Garden of Madness (13 page)
“Do not anger the gods, Tiamat. I would have you safe.”
Though his words and his gift were tender and warm, a coldness seeped from the stones beneath Tia’s feet and spread through her limbs. Off balance again, not in control. It was Amel that caused such feelings. Yet what should have angered her left her breathless. The way that the mage controlled—the quiet power he wielded—it was delicious.
He left her suddenly, stalking away toward the altar and his fellow magi, and she stumbled forward, extending a hand as if to pull him back. Tia watched him glide across the Platform and thought of a panther she had once seen during her father’s hunts, all sleek and glittering eyes, powerful and beautiful.
She shook off the image. No time for such thoughts. Her two nephews, both precious little boys with dark curls and wide eyes, could even now be facing danger.
Tia fled Etemenanki, her escorting soldiers’ sandals slapping the streets to keep up, and crossed the city with the night wind tearing at her robes and hair streaming behind. The cool stones of the amulet at her neck did not warm with her skin, a constant reminder of Amel’s protection, the touch of his hands, his words of warning.
Her sisters had married high officials in her father’s court shortly before Tia wed Shealtiel. As though her parents decided to rid themselves of unmarried daughters in one sweep, perhaps with hope that sons would soon be born. Beltis and Banu were two and four years older than she, and for several years after their marriages, they each remained childless, to her mother’s great horror.
Why Beltis and Banu had not been used for treaty, Tia never understood, but even her contribution was hardly the stuff of powerful alliances, with her kingdom-by-marriage little more than a trampled wasteland and her husband’s father in a Babylonian prison.
Instead, her father had chosen to ensure loyalty from the powerful families within his kingdom and gave her sisters to men who had earned favor and accolades on the battlefield before returning home to wealth. Her sister Banu’s husband, Nergal, in fact, was the very general who had led Babylonian troops against Judaea’s final uprising and had laid waste the land and the legendary temple of its One God. They spent most of their time in the palace, though she rarely saw them.
Tia reached the Southern Palace at last, flew up the grand outer stairs, and dismissed her guards in the first courtyard. It took only a few minutes to twist through the halls to the nursery chamber. She slowed at the door and pushed it open silently.
Only one small oil lamp flickered in a wall niche, but across the room one of the boys’ nurses was alert at once, rising from her chair. Tia raised a palm in silent greeting and the nurse nodded.
Tia kept her voice low. “The boys are well?”
The nurse tilted her head, her brow furrowed. “Yes, my lady.”
Tia padded across the room and found Labashi and Puzur curled up in their large bed, their heads close together on the cushions. Moonlight streamed through a high window and traced a path across Labashi’s cheek, and she ran light fingers through his soft curls. She held her breath at a stab of longing. Would she ever have such beautiful children herself?
The nurse drew alongside. “What is it, my lady? Is there danger?”
Perceptive woman. Tia pulled her from the bedside to the wall where the oil lamp played across her features. She was older than both of Tia’s sisters but not aged and had tended the boys since infancy. True concern shone from her eyes. “You must take extra care to be watchful. I—I have heard things that leave me anxious.”
The woman bit her bottom lip and nodded, but clearly she was uncertain of her own abilities.
“I will have a guard attend you for a while. Until we know the boys are safe.”
Her face lightened a bit. “Thank you, my lady.”
Tia squeezed her arm, took a last look at the boys, and escaped the room.
She would get no information about Shadir from Amel. Foolish to think the protégé would speak openly against his mentor. She must return to her starting point, to those who knew Kaldu best and could tell her more of his actions, his plans, even his thoughts.
She would search out Ying, the eastern slave girl who tended the gardens and also apparently tended Kaldu.
Before an hour passed, her search ended in frustration. She roused slaves from their beds, questioned guards and soldiers, and searched the various gardens. Those who knew her all supplied one answer: Ying had disappeared. Vanished.
Runaway slaves were common in Babylon, notwithstanding their branded hands, but to run from the palace brought the harshest punishment. And because palace slaves lived better than most commoners, their flights were infrequent. No, if Ying was gone, she had run in fear or guilt. Tia thought of Kaldu’s mangled body. Perhaps Ying had not run at all.
It had grown too late for more questions, but tomorrow, tomorrow Tia would seek answers in the Hall of Magi.
It is time to speak with Shadir
.
Night came early at this time of year, and the palace halls fell into twilight, the torches not yet lit. Tia flowed silently through the maze of corridors like smoke pouring into open spaces, and the thrill of her secret task set her blood racing, muscles tightening like the challenge of the bull in her training room. She forced the smile from her lips and took a set of steps two at a time to reach the Hall located on the upper levels.
The magi had been entrenched in the palace since before her birth, when the Assyrians were defeated by the joint efforts of Cyaxerxes, king of Media, and her grandfather, Nabopolassar, then governor of Babylon. The two victors hacked apart the mighty Assyrian empire, and Media took the portion from its own land in the east to the Anatolian regions of the west. The remainder of Assyria, along with Babylonia and the coastal region, was united under her grandfather as the new Babylonian empire. Seven years later her father came into power and improved the city into a stunning capital. But behind all the political maneuvering and royal bloodlines, one truth remained: the magi were the king-makers. They wielded an unseen power, consulted on every decision, with the fate of kingdoms swayed by the omens they read in stars, in oil poured upon water, in entrails of sheep.
And this power radiated outward, like spokes of a cart wheel, from the Hall of Magi.
A wide corridor led to the Hall, with three stone columns creating two large arches into an anteroom, then a smaller arch into the Hall. Wide granite steps leading downward were an initiation to even reach the vaulted chamber.
Tia slowed at the inner arch, felt the weight of the room press outward against her, as though it would bar her entrance. A hot wind snatched her hair backward. Strange, given that the only windows in the chamber were cut high in the wall, for star study more than ventilation. She pushed against that wall of pressure, breached it, and stumbled into the lofty, octagonal Hall.
The high windows faced east, dark now at day’s end. A hundred oil lamps flickered along the walls of the cavernous chamber, no more effective than ten, for deep stretches of shadow swallowed the flames, and the heart of the Hall lay in darkness save one lamp that burned on a central table.
Tia wandered forward. Her last visit here had been long before her wedding. No less impressive than it had been to a child’s eyes. White stones glittered against bitumen-tarred walls and ceiling, specks of incandescence on a midnight sky, patterned in the principal divisions of the zodiac. Shelves of clay tablets lined the walls, the ancient wisdom of the Chaldean race inscribed in wedge-shaped Akkadian, never to be forgotten. Heavy woods and heavier tapestries furnished the Hall, greedily absorbing light. And the smell . . . a heady blend of blood and incense, strong enough to coat the tongue.
A musician hunched in the corner, his legs and one scrawny arm wrapped around a bull’s-hide drum, the other hand beating a slow rhythm. Several magi clotted together at a wooden table along the wall, heads bent over a series of old tablets. They lifted eyes to Tia as one, then shifted their gaze to the mage in the center of the Hall, whose back was to her and shoulders still curved over the table. From the heavy purple robe embroidered with gold crescent moons he could have been any of a hundred magi.
Shadir
. She felt it.
He revolved to face her, his whole body moving as one rather than a glance over his shoulder. There seemed something unnatural in this, as though she was expected. The cold stars along the wall seemed to spark along the edge of her vision.
“Princess.” His eyes on her were obsidian-black, empty as the vast night desert. The drum beat continued, slow and relentless.
Tia lifted her chin and strode forward. Shadir stepped back slightly at her approach.
Good. Let him be uneasy
. “Greetings, Shadir. I trust you are well.”
Tia had not spoken to the mage for many days, since the night Shealtiel had died and Kaldu had been killed, when Shadir had seen her return from her run.
He bowed, too low. Almost mocking. “And you, my lady. We are honored by your visit. You seek an omen, perhaps?” He lowered his chin, raised his eyebrows—a firestorm of expression for him, who seemed barely alive. “Matters of the heart?”
Tia hardened her gaze. She would not be baited. “I have more weighty subjects on my mind, Shadir. My recent change in status has pricked me to take more interest in the affairs of city and empire. My studies of language and mathematics rarely touch upon such things. I thought you would be the one to seek for enlightenment.”
His eyes narrowed. Her flattery had not pierced his suspicion. Tia stepped to one side, to approach the table behind him, and Shadir shifted to block her, the same movement as when she entered. So. He had not been made uneasy by her approach. He was hiding something. Quickly, she circled the table and then studied its accoutrements.
It held the usual instruments of his dark practice. A wide and shallow clay bowl, teeming with entrails. Despite her usual lack of squeamishness, Tia’s stomach knotted. Next to the entrails, sharp picks for prying secrets from the liver and terra-cotta liver models to consult for matching alterations in shape or color. The sharp smell of death hovered above the table. Shadir could be seeking answers for anything here, from auspicious weather for a hunt to the fall of a rival empire. Nothing to hide.
But when Tia lifted her eyes to his, a darkness poured over her.
More here than simple divination
. She sucked in a shaky breath and held it in her chest, feeling the need to expand further, as though Shadir’s gaze tightened cords about her body. Too familiar, this oppression. A vision leaped before her mind’s eye, blurry and indistinct. White, bulging eyes. Tearing flesh. A mouth open in a silent death-shriek. Her breath shallowed and she shot a steadying hand to the rough surface of the table. The drumbeat in the corner seemed to quicken in time with her breathing.
The vision cleared. Had she been given an omen? A portent of evil to come or a glimpse of deeds already accomplished?
Shadir blinked slowly, his long lashes sweeping against his skin like the brush of spiders. Why had she noticed such a thing?
“How can I enlighten you, my lady? Certainly your tutors can give you all the history you desire.”
Tia swallowed and fingered the white stones of the amulet at her neck. Shadir’s gaze followed her movement and she pulled her hand away. Did he recognize Amel’s gift?
“It is not the past that interests me as much as the future.” The unseen cords still bound her, and she pushed away from the table and crossed to the windowed wall, using her mention of the future as an excuse to study the sky.
Shadir’s sandals scuffed across the room behind her. He drew alongside, face lifted to the window. Grand as it was, the dome seemed only an extension of the Hall, as though the magi had created here a portal into the realm of the gods.
“It seems to me your mother has declared your future for you.”
“The future of the
kingdom
, Shadir.”
“Ah. I see.”
Would that she could use one of those sharp instruments on Shadir’s table to scrape knowledge from
him
!
“My father is getting older. And he has been—unwell—for some time. It is the duty of even a daughter to think about the security of the throne.” She turned from the stars and studied his profile. “Whom do you think will next sit upon it?”
Shadir’s features were like glazed enamel and he spoke to the sky. “The people love your father. Love what he has brought to them. Your family holds tightly to the divine power. Despite . . .”
Despite the madness of which we never speak
.
“And my nephews? Are they in danger?”
Shadir retreated to his table, fingered his instruments. Tia remained near the wall. A safe distance. The cursed musician did not cease his drumming.
“If the princess desires, I shall seek an answer from the gods.”
Tia glanced at the entrails, but he shook his head. “This hepatoscopy is already dedicated. Another time, perhaps.”
