The Diviner Read Online Free PDF

no one the wiser to their true identities.
    Yet for all her triumph, Sheyqa Nizzira al-Ammarizzad could not rest.
    Azzad al-Ma’aliq yet lived.
    Â 
    â€”FERRHAN MUALEEF, Deeds of Il-Kadiri, 654

2

    U pon reflection, the Gabannah Chaydann had probably been a stupid idea.
    The heat was punishing by day, and it seemed that winter reached out early and greedy this year to grip the night. Azzad traveled from dusk to dawn, shivering; from daybreak to nightfall he sweated in the sparse shade of the rocks, having ejected those with prior claim: snakes, lizards, gazelles, and—once—a sand-tiger, the formidable rimmal nimir. He’d have scars on his thigh for life from that encounter.
    The pearls seemed to grow heavier as he traveled. Ridiculous notion, going after jewels to buy food and water in a place that had no food or water, let alone anywhere to buy them. He’d filled his waterskin and his belly at one of the rivulets outside the city that fed the reservoir, and left a pearl in payment for the bread and haunch he stole from an outlying village. But a mere three days into his journey to nowhere, the heat was melting the flesh from his bones. The third night, after the water ran out, he walked beside his tired horse, both of them stumbling with fatigue and thirst across hard, stony ground.
    And this wasn’t even the worst of the desert. That lay beyond The Steeps, with only one negotiable pass where caravans plodded from late autumn to early spring. Azzad hoped the first of them was even now crossing the western lands beyond the desert, bound for Rimmal Madar. If he encountered them in the pass and asked nicely enough, they might part with some food and water for another of the pearls.
    The fourth evening he was lucky.
    So hungry and weary that only instinct and long training kept him in the saddle, he nearly fell out of it when he heard the screeching of a hawk. Within ten paces, as he was still trying to calm his racing heartbeats, came the clattering of stones and a pitiable scream of a different kind. He froze, at first fearing the Qoundi Ammar, then cursed himself for a fool. If they were near, there would be no noise; all he would have heard was his own death rattle.
    Trailing the rattle of stones, he soon saw that Acuyib had sent a rock-slide to trap a gazelle near a hidden pool of brackish water, breaking its leg and leaving it to a slow death. Azzad gave profound thanks for the gazelle and the water as he killed the suffering animal. Long experience of the ritual hunt at the mountain castle of the al-Ma’aliq made him swift and sure in slicing up the meat, but as he worked, he fought back renewed grief. He would never again ride out with his father and uncles, brother and cousins, on the annual parody of a barbarian festival of long ago. The leaving of the castle and the returning to it three days later were always comical events, with the men strutting and the women fluttering and everyone giggling as the women pretended to scream in horror at all the trophy heads. His mother was particularly adept at miming a gracefully ornamental faint, right into his father’s waiting arms.
    Azzad’s movements were vicious as he stabbed chunks of meat onto a stick for roasting. Never again, never again . He kept telling himself how lucky he was to be alive, but as the tiny fire died out and he stared up at the stars, he wondered if sparing his life had been a mercy or a prank. He had nothing; he was nothing. The wealth and position—and the brilliance and laughter—of the proud al-Ma’aliq were no more.
    At dawn of the sixth day he emerged from the pass, and immediately turned Khamsin around again to take shelter in an outcropping of rock, cursing himself yet again for a fool. Down below The Steeps were tents of crimson—the color of the Sheyqa—decorated with a pattern of swords and axes embroidered in white wool. This was the camp of the Ammarad, the tribe from which Sheyqa