I froze.
“No,” I breathed. “He’s going to die in there. Please.”
Aliyah crouched over his form. Her blade remained, the middle of its outer edge pressed gently just beneath his chin. She spared him a glance. “His life is only in danger if he puts it there. The queen does not betray her hospitality.”
“Hester!” I yelled. “HESTER!”
Aliyah’s eyes flicked back up to me.
“HESTER.” I dared not risk provoking the execution by getting closer. But he did not stir.
“HESTER! HESTER! GENA!”
“Shhhhh, wizard,” Aliyah said. “He will not wake.”
I looked over to Gena. Her body also lay motionless.
“No,” I breathed. “Do you mean…”
“Hm? No, they are alive. More alive than we are,” she said, with a rueful shake of the head. “The queen’s gift is strong here, and many of us now sleep. For days at a time, even.”
For a while—ten minutes, three hours, I don’t know—I buried my face in my arms, hiding my fear, or smothering it, or wallowing in it. I don’t know. I only looked up from time to time to stare silently at my companions, whose chests rose and fell steadily. Wherever they were, whatever condition they were in, they were alive. We had made it through so much. We had made it this far. We could make it a bit further.
I was interrupted by the door, which swung open behind me, close enough to my back that I could feel the stale, hot desert air upon my neck.
I stirred and lifted my head to watch. Two men filed in and greeted Aliyah. The man whose voice I recognized from before—a crisp tenor, spoken in military rapidity—frowned down at me. His eyebrows were jet black and bushy, shading hard eyes set deep back and apart. He wore a diagonally-cut robe over a cuirass of richly colored lamellar plates. His mustache was the spitting image of Sahid’s.
Still looking at me, he said something in Uri-Kedis. It seemed that it was directed at Aliyah, because she replied in kind, and then (I think) repeated in Ivian for my benefit: “yes, awake. He has not explained, but I gather he excused himself early.”
That was a cue to me. All three of them were looking at me expectantly. Aliyah stood above Hester’s still body.
I thought to myself then: what now? It was time to tell them something, but what? I felt a surge of anger, driving my teeth against each other. Lady Iltara had made a fool of us. Of Hester, for tricking him with such an obvious bait. Of Gena, for luring her into her snares with her sophistry about dreams and worlds, just so she could use her in some petty war for territory. And above all, of me. I had all of the facts. I should have seen this coming. I could have did something. Anything. But time and time again, I had not.
I certainly didn’t owe her servants the truth—I would give them only whatever suited my needs. And what did I need? Perhaps I should have been thinking of that rather than indulging in my self-pity. But then it came to me.
The tome.
If Hester and Gena could not recover the Doctrina Tempestas, I would.
And who knows? I thought to myself with a giddy rage. Maybe I would undo this so-called queen with it myself.
“I did,” I said. “The queen has much to offer. But I must… see more, first. I wish to know more.”
Aliyah and the man frowned at each other, faces drawn with suspicion.
I sat up. “Show me your home. She has asked me for my fealty, but it would be fealty to you as much as to her. Indulge me. I am a wizard, aren’t I? An endlessly curious creature, I am.”
They shared a look again, and then Aliyah shrugged. They shared some words. “Bah,” the man said, in the universal human language. He spoke with the other man and they took up positions in the room.
“Come with me, wizard Horwendell,” Aliyah said. She helped me up and out of the little forge, leaving Hester and Gena in the care of her two comrades.
I limped out into the streets, leaning on my crutch. The wide foot was more difficult to maneuver here on stony streets, but it was still better than being half-carried about the whole world. We looked up and down the alley: shaded from the morning sun, dusty, long, and absolutely silent. We turned up onto one of the wider streets, one that crossed with the main avenue in from the gates.
We walked for ten minutes, passing worn buildings of low construction. They were homes, public places, places of business, places of worship, and places of meaning to their inhabitants.
So I imagined. The truth was, I could only guess. We walked for those ten minutes without meeting a single other soul.
There was only one place they could all be.
“How long have they been sleeping?” I asked, as we turned a corner. I recognized the place: one of the grand squares at the heart of the city. I had seen it in the dream, ringed by fires, its wide surface a glittering mosaic that swirled about a silver-plated statue of a swan alighting. Here, in the mundane world, the mosaic was splotched with heaps of sand, and what was visible between the drifts was overlaid in a brown-grey sheen of dirt. An empty statue pedestal lay dormant in the center. The sun burned sternly down upon us.
After a pause, Aliyah finally spoke. “Ten days.”
“Ten days… we were in the veld, ten days ago.”
“Of course.”
“Ten days is… remarkable. No food. No water. Are they all…?”
“All still alive.”
“How long can they go like that?”
“How am I to know?” she said, still gazing out over the empty square. “They will endure longer asleep than awake; that is all I must know. My faith is unshaken.”
I joined her in looking out over the square, leaning on my crutch and sweating deeply into my travel clothes. There were no towers here, no grand porticos or lovely ballads or dancing figures. And so it was that much easier to pick out the mundane details: three streets to the north, south, and west, clusters of buildings at the corners, and a colonnade along the east of the square whose center pillars flanked a small arch bridge that crossed a dry riverbed.
My gaze settled on the dry riverbed, and then fixed, burrowing into it. Nowhere did the air of death here hang so heavy—not upon the dusty buildings, not upon the cracked roads, not upon the empty streets—as it hung upon the still, empty channel.
“That’s it,” I said. “The river.”
Aliyah’s eyes slid to meet mine, though the rest of her body remained perfectly still and poised, as though she might be the statue upon this square.
“The king diverted it. This was…” I glanced southeast, upriver. I thought back to some of the reading material Claude had selected for me back at the Watch on the Rock. “… a distributary of the Lakalka.”
Her eyes returned to the river. “I suppose that is his power.”
“You didn’t know?”
“I didn’t question. The river dried.”
“And the queen protects her people.”
“You’re catching on,” she murmured. “The river dried. She brought the sleep upon us that we might weather the drought.”
“And I think you’re catching on, too. You can’t deny it. The king did this. The queen told me the siege is coming. But really it’s already upon you.”
“I will not deny it, then. If you say the king has taken the river from us, I say you are probably right. And I say it makes me more glad you have come. The queen says that your friends will be a great boon to her.”
I held her sidelong gaze for a few seconds, then I looked back out upon the square.
“I suppose it has not always been called the city of Bliss.”
“We are forbidden to speak the old name,” Aliyah replied.
“Oh. Do you have family?” I asked, changing the subject quickly. Anything I could learn…
“Many. My brothers and sisters in arms. My mother, my brother and sister by blood.”
“Utba, right?”
“Yes. My younger brother.”
“The others are asleep?”
“My mother and sister, yes.”
I wanted to ask if it had been hard or offer my condolences. But the words forming in my head sounded hollow, saccharine. I hoped a somber silence would do.
“Will you be a great boon? You are certainly curious, as promised,” she said.
“You know our qualms.”
“I do.”
“The weapon is stolen, and your queen means to fell a god with it.”
“You have said it yourself; the battle is met already,” she said, gesturing out over the riverbed. “So we fight with stolen weapons. So our foes are mighty. So what? We will fight. If amends are to be made, let us make them after we prevail.”
I thought about Hester’s holy quest, and I thought about their sparring match—a little ritual meeting of knights-errant. Hester, who assented to Aliyah’s escort because it brought him closer to his destination; Aliyah, who brought him closer at her queen’s command. It had been all too obvious that they were arrayed in opposition, and yet…
“So what is it, wizard? Will you be a boon?” Aliyah said. Her eyes were forward again, over the sun-blasted square.
“Apprentice,” I said.
The arrangement of the rest of the day proceeded from one bare fact: I would return to sleep in the evening, and I would do so under Aliyah’s watchful eyes1. With time to spare during the daylight, and with few other options available to us in the catatonic city, Aliyah invited2 me to her home on the eastern bank of the river. It was a small, narrow affair, with canted walls and tall, slit-like windows allowing shining stripes of light in, where they fell upon a small room that occupied most of the first floor. The expansive quiet of the outside was replaced by the lonely metal-on-wood sounds of food preparation coming from a room behind a tall half-wall the far left corner.
As Aliyah helped me down into a cane-woven chair, Utba emerged from the kitchen.
“Our guest!” he said, beaming as he wiped his hands on a towel hanging out of his apron pocket. It was the same apron as before, blackened and smelling permanently of soot. The towel, at least, seemed not to have come straight from the forge.
“Yes,” Aliyah replied. “Our doubtful friend.”
“Cheese?”
“No, thank you, I’ve had enough cheese for a lifetime.” Two weeks on the veld will do that to you.
Utba thought. “Stale bread?” he wondered aloud.
Aliyah chuckled. “He can have cherries from the garden.”
“That’s very generous of you,” I said as Utba vanished through a door leading out back. “This is…” I looked around. It was small, it was cramped, but it was on the river (such as it was) and appointed luxuriously. “It’s grand.”
“Pardon the… state.” Aliyah said, sighing. “We are not used to it.”
She was right. Rich as their possessions were, the room was dusty—sandy, even, in places. “You are busy, I am sure…” and had no servants, I observed silently. Not just because everyone was asleep; the place was simply far too small to accommodate a full household of pages and maids.
“Up-jumped, you might say.”
“You are new nobility, then?”
Aliyah had yet to take a seat, and she stood facing a window by the entryway, a stripe of sunlight illuminating the left half of her face and a length of her body down to the tip of her white half-robe.
“No,” she said, finally. “Not like your good sir knight.”
“No? Then… “
“It is different here,” Utba said as he thumped back into the room with a few clusters of cherries in a ceramic bowl. “We are artisans. On the occasion we have had to do the Queen’s Labor, our work was recognized as befitting and honoring her.”
“Quite the honor it must have been,” I said. “Your smithing for her army?”
“Ah, no. My talents were and still are appreciated, but it was Aliyah’s that earned us our fame and the queen’s favor.”
“I see. She is a fearsome swordsman,” I said.
Utba laughed. Aliyah winced.
“She is, but she is an artist.”
I looked at Aliyah. She stared directly out the window.
“It’s true. Painting and calligraphy,” she said.
“But…”
“But I am such a fearsome swordsman? I am.” She smiled, and yet her voice was edged with irritation that she was not in the mood to hide.
I munched on cherries—plump, pleasantly tart, staining my fingers red—while Utba explained. “The Queen’s Labor. In the west you pay tax, gold or grain, to your lord, yes? That is what we did when we lived in East Arc—briefly, many seasons ago. But here, in the Valley, it is the King’s Labor… or, for we lucky souls, the Queen’s Labor. We are each summoned away from our mortal masters or landholders, for two moons out of the year, to contribute directly to her greatness.”
As Utba said this, he wiped his hands on his towel, and he leaned over and began rummaging through a chest that sat beside the near wall.
“There was a time Aliyah was called to produce great works of art for our queen. Her devotion, her vision, are second to none, and out of that well sprung… incredible beauty.”
He retrieved a rolled-up canvas, about as wide as my shoulder span, and handed it to me. It was a manuscript; I couldn’t read the writing but it seemed to have the layout and cadence of a history or narrative. The bottom half of the scroll was illuminated by a map of the Valley of the Sun. It was breathtaking: the glittering golden landscape, rendered in gold leaf and sepia, was tattooed with crimson illustrations of towns and villages. A vein of ultramarine ran through, wandering from its rich source in the south to the indigo seas of the north.
“But the queen does not need incredible beauty, not now. She needs blades,” Aliyah said. She turned to me. Her eyes were hard and her voice even.
Utba broke the silence. “Don’t be alarmed by her… zeal. She misses her great work and wishes to return to it. But she also…”
“Utba,” Aliyah pled.
“… misses her little sister, Naya.”
“Utba.”
“What? I do too,” he said, filling the little room with a great shrug. “Even an afternoon is too long to go without her sweet little babbling.”
“A baby sister?” I said.
Aliyah sighed.
“I hope you get to meet her, Horwendell,” Utba said, his eyes distant with daydream.
Again, I lay on my side, facing away from Aliyah, awake. Hester and Gena were alive. As Aliyah had been settling me down onto a cot, I had been pestering my captors, and finally the thin man with Sahid’s mustache had checked my friends’ pulses and breathing. He seemed to have thought that this was ridiculous. If Aliyah had agreed with him, she had not shown it.
What now, I thought? I was to return to the dream. I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Gena and Hester still slept, and they would, no doubt, remain asleep for days. That left me alone in the mundane reflection of the city of Bliss, a dusty, dry town filled with sleeping bodies and crowned with a skeleton patrol of soldiers. They would ensure I returned to the dream. And even if I had fearsome war magic at my disposal—and I had little of that—I could not imagine a scenario that I could create, no path through these dark forests, that I could follow to escape. Not in my physical condition, anyway.
Sleep closed in on me, and the leaping, coursing, darting thoughts in the fore of my mind slowed and smoothed, becoming eddies and flows. And in this dark place of slow currents between wake and sleep, I felt a new tug of thought. The dark forests. Looming trees and hidden paths. The steps, motions, and decisions, the path we had taken, cut, and followed, leading here, where I lay…
Why hadn’t I thought of it that way before? We three had moved through the dark forest, at Hester’s direction: his faith, a great river. Shadows drifted thickly through the trees at either side, but upon the river none had impeded our journey. None could.
Lady Iltara had been waiting at the end of the river, waiting for us with great wings and paws and a mane. Hester, his hand on his hilt. Gena and I had known she was there, all this time. A coming clash. But only now, now that she was within view…
Why had we followed the river? Just because it would take us forward? It should have been obvious where forward would lead.
It was not too late. The great lion and the mighty queen waited and watched with hungry eyes and hungry fangs; the good knight drifted forward his quest to vanquish them. Eyes, watching from the forest. From the river. From the skies. Awaiting the outcome. Hopes and aspirations pressing in from all sides, turning on this battle upon the river of faith. But…
There was still time, still a few precious moments to grab the oars and beach into the shadows.
The map Utba had showed me flashed across my mind. A bright blue river in a golden valley. Hester, Gena, and I upon it…
I withdrew from the edge of sleep, and a smile crept across my face. My thoughts rose, and I began forming a plan.