The Kingdoms of Dust (3 page)

Courtiers of the Lion Throne wouldn’t be surprised to find Siddir attending the empress at odd hours. He was a favorite of the court: handsome, charming, kin to amirs and senators and shipping magnates, heir to and free with his family’s considerable wealth. Samar doted on him as she would a favorite cat—her weakness for pretty eyes was well known. What might shock the court, however, was how often Siddir came to the empress through the palace’s web of concealed passages, and how often he brought grim news instead of flattery and smiles.

Siddir bowed to Samar, sacrificing grace and flourish to keep his balance on his injured leg. The wound—a hunting accident, he called it, and that was true if he didn’t specify the nature of the quarry—had been healing well, but now lines of pain were drawn fresh across his face. Asheris’s own cuts and blisters had healed before he returned to the palace, but his skin remained tender and an aching weariness lingered in his bones. Anyone who’d been exposed to the black wind felt it still. Even the empress, safely ensconced in the palace, had a bruised and hollow look around her eyes.

“What news?” Samar asked, gesturing him to a seat a heartbeat after Siddir began lowering himself onto the couch. Siddir had been her friend and agent too long to stand on ceremony; the debts and secrets between her and Asheris also precluded formality.

They were two of the three mortals to whom he’d entrusted his secret. If not for Jirair’s words, he might have thought them the only ones who knew at all. Better, he thought wryly, to be disabused of that notion sooner rather than later.

“One hundred and forty-two dead.” Siddir drained half his cup in one swallow. White mourning ribbons fluttered from his sleeves. “That have been found so far. I’ve heard reports of chaos in the madhouses, and two mages and a priest had to be subdued after they started raving.” His frown deepened. “The temple apiaries are devastated.”

Asheris winced, remembering drifts of dead flies.

Samar sank into a chair, the weary slump of her shoulders quickly hidden. “What were you saying about precedent?” she asked Asheris. “My grandfather and nurses would tell us stories about the ghost wind when we were small, and about the saints who fought it. I thought they were only stories.”

“The lives and battles of saints I can’t speak for. The ghost wind, however, was most recently documented in 1157, seen west of the Ash. University mages made the record, so I’m inclined to trust it. Before that I’ve found records from 1007 and 806. Anything earlier is suspect, considering the archive fire of 799 and Nizam the Second’s attempts at revising history. I can find no other instance of the storm striking Ta’ashlan—they usually seem to fade after crossing the Ash.”

Siddir’s hazel eyes narrowed. “There’s a trend to those numbers I don’t find at all reassuring.”

“Do the archives know what causes these storms?” Samar asked.

“No. But scholars have noticed something.” Asheris pulled a pouch from his pocket and upended it into his other hand. Red and tawny sand trickled into his palm, glittering with green glass. “The storm comes from the Sea of Glass. The cause must be there. I want to investigate.”

Sculpted brows drew together. “Is there precedent for that?”

He poured the sand back into its pouch and scrubbed his palm on his thigh. “At least two expeditions have gone into the desert searching for the ghost wind. One found nothing—the other was never found.”

“Even more reassuring,” Siddir muttered.

“I think I would survive,” he said dryly, though in truth he wasn’t certain what the ghost wind could do. He’d survived blades and bullets, entropic magic and a volcano’s eruption, but wasn’t ready to believe himself unkillable. “Let me gather mages. The university loves a good fact-finding mission.”

Samar leaned back, staring at her wine cup in silence for a time. “No,” she said at last. “I need you here.” She waved a hand when Asheris opened his mouth, moisture shining on her fingertips. “It’s a mystery worth solving, yes. But even if your trend continues, it will be decades before the storm returns. I have warlords carving up the borderlands, governors banging on the gates, and my brother’s partisans courting my niece’s favor. Help me solve these problems—then you can search the desert for storms.”

She didn’t name the other reason, not even with the twitch of a hand toward her stomach, but Asheris knew.

Ever since her coronation, the senate had pressed Samar to marry again and bear an heir. Amirs and senators paraded eligible sons and brothers and cousins in front of her, but she had yet to find a suitable candidate. Her affairs had been few and far between, and always discreet.

But not always foolproof. A decad ago she had confided to him: She was pregnant, and the father was no one she had any intention of marrying. She had another month, perhaps four decads, to make a decision before her condition became obvious.

Argument would be pointless; he saw that in the set of her shoulders and mouth. Canny pragmatism had kept her alive to claim the throne, but she was kamnur—
dim
, mages called the ungifted—to the bone. If she had truly seen the storm, her priorities might be different. “And if the storm doesn’t wait?” he asked anyway.

Gold-flecked eyes narrowed. “Then I’ll pray it takes our enemies with it, and saves us the trouble.”

“What can I do?” Siddir asked later, lying in the darkness of Asheris’s bedroom. They nearly always met in Asheris’s rooms—the servants were more respectful of mages’ privacy.

“I don’t know.” Asheris stood by the window, letting the breeze from the garden dry the sweat that filmed his skin. He’d learned to take comfort in mortal embraces, but tonight the touch of flesh only reminded him of death. The taste of semen clung in the back of his throat, salt and decay. Even the green scent of the gardens smelled of rot.

“I could go to the desert, if you think it would help,” Siddir said after a moment of silence. “It’s easier for me to slip my leash.”

“It’s too dangerous for kamnuran. If the storm returns—” His jaw tightened at the thought of Siddir’s brown skin peeling off muscle and bone.

“I’m in no condition to outrun it,” Siddir finished, his voice threaded with frustration.

“You can help me find these so-called quiet men.” Asheris had told Siddir about his final conversation with Jirair, but hadn’t yet shared it with Samar. His place in the Court of Lions depended on secrecy—it would be better if the empress didn’t come to consider him a liability.

He stared at the window, frustration knotting his fists. Siddir, however clever and resourceful, was no mage. And no matter how brilliant Ta’ashlan’s theoreticians and battle mages, they were hampered by lack of exposure to the Fata. In a land where death was taboo, the study of undoing was in short supply. He needed—

Asheris turned, cutting off Siddir’s reply. “No, there is something you can do. A way to slip your leash. If you’re willing.”

“Whatever you need, I can do.”

“I need an entropomancer. I need Isyllt Iskaldur.”

A
cross the desert, past the rush of the River Ash and the burning wastes of Al-Reshara, an old woman sat beside her mirror in an empty house, waiting for news. Nerium Kerah didn’t study her reflection as she might have decades ago. She had known her share of vanity, but now she felt all her years and battles in her back and hips and spotted, blue-veined hands; she had no need to see them in her face.

Light slanted through the windows, hot and honey-gold, undimmed by the storm that raged far across the empire. If she looked east she might see the stain of its passing across the desert, but that view was of no more interest to her than her reflection. She’d seen the devastation of the ghost wind before.

This was the first time she had caused it.

Nerium shook her head. She was weary enough without regrets. With nearly a hundred years of service behind her, she had seen what the storm wrought—other members of Quietus had not. Perhaps now they would understand what would happen when the old seals, the old ways, finally failed. And fail they would, of that she had no doubt. Other members of the Silent Council deluded themselves that the darkness they bound in diamond prisons would stay bound forever. Or at least another thousand years—it was difficult to maintain personal investment in something that might happen centuries after one was dead. Even she couldn’t imagine she would see the turning of the next millennium. Not in this decrepit flesh.

“Mother.”

The voice came from the dark glass, husky and breathless, edged with fear. Nerium winced to hear her daughter afraid, but she counted to ten before she responded, keeping her face and voice calm.

“Is it done?” She brushed the surface of the mirror, and her own tired face gave way to another. Like watching time roll away: the loose flesh of her throat and jaw firmed; close-cropped hair darkened; the lines on her face smoothed. Then the illusion vanished, and the woman in the mirror was herself again. Nerium tried to recall the name her daughter was using now, but it escaped her.

“Yes, it’s done.” Annoyance replaced fear in her voice, but the younger woman’s eyes were wide and dark and shadowed, olive cheeks pale and splotched. “What happened? The storm—”

“Isn’t it obvious? The seals failed. We’ve lost a diamond, years before schedule, and another is close to failing. We’re sealing the breach, but the system won’t last.” The words were dull with repetition by now. With any luck, she’d only have to present this lecture one more time.

“I have Zadani’s rings—”

Nerium shook her head. “Only a stopgap measure. We don’t have enough stones to keep this up, no matter what Ahmar claims. She would scheme and delay us all into oblivion. But we won’t let that happen.”

Her daughter’s head tilted at that
we
, not bothering to hide her weariness. “What do you need?” She kept her voice pitched low and her eyes flickered to one side.

“You on a ship to Kehribar within three days.” Dark eyes rolled, and Nerium nearly mimicked the gesture. “I don’t ask the impossible.” Sending her best agent to clean up a colleague’s mess had irked her, but it meant her daughter was placed to leave Assar quickly.

“No, only the intensely annoying. What’s in Kehribar?”

“An entropomancer. Isyllt Iskaldur. Bring her to me. Offer her anything she wants. Find the right leverage.”

“She’s under surveillance already, isn’t she? Why do I need to bring her in?”

“Her watcher is one of Ahmar’s pets. I need someone I can trust.” Her daughter glanced aside again, tracking some distant sound. Behind her Nerium could make out red hangings and candles. “Where are you?”

“At church.” She grinned at Nerium’s frown; the temples of Ta’ashlan were also full of Ahmar’s pets. “Shall I ask for absolution while I’m here? Wash the blood from my hands?”

“There isn’t any, is there?”

She snorted. “Of course not. I used a wire.”

“Find Iskaldur. Keep me informed.” Nerium touched the mirror again, and the connection broke. Her own grey and weary face took its place once more in the glass.

Her knees cracked as she rose to dress and her robes weighed heavily on her shoulders. The day stifled, and she would have been just as happy to go to her fellow councillors in a nightdress, but Quietus was fond of formality and comforting rituals.

The light didn’t change, but Nerium felt a shadow gathering behind her. A smell like char and bone and the musk of insects drifted through the room.

“She looks tired,” the shadow said with a voice of rasping sand. “You work the poor child too hard. But you were always careless with your toys, weren’t you?”

She turned, because it was weakness not to look. The creature in the corner was darkness and smoke, roiling like storm clouds within a tall, gaunt outline. His head was a vulture’s, bald and beaked and snake-necked. Ragged wings lay folded down his back, and two pairs of arms crossed his sunken chest.

“My daughter is none of your concern.”

“I’ve always felt a kinship with her. We failed experiments should stick together.” Sunlight glinted on dust motes inside him as he moved forward.

“She isn’t a failure.” From the mocking tilt of his head, Kash knew it for a lie.

“Merely a disappointment, then.”

“I don’t have time to play with you today, Kash.”

“No, nor strength. You’re so tired.” He drifted behind her, resting insubstantial taloned hands on her shoulders. “You’ll wear yourself to rags if you don’t rest.” His wicked beak brushed her cheek. “And when you fall I’ll be there to eat your eyes.”

She shook her head. His taunts had long since lost their power to unsettle her. “Not today, Kash.”

“No? What if I tell the others what you’ve done? I don’t think they’d appreciate your games.”

“You don’t want me to face council justice. You want revenge.”

“Maybe I’ll take whatever I can get. I’m used to scraps and carrion, after all.”

“You’ll get your chance. But not today.”

She turned, his cold shadowy form still pressed against her, and laid her hand against his beak. Under her fingers it was solid as any living bone and chitin. She spoke a word of silence. Kash recoiled, but the spell had already taken. His beak opened in a silent hiss.

Once she would have trusted him to keep her secrets. Once he had trusted her to keep her promises.

With a word of banishment he was gone, and she was alone again.

Her knees and neck ached as Nerium left her rooms, the familiar pains worse than they had been two days ago—the ghost wind’s handiwork. Qais had been spared the worst of the storm, protected by layers of spells, but its shadow lingered.

The mages’ dormitory was silent; even the tall brass-studded doors swung shut behind her with only a whisper to mark her exit. The Chanterie, the red sandstone hall was called, and had been for centuries. Nerium didn’t know the cause, but assumed it was a bitter joke; this was not a place for music.

The courtyard too was quiet, buried under drifts of copper sand. Wide pools lay stagnant, overgrown with weeds and filmed with droning midges. Green water shone gold in the westering sun. Qais wasn’t as deserted as it appeared—farmers and craftsmen and soldiers lived here, servants who should have been tending the pools—but she could go days without hearing anyone. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen children playing in the desolate streets.

Nerium frowned. She was hardly sentimental about children, but their presence here served a function—fresh life to ward off the constant shadow of decay. Swept streets and clean fountains also served: order combated entropy, and mastery over one’s environment had thaumaturgical benefits as well as aesthetic ones. She would have to speak to the staff—too much was at stake in Qais to let the city fall into disrepair.

The city was a replica of lost Irim, carefully constructed after its doom. As much red sandstone as the survivors could carry away from the ruin had been reused—the rest had been carved from the same cliffs in Hajar. Gardeners bled myrrh trees as they had in Irim, though the Smoke Road that had carried wealth and incense across the desert was long abandoned.

Qais was meant to be a monument to all that had been salvaged from Irim, a memorial for all that was lost. To Nerium it was a sepulchre, another corpse of a long-dead kingdom. The survivors of Irim—the founders of Quietus—could have moved on, but had instead chosen to shackle themselves to the past.

She shook her head. None of her morbid thoughts was untrue, but the black veil of despair that hung over her was another effect of the storm. With the seals’ renewal it would pass. When the moribund bindings now in place were replaced with fresh ones, she might in turn see new life brought to Qais. Or better yet, let the desert claim it once and for all.

She followed a broad, paved lane lined by crouching criosphinxes till she reached the hypostyle, a forest of fat sandstone pillars holding aloft the ceiling of sky. When she pushed aside the ghost wind’s depression, she could appreciate the stillness of the hypostyle, its latticed shadows and carven flagstones, whose lotus patterns appeared and disappeared with the drifting sand. She tried to hold to that stillness as she emerged from the columns and crossed the broad courtyard to the observatory temple, but it was no use.

The Aal, the peoples of Irim and Qais and the greater desert, had been sky-watchers, filling volumes with sidereal patterns and movements. They strove to speak to the stars themselves. This desire for knowledge, surviving records indicated, had brought doom to Irim.

The observatory was a broad building, terraced in a series of receding slabs—nothing like the gilded domes and graceful minarets of modern Assari temples. A wide staircase dominated the front, but couldn’t long draw the eye away from the round tower rising above it. From such a tower the scholars of Irim had sung to the stars.

By the time Nerium climbed the last of the steps, the sky was a wash of carnelian streaked with high, violet clouds. The Reshara desert spread to the northeast, red sand melting into the gloaming sky. Shadowed in the east, as Nerium had thought, by more than dusk; she turned her gaze back to the red stone steps.

Khalil Ramadi waited for her at the top, robed in grey and leaning on his cane. His white hair was long and neatly braided as ever, but thinner each year. Gold flashed in sagging earlobes, the last echo of the flamboyant warrior-mage he’d once been. His brown skin had been creased and weathered for decades, but now pain deepened the furrows around his eyes and pressed his mouth to a bloodless line.

“I’d hoped not to see the storm twice,” he said, offering his hand as she climbed the final step. His fingers were crooked and gnarled, trembling in hers. The band of his smoky diamond ring—twin to her own—pressed into paper-thin flesh; she doubted he could ever take it off.

“We may see it yet again if Ahmar continues to ignore the truth.”

Shoulders once broad and strong hunched further. He had been a tall man—now his curved spine pressed against his robes and bent him as low as she. “I stand with you,” he said quietly as they limped toward the tower door. “But there isn’t much fight left in me.”

Relics, all of us
, she thought bitterly. Fit only to be locked away in dust and darkness.

“You deserve rest,” she said. “We all do.” If her plan worked, they would have it.

They entered the observatory tower, but followed the spiral staircase downward instead of up. Quietus had no use for the sky—their concerns were bound in earth. Nerium conjured witchlight as they descended, careful not to show the strain it took to hold the glow steady. Architects were much too fond of stairs.

The snail-shell spiral ended at a red door. Rock salt, rose-colored slabs veined with crimson and porphyry, banded with steel to hold it to the hinges. The metal showed signs of recent scouring, but rust still blossomed. Salt for protection, to help contain the darkness that slept inside. As much use as a sticking plaster on a severed limb, as far as Nerium could tell, but it was very pretty.

The room beyond the red door was round and domed, like the observation tower above it, and like the tower roughly twelve cubits across—three times the height of a man. In the center lay a black pit six cubits in diameter. Such a small space to hold so much power. So much destruction. Nerium drew a breath, bracing herself as she stepped across the threshold. Behind her, she heard Khalil do the same.

Her witchlight flared as they entered the room, reflected in diamonds set in the curved ceiling. Hundreds of stones, bought and stolen and smuggled over centuries, a fortune to ransom kingdoms. The mages who built the prison had chosen to re-create the night sky—crystalline constellations glittered coldly in black marble, unchanging, locked forever in a night centuries past. Like the salt door, it made no difference that she could see, besides beauty. The power of the stones was real; Nerium nearly staggered under the weight of magic in the room.

A man and a woman waited for them. The woman, Shirin Asfaron, was Quietus’s historian and the third member of the Silent Council who dwelled permanently in Qais. A thin, reedy woman, she had taken on the same yellowed shade of parchment as the records with which she surrounded herself. She inclined her head to Nerium, and witchlight shone against her sweat-slick brow. Her hands trembled at her sides, and the cords of her neck stood taut. She was younger than she looked, but years of living in Qais had taken their toll. She wasn’t as resistant to the constantly leaking entropy of the oubliette as Nerium.

The man, Siavush al Naranj, didn’t turn. He faced the wall, muttering a constant chant of spells under his breath as he replaced a diamond in its stone setting. He was the youngest of them all, Ahmar’s prized pupil, and very clever at bindings—vinculation, as university mages called it.

Ahmar and Siavush claimed holding Qais was an honor, a mark of great strength and trust. That was not untrue, but they were also the youngest and strongest of the circle and meant to remain so. So they lived far from the specter of Irim, guarding Quietus’s interests and their own ambitions, shaking their heads at the fate of their poor fading comrades. Trying to ignore the reality of their oaths.