by Micah Yongo
“And if we do find them?” Jasinda said.
“I and the other elders desire to speak to them, yes. But they are talented, these two. And those they have slain were strong. So…” Gahíd placed his hands on the flat scarred rock of the Creedstone. He felt the shallow grooves of the doctrines that marked the stonework. “If they cannot be brought to us,” he said, lifting his eyes to regard those gathered, “they must be killed. Swiftly. The rot cannot be allowed to go any further.”
Twenty-Two
T O M B
It turned out it was the sharíf’s custom to visit the Sovereignty’s schools once a year before the early rains. There were four in all, spread out through the Five Lands and housed in buildings built by one sovereign or another. The largest and oldest was the School of Hanokh in Hanesda, and according to the courtier, Sharíf Sidon would begin there and then go on to Qadesh and Livia, meeting the teachers and scribes who were its custodians, as well as the best of the students.
“He will go to all but Dumea,” the courtier said. “He does not like it there. The sharífa is not friends with the city’s steward, and the sharíf is to be several days in Qadesh for his wedding anyway.”
It had been Neythan’s insistence to meet the courtier before the day of the deed. If he was to rob the sharíf he wanted to be sure of the man who would be his guide in doing so. Yaron, his name turned out to be, an older man with a plump fussy neck and hairless face and a shaky querulous voice that began to grate from almost the first moment they met: We shouldn’t meet like this. Do you know what I risk in helping you? We cannot be seen. You must not be caught. Every chivvying word made Neythan want to slap the man’s pudgy nervous face. Instead he had him talk through every corner and corridor of the palace’s interior in as much detail as he was able to.
Afterward Neythan met with Yevhen every day leading up to the agreed one, going over what would be done and when and how. He spent the evenings watching the palace guard from the marketplace that fronted its gates. He wandered the city’s streets, growing familiar with its passages and alleys and buildings, and now, finally, he sat here with Yevhen and Caleb watching the sharíf vacate the palace, parading through its main gate and along the street toward the south corner of the city to visit the school.
“There,” the ranger said, nodding. “The woman, the tall one, walking before the sharíf, she is one of them.”
Them meaning Shedaím. And this Neythan could tell, even from this distance, just by the way she moved.
“But I do not see the other.”
“He will be elsewhere,” Neythan said. “Somewhere distant, where he can see everything. Somewhere like this.”
They were perched atop a roof overlooking the main road between the walls of the palace grounds and the market. It was early evening. The sun was blood red, sinking down through a clear sky to touch the mountains to the west.
“He may be in the palace,” the ranger said.
“He may, though to be so would make him a poor guardian. He cannot keep guard of the sharíf from where he is not… Still, we’ll be careful either way. Rain does not always fall in its season.”
“No,” the ranger said. “It does not.”
They climbed down from the wall as the parade moved on. The crowd followed the sharíf as he mounted a heavily jewelled camel and went along the south street.
The palace courtyard was cobbled stone, cordoned off from the rest of the city by low rough walls of sand-rock, half a man’s height. The wide frontage sat atop several broad steps. A colonnade stretching the length of the building upheld by a row of twelve pillars supported a broad balcony above.
They approached from the north side, away from the market, hopping the wall and walking, their shadows pulled long by the low sun. They came around the building to where the front entrance waited on the western face. A huge doorway stood above the pillared porch like a giant affrighted mouth. They passed by without sparing it a glance. According to Yaron the twin doors were a foot thick and manned by a pair of guards waiting behind the entrance. Better to enter by the slopdoor on the south side, he’d said. With the sharíf gone there’d be no cooks in or around the kitchens.
They followed Yaron’s advice and continued around to the back corner to find his sweaty bloated face waiting for them when they reached the slopdoor. He slipped a wary glance through the crack before opening to let them in.
“You are late,” he said breathily, and looked out behind them, side to side.
The ranger jutted his chin. “Lead on. You’ve said the way to the crypts is long.”
The courtier turned and led them through the kitchens, weaving between the wide benches of hollowed stone where the stoves seeped their ashy odour.
“Ten guards have remained,” he whispered as they went. “Two by the entry door, others by the sharíf’s chambers and the way to the gardens. I saw one in the courtyard, some others here and there.”
“Here and there, where?” the ranger said.
“They roam about the place.”
“And what of the sharíf’s own bodyguard, do any remain?”
“I’ve not seen them if they do. I’d imagine they’ve gone on with him to the school.”
The ranger grunted. Neythan and Caleb followed behind.
The palace was huge, built in broad arcades about an inner atrium with a reflecting pool. Each gallery undergirded a series of flat balconies with houses built along their length and then, on one side, a tall minaret crowned building that housed the sharíf’s chambers. Yaron took them along the south side by a narrow corridor marked with drawings of each past sharíf. Karel the Young, Arvan the Scribe, Theron the Great… Neythan wondered what would be done half a century from now when there was no more space, or whether this place would still even be here.
“This way,” the courtier said.
They rounded a corner and turned into another corridor. The passage was wall-less on one side and open to the atrium that centred the palace where the reflecting pool sat in long cool shadows, calm as stone. The dry rattle of scurrying lizards hissed vaguely from the walls. Their own footfalls were silent.
“Wait,” Neythan whispered.
They froze, listening. The murmur of voices floated somewhere ahead. The courtier gestured. They stepped to the wall and waited. The voices grew louder, nearing. The courtier turned jittery. He came back on himself toward a door close by and fiddled for a key. Out along the courtyard opposite Neythan could see a shadow shifting as a guard moved along the roof balcony just out of view.
“Be quick,” he said quietly.
The voices were clearer now, two or three men, accompanied now by the sound of their steps and the clink of weaponry. Neythan put his hand to his sword. Yevhen did the same and turned anxiously to the courtier.
“Hurry.”
Yaron’s hand fumbled; the key slipped and clinked against the ground. The shadow in the courtyard stopped, then moved again, quickly. The voices ahead were within a stone’s throw, the courtier scrambled to the ground for the key. He reached clumsily as the shadow along the roof angled for a view. The courtier was rising, trembling hand on key, probably too late, the shadow nearly at the corner, the voices close by.
Neythan pulled his sword clear of the sheath and stepped toward the corner, lifting his blade. The voices were at the wall now. Maybe more than three of them. Ribald chatter, coarse men. Neythan would have to… Suddenly he was grabbed from behind, yanked backward into darkness. The door to daylight swung closed as he tumbled back into a new chamber.
He landed with a bump by what may have been a table. The room was small and windowless. A thin, luminous beam at the door’s foot was the only thing dampening the dark. It was Yevhen who’d pulled him back into it. The ranger turned to the courtier and cursed.
“Will you have us die here for your dithering, Yaron?”
“Sorry. Sorry.” The courtier, still by the doorway, was shaking. The sweat on his chin shimmered dimly from the light beneath the door.
“Be calm,” Neythan said.
The courtier nodded, his fleshy chin shuddered.
Neythan got up and moved him gently from the door. Stood there and listened. He heard the steps of the chattering guards passing outside. Their feet swept black bars across the crack of light beneath the door.
“How far are we now?” Neythan said, turning again to the courtier. “From the crypt?”
“There is only the Judgment Hall and handmaids’ chambers, the length of the east wing.”
Neythan nodded. “And the door is away from the rest, you say. Out of sight.”
“Yes. Yes. There are steps by the corner of the vestibule. They keep it hidden.”
Neythan turned back to the door. “We will need it to be so.” He cracked the door open and peeped through.
The corridor was empty. The waning yellowed light of the sun strafed the walls. It was quiet but he couldn’t spy the guard patrolling the balconies from this angle.
“Is there any other way from this room?” Neythan said.
“Yes… yes, there is.”
“Where?”
The courtier stepped hesitantly from the wall and pointed to the room’s other end. “There are two.”
“Where do they lead?”
“This one, back to the kitchens. The young men carry what is stored here to the cooks.” He turned to the opposite wall. “This one leads to a second pantry at the corner of this wing.”
“Will anyone be there?”
The courtier hesitated. “There shouldn’t be.”
“Good enough.” Neythan eased the door fully closed. “We will go to the pantry and remain out of sight, and then find our way from there.”
The courtier nodded and fished about the folds of his garments for another key. “This way.”
The passage was short and well swept and ran along the outer flank of the palace’s south and east wings. It opened on the other side to a pantry bigger than the first, filled with broad pots of grain, a man-sized pestle leaning against one wall, and a series of smaller clay jars standing in rows in the corner like guards awaiting command.
“The rear foyer is on the other side,” Yaron said as he went to the pantry’s outer door and turned the key. “It is a large space. I will walk to the other end where the entry to the steps below lie. If all is well I will turn and beckon you with my hand. Like this. Then you will come.”
“Good,” the ranger said. “We’ll watch for your signal.”
Yaron breathed deep. His chin and neck were flushed red. He swallowed and went out through the door.
They peered through the gap as he walked across the tiled-floor lobby. Neythan watched the daylight from the atrium beyond view, scanning for shadows and movement as Caleb crouched at his hip and studied the courtier. Yaron reached the other side and turned around. Then waved nervously.
They went out and jogged toward him, wide steps, bent double. By the time they’d crossed the foyer the courtier had stepped down into a short bay cubbied in the wall. He found the lock and angled the door open before turning to wave them in. They stepped down into the recess and quickly through the entrance as the courtier followed and pressed it shut.
They’d entered a dark cold space with a long stairway stretching down into blackness. The courtier, jitterier than he had been, seemed to feel the chill, the sense of trespass.
“Alright, I’ve done what you asked.” He said it almost immediately, spilling the words as though from held breath.
The ranger saw and nodded derisively. “Go back to your duties. The rest of your monies shall be with you tomorrow when we have departed, and I can be certain you have not shrunk back from what was agreed.”
The courtier’s eyes darted between them uneasily and settled on Neythan. “It is the sixth door,” he said, then pinched his thin lips together as though to hold his breath, and stepped out, leaving the door ajar to let the light in.
“Well, you heard the man,” the ranger said. He lit the stave lodged on the wall, closed the door, then hefted the torch from its fixture and handed it to Neythan. “I will wait here and keep the door,” he said, and then nodded at the stairway. “Tarry no longer than you must.”
Twenty-Three
A F T E R L I F E
It had been near to three hundred years since the Priests’ War, and just as long since Karel, the first sharíf, did away with the old faiths. He’d killed the last priests, outlawed their practices – the observance of the moon, the speaking of ancient tongues, the strifes about special books and sacrifices and all the wars these and a thousand other superstitions had led to. By the end, Karel allowed only the ancestral prayers to remain and replaced the rest with worship by way of fealty to a new and singular god – the sharíf’s throne.
It was said he burned the priests’ bodies on a giant pyre heaped to the height of a hill, and that its summit was crowned by the collected scrolls of every order and tradition from Hanesda to Hikramesh. It had disappointed Neythan as a child, to learn that. To think that all that could be done without a whisper from any of the gods Uncle Sol’s stories always talked about. When he’d asked those at Ilysia why, everyone would offer a different tale. Some said there were never gods to begin with. Others said there used to be gods but then they were no more, like isles subsumed by the rise of the sea, ushered to extinction by the inexorable roll of time. Master Johann would say gods are a dream you count true in sleep and forget when you wake, and that you can tell which a man is by what he believes. Which troubled Neythan, but when he told Uncle Sol, he said Johann’s words were true, but that a man doesn’t truly wake until he gives himself to slumber anyway, and thereby surrenders all he thinks he knows to discover the truth. In the end, it was only Jaleem’s counsel that made any sense; there wasn’t much use thinking about it either way, the Haránite had told him.
“As many stories about that as there are about death, and besides, Sharíf Karel may have said there are no gods, but when he died he still filled his tomb with treasures ready for them just in case.”
Neythan wondered if they’d find Karel’s tomb here as they went along the crypt’s slim passages. The walls were craggy and tight enough to bump shoulders. The ceiling, wherever it was, vaulted high overhead like a canyon, sucking the torch’s glow into its narrow black maw. The stairway they’d descended was probably as deep as the palace was high. Like the whole thing had been built atop a huge enclosed ravine, or cave.
“Joram, of the line of Karel…” Neythan read as they passed another door. He lifted the torch for a better look. The flame crackled and breathed at his ear like a slow, crumpled storm as he squinted at the inscription. It had been the same with every doorway, a slim arched opening with a name ornately etched in the stone above. Except with this one he didn’t recognize the name. He turned to Caleb. “An uncle perhaps? I’d thought they housed only those belonging to the sovereign line here.”
“Joram is of the sovereign line. He was heir to the throne, before Sidon. The boy was to be sharíf… you didn’t know?”
“I’m not a scribe.”
“And needn’t be to know histories barely set. Joram was Sidon’s brother.”
“Sharíf Sidon? He has a brother?”
“Had. An elder brother. He was to rule. Sidon was to be his regent.”
Neythan turned back to the doorway, glancing in at the edges and corners of vague shapes as the light from the fire grazed the obscure contents within. “So what happened to him?”
“Sickness. Both were still children. Each fell ill with fever. Sidon recovered. Joram did not.”
Neythan grunted.
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s just find what we’ve come for and leave. I’ve no mind to tarry among the dead.”
They continued on and came shortly after to the door the courtier had told them of. Its narrow shape broadened with the angle as they neared. They stood and examined the tall arched opening and read the inscription to be sure it was the right one – Sharífa Analathe
ia, of the line of Harumai – and then stood there as though waiting for something, an instruction, perhaps.
Caleb looked at the tomb’s doorway, then up at Neythan. “Well… you’re the one with the torch.”
Neythan grimaced, glanced once more back along the passage, and stepped inside.
The inner wall, illumined by the fire, hovered dimly into view as they entered. It was marked by elaborate drawings that seemed to narrate some event. Neythan mostly ignored them and stared instead into the room’s dark void, sweeping the torch back and forth as he slowly crab-stepped his way deeper into the chamber. He flinched as the light snagged on the shape of a man. Tall. Upright. Still. And then a second. And then, as he neared, several more, emerging from the dark into the torch’s glow. Statues. Heads bowed like supplicants and circled around a long stone chest. Neythan stepped carefully between the rock-carved figures – two men, three women, all crowned, and each half a foot taller than him.
“The ranger wasn’t lying after all,” Caleb said.
Neythan turned around to find Caleb standing on the other side of the chest, looking out to the opposing wall. Long shelves had been dug into the stone and each hollowed sill glinted dully, filled with metallic items. The little man was smiling. He saw the look on Neythan’s face and sighed.
“Fine, fine, I know. We are not graverobbers. But there’s little harm in at least taking a look.”
Neythan stared flatly back.
Caleb turned and wandered over to the wall anyway. “And bring the torch, I can hardly see what I’m looking at.”
“We’ve no time for this.”
“Better to come over quickly then. I’ll not be visiting queens’ tombs again any time soon. If my penance is to be here, I’m going to see all I can.”
