Soleri Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Mel

  THE BLACK SAND

  They used to be fishermen, but that night hunger made them thieves. Under a moonless sky the men set out from the island in small wooden skiffs, sailing across the ink-black sea toward the distant kingdom. They were crowded in the long thin boats, crammed shoulder to shoulder, some turned sideways or doubled over to shield themselves against the waves. Gusty wind and angry water forced a few ships to turn back, while others were lost to the surf, and those who journeyed onward kept their eyes focused on the horizon, searching for the dim silhouette of the Dromus. The skiff rolled and the boy caught sight of the desert barrier. The great wall was hewn from cinder-gray rock and reflected no light, its jagged ridge biting at the low-hanging stars like a blacker piece of night.

  A cresting wave propelled the boy’s craft to shore. He clutched his oilskin sack and held it tight against his chest. The skiff tipped as they neared the black sand, and everyone went overboard. He was first in the water, overwhelmed by the dark, the rushing swells, the screams of men. In all his ten and five years, he had never left the southern islands. Now here he was, scrambling for footing on a foreign beach, staring at the desert wall.

  As he marched up the black-sand beach, he wondered if he had made a terrible mistake, if he should turn back. Others were whispering, afraid to go on ahead.

  As if in reply, the eldest among them urged them forward—reminding them that for the last several months all they had to eat were the bones of last season’s salt-dried fish and those were all gone. There was no going back now. There was nothing to go back to. The men turned once more to face the Dromus, that ash-stone monolith, onyx black, impenetrable, they said, impossible to breach—this wall that kept Sola rich, protected, and apart from the lower kingdoms. In the distance, as the sun rose and its light spread from the barrier’s rim, they saw the first glint of what they had come for—the riches promised beyond the wall—gold.

  All the gold of the Soleri. The words rang in their heads, the proverb they had heard as children at their fathers’ knees, words from their deepest memories: “Before time was the Soleri, and after time the Soleri will be.” The ruling family had been in power longer than even the calendars that stretched back 2,942 years—first in stone, then clay, then parchment. Those records told a history of conquest and domination by a family descended from gods, a family older than anything in the known world, ruling with nearly absolute authority for three millennia. There was no world without the Soleri—they were the center of everything, the end and the beginning—and so it was to the center of the empire, to the Dromus and all that lay beyond, that the men from Scargill, dressed in sea-soaked rags and driven by desperation, now turned.

  They pressed on, passing into the wall’s growing shadow with a mixture of dread and determination. They had crossed the burnt-sand beach and were within striking distance, but now they were vulnerable to attack from above, from the dead-shot archers of the Soleri Army. They scanned the wall for signs of its inhabitants, upward and down, following the ragged contour of the Dromus until it disappeared into the horizon. Nothing.

  The line of the wall thinned out along its broad curve, and they moved more quickly now as the ground became more certain underneath their feet, the wide plain of the desert opening up around the ash-stone barrier. There it was. The Gate of Coronel, the southern gate of the Dromus, three days’ march from the city of the Soleri. The boy could see the two panels of the gateway, each one the size of a great raft turned on end. But what was this? The doors stood open.

  A trap, some said. But others disagreed, said it was just a bit of luck, that the guards must be napping in the first light of dawn. They should take this chance, they murmured, while they still could. The boy remembered that the Feast of Devouring approached. Perhaps the guards had gone off to prepare for the high holdiday.

  The open doors stood before them.

  The elders made the decision: the fishermen of Scargill would charge the gate as planned.

  They crossed the Dromus and entered the gate. Steeled themselves for spears, for swords, for fire, for the emperor’s soldiers, warriors of exceptional skill and ferocity who were bred to conquer and slay. Who were said to be able to kill with a breath, with a look.

  They were ready for anything, but nothing rose to meet them. No fire. No arrows. No soldiers. The Dromus was empty. Unguarded.

  There was no one there.

  No soldier stood guard, and even the gold they had seen from a distance was nothing more than the sun’s first rays reflecting off the temple’s tattered dome. No army and no riches here. No food or fresh water either—the storehouses and water barrels stood empty.

  The fishermen from Scargill, their limbs thin, bones poking out at the joints, who had come if not for gold then simply for food for their children, could not go home, not yet.

  Past the temple, past the fields of spears and upturned earth, the men pushed onward till the air turned foul. Here at last were the mighty soldiers of the Soleri. But the fighting men were not arranged in serried ranks, nor were they spread out in a mighty phalanx of spears and helms. The soldiers lay lifeless, stacked in mounds, left to rot in the sun and the wind, left for the crows’ next meal.

  The men from Scargill, woolly bearded elders and smooth-chinned boys stopped their advance. There was nowhere else to go, nothing left to see. The boy flung his oilskin over his shoulder, scratched his cheek, and spat.

  Around them, the Dromus stretched to infinity—its black line holding the last traces of night.

  Everything else was just sand.

  THE DYING RAY

  1

  Will I see the sky today?

  Ren Hark-Wadi sat in darkness, awaiting the sunrise.

  As the first finger of dawn came sliding down the steep wall of the lightwell, it changed the color of the stones in his cell from black to brown to a faint, muddy yellow. Ren stood from his wooden pallet, took a scrap of polished iron from beneath his blanket, and slid the metal through a narrow slot in the window. It caught the light, filling the small chamber with streaks of blue-gray illumination. Ren let the faint rays wash over his face, hoping they might warm his skin, but the light was too dim.

  Perhaps the upper rings can see a bit more of the sky? He didn’t know.

  He leaned closer to the window, pressed his head to the slot, and peered upward. If he held himself just-so, sometimes he could see a wedge of sky—a blue sliver no larger than a nut. In his free moments, when he was certain no one watched, he would stare at that blue dot till his neck cramped, hoping to catch sight of a bird or an errant cloud, some sign that the world outside existed, that the breeze blew and the clouds drifted, but his neck was too sti
ff to find the sky that morning. He saw only rows of narrow windows, one above the next, five rings of arched windows, one for each level of the Priory, trailing far underground where the outside world never intruded—where the outside world, and all the people in it, were nothing but rumor.

  Maybe tomorrow. Maybe then I’ll be able to steal a glimpse of the world beyond these walls.

  Dousing himself with a bucket of foul gray water, his morning shower, Ren sputtered, rinsing the sleep from his eyes, as well as yesterday’s dirt from his cheeks and his long hair, which was always flopping into his face. The water poured across the floor and out to a stone scupper, where it disappeared. He suspected that it was simply used again the next day, the same water with more grit in it. The men who ran the Priory were nothing if not stingy with the necessities of life.

  Pain makes the man. The priors said it every day. The Soleri taught their people that pain built character. Pain makes the man. It was their mantra, but Ren didn’t think it was a particularly good one. If pain truly made the man, then he had been made a man many times over. I don’t think pain makes a man. I think we become men in spite of it. He had seen pain drive boys mad. He had seen it drive them to cruelty. He had never seen it make them into anything Ren thought a man should be, but what did he know? All Ren knew were boys. And all the boys he knew were ransoms.

  In the distance a trumpet blared, high and tinny and full of self-importance. The Feast of the Devouring had begun; in five days the sun would blacken for a brief span, the daylight turning as weak and shadowy as twilight, the people hushed and awed at the yearly spectacle of the sun god’s blessings.

  Mithra-Sol dims his light to acknowledge our emperor and the whole of the empire watches as if it were some great miracle. Ren didn’t care if the sun dimmed for a brief span. He’d never even seen the sun, not even a sliver. The fact that the sky blackened each year didn’t seem particularly special. He was well accustomed to darkness.

  Ren Hark-Wadi, the youngest child and only son of Arko, king of Harkana, had not seen the world beyond his prison walls since the emperor’s soldiers had delivered him to the underground city of the Priory ten years earlier. Only three years old at the time, Ren could not recall the moment he had been taken from his family, could not remember his father’s face, or his mother’s, or his sisters’. He knew his sisters’ names, Merit and Kepi, his teachers had told him that much, but he could not remember what they looked like. He wondered if they remembered him. If they would recognize him now. If anyone cared that he still existed.

  Am I a name without a face? An empty chair at the table each night?

  Surely they would know him if they saw him, even if he was now nearly as tall as a man. His hair, once honey-colored, so different from the other boys’, was dull and mousy now from years of living underground, though it had attracted a lot of attention when he was younger. Ren had sharp cheekbones and a narrow, angular face marked by fox-colored eyes and a mouth that sometimes seemed set in a permanent frown. He was tall for his age, but surely there was something left in him of the boy he had been. Surely his father and his sisters would see it, if no one else could. He spent his nights trying to recall his childhood, searching his memories for a glimpse of their faces: his sisters, his father and mother. Did they love me? Were we a family once? Did they eat meals and tell stories and were the children held at night until they fell asleep? He longed for memories, but had none. Even a dream would have been acceptable, but he had never dreamed of them either. The idea was too foreign, too distant to conceive. He recalled only these rooms, the boys, the priors, and the bitter nights he had spent in this cell.

  A prior tapped his door. “Out of your room, Hark-Wadi.” Already the boys were gathering for morning meal. Time to go, time to eat, time for lessons.

  Ren removed a stone from the wall. Behind the rock, a blade occupied a stony niche. Ren palmed the knife, tugged a linen tunic over his head. He needed to hurry. Their rations arrived once daily and were seldom sufficient: thin soup with bits of tough dried meat or stringy vegetables; sometimes a paste of dried dates or figs and thin, unleavened wafers; sometimes nothing but hard bread with oil to dip it in. It had been a long time—a very long time—since they’d had enough to fill their bellies. That was how the men ran the Priory. “Pain makes the man,” a prior shouted as he walked past the boys’ cells, banging on all the doors, waking them up.

  Ren stumbled into the corridor and caught sight of his young friend Tye Sirra of the Wyrre. An older boy, Kollen Pisk, was talking to Tye, going on about the Devouring. Ren slipped behind Kollen and shoved him playfully in the back. “Priors are calling for you.” It was a lie, but Ren wanted to get rid of the older boy, and a call from the priors was the surest way to do that. “Probably best be on your way,” said Ren, slapping the tall boy again.

  “Later then,” Kollen said. He knocked Ren on the shoulder, but his eyes did not leave Tye, his gaze lingering up and down, as if taking measure. Then he laughed and disappeared down the corridor.

  Ren waited until they were alone. “Do you think he knows?”

  “I’m not sure—he might,” said Tye.

  “Then we need to be more careful. You should grow your hair longer,” Ren said. “And maybe a different tunic?”

  “My hair won’t grow any faster—or longer,” said Tye. “And this old tunic is the mangiest I could find. I already stink like a rat, do I have to look like one as well?”

  Ren shrugged. “It’s better than being discovered. No one looks twice at a rat and they certainly don’t want to stand by one.” He pinched his nose.

  “It’s no joke. Sooner or later someone is going to figure it all out and then—” Tye glanced around to make certain no one was listening.

  “We can’t give up so easily,” said Ren. “We’ve fooled them for years.”

  “Years, yes, but I was younger then and didn’t have much of anything to hide,” said Tye, brushing a bit of dirt from what had become a slight swelling in her upper chest. Tye was a girl. Only her friends Ren and Adin Fahran, the heir of Feren, knew the truth. Her father had swapped his daughter for his son when the Protector came to fetch the boy from their home in the Wyrre three years ago. Now twelve, Tye was tall and thin, and for the most part lacked the curves that would come with womanhood. She had the light hair and eyes of the southern tribes, a slender nose, and a sprinkling of freckles on her cheeks. She was growing more beautiful every day, and took great pains to hide it. She could still pass for a boy, though each day she looked a little less like one.

  “What are you doing in this part of the Priory?” Ren asked. Tye’s chamber was on a different floor.

  “Looking for you.”

  “Aren’t you sweet—” he teased.

  “Shut up, I’m here for a reason,” she said.

  “What reason?” Ren asked, seeing her face turn anxious.

  “Just follow me.” Tye darted down the corridor and Ren followed. What was so urgent that she would risk missing morning meal? The answer came soon enough when they saw Adin.

  “My father’s dead,” Adin said, squinting in the gloom to look for his friends. He stood in the door to his cell, a yellowed parchment clutched in one hand, his skin dusky in the lamplight. Adin was a few years older than Ren, tall and lanky, his hair messy, his chin stubbled, shoulders hunched like a boy afraid of his own height.

  “It’s over,” Adin said. “I’m leaving.” The Priory boys were unable to return home until their fathers died or were killed.

  For a moment Ren just stared at his friend. This was the moment they lived for every day. Freedom. Home. But Adin looked far from joyous. “What’s wrong?” asked Ren.

  “There was a note, from my uncle, Gallach. All is not what it seems. There was a revolt a year ago. A merchant named Dagrun Finner declared himself king of the Ferens and took the throne. He kept my father hostage, then sent him to the gallows for treason. Now the emperor has recognized Finner as king and since my father is dead and I am no lo
nger the first son of Feren, I’ll be set free. My line is ended.”

  Heavy footsteps echoed outside, the priors were coming. Their yellow robes emerged from the dark of the corridor. The Prior Master, Oren Thrako, walked at the head of the group. He was stout and strong, the skin over his bald head stretched smooth and bulging like an overdeveloped muscle. He gripped Adin by the neck.

  “Time to go, boy,” Oren said.

  “Give us a moment,” Ren protested

  The parchment shook in Adin’s hand. His eyes darted between the Prior Master and Ren. “The new king will surely kill me once he learns I have gained my freedom. They’re sending me home to my death.”

  “Save your worries for someone who cares. Time to meet the Ray,” Oren said.

  Ren put himself between Adin and the Prior Master. “Just a moment,” he begged.

  “Go back to your cell,” Oren said.

  No. He would likely never see his friend again. But before Ren could speak, Oren slammed him against the wall. His fingers wrapped around Ren’s neck, slowly tightening. Ren gagged, his face turning red, fingers twitching. Then something made the Prior Master let go. Tye had taken hold of Oren’s tunic and was frantically tugging at it. The loose threads of the tunic caught Oren’s bronze necklace. She gave the cloth another tug and the necklace bit into his neck, drawing blood.

  Oren forgot about Ren. He lashed out at Tye, slamming her with his fist and knocking her to her knees. “Stupid boy,” he said, gesturing for one of the priors to hand him his cudgel, meaning to beat her, right there in front of them.

  No, no, not Tye, this is my fault. Ren swiftly drew his blade and pressed the iron against Oren’s back.

  The Prior Master turned slowly around, his eyes settling on the little knife. “What are you going to do with that?” he scoffed. “Skewer a mouse? You’d be better off threatening me with a thimble,” he said. “Throw it down or I’ll carve you with it myself.”