Of Sand and Malice Made (18 page)

Days passed. Çeda went to the bazaar or to restaurants along the Trough for food. She taught swords to her class of students at the pits. She attended the funeral rites for Sim and Verda. They'd come together from Tribe Halarijan, who burned the bodies of their dead and spread their ashes to the wind. And so that was what they did, allowing the wind to blow their gray ashes against the tops of dunes so that sand and ash were carried as one, mingling, forever traveling the expanse of the Great Mother.

Osman stood at the rear, away from the others, a place of shame, not by others' choice, but by his. Çeda came to stand by him after a time. They did not speak beyond mere pleasantries, but twice after the funeral she went to visit him, once at the pits and once at his estate. She wanted to see how he was coming along, but she didn't really wish to touch on the subject of the gem, nor Rümayesh. He didn't seem to, either. Both times he asked if she'd like some araq. “To honor the dead,” he said, though she noticed just how much araq he poured into his own glass compared to the modest helping he gave her. He seemed ready to leave the subject alone, but as they were sitting on the porch of his estate, talking, having downed a second healthy portion of the anise-flavored liquor, he blurted out. “Where is the gem?”

“It's safe,” she replied, watching him with care as the setting sun exploded along the western horizon.

“It's mine, you know, paid for entry into
my
pits.”

She could hear the desperation behind the bullying words, and also the fear. “It's yours no longer. You gave it to me.”

He looked ready to argue, but then he took a deep breath and looked around his estate, a beautiful plot of land with an old stone-and-wood house on it, a stables, even a small vineyard. It was the fruit of all his labor in the pits when he'd been a fighter and afterward, the place
from which he'd begun to build his now-considerable empire. He looked at Çeda with an expression of gratitude. “And the ehrekh? Have you rid yourself of her?”

Osman had seen enough pain, and she hadn't yet decided what to do about Rümayesh, so she lied. “She'll bother us no more.”

“Good.” He nodded, as if the matter were settled. “That's very good.”

More days passed, and Çeda continued on, waking, working, training, sleeping. There was a part of her that worried that Rümayesh would come for her. Surely at some point she would. But there was another part entirely that was petrified of the decision she had yet to make. She knew she was avoiding it, but the way Rümayesh had touched her. The way she'd made her feel. The memory had remained, like the aftertaste of the finest liquor. The very feeling was still so sharp in her mind, like she could reach out and touch it. Dear gods, that kiss. It terrified her. It made her want to run to Rümayesh to experience it again.

Twice she found herself taking a golden rahl with her on a walk. The second time she'd ended up at a well, staring down into its depths. All she need do was drop it and everything Rümayesh had promised would be hers. To touch so many, to reach beyond the boundaries of flesh and blood. To become like to a god. That was what
Rümayesh had offered and, gods help her, how tempting it was.

She'd held that coin over the well for long minutes. Tulathan and Rhia were high in the night sky. The coin glinted as she twisted it this way and that. She had but to open her fingers and all that Rümayesh had promised would be hers.

But then she saw the image of the King on the coin—it was too dark to tell which, but of course it was one of the Twelve who ruled Sharakhai—and she was returned to herself. In that moment she turned and threw the coin away, into the darkened streets. She saw it winking over and over as it caught the light of the moons.

As she breathed, blinking away the vision of the spinning coin, the door of a nearby oud parlor opened, spilling music into the night. The sound diminished as the door closed, but Çeda was drawn to it like a moth to a midnight flame. She entered and laid down money and drank until she could no longer see straight. She danced with a man who looked like Emre, but wasn't, the perfect companion for the night. She left with him and they made love on the roof of a packed tenement where he lived with his family and nine others.

She had hoped it would show her that Rümayesh was nothing, that she could live without her and have no regrets. But it only made her want the ehrekh's touch all the
more. Laying with that nameless man, as pretty as he might have been, only served to highlight just how small she was, how enclosed, how trapped.

Had she her gold coin still, she would have gone straight back to that well and thrown it in. She didn't, though. She'd only brought the one.

But she had another at home.

She returned home as the sun was rising. She stopped in the entryway, the sitting room, looking toward the archway that led to Emre's room. How dearly she wished to speak with him. She hesitated, though. She didn't want him drawn deeper into this. He'd already come close when he'd helped her to find Adzin and the strange ifin in the desert and, later, Kadir. Still, she could simply sit with him, couldn't she? Perhaps they could go for morning tea, dine on pastries from Tehla.

She took one step toward his room but stopped when she heard something coming from the archway standing opposite his. From
her
room.

She walked in and found Emre sitting on her bed. The horsehair blanket above her bed was askew. Just next to him on the bed lay a small jewelry box, its lid open, and Emre was holding a clear blue gemstone the size of a falcon's egg.

Çeda felt her mouth going dry. “Emre, what are you doing?”

He looked up. If he was embarrassed at having been caught in her room he didn't show it. He merely looked at her, and then back to the jewel, as if he could hardly bear to take his eyes from it. “I . . . felt something in here. I thought it was you.”

“That isn't yours, Emre. I want you to give it to me.”

He swallowed hard. Licked his lips. He looked up at her, then back to the stone. “Where did you
get
this, Çeda? It's beautiful.”

“I know it is. But it's mine. Now give it to me.”

Emre blinked. “But you're gone so much. It's not safe leaving it alone. I could watch it for you while you're gone.”

“Emre, give me that fucking jewel and get out of my fucking room.”

His eyes lifted from the stone at last, cold. “Or what?”

“Or I'll knock you so hard your children will feel it.”

He had no children. Neither of them did. It was an old joke she and he had told a thousand times—to one another, to their friends as they ran through the streets and the aisles of the spice market. She'd wanted to bring him back to who he'd
been
, not who he was now: a man holding a jewel that threatened to tear them apart.

Emre smiled. Then he laughed, flipping the jewel into her waiting hand. “Better put it somewhere thieves can't find it.” He walked past her, then left their home. And finally Çeda could breathe again.

By the gods, this had been another message. The gem was cursed, and anyone near it, near
her
, would be affected. She thought of taking it out to the desert, throwing it to the sands as an offering to Nalamae. But the stories never worked that way. It would find its way back into Çeda's life and, sure as the desert was dry, fate would return with a vengeance. And even if it didn't, Rümayesh would still be out there, waiting.

Rümayesh had made a terrible error. For these past many days, the threat of Rümayesh doing something to Çeda hadn't seemed so dire, but the image of a spear hanging over
Emre's
head, ready to drop, had shifted something insider her. Shifted it for good.

The temptation of going to Rümayesh had evaporated like so much spilled water on the sunbaked streets of Sharakhai. Like a city catching fire, the feeling was replaced by a burning desire to give that creature everything she deserved.

By dark of night, Çeda strode into the small yard of Ibrahim the storyteller and up to the small porch of his mudbrick home. She held a book in her left hand, tight, like a talisman against evil. She should be tired, and in truth she hadn't been this tired since the nightmares of Rümayesh's torture by the godling twins, but anticipation
and excitement over the passage she'd found kept fatigue at bay, at least for now.

She knocked on Ibrahim's door, knocking again when she heard no movement within. It was very early still—several hours before sunrise—but she couldn't wait. The time to be worried about manners had long since passed. When she knocked a third time she heard a groan, heard shuffling steps nearing the door. “Who's come to my door before even the gods have awakened?”

“It's Çeda, Ibrahim. I need your help.”

“With the same problem you brought to me twice before?”

“Yes.”

“Three is an ill portent, Çeda. It may very well bring your problems to
my
door next.”

“Three is also a blessed number. Three times did rain fall when Nalamae touched her finger to the desert to create the River Haddah. Three times did Iri call before the sun awoke in the heavens. Three may free Sharakhai from the taint of Rümayesh.”

His only reply was silence.

“I've found a story, Ibrahim.”

The span of three breaths passed, then six, then nine. Finally the door creaked softly open. Ibrahim stood there, frowning, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “What story?”

She lifted the book and shook it. “A
wondrous
story.”

Ibrahim's face screwed up as though he'd just stuffed a rotten prune into his mouth, but he left the door open as he shambled his morning pains away toward the kitchen. He lit a lamp from the oven's embers and set to making tea. When he'd poured a cup for each of them and sat across from her, he inhaled the scent for a good long while before speaking. She could see the worry in his eyes, if not his face. Eventually, though, his curiosity seemed to win out. He nodded toward her book. “What's this story?”

Çeda opened the book to a certain page and set it before him.

She'd found it after days of searching. She'd scoured the bazaar, gone to one of the more expensive bookshops in the city, pulled in favors to be allowed into one of the collegia's libraries—finding so much she'd paid a hefty bribe to stay another day and night. In the end, though, she'd found what she'd been searching for in a small, nondescript book she purchased in the Shallows. The shop owner and scribe was a woman who specialized in documenting stories from those freshly arrived in Sharakhai, those who'd come from the desert. The oral tradition in the desert tribes was vast, and many stories had never been recorded. But the woman had been documenting such stories for twenty years. She'd pointed Çeda to a
particular book, which Çeda immediately bought and devoured that night.

Ibrahim ran his hand down the page. Then he went back a dozen pages and flipped through the entire story in as little time as it took Çeda to blow on her tea and take a sip of her own.
Nalamae's teats, no wonder he knows so many stories.

“This speaks of an ehrekh being captured,” he said.

“Yes,” Çeda replied.

“Ehrekh aren't caught. They catch others.”

“So the stories say, but now I wonder. The one who wrote it said it was one of the oldest from their tribe.” Çeda motioned to the open book. “Perhaps
this
is the true story from which the others were born.”

The story told the tale of a mage, the shaikh of Tribe Kadri, whose people were being haunted by an ehrekh. Night after night the ehrekh came, slipping like a dark shadow, twisting through tent flaps, ghosting around spears and swords, to take whoever it wished. They would hear the screams in the desert afterward, and though they ran to rescue the one who'd been spirited away, they would find only empty patches of sand, a bit of blood. Minutes, sometimes hours later, the screams would start again.

The shaikh prayed to Tulathan, for she had reason to
hate Goezhen and his children. Tulathan did not come for many nights, but when her moon was full, she came to the shaikh, who had affixed to his turban an incredible ruby as large as an eye, one of the treasures of the tribe. Tulathan took it from him, kissed it, and told him that he might capture the ehrekh when it came again if only he obeyed her word. He blessed the gemstone as Tulathan had bid him, and spilled his own blood in augury to learn who the ehrekh would come for next. He gave the ruby to that young woman, and that very night when the ehrekh came again, the girl held the jewel in the palm of her hand, and the ehrekh was drawn into it, never to be seen again. The ruby had been buried in the mountains shortly after, and the tribe never returned to that place.

Ibrahim's only response was to raise one bushy eyebrow. “You think this true?”

“Do
you
?”

Ibrahim shrugged. “So why have you come here if you know what needs to be done?”