The Kingdoms of Dust (20 page)

Part of it was only logic—if someone meant to sneak into their quarters to leave a message for Isyllt, this was the night to do it. But the greater part of his certainty sprang from intuition, the sort of hunch he’d learned long ago not to ignore. Tonight was his chance.

His chance at what, exactly? Justice for a crime thirteen years past? Revenge for his own heartache? Or just to learn the truth, to prove he wasn’t going mad.

Lady of Ravens
, he prayed,
at least give me that
. But the mercenary god—Saint Morrigan, they called her in places where gods had fallen from fashion—was hardly a deity who cared about truth. Revenge, perhaps; battlefield justice; sharp-edged mercy.

True night settled and still he waited, sword across his lap, magic itching against his skin, toes curling inside his boots to keep the blood moving. What if he was wrong?

The first quiet footstep from the next room told him he wasn’t.

Lightning seared his nerves, and only long practice kept his hands from going numb against his sword-hilt. He heard the whisper of a soft-soled boot, so light any distraction would have covered it, but he’d never heard the door or window open.

His vision tunneled as a slender shadow filled the doorway. His breath caught. Black cloth blended with the night, only a paler stripe of her face exposed. Her scent reached him as she stepped into the room, teasing, and it was all he could do to keep holding his breath.

Not precisely the same—no one would be after thirteen years. Brenna’s familiar perfume—a heady blend of violet and bitter oranges he’d never forgotten—was gone, and the spices of a different diet soaked her skin. But the flesh and blood and female musk beneath—those hadn’t changed.

She scanned the room as she moved, but her gaze didn’t linger on him. He gave thanks to Isyllt and black-winged Morrigan in equal measure. Something pale flashed in Brenna’s hand—not a blade, but a note. Instructions for Moth’s return.

Thinking of the girl grounded him, eased the hot red bloodlust rising in his veins. He couldn’t kill her. Not until they found Moth.

That didn’t mean he had to be gentle.

When she reached the bed, he struck. Muscles clenched and uncoiled as he leapt, lifting his still-sheathed sword. The chair scraped and clattered behind him and Brenna swung around. His left hand opened as he moved; quartz clung to sweaty skin, then fell free. Another gift from Isyllt.

White witchlight filled the room. Adam expected it, but Brenna didn’t. She froze, hissing, for just a heartbeat. Long enough for his weight to drive them both into the far wall, the wyrmskin scabbard catching her across the face.

Even off-guard, she was fast. She writhed out of his grip, an unseen blade tracing a line of fire across his side. But when they broke apart, he crouched between her and the door.

Moisture shone in the corners of her eyes. She dragged the scarf away from her mouth, smearing blood down her chin. An angry red line rose across her jaw and fresh blood welled from a split lip.

Her skin was darker, sun-bronzed instead of pale olive away from cloudy chill of Celanor. New creases lined her eyes. Not enough. She was his age, or so he’d thought, but he felt the thirteen years that had passed in all his scars and joints. He saw them on his face in the mirror. She looked scarcely older than she had been then—barely of an age with Isyllt.

He cursed himself for his hesitation even as he stared. She paused too, dark eyes widening.

“Adam.” Her accent had changed, but the timbre of her voice was the same.

“Brenna.”

That broke her inaction. She shook her head, streaking blood across her cheek. “Brenna is dead.”

“Not yet.” The scabbard slid to the floor as he brought his sword up.

She moved like quicksilver, rocking back and out of range. She ducked under his next swing, one hand darting toward the bed. He knew what was coming, but couldn’t block the stinging snap of the sheet as she whipped it at his face.

Lady of Ravens, she was fast. Had he ever been that quick? His head turned, eyes watering, and she took the opening. A sharp blow in the ribs, a kick to his bad knee. He stumbled, fell, and she was on him like a hunting cat. Her knife was cold against his throat, but the metal warmed as she pressed it to his skin.

He still held his sword. She would kill him, but he might be able to take her—

“Is that what you want?” she asked. One knee dug into his stomach, forcing out his breath and grinding his back against the hard tiles. Blood from her first strike soaked through his shirt and into her trousers.

His lips peeled back from his teeth, a snarl tensing the cords of his throat. Skin parted, and warmth trickled down his neck. “Crows take you.”

“Vultures, here.” The pressure of the knife eased. “I don’t want to kill you.”

Focus
, he told himself.
Remember what you’re here for.

“Where’s Moth?”

She exhaled. “In Qais. She’s safe. Tell Iskaldur to come to Qais, and she’ll get the girl back.” She chuckled humorlessly. “I’m sorry it turned out like this. It was meant to be more…graceful.”

“Why?” He turned his head and spat. Sweat burned in the cut on his neck. “Why did you do it?” He didn’t mean Moth; from her flinch, she knew it.

She leaned back, pulling the knife away. He could have taken the opening, but he wanted to hear her answer. Sadness washed across her face—he might have believed it, if he hadn’t known exactly how well she lied.

“It was my job.”

“Spy.”

“Among other things.”

Thief. Killer. Liar. But could he curse her with a straight face when a spy paid his bills? Could he say he hadn’t done all those things himself?

She stood, cautious, knife at the ready. She was thinner than he remembered, and when her scarf fell back he saw she’d cut her hair.

He levered himself up, wincing as marble ground against bone. Blood smeared the tiles, seeping in dark lines along the seams; the servants wouldn’t be happy. He returned his sword to its scabbard, moving slowly.

“Qais,” Brenna—or whoever she was—said again; the name meant nothing to him. “Tell Iskaldur.”

“Tell her yourself.”

“A trade of hostages?” She smiled, then winced and touched her lip. “No thank you.”

Adam stepped sideways, putting himself more firmly in front of the door. “You’re not leaving.” If he’d stayed at the Eyrie—if he hadn’t been an infatuated coward—maybe things would have ended differently. Likely not, but the question still haunted him.

Her grin bared blood-filmed teeth. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

He expected a feint, a rush. Instead she sheathed her knife and stepped back into the corner. The witchlit crystal had rolled under the toppled chair, casting its shadow long and black against the walls. One gloved hand reached for that shadow.

Reached into it.

The wall split open like a torn curtain, revealing darkness thicker than any night. Brenna shook her head as he gaped.

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said, stepping into that yawning black mouth. “It would be easier for everyone if I didn’t.”

The wind from the abyss chilled him to the bone and turned his bowels to ice water. But he couldn’t let her escape so easily. He lunged, slipping in his own blood. The shadow portal was already closing around her.

Her teasing smile turned to shock as he followed her into darkness. “No!” She flung up a hand, but the rift sealed behind them, taking with it light and air.

Their fingers brushed, clenched, and then he was falling, blind and breathless, into nothing.

“Something’s wrong,” Isyllt said as they neared her rooms. Her magic reached, searching for Adam, but didn’t find him. Instead she felt the angry buzz of recent violence and shed blood. She quickened her pace.

Her worry broke through Asheris’s stony silence, at least—nothing else had. He lengthened his stride to keep up. “What is it?”

“I can’t find Adam. But someone was here.” Her hand lingered on the door, long enough to determine that her wards were still intact, including the weak point she’d manufactured to lure intruders. But someone else had been in the room. The door swung open and she smelled blood, and the acrid scent of nerves and sweat.

Witchlight glowed from her bedroom, casting stark shadows. Overturned furniture, sheets pulled off the bed. Rust-brown stains dried on the tiles, but not a great quantity. Her diamond was quiescent; no one had died here, or taken a mortal wound. She drew a grateful breath.

Two different people had bled here: one had fallen, leaving a smeared patch; the other had flung a line of droplets. From the way her magic lapped familiarly at the smear, she guessed that was Adam’s. The drops were a stranger’s—those she collected carefully on folded parchment and wrapped in silk. Footprints smudged the blood—mostly Adam’s, but one narrower foot had left a track as well. The woman in black.

The footprints led toward a windowless corner and stopped.

“Is there a secret passage here you neglected to mention?” Isyllt asked, even as she unwound coils of magic into the wall; they found nothing but stone and timber and plaster. Her voice was even, taut. She wanted very badly to scream.

Asheris shook his head, amber gaze unfocusing as he studied the room
otherwise
. “They vanished. Not through the wall, though, even if that were possible. The heat simply stops.”

Ghosts could sometimes walk through walls. Isyllt could do it herself, if she cast her soul free of its flesh. But it was always easier to pass through a door or window—that was their nature.

“Could they have stepped into the spirit world?” Dragging a living person through a mirror took immense power and skill, but she had seen it done. Through a wall, though…

“Perhaps,” Asheris said, “but I find no trace of them in the Fata. The spirit world is worn so thin here that it would hardly be worth the effort. But a way was opened somewhere. Can you feel it?”

Isyllt pressed her hand to the cool plaster and closed her eyes. “Yes.” Not magic, precisely. More like an absence of it. A chill snaked down her arm and echoed beneath her heart.

First Moth, now Adam. Her hands clenched, nails carving crescents into her palms. “I’m going to find these quiet men.”

“Here’s something.” Asheris crouched beside the bed, fastidiously lifting his coatskirts away from the blood. When he straightened, he held a smeared and crumpled square of paper between two fingers.

The handwriting was the same as the first note.
Meet us in Qais
.

I
syllt slept badly, and was grateful when Asheris woke her. From her aching head and the weight of the stillness outside, however, it was earlier than she’d expected.

“I thought we were leaving at dawn,” she said, rubbing grit from her lashes.

“So does everyone else.”

“Right.” She ground the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I should have become an academic.”

She bathed and dressed hastily in the dark; her bags were already packed, the new white silks as well as her freshly laundered old clothes. She might have no need of them in the desert, but she didn’t feel like leaving anything behind.

Horses waited for them, mounts and remounts and pack animals. More supplies than Isyllt had expected, until she remembered the wide desolation she’d seen from the road. Her mouth dried thinking about it.

She thought they would slip out without complications, until she saw a cloaked figure waiting by the narrow side gate. Asheris tensed, and Isyllt recognized the unshaven curve of Siddir’s jaw in the lantern-light. Siddir drew his hood back, revealing the dark circles shadowing his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly.

Isyllt felt the spell of silence enfold them, shutting out the tactfully incurious guards. She ought to be on the other side as well, but she stayed where she was, studying the toes of her boots.

“She spoke to my family first,” Siddir continued. “Once my aunt and sister were involved…Well, it would have been that much more difficult to escape.”

“When did you find out?” She flinched at the calm in Asheris’s voice.

“Just before I left for Kehribar.”

“You might have told me.”

“I wanted to. I’d planned to, but then I learned of Jirair and the quiet men. If you were a target—”

“Then I was also a liability. Of course.” Asheris laughed bitterly.

“I’m sorry,” Siddir repeated.

“Don’t be. If you weren’t so competent, I never would have—”

Loved you
.

Isyllt turned away, fists clenching.

“Don’t worry,” Asheris said, his voice easing. “I understand. We’ll work it out somehow, when I return.” Utterly reasonable, but she heard the lie. And if she could, Siddir must as well.

She looked up again when their embrace broke, schooling her face into a bland, pleasant mask. Siddir took her hand in both of his; his smile was crooked, ill fitting. “Take care of him.”

“I’ll do my best.”

They left the Court of Lions in silence. Neither of them looked back.

They followed the aqueduct road to the river, where they spent the night waiting for the dawn ferry to carry them across the flooded breadth of the Ash. At a caravanserai on the other side they traded the horses for camels—tall, knobbly legged beasts with alarmingly peaked backs draped in brightly colored tack. Their long faces were bored and imperious, and they grumbled like rheumatic old men as they chewed their cud. Isyllt had read of them but never seen one close; books were poor preparation for the adventure of climbing into the saddle, or their rolling gait. Or the smell.

When their supplies were loaded on the new mounts, they took a moment to refill their water skins and consult the map. “Where is Qais?” Isyllt asked around a mouthful of fig.

“Here, somewhere.” Asheris tapped an unmarked section of map. “On the edge of Al-Reshara, by the Sarcophagus Mountains. It’s thought to be a ruin, like Hajar or Irim.”

“Irim. You’ve mentioned it before.”

“A dead city. Nearly a legend now. I’ll tell you the story sometime.”

They left the green banks of the Ash early that morning, riding through a narrow strip of scrubby brush and grassland. They passed painted dogs and grazing goats, some attended by goatherds, others roaming wild. Vultures traced lazy spirals across the sky.

Once they startled a terror bird, another creature Isyllt had only read of in bestiaries. As it rose from its meal of an unlucky goat, she was glad of the camel’s height; the bird was taller than any man, with a wicked bone-snapping beak. It let out a startled
kweh
and unfurled clawed rust-red wings. The camels whistled angrily in turn. They eyed each other for a long moment before the bird decided they were no threat to its lunch.

The last green ended abruptly, giving way to flat red rock. Ahead, lost in the heat-shimmer, lay the desolate sprawl of Al-Reshara, the sand sea. Without the river’s cooling influence, the west wind became the breath of a furnace. Isyllt had thought she understood the desert summer from the journey to Ta’ashlan. She realized now how wrong she’d been.

Heat bound her brow with iron, a heavy band slowly tightening. Asheris had shown her how to wrap her scarf into a turban, to retain moisture and keep her head from baking, but after an hour she was sure her skull would crack, letting her brains sizzle like eggs on a griddle. Her veil kept sand out of her teeth, but she envied the camels their heavy-lidded, long-lashed eyes. She pulled at her water skin while the wind dried her sweat before she could feel the damp.

They paused just after noon by the dubious shade of a scrubby acacia thicket. Asheris braved the sun to prepare a midday meal: tea and sweet sesame cakes for energy, olives and briny cheese to replenish lost salt. Isyllt shuddered at the first swallow of honeyed tea, and had to fight not to drain the cup at once. The heat left her with little appetite, though, and she shared half the cake with her camel.

The heat was too fierce for proper sleep, but she dozed against an acacia, heedless of the thorns. The horizon shimmered and bled, earth and sky melting into one simmering liquid. No wonder the Unconquered Sun reigned here; what else could rival that fury?

And that was only the first day.

They traveled early in the day and early at night, resting at noon and moonset. They rarely spoke; words dried and died on Isyllt’s tongue, and silence was kinder. The rhythm lulled her into an uneasy slumber—creaking leather, the camels’ deep breath, the whispering sibilance of sand. She grew accustomed to the camel’s gait, to folding her legs around the wooden saddle, to the dry pungency of dung and sun-warmed wool. The heat was a revelation every day.

Asheris thrived. He kept his head covered to protect tender human skin, but every so often he raised his face to the blistering sun, drinking down its fire. He glowed with it. Once she woke from a doze to see his four burning wings unfolding behind him, but the vision vanished when she blinked.

“You said you’d tell me the story of Irim,” she said on the third night, smearing camel grease on her cracked lips. She didn’t like to use it in front of the camels, but the tent flaps were closed, saving her from their disapproving stares. Concern for dromedary sensibilities was probably a sign of incipient sun fever.

“I did.” In the witchlit shadows of the tent, his face was leaner than usual, fierce and sharp-set. Only the desiccating heat, perhaps, but Isyllt imagined she could see his human façade burning away day by day. His brow creased for a moment, soothing again when he began to speak.

“Once, hundreds of years ago—before the warrior-queen Assar was even born, before men built churches to the Unconquered Sun—the Aal ruled the desert. Al-Reshara was smaller, then, surrounded by green, and the Aal girdled the sand with their cities: Hajar, Irim, Qais, Chât. Caravans traveled the length of the kingdom, laden with gold and incense—the Smoke Road, the route was called.

“The marvel of Aaliban, however, was not its wealth or armies or towered cities. Humans and spirits lived together there, if you can believe such heresy—trading, trysting, studying. Mortal and jinn scholars mapped the heavens, while the ghuls tunneled to the bones of the earth and rakkash physicians learned the intricacies of blood and bone and soul.

“It couldn’t last, of course. No one is sure quite what happened, or whose fault it was. The humans blamed the jinn, and the jinn blamed the mortals in turn. Perhaps the ghuls or the rakkash remember better, but if so they don’t speak of it.

“Wherever the fault lay, we do remember this: As they studied the stars, astronomers in Irim found something in the heavens, a wandering comet carrying a presence they’d never before encountered. They tried to communicate with it, and at last performed a summoning to draw the wanderer near.

“It worked.”

“What happened?” Isyllt demanded, when Asheris fell silent for too long.

He shrugged, eyes glittering like citrines in the golden light. “They died. All right, all right!” He raised a placating hand as she threatened to throw the camel grease at him. “We don’t know what that comet carried with it as it fell, but it was alien to us, and hungry.

“The weight of the falling sky leveled Irim, and turned the erg into the Sea of Glass. Mortals died by the thousands. Men and spirits both died when the hungry things—Al-Jodâ’im, they were later named—crawled out of the rubble. They were…the void incarnate. Cold, formless, killing with a touch. Where they went, entropy followed. According to the legend, they birthed the ghost wind. The destruction spreading from Irim threw all of Aaliban into chaos and destroyed the Smoke Road. Khemia remained fragmented and lawless for centuries, until Queen Assar came to power.”

“And what happened to these things, Al-Jodâ’im?”

“Legend says they were finally bound, but the binding destroyed the last fragile peace between men and jinn. Jinn claim human perfidy, of course, and I’m sure mortals say the same of us. Either way, it’s become a parable against contact between flesh and Fata.”

“Is it true?”

“In part, at least, I think it must be. I’ve heard too many versions with the same heart.”

Silence filled the tent, while the camels snored outside. Asheris stared for a time into the middle distance, while his witchlight danced in lazy spirals over his head.

“I had forgotten this story. I had forgotten so much—like a shroud drawn over my past. Ahmar’s curse burned it away. I’ll have to thank her before she dies.”

The light vanished. “Rest,” Asheris said, rising and opening the tent flap. Starlight kissed his skin with silver. “We go farther still tomorrow.”