The Spice Gate, page 11
A horn echoed through the cavern.
Neither Makun-kunj nor Sibil-kunj seemed to be bothered by the disturbance, muttering between themselves. But if you were over four thousand years old, Amir supposed, not a lot would irk you. The thought of four casual millennia being shared between these two continued to stifle his hold on reality. Four thousand. Amir had thought Karim bhai, well over sixty, was old.
He heard voices following the horn. Not a conversation, but a collective, harmonic thrum of words. It echoed across the distance with some ferocity. The sounds emerged from farther ahead and below.
Within minutes, the voices were accompanied by footfalls, a synchronized march of several columns of people. Amir heard the grounding of pikes and the stomping of boots. Someone was shouting orders. Several someones.
Unable to resist, he let Makun-kunj and Sibil-kunj take a couple of steps ahead before he raised his blindfold and gazed down.
His jaw dropped.
Sprawled beneath the narrow bridge they were now standing on, occupying an enormous cavern was . . . a group of warriors of a size he’d never imagined. This was an army? When Karim bhai had spoken of war, Amir had assumed there to be a crowd of people. Perhaps a few hundred.
Down in this hollow mountain, there had to be at least a thousand men and women, their bodies covered in saffron armor and mail, with gauntlets on their wrists; swords, sickles, and axes in their hands; marked helms on their heads; and boots on their feet. There was a frightening discipline to them, a pulverizing coat of synchronization in the way they moved—trained—in tandem. It was their stomping that shook the mountain. The tips of their weapons glistened against the strange firelight in the cavern, not emanating from torches or candlesticks but from behind the walls, through cracks and crevices, slits and holes. The light seeped out in shades of blue and orange, a miasmic glow that darkened and brightened alternatively like a throbbing, pulsing cabochon.
Clinging to the sides of the cavern were beasts of a kind Amir had never seen. They resembled dogs, but they were five times the size of any mutt Amir had encountered in the Bowl, with sharp claws and drooling, saw-toothed mouths that seemed in perpetual hunger. They were tied to icy spikes of the cavern jutting out of the floor with heavy chains, and they rested on their haunches, their bodies heaving. Were these the thornwolves Karim bhai spoke of, rumored to haunt the Outerlands? One of the Immortal Sons . . .
Amir gulped and averted his gaze. Just stories, just stories.
Against the glow of the light within the walls themselves, Amir watched the Uyirsena of Illindhi train for battle, the air filled with their stomping and war cries.
Make no mistake, this is an army trained to kill.
“Their time is coming,” Makun-kunj said prophetically.
“They will make their mothers and fathers proud, and of course the Mouth,” Sibil-kunj said from a few feet ahead. “Not every generation is given this chance to Cleanse.”
“Cleanse?” Amir asked, teeth clattering and a rush of piss waiting to be released that he barely held in.
“The Uyirsena are bred for one purpose, intruder, and that is to preserve what we are and how we choose to be. They are trained to exterminate.”
He froze in his step. “Exterminate whom?”
“Ah.” Makun-kunj clapped his hands, nudging Amir ahead once more. “The Chairs would be better suited to answer that for you.”
Before Amir could respond, the ground underneath began to sway, and Makun-kunj—worried for Amir—clasped his hand and shrieked. “You lied!”
Amir had forgotten to replace the blindfold. Following a slap to his face, Makun-kunj retied the kerchief around Amir’s head. For the rest of the journey, Amir complained little, instead filling his mind with the prospect of the monstrosity he had just witnessed setting out for the eight kingdoms. This was what Fylan had not wanted, what he had begged for Amir to go to Illindhi and prevent. If Fylan had wished to keep the stranger in Harini’s court from leaking the secret of olum, why would he be so insistent this army not be sent to stop her?
Once again, the gaps in what Amir knew overwhelmed him. He was floundering in darkness.
When his feet landed on roughhewn stone once more, Amir heaved a sigh of relief, knowing he was no longer on that narrow bridge. Within moments, the sounds of the Uyirsena dwindled as Amir, Makun-kunj, and Sibil-kunj burrowed into another opening, the darkness scattering out of the blindfold replaced by the orange flicker of torches.
By the time Amir smelled open air, and the warm breeze that carried the scent of trees and flowers, his feet had numbed, his back was on the verge of detaching from the rest of his body, and his throat ached for anything liquid. He broke down and crawled in the dark to whatever mound of stone he could find on the slopes outside the mountain. There he lay, panting, massaging his thighs, and rubbing his knee. Makun-kunj and Sibil-kunj stood nearby, permitting him his blind recuperation.
Maybe all of this had been a mistake. Amir had hoped to be rewarded for his courage in the face of the unknown in carrying Fylan’s message. Instead, he had not only lost his sight but was making his way to some kind of hearing where he could well be sentenced. How was this any better than being dragged by Hasmin into the Pyramid’s prison? All told, he was as foolish as fools came.
He tried to regard the slope through the blindfold, imagining the fresh colors of the sky and the earth, presently mingling and morphing within the cloth, in layers of darkness. And slowly, as he sat up, he heard the sound of hoofbeats and the tumble of wheels, and with it came the unforgettable aroma of saffron and mace.
The chariot seemed to stop at the foot of the mountain. He heard someone jump out of it and stride up the slope to where he lay, where they exchanged a few words with Makun-kunj and Sibil-kunj in a tongue Amir did not understand. He could smell a heady scent of honeyed sweetness with a floating hint of pungency, as though the breeze were battling an old foe.
The figure approached him, a third shadow, and crouched beside him.
When their hands grazed his face, Amir winced. Their touch was soft, laden with promise. It smelled of musk and honey, and a deep lacing of nutmeg. A hint of aloe in the face and shikakai in the hair. There was something else about the hand that he could not weave into a word. His memory choked and shut down. Instead, his mouth opened of its own accord, sensing its role to play, and absorbed the magical taste of water as it swam over his tongue and down his throat. He gulped until he could drink no more.
“Come,” said the voice. Dreamlike, the word enveloped him in her intentions. A woman’s voice. Could this be Madhyra? She placed a hand on his nose, a piece of cloth—one that reeked of the opium saeveroot—and he at once tried to jerk away. Her hand was firm on the back of his head, though, and he felt her suck the consciousness out of him.
“We need a lot of answers, Carrier, unless you wish to remain in Illindhi forever.”
It was all Amir heard before he submitted to the black.
Chapter 8
Show me a home with an empty spice jar, and I will show you the djinn that has haunted their daughter.
—A Spirit Through Each Window of a Dreary Town
When the cloth came off his eyes—when Amir woke up—the brilliance of the light blinded him. He found himself curled on a floor, the touch of it unfamiliar but slick, recently washed, with a natural, earthy smell. It emitted a silvery glow along the edges of the marbling as though someone were shining dazzles of moonlight from beneath. His head pounded, so he left that mystery to another time and was on his way back into the state of unconsciousness he had been drugged into.
Lights flickered in front of his eyes, keeping him from falling asleep once more. Blinding lights. Not one. At least four. No, a dozen. A hundred. Glued to a membrane running along the walls in a circle like a great cummerbund for the chamber he was in. Pale blue light sprayed out of glass carapaces, the peripheries embedded with rubies and topazes. Mirrors were spaced between them, so that wherever he looked, he saw his own reflection, the ruffles of his hair and the vacancy in his eyes. Not quite what a man who came to help should look like.
A cavern full of the Poison, Fylan had said. But where? Could it be where the Uyirsena are training?
Two suits of armor stood near a door, their faces resting under candlelight, armed with a spear and a sword. Above, the gnarled wall tapered to form a dome, the keystone bathed in darkness, and for a moment it looked to Amir like he was inside a great tree.
A cough. Murmurs from ahead. Above. “Rise, Amir of Raluha. You are in the chamber of the Chairs.”
He struggled to stand. Bones cracked and revolted against the attempt. He felt like he had swallowed a cow and was then asked to run. With an effort, Amir managed to crane his neck at the dais in front, a series of six rock protrusions that jutted out of the floor like gigantic fingers of a hand. Atop each of them, surrounded by embroidered drapes, he glimpsed silhouettes, faces and bodies leashed to the shadows, their arms resting on what appeared to be cushions and diwans. The contours of the figure at the center, however, seemed familiar, and he couldn’t help but inhale, expecting a flow of honeysuckle and musk up his nose.
With a groan, the rock pillar shifted ahead. Only a step, almost a trick of the eye, but he swore it did. The woman’s face emerged from shadow, revealing her in a stark violet gown and a pruned bottom, with lemon leaves creeping out to envelop her ankles. A crown rested on her head, diaphanous, like a molded froth of lather, the wings clipping her ears. Her eyes seemed darker, dabbed in mascara, while her lips remained guarded, as though they would open to speak only to the most privileged.
Amir squinted to look behind her at the five other pillars and the silhouettes upon them. He must have seemed like a pitiable creature to them, barely able to stand, throat parched and every joint in his body aching and on the brink of yielding.
It was rather annoying how Karim bhai had overstated the whole affair with messengers and how they were treated in other kingdoms.
“Can I get something to eat?” he asked, and because he could no longer tolerate this treatment meted out to him, he added with a sneer, “A plate of bisibelle bath, perhaps?” His voice bounced off the walls like a threat. He avoided looking at himself in the mirrors, but they were everywhere, portraying him in cracked and distorted forms, diminishing him to a boneless figure.
The woman not in shadows said, “You already ate.” Her voice, on another day, could have been a remedy for the worst ailment that afflicted him.
Amir frowned, puzzled. “I don’t remember eating.”
“We fed you a meal while you were unconscious the last two days and then delirious for one. Suffice it to say, any hunger you feel now is merely a lack of awareness in your head. A trick of the mind.”
Amir’s heart thundered in his chest. “Three days?”
It meant . . . Kabir! Amir scrambled up from where he lay on the floor, the panic surging. “Wh-Why did you keep me unconscious for so long?”
“The Chair,” the woman replied, “had to convene in your absence and discuss your intrusion. You fail to realize that you are the first outsider in Illindhi for a long, long time.”
Amir’s mind raged. All he could imagine was Hasmin leading Kabir down the saffron fields, loading his back with glassware or victuals or saffron stalks or jars of honey then sending him through the Gate . . .
A grumble in his stomach shook him away from that dreadful thought. A trouble that was no less pernicious than the others—that of having eaten several meals without the knowledge of them. And, rather importantly, not knowing what he’d eaten.
Amir took a pause before asking, “You are Madhyra, aren’t you?”
“No,” she replied, and Amir wished he could reclaim his educated guess.
“My name is Kashyni, of the Circle of Leaves. I am the stewardess of Illindhi, ruling in place of our thronekeeper, Maharani Madhyra.”
A thronekeeper? “Where is Madhyra? F-Fylan told me I should speak to no one else.”
A hint of discomfort rippled within the other silhouettes. A whisper sliced the dark air between the pedestals like a scythe’s blade. Kashyni sighed, glancing to either side at her elevated companions before refocusing her gaze on him.
“She is a traitor,” she said coldly. “Who took our olum and crossed the Spice Gate into Halmora, threatening to reveal its knowledge to the eight kingdoms. It is after her that we sent Fylan—to bring her back, or if that did not succeed, then to kill her. Where is Fylan?”
A flurry of thoughts clattered into Amir’s head, jumbled into a knot, and came out, bruised and tattered, like several drunks stumbling out of a tavern together.
Thronekeeper. “But—”
“I ordered Fylan to give Madhyra’s name to anyone whom he trusted to carry a message back were he to fail. Only then could we separate Madhyra’s spies from our own. And she has quite a few, as many in the eight kingdoms as in Illindhi. I now repeat, where is Fylan?”
Amir gulped. “He’s dead. He asked me to come to Illindhi before he died.”
Silence on the pillars. Amir shifted uncomfortably beneath them, awaiting the Chairs’ proclamation. Perhaps, his purpose would hold more sway now that he had arrived to fulfill a dying man’s wish.
And to get the Poison, don’t forget that.
Kashyni was the first to break the spell of quiet. “It was not entirely unforeseen. We have prepared for this contingency.”
Amir didn’t know what to make of that, and—more—had no desire to interrogate them on their workings. He’d already landed on the wrong side of bewilderment, and this quest for normalcy was a dying breath, one he did not wish to waste on people who weren’t even looking at him.
A second silhouette—to Kashyni’s right—moved to adjust themselves and spoke. “He looks barely twenty.”
“When I was twenty, I had pulled far greater stunts,” a third silhouette said with a giggle from a pedestal to Kashyni’s left, a little farther behind.
A fourth shadow—twice as far away from Kashyni to the left—chuckled. “Your stunts were academic, Munivarey. I don’t remember you plucking up the courage to pass through the Spice Gate and out of Illindhi.”
“Oh, I dreamed of it! Only, I wasn’t permitted. Don’t you put this on me, Shashulyan. Kashyni, back me up! How can you just sit and listen to this?”
The softer but rickety voice of the second silhouette spoke up. “This is ridiculous. Whatever are we considering? The boy needs to be sent back to his homeland at once.”
Amir could have snapped his neck with how vigorously he nodded at that. Was she the one who would defend him?
“Ho,” agreed another Chair, and Amir was losing track of who was speaking. He sensed a commotion as murmurs exploded into more flickering shadows and bobbing heads. The rickety voice beside Kashyni persisted. “He could have chosen not to bring Fylan’s words here, but he did. We would have been floundering in the dark if not for his decision. Has anybody thought of that? This is an insult and is unfair. The Chair stands for justice.”
Amir watched Kashyni lift her palm to her forehead and close her eyes. The others were, however, relentless.
“Send him back? Armed with the knowledge of Illindhi? This would be the beginning of the downfall of the realm’s greatest kingdom. As if Madhyra wasn’t doing enough already.”
“Look at him, Shashulyan! He’s a child.”
Shashulyan snarled. “Alinjya, it is not a question of age. The Spice Trade is at a risk of severe imbalance. The first and only law of the land is that there is absolute status quo in the trade. It ceases to exist if we reveal ourselves. Our purpose is to bring Madhyra back, or even kill her if we must. Without anyone knowing. And yet now, there is another who can very well go back through the Gate and talk. Clove’s breath, it’s preposterous that we’re even considering it.”
“But we are considering it. Who would believe him, should we send him back?” replied Alinjya. “He would be like a naked suckling, his words carrying as much weight as those of a blabbering drunk dragging himself down the street having forgotten his way home. Haven’t we witnessed enough deranged souls in the past who were spared by the Uyirsena? What have they amounted to if not to become delusional prophets?”
“What then, once Madhyra’s truth begins to spread? This boy’s words will serve to corroborate a bubbling rumor. Do you not foresee how this can magnify and come back to bite us? I’m sorry, Alinjya, but this time, my morality forbids me to participate in this discourse. The Chairs were raised to prevent this from happening. For centuries, we simmered under the surface, biding our time, waiting for the inevitability that someone out there would leak our secret to the realm. Years of silence and darkness. And when it finally is the time for our purpose to be fulfilled, you wish to be reckless and abandon the very principles of the Chairs? I cannot stand for this. And Kashyni, I do not expect you to either. The boy cannot be sent back.”
The giggling male voice, the man named Munivarey, squabbled for attention, silencing Shashulyan. “Leave him to me, Kashyni,” he said. “Maybe I can scrub something off him before you decide to drop him down the Mouth in a coffin of peppers. If he is indeed a Spice Carrier, then I wish to record his experience and his sensations at the very least.”
There was a sudden whip of silence that made Amir aware of the fact that shadows had eyes, scrawny blobs of reduced darkness pointed at him. In that inescapable moment, the hairs on the back of his hands stood erect.
When he thought it couldn’t get worse, a fifth voice, belonging to the greatest of the shadow dwellers away from Kashyni, came forth. It stirred like a beast awakening from a slumber. The voice was melodious and deep.
“People fail to realize that curiosity is often the greatest of all sins. The boy is not here because he was commanded.”
“You do not rain your judgment upon this person because he was curious, Mahrang,” Alinjya said.
The baritone-voiced Mahrang ignored her, his silhouette like a dark loaf of bread. “Until today, we were lesser than a figment of his imagination, an impossibility. Eight kingdoms, never nine. His innocence goes only as far as fate placed him on those palace grounds, and for Fylan to plead a request of him, inches away from his death. There, this man’s innocence dies. Beyond that, his choices have been born out of an inclination to do something few would do in his place. Do you disagree?”
Neither Makun-kunj nor Sibil-kunj seemed to be bothered by the disturbance, muttering between themselves. But if you were over four thousand years old, Amir supposed, not a lot would irk you. The thought of four casual millennia being shared between these two continued to stifle his hold on reality. Four thousand. Amir had thought Karim bhai, well over sixty, was old.
He heard voices following the horn. Not a conversation, but a collective, harmonic thrum of words. It echoed across the distance with some ferocity. The sounds emerged from farther ahead and below.
Within minutes, the voices were accompanied by footfalls, a synchronized march of several columns of people. Amir heard the grounding of pikes and the stomping of boots. Someone was shouting orders. Several someones.
Unable to resist, he let Makun-kunj and Sibil-kunj take a couple of steps ahead before he raised his blindfold and gazed down.
His jaw dropped.
Sprawled beneath the narrow bridge they were now standing on, occupying an enormous cavern was . . . a group of warriors of a size he’d never imagined. This was an army? When Karim bhai had spoken of war, Amir had assumed there to be a crowd of people. Perhaps a few hundred.
Down in this hollow mountain, there had to be at least a thousand men and women, their bodies covered in saffron armor and mail, with gauntlets on their wrists; swords, sickles, and axes in their hands; marked helms on their heads; and boots on their feet. There was a frightening discipline to them, a pulverizing coat of synchronization in the way they moved—trained—in tandem. It was their stomping that shook the mountain. The tips of their weapons glistened against the strange firelight in the cavern, not emanating from torches or candlesticks but from behind the walls, through cracks and crevices, slits and holes. The light seeped out in shades of blue and orange, a miasmic glow that darkened and brightened alternatively like a throbbing, pulsing cabochon.
Clinging to the sides of the cavern were beasts of a kind Amir had never seen. They resembled dogs, but they were five times the size of any mutt Amir had encountered in the Bowl, with sharp claws and drooling, saw-toothed mouths that seemed in perpetual hunger. They were tied to icy spikes of the cavern jutting out of the floor with heavy chains, and they rested on their haunches, their bodies heaving. Were these the thornwolves Karim bhai spoke of, rumored to haunt the Outerlands? One of the Immortal Sons . . .
Amir gulped and averted his gaze. Just stories, just stories.
Against the glow of the light within the walls themselves, Amir watched the Uyirsena of Illindhi train for battle, the air filled with their stomping and war cries.
Make no mistake, this is an army trained to kill.
“Their time is coming,” Makun-kunj said prophetically.
“They will make their mothers and fathers proud, and of course the Mouth,” Sibil-kunj said from a few feet ahead. “Not every generation is given this chance to Cleanse.”
“Cleanse?” Amir asked, teeth clattering and a rush of piss waiting to be released that he barely held in.
“The Uyirsena are bred for one purpose, intruder, and that is to preserve what we are and how we choose to be. They are trained to exterminate.”
He froze in his step. “Exterminate whom?”
“Ah.” Makun-kunj clapped his hands, nudging Amir ahead once more. “The Chairs would be better suited to answer that for you.”
Before Amir could respond, the ground underneath began to sway, and Makun-kunj—worried for Amir—clasped his hand and shrieked. “You lied!”
Amir had forgotten to replace the blindfold. Following a slap to his face, Makun-kunj retied the kerchief around Amir’s head. For the rest of the journey, Amir complained little, instead filling his mind with the prospect of the monstrosity he had just witnessed setting out for the eight kingdoms. This was what Fylan had not wanted, what he had begged for Amir to go to Illindhi and prevent. If Fylan had wished to keep the stranger in Harini’s court from leaking the secret of olum, why would he be so insistent this army not be sent to stop her?
Once again, the gaps in what Amir knew overwhelmed him. He was floundering in darkness.
When his feet landed on roughhewn stone once more, Amir heaved a sigh of relief, knowing he was no longer on that narrow bridge. Within moments, the sounds of the Uyirsena dwindled as Amir, Makun-kunj, and Sibil-kunj burrowed into another opening, the darkness scattering out of the blindfold replaced by the orange flicker of torches.
By the time Amir smelled open air, and the warm breeze that carried the scent of trees and flowers, his feet had numbed, his back was on the verge of detaching from the rest of his body, and his throat ached for anything liquid. He broke down and crawled in the dark to whatever mound of stone he could find on the slopes outside the mountain. There he lay, panting, massaging his thighs, and rubbing his knee. Makun-kunj and Sibil-kunj stood nearby, permitting him his blind recuperation.
Maybe all of this had been a mistake. Amir had hoped to be rewarded for his courage in the face of the unknown in carrying Fylan’s message. Instead, he had not only lost his sight but was making his way to some kind of hearing where he could well be sentenced. How was this any better than being dragged by Hasmin into the Pyramid’s prison? All told, he was as foolish as fools came.
He tried to regard the slope through the blindfold, imagining the fresh colors of the sky and the earth, presently mingling and morphing within the cloth, in layers of darkness. And slowly, as he sat up, he heard the sound of hoofbeats and the tumble of wheels, and with it came the unforgettable aroma of saffron and mace.
The chariot seemed to stop at the foot of the mountain. He heard someone jump out of it and stride up the slope to where he lay, where they exchanged a few words with Makun-kunj and Sibil-kunj in a tongue Amir did not understand. He could smell a heady scent of honeyed sweetness with a floating hint of pungency, as though the breeze were battling an old foe.
The figure approached him, a third shadow, and crouched beside him.
When their hands grazed his face, Amir winced. Their touch was soft, laden with promise. It smelled of musk and honey, and a deep lacing of nutmeg. A hint of aloe in the face and shikakai in the hair. There was something else about the hand that he could not weave into a word. His memory choked and shut down. Instead, his mouth opened of its own accord, sensing its role to play, and absorbed the magical taste of water as it swam over his tongue and down his throat. He gulped until he could drink no more.
“Come,” said the voice. Dreamlike, the word enveloped him in her intentions. A woman’s voice. Could this be Madhyra? She placed a hand on his nose, a piece of cloth—one that reeked of the opium saeveroot—and he at once tried to jerk away. Her hand was firm on the back of his head, though, and he felt her suck the consciousness out of him.
“We need a lot of answers, Carrier, unless you wish to remain in Illindhi forever.”
It was all Amir heard before he submitted to the black.
Chapter 8
Show me a home with an empty spice jar, and I will show you the djinn that has haunted their daughter.
—A Spirit Through Each Window of a Dreary Town
When the cloth came off his eyes—when Amir woke up—the brilliance of the light blinded him. He found himself curled on a floor, the touch of it unfamiliar but slick, recently washed, with a natural, earthy smell. It emitted a silvery glow along the edges of the marbling as though someone were shining dazzles of moonlight from beneath. His head pounded, so he left that mystery to another time and was on his way back into the state of unconsciousness he had been drugged into.
Lights flickered in front of his eyes, keeping him from falling asleep once more. Blinding lights. Not one. At least four. No, a dozen. A hundred. Glued to a membrane running along the walls in a circle like a great cummerbund for the chamber he was in. Pale blue light sprayed out of glass carapaces, the peripheries embedded with rubies and topazes. Mirrors were spaced between them, so that wherever he looked, he saw his own reflection, the ruffles of his hair and the vacancy in his eyes. Not quite what a man who came to help should look like.
A cavern full of the Poison, Fylan had said. But where? Could it be where the Uyirsena are training?
Two suits of armor stood near a door, their faces resting under candlelight, armed with a spear and a sword. Above, the gnarled wall tapered to form a dome, the keystone bathed in darkness, and for a moment it looked to Amir like he was inside a great tree.
A cough. Murmurs from ahead. Above. “Rise, Amir of Raluha. You are in the chamber of the Chairs.”
He struggled to stand. Bones cracked and revolted against the attempt. He felt like he had swallowed a cow and was then asked to run. With an effort, Amir managed to crane his neck at the dais in front, a series of six rock protrusions that jutted out of the floor like gigantic fingers of a hand. Atop each of them, surrounded by embroidered drapes, he glimpsed silhouettes, faces and bodies leashed to the shadows, their arms resting on what appeared to be cushions and diwans. The contours of the figure at the center, however, seemed familiar, and he couldn’t help but inhale, expecting a flow of honeysuckle and musk up his nose.
With a groan, the rock pillar shifted ahead. Only a step, almost a trick of the eye, but he swore it did. The woman’s face emerged from shadow, revealing her in a stark violet gown and a pruned bottom, with lemon leaves creeping out to envelop her ankles. A crown rested on her head, diaphanous, like a molded froth of lather, the wings clipping her ears. Her eyes seemed darker, dabbed in mascara, while her lips remained guarded, as though they would open to speak only to the most privileged.
Amir squinted to look behind her at the five other pillars and the silhouettes upon them. He must have seemed like a pitiable creature to them, barely able to stand, throat parched and every joint in his body aching and on the brink of yielding.
It was rather annoying how Karim bhai had overstated the whole affair with messengers and how they were treated in other kingdoms.
“Can I get something to eat?” he asked, and because he could no longer tolerate this treatment meted out to him, he added with a sneer, “A plate of bisibelle bath, perhaps?” His voice bounced off the walls like a threat. He avoided looking at himself in the mirrors, but they were everywhere, portraying him in cracked and distorted forms, diminishing him to a boneless figure.
The woman not in shadows said, “You already ate.” Her voice, on another day, could have been a remedy for the worst ailment that afflicted him.
Amir frowned, puzzled. “I don’t remember eating.”
“We fed you a meal while you were unconscious the last two days and then delirious for one. Suffice it to say, any hunger you feel now is merely a lack of awareness in your head. A trick of the mind.”
Amir’s heart thundered in his chest. “Three days?”
It meant . . . Kabir! Amir scrambled up from where he lay on the floor, the panic surging. “Wh-Why did you keep me unconscious for so long?”
“The Chair,” the woman replied, “had to convene in your absence and discuss your intrusion. You fail to realize that you are the first outsider in Illindhi for a long, long time.”
Amir’s mind raged. All he could imagine was Hasmin leading Kabir down the saffron fields, loading his back with glassware or victuals or saffron stalks or jars of honey then sending him through the Gate . . .
A grumble in his stomach shook him away from that dreadful thought. A trouble that was no less pernicious than the others—that of having eaten several meals without the knowledge of them. And, rather importantly, not knowing what he’d eaten.
Amir took a pause before asking, “You are Madhyra, aren’t you?”
“No,” she replied, and Amir wished he could reclaim his educated guess.
“My name is Kashyni, of the Circle of Leaves. I am the stewardess of Illindhi, ruling in place of our thronekeeper, Maharani Madhyra.”
A thronekeeper? “Where is Madhyra? F-Fylan told me I should speak to no one else.”
A hint of discomfort rippled within the other silhouettes. A whisper sliced the dark air between the pedestals like a scythe’s blade. Kashyni sighed, glancing to either side at her elevated companions before refocusing her gaze on him.
“She is a traitor,” she said coldly. “Who took our olum and crossed the Spice Gate into Halmora, threatening to reveal its knowledge to the eight kingdoms. It is after her that we sent Fylan—to bring her back, or if that did not succeed, then to kill her. Where is Fylan?”
A flurry of thoughts clattered into Amir’s head, jumbled into a knot, and came out, bruised and tattered, like several drunks stumbling out of a tavern together.
Thronekeeper. “But—”
“I ordered Fylan to give Madhyra’s name to anyone whom he trusted to carry a message back were he to fail. Only then could we separate Madhyra’s spies from our own. And she has quite a few, as many in the eight kingdoms as in Illindhi. I now repeat, where is Fylan?”
Amir gulped. “He’s dead. He asked me to come to Illindhi before he died.”
Silence on the pillars. Amir shifted uncomfortably beneath them, awaiting the Chairs’ proclamation. Perhaps, his purpose would hold more sway now that he had arrived to fulfill a dying man’s wish.
And to get the Poison, don’t forget that.
Kashyni was the first to break the spell of quiet. “It was not entirely unforeseen. We have prepared for this contingency.”
Amir didn’t know what to make of that, and—more—had no desire to interrogate them on their workings. He’d already landed on the wrong side of bewilderment, and this quest for normalcy was a dying breath, one he did not wish to waste on people who weren’t even looking at him.
A second silhouette—to Kashyni’s right—moved to adjust themselves and spoke. “He looks barely twenty.”
“When I was twenty, I had pulled far greater stunts,” a third silhouette said with a giggle from a pedestal to Kashyni’s left, a little farther behind.
A fourth shadow—twice as far away from Kashyni to the left—chuckled. “Your stunts were academic, Munivarey. I don’t remember you plucking up the courage to pass through the Spice Gate and out of Illindhi.”
“Oh, I dreamed of it! Only, I wasn’t permitted. Don’t you put this on me, Shashulyan. Kashyni, back me up! How can you just sit and listen to this?”
The softer but rickety voice of the second silhouette spoke up. “This is ridiculous. Whatever are we considering? The boy needs to be sent back to his homeland at once.”
Amir could have snapped his neck with how vigorously he nodded at that. Was she the one who would defend him?
“Ho,” agreed another Chair, and Amir was losing track of who was speaking. He sensed a commotion as murmurs exploded into more flickering shadows and bobbing heads. The rickety voice beside Kashyni persisted. “He could have chosen not to bring Fylan’s words here, but he did. We would have been floundering in the dark if not for his decision. Has anybody thought of that? This is an insult and is unfair. The Chair stands for justice.”
Amir watched Kashyni lift her palm to her forehead and close her eyes. The others were, however, relentless.
“Send him back? Armed with the knowledge of Illindhi? This would be the beginning of the downfall of the realm’s greatest kingdom. As if Madhyra wasn’t doing enough already.”
“Look at him, Shashulyan! He’s a child.”
Shashulyan snarled. “Alinjya, it is not a question of age. The Spice Trade is at a risk of severe imbalance. The first and only law of the land is that there is absolute status quo in the trade. It ceases to exist if we reveal ourselves. Our purpose is to bring Madhyra back, or even kill her if we must. Without anyone knowing. And yet now, there is another who can very well go back through the Gate and talk. Clove’s breath, it’s preposterous that we’re even considering it.”
“But we are considering it. Who would believe him, should we send him back?” replied Alinjya. “He would be like a naked suckling, his words carrying as much weight as those of a blabbering drunk dragging himself down the street having forgotten his way home. Haven’t we witnessed enough deranged souls in the past who were spared by the Uyirsena? What have they amounted to if not to become delusional prophets?”
“What then, once Madhyra’s truth begins to spread? This boy’s words will serve to corroborate a bubbling rumor. Do you not foresee how this can magnify and come back to bite us? I’m sorry, Alinjya, but this time, my morality forbids me to participate in this discourse. The Chairs were raised to prevent this from happening. For centuries, we simmered under the surface, biding our time, waiting for the inevitability that someone out there would leak our secret to the realm. Years of silence and darkness. And when it finally is the time for our purpose to be fulfilled, you wish to be reckless and abandon the very principles of the Chairs? I cannot stand for this. And Kashyni, I do not expect you to either. The boy cannot be sent back.”
The giggling male voice, the man named Munivarey, squabbled for attention, silencing Shashulyan. “Leave him to me, Kashyni,” he said. “Maybe I can scrub something off him before you decide to drop him down the Mouth in a coffin of peppers. If he is indeed a Spice Carrier, then I wish to record his experience and his sensations at the very least.”
There was a sudden whip of silence that made Amir aware of the fact that shadows had eyes, scrawny blobs of reduced darkness pointed at him. In that inescapable moment, the hairs on the back of his hands stood erect.
When he thought it couldn’t get worse, a fifth voice, belonging to the greatest of the shadow dwellers away from Kashyni, came forth. It stirred like a beast awakening from a slumber. The voice was melodious and deep.
“People fail to realize that curiosity is often the greatest of all sins. The boy is not here because he was commanded.”
“You do not rain your judgment upon this person because he was curious, Mahrang,” Alinjya said.
The baritone-voiced Mahrang ignored her, his silhouette like a dark loaf of bread. “Until today, we were lesser than a figment of his imagination, an impossibility. Eight kingdoms, never nine. His innocence goes only as far as fate placed him on those palace grounds, and for Fylan to plead a request of him, inches away from his death. There, this man’s innocence dies. Beyond that, his choices have been born out of an inclination to do something few would do in his place. Do you disagree?”
