The Forbidden City

by Deborah A. Wolf

  If only I could look into your eyes once more, she wept. Just once more. If only I could hear you laugh. You had the most beautiful laugh in the world, my friend, and it has been far too long since I have heard it. I am sorry. I am sorry I did not make you laugh more. I am sorry I let them do this to you, my sister-in-heart.

  My dearest love. I am sorry.

  Dzirana Ani, the last bonesinger, gathered the naked body of Hafsa Azeina to her heart one last time, staggered to her feet, and walked straight into the magic of Sajani’s dreaming, breaking every sacred law in the world.

  Let them kill me for it, if they can. The world had killed every thing, every person she held dear, one by one, and she was done with it. Let the dragon wake, if she wills. I am sending my friend home, and I do not care what happens after this.

  The dragon’s magic did not feel like water, not at all. It was warm, uncomfortably so, and stung her flesh like nettles. Ani waded out into the lake until she was waist deep, ignoring the discomfort and the strange numbness that made it feel as if the lower half of her body no longer existed in this world at all. She closed her eyes and hugged her friend tight, wishing that she might carry her for all time close to her heart.

  “But that is not the way life works,” Hafsa Azeina had explained to her, when they were young, and had hearts new to breaking. “You cannot have life without pain. Life is pain, my friend.”

  “Life is pain,” Ani agreed. “Only death comes easy.” She let her arms drop, let the body of her friend slip beneath the still and waveless magic. She let go of everything she had ever loved.

  Then she screamed.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  The world was red, and mad with agony.

  Ismai clung to Ehuani’s blood-slick hide till the blood had dried and flaked away, till Akari Sun Dragon rose high in the sky, breathing a hot sand wind to scour and torment him. He clung to her when the world went cold, though his hands and feet went numb and his body shook so that the water-filled ruin of his face sloshed like a skin of wine.

  He held on until time no longer mattered, till heat and cold blurred into an endless buzz of torment, all the while his heart pounding in his ears like a war drum, tha-rump tha-rump tha-rumble, until he knew nothing but pain and thrumming, pain and throbbing. When he could no longer hold onto Ehuani he held onto stubbornness, and when he could no longer hold onto stubbornness he clung to Ruh’ayya.

  I am here, Kithren, she told him, more than once, more than a hundred times, and We are nearly there, and I love you. Vash’ai, he knew, held a deep disdain for the word love. Had Ismai been capable of thought, he would have known by her words that he was dying.

  The wind ruffled his hair and scalded his face, and Ehuani surged and jogged beneath him. On a subconscious level Ismai understood that they rode through the Zeera, over lands that were known to him, but all of his being was centered upon drawing one agonized breath after another into his lungs and pushing them out again, in and out, in and out. He was past caring about such trifling matters as when and where.

  Thus it was that two days and two nights after his doomed marriage to Ishtaset, Ismai son of Nurati, last of the line of Zula Din, came at last to the Valley of Death. It was not a victorious homecoming, as storytellers might sing of it, nor was it an arrival heavy with portents. He came blind and unknowing as a babe born too soon, and when Ehuani at last came to a nervous stop he fell from her back to lie unmoving upon the sand, scarcely breathing.

  Ehuani gave him the gentlest of nudges with her delicate muzzle, tickling across his stinking, dying skin with her whiskers, and pawed at the ground beside him with a careful hoof. Ruh’ayya shoved her way between them and the mare retreated.

  Kithren. The vashai’s voice was a balm, a cool wind. Kithren. That was all. She did not beg him to wake, or to live. Still, her regard was a rope that bound him unwilling to the land of those not yet dead, and Ismai loved her even as he resented her for it.

  Let me go, he thought.

  “Ismai.” The voice was softer than a horse’s breath, deeper than the love of a vash’ai. Stronger than death. “Oh, Ismai.”

  Char lifted him as easily as he might lift a one-armed child. As gentle as she was, still her touch was pain, a storm of pain that sucked the last breath from his lungs in a thin, rattling scream. From a great distance Ismai watched his own body tremble and convulse as it tried to draw another breath—

  Oh, he thought, I can see again, how wonderful.

  —failed, and tried and—

  Why did I never notice how beautiful…

  —failed.

  * * *

  “Ismai.” She called to him, and “Ismai,” and three times, binding him, condemning him to agony. “Ismai!”

  Air seared his lungs, exploded from his mouth, splitting the skin of his face so that it wept blood. Ismai found himself wracked by a fit of coughing and consumed by pain so intense that it could only mean one thing.

  He was alive.

  “Curse you,” he rasped. “To… seventh circle of… Yosh.”

  “I have been there and back again,” she told him in all seriousness. “The Red Gate holds no fear for me. Here, drink this.”

  A cup—a bowl?—was held against his lips. Too weak to push it away, too dazed to refuse, Ismai swallowed some cool liquid and grimaced at the taste.

  “What—?”

  “Do not ask, Ismai. You do not want to know, but it will help you to heal.” Indeed, a numbness spread from Ismai’s scorched throat to his stomach and even his lungs, a tingling relief from pain that had him sighing and sinking back into some soft, furred bedding.

  “You should have let me die,” he said at last.

  “I know,” she answered. “I am sorry, Ismai.”

  There was nothing to say to that, so Ismai allowed himself to be swept away into the dark, sweet oblivion of sleep.

  * * *

  The smell of burned flesh wrenched Ismai from the blessed darkness of sleep into the wretched darkness of living. At first he thought that it was his own burning flesh he smelled. He sat up with a cry of alarm, hands going instinctively to his eyes, and yanked to a stop. His wrists had been bound as he slept, and he jerked in panic against his bonds.

  “Ismai. Ismai, stop.” Char’s voice, close and growing closer, low and soft as if she would soothe a spooked horse. Char, the scarred guardian of Eid Kalmut, the Valley of Death. “Stop, you are going to hurt yourself. Here, let me.” He felt a light touch upon his arm, a tug at his bonds, then he was free. He waved his hands experimentally before bringing them back to his face, but was prevented again, this time by her hands on his. “No touching,” she scolded. “The skin is delicate and must be left to heal.”

  He thought she was moving away again, and was seized by a sudden panic.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just here.” Light, soothing. “I have a rabbit on the fire.”

  Fire. He whimpered.

  I am here, Kithren.

  Where? I cannot see you. I cannot see.

  Not far. I am at the oasis, with your horse. I have caught a tarbok. His mind was filled with the scent of fresh blood, red meat, steaming and delicious in the cool night air.

  Is it night? I cannot see. Then, sounding pathetic even in his mind-voice, Can you come here?

  I cannot. The Valley of Death is—she struggled to translate her next thought into a word that humans might understand.

  “Khutlani,” Char whispered. “It is forbidden for her to come here, but she will not leave you.”

  “You can hear her?”

  “I can hear you, and you can hear her. It is much the same.” Her voice was close again, startling Ismai so that he jumped. She touched his curled fists, coaxing them open, and he flinched at the feel and smell of hot charred flesh as she pressed meat into his hands. “Eat.”

  “I am not hungry.” That was a lie. I do not wish to eat would have been closer to the truth, and I would rather die closer still, but Ismai no longer cared nor
had the energy to tell the difference.

  “Eat,” she insisted. “We have much to discuss.”

  After another moment of doubt, Ismai ate. It hurt so badly to move his face that he shredded the meat into tiny bits with his fingers, and scarcely chewed at all. Still, by the time he had finished his small portion he was drenched in sweat and shaking with exhaustion. Char helped him to lie back on the soft pile of… furs? Clothing? She arranged his arms comfortably before tethering his wrists again.

  “So that you do not claw at your face as you sleep,” she explained, “and undo all my healing.” Then she spread a cream or salve of some sort over his skin. She started low on his chest—which Ismai had not realized was burned, till then—and up toward his face in small, circular strokes. Though the salve was cool and her fingers light, Ismai whimpered at the touch, and would have pulled away if he could.

  “Be still,” she told him, and he thought she was weeping. By the time she reached his face, Ismai’s cries had joined with hers into a long, low wail of misery. When she pried his eyes open and dropped the cream into them as well, it burned so much that he screamed.

  “I am sorry, Ismai,” she told him as she knelt over him, and her tears fell onto him like liquid fire. “I am sorry.”

  * * *

  Later—much later, he thought—Ismai turned toward the little sounds Char was making as she tended the fire.

  “Is this what it was like, for you?” he asked. “When you were… hurt?”

  There was a long, slow, heavy silence. “Yes,” she answered. “Very much like this.”

  “I am sorry.” He meant it. No child should suffer like this, he thought. “Will I be—will my face—”

  “Will you be scarred as I am scarred?”

  “Yes.” His voice was so small and afraid he could hardly hear it over the tha-rump tha-rump tha-rumble of his drumming heart.

  “Yes.”

  Ismai swallowed his pain, and with it a lifetime’s worth of hopes and dreams. “Well,” he said finally, “I guess I will never be as handsome as my brother.”

  “Oh, Ismai.” Char touched his hair, lightly, and he jumped again. “You were handsome, before… but now you will be beautiful.” She took his hands in hers, and settled down beside him. When she spoke again, it helped to calm him.

  FIFTY-NINE

  “In the long ago,” Char began, “when the land was whole, and the dragon slept soundly, and the earth was rich and dark with her dreaming, there lived a little girl named…”

  “Charon,” he guessed. Tha-rump tha-rump tha-rumble thundered his heart.

  “No,” she told him, and he thought she smiled. “There was no Char then, no Charon, there was no Valley of Death and so no need for a guardian. Now hush.

  “There was a girl, and her name was Naara.”

  Naara, the winds mourned overhead. Naara.

  “She was the beloved and only daughter of a woman with seven sons. Born on the back of a horse, as was customary in the long ago when women were stronger and babes more plentiful, and rumored to have been planted in her mother’s belly by Sai ne Nar, son of the Middle Sea. Her mother encouraged this idea and went so far as to bathe the babe in salted waters, but there was no truth in it. Her father was no sea god, but a being more powerful and terrible than even the Four.

  “Her mother, First Rider of the Mah’zula, had lain with Kal ne Mur, and from this ill-advised pairing the child was born. Her secret name, known only to mother and child, was Naar-Ahnet, an ancient name meaning ‘fire upon the dark water,’ but the people knew her only as Naara, or ‘pearl.’

  “Her father, once he learned of her existence, called her by yet a third name. He called her Sa Atu, the Heart of Atualon. Kal ne Mur invited his daughter to Atualon, to the great fort Atukos, there to abide with him for a season. The girl’s mother was loath to let her leave, but the girl begged morning and night to be allowed to go, and even in the long ago it was folly to anger the Dragon King. In the end, and with great reluctance, she sent the girl off with blessings, and fragrant smoke, and these words, ‘Remember who you are.’”

  “Wait… wait! This is you? The girl in the story is you? But—but—how—” It is Sulema’s story all over again, he thought, and his mind scattered like a herd of frightened horses. I have to go save her. In the next moment, he remembered that he was blind, and probably dying, and unlikely to be rescuing anybody. Ever.

  “Hush, you. It is rude to interrupt a story.” That soft touch again, on his shoulder this time. “Listen. Listen.

  “These were dark times in Atualon. Many of the people resented their foreign-born king with his foreign ways and Daeborn looks. No few of the women and men in power encouraged this animosity, using the people’s fear and hatred as a wedge between the king and his people. They did this in a bid to attain more of his influence for themselves. War hung like a cloud over all their heads. Then, as now, there was great power to be found in Atukos, and power draws the ever-thirsting hearts of men as a watering hole draws predators. Like predators snarling at one another over a puddle, Ismai, our kind never share power. It is only ever taken with force and bloodshed.

  “Still, for a time the girl was happy. Her father adored her, showering her with gifts and affection, and she was the darling of the Bitter Court. Though she was too young to think it was anything but disgusting, the leaders of the land sent their sons to win her favor. Learned women and men strove to teach her. Atualon at that time had a great library, buildings and rooms and tunnels filled with books and scrolls and maps. Naara was delighted, for she was one of those girls who find books and horses more enthralling than boys and pretty clothes.

  “Her father, being an indulgent man and smitten, gave her leave to roam as she liked, read whatever she liked, and so it was that she came to know the keeper of these books, one of the most powerful men in all Atualon, one of those they called the Baidun Daiel because of their sleepless dedication to the realm. On a day like any other, she was reaching for a book on a high shelf, and it was plucked down for her by none other than the loremaster himself.”

  Her voice turned hollow and sharp at the edges. A chill swept over Ismai as if some greater predator had flown between him and the sun.

  “The loremaster?” he whispered. He found himself clutching at his soft bedding, despite the pain it caused. Knowing Char meant this story would not have a happy ending.

  “His name was Ahruman, but nobody ever used it,” she continued. “He was chief among the Baidun Daiel, if they can be said to have any chief besides Ka Atu. All of the gathered knowledge in the known world was given over to his care—and there is power in knowledge, just as there is power in magic.”

  “Or in swords,” Ismai said, thinking of the Mah’zula.

  “Or in swords,” she agreed. “The girl’s father, as Dragon King, controlled all three. Naara grew to love the loremaster as he showered her with attention and books, and shared his knowledge freely. Behind his smiling mask of office, however, Ahruman hid a sinister purpose. He coveted the Dragon Throne and all it represented, and saw the dragon’s daughter as a weapon he might wield in order to seize the power of Atukos for himself.

  “Now, the loremaster of Atualon, in those days long gone, was responsible for more than the care of books and scrolls, maps and records. The real power he wielded, the most important and secret duty of his office, was as the Keeper of Masks. Each of the Baidun Daiel—men and women sworn first to serve the interests of Atualon, then to Atukos, and finally to the Dragon King himself—wore a golden mask of office. To an observer these masks seemed faceless, as the people who wore them were supposed to be devoid of all but pure servitude. On the inside, however…”

  Her voice broke.

  “I have seen the Baidun Daiel,” Ismai murmured, and he barely repressed a shudder.

  “You have not seen them as I have, as the girl saw them,” Char replied. Her voice was soft and harsh as sand driven by dark winds. “Though each mask seemed like any other from the ou
tside, on the inside they were very different. Very different. There was a ritual—”

  Her voice broke again, and for a long moment there was silence. Ismai waited in the dark. Caught up as he was in Char’s story, he half wished she would not go on.

  It does not end well, he remembered.

  No, Kithren, it does not end well. He had never heard Ruh’ayya’s voice like this, full of fear and ancient sorrow. Better you had not come here at all.

  If I had not, he reminded her, I would have died.

  Ruh’ayya said nothing.

  “There was a ritual,” Char continued, gripping his hands so hard he gasped with pain. Hearing this, she eased her grip. “Words were inscribed inside each mask,” she said. “A vow, I think, some sort of spell or poem. Nobody knew for sure except the loremaster. Most did not even know there was a spell, but he told—he told Naara this secret. Because they were friends.” She spat the last word so hard Ismai flinched.

  “Before receiving the mask, she or he who would become Baidun Daiel had a spell tattooed into the skin of their back, between the shoulders. Once the skin healed, the person would be strapped to a cross, and flayed. The spell was peeled away, slowly and carefully, all in one piece. This piece of skin was worked into leather, and the leather was used to line the mask. In this way each woman or man was bound to service, bound by words and magic and their very flesh. If any put aside the mask…”

  “They were killed?” Ismai asked.

  “They were destroyed.” Her voice was flat. “Wiped from the world’s memory as if they had never been. When a child is selected to become Baidun Daiel, she is stripped of her old life. Friends, family, home, all are taken from her. She becomes nothing more than the promise she has made, the promise she has been forced to make, and wears it upon her face till the end of endings.”

  “Forced to make?”

  “Surely you do not believe that any child would choose such a life willingly? The Baidun Daiel are chosen. It used to be a great honor. When a child was selected for service, their family would be paid thrice their worth in salt. Mothers would hire tutors in painting, in music, in poetry as soon as the darling child showed the slightest artistic talent. These children, you know, are the ones most often selected by the Baidun Daiel. Artists, leaders, geniuses, the best and brightest. So, too, those whose minds are not quite… usual, are set aside. The ones who never learn to talk, but who count pebbles, or clouds, or who have imaginary friends. Those gifted ones are nearest and dearest to the heart of the dragon, and so to the Dragon King, who ever lusts for power. They are most beautiful.