The Pillars of Sand

by Mark T. Barnes

  “What rahns and sayfs remain in the city?” Corajidin asked Mēdēa.

  She sorted though a sheaf of reports on his desk. “Nearly all the sayfs, save those from the most remote cities. Rahn-Narseh is in her qadir, her condition limiting what she can do. Her son is here and your lack of assistance in the matter of his mother’s illness has soured him against you. You can’t trust the Kadarins after Narseh dies.”

  “The Federationist rahns?”

  “Rahn-Nazarafine arrived early this afternoon, as did Rahn-Siamak.”

  “But not Näsarat?”

  “It’s reported that she’ll arrive this evening, or tomorrow at some point.”

  “You wanted proof, Mēdēya? By tomorrow almost every member of the Teshri I do not trust will be bound with a marsh-puppeteer. They will be used for different purposes, as time and opportunity provide. But the factions that have tried to split power in the Teshri will end.”

  “And those who escape this plan of yours?” Mēdēya asked. “You can’t bind every person in the Teshri to a marsh-puppeteer. What happens when word of your betrayal of your own nobles spreads like wildfire across Shrīan?”

  “It will not,” Corajidin said flatly. “On the surface it will seem as if the counselors have aligned their vision with mine. Some may suspect something is amiss, but what can they do? Unlike a Nomad, a marsh-puppeteer cannot be so easily dislodged from its host, nor can one be readily spotted. Eventually their natures will give them away, and they will revert to their insane barbarism. That barbarism will be given a nudge in the direction of quite openly murdering the Federationists. When that happens, I will declared them traitors, and an end will be made of them, as is just. But I will have none defy me, Mēdēya. And that includes you.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I will be Mahj in all but name. My policies will be assured of passing through the Teshri. From here it is a short step across the mountains to Pashrea, and to Mediin, where I will see to it that the Empress-in-Shadows qadir of Ishuajan is tumbled from the mountainside.”

  Martūm begged off attending the Qadir Erebus, despite repeated and pointed demands to the contrary. With barely contained fury, Corajidin ordered Wolfram and four squads of the Anlūki to join him on his short journey to the Qadir Selassin. Corajidin rested his hand on the ornate alabaster jar that contained the marsh-puppeteer, trying to imagine the look on the dissolute Martūm’s face when he opened it.

  Corajidin was surprised to see warrior-poets of the Vayen-sûk—the daishäri of the Selassin Lotus School—at the qadir gates, as well as hard-eyed soldiers of the Selassin Lotus Guard, their helms and shields embossed with the lion and lotus totem of the House. Martūm had not been a popular choice as rahn-elect, yet apparently there were some who held loyalty to the role and not to the man who held it. The guards at the gate ushered the carriage inside the qadir, and closed the heavy steel gates behind them as they entered a long, dark defile to the inner yard of the qadir. Once inside, Corajidin waited for Martūm to appear. After ten infuriating minutes where the Selassin guards remained silent and attentive, Corajidin snapped orders to his people to join him as they climbed the sweeping stairs to the top of the qadir.

  Without invitation, Corajidin threw the doors to the Lilly Hall open. The lofty room was dim, clouds occluding the sun through the quartz-paneled ceiling. Few of the ilhen lamps were lit, infrequent and distant pools of radiance in the long room. His boot heels clicked across the marble floor, softened when they hit a large rug, and became a squelch as he stepped in something wet. Clouds released the sun, and the darkness lifted.

  “What in Erebus’s name…?” he breathed.

  Blood spray littered the surrounds, and Martūm lay on his back, his throat cut from ear to ear, blood coating his chest like a bib.

  Bow strings twanged. Soldiers emerged from cover, and the Anlūki set to defending themselves and those they served. Bodies surged and Corajidin found himself swept away, separated from Wolfram. He quickly lost sight of the Angothic Witch, who chanted protective hexes around himself.

  Almost deafened by the racket, Corajidin took his chance to use his Anlūki as a shield. He dashed toward the nearest exit. Screams rose from behind him as the alabaster jar was knocked over and the marsh-puppeteer released to cause the havoc that was in its nature.

  Two squads of the dwindling Anlūki surrounded Corajidin in a fighting, frenetic cage of metal and leather, hustling him toward the nearest door. Corajidin yelled in pain as a Selassin warrior-poet opened his cheek with her lotus-headed hammer. He broke, and left his guard, and Wolfram, to fend for themselves. Corajidin sprinted through the door, slammed it behind him, and barred it so nobody could follow.

  Face stinging, the taste of his own blood in his mouth, Corajidin dashed up the stairs. There was the sound of pursuit from down corridors. Shouts. Pipes and whistles. Slamming doors. He fled the terrible noise behind him, desperately hoping the qadir had a path that led through the mountains and back into the city, where he could make for a place of strength.

  Corajidin stumbled into a secluded stone garden. It was a lacy thing of carved fretwork screens and marble domes, encompassing slender platforms of red stone that radiated out from the mountainside. A wind-skiff waited at the end of a long, slender finger of stone. Sobbing with relief, he trotted toward it, already out of breath and weak from his exertions.

  He reached out to open the gate when he heard a mad giggle. Corajidin drew his sword, and shrieked as sudden pain flared in his wrist. He swung his sword in a shallow cut, only to see a fountain of blood where his hand used to be. The hand still gripped the sword as both hit the ground. The pain was incredible. Every exhalation an incoherent mewling, more like the sound of an animal than a rahn of the Avān.

  “Surprise,” came a hard voice from beside him. Corajidin flinched, curled around his pain. He craned his neck to see who addressed him. At first it was a silhouette, stark and dark and anonymous, against a sky, pale and carefree blue, all around. Then his watering eyes focused, and the features of Näsarat fe Roshana came into focus. A man stood by her, blonde and unassuming, his innocent appearance belied by the weight in his eyes. I know a dyed-in-the-wool killer when I see one.

  “This does not need to end in my death!” Corajidin said from between clenched teeth. Blood poured from the stump of his wrist, the pain incredible.

  “It really does,” Roshana replied. She flicked the blood from the blade of her well-used shamshir. “But I’ll not be the one to kill you, as much as you deserve it.”

  “Then who?” Corajidin spat. “If you lack the courage, then who? Your assassin, hiding there in your shadow?”

  Roshana smiled.

  “That would be me.”

  Corajidin flinched and turned to the voice from behind him. Vahineh’s dagger took him in the eye. The blade continued across his cheek, gouging part of his ear as he flung his head back. Half blind, terrified, Corajidin shouldered the smaller woman out of the way and ran for his life back the way he had come.

  Vahineh pursued him. She stabbed him in the back and tore clumps of hair from his head. Her screams curdled his blood. Tears streamed, mixing with the saltiness of the blood on his lips.

  Corajidin tripped on the fur lining of his over-robe. He skidded, and slipped in the blood he had already walked through. Blinded in one eye, the world around him blurred with tears and blood.

  He staggered to the edge of the skydock ramp. Teetered on its edge, arms windmilling for balance.

  Vahineh caught up to him and stabbed and stabbed and stabbed with her slender knife. He screamed incoherently and grabbed Vahineh by the hair. And pulled her close as they both tumbled, out of control, into the cold and empty air.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Knowledge is in the knowing that we know nothing.”

  —From Principles of Thought, fourth volume of the Zienni Doctrines

  Day ? of the 496th Year of the Shrīanese Federation

  Indris measured the passa
ge of time through observations: thirst was first and foremost, its creeping demands interspersed with the waving and waning of dune shadows, the mineral sting of sand hurled by the wind, periods of heat and light, and obdurate blocks of dark and cold. The sky was sometimes a marbled blue that seemed an eternity away, then in its turn spangled with tiny points of fire that seemed close enough to touch. And always there was the wind through the stones, rising and falling in pitch, quickening and slowing, like and yet removed from speech.

  Mari, Shar, or Ekko watered and fed him, his body reacting like an automaton to its most basic needs. Indris was aware of all that transpired around him, and reviewed events with clinical detachment. Arguments, singing, reproaches, reconciliations—and more than once, combat. Flashes of battle in the dark with mountain Fenlings, frozen moments of faces illuminated by orange firelight. Daytime struggles with bandits, or the orjini expelled from their tribes, to wander the trackless sands without tribe, or family, or the grounding of the familiar. None of these things roused Indris from his meditations. None of them alarmed him to the point of climbing down from the mountain of his mind. At all times he knew we was protected, for where was a man more safe, more secure, than surrounded by some of the most dangerous people in the world?

  “Why are you here?” The stranger’s voice was as gentle as the breeze, without the inflection of curiosity. Indris had watched as the man emerged from the megalith, even though Mari and the others did not react to him. He folded his robes about him as he sat, bleached sapling staff balanced across his thighs. Indris queried a part of his mind and decided that he had been sitting in the sand for six days. Indris looked about, but his friends were nowhere to be seen.

  “Because I need to be here.”

  “No.” And with that the stranger rose from the sands and walked among the stones, vanishing in plays of bent light and straight shadow. Indris thought about the question, and planted it as the root of the Possibility Tree, his answer dangling like fruit. Indris examined permutation, inflection, meaning, and metaphor, but there were no answers more fitting than the honest one he had given.

  Another day passed. Indris glimpsed Mari for a long moment, her eyes staring, her lips moving, her hands on his face and in his hair. Then she, too, was gone.

  “Why are you here?” the stranger asked when he returned.

  “Because I choose to be here.”

  “No.” The stranger rose to his feet and once more vanished among the stones. Once more Indris planted the question, and hung the answer, and sought insight among the branches, leaves, and twigs that joined the two.

  After another day, the stranger took his place on the sand, legs folded, staff across his lap. Again he asked the question.

  “Because I want to be here.”

  “No.”

  The next day, rather than answer the obvious with the obvious, Indris invoked the three Possibility Trees in his mind. He inspected them side by side, the one atop the other in a confusion of branches, leaves, and alternatives. None were wrong, but the whole was so discordant it was devoid of meaning, like trying to hear one voice in hundreds, or instantly see one word on a page. Only the trunk and the roots were clear and consistent. It was thought, and speculation, and expectation that made the question complex. There was little a person needed. Much a person chose, and more that a person wanted. When such things were unimportant, what remained?

  “I am here, because I am.”

  “Yes.” The man smiled peacefully, eyes clear amid the wrinkles at their corners. “Who are you?”

  The Herald’s words echoed in Indris’s head. “That is not as important as how I am, or what I am.” Indris lingered on the rest of what the Herald said, and added, “Or why I am.”

  The man’s smile widened, and he nodded almost imperceptibly. “And why are you?”

  The words had been laid out in his head in the Black Archives, almost as if the Herald had known the question was going to be asked. “I am the cause, and the effect, of questions, promises, and actions from a time few living can still remember. I am, because you were promised a light to guide the way.”

  “But do you know what it means?”

  “I don’t.” Indris bowed his head in humility, letting the frustration pour from his limbs and into the sand beneath him. The admission felt good. Indris was about to deconstruct his mental frameworks and prisms.

  “Yes,” the stranger spoke softly. The word was almost a sob. He stood, and extended his hand to Indris. “Welcome, Näsarat fa Amon-Indris, to Isenandar, the Great Scholastic Library of Shrīan. I have been so very long waiting for you, and am glad you are come.”

  “And you are?”

  “Who you expect me to be.”

  “You’re Danger-Is-Calling, though it’s one of many names given you down the ages. Perhaps you’ll share your other names with me, as I learn what I came here for.”

  “Only if you are unfortunate.”

  Indris paused for a moment, then followed Danger-Is-Calling through the ancient stones in the sand, circling and backtracking. Each stone was like a corner: When Indris rounded it, the world had changed, as if Isenandar were being built around them, or the illusions that had hidden it were being stripped away.

  His stopped dead in his tracks. The dome of the heavens was brighter than he had ever seen it, the stars and the colored clouds of the Ancestor’s Shroud more vivid. Eln hung low and glorious in the sky, a brilliant orb of sapphire blue, emerald green, and pearl white. The white swirled slowly, like clouds, with flashes of light blossoming here and there. And the mirrored floor reflected the wonder above, providing enough light that lanterns were unnecessary.

  “Curiosity and the honest thirst for knowledge burn brighter than any lantern.” The echoes of Danger-Is-Calling’s voice rolled over the silence like a fog. “What need have we for such things, when here we light our own way?”

  Columns marched in all directions, holding up the sky, or holding back the floor, depending on perception. Indris touched one, and his hand passed into it. Light shimmered around his fingers. It felt like dragging his hand through—

  “Sand!” Light touched the silicate grains, tiny stars in their own right, cascading the light upward, downward, and outward. With each double beat of his hearts, the illumination grew. Words flowed in the columns, then sentences, then whole pages of text in High Avān, Seethe, Maladhoring, and even the circular—no, the spherical—glyphs of the Time Masters’ language, like orbs of spun toffee. There were other characters that Indris could only guess at.

  He turned to Danger-Is-Calling, who spread his hands and lifted his face to stare lovingly at the testimony to knowledge that stretched around them.

  “The Pillars of Sand, Indris. For all things we make, all the things we dream, and all the things we learn are based upon foundations that can shift, and disappear from under our feet.” Danger-Is-Calling looked melancholy. “Remember, my friend, that of all things that move through the world, we—seeking to change it for reasons that seem good and proper to ourselves—are the most imperfect, the weakest things of all. Nothing, no form, no substance, no shape, no opinion—neither love, nor friendship, nor hatred—is forever.”

  “Will my friends be safe?” Indris asked. He knew it had been many days that they had waited outside, and it was likely to be many days that Indris would remain in Isenandar.

  “I have brought them in here,” the man said, his staff clacking on the floor as they walked. “Once you had become the way, and the door, it would have been inhospitable to leave them outside. They sleep, and dream, and take much-needed rest from the woes and turmoil they carry. You can see them at your leisure.”

  Indris nodded his thanks. “Do you know why I’ve come?”

  “For music.”

  Indris opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, thinking about the man’s response. In Climbing from the Top of the Mountain, the Zienni Magnate Kobaqaru had said that knowledge is music, speaking to the heart and the head at once, pe
rsuading rather than forcing a reaction. Every piece of knowledge was its own composition, and would draw in, or send away, those who listened to it. There was no right or wrong: There was only music, and what a person took from it.

  “Old music,” Indris said.

  “Then perhaps you will find your moment of perfect beauty.”

  “How do I find anything here?”

  “There is nothing to be done, and nothing to do. What comes, comes, when you are ready to receive it.”

  “That doesn’t help much.”

  The man shrugged. “Goals are sometimes only targets for us to aim at, while we learn more on our journey to missing.”

  “No better.”

  “Teachers give neither fact nor truth. But a teacher will point to facts, while the student learns truths for his or her self.”

  “You’re not going to answer my question, are you?”

  “I already have.” And he smiled, and walked away.

  Indris drew in a breath to dampen his frustration. All about him the Pillars of Sand glittered with the light of knowledge, glyphs making smooth progress from left to right, right to left, or up and down depending on the language. He looked down at his boots, where it seemed as if he were being held in the embrace of the Ancestor’s Shroud. All this while I’ve been striding among the stars, unknowing. Indris lifted a boot, and the absence of his foot was filled with brilliant color reflected from the sky above. It was difficult not to smile in the presence of such beauty. Tension faded, releasing knots in his shoulders and stones in his mind. Form and thought moved more freely.

  Alone again, Indris stretched, observing the seemingly unending procession of pillars around him. “Take what you need, leave what you don’t.” Femensetri had said that to him so many times as he was learning from her. Would you say that here, sahai?

  Looking up at the pillar beside him, Indris absently tracked the rows of square Maladhoring glyphs. The sentence structure was archaic, and it took Indris a few attempts to think in the language he was reading…