Of Sand and Malice Made (6 page)

“Luh-leave that alone!”

“Calm yourself, girl.” He pried it open, revealing the two petals Çeda had placed inside. She'd normally have nothing inside, or perhaps one if she was expecting trouble, but she'd started carrying two for the fear that was constantly running through her.

Makuo took them, then whistled two sharp notes. A flurry of cressetwings descended from the ceiling, one of them alighting on Makuo's outstretched finger, the rest continuing to fly around and above his head. With care, Makuo set the two petals onto the wings of the moth. The petals remained there, as if they'd been a part of the moth from the moment it struggled free of its chrysalis. Makuo whistled again, and the moth on his finger flew to rejoin the swarm.

Bit by bit, they retook their positions, but in doing so Çeda completely lost the one with the petals. She searched frantically, but couldn't find it. “Where is it?”

At this the boys smiled and spoke in unison, “And what fun we going have if we be giving you that?” They glanced to the archway, and Hidi began backing away. Moths flew toward him, landing on him, layering his form as if consuming him. “You got to play the
game
, girl,” Hidi said as he was swallowed whole.

“Look to the flames.” Makuo touched his hand to Çeda's cheek, then he too began backing away, following his brother. “Look to the flames and you'll find it sure.”

Soon both of them had been consumed by the irindai, and all was still. She could hear her own heartbeat, so complete was the silence.

She looked among the irindai, from one to the next to the next, trying to find the one with the petals, but it was so bloody dim she couldn't tell if one merely had a brighter mark of flame than usual or if it was indeed the one she needed.

While she searched, she worked her muscles—her legs, her arms, her neck, her torso. She thought the pain would ebb, but it only seemed to grow worse the more she moved. Gritting her teeth, she managed to bend her limbs, to regain some sense of normal movement, even if
it was slow, even if it felt as though her muscles were made of bright, molten metal.

Just when she was ready to sit up, she heard the door opening, and this time many sets of footsteps approached. Kadir came first, but others followed, men and women dressed in white thawbs or full-length kaftans, and with them came the reek of the sort of tabbaq that would make one high. Some wore niqabs or veiled turbans to hide their faces, but most were unadorned, and came holding flutes of golden wine or stubby glasses filled with araq. Others held nothing at all, preferring to cross their arms or hold them behind their backs as they stared at the irindai or Rümayesh or Çeda.

In her desperation, Çeda tried to lift herself from the cold slab upon which she lay, but before she could do more than curl her head and shoulders up off the slab, Kadir came rushing to her side and pressed her back down. Those gathered watched with jackal eyes, hyena grins, as Kadir leaned in. “Stay where you are until spoken to,” he whispered, “and perhaps you'll leave this place whole.” Unlike Rümayesh, who was soft velvet, a knife in the dark, Kadir was a cold, bloody hammer, every bit as blunt and every bit as deadly.

She grit her teeth and stared up, not wanting to give Kadir the satisfaction of seeing the fear in her eyes, and that was when she noticed it. Makuo's irindai, slowly
fanning its wings almost directly overhead. How could she have missed it earlier? And now that she
had
seen it, it was like a bloody great beacon. A fire on the horizon.

With care, praying Kadir wouldn't notice, she averted her gaze, lay still, and tried to quell her rapid breathing. Kadir did glance up, momentary confusion contorting his features. Eventually he retreated to one corner of the room, and relief flooded through Çeda.

From a pedestal Kadir picked up a heavy bronze cymbal and a leather-wrapped rod made from the same metal. He ran the rod around the cymbal's edge, creating a strangely hypnotic sound. The irindai responded immediately, their wings moving at a slower pace in time to the rhythm of the cymbal.

“The preliminaries are over,” Rümayesh said. “I trust you'll enjoy what I've found for you, a rare little bird indeed. A Sharakhani through and through, with mystery upon mystery we can unravel together. Please”—she motioned around her to the walls, to the low ceiling—“choose, and our young maid will follow.”

Those gathered began walking about the room, looking up to the ceiling, plucking a single moth from the writhing mass. Çeda tried as well as she could not to stare at the moth with the adichara petals, but she was so worried that someone would take it that she found her eyes flicking there every so often. One of the women noticed.
Eyes glazed, she stared up at the ceiling where Çeda's gaze had wandered. Her hand wavered near Çeda's cressetwing, but the gods must have been watching over Çeda, for the woman chose another less than a hand's-breadth away.

One by one, those gathered opened their mouths and placed the moth within, taking great care to prevent harm to the delicate wings. Without exception, their eyes flickered closed as soon as the irindai was taken within them. Their eyelids opened and closed like the wings of the irindai, then they stood still, watching Çeda or Rümayesh or one another in a half-lidded daze.

Rümayesh strode to Çeda's side.

“Choose,” was all she said.

Çeda stared defiantly, as if she were conflicted, as if she might very well do something desperate at any moment. She would take the cressetwing the boys meant for her but, when she did so, she wanted Rümayesh's eyes on
her
and nowhere else. With care, Çeda stood. She felt strangely alone with Rümayesh, even with so many of those gathered staring dazedly at the two of them. With as much speed as she could manage, she grabbed the cressetwing with the petals and stuffed it into her mouth.

She had planned to chew it immediately, to devour it, but the moment the moth's delicate wings touched her tongue, a euphoric rush welled up from somewhere deep
inside. It brought with it an endless flow of thoughts and memories, their combined fabric flickering like the surface of a sun-dappled river.

Her mother raising her wooden shinai in the air, waiting for Çeda to do the same.

Running through the dusty streets of Sharakhai with Emre, each with a mound of stolen pistachios cradled in their arms, shells dripping like rain as they sprint along.

Peeking through the parted blankets of a stall in the spice market late at night as Havasham, the handsome son of Athel the carpetmonger, thrusts himself over and over between the legs of Lina, a girl three years Çeda's elder who is not beautiful but has a way of talking with the boys with that sharp tongue of hers that makes them want her.

Çeda felt her consciousness attempt to expand, to encompass all of who she was, all she'd experienced. She wondered, even as her own awareness threatened to consume her, whether everyone experienced this same thing or if it was to do with the petals. She could feel it now—the verve the petals granted her, the strength, the awareness.

Through the irindai she could feel others' minds as well: those closest, their eagerness to feel more from Çeda; those beyond, who had done this many times before but because of that hungered to experience it again; and Rümayesh, who was someone different altogether.

Where Rümayesh stood, there were two, not one.

Two minds, sharing the same body. One, a lady of Sharakhai, highborn, a woman who'd lived in her estate in Goldenhill her entire life.

And the other—

A chill rushed down Çeda's frame as more memories tumbled past.

Cutting her first purse, the exhilaration as she ran down the Trough, the lanky man chasing after her.

Swimming naked in the Haddah in spring with Emre and Tariq and Hamid, feeling the small fishes nip at her ankles and toes.

She drew herself in, ignoring the rush of her life, focusing instead on the second soul inside the woman who stood before her. It was something Çeda had never seen or experienced before. How could she have? Its mind was deep, foreign, and by the gods
old
—not in the way Ibrahim the storyteller was old, nor even in the way the Kings of Sharakhai, who'd seen the passage of four centuries, were old, but in the way the city was old. In the way the desert was old.

This was no human, but some creature of the desert, some vestige of the desert's making, or one of the ehrekh that haunted the forgotten corners of the Great Shangazi.

Çeda knew immediately that few others had ever felt this being's presence, for it now awoke from a slumber of
sorts. It grew fearful, if only for the span of a heartbeat, and in the wake of that realization, Rümayesh—or the woman Çeda had
thought
was Rümayesh—strode forward and placed her hand around Çeda's neck, gripping it tightly enough to limit Çeda's breath. She leaned down and stared into Çeda's eyes, imposing her will, sifting through Çeda's memories.

Çeda couldn't allow this.

She couldn't allow Rümayesh to have her way, for if she did, she would be forever lost.

This was the gift of the adichara petals that Hidi and Makuo had granted her—the ability to remain above the effects of the irindai, at least to some small degree.

But what to do about Rümayesh?

As more memories were examined, then tossed aside like uncut jewels, Çeda thought desperately for something that might divide these two, something that might give the highborn woman a reason to throw off the chains Rümayesh had placed on her.

She found it moments later. A memory flashed past—of stepping into the blooming fields to cut one of the adichara flowers. It was discarded immediately by Rümayesh, but the woman huddling beneath that greater consciousness, a highborn woman of Sharakhai, flared in anger and indignation. Rümayesh tried to settle on Çeda's first fight in the pits, but Çeda drew her
mind back to the twisted trees that grew in a vast ring outside the city's limits. Had Çeda not had the effects of the adichara running through her, she would surely have succumbed to the onslaught Rümayesh threw against her defenses. But with the petals she was able to focus on that memory, to share it with all those gathered within the cellar.

Çeda pads along the sand as the twin moons shine brightly above. The adichara's thorned branches sway, limned in moonlight. They click and clack and creak, a symphony of movement in the otherwise-still air. Çeda looks among the blooms, which glow softly in the moonlight, a river of stars over an endless sea. She chooses not the widest, nor the brightest, but the bloom that seems to be facing the moons unshrinkingly, then cuts it with a swift stroke of her kenshar, tucking away the cutting in a pouch at her belt.

Çeda had expected anger from the woman Rümayesh controlled. What she hadn't expected was anger from the others gathered here. She should have, though. They would have the blood of Kings running through their veins; they would know every bit as well as Çeda the sort of crime they were witnessing. A woman stealing into the blooming fields to take of the adichara insulted not only the Kings but all who revered the twisted trees.

They began to mumble and murmur, more and more of their number waking from the dream they shared. At
first they stepped forward like boneyard shamblers, but with every moment that passed they seemed to come more alive.

Behind them, the highborn woman Rümayesh controlled railed against her bonds. She was more angry, more aware of herself, than she'd been in years, and she was buoyed by the anger of those around her. Rümayesh's will was still strong, however. She held against the assault, the two of them at a stalemate. Soon, though, the woman's anger began to ebb. Before long, Rümayesh would regain the control she'd had over this woman.

Çeda had lost track of those around her. She realized with a start that one of the men was holding a kenshar. A woman on Çeda's opposite side drew a slim knife of her own. A remnant of Çeda's earlier lethargy still remained, but fear now drove her. She rolled backward, coming to a crouch, waiting for any to approach.

A moment later the man did, the woman right after, but they both gave clumsy swipes of their blades. Çeda leapt over the man, snaking her arm around his neck as she went. She landed and levered him so that he tipped backward, then controlled him, moving him slowly toward the door.

He tried to use his knife to strike at her arm, but she was ready. She released his neck at the last moment and snatched the wrist holding the knife with one hand,
closed her other hand around his fist, the one wrapped around the weapon. Then she drew his own knife toward his neck. He was so surprised he hardly fought her, and by the time he realized what was happening, it was too late. The knife slipped into his throat like a needle through ripe summer fruit. For a moment, everyone stared at the blood coursing down over Çeda's hands and arms. No one moved. Their eyes began to roll up in their heads. They were not only
witnessing
his death, Çeda realized; they
felt
it through their shared bond.

As the man's heart slowed and finally stopped, the irindai burst from the walls and from the ceiling. The air became thick with them, fluttering, touching skin, making eyes bat, becoming caught in hair.

Çeda's mind burned in the thoughts and emotions of all those gathered. They were of one mind, now, sharing what they'd known, what they hoped to be, what they feared in the deepest recesses of their minds. It was too much, a flood that consumed them all, one by one.

Çeda screamed, a single note added to the cacophony of screams filling this small space, then fell beneath the weight of their collected dreams.