The Diviner

he was an inconveniently placed rock. All around him was the same disgusting pungent odor that had nearly turned his stomach in the forester’s hut. Nearly became definitely, and he curled onto his side and vomited.

This simply could not be happening to him. He kept telling himself that as the hoofbeats faded into the distance. He was Sheyqir Qamar al-Ma’aliq of Tza’ab Rih. Ayia, that didn’t matter as much as the fact that he had never fallen off a horse in his life. His arm hurt and his head ached, his blistered feet felt swollen inside his boots, and he was lying in the dirt with his cheek in his own stinking sickness, and there was a new pain all at once in his thigh that he didn’t understand. He began to wish he’d never been born.

“So much for your career as a soldier,” a voice said some unknown amount of time later.

Qamar’s body twitched fitfully, and his eyelids cracked open, and he saw one of his Shagara relations regarding him with sardonic brown eyes in a golden-skinned face.

“Whatever would your mother say?” the man went on.

Qamar considered it a genuine pity that he’d survived to eventually find out.

The man folded his arms across his chest, and Qamar saw the light shift on the hazziri around his neck. The stones were different from those he was used to seeing a healer wear. “Sheyqir Allim might have a pertinent word or two, as well.”

Qamar squeezed his eyes shut. His arm and thigh no longer hurt, but he still felt slightly sick, and the repulsive barbarian smell seemed stuck inside his nostrils of its own explicit will, for there could not be anyone among the healers who used native plants. Perhaps they were treating enemy wounded in the dawa’an sheymma. The stink really was insupportable; he wondered how anyone not born in this cursed land could endure it.

A different voice made Qamar’s eyes open in startlement. “Find out who this one is. The look of him is right, but perhaps he’s a Tariq or Azwadh cousin who merely looks like one of us.”

Empress Mairid had always maintained that her youngest son was in possession of a fairly good mind, even though he seldom chose to use it. He didn’t intentionally use it now, but it worked all the same.

They didn’t know who he was.

If nothing else about him, they ought to have recognized Azzad alMa’aliq’s topaz ring, if not al-Gallidh’s pearl.

These people were not Shagara healers.

No, they were Shagara—did not the first man have the eyes and golden skin, and had not the second man said one of us? Possibly they were healers—Qamar’s lack of pain suggested it.

But they were not Shagara healers of Tza’ab Rih.

There was only one conclusion, and it didn’t please him at all that his mother was right, and his mind had turned out to be a rather fine one after all, even when he wasn’t trying to use it.

These people were the renegade Shagara who lived no one knew where and did no one knew what. Tza’ab Rih had not heard from them in years—ever since Ab’ya Alessid had rid the land of them most gladly.

Ayia, they were living in Cazdeyya, and they were practicing the traditional Shagara arts of healing and of hazziri, and Qamar had the dismal feeling that Tza’ab Rih was going to hear from them again, and in very unpleasant fashion, once they found out his name.

Or they might just kill him, the way those of their angry persuasion had killed his great-grandfather Azzad.

Qamar had indeed been captured by that faction of the Shagara who had long since vanished into the barbarian lands. They were healers, and they crafted hazziri, but things had changed in the long years since the first of them fled Tza’ab Rih.

For one thing, they had learned perforce the properties and uses of the plants now available to them and had adapted their magic accordingly, for the time-honored methods and formulas were useless in a country where none of the familiar herbs and flowers grew.

For another, they were too poor to work in gold and silver and costly gemstones. Their talishann were hammered into bronze, brass, and tin, decorated with humble agates and quartzes. They also used paper and various inks. But Qamar did not discover this for quite some time.

What had not changed was their loathing for anything to do with the al-Ma’aliq, whom they held responsible for what they saw as the perversion of Shagara magic that had caused their fathers and grandfathers to exile themselves rather than countenance it.

Qamar had no need to be told this. Being an honorable man, he at once proclaimed his own rank and ancestry, and any recounting of his story that asserts otherwise is a lie.

—HAZZIN AL-JOHARRA, Deeds of Il-Ma’anzuri, 813

19

He had absolutely no intention of telling them who he was. The influence of the local language had changed pronunciation, shifted emphasis, and added words to the language spoken by these Shagara, but two generations had not been enough to alter their speech so much that Qamar could not understand and then begin to copy it. Those two generations, however, had also seen the loss of several things and the introduction of several more.

They had lost knowledge of the specifics of the al-Ma’aliq. Most specifically, the ring that had been Azzad’s and then Alessid’s and was now Qamar’s. Gold, set with a dark tawny topaz carved with the family’s leaf symbol, it would have proclaimed his real name to anyone in Tza’ab Rih. It meant nothing to these people; neither did the al- Gallidh pearl. And so he was able to give them a name they had already surmised might be his. To them he was Qamar Tariq, whose Shagara father and great-grandfather had married into that tribe. This explained his coloring. He gave silent thanks to Acuyib for not making him Haddiyat—for this came only through the female line, and all sons of Shagara women had Shagara as a last name (except for the al-Ma’aliq line, of course; this was another grudge these people had against his family, the replacement of their ancient name), and trying to explain being a Tariq and also gifted was not a thing he felt equal to attempting.

It was difficult for a naturally gregarious, relentlessly glib young man to be deprived of his most effective arsenal. Long accustomed to talking his way into or out of just about anything, he was canny enough to know that he must keep his mouth shut until he understood much, much more about these Shagara. This meant he had to listen.

He had never been very good at listening. Neither were these people inclined to give him much to hear. When they spoke to him, it was to give orders or to demand answers to their questions. He meekly followed the first and resisted the second for quite a while by pretending not to comprehend. By the time this gambit could no longer be reasonably employed, he had worked out a story. He’d always been good at that sort of thing, as well, but this was not a fabrication made up on the spot to wiggle out of a belting. This was for his life.

Qamar knew very well that if they found out who he really was, the best he could hope for was to be sold for ransom, either to the Tza’ab or the Cazdeyyans. Neither had much appeal. His mother would pay whatever was asked, but the humiliation of his capture and the manner in which his part in the battle had ended before it even began made him want to wrap his arms around his head and vanish into one of the dungeons these barbarians were so clever at building. As for the Cazdeyyans—should they be the ones to ransom him, they would either barter with his mother for an even larger ransom or kill him. His death was what he expected the Shagara here would prefer; poor as they obviously were, their loathing for anything al-Ma’aliq would demand his transport back to Joharra in an astonishing number of pieces.

His plan, such as it was, must be to regain his strength, learn everything he could, and then escape.

And so he listened, and when instinct told him they would accept his excuse of incomprehensible accents no longer, he answered their questions with what he felt was a rather ingenious story.

Yes, he was a soldier of the Tza’ab. A cavalry officer, in fact. No insignia of rank? Have a look at these