“A short while ago the blood mage, Hamzakiir, escaped this caravanserai on two ships, and unless I’m sadly mistaken he took your fellow scholars with him.”
“Took them where?”
“The gods only know. Now stand aside. There’ll be time for us to speak when this is done.”
Davud could see in the way Anila walked numbly away from the ship that she was crushed. She stared at the sand, then looked up to the caravanserai’s arched gateway as if she were ready to walk into the desert, and keep walking until it claimed her for its own.
They’d failed. They’d risked so much, flown across the desert, and they’d failed. They’d missed their friends, those they’d vowed to help, by a mere hour. He’d had it in his power to see them here faster, but he’d withheld it until it was too late.
He knew he should feel every bit as crushed as Anila, but there was a part of him that felt only relief. To come face to face with Hamzakiir again so soon . . . It would have been their downfall. Or if not his—Hamzakiir had taken some strange liking to Davud, after all—then certainly Anila’s. Had they come and thrown themselves against Hamzakiir and his men in hope of saving their fellow scholars, a task that seemed doomed from the start, Hamzakiir would have killed her, if only to give Davud another object lesson.
Grief warred with relief warred with worry as the thud from the axes and the shouting from within the ship entered his awareness once more. He stared up at the fire. As did Anila. Then they looked at each other, and without another word being spoken, Anila stepped toward him, baring her arm, while Davud drew his knife.
If they couldn’t save their friends—the young men and women they’d learned with, cried with, rejoiced with—then by the gods they could save the people on this ship who might in turn help them gain their revenge. Davud pressed his knife once more into Anila’s arm. He bled her more than their first time by the fire, more than the second time as the Burning Sand chased them down. Again he put his lips to the wound and partook of her blood. Perhaps it was because he was becoming used to it, perhaps it was because he was less scared, perhaps it was even Anila lowering her defenses, the two of them sharing in their sadness; whatever the case, this time was vastly different from the other two. The warmth of Anila’s blood, of her body and soul, filled him. The slickness of it against her skin felt heady. It bordered on the erotic, to take this from a woman he’d lusted after and do so much with the lifeblood she’d given to him willingly. By Goezhen’s sweet kiss the very taste was more delicious than anything he’d ever consumed.
Though he’d felt powerful when he’d managed to hold the fire in his hands that night alone with Anila, it had been nothing compared to the intoxicating violence of summoning the gale he’d driven against the Burning Sand. But neither could hold a candle to what he felt now. He felt invincible. A god in his own right.
He turned to face the fire. He didn’t need the sigil drawn upon his palms or chest. He needed only blood and his own will. He spread his hands wide. He felt the kiss of fire against his skin, felt its contours as it licked the deck of the ship. As he’d done with the fire in the desert, he made it turn, made it spin like a gyre in the sea. It spun now, on an unseen axis of his own making.
The warden of the Blade Maidens turned to him. She called to him, eyes bright with worry. Another Maiden called his name. A woman he’d known when he was younger. He could no longer recall her name, for he was someone else now. He was somewhere else. There was only him, the fire, and Anila, standing in the cradle of the world.
As the fire continued to spin, he drew upon it. Like fresh clay on a wheel he pulled it upward, willing it away from the ship, commanding it to burn the sky instead of this ship that sailed the sands. And it obeyed. It did as he asked. But it left something in its wake. A cold the likes of which he’d never known. A cold that was wider than the desert sky, deep as night, and hungry. Gods, so very hungry. It clawed at him. Scratched. It wanted.
He scrabbled to control it, to force it away while compelling the fire to heed his will. He tried do both, but it only made it all the worse. Pain filled him. He was caught between pure cold and elemental fire. He wasn’t ready for this. He should never have tried. And now that he was in the middle of it, he didn’t know how to get out again.
They need you, came a voice, though who it was referring to he wasn’t sure. So many depended on him. Lives were at stake.
Gods, how stupid he’d been. He should never have listened to Anila. He should have forced her to take the skiff to Sharakhai, not Ishmantep. And now they were both going to die because of his weakness.
You must choose.
But how could he? His fears were giving life to new fears, and those compounded further. They mixed with the growing pain, until he no longer knew who he was. Or where. Or why any of this was happening. It was so like those pain-filled days in the darkened pit when the change was upon him. He thought he’d returned there.
“Release me,” he screamed. “Release me and I’ll give you anything you want!”
But it didn’t. It wouldn’t. He was trapped.
He scrabbled away. He scratched and clawed. He heard himself scream. Or was that another?
Finally his world tilted. Something hard struck him from behind. In the sky, orange flame swirled, just as it had in the palm of his hand in the desert, but no sooner had this registered than the cloud above him burst. Flame spread outward like a convocation of starlings, thinning, thinning, until all that was left was a swath of dark black smoke that turned the sun a ruddy orange.
The sound of the world crumbling began to dim. He was returned to himself at last. Lifting his head, he saw others standing nearby. The Blade Maidens. Silver Spears. Others who lived . . . Gods, where was he? It came a moment later. Ishmantep.
He stood and saw the results of what he’d done. The cutter, while still smoking, was no longer aflame. He’d done it. He’d done it! And yet no one was looking at the ship. They were looking at something behind him.
With rapidly growing dread, he turned. Curled in a ball, several paces away, was the form of a woman.
“Anila?” Bakhi’s bright hammer, smoke was rolling off her in waves. No, he realized as he dropped to his knees by her side, not smoke. It was a fog of cold. “Anila, can you hear me?”
Slowly, quivering like a newborn doe, she rolled toward him. Davud couldn’t help it. He gasped. Her skin. It was puffy and blistered and black. Along the backs of her hands where the skin had split, blood slowly oozed. “Oh gods, what have I done?”
“Wuh . . . What . . . What happened, Davud?” He could barely understand her, so garbled were her words. “Did . . . Did we finish it?”
He touched her shoulder, hoping to console her, but he snatched his hand away when she grimaced and recoiled from his touch. “We did,” he whispered to her. “We saved them all.”
“That’s good,” she said weakly. Like a child lost in the wilderness, a child who’d given up all hope of ever being found, her body settled back into its previous position. “That’s good.”
As the fog continued to roll off her form, he knew with certainty she was going to die. She was going to die, and it was his fault.
Chapter 53
WHEN HE HEARD THE RATTLE of a wagon rolling up outside the small room in Sharakhai’s west end, Ramahd pulled a chunk of a dark brown substance from a lacquered wooden box and set it into the bowl of the shisha sitting beside him. The floor was layered in dark carpets. Pillows surrounded the shisha. A lone lantern rested on a table in the corner, shrouded in red veils, casting the entire room in a bleak, bloody pall.
Using a brand from a nearby brazier, Ramahd lit the contents of the bowl, then blew on it. The dark substance lit, but not hungrily. It was a slow burn, a subtly eager burn, as if it knew all too well the sort of night that lay ahead. As the door opened at the top of the stairs, Ramahd drew a long breath from one of the three shisha
tubes. He tasted the bittersweet smoke, filled his lungs with it, which in turn brought his memories of using lotus rushing back to him. He hadn’t lied when he’d told Lord Rasul he was no stranger to the kiss of the black lotus. He’d used it more times than he cared to admit after Yasmine’s and Rehann’s deaths. There were times he yearned for it still, especially when he felt he was no closer to avenging their deaths than he was when he’d crawled back to Qaimir along with the other survivors of the Bloody Passage.
He would not have wished to do so now, but this was for Meryam and her plans. This was a necessary part of the story they were laying before Rasul lest he suspect something and bolt like a desert hare. It was necessary. But the touch of the black . . . It was so very, very lovely. An old friend come calling. Well, Ramahd thought, a duplicitous friend, perhaps, but a welcome one this night, for there is dark business afoot.
Two sets of footsteps descended the stairs. A form darkened the room’s entryway at its base. Lord Rasul, grandson of King Kiral, stared about in confusion. He wore the same fine clothes as earlier that night at the Qaimiri embassy house. He wore no knife, no short sword, as some of the nobles seemed to be favoring of late.
“Welcome,” Ramahd said, motioning Rasul closer. “Come. Sit.”
Filtering down the stairwell from above came the sound of clopping hooves, the wheels of a wagon clattering away. As the sounds dwindled and were lost altogether, Rasul stepped into the room. Amaryllis, who had accompanied him down the stairs, stepped past the young lord of Sharakhai and made her way to the ring of pillows circling the shisha. She wore a fine purple dress, almost black in the red light. She was a sight, Ramahd had to admit, a loyal blade to the throne of Qaimir. Her unbound hair swept across one shoulder and down her chest as she sat and took up one of the three tubes snaking out from the shisha, not as if it were an old friend, but a friend she’d never left.
Rasul stared at the rising smoke as though it were a dead body. “Lord Amansir, what is the meaning of this?” He said the words with only a hint of anger. More noticeable by far were the notes of confusion and curiosity. Promising, Ramahd thought.
From the shisha, Amaryllis drew two short breaths then one long, all the while staring at Rasul with her dark, languid eyes.
“I asked for the meaning of this,” Rasul said, his tone more biting. He tried to hold Ramahd’s gaze, but his attention continued to drift sidelong toward Amaryllis.
Ramahd took another draw from his shisha pipe; it joined his first like a new voice in a rapidly growing choir. As he blew smoke into the air, the rattle of a chain came from the next room. A muffled call followed, as of someone gagged and calling for help. It sounded strangely distant, though, as if it were happening deep in the desert, not here in Sharakhai. The lotus, toying with him already, Ramahd knew.
Ramahd motioned calmly to the pillows. “Why don’t you sit?”
Rasul stood his ground, but he swallowed. Licked his lips while glancing at the doorway over Ramahd’s shoulder, the source of the sounds. Here is a young man wholly out of his element. Ramahd almost felt sorry for him.
“You have what we need, then?” Rasul asked, glancing toward the back of the room.
“We have not yet begun the questioning,” Amaryllis said. As the rattle came again, she offered the mouthpiece of the shisha tube. “But we have time yet. Come, my lord.”
Rasul ignored her, now wholly fixed on Ramahd, as if he knew that to even look at the shisha, or Amaryllis, would be his undoing. Ramahd held his gaze evenly as the muffled sounds came a third time. It was a sad moan, of a will nearly destroyed. Ramahd tilted his head back toward the doorway behind him. “If you must know, this is business I’m not yet ready to conduct.” He drew another long breath, blew gray smoke toward the ceiling of the red room.
Colors began to shift. The edges of the table, the veil around the lantern, Rasul himself, took on a molten yellow glow, as if they’d been forged anew and borne down from the sun by Thaash himself. Ramahd turned, feeling the characteristic daze, like the feeling one has in a waterborne ship as the waves churn and the ship rocks. He poured three glasses of araq. Handed one to Amaryllis, who took a long swallow, eyes closed as if it were the sweetest taste in all the world. He poured another and placed it near the shisha where Rasul would sit if he so chose. A third he poured for himself, and drank. A syrupy liquid redolent of fire and smoke and leather, with a bright, coppery finish that tasted of anise and some unknown fruit the gods themselves would surely declare perfect.
He stared at the glass awhile, savoring the aftertaste. Exactly when Rasul had decided to join him he wasn’t sure, but he was now sitting to Ramahd’s left, taking the glass of araq in one hand and staring at it as if it were a woman, he an untested boy. It glinted blood red in the lantern light. Rasul downed it in one sudden swallow, then took up the shisha tube Amaryllis held for him. He stared into Amaryllis’s eyes as he drew from it, a short breath first, and then a much longer one. His eyelids fluttered while Amaryllis watched, sharing with him the darkest of smiles, the lure of a demon in the night.
The three of them continued like this for some time. Ramahd poured araq. They drank. They smoked. Amaryllis moved around the table to sit next to Rasul. She leaned in to him, whispered words Ramahd couldn’t hear. She ran fingers through his hair, kissed his neck. Rasul did not stop her.
When Ramahd finally noted the look in his eye—the one that told him he was now journeying to another place—he said, “Sharakhai is a wonder, is it not?”
Rasul, running his hand up Amaryllis’s leg, swung his head slowly toward him. “It is.”
“I weep,” Ramahd continued, forcing himself to concentrate on what he needed lest he become as lost as Rasul, “when I see what the Moonless Host have done to it.”
Rasul touched his forehead to Amaryllis’s. He leaned in and kissed her on the lips. “As do I. I can only imagine what it must have been like.”
“My lord?”
“The Bloody Passage.”
The lotus was carrying Ramahd away. He’d nearly lost track of his purpose here, so bewitching was the symphony now playing within him. But those words . . . “What did you say?”
“The Bloody Passage,” Rasul said. “It must have been terrible.”
A woman sprinting across golden sand. An arrow taking her in the ribs as a line of desert men watch.
His wife, lost to the Moonless Host. To Macide. The vision of his wife’s death—now seen in crystal clarity—drew him back to his purpose like reins on a willful horse.
“Those were difficult days,” Ramahd said. “Days which have grown worse as the Host closes in.”
“The Host does not close in. We will stop their every move.”
Ramahd nodded, granting him the point though it was as foolish as the emperor from the children’s rhymes who demands the wind stop blowing, the sea stop churning. When the sounds of struggle came again from the next room, it sounded like dozens had been caught and chained, ready for torture. The walls seemed to lean in and listen as Ramahd spoke again. “I’m most pleased Qaimir could help in some small way, my lord, before the caches had been compromised.”
Amaryllis raked her fingers through Rasul’s short hair, making furrows that quickly disappeared. “What caches?” she asked while planting kisses along his neck.
“The elixirs,” Rasul replied breathily.
She drew his head into her hands, then kissed him on the lips, a long, sensuous thing. She pulled him away, stared deeply into his eyes. “Elixirs, my lord?”
“The draughts,” he said. “Those that grant the Kings long life.”
Amaryllis laughed, as if Rasul were but a boy who knew nothing of life in the desert. “My lord, it was the gods who granted them long life.”
Rasul shook his head, leaning in for another kiss. “The gods granted Azad the ability to make elixirs. It’s the elixirs that grant them their immortalit
y.”
Ramahd blinked slowly. He took in the contents of this ruddy, rusty room anew as a strange elation welled up from somewhere deep inside him.
Elixirs . . .
Elixirs that grant the Kings their immortality.
In a moment of crystalline clarity, he knew that this was what Juvaan had been searching for, what he hoped to feed to the Moonless Host, thereby weakening the Kings. And in turn, it was what the Kings wanted so desperately to hide. But . . .
“Why would the Host care?” he asked, forgetting in his lotus haze that Amaryllis was supposed to lead the questioning. “The Kings could simply make more.”
“Not without Azad,” Rasul said. “And Azad is dead, fallen to an assassin’s blade.”
The emotions that struck Ramahd were so fierce his eyes closed and his head reared back. Could it be? Another King, fallen?
Movement came from Ramahd’s right. In the doorway stood Tiron’s younger brother, Luken—the source of the false moaning, the rattling of unbound chains. Before him stood Meryam, wearing the raiment of a Qaimiri queen. Ramahd could only stare, so intent was she. Amaryllis, however, broke away from Rasul and backed away at Meryam’s approach.
Meryam ignored them both, focusing solely on Rasul. “Azad is dead?”
Confusion plain on his face, Rasul looked from Ramahd to Amaryllis, then back at Meryam, who stood before him like a queen of the dead. “Yes.” He seemed to know it was something he should not reveal, but Meryam was an unstoppable force.
“And now,” she said, “three caches remain. Three stores of the elixirs that preserve the Kings like milk from Rhia’s teat.”
Rasul backed away from Meryam like a scuttling crab, as if he knew he should leave this place, knew that he’d made a terrible mistake by coming here. Luken stepped past them all and placed himself in the passageway leading to the stairs, cutting off Rasul’s lone means of escape. Rasul watched him go, his look of fearful defiance crumbling to one of simple desperation. “Please. I’ll do you no harm. We are allies!”
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