The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya)

by Bradley Beaulieu

  Andakhara was more than just a caravanserai. There were enough homes for several thousand. On the edges of the village the houses littered the land like scrub brush—most of them with small fields of wheat or flax or bright orange gourds—but as they came closer to the central well, the houses were more tightly packed, including a cluster of larger buildings.

  As they continued down a shallow slope, the road wound back and forth through the homes until they could no longer see the desert behind them. Nikandr watched the houses carefully, expecting to see the barrel of a musket poke out from a darkened window. But nothing of the sort happened, and they made their way to the center of the caravanserai. There was one large open-walled structure there. The well house. A dozen or so men stood beneath the shelter of the roof, talking, but they stopped as Nikandr and the others approached. One of them, a thin man with dark brown skin and a wide smile with several missing teeth, broke away, snapping his fingers at two boys as he came. He wore a cap of embroidered wool and a striped kaftan of bright blue and grey. On his hands were silver rings with yellow gemstones—citrine, perhaps, or beryl.

  “The fates are kind,” he said in the dialect of Mahndi used in the desert. “Welcome to Andakhara.”

  The boys accepted the reins of their ab-sair, waiting patiently for them to dismount. They’d discussed it on the way in, that they should not act as if anything were amiss, even if they feared it. The desert tribes did not like outsiders, and if there was any chance Soroush had gone missing for some innocent reason, they needed to find out. So they would follow their customs and remain as wary as they could until they could learn more.

  Once they were all down, the boys took the ab-sair toward the watering trough as a well-muscled man pumped the well. He was bald, except for a full mustache and a trim black beard. He wore no shirt, which revealed the latticework of scars running across his shoulders and chest and arms. He seemed proud to display those scars, however he’d received them. The ab-sair emitted their wails and then fell to drinking the water from the trough, nudging one another out of the way as they did so.

  Before offering greeting, Nikandr pulled his veil from his face. Atiana did the same with her veil. Then all four of them reached down and took a small amount of dirt from the dry earth. Nikandr rubbed it between his palms and then smudged a bit across his forehead, showing these men that they would share of their land, not simply use it.

  When they were done, the wellmaster smiled and bowed his head. “My name is Dahud. Please, what can Andakhara offer you?”

  As Atiana and Nikandr covered their faces once more, Ashan answered, “Rooms for the night, perhaps a handful of water before we leave.”

  Dahud smiled widely and bowed his head once more. “In Andakhara you can set your worries aside, at least for the night. Or more, if you’d like.”

  Most of the men in the well house had gone back to their conversation, but several were still watching, including the stout man at the pump. Dahud seemed to notice, for he glanced toward the well, and then motioned them toward a large clay building with a thatched roof. “There are few enough who remain for more than a night.” He tipped his head back toward the men. “You mightn’t guess it from the way they act, but we welcome those who do.”

  “Another time,” Ashan said. “For now, there are places we must go.”

  Dahud parted the beads that hung from the top of the squared doorway. Inside was a room with a dozen piles of pillows with shishas at the center of each. Two old men in striped kaftans sat on the far side of the room, drawing from the ivory-tipped tubes as a haze of smoke trailed up toward the ceiling. They looked toward the entrance, but then returned to their low conversation.

  “Please,” Dahud said, motioning to a mound of pillows nearby. “You’ll have drink and smoke, and then we can talk.”

  “We couldn’t,” Ashan said.

  But Dahud already had his hands up. “A drink and a bit of smoke. Then we’ll talk.”

  They waited there on those pillows for a long time. More men came to the smoke house, and then several old couples came in as well. A young woman entered from the back of the building, where Dahud had gone. Another one near Atiana’s age followed soon after. They wandered the room, greeting those who entered, bringing them tabbaq for their shishas and araq in deep blue glasses. They all but ignored Nikandr and the others. The sound of conversation and clinking glasses, even laughter, filled the room, and still Dahud did not come.

  “We should go,” Atiana said after a time, echoing Nikandr’s own feelings.

  Ashan, sitting cross-legged comfortably, merely patted the air with his hands and told them to wait.

  Only after the sun went down did Dahud return. He came with a long-necked bottle. Nikandr found himself more eager to partake of the drink—whatever it was—than he would have guessed. As Dahud sat on the pillows across from Nikandr, the two women whisked in, handing glasses to each of them, including Sukharam, and placing a healthy amount of what smelled like very expensive tabbaq into the bowl of the shisha. After lighting it, they handed tubes to each of them and then left, attending to the crowd that filled the room.

  Nikandr smelled the araq and was surprised how complex it was. It smelled of anise, but also of butter and smoke and honey and earth. The taste of it was deep, like a well through the center of a mountain. Nikandr closed his eyes as the warmth of it suffused his chest and gut. Were he alone he would have downed the entire glass and poured another, and perhaps downed that too. But he couldn’t. Not with the others watching so closely. He noticed Atiana watching him. He smiled to her, to tell her he was well, but she seemed as unconvinced as he was.

  If only to assuage her, he took up his shisha and drew upon it, inhaling the smoke and holding it for as long as he could. He breathed it out slowly, up toward the ceiling as the taste of oak and loamy forest floor complicated the finish of the araq.

  Dahud studied Nikandr’s face for longer than was polite. “You’re a long way from home.” Smoke wiggled out from his mouth and nostrils like a drakhen breathing fire. “I’m sure you know your way, but it’s good you’ve come through Andakhara instead of the taking the western paths.”

  “And why is that?” Ashan asked.

  Dahud’s smile was wicked. “They aren’t so kind among the hills.” He was perhaps fishing for information—where were they headed? what was their purpose?—but Nikandr would share none of this, and neither would the others.

  No sooner had the thought come to him than Ashan said, “We’ve come seeking a boy.”

  Nikandr snapped his head toward Ashan. He shook his head, hoping Dahud wouldn’t see, but he didn’t understand what Ashan was doing.

  Dahud relaxed more deeply into his pillows as if he’d been afraid of their purpose here in Andakhara. “A boy,” he repeated as the young serving woman returned with a platter of dates.

  Ashan waved to Sukharam. “As old as him, and a girl five years younger.”

  “Who would they have been traveling with?”

  “Only themselves.”

  Dahud plucked a date filled with goat cheese and pistachios from a wooden tray and popped it into his mouth. “Describe them.”

  “The girl had dark brown hair with bright blue eyes.”

  “And the boy?”

  “Hair the color of aged oak, and burning brown eyes. He might have worn the clothes of the Aramahn, but he would wear no stones. Neither would the girl.”

  Dahud shrugged. “There was a girl who came through Andakhara three months ago. She had blue eyes, but she looked older than this young man”—he motioned to Sukharam—“and she came alone.” He took a deep pull off of the shisha, holding the smoke for a long time as the conversation and revelry continued around them. As he blew the smoke upward, adding to the layer hanging over the room, he peered more closely at Ashan. “Is there nothing else you’re searching for?”

  Atiana looked cool, but Nikandr could tell from the way she held her hands tightly in her lap that she was nervous. Sukh
aram, however, seemed as cool as the winds of winter, and it was Ashan that seemed nervous. He licked his lips as if he were dying of thirst and glanced to the people over Nikandr’s shoulder.

  Dahud leaned in. “I know much, and I know many people far beyond the reaches of this small caravanserai. If there’s anything, you need only name it.”

  Ashan looked as though he were ready to ask a question, but then he suddenly looked down at his shisha tube as if it had offended him. “We seem to be out,” he said, motioning to the bowl.

  “Ah,” Dahud said. “Right away.” He turned and snapped his fingers to get the attention of one of the women, the younger. As he did, Ashan nodded toward the crowd. Sitting at another shisha was the large man from the water house. He caught Nikandr’s eye and shook his head back and forth while staring pointedly at Dahud, who was still facing away.

  The girl slipped off through the smokehouse crowd and Dahud turned back to them. “But a moment… Now, where were we?”

  “The boy,” Ashan said. “You’ll ask after him?”

  Dahud nodded. “You’ll stay for a day or two, won’t you?”

  “We leave in the morning,” Nikandr replied.

  For the first time Dahud gave Nikandr serious consideration. “Why, if you’ll forgive the question, are two from the islands here in the desert? This boy must owe you much to come searching so far.”

  “Neh,” Nikandr replied. “It is I who owe him much.”

  “Ah.” Dahud’s face became more serious. “I’ve some of those debts myself.” Dahud rose in one smooth motion and bowed deeply to them, doffing his embroidered cap as he did so. “Let me find what I can while you take your rest and prepare for the days ahead.”

  Ashan stood and hugged him. “We would be grateful.”

  “One of my boys will take you to your room.” And with that he left.

  Nikandr looked back to the corner where the large, scarred man had been sitting, but he was no longer there. A boy of twelve or thirteen came to them a short while later and led them outside and to the back of the long building. With the din of the smoke room now filtering softly into the night air, he opened a creaking door to a large room with several pallets. In one corner was a pedestal and a washbasin and above that a beaten mirror hanging from a bent nail. The boy grabbed a fluted, patina-green ewer sitting next to the pedestal and headed for the door. “I’ll bring water.”

  They closed the door and settled themselves. Everyone but Nikandr.

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “I suspect we won’t be staying long,” Ashan said.

  “Why?”

  But before Ashan could answer, a knock came at the door.

  Nikandr thought the boy had forgotten something, but he found instead the hulking man from the smokehouse. Nikandr reached for his shashka, but the man darted forward and grabbed Nikandr’s wrist. He did not attack, however. He merely put one finger to his lips and shook his head.

  “Who are you?” Nikandr asked.

  “I am Goeh,” he replied, releasing Nikandr’s wrist and stepping inside, “and I’m the closest thing you have to a friend in this place.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Dahud has gone to fetch the Kamarisi’s men. They’ve been stationed at the southern edge of Andakhara, awaiting a summons.”

  “You’re Dahud’s man, are you not?”

  Goeh turned to spit on the dusty wooden floorboards. “There are men who have no love for the Kamarisi, even less for the lackeys he sends to the desert, or those that serve them.”

  Nikandr looked to the door, which was still cracked open. “Dahud would have this place watched, would he not?”

  “The room is being watched, but not by Dahud’s men.” Goeh smiled grimly. “Not any longer.”

  From outside their room a low whistle came, a trilling call like a desert finch.

  Goeh’s eyes hardened. “There’s no time. If you want to find the two who came before you, you must come now.”

  Nikandr looked to Ashan, who nodded back to him. “The desert, as much as they like to think differently, is still under the Kamarisi’s rule, and if that’s so, then Dahud, who is essentially the lord of this place, cannot be trusted.”

  Nikandr turned to Atiana, ready to ask her the same question, but she was staring at the opposite wall, her eyes vacant and half-lidded.

  “Atiana?”

  She didn’t respond.

  Again the call of the desert finch came, louder this time.

  “Atiana?” Nikandr called again, shaking her shoulder lightly. “Atiana, hear me.”

  And still she didn’t move.

  He felt the pulse at her neck. It was slow, like it was when the Matri removed themselves from their drowning chambers.

  “We must hurry,” Goeh said.

  But Nikandr couldn’t. His whole body was suddenly tense, and he was frozen in place, for it was clear there was something deeply, deeply wrong with Atiana.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Nikandr shook Atiana harder, and was about to do so again, to slap her or shout at her or something—anything to wake her—when she said in a voice as cold as winter, “Men are coming.”

  She said this without moving, without looking at any of them.

  “Who’s coming?” Nikandr asked.

  “Men,” she repeated. “Armed men. Along the main road. And more are moving in from the desert.”

  At last she did turn, but she looked through Nikandr as if he wasn’t there. She looked through Goeh as well, and then walked past him, out and into the night.

  Goeh stared at her, clearly confused, but then he motioned for them to follow. As they left and began taking a slope upward through a grove of lemon trees, men resolved from the darkness.

  “These are mine,” Goeh said.

  There were six of them in all, spread out in a line ahead.

  Nikandr took Atiana’s arm, but she fended him away. “Do not touch me again, Nischka, and move slowly.”

  She followed him, with Ashan and Sukharam bringing up the rear, with a slow pace, like a woman sleepwalking. He dearly wished to speak to her of it, but it was clear she couldn’t. Not now. For the time being, they simply had to get out of this place before the Kamarisi’s men swooped in.

  With progress that felt painful, they hiked up the same rise Nikandr had climbed only minutes before, and then continued beyond it, along a gentle slope to a dry stream bed, a wadi, that ran through the easternmost section of the caravanserai. In the height of spring this trough in the land would be alive with rushing water, but now it was as dry and rocky as the surrounding terrain. More importantly, it was lower than the mostly flat ground, and a good way to reach the southern end of Andakhara with fewer eyes watching their passage.

  They heard little, only the sound of their own feet crunching over the dry soil, offset by the occasional bell of a goat and the rattle of the beetles flying among the scrub trees lining the wadi.

  “They’ve reached the inn,” Atiana said.

  She was using the aether, Nikandr knew. He just couldn’t understand how. She’d shown this ability only once before—on Galahesh while Sariya had held her spellbound—but those had been very special circumstances. What it was about this place that was allowing her to take the dark, he didn’t know. Perhaps Ishkyna was communicating with her in some way. Ishkyna, after all, had grown in her abilities since Galahesh. She’d dealt with the loss of her body and moved beyond it—or so Atiana had said—and this had allowed her to spread herself even further and do things never before seen in the history of the Matri.

  He scanned the skies for the gallows crow, the bird Ishkyna most often inhabited, but saw nothing, and he felt for her through his soulstone, but here too he felt nothing save Atiana’s presence, a warmth that suffused the center of his chest.

  They came to a halt at a copse of scraggly trees at the center of the wadi. Along the bank above them sat a large home with a high stone fence around it. It could be scaled, but surely there were me
n guarding it.

  “There are twelve men on the far side,” Atiana said, perhaps sensing his worry. She pointed with deliberate care to the corner of the fence twenty paces away. “Three stand just there. The others are spaced about the interior.”

  “Are Soroush and Ushai there?” Nikandr asked.

  “They’re being held within the home.” She pointed to the roof, which from their angle could barely be seen beyond the wall. “Two more men are inside. They’re janissaries, Nischka, and they’re well armed. All of them.”

  Nikandr felt his fingers go cold. Janissaries. There might be some stationed this far from the lands of the Empire proper, but it seemed out of the ordinary. It could only mean that the janissaries had somehow gotten wind of where they were headed. They had chosen their number carefully—as few as possible—in hopes of avoiding the notice of the Kamarisi and Yrstanla’s new regent, Bahett ül Kirdhash.

  “Perhaps word of our travels has reached Alekeşir,” Nikandr said.

  Ashan, whose circlet glowed faintly in the darkness, shook his head. “In time to send men here? Doubtful.”

  “He can’t have guessed our destination.”

  “There is one more,” Atiana said softly, “within the home. A woman. She’s kneeling over a dish, rocking back and forth.” Atiana’s voice went distant and ephemeral. “It’s filled with blood. Her own blood.”

  “The Haelish.” This came from Sukharam. “She’s one of their wodjana. They use blood to scry. She’s trying to find us.”

  “Then she knows we’re here.”

  “Maybe not,” Ashan said. “The wodjana of Hael are not like the Matri. Their scrying is inexact. They find paths to the future—many paths—and choosing the right one is difficult.”