Is impossible, Willem corrected himself.
No. If he wanted, he could override Nebahat’s spell. Wasn’t that what he’d always told himself? He could. He could reach out and he could touch Altan, and Altan would wake from this spell and everything would be well again. The two of them would return to Altan’s dorm room and hold one another until the sun rose, and then they’d figure out what to do about Nebahat. And Willem wouldn’t have to say a word. Who needed to talk when saving someone’s life was the most personal form of communication of all?
As they neared the edge of the collegia grounds, Willem’s face screwed up with purpose. He swallowed hard, stretched one arm out, his fingers close to Altan’s elbow.
Grip his arm, Willem screamed from within. With one touch he’ll be freed!
And yet his hand remained a whisper away from the simple flaxen fabric of Altan’s robe. Then Altan was beyond the grounds and onto the lizard-skin cobbles of the old city streets, while Willem’s footsteps slowed and halted on the esplanade’s fine gravel border.
He stood there a long, long while, tears streaming down his face. Please come back.
What were his thoughts, though, but dust on the wind? Altan strode onward, into the night, unaware that Willem had ever existed, the glimmering around him dimming, dimming, until it was lost altogether.
Chapter 8
AT THE PEAK of a crescent-shaped dune, Brama sat cross-legged, in plain view of Sharakhai’s northern harbor a half-league distant. The city’s western face was awash in the glow of sunset. The rest lay in shadow, a mismatched collection of gray and onyx blocks. In the east, Rhia hung low, a coin of beaten, weathered brass. Tulathan would soon follow her sister, and together they would begin their trek across the heavens. Beht Zha’ir had returned to Sharakhai, and it made Brama wonder what it would be like without the asirim.
Across his lap lay a short spear, the very one Mae had given him, the one he’d used to slay the ehrekh, Behlosh. It was a mundane weapon, and yet somehow it had always acted as a focus for Brama, allowing him to harness the bone of Raamajit’s power, trapped below the scarred skin of his forehead.
“I wish you lying down,” Mae said beside him. She lay on her stomach on the dune’s leeward side, a spyglass held to one eye.
“I told you. They can’t see me.”
“I know you say. But it’s making me nervous.”
A sudden gust of wind sent a scouring of sand over Mae, forcing her to duck her face. The sand didn’t touch Brama. It worked its way around him, as was his will.
“I don’t like touching the sand sometimes,” he said. “I feel too much.”
It nearly overwhelmed him at times. It was Rümayesh’s presence, he knew. She’d found a way to become a part of him, or make him a part of her—he wasn’t sure which. It infuriated him, the loss of control. It made him feel desperate. In the weeks after it had happened he would be taken by violent urges that became so intense he wanted to rend, to kill, just so he could sate it. He’d never given in, but several times it had been a near thing. He’d resorted to hiding himself in the desert until the urges passed. Thankfully they’d diminished since then.
Brama was nothing if not a realist. As much as Rümayesh still haunted his dreams, the wish to be parted from her had been reduced to a passing fancy.
In the distance, a figure approached, little more than a wavering black flame.
“She come,” Mae said.
“I know.” Brama had sensed the woman’s departure from Sharakhai. He’d not told Mae, though. He liked experiencing her excitement when she spotted such things.
I feel you growing tired of her, spoke the voice inside his head.
Be quiet, replied Brama.
The feeling will only grow. Soon you won’t be able to stomach it.
I said be quiet.
By the time the woman—one of Queen Alansal’s spies in the city—arrived, night had fallen. The moons cast the city in ghostly relief. In months past, the asirim’s cries would have filled the night. The asirim would have already been on their way to Sharakhai to collect the tributes marked by Sukru’s whip. But Sukru was dead and the asirim had been freed by Çeda and the thirteenth tribe.
Sharakhai is changing, Brama. We could do so much more than this. We could be a part of that change.
Brama glanced toward Mae, who just then was approaching her queen’s spy, a wisp of a woman. Mae spoke with her in rapid Mirean. After what looked like a particularly sharp exchange, the spy handed Mae a wooden scroll case—maps of the city’s caverns, made in anticipation of Alansal’s coming offensive on the city.
Brama wanted to deny Rümayesh’s words. More and more he wondered why he remained with Queen Alansal, but then Mae glanced back at him. It’s because of her, Brama told himself. Who else would have remained a steadfast friend to the likes of you?
I would, cooed Rümayesh. What need have you of some simple villager from Mirea?
Brama scoffed. Mae might have been a simple villager once, but she was a qirin warrior now, a protector of her queen. And then Brama realized. Rümayesh was jealous of Mae.
He was about to comment on it when he sensed another approaching: a man, moving vaguely toward them. It was strange, though. Despite passing only a few dozen yards from their position, the newcomer never once looked their way. He wore the robes of a collegia student, Brama could see now. Whether it meant anything or not, he wasn’t sure.
Mae and the spy finally spotted him, and both ducked down behind a dune. Brama, meanwhile, picked up his spear and trailed after him. Mae immediately caught up to Brama and tugged on his arm. The flare of anger that rose up inside him was so strong he found himself ripping his arm away and summoning power through the spear. Mae stared back, fearless, while Brama breathed deeply, slowly calming himself.
He was horrified at how close he’d come to using his power on her, at how quickly it had happened. It was happening more and more of late, any small annoyance or impatience leading to instant rage or hatred or a simple will to inflict pain. Each of those moments was like the blow of a battering ram against the walls he’d built against Rümayesh. When those walls fell, and they would eventually, she would gain dominance over him once more.
Before the dark urges intensified, Brama touched the lump on his forehead. There, beneath a meshwork of scars, lay the bone of Raamajit the Exalted, a thing of immense power. In a fever dream following the death of the ehrekh, Behlosh, he’d cut a slit along his own forehead and held the blackened bone to the wound, at which point his skin had regrown, subsuming the artifact whole. Or so Mae had told him; Brama didn’t remember any of it. He touched upon that power now, separating himself from Rümayesh so that his will would reign supreme.
Recognizing how dangerous things had just become, Mae sent the spy away, urging her to move with haste with several flicks of her hand, an order the spy seemed only too happy to obey. As the sound of her retreat dwindled, Mae stared at Brama, watching his movements carefully. She was aware of Rümayesh’s growing influence, but chose to remain silent about it. Instead, she motioned to the desert. “Come, Brama. We go now. We return to Alansal.”
“Go if you wish,” Brama said, and resumed his steps in the wake of the collegia student, who continued his steady march toward the blooming fields.
Mae followed Brama with a look suggesting she was angry with herself for doing so. “Whoever he is, he is of no matter to our queen.”
“Your queen,” Brama corrected.
Much may have changed about Beht Zha’ir, but one thing hadn’t. The adichara trees were still aglow, their blooms full, blue diamonds spilled over a glooming streak of kohl. With the buzz of the rattlewings sounding in the distance, the man lost himself within the nearest of the groves.
Brama and Mae followed. The branches around them clattered and clacked, not from the wind but from some arcane animus woven into them by Tul
athan when she’d planted them four centuries earlier. Eventually they reached a misshaped clearing. Curiously, the student had come to a stop before a tree that stood out from the rest. Its boughs drooped. Few leaves adorned the branches. Its blooms were dimmer than those of its neighbors. It looked diseased. Dying.
The young man, transfixed, took slow steps toward it, offering himself to the tree. Had Brama been in his right mind, he might have tried to stop him, but Rümayesh’s influence was on him now, his will to experience death strong, so he merely stared.
“No!” screamed Mae, coming to the same realization a heartbeat too late.
She dashed forward, but the man was already stepping into the tree, the tortured limbs curling around him like a child finding a toy thought lost forever.
Despite Brama’s growing numbness to the frailties of mortal man, there was something about Mae that always reminded him of who he really was. Just as Mae had sensed the danger to the student, Brama now sensed the danger to her.
“Stop, Mae!” When she continued, he pointed his spear and sent a powerful gust of wind against her. Blown by the wind, she stumbled backward, which gave Brama the time he needed to grab her arm. “The thorns,” he told her. “Their poison is deadly.”
But Mae wasn’t having it. One moment, she was staring in impotence as the branches tightened and the young man screamed, and the next, she was drawing her sword and hacking at the branches. But the adichara groves held many hidden dangers. The branches of other, nearby trees curled down, stretching, reaching for Mae as if trying to protect their sister.
“The thorns, Mae!”
He grabbed her again, and this time Mae relented and let herself be led toward safety. It was in that moment that the diseased tree wrapped a branch around the student’s throat. His screams became wet gasps, then stopped altogether. He thrashed a while longer, making the tree rattle all the more, then he and the tree both went still. The man’s blood, dark under the light of the blooms, stained his flaxen robes, dripped down along the branches, guiding it toward the adichara’s trunk. The blood glistened as runnels formed, more and more of it coursing down toward the sand, toward the tree’s roots.
As the sand drank the blood, Brama’s eyes fluttered closed at the heady feeling of the student’s soul crossing to the land beyond. He felt the touch of the farther fields, however briefly, and it filled both him and Rümayesh with light. For once, Rümayesh was silent. She basked in it.
And then a wondrous thing happened. One by one, the tree’s blooms, already dimmer than those on the neighboring trees, winked out. When the last one had been extinguished, the tree’s branches went lax, and the blooms of the nearby trees dimmed, as if in its death the diseased tree had somehow infected the others. Brama was just beginning to wonder if the effect would be permanent, if the other trees would die the same death as this one had, when Mae rounded on him.
“You let him die!” she shouted.
Brama didn’t know what to say. He felt as if he were just waking from a spell.
Mae poked him in the chest. “You let him die!”
“You and your queen are preparing an assault on Sharakhai. Why would you care about a lone collegia student?”
“I fight for my queen. Together we fight for the greater glory of our land. But I do not revel in death, Brama. I do not revel in seeing innocents die.” She looked him up and down. “That what you are now. You her, not the Brama I knew.”
She wanted him to defend himself, but what could he say? She wasn’t completely right, but she wasn’t far off the mark, either.
Mae stalked off, and Brama let her go. The thought of Mae leaving him, of his being alone with Rümayesh, made him feel as if he were tipping over a precipice he’d never return from, but for the moment he was too intrigued by the mystery of the student.
He was a tribute, Brama thought. With the asirim gone, someone is sending fresh tributes to the blooming fields.
As he stepped toward the dimmed adichara, the soft clatter of the nearby branches enveloped him. He crouched and touched one finger to the blood along the base of the trunk. He opened himself to the blood’s journey. He felt the adichara’s roots sink down, felt them join with others, then combine and recombine as they led inexorably toward the city.
“You coming?” Mae asked from beyond the edge of the grove.
“Mae, I need to show you something.”
Silence.
“Please, Mae. Your queen will want to know about this.”
After a long pause, she returned to the clearing. Brama pointed the tip of his spear at the base of the adichara, and a strong wind blew. Both sand and stone were blasted away, exposing more and more of the adichara’s trunk. Roots were revealed, then something smooth and rounded buried beneath the roots. More earth lifted. A skull was revealed. Then the jagged vertebrae of a spine. Rows of ribs and the axehead shapes of two shoulder blades followed. Soon half the body had been excavated, along with the cocoon-like mesh of tree roots that encased it.
As Mae stared at the body, understanding dawned. “The trees. They eat the people.”
“In a way, yes. The branches kill them if they’re not already dead, but either way the roots draw them down into the earth and feast upon their remains.”
Mae stared warily at the adichara. Her eyes shifted to the collegia student and the shriveled branches of the tree that had killed him. “It fail to pull him down because it die. That’s what you thinking.”
“I suspect so. But why?”
“And who send him to a tree full of disease?”
“Precisely. It may have to do with the offensive your queen is planning. I want to look into it, Mae. I want to find out who’s doing it and why.”
“Speak it plainly. What do you wish to do?”
“I want to search the blooming fields for more clues. Look for more offerings. Let’s you and I circle the city and find the truth of it.”
Mae considered the adichara, then stared deeply into Brama’s eyes. Her gaze slipped briefly to his forehead, and her look softened. “Very well, Brama,” she said. “We look, we find more, then return to our queen, yes?”
Brama smiled. “Yes, I promise.”
Over the course of the following days, they wandered from grove to grove, cataloguing the trees’ many horrors. Again and again they found corpses, each having been recently killed, squeezed to death by an adichara, and in each case the tree appeared to be dead and the surrounding trees unhealthy.
To his surprise, Brama sensed a handful of asirim beneath the adichara. They were shriveled, curled up like lost children, too weak to heed whatever call had drawn the rest away.
On the third night, they made camp as usual. Brama had fallen asleep near Mae beside a small fire but woke standing, mere paces from one of the dead trees.
Brama blinked, unable to comprehend what had happened or how he’d suddenly found himself standing before the horrific tableau arrayed before him. The tribute, an old man with dark hair and a trim beard, had been slit open at the belly. His entrails, as if displayed in a depraved sausage maker’s shop, hung not only from the dead tree but from others nearby. Ancient runes were carved in the man’s skin. Covering the stone near his naked feet were more dark signs, sigils of power that granted insight to those who could read them.
Brama shivered as he took in the grisly scene.
He was already dead, Rümayesh purred.
Of course Rümayesh had used his dead body. She’d wanted answers. She wanted to understand what was happening to the trees and who was sending the tributes to the blooming fields. It wasn’t the fact that she’d used a dead man’s viscera to scry into the future that so unnerved Brama—he was just as curious as she was to find answers. What unnerved him was realizing that, having seen all this, he knew how to do it. The meaning of it, the results of Rümayesh’s divination, lay just out of reach, but he was certain
that if he’d been awake during the ritual, he would know. Day by day, moment by moment, he was becoming more like her.
This is who we are now, Rümayesh said.
“No!” Brama touched the lump on his forehead. “This isn’t who I am!”
Viciously angry that she’d managed to gain dominance over their shared form, he pushed her down harder than he had in months. When he was done, he was shaking, sweating. He turned to find Mae standing at the gap between the trees that led to open sand.
“Brama?” She stared at the grisly scene with horror-filled eyes. She had a bow in her hands, a diamond-tipped arrow nocked.
He didn’t know what to say. Neither, apparently, did Mae. She studied him with a stunned expression, her arrow still trained on him, but said nothing as he walked past her into the desert, well beyond their camp. He lay on the cold sand that night, shivering, welcoming the strangely grounding touch of the sand against his skin. He didn’t sleep at all. He was too afraid of what would happen if he did. He was too afraid of what Rümayesh had found in the entrails.
You have but to ask, Brama.
Brama’s spear lay by his side, both a symbol of, and a talisman against, his worst fears. He thought again of taking it up, of using the power of the bone to try to cut his soul from Rümayesh’s. But found that he couldn’t. In the days after waking to his new reality, he’d tried and failed many times. In all likelihood he’d fail again. When he did, it might give Rümayesh dominance over him forever.
No, a voice whispered to him. And this time it wasn’t Rümayesh’s voice that spoke, but his own. You won’t do it because you’re afraid it will work. You’re afraid you’ll die if we’re parted. It’s a coward’s choice you make.
Turning away from the spear, Brama pulled himself into a ball, much as the asirim did deep beneath the adichara. The wind, meanwhile, whistled over the dunes, Coward, coward, coward.
Chapter 9
MERYAM’S HEART SEEMED to stop when she saw Yasmine’s abductor back calmly through a hedge and out of the maze, dragging Yasmine with him. Crushed gravel bit into the soles of Meryam’s feet as she sprinted after them. She reached the hedge and forced her way through, heedless of the branches scraping her skin.
When Jackals Storm the Walls Page 10