Empire of Dust (5 page)

High up on his favorite stallion, Alex feels strong and perfectly formed; he doesn't have to worry that his limp is showing. On and on he rides, muscle and sweat and wind, hoping to drive away all the worry and frustration. But they don't leave him.

By the time he's finished cooling down and currying the huge black stallion, he's as agitated as ever and his left leg has begun to ache. He knows a bath is always waiting for him upon his return and pictures the steaming, fragrant water, and his bath attendant, Hestia, clucking over him in her motherly way. Though he should go to Philip's office and review the peasant reports that Ortinos has left him, his head feels like it is on fire and he wonders briefly if he might have strained himself earlier by trying to influence Hagnon's mind. Perhaps his suspicions of a spy lurking among his council are overblown. He has no actual proof of a traitor, only a vague discomfort, his own swirling questions, the Persian cameo... Can he trust his own misgivings, or is he allowing doubts to distract him from the more important issues at hand?

Whatever the cause, all he can think of now is submerging himself in hot water and drowning out his racing thoughts. He jogs up a flight of stairs and down a long corridor, and enters the private bathing chamber reserved for him.

It's a small room with a copper tub over a drain that leads the bathwater outside. Beside the tub, a fire pit, now cold and dark, keeps the room warm on winter days and heats up extra cauldrons of water. All four walls are painted with frescoes of blue-bearded Poseidon, god of the sea, cavorting with sirens and stabbing ships with his giant trident.

To his surprise, Hestia is not there, but Arri's former nursemaid, Sarina, is. She sits with perfect posture in a chair next to the window, her slender hands clasped on her glistening white gown, but jumps up the moment she sees him. She looks at him with large dark eyes fringed by thick black lashes.

For a moment Alex is struck by her beauty. She's so different from anyone he has ever seen before, with skin the color of burnished bronze and waist-length hair that shimmers like blue-black silk. He had first seen her early in the summer when he returned from his three years at Aristotle's school, and he'd been intrigued...but then came the Blood Tournament, Katerina, the Aesarian Lords, and he forgot about Sarina until she joined the palace women on the battlefield in full armor. So, not just beautiful. Brave, too.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, running a hand through his sweat-soaked hair. He's suddenly very conscious of how he must look. Clumps of dirt on his legs. Sweat stains on a tunic that sticks to his back.

“Forgive me, my Lord Prince,” Sarina says in her accented voice, “but with Arridheus gone, I have been reassigned here. Hestia has left to stay on her grandson's farm.”

Old long before Alex was even born, Hestia is the only person who has ever attended to him in this most intimate of settings. Painters and sculptors glorify the physically perfect—the young, the beautiful, and the athletic—to be sure. But Alex is not physically perfect, not quite. He was born with a hideous scar snaking around his left thigh, and all the muscles in the leg are weaker than those of his right even after years of pushing himself through shattering pain to strengthen it.

It wouldn't have been such a tragedy if he wasn't a future king. But if the people of Macedon knew of his deformity, they might see him as an ill-starred monarch, believing that the gods must have disliked him even in the womb. So Philip, Olympias, and Alexander himself agreed to hide his shameful leg.

As Sarina walks up to him—half a pace too close for Macedonian protocol, but then again, she is Egyptian—he gets a whiff of her scent. It conjures up images of a glowing red sun setting behind enormous triangles of stone. Of soft perfumed beds and a cerulean blue river growing, spreading as far as the eye can see.

“My lord, if I may?” She gestures, and Alex clearly understands that she's waiting for him to remove his clothes.

“Why has Timandra reassigned you here?” he asks, stalling. “This seems like a demotion.”

The girl bows her head. “Prince Arridheus is gone, my lord. So I must do something else. And caring for the prince regent is not a demotion, but an honor.”

Alex spies a finely woven linen towel on the table in front of the window and walks over to it. “Is this where you believe your talents will be most useful?” he asks, his words coming out more harshly than he intended.

Sarina flinches as if he's slapped her. “In my former house, I was trained to rid a man or woman's jinns away through massaging the hands and feet with essential oils. However...” She hesitates a moment, as though wondering if she should continue. “I have many skills that can serve you better, my lord. I can read and write. I can prepare financial accounts.”

Alex is both surprised and not surprised. He has heard her play the lyre and flute at palace gatherings and speak in several foreign languages to important visitors. Those skills—and her queenly deportment—point to the fact that she came from a noble house before she was a slave.

“We will find something suited to your skills,” he says, pulling his tunic over his head and quickly wrapping the towel around his waist. As he steps into the hot pool of water, he makes sure that the towel continues to cover his leg even as he sinks into the tub. The linen forms to him, concealing the snake-shape scar and outlining the contours of his calves. “I shall personally look into it.”

Sarina curtsies. “Thank you, my lord.” She hurries over to the corner and lights the bronze perfume burners. Soon, incense rises and mixes with the steam of the bath.

Alex closes his eyes, inhales deeply, and sinks farther into the water, feeling his tight muscles relaxing and his head clearing as Sarina pours in fragrant oils and sprinkles flower petals. She cups his right foot in her hands and massages it.

He opens his eyes lazily and sees Sarina flashing him a smile, her big eyes shining. How can eyes so dark—almost black—also be so bright? They are emotive eyes, hard with concern when he first entered, and now sparkling with warm, gentle humor.

“It's a lovely name, Sarina,” he says, and she blushes.

“It's the name given to every firstborn daughter in my family,” she replies.

He seizes the moment—and the small tease of information—to allow himself to be drawn into those eyes, swirling disembodied a moment in their liquid blackness and then hurtling through a tunnel of overpowering silence and blinding white light.

As always when this happens, he's suddenly powerless, drawn forward by an unseen force. At the end of the tunnel he emerges, a being of invisible thought, in a courtyard of tall whispering palm trees and brightly painted mud brick buildings.

Soldiers—Persians, by the looks of them—are pushing a family into two different groups. A priestly family, Alex knows, serving strange and ancient gods. Sarina, wearing heavy gold jewelry and a pleated robe of fine white linen, is in a group of women and young children, clinging to a boy of about eight, perhaps her brother, and pleading that he remain with her even as a soldier tears the boy away.

“What troubles you, my lord?” Sarina's voice pulls Alex out of her memory, and he hastily blinks away the haze that has obscured his vision.

A better question would have been what
doesn't
trouble him. His father's stubbornness in besieging Byzantium when so much is going wrong at home. Kat's horrific story about their mother's cold-blooded killing of her foster family. He needs to find out how to protect his newfound sister. For when the queen returns, her life won't be worth an obol. And then there's...“My council.”

He doesn't even realize he's spoken aloud until he hears Sarina's sigh. “Every king's problem,” she says, moving behind him and massaging the spots behind his ears. “Who is telling the truth? Whom can you trust? Long ago, when Egypt and the world were young, there was a great god-king who gave the people a choice: they could choose truth and die with honor or live lives of base dishonesty. One by one his people chose truth. One by one he slaughtered them.”

She slides her fingers to the back of his neck. “But then, when he had no people left, he resurrected them all as a reward for their regard for truth. The moral of the story is this, my lord: truth and trust are more important to kings than anything else. Those who would die for truth are the only advisors you can trust.”

Yes
, Alex thinks. How could this slave girl know more about what's in his heart than his council? She is a paradox. Young, but brimming with ancient wisdom. Feminine, but with the courage of a seasoned warrior. A slave, yet born a noblewoman. Ethio-Egyptian, working for the Macedonian royal family.

“Was this god-king the one your family served?” he asks, feeling her warm breath on his left ear as she digs deeply into his shoulders.

Her fingers slip, and Alexander can tell he's startled her. Then her fingers find his skin again and continue working at the knots.

“You see many things, my prince,” she says. “My mother's family served many gods who walked the earth thousands of years ago. Our civilization was already ancient when Greeks lived in caves and foraged for acorns. I learned much wisdom from my mother. In Egypt many wise women are unofficial advisors to pharaohs. My father hoped one day I would be one of them, but it was not to be.”

“And if you were advising a prince regent of Macedon, what would you say?”

Alex feels her push him forward so he is leaning into the tub. Then she pours water down his back as she says, “I would tell the prince regent my favorite story about Princess Laila of Sharuna.”

“Who was she?”

Sarina kneads and pushes the taut muscles of his shoulders and back. He can feel the knots pop and release under the pressure, which is both exquisitely painful and pleasurable at the same time.

“Who
is
she is the more accurate question,” she says. “She's still alive, as far as I know, though she doesn't age. My uncle saw her fortress city shining in the sun, though he dared not try to enter. The princess lives in the cliff country below Akhetaton on the Nile and worships the sun god, Re-Harakhte, by bathing in his light every day.”

Hunting out tension with her fingertips, Sarina leans in, and for a moment, Alexander feels her breasts brush against his wet back.

Suddenly, water pours onto his face as she empties a basin of lightly perfumed water into his hair. “Laila is richer than the Persian Great King Artaxerxes,” Sarina continues, “and has a powerful army of warriors. Many suitors have sought her hand. But she is the mistress of many enchantments, and all have failed.”

Alex has an idea, a seed at first, growing, blossoming... Perhaps his father wasn't so far off course when he negotiated for Alex to marry the Persian princess of Sardis. After all, there was a reason, besides lust and love, when Philip himself married so many chieftains' wives. A royal marriage brings military alliances. It brings power. And power brings victory.

And he has two perfect ambassadors in mind. A girl who needs to disappear and a warrior not allowed to fight.

Almost as if he had summoned him by thought, the door bursts open and Heph appears in the doorway, breathless and ashen-faced. Alex instinctively springs up from the tub, towel forgotten. “What is it?” he asks. “What's wrong?”

As Sarina hastily ties a dry towel around Alex's waist, Heph strides toward him. “Your brother's party has been attacked,” he says, voice hard. “All the guards were killed except one who is gravely wounded. He's in the barracks infirmary.”

“Is he conscious?” Alex asks, stepping out of the tub.

“No,” Heph says, his dark eyes flashing with emotion. “Or, at least, he's not in any fit state to speak. He arrived with a deep gash to his wrist. He lost a lot of blood on his ride back here, and the doctor wanted to amputate his hand immediately. But I got a few things out of him.”

“What?” Alex asks, throwing his tunic over his head.

“Two hours' ride north of here, men on horses swarmed out of the woods,” Heph says through gritted teeth as he hands Alex his sword belt. “The guards were greatly outnumbered. The attackers wore armor but no recognizable uniform. They grabbed Arri and carried him off, screaming.” Heph slaps the wall in frustration. “The survivor, realizing he couldn't get the prince back by himself, raced back here as fast as he could.”

Numbness begins to spread throughout Alex, but his mind remains agile and a plan forms quickly.

“How many men attacked?”

“The guard thinks about fifteen.”

“Send Diodotus with twenty soldiers and a team of trackers after them immediately,” Alex says. Diodotus, the fearless military trainer, is the best man to plan a rescue if the trackers find the group holding Arri. “And make sure to include Phrixos and Telekles.” Two of Alex's good friends from Mieza, both men are excellent warriors with the tracking skills of seasoned hunters.

Heph nods and departs while Alex casts a glance out the window. The statue of Poseidon casts a long shadow across the flower beds. Daylight is almost gone.

“Arri,” Sarina whispers, leaning against the wall as if she needs its support. “Poor little Arri. He will be so afraid. He won't understand...”

Alex takes her gently by the shoulders and turns her toward him. Her eyes are brimming with tears, and all at once they spill down her cheeks. “A spy,” she says softly. “My lord prince, you have a spy. Only your council, Hephaestion, and I knew of this secret plan.”

And then she says something he has already figured out: “One of those closest to you has betrayed you.”

Chapter Five

“
THIS IS IT
,” Ochus says as he pulls his horse up and gestures to the wide valley below, lush grasslands bisected by a sinuous river that reminds Zofia of a silver snake. In the distance, she sees white, columnlike rocks—or are they leafless birch trees?—scattered across the flat expanse of green.

“Katpatuka,” he continues, “the land of beautiful horses. The perfect place to find a Pegasus. And only a few days' journey to the Flaming Cliffs.” He looks at Zo, raises an eyebrow, and grins. “You'd better hope your old nurse's stories are correct.”

What he leaves unsaid is that she will be sold like a sack of turnips at the nearest slave market if they don't find one. She kicks her mount in the sides and races down the hill, trying hard to ignore the smirk that she can practically feel chasing her.

When Zo was little, Mandana
did
tell her tales of flying horses that lived in the Eastern Mountains. Zo never believed them, of course, and judging by the way her old nurse would smile through her crooked teeth, she doubted that Mandana did either. How could horses fly? How could cliffs be on fire? But then last week, lying in her bed in a posting house, Zo saw a huge white wing brush against her window frame. She crept silently out of bed, trying not to wake Ochus, and peered into the golden-pink air of dawn. There, in the distance, she thought she saw a white horse flying just above the tree line. But it couldn't have been.

The question is, how long can she keep her captor convinced of her story? How long can she hide the fact that she is not the lost daughter of a horse trainer but in fact the runaway princess of Sardis, betrothed to the Prince of Macedon?

Her horse's hooves pound the dirt. Her long dark auburn hair—hennaed and combed with scented oils during her other life in the palace—flies behind her, a mass of tangles and probably faded, by what she has seen of the ends. But the afternoon sky is an impossibly bright powder-blue. For a moment she can pretend she's riding west, back home to find Cosmas, not east to find a winged horse that died out centuries ago, if indeed it ever existed.

For an instant, she allows herself to imagine that Commander Ochus of the Persian Fifteenth Cavalry—sarcastic, insulting, and proud—is a thousand miles away. That she is riding instead toward her true love: a soldier as brave as he is tall, whose kind eyes lit up the dark that one fateful night they spent together, the night she imagined would bind them forever... Cosmas's hands in her loose hair, tracing the curves of her body...his soft voice in her ear...

But as her captor rides up alongside her, she hears metal clatter in his saddlebag and knows it's the shackles he uses to chain her hands whenever she's not riding, so that she won't try to escape again.

She grits her teeth, and now the pounding of the horse's hooves seems to say,
I hate I hate I hate Ochus.
As the chains clink each time his horse's hooves touch the ground, her resentment builds and her cheeks burn.

When Zo looks up from the road, she sees that they have entered a forest of stone, tall white pinnacles rising from the ground like giants' spears with pointed caps on top. They gleam in the sun, taking her breath away, and the wind whistles around them like voices chattering in a thousand ancient tongues. Instinctively, she and Ochus slow their horses to a walk and look around in wonder.

“What is this?” she asks in a hushed, reverent voice, bringing her horse closer to his.

The wind blows Ochus's wavy golden-brown hair behind him. “It is called Korama, the Stones of the Gods,” he says. “It goes on for hundreds of miles. These are the foothills of the Eastern Mountains.”

The Eastern Mountains. Her heart leaps. That is where she needs to go to find the magical beings she is searching for, the ones who can free her from her fate.

Kohinoor—an old soothsayer—told Zo that her blood is destined to unite with that of Macedon—Prince Alexander's, to be specific. That the only way she might alter her destiny and marry Cosmas instead would be to seek help from the Spirit Eaters of the Eastern Mountains, a sprawling region, but last week the posting station waitress told her they were rumored to live north of Korama, the very region where she finds herself right now.

Kohinoor told her something else, too, something that chilled her unshakably: that if she ever were to see Cosmas again, it is fated he would die.

So she knows, she
must
change her fate. She
must
see him again.

After all, she is carrying his child.

She looks around now, and every hair on Zo's body stands on end, alive with the knowledge that they are in an enchanted land of jinns and fairies. She is, at this very moment, in a place carved by the hands of the gods themselves, a place where myth and reality meet.

Perhaps the Spirit Eaters themselves formed these strange rocks.

“Was it a god who turned these trees to stone?” she asks.

“No one knows how it came to be,” he says, looking up at a particularly tall stone as they ride past. “But some say that long ago, the earth goddess ate and drank too much at a feast and vomited all these rocks up, and the wind god took pleasure in sculpting them. Since then, the shades of the dead wander here, blown this way and that by the wind.” Zo finds herself sinking into the stunning magic of the place, torn between awe and fear.

“My great-grandfather told me all that,” Ochus adds smugly.

The mysterious moment snaps like a too-tight sandal strap.

“Every day I've had to listen to you bragging about your royal blood,” Zo says. “My great-grandfather this and my great-grandfather that. But everyone knows that the Great King Artaxerxes has
thirty
wives and concubines. And more than
ninety
surviving children. So he probably has
thousands
of great-grandchildren. And somehow I can't imagine three thousand children crowding around his throne while he tells a story. I bet he wouldn't even know who you were if you bumped into him.”

Ochus focuses his intense golden-brown eyes on her. “You don't know anything about my childhood,” he says. “Some of those children—”

Even as Ochus is speaking, Zo smells something wrong. A whiff of latrine and sour body odor and rotten flesh.

With a loud shriek, a filthy, wild-haired man emerges from a cluster of pillars and grabs the reins of Zo's horse, which rears, nearly throwing her. She screams, clinging to the horse as she's jostled roughly, thinking her attacker must be an ogre or a troll.

“The age of gods is ending!” the creature cries, his pale eyes crazed, as she steadies her horse. “The monsters have been loosed! They will devour the world!”

“Get away!” Ochus commands, unsheathing his sword.

The man lets go of Zo's reins but doesn't run. “The age ends!” he shouts again.

A chill goes up Zo's spine. The Persian magi, consulting the stars, have all predicted a new age. But a new age of what? No one seems to know.

“Come,” Ochus says sternly to Zofia. “We should ride faster. This place is haunted by both the living and the dead.” He spurs his horse forward and she follows.

As much as she dislikes Ochus, Zo has to admit it's good having him by her side in times of danger. The first time she saw him, she was curled up in a filthy cage in the camp of the brutal rogue slave traders who had captured her, the old soothsayer—Kohinoor—and several others. Ochus and his men swooped in on horses, fired arrows and threw spears until all her captors were dead. As she climbed weakly out of the cage, she thought he was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.

But when he asked who she was, she couldn't exactly tell him she was a princess of Sardis who had run away from the palace to avoid a marriage with the crippled prince of Macedon, to marry the man she loved, a common soldier and the father of her unborn child. If Ochus returned her to the palace, what would her uncle, King Shershah, do to her?

So she wove a web of lies about being a horse breeder's daughter who had seen a map of where the last of the Pegasi lived. With a greedy gleam in his eye, Ochus agreed to her suggestion to find the last of the winged horses to give to the Great King, and Zo had chalked him up for a fool. But throughout this interminable journey, Ochus has proven himself clever and resourceful. Surely he should have guessed by now that she's been lying to him. But if he
has
guessed, why would he put up with the sweat, dirt, heat and ache of riding east? Of course he
must
believe her, and she should not let doubt get in her way, not when she's come this far.

Her thoughts are interrupted by an imperial courier thundering from behind, calling loudly to clear the way for the king's post as the horse's hooves kick up clods of dirt. She and Ochus edge to the side. The purpose of the Royal Road is to deliver mail, taxes, and armies throughout the Great King's far-flung empire. The well-maintained highway runs sixteen hundred miles from Sardis in the breezy west, near the Aegean Sea, across deserts, mountains, and swamps all the way to the dusty capital of Persepolis in the east.

Once the courier passes, she and Ochus nudge their horses back to the middle of the road, only to be edged off again when several merchant carts packed with goods trundle toward them. The passengers cheerfully call out greetings, and one, a little freckle-faced girl, waves at Zo.

Zo quickly turns her head away, unable to wave.
Roxana
, she thinks. Her six-year-old half sister, who followed her out of the palace and down the Royal Road, only to be killed by the slave traders. At night, she still hears the screams.

No, Zo can never go home. It wouldn't be the same without Roxana. Who would she tell bedtime stories to, the old tales of valiant heroes rescuing beautiful princesses? Zo told Roxana only the happy stories she learned from Mandana, not the ones that kept her up all night when she was small; really Mandana should have known better. Corpses cracking open their tombs to eat the living. Evil jinns flying into people's mouths and possessing their bodies. A group of murderers called the Assassins' Guild who always slashed the chests of their victims with a bloody X.

Zo starts to laugh at the memories of herself sleeping under the bed rather than on it to fool the corpses, jinns, and Assassins when they came for her. But her laugh turns into a little sob. Roxana will never be old enough to hear those stories. Never. A dull ache courses through her and she tries to stop all thought, to concentrate on the horse's rhythm.

After a couple of hours, the landscape changes into crumpled white cliffs that look like wet laundry thrown in a heap. And beyond them, gray cones of stone rise up. As the sun slides low on the horizon, they enter a town of towering pointed houses, four and five stories tall, each carved out of rock formations and leaning toward the west as if pushed there by the wind. Rooms have been dug out of the stone, and Zo sees an intricate series of wooden ladders and stairs that connects them all.

“This is our last posting house along the Royal Road,” Ochus says, pointing to several rock-cut dwellings with high walls in between and a courtyard in the center. Creaking in the wind over the main gate is the usual wooden sign of a running horse carrying a blue sack of mail and the posting house's number; this one is 374. The comfortable posting houses—located every fifteen miles or so—were built for the couriers to sleep, eat, and get fresh horses, though soldiers and other travelers can use them, too.

“Tomorrow we head northeast,” Ochus says, wiping the road dust off his face, “on a smaller road.”

Zo nods carelessly, but her thoughts are racing. She will miss the comforts of the posting houses—the clean beds, water to wash with, and delicious tavern food—but their barricades slam shut at dusk and open at dawn. She could never run away even without the manacles, which, she knows, Ochus uses only to humiliate her. But perhaps—if he gets careless or starts to trust her off the Royal Road—she could escape.

When they turn their horses into the stables and try to arrange for new ones the following morning, the horse master shakes his head sadly. “We don't have any to offer,” he says. “We keep getting reports that horses—and their riders—are meeting with...accidents in the east. Even royal couriers have...gone missing.”

“What accidents?” Ochus asks in irritation. The man shrugs. Ochus runs his hands through his tangled brown hair. “But our horses are exhausted,” he says, “and one of them is favoring his right leg.”

But there are no fresh horses to be had.

With Ochus grumbling by her side, they enter the tavern and she immediately knows it's very different from the other posting house taverns they have dined in. This one has been dug out of stone. It's smaller and cooler, and Zo feels the crushing weight of rock all around her. She smells roasted meat, fresh bread, spilled beer, and the smoke of resin-soaked torches. It seems that lately her sense of smell has increased dramatically, not always a good thing.

A cheerful girl shows Zo and Ochus to a low table, and Zo sinks gratefully onto the cushions. The first ten days of riding on the Royal Road were agony, with blisters blossoming on her rear end and thighs, and pains shooting up her back and legs. Now, she is just tired and sore.

“It is time, my darling love,” Ochus says, jingling the manacles.

Biting back the embarrassment, she holds out her hands, and he snaps a heavy iron bracelet on her right wrist and another on her left, the chain dangling between them. She feels a weight, greater even than the rock all around them, pulling her down.

The waitress's eyes widen when she sees Zo's manacles, but she says nothing as she plunks down a basket of fresh bread, a bowl of olives, and two mugs of frothy beer. Ochus asks her about the food, but Zo isn't paying attention. She is looking at a group of five imperial couriers in bright blue uniforms at the next table who are drinking deeply and talking loudly.