Chapter Four
Eyul rode through the narrow streets of the Maze. He kept his camel to a slow pace along the central path, making it tread around the channel where the sewage ran, or rather where it lingered, stagnant and polluting the night. Despite the camel’s protests, he held it from the easier ground to either side.
Long ago, in this place, Eyul first learned to kill, his mentor Halim guiding his hand. In the darkness of the alleyways, whose black mouths yawned to the left and to the right, he had sliced lives from their owners. The Maze made him feel old. In the forty years since he ran here as a boy, nothing had changed: same stench, same murmured night-song, distant laughter, muffled violence, quick feet.
Eyul didn’t fear an attack, but why risk one? Take the path of least resistance. His camel resisted, as camels always do, giving out a loud snort of protest. He kicked it with both heels, hard, and kept the centreline.
His thoughts returned to the palace whilst his eyes remained on the alleyways. Who would employ Carriers as assassins? Who wanted the vizier dead? Eyul goaded his camel on, cursing at the throbbing in his leg where the Carrier’s knife had caught him.
Getting slow, old man, getting slow.
A movement in the moonlight shadow, liquid and threatening. “Do you really want to die here, my friend?” Eyul addressed the darkness. He heard the whisper of retreating footsteps. When robbed of surprise, most inhabitants of the Maze were apt to withdraw.
The Carrier had also run. Eyul had not given chase; that wouldn’t have been wise, not with a bleeding leg. Besides, anyone who could get into the Red Room would have had help; they would have been hidden long before he’d limped along their trail. Odd. Most odd. The patterning might not always take the life from a Carrier, but it took his fear of death. Why would a Carrier run?
Eyul followed the snaking path of the Old Way, passing a pyre tended by a lone Blue Shield. The royal guardsman wore a scarf around his mouth and nose to block the acrid smoke. The Carriers inside had fallen to nothing more than blackened bits of bone, yet he continued to stoke the flames. He didn’t look up; he didn’t notice Eyul leaving Nooria by the Low Door, where any man, even the emperor’s assassin, might escape the snare of the city walls without undue attention.
“Who goes? And on what business?” Another soldier, gap-toothed and limping, emerged from the gatehouse. His concern was only for show; he shone his lantern on the camel, not the rider.
“My name is Rinn, and I go to count the sand.” Eyul gave the old reply, a nod to legend and custom. He leaned from the saddle and placed three jade coins in the soldier’s hand. The man’s breath stank, fouler even than the sewers of the Maze.
“Go in peace, Rinn.” The soldier turned to raise the gate-bar.
Eyul’s leg throbbed, and he wondered if the patterning would enter him through the cut. Perhaps Tuvaini had more than one reason for sending him away. Eyul remembered struggling with the Carrier, held close, eye to eye, before he slid the emperor’s Knife over that unclean throat. The hermit will help me. For a price. Eyul shuddered. The hermit always had his price.
It would be twenty days across the sands to the Cliffs of Sight. He had his water and his parasol, his blankets and his tent. And a good bow and his Knife, always those. But he wouldn’t need them yet; outside the city wall, marketers waited to sell fermented juice, roasted goat, leg of dog, pickled eyes, and a thousand other delicacies. Even at this hour, when honest men lay abed, Eyul’s passage stirred the vendors into action. They stepped from tent to stall, sing-songing their wares, lifting the lids on blackened pots.
Eyul twitched his nose, searching through the scents. The oily barks of duggan tree and sand-birch smoked on low fires, flavouring the meats above. His mouth watered. An old man dusted strips of dry-roasted camel-hump with pollen. Eyul caught the scent of desert-rose and his stomach growled. He had long since learned to tolerate the bland foods of the palace, but he had never begun to like them.
The old man looked up as Eyul passed. “Two jade. Best rose-camel. Two jade only.”
Two jade? The man must have heard Eyul’s stomach, too.
“For two jade I would want your tent as well.” Eyul kept his eyes on the road.
“One! One jade, noble traveller. One jade, two strips!” the old man called from behind him now.
Eyul’s camel greeted the offer with a long and undulating belch.
“On my way back, friend. If I become rich in the desert.” He kicked his beast on past the souk, the common traders’ tents, and the last well.
The moon made white crests of the dunes, marching across a black sea. Eyul marked his way by the Scorpion, the seven stars beneath which his mother had birthed him. In no time at all the clamour of Nooria lay in memory. Even his unruly camel felt the new peace and stopped its complaining. Soon only the sigh of the wind rippled the silence.
So. The hermit will not be pleased to see me again. A man seeks solitude in the vastness of the desert, and what happens? Men travel mile upon mile to plague him with visitations. A boy-prince seeks only love and company, and his family entombs him alone in the teeming palace.
At first Eyul thought he saw a sandcat perched atop a dune; then, as the moonlight revealed more detail, he saw it was a camel, half-hidden behind the crest. He made out a saddle and reached for his quiver as he scoured the sands for a rider. He spotted a white-robed figure, almost lost in the darkness at the base of the dune, motionless, facing him.
Eyul stopped his camel at a hundred paces and nocked an arrow to his bow. He took reassurance in the creak as the recurved horn bent to his pull. Power in his hands.
“What business have you in the White Sea?” he called out.
A woman’s voice answered him. “I wait for you, Eyul of Nooria, son of Klemet, Fifty-third Knife-Sworn.”
A pause. “Come closer, then.”
The wind billowed her robes as she stepped across the sand. Her hood fluttered, then fell free, allowing dark curls to twist in the air. She came within twenty paces. Skin like roasted butter-nuts, eyes darker still: from the Islands.
She held his gaze.
He pointed his bow to her right, but kept it drawn. “You have used my name, but have not offered your own; that is a rudeness in the desert.”
She bent her knee slightly, but the curve of her mouth did not suggest humility. “Apologies. Amalya. Of the Tower.”
A wizard. He returned his aim to her throat. “Amalya. Go back to your Tower. Tell your masters that my business is not theirs to supervise.”
“You will deny the Tower?” She was brave to smile so in the face of his arrow, and braver still to step forwards, holding out one hand. A hand that held a Star of Cerana, sparkling in the moonlight. “Will you deny the one who gave me this?”
Eyul relaxed the grip on his bow, feeling the ache in his arm for the first time. Who had given her that Star? Beyon? His mother? Tuvaini? He felt old once more.
“You are as brave and obedient as I have been told,” she said. “I am glad to have such a companion on my journey to the hermit’s lair.”
He took a moment to secure his bow, his surprise hidden in the practised movement. He spurred his camel towards the dune. “And what can I expect from my own companion?”
Amalya raised her face to the moon, eyes closed, her feet finding their own way. “Well, I can cook.”
The scents of the marketplace lingered on Eyul’s robes. He took a deep breath. “This is good,” he said, “but surely you haven’t been sent to fix my meals.”
She laughed at that, a velvet noise, and tucked the Star in a pocket.
Eyul turned his eyes to the sands, looking for more surprises.
“We are safe here, gri she said, as if reading his mind.
A cold wave swept over him. “And if I ask who sent you?”
“I would not answer.” She opened her eyes as if waking. “I am not here to hurt you, Eyul.”
Before he had time to linger on those words, she spoke again, in a conversational tone. “My camel’s not very cooperative. I fear I may have to walk across the desert.”
“I’ll help you.” Eyul pulled the half-staff from his saddle-pack. “I speak fluent camel.”
