Empire of Dust (23 page)

“In what way?” Heph rummages in their pack and hands her a pouch of dried figs. She accepts gladly, and the sweet, sticky thickness bursts on her tongue.

Kat chews, considering his question. “There are no animals. None at all.” She spits out the date pit. “There are no donkeys or horses, or dogs or cats. The chickens or goats that roam every village, town, and metropolis are nowhere to be seen. There is not a single mouse or fly.”

Her body starts to shake involuntarily, but she can't tell if it is from exhaustion or fear. She forces out the next words. “There are no
people
, save one—a single woman sunbathing nude in the main palace garden.”

“So the legends Sarina told Alex are at least partially true,” Heph says, running a hand through tangled curls. “But, Kat...” He hesitates, and she follows his eyes toward the massive gate. She doesn't immediately grasp what he's saying, but then she sees a flicker of movement. She squints—her eyesight seems so dim after the eagle's—and sees that behind the crenellations, soldiers pace back and forth.

She inhales sharply—they were not there moments ago. At least, she thought they weren't. She shakes her head slightly, but the soldiers remain—muscular, armed, and very real.

“Could you have been confused?” Heph asks. “As a bird, I mean.”

“No.” She frowns. “An eagle's eyesight is much better than ours.”

“Maybe they were all inside?” Heph suggests. “The heat of the day...” But he stops talking when he sees Kat tilt her head.

“I don't think we should go in there.”

Heph raises a black eyebrow. “What?”

“None of this makes sense!” Kat says, waving her hands about her. She regrets it immediately as her hurt finger sends shooting darts of pain up her arm. She winces and cradles her right hand in her left palm, holding it close to her heart. “Why have all the animals gone?”

Heph stands up, then offers her a hand. Though the dates helped, she still feels weak. She allows him to pull her up.

“I don't know, but we knew before that it is a city of powerful legend and magic.” Heph ties his goatskin to his belt. “It's not a normal city like Pella or Halicarnassus. And Alex needs us to go there. This is bigger than either of us.”

Kat knows he's right, but she still can't shake the fear of being trapped within those thick, high walls, trapped with the eternally aching sadness pulsing through the place.

A thought occurs to her: perhaps she isn't really scared at all. Maybe the fear flooding her heart is left over from the bird's terror. But before she can explore this idea further, a yawn overtakes her. She is so very tired, despite her protestations otherwise.

“The sooner we go, the sooner you can rest,” Heph says, grabbing hold of her arm and supporting her.

Sleep
. She nods.

He wraps his arm behind her back, and she lets him. “Let's go and see what the princess has to say about Alex's proposal.”

Before they are even halfway there, though, the massive gate swings open and dozens of soldiers line up forming a solid wall. They are gigantic, broad-shouldered and olive-skinned, each wearing a leopard skin tied over the left shoulder. Their tall, figure-eight-shaped shields are made of zebra skin, and they each hold an impossibly long spear. They wear red-and-white striped headdresses, low and tight across their foreheads, with folds of cloth hanging down their chests.

As Kat approaches them, she sees they all look nearly identical, and she wonders if she has ever seen people so beautiful in her life—the flashing dark eyes, the straight noses, the strong cheekbones and square jaws, the bulging biceps and legs like tree trunks. Oddly, incised into their arms and legs, shoulders and chest—on every bit of skin below the neck—are rows and rows of magical symbols many shades lighter than the surrounding skin. Kat makes out birds and snakes, hands and feet and eyes.

She doesn't know what to say. She never learned how to greet soldiers as a visiting ambassador, and Alexander didn't have time to teach her before he sent her away. Luckily, Heph seems to know.

“We bring you greetings from the prince regent of Macedon, Alexander, son of the great King Philip,” Heph proclaims loudly, bowing slightly. “We are the prince's emissaries on a diplomatic mission to meet Princess Laila. I am Lord Hephaestion of Pella, and this is the prince's sister, Princess Katerina.”

Kat almost laughs.
Princess Katerina.
She glances down at her patched, travel-stained dun-colored tunic and wonders if the guards will laugh, too.

A soldier steps forward, even taller and more formidable than the rest. “I am General Wazba, commander of the city,” he says in heavily accented Greek. “You may not pass in daylight. Return shortly before sunset, and we will escort you inside.”

Kat's stomach lurches as if a horse has kicked her. Why would they not let them in while the sun shines?

“We will be here,” Heph replies, gripping Kat's arm, and she's more than a little grateful for his support. Her traitorous legs would not be able to hold her up just now.

The soldiers turn and reenter the city, leaving Kat and Heph outside to stare at the massive gate which has closed without making a sound. Only then does Kat finally realize what is so wrong.

She hears no tromp of booted feet.

No creak of leather shield grips.

No gentle clanging of scabbarded swords against shields.

It is a silence that belongs to the dead.

* * *

“It's time, Kat.”

She opens her eyes. She barely remembers Heph spreading out the blanket under an old carob tree. She doesn't feel refreshed, but at least she doesn't feel like she's about to fall over. She looks down at her hand and is surprised to see that her wounded finger has been attended to recently. She must have slept so deeply that Heph was able to change the bandage without her waking.

She sits up. Now the golden streams of light through the branches have become soft, gentle: the rosy silver glow of sunset. Time to go. But she does not want to. Every part of her wants to head back to the cliff and scramble down the stone steps as quickly as she can without falling.

“Heph?”

“Yes?” he says, rolling up her blanket and stashing it in his pack.

“We can't go back to the gate.”

“What?” He looks up, startled. “Why?”

She shrugs, not knowing exactly what to say.

“So what do you suggest, then?” he presses. “That we stand down by the river and find a boat to take us back to the coast? And then go home to Macedon and tell Alex we failed him because you had a bad feeling?”

“Y—maybe.” She hesitates. “I'm not saying—”

“Kat, did you get a look at those soldiers? They make the Aesarian Lords looks like children! Those men could squeeze a Persian's neck with each hand and not miss a step marching. Whether the princess agrees to marry Alex or not, we still need to negotiate for some of these warriors to be added to Macedon's army.”

Kat sighs. He is right. They've come too far and survived too much to just turn around now. She firmly tells her stomach to stop doing its nervous flutter. Alex needs her. She picks up her pack, and together, she and Heph walk toward the gate.

The Sharuna warriors are waiting for them, lined up as if for battle in the light of the setting sun. General Wazba steps forward holding a torch which, Kat supposes, they will need very soon. In Egypt there is very little twilight. There is day, and suddenly night. “The princess bids you welcome, visitors from Macedon,” he says, unsmiling. “Follow me.”

They enter the city beside the general as the fifty or so soldiers fall in behind them. For a second time, Kat does not hear the thud of the gate. As they walk down a street of impressive buildings, she feels a cold breath on the back of her neck and shivers.

She keeps her eyes open, missing the eagle's sight. The Egyptian buildings seem heavier, more solid than those in Macedon, with their low, fat columns and boxlike shapes. The Greek public buildings she's seen in Pella and Halicarnassus emphasize tapering height and pleasing proportions. But these are brightly painted, all the figures with thick black wigs and heavily lined eyes and shown in profile, one shoulder and one leg in front. She sees a goddess with enormous cow ears. A god with the head of a jackal. Paintings of people baking bread, farming fields, fishing from reed boats.

Kat starts to feel her heartbeat skipping. Something is wrong here. Very wrong. The empty buildings. The odd, nearly identical guards. The lack of sound. Even the air feels wrong. It's all she can do not to turn around and run back to the gate.

Ahead of her is a fountain of a woman, arms and wings spread wide, water spewing from two horns on her head surrounding a full moon. It is masterfully carved, but that's not what catches her attention.

There is no slap of water as the droplets hit the rock, and as the last ray of the sun touches the fountain, it illuminates the spray, making it seem as though it is a fountain of embers. Then the sun drops below the horizon, and everything changes.

In the blink of an eye, the fountain collapses with a thundering crash. The goddess is on her side in the street, her wings and head broken off. The stones are charred, the basin cracked and bone-dry.

The formerly pristine buildings are burned and broken, crumbling to ash around her. The eerie silence is replaced with wails, moans, screams, frenzied prayers, crashing thunder, exploding lightning, crying babies who suddenly stop crying, shrieking animals, crackling fires...

And all around her, there are bodies.

At her feet, a mother wrapped in rags shields a child, bones protruding from her legs and arms, her eyes black, empty sockets. And there's a horse, its moldy flesh pulled back from large, yellow teeth as if it is grimacing in agony, every rib exposed.

This is a dream
, Kat thinks, trying to quell the scream bubbling up inside her but caught in her tightening throat. In dreams, scenes shift from one to another in the blink of an eye. Not even in Ada's enchanted fortress did Kat experience anything like this. Her spine has turned to ice, her legs to jelly.

Kat sees two long bundles lying right in front of her in the street.
Don't look
, a voice inside her head commands. But she can't help herself. With an increasingly heavy sense of dread, she bends down and lifts some rough-spun cloth to see what is inside one of them. It is a human head, its eyes yawning cavities, its nose eaten away, maggots writhing in its blackened cheeks. She leaps away from it and stands behind Heph, shaking, wondering if she will throw up.

Silently cursing, she tells herself to remember who she is. A princess. A Snake Blood. Twin sister of Prince Alexander. A sixteen-year-old girl whose cleverness and bravery turned the tides of Alex's battle against the Aesarian Lords. But right now she would take on a whole regiment of Lords by herself rather than face the enchantments of this doomed place.

Heph, too, has paused in shock and fear. “What treachery is this?” he demands of Captain Wazba's back, outrage in his voice. “What have you done?”

“Come, honored guests,” says Captain Wazba in a deep voice, though the giant soldier keeps his back toward them. “We will not allow you to be late.”

“No,” Kat says, finally finding her voice as she grabs for Heph's hand in the growing dark.

The captain pauses. Then slowly, he turns around. And that's when Kat's scream finally comes.

For the captain is no longer the handsome man of moments before. He is a giant figure of flaking brown clay, covered with magical symbols, his huge eyes two fiery orange lights glowing in a cracked and crumbling face.

Whirling away from the awful sight, Kat sees the soldiers behind her have undergone a similar transformation. They are ancient, living statues.

The eagle was right; other than Princess Laila, there are no living things in the city. Because the soldiers standing all around Kat are not the army of an Egyptian princess, but the diabolical regiments of sorcery.

Chapter Twenty-Three

JUST OUTSIDE THE
beach cottage, waves pound the shore like the angry drums of an invading army. Inside, the air tastes like salt and wind, and a fine coating of sand lies on clay jars, metal instruments, and scattered scrolls...items that look like ancient artifacts but which are, Alexander knows, the tools and writings of his former teacher.

“He's not here,” the prince says, impatience dampening his mood even as the moist island air soaks into his cloak. He had wanted to come to Samothrace much sooner, but the Aesarians had forced his hand. Now that they've been temporarily driven back—completely off Macedonian soil, according to reports—he is eager to return to troubling matters closer to home.

“Are you certain we're in the right place?” Kadmus takes the lid off a jug, bends over it, and quickly replaces it, his lean handsome face a mask of disgust. “Something dead in there,” he says. Then he points at a bronze contraption on a table and raises an eyebrow in question. Balls of different sizes can be moved around one another on an elaborate network of thin curves of metal.

Alexander smiles. How many times did he and Heph and the other boys work with the astronomer at Mieza, predicting eclipses and the location of planets in the night sky? The center ball is the earth, around it are the sun, the moon, and the six other planets.

“Yes,” he says, suddenly missing his old tutor—and those boyhood days, which seem so long ago—with a physical ache. “This is definitely his home.”

A dark silhouette blocks the low doorway and a woman enters, carrying two jugs.

“Are you looking for Master Aristotle?” she asks in the harsh accent of Samothrace. “He's not here today, but I expect he'll be back this evening or...” She casts a glance out the window at towering dark clouds rising from where the sea meets the sky and adds, “Perhaps tomorrow.”

The woman pushes aside some scrolls and sets the jugs on the table. “If I didn't bring the man food, I think he would forget to eat.”

She wipes sweat off her face with her apron and tucks a stray black tendril behind her ear.

“Do you know where he is?” Alex asks. “He was my teacher once, and I have traveled far to see him.”

The woman eyes Alexander and then Kadmus. Alex realizes that to her, they could be any two high-ranking soldiers in the prince's army. “He's on the islet, doing research,” she says, gesturing out the open window. Alex looks out and sees a green-gray blur of rocks and trees across the choppy water.

“Can someone take us out in a boat?” he asks, turning toward her. She has grabbed a broomstick of twigs and started sweeping the floor.

“On this side of the island you would have to ask the Wave Dancers,” she says. “They have all the fishing boats.”

“Wave dancers?”

“The Wave Dancers of Poseidon,” she says. “They fling themselves into the arms of the sea when it's rough as a way of worshipping the Trident Bearer. And today, with the storm coming, they will be dancing, not fishing, I imagine. Go left outside the door and along the beach until you round the bend where the cliff comes down to the water. You'll find them there.”

When they round the cliff, they see that waves thunder toward shore from a half mile out. Alex doesn't know what he expected from the Wave Dancers, but he is surprised to see human heads, dozens of them, poking out of the rolling foam. The swimmers seem to be flying on the waves. In between the swells he sees naked men and women studying the breakers, swimming out to meet them or ducking below them to wait for others. Alex is amazed. Usually even the best swimmers run from such seas.

But none of them is willing to take Alex and Kadmus to the islet. “Look at those waves,” one bandy-legged graybeard says in awe, gesturing to the high foaming breakers. “Now is the time to worship the god by embracing him, not take fish from his waters.”

“Perhaps we should just wait until this evening, when he comes back?” Kadmus suggests, shading his eyes with his hand and staring at the islet. It's hard to judge exactly how far out it is; it looks to be the size of a man's sandal, and sometimes large swells hide it entirely. But Alex doesn't want to wait. His teacher is so easily distracted by stars and birds, plants and tides, it is possible that he will focus on some new observation and stay on his islet for the next several days.

Alex needs Aristotle's advice now. The Aesarian Lords could come thundering back with reinforcements at any time. War wages in Byzantium. And something else sits heavy on his shoulders like the golden parade armor Olympias made for him, weighing him down, constricting him—something that maybe only Aristotle can help with.

The sea wind blows Kadmus's straight dark hair back from his face as he studies clouds that seem to get darker and angrier by the moment. Alex bends down and takes off his sandals. The hard rocks of the beach push into the soles of his feet as he unties his belt.

“My lord?” Kadmus says, snapping to attention. “What are you doing?”

Alex lifts his tunic over his head and knots the garment around his waist. The unbleached cloth just covers the snake-shaped scar on his thigh and the slightly smaller muscles. “I'm going for a swim.”

“But, my lord!” Kadmus protests. “The clouds are heavy with rain and the surf is dangerous—a storm is coming.”

The wind pricks at Alex's chest, causing goose bumps to ripple over his skin. Breathing in the fresh salty air, he feels like he's woken up from a long sleep, and now he's ready to live.

“You don't have to come with me,” Alex says, looking Kadmus straight in the eye—a challenge—and then he is sprinting toward the sea, his feet slapping against the shallow water as wet sand sucks and tugs at his ankles. He hears slapping behind him—Kadmus—and laughs as he used to years ago when he had nothing to worry about except displeased tutors.

A foamy wave slams into his knees, and he pushes through it. Another hits him in his abdomen and suddenly he's lifted, weightless, floating in water the pale translucent green of rare Egyptian glass. He looks down and sees an entire world swaying below him—sea anemones and swimming crabs with pincers outstretched and schools of tiny silver fish.

Straightening his legs, he keeps his head and shoulders high. He kicks, and in the water his left leg is just as whole and strong as his right. He is strong. He is powerful. He is soaring in the hands of the god Poseidon. He propels himself through the water toward the islet, rising and sinking on the rolling waves, Kadmus to his left, though sometimes he loses sight of him when a wave slides between them.

At first they make good progress, and the islet grows larger, ever closer with each stroke, but then the wind picks up, shrieking like a wounded animal. The waves rise higher, crested now with bubbling foam, and dip so low Alex wonders if he will hit sand. He sees the islet growing smaller on his left and corrects course, pulling with all his strength toward it.

Suddenly, the waves are so high Alex can't see anything but water. It seems as if the sea has swallowed the island, the islet, and Kadmus. This is like riding Bucephalus for the first time, he thinks, remembering the jolting, heaving, twisting mass of angry horseflesh below him, only now the challenge is a beast of water. Alex laughs, and a wave slaps him hard in the face like the girl in the tavern outside Mieza when Heph pinched her butt and she thought Alex had done it. He coughs and sputters as he laughs some more. Here he is, riding out a storm in the sea. Shouldn't he be afraid? Yet he has never felt so alive.

There's a roar and he looks over his shoulder. A wave the size of a small temple crests behind him, curling and twisting, and tosses him high. He tucks in his arms and looks ahead but the wave slams him down hard and spins him around. As he somersaults beneath surging water, he doesn't know what direction is up. Then he's dragged against the sandy bottom, scraping his chest and legs.

For a moment Alex wants to open his mouth and cry out in protest, but he needs to save every bit of air in his lungs. The wave will pass. If he doesn't panic, the air inside him will lift him to the surface. He rolls, tossed back and forth in the gray-green twilight world, his chest ready to explode. And then he starts to rise.

Suddenly a pair of arms surrounds him. It's Kadmus with a large piece of driftwood. “Put your arms on it and kick hard with your feet,” he says. Together, slowly and painfully, they make their way toward the islet, finally catching a large swell that swings them toward the beach and hammers them into the shallows.

Gasping, Alex staggers out of the water, Kadmus just behind him. They collapse onto the beach. His entire right side is an angry red mark where the sea has slapped him, and blood pours from a gash in his left shoulder he didn't know was there and still doesn't feel.

“Congratulations,” Kadmus says, leaning on an elbow and grinning. “Poseidon has just initiated you into the cult of his Wave Dancers!” An unexpected laugh bursts from Alex, surprising him and hurting his scraped sides. And then Kadmus laughs, too, his ice-colored eyes shining with mirth.

Alex sits up and realizes that the sea, like an impatient lover, has yanked off the tunics both Kadmus and Alex knotted around their waists. The general's tanned chest is strong, his stomach flat and hard as a tabletop. Even the battle scars soldiers proudly display as marks of honor—white lines on golden-brown skin—are sprinkled over his body artistically.

Suddenly, Alex realizes that his scar is completely visible.
The
scar. The one he was born with like a mark of shame, marring his left leg. His laughter dies out before Kadmus's, and then the general falls silent, too.

They are completely alone on the little beach, a thick screen of trees behind them. Kadmus stares at him.

No
, Alex realizes with sudden shame.
Stares at his leg.

Shifting it, he tries to hide the scar in the sand. The movement seems to startle Kadmus, and the general quickly looks away. No one knows about Alex's scar except for his parents, his old bath attendant Hestia, Kat, Heph, and Sarina. And now Kadmus.

For a moment, Alex wishes he could grab his sword and cut it out, separating himself from the weakness.

“True strength is not hiding who you are,” Kat said once when he was complaining about his leg. “It's accepting it, and working to improve it if you can. And you'd be surprised how many people don't even care about the thing you're working so hard to hide.” He had nodded in agreement but said to himself that Kat would never understand. Her body was perfect.

But now he can see that she was right. He doesn't want to keep hiding himself from his friends. He wants Kadmus to really
see
him—and still find him worthy.

Alex opens his mouth to speak, but a shout breaks through the silence. He twists around to see a man coming out of the tree line, his dark hair liberally streaked with silver, his rough-woven gray robe clearly spotted with dirt and sea spray even from this distance. A smile spreads over Alex's face as the man draws closer.

“Well,” Aristotle says, coming to a stop next to them, his gray eyes crinkling. “Just look at what the tide washed up!”

* * *

Alexander sits on the sand, a poultice of vinegar and calendula leaves bound on his injured shoulder, and a salt-stiff tunic of Aristotle's making his back itch. With a battered basket over one elbow, the philosopher wades through a tidal pool, a small lagoon protected by two rocky arms from the choppy waters beyond. Suddenly he squats down, the tip of his long beard hanging into the water.

“Look at this!” Aristotle calls, and though Alex looks, the darkening sky makes it too hard to see what Aristotle is holding up.

“I can't see it!” he shouts back. “What is it?”

Aristotle shakes his head and, instead of answering, flings a mass of slimy black tentacles interspersed with what looks like fat black beans. It lands with a wet plop next to him.

During his three years at Mieza, Alex grew used to his teacher's eccentricities—watching spiders build webs by candlelight or studying thunderstorms from the roof of the tallest towers. Throwing around seaweed is unusual, but not unexpected.

Nor was it unexpected that Aristotle waved away Alex's questions when he found them on the beach, saying there would be time to talk later. High tide was coming in on the breath of a storm, he pointed out, filling the tidal pool with new treasures. After Aristotle bandaged Alex's shoulder in his hut, he directed Kadmus to find firewood and left Alex sitting on the sand as he went wading, his tunic hiked up over his belt, exposing knobby legs.

Now Alex looks at the slimy tangle next to him as his teacher walks toward him until the water comes up only to his ankles.

“This seaweed is very rare here,” Aristotle says. Seawater drips from his beard and creates a dark damp patch on his tunic. “It thrives only in the north of the Black Sea and rarely makes it through the straits down into the Aegean.”

Alex picks it up. “Rare though it is, some of it will make it past the Pillars of Hercules into the endless sea. Nature's nature is to disseminate.”

Aristotle grins, his lined, weathered face looking almost youthful. “So you
were
paying attention in class. And I thought you were always daydreaming about your next hunting trip with Hephaestion and new moves to try out in your wrestling lessons.”

Alex smiles back. “Well, that, too.”

“Though I do wish you had managed to do more than memorize facts. I wish I had taught you to think. But perhaps I was simply not up to the task.”

Alex sits up straight. “What do you mean?”

Aristotle squints down at the water sliding back and forth over his feet. “I know you want me to join your council. That's why you're here, isn't it?”

Alex doesn't know how Aristotle knows, but he rises and slaps the sand from his tunic. This is a formal request, and he shouldn't be sprawled in the sand when making it. “Yes, teacher. My father has mired himself and most of our army in war with Byzantium. Pella was attacked by the Aesarian Lords. I need your wisdom, your advice. The people of Macedon would be delighted to know you were helping me.” Delighted is too soft a word, but Alexander doesn't want to admit that he needs something massive, something persuasive, to make the people trust him.