With Blood Upon the Sand Read online

  In the days ahead, she would learn those things and more, but that night Çeda knew none of them, and when her mother came home safe and whole and stitched Çeda’s wounds, the two of them lay with one another long into the night, Ahya stroking her hair while Çeda cried herself to sleep.

  Chapter 7

  ALONG THE SHORE OF the Austral Sea in the castle of Viaroza, Ramahd sat within a coach, waiting for the train of horses and wagons to begin the trek toward Almadan. A cold wind blew. Dozens had come from the castle to bid them farewell. They waved, but their eyes . . . Mighty Alu, there was a haunted quality to them that made Ramahd wonder what could have caused it, and in so many of them!

  Just as he turned to Meryam to ask her about it, Lord Hamzakiir’s tall form strode past his window, blocking the sun momentarily. Ramahd’s heart lifted to see him, but Hamzakiir didn’t so much as glance his way as he made for the front of the train.

  Like Ramahd, those gathered in the courtyard at the foot of the castle stairs—the steward, the guards, the page boys, the cooks, the maids, the smith and his massive wife, the stable master, and over a dozen children—all basked in Hamzakiir’s presence. They looked mad with glee, and for a moment, Ramahd saw himself in them and wondered, Is that how I look? The thought unnerved him, but the next moment he was waving to the gathering and leaning back into the padded bench as the coach lurched into motion and rattled beyond the walls.

  Across from him, Meryam was picking at her nails again. “Stop it,” he said. “You’ll ruin your hands.” Indeed, her nails were already bloody, the cuticles a torn, red mess.

  She stared down at her hands, placed them in her lap, where rust-colored stains now marred the robin’s egg blue cloth. A moment later she was back at them, picking, scratching. “There’s something strange about him.”

  “Hamzakiir? Don’t be foolish, and lower your voice.” He motioned up to where the driver and guard were sitting. “You know how the others talk, and you know how very loyal they are to him.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “It’s only . . . something has happened. I just haven’t been able to work out what.”

  A handsome man, staring Ramahd in the eye, holding a knife. “Meryam, stop it.”

  “In the dungeon. Dana’il was with me. You’d gone for a swim. I was speaking with him, though why we were in the dungeon I can’t recall.”

  That same man, lying on the filthy floor, his body bent at odd angles, as if he’d died in terrible pain.

  “Meryam, I told you to stop it.”

  “We were looking into one another’s eyes. I was speaking to him, but he . . . he was whispering. At first, I could barely hear it, but then it was all I could hear.”

  What was his name? Meryam had said it only a moment ago. He’d been a dear, dear friend, hadn’t he? Now he was a man with no grave because Ramahd hadn’t seen fit to give him one. Though Ramahd couldn’t explain why, a surge of rage rose up inside him. He lifted his hand and backslapped Meryam. She reeled, but then looked him in the eye with a dread anger. She seemed ready to speak, so he slapped her a second time. Blood trickled from her split lip, down along her chin. It pattered against her dress, mixing with the older, smaller stains.

  She blinked, ran a finger up the trail of blood, brought it to her mouth and licked it. Her nostrils flared. Her eyes went wide, as if she’d come to some new understanding, and then her look grew worried, frantic. “What have we done, Ramahd.”

  The cold dread in her words sent a shiver up Ramahd’s spine. “We’ve done nothing. It’s only your nightmares. You’ve been having them again, haven’t you?”

  Meryam seemed to shrink into herself. She was edgy as a rosefinch, her face aghast. It made Ramahd nervous just to look at her. “They’re with me all the time.” Her words came in a thin rasp, so desperate Ramahd wanted to weep for her. She was staring through the coach window. The humid air blew in and threw her fine hair across her face. She ignored it and blinked, a tear streaming down one cheek. “All the time, and yet when I put my mind to it I remember so little. I see glimpses. Echoes of a life I once led.”

  “They’re dreams, Meryam. Things have been difficult. We’ll go to Almadan and attend our lord as he bids us, and when we return, I’ll see if we might not take a carriage ride to see the gardens of Dalasera.”

  “He’s done something terrible.”

  Ramahd lowered his voice. “I told you to hold your tongue.”

  “He did something to Dana’il. He made him do it.”

  The man on the dungeon floor, a red smile across his stomach, knife lying forgotten in a lifeless, bloody hand.

  As he had so often this past week, Ramahd pushed the strange memory away. It made him irrationally angry to do so. Why, he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that Meryam was the common thread; these things only seemed to happen around her. His anger at his own confusion and Meryam’s small disobediences had been accreting like snow along a mountainside, each one making it more and more ponderous. Now the snowpack began to fracture, to fall in a rapidly growing avalanche. Before he knew what he was doing he’d wrapped his hands around Meryam’s scrawny neck. Her eyes bulged as he squeezed, as he used his weight to press her back against the padded bench. Her blood-stained fingers clawed at him, but she was too frail to stop him. Her face went red. She tried kicking at him, but his body was too close to hers for it to do any good. She struggled. She squirmed. And still Ramahd squeezed tighter as the wind blew through the cabin, throwing her dark hair across her face.

  That look. He’d seen it on another woman’s face. He’d been standing on a wide veranda. His wife, Yasmine, long dead now, her bones buried in the desert. A girl had been standing beside her. Precious Alu, his daughter, Rehann. He’d forgotten how very small she’d looked as Yasmine led her through the dance steps of the seguidilla while Ramahd and Meryam watched. They’d clapped in time and hummed the tune while Yasmine and Rehann whirled and spun, their path curling over the veranda’s red stones.

  When they’d finished, Meryam had clapped, her eyes filled with pride, and said, “That was perfect, little one. You’ll be the envy of them all.” Rehann’s smile had filled him with light for days.

  It had been windy that day, and as Rehann had come to the table to finish her plate of dates and honey, Meryam had scooped her up and set her on her lap. The wind had played with Meryam’s hair. How different the two of them were: the Meryam of old, strikingly pretty, her face elegantly full, and the Meryam of now, so gaunt she looked like the starving beggars of Sharakhai.

  Meryam was still clawing at him, but her strength was flagging. As her eyelids began to flutter, Ramahd snatched his hands back, his chin quivering. By the gods who breathe, what’s happening to me? Why was he always so angry? Why did he blame Meryam for it? None of this was her fault, was it?

  But if not hers, whose fault is it?

  Meryam took in a long, hitched breath, then began coughing heavily, eyes red and watery as she stared at him, shocked as she was pained.

  Ramahd sat back on the bench as the coach bounced along. He looked out to a day so pleasant it begged to be watched. They were passing a farmstead. A man and his son stood from their work and waved to the train. Ramahd waved back, wondering who could be angry on a day such as this.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to Meryam without looking at her. “We’ll reach the capital soon. We’ll have a grand time, and the two of us will forget any small tiffs we had along the way.”

  Meryam said nothing, but Ramahd knew they would.

  Surely they would.

  Four days later, they reached Almadan. The city rose above the green landscape and the nearby forests like some leviathan of the sea. They rode through the vast city, its citizens stepping aside for the train of coaches and horses. When they reached Santrión, Almadan’s stout castle upon its hill, it was not Ramahd’s footman who came to set the stairs in place, but Hamzakiir.
/>   “My lord?” Ramahd said.

  Hamzakiir touched the back of his neck and whispered something into his ear. The moment he did, the world blurred. He was led into the castle proper. Lords and ladies greeted him, men and women who looked so very familiar, and yet he could neither place them nor remember their names. Despite this, he found himself holding conversations with dozens, singly or in groups, as if he were nothing more than a puppet.

  For a day or more this went on. He moved from place to place, eating, talking, even dancing at a formal ball, and all the while he felt as though he were lost in the sort of deep fog that rolled off the sea in spring and swallowed Viaroza for days at a time.

  But it all changed when he was given an audience with Meryam’s father, King Aldouan. Meryam came as well, as did Hamzakiir. They supped in a grand room covered in tapestries. The fire snapped in the broad hearth behind the king, as they were brought roast venison with blueberry sauce, black mushroom caps stuffed with rice, mango, and sweet lobster meat, a squash soup with a currant-pepper spice he’d missed terribly while traveling in the desert. More courses came and went, but at last the king, a thickset man with a dark beard and eyes very much like Meryam’s, bid all the servants to leave the room. The king spoke to Meryam and Ramahd almost exclusively, all but ignoring Hamzakiir. He asked detailed questions about how long they had questioned Hamzakiir, what he had divulged of the Twelve Kings of Sharakhai, and how, in the end, they had broken him.

  What a nonsensical question, Ramahd thought. They hadn’t broken Hamzakiir. They had merely traveled with him to the capital from his estate along the coast. And he’d divulged nothing to Ramahd. Why would he? And yet Meryam answered the king as if Hamzakiir had, telling her father how long it had taken in the dungeon, how she’d worn him down, how she’d used Ramahd to lure Hamzakiir out and chain his mind to hers. “In the end, I broke down his walls, and there was nowhere left for him to hide.”

  “And your hands?” Aldouan asked, clearly concerned over Meryam’s partially healed fingers.

  Meryam hid them in her lap. “It was a stressful time, father.”

  The king’s expression was one of ill-concealed disgust. “Well I daresay it’s over now, Meryam. Get ahold of yourself.”

  “Of course, father,” she replied easily.

  “You’re sure that he’s ours?” Aldouan asked.

  Meryam nodded with the sort of enthusiasm a maid reserves for suitors asking her to dance. “Would you like to see?”

  “I would,” Aldouan replied, his eyes betraying his deep-seated curiosity.

  “Well then,” Meryam said to Hamzakiir. “Come, the king wishes to see a demonstration.”

  Hamzakiir nodded and complied, pushing his chair back to stand beside Meryam.

  “Bow to your king.”

  Hamzakiir bowed low, but he did not drop his gaze, as one should before the king. Instead, he stared at Aldouan with a look of hunger. If Aldouan was concerned, he didn’t show it. But Ramahd was concerned. This wasn’t right. None of it was right. Why was his mind so muddled?

  “Now serve him wine.”

  Hamzakiir rose and strode proudly toward the head of the table, where King Aldouan sat. Feeling an indescribable fear, Ramahd made to rise from his chair. He’d managed to grip the chair’s arms, to push himself off the padded seat, before he found himself sitting silently once more, his body trembling.

  Hamzakiir was his lord. Hamzakiir was his enemy.

  I can’t let this happen. I can’t.

  Hamzakiir retrieved the wine from its silver platter at the serving table behind the king. He filled Aldouan’s half-empty glass. “In truth,” Aldouan said to Meryam while lifting his glass, “I thought we’d be forced to kill him.”

  Hamzakiir set the bottle of wine back on its platter, but instead of returning to his seat, he stepped behind Aldouan’s chair.

  “Don’t!” Ramahd called.

  It was the only word Ramahd managed to utter. Hamzakiir’s eyes were on him, and he was silent once more, watching a scene unfold that was always going to play out in just this way.

  Aldouan set down the wine and turned to see what had so shaken Ramahd, but Hamzakiir’s left hand was already clamping over Aldouan’s mouth while his right snatched the king’s wrist and pressed a thumbnail sharp as a badger’s claw deep into the king’s flesh. Blood poured from the wound. Aldouan tried to use his free hand to scratch Hamzakiir’s face, but Hamzakiir was fiercely strong and it was all too easy for him to maneuver away from the king’s clumsy swipes. Legs flailing for purchase, Aldouan struggled as Hamzakiir held his bleeding wrist over the freshly poured glass of wine. Blood dripped. Aldouan seemed transfixed, so much so that he stopped thrashing for a moment. As understanding dawned on him, however, he struggled all the harder to escape.

  It was Meryam who came and stopped him. She grabbed his free hand and held it tight against the table. “Shhhh. It will all be over soon.”

  A glow of flame formed in the palm of Aldouan’s hand, the one Meryam was holding. He was accomplished in the ways of blood magic, but he was surrounded by two adepts. Meryam leaned down and banished the burgeoning spell with a puff of breath from her pursed lips.

  All this time, Hamzakiir had been watching Ramahd. His mere gaze held Ramahd in place. Fight him, Ramahd called to his King. Deny them, or we are all lost! But nothing Ramahd did would allow him to speak again. He was well and truly trapped in the fetters Hamzakiir had placed on his mind in the dungeon of Viaroza.

  “I must admit, I’m impressed,” Hamzakiir said to Ramahd while holding Aldouan steady. “I doubt there’s been one like you in generations.” At first Ramahd had no idea what he meant by that, but then he thought he understood. His resistance to Hamzakiir’s will. Had there been others like him? It would perhaps explain why Hamzakiir’s commands, this grand ruse he’d sewn within Ramahd’s and Meryam’s minds, had been imperfect at the seams and had never quite taken hold of Ramahd.

  “But now,” Hamzakiir continued, “it’s time we went on.” He released Aldouan’s bloody wrist and snatched up the wineglass while keeping his other hand firmly over Aldouan’s mouth. Aldouan swiped at the glass, managing to bat it once. Wine splashed over the plate of half-finished food and the fine white tablecloth. But Hamzakiir kept his hold on the glass and brought it to his lips. He downed it in three long swallows.

  Aldouan fought all the harder, his muffled screams sending a chill down Ramahd’s spine. The king managed to snatch his arm from Meryam and shove her away. He tried desperately to wrest himself free, wriggling like a fish in the bottom of a boat, but soon his movements grew less frantic, then pathetically weak, until at last he was sitting in his chair, staring along the length of the table, blinking as if he’d just woken from a terrible dream.

  Hamzakiir released him, at which point King Aldouan looked down at the table, at the spilled wine and spilled blood, then ran his hands down his rich clothes as though that would clean it all up. He took up the napkin in his lap and began furiously rubbing the blood from his fingers. “Call for the servants, won’t you?” he said to Meryam. “Have them bring us our dessert.”

  Meryam did, and what followed was surreal. The servants entered with confusion plain on their faces, cleaning the mess as best they could while staring with sidelong glances at the four gathered for dinner, then bringing roasted pears with cinnamon-ginger cream drizzled over the top. The king ignored them all, constantly dipping his napkin into his water glass to clean more of the blood from his skin and clothes. Meryam and Ramahd stared at one another. Ramahd was living the script Hamzakiir had written for him while also watching it play out. He’d become both spectator and actor in the most horrifying play ever written.

  Ramahd could see from Meryam’s expression she felt the same; there was a composed look on her face, but also a sickened gleam in her eyes, a defiant quiver on her lips. All the while, Hamzakiir watched with a le
vel of satisfaction that made Ramahd want to crash his skull in with a mace.

  He had trouble remembering what happened after that. Hamzakiir was much more careful, knowing now that Ramahd had found some way—or had inherited it by dint of blood—to resist the domination of his mind. Even so, it was different than before. Ramahd now recognized who Hamzakiir was: the son of King Külaşan, a blood mage, a man who threatened the King of Qaimir; indeed, a man who threatened the very monarchy. And yet having that knowledge did him no good. The puppet show continued, Hamzakiir feasting in the halls of Almadan, King Aldouan praising him to any and all who came for an audience, Ramahd and Meryam playing along, trapped within their own minds.

  And then came the most troubling realization of all. In one lucid moment, Ramahd heard King Aldouan bidding his chamberlain to make arrangements for travel to the Shangazi Desert. They would travel by land, then take a sandship from Ur’bek and over the amber sea.

  It wasn’t the fact that Hamzakiir would return to the desert—Ramahd had reasoned he would do that eventually—nor was it the fact that Ramahd and Meryam would be joining him. What troubled Ramahd was the fact that for the first time in his life, King Aldouan would be taking to the sands as well.

  Ramahd’s days blurred. His nights became unending pits of terror. He seldom woke from the fugue Hamzakiir had placed on him, but it did him little good. Hamzakiir had become adept at noticing when Ramahd was beginning to wake, and when that happened, he would come, he would whisper in Ramahd’s ear, and the world would return to its dreamlike state.