Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Temur was slightly startled to realize that he could still pick out the faintest stain of sunset across the perfectly flat horizon of open water lying east. So little time had passed. Just a lifetime, for those who had not survived the fire. He turned his hand around and slipped his fingers through Samarkar’s. Within the prickly carapace of her gauntlet, her palm felt moist and soft. She leaned into him; he leaned into the mare.
The sea was calm and still; the vessel might have been gliding across a black mirror slightly rippled and warped with age. As she gained speed, the frantic activity settled. Some of the men went below; Temur imagined they were off-watch and could take their rest now. A man came toward Samarkar and him, a man no taller than Temur—who was not tall, even by Qersnyk standards—but broad across the shoulders. On black skin sunburned blacker, deep shadows pooled in those places where the sharp valleys defining hard muscle lay.
He stepped into the lamplight. His hair lay braided close to his skull in rows and his features were handsome, fleshy, rounded. He was garishly dressed in a gold-sewn mirrored vest and crimson trousers that bloused to high boots. A dagger’s jeweled hilt, the head of a snarling animal rendered in a style Temur did not recognize, protruded from the left one. His ears were full of gold rings, a ruby dangling on a chain from one lobe to tap softly against his bullish neck, another gleaming against the flare of his nostril.
“Kebede,” he said, holding out crossed hands. His voice was a rumble nevertheless soft as a catkin. Temur had never seen the Aezin greeting before, but he had heard of it. He grasped Kebede’s hands, feeling callused palms and thick fingers, releasing his grip on Samarkar’s to do it.
“Re Temur,” he said, leaving off any honorific because the captain had. He spoke in his growing-fluent Uthman. “The woman is Samarkar-la, and the mare is Bansh. In the face of the fire, we did not expect you to wait. Thank you.”
“You are Tesefahun’s grandson,” said Captain Kebede, honoring Samarkar with a nod and showing no horror of her uncovered face. “Should I leave a nephew to burn? I would have saved my ship, had it become necessary, but there was not much danger yet.”
“You’re Ato Tesefahun’s son.”
“You are my sister-son,” Kebede said. “You and your friends are welcome aboard my vessel.” His gesture took in the long angled rigging, the black-and-gold prow cutting black water spangled gold with lantern light.
“Captain,” said Samarkar. She had turned to follow the arc of his hand. “What sort of boat is this?”
“She’s not a boat. She’s a dhow,” he said. “What they call crab-claw rigged. Come, let me show you where you’ll sleep and the stables. We can get to know one another after.”
Samarkar followed and Temur went after, still wondering what, exactly, a “crab” might be.
* * *
Edene wandered where she would amid the ruins of Erem, under the moons and nightsun, and under the killing light of the daysuns as well. At night or underground, her ghulim accompanied her in legions; under the burning light of the daysuns, only Besha Ghul and the djinn would walk, and despite Edene’s assurances that the ring would protect them both, Besha went swaddled in acres of black cloth.
Now it guided Edene past the conical pit-traps of myrmecoleons, which—if it had been night—might have poked up their shaggy-maned heads to do her homage. As it was, they stayed in their cool burrows in the sand and Edene felt their sleeping breathing like a second pulse beneath her own as she walked over them.
“Just a little farther,” said Besha Ghul, mincing as if the sand scorched the pads of its hairy feet.
Edene had asked to be taken to the meeting place of the ghulim, which the ring told her had also been the meeting hall of men, when men still lived here. From the ring, she knew to expect a massive hypostyle that filled a narrow canyon side to side, hunkered in its belly and so doubly protected from the rays of the sun. As they walked, she played games with herself: How much of it would still be standing? What would the ruins look like, and how badly preserved would they be? The sand and heat and general dry lifelessness of this desert tended to preserve buildings, especially when the architecture was of stone. But Erem had been abandoned since the fall of the Sorcerer-Prince, centuries and more ago.
They walked in the firm rubble-dotted sand at the top of a slope beside a tongue of red rock, Besha Ghul patently grateful of the slender shadows. As they came around the tip, Edene’s questions were answered.
She looked down along a gentle slope into a narrow cliff-walled valley that lay completely in shadow, though it would not have throughout the whole of the day. Topless pillars forested the lone and level sweep of sand—cracked and crazed, or shattered at sharp angles, or standing inviolate and white as virgin warriors in the violet shade of Erem. Edene had the uncomfortable sensation of
depth,
as if the glade of columns stretched to infinity, rather than being bounded by sheer cliffs in three directions.
Once, she might have said,
Oh.
But that Edene was no queen. Now she bit the tip of her tongue—because you could see someone bite a lip—and started down the slope, leaning backward to counterbalance the belly bobbing before her like a great balloon.
Here in the shadows, ghulim crept from the cliffs and fell in as if they had been there always, and the scorpions and serpents stirred themselves from underground to writhe across the sand before her.
The djinn kept pace, silent as he usually was, and the fires that burned around him cast shadows of the pillars—and of Edene—wriggling on the sand. It was cooler here. The fallen hypostyle had an elegiac air.
“Your master,” Edene said to the djinn, in tones of casual conversation. “Is that al-Sepehr?”
“I am forbidden to answer questions about the Nameless.”
Edene smiled. “If I am the Mistress of Secrets,” she said, “do you think you can keep a secret from me for long?”
“I have been bested,” the djinn said. “Until I can return the favor, I must do as I am bid. But I would say I have no master, though there is one who would like to claim that role.”
“And you cannot tell me if that one is al-Sepehr?”
He glanced aside, the sharp angle of his jaw stubbornly unmoving.
“Could you tell me that it is not al-Sepehr?”
“I could lie,” said the djinn. “But I have not been commanded to do so, and have no reason to do so of my own accord.”
He might have been sly. Instead, he was matter-of-fact. What he was not saying—what he was saying by not saying it—lit up in Edene like a torch. “You’re constrained to do his bidding. But you are not a willing servant.”
“I may not answer,” said the djinn, after a moment’s furrowed concentration.
“You do not need to,” said Edene. “I’ve seen how he controls the rukh.”
She subsided into a considering silence. So she could not send the djinn away, and he was al-Sepehr’s agent. But he was an unwilling one.
She might have said more, but a clean, piercing shriek like a glass bell from Song drew her attention skyward. At first the pillars rang with only one note, but in moments another fell between them, and another, until the space among them rang with madhouse, crystalline noise like a storm of wind chimes. Something flitted across the savage sky above, a confused translucence like a shadow beating wings. A half-dozen others followed.
Besha Ghul cried, “Run!”
Easier said than done, when your belly pushed out before you like a wind-billowed tent, but Edene turned and followed the ghul, scrabbling up the slope toward the cliff half on her hands and knees as the chiming grew toward a crescendo.
She did not make it. As the ghulim dissolved away into the shadows at the base of the rocks as if the stones had swallowed them, something struck her across the back. Edene plunged face-first into slipping sand, her lungs convulsing with pain as the breath rushed out of her and would not come in again. She pushed the ground away with strengthless arms and spat grit, trying to tell if the wetness adhering her tunic to her shoulders was sweat or blood.
Within her, a voice like chains over gravel gritted,
A queen does not flee.
Besha Ghul had not run with the others. Edene had a confused sense of bent knees and hocks pushing the hem of a black robe this way and that. Three fingers and a thumb closed on her upper arm, a horny dog-nailed hand with phalanges pinched slender between swollen knuckles—
Blue brilliance washed Edene’s perceptions. For an instant, she thought somehow the light of the daysuns had crashed down into the valley—but then she realized she was bathed in the glow of the djinn’s fires. She rolled onto her back, tugging loose from Besha’s grip—some queen, if this was her dignity—and shaded her eyes with her hand.
The djinn stood over her, washed in flame, at the center of a storm of wings. The creatures circling him wheeled through the pillars on attack trajectories, too fast for Edene to make more of them than a confused welter of bright pallid sky showing through the gaps in black-transparent rib cages like obsidian, scimitar-pincered heads like those of beetles, bony wings of smoke-colored membrane that chimed and clashed with every stroke. A palpable cold rolled from them as if they were the antithesis of a hearth, even at the distance of a body’s length. Edene could feel the burn of it now across her shoulders where one had struck her back.
A queen does not die on her ass.
She took the knotty hand that Besha Ghul held out for her and levered herself to unsteady feet. There was a knife at her belt, some trinket of ancient Erem, no longer than the span of her hand. Just a thing to cut her meat. She slid it from the sheath, the hilt slightly scratchy with decorations and still warm from the sun. A cabochon stone slid against her sweat in the hollow of her palm.
The creatures that had been flocking to attack the djinn must have decided to seek easier prey. As if some signal had gone through them, half the flock wheeled off in pursuit of the few ghulim still straggling for the rocks, and one plunged directly at Edene.
Struggling in the sand, overbalanced by her rigid belly, what should have been a nimble twist became a stagger to the side. She went hard to a knee, tendons in her groin stabbing protest, and felt the cold strike with the force of a shield-wall as the crystal beast swept over. In an instant she memorized it—the grasping black glass talons, the blue glitter of the djinn’s fires reflected in a faceted eye, the smoky outline of a pillar through a wing—and in an instant it was upon Besha Ghul.
The ghul whirled, snapping in the face of the beast. Edene caught a glimpse of red maw, flying tongue, fierce jackal-white teeth—and then the winged thing slashed, bowled her over, and would have swept on. But Besha had locked a clawed hand through the thing’s empty rib cage, and, as the ghul’s arm reached full extension, the creature’s own momentum slammed it to earth.
In that instant, Edene was upon it. She dove upon its back, sand-skinned knee pressing it down as she grabbed the base of one flapping wing. An edge of membrane opened her cheek. She saw red spatter but felt no hurt. At the bottom of the pile, Besha Ghul snapped and snarled and slobbered like a rabid thing.
Edene brought the little dagger down like a chisel at the neck below the glass thing’s skull. A sharp crack, a shudder: the point went in. She leaned on it, prying, twisting with her grip on the creature’s slick wing.
Something shattered, and the creature went not limp, but slack, like a string of jointed bones, in Edene’s grasp. It collapsed under her and she rolled away, gasping heavily with the weight of her babe upon her lungs, her knuckles bleeding from a spray of needle-shards of glass.
Besha Ghul shoved the thing off and crouched, its own blood dripping mixed with froth from its jaws. “You could have used the ring—”
But Edene shook her head, timing each word between heaving breaths to make herself understood. “These—are not—beasts—of Erem.”
“No,” said Besha Ghul, with the air of one who speaks against their better judgment. “They come from somewhere alien. But … my brethren are.”
* * *
The twins kept a brazier beside their bed. Despite Saadet’s disappointment in her brother’s fastidiousness—at his willingness to let her do this unpleasant work—Shahruz continued to allow her to manage the sexual aspect of their seduction of Qori Buqa. It was bad for Shahruz, trapped in this unfamiliar body—but how, Saadet thought, was it harder for him than for her, or the myriad other women throughout history who had lain with a man, married a man, because they were instructed to?
Now, as the man who would be Khagan lay sprawled snoring beside the wall, Shahruz returned to assume her burdens. Saadet let him—willingly, more willingly than she had lain down for the Qersnyk warlord—and watched as her brother used her small hands to open the packets of incense and spice that she kept in a box beside the bed. He had previously written out a paragraph in tiny, perfect script on a square of rag paper. The cursive letters of the Uthman tongue scribed a spiral, a labyrinth that would trap Qori Buqa’s thoughts. Now Shahruz required Saadet to dab a bit of the warlord’s slimy spilled semen on the paper. Then he tied it into a scroll with a few strands of the man’s coarse hair.
The scrap of spell went into the brazier, along with chips of frankincense to sweeten the mind and exotic rosemary to elevate the thoughts. It all burned quickly, curling around a lick of sun-yellow flame.
Qori Buqa made a sound—a sigh rather than a complaint—as the sweet smoke reached him. He kicked in his sleep, struggling against the furs, and then rolled on his side and was still except for a faint trembling. The twins breathed the smoke too, and though the dream was not for them, they caught the edges of it. A woman veiled in indigo spoke low and sweet, revealing her special love for Qori Buqa, his special place in her design. She might have been Mother Night; she might have been the Scholar-God. She could seem both, with her irises like twilight and the dusky, glowing skin around her eyes.
There is a Dark God rising, Re Qori Buqa,
she said.
The Sorcerer-Prince has slept long, but sleeps no longer. I am your mother and the mother of the Rahazeen, and all my children together must oppose him.