1
The desert writhed with poison life. A rustling carpet surrounded Edene on every side. Barbed tails curving over scuttling carapaces that were patterned sand-colored or stone-colored, glossy or dull, rust or taupe or black or brown.
Tireless, escorted by scorpions, she walked through day and night, through the hazy scent of baked stone. Light and darkness had no meaning to what Edene had become. Unpunctuated by sleep, the days joined seamlessly. She could not have said how many had passed when a sunset found her, light-footed and easy, climbing a rocky trail leading into a valley that cut a low sweep of hills. Mountains rose before her, one tier beyond another. She did not recognize the range, but they could not stop her.
Always east. She must move east.
There were ruins here, the remnants of a stone-and-daub house huddled like a mud wasp’s nest against a great boulder. This was the first sign of habitation that Edene had seen breaking the desolate Rahazeen outlands since she escaped Ala-Din, the rocky clifftop fortress of the cult of Nameless assassins. Only her wits and the magic of the hammered green-gold ring weighting her left hand had won her free.
Edene paused, contemplating the winding path before her, the slumped carcass of the little house so alien in this landscape. The hills must be wetter than the plateau she had just walked across: their grim line against the evening sky was softened like a man’s ill-shaven cheek by a thorny fuzz of shrubs.
Dust turned the sunset yellow behind those hills—east, still east. She was not out of Rahazeen territory yet. But perhaps if she walked the night through, the sun would rise in the same place come morning, and she would know by the changing skies that she was one nation closer to home.
She pressed a hand against her belly. The babe had quickened savagely since she fled Ala-Din, and now she endured a spate of blows that felt like dried rice fire-puffing inside her. It did not pass swiftly, but she was growing accustomed to the child’s ferocity.
While she waited out the assault, her eye fell again on the tumbledown lodging. Curiosity drew her off her eastward path for the first time. The hut’s walls were standing and roof collapsed, as if someone had carefully stepped in the center. She wondered who had lived here, and a few moments to explore would cost her little in light of the length of the journey still before her.
Her escort of scorpions broke away from her footfalls. A scurrying wave crested and crept, lapping the bottoms of stone walls and mounting crumbling mortar to whisper over the sills of deep, narrow windows. The hut had no remaining door, but a cracked stone lintel still bridged a narrow gap. Edene turned to pass beneath it—
And drew up short.
Within the hut velvet blackness puddled; without lay blue, quiet gloaming. Framed within the door, outlined against that interior darkness, stood an inhuman creature as gray-blue as the twilight hour and as velvety as the dark. It had a long face with a wrinkled muzzle, mobile ears that focused on her brightly, and the huge soft eyes of a night predator. Even in the evening’s shadow, its pupils had contracted to pinpricks in the green-gold watered silk of its irises.
“Mistress of Secrets,” it said, in a language that hurt her ears but that she nevertheless understood, despite never having heard it before. A thick tongue showed behind chipped, yellowed fangs. “Far we have traveled to find you. I am Besha Ghul. I have come to bring you home to old Erem.”
“Erem?” She’d heard of the dead empire, as who had not? But it lay beyond the Western Ocean and the Uthman Caliphate—and no ruined city could serve her now, when she needed to win home to her clan, to her people, and to the father of her child.
For the whole duration of her captivity, she had restrained herself from brooding on Temur—where he was, if he was safe. If he was seeking her, as she suspected he must be. But now she was free, and the itch to return to him was the only fire close to as strong as the curling certainty that had risen in her since she escaped Ala-Din: that she would go home to the steppe and arise a queen.
“Erem,” said the Besha Ghul, its ears flicking to and fro. “You wear its ring upon your finger, Mistress of Secrets, Lady of Ruins, Queen of the Broken Places. You walk half within its veil already. It is deep time; its nights and twilights speed like quicksilver to hurry you through the shallow days of this insubstantial modern world. You have more time than the world, my Queen.”
She considered that. She considered the blur of days—had they been days at all, then? Nights? Or something else, some shape of time passing that her experience had not yet prepared her for?
“You call me by many titles,” Edene said. “But I am not those things. I am Tsareg Edene, not your Queen of Ruins.”