Of Sand and Malice Made (20 page)

Çeda moved among the ruins of Nalamae's temple, stepping over broken stones, shining the light of her lantern over a grand mosaic. The mosaic covered the dome above—what was left of it—all the way down to roughly eye level. Above, the dome lay broken, the stars watching her, intrigued, expectant.

She moved carefully along the mosaic's pastoral scene, where a field of green surrounded a beautiful, flowing river. The scene depicted the years of bounty after Beht Tahlell, the holy day when Nalamae had touched her crooked finger to the dry desert floor, creating the River Haddah. It wasn't difficult to figure out what the message meant by
luscious bed of blue
. The deep blues of the Haddah's lively flow were still rich and beautiful even
after the temple's long years of abandonment, but there was a
lot
of blue.

She moved slowly, knocking against the mosaic with the steel butt of her kenshar. She held the lamp to the wall in one place, her fingers atingle as she inspected a crack. She chipped at it with her knife, knocking out several of the square blue tesserae. There was nothing, however. No hidden hole, no cavity camouflaged.

She could feel the night passing, could feel Rümayesh taking steps on stolen limbs, coming closer and closer. She moved quickly, but not so quickly that she would miss the clues, cracks or discolorations, anything that would point her to the place where Rümayesh's sigil stone had been hidden. As edgy as the petals had made her earlier, she was glad she'd taken two. She needed the sharp hearing the petals granted, the keen eyesight. She needed their strength and verve.

As she continued, her confidence ebbed. She grew edgy, and then desperate, knocking harder and harder against the small squares of azure and cobalt and a blue turned copper in the ravages of the weather. She knocked more tesserae out. They skittered against the marble floor. Then she began bashing the steel butt of her kenshar against the wall, hoping, praying she would stumble across it.

Stop, Çeda. Stop.
If you haven't found it yet, then there
must be a reason.
Become desperate, and you play right into Rümayesh's hands.

She tried to take in the mosaic anew, lifting the lantern higher, then lower, considering things she hadn't bothered to examine closely earlier.

And then she saw it. A small home in the amber desert, hidden among the dunes. Near the home was a walled garden, and inside the garden was a bed of blue flowers. This was it. She knew it was so even before tapping the garden and hearing its hollow reply. She quickly pried at the stones, and in so doing saw the crack around it, and soon she had levered free a vaguely round piece of mosaic, revealing a small space where a black silk bag was secreted.

She upended it quickly, but before she could do anything more than verify that this obsidian stone was the very one Brama had used to change Rümayesh's name to Thalagir, she heard the scrape of footsteps behind her.

She turned and found Brama standing twenty paces away on the opposite side of the rotunda.

“You've done well,” Rümayesh said, “but I think our game is coming to a close.”

“Good. Then I'll ask you to leave me be. But before you do that, if you'd be so kind, I'd like you to leave Brama to me. He's done nothing to deserve this, and neither have I.”

Rümayesh laughed. “What have any of us done to deserve our fates? Despite what the sagas say, it's all luck and happenstance, and occasionally the fickle whims of the gods.”

“We're no threat to you.”

“But you are. You absolutely are. You know far too much, and I can see now just how headstrong you are. You won't let it go, so neither can I. If you won't join me, Çedamihn Ahyanesh'ala, I'm afraid my own response will need to be quite final.” Rümayesh took several steps forward and held Brama's hand out, a simple gesture that looked so very threatening. “So I ask you one last time. Will you take my hand? Surely you felt some of what I felt. Surely you were tempted . . .”

She took another step, a gentle smile forming on Brama's scarred face. When Çeda drew her kenshar and pressed it into the tip of her thumb, however, Rümayesh halted, eyes widened enough that Çeda knew just how worried Rümayesh must be that Çeda would wipe away the blood. Rümayesh shifted her position, coming no nearer to Çeda, but moving to see the hole in the wall. “You wish to name me anew, then? Control me as young Brama once hoped to do?”

“All I've ever wanted,” Çeda said, “was to be left alone. Now, that's no longer enough. Nor is leaving Brama in peace. I want you to leave
Sharakhai
as well.”

“And how do you suppose you'll force me to do that? With the sapphire? The stone I
gave
to your Osman? You'll find it an imperfect dwelling at best, dear girl. It won't hold me for long.”

“We'll just see about that.”

She poised the knife, preparing to press the finely honed tip into her thumb, when she heard the soft patter of footsteps rushing toward her from behind. She'd expected Kadir to arrive, and she'd known his penchant for the garrote, but still she hadn't expected him to move
this
fast. Something dropped across her field of vision—the black wire of his garrote, she knew. She had time only to lift her knife and press it flat against her neck before it was around her.

Kadir pulled the garrote tight. The sigil stone clattered to the floor, and Kadir kicked it with his foot, sending it skittering over the rubble toward Rümayesh. Çeda used what leverage she had, trying to push Kadir off balance. He held, but it was only a diversion in any case. With her knife, she sawed once. Twice. On the third time, the wire was cut.

Çeda spun away, but not before Kadir dropped the wooden handles of the garrote and backhanded her. Çeda reeled, and Kadir connected again, but only because she was more worried about pivoting to position him between her and Rümayesh.

The sounds of Brama's footsteps racing toward her filled the air. “Kadir, watch her!”

Çeda had only moments. She faced Kadir and feinted high, then sliced across his incoming fist when he grabbed for the sleeve of her dress. The moment Kadir recoiled from the pain, she lunged deeply, more than would be wise in a fight with a skilled opponent, and cut a neat line across Kadir's throat.

A river of red gushed from the cut. Kadir gasped. His hands shot to his throat, hoping to stem the tide of blood. He tried to retreat, but Çeda was already moving. She advanced in two quick steps and drove the knife into his unprotected chest. Kadir fell to his knees, his gasp mixing with a bubbling sound that came from the new wound. Çeda pulled the knife free, and warm blood gushed forth, coating her hands and wrists and staining the front of her dress.

Rümayesh slowed, then stopped near the place where the sigil stone had come to a rest. She stared at Çeda as if
she'd
been stabbed. “I would have loved you!” she cried. “Like no other, I would have loved you!”

Brama's scarred face brimming with rage and disbelief and sorrow, she bent down to pick up the stone, but her hand stopped just over it, hovering there as if it were too hot to touch. It took Çeda only a moment to understand why.

“No!” Rümayesh screamed. Brama's hand retreated, shook, then retreated more. “No! I will not be denied!”

Brama's entire body began to shake from the conflict within. He was fighting her. His desperation would surely be driving him, but already he was weakening. He couldn't hope to stand against an ehrekh. But he'd given Çeda time. As Rümayesh reached for the stone once more, Çeda sprinted toward him. It was four long strides before Çeda crashed her shoulder into Brama's body. His fingers had just brushed the stone, but now he was flying backward. His body fell twisting, sliding, against the dusty marble of the temple floor.

And then Çeda had it. Her hands were filthy with Kadir's blood, and she used it now to wipe away the sigil Brama had made. Thalagir, he had named her, but now Çeda was wiping away that name, making Rümayesh formless, bodiless, until she could take a new host.

Wind swirled at the center of the temple. It twisted into a cyclone, a body slowly forming within. Horns could be seen, a tri-forked tail. Baleful eyes and a terrible grin.

Çeda fumbled for the cloth bundle in her pouch, pulled it out as Rümayesh appeared in her natural form. The ehrekh arched back, spreading her arms to what remained of the domed ceiling, and released a bellow that sent the stones to shivering. “It isn't the way I wished it,” she howled, “but I'll still have you, girl.”

Çeda could feel the ehrekh's mind pressing down on her. She screamed from the pain of it, curling into a fetal crouch.

Then suddenly Brama was on Rümayesh's back, holding her arms, trying to contain her as he arched his head back and screamed toward the great hole in the dome above. Rümayesh's attack shifted. Çeda could feel the assault on Brama as well. It may have been this—Brama's will added to her own—that allowed Çeda to press herself slowly up from the dusty floor and with shaking hands take the sapphire out from its cloth wrapping. She gripped the smoke-coated gemstone in her bloody right hand, and then, releasing a cry filled with all the fury that had been building these past many months, stood and charged forth.

As she ran, one of Rümayesh's tri-forked tails slithered around Brama's right wrist. Another wrapped his throat. The third plunged into his back. Çeda leaped, gripping one of the thick horns atop Rümayesh's head, holding the sapphire before her eyes with the other. The only facet that wasn't clouded with the smoke of Çeda's blood now faced Rümayesh.

Rümayesh stiffened. A sudden heat washed over her. A cracking sound—like glass as the pressure upon it builds too greatly—echoed throughout the cavernous space. Rümayesh fell, and Çeda with her. The ehrekh's black skin became like ash, powdering as she tipped backward.

When Rümayesh struck the marble floor, her body shattered. Great chunks of her fell away. The exposed surfaces glowed like embers, but cooled quickly, becoming black, then gray, then white like ash. Her remains began to powder and flake. They swirled away on some unseen wind until all that was left in this forgotten temple of Nalamae was Çeda, Brama, and the body of Kadir.

Çeda looked about the expanse of the temple, feeling ill-at-ease. She expected Rümayesh to reform, or to wake in Brama's body once more, but nothing like this happened, and she heard only the frightening, rhythmic rasp coming from Brama as he breathed.

She crawled toward him. He opened his eyes and turned toward her, peering at her with eyes of emerald set in a ruin of crisscrossed scars.

“Are you there?” Çeda asked. “Can you hear me?”

He said nothing for a long while, apparently gathering his strength. When he spoke at last, his words tumbled out in one long slur. “You owe me two hundred rahl.”

Two hundred rahl, the promised reward for helping her in the desert.

Çeda couldn't help it. She laughed, and Brama laughed with her.

In an alley not far from the entrance to the collegium medicum, Çeda waited. Dozens paced along the stone-lined street, some few glancing her way as she leaned against a wall within the shadows. The collegium medicum was a hive of activity, used by the sick, whether they had money or not, when they wished to consult with a physic.

When Çeda had carried Brama here two weeks ago, the attending physician, a black-skinned Kundhunese woman with expressive eyes, had stared dourly at Brama's gut wound. She seemed ready to set Çeda's expectations appropriately, but before she could speak Çeda took the money Osman had declined—the sum total of her wealth—and set it at the foot of the bed.

The physic had picked it up, weighed it in one hand, then slipped it into her belted white robe. “For the collegium,” she told Çeda. “Now we see what we can do for your man.”

“He isn't—” she'd begun to say, but the physic had already turned away, calling to an assistant, her voice cutting through the din of the large room like a scalpel.

Çeda had held Brama's hand as they worked, burning his insides with an iron brand and then sewing him up like a doll. Çeda had returned every day since to check on his progress. When she'd been told that he had awoken, however, she found herself unable to go to his room. She
was responsible for everything that had happened to him; she had no business staring into his eyes while mouthing some piss-poor apology. Her words would be meaningless to Brama. Dust in a sandstorm.

“You're such a fucking coward,” Çeda said aloud, to herself.

Three women, each carrying an ungainly basketful of bread on one hip, glared at her, but when she glared back, they frowned and continued on their way.

The morning ended and high sun arrived, and she wondered if the physician had been wrong. Maybe he'd had a setback. Maybe he'd died. No sooner had the thought come, though, than Brama stepped from within the shadowed halls to stand beneath the grand, arched entrance. He wore the opulent, blood-ridden clothes he'd worn when she'd delivered him here. His cowl was pulled high to hide his face, but she could see him scanning the street and finding her almost immediately.