Realm of Ash

by Tasha Suri

  Send him away, she’d said instead. He has betrayed your trust, husband, and betrayed his duty. A beat. Fear a sudden flutter in her throat. That is, if you so will it…

  And Kamran…

  Kamran had looked at her as if he did not know her, looked at her with fresh, uncomprehending eyes.

  My wife is wise, he’d said eventually—always so achingly formal, this man who shared her soul, whose marriage seal she wore around her throat. I will see him gone.

  And he had. He had.

  “Maha save us,” she whispered.

  “Aunt Madhu doesn’t extend an invitation to join us to just anyone,” Diya said then, sudden and sharp. “We have a good arrangement here. We’re safe, we have enough food and coin, we can protect each other. You may be usefully young and pretty, sister Arwa, but our aunt also worries for your safety as a woman, with things as they are now. Think on her offer, will you? If the soldiers decide to make things difficult, if their captain…” Diya huffed out a breath, nostrils flaring. “Well. At least they pity us widows. They will not pity all the pilgrims, or all other women who carry out their business along the road. Think on it.”

  Diya grabbed the frayed grave-token. Held it out to Arwa as if it were a weapon, precious and fierce.

  “For luck,” she said. “Take it with you when you go back to your kin. We’ll be waiting for you.”

  Arwa took it. Clutched it tight. Felt the crumbling dirt on her hands.

  “Thank you, Diya,” she said. “I will.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The itch of fear at the back of her skull. The tension in her chest, a band steadily pressing the air from her lungs. These were signs and omens, of a kind. She should have recognized them. She should have known.

  She had felt this before, in Darez Fort, on the day of the massacre. Felt it as she’d touched her fingers to the window lattice and watched the soldier throw back his prisoner’s hood.

  Fear. Unnatural fear.

  It can’t be happening again. It just can’t.

  There were differences. She looked at them for comfort. In Darez Fort it had risen with awful swiftness. Here, in the caravanserai it moved slowly, building within her. Within all of them.

  She thought back to Eshara’s fear that the crowds upon the pilgrimage route were dangerous—the keen edge of her fear, too sharp by far. She thought of the way they had all stumbled and trembled, huddled together like children, after finding the bodies of the dead. She understood now: There had been a ghost of unnatural madness, crouched in the dust of the pilgrimage route. There had been one among the trees. There was one here now too.

  The madness was an invasive crop, a blight that had taken root and spread across the Empire. Darez Fort—and the sheer, bloody scale of its savagery—had only been the start. The death Zahir had predicted, the price of the Maha’s ill magic, was now suffused in the Empire’s soil, and here in the Grand Caravanserai it was near full bloom.

  When it flowered, they would all die.

  The knowledge filled her with a feeling of suffocation. Screaming babies. Wide-eyed children. Groups of men hunched together, and women curled against walls, already staring at nothing. Market stalls with cooking fires and sharp knives and vats of hot oil. Pilgrims with daggers and bows and scimitars at their hips. Sharp fingers for gouging. Teeth for biting. Bodies, vulnerable and vicious by turns. Their lodging was full of the presence of people. As Arwa passed through the curtains, she felt as if she were slipping between a dozen shrouds, waiting to be laid.

  The fear in the Grand Caravanserai was like rainfall on bitter earth, seeping into the soil, rising out of it so insidiously that a person would only realize too late that a flood had come, and they were caught within it. No escape.

  There were so many people here, and so many weapons they could turn on one another.

  Part of her—the part that had splintered from her the night of the Emperor’s death and remained still in the realm of ash—had known the curse was here. She’d fallen into the realm. Half dreamed, half walked. She’d seen that familiar face of bones. The realm had warned her.

  Diya had felt the fear too. Eshara had trembled, unwilling to be alone. Someone had died beyond the caravanserai’s walls, left to rot. All these were entangled together, a great skein of terror.

  They needed to get out, no matter what it took.

  “Talking to the soldiers,” Zahir said flatly. They were sitting across from one another, face-to-face in their makeshift room, and his displeasure was impossible to miss. “That’s what you’ve decided is best?”

  “What else can we do?”

  “I understand taking risks. Reasonable, measured, calculated risks. This is not one of them, and you know it. What do you think you’ll accomplish?”

  “The widow told me who to speak to,” Arwa said determinedly. “I’ll find the two soldiers she suggested—I’ll plead with them, convince them. I have to try.”

  “Don’t you think your widow friend would have spoken to them herself, if she thought they could help her escape?” Zahir asked.

  “Perhaps Arwa does stand a chance,” Eshara interjected.

  She was sitting with her back to the curtain, slowly sharpening the edge of her scimitar. The hiss of steel on stone cut through the air. She had begun sharpening the blade the very minute Arwa had warned her of what the widow had said about the captain, as if a blade would be anything but a detriment, as if the hiss of metal didn’t sharpen the edge of leashed violence in the air to a terrible point. “Their ilk listen to well-bred women, sometimes. Something about treasuring them.” She shrugged. “She’s a noble and pretty. She might be able to sway them.”

  “Or their captain may cut off her head and place it on a stake outside the caravanserai’s walls,” said Zahir. His eyes were keen blades, his voice equally sharp. Everything was sharp now. Even the thud of Arwa’s own heart in her chest. Even the breath in her lungs. “Isn’t that what your widow friend said he does to heretics?”

  “He may also cut out my tongue,” said Arwa. “You forgot that.”

  Zahir swore an oath.

  “Arwa, you’re cleverer than this.”

  “And what do you think we should do instead?” she threw back. “This captain cannot be bribed, and we have little coin left anyway. We can wait here until we’re freed—but when will that be? Will we be freed at all?” Arwa threw her hands wide, all feeling. “There are no clever options available to us. There’s only this.”

  “There’s no reason it has to be you,” Zahir said. “I could speak to them.”

  “You’re mildly less pretty,” Eshara said, squinting down at her blade. Zahir gave her an irritated look and Eshara added, “And I’ve never cajoled anyone. It isn’t my nature.”

  “We can go together, then,” Zahir said. “All three of us, if need be. Arwa. Please. See reason.”

  She shook her head wordlessly, and Zahir leaned forward, clear light blazing in his eyes.

  “You can’t truly think they’re going to let us go,” he said. “You can’t. Please. Be honest with me?”

  It was hard to be barbed or secretive in the face of that naked want—that hunger for knowledge and truth that blazed in him always, like a great light.

  She looked away.

  “No,” Arwa admitted. “But I…”

  Truth. Give them truth.

  What else could she do, after all?

  “I had a dream,” she said.

  “Oh, a dream,” Eshara said flatly. “Wonderful.”

  “You don’t understand. The realm of ash, I…” She curled her hands, tight, tighter. “I have entered it. In my dreams. And sometimes—when I’m awake. When we fell from the dovecote tower, it wasn’t my ash that made me forget myself, alone. Reaching for the ash made me fall into the realm.”

  Silence. Then Zahir’s voice, tightly controlled:

  “You should use ritual to enter the realm of ash. Opium. Blood.”

  “I can’t entirely control it,” admitted
Arwa.

  “You told me you were well, in Jah Ambha. And I…” He exhaled. Squeezed his eyes shut. “I should have questioned you more. I shouldn’t have trusted you.”

  Arwa wanted to recoil, at those words. Something dark squirmed at the back of her skull.

  “Because of my ability to slip into the realm,” she said slowly, forcing herself to go on, “I think I was able to feel the danger here, in a way I could not if I walked only in one world. I saw something that I’ve seen before, at Darez Fort. Something that filled me with unnatural fear then and fills us all with it now. A nightmare, Zahir. I saw a nightmare. And I am more afraid of it than any soldier. Because… because I know what it can make a soldier do.”

  “I should have known,” he said to himself. “I should have guessed.”

  “Are you listening to me at all? Eshara—”

  “Don’t involve me,” Eshara said. She wasn’t sharpening her scimitar anymore, but she was staring down at it with great single-minded intensity, as if the sight of the blade could keep the fear at bay.

  “Zahir, then,” said Arwa, turning her attention back to him. “There is no soldier in the Empire who doesn’t fear being at the heart of the next Darez Fort. Perhaps if I warn the soldiers, they will release us, before the nightmare can consume us all.” Even to her own ears, it sounded like a weak possibility. “We can hope.”

  “You and your foolish hopes,” he said.

  “They haven’t failed us yet,” she replied.

  “What a fine time for them to do so, then,” he said grimly.

  “I need to see if the nightmare is in their eyes,” she said, pressing onward. “I need to see it, because I will recognize it. I know the nightmare in all its forms. It haunts me. And I hope—my truest, strongest hope—that if I stare the nightmare in the face, the ash will show me a way to dispel it. And if it does not, and if the soldiers do not let us run for our lives… well.” She swallowed. “We’re all going to die anyway.”

  He leaned forward. Touched the ground before her hand, as if he wanted to grasp her but wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

  “Don’t do this,” he said. “Stay here. Think. If the answer lies in the realm of ash, then Eshara and I are well placed to help. We can study, we can enter the realm more safely, together—”

  “How long until the captain takes another head, kills another heretic?” snapped Arwa. “How long until the nightmares make us turn on one another in a blood frenzy?” Neither of them looked at Eshara, though it was a near thing. “And where will we perform a ritual, in this place? I won’t live through a Darez Fort again, Zahir. I won’t. I can’t.”

  She was the one who breached the gap between them, who grasped his wrist, holding him fast. She felt the beat of his pulse against her fingers and saw something in his face—something strange and raw and lost.

  “Arwa,” he said.

  “I saved our lives, Zahir. And all we had then was foolish hope. I think…” An exhalation. “There is more in me than either of us knows. There is more in me than me. My ancestor’s ash may give me the answer to save this place. It may not. But when the nightmare came to Darez Fort, I hid and wept as my husband and his men died. Now the nightmare is here, now I know what it is and what it can do, now I have a second chance to be strong, how can I not try to save us?”

  “She’s already speaking like a thing cursed by fear,” muttered Eshara.

  “This isn’t right,” Zahir said. “You can’t do this.”

  “I will. I can.”

  “It places you in terrible danger, you know that.”

  “We’re already in terrible danger. Just this once—”

  “The risks, Arwa—”

  “We have a mission, Zahir. And the safety of these people—”

  “It is not your responsibility to die as your husband died,” he said sharply. “You lived through Darez Fort once, you owe no one anything—”

  “Don’t you care?” she asked, knowing even as she spoke that her words were unfair, untrue. “Do you truly want the nightmare to take us, without hope, without a fight?” She swallowed. Tried to soften her voice, feeling the trembling heat of his hand in her own. “I am sorry, Zahir. But if you’re afraid, I—”

  “I am afraid for you!” His voice was vicious. His pulse burned beneath her hand. “If anything happens to you here and I live, I will read every book, every tome, I will trick death itself to bring you back. I will become something terrible, not for your sake, but mine, because I cannot live in a world without you in it.”

  “You don’t feel so much for me,” she whispered.

  He blinked. Blinked again. It was as if clouds parted upon his face.

  “No. I don’t. I.” He shook his head. “Something is wrong.”

  He pulled away from her grip. He touched his fingers to the back of his neck. Shaken.

  “Fear,” he said. “This is my fear. And yet it isn’t. We are—none of us—acting like ourselves.”

  Eshara had lowered her blade to the ground. Her face was gray. Distantly, Arwa could hear someone weeping.

  “No,” Arwa agreed. “We’re not. You called me your partner, Zahir. Do you remember?”

  “I do.”

  “Then trust me,” she said softly. “Allow me to take a risk. At the very least, accept that I have the right to risk my life on my own terms, when death waits for us here, no matter what we do. Let me have that.”

  Zahir closed his eyes. Opened them.

  “Arwa. I can’t even think.”

  “I know. I’m sorry for it, Zahir.”

  “For what it’s worth, two women will be considered less threat than even one man,” said Eshara. “I’ll go with her.”

  “You’ll have to leave your blade behind,” said Zahir.

  “Ah.” Eshara looked down. “I’ll still go with her.”

  “Fine,” said Zahir. “But if you don’t return I will follow you both. I hope you understand that.”

  “Zahir.”

  “I have a right to risk my own life.”

  “It isn’t fair to throw my own words back at me.”

  “Ah. Well.” He smiled tightly. There was still fear in his eyes, still something tight and dark and blood bitter. “When is life fair?”

  Eshara and Arwa left their lodgings. They stepped into the light, into air that swarmed with fear and heat, that lay heavy on Arwa’s shoulders, and held her fast.

  Eshara rolled her shoulders. Cracked her neck, and gave Arwa a level look.

  “Well,” she said. “Let’s go to die.”

  Together, they crossed the courtyard. The soldiers were encamped, largely, near the main gate. They’d commandeered some of the largest buildings and stalls, which had been stripped of their signs and wares. Despite the dangers—the man who had been struck down for confronting the guards, and the palmful of fools who had followed his example—there were people begging for escape. Many women, a number clutching small children, begging for mercy. Arwa’s heart twisted at the sight of them.

  “I’m looking for someone in particular,” she murmured, searching the guards for the man Diya had described to her. “Do you see a soldier—bald, tall?”

  “They’re wearing helms.”

  “Not all of them,” said Arwa. “And… ah. There.”

  Two soldiers were standing in the shade before an elegant storefront. They weren’t mobbed—the shade provided them cover, and their lack of helmets and lighter clothing made them resemble the pilgrims more closely than their fellow soldiers. Arwa, at least, recognized their clothing and knew their bare heads were a sign of their status. They were still green recruits, perhaps no more than a palmful of years in service, barely full-grown men with thin limbs and awkward faces that weren’t quite yet honed by time. One was bald, the other round-faced and softer looking for it.

  She approached them, Eshara at her side. Stopped and waited, head lowered deferentially but eyes still fixed on them both, as they straightened up at the sight of her.

  “I am so
rry to disturb you, my lords,” she said. “But I am looking for Sohal.”

  The bald one shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Uneasy.

  “That’s me,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “A friend gave me your name,” said Arwa. “I was hoping for your help.”

  Sohal and his friend exchanged a look.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Sohal said finally. “Go on now.”

  “Lords,” Arwa murmured, tilting her head down demurely, drawing her veil carefully over her face, without concealing the short cut of her hair. “I was told that you’re… not unkind.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the round-faced one, voice very soft, as if he were afraid of being overheard. “You—the other widows. We can’t help you. We have our orders. Our captain has been very clear. No one may leave.”

  “He’s not—he. Wouldn’t respond well. If we were to help.” The bald one—Sohal’s—gaze flickered to the crowd of pleading people, then back to Arwa once more.

  Arwa heard Eshara exhale, felt Eshara’s hand touch her arm.

  “As you say, my lords,” said Eshara. “We’ll go.”

  But of course, they couldn’t go. Not yet.

  Arwa raised her head and looked at them properly, tracing their faces with her eyes.

  There was no evil living in them, not that she could see. Nothing unnatural rooted inside them, nothing like what had haunted Darez Fort. Their eyes were clear, their faces burnished by the sun; Sohal’s nose was faintly peeling. They were just boys. No more.

  But the nightmare was here.

  There was a trick to this: to being soft enough to arouse sympathy, sweet enough to reel them in. But Arwa used none of it, only stared at them, demureness forgotten, and said, “Darez Fort.”

  Eshara hissed through gritted teeth.

  The men stared at her with wide eyes. She’d spoken the name of a tragedy and pinned them with it. Good.

  “My lords, in Darez Fort a commander serving the Governor of Chand and all his men and all their servants perished. Behind barred doors a curse consumed them, and they died, to the last man.” A slow inhalation. The two men waited, silent before her. “Some say the Empire is cursed. That our crops die and our people sicken. But in Darez Fort, the curse wore a face. It made them murder one another. Every one.”