Realm of Ash

by Tasha Suri

  “I am a pragmatist,” Zahir continued. “The world owes me nothing. Prince Akhtar owes me nothing. And yet, I have been given the opportunity—the possibility—to save the Empire. I cannot estimate how many will die if a miracle does not save the Empire. I like precision, Lady Arwa, but the numbers are—impossible, too terrible to calculate. That is what I focus on. The aspect of my life I can control. The deaths I can, perhaps, avert. The work I can do, that I have chosen. And all of this is—not insignificant. I have tried to mold myself into someone worthy of the task.”

  “I don’t think you are a pragmatist,” said Arwa.

  “No?”

  No.

  I think you are a furious idealist, so passionate you’ll splinter yourself on your idealism, so hungry for your purpose you would die for it.

  I think you understand love is finite, and you strive for the small scraps you receive.

  As I have. As I do.

  “No,” Arwa said, unable to shape the words. Her voice shook like a reed. “No, you are not.”

  He stared into her eyes. She stared back.

  “Who have you molded yourself for, Lady Arwa?” he asked softly. “If I may be so bold.”

  She was struck, again, by the way he could look through a person, the way her nature felt like a bare wound before him.

  She swallowed.

  “Everyone, of course. What else could I do? But I am afraid, since my husband died, I’ve lost the talent for it.” She didn’t know how to express to him how she felt: the anger in her, and the desire for a war worthy of her fury; the grief in her, and the way it swallowed all her learned goodness whole. She was not sure she wanted to offer him such knowledge about her—such power over her. And yet…

  He had told her about his mother. She could offer him a truth in return. Besides, the words were burning in her throat, hot as coals. She couldn’t contain them.

  “I am not like you, my lord,” Arwa said. “I am a widow and illegitimate and my blood is—my blood. I deserve little. I should be grateful for what I have. But whatever I deserve—I do not want it.”

  She did not say, I want more. He understood.

  “The wanting will not help you accomplish anything,” he said. Guarded. Reading her with his eyes.

  “I know, my lord. Nonetheless, I still want, and grieve, and rage. I cannot stop myself, it seems.” Want. She should not have said want. There was a flush of color to his face, and she was sure her own burned also.

  “Now,” she said. “I would like to begin our work, my lord. May we?”

  “Of course,” he said. Cleared his throat. “Follow me.”

  They entered the realm of ash as always: by blood and flame and drug-laced sleep.

  Arwa had theorized that further exposure to the realm of ash would give their souls the strength and stamina to travel deeper into the realm.

  “I watched soldiers train often enough to understand the logic of building the body’s strength for a task,” she’d explained. “Some of the green boys who joined my husband’s service could not even hold the weight of their armor at first. But Kamran would make them wear it, and in time the body would find a way to carry its burden. The same may work for the soul.”

  “Except that the soul has no bones, no musculature,” Zahir pointed out.

  “Do you want to discuss the way our souls mimic our bodies and the possible implications of that?” Arwa asked, cocking her head, allowing a challenge to flicker in her voice.

  “I don’t want a headache tonight,” Zahir had said, shaking his head with a smile. “We’ll test your theory and see what becomes of it.”

  Luck had been with them. They had begun, in small increments, to move farther and farther from flesh, farther along Zahir’s path of ghostly, inherited dreams. They held their roots tight and entwined, the shimmer glass of their hands jointly clasped.

  They moved through strange gossamer rooms of ash. Forests of bodies that hung suspended, caught frozen between laughter or tears, memories preserved in amber. Arwa saw figures upon thrones, worlds in hands and mouths. Bodies caught mid-dance, hands outstretched, skirts whirling. She saw women and men. Caught in his history was an imperial line, ancient and powerful, a bloodline that awed her. And another bloodline—of scholars and mystics and courtesans. His mother’s blood.

  His mother who had died for the Empire, for the sake of knowledge, and all the dangers it brought.

  They were on the sand again. Pain tugged at Arwa’s insides, soul and flesh both. She looked at his glasslike face. There was no feeling in it; nonetheless, she knew he felt as she felt.

  “Just a little farther,” he said.

  She nodded. There was too much at stake for either of them to hold back.

  They walked one step farther. Two. Suddenly Arwa felt—strange. The sand sharpened, jagged around her. The grains were moving, whirling softly around her ankles. As if…

  As if they were on the edges of a storm.

  There were not trees, not any longer; no canopy, no shadows of leaves, not even bare sky. Instead there was a whirling, white-edged storm. It took her a moment to recognize the storm for what it was. It was the storm Arwa always woke to, when she entered the realm of ash. It was a memory of dreamfire.

  Arwa gazed at it, her attention drawn as if by cold fingers. White, gray, ash, and smoke. Within it, she saw shadows of figures, no different from the ones she had seen in Zahir’s forest of ink-dark trees.

  One of the figures moved. And for the barest moment—a heartbeat, at most—the ash parted. And Arwa saw her.

  Turn of a skirt. Long braid of curling hair. Skin, brown as rain-drenched soil, a face of high cheekbones and a soft mouth and a blue shawl at the throat, of flesh and not ash, and Arwa knew that face—

  Mehr.

  “What is it?” asked Zahir.

  She squeezed her dreamed eyes shut, felt her distant body move a little upon the ground where it slept. When she looked again, her sister’s too-mortal figure was gone. Somewhere her heart raced and raced, and her skin flushed with grief so sharp it was a knife in her belly, but she could only feel it distantly here, and she was thankful for that.

  “Lady Arwa,” Zahir prompted. His voice was low with concern. “Speak to me.”

  My sister, she thought. I saw my sister.

  She could not say it. If she did, she would shatter entirely. And what good would she be then? Instead she said, “Something is different here. I feel as if… I’m on my own path of ash, and not yours.” She spoke carefully, glad her voice was steady, glad her racing heart could not shape her voice here. “I think our paths have—crossed, somehow. Joined. Or bled into one another.”

  “That would be—an interesting development,” he said tightly.

  “When you last ate ash, you know I saw a little of what you saw,” she said. “Perhaps when people travel the realm of ash together, their paths begins to… connect.”

  “I think we may need to research this further, before we continue.”

  “As if you haven’t read every book in your library.”

  “Ah, you forget the key quality of books,” he responded. “They have a far greater capacity than a man’s memory, and doubtless contain answers I can’t recall.” His grip tightened. “If we let the roots draw us back—”

  “No.”

  She thought of Akhtar’s hand around Zahir’s throat, of the Emperor, old and trembling. She thought of Mehr.

  And she thought—as she always thought, every moment—of Darez Fort.

  “Lord Zahir. You are running out of time. The Empire is running out of time. Besides, what better way is there to test the limits of what we can accomplish, than to try?”

  He said nothing. But when Arwa stepped forward, he did not argue. He followed her.

  Another step. Another.

  On the storm-burnt sand that was their joined paths, they stopped once more. Horror rose in Arwa’s throat.

  They were surrounded by bodies.

  This was not a scene of
war: a dream she could understand being left behind in this realm of mortal dreaming and ghosts. This was… children. Women. Men, young and old, their ash figures too sharp in her vision, broken into segments of limbs, half buried, as if a storm had lifted the sand and revealed their remains.

  Their presence should have repulsed her, sent her stumbling back to her own skin. She should have felt the tremor of her own heart, a sharp cold breath in her lungs.

  Instead she felt a terrible longing. A knowing.

  These bodies lay upon both their paths. But they were as much hers as the dancing figures, the throned ones, that existed under the shadow of Zahir’s great trees. Her sister had been a sign of them, somehow: a portend, a bright beacon. A blazing lantern in the dark, guiding Arwa to the truth.

  “Arwa,” Zahir said, voice urgent.

  “Step forward with me,” she insisted. He spoke again. She did not hear him.

  She kneeled down despite Zahir’s distant protests, drawing him down with her. She felt the call of the limbs before her like a song. She saw a shadow memory of a hand, broken from a body, a dagger clutched desperately in its fist.

  The dagger. It looked like—

  The dagger her sister had given her.

  Mehr’s dagger.

  Distant breath tight in her chest. She reached for the hand, feeling the ash shatter at her touch, sweeping over her glass-boned fingers, gray clouding it from within. If she remained where she was, it would fill her.

  “Arwa!”

  Zahir wrenched her to her feet. The storm drew the ash away.

  “We need to leave here,” he told her.

  “These are Amrithi dead,” gasped Arwa. “I know it. I recognize the blade. I can feel them drawing me to them.”

  “Lady Arwa, you need to be careful.”

  “I know who they are. I can feel it. And I saw—”

  “You know there are dangers here,” he cut in, desperate. “Please—”

  He was reaching for their roots, ready to allow the tethers to draw them both back to their flesh. But Arwa could not leave. Not yet.

  She wrenched free from his grip. Roots wrenching, unfurling. She was suddenly only one soul, alone. She felt the thud of her heart, lungs seizing. But her path of ash had a terrible magnetism.

  There was no sign of her sister. No bright beacon to guide her. But there was a figure lying between the rest, its edges somehow clearer and sharper than all those that surrounded it. A torso, a face turned against the sand, a single arm flung out, knife in its throat. The eye opened. A jumble of parts. A jumble of bodies.

  Arwa leaned over it, terrified. She thought again of her sister in the storm, a cruel mirage, too bright and alive.

  She had to know. Had to know.

  She parted her mouth. Pressed her hand down. The ash rose to meet her.

  She was not Arwa anymore.

  She was a woman named Nazrin. She knew what it meant to be an Amrithi woman: to live in Irinah’s vast desert, to travel with her clan and children, to avoid the Ambhan authorities, who had no love for her people. She knew how to barter with local villagers, offering them her blood as defense against the daiva in return for food and resources. She knew how to dance rites of worship.

  She knew what it meant to have been born both gifted and cursed. As a child, she had watched a storm of dreamfire with her clan. Reached for it… and felt the dreamfire reach back.

  She’d known then that she possessed the gift of amata.

  Some Amrithi women and men had too much daiva blood still in their veins. Some, like their daiva ancestors, could not make vows without the weight of those vows being burned into their skin and souls. Some could move the dreams of the Gods to their will, if they knew the way, if they were willing to indulge in a terrible world-breaking heresy.

  How her mother had wept, when it was discovered that Nazrin was one such Amrithi. You are something the Maha will steal from me, she’d said. He will make you vow yourself to him and use you to crush the ill dreams of the Gods and make them dream unnatural glory for his Empire. I know it.

  Nazrin had insisted he would not. He would not steal her like he had other Amrithi with her gift. She would hide her power. She would be clever and canny and quiet. She would not show her face in villages too closely allied with Ambhan officials in search for her kind. She would survive. She told her mother so, but her mother only shook her head and wept all the more.

  The monster will destroy you, one way or another.

  Nazrin knelt upon the sand, weeping. Remembering her mother. Her nose was clogged. She could not move her arm to wipe it. She needed her left arm to hold herself up from the ground. She needed her right to hold her blade, which was at her own throat. Closer, and she would cut herself; farther away, and one of the figures surrounding her would take it from her, and then she would be lost.

  “Woman,” said the mystic. His face was wrapped in blue cloth. His eyes were terrible, compassionate and unyielding. “The power in you belongs to the Empire and our Maha. Lower your blade.”

  Nazrin thought of her children. She was grateful beyond measure that neither of them possessed the amata. She had taken them into a dreamfire storm, watched, heart in her throat, for any sign they shared her burden. There had been nothing. Although they would face the same dangers all Amrithi did, the same persecution, they would never kneel, as she did. They would never be forced to make the inevitable choice: slavery, or death by their own blades.

  I am Amrithi, she reminded herself. Amrithi, and my freedom is my right. And yet her heart quailed; she wished for something—someone, anyone—to save her.

  But there was no one, and as the mystic drew toward her, she drew the blade firmly across her own throat.

  Flicker. Ash, sweet as wine.

  Arwa was not Nazrin anymore.

  She felt new ash unfurl beneath her skin.

  His name was Ushan.

  His mother had lain with a daiva in the heart of a dreamfire storm, and Ushan had been the result. He’d been born more or less human. His mother had told him so. She had counted all his fingers at his birth; peeled back his lips to see the unformed gums, the tongue, the wailing cry of mortal lungs. And yet he dreamed strange dreams, and sometimes his shadow changed, transforming into inhuman shapes: a bird, a snake, a panther; a thing hooded, a thing naked and all bones.

  He met his daiva parent once. Tall, they had been so tall, with hair like a dark flame and eyes of gold; lush mouth and bones like blades. Ushan had offered his parent blood, and they had tasted it, and wrapped him up in a shroud of shadow, lifting him with great wings carved from shadow. This, Ushan had recognized as love.

  The memory slipped away.

  Arwa. She was Arwa. For a moment.

  Then the storm descended once more.

  A knife lay in a man named Tahir’s hand. He held it to his throat, trembling, biting his tongue. He thought of his little girl; his girl who would be Tara and lead her clan. At least she was not here. At least she would not have to know what had become of him.

  Then Arwa was Ushan again. Stretching his arms wide. Bitter fury bubbling in his blood. Body changing. Grief stretching its wings within him.

  His arms were feathered and sharp. Her arms were feathered and sharp. Her mouth opened.

  His mouth—

  “Girl,” he said. His voice rumbled out of him. “Return to your flesh, before it’s too late.”

  She felt something grip her arm. Fingers strong, firm. Something dragging her back, back—

  She heard screaming. Her throat hurt. It took her a moment to realize she was the one crying out, that Zahir was holding her and whispering her name, firm against her hair, as he held her pinned.

  “Arwa, Lady Arwa, Arwa, please, speak to me. Speak to me. Can you hear me?”

  Arwa. She was Arwa. She was not Ushan, daiva-blooded. She was not Nazrin. Not Tahir. She was not an Amrithi with a knife to their own throat. She scrabbled wildly, gasping for words, until finally he understood and released her
.

  “Do you know yourself?” he asked. “Are you well? Are you safe?”

  “Yes,” she forced out. “I know who I am.” No, no, no.

  “You let go of our shared roots,” he said. “You consumed ash. You could have—anything could have happened to you, Arwa.” Through her own screaming trauma, she realized he was honestly shaken. His face was gray with fear. “You saw how I nearly forgot myself, when I consumed my grandmother’s ash, and that I did with you bound to me, to ground me. You could have lost yourself. Arwa, you should not have done it. What possessed you to risk your soul and mine?”

  But his words were distant. A buzz in her ears.

  She could still feel the blade at an Amrithi throat.

  When she remained silent, he swore to himself. Then he shook his head, and stood.

  “I’ll get you some water,” he said.

  She rose to her feet.

  “I need to go,” she told him.

  He reached for her once more. She shook him off, and walked up the steps of the enclosure, unveiled. The air pinched her skin.

  “Lady Arwa,” he called, his voice all mingled rage and worry.

  “Don’t follow me,” she said. “Please, my lord.”

  She left despite his protests. Walked for a while, then kneeled down among the plants and retched and wept, blocking her own voice out with a hand between her teeth.

  Amrithi. Dead Amrithi. Ah, Gods.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Her sister. Her sister.

  It was as if the loss of Mehr were a book, a great tome, like the ones in Zahir’s library. But half the pages had been ripped out brutally, pointedly. The rest were in a state of ruin: water-damaged, mold creeping up their edges, the words smudged to indecipherability. Arwa could only read a sentence here or there, piecing together a patchwork grief.

  She knew Mehr had revealed her Amrithi-ness. She knew the Maha’s mystics had taken Mehr. She knew Mehr had died.

  Now here she was, the damaged fragments of a dozen other tales strewn in her lap. Tales of persecution and death; tales of Amrithi with a gift called amata, a gift that allowed them to control the dreams of the Gods, stolen by the Maha for their power. Stolen by the Maha, in order to shape the Empire’s glory.