When Jackals Storm the Walls

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  “But there is—”

  Hamzakiir stood, cutting off Ramahd’s next words. “Tell it to someone who cares, Ramahd Amansir. Tell it to the lords and knights who’ve come from your country. Tell it to your blood magi.”

  “Some few knights have joined me. But all the blood magi are beholden to Meryam.”

  “Then the knights will have to be enough.” He sidled over to the stairs and began taking them up, his worn leather sandals scraping the steps as he went. “I’ve no interest in your war. Not any longer.”

  Both Cicio and Renzo cast questioning glances at Ramahd, asking if he wanted them to prevent Hamzakiir from leaving. But Ramahd waved them away, and soon Hamzakiir was gone.

  Chapter 17

  WILLEM SPARED NO EFFORT in his search for Davud. He broke his habit of sleeping during the day so he could return to the hall of records as often as possible. For several days he hid behind the grate in the hall of records and watched Cassandra. He wisped from hall to hall: sciences, architecture, medicine, alchemy, history, literature, and the long, curving building where trivium and quadrivium were taught. He perched in the dark recesses of the dormitories’ eating halls. He crept through the kitchens, peeked into larders, secreted himself within the student shisha parlors, all in the hopes of catching a glimpse of Davud’s light. He even haunted the administration building, his least favorite place, hoping Davud might want to follow the trail from Cassandra to the chancellor. But there was no sign of Davud.

  Cassandra’s research continued apace. Every so often she would write down a name. Willem was intensely curious to learn those names—the hope that he might be able to save them was patently ridiculous, what with the restrictions Nebahat had placed on him, but it was a hope to which he subscribed wholeheartedly. He might not have been able to save Altan, but by the gods, perhaps he could save others. He never learned those names, though. Cassandra always took them away with her at the end of her session.

  She received a new partner to help in her research efforts, a dull boy with an unappealing halo named Manu, who did everything Cassandra told him with one eye on the hourglass.

  You’ll never replace Altan, Willem thought sourly.

  Not that Manu was trying to. The argument didn’t even make sense, really, but Willem couldn’t shake the thought and always hoped that Manu would leave early, which he did quite often.

  Willem’s continued lack of sleep wasn’t helping things. Several times he woke leaning against the gap in the walls, snoring softly. Dull Manu even heard him and began casting his gaze about the room to locate the source. Angry with himself over his own weakness, Willem fled and found a place to nap.

  Compounding the lack of sleep (and the fear that he’d never see Davud again) was the fact that Nebahat’s tasks for him seemed to be multiplying. Sometimes he demanded more alchemycal agents. More and more, though, he asked Willem to locate specific texts from the collegia’s many libraries.

  Despite the lethargy that hung over him like a pall, Willem read them all before delivering them to Nebahat. Largely they were memoirs, apparently unconnected to one another, but taken together they painted a picture. Each of them had some mention, even if only in passing, of Beht Ihman. There were stories told of Suad, the Scourge of Sharakhai, the shaikh who’d rallied the tribes against the Sharakhani Kings. There were tales of the Kings’ contentious early decades leading up to Suad’s grand offensive. There were even hints of visits from the gods to the various desert tribes, visits that were clearly meant to enflame their hatred of Sharakhai and the power that had concentrated there over the centuries.

  Though he sensed some connection, Willem couldn’t quite piece together what Nebahat was looking for. He was nearly there, but he was just so tired. One day, he was watching Cassandra and Manu in the hall of records, and beginning to think that getting sleep was what he should be doing, when something strange happened.

  “I need to see Master Luwanga about my scholar’s thesis,” Manu said.

  Cassandra rolled her eyes. “You mean you’re going to the oud parlor early.”

  “No, this time I really do need to see her.”

  “Your graduating is contingent on this project too, you know.”

  “Yes, but you’re doing such a good job of it.” He buckled several books together with a leather strap, swung them over his shoulder, then leaned over and kissed Cassandra. “I’ll put in extra time tomorrow.”

  Cassandra rolled her eyes. “I never should have recommended you for this.”

  “Have I ever told you how much I love you?”

  When he tried to lean in and kiss her again, Cassandra shoved him away. It was then, as Manu was strutting away like a cock in a hen yard, that Cassandra began toying with the blue topaz pendant hanging from her necklace. It sparkled. Not like gemstones sparkled, but like people. Willem thought it was somehow refracting a bit of Cassandra’s glow, but the color was all wrong, as was the way it kept changing, like gears made of crystal turning under sunlight.

  It was Davud’s color, he realized. Davud had ensorcelled it.

  A spell then. Gods, this was why Davud hadn’t been coming to see Cassandra. He didn’t need to come. He was using the pendant to watch her, to check on her progress. Willem found himself admiring Davud—it was an ingenious solution to his problem—but it was also frustrating as it left Willem without a way to find him.

  Unless . . .

  He stared closely at the pendant as Cassandra released it and returned to her reading. There was only one way he might find more answers. If he was going to do it, though, he needed his wits about him.

  Sleep, Willem thought. I need sleep.

  He left Cassandra and returned to his small alcove near the top of the hidden archives. He’d already delivered Nebahat a dozen more books, books which Willem would read and ponder another time. Tonight was for Davud. Tonight, Willem would find him.

  Settling himself in, he smiled and fell fast asleep.

  Willem crawled silently along the slate roof of the collegia’s oldest dormitory. The stars were out and the night was cool, but he’d already seen from his hiding place in the courtyard’s trees below that Cassandra’s window was cracked open. Lowering himself over the roof’s edge, he dropped down to the small balcony and slipped inside her room, which was small and narrow, its floor cluttered with cast-aside clothes. Taking care to avoid them, he tiptoed to Cassandra’s bedside and the small table beside it where she kept her jewelry.

  From her heart-shaped jewelry box, he lifted the blue pendant, careful that it didn’t snag any of the bulky earrings or bangles around it while also ensuring that the face of the pendant always pointed away from him. The topaz sparkled, sending shards of light playing across the far wall.

  Cassandra’s breathing suddenly hitched. Willem waited, controlling his own breathing, nervous to so much as move a muscle. The greatest danger wasn’t that Cassandra would wake and see him, but that Davud was watching even now. In a flurry of movement, Cassandra rolled over and yanked the blankets more tightly over her shoulders. Thankfully she fell right back into the easy rhythms of sleep.

  With exaggerated care, Willem spun the pendant toward him. The light played wildly. His nerves screamed for him to set it back in the box, to leave before he was found out after all his careful sneaking these many years. In all his time at the collegia, no one had seen so much as his shadow, and now he risked being discovered, his secrets laid bare, over what? Davud and his purposes? Willem didn’t even know what those were!

  I’m merely curious, Willem told himself.

  That’s hardly a reason, a doubting voice whispered a moment later. You’re curious about a great many things, like the answers Nebahat is after. Why don’t you search for those?

  It was the sensible plan, yet there he remained, the pendant stilled in the air before him.

  Altan, another voice whispered. This is for Altan an
d others like him.

  Holding his breath, Willem turned the pendant just a bit more. He stared into the facets of the blue gemstone, squinting from the glow. Davud’s glow. Seeing nothing of note, he swallowed hard and rotated it just a little bit more, and saw a reflection in those tiny facets. No, not a reflection. The facet was acting as a tiny window, revealing a small portion of a different room entirely.

  Willem twisted the pendant further, brought his eye closer to the large, central facet. Twisting it this way and that, he saw more: the seams between large sandstone blocks; a closed wooden door with a coat hook nailed on the inside; shoes set with care beside one another and pressed against the wall; and at the very edges of the vision, varnished wood, a desktop.

  It wasn’t much, but for Willem, it was more than enough. Davud was hidden inside faculty housing. Except, Willem had been to that room only two days before, late at night. He’d stepped through it, examining it for clues.

  Or had he?

  Now that he thought about it, he remembered approaching the room. He remembered holding his set of lock picks in his right hand. He remembered kneeling, preparing to defeat the lock, a thing he was particularly gifted at. And then he remembered creeping along the hall and moving on to the next room, satisfied. The memory of being inside the room was fuzzy and gray, as if he’d drummed up one of his visits from months ago and placed it there haphazardly, imperfectly.

  Suddenly everything was clear, and Willem knew exactly where to go. After placing the pendant back inside the jewelry box just as he’d found it, he left and clambered up to the dormitory roof. He fairly sprinted along it as he headed toward the faculty building.

  A short while later, Willem crept out of the janitor’s closet on the second floor of the faculty quarters and made his way quietly and carefully to a long corridor filled with many doors. A lone lantern on a small table near the stairwell somehow made the hallway look a league long. Snores emanated from several of the doorways he passed on his way to the third on the left—a nondescript door leading to a nondescript room.

  He’d not noticed when he’d been there last, but he could see it now that he knew what to look for: the faintest of shimmers around the edge of the door, evidence of a spell. It was meant to force one to move on, to bypass the room—maids, carpenters, the housing secretary, anyone who might have an interest in the room would simply go on as if they’d never had a purpose there in the first place, or had entered and completed whatever it was they’d meant to do.

  Even knowing the spell’s effect, Willem felt a strong urge to return to his cubbyhole and go to sleep, safe in the knowledge that he’d searched this room and found nothing, but he concentrated hard on the light glimmering through the keyhole.

  There are answers in there, Willem told himself, and I mean to get them.

  Crouching, he readied his lock picks, holding them just before the keyhole. As he moved them forward, he willed the slim instruments to slip through the light as if they were made of a special alloy of iron, shadow, and silence. As he worked the lock, his excitement rose to the point that the mechanism rattled. Careful, Willem. Careful now. After a deep breath to calm his nerves, he lifted the handle the precise amount that would prevent it from clicking audibly, then swung the door inward.

  It revealed the outer edge of Davud’s spell, which shimmered like a waterfall across the threshold. As he’d done with the lock picks, Willem forced the spell to slip around him as he stepped inside the room and closed the door.

  There, sleeping on a bed, were two people: Davud and a woman Willem had never seen before. Davud looked just as Willem remembered him from his time attending the collegia as a promising young student: a moderate frame, a shapely neck, his hair cut short so that it framed his handsome face. He looked older, of course, and there were faint scars on his cheeks and forehead, another small one across his upper lip. The woman, sleeping on her side, one arm across Davud’s chest, had a strange glow about her. It was dim but colorful, and there were flashes of radiance, as if she wasn’t as bright as she’d once been but while she dreamed some small amount of her former brilliance shone through.

  Willem moved to the desk, where another large, topaz pendant hung facing the door—the twin to Cassandra’s. Spread about the desktop and another table toward the corner of the room were various scrolls and books. Most important was a leatherbound journal. It glowed as the pendant had glowed, as the threshold glowed, which was how Willem knew it was Davud’s personal journal.

  With care, he opened it and found that there was a glamour over the pages. It obfuscated the writing, but Willem had dealt with such things before. He was able to dim the glamour to see through to the real words beneath. He read it from start to finish, using the faint shimmer of the revealed ink to read by. He finished and read it again, his fingers starting to tingle. A thought had occurred to him about halfway through his first read, and he had trouble shaking it. By the time he’d finished his second reading, it felt like a directive, something the gods themselves were demanding.

  Contained in the journal was a series of meticulous notes, the same as Davud had always taken during his time in the collegia, except they weren’t notes about language or history or rhetoric—Davud’s areas of focus during his time at the collegia—but an account of Davud’s attempt to uncover what had happened to Altan. It wasn’t mentioned much in his notes, but Willem could tell Davud was frightened. He wanted to protect himself and Esmeray, who was surely the woman lying beside him in his bed. They’d both fled from King Sukru, hoping to find solace in the Enclave. The Enclave had declined their proposal, but Davud still hoped to come to an accord. In order to do that, he needed to speak to one of the Enclave’s inner circle.

  He’d wanted Undosu, but after speaking with a man named Tariq, he’d come to the collegia instead to learn of Tariq’s cousin, Altan. Since arriving, Davud had found evidence of many people gone missing, Altan among them. The trail had led to Cassandra, which had led him to more names. Many more.

  Willem set the journal down exactly as he’d found it and turned to face the bed. How he wanted to wake Davud. I can lead you to Nebahat, Willem would say to him. You need but follow me. And then he would take Davud down to the hidden archives, where he would confront Nebahat and make him pay for his crimes.

  But Willem couldn’t. He was forbidden. He was bound to do Nebahat’s will. More than that, Nebahat was a dangerous man. Admitting anything to Davud could put him in danger.

  He left the room heartbroken. He’d been so consumed with finding Davud. Now that he had, he had no idea what to do. He might come to watch him sleep. He might follow Davud now that he knew where he was keeping himself and learn more. But either plan felt perfectly hollow.

  He returned to his cubbyhole in the hidden archives. Part of him wished the stone above him would collapse, burying both him and Nebahat. The world would never see either of them again, which was perhaps for the best, because Nebahat was evil and Willem was useless. As he lay himself down to sleep, he touched the books piled around him, ran his fingers over their bindings, felt the scruff at the edges of one fraying leather cover.

  He considered reading that particular volume to help soothe his fears, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. He lay away from the books instead, wondering what sort of stories would be written about him. None, Willem told himself. No one even knows you exist.

  Suddenly Willem sat up, his eyes wide, his heart beating like a drum.

  The books. The stories within them! What better way to convey the answers to Davud’s questions?

  He was so excited he yelped, then immediately clapped his hand over his mouth. He waited, praying Nebahat hadn’t heard. As the silence lengthened, his fears quelled, and he began collecting the books he would need.

  Chapter 18

  “DAVUD, WHAT’S THIS?” Esmeray asked one night.

  She and Davud were sequestered in their room in the colle
gia’s faculty quarters, the one they’d been hiding in for several weeks as they looked into Altan’s disappearance. Davud was jotting thoughts in his journal, but when he heard the note of concern in Esmeray’s voice he turned and found Esmeray with a stack of nine or ten books in her hand.

  “Where did you find those?”

  “Just inside the door.” She opened the door, peered into the hall, then closed it with a frown and set the books onto the desk.

  As she thumbed through the topmost book, Davud spread his hands wide, closed his eyes, and carefully checked the spells of detection and concealment he’d placed over the room. They were intact, untouched, and yet someone had managed to breach them and leave them a stack of books.

  Esmeray flipped open more of the books, scanning them quickly. “They’re children’s tales.” She flipped through the rest. “All of them.”

  Satisfied his spells hadn’t been altered in some way, Davud took up the topmost book and paged through it, skimming the fables. He paused when he came to one of Fatima, the desert’s most infamous thief. It told the tale of how she’d stolen the entirety of an ehrekh’s hoard and left in its place a lone copper coin with a note that read, To begin your hoard anew. The ehrekh had found it so amusing he’d not only allowed Fatima to live, he’d gifted her with slippers that made no sound and left no footprints upon the sand. Fatima, incensed the ehrekh thought she would need such things, had burned the slippers and stolen back the copper coin.

  He went through more of the books, hoping to find a hidden message or some commonality among the tales. He found no hidden notes, though, and the tales were as varied as could be. They ranged from nursery rhymes to epic poems to morality tales from the Al’Ambra, the oldest of the desert’s religious texts. Perhaps there was some common thread running through them, but if so it was too well hidden for him to detect.