The Diviner

by Melanie Rawn

  She sent emissaries to absolutely everyone who had any stake at all in a prospective war. To Empress Mairid, she wrote that whatever troublesome resistance was still to be encountered in the conquered lands, her armies would help the Tza’ab make short work of it. To the nobles, in power or not, of these same conquered lands, she wrote that only her assistance could free them of their hated Tza’ab masters. To everyone she promised that the price of her support was nothing more than a trading outpost here and there for her merchants.

  Nobody believed any of it.

  “Not that she expects anyone to believe it,” said Qamar as he poured qawah for Miqelo that evening. “But she’ll have everyone eyeing everyone else, wondering who will join with her and who will not.”

  “And too suspicious of each other even to bring up the subject of an alliance,” Solanna added, then shook her head in disgust. “Trading outposts!”

  “You will excuse me, Qamar, I’m sure,” Miqelo replied with a grimace, “when I say that we learned with the Tza’ab that once an army is here, it stays.”

  Qamar shrugged. “Yet it seems there are those in Taqlis and Ibrayanza, and even in Cazdeyya, who are willing to take a chance.”

  “Taqlis,” Solanna mused, “is quite a long way from everyone else. They may think the Sheyqa won’t bother coming that far.”

  “I think the Cazdeyyan nobles have this in mind as well,” Miqelo agreed. “This lamb is excellent, Solanna, I’ve never tasted it dressed with mint before.”

  “An experiment,” Qamar said, smiling. “When you or my other roving friends bring me samples, once I’ve done with them we use them for cooking—after testing them for poison, Miqelo, I promise! This isn’t our mountain mint but another kind—Ibrayanzan. It’s odd, you know, that in the desert there are at most two or three varieties of any one plant—as if they learned early on what they must do in order to survive and just kept doing it. But here—ayia, my friends bring back for me four types of daisy, or six different grasses, and all from the same hillside! I’ve cataloged seven different sorts of mint, for instance, and of those acorns you brought me last time, three were entirely new to me. It’s—” He broke off suddenly as Solanna clapped her napkin to her mouth, her dark eyes sparkling merrily. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” he sighed. “Your pardon, Miqelo, I’m afraid I become worse than boring sometimes. Please go on with your news.”

  Grinning, the merchant ladled more mint sauce over his plate of lamb. “It’s good to see a young man with a real purpose in life, Qamar. My son—eiha, if he ever had a thought, it would die of shock at finding itself in his of all brains!”

  Qamar laughed and did not look at his wife. His real purpose in life . . . after twelve years of marriage, after watching him do his research and helping him with it, she still had no idea what his real purpose was. That was how he preferred it.

  “So our people—some of them, anyway—want to ally with Rimmal Madar to throw out the Tza’ab,” Miqelo continued. “I think it’s possible that Sheyqir Allil would unbend his stiff neck and accept the Sheyqa’s help to subdue the outlying regions of Joharra. They do keep him busy, you know.”

  “I never much liked him,” said Qamar. “I can imagine what would happen if he even hinted at such a plan to the Empress.”

  “It’s a pity he won’t dare,” Solanna said. “She’d be so outraged she’d throw him out. If that happened, at least the Joharrans wouldn’t have to suffer any more.”

  “Ayia, but what would happen then?” Qamar grinned at her. “Joharra might get to like their new ruler, and then what would happen to the spirit of rebellion?”

  She scowled her opinion of his teasing. “And what if Sheyqa Nizhria simply attacks and succeeds in gaining a foothold? Do we join with her against the Tza’ab, or join with the Tza’ab to throw out this new enemy? And where, finally, stand the Shagara?”

  “Aloof, as always,” Miqelo said firmly.

  Qamar exchanged a glance with his wife. “More wine?” he asked their guest, and poured from the chilled flagon. He would have liked a taste of it himself, but since that last tavern night in the seaport—so long ago now!—he had not touched a drop. He had promised Solanna.

  So much to learn. So much to codify. So much to organize into useful, useless, and possibilities to be investigated further.

  Berries, for example. Mulberry for peace and protection, raspberry for protection and love, strawberry for love and luck. Blackberry brambles prevented the dead from rising as ghosts, but in combination with rowan and ivy warded off all other sorts of evil.

  The plants and trees that grew here gave fascinating promise. So many of them were unknown in Tza’ab Rih. Qamar wished that the Shagara in his homeland had thought to study them before now. If nothing else—and there was a great deal else—there was help here for the pains of the bone-fever that afflicted Haddiyat, help in the form of the humble walnut. Yet the tree had another tantalizing association: it expanded things. Wealth, horizons, the mind, the emotions, the perceptions, the soul...and magic. Its use in inks was long established, but Qamar had from the first seen other ways of using the tree. Specifically, the wood. More specifically, to write on the wood. And finally, and most specifically, to draw on the wood of the walnut tree that expanded magic.

  A few months after their marriage, when they were still telling each other things about their families and childhood homes, the sort of idle reminiscences sparked by a word or a scent, Qamar was describing the palace where he had grown up. Gardens, gravel paths through them, intricate mazes of shrubs or walls that led to cooling fountains—all the serene beauties he had so taken for granted.

  “But the most beautiful garden and fountain were inside the palace itself. It was all made of tile—the grass underfoot, the trellises of climbing roses, the sky above them, darker and still darker blue until they reached the domed ceiling, sparkling with millions of stars. In the middle of the room was a fountain . . .”

  “Made of water, I hope?” An instant later she exclaimed, “Qamar! Stop that, you’ll burn your hand!”

  Startled from his thoughts, he snatched his hand back from lighting a candlebranch with a twig and blew out the flame that had indeed come almost near enough to scorch his fingers. And as he felt the heat that had not quite burned him, two separate memories swirled together like different inks combining to make a new and different essence.

  “Qamar?”

  “Yes,” he said mindlessly. “The fountain. It stopped working. There was a book of drawings, and he drew the fountain from memory, and it worked again—but then it didn’t, and he was dead with burned paper in the hearth—”

  “Meya dolcho,” she said with a worried frown, “what are you talking about?”

  So he explained it to her, the curious thing he had heard about from Ab’ya Alessid years after the fact. The fountain, the drawing spoiled by blood from a cut finger, the dead fountain and the dead artist and the dead ashes in the hearth.

  Solanna stared wide-eyed as he spoke. “Do you think—no, it’s not possible.”

  “Isn’t it? Fadhil was burning the drawings he didn’t like or couldn’t use, including the one with his blood on it—the one that had reawakened the fountain.”

  “With a picture?”

  “Why not? We do it with words and symbols, why not a literal depiction of the thing we wish to influence?”

  Suddenly she gripped his arm. “Or the person,” she whispered. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? You could draw a person, and in such detail that it would look real, and—and—”

  “And I could do to it whatever I pleased,” he said slowly. “I can do it now, with a name and ink and the right talishann and my own blood—but those are mere curse-tablets, like the Hrumman used to make. Piles of them are found every so often where their temples used to be. But they were superstition, useless. Powerless. If a likeness could be made that looks absolutely real—”

  “Stop. I will hear no more of this.” And to emphasize her
determination, she rose from the chair beside him and went into their reception room and stayed there the rest of the evening.

  So she did not hear his other story, the one about burning his hand as he wrote the letter to Rihana and Ra’amon for Ab’ya. His blood had surely been on that paper commanding them to rule wisely and gently, to unite his name with her power for the benefit of Joharra. Had they not done just that? Even when logic suggested otherwise, they had found ways to combine their strengths and—

  —and he had even playfully included talishann for love and fidelity and fertility and happiness, and they had known all of those things in abundant measure.

  But Rihana and Ra’amon were both dead, and Allil was ruling unwisely and ungently on behalf of the next queen, who was years away from taking power herself—if Allil was willing to give it up, which Qamar very much doubted.

  Neither did Solanna hear his further conclusion: if someone had thrown that letter into a fire or ripped it up, was it likely that Qamar would not be alive?

  In all the years since that night, he had never spoken of those things again, except to ask a casual question of one of his teachers. What was done with old pages? Once a healing had been accomplished, what became of the paper used to accomplish it?

  “Back into the slurry, of course, to be used again. We’ve always done that—ever since the first years here, when we didn’t have mountains of paper to waste.”

  So the blood was diluted, not actually destroyed by fire or its substance ripped apart by tearing the fibers into which it had soaked.

  No one knew. No one knew about drawings, and no one knew about destruction.

  Qamar kept these things to himself.

  The original Shagara magic, in the desert wastes, had been medicine—potions and unguents and dressings made with precision and care—and then the hazziri, made with Haddiyat blood. Here, the medicine still obtained, though with new and different plants replacing the old familiar ones. The hazziri were much the same as well, though the materials used had changed drastically. From gold, silver, and gems to tin and brass, the traditional arts had been translated as best they had been able. But these Shagara had added something no one in Tza’ab Rih had ever even dreamed of—and whatever isolated instances might have provided the clues, no one had put everything together.

  Qamar had recognized the entirety of it. The vastness of the magic that no one else had ever guessed. The art of the healer added to the art of the talishann, with quickening blood to kindle the magic, could find its ultimate potency in art.

  As he researched and learned and organized his findings, he realized that in hundreds of instances the Shagara here had adapted old formulas without fully understanding the additional significances of the indigenous plants. Solanna knew much of the lore her people had assembled over the years; in remote villages, lacking formally trained healers, most people learned at least the basics and usually rather more than the basics. And whereas every healer—Shagara or otherwise—knew that the poppy was used for sleep potions, Solanna told him that among her people, the white poppy brought the gift of consolation and the yellow, success. How such things had originated, no one knew. But Qamar made note of them all, and through the years had been indulged in his obsession by Miqelo and other friends who traveled for the Shagara, who brought back not just herbs and flowers but books.

  In one thing he was stymied. He could not draw. There were people here who had talent and tried to teach him, but it was all quite hopeless. He didn’t dare experiment. What if he had asked someone to draw one of the climbing roses in exact detail, only with summer flowers heavy on its canes, and then added his own talishann and blood—and what if the roses changed, right in front of everyone? Temptation gnawed at him to try it, but his wife’s reaction to the little he’d shared with her cautioned otherwise.

  He spent a great deal of time walking the hills near the fortress, not to collect specimens but to escape the noise and bustle that necessarily resulted when hundreds of people lived in such close proximity. He needed to think. He needed to make sense of what he had learned, what he had intuited, and what he suspected might be true. He could not act on any of it until he was sure. But there was always so much more to be discovered, so many things to compare and balance with each other.

  One thing became clearer to him the more he considered it. To influence a person, that most wondrous and complex of Acuyib’s creations, a drawing would have to be not just accurate to the last detail but done in colors. The rosy flush of cheeks and lips, the dapple of freckles across a nose, the highlights of red or gold or bronze in dark hair—all these things would have to be depicted. So it was fortunate that he had turned out to be good at mixing inks. He secured a small chamber one floor down from their living quarters, stocked it with the usual and the unusual for making ink, and put to use his ever-growing knowledge. Solanna called this room the Inkwell, more than pleased that her husband’s experiments were not cluttering up her home.

  Qamar spent many long hours fussing with various recipes, even though he knew that ink would never be able to capture the delicate coloring of a human face, however subtle the artist. There had to be an answer to the difficulty, and he must be the one to find it—for the rest of the Shagara could not learn that there was any difficulty at all.

  Sheyqa Nizhria grew weary of waiting for replies to her letters. Her next action was to send proclamations to all parties. Those who accepted her, she would not annihilate. Those who defied her would be destroyed. These were her terms.

  She received many replies this time. All of them defied her, sometimes in language that had never before been read aloud in the presence of a Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.

  The Empress of Tza’ab Rih sent no answer at all.

  With the early spring, ships sailed. Landing on isolated shores, they offloaded thousands of the Sheyqa’s warriors, including a large contingent of Qoundi Ammar and their magnificent white horses. When word of the invading forces reached Joharra, Cazdeyya, Elleon, Taqlis, and the new city-state of Shagarra, men who had been training all winter in anticipation of just this event began to march.

  This was precisely what the Sheyqa wanted.

  Miqelo and his son Tanielo returned early and shaken from their first expedition after the snowmelt. More than half the goods loaded onto pack animals for sale in towns and cities was still securely in place, and on seeing this the crafters groaned. There would be no profits this year from the rolls of paper or the pretty tin hazziri wind chimes, the lush woven woolens or the hundreds of bottles of medicine coveted by traditional physicians. Worse, there would be no sacks of fine grains, no bolts of new cloth, no citrus fruits or dried dates or figs. The only thing Miqelo brought back with him was news. None of it was good.

  For the first time in years, Qamar began to feel himself an outsider. Not just gharribeh, foreign, but dangerous. He was Tza’ab. His wife was Cazdeyyan. It had taken a long, long time for the people here to greet them as equals in the zoqallos and streets, then to speak with them, and finally to invite them into their homes for afternoon qawah or a casual meal. Yet Qamar knew that he and Solanna were still looked upon as outsiders. So he was surprised when a girl came to the Inkwell and said she had a message for him. She was a pretty little thing, so much Shagara in her looks that she might have just ridden in with her parents from the winter encampment in the wastes of Tza’ab Rih.

  “Please, Sheyqir, I am to say you must be as quick as you can, please. There is an assembly—at the Khoubri.” Her eyes widened like those of a startled fawn at the array of flasks and bottles on the shelves, the tables cluttered by heating rings with iron bowls nestled in them, jars of glass stirring rods, stacks of paper, bundles of unused pens. “The Khoubri, please, Sheyqir,” she said, as if worried that the oddities had made her forget to mention it.

  “I shall be there at once. Thank you.” He watched her run out the door and heard the clatter of her shoes on the stairs. A sound he would never hear his own daughter making. The
re would be no daughters, no sons.

  Shrugging off the thought as something he could never afford to dwell on, he rinsed his ink-stained hands in a bowl of clean water and ran his wet fingers through his hair. He was thirty-eight this year, but other than a few strands of gray and some lines around his eyes from squinting at his books too much, his age rested lightly on him. Especially for a Haddiyat. He knew this wouldn’t last much longer. He dreaded every winter morning, positive that he would wake to pain in his hands, his knees, his back. Not yet, praise Acuyib. But soon.

  The Khoubri was one of the oddest features of a very odd fortress. Its name was its description, for it served as a bridge between the outer wall and the building that housed the unmarried guards. At the junction, the bridge descended in a series of steps that gave out onto a large room with no windows and only one other exit. The idea, Qamar supposed, was that enemies gaining the walls would be funneled through the passage, push each other into the open, and discover they had only two choices: go forward through the single door and down the stairs, or shove their way back across the bridge and try to find another way in. Swords and spears would be waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs, of course.

  Whatever the case, the room turned out to be a good place for general meetings. A speaker could stand a step or two above, to be seen more easily. The echoes in the Khoubri were annoying, but after a while one learned to deal with that.

  Qamar climbed the stairs and sidled along with his back to a wall. There was no place to sit and no time to wriggle himself a space, for Miqelo was already standing on the second step, holding up his hands for quiet.

  “The Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar has a new weapon. It is called a ballisda, and it need not be brought in the ships. These things can be built here in a day or two. It is a mechanical arm that throws giant stones, burning pitch, anything at all either into or over any walls.” He paused. “Even ours.”