You have work to do, Meryam, and promises to keep.
She rose from her bed and somehow made her way down to the cavern and the glowing crystal. Near the scaffolding stood several tables with a small host of tomes and scrolls upon them. A few paces away were three chairs, two of which were occupied by a pair of men wearing simple, sweat-stained clothes. They were father and son, two scarabs of the Moonless Host who, as far as she’d been able to discover, had no other close family in Sharakhai.
They shivered from the cold that permeated the cavern. Or perhaps it was from their fear. Both were bound, gagged, and blindfolded. Most importantly, their hearing had been taken from them, a necessary measure lest they learn what Meryam had planned for them. She couldn’t have that. She needed to make sure it was the spell forcing the men to act, not them acting on their own.
Prayna, a blood mage and the de facto leader of the Enclave, was already there, standing beside a set of tables near the crystal. By the light of the crystal itself, she was reading over several ancient tomes she’d brought for the purpose. Beside the tomes lay sheets of vellum, which Prayna was using to mark new sigils, combinations she hoped would give Meryam what she wanted.
Meryam hated that she’d resorted to calling for the help of another mage, but there was no doubting Prayna was gifted in the red ways. More to the point, she knew more about sigils than anyone Meryam had ever known, including herself. Prayna was so engrossed in her work she didn’t look up as Meryam approached.
“You’ve found something?” Meryam asked.
Prayna shivered and her head shot up. She blinked her elegant eyes at Meryam, then resumed the careful creation of her latest sigil. “I hope so, but we won’t know until we try.” With one last stroke of her pen, she was done. She spun the sheet of vellum, turning it toward Meryam.
There was a complex master sigil in the center that was surrounded by a dozen others, all of which were represented in the larger master. It was a dizzying spell combining a half-dozen sigils for bonding and blood ties, more for attraction and find, and several that added various shades of compel. Together they would put a compulsion on those related to the subject to cease what they were doing and search for them. Or so Meryam hoped. Their efforts so far had all been miserable failures.
Meryam noted the one major exclusion since their last iteration. “There’s nothing for the trees.”
“No,” Prayna said. “The sigils have been too complex. Better if we can master the summoning first, then add more to combine it with the adichara.”
Meryam couldn’t argue with her logic. “Well enough. Have you tried any versions of it already?”
She held the sheet of vellum out to Meryam. “This will be the first.”
Meryam accepted it and looked it over carefully. Then she sat in the empty chair across from the father and pricked the man’s wrist with her blooding ring. The man flinched, but then sat quietly, unmoving. He knew that to do otherwise would invite punishment. He couldn’t control his shivering, however. It grew ever stronger as Meryam used a vulture quill to draw the sigil upon his forehead. Meryam was exacting in her spell work, so it took time, but soon enough the sigil was complete.
Meryam stood and dragged the chair away, the legs thumping against the roots’ gnarled landscape. Then she and Prayna waited, watching not the father, the one they’d drawn the sigil on, but his son. He was the one the spell should affect. If the sigil worked, the son would get up and try to reach his father. He would be drawn by their shared blood.
“We’re sure they’re father and son?” Meryam asked Prayna.
“As sure as we can be, yes.”
They waited minutes longer. When nothing happened, Prayna tried the spell on the son instead, but this too failed.
Over the course of the day, they tried nine more combinations of the spell, but nothing worked.
“I’ll develop more variations,” Prayna said, an indication she was ready to leave. “And I still wish to speak with Nebahat. He might be able to help.”
“No,” Meryam said. “For now, this stays between us.”
After a brief pause, Prayna said, “Very well,” and made her way over the uneven floor toward the tunnel that led to other parts of the city.
When she was gone, Meryam left the two scarabs to the Silver Spears and returned to the Sun Palace. Within her apartments, tomes and tablets and scrolls lay over an expansive travertine table. It was late. She knew she should rest. She knew she should eat. But there was still so much to do, so she lit a lantern, sat at the table, and pulled one of the books closer. It was her most recent find. It described how one of the elder gods, Ashael, had been struck down by Iri after a terrible battle, how Ashael’s presence soiled the land for centuries after, how demons had congregated there, feasting off his decaying soul.
Meryam wondered where that place might be, wondered if it might be used to further her goals. She had no idea where to begin, so turned to another book, one written by King Sukru’s brother, Jasur, the Sparrow. In it, Jasur detailed the alchemycal experiments he’d started to conduct on the essence collected from the tendril in the crystal’s cave.
An hour had passed, perhaps more, before Meryam realized she’d been staring at the same page, reading it over and over again without understanding the words. Stranger still, the page was wet, dotted with tears. The text itself had mentioned a rare flowering herb from Qaimir, named hartroot for the way the stalks looked like deer antlers. Yasmine used to pick them and pluck the smaller stems away, then weave them into Meryam’s braids. It had always looked so pretty when she was done.
She’d managed to avoid thinking about Yasmine all day. She’d managed to avoid the black well of sorrow and misery that always accompanied the memories. But now it all came rushing back. She felt powerless again. Weak. She felt as if she were being blown around the Shangazi like any other of the countless grains of sand.
“No!” Meryam said aloud. The word sounded shrill and desperate in the harshness of the Sun Palace. She wiped away her tears, and said it again, louder this time, “No!” She dabbed the skirt of her night dress onto the page, blotting the tears away. “That isn’t how you fix this. Blood is the way. Not with tears. Blood!”
“My queen?” came Basilio’s voice from her sitting room.
Meryam tried to compose herself before Basilio came striding in, but she failed.
Basilio stopped in his tracks at the threshold. “My queen?”
She sniffed and blinked, trying ineffectually to clear her eyes. “You were to bring more elixirs,” she snapped, more for something to say than anything else.
Basilio’s reaction was not an encouraging one. “Yes,” he replied, gripping his hands behind his back like a soldier on parade. “I’d hoped to have better news for you by now.”
Meryam felt something tighten inside her. “What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry, my queen, but it seems the elixirs have . . .” He swallowed hard, then nodded, as if accepting his fate. “The elixirs are gone.”
“Gone?” She needed those elixirs. She needed them.
“I thought perhaps it was a mixup, that in the move from Eventide they’d been misplaced. But I’ve come to the conclusion that they were likely stolen.”
“Stolen? By whom?”
“We don’t know as yet. My suspicion is that two of the servants moving your effects learned of their existence and arranged for them to be taken on the way down to the Sun Palace.”
“You left their transport to someone else?”
Basilio looked beside himself. “There was so much to do. They were in a locked chest, which I ensured was loaded onto a guarded wagon. When the chest arrived here at the Sun Palace, I opened them myself and found the elixirs gone. And now Eventide, incensed over King Yavuz’s death in the ritual the two of you performed with the golem, is saying we’ll be allowed to interrogate no one until the
question of succession has been resolved and the new King, whoever he might be, has had a chance to consider the matter.”
Meryam dipped her head into her hands. It was likely that someone in Eventide had stolen them. Meryam wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it had been Kiral’s old vizira herself who’d arranged for it. She’d been beside herself with rage at news of Yavuz’s death. Meryam had moved to the Sun Palace by then, but some of her effects were still in Eventide. When Yavuz had died, his vizira had practically thrown Meryam’s things down the mountain.
Basilio looked uncomfortable. The look he’d had on his face when he entered, before he’d seen her state, had been cheerless at best. It meant foreboding news, something other than the elixirs.
“The reason you came,” she said, “how bad is it?”
“Very.”
Meryam pinched the bridge of her nose. “Go on.”
After several moments in which Basilio seemed to be having trouble deciding where to begin, he steeled himself and launched into it. “It’s the warfront, Your Excellence. It turns out, some of the Kundhuni warlords who’ve been helping to harass the Mirean supply lines have not, in fact, been harassing them at all.”
Meryam reeled at the implications. “They’ve switched allegiance.”
Basilio nodded. “We thought it only one at first, but now I suspect many have been bought off.”
“Mighty Alu give me strength,” Meryam breathed. They had some twenty Kundhuni warlords—each the king of some tiny grassland kingdom with a small fleet to call their own—sailing against the Mirean supply lines. If they didn’t know which ones they could trust, they could trust none of them. War can turn on the smallest of things, Meryam thought. This could be one of them. “I want their heads on pikes, Basilio. All of them.”
“That would be unwise. We’d lose them. Every single one of them.”
“They’d balk at my killing a traitor?”
“They wouldn’t see it like that. The rituals and rites of honor that surround their kings is complex.”
“Then what’s your suggestion?”
“You could dominate them.”
She exhaled noisily while waving to the chest on her bed. “I’ve reached my limit, Basilio. I’m barely holding things together as it is. And with the elixirs almost gone, I can’t afford to do more, not for long, and certainly not considering how far away they are from the city.”
“Our magi from Qaimir, then.”
“They’re spread across the eastern desert. It would take months to round them up.”
“Then the Enclave.”
“I don’t trust them, not for this.”
Basilio eyed her warily. She could tell he was choosing his words with care. “My queen, perhaps if you spent less time in the cavern and more time here in the palace, things would go smoother—”
Meryam cut him off. “We’re close to an answer. The riddles of the crystal have nearly been unlocked. I’m certain of it.”
“You’ve been saying that for over a week.”
“Because it’s true!”
Basilio’s look was mollifying, which made it all the more infuriating. “Then I’m afraid the only other option is to pay the warlords more than the Mireans.”
Meryam stared, dumbstruck. “Only yesterday you said we could barely afford saddles for our horses.”
“A slight exaggeration.” Before Meryam could object, he went on. “We need the Kundhuni tribes for another six months at most. By then more of our fleet will have arrived from Qaimir, and more of the ships being built in King’s Harbor will be ready. Then we’ll take the war to the Mireans and the Malasani and we’ll win it.” He saw her hesitation. “This is an expense we cannot afford to skip, my queen.”
Meryam flung her hand into the air. “Oh, very well!” She stalked away.
“My queen, where are you going?”
“Back to the bloody cavern.”
“At this hour?”
“Well someone has to get answers, Basilio!”
But the answers didn’t come that night, nor in the days that followed, and Meryam wondered if she was ever going to get what she wanted.
Chapter 23
DAVUD HAD BEEN SITTING in the chancellor’s waiting room for over an hour before a serious looking woman wearing the wheat-colored robes of a collegia scholar entered and bowed her head to him. “The chancellor will see you now.”
Davud nodded and followed her into a large office that looked much the same as it had when Davud had attended the collegia. Shelves adorned every wall. At the room’s center was a large desk made of stout wooden legs with a brightly veined marble top holding stacks of books and papers, all impeccably ordered, all impeccably clean. Behind the desk sat Chancellor Abi, a bald man of middling years who looked every bit as clean and orderly as his desk.
Chancellor Abi’s assistant, her mouth set in a grim line, waved Davud toward a chair, clearly ready to depart, but stopped with a sigh when the chancellor held up a finger while still writing on a piece of parchment. “Hold a moment.” She waited impatiently while the chancellor finished his letter with a whirling scrape of a signature and held it out for her to take. “For Master Luwanga.”
“Of course.” She took it and rushed from the room.
Without so much as glancing at Davud, Chancellor Abi took out a wide, cloth-backed ledger and scribbled a few notes into it. He had a crooked nose, a dimpled chin, and a manner that Chancellor Abi himself once described to Davud’s incoming class as methodical. Most would say it was curt, or even dismissive, but Davud knew him as a good man, an honest man who took his responsibilities as head of the collegia seriously, and as such tried to be as efficient with his time as possible, which made Davud think Abi didn’t realize he was being used by the House of Kings.
But he was a meticulous man too. He wouldn’t take on a project like the one his student, Cassandra, was spearheading without full knowledge of how the information would be used.
Which are you then, Davud mused, puppet or accomplice?
After closing the journal and squaring it against the edge of the desk, Abi stood and gathered several ledgers from the shelves behind him. When seven of them had been piled into his arms, he turned to face Davud. “Walk with me?”
“Chancellor Abi”—Davud stood, but made no move to follow—“I thought you’d been told, our discussion is of a rather sensitive nature.”
“Yes, but I’m a busy man, and I deal with subjects of a sensitive nature every day.”
With a tilt of his head, he beckoned for Davud to follow and whisked past him. Davud rushed to catch up, and the two left his office side by side. “You’ve been gone from the collegia a while now,” Abi said as they wove around a group of laughing students and took a set of stairs down. “Two years, is it?”
“Just about, yes.”
“And after the incident, you were in the employ of the Kings, as I recall.”
Incident, Abi called it. Massacre was more like it. Several hundred had died on the collegia grounds, and dozens of graduates taken and later turned into shamblers, creatures straight out of a nightmare, which Hamzakiir had used in his plans to attack King’s Harbor.
“I was not in the Kings’ employ, no, but I spent some time in the palaces.”
“Along with Anila Khabir’ava.”
“Yes.” They whipped around a landing and attacked the next flight of stairs. “Chancellor Abi, I’ve come to speak to you of a collegia student. A young man who’s gone missing.”
“You would be speaking of Altan, no doubt.”
“I am, yes.”
They reached ground level, at which point the chancellor made a beeline toward a tall archway on the opposite side of the crowded atrium. “I’m sure Altan will turn up.” His pace developed a sudden hitch as he swiveled his head and fixed Davud with a goggle-eyed stare. “Did you kno
w him? Personally, I mean?”
“No, chancellor.”
“Because the collegia has already given all it can to the Silver Spears.” Eyes firmly ahead once more, his dogged pace resumed. “And there is a war on, my boy. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but there are reports of people going missing every day.”
“I’m glad you mentioned that. At the time of his disappearance, Altan was working on a research project.”
“He was.”
“At your direction?”
“Yes, yes, as I suspect you’ve already heard.” Abi led them beneath the archway and onto the esplanade, a long, green space that abutted many of the collegia’s halls of learning. Students were the most plentiful, but there were masters, scholars, and a handful of ordinary folk—likely the family members of attending students—roaming about as well.
“Chancellor, are you sure it’s all right to—”
“Get on with it, scholar.” Abi’s tone was exasperated. “I have a meeting I’m already late for.”
“Of course. Altan’s project. Its stated purpose is to research the marriage and birth records of those who have blood of the thirteenth tribe, yes? Research driven by records obtained from the palace of King Sukru?”
Abi frowned. “Who told you that? Cassandra?”
“Never mind how I found out. Is it true?”
“Well, yes!” Abi seemed suddenly off-balance.
“Who told you to undertake the project, Chancellor Abi?”
“No one did. It was my own idea!”
“Why did you order a census of the thirteenth tribe?”
Chancellor Abi’s footsteps came to a slow, unsteady halt. He was so near, Davud could smell the mint on his breath as he spoke. “As a scholar yourself, you’re well aware how we in the collegia value truth. Unfortunately, many of the highborn, particularly those in the House of Kings, do not. They’ve been suppressing some rather momentous truths for”—he sent a glance toward the dark peak of Tauriyat—“well, a long while now.” He spoke softer. “I recognize, even if the House of Kings does not, that the thirteenth tribe has become a power in the desert. We may hope to forge ties with them. What better way to do that than by locating those of their bloodline here in the city?”
When Jackals Storm the Walls Page 22