Ariah (34 page)

“
Sorcha is, yes.”

“
May I ask why you’re going back?”

“
Personal reasons.”

“
Personal reasons,” she said. “Personal reasons are the only reasons you ever have for anything, professor.”

“
So, can we tag along with you or not?” Sorcha asked.

“
How soon?”

Sorcha elbowed me in the ribs. “Soon,” I said.

Shayat looked over her shoulder at her crew. There were five of them, all men but her. They were expressive, free with laughter. One leaned against the caravan’s single wagon and flirted with a Vilahnan girl half his age. “The crew gets two months here.”

“
Shayat, you’ve come to Alamadour two, three times? And every time you’ve stayed for months?”

“
Yes.”

“
I’ve been here this whole time!”

“
Well,” she said. She dropped her hands to her hips and smiled. It was a guileless, unadorned smile. My heart skipped a beat. “I did think about tracking you down.”

“
Why didn’t you?”

“
Personal reasons.”

* * *

Three days later, Shayat appeared at my door. It was quite late; had we already been back in Rabatha, it would have been well after curfew. I was stoned and shirtless, already half-asleep. Sorcha was deep into a bottle of Vilahnan wine all by himself. He sat against the side of the fireplace, idly poking at the burning log. The summer night was warm, but he had built the fire anyway. I answered the door thinking, perhaps, it was the bartender. But it wasn’t.

Shayat grinned like a cat when I opened the door. She drank in the sight of me, bold, unfazed by my half-naked state. “Is this a bad time, professor?”

I leapt behind the door. “Oh! Oh, I…no, I just, uh…I’ll find a shirt.” I let her in and ducked into the bedroom.

“
If you insist,” she said.

I stuck my head through the door. “I’m sorry, what?”

Shayat, still grinning, still self-possessed, shrugged. Sorcha caught my eye and shot me a curious look. I stumbled around ineptly until I found one of his shirts. When I came back into the room, I found Shayat and Sorcha eyeing each other like territorial predators. There was an odd tension in the air, one that pulled at me, but I’d smoked the gift into submission, and I couldn’t parse it. “How did you know where to find me?”

“
It didn’t take much,” she said. “You two are the only silver-skinned men who live anywhere but the markets.”

“
Why are you here?”

“
I have a proposition for you. Have you secured transport back yet?”

“
We haven’t, no.”

Shayat nodded and sat down. I sat across from her, eager and compliant. “Then, I have a proposition,” she said. “I spoke with my crew. For a reasonable price my cartographer and I would be open to considering loaning you two camels and taking you to Rabatha using our very fast route. Ariah, I know you have valid papers, but does he?”

“
He doesn’t,” Sorcha said. He drank more wine straight out of the bottle.

“
Well,” Shayat said. “Well, well. For a reasonable price I might be able to secure you some papers. For a price.”

“
Shayat, you know a forger?”

She answered with an unreadable smile. “Let me tell you about the route. It is all camelback, up through a mountain pass and then north through the Mother Desert. We don’t hit border guards until we ride through Iyairo. Can you ride camels?”

“
No trains?” I asked.

“
Stationmasters can take an eighth. Police can take an eighth. All camelback.”

I frowned. “I hate camels.”

“
But you can ride?”

“
Yes,” I said. “I can ride.”

“
Can he?”

“
He can,” said Sorcha. “He rides well, actually.”

I looked over. “I didn’t know that.”

He grinned. A flash of better humor brightened the room, and I grinned back. “Ah, you know, you give them a lump of sugar, you coo, and they’re putty in your hands.”

“
They scare me.”

Sorcha shook his head. He came and sat next to me on the couch. The half-empty bottle of wine stood abandoned and forlorn next to the fireplace. “Ariah, they’re not scary. Sanctuary is scary. Inalans are scary. Camels are just…camels.”

Shayat cleared her throat. “Let’s talk reasonable prices. With lost time, with the extra feed for the camels, with papers for him, I think twelve hundred marks would be a fair ask.”

“
We have five hundred,” I said. “I don’t want to bargain. I don’t want to negotiate. I don’t want to be cleaned out. Together, Sorcha and I have five hundred marks.”

“
That’s it?” she asked.

“
That’s it.”

She frowned slightly. “I don’t believe you.”

I pulled all our cash out of a box on the mantle and handed it to her. She counted it and sighed. “So, this is a favor to you.”

“
Well, yes. I guess so. Though you don’t have to take me.”

She handed me the cash back and sighed. “You know I love haggling. That’s the best part.”

“
I know. But we’ve only got five hundred. There’s not really anything to haggle over.”

Shayat sat with her arms crossed. She glanced around the apartment, considering, taking stock, writing ledgers in her mind. “You have nothing to sell.”

“
We don’t.”

She scratched her nose and looked at me. “I will call in a favor and get his papers for free. Three hundred will cover the feed for the camels, water for you, and nothing more.” She smiled. “My father will be glad to see you.”

PART FIVE:

THE MOTHER DESERT

CHAPTER 23

The travel was hard. Travel was miserable. My camel was bad tempered, and Sorcha had to charm her and me both in order to get me on her in the mornings. Once in the saddle, I took to smoking more or less constantly to keep the panic at bay. I missed a lot of what was going on around me. In those first few days while we traveled the northern plains of Vilahna, Shayat and her cartographer rode ahead, steeped in private conversation. Shayat’s cartographer, a man named Tamir, was the forger. He was a forger, and therefore a criminal in the eyes of the Exalted, but he regarded Sorcha and me with obvious mistrust and distaste. The day we left, he handed Sorcha a set of forged papers without a word, mounted his camel, and rode off at a gallop ahead of us. His brusqueness left me shaken; it left Sorcha curious.

Tamir was middle-aged and hardened, with skin pale enough silver that it looked like the sun had bleached it. He was on the tall side and gaunt. A series of ragged scars raked across a milky, useless eye; the other eye was an endless black ringed in glowing violet that seemed like it did enough seeing for the both of them. He wore Chalir-style robes that hid the rest of his face from view and cut a very striking figure on camelback. Tamir was the desert incarnate: remote, spare, and uncaring. It was strange to see him in his desert robes on his desert animal among the lush green of Vilahna’s fields. He alone of Shayat’s crew had been eager to return to the Empire.

We rode north for a week. Farms thinned out and the grass went from green to gold. We traveled a main road, one that passed by compounds and small towns, but the farther north we went, the more insular the red elves became. We rode north right up into the mountains. They loomed huge and gray for days before we made it to their base. I am born of flatness, of space; I come from places with few trees, where the horizon stretches endlessly out. I had seen these mountains before, but they had not lost their novelty. They stretched up, imperious, unassailable. The mountain face was sheer and proud, totally unadorned. The camels grunted in passive protest as the land grew steep. The mountain pass was a narrow, winding path cut through the stone by a long-dead river.

When we entered the mountains, Sorcha picked up his pace. He caught up with Shayat and rode beside her. They were less than a foot from each other, pressed into an odd intimacy by the pass. “Hey, are we going through a mountain compound? Looks like we are.”

“
Yes, we are,” she said.

“
Which one? It’s not Lachandour, is it?”

“
No, it’s Bardondour. Why?”

Sorcha slowed his camel to let her ahead. He shrugged.

Shayat peered at him over her shoulder. “Why Lachandour?”

“
My pa’s from there.”

“
Does he have people there still?”

“
Don’t know,” Sorcha said. “Thought it might be interesting to find out.” The growing distance broke the tenuous thread of their conversation. My camel made slow, bitter progress up the mountain. When I caught up to him, I asked if she had said it was Bardondour we were heading through. He said it was. “Why? What’s in Bardondour?”

“
I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s strange. Bardondour comes up sometimes at court. It’s like a little country of its own. It’s not really Vilahnan. Dor’s been there a few times. The queen thinks he’s wasting his time on the mountain compounds. She says they’re still mired in a war no one’s fighting, and that Bardondour is the worst of them.” I laughed. I lit a match and took another draw from my perpetually packed pipe. “She is such a hypocrite.”

“
Well, Ariah, don’t be shy now. Tell me how you really feel about her.”

I shrugged and took another hit. “It’s true. Bardondour. You know, Fallinal said they won’t even trade goods with the plains towns.”

“
But they’re gonna let a bunch of silvers through?”

I looked up ahead, shielding my eyes to track Shayat’s camel. She swayed with its movement. She was a graceful and effortless rider. The black skin of her arms stood out against the mountains. Her cropped hair blew around her. She looked wild. She looked fearless. “Like they could stop her. Shayat could get through anywhere.”

“
That girl. Hey, I been meaning to ask you something.”

“
Ask.” My camel spat on the ground. I tucked my legs further underneath me.

“
Why would she cut us this deal?”

“
What do you mean?”

Sorcha shifted in his saddle. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Look, it’s not like I know her none, but that one, she strikes me as anything but generous. Why would she break up her route and ferry us up there for no profit?”

“
Well, her father is in Rabatha. I think she worries about him.”

Sorcha was quiet for a beat. He nudged his camel forward so we could see eye to eye. He gave me a hard look, a challenging look. It was a look of wounded pride. It caught me off guard. “Ariah, just come clean with me. What’s with you and her? What happened back in Rabatha?”

“
I taught her languages.”

“
And?”

“
And…her father made me clothes.”

He sighed. He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand and stared at Shayat’s back. He sighed again, and he took the pipe from my hands. “All right. Look. I’m all right. Wish you’d’ve let me know, but I’m all right. But you’ve got to get your shit together, Ariah. Might make sense for you to scale back, let your talents out a little more.”

“
What? Why?”

“
Ariah, maybe nothing happened back in Rabatha, but you are damn near swooning over her any time she talks to you. And that one, she’s leading you back for no good reason? There’s an open door there just waiting for you to walk through it.”