Twelve Kings in Sharakhai Read online

  Coming down the stairs from Osman’s private box were four Mirean soldiers, each of them tall and muscular, their hair pulled up into a topknot. As they scanned the crowd below, their hands on the pommels of their gently curved swords, Osman’s own guardsmen—two hulking elephants chosen as much for their foul tempers as their skill with the studded cudgels swinging from their belts—stepped aside to let the Mireans by, but the lithe Mireans in the tight-fitting armor didn’t go far. They waited as their white-skinned lord finished talking to Osman near the edge of the pit. After bowing politely to one another, the Mirean took the stairs down and headed east toward the Trough, his guards flanking him.

  Young Mala stood in a nearby alcove, wearing a simple blue dress, her hair tied in a sloppy braid. Çeda nodded toward the Mirean men, and Mala nodded back. Instantly she was lost in the crowd, her sister Jein and three other children followed her, darting through the pit-goers like fish among the cattails.

  Çeda waited a long time, then longer still. The light of dusk faded. Osman and Tariq left the pits together, the two of them chatting softly. Osman didn’t notice her standing in the darkness of the narrow archway. Tariq, however, did. He looked right at her, then turned away and followed Osman.

  The crowd continued to thin. More fighters left. And still there was no sign of the Qaimiri. Soon, the small plaza outside the pits was empty. She must have lost him. Or maybe he’d left through the exit on the far side.

  When she’d nearly given up, he stepped out from the pit. He was limping badly, but he’d remained until the end. Which meant he’d made it to the third and final match of the day. He might have won, which would give him a chance to return tomorrow for a final fight and a large prize, but something told her he hadn’t. He wouldn’t. Because for some reason he’d only come to spy on the Mirean.

  He walked into the darkness of Sharakhai after sunset. As slow as he was moving, he was easy to keep up with, but Çeda still gave him wide berth. He headed east, then south, in the general direction of the southern harbor, along a road that hugged the banks of the Haddah. Just before they reached the Trough, he seemed to disappear into a patch of dark shadows to the right of the road.

  Çeda picked up her pace, padding quietly over the well-packed dirt. She watched carefully, and saw, at the last moment, a gleam of steel in the archway of an arbor overgrown with ivy. She stopped in her tracks but left her kenshar in its sheath at her side.

  “Come no closer,” came his voice from the darkness.

  “I mean you no harm,” Çeda said. “I’ve only come to ask your name and your business in Sharakhai.”

  “That’s much to ask.”

  “Just your name, then.”

  “My name doesn’t matter.”

  “Your name for mine?”

  “You are the White Wolf, and that’s all I care to know.”

  Çeda paused, suppressing a cringe. “Who?”

  “You know very well who. I recognized your gait. It marks a person as well as their face or their name. Better, because few think to disguise it.”

  Stupid, Çeda. In her rush to catch up to him, she’d abandoned the limp she usually used outside the pits, not realizing he’d been paying attention. “Then it appears you have the better of me already. Come, are you so afraid that you can’t even part with your name?”

  He paused. “I saw the way you watched Osman’s guest. You’re meddling in things you shouldn’t be.”

  “The moon-skinned man?”

  “His name is Juvaan Xin-Lei. He’s a caravan master from Mirea.”

  “I may be many things, but I’m no fool. Juvaan is no caravan master.”

  “He is. His family have owned that route since Mirea first began sailing the seas of the Great Desert. But you’re right. He’s much more than that. He’s an emissary of Queen Alansal as well.”

  Tulathan’s bright eyes, this was getting complicated. “And her business in Sharakhai?”

  He shifted his feet, then stepped forward, sheathing his knife in one fluid motion. She could see his face now, lit in the dying auburn glow of the western horizon. “I’ve said too much already.”

  When he turned to walk away, she said, “I found a canister sent by Juvaan.”

  The Qaimiri stopped in his tracks and turned slowly back to her. “You what?”

  “A canister, sent by Juvaan and meant for the Moonless Host. Interesting, is it not, that the Queen of Mirea and the Moonless Host are linked?”

  An intensity had stolen over the Qaimiri that told her she’d struck the mark.

  They were interrupted by a woman farther up the street shouting for her boy. A young voice called back moments later, and was quickly teased by several others for running to his memma.

  “Tell me more,” he said.

  She crossed her arms, a self-satisfied grin stealing over her as she did so. “I don’t know how you do things in Qaimir, but in Sharakhai, we trade.”

  The Qaimiri considered, and she thought perhaps he hadn’t taken the bait after all. When he spoke again, though, she could hear the boyish curiosity in his voice. “A bargain, then. Your story for mine?”

  “Done,” she said.

  “You first.”

  She was tempted to protest, but something told her that offering trust would be the right move here. He seemed honorable in a way that many were not. “A friend of mine was paid to deliver that canister. He nearly died in the attempt. That’s enough for me to investigate who sent it.”

  “What’s his name, your friend?”

  “Irrelevant,” Çeda countered.

  “I thought we were here to trade.”

  “I don’t betray those I love.”

  “So you love him, this boy?”

  She knew he was toying with her, but for the moment she didn’t care. “He’s no boy, and of course I love him. He has protected me since we were children, and I him.”

  “And where would he have taken the canister?”

  “As I said, it was destined for the hands of the Al’afwa Khadar.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I delivered its sister to an old woman in the Shallows. It was later picked up by their agents and delivered to the hands of Macide Ishaq’ava himself.”

  At this, the Qaimiri stiffened. “Do you know where he is now?”

  “No.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  “I have none. I saw him in the streets of Red Crescent, in an alley behind the bath house.”

  “Are you of the Al’afwa?”

  There was a distrust in his tone that hadn’t been there before. She measured her next response carefully, knowing that this was not merely important to the Qaimiri, but paramount. “I am not.”

  He seemed to weigh her words for a time. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its edge. “What was in the case?”

  She debated lying, but this was her chance to learn more about it, about Macide’s plans with it. “It contained a diaphanous stone.”

  “Describe it.”

  “As large as a grape. Nearly clear with cloudy white bands running through it. Light as air.”

  “White, you said?”

  “As snow in the mountains.”

  “And the sister case. Did you open that as well?”

  “No.”

  “Why? Why open one and not the other?”

  “I had delivered the first before knowing its importance.”

  “Does Osman—”

  Çeda raised her hand. “Enough,” she said. “I’ve given you all I’m willing to trade this night.” The sun had now fully set. Only a band of pale light remained on the horizon, which left the Qaimiri little more than a swath of jet against a field of kohl.

  “Are you saying there will be another night?”

  “I’m saying nothing of the sort.” Chee
ky bastard.

  “Fair enough.” And yet he paused a good long while before speaking again. “In return, I’ll tell you a tale, if you’re willing to hear it.”

  “I am.”

  “Sharakhai and Qaimir have many interests in one another, yes?”

  “Of that there can be no doubt.”

  “And many travel from the Shangazi’s southern borders to this very place, the Jewel of the Desert?”

  “They do.”

  “Well, two years ago a large caravan came to Sharakhai. It brought wood and wine and grain. It brought finely crafted urns and bolts of supple cloth. It brought calves and foals and songbirds. It even brought crates of ice packed in fresh summer straw for the Kings to cool their drinks.” As the Qaimiri did when telling tales, he slipped into a singsong voice. Çeda had overheard such tellings in teahouses throughout Sharakhai, but she’d never thought much of it. Then again, she’d never been the sole intended audience. Here, standing before this man in an alleyway, she found herself deeply drawn into his tale, hardly realizing it was happening. “The masters of Qaimir traded their goods for spices and tabbaq and the wicked steel swords this city can produce. But this was no ordinary caravan. There were dignitaries there to treat with the Kings of Sharakhai. There were Lords of Qaimir. Some even brought their families. They had come to trade, true, but they were there to see the wonders of Sharakhai as well.

  “And they did. The caravan stayed for fourteen days and fourteen nights, and when they set sail once more, the Kings of Sharakhai sent royal ships with them to trade with Qaimir. The two caravans sailed as one, eleven ships taking to the endless sands of the Shangazi for the southern harbor of Nijin, but before they could reach even the first caravanserai they were attacked by the desert tribes. Twenty small ships—cutters and sloops and the like—attacked three days out from Sharakhai. They brought the ships of the Kings down first. In this they were both efficient and savage. The ships from Qaimir, however, they toyed with. One by one they took them down until only one remained. The largest. The one that carried royalty and their families. That ship was grounded when her runners were taken from her by chain traps hidden in the gutters of a sandy vale.

  “The men were killed first, but not all of them. They left as many alive as there were women and children. These men were lined up like cattle, like slaves. The women and children were lined up as well, across from the men.” The Qaimiri paused. He swallowed so hard Çeda could hear it in the relative silence of the night. “Each man—” He paused again. “Each man was asked to choose between his own life and that of one of the women or children. One by one, the men gave themselves that the innocent might live, their red blood staining the golden desert floor. But when it came to the final man—the final man by luck only, mind you—a woman charged forth. She ran screaming toward the leader of the tribesmen. Before she’d taken three steps, an arrow drove through her, and she fell, sand spraying where her knees struck the dunes, her hands clutching uselessly at the silted earth. The leader, a shaikh with a forked beard and golden rings and tattoos of snakes twisting around his arms and wrists, went to her as the man screamed and tried to reach the woman. She was his wife, you see, and though their daughter stood watching, her eyes wide with horror, he was still willing to give himself that his wife might have a chance at life. The shaikh judged that the woman had made a choice in the man’s place, and he killed her with one swing of his sword.”

  Çeda had heard of the Bloody Passage. Most in Sharakhai had; that had been the point of it, after all, a declaration by the Moonless Host, claiming the desert as theirs. She knew the man he was talking about as well. The shaikh with the forked beard was no true shaikh at all, though it surely pleased him when outsiders thought him so. It was none other than Macide, the man with the forked beard and the snake tattoos Çeda had seen take the canister she’d delivered to the Shallows. She understood now why the Qaimiri had tightened upon hearing Macide’s name, why he’d been so intent on knowing if she was one of the Moonless Host.

  “When it was done,” the Qaimiri went on, “the shaikh left her there. The woman spilled her blood, and lay lifeless upon the unforgiving sand. ‘Go,’ the tribesmen said to the man. ‘Take your women. Take your children. Take your cargo if you will.’

  “‘But we have no ship! No water! You said you would let them live!’ the man cried to the shaikh, who merely stared with dispassionate eyes. ‘And I did. The rest is up to the Great Mother.’” His words came slowly now, as if he wished to leave them unspoken. “And then the tribesmen left. All of them. Leaving the broken ships, leaving the cargo, leaving the women and children and this lone man from Qaimir. He did what he could, he and the women. They made a skiff from the remains of the ship’s runners. They traveled south, trying to reach the nearest caravanserai, but the going was too slow, and they had scavenged so little from the remains. All their supplies had been taken or destroyed. For three days they traveled, and one by one the children died. Then the women, some from the dry desert air, others from the sun and exhaustion.

  “He lost his daughter a day before they were saved. By Tulathan’s bright smile, one day! He saw her die, and he wanted to die with her.”

  Goezhen’s swift sword, he was the one, the lone man to survive the massacre. “She was your child,” Çeda said.

  He nodded. “Her name was Rehann, and my wife, may she walk with our daughter in peace in the farther fields, was Yasmine.”

  No one deserved to see his wife cut down before his very eyes, to see his child die slowly of thirst as he made his way toward shelter. “My heart fills with salt for your loss,” she said, unable to think of anything equal to the depth of his sorrow.

  He seemed to harden at her words, as if they were a beacon, bringing more of the tale into relief. “Only four survived. Two of the women, one boy, and me. I returned to my King and told him my story. I begged that I be allowed to return to the desert, to hunt those who had committed this unforgivable crime. And so I did. I gathered ships of war and hunted the tribesmen. I knew their ships. A thousand years could pass, and still I would remember the cut of their sails, the lines of their hulls. When at last I found three of them traveling alone, I took them down, but not before I questioned one of their number. It was not the shaikh, but another I remembered from the slaughter. The tribesman did not speak easily, even when tortured, but at last the truth was out. Or enough of it to lead me back here to Sharakhai where it all began. The tribesmen had been paid, I learned. Paid to attack the Kings’ caravans. The presence of the Qaimiri ships had simply been an unfortunate accident.”

  Dear gods, an accident. So many dead because they’d had the misfortune of sailing with the royal fleet of Sharakhai on that particular day.

  He looked at her, more shadow than man. “I’ve been following his trail ever since. And that canister might have told me more.”

  “But you know it came from Juvaan. Why not go to him?”

  “Juvaan will pay for his part in this. The events that led to the Bloody Passage reek of his scent and that of his Queen, but I cannot lose sight of the fact that he is but one piece on the board. There are many more, and I must uncover them for my King.”

  “And the stone?” Çeda said. “Do you know what it is? Do you understand its nature?”

  “I’ve a feeling you do.”

  “I didn’t ask what you thought I knew. I asked what you knew.”

  “It’s difficult to tell without examining it myself, but I suspect it’s a breathstone. And yes, I understand its nature. Among other things, it can be used to speak to the dead.”

  “Do you have any idea who it will be used on?”

  “None at the moment.”

  “You have no idea why Juvaan might have given Macide such a stone? No idea who they would wish to speak to?”

  “None,” he said coolly, “but I’ll confer with my liege, King Aldouan.” She saw him tilt his head in the d
arkness. “It occurs to me that the two of us might have more to trade in the future.”

  “We might,” she allowed.

  “Then how can I find you?”

  She believed his offer was made in earnest, but she wanted him nowhere near her home. “Where I live, you would be noticed, something neither of us can afford.”

  There was a note of humor in his voice as he said, “I’d not come wearing the garb of a dirt dog.”

  “Even still.”

  “In that case, do you know Hefaz the cobbler?”

  “Everyone knows Hefaz.”

  He stepped back into the deeper dark. “Then you know where to find me. But be careful. This is bigger than both of us. Chances are it would be better if the White Wolf left it alone.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Perhaps you can,” he said, stepping further into the darkness. When he was almost out of earshot, he said, “Ramahd.”

  “What?” Çeda called.

  “My name,” he said. “My name is Ramahd.”

  And then he was gone.

  RAMAHD AMANSIR GRITTED HIS TEETH against his bruises and pains as he stepped down from the dock and into one of the sleighs lined up for patrons like him, those unwilling to walk over the grasping sands to the docks at the center of the harbor.

  The driver wore a kaftan and a dozen necklaces strung with fire-dried peach pits that clicked and clacked at the slightest movement. He turned to Ramahd and touched his hand to his forehead. “And where might I bring my Lord this night?”

  Ramahd handed him a sylval. “To the inner docks.”

  It was dark, but by the light of Tulathan, Ramahd could see the sleighman’s eyes light up as he slipped the silver coin into his purse. “A bit of a night cruise then?”

  “You have a silver there, which is more than enough for a silent ride, I trust.”