The enchantress touched Chandur's shoulder. He tilted his head to hear her faint words.
“While healing the young feline, I considered our position. I’m by no means assured of finding the thief and the fennec. And I might escape a sarcophagus with my own magic but never a guarded pyramid, not without you.”
He believed that fate would bring her success in freeing him, though he still worried her own destiny might end in the tomb of the Golden Scoundrel. He was trying to think of something encouraging to say when she continued murmuring in a voice he struggled to hear even arm and arm with her.
“Chandur, I order you to escape at earliest convenience.”
“Don't worry about me.”
Hiresha said, “There's no reason for you to also lose your life over this insanity. Escape, and, if—if necessary—leave me.”
The thought of abandoning the enchantress in this city sickened Chandur. He lost his chance to say so when guards pulled him from her. A grunt slipped out of him as they forced a pole behind his back and through the crook of his arms. They retied his legs.
“Stand in front of Pharaoh, will you?” A guard pushed him to the ground.
“Only the best for a spellsword,” another guard said with a flash of gold teeth. “It's Bleak Wells Prison for him.”
Feelings of alarm nauseated Hiresha when she learned the guards intended to take her to the prison.
“Not to stay,” a guard said. “To meet the priests.”
She was less than reassured. Few enough hours remained to her in which to find the thief and fennec; losing another made her more anxious than leaning over a ledge of the cliff-side Academy.
They carried her sedan chair past a granite statue of a woman sitting on a throne. Her speckled-white arms crossed over her bare chest, and she grasped a stone cobra and three golden arrows.
“Doesn't look the mothering type,” Maid Janny said.
“They say,” a guard said, “Queen Sting poisoned arrows with her breast milk. But even she never stole no poor, defenseless fennec.”
Hiresha battled off a yawn before she could speak. “For the last time, we did not abduct your flea-bitten god.”
She could not look away from Chandur as guards hauled him into a circular building of unwashed stone. Hiresha was escorted after him down a windowless hall. Soot stained the walls in fan patterns above braziers. The smoke stank of burning camel dung. Metal grated the floor in alcoves painted with hieroglyphs and adorned with carvings of snakes.
“You're in Bleak Wells now.” A man wearing key amulets leered at her and Chandur, half his crooked face in shadow. “I promise not to let the boys tip hot coals onto that pretty head of his, even if he kidnapped a god's bride.”
“He did nothing of the sort,” Hiresha said.
A moaning from a nearby grate startled Maid Janny. She edged back to the prison entrance.
“Put him down.” The jailer unlocked a grating with his amulet and gestured to Chandur.
Guards heaved up the metal bars. They removed his wooden shackles only to retie his wrists with rope, and the men gestured him to step into a basket attached to a cord. “Hold on, unless you want to break a leg.”
Chandur did not step into the basket but instead removed the rope hooked to it. Holding the cord between bound hands, he shook off a guardsman and hopped on his own and dropped into the oubliette.
Seeing him so willing to descend into a hole full of darkness made Hiresha shiver. She wondered if he would see the sun again. That was, before they led him to his execution.
Three men spooled down the rope, slowing his fall. “Never seen one do that before.”
“Ain't natural.” A guard pushed the grating, and it slammed with a clang.
Hiresha covered her ears with trembling fingers. What if the thread of Chandur's life is snipped short? She hated to think she had guided him to that fate.
The guards yelled at Chandur to let go of the rope. They yanked and tipped over when the tension on the cord gave out. Two more guards carried the jasper sword on their shoulders.
One huffed. “More battle-ram than blade.”
Hiresha felt compelled to follow them. They lowered the enchanted sword into another oubliette, another black pit. The blade had been carved out of a single boulder valued at a hundred and seventy gold pieces, and enchanting it for Chandur had taken days, and before that, decades of mastering her craft. The reek of burning dung made her eyes tear.
Seeing both Chandur and his sword locked away made her think of her own future. Hiresha imagined the lid of the sarcophagus booming shut. Her breath shuddered in and out. Even if she saw no hope for herself, she would not let Chandur come to harm because of her. He had far more waking hours ahead of him.
Resolving to do all she could for Chandur, she straightened her back and strode down the corridor. Before she could leave the prison she received another shock. The Lord of the Feast knelt in front of a grating. The gloom in the hall swelled in time to his breaths, and his crooked fingers stretched shadows over the wall in the shape of fangs.
A guard gripped his sword hilt. “Who're you?”
“I belong here.” The Lord of the Feast spoke with such conviction that the guard muttered an apology and backed a few steps away.
A royal guard whispered an explanation of some sort to his fellow. Hiresha caught the words “Lord Tethiel” and “trades with the Dominion.”
“Hiresha,” the Lord of the Feast said, “my heart, this is a splendid surprise.”
She cocked one brow. “Is it really a surprise?”
“True, I could have followed your aroma. But I come here daily,” he said. “Gloating is my favorite form of exercise.”
Hiresha's face burned as she peered at the bars and the darkness below them. “Is Chandur down there?”
“This lofty abode belongs to a once-tracker for the Bright Palms. She hunted and baited five of my children into a rude impaling.”
The hush of his voice sent a trickle of coldness through Hiresha, and she imagined Bright Palms nailing the younger Feasters through their necks and chests, leaving them dead and hanging from their homes. Hiresha spoke with care. “I did not think working with Bright Palms could bring a sentence.”
“Apparently not content with murder, she also stole from a city temple. No doubt trying to enrich the priests with poverty, as per the Bright Palm’s tenets.” He raised his voice and spoke downward to the grating. “And her story will end happily. Instead of turning her heart to stone by becoming a Bright Palm, the organ will be freed from her chest, two days hence. I look forward to the event.”
Hiresha could not bring herself to feel sorry for the deaths of Feasters, who would have been murderers themselves. Her thoughts searched for a polite way to leave the conversation.
“Her scent grows richer by the day.” Air hissed through his nose. “Ah, prisons smell so lovely.”
The enchantress made the mistake of inhaling. A stink of filth and humanity seeped up from between the bars. The Lord of the Feast had to be smelling something very different. She winced at the thought of Chandur having to molder in his own waste.
“Your sword lug is imprisoned?” The Lord of the Feast did not truly ask it as a question. “Best thing for him. He fears less than a simpleton.”
“His name is Chandur. Fosapam Chandur.” She checked over her shoulder, seeing the guards had given them a bit of privacy. Her eyes drooped closed as she struggled against the wish to ask the Lord of the Feast to free Chandur. “Could you....”
Hiresha thought of the prison silent, all the guards lying dead. Each of the men would have families. Many of them were young, the first sons of merchants or the second and third of lords. Today's guardsmen might grow to be captains, fathers, wise men. A few years ago, Chandur had been one of them.
“Free him?” The Lord of the Feast completed her thought. “You're better off without him.”
“I'll be the judge of that, thank you.” Don't ask for his help, she told her
self, don't plead. The fewer ties with him the better. Even if you feel more awake with Tethiel close. She strode past him.
He followed with a wide stride. His legs had the outward bend of one used to riding, and they brought to mind the time he had ridden away from her on the back of a many-legged basilisk. “A fine idea,” he said. “Better we speak someplace less enclosed by ears. And walking limbers the thoughts.”
“I did not ask for your interference.” Hiresha's skirt flowed back and forth over her legs as she tried to outpace him. “I make my own plans, and they mustn't include you.”
“Every plan should allow for the unforeseeable.” He was a few steps behind her now. “And I mean to talk about just that.”
A guard hailed her at the door leading into the daylight. “Enchantress, the priests will replace me with a baboon if I let you out. They're bringing someone to question.”
“We won't go far.” The Lord of the Feast nodded to a brass tower that shadowed the prison.
Hiresha stepped back into the building. “I will stay then. I have no wish to converse with Lord Tethiel.”
“The conversation you least want is the one that's most necessary.” He started toward the brass tower as if assuming she would follow. Over his shoulder he said, “You should know, my heart, being stuffed into a sarcophagus is the least of your worries.”
A draft from the prison disturbed the bare skin of Hiresha’s spine with a puff of chill. Is Tethiel threatening me, she wondered, or does he know something I do not? She reasoned if he had wanted to hurt anyone, he would have done it in the gloom of the prison. Is it right for me to turn up my nose at help that could save Chandur's life?
I will hear him out. She decided to be bold and strode out of the prison and past the guard.
The man with the sickle sword called after her. Several more guards with blades or flails started to follow. They had been speaking to Maid Janny, by the sedan chair. The maid started to go after the enchantress, too, but at the sight of the Lord of the Feast she turned away, muttering.
“Oh my, oh my! Not him. I just can't, can't, can't.”
The guards caught up to Hiresha as she neared the base of the brass tower. The Lord of the Feast waited for her, alongside three men with their faces concealed by turbans and veils. Their sword hilts twinkled with enchanted jewels, which she recognized with a pang. My enchanted swords, in the hands of Feaster lepers. With a shudder she wondered if they had lost anymore fingers since she last had seen them. The gloves they wore hid the disfigurement.
The Lord of the Feast snapped his gaze over the empire's guardsmen. As one, they stopped, took a step back and looked to each other.
“A moment of privacy for us, my hearts,” the Lord of the Feast said. “Past lovers, you understand.”
“We were most certainly not,” Hiresha said to the guards.
“I'm deathly jealous of her new fiancé.” The lord winked.
One guard laughed. Another started to say, “You know the fennec Incarnate has been—”
His captain gripped his arm and interrupted him. “Once the priests come back, the enchantress will have to come with us.”
The veiled Feasters motioned the guardsmen to follow. One masked leper drew an enchanted sword to show, and the hidden lepers and the guards began a conversation.
Hiresha moistened her dry mouth by swallowing. She was upset at the Lord of the Feast for implicating her. Yet, better they think him a philanderer than a Feaster.
He gave Hiresha a subtle smile. Not even the greasepaint could hide the new lines of worry on his handsome face. He slouched as if he dragged chains with each hand, and he had the look of a defeated king, except for those pale eyes. In them swirled a chilling confidence, a will that could cut through stone.
“Tethiel,” she said and stopped, uncomfortable at how much she enjoyed saying his name. “You do know that they won't appreciate me leaving the sarcophagus, once they put me there. They plan to—”
“Suffocate you, I can smell that.” He inhaled then breathed out with a sigh.
“Asphyxiate, to be precise.” Hiresha folded her lips between her teeth. She had deduced Feasters to have some skill in sensing the fears of those nearby. “You may not care what happens to Chandur. Once, I thought you cared about me. Do you maintain that my slow, gasping death shouldn’t be my primary concern?”
“Death, no, I would advise against that. As an enchantress who specializes in regeneration and curing diseases, dying would ruin your reputation.”
Hiresha's face felt too hot, her heart beat too fast. She paced in front of the brass tower, her frustration mounting. The tower had no doors, its metal walls etched with hieroglyphs of men standing sideways, salt urns, snakes, a balance, and many other symbols.
She asked, “Then what would the lord advise?”
“For one, I know why your escape failed today.”
“So you have heard about that fiasco.” The pursuit of the camelry and ships had struck her as unreasonably fast. An idea flashed into her mind that petrified her with rage. “Did you tell the guards? Did you get Chandur thrown down a pit?”
“No, but I'll tell you who did.”
Hiresha eyed the Lord of the Feast. Scores of thin braids beaded with gold dangled from his wig. She wondered whom he would name, and if she could trust him.
“A Soultrapper,” he said, “wants to imprison you in this city.”
Hiresha did not much like the turn of this conversation. She had encountered a Soultrapper before and found him to be most ill-mannered. Magic users of that ilk had the bad habits of corrupting flesh and controlling minds. “Why suspect a Soultrapper? Have you seen abominations on the streets? The reek of urine hardly counts.”
He said, “I have not.”
“I am skeptical that I could tell if any minds were being controlled. What is the difference between mass stupidity and aberration?”
“Permit me to ask you this, Hiresha. Do you believe your fiancé is possessed by a god?”
One of the nearby guards frowned at this as if he had heard. Hiresha lowered her voice. “Not as such.”
“Then how do you explain a fox marching three circles around you then kneeling?”
“Animal training.”
“Mind control. How else would the fox know to pick you out of a crowd?”
Hiresha traced a finger between the precisely arranged garnets on her dress. “The mathematical laws of aesthetics transcend species.”
His gaze traveled up her, from legs to eyes. It felt like a caress of ice. She hoped this lord of murderers would not be the one to notice she wore garnets, not amethysts.
He said, “I fear the Soultrapper married you for the wrong reason. Revenge.”
“I doubt very much that I could have offended...ah.” Hiresha kneaded her forehead with three fingers. People across the Lands of Loam believed the city of her birth had recently been attacked by the Lord of the Feast. Hiresha trembled to think what would happen if they learned the truth: The Lord of the Feast had helped her save the city from a Soultrapper. “You think this hypothetical Soultrapper knows about the incident in Morimound?”
“He might've taken an interest in the enchantress who killed his apprentice.”
“I am not convinced.” She did not want to believe it. I have too much else to worry about.
“Soultrappers draw glyphs on the dying, to enslave the power of their spirits. This city is covered with glyphs.” His arms stayed limp at his side, but he nodded toward the brass tower and its panorama of etchings. “I can't scent him because he doesn't fear me or anyone. He's cleverly pretending to be dead, in a city with more mummies in residence than the living.”
Hiresha glanced up the hieroglyphs etched into the bronze tower. Three stories above street level, the rows of sarcophagi began. Stone faces gazed over the city, each built into the structure and enclosed by bronze. More such towers loomed nearby, and in the distance to the north and west, lines of them converged on the pyramid at center of th
e city. Hiresha understood that many people wished to be entombed close to the gods they worshiped.
“Oasis City,” the Lord of the Feast said, “centerpiece of the Oasis Empire, and the most fashionable place to be dead.”
She asked, “The Soultrapper is a forward thinker who buried himself before his time?”
“No, his time is long past. His magic keeps him bound into ancient flesh. He'd not take kindly to me opening tombs at random, but your heroic brain could find the one crypt among thousands. His burial haven.”
She had to hold in her next remark while a passerby walked close. The pilgrim laid a clay plate at the base of the spire, among hundreds of other tablets. In a hushed voice, he said, “May you have overcome every trial in the afterlife, my brother.”
Scribes had taken up positions around the tower, accepting coin to write benedictions on tablets for pilgrims.
Hiresha resumed in a quiet but pointed voice. “The hieroglyphs are not the same as Soultrapper glyphs.”
“But similar,” Tethiel said. “Every Soultrapper has traveled, has visited Oasis City. At least those my children have killed.”
“Every citizen of the empire aspires to the pilgrimage.” Hiresha turned to Bleak Wells Prison and saw the blue robes of priests at the doors. Soon the guard captain would notice, and she had little time left with the Lord of the Feast. “Assuming I do find some non-speculative evidence of a Soultrapper, you would assist Chandur and me in leaving? Hypothetically, of course.”
“Catch and kill the Soultrapper, and you won't need my help. He is the city's silent ruler. Leave him alive, and the night has nothing that can save you.”
Hiresha asked, “You believe the Soultrapper is influencing the vizier?”
“If the Soultrapper has hoarded spirits for centuries, he could influence most anyone. But I'd like to think that I'd distrust the vizier regardless. He has thirty titles but won't wear an ounce of gold. Nothing is more pretentious than humility.”
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