The Diviner by Melanie Rawn Read Free Book Online

Now!”
    It took all his strength to put force into the order—and by the amusement flickering in Chal Kabir’s eyes, the old man knew it. He gestured with one gnarled hand to young Fadhil, who disappeared out the tent flap, brushing against wind chimes as he did so. “He will bring the horse around. A splendid animal. We will accept him in payment for your life.”
    Azzad bit back a hot retort. Fear and relief had followed each other too quickly, leaving him dizzy. He must be cautious. Laws of hospitality aside—those same laws that in theory compelled these people to tend him without requiring recompense—Chal Kabir had mentioned tests. This might be another.
    It was.
    Chal Kabir snorted a laugh. “Ayia, you can control yourself. Good, good.”
    Movement in the triangle of light at the tent flap caught Azzad’s gaze. Khamsin: whole and sleek and fractious, needing three boys to hang onto his halter. A whistle from Azzad calmed him at once, and he followed the boys decorously enough out of Azzad’s sight.
    â€œInteresting,” commented Chal Kabir.
    â€œHe obeys no one but me,” Azzad said, sinking wearily back down onto the pillows. “We have been each other’s since the moment of his birth.”
    â€œYou claim brotherhood with a horse?”
    â€œWith this horse, yes.”
    â€œAnd he allows you onto his back?”
    Azzad peered up at the old man. “I trained him.”
    â€œIs it difficult, this training?”
    Outraged: “You don’t think I’d hitch him behind a cart or a plow, do you?”
    Chal Kabir had a closed countenance behind his gray-streaked beard, but Azzad suddenly knew that this was precisely what horses were used for here. Wherever here was.
    â€œWe will speak more later, when you are stronger. Sururi zoubh.” He touched his fingertips to his brow; Azzad recognized the ancient sign for I mean this with my thoughts , and gulped because the hand had not touched the chest. That would have meant I mean this with my soul . But what the old man said was harmless enough—a simple wish for sweet sleep.
    Azzad watched him limp across the sunlit brilliance of the rugs. “Chal Kabir? If it is permitted, please do me the favor of thanking the ladies Meryem and Leyliah for their good care of me.”
    Beneath the brown, dusty robe, the bent spine suddenly straightened—and not without pain, to judge by the flinching shoulders. Chal Kabir did not turn as he said flatly, “No women have been inside this tent while you have been within it.” And then he was gone, and the flap closed, and heated darkness shut him in once more.
    Azzad folded his arms behind his head. The old man had lied to him. Why?
    Ayia, it was improper for a woman to be inside a tent with a man not her husband or brother or son or father—even if the man was drugged to the eyes and incapable of lifting a finger, let alone his male member. Having satisfactorily explained Chal Kabir’s lie, he began puzzling out the truth.
    First, who were these people? The tent proclaimed nomads, yet Chal Kabir had implied that they used horses to plow the ground. No meandering tribe he’d ever heard of cultivated crops. The only water was poisonous—he had hazy memories of the water hole, Ma’ar Yazhrad, the old man had called it, and “bitter drinking” it truly had been. But by then he was too stuporous with heat and hunger to have any idea what he was doing. He recalled very well, however, the forbidding land around him: crystalline salt flats, immense sand dunes, ravines dry for a thousand years and littered with sharp stones. What plow could turn this cracked and tainted soil? And even if it could, what could possibly grow?
    In retrospect, the look of the desert surprised him. He’d always thought that across The Steeps lay endless sand dunes of the kind that formed the borders of Rimmal Madar beyond the mountain