Of Sand and Malice Made (3 page)

“Tales are not told for free in this city, my lord.”

“If it's money you want”—he leaned toward her—“you need but whisper the price.”

“The price of their telling is something you cannot afford.”

Kadir laughed. “You'd do well not to underestimate
the size of my mistress's purse, nor her will to follow a scent once she's gotten wind of it.”

“My tales are my own,” she said finally.

For a moment, Kadir seemed prepared to press her, but then he raised her hands and bowed his head. “Forgive my boldness. A habit most foul, formed from years of service.”

“Think nothing of it,” Çeda said, though somehow she doubted he would heed her words. No matter what he said, his eyes were too hungry, too expectant of submission.

Kadir raised his hand high and motioned to Ashwandi, who stood farther down the hall. She came and put on a smile, motioning for Çeda to follow her. Her smile vanished, however, when the moth fluttered out from Kadir's office to flitter around the two of them. As they walked toward the entrance to the estate, the moth continued to dog them, and it became clear it was fluttering around Çeda much more than it was Ashwandi, a thing that appeared to please the Kundhunese woman not at all.

The clack from the strike of wooden swords filled the desert air, strangely deadened by the surrounding dunes where Çeda and Djaga, her mentor in the pits, fought.
The sun shined off Djaga's dark, sweat-glistened skin. The sand shushed as they glided over it, a strangely calming sound amidst the rattle of armor and the thud of their shinai as they engaged then backed away.

Çeda fought with abandon, hoping to impress, pushing herself more than she had in a long while. When Djaga retreated, Çeda closed the gap. When Djaga pressed, Çeda countered as soon as the flurry had ended. When Djaga ran backward, Çeda flew after her. She thought she'd timed her advance perfectly, but just as she was lunging forward, Djaga did too, beating aside her blade and sending a nasty swipe of her shinai over Çeda's thigh.

Çeda, thinking Djaga was going to press her advantage, slid quickly away as the pain blossomed, but instead the tall black woman stopped and stood, chest heaving, her face a sneer of disgust. “You invite me to spar,” she said in an accent similar but distinctly different from Ashwandi's, “and this is what I get? You're not watching
me
.”

Çeda opened her mouth to explain, to apologize, but Djaga abruptly turned away and headed for the skiff they'd sailed that morning from Sharakhai's western harbor. Together they stepped over the runners of the sandship to reach the ship's side, at which point Djaga leaned over the gunwales, pulled the cork from their keg of
water, and filled a gourd cup. “You're distracted,” Djaga said after downing the cup and running the back of her hand over her mouth. She refilled the cup and held it out for Çeda. “Why?”

There was no sense denying it. She
was
distracted. Çeda took the cup and drank down the sun-warmed water.

“Tell me it's a man,” Djaga went on, a smile making her full lips go crooked. “Tell me you've decided to take your Emre to bed. He's disappointed you, hasn't he? I knew he would. Haven't I always said it? No man as gorgeous as that knows his way to the promised land.”

Çeda laughed. She shared a home with Emre, and he meant much to her, but not
that
—they'd probably never be
that
—yet it never stopped Djaga from digging her sharp elbows into Çeda's ribs every chance she got.

“Come, come. What's there to think about? He's a pretty boy . . . You're a pretty girl. . . .”

“Well, if you must know,” Çeda said, desperate to move the conversation beyond these particular grounds, “it
is
about a boy.”

“A boy . . .”

“A Kundhunese boy.”

“Well, well, well . . . A
Kundhunese
boy . . . Who knew it was the
darker
berries that tempted your palate?” Djaga laughed, then bowed and flourished her arms to the desert
around them. “Know this, oh Çeda the White Wolf. The desert, she is wide enough to hold all your secrets and more. Tell us both your tale if you're bold enough.”

Gods, where to begin? In the days that followed her meeting with Kadir, she would swear by her mother's own blood that she'd seen the blue-eyed boy a half-dozen times, but always from the corner of her eye. Always, when she looked with a direct gaze, she found someone or some
thing
else entirely—boys or even girls with similarly dark skin, lighter-skinned boys wearing dark clothes, even the simple swaying of shadows beneath the odd acacia tree. Once she thought she'd spotted him in the ceaseless flow of traffic along the Trough, but when she'd caught up to him and spun him around, it had been a Sharakhani boy with closely shorn hair who looked nothing like the bright-eyed Kundhuni. The mother had shoved Çeda away and shouted with rage. Under the angry glares of those standing nearby, Çeda had retreated, wondering what was happening to her.

She'd spent the next few days wallowing in confusion and fear while a small voice whispered from the corners of her mind—
you're going mad, mad, mad, you're going mad
. A fury born from her own helplessness grew hotter by the day, but what good was fury when there was nothing to direct it against? She needed a change. If the winds were blowing across one's bow, one didn't simply stay the
course. One turned and tacked until the safety of port was reached once more. And who better to help steer this strange ship than Djaga? So much of this tale seemed to be wrapped up in the people of Kundhun, their customs, their norms, and Djaga was Kundhunese. She might see any number of things Çeda was blind to. So she told Djaga her tale. She spoke of the shade, of Osman's confession after, of her visit with Kadir. She spent a long while describing the strange blue-eyed boy with the cinnamon skin, hoping Djaga would somehow know him, but there was no glimmer of recognition in her eyes. She described Ashwandi as well, receiving only a halfhearted shrug in reply.

When she was done, she asked Djaga, “Have you heard of her, this princess Kesaea?”

“No,” Djaga replied, “but you know what we say in the backlands. If you stand our princesses shoulder to shoulder with our princes, they will drown the land like blades of grass.”

It was true. There were as many kings and queens as there were hills in Kundhun, or so it seemed. “It was so strange,” Çeda went on. “When I left, a moth followed me.”

Djaga smiled her broad smile. “Good luck be upon you.”

But Çeda shrugged. “So they say, but it was a gallows moth.”

“An irindai? A cressetwing?”

“Yes. Why are you making that face?”

“Who did you say is this Kadir's mistress?”

“I was never told her name.”

Djaga's expression pinched from one of confusion to outright worry. “There's a woman who hides in the shadows of the powerful in Sharakhai. A drug lord named Rümayesh. Have you heard the name?”

“I've heard it,” Çeda lied.

“I can tell you don't know enough, girl. Not nearly enough. Those who enter her house pay fistfuls of rahl to do so—not the silver of the southern quarter, mind you, nor the coppers of the west end, but
gold
. Her clientele is exclusive. The lords and ladies of Goldenhill, those of noble blood, rich merchants and caravan masters who paid their way into Rümayesh's good graces, and in return she feeds them dreams, dreams she summons and all share in. Dreams taken from the souls that Rümayesh herself selects.”

“What makes you think Rümayesh has anything to do with this?”

Djaga's face was staring out at the sand, her eyes distant, but now she pulled her gaze away and stared down at Çeda. “Because she uses irindai, Çedamihn.”

Someone, somewhere danced a dance right over
Çeda's grave. She was just about to ask,
How can you know?,
when Djaga went on.

“Years ago there was a woman in the pits, a dirt dog who taught me as I teach you now. Her name was Izel, and one day she disappeared. For weeks we searched for her. She was found at the bottom of a dry well two months later, still alive, the crushed body of a cressetwing stuffed inside her mouth. We nursed her back to health, but she was never the same. Her mind was gone. She remembered nothing—not why or where she'd been taken, nor who had taken her. She couldn't even remember who she was, not much of it, anyway. It had all been taken from her. She did whisper a name, though, over and over.”

“Rümayesh.”

“Just so, girl. She took her own life two months later”—Djaga drew her thumb across her neck—“a crimson smile, drawn with her favorite sword.” She looked Çeda up and down as if she were in danger even here in the desert. “You say he's left you alone, this Kadir?”

“As near as I can tell.”

“Then make no mistake, the gods of the desert shine upon you!” Djaga took the gourd cup from Çeda and set it onto the keg. In unspoken agreement, they strode away from the skiff and began loosening their limbs. “Watch
yourself in the days ahead, and when we return to Sharakhai, go to Bakhi's temple. Give him a kind word and show him a bit of silver, or gold if you can manage, lest he take it all back.”

Çeda had no intention of doing so—she didn't believe in filling the coffers of the temples any more than she believed in giving the Kings of Sharakhai their due respect—but she nodded just the same.

“Now come!” Djaga brought her blade quickly down across Çeda's defenses, a swing Çeda beat aside easily. “You've a bout in two weeks.” She swung again, and again Çeda blocked it, backing up this time. “People know we spar with one another, girl.” A third strike came, a thing Djaga put her entire body into, but Çeda skipped back, avoiding the blow. “I'll not have it said the White Wolf is some poor imitation of the Lion of Kundhun!”

Çeda retreated and bowed, arms and shinai swept back while her eyes were fixed on Djaga. “Very well,” she said, and leapt in for more. For a short while, there in the desert, her troubles were lost in the spindrift and the fury of their blows.

The days passed quickly after that.

Çeda saw the boy again—several times, in fact, and now she was certain it was him. Once, she'd nearly
trapped him in the Well, the quarter of the city that held Osman's pits. She'd chased after him, yelling for him to stop, her hand nearly upon him, but when she'd turned the corner, she found the alley ahead empty. At a whistle, she'd craned her head back and found him three stories up, staring down at her with a wide, jackal smile. And then he was gone, leaving a knot inside her she couldn't untie, a knot composed of anger and impotence and foolishness.

He must be a warlock, she decided—it ran thick in some areas of Kundhun—and now for some reason he was toying with her. She vowed to find him, but for the life of her she had no idea how she would manage it. Every time she tried to lie in wait, she ended up spending hours with nothing to show for it.

Instead she lost herself in preparations for her upcoming bout—running in the mornings, sparring in the afternoons, lifting Djaga's stone weights beneath the pier in the western harbor in the evenings. Osman had told her she'd have no shading work until after her day in the pits, a thing that bothered her at first, but given that there was nothing she could do about it she threw herself into her training with an abandon she hadn't felt in months.

Djaga noticed, and even allowed a grudging nod once or twice for how focused Çeda's technique had become. “Good, girl. Good. Now keep your rage bottled up.
Release it in the pits, not before. It's not so hard as you might think.”

Çeda thought she understood, but as the day of her bout approached, she found herself becoming more and more anxious, not from any fear over her opponent—a Mirean swordmaster who'd had some small amount of success in the pits—but from the relentless feeling that she was being watched. Whether by some trick of the mind or the unseen workings of the boy, she felt on display, a prized akhala being paraded before auction. All across the city, men, but more often women, were spying her out. She was sure of it. And yet whenever she looked, they were doing completely innocent things, apparently oblivious to her presence.