A Desert Torn Asunder

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  “We don’t need to do this today,” Amaryllis said.

  Meryam shook her head. “To wait another day would be to tempt the fates, and those old hags probably think they’ve allowed us too much time already.”

  She headed down the pier with Amaryllis following. The ship’s captain, Yosef, stood at the gunwales. He had the bronzed skin of a Malasani. His baggy trousers, tall red fez, and bejeweled vest, which appeared to be waging a valiant but losing war against his ample potbelly, gave him a look that bordered on the foolish. But everyone Amaryllis had spoken to said it was an act, a way to put one off-guard. All said he was as shrewd as any captain in the western harbor, a place famous for chewing up and spitting out the unwary.

  Yosef waved her aboard with a grin. “Tulathan shines on our meeting.”

  “Yes”—Meryam did her best to ignore the way he was staring at her ivory eyes, a byproduct of her magic having been burned away—“we’ll see about that.”

  The crew traded nervous glances as Yosef led Meryam down the nearby ladder and into the ship’s bowels. As strange as the ship looked from the outside, it was even stranger within. Hundreds of oddities hung from rusty hooks along the passageway. There were bloodstained carvings of animals in tortured poses, tufts of hair with bits of skin still attached, strings of what looked to be fingernails, and rag dolls whose eyes had been eerily painted in kohl.

  Disturbing as they were, seeing them was a relief. When she’d learned about the man who’d once owned this sloop, and the sort of scryings he’d once performed, she’d thought surely whoever had taken ownership after his death would have taken everything down. That Yosef hadn’t gave her hope that he would have more of the soothsayer, Adzin’s things, things she desperately needed.

  “You’re the cousin of the previous owner, are you not?” Meryam asked as they entered a cabin with a low table and large, overstuffed pillows around it.

  Yosef’s wide smile revealed yellow, tabbaq-stained teeth. “You’ve heard of his miracles, then.”

  Meryam waggled her head. “Recently, yes.”

  Yosef waved his hands broadly. “You’re interested in the ship, then!”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  His smile faltered. “What, then?”

  “I’m interested in Adzin’s maps, his writings.”

  Yosef was the sort of horse trader who treated people nicely until he knew he no longer had a sale, at which point they meant less to him than a pile of mule dung. Meryam could tell he was already precariously close to dismissing her. “I’m not selling maps,” he said, “nor writings. I’m selling a ship.”

  “I have no use for a ship. What I want are Adzin’s notes on his forays into the desert.”

  The collapse of Yosef’s smile was like a wall succumbing to a battering ram. Giving up the pretense of pleasantries altogether, he licked his teeth. “I have no such things.”

  “Are we speaking about the same man? Your cousin was Adzin the soothsayer, was he not?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “What do you know about his trips to the desert?”

  Yosef looked more confused. “As much as anyone.”

  “Then you’ll know that on occasion he visited peculiar places. Places filled with ancient power.”

  A hint of a smile returned. “Yes, which is precisely why this ship is so valuable.”

  “He would have had maps that marked those locations. He would have notes about the sort of power conferred by each.”

  “There are several maps and a ship’s log, all of which you can have if—”

  “Fetch them.”

  Yosef’s face turned hard, giving him an ugly, bulldog look. “They aren’t for sale.”

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when Amaryllis sent a golden rahl flying through the air. It landed on the table with a sound that, for a man like Yosef, would speak of fragrant tabbaq and the rarest of liquors. The rahl circled noisily for a moment, then fell with a clatter.

  Yosef stared at the coin. His eyes lifted, judging both Meryam and Amaryllis anew, then he scooped up the coin, stood, and left the cabin. He returned shortly with four maps and an old, leatherbound log. Meryam looked through all of them, but they were run-of-the-mill documents. The maps showed no signs of special markings, the routes Adzin might have traveled out to the desert, nor did the log show anything out of the ordinary, only trips to and from various caravanserais and notes of mundane cargo bought and sold.

  Meryam realized her fingers were shaking. “There must be more.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Did Adzin ever mention the Hollow?”

  Yosef shook his head. “Should he have?”

  The very name, the Hollow, was known to only a few. No one Meryam had spoken to, nor any of the many ancient texts she’d read, had been able to give her its exact location. She’d hoped that Adzin’s notes would hold the answers she sought.

  Meryam turned toward Amaryllis. “Give us a moment, won’t you?”

  Amaryllis nodded and left, sliding the cabin door shut behind her.

  When her footsteps had faded, Meryam regarded Yosef with a cool expression. “I understand what Adzin did. He could peer into the future.” She waved to the doorway, beyond which lay the passageway with the grisly oddments hanging from hooks. “For the right price, he used all manner of techniques and tokens to separate the threads of fate, then helped his patrons choose one. I understand that he may have had discerning clients who wouldn’t have wanted their fates revealed. I assure you, I’m not interested in any of that. What I want is knowledge about his techniques, the resources he used here in Sharakhai and in the desert.”

  Meryam had heard of Adzin only by chance. After escaping from Ramahd in Mazandir, the goddess Tulathan had come to Meryam and offered her a way to rule the desert alone. She’d given Meryam only two things to help: the body of the fallen god, Goezhen, and the name of an elder god, Ashael.

  Much of what Meryam had since learned about Ashael terrified her. He’d been abandoned by Iri, Annam, Raamajit, and the other elder gods when they’d left this world for the next, which naturally made one wonder: Why had Ashael been left behind? Her research made the answer clear. Every text spoke of terror, of destruction, of a god who reviled the creations of others. If that was true, why wouldn’t the gods leave him behind? Who would want such a cancer despoiling the new world they were about to create?

  Meryam knew she was playing with fire, but the knowledge she’d gained gave her hope she could have everything Tulathan had promised. Goezhen was part of the puzzle—Tulathan meant for her to use his body in some way, perhaps as an offering, to control Ashael—but she needed to find him first.

  She’d searched through hundreds of texts Amaryllis had procured for her using their quickly dwindling fortune. Adzin had been mentioned in an obscure text written by an amateur soothsayer, a woman who’d heard of Adzin’s fame and had managed to apprentice herself to him. She’d had eager eyes at first, a lust for hidden knowledge, but everything had changed after a voyage she and Adzin took to a place of raw, malevolent power.

  It’s a place that feeds many of Adzin’s wondrous abilities, she’d written. A depthless pit in the desert where many demons dwell.

  Meryam had thought little of it at first, until she’d read one of the woman’s final entries.

  I asked Adzin of the pit today, after plying him with the best araq my meager silver could buy. I had hoped to learn how to control the creatures that come from it, as he does. In a drunken slur he admitted that it isn’t necessary to control the creatures. It’s necessary to control their master.

  And who is their master? I asked.

  Ashael, said he.

  A chill ran through me at the very name. I’ve learned enough about Ashael to know one does not toy with elder gods. One leaves them where they lie, sleeping.

  She
’d abandoned her apprenticeship the next morning, making excuses that her father was sick, that she needed a job with better pay. When Adzin had offered her more, she’d declined and had never spoken to him again.

  In the cabin of The Gray Gull, Yosef waved vaguely to the ship again, this time with much less enthusiasm. “I daresay with a ship like this, a smart woman like you could suss out Adzin’s methods given time.”

  “Let me make myself perfectly clear. I don’t want the ingredients. I want the recipe.”

  “You’re asking me for something I don’t have.”

  “Let me search the ship then,” Meryam said, hating the pleading sound in her voice. “I’ll make it worth your while to let me have a look about.”

  “So you can take what you want while no one watches?”

  “Watch me if you wish. I only need access to the ship for a day or two.”

  Yosef stood, a dour look on his face. “This meeting is over.”

  “No, please.”

  But Meryam could tell she was losing the battle. She was trying to find the right words to convince Yosef to help her when Amaryllis called from the passageway.

  “My lady?”

  Meryam opened the door to find Amaryllis holding one of the oddities from the wall, a raven’s skull. “Look,” she said, holding it out to Meryam.

  Meryam accepted it, but could find nothing strange about it.

  “Look through the eye.”

  Meryam did, and saw at last what Amaryllis had spotted. Within the skull, in the smallest script Meryam had ever seen, words were written. It was a note, penned, no doubt, by Adzin himself. Only when Tulathan is in her first quarter, Rhia in her third, can one find the path to solace in the desert.

  Her curiosity piqued, Meryam took up a painted carving of a doe, slain by an arrow. No message was apparent until Meryam held it up against the light filtering down from the hatchway above. There were small cuts in the red paint, made by a scalpel, perhaps, all over the doe’s skin. More words, Meryam realized.

  When the summer doldrums are strongest, go to the plain of glittering stone. There can the efrit be found, dancing beneath the stars. Promise them fresh silver and they will reach to the heavens. Diamonds will they place in your palms before they vanish in a glimmer of stardust.

  The grisly oddments, Meryam realized. Those were his journal. Those were his notes. Find the right ones and she would have Ashael’s location. Find the right ones and the desert would be hers.

  When she turned toward Yosef, she discovered the fear that had been so oppressive only moments ago had vanished. She was filled with purpose now. She’d found the head of the path that would lead her to everything she’d ever wanted.

  “How much for the ship?” she asked.

  Chapter 5

  In the desert, two leagues east of Sharakhai, the blood mage Davud rode a tall akhala mare with a glimmering pewter coat. Beside him, Esmeray, a one-time blood mage whose abilities had been burned from her, rode a brass gelding with pearlescent white patches. Both horses had bulging leather bags laid across their rumps.

  Davud unslung a water skin from around the horn of his saddle. The cork squeaked as he pulled it free. He tipped the skin back and took a long pull of warm water. When he was done, he passed the skin to Esmeray, who accepted it with hardly a glance at him and drank.

  The path they took skirted a grove of adichara trees, one of hundreds that made up the blooming fields encircling Sharakhai. For four hundred years, the blooming fields had stood as a testament to the power of the Sharakhani Kings. The mere mention of the fields struck fear and wonder into every man, woman, and child in Sharakhai. They’d once been lush with life. No longer. Now the trees were ashy white, their branches devoid of both leaves and moon-fed blossoms. It made the grove look like a vast pile of bones.

  Esmeray downed one last swig from the water skin, then handed it back. Her long hair was done up in braids. A purple head scarf wrangled them into an unruly mop atop her head. The tattoos adorning her cheeks and forehead gave her a wild look. It was partly why Davud was so attracted to her. She was everything he wasn’t: bold, decisive, someone who fought ferociously for everything she believed in.

  Like the trees, Esmeray’s eyes were bone white. They had been since the Enclave burned away her magic. Though she’d come to accept the loss, there were times when it was clear it was weighing on her. Lately, it was during these forays, when Davud was casting spells all day long.

  The sun shone off her trove of bracelets as she pointed to a grove a quarter-league ahead. “There.”

  Davud spotted it a moment later, a hint of green among the white, a lone tree still clinging to life. He kicked his horse into a trot. “Let’s hurry. Willem gave me several new drafts of our proposal. I need to read them tonight.”

  Esmeray took the statement in her stride, but the very fact that she was ignoring it made it clear how opposed she was to the project Davud had begun with Willem, the brilliant young man from the Collegia who for years had been enslaved to the blood mage, Nebahat.

  “You still think it’s a pipe dream?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “No King or Queen of Sharakhai, be they elder, son, or daughter, is going to cede power willingly.”

  “In the end, you may be proven right”—he jutted his chin to shimmering light along the horizon, the vault that hung over the House of Kings in Sharakhai—“but I have to try. We have to be ready when the gateway is finally closed.”

  She stared at him with an expression that might, just might, have contained a glimmer of hope. The look vanished as she kicked her horse into a gallop. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  Davud hid a smile as he snapped his akhala’s reins. Esmeray was like a force of nature—mercurial and stormy one minute, calm and caring the next. She might be short with him from time to time, but it came from a place of love. She was a grounding force for him, a woman unafraid to tell him when he’d erred, a thing he admitted needing more of since becoming a blood mage. By the same token, when the time came to celebrate his victories, she was more vocal than anyone.

  “You two are like the golem and the efrit,” Frail Lemi had once told Davud.

  It was a reference to the old children’s tale, and Davud couldn’t deny it. In many ways he and Esmeray were opposites, but that was precisely why he’d fallen in love with her.

  He urged his horse to catch up, and soon they reached the grove and slipped down from their saddles. From the saddlebags, Davud retrieved a different sort of water skin—unlike the one he and Esmeray had drunk from earlier, this one was filled with blood.

  Slinging the skin over one shoulder, they headed into the grove. The passage they took wound like an errant stream. Around them, the trees wavered in the wind. The sharp thorns along the branches clicked and clacked, the sound like a rain of pebbles. They arrived at a clearing, at the far end of which stood the lone survivor: an adichara with green leaves and branches that swayed with an animus the breeze couldn’t fully account for.

  The death of the adicharas was yet another byproduct of the sweeping ritual that had ended with the shattering of the crystal. While alive, the adicharas had fed the crystal with their essence—an essence distilled from the blood of the tributes culled from Sharakhai by the asirim. The process had fed the crystal for centuries. At some point the trees had begun to die, a process hastened by Queen Meryam’s ritual in the cavern beneath the Sun Palace—a ritual that had seen hundreds with blood of the thirteenth tribe running through their veins giving themselves to the twisted trees. The ritual had caused the crystal itself to shatter, which had, for whatever reason, led to the deaths of nearly all of the adichara.

  Only a bare few had been saved by the asirim. Those very same asirim now safeguarded the remaining trees, feeding them, supporting them lest they perish and the gateway beneath the city be opened wide.

  As they nea
red the tree, Davud pulled the stopper from the skin and upended it near the adichara’s base. The blood pooled on the dusty earth, mirrorlike, and began seeping into the arid ground.

  The blood had been donated by many—those Davud, Esmeray, and Meiying had rallied to their cause. The grisly enterprise, meant to brace the adichara that still lived, had been taken up by the Enclave at Davud’s bidding. It seemed to be working. The asirim had all said it seemed easier for them to sustain the trees, and the knowledge that the blood had been given willingly buoyed their spirits.

  It was a vast relief to Davud. Were the trees to die, the glittering vault that hung over the city would, presumably, expand farther. It would swallow all of Sharakhai, and who knew what would happen then?

  When at last the fields do wither,

  When the stricken fade;

  The gods shall pass beyond the veil,

  And land shall be remade.

  That was the final verse of the poem, as recited by the gods themselves on the night of Beht Ihman four centuries earlier. The gods shall pass beyond the veil. That had been their plan all along. The verse as a whole had been a monumental discovery, but it was the last line in particular that sent chills along Davud’s spine. Land shall be remade. When coupled with the visions of Sharakhai’s destruction that King Yusam had seen, it struck fear in his heart. The gods had to be stopped.

  “Sand and stone,” Esmeray breathed.

  Lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed her scraping at the adichara’s bark. Some of it had fallen away to reveal a dark splotch beneath. Now that he’d seen it, he saw other places where the bark, normally a mottled brown, was darker. Like a melon going bad from within, the tree would soon blacken entirely. Its leaves would fall off. The bark would turn gray and finally an ashy white. It was dying, which implied that the asir that had been lending it strength was dying as well.