In the beginning, the gods made one portion, one soul for both worlds. Flesh grows and dies and is pruned away, but the soul endures. Those who die give up their souls into the Eidomene. But what is dead may guide the living, and the living will welcome the dead through reincarnation. This is part of the great balance of the cosmos until one day, the last flesh will die. Only then will the Eidomene be whole again eternally.
-The Twenty-Nine Mysteries, Book 29
Baranatha, Zan Desert
All Akona saw was bright light.
She could tell it was white, but it was pinkish behind her closed eyelids. Still, it was harsh enough to hurt her eyes, so she turned away and buried her face in something soft. A pillow.
Was this the afterlife? Was this the Eidomene where she would await reincarnation?
No. Her pillow smelled of sandroot; she recognized its smoky scent anywhere, though she had only ever harvested it on the beach. The sense of smell was such a powerful tether to her memories that she could place the name of the herb dusted on her pillow before she could piece together where she was.
But then she remembered.
Akona sat up with a start. The light through the open window was blinding—she held up her hands to shield her face. Strangely, though the daytime sun shone full as ever, the room was cool. There was even a breeze.
She was sitting on a hard bed made of hide stuffed with straw. Her pillow, on the other hand, was linen and stuffed with something softer, likely feathers. The room had a single tall window with open linen drapes but no shutters or glass to close off the outside. There were two other beds in the room just like hers, both made and empty. She jumped to her feet.
“Styri?” she called out.
Akona wandered out of the empty room and into a long white hallway. The limestone hall had simplistic decorations, alternating sky blue and mint green tiles in two parallel rows along the walls. There was a green-and-beige plant she didn’t recognize hanging in front of a window, its leafy tendrils dangling almost to the floor, and she realized she still wasn’t used to seeing a plant she couldn’t name—even in these foreign lands.
The desert. She was in the Zan desert, she knew. She’d been carrying Styri on her back when she collapsed. Were they found, or had that just been another illusion brought on by the delirious heat?
How else could she have come to be here?
She looked down at her hands. The left one was bandaged. Both of her feet were bandaged, too, and beyond the point of soreness. They were injured. Whether superficially or in the musculature under her skin, her feet hurt sharply when she walked. Her gait then took on a clumsy daintiness, and she regretted remembering her pain.
It would only slow her down.
“Styri?” Akona called again. This time, someone appeared at the far end of the hallway. “Have you seen my sister?”
It was a man wearing all-white cotton robes with an arm-length headscarf cinched around his forehead. On his head was a laurel of green leaves. His fashion was strange, an amalgamation of trends she’d seen in both Qarda and Myrenthos. She had dreadfully little knowledge of the tribes in the Zan desert—neither Zan Vayonado nor the lesser known nomads.
“Go,” he said in Myrenthian with a thick accent. “No, you go. Not this way.”
“Please, I need to see my sister. Where is she?”
He had a weary, stone-faced look about him, looking down at her solemnly over the bridge of his enormous nose. “You... not can see her. Gone.” He used his hands to mime lying down on a pillow.
“Gone?” Akona’s legs suddenly felt even weaker.
“Girl. Sister?” The man’s face scrunched up in concentration. “She, eh... Your sister sleep. She sleep the... forever. Sorry to you.”
It didn’t feel right. She could still feel Styri in her heart. They were close enough that one knew when the other was ill even while apart, or when the other one was fibbing, even if she’d done a perfect job of covering her tracks. They had no secrets between each other—it was impossible.
But Akona remembered how Styri had stopped breathing on their trek through the desert. She’d been without food and water. And Akona, in her delirium, had made the mistake of walking the sands in the light of day, when the desert heat was most damaging to them.
It would not be a shock to imagine that Styri hadn’t survived the journey. Not a logical one, at least.
“I need to see her body,” said Akona. She didn’t allow herself the leisure of grieving, not yet. That would come when she performed all the tests that the glademothers had taught her—she needed to be sure that her twin was really gone for good and beyond saving. “Take me to her. Now.”
“You, eh, not want to see her,” said the man, wincing with the difficulty of speaking this unfamiliar language. “She... she forever sleep now. Better if you not.”
He was useless. Akona pushed past him, running down the hall in her bandaged feet, ignoring the lightning bolts of pain arcing up her calves. She poked her head in room after room—empty. Empty. In one, a skinny old man sat in a wooden rocking chair next to a window. She kept searching.
One room was sealed with linen curtains. She pushed through them and entered, finding a room with two beds.
On one of the beds was her sister Styri. She was sitting upright, surprised to see her. “Akona?”
Akona leaped onto the bed next to her and the two of them embraced. “Styri, what happened to you?” she asked.
“I don’t remember. We were in the desert... and the next thing I knew, I woke up here. And you?”
“The same.”
The curtains fluttered behind them. A man and an old woman entered the room, both wearing similar garments, though the woman’s headscarf was shorter and embroidered with a checkered pattern at the edges. “She’s already awake?” the other man said in a Stonish dialect. He had icy blue eyes.
“I told the other one not to come,” said the large-nosed one, entering after them. “They need sleep.”
“You speak Stonish?!” Akona blurted out in the same language.
The large-nosed man furrowed his brow, offended. “Of course! We are Zan!”
“Then why didn’t you tell me my sister was sleeping and not dead?”
“I said sleep!”
“Forever, though?!”
“You don’t have hyperbole in Myrenthos? You’ve both been in and out of sleep for the past four days!” He folded his arms and turned up his big nose. “Is this how you thank your gracious hosts?”
The twins shared a glance. Akona softened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Thank you for having us. Thank you for everything you did to help us.”
“You saved us out there?” Styri asked.
“My two sons and my cousins did,” the blue-eyed man answered. “You were but a dial’s turn from the oasis. You almost made it on your own. It was a good thing they found you, though—it was nearly midday, and on your own, you would have both perished before the sun set.” He reached out with a smile and grabbed Akona gently by the forearms. “Hello. I am called Haareg. You are called Akona, yes?”
The girl nodded. “Is this how you greet here—with the arms?”
“I am called Zeled,” said the man with the big nose. He touched both her forearms at once, and Akona responded in kind. It was sort of how the other Stonish peoples in Grackenwell and Dridon greeted each other by a single-armed grasp of the other’s right forearm. “You were in bad shape when you came to the oasis, Akona, but your sister—Styri, was it? We thought she had died.”
The elderly woman greeted her next as the men introduced themselves formally to Styri. “I am called Ipaar,” she said, her smile revealing mostly toothless gums. “Welcome, welcome. Stay as long as you like.”
“Where are we, exactly?” Styri asked.
“This is the Oasis of Baranatha.” The old woman hobbled across the room and threw open the drapes in front of Styri’s window, letting in the light of the desert reflected brilliantly off the limestone buildings outside. Palm trees lined the packed dirt roads. There were large white birds with pink-tinted wing feathers and long, rounded bills walking the roads, as well as smaller birds of many colors perched on the rooftops. Insects buzzed nearby. “There is more water within the walls of this city than in the rest of the Zan desert combined. Truly a height among hells. There’s no place you’d rather be in your condition.”
Akona knew what the old woman meant, but sadly, she knew they couldn’t stay long. Not with the veracidins on their trail. Even with their extensive training by the glademothers, they were still two children—and the veracidins were grown men who’d had brutal training of their own, likely in southern Qardish deserts not unlike this one. They’d survive the journey.
If they could find the twins here, they would.
“Is this the only oasis in the Zan desert?” Akona asked innocently.
Zeled nodded. “Well, not the only. But certainly the biggest by far, and the only one with a city. In fact, this is the only permanent city in all the desert. It is the main hub of trade for travelers going north or south on the Stone Continent.”
Akona and Styri shared a secret glance. They sometimes had a way of intimating their thoughts to one another without speaking, a skill it seemed that only they had and could never teach others. It was useful in times like these.
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She tilted her chin down, a slight arch of her brow, as if to say, This will be the first place the veracidins search for us.
Styri tilted her head almost imperceptibly toward the window. We should leave.
Akona reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, brushing her cheek as she did so—not unlike a pillow against her face. Tonight. It all happened in the span of a breath.
“Thank you all again for your hospitality,” said Akona. “I think I’d like to take a walk with my sister if that’s all right. We want to explore Baranatha.”
“Now?” said Zeled.
Haareg stepped forward, held up his hands. “I-I don’t think—”
Just as Akona helped her sister to her feet, Styri’s legs buckled—she fell to the tile floor, wincing. Her white linen bandages parted to reveal dark red-brown patches in the layers underneath.
“I was afraid of this,” Haareg sighed.
“It hurts,” Styri hissed in her reflexive Myrenthian. “Bad.”
“You are free to leave whenever you like, of course,” the old woman Ipaar said warily. “But I think she ought to stay until healed. You won’t make it far in the sand like this.”
The sisters shared another look, as if to say, We’re stuck here for awhile.
***
The first day they were awake together, the sisters had mostly water. They nibbled corners of soft bread for supper. Akona felt her strength returning faster, making her ravenous, so she devoured an entire floury flatbread with fire-browned spots. It filled her stomach to the point of stretching.
The second day, they ate more flatbreads, this time with stewed vegetables that lacked spices. They were so hungry that even an unspiced meal didn’t taste half bad—a rare feat for a Myrenthian. One meal a day became two. Akona could see her sister’s strength returning bit by bit, her cheeks and neck filling back out with the fullness of water that they’d both been lacking for so long, and her color even started to come back.
The third day was a bit more adventurous. Their meals consisted of the same, along with camel’s milk—it was salty and rich with a sweet aftertaste—and stewed meat with unleavened bread baked in the sand. For dessert, they enjoyed dates so sweet that Akona thought she might cry.
When she asked what the sisters could do to repay the generosity of their hosts, Ipaar waved a hand and shook her head. “You said you would leave this place when ready. That makes you guests here. And the hospitality of the desert is to treat all guests this way.”
Akona and Styri walked the streets of Baranatha that night. They were well enough to be on their rebandaged feet again, though her sister walked with a pronounced limp. The streets smelled of roasting goat and fragrant herbs that men smoked from water pipes.
“Where do we go from here?” Styri asked her after a long stretch of quiet.
Akona sighed. “It’s too dangerous to retrace our steps. We might cross paths with the veracidins. Our only hope is to keep going.”
“West?”
“Where else?”
Styri scoffed. “Until we hit the islands? Or...”
“Farther.”
“Farther than the Grand Archipelago? Now I know you’ve gone mad!”
“The world is round, Styri! Like a pomegranate. We can’t go east or north—that’s Grackenwell, Qarda, veracidins, and we’ll be killed. Or worse. But if we keep going west, we circle around to the other side of the world.”
“You say circle around like it’s so easy. Ever heard of a place called the Great Unknown?!”
“Yes, and the Great Unknown is just a big ocean! We might be safer there than anywhere else. We’ll buy a boat in Dridon—steal one, if we have to. We just need to make it to Xheng Yu Xi. They’re neutral in all the conflicts of the world, so we can buy safe passage back to Myrenthos from there. Then we’re finally home free! Our mother is waiting for us. Our payment is waiting for us—we’ll have wealth for life! And we get to help rebuild Myrenthos. Rewrite the books that the Qardish burned.”
Akona’s words seemed to be getting through to Styri, who turned her head away in a huff, but the argument had gone out of her. “Show it to me again,” she said.
“Not out here,” said Akona.
“In here, then!” Styri pointed to an alley. “I need to see it with my own eyes. You’re sure they didn’t go through our things while we were asleep?”
“Positive. They would have said something.” Akona obliged her anyway, ducking into the alley between a loud, smoky tavern and an empty butchery. A rat scurried between their feet and out into the city.
Akona reached into the bag she carried around her shoulder, pushing aside the supplies that their Baranathan hosts had gifted them—dried food staples, full wineskins and skins of mild beer that would keep for emergencies, medicinal herbs, more bandages. She rifled through to the bottom of the bag and undid the hidden clasp in the corner—revealing the false bottom.
That was where it was stored, the length of the emperor’s beard with the golden lacer still fastened around it. The metal caught the light of the tall torches burning on the city streets. She let Styri have a peek, then sealed it all back up as it was.
“We have most of what we need,” Akona went on. “We’ll need to buy a few more things tomorrow before we—”
“Before you what?” said a voice behind her in Myrenthian. It was male.
Akona’s heart quickened. In a split moment, she reached back into her bag—a hand grabbed her wrist, then another swiped the bag from her clutches. She spun around. Another lean man in Qardish garb. A veracidin.
“Sister!” Styri whined. There were two more veracidins who subdued her. A fourth one waited behind them, keeping watch at the other end of the alley. They were blocked on both sides.
Akona looked up. A fifth veracidin looked down at her from the butchery’s rooftop. It was a narrow enough alley that she could have climbed up between the walls in an emergency—not with him there. Besides, they had her sister.
There was no way out.
“Don’t even think about screaming,” said the lead veracidin, the one holding her by the shoulder. He was a one-eyed man with a scar across his left eye that was permanently closed. “Look at your sister. Now.”
Akona turned her head, recoiling from the veracidin’s vise grip on her shoulder. Two others each had Styri by one of her arms. One held a glass jar up to her face, its mouth sealed with a wicker lid full of airholes. In the transparent jar was a thick black scorpion, a fat, spiny barb at the end of its curved tail.
“Don’t,” Akona whispered. “Please.”
“We won’t, so long as you remain quiet,” the veracidin warned her. “If you scream, call for help, if you make some other sound or give another signal—if you so much as speak above a whisper...” His grip somehow tightened even more. “...then your sister will be dead in moments. No one will be able to save her. We have the only antidote, and we will flee, leaving her here to die in your arms. Her whole body will be in terrible pain until she dies, and nothing you say or do will comfort her. And then we will find and do the same to you when the time is right. The only way you both survive is if you do exactly as I say. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good.” She felt the veracidin move. “Do it.”
The man holding the jar lifted the wicker lid, allowing the scorpion to crawl to the rim of the jar, touching two sharp claws and a leg to Styri’s cheek. Its tail moved so fast that she never saw it strike—only when it retracted. Styri let out the start of a scream, but the other veracidin stuffed a rag in her mouth, clamped it tight.
“I obeyed!” Akona hissed. “I did what you said! Give her the—”
“In due time,” said the scar-eyed man. “One hundred breaths. That is the longest a person has endured the venom. You are breathing quickly now because you are afraid, which gives you even less time. And your sister... well, hers is even faster because of the pain. Right?” Styri shook her head, tried to speak around the rag in her mouth, but the sting site was already red and swelling. A tear leaked from her eye. “The body betrays what the heart denies,” he said in Qardish. Then, again in Myrenthian, “We will administer the antidote when you answer two questions. Answer them truthfully, and you will both live to face judgment in Rayyaq Raleed.”
“Fine!” Akona said through gritted teeth. “Ask—hurry up!”
“Did you assassinate Hierophant Drakhman Sanzeen?”
She couldn’t help but notice the red spot on her sister’s cheek now turning a sickly pale green, the sting wound slick with some kind of fluid. “Yes. Please just give her the—”
“In time,” said her captor. “In time. Watch.” He gestured for one of his comrades to retrieve a glass vial with a feather-tipped dart submerged in a yellowish liquid. “The antidote, as promised. You see, we veracidins deal in the truth. Everything I have said to you is true—you can trust that. ‘For the power of Eloei flows from truth alone; therefore, let not deceit be found among you.’ Now then. How many breaths has that been? Fifty? Sixty? Truthfully, I am not sure.”
“Just ask your question!”
“Know that we have no time left for your lies, little girl.”
“I’ll tell you the truth!” Tears rolled down Akona’s cheeks. “Please!”
She heard him snicker behind her back. “I have done this a long time, little girl. And I can tell that you speak the truth. We know that you two did not act alone. Who hired you to assassinate the Hierophant in his bedchamber?”
She blurted out her answer without a moment’s hesitation. “Ghamal! His name was Ghamal! Ghamal Sanzeen—the vizier! The men with him, he had their necks tattooed to look like Grackenwelsh...” They said nothing at first. A few of them exchanged tense glances. “That was his true name. The matriarch used a poison to make him tell us. But one of his men, they called him by another name in private... uh... um...” Akona wracked her brain for the trivial memory that was now a matter of life and death. “Izzahd! They called him Izzahd!”
Her response fell like a stone on their heads. A couple of them gasped. One’s eyes widened, his jaw hanging open in shock. The other one, the one standing in the back of the alley, set his eyes in a glare aimed straight at the confessor.
“The secret name,” said one of them in an awestruck voice. “The one only we know. She speaks the truth!”
“Eloei deliver us,” her captor whispered. “The antidote—now! We will need their testimony in the holy city!”
Styri was now moaning with the pain, her limbs shaking. The sting site was already blistering over; dark veins were visible under the swollen flesh. The veracidin with the glass vial plucked out the dart and slipped the needle into the bend of her arm. It bled slightly, which he dabbed away with a white cloth.
“Will she live?” asked the veracidin in charge.
The one with the antidote nodded. “She gave only four signs—lucky. She was cured before the other signs manifested. She will sleep for a time, but that is it.”
“Good. Prepare the baskets! Give them only waterskins to start.”
“Sadriq,” said the veracidin in the back. “We cannot return them to Qarda. They must be released.”
“Released?” Sadriq, the scar-eyed man, scoffed. “Ahkuhl, what is the meaning of this? We found the killers of Hierophant Drakhman, Eloei grace him!”
Ahkuhl, a man with a tiny tuft of a beard at the tip of his chin, stepped forward, placing a hand on one of the veracidins supporting Styri’s swaying, half-conscious body. “It was the will of Eloei that the previous hierophant be laid to rest. It was the will of Eloei that Ghamal Sanzeen, the true heir to Nahshaheeb Sanzeen, take the throne. Ghamal acted in accordance with Eloei’s wishes. Therefore these girls must be spared—they acted not of their own accord, but every move they made, Eloei—”
“What you say is heresy, Ahkuhl!” said Sadriq, his tone razor sharp and angry again. “Hierophant Lanor Sanzeen is the Seventy-Eighth Prophet of Eloei! She is the only heir of Hierophant Drakhman—”
“Drakhman was a pretender!” Ahkuhl interrupted him. “He led Qarda to countless wars and ruin. He was a tyrant to the rest of the world and so soft on his own people that apostasy has run amok! Ghamal will set the world right again. As Eloei wills it, so shall it be!”
“We deal in the truth, brother. Or have you forgotten the oath you swore?” Only now did Sadriq inadvertently loosen his grasp on Akona. The others began to turn on Akhuhl as well. “You speak in the language of your father. And so, you are no brother of mine.”
“Don’t do this!” Ahkuhl yelled. He had a dagger drawn—he warded off the attack of one of the veracidins holding Styri, who in that moment kicked the legs out from under the other one.
Akona scratched Sadriq’s good eye—her fingers came away wet with either tears or blood. He cried out in sudden pain.
It all happened in the span of a breath.
“Run!” Akona yelled, and by some turn of fortune, Styri kept perfect pace with her despite the scorpion venom pulsing through her body. Her fatigue must have been a feint the whole time.
“My eye!” Sadriq yelled. “Jahfni, don’t let them escape! Eloei damn you, Akhuhl!”
The fifth veracidin, the one on the butchery’s roof, jumped a shocking distance to the packed dirt road below while the others traded blows. He hit the ground running even from such a height.
The sisters shared a glance in the torchlight of Baranatha. Styri’s look was as if to say, The desert? Again? My feet still hurt. Akona’s look said, West. Southwest. Dridon. The Archipelago. The Great Unknown. We will make it home!
As Styri turned away, her eyes said, Will we?