Empire of Sand Read online

  That kind of torture had the strength to shatter anyone. But Amun was not shattered. He was whole and strong, lying next to her on the floor of the tent, wide awake, breathing his careful, even breaths. Despite his self-hatred he had reached for her hand. Despite it, he had offered her a little time, a little mercy. He wanted goodness and tenderness—he craved it, starving with loneliness as he was—and that fissure in his strength was a tool at Mehr’s disposal.

  I could use him, Mehr thought, a thrill running up her spine. It felt like something akin to hunger. It would not take much. The Maha had bound him with vows written into his skin and his soul. But Mehr could bind him too. All it would take was a little kindness.

  She could place a hand on his back now. She could apologize again. I’m sorry. Let her voice soften. I didn’t mean to hurt you.

  She could turn him to her own ends so easily. And she deserved a shield, didn’t she? She was so very alone out here, among enemies and strangers. Would it be so wrong to ensure that Amun was on her side?

  A voice echoed through her head: People are not tools to be used, Lady Mehr.

  Nahira had told her that when she had discovered how Mehr had used Sara, bribing her with blood for a momentary escape into the storm. She’d warned Mehr off that path, and yet here Mehr was again—hand raised, words hovering on her lips—ready to bind Amun with the insidious power of kindness.

  People are not tools to be used, Lady Mehr.

  Mehr had used Sara in order to try to save Lalita’s life, and however foolish that had been, she had at least had noble intentions. There would be nothing noble in manipulating Amun. She swallowed around the guilt rising in her throat. Like it or not, survival was not a noble cause. It was a necessity. Mehr would do whatever preserving her life and freedom required, fine morals be damned.

  But there was no doubt in Mehr’s mind that manipulating Amun as she’d imagined would change her irrevocably. She didn’t want to be everything she hated about Maryam. Whatever choices the mystics had stolen from her, this one choice belonged wholly to her. She could be like the people who had manipulated her and used her—the mystics, the distant Maha, her stepmother—or she could be something else.

  She had to find another path.

  She curled her toes against the soles of her boots, grounding herself. And then she took a leap of faith.

  “I think I owe you a debt, Amun,” she said carefully. “You were honest with me about your vow, and about the vow I had made. You tried to be merciful.”

  She heard him turning, heard the whisper of his clothes, his breath.

  “It wasn’t mercy,” Amun said. “Mercy would have been finding a way to ensure that we never wed. It was—decency. Nothing more than that.”

  “Then let me pay my debt with a similar mercy,” Mehr replied quietly. “Let me be decent to you. And honest.” She clutched her knees tighter to her chest. “You’re not as good at hiding yourself as you think you are, Amun,” she said into the darkness. “Your face, and your voice—in those, you hide your feelings well. But your shoulders. Your hands …” She trailed off, remembering his hands sweeping sigils through the air. “They reveal you,” she finished. “I see it, and I believe Kalini does too. No doubt your Maha reads you just as well.” Mehr swallowed. “You shouldn’t allow yourself to be so vulnerable,” she went on. “Not to me. Not to anyone. Weakness is a temptation. Give people the opportunity to use you, and they will, I can promise you that.”

  Silence.

  “Do you know what it is truly like to be used?” he asked.

  There was no threat in his voice. Still, she shivered.

  “I know I could use what I’ve seen to truly use you,” Mehr said frankly. “But I won’t.”

  “Why?” He sounded honestly curious.

  “Because I’m choosing to believe in your decency.” And if he proved her wrong, if he turned her leap of faith into a fall into darkness, then she would find a way to gain the upper hand on him again. She would find more weaknesses, more fault lines in his nature that she could leverage to her own purposes. She would do what needed to be done without regret. “I’ve chosen to repay your decency in kind.”

  “I never asked you to do so,” he said.

  “But I have.” Mehr shrugged.

  She heard him sit up. Her eyes had adjusted a little, now, to the darkness. She could see the outline of his body—the breadth of his hunched shoulders, the tilt of his head.

  “What do you want from me, Mehr?”

  She felt light-headed now. Perhaps she had been a fool to talk to him without playing the demure maiden. She could have used her knowledge to build his trust in her slowly, to make him reliant upon her for kindness, for company, for affection. That would have been wiser. She had no other allies here, no one but him. If he turned against her, if he chose to distrust her, if he decided he no longer wanted to help her …

  She tightened her hands into fists, pushing the panic away.

  “I would like it,” she said, “if you continued to be decent.”

  Amun said nothing.

  “It’s a fair trade,” Mehr said evenly. “Honesty for honesty. Mercy for mercy. Tell me what the mystics want from me. Tell me why your Maha has gone to such great lengths to acquire me, and in return—I promise I will be someone you can trust. A friend, just as you’ve been to me.”

  She saw him shake his head. Even in the gloom, she could see that.

  “Your trade isn’t fair,” Amun said. “The mystics have absolute power over me. And you …” He let out a breath. “I have nothing to gain from telling you, and everything to lose.”

  “Then why be merciful at all?” Mehr challenged. “Why defy your Maha and give me time before completing our marriage vow, if the cost for you is so high?”

  “I just want you to recognize that this is no game,” Amun said in a low voice. “You can’t barter with the Maha’s people for power, and you shouldn’t try. None of us are worth trusting. You’ve told me not to show my own weaknesses. First you should follow your own advice.”

  “Are you telling me not to trust you?” Mehr asked.

  “I am telling you that I have lived all my life as the Maha’s creature, and I know what it means to serve. I know my own nature.” His voice was suddenly savage. “I know that if you look for goodness, you will find it is finite. If you trust me, I will betray you. That is what it means to be the Maha’s creature. That is what I do.”

  Mehr had seen his marks. She’d seen the way he obeyed Kalini, seen him banish a daiva, seen the feral bitterness in his face. You can’t trust a creature in a cage. This she already knew. She breathed deep and slow, feeling the weight of his seal around her throat. Her mark felt like it was burning against her chest, a deep cold pain.

  “If your goodness is finite, then it seems I must make use of it before it fades,” Mehr replied. She was trembling. She had to resist the urge to step out of the tent and run until her feet failed her. “You’ve bought me a little time, Amun, just a little time before our vow is done and I am the Maha’s creature too. You have told me there’s no way to escape the vow.” A deep breath. “If I can’t avoid my fate, then at least give me the knowledge I need to choose how I spend my freedom. Tell me what the Maha wants from me. Not because I’ve bargained, not because I’ve used you. Tell me because you are good.”

  He let out a sudden, helpless laugh.

  “You are a strange creature,” he said wonderingly. “A very strange creature.”

  Mehr let out a breath. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t. This was just her body, her exhausted body reacting viscerally to the sudden break in his voice, that fall in gentleness. Her fingers uncurled. She felt an unraveling in her chest, as if she could breathe more easily. Even before he next spoke, she knew she’d won.

  “Meet the Maha first,” he said. “And then I will tell you everything you want to know.”

  Rahima

  The sky was very black, the stars bright as small moons, when the Amrithi woman
approached Rahima’s hut. Rahima saw her first through the shutters, when the woman was still in the distance, striding across the sand. In the nighttime wind, her hair was a black flame, flying loose behind her. At first Rahima mistook her for a daiva. She thought perhaps one of the ancient ones had crawled out of myth and come for her, and she prayed to the Gods for mercy. But as the woman drew closer, Rahima’s fear abated.

  The woman was flesh, dark-skinned and graceful. She moved across the sand with the ease of someone raised in the desert. But her clothing was strange—more Chand than Ambhan or Amrithi or Irin—and she was moving her hands in an odd, sweeping motion as she walked. In response, the sand was rippling behind her, erasing her footsteps entirely.

  Rahima stepped carefully out of her hut. She squatted down on the ground by the door, clasped her hands, and waited.

  The Amrithi woman stopped. She lowered her hands at her sides and looked about, from Rahima, to the husks of ruined huts around them, then back to Rahima again. She was close enough for Rahima to see her face, which was hollowed with exhaustion.

  “There used to be a village here,” the woman said. Her voice was hoarse.

  “The trade routes changed,” Rahima said. “Ambhans stopped coming. Everyone left.”

  “I remember a water well,” the woman said. “And a storehouse, full of rice and grain. A clan used to pass through here …”

  The woman wavered on her feet.

  “I have gold,” the woman said. “Or blood, if you prefer.”

  Rahima stood up.

  “Come inside,” Rahima said. “I’ve got water. Food. A place to sleep.”

  The Amrithi woman followed her in. She sat on the floor at Rahima’s direction, and waited as Rahima poured her some water into a cup and gave her a little food to dull the edge of her hunger. Rahima placed a lantern on the floor between them.

  As the Amrithi woman ate, Rahima watched her. The woman was not young, but not old either. Rahima was at least two decades her senior. Old enough to be her mother. If the woman remembered the storehouse and the visiting clans, she must have visited the old village years before its demise. Only Rahima’s house had survived the passing years and unkind storms, thanks to her diligent maintenance.

  “Your kind haven’t been here for a long time,” Rahima said. “The last Amrithi I saw … why, it was a girl and her grandmother. We traded food and blood. That was three years ago.”

  The vial of blood was still buried beneath Rahima’s door, to keep the daiva at bay. The grandmother had warned her it would lose its power after a month at most. But Rahima had seen no Amrithi since. What could she do but keep the blood close and pray for her own safety?

  “Ah,” the woman said. She understood. “You’d like more blood then.”

  “It used to be easier to keep the daiva away,” said Rahima. “A clan would come here before every storm. They never wanted much. Food, mostly. Medicine sometimes. We never had to worry. But those days are gone now.”

  The woman said nothing. But there was something inviting about her silence.

  “I haven’t had company in a long time,” Rahima said, half in apology for how she would not, could not, stop speaking. “My son, the last time he visited, he told me to come to his village. But I told him no, this is my place.”

  She told the Amrithi about her son, and his wife and child. She told her about the heyday of the village, before the trade routes had changed and the road had been swallowed back up by the desert, leaving Rahima’s village to wither and die. She spoke about her life here, alone in what remained. She spoke until her mouth was dry, then poured herself a cup of water to clear her throat.

  The Amrithi woman was watching her.

  “There’s something you want to say to me,” the Amrithi woman said. “Isn’t there?”

  “My village betrayed the Amrithi,” Rahima blurted out. “That is why the village died. We were cursed. The daiva are punishing us.”

  It was a relief to say so. She had carried the weight of that guilt for so long.

  “My husband was the one who told the mystics about the clan,” Rahima said. She ladled water into the Amrithi woman’s now-empty cup with a trembling hand. Drops splattered on the floor. “They came to our village and offered gold for information. My husband told them about an Amrithi boy who could make the storms move for him. We saw the boy do it once. The mystics gave my husband gold. After that, we never saw the boy again. Soon your people stopped coming here at all.”

  The woman sipped the water and said nothing.

  “The trade routes changed,” Rahima said, pressing on. “My husband sickened and passed. My son said we should take our gold to one of the bigger villages. But I said I would die here, and he left. I thought … maybe if I stay here alone, if I suffer without my family day in and day out, and pray to the Gods for mercy, the daiva will be less angry. They will forgive us. The villagers would come back again.”

  The woman said nothing. Her silence no longer seemed so inviting. Rahima reached for her hand and clasped it.

  “You could speak to the daiva,” Rahima said, clutching the woman’s hand. “You could ask them to forgive us.”

  The woman exhaled. Then she met Rahima’s eyes and smiled, a flat and unfeeling smile.

  “If people were cursed for betraying Amrithi, the whole Empire would be in ruin,” the woman said.

  Rahima shook her head. “You don’t know. I hear them at night! They cry in the boy’s voice. They tell me we should all be punished. I …”

  Rahima fell silent and miserably wiped tears from her eyes.

  The Amrithi woman stood. She moved to the corner of the room, back to the wall.

  “I don’t know if you want absolution from me,” the Amrithi woman said, “but I’m not in a position to provide it.” The woman leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “If you’ll allow me to rest,” she said, “I’ll provide you with my blood in the morning.”

  Rahima murmured agreement and went back to her own bed to weep.

  When she woke, the woman was gone. She’d taken some of Rahima’s food and water with her, and one of her robes too. There was a gold necklace on the floor where the woman had slept. Rahima looked outside, but the woman was already long gone, the sand unmarked, the sky painfully blue. She hadn’t left any blood.

  CHAPTER TEN

  After their conversation, Amun stayed close to her side. There was no other discernible change in his behavior. He didn’t grow friendly or talkative, didn’t relax in her company or show her any particular gentleness. He simply shadowed her, slowing his pace to match hers as they walked through the desert with the mystics vigilant around them. Every day he walked beside her. Every night he slept by her side, his back to her. They didn’t repeat their discussion. Mehr felt the silence grow between them, heavy with the weight of words unsaid. All Mehr could do was hold on to her faith that the silence would break. She had to hope that once she met the Maha, Amun would tell her everything she needed to know, as he’d claimed he would. She had taken Amun’s measure, weighed his weaknesses against his strengths, and she was sure—almost sure—that he would keep his word.

  Thoughts of the Emperor and the Maha haunted Mehr constantly. For so long, her only image of them had been a faceless effigy on an altar, the world held in its upraised palm, symbolic of the powers of all the Emperors who had ever held the throne. It was hard for her to envisage either of them as flesh and bone. Her father had at least met the Emperor, had served in his court and earned his governorship by winning imperial favor. She knew the Emperor was a mortal man. But the Maha …

  The Maha, the Great One, first Emperor of the Ambhan Empire, had lived far, far longer than any mortal could. His apparent immortality was proof that the imperial bloodline was blessed by the Gods. His temple stood on the sand where the Gods slept, his mystics prayed for the Empire, and the Empire had grown and flourished with fortune on its side.

  When Mehr tried to imagine him—the man who ruled the soul and faith o
f the Empire—she imagined a man with no face, smooth and unblemished and timeless.

  She wouldn’t have to wonder about the Maha for long. Their journey was almost at an end. Mehr could not tell one cliff or sand dune from the next, but the mystics knew the temple was close. Edhir was beaming, chattering away like a child and making no secret of his excitement. None of the mystics seemed to have the heart to hush him. Bahren simply smiled at him, his weathered face softened with joy. All of them were alight with expectation, the tiredness of their journey fading from their faces, their backs straighter and their eyes brighter, their strength returned.

  Even through her dread, Mehr felt that same light inside herself. It was hard not to feel the influence of their joy; it was harder still not to think longingly of a warm bed, fresh food, and clean water. The journey had broken her down into nothing but exhaustion and hunger. More than anything—more even than answers—she wanted the opportunity to feel like herself again.

  They came upon the temple just after sunrise after traveling hours through steadily receding darkness. The temple was barely visible at first glance. The same color as desert sand, it was hidden in plain sight. But as they drew closer, Mehr saw the shadow of towers and domes rising against the horizon, the silhouette of her new home forming before her eyes.

  She stopped to take the sight of it in. Amun went still by her side. She could hear the soft brush of his robe against the sand as he shifted on his feet.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “No.” The temple was nothing like the Governor’s residence or the smaller, graceful havelis of Jah Irinah. It was crude and austere, unornamented with nothing but its sweeping, uncompromising lines against the skyline to lend it grandness. For three hundred years, the temple had stood on the desert. Long enough for its edges to be rubbed raw by storm and sand. Mehr knew, as all Ambhans knew, that the Maha had chosen to build his temple on the desert as a demonstration of how greatly blessed the Empire was. Looking at the temple now, Mehr couldn’t deny the Empire’s great and almost otherworldly power. “It’s nothing.”