The Kingdoms of Dust (22 page)

He followed her out of the guardhouse into the empty street. In the scant light spilling through the door, her eyes glittered as she glanced at him. “Are you going to hit me again?”

His hands tightened, but he kept them at his sides. “No.”

“Good. Let’s have a drink, then.”

She led him into the main building—not past the guardian sphinxes, but through a side door—and through a maze-like twist of stairs and dark hallways. Even his night vision failed in a few black corners, but she moved with the ease of long familiarity.

“You live here?” he asked when they finally reached her rooms. They smelled like her, at least, her and wine; if he’d hoped for any revelations about her true identity, there were none to be found.

“I don’t spend much time here. In Qais. Mostly I work abroad.” She set a bottle of wine on a small desk and began to unscrew the cork.

“Like Celanor.”

Her chin rose. “Among many other places.” The wine opened with a pop.

“Where else?”

“Do you really want to know?”

He shrugged. “I’m curious.”

She turned away, searching the shelves until she found a second glass. “Ninaya, northern Assar, Iskar, Andemar—”

“So Andemar wasn’t a lie, at least.”

“Damn it, Adam.” Glass thunked against wood. “It was my job. I remember some of your stories. Don’t pretend your hands are clean.”

“No. Never that.” An apology was more than he could manage, so he held his tongue. She pressed a glass on him and he took it; she waved him toward a chair and he sat. Drinking was a bad idea while he was still dehydrated. He raised the cup anyway. The glass was swirled blue and green, imperfectly balanced and flawed with a dozen tiny bubbles. Pretty, in a magpie way. The wine was dark and dry and burned its way down.

“Brenna—”

She flinched. “Don’t call me that. Brenna is dead. I thought you were dead too. How did you get here?”

He lifted one shoulder—the wrong one, he remembered, as the scab on his ribs pulled tight. “It’s your magic trick. You tell me.”

Her eyes narrowed, lips quirking. She knew, he guessed, about the shadow that had spoken to him on the cliffs, but that was no reason for him to volunteer information. She opened her mouth and shut it again with a frown. When she spoke, it was a different accusation than he’d expected. “You’re hurt.”

“Just a scratch. You used to be better than that.”

“Hah! If I’d wanted you dead, you would be. Let me see.”

He wasn’t quite proud enough to let a wound fester rather than let her treat it. He stripped off his torn shirt and let her sponge away the blood and grime.

“What is this about?” he asked while she worked. “Kehribar, Moth…”

She discarded the dirty cloth. “Wait a moment—I need bandages.” She stepped into a shadowed corner. Even anticipating it, Adam shuddered as she vanished into darkness. She returned a few moments later, from a different shadow this time, carrying folded bandages and jars. The smell of aloe rose from the first one she opened, the sharp blood-metal scent of copper from the next.

“The people I work for want Iskaldur,” she said, each word carefully measured. “Her help, that is, not harm. I was sent to make contact. But when I saw you, I panicked.” Her jaw tightened with the admission.

“So you kidnapped a child instead of talking?”

“You would have talked, instead of attacking me? It was a mistake,” she continued, when he didn’t meet her gaze. “But Moth is safe, and so are you—though following me into shadow was stupid, and by all rights you should be dead. Besides—” She nudged his arm away and smeared a cool, rust-red paste along the cut. “Iskaldur will be safer away from Ta’ashlan. The city is a stronghold for the people who want her dead. Be careful with this,” she said, changing the subject as she wrapped his ribs. “Qais is…not healthy. Wounds don’t always heal as they should.”

“What is it? This place.”

“It’s—” She busied herself with the final knot. “Something very ancient sleeps here. Very dangerous. We—the people I work for—keep it bound.”

“And that’s why you want Isyllt.”

She nodded. “Not that I understand the details. I’m just a spy.”

He’d finished his wine while she worked—he set the cup aside before she could refill it. “What should I call you, if not Brenna?”

Her mouth twisted, and she rose and turned to the window. “I’ve been using Melantha lately, but it still doesn’t fit. Like a pair of boots that never quite break in.”

The shutters opened with a soft squeak, and cool night air filled the room. Adam hadn’t realized how he stifled until the draft touched his face. The heat of the wine, of his wound, the scent of a woman who was friend and enemy and stranger all at once.

“What about a real name?”

“That’s long gone.” She threw a wry smile over her shoulder. “And I couldn’t tell you anyway.” She leaned her elbows on the casement and stared out the window. After a long silence, Adam joined her. The night was quiet, dust-faded. The stars ended at a ragged gash where mountains chewed the sky.

“Your hair—” His hand rose, nearly brushing the tousled curls at the nape of her neck. He stopped before he touched her.

“I could say the same to you.” Her smile vanished. “The hair was Brenna’s. That’s how I killed her.”

“You can’t kill the past.”

“Yes, I can.” She turned to face him, catching his hand before he could draw it away. “I know because it haunts me.”

She leaned against his chest, lifting her face to kiss him. He meant to pull away, but couldn’t move. He wished he could blame her magic for that. He also wished he could remember the last time a woman had kissed him sober.

“I can’t,” he said when she drew back. His voice was rough and strained, and he shuddered like a stung horse.

“What’s past is gone. You may hate me, but you still want me. And it helps—a little life to ward off the death in this place.”

“The woman I wanted is dead. You said so yourself.” But her scent tangled him, kindled heat in the pit of his stomach. Denying it was ridiculous, with her hips pressing against his.

“Does it matter in the dark?”

Yes
. But her fingers caught in his hair, pulling his mouth to hers, and the word died unspoken. Beneath the wine, she tasted of blood and grief.

She filled the room with shadows and he was blind. His heart sped; fear did nothing to ease the pulse in his groin. She led him to her bed.

She wasn’t the woman he had wanted. That woman had never existed. Brenna had been real to him, if a lie, but she had also been his friend’s lover, and faithful within the confines of the lie. The woman who’d visited his dreams and clung to his waking thoughts the way strands of her hair sometimes clung to his sleeve—that woman only ever existed in his mind.

Brenna had been bright and dark and deadly, quicksilver with a blade and just as quick to laugh. It was her laughter that haunted him—her grin, her teasing eyes, her wry chuckles and the rich, raw croak of real humor. A laughing raven girl, and no wonder mercenaries fell at her feet.

The woman in his arms now—Melantha or whatever her true name was—was as sad as anyone he’d ever known. Desire warmed her scent, headier than wine, but no matter how she writhed and sighed at his touch, no matter how wild and strong she moved against him, pinning him to the bed and outpacing his rhythm till his control broke, there was a distance inside her he couldn’t touch. When his breath returned he held her down in turn, using tongue and fingers until her climax rippled down the sleek muscles of her thighs. She clung to him, slick and gasping, bruising him with her grip, but even then there was something more she wanted that he couldn’t name or give.

He would have given it in that moment if he could. He’d always been quick to lose his wits for women. But he couldn’t, no more than he could have eased Isyllt’s sorrow, or healed the hurt festering deep beneath Xinai’s scars.

Was it easier, as Isyllt suggested, to know he couldn’t? To know from the beginning that they would leave, and armor himself with that knowledge? He didn’t think it was.

Nice women, Isyllt had said. He laughed, face pressed to the sweaty sheets, and his chest ached with the sound.

D
ays melted one into another, till Isyllt could barely keep count. The journey wasn’t a long one—Asheris estimated sixteen days of travel to the ruins of Irim, and perhaps twice that to Qais, if his maps were accurate—but the rolling waves of the erg was as timeless as the sea. And as beautiful, and as deadly.

Dunes rose and fell, fluted and ruffled by the wind, knife-edged on the leeward side.
Al-Reshara
meant “the red desert,” but Isyllt found dozens of colors in the sand: rust, carnelian, ochre and honey and grey, glittering with flecks of quartz and green slivers of glass. The wind blew fine plumes of dust from their peaks, till the desert seemed to smoke and smolder.

Soon she could see the sharp peaks of the Sarcophagus Mountains in the distance, rising from the sand like the bones of some ancient giant, piercing the southwestern sky. Straight ahead lay nothing, only the liquid fire of the dune sea rolling to the horizon. And the sun with its molten unblinking eye. Unconquered. Conquering.

Many of the wells they passed were dry. Since Asheris barely touched his share of the provisions they were in no danger, but every collapsing hole that had once held water twisted an unhappy knot in Isyllt’s stomach. The desert was a killer without par, and in its vastness all her magic was only a tiny spark, so easily snuffed.

Despite the emptiness, sometimes at night her nape prickled with the sensation of watching eyes. Once, waking at dawn, she glimpsed a dark canine shape vanishing into the dunes.

“Jackals,” Asheris said when she told him. “Friends, I think.”

Asheris told more stories as they rode, stories of the Fata’im—some of sphinxes and ghuls, but most of Mazikeen, the jinn city of fire and glass where he had once dwelled. He spoke of their kings and councils and shining hosts, of their sacred Tree of Sirité, that blossomed into flame every hundred years and was fertilized by its own ashes. He told her of the eyrie of the rukh, where the jinn nursed the last egg of the giant birds, which might hatch a decade or a century or a millennium from now.

“Can you never go back?” she asked one day, as he brewed their midday tea. “What happened to you was hardly your choosing.”

“No. But if I’d chosen to obey the Flames’ injunctions, I would never have been captured. And while I don’t know the truth of the break between men and the Fata’im, both sides have become equally immovable.”

“We could stay here,” he said that night, as they lay in the darkness outside the tent.

The moon had set and their campfire died, leaving no rivals for the stars. Isyllt had never seen a sky like this, the depthless black paved in jewels, ruby and topaz and brilliant diamonds. A dark ribbon bisected the firmament like a banner of smoke. The Mother of Heaven, Asheris named it, the great serpent who laid the first clutch of jinn eggs and breathed her fire into them.

“Here?”

“The desert. Leave men and their intrigues behind forever. Forget Qais and Ta’ashlan.”

“You’d miss the theater.”

It didn’t earn the chuckle she’d hoped for, and she turned to watch him. Starlight filled his eyes and bathed his face. His beauty caught in her throat, and for a wild instant she would have agreed to anything. She held her breath until the foolish impulse suffocated. The dunes hissed softly around them, punctuated by the camels’ snores.

“You’re serious,” she said at last. Sand rasped as she rolled over; despite her veils, grains caught in her hair and itched against her scalp.

“Why not? There’s nothing for me there.” He gestured to the east. “Nothing but heartache and eventual exile.”

“Maybe not, but I don’t believe you’d last long as a hermit. I know I wouldn’t. And Qais has Moth and Adam—I can’t abandon them.”

“No, I suppose not. Human bonds are hard to break.”

Isyllt shoved herself up. “Horseshit. Friendship is hardly a mortal foible. Not according to your stories. If it were you held prisoner on the other side of the desert, I wouldn’t abandon you. You of all people should respect that.”

He rose, more graceful on the shifting sand than she could ever hope to be. The fey light dimmed in his eyes, leaving the man she knew. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He took her hand and kissed it, heedless of clinging dust. “We’ll find your friends, I promise. I can always contemplate a hermitage after that.”

She wished she thought he was joking.

The next day the sun poured fire and the wind only worsened the heat. Asheris kept his veil pulled tight, and more than once glanced unhappily toward their backtrail.

“What’s wrong?” Isyllt asked. The wind stung her face; even veils and aloe and camel grease couldn’t protect her from the sun. Her skin dried and lips cracked, and a few unguarded moments scattered throughout the day were enough to leave her nose pink and peeling and her eyelids tender. It wasn’t yet noon—the desert always gave her something to look forward to.

“We’re being followed. By something besides jackals.”

She twisted in her saddle, sitting up straight and shielding her eyes. “Wouldn’t we have seen them by now?”

Dust dulled the horizon, blurred the line between earth and sky. Her eyes tingled as she sharpened her sight, but she still saw nothing. Except a distant glint to the southeast that might have been sunlight on metal. She couldn’t tell if it moved.

“Not if they rode through a wash. It’s dangerous, but would keep them off the horizon. The ground hardens into reg closer to the mountains—desert pavement. It would lessen their dust. The desert tribes might travel so, but one of us should have sensed ordinary riders by now.”

“The quiet men? Herding us to Qais?”

“Maybe. But Ahmar and your shadow from Kehribar seem to have different ends. Two different factions? A schism in the group? Since one of them wants you dead, this might not be the best time to find out.”

“Maybe not. Can we outrun them?”

“If I knew where we were running, we might. Instead, I think I’ll enliven their trip a little.” He winked, and his magic crackled against Isyllt’s skin. The wind rose with it. “Cover your eyes.”

The wind strengthened, dimming the sky with dust—a smoky amber veil drawn across the sun. Isyllt drew her own veils over her face till she was all but blind, but still fine particles stung her eyes and crunched between her teeth. Once called, the wind took on a life of its own. They sped the camels to escape it, but the storm nipped at their heels even as it churned east.

“Something’s wrong,” Asheris said, raising his voice above the roar. “They’re trying to turn the storm against me.”

Isyllt was no weather witch, but as she stretched her senses toward the gale, she felt a second presence riding the wind, darker and colder than Asheris’s familiar fiery magic. “Now what?”

“Now we try running.”

The camels ran swiftly, surprisingly graceful on their long knobbly legs, but they couldn’t outrun the sandstorm. The air grew thick and hot, earth and sky bleeding together, and the wind drew sparks from their clothes and the camels’ hides. At last their mounts refused to go on and folded themselves to the ground, turning their backs to the wind and shutting their long-lashed eyes.

“They’re wiser than we are,” Asheris said, shoving Isyllt down into the shelter of her camel’s leeward side. Dragging a tent from the saddle packs, he crouched beside her, draping the canvas over them and tucking it beneath their legs and the animals’
.
Fabric snapped in the wind, and sparks jumped and crackled like angry fireflies with every movement. The enclosed air was hotter than an oven; the camel’s flesh behind her was cool in comparison.

They sat enfolded in pungent dromedary musk, broken by the occasional green whiff of cud. The sour, woolly smell had grown familiar over the past decad, very nearly comforting. The rush of the storm drowned even Isyllt’s thoughts, lulling her toward sleep. But from under that din another sound grew: a low, fervent drumming.

“What is that noise?” Isyllt asked at last, wincing as her lips cracked on the words.

“Sand. I hope.”

“What else would it be?”

“Stories tell of the zar, spirits of the wind who hold their revels during sandstorms. The sound of their drums is said to drive men mad with desire, till they leave their shelters and dance to their deaths in the sand. But by the time of my hatching, the jinn had seen no zar for decades.” His eyes gleamed as he glanced at Isyllt. “You don’t feel like dancing, do you?”

“You’ll know the moment I do.”

The drumming finally faded, with Isyllt’s feet having done nothing more treacherous than fall asleep beneath her. The howl of the storm died to a sibilant whisper. As the tension finally began to bleed from her limbs, a deep chuffing breath shook the stillness.

The camel behind her startled, lowing in concern, and Isyllt toppled forward on her hands and knees. Asheris hissed, one hand closing on her arm.

“That wasn’t sand,” Isyllt whispered. “Or a jackal.”

“No.” His mouth compressed to a bloodless line. “I think it’s time we were on our way.”

Warm sand cascaded over them as they drew the canvas aside, sifting into Isyllt’s shirt and boots. The air was a swirling orange cloud of unsettled dust, the sun a dull white disk overhead. Isyllt could barely see past her camel’s nose as she clambered into the saddle.

The growl sounded again, an echoing cough. She couldn’t tell what direction it came from, but it was much too close.

“It sounds like a lion,” Asheris said, his voice low. “But…bigger.”

Whatever prowled the dunes was no ordinary flesh-and-blood beast. Isyllt’s nape prickled under sweaty hair, the familiar shiver that meant a powerful spirit was near. The camels, usually stoic and unflappable, shuddered with tension, eager to be away from the predator.

She thought they traveled west—hard to be certain, with the sun vanished behind clouds of sand. The camels shifted from their usual rolling walk to a bone-jarring canter, and then to a gallop. Not as fast as a horse could run, but their long legs devoured the distance. Isyllt set her teeth and clung to the saddle.

The beast kept pace. Once she glimpsed a sleek dark shadow loping beside them, but it vanished into the haze once more. Her camel veered away, gaining speed.

“It’s herding us,” she shouted to Asheris.

The smallest pack camel, also the lightest-burdened, took the lead. Soon only her tail was visible, crackling with sparks in the charged air. Asheris followed close behind, with Isyllt at his heels and the last two pack beasts at the rear. She expected their hunter to strike at the slowest camel. Instead it surged ahead to intercept the mare.

Isyllt saw it move, but had only a heartbeat to draw breath before flesh struck flesh. The camel screamed, shrill and lingering, and the smell of blood filled the air. Cursing, she tried to rein in her mount, but its momentum was too great. They avoided colliding with Asheris, but tangled in the thrashing legs of the wounded mare. Her camel shrieked and toppled, throwing Isyllt to the red-stained sand. Dazed and breathless, she rolled aside as its bulk came crashing after.

Dusty air billowed in the wake of a giant paw, retractable claws flashing inches from her eyes. Blood sprayed hot against her face and a camel screamed once more. Isyllt couldn’t scream—her throat locked tight with terror, stomach twisting into an icy knot as predator musk washed over her.

Asheris’s outflung arm knocked the rest of her breath away as he tackled her. Hands closed in her robe, dragging her away. “Run!”

Fire surged between them and the beast, singeing her lungs as she inhaled. The creature roared through the flames. The sound echoed through Isyllt’s sternum and down her spine, filling her bowels with ice water. Instinct took hold, primal prey-fear, and she ran.

Glancing over her shoulder, she nearly ran straight into the shadow that loomed in front of her. She threw up her hands, scraping her palms on warm stone. A pillar, worn and pitted, rising from the dunes. They had reached the edge of a forest of broken columns.

“Climb,” Asheris said, crouching and cupping his hands. “We won’t outrun that.”

To prove his point, the beast roared again and leapt, singeing its underbelly in the fire. Isyllt planted one boot in Asheris’s hands and let him heave her upward. Her good hand closed on the lip of a crumbling architrave and she hung for an instant, cursing breathlessly. She hooked her other hand over the edge in an awkward two-fingered grip and pulled. One flailing foot found a toehold, then the other, and she scrambled up. Her nails splintered on stone, and the shoulder she’d hurt in Sherazad burned angrily once more. Clinging to the top on her belly, she looked down in time to shout helplessly as the lion-creature pounced on Asheris.

A blow from one shovel-size paw sent him sprawling, trailing blood across the ground. He sprang up and flung a handful of sand, which ignited as it struck the beast. The creature roared and swatted the sparks aside like gnats.

Isyllt dragged her belt knife free of its sheath, nearly disemboweling herself in the process. Not her demon-killing kukri—that, damn her own stupidity, was still hanging from her camel’s saddle—but it would have to do. Steel didn’t hold energy as well as silver, but the blade still glowed white as she poured magic into it. The metal would rust and shatter with sustained exposure, but she only needed it to last a moment.

The angle was bad and the set of her wrist even worse—Adam would have sighed to see it. All the same, she hit what she aimed at. The blade bounced off the monster’s flank, but its snarl of pain assured her she’d drawn blood. Its right rear leg buckled as death-magic sank into preternatural flesh. The effect wouldn’t last long from a slight wound, but an instant’s distraction was all Asheris needed.

His wings burst free, incandescent in the gloom. Three powerful downbeats carried him to the top of the column beside Isyllt’s, where he alit much more gracefully than she had.

“A manticore,” he breathed. “I thought none were left in the desert.”

Isyllt drew herself to her knees, shaking despite the heat. “What an opportunity for us, then. Can you fly us out of here?”