Twelve Kings in Sharakhai

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  She’d had a child, then. A child of the lost tribe. And if the Matron’s intuition was correct, if the things she’d seen reading the girl’s palm were true, then she was a child of one of the Kings as well. Ihsan trusted the Matron well enough to believe it. And there was the poison as well. Those of common blood would have died well before now. It wasn’t difficult to believe she was a first daughter—the blood of Kings is bound by no walls, as they say. And if it was true, Ihsan certainly didn’t know who her father might be. He doubted the King who’d sired her was even aware of her existence. The assassin had been very careful, very good at keeping secrets, as evidenced by how little they’d managed to learn about her. And her identity was a piece of information upon which she would certainly have placed importance.

  “Shall we keep her?” the King of Whispers said.

  “I believe we shall,” Ihsan replied.

  “There is risk in doing so.”

  Which was true.

  If any of the others noted her resemblance to the assassin—a woman from whom Cahil hadn’t even managed to extract a name—it might come back to haunt Ihsan, but the resemblance was not so great as to leap to it immediately, and even if one of the other Kings did make the connection, Ihsan could easily deny that he’d seen it. Besides, there would be more than a little mystery over which King had fathered the girl. It certainly wasn’t Ihsan himself—he knew that much—and whoever it was would have a good deal more explaining to do than Ihsan would. So he was confident he could use this to his advantage no matter which way it went.

  And there was more to consider when balancing the ledger. The instrument this young woman might become was not something easily ignored. Given the right guidance, she could prove invaluable. And if there ever came a time when she disappointed, or the risks became too high, well, there would be little difficulty arranging for her demise, protections of the Blade Maidens or not.

  “Let me worry about the dangers,” Ihsan said. “Just tell me what you’ve found.”

  His eyes went heavy and fluttered for a moment. Then he shook his head, took a deep breath, and stared down at the poisoned creature before them. “Little enough so far. She comes from the West End. She fights in the pits. They call her the White Wolf.”

  Ihsan’s eyebrows rose of their own accord. “This girl is the White Wolf?”

  Zeheb laughed. “I didn’t know you watched the dirt dogs scrap, Ihsan. I rather thought you above that.”

  Ihsan smiled easily. “I’ve been known to watch the dogs bark from time to time. Besides, even I’ve heard of the White Wolf.” Ihsan stared down, wondering how many more mysteries there were to this girl. “A legend nearly as large as the Black Lion of Kundhun, is she not?”

  “Just so!” The stocky King grinned. “I am impressed. We’ll have to attend a bout one day.”

  But to this, Ihsan merely shook his head. “I don’t care for your killing pits, Zeheb.”

  Zeheb’s grin widened. “Can’t stomach the blood?”

  Ihsan couldn’t help himself. A bark of a laugh escaped him. “I can stomach much. I simply don’t like to see lives tossed into the dirt like a handful of copper khet. As well watch the dunes roll past.”

  “The dunes don’t fight back, Ihsan.”

  “Do they not? What of the Moonless Host? What of the lost tribe?”

  At this, Zeheb merely grunted.

  At a sound from outside the room, Ihsan looked up. “Well, unless you’ve any objections, we’d best let the Matrons attend to her, or our decision will be made for us.”

  “Well enough.” But Zeheb remained as Ihsan began to walk away. Then Ihsan stopped, and the King of Whispers said with utter sincerity, “Are you sure it’s time?”

  Ihsan had gone as far as the foot of the bed, and was facing the doorway through which they’d entered, but upon hearing these words he squared up against Zeheb, pulled himself taller, and put all of himself into his next words. “My dear Zeheb, it is far past time.”

  Zeheb blinked. His eyelids fluttered for a time, but then he nodded.

  And the two Kings walked together from the room.

  WHEN ÇEDA WOKE, she was surrounded by cool, clear water. The current carried her, and she was content to allow it to take her where it would. It must be the Haddah, but the river is rarely so calm.

  Small fish nipped at her toes and fingers. As the current began to rock her, she tried to move but found that she couldn’t. Her body refused her, preferring the easy contentment of drifting onward, downward. The current began to carry her faster. The water became more violent, more turbid. She tried again and again to move her arms, to lift her head, to simply breathe, but no matter what she did, her body refused to respond. The water pulled her down beneath the surface. It tossed her about. She crashed into something—a rock, or the riverbed below.

  Until now she hadn’t been too concerned with the simple act of breathing, but as she realized how desperate her situation truly was, it became the only thing that filled her mind. Struggle as she might, though, the surface remained well out of reach. It wouldn’t be long before the water took her completely.

  Perhaps she should let it. Perhaps she should sink down, as her mother had so many years ago, and give herself to the river.

  But no. She refused to do that. She would fight for life, whatever the world pitted against her.

  She pulled at the river, struggling with everything still in her. At last her body responded, and the more she fought, the easier it became. She stroked her arms like a heron taking flight, she kicked her legs and slowly swam for the shore.

  Below her, the riverbed was choked with bones. Skulls smiling, arms and legs tangled in a grim yet lovely dance. From time to time the current swept her body against them. Each time it happened, it sent a terrible chill through her, as if by touching them she might wake the dead, might make them aware of her. She tried to avoid them, but the water was so shallow here it was impossible.

  A skeletal hand reached up and gripped her wrist. The tip of its bony thumb pressed into the meat of her thumb, harder and harder, hurt becoming pain becoming agony, and yet it did not pierce her skin. It did not draw blood. It fouled the place it had touched, though, made her skin blacken and swell with disease or poison.

  More hands grabbed for her and pulled her close while grinning mouths gave macabre smiles, hoping to share one last kiss.

  But then she was pulled up through the water, away from the empty eyes and grasping hands. She broke the water’s surface, coughing, sputtering, limbs flailing uselessly. She was dragged up and onto green grasses. She fell heavily into them, a lovely feeling, this sense of solidity, of form. Even the pain was almost unbearably beautiful, for it gave her the sense that she was alive. And for now that was enough.

  At last, when her coughing expelled the last of the water from her lungs, she sat up and looked for her savior.

  Kneeling there in the grass, running her hands over the stiff, sharp blades, was Ahya. The Kings’ foul words were carved on the backs of her hands, whore, and on her feet, false witness, and on her forehead the sign that Çeda still did not understand. A fount of water beneath a field of stars. It was difficult to meet her eyes with such things done to her, but Çeda forced herself to.

  By the gods’ sweet breath, she was beautiful, even with the carvings. Or perhaps because of them.

  “You’re dead,” she said to her mother, unsure where to begin.

  “Have you found them, Çedamihn?”

  “Found who?”

  She traced a fingertip along the furrows in her skin, making it hopelessly bloody. “Those who killed me.” The strokes of her finger were applied with morbid tenderness, as if she were penning verse and rhyme, as if she had made those cruel marks, not the Kings of Sharakhai.

  “The Kings killed you.”

  “Ah, but which? Which Kings, Çeda? That is the question.
”

  “I don’t know. Was it my father?”

  Ahya stood and walked away.

  Çeda followed, shaking, little better than a newborn foal, but gradually she gained strength until she was able to walk side-by-side with her mother.

  Tall grasses gave way to shorter, then to hard-packed earth, then windblown sand. Horizon to horizon there was nothing but wave upon wave of sand dunes, and when Çeda turned back toward the river, she saw that it was gone, lost to the parched maw of the desert.

  She heard fluttering behind her. She turned and saw a flock of birds swooping and swirling around Ahya—blazing blues, just like the ones they’d seen over the salt lake years ago. They eddied around her, billowing then tightening like the dust demons that signaled the coming of greater storms. They were so thick they obscured her mother completely. Then they burst apart, flying outward and upward, revealing a different woman, a taller woman carrying a stout staff in one hand. “Do you remember coming to me when you were young?”

  It was Saliah, bearing the same markings as Çeda’s mother. It had looked foul on Ahya’s skin, but on Saliah’s it looked like a travesty, a perversion.

  “I remember running through your garden,” Çeda replied.

  “And climbing the tree.”

  “That too.”

  “Few others have done so, Çedamihn Ahyanesh’ala. Did you know that?”

  “Because you don’t allow them.”

  “Because they are not brave enough. Few would dare to look into their future. But you. You have done so many times.”

  “Only because I didn’t understand.”

  “No.” Saliah’s vacant eyes looked over Çeda’s shoulder to the horizon, but her left hand reached out and touched Çeda’s forehead, traced a mark there. The same mark that was on Saliah’s forehead. “The body understands. The mind follows.”

  Çeda reached up and touched her forehead, and her fingers came away wet with blood. So much blood.

  How much had her mother learned before she’d died at the Kings’ hands? “I’m lost,” Çeda said, more to herself than Saliah.

  “You’ll be found, Çeda. You have no choice.”

  “You can help me. I’ll come to you.”

  “Perhaps.” Saliah smiled, and Çeda noticed a cut on her cheek, the same place she’d been wounded when the chime had shattered in Saliah’s garden. Çeda looked at her thumb, where Saliah’s blood had touched her, the very place the adichara thorn had pierced.

  Saliah held her hand to her own cheek. She looked pale and somehow fragile. Her whole body shivered, and she fell to her knees. She used her staff to support herself, but she lost her grip and tumbled back, falling to the desert floor. Çeda rushed to her side, but Saliah’s skin was drying, flaking and falling away like sand scoured by the wind. “Please,” Çeda said. “Please tell me what to do.”

  Saliah did not hear her. She was reduced to bones, bleaching in the desert sun.

  Çeda’s thumb hurt terribly. Like a fire spreading across dry grassland, the pain extended through her fingers and along her wrist and forearm until it had filled her entire being.

  It was white hot, a blaze, an inferno in which she burned.

  She opened her eyes. A dream. It had all been a dream.

  By the gods, memma, how I miss you.

  A dozen Blade Maidens surrounded her, and one was sitting by her side, stabbing her skin with a needle, over and over and over.

  Çeda was bound. By the women, by straps. She didn’t know. But she couldn’t move. She could scream, though, and once she started, she screamed until her throat was raw. She screamed until it was all she could hear.

  The pain of the needle moved about. It was not always in the same place, as she’d thought at first. It moved along the palm of her hand, and across to the back. Along her wrist and then back to her palm. She focused on the distinct pain of the needle. It helped her. It kept her from going mad, allowed her to ignore the other burning pain that ran throughout her arm and shoulder and into her chest, a pain that eclipsed the other if she let it. She tried to sense where the point of the needle was being directed, and over time she could feel it, moving in rhythmic patterns. Telling a story. She was being marked, she realized. Given a tattoo, in the way the peoples of the desert did, to tell their tales.

  Did the Blade Maidens do the same? Or did they think her a child of the desert, a woman to be marked, her story told before they killed her?

  She struggled to move. She refused to let them touch her. She would not allow it.

  Her hand moved as the old woman tapped the needle into the palm of her hand. It moved only a fraction of an inch, but it was enough for the woman to frown, to look at Çeda with a disapproving stare. She pressed harder on Çeda’s wrist, and the pain took her.

  She opened her eyes.

  Above her was the old woman, the one with the regal brow and sad eyes. Primitive tattoos covered her neck and cheeks and forehead and chin. A crescent moon arched over her brow, making her look like a messenger from Tulathan herself. She was hunched over Çeda, using a flat stick to tap a needle into her hand, working on the area immediately around the adichara wound. Somehow the pain had been made distant, but now that Çeda was aware of it, it grew stronger and stronger until she screamed.

  There was a smell like burnt honey in the air. It brought on the memory of Dardzada tattooing her back with the ashes of the adichara bloom—her adichara bloom—to such a strong degree that she began to question where she was and who was tapping this new design into her skin.

  She forced the reality around her to coalesce. This was not Dardzada’s apothecary, and the woman tapping the tattoo into her was certainly not Dardzada.

  How strange that the Maidens had adopted the same technique as the tribes of old. Or perhaps it wasn’t strange. She wasn’t sure anymore.

  “Sümeya, stop staring and give it to her.”

  Çeda looked up. There were other women around. Six of them, seven, perhaps more; her eyes wouldn’t focus. Each wore the black thawb of the Blade Maidens, but none wore a turban. One of them, a woman with brown eyes and a strong jaw, held a thick strip of leather near Çeda’s mouth.

  “Take it,” she said.

  She meant for Çeda to bite down on it, if only to prevent herself from chewing off her own tongue. Çeda accepted it as sweat trickled down her forehead. She was damp with sweat, she could feel now. More and more sensations were returning to her—the heat of her skin, the thick leather straps around her chest and stomach and thighs, the smell of urine, no doubt her own—but more than anything she felt the pain emanating from the poisoned wound on her hand. Despite her fears of losing her arm in that other strange place—the place with the host of surgical instruments—were she given a knife right now, she would gladly saw her hand off, just to be free of the pain. She grunted around the leather between her teeth. She looked to the women standing around her. Some would return her gaze, one or two even with looks of pity or sympathy, but most stared at her dispassionately.

  The old woman’s needle was circling her injury, and the pain had risen to impossible heights.

  The woman who’d given her the length of leather looked at Çeda only once, when her cries grew the most desperate. She was not old, this woman with the striking brown eyes; she was perhaps ten years older than Çeda herself. Not an ounce of sympathy registered on her face. But there was emotion: Disappointment. Disgust. It radiated from her. Çeda thought perhaps it was simple displeasure over her weakness, but then it occurred to her that these women would know the poison came from the adichara, would know Çeda had gone to the blooming fields. One of them might even be the Maiden she’d fought on the dunes—and now here was one of their own trying to save her, a thief, one who should have been put to death the moment she arrived.

  Why the old woman had decided to do this Çeda didn’t know, but she knew that th
e younger woman resented her for it.

  How long the tapping of the stick continued Çeda couldn’t say. It came in waves. Tapping, then a pause, tapping, then a pause, the old woman acting as artist and healer and historian telling Çeda’s story—one small part of it, in any case—with the tattoo she was laying upon Çeda’s skin.

  When she finally stopped, she pursed her lips and stared down at her handiwork. She turned Çeda’s hand this way and that, and nodded once. As she did these things, Çeda felt a wave of relief. It was over. There was still pain, to be sure, but with the sudden lifting of so much of it, Çeda’s entire body went limp.

  She was completely and utterly spent, and darkness soon claimed her.

  When she woke it was to no small amount of pain. For some reason, she couldn’t open her eyes. The world around her felt distant and dreamlike.

  “Leave it alone,” came the old woman’s voice, “the poison must work its way out.”

  “Very well.” A man’s voice, deep and ancient, as though the desert itself were speaking to her. “You’ll bring her to me when she’s awakened.”

  “She may relapse. It would be best if I could bring her once she’s healed.”

  “And when will that be?”

  Çeda opened her eyes a crack, which was all she could manage. Above her she could see the old woman who’d marked her arm. But the man was out of sight. There was a distinct smell about him, though. Myrrh and amber and sandalwood, the scents one would offer to Bakhi for his favor. This came across not as tribute, however, but hubris, for one would never wear those scents, not together, not unless you compared yourself to the god, thought yourself better than him.

  It had to be one of the Kings.