The Pillars of Sand

by Mark T. Barnes

  Padishin waited for any more hands to be raised. He vocalized the count, and the junior secretaries made notations in their journals. Padishin cleared his throat. Mari tensed. Femensetri and Sanojé had said they would act immediately, once the potential targets revealed themselves.

  “Those who oppose the motion to remove Corajidin from the office of Asrahn, please make yourselves known.”

  Hands shot into the air as one, though others rose slowly, as if the counselor was not entirely sure of their position. We have you.

  Femensetri and Sanojé rose from their seats, as did a handful of other people in the shorter over-robes and coats of the middle-castes. Sanojé chanted her hex, her Aspect of a six-armed hag made of the flotsam and jetsam of shattered bones a nebulous thing, as if she did not want to manifest it. Femensetri crooned her canto, her mindstone a whorl of black on her brow. Other scholars’ voices joined hers. Mari felt the air thicken, heavier as it pressed onto her skin and hair.

  Within moments, the bodies of those counselors who had voted against the motion took on a dirty corona, the formulae and hex illuminating within the bodies of their hosts and revealing the pus-colored phantom of marsh-puppeteers. Tendrils shone throughout the majority of the counselors’ bodies, where the parasitic marsh-puppeteers had spread throughout the head, torso, and limbs. It was not only the counselors but their personal guards who were so afflicted, which made their enemy more numerous than expected.

  Mari dashed forward, Belam, Neva, and Yago at her side. Around the chamber the warriors aligned to their cause wielded their sheathed swords like clubs—the purpose here was to render senseless, rather than kill.

  The Neyudin leveled their spears, stoic in the face of danger. They joined ranks in squads and marched forward, until Padishin ordered a squad to escort the rahns and allied sayfs from the chamber and protect them at all costs. The others were to hold the doors. The ceremonial guards looked confused, but were trained to obey.

  Mari sprinted on light feet, drawn Sûnblade burning bright in one hand, her scabbard in the other. She dropped and slid on her knees as an enemy swung at her. Mari hammered a blow across the man’s abdomen as she passed under his attack. She turned as she came to her feet, the man barely perturbed by a blow that should have double him over in pain. Mari spared a glance for her comrades to see they all faced similar problems. Those inhabited by the marsh-puppeteers were stronger and faster than they had been as people; they also did not react to wounds. Despite dislocated shoulders, limbs bent at wrong angles, or other damage, the enemy was undeterred.

  About her the Tyr-Jahavān was a place of turmoil. Counselors cried in terror as they tried to escape under the Neyudin’s protection, in stark contrast to the battle cries of the warriors, or the crooning scholars whose skin and eyes shone bright as lanterns. The floor was smeared with the blood of warriors who had used less-than-deadly force. The marsh-puppeteer counselors snapped bones, or tore throats out in sprays of viscera. Femensetri’s cantos and Sanojé’s hexes had failed, and subduing their enemies was not an option.

  “Lethal force!” Mari yelled. Without hesitation the warriors drew steel. Belam glided through the press like a dancer, every movement precise and beautiful. Neva moved lightly, her spear spinning, striking, parrying, her brother Yago completing their web of steel. Padishin joined the fray, his two-handed dionesqa handled with all the skill of his years as a soldier. Kiraj was by his side, swordwork precise, clinical.

  Femensetri and Sanojé stood amid the melee. The Stormbringer had dropped her over-robe to reveal a sapphire-scaled gauntlet that covered her right arm from fingertips to shoulders. Lightning arced across the scales, burning blue-white. There was lightning, too, in her hair, and the phantom images of storm clouds whirled about her. She reached into the empty air and pulled from nowhere a tall spear, a single length of metal that blazed from tip to tip. The Stormbringer flung lightning and caused her enemies to dance an unsightly death jig as they cooked. Sanojé summoned flaming serpents who coiled, crushed, and immolated their targets.

  Their enemies took their toll. Kiraj fell, his face collapsed under the hammer fist of a counselor. Padishin, surrounded, was knocked to the ground and stamped to death as he went to aid his friend. Neva was savagely backhanded, her body sliding across the blood-streaked floor. Yago shouted in anguish, his spear a blur as he cleared his way to his sister’s side, only to have his back broken with an audible snap when one of the enemy counselors kicked him. Yago fell to the ground atop his sister, their blood mingling.

  “Bensa!” Mari screamed. Bensaharēn the Waterdancer was tracked with blood. One eye was swollen closed. Clumps of his hair had been torn from his head. He swung his red-stained amenesqa with speed and skill, yet those fueled by marsh-puppeteer strength were not easily put down. Missing limbs, they fought on. The Poet Master swayed, flowed, and seemed to pour into the empty spaces between his attackers. Still he was pummeled, and struck with weapons taken from the fallen. He fought with blade, fist, and foot, yet was pushed back toward the open space between the pillars of the Tyr-Jahavān, and the space beyond.

  Mari cut the head from one opponent. Both arms at the elbow from the next. She fought her way toward Bensaharēn: With each step her Sûnblade severed and cauterized flesh, slowly closing the distance.

  The Stormbringer hurled lightning. Sanojé guided her flaming serpents, a puppeteer fighting the puppeteers. Belam and Nima fought like men possessed, their bodies streaked red. Though the floor was littered with the dead and wounded, the marsh-puppeteers neither gave, nor asked, for quarter. It had become less a battle, more a cull, as the odds slowly turned in the favor of Mari and her comrades.

  Bensaharēn had been forced to the edge of the Tyr-Jahavān. One counselor, then another, and another, flung himself at the Waterdancer, weighing him down. Another added her strength. Then another. Bensaharēn was pushed farther back, his technique heartbreaking for all that its beauty did no good. He roared in defiance, teeth bared in a bloody mouth.

  Mari was within arm’s reach, when the press of bodies became too much.

  The Waterdancer, her teacher, along with the handful of counselors who attacked him, toppled off the side of the Tyr-Jahavān.

  Mari threw herself to clutch at one of the Poet Master’s hands. For a moment they held together. She was dragged toward the edge, but held on regardless.

  “I will not let you fall!” Mari screamed.

  Bensaharēn hacked the head from one of his attackers. It was not enough. He smiled at Mari. “Tell Valaji I love him, am glad I married him, and will wait for him…” With deliberate care, he let go Mari’s hand.

  Clutching his attackers to him, Bensaharēn sailed through the darkening skies to the cradle of Avānweh, hundreds of meters below.

  Mari gave orders through her tears, her voice as hard as her grief. Belam and Nima had gone into the city with their surviving Anlūki, in the hopes they could help maintain the peace, obsessed with making amends for Corajidin’s failings.

  The compromised counselors had been vanquished. The floor of the Tyr-Jahavān was littered with the dead, the dying, and the wounded. Healers had been summoned; Femensetri, Sanojé, and the other Sēq prioritized their patients and used the energies at their disposal to save who they could.

  Ajo approached Mari, his expression stricken as he stared at the scholars who kneeled over his grandchildren: not dead, though not far from it. “Mari … we can’t—”

  “Continue with the vote, Ajo,” Mari snapped. She looked down at her hands, dried blood caked in ox horns around her nails, or wedged under them. It goes on much more easily than it comes off. “It’s what we came here for. Don’t make so much death worthless.”

  The Sky Lord nodded mutely. He addressed his colleagues, themselves stunned but attentive, their allies in the Teshri saved, for the most part. Mari did not hear the words. The raising of their hands—all of them this time—was something she barely paid attention to.

  Mari wiped the tears fr
om her eyes with her bloodied thumbs. The floor was smeared with red. The wounded cried in pain. Healers crooned, or chanted hexes, hard marble in place of soft beds for the stricken. Such is the price of liberty. She wished it had been otherwise—they had tried for it to be otherwise—but this was a road one saw to the end, or did not walk at all. This is what it means for the few to protect the many.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Hope and expectation are not the same thing. Both will lead to disappointment. Exist in the moment, accepting all things as they are, not as you would have them be.”

  —from the Nilvedic Maxims

  Day 83 of the 496th Year of the Shrīanese Federation

  Corajidin huddled in his over-robe at the entrance to the bustling command pavilion, his wrist, eye, and back aching. Snowflakes whipped out of a mustard sky, long streaks of late afternoon light staining the stew of mud and camp filth. He was thankful for the cold and the way the ground froze hard in the night, as it kept the reek of the camp at bay.

  He crushed the scroll in his hand, then dropped it into the stew at his feet: Narseh was dead, an ally gone. Erebus only knew what her heir was going to do; his message had certainly been noncommittal. Do all my sins remembered and forgotten come for their retribution now? It would be typical, for the world to take from me as much or more than it gives. Soon it will be over, one way or another, and perhaps I will know peace of a kind.

  “What are you thinking, Jidi?” Mēdēya asked.

  “Endings, beginnings…” He looked at his wife, Yashamin so close to surface. How much are you Yashamin, how much Mēdēya, and how much the voice of the Emissary? I stole your grace from you, my love. Is it too late to give it back?

  “You steal the grace from everything about you.” At the sound of the Emissary’s rusted croak Corajidin’s hearts stuttered, and Mēdēya jumped back, startled. The Emissary stood at Corajidin’s other shoulder, hooded and cloaked. Yet she was no longer in silver-shot gray: Her attire was a sullen mix of bruised hues. Her sword was changed, a long curved weapon with an ornate bell guard shaped like an octopus, its tentacles forming an interwoven basket. “It’s what we ensured you were made to be, so you’d be in this place, at this time, doing this thing for us. Never doubt that you’re indeed an agent of destiny, Corajidin. Take comfort that most everything you do suits a purpose.”

  “Where have you been?” Mēdēya breathed. Corajidin’s mouth tasted sour at Mēdēya’s relieved tone.

  “Indris killed me.” The Emissary’s tone was bleak.

  “Indris is alive?” Corajidin choked. “How long have you known?”

  “You were dead?” Mēdēya asked sympathetically. Corajidin glared at her interruption.

  “For a time. I’ve hung in and on darkness, drowned in the will of my Masters, and punished for my failures. Yet they’re not done with me. The Masters are never done.” The Emissary glanced at Corajidin’s prosthetic hand. Craned her neck to stare into the kirion ball that replaced his missing eye. Her smile was cold. “Seems I’m not the only person somebody tried to kill. At least Indris is neat about these things.” She used her stiffened fingers to pantomime a sword stab. “He even kills with love. One cut. Right through the heart.”

  “One would assume this changes your position on whether he lives or dies?”

  The Emissary’s head cocked to one side in what Corajidin took for confusion. “Why? He was defending himself and those he cared for: one of the things that draws me to him. Neither my own nor my Masters’ need for Indris has changed. He’ll grow into what he must be.”

  “And my daughter?”

  “That’s a different matter entirely. She has taken something from me. I mean to have it back, over her dead body. You’ve lost her, Corajidin, to a cause she loves more than yours. And your golden Widowmaker, who came close to showing such promise. Tamerlan is fallen. The Dowager-Asrahn taken by the sea. Jhem slain at Mari’s hands, and Nadir captured.”

  Had I understood what Belamandris was going to do, would I have stopped him? “How do you know this?” Corajidin whispered. An old pain settled in his chest as his hearts faltered in distress.

  “I witnessed it.”

  “And there was nothing the great Emissary of the Drear could do to prevent this?”

  The Emissary pressed her hand against Corajidin’s chest. His hearts hammered more erratically, his pulse an off-kilter staccato. “Do? My husband saw me for what I have become, and killed me at Tamerlan. Would you like to share the experience of my death, my epiphany, enlightenment, and my resurrection?”

  Corajidin found it hard to breath. His hearts beat so rapidly that his body shook, and his skin became fever hot. He could not form words, so he shook his head rapidly from side to side. The Emissary held on. His pulse was a whirring of hummingbird wings in his ears. His vision dimmed. He collapsed to his knees in the filth, then to his side, curled in a ball. Contact broken, his hearts slowed. It took many minutes for Corajidin to find his breath, all the while lanced on the Emissary’s gaze.

  “I thought not,” she murmured. The Emissary looked at the last of the siege engines being hauled aboard a wind-galley. Soldiers struggled with the weight, faces red. The storm-cannon lumbered upward, so heavy it barely swung in the wind. Feyd stood at a safe distance among his officers, though Baquio stood almost directly beneath his creation, as if he could coax it upward through hand gestures, vocal encouragement, and will. At the far end of the camp, Prahna oversaw the loading of her precious cargo: lined crates filled with fire water, medicines, fuel crystals for the Salamander Lances, exploding powder, and other items best not damaged during the journey to Fandra.

  “You’re going to fight Indris from a fixed position?” The Emissary shrugged. “I suppose your Master of Arms knows what he’s doing.”

  “Of course he knows what he’s doing!” Corajidin snapped. Her tone rankled, the ensuing silence more so. “Why? What would you suggest?”

  “Run? Surrender?” The Emissary was not smiling. “I’d not want to face him. My husband is a smart man, Corajidin. Smarter than anybody you’ve met. He made a career in the Sēq by delivering improbable solutions to complex, virtually unwinnable situations. He’ll let you think you’re doing well, right up to the point where he has you realize that not only are you beaten, but you’ve been playing the wrong game.”

  Troubled, Corajidin stalked across the compound to Feyd. The Master of Arms bowed to Corajidin, pretending the Emissary was not there. A report on progress was given promptly and in detail, much as Corajidin expected. Fandra had been occupied, the remaining townsfolk incarcerated so they could not spread word of the Erebus deployment or of new weapons. The force moving in from the south had maintained its approach, gaining strength as it passed. According to Feyd, the enemy commanders followed sound tactics and coordination. If they remained as disciplined in the field, the Erebus and their colors would be grateful for the protection Fandra had to offer, as well as the additional strength delivered by the witches, and the weapons of the artificers and the alchemists.

  “Have you heard anything from the ruins?” the Emissary asked.

  “Not for some hours,” Feyd replied.

  “Maybe you should check on their status,” Corajidin suggested.

  “As you wish.” The Master of Arms called for one of the witches on intelligence duty.

  “What word from the ruins?” Feyd asked her.

  “Nothing since high sun today,” she replied. “Ikedion wanted to reduce the number of sendings, as the hexes agitate the local fauna. We’re finding the same thing here: Creatures are drawn to the power we use. We had a dhole come within a kilometer of the camp. It took a dozen witches and almost forty soldiers to kill the thing.”

  “Contact Ikedion now,” Corajidin said. The witch muttered her hex under her breath, eyes rolling back so only the whites were seen. After a minute the witch’s eyes rolled back down, her brow lined by a frown.

  “There’s no response, Asrahn.”

  “No wit
ches to speak to?”

  “No, Asrahn. Nobody at all.”

  Corajidin snapped orders to ready the first available ship to fly to the ruins. “Where is Kasraman? Or Wolfram? They need get out there and report back to me.”

  “Pah-Kasraman is in Fandra, overseeing the positions for the last of the siege weapons,” Feyd said. “Wolfram was with Ikedion, at the ruins.”

  “You can blow your people at the ruins a kiss good-bye,” the Emissary jibed.

  “Oh, for…” Corajidin clenched his teeth in frustration. He was reminded of the Emissary’s words, not too long before. Was this Indris? Was he this close? “What about Tahj-Shaheh?”

  “With the sky fleet, Asrahn,” Feyd replied. “I can have the witches recall her.”

  “No. Have her scout Wolfram’s position, then report immediately.” He pointed at Feyd. “Hasten the installation of the siege weapons at Fandra. I want the city as defensible as possible, as soon as possible.”

  “As you will, Asrahn.” Feyd turned and shouted orders for his officers to join him in the command tent. The Emissary’s chuckle was wet. Corajidin shot her a glare.

  “You should rest, Jidi.” Mēdēya’s voice was firm. “You’re not recovered—”

  “I am well enough.”

  “No, you aren’t. You can’t fight, you’re half blind, and your back wounds are not fully healed.” Mēdēya placed her hands on his chest. “The energy in the Rōmarq is healing you faster than I would have thought possible, but—”

  “So much so that you don’t use my potion,” the Emissary added. “Perhaps you should relocate here? Live amid the muck and mire. I’m sure your sins would find the scenery to their liking.”

  Corajidin rested his palm on the hilt of his knife, an unfamiliar gesture with his left hand. “Emissary, unless it has escaped your recollection, this is all being done in order to unify my people, so I can pay off my debts to you. You should rejoice that I have the strength I do, to execute your will. And, Mēdēya, I will be well enough. I do not intend to take part in the fighting.” What use would I be? How has this changed my dream, of facing Indris on the Ast am’a Jehour? I never saw how that encounter ended.