“How large are the caches?” Meryam asked, standing above him. When Rasul remained silent, Meryam stepped by his side and crouched, taking his jaw in a grip so fierce her knuckles turned white and Rasul’s face pinched in pain. “How much is there?”
Rasul’s throat convulsed. His breath came rabbit quick. He stared into Meryam’s eyes, nostrils flaring, and then the look in his eyes hardened.
“Meryam!” Ramahd called.
Before anyone could react, Rasul had pulled a slim knife from his sleeve and slashed it across Meryam’s body. Meryam warded off the blow with her arms, arching away from Rasul’s swing. Even in the dim light Ramahd could see the depth of the cut Rasul had made across both forearms.
Luken was on him in a blink. Rasul tried the same move with him, but Luken was a fighter, through and through. He pulled back from Rasul’s initial swing, timing his forward momentum to bring one hand against Rasul’s wrist, holding the knife at bay, while the other went to his throat.
“Leave him unharmed!” Meryam called.
They all turned to her. Blood flowed from her wounds, a river that darkened the sleeves of her golden dress. She pulled at her wrists, ripping the buttons away, which clattered to the floor. Pulling the sleeve back, she examined the deep wound along her right forearm, then ran her tongue along the wound. Blood sizzled. Then she turned her attention to her left arm and did the same.
When she was done, her eyes were alive, black jewels in a sea of red. A grim smile lit her pallid face. She took Rasul by the coat and dragged him back to the pillows around the shisha. From the lacquered box she took a fresh hunk of lotus and set it in the shisha’s bowl, and then, leaning close, she blew it a kiss. It flamed like a blossoming rose, petals unfurling, smoke rising, twisting, curling toward the ceiling like the vines of an ivy. She picked up the shisha tube and drew upon it, exhaling toward Rasul, who did nothing to stop it. “Leave us,” she said, the chill of the Austral Sea captured in those two simple words.
Luken and Amaryllis immediately complied, heading for the stairs. Ramahd, however, remained. “Meryam—”
She held the mouthpiece out for Rasul to take. After the briefest of pauses, he took it, a look of cold resignation on his face. Here is the grandson of a Sharakhani King, Ramahd thought, so different from the man who’d entered the room not so long ago.
“I said leave us.”
What could he say? This course had been laid out since the moment he’d poured his own blood down Tariq’s throat. They needed to know what Rasul knew, and giving him back to the Kings was no longer an option. He supposed it never had been. He didn’t wish to see Rasul tortured, or dead, but what would he do about it now?
“Could we not take him back to Qaimir? Use him as a hostage should things go poorly?”
Meryam swiveled her head toward him as Rasul took another draw from the shisha. “Your queen has told you to leave.”
Ramahd held her gaze, but in the end couldn’t maintain it. The hunger in them. The anger. “Of course,” he said, then turned to the stairs.
Golden Rhia, a thin sliver above the city, trekked across the star-filled sky. Those few walking along this narrow, west end street gave little notice to the three of them, especially with Luken watching them like a hungry jackal. They passed Ramahd with the same sort of lotus glow as below in the cellar, but their edges were inked bright blue instead of gold. At first the city—the sound of it, the smell of it, its very corpus—felt as large as the whole of the world, but soon that sense reversed, and the world began to press in, crushing him bit by bit.
Amaryllis watched him silently, to Ramahd looking as though there was ill-intent in those beautiful dark eyes of hers. He knew her to be as loyal as Luken and Tiron, but just then he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was ready to pull a slim knife of her own and thrust it into his heart, so he sent her home to the place she kept near the western harbor. He felt nothing similar from Luken, but the man’s breathing was like a ruddy forge, and Ramahd soon sent him back to the embassy house. He was alone with Sharakhai at last.
Nearby, a rooftop oud began a soulful song, other instruments across the neighborhood picking it up—a flute, a rebab, a tanbur. It quelled the feeling of unease in Ramahd, made him wonder what Meryam might be learning from Rasul. And that in turn made him wonder about Yasmine and Rehann. He’d begun this journey on a quest for revenge, but now that quest—and his promise to his wife and daughter—felt as distant as the stars above. His own quest was now tangled in Meryam’s intricate web to the point that he would assassinate a young Sharakhani lord simply to gain information. Were Yasmine before him now, he didn’t know if he could look her in the eye.
Have you found him, Ramahd? Have you found Macide?
My regrets, dear Yasmine, but I haven’t even come close.
He sat with those thoughts burning inside his gut. At last the music faded. The sounds of the city quelled, became silent, a restless beast lying down for its slumber. An hour passed. Two. His mind cleared, at least enough to speak with Meryam. The sun would soon be brightening the east in any case. They’d have to leave Rasul’s body in a nearby alley—one only a short walk from the most notorious drug den in the west end—before the city woke to witness it.
He took the stairs down to the cellar and its blood-red light to find Rasul lying on the pillows, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, the shisha tube still twined between the fingers of his right hand. The haze of the lotus had dissipated, but the smell lingered. It made Ramahd’s stomach turn, and yet such was the lotus’s lure that it kindled within him a desire to sit and draw on the pipe once more.
Meryam leaned against the back wall, hands behind her back, looking more like a street tough from the Shallows than a queen from Qaimir. “We have a decision to make, Ramahd.”
Ramahd came to a stop just outside the ring of pillows. Rasul lay halfway between them. “What have you learned?”
“Little more than what he told us before you left, but I’m convinced now he was telling the truth. Two Kings are dead, and with one of them their tie to immortality. Now the Moonless Host conspire to rob them of the dwindling remains of King Azad’s work.” She stared down at Rasul, her eyes sharp as broken glass. “We could take this to the Kings. We could give them this information and put a stop to the Moonless Host’s plans. We could serve them Juvaan Xin-Lei on a spit, and likely exact concessions that would keep Qaimir safe for generations.”
“Then why don’t we?”
“Because such concessions would mean little if the slow decay of Sharakhai’s power continues. Juvaan’s queen positions herself. She sits at the edge of the desert like a mountain fox, waiting for the right time to pounce. Kundhun is too disorganized to consider a move for the desert, but we’d be fools not to think Malasan isn’t doing the same as Mirea. I wonder if Queen Alansal knows something we do not, else why have Juvaan take such bold steps in the first place? Perhaps Sharakhai’s fall is closer than we’ve ever guessed. And if that is true, it may not be wise to make bargains with the Kings.”
“We’d be fools to think the Kings are powerless, waiting to be pounced upon by the likes of Queen Alansal.”
In the corner, the lamp flame guttered for a moment, making the shadows sway nauseatingly about the room. “Perhaps there’s a way to learn more.”
“How?”
“Do we not have a friend in the Blade Maidens? One who might share what she’s learned with us?”
“Çeda?”
“Just so.”
At that moment, Ramahd could think of nothing but his pact with Guhldrathen, Çeda’s life in forfeit should they fail to deliver Hamzakiir. And my own blood used to seal the bargain, a thing the beast will surely call upon one day. “What could a Maiden, freshly given her ebon blade, possibly know?”
Meryam chuckled, a sanguineous sound in the blood-red room. “There’s only one way to find out, Ramahd.�
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Chapter 54
ÇEDA WATCHED AS TWO OF THE SPEARS, on Sümeya’s orders, lifted the blackened form of Davud’s friend, Anila, onto a makeshift stretcher. The poor woman moaned as they carried her away, but the sound was akin to a kitten mewling, weak-born and sure to die. Davud looked torn between following Anila and fleeing into the desert. There was still some blood at the corner of his mouth.
Davud, a blood mage . . .
How it had happened, she couldn’t begin to guess, but now was not the time for that tale. “Go to her,” she said to him. “Sit by her side. Comfort her if you can.”
His gaze shifted to Çeda as though he hadn’t realized she was standing there, as though he’d just remembered where he was and all that had happened. “Yes, of course.”
She squeezed his arm. “We’ll speak soon.”
He nodded and walked away.
From the deck of the ship there came a crash, the splintering of wood. Melis and a Silver Spear had finally managed to open the magically bound door leading to the ship’s interior. Crewmen came staggering onto deck, their eyes wide with sober relief.
After motioning Çeda to follow her, Sümeya headed for the ladder leading up to the pier. Together, they made their way onto the ship and belowdecks. Sümeya stopped in the narrow passageway at the base of the stairs. Men were gathered around the captain’s cabin. They made way for her and Çeda. Inside, Aziz lay on the floor, his eyes staring sightlessly at the beautifully worked wood of the cabin’s ceiling. Emre was on his knees near his prone form, his expression one of shock and confusion. Melis—her black robes hopelessly dusted with golden sand—was leaning over Aziz, listening for breath, her fingers placed gently over the veins in his neck.
“What happened?” Çeda asked.
Emre stood slowly. “When the fire came he was ordered here to wait. He was sitting on the captain’s chair”—he pointed uselessly at the chair, which was tipped over and lying in the corner of the cabin—“and he just . . . fell over. Straight onto the floor.”
“He ate nothing?” Sümeya asked. “Drank nothing?”
“Not that I saw,” Emre replied.
Sümeya looked to the Silver Spears, who shook their heads. “We saw nothing, Maiden,” their captain said.
“Here,” Melis called. She lifted Aziz’s right hand and showed them a ring with a hinged lid. Within was a silver thorn with blood and some purple substance coating it. A poisoned ring. All Aziz would need to do was open it and drive the thorn into his skin. “He surely used it here,” Melis said, pointing to a red mark on his palm.
It was in that moment, while everyone was staring at Aziz, that Çeda caught Emre looking at her. It was for a fraction of a second only, the blink of an eye, and no one but Çeda would even recognize it, but Emre was embarrassed. She’d seen the look on his face a hundred times. He’d got better at hiding it over the years, but she still knew.
He was lying. He knew how this had happened. Which could only mean one thing.
Emre had killed him.
They remained in Ishmantep for several days. At Sümeya’s orders, the serai’s shipwrights worked furiously to repair the Javelin. They might have taken another ship, but the ones that had survived the fire were even more damaged than the Javelin. A caravan came in on the second day—three massive ships, slow movers across the sand—and for a time Sümeya debated on commandeering one of them, but in the end she reckoned they’d be better off completing the work on the Javelin and making up the time on the journey.
Sümeya spent her waking hours sifting through Aziz’s records. Melis, Çeda, and Yndris were ordered to search the temple, which was a foul exercise that taught them little they didn’t already know: that Hamzakiir had occupied this place, and had performed grizzly experiments on the collegia scholars to turn them into those unnerving creatures.
“Do they know what’s happened to them?” Yndris said one day as they were searching through the room of stained tables.
“Let us pray that the gods were kind,” Melis said, leaving the rest unsaid.
Çeda did pray. To Bakhi, who may have come to take their souls as they’d changed, and to Thaash for them to find their vengeance if not.
Kameyl threw herself into her assignment: questioning the scarabs of the Moonless Host. She found, however, that they’d arrived only a few days before the Javelin, and that they’d been told little. After two solid days of interrogation, they revealed what Kameyl had already started to believe: that there was a rift in the Moonless Host. There was a power struggle between Macide Ishaq’ava and Hamzakiir over the direction of the Al’afwa Khadar.
Satisfied she’d gotten all she could from the men, Kameyl questioned those who lived in or near the caravanserai. Here too, she learned little, and became so overzealous in her search for anything of substance that Sümeya ordered Melis to replace her. In the end, they merely added to the story the old bookbinder had told them on the day of the attack, stories of Hamzakiir, disguised as Şaban, how he’d arrived, how afterward the pervading mood of industry in the serai had changed to one of uncertainty and fear.
By the time the repairs to the Javelin were complete, Sümeya felt confident they’d found all they were going to find, and she ordered their ship to set sail for Sharakhai; the Kings needed to know what had happened, before Hamzakiir could unleash his plans.
“The question is what Hamzakiir plans to do with them,” Kameyl said that first night on the sands. She wore only her gray shift, which she’d pulled down over her shoulders so Melis, who was sitting on the same cot, could tend Kameyl’s acid-burned skin. Kameyl grimaced as she applied a salve to the angry red flesh on her right arm, where she’d caught the worst of the shamblers’ spray. The wounds were not life-threatening, but they were serious. The acid had burned not only her arm, but her right cheek and neck as well. The skin there was raw, and in the worst places was pocked and ridged like a barren landscape.
“If Emre’s story is to be believed,” Melis said, “they’ll throw themselves against the aqueduct and try to tear them down.” She shrugged. “Now that I’ve seen them with my own eyes, I can’t say I doubt it.”
“They could do that any time they wished,” Kameyl replied, “far out in the desert where we’d never find them.”
“But it isn’t the destruction of the aqueduct they want,” Çeda said, “not truly.” All eyes turned to her. “They wish to strike fear into the hearts of those who love the Kings. They wish everyone to know that they are brave enough to stand against the might of Tauriyat. They wish to lure others to their cause by doing so. And they will if they succeed in their plans, but first, they need to be seen. They need to be heard by all in Sharakhai.”
“Dear gods,” Melis said softly, “where does it end?”
Kameyl immediately pulled away and stared scornfully at Melis. “When the Al’afwa Khadar and their sympathizers lie dead.”
“Of course,” Melis said, motioning for Kameyl to turn back. “It’s only that I feel Sharakhai itself tiring of this fight.”
Yndris lifted her head from her reading of the Kannan. “Find your nerve, woman.”
“Mind your tongue,” Sümeya snapped before Melis could respond. “She has as much nerve as you, young dove. As much as anyone in our order. She’s proven it over and over again. The stories you have to tell, on the other hand, I can tick away on a single hand. Call her woman like that again and I’ll let her take it out on your hide.” Yndris stared with a cold expression, but then went back to her book, and Sümeya turned to Melis. “I feel it as well, the centuries of struggle, the weight on the people’s shoulders, but there is nothing to do but fight. Give the enemy the smallest foothold and they strengthen their position. Give more and they will take the city.”
Çeda nearly said it. The desert cannot sustain your war forever. Speak with the Host. There must be a path to peace. But it would be the height of fool
ishness with Yndris present. And Kameyl would never listen to her words.
Sümeya had surprised her, though. Çeda had never thought to see her bend. Then again, she’d never thought to see the First Warden lost in love.
Love breeds weakness, she could hear Yndris saying.
No, Çeda would say in return, love breeds life.
Melis continued her ministrations. Scars of every shape and size marked her body. A long, ragged gash across her ribs; three claw marks that ran like furrows down the back of one shoulder, several puckered kisses along her stomach and another in the meat of her right arm; a rounded lump on her elbow that looked as though something had grown beneath the skin. A dozen others, small and large, faded and fresh. They told Kameyl’s stories—told them well—but so did the intricate tattoos over her arms, across her upper chest, across the entirety of her back. Intricate, scrolling designs and images that, along with the scars, told of a life filled with pain and will and passion that knew no bounds. Where would the Kings be without their Maidens?
Oddly, those born near Tauriyat laughed at the tales laid out on the skin of those who emigrated from the desert, considering them unworthy of the Amber Jewel. Those very same people would beam with pride when the first of their daughters’ tattoos was inked on the back of their sword hand, and again as more tales were added. Kameyl’s recorded the battles she’d fought, the enemies she’d sent to the grave. But they also spoke of her loves. A vine-like design that wrapped around her right arm, around her biceps and shoulder, was a poem Kameyl herself had written, a counterpoint to the hard life she led and an indicator to the gods the things she loved most so that they might choose an appropriate place for her in the farther fields.
“May I?” Çeda asked, motioning to Kameyl’s arm as Melis began wrapping fresh bandages around her midriff.
Kameyl stared flatly into Çeda’s eyes, but then nodded, twisting her arm this way and that to allow Çeda to see the words.
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