The Seared Lands

by Deborah A. Wolf

  What she had never been, not for a day in her life, was alone. Her mother, her youthmistress, her friends, her pride had always been there, infuriating in their meddling, stifling in their interest. Even when she had faced the lionsnake, she had not been truly alone. First Warrior had known where she was, after all, and Sulema had known in the depths of her heart that if she needed them, if she wished for them, her people would come. But now—

  Tears are not rain, her mother’s voice scolded. They will not cause the desert to bloom.

  Sulema stood, as best she could judge, in the center of her walled-up cell.

  Think!

  The air was still but not stifling. Small cracks and holes in the dragonstone let the air and the rats come and go, yet she was neither air nor a rat, so there was no escape for her that way. Nor did the newly laid stone wall give beneath her hands, push though she might.

  If I had my staff, maybe I could—but no, her mother had not wanted to teach her to dreamshift, any more than Sulema had wanted to learn. If I had learned more about wielding atulfah, perhaps—

  If I had armies to command, they could storm the castle and set me free. She shook her head and grunted a laugh. Strangely enough, that made her feel better. “If you can still laugh,” Ani would say, “there is yet hope.”

  She is laughing.

  A woman’s voice.

  Why is she laughing? Is she mad?

  The voice was soft and smooth and strong. Sulema froze as the words whispered through her cell, faint as footprints upon the Lonely Road, thin as shadows in the deep of night. Had she imagined it? Was she mad?

  No, not mad, a man answered. Not yet, at any rate—no more than any other of the Zeeranim, who are all a touch insane. Too much time spent under the sun; it bakes their brains.

  Sulema’s mouth dropped open, and she spun about, as if turning circles in the dark might help matters.

  “Who is there?”

  There… there… there…

  Her voice echoed, and Sulema thought she heard a response, deep in the heart of Atukos. Now that she was aware of them, the voices were clearer.

  They should have killed her, the first voice said. It is foolish of Pythos to leave such a weapon lying about, where I might pick it up and use it.

  A weapon he may yet bring to bear against you, my queen, the male voice replied. Better to kill the girl and be done with it than take this foolish risk.

  I am no fool, ta. The woman’s voice rang cold and hard with power. Sulema thought she must be a warrior. Neither am I your queen. We will not kill the girl today—to do so would tear a hole in the web big enough for Eth to crawl through. I have seen it. I would pick up this weapon and wield it. She is her mother’s daughter, and her father’s. She can be a powerful ally.

  As you wish. Remember, however, that this is the City of Lies. An ally made here is surely doomed to become your enemy. As for its usefulness, perhaps this sword is less than the sum of hilt and blade. The girl is afraid to confront her potential. She is weak, and a weak weapon may be worse than no weapon at all.

  “Het, het!” Sulema shouted a challenge into the dark. She tensed, expecting an attack. “Show yourself, you goatfucking coward. I am Ja’Akari, and I am no easy meat!”

  In each possibility where I choose to aid the girl, the woman continued, unfazed, she returns from Quarabala with Maika. My Maika, alive and well.

  Do not let the yearnings of your heart blind you to reality. We both know this is impossible.

  You forget yourself, Illindrist. I have seen it. Do you doubt me?

  Sulema controlled her anger in the dark and waited for these voices to decide her fate. She knew to whom the voices belonged now, and they possessed the power to snuff her life as easily as she might pinch the flame from a candle.

  If you are no queen, I am no Illindrist. Do as you will, then, my… apprentice, but if the girl becomes a threat to you, know this. I will kill her myself.

  I would expect nothing less… Master.

  Safe travels, then, little one. I will go to the new Dragon King and make some excuse for your absence. It should not be difficult. The man is an idiot.

  Sulema knew then that she was alone again, straining eyes and ears to no avail. Alone in her cell in the belly of Atukos, where there was only silence, and darkness, and the occasional hopeless rat.

  “Hello?” she called, and again Atukos answered with an echo.

  Hello… hello… hello.

  “Well, fuck!”

  “My akamu always said that a foul mouth is a sign of a weak mind. Do you have a weak mind, girl?”

  Sulema spun, half crouching as a light flickered, flickered, flared to life. Once again she could see the details of the room, including the painting on the wall. There, in one corner of her cell, stood the Illindrist’s apprentice. She held a glass oil lamp in one hand, a small glass bottle in the other. She was clad in robes the color of road dust, had a pack slung over one shoulder, and on her face she wore the most disapproving frown Sulema had seen since leaving home.

  Her name is Yaela, she remembered. Sulema bared her teeth as if the other had challenged her to a fight. “I do not have a weak anything, girl. I am Ja’Akari.”

  “Good.” Yaela nodded, strange eyes slit against the faint illumination. “You promised that if I were to help you escape Atukos, you would travel to the Seared Lands and bring to me my little niece. Did you speak truth?”

  “I am Ja’Akari,” Sulema said again, standing straight so that she towered above the newcomer. “My words speak only truth, ehuani. I will do this thing…” She hesitated, and because there was beauty in truth, she added, “or I will die trying. I am no Zula Din.”

  “No, you are not,” the sorcerer’s apprentice agreed. “It is not possible for you to do this thing.”

  I have no wish to do this thing, Sulema thought. Still, she stiffened at the insult. “Impossible for an outlander, perhaps. For one who is Ja’Akari—”

  “Impossible,” Yaela insisted, unmoved. “I have seen the scars you bear from fighting a single lionsnake. You were nearly broken beyond repair in the course of a single day, Ja’Akari, and in your own lands at that.

  “There are worse things in the Jehannim than snakes and spider-men,” the apprentice continued. “Bonelords, mymyc, and bintshi are only the beginning. The mountains would chew you up and spit you out like a handful of your pemmican long before you could ever dream of reaching Quarabala. You are no shadowmancer, able to weave shadows into protection from the sun and walk the Seared Lands, nor do you have the salt to hire one. You are no bonesinger, to sing the bones upon the shadowed roads into quiescence. You are not even a dreamshifter, as your mother was.

  “You are just… just a girl.” Yaela sighed.

  “If I am so weak,” Sulema asked, jaw so tight with affront that she could scarcely force the words out between her teeth, “then why do you ask me to do this thing?”

  “You are no Zula Din,” Yaela answered after a long pause, “but you are what I have. Here.” She held out the bottle. Sulema eyed it suspiciously, even as she took it and brought it close to her face. A familiar stench wafted to greet her, and she wrinkled her nose.

  “Did you get this from Mattu?” She tried not to feel anything as she said his name. Tried, and failed.

  “I stole it from Rothfaust’s quarters. There were only a few bottles left, and I took them all. I thought to ask the loremaster to make more, but he is nowhere to be found. Many people besides your brother and your mother’s small apprentice have gone missing since Pythos has returned— Rothfaust is probably dead in a pit somewhere with the rest of them.” She shrugged. “This will help against the reaver venom, but I do not know for how long.”

  Sulema froze, with the bottle against her lips.

  “You know about the reaver venom?”

  Yaela rolled her eyes. “This is Atualon. Everybody knows everything.”

  Sulema wrinkled her nose, held her breath, and swallowed the contents of the b
ottle. The loremaster had refined his medicines—or so he had assured her—but it still tasted like churra piss. Maybe worse.

  “Gaaaah,” she said, and she spat. “Surely turning into a reaver cannot be worse than drinking this shit.”

  “Oh,” Yaela said, “but it is. Worse than you can know, child of the sunlight.” Every word as slow and dark as a stone dropped into a well.

  “You have seen a reaver?” Sulema had not believed that they existed, not really, until that day at the Bones of Eth—

  Her mind fled from the thought.

  “I was a child,” Yaela answered, “a little child, on the Night of Sorrows.”

  “The Night of Sorrows?”

  For a moment, Sulema thought that Yaela’s little oil lamp had flared like the sun. When she realized that the shadows had fled the room in terror, all the hairs on her arms stood up.

  The sorcerer’s apprentice, she thought, is more than she seems.

  “Forgive my ignorance,” she said. “The shadows flee your wrath, and my… my father’s shadowmancer… calls you ‘queen.’ Why do you not simply return to Quarabala and retrieve your niece yourself? Why send someone unfamiliar with the land, someone who—as you say—is no Zula Din?”

  “I cannot,” Yaela answered, her face smooth and hard as stones in the river. “I have run from the edge of the Seared Lands to Min Yaarif three times. Three—when no other living shadowmancer had passed the shadowed roads more than once and lived to tell the tale. Shadowmancy leaves a trail, a smell of sorts, and that scent draws all manner of… unpleasant attention.”

  “Ah.” Sulema remembered something Leviathus had told her. “Like the magic slick left upon the Dibris by the Baidun Daiel? That was why they had to take me overland to Atualon, rather than taking the shorter river route.”

  “Much like,” Yaela agreed. “Each shadowmancer has a unique… scent, I suppose you could say. Travel the road once, and if you survive you have left a taste of yourself. Attempt a second pass, and…” She shook her head.

  “Yet you have made that journey three times? Why not a fourth?”

  The fleetest of smiles crossed Yaela’s face, there and gone again.

  “I am very fast, but a fourth time?” She shook her head. “I survived my third run by the thinnest of luck and do not dare another attempt. Another shadowmancer will have to shield your path into the heart of Quarabala, one who has escaped the Seared Lands without using his own magic. There is one such I know of. His name is Keoki. He lives in Min Yaarif and has let it be known that he is willing to provide escort… for a price.”

  “So.” It was Sulema’s turn to smile. “I can choose to die horribly here, or I can die horribly in Jehannim, in a futile attempt at an impossible quest.”

  “Sometimes a death of our choosing is the best for which we can hope. But I offer you more than certain death, Ja’Akari. The thinnest hope, less than a mouthful of water to a woman dying of thirst.”

  Sulema swallowed. She had almost forgotten how dry she was, and how hungry.

  “I am listening.”

  Yaela swung her traveler’s pack to the fore, unfastened the flap, and rummaged about inside. After a moment she pulled out a round bundle bigger than a man’s fist and handed this to Sulema as if it were of little note. Curious, Sulema let the wrappings fall away, and gasped to see the rose-rock globe her father had shown her in Atualon. Veined in lapis and set with jewels, the globe, as Ka Atu had explained, was a miniature of their world; anything which affected the land might be reflected upon the stone’s surface. It was possible, he had added, that damage to this artifact might in turn wreak havoc upon their lives.

  “This…” She breathed. “My father said it was too powerful for me to handle.”

  “Your father is dead,” Yaela said, sharp and short. “This is my offer to you, should you return from the Seared Lands with my Maika.”

  “You offer me… this globe?” Sulema wanted to laugh, but she remembered how the shadows had fled Yaela’s presence. “You have already given it to me.”

  “I offer you the world, Sulema Ja’Akari. I offer you freedom.”

  “But… how?” Sulema stared longingly at the globe. Freedom. “Even if I was not locked in a dungeon—which I am—I am bound to Atualon by blood and honor, and I am bound to weakness by the reaver’s magic, as well. How can I ever be free?”

  “I can use shadowmancy and the magic in Cassandre’s painting to free you from this place. That is a simple matter. Crafting a medicine that will cure you of the reaver’s venom for good will cost me a great deal more, and the risk will be… considerable. If I am to perform such a dangerous task for you, you must repay me in kind. As for the ties of blood and honor, you will have to learn to sever or live with them yourself, just as we all do. I am an Illindrist’s apprentice, not Illindra herself.

  “Here is my offer, then. Agree to bring to me my little niece, my Maika, daughter of my twin who died birthing her, and I will give you, Sulema Ja’Akari ne Atu, the greatest treasure any person can hope for—a chance at freedom. Freedom from Atualon, from the reaver’s venom, to become again who you once were. A warrior blessed to ride the desert sands, beneath the gaze of Akari.”

  Free of the Dragon’s Legacy at last, Sulema thought. Is such a thing possible? She knew only that she had to try.

  “Yes,” Sulema said simply. “Yes. Show me the way.”

  Yaela rocked back on her heels and let out a long, low breath. Shadows flowed back into the room like the river after spring rains.

  “That is the easy part,” she said. “You already know the way, truly. Here, touch this, here…” she moved Sulema’s finger to a tiny jagged chip like blackened bone upon the globe, not far from the gem that was Min Yaarif. “Yes, just like that. Now, look at the painting Cassandre made of you. The real painting. Close your waking eyes, open your dreaming ones, and look.” Even as she spoke, Yaela struck a dancer’s pose, one arm above her head, hand twisting like leaves in a summer wind. Her spine arched, and she flowed like dark water. “Look!”

  Sulema closed her waking eyes, just as her mother had taught her, back when the world was sweet and Hafsa Azeina immortal. She drew in a long, slow breath and as she let it out again allowed it to resonate through the singer’s bone deep within her face that Aasah had been teaching her to use, the one he had referred to as her hidden mask.

  “Ohnnnnn,” she sang, feeling a bit foolish. “Ohnnnnnn…”

  Her dreaming eyes opened slowly, slowly. Shadows writhed like snakes in every corner; they dripped like black blood down the walls. Yaela was, oh, she was beautiful, and how she danced—

  The painting Cassandre had presented to the dragon court, of Sulema as an Atualonian princess, wavered and fled like a mirage. The true image, hidden by the artist’s magic, flowed from the canvas hot and real as the desert sun. She gazed upon herself as she had been, as she would be again. Sulema Ja’Akari, true daughter of the desert, fierce and free. It seemed almost as if she could reach up and tug at the warrior’s braids that she had worn, which had been cut away from her to mark her shame.

  A hot wind caressed her shorn scalp—

  The dunes were so cunningly, so lovingly depicted it seemed as if she could almost hear them singing. Sand burned gold beneath Akari’s gaze.

  Her feet burned—

  The river, the sweet Dibris, was a shining ribbon of blue in the distance; she could all but smell it.

  Somewhere in the distance a serpent sang, sweet and low, and was answered by another. Its mate perhaps, or a sister, welcoming the lost one home.

  “Sulema. Sulema! Wake. Wake now, aiwa! We are here!”

  There was joy in the young shadowmancer’s voice, and it startled Sulema so that she opened her eyes. Opened them and blinked against the hot blue sky. When had she fallen asleep? And how?

  She pressed her hand against the ground and came up with a handful of sand. How—

  A shadow fell across her. It was Yaela, face split in two with the most beau
tiful, most brilliant smile Sulema had ever seen.

  “I did it!” The shadowmancer’s apprentice exulted. She threw her head back and laughed. “It worked!”

  “What?” Sulema sat up, faint from long captivity and from shock. “What?”

  She was sitting upon the sand, beneath a hot blue sky, in the shadow of a twist of standing stones like and not like the Bones of Eth. In the distance she could see the shining blue Dibris as it snaked across the Zeera, with a belly full of life, a belly full of death. A harsh wind stroked the dunes and they curled upon themselves like waves, roused to dance and to song.

  Sulema closed her eyes and her heart broke at the sound of the desert singing. Singing her home.

  SEVEN

  The Great Salt Road began at the heart of the world and went on forever, glittering with the sung bones of heroes, cobbled with the unsung bones of ordinary people, bitter with the red salt dust.

  Born in the aortic tunnels of the red salt mines of Quarabala, it flowed through the land like blood through a person’s body, bringing the life-sustaining red salt to every corner of the known world. From the deepest mines and canyons in the subterranean queendom of Quarabala to the easternmost reaches of the Sindanese empire and beyond it rang with the hooves of mounted warriors, sang with the voices of merchants, and bound them all together even as Illindra’s web bound all worlds.

  A book had been placed in Maika’s hands before she could walk, and she had spent her childhood with a coterie of tutors whose collective goal was to stuff every bit of Saodan’s massive libraries into the stuff between her ears. She knew that the Great Salt Road led up through the shallow cracks in the earth that marked the Edge of Quarabala, across the seared flesh of the earth on a portion of the route known as the shadowed roads, through the once-thriving merchant city Min Yahtamu, through the Jehannim and to the green world beyond. She knew the names of the engineers who had delved deep and wrought the road from living rock, could recount its history and the value of trade goods that followed Quarabalese shadowmancers into the green lands and back again. Yet knowing of the road was not the same thing as understanding its perils.