“What does it say?” Idisio asked, opening his eyes.
“I have no idea,” Scratha admitted. His grin faded. “I think it's meant to be read in all directions at once. Humans can't possibly begin to interpret it.”
“But how. . . .” Idisio stopped, looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, and felt gooseflesh rippling along his arms. “This isn't a cut tunnel.”
Everyone looked up and around.
“So?” Riss said.
“It's a burrow,” Idisio said. “Like a snake's.”
The light flickered slightly.
“Not quite,” Scratha said hastily. “Don't compare them to any kind of reptile,” he added in a low undertone, bending further to speak into Idisio's ear. “They get upset.”
Idisio, with a sudden awareness of how far underground they were by now, and how precarious their light source, pressed his lips together.
Scratha glanced at Riss, who looked puzzled. “It's writing,” he said to her, “of a sort. It's meant to be read by touch, not sight, and it's all around the walls, which means the ha'reye probably fill the tunnel when they travel through it.”
“Probably?” Idisio said. “I thought you . . . knew . . . haven't you met . . . ?” He stopped, suddenly confused.
“We see of the ha'reye what they want us to see,” Scratha said. “Some have seen what is likely the true form. I've never been granted that.” He didn't sound regretful. “Let's keep going.”
* * *
Chapter Twenty
Aleya and Deiq sat on asun-warmed rock under an overhang, watching the last hour of daylight spread glorious sprays of gold, orange, peach and purple across the cloudless sky.
“You've passed the blood trials of Comos and Ishrai,” Deiq said. “There's one left.”
Alyea said nothing, waiting. Ever since she'd awoken some hours ago, she found herself strangely unwilling to speak unless she had to. The sound of her own voice felt odd to her ears, and her throat still hurt, as if she'd been screaming in her sleep.
Noise of any sort crackled painfully in her ears, like a burgeoning infection. Deiq spoke in a near-whisper. They'd come outside because the echoes of human movement bouncing from the rock walls made Alyea flinch.
Outside all was beautifully silent and still, save for the occasional whiss-scritch of desert animals venturing into the warm air.
“The sun-lord,” Deiq said finally, his gaze still far away, abstracted. “Datda. Most people won't name him. It's considered bad luck, unless you're a follower. He's the god of war, of death, disease, violence, and so on.”
“I'm going to have to fight?” Alyea said when it became clear Deiq had finished speaking.
“I don't know.” He rubbed the knuckles of one hand with the palm of the other and shut his eyes. “It's different for everyone.”
Alyea felt her forehead wrinkling into a frown. It hadn't been a lie, exactly, but she had a feeling he wasn't telling her the whole truth, either.
He looked up and caught her staring at him. A rueful grin appeared on his face. “Yes. Going through the trial of Ishrai makes you harder to fool.”
“So tell me,” she said.
“I can't. There are rules to the blood trials, Alyea. I can't interfere.”
She made a disgusted noise.
“Sorry,” he said, sounding completely unapologetic.
“What can you tell me? There has to be something!”
He considered, watching her closely. “I can tell you,” he said at last, “that if you lose, I can't help you, but you won't be bonded to me any more.” He cleared his throat and looked away, seeming uncomfortable.
“Because I'll be dead. No surprise there.”
“Not necessarily,” he said without looking at her. “I can't say more than that. I'm sorry.”
His expression, in profile, was so bleak as he stared at the horizon that she left him alone. They sat in silence, watching the sun settle into a fading glow, watching as the stars began to appear high above.
By evening of the next day, Alyea's sensitivity had eased enough that she could eat dinner with the Qisani community. The room stayed mostly silent. The ishraidain—women serving penance under the protection of Ishrai for various crimes—kept their vow of silence, and the Callen seemed to prefer to refrain from speaking themselves. When the Callen did talk, they used low voices that even Alyea's newly sharp hearing had trouble picking up.
There seemed no particular ranking to how people arranged their positions at table. Acana sat next to Alyea, but around them ishraidain and Callen mixed together randomly.
The stew this time tasted spicier than it had previously. Alyea found she enjoyed it; the flavors of all food seemed brighter lately. She glanced up to see Acana watching her, smiling.
“In your honor,” the ishrait said quietly, “I asked for the food to be made a bit more interesting. Do you like it?”
“Yes,” Alyea said, keeping her voice to the same low volume. “Very much. What's in it?”
“It's the same stew we always have,” Acana said, “but we added more cactus peppers. I think it's rather similar to what Juric fed you, in fact.”
Alyea took another bite, comparing memory to present, and nodded. “It is. Why doesn't it bother me any more?”
“You're adjusting your sense of taste to avoid feeling pain,” Acana said. Her smile widened. “I always win the pepper-eating contests with Juric these days. He doesn't understand why.”
Alyea found herself grinning in return. “I can see this is going to be useful.”
“You can also tell if there's something harmful in the food,” Acana said. “Poison, for example. You'll find yourself making adjustments for that too. It's very hard to kill a desert lord. Or a ha'ra'ha,” she added with a respectful nod to Deiq.
He nodded without comment and went on eating. Nobody spoke again until the meal ended and ishraidain rose to clear the dishes. Then Acana motioned wordlessly for Alyea to come with her. Deiq tagged along unasked, and as the ishrait made no objection, Alyea kept her mouth shut.
They followed the ishrait into a small, unoccupied room similar to the ishell but without a pool. Several of the strange green-oil lamps burned high but produced almost no smoke; Alyea resolved to ask about them soon.
“The lamp oil comes from Aerthraim Fortress,” Deiq said in a low voice. “I'll tell you about that another day.”
Alyea shot him a hard stare; he shrugged, unconcerned, and settled on a bench near the doorway. Acana motioned Alyea to sit on one end of a long bench and took the other end herself.
Cross-legged, facing Acana, Alyea watched the flickering of the lamps move shadows around the room and across the ishrait's face in patterns that didn't quite match what the physical flames should be producing. Rather than making Alyea nervous, the discrepancy seemed strangely comforting.
“You have been with us ten days,” Acana said at last.
Alyea blinked, startled. “That long?”
“That long,” Acana said. “Unless you apply to become an ishraidain, ten days is the limit you can claim sanctuary within the Qisani. You are under the hand of a ha'ra'ha, relieving us of the responsibility of teaching you, and you are not an ishraidain. This is your last night with us. You must leave.”
Alyea took a deep breath, let it out slowly as she considered. “Can you answer some questions, before I leave?”
Acana seemed to smile a bit, although it might have been a distortion of shadow. “Some things I can answer. Some I cannot.”
“Who was the healer that attended me?”
“A healer. The name doesn't matter.”
Alyea rephrased the question. “What was she?”
“I can't answer that.”
Alyea smiled. “You just did. She's from the Forbidden Jungles, isn't she?”
In Alyea's peripheral vision, Deiq shifted as if about to speak, but settled into silence again.
“She traveled a long way,” Alyea said.
“Alyea,” Deiq s
aid quietly, “she can't tell you about the healer. Please stop baiting her.”
“That wasn't my intent,” Alyea said. “My apologies, Acana.”
She turned her head to stare at Deiq, took a breath, and willed him to give an unguarded answer. “How often have you been to the Forbidden Jungles?”
“Not often enough,” he said, his voice rough with emotion, and grimaced. “Damnit.”
The tension in the room eased abruptly as Acana laughed. “She's going to make a very good desert lord,” she said.
“If she survives the last trial,” Deiq said.
“I don't have your doubts,” Acana said, and stood. “I pity the one who goes up against her. For that matter, I admit some sympathy for you, Deiq. You're going to have your hands full.”
“Tell me about it,” Deiq said, sounding grumpy.
Acana laughed again, bowed to both of them in turn, and left the room.
“No honorific?” Alyea said before Deiq could speak.
“I don't ask for one,” he said, and stood. He crossed the room and sat on the bench, drawing his legs up to sit facing her as Acana had been moments before. “Don't do that again, Alyea. You caught me off guard with that push.”
“I wanted to find out if I could do it,” she said.
“You can,” he said, unamused, “but don't try it with another ha'ra'ha or desert lord. It's beyond rude, and a dangerous trick to play.”
“I won't,” Alyea said, chastened.
Deiq nodded, his taut expression relaxing slightly. “We leave tonight. The last blood trial is going to be held at Scratha Fortress, since that's the heart of the current dispute. We should be there by morning. Walking,” he added, anticipating her next question. “Juric is long gone, and the Callen of Ishrai don't use sharaks—that's the word for the type of carriage brought you here.”
He held up a hand to stop her from speaking. “There's something else I have to say.”
She raised her eyebrows and waited.
“I know Pieas raped you,” he said. “I know Oruen seduced you. I know what the ha'reye did to you felt like a combination of both. Trust me that I'll do neither. My obligations are more important than that.”
She felt her face heating, and couldn't speak.
“Remember what I am,” he said. “I can read people. I saw how you looked at Pieas, and at Oruen, and how they looked at you—it was as if you shouted it.”
“Gods,” she said, covering her face with her hands.
“Make sure you know which gods you refer to,” he said, “when you say that in the southlands.” He stood. “Time to go.”
She wore a greyish-tan garment this time, one with a long, loose cut. Deiq wore a similar outfit, and hooked a small pack over his shoulders. She had nothing to carry; even the robe from Juric had been taken away.
Silent and tall, Acana stood in the darker shadow of the entrance to the Qisani, oil lamp in hand. She bowed to them once. They returned the bow, and without speaking turned away and began walking.
The moon hovered low on the horizon, just past full. Wan light shifted the darkness into strange, flat pools and lines, eerily reminiscent of what Alyea had seen at the beginning of the blood trial of Ishrai. She tried not to think of that: a chill still ran down her spine at the memory.
The sand lay deep and loose in spots, in others hard as a thin layer over buried rock. Deiq set a steady pace, one Alyea could easily match; still, within an hour her legs ached and cramped.
“Hold on,” she said, stopping, and bent to rub her calves. “I need a rest.”
“No,” he said, and knelt to push her hands aside. “Not like that.”
She frowned down at him. “My legs hurt.”
He sat back on his heels and put a finger to his forehead, just above his left eye. “Here. Don't use your hands. Tell your body it's going to walk without pain.”
“You're mad.”
He stood. “We're not stopping again. Do it my way or I'll leave you behind.” He turned and started walking again.
She cursed under her breath and jogged awkwardly through the sand to catch up.
“How?” she panted when she reached his side.
“You're in control,” he said without looking at her. “Your body's a tool to get you from place to place. You control the tool. You tell it what to do. You don't have to breathe hard, either, by the way. You can control that, too.”
He didn't break stride as he spoke, moving forward with the same even pace he'd used before. Alyea fought to slow her breath, distracted by the increasing pain in her calves.
“Don't force it,” Deiq said, still not looking at her. “Just know it's under your will.”
“Will you stop so I can focus?” she snapped.
“No.”
“Damn you!”
He made a dismissive gesture with one hand and said nothing.
“This is what you call teaching?”
“Don't waste your energy yelling at me,” he said. “Use it to focus.”
She snarled, feeling rather like an angry asp-jacau, then forced her attention to her breath. Step . . . breath . . . step . . . breath. It took a few minutes to catch the rhythm; abruptly, the pain vanished, and she only felt the ground rolling past her feet. Her body consisted of breath moving in and moving out; turning that breath into forward movement, and then balancing a thousand tiny adjustments in each step. Sounds, smells, sight, the slither of fabric against her skin and the taste of the air in her mouth: all senses combined into one long liquid moment. Pain arose, rerouted itself into energy to take another step. Protesting muscles simply smoothed themselves out.
Astonished at the incredible, flowing clarity, she fell. The ground sprawled up beneath her with a hard thump, shaking her breath back into erratic gasps. Aches redoubled, cramped her into a whimpering ball for a moment, then eased.
Deiq laughed and helped her stand, brushing sand from her clothes.
“Good start,” he said. “Everyone falls the first time.”
She stood still, blinking to clear a doubling of her vision, until things returned to normal. Her leg muscles quivered.
“What did I just do?”
“You reached center,” Deiq told her.
“It felt like an aqeyva trance,” she said, the words sounding thick and blurred to her own ears, “but I was taught never to try walking while in trance.”
“What you call aqeyva is the closest a human can get to the discipline of the ha'reye,” Deiq said. “No full human can ever reach as far into the center as you just did. You can do it because you've traded essence with a ha'rethe; you're not full human any more.”
“Am I a ha'ra'ha?”
“Not even close,” he said with a patience that told her every new desert lord asked that question. “Desert lords are . . . in a grey area between human and ha'ra'ha. As I said earlier, you may have some of the blood, but it's too faint to mean much. It's given you an edge with learning aqeyva meditations, and those most skilled at the aqeyva trance are considered the best candidates to be desert lords; it's part of the blood trials.”
Alyea remembered the odd look on Juric's face when she'd come out of an hours-long trance.
Deiq nodded as though hearing her memory himself. “From what I'm told,” he said, “you did exceptionally well. The taska said you were a natural—that you sat for much longer than any supplicant he'd ever handled before.”
She couldn't think of anything to say to that.
“Let's move on,” Deiq said. “We've a way to go. Move faster this time.”
He turned and started walking again.
She followed, finding it easier this time to fall into the walking trance. Time slowly ceased to matter. The stars moved overhead, the moon shifted across the sky; she felt no sense of hurry, just the steady sensation of sand shifting underfoot. The sand seemed almost to be helping her move forward, propelling her faster with each step.
Emotion peeled away in layers. The vast sky overhead and the endless, moonl
ight-greyed sand around them reduced everything in her life to a tiny, insignificant speck. No wonder, no astonishment remained. Her movement became more an act of will than the shifting of muscle and bone. She moved through a thousand contradictions and saw the resolution to each for a fraction of a second, brief and sharp, then lost the answer again.
If she had been capable of tears she would have wept.
As dawn began to rearrange the colors of the sky, she felt a vast sense of presence ahead. Refocusing her vision with an effort, she saw a fortress, built of enormous chunks of whitestone and granite. It sprawled across the sand, not nearly as tall as she'd expected, far from gracious— nothing but an unattractive pile of disorderly rock.
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