The Kingdoms of Dust

by Amanda Downum

  They entered the observatory tower, but followed the spiral staircase downward instead of up. Quietus had no use for the sky—their concerns were bound in earth. Nerium conjured witchlight as they descended, careful not to show the strain it took to hold the glow steady. Architects were much too fond of stairs.

  The snail-shell spiral ended at a red door. Rock salt, rose-colored slabs veined with crimson and porphyry, banded with steel to hold it to the hinges. The metal showed signs of recent scouring, but rust still blossomed. Salt for protection, to help contain the darkness that slept inside. As much use as a sticking plaster on a severed limb, as far as Nerium could tell, but it was very pretty.

  The room beyond the red door was round and domed, like the observation tower above it, and like the tower roughly twelve cubits across—three times the height of a man. In the center lay a black pit six cubits in diameter. Such a small space to hold so much power. So much destruction. Nerium drew a breath, bracing herself as she stepped across the threshold. Behind her, she heard Khalil do the same.

  Her witchlight flared as they entered the room, reflected in diamonds set in the curved ceiling. Hundreds of stones, bought and stolen and smuggled over centuries, a fortune to ransom kingdoms. The mages who built the prison had chosen to re-create the night sky—crystalline constellations glittered coldly in black marble, unchanging, locked forever in a night centuries past. Like the salt door, it made no difference that she could see, besides beauty. The power of the stones was real; Nerium nearly staggered under the weight of magic in the room.

  A man and a woman waited for them. The woman, Shirin Asfaron, was Quietus’s historian and the third member of the Silent Council who dwelled permanently in Qais. A thin, reedy woman, she had taken on the same yellowed shade of parchment as the records with which she surrounded herself. She inclined her head to Nerium, and witchlight shone against her sweat-slick brow. Her hands trembled at her sides, and the cords of her neck stood taut. She was younger than she looked, but years of living in Qais had taken their toll. She wasn’t as resistant to the constantly leaking entropy of the oubliette as Nerium.

  The man, Siavush al Naranj, didn’t turn. He faced the wall, muttering a constant chant of spells under his breath as he replaced a diamond in its stone setting. He was the youngest of them all, Ahmar’s prized pupil, and very clever at bindings—vinculation, as university mages called it.

  Ahmar and Siavush claimed holding Qais was an honor, a mark of great strength and trust. That was not untrue, but they were also the youngest and strongest of the circle and meant to remain so. So they lived far from the specter of Irim, guarding Quietus’s interests and their own ambitions, shaking their heads at the fate of their poor fading comrades. Trying to ignore the reality of their oaths.

  The object of those oaths lay in the blackness in the center of the room, whispering softly even now. Al-Jodâ’im. The Undoing. The doom of Irim.

  In all of Quietus’s years of study, no trace had been found of a greater destructive force, not even the ancient cataclysm that sank fabled Archis. In their desire to commune with the stars, the scholars of Irim called something down from the heavens, and nearly destroyed all of Khemia.

  The touch of Al-Jodâ’im crumbled stone and withered flesh. Men and spirits alike disintegrated in its shadow. Crops failed and earth grew lifeless. Plagues sprang up where it passed, spreading lesions and tumors and twisting organs against themselves. In the dark times after Irim, the storms men called the ghost wind had swept across the desert, killing hundreds and stunting the land.

  Out of that chaos Quietus had risen, dozens of mages who risked—and often gave—their lives to seal the hungry darkness where it could do no more harm. But Al-Jodâ’im were stronger than any spirits human mages had ever dealt with. A diamond might bind a ghost forever, but even the strongest of mage stones eventually failed under the entropic touch of the Undoing. So a new generation of mages had taken up the burden of Quietus, and then another, for over a thousand years. They pledged service till their deaths, and to uphold the seals above all else. They pledged secrecy too, lest the greed and curiosity of man cause more disasters like Irim. They had been ruled by ennearchs and heptarchs and triads, and even a few autocratic witch-kings.

  And now there were five of them. Though only four gathered today.

  “Is Ahmar joining us?” asked Nerium when Siavush was nearly finished. She kept her voice light despite her lingering unease. If he’d found signs of her tampering, he surely would have said something by now.

  Shirin shrugged. “I’ve heard nothing.”

  Siavush stopped chanting and finally turned from the wall. His face too was drawn and damp, his warm copper skin lusterless with fatigue. He held himself straight against the strain, but the glitter of his rings betrayed shaking hands. “She’s busy dealing with the destruction in Ta’ashlan. I speak for her.”

  “I’m glad to know how seriously she takes this,” Nerium said dryly. “But of course, I already knew that.”

  Siavush frowned. His weight shifted as if he meant to step forward, but thought better of it. No one wanted to stand close to the lip of the pit. “We all take our mission and oaths seriously. A lapse in the seals is nothing trivial. But it’s remedied now.” He waved to the newly replaced diamond. “The seals will hold, with vigilance. Ahmar will replenish our diamonds.”

  Nerium wanted to turn away from the faith in his voice, the affection he still felt for his teacher. Those too would wither with time, but the reminder of her long-faded youth stung.

  “With vigilance.” She snorted. “With the vigilance of Qais, you mean, while you and Ahmar sip iced wine in the comfort of the cities.”

  “I’m hardly sipping wine here, am I?”

  “No,” she acknowledged, smoothing her tone. “Your sense of duty is not in question. But all of our burdens could be lessened if we stopped binding ourselves to this carious corpse of a place, and to an expensive and antiquated method of vinculation.”

  “There is little profit in changing methods that still work,” Siavush said, “and a great deal to risk if something goes wrong. One broken seal is enough to loose the ghost wind—imagine what could happen if we removed them all. Ahmar and I—”

  “You’ve made your feelings clear. As has Ahmar, with her absence from this meeting. If not for my oaths, I would be happy to let you fail. Luckily for the rest of the world, I won’t.”

  Siavush’s face pinched. “What have you done, Nerium?”

  “I’ve acted, as we should have long ago. I’ve summoned an entropomancer, a vinculator. The best candidate I’ve found in thirty years to help us deal with our burden.”

  “That stormcrow spy? You risk everything we work for. We won’t allow it.”

  Nerium smiled, sharp and cold. “The majority is mine, Siavush.” She glanced at Khalil and Shirin, who each nodded slowly.

  “Nerium is right,” Khalil said, knuckles whitening on his cane. “Something has to change.”

  “Enough argument.” Shirin’s voice cracked. “Let’s finish what we came to do, and get out of this tomb.”

  Nerium nodded. “Yes. Let’s.” She often wondered if the founders of Quietus called themselves the Silent ironically, or if the quarreling had come later.

  Siavush frowned, but finally nodded. The four of them positioned themselves evenly around the black pit. They didn’t hold hands, but their magic commingled and flowed into a circuit.

  Her blood beat hard in her ears; under its rhythm, a different music swelled. As she turned her attention to the oubliette, the whisper grew, became a song. Polyphonic, discordant, inhuman, but its meaning was clear nonetheless—loss and loneliness, exile and longing. It scraped and shivered over her skin, ached in the roots of her teeth—it would take them apart, if they let it, layer by layer, muscle and bone, until all that was left was dust.

  They hadn’t let it yet.

  Sleep was the only mercy they could grant Al-Jodâ’im, bound as they had been for centuries. Her
tampering had disturbed their rest years before they might have woken on their own. But since her colleagues refused to consider the evidence otherwise, she had no choice but to force the issue. She quashed a pang of guilt before it could infect the working.

  Each of them focused their power differently: Siavush chanted under his breath, incantations and litanies of strength; Khalil recited sword-forms, though he hadn’t practiced them in decades; Shirin ran mathematical equations in her mind. Nerium sang. Her voice was not what it once was—that had been lost, with her beauty, to time—but rhythm and pitch she still had.

  Disparate as they were, their rotes served the same function: strength, order, precision, and perhaps even love. All the things that stood against the chaos and destruction that were Al-Jodâ’im, and the despair they had learned to wield as a weapon against their captors. All these they wrought into chains to bind the darkness, as their order had for centuries.

  They left the temple in silence when their work was done, limping, trembling, cold with sweat. No amount of pride could disguise the cost of these spells. But the crushing air of hopelessness had eased—the night air was still, soothing. The seals would hold.

  For now.

  They paused in the courtyard before the hypostyle, and Nerium couldn’t resist needling Siavush one last time. “Zadani is dead, by the way.”

  “Good,” he said, his voice clipped. While no one argued that Quietus needed fresh blood soon, Siavush’s choice of the imperial mage had proven a poor one. Next time, she’d let him clean up the mess himself. “It’s time I returned to my work, then.”

  Shirin’s lips pinched. Nerium marked it too, how he placed his second life outside Qais over his sworn service. She didn’t bother scolding him, though; she was finished with that.

  “Would you prefer the short route or the long?”

  His eyes narrowed at her solicitude. “The short, if you please.”

  A journey across the desert took decads, a month with slow camels, fraught with the danger of storms and wells gone dry. Quietus had faster methods of travel, though not always more pleasant.

  “Kash!”

  He balked at her summons; a hundred years of servitude had not broken him to the bit. She respected his defiance, but it was often inconvenient. She tightened the leash of her will and called again. The air curled away from him as he manifested, like skin from a wound. Black wings flared, blotting the stars. Shirin flinched, and Khalil turned his head.

  To the rest of Quietus, Kash was a necessary evil, a tool to be used quickly and set aside. To Nerium he was her grandfather’s legacy. Any oathsworn member of Quietus could call him, but her family were usually the only ones willing to do so. He had become their inheritance, an unholy bequest. Once he had been even more, but that had ended badly.

  “Kash, escort Lord al Naranj back to Ta’ashlan, if you please.”

  Kash had been a jinni, captured and exposed to Al-Jodâ’im’s touch in an experiment to discover the effect of entropy on immortal spirits. It turned his fire to smoke and ash, left him dark and bitter and twisted, but it also wedded him to the void, an avatar of the great nothingness. A way to harness its power.

  Kash hissed soundlessly, still held by her silence. She read calculation in his eyes—wondering, no doubt, if she was weak enough to challenge. Not today. He acquiesced with a mocking bow and the air parted once more behind him, a doorway into emptiness.

  “Ahmar won’t be happy about what you’ve done,” Siavush said, turning reluctantly to Kash.

  Nerium smiled at the threat. He was so very young. “She’s welcome to discuss the matter with me. I’m always here, after all.”

  Kash might hate her, but he scorned the other mages more. The rift sealed behind Siavush before he could have the last word.

  CHAPTER 4

  A decad and a half passed in the ochre house, while Adam ate and slept and paced the length of the weed-tangled yard. When the sun rose high over the dusty streets of Kehribar he sat beneath the mulberry tree and breathed in the scent of earth and stone and sap, the tapestry of smell the city wove. The fever eased—drowned, he imagined, by all the tisane Isyllt poured down him—but his strength was slow to return.

  Isyllt’s young apprentice courted him as if he were a feral dog, watching him from doorways and leaving plates of food where he’d find them. He felt like a carnival curiosity, but tried to smile. He’d imagined a younger version of Isyllt when she first told him she’d taken a student—thin and pale and sharp-edged—but Moth bronzed in the summer sun, and baby fat still softened her limbs.

  She spent her nights in the city, carousing with companions she never named, bringing home food and wine and trinkets. She slept through the mornings and studied sorcery in the afternoons, playing tricks with pink witchlights and scrying in bowls of water. There was a tension between her and Isyllt that neither spoke of; each treated the other as if she were made of eggshell.

  Isyllt talked of politics and recent events. She told him of the unrest in Erisín and the sorceress responsible for the death of Selafai’s king, and Kiril’s death as well. She received letters—some slipped beneath the warded gate, others sealed and delivered through the post. A lassitude Adam recognized as grief held her, giving way in turns to restless energy that left her waspish and pacing.

  Perhaps it was only her paranoia catching, but after a few nights Adam’s neck began to itch. Someone was watching them, and neither his senses nor Isyllt’s magic could tell them who.

  When he slept, he dreamed of stone walls.

  Isyllt woke before dawn, the sound of rain on the eaves rescuing her from her dreams. Not a nightmare this time, the ones that left her clawing at the sheets and choking on cries. The quiet dreams were worse. Dreams of Erisín, of Kiril. Waking left her bruised and hollow.

  A streetlamp cast rippling rain-shadows against the horn-paned window. Her eyes ached, but it was no use sleeping again. The dreams would only wait for her.

  The tiles were cool and sticky beneath her feet as she crept downstairs. Moth curled on the couch, twitching with dreams. Adam sprawled in the bowl chair across the room. Both of them snored.

  Moth was scarcely recognizable as the threadbare street child Isyllt had met six months ago. Some of it was the work of better meals and clothes, growth and sun, but not all. Taking a new name had shed a chrysalis—she emerged brighter, fiercer, lit from inside with a reckless spark.

  Was this what it was like to be a parent? To look away for a moment and find a child changed? To see the irrevocable passage of time on someone else’s face? The thought made her wince. She’d always imagined she’d make a terrible mother, and the past few months had done little to disabuse her of that notion.

  Adam had changed too, and not for the better. She’d known when she walked into the Çirağan that a year in its depths would mark him, but the reality was worse than she’d imagined. His color was better after days of sun and food, but nothing like the burnished olive she remembered. His long face was as gaunt as her own, eyes and cheeks and temples hollow. The hinge of his jaw worked in his sleep, and she could count the rings in his larynx when he swallowed. She’d never thought to see him so weak, his strength and predator’s grace stolen.

  Her throat tightened as she studied him, but her pity was selfish. She wanted him to be strong to remind her of better times. The last thing she needed was a mirror.

  His twitching stilled and his breath changed. His fingers brushed the hilt of the knife that never left his side and fell away. “You’re staring again.” Dark lashes fluttered and his eyes opened. Green-gold as a wolf’s, and as wary.

  Her mouth twisted sideways; she was stretched too thin to tease. “I can’t sleep, and you need to eat.”

  “You’re one to talk.” He rose slowly, carefully, wincing as his joints cracked. They spoke softly—not that a riot in the street would have woken Moth.

  Isyllt heated water in the battered brass samovar that had come with the house, measuring tea for her and tis
ane for Adam—ginger and willow bark smothered in honey and lemon. His cough was better after days away from the prison’s stale air, but he still tired too easily.

  They sat outside, sheltered by the eaves in the house’s tiny rear garden. Rain fell in shining ribbons, shaking the overgrown jasmine vines on their sagging trellis. Adam drank his tisane in determined gulps while Isyllt stared at her tea.

  “What are you going to do?” Adam asked at last, setting his cup aside.

  She swallowed tea and wished for wine; she’d been expecting this question. Her breath steamed as she exhaled. “I don’t know.” She turned her cup round and round again. She hadn’t gloved her left hand yet; the scarred palm and curled fingers made her feel naked and she fought the urge to tuck the hand into her lap. Adam had bandaged the wound for her, so many years ago. “There’s always Assar. I’ve kept in touch with Asheris al Seth.”

  Adam’s eyes narrowed. “The man who tried to kill you. Twice.” His gaze settled on her left arm—not the injured hand, but the bracelet of scar tissue that ringed her wrist. A burn, ridged and glossy, in the shape of a man’s hand.

  “That wasn’t his fault. We’re friends now.” She arched her eyebrows, daring him to argue.

  “So you’d defend the empire instead of undermining it?”

  They’d sailed together to Assari-held Sivahra to foment revolution and fund nationalist rebels. While doing so they’d discovered imperial embezzlement and smuggled diamonds. That discovery helped the emperor’s opponents in the Imperial Senate, and led to Rahal al Seth’s death in a suspicious accident and his sister Samar gaining the throne. Quite a success, as far as Isyllt’s masters had been concerned. It had only cost her most of a hand, and Adam a partner.

  Isyllt shrugged. “I haven’t had any better offers. I just wish I knew who was following me so doggedly.”

  “Could it be Selafai? The king might not want you working for a rival.”