The Pillars of Sand Read online

  “It’s not as simple as that, Indris.” He-Who-Watches flicked a quick glance at Femensetri, his expression troubled. He gestured for Indris and the others to follow him out of the ruined laboratory. “Much has happened in the time you’ve been with us. Our imperatives, as well as our needs, have changed.”

  “There’s a surprise,” Indris drawled. “The Sēq have changed their minds because it suits them. If you won’t help me—”

  “I never said we wouldn’t help.”

  “Then give me access to the Black Archives,” Indris said. He felt the tension bordering on pain in his clenched fists. “Or let me out of here so I can do what I should be doing while you nest here behind your walls and wards.”

  “Watch your mouth, Indris,” Ojin-mar warned. “We tolerate much from you, but there are limits.”

  Limits? Indris suppressed a bark of bitter laughter. None of us know what my limits are, though you’ve pushed and pushed and still not found the answers any of us need.

  He shielded his eyes from the sudden glare as they emerged into the open air, high up above the smokey-towered Amarqa-in-the-Snows, first and greatest of the Sēq chapterhouses. Clouds scudded overhead, and farther down the valley Indris spotted the sparking shapes of wind-ships heading toward Amarqa.

  “We don’t know enough to let you go.” He-Who-Watches stamped his feet against the cold. “And can’t afford to lose what may be in your head.”

  “Does it really matter why Sedefke abandoned you?” Indris folded his hands in the sleeves of his over-robe. His breath streamed between his lips, a milky cloud tinted with all the words he did not say. “And why, in the names of all the sacred dead, do you think he’d tell me what he’d not tell his own disciples?”

  “That’s one of the things we want to know, boy,” Femensetri said. “And it matters. Sedefke is gone. The Time Masters are gone. Other than the Seethe, the other Elemental Masters have vanished from the world.”

  Ojin-mar’s shoulders slumped. “And we need to know if we’ve been left alone, to face—”

  “Avendi!” Enough! Femensetri snapped in Maladhoring, unaware that Indris could understand her perfectly well. But how is it I’m able to understand her?

  Indris let his eyes close for longer than a blink, centering himself, overcoming frustration. He had hoped the Sēq would have found a way around the Anamnesis Maze, revealing at least some of what had happened to him during the three missing years of his life on the Spines. Perhaps he might learn what he and Anj had said to each other before his memories were locked away: Almost every permutation of the Possibility Tree told him his wife had other intentions for Indris than telling him the truth. But in his time at Amarqa there had been no progress. In fifty-one days, seven laboratories had been ruined. One Master sent to the Differential Baths in an attempt to save her life. Four knights and eleven librarians not so fortunate as to make it even that far. And they were no closer to finding the keys to what was locked in Indris’s mind, or discovering who had locked it away or why.

  If Sedefke was alive, and it had been him that had taken the time to tell me anything, why bother locking it away?

  “I need to know what’s happened to my friends,” Indris said.

  Femensetri squinted in the glare. “You may as well forget Mari—”

  “No. I’ll not.” Neither her nor that it was your actions, sahai, which led to the death of my friends, Hayden and Omen. To Mari and Vahineh being taken. If I’d been there, things would’ve ended differently. “I’ve given. Now you must.”

  “Sounds like a threat, boy.” His former sahai’s voice was flinty.

  Indris shrugged. “It’s what you promised. I’ve cooperated and my jhi-reflex has killed some of you, and wounded a lot more. The results could end up being different next time.”

  “Let’s all take a step back, shall we?” Ojin-mar raised a hand to shade his eyes. “Indris, surely you’ve been looking into things yourself? I’d be disappointed if you’d not.”

  “If I knew, would I ask?”

  “Of course you would.” Ojin-mar smiled. “Otherwise you’d be admitting I was right and you were skilled enough to break through our layers of wards. Which I think you are, and have. We respect you, Indris, and aren’t blinded to certain realities about you. Please do us the same courtesy.”

  “So, if you respect me so much, you’ll give me answers? Or the means to get them myself?”

  Femensetri looked to the other Masters, then said, “In light of recent events … join us in the Founder’s Deep, at the Hour of the Hart tomorrow morning. Bring your questions and we’ll tell what it’s safe for you to know.”

  “Safe for whom?” Indris asked.

  “Us, obviously.” Ojin-mar’s lips quirked in what was almost a smile as the Masters walked away, over-robes snapping in the chill autumn wind.

  It had been a frustrating afternoon in the library, Indris leafing through innumerable books and scrolls without finding any answers. The Mah-Psésahen, the high mental teachings, were alluded to but not discussed at any great length. The Deh-Psésahen, the lesser mental disciplines, were examined at great and tiresome length, with an array of theoretical and practical works, none of which brought Indris any nearer to his goal.

  In frustration he had gone to the Manufactory to work on his designs for new armor. The Manufactory had been stifling, and Indris stank from his labors. Once he dropped his new journals with their designs in his room, he was looking forward to a soak in the hot springs and a meal at the Black Quill.

  “Hello, husband.”

  Indris stopped in his tracks at the door of his chambers, hearts skipping a beat at the sight of Anj, leaning long-limbed against the wall. It reminded him of the day he first realized he loved her. He drew in a quick breath and held it to steady himself, before covering his lips with the tiny mask of a smile.

  “Anj,” Indris said. Where have you been, and who are you now? He did not step closer to his door, for fear the opening of it would provide an invitation he was not yet ready to make.

  “Sure you don’t want some company, stranger?” she said with a wicked smile. She came to stand so close to him, he felt the heat from her skin without touching. Her sapphire eyes were preternaturally bright, her skin glowing against the somber black of her cassock.

  “Don’t know. You look like trouble.”

  “You could be so lucky.”

  And here we are. The same words, a different place. Indris had not forgotten what it was like to run his fingers through the silken strands of her quills. To draw her to him. Linger over the taste of her breath, lips almost touching, the anticipation building until—

  He blinked and shook his head. She smiled.

  “Somebody’s being a very bad man.” Her voice was low and throaty, almost a purr. “Exactly the way I like him.”

  Indris smiled and took a step to the side, causing her to frown.

  “What are you planning to do now you’re back?” Anj asked.

  “I’m here because it’s less inconvenient than being elsewhere, to learn what I need to learn. But there are things I need to do before I have anything resembling a plan.” He sobered as he thought of his friends. Of Mari, never out of his thoughts, her mortal appeal so unlike Anj’s eldritch fascination. It’s been years. I thought you were dead and said my good-byes. Badly, it now seems…

  “Need some help?” she asked. “I’ve the time, and people don’t seem to need me around here.”

  “Thank you, these are things I need to do by myself. Besides, I thought you’d be of some rather profound interest to the Suret.”

  “Ha!” Her whole torso rocked with the word, which made him smile as it always had. “They’re as curious about me as they are about you, but my patrons in the Dhar Gsenni buy me liberties not extended to you.” She frowned. “Fascinating as Order politics is, we need to talk, Indris.”

  “I’ve tried to find you to talk but you always seem to be somewhere else.” Suspicion rose in him, and not for the
first time. “Tell me where you’ve been.”

  “Here and there. Mostly there. Indris, I’ve some of the story of what happened after you left. After I … You looked for me, you beautiful man. For years. And I’ve heard about this Avān woman—”

  “Mari.”

  Anj’s eyes narrowed dangerously in an expression he remembered well. “Yes. Her. But you thought I was dead. Now you know I’m not. So, we need to talk, you and I.”

  You may not be dead, but you are not yourself either. He opened himself to the ahmsah and looked at her Disentropic Stain. There it was! The faint blurring, a writhing of shadows around her as if something hid the truth. The same blurring he sensed around the edges of her features, as if this were a painting of the woman he’d known laid over the Anj she had become. He felt the faint oiliness he had come to associate with tainted energy, gone almost as soon as he felt it.

  “We do need to talk, Anj. But it’s been a long time since we’ve … I was gone three years on the Spines doing Ancestors know what, then two years as a slave in Sorochel, then two years looking for you. Then, enough time to try to find happiness again. Seven years and more was a long time to be parted, and too many years for nothing to have changed.

  Anj nodded slowly, her expression still, as if reading his thoughts. “A lot of years have been stolen from us, Indris, and it was neither of our faults. But I never gave up on you. All I ask is that you give us a chance. We were happy, if I recall. And good for each other, when nobody else was.”

  “Anj, please…” Indris looked at the toes of his boots, hiding the doubts he knew would be written on his face.

  She moved so close they almost touched. He stepped back, and found himself pressed against the wall.

  “Laughing winds of revelry, will you relax? We’ve waited seven years. We’ve both been busy this year, with the Masters taking your time, and me away as often as not. What are a few more days for us to come to terms with where we are?”

  “Thanks.” I need to know some ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’, before I think too much on ‘where’. You have the answers to so many questions … but do I trust you to tell me the truth, whatever you’ve become, despite what you feel the need to hide? He leaned forward to kiss her cheek, but she opened her mouth over his and kissed him hungrily. Her tongue tasted of honey, yet part of him sensed that it, too, was an illusion over a rancid truth.

  As he took her hands and put them at her sides—more slowly than he should have; her hands were warm and soft and brought back another flood of memories of the sureness of her touch—Indris stepped back and felt his hearts break all over again. If not for the loss of her, then for the doubts he now harbored.

  “There are some things I need to know, Anj. About me. About you. About some people I need to find—”

  “Including your Avān?” Anj almost spat the words.

  Indris frowned. “Including Mari, yes. Let me do these things; tell me what you know about my time on the Spines. Then you and I will talk about us.”

  “Very well,” she pouted, kicking the wall with her heel, arms folded, head turned down even as she smiled dangerously. “Promise?”

  “Would I lie to you?”

  “Not if you’re smart.”

  “Lucky for us both, then.”

  Steam coiled about Indris’s face as he relaxed in the hot springs, sunk so low that only his head was out of the water. Several other students and townsfolk had come to enjoy the water, dancing comically as they undressed in the chill, capering through the snow to plunge into the water. Indris greeted those he knew well, and smiled at those he did not, but all of them gave him distance as they huddled at the far end of the spring.

  Indris altered his breathing patterns with the ease of practice and opened his mind. The thoughts of those nearby clamored in his head, quickly isolated and silenced. More distant thoughts were a whisper that he could listen to if he focused, but his telepathy was not so well tuned that it was simple. With part of his mind, he identified and isolated sounds: the chatter of the other bathers, the wind through the pine needles, the slosh of snow from overhanging plants, the players in the Black Quill who entertained the packed house. One by one he found the noises, and moved them aside until there was only—

  “Chaiya?”

  “Indris!” Her response was quick. “Your mental voice is getting stronger every day.”

  “Exercising it to speak with you since I got here has helped. Is there any sign of Mari, Shar, and Ekko?”

  “Of Mari, no.” Chaiya’s voice was sad. “But her soul is not with the dead, so I assume she is being warded by mystics. Wherever she is, people don’t want her found. But I’ve heard the dreams of Shar and Ekko. They are sailing southward, with Morne Hawkwood and the Immortal Companions.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “But they’re well?”

  “As best I can tell.” Chaiya’s presence in his mind was comforting. “Their dreams are vivid, and filled with memories both joyful and heartbreaking. They think you’re dead, Indris.”

  “So I hear,” Indris replied. “It appears the Sēq have been loose with the facts about my untimely demise.”

  “Should I enter Shar’s and Ekko’s dreams, and tell them otherwise?”

  “No, though thanks for the thought. Best not to distract them, or tempt them to come looking for me. If they’re with Morne, they must be doing something dangerous. And more than likely reckless. I wish I were with them.”

  “Searching for Mari, perhaps?”

  Indris smiled at the thought. “There’s nothing they can do for me here, Chaiya, and there are things I need to do before I leave. But I do need to leave here, as soon as I have the knowledge I came for. I’ll wait a few more days before I finalize my plans.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Sing to me?”

  “Of course, my friend.” Indris counted the heartbeats before the gentle choral voices of the dead swelled in his mind, the intricate instruments of the soul that carried across the endless expanse of the Well of Souls.

  “Thank you, Chaiya,” Indris said as his eyes closed.

  The Founder’s Deep was built into the rock wall at the high end of the vale, overlooking the long stretch of Amarqa-in-the-Snows and the township at the mouth of the valley. A tower of translucent quartz, the Deep was only slightly darker than the snow that huddled in the jagged cracks texturing its surface. Many sets of stairs and the confectionary glitter of serill bridges joined the Deep to the buildings around it, high enough to avoid the cold spray of the Anqorat River, if not the stinging spume that flew from it. Gnarled trees clung to the rock, dappling the quartz with swaying shadows.

  Indris folded his hands in the sleeves of his over-robe as he walked across a rimed bridge. The jagged ilhen lamps that lined the bridge were fitful sparks in the light of the bright autumn morning. Along the ridgeline to the north, he saw the tethered shapes of wind-ships floating like kites. The guards who stood by them wore no livery Indris recognized, nor did the ships fly any of the colors of the Great Houses or the Hundred Families, or any of the consortiums of the Teshri. There were few who would willingly come to the Sēq in Amarqa, and Indris wondered who had been desperate enough to make the journey.

  At the doors to Founder’s Deep stood two Iku guards, their watchful round eyes set in cheeks like slanted cliff faces, their skin tinted in swirling colored patterns, and their short wings an oily black. A folding fan made of feathers with steel veins was thrust through each Iku’s sash, and both had their clawed hands—wrinkled as chicken feet—wrapped around the hafts of chest-height, studded mauls. Indris had seen just how horrifying the kanbōjé—the “falling sapling,” as the weapons were called—could be in the right hands. Legend had it that the Iku had been waiting for the Sēq when they first arrived in the forest valley, and had shown them the hidden halls and secret ways of the fortress that would later become known as Amarqa-in-the-Snows.
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br />   Both guards nodded respectfully as Indris approached, and he responded with a smile and a nod of his own.

  “General Indris,” one of the Iku trilled. She looked around, expression content as she took in the clear skies, mountains, trees, and snow that surrounded them. “Nice day for it.”

  “Aren’t they all, Wakanhe?”

  “That they are.”

  “Do you think it’ll stay that way?”

  “For some.”

  Indris passed under the jagged quartz lintel. The translucent walls of Founder’s Deep admitted a cool, frosted radiance. Firestones set in black iron braziers cast pools of warmer light around the five tall galleries with their arabesqued black marble columns and floors. The Deep was a wide building, hollow from its high domed roof down to its gravel-strewn floor, and dominated by a tall, eerily lifelike statue of Sedefke, the Founder.

  Indris had asked Femensetri once, when he was still a novice, whether the statue was accurate. She had looked up at it with what the younger Indris had thought was love—though the older might say obsession—and said that it was as if the very man himself stood there, made huge in honor of the greatness of his body, mind, and spirit. The statue wore a small smile, as if Sedefke were considering a joke he was waiting for the rest of the room to understand. He wore the buckled cassock of the Sēq, hood thrown back, with a weapon belt buckled about the sash around his waist. A weapon hung there, or at least the hilt and pommel of a weapon, as long as the man’s forearm. The pommel was carved into the likeness of a stylized dragon, or a bird of prey, the hilt covered in what may have been feathers, or scales. Yet there was no blade. Nothing to make the weapon, a weapon.

  The wise man never carries a weapon that can be used against him, Sedefke had been famous for saying, after he and the scholars had helped Näsarat fa Dionwē topple the Petal Empire. The wisest has no need to carry a weapon at all. His comment had led to the creation of the first psédari, the mind blades. Legend had it Sedefke had perfected the technique yet further, creating the kajari, or soul blade, a weapon that reflected the ternary nature of existence, and existed only by the manifestation of the owner’s will. A weapon where the hilt and pommel represented the nayu, the shape of the blade was created by the psé, and the blade itself appeared only as manifestation of the kaj—a weapon that was not a weapon without the soul to make it so.