The glowing footsteps led toward the heart of the city—to the collegia, of all places—except, as they entered the grounds, the footsteps faded and were lost.
Brama stopped. Peered more closely at the gravel path.
“What wrong?” Mae asked.
He tried to pour more power into the spell, but it was no use. “They’re gone,” he said. “The trail just disappears.”
Mae took in the sandstone buildings around them. Some were ancient, some quite new. Some were small, others large. A few were hulking monstrosities that dominated the space around them. “You think he live here?”
“It’s possible he only passed through the collegia grounds, but yes, I suspect so.” All around them, a light fog was lifting from the ground and dissipating in the cool desert morning. “There’s something about this place.”
“What?”
“Like it’s alive.”
“The students?” Mae asked. There were a few wandering the paths of the esplanade in the distance.
“No. The land. The buildings. It’s a mystery, Mae.”
Mae seemed doubtful. “Then what is the solution?”
Brama had no idea. But he would find out. For once, this was something both he and Rümayesh agreed upon. It chilled him to know that Rümayesh’s dark soul was as curious about the tributes and the purpose behind their being sacrificed to the adichara as he was, but he had to admit he was glad she wasn’t fighting him. What would happen when he found the answer, Brama didn’t know, but for now she was content to let him search.
Brama did search, for weeks. He scoured the grounds, hiding his presence behind a spell lest the blood magi of the city take note of him. He cast spells of searching, spells of divination. Spells that would reveal sources of power, which should have been enough to uncover where the mage who’d ensorcelled the boy was hiding. None of them worked, a source of endless frustration for Brama.
One night he grew angry over it, and decided to take one of the collegia masters and perform a ritual on her to seek answers. He stalked behind her along a darkened gravel path, debating where to perform the ritual. It was the image of making that first cut along her belly that snapped him from his dark fugue.
It was Rümayesh’s foul urges, not his own, that were driving him to chase this woman. Desperate not to let an innocent die for lack of trying, he pressed Rümayesh down, suffocating her twisted desires as the master, a woman with a round face, kinky hair, and clusters of moles beneath both eyes, sensed something. She peered into the night, searching for the source of her discontent. Failing, she rushed through the lantern-lit entrance to the residence hall, slamming the door behind her.
She might have provided answers, Rümayesh cooed.
“No,” Brama said as he stared at the closed door. “You know she wouldn’t have.”
She didn’t disagree, which was proof enough his words were true, and yet her absence made him feel her hunger all the more acutely. She fed on the fear of mortals, fed on their pain. She ached for it. Brama did too, which made him wonder how long it would be before Rümayesh had him, once and for all.
An echoing laugh seemed to follow him. Then it was beside him, the echo’s resonance easier to discern than the laugh itself.
Mae contacted Queen Alansal’s spies in the city. She found a safe house not far from the collegia and checked on Brama from time to time, but as the days passed and Brama found nothing, their meetings grew more sparse and his mood turned grim.
Perhaps I should abandon this, he thought, return to the desert.
No, Brama. This mystery runs deep. It touches the very heart of the desert’s history.
He suspected she was right, but what did it matter? His search was starting to look like a lost cause.
Then one day he found something new. He was walking across the grounds in the light of day, students walking by him, many getting a chill when they came too near, when a glowing thread of gossamer appeared in the air before him. At first he thought it some random remnant of the sigils built into the walls of Sharakhai, or fading evidence of some clumsy blood ritual.
The longer he looked, though the more he saw its elegance. It was a spell of binding, of connection. He followed it, but when the thread trailed away to nothing—a victim, perhaps, of the same spell that concealed Brama’s elusive quarry—he followed it the other way and discovered a wavering in the air, a less elegant spell of masking.
Taking care not to be detected, Brama pulled back the veil and, gods of the desert, saw Davud, the baker’s son, the one who’d impressed the collegia masters so much they’d sponsored him. A woman walked beside him, somehow helping him cast the complex spell of finding. Brama didn’t recognize her, but she looked like a typical west end girl—tattooed face, wild, braided hair, and a look like she’d cut you if you spoke to her the wrong way. Except that her eyes were bone white. He had no idea what could have happened to her, but he was intrigued. A refined collegia graduate with a rough-and-tumble west end mage, the two of them casting a spell to draw them closer to the place Brama suspected was the same one he’d been searching for these past weeks.
The two of them walked slowly, carefully, along the grounds. Brama followed, wrapped in a cloak of perfect silence. They entered a large, rectangular building, followed its high central hall to a room filled with an ordered mess of stone tables, shelves, and glass beakers held by metal contrivances of many sorts. They continued to a storeroom at the back. Brama had entered it several times and sensed nothing, yet when they pushed on a shelf that brimmed with brightly colored powders and liquids in glass jars and bottles, it swung wide.
They moved faster now, perhaps sensing the game was nearly won. They spun down a spiral staircase, then along a tunnel toward a room far ahead lit with lanterns. Brama sensed two souls inside that room. How they could have remained hidden from him for so long he had no idea, but just then he didn’t care. He was transfixed by the unfolding story.
Suddenly, one of the two people in the room ahead vanished and reappeared near Brama. A mage. Perhaps the one who’d cast the spells to mask the catacombs from detection.
Davud and his companion reached the entrance to the subterranean room. Outlined in the light as they were, they looked like wights, souls traveling to the farther fields. In that moment the mage swept up behind them and touched their shoulders, at which point Davud and his companion fell instantly and unceremoniously to the floor.
Brama’s instincts as a thief took over. He crept forward and watched as the mage dragged Davud further into the light. The mage’s broad facial features marked him as a Malasani, as did his orange forehead with the bright yellow circle in the middle of it.
Using a blooding ring, the mage bent over Davud, pierced his wrist, and drank from the bleeding puncture. Then he traced a sigil in the air.
Davud woke, eyes glazed, then shivered. “Nebahat.”
“Yes,” the Malasani said. “Now stand.”
Davud did, a marionette, his strings pulled by the mage standing before him.
“I’ll admit,” Nebahat said with an admiring smile, “you’ve avoided us so well until now I never thought to see you again. Why have you come?”
Davud’s answer completely surprised Brama. “Because you killed Chancellor Abi,” he said in an emotionless voice. “Because you’re searching for the descendants of the thirteenth tribe. Because the people you identify keep going missing.”
It was the last part—the very thing Brama had been searching for: the reason for the tributes being sent to the blooming fields. If what Davud said was true, it wasn’t merely for their blood, but for their lineage. They were descended from the thirteenth tribe. Once again, those cursed people had been caught up in the plots of Sharakhai’s most powerful.
“Is it true?” Brama asked as he stepped into the light.
Nebahat’s entire body spasmed in fear. He stumbled
backward and tripped over a pile of books, then scrabbled away like a crab.
“Is it true?” Brama pressed. “Are you sending tributes to feed the twisted trees?”
The man’s eyes were locked on the ruin of Brama’s face, on the strange lump on his forehead. He raised one hand, began describing a complex sigil in the air.
“No, no, no,” Brama said, and stopped him with a wave of his hand. “Now tell me, is it you who’s sending the tributes?”
Jowls quivering, his eyes wide as saucers, Nebahat nodded.
“Why?”
He swallowed hard, the apple in his neck bobbing furiously. “For Queen Meryam,” he managed.
And then, most strangely, Brama’s spell of command slipped off Nebahat like skimwood over sand. Brama thought Nebahat himself had done it, but realized a moment later it was the other occupant of the room, a young, clean-shaven man with thick eyebrows and an innocent face. Somehow he’d made Brama’s spell slide off Nebahat.
Brama was completely and utterly bewildered. “Who are you?”
The young, bright-eyed man didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Brama was just about to force him when he realized there was a binding on him, preventing him from speaking. Brama tried to remove it, but the man eluded his spells with astonishing ease.
When he tried again, something bright flashed before Brama’s eyes and the world swam before him. He felt nauseous.
In his disorientation, Rümayesh swept up from the depths like a leviathan. She traced a sigil in the air, banishing the spell that was causing the discomfort. By then Nebahat was casting another. Rümayesh tried to stop him, but fighting her way to full consciousness had cost her precious time, and Nebahat made his escape in a cloud of green smoke.
The young man stood there like a frightened lamb his eyes miserable. His lips moved, but no sound came out.
Rümayesh, seething in anger, stalked toward him. “You will give me the answers I seek.” Gripping his neck, she drew upon the power of the bone in Brama’s forehead to remove the chains that bound him.
“Tell me now,” Rümayesh said. “Why does Queen Meryam search for those with blood of the thirteenth tribe? Why is she sending them to the blooming fields?”
In answer, the man lifted the clay tablet he held in one trembling hand. Rümayesh, filled with an awe that was unlike anything Brama had ever sensed in her, took it from him. The tablet was written in a centuries-old tongue. As Rümayesh read it, the thoughts of the young man, borne on the wings of her spell, drifted to her. Both the tablet and his thoughts spoke of the gods, of their deepest desires, of the ways they manipulated the people of the desert, not only the tribes and the people of Sharakhai, but the Sharakhani Kings themselves, to get what they wanted.
Understanding dawned, the purpose of the gods revealed at last, and the tablet slipped from Rümayesh’s fingers, forgotten in the immensity of the moment.
The man gasped and reached for it, but he was too late. It shattered on the hard stone floor.
Rümayesh barely noticed. She could hardly contain herself. Her heart had opened its doors, and joy and excitement and fear were pouring forth. She felt as if she were standing at the dawning of a new world.
Without another word she left through the tunnel. She didn’t return to the surface, however. She walked until she came to a place that was not hewn from the rock by the hand of man, but by time and erosion.
She wended her way, coming ever closer to a place she’d sensed many times but never visited, the place where the roots of the adichara met. This, she thought as she stared at the immense cavern and the violet crystal glowing in its center, is what it was all for. The Kings. The asirim. The tributes taken and fed to the twisted trees. The gods had built it all, step by painstaking step, for a purpose.
As she paced over the spongy floor toward the crystal, enthralled by its violet light, she saw how everything connected: the manipulation playing out over centuries, the unwillingness of the gods to interfere, the slow accretion of this crystal, fed by the blood of tributes collected generation after generation. The ruthlessness of the Kings had never been for their benefit alone. Its true purpose had been to serve the gods. To create this portal, a pathway to the lands beyond. It seemed impossible at first, until Rümayesh remembered that the first gods had granted mortal man their own blood, despite withholding it from the younger gods. That was what the young gods had wanted all along, what they’d needed to breach the impassable barrier that separate this world from the next.
The gods daren’t interfere too much, though. Do that and they bound themselves to this earth, as Nalamae had done. They would be trapped. But trick man into feeding the trees? Trick man into creating this crystal? Trick man into forging a path to the farther fields, a path the gods themselves could follow? Well, then they would have what they most desired: to be reunited with the old gods, to feel their touch, to sit before them and bask in their glow, no matter that the cost would be dear to the world they left behind.
When at last the fields do wither,
When the stricken fade;
The Gods shall pass beyond the veil,
And land shall be remade.
So the verse in the tablet had read, the final pronouncement of the gods on the night of Beht Ihman. Sharakhai itself would be destroyed, of this Rümayesh was certain. But why should Rümayesh care? What happened to those who remained behind meant little to her. What mattered was that the gods had created a way to reach the farther fields. And if they could use it, then so could Rümayesh.
And she would.
She would ensure that the tributes continued. She would ensure the gods’ plan worked.
And when it did, Rümayesh would follow them to paradise.
Chapter 33
WILLEM WATCHED IN FEAR as the scarred man strode away. Stone and sand, the sheer power in him. Nebahat was fearfully strong in magic, but he was a babe compared to the thing that had just prized the pages of Willem’s mind open and stolen his memories.
Thank the fates that rule all, the darkness of the tunnel soon swallowed the scarred man. His footsteps faded and were lost. Only then did Willem crouch and try to piece the broken tablet back together. He remembered the words on it, but it felt like the desert was poorer for its breaking.
A twinkling caught his eye. Davud and Esmeray. Oh gods, he’d forgotten about Davud and Esmeray. He stood, breathless. He wanted to rush to their side. He wanted to slip Nebahat’s spell from them. But how could he? He was still bound. No matter that the scarred man had lifted it momentarily. It was back, strong as ever, and there was nothing Willem could do to lift it.
Slowly, he backed away, stepping closer to the aisle between the nearby shelves. He would return to his alcove. He’d let Nebahat deal with them. It was the only way. He had no choice.
He wondered what Nebahat would do. Rip their stories from them, certainly, but what then? What would their punishment be?
The answer came as a whisper in his mind. Death. Their reward for finding him will be death.
He bumped into the book shelf behind him and turned, frightened, then spun slowly about, taking in all the other towering shelves holding hundreds upon hundreds of books and scrolls and tablets. He stood before one, touched his fingers to the bindings of an old tome made of cracked leather. Below it was a set of wooden trays containing ancient tablets, and beside that, the golden tracery on one of Nebahat’s most prized possessions, an early copy of the Al’Ambra.
Willem had always been an observer. He’d always read stories, and wondered what it would feel like to be in one. Like this, the voice inside him whispered. It feels precisely like this.
What would the histories say about him? Would they recount him as a victim? A coward? Would they record him at all?
Not if you leave. Not if you abandon them to a man you know is evil.
Willem turned around. I can’t abandon
them. I can find a way.
Every step forward felt as if he were trying to lift the city onto his shoulders. Every moment that passed felt as if it would see the return of Nebahat. He could still turn around. He could still hide in his alcove and curl himself up into a ball and cover his ears until this was all over.
But he didn’t. He took step after painful step until he stood over Davud. Except now that he’d arrived, he had no idea what to do. The chains that bound him were as strong as ever.
Davud stared up at him, unmoving, trapped. He looked confused, as if he didn’t know what to make of Willem. But there was fear in him, too. Nebahat’s return was a certainty. It was only a question of when.
The spell on Davud glowed fitfully, dulling his brilliance. Such a travesty, Willem thought. Davud deserved to shine.
What if . . .
Willem swallowed.
What if he could find answers for Nebahat, to give to him upon his return? What if he freed Davud and Esmeray that they might speak to him? Wouldn’t that be helping his master in the end? He might even do a better job of it. They wouldn’t be afraid of Willem. They’d be glad to give him his answers.
His stomach felt like it was curling in on itself, but Willem ignored it and crouched down. Sweat tickled his palms as he held one hand over Davud’s face, then swept his hand down along Davud’s body, drawing the spell from him like a snake shedding its skin.
His light shining brightly once more, Davud coughed and sat up.
Willem moved to Esmeray and did the same to her. She shone in her own way, though the raucous colors made Willem shy away.
Esmeray was immediately on her feet, and when Willem put his hands up, pleading with them to remain, she shoved him away. “Stay back!” she yelled, and took Davud by the arm, trying to lead him toward the tunnel.
But Davud, gods bless him, refused to go. He remained, staring at Willem with an expression of naked wonder. “Tell me your name,” he said.
When Jackals Storm the Walls Page 30