Ashes of the Tyrant

by Erin M. Evans

  “I won’t tell if you don’t tell,” she teased.

  He’d never not wanted her—from the first moment he’d met her, he’d been struck by how sharp, how clever, how striking she was. She knew what it was to be a Harper. Or close enough. And she was here, in his arms, and human—what could anyone say about Mira?

  Here and now, Dahl thought, are all that matter after all. Someone had said that.

  Mira shoved him up against the wall, his collar in her fists. Dahl hooked his fingers in her waistband—

  The crash of glass beside his head startled Dahl—he pushed away from Mira. The scent of rosemary hit him next and he gasped.

  Farideh—“It smells like rosemary,” she’d said, not knowing how intimate a gift she’d given him, just wanting to make him happy, to make things right. He pushed Mira farther back—maybe it would be easier, it wasn’t what he wanted.

  He blinked. The cavern, Mira at the end of his arms, eyeing him in a glazed and sultry way. A shaking, bony hand, green with spilled ink and red with blood, inches from his face.

  “Think!” his grandmother shouted.

  He blinked. Think. It would be easier to give in, it would be easier to let the demon drive him like a horse to whatever fate the demon craved. Or he could get one of the scrolls out and make an escape. Even if it only sent them farther into the tunnels, it would give them a chance.

  Think, he told himself, reaching back for the pack. Think of Thost and Bodhar. Think of Granny. Think of Mira. Think of the Harpers. Think of Farideh.

  Farideh—arms around him, legs around him. “I don’t want you to leave.”

  Who is this?

  Farideh surged up in Dahl’s thoughts again, and even when he opened his eyes, he could see her, as if the demon had summoned her to stand beside him. Dahl didn’t answer, and the demon laughed.

  I’ll have it out of you sooner or later.

  Farideh—sitting on the opposite side of the table, deliberately adding lumps of sugar to her tea, watching him over the cup like she was daring him to tease her again.

  Farideh—lying against him, her head on his shoulder, her horn falling into the gap. “Gods you fit there perfectly,” he’d said.

  Farideh—burning like a bonfire, surrounded by the wings of a Hellish angel, pulling souls from the very stones beneath her feet.

  Farideh—“I’m one of the Chosen of Asmodeus!” she’d shouted. “You cannot possibly love me.

  Well, the man made of night said. Well, well, well.

  Farideh—kissing Lorcan in the snow, like Dahl wasn’t even there.

  Farideh—saying, “I want you to promise that if he doesn’t try to hurt you, you’re not going to try and hurt him.”

  Why do you think that is? the demon asked. A devil—that devil? He has to be protected?

  “He protects her,” Dahl said. “He has to.”

  From what? A cold bed?

  Why are you answering? Dahl’s thoughts screamed. But he couldn’t stop himself: “From the rest of the Nine Hells.”

  I see. A cambion against the full might of Asmodeus. For a clever boy, you’re easily duped. Even I can see she loves that thing. Even I can see he’s going to win her in the end, unless … He turned Dahl’s face toward his with one long finger, lingering on his cheek. Unless you are something special after all. Unless you can do what must be done.

  Anything, Dahl thought. Anything.

  The man made of night grinned the grin of a crashing moon. He moved his hands in careful concert, shaping a ball of magic and power. Dahl watched it, transfixed, as it built to the size of an apple. The demon held it in one hand for a moment.

  Here is everything you need, everything I need.

  Then slammed it into Dahl’s chest.

  He felt the magic suffuse him, reaching every inch of his skin. For a moment he could not breathe. For a moment, he was sure he would die.

  Never say, the man chuckled, that I am not generous with mortals. That should give you a fighting chance when your rival comes to call.

  “What have you done?” Dahl managed.

  Made of you a most fearsome weapon, the man said. Now tell me what you know about Asmodeus, and his Chosen.

  No, Dahl thought.

  The demon clucked its tongue. That wasn’t a question.

  “My lord, Graz’zt!” a woman called. The man made of night turned, and Dahl followed his gaze to the far edge of the cavern, where the cambion woman who’d tried to lure Dahl into another deal stood, wings outstretched, expression imperious. “I’m here to make a deal with you.”

  DUMUZI KNEW HE should be worried about Arjhani as four cousins helped his sedated father off the hellhound’s back, but he found himself curiously numb, as if he were looking at an injury that his nerves hadn’t yet caught up to.

  The bits of conversation he’d overheard in the catacombs bounced around his thoughts, taking advantage of that empty-feeling space.

  “Where’s Anala?” Mehen demanded.

  “She’s not back yet,” Lanitha said, straightening as she laid Arjhani on the stretcher. She glanced at the group of them. “Which of you are coming up? We need two for the stretcher.” She gave Dumuzi a look that said she clearly expected him to volunteer.

  No one said a word. Arjhani’s head lolled to one side, his eyes half-lidded with the chmertehoschta.

  “Well, I suppose that’s me,” Kallan said. To Mehen he added, “I’ll be back in a song. Can I come find you?”

  Mehen’s expression didn’t soften. “You might be waiting. I have words for the matriarch.”

  “Sounds like I’ll track you down later.” He smiled at Lanitha. “Which end do you want?”

  As they carried Arjhani off, Mehen watched the sellsword go, and Dumuzi made himself avert his eyes. It wasn’t his business. It was too close to his father’s business.

  Havilar, on the other hand, stared shamelessly. “Are you and Kallan brightbirds again?” she hissed.

  “That is not your business,” Mehen said. “You and I and all of us have better things to worry about. Go see if your sister and Brin have cracked the secret of that karshoji axe. I assume you,” he said to Dumuzi, “will want to carry word to Uadjit.” He looked back at the doorguard, a skinny fellow a few seasons older than Dumuzi. “When the matriarch arrives, tell her I’m waiting in the elders’ audience chamber to speak with her.” With that he stormed off, down the hallway.

  “Gods, he’s impossible.” Havilar considered Dumuzi a moment. “Is … your father like that?” she asked, more subdued than Dumuzi could ever remember seeing her.

  “We don’t talk very much,” Dumuzi said. “I don’t interest him. And …” He shut his mouth around the words. “Sorry, I’m not feeling well.”

  “You and me both,” Havilar said. She scratched the hellhound’s neck. “I wish the Lance Defenders would hurry up and get rid of that thing. You’d think they weren’t even trying.”

  Dumuzi shook his head. “This city is a warren. They built it out of rubble with the magic of a relic—not everything lines up right and not everything was constructed together. There are tens of thousands of places to hide. The catacombs alone are far bigger than you’d imagine.”

  Havilar squinted at him. “How many people can have died in a hundred years?”

  “Not just them,” Dumuzi said. “Everyone who died in the Blue Fire. Everyone who died in the other world, whose bones made it through. And room for every descendent who will one day pass.”

  Havilar made a face. “That’s kind of morbid. You know exactly where you’ll be buried?”

  Dumuzi blinked at her. “You don’t?”

  “I try not to think about it,” she said. “Are you coming back to the rooms or what?”

  Dumuzi looked down the hallway, toward the elders’ audience chamber. “I have to get a message to Uadjit. I assume I’ll see you later.”

  Once Havilar and Zoonie had passed out of sight, Dumuzi blew out a long slow breath.

  My father was more t
han fearsome. He was a tyrant in his own right, the kind of person that slips up unnoticed, until you look around and realize you’re living in a karshoji ancestor story, only the dragon’s one of you.

  In those stories, the elders praised the values of omin’ iejirkkessh—what the clan writes in your blood. What you should know to do, to say, without being taught. You didn’t speak poorly of your sire, your patriarch, like that, not if you knew omin’ iejirkkessh.

  But if you were exiled? If you were cut loose?

  Not even certain of what he was hoping to discover, Dumuzi strode down the halls of the Verthisathurgiesh enclave, not daring to stop. He slipped in through the audience chamber’s double doors. Mehen sat with his head in his hands on the edge of the platform, before the center throne and the great red dragon’s skull. He looked up as Dumuzi came in.

  “I hope you haven’t come to tell me Arjhani wants to talk. I have no interest in making my way through the chmertehoschta-addled babbling of anyone else.”

  “I,” Dumuzi began, not sure how to begin. “I wanted to ask you … If it’s not impertinent? If … if it’s not overstepping?”

  “Lad, what is making you so karshoji nervous?” Mehen demanded. “Every sentence out of your mouth takes three tries these days. What in the Hells do you think is going to happen?”

  Dumuzi shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s that karshoji story, isn’t it?” Mehen folded his arms over his chest. “You didn’t tell the girls everything you know about how I got exiled, did you?”

  Dumuzi held himself as straight as he could. “Not all of it. It’s not mine to tell.”

  “Oh, so just some of it is? Well, out with it. What nonsense have you heard that’s left you quaking like I’m some sort of karshoji warlord in an ancestor story?”

  Dumuzi’s tongue rattled nervously against his teeth. “I think you’ve got the wrong impression about me. I don’t—I haven’t spread gossip about my father and you, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I asked what you’ve heard,” Mehen said. “Not if you passed gossip. What do they say?”

  “They say … They say that when Pandjed ordered you to marry my mother, you refused, because Kepeshkmolik wouldn’t let you … That is, you had other entanglements, and … Agreements—”

  “I was in love with Arjhani,” Mehen said flatly. “Is that all they say?”

  “They say you told Pandjed you’d rather be exiled and when he threatened to do it, you urged him on. They say before you left that you struck him. That you hit him so hard it knocked the tooth from his upper jaw. He did have a gap there,” Dumuzi added. “A missing tooth.”

  Mehen said nothing for a long moment. “I’m surprised he never had that fixed.”

  “Is it true? Did you hit him?”

  He laughed once, unfolding his arms and leaning against his knees. “No, I didn’t hit him. I beat him nearly dead.”

  A thrill of horror, of righteousness went through Dumuzi. “While he was patriarch?” he blurted, as if that made a difference. The idea of attacking one’s elder, one’s own sire—to say it wasn’t done was like saying people didn’t leap from the pyramid’s peak to get to the market.

  But Mehen just nodded, grimly. “He was patriarch and I, his scion. He brokered a marriage with Kepeshkmolik and had it in his mind that I would settle down, quit ‘dallying with boys,’ and be his little spy, bring back the sort of information that would make Narghon fall.

  “I told him I wouldn’t marry Uadjit for that, that I wouldn’t cut ties with Arjhani, and he tried to shame me. I told him I didn’t care how that reflected on him, and he threatened me with exile. I told him I would gladly take exile, and he stepped down from his throne and challenged me. Like a karshoji rival. Like he knew he was going to crush me.

  “He struck me for the last time, and then I beat him to a bloody pulp in return. Right in front of the other elders. I left without knowing or caring if he survived. That’s why the very old ones won’t tell the story, not even to make a lesson of it. It might give you young ones the wrong ideas.” He shook his head. “He was a cruel man.”

  “I know,” Dumuzi said, too quickly. “I knew him too.”

  Mehen straightened and let out a soft curse. “He was always hard on hatchlings. Probably harder on you for descending out of my mess. You have my apologies for that.”

  Dumuzi hesitated, and then it seemed as if his mind were elsewhere, floating, while his body turned itself, unbuckled his brigandine, bared the lightning scars to Mehen.

  “I was koshqal. It shamed Kepeshkmolik that I begged to be returned,” he said, his voice shaking in a way that shamed them all over again. “But after … after this, I couldn’t remain.”

  “Ah, karshoj,” Mehen swore softly. “That’s not just from once.”

  Dumuzi pulled his brigandine down with a sharp, embarrassed tug. “No.”

  “How long did you last?”

  “A few months.”

  “Does your mother know?”

  “Some of it.”

  “What about your father?”

  Dumuzi was silent a long moment. He had gone to Arjhani first, nearly blind with the pain of the burns on his back. Arjhani had pulled him into the farthest room of the enclave, salved the burns, told him he shouldn’t worry, Pandjed would give up soon, everything would be all right. Don’t tell Uadjit. He wasn’t angry, he was afraid.

  “He did nothing,” Dumuzi said. “He was a coward.”

  Mehen gestured to him to come and sit on the dais beside him. When he had, it took several breaths before the other man spoke again.

  “You have to give your father a little bit of slack,” he said. “Not a lot. You don’t have to like him, you don’t even have to love him. But for your own peace of mind if nothing else, you have to forgive him for this. He grew up here too. He lived under Pandjed’s thumb, less than you or I did, but all the same. It shapes you whether you like it or not, and maybe it forges some of us into stronger stuff, but you cannot make tin into steel no matter how it’s tempered.”

  Dumuzi gave the smallest of nods, keeping his eyes on the tiles. None of this was proper. But none of this was fair. Maybe Arjhani was as afraid as he was—but why couldn’t he have been better? None of that was proper either, and the words filled his mouth like river rocks jostling against one another, unable to settle.

  “I still think he’s a coward.”

  “You’re right,” Mehen said. He sighed. “But it’s who he is. Your father is a coward and mine was a tyrant. There’s nothing either of us can do about that.”

  “Why did you love him?” Dumuzi demanded. “Why give up everything for him? He’s so … false, so selfish.”

  Mehen sighed again, his nostrils flaring. “You’ll understand when you’re older, when you’ve had some heartbreaks and some distance. You fall in love with someone and it doesn’t always make sense. You fall in love because maybe you need something they can give you, or you think they can give you. And you don’t see, until you’ve let it go, the flaws and the failings in that.”

  He didn’t mean to think of Zaroshni then, but he did, his throat closing tight. All the confidence, all the joy, all the sharpness he didn’t have. He loved her after all, or maybe just the parts of her he couldn’t be.

  “And you’ll understand one day that your parents are just people. They make mistakes. They fail.” He cursed again. “A great deal of them seem to leave me to have these conversations with you all, so that’s one enormous failing so far as I’m concerned. But—and, mind, I have no reason to say a single kind word about your father just now—they have goodness in them too.”

  Dumuzi nodded, eyes on the carpet. “Your pardon, but I don’t much care anymore.”

  “The problem I have always had with Verthisathurgiesh,” Mehen went on, “with Djerad Thymar, truth be known, is that you have so little choice in where you belong. You are born, and that is that. But if your clan is wrong, if your patriarch is a monster, what do you do
? It’s cut yourself off or swallow it all, but out there? You have other choices. You can make your own family. You can tell your clan to piss into the wind.”

  Dumuzi folded his hands in his lap. “What about ‘we are strongest together.’ ”

  “We are. And that means you tell a fool when she’s a fool, and a tyrant when he’s a tyrant and you remember that all these things about saying and doing the right and honorable thing are guidelines we gave ourselves, nothing else. You don’t owe your mother your silence because she’s your elder.” He shook his head again. “Pandjed’s lucky you didn’t tell her. The Uadjit I knew would have found a way to break him right down and never torn a scale. She’ll make a formidable Vanquisher.”

  “You won’t stand?” Dumuzi asked. Mehen only snorted.

  “If it matters,” he said a moment later, “I know those scars too.” He patted his chest. “Quite a lot up here. I hate to tell you they’ll probably never fade.”

  Dumuzi began to protest that he knew that, that he didn’t hope they would, even as the pit of his stomach dropped at the confirmation he would always bear the scars of Pandjed’s wrath.

  Before he could, the doors opened once more and Matriarch Anala swept in. Dumuzi sprang to his feet, bowing to her. Mehen stood more slowly, not seeming to notice Anala’s perturbed expression.

  “Run along,” Mehen said. “Go see if your father’s woken.”

  Upstairs, Arjhani still lay sleeping. Kallan sat on a chair beside the door, arms folded as he considered the farther wall. He shifted slightly as Dumuzi entered, hand brushing his sword hilt. He recognized Dumuzi and nodded.

  Dumuzi frowned. “Are you really guarding him?”

  Kallan shrugged. “I don’t know what you think of me, but I don’t want him eaten any more than you do. Plus—I’m not going to lie—that Lanitha said she’d bring me some tea and sweet farothai while I waited.” He dropped his voice, “Between you and me, I think she has ulterior motives. I don’t like breaking a girl’s heart, but it’s a little easier when I’ve got a full stomach.”

  Dumuzi made a face, and Kallan’s smile fell. “What’s that?”