened her back, and continued. “This dream was stolen from us, even as our children are stolen by slavers every year, as our fish are stolen by the giant fleets that dock in Min Yaarif, as our magic is stolen from us whenever Ka Atu”—she spat the title—“takes a fancy to perform tricks for his people. Even now, though sa and ka returns to our lands, our minds, it returns slowly. Who here can sense the presence of prey, or of water, or of enemies, without feeling the strain? Who here can no longer feel the land about them at all?

  “And though it returns, as I have said, who here believes it will return to its former strength? The magic in our land is like mead in a pitcher of gold, poured into a golden cup for the Dragon King. His thirst is never satisfied, and though the pitcher is refilled there is never as much as there had been—is there? Who here believes that some day the dragon kings will drink the world dry, and leave the pitcher empty?”

  A dark storm gathered among the people, clouded faces and the distant thunder of angry words. Ismai bit his lip when he saw Mastersmith Hadid, whose own mother had perished in the burning of Aish Kalumm, stroking his chin thoughtfully.

  Our dead are not yet buried, their ashes are not yet cooled, and the people stand here listening to her lies as if they were dying of thirst, and she has promised to bring the rain. Why are they listening to her lies?

  “I believe—the Mah’zula believe—that the Dragon King, if left unchecked, will be the death of the Zeeranim. Look how our lands have already been spoiled, our people left impoverished by the greed of Atualon. And for what? So Ka Atu may keep the dragon from waking?” Ishtaset put her hands on her hips like a kitchen-mother scolding the younglings. “What proof do we have that this song of Atualon benefits any land but Atualon? Perhaps this song drains the dragon’s magic, as it does ours, and perhaps some day the dragon’s pitcher will be emptied…”

  The world would rot from the inside, Ismai thought with a start. Like an egg with a dead chick inside. We would all die.

  This is why they listen to her lies, Ruh’ayya whispered inside his mind. She weaves them into a fabric of truth and dazzles them with the pretty colors.

  “…cannot let this happen. Will not let this happen. In the days of my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, we Mah’zula saw what was happening to the lands, and to the people we love. People we vowed so long ago to protect. We saw how the people had begun building houses, then towns, then a city of stone, crouched on the banks of the Dibris like a toothless old woman hoping to catch fish. How the magic was leaving us, and the vash’ai, and how little our leaders were doing to prevent it. Instead they squabbled and schemed among themselves like outlanders, gathering wealth and power for themselves even as the people faded and died away, until you are as we see now. A remnant. A remnant of a remnant, shadows and sad reminders of your former glory.”

  “What have you done to stop it?” a woman shouted from the stands, a stout older Mother with gray in her hair and anger flashing in her eyes. “Where have the Mah’zula been?”

  “A fair question.” Ishtaset smiled. “Long ago it was decided that we would remain pure by remaining apart from the people, and keeping to the old ways, the path of ehuani. We have been watchers in the night, guarding your sleep. The riders in the morning, driving slavers back to their forsaken lands and filthy cities. We have been the sword at dusk, slaying the greater predators as they came to devour your flesh. We have been the song in your bones, reminding you of what you were, what you might become once again, if only you would wake to the sun of Akari. And we would have remained so, perhaps indefinitely, had it not been for this woman.”

  There was a commotion at the back of the arena and a fist of Mah’zula emerged from the crowd, dragging a bound and gagged woman between them.

  Ismai shivered as his blood ran cold.

  Sareta Ja’Akari Akibra.

  “The Zeeranim have withstood the Dragon Kings, raiders and slavers who would steal your children. You have survived droughts and famines, plagues and predators, but you would not have survived this. An enemy in your midst, one whom you clasped to your breast and called sister. Friend.”

  The Mah’zula reached Ishtaset and hauled Sareta upright. The golden warrior spat into her face. “First Warrior. False Warrior, I name you. Kha’Akari.”

  “Kha’Akari,” the Mah’zula echoed, and it seemed to Ismai as if the sands trembled with their fury.

  “Many of you would look upon me, upon my riders, and call us murderers. Is this not so?” An ugly murmur came from the stands. “Yet I have, we have not done anything here that Akari himself would not have done. The Zeera is no place for the weak, and it never has been. The people are only as strong as the weakest among us. In the days to come, my brothers and sisters, we will need to be strong.

  “Dark winds born of foul magics sweep down upon us from atulfah-clouded Atukos. Bloody winds born of a longing for war sweep down upon us from the shining walls of the Forbidden City. Scorching winds boil down upon us from the cursed peaks of Jehannim and the Seared Lands beyond. Do any of you think the Zeeranim will stand a chance of survival in the times to come, if we wield our shamsi with shaking hands? If we hide in cities of stone, like the outlanders, and if we allow our hearts to grow soft and our blood thin, the Zeeranim will be no more.

  “My sisters and I have taken vows—as did our mothers in the long ago—to do whatever it takes to protect the people. Whatever it takes, no matter how bitter the task, no matter how it stains our own hearts and souls. We will kill for you, my people. We will die for you. It is a woman’s duty to protect her people, no more and no less, and we have suffered this burden alone, unseen and unsung and alone in the long, cold night. For honor. For love.

  “You spit at our heels and call us murderers. This burden, too, we shall bear for you, and yet this… woman… this woman you have embraced as a sister, loved as a mother, upon whose brow you have set a crown of high honor, and into whose hands you have pressed the sacred shamsi, this woman alone among us has committed murder most foul. In shadow and secrecy she has whispered with the sworn enemies of the people. She has conspired against you and committed crimes without count. Not least among them is conspiracy to murder your First Mother and her family, in a wicked attempt to seize power by ending the line of Zula Din.”

  The world around Ismai roared with silence, as if he had been swept into the eye of a storm. Blood thundered in his ears. It blinded him and sucked the breath from his lungs, and the world twisted and lurched. He staggered and would have fallen, but a pair of Mah’zula warriors grasped his arms and held him upright. Ishtaset’s words rang.

  “Do you deny these charges, Sareta of the Zeeranim?” The Mah’zula pushed Sareta to her knees, but she had not been First Warrior these many years because her veins ran with water.

  “Kha’ehua,” she spat at Ishtaset’s feet. “I deny them. I deny you.”

  “Very well,” Ishtaset said, and a hard smile played at the corners of her mouth. “In that case, I invoke Raqs eh Shamsi. Pray to Akari that he might have mercy upon you—because I will not.”

  Raqs eh Shamsi… the Dance of Swords. Ismai felt sick to his stomach. He looked down at the gray-haired woman, tall and proud even as she swayed upon her knees before him, and his heart was torn. If Ishtaset spoke true…

  “So be it,” Sareta whispered. Her face had gone pale, exposing the shadows of bruises on one cheekbone and under her eye, but her gaze was as strong and proud as a First Warrior’s must be. “I am ready.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  The Dance of Swords was always performed at midsun, the better for Akari to see. It was not a dance of naked young men, sweating and laughing before the admiring eyes
of potential lovers, nor yet a harvest-dance, meant to give thanks to the shades of the animals and plants that sustained the people’s lives. It was a dance of justice, of blades bared under the sun, and that meant death.

  The lower seats of the Madraj were nearly full. It was this sea of faces, more than the lack of food and drink, or his seat upon the high dais, that made Ismai dizzy. As the son of Nurati and brother to his murdered siblings, he had fasted since the previous day, and took the seat of the accuser. The arena itself was filled edge to edge with Mah’zula and Ja’Akari, naked and painted and grim so that they resembled the vash’ai more closely than he could remember. Cats and warriors stood ready, row upon row of them, swords and claws gleaming in the bright sunlight, breathless-still as statues.

  To the east of them, and the west, stood the two women who sought through blood to prove the worth of their words. Ishtaset and Sareta were naked and painted as the rest of them, but they were blindfolded, as well, and their arms bound behind their backs.

  From the tunnels and caverns beneath the Madraj came a low thud-thud-tharrrrrum, thud-thud-tharrrrrum, as drums in the deep called the swords to dance. As one the Ja’Akari and their sister Mah’zula raised their arms and lowered them again, raised and lowered. Shamsi flashed in the harsh light as swords cut through the air, just as the gaze of Akari would cut to the truth of the matter. Swords were caught, thrown, twirled around the women’s heads in a dance so ancient, so sacred, that no man was allowed to watch it. Raqs eh Shamsi…

  Ismai had never seen anything so beautiful.

  Nor had he ever wished for anything so much as he wished, in that moment, to close his eyes and shut it out. Yet as Sareta and Ishtaset stumbled forward, driven by the drums into the shining, whirling maelstrom, Ismai straightened his spine and hardened his heart. He sat alone upon the dais because his family had been murdered. He would not turn away from his duty to them.

  Not alone, Kithren, Ruh’ayya whispered in his heart. Never alone.

  Ismai let the tears fall from his eyes. Thank you, my friend.

  Ishtaset reached the dancing blades. She cocked her head as if listening, and without hesitation strode into the storm of death. Neither did the women pause in their dance, not to slow or deflect the course of a single blade. They allowed the Rajjha to glide between them, graceful and sure. Ismai held his breath as a shamsi whirled just in front of her face, and another just behind her head as she passed.

  She was not so fortunate the third time. A sword sang through the air and licked her skin as a hungry child might lick honey from a platter, carving a deep gash into her flesh from one shoulder and across her back. The blade stuck point-first deep into the sand, and the Ja’Akari who had wielded it sank to her knees, head bowed. For her, the dance was over.

  For Ishtaset, it had only begun.

  She twisted and ducked, graceful as a young girl, and even from such a distance Ismai could see a wide and delighted grin upon her face. The hilt of a sword hit the point of her jaw with an audible crack, and Ishtaset laughed aloud. She shook her head as if to clear it, then whirled around light and careless as a sand-dae, to roll beneath a flurry of sharpened steel before leaping to her feet again.

  “Yeh Atu,” Ismai breathed. What sort of woman, faced with Raqs eh Shamsi, would dance with the swords, in truth? She is mad, he decided.

  Mad, and beautiful.

  A gasp from the crowd drew his eyes to the other side of the arena. Just as Ishtaset had done, Sareta was joining the dance. Her face showed no more fear than that of the Mah’zula, her feet were no less sure, her movements no less swift or graceful, but her story, written in blood upon the sand, looked to have a very different ending.

  Even as Ishtaset reached the very center of the arena, where a ring of unarmed warriors stood ready to embrace her and kiss her cheeks, Sareta wove and twisted, ducked and came up again—directly into the path of a thrown sword. It struck high and hard, deep into the flesh just below her collarbone so that it stuck fast. A flap of skin hung down and a smell like a butcher’s tent hit Ismai as blood poured down her front. The Mah’zula whose blade had struck sank to her knees, smiling.

  Sareta grunted, but did not go down. Her movements became slow and clumsy, less a dance of life than a lumbering, staggering fall toward death as another blade, and another, tasted her blood and found her unworthy. Ismai swallowed hard as a shamsi plowed into the First Warrior’s gut. She bellowed in agony through gritted teeth, but staggered on. The sword fell from her belly, leaving a hideous wound from which loops of pale intestine slipped like pale snakes, and someone in the lower seats screamed.

  Ismai could only stare. He felt numb, and strange, as if he might float free of his body and up, up into the sky.

  Sareta had managed to stagger perhaps two-thirds of the way across the arena when the final sword slicked across her upper thigh. Blood spurted thick and bright across the faces of Ja’Akari and Mah’zula alike, naming her Kha’Akari before the eyes of the people.

  Liar. Traitor.

  Murderer.

  Sareta sank to her knees and then toppled to one side, kicking weakly as her life poured forth and pooled beneath her. The women nearest Ishtaset removed her blindfold and the bindings from her arms, and one of them pressed a shamsi into her hand. No longer smiling, she strode to where her enemy lay dying, leaving a trail of bloody footprints in the sand behind her. When she reached Sareta’s side, Ishtaset looked up, up to the high dais, and met Ismai’s horrified stare.

  “Akari has spoken,” she said, and though she did not shout, her words were as clear as if not a hand’s space lay between them. “It is done.”

  She raised the sword high, and brought it down in a single, clean cut. Sareta’s head rolled face-down into the sand, and Ishtaset bent to cut off one long, bloodied braid as Mah’zula and Ja’Akari alike threw their heads back and roared.

  Ishtaset held the shamsi off to one side, without looking at it, and it was taken from her. She did not watch as the head of the former First Warrior was placed upon her chest, and the body carried away. She did not respond when the lower stands burst into a cacophony of shouts, screams, and ululations, as the Zeeranim watched the world they had known come to an abrupt and bloody end.

  Holding out her arms to either side she allowed the victor’s mantle to be draped across her shoulders. The thin linen stuck to her wounds, soaking up blood, and light played along its beaded edges. Two of the older Ja’Akari emerged from the tunnel bearing the First Warrior’s headdress between them, and they raised it as if they would crown Ishtaset.

  They would make her First Warrior, Ismai thought as he watched the rapt faces that surrounded them. She burned the City of Mothers to ash, and still the people would crown her queen as the outlanders do, did she but wish it.

  Ishtaset frowned and waved the headdress away.

  She does not wish to be First Warrior, after all, any more than she aspires to live in a city and sit upon a golden throne like the Dragon King of Atualon, he realized then. What does she want, I wonder? As if drawn by his thoughts, Ishtaset’s face tilted up just so, and her eyes met his again. Her face softened for a moment, as if she were smiling on the inside.

  Oh, Ismai thought. Oh, fuck.

  Ishtaset stalked across the bloody sand like a vash’ai queen sure of her prey. She mounted the stairs, climbing to the dais, and Ismai sensed every eye upon them when she stopped at the foot of his high chair and stood before him, hands on her hips, mantle billowing out behind her, stained with old blood and new. There was blood in her hair, he noticed. Blood streaked the paint across her face, and a promise of blood swam deep in her eyes, like the shadow of a greater predator more sensed than seen.

  She kissed the long gray braid and handed it to him. What could he do but accept, and bow his head? Akari had spoken. It was over. Ismai accepted the token and pressed his lips to it, masking his dismay at the smell of death. He had spent half the night rehearsing the words, and they flowed from his lips as easily as wine
.

  “Well done, O warrior, and well met. Justice has been served, and the truth laid bare for all to see. What boon do you seek, O warrior, for your service? For your blood has blessed us in the eyes of Akari, and you shall have your reward.” He had been instructed to give the victor whatever she might desire, from what little had been salvaged from the ruins of Aish Kalumm—precious stones, hides, swords. Horses, of course, or salt.

  Ishtaset’s grin was as wide and bright as the midsun sky. She stepped closer—too close—set one bare foot upon the bottom rung of the witness chair, and hauled herself up so that her face was even with his. Ismai held his breath and would have pulled back, but she laughed again, buried both hands in his hair, and kissed him so hard Ismai could feel her teeth mashing against his lips.

  Releasing him at last, she stared at his face with a hunger that had nothing to do with Ismai, and everything to do with the blood that ran in his veins and smeared his mouth.

  “I choose you,” she answered, in a voice meant to carry. “Ismai son of Nurati, last of the line of Zula Din, I claim you as my prize.”

  “No,” he whispered, “No. I do not want this.”

  Ishtaset looked deep into his eyes, and in her gaze Ismai could see the flames of Aish Kalumm.

  “Sweet boy,” she told him. “What you want—what I want—these things do not matter. We are but pawns in a greater game.” And she kissed him again, to thunderous applause.

  FORTY-SIX

  Rage and terror coiled in her gut as Hannei waited her turn to die.

  Screams and sand rained down upon her bowed head with every thud, thud thud of the heavy drums, every attack by the pit beasts against the slaves sent out to die, all for the entertainment of people who had not—yet—fallen so low. The crowd roared hungrily as a blacksmith’s furnace each time the pit slaves’ door opened and disgorged yet another victim into the arena. They roared again with each death, stoking the fire inside her till Hannei felt it might wake like a dragon and sear the world to ash.