The Four Profound Weaves

by R. B. Lemberg

  I will teach you the last of my secrets, my aunt never said to me.

  There was no wind. I was under a ceiling, low and fashioned of stone, each boulder enormous like a heaving belly pregnant with my death. I was a Surun’ woman from the tents, not used to stone rooms crushing me. Squeezing me in. Even my carpet of sand was gone.

  “Look up,” somebody said.

  In front of me there I saw bars, thick with iron and magic. Beyond the bars, a corridor of stone. And then I saw an elaborate enameled birdcage, barely contained in the corridor.

  Inside that birdcage was a man.

  He was ancient and stooped like my aunt, but not my aunt. Dressed in blue robes embroidered in blue, decorated with beads of sapphire and lapis, turquoise and aquamarine. His brown skin, just slightly lighter than mine, was wrinkled and spotted in very great age, but his eyes were as dark and agile as a youngster’s. His long, scraggly beard was oiled and painted indigo-black. On his head he wore a circlet of sapphires.

  Three other people flanked the birdcage and propped the corridor wall. The physicker, who had told me to look up. An assassin in white robes that smelled like my aunt’s tent of bones. Another person, whose magic roiled off their skin. Such great excess, barely contained. In one hand that person held a whip of braided leather. In the other hand, an iron rod of full faces, leering and leering and leering at me.

  All were silent.

  “Why am I here?” The pain of my body felt less sharp now. Still present like a lover, but less demanding.

  The roiling magical person lashed out with his whip, tearing at me. The pain was hot and fast, a relief from all my other pain, and then the new pain was terrible too. I doubled up on the ground, and because of the motion, my wilted leg sent horrible jolts up my torso, overcoming the pain from the whip, moving putrid and slow toward my heart.

  My tormentor said, “Speak when you’re spoken to!”

  “Desist, my dear torturer,” the man in the birdcage said. “I need her in one piece. What is left of her, anyway.” My Iyari was very poor, but I could understand this, not just from words, but his gestures, his tone.

  The old man in the birdcage turned to me next. “You had woven a carpet from sand.” He spoke in Iyari, and the physicker translated.

  Who are you? But I knew without asking. The Ruler of Iyar was rumored to move around in a birdcage throne, and he was very old.

  “I lost that carpet,” I said, biding for time.

  “Oh no, you have not.” He smiled, and his teeth glinted like Benesret’s palisade of bones. “I have already examined it, already acquired it, already put it away.”

  You acquired it? Acquired without my consent to the trade? Acquired without even paying me? I did not say it, but it must have shown on my face, because he said, “Do you know that it is forbidden for a woman to openly bear her deepnames here, nomad?”

  He made a motion, and the torturer’s whip lashed me on the leg that had wilted. I did not even scream.

  “I took your carpet in compensation for your crime.”

  The physicker added, after translating, some words of his own. “Our sovereign has been exceedingly patient with you. I would advise you not to overextend his patience.”

  Yes. This was the Ruler of Iyar, the Collector. Here, in an underground dungeon, talking to me.

  “Now, tell me about it,” the Collector said. “Your carpet of sand.”

  All out of subterfuge, I obeyed. “I wove the carpet out of the desert’s flesh, so it would take me where I wished to go.”

  “Hmm.” He steepled his hands together, as if deep in thought. “My people heard you say that you are familiar with a legendary desert weave, a carpet made of death and death alone. Is that so?”

  I will teach you to weave from death, my aunt never told me. She promised she would, but she never did.

  I spoke out, my voice dry and brittle like the white curls of Benesret’s hair. “You already possess the greatest treasure ever woven. Why do you need a carpet made of death?”

  The torturer lifted the rod. I could see it closer now; it was forged of iron and molded with screaming faces as dark as the iron was dark. He inhaled and imbued the iron with deepnames so furious that the faces screamed themselves red. Then he swung it.

  The rod stopped just a breath away from my cheek, so hot that I tried to pull away. The motion made my bad leg convulse. Where was nen-sasaïr? He had left me. Everybody leaves. My aunt had left me, and Lali, and my children, and nen-sasaïr—all the screaming faces in the iron. But I would prove myself to Benesret.

  The Ruler of Iyar waited for me to live through my pain, a benevolent smile on his face. The torturer looked hungry. The assassin, attentive. The physicker, blank.

  The Ruler of Iyar said, “You made that old carpet from sand. More of a rag, and yet it had a certain charm. Is it your only bid at this craft?”

  “I wove it forty years ago,” I said, bristling, “under the guidance of my aunt, who made the greatest treasure ever woven. The carpet of song. You have it, here, somewhere.”

  “Ah,” he said, his eyes bright and predatory in that wilted face, burning like they burned when he had watched my pain. “So did she teach you?”

  The fourth and last mystery of the ever-changing desert is a weave of bones: you have learned it, and now you are ready to put together my loom.

  My aunt had never said this to me.

  Despite myself, because of myself, I forced the words out again. “Why do you need it?”

  “I sent emissaries to the desert court of my enemy the Old Royal, spies and traders to the Maiva’at and the Gehezi, to the many-folded realms of Lepaleh in the south, to the Mon Mountains in the farthest east. Again and again I sent emissaries to your own people, the Surun’. For forty years I sought a new woven treasure to equal the carpet woven from song. I have not found it.”

  The physicker translated all that, while I thought, you roamed far and wide to avoid my question. “Why do you need it?” I asked again, louder, for I had a habit of repeating myself until I was satisfied.

  The torturer raised his rod of faces, but the Ruler of Iyar ordered him to step back. Then he spoke. “You are nothing, and nothing arises from dirt to fashion the treasure I hold. Then to dirt you shall return, while my treasure lives on. Why must you question me?”

  “You, too, shall return to dirt,” I said, averting my gaze from the torturer’s grimace. “So why do you need it?”

  “I shall not return to dirt, old woman, for I did not come from it.” His face lost some of its anger. “You think that because we must die, we must care about nothing? The older we get, the less we should care?”

  I turned from him, shamed. “No.”

  “Change is the world’s greatest danger. Around the world you and others, old woman, chafe at my rule, forever desiring a change, yet change destroys all. If not for that power of change, we would not need to die. But you people do not understand. You rebel, you wander from place to place, you chafe at my rule, thinking that something else, somewhere else, would be better. It isn’t. But I save you. I am the one who is centered and stable, anchoring the whole world from my rainbow-tiered court, unmoved by world’s wildness, contained in my birdcage throne. The best of the world comes to me, and I save it from change and I save it from you, who know only dirt even as you make treasure. The treasure is only safe in my palace. Separated from your stench and squalor, forever locked in my coffers. Are you satisfied?”

  I was not quite satisfied. I did not fully understand his answer; but it was an answer. “Yes,” I said.

  “I sent emissaries to your aunt, when your people exiled her. She told me she’ll weave from death. A treasure greater than her treasure of song. A treasure that will complete me. But she had not done it. She failed.”

  I had always thought that of all of them, Benesret only abandoned me because she loved me. She did not want to feed on me when I was young. Because she loved me. Instead, she had fed on other people in secret, and then
on my husband Lali, but Lali did not love me like she did. So I found her. Told her, take what you need from me. And she did.

  And then she abandoned me again.

  Nothing matters. But I can put together my own loom, now. Make my own profound weave.

  My lips moved, disgorging words I did not know I wanted to say. “I am better than her.”

  “Yes?” hissed the Ruler of Iyar.

  “I can weave you one better than hers,” I said. A treasure made out of death, which would transcend her, devour even my own need for her love.

  “Then weave me that carpet,” he said, “And I will let you go, and pay you lavishly.” But I heard the lie as it dripped, poison-sweet, from his lips.

  “I am old and have lived a life,” I said. I had wanted to live, or perhaps I did not. It was hard to know, now, after my aunt fed on me. Life and death were blurred in my mind, in the underground palace. Perhaps it did not matter. I knew this: I needed a loom.

  “I will weave for you,” I said. “But on two conditions. The first is to see my aunt’s great carpet of song, so I can learn to surpass it. The second is bones. Bones to weave from, and bones to make me a loom.”

  The Ruler of Iyar laughed, a short, sweet, satisfied sound. “Bones, my dear, I have here in abundance. Come, I will show you.”

  The torturer and the physicker moved forward to drag me out, the pain almost dulling my eyes again. Almost. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the assassin watch me. His white clothes smelled like my aunt’s skin.

  nen-sasaïr

  I bound the two unconscious soldiers with my magic. They wouldn’t stay that way for long, and I was winded, but my anger had carried me through. The third of the men, semi-conscious, kneeling, stared up at me. His eyes were glazed in shock.

  “Where is Uiziya?” I wheezed. The darkness and dust of the room strained my breathing. My arms trembled, and something twitched again and again in my face.

  “Who?” the man asked, recoiling from me.

  “The woman who was here. The one who was injured.” It was all my fault. My foot prodded what remained of my staff-chair. I had fashioned it with such hope, in the quarter. Now it was broken. Discarded. I’d left Uiziya alone and in danger, for this. For my vanity.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, man. Taken to the palace.”

  A terrible fear bloomed in me. Perhaps it was rage. “To the palace? What for?”

  The guard recoiled in earnest, his arms and legs making little useless motions on the garish carpet. “To the master. Don’t kill me!”

  “I won’t.” But my magic seized him and hoisted him up like a rag doll. My legs nearly buckled. I would not sustain this for long. I was not in my prime, and I hadn’t slept. But for now, the power of my rare three-deepname configuration upheld me. “You will take me there.”

  The man mumbled something. I did not listen.

  Was she taken alive? But life and death had no meaning in the lowest levels of the Rainbow-Tiered Court. In the dungeons, life and its end are mated like two royal swans, their necks winding round and round each other. I was not sure if the guard spoke, or my brain spun the words for me out of the stifling, stale darkness.

  I kicked the bent remains of my staff even farther away. Wrapped myself, instead, in an unconscious soldier’s coat. I wanted to pick up his scimitar, to wrap my fingers around its leather-wrapped handle as if it was Uiziya’s staff. My staff. My handiwork. I lied to myself that I wanted to ease her life—perhaps I had wanted to simply to steer her this way and that like I had with Bashri-nai-Leylit. And so I had not protected Uiziya when she needed me most.

  I left the scimitar alone. It wasn’t my weapon. My deepnames would either suffice or they wouldn’t.

  I pushed the soldier out of the room. Out of the back exit, into the familiar, scented night.

  “Bring me there.”

  Uiziya e Lali

  I had been delirious, I now recognized. Delirious on Benesret’s diamondflies. They sucked life from my blood, and fed Benesret; but I was her niece, and my blood and her blood were alike, and so her predation had fed me in turn. We were tied, she and I, connected by her theft of my life and by my withered flesh. She took, but she gave, too: perhaps without knowing. Perhaps she had learned from her teacher, whom I had never met, or from the Orphan itself, that desperate star underneath the School of Assassins. It did not matter now. Inside me I could almost hear my bones rattle, whispering truths I had not known before Benesret took from me. I listened to the speech of my withered leg, telling me of a loom which was made of bones. The bones in all the stories. The bones that have a story to tell, a story that persists beyond the last breath and demands to be told.

  I could weave from death now, if I put my hands to a loom.

  The physicker and the torturer dragged me out of the cell. I do not remember how the Ruler of Iyar moved in his cage; I was overwhelmed with a new feeling. I was listening to bones.

  Because now the bones of my death-withered leg called to bones I could sense through the thickness of stone walls around me, through the floors leading deeper down. Beyond the thickness of these impenetrable walls, through the dense body of the earth, my sense of bones stretched up, bloomed like the bones of murdered brides that played pipe and reedflute to leery passersby. My sense of bones grew upward through the earth, bloomed into the city’s nighttime air to sense all the dead of Iyar, and beyond them—those drowned at sea, and beyond. The world’s grief, singing for me to be spun and woven.

  And back into the earth my sense of bones plunged, through the many layers of the palace. If all of the world’s forsaken deaths were weeds, this place was a garden tenderly tended. I sensed how the palace was thick with death, below, beyond, between. In all directions, death had taken a root here. In the Collector’s palace, where change was not allowed, it was death that endured. And I was getting closer to where it sang the loudest.

  We stopped by an iron door. It was simple, without adornment, barred and locked with a lock with a young woman’s terrified face. The Ruler of Iyar made a motion with his hand, and the lock screamed and split open.

  The door swung inward, revealing a stale reek of darkness, within which nothing could be seen.

  nen-sasaïr

  The walk to the palace was not very long, but I was on my last breath, the weight of my guilt and my age and the sleeplessness of the night binding my feet as if with weighted chains. I drew on my magic to give myself some nourishment, energy. This, too, was dangerous and hard to do safely with all but the most stable configurations, of which mine was one. I was lucky, but even so, I knew this action would sap me. I would be paying for this in the days to come, but it would be a worry for later. If I survived.

  The guard had taken me to a row of buildings beyond a tall arch of chiseled roses and swans of gray stone that loomed shadow-deep in the predawn darkness.

  “Get me in,” I hissed to my captive, “or die,” and my magic prodded him. He took me through the arch, but not into any of the public entrances to these buildings. We walked through a narrow, dark alley, down a long spiral run of stairs, down into a well of stone that led to an even smaller door, with no decoration or signs. The guard pushed it through, and we entered.

  Pitch darkness. Not a sound. The guard at my side breathed heavily, and I knew he was plotting something. I took a deep breath, and as I pulled on my deepnames to create a light and still hold on to my prisoner, the Bird-forsaken son of filth tripped me with his foot, and my grip on him slipped. I fell. I fell and fell, down the stairs, into the maw of unlife and no-light.

  Above me, I heard the guard’s cry, more terrified than gleeful. “If you follow the path, it will lead you to the master. To your fate.”

  I had no time for him. Rolling down, I fought hard to keep the hold on my deepnames and dampen my fall—enough to survive unbroken, not enough to stop or slow my descent.

  Far above now, the sound of a door slammed shut.

  Uiziya e Lalir />
  The physicker drew back from the gaping door. The Ruler of Iyar contemplated the physicker’s bloodless face. “What are you afraid of . . . ?”

  “This place. I did not know—”

  At a sign from the Ruler of Iyar, the assassin prodded the physicker forward. The assassin’s robes smelled slightly of damp and of Benesret’s skin, and I knew that my aunt had woven this fabric.

  “You can stay outside,” said the Ruler of Iyar to the assassin.

  The assassin spoke. “I will follow you wherever you go.”

  They say in the desert that assassins are orphans. Many are and many are not, but they are alone and unwanted by others, even by themselves. That’s how the Headmaster recruits them, and then he trains them to be loyal. They would follow their masters wherever they wished to go. Even into the roiling domain of death. Just like I had followed Benesret.

  The Ruler of Iyar now spoke to the physicker. “I need a translator.” But I understood him. I did not know how my understanding had grown, and it was strange. I did not reveal it.

  “You must come with me,” said the Ruler of Iyar.

  Blood flowed away from the physicker’s face, and he swayed on his feet. “Please . . . my sovereign . . .”

  The assassin pushed him into the darkness beyond the door. Then he picked me up, and carried me over the threshold into utter darkness. It no longer terrified me, because from it voices whispered to me, begged me in this Iyari tongue and in nen-sasaïr’s native Khanishti, and in all the tongues of the desert. They whispered and called and threatened and pleaded, but I could not quite attend to their speech yet. The birdcage throne of the Ruler of Iyar floated in, and the iron door closed.