Empire of Sand

by Tasha Suri

  He’d used the rite to make himself something not quite human.

  Somewhere, immortal dreams of his death lay, crushed beneath the weight of the mystics’ prayers and the rite. If he had managed to twist himself into something so utterly inhuman through the power of the rite, what had he done to the Empire? What had he done to the world?

  A shudder ran through her. The emotions she’d been so careful to push away drew in closer. She clasped Amun’s hand in her own, taking comfort in him. He was here. His hand was in her own. What a small thing that touch was, and how utterly vital it felt to her in that moment.

  She heard his breath catch.

  “Mehr,” he said.

  She should have let go of him then. She knew that. But he was so warm. She waited for him to speak again, but when he was silent she clasped his hand tighter, leaning closer to him. Under his shadow, she didn’t feel the need to hold on to the iron in her spine. She could breathe.

  Amun didn’t move noticeably. But she felt him relax, increment by increment, until they were leaning in to each other.

  As the seconds ticked by, she realized a line had been crossed between them. The careful distance they had worked, without words, to maintain all this time had been breached. She was glad she couldn’t feel right then. She was glad not to be ashamed. Perhaps she would be later. But not now.

  She looked up at him. There was a warmth in his face, a heat that made her think he knew just as well as she did that a line had been crossed between them, and could never be uncrossed.

  “Mehr.” His voice was low. Regretful. “You should let me go.”

  They were nearly sharing breath. Mehr did not examine the thrum of her heart, or the way the world felt as if it had gone slow and silent around them. She didn’t examine the desire his words evoked in her to hold on to him even tighter.

  “You’re hurt,” Amun said. “You’re afraid.”

  I’m not the only one who is afraid, Mehr thought. But she said, “Do you want me to let go?”

  His nostrils flared. A small, ridiculous show of emotion.

  “I do.”

  He had always respected her wishes. So now she respected his, and released him. He pulled away.

  As he stood, Mehr made a show of looking down at her hand. The wound was bound and clean. He’d done a fine job, but it didn’t seem right to tell him so now. He had his back to her. His hands were clasped tight behind him. He’d never learn to hide his heart.

  “I won’t be able to fight the vow forever, Mehr.” The words passed his lips torturously, as if he were loath to say them. “I can delay it a little longer. I think. I hope. But I can’t … I can only bend my obedience.” His voice was rough. “I can’t shatter it completely.”

  His vow. To make her his wife in flesh and soul. To take her to his bed.

  “I know,” she managed. “I know, Amun. And I’m sorry for it.”

  Her heart hurt. She’d known, always known, that he couldn’t break his vows, only shape his obedience. She had allowed herself to forget that. More fool her. Worse still, she had simply not considered what their shared secret meant for him.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked. “The mark—does it hurt you?”

  Amun said nothing. But she watched his fingers curl tighter, knuckles whitening, and that was answer enough.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Don’t apologize.” Bitter blackness in his voice. “I will be my Maha’s faithful servant in the end.”

  Mehr bit her tongue, holding back her own words for a long moment. It would do no good to tell him to be kinder to himself. He was what he was. And some part of Mehr shared that black despair she heard in his voice. Some part of her felt the inexorable pull of the Maha’s power, dragging her down a path she did not want to walk.

  “We will find a way to be free of him,” Mehr said. “Amun. I promise you we will.”

  “There is no way to be free of him. Not for me. I’ve told you, Mehr.”

  “If you truly believed that, you would never have tried to give me time. You still give me time, Amun. You fight. If the Maha can’t be resisted, why do you fight?”

  “Because I’m not so cruel as all that,” he said wretchedly.

  “You’re not a monster,” Mehr agreed, although she knew he believed he was. “But you also have hope. You must have hope.” Her fingers twitched. She wanted to reach out to him. She didn’t. “We don’t have to be what the Maha has made us. We can try to be free, Amun. Just try.”

  Amun shook his head. He said nothing.

  The shutters rattled with the wind. Mehr took a deep, slow breath. Her hand had begun to throb. He’d told her, once, that hope would hurt him. She knew he feared that hope was pointless and came at too high a cost. But they couldn’t continue to live like this, bound and terrorized. They had to work together and find a way out.

  “We’ll get through the storm first,” Mehr said. “And then we will find a way to escape, Amun. I know we will.”

  As the Maha had told them, the mystics had all begun their prayers and their fasting. All other tasks were abandoned. The fires went unlit, food uncooked. Mehr and Amun, who both had no desire to fast, scrounged up some dried dates from the food stores. Neither of them was particularly hungry, but they would need the energy to face the demands of the rite.

  When the dreamfire began to fall, the first gouts of color drifting down from the sky, one of the less senior mystics, a boy Mehr had seen sweeping the corridors from time to time, brought them clothing that was a close approximation of Amrithi costume. Fanned cloth trousers, a blouse, and a length of cotton shot through with faded color were given to Mehr to wear draped across her torso. She dressed in silence, her back to Amun, allowing them both some privacy.

  She missed her own Amrithi clothing. She missed the joy it had once given her to drape herself in cloth and mark the edges of her eyes with kohl. Mehr felt nothing but nervousness now. Nothing about this storm was as it should be. She felt drab and colorless in her clothes, her stomach filled with butterflies and her skull heavy with all the things she couldn’t forget: sigils, secrets, vows.

  As she began to try to apply kohl to her eyes without a mirror to guide her, she heard Amun’s voice.

  “Let me help you.”

  She turned to him. Froze.

  He looked nothing like his old self. No longer swathed in a heavy robe or ill-fitting tunic, he was tall and strong, his blackened eyes otherworldly, his expression serene. In Amrithi clothing he looked like the self she’d seen flashes of, through his usual garb of hunched shoulders and self-loathing. He looked clear-eyed and strong.

  The sight of him—oh, it brought a lump to her throat. What could Amun have been, if he had never made vows to the Maha? What kind of man could he have grown to be among his own people?

  A kind man, a voice inside her said. Just as he is now.

  Mehr held the kohl out to him wordlessly and he took it. She closed her eyes as he applied ash to the lids, fanning the color out. “You remember everything I taught you?” he asked.

  “I remember.”

  She heard him let out a breath.

  “Then I suppose we’re ready,” he said.

  They were followed outside by a procession of mystics, who sang in bright voices for the Empire’s glory. She didn’t try to look into their faces, which were concealed from the sand by low hoods. She didn’t wonder if the Maha stood close, or if Hema followed her in the procession or kneeled praying inside the temple instead. She and Amun, exposed as they were to the burning light and sand, had other things to worry about.

  The mystics nearest to them carried weapons. Mehr tried not to think about that either.

  She covered her face with her hand as she walked, her eyes closed tight. She could feel the shudder of the dreamfire, as if the earth were reshaping around them. The sand should have abraded her bare feet, but instead it smoothed beneath her footsteps to a slickness like glass. She wished she could open her eyes and take the sigh
t of it in, but she was afraid the storm wouldn’t be as kind to her vision. She took small breaths, too, to protect her lungs.

  There was song in the air. The prayers of the mystics. The cries of the daiva. Mehr shivered and went still. The dreamfire was falling. The storm was here.

  For a second her eyes snapped open. She looked at Amun, suddenly panicked. She couldn’t do this. She was afraid. She couldn’t.

  But it was too late. Mehr saw the dreamfire shower down over Amun’s form, saw his steady, blackened gaze, the trust in his eyes.

  The light swallowed him whole.

  The storm Mehr had experienced in Jah Irinah had been nothing like this. Jeweled light consumed her body, as it had in Jah Irinah. But the way this storm cloaked her—swallowing her flesh, turning her body to pure flame—terrified her, made her body instinctively flinch from the promise of agony. But there was no agony. Instead she felt a crushing pressure, battering her from all sides, stealing through her blood.

  This was the power of the Gods’ dreams, in the very place where they slept and dreamed. This was the power Mehr was expected to turn to his will.

  Right now, that task felt utterly impossible. She crumpled to her knees. Amun. She needed Amun. But there was too much light, too much for her to even see the mystics she knew stood all about her. She needed him, but she couldn’t speak, couldn’t reach out.

  She sucked in breath after desperate breath, not caring about the sand any longer. She pressed her hands into fists. The cut throbbed.

  Slowly, slowly, a calmness welled up inside her.

  She didn’t need Amun. Not for this. He’d already taught her what she needed to know. It was up to her now to find the strength to stand up and perform the rite. It was up to her to survive.

  She stood up, held the fragments of that calm close, and stopped letting the power crush the strength out of her. Instead she let the power pour in.

  Amrithi danced with dreamfire, Mehr knew, because it was as close to the divine as any mortal could come. Falling into the immortal place inside herself, Mehr realized in her last moment of clarity that she was committing an act forbidden to mortals for good reason.

  When we dance with dreamfire, we dance with the Gods. So her mother had told her. She’d been right. But this was no Rite of Dreaming. This was not dancing with the dreams of Gods. This was being consumed by them.

  Dreams roared through her. Her mind, so fragile and mortal, could make no sense of them.

  She was human. She wasn’t meant for this. The dreams of Gods were too huge, too beautiful, simply too much. They were everything that lived and everything that died: a great, weaving circle, the cycles of creation and destruction that molded all things. They were a knife to the hand and a field of metal and blood. They were glass and flame, earth and water, the way birth feels and a blinding tightness akin to dying. They were creation. Creation, in its headiest, purest form. She wasn’t made for this. She was small, far too small to survive.

  But Amun had survived this. Over and over again, he had survived. Other Amrithi—the man Gaur, with his missing finger, the nameless older woman who had taught Amun the Rite of the Bound—had done it before him.

  And died, a voice said in Mehr’s head. They all died, in the end.

  Not Amun. Not yet. And Mehr would not die either. She had to live to find a way to set them both free.

  Mehr breathed. She breathed as Amun had taught her in all those long, painful lessons. She breathed until she felt as she had on the day he had held her in his arms, letting her soul tip free from her skin. She breathed and drifted deep into the heart of herself, deep beyond flesh and fear and the animal terror scrabbling at her animal bones. The dreams carried her along with them.

  She breathed until she knew she would not drown.

  Then she stood, and felt the calm well up in her and run through her blood and her bones. She felt the dreamfire coil around her, winding over and through her, raising her from the earth into the burning winds of the storm. She began to move.

  The sigils, which had meant little to her during her training, suddenly seemed to leap into life. They skimmed her hands lightly, rippling off her fingers with their own heady power. They shifted the fire running through her mind and her blood, diverting the flow of those dreams, stemming them and turning them to the call of the mystics’ prayers on the wind. She felt those prayers waver through her own bones. Her scarred skin burned with the weight of the Maha’s presence. She was performing the Maha’s will. She was performing the Rite of the Bound.

  It was a relief to know that she could do this. She kept on moving, kept breathing, maintaining the shape of the rite. She just had to make it through the storm.

  Her hands suddenly faltered.

  She was sure that her faltering had been a symptom, not a cause, of what came next. Her body knew long before her mind did that something had gone wrong. The fire had changed inside her. Something—an unwanted dream, a thread of brittle white flame—slipped free from her control and from the call of the mystics’ prayers. Something that had been carefully suppressed by the rite was suddenly no longer crushed and contained by the force of the rite’s power.

  The pale flame grew, and grew, boiling and seething. She felt it pooling at the base of her skull, feeding on her fear and her desperation to be free. She felt it shudder to terrible, sentient life, tracing the shape of her bones, knitting its own terrible sinew and flesh.

  She faltered again. Sigils died on her fingertips. And the pale flame—oh, it rushed through her, cloying and cold. It rose up. She felt the sand collapsing beneath her feet.

  Nightmare. This was a nightmare.

  Mehr stumbled. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t remember what to do. The nightmare had shattered her concentration. The dreams were going to bury her. She was done. Finished.

  Mehr!

  Amun. She could hear him. Feel him. He was there in the heart of her, in the place where they were both immortal, in the place where the Gods slept. He was there in the fire, the glow of him, the strength. Her ragged breath caught. They were dreaming with the Gods. They were dreaming together.

  Amun?

  Mehr. I’m here.

  The scar of her marriage seal throbbed. She pressed a closed fist to her chest. Her body was distant but alive, still alive.

  Amun, I don’t know what to do.

  Don’t fight it, he told her. Keep going. Continue the rite.

  I can’t.

  The nightmare was dragging her under, under. It had hands. It was drawing her down by the body, by the soul. But there was his voice. There was his heart.

  You can.

  She felt his faith. It coursed through her like dreamfire, like blood. Her own image wavered in front of her eyes—a woman with dark skin and dark eyes, a tangled mess of hair and the bearing of an Empress. She saw the light of her own smile. The dimple etched in her cheek when she laughed. This was how Amun saw her.

  In his eyes, she was the one who was strong, who stood straight and tall and never let the world crush her. In his eyes, she was the one who was kind and good. She wanted to laugh and weep at the same time.

  Together. Perhaps it was her thought. Perhaps his. She no longer knew anymore. The dream had tangled them together like two skeins of thread. We do it together.

  Mehr raised her hands and shaped a sigil. Then another. She breathed, steady and strong. She danced with all her strength, danced because she wanted to live. She felt the nightmare loosen its grip, increment by increment, until there was nothing left but the fire and the shadow of Amun’s presence.

  Finally the storm began to quiet around them. She felt the dreamfire fade away until there was nothing but her aching body and the exhaustion that felt like it filled her head to toe. She stood, swaying and helpless, as the dust settled and the sky lightened with the blush of morning.

  She turned, seeking out Amun with her eyes. He was farther from her side than she had expected him to be. When his mind had touched her own in the storm,
he had felt so much closer. But instead he was covered in a layer of fine, glittering sand, his body on the ground. Under the dirt she could see that his face was gray and bleak, his eyes half open but unseeing. She tried to walk toward him but her legs refused to cooperate. Instead she fell, her head hitting the ground, agony bubbling in her blood.

  The world went suddenly and blissfully black.

  She woke in someone’s arms, face pressed against musty cloth. She was being carried back to the temple, the mystics around her utterly silent. She looked up blearily. Bahren was the one holding her. His hood was thrown back, his expression grim. When he felt her stir, he looked down.

  “Are you awake?”

  Mehr didn’t respond. Something at the corner of her eye had caught her attention. She let her head loll back, looking behind Bahren at the fading dreamfire behind him. Tangled with jeweled light was a creature as brittle and pale as bone, its eyes the flat silver of a sharp blade. It skittered behind them, flickering in and out of life as the dreamfire wavered with it.

  She remembered the feel of the pale flame inside her, tracing her bones. She shivered. She’d felt this one rise out of suppressed, leashed dreams. She’d felt this one being born.

  “There’s a nightmare following us,” she slurred out.

  Bahren did not look. But she felt his grip on her tighten.

  “I don’t like this,” Bahren muttered. “I don’t like this at all.”

  The mystics around them said nothing, but Mehr could feel their unease. She swallowed. Her mouth tasted of ash and blood. She kept her gaze fixed on the nightmare until her vision grew hazy again, and the blackness gently retook her.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  She woke with the feeling of silk underneath her cheek. Groaning, she turned onto her back and took in her surroundings. She was on a rug, a floor cushion tucked beneath her head. To her right she could see a divan surrounded on all sides by a curtain of gold gauze. Lamplight flickering on the glittering cloth. She hadn’t been surrounded by such opulence since leaving Jah Irinah.

  Am I home? she thought. No. The memory of her old room had faded, but she knew it hadn’t been quite like this. The divan was too large, the curtains made of far finer cloth than Mehr, the illegitimate daughter and disgrace, had ever earned. And she wasn’t dreaming either, she was sure of that. The ache of her muscles was far too sharp, and her head hurt—a clear, pounding ache that told her in no uncertain terms how awake she really was.