Of Sand and Malice Made (19 page)

“I've come because I
don't
know. The story doesn't say. I need to know how to perform the ritual.”

“The story speaks of a gem.”

Çeda reached into her shirt and pulled out a cloth bundle. She unrolled it and caught the sapphire in her hand. Even in the dim light of the lantern it was brilliant.

Ibrahim tried not to show his surprise, but his eyes
widened, his jaw worked. He swallowed, one hand reaching out for it, suddenly shaking, whereas before, while he'd been reading, they'd been steady as stone. “You said it was large”—his fingers stopped just above it, then his hand withdrew—“but truly I had no idea gems could be like this, so flawless.”

He stared at it a while, but Çeda was growing anxious. “Well?”

It seemed to take a great amount of effort for him to drag his eyes off the jewel and regard her once more. “You want the ritual.”

“Yes.”

After one last look at the gem, Ibrahim sighed, as if with that breath he'd given up the hope of owning something so fine. “What the tales say of the ehrekh, how they hide the souls of man in such jewels . . . This story makes me think those might indeed be the same ritual. When Tulathan is brightest, one burns blood. Only the blood of man will do, as much as will fit in the palms of both hands. Burn it in a censer with the gem hanging above it. The smoke will coat the gem. When it's done, you will polish the largest surface with the wool of a newborn lamb. Show that surface to the ehrekh and it will be drawn into it.”

She wrapped the gem up and stuffed it back inside her shirt. “That's all?”

“The stories I've heard and read are the same in this respect. Some others have the ritual performed deep in the desert. Others say it can only be done when the Haddah is flowing. Others still call for the gem to be buried in the sand for twelve days before the ritual begins. But they're all embellishments, I suspect. So, yes, if you mean to go through with it, that would be all.”

“Tulathan will be full tomorrow night.”

Ibrahim nodded, his eyes wary, worried.

Despite Ibrahim's fears, relief of a sort flooded through her, and with it came a deep and contented lethargy. Still, she was not safe. A river raged around her, threatening to carry her away, but she had reached a rock she could cling to for a time.

“Ibrahim, might I sleep here awhile?” She couldn't go home. She'd promised herself she would bring the stone nowhere near Emre until this was all done.

Ibrahim's forbidding expression told her all she needed to know. She was ready to leave his home and find a place in the streets to rest for a time when a voice called from the next room. “Of course you can.”

Ibrahim's wife, wearing an ivory nightdress, her long gray hair unbound and flowing down past her knees, smiled at Çeda while squinting from the light of the lantern. “Come now, dear. You can sleep in my bed.”

“I don't want to—”

“Shush, now. I'll have none of that.” She waved Çeda to follow her. “I need to be up anyway. Ibrahim leaves early for his treks, don't you, my dearest love?” As Çeda followed her down the narrow hallway, she turned and whispered, “Can't stand the brightness of my sun.”

“Can't stand the heat of your anger!” Ibrahim called from the other room.

To this she only smiled, ushering Çeda into her bedroom and the bed that lay within. By the gods, it was still warm. It cradled her like a mother would a newborn child. Exhausted, clutching the gemstone beneath her shirt, Çeda fell plummeting into sleep.

Çeda stood at the edge of a well. Since Ibrahim's, the day had risen and fled with the coming of night. Somewhere in the distance, an oud played over the Shallows, low and mournful.

She wore her black fighting dress. It was loose and easy to fight in while still protecting through the boiled leather strips sewn into it. She wore a black turban, the veil drawn across her face. Her shamshir hung loose by her side, a dear companion who'd rarely failed her. Wrapped in a cloth, secreted away inside a leather pouch at her belt was the sapphire, prepared as Ibrahim had said. The smell of the burning blood still lingered. She'd
used her own, and truth to tell she was still a bit lightheaded from letting so much of it, but she would take no other for such a ritual—Ibrahim hadn't mentioned one way or another, yet it felt not only important but paramount that it be her own.

Seven avenues met in a drunken rush here at the well, the center of a twisting, misshapen web of streets known as Yerinde's Snare. It was the most populous district in the entire city. The tall tenement buildings loomed, standing five, six, even seven stories high. Each of their low floors was subdivided into the simplest of dwellings—one-room homes that housed seven or eight each. Those who lived there slept cheek to jowl or in alternating shifts.

Çeda lifted her hand and unfurled the fist she'd held for the past half-hour. A gold coin glinted in the palm of her hand, lustrous beneath the gauze of the heavens, as if it knew how very potent this night was, as if it knew the part it was about to play. She'd held its sister not so long ago. She felt that same desperation, the seductive draw toward Rümayesh, but this night she was buoyed by seething anger over the threat Rümayesh had made on Emre's life and a sense that by the time the sun kissed the eastern horizon this chapter of her life will have been completed one way or another. With a glance up toward bright Tulathan and her gentler sister, Rhia, Çeda
whispered a prayer to each of the goddesses, then dropped the golden rahl into the well. It glinted downward. She heard its distant entry into the water.

Immediately she felt something tug inside her, like the feeling of worry one gets when the truest of friends is in danger. She swallowed, turning from darkened street to darkened street, her hand on the hilt of her shamshir. Rümayesh had said she'd arrive by the time the ripples ceased, so Çeda knew if it worked at all it wouldn't be long.

There.

In the darkness.

A form walked down the street from the southeast. She'd guessed Rümayesh would come along one of the eastern avenues, but she hadn't known for certain, so she'd had Osman set traps on all of them. Thank the gods, though, they'd decided to station more along the eastern avenues.

Çeda saw them along the roof of one of the tenements, dark forms moving carefully. Something dropped toward the approaching form. Çeda closed her eyes just before she heard a soft thump. Then, as if a star had been born right here in the rough and tumble streets of the Shallows, a flash lit the night.

Brama reeled away, shouting in surprise. Shadowed
forms closed in. One clouted Brama over the head and he went limp. As simple as that. Like the snap of a finger.

“Breath of the desert, thank you, Osman,” Çeda whispered.

After waking at Ibrahim's, she'd gone to Osman's estate and explained what she wanted him to do. Afterward, she'd handed him a leather pouch containing what little she'd managed to save after spending so much on Adzin and his ifin.

Osman had tossed the pouch into the air, weighing it. “What's this?”

“For your help. To pay for a crew. It's grim work, and those who come will need to be flame-hearted, no doubt.”

“Grim,” he'd said, tossing the pouch back to her. “Yes, I believe it will be. I know some who enjoy such work, and they'll do it gladly, but to offer coin would be an insult, for they loved Sim and Verda, even more than I, and they've come to understand the truth of what happened.”

She'd been ready to argue, but Osman had talked over her, asking more pointed questions of what she had planned. She'd answered, silently grateful not only for his help, but for feeling as though she wasn't alone. Together they'd set up their trap. It had worked perfectly, and yet for all the simplicity of the act, Çeda knew their time was already growing short. Rümayesh would know
something had happened. The question was what her response might be, and when it would come. Their fervent hope was that she would remain in Brama's form, that she might be incapacitated as he was for a time. But if Brama remained unconscious for too long, she might awaken and come to investigate herself, and that was something that would bode ill for all of them.

Several men picked up Brama's limp form and carried him down an alley. Çeda followed, twisting this way and that through tight spaces, until finally they reached a cellar. A waiting lantern was struck, and by its light Çeda could see Osman pulling the veil of a black turban from his face. Tariq pulled his off as well. Two others had come also, each wearing similar, threadbare thawbs and turbans. One held a kenshar with both hands, ready to drive it down should Rümayesh awaken. He was clearly nervous, though, for none of them knew if a blade would do any good at all against her. It might drive her from Brama's body prematurely, but that was the last thing she wanted.

“His feet,” Çeda said quickly. “I need to see the soles of his feet.”

Tariq pulled off his supple leather boots and his socks. Çeda looked there, expecting to find a tattoo, one that was meant to tell Kadir where the obsidian stone that kept Rümayesh's name could be found, but there was nothing there.

She waved to Brama's unconscious form. “The rest of his clothes. Take them off.”

Osman's men complied, and Çeda looked over the rest of his body.
Gods, there's no tattoo.
“It must be here,” she muttered.

She checked everywhere. His armpits, between his fingers and toes, the insides of his thighs, beneath his scrotum. She even checked the insides of his lips. But there was nothing. Perhaps Rümayesh had feared Çeda's knowledge of the tattoo and had changed her routine accordingly.

Brama's breathing hitched. He didn't awaken, but his head lolled to one side, exposing more scars along his ear and the side of his head. Some of the scars trailed up along his head, lost beyond his hairline.

His hairline . . .

“Turn him over. Quickly.”

Osman and his men complied, and soon Brama was face-down on the dirty work table. Çeda ran her fingers through his hair, parting a section at a time. And there she found it, tattooed words, the hair having grown over it in time. Çeda pulled her kenshar, a weapon she kept wickedly sharp, and cut away Brama's hair in hastily sheared hunks. Slowly, the tattoo was revealed in its entirety:
In the temple of the forgotten lies a luscious bed of blue.

“Nalamae's temple,” she whispered.

“What?” Osman asked.

“Nothing.” She nodded toward the men, indicating all of them but Osman. “Now, as we agreed.”

“Leave us,” Osman said, and the men left, but not before Tariq sent Çeda a look of hurt, betrayal. Well, he could brood all he wanted. She wasn't about to do this in front of him.

When they'd left, she pulled a locket from inside her black fighting dress. She pried open the locket's two halves and from within pulled out a pair of dried petals. She'd taken two petals simultaneously only one time before, after Hidi and Makuo had affixed them to one of the irindai moths. They'd helped her to fight off the moths' hypnotic effects and the will of Rümayesh. She prayed they would do so again.

After a kiss to Brama's forehead, she backed away toward the door. “I have to go, Osman.”

“Not without us.”

“No.” She pointed to Brama, who was stirring more now. “As we agreed. Wait only long enough for me to get a head start, then leave this place. With luck, we'll all be far away by the time he awakens.”

“And let him just walk away? He's not Brama, Çeda. Not anymore.”

“I'm not going to abandon him, and I can't chance
that Rümayesh won't come for me in her true form. If she does, I suspect we're all going to die. You, me, Emre, Tariq. All of us.”

Osman looked ready to order her to stay, to let
him
go to the temple, but he knew this was Çeda's fight, and that further involvement might be counterproductive to her chances of succeeding, so he simply nodded. “It will be as you say.”

She returned the nod, and then she was off, into the night.