She strode down to the desert floor and laid the man on the ground. The threadbare tatters of a blue robe did little to cover his emaciated limbs, and Iyasu knelt beside the man’s hairless head to peer into his eyes, only to find them milky and blind. He touched the man’s cheek, and then his neck. “He’s a djinn.”
“And a Tevadim, judging by his robes,” Azrael said. “And his sand-monster.”
Iyasu leaned down, placing his ear over the man’s mouth and felt how faint his breath was.
Samira said djinn were quick to life, and quick into death. We only have a few seconds.
“What’s your name?” the seer asked. “Can you tell me your name?”
The elderly djinn cleric shuddered. “Ar… Arzang.”
“Arzang.” Iyasu nodded. “Arzang, this will all be over in just a moment. I promise you. No one is going to hurt you. It’s all over now. Can you please tell me, where is Ramashad?”
“Rama…?” The man shuddered again and coughed violently.
Iyasu took his hand, only to find the hand cold and stiff. “Arzang? Where is Ramashad? How do we find it?”
The djinn Tevadim named Arzang lay still and silent on the ground, his fragile body already cooler than the sands on which he rested, and as Iyasu watched, the djinn’s body began to flake away as the wind gently tore apart the dry, ashen remains.
Iyasu sat back and watched the old man fade and disintegrate before him in a matter of seconds.
“I barely touched him,” Azrael said softly. “He was already so close to the end. The effort to summon the manticore and fight us today must have taken the last of his strength.”
Iyasu nodded and sighed.
Rahm grunted. “Well, together again. It’s good to see you, more or less. Try to keep up.” And the warrior strode away with the princess as his side.
Iyasu exchanged a silent weary look with the angel, and they followed, heading south into the deep desert as the dull throbbing in his right hand fell into a painful rhythm with the throbbing in his bandaged eye.
Chapter 27
Iyasu stood in the heart of the desert ruins, squinting through the gloom of the midnight hour. Dark clouds glided across the stars, dimming the faint silver light even more, and while his sharp vision could still discern the cracks in the stones around him, he would have felt far more confident standing in the clear light of day.
He shrugged. “This must be it.”
To each side rose three ranks of massive stones, carefully sculpted pillars of pale granite studded with huge, shining facets of quartz. The pillars towered over them, and each one was crowned with a rusted statue of a man or woman pointing a sword or spear defiantly at the sky. Beyond the pillars Iyasu could see the worn and buried remains of buildings that had long since lost their roofs and now offered only the vague outlines of walls and foundations covered in sand to suggest what might have once been a city in the heart of the desert.
One building remained intact, and the four travelers faced it now. The pyramid consisted of five huge levels that receded upward to a high platform where a pile of rubble indicated that some sort of shrine or tower had once stood there. A staircase emerged from the sand and cut halfway up the height of the structure before the wind-whipped upper levels faded into rounded, vague shapes.
“This is Ramashad?” Azrael looked around them. “This is what drove Galina Bolad insane?”
“Why not?” Rahm said after a loud yawn. “It looks old and… destroyed.”
“Because it doesn’t look like a djinn city,” the angel said. “Usually, the djinn build simple homes and elaborate gardens, not symbols of military or religious power.” She indicated the pillars and the pyramid. “This looks human.”
“Then where are we?” Hadara asked.
Iyasu went over to one of the massive columns and ran his hands across its surface, but all he found were cracks and sand. His fingers traveled up and over the rock still warm with the day’s heat, until he touched something cooler, the smooth face of a large quartz deposit in the stone. He was about to back away when his hand slid down the side of the crystal and felt something deep, sharp, and straight. Squinting as he brushed away the sand, he uncovered a series of deliberate cuts in the quartz, arranged in vertical rows with many clearly repeated symbols.
“Rael, I think you’re right.” The seer turned back to his friends. “This isn’t Ramashad.”
“Then what is it?” Hadara asked.
“Messenad.”
“What?!” Rahm spun around as though he hadn’t already taken a good look at the ruins looming over them on every side. “This?”
“It’s written everywhere.” Iyasu scanned the etched crystals on the pillars nearest to them. “In the name of eternal Messenad. For the glory of golden Messenad. In the service of holy Messenad.”
“It doesn’t look very eternal, golden, or holy to me,” Hadara said, crossing her arms. “And it doesn’t make any sense, either. King Kavad didn’t lead his army into this blasted desert six months ago to attack some old stones. He went to kill demons. So unless he was an even greater fool than I already thought, this can’t be Messenad.”
“Well, the stones seem to think it is.” Iyasu smiled to himself as he read more of the etchings. The statements there were brief, mostly listing the names and accomplishments of warriors, heroes of a forgotten people who triumphed in forgotten wars, killing forgotten people for forgotten reasons. His smile faded as the stories began to pile up in his mind, the names and battles slowly painting a picture in his imagination, complete with the screams of the dying and the blood of the innocent. He grimaced and turned away.
Nothing changes.
“These carvings are at least a century old,” he said soberly. “Probably more. It’s hard to tell.”
“Tell us again,” Azrael said to Hadara. “Why did your king come here?”
“King Kavad is not my king,” the princess said with an arched brow. “But he and his generals heard the tales of the fire demon and decided that they would be the heroes who rid the world of the monster, so they set out with ten thousand men half a year ago. Months passed with no word of his progress, or even his survival. And finally Rahm decided to look for him, because it’s the sort of thing that interests him, and of course I came with him.”
“No, this can’t be Messenad,” Rahm announced. “We spoke to a soldier who survived the massacre, he told us what happened. The poor man crawled out of the desert with a scorched stump where his arm used to be, and he died not long after we found him. He described a terrible battle, fire and steel, the legions of the north against the demon of the south. Look around you. This is no battlefield. There are no corpses. There is nothing here.”
Iyasu sighed and glanced around one more time. He paused. “Don’t be so sure.” He hurried through the huge pillars and knelt in the soft white sand where a bit of metal poked up into the free air. He scooped away some of the sand and tugged at the metal, and a moment later the thing came free and he stood up to show the others. “Does this look familiar to anyone?”
He held in his hands a breast plate forged of dull steel and bright bronze, banded and chained, and emblazoned with a stylized eagle across the center of the chest. But in the center of the armor was a hole, a tear, narrow and sharp, and edged in a dry, brittle blackness. Flipping it over, they saw more burn marks inside, along with a few rusty speckles that the seer knew to be blood.
“Burzhian armor.” Rahm took the breastplate in his hands and ran his fingers over the burns and the blood. “Kavad did come here.”
“And died here, and then the desert swallowed the dead,” Hadara said. “I always knew that old fool would march off to a foolish death, but still… I’m sorry to see it.”
“But that just raises more questions,” Azrael said. “If there are demons here, where are they? We’ve only seen one living soul since we entered the desert, and he was so old and frail that he died within moments of attacking us. If Arzang wasn’t the fire demon, t
hen where is it?”
No one answered. Everyone frowned and studied the armor, or the ground, or the horizon. None of these gave them any answers.
“Maybe we should look around a bit more,” Hadara said. “Look for other signs of the battle.”
“No.” Rahm tossed the breastplate to the ground. “There’s no point. The survivor told us what happened here. Just look around. Kavad marched his men to their deaths, and something or someone slaughtered them. I wanted to believe he might still be alive, that I could save him, but that was a fool’s hope. We’re done here. Let’s go home.” The troubled look on the huge warrior’s face was utterly despondent and resigned as he trudged away. After a moment, the princess followed him.
Iyasu realized it was the first time he had ever seen the man looking anything other than joyous or angry. He wanted to say something of comfort, but Azrael was right, there were more questions than answers here, and he didn’t know how to make sense of the hidden whisper of death all around them.
“What now?” the angel asked. “Stay here or move on? Whatever this place is or was, it’s not a djinn city. It’s not Ramashad.”
A burst of whistles and chitters from the folds of her dark dress reminded them both of the three peris nestled there, and Azrael carefully scooped them out and held the tiny four-armed creatures in the palm of her hand. “It’s nothing new,” she said. “Just what they said before.”
Iyasu pouted. “Well, let’s try to get them to say something new.” He leaned forward over her cupped hands and said, “King Kavad.”
Silence.
“Fire demon.”
One peri gave him a curious look. Another one tipped over and bumped his head.
Iyasu paused. “Djinn.”
All three of the peris sat up and began whistling and chirping. Azrael looked up slowly from the tiny winged creatures. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“Try me.” He grinned.
“They just said that a person can summon a djinn, any djinn, by name.”
Iyasu tilted his head. “Come again?”
“We can summon a djinn,” Azrael said. “Call out their name and they will appear, I think. These little ones are being about as clear as they were before. They said, cry the given and cry the sur unto the bloodstone, and unto the bloodstone shall the djinn be drawn.”
“Okay. Sure. Why not?” Iyasu shrugged. “Let’s try that then. Just one little question, a minor thing, really. What’s a bloodstone?”
The angel blinked. “I have no idea.”
Iyasu leaned around her and called out to the retreating back of the princess. “Lady Hadara! What’s a bloodstone?”
The princess stopped and frowned back at him. “What?”
“What’s a bloodstone? Is it a real stone, or is it just a name for something else, like, I don’t know, a heart, or maybe a bone. Blood comes from bones, I think,” Iyasu said.
Hadara paced slowly back toward him. “Bloodstone is a jewel. Dark green, flecked with red like drops of blood.”
“Oh? Delightful,” the seer murmured. “All right, so we just need to find some. Is it rare?”
Hadara kept walking back toward them, a curious and thoughtful look in her eyes. “I know it comes from the east, and isn’t found just lying around.”
“Mm. So you’re saying you don’t conveniently have a ring or necklace with a bloodstone in it, do you?” Iyasu asked. “Because that would be fantastic right about now.”
“No, I don’t.”
Iyasu sighed. “Well, these things happen.”
Azrael gazed up at the nearest of the monoliths and the huge milky quartz deposited studding its face. “I wonder…” She took Iyasu’s hand and carefully poured the three little peris into his palm.
“Wonder what?” he said.
“Well, it’s a pyramid. People put valuable things in pyramids.” She arched an eyebrow as her long black wings poured out of her back and spread high above them, shading them momentarily from the bright moon, and then she was gone, a dark and blurry figure of silk and feathers dashing up the huge step-levels of the pyramid until she reached the fallen shrine at its peak and then she vanished.
Iyasu watched the top of the pyramid. Waiting. Trying not to peer down at the peris in his hand because their tiny human-like fingers made a terribly disturbing sensation on his skin as they scampered and rolled and played in his palm.
And then the dark blur emerged from the pyramid and rushed down to stand beside them once more, cloaked in dust and sand as her wings vanished from sight, and Azrael smiled brilliantly as she held out her left hand. “Is this it?”
The stone was angular and irregular, but smooth and polished, and its dark green surface was flecked by many large and small dots of bright red.
Hadara nodded. “That’s a bloodstone.”
Azrael nodded. “I figured if Messenad was anywhere near Ramashad, then they might have had some. Or at least, they’re dead kings might.”
“All right then.” Iyasu nodded and clasped his hands together. “So now we just need to name a djinn, right? Well… there’s Galina Bolad, obviously. But I doubt she’d be any more helpful now than she was at the fort. We could call for Samira. That’s a friend of ours from the west,” he explained to Hadara. “But she doesn’t know where Ramashad is.” He winced and looked at Azrael. “That just leaves one name, doesn’t it?”
The angel nodded. “It’ll be dangerous. Very. You should all find cover. I’ll summon him over there, near the pyramid. I beat him before, and I can do it again. But I need you all to stay hidden.” She gave Iyasu a long, steady look. “There are no healers here, this time.”
The seer nodded. He darted forward to give her a quick kiss, and then he herded Hadara and Rahm back through the sandy avenues between the pillars, angling toward the crumbled remains of a small stone wall where some sort of home might have once stood.
“Why do we have to hide?” Hadara said. “Who is she going to summon?”
“The only other djinn we know by name,” Iyasu said. “Jevad Tafir.”
“And who is that?”
“A killer. He tried to take control of the Navean kingdoms so he could start a war, just to kill as any people as possible.” Iyasu swallowed. “He killed enough.”
“I can fight a killer,” Rahm growled, reaching for his sword.
“Not this one,” Iyasu said quietly as they slipped around the stone wall and knelt in the cool sand. “Jevad Tafir is a djinn, so he can move faster than even I can follow. And he can change his appearance, change his face and body to look like anyone he wants, in an instant. If we tried to fight him together, he would probably change to look like one of us, and turn us against each other. And he’s strong, too.”
“How strong?” Hadara asked.
“Stronger than us. But not stronger than her.” He nodded at the dark figure standing alone by the base of the pyramid.
“You’re sure about this?” Rahm slid his sword halfway out of its sheathe. “I didn’t have much trouble with the wood wyrm in the canyon.”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Iyasu sighed. “Very sure. Now stay down, and stay silent.”
Rahm glared. “But what if…?”
“Silent.” Hadara gave him a stern look.
And then all three of them peered out across the ruins to watch. They saw Azrael walk up the wind-scoured steps of the pyramid to the first landing, and there she held the dark blot of the bloodstone to her mouth and Iyasu imaged he could hear her whisper the djinn’s name.
Jevad Tafir.
Azrael lowered her hand and slowly turned, watching the desert carefully. Iyasu glanced around as well, but saw no sign that a djinn was about to appear. He saw his love look directly at him for a moment, but her eyes moved on, roving over the dunes.
Maybe we misunderstood.
Iyasu squinted.
Maybe the peris meant something else. Or maybe the peris don’t mean anything at all. Maybe Galina Bolad was truly insane, and the peris a
re only telling us nonsense.
A plume of dust rose to the west, dancing and quivering on the desert floor.
Iyasu tensed.
Or maybe we got it right. And maybe we’re all about to get killed for it.
The dust devil carved a trail across the dunes, slicing over the sandy ridges like a scorching sword and leaving only a thin black trail behind it that faded quickly as the wind scoured it away.
And then suddenly a bright figure raced into the center of the pillars and stood still beneath the bright stars. The man was tall and lean, with long flame-red hair and a tall, proud nose above his small, stern mouth. He wore a sleeveless white robe with the hood resting on his shoulders, and his bare arms knotted with wiry muscles as he curled his long fingers into angular fists.
Iyasu saw the expectant looks in Hadara’s and Rahm’s eyes as they silently asked him, Is this Jevad Tafir?
The seer frowned. It certainly looked like the man who had been unmasked in the Pillars of Aram after a brutal combat with Azrael. The hair was very different, but that didn’t mean anything for a shape-shifter. Tafir could look like anything he wanted.
Iyasu nodded at his companions.
“Well?” the man called out, his voice echoing in distorted waves across the ruins and sand-blasted pillars. It was a clear and pleasant voice, strong and perhaps well-suited to singing. And it made Iyasu frown a little deeper because it was not the voice he remembered Jevad speaking with when they met two years ago. “I know you’re here. Know you called for me. Know that you know my name. So where are you?”
“Here.” Azrael descended the steps of the pyramid slowly and carefully, moving with all the trepidation of a mere mortal. “I’m here.”
“So you are.” The djinn strode toward her but then stopped short after only a few steps. “You… but you can’t be… but you are. Hello, dear sister.”
Azrael stopped as well. “Sister?”
“Of course? Why? Don’t you know me?” the djinn held out his empty hand, inviting her to take it.
She remained where she was, with more than a score of paces between them. “I don’t know many djinn.”
Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom Page 27
