The Aramahn were revered by the Maharraht, and here was Soroush ready to press the life from one of them.
For Nasim. For Nasim and the plans Soroush had for him.
This changed everything. For Soroush to be willing to take such a step meant that the secrets within Nasim were much more significant than Khadija had suspected.
This all implied something else, however—not only that Soroush had planned to kill Ashan, but that Ashan had known it from the start. And still he’d come.
Why? Why would he have put his faith in her like this?
The sound of the surf suddenly diminished until all she could hear was her own heartbeat.
He’d done it to save her, she realized. To save her.
A fool’s quest. She would not be saved by some simple ploy from Ashan.
But neither would she allow Ashan to be murdered like a mongrel dog.
“He has use still,” Khadija said finally.
Soroush’s eyes were piercing. Weighing. “Does he?”
Khadija stared at him flatly. “Try to work with Nasim on your own if you doubt me.”
Soroush considered this. She’d been bluffing, hoping he would see how little progress he’d made with Nasim on his own, but instead he said to her, “You’re right. It’s time we learn to live with Nasim and his peculiarities.”
“What?” she asked lamely.
Soroush turned and walked back into the tunnels, but when he was nearly out of hearing he called back to her, “It’s time that boy gave us our islands back, Khadija, as the fates have decreed.”
She watched him recede into the darkness as a chill washed down her frame.
Bersuq came for her before dawn the next day. He snatched her blanket away, grunting at her, “Up!”, before moving to stand at the doorway of her room in the tunnels. After she’d slipped out of her night dress and pulled on her robes, Bersuq led her out from the tunnels and up into open air.
There, standing with two other Maharraht just outside the mouth of the tunnel, was Ashan. She walked side-by-side with him as Bersuq led the way along a path to higher land. Ashan moved stiffly, as she might well expect, but the bandages around his hands had already been removed. The skin there was red and flaky in spots, but otherwise seemed much better than she would have guessed.
Eventually they came to a copse of windwood trees that ran along the southern ridge of the waterfall vale. The morning humidity had settled in Khadija’s chest, and she coughed from time to time trying to clear it. Ashan looked at her sidelong. “Are you well?”
She ignored him, looking up through the branches bowing to the wind as the sky brightened in the east. In the center of the trees, Soroush stood with Nasim. Dozens of Maharraht had gathered here. It must be nearly everyone who had come to this island—all save a few that Soroush had stationed in Kirishci to stage the diversion for this very ritual. It wouldn’t do, after all, to go through this trouble and have the Landed drawn here before it was done.
This was an important step in Soroush’s plans. He wouldn’t have called so many if he didn’t think it would be so. It might even be the fulfillment of Soroush’s desires here on this island.
But things hadn’t gone according to plan. Soroush was angry. She could tell by his stiff stance and the way he was stroking his beard while staring at the ground. Nasim was kneeling on the dewy grass, blood pouring from a cut along his cheek, the skin around it reddened and puffy. He seemed not to notice, however. He was hugging his waist and rocking back and forth, eyes staring lifelessly at the ground. Or perhaps through it, Khadija thought, to the world beyond.
In one hand Soroush held a circlet with an opaline gem in the lone setting. He motioned Khadija to a clear space between three of the trees. “Kneel,” he said to her.
She complied, knowing that to press him now would be a foolish choice indeed. Clearly he had tried to work with Nasim and had failed miserably. His plans hinged on a boy he could not control, and it pleased him not at all.
Soroush handed her the circlet, which she set upon her head without question. He wanted her to bond with a dhoshahezhan using the opal. Many of her people could not commune with spirits at all, some could commune weakly with one or two, but Khadija was gifted—due in no small part to Ashan’s mentoring—in that she could commune strongly with three. Dhoshahezhan, the spirit of life, was among them, and it was to these spirits that she opened her mind now. It was why Soroush had chosen this place. It was often easier to attract such rare spirits among woodlands or groves of trees, especially elder windwood like these.
“What do you wish me to do?” Khadija asked.
“Give of yourself,” Soroush replied, “more deeply than you ever have before. Summon the spirit close so that Nasim has no choice but to draw it forth.”
Khadija was stunned. Spirits crossed of their own will at times, but the days of qiram summoning spirits forth from Adhiya had long since passed. “And what shall we do when it crosses?”
“I suspect Nasim will handle the rest.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then perhaps it is our time to die.”
With that he moved to stand next to Bersuq and the other men and women of the Maharraht. Ashan was kneeling next to Nasim, whispering into his ear, and it was having its intended effect. Nasim was calm now, and it made Khadija wonder, not for the first time, what Ashan was doing here. He was, in effect, helping Soroush. Even now, this was allowing Soroush to achieve his goals. The teacher she had known once would have died before doing such a thing.
But she couldn’t worry about that now. If Ashan was willing to help, then so be it.
She opened herself to the world around her. She could feel the veil of the aether that stood between Erahm and Adhiya. She touched this and moved beyond, reaching out to the spirits that lay near. And there were many, as there were when Nasim had touched the suurahezhan—so many, in fact, that it soon felt overwhelming. Somehow they had been drawn to this place. Part of it, she knew, was the state of things here on Rhavanki, but another factor was Nasim himself. This child was not merely gifted; it felt as if the fates themselves had kissed him and sent him here.
It would be easy to bond with any of the hezhan that surrounded her, but Soroush had said to bond more deeply than she ever had before, so she coaxed one near the edges of her perceptions. It approached, pressing beyond the others, and Khadija realized this was no simple hezhan. It was an elder. It shook her, made her skin tingle at the thought of bonding with a spirit of such age. What might it have seen in its time? The birth of the Grand Duchy? The coming of the Landed to the shores of the islands once touched only by the Aramahn? The arrival of the first skiff on these shores? The thought of it awed her.
She did as Soroush had asked. She opened her mind. Gave of herself that the hezhan might taste of this world. And in doing so she was consumed.
She felt the hezhan as it stood in Adhiya. She felt something else as well. Never had she been able to feel the land around her as she supposed the Landed Matri did in their drowning basins, but standing there among the windwood she thought she might have. She felt the weight of the islands themselves for a moment, their immensity. She felt the ways they were connected with one another. The ley lines that guided the windships of the Grand Duchy also connected the islands in vital ways. And there was a tear in this fabric. A tear in the veil between worlds. Such creases happened from time to time—it was how hezhan could cross spontaneously—but they were never so wide. Surely it was no fleeting thing. It had been this way for some time. Weeks. Months. Perhaps even years. This is what had brought Soroush to these islands. He wished to use the rifts against the Landed. And Nasim was the key to doing so.
The dhoshahezhan was so close now she might touch it. She felt the hair on her head and the back of her neck lift. Above her, lightning arced between the boughs of the trees. A pinpoint of light formed directly above Khadija, and something tore through her. Body and soul. Something bright and white and filled with a thousa
nd years of love and knowledge.
Khadija had birthed no daughters. But she felt as though that wondrous event might be similar to what she experienced now. The elder spirit was crossing over to Erahm, and it was using Khadija to do so. Her entire body went stiff, but she didn’t fight it—this was what Soroush had wanted, after all.
In those endless moments she felt as if she were the hezhan, and she felt another soul in those moments as well: a boy who stood nearby, drawing the elder forth. Khadija had summoned this ancient soul, she knew this, but so had Nasim—the only difference was that it had taken every ounce of will Khadija had while Nasim did this with apparent ease. She doubted he was even fully aware of it.
At last the spirit crossed. It was a flare of white light. A ball of lightning, brightening, darkening—a coruscating star that made the clearing come alive.
As Khadija’s connection to it faded and vanished altogether, the spirit became brighter and brighter.
No longer was Nasim hugging himself. No longer was he rocking back and forth. He was watching this creature with widened eyes, his arms at his side in supplication.
“Nasim!” Ashan called.
But Nasim wasn’t listening. He raised his arms higher, and the dhoshahezhan responded, brightening further.
“Nasim, don’t!” Ashan barreled into him, wrapping his arms around the boy, pressing the iron bracelets around his wrists purposefully against Nasim’s skin as he brought him to the ground.
At that very moment, the hezhan released a bolt of pure white lightning. It crashed into the dirt near Khadija’s feet. Another shot out, striking the bole of the tallest windwood tree.
There was an expectant pause—a moment when every man and woman in that clearing stared wide-eyed at the hezhan, wondering whether to run or to stand still—and then dozens more flew forth, striking those gathered around, spreading through them. Khadija watched them go rigid as the energy coursed through their bodies.
And then a bolt coursed toward Khadija herself. It struck, and her muscles all tightened at once. She felt herself collapse to the ground, shaking violently. She heard herself release a groan as the pain rose to impossible heights.
And then the world went dim.
When she woke, she had no idea how much time had passed. She pulled herself up with quivering limbs and saw that most everyone was still unconscious.
Most, except for Ashan and Nasim.
Of them there was no sign.
Soroush woke soon after, then Bersuq and many of the others. Three remained still, killed by the power that had surged through them.
Khadija was about to go to Soroush when she saw something glinting in the soil at her feet. She reached down and picked it up. A gemstone, she realized. It was opaline and roughly the size of a robin’s egg.
“What is it?” she asked Soroush when he came near.
He took it from her, examined it, as if he had hoped for this but never truly believed it would happen. He handed the stone to Bersuq, who seemed to be seething at all that had happened, but as he began turning the stone over in his hands, the lines of anger and worry on his forehead relaxed, and the grim line that was his mouth turned to something like wonder—at least, as much as a man like Bersuq would allow.
Soroush ignored Bersuq for the moment and turned to Khadija. “Tell me what you felt. Every detail.”
She did. And she held nothing back, for though Soroush was forcing himself to remain calm, she could tell he was every bit as angry as Bersuq that Ashan had managed to escape with Nasim. She told him of the hezhan and its crossing to this world. She told him how thin the aether felt here. She told him how deeply she’d bonded with the hezhan, how intimate it had been, how ancient a creature.
When she was done at last, Soroush looked to Bersuq. Bersuq, now finished with his inspection of the glittering opal, nodded to his younger brother, as if to say the stone was acceptable. It made it seem as though the stone was the very thing they’d come to this island to obtain. But that couldn’t be true, could it?
The rest of the Maharraht soon left, taking their dead with them. This left Khadija alone with Soroush and Bersuq, a fact she was suddenly and inexplicably uncomfortable with.
“When the hezhan crossed,” Soroush said, treading away from her to the spot where Ashan had tackled Nasim to the ground, “were you bonded to it still?”
She thought back. The time was a jumble of memories and disquiet and pain. “It’s difficult to remember.”
Soroush stopped and spun on his heels. “Try.”
And she did, though she could also feel their stares as she did so. “I suppose I was, though I couldn’t think well enough to make use of it.”
“Could you not?” Soroush asked.
She understood what he was hinting at. He thought that at the last moment she had done something to save Nasim and—more importantly—Ashan. She hadn’t, but that wasn’t what Soroush believed.
Khadija stepped forward until she was practically chest-to-chest with him. He was a tall man, a full head taller than she, but she squared herself and stared into his eyes. “Do you doubt my commitment?”
“They escaped, Khadija, something I doubt Ashan could have done on his own.”
“Were you not listening to me? Ashan wasn’t alone. Nasim had drawn the hezhan forth. He was communing with it in a way I never have before, with any hezhan. Nor have you, I’ll wager. It was Nasim that protected Ashan, not the other way around.”
“You summoned your kuadim here from the ends of the world. You’ve bonded with him these past months. You’ve grown closer to Ashan and Nasim, enough that I doubt you can do what needs to be done in the days and months ahead.”
“I will do what needs to be done.”
“I hear your words, Khadija Gheddesh al Fassed, but I do not believe them. Not any longer.”
“My desire to kill the Landed is unswayed, Soroush. How can you doubt this?”
“I doubt you because your goal was never to harm the Grand Duchy.”
“They killed my sister!”
“Your sister flung herself from a cliff.”
Khadija spit upon the ground. “After she’d been tortured by them!”
Soroush’s eyes softened, as if he were saddened, as if she were someone to take pity upon. She swung her hand to slap him, but he grabbed her wrist.
“Do you want to know why I chose you to watch Nasim?”
“Because I found him.”
“Neh. I chose you because I thought it would bring you some peace, to work with a child. I thought it might bring you closer to your brothers and sisters.”
Khadija shook her head. “The Maharraht are my brothers and sisters.”
“I mean the Aramahn…” Soroush nodded to Bersuq, who stared at Khadija with contempt for a moment before nodding to Soroush and following the others. Soon enough, Khadija and Soroush were alone. “I’ve known you long years now, Khadija, and I’ve learned more than a little about what drives you. You came to me with fire in your eyes and a hand upon your knife. You told me that you came to cripple the Landed. But I’ve come to know the love you hold for your sister.”
“Five days they kept us, Soroush. Five days, and Mirilah took the worst of it. She lost her eye to their gaoler. Her leg was ruined!”
“And yet you did not join the Maharraht along with her.”
Khadija’s jaw tightened. She’d told no one this.
“She came to us months before you—”
“Stop,” Khadija said.
“—and when she returned home at last to visit her sister, she was taken by the Aramahn.”
“Stop!”
“They burned her, didn’t they? They burned her and she lost her will to live because of it.”
“Stop it!” Khadija put her hands over her ears and crouched down over her knees, trying to make Soroush’s words go away. “Stop it!”
“Hide your head if you wish, but you need look no further than your kuadim for the truth.”
She cr
ied for a long time, crouched there, hugging her knees to her chest. She didn’t know how much time passed, but when at last the tears had faded, she looked up to find Soroush crouched by her side, stroking her hair and rubbing her back.
“The Maharraht is no place for you. I should have realized this long ago.” He kissed her head and stood. “Forgive me for not doing so.” And with that he left her there in the clearing.
She remained, listening to the wind through the trees, wondering where the Maharraht would go now that Nasim was gone, wondering when the oprichni of Rhavanki would come to find her here. Part of her hoped they would. Part of her hoped they would take her back to Kirishci and string a rope around her neck like they had the others the day Ashan had come. Or shoot her in the chest like the drowning soldier had the woman who’d been waiting to die.
But Soroush’s words haunted her. You need look no further than your kuadim. She didn’t at first understand what he’d meant, but then she realized she was hiding behind her thoughts. She’d drawn Ashan here. She’d told herself for a long time that he would never come, but a secret part of her hoped that he would. A secret part of her hoped that he would come to harm. He’d had nothing to do with Mirilah’s death, but that wasn’t what had mattered. What mattered was that for Khadija, he embodied the Aramahn people. What mattered was that the Aramahn had destroyed Mirilah, not the Landed. Not really. It had been the people she’d been born to, the people she’d loved and cared for, even while turning to the Maharraht. The people to whom Khadija had clung while Mirilah had waged her own personal war. And then they’d stolen Mirilah’s last true love. Her ability to touch Adhiya. They’d stripped her of it, and in turn it had stripped her of her will to live.
And ever since Mirilah’s death, ever since Khadija’s first steps across the threshold of the Maharraht, Khadija had been harboring, deep within her a desire to return that pain a thousandfold. On the Landed, certainly, but even more so on the Aramahn themselves.
To the Towers of Tulandan Page 4
