The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya) (11 page)

Nikandr nearly reached for his own pistol, but one of the men had spotted Atiana and was pointing his cocked pistol at her.

His heart pounded. It was bad enough he’d been caught by these men, but more soldiers would be here any moment.

“Release the horses,” the janissary called with a calm assurance. He would fire if Nikandr didn’t do as he asked, no matter what orders he might have received from Dahud or his superiors.

Nikandr released the reins, his mind going wild trying to find some way, any way, out of this.

The janissary swung his horse around so that he was between Nikandr and Atiana. “Now step away.”

Nikandr had taken only one step back when the ground began to rumble. From the far side of the wall came a sound like a growing landslide.

The janissary looked to the wall, then to Nikandr. His ab-sair reared onto its hind legs, screaming loudly as if some primal fear had risen up within it. “Easy, boy!” the janissary called as his mount dropped back down. “Easy!”

But the ab-sair began bucking like an unbroken yearling. It rose up again, and when another janissary urged his skittish mount forward and began grabbing for its reins, it clubbed the other ab-sair. Its sharp front hoof caught the other beast’s head with a sound like a gourd being staved in. Mount and rider both fell, pinning the janissary’s leg. As the soldier screamed in pain, the crazed beast charged over him, its hooves landing heavily on the fallen janissary’s chest.

A pistol cracked sharply over the sound of the ab-sair’s screaming. Blood exploded from its chest, but other than a momentary pause, it didn’t seem to notice. Until the leader of the janissaries, still seated in his saddle, leaned forward and shot the beast point blank in the skull.

The mount collapsed, every one of its powerful muscles going slack in an instant. As the leader leapt free and rolled along the ground, Nikandr darted forward and grabbed the pistol that the fallen janissary had dropped. He pulled his own pistol as well, and trained the two of them on the two soldiers—one mounted, one on his feet, neither of whom had loaded weapons at the ready. “You’ll tell your man to get off his horse and you’ll run out into the desert”—Nikandr motioned with one pistol out to the southern wastes of the Gaji—“or I’ll send you to meet your ancestors now.”

The soldiers from Yrstanla stared at him, then each other, but when Nikandr lifted his left arm to aim for the leader’s chest, the man raised his hands and ordered his man down from his ab-sair. The two of them ran off into the desert as Nikandr readied the mounts. He was just finishing when Sukharam returned with Soroush in tow. Ashan came behind him, carrying an unconscious Ushai.

“Hurry,” Ashan said. His face was wan, even in the white moonlight.

And they did. As beaten as they were, they pulled themselves onto the ab-sair, taking what food and water they could, and rode into the desert night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A young man trudges through sand the color of ochre. A woman of nearly the same age walks next to him. She wears a flowing desert dress, light and bright and supple as the wind. It is the color of the desert dawn, a pale yellow not so different from the color of a golden tourmaline. She does not wear a veil as the desert women do, nor does she drape a cowl over her head. Her nutmeg hair flows freely down her back, and she lets the sun fall as it will against her olive skin.

He feels foreign in this place, as well, more so than she. He wears no turban. His clothes are cut differently than those of the people who live in this endless desert.

They came here together—he and the woman—but he knows not where they go, or why. He knows only that they will work toward some greater goal. He doesn’t think to speak to her of it. To speak would be to waste his breath. She knows where they go, and that is enough for him.

As they take the incline toward the black-capped mountain far ahead, the sand gives way to gravel, and gravel gives way to dirt. The barren scrub brush of the desert floor grow sparser, and in their place comes a wiry grass that will cut skin if one is not careful.

Eventually there come proper, if stunted, trees. As he walks among them, as the endless hike and incline make his thighs burn, he tries to remember his name. There are days when he can remember it, but today isn’t one of them. Nor is it one in which he remembers the name of the girl—
neh
, the young woman—who walks beside him.

They stop at a tree whose boughs spiral up toward the sky. The woman moves to the trunk and presses her hands against it. She leans forward and kisses the rough bark. For long moments, nothing happens, but then the bark darkens where she’d placed her lips. It moistens, and soon there is a rivulet of sap draining from a small hole in the tree. She presses her lips against the hole, drinking from it, and he’s surprised how similar it seems to the hezhan who feed upon her—and him—constantly.

She finishes and motions for him to drink his fill.

He doesn’t wish to, but neither does he wish to die. As powerful as the two of them are, they must still drink, and they have no other source of water. He steps to the tree and presses his own lips against the rough bark. The smell of the wood is as strong as the heat of the desert—they’ve not risen so high to have escaped that—but the sap is cool, and it tastes sweet, like the juice of a melon, but with earthy, mineral overtones.

When he finishes, he calls upon a spirit of life, a dhoshahezhan. It comes easily, willingly, feeding upon him, feeding upon the tree, even as it does his bidding. The flow of sap stops. The hole mends. And the hezhan is sent back from whence it came, beyond the veil to the land of Adhiya.

“How much longer?” he asks the woman.

She stares at him with bright blue eyes and smiles, but he knows it is forced. The handful of times he’s seen her truly smile, it was bright indeed—the moon itself, not the dim and distant star she offers him now.

She points toward the dark peak. “We’ll reach the entrance before nightfall.”

They rest for a time, eating honey and seeds that had been flattened into a sticky wafer. As they prepare to continue up toward the tomb, he notices a lump within the leather satchel at her side. There is something within that satchel. Something important. He’s looked upon it in the past, but for the life of him he cannot remember what it is.

She sees him staring at her satchel, and it is in that one small instant that he remembers the radiance that comes from the stone that lays hidden from his gaze. It is a stone as old as the earth. As old as the worlds themselves. It created them, and one day it will destroy them.

“May I look upon it?” he asks.

For a moment there is mistrust and worry in her eyes, a look that speaks of insecurity, which is strange given the amount of power she wields. “You may not,” she says, and with that she turns and resumes her trek up toward the peak.

He follows, wondering what it was he was just asking about.

The sun sets as they come to an easy, upward slope. The peak juts up from this place, climbing quickly, harsh stone and black rock, an edifice that seems fit to house the fates themselves. They trek toward the base of it, and he realizes she reminds him of another. A woman tall and fair, her hair golden, her eyes a beautiful blue.

Her name was Sariya, and she was fearsome and learned and wise.

But she was also dead.

Who then was this woman? Were they related? He remembers her daughter. Sariya’s daughter. She was young, a child where the one next to him is a woman grown. They must be the same, but how could this be?

Had so much time passed since…

He remembers a bridge. He remembers falling. He remembers holding a heavy stone in his hand. He remembers healing a man who had come to be a hidden and indescribable part of him, like memories both painful and sweet that shaped a man into the person he was.

He remembers a girl crashing into him. They fell to the waves and plummeted through the sea. Down and down they went. He felt the stone, the Atalayina, slip from his grasp. It had been a moment of terror, not for himself but for the world.

There was a shift. It itched the skin of his face and scalp. Made his bones ache. It brought them to a different place. He could tell, for the light was different, the water warmer. The very
sound
of it was different. When the girl pulled him with an arm around his neck, he let her, and when they broke the surface at last, he found himself in the center of a wide river. The land around him was rich with swaying fields of grass that seemed untouched by the hand of man.

He recalls asking her one simple question. “Where have we come?”

She looked at him, her brown hair plastered to her face. She looked as her mother had, regal and frightening while others would look bedraggled and sad. With that one look, she stole his memories, for he recalls nothing beyond it for long days or even weeks.

As they approach the base of the cliff, more memories surface, mere glimmers of their travel across the Motherland. A village where they bought packs and food for their journey. A forest of alder and spruce whose last leaves were just beginning to fall. A city that lay at the edge of the desert. It was difficult for him to see how she changed over that time, but now, as he looks back, he sees the changes clearly. She was a girl of eleven when they left the Spar. But now she looks to be at least as old as his eighteen years. If he reckons it right, less than two years have passed, and yet she has somehow aged seven or eight. He wonders if her mind has grown similarly, but he tosses the thought aside in an instant. She had always seemed older than her years. Perhaps this was simply the fates allowing her mortal shell to catch up.

Thinking back, he doesn’t know why she didn’t simply transport them as she did in the sea, but he wonders if it had anything to do with the way she stared into the stone when the two of them were alone. There were many nights when she would simply sit at the edge of their fire like an urchin with a bright new coin. She would stare into its depths, learning or perhaps yearning for things yet closed to her.

She asked him from time to time what he knew of it, and he would answer—he had no choice but to do so—and he would tell her of his memories…

His memories of Khamal. One of the Al-Aqim.

By the fates, he cannot remember who he is
now
—that much is still closed—but he remembers his life as Khamal, and he remembers the other Al-Aqim. Muqallad and Sariya they were named. And with Sariya’s memories come memories of her daughter.

Kaleh.

The woman’s name is Kaleh.

He told her of his life as Khamal, of what he had done with the stone. She asked not of the time after the sundering but instead of the days leading up to it. Of those days, however, he had very few memories, and all too soon she would return to her contemplation of the Atalayina, and
he
would slip back into forgetfulness. But he would retain
some
of what he’d lost, and he would store it away in a place she couldn’t find so that when he woke again he could find it easily and slowly, hopefully, return to himself. It was the only way he knew to break the chains she and the Atalayina placed on him.

At last they come to the face of the tall black cliff. Kaleh walks along its length. Bushes and briars grow at the foot of the cliff, and it is in those dark places that Kaleh stops and hunkers down and peers intently. She finds nothing, however, and they continue on.

As the sun slides behind the westward ridge of the towering peak, the air immediately becomes more chill. They come to a forest of impossibly tall trees. Their bark is greenish-grey, and their branches still hold leaves, as if they refuse to bend to the coming winter. The air is filled with sage, but there is also the scent of antiquity, like the smell of ancient scrolls. Kaleh continues to lead them along the face of the cliff. Sometimes they’re forced away by the landscape, but this never seems to bother her. She simply leads them beyond it and resumes her search as they trek westward. The sky darkens, making their path through the trees more difficult to see. She continues until she’s practically searching with her hands along the rock.

Finally the sun sets fully. The stars shine brightly and insects chitter among the trees. And Kaleh suddenly steps back.

Ahead there is a looming blackness. Kaleh retrieves the Atalayina from its pouch and holds it high in her hand. The stone begins to glow, first a deep blue like the sun against a shallow sea, and then it intensifies into a cold white brightness that reveals a yawning opening in the face of the cliff. She stares at it for some time, moving the stone this way and that, as if she doesn’t quite believe what she’s found.

She shrugs off her pack and motions for him to do the same.

He complies—there is no choice but to obey—and he follows her into the opening. It is not deep. They come quickly to the end of it. Creeping vines grow here, and it is clear they’re covering something. Kaleh pulls at them. Unbidden, he does the same, and slowly a figure is revealed, a figure carved into the stone itself: a woman, her eyes closed, her arms crossed over her chest as if she’s been laid to rest. His first thought is that this is a grave, a marker of someone’s passing, but somehow that doesn’t seem right.

Kaleh, holding the Atalayina in her left hand, touches the statue with her right. No more do her fingertips brush the statue than the stone begins to crumble. It seems improper to tear down what someone took so long to create, but in mere moments it is done and the rocks look like nothing more than some forgotten remnant of man.

Revealed is a passageway into the mountain.

Kaleh stares into that deep darkness. Her grip on the Atalayina is not merely tight; her hand shakes from it. For the first time he can remember, she seems fearful—truly fearful. For some reason this place has shaken her to her very core. She notices him watching and tries to calm herself, but the strength of her emotions cannot be buried so easily. He can hear it through the quaver in her voice as she utters a single word. “Come.” And with that, she heads into the passageway, holding the glowing Atalayina above her head as if it would protect her from whatever dark things lie ahead.