The Seared Lands

by Deborah A. Wolf

  “Lehuahei?” Counselorwoman Puani interrupted, clutching her hands before her breasts. Maika, remembering that the woman kept husbands in that beautiful city, met her grieved eyes and shook her head.

  “All gone. I am sorry, my friend. They are lost to us, every one. The City of Queens has doubtless been taken by the Arachnists by now, and Araids are close enough to be taking and turning our own scouts against us. The choice is clear. Remain here in the Edge and die—or worse, find ourselves caught in an Arachnist’s web and turned to reavers.” Silence fell over the chamber thick as grave dust. Again Maika paused for effect, stilling her hands and feet, her face, lest her body betray nervousness. “Or we can fight, fight like the warriors of old, to find a way into the green lands where we might someday, somehow, build a new home for ourselves and our children.”

  Let them think I am stone, she thought, for stone is harder to break than flesh, and offers shelter to the besieged.

  Finally Counselorman Moki stood and bowed his head. “Lead us, o queen. The Ho’olau stand with the Kentakuyan, as ever of old. Though I do not believe there is hope, still I will fight with you against this wickedness which pursues us.”

  “And the Lehuaina,” Counselorwoman Puani agreed, her voice shaking but eyes fierce. “For my people. For vengeance.” One by one, the counselors stood and renewed their pledges of obedience.

  Maika was not finished.

  “Even the strongest heart might be swayed with fear,” she said. “Lehaila, too, pledged undying loyalty, and she was true—up until the minute of her betrayal. In dark and dangerous times, even the truest of hearts must be made stronger by… other means.”

  Even as she spoke, warriors poured into the room like sand. Each of them had been painted in an Iponui’s glow paints, their braids, the palms of their hands, and the soles of their feet oiled and gilded. Each warrior had a gemstone set into the skin in the center of her forehead. The Eye of Illindra, a soul-binding that marked them as hers to the core of their singing bones. Each of these warriors would die a thousand deaths before allowing the least harm to befall their queen.

  As well they would die when this binding was removed, or when their queen died. This was a bond entered into voluntarily, and only in the times of gravest need. Again the counselors fell to their knees in the dirt.

  Still Maika was not finished.

  She gave a signal and Tamimeha leaned to whisper into the ear of an exceedingly tall, thin warrior. That woman left the room and returned a few heartbeats later leading three prisoners, all robed and hooded in the sky-and-gold spidersilk of the condemned. These hoods were yanked off one by one to reveal the tear-stained and defeated faces of those shadowmancers who had agreed to escape with Lehaila.

  A low moan rose from one of the counselors. To violate the person of a shadowmancer was unthinkable.

  Let them moan, Maika thought. Lehaila’s plans of escape had to have been known, perhaps by a person or persons in this room, staring at me now with the taste of vows still upon their lips. Let them learn to fear me.

  At the very least, I will teach them to fear the price of betrayal. The shadowmancers dropped to their knees in the sand. Maika firmed her heart as she looked upon their terrified faces.

  “I have sentenced you to death,” she said.

  One woman began to weep. “I have a son! I only meant—”

  The warrior holding that woman’s collar gave it a brutal yank.

  “The dead do not speak,” Maika said in a soft voice. A visible shudder ran through counselors and prisoners alike.

  They see at last that the child is gone, Maika thought, and she had no time to feel sorrow for their loss. And that a queen has risen in her place.

  On cue, Akamaia’s three young apprentices filed in and took their places beside the prisoners, bearing bowls of manna milk laced with herbs and reaver venom, and bound with spells of Maika’s own weaving.

  “I have sentenced you to death,” Maika continued, “but am willing to commute this.” The prisoners stared wide-eyed and mute. “The life you had is over. The one you may yet live will belong to me. There is no betraying this vow. Will you pledge to me, in atonement to the people and the queen you betrayed? When you have come to the end of your path, Illindra may yet look upon you kindly.”

  “Yes, my queen,” one prisoner said.

  “I do so swear it.”

  Maika took a deep breath. A refusal would have weakened her in the eyes of the council. “And you?” she asked the third shadowmancer, an older man from Kaha’ai.

  “No,” he said shortly. “I will not do this. My people are gone, my wives, my husband. I will go to them with no stain upon my—”

  Tamimeha’s blade ended his speech. The warrior cleaned it on the shadowmancer’s robes even as his feet drummed an uneven tattoo on the packed sand floor.

  “When it is time to die,” she said, “it is best to die bravely, and without unnecessary talk.”

  Maika bit her lip to keep herself from breaking into wholly inappropriate laughter. What kind of monster am I, she wondered, to laugh at jokes as a man dies at my feet? And that man’s death left her people with one less shadowmancer to shield them on their run from the Edge to the Jehannim.

  The kind of monster that wields the power to lead her people to safety, whispered Na’eth in her mind. Remember what I taught you.

  Maika stood at last, arms outstretched to either side, letting the robes fall back and exposing the flesh of her wrists. Na’eth had shown this to her in visions and dreams: the bloodbound oath. The Sindanese daemons called their bloodsworn troops dammati; Maika would call hers shadowsworn.

  Tamimeha’s knife flashed red as it tasted a queen’s flesh. Strong brown fingers kneaded her forearm—it hurt— milking bright blood into the bowls as a gatherer might milk manna sap. These bowls were given to the two remaining shadowmancers, who drank the foul brew, and then were led from the chamber.

  Best let them work through the pain in private, Na’eth had suggested, lest the screams of their agony dissuade others from taking similar vows. Through this magic, Maika meant to eventually bind every Quarabalese shadowmancer and Illindrist to her; through their magic all the people of Quarabala would be bound, as well.

  The dead man—or nearly dead, his fingers still twitched occasionally—was picked up and carried out like a hunter’s kill, leaving a trail of blood as counterpoint to the warriors’ gold-dust footprints.

  The medicines Maika had taken that morning began to wear off. Her skin began to tingle, then itch, then burn, quickly. Maika bit back the pain and faced the room.

  Be strong, you little idiot, she chided herself. This is nearly finished. I cannot afford a show of weakness now. She cleared her throat, and the counselors looked at her, trepidation covering their features. Maika smiled down at them, attempting as she did so to appear as Queen Maika the Benevolent and Completely Unafraid.

  I can do this.

  I can.

  Just imagine that they are all naked…

  “Take your seats,” she urged, softening her voice so they would know she meant them no harm. “My faithful sisters, my good brothers, listen to what I have to say.

  “Long ago, Quarabala was the heart and spirit of this world. Long ago, a Dragon King of Atualon, in his great arrogance, dealt us a crippling blow. He released the fire of Akari, who rained down wrath and caused us to flee to dark places, there to live out our days in hiding. He broke our hearts, our spirit—

  “—but he did not break us.”

  There was a murmur of assent, of anger. Good, she thought. It was as Na’eth had suggested—let them direct their disquiet toward a foreign king, and not the queen who they have learned to fear.

  “Long, too long have our people kept to the dark, hiding our faces from the sun. Like parasites we live in the bones of the world and drink her blood. Long ago, the dragon and his brood forgot about us, their betters, whom they thought vanquished and gone.” Maika raised her hands, palms up, and her slee
ves fell back. In doing so she displayed the fresh cuts which signified the shadow-bond, and the queen’s duty to her people. There, newly emerging from her skin, she revealed glittering gems and strands of the Web of Illindra in all its glory.

  “My queen!” Tamimeha gasped, and then thrust her spear into the air, toward the sky beneath which they longed to walk. “My queen!”

  The warriors began to pound their spears and chant as the hooded figures of three young girls—Maika’s own apprentices, now—bore a gold-chased threefold loom into the chamber. An immense and glorious o’oraid crouched atop this loom, pleased with herself and her creation. She had spun an oracular web, dark and gorgeous, and it shimmered with power.

  The o’oraid was called Lailith. She was Maika’s, and Maika was hers. In the center of Lailith’s web, bound in shadows and magic, hung the Mask of Sajani. It glittered even in this low light and shone with a verdurous light of its own.

  “The world has forgotten us, its true masters,” Maika said, her words clear and powerful. “It is time now for us to remind them. It is time for us to return to the world above and take what is rightfully ours.”

  “And what is that, your Magnificence?” a counselorwoman asked in an awed voice.

  Maika leaned back fractionally and smiled the brightest, most winsome smile in her arsenal.

  “Whatever we wish, of course.”

  THIRTY - FIVE

  Sulema slept through an entire day and woke feeling nearly as tired as she had after attempting to sing Sajani to sleep.

  It is this blasted wound, she thought, rubbing her shoulder and shaking her sword arm, trying to shake the feeling back into it. From shoulder to elbow it tingled and ached as if it had been thrust into cold water, and fingers of pain stroked downward toward her spine.

  I need to return to Min Yaarif and find Yaela, if she is still alive, or get more medicines from that loremaster somehow. Rothfaust had hinted that a permanent cure was possible, but he was most likely dead. Sulema did not want to think what might happen if the venom’s cold fingers took hold of her heart. She did not wish to think of the reavers, their burnt-out bug eyes and shining hard skin. Neither did she wish to think of Yaela, whom she had begun to think of as a friend, and whose lies had led her to this impossible road—likely to her death.

  “Is aught wrong, your Radiance?” Tamimeha asked solicitously. She shadowed Sulema’s heels, as she had done much of the time since their arrival, and though she was courteous and helpful, Sulema could not help but think she was as much guard as guide. Sulema was weary of being guarded. “You seem angry.”

  “Tired,” she answered. “I am not used to being so far underground. It feels… odd.” This was truth, if not the whole truth, she told herself. She was tired, very tired of being lied to and used.

  “Mmm.” Tamimeha gave her a considering look. “Perhaps you would do well to take another sweat bath.”

  Sulema choked on her own spit. The Quarabalese were, if possible, less shy about bodily functions and bathing than even the Atualonians. The last time she had attempted to clean herself, Keoki had offered to wash her back… and then some.

  “I am clean,” she insisted. “Bathing too often weakens the constitution.”

  “Mmm.”

  They walked along the cobbled path that wove in and out among the crumbling walls of the city and watched the sun set. Before they abandoned this place the ancient Quarabalese engineers had, through a series of shafts and mirrors that Sulema did not fully understand, brought a semblance of the sky down into the deep rifts of the earth so that the people might gaze upon the stars and moons, or even feel sunlight upon their faces. A soft rosy glow warmed the blanched bones of the city and glittered among the gemstones that crusted many of the walls and fallen tiles that littered the road. Sulema, who had never been much for gilt or flowers or shiny stones, found herself charmed.

  “Pretty,” she murmured. “Even ruined like this, even after so long, it is pretty.”

  “Would that you had seen Saodan,” Tamimeha told her. “It is—it was—glorious.”

  Sulema glanced sideways at her companion, moved at the grief in her voice. Before she could formulate an answer that did not sound trite a series of horn blasts rang out, their lovely silvery voices reminding Sulema of the Dibris at springtime.

  “Ah!” Tamimeha said, stopping so abruptly that Sulema almost trod on her heels. “That is the call to council. We must go.”

  Sulema followed her guide-guard down and over and through a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Sulema wondered how her guide knew the way, and whether—as she suspected—this was not Tamimeha’s first stay in this place.

  Rehaza Entanye and Hannei joined them at one juncture, along with their own guards, and Keoki awaited them at the top of a flight of wide, shallow steps which had once been beautifully tiled in indigo and gold. The shadowmancer’s face was grave as he led them into an enormous chamber which had survived not only the years but the recent earthquake intact.

  Maika was there, and the stout woman with fantastic hair, and other men and women whose intricately embroidered if travel-stained robes hinted to Sulema that she was—once again—in over her head. The faces that turned as they entered the room were grave.

  “Well come and well met, your Radiance.” Maika, alone of all those gathered, looked entirely pleased to see her. She inclined her head slightly, and all those assembled fell to their knees. Sulema saw, or thought she saw, a shadow of uncertainty in the young queen’s pale eyes and felt a rush of affinity for the girl.

  We are both in over our heads, she thought. Though she hides it well. Straightening her back she schooled her face into a stern expression such as her mother might have worn. If this child can pretend such a calm confidence in these uncertain times, by Atu, I can fake it as well.

  “Here, my good people,” the young queen said, “is Sulema, daughter of Hafsa Azeina by the Dragon King of Atualon. Seldom have any made the journey from the golden Zeera to Quarabala, and never in such perilous times. Welcome, Sister Queen.” She held both hands out, smiling. Sulema could do nothing but go to her, accept the greeting, and take a place at her side. She took a deep breath as she turned to face the assemblage.

  It was easier to face the lionsnake. Sulema suppressed the thought that that had not turned out so well.

  “Perilous times indeed,” the stout woman agreed. “Why have you come, Dragon Queen of Atualon? If, indeed, that is who you are.”

  Sulema opened her mouth to answer, though she had no idea what she might say next. A risk, considering what often came out of her mouth, but Maika jumped in.

  “Counselorwoman Puani, you owe the Dragon Queen honor. She has come to save us.”

  “I have come to bring—” Sulema stopped, registering Maika’s words, then turned to gape at the girl. “I… what?”

  “You have.” The stubborn set of the girl’s mouth, a flash of defiance in those dark eyes, were strangely familiar. Where had she seen such an expression before?

  Oh, yes, she thought wryly. In the mirror.

  “You have come to save us,” the girl queen repeated firmly. “Though you did not know it. I have seen it in my dreams, and the oracle agrees—”

  “The oracle agrees that it is a possibility,” a woman’s voice said, strong and clear as a bell, “and that is all. Do not put words in my mouth.”

  Those already in the room rose quickly, preventing Sulema from seeing who it was that had spoken. When at last they were seated, and the speaker was brought forward, she was startled. Such a frail, old woman, to have spoken with such force. She was bent like an ancient tree twisted by powerful winds, and leaned on a staff of dark wood longer than she was tall. Her eyes were wide and pale as Yaela’s, a milky blue that was almost white and slit like a cat’s. Her robes were a swirl of color, and her hair hung in a multitude of grayed braids nearly down to her knees.

  These women have impressive hair, Sulema thought, and resisted the urge to ruffle her own or
ange fuzz in shame.

  The woman walked in a slow shuffle, moving with such deliberation that Sulema guessed she must have been in a great deal of pain. In the next moment two young men emerged from the doorway behind her, bearing between them what at first seemed a great wooden three-paneled loom, but on closer inspection was revealed to support a spider’s web like nothing Sulema had ever seen.

  The strands of webbing, thick as spun wool, were hung with all manner of jewels and feathers and bits of bone. In the center there hung, head down, the most enormous spider Sulema had ever seen. Easily twice as large as a russet soldier, this paragon of spiders was as resplendent as any human queen and radiated as much pride.

  She is magnificent, Sulema thought. Terrifying, but magnificent.

  “Spiders,” Rehaza Entanye groaned behind her.

  The stout woman offered her place of honor to the ancient woman, who waved her off impatiently.

  “Maika,” she scolded, as if the girl were merely a troublesome child and not a queen at all, “you were supposed to wake me.”

  “You were exhausted. I thought it best to let you sleep.”

  The old woman’s skin had an unhealthy, ashen pallor, and her hands trembled even as she gripped the staff.

  She is not long for this world, Sulema thought, and felt a moment’s pity for young Maika. The love between these two was as evident as the spider’s web, and as beautiful.

  “I can sleep when I am dead,” the old woman grumbled. “This is important. Now, you…” She pointed her chin at Sulema. “Why are you here?”

  Sulema was taken aback. “I made a vow,” she began.

  “Of course you made a vow. Nobody crosses the Seared Lands for the food.”

  Tamimeha coughed to cover a laugh.