“Mollai has more on her mind than my little fantasies.” She frowned and kicked sand to the rooftops far below.
“You need more patience, Rana. A few more years apprenticing and we’ll each get our own foremanship. You’ll see.”
“Apprenticing? Davo, I set the capstones on the Crypt of Umer when I was six. I dangled from ropes two hundred stories above the ground! I helped my father design the palace where the king sleeps. I was weaned on mortar. How much more apprenticing do I need?”
Davo frowned. “Forget it. It’s not worth fretting about things we have no control over.”
“But that’s just it. Every day I choose to heft stone for that sweaty fool.” She pointed down the ramp where Jo had fled. “I could leave.”
“Leave?”
“You know, quit.”
“And do what? You can’t work in Azru without the king’s blessing.”
“Then I’ll quit Azru too.”
Davo scratched violently at his black stubble. “Where would you go? In the desert you’d drown in the tides, or get eaten by demons, or kidnapped by Bedu. And you’d need a guide, and guides costs money. And you can’t trust a sellsword—”
“Davo!” She shook her head. “Forget it. It was just a dream.”
He squinted at her. “Rana, if you left, who’d sing for us?”
She felt pity for him. One day, she knew, she’d have to leave this place. Leave him. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.” Not yet, she thought.
He bit his lip and stole a glance at the sun. “Micah and me are going to the fermentary on Ramswool Row tonight. Want to join us?”
“And get groped by drunk men again? No, thanks.”
“I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen this time.”
“Sorry, Davo.”
“Maybe we can go someplace else, then?”
“We?”
He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know, you and me.”
She climbed onto the wall and swept her gaze across the cityscape, over buildings she had laid with her own hands. Once this view had inspired awe. But as her hair fluttered in the hot breeze she realized this city was no longer enough. Azru was too small.
“Not tonight,” she said. “I’ve got plans.” She jumped off the wall and grabbed her satchel and tools.
“Plans?” Davo said. “With who?”
The sun touched the horizon, the official end of the day. The masons grabbed their belongings and raced down the wooden ramp, and Rana followed.
“Rana!” Davo shouted, running after her. “Wait! Tell me, who do you have plans with?”
A few early stars shined in the east as she shouted, “With a paintbrush, you fool!”
CHAPTER THREE
Something was wrong with this desert. Dunes rolled across the sands like slow moving ocean waves, lofting Daniel and the dog hundreds of feet into the air before plunging them deep into valleys. He grew dizzy, queasy, as dunes merged, collided, and vanished, all while humming like an orchestra warming up, an out of tune symphony, threatening to harmonize but never quite succeeding. He took many deep breaths to keep his panic in check, but the technique was quickly losing effectiveness.
The huge black dog led onward, and Daniel followed, because what other option was there? Things flitted across the sky. Birds? Bats? When he turned to look, they darted out of sight, and he only caught their dark silhouettes. A few hundred feet away, a huge yellow cylinder slithered across the sands and his hopes rose. A school bus on a road? A stationary building appearing to move by optical illusion? But this “bus,” he soon saw, had pearlescent scales, huge white eyes, and opalescent fins that flashed rainbows in the sun. Neither fish nor whale, but something wholly different. This huge beast swam through the dunes, serpent-like, in and out, under and over, before it vanished.
“What the holy hell is that?” he said. But the dog just kept on walking. “I saw you change shape,” he said. “And I remember you. You followed me home from Rising Path. You stopped me in the street. And you were at my wedding. And now I’m in a desert that sings and some yellow serpent is swimming across the sands. I’m dreaming or I’ve gone insane.”
The dog glanced at the sun and kept walking.
“Where are you leading me? Where are we going?”
The dog ascended a dune, and at its peak the dog paused to stare at something Daniel couldn’t see. The dune sunk slowly with a gut-vibrating hum, dropping by degrees to reveal the landscape beyond. And then he saw the city.
At the base of an enormous plateau there was a crowded city, nestled like a babe in its mother’s arms. Gilded spires reached into the blue sky, their shiny tips burning like candles in the sun. Many walls crisscrossed in dizzying, overlapping layers that followed crooked and haphazard courses. Their jumbled shadows made the city’s true size difficult to discern. In the cliffside, an enormous palace had been carved in the rock face. A webwork of bridges linked the palace to the city. It seemed as if this city had been built on top of an older city, one with different architecture and aesthetics, and that had been built on top of one before it, ad infinitum.
He had never seen anything like it, not even in a dream.
The smoldering sun sent the city’s shadows deep into the sands, all the way to his feet and beyond. This was where the dog was leading him. The animal was already running toward it.
——
By the time Daniel and the dog reached the outskirts of the city, night had fallen. A spray of stars lit the sky, more points of light than he had ever seen. He grew dizzy and disoriented under their pallid glow. There were no familiar constellations. And the moon, rising above the mountain, had a strange face. It looked smaller too. Wrong, somehow.
I’m on the other side of the world, he thought. I’ve been drugged and abducted. But why?
Wind blew across the sandy plain, and the temperature plummeted. His unprotected skin, sunburned in the day, gave him chills. He donned his wedding jacket, the wine-colored flower still pinned to the lapel. People moved on the edge of the city, figures winding through crooked streets. Light and shadows flickered inside row after row of stone homes.
People. Civilization. His mouth watered at the smell of grilled meat and baking bread. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. The dog paused to sniff the air, then led on.
The outermost streets of the city were buried in sand. These peripheral buildings seemed to have been abandoned ages ago. Most were filled with sand. Daniel and the dog hiked up a cobbled street that sloped into the desert. After hours on shifting ground, the hard stones felt wonderful under his feet.
An aged woman, brown-skinned and leather-faced, sat under a smoky oil lantern beside a tray of necklaces and charms. A crimson scarf wrapped her head, and her loose brown robe was filthy. She eyed him and the dog through narrow eyes.
“Hello!” he said hoarsely. “Could you please tell me where I am?”
She took off the lid of a large jug beside her, dipped a bronze cup into it, and handed it to him. When he saw the shimmer of water, he thanked her and took it. He offered it first to the dog. The animal had brought him to civilization after all. The dog drank prodigiously.
The woman dipped again and offered him the cup, and he drank it all in one gulp. “Thank you,” he said, giving the cup back to her.
“Ee-nee pos-yi nyah-neh,” she said and threw the cup into the jug.
Daniel said, “May I have another, please?”
She slapped his hand. “Nyeh! Pos-wer so-nud-neh, soub!”
“Do you speak English?”
She scowled at him.
He made the universal sign for a telephone. “Do you have a phone?”
She held out her fingers, mimicking his gesture. “Nyeh bur-dah me-owpt na! Feh zhu, feg! Nyah-nyah!” She waved him away as if he were a gnat, and the dog clamped onto his hand and pulled him up the cobbled street.
“Not so friendly,” Daniel said.
People in loose-fitting robes and tunics carried smoky
oil lamps up and down the narrow avenues. They moved hurriedly, furtively, and didn’t pay too much attention to Daniel and the dog, as if afraid of them. He called out to a few, but they only walked away faster when he did.
The city’s ten thousand flickering lights from lamp and candle flames formed a starscape of its own. But this starscape moved as people walked the streets with lanterns in hand. Through open windows and shutters he peered into stone and brick homes. The residents had tea-colored skin, long, narrow faces, and eyes dark and intense. At stone tables they ate meals of soup and bread using metal and stone utensils. In one house, a man prostrated himself before a large stone effigy of a full-figured woman. In another, a man berated a boy who had broken some kind of loom. Behind a shuttered window, he heard moans of people in the throes of sex.
Their fabrics were fashioned from canvas, linen, burlap, leather. All earth-toned, with a smattering of natural reds and blues. Not a single pair of jeans or a t-shirt on any of them. No phones or computers either, or for that matter anything that hinted at the past thousand years of human technology.
Even the most remote places on Earth couldn’t have sealed themselves off to modern life as well as this city had. No electrical wires. No advertisements. Not even a stray cigarette butt. How had these people so assiduously avoided modern contamination? It was almost as if he’d been thrown back in time, into one of Gram’s folk tales of biblical Canaan.
On a dark, dead-end street, they paused before an ornate stone door twelve feet tall, as if made for a giant. Spirals within spirals had been carved into the door by a skilled hand. With a gentle push, the dog nudged the door, and it swung open on a miniscule pivot, a marvel of precise engineering. He followed the dog into a walled-in courtyard, each wall a magnificent mosaic full of people, monsters, and desert scenes. Four palm trees and rows of potted succulents bordered a walk that led to the opposite end of the courtyard, where three buildings stood boldly beneath the stars.
The central one was larger than the other two. The buildings were all built of white and obsidian bricks laid in a complex, repeating pattern. The roofs were slate, gently sloped, and were silver-tinted in the moonlight. Above the houses the stars burned in many colors.
Voices came from the largest building, echoing against the walls. Daniel smelled bread and his stomach grumbled. He thought about knocking on the door, but the dog pulled him toward the smaller building. The animal pawed at the door, yet another masterpiece engraved with an image of a giant bird leaping from a cliff. The dog shoved his body against the door, but it was locked. He gestured at Daniel with his snout.
“How about we knock on the door of the main house?”
The dog shook his head and growled.
“You want to go in here?”
The dog nodded.
“What’s in here that’s so important?”
The dog growled again and bared his teeth.
Daniel didn’t want another scratch on his chest, but neither did he savor the idea of breaking into someone’s house in a city that wasn’t keen on strangers. Perhaps there was an easier way inside.
He circled around back, where the air reeked of feces. A few tall and thin cacti tilted somberly. He found a small, high opening in the rear of the building. An alcove. It was beyond his reach, but he used a potted plant as a stepstool and squeezed himself through the opening. It was dark inside, and as he fumbled for footing he crashed to the floor.
He sat up. He had only bruised himself, but he couldn’t say the same for whatever object had broken his fall. A rectangle of moonlight shined though the alcove, revealing shadows numerous and strange. Something chittered high in one corner. A bird? He limped toward the door, banging into unseen things, and fumbled the latch. The dog bolted in.
“Okay. Now what?”
The dog shoved the door closed, then pulled Daniel into a corner, down to the floor, behind a table. And there they sat.
“Enough of this. I’m hungry and I’m knocking on the door of that house.”
Daniel rose, when the dog exhaled phosphorescent green smoke from his nose. The smoke floated into the center of the room, where it coalesced into the shape of a young woman. She was beautiful, taut and muscular. She had brown skin, black hair, and eyes as dark as the space between the stars.
Daniel froze as the smoke slowly blew away, taking the visage of the young woman with it. From outside came the sound of footsteps, a voice singing like a spring bird. The voice echoed against the courtyard walls, and Daniel thought this could be what those ancient sailors heard in the cliffs by the sea as their ships crashed into the rocks. His body thrummed, and he felt renewed and energized. He found himself moving for the door before he realized he had stood, but the dog grabbed his hand and pulled him back under the table.
Someone fumbled with the latch. Whoever was singing was coming in.
CHAPTER FOUR
By the time Rana had reached street level, the stars were shining by the thousand-fold. With her tools in a satchel slung over her shoulder, she skipped home, whistling a tune that had come to her late one night while she had been toiling in her workshop. The cityfolk, heading home themselves, gave her plenty of space as she walked through the crowded streets. Her songs had made men do crazy things, the rumors went, like disrobe and dance in the streets, or laugh maniacally at the stars. Sometimes children threw stones at her, and more than one witch had cursed her. She still sometimes pulled baby scorpions from her hair.
Once, when she had come home with a bleeding welt on her head, Papa told her never to sing in public again. But she couldn’t stop singing any more than she could stop breathing. Songs arose in her breast with the regularity of the morning sun.
At Dusty Square, she paused to run her fingers over the sharp teeth of the stone lion statues, as she liked to do every night before turning toward home, for good luck. Papa had carved them, these stone sentinels.
When she reached the tall door that led into the courtyard of her house, she found it swinging. Guests? she thought.
She walked into the courtyard, past walls she had painted and tiled herself. Something was amiss here that she couldn’t place, but the smell of dinner from the house pulled her home. Besides the pomm fruit Davo had given her, she hadn’t eaten since morning. When she opened the door, Mama was holding baby Liu in her arms.
Rana beamed as she came inside. She kissed baby Liu and Mama. Papa sat in his special wheeled chair that Rana had made for him, grunting as she kissed him hello.
“Who’s my Little Bean?” Rana said, grabbing Liu from her chair. Rana couldn’t resist her sister’s brown pebble eyes, her soft, round cheeks.
“Put her down before she throws up,” Papa said.
Mama helped Rana settle Liu back into her high seat. Rana picked up a washrag from the table and folded it into the shape of a cactus flower.
Compared to most of Azru’s homes, theirs was luxurious. “The late King Umer,” Papa boasted when he got very drunk, “could not have me live in an ordinary house, no! He wanted his chief architect to live in a home worthy of the king! I laid these stones by my own hand.” Then Papa would knock on the wall and laugh. But since his injury, his story had taken on a bitter tone, as did most everything else Papa said.
He had built the adjacent storehouse as a buffer against the frequent famines. And when he’d discovered Rana’s fountains of creativity, he’d built her the workshop. Inside those walls she had taught herself mosaic, metalwork, tapestry, painting, music, woodcarving, and many other arts. Her sculptures of the Goddess appeared in every nook and on every shelf about the house. Her brass lamps with hawk wings and oxen horns hung from the ceiling by chains she had made. Mama’s wrists glittered with jewelry Rana had crafted for her, inlaid with precious stones she had mined from the mountain. Mama seemed often suspicious of the ease at which Rana learned each new skill. Once, when she was angry, Mama had said there was dark magic in it. But Papa said it was only her inherited talent that gave Rana her skills in the art
s. She was the offspring of the chief architect, after all.
At Mama’s order, Rana set the table with bowls she had painted with scenes from the Books of Tobai. She had molded the bronze utensils to resemble small hands. The four sat at a stone table Rana had hewn and polished from a solid block until the flecks of copper shined like stars. Rana eyed her creations doubtfully. They were never as good as she’d envisioned.
The table set, food ready, they turned to the bronze bust of Mollai that Rana had made, and Mama said, “Goddess Mollai, giver of rain and succor, praise your infinite greatness. May the winds of your blessings blow upon our family.”
“So may it be her will,” they replied. Baby Liu watched with curious eyes from her chair. One day, her sister would be old enough to paint and draw and set stone, and Rana would teach her everything she knew. Liu smiled, as if she was privy to this beautiful secret.
They ate a stew of ox meat and beans, a loaf of hard bread, a feast compared to what most ate. Grains and legumes arrived infrequently from the wetlands beyond the desert. Water was scarce and expensive. Azru was always at war with one city or another, and the city’s storehouses were perpetually low, buffered only by Papa’s foresight and wealth. But since his accident, much of that wealth had diminished. He was always concerned with money now.
“How’s the Ukne coming?” Papa said. “You obeying Jo?”
Rana huffed. “Jo’s an ugly lizard.”
“Rana, your tongue!” Mama snapped. She frowned as she removed a morsel of chewed meat from her mouth and fed it to Liu.
“Everyone misses Papa,” Rana said.
Papa lowered his eyes. Since he’d broken his back, he couldn’t pick up Liu, and it was only by taking a strong powder from Anya the Healer that he was able to sit upright at the table.
Papa gave Mama a hard look. “You mustn’t speak ill of the king’s architect. You can’t afford to lose your income, Rana.”
“All the masons speak ill of Jo.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“He’s a poor chief architect. But we’re ahead of schedule because of me, and I’ve improved his design.”
King of Shards Page 3
