Surprising. I put my plate down and noticed that Lila also had backed away from her food. “How surprising?” I made myself ask.
Shem leaned back and brought out a small pack that he carried with him. When we’d escaped Dragon’s Ground he’d looked to have nothing but the clothes on his back. But under his shirt he carried a thin backpack that was very nearly empty by the looks of it. He unzipped the bag and reached in.
“I would say . . . impossible,” he said, his eyes on mine. “Yet, with you, that seems to be a word you just ignore. Like leaping off the back of a dragon, falling, and yet somehow surviving what should have killed you.”
Before I could respond, he pulled out a leather satchel from his bag that folded over and tied closed around a bone button. I frowned. It looked an awful lot like the satchel I’d taken off the Jinn from their camp—a satchel that had been full of nothing but blank sheets of paper. Lila caught my eye and nodded, but like me, she said nothing. The three of us watched as Shem untied the string that held the leather cover closed and pulled out a few sheets of paper. His paper was not blank like that in the satchel I’d stolen, but instead covered in strange writing. Pictures and letters, glyphs that drew me, and I found myself creeping forward.
“What is that writing?” I stared at it and the words shimmered and shifted around until they were pictures only, and not words or letters.
“What do you mean?” Maks leaned over from the other side of me. “I don’t see anything but blank paper.”
I lifted my eyes to Shem’s and he raised both eyebrows. “What do you see, Zamira?”
Shit, I could tell him, but then would it be used against me? How? Fuck, I had to trust him, he was my uncle and I’d named him my seer.
I stared at the paper as it shifted and moved. “I see words that turn into pictures. Like a . . . TV.” I knew that much about technology. We had a TV back at the Stockyards. Bryce had been trying to get it to work before he’d died. The best he’d managed was a flicker here and there of pictures, but I understood the idea behind it. Moving pictures with sound, just like life. Only on a box.
I looked back to the papers and the images cleared further. Were these like the papers I had snagged from the Jinn? Though they seemed the basic idea, I didn’t think they were exactly the same.
Maks leaned forward. “What are these about?”
“These belonged to the Emperor’s bastard daughter. A child born from a servant woman. She gave them to me for safekeeping. Her husband didn’t want her to have anything to do with them as he felt they would bring about her death. As I have always been known for being crazy, she felt I could give warnings easier than she could and get away with it.” He sighed. “In the end, she was wrong. Her life was snuffed out for these.”
I stared at the papers. There was a distinctive feminine feel to the drawings on the papers. I had to clench my hands to keep my fingers from tracing them, and a part of my brain whispered that I’d seen them before. Which was ridiculous.
“Okay, so she gave you these papers, which means you found her in your journeying after you left the pride? Is she the one who told you about the signs of the Emperor returning?” Part of me fought that we were even having this discussion. Because despite what some people had told me, I was not interested in dealing with the Emperor. A mage of unbelievable power, he was a legendary terror among legends.
Especially after he decided to have a chat with me. That was a whole lot of nope right there.
Shem nodded, his eyes on the satchel. “She died not long after she gave them to me, but she knew she was being hunted and her death was written in the stars, is what she believed. She always told me it would come, but I didn’t believe it—I thought I could protect her.” His golden eyes clouded with old pain, like a wound seeping. Before I could ask him why the papers were worth killing for, he gave me the answer.
“You see, she knew how to kill the Emperor. That was her downfall.”
Maks grunted as though Shem had punched him in the gut. “Wait, the Emperor has been asleep for over two hundred years. Even if there are signs showing that he’s gathering power, it could be another two hundred years, long after we’re gone.”
Shem flipped through the papers as he spoke again. “The sleep was never going to be forever; she knew that, we both did. The Emperor’s son put him to sleep, but the Emperor was savvy. He did something so he couldn’t be killed. We don’t know what, exactly. Hence the sleeping issue. Ah, here it is.” He pulled out one of the sheets of parchment and laid it on top of the others. It had a single tick on it, like a page number. “Zamira, you have a bloodline that can read this, obviously. What do you see?”
The words slid and danced and finally began to form a moving picture. “I see a temple rising out of the deep sands, far to the east. It’s shooting up like a mountain forming.” I frowned and clenched my hands to keep them from touching the paper. “But that’s it.”
“That is where the Emperor sleeps.” Shem pulled another paper and laid it out next. This one with several ticks in the corner. The next pictures were ones I knew.
This time I did reach out and touch the edge of the paper. “The standing stones, I see them all over the place.”
“To catch the unwary,” Maks said. “Damn.”
I nodded but didn’t look at him as the picture shifted. “The blood vine is next, weaving around the stones. But that isn’t right. There are no stones here, none with the bush.” I pointed my hand in the general direction of where we’d encountered the blood bush.
“Symbolism only, that they will come one right after the other,” Shem drawled. “What is the last thing you see? I’ve never been able to interpret it fully.”
Before I looked at the paper, I shot him a glance. “So, you are a bloodline that can interpret this, too, then?”
He shook his head. “I’m a seer. I have a knack for deciphering that which is hidden. But not enough to fully grasp what is here. I need you for that, apparently.”
I dropped my eyes to the parchment again and watched as the vines pulled back and a dark mist flowed between the vines and the stones, eyes set inside of it, and then it blew away, into the vines and the stones. I shivered. “Eyes and mist. Like someone is watching. But then they are gone too.” Gone, like water drying in the desert.
Lila groaned. “I don’t like that. We don’t need more people watching us.”
I looked up at Shem, tearing my eyes from the parchment with some difficulty. “The Emperor is waking, sure. And while I realize this is like a case of the runny shits down the legs of life, what has that got to do with us rescuing the remainder of our pride from the Jinn and Ish?”
Lila cleared her throat and I shot a look at her. She widened her eyes and tipped her head as if to ask why we weren’t saying anything. I shook my head. If we mentioned the voice now . . . then what? What would it change? Nothing.
We were going forward, end of that story.
Shem sighed. “A warning only is all it means. The old evil awakens, and we may inadvertently come across some of the traps he has as they spring up. The Emperor’s power must be fed, and he will seek out blood and magic wherever he can.”
“He sounds like a dick,” Lila said.
I laughed. “Yeah, a floppy dick. Good for nothing.”
She snickered, but I heard the anxiety in her laughter. Funny, but not funny. This was turning stressful.
Again. Surprise!
Maks rolled his eyes, but I saw the twitch on his lips. He didn’t reach out for my hand, and much as I wanted to shift into my cat form and slide into his shirt to absorb the warmth of his body, I had a job to do. One that didn’t involve letting Maks carry the bulk of my weight and responsibilities.
“Take these papers.” Shem pushed them at me. “You can read them better than I can anyway. Perhaps you will be able to decipher more of them.”
Before I could say yes or no, he’d shoved the satchel into my hands and forced me to take them. I clutched them to me.
A smell of jasmine floated up. The Emperor’s bastard daughter smelled nice. “You sure? You’re the seer, not me.”
“Yes, I’m sure.” He didn’t look at me again. “You should have them. She’d have wanted . . .” he muttered the rest under his breath.
I tucked them into my saddlebags, my thoughts whirling. This whole transaction seemed odd, even for Shem.
“You never said if there were more traps to look for,” Maks said. “Are there?”
Shem rolled his shoulders. “The Emperor has control of the Ifrit that are left. What does that tell you, Maks?”
Ifrit, I knew that word, but . . . the definition came to me slowly and I gaped like a fish out of water. “You can’t seriously mean the underworld demons?” I blurted.
Shem nodded. “I do.”
Maks’s face was pale and he swayed where he was. “This is bad, Zam. Worse than even I could have imagined.”
Lila buzzed between us. “I don’t know what an Ifrit is. Will someone explain? And fast!”
I drew a slow breath. “The Ifrit, they are demons, and they rule the underworld. In the past, the Jinn traded favors with them and used them to their advantage.”
“That was thousands of years ago,” Maks said quietly.
“Then why the pale face?” Shem asked the very question I wanted to know.
“Because of Marsum.” Maks sucked in a big breath and shook his head, almost as if he couldn’t find the words. “Before I left, he was talking about waking the Ifrit and using them once more. He wants to rule, not just his section of the wall, but all of it.” He looked at me. “He wants the Emperor dead. He wants to be the next emperor. The Ifrit would be a way to make that a reality.”
I snorted, thinking of the man who’d taken me into a dream, and the power I’d sensed in him. “Then we should let that happen. Two birds, one big stone; they can just kill each other.” Maks and Shem shook their heads in unison. I raised an eyebrow at them both. “Why not then?”
Shem held his hands out wide. “Because, there is always another big bad ugly. You know that, Zamira. Just like there is always someone stronger than you, faster, smarter. There is always someone more dangerous. Someone the Emperor in his own way has kept us safe from.”
For just a moment, I stared at him, not comprehending. “What are you saying? That there is someone, or something worse than the Emperor and the Jinn?”
The twist of pain on Shem’s face said it all. But he said it anyway.
“Yes, Zamira, there is.”
Well, howdy fucking doody. How was that for a way to start the morning off right?
I stared at my uncle with my mouth hanging open and my brain stuttering over what he said. That something worse existed, something uglier than the Emperor.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I sputtered the words.
Shem shook his head. “No, unfortunately, I’m not.”
I wanted to put my head between my knees and take deep even breaths until this new twist slowed down. “Really, tell me you’re teasing.”
Shem sighed. “I wish I were, but the Emperor . . . he was not always the tyrant he became. He started out a hero, as so many tyrants do. He saved our world, Zamira, a long time ago. And the world worshipped him for it.”
“Saved it from what?” Lila asked, her tail lashing with irritation. “What the hell could he save it from that was so bad?”
Maks surprised me by answering. “It’s the falak, isn’t it?”
Shem nodded, and I just let my body slump to the ground. “No, no, that is a legend. That is not real. Falaks are not real.”
“Well, there aren’t more than two of them, as far as I know,” Shem said.
Two.
Lila tapped me on the head. “Tell me. What is this falak?”
I swallowed hard, but the two men didn’t seem inclined to fill her in. “The falak is a giant snake-like monster that lives in the fire realm under the earth’s crust.”
The ground below us rumbled suddenly. I leapt up and stared at the sand and rocks at my feet. Lila squeaked and clung to me.
“Listen, much as this conversation is awesome, and the perfect fucking way to start the morning, I think it’s time we go. I want distance between us and the blood vine,” I said. “We can’t do anything about the Emperor other than avoid his traps, and discussing the falak is not going to get us anywhere.”
I held my hands up when Shem opened his mouth. “I get it. Things are bad. But I can only deal with one bad at a time. We are going south into the Jinn’s Dominion, Shem, to get our family back. The land where our family’s blood was spilled until there were so few of us left that we are close to the edge of being nothing. I think that’s enough bad shit for right now, don’t you?”
“As long as you understand that this conversation needs to continue.” Shem stood and went to his horse, Ali. Well, she had been Bryce’s horse before Shem’s. I pursed my lips as I watched him tack her up. She was built thick, a heavier breed of horse for carrying the big men and pulling carts.
She was not built for speed. Which if we ended up running, we were going to need.
“We need to trade Ali in, much as I don’t want to.” I went to her and rubbed her velvet nose. Her big lips flopped around my fingers, looking for a treat. I smiled at her. “There are horse traders down the west side of the Caspian. We should go there. See if we can get you something with running legs on it.”
“And avoid Ish along the way.” Maks nodded. “Good call.”
I backed away from Ali and went to my own horse. Balder watched me as I brushed him off and tacked him up carefully, checking that all my straps were straight and not pinching his skin. The last thing I needed was a saddle sore from being careless. I flicked a hoof pick through his hooves, checked his shoes that they were all nailed on tightly. While I could manage to fix a loose shoe, it was better to catch it early. So far, we’d been lucky not to throw any.
Balder nudged me with his nose as I finished attaching the last of his gear and mine. The flail sat on my cross-spine sheath I’d made for it. The weapon was light as a feather and I rarely noticed that it was even there. Until a fight broke out, then the urge to grab it and knock the shit out of my enemies was overwhelming. Which I did my best not to do simply because when I used it, the weapon drew my own life force into it. Basically, it tried to kill me.
I reached up and brushed two fingers along the wooden shaft, feeling the engraving of my family’s crest in it. What were the chances that I found it in the giant’s hoard all those months ago? That I’d seen it amongst the garbage and shit as if drawn to it? I shook my head as the wooden handle warmed, becoming tacky to my fingers. I snatched my hand away. “None of that,” I said quietly.
The heat from the weapon’s shaft pushed through my clothing and marked a line across my back as clearly as if I’d had Maks draw one there. Yeah, not sentient exactly, but there was power running through it I didn’t fully understand.
Ignoring it as best I could, I slid a horse treat out of my cloak pocket and offered it to Balder. He took the treat and chewed contentedly, unbothered by eating around the bit in his mouth. That was our life, eating on the run. I sighed and mounted up, swinging my leg high over his back, then settled into the saddle.
His head snapped up and his ears pricked forward. Something moved in the distance at a flat-out gallop. Balder let out a whinny welcoming the newcomer.
I frowned as the person came into view. Person, satyr, same difference. Goat from the waist down, man from the waist up, I’d sent him to Ish to get help for Kiara and her child. Maybe he had good news. But by the look on his face, I doubted it. Damn it, I needed to restart this day.
Chapter Four
Marcel the satyr slid to a stop, gasping for breath in front of me. I didn’t dismount from Balder, but instead, urged him forward. “Marcel, you have news about Ish?”
I’d sent him in my place to beg for help from Ish when Kiara had been taken by the Jinn. I’d been torn in two directions
—Bryce had gone into Dragon’s Ground, and Kiara had been scooped by a fleeing Jinn as a prize. I’d hoped that by sending Marcel to Ish, she might consider doing something to save the young lion shifter. In a dream or a vision or some shit like that, I’d seen the meeting between Ish and Marcel, and the entrance of Merlin. But I didn’t see it all and I was worried about what I missed.
Marcel bent at the waist, breathing hard, his hands on his furry knees. “Holy shit. Merlin showed up while I was there. Flounce me sideways for days, I do not want to ever see that kind of power thrown around again.”
My eyebrows shot up. “What kind of power?” I hadn’t seen Merlin since we’d forayed into the Witch’s Reign, if you discounted the vision. What was he up to now?
Shem growled. “He’s causing trouble, is he? No surprise there considering who his pap is.”
Marcel stood and waved both hands at us. “He tried to calm Ish down. Said something about the jewels being what was making her mean again. Like she’s been a bitch before. She flipped her shit and we ran for it.”
I moved Balder beside him and handed him a skin of water. He took it and gulped it down. “Did she even mention Kiara? About helping her?” Again, I’d seen her response with my own eyes, but I was hoping that after I’d left the scene she’d changed her mind.
He nodded as he drank and a burst of hope climbed through me. He lowered the flask of water. “She said, and I quote, ‘Kiara will have to save herself if she is to survive at all’ or something like that.”
Lila swung in close and whispered, “I think he doesn’t know what a quote is.”
I smiled, but it fled quickly. “Anything else?”
“Well . . . ” He looked to the sky. “Basically, she said that you aren’t safe around her. Something about the giants’ jewel making her meaner than normal. And that they hate you and that is filling her up.”
Jinn's Dominion (Desert Cursed Series Book 3) Page 4