Chasing Embers Read online

  The Gulf of Aden reflected a sky of polished steel, bolted to the edges of the world. Rolling waves broke the immensity, crashing against the bleached white shore. Other dangers lurked out there, she knew, though not necessarily for her. Somali pirates, stalking the surf for millionaires’ yachts or tankers loaded with cargo. American warships, manoeuvring within operable range of the Middle East. Arabian storms. Sharks. The vast waters sang like scorn, a ceaseless, thundering taunt. On dry land, dust was the only tide, washing over the ancient ruins that littered the sands around Elaayo. March brought with it jilal, the harshest season of the year. Drought had withered the crops long ago, swallowed the last strips of green.

  The girl, Khadra – a name that her mother told her meant lucky – limped across the waste, clutching her little bag to her chest. She put one foot in front of the other, stumbled, but did not fall. Then another foot, heavy as lead and puffing up dust. She wore the heat like a second skin; bore the midday sun on her back. And Khadra was hungry. Hungrier than the scorching sands. Her ribs were like a marimba, her heart beating a hollow song.

  According to her mother, Ayan, this ancient land had once belonged to the pharaohs – those proud, mysterious ghost kings of Egypt, a country many kilometres north. Copper, amulets, naphtha, ivory, animals, plants – all had sailed up the Red Sea in exchange for Nubian gold. So rich were the new-found southern resources that the pharaohs came to know Punt as Ta Netjer, words meaning God’s Land. Soon temples rose from the sands, from the hard yellow rock. Men named new and terrible gods. Crowned shining kings and queens. Worshipped winged, fiery beasts.

  It was hard to picture such riches now. The Horn of Africa was empty. Some said drunk dry. Worn stacks of stone were all that remained of the temples, broken pillars pointing at the sun. These unexplored ruins dotted the Sanaag. Political quarrels and civil war left little time for digging up relics. The same went for the drought. Deep in disputed territory, far removed from prying eyes, these ruins were crumbled theatres for the wind, offering nothing but secrets and silence.

  Khadra drew no comfort from the past. The old gods were dead, the Queen was sleeping and her people starved. A hundred thousand this year alone, men, women and children. Corpses lined the streets of Dhuroob, the numbers rising, rising in her village. And as for the living…Khadra remembered their dull eyes, too weak to blink away flies. She remembered the mournful wailing on the wind and the helpless, staggering infants. The crows pecking at bleached bones. She remembered Death’s ever-grinning skull. Saw it again in the landscape before her…

  The past held no comfort, true, but it still held promise. The sands shifted, swirling around her ankles. Acacia perfumed the breeze. Somewhere a jackal barked. She could not stay out here for long.

  Smooth stone steps rose from the waste, climbing into imposing rubble.

  This is it. Khadra could barely believe it. The taalo. The tomb. How have I come so far?

  Destiny, the sands replied.

  Necessity, her mother countered.

  A pillar protruded from the ruins, slanting at the sky. Faded hieroglyphics ran around its base. Maybe it was just fatigue, but the scene was brightening a little, the hieroglyphs growing a touch sharper. Curious, Khadra moved towards them, her fingers outstretched. Sand trickled to the ground as she traced the outline of feather and wave, eye, cat and knife. Sand glittered in the light. The sun was slipping from the tyranny of noon but the ruins shone with an inner splendour, the shadows withdrawing from the wide stone steps, parting to form a golden carpet that snaked up into the rubble.

  Too tired to question the mirage, Khadra clutched her bag and followed it.

  Lizards skittered from her path as she climbed, quick slicks of green. The little map fluttered in her hand. She let it go to the wind, no longer having need of it. The ragged, charcoal-smeared cloth came to rest on some nearby blocks, a limp, exhausted moth. The steps ascended to a broad area of crooked slabs, the gaps between them lying in wait for a stray foot, a misstep in the rubble. Unsteady cylindrical stacks rose into the burnished blue, the roof caved in centuries ago, flint strewn across the temple floor. Khadra picked her way into the ruins, a thief in an ogre’s lair.

  Or the tomb of a god.

  Was it just imagination, a vague, dehydrated impression cooked up by her mind, or did the atmosphere hold more than dust and heat? Her sore feet tingled on stone and she moved forwards as if through water, a subtle magnetism drawing her on, the sense of little teeth nipping at her budding breasts. Ants swarming in her guts. She stared in awe at the crumbled rocks in the middle of the chamber.

  Had this been an altar once? The worn motifs around its flanks would suggest so.

  Hands trembling, Khadra tugged open her grey fur bag. The polished stone was heavy in her grip, a cylindrical shard of black rock, ringed by arcane symbols. She tested it with her finger, feeling the keenly honed edge. In a way, the rock was the key to the altar, but she doubted that anyone would guess its use if they happened to find the thing once her task was done. The knowledge, like the sun on her back, did nothing to warm her.

  She closed her eyes, whispered a prayer. To Eebe. To God. To any who could hear her. Then she climbed the steps to the altar.

  She spoke the words her mother had taught her, a week and five hundred klicks ago, crouched around the fire in the little shack, one of several in dry, dwindling Dhuroob. Her mother, Ayan, dabbling with sixir, casting bones and chanting to the ancestral spirits, her eyes rolling back in her head like pearls sewn into flyblown hide.

  Khadra weighed the shard in her hand. Her fingers closed tightly around the object, holding it with point turned downwards above her other palm. Squeezing her eyes shut, she sucked in a breath and drew the honed edge across her flesh, blood welling up from the cut. She gasped at the sacrifice, at the sharp, stony intrusion. Still, she was satisfied. Her journey was complete. She had succeeded in all that her mother had asked of her. Despite the burning pain in her palm, she muttered a prayer in thanks.

  Blood speckled the yellow stone. A measly river trickled off the edge of the altar, a crimson snake slithering to the ground.

  Drip, drip, drip. Scarlet beads sank into the dust, precious, powerful and pure.

  Khadra felt the silence. Under her palms, the ruins hummed. The broken pillars and crooked slabs moved like reflections in wind-stirred pools, rippling into a blur. The temple was a vast stone wheel, with her sat bleeding at its hub, the scene spinning into nausea. An unmade world smeared before her eyes, a world of yellows, blues and trickling reds, needles of light that splintered apart, engulfed by a smothering darkness.

  Khadra tumbled to the temple floor, spittle speckling her lips. A waste of water in this dry, dead place.

  She did not know how long she lay there, the sun and the buzzards wheeling overhead, aeroplanes pissing vapour in the blue. When she opened her eyes, long shadows had slipped between the pillars, cool bars across her skin. Across her palm, a dull, nagging fire.

  Once again, the temple was solid. Raising her head, she saw nothing different in the scene, one fallen block much like another. But the atmosphere vibrated and hummed, the magnetism pervasive, prickling in her hair, her mouth, behind her eyeballs. Static sparked off the nearby pillars, thin blue lines dancing on stone. In her mouth, the tang of sand, iron and salt. The slabs underneath her were cold. Too cold for the afternoon shade.

  “Little girl, you should not have come here. This place is not for the weak.”

  Khadra struggled to sit up, but the strange pressure kept her down.

  “Or perhaps it is, now,” the air mused. “I look at these walls and see no palace…”

  Squinting across the temple floor, tracing the sound of that sepulchral voice, Khadra thought she was looking at the base of a statue, so dark and still were the feet on the slabs.

  “I am not…weak.”

  The feet moved, floating towards her.

  “All flesh is weak. Still, you survived Dhegdheer. Not many children can say th
at.”

  The name of a childhood nightmare trapped the breath in Khadra’s throat. She remembered her mother’s tales around the fire, about old Long Ear, a fearsome demon who roamed the waste, sometimes in the shape of a hag, sometimes as a hooded vulture. The demon hunted out the young and the lost, sucking the marrow from tender bones…Khadra recalled the old woman in Qardho, the animal skulls that hung on her walls and the way she had sucked her pale grey gums. Her hurried pre-dawn inspection.

  Shock forced her to sit up, exhaling dust.

  “Yes, you are lucky, little girl. Now tell me, why have you come here? Why disturb my dreams?”

  Khadra looked up at the Queen. The late-noon sun gilded the sands around Elaayo, slanting across the ruins, spears formed from swirling motes. The light shone through the woman too, her tall, striking, ghostly form, naked from head to toe. She was like a vase in womanly shape, care given to her glass curves, her etched muscles and sharp cheeks. Someone had filled the vase with oil, pouring darkness into her breasts, the oval of her stomach, the slit of her neat, hairless siil. The motes danced inside her, glittering, alive.

  The Queen stretched out an onyx hand, her palm sparkling and wet.

  “Why have you given me…this?”

  The blood!

  Khadra found her tongue, licked away awe.

  “My…my mother, Ayan, sent me. Our people…our people are dying…”

  “I hear their cries on the wind,” the Queen said. It was clear that she needed no explanation. “The land weeps, but no rivers flow. Gone is the glory of Punt. This land has been a wasteland before, blighted, stricken and lost. And before, this land has healed under the blessed rains. Now the ages have turned once again, from gold into rust. Do you know why I went to my grave, girl? Do you know?”

  Khadra watched her. Trembling. Afraid. She quickly shook her head.

  The Queen was no longer looking at her. She studied the walls, the static crackling there, a frown creasing her forehead.

  “Long ago, this place welcomed a woman who was king. A pharaoh. Chosen of the gods. The land of Punt lay in ruins and her empire offered us aid. They came to me from Thebes. From Egypt’s highest throne. Their gifts were many and rich. And yet I was betrayed, my treasures stolen. By a man, girl. A cruel, jealous man.”

  The Queen’s eyes flashed, sapphires in the sun.

  “And now you have awakened me.”

  Khadra swallowed.

  “Can you…will you help us?”

  The Queen regarded the girl for a moment, the same way she might regard a flea. Then she glided to the altar in the middle of the chamber, a shadow sweeping through shadows, and caressed the newly wet stone.

  Fingers red, she dabbed her lips.

  “I am Atiya, a serpent-born servant of Eebe. Yet I became something…more,” she said. She seemed to think on it, as though the past was carried on the wind, ghost speaking to ghost. Then, her neck straightening, proud, “This land is mine. It always was. But I stand here between two worlds, the world of myth, and yours of flesh. If I am to rise, this will not do. I would wear my earthly shape. Take back the treasures he stole from me.” She lowered her voice again, silk over sand. “I will need…substance.”

  “Take what you need. Anything.”

  “Blind addoon. To think I need permission to fly.”

  Light flickered. The Queen stood before Khadra. She spread her glassy, slender arms. Shadows fanned out, flooding the ruins. Darkness eclipsed the sun. Electricity sang, spinning silver between the pillars.

  Then Khadra, skinned knees, cornrows and all, found herself in a depthless embrace. The Queen held her fast, drawing her down into the dark, drinking in her solid substance, joining with her flesh.

  Absorbing her. When it was over, only a woman stood in the ruins, tall and proud, her skin as slick as obsidian, her eyes a static-blue fire.

  Then the woman too was gone, and only a beast remained. The beast roared and lashed her tail, stirring the grit of three thousand years. A whirlwind swept across the ruins, out into the empty Sanaag, out over the laughing Gulf. Lightning zigzagged up from the ground, trailing dust, rubble and sparks. Wings of night unfolded, obscuring the steel sky.

  And the sands whispered duul, fly.

  The sands whispered noqo, return.

  A storm swept north over the desert.

  THREE

  The city was a golden web. Canyons of light, banked by temples of commerce and greed, bled a flux of cars like iridescent veins. The Bay reflected the dim stars and the surrounding buildings, which loomed with sheer, tapering heights into the metropolitan night. Aircraft warnings blinked and spun, strobing from the upper reaches where pigeons perched, puff-chested and grey. Above the satellite dishes, water tanks, girders, gargoyles and lightning rods, the moon shone through the city glow.

  There was a place where the shimmer faded, thinning out like surf on a beach, the city lights growing diffuse. Neon gave way to night. True night. Planes traversed the darkness, sketching smoke on the emptiness. Smog drifted, spewing from the Eastern Seaboard’s ceaseless industry, chemicals and oil scenting the air. It was cold. Ice cold. In this vast ephemeral pasture, this last primitive frontier, another winged shape swept through the night, veiled by the dirty sheen that lay between the city and the sky.

  With the benefit of a telescope and luck, the people in the houses below might look up and recognise this shape. They would know it from storybooks, from paintings and films, images made by artist on artist, rendered in flag and statue and tasteful tattoo. They would know it from symbols in stone, on brown parchment, or printed in digital font. Words that fell from parent’s lip to child’s ear down the spiralling ages. Despite shock, despite disbelief, every human would know this shape on a deep level, the same level that made men and women cower from the beast, from the wolf at the door, the snake in the grass. The shape was a silhouette on the stellar curtain, a metres-long reptilian shadow. Great pinions, leathery and veined, beat a steady rhythm from the wind. Metacarpals the size of a yacht’s mainmast pushed against the air, propelling the seven-ton scaly bulk, a red titan, through the sky. The colossal beast was graceful and sleek, his arrow-tipped tail rippling behind him, a rudder navigating stars. Claws hung under his belly like spiny copper fruit. Embers smouldered in his cat-like eyes, peering down a narrow, horned snout, his cavernous nostrils trailing steam.

  Yes, this shape would be only too familiar, if the people below happened to see it. And under all the fine clothes, the designer dresses and sharp suits, their flesh would instinctively know and shiver, hear a vestigial echo of a roar. Fear would make them children again, huddling around the fire in the hut. Or, these days, around the flat-screen TV. Unlike Ben’s metamorphic hide, the human reaction never changed. It didn’t matter that his kind were as varied in their temperaments and tastes as their hominid neighbours. Sure, you had your carnivores, like Mauntgraul the Terror, the White Dog, thankfully slumbering in rock on distant shores. Then you had what idiots like Fulk liked to call milk drinkers, those few of Ben’s kind who wouldn’t eat humans or, in his case, abstained from meat altogether. The term arose from a medieval myth about the supposed origin of dragons. Some said that maidens in the Old Lands had suckled baby snakes, turning the humble everyday viper into something much more singular and dangerous. It was absurd, of course, an old wives’ tale, and a choice insult. Ben was no more related to snakes than he was to dinosaurs. Fulk probably thought it was funny. All things considered, such cock-and-bull stories spoke volumes about superstition, how fear rendered people blind to the truth. To most human beings, it just didn’t matter. Regardless of villainy or virtue, if the people below happened to look up and see him, they would scream, run and raise the alarm. After that, it always tended to go the same way…

  Up here, where the eyes of the world couldn’t reach him, Ben let the air rush into his lungs, the night surging into a visceral cave. In, out, his lungs throbbed, pushing against two tubular chambers lower down his tusk-like ribs, s
ecret respiratory organs lined with hundreds of alveoli, little sacs containing a super-ordinary gas. Among other things, this inner buoyancy helped his bulk stay aloft, assisting his unfurling wings as they caught the buffeting airstreams. Now, his wings carried him away from danger. Or so he hoped.

  Anxiety gnawed at his diving-bell heart. He was a ball in a pinball machine, flipped into flight by circumstance, bouncing off the bumpers of chance. He had the what but not the why. Anger and fear conspired with resentment – Fulk and the CROWS had tried to kill him! No news there, but their alliance didn’t only go against the Lore, it also went against logic. Colluding with witches was far from wise. Ben wondered what the CROWS had demanded and what the Fitzwarrens, an ancient but human dynasty, were willing to pay. In his experience, the price was usually greater than the buyer had banked on. Why, after all this time, had House Fitzwarren chosen this precise moment to strike? Obviously, Fulk’s attack wasn’t just due to a Shropshire castle and the bloodthirsty provision of a deed. Whittington was a crumbling husk, a medieval blot on the landscape, a place overlooked by the National Trust and managed, at least on the surface, by its local community. Ben found it hard to believe that anyone would risk their neck for it, ancient vendetta or no. House Fitzwarren’s inactivity for fifty-five years almost said as much.

  No. The jagged grin across the third floor of the Javits Center implied different, darker motivations. The theft of the Star was clearly involved, and besides, he didn’t think the CROWS would help the Fitzwarrens with their petty feud. It was too basic. Too human. It just wasn’t their style. Babe Cathy had practically confessed that on the bridge, her short figure trembling with pride, her lips trembling with rebellion.

  This is just the beginning. She’ll track down every last one of her gifts and kill anyone who gets in her way.