The Embers of Heaven by Alma Alexander Page B

changing ships. They had been on their way almost before Amais had really had a chance to feel solid ground under her feet once more; as she watched while on deck as the ship left this ephemeral shore behind, she held a faint regret that she hadn’t had a chance to pay more attention to a place she was unlikely to return.
     
    But that passed; the transit port had not been either kind of home for Amais, and she had been too stretched between future and past to have time to feel anything that didn’t have roots in either fear or impatience. She wanted to see Syai now, the Syai of her grandmother’s tales, of the old poems, of Tai’s journals—the glittering place where she thought she could find what she needed to glue together the mismatched halves of her spirit into something that resembled a whole. The captain’s purloined notebook filled with stories of ancient sages stepping down from their Temple niches and walking the city offering blessings—stories of glittering Empresses who were sisters-of-the-heart to little girls who sold fish in the marketplace, and the great adventures they had together —stories of Imperial Guard phalanxes dressed in black and wielding magic daggers. It was a world woven from Tai’s journals, from baya- Dan’s stories, from Amais’s own imagination—something she now anticipated with a feverish desire, waiting to step into those stories herself, become part of them and let them become a part of her.
     
    When the ship’s notices, pasted on the public boards every day, finally announced their arrival in Chirinaa, Amais was already exhausted with expectations, building the place up in her mind into a city whose walls would shine with gold, its streets paved with rubies, full of people dressed in bright silks and women whose hair dripped with jewels, with opulent tea houses on every corner serving fragrant mountain tea in white porcelain teapots painted with cranes and hummingbirds.
     
    The reality was quite different—at least the reality that the ship disgorged the small family into on the quay. There might well have been ruby paving stones somewhere, but not here—not out in the busy working harbor, teeming with barrels, boxes wrapped in massive chains and secured with even more massive double-lock puzzle padlocks, scraps of torn oilcloth and tarpaulin underfoot, vats that smelled achingly familiar with whiffs of new-caught fish and salty brine clinging to their sides, sloshing open tanks that contained heaving crabs and lobsters, bales bound with thick ropes, and, everywhere in between this chaos and confusion, scuttling and quick-moving no-man’s wharf-cats, and bare-chested and bronze-skinned dockworkers with shaved heads and hooded eyes. The place smelled of coal dust, of sweating bodies, of all the various scents, both pleasant and evil, of the ocean. There was even a faint whiff of something oily and rotten, a miasma that was a reminder of the wide marshes that lay not too far away to the city’s west.
     
    Vien shepherded her older daughter onto the dock, carrying her younger on her hip as she had done when they had departed Elaas in what now seemed to Amais to have been another age, and then stood surrounded by luggage, hesitating, unsure of what to do next.
     
    “We should find an inn or a hostel or something,” Amais said, after a long silence.
     
    “Yes,” Vien agreed, her tone conveying simple agreement and a total loss as to how to start looking for such a place. The laborers hefting their loads passed back and forth, parting to flow around Vien and her daughters as though they were a rock in a stream. Some might have turned their head marginally to glance at the solitary woman and the two children, waiting for something that never came, but most simply ignored them.
     
    Amais scanned the buildings beyond the wharf. Even to her young and inexperienced eyes they did not look promising at all. Some were no more than padlocked storage facilities, with their