Empire of Sand

by Tasha Suri

  “Is that why you left? To protect us?” Mehr’s voice sounded small, so small.

  “I had a duty, Mehr,” said her mother. “My clan needed a Tara, my mother had passed on, and I …” She paused, then continued, slow and deliberate. “I chose to leave for your sakes, yes. But I also left for my own. For my people. My clan. Your father told me if I left, I could never return. He thought he could use you and your sister as a weapon, as chains to hold me. But I would not be caged, Mehr. I had made him no vows and no promises. I told him: I am Amrithi. I know the price of freedom.” Her voice was flint, all its richness hardened to a fine edge. “I don’t ask you to forgive me, Mehr. I have thought of you and your sister every day since I left the city. But I will not say I regret my choices. I believed that I left my half-Ambhan daughters well protected, and far safer than they would be in my care. I thought his blood would keep you safe; our gifts are so rare, after all. I never thought one of my daughters would inherit mine.”

  All Mehr could think of, as she listened to her mother speak, was of the grief she’d felt when her mother had left: the weight and the greatness of it, the way it had shaped her into what she was. She thought of her father’s guilt-stricken face. She thought of all the things Arwa had never experienced, the love she’d never had and the stories she’d never been told, and now never would be.

  “Now that you’re here, I’ll keep you safe. Whatever the Maha has done to you, whatever hold he continues to have on you, you will be protected,” Ruhi said into the silence.

  “Will you vow it?” Mehr asked.

  Her mother’s answering look was steady. “We don’t make vows, Mehr.”

  There were many things Amrithi didn’t do that Mehr had done. Mehr had made vows and manipulated the dreams of the Gods. She had done things that Ambhan women didn’t do too. Knowing that she stood on the distant edge of both the world she’d been born to and the world she had always wanted to belong to left her heart cold. She lowered her head.

  “Mehr,” her mother said, her voice soft. She reached out a hand as if to comfort her.

  “I can’t look at you,” Mehr said sharply. Her voice was full of all the bitter things she couldn’t allow herself to think, feel. “Don’t touch me. Please.”

  Ruhi dropped her hand. Mehr saw her hesitate, saw her clasp her own hands together, as Kamal shifted angrily in the corner.

  “Lalita was right,” Ruhi said ruefully. “You are very like me after all.”

  In the end she left with a promise to return, taking Kamal—and the lantern—with her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Mehr was soon moved from the tent to a new hiding place, a moderately larger shelter carved into rock. The clan weren’t willing to accept her in their own home yet, and it was possible they wouldn’t be for a long time. Many, Lalita told her, were afraid she was still bound to the Maha; others feared that her presence would somehow draw the mystics to them. Mehr couldn’t find it in herself to blame them for their fears.

  Lalita also told her that the shelter that would now be her home had once been used by Amrithi preparing for the Rite of Dreaming, as a place to dress and pray and wait for the dreamfire to fall. Now it was abandoned. Not large enough to hold a clan, too enclosed by sand and its own walls to act as a guard post, it served no purpose to their clan.

  For Mehr, it was perfect. It didn’t have the honeycomb warren of corridors of the Maha’s temple, or the gleaming, golden elegance of her father’s household. Instead the structure was dark and secretive, its columns and walls all soft lines, flowing with the grace of dunes. It felt peaceful, but most of all, it made Mehr feel safe. She couldn’t help but trace its whorled walls with her hands, thinking of what it must have been like when those with and without the amata gift walked the room together, ready to dance the Rite of Dreaming as a clan.

  Lalita spent a few hours with her on the first day, talking to her and offering her comfort. She treated Mehr as if she were fragile, keeping her voice soft and her movements slow. The kindness aggravated Mehr to no end. Too full of feeling, she couldn’t remain still under Lalita’s eyes. Instead she walked the room in circles, bristling like a caged animal.

  Lalita watched Mehr pace, back and forth across the shelter’s floor, and said, “You need to rest, Mehr. Sit. You’ve been through an ordeal.”

  “I’m well,” Mehr said, and that was true enough. She was as well as she could be, would be, when her chest ached, when Amun was not with her, when the Maha still lived and the echo of immortal nightmares still writhed under her eyelids.

  “Just try not to think so much, then,” Lalita said gently. “I can almost see you fretting. For now it’s enough that you’re safe, and you’re here.”

  Lalita left eventually, assuring Mehr she would return when she could, but as the days passed with no sign of her, Mehr soon found she was glad to be alone. She was grateful, so very grateful, that Lalita was alive and well. But she wasn’t the girl Lalita remembered any longer. That girl had believed in her own strength, but she had been soft, her resolve untested. Mehr had been tested, and she had shattered and remade herself. There was no going back for her.

  Rest, Lalita had entreated. But Mehr couldn’t allow herself to rest. Not yet, not even for Lalita’s sake. She would need to regain her strength eventually, but for now the thought of being soft, even for a moment, pained her.

  That night, after eating some of the food Lalita had left for her, Mehr lit a prayer flame. She told herself it was a much more economical use of fuel than the oil lantern, and also far less likely to draw attention from any Saltborn out searching for her. But really she simply liked the comfort of holding the small clay container in her palm and feeling the flickering heat of the candle flame. She sat on the floor and looked down at the marriage seal around her neck, the one Amun had carved for her long before he’d met her.

  The light flickered on the seal, and on the whorls Amun had carved into it, the same whorls that decorated the walls of this Amrithi ruin around her.

  Amun would have been so happy to be in this place, among these walls. Mehr imagined him by her side, kneeling on the cool ground, imagined him tracing the whorls of her seal, the only mark on it apart from his name, and speaking in that low voice of his. I gave you a symbol of our people—

  She let the seal go.

  Her heart ached for him, and for herself.

  Amun had sacrificed so much to save her, and Mehr had found so much that she’d feared she had lost forever: her mother, Lalita, a surviving clan. She had no right to feel crushed by her own grief, and yet she was. Amun should have been here, not Mehr. This was where Amun belonged.

  A noise from beyond the shelter made Mehr flinch, then tense abruptly. Straightening, curling her fists at her sides, she looked up—and saw her mother watching her from the doorway. In the light of the flame, her hooded face was largely shadowed, and Mehr was glad of that. She wanted no mirrors.

  “I’ll be on watch, if you’d like to join me,” her mother said. She vanished back into the dark.

  When Mehr finally followed, she found her mother seated facing the horizon. Her hood was thrown back, her hands clasped in front of her. She had no lantern of her own to illuminate the night, but she didn’t truly need one. The stars were achingly bright above them.

  Mehr looked up at those stars and shivered. They looked … wrong. They glittered like shattered glass, splinters of fury on the black surface of the night. They reminded her of the Maha’s nightmare-flecked eyes. Sickened, she forced her gaze down, only to find that the sand was reflecting the starlight, wavering and strange.

  “Come sit by me,” her mother offered.

  Mehr wrenched her gaze up.

  “I don’t need to be guarded,” she said.

  “It puts my mind at ease to do so,” her mother responded. “Come.”

  Mehr sat down next to her. The air was painfully cold, but the breeze was blessedly faint. Her mother was silent beside her, eyes narrowed and watchful. At her le
ft side lay her dagger. Unlike the one she’d given Mehr when she left Jah Irinah, this one was unornamented, with a bone handle worn smooth by countless hands. It seemed she really did intend to remain on watch.

  Mehr followed her mother’s gaze and stared out at the desert. Under the shattered sky, the flowing lines of the desert—its peaks and valleys, its sparse vegetation—glowed with subtle, off-kilter light. Only the horizon remained dark, a deep and fathomless blackness.

  Under Mehr’s gaze, the darkness shifted.

  She flinched with surprise, then narrowed her own eyes and leaned forward, squinting through the darkness.

  “The daiva are moving,” said Mehr after a moment, awed. Now that she was looking closely, she could see them roiling upon the horizon, wild and seething.

  Her mother was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “Strong dreams give them life. Now that the Maha’s grip has weakened, they dance.” Ruhi leaned forward too; she laid one hand on her dagger hilt, the fingertips of her free hand pressed thoughtfully to her lower lip. “If not for the Maha, perhaps they’d still walk the earth like men.”

  “When I was little you told me stories about the daiva,” Mehr said. “Do you remember?”

  “Ah, Mehr,” her mother said. Her breath gusted out of her. “Of course I do.”

  “I used to try to tell Arwa those stories. But I don’t remember them as well as I should,” Mehr admitted. “And I had little chance to tell her tales.”

  “Why?” Ruhi asked. Her voice was cautious.

  “Our father’s wife didn’t care for Amrithi tales.” Mehr kept her gaze fixed on the black horizon. Maryam seemed like such a distant memory, now. A creature from another time and another world. “She thought it would be best to raise Arwa as an Ambhan, ignorant of her heritage.”

  “Perhaps she has done Arwa a kindness,” Ruhi said. “Perhaps she has given Arwa the chance to live a life without regrets.”

  Ruhi didn’t sound as if she truly believed her own words, but Mehr shook her head anyway.

  “I don’t believe that,” Mehr said. “Arwa is part Amrithi. It’s part of her, just as being Amrithi is part of me.”

  You are part of us, like it or not, Mehr thought.

  Mehr was so like her mother. She had always known she was. She’d seen the truth of it often enough in her father’s eyes. It still made it no stranger to be confronted with the truth of it. Her mother’s eyes, her face, the way she held herself like a creature always on the verge of flight—

  Mehr was not so sure, anymore, that she was happy to be her mother’s daughter. Her mother was so … hard. Hard as blade or bone, and she wore her feelings like scars that pained her still. She’d left her clan once, although she’d returned to them, to be their Tara. She’d left her daughters behind too, though she welcomed Mehr now with open arms. She wore her love for her clan and her love for Mehr like a grim wound, a thing that had to be borne. Looking at her made Mehr think of her own love for Arwa. Her love for Amun.

  She’d left them both behind too. Ah, Gods.

  She looked at her mother again, then looked away. It was so hard to acknowledge her, when the feelings she conjured in Mehr were a child’s feelings, deep and grief-stricken and furious. So Mehr looked back at the daiva instead. Once the sight of them would have filled her with joy. Now the sight of them only made her heart beat faster and a cold sweat rise on her skin. Joy seemed a faraway thing.

  “The desert isn’t right,” Mehr said. “Something is wrong. I know you see it.”

  “I do,” Ruhi acknowledged. “But it will return to normal soon enough.”

  Ruhi spoke in a tone that suggested she didn’t want to be asked any further questions. Instead of heeding her, Mehr said, “Why is the desert as it is now, then? Why will it return to normal?”

  There was a brief silence. Then Ruhi said, “The night of the storm … you didn’t perform the Maha’s rite. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “No one did.” Her mother looked tense. “There is a balance, Mehr, to the world the Gods have woven. Death and life, sickness and health, dreams and nightmares. The Maha has altered the natural balance through his rite, ensuring that the Gods dream sweetly for his sake. Without the Maha demanding imbalance, holding their dreams in his hands, balance inevitably attempts to restore itself. The daiva grow stronger. And the dreams he has kept at bay so long begin to take shape.” She sighed. “But he will find another Amrithi to wear his leash, as he always does. And everything will be as it has been all the years of the Empire.”

  “What will happen,” Mehr whispered, “if he doesn’t find another Amrithi to perform the rite?”

  The temperature almost seemed to plummet at her words.

  “What does balance look like?” Ruhi shrugged helplessly. “Mehr, we don’t know. Who living can? But we fear that setting the world right will come at a terrible cost. The Gods have so much fury waiting to be unleashed. And …”

  “Tell me,” Mehr prompted, when she saw her mother hesitate, still watching the darkness whirl on the horizon.

  “We fear the full anger of the Gods,” she said. “We fear the worst: that they will awaken in their fury and shatter the world.” Finally, she looked at Mehr. Her face was gray. “But Mehr, you needn’t fear. Nothing will happen. The Maha will find another of us, as he always does.”

  “And if he doesn’t, this time?”

  “He has shaped the world into a place that is kind to him,” Ruhi said shortly. “He will.”

  Mehr wasn’t so sure. She thought of the way word of the Emperor’s displeasure with “barbarians” had spread across the Empire, the way the Maha had stretched his eyes and ears across the Ambhan provinces, seeking gifted Amrithi far and wide, when he should have been able to thieve them from his own doorstep. She thought of the way she had been taken, despite the fact that she was Ambhan, and a nobleman’s child, and the Maha had risked igniting the fury of the Emperor’s most loyal followers. The Maha had been desperate when he’d claimed Mehr, and now that she was gone and Amun lay somewhere in an agony Mehr could barely contemplate, he would be more than simply desperate.

  “If you truly believe he will find another Amrithi, why are you so frightened?” Mehr said softly.

  “I’m not afraid.”

  Mehr looked at her mother. She met those dark eyes, set beneath straight, serious eyebrows. Oh, she knew that look. “I know that you are,” she said.

  For a moment her mother was utterly silent. Then, with visible effort, she held Mehr’s gaze and spoke.

  “I am afraid,” she said slowly, “because when I danced the Rite of Dreaming with the clan the last two storms, I felt a fury grow. I can feel the Gods’ anger, Mehr, as you must.” She touched her fingertips to the nape of her neck, at the place where Mehr could still feel the cold touch of the nightmares in her own skull. “I know that their anger wears its own flesh and squats in the shadows, waiting for the dreamfire to breathe life back into it. I fear what immortals are capable of.” Her voice lowered. “The clan are afraid too. And the fear makes them act—differently. Rashly. But when the next storm comes, and they see he has control again, they won’t fear any longer.”

  The clan were afraid, and here was Mehr, a convenient tool to be returned to the Maha’s keeping. Mehr understood then that it was more than distrust of Mehr’s vows that had led her mother to keep her out here alone, far from wherever the clan resided. She was trying to keep Mehr safe.

  Perhaps the Amrithi feared the Maha more than they cared to keep a fellow tribeswoman—a daughter of their own clan—safe. Perhaps they didn’t think of her as Amrithi at all. The thought made anxiety knot in Mehr’s chest, so she pushed it away.

  “There will need to be a balance,” Ruhi said. “But not today. And hopefully not in any of our lifetimes.” She closed her eyes and opened them, a bleak look on her face. “He has created a trap none can escape from.”

  “You should send me back,” Mehr said bleakly. “If he has no Amrithi to use when t
he dreamfire next falls …”

  “You’ve paid more than enough,” Ruhi said fiercely; her sudden fierceness, the depth of emotion in her voice, jarred Mehr. “More than enough! It’s a miracle you’re free, a miracle, Mehr. And he will take someone else—he always finds someone.”

  Mehr bit her tongue. So I wait, then, for Amun to awaken, or another Amrithi to take my place? I let another suffer for me?

  She felt sickened.

  “I’m going to rest,” she said abruptly. She stood. Her mother turned her head away, nodding sharply.

  “I’ll keep watch a little longer,” Ruhi said. “Just until sunrise.”

  Hours later, Mehr finally heard her mother go. Steeling herself, she breathed deep and slow and lifted her marriage seal from her skin. Then she touched her fingers to her scar.

  The pain raced through her, fierce and all-consuming. But she resisted the urge to wrench her hand away from her scar. She clung on instead, letting the pain deepen its claws into her blood and her bones. It was Amun’s pain, and it should have been Mehr’s burden as much as it was his. She let it consume her, until she was floating in a red sea of agony, until she could feel every subtle element of his suffering: the conflicting weight of his vow to her and to the Maha, stretching him thin, clawing him apart; the way his pain went beyond flesh to the place where his soul lived.

  There was nothing Mehr could do to save him.

  Finally she wrenched her hand away and found herself curled up on her side on the ground, gasping for breath. She climbed laboriously up onto her knees and wiped her streaming eyes.

  Oh, Amun. Amun. How long could he possibly survive, suffering as he was? There was no possibility that he would be able to perform the Rite of the Bound when the next storm came. Mehr was not even sure he would live to see it.