Sands of Memory

by Melissa McShane

  They passed through a marketplace filled with colorful awnings throwing geometric shadows on the hard-packed earth. Here, people interacted with each other, bartering in loud voices that turned the background hum of the city into a gentle roar. It took a few moments for Sienne to realize that despite the shouting and the wild gesticulation of both vendors and customers, no one was actually buying anything. It looked like a picture, like someone’s idea of what an Omeiran market looked like.

  More children raced between the stalls, some of them stealing right from under the owners’ watchful eyes. Sienne dodged out of the way of two of these laughing children, carrying a copper pan between them, and had to dodge again as a woman dressed in vivid green with a blue head scarf covering her mouth and nose nearly walked into her. She stopped watching the people and paid closer attention to Vaishant, whom Alaric was hurrying to catch up to.

  Vaishant led them out of the main thoroughfare and into narrower, less-trafficked streets. The houses there were rundown, with doorways little more than openings hung with tan or black curtains and cracks in their plastered surfaces. Soon, they were alone, and Alaric beckoned to the others. “No one got lost, that’s good,” he said.

  “There is something very wrong about this city,” Perrin said. “Did you note how no business was transacted in the marketplace?”

  “And much of the shouting made no sense,” Ghrita said. “As if they all wanted to make noise, but ran out of things to say.”

  “We just have to finish our business with the temple, and then we can get out of here,” Alaric said.

  “Unless there is someone guarding the temple,” Ghrita said. “Do we have a plan for that?”

  “Sneak past, subdue anyone we can’t bypass, make it as quick as possible,” Alaric said.

  “Good plan,” Ghrita replied.

  “I think we can go behind the big streets,” Vaishant said. “It will take longer, but we will not encounter people.”

  “Do that,” Alaric said. “But hurry. Vanish won’t last much longer.”

  They went more rapidly now that the streets were clear. Sienne couldn’t tell if Vaishant knew where he was going, or if he was guessing, but he moved with such confidence it was impossible not to trust his guidance. He reminded her of Alaric, though where Alaric was forceful, Vaishant simply had a calm certainty that reassured her.

  She gripped her spellbook through her shirt, reassured further by its smooth surface rubbing against her stomach. Everything was going so perfectly she had to make herself stay alert. This was the most dangerous time, when it felt like nothing could go wrong.

  They came out of the narrow back streets into what Sienne thought of as the public face of Ma’tzehar, the new-looking buildings painted bright colors, the crowds of people all ignoring each other. The main street pointed arrow-straight at a towering structure that could only be a palace. Sparkling crystals embedded in the walls caught the afternoon sunlight and reflected it back in blinding brilliance, making Sienne’s eyes water again. The crystals made the vibrant blues and greens and reds of the palace walls look dim by comparison.

  Towers at each corner were painted in blue and yellow stripes spiraling up to the golden pointed domes capping them. More gold and copper domes dotted the roofs, stretching back until they vanished from sight. Sienne thought of the palace in Fioretti, with its white and red lights that made it look like a delicate confection at night. Whoever had decorated this place had had abysmal taste.

  They dodged pedestrians—that was something nice about Ma’tzehar; no animals in the street meant no animal waste to dodge as well—until they reached the shallow, curved stairs leading to the palace door. It was gilded like the domes and large enough to admit four of those camels side by side, not that anyone would let camels into such an opulent building. Sienne had enough time to observe this before Alaric tugged on her hand, and they continued to the left, paralleling the palace.

  The temple was immediately recognizable from the description Perrin had given in his scrying. It looked decrepit next to the gaudy palace, its unadorned white walls cracked and blistered from long exposure to the sun, its roof sagging in places. Sienne could easily imagine this building sitting there for hundreds of years, uncared for and untenanted except by wild beasts. Doorways like the ones at the temple in Chirantan lined its façade, sheltered by broad roofs that put them in deep shadow. Vaishant stopped near one of these and waited for the others to catch up. “I do not know where you want to go from here,” he murmured.

  “Neither do we. Is there some kind of sanctum, or secret place? Kalanath, what did you see in your dream?” Alaric asked.

  Kalanath shot a quick look at Vaishant. “It was a bare room. Circular. The floor was tiled with many tiny squares, but no pattern, just a dark color. Black or blue or maybe green. The walls were painted very light brown, and the ceiling was a dome with things painted on it. Birds, I think. It was dark enough not to see clearly. I have not seen one like it in the Chirantan temple.”

  “That is the place where the divines worship,” Vaishant said. “There is one in every temple, though its decoration is always different. If this temple is the same, I know where the room is.”

  “Let’s go there first,” Alaric said, “and see what’s there. Then look for the phoenix feather.”

  This time, Alaric led the way through the doorway and into the courtyard. It was as decrepit as Sienne had imagined, its fountain cracked with half the stone lying in the basin, its trees dead or dying, the ground covered with dry yellow weeds. Sienne’s heart ached at all that beauty turned to dust. Why hadn’t this been restored with the rest of the city? Surely no Omeiran would have wanted such a holy place to stay ruined.

  Several dark doorways opened off the courtyard. Vaishant took one that looked no different from the others. It led to more of the narrow, winding corridors Sienne remembered from the Chirantan temple, but darker, more ominous. Without being asked, Sienne made several lights and set them to hovering above her friends’ shoulders. They made strange shadows on the walls that did nothing to dispel the eerie aura permeating the place. She resisted the urge to light the hall to a noonday brilliance and took her place behind Alaric as they moved on.

  Ancient dust that smelled dry and bitter rose up wherever she stepped, more evidence that no one had come this way for a very long time. She followed a crack in the plaster with her eyes from the floor to spider across the ceiling, and prayed the roof wouldn’t decide now was a perfect time to collapse. Was it appropriate to pray to an avatar in a temple consecrated to…well, they were both God, so maybe it didn’t matter. And maybe the place wasn’t still consecrated after all these centuries. Vaishant would know, but she felt wary of speaking in this quiet, still place.

  They passed doorways containing the splintered remnants of wooden doors, all painted white to match the walls. Vaishant didn’t so much as slow to examine them. Sienne followed him around a corner to find him halted before a doorway at the end of the hall. Her magic lights illuminated enough of what lay beyond to show the room had a floor of thousands of inch-square tiles of midnight blue. “The divines’ chamber,” Vaishant said. His voice was only just audible, something Sienne understood. He, too, must feel this was not a place where speaking loudly felt appropriate.

  Alaric nodded and stepped through the doorway. Sienne followed him, drawing her spellbook out of her shirt so it appeared to float in midair. The round room was some forty feet across and half that in height, rising another ten feet to the top of its domed ceiling. It looked as Kalanath had described it, down to the paintings on the dome.

  Sienne sent more lights to illuminate the paintings. Birds of all kinds painted in bright gold that gleamed in the lights flew or perched around the dome, peacocks and doves and strange birds Sienne had never seen that she concluded were Omeiran natives. The artist had rendered some of them realistically, and others in an abstract, blocky style that nevertheless left them both easily recognizable and filled with tight energy
, as if they might go flapping off the ceiling at any moment.

  A shudder passed through Sienne, and the shimmering outlines of her friends went solid. She looked down at her hands and saw them waver back into focus. “I’ll need to cast it again to get us out of here,” she said. “But that will leave me at the end of my reserves.”

  “We’ll deal with that when we come to it,” Alaric said. “If we wait until dark, we might be able to leave without using vanish.”

  “Now what?” Dianthe said. “I don’t see a symbol.” She was studying the floor, which bore no markings and was surprisingly free of dust.

  “In my dream, the symbol hangs in the air,” Kalanath said. “I think it is that we must do the ritual.”

  “Which ritual, I wonder,” Perrin said. “Performing the unaltered ritual does not help us know how to invert the binding and free the Sassaven.”

  “We know the original, though,” Alaric said. “The coming of age ritual, the one that creates a full Sassaven. That’s the place to start.” He set his pack down and rummaged through it. “I have the flask with the potion, the goblet, the knife…Sienne, you know the spells.”

  “I do. But I don’t know how to make the symbol appear. Unless…” She turned pages in her spellbook. “Mirage might do it, if Kalanath can draw the symbol for me.”

  “Shh,” Dianthe said, moving to the door. “I hear something.”

  The room went silent. Sienne strained to hear whatever Dianthe had, but heard only her own breathing. Dianthe turned and gestured them all away from the door, toward the walls.

  “Hands against the wall!” someone shouted in Meiric, and now Sienne heard running footsteps as a dozen slim figures in black desert garb, their heads bare, ran into the room, long knives at the ready. “Drop your weapons or die where you stand!”

  Alaric reached for his sword, and two of them tackled him, kicking his legs out from beneath him and forcing him to the floor. Sienne turned to fury and tried to read, but in the next moment someone spun her around and yanked the harness off over her head, shoving her down. She cried out as she landed too hard on her wrist. Alaric shouted her name and rose up, tossing his captors aside before three more of them dove atop him and pinned him. Sienne raised her head and saw more dark-clad figures pouring into the room, subduing her friends and taking their weapons. Kalanath was backed against the wall, his staff in an enemy’s hand, and as she watched he feinted left, moved right, and grabbed his opponent in a complicated hold. “Release them, or I kill him!” he shouted.

  Someone grabbed Sienne’s hair and pulled her head back, laying the sharp edge of a knife against her throat. “Which of us do you think is faster?” the man holding the knife said.

  “Alaric, don’t change!” Sienne screamed, feeling the edge bite into her throat. She had no doubt if a unicorn suddenly appeared among them, that knife would find its mark.

  Kalanath grimaced, then shoved his captive away. The knife withdrew. “You will come with us,” another man said. Sienne’s captor wrenched her hands behind her back and withdrew manacles from his belt, securing her wrists firmly but not too tightly. He patted her down briskly and took her belt knife and then, to her dismay, her well-hidden boot knife. Then he hauled her up with one hand under her elbow and pushed her, more gently this time, toward the center of the room.

  Sienne hurried to Alaric’s side. “Did they hurt you?” he said. He, too, was manacled, but his captors hovered nearby as if they thought he might be capable of breaking iron chains. It was a reasonable fear, Sienne thought.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “What language is that?” one of their captors said. “Stop talking immediately!”

  “It’s Fellic,” Sienne said. “Most of us don’t speak Meiric. And you’d better let us go.”

  “Fellic? Never heard of it,” the man said.

  “How did you know we were here?” Kalanath asked.

  The man sneered. “Our lord has great powers of discernment. Nothing is hidden from his eye. You’d better pray for mercy. Our rakhyanam is a cruel and pitiless lord, and he won’t like that you came sneaking into his city.”

  Sienne said nothing. They had been sneaking, after all, and in hindsight they probably should have guessed that where there was a palace, there would be a ruler. But how had anyone known of their presence? Only a priest could scry, and if the temple was dilapidated, she doubted the rakhyanam was a priest.

  “What did you say?” Alaric said. A dark-clad man prodded Alaric in the vicinity of his kidneys with his so-sharp knife, and Alaric went silent.

  “They don’t want us talking Fellic,” Sienne said to the room at large, then in Meiric added, “I just told them what you told me, not to speak our language, so don’t go jabbing that knife in my direction.”

  Another man walked up to Sienne, dangling her spellbook in its harness. “What is this?”

  “A book.”

  “We were told it was a weapon. How is that so?”

  “It’s magic. Have you heard of magic? You should give it back before it hurts you.”

  The man grinned, displaying very white teeth, the canines filed to a point. “Our lord has magic of his own, foreigner. You must be weak to need a book to contain yours. The rakhyanam wishes us to bring it to him.”

  Sienne bared her teeth at him, which made him smile more broadly. Someone shoved her, enough to get her moving, and the black-clad men maneuvered them out of the chamber and into the narrow little hall, where they had to go single file. Sienne kept a close eye on her spellbook. If only they’d hold it by the harness straps instead of the book itself, she could maybe use her invisible fingers to snatch it back. But the man carrying it tucked it under one arm, where it taunted her with its unattainable nearness.

  They emerged into the dead courtyard, where their captors arranged them in the center of several black-clad men. Sienne once again was near Alaric, whose shoulders were tense in the way that said he was thinking hard about a problem. This was certainly the worst problem they’d faced in a long time. Captured, taken before the rakhyanam, unarmed and…well, not exactly helpless, but certainly at a disadvantage. She hoped Alaric would come up with something.

  13

  They left the temple and, as Sienne had guessed, marched straight for the palace. She thought they might be taken around to the side, but no, their captors led them up the front stairs and through the massive double doors that shone bright as gold. It chilled Sienne to know that someone had known not only that they’d entered the temple, but that Sienne’s spellbook was a dangerous weapon. It spoke to a level of awareness Sienne didn’t think they could counter. And if the person knew that much, who could say how much else they might know?

  The double doors opened on a vast hall, pillared down both its long sides, with a floor patterned in green and gold tiles Sienne thought might be actual gold. The ceiling rose to an elongated dome of some translucent material that filled the hall with a diffuse light. The room felt much cooler than the outdoors, far cooler than Sienne had expected, and she smelled the distinct hot-metal tang of a lot of magic hovering in the background. The only places she’d smelled magic this strongly were wizardry schools; nowhere else had a high concentration of magical residue from people doing many, many spells all at once. She sneezed, and one of her captors gave her a glare that she returned.

  Stairs went up at the far end of the hall, rising more than twenty feet to the next floor. Sienne trod carefully, not wanting to trip and go rolling to the bottom, unable to catch herself with her bound hands. The stairs were painted a brownish-red that reminded her of dried blood, an image she tried to shake. Their rough surface clung reassuringly to her soles. Tripping was unlikely, but the idea still made her nervous.

  Two more gilded doors the size of the main entrance awaited them at the top of the stairs. These were open, swung inward as if welcoming guests. Sienne didn’t feel very welcomed. The manacles might have had something to do with that. She walked forward, feeling comforted, a l
ittle, at being surrounded by her friends. Alaric was ahead of her, as usual, and the sight of his broad shoulders and back comforted her further.

  She took a step to the side so she could see around him. The walls of this room were solid gold as if someone had slathered the gilding on with a paintbrush, with sheets of mother of pearl at least five feet long hanging like mirrors at intervals. Four other doorways revealed only darkness beyond. More of the soft, diffuse light came from the ceiling, making the gilded walls and the mother of pearl glow as if lit from within. The floor tiles were as small as the ones in the entry, but tinted dark blue and crimson in a chessboard pattern that, when Sienne looked it out of the corner of her eye, made the floor look violet. More men dressed in dark desert clothes stood at attention near each of the mother of pearl panels, armed with long knives and curved swords.

  At the far end of the room, on a raised dais, stood a golden throne, and one look at it told Sienne that it wasn’t gilded, but made of solid gold, because its creator wouldn’t have stood for anything less. Faceted gems that winked dully in the soft light made patterns, spirals and curves, around the throne’s base and arms, and outlined an elongated fan across the high back. Golden snakes wreathed the armrests and coiled along the foot, their eyes enormous rubies or sapphires. This was the gaudiest thing Sienne had ever seen, putting the palace in the shade.

  A man lounged on the throne, his legs disposed over one armrest and his elbow propping him up on the other. His red hair was long for an Omeiran, curling around his shoulders, and his short beard outlined a firm jaw and a shapely mouth. He sat up as they entered and adjusted the golden crown he wore. It was encrusted with gems and would have looked unspeakably tasteless if it wasn’t in proximity to the throne.