Beneath the Twisted Trees

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  The Kings had taken a terrible risk in the release of the scourge, and only the fates knew what would become of it. I’ll place my bets on the cruelest option, Brama thought. The fates were nothing if not cold-blooded bastards.

  Soon Brama saw the edges of the caravanserai, the encampment, and far from them, the seven hospital ships. He headed for the mass grave, where most of the thousands who’d already died were buried. There was a line of flatbed sleighs leading up to it, each one piled high with the dead. Another hundred bodies waited to be lifted and laid next to their brothers and sisters in the long, deep trench. Dozens already lay there, their arms crossed over their chests, knives held in their hands, or the occasional sword. Some few, those who’d lost loved ones recently, had sapphire orchids clutched in both hands. Rock buzzards circled above. More had landed nearby, waiting for their chance at the corpses, which those tending to the dead were careful never to give them.

  “Brama?” He turned to find Mae wearing the lacquered armor of the Damned once more. She rode toward him on her qirin, which released a noisy trumpet of a call and a sputtering gout of fire as it came to a halt. “Why are you here?”

  What could he say? He wasn’t even sure why he’d come, other than to wallow in his own failure. He motioned to the trench. “I only wished to pay my respects.”

  “Pay . . . respects?” Mae had trouble with the words.

  “To wish them good journey.”

  Her qirin clawed at the sand as Mae considered his words. “I never thank you, for helping us. For healing me.”

  “You don’t have to—” But he stopped when Mae raised her hand.

  “I was angry. What happen to Shu-fen.” She pointed to the place where not so long ago the Mirean fleet had anchored. “What happen to us all. I thought it your—how you say it?—your fault. You and Rümayesh. But it not your fault, Brama.”

  Brama didn’t know what to say, so he remained silent.

  “The other ehrekh,” she went on. “Behlosh. I wear the armor of the Damned proudly. But I think I could not take you to him to be healed. I don’t think I’m brave enough.”

  “You’re plenty brave,” Brama said, grateful he’d managed this much, to save Mae.

  She looked to the trench and the line of sleighs. “Do as you say. Pay your respects. But then you must leave.” She put her hand on the hilt of her dao. “I have no choice. You understand?”

  “I understand,” Brama said. “Thank you.”

  She nodded, kicked her qirin into motion, and began helping the others with the bodies. Brama watched them, pulling the dead bodies from the sleighs, dragging each carefully, respectfully, into the trenches and giving them a weapon or some other memento to carry with them into the afterlife. The sun fell, but there were so many bodies to deal with they set up torches and lanterns and continued into the night. The stench of it was horrendous.

  Brama heard a buzzing, felt a presence coalesce along the sand behind him.

  Brama didn’t need to turn to know who it was. “Come to admire your handiwork?”

  “This isn’t my handiwork,” Rümayesh replied, “but that of the Kings.”

  “It was in your power to stop. It still is.”

  Rümayesh’s heavy footfalls approached. She crouched beside him, arms over her knees, the discordant look of a beggar girl about her once more. Her tails swished across the sand. As had been the case for the past several days, he could feel none of her emotions, but he knew her manners well; she was caught in one of her rare spells of introspection. It was in these times that he might speak to her, truly speak to her, free from the fits of rage or cruelty that often overtook her.

  Brama took out the glass vial, the one filled with powder from the bone of Raamajit. Tulathan, the barest sliver in the sky, was rising in the east. Brama stared at it, wondering if the goddess, waking from her slumber, could hear them.

  “I was going to use this to sever our bond,” he said.

  He thought Rümayesh would be angry. Rail against him. But she didn’t. She remained calm as a desert sunrise. “Why didn’t you?”

  Brama shook the vial, setting its contents to glittering in the dim moonlight. “Who is Behlosh to you?”

  She swiveled her great horned head and looked at him, and Brama expected her to refuse to speak of it, but to his surprise she nodded once, as if she knew the moment had come.

  Brama, afraid of saying anything that might break the spell, merely waited.

  “I’ll share with you something few mortals have ever known.” She turned her attention back to the mass grave. “When my lord Goezhen was still young, he toyed with the stuff of creation, a knack he’d stolen from Iri, his maker. He made many creatures. Some beautiful but simple, others you’d most likely consider foul. Many had a thirst he wasn’t aware he was granting them. They roamed the desert in numbers in those days. They plagued the sands. But Goezhen grew bored with them and allowed many to wither and die when the old gods began granting the people of the desert miracles to put them down. What Goezhen truly wanted was to create something like man. He worked for many long years, mimicking what he thought Iri and the other gods had done. But the bitterness in his heart prevented him from creating in the same way his maker had done.”

  “He has no love in his heart?”

  “He does, but mostly for Iri, and some of the other elder gods. And love is a strange thing in any case. Bitterness and hatred are its closest kins. So it was with Goezhen. He began to make the ehrekh in pairs. We each had another half, as the people of Qaimir are so fond of saying, except of the ehrekh it was quite literally true.”

  “Behlosh is your other half,” Brama said with certainty.

  “He is. Was. It is not the same thing as being lovers, nor brother and sister, nor dear friends, though all of these are close. We share the same soul.”

  “But why would he craft you in such a fashion?” Brama asked.

  “Goezhen?” She shrugged. “He thought we would create new life with one another. Something he’d been hoping to achieve since long before stealing Iri’s power. It was the greatest of the elder gods’ gifts to this world—life begetting life—and Goezhen wanted that power as well. In this he failed. None of his creations had it. It was a power Iri, surely sensing Goezhen’s purpose, had kept well hidden. But what it did give us was an undying sense of one another. A simple urge to be with one another.”

  Brama couldn’t help but think of the urge Rümayesh had placed in him while she was trapped in the sapphire. When Ramahd, the Qaimiri lordling, had stolen it—thereby stealing Rümayesh—a great relief had washed over Brama. It hadn’t lasted, though. His relief had faded and been replaced with a compulsion to find her. It led him to set her free of imprisonment, to take her hand and wander the desert with her.

  “You found a way to free yourself,” Brama realized. “Behlosh is no longer your other half.”

  Rümayesh’s laugh was a low rumble that attracted the notice of the grave workers. Brama saw them by their lanterns, peering into the darkness. Unable to locate the source of the laughter, they went about their business, noticeably faster than before.

  “I did,” Rümayesh admitted. “As was true of many of us, Behlosh and I grew weary of one another. Then we began to hate each other. Yet every time we parted, our desire to be with the other rose, and it only grew stronger the longer we remained apart. But what if there was a way to change it? To break the bond Goezhen forged within us?”

  “That’s why you bond with mortals,” Brama said.

  “Yes. It’s how I found my first love. It’s how I came to live in Sharakhai while the sigils on the walls kept others away. It’s how I was able to shatter my bond with Behlosh at last. He was driven mad by it. He came for me. He even tried to break down the walls of Sharakhai before the Kings came and stopped him. Many years later, I made the mistake of allowing my love, Lirael, to leave the city.
It had been many years since Behlosh was driven from the city. But he’d remained patient, waiting, and he found her.” Rümayesh fell silent and then said, “He was not kind.”

  “All the more reason to oppose him now.”

  “I wouldn’t be opposing Behlosh but my lord Goezhen.”

  “Why would he care what happens here?”

  “I cannot say. But he was adamant. He told me to leave the fleet be, or suffer his wrath.”

  “And yet you traveled to the Kings’ fleet. You found Alu-Waled and placed him at the feet of Queen Alansal.”

  Rümayesh looked displeased. “What of it?”

  “You wouldn’t have done that if you thought there was no possibility he would find a cure for the scourge. You wanted him to find a cure. You did it because Goezhen forbade you from interfering on their behalf but said nothing about delivering them someone who could.”

  “I’m forbidden from disobeying my lord.”

  “Are you? You said it yourself! You found a way to break the bonds of your making, to release yourself from Behlosh. If that isn’t disobeying your lord, I don’t know what is.” Brama stood and moved in front of her. Like this, him standing, Rümayesh crouched, they were nearly eye to eye. “Do you know what Behlosh said to me after he healed Mae? He said that his mind still lingers over Lirael’s taste. He healed Mae and took the bone of Raamajit, knowing I wouldn’t be able to heal them all. The bitterness of my failure pleased him greatly. But you could deny him that pleasure.”

  “This is a weak gambit, Brama.” She feigned amusement, but there was doubt in her eyes.

  “And yet you’re tempted. I know you are. That’s why you’ve closed yourself off to me, because you fear I’ll reach your wicked heart.” He waved to the dead in the trench. “How many Liraels have died already? How many are now threatened? Imagine what it would be like to save them. Relief and love such as you’ve never experienced would flow. And it will all be because of you.”

  For a moment while he spoke, a little of their shared bond returned, and he felt her uncertainty.

  “I beg you,” he went on. “Help them for Lirael. Help them for the others you’ve joined hands with, for whatever it is you’ve come to love about us.” He stood and tossed the glass vial of powder to the sand. “Help them for me.” He lifted his sandaled foot and stomped his heel onto the vial. It broke with a crunch, and the air filled with the scent of power. “I’ll remain with you. I won’t try to escape.”

  Near the trench came a raucous squawking sound. An old man was chasing away buzzards that had managed to get close enough to peck at the corpses. As he chased one away, waving his shovel, several more swept in. The other workers came quickly, shouting, bearing shovels of their own.

  As the spectacle unfolded, Rümayesh seemed unfazed. As emotionless as those buzzards. And yet, after the birds had been chased away, her eyes met Brama’s, and she said, “Very well.”

  Chapter 36

  EMRE RAN LOW AND QUICK through the moonless night. To his left was Hamid. On his right, Frail Lemi. Ahead, lit only by starlight, was the dark shape of Calamity’s Reign, Haddad’s dhow. They crept toward the rear of the ship, then crouched, waiting for the guard Haddad always kept on deck.

  A short while later they saw him. Haddad’s first mate; Emre could tell by the way he leaned toward his left side when he walked, favoring the side that had taken the most acid damage from the wyrm. They waited for him to head to the foredeck, then ran hard for the ship’s stern, where Frail Lemi stood on the skimwood rudder and hoisted Emre up until he could grab the sill of the shutters to Haddad’s cabin. She always latched them, but one of the latches was faulty. Shift the window toward the old hinges just enough and he could slip it free.

  He did, and it released with a soft tick, swung outward, and he was inside the empty cabin. Hamid slipped in behind him with an oiled ease. Frail Lemi remained outside, lying low on the rudder so that, with his dark clothes, he looked like part of it.

  Wary of any sound, Emre and Hamid made their way along the ship’s central passageway toward the hold. It was several hours before dawn and the ship was quiet, but it wasn’t uncommon for someone to be up, making night soil or pissing over the side of the ship or sneaking into the galley to steal a bite while the cook was asleep.

  They heard snoring, and a cough from a crewman in a cabin, but reached the hold without incident. Hamid lit a lantern and shone its golden light over the crates, ropes, and dark hull boards. Several hammocks were still hanging from the thick beams, reminders of the days before the battle with the wyrm and the Blackspear soldiers, when Calamity’s Reign operated with more than a skeleton crew.

  After taking a pry bar from a hook affixed to the hull, Emre used it with care to open the same crates Haddad had shown him. Unlike the last time, he wasn’t satisfied with seeing the topmost layers. He dug beneath the straw and the clay pots and found it to be shallow, hardly deeper than his fingers were long. The rest of the crate was filled with burlap. The same was true of the others they opened. The crates of fine wooden bows had been similarly faked, one layer at the top with nothing beneath.

  Haddad had been worried about discovery of the deal she’d made with Tribes Kenan and Halarijan. She’d paid Shaikhs Dayan and Neylana and asked them to give her some of their goods so that if any came asking, she could point to them and say it was for trade, when really their agreement had been about something else entirely.

  “You see now?” Hamid whispered.

  It burned Emre to admit it, but Hamid had been right all along. Even after seeing Haddad with King Emir, he still hadn’t wanted to believe it, but he could no longer hide from the truth: Haddad had been playing him for a long time, perhaps from the beginning.

  Without answering, Emre began putting the lids back on the crates. Soon the two of them were working their way back through the ship, up the ladder, and into Haddad’s cabin.

  “You go on,” Emre whispered when they came to the window.

  “No,” Hamid said. “This time we’re both talking to her.”

  “I have more to talk to her about than just this.”

  “You mean you want to fuck her one last time.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Emre rasped, “unless you want to see our bones fed to the Great Mother.”

  Hamid said no more, but neither did he make a move toward the window.

  “We still have the treaties to consider,” Emre finally said. It wasn’t the whole of his reason for staying, but Hamid didn’t need to know that.

  “And you think she’s going to help you get them?”

  “We have to protect the tribe first.”

  “Exactly. Which is why the tribe should send a message: slit her throat so all know not to take us lightly.”

  “This isn’t Sharakhai, Hamid.”

  “And we’re no longer children, Emre. Time for you to grow up and act like a man.”

  “I’m speaking to Haddad alone.”

  Hamid shook his head in frustration but finally relented and began climbing through the window. “This is the last time I look the other way for you.”

  Emre said nothing as Hamid slipped down and into the night. As the soft sounds of his and Frail Lemi’s passage faded, Emre closed the window, sat in the captain’s chair, and waited.

  He was still there at dawn when Haddad walked into the cabin. Golden light angled in harshly through the shutters, slicing Emre into alternating layers of light and shadow.

  “Hello, Haddad.”

  Her first mate, coming up behind Haddad, glared at Emre. “Told you I saw them sneaking away from the ship.”

  He drew his knife and tried to step past Haddad, but Haddad grabbed his wrist and tilted her head back toward the passageway. “Give me some time.”

  Her mate pointed the tip of his knife at Emre. “He’s a snake, this one. He and all his friends from the lost
tribe.”

  “I said give me some time.”

  The mate fumed, but in the end drove his knife back into its sheath and stalked away.

  Haddad quickly closed the door. “What are you doing here?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Emre, if you’re here about King Emir, I . . . I didn’t expect things to happen so quickly. I was angry and—”

  “This isn’t about Emir.”

  She looked genuinely confused, but there had been a flash of worry as well. “Then what?”

  “Sit,” he said, and kicked out the stool by the desk.

  She chose to sit on her bed instead.

  “I opened the crates,” he said, watching her reaction carefully. “A handful of ointments from Tribe Kenan. A few bows from Halarijan. The payment you gave—what did you call it? Good Malasani gold?—wasn’t for trade, nor to grease the skids for future treaties, as you claimed. You paid them to stay out of the alliance. Your king fears a united desert.”

  Haddad stared at him with a flat expression. She couldn’t deny it. Not any longer.

  It was why she was so upset when Shaikh Dayan left, not because Emre had spoiled her agreements with Tribe Kenan, but because she feared her work to thwart the alliance was unraveling. That’s why King Emir sent her to meet with the eastern tribes in the first place. It’s why she remained after the battle with Onur and the wyrm, and later, the Battle of Blackspear.

  “Emre, I don’t know why you’ve come here, but whatever it is—”

  “I’ve come for the asirim.”

  She stopped. Whatever she’d thought he would say, it hadn’t been this. “The asirim?”

  “You saw what’s happening to them. They’re innocent in this.”