The rope held her weight; the curse beneath her ribs did not. By the third stroke of the wedding drum it moved under her left side — a fingerprint of cold pressing higher, half a finger gained since dusk — and she counted it against the twenty-eight days she had to her name.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven by morning, if the moon kept its calendar.
Below her, half a hundred meters of warm air and torchlight, the courtyard of Diwan-i-Khass spilled with people. Drum, oud, the deliberate palm-clap that Mehrazad reserved for royal vows. From this height the wedding looked like a copper bowl filled with moths. She did not look long. Looking long was how thieves got remembered by their own faces.
Two soft steps along the rope, one measured pause. The harem roof.
Through the lattice the bride passed in a column of attendants. Inara of Brassmark wore her two-tiered northern crown wrong against southern light, all pearl and no shine. Her left sleeve had ridden up at the wrist — a flicker of dark ink under skin too pale for it, three berries on a thin branch, a brand burned in. So that was where the new wife kept her real allegiance. Useful. Not tonight's use.
The loose tile lifted clean. She had counted on it three nights ago, and the harem opened like a polite door.
Down was always easier than up. She slid through the servants' corridor that ran behind the women's quarters, came out behind a tapestry that smelled of saffron and old hair-oil, and crossed into the Sultan's private wing where the guards were thinner than they should have been.
Two men where there should have been six. The lock-iron on the inner door open by half a finger. Not unlocked — half-locked, which was a different kind of laziness, the kind that forgot to be lazy properly. The hairs at the nape of her neck did the job they had been trained for: nothing.
Notice. Don't like.
She moved.
The Khazina sat at the heart of Kazim's wing, a round room without windows, with one oil-bowl on a copper ring throwing a single bronze color onto everything. The lamp was where a year of patient listening had told her it would be — third shelf, second from the left, on a low brass stand, behind a pair of jeweled scabbards the Sultan had never pulled in his life. A fat little vessel of unpolished bronze, no bigger than a cat curled twice, the metal almost black at the spout, the body banded with old script she could not read by torchlight and would not bother to read at all.
Lifting came later. She slid the scabbards aside in case the shelf was set against weight, and let her thumb find the underside and feel for the pressure-plate fools liked to set under sacred objects. Nothing. She lifted.
Heavier than she had been told. Not heavy enough to argue with.
The script along the body pressed against her palm — not raised, not engraved, something in between, the way old letters lie under the skin of fine bronze when the caster has been a craftsman and a worshipper at the same time. She turned the vessel once, slowly. The weight inside it shifted with the movement a heartbeat after the bronze did, the way oil shifts in a sealed jar. There was no oil in this lamp. Whatever moved inside had a delay of its own, a refusal to be in the same time as the metal that held it.
She slid it inside the inner lining of her vest, against her ribs.
On the way out a girl came around the corner with a basin of rose-water for the Sultan's hand-washing. Yara took her wrist, took the basin, set it down without sound, and put the girl on the floor in the curve of the wall with two fingers behind one ear. The girl breathed. She would wake with a headache and a story no one would believe.
The rope took her again before the next stroke of the drum. Up was harder than down by the natural shape of bodies, and harder again with bronze pressed to her ribs and the women's wing waking under her, and she made the climb on the count of the music — palm-clap, oud, drum, palm-clap — because counting was what kept hands from forgetting where they were.
On the ridge tile she paused, one breath. The courtyard opened under her again. The bride was on the balcony now, the northern crown catching the wrong light, Kazim's hand at her elbow at the angle a man uses when the woman is property and the audience is watching for the gesture. The Sultan looked happy in the particular way that men of his trade looked happy at weddings: not at the woman, at the floor of the hall and the people on it, the line of nobles bending the right amount. She had been planning his death for thirteen months. A year of his voice from edicts, a public whipping's worth of his order on her back. The look of him settled in her like a stone settling at the bottom of a jar, and then she went over the ridge and down the dark side of the roof.
Relief was something other thieves felt. The lamp pressed bronze against her ribs; the vine pressed cold a finger higher than it had at dusk; the count came out the same. The lamp by itself solved nothing.
The Stilts smelled of rotting reed and cold copper. Her basement was under what had once been a dyer's; the chans still stood in their stone cradles, and the walls held the green-blue of old indigo like a memory of weather. She locked the door three times — bolt, latch, hair-thread — dropped to one knee at the chan farthest from the stairs, and lifted the lamp into the bowl of her palms.
Bronze. Old. Hers.
She set it on the lip of the chan and reached, without looking, for the silver shard of mirror she kept wedged behind a loose brick. Lifted her tunic on her left side. Looked.
The vine had reached the lower curve of her ribs. The skin under it was a degree colder than the skin around it; she had checked this before, with the back of one knuckle, and she checked it again now, because checking was the shape grief took in her family. The pattern was the pattern of a year ago — Anwar Saif's hand on her bare shoulder while she lay face-down on the boards of the public square, the seven new wounds across her back still hot, his voice quiet as a man dictating a recipe. It hadn't moved for a year. It had begun moving a month ago. It would not stop until it touched her heart, or until the man whose blood it was tied to stopped breathing.
Whichever came first.
She let the tunic fall.
The lamp was a piece of cold metal under her hand. She wiped the spout with her thumb — old reflex, looking for trap-paste — and felt nothing but bronze. The cap was a screw, not a stopper. Childishly simple.
She turned it.
No smoke. No wind. No light.
A man.
The basement was eight steps wide and the man took up two of them. He did not arrive; he was simply there, between the dye-chans, head almost at the ceiling beam, bare-shouldered under a sleeveless tunic that should not have looked like a king's clothing and did, glowing geometric chain-runes printed onto the skin of his throat, his collarbones, his arms. The glow was the color of brass held too close to a fire. The air around him bent.
The copper chan under her palm warmed to body-heat in the time it took her to look up.
Every child in Mehrazad knew the qissa-khwan's tale of the First Crown of Sahar. The villains in the story changed by neighborhood — priests for the eastern poor, nobles for the western merchants, Hassan ibn Mahir always at the end. The hero changed face by storyteller, but not by much. A long braid forward over the left shoulder. Eyes the color of a melted coin. The chains.
So the legend had not lied about him being in here. The legend had lied about who he was.
The light off the chains laid a faint gold over the indigo on the walls and turned the green-blue into something older, the way certain hours of a sandstorm turned the city the color of an old bruise.
He looked at her.
He looked at her the way she had once seen Reza look at a stolen ledger — like he had finally laid his hand on the right page after months of reading the wrong ones. Recognition without surprise.
"Yara Vehr."
He said it the way a person says a name he had been keeping in his mouth. A pause; the runes at his throat brightened half a shade. "The one who came before you — who reached this far and not farther — Reza — was closer. A pity."
Her brother's name went in like a pin going into cloth. Clean. Through. She had not heard it spoken aloud in eleven months. The qissa-khwan did not use it. Ushad would not say it. She did not say it, even alone. She said it now, in the only place she said it, which was behind her teeth, and outside her teeth she said —
"Step back."
He did not.
She had a knife at her hip, and another in her boot, and a third laced inside the right braid. She reached for the hip one. He reached for her right wrist.
His fingertips set on the inside of her wrist the way a healer's do to find the pulse, and the skin there warmed once — not painfully, professionally — and when he took his fingers away there was a circle of gold on the inside of her wrist that had not been there a heartbeat before.
Geometric. Concentric. Old imperial script. The line of it sat on top of the skin and under it at the same time, a brand without burn.
She had not said yes.
She had not said anything.
She stepped back. Two steps. The chan stopped her hip. He stayed where he was. His gaze went to her left side. Through the tunic. He looked at her left side the way a literate man reads a page, his gaze following the script of the vine, and that — that, more than her name in his mouth, more than the gold on her wrist — was the moment it became clear that what she had let out of the lamp was not a thing she had let out of the lamp.
"You did not need the lamp." His voice was bronze going through fabric. "The one you have freed from it — he is what the hand of Yara Vehr was reaching for, though the hand had not yet learned the name of its errand. You need me."
The mirror shard on the rim caught the oil-light and threw a slim white line across the wall, and in that line both of her wrists were caught at once. The right one carried a circle of fresh gold. The left side, under the tunic, carried a fingerprint of cold creeping up under her ribs.
Two seals on one body, pulling toward different ends.
Twenty-eight days.
She had been planning a war, and she had brought home a husband.