The Kingdoms of Dust by Amanda Downum Read Free Book Online

could infect the working.
    Each of them focused their power differently: Siavush chanted under his breath, incantations and litanies of strength; Khalil recited sword-forms, though he hadn’t practiced them in decades; Shirin ran mathematical equations in her mind. Nerium sang. Her voice was not what it once was—that had been lost, with her beauty, to time—but rhythm and pitch she still had.
    Disparate as they were, their rotes served the same function: strength, order, precision, and perhaps even love. All the things that stood against the chaos and destruction that were Al-Jodâ’im, and the despair they had learned to wield as a weapon against their captors. All these they wrought into chains to bind the darkness, as their order had for centuries.
     
    They left the temple in silence when their work was done, limping, trembling, cold with sweat. No amount of pride could disguise the cost of these spells. But the crushing air of hopelessness had eased—the night air was still, soothing. The seals would hold.
    For now.
    They paused in the courtyard before the hypostyle, and Nerium couldn’t resist needling Siavush one last time. “Zadani is dead, by the way.”
    “Good,” he said, his voice clipped. While no one argued that Quietus needed fresh blood soon, Siavush’s choice of the imperial mage had proven a poor one. Next time, she’d let him clean up the mess himself. “It’s time I returned to my work, then.”
    Shirin’s lips pinched. Nerium marked it too, how he placed his second life outside Qais over his sworn service. She didn’t bother scolding him, though; she was finished with that.
    “Would you prefer the short route or the long?”
    His eyes narrowed at her solicitude. “The short, if you please.”
    A journey across the desert took decads, a month with slow camels, fraught with the danger of storms and wells gone dry. Quietus had faster methods of travel, though not always more pleasant.
    “Kash!”
    He balked at her summons; a hundred years of servitude had not broken him to the bit. She respected his defiance, but it was often inconvenient. She tightened the leash of her will and called again. The air curled away from him as he manifested, like skin from a wound. Black wings flared, blotting the stars. Shirin flinched, and Khalil turned his head.
    To the rest of Quietus, Kash was a necessary evil, a tool to be used quickly and set aside. To Nerium he was her grandfather’s legacy. Any oathsworn member of Quietus could call him, but her family were usually the only ones willing to do so. He had become their inheritance, an unholy bequest. Once he had been even more, but that had ended badly.
    “Kash, escort Lord al Naranj back to Ta’ashlan, if you please.”
    Kash had been a jinni, captured and exposed to Al-Jodâ’im’s touch in an experiment to discover the effect of entropy on immortal spirits. It turned his fire to smoke and ash, left him dark and bitter and twisted, but it also wedded him to the void, an avatar of the great nothingness. A way to harness its power.
    Kash hissed soundlessly, still held by her silence. She read calculation in his eyes—wondering, no doubt, if she was weak enough to challenge. Not today. He acquiesced with a mocking bow and the air parted once more behind him, a doorway into emptiness.
    “Ahmar won’t be happy about what you’ve done,” Siavush said, turning reluctantly to Kash.
    Nerium smiled at the threat. He was so very young. “She’s welcome to discuss the matter with me. I’m always here, after all.”
    Kash might hate her, but he scorned the other mages more. The rift sealed behind Siavush before he could have the last word.

CHAPTER 4
     
    A decad and a half passed in the ochre house, while Adam ate and slept and paced the length of the weed-tangled yard. When the sun rose high over the dusty streets of Kehribar he sat beneath the mulberry tree and breathed in the scent of earth and stone and sap, the tapestry of smell the city wove.