by Ginn Hale
Parthenon lunged after Rousma. It slammed a leg into her back before she could regain her feet. Rousma collapsed to the floor and curled her arms around her skull.
“Stop, you bastard!” Kahlil shouted. “Touch her again and I’ll tear you apart, I swear it!”
At the sound of Kahlil’s voice, Parthenon spun on him. For a moment Parthenon stood perfectly still and Kahlil wondered if somehow his threat had penetrated the creature’s awareness. Then, very slowly, Parthenon extended its head towards Kahlil and opened its jaws as if it were drawing in his scent.
It wasn’t his threat that had caught Parthenon’s attention, Kahlil realized. It was his fresh blood.
Careful not to touch the edge of his restraints, Kahlil lifted his hand. Tremors of pain shook through Kahlil’s arm as he moved his hand just a few inches. He flexed his remaining fingers into a fist. Tender scabs split open and fresh blood gushed out. Kahlil had to clench his mouth shut to hold back a shout of pain.
Parthenon immediately dropped open a massive set of jaws and roared. It batted Rousma’s limp body aside and rushed to Kahlil. Parthenon circled the table with the slow caution of a guilty dog. Kahlil guessed that on some animal level Parthenon knew Loshai would not want it feeding on him.
Not yet, at least.
Slyly, Parthenon raked the side of its jaw against Kahlil’s bloody hand. Kahlil gasped as teeth dragged over his open wound. Parthenon jerked back and cowered against the floor. Its head turned to the door, seeming to expect an immediate punishment to come from that direction. Parthenon was far too intent on the door to notice the slight movement of Rousma’s crumpled mass.
Several moments passed. Parthenon straightened up from the floor and slunk back to Kahlil’s side. It circled the table as it had done before and then rasped its jaws over Kahlil’s hand again. This time Kahlil choked back his cry of pain. He didn’t want Parthenon to notice Rousma as she crawled towards the door.
Parthenon shoved its teeth down hard into Kahlil’s bloody hand. Pain overwhelmed him. His vision wavered, cracking into white flashes. He fought to remain conscious. He focused on the motion at the very corner of his eye. Parthenon tore into his hand, but Kahlil stared with all of his will at Rousma’s tiny figure. He watched her move slowly across the floor. Then she was beyond his range of vision. Kahlil clenched his eyes shut and strained to hear the quiet click of her bones against the stone floor.
Parthenon jerked Kahlil’s hand and Kahlil gasped. For a sick instant his attention flashed back to his own bleeding arm and Parthenon’s hungry jaws. The skin of his palm was torn open and Parthenon jammed its teeth into the flesh. Blood soaked up through the incantations carved into Parthenon’s jaws and spattered its huge skull.
Parthenon noted his gaze and opened its jaws wide, as if grinning at Kahlil’s pain. Far behind them, Kahlil heard the soft click of a latch sliding back and then the creak of a door swinging on its hinges.
Parthenon took no notice, but Kahlil felt everything change. Suddenly even the air in his own lungs tasted thicker, full of dark, hidden portals. The flat surface of his surroundings was once again a thin skin stretched over thousands of tangled depths and ragged edges.
Kahlil flicked the fingers of his right hand and the air shrieked. Flames gushed up as ozone burned and the Gray Space ripped through Parthenon’s gaping jaws. The hungry bones jerked back, howling. Kahlil tore the Gray Space open again, this time rending apart his restraints. He rolled from the table as Parthenon lunged for him.
Kahlil’s head buzzed and he forced himself up to his feet and bolted for the door. The edges of his vision darkened and closed in. He’d lost so much blood. He was still bleeding, and alarmingly, he couldn’t feel his left hand anymore.
Still, he ran and Parthenon followed fast behind him. Kahlil grabbed Rousma with his right hand and lifted her. He lunged through the doors into a wide stone corridor.
“Lefties!” Rousma shouted.
Kahlil veered left and raced down the corridor. Parthenon crashed through the doors and hurled its huge body after Kahlil. Waves of dizziness rolled through Kahlil and his field of vision narrowed to a dim tunnel. He gripped Rousma’s hard body tighter.
“Lefties!” Rousma called again. “Lefties! Quick!”
Kahlil blindly obeyed Rousma. He swerved into a tiny dark hallway and nearly slammed into a wall. Parthenon surged after him. Kahlil’s legs suddenly buckled and he stumbled down to the uneven floor.
“No!” Rousma shrieked.
Kahlil kept his grip on his sister as Parthenon charged into the hall.
“Move!” Rousma cried. But Kahlil knew he didn’t have the strength to run. He’d lost too much blood. Parthenon’s entire mass arched up over them.
Kahlil pulled Rousma tight against his chest. With the last of his strength, he ripped into the Gray Space and collapsed back into its silent embrace. Parthenon slammed into the wall, its bones splintering and cracking against unforgiving stone.
Rousma raised her head from Kahlil’s chest. She opened her mouth, but the silence of the Gray Space was absolute. Kahlil shook his head. Rousma raised one of her oversized hands and made the Payshmura sign of blessing.
Kahlil smiled at her. He doubted he could do much more. He could hardly stay conscious. He’d underestimated how much of his strength it would take to open the Gray Space here. The thick, scarred texture of the space resisted him. It cut into him as he tore through it. Kahlil glanced down at his left arm and noted the long gashes running across the back of his hand and up his forearm. At least the Gray Space dulled his pain. His bleeding arm ached but that was all. He didn’t even feel the gash across his cheek. He felt very little, in fact.
Rousma gripped Kahlil’s right hand, attempting to pull him to his feet. He struggled up but couldn’t force his way through the ropey, cutting edges that filled the Gray Space. More lacerations split open over his arms as he reached out.
Rousma gripped his hand harder. She shook her head violently. Kahlil knew she was right. They couldn’t stay here. He would be ripped apart and then she would be trapped.
Kahlil fought out of the Gray Space. The heat of the world gushed over him and pain surged through both his arms. The blood pouring over his skin felt like fire.
Kahlil sagged, almost collapsed, but then caught his weight against the wall. At his feet, Parthenon’s bones still writhed after the blood that splashed onto the floor.
“Rotten.” Rousma kicked aside one of Parthenon’s cracked leg bones. She wrapped her thin arms around Kahlil’s waist and tried to take his weight. “This ways. I takes you to safey.”
“I can’t, Rousma,” Kahlil whispered.
“You can!” Rousma growled. “Even dead we never stops. We never gives up.”
So long as you’re living, never give up, wasn’t that what Jath’ibaye had told him?
Kahlil took in a slow breath and nodded. Tears of pain welled behind his eyes. He leaned on the wall and followed Rousma almost blindly as they descended one half-collapsed staircase after another. “We walks down stairs, me and you,” Rousma murmured in soft singsong.
For a moment Kahlil didn’t know what she was trying to say, but then he remembered the game they had played when Rousma had been a plump little girl. When she had been alive and he had sung rhymes to her.
They’d had a dog, he thought blearily.
But then his thoughts returned to the challenge of the couplet. He stumbled over a cracked flagstone and caught himself. Rousma placed her hands against his side to steady him. Kahlil continued walking with her, descending narrow steps.
“We walks down stairs, me and you…” Kahlil whispered the words to himself. “I take the steps one by one. You take them two by two.”
Rousma giggled. She squeezed Kahlil’s side gently.
“Rousma leads across the water to a safey place,” Rousma sang.
Kahlil answered, “Where I’ll lie down and the hungry bones won’t chase.”
Again, Kahlil was rewarded with a tiny
laugh.
He continued finishing Rousma’s couplets as he followed her down into the depths of the ruins.
Steadily, the air grew humid; Kahlil’s lungs felt permeated with the dank scent of fetid, stagnant water. Moisture beaded on his bare skin. In his clumsy, numb state he slipped often on the slick stones, but didn’t fall. Rousma saw to that.
As they descended, the walls surrounding them lost the smooth surfaces and symmetry of architecture, becoming rough, raw stone. The pools of stagnant water covering the pitted floor slowly deepened until Kahlil found that he was wading almost knee-deep through cold, still water.
At last they reached a vast flooded hall. The walls and ceiling above seemed dark, but Kahlil knew that had more to do with his own failing vision than reality. Green light radiated from the surface of the deep waters.
He was bleeding to death and yet he kept moving.
He hardly felt it when the floor dropped away beneath him and he fell into a vast black body of water. He spat out the sickening taste. Rousma gripped his shoulder and pulled him along with her.
“Not far. Not far. We be safey soon,” Rousma whispered to him.
Kahlil was too tired to even respond. It was all he could do to keep his head up above the salty, reeking water.
As he struggled to swim after Rousma, he saw rafts where the green luminescence congregated around odd bobbing shapes. A rotting human foot bumped against him. Kahlil choked on the bile rising in his own throat.
“She throws away them little parts and they washes down here.” Rousma shoved the foot aside. “I gets my hands here and sometimes I finds little eaties. Wigglies.”
“Wigglies.” Kahlil could only imagine what kind of parasites and diseases were floating over the open wounds in his arms.
“We keeps going.” Rousma pushed at his back.
The salty water buoyed his body as Rousma pushed him through the flooded hall—though now Kahlil thought it must be a cave.
Something living brushed past Kahlil’s leg. He didn’t have the strength to kick it away. Rousma swatted it aside. She wrapped her arm around Kahlil’s chest and towed him up to the rough side of a stone wall.
“We goes under here,” Rousma told him. “You hold on to my hand. I take you through the right place.”
Kahlil nodded weakly.
“Lots of wrong places,” Rousma said intently. “You holds onto me tight. Don’t let go!” She grasped Kahlil’s right hand. He tried to return her hard grip, but his fingers were numb. He barely managed to catch a deep breath before Rousma dragged him under the dark water.
Kahlil didn’t know how far Rousma pulled him. Minutes seemed to pass. His thoughts began to slip away. He felt dizzy and lost in the blackness of the water. Suddenly he was no longer sure which way was up. He couldn’t feel Rousma’s grip. He couldn’t feel anything but the cold water and his own burning lungs.
Then light and air rushed over him. He gasped for breath as Rousma pulled his head above the water. Her fingers tangled through his hair. She pulled him forward to the shallows of the pool.
Moon water glowed from the pool’s surface and illuminated the surrounding cavern walls. The light refracted through countless jewel-like crystals and gleamed across wide veins of shining gold. The cave floor was unnaturally smooth and lustrous, like a carpet of opal.
“Come.” Rousma hurried out of the water, scampering up what looked like steps. She waved for Kahlil to follow her. He crawled from the water and then, with difficulty, managed to get to his feet and follow after her. A luminous sheen of moon water clung to his body. As he moved, shadows danced away and countless prismatic crystals gleamed.
At the far end of the cavern, a knoll of obsidian rose up from the floor like an altar. Deep indentations marked the floor at the corner of the obsidian, looking almost like the impressions left by a kneeling body at a bedside. Laid out across the top of the altar was a long skeleton.
Rousma reached up and gently stroked the cracked skull.
“You is safey,” Rousma whispered. “Nobodies hurts you now.”
Kahlil moved closer. Rousma looked up at him.
“I tries to bring you back,” she said. “I carves the words and ties you together with wires but you is gone already.”
Kahlil could see the delicate Payshmura spells that Rousma had etched into the skull and carved across the rest of the bones. Prayers were even cut into the shattered pieces of ribs. Salvaged bits of copper and steel wires glinted all across the remains. Kahlil shifted his gaze, taking in the crumpled bullets that now lay harmlessly among ribs and vertebrae. Then he noticed the gleam of pale gold.
There, just below the jawbone, lay a tarnished chain and a gold key.
It was the ush’hala. The key that he had missed in Nayeshi and John had taken. And it was the same key that, in another life, John had lost and Ravishan had discovered in the snowdrifts. Kahlil stared at the shining key. It seemed like fate that he should find it here among Ravishan’s bones. It was almost inevitable that he should be dying now as he gazed at the key once again.
“The key that opens death,” Kahlil whispered.
“No,” Rousma said. “You is alive now. You stay alive this time. Promise. You stay alive and takes me away to run and sniff.”
“I’m sorry, Rousma.” Kahlil slumped back against the obsidian altar.
“NO!” Rousma grabbed his hair and pulled at him, trying to force him back up to his feet. Kahlil hardly felt her sharp finger bones. His body was numb. Even the blood that spilled out from his arms had slowed to a dark ooze.
“We gets away!” Rousma’s tiny voice shook. “I seen it. You takes me away and I climbs into a doggy skin. And we is free. We is happy and you lives. You lives—” Her voice broke in a rasping, dry sob.
Kahlil didn’t want to tell her that everything she had seen had happened already, but to a different Rousma in a different lifetime. He had saved her once, but it hadn’t been enough. Now he could do nothing for her.
“I’m sorry,” Kahlil whispered. His head drooped and he stared down at his mutilated left hand. His blood looked black against the glow of the moon water. There was one thing he could offer her. Kahlil forced his arm up and clumsily placed his bloody hand against the prayers carved into Rousma’s skull.
Despite the numbness in his fingers, he felt her bones drinking his blood. He didn’t have the strength to escape this place, but perhaps she still could.
“No!” Rousma jerked back from Kahlil’s touch. “I is your sister! I is not taking your life! No!” Rousma shoved at his chest, shouting, “You gets up! You lives!”
Kahlil drew in a deep breath. He hadn’t wanted to scare her like this. He didn’t know what more he could do or how to calm her.
“Gets up!” Rousma demanded.
Kahlil shoved himself up, using the altar to take most of his weight. Even so he felt tremors in his legs. Rousma leaned against him.
“You sees.” Rousma’s voice broke with a sob. “You gets up. You lives.”
Kahlil swayed. His vision splintered and broke into white flashes and dark pools. Then suddenly he toppled forward. Rousma shrieked. Kahlil fell across his own bones. He felt the sharp edges cutting into his bare skin and his blood soaking into the carved prayers. He was too weak to lift himself up.
He thought he heard Rousma shout something, but he couldn’t be sure. His senses receded, both sound and vision fading to faint impressions against a numb darkness. Even the bones beneath him seemed to have lost their hard edges, almost as if they had melted into his body. There was nothing more he could do. Nothing left for him, but the senseless emptiness of death.
He wished that he could see Jath’ibaye one last time, but that was all. Then he thought nothing more. A perfect darkness swallowed him.
Then, from the depths of nothingness came a tiny spark, a shock in the deep chambers of his heart. It grew hot and then spread. A tingling, electric heat rushed through him like the burn of liquor. It surged from his chest outward, c
oursing over his face and head and down all the way to his feet. His skin felt flushed and hot. His muscles tingled. Kahlil opened his eyes.
Though his body was still slumped across the marble altar, the deep gashes on his arms had closed to fine white scars. The ring finger of his left hand was no longer missing. Instead intricately carved finger bones and delicate copper wire protruded from his hand. They were Ravishan’s bones, Kahlil realized. His blood had awoken the spells Rousma had carved over the skeleton. Kahlil could feel the heat of the rest of them inside him.
He straightened, marveling at the ease of the motion. Under his left hand he found the shining golden key.
“You see,” Rousma said. “You lives!”
Kahlil gripped the ush’hala. He glanced to Rousma. “What happened to me?”
“You lives.” Rousma bounced excitedly on her skeletal feet. “You is whole now and you lives. I told you. I seen it.”
Rousma seemed right. Not only were his wounds healed, but he also felt, somehow, whole. That gnawing sense of inevitable failure had left him for the first time in what seemed like years. He was still the man who had failed to save the Payshmura Church, but now an assurance seemed to rise up from his bones—or perhaps they were Ravishan’s bones. He felt a surge of pride. He had turned his back on a corrupt church. He had fought for what he believed in and awoken the Rifter’s divine justice.
Both halves of his life melted into each other and what had once felt like contradictions, like losses and failures, now seemed unified and blessed. If, as Ravishan, he had betrayed the Payshmura, it had only been because he had served the greater divinity of the Rifter. And all the pain that he had endured in this life as Kahlil—all of the loneliness and suffering—had been necessary so that he could be here, now, at this moment. Both his lives seemed to converge to a central purpose.
Whether it was the Rifter, or John, or Jath’ibaye, it no longer mattered. They were all one. At the center of both of Kahlil’s lives was his dedication to that single man who was his deity, ward, friend, and lover.
