When Jackals Storm the Walls

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  “A good question,” Brama replied. “Would you like to know more?”

  The look of fear on his face hadn’t diminished, but he nodded just the same. Braver than I would have been at his age, Brama thought.

  As soon as they left the adichara grove, Mae whistled a trilling note. Moments later, Angfua came trotting through a gap between two of the adichara groves, trumpeting as it came, throwing its coiled horns this way and that as if readying for battle. Kweilo, Brama’s temperate mare, trotted calmly in Angfua’s wake.

  “I’ll return when I’m able,” Brama said to Mae.

  Mae, however, had gone to Angfua’s saddlebags. She’d taken out a piece of paper and was writing on it with a coal pencil.

  “Mae?”

  She finished her note, rolled it up, and stuffed it inside her saddle bag. “I know you not know me well,” Mae said as she tied Kweilo’s reins to the pommel of Angfua’s saddle, “but if you think you going to Sharakhai without me, you have—how you say?—an other think coming.”

  “Mae—”

  “I know you trying to get rid of me, Brama. But I don’t go. You are my friend. I don’t give you to her. Understand?”

  Brama swallowed while the boy stared on, his confusion plain. Mae, meanwhile, pointed to the trail the boy had made in coming here and proceeded to remove her armor and change into simpler clothing.

  “Well, we are going or not?” she asked.

  Mae was taking a serious risk by coming with him, but the relief he felt was so great that he couldn’t find it in himself to deny it. “We’re going,” he said.

  Mae nodded, satisfied. “Good.”

  She whispered into Angfua’s ear, and the qirin snorted loudly. It trumpeted, releasing a gout of flame, but then seemed to accept its fate and began cantering east into the desert, toward the Mirean fleet, with Kweilo in tow.

  As their mounts were lost behind the line of trees, Brama and Mae set off, following the boy toward Sharakhai.

  Chapter 27

  EMRE WALKED WITH Shaikh Neylana over the dunes, their strides falling into a sympathetic rhythm. Behind them, Tribe Halarijan was preparing to depart. So were Emre’s ships, but Neylana had agreed to grant Emre an audience first. The dunes were tall where they walked, the sand slippery, as they said among the southern tribes. It helped along the declines, the sand practically pouring one toward the trough, but made it doubly hard on the inclines as one’s legs churned furiously to overcome the sand’s give.

  By the time they reached the fourth crest, Neylana was breathing hard. Emre was too, but worse, his head was pounding. Neylana, taking note, slowed her pace and navigated the top of the snaking dune instead of heading down the decline. “You’re leaving,” she said as she waved toward the Amaranth and the trio of frigates beyond, “but I wonder, will it be to return to your tribe or to find Hamid?”

  “I suspect if I do the former I’ll end up with the latter.”

  A smile seemed to want to break out over Neylana’s stony face, but it was an incongruous thing, like a lizard trying to grin. “I was like you, at your age.”

  Emre started to laugh but choked it back, which sent him into a short coughing fit. Feeling the weight of Neylana’s stare, he pretended to find the dunes in the distance terribly engrossing.

  “I know what you must think,” she said. “Many say there’s no humor in me. That I’m too severe. I was once carefree, though. I made jokes, if you can believe it. But sadly, the mantle of shaikh is a millstone that grinds you down until all that remains is dust.”

  “It’s a heavy weight to bear.”

  “You have no idea. Not yet. But you will.”

  Emre thought she was toying with him, but she looked serious as a hungry lioness. “I’m no shaikh,” he said.

  “No, but you’ve captained a ship. You’ve bargained with a foreign adversary, then played the grand game with him and won. You’ve convinced an aging shaikh to join an alliance against her better judgment. I see the care you have for others and the shrewdness that’s needed to do anything about it. Just you wait. Unless I’m sorely mistaken, the title of shaikh is not far off.”

  “Macide is our shaikh.”

  The laugh from Neylana was like a tumble of bones. “You may not have noticed, but the Great Mother has a way of culling the herd. She’s quite good at it.”

  “Well you’ve managed to keep her at bay.”

  As they crested a dune and headed along the leeward side, Neylana hawked and spat. “Let’s see how funny you think that is when I bury you up to your neck in sand for the beetles to eat.”

  “I’m afraid I won’t taste very good.”

  Neylana rolled her eyes. “Please don’t tell me you’re too sweet.”

  “No, too bitter. I’m becoming more like you already.”

  He said it with a wink. Neylana tried to hide her amusement, but then laughed. It felt honest and true, all the more so for how rare it was. Emre laughed with her while veil-thin clouds traveled in packs across the deep blue sky.

  “So you’ll return to your tribe, our final offer in hand. Will Macide accept?”

  “It isn’t a generous offer,” Emre said truthfully, “but it’s fair. I think Macide will agree to it.”

  “A desert united,” Neylana said.

  “A desert united.”

  “And in the meantime, Queen Meryam grows impatient. She’ll want an answer from the tribes. What do you suppose Macide’s position will be?”

  “She didn’t make that offer to the thirteenth tribe, only the other twelve.”

  “When she sees we’re all united, she will.”

  “You’re asking me what Macide will do with an offer from the woman whose sister he killed?” Emre shrugged. “It’s difficult to say.”

  “Try,” Neylana replied, making it clear she expected an answer before he left.

  “I think he’ll give it due consideration. Truly. I wasn’t lying when I said Macide wants peace in the desert. He sees the presence of Mirea and Malasan as an offense that needs addressing, a rare bit of common ground between the tribes and the House of Kings. If Sharakhai and the tribes were to fight together to drive them away, it could lead to a lasting peace.”

  “And if, after all that, the lesser Kings and Queens take up their fathers’ ways? If they resume their silent war against us once the invaders are gone?”

  “Things can’t go back to the way they were. Sharakhai is weaker than it once was. It will be weaker still by the time the war is over. The tribes will take what’s rightfully ours. No more, no less.”

  “Spoken like a true shaikh.” Neylana gave him a wry smile. It was like a window into the past, a rare glimpse of the woman she was before she’d taken up her father’s sword.

  “You know,” Emre said, “I think we might have been friends if we’d met before you became shaikh.”

  “Might’ve been a lot more than that, Emre Aykan’ava.”

  The suggestive wink she gave him made his cheeks go red.

  As he turned to see if anyone had witnessed it, Neylana’s peals of laughter filled the dry desert air.

  Emre was sailing toward Mount Arasal on the Amaranth, their three frigates trailing behind, when a ship was spotted along the horizon.

  “A royal galleon,” Sirendra said while peering through a spyglass.

  She handed the glass to Emre, who lifted it to one eye. Indeed, the ship had the lines of a navy vessel but looked to be in poor shape. The canvas was patched and plagued with holes, and part of the stern was missing, gouged out in some battle, perhaps.

  “What in the great wide desert could have inflicted that sort of damage?” Emre asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sirendra answered, “but they’re turning to match our course.”

  Nearby, Frail Lemi cracked his knuckles. “Time for a fight, Emre?”

  “No
. I don’t like the look of it.” Emre handed the spyglass back to Sirendra. “Let’s see if we can’t outrun it.”

  They tried. They put on more sail, they cut more carefully across the dunes, which rolled easily but could sap speed from the skis if the pilot wasn’t careful, yet the strange galleon still gained on them.

  By midday it loomed a quarter-league off the starboard quarter. The hair at the nape of Emre’s neck was starting to rise. The galleon’s hull and decks showed swaths of dry rot, making it look like it had been burned, the fire put out, and the ship put into service again. Stranger still was the crew. They wore the white tabards of the Silver Spears, but the fabric was torn and dirty. They limped from place to place, listless as plague men. Many had limbs missing. Others had gaping wounds in their necks, arms, or chests. One was missing half his face.

  Dead, Emre said to himself, feeling suddenly cold. They’re all dead. “Prepare fire pots,” he ordered Sirendra, “quickly. And ready the asirim.”

  On the ship of the dead, the ship’s captain, a woman, stood on the foredeck. She wore a violet dress and a black head scarf, the tails of which snapped in the wind. Her skin was dark like a Kundhuni tribeswoman, but it glinted under the sun as if she’d been dipped in crushed emeralds. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she bellowed across the distance, “Halt, that we may speak.”

  Beside the captain stood a man with a peg leg, the only crewman not dressed in the uniform of a Silver Spear. The first mate, perhaps? He wore trousers, a clean white kaftan, and a fashionable coat. “I really would listen to her if I were you,” he shouted in a theatrical voice. “She is Anila, Dealer of Death, Destroyer of All Who Would Deny Her.”

  It was difficult to tell at this distance, but the woman seemed to take a moment to gather her patience. “I ask you to halt a second time! I won’t ask again.”

  Four fire pots had been lit: one on the Amaranth, three more on the nearby frigates, all waiting for Emre’s signal to launch. “I’ll tell you only once,” he shouted in return, “turn away while you still can.”

  The mate standing next to Anila cringed. “Might you consider telling us to turn away before you light our ship like a beacon?”

  The strange, pregnant pause that followed was broken by Frail Lemi’s booming laughter.

  “That seems a bit on the nose, doesn’t it?” Emre shouted, pointedly not looking at Frail Lemi.

  The first mate waggled his head. “The audience wants what it wants!”

  Frail Lemi’s laughs rose even higher. “I like that one.”

  “That’s enough, Fezek,” Anila said.

  Sirendra, meanwhile, came up beside Emre. “The asirim won’t come. They’re huddled in the holds, whimpering, refusing all commands.”

  Breath of the desert, this was spiraling out of control. “Speak to me now,” Emre called. “I’ll answer as I can, then you and your ship can be on your way.”

  “Not good enough.”

  Emre wished it hadn’t come to this, but he refused to risk the safety of his ships and their crews. He nodded to Sirendra, who whistled a series of notes. A moment later, the first catapult launched, its arm striking the crossmember with a resounding thud. The fire pot arced through the air.

  “You’ve made a very poor decision!” cried the first mate, Fezek.

  The cold inside Emre grew deeper as the captain of the dead, Anila, traced a sign in the air before her. A white mist flowed from her hands. A blue glow trailed like a pennant behind her swiftly moving fingertip.

  The fire pot shattered halfway to the galleon. Flaming oil and shards of pottery fluttered through the air, a swarm of orange and yellow moths that fell well short of the galleon to patter harmlessly against the sand. The black smoke lifting from the patchwork of flames was borne on eddying currents as the galleon, unharmed, sailed on.

  The second firepot exploded while it was still in the catapult’s cradle. The Shieldwife tending to it reared away in surprise, triggering the arm’s release, causing the flames to spray over the frigate’s quarterdeck. The crew set to immediately, throwing handful after handful of blue dousing agent to snuff the burgeoning fires.

  By then Emre had taken up his bow and had three arrows pinched between his fingers. In a practiced move, he nocked the first, aimed at the captain while drawing the string to his ear, and let fly. Anila, meanwhile, had drawn another glowing blue symbol in the air. The arrow warped. Its path curved sharply. Instead of hitting Anila, it struck Fezek directly in the chest.

  “Hey!” Fezek called with an annoyed expression, and pulled the arrow free with a mighty grunt.

  Emre tried twice more but both arrows winged away like wounded doves. When he paused his fire—a terrible mistake in retrospect—Anila drew a third sigil. There was so much frost pouring from her hands it looked like smoke from a signal fire. She spread her hands. Arched her head back. Sirendra and two other Shieldwives tried to take Anila down with arrows of their own, but by then several of the crew were standing in front of her, holding shields to protect her. As the arrows thumped ineffectually into the shields, a cracking sound came, a rending.

  Emre turned just in time to see a white crack forming on the nearest frigate’s rudder strut, the thick support that ran from the turning mechanism inside the hull to the rudder’s ski. Like Anila’s hands, a white fog issued from that crack, then wood started to flake around it.

  Emre ran to the starboard gunwales shouting, “Drop the rake! Drop the rake!”

  But it was too late. The rudder gave way and the ship’s stern dropped to the sand with a resounding boom that Emre felt in the gorge of his stomach.

  The frigate’s masts swayed menacingly. The sails thrummed. The ship slowed precipitously, and the crew were thrown to the deck. Two Shieldwives pinwheeled overboard and were lost in the spray and dust kicked up by the dragging hull.

  “Drop rakes!” Emre bellowed. “All ships drop rakes!” Hearing the asirim howling within the frigates’ holds, he turned to Sirendra. “I don’t care if they’ve suddenly turned scared,” he said to her, “order them up. Have them protect the fallen ship.”

  She nodded, clearly confused as to why the asirim had become so agitated. As she relayed the orders, the ship of the dead dropped its rake as well. It slowed, coming to a rest along the frigate’s starboard side. A dozen ghulish soldiers dressed in white swarmed over the gunwales and onto the frigate’s decks, coming to blows with the Shieldwives and the sandsmen who crewed her. The asirim, even with their ship under attack, remained inexplicably belowdecks.

  When the Amaranth had come to a stop at last, Emre, Frail Lemi, and ten Shieldwives dropped to the sand and sprinted toward the wounded frigate. Only two asirim joined them: Huri and Imwe, the bloodthirsty twins bonded to Sirendra. They howled over the sand with their strange gaits. As they came near the ship of the dead, however, they stopped and would come no nearer.

  “What is it?” Sirendra asked them.

  The two of them only cringed, refusing to speak, forcing Emre and the others to go on without them.

  By then the crew of dead soldiers had dragged the wounded frigate’s Shieldwives and crew, twenty in all, down to the sand. Anila was there, standing in the shadow of her galleon, while her crew lined the prisoners up. From the galleon itself came the sound of rattling chains and a strange, rhythmic pounding. The entire ship trembled from it. A feeling of dread churned in Emre’s gut. There was something terrible inside that ship.

  Anila had her arms raised in a gesture of peace. Her mate, Fezek, stood beside her. Now that they were close it was clear that, though Fezek was a ghul too, he had the brightness of intelligence. Not so the ones in the tatty chainmail armor and threadbare tabards of the Silver Spears, who pressed their captives onto the sand and held bent, pitted swords to their necks.

  “Order everyone to lower their weapons,” Anila said to Emre, “especially that bloody great giant standing besid
e you.”

  Frail Lemi gripped the haft of Umber, his greatspear, and looked in no mood to let go of it, nor did Emre truly want him to, but there were lives at stake. The weight of the decision bore down on him, a thing made all the more difficult by the terrible headache he felt coming on. It grew so bad, so quickly, stars burst across his field of vision.

  “Do as she says,” he said through the growing pain. “Now,” he added when they made no move to comply.

  Finally they did. Their weapons thumped to the sand, all but Frail Lemi’s.

  Emre touched Frail Lemi’s shoulder. “This isn’t the fight we want, Lem. Save it for Hamid.”

  The muscles along Frail Lemi’s jaw worked. A glimmer of understanding shone through his blood lust. He nodded, then let Umber fall to the sand with a thud.

  Anila stepped closer with an intense look in her eyes that made Emre fear she was about to transform him into one of her ghuls. It made his headache feel all the worse.

  Suddenly the pounding from inside the galleon came louder—boom, boom, boom. Everyone turned toward it, even the dead crewmen. All except Anila, who seemed transfixed by Emre. “You’ve known death,” she said to him. “You’ve known it as I’ve known it.”

  Emre swallowed hard. “I doubt I know it half as well as you.”

  With another few steps, she came within arm’s reach of him. “A shadow of it lays upon you still.”

  “Yes.” For some reason, the admission intensified his pain. He couldn’t so much as look at Frail Lemi or Sirendra for fear the stars would multiply and swallow him up.

  Anila’s night-black skin glinted in strange patterns as she lifted one finger toward his forehead. “Would you like me to remove it from you?”

  “No!” he said, louder than he’d meant to. He had no idea what Anila could do to remove the pain, but he knew better than to bargain with a woman who’d been kissed by the lord of all things.

  Anila lowered her hand, disappointed, and the wonder faded from her eyes. “So be it.” Her look turned deadly serious. “I’ve a few simple questions for you. Things you’ll not mind giving up but which are extraordinarily important to me.”