With Blood Upon the Sand

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  “And the shaikhs bowed to the Kings’ will?”

  “At first, no. They bristled at the very notion. Some few refused even to speak with King Ihsan, but when the asirim were brought to bear, and the Kings themselves murdered the shaikhs who ignored Ihsan’s calls to treat with him, the sons who replaced them did listen. They were too hard-pressed after the losses in the war and the devastation of Beht Ihman to do otherwise. So eventually, one by one, all the shaikhs agreed. They were complicit in the loss of our people, our culture, our very soul. But I don’t blame them. Not truly. The desert is harsh, but it harbors life, it secrets it away until the storms come once more.”

  He seemed to be waiting for her to answer, but when she didn’t, he went on. “Once the Kings felt like they’d forced the tribes into line, they returned their gaze to Sharakhai, which was in the middle of rebuilding after the war. It was a slow process. It took generations to scour the memory of the thirteenth tribe from the populace, but scour they did. The Kings are patient men. They burned the books with any mention of the lost tribe. They created their Kannan and had scribes create one for every house in Sharakhai. They had learned women in fine raiment—the precursor to your Matrons—go door to door and teach their ways. And always they spoke of twelve tribes. Those who breathed of a thirteenth were killed, and there were many at first, but the Kings gave blades to their daughters and told them to silence those who spoke the wrong words, or went themselves to lay the law upon those who’d broken it. Dissenters were culled. And soon enough, no more than a few lifetimes, only a bare handful knew the truth.

  “And in the desert?”

  “In the desert, it was the same and it was not. The shaikhs followed the will of the Kings. And when they didn’t, the King of Whispers heard them, for in those days Zeheb was most concerned with keeping the tribes attentive to the agreements they’d made. When they stepped out of line, those who spoke of lost tribes were found dead, grim smiles spreading wide across their throats. And when it happened too often in one tribe, it happened to the shaikh, or his wife, or his children. Soon enough they too fell silent, and that was all it took. In those days, few enough knew how to write, and in any case our histories were told around fires or beneath the twin moons, not written on scrolls or in the pages of books.”

  “You and I are speaking of the lost tribe now,” Çeda said.

  “True, but we have learned that there are particular ways, particular times, when we might speak openly. What looms largest, however, our greatest strength, is that the King of Whispers has trouble hearing us when blood speaks only to blood.”

  By blood, he meant those of the thirteenth tribe, of course. “It cannot be.”

  “Only with one another, mind, and it depends on how much blood you have, but it’s been proven over and over again.”

  “Why would the gods have given them such a weakness?”

  “Why would they have sacrificed our tribe at all? The Kings begged the gods to save them. In answer, the gods might have cleared the field of the amassed army, but they didn’t. Instead they demanded blood. They demanded sacrifice. They allowed the Kings themselves to choose which ones would be taken, and when the Kings did they granted them power, but also weakness. Why do any of that?”

  Why indeed? “I don’t know.”

  “No one does. Perhaps we never will. It may be that it simply pleases them to see us squabble. Four centuries ago they set a grand aban board in place, the Kings on one side, the desert tribes on another, and they have been watching it play out since then.”

  “I’m no piece on a board.”

  “You are, Çeda. And so am I. And now all we can do is play our part.”

  I’m no piece on a board, and neither was my mother. “You said you would ask something of me.”

  “Indeed.” He motioned ahead, where they approached a dead end, an alley of sorts between two wings of a massive warehouse. He stopped and motioned for her to hand the burlap bag to him. “Wait here,” he said. “It would be better, I think, if the one who thought of it explained it to you.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  He ignored her, walking toward the lone warehouse door ahead with a certain weariness that reminded Çeda of her mother on the days when Çeda had tested her the most.

  A woman opened the door, swinging it wide to allow Macide entrance. The woman, of an age with Çeda, stared at her with hard eyes. Çeda stared back, refusing to be cowed. “Go on,” Çeda said. “Make sure your master doesn’t trip with those heavy bags.”

  The woman remained, looking Çeda up and down as if she just might step out and make a problem where there didn’t need to be one, but then she glanced back inside, into the darkness, and closed the door behind her, leaving Çeda alone to wonder who Macide had gone to fetch. Ishaq, Çeda thought. It must be Ishaq. Who else would Macide defer to in this way? Who else would put forth an idea that he would accept?

  The very thought of seeing her grandfather, the man who could tell her so much more about what had happened to her mother and why she’d come here to Sharakhai . . . It made her gut twist in so many knots she felt sick. But it made her feel glad as well. To know more of her mother felt like finding lost treasure in a mountain cave.

  It took only a few moments more for a man’s silhouette to darken the doorway. When he remained, silent, Çeda took a step forward. “Hello,” she said, feeling the fool for speaking first.

  “Has it been so long you no longer recognize me?”

  Çeda’s breath caught in her throat.

  By the stars above, it was Emre.

  Chapter 37

  TIME PASSED FOR DAVUD IN ENDLESS MOMENTS. They bled into minutes, became hours, grew into days, one stacked on top of another like stones on an ever growing pile, becoming so tall, all around him, he could no longer discern its form. Had he been here for weeks? Months? Had months slipped into years? Surely not that long. Surely he would have died. He wished he had.

  Cold stone beneath him drew warmth. It gnawed at him like a wight crouched at the edge of a boneyard, fingers curling, beckoning him closer.

  “Were you truly there,” Davud whispered, “I would.”

  He pushed himself up off the floor, the aches and pains he wore like an ever more burdensome robe accompanying his movements. He stood and shuffled to the bucket he’d been given to piss in, to shit in. It was cleared once a day. The food and water that had been lowered to him in another bucket hours ago sat on the opposite side of this deep hole, untouched. Both buckets were tied with only twine, and not nearly strong enough to support his weight to climb out of this place.

  He thought of eating yet had no appetite. Every time he tried, the pangs of need, of simple desire, returned. The desire for what, Davud wasn’t quite sure. Blood, he presumed. But why? Why would he desire blood? What was it Hamzakiir had awakened in him by the mere application of those arcane symbols?

  He’d had little reason to study the red ways at the collegia. He knew what most people knew, that they used their own blood, sometimes others’, and bent it for their dark purposes.

  “No,” Davud said, his voice echoing in the closeness. “That’s unfair.” Their purposes were not always fiendish. He was associating that with the magi because of Hamzakiir, but there were many stories of heroes of Qaimir who had turned the tide of battles, sometimes to aid Sharakhai. Like anything, blood was merely a tool. But he still wondered: what was it his body hungered for? The blood of the first gods, Hamzakiir had said. That was what the ehrekh hungered for, the thing that had never been given to Goezhen and Tulathan and Bakhi and the rest of the younger gods. Had their very desire somehow been passed on to the first of the magi? Had it in turn been passed down from one to the next to the next? It might make some sense. Was blood not passed down from a mother and father to their child? But what of the magi who changed spontaneously, those who hadn’t been touched by another mage? Endless questions wit
h almost no answers.

  As Davud finished his business with the bucket and went back to lie down, he felt the beginning of another endless wave of agony. A long, pitiful moan escaped him at the very thought. It started deep in his chest, but spread quickly, reaching, clawing, until his entire form was alive with it. An itching, an ache, a deep desire that could not be sated. Not by mere food. Nor by drink.

  He moved to the corner of the pit. Drove his head against the stones, if only to feel something different than the walls that were slowly tightening around him, squeezing, unrelenting. Again and again he thumped his head, in time with the beat of his heart. The skin along his forehead was already raw, bruised, bleeding. He didn’t care. It was something else, and that was a thing he would maim for. A thing he might kill for.

  The thought grew within him like a dark, choking weed. He’d thought it many times before. He could kill himself and be done with this, all of it, the pain of the change, the pain of being separated from his friends, the pain of knowing something terrible was about to happen to them. Or was happening. Or already had.

  He felt warm blood trickling down his forehead. He let it fall, let it run through his eyebrows, along the edges of his eyes, down his cheeks. The warmth of it crept ever nearer his own mouth. He tilted his head that it might touch his lips, and when it did, this small rivulet of crimson, he ran his tongue across it, accepting whatever happened.

  It tasted of salt. Of copper. Of younger days filled with skinned knees and bloody noses and sucking blood from his wrist when he’d cut it on the edge of his father’s belt buckle. But there was no deep, hidden meaning. No well of power as he’d thought there might be. As he’d hoped.

  He laughed, a maniacal sound that bounded over the walls in the deep of this cold, hard place. “What did you expect, you beetle-brained fool? Some miracle from tapping your own, childish veins?”

  The pain was beginning to ebb at last. He was able to pull away from the corner of the pit and make his way to the center, the place he most often inhabited. He breathed more deeply, the ache receding, like a serpent into a night-darkened well, readying itself to surge forth when the time was ripe.

  As he sat, he realized he was hungry at last. He tried to ignore it, knowing food would just come up again when the pain returned. But if he didn’t eat now, he might not later, and he was feeling so very lightheaded. He crawled forward, and as he did, he heard a long moan of pain. He was so confused he wondered if it was his own pained utterance he was hearing or not. But it came again moments later, a shriek that twisted into a full-throated note of anguish. It was distant, but it consumed him. It bore him like a babe on a raging river. On and on it went, unending, until suddenly and simply it was gone, leaving him feeling strangely empty, as if a beautiful flame had been snuffed between his thumb and forefinger.

  He struggled to recall their names. “Anila,” he whispered. “Jasur, Meiwei, Raji, Aphir.” On and on he went, naming all forty-eight other graduates, finishing with Collum, who’d passed to the farther fields in the hold of the ship.

  The screaming came again moments later, descending the pit as another spasm overtook him. He worried he would go mad, that he would be consumed by his fear for his friends and the pain within him, but strangely, those distant screams often quieted his own. Like cool water against forge-lit steel, it tempered him, hardened him to his own pains. He screamed, for there was no way around the agony that gripped him, but he was able to grit his teeth against it, to shunt it away in hope of . . . he knew not what.

  Untrue, you coward. He did know, of course. He was silently praying to the gods that he wouldn’t hear one voice in particular. Anila’s. It was unfair of him to single out any one of his fellow scholars, when each would be feeling the same pain. But there it was.

  Davud shivered as the food bucket shifted, scraping loudly over the stones. It was pulled upward, clunking against the wall. There was a plea within him that he was desperate to voice, a new position in his bargaining with Hamzakiir. Perhaps he should have offered it before. Perhaps he should keep his mouth shut now. He had no idea what the right choice was, whether he was playing the coward or the savior.

  Both, you beetle-brained fool, now out with it.

  There were sounds from above: scraping, a grunt, perhaps the one who’d come was annoyed that Davud hadn’t eaten what he’d brought last time, or annoyed he was here at all, dealing with some fool scholar whose most fervent wish, apparently, was to die in a hole. And still Davud remained silent.

  It wasn’t until the bucket thumped against the stone floor that Davud blurted out. “One!” He looked up through the impenetrable gloom, hoping to see some hint of a body, to appeal to him directly. “Tell Hamzakiir I will do as he wishes if he gives me but one!”

  He thought he might have seen movement above, the subtle shift of clouds on a moonless night, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Please, tell him!”

  There was no reply. Only the scrape as a leather sole shifted on stone, the patter of grit as it fell against the stone at Davud’s feet, and nothing more.

  “Please!”

  But he was alone. More alone than he’d ever been. At least before the bucket man had come he’d been resigned to his fate. Now he had hope. A foolish hope, no doubt, a hope that threatened to crush him, but a hope nonetheless.

  Every so often, the pain inside him abated. It did so now, leaving him utterly spent. He thought of eating. He knew he should eat. That he needed water as well. But just then all he cared about was closing his eyes and putting the horrors aside for a short while.

  As he lay there, the realm of sleep closing in around him, the screams began again. He couldn’t tell if it was Anila’s voice or not, but in his dreams, she died a thousand deaths.

  Davud woke curled up in a tight ball like an insect waking from its slumber, ready to unfurl and scuttle across the sand. He was hungry. So very hungry. But not for food. The gnawing had grown worse. It clawed at him from the inside, as if it were willing to tear away whatever flesh and bone might stand between it and freedom. In some unknowable way, the gnawing felt deeper, as though it had bored its way into his soul, a thing infinitely more terrifying than mere hunger of the body.

  His lips were dry and cracked. Bleeding, he realized. His breath was shallow and quick, like a heat-struck dog. He knew he should move to the bucket and drink some water. But he didn’t wish to.

  So he lay there, wondering how long it would be.

  And then a new wave struck him so hard he realized that all this time since he’d awoken had been spent in the valleys of his pain, not the heights. The pain so consumed him the world all around turned bright red. He cried out in agony, he was sure, but the only thing he could hear now was a keen ringing.

  On and on it went.

  Until he woke once more. He hadn’t even realized he’d fallen unconscious, but dear gods the pain was worse than it had been the last time he woke. He was going to die in this place. In this deep dark pit hidden away from the world. He’d never see Sharakhai again. Never see Tehla, or mother and father, or Anila. Or Çeda. He would die as Collum had: quietly and unobserved.

  He might try to hang himself, but the twine on the buckets would simply break. He swallowed, and coughed from the tight emptiness in his stomach.

  “Ah,” a voice came from above. “You’re awake.”

  Hamzakiir.

  He’d been so desperate to speak to Hamzakiir, but now the doubts returned. The path that lay before him. The cost in the end.

  “You haven’t been eating.”

  Davud crawled away until his back was pressed against the wall, then he sat up and pulled his knees to his chest. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a strangled rasp. He swallowed again, licked his lips. “I’m not very hungry.”

  “I told you. You don’t have to die down there.”

  He wanted to give a biting r
eply, but his mind was too muddled, and he didn’t have the will in any case. “I can’t simply abandon them,” he said at last. “I couldn’t live with myself.”

  A silence followed that seemed to stretch wider and faster the longer it went. It went on so long Davud thought Hamzakiir had made up his mind and decided to let Davud rot, but just when he was about to call up to him, Hamzakiir broke the silence. “One, you said.”

  He didn’t know what he was talking about at first, but then he remembered his plea, and suddenly his indifference, his doubts, all vanished. “One,” he replied.

  “Which?”

  Gods forgive me. “Her name is Anila.”

  A moment passed, but then Davud heard the rope snaking down once more. It slapped against the stones near his head. “Best to climb out now, before another fit overcomes you.”

  Davud tried, but he could go no more than a few feet before he halted, his arms quivering from the effort. Suddenly he found himself being pulled up, quickly moving up to the top, where Hamzakiir grabbed his clothes and pulled him over the edge.

  He was led, Hamzakiir supporting him, to a high room in the caravanserai. What followed was a day of bright light and pain. He was fed broth, given sweet lemonade laced with peppercorns and mint. What he remembered most, however, was Hamzakiir sitting by his bedside, a short, sharp kenshar in one hand. He used the tip of the kenshar to draw blood from the palm of his hand, which he then used like a painter’s well, dabbing a finger, then applying blood to Davud’s forehead, dabbing, then applying more to his cheeks. On and on it went, Hamzakiir studying Davud like a caring uncle might, one who was tied by blood but not so closely that his emotions overcame him.

  It took hours to complete, some grand work over Davud’s face and chest and arms and legs. It felt as if his entire body was covered with it. And perhaps it was. He’d blacked out several times as relief and pain alternated in strange, unexpected waves.