Pale Queen's Courtyard

by Marcin Wrona

  Chapter 15: Wall, Wall, Wall

  Ilasin was cold. She was cold, and something was creaking. Her eyes opened slowly, laboriously, and then she winced as the dull and distant memory of pain grew clearer, until it was neither dull nor distant but a red, throbbing rawness at the base of her neck, pulsing in concert with a second ache in her jaw.

  I can’t see.

  Panic took her, and she felt her blood grow hot as it had so many times before. She felt the promise of ecstasy if she only let the power in her sing freely, and then the familiar guilt that gnawed at her, whispering of the consequences, and the lives – so many lives – that she had never intended to take.

  “She’s awake.” An unfamiliar woman’s voice, heavily accented and tinged with menace. Ilasin screamed, her guilt forgotten as she reclaimed the memory of last night’s terror. Her blood burst aflame, and coruscating waves of deadly fear leapt from her throat. A hand grasped at her throat and cut the scream short, and she felt the clench of long-nailed fingers digging into her skin. The outline of a head – she could see! – came into her field of view, inky blackness against what she realized was a naked night sky. The creaking that had awoken her was gone. She heard nothing but the distant call of a night bird.

  “You needn’t bother, child,” said the voice again. It came from whoever bent over her, tickling her cheek with hot breath that smelled of jasmine. “Your untutored sorceries cannot harm us. And neither do we wish to harm you.”

  The dark figure released her throat and disappeared, leaving behind a darkness that faded from black to grey as Ilasin’s eyes grew accustomed to the night. Whatever was beneath her lurched forward, and the creaking started again. Ilasin realized that she was lying atop a wagon of some kind, her arms and legs tied back.

  Where am I? Navid?

  He was not here. He could not be here, or she would not be bound. Ilasin struggled to make sense of what had happened. She remembered soldiers breaking through Uchu’s door, rough-looking men with spears. One of them had pointed at her, and then something hit her from behind. The last thing she could remember before everything went black was Awasha’s mouth beginning to open, concern and shock plain in her matronly features. And now… this? The cool night air brought the brackish scents of still water and rotting vegetation to her nose. The swamp?

  Ilasin lifted her head, grimacing through the pain, to look around her. She could see a few dark shapes, but only one of them wore what she thought, in that darkness, to be a guardman’s bronze panoply. The others were too slender. Nowhere could she see the silhouettes of spear or shield, but the dim outline of a thicket of reeds at least confirmed her whereabouts.

  This is bad. Alu-nin-hura, the ruined city within the Flooded Land. It had belonged to Nin, once. Her father had always told her that the Crescent hid here, among worse things still.

  Ilasin tested her strength against bonds that held her, trying in vain to pull her hands through the rough loop of rope that held them. She succeeded only in drawing her manacles tighter and rubbing her wrists raw. Defeated, she tried instead to puzzle out what exactly had transpired. Uchu’s house. A blow from behind. The whites of her aunt’s eyes, widened by shock. Betrayal. She had been betrayed.

  Oh, uncle. How could you?

  There had been screams. She had flitted briefly back into consciousness when they began, and then a yelp of pain echoed somewhere above her. Then she had fallen chin-first to the flagstones. She remembered a blaze of pain, then hands grasping at her, and the image, burned now into her mind, of a sweet-smelling vial. Awasha’s eyes. A little bottle. Blackness had followed both.

  Her eyes had now grown accustomed to the night, and she shifted painfully in the wagon to get a better view of her captors. Even in the darkness, she could see that her prior observation was right. These people, whoever they might be, were no soldiers. She’d been taken by men with spears, grim and broad, and now fate had delivered her into the hands of a motley band. Following the wagon was a tall man dressed in what looked to be the hooded robes of a desert nomad. Beside him walked another, stocky and small, with a sword conspicuously dangling from the rough-spun labourer’s kilt he wore. She could just barely make out the drooping folds of an old man’s face, hidden behind a busy hand.

  The taller man nudged the shorter. “Stop picking your nose, you oaf,” he said, each word ringing with the sing-song brightness of an accent she did not recognize. “What sort of example is that, eh?”

  “Go bugger yourself,” said the other without a whisper of friendliness.

  “And now cursing. Excellent.” The taller man shook his head and stepped closer to Ilasin’s wagon. “You’ll have to forgive my unpleasant companion. I am Renjiya, of far away. Do not be afraid, little one. We won’t harm you.”

  “Let me go,” Ilasin said, steeling herself for the all too predictable response.

  “That is not a request I can grant. But we are not your enemies. Did we not save you from the guardsmen that captured you? Surely, you are happier and safer with us.”

  “I don’t want to be with you. I want you to let me go, so I can go back to my… father. What do you want with me?”

  Renjiya nodded his head vigorously. “Of course, we will return you to your home. It is at your father’s behest that we helped you.”

  My father? Do they mean Navid, or…

  “If you really were sent by my father, what is his name?”

  “Oho,” said Renjiya with a chuckle, “a test of honesty, like Nithya posed to Ranish. You, my dear, are the daughter of High Priest Ananta. Yes?”

  My father? Was it possible? Would he really have sent people – and such people, foreigners and sorcerers and cutthroats – to assail his own allies in the streets? The very same father who would have watched her die at the hands of hard-eyed Merezadesh priests if Uchu had not smuggled her out of the temple?

  And then Uchu betrayed you. It was too much to believe, but what a pleasant fiction! Her father, with his gentle eyes and the long, oiled beard that she’d once loved to twist around her fingers...

  Don’t be stupid. Navid is your father now. He wasn’t, not really, but he had protected her and comforted her, and at such risk to himself. He could have left – had even wanted to leave – but instead he swore to protect her. She believed him... and missed him. Navid would have known exactly how to make sense of this tall outlander and his kind voice.

  My father. Maybe this Renjiya was telling the truth. Maybe he was not. Maybe it did not matter. Would she place her trust in the man who had given her the bitterest betrayal of her life, the man who had forsaken his own daughter? It was too late, much too late, to make amends now.

  She had to escape. But how? And to where?

  “Why am I bound?” Ilasin asked. “Can you not release me?”

  “We feared you would try to run away. This swamp is too dangerous, child, even for you. There are ghouls here, man-eaters. We wanted to be sure you would not try to leave before you knew we were friends.”

  “Ghouls?” she asked, rolling her eyes. She had heard of the creatures, of course: monsters, said to have been men once, that captured and devoured naughty children.

  Renjiya tossed a furtive glance over his shoulder and nodded, his brow knitting.

  “Yes. They have been following us for some time.” He made a gesture she did not recognize, and spat. Ilasin glanced at the shorter man, and saw unease in the thin line of his mouth.

  “Ghouls?” she asked again, somewhat less sure of herself. “Flesh-eating monsters from children’s stories that no sane man has ever seen? You believe in ghouls?”

  “Perhaps I am not a sane man, then,” he replied. “For I have seen them. We are near a place in the marsh where the reeds thin, and the mangroves grow more sparsely. Look behind us then, and you will see the truth for yourself.”

  Unease crept into Ilasin’s stomach, twisting it into a knot. Could it be true? “Why have they not attacked us, then?” she asked, glancing behind Renjiya and seeing nothin
g but the feathery silhouettes of weeping trees.

  “The sorceress. She wards us against their attack. But enough. This is not a subject for little girls to discuss. We are safe, and we will keep you safe also.”

  He stepped back and nudged the bald man who continued to trudge nameless behind her wagon. Renjiya mumbled something to Baldhead that she could not hear, and they began to converse. She listened intently, but they backed further away from the wagon, and spoke quietly enough that she could catch only a few words – ‘temple’ was one, ‘day’ another, but they were no more than fragments and images, divorced of meaning.

  Ghouls were... unexpected. This marsh had always carried an ill reputation, and many whispered of those who entered the swamp never again being seen, but she had always – since she grew old enough to roll her eyes at tales told to scare children, anyway – credited the ‘mysterious’ deaths to crocodiles, bandits, disease or any of the other hundred dangers that normally lurked in dark places such as this. Ghouls were not among those explanations, and yet here was a grown man who seemed convinced that monsters from the old legends dogged their steps.

  It’s a trick. He said it himself. He means to keep you from running away.

  But what if it wasn’t? Could ghouls really be more dangerous than what she had already faced? More dangerous than murderers and priests, crocodiles and soldiers? Perhaps not. Perhaps so. But if she protected herself, she risked giving away her position to the Hounds.

  And to Navid.

  “So will you untie me or not?” she asked.

  Renjiya whistled, and then called out in a language she did not understand. A woman – the same voice from last night – responded in the same unfamiliar tongue, her intonation questioning, and the tall foreigner replied. The woman spoke again, a single word.

  Renjiya turned back to Ilasin. “Your wish is my command,” he said brightly. Ilasin could feel rough hands tugging at the knots at her wrists, and then relief as the ropes fell away. “Better?” asked the tall man.

  Ilasin shook her hands, wincing at the wave of pinpricks that signaled her limbs waking from their pinioned slumber. “Better,” she said, smiling up at the man named Renjiya. He tousled her hair and smiled back, his eyes kind. But she would not be taken in. Not yet.

  Ilasin sank back into the wagon and stretched luxuriantly, then closed her eyes. The pain had not abated, not completely, but as she lost herself in thought, the ache grew more remote. The last images to flit through her mind before she drifted into a deep sleep were an empty golden pallet on which a god was said to sleep, and her father’s red, anger-twisted face.

  She awoke to a grey-green evening and the scents of rot and porridge.

  How did I sleep so long?

  “Get up, girl,” a female voice, one she had not yet heard. “The swamp is too wet here for your chariot to continue along with us. Eat something. We leave shortly.”

  Ilasin sat up and rubbed her eyes. The woman who had spoken thrust a bowl of thin gruel into her hands. She looked to be a local, with thick-lashed almond eyes set in a sandy brown face that may once have been pretty but was now jagged and weathered. A miasma of power hung in the air around her, neither so faint as to be imperceptible nor so strong as to be noticeable until she drew close. The sorceress.

  The woman watched critically as Ilasin scooped the porridge into her mouth with a rough-hewn wooden spoon, then smiled when she swallowed it and put a hand on Ilasin’s shoulder. The girl’s flesh crawled at her touch, but she fought down her revulsion in the hope that she would give nothing away. “There, eat, eat. It may be a long journey.”

  “Where are you taking me?” asked Ilasin. “I think it is time for me to know.”

  “Not far now. We are nearing the edges of the marsh. There, we will hand you over to some men sent by your father.”

  “Why did we go through the swamp at all? There must have been an easier way.”

  The woman chuckled without warmth. “Don’t you ask a lot of questions? Those were our orders, and a fat purse of coin means we follow them. Your father must have wanted you to be as difficult as possible to find. Handy, that. I wish my father had been a rich priest.”

  The sorceress took the bowl when Ilasin had finished, and walked away.

  “Good morning,” said Renjiya, who took her place. Her captors may have removed her shackles, but they were less willing to leave her unattended.

  “Hello, Renjiya. Where are we?”

  “Not far from the meeting place. We have boats concealed nearby. Maybe a two-hour walk from here, the ground turns from mud to river. From there, the trip is easy. I will feel much better if I’m in a boat before night falls.”

  Boats? She would have to escape before then, or it would grow far more difficult.

  “What happens at night?” she asked. Renjiya shuddered in response.

  “Ghouls.” Baldhead approached them, scowling. “Is she ready to go?”

  In the dim light of evening, she could see the sword-brand of a war-slave on his forehead. A slave? Had Leonine not told her that the Manacle and the Crescent worked together? Her father had the coin and reputation to hire freed men – why should he choose an aging, out-of-shape war-slave when he could hire a hundred mercenaries from Karhan or Aramayin? The doubts and afterthoughts of the last day evaporated. These men had not been sent by her father. How could they have been?

  The Crescent. She would not be fooled.

  The walk was long and tiring, over treacherously slick stones and through thick mud. Ilasin pretended to fall and twist her ankle. The longer it took to reach the boats, the more time she would have to find an opportunity to escape. If night fell and drew ghouls upon them, so much the better. She could use a distraction.

  Her slowed pace lasted only as long as the sorceress’s patience. She commanded Renjiya to pick Ilasin up and carry her; he smelled of musk and a perfume she did not recognize. He carried her until after night fell, and he was visibly tired from the exertion.

  “I think I can walk now,” she said. When he lowered her to the ground, there was gratitude in his eyes. He looked past her, and the gratitude turned to fear. She had her distraction.

  Ilasin started at the sound of a hiss of in-drawn breath and the familiar heat rose in her blood. Cold fear and hot desire commingled, and set her stomach roiling. She realized that she was holding her breath and expelled it, then followed the tendrils of power to their source: a coruscating wall of power behind which dark shapes loomed.

  In sick fascination, Ilasin watched the shapes approach the wall and recoil from it, grunting and hissing, waving rope-thin arms. She caught the gaze of lantern-yellow eyes gleaming cat-like in the light of torches and the night sky.

  Still the creatures approached, and now she realized their numbers – they swarmed, one atop the other, pushing and clawing like piglets fighting for a teat, only to be rebuffed time and time again by a sorcerous wall that strained and wavered before their hungry surge.

  A dozen paces from her stood the woman who was their rampart, barely upright, bracing herself against Renjiya’s wiry frame. She muttered a mantra Ilasin could not make out in a language she would not have understood, a nonsensical litany that gurgled and rushed like a swollen river.

  What are you waiting for? Nobody was paying Ilasin any mind. The mercenaries’ attention was consumed by the spectacle unfolding before them. Baldhead stood to her right, a torch in one hand, a curved sickle-sword gripped tightly in the other. His shoulders rose and fell with ragged breaths, and she could see the terror in his trembling body. Renjiya’s sultry countrywoman was near him, still as a corpse, her eyes wide.

  This is your chance. Ilasin tore her gaze from the writhing wall of flesh and tried to steady her breath. She backed off slowly, keeping an eye on her abductors, with an occasional glance over her shoulder to ensure the way was clear.

  It was not. She hit her heel against a sharp rock, and fell over with a yelp of pain. Baldhead turned towards her. His eyes widened, an
d he drew in a breath. Ilasin grasped at the rock, a sick clarity beginning to take hold of her. She could not just run. Not like that.

  “The girl!”

  The rock was heavy, but fear gave her strength. Baldhead started to move towards her, and now the foreign woman was turning with him, but they were slow and surprised. Ilasin was neither, and she knew exactly what had to be done.

  Ilasin raced, the stone in her hands, towards her captors. She heard another yell, and now Baldhead chased after her. He was too late.

  Ilasin’s blood began to sing as she drew power from her fear. The sorceress stumbled over her words and turned towards her. The woman’s eyes grew wide, and wider still as Ilasin leapt. An arm extended to grab her, but too late. They were all too late.

  The rock came down, hard, and her arms almost went numb from the impact. Arms grasped at Ilasin, but her fear turned into waves of pain that made them weak. She twisted through them, dancing to shrieks of horror and the feverish exultation of starving ghouls. The sorceress had fallen, and with her, the wall.

  Ilasin ran blindly into the underbrush behind her, away from the horrible noises of the feast she had left behind her, tears streaming down her face. She did not dare slow or look back, expecting at any moment to feel bony claws curl around her ankles. The screaming stopped, and soon there was no sound but the sucking of mud around her ankles, but still she ran, until her lungs burned with exertion. She glanced over her shoulder, then, and saw nothing but the deceptive calm of the marsh, heard nothing but the chirping and buzzing of insects. Only then did she dare stop.

  Ilasin sank to her knees and drew ragged breaths while her heart drummed.

  Every Hound for miles must have felt that. And Navid.

  How would she find one, but not the other?

  The ghouls had not followed her, but Ilasin did not feel safe. She had no food and no clean water, only fears of what else this swamp might hide. She had to find Navid, and quickly.

  Can I even protect myself if the ghouls do follow?

  The sorceress had managed it, but she was trained. Ilasin remembered the shape of the wall that had warded them from the beasts, and its feel, but could she replicate it?

  I don’t know the words.

  She remembered the sewers of Inatum, her first meeting with Navid… and with the Hunt. The Hound had prayed to Ahamash, and in doing so had protected himself from her scream. Navid did not pray when he needed protection, but he had it all the same.

  Maybe the words aren’t important.

  She took a deep breath, and concentrated. Navid could not find her, in any case, not if she stayed quiet. She had to use her sorcery. And if it draws the Hound? She would have to risk it, and trust in the gods.

  Ilasin tried to open herself. She visualized the great Shalumes to which Navid had once compared sorcery, pretended that a river flowed through her veins. “Wall, wall, wall,” she chanted. It seemed as good a spell as any.

  Nothing. Of course there was nothing. I can’t do this.

  But she had to.

  She tried again and again, each time visualizing something different. If the river had not worked, what of rain? When rain failed, she imagined the heat and flavour of jasmine tea. When that failed, she sat down, fighting away tears of frustration, just as she had the last time, outside Inatum.

  Navid had laughed at her, then. He had apologized, but it still hurt. If it’ll just happen when it happens, what good is it? I need it now.

  That night, Navid had trusted her with the name he no longer used. It was not until he warned her never to use it in public that she’d understood just how much that had required of him. He did not trust people easily; he’d asked her, on the way to her mother’s grave, if Uchu was trustworthy. She’d been wrong about that.

  But I wasn’t wrong about Navid. She’d felt comfortable with him from those first moments, when she learned that he had the same talent, and that he too had been hunted. But it was not until that night, when these same sorcerous frustrations had her in tears, that he had begun to trust her.

  The pain of Navid laughing at her tears had been fleeting compared to the peace she had felt afterward. She had held his hand and told him a secret, and he – a sorcerer like her, who shared her pain, her confusion, her frustration – had trusted her.

  Navid, I miss you.

  That same peace came over her now. She would not – could not – force it. Navid had told her that it would come when it was time. And Navid had told her that he would protect her, that he would never let them take her. Surrounded by ghouls, in a swamp she did not know, with neither water nor food, she nevertheless felt safe and warm.

  Warm?

  Ilasin was too surprised by the sudden heat in her veins to remember why she had been trying to gather it. She expelled power into the fetid air, and tried once more. She opened herself to sorcery, thinking not of the flooding Shalumes that tore huts apart in its wake, but of the gentle river that had lapped at her feet while she held her protector’s hand and learned his name.

  Her veins grew warm, then hot, and she was in ecstasy.

  “Wall, wall, wall!” she cried, calling to mind the shining globe of light that had warded away ghoulish pursuit, and a wall came into being around her. She laughed delightedly and let it drop.

  She could not know if it would hold against assault, but somehow, that no longer seemed important. Ilasin got up and began to walk in what she thought was the direction of Nerkut.

  When Anki’s Chariot rose over the swamp and she was certain the ghouls were no longer in pursuit, Ilasin fell into a fitful sleep, hidden away by the delicate boughs of a willow.

  She awoke at noon and continued her trip, stopping periodically to draw sorcery into herself in the hope that Navid would catch her trail.

  That evening, hungry and frightfully thirsty but unwilling, still, to drink the fetid swamp water, Ilasin felt another presence as she prepared her spell.

  “Navid?” she asked tremulously, closing herself and allowing the energies to disperse.

  “Is that his name?”

  A black-skinned woman emerged from the underbrush behind her, trailed by a fat man who flashed a vicious grin.

  “I… Ibashtu?”

  The woman clucked her tongue. “Leonine talks too much. A shame he’s not here with you. Luwa-Shagir here was quite anxious to see him again.”

  “What do you want from me?” she asked. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She had not considered that there might be another sorcerer in this swamp, who was neither Navid nor the Hound.

  “Compliance. Luwa, take her.”

  Power flooded Ilasin, and she screamed, but the Hakshi woman had already erected a barrier. Her spell struck it and dissipated into an eldritch mist.

  “Is that all?” The Hakshi drew more power into herself, until she blazed with it, and spoke a single word.

  Ilasin was torn from her feet. She sailed through the air, eyes wide with fear, and fell painfully to the ground near the fat man. She tried to scramble away, to erect a ward, but a thick arm grabbed her around the neck. A heavy weight pressed into her back, pinning her helplessly to the moist ground.

  “Not too rough, Luwa. She can’t die yet. Give her the salts.”

  No. Oh, no. Navid, where are you?

  Another tiny bottle. Blackness once again.

  She awoke lying in a place she did not recognize, her arms and legs splayed out. There were loops of corded rope at her wrists again, but this time she was not atop a wagon. She turned her head first left, and then right, in search of answers. To her left was scaffolding. To her right, Anki’s Chariot overlooked a mockery of home. The steps of a ziggurat descended before her, but at their base she could not see the great courtyard or straight streets of Nerkut – only swamp and ruins.

  She tried to call for Navid, only to realize that she was gagged. Tears formed in her eyes, and as she cried, she became aware of two menacing presences behind her; one in the shape of a woman, the other a fluted vase.


  Ilasin tried to pull her head back, to look behind her. She saw Ibashtu, upside-down, and beside her an orange and black urn that roiled with hideous sorceries.

  “Good afternoon, child,” said Ibashtu, her voice mocking. “You will be the first to witness the rebirth of the Pale Queen’s temple, here in Alu-nin-hura. We will give you to her, child of a treacherous god, and when she is reborn in your little witch body, we will dance once more in her courtyard.”

  Navid. Save me.