Aliyah

Aliyah sneezed. The laundry hall, cavernous and echoing as it was, smelled of wet dust. People flitted to and fro, hanging up sheets to dry; others sat in rings and passed conversation around as they did their mending.

She perched at the periphery of her sewing circle, piloting six needles which darted in and out, closing rips and adding patches to preserve the precious linen. Most of her clothes were similarly darned, she thought gloomily, and wondered when she’d next be able to afford new skirts.

“The next big Glister shipment isn’t due for a couple of years yet,” one of the girls grumbled. “My cousin’s a Weathermancer and she says that they’re cycling through rye before getting to flax. We’ll be sleeping on woven reeds before the year’s out.”

“Pah, didn’t you hear? They’re searching for gemstone sites up North. Fancy that, all you lads and lasses in shiny stones. Say, Caph, I think a string of turquoise would suit you.”

“Hah, I wish.”

“How was the execution earlier?” someone else asked.

Aliyah glanced up from her work and flinched, but the question was for another scion-lowborn.

“Oh, it was awful,” he replied in hushed tones. “She was all quiet and miserable and when they chopped, her blood went everywhere—and did you hear? They caught at least a dozen sympathisers. Lord Reza was missing from his rounds this morning.”

Aliyah felt cold at the thought of others put on that block, their blood pooling into the salt, guided into Magician symbols, forming miniature rivers…

“She had a courtesan-spy too,” another girl giggled. “How glamorous.”

“Shhh, shut it,” the Weathermancer’s cousin whispered, “There’s a highborn coming through!”

“Who?”

“A Healer, I think. One of the younger ones. Pretty handsome, if you ask me.”

“Tsk, not really,” someone else scoffed. “You need better taste. I say, is that blood on his cloak?”

“Oh horrors, do you think it’s from the execution?”

A flurry of nervous titters and shocked sounds erupted through the circle.

“Why’s he coming this way?”

“Shh, shh, quiet!”

A hush fell. Aliyah glared down at her mending and pointedly ignored the sound of footsteps coming to a stop behind her.

“Aliyah,” Zahir exclaimed with a disturbing level of cheer. “There you are!”

When she glanced up at her fellow maids, her heart sank. The entire mending circle was staring at her. Some looked intrigued, others scornful. She was sure that at least one of them was on the verge of giggling.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed, attacking the linen in her lap with a cross-hatch of stitches. “I’m—we’re working. I can’t talk right now.”

Her skin prickled under dozens of watchful eyes and her stomach sank as she reassessed her words, turning them over for any possible flaw. No doubt they were already inferring whatever subtext they wished to see.

“It is important. Can you leave early?”

“No.”

“Then could you point me to the hydrogen peroxide?”

She finally turned around. “Excuse me?”

Zahir was still clad in pristine execution-white. It clashed against his dark hair and washed out his complexion, making him look almost sickly. She suspected that she looked similarly miserable in maidservant-grey.

“Blood,” he said by way of explanation, and gestured at the hem of his cloak. There was a large-ish stain there, an incongruous splash of rust. It was possible that he had wandered right over one of the Magician’s makeshift miniature blood-canals on the way back from the salt flats, but she suspected it was more likely to have resulted from an accident with some poor castle rat’s arterial supply.

“Your apprentices can’t fetch it for you?”

“Funny thing, it’s almost like they’ve been trying to avoid me ever since I sent them to acquire a few samples from the septic tank on North corner.”

She didn’t comment on his inane attempt at humour. “That looks dried. You’ll need enzymes for it.”

“So by all means, lead the way.”

Aliyah set down her linen and walked at what she hoped was a steady, reasonable pace down the hall to the chemical cupboard. 

“Don’t come in,” she warned him as she opened the door. Zahir raised an eyebrow, but did not otherwise comment. “Just—keep standing there, please. Where they can see you. Thank you.”

Such were the hazards of being an apprenticeling—she could feel her reputation being slashed to ribbons as she spoke.

She fetched a jar each of hydrogen peroxide and enzyme paste from the musty depths of the cupboard —it was more of a corridor than a cupboard, which still reminded her of the Higher Library and gave her the creeps. When she emerged, he was standing exactly where she had left him and shamelessly staring back at the various sewing circles—almost all of which had taken notice by now.

“Here.” She held out the items. “Take them.”

“Much appreciated. When does your shift end?”

“Noon.”

“Come up to the office as soon as you’re done,” he said. “It’s important. I’m serious, by the way. Not another rat-catching expedition.”

“Zah—Healer Saar-Salai,” she said, catching herself. The nearest people were a fair ways away, but she was fairly sure that half the maids here had uncannily sharp hearing. “I am working.”

“I know. Believe me, this is important,” Zahir said. Something about the urgency in his voice gave her pause.

“And why is that?”

Zahir fixed her with an unimpressed look. “Do you remember what the seventhborn princess said, earlier today?”

Did she remember? She cast her thoughts back, even though she very much didn’t want to. A chill ran down her spine as she recalled them.

It is too late. They are coming.

===

She burst into Zahir’s office, magic pounding through her skull like a headache and panting with exertion.

“Damn you,” she hissed between breaths, trying to circulate oxygen, to steady her breathing. “Could you not have put your quarters into a tower with fewer stairs?”

Zahir looked up from the assortment of items spread out over his desk. A tall stack of papers had been shoved to the side; it looked in danger of collapsing.

“Oh, hello.” he waved absentmindedly, blunt condiment knife in hand. “You made it here early.”

“Of course I did! What with the ominous message and—what are you doing?”

“I am making a sandwich,” he said, placing a slice of bread onto the plate in front of him. “I was just thinking that this particular spread would pair well with the pickled vegetables.”

“This had better not be your idea of a joke,” she said. She could feel sudden outrage simmering in her chest, bubbling up like poison. “You speak in cryptic riddles and walk off, I worry myself grey for an hour as my peers make stupid assumptions and ridicule me for them, and then you make me sneak into your doorway and run up hundreds of stairs just to show off your sandwich ingredients?”

She knew she was probably being unfair, but that last hour in the sewing circle had been unbearable. She hadn’t quite gone grey, but it had been a near thing, fretting over the mysterious message: they are coming. Who was‘they’?

“On the contrary, I think it’s extremely important to have a good last meal. Help yourself, I’m sure you’re hungry after all that laundry work and all of those stairs.”

Her thoughts raced to catch up. Last meal—? What in the hells was he going on about?

“First of all, what did you mean by ‘it is too late, they are coming’?” she demanded. “Who are ‘they’?”

“Sit down and get some nutrition into you,” he said, applying a smear of green paste to a slice of bread. “We’re all probably going to die soon.”

He said it lightly enough. That gave her pause and quelled her rising panic. He couldn’t say it like that if they were actually in danger, could he? Then again, she’d never seen him properly lose his composure, so perhaps he was simply under-reacting to a stressful scenario as was typical of him—only this time, it could be a situation that really would kill them all.

Fire could start raining down from the sky and Zahir Saar-fucking-Salai would be sitting there making a tactless observation over the rim of his teacup, she thought gloomily. He’d probably say something like, ‘it appears as if we’re all going to burn to death. But not me, because I’m a Healer. Want some tea before you go?’

“Are you serious about the dying thing?” she asked, before her imagination ran away with her.

She noticed, with no small amount of dismay, that he was using a crinkled map as a napkin. Still, her stomach rumbled and she was suddenly aware that the only thing she’d eaten since the dawn execution was a bowlful of questionable pottage. She sat and began piling goat cheese and slices of tomato onto the proffered bread.

“I think that you are more susceptible to dying, but certainly, we are all at risk,” he said. He took a bite of his sandwich with a sour expression on his face, chewed, swallowed. “They’ll probably put my apprentices and I on that wreck of a Healer’s ship and drop us into complete mayhem.”

“Wait, wait. Explain: mayhem? And who is the ‘they’ that the princess insisted was coming? Do you think that ‘they’ are going to kill us all, is that it?”

He held up a hand as he finished swallowing his bite of sandwich. “I suspect that the ‘they’ that Alhena referred to are whoever or whatever is soon disturbed in the Northern gemstone mountains, but I have not yet confirmed the nature of these beings or phenomena.”

“Beings or phenomena,” she echoed, and felt her expression twist into a frown. “You think there’s some horrible slumbering magic thing in the mountains? Something like another Killing Field? Or what, an Old-World dragon? You do know that this sounds incredibly dramatic, right?”

“No. Something a little less exciting than that, but likely still quite dangerous.” He paused and peered over at her plate. “You should take more of the lettuce. It’s fresh from hydroponics, you know.”

She obliged, and noted—begrudgingly—that it really was quite good.

“Nice ‘last meal’, I suppose,” she said.

“Not quite your last meal,” he countered. “I suppose you could fit dinner in before whatever happens, happens.” He gestured with his map-napkin and she noted that it looked as if he had been scribbling all over it with red ink. “Due to distances and such. From the mountain mining site to the castle, a reasonable creature would take oh, about a day and then some before showing up on the horizon. I am estimating, of course. I could be wrong.”

“You’re sure about the whole ‘mining’ thing? On what basis do you believe the words of a dead princess?”

“You are not familiar with court politics, I assume?”

“Not at all.”

Zahir set down his food and took a slow, deep breath. “Suppose that you have noticed, in retrospect, that Alhena ‘s currying of court favours became more pronounced and erratic over the past year as the King and Magicians grew in favour towards mining efforts in the mountains. Also consider the official Magician statements of her treasonous motives—overtaking the mountain mines, presumed greed—combined with her final words: ‘it is too late; they are coming’. Could it be then, that Alhena knew something of the nature of those mountains that we do not?”

Aliyah looked at him blankly. “That’s a lot of speculation and only the last part made any sense to me. Look, Behemoths don’t hibernate in mountains. And I don’t think I’ve seen a witch come by with a warning in years. I mean, I guess they’d have to travel far which is why I haven’t heard of one for so long, or maybe I just haven’t been listening, but they wouldn’t just—abandon the kingdom. Would they?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I do not think it is a Behemoth. That would be too obvious; the witches would indeed have noticed. We would have heard of it by now; people would be screaming their heads off. I think it’s far more likely to be a disrupted herd of some kind, a dangerous but esoteric species. She did, after all, say ‘they’ and not ‘it’.”

“Disrupted,” she said doubtfully. “Disrupted how? Oh, never mind. Right, because they’re going to be mining there. But they’re not mining out the whole mountain, you know. You make it sound like—like vengeful mountain creatures are going to invade the kingdom. I mean, it sounds so fanciful. I’m pretty sure I read something like that in a storybook when I was small, except it was about skyfish. The message was to teach children to be kind to nature, or something.”

“Fiction is a product of its environment,” he said. “Such circumstances do not merely occur in fables aiming to instill values which are antithetical to ecological destruction. There is a historical precedent for such things. Most notably, the former kingdom of Fawnfell was consumed by knife-spirits a mere century ago—”

“Yeah, okay,” she broke in. “But if Alhena knew about this, then why mess around in court? Why keep a spymaster?” None of this made any sense.

Zahir sighed. “The kingdom is—dying, economically, if you haven’t noticed.”

He said it as if it were obvious fact, and yes, she supposed that fruit and imported fabrics had been growing more expensive for a while now. But that was just life, wasn’t it?

“Foreign nobility is pushing at the borders and asking to be let in,” he continued. “And that’s the last thing the kingdom wants. Outside mastery of Songian magics dilutes its strength as a tool of warfare, and the court is stuck in the old ways. I suppose that it is difficult to be an isolationist empire in this day and age, even with a field of neurotoxins barring the way. Since bridging ties with the rest of the continent goes against Magician ideals, the kingdom has a vested interest in acquiring valuable resources. Precious gemstones and the ever-coveted energy crystals being among them. Alhena and the rest of the royals and all the upper echelons besides—and that includes my peers and I, with all that our influence entails—depend on the kingdom’s ability to finance its own affairs.”

“I still don’t understand,” she said, bewildered. “If she was sure that it was dangerous, then why not just say so? She was a princess, for star’s sake. She might lose a bit of court status and you all might have been a bit less rich than you are now, but at least she wouldn’t have died, that way. What’s the point of shuffling the court and having a spymaster?”

“Too much caution,” he said dryly. “She didn’t have the benefit of hindsight that you do now. And she likely commanded less power than you assume. ‘Princess’ is, after all, just an inherited title that dooms her into producing future heir-spawn regardless of her taste in courtesans. ‘Court harpist’ is also a prestigious title, but not nearly as powerful as, say, ‘Magician’. I suppose there are many convoluted reasons as to why she did not speak up. When in doubt, suspect politics.”

“Zahir, she’s dead,” she said, head still whirling from the onslaught of information. “And you’re just guessing at what the message was. You don’t have proof. You can’t go and ask her what she meant, unless you’ve revived the art of necromancy.”

“Correct,” he sighed, “I cannot. However, they still have her spymaster down in the dungeon. We will pay her a visit.”

She startled. The dungeons? Dread pooled in her stomach as she considered it. “What, right now?”

“After I finish my sandwich.”

“Why summon me, though?” she asked. “I mean, maybe you just find it funny to mock me in front of the whole laundry hall, but what’s this even got to do with me? I don’t really want or need to go down there. You can do whatever you want. You don’t need my help.”

He fell silent for a moment, looking pensive. “I thought you deserved to know. As I said, you’re rather susceptible to dying, as things stand.”

“You really think that something’s been disturbed in the mountains and it’s coming to kill us?” she asked, exasperated. “Even if that were true, we have Magicians. We have an army. It’s not like the knife-spirits or mystical mountain-creatures or whatever—it’s not as if they’re able to walk in through the gates and start killing people by the dozen.”

But beneath the surface-level exasperation—which was, to her dismay, mostly a front—a poisonous nodule of anxiety wormed its way into her chest. True, Zahir had some hare-brained ideas from time to time, but he wasn’t stupid. He was still a Healer, she reminded herself. Several leagues above her when it came to court tricks and machinations.

“Not quite,” he said. “I think that the Magicians will kill you to combat whatever comes out of the mountains. This supposed invader is, as you say, ‘mystical’ in nature. The Magicians fear that. Surely you’ve heard the stories, seen the festival theatrics? Slaying gluttonous dragons and burning nymphs alive. You know the like.”

“The Magicians…? You’re joking,” she said. She frowned at him even as she cast her mind back to footnotes in textbooks, stories told in hushed voices, mock-terror by moonlight, the execution that had happened…had it really been just this morning? The event felt simultaneously close and weeks past, breathing down her neck and yet swimming out of focus, a mirage over the salt. “Are you talking about the whole…blood ritual thing?”

The very words sent a shiver down her spine as they came out of her mouth. Hadn’t she thought, just earlier today, that the blood flowing through the channels had seemed uncomfortably ritualistic?

“That’s not a real tradition,” she added hastily. “It’s just a legend. A dumb wartime story.”

“I hope so,” he said quietly. “I really do hope so.”