The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya)

by Bradley Beaulieu

  Nikandr didn’t know why he did it, but he found it vastly amusing that the woman from Hael had escaped. He laughed, good and long, for the first time in what felt like months.

  He wondered if the commander would pull him down from the saddle, perhaps beat him for his impudence. But he did not. He merely set his jaw and pointed his gaze to the fore, as if he knew he deserved it.

  PART II

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Atiana lay against the floor of a pitch-dark cell. She took measured breaths, drawing in the mineral scent of the air, exhaling it as slowly as she drew it in. She was naked, her skin in direct contact with the cold stone. She tried to convince herself she was surrounded by freezing water, that a servant awaited her return from the aether, that above her lay the bulk of Galostina. But however she tried to fool herself, she knew it was not the same. It felt different. It smelled different. And by the ancients, it was too warm.

  More than this, though, she desperately wanted to enter the aether—to find Nikandr and the others, to find Ishkyna, to summon what help she could—and desperation was one of the surest things that would keep a Matra from entering the midnight world.

  Part of her wished for a censer, wished for a knife and coals so that she could burn her blood and cross over without the embrace of the frigid waters of the drowning basin. Another part was horrified at the thought. And another part still wanted to enter the aether as she had on the small island Duzol and in the city of Vihrosh on Galahesh. She’d done these things. Why couldn’t she do it again? Why did she need water or blood?

  She shivered.

  The blood. Her own blood. How burning blood could allow her to cross over she had no idea. She wanted to believe that some combination of time and place and her own mindset had allowed her to cross over, and yet there was no denying what had happened.

  She sat up, waited for the pain of remaining immobile for so long to pass, and then sat with her legs folded beneath her. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d pulled her hands over her head as if there were smoke rising before her now. She gripped her hands tightly to keep them from shaking.

  She hadn’t eaten in two days. She’d been given water, but very little. And yet she knew it wasn’t these things that caused her mind to wander, to lose touch with the solidity of the world around her. It was the tūtūn. It had somehow remained within her ever since the ritual three nights ago. When her mind was at its weakest, she would slip into some memory, very often those that had run through her that night, and it would feel as though she were there, out in the desert, drawing smoke over her hair, or in the aether speaking with her sister. When she fell asleep she would wake to someone’s voice, and it would take her long, panic-stricken moments for her to realize it was her own voice.

  At times she would cry, but soon after she would force herself to stop. She would stand in her earthen cell, vowing to take whatever the Kohori had in store for her. She was a child of the islands, after all. What terrified her to the bone, however, was the thought that she was losing her own mind, because instead of fading, the memories of cutting her own wrist, of the sizzle as each drop struck the hot censer, of the acrid smell that lifted from it soon after, had come more often, and with greater intensity.

  Light suddenly shone down upon her hands. She blinked from the intensity of it and saw with crystal clarity how badly her hands were shaking. She’d had no idea. She gripped them again as her breath released in halting increments, like snow as it slips in those silent moments before an avalanche begins.

  But then came sound. A thump. Creaking.

  The light dimmed, became brighter. The sounds approached, and she remembered that this place, this cell, was deep underground. Despite the pain it brought, she stared up into the bright light. There was a ladder there. Someone was descending. Who, she couldn’t tell. Her eyes were watering, and blinking did nothing to help.

  The person—a woman from the shape of her—reached the bottom of the cell and stared down at Atiana. After a few moments, she sat and leaned against the wall.

  It was Ushai. She held a set of white robes, which she handed to Atiana.

  Atiana accepted the robes, but did nothing with them. “What are you doing here?”

  It made no sense. She’d been told that the others had left two days ago, the morning after she’d been put down in this cell. They’d answered few of her questions, but her query of where her friends and companions had gone had been answered coldly. “They left,” the Kohori man had told her. “They attacked our people and left.”

  She thought surely everyone had left. Why, then, was Ushai still here?

  “Can you climb?” she asked.

  Atiana stared at her hands. They were shaking much less now. She licked her lips and nodded. “I think so.”

  “Then come.”

  Ushai stood and stepped up the ladder. Atiana pulled on the robes Ushai had given her and followed as best she could, but it was slow going. Her hands shook as she moved up one rung, two. Her feet slipped, until by the time she neared the top she was sure she would fall and crush her legs against the cold stone below. But she didn’t fall, and Ushai helped her out into sunlight so bright it caused pain to look upon. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything but hide her face in the crook of her arm.

  Finally the pain eased and she was able to send quick glances to the landscape around her. She was outside the village. A hundred paces away were the first of the mudbrick homes with their thatched roofs.

  Ushai stared at Atiana with an unconcerned look. She held her damaged arm close to her body, as if it had been injured. She stiffened when she realized Atiana was staring at it.

  “Where are the others?” Atiana asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said and walked away.

  Atiana followed. They walked toward the center of the village. It took time as slowly as Atiana was moving, but eventually they passed the tall obelisk. It looked like a bloody finger pointing accusingly at the sky. Ushai continued toward a round building, the largest in the village. Two Kohori men, wearing the full red robes so that Atiana could only see their eyes, nodded to Ushai as she approached. She nodded back and passed through the open doors of the building.

  Atiana had never been inside this place, but when she entered, she stopped and stared. Glittering stones had been worked into the brick in the patterns of the heavens. Larger bits of stone—most of them white, but some yellow or pink or blue—caught the light coming into the room from a hole in the ceiling. At the hole was a sculpture of mirrors crafted so that it spread the sunlight throughout the room, where it lit these manmade constellations from the nighttime sky. Atiana could nearly picture the blanket of stars that occupied the sky above, so different than what she was used to among the islands of the Grand Duchy.

  In the center of the massive space was a stout table made of stone. Upon it, laid out over a black blanket, was a young woman. A beam of light shone down from above directly onto her face. Ushai led Atiana here, standing aside to let her look at the woman unobstructed. Atiana thought she should know her. She looked familiar. And yet, Atiana couldn’t place her.

  Beyond the table stood a brazier with hot coals glowing within it. The air above it wavered. What the Kohori might do with such a thing here, she had no idea. Near the brazier stood a pedestal with a fine red cloth thrown over it. Atiana wondered what lay beneath the cloth, but she was too transfixed by the vision of this place and this strange woman. She paced closer, moving over a stone floor inlaid with bits of glinting black stone. The woman. Her eyes were elegant. Her chin strong. Her hair was the color of rich, aged oak. She was so familiar…

  At last Atiana reached the very edge of the table. There was a bandage wrapped around the woman’s left shoulder. Blood seeped through, making Atiana wonder just how much blood she’d lost, how long she’d been unconscious.

  “Who—”

  Atiana stopped. No sooner had the word touched her lips than she knew.

  It couldn�
��t be. It was impossible.

  And yet, there was an undeniable resemblance. She had Kaleh’s eyes. And her nose and chin and lips. Her features were fuller—this was a woman grown—but there was no doubt that the youth Atiana had seen on Galahesh was hidden within those features. She’d seen her only eighteen months before, in Vihrosh. It was her hand, in fact, her touch, that had drawn her fully into Sariya’s clutches. She’d been only eleven then. Eleven. And here she was now, a girl that looked as though she’d seen twenty summers.

  “How?” Atiana asked.

  “I do not know.” She motioned to Kaleh’s sleeping form, as if that were answer enough. “She was found by the Kohori to the south, near the edge of the valley. She was unconscious.”

  Kaleh’s eyes moved beneath her lids as if she were having a terribly vivid dream. Her lips parted, and she began to speak. At least, Atiana thought she was speaking. She couldn’t actually hear any words. Even when she leaned over so that her ear was just above Kaleh’s lips, she heard only a low susurrus, like the whisper of the sea within the halls of Galostina.

  “Has she awoken?” Atiana asked.

  “Not since she was brought here.”

  Atiana’s mind had been muddled in the cell. She’d been confused and off-balance from the climb and the light and the mystery of Kaleh. But her wits were finally starting to return to her. She stared into Ushai’s eyes. “Where are the others?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And yet you remain.”

  “I am here because I wish to be.”

  “You joined us to find Nasim and the Atalayina.”

  “Spoken like a woman of the Grand Duchy. Yours is not the only way, Atiana Vostroma. There are others, and the Kohori have opened my eyes.”

  A cold fury rose up inside Atiana. “You abandoned us.”

  “I left to find my own way. The world needs to be healed.” She motioned to Kaleh. “Sariya has returned to them, just as they always believed.”

  “You can’t believe it, though. You know what Sariya is like. She’ll destroy us all if she has her way.”

  “I know that, and so do the Kohori. They’re not so foolish as you believe. They were right about Sariya’s return, and they were right about the Atalayina.”

  “She has it?”

  Ushai paused, but then stepped over to the pedestal and pulled the red cloth away. Sitting upon the striated column of glittering granite was a stone of blue. Sunlight did not hit the Atalayina directly, and yet it still gathered much on its own, as if jealous of attention. Bright veins of silver and gold seemed lit from within, and in that instant, in this place deep within the wide, dry ocean of the Gaji, it looked deep, like a well one could use to peer to the center of the earth to see its soul.

  Atiana stepped forward, suddenly and inexplicably nervous. She could feel the warmth from the glowing coals within the brazier to her right. She thought Ushai might stop her, but Ushai merely watched, her eyes passive, as Atiana approached the fabled stone of the Al-Aqim.

  Atiana reached out a trembling hand. She touched the stone’s cool surface, wondering what secrets lay hidden within, wondering indeed how they might be unlocked.

  When she submerged herself into the waters of the drowning basin, as her skin was chilled and she neared the point at which she might slip over to the world between, she felt as though she could embrace one or the other—the material world or the aether—but not both. To try to remain grounded in the material world and the ephemeral world of the aether would doom her. She felt the same way now. Except instead of two worlds, she felt as though she were touching all three—the material world of Erahm, the spirit world of Adhiya, and the place between, the aether. She felt as though she could take a step in any one direction, and embrace any one of these worlds like never before. The material world of Erahm and the aether were two worlds she was familiar with; they caused her no fear. Adhiya, however, was something else entirely. Were she to take one more step toward it, she was sure she would be drawn into it, just as the hezhan did when they crossed over to her world. She would be lost, consumed by the hezhan that waited on the other side.

  Atiana felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned and found Ushai staring at her with a look of mild concern, but when Atiana blinked and stepped away from the stone, her eyes relaxed.

  “The two of them…” Ushai spread her hands wide like a havaqiram summoning the wind. Strangely enough, it was the ruined and shriveled remains of her left hand that motioned to the Atalayina, the one that had been burned trying to reach for a piece of that very stone. “The stone that came from this place at the dawn of time, and the woman who touched it on the day the world nearly broke. The Kohori would have her back, Atiana, daughter of Radia.”

  Atiana stared at Kaleh’s young, smooth face. “And they want me to give her to them?”

  “Just so.”

  Atiana struggled to understand. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you wish to know more. Because without Sariya’s knowledge, the world might never be healed. And that knowledge is now more important than ever.”

  Atiana stepped up to Kaleh’s side. “You want me to enter the aether.”

  Ushai stepped to the other side of the table. She regarded Atiana with heavily lidded eyes. She leaned down and from beneath the table—perhaps from a shelf Atiana hadn’t noticed—retrieved a brass censer and a small, keen knife. She set the censer on Kaleh’s stomach. The knife followed with a dull clink as it was set on top of the censer. “I cannot enter the aether as you can.”

  Atiana glanced back at the brazier, her mouth suddenly dry.

  She’d done those things in the desert, finding her way to the aether with her own blood, but it had felt distant ever since reaching Kohor. It had felt like someone else had done it, not her. Even after the visions she’d had in the hut while taking in the smoke of the tūtūn, the memories of the Haelish ritual had felt distant, like a dream. But now it was all rushing back. The censer and the knife sat before her, rising slowly with Kaleh’s breath, falling a moment later.

  What she found might wake Sariya. It might give the Kohori what they wanted. But Ushai had the right of it. Atiana couldn’t let this opportunity slip past. She had to know more about the stone.

  As Atiana took up the bone-handled knife and the cool censer, Ushai smiled.

  But Atiana grit her jaw. Ushai’s approval felt foul, like a betrayal of all she’d ever known.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The brazier clacked as Atiana used the wide wooden handles to set it on the glittering stone floor. The sound of it echoed harshly in the immensity of the space. After taking a deep breath, she set the censer onto the coals and waited for it to heat. She held the knife in her left hand. Already her palm and fingers were sweaty. She swallowed as Ushai stood several paces away, staring down like an expectant mother.

  Atiana pulled back the right sleeve of her coarse linen robes. She slipped the blade of the knife beneath the bandages, the ones that had been set days ago after Atiana and the others had arrived. She pulled the knife sharply along the light cloth, cutting it free.

  She placed the knife near the other cuts and pressed it into her skin. The bright pain felt like the bursting of the sun from behind dark clouds. She watched as blood pooled in the cut, ran down the length of her wrist, and dripped down onto the censer.

  The drops sizzled. The blood blackened. Smoke rose.

  She felt sick, and still she squeezed her arm, forcing more blood to flow.

  When the bleeding had slowed to a trickle, she leaned over the censer and pulled the rising smoke toward her. As the smoke sighed across the skin of her face, over her tightly bound blonde hair, she allowed her feelings of disloyalty to shed from her frame. She gathered more of the smoke with motions like a child trying to guide a dandelion seed drifting on the wind. She drew the smoke down along her chest, along her stomach and thighs. She drew it along her arms and across her fingers, never allowing her hands to touch. The feelings o
f fear, of being alone in this place without Nikandr, without any hope of her sister, Ishkyna, finding her, faded.

  The feelings of isolation, however, she embraced, for this was the touchstone of the Matri. As important as it was not to fear the aether, it was important to understand its nature, and the aether brought nothing if not isolation.

  The sounds of her breathing faded. The motions of her arm became rhythmic, trancelike.

  And soon… Soon…

  Atiana drifts in the dark. Before her is her own body, still rhythmically drawing smoke over her frame. She is white against a field of midnight blue, as are most things when viewed in the dark of the aether. Ushai stands near, watching, waiting.

  And there is Kaleh.

  She lies on the stone slab like an offering. She’s outlined in white, but within her, subtler hues shift along her frame like sunlight against the bed of a shoal in calm seas. It’s been six full seasons since Atiana saw her last, but she immediately recognizes Sariya’s presence. It would be impossible not to. The two of them had seen one another’s thoughts. They had warred against one another. Sariya had overtaken her with her subtle ways, making Atiana believe that Sariya’s thoughts had been her own.

  Atiana approaches, then stops short, shocked, for drifting from the wound on Kaleh’s shoulder is a faint whiff of smoke. Like the dying breath of a snuffed candle the smoke rises and dissipates. Unlike the bright outline of Kaleh’s form, it is darker than the near blackness of the aether’s deep ocean blue. It flows from Kaleh’s wound toward the Atalayina, and from there it is lost, drawn into some world known only to that ancient stone.

  Never in all her years in the aether has she seen such a thing. She wonders if it was something she merely overlooked—its subtle nature would make it difficult to sense—but she has seen many wounded, and with more grievous wounds than Kaleh has now. It might be the nature of the Atalayina, a stone whose hidden powers are difficult to define, but she thinks not. More likely it’s due to the ritual she performed to enter this place; the drawing of her own blood perhaps makes her more attuned to such things.