The Kingdoms of Dust Read online

  “No. I wouldn’t either, if I were him. But I don’t think Nikos has it in him. Not yet.” She’d saved Nikos Alexios from the machinations of a vengeful sorceress. She’d let that same sorceress murder his father. Though not fond of his father, Nikos had dismissed her from her position—keeping traitors on the payroll set a bad precedent.

  The thought of returning to government service made her tired. She could find work, she had no doubt, with another crown or in private employ. Secrets were a valuable commodity, and she had a collection. But she was scraped hollow and sick of looking over her shoulder. Perhaps a university position, safe and boring…

  “Come north with me,” Adam said. “To Vallorn.”

  She blinked, a knot tightening in her chest. She was Vallish by birth, though raised and trained in Selafai, but she hadn’t seen Vallorn since she was seven, nor spoken its tongue since her mother died four years after that. Adam likely spoke it better than she by now.

  “There’s nothing for me there.” The argument rang hollow. There was nothing for her anywhere—she still had to choose.

  Adam shrugged. “So not Vallorn. Veresh, then, or Riven. I want to see the mountains again.”

  Memories rose, long faded—towering pines and sharp-toothed peaks, white with snow even in summer. The dregs of her tea couldn’t ease the dryness in her throat.

  “We can’t stay here,” he continued.

  “No.” Selafai and Iskar had no open hostilities, but Kiril and the caliph’s spymasters had maneuvered against each other more than once. Kehribar wasn’t somewhere she could let down her guard. If any such place existed.

  “Rest,” she said, collecting her teacup. “We can’t go anywhere till you’re stronger. I’ll think on it.”

  He reached across the table as she rose, stopping before he touched her hand. She felt the heat of his skin. “Thank you.” It was the first time he’d said it.

  She shrugged it aside and tried to smile. There was nothing to say, so she retreated into the house, leaving him to the thinning rain.

  In the fading darkness on the rooftops of Mulberry Lane, the woman who called herself Melantha crouched heel to haunch on wet tiles and watched the necromancer vanish into the ochre house.

  Low clouds rode the city, the orange glow of streetlamps bleeding through the haze. Her wet silks chilled whenever the wind shifted. The damp was welcome after summer in Assar, the sharp scent of rain on clay pleasant after days of brine and unwashed sailors. The weather kept people’s heads down, and she’d happily trade that for the hazard of slick tiles.

  Her eyes narrowed as Iskaldur’s gaunt companion rose and followed the necromancer inside. Something about him nagged her—the shape of his shoulders, the tilt of his head—but she couldn’t place it. It had been years since she was last in Iskar, and her mission had been brief. Corylus might know—he’d worked with her then too. She didn’t think she’d ask him.

  Corylus had long since retired for the evening; crowds were his specialty, where darkness was hers. She might go down now and talk to Iskaldur, if she had any idea of what to say.

  Quietus had set a shadow on the necromancer when she first left Erisín, while the council argued over what to do with her. Iskaldur had thwarted their plans before, if unwittingly—now the council wondered if she could be of use to them, or only more trouble. The consensus leaned toward trouble, but Nerium was fond of taking matters into her own hands. There’d been no chance of wooing the Selafaïn spy away from her old master, but now that he was dead—

  She wasn’t sure how open Iskaldur was to courtship. Find the right leverage, her mother said, but Melantha was best at the sort of leverage that came from a knifepoint. She might restrain Iskaldur alone, but wasn’t eager to fight three people at once. Never mind her mother’s hurry, she would have to wait till a moment presented itself.

  She rose from her crouch and stretched. Let Iskaldur have a few hours of privacy; she looked as though she could use the rest.

  From rooftop to rooftop Melantha ran, a darker shadow in the waning night. Night was her time, her senses heightened in the darkness. No one looked up as she leapt across alleys and balanced on garden walls. Her feet never touched the ground on her way back to the Corylus’s rented room. She might have stepped into the shadows, moving more quickly through the nothing-place her magic opened to her, but the rhythm of breath and muscle relaxed her, silenced the voices in her head. Too many days confined to a ship had left her stiff and restless, haunted by dreams. She rarely slept easily, but after the storm in Ta’ashlan the nightmares had worsened.

  Corylus had taken quarters in a nondescript building in a nondescript neighborhood. A glimpse through shadow told her the room was empty, so she stepped from one darkness to another, bypassing the door. Inside was narrow and dim, worn but clean—as plain and unremarkable as everything else about him.

  Of all the agents Quietus could have sent, it would have to be him. She wished she could blame malice on the part of either Ahmar or her mother, but knew it for bad luck. And her own mistakes.

  They had been partners on and off for years, till ambition became a strain between them. His ambition—the inner circle of Quietus was not where Melantha wanted to spend the rest of her life. Once she might have waited for him in bed; now she turned the room’s single chair to keep her back to the wall.

  She didn’t have long to wait. A stair creaked. Tumblers clicked with the turn of a key. She heard the pause as he realized he wasn’t alone, then Corylus stepped into the room.

  He wore brown, his color as black was hers—the kind of brown that blended into a crowd and out of watchers’ memory. She’d known him before he took up the mantle of anonymity that made him such an effective agent, but still his features faded in her memory to a blur of brown hair and hazel eyes, a soft, colorless voice too often sharpened with sarcasm.

  “How was your night, dear?” she asked. An old joke, but the words felt flat on her tongue.

  You never should have slept with him, said the voice in her head that sounded like her mother. Melantha hated it when she was right.

  “Oh, the usual.” He draped his cloak across the foot of the bed. A stripe of light fell through the narrow balcony window, splashing his hair and cheek with yellow. “This is a surprise.”

  “Lady Kerah sent me.” The formality sounded ridiculous; everyone knew Nerium was her mother. “I’m to retrieve Iskaldur.”

  His face creased in a frown. “Retrieve her? That’s not what I’ve been told.”

  “My orders come from Nerium, not Ahmar. I’m to bring the necromancer back to Qais.”

  “Nerium has lost her mind. Iskaldur is dangerous. Reckless.”

  Melantha shrugged. “She’s grieving.”

  Corylus snorted. “What do you know about grief, Mel? You’re your mother’s daughter.”

  She couldn’t argue that—her mother had trained her too well for regrets, let alone more hazardous emotions. But she’d heard the details behind the necromancer’s departure from Erisín, and glimpsed the pain beneath Iskaldur’s cool mask tonight. Melantha knew a little about leaving old lives behind.

  “I am,” she said instead. “And I have my orders.”

  “Look at what happened in Symir, and that mess in Erisín. Trouble follows her like flies to carrion. Bringing her to Assar is only a risk for us. Ahmar will never allow it.”

  Melantha rose, spreading her hands. “Perhaps that’s true. But Ahmar isn’t here, and neither is my mother. Let them sort this out between them.”

  The jaundiced glow of the streetlamp faded as they spoke, replaced by the leaden gloom of dawn. Rain dripped steadily past the window.

  “You’re right,” Corylus said at last, his voice smoothing. The tension eased in his spine. “No sense in you finding another room now. We can have breakfast sent up. Or a bottle of wine.”

  She let him draw her close and kiss her neck. He still wanted it all—a partner and a lover, but one he could throw to the jackals the moment it wo
uld advance his career. Not that she wouldn’t do the same.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, his breath tickling her nape as he kneaded the taut muscles in her shoulders.

  “Too long on that damned boat.” She conjured a smile; he could read her duplicity as well as she could his. She wasn’t going to sleep anyway. “Send for the wine.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Two days later, Isyllt took Adam shopping.

  They left Moth sleeping on the low couch, curled and twitching with kitten dreams, and walked two blocks from the quiet of Mulberry Lane to find a carriage. As the stink and clamor of the city rose to meet them, Adam’s heart raced like it had before his first battle. The carriage slowed as they neared the Great Bazaar, and the coach shook from the crowds pressing around them. Adam scrubbed his palms on his thighs.

  Isyllt’s lips thinned, and she craned her head out the window to shout at the driver. The din swallowed most of it, but Adam heard Istara Carsisi. A smaller market in an older, less-trafficked neighborhood. The driver yelled to the horses and cursed pedestrians, and the carriage began to turn.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Adam said as Isyllt settled back in her seat. “I can take it.”

  “It would be embarrassing if you cut someone’s head off in the market, and I can’t afford to buy you out of the Çirağan again. Besides, if our shadow follows us today, I want to be able to see him.”

  The blue domes of the Istara rose above the rooftops as they approached, smaller and fewer than those of the Great Bazaar. Banners flapped in the breeze, reflecting the nationalities of the merchants inside: the crown and stars of the Ataskar Empire, altered and reused by Skarra and Iskar alike; Assar’s three-headed lion on crimson; the silver tree on blue of Vallorn; Selafai’s white tower and crescent on grey; and a dozen others besides. Even the knotwork horse of the Steppes clans, gold on sky-blue.

  Colors dazzled as he stepped out of the carriage—gleaming spires, tangling flags, buildings painted ochre and orange, pinks and reds and blues. Sunlight sparked off brass chimes and windowpanes. Dogs barked and snarled after food carts, and goats bleated on their way to the slaughterhouse. Adam was full of sympathy as he followed Isyllt through the wide arch. At least the market had a roof to protect him from the yawning mouth of sky.

  Light streamed through high windows, swirling with dust from the packed earthen floors. Sweat and spices and the heat of bodies thickened the air, enough to make him sneeze. Every draft carried a new scent—fruit, bread, oiled leather, wool, incense—a map to guide him through the labyrinthine aisles.

  Isyllt didn’t haggle well, but still managed to collect bread and persimmons for a good price. She wore a glove over her black diamond ring, but her pallor and sharp cheeks and sharper smile served just as well. Few merchants found it worthwhile to antagonize a witch over pennies. The cheesemonger, however, was less impressed, and charged her three clipped silver kurush for a round of wine-soaked cheese.

  She bought clothes and boots for Adam as well. Everything practical, but he saw her gaze and fingers stray to southern styles more than once. She was considering Asheris’s offer more seriously than she would admit.

  By the time they left the clothiers’ row Adam’s neck had begun to itch. Even small markets in Kehribar were crowded, and too many people had brushed or bumped or shoved him already, but the watched sensation didn’t change.

  The next aisle belonged to the metalworkers, booth after booth of gold and silver, bronze and steel, polished and gleaming. The bitter smell of oil and metal soothed him; the sight of sword racks soothed him even more.

  “Have you seen our friend yet?” Isyllt whispered in Selafaïn, leaning close as a lover as he studied a row of blades. Her breath chilled the sweaty stubble above his ear.

  A flicker of movement in mirror-bright steel, and he knew. “The brown man.” Brown skin, brown clothes, brown mien. The kind of man who left a gap in a watcher’s memory, but Adam had seen the same gap too many times to discount him.

  “Damn.” She turned her head with a laugh and leaned in again, her lips brushing his ear. “Then there are two of them.”

  They didn’t leave the bazaar after Adam found a sword, but retired to one of the inner balconies to drink coffee and study the crowd. The upper level was still hot, but a breeze wafted through the windows, drying the sweat on his scalp and neck.

  “Who’s your second shadow?” Adam asked, running his hand over the pommel at his hip. Three merchants had nearly come to blows over his choice, all swearing the quality of their goods on a lengthening line of dead ancestors. Each told the truth, but no matter how well crafted the yatagans and kilijes, how lovely their curves, the balance of chopping blades wasn’t right in his hand. He’d refused them all until the last vendor unearthed a western longsword in the bottom of a trunk.

  Isyllt lifted her coffee cup. “The woman in black,” she said, hiding her lips behind the rim. “By the glassmaker’s table.”

  A slender woman, neither short nor tall, wearing loose robes and a veil hiding her hair and the bottom half of her face. Another nondescript darkness in the press of shoppers, but something in her stance nagged at him, the bend of her wrist as she lifted a glass. Try as he might, he couldn’t pin the memory down.

  Adam raised his own cup but didn’t drink. The liquid was thick enough to stand a spoon in, rich with cardamom and so sour it was almost salty. His hands tingled from the few sips he’d taken. “Lose her? Follow her?” The brown man had vanished when they sat down, but the woman lingered.

  “There’s no need to rush.” Isyllt pulled a persimmon from her satchel and a small folding knife from her pocket. Juice ran down the blade as she carved the orange fruit into slices. She only used the thumb and forefinger of her left hand—the other three fingers curled toward her palm, hidden in a black glove. “She buys things to keep from being noticed. The longer we sit here, the more she spends.”

  Adam laughed and took the slice she offered. The sweetness shocked him, nearly as potent as the coffee. “Cruel.”

  Sure enough, the woman handed the merchant a handful of coins in exchange for a glass perfume bottle. He read annoyance in the set of her shoulders as she turned away, losing herself in the current of the crowd.

  Isyllt wiped her knife clean and tucked it away. “Do you two want to be alone?”

  When he frowned, she tilted her head toward the sword angled across his lap. His left hand hadn’t left the hilt, absently tracing the grain of the wyrmskin wrappings. An eastern touch on a western blade—the great serpents were rare, and never seen west of the Zaratan Sea. The chunk of amber set in the cross-guard was another, an unblinking orange eye.

  Adam snorted and took his hand away. “It’s been a long time.”

  That earned him a sideways glance and the slow lift of her eyebrows. He blushed, and cursed the sallow pallor of his skin that let her see it.

  Her gaze sharpened and turned back to the market floor. “Now,” she said, taking a last sip of coffee and grimacing at the dregs. “She’s distracted again. Let’s go.”

  They moved casually, twisting through the press toward the doors. “I want to catch her,” Isyllt said. “Are you up for a fight?”

  His hand tightened on the sword. His palms were soft, and his shoulder ached from the weight of the satchel he carried. “No.” The word was bitter, or maybe that was just the coffee on his tongue.

  “I don’t know that I am either.”

  They shared a wry glance. Three years ago, that might not have stopped either of them.

  Sweat sprang up on Adam’s brow as they stepped into the hammerfall of sunlight, thickened with billowing dust. Isyllt squinted into the glare and shook her head. “We’re getting old.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he said. But the lost year was another pushing him closer to forty. Grey flecked the stubble on his scalp for the first time. Not quite doddering yet, but an age when a mercenary had to plan for the future—or rush headlong toward it.

  They i
gnored the waiting carriages and ducked around the side of the building, where the alleys were crowded with more merchants selling fruit and crafts and fabrics from baskets and handcarts. Adam’s knees and hips and shoulders ached from dodging the crowd, and the light and noise fed the headache growing behind his eyes. He breathed deep and forced the discomfort away, keeping pace with Isyllt’s long-legged stride. The world wouldn’t wait for him to catch his breath.

  Adam watched the entrance while Isyllt pretended to peruse a stand billowing with silk shawls. The bazaar had smaller doors for merchants and security, but if their shadow meant to follow them she would come this way. Heartbeats slipped into moments, and she didn’t appear. Had she lost track of them? Given up? Wrapped herself in sorcery and slipped away unseen?

  Isyllt’s own tactic backfired—she eventually paid the shawl-seller for a black-and-silver scarf and shoved it into her bag. “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t—” Adam broke off as his shoulder blades began to prickle. He spun, to hell with stealth, and caught the brown man watching them from the far end of the alley. The man vanished between stalls as soon as their eyes met.

  “Shadows,” Isyllt swore, and hurried after him.

  They found the alley their tail had taken, a narrow dusty lane shadowed by buildings. Isyllt scanned the rooftops and kept going.

  “You know this is a trap,” Adam said. His breath came rough and painful, but the rush of a chase gave him new strength.

  “Of course.” She tugged off her right glove and the cabochon diamond shone dully.

  Another turn, and this time they caught their quarry ducking around a bend. Adam had the man’s scent now, and it was as bland and forgettable as the rest of him. They dodged sleeping beggars and a startled dog and turned again. They were gaining.

  The next twist led to a dead end. Adam cursed as they stared at a grimy brick wall. The man might have climbed it, but there was no sign of him on the roofs.

  Isyllt nudged him till they stood side by side in the alley mouth. “Look.”