Free Longing's Levant by Charlotte Boyett-Compo

ears. Dahkla, do not do this!
    Lifting her own lantern from the ledge on which it sat, she held it high and hurried to the steps.
    Dahkla, please!
    Dahkla knew the voice was in her head, but it began to fade as she wound her way up out of the burial tomb. When she had re-sealed the doorway into the hidden chamber, she rushed outside, tripped and fell to the sand, scraping her knees.
    Please, do not leave me here , she heard one final whimper of great sadness invade her mind.
    “Be still, demon!” she hissed, swiping angrily at the tears which cascaded down her pale cheeks. “I will not listen to your deceitful voice again!”
    Scrambling to her feet, the young woman ran for her horse, stumbling twice in her haste to flee this place of betrayal and going down to her knees in the sand.
    Dahkla! You will regret this!
    She reached her horse and pulled herself up into the saddle. Like the mad woman she had become, she spurred her horse and raced back to Marrupa.
    Even later, as she lay beside her hated husband in the safety of the king’s palace, she could hear the feeble cry of her name that was fading with the coming of dawn.
    Dahkla turned her face into her pillow and wept hysterically. When her husband woke and pulled her into his arms, she shuddered against him.
    “What is it, sister?” he asked, smoothing the hair back from her damp forehead. “What troubles you so? A nightmare?”
    How could she tell her husband that she had buried a man alive this night? How to tell him that she was one of the women the Rysalian demon had seduced? That it had been she who had enticed him to pleasure her and her alone? That the demon had felt the loneliness of the others and had given of himself to them, thus garnering Dakhla’s jealousy and revenge? Or that it had been she, not the queen, who had betrayed him to the king’s men?
    She could not , Dahkla reminded herself. To do so would surely bring about her ruin.
    “It was just a nightmare,” Ahkmed declared and patted his wife clumsily on her back. “A nightmare that is over now.”
    Perhaps, Dahkla told herself. As long as Kaibyn’s body lay deep in his borrowed burial chamber and was never discovered by his Bloodkin.

Chapter Five
     
    Jabali armed the sweat from his brow, squinted against the heat of the noonday sun and wondered if the day could get any hotter. He sighed as he took a water skin Tashobi extended toward him. “You are a fine assistant, ‘Shobi,” he said. “You anticipate what I need before I need it.”
    Tashobi inclined his head. “It is my privilege to serve you, Master.” He looked about them. “There are many graves here. Do you know into which one they have hidden Lord Kaibyn?”
    “There,” Jabali said, nudging his dripping chin toward an entranceway a few yards to their right. “He is aware. If you listen closely, you will hear his anger.”
    Closing his eyes, the apprentice allowed his mind to venture into the necropolis until the faint words of he whom they sought could be heard cursing the women who had betrayed him.
    “He is, indeed, very angry,” Tashobi commented.
    “And rightfully so,” Jabali said.
    “As angry as the Akkadian was.”
    “True, but where one will demand the lives of his enemies, the other will want them to live to regret their foul deed,” Jabali replied, handing the water skin to the younger man. “Yet, we need them both for what must be done.”
    Knowing it would do him no good to question the mysterious statement, Tashobi slung the water skin over the pommel of his saddle. “Should I wait here, Master?”
    “Aye,” Jabali said tiredly. “I will free him from his burial place and bring him into the light.”
    A ripple of fear went through Tashobi. “Will he be frightening to look upon?”
    The young man’s teacher chuckled. “No, lad. He will be just as he appeared in life.”
    Tashobi shrugged away his unease. He watched his Master walk slowly, painfully toward the entrance to the necropolis. He knew