The Forbidden City

by Deborah A. Wolf

  No! Hannei screamed silently. Finish it!

  “What? What do you want, Sharmutai? This little puqqa is mine to do with as I wish, and I wish to kill it.”

  “Why kill what you can sell?” The woman swam into Hannei’s dim sight.

  “Who is going to buy this?” The man jabbed with his knife, and blood ran freely. A fly left Hannei’s back to walk across her face as it searched for tears. “You?”

  “Well, since you ask…” The woman upended a small bag into the palm of one hand, and the crowd gasped. She held the hand low enough that Hannei could see.

  Red salt, she thought, and her gorge rose. She offers life for life.

  The man gaped at the fistful of red salt tablets, then at the woman who held them.

  “But… why?”

  “Because it amuses me. Because I am wealthy, and foolish with my money. Because I want to… which is the only reason I do anything, as you well know. Does it matter?” She jiggled her hand up and down, making the salt tablets clack and chatter against one another.

  “Not a bit,” the fat man replied with a laugh. He dropped the knife, and the whip, and snatched up the money with both hands. “But do not come crying to me when it dies! No guarantees! It will be dead by sundown, most like.”

  “Most like,” the woman agreed softly. She touched the top of Hannei’s shorn scalp, the only part of her that did not yet hurt. “We shall see.” She picked up the man’s discarded knife. Snick-snick, fast as a lionsnake’s strike she cut the ropes, ducking her shoulder and catching Hannei upon her back as Hannei fell down…

  …down…

  …down into the shadows.

  * * *

  The first thing Hannei noticed was the smells. Wine and honey and fresh linen, and some sort of burning herb or spice.

  The smoke made her nose wrinkle involuntarily and she sneezed—and then she noticed the pain. Pain everywhere, every bit of her a brilliant inferno of agony. She hurt on the outside, she hurt on the inside, she hurt in places she had not known she had. Worse, she itched as if a thousand thousand sand ants swarmed across her corpse, taking mouthfuls as they passed.

  “She is awake!” a voice cried out nearby, startling Hannei so that she jerked away from the sound, and that hurt. “Mistress, she wakes!”

  “Nnnh,” she protested, only then remembering that they had taken her tongue. “Ngkok.”

  “You awake to the gift of sweet life, and the first thing you say to me is ‘fuck’?” a gentle voice remonstrated. “I must say, it seems rather ungrateful of you.” Hannei tried to lift her face from the soft bedding, but a light touch upon her back held her still. “Ah-ah, none of that, my prize. Let us get you healed up first, then you can jump about my house breaking things like the barbarian you are.”

  “Nnh.” It hurt.

  “None of that, now, either. There will be time enough for you to learn to speak properly, once the healers can guarantee to me that you will live. Until then, please do not trouble my ears with your noise.”

  The bedding beside Hannei sagged as the woman’s weight pressed it down. Something cool was pressed against her back, and Hannei wept with relief as the inferno of pain receded to a dull heat.

  “There you are,” the voice crooned. “There, my prize. Rest now. Rest.”

  Hannei slipped away.

  * * *

  Later—days later, moons later, she would never know for sure—Hannei perched on a padded wooden stool, sipping dragonmint tea from a salt-clay mug and watching colorful little fishes swim in a fountain. A heavy iron collar was clasped about her throat, loose enough that she could swallow but not so loose she might hope to slip out of it, and it was fastened to a silvery chain that kept her from leaving, or even standing upright.

  The fountain was colored red, and it sparkled in the late sunlight. It had been glazed with red salt, one of the girls had told her in awed tones, the same as the cup from which she drank sweet water at every meal. The robes they wore had been dyed red with salt, and tablets of red clay fell clack-clack-clack through the mistresses’ fingers, more precious than rain.

  How many lives is this all worth? Hannei wondered, turning the cup round in her hand. A small child ran shrieking through the gardens, chased by two young women in fluttering red veils, all of them laughing as they passed her by. How many babes might the Mothers bear, if only we had this much salt?

  They, she reminded herself harshly. Not we. They.

  “Sometimes I wonder what you are thinking, my prize.” A hand touched her shoulder, the nape of her neck, and rubbed the soft strip of hair that was growing in—curly, much to Hannei’s disgust. “I wonder what thoughts chase each other round and round in that pretty head of yours, day in and out as you sit here and watch us all.”

  Hannei was pretty. The surgeons had seen to that, and the girls with their brushes and paint, and golden dust for her eyelids. Hannei’s ears had been pierced and hung with red gemstones, and her nose, as well. She longed to pick it.

  “Nnnnh,” she grunted, and scowled as she set the tea aside.

  “Oh, stop.” Sharmutai laughed and sat on the edge of the fountain, trailing her fingers in the water. Every movement she made was as graceful as an oulo dancer’s, and as calculated. For all her gentle voice and warm words, the softness never reached her eyes, not one bit of it. When she smiled, Hannei’s ridiculous hair wanted to stand on end. “I do not care to know that badly. I was just bored.”

  Sharmutai, she had learned, owned a comfort house—a whorehouse for those too wealthy to utter the word whore. Or she owned ten of them, or a hundred, depending on which whispers you might choose to believe. Certainly she owned this house, the one to which she had brought Hannei… and it was not a nice place. Slaves would prefer to be sold as serpent bait rather than be dragged through those front doors. It was known that none who entered that way ever left again, alive or dead. Slaves had swallowed their own tongues, it was said, rather than be sold to Sharmutai.

  Hannei grunted again, softly, eyes never leaving those of the woman who owned her. Swallow their tongues, ha, she thought, and washed the bitter thought down with hot sweet tea. Not like I had the choice.

  The toddler ran laughing into the garden again, saw Sharmutai sitting there, and all laughter stopped. Her big brown eyes widened, they filled with tears, and she ran away sobbing, her attendants following with quick and silent footsteps. Sharmutai stared after them. Although the smile never slipped from her face, her eyes could only be described as thunderous.

  “In truth, I know what thoughts spin around in your head,” she murmured. “In all your pretty little heads. Day in and day out, you all think of one thing. Freedom.” She cut her eyes at Hannei. “Am I not right, my prize?”

  Hannei shrugged. Freedom to go where? The question did not interest her all that much.

  “I say I know what you are all thinking, and I do not care. I care about one thing, and one thing only, and that is wealth.” Sharmutai ran her hand along the rim of the glittering red fountain, and her eyes shone as if she were fevered. “Wealth enough to buy what I want. What I want. And do you know what that is?”

  Hannei blinked—at the lemon trees and the fish in the fountain, at the sight of enough red salt to buy anything at all, anywhere in the world. What would she wish to buy, if she owned so much? What could any woman want so badly?

  Tammas, she thought. I want Tammas. I want my life back. But there was not enough red salt in the world to buy what she wanted. The closest she might ever come would be vengeance against those who had taken these things from her.

  Oh, she thought. Oh.

  Still holding her gaze, Sharmutai nodded slowly. “You understand,” she whispered. “I knew you would.” She took Hannei’s tea, drank the rest down, and then threw the precious cup against the ground, where it shattered into a thousand sharp pieces.

  “Now,” she continued, dabbing her mouth gracefully on her sleeve, “it is time we have a talk. I know you have heard the whispers abo
ut me. Some of them are true. This is, indeed, a brothel, and it is one of the worst. People—mostly men, you know, but not all—come to sate their coarsest desires here, their absolute worst. My poor little whores are lucky if they survive one night, which is how my physicians came to be so good at stitching girls up. When that happens, I do not care. There is nothing you can do that will make me care. Understand this, believe it, and you may just survive this place.”

  Ehuani, she thought, the woman speaks truth. Hannei nodded, slowly, as the chillflesh raised up along both arms.

  “Good. Now, I paid good money for you, wrecked though you were, and the whole of Min Yaarif is laughing in their sleeves about Ovreh finally getting the better of me in a deal. A cut-tongue slave, a barbarian no less, beat all to shit and likely dead by now. There is nothing this town loves so much as gossip, and right now you, my prize, are at the heart of it.”

  “Nnnhgh,” Hannei snorted. She only wished she had killed the fat bastard. Grab her by the pussy, would he?

  “Still angry with him, are you, pet? There are men I know who would do so much worse to you.” Sharmutai flicked her fingertips against the fountain’s surface, and the little fish scattered in terror. “Men who would love to get hold of an exotic Zeerani warrior-girl, broken or not. How many times could we stitch you back together, I wonder? My physicians are very good. I expect I could sell you over and over again until I had made a tidy profit, enough to make that odious Ovreh eat his words.”

  Hannei growled low in her throat, would have stood but for the silvery chain, the collar that marked her as a slave.

  “Ah. Good girl, good.” Sharmutai nodded. “This is the girl I saw in the market. This is the prize I bought, from a fool who did not know what he had.

  “I said I could sell you to these men, but I have not yet decided that I will. What would that get me? A throne of red salt? A house made of red salt bricks? Not even that much, my pet, and those things I own already. No, I want more than things, I want more… and you might just help me get it.” She leaned close. “Do you wish to know what it is that I want?”

  The collar tugged tight against Hannei’s throat. Only then did she realize that she had leaned in, too, that she hung on the other woman’s every word. She nodded.

  When the blow came it was so fast, so unexpected, that Hannei cried out even though it did not hurt all that much. Sharmutai laughed, a merry sound.

  “I am not going to tell you!” she sang. “But you are going to help me get it, all the same. There is something in it for you, too!” She leaned in again, as if they were girls, conspiring to steal spiders’ eggs from the kitchen. Hannei leaned away, rubbing her face and scowling.

  “Oh, stop sulking. I will not reveal to you the deepest wish of my heart, as if we were equals, you and I, as if we were milk-sisters sharing a teat! I will tell you, however, what you want. I might even help you get it, because I like you.”

  Hannei could only stare. The woman is mad.

  “I know what you want,” Sharmutai breezed on, unconcerned. “You want—what is your word for it? Ah, yes. You want kishah. You want vengeance.”

  Hannei froze.

  “Do you know what else I own? Besides the comfort houses, I mean? I own a fighter’s pit. It is very small, and only the elite are allowed to attend the fights I put on…”

  A strange sensation grew in Hannei’s heart, a warm pain, as if a tiny dragon stirred in her sleep.

  “I could let men buy you, and women, all manner of wealthy filth, and they would use you up, pffft.” Sharmutai pinched her fingers together between their faces, “Like putting out a candle, but I can think of a better use for that strong young body of yours, that fire I see in your eyes. I can afford to send you to the finest school for pit fighters this side of the Seared Lands. You could fight for me. Fight hard enough, and you might win me the thing I really want. Do that, my prize, and I will set you free. Free to avenge yourself upon the people who cut out your tongue…” She stuck her own out, and laughed. “…and sold you to a monster like me.

  “The choice is yours,” she told Hannei. “You can fuck, and you can die, or you can fight, and probably die, but maybe not. Uh, well, that sounded better in my head.” She smiled, and this time the smile reached her eyes as she reached out and gripped Hannei’s hands so hard that her nails bit into flesh. “What say you, slave?”

  “Ngkok ech,” Hannei agreed. She squeezed back and blood welled from her palm to spatter on the ground between them, sealing the deal.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Ani woke to the sound of the Zeera singing, the taste of her lover’s sweat, and the pain of having died. She lay for a moment without moving, savoring the beating of her heart. The gentle whuffling of the horses as they slept, and the not-so-gentle snoring of Askander as he lay beside her, one strong arm flung across her hips and a scowl on his face. He always slept like that, when they were together, as if he could protect her from all the dangers of this world.

  Dawn came, and with it the realization that nothing was as it had been before the Dragon King stretched his hand across the Zeera. Sa and ka, always a shallow well from which she might draw, had run dry. Duq’aan was nowhere to be seen. Askander’s vash’ai had refused to speak with him since Inna’hael had dragged them here. As she was the warden’s lover, his vash’ai would sometimes grace her with conversation, but now when she tried to touch his mind…

  “Nothing,” Askander said, his voice low and ragged. Ani had not heard him wake. “Nothing. He is gone.”

  “He will be back,” she assured her lover, turning to face him. Ani winced, then grinned, as the ache low in her belly reminded her of the night’s loving. “As long as we are alone…”

  “No.” Askander reached out and enfolded her in his arms, to let her know the word was not meant for her. His heart beat a sad tempo against her cheek, its song as familiar to her as her own. More familiar to her now than her own.

  Everything has changed. Everything.

  “Everything has changed,” he said, echoing her thoughts. “Duq’aan is gone. He is gone from my mind, from my heart.” His voice cracked. “He has gone on and left me behind.”

  Ani frowned. She could still feel Inna’hael. The kahanna was somewhere far away, but their connection held.

  A strong wind picked up outside, slapping at the sides of Askander’s tent. Everything has changed, it told her. The desert sang a dirge, low and urgent. Everything will change, it said, and it wept.

  Ani closed her eyes again, breathed deep, and listened to the bones of the world. She had not done this since she was a small child, young and bright. Then she was a hummingbird, flitting among the people’s wagons. The song was there, as it had been long before her birth, as it would continue on long after her death, and the song agreed.

  Everything is changing.

  With her eyes closed she could see the color of her lover’s bones, the gold and black and blood red of the Zeera. He belonged here. Their horses’ colors would be the green-blue of a grassy oasis under the desert sky. Talieso’s bonesong was streaked with earthen clay and iron and copper, soiled as it was after having been claimed by her all those years ago.

  As was Askander’s.

  I am sorry, she thought, and she bit her lip hard against tears. I should never have tamed you.

  “Come, pretty girl,” Askander said at last, kissing the top of her head. “This morning grows old, and the road is long.”

  Ani hugged her lover one more time, and rolled away from his warmth.

  * * *

  They worked in silence, a dance of bodies that had long lived and loved and ridden together. There was an efficiency in everything Askander did, that Ani had always found attractive. Nothing superfluous, no movement wasted, because he knew what had to be done. Just as she did.

  She sang under her breath as they broke camp, as the horses were fed and watered, even as she chewed her ration of lionsnake pemmican. Askander shot her a puzzled glance but said nothing, trusting tha
t she knew what she was doing, that her intentions were good. In those dark and silent glances, Ani learned that she was not too old to suffer a broken heart.

  I am sorry, she told him silently, and she was, but that did not stop her from singing, from working the Dzirani magic which was forbidden in every land.

  Askander swung up into his saddle and turned Akkim’s nose to the south and west. “We should stop first at Nisfi,” he said, “then straight on to Aish Kalumm. Wardens and warriors need to know of these false Mah’zula…” His voice trailed off, and he did not meet her eyes, even as he spoke of their journey together.

  He knows.

  Ani paused in her singing, though the tune still whispered through her breath, through her blood and bones. The song would go on unless she chose to end it, or until the magic had enabled her to achieve her bloody goal.

  “I cannot return with you.”

  “The Dragon King has done something to sap the land of sa and ka,” Askander continued, as if she had not spoken. “Hafsa Azeina is gone, Umm Nurati is dead, Sareta is acting more like First Mother than is the new First Mother, and the people need guidance and wisdom from their elders. The world is changing, bringing with it a new day, and they are afraid there will be no Zeeranim left to meet it. I am afraid, as well.”

  You are afraid? Ani shuddered. I am terrified. But she said only, “I cannot return. I have to go to Atualon, to help Hafsa Azeina, and to help Sulema.” As she said it, what had been a thought became real. Askander frowned at his horse’s ears.

  “They are no longer of the people.”

  “If they are not, neither am I, nor ever was. The Zeera is more than a place, and the Zeeranim are more than brown hair and brown eyes, more than horses and blades and bows. The Zeera is in my heart, as it is in theirs. I will remind them of this, and persuade them to use the power of Atualon to help the people.”

  “The last time you dragged me to Atualon, we were turned away. How do you think now to whisper into the ear of the Dragon Queen, or her daughter?”

  Ani smiled even as her eyes brimmed with unwelcome tears. “I will use my sharp wits and sweet tongue.”