When Jackals Storm the Walls Read online

  Near the end of the battle, it is revealed that Queen Meryam has long been dominating the mind of the blood mage, Hamzakiir. She has designs on more than just Macide or the Moonless Host. She wants the city for herself. In order to secure it, she forces Hamzakiir to take on the guise of Kiral the King of Kings. Kiral himself, meanwhile, is sent into the battle and is killed.

  In the battle’s closing moments, Çeda is nearly killed by the fearsome ehrekh, Guhldrathen. Guhldrathen, however, is swept up by Rümayesh and destroyed. This frees the path for Çeda to kill King Onur, which she does in single combat.

  Beneath the Twisted Trees

  Sharakhai was sorely weakened after the Battle of Blackspear, the intense conflict that saw King Onur die and the thirteenth tribe narrowly escape the royal navy and the Sharakhani Kings. Sensing that Sharakhai is ripe for conquest, the kingdoms of Malasan and Mirea sail hard across the Shangazi Desert, each planning to take the city for their own.

  Unbeknownst to all, Queen Meryam sent Kiral, King of Kings, to die in the Battle of Blackspear, while putting Hamzakiir, disguised with her blood magic, in his place. To further secure her power, she forces Hamzakiir, in his guise as Kiral, to marry her, thus cementing her place as a queen of Sharakhai. Their nuptials are interrupted by the goddess, Yerinde, who demands that the Kings kill Nalamae, her sister goddess, who has remained in the shadows for centuries but who Yerinde fears may interfere with her plans. Knowing Yerinde could undo all they’ve worked for, the Kings agree and a hunt for Nalamae begins.

  Çeda, meanwhile, searches for a way to liberate the asirim from the curse placed on them by the desert gods. She frees a family of asirim that, against all odds, has remained together since Beht Ihman four centuries earlier. Çeda discovers a way for the asirim to bond with her handpicked warriors, the Shieldwives, which helps them to resist their compulsion to obey the Kings.

  Using a legendary bird known as a sickletail, the Kings find Çeda in the desert and attack, but she and those with her are saved when Nalamae suddenly returns. While escaping, they take a lone prisoner, none other than Husamettín, King of Swords. Nalamae was wounded in the battle, however, and is in desperate need of a safe haven, so Çeda sends her to a valley where the bulk of the thirteenth tribe hides.

  Çeda, meanwhile, along with Sümeya, Melis, and the asirim, sneak into Sharakhai and corner her former sister in the Blade Maidens, the famed Kameyl. Çeda explains to Kameyl the Kings’ betrayal of the thirteenth tribe on Beht Ihman, the enslavement of the asirim, their deceptions to hide their crimes. Kameyl is unconvinced until Çeda tricks Husamettín into revealing many of his long-held secrets. Realizing it’s all true, Kameyl helps Çeda, Sümeya, and Melis to steal into Sharakhai’s uppermost palace, Eventide, and free Sehid-Alaz, King of the thirteenth tribe, from imprisonment.

  In the process, they’re nearly captured, but King Ihsan has been working behind the scenes to forestall the gods’ plans. After reading a prophetic entry in the Blue Journals—of Çeda’s freeing Sehid-Alaz—Ihsan helps her and the others to escape but is captured by King Emir of Malasan, who has begun his invasion of Sharakhai. King Emir’s father, Surrahdi the Mad King, was long thought dead but is revealed when Ihsan arrives in the Malasani war camp. Surrahdi created hundreds of golems for the assault on Sharakhai but was driven mad in the process. On seeing Ihsan, Surrahdi cuts out Ihsan’s tongue, robbing him of his magical voice and its power to command others.

  Emre has been traveling to the southern tribes on a mission for Macide. He hopes to form an alliance among all thirteen tribes to act as a unified force not only against Sharakhai, but Mirea and Malasan as well. Emre hopes to secure peace with the Malasani King, but when King Emir makes it clear that any accord will entail the desert tribes’ bowing to the will of Malasan, Emre is certain he’s failed.

  Queen Meryam, forced to deal directly with the looming threat of Mirea, goes with Sharakhai’s navy and confronts them on the sand. The Mireans have managed to entice an ehrekh, Rümayesh, to work with them. Rümayesh has a servant, Brama, who eventually sympathizes with the Mireans when a plague is introduced into their ranks. The plague is voracious, but Brama finds a way to nullify it with the help of Rümayesh, thus saving a good portion of the Mirean fleet.

  After her near capture in Eventide, Çeda returns to the desert and works to free King Sehid-Alaz, finally succeeding when she realizes that Husamettín’s own sword, Night’s Kiss, can be used to kill and rejuvenate. Sehid-Alaz, his chains broken at last, frees the rest of the asirim. This momentous event occurs just as Meryam is throwing the might of Sharakhai’s royal navy against the weakened Mirean fleet. Things look to be going Meryam’s way, but when the asirim all flee at Sehid-Alaz’s bidding, the tide turns and the royal navy is forced to retreat toward Sharakhai. The Mirean fleet, badly weakened, remains to lick its wounds in the desert.

  During the battle, Brama learns that Rümayesh has been trying to steal his soul. He stops her using a powerful artifact, the bone of Raamajit the Exalted, but Rümayesh manages to save herself by fusing her soul to Brama’s. Brama and Rümayesh are now inextricably linked, their souls sharing the same scarred body.

  King Emir, meanwhile, renews his assault on Sharakhai using the Malasani golems, an unstoppable force. But Ihsan, even though imprisoned and mute, is not powerless. He’s learned the reason for Surrahdi’s madness: the golems themselves, each of which required a splinter of Surrahdi’s soul, weigh on him, putting him on the very brink of insanity. Ihsan, using his gift of manipulation, convinces Haddad, a woman Surrahdi loves and respects, to force Surrahdi to face his misdeeds. Surrahdi becomes distraught and slips entirely into madness. The golems do too, and the entire Malasani assault is thrown into chaos.

  Davud the blood mage, Anila the necromancer, and Lord Ramahd Amansir of Qaimir are all in similar circumstances: they’re on the run from the powers of the city. They join forces for mutual protection but are split up when King Sukru captures Anila and takes her back to his palace in the House of Kings. King Sukru wants the return of his brother, the blood magi known as the Sparrow, and he hopes Anila can help him using her power over the dead and the wondrous crystal beneath the city, which acts as a gateway to the farther fields. When her family is threatened, Anila agrees to help, but tricks Sukru in the end and then kills him when her brother is summoned from the dead.

  As the battle for Sharakhai reaches a fever pitch, Davud and Ramahd work to free Hamzakiir from Meryam’s imprisonment. They manage to do so in grand fashion, breaking the chains Meryam has placed on him and, in the process, revealing Meryam as a traitor to her own throne and to Sharakhai. Meryam, however, has allied with the children of the Sharakhani Kings to start a new order. With them, she overthrows the old power structure and takes a position of leadership among the new.

  Never abandoning the quest for Nalamae, King Beşir goes with a sizable force to conquer the thirteenth tribe in their mountain fastness. Çeda kills King Beşir and returns to the fort where she finds Yerinde standing over her wounded sister goddess, Nalamae. Çeda sneaks up on Yerinde and slays her with Night’s Kiss, a sword forged by the dark god, Goezhen. Nalamae, having been given a mortal wound by Yerinde, dies moments later.

  As the story closes, Emre frees King Ihsan in repayment for his help in saving the city. When Emre returns to the tribe, however, he’s intercepted by Hamid, a childhood friend of Emre’s and once a rising star in the Moonless Host. Hamid, both jealous of Emre and incensed by his actions, attacks Emre and buries him alive in the sand.

  King Ihsan, meanwhile, gets the Blue Journals from Queen Nayyan, planning to read them all to find a path to save Sharakhai.

  And in the valley, Çeda plants the acacia seed her mother left for her. The acacia tree begins to grow at an incredible rate. Knowing Nalamae would have been reborn, Çeda vows to find her in her new incarnation—Çeda is determined to learn the plans of the gods and stop them once and for all.

  Prologue<
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  THERE WAS A PARTICULAR VAULT below the Sun Palace that had once belonged to the royal vivisectionist but that Meryam shan Aldouan, queen of two kingdoms, had found convenient for her own purposes. The vault was cool and humid. It had a ramp leading down from the palace proper that could accommodate large, rolling tables for the delivery and removal of corpses, even those as massive as the Malasani golems Meryam had been studying. It was stocked with a hundred instruments for cutting, and sawing, and chiseling, all useful tools for the sorts of operations Meryam had been conducting on the golems since the terrible battle with Malasan three weeks earlier.

  As Meryam walked along the easily sloping ramp, braziers lit the passageway and the room ahead in a sunset glow. When she reached the vault itself, an open space the size of a small temple, a broad marble table was revealed, and on it, the latest subject of her experiments, a massive clay golem wearing the face of Surrahdi the Mad King.

  The golem was awe-inspiring, as were all the Malasani golems. More importantly, it was impressively pristine, so much so that Meryam was actually starting to believe that the opinion King Yavuz had shared with her a little over an hour ago was true: that the golem, or, more accurately, the crystal heart inside its chest, might provide her the opportunity to rid herself of one of her most powerful enemies, King Emir of Malasan, who had yet to give up his quest for Sharakhai.

  On the table’s far side stood Yavuz himself, son of the departed Kiral, King of Kings. He waited patiently, studying Meryam’s approach over the golem’s rounded belly. He wore a rich khalat of white and silver. Pinned to the fabric of his white silk turban was a diamond and pearl broach. He was a tidy man, his dark beard sculpted, his nails impeccably clean. He’d taken his father’s throne on the discovery that Kiral had not survived the Battle of Blackspear, as everyone had thought, but had died, a victim of the terrible blood mage, Hamzakiir. Or so Meryam had made them all believe—in truth she had killed Kiral; Hamzakiir had merely been a convenient scapegoat.

  Kiral’s death had been one of many sweeping changes that had unfolded in the past few years. Eight of the original twelve Kings had been taken by the lord of all things. Azad, the first King to die, had fallen to the blade of Ahyanesh, Çedamihn’s mother. Çeda herself had assassinated Külaşan, Mesut, Onur, and Beşir. No one was certain how Yusam had died, but signs pointed to a supposed ally of his, King Ihsan, as having done the deed. Sukru had grown overly ambitious and had been murdered by the necromancer, Anila, in some strange scheme to bring his brother back from the dead. With Meryam herself having arranged for Kiral’s death, it left only four: Ihsan, Husamettín, Zeheb, and Cahil, all of whom had fled the city, leaving their houses in disarray. The other eight thrones, meanwhile, had been filled by the Kings’ sons and daughters—the lesser Kings and Queens, as many referred to them. It made for a greatly altered landscape in Sharakhai, but one infinitely more favorable to Meryam and her goal of ruling the city alone.

  Across from her, Yavuz motioned to the golem, his pride plain to see. “We found it in the southern harbor, buried beneath the sand.”

  Ignoring his overly eager look, Meryam inspected the golem with care. She ran her hands over it, felt the grit of the clay, which had bronze-filings worked into it. There were nicks here and there, and one great, gaping hole that went clean through its abdomen—all signs of the pitched battle Malasan had waged for control over the city—but the golem’s upper chest, the area Meryam cared about most, was free of wounds.

  “It’s in surprisingly good condition,” she said.

  His relief plain, King Yavuz pointed to the golem’s chest. “No doubt we’ll find the heart intact.”

  At this, Meryam frowned. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  Yavuz’s pride, so bright and clear moments ago, dimmed, then went out altogether. And well it should. A month before, in hopes of currying her favor, he’d attempted to liberate, on his own, the heart of the only other pristine golem they’d found. He’d bungled the operation badly and cracked the precious artifact.

  Meryam, holding the broken pieces in her hands, had barely been able to hold her rage in check. “Why didn’t you send word?”

  Yavuz might have been Kiral’s son, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he’d fidgeted and avoided her gaze. “I’d hoped to save you the trouble,” he said, like a boy admitting he’d broken his mother’s prized vase. “It’s still mostly intact.”

  “Mostly intact does me no good.” She lifted the broken pieces of the heart. “This is useless to me now.”

  When the intense battle for the city had ended, Meryam had examined dozens of golems. Formed of a special clay and infused with a fragment of a mortal soul, the Malasani golems had historically been crafted as protectors. Not the ones that had swept like a storm through Sharakhai, though. Those had been violent machines of war, set upon the city by King Emir.

  Emir’s father, King Surrahdi the Mad, had made them over the course of decades by shearing off splinters of his soul and trapping them in crystals, which were then placed inside the golems’ chests. Each golem was autonomous, but Surrahdi had stood among them all, creating a grand, mind-bogglingly complex web. By the end there were a thousand of them, each placing an incremental strain on Surrahdi’s delicate sanity.

  It was hardly a surprise the golems had gone insane; their madness was an echo of Surrahdi’s own. He’d taken a knife to his own throat in the end, but Meryam could still use him. In fact, his being dead only helped her. Surrahdi wouldn’t be able to fight her for his soul. By the time he was summoned, he would already be beholden to her.

  Meryam hoped to use the heart to peer into Surrahdi’s mind and learn more of Malasan’s secrets, or animate his body and use it to sow chaos on whatever ship had been given the unfortunate duty of bearing it home. She’d taken great care with the rituals but had always fallen short of her goal, and she knew perfectly well why. The golems’ hearts had all been broken, cracked, imperfect, leading to imperfect connections to Surrahdi himself.

  This time, Meryam vowed, it will work.

  She regarded the tools laid out on the slab above the golem’s head: a variety of hammers made of iron and wood, a few iron spikes, several picks and saws, and a set of gleaming steel chisels of various sizes. She chose a wooden hammer and one of the smaller chisels—she’d learned from experience it took a delicate hand.

  Using the chisel’s edge, she scored several lines to guide her—indicators of where the golem’s heart would be buried—then placed the spike against the skin and tapped just so. A chunk of it splintered away. When Yavuz cleared the debris, she laid the spike, tapped again, and broke more of the clay free. Like this, the two of them continued, Meryam tapping, Yavuz sweeping away the flakes with a horsehair brush, until something new was revealed: a brilliant, chromatic gleam amongst the dullness of the clay. It looked like the tip of a massive diamond, but it wasn’t. It was a crystal, its nature and the secrets of its making known only to the Malasani priests.

  Meryam slowed her pace, taking all the care of an archeologist liberating a fossil from stone. Well over an hour passed until she had it: a pear-shaped crystal with facets that glittered green, gold, azure, and coral. She could hardly take her eyes from it. It was perfect, and miraculously whole.

  “Summon Erol,” she said. When King Yavuz paused, Meryam let out her breath slowly. “What is it now?” Meryam would never have spoken in such a brusque way to his father, but Yavuz was not cut from the same cloth as the King of Kings.

  Yavuz took a deep breath. “Allow me to take Erol’s place.”

  Meryam gave him a flat stare. “You?”

  Yavuz nodded. “Erol is a fine man, and brave”—he waved at the golem between them—“but he fears this. He fears you. I saw it in him every time we tried this. I think his fear is as much to blame as the broken crystals.” He motioned to the golem’s heart in her hands. “Let me try. I have no such fear.”
r />   Meryam was surprised at his sudden fit of bravery until she noticed the redness in his eyes and the way his hands quavered. Yavuz was one of a growing number of royals who’d become disaffected by his lot in life. Only a year ago, the order of succession was an all-but-meaningless distinction for the sons and daughters of the Sharakhani Kings; those waiting to sit the thrones of their fathers had as much hope as any in the last four hundred years, which was to say none at all. So many frittered their fathers’ money away—on black lotus, on brightwine, on the many other narcotics that flowed into Sharakhai from the four kingdoms and lands beyond—and Yavuz was one of the worst offenders.

  He was constantly on the lookout for new highs, and what would becoming the focus of her spell be if not a wild rush of emotion and fear that he could later share with his friends? Who among them, after all, could claim to have melded minds with the Mad King of Malasan?

  Putting a Sharakhani King in danger was nothing to take lightly—it would create no end of complications if something happened to him. Even so, Yavuz wasn’t wrong. The willingness of the participant was a factor. And the intact heart might be her last, best chance at using Surrahdi’s soul.

  Her decision made, Meryam walked around the slab and twisted the blooding ring on her right hand into position. “Give me your wrist.” Her words echoed in the harshness of the stone-walled room.

  Yavuz complied, nostrils flaring as she pierced his skin. She sucked on the wound, swallowed his blood. Power flowed through her, giving her the same heady rush as always. She held it in check, a reservoir ready and waiting for her to call upon.

  After smearing the crystal heart with more of his blood, she held it out for him to take. “Hold it to your chest, near your heart.”

  He did so, gripping it in both hands like an offering to the gods.

  In the air before her, Meryam drew a complex sigil. She immediately felt a difference from the other attempts—her connection to Yavuz and to the soul still attached to the crystal was strong, and through Yavuz, she felt the stirrings of Surrahdi’s soul. He was drawn toward the land of the living. Drawn toward his own body, which lay in a distant ship, wrapped in a funereal shroud within a wooden coffin. She could feel how cold his lifeless corpse was, how tight its desiccated frame.