The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  He stared at me, perhaps wondering if I was bluffing. A question I pondered as well while I met his stare, hoping my face betrayed no sign of my racing heartbeat. If I did, indeed, resign, there was a very real risk that the path to the Academy might be forever closed. I might be condemned to a life in some far-flung but peaceable corner of the Sienese Heartland, mediating trade disputes, never given cause to wield magic let alone wrestle with its depths for mastery.

  “I expect to be kept informed,” Rill said, and relief washed through me. “I should not be learning of your doings, whatever they may be, by way of rumor. You are young, and new to your post, and energetic--which is an admirable quality. I trust that I will be notified before you take any similar action in the future?”

  “Of course,” I assured him. “If you will allow it, I intend to return tonight. There are sides to the city that only emerge after dark, my guide tells me. I would see those.”

  Voice Rill’s brow crinkled--though the lines of his forehead did not touch the tetragram branded there. “She may be luring you, Hand Alder. It is a common tactic, often effective against young men such as yourself.”

  “She may be,” I answered, somewhat embarrassed to have my attraction to Atar brought up so frankly. “But I will keep my wits about me. And, if things go badly awry, I am more than able to defend myself.”

  “And you will have guards, of course.”

  “If you insist, Voice Rill,” I said carefully. “Those who accompanied me yesterday were…less than subtle, and I worry that the city reshapes itself to their presence. I want to see the city as it is, left to its own devices.”

  “Was this your guide’s idea?” Rill said.

  “She suggested it,” I admitted. “But I agreed.”

  “Traveling the streets at night, in the company of a woman…” He breathed a heavy sigh, shook his head, and refreshed his smile. “Unorthodox, to say the least. Bordering on a violation of propriety. I trust you will hide your tetragram, so that rumors of the Minister’s dalliance with a dancing girl do not begin to spread?”

  Heat rose in my cheeks. “Of course,” I said. “And--”

  Voice Rill waved a hand. “Whether it is a dalliance--as Alabaster thinks it must be-- or no, you’ve no need to explain yourself to me. I was young once, long ago, hard to believe though that may be. And I think that there is value in seeing things first-hand, not only by way of reports and ledgers. So…very well. You may conduct this…research…if that is what it is. Who knows,” his voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “The girl may fall for you, and perhaps she has her own secrets. The windcallers, I am sure, spend time among such women. She may know things of value to the Empire.”

  “She may,” I said. “Thank you, Voice Rill. I will keep you informed of any such discoveries.”

  The afternoon passed in an excited flurry. At dusk I donned my peasant’s clothes, pulled on my gloves, and told Jhin not to expect my return until morning.

  * * *

  Atar sat on the rim of the Blessed Oasis, her basket of coins in her lap. Her face brightened--and I felt a thrill at its brightening--when she spotted me through the thinning crowd.

  “I was about to leave without you,” she said.

  “A Hand of the Emperor is never late,” I said. “In fact, you should be honored that I’ve come out to meet you, rather than summoning you to the audience hall.”

  “If you did, I would not come,” she said, and slipped down from the rim of the fountain with a jangle of coins and a bounce of curls. She peered through the crowd behind me and smiled when she was satisfied that no guards lurked in my wake. “Well. We’ve an appointment to keep.”

  Our winding path led to an obelisk that rose from the roof of a broad two-story building. A brazier in the plaza in front of the building threw deep shadows across its scarred sandstone walls, which showed signs of hasty repair. A tall, broad-shouldered silhouette stood guard at the door. I did not recognize her until she drew the tulwar at her hip.

  “Put that away, Shazir,” Atar said.

  “Are you sun-addled, winddancer?” Shazir said, pointedly not putting her sword away. “He is Hand of the Emperor! We stood in his audience hall not two weeks ago! Why is he in your company?”

  “He is more than that,” Atar said. “He asked to be shown the truths of our city, and he came alone. Nothing he will see tonight is secret or forbidden.”

  “No,” Shazir said. “But it is ours.”

  “He should see the good he has done,” Atar said. “And he should see what stands to be lost if his Empire kills An-Zabat, as it has killed all else it conquered.” She placed the back of her hand on the flat of Shazir’s blade and pushed it aside. “At the very least, he is the winddancer’s guest. You are a blade-of-the-wind. War is yours, but the dance is mine.”

  Shazir’s expression soured, but she stepped aside. She sheathed her weapon, and I felt a coil of tension unwind in my shoulders. Atar’s company was thrilling, and exploring An-Zabat was more stimulating than anything I had done since coming to the city, but I had not for a moment forgotten that I was among people with every reason to hate the Empire, protected only by Atar’s influence, my own prowess, and the threat of imperial retribution for any harm that might befall me.

  The interior of the building was spacious and open--a single vaulted hall with stairs leading up to balconies and smaller rooms--and lit by lamps in sconces that ran up the four corners of the hall. Several dozen people huddled around low tables, while twenty or thirty more stood in a line along one wall. At the head of the line an old man ladled thin soup into wooden bowls. The shadow of a woman filled the wall behind him, marking where a statue had once stood. A few women dressed in simple robes dyed the blue of sky and spring water oversaw the line and offered coins to some of the more desperate-seeming patrons.

  “This was once a temple to our goddess,” Atar said. “Not every obelisk rises from such a place, but many do. When the Empire fought the windcallers, they stripped this place of all its finery.”

  It was nothing like the Temple of the Flame, but when I looked at the silhouette on the wall and the high, vaulted ceiling I felt the same knee-weakening awe that struck me on the first night my grandmother led me into the forest, when I first came face-to-face with the wolf gods.

  “I have read the story of Naphena,” I said. “She is not like the gods of Nayen. They are wild, dangerous, and cruel as often as kind.”

  “She was a woman, before she was a goddess,” Atar said. “A woman gifted with great power that threatened the gods, and so they forbade her to use it. Yet she taught us what she could, and in her final act gave us this city, and ascended to stand rival to the gods who once hated her.”

  “She made the oasis, did she not?” I said. “It’s a fascinating thing. Clearly magic, but it leaves no wake in the world.”

  “Fascinating indeed,” she said, with a lilt of amusement. “Katiz, windcaller and master of a dozen ships--as well as the patron of this place--feeds the poor here in honor of Naphena, and has been doing so for many years. Of course, the portions are slightly larger than usual lately, thanks to your granaries.”

  Atar approached one of the blue-clad priestesses, who took her basket of earnings and disappeared up a stairwell, and I realized that Katiz had outflanked me. If the windcallers had cause to close the city and burn the silos, the people would blame the Empire, not those who had been feeding them all along. I thought myself clever, but Atar was right. I knew very little of An-Zabat.

  Strangely, I did not find these thoughts troubling. I felt only the familiar, mild sting of having lost a game of stones to a skilled opponent. A bittersweet sting, reminding me of nights spent over a stones board, with wine and a pair of mismatched cups.

  “You are smiling,” Atar said. “Has the hard heart of an imperial Minister been touched by this show of charity?”

  “My intention was always to help the people. I am glad Katiz has done just that,” I said, and meant it.

&nb
sp; Atar studied me curiously. “There is more to see, Nayeni. You asked who I was to stand side-by-side with the windcallers and treat with you. Would you like that question answered?”

  “I would,” I said.

  She nodded, and led me from the temple, then down another alleyway that ended in a heavy brass door set into what looked like a squat sandstone block. Beyond the door, stairs led downward. Atar took a lantern from a wall sconce and descended.

  “What is this?” I said, lingering in the mouth of the stairway.

  “You do not fear the dead, do you?” she called back, her voice echoing.

  The light from her lantern hardly pierced the shadows around us. Where it did, skulls--carved or real; it was impossible to tell in the dark--peered out from recesses in the walls. I quickened my step to keep close to Atar, and to put space between myself and the shadows.

  We walked until my feet began to ache and my sense of time became distended. At last, after what felt like hours, our path ended in another brass door. It opened into the crisp, dry air of a desert night. We stood above a sandstone canyon that echoed with the rhythm of reed-pipe, sitar, and drum. A glow on the eastern horizon lit the silhouetted obelisks of An-Zabat. Below us, in the light of a full moon and a sky brilliant with stars, men and women formed a ring around a lone figure who leapt and spun to the music.

  “This is the Valley of Rulers,” Atar said. “Where the old kings of An-Zabat dwell.”

  The walls of the valley were speckled with round stone doors without handles. Atar led me down to the gathering, where the dancer was returning to the circle and another was taking his place.

  Katiz approached us. He recognized me with a flicker of concern across his otherwise stolid face.

  “New feet for the dance,” Atar said.

  “The imperial Minster of Trade?” Katiz said.

  “You know the good he has done,” Atar said.

  The windcaller regarded me, stroking his thick beard, the color of straw at the ends fading to silver around his mouth.

  “The Empire is devious,” he said. “Do you trust him?”

  “Not entirely,” Atar said--I felt a pang of hurt and stifled it for its foolishness. “But the dance is my dominion, as your ships are yours, and I would show it to him.”

  He put up his hands in surrender. “Very well,” he said. “But all who come to the circle must dance.”

  “He will dance,” Atar assured him.

  With a last, lingering stare the windcaller returned to his place in the circle. The woman in the center leapt in a flash of bangles.

  Atar took my wrist--I shivered, and not just from the cool smoothness of her hand--and people made space for us in the circle. “You can dance, can’t you?”

  “That seems like something we ought to have discussed earlier,” I said, hardly thinking, distracted by the leaping woman, the hand on my wrist, the smell of honey and lavender and salt.

  Atar stared at me, mouth open halfway between shock and bemusement. “Are you saying you can’t?”

  I gestured to myself with an acrobat’s flourish. “Do I look like the sort of man who dances?”

  Atar laughed, and I grinned like a fool.

  “Why yes, Nayeni, you do.”

  The woman in the circle landed with a jangle of bracelets, then returned to her place. The man to her left stepped out to take his turn. He drew a tulwar much like the one Shazir carried, then began his dance; a whirling, lashing spin around the edge of the ring.

  “He is a blade-of-the-wind, a warrior windshaper, like Shazir,” Atar said. “The one before him was a merchant.”

  “They are not all windshapers?” I said, considering that term. There was only one word for An-Zabati magic in Sienese, for only one use of that magic was of interest to the Empire.

  “Many are, most are not. Those who can guide the wind lead the dance, but there are as many dances as there are walks of life, for the wind moves us all.” There was a proud tilt to her chin. “It is my task to know every dance, and to teach them.”

  The blade-of-the-wind landed with a low sweep. The sand where his sword passed shifted, swirled by a gust that flowed from its edge and sent the brisk wake of windcalling down my spine.

  He changed places with the next dancer, a young housekeeper. She was thin, and I wondered how well the larders of her house were stocked, yet she danced with grace and energy. A shepherdess followed her, then a farmer--a rare and respected trade in An-Zabat--then a windcaller from a ship at harbor, and so on. Each dance was unique, and Atar told me that each one had been passed down for generations.

  “Before Naphena made the Blessed Oasis, our people roved the waste in tribes. When two tribes met, they would dance beneath the moon and share water, and in this way come to know and trust one another,” Atar said. “Once, every soul in An-Zabat knew their dance, and would come to share it at least once a year. But it is difficult to care about such lofty things when your stomach churns and your head aches from hunger.”

  The next dancer dove out onto the sand. He tucked and rolled, then sprung up and dove again like a porpoise leaping from wave to wave.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “A glassblower,” Atar said. “It is said that the first glass was made by a great serpent that dwells in the sun. The glassblowers do well, now, for the Sienese covet their work.” She gestured toward the tombs built into the walls of the valley. “Before you came we were ruled by interlopers from the west. Before them, by merchant princes who paid tribute to the horse tribes of the north. Before them, there was someone else with spears and soldiers. Rulers come and go, but the wind, the goddess, and her people will remain.”

  A truism that would not hold if the Empire succeeded in adding windcalling to the canon, breaking the windcallers’ monopoly. My thoughts were interrupted by the man to my right, who finished his dance, returned to the circle, and clapped me on the shoulder.

  “It is your turn,” Atar said. “Show us your dance, Nayeni. Show us what you are.”

  Every eye in the circle fixed on me. Despite my earlier jest, the first steps came slowly. But movements trained deep into muscle and bone are not easily forgotten. I shut my eyes, recalled the Temple of the Flame, my grandmother correcting the angle of my arms, the arch of my back and knee. My hands curled into fists, wanting for the rattan dowels I had used in place of swords.

  The Iron Dance had nothing of the wind. It did not whirl or spin around the circle like the dances of the An-Zabati. But it, too, carried the legacy of a people who resisted imperial rule. And maybe here, among the An-Zabati, I could find the first steps of a new path. One not chosen for me. One that might lead to the secret of Naphena’s Blessing, and the deeper truths of magic I had always longed to know.

  For that to happen, Atar needed to see me for what I truly was--more than the Minister of Trade, a Hand of the Emperor, a servant of Sien. More than I had shown to anyone, even Oriole.

  The windcallers would not betray me. They would benefit from the presence of a renegade in the citadel. And we were far from the city. The wake of my magic would fade long before it reached Voice Rill.

  Still, there was danger in what I did, and there was a moment of hesitation. Of fear that I had overlooked something. That I gambled too much, in this.

  A presentiment, perhaps. Faint. Not strong enough to dissuade me from my course. Not when I turned my head and caught a glimpse of Atar’s eyes while she watched me dance, and saw possibility reflected there--both magical and mundane.

  It is a great strength of the young, this willingness to shoulder risk. It can also be our greatest weakness.

  Arcs of heat and light and a breath of cinnamon trailed from my fists as I moved through the Iron Dance, burning away the cloth of my gloves and leaving my hands--one witch-carved; one marked by the Empire--uncovered. Gasps erupted from the crowd. The drums faltered. My steps did not, for I had never danced to drums.

  I came to the last steps, the final downward blow. The fire gathered at
the tips of my fingers splashed and rolled across the ground. The drums rumbled to a stop.

  “Firecaller…”

  The cheer began slowly, like the first pulses of high tide.

  “Firecaller!”

  It became a wave, rolling and crashing over me as I walked--flushed and astonished at what I had done, and at their reaction--to my place in the circle.

  “Firecaller!”

  Atar smiled and pressed my right hand. She leaned to my ear.

  “So, you are more than you seemed,” she said. “You have a story to tell, I think. Later. It is my turn, now.”

  And Atar, who knew every dance of An-Zabat, gave a performance that outshone mine as the sun outshines the stars.

  * * *

  When all who had come had danced, Katiz stepped into the center of the circle. He held aloft a wide brass bowl, decorated in swirls of silver filigree much like those that decorated the obelisks and the statue of Naphena in the Blessed Oasis.

  “A cool wind promised water!” he cried.

  The gathering answered; “All things flow to An-Zabat!”

  He knelt and dug a shallow basin. Within it he placed the bowl, so that only its lip showed above the sand. He looked up at me, his hands hesitating over the empty bowl. There was danger in my presence, even if I had revealed my own forbidden magic. Some quiet calculation transpired behind his eyes, weighing the risk that I might still betray them. That this was all some elaborate scheme on the Empire's part.

  Finally, he offered me a shallow nod. A small gesture of trust, preceding a revelation to match the weight of the secrets I had shared.

  Power rippled from him and into the bowl, then down deep into the earth. It was not the wake of windshaping--which I knew well by now--but had the same cool, refreshing texture. A trickle of water seeped into the bottom of the bowl. People began to join Katiz in the center of the circle. One by one they cupped their hands and drank.