The Diviner (46 page)

A
fter having it proved to him that he was Haddiyat, that he would age quickly and painfully, that at not quite twenty-two his life was half over, he spent three days alone in his room at the Shagara fortress. The door was no longer locked. This was a good thing, for it took less time to open it when more wine was delivered, and speedy delivery was second only to generous quantity in Qamar's bloodshot eyes.

On the fourth day, no wine arrived. Downstairs Zario Shagara was waiting for him in the room where his blood had proved what he was.
It often happens like this
, Zario said.
Some cannot face the truth at first,
he said.
I remember once a boy only a bit younger than you broke into the dispensary and swallowed everything he could stuff into his mouth.

Now, despite the passage of many weeks, Qamar was still unable to decide whether or not he envied that boy. The fact that he was yet alive argued in one direction; the fact that he was planning to go on drinking argued in the other.

The first choice,
Zario said,
is acceptance or despair. But your next choice,
he said,
is one never given to any man before: Stay here and learn how best to use your gifts, or return to your own Shagara, with whom you would probably be more happy.

Happy. Ayia, of a certainty—happy as a colt in clover.

It was a dim, rickety little tavern he sat in now, a short walk from the palace in Joharra. He wasn't quite drunk enough. The last weeks had refined his perceptions of how much wine it took to make him forgetful and how much rendered him oblivious. There were stages between tipsy and insensible he had never bothered to catalog before. At the moment, he was at that unfortunate point where nervous caution still existed. It was a somewhat delicate calculation, but the amount of wine left in the jug was sufficient to bring on just enough recklessness so he could accomplish his goal. He had only one, very carefully thought out while he was stone sober. Simple, really. He needed money.

His Shagara relations—by Acuyib the Incomprehensible, how he loathed having to acknowledge them as such, and especially the reason he must acknowledge them—had no money to give him. What they had given was food enough for three days and a horse. This was after they'd drugged him for an unknown number of days, and taken him on a journey to Acuyib didn't want to know where, and left him with a vicious headache and the food and the horse and instructions to ride south for two days and then east. Or perhaps it had been east for one day and then south. He'd been beyond caring.

He'd ridden sober back into territory controlled by Joharra. That had been his last piece of luck—the right choice of direction, not the sobriety.

Seated in a corner of a tavern in Joharra, Qamar poured a precise amount of wine into his cup and wasted a few moments picking little floating bits of debris from it.
Happy
. He would not go to the desert, to the Shagara, to waste precious years of his abbreviated life crouched at some mouallima's knee, memorizing talishann or pounding designs into silver or mixing up healing potions, and dripping his blood onto or into his work.

Neither would he stay with the other Shagara in their Cazdeyyan fortress. The studying would be the same, and the bleeding. But his tools would be paper and pen and ink and the strange plants of a realm that had already tried to kill him once with lethal thorns. Besides, being pent up inside stone walls in a land not his own was not the way he wanted to live. Happy? He would go insane.

Not that this wasn't an intriguing thought, for a little while. Empress Mirzah had been quite, quite mad. When Qamar thought of the afternoons spent with her as she tended her dolls and called him by his great-grandfather's name, he was both attracted and repulsed by the prospect. To live out his days not understanding or caring; to lose all awareness of reality . . . to be shut up someplace safe and private where he could shock no one . . .

Ayia, he was here, in this filthy little tavern not far from his cousins' palace, so he had made the choice not to go mad, at any rate. Now that he thought about it, he had made quite a few choices. To stay alive, to leave Cazdeyya, to retain his sanity—although what he planned to do this evening would not be considered entirely sane.

Halfway through the last measure of wine now. He could feel nervousness turning to excitement, and smiled. He was still in an alien land that had first tried to kill him by piercing his body with poisoned thorns and in essence had succeeded in killing him with the truth about what he was. But a transplanted piece of Tza'ab Rih was a few streets away, eminently exploitable. He did not know how to live, let alone thrive, in this country that was full of barbarian people and poisonous plants and all manner of hideous things.
Happy?
he thought again, with a muffled snort.
Here?
He could not go home, but at least he could have one last hour of sensing home things all around him.

He began to be grateful, grudgingly, that the Shagara had let him go.
It is not so much that we trust you not to try to find us again,
Zario had said,
and lead your army to us. You have no idea where you are, and will have even less idea of it by the time you ride away.

Then why?
Qamar demanded.
Why allow me to leave?

We value honor,
Zario said.
My grandfather exiled himself from his homeland because the honor of the Shagara had been compromised by the unspeakable crimes of Azzad al-Ma'aliq—who must have been a truly vile man, to have used his friend Fadhil in such a fashion, killing his enemies.

He didn't kill them, he gelded them,
Qamar said—and in a moment of sheer spite added,
He made them like you.

And you,
Zario had said without a twitch of an eyelash.
Alessid al-Ma'aliq was even more shameless, for he corrupted his own sons to his purposes. Many more departed from the Shagara tents in disgust after that. Indeed, it is a wonder any stayed at all. Perhaps all honor is lost to them. But not to us.

Ayia, perhaps Zario's implication had been correct, and all honor was lost to Qamar. What he was about to do was scarcely praiseworthy. Not that he much cared.

He left a swallow of wine in the cup, not needing it. Rising, he stretched widely, not thinking about the supple play of muscle and how it felt to be young. What he still possessed, he would use. A strong body, a beautiful face, melting dark eyes, and the infallible charm he had inherited from Azzad al-Ma'aliq—who had
not
killed his enemies, no matter what the renegade Shagara believed. He had exacted revenge, just as Ab'ya Alessid had done. As Qamar made his way through the dark city streets toward the palace, he wondered if Alessid had seen it as vengeance—whether of Acuyib or Chaydann al-Mamnoua'a—that his beloved wife had gone mad. But if there was one thing Qamar had decided without even having to think about it, it was that his mother would never ever learn that she too had birthed a Haddiyat son. Not that it would break Mairid, as it had broken Mirzah; he simply did not wish to see anyone ever look at him the way he had seen them look sometimes at Mairid's brother Kemmal, with sadness and pity.

The palace guards did not recognize him. He had not expected them to. During his one night and one day back in Joharra, he had neither trimmed his beard nor changed to more conventional clothing. Both would have cost money much better spent in the tavern, achieving this lovely, carefree courage.

They did recognize his topaz ring.

“Sheyqir! Your whole family has been frantic with worry for months!”

“Not so loud!” he begged, laughing, and flicked a casual finger against one of the hazziri dangling from the gates. He didn't know what this particular one signified, but that he could touch it at all meant the magic recognized him. There were similar protections in every palace he'd ever lived in, things that admitted family and kept doors locked for all others. “I'm a surprise for Queen Rihana's birthday. A little late, of course, but—what? What is it?” he demanded as the two men exchanged agonized glances.

“The Queen . . . she has joined her beloved husband, may Acuyib gather them both into His Arms.”

Qamar felt his stomach lurch and the wine within it turn sour. Solanna Grijalva had said she'd seen Ra'amon's death, and it had turned out to be true that he had died. Qamar had heard it in the taverns. But Rihana—“How did this happen? When? How did she die?”

“Earlier in the summer, after word was brought that her noble lord had been slain in a skirmish with the Taqlis—”

“The what?”

“It's another barbarian country, Sheyqir, somewhere west of Cazdeyya.”

“By Acuyib's Glory, do these damned nations breed while we're not looking? And what was Ra'amon doing so far north?” He shook his head. “Ayia, I will learn all of this later.” After tonight, once he could afford it, he'd find a better class of tavern, where men conversed civilly with each other rather than muttering glumly into their wine. He would not be asking any al-Ma'aliq for information. He did not intend to see any of them at all. “I assume the family still lives in the same apartments? Excellent. Thank you. And not a word to anyone! Please?” He gave them a subdued version of the cheery, conspiratorial smile he'd planned, and they nodded and bowed.

Having successfully passed the gates and their protective hazziri, he was assumed by the rest of the guards to have legitimate business within. His body remembered the saunter appropriate to, and his face effortlessly arranged itself into the proper expression of, a casually arrogant al-Ma'aliq sheyqir. As he neared the Queen's chambers, it was necessary to display his topaz ring once or twice more, but persuading the sentries to secrecy was so simple that it would have distressed him had he been the one these guards were guarding. Ayia, once they discovered what had happened tonight, they would be more cautious. They exclaimed at his presence, as the others had; they yielded to his authority, as the others had. It was a bitter amusement that these were the last orders he would ever give as a sheyqir of Tza'ab Rih.
Tell no one I am here. No one.

This time of night, the family would be sleeping. He had no need of private chambers—though his bones whispered a plea to rest in a soft, silken bed again. The first whimperings of what would eventually become screams . . . had not the girl Solanna seen him old and scarred? It was in him: His own early decay and death were inside him. How long before the whimpers turned to gasps of pain, and then moans, and then—

A little of the wine-inspired recklessness seeped away. There was only one remedy for that, and the maqtabba was entirely adequate to his purpose. It took him very little time to denude the room of all the lesser gold and silver fittings—doorknobs, drawer-pulls, and the like. From one of those drawers he took a large drawstring pouch of money kept there for incidentals. He was al-Ma'aliq, and the Shagara working did not defend against him. There was no lock because none was needed. Others could not even slide this drawer open, but he could.

Praising his deceased cousin Rihana for being royal enough to scorn carrying money on her exalted person, he weighed the pouch in his hand. He untied the sash from his waist and spread it across the table, then quickly folded the coins and doorknobs and such into it, twisted it to secure his booty, and wrapped it once more around him. He paused to smile slightly, recalling that great-grandfather Azzad had carried the famous necklace of pearls this way, long ago, the only wealth he had saved of all the vast al-Ma'aliq fortunes.

At the maqtabba's door he hesitated, then returned to the desk. In the drawer that had held the money he left behind his grandfather Alessid's hazzir, the necklace that had kept him safe through dozens of battles. Whoever found it would know who had been here; what they might think about why he had left himself unprotected, he cared not.

He kept the two rings. He had promised himself he would never take them off. All the other hazziri—the earring, an armband, two silver discs sewn into the heels of his boots—these he had already sold. But the rings he would keep as long as he lived. They were reminders of who he had once been: al-Ma'aliq, al-Gallidh.

Qamar walked unchallenged out of the palace at Joharra. At just past midnight he was enjoying a tasty meal and a large jug of very good wine at a clean, refined tavern that specialized in traditional Tza'ab cooking. Tomorrow, he decided, on his way out of Joharra, he would take the time to find out exactly what had happened to Rihana and Ra'amon and who was in charge now. On reflection, he decided it was probably Allim, a seasoned war-leader who could take care of the incursions from Cazdeyya and—what had the guard called it? Taqit? Taqim? Qamar didn't have it in him to care, not tonight. Tonight, he cared only about getting very, very drunk.

 

He stayed drunk all through the autumn and winter.

He found a congenial seaside town and called himself Assado, and said he was from the newly established Tza'ab town of Shagarra in the southeast, which his atrocious accent and somewhat limited vocabulary seemed to confirm. No one ever discovered much more about him than his name. He kept to himself and his wine jars. Indeed, he had chosen the town for the potency of the imported wines in its dockside taverns. Once or twice someone saw him ambling drunkenly down the pier or along the beach, and several of the tavern girls had graced him with their favors, for he was a handsome youth—at first, anyway. As autumn became winter, and the wine did its work on his body as well as his mind, all that remained of his beauty was the large dark eyes with their extravagant lashes and a certain withered sweetness to his smile.

At about the same time his money was running out, there arrived in the seaport an old man and a young girl. No one in the dockside taverns had ever seen them before, and no one ever saw them again. Nor did they ever see again the youth who called himself Assado.