Star of Cursrah Page 8

  From high on the valley road the young citizens could see the fabulous library and college, a long, low building anchored by stair-stepped ziggurats and painted a blinding white. At the city’s center, on its own water-ringed island, glowed the fabulous Palace of the Phoenix, rich with gold leaf. Radiating outward streamed plazas, arches, lush shaded gardens, solemn gated necropolises, the domed temple of Shar and the crescent moon temple of Selûne, and more. The city of ten thousand spilled up the slopes in scores of high-walled mansions, apartment houses, neat cottages, and—highest of all—ancestral tombs with their ends brightly painted or hung with floral wreathes. Only at the south did the valley’s rim dip, and there a sturdy wall was manned by the bakkal’s tiny army.

  “Anyone can see that Cursrah is prosperous,” Gheqet admitted, “but money can’t buy water that doesn’t exist.”

  “Doesn’t exist? We’ve got oceans of water. Well, lakes of it.”

  Tafir pointed across the city. Throughout the public sector, and at every home, pools and fountains and waterfalls sparkled like living things in the bright spring sunshine.

  “True, but the aqueduct water enters there,” Gheqet said, pointing higher up the valley wall where a blank stone building crouched, “where it’s channeled into underground pipes, then,”—the apprentice swept his finger toward the valley’s lowest point, where glittered a small, clear lake sporting sailboats and punts, and a tiny island sprouting a blocky building—“most of the water empties into the lake and from that pumphouse is distributed all over the city. That’s where the marid lives, the sea genie bound by Calim to oversee and protect the entire waterworks from this valley clear back to the River Agis itself, at the Mouth of Cursrah. I’ll concede, the whole waterworks is a miracle, Great Calim’s finest work, all praises to his name and so on, but think … only this water and thin winter rains keep Cursrah alive. Every drop hinges on one fragile aqueduct and one ensorcelled water genie.”

  “So? Bitrabi is immortal,” Tafir said, then yawned from a long night and day, and now a long walk.

  “Look what happened to Calim, may all mortals revere him,” Gheqet persisted. “In the Era of Skyfire he battled Memnonnar and wound up banished to the winds. Don’t you see? If one genie can be banished, so can another. If Cursrah loses Bitrabi, our marid trapped against her will in that pumphouse, it loses its water … and its way of life. No one’s even sure Great Calim guards our city these days. My master, old as he is, has never even seen Bitrabi. No one’s seen her in over fifty years. We’ve put all our eggs in one basket … or all our water into one jug.”

  “Hush, you scurvy beggars,” Yuzas Anhur, loyal defender of the crown, growled. “You speak heresy, young sir. Cursrah shall live as long as Calimshan endures.”

  Gheqet and Tafir let their faces go blank. Preoccupied with her aching leg, which was cradled by a guard walking alongside the horse, Star ignored how her captain chastised her friends.

  “Forgive my waywardness, Yuzas,” Gheqet mumbled, “I’m but a simple student with much to learn. A thousand pardons, I beg you.”

  “Accepted,” the captain ceded, “and you may put your mind at rest. Our genies will never forsake Cursrah, no more than our other sprightly beings, for they glory in serving Calim’s Cradle. From Bitrabi below to Jassan above, we’re safe as long as the sun shines.”

  Gheqet and Tafir turned their eyes upward. Jassan was another Cursrahn legend, an invisible air genie, a djinni, who patrolled the sky and kept dragons at bay—or so people reckoned, for in the city’s long history no dragon had ever come marauding. Gheqet believed in the djinni too and had been warned as a naughty child that Jassan might swoop down and eat him, and danced in the Dragon Parade every year at Jassan’s Jubilee. Lately his educated mind noted it was impossible to prove or disprove the existence of a mile-high invisible air spirit.

  Some guardian genies were seen every day, as well as other enchanted beings from planes known and unknown. In Cursrah’s parks, sylphs flitted on dragonfly wings and sang their sad songs while stwingers swung from tree branches and filched sweetmeats from picnickers. In noble kitchens, ice mephits chilled food. Down in the sewers, steam mephits cleared drains and cured odors, and at the city’s dump, elemental vermin flame-lings incinerated garbage while grigs potted rats.

  Anhur addressed Amenstar. “Your majesty, the first sama, your gracious mother and mistress of the hearth desires an audience,” he told her. “First, though, we needs conduct you to the vizars to see that leg treated.”

  “Very well,” Amenstar, tired, bored, and sore, replied, “but between visiting my mother and suffering those creepy vizars, I don’t know which is the greater punishment.…”

  “Hold still, Your Majesty, this will sting. It’s venom from horned vipers diluted in wine.”

  Amenstar squeaked as the medicine dripped into the long gash on her calf, then burned so hot tears erupted from her eyes. Panting, she clutched the marble table until the scorching eased. From shelves along the wall, eerie animal heads atop canopic jars—jackals, cobras, falcons, mountain apes, boars—stared with green feldspar eyes. In other jars stirred leeches, maggots, and worms.

  “Painful, no?” the vizar-in-waiting hissed. The priest’s hollow lisp reminded Star of a snake stuck in a well. “Life is pain.”

  Star found all vizars loathsome, and normally she avoided the priests. They were the kingdom’s healers and keepers of life and death, though heavily weighted toward death. Star had little choice but to lay on a cold marble slab in their subterranean den and endure the touch of their slimy, chilly fingers.

  “Hurry up, you,” she cursed. “I’ve duties to attend!” Any excuse to get away.

  Amenstar couldn’t even stand to look at the clerics. Every one bore a hideous shaved skull and drab robe the color of the resin that dyed mummies. Bald and brown, they resembled vultures, perhaps deliberately. The junior priests, called anatomists, almost looked human, but as they rose in the hierarchy they underwent obscene disfigurements to show their dedication to death and their rebuttal of the flesh. The higher priests had arcane sigils fire-branded onto their skulls. Later came tattoos, and it was whispered, amputation of their genitals. Certainly it was difficult for Star to tell if any of the priests were male or female, and like most she didn’t care. Decent folk left the priests alone to scurry in cellars like rats and carve up cadavers like ghouls.

  “Hurry, hurry,” cooed the vizar. Cold fingers squeezed pus from Star’s leg wound until the patient screamed. A white sigil—a scar—crinkled in the priest’s forehead as fennel-and-hyssop poultice was daubed on Star’s wound. “We hurry through this short life, Princess, and never think of the next, but the next is the only life that counts. We suffer a few short years as flesh to live an eternity as undying—”

  “Spare me your lecture, priest,” snarled the samira. “If you fish-eyed necromancers spent more time saving lives—”

  “Life and death are of little consequence, Samira. Our work is to preserve Great Calim’s memory. To that end, we even fashion mummies to serve him in the afterlife.” Picking up an obsidian scalpel and a silver bowl, the vizar kneaded Star’s thigh, hunting a vein, and added, “Royal blood such as yours, the blood of genies—”

  Realizing the vizar meant to bleed her, Star whipped her leg away, and said, “Let go! I’ll keep my royal blood in my royal leg, or do you moonstruck ghouls need it to make date-wine punch after hours?” A poor joke, since vizars were said to drink blood.

  “Hot bile only hies to the grave.”

  Sniffing, the vizar-in-waiting discarded the grim tools, then snugged the linen bandage tight; too tight, Star suspected. A junior vizar reached with a camel-hair brush to dab some yellow liquid on Star’s forehead.

  “What is that?” Star snapped.

  Unused to talking patients, the anatomist blinked and said, “Uh, I don’t know, Gracious Samira.”

  “Then keep it!”

  Star batted the dish across the lab. It smashed and splashed its c
ontents over scalpels, forceps, needles, bonesaws, retractors, and other tools of surgery and torture. Vizars also served as the bakkal’s inquisitors. Peeling prisoners for information, it was said, was the only task at which they smiled.

  “You’ll need to return each night,” gloated the vizar-in-waiting, “lest your wound turn necrotic.”

  “You don’t see enough rotten flesh?” she asked. “Have you no other entertainment?”

  Amenstar couldn’t look at the vizar-in-waiting’s glittering black eyes. No one knew how old the cleric was. Rumor said the highest vizars plied spells to arrest decay, channel negative energy, and steal others’ life-forces. They were insane, all of them. Probably the holy order attracted madmen at the start, or else the skull-branding cooked their brains. From the dank corridor, Star heard a dog or hyena whimper. Vizars also practiced vivisection, teasing animals to death to see its onset. The samira shivered.

  Swinging her legs, Amenstar hopped off the marble slab, straightened her ratty traveling clothes, and limped out of the laboratory. Four bodyguards fell into step behind her, and together they took a spiral ramp to escape the vizars’ netherworld of icy death. Warm air and light beckoned, and cedar-resin torches scented the air, but Star rubbed her hands over her arms, still cold.

  “Those slimy sons of Skahmau,” Star said to herself. “I’ll die before I ever let them touch me again.”

  “Aaaah,” warbled a fluting voice rich as a bronze bell, “there you are, dear! Is your leg all better?”

  Star craned her neck to see the speaker, for Vrinda was nine feet tall. An administrator genie, Vrinda had run the palace bureaucracy for fifteen hundred years, overseeing the affairs of generations of bakkals, yet she never seemed to age nor grow a gray hair. She’d been tasked by Great Calim when the Palace of the Phoenix was newly built. At some point the genie had lost her ethereal qualities and become solid flesh, but she still towered over humans, and her elevated features were golden as honey, her nose pert, her hair the color of ginger and braided into a train, her clothes puffy and brocaded, antique. Her huge hands were dyed red with henna, an ancient symbol of slavery, and under an arm was trapped a slate palette, her badge of office.

  “Come along, Samira dearest,” said the genie like a nursery maid. “The seamstresses await. You want to look your best for the gala, don’t you?”

  “No, I want to look hideous,” groused Amenstar. Vrinda giggled as if at a joke.

  With her leg throbbing at every step, the daughter of royalty and genies threaded winding corridors, ramps, and stairways. The Palace of the Phoenix was central to Cursrah, the city’s showpiece, but no one lived there. The royal family’s living quarters was a nearby sprawl of opulent buildings and wings, all walled and guarded from curious commoners. Because summers in the valley were relentlessly hot, and winters dismal and drizzly, and so family and servants might pass undetected, the entire center of Cursrah—palace, royal family compound, civic buildings, even temples—was honeycombed with tunnels, some even passing under the palace moat. So extensive were the tunnels that icons and arrows were painted at corners lest people become lost.

  Spiraling upward on the wide ramps, Amenstar heard the tramp of hobnailed sandals. As the soldiers came into view, they broke ranks and scuttled against the walls to let the genie and princess pass. From their tall triangular shields Star knew they were her father’s most elite troops, the Bakkal’s Heavy Infantry, a troop of four who marched downward to replace the afternoon’s guard detail.

  The Palace of the Phoenix had many homegrown mysteries and despite living here since childhood, there existed corridors and rooms Amenstar had never seen—or been allowed to see. Still, she knew some of what the soldiers guarded.

  Below even the dank catacombs of the creepy vizars, the bottommost levels under the palace held tombs of the royal dead, where Star’s ancestors lay in state as mummies, carefully wrapped in bandages and sealed in tombs, forever preserved as future attendants should Great Calim ever call them, or so she’d heard, but never seen. There might be many rooms, or who knew what, in the dark depths.

  Star’s father, as bakkal, descended those depths often, sometimes gone for days. Assisted by high vizars, he communed with the quiet dead to gain knowledge unguessed by the living. Star shuddered, glad she’d never have to pry into dead, desiccated, and probably angry brains for secrets. Still, the princess wondered.

  “Vrinda,” she asked, “have you ever been to the lower levels? The very bottom?”

  “I?” fluted the genie. “Never. That’s the bakkal’s domain. Your esteemed father holds many irons in the fire and toils for the good of the city. Even the most lasting dynasty may wither if not tended regularly, same as an olive orchard.”

  “Olive orchard? I wanted to know—uhh!” Her leg panged so sharply Amenstar cried out, despite her stubborn pride. “Those useless vizars! May the Chariot Maidens whisk those lepers to the Mother of the Nine Hells.”

  Gliding alongside, Vrinda made a tiny boosting motion with one hand and Star suddenly felt light as a bird, almost skipping on tiptoes. The giddy sensation made her stomach flutter.

  “Mustn’t keep the dressmakers waiting,” bubbled the genie. “They’ve brought enough bolts to clothe every woman in Cursrah.”

  “We have to wrap the package neatly,” grumbled Star, “to bring a high price at auction. Did ever anyone suffer as much as I?”

  “Suffering, she speaks of,” Vrinda said, her voice gaining an icy edge. “She who was swaddled in cloth-of-gold and fed caviar from a silver spoon.”

  5

  The Year of the Gauntlet

  “Gold!”

  First into the dim tunnel, Reiver pounced on a glimmer on the sand-strewn floor. Only pure gold could lie untarnished for centuries. Reiver held the coin to the light. It was round like a Calishite tardey; on one side frowned a king with a head cloth and serpent headband, big nose, and thin lips.

  “A bakkal,” murmured Amber.

  “A what?” asked the two.

  “ ‘He Who Rules from On High,’ ” Amber translated, taking the coin from Reiver. “Nowadays we call them pashas, but bakkals were thought to be genie-kin, or even demigods. What’s on the obver—ooh!” On the coin’s back glowed a ruffled bird rising from fire. “A phoenix.…”

  “This’ll cause a flurry in the gold seller’s bazaar,” Reiver said, grinning, teeth bright in his tanned face. He took the coin back from Amber. “We might have wandered into a dragon’s lair. They drag in treasure and coins fall out of their scutes.”

  “So do people’s bones,” sniped Amber.

  “Don’t speak of dragons,” Hakiim hissed. “It’s bad luck.”

  “You must have elven blood, Reive,” Amber said, happy to change the subject, “you’ve the eyes of a lynx. I can barely—Vipers of Kalil!”

  Her eyes having adjusted, Amber shifted her capture staff to pick up a white oblong. The skull leered at her, either a dog or wolf with a blunt muzzle and bone-crushing teeth. She tossed the relic away.

  “Awful,” she said. “This place is like a tomb.”

  Ignoring Amber, Hakiim raised his eyebrows at the coin in Reiver’s hand and said, “Share and share alike?”

  “Certainly. Next one’s yours,” Reiver said and slipped the coin into one of many pouches. “Let’s hunt up another.”

  Edging past the men, Amber squinted down the tunnel, which descended slowly but steadily. How far and how deep? she wondered. “First,” she said, “let’s strike a li—Bhaelros take me!”

  The daughter of pirates had brushed something with her hip. It moved. Wary of snakes, she flinched.

  Too late. The tripwire parted with a pung!

  Stone grated on stone, as a creak and groan sounded deep within the walls. Dust trickled from the ceiling. Amber shouted a warning. Hakiim whirled to dash for open air. Reiver, who survived by quick reflexes, rammed his hands against his friends and shoved. Amber and Hakiim lurched headlong, deeper into the tunnel, and dropped onto their h
ands and knees. Reiver flopped between them. Behind, the world crashed down.

  Where they’d stood a second before, a stone block big as an oxcart fell into the corridor with a resounding crash. The impact lofted the intended victims a foot off the floor. Other blocks, no doubt cantilevered against the first, tilted, slid, and crashed atop. The grinding and subsequent thuds boomed like explosions in the travelers’ ears as they crawled deeper into the tunnel to escape the dust. Instinctively they yanked their kaffiyehs across their faces, and Reiver clutched his companions’ sleeves.

  “Stop,” the thief cautioned. “That’s far enough. There may be more traps.”

  Frozen, they hunkered in darkness, waiting for the blocks to stop crashing and sliding. Billowing dust stung their eyes and made their noses run. They hunched their backs uselessly lest giant blocks drop on them. Gradually, scarcely breathing, digging dust from their ears and eyes, they guessed the cave-in had subsided and rose stiffly, sneezing and wheezing.

  Batting the swirling air, they saw that the entrance was not far away. Early evening sunlight leaked through cracks and made dust motes dance, but jumbled blocks as big as hayricks blocked the corridor, the cracks too small to crawl through.

  “Ogham’s eyes! I would have been crushed running for the outside,” panted Hakiim. “How did you know?”

  “Common sense, a lucky guess,” Reiver whispered. “Small traps nail a person on the spot. Big traps set the trigger at the far side so the whole party is—”

  “Shhh!” Amber squeaked. “Something moved!”

  A sound, part slithering, part skittering, and part chittering, came from just ahead and froze them. With a hand, Amber shooed Reiver and Hakiim against the opposite wall so slanting sunlight could lance into the depths.