Brama rolls over one shoulder and takes up Maru’s knife as Kymbril, mouth gaping, makes it to one knee.
The assassin, meanwhile, stands in the doorway, his left arm burned and blistered. The lights swirl around him, and I am transfixed. I can do little, but I reach out to him. With all my will I beckon him, I force him to notice the glint in window. I whisper but one small memory: an arrow that bursts into flame as it strikes his enemy’s chest.
As Brama moves to engage Kymbril, the assassin moves to the window. He reaches out and grasps the necklace. With a downward tug, he snaps the string holding it in place. By Goezhen’s sweet kiss, what we might do together, he and I. For a time, he will be the one in control, I have no doubt, but with someone like him holding the necklace—I can already feel his eagerness, his ambition—it won’t be long before I am the master of my fate once more. Perhaps then we’ll return to Malasan. Perhaps I’ll allow him to accept commissions from his lords. I could do with a bit of murder to quench the fire that’s been building within me. Or perhaps I’ll move on, toss the assassin aside and take the form of one of his lords. It’s been too long since I’ve been to Malasan in any case. The last time I was there it wasn’t even called Malasan.
Brama and Jax are wrestling with Kymbril. Kymbril tries gouging Brama’s eyes, but Jax raises a knife high overhead and plunges it into Kymbril’s neck. Blood sprays over her, over Brama. Kymbril thrashes as the two of them stand and back away. Then the big man with the mismatched eyes goes still, his hands grasping empty air. Finally his body goes still, and Brama and Jax turn to the assassin. Nehir is there as well, on his feet, hands pressed against his stomach, his face white as salt. Together, the three of them hem the assassin in.
Brama eyes the sapphire in the assassin’s hand, but he knows something has changed. He can feel it. A distancing from me, which, even though he’d come to resent it, leaves an empty space inside him.
“You don’t have to do this,” Brama says.
The words are for me, not the assassin, but the assassin still responds. “All of this is necessary.” He grips the sapphire tight. Wills me to burn them all as I burned the arrow.
But there’s something about Brama that gives me pause. I haven’t seen him through another’s eyes in years, and when last I had he was dull, almost lifeless. Back then, I hardly spent a moment on him, blinded as I was by my obsession with the White Wolf.
But now…
There are lights, but they are dark and difficult to see. They remind me of my lord Goezhen. Will Brama be touched by the God of Demons? Will he one day stand before the lord who made me? It is something I’ve given up on ever happening again, thinking my god abandoned me. But if it might be so, what a fool I’d be to pass it up. And yet it isn’t up to me. Not me alone, in any case.
Nearby, the green, alchemycal fire is dead, and a mundane fire of flickering orange burns in its place. The smoke is growing, but no one pays attention to it. The assassin has opened his mind to me, enough that I can take his body from him for a time. “If I remain,” I say with the assassin’s voice, “will you allow me to help you?”
“What’s happening?” Nehir asks, leaning against the wall. As he slides to the floor, his confused gaze flits between Brama and the assassin. Jax rushes to his side, every bit as confused as her brother, but Brama understands all too well who voiced that question.
“I will not kill for you,” he says.
“You hold the reins, Brama. I only wish to help.”
Brama stares, clenching his teeth.
“Brama—” Jax begins, but when Brama holds his hand up, she goes silent. Brama looks the assassin in the eye, and I know his answer before he gives it.
“Very well,” he says.
And I nod back to him.
With a voice given to me by the God of Chaos himself, I whisper to the assassin’s mind. I tell him a story, of how he came to Sharakhai, how he found Jax and Nehir, how he made a deal with a local drug lord to secure them. I tell him how he slit both their throats, completing his lords’ mission here in the desert. I breathe into him the satisfaction the deed gave him, and he swells from it.
As I knew it would, the urge to return to Malasan after long months spent tracking his quarry here to the slums of Sharakhai is born inside him. Slipping his knife into its sheath, he drops the crystal and walks through the smoke, beyond the flames, and down the stairs.
When he is gone, Brama walks to the where the necklace fell. He picks it up and slips it around his neck.
#
One week later, Jax stands at the door to the room that was once Kymbril’s bedroom. “There’s a man downstairs asking to see the Tattered Prince. He’s the cousin of the girl you put right yesterday.”
“How bad is he?”
“Bad,” Jax replies.
Brama stands from the chair he’d been sitting in and begins to stretch. “Tell him I’ll speak with him.”
Jax stares. “You can’t mean to heal him now.”
“I do, if he can convince me of his earnestness.”
He heads for the pair of beds that sit along the far side of the room. Brama will lie in one, the lotus addict the other, and then he and I will work together to lift the addiction and place it on Brama so that the man might be freed.
“But you’ve only just recovered.”
“Maybe, but I am recovered. Send him up.”
“Gods,” Jax says under her breath. She stares at Brama as if he were some unanswerable riddle. “You’ll kill yourself if you keep going.”
“Perhaps. But I’m giving people new chances at life.”
He’s used that term once or twice before, and it has struck Jax hard each time. Nehir died the night of the fight with Kymbril from the wound to his gut. They buried him in the sand the following morning. When it was done, Brama asked Jax what she planned to do.
“I don’t know,” she said, staring out at the eastern horizon, toward Malasan. “Part of me wishes to return to my home. Part of me wishes to leave and go to Kundhun as I’d planned.” She turned to Brama then. “And part of me would stay.”
It was an offer, a plea, as clear as she could make it just then.
Brama smiled, a bit of the scoundrel returning to him. “Stay for a day. Stay for a week. I’ll show you parts of the city you’d never find on your own.”
As she stared into his eyes, a genuine smile crossed her lips. “I’d like that.”
But she hadn’t counted on Brama following through on his offer to Kymbril. The very next day, he healed two of the worst addicts who’d wound up in the lowest floor of Kymbril’s manor, freeing them from the prison the lotus had built around them.
In the manor, Jax strides to Brama’s side and takes his hand. “Promise me you’ll be careful?” She leans in and kisses him, pulling away as quickly as she’d come. “We have sights to see, you and I.”
I feel him brighten from within, and a smile most genuine spreads across his face. “I will be.”
The look they share is precious, one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in Sharakhai, a tattered prince and a young, foreign noble. And then Jax leaves the room to lead the suffering man up.
When she’s gone, Brama moves to a beaten brass mirror hung against the wall. “Are you ready?”
“Of course, my master.”
“I asked you not to call me that.”
In the mirror, my visage smiles. “You don’t have to suffer like this, you know. There are a thousand things and a thousand more we could do together. You and I and the girl.”
“To live is to suffer,” Brama replies. “I merely wish to do something virtuous with my life for once.”
I consider this, wondering where the dark lights I’d seen will take him. Where they will take me.
“Very well,” I say. “I’m ready.”
About the Author
Bradley P. Beaulieu fell in love with fantasy from the moment he started reading The Hobbit in third grade. From that point on, though he tried read
ing many other things, fantasy became his touchstone. He always came back to it, and when he started to dabble in writing, fantasy—epic fantasy especially—was the type of story he most dearly wished to share.
Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, the first book in his latest series, The Song of the Shattered Sands, was named to over twenty “Best of the Year” lists when it was released in 2015. His critically acclaimed series, The Lays of Anuskaya, has recently been released in omnibus form.
Brad, who recently became a full-time writer, lives in Racine, Wisconsin with his wife and two children. Beyond writing, cooking has become an obsession. His favorite dishes are French, Italian, and Mexican/Southwestern, but he is also fascinated by the art of bread baking.
For more, please visit www.quillings.com, and to sign up for the author’s low-volume newsletter, click here.
Twelve Kings in Sharakhai is the first book in the new Arabian Nights-inspired epic fantasy series, The Song of the Shattered Sands…
Sharakhai, the great city of the desert, center of commerce and culture, has been ruled from time immemorial by twelve kings—cruel, ruthless, powerful, and immortal. With their army of Silver Spears, their elite company of Blade Maidens and their holy defenders, the terrifying asirim, the Kings uphold their positions as undisputed, invincible lords of the desert. There is no hope of freedom for any under their rule.
Or so it seems, until Çeda, a brave young woman from the west end slums, defies the Kings' laws by going outside on the holy night of Beht Zha'ir. What she learns that night sets her on a path that winds through both the terrible truths of the Kings' mysterious history and the hidden riddles of her own heritage. Together, these secrets could finally break the iron grip of the Kings' power...if the nigh-omnipotent Kings don't find her first.
With Blood Upon the Sand is the second book in the Arabian Nights-inspired epic fantasy series, The Song of the Shattered Sands.
Çeda, now a Blade Maiden in service to the kings of Sharakhai, trains as one of their elite warriors, gleaning secrets even as they send her on covert missions to further their rule. She knows the dark history of the asirim—that hundreds of years ago they were enslaved to the kings against their will—but when she bonds with them as a Maiden, chaining them to her, she feels their pain as if her own. They hunger for release, they demand it, but with the power of the gods compelling them, they find the yokes around their necks unbreakable.
Çeda could become the champion they’ve been waiting for, but the need to tread carefully has never been greater. After the victory won by the Moonless Host in the Wandering King’s palace, the kings are hungry for blood. They scour the city, ruthless in their quest for revenge. Unrest spreads like a plague, a thing Emre and his new allies in the Moonless Host hope to exploit, but with the kings and their god-given powers, and the Maidens and their deadly ebon blades, there is little hope of doing so.
When Çeda and Emre are drawn into a plot of the blood mage, Hamzakiir, they sail across the desert to learn the truth, and a devastating secret is revealed, one that may very well shatter the power of the hated kings. They plot quickly to take advantage of it, but it may all be undone if Çeda cannot learn to navigate the shifting tides of power in Sharakhai and control the growing anger of the asirim that threatens to overwhelm her.
A Veil of Spears is the third book in the Arabian Nights-inspired epic fantasy series, The Song of the Shattered Sands.
The Night of Endless Swords was a bloody battle that saw the death of one of Sharakhai’s immortal kings. When former pit fighter Çeda narrowly escapes the battle and flees into the desert, she takes with her the secrets she learned while posing as a Blade Maiden, one of the elite women warriors who protect the kings. Foremost among these is the revelation that the asirim, the kings’ frightening immortal slaves, are in fact Çeda’s own ancestors. They are survivors of the fabled thirteenth tribe, men and women whose lives were bargained away so that the kings could secure their wondrous powers from the desert gods.
To Çeda’s great joy, the scattered survivors of the thirteenth tribe are gathering in the desert, forming a new tribe from the descendants of the few who escaped the kings’ cruelties. Their very existence is threatened, however, both by Onur, the King of Spears, who is calling warriors to his banner to challenge the other kings’ rule, and by the other Sharakhani Kings, who will stop at nothing to see the thirteenth tribe destroyed once and for all.
In desperation, Çeda returns to Sharakhai, hoping to break the chains of the enslaved asirim and save her people.
In the city, Çeda soon discovers that the once-unified front of the kings is crumbling. Feeling their power slipping away, the kings vie for control over the city and the desert beyond. Çeda plans to use that to her advantage, but who can she trust? Any of them might betray her as easily as they betray their fellow kings.
As Çeda works to free the asirim and rally them to the defense of the thirteenth tribe, the Kings of Sharakhai prepare for a grand clash that may decide the fate of all.
Of Sand and Malice Made is the exciting prequel to Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, the acclaimed first novel in The Song of the Shattered Sands.
Çeda is the youngest pit fighter in the history of Sharakhai. She’s made her name in the arena as the fearsome White Wolf. None but her closest friends and allies know her true identity. But this all changes when she crosses the path of Rümayesh, an ehrekh, a sadistic creature forged aeons ago by the god of chaos.
The ehrekh are desert dwellers, but for centuries Rümayesh has lurked in the dark corners of Sharakhai, combing the populace for jewels that might interest her. Some she chooses to stand by her side, until she tires of them and discards them. Others she abducts to examine more closely, a thing that leaves them ruined, worn-out husks.
Çeda flees the ehrekh’s attentions, but that only makes Rümayesh covet her even more. Rümayesh grows violent. She threatens to unmask Çeda as the White Wolf, but the danger grows infinitely worse when she turns her attention to Çeda’s friends. Çeda is horrified. She’s seen firsthand the suffering left in Rümayesh’s wake.
As Çeda fights to protect the people dearest to her, Rümayesh comes closer to attaining her prize and the struggle becomes a battle for Çeda’s very soul.
This spellbinding tale is sure to strike a chord with readers of Peter V. Brett, Brent Weeks, and Trudi Canavan—as well as fans of Twelve Kings in Sharakhai eagerly awaiting the later books in the Shattered Sands series.
This omnibus edition of The Lays of Anuskaya is comprised of the following novels:
The Winds of Khalakovo
The Straits of Galahesh
The Flames of Shadam Khoreh
Also included are the following two Lays of Anuskaya novellas:
“To the Towers of Tulandan”
“Prima”
Among inhospitable and unforgiving seas stands Khalakovo, a mountainous archipelago of seven islands, its prominent eyrie stretching a thousand feet into the sky. Serviced by windships bearing goods and dignitaries, Khalakovo’s eyrie stands at the crossroads of world trade. But all is not well in Khalakovo. Conflict has erupted between the ruling Landed, the indigenous Aramahn, and the fanatical Maharraht, and a wasting disease has grown rampant over the past decade. Now, Khalakovo is to play host to the Nine Dukes, a meeting which will weigh heavily upon Khalakovo’s future.
When an elemental spirit attacks an incoming windship, murdering the Grand Duke and his retinue, Prince Nikandr, heir to the scepter of Khalakovo, is tasked with finding the child prodigy believed to be behind the summoning. However, Nikandr discovers that the boy is an autistic savant who may hold the key to lifting the blight that has been sweeping the islands. Can the Dukes, thirsty for revenge, be held at bay? Can Khalakovo be saved? The elusive answer drifts upon the Winds of Khalakovo…
Find more adventures in other worlds with Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories…
With The Winds of Khalakovo, Bradley P. Beaulieu established himself as a talented new
voice in epic fantasy. Now, with the release of his premiere short story collection, Beaulieu demonstrates his ability to weave tales that explore other worlds in ways that are at once bold, imaginative, and touching. Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories contains 17 stories that range from the epic to the heroic, some in print for the first time.
Twelve Kings in Sharakhai marked the start of a bold new epic fantasy series for critically acclaimed author Bradley P. Beaulieu.
In the Stars I’ll Find You & Other Tales of Futures Fantastic features Beaulieu’s science fictional work, from exploring far-flung worlds to finding what it means to be human through artificial intelligence to the cost of dividing ourselves—or ourself—through the use of technology.
In this short story collection, you’ll find eleven tales that explore our very human relationship with technology, some in print for the first time.
The Burning Light is a stand-alone novella by Bradley P. Beaulieu and Rob Ziegler.
Disgraced government operative Colonel Chu is exiled to the flooded relic of New York City. Something called the Light has hit the streets like an epidemic, leavings its users strung out and disconnected from the mind-network humanity relies on. Chu has lost everything she cares about to the Light. She’ll end the threat or die trying.
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