The Kingdoms of Dust (10 page)

He dreamed of black hair enfolding him like raven wings. Teasing smiles and laughing eyes. Not Isyllt—the scent was different, the texture of skin. He couldn’t see her face, and every time he reached she slipped away.

He woke reaching still, tangled in the bedclothes. Dawn rose over the water, and Isyllt was gone.

N
erium woke from unquiet dreams to the sound of screaming. She was halfway to the window, nightdress tangled sweaty around her legs, before she realized the sound didn’t come from a human throat. Instead it was the shrill reverberation of her wards.

Startled panic turned to dread. She ran barefoot from the Chanterie and into the street, ignoring the knife-edged pain in her joints and lungs. Darkness blotted the stars and thickened the air; the few streetlamps guttered in the choking shadow. All around her the wind rose, flinging grit into her eyes. Sand scoured her feet as she ran toward the temple; slivers of glass tore her skin. Light blossomed in windows, dimming again as the watchers flung their shutters closed. No one emerged—Nerium couldn’t blame them.

Once she could have run the length and breadth of Qais. Now her breath gave out halfway through the hypostyle, and she leaned against a column to get it back. Each gasp felt like briars ripping through her lungs and tightening around her heart. And what was the point of haste, anyway? The damage was done, the storm freed. What point in anything but returning to bed and letting it devour the world?

She pinched her arm, hard and savage. The sudden pain cleared the dulling miasma from her head. She was sworn to stop Al-Jodâ’im. Death might free her from the vow, but age and misery did not.

Besides, she thought, forcing her aching feet on, she ran quite well for a woman of one hundred and two.

As she reached the last row of columns, a grotesque shape appeared out of the haze, nearly startling her out of life she could ill afford to spare. It was only Khalil, bent double over his cane. Behind him was Salah, captain of Qais’s guards; his dark face was grey with strain, but he braved the storm.

Nerium led the way up the stairs, buffeted by the scouring wind. Stepping inside the shelter of the temple should have been a relief—instead her stomach cramped at the misery welling up the stairs.

She descended into darkness absolute. Her witchlight died as soon as she summoned it and she wasted no strength on another. One hand on the wall, the other outstretched for balance, she climbed blind, one groping toe-curled step at a time. She miscounted somewhere down the spiral, and bloodied her knees missing the final stair. Sticky warmth trickled down her left shin, and she wanted to cry like a child.

The salt door was cool to the touch, the latch rough and clogged with fresh corrosion. Hinges shrieked as she tugged it open and their cry mingled with the cacophony pouring from the oubliette. She knew she should wait for Khalil but she couldn’t hear him over the wail, nor stand long before its onslaught.

Two strides into the chamber she realized her mistake: She was walking straight into the oubliette. Her legs folded like a discarded puppet and she sat down hard on the floor. Where was Khalil? Where was Shirin? She didn’t dare take her attention away from Al-Jodâ’im long enough to search for them.

“Kash!”

He fought the summons—not his usual reluctance, but a real struggle. Under other circumstance she might have indulged him, but she couldn’t afford the distraction now. The clouded diamond on her left hand flared. Her grandfather’s diamond. She granted Kash what freedom she could, but part of him was always bound to the stone. She tightened the leash, reeling him back into his faceted cage. Leaving her alone once more to face the fury of Al-Jodâ’im.

Nerium began to sing.

Evening has fallen like the first evening

Nightjar has spoken like the first bird

Her voice cracked at first, and the howling storm warped all her notes out of true. But she kept on, and her throat relaxed and warmed, and the pain in her lungs subsided to make room for words.

Praise for the singing, praise for the gloaming

Praise for the light fading soft from the world

One of the church’s sunset hymns, one of the hundreds of songs that some ancient member of Quietus had helped to write. A hundred little wards set to music and spread across the continent, to weaken the night, weaken the Fata, and strengthen the seals against the darkness. Nerium had never involved herself in ecclesiastical matters, but some of the hymns were pretty. She had sung this one to her daughter in the cradle—it always calmed her, even through the worst colic.

And part of that child lived forever in the oubliette.

Nerium sat in the darkness, singing and weeping, for what felt like an eternity. If there was a hell of punishment, of atonement, this would be hers. The thought that even death might not bring peace terrified her.

It wasn’t until someone called her name that she realized she could hear again. The howling had subsided once more into a sleepy dirge and magelight glowed against the darkness. Blinking back tears, she saw Shirin pacing the circumference of the pit, tracing numbers on the dusty stone.

“Lady Kerah.” Salah knelt beside her, chafing her cold hand in his broad callused palms. “Are you all right?”

Her laugh was a harsh, ugly sound. Her legs were numb, and when she straightened them her scabbed knees cracked and bled fresh. Her left hip ached from landing on the stones. She’d lost vocal discipline—her throat felt scraped raw.

“I’m alive,” she croaked. “That will have to suffice.”

Salah smiled crookedly. “It will. Can you stand?”

She could, with help. Across the oubliette, Shirin met her eyes and gave a strained nod. The diamonds in the walls sparked with rainbow fire as her light bobbed above her shoulder.

Salah hesitated as he helped Nerium through the door. “Lady, I hate to burden you further after all you’ve done tonight—”

She closed her eyes. “What is it?”

“Lord Ramadi. He tried to help you, but he fell.” His voice lowered. “I think it’s his heart.”

Looking up, she saw Khalil slumped on the spiral stairs, one fist pressed against his chest. His breath came loud and harsh and his face had drained a sickly grey. His cane lay discarded and useless at the bottom of the stair. Nerium threw off Salah’s supporting arm and stumbled up the steps to his side.

“What happened?” She tried to keep her voice brisk, but her own heart filled her throat and choked her. His brow was cold beneath her hand.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. “I tried to help.” He took her hand, turning his cheek against her palm. “I never meant for you to face them alone.”

“It’s all right. It’s over now and I’m fine. Shirin will finish the work.”

“Good. I’m glad you’re still strong. I have no strength left.”

“Don’t be silly. You just need to rest.” The words were ashes in her mouth. She felt the weakness creeping through his limbs, the strain in his heart. Such injuries would never truly heal.

“It’s over, Nerium.”

“Not here it isn’t. Not like this. Captain”—she turned to Salah—“can you carry him?”

“Of course, Lady.”

“Let me rest,” Khalil said, reaching for her hand.

“Yes.” She pressed dry lips against his fingers and wondered if her own heart was failing as well. “You can rest. You’ve earned it. But not here.”

She couldn’t watch Salah carry him up the stairs, couldn’t bear to see a man once so tall and strong cradled like a child. She had understood, in a clinical way, that to extend her own life would be to outlast things she knew. That knowledge was a bitter balm now.

When Khalil was laid in his own bed, Nerium sent Salah for willow bark and hot water. The captain didn’t hesitate, but she saw the resignation in his face.

“You don’t have to fuss over me, Nerium,” Khalil said when Salah had come and gone again. He set the dregs of his tisane on the bedside table. It couldn’t undo the damage already done to the muscle, but at least it might ease the strain, and the pain.

“Yes, I do,” Nerium replied, soothing his blankets.

“Let me rest. Give me mercy.”

She couldn’t hide her flinch. “Would you ask that of me? I’ve never known you to run from a fight.”

“The fight is over. We’re losing the war. You’ve said so yourself.”

“I’ll find a way. I’d hoped you’d be with me when I did.”

He smiled. “Still a beautiful liar. But we’ve both always known you’d leave me behind.”

Nerium closed her eyes. She was lying, though not in the way he thought. She needed the other Silent for her plan to work, but she’d known for some time that they wouldn’t be aware when it happened. Khalil and Shirin might make the sacrifice willingly, but Ahmar and Siavush never would. It didn’t matter—their vows were consent enough.

“I’m sorry.” She hadn’t realized she meant to say it until the words fell from her lips. “I’m sorry I left you.”

He waved the apology away. “You did what you had to. We’ve all made sacrifices for the order.” His bony fingers closed around hers. “I never stopped loving you, though. Even
they
couldn’t destroy that.”

“I know.” Qais hadn’t withered her love, either. At least not at the beginning.

She’d left on assignment nearly forty years ago, the last great absence she took from the empty city. Fear had prevented her from telling Khalil, her lover for many years, that she was pregnant. Her magic extended her life and her fertility, but she still worried that she wouldn’t carry the babe to term. And then she did, but despite her hopes for a successor, a mage to take her place on the Silent Council, her daughter had been born kamnur. No training had ever woken more than a spark of sensitivity. From that disappointment grew bitterness, and by the time she returned to Qais, she couldn’t bear to return Khalil’s love.

She still couldn’t bear it, but she’d learned to push past the limits of her endurance. She bent to kiss him, tasting honey and bitter medicine and even bitterer mortality.

“Sleep,” she whispered against his lips, filling the word with power. His eyes closed as she leaned back, his breath deepening. She held his hand for a long moment before folding it across his breast. The diamond winked in the dim light, a cold reminder of what she had to do.

She’d always had a talent for healing, a rarity among Quietus. It kept her from becoming a skilled entropomancer, but that sacrifice was worth it. For decades she’d studied medicine and anatomy, taking bodies apart layer by layer to understand their function.

No amount of skill would let her work miracles—Khalil was over eighty years old, and had spent much of his strength withstanding Al-Jodâ’im—but it let her find the weak place in his heart and wrap it in threads of magic fine as spider silk. Not true healing, but preservation, the sort of spells the necromancers of Selafai learned to keep corpses fresh.

She cocooned him in stasis and sleep. The greater working was still to come; she would return with amber and honey and myrrh, and make of her friend and lover a vessel strong enough to withstand the void. This would serve for now, until she recovered her strength.

A sound drew her from the fugue of magic and fatigue. Nerium turned, stiff neck crackling, to find Shirin standing in the doorway.

“How is he?” the librarian asked, her voice low.

“Resting.” Nerium rose with a wince and closed the shutters. The sky beyond was bruised with incipient dawn. The bed hangings stirred with the last breeze, ghostly in the gloom, then hung still.

“It’s his heart,” she said softly, joining Shirin. “I did what I can, but—” She lifted her hands in a gesture of futility. “It’s best if he sleeps for now.”

Shirin nodded slowly and let Nerium steer her out of the room. For an instant Nerium thought she read suspicion in the other woman’s eyes, but Shirin blinked and it was gone. A trick of the light. The pricking of her conscience.

“Another stone failed—a smaller one beside the one we just replaced. I redid the bindings. Not as strong with only the two of us, of course, but they’ll hold.”
For a while
. Shirin didn’t need to speak the coda aloud—they both knew. “I’m sorry,” she added after a moment. “I was too slow in answering the alarm. I tried, but…”

“I understand.” Nerium laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder, and wondered if the tension she felt there was a flinch or merely lingering strain. Blaming Shirin for Khalil’s collapse might have soothed her own guilty nerves, but it would be a lie. And anyway, Shirin would have the chance to redeem herself soon enough.

Dawn broke across the desert and Qais and its prisoners returned to uneasy sleep. The wind that had escaped the oubliette, however, did not die. Instead it churned eastward, gathering strength as it spun.

In the Fata, it drained color from the desert, leaving a grey trail behind. Little spirits fled its passing. In glass-walled Mazikeen the jinn felt it and shivered. Even in distant Carathis the ghuls hunkered deep in their tunnels and their queen shuddered on her bone chair. In the necropolis outside of Ta’ashlan, a veiled mortician pulled her robes tight around and whispered prayers to dead gods.

In the lands of flesh, animals also fled, but not all were fast enough. The ghost wind stripped their flesh, leaving polished bone behind. An unlucky band of nomads lost their last camel to the wind’s kiss, stranding them deep in the erg. The nearest well collapsed and dried as the storm rolled past.

The wind bore toward Ta’ashlan, as its last incarnation had, but as it neared the River Ash its attention shifted north. The main storm faltered and faded, spending the last of its momentum to birth a dozen smaller whirlwinds. Fish and river birds died as they sped past, and flooded fields fouled. Waterwheels broke their axles, leaving distant crops to wither in the heat.

But even the power of destruction burned out in time. The small storms sputtered in turn, until only one remained. That one, driven by more than wind and sand, fueled by desperation and curiosity and slow-simmering inhuman anger, gyred north along the river, toward Sherazad and the sea.