The Kingdoms of Dust (24 page)

D
espite her resolution to stay alert, Isyllt dozed after Nerium left. She woke when silent servants arrived with the promised food and water and clothing. Her own clothing, no less, though not all of it. Having seen the disemboweled camel, she wasn’t inclined to complain; viscera stains weren’t worth scrubbing. They dusted as well, and changed the bloodstained sheets and musty drapes. The stones felt old and silent, but Isyllt didn’t realize just how old until she saw the antiquated plumbing. Bathwater was hauled in buckets to fill a copper tub. Grey water emptied down a narrow drain whose grate was blue with verdigris; other waste required a chamber pot. Hardly an ideal situation with only one arm.

At least she’d already learned to wash her hair one-handed.

Dressing was worse. Trousers she could manage, but the shirt defeated her. The sling looped both shoulders and knotted between them, holding her back straight and minimizing movement. Sleeves were right out. She settled on her last clean robe, draping it over her left shoulder. With that misery accomplished, she drained a cooling mug of willow bark tisane.

The only mirror was covered and she felt no telltale prickle against her wards—all the same, she felt herself observed. Finally she traced the sensation to a heavy shadow in the corner, a darkness that smelled of familiar bitter ashes.

“Who’s there?” At her voice, the shadow vanished, leaving only natural dimness in its place.

“Charming,” she muttered.

She ought to sit and rest, but agitation and curiosity drove her around the room, poking in drawers and peering out the window. A sound at the door distracted her from the desolate mountain view. Adam stood in the doorway and relief washed through her, cool and tingling.

“I leave you for a few days, and you’ve already broken something.” A smile hooked his mouth, but his eyes were tight and troubled.

“Are you all right?”

“Better than you. I’m fine, and so is Moth.”

She went to him, brushing light fingers against the side of his jaw to reassure herself that he was real. His eyes were bruised with lack of sleep, but she sensed no hurt in him. Except one—a fresh bruise on his throat, the familiar mark of human teeth. The scent of myrrh clung to him, as it seemed to cling to everything here, and under that, the jasmine and honeysuckle sweetness of a woman’s perfume.

Her hand fell and her brows rose. “Tell me you came by that willingly.”

A flush climbed his cheeks, and he didn’t meet her eyes. “Yes. It was stupid, but it wasn’t rape.”

“Your Brenna?”

The flush darkened. “Not Brenna, and not mine. But yes.”

She swallowed something snide. “I’m glad you’re safe. I worried.”

“I don’t know about safe. This place is a tomb. Bren—
she
—says they want your help. But there’s more than one agenda here—” He broke off, head cocking toward the hall at a sound she couldn’t yet hear.

A whisper of footsteps approached, and Moth stopped outside the open door. Like Adam, she looked sound but ill slept—not, Isyllt hoped, for the same reasons. Her hair had grown long enough to curl in loose ringlets at her cheeks and brow, and the bronze tones in her face had deepened.

“You came,” she said at last. Her eyes were dark, remote, her mouth an emotionless line.

“I came.” Isyllt took a hesitant step closer. “Of course I came. I’m sorry it took so long.” She knelt, jarring her shoulder; it left her looking up at Moth. “I’m sorry.”

One corner of the girl’s mouth quirked—whether in a smile or a flinch Isyllt couldn’t say. “You’re hurt. What happened?”

Isyllt eased the collar of her robe back with a grimace, baring the bandages and splint. “I was shot. Don’t worry—they’re all dead. I met a manticore, too. I’m sorry you missed that.” She swallowed, humor drying in her mouth. “Have they treated you well?”

Moth snorted. “For a prisoner and bait, you mean? Yes. Melantha has been teaching me to ride.” A crease formed and smoothed between her brows. “She’s trying to turn me.”

“Ah.” Her tongue worked against the roof of her mouth until she could say the words lightly. “Is it working?”

Moth’s chin lifted, her eyes unreadable. “I don’t know yet.”

Isyllt nodded. There was nothing else she could do. “Let me know when you decide. Until then—” She stood, hissing as the movement jarred her shoulder. “One of you help me with this damned sleeve. Then we find Asheris.”

After navigating one dark and narrow corridor, Isyllt had no desire to play jinni-in-a-haystack through the whole building. Luckily Moth had seen guards carry Asheris in.

They found him in a windowless interior room, on the wrong side of a barred door. Adam threw back the bar while Isyllt stripped away a light web of wards, her stomach churning. If they’d hurt him— But the door swung open to reveal Asheris whole but half dressed, slumped on the edge of a bed with his head in his hands. He looked up with a weary smile.

“Oh, good. I was getting bored. Is this a rescue?”

“A relocation, at the very least. Are you hurt?”

“A bit sluggish still, but no worse. They were kind enough to take the bullets out while I was asleep.” He nodded toward the bedside table, where a pile of misshapen lead balls gleamed greasy in the dim lamplight. His rent and bloody shirt lay beside him; when he stood, the skin of his chest and stomach was smooth and unscarred. “Lead isn’t as painful to me. And you?”

She eased her collar back to show the bandage. “I’ll mend, if not so quickly.”

He glanced past her, to where Moth and Adam waited in the hall. “Your apprentice? Good—I’m glad we didn’t come all this way for nothing.” He brushed her good shoulder with his, a gentle touch to take the weary sting from the words.

“We’re in Qais,” she said while he inspected and subsequently abandoned his shirt. Four long lines ridged his back, pink and tender. “Even if we fought past the guards, we wouldn’t get far. For the moment I’ll settle for finding out hostess, and some answers.”

They found Nerium in the library on the ground floor of Quietus’s silent fortress-maze. The scent of parchment and leather and cedar breathed over them as the tall brass-studded doors swung open, mingling with the ever-present bitterness of myrrh. Shelves paneled the high walls from floor to ceiling, row upon row of books and cased scrolls. Isyllt whistled appreciatively. A pity, though, that such a collection was locked away in the middle of the desert.

Nerium stood before a tall window, its heavy curtains holding back the dawn. Two low stone tables lay beside her.

No, Isyllt realized as she drew closer. Coffins. Coffins made of red rock salt, the kind that would cost its weight in silver in Selafai. They had no lids, revealing the man and woman who lay within. But while magic prickled her skin as she looked down at their slack, time-worn faces, her ring held no chill. Not dead, merely sleeping, wrapped in enchantment like flies in spidersilk.

“Not your last guests, I hope,” Isyllt said, burying her unease. Death and decay could never alarm her, but this unnatural sleep made her skin crawl.

“No. These are my colleagues. Fellow councillors of Quietus. Their sacrifice is the reason I’ve brought you here.”

“You might have sent a letter, you know.”

“I would have liked to, but one of our council opposes my summoning you, strongly enough to have you killed.”

“Ahmar Asalar,” Asheris said.

“Just so. I see she tipped her hand.” Nerium’s smile was tight and cold. “Because of our quarrel, I tried to have you brought here quietly.” She acknowledged Moth with a wry tilt of her head. “You see how well that turned out. But you’re here, and mostly whole, with only the loss of Ahmar’s pet warlord to show for it.”

“We’re here,” Isyllt agreed. “So tell us why.”

“I’ll show you. But it’s not a sight for kamnuran or apprentices. If your friends would care to wait, or help themselves to breakfast…”

Moth frowned; Adam shrugged. “All right,” Isyllt said.

Asheris didn’t move from her side, and gave Nerium a chilly smile when she balked. His ruined robe hung open, baring his chest and flashing his scarred back, but his dignity was intact. “I am many things, lady, but
dim
is not one of them.”

“Of course not,” she said, with perfect aplomb. But it was to Isyllt that she looked, judging. Isyllt shifted closer to Asheris in answer. One ashen brow quirked acknowledgment. “Follow me, please.”

She led them from the great hall and down a broad, dusty avenue. Dawn spread like a fresh bruise behind the eastern mountains and the morning was cool and still. As they passed through a neat orchard of columns, Isyllt blinked. The pillars were the same as the one she’d spent a day perched on, though in better repair. Ahead a familiar tower and cupola rose against the fading stars, and the courtyard walls formed the same angles: This was a mirror of lost Irim.

It was to that terraced tower that Nerium led them. As they climbed the worn red steps, an unquiet weight grew in Isyllt’s chest and her neck prickled with a strengthening force of magic. She’d visited many places steeped in magic, whether it was the careful constant workings of the Arcanost, or the sour corruption of ancient spells gone wrong, but never had she felt anything like this.

At the top of the steps Isyllt drew up short. The door lay several strides ahead, but the air between might have been made of stone. When she looked
otherwise
, the power of the protective magic hung around the opening seared the backs of her eyes.

“The spells are keyed to our oaths,” Nerium said, stepping forward. Magic blurred and distorted her face like heat-shimmer. “No one may enter the temple unless they’re sworn to Quietus, or accompanied by a member.”

Asheris pressed one palm against the ward. An orange spark flared, but like Isyllt he couldn’t pass. Satisfied that they understood, Nerium took them each by the hand and led them through the caul.

The door opened onto yet another set of stairs—Isyllt lost count of steps after eighty, but her shoulder remembered every one. At the bottom of the narrow spiral, Nerium stopped, sweat glinting on her brow. Her conjured light couldn’t reach the top.

“Do you know the story of Irim?” she asked, one hand resting on the latch of a red door. More rock salt, an unpleasant reminder of coffins.

“I’ve heard it,” Isyllt said. “One version, at least.” Asheris remained silent.

“This is the truth. We keep it, along with Irim’s history. Be careful inside, especially of your injury—they can exploit any weakness.” The red door swung open.

The light was a wound, Isyllt thought as she stepped inside, a blasphemy against the power of the dark. A web of diamonds threw back shards of brilliance, sharp enough to cut. Behind the stones, black marble lined the walls and curving ceiling, swirled with grey and glittering sprays of gold, like the night sky.

“This—” She winced at the sound of her voice. “This is where Sivahra’s diamonds went.”

“And many more. For over a thousand years Quietus has bought and smuggled and stolen such stones, to keep the seals intact.”

“Do you know the price of your seals in lives?”

“Better than you.” By reflected witchlight Nerium’s eyes were bright as mirrors, and as cold. “And I know the price we would pay if the seals fell.”

“The ghost wind,” Asheris whispered, his face transfigured with dread and awe. He hadn’t left the doorway. “This is where it’s born.”

“Yes. Every lapse frees it. What you felt in Ta’ashlan and Sherazad were our failures here. They’ve learned to wear through the diamonds, you see, and they eat them faster and faster every time. Some of my colleagues would like to ignore this, and simply replace the stones whenever a flaw forms. If we did that, in a hundred years—or fifty, or twenty—the fortune of diamonds men have bled and died for would be as worthless as glass.”

“What deserves such a prison?” Isyllt asked. She’d asked the same of Asheris once, when he still wore the collar imperial mages had used to enslave him. That had been a marvel of craftsmanship, magical and otherwise; it was a tattered thread compared with this room.

“Step closer and find out,” Nerium said. “Carefully.” She moved back to stand beside Asheris, gesturing Isyllt toward the well in the center of the room.

Isyllt’s blood beat hard in her ears as she inched forward. The floor was flat and dry and stable, but the closer she drew to the pit, the more it seemed she balanced on tilting ice, and one wrong step would send her sliding. She stopped a single pace away from the edge—beyond the line of stone lay only empty black.

No. Not empty.

Under the rhythm of her pulse, a different music swelled. A low discordant wail, so soft at first that she thought she imagined it. The song rose and fell like a temple choir, one voice and a hundred. A song of loss and loneliness, of exile and longing. It scraped and shivered over her skin, aching in the roots of her teeth and driving a spike into her fractured clavicle. It would take her apart, muscle and bone, layer by layer, till all that remained was dust.

As the song rose, so too did the darkness in the oubliette. Black as ink, black as tar, black as a night without stars, welling past the lip of the pit and toward her boots. A delicate midnight coil, incongruously frail, licked curiously at her toe. A shudder racked her, clacking her teeth together.

“That’s enough.” Nerium’s hand closed on her elbow, simultaneously holding her steady and pulling her back. “It’s best to build a tolerance slowly.”

Asheris walked behind Isyllt as they climbed the spiral stair, a reassuring warmth between her and the aching chill they left behind. By the time they reached the top she had stopped shaking, mostly. She stopped as the shroud of spells sealed behind them.

“What are they?” Her jaw ached with the effort from stilling her chattering teeth, and fresh blood oozed beneath her bandages.

“Look down,” Nerium said.

In the morning light, Isyllt studied her boot. She’d bought them new only a month ago; the soles were scarcely worn. But where the darkness had touched her the leather was cracked and rotted, flaking away to expose the stocking beneath.