Chapter 28
By the time I returned to the drain running with dyes in every color of the rainbow, I was starting to wonder if wisdom should have won out over resolve.
This was my second night without sleep. Had I been younger, mayhap I wouldn’t be so exhausted.
Were I perhaps not actively dying—Sheikh Sasan’s poison lurking in my blood like a hidden predator—maybe my steps would have been surer, my mind less cloudy.
But with the memory of Orinth’s bestial scream ringing through my ears, grief pushed me on.
Grief and the feeling that my time here was running out like grains in an overturned hourglass.
If Dalila was with me—as she should have been—she would have told me to turn back.
Admonished me over how easily mistakes were made when one wasn’t their sharpest, how you could ruin a job months in the making.
However, my partner wasn’t here. Whether that was because she was sweating over an antidote in the apothecary or taking walks in the garden with Lab, God only knew.
I carefully lifted the grate and peered into the workshop.
The scene was the same as last night’s: wordless, dutiful workers tending to their brilliant textiles.
A pile of freshly shorn wool—dark this time, perhaps culled from the sheep’s ebony markings—partially blocked my view.
I leaned out, catching sight again of that vast tapestry, still inconceivably large and jarringly alive, the colors twinkling like stars in the deep black sky.
If it did somehow influence Khatti Ugal’s people, I wondered what happened when Lab transformed them.
Did she come here herself and rip them from the seams of her world?
Or did she weave a new story, one she liked better?
I gazed upon the patterns, still feeling as though I were staring at a book I couldn’t read, a text that underlay all the enchantments in this unusual place.
Then I hesitated, truly contemplating that prospect.
What if the tapestry did hold the enchantments—the secrets—of Khatti Ugal, woven from thread spun by a sorceress on a spindle that could rewrite fate, rewrite reality?
Were there spells envisioning magnificent glassworks and astonishing gardens, sumptuous chambers and the boundary that kept Dalila and me trapped in the city limits—all woven in the patterns I couldn’t read?
Burn it and find out. But I dismissed the idea nearly as soon as it came.
This was all conjecture, and I wasn’t yet desperate enough to start burning things down.
I was getting close, but I had come here tonight for another reason.
Spotting the door the woman carrying the basket of freshly spun thread had come through last night, I contemplated how best to access it.
The textile workers seemed absorbed in their tasks, but not so absorbed that they wouldn’t notice a giant stranger creeping through their temple.
Keeping the door’s location in mind, I returned to the tunnels, searching for a nearby exit.
I finally found one—well, made one by ripping open a stone lattice and squeezing through the narrow opening.
Wincing as sharp thorns snagged my flesh, I climbed through a thicket of roses, emerging in a wild, neglected section of the palace grounds.
Ahead was a long-abandoned fountain, fetid water and mildew collecting in its cracked basin.
Strangling vines crawled over the broken remnants of a winged statue with mournful eyes.
A horned rabbit froze near a patch of cloudy pink berries, then took off.
The air smelled of pine and wet soil, and the moon was so bright I didn’t need my lamp.
Beyond the trees, light flickered. I crept closer, spotting an ivy-covered building that seemed to match the dimensions of the textile workshop.
A sandy footpath led to a wooden door, the other end ribboning through the garden’s feral heart.
Careful to stay in the shadows, I followed the path away from the workshop.
But I hadn’t been walking for long when it ended at the foot of a scrubby hill, dense with overgrown bushes and gnarled old trees.
Except it wasn’t a hill, not truly. Instead, it was the ruin, the ancient building that Queen Lab claimed was all that was left of the first structure her “ancestors” had built in Khatti Ugal.
A small cottage of earthen walls topped by a round roof with a center hole cut for smoke; the surrounding hill seemed to have built up around it over the centuries, offering a protective embrace.
Firelight flickered from within, and a stack of baskets like the one I’d seen last night waited outside a curtained door.
This is it. Excitement and apprehension warred within my racing heart. There was no one in sight and so I crept up to the cottage, leaning into the shadows and moving with every bit of discretion and thieving grace I had until I could steal a glance inside.
My stomach dropped.
Dalila.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting to see inside the cottage, but it certainly wasn’t my companion sitting upon a woven mat on a dirt floor marked with odd symbols.
And Dalila wasn’t alone. The queen herself sat directly behind her, hovering over Dalila’s shoulders as though a master to an apprentice, a terribly apt metaphor.
For it was indeed craftwork they were engaged in, the very one I’d been searching for tonight.
And whirling in the dusty air before them, like an enraptured Sufi acolyte, was the Transgression I had been tasked with retrieving.
The spindle was no Moon of Saba, the brilliant silver basin whose very sight was intoxicating.
It was, as all spindles are, a simple wooden shaft, perhaps the length of my wrist, with a stone whorl no larger than an egg at one end.
Bristling with new thread, the spindle was a sight as common and domestic as a cooking spoon, as a bowl.
But gazing upon it longer, an element of enchantment began to emerge.
The wood was so dark and had been so frequently handled that it gleamed like black leather, appearing almost soft.
The stone whorl was conical but inscribed with bizarre runes that shimmered with an ethereal sapphire light.
The fluffy wool on the distaff rod that Dalila held looked utterly unremarkable; it was only as it was being drawn into the twist, spun into a tight thread by Dalila and the queen’s entwined fingers, that it began to gleam, to sparkle like the emerging stars of a celestial event.
Lab removed her hand from Dalila’s to twirl the spindle into another, faster rotation, and I would swear the very earth trembled.
She murmured a word softly in my friend’s ear that sounded gentle, instructive, and Dalila shivered.
My mouth went dry. I did not know how to make sense of the scene before me.
To see Dalila all but in Lab’s lap, both an intimate and a puppet.
They were dressed in simple tunics, their bare arms glistening with sweat, and Dalila seemed to be slightly out of breath.
Her wrist dipped, the spindle shuddering, and Lab carefully corrected her without allowing for a break.
I thought you loathed magic. I thought you were convinced the spindle didn’t exist, that it was all a peri trick.
It was a ridiculous reaction and yet there I was, feeling as freshly betrayed as I was shocked.
How long had Dalila known about this? Why had she kept it to herself and what in God’s name would have possessed her to take up the damned thing?
Was . . . whatever this was part of the deal Dalila had struck with Lab?
And why? If the spindle could truly rewrite fates, memories—why would the queen allow anyone else to touch it, let alone spin with it?
Why hadn’t Lab already scrambled my mind, used her magic to convince the irritating thorn of a pirate captain to become a good little Khatti Ugalan and help her queen sail away?
I forced myself to draw closer once more.
To banish my shock and study the scene as a prospective burglar would do.
Dalila and Lab were alone, the chamber with entries at only the door, window, and ceiling.
The cottage was at odds with the rest of elegant Khatti Ugal, simple with its wattle and daub walls and bare bark mat.
Even the wool that awaited spinning was piled in plain baskets of braided reeds.
For a queen and a culture that adored opulence, the difference was stark.
It fits the appearance of the spindle, though.
I stared at the whirling tool, an artifact that appeared to have fallen from a primeval world.
It was close, so close that the temptation to lunge through the doorway and snatch it, snap the accursed thing over my thigh before either woman could react, was overwhelming.
But just as I had suppressed my urge to set fire to the tapestry, I stayed my hand again.
What if I couldn’t break the spindle? Or what if I did break it, but it wasn’t the source of Lab’s magic and the enraged queen turned Dalila into a goat before my eyes?
Though judging from the scene before me, such enmity was not in either woman’s mind.
Lab flicked the spindle again, sending it dancing, and then trailed her fingers up Dalila’s bare arm.
Dalila closed her eyes with a sigh, relaxing into the queen’s embrace.
The expression on her face was unguarded, raw and soft in a way I’d never seen.
She otherwise didn’t look well, though; shadows ringed her eyes and she’d lost some of the healthy weight she’d put on when we arrived.
Oh, my friend, what have you gotten yourself into?
A sick feeling wormed through my heart. Dalila might have betrayed me, lied to me in a way I wasn’t sure I could forgive, but I didn’t want to see her get hurt.
Perhaps this was part of a scheme, a plot to trick the queen of which I was not party—Dalila was indeed among the most conniving, cleverest, and coldest people I had ever met.
However this didn’t look like acting.
Dalila suddenly winced, nearly dropping the spindle before Lab caught it. I tensed, concerned she might be punished for the slip.
But Lab seemed more worried about Dalila than ruined wool. “Are you all right?” the queen asked, pressing the back of her hand to Dalila’s cheek. “You feel warm.”
Dalila pinched her brow but nodded, looking determined. “I can continue for a bit longer.”
Lab drew the spindle away. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.” Dalila held her hand out for the spindle. “I know how important this is.”
Lab hesitated, but only for a moment. “You will let me know if you need a rest. Either way, perhaps we will do some weaving once this is done. And soon enough . . .” Her voice softened.
“You will not have to worry about anything anymore.” She squeezed Dalila’s narrow shoulder. “Let me get more wool.”
I slipped away before Lab could rise, my mind a jumble.
I had memorized what I could of the spindle’s home; to stare longer seemed intrusive.
Which was likely a ridiculous concern considering that Lab and I were headed toward calamity.
I wasn’t taking the witch who’d turned Orinth into a goat on my ship and I was determined to shatter that damn spindle before even dreaming of such a departure.
If I came for Lab—when I came for her—on whose side would Dalila stand?