Uiziya sighed. “Very well. If you want to find Benesret, we should follow the diamondflies. They feed on death and feed her, and she feeds on all the death.”
We left the ghostly encampment and traveled south through the desert made once more ordinary. We rested in the heat, and with darkness we traveled again, following the sparkle of diamondflies and glimpses of bone revealed and concealed by the wind.
I had never been this far south in the great Burri desert. At the dawn of our lives, on our first trading journey, Bashri-nai-Leylit and I had gotten only as far as the snake-Surun’ encampment. We journeyed in hope and in fear, for the Ruler of Iyar had imprisoned our lover; and he would free her if we brought, in exchange, the greatest treasure ever woven.
Its threads were spun of song, and it was made from these threads by Benesret e Nand e Divyát, a weaver who sat under the faded embroidered awnings in her tent. She wove not from death then, but from song; and weaving from song was an ancient tradition known to no other kin but the snake-Surun’. Yet among all the other snake-Surun’ weavers in their tents, Benesret alone knew the secrets of all the desert’s profound weaves. As she had no children of her own, she would bequeath this craft to the child of her closest kin. Uiziya.
Darkness was falling over the dunes, and the cry of the swaddlebird came from the gloom, calling out a warning to its mate. I was once oreg-mate to two of my lovers, but now I was the last of the three to remain.
“Look!” Uiziya’s carpet stopped, and she pointed forward. I saw something swirling there, dense darkness in the dusk, like guardian snakes undulating in the evening sand of the Surun’ encampment. Feeding. “What is it?” I asked, swallowing the other question.
“I’m afraid it’s somebody we know.”
Uiziya e Lali
My carpet floated closer. The darkness tugged and beckoned at me with a secret buzz, and out of it I saw a cloud of diamondflies swarming over a body.
The young assassin. His body under the swarm of the diamondflies was almost whole, but his arm and hand were missing from the elbow, where my blood had spilled on the white cloth he had taken from the tent. He had touched my aunt’s work, and now he was food. My aunt had been banished, because they feared if she stayed, her workmanship would have killed not only Lali, but everybody else as well—goats, children, women, men, in-betweeners, even the snakes that guarded us—everyone.
It has not been a day since we encountered the assassin, but the body I saw now had lost all human integrity under the shreds of its piece of cloth, no longer brilliant white. The smell was horrible, putrid, with a strange green tang, and I pushed my sleeve in front of my nose to shield myself from the worst.
“It is full of stars,” said nen-sasaïr, behind me. His voice was tense.
“No, just diamondflies. Feeding.” I needed to get away from here. And I needed to stay.
I exhaled, calling on my two deepnames. Onesyllable and three-syllable, a configuration which our people called the Weaver’s Promise. Nen-sasaïr’s magic was more powerful; mine was not known for its strength, but for its uses in craft.
I extended my magic and let the light push past the feeding diamondflies and touch the slip of besmirched cloth and the body beneath it, now being absorbed into the magic my aunt had made. My touch conjured a brief vision of the person in life. Yes, it was the assassin we had seen. A young person, their face twisted in so much bewildered anger. Far to the southeast, underneath the School of Assassins, the great Orphan Star slumbers, its power almost as great as that of the two sibling gods. Those who had tasted despair come to it, to train as assassins. I heard they train the anger out of you in that school, or else you fail.
I redirected the flow of my magic and folded my deepnames back into my mind. My touch had been gentle. Some of the diamondflies lifted off and away, but most continued to feed.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Why did he die? He did not seem wounded to me, just distraught . . .” Nen-sasaïr had also seen the apparition of the dead youth, and horror tinged his voice.
“I don’t know. But we should go see Benesret. It’s not far. These flies feed her, see.” I wondered if she knew now that we were coming. I should have offered to turn back, but I did not. Nothing waited for me back at home, except the traders and the knowledge that I could not weave or live like before. And all these visions of death disturbed me and drew me forward.
We left the body behind. As soon as it could no longer be seen, nen-sasaïr stopped and bent over. Floating above on my carpet of wanderlust, I watched him retch and heave, and I did not say a thing.
nen-sasaïr
We traveled southeast into the true night. Stars spun and rustled above us like predatory diamondflies, waiting for me to lose my balance and fall. But I would not let it happen. No. I was old, and I wanted to live. This was my true life, life in the new body made by the cloth of winds and by the sandbirds; I could not figure out my place or my name, but this I knew: I wanted to live for decades still, to taste the world in my true body.
“Benesret—” I said, just to break the silence. I did not turn, but I put some power into my words, so that Uiziya would hear. “Benesret—all those years I thought she was exiled because of an affair, or—”
“Because she had two husbands?” Uiziya laughed, but there was no joy in it. “No, it’s not a punishable offense, or an offense at all, among our people—”
In the distance I saw a kind of hill, an outcropping of hard rock overgrown—no, studded—with thin dry reeds, which were topped with skulls of jackal and sand-fox and mouse, their eyes glowing with bluish magical lights. Human and animal bones formed the palisade. Behind that grate was a Surun’-style tent—but instead of reed poles, it was supported by curving tusks of the great razu beast, the legendary creature nobody had seen alive in the desert. The pink of the tusks had turned pale green and petrified millennia ago, when nothing else existed. And all the bones glowed in the near-darkness, reflecting starlight and the pallid blue light from the skulls.
The diamondflies had terrified me, but not like this. No. I wanted to live. Not rush headlong into death.
I turned on my sand-skis, but Uiziya lowered the sand-carpet and gripped my sleeve, unbidden. “Please. I want, after all these years, to talk to my aunt. If you leave without me, you will get lost in the sands.”
I wanted to protest, before I could open my mouth, she hissed, “If you offend her, maybe the diamondflies will feed on you next.”
“Benesret was my friend,” I said angrily. “She would not do that to me . . .”
“Then why are you running away?”
“I . . .”
Bluish light poured out of the tent of bones, and stars swirled overhead in rapid motion, revealing a pink glistening in the eastern sky. Night had not yet fully fallen. And yet—
The light within the bone tent grew brighter. A withered, stooped figure emerged and gingerly sat down at the entrance. I heard a voice that chilled and welcomed me.
“My friend, you say. Yes, I remember. I’ve woven from air a cloth of transformation for you. And also I had woven another, much larger. From song. Oh, that carpet of song. For your master.”