The Diviner (golden key)

by Melanie Rawn

  Also in Sihabbah that spring he received from the women who had carried his father’s murdered body down from the mountain a small silken pouch containing twenty-two pearls. He knew these gems; they had been part of his mother’s bridal necklace. The women had picked them carefully from the charred remains of the House of al-Gallid. The moment he saw them was the first time anyone ever saw tears in his eyes.

  By summer’s end, the Haddiyat of the Shagara had made of these pearls earrings for Mirzah, Ra’abi, Jemilha, Za’arifa, and Mairid, the daughter born that summer. Two pearls remained, and these Alessid had placed on the chain of his hazzir, near his heart, in memory of his mother.

  And, perhaps, his father.

  —RAFFIQ MURAH, Deeds of Il-Nazzari, 701

  14

  All that remained was Hazganni. Alessid remembered the city from his childhood: a cheerful maze of shops, houses, mansions, gardens, warehouses, and the huge central zouq where once he and his brother Bazir had escaped Fadhil’s watchful eye for one whole delightful afternoon. The belting they had received that evening had been well worth the excitement. In the vast zoqalo, all manner of vendors sold a dizzying variety of merchandise: whole rainbows of bright silks and woven woolens, thread and yarn, buttons and lengths of embroidery, spices and candies, shoes and scarves and cloaks and gloves, pottery jars, brass plates, bronze bells, copper bowls, “silver” jewelry that was really tin, wooden toys . . .

  There was also an array of “medical” specialists, hawking cures for the bald and the ugly, the sore and the lame, and every disease with which Chaydann al-Mamnoua’a had ever afflicted humankind. Bazir’s favorite had been an old man in the very center of the zoqalo who sing-songed his skills while pacing back and forth on a garish carpet, a gruesome collection of clamps and pliers jingling from a chain around his neck as he rattled a tray of successfully yanked teeth. Alessid, gazing down at the city from the hills, smiled to think that perhaps that same old man would be there, exhibiting his souvenirs to other wide-eyed, deliciously horrified boys. The great zouq had been a magical place, and Alessid had loved the tangle of it, the smells, the noise, the swift brilliance of color and movement.

  But he was told that the zoqalo was nearly empty now, nearly silent. The local vendors were all too terrified to set foot outside their own shops, if any. The towers and walls built at Sheyqir Za’aid’s order kept folk from the countryside from freely entering the city with their wares. There was poverty within and without those walls. From a hilltop three miles from Hazganni, Alessid cursed Sheyqir Za’aid for the people’s sake.

  For his own, he damned the man for destroying the trees. Not because his father had either planted them himself or encouraged others to do so; not because without them there was no protection from the ever-hungry desert; not even because of his childhood memories of playing beneath those trees. The groves would have made cover enough for an army twice the size of Alessid’s. Now there was nothing between him and Hazganni but miles of dead open country.

  Turning his back on the city, he walked downhill to his tent. There, beside the fire, Jefar was brewing qawah for the qabda’ans. The warriors of the Za’aba Izim were consolidated now, over a thousand strong. They knew how to fight; every man had been in at least ten actions. Their horses—many of them pure white, captured from the Qoundi Annam—were fully trained to war. Alessid had kept them in their original groupings, one for each of the seven tribes. But they knew they must now become a single force, to take Hazganni.

  Alessid stood apart for a few moments, surveying the qabda’ans. Despite having been divorced by their wives, Kemmal still led the Tallib and Kammil was qabda’an of the Harirri. Alessid’s third son, Addad, was in no danger of being divorced; his wife was hugely pregnant, and the Azwadh followed the husband of their beloved Black Rose as if he had been born one of them. Alessid had blood ties to the Ammal, as well, for Mirzah’s grandmother and great-grandmother had been of that tribe. The qabda’an of the Tabbor had wed Mirzah’s close cousin. Only the Tariq had no intimate ties to Alessid. The Shagara themselves were, of course, Alessid’s personal army.

  Over a thousand, all told. Within Hazganni and patrolling its walls were more than twice that number.

  Accepting the cup Jefar offered him, Alessid sat on a flat rock and addressed his qabda’ans. “Aqq’im, my esteemed brothers, we cannot storm the walls of this city. They will see us coming for miles, even at night with a dark moon. It seems to me there are two alternatives. Either we face them in open battle on the plain outside the city, or we destroy them from within.”

  They all knew that neither would be easy to accomplish. Why should the Qoundi Ammar come out to do battle, when all they need do was laugh atop the towers? And how could anyone get inside a city so tightly shut that not even a snake could slither inside unremarked?

  “If we could get inside,” mused Addad, “the people might aid us. Surely they know what we’ve done for others, what we hope to do for them.”

  “Grandson,” said Razhid, “when Sheyqir Za’aid first came here, the people of Hazganni capitulated rather than fight for their city and their freedom. After nearly twenty years, can you think they would suddenly rise up?”

  Addad sighed. “You’re right, of course, Grandsire. But surely there must be some who would aid us.”

  “And how could we find them? Sneak someone inside and have him knock on doors asking if anyone would care to open the gates for us?” Razhid echoed his grandson’s sigh. “There may be some, as you say, who would help us—but there will be many, many more who would gladly sell us to the Sheyqir.”

  Alessid nodded. “I don’t think it’s possible to get enough warriors secretly inside to make a difference. Yet how can we lure them out of their security into battle?”

  “Do we have to?” asked Azadel Tabbor, a fiercely bearded man whose shoulder muscles bulged beneath his robes. “Could we not starve them out?”

  Alessid raised a hand as if to ward off such an occurrence. “The people of the city would be burying each other long before the Sheyqir feels even the slightest pang of hunger. Our enemies are the soldiers of the Qoundi Annam, not the forty thousand people of Hazganni.”

  “Al-Ma’aliq,” said Kammil, giving his father the formal title rather than calling him Ab’ya, “may I point out that we have what the Sheyqir does not?”

  “More horses?” Tabbor asked, frowning. “Finer warriors? A better commander?”

  Kemmal nodded acknowledgment of the compliment to his father, then glanced at his twin. “Those, certainly,” he agreed. “But I believe my brother has something else in mind.”

  Two days later, his eldest sons came to Alessid’s tent and presented him with a plain wooden box. Inside, resting on black silk, was a simple rectangular plaque, three inches high and two wide, depicting an ibis in low relief. Inspecting it without touching it, Alessid listened to his sons explain.

  “We reworked an existing piece,” Kemmal began, “for as you know we’re both terrible at design and crafting. Grandfather Razhid remembered that his grandfather had an ibis hazzir, for what purpose he didn’t recall, and that it had been passed to youngest sons at their marriage.”

  “And now—?” Alessid prompted.

  “Magic—both the silver and the bird. We set the sapphire eye to give dreams of loss. It was done in late morning, when it is most powerful.”

  Kemmal said, “And the onyxes were done at midnight. One stone on the breast for doubts, the other atop the head for terrifying dreams.”

  “Have you a plan for getting this to the Sheyqir? It is a magnificent piece, and he is greedy, like all of his kind, but suspicious. I can’t just send it to him.”

  “There is among us one who volunteered to ‘betray’ our people,” Kammil told him. “He will say it is out of concern for relatives inside Hazganni, but he will make it obvious enough that he is simply a coward terrified of the coming battle—”

  “A nice impression for them to have of us!” Alessid approved. “Go
on.”

  “This will be in his possession, but we haven’t decided if it is a token of his good faith, stolen from someone important—perhaps yourself, Ab’ya—as a gift for the Sheyqir, or if it would be more subtle to make it a family treasure with which he is reluctant to part. He feels confident that he can make either work and can get it into the Sheyqir’s hands.”

  “And who is this supposed traitor?”

  The twins exchanged half-glances. “Jefar.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Ab’ya—”

  “No.” He stared at the hazzir for a time. “Should this reach the Sheyqir, will this frighten him enough?”

  “Over time, yes.”

  “How much time?”

  They traded looks again. Kammil answered, “Perhaps a month.”

  “We don’t have a month.” Alessid shut the box. “Make it more powerful.”

  “Ab’ya—” Kemmal bit his upper lip. “These are things the mouallimas caution against. We Haddiyat learn the sigils and the properties of the gems, but there are certain applications—”

  “—that are not done,” Alessid finished for him. “Do you see any mouallimas here? Do they ride with us, their swords ready to take Hazganni? Make it stronger, Kemmal.”

  “With respect, Ab’ya—”

  “Acuyib give me patience! If a man’s family is starving and a sheep is available to him and he knows how to slaughter it, he slaughters the damned sheep!”

  “But if it is the only one left, his family will soon starve anyway.” Kammil met his gaze squarely. “Should we work this hazzir to be more powerful—to do actual harm rather than merely suggesting certain things to the Sheyqir’s mind—”

  “Enough!” Alessid slapped his hands on his thighs. “I want this man frightened out of his wits. I want him sick with fear—in both his mind and his body. I want him plagued and tormented and leaping at the smallest shadow. Do you understand me? Either make this more powerful or think up something else.”

  “Yes, Ab’ya,” they said together, and departed his tent.

  Eight days later, on a fine, fair evening just before dusk, Alessid rode to a promontory overlooking Hazganni. The setting sun glowed behind him, turning his robe and his horse’s cream-gold hide to molten sunlight. The soldiers on duty in the tower saw him at once. An alarm drum pounded, and the walls bristled silver with swords and spears.

  Alessid watched. A stray bit of whimsy left somehow inside him observed that the city looked rather like a prickleback hunching to bristle its spines: silly and ineffectual against anything larger than a snake. There was a lesson in it, he mused—the little animal trusted too much to its defenses against a particular enemy and had not the wit even to realize that other enemies could be much more dangerous.

  Too, he thought, the wayward amusement diverting him again, it was a clever snake that knew a mouthful of spines was avoidable. All it had to do was find a single slender gap in all those defenses, slither through it, and strike.

  At length, in a voice honed by years of training his cavalry in the wide wilderness, he shouted, “Soldiers of the Qoundi Ammar! Tonight your sleep will bring you dreams of the future! We show you these visions in warning of what is to come!”

  Behind him, out of the soldiers’ sight, his men began to chant: “Ah-less-eed ! Ah-less-eed! Ah-less-eed!”

  He let the sound wash past him, flowing down the rise to surge against the city walls like the ocean few of them had ever seen. If there was laughter among the Qoundi Ammar, and he knew there would be, it was drowned in the rhythmic tide of his name.

  He smiled and rode away.

  That night, wrapped in black cloaks and protected by potent hazziri, Kemmal and Kammil walked down the hillside. Silent as shadows and as invisible, they worked with swift thoroughness. On each of the four towers and at the midpoint of each connecting wall, they wrote and drew. By midnight, Hazganni was encircled with Shagara magic, delineated in al-Ma’aliq blood.

  The next evening, just at dusk, Alessid once more rode golden Qishtan down to the hillock. The response was the same, with soldiers scrambling to their posts, but this time someone threw an axe at him. He watched it thunk harmlessly to the ground far from where he sat his horse, and smiled.

  “Soldiers of the Qoundi Ammar! Tonight every bond in the city will loosen! Listen while stones shift against their mortaring, and know that the walls of the al-Ammarizzad are beginning to topple!”

  “Ah-less-eed! Ah-less-eed! Ah-less-eed!”

  Over dinner that night, Razhid observed, “Our old friend Abb Shagara, may his soul find splendor with Acuyib, would have loved this. And Fadhil would have been appalled—or at least feel compelled to give the appearance of it before laughing himself out of breath.”

  Alessid poured more qawah for them both. “Ayia, if I didn’t keep Abb Akkil Akkem Akkim Akkar strictly out of my thoughts as I bellow at the top of my lungs, I’d be laughing so hard I’d fall from my saddle. And think what an inspiring picture that would be!”

  His wife’s father eyed him. “Alessid, did you just make a joke?”

  He thought for a moment, then smiled. “I believe I did.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.” After a wry grin, Razhid grew serious. “How are the boys feeling?”

  “Fine. Is there a reason they shouldn’t?”

  “Surely you know what they’re using to write with.”

  “Of course. I’m their commander.”

  “And their father! They worship you, Alessid. And they’ll spend themselves for you,” he warned, “completely and unselfishly.”

  “I know.” He thought of Mirzah and refused to let her father see his pain.

  When his sons returned very late that night, Alessid was waiting for them with strong wine, fresh fruit, and new-baked bread. “How many more nights can you do this?” he asked.

  “As many as you require of us, Ab’ya.”

  But Kammil was almost too tired to lift the cup to his lips, and Kemmal didn’t say anything at all. Razhid had been correct; they were spending themselves for him without thought to their health. If they returned to their mother’s tent as wilted and pale as they were now, Mirzah would slit Alessid’s throat.

  And she wouldn’t even wait until he was sleeping to do it.

  “I think we will let the Qoundi Ammar wait before the next working,” he said to his sons. “Wait, and wonder, and grumble about the Sheyqir—” He had been speaking almost at random, trusting his mind to come up with reasons convincing enough that would save his sons’ pride, but now he smiled in genuine liking for the idea. “—and exhaust themselves inspecting every wall in Hazganni!”

  Kemmal dutifully smiled back; Kammil dutifully protested, “We can continue as originally planned.”

  “I believe it would be better to wait a day.” He said the words in such a way that they knew they were not to argue.

  The next day while they slept, he took care of the restive elements among his cavalry. After a spring and summer of battles, every man was brashly convinced that he could defeat fifty Qoundi Ammar without breaking a sweat. They wanted to fight, and they wanted to do it now. Alessid appreciated and approved their zeal, but if all went as planned, they would do very little actual fighting for Hazganni. Where would all this energy go once they returned to their tents and the admiration of their people? It was a question that had been occupying his thoughts for quite some time.

  That afternoon Alessid found a quiet place away from the camp and sat down to consider. His men would return to their tribes and renew the ancient balance of life in the wilderness: work, family, seasonal travel from one place to another. These places had been claimed by them forever; Sheyqir Za’aid had perturbed the natural equilibrium between the wasteland and its people, but had not Alessid done the same thing even while he was attempting to restore it? The men of the Za’aba Izim knew now how to make war to take back what was theirs; would they ever use these skills to take what was not theirs?

&n
bsp; For one of the few times in his adult life he called up memories of his father, so that he could review his father’s memories. Rimmal Madar; Dayira Azhreq; the lying, greedy sheyqas who, not content to throw out barbarian invaders, had taken what had belonged to the al-Ma’aliq and made it theirs. Or attempted to. The al-Ma’aliq lands had never truly belonged to the al-Ammarizzad, any more than Hazganni and all the other towns and fields and forests and mountains of this country would ever belong to them. In truth, he could think of only one place and one people belonging entirely to and with each other: the desert and the Za’aba Izim.

  As he sat through the long hours of the night, gazing down at the city—and especially the ruined groves—it was with a slow and certain understanding that he discovered why.

  The Seven Names, the desert. The tribes were the land’s. They knew it, used it, cared for it. They knew the places where water, grazing, even fruit could be found; they hunted its animals and harvested its plants; they never lingered so long in one place as to deplete its resources. But how had it happened that the desert belonged as well to the Za’aba Izim? For Alessid knew it did; he had sensed it on some deeper level of his soul. It was not because they put walls around the desert, or drew adamant lines on maps, or defended it with their blood, or—

  No. That was the reason. The blood. Especially the blood of the Shagara.

  The sun and wind and water, the ground from which food grew—the herbs for medicine and the herbs for seasoning—all these things were within the Za’aba Izim and had been for uncounted lifetimes. Their bones and flesh and blood were made of the desert. In the Shagara, for reasons unknown and unknowable, that blood had turned into power.

  The land itself had given them the means with which to protect and defend it. The land was theirs.

  Not his. Not Alessid’s. He knew that. He no more belonged to this country than it could ever belong to him. He had not given it enough.

  Mother, father, sisters and brothers, friends—

  But not his blood.