Twelve Kings in Sharakhai

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  She should scream. She should cry. But the truth was, this felt as though everything—from leaving home in the early hours, to what happened at Saliah’s in the desert, to this—had been preordained, as if she were merely turning the final page on the book of her mother’s life. It had always come to this, she saw now.

  The forehead symbol troubled her. “What does it say?” Çeda asked, more to herself than Emre.

  “You know I can’t read,” he mumbled softly.

  She studied that symbol, committing it to memory. Each curve. Every angle. The depth it cut into her mother’s skin. The blood that left haunting patterns along her eyes and forehead and unbound hair.

  She would never forget it. She couldn’t if she tried.

  Something clattered behind the gates, and they groaned outward. It sounded as though Tauriyat were some great beast waking from its midnight slumber. With the jingle of tack and the clop of hooves, rank after rank of Blade Maidens rode out on their tall horses.

  “Come on,” Emre said, tugging her arm.

  At first, she refused to go, but as the horses neared, Emre became more insistent.

  Before following him, Çeda stared at the tall towers of the House of Kings and spat on the dusty street. Then she ran down the narrow alleyway with Emre, where the horses couldn’t follow, and they wended their way back toward Dardzada’s.

  “You shouldn’t come,” Çeda said when they were coming close. “He’ll beat you for sure.”

  Emre smiled, for her sake. “Only if he catches me.”

  “I’ll get anything he doesn’t give to you.”

  With that, Emre’s smile vanished. His brown eyes stared into hers with an honest, compassionate look Çeda had rarely seen from him, from this boy who liked to smile and joke too much. “I loved her too, you know.”

  Çeda nodded. “She loved you as well.” She kissed him on the cheek, and then struck a solid pace toward Dardzada’s shop.

  The stout apothecary was waiting inside, but he wasn’t angry. He merely stared at her as if he knew what had happened, as if he’d known since last night. All of it. Her mother leaving, her death, Çeda finding her this morning. He’d known, and he stared at her as if this were all as the gods had decreed, and there was nothing he, nor Ahya, nor Çeda could have done about it.

  She didn’t much care what he thought, though.

  She went upstairs and lay down on her pallet. She heard Dardzada gathering his things a short while later, and then the front door opened and closed, and the hustle and bustle of the city washed over her.

  And then at last she cried, the feelings of loss starting to blossom now that she was alone. Her life with her mother had always been one of change, the two of them moving from place to place around Sharakhai, never keeping friends for long. But Çeda had always had her mother. How she’d loved the times that they’d read to one another. How she’d loved the trips they’d taken out to the desert. How she’d loved the sweet coconut lassi her mother had made for Çeda on her birthdays, and the way they’d dance with swords for hours.

  Now what did she have? Dardzada?

  She had nothing. She had emptiness.

  What could she have done to stop all this? There must have been some way. Perhaps if she’d been better behaved at Saliah’s. Or if she’d pleaded harder with her mother. Perhaps she could have delayed her departure. Or made her stay. Another night, things might have gone differently. Another night and, breath of the desert, she might still have her mother.

  Gods, why did her last act have to be that slap across Çeda’s face?

  Tears fell as a thousand scenarios played through her mind.

  Long into the night, she prayed for this all to be a dream, to wake up and find it all to have gone away.

  She woke to someone nudging her shoulder.

  It was Dardzada. He was sitting on a chair by her pallet, holding a small leatherbound book with a chain draped like a bookmark through its pages. From the chain hung a beautiful silver locket. Her mother’s locket. These were her mother’s things.

  “She wanted you to have these,” he said, holding them out for Çeda to take.

  Çeda didn’t want them. It felt as though accepting them would make her an accomplice to her mother’s death.

  But that was foolish. The book was a collection of poems and stories her mother had cherished. And the locket was the one thing of beauty her mother had allowed herself. She rubbed the painful, salty crust from her eyes, took them both, and pulled the locket around her head, felt its lovely, sickening weight against her chest. The book she opened gently and thumbed through, reading several lines from her mother’s favorite poem.

  Rushes withered,

  River dry,

  Warbler shivers,

  ’Neath winter sky.

  “The Maidens will be looking for those who knew your mother,” Dardzada said as he relaxed the bulk of his weight into the simple wooden chair, “but Ahya hid her trail well, and the city guardsmen who patrol here—I’ve known them for years. They’ll pass us by if I pay them well enough.” He smoothed his brown beard. “And I do. I will.”

  “Do you expect me to thank you for it?”

  Dardzada’s eyes brightened. They were angry, but not for his own sake. “You should thank your mother, for her steps have been taken with care these many years. The friends she’s made are fast. They won’t give her up. And soon, if we’ve any luck at all, the House of Kings will lose interest in chasing ghosts and be satisfied with the example they’ve made today.”

  Çeda wanted to be sick. Her mother had been reduced to an example. An example for whom? Why? She thought again of the strange symbol carved into the skin of her mother’s forehead.

  “Why did she do it?”

  “What Ahya did, she did to protect you.”

  “But why?”

  “I won’t reveal those things to you Çeda. They got your mother killed.”

  “You have to tell me. She was my mother.”

  “I’m sorry, Çeda. I owe your mother much, a debt I’ll repay you in her stead, but I don’t owe her that.”

  She couldn’t help but think of her mother’s final hours. What they must have done to her. “They’ll know of me.” Clutching the book to her chest, she shifted away from Dardzada until her back was propped against the wall. “They’ll come for me now, won’t they?”

  “No. She will not have told them about you. You’ll be safe, I think. We’ll all be safe.”

  Dardzada had allies, she knew, men and women the Kings would kill if ever they learned of them. She’d heard her mother speaking about them, speaking to them, over the years. These were the people Dardzada was referring to when he said we: the undying soldiers of the Moonless Host, as one of memma’s friends had once referred to them.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  She wanted to know more, but she knew Dardzada wouldn’t tell her, and that asking him would only convince him that his instincts to hide the information from her were correct, so she remained silent, running her hands over the cracked leather cover of the book. Dardzada got up a short while later and waddled his way back downstairs.

  Late that night, after he’d come and gone a few times, she heard him climb the stairs and go to his bedroom. The door closed with a soft click.

  Hours later, deep into the night, she heard him crying. It went on for a long, long while, much longer than Çeda would have guessed. Dardzada had always been so mean to Ahya, so brusque and quick to anger. Had he loved her?

  A fine time to show it.

  Çeda waited for his cries to soften and go silent, then a while longer for his snores to fill the house. Only then did she get up and creep downstairs. She left his home and walked into the cool night. She shouldn’t be out. She shouldn’t risk the chance of the city guard or the Maidens seeing h
er. But she would not hide. She would not skulk. Not tonight. She would see her mother one last time, and if the Kings found her, they could do with her what they would.

  She wound down to the city’s main thoroughfare, the Trough, and followed it to the Spear, the wide street that held the most expensive shops in the city and led to the very gates of Tauriyat.

  The moons were high—bright Tulathan and her sister, golden Rhia, near her side—and by their light Çeda could see that the gates were closed. She saw a Maiden walking the wall. Çeda waited until she had passed from sight beyond the buildings of the grand square, then strode across the courtyard and stood before the gallows.

  From beyond the city, from somewhere far in the distance, came the howl of a maned wolf. Another joined it, and another after that. They lifted Çeda’s spirit even as she stared at her mother’s form, still hanging in the dry desert air. The lanky wolves had always seemed like family to Çeda. Children of the desert, like Çeda and her mother.

  Soon the wolves fell silent, and Çeda was alone. She whispered no words of farewell. That wasn’t why she had come. Instead she pulled her kenshar from its sheath at her belt—a knife her mother had given her two years ago, on her sixth birthday. She drew it across the palm of her right hand. The cut burned but no more than her heart burned for the loss of her mother. After slipping the blade back into its sheath, she ducked beneath the gallows’ platform and scrabbled to the spot directly beneath Ahya’s body. Using her bloodied hand, she gathered up a fistful of sand from the dark circle she found there—sand caked with her mother’s blood.

  “Blood of my blood,” she whispered, then crawled back out from under the platform and walked calmly to the center of the courtyard, Maidens be damned.

  From this vantage Çeda could see Tauriyat in its entirety—or as much as one could from outside the walls. Lanterns lit the road that wound its way up the mountainside. Like the winding branches of an acacia, the road split and split again, each branch wending its way to one of the twelve palaces. Lights from hundreds of windows twinkled, and Çeda wondered what they might be doing now, those Kings, while her mother swung in the wind.

  Staring up at the lights, giving each house her undivided attention, Çeda raised her fist to her lips, squeezing the clumps of bloody sand she’d gathered. As it sifted through her fingers, grinding painfully into the cut, she spoke, but she spoke no plea to Nalamae—she had called on the goddess twice already, and she had failed Çeda utterly.

  “This I vow, O Kings.” She did not whisper; she spoke plainly and clearly, as if the Kings were standing there before her. “I am coming for you.”

  In the desert, the wolves renewed their calls, higher and more urgent than before. More and more joined in until dozens seemed to echo Çeda’s vengeful words.

  As the last of the bloody sand pattered against the ground at Çeda’s feet, Çeda said, “I am coming for you, one and all.”

  EMRE DREAMED.

  He dreamed of a howling that spread through the shadow-cloaked streets of the Amber City. He dreamed of dark skies and rolling thunder.

  He was running down the Haddah’s dry riverbed, snaking his way along it, hoping to stay ahead of the dark forms slipping through the night. They stood on bridges above him, watching, cloaked in shadow. They allowed him to pass, but as soon as he had, they jumped down to the riverbed and began running with the others. A handful gave chase, then a dozen, then a flood of long-limbed asirim, some running like men and women, but most galloping like jackals. Their howls drove him onward, not because they sounded like feral beasts, but because they sounded so human. There was pain in those cries. Anguish. A lament for something they had long sought but never found.

  The closest of them scratched at his heels. Another swiped at his legs, nails tearing skin and gouging flesh. The third caught his clothes and dragged him to the ground in a heap.

  The weight of the asir bore down on him, but it was fear that petrified him. He couldn’t move, not as the asir rose up, its lanky hair swinging, not as it pressed its long, grime-covered fingernail into his chest, not as it pulled back its lips, revealing a boneyard smile that caught Emre’s breath in a dead man’s rigor.

  The nail pressed deeper into his skin. He felt it parting his bones, touching his beating heart. He felt it brush against his very soul.

  “You should have saved me,” said the asir.

  And then he realized he’d seen that face before. Beneath the dirt, beneath the blood, beneath the decay evident in the tears and open sores in his skin, Emre recognized him.

  Rafa. His brother.

  Bakhi’s guiding hand, please, no!

  His brother only smiled, then pressed his fingers ever deeper, cleaving flesh and bone until his hand was gripping Emre’s heart.

  Emre woke, drenched in sweat.

  He lay in a room of faded, chipping plaster that revealed patches of the ancient brickwork behind it. He tried to sit up, but stopped at a bright, burning pain along the left side of his ribs and lay back down.

  “Nalamae’s teats, who let the oryx in to stab me while I was sleeping?”

  He probed the area, feeling sharp pain beneath the thick bandages wrapped across his chest and, slowly, he began to understand the state he was in, and the fog of his dream began to recede. Like a song from one of the deadly desert sirens, each painful press of his fingers drew forth memories, real memories of what had happened in the night, teasing them bit by aching bit from the cloudy recesses of his mind.

  He recalled reaching the southern harbor well enough, and speaking to a man in a black turban and veil. The turban had been tied loosely, and the folds were strange, as if such garb were new to him. A man posing as a Sharakhani, perhaps.

  A Qaimiri? he had wondered. Mirean? Some Malasani dog?

  He recalled taking the leather satchel with the scroll case inside and leaving the harbor. More than this, however, was lost to him. It was as if he’d stepped into a doorway to another land after taking that satchel, his time there lost in the vagaries of that place.

  He tried to sit up again and got farther this time, but the effort was so painful it made his ears ring. Only by carefully rolling onto his uninjured side and pushing up with his arms was he able to reach a sitting position. Even this made his skin go clammy.

  After sitting there for some time, breathing and listening to the distant sounds of a smith’s hammer working some forge-brightened alloy, he rocked himself forward onto wobbly legs and stood. Bright stars danced across his vision. Running his dry tongue over lips that were cracked and bleeding, he shuffled over to the table just next to his bed and took up the ewer of fresh water and drank his fill.

  Bless you, Çeda.

  The water made his gut ache, but he still felt better for having downed as much as he could manage. He took tentative steps toward the arched doorway to the sitting room, then parted the hanging beads, head pounding in time to the smith’s relentless hammer, and slowly but surely made his way toward Çeda’s room. He was so dizzy he nearly called out to her, but how pitiful would he look, already cared for by her—perhaps even saved by her—and now calling out like a fainting child?

  Finally the feeling of dizziness passed, and he made it to her doorway. “Çeda?”

  He parted the thick curtain that lay across it, and found her lying on her bed, facing the wall. She didn’t stir as he made his way in. He tried to pull the chair from the corner, but his ribs screamed from that simple effort. He switched arms and tried again, scraping it loudly until it was sitting across from her bed. Even though maneuvering into that chair felt as though molten gold were being laid across his wounds, he could feel how well his wounds had been tended. He didn’t need to take the bandages off to know how expertly she had stitched his cuts. He’d seen her do it before, once on his own leg, sliced on a stone while climbing over the city’s ancient inner walls, and countless times on herself when Çeda
had stitched her own wounds from pit fights or others in the back alleys of Sharakhai. And sometimes from her forays out into the desert.

  You’re every bit as bad as your mother, he used to tell her. And what of it? she would shoot back with a grin that made it clear how very pleased she was by the comparison.

  “Çeda?” he asked when the pain subsided sufficiently that he could talk without sounding like a wounded lamb. “I know you’re awake. You breathe like an ox when you’re asleep.”

  “You smell like an ox,” she said to the wall. “Always.”

  He laughed, but his laugh died quickly for the pain it caused.

  Her words had come out strangely, as if she’d downed too much araq the night before and was still coming around the river.

  “Çeda, what’s wrong?”

  She remained motionless for awhile yet, her chest rising and falling as if she were deciding how to answer, but then, like a capsized ship slowly righting itself, she rolled herself over, wincing with every movement.

  “Çeda! By all that’s holy, what happened?”

  Her left eye was swollen with a blood-crusted cut running along her brow. Her lip was swollen even worse, and her clothes were dirty and torn, blood showing through in several places.

  “Went to the pits. Tried fighting a set of stairs.” She tried to smile, but it came out like a grimace. “Didn’t go so well.”

  “No jokes.” Ignoring his own pain, he scooted the chair closer to her bed. He looked her over, his hands opening and closing of their own accord, an expression of the impotent feelings raging within him. Her blanket covered her from the waist down, but he could tell by the way she was curled up that she’d been beaten everywhere. As the magnitude of it sunk in—Çeda, the White Wolf, beaten like headstrong mule—his anger burned brighter. “Who did this to you?”

  She drew breath, but the pain was clearly preventing her from breathing deeply. “I wish I knew. Because if I did, believe you me, I’d piss in their oats.”