Empire of Dust (22 page)

Instead, he thrusts her from him with both arms. Though she always thought she had no memories of her mother before she left Sardis for Bactria, Zo has a sudden, soul-wrenching memory: the beautiful Attoosheh rudely pushing her away to climb into the litter that would take her three thousand miles east to become queen.

Now this rejection, this abandonment, this sudden loss of love and possibility.

She drinks in the angle of his jaw, the flare of his nostrils, the amazing honey-gold color of his eyes blazing with a dangerous intensity.

“Go!” he says.

She doesn't move, can't move. Her heart has gone to stone.

He swings gracefully onto the horse, a single fluid motion that reminds her of a haunting poem in flesh and muscle. He kicks his mount and tears across the field, golden-brown hair streaming behind him, an ever-diminishing figure, until he is a smudge on the horizon.

And then, he is gone. And she is alone.

Chapter Twenty-One

BREATHING IN THE
fragrant scents of his private garden, Darius admires the thick foliage and vibrant blossoms. The riot of color and wild vines are contained on all sides by the rooms of his palace apartments. This garden—the Garden of Life and Death—is for him alone.

Life is all around him in the thick, rich foliage, the splashing of his two pet crows in the small fountain intricately carved with snarling monsters of the underworld, and the buzzing of bees hovering over brightly colored flowers.

But Death lurks, too.

He strokes the spade-shaped leaves and purple bell-shaped flowers of the deadly nightshade bush. Two to five berries—or a single leaf—will take down a warrior.

Squatting, he examines his rhododendron bushes, only two handsbreadths high. Their yellow petals like crooked fingers are gone now, having bloomed earlier in the summer. But bees from his hives in the corner of the garden continue making honey from the nectar and pollen—delicious honey that in small quantities intoxicates and, in large ones, kills.

The hellebore flowers—white and roselike—will not bud until early spring, but Darius is not interested in the blooms. When crushed, the plant's seedpods can burn through a man's clothing and blister his skin. Ingested, they swell the throat closed, blocking off air completely. He carefully pinches the seedpod between finger and thumb. They are ready to be harvested and brought back to his workshop.

Holding the place of honor in his garden is his masterpiece, the rose he has spent years cultivating. It's the palest pink—almost white. And in the center, two red veins cross, creating a vibrant, bloodred X. The Assassin's Bloom, he has named it.

He strokes the velvety petals with a lover's caress before snapping off a withered bloom.

He senses the presence of someone nearby, a new energy coming into the garden on silent feet. There's a shift, a disturbance in the usual feeling of the place, like waking up in the dark and knowing for a certainty that someone is in the room. Bending over his roses, he quiets his thoughts to examine the feel of the visitor, almost like handling an object while blindfolded. Male, though perhaps not entirely. Vicious beneath a polished veneer of refined elegance.

“Yes, Rostam?” He turns and sees the surprise in the younger man's heavily lined eyes. Rostam is still new and unused to his master's skills.

Rostam recovers, though his dark eyes remain wide. “It is done, sir.”

Darius turns back to his Assassin's Blooms, humming a little tune a bard played at last night's banquet. He sees a jewel beetle on the underside of the leaf, named for its shiny shell of gold, green, and red. He picks it up. It's as innocent as a Persian princess...or three. As dazzling as the jewels he sent them off with, to wear for a prince they would never see.

With a swift movement, he crushes the beetle between his thumb and index finger before its spangled wings can even flicker.

With a true smile now on his face, Darius turns back to Rostam.

“Good.”

ACT FOUR:
THE CURSED

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

—Socrates

Chapter Twenty-Two

WHEN KAT SLIPS
on the crumbling stairs carved into the bluff, rocks tumble down the hundred-foot drop. Her sword bangs into the cliff wall—why didn't she wear it on her back, by all the gods? And she grabs a jutting rock with her injured hand—preventing herself from falling, but causing her finger to ache more than ever.

Worst of all, Heph twists around and looks down at her, eyes wide in alarm, as if she's a helpless girl about to fall off the cliff.

“Are you all right?” he asks, coming back down a couple steps toward her.

Everything's fine except her dignity. “Yes,” she says casually, trying to smile despite the throbbing in her finger. She looks behind her.

They are at the narrowest part of the Nile, with cliffs rising high on both sides, and eddies and whirlpools swirling in the dark waters below. Already, she can see that the
Hathor'
s crew has removed the sail and stowed the mast. The four crewmen plunge their long oars into the sand, and the boat turns as slowly as an old grandmother. But as Kat watches, the currents take control of the vessel, and it is as though the waters have given the
Hathor
new life. In moments, the ship has skimmed the Nile toward Memphis, then rounded the bend and disappeared. She suddenly feels very small and alone.

Heph, too, has paused to look at the disappearing boat. “How will we get back?” she asks.

He wipes sweat from his forehead, but it's the only sign of exertion. She's constantly surprised at how clean his tunic is, how the curls of his tousled dark ringlets fall beautifully without benefit of a comb, while she's a bedraggled mess no matter how many times she rinses out her clothes and tidies her hair.

“Beg or buy a ride, I suppose,” he says, his gaze lingering on the foam-flecked river. “There will be plenty of pilgrims coming back from the temples of Luxor and Karnak. Come on—we're almost there.”

Palms and acacias, the branches hovering horizontally like clouds, greet them at the top of the cliff. Out of the narrow gully, the wind is free to whip through her hair, and she welcomes its light touch on her hot face. She hears quiet laughter and turns to see Heph watching her, amusement in his eyes.

She hastily grabs her wayward hair and braids it down over her shoulder. “What?”

“It's nothing.” He shifts his pack to pull out a thin leather cord. “It's only—well, when I see your hair like that, I can't help but think of the fields of ripe grain outside Pella this time of year. All golden brown and wild, swaying in the breeze, just begging you to run your fingers through it.” He blushes at the last statement, and Kat knows he wonders if he's gone too far.

She tilts her head quizzically, not about to let him have his compliment. She won't accept flattery from a man who so recently allowed Cynane to get him drunk and...whatever else happened between them just before her brazen attempt to kill Kat. “So you're saying my hair looks like plants. Like food,” she says flippantly.

“No,” he says, his eyes widening. He exhales sharply. “That was supposed to be a compliment. I guess it fell flat.”

She suppresses a smile, though her mouth twitches a bit to the left. “I suppose it did. What if I said your hair reminded me of...of lentil stew?”

She expects him to come back with a quick retort, but instead he frowns. “That's not what I meant.” He is suddenly serious, and for a second, Kat thinks she sees the man he will become. A man of deep thought and resting laugh lines. “I only mean that your hair is the same beautiful, waving amber in some lights.”

Kat's cheeks warm again, and this time it has nothing to do with the climb. Heph hands her the leather cord, and she ties it around the braid's end.

“Come on,” she says, “if we move quickly, we can reach the city before the sun is too high.” She walks past him, and she feels him follow close behind.

It's cool here, an oasis of silence after the heat of the climb with the roar of the river below. They walk beneath a canopy of trees, patches of sunlight falling as if through fretted screens. Kat listens for birds. With so many trees, there should be at least a dozen different songs trilling the air. But there isn't even one. No creatures dart out of their path to plunge into piles of leaves. There are no buzzing cicadas. No lazy fat flies. Not only does she not hear anything, she doesn't
feel
anything. She looks right and left, suddenly desperate to find something alive.

There is nothing. No life.

She stops so suddenly Heph almost bumps into her. They have emerged from the trees into a field and in the distance, gold-tipped cupolas and spires rise above gleaming white walls like the points of a crown. Between two high rectangular towers, a golden gate winks in the sun.

“Sharuna,” Heph says. His shoulders relax but Kat is suddenly nervous. There's something not right here.

“Heph,” she says slowly, searching for the words to make him understand. “I have a...a bad feeling.”

“A
bad feeling
? We've made it this far and you have a
bad feeling
now? Perhaps it's just the exhaustion of the journey.”

“I'm
not
tired,” she says, though it's not quite true. “There's something else. Or rather,
not
something else. Doesn't the forest seem eerily quiet to you? Empty? I haven't seen a single bird or—”

Heph makes a little
tsk
-ing sound and points heavenward. “Kat, there's an eagle.” She looks up and spots it, a white body with dark brown wings, tilting and soaring on air currents.

“But there's nothing down here,” she insists, unable to shake the suspicions itching her skin like insects.

Heph shrugs.

“Remember what the captain said?” she persists. “As soon as he let us off, he left because everyone says this place is haunted.”

“Oh, for the sake of almighty Zeus, Kat,” Heph says, rolling his eyes. “You believe that old man's ghost stories? Besides, what choice do we have? We've come this far, battled pirates, survived a storm and Cyn trying to kill you, and you want to turn back around? Without helping Alex?”

He's right, of course. But still... Every hair on her body seems to stand on end. Every part of her being screams to leave.
Now.
She looks back up at the eagle.

She's never tried to use her powers to reach out to an animal so far away. Gripping her lotus necklace in her palm, Kat closes her eyes. Taking note of her breath, she begins to count the beats of her heart. They are slow, steady...but if she were to fly, it would need to be beating fast.

She would need to feel life coursing through her veins as she stretches her wings, feathers gently pricking the hidden skin beneath as the currents push her along.

Her stomach would be empty, light after hours of hunting. The need for a warm liver and soft entrails drives her forward, and the eagle opens its eyes.

The world is color and motion. With its wings held straight, the bird swivels its head, searching for the tremble on the ground that means food. A strong draft pushes down on its wings, and it shifts its tail, tilting slightly until the wind moves under. The eagle soars through the vast empty
up
, looking at the solid, crowded
down
.

Another gust throws dust into the air, but the eagle only blinks clear eyelids and continues to hunt. It never stops searching. And yet—even though the eagle can usually spot dark specks crawling on individual leaves or the slightest bend in the bush that indicates life, there is nothing for it to spot now.

Frustrated, the eagle cries out—not in anger, because an eagle does not understand what it means to be angry—but in exhaustion. It will have to fly farther, search longer.

The eagle knows that if it keeps flying away, back toward the great rushing
wet
, it will find food. But something makes it want to turn back to the place of small mounds and stone trees, even though it doesn't like going that way. No matter how much the eagle strains, it's as though some invisible force pushes it toward the walls.

The eagle banks hard in the sky and turns, changing its course to the two-leggers' nests.

As the eagle flies, its eyes still sweep the ground, but this time it is searching for something other than blood and breath. Well, not
only
blood and breath. The primal needs remain, but a new,
human
want
smothers them all. It's a want to explore and understand.

As the eagle circles the stone trees, it looks down on small square valleys filled with tiny springs and colorful rocks with the patterns of butterflies' wings.

Courtyards.
The word pops into the bird's mind, unbidden.
Fountains.
Murals
.

As the bird looks below, knowing washes over it.

Not
stone trees,
but
towers.

Suddenly, names come to everything: large squares and fountains, marketplace, temple, courtyard houses. And in the center of the city a royal palace, surrounded by high walls.

The eagle doesn't like to be inside the walls but still it remains, dipping toward a sparkling pool among carefully cultivated flowers.

A moment later, the bird spots movement: the movement of a two-legger—no,
woman
—lying next to a long lake in the center of the main courtyard. Gleaming golden-brown in the sun, she lies naked, looking plucked, soft and easy to tear into, though the long black hair would be difficult for a beak. The eagle is uninterested. This woman is not a meal for her. The bird will need to keep seeking.

But as the eagle circles the city, the woman is the only source of movement. There is not the slightest stir in any of the buildings. There are no four-leggers—donkeys or horses or cats or dogs.

And now the eagle senses something else in the air, something it knows all too well: a low throbbing ache of... Words come into its mind:
Loss. Loneliness. Sadness
. When it left its nest of hatchlings for food, it returned to find an owl devouring them. The eagle was forced to live on. Alone. Always with the feeling of emptiness, a kind of hunger that no amount of soft flesh and bleeding livers can assuage.

The eagle screams.

It's falling.

And with the bird, the girl Katerina falls, too, lending her voice to the eagle's cry. She's too aware of herself—of human fingers trapped in talons, and human thoughts overcoming eagle instinct. Kat/eagle has forgotten how to fly. She needs to get
out
.

But she's stuck. She doesn't remember what it means to be a human girl. They're going to hit—

“Kat!”

A shout shatters her concentration, and Kat finds herself in the dirt. She has not fallen hundreds of feet, only collapsed onto the ground, wholly human.

“Katerina!” Heph's voice is loud and angry. It makes her head hurt. “Kat! What
happened
?”

She opens her eyes and they slowly focus on something silver and shiny on the red earth just beyond her nose. She rolls over on her back, exhaustion claiming every corner of her being.

“I—the eagle,” she croaks out, her tongue thick and clumsy in her mouth. Did the eagle make it? She tilts her head back, and though nausea rises, she's able to see a black speck soar into the sky. The golden eagle recovers its height and flies north, away from her and the silent city. She doesn't blame it.

Suddenly, Kat feels water coursing down her face. She blinks. Heph has poured water from her goatskin onto his hands, and he's gently rubbing the refreshing liquid over her face, tracing her cheekbones with his thumb, and wiping away the grime from her fall.

His eyes meet hers, and she's pulled in by their rich, warm depths. They are the only things that seem to have color after leaving behind the extraordinary eyesight of the eagle.

After a moment, she whispers, “Thank you,” and pushes herself up to a seated position. Across the field, the golden city of Sharuna shimmers in the heat.

“Kat,” Heph says again, stroking her hair before suddenly pulling his hand away. “What happened? Are you all right? One moment you were standing, and then the next, you were falling. Your eyes were open but you weren't
here
.”

“I'm all right,” she says. “All is well.”

What she doesn't say is that she needs more training on how to use her magic. Ada of Caria had warned her that without the proper knowledge, she could get trapped in an animal's body and die with the creature. Then her human body, without a spirit, would also die.

She instinctively grips Helen's silver six-petaled Flower of Life pendant and brings it to her nose. Ada taught her to rub lotus oil on the pendant and inhale it deeply when her Snake Blood experiences raced out of control. Now she inhales the rich, exultant smell, a kind of intoxicating wine for the nose that lifts her out of herself immediately to a place of perfect peace.

By the grace of Tyche, goddess of fortune, she collapsed in such a way that the pendant fell near her nose. Though it has been many days since Kat was able to apply lotus oil to the amulet, the fragrance is still there.

But what about next time? She has no more oil to replenish the scent, and she might not have Heph shouting her name, anchoring Kat to her human body.

“Where were you?” he asks again.

She shakes her head. “I got a bird's-eye view of the city. And Heph—it's beautiful.”

The images that had been so confusing to her as bird come back to her. Buildings with thick columns, each crowned with a capital in the shape of a lotus flower or a god's head. Everything painted with magical signs and the figures of people and gods in red and blue, green and yellow.

It was so beautiful...and so horrible.

“There's something wrong with the city,” she says, gazing at its walls.