“Do you know what this is?”
She shook her head.
“It’s a petal from an adichara. Do you know them?”
Çeda nodded. Everyone in Sharakhai knew of the adichara. “They’re the twisted trees.”
Leorah’s chuckle was like an ancient door groaning open. “Yes, child. Twisted trees, indeed. I agreed to come here because your mother thought you were ready. After speaking with her, I agree.”
Suddenly the small petal looked infinitely more dangerous than it had a moment ago. “Ready for what?”
“To imbibe the petal. Or part of it in any case.” She broke off the petal’s sharp tip. In Rhia’s golden light it looked purple or dark blue. She shook it, apparently waiting for Çeda to take it.
But Çeda could only stare. She was suddenly and inexplicably afraid. “What will it do?”
“Perhaps nothing, child. Perhaps nothing at all.”
“Perhaps something as well.”
“Yes, perhaps something, but we needn’t worry about that yet.” She shook the petal again.
Çeda wanted to be brave, but this journey had been all too strange. She didn’t want to be here anymore. She wanted to go home. She wanted to run the streets with Emre and Tariq and their friend Hamid. But what was there to do but obey? She held out her hand to take the petal, but Leorah moved her hand away. “Open your mouth, girl. Lift your tongue.”
Çeda did, and Leorah placed the petal fragment beneath it. Immediately her mouth began to water. As did her eyes. The horizon, lit golden by Rhia’s light, wavered before her. She blinked away tears as the fragrant taste filled her mouth.
“Tell me what you feel.”
“I feel . . . bright. And warm. Like there’s a fire trapped inside me.”
“What else?”
Çeda’s hands shook. She gripped them tight, but it wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t from nervousness—not any longer—but because what filled her was impossible to contain. It leaked from her every pore. “It’s how Rhia herself must feel.”
“Go on, child.” Leorah stared intently, her eyes betraying nothing. The grim way in which she set her mouth, however, made Çeda feel as though Leorah were disappointed. Why, she couldn’t begin to guess.
“The taste of it is like—”
“Not the taste. Tell me what you feel inside.”
“I already said. I feel like a fire’s been lit within me.”
“There must be more.”
“Why?”
“Just concentrate.” Her voice was hard, almost desperate. Çeda didn’t know this woman, but there was something that made Çeda want to please her. As she and her mother did before and after they sparred, she took deep breaths. She released it slowly through pursed lips. She searched for her center, as her mother described it.
As the cool wind playing over the desert fell away, as she tied herself more deeply to the earth beneath her feet, she felt it tugging at her insides: a feeling rather like the fear she had when her mother left Çeda alone on Beht Zha’ir, or when she returned cut or bruised and wouldn’t explain why. Çeda would help her clean and dress the wounds, but she would worry until she fell asleep, sometimes for days, that someone was coming to get them. Or something. It gnawed at her from within. That’s how it felt now, and it had a clear direction. She turned and faced it, ignoring Leorah’s inquisitive stare.
“What is it?” Leorah asked.
How could she describe it? “Something large. And deep.” She lifted her finger and pointed. “Like a part of me is there. Like it’s always been there, and the petal merely uncovered it.”
“Yes,” Leorah whispered. “Yes, child.”
“Is it Sharakhai?” Çeda asked, unable to guess what else it could be.
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
Another wall between her and the truth. “Lady Leorah, why won’t anyone speak plainly?”
Leorah stared a moment, but then laughed. “You will learn one day, Çedamihn, that there are times to share knowledge and times to hide it.” She stood and took Çeda’s hand, and together they walked back toward the yacht. “Our secrecy is for your own protection, and for others as well. Many, many people may be harmed if it were to slip into the wrong hands.”
“But one day you’ll tell me?”
Leorah squeezed her hand. “One day, child.” When they reached the edge of the fire, the four women around it dropped their conversation and watched in silence. Leorah nodded to Ahya. “Take her to Saliah.”
Ahya nodded back. She seemed pleased, but she couldn’t hold Çeda’s eyes. She looked away, anywhere but at Çeda. Ahya was somehow ashamed, but Çeda didn’t know whether it was for something she’d done, or what she was about to do.
After they’d fallen asleep—Leorah in the yacht, everyone else in bedrolls on the sand—Çeda woke and made water on the far side of the ship. After waiting to make sure no one had stirred, she went to the ship, climbed onto the curving struts and levered herself over the gunwale. Heart pounding, she stole down and into the ship. She could hear Leorah’s snores. The door to her cabin, thank the gods, was open.
She slipped into the cabin, quiet as a ghost, just like she and Emre and Tariq had practiced. Hands shaking, she reached into Leorah’s clothes and pulled the locket out. Leorah’s snoring remained steady, a rumble followed by a reedy inhalation. Çeda pried the two halves of the locket open, seeing the remains of the petal Leorah had fed her by the light of Tulathan coming through the nearby porthole. She didn’t know what Ahya and Leorah had planned for her, but she deserved this much. A prize for all they were putting her through. Let Leorah wonder where it had gone. Let her have a mystery of her own.
After secreting the petal in her handkerchief and tucking it carefully inside the bag at her belt, Çeda left and returned to her bedroll near the pile of softly glowing embers.
She and Ahya left in the morning on their skiff, but not, Çeda soon realized, for Sharakhai.
Chapter 34
ON AN OVERCAST DAY, with a chill wind blowing in from the northwest, a two-masted dhow sailed from the desert toward the entrance to Sharakhai’s southern harbor. The ship’s approach was noted by the two towering lighthouses, which stood on either side of the natural channel that led from the desert to the harbor proper. From the upper deck of the easternmost lighthouse, signals were passed to the ship via crimson and yellow flags. A brief exchange followed from ship to lighthouse and lighthouse to ship in which the Emerald Ibis, owned by Lord Aziz of Ishmantep, requesting berth overnight to offload goods, identified itself and the lighthouse replied that the harbor was open and that the Ibis could sail on for its berth assignment. The lighthouse then passed another message to a squat keep halfway along the channel’s considerable length, a message that was immediately relayed to the harbormaster’s tower, an octagonal monstrosity that stood at the rough center of the harbor’s haphazard cluster of outer docks.
In little time, the harbormaster, sitting at her desk, her massive harbor log sprawled before her, received the news of the incoming ship, already the twenty-fifth to arrive that day. Normally she wouldn’t think twice about routing such a small ship to the outer docks, a position that necessitated the offloading and ferrying of the ship’s goods quayside by sleigh, an operation that cost time and, occasionally, money. The captains rarely liked it, but she had precious few berths quayside, and the day was only going to get worse. The lighthouses had reported over a dozen more sails on the horizon, surely a caravan, perhaps more than one.
She knew giving the Emerald Ibis a berth quayside would cause her grief later, yet she paused. The Ibis came to Sharakhai nine times a year, as predictable as the passing of the seasons. It was not a ship that would be carrying much cargo, small as it was, but its owner was not a man to be trifled with. She’d never met Lord Aziz, but she’d held her position long enough to know what was good for her. Azi
z was high enough in the city’s pecking order to make her life miserable if he was annoyed about how his ship was being treated. And rumor had it he’d come only recently to the city himself. He might still be in Sharakhai. So after a moment’s pause, she made a note in her log that it would be given a berth that would be opening up in a quarter of an hour.
She passed her decision on to her master flagman, who relayed the news to the squat keep with a series of sharp signals. Normally the flagman would stand vigilant, waiting for more signals to make their way to the tower, but in this case he set his flags down, wrote a number on a flat stone and tossed it down from the deck. The flagman watched as the stone spun in the wind and splashed against the amber sand in a sailing lane in the outer docks. He watched as a girl ran out from beneath a nearby pier and clawed at the sand where the stone was buried. Assured the stone wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands, he took up his flags and returned to the business at hand.
The girl, no more than ten summers, found the stone and returned to her place beneath the pier. Once there, she noted the number written on its surface and buried it deeply, smoothing the sand over so that no one could easily find it. That done, she launched herself onto her zilij, a board she’d made from a length of cracked, discarded skimwood she’d found behind a shipwright’s workshop. She would kick once or twice, then glide along on the zilij. The skimwood, and the special wax applied to it, made the board’s underside slick as a silverscale in the lazy flow of the Haddah, which allowed her to fairly fly over the sand. In a short while she came to the inner docks, where ship after ship was moored, the landsmen helping the crews to unload their cargo. At the end of one of the piers, however, were two young men, who sat watching, waiting.
“Seventeen,” the girl said when she’d come near.
Both of the men stood, but it was the one with the sleepy eyes who took out a sylval and flicked it into the air at her. She caught it easily and slipped it into the leather purse inside her trousers. Then she was off, gliding back toward the outer docks while the two men headed up the pier toward the quay, dodging several crewmen as they went.
In a short while, the Emerald Ibis docked at berth seventeen. The two men stood at ease nearby, close enough to note those who came or went but a good enough distance away that their presence would attract no undue attention.
“Just like he said,” Emre said, referring to Ishaq.
“Just like he said,” Hamid replied.
The crewmen aboard the ship were moving smartly, seeing to the sails and the rigging, but Emre was watching the quay, wondering how it would all progress from here. “You don’t think Aziz will come himself?”
Hamid shrugged. “Why should a lord be bothered to come when he has men he trusts?”
“I would if I were him.”
“And by doing so you might draw more attention than it’s worth. The goods he’s ferrying in are skimmed from the caravans that bypass Sharakhai. He collects the Kings’ tithe, but he collects his own as well, then sends the goods here to be sold.”
“That’s what I don’t understand. Surely the Kings suspect?”
“Of course they do. Likely Beşir has arrangements with Aziz allowing him to cull what he wants in Ishmantep. Within reason, of course. What good is a lordship in the middle of the desert otherwise?”
“Then why would it matter if he came to the ship or not?”
Hamid slipped his arm around Emre’s shoulder and pulled him close while motioning to the Ibis. “My dear Emre. It’s like the jackals and the bone crushers. Whether the bone crushers brought the oryx down themselves or not, they feast first. The jackals, if they’re wise, bide their time, waiting for the crushers to gorge themselves. Only when they’re sleepy and slow do the jackals approach, taking what they can. Come too early, though, and they’re as like to get their own throats torn out as they are to get a meal. Aziz can’t very well flaunt it so that everyone sees, particularly when men like Kiral or Husamettín would take it badly if they knew, or worse, Onur or Sukru, men with the sort of greed in them that would push them to make an example of Aziz.”
Emre shrugged. “Fair enough.”
Along the quay just then were a squad of four Silver Spears in their white uniforms and conical helms, chain-mail hauberks lapping at the top of their gray boots. One of them, a beast who towered over the other three, stepped down the pier and, without asking permission to board, dropped onto the deck of the sleek dhow with a thud Emre heard even over the din of the harbor. “And so it goes, the Spears come to collect their tithe.”
Hamid nodded. “You know him?”
“I know enough not to poke at him with a stick.” Everyone in the west end knew of Haluk. He was a terror of a man, worse for having been beaten in the pits by Çeda in her guise as the White Wolf. Since then, he’d fallen in with Layth, the new Lord Commander of the Silver Spears, a man cut from the same cloth.
Haluk’s white uniform stood out against the dark wood of the ship, against the dingy clothes of the crewmen. He spoke for a short while with the ship’s captain, a squat, potbellied stove of a man, and then they lost themselves within the hold. Emre was worried they’d be in for a long wait, which made him nervous with the other three Spears still standing along the quay, but Haluk and the captain returned a short while later, Haluk carrying two small crates across his shoulders by use of a rope tied between them. Haluk and the captain shook forearms, and then Haluk was off, taking to the busy quayside and flanked by his comrades-in-arms like cocks in a henyard.
Now came the real questions. Where were the rest of the goods going? How was the money collected? And where in turn was the money being routed? Ishaq was certain there was a connection between Aziz and Hamzakiir. Emre and Hamid just had to find it.
On the deck of the ship, the captain was waving his hand, yelling at his crew, who were now busying themselves, handing up crates that were passed from crewman to crewman, over to the pier, and onto the waiting bed of a mule-drawn cart. The process took the better part of an hour, after which the ship was readied to pull out and take a berth at the outer docks.
“Best get moving,” Emre said.
Hamid nodded. “Good hunting,” he said, then walked along the pier and dropped down to the sand, where he whistled for a sleigh.
Emre, meanwhile, waited, following the wagon as it pulled away and took to the Trough. Were it not a busy day he would have worried he couldn’t keep up, but traffic along the Spear was so choked he had no difficulty jogging behind it. He knew the wagon would eventually be headed to Aziz’s fence, a man Ishaq apparently trusted. Ishaq was convinced, as Emre was, that the wagon would stop somewhere first and drop off a few of the crates to be sold, and that the money eventually make its way into Hamzakiir’s hands with Ishaq none the wiser. But the wagon never stopped anywhere. It went straight to Ishaq’s fence.
He wondered if Hamid would have better luck. Some of the crates might have been left on the ship; they might be taken later that night by someone else. But then a new thought occurred to him. And the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed.
As the last of the crates was levered off the wagon and into the warehouse, Emre was off, running through the city, back toward the harbor.
That night, well after sundown, Emre sat at the back of The Jackal’s Tail, a shisha den he wouldn’t have had the stones to walk into a year ago. Now he was treated like royalty. His glass was always filled with araq whether he asked for it or not. His shisha was well tended and filled with a smoke that smelled like a jungle ablaze. He got more than a few looks from other tables, nods of respect, a sly smile from the woman tending the tabbaq. He was just about to ask her to sit with him when the door at the far side of the room opened. Two men strode in, both with turbans and veils hiding all but their eyes.
They strode immediately toward Emre’s table, took seats, and unwound their turbans—Hamid first, then Macide, although he le
ft his veil loosely around his face, only partially concealing his identity.
After more araq was poured and the three of them had each raised their glasses and taken a swallow, Hamid said, “I found nothing.”
“I know,” Emre replied.
Hamid gave a look like Emre had just spit in his araq. “Well, out with it, you bloody goat fucker.”
Emre picked up his shisha tube and drew a long pull from it. Until, that is, Hamid knocked it out of his hand and grabbed the neck of his kaftan. “You don’t treat me like I’m some fucking carpetmonger, Emre!”
Hamid raised his hand to slap Emre, but Emre snatched his wrist and half rose, grabbing a fistful of Hamid’s thawb, ready to defend himself if Hamid wouldn’t stop.
“Enough,” Macide said. A single utterance, but it filled space between them, cutting through Emre’s anger. It cut through Hamid’s as well. He looked to Macide, a flash of embarrassment showing, but then he looked at Emre once more, that same look on his face, and slowly the two of them sat back down.
Macide held Emre’s eye. “It appears, young falcon, that Hamid has had rather a more difficult night than you have.”
Hamid downed the rest of his drink, staring at Emre, daring him to say something smart. It was then that Emre noticed the bruising around Hamid’s right eye, the slight swell to his lower lip, the way he kept swallowing, as if his throat was bothering him.
“What happened?” Emre asked, a thread of concern creeping past his shroud of indignation.
“Never mind,” Macide cut in. “Tell us what you’ve found.”
Around them, the hum of low conversation returned. “I’ve found the link to Hamzakiir,” Emre began. “I followed the wagon to the warehouse, but they delivered all of it. Every single crate. I worried that Hamid wouldn’t find anything in the ship, that we’d reached a dead end. And then it struck me. Haluk.”
When Emre paused, Macide waved for him to continue. “I know him.”
“He’d taken two crates directly from the ship, and I wondered if he might be involved. I backtracked and asked around for him.”
With Blood Upon the Sand Page 39