Maks spun around and stood stock still, his eyes going to my once-white shirt. “Zam? What happened? Are you okay?”
I raised both hands. “I’m fine. Lila is fine. It’s . . . weird is the closest word I’ve got for it.” I quickly told them about the bush with the thick red vines, oozing blood, and our narrow escape. I did not mention the voice.
“I warned it I would salt the ground if it tried again.” I sat against Balder’s saddle on the ground and took a plate of food Shem offered me. “It backed off. Like it had a brain inside all those twisty vines.” I took a bite of the eggs and grimaced. They were dry as the desert sands. I would lay money Shem had done it on purpose.
Maks stared hard at me. “If not for the blood, I would ask if you were seeing things.”
I snorted and took a bite of the meat on the plate. Bird of some sort by the taste, maybe desert pheasant. “You and me both. I wondered if it was a nightmare and I was still asleep.”
Shem was quiet as he made up a plate for Lila and then one for Maks and himself. Too quiet. I narrowed my eyes. “Shem, you know something about that bloodthirsty bush?”
He sighed as he lowered himself into a crouch, easily balancing his plate on one knee. “I do. It’s something of the Emperor’s. Not unlike the standing stones, if you remember those from the stories I told you as a child.”
I stopped chewing, the food in my mouth turning to dust. I shot a look at Lila and gave the subtlest of head shakes. We were not mentioning the voice. Not yet.
“We saw a set of the standing stones farther north. They ate two Jinn,” Lila said.
Hell, they’d almost eaten Maks.
Maks paled, obviously remembering. He twisted around to look in the direction Lila and I had come. “And this bush, it’s the same thing? Will it call to Jinn and others who have magic?”
Shem went from a crouch to sitting on the ground, his long legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. “The standing stones are the first marker the Emperor is awake. The blood vines, they are the second. While the standing stones take the magic and soul of those who carry that type of ability, the blood vines take just that. Blood.”
I made myself keep eating though the food tasted like dirt. I swallowed with difficulty before I spoke again. “Two questions. One, the Emperor needs blood? And two, are there more signs like this we should be on the lookout for?”
“Yes, to the first. He needs blood to fully revive himself.” Shem nodded. “And he needs a great deal of it. The vines are indiscriminate. The blood can come from any creature, though I suppose he might prefer one with magic humming in their veins. That would make more sense in terms of giving him strength to break the spell he’s under.” He looked past me in the direction where the bush was. “The signs are shadowed with his power so that you walk into the trap unknowing. That you escaped . . . that is surprising, to say the least.”
Surprising. I put my plate down and noticed that Lila also had backed away from her food. “How surprising?” I made myself ask.
Shem leaned back and brought out a small pack that he carried with him. When we’d escaped Dragon’s Ground he’d looked to have nothing but the clothes on his back. But under his shirt he carried a thin backpack that was very nearly empty by the looks of it. He unzipped the bag and reached in.
“I would say . . . impossible,” he said, his eyes on mine. “Yet, with you, that seems to be a word you just ignore. Like leaping off the back of a dragon, falling, and yet somehow surviving what should have killed you.”
Before I could respond, he pulled out a leather satchel from his bag that folded over and tied closed around a bone button. I frowned. It looked an awful lot like the satchel I’d taken off the Jinn from their camp—a satchel that had been full of nothing but blank sheets of paper. Lila caught my eye and nodded, but like me, she said nothing. The three of us watched as Shem untied the string that held the leather cover closed and pulled out a few sheets of paper. His paper was not blank like that in the satchel I’d stolen, but instead covered in strange writing. Pictures and letters, glyphs that drew me, and I found myself creeping forward.
“What is that writing?” I stared at it and the words shimmered and shifted around until they were pictures only, and not words or letters.
“What do you mean?” Maks leaned over from the other side of me. “I don’t see anything but blank paper.”
I lifted my eyes to Shem’s and he raised both eyebrows. “What do you see, Zamira?”
Shit, I could tell him, but then would it be used against me? How? Fuck, I had to trust him, he was my uncle and I’d named him my seer.
I stared at the paper as it shifted and moved. “I see words that turn into pictures. Like a . . . TV.” I knew that much about technology. We had a TV back at the Stockyards. Bryce had been trying to get it to work before he’d died. The best he’d managed was a flicker here and there of pictures, but I understood the idea behind it. Moving pictures with sound, just like life. Only on a box.
I looked back to the papers and the images cleared further. Were these like the papers I had snagged from the Jinn? Though they seemed the basic idea, I didn’t think they were exactly the same.
Maks leaned forward. “What are these about?”
“These belonged to the Emperor’s bastard daughter. A child born from a servant woman. She gave them to me for safekeeping. Her husband didn’t want her to have anything to do with them as he felt they would bring about her death. As I have always been known for being crazy, she felt I could give warnings easier than she could and get away with it.” He sighed. “In the end, she was wrong. Her life was snuffed out for these.”
I stared at the papers. There was a distinctive feminine feel to the drawings on the papers. I had to clench my hands to keep my fingers from tracing them, and a part of my brain whispered that I’d seen them before. Which was ridiculous.
“Okay, so she gave you these papers, which means you found her in your journeying after you left the pride? Is she the one who told you about the signs of the Emperor returning?” Part of me fought that we were even having this discussion. Because despite what some people had told me, I was not interested in dealing with the Emperor. A mage of unbelievable power, he was a legendary terror among legends.
Especially after he decided to have a chat with me. That was a whole lot of nope right there.
Shem nodded, his eyes on the satchel. “She died not long after she gave them to me, but she knew she was being hunted and her death was written in the stars, is what she believed. She always told me it would come, but I didn’t believe it—I thought I could protect her.” His golden eyes clouded with old pain, like a wound seeping. Before I could ask him why the papers were worth killing for, he gave me the answer.
“You see, she knew how to kill the Emperor. That was her downfall.”
Maks grunted as though Shem had punched him in the gut. “Wait, the Emperor has been asleep for over two hundred years. Even if there are signs showing that he’s gathering power, it could be another two hundred years, long after we’re gone.”
Shem flipped through the papers as he spoke again. “The sleep was never going to be forever; she knew that, we both did. The Emperor’s son put him to sleep, but the Emperor was savvy. He did something so he couldn’t be killed. We don’t know what, exactly. Hence the sleeping issue. Ah, here it is.” He pulled out one of the sheets of parchment and laid it on top of the others. It had a single tick on it, like a page number. “Zamira, you have a bloodline that can read this, obviously. What do you see?”
The words slid and danced and finally began to form a moving picture. “I see a temple rising out of the deep sands, far to the east. It’s shooting up like a mountain forming.” I frowned and clenched my hands to keep them from touching the paper. “But that’s it.”
“That is where the Emperor sleeps.” Shem pulled another paper and laid it out next. This one with several ticks in the corner. The next pictures were ones I knew.
This time I did reach out and touch the edge of the paper. “The standing stones, I see them all over the place.”