Free Of Sand and Malice Made by Bradley P. Beaulieu Page A

this, the very place of her birth.
    Even the simple effort of turning her head is painful, so she turns away from the window until she stares once more at the stone ceiling and the ghastly light now splashed across its skin. Its surface reads like a map,charting her life over the course of aeons in the desert. She sees within its topography her awakening when Goezhen himself placed his lips to hers and granted her her first breath. She sees in it her wanderings after her birth, years untold in which she trekked along the vast mountain ranges that ring the Great Shangazi. It is a circuit she completed seven times in order to assimilate within her very soul the borders of the desert and all that lay within. She sees in the stone her first steps as she returns to the endless sands, the first time she’d ever disguised herself. She posed as a lost traveler and sailed with the desert tribes for generations, often moving from tribe to tribe.
    An amberlark calls in the distance, little more than a gentle cooing, but to her it sounds like the screams of the women and men she lured away from their brothers and sisters into the desert deep, where she picked them apart, bit by bit, to see what they were made of. These are ancient memories of days she’d nearly forgotten, days that brought her no particular pride, but no particular sense of shame, either. She was inexperienced then, and curious about these humans that Goezhen seemed both to love and to hate. How many souls has she toyed with in the ages spent wandering the desert?
    Many . . .
    The sounds of footsteps approach.
    Many, indeed.
    In the corner, a dull red flame ignites like a beacon fire.
    And now the sands have turned.
    â€œShe’s awake,” came a voice in the darkness, speaking the rolling tongue of the Kundhunese.
    â€œI feel her,” replies the one near the brazier.
    The glowing coals outline his form in ruddy light. He looks like one of the first gods working with the protean stuff of the stars to forge a new world. It’s probably how he views himself, though he and his brother are nothing more than a twinkling of Onondu’s eye—childling gods come to torment another childling god.
    We are cousins of a sort, we three.
The thought makes her smile.
Isn’t pain dealt by family the deepest pain of all?
    From the darkness, a form approaches. “Are you ready?” Makuo says.
    She says nothing in return.
    â€œI know it mean much to you,” he says in stilted Sharakhan, “but what is that compared to what we do to you? What we
will
do to you?” He reaches her side. The pale morning light casts his eyes an icy blue. His dark skin looks sickly.
    Her voice is an ancient door opening. “This is senseless.” Despite the ages she’s lived, despite all she has done and might yet do, there is fear in her heart for the pain that is coming. The boys are gifted in this if nothing else.“I’ve told you. I don’t
know
where it is.” It is the truth, but she sees the disbelief in Makuo’s eyes. She sees that he will
never
believe her.
    From her prone vantage his arm distends strangely, his hand reaching toward her. As his fingers brush her cheek, she feels herself falling away, down, down, deep as she’s ever gone. Away from the light. Away from the touch of Makuo’s fingers. Away from the pain.
    â€œShe trying hide again,” Hidi says by the brazier.
    â€œI know,” Makuo says as he stares into her eyes, trying to prevent her departure, “but she cannot escape the pain. Some will still reach her.”
    Hidi steps away from the brazier, a curved knife held in one hand. The blade glows dully. The edge gleams a violent red. As he reaches her side, he speaks to her in Sharakhan, as if speaking the tongue she’d adopted these past many centuries would endear him to her. “Tell me now. Tell me where you hide it, and we will end this river of pain.”
    But she is well