When Jackals Storm the Walls

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  Frail Lemi, meanwhile, had gone stone still, his gaze distant, as if he were still trying to piece together the facts.

  Hamid unstrapped the buckler from his belt and fitted it over his left hand. Emre did the same, and the two of them met at the center of the circle. The crowd closed in. Hundreds gathered on the ships, watching from the gunwales. There were men, women, and children of every age; some held young ones to their chests as they waited.

  Shaikh Neylana raised her arms and turned slowly, taking in the entire assemblage. “Two enter the arena. One leaves, the other will be given back to the desert.” She faced Emre and Hamid. “May the gods have mercy on your souls.” With that she clapped three times. Around them, the warriors began to thump the butt of their spears onto the sand, creating a strange, rolling rhythm.

  “Better if you’d gone back to Sharakhai,” Hamid said, soft enough that only Emre could hear.

  “I couldn’t live with myself, knowing the man who attempted to murder me was still free,” Emre replied as he gripped his own buckler.

  “It was conquest, Emre.”

  “It was cowardice.”

  “Well, we’ll see who’s a coward now.”

  Hamid rushed in, sword flashing. Emre blocked him, backing away, hoping Hamid might use up a bit of his nervous energy. But Hamid was relentless. He pushed Emre to the edge of the arena, and when the warriors crossed their spears and shoved Emre back, he kept up the pressure, raining his sword down against Emre’s shamshir or his shield.

  It was all Emre could do to keep from losing a limb. He’d tried to practice, hoping the debilitating headaches would fade in time. And they had, somewhat, just not enough.

  Even now Emre could feel it, a weakness in his limbs, a creeping pain at the back of his skull. Calm, Emre thought. Calm. It was the only thing that had helped. But with his heart beating so madly, all his attempts at finding a place of peace were failing.

  Hamid hammered his sword against Emre’s buckler, then backed away. “You’re not yourself, Emre.”

  Hamid bulled forward, forcing Emre to retreat. When he tried the same move, Emre sidestepped and drove Hamid’s sword to one side. When Hamid did it a third time, he discovered it was all a setup. When Emre parried and riposted with a sharp flick of his blade, Hamid blocked it easily and brought his sword against Emre’s shield like a battering ram. The blow was so fierce it made his arm go numb.

  Emre rushed forward before Hamid could get another blow in, and the two of them locked swords.

  “You’ve lost a step,” Hamid said, then crashed his forehead against Emre’s.

  Emre’s skull flared with bright white pain, a perfect echo to the blow Darius had delivered to the back of his head with the shovel. Dazed, he staggered backward. He tried to keep his sword and shield at the ready, but he was shaking so badly it felt comical. Hamid stared for a moment, wary, as if it were all some ruse. Emre, meanwhile, couldn’t seem to keep his balance and fell backward onto the sand with a heavy thud.

  As the spears thumped in a rhythm that made Emre nauseous, Hamid strode calmly forward, his look half confusion, half disgust. “I don’t know what you were thinking,” he said, “but I’ll thank Bakhi for it later.”

  He raised his sword to strike, but just then a soul-wrenching roar rose up along the edge of the circle. Men shouted. Hamid turned. Then a massive form came flying in and caught Hamid around the middle.

  Down they went, Hamid and Frail Lemi. Hamid tried to fight him off, but he stood no chance against Frail Lemi. In moments Frail Lemi was straddling him, bringing his pair of ham-hock fists crashing down against Hamid’s face over and over and over again.

  “You tried to kill him!” Lemi cried. “You tried to kill him!”

  Emre had never seen Frail Lemi so angry. His face was splotched with red. And his eyes. Gods, his eyes made him look like he’d been crafted of flesh and fury by the hand of Thaash himself. The sun shone off his corded muscles as his long, powerful arms rose and fell.

  Warriors swarmed, trying to pull him off, but Lemi shoved them away. Only with half a dozen working together were they finally able to drag him back.

  “I’ll kill you, Hamid! You hear me? I’ll fucking kill you!”

  Hamid had long since fallen unconscious.

  Emre managed to push himself up so that he could sit and breathe and wait for the shaking to subside. Despite himself, despite all his anger at Hamid, he recoiled at the state of him. His face looked like the leavings from a butcher’s block. There was blood everywhere, pooling in cuts, even pooling in the hollows of his eyes. One of the cuts, a ragged fissure along his cheekbone, was so deep Emre swore he saw bone.

  Emre realized Shaikh Neylana was standing near him, staring at Hamid with a grave expression. “That was unfortunate.”

  “Don’t harm Lemi,” Emre said. “Please. He was only trying to protect me.”

  Neylana was silent for a time. “I suspect, if we gave him time to calm, he would tell us that he’s remembered how things went that day. He realized you were right.”

  Emre nodded.

  “Furthermore, I suspect that, were we to put Hamid’s companion to the question, he would reveal the same version of events.”

  Emre nodded again. “I’ve no doubt that’s true.”

  “Well, then,” she said with a look over to where Hamid lay on the sand, “I don’t imagine anyone in Tribe Halarijan would squawk if you considered the trial still in effect and took his life where he lay.”

  A chill ran down Emre’s frame, which only added to the dizziness and trembling that still plagued him. She would look the other way if Emre wished to kill Hamid in cold blood.

  Emre nearly agreed. It would be as simple as kneeling beside him and putting his hand over Hamid’s nose and mouth, choking the life from him as Hamid had tried to do to him.

  But he found that he couldn’t. He refused to let it end like that. He refused to become the sort of person who could do that to a man he’d once considered a friend.

  Emre stared at the sun, which was lowering in the western sky. “We’ll resume this tomorrow.” Hamid would hardly be in a state to fight, but then neither would Emre. The two would be evenly matched, each haunted and hobbled by Hamid’s past actions.

  Neylana stared at Emre’s shaking hands with a disappointed look. “Very well,” she said, and glanced over at Frail Lemi, who was still growling and struggling against the men trying to hold him down. She held out a hand to Emre. “You’d better help with your friend before we’re forced to kill him.”

  Emre nodded and stood with her help.

  It took him nearly an hour to calm Frail Lemi down. Hamid had betrayed Emre and, in so doing, betrayed Frail Lemi as well. It had taken him a while to figure that out, and was taking even longer to process. Lemi was simple in the head, and took betrayals like a child would, which is to say he took them very, very hard. He fixated on them, working them over and over in his mind, reliving the hurt. Hamid would never recover from this in Frail Lemi’s eyes. Emre doubted the two of them could ever be near one another again without Lemi trying to kill him.

  Eventually, Frail Lemi calmed enough that they could lead him to the Amaranth. Emre stayed with him long into the night in the captain’s cabin, telling stories about Sharakhai, about their childhood, about Frail Lemi’s tiny mother who always babied him, even after he’d grown to outweigh her by ten stone.

  Darius and Hamid were taken to one of the frigates and watched. The asirim were uncharacteristically quiet. Eventually Frail Lemi fell asleep, and Emre slept too.

  In the morning, Sirendra rushed into the cabin. “They’re gone.”

  “Who?” Emre said.

  “Hamid and Darius. They snuck off the ship last night and stole away on a skiff.”

  Chapter 16

  THE HIPPODROME WAS ONE of Sharakhai’s most famed attractions. Thousands flocked d
aily to watch chariot races, tests of skill on horseback, even jousting as they did in the lists of Qaimir far to the south of the Great Shangazi. The hippodrome’s front entrance spilled onto a broad plaza, at the center of which was a fountain with a statue of a rearing horse. Water flowed from the horse’s mouth. Its mane and tail blew wildly in the wind.

  On reaching the plaza, Ramahd headed toward the fountain. Beside it, one foot resting on the tiled enclosure, stood Cicio, Ramahd’s most trusted servant. He had a distant look as he stared at a pair of young children playing, a wild-haired boy and a girl in pig-tails who toddled as she ran. They chased one another in dizzying circles over the plaza’s broad stones. When Cicio noticed Ramahd coming, he looked momentarily surprised, maybe even a bit embarrassed. Recovering, he pointed toward the mother, who was speaking with an old, bent man.

  “What you think of her, ah?” Cicio asked as the fountain splashed.

  Ramahd didn’t bother to look. Cicio had only said it so that Ramahd wouldn’t guess his true thoughts, but Ramahd had being seeing the signs for months, his bouts of sadness, his longing stares at the families they happened to pass in the streets of Sharakhai. “You know, it’s okay for you to miss your son, Cicio.”

  For a moment Cicio looked lost. He ached for Qaimir, their homeland. He ached to see his son, who had grown two years since Cicio had been away in Sharakhai. He looked like he was going challenge Ramahd, perhaps brag about how he was going to bed the mother, but instead he jutted his stubbly chin toward the hippodrome’s grand, arched entrance. “He there. Same place he always take.”

  “No one with him?”

  “No one I could see.”

  Ramahd was eager to speak with the man in the hippodrome, but he tarried a moment. “This is the first step,” he said to Cicio. “This is going to lead us home.”

  “Bullshit,” Cicio said chidingly. “This city is a fucking maze, ah? Once you enter, you never get out.”

  Despite his words, Ramahd could see the hope in him, and for that he was glad. If he did nothing else after all this business with Meryam was done, he wanted to see Cicio returned to his home in Qaimir.

  As Ramahd and Cicio entered the hippodrome, a gong rang and the crowd roared. The sound of galloping horses and rattling wheels rose above it. Below the cavernous space of the arcade, where one placed bets and collected winnings, dozens of people milled. Hearing the race starting, many of them rushed along the tunnels, tickets in hand after placing bets with the hippodrome’s bet takers. It was there that they met Renzo, a honey-haired youth assigned to them by Vice Admiral Mateo.

  “He’s still there,” said Renzo in their native tongue. He couldn’t speak a lick of Sharakhan.

  When Ramahd nodded, Cicio and Renzo took one of the tunnels leading to the arena proper. Ramahd took a different tunnel, and soon the hippodrome opened up before him. It sprawled in a grand oval. Eight chariots, each led by a pair of akhalas, were just entering the first curve. They jockeyed for the lead, some of the chariots’ wheels coming dangerously close to one another as they fought for inside position. Others steered wide, hoping to take advantage if their opponents’ chariots happened to crash into one another or scraped the stone wall at the track’s inner edge.

  Ramahd peered up at one of the sections farthest from the main entrance. It was shaded by orange fabric strung between long poles that reached out from the top of the hippodrome. Sitting there by himself was an older man in a white turban, a belted kaftan, and a hooded, sleeveless cloak that hung loose about his shoulders. There was little remarkable about the man—you might find a hundred more just like him in the stands—but he was the lynchpin to all Ramahd’s plans.

  Ramahd walked along the stone seats toward him, climbing row after row, wary of spells being cast or power being gathered. Spells could be made to act like snares as well, with tripwires of sorts that caused them to trigger when an enemy came near. Ramahd sensed nothing, however, and was soon nearing the vacant area where the man in the white turban sat alone.

  In the shaded arcade above, Cicio and Renzo leaned against the simple sandstone columns, watching. Each had their hands behind their backs, hiding small crossbows with poison-tipped bolts. When Ramahd came within several paces of the old man, he sensed something at last, a subtle spell of hiding. It had transformed the man’s face, as Meryam had done to Ramahd and his men on the Night of Endless Swords. Ramahd recognized a few of his former features—his long nose and the set of his jaw—but unless one knew him well, one would fail to recognize him as Hamzakiir the blood mage, son of Külaşan the Wandering King.

  He was the rightful heir to a throne of Sharakhai and yet here he sat, watching the chariot races as he’d done for most of the past two weeks. Ramahd had been walking along the streets of the southern harbor when he’d come across Hamzakiir by pure chance. He’d been casting his senses outward, searching for any spells Meryam might be using to find him, and had sensed the arcane mask Hamzakiir was using to hide his identity. Ramahd hadn’t recognized him immediately. It was only after he’d followed him to the hippodrome and watched as he’d paid his way in and sat among the stands and watched the horses race that he’d been able to pierce his disguise.

  “You may as well come and sit,” Hamzakiir said.

  Ramahd snorted softly and sat beside him, a blood mage who’d been raised from a crypt beneath his father’s hidden desert palace, a man who’d lived an abnormally long life due to the bargain he’d struck with the ehrekh, Guhldrathen, a man who’d been captured and tortured by Meryam, then dominated for months on end for her own ends. It felt strange to sit beside a man who by every right should be his sworn enemy—Hamzakiir had done much to harm Qaimir, not the least of which was summoning the ehrekh, Guhldrathen, and leaving Ramahd, Meryam, and King Aldouan for dead—but sit he did, while the chariots charged around the track.

  “Your men don’t need those crossbows. I won’t harm you or them.” He swung his gaze to Ramahd. “The question is whether you mean to harm me.”

  In his eyes Ramahd saw sadness and a deep loneliness, but no fear.

  “I wish you no harm,” Ramahd said.

  “Good.” Hamzakiir returned his attention to the track, where a chariot had just overturned in a spinning gyre of wheels and reins and dirt thrown high. The crowd roared.

  “Why do you come here?” Ramahd asked.

  Hamzakiir chuckled, a low rumble. “That’s what you wish to know? Why I come to watch the horses?”

  “Well, yes.” Below, a chariot racer wearing sandals laced to his knees and light armor over his white kaftan was straining to right his chariot. With a great heave, it thumped back onto two wheels, and he leapt onto the bed and cracked his whip above the horses’ heads. “You had designs on the city. You thought to rule Sharakhai alone.”

  Hamzakiir’s gaze swung to where the heights of Tauriyat and the palace of Eventide could be seen over the hippodrome’s stony expanse. “I did, yes.”

  “You’ve given up on that dream?”

  More and more in the crowd were coming to a stand, pumping their fists as the two leaders neared the finish line.

  “I suppose I have.”

  It felt strange to see a man once as ruthlessly ambitious as Hamzakiir become so deflated. “And if I said I know why you’ve lost heart?”

  “It hardly takes a man of great insight to determine that.”

  “It’s because of what Meryam did to you,” Ramahd continued. “Losing control over your own actions and thoughts for that long would unnerve anyone.”

  Below, the two lead chariots crossed the finish line so evenly with one another that the crowd stood as one, cheering for their pick to be declared the winner. Groans and louder cheers followed as the lineman twirled a yellow flag, indicating which of the two chariots had won.

  Hamzakiir licked his chapped lips. Stared at the sun through the orange fabric above them. “You were hardly innoc
ent in what happened to me, Lord Amansir. You stood by and watched as she broke me. So why don’t you spare me your false concern and come to your point?”

  “My point is this city isn’t safe. Whatever gains the royal navy has made in taking back a few of their lost caravanserais, the Malasani and Mireans will soon recover, and then they will move to take the city once more.”

  Hamzakiir was unmoved. “So now you care about Sharakhai?”

  “I do, but I care more about my homeland. I want Meryam in chains. I want her taken back to Qaimir and tried, so everyone can see that her rule was founded on betrayal and murder and we can transfer power peacefully to the rightful ruler, the son of Duke Hektor, King Aldouan’s brother.”

  “And what would you have me do?” He glanced up at Tauriyat. “Go to Eventide and attack her?”

  “Could you?”

  Hamzakiir sneered. “Meryam has dozens of safeguards in place to prevent it.”

  “That’s all that’s stopping you? Her safeguards? Because I can—”

  “You will recall from our time together in Qaimir,” Hamzakiir said, “what it feels like to be dominated. To be so for a day or two leaves one mentally and physically exhausted. Meryam did it to me for months. When that happens, cracks begin to form in your mind, cracks that grow wider the more you fight them.” He swallowed hard, and seemed to bear down, as if something pained him. “And believe me, I fought her. You begin to question your very existence. You become like a Malasani golem, a splinter of a soul whose only purpose is to serve another, so that when you’re freed”—he motioned to the people in the stands, who were sitting, or filing out to place new bets—“you wonder if it’s real at all, and if it is, whether you truly have free will.”

  “You do,” Ramahd assured him, “and you can use it to set things aright.”

  Hamzakiir waggled his head in a lip-raising sneer. “Things will find their new equilibrium once the war has ended. So it has always been.”

  “At what cost, though?”

  “Blood and lives,” Hamzakiir said. “Pain and anguish. But there’s little you or I can do about that.”