Twelve Kings in Sharakhai

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  Eventually Hamid’s words registered, though, and it made him wonder. “Why would she have returned?”

  “One of the many mysteries of that night.” Hamid glanced at Emre in the lantern light before returning his attention to the path ahead. “As curious as her reason for staying with the Qaimiri lordling who had been waiting for you, and what they spoke of.”

  A Qaimiri lordling? “Who?”

  “Ramahd shan Amansir. He was a minor noble until he married the daughter of their King, Princess Yasmine. His wife and child were later killed by Macide. He’s been the voice of King Aldouan in Sharakhai and hunting the Moonless Host for revenge, ever since.” Hamid paused as they ducked beneath a stone overhang then continued. “Did she ever mention him?”

  “No. Never.” A Qaimiri lordling? Why wouldn’t Çeda have mentioned him? The answer was obvious, of course. She’d warned him away from the Host, and he’d practically laughed at her for it. Why would she breathe a word to him of someone bent on revenge against Macide, especially someone she was friendly with?

  “You’re sure, Emre? It’s important.”

  “I’m sure, Hamid. I wouldn’t protect some mouthpiece of King Aldouan.”

  “No, but you’d protect Çeda.”

  “She never mentioned him.”

  Hamid walked in silence for a time before replying, “Well enough, Emre.”

  They continued through the tunnel, and eventually heard distant voices, but before they reached them, a darker shadow slid into the tunnel ahead. Hamid held the lantern high, shedding light on two women clad in leather armor. Each bore a long, slim knife useful for fighting in tight quarters.

  “Who comes?” the woman at the rear called.

  “You know who comes,” Hamid shot back.

  “Then best you hurry,” the nearest of them said. “Macide arrived an hour ago.”

  “I know my business,” Hamid said. He leaned in to kiss the one who’d spoken. “Unless you’d like the Spears running along these halls with us.”

  She pressed the tip of the knife into his ribs. “They do, and they’d get a surprise or two for their trouble.”

  As they kissed again, Emre saw Darius giving Hamid a strange look, but it was gone in a moment, and soon they were heading down a gap in the tunnel so narrow they had to sidestep along it to reach the end. It opened into a natural cavern filled with glistening formations. A low fire burned in a brazier at the far end of the cavern, its orange light glistening off slick walls and columns and a forest of mineral skewers, stakes, and thorns piercing floor and ceiling. The sound of echoing drips mixed with the soft murmur of voices.

  When Emre finally reached the far end of the cavern, he found several dozen gathered there. Many wore the thawbs of the desert, but others wore clothes that were fashionable in the city—fine khalats for the men, jalabiyas for the women.

  “You said this would be a small gathering of the Host,” Emre whispered to Hamid as they walked along a path between the stalagmites.

  “Is this not small?” Hamid replied with an easy smile.

  “It is not, you miserable shit,” Emre shot back. “Not by a long stretch.” He’d never liked crowds, not when it felt like he couldn’t escape them.

  Many of those gathered looked his way, exchanging words as they stole glances, but one man broke from the crowd and strode to meet them. He was tall and broad. His beard was forked and braided into two long tails. The viper tattoos on his forearms marked him as much as anything else, but Macide was recognizable from his mere presence as well. He was a man Emre had both hoped and feared to meet.

  He hugged Hamid, and then Darius, and finally stood before Emre, staring down his nose with a mischievous glint in his eye. “And here is Emre Aykan’ava.”

  A statement, not a question, but Emre nodded and held out his hand. Macide offered his in return and the two of them gripped forearms.

  “You did well at Matron Zohra’s.”

  From the far end of the cavern, in an area hidden by a bend, came a muffled sound. Emre tried to see who or what had made it but couldn’t from his present vantage. “It was nothing,” Emre said.

  “You’ll forgive me if I disagree. It was something we needed, and we are in your debt.” Macide put his arms behind his back, looking for all the world like one of the masters in the collegia. “So I say again: you’ve done well, but there are further things to do if you wish to join us in earnest.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Are you? Because from what I hear from Hamid and others around Roseridge, you’re not.” He said this with a casual air, but Emre knew his words were deadly serious.

  “This is nothing I enter into lightly.” Emre knew he was treading on very dangerous ground.

  “No?” As the light from the brazier cast flickering shadows throughout the cavern, Macide stared deeply into Emre’s eyes, and seemed to come to some conclusion. “No, you don’t enter it lightly. But I wonder how long you’ll stay when things get difficult. And they will, Emre, sooner than later.”

  “I have many talents.”

  “We have many talents. What we need are men and women with loyal hearts.” He stepped forward until he was almost chest-to-chest with Emre, who resisted the urge to back away as he met those piercing eyes. “What do you care if the Kings sit in their palaces? What do you care if the Host works to tear them down?”

  “Because while the Kings sit their thrones in their high palaces, we are reduced to prey. On each of their holy nights, we are their prey. When the Blade Maidens strut about the city, we are their prey. When the Silver Spears choose to protect Goldenhill and the east end and their precious harbors and nothing else, we are their prey. How many souls have perished at their hands? How many from their neglect?”

  “Many,” Macide replied.

  “Too many. It’s for them I wish to join the Host.”

  Macide looked to Hamid, then Darius. What their expressions told Macide, Emre had no idea, but a moment later, Macide nodded and led Emre toward the far end of the cavern.

  As the crowd parted for them, a portion of the cavern previously hidden was revealed, and Emre saw a man hanging upside down from a rope tied to a hook in the cavern’s ceiling. The man was naked save for a loincloth. Except for the raw abrasions around his ankles where the rope was cinched, his skin was surprisingly clean and unblemished. Emre didn’t have to ask who the man was. This was Lord Vesdi, the man Emre had identified as King Külasan’s son. The Host had taken him three nights ago, using the attack on the House of Maidens as a diversion.

  The crowd closed in, staring at Vesdi, at the wide brass censer beneath him, at the cloudy white stone sitting in its exact center. The breathstone, Emre realized, the very one Çeda had discovered in the canister Emre had been delivering for Osman.

  As the crowd squeezed closer, making Emre feel like a pressed grape, Macide pulled a curved knife from his belt, flipped it easily, and handed it hilt-first to Emre. Emre stared at the knife, then looked up to Vesdi, who was staring at him with eyes crazed with fear. Macide put his hand on Emre’s shoulder and nodded to him, an offering of support as Emre was reforged into something altogether different than what he’d been before: a murderer.

  He had known this time would come, but that made it no easier. To enter the Al’afwa Khadar was to step over a threshold that could never be crossed again.

  Emre took up the knife. It felt obscene, but he had to admit it felt freeing as well. It made him feel powerful in a way he hadn’t experienced since Rafa’s death. When Rafa was alive, Emre felt as if the world were in his hands, but only through naiveté. Now he understood the world. He knew it was insufficient to merely defend. Do that and life nibbles at you like a rat until there’s nothing left. No, one had to sally forth lest the world around you crumble and fall.

  He strode toward Vesdi, this Lord from Goldenhill, this Prince who wriggled
and squirmed, a man who knew his fate had come. The handle of Emre’s knife felt suddenly slick in his hand. Cold blood, he thought. Cold blood. By the gods, I’m readying to kill a man in cold blood.

  He licked his lips and tried to ignore the weighty stares of those gathered. Tried not to care what they thought of him, wondering if he were forged from the proper elements.

  He was. Absolutely he was. He was no brittle blade. Not any longer. The pain he’d endured following his brother’s death had nearly killed him. But he stood here now a different man. He’d found himself through the simple act of standing before a mirror and seeing his true nature for the first time. He wasn’t reborn, but stripped bare, his weak outer shell removed at last. It was as if he’d been lifted from an oubliette after years of seclusion, to see the world once more. And the light had burned away all the fear, all the worry, all the self pity that had festered within him. He refused to go back to his old self. He wouldn’t go back in that hole again. Not ever.

  As he considered Vesdi, he didn’t see the face of a Lord of Sharakhai—he saw the face of a Malasani bravo who deserved to die. As he drew the knife across his throat, he saw Rafa’s eyes staring back at him. Saw Rafa dying. Saw Rafa dead.

  He heard the patter of liquid, and when he looked down, he found the blade blood-slicked. His hands and arms were covered in red. It dripped down his face, warm but already cooling. He wiped it from his eyes, from his face, and saw the censer, below the still-wriggling man, full of blood. It overflowed onto the stones and ran in rivulets to a once-clear pool of water, staining it scarlet.

  As cries of joy and fury rose up around him, footsteps approached. Whose, he wasn’t sure, but when he felt a hand on his shoulder he turned and saw Macide—not smiling, not proud, but intent. “Pick it up,” he said to Emre.

  Emre crouched down and lifted the surprisingly heavy stone from the warm pool of blood. The stone was no longer white. It was red. Red as death. And not merely on its surface. He wiped the blood with his thumb and found it was red through and through. It had drawn the blood into itself, absorbed it, as if a man’s life were no different from broth waiting to be sopped.

  “You’ve done well,” Macide said. “On the holy night, we’ll go to Külasan’s desert palace. And then, my friend, we shall see who is the hunter and who the prey.”

  FIVE YEARS EARLIER . . .

  ÇEDA’S MEETING WITH PELAM in the pits still burned as she ran for the western harbor. But she had hope now. A small hope, but a hope all the same.

  By the time she reached the harbor, her muscles felt like forge-brightened metal. She wandered along the quay, checking the ships moored there, looking among the warehouses standing opposite the piers. Some noticed her, wondering why a girl was poking her nose into things in the harbor, but most ignored her. What was one more gutter wren in the cramped west end of this overcrowded city?

  “May I help, dear girl?”

  Çeda turned and sighed with relief. It was Ibrahim, and Ibrahim knew everyone. He was standing beside his mule wearing sandals and sirwal trousers and that wide-brimmed hat of his, while a short, thickset man unloaded rolls of carpet from the bed of his dray.

  “Where can I find Djaga?” Çeda asked.

  “Oh,” he laughed, “it’s Djaga you wish to see. The Black Lion. And why might you be needing her?”

  “My business is my own, Ibrahim.”

  Ibrahim grunted, allowing her the point, while the man at the back of the cart gave her a sour look, the sort of look one gave to a gutter wren when you thought they might be planning to nick something. “And what do you have for me, little Çedamihn? What do you have that I want?”

  “I’m only looking for the pier where she works, Ibrahim. Anyone here could give it to me.”

  “A small thing, then. So give Ibrahim something small in return.”

  Çeda thought about simply leaving, but she was in a hurry, and in truth, there was a part of her that liked trades like this. “There are birds in the desert that fly like a cloud given life by Bakhi himself.”

  “Blazing blues, Çedamihn. Lapis eyes. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “They eat tiny shrimp in the salt lakes in the dead of winter.”

  Ibrahim’s eyebrows rose. “And?”

  “You can hold the shrimp in your hand and the birds will peck them off your palm without touching you with their wings or scratching your skin with their hungry beaks.”

  Ibrahim stared at her. He blinked. And then he reared back and laughed harder than before. “Do they really?”

  “I wouldn’t lie, Ibrahim.”

  “That’s wonderful. I never knew, and I believe, if I’m being honest—and Ibrahim is always honest—that I’ll owe you after this. You come find me again, won’t you? We’ll trade again?”

  “I’d rather have two things now.”

  Ibrahim scratched his stubbly chin and smoothed his mustache down. “Two now, is it?”

  “Neither would be difficult for someone like you to answer.”

  Ibrahim goggled his eyes. “I’ll be the judge of that, Çedamihn.”

  She nodded, suppressing a smile. “First, do you remember this life when you pass to the next?”

  “Of course you do!”

  “Even if you couldn’t remember your life at the moment you passed beyond?”

  Ibrahim frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Çeda shrugged. “What if you were so drunk you couldn’t remember your own wife?”

  Ibrahim laughed. “Would that I could!”

  “Would you, though? Would you remember?”

  He grew more serious, stretching his neck as his face screwed up in thought. “We are granted a new life when we pass, but one of the gifts, or curses, are the memories from this one. This is a covenant that cannot be broken by mere drink, I judge.”

  What about a drug? Çeda wondered. What about hangman’s vine? But she couldn’t press further than she already had. Ibrahim might connect her questions to Ahya, and she was wary of that, especially with a man who told stories for money.

  “Well enough?” Ibrahim asked.

  She nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “Now to the second.” He pointed with a long, crooked arm toward a pier with a mid-sized cutter berthed at it. “Djaga works the Willow Wind most often.”

  “The Willow Wind?”

  “Are we trading again already?”

  “Never mind,” Çeda said as she set off down the wooden boardwalk toward the pier.

  In her wake, Ibrahim cackled. “The owner hails from Mirea, where the willow is sacred. That one’s for free, Çeda!” As Çeda ran, she heard Ibrahim call behind her, “Come see me, girl! I like your stories!”

  She found Djaga polishing the skimwood runners of the cutter, which stood on two stout boat stands that lifted the entire ship up off the sand. Djaga was dipping a horsehair brush into a large bucket filled with a viscous golden liquid, which she slathered over the runners.

  “Djaga Akoyo?”

  Djaga looked up to the dock, shading her eyes from the sun beating down over Çeda’s shoulder. “Who are you?” she asked, and then went back to her work, moving slowly down the runner, making sure to get underneath and on either side of the round-bottomed wood. The smell of it was sharp like pitch and sweet like amber.

  “My name is Çeda.” She jumped down to the sand, and stood, awkward, unsure where to begin. “I’ve just come from the pits.”

  Djaga ignored her. “Have you, girl?”

  “I’ve seen you fight. You’re very good.”

  “Am I?”

  “I’d like to enter the pits as well.”

  Djaga stood, making Çeda realize just how tall this woman was, how sleekly muscled. “You?” She pointed to Çeda with her brush, which was dripping beads of gold onto the sand. “You would fight in the pits?”

&
nbsp; “I would, and I’m hoping you’ll train me.”

  Djaga barked out a single laugh. “I wouldn’t if I were you. The pits are nasty business, girl, not made for the likes of you.”

  “I’m made for the pits.”

  “You aren’t, either.”

  “I am. And I’ll prove it one day, with or without you.”

  “Then do it without. I have work to do.” And she bent her back and returned to swabbing the port runner with dripping wax. She moved to the rudder next, the smaller ski at the aft of the ship, used to steer it over the sands.

  Çeda trailed her. “There’s a man I wish dead.” The Kundhunese took such things seriously, but Djaga would probably doubt whether Çeda—a young woman and a Sharakhani—would feel the same.

  “Then kill him. You don’t need the pits for that.”

  “He’s entered the tourney. He’s protected until he leaves.”

  “Then wait ’til he leaves.”

  “He may leave on a ship again, like he did after he killed my alangual’s brother.”

  Djaga stood tall once more. “Alangual . . .”

  “Yes. His name is Emre, and he’s been my closest friend since I was a girl.”

  “Do you know the word you’re using?”

  “I know what it means. I would die for Emre. And he would die for me.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “There is more to it.”

  “I believe that we are two halves of a whole, that we will hold hands in the farther fields.” In truth she hadn’t believed anything of the kind. As the words had came out, though, they’d felt truer than anything she’d ever said, and she was somehow glad that her paths had crossed Djaga’s, if only for this.

  Djaga stared at her with doubtful eyes, but there was some grudging approval there as well. “Are you smitten with this boy?”