When Jackals Storm the Walls

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  Meryam stood crookedly. She was frail and impossibly thin, a scarecrow made of twigs and twine. Her eyes shifted from Hektor to Meiying then back to Ramahd again. “How dare you speak to me after sparing your wife’s killer.”

  “Macide is dead, Meryam.” He let the words sink in. “Now who made that promise to you, and what did you promise in return?”

  Her face turned sour and spiteful. “You’re as weak as my father ever was. You think with Macide dead the score has been settled?”

  “The debt has been paid, by Macide and the Moonless Host both.”

  “I used to think it was that girl, Çeda, who’d made you go soft, but now I see it was the city itself.” She straightened herself, stood taller. Her hands shook. “Every step you took led you farther from Qaimir, each a betrayal to the memory of your wife and daughter.”

  “Don’t speak of my wife and daughter ever again. We’re done here in the desert. We’re going home, and you’re going to answer for your crimes.”

  “Crimes . . . ? My father deserved what he got.”

  “Whatever failings you saw in King Aldouan, and there were many, he didn’t deserve death. Now come quietly, Meryam.”

  “No, Ramahd.” She raised her hands and was suddenly holding a slim knife. She held the point to her chest and gripped it with both hands. “I’ll not stay for your trial, nor to be judged by those who think themselves my betters.”

  She pulled the knife toward her chest, but Meiying was as swift a spell caster as Ramahd had ever seen. She drew a sigil, and the steel blade crumbled, the remains pattering against the floor like ash.

  Meryam stared at the handle, at the ash on the front of her dress. She lifted her gaze and stared into Ramahd’s eyes with a look that said it wouldn’t matter in the end. Ramahd didn’t much care what she thought. She would be brought back to Qaimir. She would be tried. Her patricide would be proven and the throne would pass to Duke Hektor the Second. But there was something that needed doing first.

  “Hold her,” Ramahd said to Duke Hektor.

  Hektor stalked toward her, and when Meryam tried to retreat, rushed forward and grabbed her arms, forcing her to face Ramahd and Meiying.

  “What are you doing?” For the first time, she looked worried.

  “No longer will you be allowed to walk the red ways.” Ramahd motioned to Meiying.

  “No,” Meryam said, understanding dawning on her. “No!”

  She struggled, but she was no match for Hektor, who held her firmly in place as Meiying approached. Meryam screamed, but it did her no good. Meiying blooded her, then began drawing complex sigils over her forehead and face. It took a powerful wizard to cast such a spell, and few knew the sigils needed to cast them. Meiying was one of them, as part of the Enclave’s inner circle.

  After collecting more of Meryam’s blood into the reservoir of her blooding ring, Meiying cast one last spell on the blood itself. “Now,” she said when she was done.

  Ramahd forced Meryam’s mouth open, and Meiying fed Meryam her own blood, blood that had become like poison. Ramahd forced her mouth closed lest she spit it out.

  Meryam fought wildly, but she was simply too weak. Her rapid breathing eased, her wild movements slowed, and when she opened her eyes again, her irises were bone white. Meryam’s magic had been burned from her.

  Chapter 59

  FAR BELOW THE HOUSE OF KINGS, Anila paced along a subterranean tunnel with the ghul, Fezek, limping by her side. Fezek had been making a show of rubbing his arms for warmth for some time. “It’s awfully cold down here, isn’t it?”

  Anila might have been annoyed if she weren’t so preoccupied with what was about to happen. “Can you even feel cold?” she asked.

  “Well, my skin’s a bit numb, but yes!” He stumbled, catching his balance with several wild swings of his arms.

  “I told you to be more careful.”

  “Well it isn’t my fault.” Fezek glared at her from beneath his wide-brimmed hat. “I didn’t fix the end of a rake to my leg and call it a day.”

  “You could have replaced it a thousand times by now.”

  “I have more important things to do. Work on my latest epic goes apace. I’m preparing it for a first reading at a very special place, an institution, really.” Anila saw the way Fezek was watching her as they took a fork in the tunnel, but she kept silent. “Don’t you want to know where?”

  “The Four Arrows.”

  His eyes lit up. “How did you know?”

  “Isn’t it the most famous of all venues for the serious, avant-garde poet?”

  “You’re quite right! Have you been?”

  “Not even once.”

  “Then clearly you’ve heard of its renown!”

  “No.”

  “Then how—”

  “Fezek, your triumphant return is all you ever talk about.”

  “Oh . . . Yes, well, I may have mentioned it once or twice.”

  Fezek’s memory was becoming progressively worse. She had half a mind to let his soul go, to let him return to the farther fields, but there was something about the sheer wonder in him. His poetry was about as pleasant as chewing a mouthful of sand, but she couldn’t deny he had a certain lust for life that, while she might not admit as much to Fezek, she knew she needed from time to time.

  “Well,” Fezek went on breathlessly, “it will be a grand night. A grand night, indeed. You’ll have to come. You can hear your own tale as viewed by a master poet!”

  “And how would I do that, Fezek?”

  “Why, after . . .” He looked startled, then stared at her with naked sadness. “Oh, right . . .”

  He’d forgotten, again, what would happen after she’d dealt with Hamzakiir—Anila would lose her hold on life, and when that happened, Fezek would surely die too. He fell into silence, and Anila was glad, for her memories of this place were flooding back, particularly memories of her mother’s death—her second death—the moment she’d touched the strange, glowing crystal. Part of Anila felt that if she just kept walking these tunnels, she’d eventually come across her mother. She’d be there waiting, her arms spread wide, and Anila would rush to embrace her.

  But that was nothing more than a childish dream. Her mother was gone. They would be reunited, just not in this world. Find Hamzakiir, Anila told herself. Make him suffer and then snuff the life from him. Then you can slip to the land beyond.

  Guhldrathen’s roar reverberated through the tunnel. It was followed by screams of terror and calls to battle. It was distant and dreamlike, so much so that it felt inconsequential, but it wasn’t. It meant everything. What Guhldrathen was doing now would flush Hamzakiir from the cavern and into the tunnels. In his final vision for her, Guhldrathen had revealed that she would find him in the tunnels. In that same vision, the ehrekh had seen his own death—he would be slain, he’d told her in the stuffy confines of her ship, while trying to kill the King of Swords, who lay wounded on a bed of intertwined roots.

  She reached a small cavern littered with smooth, mounded rocks. Two tunnels leading from it stood like gaping mouths. Elsewhere, glowing, mustard-colored moss grew on the exposed rock, lighting the space in ghostly relief, including the silhouette of a man crouched in the gloom.

  She felt her heartbeat quicken. At last I have you, Hamzakiir. Each careful step she took forward felt heavier than the last, as if the others were watching from the land beyond. Jasur, Raji, Collum, Aphir . . . The rest of her fellow collegia graduates as well. The weight of their expectations pressed in on her.

  She drew a sigil in the air, a spell that cast light over the small cavern. The man stood and faced her, and Anila drew a sharp breath. He wasn’t Hamzakiir at all, but a man of middling height with a mop of curly brown hair hanging around his head. He looked to be thirty summers, perhaps less—it was difficult to tell with the scars that crisscrossed his face and hands.


  Anila tried to reach out with her senses but found them to be deadened, all but useless here. It cemented her fears that the man must be Hamzakiir in disguise, but then she noticed what he’d been crouching beside: the naked body of a tall, bearded man. She rounded the rock to get a better look, knowing that it must be Hamzakiir, and indeed it was. He lay on the root-lined floor, so still Anila wasn’t certain if he was alive or dead.

  She tried to reach out with her senses again, but it was no use. The scarred man was blocking her attempts, which made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She was in much greater danger than she’d realized at first.

  “Hello,” Fezek ventured. “I’m Fezek. And you are?”

  The man waved a hand in a simple gesture—nothing more than a roll of his fingers—and Fezek collapsed to his knees.

  “Oh my,” Fezek said, and fell flat on his face.

  As he lay there motionless, Anila peered more closely at her unexpected adversary, who had a large lump in the center of his forehead. “Who are you?”

  His smile was the sort one gives to a child who’d just asked why the sun hides at night. “Call me Brama.” He flourished toward the light she was creating through her link to the land beyond. “There’s no need for me to ask who you are, Anila.” He studied her as if he were an ornithologist who’d just stumbled upon a phoenix. “You’re a curious one, aren’t you? A woman who walks in the land beyond. It almost makes me wish I could stay.”

  Anila’s instincts screamed for her to run—there was something terribly wrong about Brama—but she’d come too far to run away now, so instead she pushed beyond the walls Brama had erected around her and spread her senses toward Hamzakiir. Finally it worked. She sensed a faint heartbeat. He was alive, then . . . But that did nothing to unlock the mystery of Brama’s presence here.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, Brama waved to Hamzakiir’s body. “Please,” he said, “be my guest.”

  With one eye on Brama, she stepped closer and intensified the light. Since entering the tunnels, many of the roots threading through them had begun to shrivel, turning hard and brittle. Not all of them, though. Some were as they’d always been: supple and delicate. From a handful of those fuller roots, small tendrils had grown over Hamzakiir’s shoulders, his hips. They moved between his thighs and over his manhood. They pressed between his lips and crawled into his eyes and nostrils and ears.

  It made Anila’s heart race. Hamzakiir was one of the most powerful wizards the desert had ever seen, and he’d been rendered powerless by Brama. Anila had been the hunter moments ago. Now she felt like prey, as if at any moment Brama would focus his foul intentions on her.

  In her fear, Anila pushed as she had with Hamzakiir and examined Brama’s soul. She’d grown accustomed to examining the fabric of a soul’s making, and Brama’s was unlike anything she’d ever seen. It was a whole made of two parts—one recognizably that of a mortal man, the other like Guhldrathen’s, the soul of an ehrekh. It shouldn’t be possible, but it was staring right at her, the halves of two souls stitched imperfectly together.

  A story drifted up from her memories, the story of a thief who’d broken a fabled sapphire in the Battle of Blackspear. There had been an ehrekh trapped inside the sapphire, and the thief had freed it. “You’re not just Brama,” Anila said, “you’re Rümayesh as well.”

  It would explain how he could have overwhelmed Hamzakiir. It would explain how he was able to stop her from using her own abilities.

  The smile on Brama’s face deepened. “How very perceptive, but that’s hardly the most important question at hand. A better one is: what are you going to do with Hamzakiir now that you’ve found him?”

  Anila’s heart beat madly. “That depends on what you’ve done with him.”

  “After all he’s done to you . . .” Brama smiled a condescending smile, then pulled a kenshar from his belt, a nicked weapon with a wicked, gleaming edge. “After all he’s done to your friends”—he held the blade out, hilt first—“you would put preconditions on taking your rightful revenge?”

  Anila didn’t know how Brama had come to be here. She didn’t know his purposes. But she couldn’t deny that this was a gift from the gods.

  She moved to stand near Hamzakiir’s feet, realizing only then that his tendril-choked eyes had opened and he was staring straight at her. He had a sleepy, emotionless expression, and on seeing it Anila’s anger returned in a rush. Memories of the chaos of her graduation day resurfaced. She heard the screaming in the collegia forum again. She smelled the gas after they’d taken shelter in the nearby basilica. She felt the sting in her eyes as she’d woken in that forgotten, subterranean temple in Ishmantep.

  The anguished pleading of her friends was the worst—that and their endless screams. They echoed in her mind, making her relive the terror of wondering what they were going through, a terror that was somehow accentuated when their screams were silenced. Their days of captivity had taught them that when silence came, it meant Hamzakiir had finished with one, and would soon come for another. Every time it had happened, Anila prayed she wouldn’t be taken. And then, when someone else had been chosen, a ceaseless guilt scraped at her insides, a thing made all the worse when the screams started up again. Her own cries had nearly suffocated her.

  Brama smiled, still holding the knife.

  Anila stared at it, feeling her own heart beat, then she snatched it up and crouched over Hamzakiir’s naked body.

  Hamzakiir’s lips trembled and he said, “Please,” the sound like the wings of a wounded dove.

  “Please?” Anila asked, incredulous.

  His eyes closed languidly, then opened again. “Please don’t do this.”

  Anila laughed. “After all you’ve done you would ask for mercy?” She straddled his chest, as she had with King Sukru before leaving him to die in the cavern not far from here. She paused, however, when she noticed the web of roots. They were burrowing deeper into Hamzakiir’s skin.

  A noise came from one of the tunnels leading to the cavern, and a woman’s voice rang out. “Brama?”

  Brama turned toward the sound. Anila did too, just in time to see something metallic spin through the air and lodge in Brama’s chest. Suddenly a shining length of steel, a pin of some sort, shone brightly against Brama’s dark clothes. Brama grunted. One hand reached for the pin as a second came flying in to land just beside the first.

  Releasing a long groan, Brama staggered backward, struck the cavern wall, and slid down until he was curled up like a drunk in the corner of an oud parlor.

  Chapter 60

  BRAMA WATCHED IN HORROR, trapped within his own body, as Anila crouched over Hamzakiir. It was all his fault. He’d let Rümayesh get to this point. After nearly killing Mae in the blooming fields, he’d spiraled into a well of despair. His doubts and failures had left him vulnerable, more so than he’d realized, and Rümayesh had regained dominance once more.

  For months the bone of Raamajit had given him the illusion that he might be able to expel her from his body, but it had been a mirage. All he’d managed to do was delay her plans. She was sure to get what she wanted now—passage to the farther fields, the cost to Sharakhai and the desert be damned.

  Worse, there was a part of Brama that wanted her to succeed if only this could all be over. He hardly challenged her as the days progressed. She spent time with Queen Meryam, instructing her in the final sigils needed for her dark spell. She wandered the halls of the Kings, enflaming tensions here, quelling them there, applying the small flourishes that would set the pieces on the board just so.

  As the ritual in the cavern had begun, she’d watched with a smile on her face as more and more had been drawn to the blooming fields. In a grand arc beyond the city, the candle-flame lives of mortal men, women, even children, were snuffed. Many asirim died alongside them. Meryam came closer and closer to achieving her goal, and so did Rümayesh.

 
But then Çeda and Sehid-Alaz had somehow countered the spell. Rümayesh had nearly raced to the blooming fields to kill them, but she was terrified of interfering too much—do that, and her nature as a child of Goezhen, even with the soul of a mortal fused to her own, might bind her too tightly to this world.

  Shortly after, Macide, the focus of Meryam’s spell, had been slain, banishing the spell entirely. The blood of the dead still fed the adichara, but Sehid-Alaz and the asirim were slowing its effect. She was no longer sure whether the crystal would break and to come so close only to be stopped now was tearing her apart.

  But the crystal was close to the tipping point. It would take only one more, someone powerful, to push it over the edge. It was in that moment that she’d sensed the arrival of Guhldrathen, and through him, the necromancer, Anila. She’d watched them closely, studied the lines of fate that linked the two of them. Those same lines had led Rümayesh to Hamzakiir, and a plan that would tip the balance for good began to form.

  It had been a simple matter to lure Anila to the proper place. From there it had been child’s play to enflame her hatred. She’d been ready to kill Hamzakiir and have his blood feed the crystal when a steel pin had blurred through the air.

  Pain exploded in Rümayesh’s chest, in Brama’s chest. It was terrible, and grew infinitely worse when the second pin came streaking in, sinking deeper than the first and piercing her heart. Rümayesh stumbled. She fell against the rough cavern wall, her hands reaching up to grip the pins. The barest touch made the pain soar to new heights, a thing that Brama felt every bit as much as Rümayesh.

  Brama fought for dominance, but Rümayesh had felt the touch of the elder gods in those pain-filled moments. The pins, remnants of a distant age, had been forged by Annam, and it made her yearn for their touch all the more. No, she said to Brama. Not with the end so near.

  Brama fought her with everything he had left, but nothing seemed to work. Even with all her pain and fear and worry, she was the stronger of the two.