These were merely delaying tactics, Nasim knew. Sukharam was keeping them at bay until the earth widened sufficiently. Nasim couldn’t make it there in time, so he furthered the effect. He forced the earth to open wider.
Sukharam didn’t realize what he was doing until it was wide enough to swallow a house. Without turning back, he stepped into the breach. As the earthen maw began to close, Nasim ran forward, struggling to keep the rift open. It wasn’t going to be enough, he realized. He wouldn’t reach it in time.
“Nasim!”
He turned and found Ashan standing by a handful of streltsi.
The look on Ashan’s face was one of horror at what was happening, but he was also helping Nasim to hold the gateway open.
“Go!” Ashan said to the streltsi. “Find your prince as he bid you.”
The streltsi standing there looked amongst themselves. “Where will you go?” one of them shouted above the sound of the rumbling earth.
“To Ghayavand. Tell Nikandr we go to Ghayavand.”
The streltsi nodded and were off, heading back toward the bulk of the kasir, while Ashan stepped forward, the stones in his circlet and on his wrists shining more brightly than Nasim had ever seen them.
Together, Nasim, Ashan, and Tohrab made their way to the rift. It was nearly closed, but there was room enough yet.
No sooner had they stepped down into the earth than it pressed in. In an instant Nasim felt his bonds release. He was alone in the dark, and for a moment he feared he’d made a grave mistake. He feared Sukharam had gone and the gateway had already closed, leaving him breathless seven feet below the surface of the ground.
But then he felt disorientation, a shift in the world around him. A shift in the aether as well. It felt different than before, as though the transition was taking longer than it had with Kaleh.
When the earth above him opened, it was to a blanket of stars.
Nasim pulled himself up, helped Ashan and Tohrab to do the same. His joints ached. His mouth felt like dried leather.
How long he’d been in that place he couldn’t guess. Surely it had been at least several hours.
“By the fates,” Ashan said.
He was staring up at the sky, at the constellations that shined down on Ghayavand. When Nasim did the same, he realized they weren’t right. It had not merely been a handful of hours. It had been weeks since leaving Alekeşir.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The breeze smelled fresh of the sea as Nasim and Ashan led Tohrab through the streets of Alayazhar. Morning sunlight angled in against the city, making the gutted stone homes and buildings look like they were tipping to the ground. Nasim and Ashan were tired—they’d walked nearly every waking minute since crawling up from the hole in the ground well before dawn. But if they were tired, Tohrab was nearing collapse. He shuffled, stumbling occasionally before straightening and continuing on. Nasim and Ashan had both pleaded for him to allow them to help, but Tohrab had refused them.
“Your mere touch draws my concentration from where it’s needed,” he’d said. “I will hold for a while yet. But you must leave me be.”
So they’d continued on, hoping Tohrab was right, for he had no idea what would happen when the final ward failed altogether.
“It’s so desolate,” Nasim said.
Ashan, walking next to him, took in the city. They were walking through the center of the old city northward toward the crescent bay. “It has been so for some time, Nasim.”
“I’m not talking about the days before the sundering.”
“You speak of the akhoz?”
Nasim nodded and waved to the city around them. “They’re gone, Ashan. All of them.”
They’d spoken of how the akhoz had been made. In the days following the sundering, after other attempts at halting the spread of the rifts had failed, children and suurahezhan had been bonded to one another by the Al-Aqim. They had used the broken pieces of the Atalayina to fuse the two together, and when they had, they’d created a grounding of sorts, and it had for centuries slowed the spread of the rifts. The tragedy was not that the children had been used in such a way, it was the fact that both spirits—the soul of the child and the suurahezhan—had forever been lost to the cycle of death and rebirth. Both had been fated to death, true and final death, when the ritual had been completed. Though their existence had been miserable, it gave Nasim no solace that they had now been freed from it. They would never return to Erahm, never slip back to Adhiya. They would never learn and grow, and so their destiny of eventual enlightenment had been robbed from them, a fate infinitely worse.
Unlike the last time he was here, the streets were completely free of akhoz. Their aching calls no longer haunted the city.
In their place, however, was a strange feeling of discomfort. Nasim knew it was from the closeness of Adhiya. He could feel the hezhan there, some hoping to cross when the veil grew thin enough. Occasionally he would feel one slip through—most often havahezhan in the sky above them—but when they did they often slipped right back through the same rift that had delivered them. The rifts were not so deep that they could cross at will.
It won’t be long, though.
“They were wretched creatures,” Ashan said. “I’m glad they no longer suffer.”
“As am I. Yet still, the world seems poorer for their absence.”
They came to a crumbling bridge. Below, the stream that once ran through the city was dry. Nasim and Ashan walked over it easily, but it took Tohrab long minutes to make the twenty steps needed to cross to the other side. Nasim was about to ask him again if he could help, but Tohrab, sensing it, raised his hand and shook his head. His deep-set eyes were pinched in pain or concentration or both, and his hands quavered, but he continued on.
“Men are driven to desperate things in times like those,” Ashan said when they’d started making their way once more.
“But they were learned,” Nasim replied. “They were wise. We are meant to heal, not harm.”
To Nasim’s surprise, Ashan didn’t respond. He merely walked beside Nasim, the soles of his boots scraping over the remains of the stone road.
“You no longer believe those words?” Nasim asked.
“I do, but I say them from the comfort of the life I’ve led and the time in which I’ve lived. I’ve often wondered what I would have done in their place.”
“You?” Nasim laughed. “I can’t escape such thoughts.”
“You are not Khamal.”
“I know that, Ashan, but I feel his fears and hopes. I feel his desperation. I can only think that they were blinded by the failure of the ritual. They were more desperate than they realized.”
They came to a bend in the street, and before them, down a hill and near the rocky shore, were the remains of Sariya’s tower. It had crumbled to nothing, a mere remnant of the proud, white tower Nasim had seen when he was here last.
Ashan looked up to the ridge on their left that overlooked the city. There the remains of the celestia could be seen. They lay like the bones of a drakhen collapsed from hunger. The celestia had been Khamal’s demesne, and the tower had been Sariya’s. There was only one remaining, though it was a place to which Nasim didn’t relish returning. The village of Shirvozeh to the east of Alayazhar. It had been used by many before the sundering, but after the three Al-Aqim had been trapped on the island, Muqallad had claimed it for his own. Nasim had traveled there two years ago. It had been the place he and Rabiah had come to free Ashan. It had been the place Ashan had been taken and tortured by Muqallad. Nasim would go elsewhere, but the village and its lake were still a place of power on the island.
And, he told himself, he would not allow Muqallad power beyond his death. If the village was the place he needed to find answers, he would go there and hopefully free it from Muqallad’s taint.
“I wonder where she is,” Nasim said as they passed the fallen white stones of Sariya’s tower.
“I wonder as well. But more, I wonder where the Atalayina is.”
Nasim had been so close to it in Shadam Khoreh. He should have grabbed it when Sariya fell. But he’d been so disoriented by the storm. He’d simply been glad he was still alive.
“It will find its way here,” Nasim said.
“If it hasn’t already.”
“Yeh,” Nasim said, laughing. “If it hasn’t already. The ways of the fates are strange.”
Nasim felt Ashan’s hand on his shoulder. The old arqesh rubbed him affectionately, as a father might his son. “Strange, indeed.”
Tohrab had begun walking past Sariya’s tower. He was headed not along the road toward Shirvozeh, but the trail that led down to the seashore.
“Tohrab?” Nasim called.
“I must take rest.” He did not turn as he spoke. He merely kept treading forward with his slow, shuffling gait. “Go to Shirvozeh. You will find me on the rock”—he raised his hand and pointed—“there.”
Nasim shivered. He was pointing to the rock where Khamal had sacrificed one of the akhoz. It had been in preparation of leaving the island. Of tricking Sariya and Muqallad to murder him so he could be reborn.
Reborn as me, Nasim thought.
For a moment he struggled to recall the boy’s name.
Alif, he finally remembered. Alif. One of the survivors of the devastation after the sundering. It had been that reason—his status as an orphan—that had made Khamal choose him over Yadhan for that ritual. A poor reason, indeed.
As they watched, Tohrab reached the trail and headed down, but before he was lost from sight completely, he turned his head and said, “Hurry, Nasim. Hurry.” And then he was gone.
“Come,” Ashan said.
Nasim nodded, and they were off.
They reached Shirvozeh hours later when the sun was near its zenith.
The entrance stood open. The tall metal doors that once hung there were gone. They trekked down through the tunnels. Nasim could have taken them through the darkness to the lake from memory—such was his memory of this place—but Ashan found a siraj stone within one of the dark rooms they passed, and he used it to light their way.
Eventually they came to the stairway that led them to the dark lake. When they reached the massive cavern that housed the lake, however, Ashan gasped. Gone was the black water. All that remained was a dry cavern with a rocky bed. The water had drained. Nasim didn’t understand the power of the lakes, but he knew that the same thing had happened to many Aramahn villages over the centuries, and when that happened, the Aramahn eventually left.
Nasim stepped to the edge of where the water once was and stared out over the field of dark grey stones. “Sukharam said that my memories of Khamal were being viewed through the veil of the dead. I told him they’d never been wrong, and he became stricken. He was terrified, Ashan. I’ve never seen him so scared.”
Ashan squatted and ran his hands over the line on the stones that had once marked the water level. “I think it has something to do with his time in Kohor. When he left the Veil of Stars, shortly before we traveled to the valley of Shadam Khoreh… To say he was unsettled would be to trivialize it. He was shaken to his core. He was wide-eyed, but he wouldn’t speak of it, not yet.” Ashan paused his inspection to peer into the darkness. “He’d been making strong progress, reaching further each night as he took breath. Perhaps he’d managed to reach the heavens. He might even have managed to feel their intent. But when he left, that memory may have faded like a dream. Perhaps it resurfaced when you spoke with him in Alekeşir.”
“The question, then, is what did he see?”
Ashan shook his head. “The fates. Their will. Their anger. Who can know?”
That was exactly why they’d come to this place. They had to know more, and it was time for Nasim to unearth the answers that had been eluding him for years.
He moved several paces away from the lake and lay down. Ashan knelt and cradled Nasim’s head between the palms of his hands. Ashan took a deep breath and released it, as if by doing so he were releasing all his troubles as well. Ashan had always been good at such things, a skill Nasim was extremely envious of. How could a man who dealt with things of such import take them so much in stride?
Perhaps one day I’ll manage the same.
“Close your eyes,” Ashan said. “Think of that day. Relive it. I’ll guide you, but keep within the dream as long as you can.”
Nasim nodded and began taking longer and longer breaths. Soon, his inhalation and exhalation were the same length. They were long as the night. The feeling of the round stones against his back faded. Then the chill of the air. Then the feeling of Ashan’s warm hands against his cheeks and ears.
And finally, that fateful day from the life of another man returned to him, brighter than ever before.
As the ritual begins, Khamal looks into the eyes of Muqallad and Sariya. They nod to one another.
At last, after all these years, it has begun in earnest.
The world opens up around him, not simply the mountain with its crisp spring air, not simply the island and the sapphire waters that surround it, but the firmament above and the heavens beyond. The aether and Adhiya are drawn in as well. In this moment, all worlds have become one.
And Khamal feels all of it.
He feels the fates as well.
They are smiling, and with this, they give their tacit approval.
They approve of this grand undertaking.
Together, Khamal draws Adhiya closer, as Sariya draws the aether and Muqallad draws Erahm in around them. The Atalayina brightens. It moves beyond its deep blue to a cerulean glow, then the bright blue of the sky, then a white so bright it is difficult to look upon. And yet it is not warm—it is cool and getting colder.
It is then, when the stone becomes painful to touch, that Khamal realizes the mood of the fates has changed. No longer do they smile. They are discomforted yet still expectant. The three of them have anticipated this for eons. He can feel it in his bones.
He looks to Sariya and Muqallad. They sense it every bit as strongly as he does—he can see it in the way Sariya’s brows pinch, the way Muqallad’s jaw grits—but there is nothing to do now but rededicate themselves and draw upon the Atalayina further.
The stone becomes colder still, the cold of the deepest winter, the cold of the frozen north seas. His hand is numb. The brightness of the stone shines red through his skin, revealing the hint of bones beneath.
Dear fates, the pain of it.
Should the fates not help? Should they not lend their strength in this time of change?
Neh, Khamal realizes. Indaraqiram, the rising of the soul of the world, is a mortal thing, a threshold only men can cross, a goal set against the children of the fates when they were first made from the raw elements of Erahm and Adhiya. The fates will not interfere when man has nearly completed all they were meant to do.
And yet Khamal can’t help but fear that something is terribly wrong. Should the fates not rejoice when indaraqiram finally comes?
They should, and yet he feels none of this from them, only a grim determination, a feeling of release—of release, as if they are tired of this world, tired of the burden that they’ve borne for generations beyond count.
How long we have waited. How long we have prayed for the will of man to rise above all that assaults them.
This is wrong, Khamal realizes.
It’s all wrong.
Khamal opens his eyes as the pain from the cold stone moves further up his arm. It goes beyond his shoulder and takes him deeper into the place of pain than he has ever been.
There is a ringing in the air, a high-pitched cry, and he realizes it is his own lament, his own pain, and that of his brother and sister. The three Al-Aqim have come to this place to take the world beyond, but now they know—all three of them—that this… this tragedy… is something the fates had been hoping for. Pleading for.
As much as the fates pulled the strings of man, they did not have control over this: their own death.
They had not co
nsidered their task a burden in the early days of the world. For long ages their will was strong, but when the cycles of man rose and fell with collapses from disease, from war, from a struggle with the worlds themselves, they grew weary. And then desperate for release.
The fates are dying, Khamal realizes. They are dying, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
He feels them slipping away. They fade even as the worlds approach. This will not be indaraqiram. This will be the very end of the world.
He feels Sariya and Muqallad. They know. They weep as he weeps—for the fates, for the end of the world—but just as he is they are caught like flies in amber.
A guttural scream rises up inside Khamal and finds release in the thin air of the mountain at the center of the world’s destruction. It is nothing to the tearing of the world around him, but it gives him strength. He pushes the worlds away. Sariya and Muqallad feel him doing this, but they merely watch.
“Help me!” he cries.
They do not. Their hearts are broken, and the fates begin to slip away. Perhaps they go to worlds beyond. Perhaps they go to the place where those who have reached vashaqiram—true enlightenment—go. Perhaps they will simply be gone, leaving the world bereft of their guiding hand.
It is nearly too much. Khamal does not know what the world will be like after this day. It will be cast adrift. Rudderless.
It is nearly too much to bear, and yet he knows he cannot abandon it. He loves it too dearly. He pushes harder as the worlds close in. He screams, releasing his soul into this one, final effort.
And slowly, the worlds stop. They begin to recede. They take their rightful places once more.
But there is something terribly, terribly wrong.
There are tears in the aether. Tears that allow Adhiya to touch Erahm. It is not as it should be, but before he can try to heal it, the world around him begins to shake. The air above him is afire. The island itself shifts. And the spirits begin to cross through the tears between worlds.
It will not stop, he realizes, not here. It will move beyond to the rest of the islands. It will consume them, and then it will move to the mainland itself, the motherland where life itself began.
The Flames of Shadam Khoreh Page 46
