The Pillars of Sand

by Mark T. Barnes

  “Just one more chance.” And Corajidin bowed as best he could before the darkness. “Deliver me, and I will not disappoint you. I will serve you, and your Masters, in all things.”

  Light flared around him, and Corajidin held up his crooked hand to shield his eyes.

  “I will deliver you, Corajidin,” she said. But the voice was wrong. Corajidin blinked against the glare. His eyes focused on a compact woman, her hair pulled back in a severe tail. Her features were chiseled, and stern. The gray over-robe over her white jacket and black trousers embroidered with the symbol of the scales of justice in gold proclaimed who she was.

  “You remember me, don’t you?” The new Arbiter-Marshall’s lips were a slash in her face, her eyes remorseless pits. “Have no fear; you’ll have your wish. You’ll serve the people you failed.”

  Yauri stepped out of the room. Armored kherife barged in and laid rough hands on Corajidin, dragging him out of his cell. He tried to kick. Did his best to struggle. But even his shouts for aid, and his cries of indignation, sounded weak. His hand flailed ineffectually; his legs were unable to support his weight. The kherife bundled Corajidin into a bronze chair with a high back. His ankles and wrists were shackled. They blindfolded him, then strapped his head to the back of the chair.

  The chair was lifted, and Corajidin carried away. Corajidin screamed for the Emissary until he was hoarse. When that availed him nothing, Corajidin yelled for Kasraman to rescue him. For Wolfram. He demanded to know where he was being taken, but the only answer from his guards was the sound of their heavy tread on stone.

  Gripped by fear, Corajidin had no idea how long he was carried, from where, or to where. His pulse galloped, and his chest began to hurt. His fingertips tingled. His toes were numb. Bile threatened to come up again, yet there was nothing left in him to expel.

  The chair was set down with a jolt. The blindfold was removed.

  Corajidin’s eyes focused on the gathered ranks of the Teshri, all in their formal robes of state. There were many that Corajidin recognized as people he had scorned: Roshana, Siamak, Ajomandyan, Ziaire, Teymoud … Femensetri! The Stormbringer stood grim as death in her worn black cassock, Scholar’s Crook topped by a radiant, jade-hued sickle. There were others he did not recognize, and many he had influence over were absent. Corajidin struggled against his bonds, to no avail.

  Yauri approached Roshana, Siamak, and Nazarafine—who looked like she would collapse without the support of her portly nephew, Osman. With a degree of ceremony that chilled Corajidin’s blood, the Arbiter-Marshall handed Rosha a scroll. Rosha broke the seal, took up a brush, and wrote on it. The scroll was passed to Siamak, who wrote without hesitation, and then to Nazarafine, who wrote slowly, the ink brush unsteady in her hand.

  “What is this?” Corajidin winced at how weak his voice sounded. He licked his lips and repeated the question, the result little better.

  Roshana answered. “The Teshri am Shrīan has been in deliberation with the new Arbiter-Marshall, the Kherife-Marshall, and the Scholar-Marshall—”

  “That role was abolished, the Sēq cast out of Shrīan!”

  “We reestablished it, and invited the former Scholar-Marshall to resume her place until we can hold elections.”

  “You don’t have the authority!”

  “I was given the authority when you crippled our damned nation!” Rosha thundered. She flung her arms wide to include the other members of the Teshri. “Ironically, it was you who showed us the way. We have the authority, together. And together we have reviewed the laws, and debated what it is that should be done with you.”

  Her voice was clear as a bell. She rose from her seat to loom over Corajidin. He sneered up at her, his dry lips sticking to his teeth.

  “What is it to be? Who has the courage to end me, eh?” Corajidin rolled his eyes left and right to see the way some of the counselors shuffled their feet. That’s right! I still own some of you. Time for you to lick the hand that fed you, like the dogs you are. “Who will tie the yellow silk around my neck, and strangle the life from me? Who wants my blood curse on their head? You, Roshana? Seems only fitting.

  “Or do you realize that my life is more valuable than my death? That, though my judgment may be perceived as lapsed, and my actions ill considered in your eyes, I’ve experience and influence you need.”

  His rasping voice echoed from the close walls. Several of the Teshri leaned in to speak with one another. Then a few more. Corajidin smiled. This is how it starts.

  Expression carefully neutral, Roshana stared down at Corajidin.

  “All the wealth in Īa won’t save you from the fate you’ve made. I, Asrahn-Elect Näsarat fe Roshana do, as the voice of the Teshri am Shrīan, sentence the former Rahn-Erebus fa Corajidin to death for his crimes of multiple counts of regicide, treason, conspiracy, and murder.” Roshana waved the scroll. “There’s more, but frankly I’m sick of talking about all the wrongs you’ve done. Do you have anything to say?”

  Corajidin glanced left and right, and saw the support he thought he had vanish into hard, cold expressions. “Where is my advocate? I demand a trial! And time to prepare for it. It’s the law.”

  “A trial presumes you may be innocent,” Nazarafine said. Her graying skin hung in a loose bag around her neck. “With the evidence arrayed against you, there was never any doubt that you were guilty.”

  “You end today, Corajidin,” Roshana said. “Here, and now.”

  “Who brings you your evidence?” Corajidin’s breathing was panicked. I’m going to die! “I demand to speak with my children!” Was Belamandris here? Mariam? There was much to say that could not wait until their reunion in the Well of Souls—provided the ancient powers of the Drear did not drag him down.

  “Mari and Belamandris are better off away from you.” Roshana gestured. The kherife dragged two bodies behind them. Mēdēya and Nadir. Corajidin bit down on his grief to see Yashamin-Mēdēya dead on the floor, her second life over before it had been lived. Both corpses had lengths of yellow silk wrapped around their throats, their faces dark with strangulation. And I will be next…

  “I will see you in the Well of Souls, my love,” Corajidin murmured. But Yashamin-Mēdēya only stared back with lusterless eyes. “We will be together again.”

  “No, you won’t,” Roshana said. She leaned forward and whispered in Corajidin’s ear. “As you did to the father I loved, so I do to you, whom I despise!”

  Corajidin’s chair was turned around so that he faced a tall rectangular shape, hidden by curtains. Preoccupied, the terrible jarring he felt came as an unwelcome surprise. It was more than physical, more than mental, more than spiritual, yet comprised of all three: as if somebody had gone into him with a razor and excised parts of his memories. Some of his senses. Again. And again. Sharp, directed pain that had his one eye tearing. With each invisible wound he gasped and felt parts of himself get cast away.

  “We Sever you from your Awakening, and leave you deaf, dumb, and blind to the power of the world you had been blessed to know.” Femensetri’s crook hummed, and fractals of light grew in size, and brightness, until Corajidin had to close his eye. He heard her voice close by his ear. “And now we leave you to a fate more richly deserved than any you gave your enemies, Corajidin. May others look back on this day, and question themselves before walking in your steps.”

  Corajidin heard the counselors walk away. The doors closed. There came the hiss of curtains being drawn, and a sense of cold washed across him.

  Silence. The light faded.

  He gingerly opened his eye. It focused on the ornate and ancient mirror before him, the glass that gave no reflection as dark as any ocean. Pearlescent light seeped from the baroque frame, reaching out to him in spirals and arcs cold as ice when it touched him.

  Corajidin screamed, voice rising in pitch as the lazy tendrils from the Sepulchre Mirror sank into his body. They coiled, flexed, and broke the anchors between the physical and the spiritual. His essence was torn from his body and c
arried back to the glass.

  Corajidin floated like a man drowned in a glass box, but horribly aware. He saw his own slumped, broken body in the chair. It was a piteous thing, now that it was devoid of the life that had animated it. A sack of aged and diseased flesh. He hammered on the glass with his fists, but there was no sound.

  He drifted, no pulse, no warmth, no voice—alone, silent, and powerless, as he would be forever.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Truth, like love, should never be hidden. Yet truth, like love, is one of the hardest things to find.”

  —from The State of Grace, by Sedefke, inventor, explorer, and philosopher (823rd Year of the Awakened Empire)

  Day 87 of the 496th Year of the Shrīanese Federation

  Indris disentangled himself from Mari’s limbs. She mumbled a sleepy, drunken protest, and reached out for his missing warmth. Her hand fumbled around until it found the thick softness of the sheepskin blanket. With a dreamy sigh she hugged it to her neck. Indris sat on the edge of the bed in the blue-gray light, skin raised in gooseflesh from the cold. He ran a gentle hand through her tousled blonde hair, leaned forward, and kissed her.

  He dressed quickly and quietly. Out of habit he reached for his weapon harness, then put it back on the rack. Instead he slid Changeling’s curved hilt through the sash at his waist and took up his Scholar’s Lantern. As softly as he could, Indris made his way to the top deck of the Wanderer, where he paused at the wonder of the world, the night so bright it was almost blinding. The white-clouded ball of Eln shone, a radiant opal on a sheet of black velvet strewn with polished gems. The Ancestor’s Shroud blazed against the darkness, the sapphire of its eye piercing Indris as if it could see him from across the breadth of the sky. Avānweh was marbled with the rainbow haze of the souls of everything that lived there: the fitful sparks of people, magnificent and flawed; the calm and deep-seated minds of trees and flowers; the thousands of nocturnal animals that darted here and there. And the mountains themselves radiated colors and textures he had no names for, other than peace, strength, and depth. Of them all Īajen-mar shone brightest. Lines of energy flowed, the veins of the world carrying the precious Water of Life.

  Indris heard his name on the lips of the world, a siren song that promised wonders, and gave hints of powers and secrets that Indris could barely conceive of. All he need do was let go … But he was already too far down a road toward becoming something that terrified him, and in no hurry to reach a destination he—and the rest of the world—might regret.

  The clatter of metal drew his attention. A crow was perched on the rail. The glow from the Wraith Jar inside it flashed from between the metallic feathers, and lit the amber ball of its eye. Indris scowled at it, seeing the misty shape of the Sēq Wraith Knight contained within.

  “Spying? Really?” Indris asked it. “How long till she gets here?”

  “Not long,” Femensetri croaked. The crow simulacra bobbed its head by way of an apology, then flew off into the night. Femensetri blazed with ahm, her Disentropic Stain a corona of energy currents that flowed around her. Indris closed his third eye and looked at his former sahai with his physical ones. “Didn’t think there’d be much that would drag you from Mari’s side.”

  “She’s sleeping, and will have the mother of all hangovers tomorrow. Corajidin’s death, and the manner of it, were hard on her, and Belamandris.”

  “So where are you off to at this time of the night?”

  “Thought I’d take the chance to settle a few things, before we leave Shrīan.”

  “So you’re going to ignore your duty, and leave the country in a shambles?”

  Indris waggled his finger. “I’ll not let you goad me. I’ve done well by Shrīan, by the Great Houses and the Hundred Families, and by the Sēq. Now I have to do well by myself.”

  “Listen to you!” Femensetri laughed, clear, soft, and without the mocking tone she usually carried. She leaned on her crook, and gazed out into the night. “You have done well, Indris. And you do deserve the chance to do what you need to do. And to be happy. I’ll not apologize for what we did. Suffice to say we had larger concerns, and still do. Had we to do it all over again, we’d do exactly the same.”

  “As would I,” Indris replied. “It’s why I’ll never return to the Sēq. And why all those scrolls and letters of offer that are sitting on my desk will stay unopened.”

  “Do you have any idea what you’re being offered?” Femensetri gazed at Indris with something close to envy. “You’ve shown the Teshri, and the Sēq, a glimpse of what you can do. Indris, many of us would follow you—”

  “I know. And that’s part of the problem. The rahns have been at me to re-Awaken them, but they’re not ready yet. It will be some time before they are, I think. For now they’ll have to rely on their own experiences, and instincts, like any other leader. The world will turn well enough without Mari and I, but I’ll know if things take a turn for the worse. You always said my love was a weakness. If things go badly here, you’ll understand how wrong you were.”

  “Kasraman is out there, Indris.” Femensetri’s voice was hard. “And Wolfram. And Anj—”

  “Anj is dead, sahai. The Emissary is who you should fear, more for what we don’t know about her than what we do. Corajidin was tied to her, but she abandoned him to help Kasraman escape. Morne has said that he met others who called themselves the Emissary, in service to the Dynasty of the Ivory Masks, in Eidelbon. The Sēq would do well to enlist what aid they can to assess the threat they represent.”

  “Where will you be, while you leave this mess with us?”

  “Mari wants to go somewhere warm.”

  “Not surprising, after Tamerlan,” Femensetri snorted. “But you’re not going somewhere warm. You’re going to translocate to Amarqa, aren’t you? You’re going to open that damned vault. I told the Suret that letting you in there was a mistake. Some of them are blind to what you are. Others refuse to see it.”

  “But not you?”

  “Never me!” Femensetri looked fierce. “There are others who share my view that you are the answer to a lot of our questions.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. But it’s time I found out who I am.”

  Femensetri rested a hand on Indris’s shoulder. The tenderness in the gesture made Indris apprehensive. “I don’t know that there’s ever a time to discover what you’re about to learn. Suffice to say, there’s a reason it was kept a secret by a few, for so long.”

  Indris swallowed his questions, with a large portion of trepidation. “Take care of the place while I’m gone. I didn’t work so hard just so you could break it some more.”

  “It’s pretty broken, but we’ll try.”

  Numbers cascaded through his mind in overlapping, multidimensional formulae. He reached out for the space where the Black Archives stood, linked the energies around it to the place he stood, and brought them together in his mind. A rainbow bridge opened across the monochrome nothingness. He took a step out—

  Crossed the silent, airless, absence between—

  The tiny hammer blows of snow struck his face. Wraith Knights in their rimed simulacra turned their gazes on Indris, but made no move to bar him.

  It took merely moments to solve the puzzle door, the pieces collapsing like toy blocks. Indris strode through the archive. Ancient artifacts resonated as he passed: Scrolls and books glowed, weapons flared beneath thin layers of dust, writing on the walls displayed second, and third, layers of characters. Fixed on his purpose, he opened the door to the central archive, climbed the stairs, and came face to face with the serill vault with his name on it. The lock had reset itself, but Indris answered the questions one after the other.

  The final questioning on Awakening was part of him now. It was not a question he could have answered in words, rather something he demonstrated. Indris opened the barriers he had erected one by one, and allowed the question to examine him. With each barrier Indris dropped, the question flowed deeper into him. It merged
with the metaphysical serpent that coiled around his spine: filled his body, rose into his mind, then trickled like warm water through his soul. Indris closed his eyes, overcome by the peace that pervaded him. He did not know how long he stood there as the sensation in him faded. When he opened his eyes, the door to his vault folded in on itself, over and over, until none of it remained.

  Inside, a gentle light shone on a faceted crystal egg, over half a meter long. The egg was striated with rainbow glimmers that swirled in circles and arcs, in straight lines and waves. He looked closer at the patterns of light, to see they were comprised of thousands of tiny glyphs. Indris recognized High Avān, Maladhoring, the characters of the Time Masters, Hazhi, and three other languages he guessed to be those of the other Elemental Masters. The last character set that made him dizzy as the characters looped in, around and through each other, their shapes erratic in composition and movement.

  It was a Feigning Egg, such as was produced by the Torque Spindles of old. Indris racked his memory for what he had been taught about the Feignings, where disparate living things were brought together to fabricate, or forge, life. Only the Great Feignings used eggs, where the disparate elements of many lives had been used to create something powerful and unique. That which was made would remain in the egg for months as it grew and the different elements bonded. Most of the Great Feignings failed, and of those that survived the process, most went mad and died—but only after being the sources of great tragedy, and sorrow.

  Who is in here? And what have they to do with me?

  The vault was otherwise empty, save a jade disk ringed in glyphs in different languages. As Indris reached in to take the disk, his arm brushed against the Feigning Egg. It chimed with a crystal note, and a name coalesced on its surface.

  Īa fa Näsarat fe Malde-ran yai Sedefke fa Amon-Indris. Indris, son of Sedefke and Malde-ran, son of the Näsarat, son of the world—

  Speechless, Indris stumbled back as the egg split into two hemispheres. Inside it was stained blue and gold, edged in a mosaic of polished stones that blazed the hue of ruby and sapphire, amber and diamond. Indris tried in vain to control his breathing when he saw the vacant, fetus-shaped space at the center of the egg.