Blood of the gods, could they all have fled the building and someone barred the door behind them? Perhaps, but it seemed unlikely that all of them would have left. Surely some would have fallen to the gas. They might have been ordered to hide somewhere in the building Çeda hadn’t yet searched, but if so, why wouldn’t the masters have hidden in the same place? They had no more ability to fight than the scholars did. Less so, in fact.
In the end she and Yndris were forced to leave. They cleared the doors and headed into the wind to avoid breathing in any of the gas that might be blown in their direction. When they entered the basilica again, they searched for the source of the gas. In the northwest corner of the building they found it: two clay pots with a brownish liquid bubbling inside them. Çeda and Yndris took one pot each, then ran outside. After setting them downwind, clear of any of the nearby buildings, they backed away. They gasped, hands on their knees, as a wracking cough seized them both. Yndris vomited. Their eyes were reddened and puffy. Snot ran freely from their noses, forcing them to wipe it away with their sleeves.
On the far side of the forum the battle still raged, but Çeda and Yndris both knew the battle had been nothing more than a massive feint. The Host had been after the graduates all along. They were trying to pull off some grand trick, and Çeda was sure they had only moments to unravel the mystery before it was too late.
“Where could they have gone?” Yndris asked, staring at the basilica doors. “To a cellar, perhaps? To the roof?”
Çeda shook her head. “No. They were taken.”
“How?”
How, indeed? Where might they have gone? As Çeda stared at the nearby buildings, her mind went to the tunnels beneath the city. Davud had shown her some to get from the Well in the western quarter of Sharakhai to the scriptorium tower’s cellar. Why couldn’t there be more? “Are there tunnels that lead to the basilica?”
Yndris seemed caught off guard. “Of course not.” But her tone made it clear she wasn’t certain of the answer. She too began looking to the other buildings, but Çeda was already running toward the fight raging on the opposite side of the forum. Çeda whistled a winding series of notes, the ones that identified their hand uniquely, a call for Kameyl and Sümeya to attend them.
Kameyl was deep in the battle, but Sümeya, fighting near the back, disengaged and ran toward them. “The scholars have been taken from the basilica,” Çeda said when she came near. “All of them. Are there any tunnels leading to nearby buildings?”
Sümeya stared at the basilica, then swung her gaze to the old garrison, a dull stone among the brighter jewels of the collegia’s more modern buildings. Sümeya’s eyes were calculating. She glanced back at the battle, but then motioned Yndris and Çeda toward the garrison. “Come with me.”
Over the gravel they flew, through the green bushes bordering the mall, across the cobblestone street. They reached the stairs leading up to the garrison’s stout, iron-bound doors. Çeda expected them to be barred, but the rightmost door creaked open at Sümeya’s touch. All three of them—Sümeya, Yndris, and Çeda, had swords in hand as Sümeya pushed the door fully open. Just inside, three guardsmen lay dead.
Down a short hallway, in a large, open room, stood a man by a barrel. He stared at the three of them with a sickening gleam in his eyes. He was old. Blood streaked down over his eyes and cheeks in a haunting pattern. His long beard was matted with dried blood. In one hand he held a brass lantern. In the relative darkness, it cast strange shadows against his craggy face.
Sümeya came to a halt, clearly wary. “Who are you?”
“The one sent to kill you,” the man said, his voice cracking with age.
Sümeya took one step forward, her movements measured, neither too quick nor too slow. “Where are the scholars?”
The man smiled like a thief who’d just stumbled upon a bag of golden rahl. “Gone, gone, gone! Taken from beneath your very noses!”
Çeda tried to reach out, to feel for more who were here, but for some reason she could barely feel the man’s heartbeat, let alone others. Yndris had moved to the left of Sümeya. Çeda stood on Sümeya’s right. There was a trap here, but what?
With a dire grin, the man reached down and lifted something from the top of the barrel. And then Çeda realized there were no barrel rings around the barrel, neither along the bottom nor near the top. No sooner had she noticed than Yndris started running toward the man.
“Yndris, stop!” Çeda called, sprinting after her.
The man pulled the rope, and the barrel staves fell outward like the petals of a blossom. Thick, golden liquid spread in all directions. As it rushed over the floor like charging cavalry, the man lifted the lantern high.
Çeda managed to catch Yndris’s arm and pull hard. Yndris was so fixated on reaching the man she fell in a tangled heap. The lantern shattered. The oil lit with a whoosh. In the center of this spartan place, a sun was lit, its center fixed on the man as he laughed, raising his arms high. “So the Kings tumble!” he screamed. “So the Kings fall!”
Çeda tried to pull Yndris to her feet, but Yndris fought her. “Release me!” she screamed, and fell backward.
The oil caught up with her, soaking into her left sleeve as Sümeya rushed in and pulled her up by the bodice of her dress. The oil caught Sümeya’s skirt and crept beneath Çeda’s shoes, but the two of them managed to pull Yndris to her feet and run.
The flames followed. The sound of it roared, drowning out the madman as his laughs turned to screams. They burst from the building as the oil rushed out and flowed down the stairs, making the garrison look like an elder god spitting fire and hatred. Çeda slipped her burning shoes from her feet. Sümeya used her ebon blade to cut her own skirt free.
Yndris’s right sleeve was still aflame. She tried to pat it out, until Çeda grabbed a fistful of cloth at the shoulder and yanked downward in one hard motion, ripping the sleeve away. Sümeya did the same to Yndris’s skirt, leaving her looking like a poorly made rag doll, but she was free of the fire.
For a moment, the man’s screams reached a fever pitch, but then they simply stopped. The fire continued to rage. It burned with bright white intensity, with licks of darker colors, green and turquoise and blue. Kameyl rejoined them. The battle was nearly ended, the last of the Moonless Host’s maniacal scarabs being cut down at last. As they fell, more and more of the Kings’ warriors turned to look up at the garrison. Here and there along the base, flame was burning through the gaps in the stones. Those gaps widened. The stones themselves began to slump like blown glass.
“Back away!” Sümeya called.
And everyone did, moments before the front half of the garrison collapsed. Stone walls buckled, then gave altogether. Four stories crumbled, coughed away from the rest of the building, spreading like a fistful of pebbles dropped by a child. Stone and fire mixed, smoke roiling upward. The earth itself rumbled like the day of reckoning.
For the first time, Çeda truly saw the Al’afwa Khadar’s destructive ways through the eyes of a Blade Maiden. She felt like the old children’s tale, the moth in the maelstrom. She had so little control over what was happening to Sharakhai, to the desert. And she wondered where she and the city and all those she loved would wind up when it was finally over.
You assume too much, Çeda mused. It may never end. This struggle may flow beyond your precious years.
Some continued to watch the burning building for a time, but there was work to be done. Wounded to tend to. After watching perhaps longer than she should have Çeda turned away, to help as she could.
Chapter 23
THE MORNING AFTER THEIR ORDEAL WITH GUHLDRATHEN, during the false dawn, Ramahd waited on the dunes with Meryam by his side. A bare mist was forming, slipping over the dunes as the cool of the night was slowly replaced by the warmth of the day.
The desert was a harsh mistress, but Ramahd had been studying her ways for years. After the
Bloody Passage, in which his daughter, and almost all the other survivors of that tragedy, had died of thirst, he’d promised it would never happen to him again, and so he’d found those watering holes that existed. He’d studied the flora and fauna of the desert so that he could, if need be, survive. Ignoring the objections from both Meryam and Dana’il, he’d tested himself in the desert for no less than seventeen days and seventeen nights.
It had meant days of travel over open sand as he moved from oasis to oasis, but he’d forced himself never to rely on a single watering hole. He’d painstakingly collected the tiny, bitter leaves from firebushes and eaten them for their hunger-sapping effects. He’d used a rock to form and sharpen a crude spear, which he’d used in the mornings to stab lizards as they crawled out from under the rocks they used for their warmth in the night. He’d found it grueling, and there were days when he wondered if he’d survive, but he had, and he’d returned to Sharakhai hardened. He’d built a fire on his last night in the desert and feasted on an addax calf he’d taken down with his spear. He hadn’t been proud of taking such a young animal, but he’d thought it a sign from Alu or perhaps even one of the desert gods that he’d done well, and he didn’t wish to insult them.
Ahead of where Ramahd and Meryam waited, forms scuttled from the troughs between the dunes, hundreds, thousands of them. They crawled up along the windward side, stopping just before they reached the crest.
“Watch them now,” Ramahd said to Meryam.
She did, though with a numb expression. The beetles spread their wings, tipping their backsides toward the wind. The mist collected on their wing covers, at which point they’d close them and gather the water to drink.
Ramahd walked along the dune to the nearest of them, then picked up a beetle and sucked what moisture he could from it. It wasn’t much. A drop or two. But it was something. He continued this way, beetle after beetle, motioning for Meryam to do the same. She stared at the beetles, then Ramahd, then closed her eyes and shook her head as if she were wondering how all this had come to pass. But when she opened her eyes again, there was some small spark in them. She trudged over, weak and shaking. Every time Ramahd had offered her help she’d refused, so he remained silent, ready to rush to her should she collapse. She picked up a beetle, sucked moisture from it with a pinched expression on her face, then tossed it aside like a pistachio shell.
“Eat some,” Ramahd said, then crunched down on one of the wriggling things. “We don’t know when we’ll be able to eat again.”
She stared at him sidelong. He thought she would refuse, but a moment later, she crunched down on one. She chewed and swallowed, taking rather a long time to do so, but ate another a moment later, faster this time.
Soon the sun had risen, burning away the mist. The beetles fled back beneath the sand, and the two of them were off toward the nearest of the drinkable watering holes he knew of, or as near to it as he’d been able to judge from the late evening stars.
Ramahd spotted it near nightfall. He might have missed it entirely, but he’d been watching carefully for any signs of birds, and a few had flown in from the south, passing overhead and gliding down toward it. It was a small thing, secreted between two rocky strips of land. There was green vegetation surrounding the crescent-shaped oasis. Such a strange sight. Leagues of sand, but here, a strip of water reflecting the bright orange sky, emerald ribbons along the bank framing it like the setting for a flaming jewel.
They reached the water and drank deeply. It tasted foul, but it would sustain them until they reached the next.
Meryam plopped herself down on the bank, her dress fanning around her. She took off her shoes, set them carefully by her side, put her feet in the water, and stared intently into the crystal-clear depths as if it might reveal her future like King Yusam’s mere. After a time, she pulled her legs up and hugged them, looking for all the world like a lost little girl.
“I am the queen,” Meryam said after a time.
“What?” Ramahd asked, pausing in his task of collecting dates from a nearby palm.
“I am now the Queen of Qaimir.”
It was true. Ramahd had thought of it several times that day, but hadn’t wanted to bring it up; it made no difference, not until they reached the safety of Sharakhai.
Ramahd sat next to her. After removing his boots, then his socks, he put his feet in the warm water next to hers. “You are.”
“What ever will I do with a kingdom? I wasn’t meant for such things. Indio was meant for the throne, or Yasmine after he died. I never thought . . .”
“Well,” Ramahd said, motioning to the dunes beyond the palms and desert ferns that lined the water, “who’s to say that skinny little arse of yours will ever reach the throne?”
Meryam glared at him, but then looked out over the desert, a florid purple landscape with the sun’s passing. And then she laughed. She laughed so hard she nearly fell in the water, and when Ramahd grabbed her arm to keep her from falling in, she lay on the grass and laughed at the sky. “The throne of Qaimir is years and worlds away.”
It was a common refrain in Qaimir among its lords and ladies, referring to how very few would ever get to sit the throne, no matter how much they might like to. And here she was, the kingdom given to her by the callous act of a fellow blood mage—albeit a foreign one—and a merciless ehrekh.
Meryam seemed to feel this connection as well, for just then she rubbed her hand on her forehead, where not so long ago Hamzakiir’s blood had marked her and Guhldrathen’s forked tongue had licked the sigil away. She rubbed harder, then took some water up with one hand and did so again. Then she was splashing into the water, clothes and all, rubbing viciously at the place where she’d been marked.
“Meryam, stop it.”
She didn’t. She rubbed even harder, thrashing in the water, screaming in rage or impotence or both.
“Meryam!” He dropped into the water and grabbed her hands. “Stop it!”
“I’ve done a terrible thing, Ramahd.” Her tears mixed with the water, and she cried, falling into his arms, sobbing against his chest. He held her, brushing her hair from her face, running one hand along her back as they listened only to each other’s breath. Their toes squished into the mud. Nearby, beetles began to buzz.
“It was a mistake,” he spoke softly. “He was more powerful than we’d guessed.”
Meryam’s hand reached up to touch his cheek. His neck. For a long while they remained this way, standing in the water, two souls comforting one another in an embrace that belied her years of cold, bitter behavior. She pressed her lips to his neck, merely resting there against his skin, but then she was kissing him.
He tightened, but it only made her pull him closer. She stitched ardent kisses across his neck. She raked his hair until she had a fistful of it. She craned his neck back until he stared at the sky, a willing prisoner to her affection. A bare few stars lit the field of dusty gray above. One, the brightest, felt like a soul he’d known—Yasmine, perhaps, watching his betrayal from the farther fields.
“Meryam,” Ramahd said.
She ignored him, pulling his shirt out, her fingers now working at the ties to his trousers.
“Meryam.”
“Be quiet.” She shoved him backward against the bank until he was lying on the reeds they’d matted down. “Your queen wills it.” She pulled his trousers halfway down. Still in the water herself, she stroked him while placing warm, wet kisses along his thighs, over his hips, over his stomach. Then she took him in her mouth, and he gasped in pleasure and pain as she—sometimes roughly, sometimes tenderly—ran lips and tongue over his hardening cock.
As he watched her, his pleasure mounting, he saw small glimpses of the old Meryam: the beautiful younger sister of his dead wife. He saw the Meryam who had been carefree, if inclined to dark thoughts. How far they’d come since then, their days spent in Viaroza or in the capital or occasionally tra
veling the country together, going from city to city and sampling the food, a thing he, Yasmine, and Meryam had all enjoyed immensely. And now they were reduced to this: Yasmine dead, Meryam a shadow of the woman she once was, Ramahd vowed to take the head of his wife’s murderer but too often being swept along by currents he was unable to see, much less control.
Meryam climbed out of the water. She stripped and stood over him, naked, staring deeply into his eyes, daring him to turn his gaze from her, to deny her what she sought.
He didn’t. He waited for her to lower herself down, then guided himself inside her. She gasped as she fell over him, her cold skin now pressed against his as he wrapped his arms around her and thrust slowly into her. He saw the star again, twinkling, shining bright. But now other stars joined it. More of the dead, gathered to see some small glimpse of those they would never touch again, not until they too passed beyond the darkling veil.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the star.
Meryam rose enough to stare into his eyes. She looked so very desperate still, but something else had kindled inside her: a glimmer, like the most distant of fires. It wasn’t passion, or not entirely. It was an undeniable lust for life, a thing he hadn’t seen in her since the desert when she’d taken Hamzakiir in a clash of brightfire. “What is it?” she asked, halting her movements.
Ramahd couldn’t take his eyes from her. He didn’t want to. “Nothing,” he said, then drew her to him.
Meryam kissed Ramahd deeply, riding him faster now, breath halting noisily through her nose. She shuddered once, twice. Her body convulsed, and then she broke her kiss and arched her back to look up at the sky. Ramahd kissed her breasts, holding her waist as he thrust into her over and over. As he was drawn over the edge as well, Meryam looked down at him with an expression of simple passion, of joy in the physical form. He’d never seen her look so beautiful.
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