Melanie Rawn: The Diviner

He summoned the nurse, who was so terrified she actually cast a glance at the bed rather than keeping her eyes strictly on her charge. The Sheyqa glanced at the eunuch, who nodded; a new nurse would be found by morning. When they were alone with Ammineh’s corpse, Nizzira said quietly, “Find Azzad. Find him, and kill him.”

“As Your Glorious Majesty wills it, so shall it be done.”

He could stay, and die. He could flee, and live.

If he stayed, he could accuse the Sheyqa in public and have all know what had been done to the al-Ma’aliq.

Which everybody would know anyway. And nothing would be done about it. The Sheyqa was the Sheyqa.

If he fled, he could establish himself—somewhere, somehow—and one day take his vengeance.

Which was precisely what the Sheyqa feared and why he would be hunted.

He had nothing. With the deaths of the al-Ma’aliq, he was nothing.

But the thought of Nizzira wondering—wondering for years, never safe, never at rest, always wondering when and where and how Azzad al-Ma’aliq would strike—filled him with hot, vicious glee. He must survive.

Khamsin snorted softly, as if to remind him that they were still in the capital city of Rimmal Madar and within easy reach of the Sheyqa. Revenge was for the future—if Azzad lived that long.

And if living required money, vengeance required a fortune.

In pearls, perhaps?

Two hours later, so covered in midden filth that Khamsin’s nostrils flared in disgust, Azzad had the pearl necklace tucked once more in his sash.

It lacked several hours till dawn, and in those hours he could be halfway to the western coast. Instead, he turned south. South, to The Steeps that marked the border of Rimmal Madar and the Gabannah Chaydann—the Devil’s Graveyard. No one would ever look for him there.

In the city of Dayira Azreyq, dawn was stained red-brown. All that morning people muffled their coughing, shuttered windows in vain against thick drifting smoke, and thanked Acuyib that the only fires in their own homes were in ovens and lamps. Anyone who had cut himself anytime in the past week sent up similar praise that the wound was not a sword or an axe through the chest. And those with sicknesses of the belly or bowels paused in their misery to be grateful that only spoiled meat or too much wine afflicted them, and not the Sheyqa’s poison.

In the way of great cities, small words traveled quickly. A servant, a day laborer, a lover sneaking out a back door, a cook venturing early to the markets—small words, they were, fire and swords and poison , connected to the once-great name of al-Ma’aliq.

Dayira Azreyq came alive more slowly than usual, but it did come alive; and for all that nearly a thousand al-Ma’aliq had died the night before, it was a day like any other—all its inhabitants furtively thankful for another day of life.

Thus the evil was accomplished. For a jealous Sheyqa’s obsession, the al-Ma’aliq were exterminated, from the aged patriarch Kallad to the real ruler of the family, Za’avedra el-Ibrafidia, to Kallad’s infant great-great granddaughter, only five days old.

The el-Ma’aliq who had married outside the family were also killed, and their children with them, and their husbands as well for safety’s sake. From the mountain castle’s fastness to the broad estates in the lowlands, from Beit Ma’aliq’s splendor to the small stone huts of the workers, those connected to the al-Ma’aliq by blood or loyalty or employment were obliterated. Within a handful of days, the dead numbered more than four thousand. No one spoke a word against the slaughter.

The Sheyqa’s servants who were not the Sheyqa’s servants vanished hence they had come, with no one the wiser to their true identities.

Yet for all her triumph, Sheyqa Nizzira al-Ammarizzad could not rest.

Azzad al-Ma’aliq yet lived.

Upon reflection, the Gabannah Chaydann had probably been a stupid idea.

The heat was punishing by day, and it seemed that winter reached out early and greedy this year to grip the night. Azzad traveled from dusk to dawn, shivering; from daybreak to nightfall he sweated in the sparse shade of the rocks, having ejected those with prior claim: snakes, lizards, gazelles, and—once—a sand-tiger, the formidable rimmal nimir. He’d have scars on his thigh for life from that encounter.

The pearls seemed to grow heavier as he traveled. Ridiculous notion, going after jewels to buy food and water in a place that had no food or water, let alone anywhere to buy them. He’d filled his waterskin and his belly at one of the rivulets outside the city that fed the reservoir, and left a pearl in payment for the bread and haunch he stole from an outlying village. But a mere three days into his journey to nowhere, the heat was melting the flesh from his bones. The third night, after the water ran out, he walked beside his tired horse, both of them stumbling with fatigue and thirst across hard, stony ground.

And this wasn’t even the worst of the desert. That lay beyond The Steeps, with only one negotiable pass where caravans plodded from late autumn to early spring. Azzad hoped the first of them was even now crossing the western lands beyond the desert, bound for Rimmal Madar. If he encountered them in the pass and asked nicely enough, they might part with some food and water for another of the pearls.

The fourth evening he was lucky.

So hungry and weary that only instinct and long training kept him in the saddle, he nearly fell out of it when he heard the screeching of a hawk. Within ten paces, as he was still trying to calm his racing heartbeats, came the clattering of stones and a pitiable scream of a different kind. He froze, at first fearing the Qoundi Ammar, then cursed himself for a fool. If they were near, there would be no noise; all he would have heard was his own death rattle.

Trailing the rattle of stones, he soon saw that Acuyib had sent a rock-slide to trap a gazelle near a hidden pool of brackish water, breaking its leg and leaving it to a slow death. Azzad gave profound thanks for the gazelle and the water as he killed the suffering animal. Long experience of the ritual hunt at the mountain castle of the al-Ma’aliq made him swift and sure in slicing up the meat, but as he worked, he fought back renewed grief. He would never again ride out with his father and uncles, brother and cousins, on the annual parody of a barbarian festival of long ago. The leaving of the castle and the returning to it three days later were always comical events, with the men strutting and the women fluttering and everyone giggling as the women pretended to scream in horror at all the trophy heads. His mother was particularly adept at miming a gracefully ornamental faint, right into his father’s waiting arms.

Azzad’s movements were vicious as he stabbed chunks of meat onto a stick for roasting. Never again, never again . He kept telling himself how lucky he was to be alive, but as the tiny fire died out and he stared up at the stars, he wondered if sparing his life had been a mercy or a prank. He had nothing; he was nothing. The wealth and position—and the brilliance and laughter—of the proud al-Ma’aliq were no more.

At dawn of the sixth day he emerged from the pass, and immediately turned Khamsin around again to take shelter in an outcropping of rock, cursing himself yet again for a fool. Down below The Steeps were tents of crimson—the color of the Sheyqa—decorated with a pattern of swords and axes embroidered in white wool. This was the camp of the Ammarad, the tribe from which Sheyqa Nizzira’s line had sprung. He could not elude them. The Ammarad were camped here for the season, exacting the Sheyqa’s taxes and tribute of their own from every caravan. He could hide the ring marking him as al-Ma’aliq, he could tear off every bronze tassel from Khamsin’s bridle and saddle, he could claim any other name in the world—and he might get away with it. But once they learned, as they inevitably would, that their kinswoman Nizzira wanted him dead, they would remember that a stranger had passed by in the wrong direction for this time of year—toward the desert, not toward Dayira Azreyq—and come after him. Their expertise in tracking a man through trackless wastes was legendary.