“It will be a stone dropped into a deep pool. No pattern can be made whole without a ripple.”
He stared at Aherim. “Someone will notice? Who? Tell me who.”
Silence. Sarmin felt unnerved. “I will ask Him.” It was not a threat to be made idly, but surely one that would coax Aherim to speak further.
Sarmin waited. He pursed his lips. He had found Him last of alclass="underline" Zanasta, eldest of the devils, speaker for the dark gods. He showed only as the light failed and grazed the east wall at its shallowest angle. Even then Sarmin had to unfocus his eyes to reveal Him.
“Tell me of the Felting girl. The bride Mother has chosen.” There was time to kill before sunset.
“She comes.” Aherim spoke again at last, his voice the dry whisper of fingers on silk.
“Is she pretty? Is she kind? Does she smell good?” Sarmin sat up and leaned forwards.
“She is sad, she is strong, she smells of horses.” Aherim fell silent. He only ever answered three questions, and generally not the ones Sarmin asked.
“She is riding to me. That’s why she smells of horse.” Sarmin picked up his dacarba and sighted down the blades at one of Aherim’s faces. “But why is she sad? Perhaps they have told her bad things about me. Maybe I’m ugly. Or is she worried that she will have to stay in this room with me? Maybe she will miss her horse.”
Sarmin remembered camels, though not with fondness. His father had horses, but the princes were never allowed among them. “They kick worse than camels,” he remembered a groom telling him. Still, he liked the way they looked. Perhaps a horse would be a good pet.
“I will make her happy, Aherim.” Sarmin tilted the knife so that light danced along the blade’s edges. “I will…” He tried to think how he might entertain her. When they came at all, people came to him with a purpose. He couldn’t recall a time when someone had come to his room simply to speak, simply to be with him. “Perhaps I will not make her happy, Aherim. Maybe I will share her sorrow. I will listen and hear of her life in the sandless wastes.”
Eyul took one uncertain step, then another. Under his feet a thin layer of sand covered something solid: old stone, undisturbed by the passage of time or the magic that brought it to the surface. Amalya kept by his side, moving so close her sleeve rubbed against his. Eyul touched her elbow with his fingers and they each took another step forwards.
“Nothing could be alive in here,” she whispered.
Neither of them wanted to test that idea too quickly. They took two more small steps. Sandstone houses lined the road. Square gaps in the walls showed where carved window-screens once had been mounted. Eyul could see nothing but darkness through them. Like Carriers’ eyes, they watched their guests with quiet malevolence.
The sun was sinking towards the west, but still it blazed with heat. They wandered, separate from their shade and water. Eyul’s leg ached with every step. This was a fool’s game. He shook his head. “Let’s get our camels and leave this dung in our wake.” They turned in unison, for the first time moving with speed.
A stone wall had risen behind them, ten feet high and scoured by sand. It stretched to either side, curving out of sight in an unbroken arc.
Amalya let out a breath.
“Is there nothing you can do?” he asked her.
She blinked at the wall as if it had slapped her. “I can’t touch my elemental here,” she said. “It’s as if he’s gone.” She said it the same way Eyul would tell her that every well in the desert had gone dry.
I have my Knife.
“Come on,” he said, gripping her elbow and pulling her away from the wall. “They want us here, we’ll be here. But it won’t be that easy for them.” With his right hand he pulled his weapon free. They turned again and walked up the street, the sun now in their eyes.
At a corner where the road split three ways, Amalya stopped.
“I feel something,” she said. She leaned over and Eyul watched, spitting some fine grains from his mouth, as she ran the sand through her fingers. After a few seconds she said, “This way,” and set off to the left. He glanced behind, then followed her.
They walked a hundred feet more. The road grew narrower.
“Does this look familiar to you?” Amalya asked.
Eyul shook his head before taking another look around. “Maybe.” He wiped the sweat from his face, leaving a layer of sand. They walked some more. The sun slipped further down the sky. At least it would soon be cool.
“I want to get up high and see. If this was a city, there will be a gate.”
“Not a good idea. These buildings don’t look sound.”
Amalya turned away, into the nearest building.
“Amalya, no!” Eyul ducked under the doorway after her.
“It’s cooler in here,” she pointed out. It was true. The stone remained chilled from wherever it had been hiding beneath the sands, and the sun hadn’t yet found its way through the lower windows. Amalya pressed her forehead to a pillar and Eyul leaned against an interior wall.
“I have to find a stairway,” she said, but neither of them moved.
The beating sounded first, a thumping sound like a distant heart. A spilling noise like the fall of a dry river came with it, outside the window to Eyul’s right. Two beats later he heard a hissing through the window in the next room. Something or someone approached at a walking pace. He moved arrow-quick, grabbing Amalya by the waist. “Up, up,” he whispered, searching for the stairs as he pushed her in front of him.
They found the stairs in the centre of the building. He was glad for her quiet movements, her lack of questions or fright. At the first landing he turned to survey the gloom below. “Stay to the side,” he warned Amalya, not believing the calm darkness before his eyes. He spread his feet and relaxed, watchful, the emperor’s Knife sure and ready in his hand. He was aware of everything at once: Amalya’s stillness at his left, the sun’s orange invasion through a hole in the ceiling, and the slow but steady approach of whispering sand.
The heartbeat stopped. The silence ached for the missing pulse, and then it came again, smaller, closer, quieter, somehow familiar. Thump. Thump. And again, on the stairs, like the bouncing of a ball.
A figure moved through the shadows. Eyul watched it climb the first steps. The red ball emerged into the sunlight first, then the boy’s hand that held it. The light caught black curls and a smile, a smooth boy’s face. “No,” Eyul whispered. The boy climbed closer, pushing his feet into each stair with force, though the only sound he made was that of sand blowing in the wind.
Eyul forced himself to look into Prince Pelar’s eyes. Black and cold, they stared both at him and through him. This was no longer the chubby, laughing boy he’d killed. This was a tormented creature from the depths of Herzu’s hell itself. Dread soaked through Eyul’s robes like cold rain. At his side Amalya drew in her breath.
“Kill it,” she whispered.
“I can’t,” he said. This is my creation. Sorrow and horror weighted the Knife in his hand.
The creature smiled then, a skull-grin, and raised its arm towards the west. As it pointed with one finger, the red ball fell and bounced down the steps.
“Kill it!” Amalya had found her fright.
Eyul threw. A sound like grinding pebbles filled the stair. Sand swirled and stung for an instant, and fell before him, leaving only a scattering of stone and black grit.
“What- Was that real?” he asked Amalya, who crouched and ran her fingers through the dark grains.
“I don’t think I saw what you saw,” she said.
“What did you see?”
“Brannik of the Tower. Rock-sworn-or would have been; he died during the ceremony.” She wiped her hands on her robes. “It wasn’t him. He couldn’t-”
He pulled her back from her memories. “Amalya, back at the camp you said the enemy put us here. Who is the enemy?”
She looked at him and placed one hand on the pendant that hung from her neck. “The creature pointed west. Should we go to the roof and see what’s there?”