The Diviner

“He’ll have to go for help,” Qamar told the girl through the barred window. “If you’re careful, you can slip out then. Will you lock the damned door and get out of here?”

She said nothing, but in the darkness he heard the clink of metal on stone on the floor within his room. He had to wait for the next flash of lightning to be sure. But it was indeed the key.

No one accosted him the next day to demand what had gone on in the middle of the night. Thus he assumed that Solanna had safely reached her own quarters, wherever they might be. Over the next few days, on his walks around the rain-grayed alleys, he looked for possible “guest” accommodations—or, better still, a glimpse of her—but had no luck.

As for the key—ayia, guards who got drunk on duty were also capable of losing keys. That was what got shouted the next morning, and Qamar was disinclined to correct the mistake.

He kept it in his left boot, and Solanna’s knife in the right.

The building in which he was not quite a prisoner but not quite a guest was a narrow construction crammed against another building several stories taller. The entire fortress always smelled cold and harsh, for everything here was built of stone and iron. He missed the sweet fragrances of wooden floors and staircases polished with oils. But he supposed that this, like the stinking salve and the pungent herbs that flavored the food, was yet another example of working with what one had. The lowest floor was divided into treatment rooms and a dispensary; the second was a single large room with beds for recovering patients. The third floor’s dozen little rooms were all equipped with barred windows and lockable doors. Qamar wondered if this had been the doing of the original builders or if the Shagara had turned this floor into a prison.

One morning the healer who had Tariq forebears was the one to unlock Qamar’s door. After a silent walk downstairs, he was ushered into a room almost as small as the one he inhabited upstairs.

“Please sit.”

He did so, in a comfortable wooden chair at a table laid out with paper, pens, and bottles of different colored inks. Smiling brightly, he asked, “Am I to write my own ransom note?”

“You may be worth more than money.” From a pocket he drew a much-folded sheet of paper. “Copy these symbols using the green ink.”

What in the Name of Acuyib the Inscrutable was going on here? During boyhood he had spent a year with his Shagara relatives, but having no talent for even the most rudimentary talishann he’d been perfectly happy tending and training the horses instead. His Haddiyat cousins were forever writing and rewriting the protections at the family residences, and a few times Qamar had been bored enough with his other pursuits to watch. None of the symbols on this page looked familiar at all.

Shrugging, he opened the bottle of green ink, noting that the stopper was carved of green moss agate into the shape of a rather pretty flower he didn’t recognize. He dipped a pen and made his copy.

“Now write my name at the top. Zario Shagara.”

Qamar glanced up. “That’s unusual.”

“It commemorates the Cazdeyyan nobleman who gave us this fortress. One Shagara male at a time, and only one, bears the name. Do you want me to spell it?”

“Please.” He wrote as he was told. When he looked up, expecting further instructions, Zario was holding a small, thin-bladed knife.

“Your hand,” he said.

Qamar stared at him.

“I need a few drops of your blood. Hold out your hand.”

He very nearly blurted out “No!” They must think—they thought he was—but he wasn’t, he couldn’t possibly—

He tried to remember what most people knew about Shagara magic. He was wearing hazziri, so he had to know something, but how much?

“Your great-grandfather Azzad didn’t believe until it was demonstrated to him over and over again,” his great-grandmother Leyliah had told him a long time ago. “Ayia, a very stubborn man! Your grandfather Alessid, of course, was told directly when Abb Shagara thought it time to do so. And now I will tell you. It is not just the talishann, nor the skill of the maker, nor the metal, nor the stones that make hazziri potent. Neither is it only the particular combination of herbs or flowers or the amount of wine or water or vinegar in a medication that gives it the power to heal.”

They thought him Shagara, and he was—but not that sort of Shagara. He was certain of it. So let Zario do whatever it was he would do, conduct whatever test this might be.

Qamar shrugged and held out his hand.

Zario didn’t prick Qamar’s finger. He drew a long, shallow scratch across his own palm. He watched the blood well up, a meditative and bitter smile curving his lips. Then he wiped the blade between his fingers and seized Qamar’s hand and pricked his thumb. Before Qamar had time to cry out his surprise, Zario had squeezed drops of blood onto each of the six symbols and both words of his name.

“What do you—how dare you—” He looked from the smear of blood on his thumb to the Shagara’s face—but blocking his gaze was the man’s palm. His clean, whole, uninjured palm, without a mark on it.

“But I’m not!” he cried. “I’m not one of you—I’m not like you!”

The old man who was not really an old man eyed him with a certain grim satisfaction. “All evidence to the contrary,” he said.

“No—it’s not possible—” He cast about frantically for some excuse. Some reason. Some escape. “It was your blood, not mine—your blood still on the blade—”

“Are you calling me a clumsy fool, boy? I’ve done the testing these twenty and more years. It’s one of the privileges of bearing my name. There is only one of me, you see, and so only one person that the signs and the blood and the paper and the ink can touch.”

Qamar staggered up from his chair, dimly heard it crash behind him, backed away from Zario’s shrewd, pitiless gaze. “No! I can’t be one of you!”

“Certain of that, are you? Left a fine little collection of bastards behind you in Tza’ab Rih, did you?” He snorted a laugh, then drew himself up and squared his shoulders and said in cold and formal tones, “Qamar Tariq, it is my honor to inform you that you have been blessed by Acuyib and have the right to use the name Shagara.”

His first encounter with Solanna Grijalva came when both were guests, or prisoners, or perhaps both, at the Shagara fortress, from which he escaped with great cunning. It would be more than half a year before he saw her again. Little is known of that portion of his life, although rumors have gradually transformed over time to legends, none of which are true. The most repellent of these stories would have it that he slaughtered a dozen or more Shagara during his escape from the fortress, and spent the next autumn and winter carousing from town to town. Any recounting of his life and deeds that asserts these things is a lie.

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

20

After having it proved to him that he was Haddiyat, that he would age quickly and painfully, that at not quite twenty-two his life was half over, he spent three days alone in his room at the Shagara fortress. The door was no longer locked. This was a good thing, for it took less time to open it when more wine was delivered, and speedy delivery was second only to generous quantity in Qamar’s bloodshot eyes.

On the fourth day, no wine arrived. Downstairs Zario Shagara was waiting for him in the room where his blood had proved what he was. It often happens like this, Zario said. Some cannot face the truth at first, he said. I remember once a boy only a bit younger than you broke into the dispensary and swallowed everything he could stuff into his mouth.