With Blood Upon the Sand

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  Çeda nodded and ran toward the dwindling forms in the distance. As she did, she summoned the asirim. They defied her at first, which made her insides twist into knots. She could feel how hungry they still were, but they’d killed many aboard both ships, and the feeling wasn’t so strong as it had been. Eventually they came, slinking toward her like scuttling crabs. When they’d put a hundred paces between them and the ship, their hunger faded, and they rose, running with speed until they’d caught up to her. She forced them to stay close at heel now. Their instinct to hunt was on them, though. They’d sensed those running ahead, a group of eight men and women.

  Those fleeing had given themselves a good head start, but they were not conditioned and were slowing already. And then Çeda realized several had stopped. She had no idea why until she came closer. A body lay on the black stone. At first Çeda thought it one of the pirates, but as she came closer she saw the body’s raiment was too rich for a simple pirate, and the cut was not Malasani, but Qaimiri, and in the royal colors of saffron and crimson with viridian piping. Few would wear such colors together, for in Qaimir, red and gold were set aside for the royal family alone.

  The pirates watched her warily as she approached. They stared at her ebon sword, which was drawn and ready but held in no hostile manner. They backed away as Çeda came to stand before the body.

  It was a man with a light beard, his sightless eyes, now clouded and desiccated, staring skyward toward the heavens, perhaps to his own soul, who walked in the farther fields. His chest was a perversion of blood and bone and torn clothing, as if his heart had exploded. Or been torn out. She stared at the withered fingers, the drawn skin, wondering how long it had been here. Surely a week at least. Dried blood lay all around the body, and now that she was standing before it, she could see that there were constellations of the gods drawn in a circle around his dead form. There were ancient symbols as well. She was well-versed in the languages of the desert. They’d been drilled into her by her mother. But she recognized few of these sigils. She saw one for betrayal above the man’s head, another for lure at his left hand. When she saw the one by his feet, however, she gasped. She sheathed her sword and crouched down, reaching a hand out, but she found herself unable to touch it.

  By the gods who breathe, it was the same symbol that was on her back, the tattoo Dardzada had given her when she was twelve, turning thirteen. She had thought it meant bastard child, but she’d found out later the older meaning—one in many, and many in one—revealed to her by the King of Swords, Husamettín himself.

  How could this be? Who would have done such a thing? She’d like to think it had nothing to do with her, that it was some strange coincidence, but she knew it would be foolish of her to ignore it.

  This was what Yusam had seen in his mere, she realized: this body, herself finding it. It was too improbable for it to be otherwise. What it meant for her, for the Kings, she had no idea. Why would a lord from Qaimir have come here to the desert? And what by Goezhen’s dark crown had happened to him?

  Çeda studied the symbols, memorized their placements, then stood and stared at the pirates, the eight of them fretful, nervous, watching her and then the asirim, sometimes glancing back toward the deeper, darker part of this blasted land. “What do you know of this?” she asked them.

  The one closest to her, a woman ten years Çeda’s senior, shook her head. “Nothing, my Lady,” she said in halting Sharakhan.

  Of course they knew nothing. Çeda turned toward the asirim, drawn by their shift in mood. Their hunger had been replaced with a wariness she’d never felt from them before. They crouched, backs arched, eyes staring wildly at the land beyond the pirates, like hounds that had suddenly become aware of some primeval danger mortal man could never hope to understand.

  “What you will do with us?” the woman asked, the sound startling Çeda from her reverie.

  Çeda pointed to the body. “Take him. We’ll return to the ship. And by the gods, say no more until we’re off this stone.”

  Together, the two young men dragged the body, Çeda motioning them and the others to walk ahead of her. The asirim came behind, and slowly they all moved off the dark stone and onto the blessed sand of the desert.

  Sümeya met them there. She stared down at the body. “We found it,” Çeda said, “just lying there on the stone.”

  Sümeya pulled her eyes away from the bloody corpse and took in Çeda anew. “Do you not know who this is?”

  Çeda shook her head.

  “Here, in the forgotten corners of the Shangazi, lies the King of Qaimir.”

  A tingling sensation ran through Çeda’s fingers and toes. Her first thought was for Ramahd. He’d come to Sharakhai at his king’s bidding. He was one of Qaimir’s primary diplomats. Her second was over the upheaval the death of the king would cause.

  The sands are shifting, Çeda thought. One day they may overwhelm Sharakhai.

  Two days into their return toward Sharakhai, just as they were anchoring for the evening, Çeda was alerted by a cry from the pirate ship behind the Javelin. Many were moving about the ship, preparing it for the night, which looked to be windy, but all were now flocking toward the deck of the pirate cutter.

  “Make way!” Çeda called, pushing her way through. When she reached the deck, she found a boy being lifted from the hold of the ship. The boy’s head lolled back, his body twisted at odd angles; a doll of string and bones. The gathered Malasani prisoners wailed, and a woman fell to the boy’s side, holding his cheeks between her hands as he lay lifeless on the deck. It was the same boy—a young man, really—who Yndris had nearly cut down when they’d approached the ship.

  Sümeya stood nearby, watching the scene unfold. Her face was hidden by her veil, but there was concern in her eyes.

  “What happened?” Çeda asked Sümeya, who, along with Yndris, had been aboard that day, interrogating their officers.

  “I don’t know. He may have fallen into the hold.”

  “Did anyone see it?”

  Sümeya shook her head. “No one seems to have.”

  To her right, Çeda saw a form coming to a halt on the gunwales—Yndris in her black Maiden’s dress, turban and veil hiding her expression. She stared at Çeda for the span of a heartbeat, and then, one hand gripping the shroud, the other the pommel of her ebon blade, she dropped to the sand and strode away as if the wailing on the deck were nothing more than the howl of the wind.

  A cold hatred flared to life inside Çeda. “She’s a disgrace.”

  “You don’t know that she had anything to do with it.”

  “I do. And so do you. She had no right to do it. She’s nothing more than a child, unfit to wear the Maiden’s black.”

  “As though you’re one to judge.” The words sounded bitter, but they were hollow, and Sümeya likely knew it. Çeda could see it in her eyes.

  “I know enough to know that women like Yndris are a cancer. Best to excise her now before she infects others.”

  Çeda expected Sümeya to grab her, to snap at Çeda for questioning her authority, or that of her father, King Husamettín. But she didn’t. She merely watched the woman grieving over the boy, and then turned and stepped onto the gunwales, much as Yndris just had.

  “Come. Let them grieve in peace.” And then she dropped to the sand and headed for the Javelin.

  Chapter 18

  KING IHSAN TAPPED THE INK FROM his quill and wrote the final entry in his journal. He sprinkled salt over it, then lifted the edges of the journal to gather the salt into the gutter and funnel it into a salt cellar. As it was the end of the day, he gave the cellar a quick shake, then took a pinch and placed it on his tongue, reliving the day, in a manner of speaking. It had been a day that had seen him speak with a dozen of his courtiers, those most loyal to him. Soon all the work he’d done, all the positioning, would begin to fall into place.

  Azad was close to perfecting the
serum Ihsan and his closest allies would need in the coming years. He was hopeful that the collegia scholars he would soon secure would help Azad to finish the job. And then at last the royal pruning that was centuries overdue could begin in earnest.

  He rang a bell from his desk. Footsteps followed, and soon Tolovan loomed in the doorway. “Prepare my bed,” Ihsan said.

  “Would you care for some tea, my Lord King? Some araq?”

  Ihsan was just about to ask for both when a bell of a different sort rang. A low bell. One that could be heard over all of Tauriyat, and a good amount of the city as well. It was a bell that hadn’t been rung in twelve years.

  Tolovan looked to the open windows, to the darkness beyond. There was an accepting look on his face as the bell rang again, as if he’d long expected its return. “Shall I have your coach brought around, My Lord King?”

  “That would be good of you, Tolovan. Thank you.”

  “Of course, my Lord.” He bowed and left.

  Soon, Ihsan was sitting in his royal coach, being bumped and jostled past the palace walls. As it moved beyond a curve in the stone-paved road, the southern face of Tauriyat was revealed, and the tolling of the bell sounded clearer. Ihsan chuckled as the coach approached the central road, the one that led to each of the palaces in turn. Four hundred thirty-two years on this earth, and here he was, summoned like a vizir to bow before the King of Kings. He had no one to blame but himself, he supposed. He might have tried to sway the other Kings to choose a different man to lead them on the night of Beht Ihman long ago—himself, perhaps, or Yusam, a figurehead he might have more easily swayed over the years—but there had been an impetus around Kiral’s claim to the high throne that Ihsan hadn’t at all been sure he could preempt. He’d been so new to his powers he hadn’t wanted to overplay his hand.

  More fool me.

  But the river flowed, as they say. Things had changed since then. The time to act was nearly upon them, and then Ihsan would be the one ringing that mighty bell, summoning his chosen to attend him.

  Many minutes later, after working through a series of switchbacks, the coach arrived at Eventide, Kiral’s high palace. Upon entering, Ihsan was led by a servant in rich dress to an opulent room where Kiral and nine other Kings had gathered to one side. Husamettín studied Ihsan with something like annoyance. Cahil, their Confessor King, seemed eminently bored. The man was over four hundred years old, yet the expression of tedium on his boyish face reminded Ihsan of young royals throughout the ages forced to suffer through one ceremony too many. The rest, however, looked impatient, restless to get to business. He was relieved to see that the Feasting King, Onur, had not come. Well and good. What need have we of a man who most days can’t be bothered to wash himself? On the other side of the room, standing with hands clasped behind their backs, stood two Maidens wearing their black fighting dresses but not their turbans. One was Sümeya, First Warden of the Blade Maidens, and the other, perhaps not surprisingly, was Çedamihn, a young woman whose fate seemed more entwined with Ihsan’s by the day.

  Lying on a table between the Kings and Maidens was a body, bloody and broken, wearing the raiment of a Qaimiri nobleman. The ribs were splayed wide, innards missing, the skin sprinkled with a fine white powder—natron, if Ihsan didn’t miss his guess. At first he thought the body might be a high- ranking member of the Moonless Host in disguise, but as he reached the foot of the table he recognized the form of King Aldouan shan Kalamir, Lord of the Sovereign Lands of Qaimir these past thirty-five years.

  “Good of you to come,” Kiral said, a look of sufferance on his pockmarked face.

  Ihsan bowed his head to the degree he felt appropriate for the minor shame of having arrived last. “I was unavoidably detained. What, pray tell, have the Maidens found?”

  “Tell them what you told me,” Kiral said to Sümeya.

  Sümeya nodded. “We found him in the desert, far to the southwest of Sharakhai.”

  “Surely you didn’t find him by chance,” said stout Zeheb, the King of Whispers.

  Sümeya shook her head. “We were guided by King Yusam to a small pirate caravan sailing the forbidden paths through the desert. Some were chased onto a plateau of blasted stone, where Çeda found the king’s dead body.”

  As she spoke, Ihsan studied Çeda. How she’d changed in her time with the Maidens. She had looked so out of sorts when she’d entered the House of Maidens. A babe among jackals. Now, while she might not have the same sort of calm confidence as Sümeya, she was not far off. She studied each of the Kings without really seeming to, and when her eyes met his, she didn’t stare wide-eyed as she might once have done. She merely gave him a perfunctory nod.

  Ihsan nodded back, then returned his attention to the body and the ruined cavity that was once its chest. This wasn’t the work of a black laugher, Ihsan knew. There was order in this chaos. There was intent.

  Kiral unrolled a piece of parchment and laid it across Aldouan’s thighs. “This was around the body.”

  The Kings—even Cahil, who had been leaning against the wall, staring with dispassionate eyes—gathered around the parchment. Near a crudely drawn outline of a body, dozens of symbols were laid out in a rough circle, some smaller, some larger. Constellations, Ihsan saw immediately. There was Goezhen’s near the top, where Aldouan’s head would have been. Bakhi’s lay near Aldouan’s right hand, and just inside of that symbol was Alu’s, the Qaimiri god who hadn’t set foot in the desert since well before Ihsan had been born. Strangely, Nalamae’s constellation was present, east on the compass rose, but well outside the circle formed by so many of the other symbols. Interestingly, there were some symbols Ihsan could attach no meaning to, ancient sigils from when the first gods still walked the earth.

  “Who made this?” Ihsan asked, flicking the corner of the parchment.

  “Çeda,” Sümeya supplied.

  “While you were there, at the scene?”

  “No, my King,” Çeda said. “On the ship, once we were underway.”

  Almost of their own accord, Ihsan’s eyebrows raised. “This is complex. Placement will be important.”

  “It’s accurate,” Çeda said, with all the confidence of a master scribe penning a scroll she’d copied thousands of times before. He was about to challenge her when she repeated it. “It’s accurate, my King.”

  He found he believed her.

  “This”—Husamettín pointed to a symbol Ihsan recognized, the ancient pictograph for unity: one in many and many in one—“appears on your back, does it not?”

  Çeda nodded to him. “It does, my Lord King.”

  “How did you find the body?” Kiral asked.

  “Sümeya bid me chase a handful of the Malasani pirates. They had stopped when they came across Aldouan’s body, clearly afraid to continue.”

  “And did they know what might have done it?” asked King Mesut, the Jackal King, Lord of the Asirim. He had a reedy voice, a remnant from a bout of whooping cough he’d survived when he was young. Like Cahil and Sukru, he was normally a man who preferred to watch, to follow, but not because he wasn’t as bellicose as the others. He was, at heart, a man who preferred the sword to the olive branch. But he was also a very deliberate thinker. He studied a thing from all angles before deciding, which made him in many ways more pliable than the rest of Kiral’s lackeys. Now, he was strangely intent on Çeda and what answer she might have for him.

  Çeda replied, “No, my King, they had no idea. There was fear in them and little else. They knew there was a good chance that the Kings’ justice would take their lives, and yet their hope of fleeing had transformed into a plea for the Maidens to deliver them from that cursed place.”

  “Have you no guesses of your own?” Mesut went on.

  “Surely the Kings would know better than I.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked,” Mesut replied easily, his breath a harsh whisper.

  “
I suspect, my Lord King, that it was an ehrekh.”

  Mesut paced like a master at the collegia might do with a prized student. “And why do you suspect it was so?”

  “The symbols are the old script.” She pointed to several of them in turn and spoke a word as she touched them. “Fallow. The unending well. The wonder of the gods. Stave, or sunder.”

  Mesut smiled, a strange thing to see on his pinched face, but he looked to the other Kings. “A learned woman, our young Maiden. But there are many, as you have just proven, who might know the old script.”

  “True,” Çeda replied, “though few but an ehrekh would feast on the heart of man, as I suspect happened here, for they believe that to do so will give them a glimpse of the man or woman in the next life as they walk the farther fields. They hunger for such things, for in them Goezhen lit a desire for the touch of the first gods. And despite what I might know, the symbols are known to few. Fewer still would know where to place them on a circle such as this. And only a handful of souls would dare place the constellations of the gods along with them”—she pointed again—“Bakhi, Goezhen, Alu, thereby risking their wrath. And there is the strange stone we walked upon. The ehrekh are said to favor such places. There was a feel to it, my Lord King, a thing most unnerving. A feeling like the end of days was near. Any one of these things presented alone might indicate something else—a blood mage perhaps, a blood shaman of the desert tribes—but together, they point to an ehrekh or I’m a stonemason’s son.”

  Ihsan laughed. Kiral was annoyed by it, but Ihsan couldn’t help it. Çeda was always surprising him. And he hadn’t failed to notice that she’d avoided calling attention to Nalamae’s constellation, though certainly she’d seen it.

  “No doubt you are correct,” Ihsan told her. Then he turned to Kiral. “But what now?”