Davud took a moment to scatter the twigs even more—as if afraid the wind might push them back into the sigil’s shape. Then he gathered his things and went inside.
* * *
The following day, Davud wandered the palace. He strolled through the central gardens, climbed the library tower, and made his way to the great hall, which was filled with rare art: beautiful paintings, fine vases, golden plates. He lingered, enjoying himself, but kept an eye out for one particularly precocious girl.
After a long and fruitless search, he found her by pure chance. He had given up and was heading back toward his room when he heard the sound of splashing. Of course. There was a small wading pool nearby. He walked through a scalloped archway and came to it, a large, oval pool filled with the clearest water Davud had ever laid eyes on. Painted ceramic tiles lined the pool. Around it were flagstones made of pretty blue slate.
In the pool, a handmaid was tending to a flock of children, who ranged in age from toddlers, barely old enough to walk, to Bela and a wide-eyed, black-haired boy, who seemed roughly the same age. All wore simple white tunics, which clung to their skin as they splashed and kicked the water about.
Davud waved to the young handmaid, who smiled back, but quickly went after one of the young ones, who was trying to go into the deeper water.
“Hello, Bela.” Davud crouched near the edge of the pool. The ceramic bed was sloped so that the waves lapped softly at his feet. He went in until his leather sandals got wet, then leapt back, wrapping his arms around himself as he shivered from head to foot.
Bela laughed.
He tried again, teeth chattering, making a show of touching one toe to the water. “Why, it’s cold as snow! How can you stand being in there?”
Bela laughed harder. “It’s warm, silly! You’re just pretending!”
Davud stepped back in carefully, closing his eyes and sighing loudly, as if the water were now warming his frigid feet. “Anila told me this pool was magic but I didn’t believe her.”
“She didn’t, either!”
“She did!” Davud paused, as if he were debating on sharing a secret. He glanced at the handmaid, then stepped closer to Bela and crouched down. “Anila is magic, too, you know.”
Bela nodded. “She was burned by the fire, but she used her magic to make it out alive.”
Davud decided not to correct her. “Do the two of you speak often?”
She nodded again, this time so hard her pigtails shook. “Almost every day.”
“What about?”
Bela shrugged. “My horse. I’m going to race her one day. Memma said I could.”
“Does she ever talk about me?”
She lifted her foot high and stomped the water, making a plunk sound. The water flew high, splashing her and Davud, both.
“Bela, does she ever talk about me?”
“No.”
“Does she ever say what she wants to do?”
Bela waded through the water, arms wide, kicking it up into the air ahead of her, a parade of diamonds before a striding princess. “She wants to learn.”
“Learn what?”
Bela jumped in up to her neck then came up dripping. “Learn like she did in the collegia. She misses it.”
I do too, Anila, Davud thought.
“Bela?” The handmaid was waving her over. “Come dry yourself. It’s time to eat.”
Without another word, Bela turned and splashed hard through the deepest part of the pool to rejoin the other children. As Davud watched them go, he thought, how can a girl who’s only just met Anila know more about her than I do?
He knew the answer, of course. She cared enough to ask.
As the handmaid herded the children from the water, Davud smiled sadly, then turned and left.
Chapter 11
KING IHSAN RAN HIS FINGER up the page of Yusam’s journal and started the passage again.
A storm rages above Tauriyat. No mundane storm. The clouds are struck through by light, striations of blue against charred marble. Goezhen, god of chaos, walks alone, twin tails lashing in his wake. He has climbed above the palaces, intent on reaching the mount’s uneven top. He waits there, surveying the city below, the desert beyond. Sharakhai is largely whole, though fires burn along the western edges and war still rages in the southern harbor and deep in the merchant’s quarter, threatening the city’s porous inner walls.
Tulathan follows Goezhen. Her long, silver hair flows in her wake, not unlike the swaying of Goezhen’s tails. Her naked skin is tinged in blue, resplendent in the storm-bred darkness. She reaches Goezhen’s side. The other gods approach. Golden Rhia. Thaash, tall and stoic. Bakhi, as intent upon the sky as Goezhen, though with little of the dark god’s anger. He is accepting, somehow, and I wonder whether this is important.
Yerinde is there as well. She has fallen on the slopes, unmoving, all but forgotten by the other gods. Her body lies unnaturally, one hand clutching her throat. That she died in pain is clear. Has she betrayed them in some way? Failed them?
The gods gather. They take each others’ hands. And they wait.
This is where the vision ends. I am thrown from it, as I often am, by pain, which indicates that the mere has shown me something that might be related to my own demise. Yet this differs from many previous visions. The city is not a wasteland, as the mere has shown on a number of occasions. Does this mean the steps we’ve taken have helped us avoid the path of destruction we walked for many years? Time will tell, but I am hopeful.
Yerinde’s death and her position on the mount both concern me. Must she die? Is this what the vision has proscribed? In many previous visions she became uncharacteristically aggressive, meddling in the lives of mortals, both in Sharakhai and the desert beyond. In one she even spoke directly to several of the Kings—Kiral, Husamettín, Sukru, and Cahil. All toward some greater purpose, it seemed to me. I felt certain I was coming close to finding that purpose, but now this, and I worry I’ll never know.
And what of Nalamae? Again and again I am foiled in my attempts to find her, to sense her path. I have long thought she has worked actively against me. Now I’m certain of it. Since her last known rebirth two generations ago, my ability to see anything about the goddess has diminished, no doubt from her slow awakening to what has come before.
Does her ability to hide affect mine to see the paths ahead? I must set aside the time to investigate further. If only there were some news of her . . .
The sound of footsteps roused Ihsan from his reading. “My Lord King.” Tolovan, his tall vizir, spoke from the horseshoe archway nearby. “King Azad has arrived.”
They both knew, of course, that King Azad was in fact Nayyan, but Ihsan had always been careful to keep a strict code of keeping to appearances. Nayyan was supposed to have been lost, after all, the same night Azad had been killed by Çeda’s mother, Ahya.
“Send him in,” Ihsan said.
Tolovan bowed and left, returning shortly with King Azad. Uncharacteristically, Azad wore a flowing cloak over his rich robes, a Qaimiri import.
“A bit much, don’t you think?” Ihsan asked as Tolovan left and Azad came to stand before the desk.
“Kiral wanted me to meet with Queen Meryam.” Azad shrugged. “He asked that I humor her. I saw no reason to deny him.”
“And how is she, Qaimir’s new queen?”
“Well enough. It was a luncheon, though Kiral asked her to remain with him as the rest of us were dismissed.” Azad took a seat, stiff-backed, on one of the upholstered stools across from him.
“Forgive me,” Ihsan said, remembering himself and waving Azad to take his padded chair. Though the body before him showed no signs of it, Nayyan was carrying his child. That and Nayyan’s natural form had both been transformed through the magic of the necklace she wore.
Azad stared at the chair crossly.
“Please,�
� Ihsan said.
“I need no pampering, my Lord King.”
“It isn’t pampering.” A half-truth. “I’ve asked you here so that you can read what I’ve found.”
Azad looked unconvinced, but he stood and came to sit in the large, high-backed chair that not so long ago had belonged to King Yusam. Azad read over the passage Ihsan had been lingering over for several days now—that one and several others like it. When done, Azad pushed the journal away. “What of it? There are likely a dozen other accounts that contradict this entirely.”
“You’re not mistaken. There are.” Ihsan paced before the wide table, his footsteps echoing. “I might have given Yusam more credit when he was alive. The things he saw would have driven me mad.”
Azad paged through the journal, written over forty years before. “They did drive him mad.”
“I don’t think so.” Ihsan stopped his pacing to point to the marginalia: dozens of notes penned in red or green ink, contrasting the ochre of the rest of the page. Ihsan pointed to one near the corner. “See here?”
It was a note that referenced a date—the 208th year of the Kings’ reign in Sharakhai, Twelfth of Sindra, Tavahndi. It was a reference to a particular day, a particular vision, in yet another of Yusam’s endless journals. That very journal was on the desk, already open to the relevant page. He pulled it toward himself and pointed to the entry, which spoke of a specific attempt to find Nalamae, which in turn referenced yet one more entry from a particularly strong vision Yusam had received over a hundred years before: an account of Nalamae being hunted and killed by Thaash, the god of war.
Azad read all three accounts, then leaned back in the chair, shaking his head. “It’s dizzying.”
“Now imagine dealing with four centuries of it. It’s a wonder he remembered to take his cock out before pissing.”
Azad frowned at the analogy. “And you claim he wasn’t mad?”
“My point is that while Yusam may have become lost in trying to deal”—he waved to the shelves upon shelves of journals that lined the walls around them—“with all of this, he did remember to take his cock out before pissing.” He pointed to the journal. “His memory for events was much better than I ever gave him credit for. Throughout these journals he draws upon vision after vision, tying it all together, or ruling out certain predictions that, based on evidence, could never come to pass.”
“He hardly saw a thing toward the end.”
“True, but I don’t think that was due to madness. I think it was because he was nearing his own death.” Ihsan recited Yusam’s bloody verse: “See far his eyes, through cloak and guise, consumed by sight is he; yet as death nears, will grow his fears, still blinded shall he be.”
Azad, who’d heard it only once before, nodded. “So his abilities were diminished as he neared his death, unable to see his path forward, or others.”
“That about sums it up, yes. He was consumed by his fading power, and started to focus heavily upon it, trying to fool the gods, but lost sight of much else in the process.”
“I’m sure this is all fascinating, my King, but what is your point?”
“My point is that there is much here.” He waved again to the journals. “This is a grand resource I hope to use to navigate our way forward. Yours and mine.”
“There is Yusam’s heir to consider.”
“Heir . . . He’s a madman.”
Yusam hadn’t fathered a child in over eighty years. His one remaining child was presently locked in one of the towers of this very palace, a lunatic who thought himself the leader of a troupe of minstrels. When he wasn’t shitting himself, he was demanding to be taken to his tent, and for the troupe’s best jongleurs, his granddaughters, to be brought before him. That he had no sons or daughters, much less granddaughters, didn’t seem to bother him.
“Mad he may be, but there are already those who seek to use him to gain a seat at the table.”
“No one, least of all Kiral, will stand for it. They’ve all had enough, begging your pardon, of petulant children demanding to sit at the head table.”
Any time such things were brought up during council, it understandably rubbed Azad the wrong way. The young King Alaşan, on the other hand, Külaşan’s son, was another matter entirely. He’d been given the Wandering King’s crown and his title, and now he was pressing for a say in matters of state. The young man had nearly lost himself his head the last time council had met, arguing with Kiral over the right to more of the city’s coffers.
“Hungry children or not,” Azad went on, “trouble will come of it sooner or later.”
Yusam’s situation was the most easily dealt with. They couldn’t allow his son, a barking basset of a man, to take his father’s place. His descendants in Goldenhill would balk at it, trying to position themselves for more, or at least not less than what they’d become accustomed to, but in the end, Yusam’s throne would remain empty.
Onur’s seat was a different matter. Here they had the opposite problem. The man had too many children, few of them legitimate, and many of those had been formally disowned. Onur was a jealous man and had seized on any insult to withhold the inheritance of those he’d sired. Fortunately for Ihsan, Onur was so spiteful he often had his children stand before him as their proclamations of forfeiture were read. Those very same proclamations now provided Ihsan and the others all the leverage they needed to keep many of the claimants at bay. At the very least, he would ensure that their claims to Onur’s crown would take years to sort out.
It helped, certainly, that Onur had fled, which had given Ihsan time to craft and plant stories about his betrayal of Sharakhai and its rightful rulers. It helped as well that Onur was active in the desert. It created fear and uncertainty in any wishing to sit the throne of the Feasting King.
“We’ll deal with them easily enough,” Ihsan said.
“We cannot afford to have more lords withholding their taxes from us.”
“Is it Beşir, the King of Coin, who sits before me, or Azad, who has more to worry about than filling the city’s coffers?”
Azad frowned, and spoke carefully. “I think you’re underestimating just how dry the tinder is in Sharakhai. We’ve been pushing too hard for too long. The city is ready to rise against us.”
“Then we’ll put it to good use, but only when the time is right. In the meantime”—Ihsan motioned to the journal before him—“there are riddles to be answered.”
“Nalamae?”
“She’s set to rise once more.”
“What of it? The desert gods will likely kill her once more.”
“That’s exactly what troubles me. They’ve taken her life a dozen times since Beht Ihman, perhaps more. Why?”
“Because she betrayed them. She didn’t heed Tulathan’s call. She chose to remain away from the city while all the other gods met on Tauriyat.”
“Yes, and why was that?”
Azad shrugged, looking over the account he’d read a moment ago only with more interest. “You have thoughts?”
“Nothing worth mentioning now. But this is why it’s vital to take a true accounting of Yusam’s writings.”
“And what will you do that Yusam could not?”
“Apply a fresh eye. You’re right that he was less reliable near the end. It may have led him to tie the wrong events together, or overlook some simple connections.”
Azad stood and shrugged. “It seems a waste of time.”
“No matter what we do with Sharakhai, we would be unwise to forget the desert’s true masters.”
Tolovan ducked his head inside the room. “My Lord Kings, a message has arrived. King Zeheb wishes to see you both at his palace.”
“Impertinent,” Azad said. “Could he not have made the journey here?”
Tolovan shook the rolled letter he held in his knuckly right hand. “The letter indicates it’s to do with the
men taken to his palace.”
Prisoners. Men of the Moonless Host, Ihsan knew, captured recently. “Have the coach prepared, Tolovan.”
Chapter 12
IN THE DARK OF THE NIGHT, with the moons casting long shadows over the city, Emre waited not far from the fighting pits. As dark as it was, he wasn’t watching so much as listening, but he could see the open window of Tariq’s home three stories up. He heard the crash of a door being kicked in. Heard a woman scream. Heard a scuffle and the scream being cut off.
Muffled words filtered into the night, Hamid giving orders to Darius and Frail Lemi. They were quiet enough, but they’d moved beyond stealth, and Emre could hear them, searching the small home.
Lemi had said he’d seen Tariq pay a visit to Adzin’s ship. Why? Many thought the old soothsayer a quack, a swindler. The fortunes he gave were often not well received; the man was too truthful for most. But Emre believed in his power. He’d seen it at work with his own eyes. Others in the Host had as well, and Macide had grudgingly come to trust him.
But that did nothing to explain Tariq on Adzin’s ship. Osman was well known for despising such men. Even if he can tell the future, he’d once told Emre, why would a man want it? Everyone knows the fates come calling for those who try to escape them, and when they do, it goes much worse than if they’d left well enough alone.
Tariq and Osman’s role in this was simply to organize a ship, so why would Tariq have visited Adzin’s sloop? For Osman’s sake? Or his own? Perhaps, but the timing of his visit with Moonless Host’s departure from the city was suspicious. Emre had to know the truth, and he was sure he could get it even if Tariq tried to lie—the two of them knew one another too well to hide much from the other for long.
Emre caught movement along the rooftop. The silhouette of a slender man moving with speed. Limned in moonlight, he looked like Tulathan’s servant, a thief sent to Sharakhai to do her bidding. Emre was supposed to warn the others if he saw Tariq leaving, but he remained silent as Tariq glided onward, picking up speed as he neared the gap between his building and the next. He leapt from the roof’s edge, spanning the alley before landing on a brick balcony with an acrobat’s grace. Then he was climbing down, the darkness swallowing him as he was lost to the moonlight.
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