The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya) (71 page)

Styophan came closer and crouched down. He shook Tohrab’s shoulder. “Are you well?” he asked, louder than before. Tohrab’s skin was so white, so thin. It looked like rain-drenched paper left in the sun to bleach. How this miserable soul had made it this far he had no idea.

Slowly, Tohrab’s wrinkled eyes opened. He regarded Styophan with a look of profound confusion and pain. But in his eyes there was a timelessness, and a determination the likes of which Styophan had never seen. In those eyes Styophan could believe that he alone was holding the final wards together. It would take an immense reserve of will and power, but if what Nikandr had said was true, one of the Tashavir would have it.

“How can I help, grandfather?” Styophan asked.

“Who are you?” the Tashavir said, his voice reed thin.

“A friend.”

Tohrab slowly and with obvious pain pulled himself to a sitting position. “You cannot help.”

“Where is Sukharam? Where are Ashan and Nasim?”

Tohrab’s eyes went distant. “The time has nearly come. She approaches.”

Styophan turned and followed Tohrab’s gaze toward the city. Nothing had changed, however, and he saw no one approaching.

“
Who
is coming?”

As the water below drew back, Tohrab drew in breath with a slow wheezing sound, and when the waves crashed against the rocky beach, he released it again.

Styophan shook him, and still Tohrab didn’t answer. “Tohrab,
who
is coming?”

“Styopha?”

Styophan turned. Rodion was staring toward the base of the cliff below the city. Many people were hiking down a trail that led from the city down to the sand. At the head was a woman. Dozens followed her, men dressed in red robes and flowing scarves that covered their faces.

“She comes for me.” With great effort, Tohrab pushed himself up off the stone. “Do not fight her. Go to the city. There is another that needs your help.”

“Who?”

Tohrab’s lips were pulled back into a grim line. He drew breath, released it with the sound of the waves. “They will not harm you. Not if you give them wide berth.”

“I’ve come to help you.”

“You cannot help me. The time has finally come. What the world will do, it will do. Now go.”

“I cannot. My Lord Prince has sent me here to find you, you and the others.”

Tohrab did not speak again—he did not so much as glance his way—but just then a wind picked up and pushed Styophan so hard he was forced to the very edge of the dark stone. He tried to remain in place, but the wind shoved him off. He fell hard to the beach, rolled and came to his feet, but by then the wind was picking up, sending sand and pebbles against him and his men. Despite the men baring their muskets before them to ward the magic of the hezhan away, they were forced, step by step, away from the stone and toward the cliffs. Tohrab was doing this, he knew. He thought he was fated to die, but Styophan still didn’t understand why he wouldn’t allow them to help.

By now the woman in white and the men in red had closed the distance. The woman was near enough now that Styophan recognized her. It was Ushai, the woman who’d betrayed Soroush and Nikandr and the others in the heart of the Gaji. Her left hand hung useless and scarred at her side. Her right hand gripped the Atalayina. Styophan had never seen it himself, but he’d heard the stories. Even through the haze of the biting dust and stone it glowed blue under the sun, and it glittered like gold.

Ushai stared directly at Styophan. Her face was emotionless, but there was threat in her eyes.
Approach
, they said,
and I will kill you
.

Tohrab had known this, of course. He’d known the odds were too much against them. Part of him still wanted to raise his pistol and fire on Ushai. Part of him felt cowardly for not doing so.

As if Tohrab had heard his thoughts, the wind picked up, driving saltwater and pea-sized rocks against them.

“To the city!” Styophan shouted.

If the miserable creature on that stone wanted to die, there was nothing he could do about it. Not any longer.

They marched as well as they were able, ducking their heads as they went, and soon they’d lost all sense of unity and they started running as quickly as they could toward Alayazhar. Finally, as they reached the path toward the city, the wind eased, but the sand still swirled high above the water, enough that he could see little but a hint of the darkened stone.

They marched to the top of the path. No sooner had Styophan stepped foot on the level ground near the buildings of Alayazhar than a howl reverberated over the island. Styophan felt it through the soles of his boots as it rang through air and land itself. Down on the beach, the sand had begun to settle. The howl faded until the only thing he could hear was the patter of rocks and sand below. The world around them had suddenly become as still as the making of the world.

On the beach, the sand drew inward toward the rock. And then it blasted outward.

“Away!” Styophan called. “Away from the cliff!”

The land around the black rock undulated as if it were made of so much water. The wave expanded, eating the distance between the shore and the cliffs. The ground below Styophan shifted and buckled. Part of the cliff—including the pathway—fell away, taking men with it. They cried out not in pain but in shock.

The voices died away as his men fell, surely to their deaths.

Styophan was thrown to the ground. He scrabbled away from the edge, but more and more of the cliff began to ablate like a fortress of sand built by the hand of a child. Those who had managed to remain standing helped the others to regain their feet.

Slowly the sound died away, and the rumbling beneath him quieted. The edge of the crumbing cliff stopped only paces away from where he stood. Styophan’s mind and heart told him not to approach the edge, but he forced himself to go step by tentative step to search for his fallen men. His heart pounded like a skin drum as he inched to the edge and looked down. There was no sign of his men. Nor was there any sign of Ushai. Or the men in red robes.

But Tohrab, he could see. As the sea churned white waves around him, he lay on the rock, unmoving. He’d found his peace at last, but his death meant the last of the wards had probably fallen.

It won’t be long now
, he thought.

“Styopha.” It was Rodion, and there was confusion in his voice.

Styophan turned and found three women approaching.

By the ancients, one of them was Atiana Vostroma.

She was walking toward him with a Haelish wodjan on one side and an Aramahn on the other, neither of whom he recognized. Atiana’s blonde hair was pulled back into a ragged tail, and the shayla dress she wore was dirty and threadbare, but there was a determination in her eyes that Styophan could feel in his chest. It reminded him of Nikandr.

“My Lady Princess,” Styophan stammered, “how did you find us?” She had only to wave at the beach for the ridiculousness of the question to hit him. “I mean, how have you come to be here?”

“I could ask you the same, but there isn’t time. You saw Ushai, did you not?”

Styophan glanced back toward the beach, still half expecting the ground beneath him to give way and swallow them. “She found Tohrab on the beach below. She killed him. Or rather, he allowed himself to be killed.” He paused, feeling wholly inadequate before this Princess of Vostroma. “We could do nothing against them.”

“I came too late myself,” she replied. She looked over his men. “But I believe the ancients have watched over us all. You’ve done well to reach these shores, and I have great need of you now that you’re here.”

Styophan snapped his heels and bowed his head. “You have only to name it.”

“Ushai goes to the mountain.” She raised her arm and pointed southwest. “To Sihyaan. We cannot allow her to reach it, Styophan Andrashayev, or we will be lost, not merely those on this island, or even those in the Grand Duchy, but everyone, everywhere.”

Even as Atiana spoke these words, Styophan saw the strange, spear-shaped ships rising into the sky. Only a few at first, but then more and more. And then he saw the reason why. Far to the southwest, he could see incoming warships.

Nikandr had failed, he realized. The ships of the Grand Duchy were coming.

“Best we hurry,” Styophan said in Anuskayan.

“Best we hurry,” Atiana replied.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

The darkness around Nasim was impenetrable, and yet his mind was consumed by a white flash, a shattering stone.

The moment he’d seen it—when he’d
remembered
that it had happened—a bottomless pit had opened up inside him. Down it went, deeper than the darkness between the stars.

The knowledge of what had truly happened that day washed over him like a dark and hungry wave.

He screamed. Screamed until his throat was raw. His fingers curled into fists, nails cutting skin, and body tightening until he shivered from the pain.

That one moment consumed him. It wasn’t the shattering stone, nor the blinding white flash, but the utter emptiness he’d felt in the space of a blink beforehand.

He wanted to tell himself that these were
Khamal’s
memories, that he needn’t accept them as his own, but he knew this to be foolish, utterly foolish, and he refused to deceive himself any longer. These memories were his as well.

He was Khamal, and Khamal was he.

It was something he should have reconciled with long ago. Perhaps he would have saved himself a lot of pain.

As his cries subsided, and his body began to unclench, part of him wanted to immerse himself in the pain. Part of him hoped this would go on until he could no longer
feel
the pain. But he knew that would never happen. He would feel this until his dying day. And then, at last, he would be gone, forever. Khamal had seen to that when he’d sacrificed the akhoz, young Alif. It had allowed Khamal to escape the island and the wards of the Tashavir, but in doing so, it had committed his undying soul to this one, final life. It had grounded Nasim to the material world. He would never again return to Adhiya. He would never reach vashaqiram, one’s own state of enlightenment, nor would he see the world reach its higher plane of existence: indaraqiram.

But this?

A white flash.

The breaking of the Atalayina.

How could anyone go on toward enlightenment, whether they believed in the ways of the Aramahn or not?

Nasim felt a tender hand stroking his hair. It was such a familiar gesture. Ashan had done it for him over and over again after he’d rescued Nasim from the Maharraht. In those days it had merely allowed him to slip back into a state of directionless confusion. He’d been caught between Adhiya and Erahm, unable to distinguish between the two.

How he wished he could return to those days.

For a time, he simply lay there in the cavern by the dry lake of Shirvozeh. The siraj stone lit Ashan’s kind face. In the vastness of the cavern, the stone cast his brown hair in a numinous light, making him look half man, half hezhan.

“Can you hear me?” Ashan asked softly, still stroking his hair.

As Nasim rolled over, the stone beneath him felt different. It felt meaningless, as if this place were merely the center of some grand experiment that had failed.

“It’s all wrong,” Nasim said, more to himself, or perhaps to the vastness of the cavern. “We’ve been wrong all along.”

“Wrong about what?”

Nasim shifted away from Ashan. He didn’t wish to say the words—to voice it would make it real. But of course the notion was foolish. A child’s reasoning. His insignificant voice would change nothing. “They’re gone, Ashan.”

“Who’s gone?”

“The
fates
. They…” He didn’t know how to say it.

“Come,” Ashan said as he took Nasim’s arm. “Let’s get you up into the light.”

Nasim pulled his arm away. “I don’t need light! On the day of the sundering, Ashan, they were there. Watching.”

“The fates?”

“
Yeh
.” The memory was so clear, Nasim felt as though it were happening all over again. “They were waiting. They’d
been
waiting since the moment the Al-Aqim were born, and they’d been holding their breath every moment since.” Nasim felt sick. “They
wanted
the sundering to occur, Ashan.”

Ashan’s face pinched into a frown. He was already shaking his head. The siraj—which had moments ago made him seem like so much more than a man—now made him seem pale and sick, a man in the throes of the wasting.

“You must listen, Ashan. You may try to reason this away, but you must set those thoughts aside. The fates sat idly by as the ritual took place. They could have stopped it had they chose, but instead they did nothing. And then“—Nasim was unsure how to say it, so he said it as simply and as truthfully as he could manage—“they were taken by the ritual. The very moment the Atalayina tore the first of the rifts between worlds, they were freed. They stepped beyond this life. To another. To their death. Who knows? But they are gone, Ashan. Lost to us. And they
have
been since that very moment.”

Ashan stared deeply into Nasim’s eyes, a parent suddenly embarrassed by his son. “You’re wrong,” he said. His voice was resolute, but his hands shook; his eyes quavered with indecision.

“I am not.”

“There was much happening. The Atalayina shattered. This is known.”

“The Atalayina shattered not from the ritual, as we’d always assumed. It shattered from the passing of the fates.”

Ashan’s face grew angrier by the moment. “You are viewing this through the memories of a man that has been dead for decades. And even then, his memories of the event were centuries old.
Centuries
, Nasim!”

“Those moments are as clear to me as this conversation is now. The fates are dead, Ashan.”

Ashan took a step forward. They were of a height, but he still towered darkly over Nasim. “You’ve no idea what you’re saying!”

“The fates are dead!”

Before Nasim knew it, Ashan’s arm flew up and struck him across the face. Pain flared along his cheek and jaw. The darkness blossomed with stars. He worked his jaw, tasted blood from the cut on the inside of his cheek, but he did not cower. He turned back to Ashan and faced him, as resolute as the mountain above him.