Empire of Sand

by Tasha Suri

  There was a short, fitted bodice, a fanned skirt, and long lengths of cloth dyed a vibrant indigo that deepened to darkness at the fabric’s edges. Mehr lifted the folded cloth out, then reached carefully for what lay beneath it: small stone flowers, strung on coils of white thread, ready to be wound through her hair, and a faded band of red silk. She held the silk up to the light, admiring the delicate patterns stitched onto its surface in white thread—images of sky and stars, of the heavenly bodies in motion.

  The bodice and skirt had been gifts from Lalita. “If you need replacements, you ask me,” Lalita had told her. And Mehr had nodded, understanding, because she could hardly ask her stepmother’s seamstress for help, could she?

  The sash and hair ornaments had belonged to her mother. Mehr had found them in her mother’s chambers, in the early days after her mother left, carefully folded and wrapped in linen. She had no proof, but she liked to believe her mother had left them for her, as an apology and a farewell.

  She fanned the cloth, the bodice, and the skirt out on her divan. She kept the stones in her palm, tracing the edges of the flowers with her thumb. She felt restless, full of joy and sadness at the same time. It wouldn’t be long until the storm reached Jah Irinah. On that day, she would finally be able to dance the Rite of Dreaming as a grown woman, Amrithi and Ambhan, light in her hands and her heart.

  Then Lalita would leave, and Mehr would be alone.

  A sound from beyond the bedroom made Mehr snap sharply out of her reverie. She placed the flowers on the divan and stepped out of her room. She found Sara waiting for her, a characteristic look of nervousness on her face.

  “Lady Mehr.” The maidservant offered a shaky bow.

  “What are you doing here?” Mehr asked.

  “Nahira sent me, my lady.”

  “Does Arwa need me?”

  Sara shook her head quickly.

  “Oh no, my lady. Lady Arwa is well. Nahira sent me to … to request a favor.”

  Mehr frowned.

  “What could Nahira possibly need from me?” she asked.

  Sara swallowed, biting her lip. Her reluctance to speak almost radiated off her.

  “Go on,” Mehr urged.

  “Your blood, my lady.” Sara’s voice was small. “She wants your blood.”

  Mehr was stunned into silence. She was saved from responding by Sara, who seemed determined to finish speaking before her courage failed her. She went on hurriedly, tripping over her words. “The dreamfire frightens her, my lady. She knows a storm is coming. But the daiva—there are so many of them out there now, my lady—they frighten her so much more than the dreamfire.” Sara took a deep, steadying breath. “Your blood has kept Lady Arwa safe. Everyone knows nothing creeps into her rooms at night. She sleeps soundly. And Nahira—she is old, my lady, and superstitious, you must understand—Nahira has asked if you will protect her too.”

  Sara had her hands on the edges of the shawl draped around her shoulders. Mehr watched her fingers as she spoke. She was twisting the cloth into knots. Her words were a buzz of noise in Mehr’s ears.

  “You are lying to me,” Mehr said coolly.

  “No, my lady!” Sara’s voice was high and frantic.

  “Shall I summon Nahira now and ask her?” Sara’s silence was answer enough. Mehr went on. All the fury Mehr had been holding back rose up as a hard frost in her veins, her voice. “Nahira sleeps in Arwa’s bedchamber. She doesn’t need my blood to protect her, and she would know better than to ask for it.” Right now, when Mehr was in disfavor, asking for her help was a dangerous act. Nahira was too much of a survivor to make such a basic error of judgment. “You know what the other servants say about me. You know what I’m capable of. So why, Sara, have you decided to make me your enemy?”

  Sara tried to turn and bolt from the room, but Mehr was close enough to catch her hand and hold her still.

  “No,” Mehr said. “Speak to me first. Then you can run.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sara said, teary. “But some of us are so afraid, my lady. Not the Harans or the Numrihans—they don’t understand, they laugh at me and call me a superstitious barbarian—but we Irin, we know what’s coming. I grew up outside the city, my lady. Near the Northern Oasis. I know what a storm is like. I know how the fire falls and the daiva follow it. So many daiva, my lady, and our blood doesn’t protect us from them. What will we do if an evil daiva creeps into our quarters with the storm? Gods forbid, an ancient? What will we do?” Her voice turned entreating. “A little blood, my lady, that’s all I need to protect the servant quarters. Please.”

  Mehr let go of her. But Sara didn’t run. She stood her ground, terrified but determined. In the face of her fear—and her stubbornness—Mehr’s own anger faded. She didn’t have the strength to be cruel.

  “You shouldn’t have come to me,” Mehr said heavily. “It was a foolish thing to do. Be sensible, Sara. Find an Amrithi clan and barter for some blood. You work for the Governor, you surely have the coin.”

  Sara looked down at the floor, as if she couldn’t bear to meet Mehr’s eyes. Her voice came out in an incomprehensible whisper.

  “Speak up,” Mehr ordered. Her patience had worn thin.

  Sara swallowed.

  “I haven’t seen a clan in years, my lady. That’s all.”

  “Near Jah Irinah?”

  “Anywhere, my lady,” Sara said. She still wouldn’t meet Mehr’s eyes. “It’s as if they’ve—vanished.”

  Mehr turned away from her. Without consciously deciding to do so, she walked over to the perforated wall and stared out at the desert beyond. The sand was glowing with the warmth of encroaching dreamfire.

  She thought of the feel of Maryam’s fingers on her face, of Lalita’s trembling hands, her tired smile.

  She had told herself she would seek out new knowledge. Well, here it was. Mehr already knew that not all was well in Irinah, and not all was well for the Amrithi. Lalita had always done her best to make sure that Mehr was aware of the dangers the Amrithi faced. But it was different, hearing what had become of the Amrithi from Sara’s lips. Lalita’s knowledge came from the highest echelons of society: from pillow talk, from salons, from the constant threads of rumors and gossip that wound their way through the city. Sara—raised near the Northern Oasis, far beyond the city’s borders—had gleaned her knowledge of the fate of the Amrithi not from gossip and connections, but from the bare reality of life on Irinah’s sand that Lalita had worked so hard to escape from. Sara knew what Lalita—always so careful to avoid crossing paths with the people or haunts of her past Amrithi life—couldn’t have known:

  There were no Amrithi clans visiting the city in Irinah. No clans visiting the towns. No clans visiting the villages. No clans.

  They were vanishing.

  The Emperor’s hatred had not grown suddenly, as Mehr had so foolishly believed when Maryam had warned her of his messages to his nobles. His hatred was a storm that had grown ever larger by feeding on itself, and Mehr had been protected from the full weight of it by the shelter of her privilege and of the very Ambhan walls that so stifled her. Now the storm was too great for even Mehr to ignore. Her status as the Governor’s daughter couldn’t protect her forever. She had Amrithi blood, and the Amrithi were being erased.

  “You can have my blood,” Mehr said finally. “But in return you’ll owe me a debt.”

  “Anything,” Sara said. “Oh, anything, my lady.”

  Mehr watched the shadows of the daiva shifting in the dreamfire’s light.

  “A favor,” Mehr said. “You’ll owe me a favor. That’s all.”

  Lalita

  Lalita stood in the dark of a hallway in her home. She could smell the incense of the approaching storm, mingled with the jasmine scent of her own hair, recently washed and oiled, now bound at the nape of her neck in a hasty knot. Her neck was damp with sweat. She breathed in and out in a steady, slow rhythm even as her hands trembled at her sides.

  Below her, echoing up from the central courtyard of her
home, came the sound of a woman weeping.

  “Tell us where your mistress is.” The man’s voice echoed up from below, mingling with the sound of tears. “Or I swear, I will make sure your whole family is hounded out of the city for protecting Amrithi scum. Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!” howled a voice. “I don’t know where she is!”

  Farida, fool girl, could have told them that Lalita was likely to be on the roof, watching the storm approach, or in her study as she had been that morning, writing a message to Mehr. Instead the maidservant wept and claimed to know nothing, all the while begging for mercy. Lalita would have liked to believe Farida was showing her an astonishing level of loyalty, but it seemed far more likely that fear had entirely obliterated the girl’s mind.

  Lalita closed her eyes. Controlled her breathing. There was a rhythm to maintaining a semblance of calm in the face of danger. It was something akin to a rite.

  When Lalita left Irinah, for the first time, she was just fifteen. Her grandmother had given Lalita the last of her coin and taken Lalita’s face between her hands. Lalita remembered, still, her dark eyes and the uncomfortable curl of her lip, scarred from a decade-old encounter with a lowly Ambhan official who’d taken it in his head to make an example of an Amrithi woman who dared to attempt trade with a village under his purview.

  Hala, she’d said. Little one. You’re the cleverest one of my blood, but your mind will only take you so far. No matter what you do, they will discover you one day. Don’t argue, child. Listen to me. When you make a mistake—when they find you—don’t try to save your money or your possessions. Don’t try to be clever. Save your skin first, Hala. Run.

  Lalita was not Hala anymore. She had not been Hala in a long time. But she recalled her grandmother’s words, as she stood still in the hall of her haveli, dressed in her Chand garb and her Chand name, and thought of all the mistakes that had led her here, into a dark corridor, with nowhere to run to.

  Lalita’s first mistake, of course, had been returning to Irinah. But homesickness was a curious thing. For a small handful of years, she’d basked in the comforts of Ambha, its distant white-peaked mountains, its lush lakes and sweet air. Its wealthy men. Then she’d begun to yearn, despite herself, for Irinah: for its dreamfire, its daiva, for the scents and sights of home.

  Irinah was not a safe place for someone like her. She’d known that. There was too high a chance of her being recognized as an Amrithi, too high a chance of a daiva seeking her out for her ancestry, for her blood. And yet Lalita had come home.

  She’d always prided herself on being a practical woman, but it was homesickness that had brought her back. Homesickness, and the feeling that she was losing herself, day by day: that somehow her hidden self was slipping, ever so steadily, from her grasp.

  “Don’t you know who we are, girl?” said another voice. Male, again.

  “No, my lord,” Farida whimpered.

  Her second mistake had been ignoring Usha’s warning.

  One of your kitchen boys was questioned by a nobleman, Usha had said. Somebody knows, or thinks they know the truth about you. You should run now, while you still can.

  But Lalita had not held her grandmother’s advice as close as she should have. She had wanted to say farewell to Mehr. She’d needed time to arrange the transport of her possessions. Excuse after excuse had kept her feet firmly on the city’s ground, when in truth she’d simply wanted to cling to the life she’d worked so hard to build. Ah, she was a fool.

  “We’re no petty lords. We have a higher purpose than most of the nobility,” he boasted. “We’re devotees of the Saltborn. Do you know what that means?”

  Farida whimpered out a no.

  “We serve the Emperor’s will. You know who the Emperor is at least, don’t you?”

  There was a chorus of ugly laughter.

  She was not sure how many men stood below her. She didn’t dare look through the lattice window facing the courtyard, for fear they would see her. She wondered if these boastful lords—these squabbling Ambhan children, who had no higher purpose in life than wreaking destruction on their Emperor’s behalf—would have thought to set guards on all the exits from the household. She considered whether men who had never worked for their survival would think to look in the servants’ corridor she now stood in, a narrow passage lit by one latticed window and guttering candles set into alcoves along the wall. She hoped not.

  Her third mistake had been carelessness. She’d grown soft after living all these years in Jah Irinah. She’d made no secret of her visits to the Governor’s half-Amrithi daughter. She had danced her rites in her room alone at sunrise, and kept her Amrithi dagger close. Taking on a Chand name had only provided her a thin veneer of security. She should have given up her rites. She should have discarded her dagger. She should have left Mehr well alone.

  But Mehr’s mother had been her friend, once—her only friend, in fact, when she had returned to Jah Irinah as a young courtesan heartsick and hungry for home. Ruhi had asked her to care for Mehr—begged her—and Lalita had loved both mother and daughter too well to refuse. She’d never found the will in her heart since to untangle Mehr from her life.

  There was more shouting—and more sobbing—from below her. Through it, Lalita heard another noise. To her right, the candle flickered. She heard the scuff of a footstep. Lalita turned sharply, her hand reaching instinctively for the dagger in her sash.

  The flash of a familiar face in candelight. Usha.

  Ah, Gods.

  “I killed a man at the exit from the kitchen,” Usha said, her voice very soft. “Go there now.”

  “Come with me,” Lalita whispered.

  Usha shook her head.

  “They need a distraction,” murmured Usha. “And I need to make sure they let Farida go.”

  In the flickering light Usha’s face was resolute, her jaw firm. There was a spatter of blood on her cheek.

  There are too many men, Lalita thought. And only one of you.

  Lalita thought absurdly of the way her grandmother had taken her face in her hands, a lifetime ago. She wanted to place her hand on Usha’s jaw and give a shape to a farewell that already felt wrenchingly, terribly final. She wanted to tell Usha to save her skin first, to leave Lalita to the fate she’d built for herself, and run. Her hands were trembling. She didn’t reach out.

  “I can’t leave you here,” she said instead.

  Usha smiled wanly.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  There was a commotion below them; a scream, and then silence.

  If the noblemen found Lalita, she would be the one screaming. She knew very well what Ambhan noblemen thought of the worth of Amrithi. She knew the cruelty they could inflict, before they forced her from the city and the life she had so carefully, laboriously constructed for herself. She thought of her grandmother’s scarred lip, her warning, and shivered.

  Usha gestured with her free hand, the other one tight on her scimitar. Go.

  Usha slipped away, toward the courtyard, and Lalita headed to the right. The exit from the kitchen was ideal. It led out to a poorer district of Jah Irinah, winding and crowded and likely to be unfamiliar to the noblemen who had come to punish Lalita for tainting their city with her heathen presence. They wanted to protect the people of Jah Irinah from her, but—thank the Gods—they knew very little about the lives of the ones who were not of their rank.

  She reached the kitchens. Pushed open the door and stepped out into the street. The body of the man Usha had killed lay against the wall, in a pool of its own dark blood. She murmured a curse, averting her eyes, and finally let the panic she’d been holding at bay take her. She sucked in a breath and began to run.

  Her final mistake was tangled in with all the rest: She had wanted, so very deeply, to perform the Rite of Dreaming at Mehr’s side. She’d wanted to do so for Mehr’s sake, because she loved the girl dearly, as if she were her own child. But most of all she had wanted to dance the
rite for herself. The Rite of Dreaming was a rite for worship and joy, for history and family, but most of all, it was a rite for dancing with clan. Lalita had wanted, just for a moment, to perform the rite with someone who was clan to her. Just for a moment, Lalita had wanted to belong.

  She’d always understood that keeping even the barest bones of her heritage demanded a terrible price. But she had kept her heritage regardless. That was her gravest error.

  Now all that was left for her was to survive.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On the morning when the sky above the city began to bleed from pale blue into the dark jewel tones of dreamfire, Mehr knew the storm had finally arrived. She went onto the roof with one disapproving guardswoman to accompany her. She couldn’t stay long. The guardswoman was muttering darkly about Lady Maryam, gazing up at the sky with obvious trepidation. Mehr took a brief moment to stare at the dreamfire, to snatch in the scent and the sight of it, then returned inside.

  Once she was back in her chambers, a maid handed her a message from Lalita, confirming that she would be at the Governor’s residence by evening.

  Worry knotted Mehr’s stomach and wouldn’t fade. Maryam’s words wouldn’t leave her. It would be a relief when Lalita arrived.

  After the rite was done, she would speak to Lalita about the things Maryam had said to her, the whispers Sara had confided. She would find a way to keep herself and her family safe.

  The hours passed and the sky darkened. Rather than waiting impatiently for Lalita, Mehr dressed. She put on her fanned skirt and her blouse. She wound indigo cloth around her body, draping it so it would move easily with her body and also protect her from the storm. The red silk she drew around her waist—and tucked her dagger securely into a fold, where she could feel the promise of it against her skin.

  She marked her hands and feet with red. Her eyes she lined with black, and touched her forehead with ash also rimmed with red. She looked at herself in the mirror in her bedchamber. The woman who stared back at her had eyes like midnight and skin like rosewood, a solemn mouth and a forehead tipped vermilion. Sky and earth and blood.