The man bristled at her insulting words, but spears bristled back at him, and finally he backed down with an ugly laugh.
“Not worth the fight, you,” he said. “Little girls and old women not fit for my nag. When you are gone, I will shit in your bed and eat your food.”
Maika imagined an Araid wrapping this man up in spidersilk, and smiled.
“The price for passage is—” He looked around him, at the people, the warriors, the counselors, and licked his lips. “Sweet water, and red meat, and your nubile women.”
“Unacceptable.” As Akamaia had taught, Maika did not elaborate or allow outrage to show in her voice, but merely waited for his counteroffer. I should let my nubile women kick his ass, she seethed. As if I would buy my safety with the bodies of my people.
“Girl children—” he began again. Maika raised her hand and cut him off.
“No,” she told him. “Not one woman, nor man nor child. Name another price. You try my patience.”
Makune hit her with a black scowl. “Sweet water,” he growled. “Red meat, and—” He glanced at Akamaia with greedy eyes. “An Illindrist. Make magic for us. Keep safe.”
The seer sucked breath in through her teeth with a sharp whistle, and Tamimeha’s grip tightened on her spear. Maika held up her hand again, and pitched her voice to carry.
“Manna water,” she offered, “not sweet. Dried meat, as much as you alone can carry. Not a single Illindrist or shadowmancer, but”—she ignored Akamaia’s hot, hard glare—“my own Illindrist will cast a blessing on you and yours, a protection against reavers. That is my offer. That is my only offer.”
The words hung between them like a body in a spider’s web, and the man remained silent for what seemed like an eternity. Finally he shrugged, face unreadable.
“Manna water, dried meat—packed tight, no cheat—and magic blessing for me and my chiefs against our enemies.”
“Against reavers,” Maika corrected.
“Against reavers,” the man agreed, and a sly smile stole across his face. “What other enemies do we have out here on the Edge, hah? Surely not you. You are our queen.” He laughed, his hard round belly shaking as if they were the cleverest words ever uttered.
Maika let her hands drop to her side, resisting the urge to rub at her throbbing temples.
A headache, she thought ruefully. Now I really do feel like a queen.
* * *
After the queen’s ransom had been delivered, the people of Quarabala resumed their slow and wretched exodus. Tamimeha and her strong women encouraged them to move as quickly as they were able, and for a time the pace quickened, spurred on by the Iponui’s shouts and deep-seated fear of the Edgelanders, but soon the weariness which clung to them all tight as clothes dragged at their feet. Somewhere nearby a child sobbed, a thin, hopeless sound that wrung tears from Maika’s eyes. She despaired that even the fittest citizens would be hard pressed to keep up the pace, and that the frailest would soon be lost.
“My queen,” Amalua murmured to her, “you must understand—some of these people will die. Perhaps many of them will die, but if you survive this journey, and a greater portion of our people as well, you will have succeeded. We have our books, our songs, our seers—you will have saved the heart of Quarabala, if not our cities.”
The horrifically scarred runner had shadowed Maika since the day she had faced down the Edgeland leader, sleeping curled at the edge of Maika’s bedroll as she slept, even insisting on tasting food and drink before it passed the queen’s lips. Maika suspected that the young Iponui felt as if she had failed to save those at the outer bastion, and wished for a chance to redeem herself.
She nodded reluctantly.
“I know,” the young queen said. “I just wish—I wish I could save everyone.”
“You cannot,” Amalua answered, and a cold wind blew through her words. “I cannot. No one can.”
They had been moving quickly for some nights’ time, sleeping during the hours of heat so that the shadowmancers could rest in preparation for working their magics when they reached the shadowed roads. These lands had been the outer bastions when Maika’s grandmother had been a queen, and they had been part of the inner city in her grandmother’s grandmother’s time. Now it was the Edge, the half-dead shallows of a sea of salt and blood and frightened people drying and dying under the wrathful eyes of Akari.
This land has been shrinking in on us all along, she thought, like a spider’s web unraveling at the edges, till nothing is left but the spider and a few sad strands. Had we remained, we would have died anyway, in my time or my daughter’s, perhaps. It is good we left when we did—perhaps I have saved my people, after all.
Or perhaps, whispered the dark voice of doubt, you have simply hastened their deaths.
“How do I know?” she whispered, anguished. “How do I know?”
“How do you know what?” Akamaia asked, not as lost in thought as Maika had guessed.
“How do I know if I have done the right thing, leading my people from their homeland? What if we all die here? What if we die when we are on the naked earth, and Akari flies above us? What if—”
“You will never know,” Akamaia interrupted gently, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Not until the historians write the books of these times and the ink dries, not until you are old as dust and your name is used to bore a schoolgirl to tears. Maybe not even then.”
“Yet you know,” Maika insisted. “You with your eyes of Pelang and your o’oraid, you can see the future.”
Akamaia shook her head. “I can see a short way,” she amended. “It is like staring into a clouded pool: you see a fish flashing by, maybe, or a bit of moonslight shining upon the water. Mostly you see your own face reflected up at you, puzzled and confused and lost.”
“You said the Araids are coming,” Maika said, “that they would overrun Quarabala and kill us all if we remained.”
“I did, and they are,” the seer agreed. “Likely the Araids rule in Saodan now, and would be feasting on our flesh had we remained. Yet I cannot tell you with certainty whether we survive this journey, or this day, even this hour. That which is seen does not always come to pass, and that which comes to pass is not always seen. This is why we have sa and ka—to sense the land about us, the song of earth and sky and wind. It is also why we have Iponui and warriors, and our own strong eyes.” She patted Maika’s arm. “And strong, smart young queens who question everything. With these tools, we may have hope.”
“It is not much.”
“No, it is not,” Akamaia agreed. “But it is something. And it may be—if we are lucky, and smart, and brave—it may be enough.”
They walked on in silence after that. Maika listened to the shushhh-shushhh of the warriors’ feet padding along the path, to the crunch and whisper of bone and dust beneath them. To the dry hot wind that sucked through the rifts like the air through an angry old woman’s lips. They were closer to the surface than Maika had ever been, so close the path and the walls were hot to touch, though the shadowmancers strove to shade and cool their steps. She strained her eyes upward, hoping—though she knew better—to catch a quick, far-off glimpse of this sun dragon who had banished her people to lives of exile and darkness.
Bright as gold, they said of the sun, hot as fire. Though it was folly to look upon the sun here, in the Seared Lands, to have one’s flesh melted away and bones crisped to dust. Maika had always longed to turn her face to the sun’s warmth, just once, to look upon the dreadful splendor of Akari Sun Dragon.
To ride beneath the sun, as those horse-warriors of legend, she thought, closing her eyes and walking blind, must be glorious.
Urged by Akamaia’s words, she unfurled her ka up toward the seared surface of the earth, let the tongues of sa taste the wind. She sensed the moving body of her people like a great mass of life and light and brilliance, a lovely low chorus of vibrance defying the silence of rock and dust. They burned bright as stars, the souls of her people, like hearthfires on
a cold night, or—
Above them, in the cold faces of a forgotten city, bright lights winked and shone. They moved furtively, in twos and threes, above and before the seething mass of humanity, closing in from all sides. Maika’s eyes flew open and she gasped.
“Ware!” she shouted, breathless, pointing up and up into the canyon walls above. She could not see them with her eyes open, but she knew they were there: enemies, armed enemies, waiting in the dark. “Ware! We are betrayed!” For she had no doubt that this had been the Edgelanders’ plan all along; to lure them into this quiet place and kill them all.
Makune ducked away from the warriors and would have run, but Amalua caught him by the hair. She dragged him down to the ground at her feet, and without a word or a glance at her queen she drew a long knife and stabbed him in the eye with it. The Edgelander screamed, horribly, heels drumming against the sung bones of heroes, raising the dust and shadows of the dead as his soul flew to join them.
Maika stared. She had seen animals butchered, had attended executions of prisoners, but she had never seen death like this. Raw and ugly and stinking, spraying blood and eye fluids as it went. Amalua wrenched her knife free and wiped it on the Edgelander’s filthy robes even as he gasped in the dirt.
“Araids take him,” she said, spitting upon his ruined face. “I knew he was a liar.”
Maika opened her mouth—to say what, she had no idea—and laughter bubbled out; loud, clear laughter like a child’s. She clapped both hands over her face.
A man died, she told herself. His blood is on my feet! And I am laughing—
Even that thought was torn from her as, in the next moment, men swarmed down the cliff face, screaming, blades flashing in the dim light. She drew her knife and held it before her, trembling like a moth in a spider’s web.
A queen is not afraid, she told herself. A queen is not afraid.
“Spears!” Tamimeha cried, and warriors clustered thick around their queen, bristling outward, grim-faced and ready to die. “We are betrayed!”
And then there was no more time for fear.
* * *
The Edgelanders attacked the shadowmancers first, and the women with children next. Perhaps they wanted to take them as prisoners, or perhaps they guessed—rightly—that the warriors of Quarabala would not resist the urge to protect the most vulnerable, at any cost to themselves.
Men poured down the sides of the canyon like the spiders of Starfell Gates. They were armed mostly with clubs, knives, and crude spears, but what they lacked in weapons and training they made up for in numbers and sheer savagery. Maika watched in horror as one of these low-caste men threw himself upon Tamimeha, teeth snapping like a reaver as he tried to bite her throat. He was cast off, and the next as well, but looking up at the swarm of Edgelanders and listening to the screams of her people, Maika knew they would be overwhelmed. She gripped her knife with a trembling hand, drew a breath, and prepared to die.
There was an odd whistling noise, like the wind in a narrow canyon, and Maika’s first thought was that it might be bats, or birds. Then something brushed across the top of her head, as if death itself had reached a hand from Eid Kalmut to ruffle her hair, and she let out an involuntary squeak of fright.
“Archers!” she cried. “Ware archers!”
Another arrow whispered overhead, not so close this time but still terrifying, and Amalua shouted as a third landed with a soft clatter at her feet.
“My queen!” she shouted. “To my queen! Ulukau i ka Peleha o’e!” So saying, she scooped Maika up in her strong arms—knife, mask and all—and began to run toward an overhang in the rock.
Perhaps her shouts had drawn the attention of the archers, or perhaps they knew to look for a young girl who had the foolish arrogance to have been born a Kentakuyan queen. Maika would never know. Arrows fell about them thick as secrets as Amalua ran for their lives. Maika clung to the Iponui and felt the woman’s shoulders jerk, her footsteps falter, felt the body jerk again, but she did not stop or slow her pace until they had reached scant shelter. Even then she curled protectively around the queen, shielding her body. Her arms tightened, and she breathed into Maika’s ear in long, shuddering, warm gasps.
“Mother,” Amalua whispered. “Tell my mother—oh, my queen—tell her—”
And then there was nothing but the gentle fall of arrows, the singing screams of the wounded and dying, the long empty silence between the breath that was and the breath that would never be.
* * *
“She is here! I have found her!”
The voice came from far away. The world shifted and a weight, a great and heavy cold weight, was lifted from her shoulders.
I will die now, Maika thought. They have discovered me. She shivered in the cold and dark, waiting for these crude men to hack her into pieces, or worse. In the end, it was her own warriors who had found her.
The Edgelanders had been defeated, beaten back, chased to their mean camps and put to the spear. Akamaia had lived through the attack, though one arm had been badly broken, and her trifold loom smashed to pieces. Tamimeha had survived as well, without suffering so much as a torn fingernail, much to her shame. Too many of their own citizens had been killed in the attack, but they had lost a great many more warriors.
Their greatest loss was the loss of hope. The shadowmancers had been hit first and hardest, their sparse numbers decimated. Only four remained alive—four, when two dozen had scarcely been enough to protect the people in their exile and exodus. Four surviving, their scent now carried in the winds and wounded flesh of the Seared Lands, a lure to shadows and greater predators of the worst sort.
It was the death of all hope. The hopeless men of the Edge had not hoped to gain anything through their actions so much as they desired to drag the lives of others down into the same miserable pit they had dug for themselves.
Maika trembled and wept as the body of her faithful Iponui was dragged off her. Beautiful, bright Amalua had died protecting her queen. When they rolled her over, Maika could see her eyes, flat and dry and blind, staring up toward the sky.
A low wail rose from the bottom of the young queen’s soul. It wound its way like a dark snake through her gut, her heart, her lungs, and finally burst through her mouth into the dangerous world. She screamed, and screamed again, jaw cracking and chest heaving as she could not force the utter wrongness of what she was feeling out and away from her body fast enough.
“Hush, sweet girl, hush, my queen,” Tamimeha murmured as she helped Maika to her feet. She glanced around them and leaned in to whisper. “Be still. Have courage. The people need to see you alive and well and confident. We will survive this. We will. Have no fear, my queen.”
Maika closed her mouth and clenched her teeth hard, so hard her jaw ached, in an effort to hold the screams back. A shudder shook her thin frame and tears rolled like thunder down her face as she stared into the empty eyes of the Iponui. Amalua, she thought, would have understood. It was not fear she felt, not for her person or even for the fate of her people.
It was rage.
NINE
The sand beneath her bare feet was white as bones, and softer than the sands of home. The wind that swept down from the peaks of the Jehannim to the foothills where she stood whispered of early berries and sage and wyverns’ eyries. The mountains’ passions were clutched in stony fists and held up to the sun, not buried and secret like the heart of the desert or locked away in dark places like the daughters of dragons.
Sulema wiggled her toes, luxuriating in the sensations on her unclothed body, of wind and sunlight and freedom. It was not home, but neither was it a dungeon.
“I thank you,” she said, and meant it. “Had I remained in Atukos, likely I would have died of thirst. I might have worked out a way to escape”—she thought specifically of the Dreaming Lands— “but I thank you.”
“If you had remained in Atualon, you would have been dead before tomorrow’s dawn,” Yaela said. She dug through her bag and pulled out article
s of clothing to toss to Sulema. “Bashaba plans to have poisoned gasses pumped into your cell through the drain-holes. Here, you cannot go naked into the mountains. I did not rescue you from the Dragon King’s dungeons to lose you to sun-sickness.”
“Bashaba. I do not even know the woman. How can she hate me enough to want me dead?” Then Sulema looked, really looked at the clothing Yaela had tossed at her feet. “My vest! You brought my vest! How did you…?” She turned her face away, to hide shameful tears.
“Bashaba does not hate you. You are a threat to her son, and she would see you eliminated. Surely the daughter of Hafsa Azeina understands this.” Yaela rolled her eyes at Sulema’s stupidity. “Cassandre still had your clothing from the last time she painted you, and I thought you would prefer them than slippers and gowns, or a golden crown.” Her lips twitched. “Certainly they are more sensible.”
“Ah, my thanks, this is much better.” Sulema wriggled with delight as she laced up her vest. It felt like home. She hoped that she would not have to bare her breasts on this day. She wanted a meal, and sleep, and another meal before she was forced to fight so much as a stray thought. “Cassandre knows of this?”
“When the magic in her painting is discovered—and it will be discovered—her life will be forfeit. She and all who loved you in Atualon will fall under suspicion, and if Bashaba has her way, they will fall under the sword, as well.”
Sulema’s breath caught in her throat, and she shut her eyes against an upwelling of grief and shame. That sweet, bright, joyous Cassandre would die because of her was unthinkable; that she would not be the first to die for her was horrifying. What about me is worth dying for? she asked herself. Nothing. Nothing. She had grown up Ja’Akari, and knew a true thought when it came to her.
She thought of Daru, her mother’s little apprentice who had gone missing and was almost certainly dead, and of her brother Leviathus. Of Saskia, and others of the Ja’Akari whose bones lay unburned in foreign lands because of her birth or her folly. She could not yet face those deaths which lay so near to her heart, and which could arguably be laid at her feet: those of her mother and father. Too close, too new. Neither did she mention aloud the name of Mattu Halfmask, her lover and the younger son of Bashaba. Sulema refused to think of him, that ten-faced bastard, or give a damn whether he lived or died. And she most certainly did not miss him.
The Seared Lands Page 8
