Rana kicked the camel’s flanks. “Hey, girl! Come on! Don’t stop!” The thought of stopping here seemed worse than whatever awaited them below.
The canyon walls whistled as if wind were whipping over the stones, but the ashen air was calm. She kicked the camel again, and with a groaning bleat the animal crept forward.
They rounded a knob of sharp stone, and before them appeared an enormous black obelisk. It was tilted at an angle, but leaning it still stood almost four-stories tall. It seemed to be cut from a solid piece of obsidian. Its surface was dull and featureless save for an engraved metal plaque on one side. She read the Ytrian inscription, severely sandworn. The words were written in a strange grammar and unusual script.
“The mountains and sky shake in fear of King Diasamaz,” she read. “On this ninth day of Ev, in the 82nd year of Eshpeth, great Diasamaz defeated the armies of Zidad and took their daughters and riches. None will surpass his glory.”
The names and dates meant nothing to her. Here stood a monument to a once-great king. And what was he now but a fading memory? The thought filled her with despair. She remembered what Papa had said, how Time makes dust of us all. Once a monument to a great king, the obelisk was now a tombstone.
Fine black ash blew up from the chasm as Adar limped down the crooked path. Her throat burned, and she took a drink, offered some to Daniel. In the canyon, vortices of black ash spun in tight circles like a flock of sparrows, except there was no wind to move them. As the black dust caught the light, it sparked like sun on water.
Adar teetered, drooled, and paused.
She dismounted and ran to him. “Do you need water? What do you need?”
Daniel came running behind her.
Adar gagged, then vomited a torrent of blood and bile. She winced as Adar vomited rivers. How could so much liquid fit inside him? She felt helpless as he vomited again and again.
“You’re watersick,” she said, fighting back panic. “Drink.” She held her bladder open for him. “Before you faint.”
He vomited again. “Adar, you can’t die. We’re lost without you.”
Daniel petted Adar. He put his ear against the dog’s chest, checking his heart. He frowned and shook his head.
With much effort, Adar scrawled in the sand beside his puddle of vomit. The letters were poorly formed and it took Rana a moment to read them.
“Key,” it read. Adar fainted, and the spreading puddle swallowed the letters.
“Adar?” Daniel said. “Adar!”
The soot-filled air burned her lungs. The rocks beside the path were sharp as razors. Her injured forearm throbbed. Panic threatened to bury her alive. They couldn’t remain here, in this dreadful place. Nor could they go back to the plateau. The bright sun was the worst place to be if you were watersick. “I should have packed a tent,” she said. “Why didn’t I pack a tent?”
Daniel tapped her and pointed into the vomit.
“What?”
He reached into the puddle, using the hem of his sleeve as a glove, and pulled out a round object. At first she thought it was a simple stone. But as the slime dripped away she saw that Daniel held an emerald sphere.
“What is it?”
He turned the sphere over, gave it to her. It was heavier than lead, and its weight surprised her. It fit snugly in her palm, its surface covered in raised symbols of an alphabet vaguely familiar.
“Is this the key he meant, do you think?” she said. “Perhaps to Marul’s prison?”
Daniel’s eyes opened wide, and he gestured at the sphere. She gave it back to him. He turned it over again and exclaimed, “Heebroo!”
“You know this?”
He said some more, but it was useless trying to communicate.
She took the sphere from him. “Okay, suppose this is a key, why would Adar give it to us here? There has to be a door close by. Adar said that Marul is trapped in a cave on the DanBaer.” She scanned the mountainside. “The cave must be here!”
The cliff face rose steeply behind them. The stones were black and sharp, and there was no obvious cave. She put the sphere in her pocket and climbed the wall, avoiding the sharpest rocks. She paused when she reached a full story above the path.
“It must be here. It has to be here!”
“Rana!” Daniel pointed into the chasm, where a cloud was approaching.
The swirling cloud of ash engulfed them, depositing a thick layer of soot over everything. For a moment, all was black. But the tornado blew off as fast as it had come, twirling down the path. And there, for an instant, beyond the cliff’s edge, a thin layer of soot hovered in the air, as if the mountainside extended three paces beyond the visible ledge. But the soot vanished like water draining into sand.
She leaped down, ran over to the ledge. Smoke obscured the floor of the chasm as she peered down. “You saw it too, didn’t you?” She tossed a handful of sand over the edge. It hovered in the air, as if resting on an invisible shelf.
“Look!” she said. “Look, Daniel!”
A few seconds later the sand vanished as if swallowed. But there was no wind. She felt around the space beyond the ledge with her fingers. She felt sand on top of hard stone, but her eyes saw only smoke and empty air.
She turned to Daniel and smiled. “A hidden ledge!”
She filled her pockets with sand, then carefully stepped onto the transparent ledge. Nothing visible lay beneath her, but she did not fall. “By the Goddess, I hope I’m right.”
Daniel stood by the ledge, eyes wide.
She dropped sand before her, revealing several flat ledges that fanned downward in a tight right-hand curve. A spiral stair! She caught its shape before the sand evaporated. She took another step, and a third, tracing out the curving path, until she had descended a half-turn. Daniel, watching her from the edge, said something nervously. A warning, it sounded like.
“Marul?” she whispered. “Marul, are you here?” She decided it best to keep quiet, if her jailers were close.
She took another step, and Papa’s words came to her. She had once asked him how he walked without fear on the highest ledges.
“A mason,” Papa had said, “never loses her fear of heights. She only learns how to manage it. One way is to, as much as possible, avoid looking down.” But there was no way to move now without looking down. With every step she felt as if she would plunge to her death. And with a pang of dread she realized her pockets were empty. She was out of sand.
Like a blind person, she felt for each step with her outstretched foot. Ten more and she faced the ash-colored cliff. The invisible steps ended. She ran her fingers over the pits and scars, searching for a crevice, an opening, a keyhole. Daniel shouted and pointed down at her.
“What?” He was pointing to a recessed symbol in the rock.
“Heebroo!” he said. “Ayin!”
She removed the sphere from her pocket and twirled it slowly until she found the identical symbol. A letter? The raised symbol on the sphere was the same size as the recessed letter on the wall.
“The keyhole and the key,” she said, smiling.
With the symbols aligned, she pressed the sphere into the rock—
And nearly fell forward as the wall swallowed her hand. It looked as if the wall had eaten her hand, that it had been sliced off at the wrist. But there was no pain. In fact the air was refreshingly cool wherever her hand was. Her arm moved through the wall easily. And so with a deep breath to steady herself and one last glance at Daniel, she stepped into the mountainside.
She found herself in a cool, dimly lit tunnel. Pale emerald light filtered into the tunnel from the chasm behind her. From this side, the cliff wall wasn’t rock at all, but an emerald film, like tinted glass. The cliffs beyond were as dim as twilight.
Her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and she took another cautious step. The tunnel walls were jagged and chipped, as if hewn in haste. Twenty paces down the corridor several tall doorways led to other places. It was too dark to see what lay inside them. Rana
moved slowly, afraid to venture too far from the exit and the light. She peered into one chamber. Dusty containers lay scattered on the floor. A high ceiling vanished in shadow. Otherwise, this place was empty.
Something rustled in the darkness, and she froze. Someone was approaching from the dark end of the corridor, breathing heavily. An aged man shambled into the pallid light. One of his legs twisted grotesquely, as if set poorly after a break. With each step closer, more hideousness was revealed. He was as skinny as a decaying corpse. Large gray eyes peered from hollow sockets, glowing with a faint yellow light, as if candles burned inside his head. He had few teeth, long and sharp; most had fallen out. Sparse threads of thin, white hair fluttered on his scalp as he shuffled forward. He was naked, save for a loose-fitting belt and a maroon cloth over his groin.
She retreated quietly, unsure if the stranger had seen her, when something glinted in his hand. She gasped. The sound she’d heard wasn’t breathing, she realized, but the scrape of his sword along the floor.
“How did you enter this forbidden place?” he said in a voice like sand and gravel mixing violently. “You should not be here.”
Rana reached for her dagger. In a trembling voice she said, “I’ve come for Marul Menacha. Is she your prisoner?”
“Not mine. I’m just the guardian, not the master of keys.” He crept closer.
“But Marul is here?” The hope in her heart almost pushed out her fear.
“This is her eternal resting place, as it shall be yours.” The creature, stepping fully into the light, was hideous. Once, he might have been a man. Now he was a grotesque shadow of one.
As he lifted his sword, Rana raised her dagger. She backed toward the door, toward the lighted world, reaching for the wall. Her hand pressed against the green glass, but did not pass through. She tried the sphere, pressing it randomly on its surface. There was no Heebroo letter keyhole on this side.
“No!” she said. “No!” Her voice echoed down the tunnel.
“A shame,” the creature said, “that your last words will be so unoriginal.” He lifted his sword. No, she couldn’t die, not like this! But there was nowhere to go. She thought of Mama, of Liu’s glistering eyes. But instead of striking, the creature plucked the sphere from her hand.
“Where did you get this?” he said.
It took her a moment to find her voice. “A . . . friend?” she said, swallowing.
He retreated two paces and sheathed his sword. “I am Grug, guardian of these caves.” He turned on his heels and shuffled down the corridor, his sword scraping the ground behind him. He wore no shoes, and his hairy feet were heavily calloused. His testicles hung below his loincloth like two eggs in a shriveled leather sack.
“Come with me,” he grumbled.
Rana straightened herself. “Is Marul here?”
“Here? I suppose in a manner of speaking, she is present.”
“But alive?” Her words seemed to linger in the air.
“That depends on your definition of life.” He disappeared into the shadows.
She sheathed her dagger. Marul! Goddess, Adar was right! She was here!
“Are you coming?”
“Yes, yes!”
The tunnel grew dark as she walked. “Where are you?” she said. “I can’t see.” Her voice tumbled into the darkness, and she grew afraid.
“Right.” Grug grumbled a few bitter words in a harsh language, and sconces in the walls flickered to life with a hundred little tongues of orange flame.
Rana blinked, astonished.
“Sometimes I forget,” Grug said, “what it was to be a man.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Rana said.
The walls seemed to shiver and dance in the firelight. Strange symbols and long columns of numbers had been scratched onto the walls by a nervous hand. None of the scratchings made sense, though here and there she did recognize the Heebroo letters from the emerald sphere. The farther they walked the more numerous the scratchings became, so that after a few minutes the walls were covered from floor to ceiling.
“You’re a Cursed One?” she said.
“We call ourselves the Mikulalim.”
“Is it true what they say about your kind?”
“I don’t know. What do they say?”
“That you . . . eat dead people.”
“My, you’re a bold one,” Grug said. “Most men lack the courage to ask such questions.”
“As I said, I am not a man.”
He snorted. “Yes, we do.”
“Do you want to eat me?”
Grug laughed. It was an awful sound, like the sound of the eagle’s leg being torn open by Adar’s teeth. “We eat the flesh of men as you eat the flesh of beasts, only after death. Do you plan on dying soon?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Then not yet.”
Despite her fear, she found herself oddly warming up to this Grug.
They stepped through an arched doorway and entered a circular chamber thirty paces across. Hundreds of candles spread about the chamber burned brightly, filling the room with golden light. Even so, the walls glowed with an illumination beyond what the candles provided, like a halo around the winter moon. The walls here were also covered with strange writing, but in even greater density than the corridors. A queer tree-shaped diagram had been drawn on the floor. And in the very center of it, as motionless as a statue, crouched a small woman.
“Keter is the crown, the havdole, the dividing line, beyond which no mind may pass unscathed,” the woman muttered. “Beyond Keter lies Ein Soph, the unknowable. Gehinnom is the same. Forever unknown to me now!” Her words were ragged, like an overworn shawl.
“Did you know?” the woman said. “Four entered the heavenly orchard? Azzai looked at the Shekinah, and boom! He died. Poor sap! Zoma looked, and he went mad. The insanity! Elisha killed all the plants. He denied what he saw, fool! Only Akiba left in peace. How? How does a man glimpse the divine and not lose sanity? Tell me!”
Her long gray hair was natty, and a filthy brown robe hung over her shoulders. Could this raving, filthy woman be Marul?
“You have a guest,” Grug said.
The woman snapped her head toward Grug. Her pupils were tiny in the candlelight, but her eyes, those were green as cactus buds, green as Ketef, the summer star. A line of snot dripped from her long, curving nose. A familiar nose. Rana’s heart filled with a glut of emotions—relief, fear, excitement, terror.
“A guest?” Marul said. “One of your brothers?” She scratched her cheek with a long-nailed finger.
Rana stepped into the light. This was not the Marul Menacha she had known five years ago, the woman who had conquered demons and traveled to dimensions she could explain only in crude metaphors. “Marul?” she said, shyly. “Marul, it’s me, Rana.”
Marul stared at Rana for a moment. Then she turned her eyes to the floor, where a tree of circles and lines had been drawn, labeled with the same Heebroo symbols that were on her emerald sphere.
The woman pointed to a circle on the left of the diagram. “Do you see this sephirah, Grug? This is Din, sphere of judgment. That is Ashmedai’s nature, to judge.”
“Yes,” Grug said.
Marul pointed to a second circle. “And this is Chesed, sephirah of mercy. To a demon, Chesed is poison, weakness! This thing that calls itself Rana cannot be real. It would be too merciful. Ashmedai would not allow it. It is an apparition. Send it away!”
“Marul,” Rana said. “I know it’s been years. I’ve grown. But it’s me. Rana Lila.” She stepped closer.
“Stop!” Marul shouted. She pointed an accusing finger at Rana but did not turn her gaze from the floor. “She’s a phantasm! A trick. Where are you hiding, beast? Oh, you must get so hard watching my agony, you vile demon!”
“I’m no ghost, Marul.” She glanced at Grug. “And I’ve come to free you.”
“Freedom comes not from a mirage. Oh, the evil king must be pleased, watching me squirm! But I’ll not fall for his
tricks.”
“This is one of her good days,” Grug said. “Mostly she rocks in the corner, holding her knees, moaning.”
Rana crouched beside Marul and took her hand. It was small, frail. Not the strong hand she remembered. “You used to call me your Little Plum, do you remember?”
“He could have learned that,” she said. Her voice echoed back from the tunnels. “Enough torment. Please, Grug, please, make it go away.”
“I’m real, Marul.”
“Lies!”
“Marul, feel the warmth of my hand. Hear the sound of my voice. Forget your eyes. What does your heart tell you?”
“Stop!” Marul screamed. She ran across the room and buried her face in her hands. Sobbing she said, “Make it go away, Grug. Make the ghost leave!”
“She’s no illusion, mistress. And she came with this.” He held up the emerald sphere.
Marul eyes widened. With a stooping gait, she approached Grug and snatched the sphere from his bony hand. “Where did you get this?”
“It’s hers. A key to the upper door.”
Marul spun the object in her hands, examining its sides. “Twenty-two Heebroo letters, dancing, aflame. All keys to many doors.”
“A dog called Adar gave it to me,” Rana said. “A demon. Do you know him?”
“A dog, you say?”
“And a demon.”
Marul scratched her head. “Could one of Ashmedai’s enemies have come to rescue me? Mashit herself? Rana, is that really you? My heart will shatter if it’s a lie.”
“I swear to the Goddess it’s me.”
“Vows mean nothing. Prove you are Rana.”
Rana lifted one of the candles and carefully poured its hot wax into her palm. Years of working with stone had calloused her hands; she felt no pain. She collected the wax and formed a small ball in her hands. With a pinch here, a nudge there, and a little coercion from a candleflame, she formed a round shape between her fingers.
“Here,” Rana said, holding her creation up. “Do you recognize this?”
Marul stared at the sculpture in Rana’s hand. “A plum?”
“I had never seen one before. You told me they were from another world. You brought me a bag of them. They were so delicious. I ate so many I got sick. You said if I wasn’t careful—”
King of Shards Page 8
