Revik now knew the male’s name to be Dalejem, or “Jem,” as the other Adhipan seers seemed to uniformly call him. Dalejem seemed to have made Revik his pet project of sorts, too, although he didn’t say as much to him aloud, merely attached himself to Revik’s every move once they left the caves. Something in the way the other seer’s light enveloped his made it difficult for Revik to mind, however. He felt the protectiveness there, and couldn’t help but appreciate it, even though Dalejem was a stranger, too.
Maybe he’d just been absent from that kind of warmth for too long.
Or maybe that absence was simply making him stupid.
In either case, he let himself be escorted.
He didn’t speak much to either of them, but merely followed Balidor and Dalejem when they urged, and even when they didn’t. He still felt strangely out of place, no matter where they were. In the airport at Kabul, he felt like he’d been thrown into some kind of alternate reality, where he walked as an alien life form among the indigenes.
Sounds battered him the instant he’d first stepped out of the jeep, like the volume of a radio that had been turned violently up, shattering a silence Revik only noticed in its absence. The drone of the jeep’s engine hadn’t managed to penetrate that silence on its own, but once they hit the streets of Kabul, Revik flinched from the horns, the shouts of pedestrians in markets and on the street as they passed, dogs barking, music from the open-air shops, feed stations running on the larger stores, both in images and text, the contact with so many minds... not only in his light murmuring at the edge of his awareness but in his visual range before long, too.
Once he got close enough that the people attached to those minds began talking to him, wanting things from him, trying to sell him things, Revik basically hid behind the other seers, feeling some embarrassment for doing it, but unable to help himself. To their credit, the seers closed around him, and he felt more understanding (and surprise, in some cases) than he did ridicule or even judgment.
Even so, it was hard to take.
Given that hawkers and touts descended on them pretty much as soon as they hit the cold but still dusty streets... it was almost more than he could handle.
Smells hit him, too, shockingly strong, some extremely unpleasant, some mildly so, the rest just overwhelming in their frequency and intensity. Petrol, exhaust fumes, spiced foods, sweaty bodies, dirty clothes, the chemical taste of perfume, animal urine, rotting vegetation from the stands, meat cooking, burning plastic from a trash fire, rotting animal meat, sulfur...
He looked at faces, even when they didn’t look at him, but his eyes couldn’t track them all, any better than his light. He found himself staring at a group of women wearing full burqas of a sharp, lapis lazuli color. He barely comprehended what he was looking at until Dalejem pinged a warning at him with his light. When Revik’s eyes swiveled to the other seer, then followed the direction of his warning’s meaning, Revik saw a group of male, Afghani humans watching him stare at the females in burqas. The connection between those male Afghanis and the warning and the women fell into place, enough to get Revik to look away, anyway.
When he glanced at Dalejem himself, somewhat embarrassed, the other seer only smiled.
Revik saw the faint warning in those green eyes, however.
Don’t stare at the women here, brother, he cautioned gently. Not the human ones... no matter how hungry you are. It’s bad politics, and we don’t have time for a confrontation with the locals.
Revik blinked at that, startled, but not offended.
He’d turned over the other’s words, wondering if he’d been staring at more than the color of the burqas after all, consciously or not. He couldn’t make up his mind. Truthfully, he hadn’t been aware of thinking about sex at all, not here, not in the face of so much stimuli, most of which just made him recoil from the shock to his light.
After Dalejem’s words, he did make a point of not looking overtly at the Afghani humans, however, especially the females.
He also noticed that the female seers with them, Mara included, had covered their hair and in some cases their faces before they’d left the jeep traveling behind his.
Revik knew that might be partly to obscure the truth of their race as much as to adhere to local custom, but he noted that things might be more tense in this part of the world than he remembered, too.
Your intuitions are accurate, Dalejem told him, apparently feeling enough of Revik’s thoughts to feel compelled to answer. Things are... heated... in this part of the world. Many of the social customs have become more rigid as a result. There is a resurgence of human religious fundamentalism in this part of the world, brother. There are a number of radical sects following the seer myths, as well. Terrorism is on the rise as a result. We have been trying to stabilize the situation, but most of it is symptomatic. Far deeper problems are beginning to manifest, brother, both within the seer and human communities.
Trailing, Dalejem flipped one hand eloquently, a seer’s shrug.
Revik thought he might say more, but he didn’t.
Realizing that he wouldn’t, Revik nodded, and didn’t ask for more information.
He supposed he would have plenty of time to learn about that kind of thing later, anyway. He also caught the other male’s underlying implications.
Mythers. Religious wars. The scriptures were rife with predictions around this.
He let Dalejem and Balidor lead him towards the door of the airport, keeping his light and his eyes within the group of infiltrators.
He still caught a few stares, however.
He found himself strangely self-conscious of his clothes, touching his face to remind himself if he’d shaved, how long his hair was, what he even looked like.
It hit him... really hit him... that he hadn’t left those caves in over five years.
At the thought, Dalejem and Balidor’s lights wrapped more tightly into his.
It was strange to be protected by these two men, given who he was.
It was strange, but not unwelcome.
Revik knew of the Adhipan, of course. He didn’t know much about them in terms of details, but then, apart from Vash and a handful of other members of the High Council of the Seven Tribes, Revik doubted most seers knew much about the Adhipan in terms of details, apart from rumors. Historically, the Adhipan worked in secret. They trained in secret and recruited in secret and had done so for over two thousand years.
Regardless, all seers had heard of the Adhipan, whether they believed them to be more myth than reality or the reverse. Revik had been hearing stories of the Adhipan since he was a boy growing up in the mountains of the Himalayas. Like most young seers, he supposed, he’d heroized them. Also like most young seers, Revik had fantasized more than once about being invited into that elite cadre, about being marked as one of the chosen.
He never had been, of course.
Frankly, most of what Revik had been told, he’d questioned the accuracy of as an adult, if only because so many people seemed to try and use sightings or knowledge of the Adhipan as bragging rights of one kind of another. They had joked about such things a lot when Revik was still a member of the Org...
But he pushed that from his mind, too.
He had heard myth-like rumors about Balidor himself, even.
It was said, by those who believed he existed at all, that Balidor was the greatest infiltrator alive, perhaps even of the past several generations. It was said that his sight skills matched those of the Council Seers themselves... and far surpassed them in any area utilizing a military skill, or anything that exceeded the charter of the more religiously-oriented seers.
Balidor constituted a living legend among seers, and not only because very few could claim to have met him or even seen him in the flesh.
Revik still entertained a few fleeting doubts that this human-looking seer could really be the famed Balidor, but as he watched him work and studied his light surreptitiously––or what he pretended was surreptitious anyway, since
the occasional puzzled and/or humorous looks aimed his way by Balidor himself told him otherwise––Revik’s doubt began to fade. He felt no duplicitousness on any of these seers. Even those who did not trust him––or did not like him because of what he was––did not hide those sentiments in any way.
Further, Revik felt a frequency of light on Balidor similar to what he felt on Vash. That frequency was one with which Revik had grown familiar over the past few years. He found it increasingly difficult to distrust that light, or to shy away from it.
It rang of truth, somehow.
Even “truth” wasn’t quite the right word, but it was closest to what Revik felt. Truth, clarity, love... or maybe just “reality” in the broader, more philosophical sense.
At any rate, that light didn’t seem to be hiding anything from him, either.
In fact, it seemed to encourage him to look deeper.
Whoever this gray-eyed seer was, when he named Revik as his responsibility, Revik hadn’t taken those as idle words. If he truly was Balidor of the Adhipan, he probably meant those words quite literally. The Adhipan not only followed Code, they considered themselves the protectors of that Code, its champions. They did not lie. Not even in half-truths.
Moreover, they did not work against the free will of any being. It was one of the most basic tenets of Code, one that required absolute transparency.
So if Balidor was who he said he was, he would protect him, at least out here.
Revik hadn’t yet asked if he would be returned to the caves of the Pamir when Kali’s need for him had ended, but he assumed that they would. So he took Balidor’s promise to mean that he would do everything in his power to return Revik to the monks in one piece, so that Revik could complete the terms of his penance.
Which could also mean that Revik was a prisoner here, when all was said and done.
He forgot all of that, of course––even Kali, who he’d been trying actively to not think about since they’d first told him of her kidnapping––when he walked off that plane in São Paulo.
REVIK FOUND HIMSELF fighting not to... well, fight.
Hands pulled at him, tugging his clothes.
He’d left the airport following close behind Balidor and Dalejem, tracking the positions of the other infiltrators as they left the glass-enclosed area of customs. Once the second set of glass doors opened them out onto the curb and into the tropical sunlight and dense, humid air near to the equator, Revik let out an involuntary gasp. Wet heat clung to his mouth and nose, sucking at his lungs, making it difficult to breathe. It felt like he broke out into a sweat all over his body in a matter of seconds, and shock hit his system as he realized again how few changes in his environment he’d had to endure over the previous few years.
It reminded him of Vietnam, too, which didn’t exactly calm him down.
Worse than that, he felt exposed, even before a group of touts spotted their group and surrounded them, offering him hotels, women, tours, food and stolen watches before Revik had come close to regaining his equilibrium... or even adjusted his eyes to the bright sunlight.
Fighting to control his own reactions, he glanced around at the seers he’d left the plane with, and saw them all standing at the curb a few yards away, watching in some amusement as he alone among them seemed unable... or perhaps unwilling... to manage the crowd of humans, all of whom seemed to want something from him. Revik found himself fighting to talk himself down, to not overreact... even as he put a pair of mirrored sunglasses clumsily over his eyes to minimize the chances someone might ID him as a seer.
“Dehgoies!” a female voice called out mockingly. “Do you intend to let them strip you naked? Or do you plan to join the rest of us at some point... ?”
She sent him a snapshot as she said it.
Revik felt the meaning behind it, even as his skin warmed with more than just the heated air.
They’d pushed them, of course. In that same cluster of packed images and meanings, Revik realized that it didn’t break Code to push humans to not see him, if it was important that his race and his person not be noticed. It fell under the category of self-defense.
Revik felt his light cringe with embarrassment, even as he sent a gentle push out with his aleimi, carefully turning the humans’ interest and minds away from him.
He has no money. He is useless to us... he sent softly.
He knew it was all right.
The Adhipan seers all but told him to do it, but something about impinging on their free will felt wrong to him, anyway.
Maybe he really had been spending too much time with those monks.
Once he had done it, though, it was too late.
The human eyes in front of him glazed. They slowly began to back away from him, almost as a group. A man took his hand off Revik’s arm, giving him an irritated look before shaking his head and walking back towards the glass doors, looking for a tourist with more to offer. The human female who had been closet to him in those few seconds backed away last, caressing Revik’s thigh through his pants as her fingers left him, and Revik bit his tongue, hard.
Humor rippled the Barrier around him as he did it, and that time, Revik felt something closer to shame. Fighting not to let it turn into anger, he shut his light down altogether instead.
Then someone had hold of his arm.
Before he could stop himself, Revik glanced down.
“Do not worry, brother,” Dalejem said to him in English, smiling at him.
“They are giving you shit,” he said. “It’s hazing, brother. They sent those humans at you, to see what you would do.”
Revik felt his embarrassment turn into a more smoldering irritation.
Dalejem nudged him playfully with his shoulder. “Do not be angry, brother,” he said, grinning wider. “It was not done in spite... quite the opposite. It means that most of them have decided that they like you.”
Revik rolled his eyes at that, snorting a little in spite of himself.
“...They will not leave you behind,” Dalejem added, tilting his head for Revik to follow. “But we had better go.”
There is nothing to be embarrassed about, brother... he added softer in his mind. Truly. We are all surprised at how well you are doing with this...
Nodding once, seer-fashion, Revik didn’t open his light, but he felt that tension in his chest relax slightly. He averted his eyes from Dalegjem’s intent stare, following the tug of those fingers and fighting to ignore the fact that he’d gotten hard from the human’s caress, and that the others probably noticed that, too.
By the time he reached the curb, four SUVs had pulled up with tinted windows.
Modified, Revik guessed, likely bullet-proof and mine-proof organics on the sides and the lower chassis. It occurred to him in the back-end of that same thought that the more tactical side of his mind lived there still, despite how completely off-balance he felt.
He let Dalejem lead him into the last of those SUVs. He closed his light even more when he found Mara in there, too, now grinning at him with a smug triumph in her eyes.
“Enjoy yourself, pup?” she asked him as he took his seat.
When he glanced over at her, he saw her staring pointedly at his crotch. He covered it with one arm, almost before he knew he meant to.
He realized his mistake when she laughed in delight, causing a few of the seers sitting around her in the cramped space to laugh, too.
“Don’t be ashamed,” she said, smirking at him again when he glanced up. “From what I can tell, you have nothing to be embarrassed of down there, brother...”
“Leave him alone, Mara,” Dalejem said.
That time, Revik heard the hardness underlying the other male’s words.
He didn’t know if he resented it or felt grateful. Deciding not to entertain either thing, he wiped the last of the thoughts from his mind, staring out the tinted windows with no expression on his face, his light as closed as he could manage to make it.
He might not be as good at hiding his ligh
t as any of them, but he could still keep himself from thinking well enough to not give them too much ammunition.
At the thought, he felt a pulse of warmth hit his chest, strong enough and heated enough that he looked over in spite of himself. That time, when he met Dalejem’s gaze––for it had to be Dalejem, since he was the only one here who didn’t seem to hate him entirely––he couldn’t help but wince at the pity he saw there.
But he wasn’t here for them, he reminded himself.
He was here because he owed Kali.
Although as he turned over that thought in the more bitter corners of his mind, he knew he might be lying to himself about that, too.
4
BEING TESTED
“WHAT ARE WE doing out here?” Revik said.
The other male didn’t answer him at first, but continued to push past trees in the jungle, a heavy, black, canvas bag wrapped around his back cross-wise. Revik followed him, without even slowing his pace much really. Even so, he felt a denser kind of pain hardening in his chest.
He could feel that the other seers were trying more with him.
They’d laid off on some of the teasing he’d gotten when they first landed in São Paulo, but he couldn’t help but notice their eyes on him. They watched him more than they watched one another, and while he saw curiosity in some of those stares, not only hostility, the added scrutiny couldn’t help but make him paranoid, if only because he couldn’t read them at all.
They didn’t seem to mind that, either, as far as he could tell.
Meaning, the power imbalance between him and the rest of them.
Anyway, Revik strongly suspected that their more subdued air around him had more to do with Balidor chewing them all out than any change of heart, regardless of Dalejem’s attempts to reassure him.
Allie's War Early Years Page 50
