“I was.”
Kymbril nods, neither pleased nor displeased. “Thought so.” His brow creases as if he’s working out the final pieces of a puzzle but can’t quite get to them to fit. “You can imagine how a man in my position might wonder why you’d do such a thing. Why you’d protect them. Doesn’t seem to be a reason. Unless…” He purses his lips, the picture of a man lost in thought, then nods as if the last of the pieces had fallen into place and the painting was now clear. “Unless you have a vested interest. You know that term, Brama? A vested interest?”
A manic gaze had replaced the look of sufferance in Kymbril’s ill-matched eyes, and the tightness in Brama is building. He’s ready for anything from Kymbril. As am I.
“A vested interest means you protected him because he means something to you. Let’s say Nehir was your brother. You’d protect him then, wouldn’t you? Or if he was paying you. Then you’d certainly protect him. Tell me it isn’t so.”
“I never met him before that day, Kymbril. I swear it.”
The muscles along Kymbril’s shoulders bunch. “He swears it.” He stands and stabs a knotted branch of a finger at Brama’s chest. “When I was your age, I was already carving out my territory, right here in the Knot. I took it from a man who was as cruel a bastard as I’ve ever come across. But while I was coming into my prime, he was going rheumy with age. He was worried more about the tea that helped his gout than the men who ran his reek for him. Do my eyes look rheumy to you, Brama?” He cracks the knuckles on one hand loudly, then does the same to the other. “Do I look like I couldn’t take down a bone crusher with one fist?”
“You are the envy of all who survey you. As fit a man as I’ve ever seen.”
With blinding speed, Kymbril grabs Brama by the throat and drives him backward. The chair tips over and Brama falls to the floor. He doesn’t move a muscle to stop Kymbril, even though I offer him all the power he needs. I am more incensed at Kymbril’s actions than I ever thought I’d be. Coming here to Brama’s home and pretending he owns all he lays his eyes on…
“Are you working for Nehir?” Kymbril asks, his breath heavy with lemon and garlic. “Be careful how you answer, now. Take your time. It could mean your life.”
His hand is around Brama’s neck, squeezing hard enough to bruise, pinching Brama’s windpipe so tightly his breath comes in choking gasps. Brama shows no pain, though, nor does he flinch, not even when Kymbril lifts him by the neck and slams him down onto the warped floorboards.
“I work for no one,” Brama replies.
“Not even me?” A threat. An offer.
“Especially not for you.”
Kymbril’s laughs a deep rumble of a laugh. His eyes drift down to Brama’s neck, where the sapphire in its dirty leather wrapping has spilled from his shirt. “Man could stand to make a pretty pile of coin, he sold a thing like that.”
“I could never sell this, Kymbril.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“After I fucked your mum every which way but sideways, she handed it to me with a smile so bright that tears came to my eyes. Told me never to part with it as she placed it in my hands.”
Kymbril stares, eyes crazed, even a bit fearful, as if he can’t figure out why Brama isn’t more scared of him. But then his face softens and he laughs, a loud affair, the sort the drug lord is known for. “You’re a twisted little fuck, you are.” Then he shoves Brama away, stands, and walks out, chuckling, as if Brama hadn’t just denied him something he very much wanted.
#
A short while later, Brama stares into a brass mirror hung above the wash basin. His room is dark, but there’s a candle on the table below the mirror, lighting the carpet-weave pattern of his scars in a ghastly pallor. “Did you know he would come?”
“I’m no god, Brama. I cannot see the future.”
He chooses his next words with care. “I need to find the girl.”
I stare back at him, calm for all the anticipation that’s boiling up inside me. Even though I’m bound, even though I’m imprisoned and beholden to Brama, the things Kymbril revealed have lit a fire in me. Kymbril is now a part of the light that surrounds the girl, Jax, as is her brother, Nehir, as is the assassin chasing them. I know it is so. I just don’t know how as yet, or why. But that is all part of the wonder of this gift given me by Goezhen. Like a flower unfolding, it changes every time but is no less beautiful for it.
“Why would you care if she lives or dies?” I ask. “You’ve never even spoken to her.”
He knows I can sense his thoughts and still he lies. “I don’t care for her.”
“Do you not?”
His face has begun to flush. “She’s being preyed upon by her brother and by the people of her homeland. Soon Kymbril will have her, and when he does, he won’t let her go until he’s wrung every last copper from her. And then he’ll give her back to the desert with a knife across the throat.”
“And you won’t allow it?”
“You know I won’t.” His words are a nod to how he was preyed upon by me. A bit of that dark time flits through our minds, and I feel his resolve harden, his anger toward me growing in the bargain. “Tell me how I can find her.”
I reach out to him. “You know you have but to take my hand.”
“No.” He recoils. “Lead me to her.”
In the mirror, my expression saddens. “Alas, in my current state that is well beyond me. Had I true form, however…”
Brama’s face pinches in anger. From a shelf beneath the basin he takes out a small lead box. “Wait,” I say, but Brama ignores me, placing the necklace inside it. “Wait! You may torture me if you wish, but it changes nothing!”
The lid closes, and all goes black.
I feel nothing. Not Brama. Not the tiny room he’s chosen to live in. Not the tannery nor the Shallows beyond. None of Sharakhai. None of the desert. Not even the heat, nor the sky, nor the endless sands. I know not how Brama found this secret, but it is my one true fear, my one true weakness, to be utterly parted from all I’ve come to love.
I feel myself falling. Down a deep hole I drift, and the farther I plummet, the more I worry that I’ll never be able to return even if Brama were to open the box. It is one of the few ways we, the ehrekh, can die. Does Brama know this? I hope not. By the gods who walk the earth, I hope not. Far worse than the isolation is the sense of being undone, of leaving this place, never to return. I will never go to the farther fields as Brama will when he dies. Lacking the blood of the elder gods, I will live in this realm until my final hour, and then I will simply be gone, like smoke from a candle snuffed. It is a fear I have always harbored, but now it consumes me.
Time passes—how much I cannot tell—but finally, blessedly, the lid of the box opens, and Brama takes me up once more.
I stare at him in the mirror, my dark skin cast golden in the wavering brass. “I cannot find her! Not unless you will it!”
“I do will it,” he says.
“But you must accept what I give!”
He lowers the sapphire. “Never.”
“Then you will not find her and all that you’ve predicted will come to pass! Save her if you would, Brama Junayd’ava. You have but to take my hand.”
For a moment, the gem remains, hovering above the leaden box. He is lost in the memories of our time together. Part of him wants to be done with me once and for all, but there is another part that wonders at the things he might do were he to accept the power I could give him.
I whisper to him, “You could rule this city if you so wished.”
A heartbeat passes. Then another. Slowly, Brama lifts the gem from the box and stares at my beaten reflection once more. “How?”
“Welcome me,” I say to him. “Welcome me, and use the gifts I lay at your very doorstep. You have but to say the word, and I will be returned to my prison. All is at your will. But make no mistake. Your very form and frame is necessary. You must open yourself to me.”
He stares into my eyes, and I know he�
��s already decided. The dread from moments ago lingers, but for the first time since being trapped between the facets of this sapphire, I feel like I’ve taken a step closer to setting myself free—not because of Brama, but because of the girl. She is the key, though I cannot yet say how. The path the fates have laid for me is often clear only well after the lights have first been shown.
“Very well,” Brama says, and indeed he welcomes me.
I approach, and he blinks, once, twice. When he opens his eyes the third time, his view of the world has changed. He sees more. Motes of magic drifting on the subtle breezes within this dingy room in the slums of Sharakhai. He hears more. Echoes of life and death and anger and lust. The very breath of the first gods falls upon his skin, making it tingle here, then there, then deep inside him.
He walks to the door. Opens it. Takes the stairs down and enters the street. So many scents are on the wind. The young. The old. Lovers. Sworn enemies.
“What now?” Brama says to the first star in the sky.
“You walk the city.”
And so he does, the twinkling lights of fate brightening as he goes.
#
Near the edge of the Shallows sprawl five mountainous buildings, the constituent parts of an ancient tenement built hundreds of years ago as a barracks for a looming war with Qaimir. The buildings show their age: their amber stone crumbling, arched windows chipped away by more recent inhabitants, graffiti along the ground floor written in paint or blood or shit. The slumlord who owns them cares little about its outward appearance, nor does he care how poorly the interiors are treated; one need only enter any of the edifices to see the truth of that: refuse in the halls, holes in the walls between rooms, the unyielding smell of piss and unventilated cooking—humanity squeezed to the breaking point. No, the lord of this manor cares only that his rent collectors are able to sweep through with their enforcers and gather the handful of copper khet owed from each and every room at the beginning of each and every week.
More interesting to Brama is the sheer number of entrances and exits to this gargantuan complex. Like a tribe of desert titans, each building has eight scalloped archways that disgorge or ingest its inhabitants. Each has four courtyards as well, with exits to the north and south. Above, makeshift walkways string between these and the neighboring buildings, making up one small part of the sprawling rooftop neighborhood the Shallows is famed for. No doubt there are even a few underground tunnels leading to and from this place.
It all makes for the perfect place for Nehir and Jax to hide. And so it was with little surprise that the lights led Brama here. They dissipate, however, when he nears the buildings, and though he’s walked their circumference several times over the past few days, he still hasn’t found her.
“Why?” he asked me that first night in his beaten brass mirror.
“The fates are fickle friends,” I told him. “The path is not always clear. It can become clouded by others who hold power or control the fate of those involved. It can become dulled by the sheer press of humanity in Sharakhai. My guess, however, is that for the time being, the fates have found other, more interesting baubles to play with. That or they’ve simply not decided what to do with you.”
Or, more accurately, me.
Brama seemed unsatisfied, but it is the plain truth, and the only answer I could give. I worry over it as much as he does, perhaps more. I feel as though this story, however it unfolds, is a test on the part of the fates, a way to offer me a path back into their good graces. For all my power, for all the centuries I’ve spent living in every corner of the Great Shangazi, I am as much in control of my own destiny as Brama is of his.
Sundown nears as Brama waits. The light splashing against the buildings fades, burns red. And then Jax comes rushing from an alley into the nearest of the tenements’ tall buildings. She slips through a darkened archway and is gone, but Brama is already on her trail. He heads inside but promptly loses her to a stairwell twenty paces along the narrow hallway. Tenement dwellers watch Brama pass by their doorless entries. Some peek out from behind blankets hung across their cramped rooms, or lift their heads from their meals to stare through strings of beads. Some even make love, but it doesn’t do to lower one’s guard in the Shallows, so they watch him pass, then return to their rutting.
Brama hurries up the stairwell, glancing along the hallway of the second story, then the third. Finding both empty—of sparkling girls, at least—he continues to the fourth floor. At the end of the dirty corridor, a gutted window shows a sky of brilliant mauve gilded in the orange light of the setting sun. Just short of the window, he sees the silhouette of a girl slipping inside a room. Brama approaches carefully, pausing near the doorway, which has a beaten old carpet hung across it. The sound of shuffling comes from within, then the rhythmic thump of a mortar and pestle, accompanied by sniffing sounds. Other sounds rise up all around in this cramped hive of humanity, but lying in the interstitial spaces between them is a sibilant hiss, the rasp of wet breath. The scent of black lotus laces the air, an earthy, floral smell that lingers, especially when one has been smoking it for as long as Nehir apparently has.
As Brama reaches to move the carpet aside, the mortar goes silent; the carpet is flung wide and the girl rushes out, knife to hand. She presses the knife to Brama’s throat until he’s against the wall behind him. She stares at him, her brows pinched in confusion. She expected someone else—the assassin, most likely, assuming Kymbril’s story is true.
She starts to speak, then glances back, pulls the carpet back into place to hide the sight of Nehir lying in a hammock slung between the mudbrick walls. “What do you want with us?” she asks in a thick Malasani accent.
Brama pauses to think. “I don’t know. I only wish to help.”
She stares at Brama’s scars, clearly revolted, clearly scared. “We need no help from you.”
“Yes you do. The world is closing in around you. It won’t be long now before Kymbril has you.”
She frowns, her brow furrowing. “Who’s Kymbril?”
It’s clear then how woefully incomplete her understanding of the situation is. She knows some—else why hide in this place and cover her tracks so carefully?—but she understands neither the nature of the danger nor its immediacy.
Before Brama can reply, a filthy man wearing only his small clothes approaches along the hallway. His eyes are dark and haunted, his malnourished ribs like ripples on a windswept pond. He carries something, a single silver six-piece that he holds with both hands toward Jax as if it’s meant to save his own mother.
“Go on!” Jax shouts. And when he doesn’t, she screams at him, “There’s nothing for you here!”
He remains, mouth opening and closing uselessly. He shuffles one step forward, holding the sliver of a silver coin out further.
“Go!”
Finally the man leaves, the sound of his footsteps replaced by a choking sound from inside the room. Jax’s eyes go wide. She bats the carpet aside and bursts into the room. Brama holds the carpet wide as she sinks to the floor by her brother’s side. His eyelids flutter. His body convulses, rocking the hammock slung between the walls of the narrow room.
Beneath the hammock sits a grimy shisha, its frayed black tube snaking across the floor. Next to the shisha is the mortar and pestle. She tosses the pestle aside, spraying some of the red paste onto the floor, then uses her fingers to scoop up some of the crushed wolfberry. “Nehir,” she whispers. “Nehir, take this.” She smears as much of the red paste into his mouth as she can, making him look as though his gums were bleeding. “Swallow it!”
He doesn’t respond. The embrace of the black lotus is already on him, and it’s drawing him deeper and deeper. It will never let him go. As we watch with all the impotence of babes, his spasms begin to slow. His eyes roll up in his head. His breath comes slower, more shallowly.
Jax turns to Brama, her eyes brimming with tears. “Do something!”
Brama stands silent, peering around the room. In a corner
lies a bowl of water with a rag folded carefully along one edge. He steps across the room, drops down in front of the bowl, and stares into the reflection. “What can I do?”
Slowly, the smooth black skin of my face forms in the white bowl of water. Twin horns furl backward. Black spines replace Brama’s curly hair. “Little enough,” I say. “Give him comfort. Give him more of the reek to ease his flight.”
“You know that isn’t what I mean.”
“My dear Brama,” I say, reaching out to his mind, “if you wish for my help, you know what you must do.”
Brama stares into the water, his worries roiling inside him.
Jax, hands clutched to her throat, steps closer and stares at the bowl. “Who are you talking to?”
Brama ignores her. “Do it,” he says to me.
Do it. Allow me to take his form, at least for a time, and to some small degree. It’s doubtful I can do anything more than help with Nehir—the narrow tie between us will not allow me to do all that I might wish—but we both know that the more I’m allowed to do this, the more dangerous it becomes for Brama.
When Brama first accepted the gem that contains me, I thought surely he would use it to bring himself fortune or to grant himself long life. It would take time, surely, for our dealings before that point were anything but kind to Brama, but so often when mortals gain power, their only wish is to gain more. Brama hadn’t wished for that, though. He’d squirreled me away, sometimes in the lead box, other times beneath his mattress, other times within his shirt. He’d never sought power.
Until now.
“There is a cost,” I tell Brama. “You will be required to act in this as well. Your body must suffer in his place.”
“I don’t care if I suffer.” And he means it. I’ve felt the disregard he has for his own life, the pain that befalls him. I feel it even now.
“Very well.”
“Please,” Jax says, and then goes silent as Brama stands. She watches as he steps to her brother’s side. Watches as Brama takes his hand. In this moment, Brama lowers his guard. It feels not like the opening of a door, but more of a nod, a bow to me. It is all I need.
The Tattered Prince and the Demon Veiled Page 3
