Book of Iron (2 page)

“Then so have the tales of Ancient Erem’s dangers,” Kaulas said.

Maledysaunte cocked her head. All three of the newcomers looked thin and drawn, expressions Bijou was used to seeing on the supplicants who came to seek the aid of Prince Salih’s little band. But the black-haired woman had something in her expression beyond worry and tiredness: a sense of some deep knowledge that made even Bijou wish to recoil.

She said, “We know a little of them.”

“You have a purpose beyond curiosity in going there, of course,” Bijou said. Behind her, Ambrosias chimed lightly as a breeze passed through the chamber. Bijou looked to Kaulas for support.

He did not meet her eyes, but nodded nonetheless. “Your yarn—you should spin it.”

“And see what we catch in its web?” Salamander laughed. She glanced at the bard: he waved her on. Bijou saw Maledysaunte bite her lip to silence herself. “I suppose we do. And if so, it is my tale to tell, though I will not tell it as prettily as Riordan would. We are in pursuit of an adventurer. One of the mystical sort. A Dr. Liebelos by name.”

“How not,” Prince Salih murmured, “when you are adventurers yourselves?”

Maledysaunte met his level look with a faint smile, a glance that said
How well we understand each other.

“What has this man done to earn your wrath? And—more pertinently—mine?”

The Wizard Salamander sighed so deeply that her whole chest and shoulders rose and fell with it. “She is my mother,” she said. “But that is not why we pursue her. Nor is wrath, exactly. We pursue her because she has a passion for antiquities. She’s exercised it at several sites in Avalon, and as far east on the continent as the Mother River. With…predictable results.”

Given his sallow pallor, it was easy to see Kaulas blanch. “And she’s gone to Erem.”

“You understand, then,” Maledysaunte said coolly, “why it is we came to you.”

With shaking hands, Kaulas lit another of his sticklike cigarettes. When it was glowing to his satisfaction, he said, “Ancient Erem…” and then paused for a puff or two, as if to steady himself. “Ancient Erem is cursed. Abandoned by the gods. It can only be entered by night, and there are other perils and conditions. Merely reading its script is said to blind the unlucky Wizard or scientist who attempts it. It is infested by ghuls and myrmecoleons, and it’s only the ravages of the amphisbaenae that keep the latter in check.”

“In Avalon,” Maledysaunte said, “there are those who say the same of Wolf Wood, although those legends tend toward dragons and vipers. But I have never found it anything other than congenial.”

Kaulas let the smoke coil about his face like the tendrils of one of the dragons the other necromancer named, but it was the prince who spoke: arch, amused. “And can the same be said by everyone else who has ventured there?”

Maledysaunte’s thin lips pressed thinner, an ugly slash across her face. “They know what they’re getting into.”

“And now, so do you. Artifacts have been retrieved from that place…” Kaulas shrugged. “Does the good Doctor your mother carry casualty insurance?”

“Actually,” Bijou said, “I am curious. The Wizard Liebelos. What is her specialty?”

From the press of Salamander’s lips, Bijou knew that she and her friends had been intentionally withholding the information. Glances passed between them. Infinitesimally, Maledysaunte’s chin dipped—the faintest of nods. So she was the leader of her little group, as Prince Salih was the leader of Bijou’s.

“She’s a precisian,” Salamander said.

It was the rarest of magical specialties. As healers were rarer than necromancers, so the world gave birth to entropomancers galore—and only a very few of their opposites. Or complements, if you preferred—the Wizards whose art and science was that of perfected patterns and perfect numbers, of completed cycles and completed vows. Their magic was powerful and insinuating: it worked through mechanisms as subtle as the layout of rooms in a house or words in a promise. It could take years in reaching fruition, and those affected might never know.

The great precisians of history had propped up crumbling empires and founded colleges that endured a thousand years. They had a gift for making things permanent. Bijou suspected it was good there were so few of them. Otherwise the whole world might find itself trapped in unchanging amber, a fly unable to buzz.

If somebody with such an ability were to master the potent, corrupt powers of ancient Erem…Bijou would have liked to say the implications did not bear considering. But unfortunately, considering it was suddenly her job. The nausea and cold chills just came with the territory.

Should she obtain the powers of Erem, the foreign sorcerers’ nemesis would wield all-too imaginable power.

“Irrevocable curses,” Kaulas said, as if tasting it. “Enduring, impassable structures of death.”

“You don’t have to sound so happy about it.” Bijou glanced at the prince for confirmation. His expression gave assent. “I think we can help you.”

Messaline was called the City of Jackals, and jackals in quantity haunted its crooked streets. But Messaline had been built on the ruins of a previous city, a city rarely spoken of, as if to call its name might induce it to wake and shake the living city off its back. Messaline had inherited that city’s epithet; the original City of Jackals was Erem.

And the Erem in whose bones Messaline stood was not even the first Erem. Out beside the erg, abandoned to the endless rippling dunes of the Mother Desert, there was another, even more ancient city—one not so much in ruins as simply abandoned where it stood, hewn from the living rock of a sandstone valley. No one was exactly certain why it had been left for the desert to reclaim, but visiting Ancient Erem was said to be perilous in the extreme. Legend held it to be not merely the haunt of ghosts, but the lair of monsters and of inhuman beasts that dined on human flesh. There were said to be curses there that lay in wait for the unwary, and insects that would burrow into a body and eat the brain from the inside out.

Prince Salih was not the sort to be put off easily by tales of ghuls and myrmecoleons, however. Once the Northerners argued their plan—and Bijou countenanced it—it seemed as if it took fire within him. He would not be content merely to extend them permission and as much of a safe-conduct as he was capable (which meant, in practice, however much the desert tribes might be willing to honor)—no, the prince himself would visit Erem. Again.

As if the first time had not been enough.

Which meant that his faithful friends and adventuring companions, the Wizards Bijou and Kaulas, must accompany him.

Bijou could not argue it: the precisian must be stopped. And surely six of them, half of whom were experienced in the horrors and pitfalls of ancient Erem, stood a better chance than three neophytes. It was the job; it was their duty. To the city and to the world.

Bijou sat before her vanity in the bedchamber she shared with Kaulas the Necromancer, oiling her skin and the roots of her hair in preparation for the desert’s hungry dryness. She smoothed scented oil into her hands, polishing her dark flesh and pale palms to a shine. Behind her, she could hear Kaulas breathing. She watched his tall, spare shadow cross her mirror from side to side as he assembled his kit. They would set off at sunset, when there was light of twilight and then moon and stars to guide them, and they were well-shut of the killing heat of day.

“It’s a fool’s errand,” Kaulas said. Although he, too, was a pale Northerner, his accent was very different from that of the sorceress Maledysaunte and her entourage. Kaulas was not from the western isles, but rather the rich land to the west of the great border city of Kyiv, near Vyšehrad. He’d once shown Bijou on the Bey’s jeweled globe where his homeland lay. It didn’t seem so far away, but Bijou knew it could take months or more of travel on foot to reach it. Even using ships and trains, it would be a matter of at least a week.

She’d imagined a land where everyone had the straight hair and fair skin of her lover. It would be a strange world. Where everyone looked like Kaulas, or Maledysaunte, or (even stranger) the almost-albino coloring of Salamander.

“I’d think,” Bijou said, “that a return trip to a dead city where we nearly died ourselves last time…would be exactly the sort of thing to intrigue a necromancer.”

He snorted. In the mirror, she saw him lift up a length of white cloth, smooth it carefully, and begin winding it about his neck and head so that it covered everything but his eyes.

“Do you think that’s actually an immortal come to seek old Erem?” His voice echoed wistfulness.

Bijou’s fingers curled in irritation. “Maledysaunte? I believe she’s what she says she is. The Wizard Salamander is pretty, don’t you think?”

“That type is at ten-a-penny in my homeland,” he said.

Bijou noticed that it wasn’t actually an answer.

“If she’s immortal…” Kaulas settled a veil over his wrap, binding it in place with a red cotton band. Now faceless except for the squint of his pale eyes and the tanned skin of the bridge of his nose, he turned to regard her in the mirror.

The hostility in Bijou’s expression must have warned him to drop it. She’d known for years that Kaulas was terrified of death: an ironic fear, she thought, for a necromancer. Or maybe one more justified for him than for most people. She didn’t want to hear his conspiracy theories and self-pity about why Maledysaunte had managed to live forever, and he hadn’t.

“We won’t be in the sun,” she said, replacing the stopper in her vial of oil. Ambrosias wound scratchily around her ankle, anxious not to be left behind.

“There’s the morning to think of. We were lucky last time. You should prepare for daylight, in case we get trapped there over the day.”

“As long as you’re bringing plenty of water,” she said. “I’ll take some trinkets with me, I suppose.”

She’d crossed the burning sands of the Mother Desert in sandaled feet once, but she’d been following the river then, down from its headwaters in the mountains where she was born. She’d been utterly unprepared and yet she’d survived. Erem, however…

Kaulas was right: it was stupid to let past luck make her careless now. She tucked some useful things into her pockets just in case—filters, a head-wrap, a veil.

She stood. She had changed her clothes to another man’s suit, this one more rugged in its construction and of a lighter fabric: something suited for hours in the saddle and scrambling over rocks. Now she let Kaulas help her into a pale kaftan that would shield her somewhat from heat, wind, and sun. She tugged the sleeves down so only her fingertips protruded, then clucked Ambrosias into her arms. It swarmed up her like vines up a pillar in the rainy season.

“Pass me my sun hat,” she said. “Just in case we’re late coming back.”

When he did, their fingers brushed with familiar electricity…and familiar loathing. She pulled her hand back, knowing all too well that if he was good for her, she wouldn’t want him.

Prince Salih awaited them in the courtyard, behind the wheel of a roadster no one else was permitted to drive. Maledysaunte already sat in the front passenger seat, the Wizard Salamander between her and the prince. In the second row, the red-haired bard had claimed the middle seat. He must have been wearing a sword at his belt, because now he held it—scabbarded and unslung—between his knees.

Kaulas split from Bijou, walking around the car to take the rear driver’s side seat. Bijou settled into silky, squeaking glove-soft leather behind the Hag of Wolf Wood, pleased that Riordan had left her enough room for her hips without having to crowd in beside him. Long-legged Kaulas would be having a more awkward time on the opposite side. Bijou heaved the heavy door into place—it swung smoothly once she overcame its inertia—and made sure it latched. Even as it clicked, the roadster began rolling smoothly forward.

Normally, Prince Salih would not have gone out into the city unaccompanied by body guards—but he had long ago fought the metaphorical war with his father as to whether he’d be taking
kapikulu
adventuring. He had only won, Bijou thought, because he wasn’t the heir.

The Bey’s sons both loved automobiles. It was in their service that the roads of Messaline had come to be paved, and now Prince Salih’s roadster purred velvety over cobbles laid flat and flush by master masons. They were carved of the same golden stone as so many of the old city’s buildings, but the blue twilight washed away all color, rendering the walls and streets pale and ghosty. Messaline was coming to life with the sunset, the afternoon’s high heat giving way to the relief of evening as a long, dusty, golden thread faded away against the western horizon. The top of the roadster was down: warm, arid wind made the coiled springs of Bijou’s hair sway and brushed her cheeks like dry cloth.

The city stood on the banks of the river Dijlè, just above its confluence with the Idiqlè. Their reliable water in the vast desert was the reason trade cities had flourished and fallen and been rebuilt along their lengths for millennia. They crossed the river on one of Messaline’s four bridges, an arched stone structure so narrow the roadster’s wheels brushed the low walls at its edges. You could turn your head and look down directly into the silty, milky water.

It was fortunate, Bijou thought, that she’d ridden with Prince Salih in enough…varied…situations that she trusted his wheelmanship implicitly. If he’d been going to get her killed with his driving, it would have happened a long time since.

Bijou held her hat in her lap and tugged the caftan’s collar up to cover her mouth and nose. She was paying for her vanity, while Kaulas looked at ease beneath his veils. The streets might be paved, but that didn’t stop the dust from blowing over Messaline’s walls.

The main road south, toward the deep desert, led them along the avenue of temples. Here the thoroughfare was divided, lined on both sides and along the median with date palms and pomegranates, shaded by argan, olive, sugar ash, and lime. Temples rose above the treetops, four large edifices dedicated to the principal gods of Messaline—Kaalha, Vajhir, Rakasha, Iashti—rivaled only by the palaces built to honor the nameless Scholar-God of the Uthmans, who was worshiped here in two or three denominations. Smaller cloisters, chapels, and shrines huddled between those of the major religions like chicks among hens.

These were not the only churches in Messaline. Nobody wanted to walk the width of a great city merely to worship. But it was the highest concentration of monks and nuns in the known world, and Messaline’s tourist industry was notably proud of the architecture.

As the roadster purred past the temple of mirror-masked Kaalha, Bijou realized that a sliver of crescent moon was following the setting sun into the west. Dawn and moonset were Kaalha’s hours, and though Bijou had been raised to different gods in her youth in the two-sunned lands south of Aezin and the desert, she had adopted Kaalha as her patron here in Messaline. Under her breath, behind closed lips, she muttered a brief benediction. Kaulas noticed; she saw him leaning around Riordan to grin at her, only the crinkling of his eyes visible above his dust mask.

She looked away, lips twitching with amusement. Kaulas too had converted to the religion of his adopted city—there was something to be said for honoring the gods who were observing the land where you happened to be—but he preferred the tiger-god of summer and high noon, red Rakasha. And after the traditions of his people, he kept his devotions private.

They motored towards the city gates, which stood open even at night in these times of peace. To reach them, the prince wended through mobs of pedestrians heading out for the night markets—some leading pack animals or pushing barrows—and the inevitable bicycles, dogs, camels, and occasional man on horseback. Here and there, somebody cheered the prince and his entourage. Bijou had never been certain if that was just good politics, or if the people of Messaline really did love the Bey’s adventuresome second son. They’d be even more impressed, she thought, if they knew half of what he’d been up to.

Beyond the walls of Messaline lay hectares of rich farmland, hugging the riverbanks of the Dijlè and the Idiqlè. More date palms, vineyards, and the fallow fields of winter barley stretched to the horizon, shadowy and mysterious in the blue twilight—and then, as time passed, crisp and silver in the glow of the stars.

The roadster was equipped with headlamps. As the light faded from the sky, Prince Salih switched them on. Bijou regretted their dazzle: her eyes adapted to the brightness, so she could not see across the starlit fields. In the mountains of her birth and in the veldt they presided over like so many seated queens, stars were a rare sight, and total darkness rarer still. The single sun of Messaline, and the darkness of its nights, were precious to her.

Soon enough, they left behind the plantings for grazing land. Goats dozed on the rocky ground beside round-roofed cottages. The roadster’s passengers engaged in idle conversation, Prince Salih explaining to Salamander and Maledysaunte what it was that they passed—which village grew olives, and which mined salt—and the names of the mountains in the distance. Riordan was curiously silent, a trait Bijou did not associate with entertainers. Kaulas pulled his veil down to smoke another cigarette.

The road turned away from the river and began to ascend, narrowing into a pass between high stony hills that were mountains only by courtesy. The suspension rattled over ruts and rocks. At the top of the rise, the prince let the automobile roll to a halt on the shoulder. He killed the headlights, and for a moment they sat silently in the desert chill.

It was full dark now, that scraped curl of moon long set, but the stars burned bright and close. It did not take Bijou’s eyes long to adjust, and by the mutters from the front seat, Maledysaunte’s adapted even faster. Necromancers could see in the dark.

Before them, a sea of sand stretched into the distance, heaves and swells robbed of color by the starlight. By day those slopes were red and tawny and streaked black with mica-dust along their lee surfaces. Now they might have been cast in beaten, tarnishing silver: the eternally breaking sand-waves of the seemingly endless erg. Bijou knew it didn’t stretch forever—she’d crossed it once, as a girl who’d seen fewer than twenty harvests—but in the starlight it might as well have.