“Everyone else wants it all to go away. And you forget that I have a reason for believing that others do not. Even if I didn’t trust you, I trust Solanna. She has no reason to lie. Not that you do, either. If all you’d wanted was to steal what we know, you could have done it and left years ago.” Leaning back in his chair, he waited until Qamar met his gaze, and chuckled. “I was one of those guarding you, when you returned to us from the seaside. By Acuyib, how I hated you! Never once did you set foot inside either of the taverns. And on cold nights, after you’d finished late with your work, I could have used a nice cup of mulled wine.”
“So could I,” he admitted wistfully. “Were you one of those who made sure I’d think thrice before ever really wanting one again?”
“Ayia, that was Zario.” Yberrio raked the graying hair from his brow and said, “You know the present one is resisting. Doesn’t want to leave his parents.”
“He has to come, and all the other Haddiyat boys with him.”
“And their mothers.”
So that even if Sheyqa Nizhria succeeded in taking the fortress, she would find no useful Shagara within it.
That the fortress was indeed her aim became clearer with every city ignored on the march northward. Small groups of her soldiers peeled off from the main force every so often to burn a few villages as a warning. When, at one night’s camp halfway to Cazdeyya, a well was found to be poisoned, every human being within a day’s ride was slaughtered. There were no more attempts to interfere with the advance of the Sheyqa’s army.
“I keep wondering,” Qamar said suddenly, “how much Allil has revealed.”
“Does it matter?”
“Joharra has been spared,” Qamar said. “Allil bought this with maps and advice, that much is obvious. But I wonder how much he told her about the Shagara of Tza’ab Rih. That they provided hazziri to my grandfather, Sheyqir Alessid, when your people would not.”
“You mean that we shall be easy for them to take and use, whereas our kindred of the desert would not?”
“They would defend themselves with the arts. You will not. They would aid the Empress in any attack against invasion—but you will not.”
It was a major point of contention. Some of the younger Shagara here wanted to abandon their principles and create hazziri for war. Their elders utterly forbade it. But the Sheyqa could not know this, and so she marched northward as quickly as she could, to take the one place that she was certain would win her everything.
Including Tza’ab Rih. Solanna had seen it. Not in the smoke that deliberately incited visions, but unexpectedly one morning while helping him sort herbs in the Inkwell. The crash of glass as she leaped from her chair and backed into a table had brought other people running in time to see the stark unreasoning terror on her face. Qamar carried her upstairs, grateful that these attacks of sight had been rare these last dozen and more years; nobody knew what that look in her eyes meant except him.
And, it turned out, Miqelo. Someone had mentioned to someone else that Solanna had been taken ill, and Miqelo had heard of it, and by sundown he was in their reception room asking with brutal directness exactly what she had seen.
“A map,” Qamar had answered for her. “Not of this land, but of Tza’ab Rih. All the towns and cities, the desert, everything.”
“Labeled in Tza’ab script, not ours,” she added. “And I saw a hand, a woman’s hand thick with rings, and one of them was of silver and carnelians.”
“I don’t see—”
Qamar interrupted with, “Each sheyqir my great-grandfather gelded was given a ring. Carnelians set in silver, with rows of tiny ants etched into the bands. You know the symbolism, of course.”
“Harvest,” said Miqelo. “Izzad. Whose ring, do you think? All of them are dead by now, of course, so the rings would be no longer binding—”
“Reihan’s, at a guess. He worked to put her where she is. What’s obvious is that Nizhria intends to use you Shagara against those of Tza’ab Rih. She can’t hope to conquer that land without you. I will wager that her troops in Ibrayanza are even now scouting the best place to do battle against the Empress.”
“But we will never help her. Never.”
Solanna, still very pale and shaken, said, “Do you know what that hand was doing? Stroking the map, like it was the naked skin of her lover. You can tell her No until the sun turns cold, and all she will do is laugh—and start killing your families until you cooperate. And the first hazziri that doesn’t work precisely the way she orders it to work, she’ll kill more.”
“Her armies destroy without mercy. She’s showing herself as ruthless as her great-great-grandmother,” Qamar added. “And that, my friend, is ruthless indeed.”
The Shagara here would not use Al-Fansihirro for war and destruction or even self-preservation. Qamar admired their adherence to their beliefs but deplored their stubbornness. What little he had seen of war, he hated; these people hadn’t seen war in over eighty years. They didn’t even paper the fortress walls with talishann drawn in appropriate ink. Once the paper was slashed or burned the protections would be nullified, and the men who had worked them would die. Paper was frangible; it made the Haddiyat vulnerable.
And so . . . this book he held in his hands. In it, he would record everything these Shagara knew of magic.
To do this in safety, he must find a haven. Solanna had sent messages to every Grijalva connection she could think of, but it had been many long years since they had seen or even heard of her. Only a few wrote back, and only one did not berate her for abandoning her people. This one letter, from an elderly aunt, told her that if she needed a place to go, there was a valley three days from the great river, a box canyon where no one lived because it was useless for farming or cutting lumber or indeed anything but hiding in. It was to this lonely place that Qamar, Solanna, all the Haddiyat boys under the age of fifteen, and their mothers were preparing to go.
At least, this was what they told everyone. Qamar was under no illusions about what would happen to any Shagara left alive in the fortress after Nizhria’s ballisdas had demolished it and her troops had overrun it. When they talked—and they would talk, the Geysh Dushann would make certain of it—they must speak what they thought to be the truth.
The only person who knew where they would really go was Miqelo. Twenty-five years of roaming these lands, first with his father and now with his son, had made him a living map. He assured Qamar that there were several places he had in mind, and he would decide only when they were at least three days away from the fortress.
Qamar walked back through the zoqallos, the green leather book cradled to his chest. The Shagara were learning why their forebears in the desert traveled light. He walked past buildings where paper was made, and ink, schoolrooms and forges, storehouses and binderies and the healer’s quarter—each little street and narrow alley was congested with people doing one of three things. They carried items that would be taken out of the fortress, or ones to be hidden in hopes that they would survive, or ones that must be destroyed rather than fall into the hands of the Sheyqa. Qamar could always tell when someone had been assigned to that task: Their faces were either grim with purpose or bleak with sorrow.
There were armfuls of paper to be dumped into the slurry, even though no new sheets would be made from them. Metal dies to be melted in the white-hot forges, never to stamp talishann into tin or brass again. Crates of glass bottles and ceramic flasks to be emptied outside the walls and the containers smashed, some containing medicines, others full of inks. Bins and baskets of herbs, flowers, leaves, all the tools this land had given to the healers, burned.