The Diviner

—”

“Meya dolcho,” she said with a worried frown, “what are you talking about?”

So he explained it to her, the curious thing he had heard about from Ab’ya Alessid years after the fact. The fountain, the drawing spoiled by blood from a cut finger, the dead fountain and the dead artist and the dead ashes in the hearth.

Solanna stared wide-eyed as he spoke. “Do you think—no, it’s not possible.”

“Isn’t it? Fadhil was burning the drawings he didn’t like or couldn’t use, including the one with his blood on it—the one that had reawakened the fountain.”

“With a picture?”

“Why not? We do it with words and symbols, why not a literal depiction of the thing we wish to influence?”

Suddenly she gripped his arm. “Or the person,” she whispered. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? You could draw a person, and in such detail that it would look real, and—and—”

“And I could do to it whatever I pleased,” he said slowly. “I can do it now, with a name and ink and the right talishann and my own blood—but those are mere curse-tablets, like the Hrumman used to make. Piles of them are found every so often where their temples used to be. But they were superstition, useless. Powerless. If a likeness could be made that looks absolutely real—”

“Stop. I will hear no more of this.” And to emphasize her determination, she rose from the chair beside him and went into their reception room and stayed there the rest of the evening.

So she did not hear his other story, the one about burning his hand as he wrote the letter to Rihana and Ra’amon for Ab’ya. His blood had surely been on that paper commanding them to rule wisely and gently, to unite his name with her power for the benefit of Joharra. Had they not done just that? Even when logic suggested otherwise, they had found ways to combine their strengths and—

—and he had even playfully included talishann for love and fidelity and fertility and happiness, and they had known all of those things in abundant measure.

But Rihana and Ra’amon were both dead, and Allil was ruling unwisely and ungently on behalf of the next queen, who was years away from taking power herself—if Allil was willing to give it up, which Qamar very much doubted.

Neither did Solanna hear his further conclusion: if someone had thrown that letter into a fire or ripped it up, was it likely that Qamar would not be alive?

In all the years since that night, he had never spoken of those things again, except to ask a casual question of one of his teachers. What was done with old pages? Once a healing had been accomplished, what became of the paper used to accomplish it?

“Back into the slurry, of course, to be used again. We’ve always done that—ever since the first years here, when we didn’t have mountains of paper to waste.”

So the blood was diluted, not actually destroyed by fire or its substance ripped apart by tearing the fibers into which it had soaked.

No one knew. No one knew about drawings, and no one knew about destruction.

Qamar kept these things to himself.

The original Shagara magic, in the desert wastes, had been medicine—potions and unguents and dressings made with precision and care—and then the hazziri, made with Haddiyat blood. Here, the medicine still obtained, though with new and different plants replacing the old familiar ones. The hazziri were much the same as well, though the materials used had changed drastically. From gold, silver, and gems to tin and brass, the traditional arts had been translated as best they had been able. But these Shagara had added something no one in Tza’ab Rih had ever even dreamed of—and whatever isolated instances might have provided the clues, no one had put everything together.

Qamar had recognized the entirety of it. The vastness of the magic that no one else had ever guessed. The art of the healer added to the art of the talishann, with quickening blood to kindle the magic, could find its ultimate potency in art.

As he researched and learned and organized his findings, he realized that in hundreds of instances the Shagara here had adapted old formulas without fully understanding the additional significances of the indigenous plants. Solanna knew much of the lore her people had assembled over the years; in remote villages, lacking formally trained healers, most people learned at least the basics and usually rather more than the basics. And whereas every healer—Shagara or otherwise—knew that the poppy was used for sleep potions, Solanna told him that among her people, the white poppy brought the gift of consolation and the yellow, success. How such things had originated, no one knew. But Qamar made note of them all, and through the years had been indulged in his obsession by Miqelo and other friends who traveled for the Shagara, who brought back not just herbs and flowers but books.

In one thing he was stymied. He could not draw. There were people here who had talent and tried to teach him, but it was all quite hopeless. He didn’t dare experiment. What if he had asked someone to draw one of the climbing roses in exact detail, only with summer flowers heavy on its canes, and then added his own talishann and blood—and what if the roses changed, right in front of everyone? Temptation gnawed at him to try it, but his wife’s reaction to the little he’d shared with her cautioned otherwise.

He spent a great deal of time walking the hills near the fortress, not to collect specimens but to escape the noise and bustle that necessarily resulted when hundreds of people lived in such close proximity. He needed to think. He needed to make sense of what he had learned, what he had intuited, and what he suspected might be true. He could not act on any of it until he was sure. But there was always so much more to be discovered, so many things to compare and balance with each other.

One thing became clearer to him the more he considered it. To influence a person, that most wondrous and complex of Acuyib’s creations, a drawing would have to be not just accurate to the last detail but done in colors. The rosy flush of cheeks and lips, the dapple of freckles across a nose, the highlights of red or gold or bronze in dark hair—all these things would have to be depicted. So it was fortunate that he had turned out to be good at mixing inks. He secured a small chamber one floor down from their living quarters, stocked it with the usual and the unusual for making ink, and put to use his ever-growing knowledge. Solanna called this room the Inkwell, more than pleased that her husband’s experiments were not cluttering up her home.

Qamar spent many long hours fussing with various recipes, even though he knew that ink would never be able to capture the delicate coloring of a human face, however subtle the artist. There had to be an answer to the difficulty, and he must be the one to find it—for the rest of the Shagara could not learn that there was any difficulty at all.

Sheyqa Nizhria grew weary of waiting for replies to her letters. Her next action was to send proclamations to all parties. Those who accepted her, she would not annihilate. Those who defied her would be destroyed. These were her terms.

She received many replies this time. All of them defied her, sometimes in language that had never before been read aloud in the presence of a Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.

The Empress of Tza’ab Rih sent no answer at all.

With the early spring, ships sailed. Landing on isolated shores, they offloaded thousands of the Sheyqa’s warriors, including a large contingent of Qoundi Ammar and their magnificent white horses. When word of the invading forces reached Joharra, Cazdeyya, Elleon, Taqlis, and the new city-state of Shagarra, men who had been training all winter in anticipation of just this event began to march.

This was precisely what the Sheyqa wanted.

Miqelo and his son Tanielo returned early and shaken from their first expedition after the snowmelt. More than half the goods loaded onto pack animals for sale in towns and cities was still securely in place, and on seeing this the crafters groaned. There would be no profits this year from the rolls of paper or the pretty tin hazziri wind chimes, the lush woven woolens or the hundreds of bottles of medicine coveted by traditional physicians. Worse, there would be no sacks of fine grains, no bolts of new cloth, no citrus fruits or dried dates or figs. The only thing Miqelo brought back with him was news. None of it was good.

For the first time in years, Qamar began to feel himself an outsider. Not just gharribeh, foreign, but