Night laved the last of the light from the sky, relieving the sooq of the relentless heat. Zafira had always thought people annoyed her. The way the Demenhune laughed and smiled despite the ill that surrounded them had always grated on her nerves.
That had nothing to do with the people, she knew now, but herself. Her own inner turmoil.
As she meandered the sooq, listening for whatever voice Bait ul-Ahlaam would use to call her, she studied the people as much as the stalls.
A young safi spread fresh yogurt across a round of flatbread for his smitten human customer, and it was clear the way they felt about each other was mutual. Zafira watched as two safin sisters nicked an extra from an olive cart when the merchant turned to grab change. It was behavior she’d never expected from safin, and it made her smile.
She passed a shop that offered narjeelah alongside tobacco marinated in molasses and sold by the weight. There was another with abayas adorned in embroidery that would have taken weeks, low-cut necklines making her skin burn. A moon ago, she would have barely given the colorful gowns a second glance. Now she wondered how she would look wearing one of them. Any of them.
You’re still poor.
That was not why she looked at them, and she knew it. She hurried along, pushing past safin and human alike, nearly tripping on the tiny sand qit roaming for scraps near the stalls that smelled of tangy sumac and sizzling onions, manakish and roasting mutton.
At the head of another dark alley, she paused. A song whispered from a dimly lit entrance deep within, and her spirits rose.
“Found you,” she whispered back.
The night drew shadows that reminded her too much of the Lion and the heart he had stolen. Of Nasir and his wayward dark. As she neared the doorway, the tune grew louder, a flute both gentle and seductive. Zafira stepped inside, breath held, fingers pressed against her thighs.
She frowned. The place was large, possibly two or three stories high, but bare in a way that shops were not. There were no tables heavy with trinkets, nothing fastened to the walls.
Sweet snow, the walls. Zafira averted her gaze from the depictions painted across the golden surfaces: men and women unclothed and deeply entwined in various positions.
A lazy titter drifted from upstairs, along with a deeper, rhythmic handful of sounds she hadn’t heard at first but couldn’t ignore now. Her splendidly slow conclusion cemented as footsteps whispered along the stone floor. A man dropped a beaded curtain and sauntered toward her with an indecent smile that would have made Altair blush. Possibly. Unlikely.
“Did I interrupt anything?”
Zafira whirled at Kifah’s slow drawl. The warrior leaned against the entrance, arms crossed, a single eyebrow raised as she looked between Zafira and the man.
“I can imagine it’s tempting, Alderamin being the caliphate of dreams and all, but—bleeding Guljul—try to stay focused.”
Someone might as well have flayed Zafira’s skin for the way it burned. She turned and halted the man’s languid, wandering gaze with a glare. “Stop looking at me.”
He froze. The lewd walls echoed with Kifah’s laughter, and Zafira eyed her with irritation.
“I heard a flute,” she snapped, as if that explained everything.
 |
Zafira followed Kifah across the open market and down another alley, where a weathered old man watched. She shivered as they passed him, feeling his gaze on their backs until the walls pressed closer, swallowing the last of the light.
Kifah’s spear tapped a beat against her leg, quickening as they ventured deeper and stopped before a curtain, crimson and heavy. Zafira touched a hand to her dagger and followed her inside.
Bait ul-Ahlaam was smaller than Zafira expected. Darker, too. In fact, stepping past the curtain gave her a sense of unease vastly unlike her discomfort in the pleasure house. There, she had felt in control. Here, she was already losing something without knowing the price.
“Magic,” Kifah said as the hum of it stoked something inside Zafira, a fire that had begun to die. Dum sihr, for how else could magic exist in a place so dark?
Lanterns dripped from the ceiling, the four walls flickering with their light, wearied beneath the weight of all they contained. There were shelves laden with trinkets and contraptions. Tables tiered upon tables. Straw dolls with round shells for eyes, watching them more intently than eyeballs ever could. Sand that breathed in time to her heartbeat, ebbing and flowing yet contained by an invisible box. Vials that sputtered and grinned, the glass like teeth and the stoppers like mouths. Boxes and furs, fruits and books, lamps and jewels and a number of mechanisms Zafira had no knowledge of.
“Touch nothing. Question the authenticity of nothing, either,” Kifah murmured just as a voice came from everywhere.
“Marhaba.”
Zafira’s hand dropped to her jambiya. Kifah pursed her lips and gave a small shake of her head as a man stepped soundlessly from behind a table, his finely spun robes glittering dark green in the mellow shafts of light. His face was smooth and unbearded, ears round just beneath his jeweled turban. Strange. How could a human come into possession of what would have taken years to procure?
His dark eyes fell to where her hand rested, and sparked with interest. “May you find what you seek.”
Zafira opened her mouth to lie and say they weren’t looking for anything in particular, but the shop catered to those who searched for it, not to the random wanderer. Which led to another thought: If the shop and its keeper knew they were here for something, then there was no harm in asking after the vial, was there?
Kifah dug her elbow into Zafira’s side, telling her just what she thought.
The shopkeeper vanished behind another mound of oddities, and the lanterns flickered, darkening without their host to illuminate. The shadows whispered, crowding around them.
This was a place the Lion would adore.
Kifah left her side and began looking around, ghostlike in her calm. Zafira ignored the dark hum and did the same, wandering past a display of stained teeth. A shelf full of lamps. For wish-granting jinn. There was a shawl that seemed to change position every time she blinked, and a pair of cuffs that winked sinfully at her.
It settled a question in her stomach, leaden and dreary: What were they expected to offer in exchange for what they sought?
All the trinkets had one commonality: They were almost colorless, strangely bland, for they were not what she sought. No, what she needed was red, sparkling, housed in a silver vial
that coaxed her as a bedouin to an oasis. And Zafira had found it.
Laa, it had found her. It was daama floating before her. The fine etchings on the casing caught in the light, geometric points housing a supple crescent moon in its center. She had seen that symbol before—on the silver letter she had found in her satchel so many days ago.
It wasn’t the blood of any Sister of Old. It was Anadil’s.
Next you’ll be calling me safin because I’m pretty, Yasmine drawled in her thoughts.
Was it too improbable a conclusion to assume the blood was the Silver Witch’s? She had been distraught at Nasir’s suggestion to come here for aid. Angry. She had spoken of the cost as if she had suffered the price.
Zafira startled when the shopkeeper snatched the vial from the air with a smile. His teeth lengthened and sharpened, his nose rounded into a snout.
She blinked and he was human once more. A farce—this was no mortal man, but one who could shift between man and hyena at will. Suddenly, she understood the savage glow in his gaze, and the ancientness of Bait ul-Ahlaam.
He was a kaftar.
“Si’lah blood. Quite the treasure,” he observed. “The way of the forbidden often comes at too steep a price.”
Kifah rounded a display. Gone were her calm and caution. Anger and aggression rolled off her in waves. “I saw your collection, creature. You glean memories. You thieve people of their pasts in order to sell your wares.”
He trailed his gaze up Kifah’s bare arm and the tattoos that branded it. “I thieve no one. You wish to make a purchase, you must pay what is due.”
Memory gleaning was thievery. It meant taking a fragment of someone’s past and bottling it for an eager patron to experience. An intriguing trade, if it didn’t require the former to lose the memory, too.
“You can’t sell memories without magic,” Zafira said, confused. Only glean them. And if the bottles along the far wall were for memories, what purpose did the rest of his goods serve?
“As such, magic is on the mend,” he said lightly, lifting the tiny bottle with its silver markings.
Zafira stared at it. There was no part of her past that she wished to undo. Nothing she wanted to forget. Every moment of elation had made her who she was, and every moment that broke her down had only paved her path.
The shopkeeper sensed their reluctance, and he closed his hand around the vial. For once, Kifah had nothing to say.
“There won’t be a mend if we don’t have that vial,” Zafira said suddenly.
The kaftar stilled, canting his head like the animal he was.
Kifah bored holes into Zafira’s skull.
“We met your kind on Sharr,” Zafira said. “They were cursed until we helped them. They fought for us. Knowing their death was guaranteed by sunrise, they fought for the Arawiya that was.”
Hope fluttered against her chest as the shopkeeper considered her.
“You are the Demenhune Hunter. A girl,” he said with some surprise.
A girl. Her heart sank.
“The rumors do you justice.”
Her eyes snapped to his, and falling like a fool for the appraisal in his tone, she asked, “Will you sell us the vial for
anything other than a memory?”
She realized her mistake when his smile was all teeth.
“Give me the dagger, and the vial is yours. For Arawiya.”
No.
Laa.
Her heart and limbs and lungs caught in an iron fist, thought after thought racing through her. One: It’s only a dagger. Two: It’s not. Three: Baba.
Baba. Baba. Baba.
That was where she faltered and held.
One who sold memories and bargained blood from a Sister of Old would have no qualms stealing emotions. That was what her dagger was, wasn’t it? A blade forged of cheap steal, worthless except for what it held: love. Years of it. Barrels of it.
That was what the oddities in the shop were. If they weren’t coveted for what they were—the teeth of a dandan, ore from the depths of Alderamin’s volcanoes, enchanted artifacts—they were valued for what they contained. Love, anger, hate, confidence.
Memories, emotions, rarities acquired by ill means: This was what Bait ul-Ahlaam dealt in. That was why Seif had been reluctant to come here. Why the Silver Witch had been angry at the mere mention of its name.
“No,” Zafira said with finality. She had lived this long without dum sihr, without doing what was forbidden. She had hunted and found and lived.
She was lying to herself.
Kifah made a strangled sort of sound. In it was her accusation: Zafira had chosen herself over Altair. Her old knife over finding the Lion and getting her daama book back.
“It’s only a dagger,” Kifah hissed, siding with reason. “I can buy you a new one that looks exactly like it.”
Zafira clenched her jaw. It wasn’t about coin, it wasn’t about how her dagger looked. She didn’t care that the shopkeeper was steps away from them, clinging to their every word. “Then why do you think the kaftar wants it?”
If Kifah understood, she didn’t care. “This is not the time to be sentimental.”
Anger reared its head at a level birthed by the Jawarat, for never before had rage twisted words together, ugly and whole.
What do you know of sentiment? it wanted her to say.
But Kifah was her friend, and Zafira didn’t have to speak. She read her well enough. Her soft breath tore with her dark gaze.
“Emotion is as potent as memory, isn’t it?” she asked the shopkeeper without a shred of feeling. “That’s why you want the dagger.”
The kaftar had no reason to be guilty.
Kifah smiled cruelly. “You can take the dagger of a peasant, or the spear of a former erudite turned Nine Elite and every emotion that led from one to the other.”
The kaftar considered her afresh. One of the lanterns sputtered noisily, angrily.
“In that case,” the kaftar mused, tipping the silver vial to and fro, “I will take both.”
Zafira swayed. Her hand twitched for an arrow, anger engulfing her desperation, but it was Kifah who spoke first, her fury focused on the vial. “Keep it. May it shatter and defile this place forever.”
Curses meant little to those versed in them. The kaftar set the vial back on the shelf, between a wicked knife and a camel-bone dallah, and turned away. With his back to her,
anything was possible: her dagger in his spine, Kifah’s spear through the back of his neck. Another chance.
Kifah was already near the door.
Zafira’s pulse pounded beneath her skin, a drum born of disquiet. “Here.”
The leather hilt fit snug in her grip. She felt every fiber against her fingers, she knew every snag and every little bump. The way the leather was loose at the hilt’s curve, the blade dull from use but sharp as the cleverest of wits. Baba’s gift to her. All that was left of him.
The kaftar only looked.
“You can’t have both,” Zafira said, keeping the tremor from her voice. “Nor will anyone else want the vial. Not when magic returns.”
He took the dagger. She took the vial. The blood of the most powerful beings in Arawiya sat in her palm, and still she had lost.
