Heir of Iron (The Powers of Amur Book 1)

by J. S. Bangs

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to understand. Just hold still.”

  He slipped his hand beneath the collar of Navran’s kurta and ran his fingers gently down Navran’s chest, like a lover’s caress. Navran went rigid. Ruyam’s fingers pressed against his breastbone and ribs, seeking a particular place, and then his hand stiffened. A trickle of heat leaked from Ruyam’s fingers.

  And then, all at once, a searing pain, as if a brand straight from the fire were pressed against his chest. He screamed. He tried to struggle, but his whole body was rendered immobile by bolts of agony. The burning raced through his blood. His screaming stopped. His lungs could not draw air. His lips would not move. Every part of his body flared with pain, as though molten copper coursed through his veins, his face and his palms pulsing with it, his spine crackling from the heat.

  Ruyam withdrew his hand. The burning ceased. Navran collapsed to the floor.

  “Your allies will rescue you tonight,” Ruyam said. “I’ve arranged for their rescue to succeed. You will tell them nothing, of course. The easiest thing for both of us is if you simply follow all their demands. I know you are close to the Heir—Cauratha of Virnas, if you’ve told me that truly—and you’ll see him soon enough. And all you need to do is touch him. Everything else you’ve already done.”

  Drool trickled out of Navran’s mouth onto the stone floor. His lips moved. His limbs were like wet reeds.

  “Kirshta, call for the servants of Parthani-kha and have them gather up the body of their mistress. Make sure they understand what happened here. By tonight I want every khadir and majakhadir and merchant within ten miles of Majasravi to know the story.” A strange weariness entered into Ruyam’s voice. “Then attend to me in my chamber. I will require a peculiar kind of refreshment tonight. Bring incense, rice milk, and copper.”

  His feet moved out of Navran’s sight. Navran couldn’t yet move his head to follow. The door of the chamber opened and closed. Kirshta knelt next to him.

  “You failed,” he said. “You’ve doomed us.”

  His lips found just enough strength to speak. “I always fail.”

  21

  Gocam’s eyes were closed, his chest barely moving with his breath. Mandhi watched Navran with eyes so emptied by horror and grief that he couldn’t tell if she hated him or pitied him. His mother covered her face and wept quietly in the corner.

  “There is a way,” Gocam said at last.

  No one responded at first. The rain thrummed against the thatch overhead and pounded against the mud streets. Finally Navran said, “A way to do what?”

  “A way to remove Ruyam’s mark. Let me see it.”

  Navran lifted his shirt. The tips of Ruyam’s fingers had left circular burns at five points on Navran’s chest, and ragged lines of seared flesh like lightning bolts joined them. The shape was like a warped and blasphemous pentacle.

  “What will it do?” Mandhi asked. Her voice was gravelly with the aftermath of her sobbing.

  “I don’t know yet,” Gocam said. “But Navran cannot go to Virnas with it.”

  Navran’s heart lifted. He could be free of the Heir’s ring and of Ruyam’s mark. “You can erase it?”

  “Erase?” Gocam shook his head. “A mark like that cannot be erased. But it can be taken.” He rose to his feet and strode across the room to Navran. “Lie down.”

  Navran stretched himself out on the reeds. Gocam’s dry, thin fingers probed gently at the scars on his chest. They bloomed with heat at the brush of his fingertips, as if the fire that made them was ready to burst into flame again beneath his skin. He drew in his breath sharply at the pain. Gocam pressed his palm against Navran’s breastbone, and a ripple of liquid chill quenched it.

  “This is how Ruyam followed you to Ternas,” Gocam whispered. His hand remained on Navran’s chest. The chill that began in Gocam’s palm began to spread through Navran’s veins, like little trickles of cold water dribbling beneath his skin. “Yes, I see his art. He locked the fire within you. At the moment you laid eyes on the Heir, it would have spilled out and consumed you and the Heir alike.”

  Gocam grimaced in pain, and the tips of his fingers dug into Navran’s flesh. Navran cried out in agony, and Gocam hushed him. He continued to speak in a soft voice. “If you had gone straight to Virnas, Ruyam would have had no need to pursue you. But in Ternas he feared someone might free you. The mark which he placed on you is not an art which most thikratta learn, but a few of us have heard of it and might know its cure.”

  “I brought Ruyam to Ternas.”

  “And Ruyam was the one who burned it. You bear enough guilt rightly. Don’t imagine further debts for yourself.”

  The sensation of cold reached his palms. It tingled pleasantly in his fingertips. “Ah,” Gocam said. “That is the extent of it.”

  “You’re done?”

  “Done? I’ve reached the point where I can begin.”

  A bolt of pain shocked Navran rigid. Half a scream fled his lips, only to be choked into a whining gurgle as his throat locked. The same burning, the same fiery immobility as when Ruyam had marked him—but not the same. Alongside the glowing copper in his veins was a countervailing force, a cold as piercing as the snow, a darkness, a negation, a silence into which the heat dissipated and was nothing. The pain of both in his body at once was greater than the pain of the fire alone, but even as he thought it, he felt the pain lessen. The fire cooled and retreated, and with it the cold withdrew. His lungs came unstuck and he gasped for air.

  “My son!” Bhundi said. She scrambled forward, reaching for Navran’s face.

  “Wait!” Gocam shouted and shoved her back with an outstretched arm. Navran spasmed. Only his chest was hot now, with a simple, terrestrial heat, like the burning of a brand against his flesh. And then, with the suddenness of a coal dropped into water, it was gone.

  He fell limp against the floor. Gocam cried out and bent over, his hand curling against his belly. Mandhi shrieked and came to Gocam’s side as Bhundi crawled forward and took Navran’s head into her lap.

  “It’s done,” Gocam said. He leaned back into Mandhi’s chest. He seemed pale and drained of blood, but he smiled. He showed them his hand: the five burns were transferred to his own flesh, the ragged lines between them criss-crossing his palm.

  Navran put his hand on his chest. The skin was smooth. There was no pain of fire when he touched it.

  Bhundi wept and bent forward, kissing Navran’s chest as if he were an infant and running her hands down his face and beard. He sat up, took his mother’s hands in his own, and pulled her into an embrace. She wet his chest with her tears, and he kissed the top of her head.

  * * *

  In the morning Gocam was gone.

  The household was in a panic for a few minutes as they attempted to discern whether anyone had seen Gocam go and what had happened. The rain had ceased, but the roads of the village were nothing but mud. Navran stripped off his sandals, tied his garments above his knees, and slogged through the mire as far as the boundary of Idirja, looking for any sign of the thikratta. But there was nothing. When he returned he found Mandhi and Bhundi talking to a neighbor.

  “He looked like a spirit,” the man said, gesturing madly about him. He was vaguely familiar to Navran, but he couldn’t recall the man’s name. “Like the rain passed through him.”

  “But where did he go?” Mandhi asked.

  “Downriver,” the main said, waving off to the east. “Away from me!” He made the pentacle over his chest.

  Mandhi looked up and noticed Navran approaching from the east. “Did you see him?”

  “No,” Navran said. “No trace.”

  “He left no footprints,” the man went on. Navran dredged the name up from old memory: Vishitu.

  Bhundi looked terrified at the man’s tale, but Mandhi seemed to stifle a look of disbelief. “What time was it? Do you know?”

  “Night,” Vishitu said. “After the moon set.”

  “
Early in the evening,” Mandhi muttered. “He has almost a whole day ahead of us.”

  “We can catch up with him,” Navran said.

  Mandhi pursed her lips and looked to the south. “We could just go directly to Virnas.”

  “No!” Navran said with a vehemence that surprised him. “We have to find him.”

  “Why?” Mandhi’s tone was biting. “You pawned off your burden on him. Now let him go and face Ruyam for you.”

  “I won’t,” Navran said. “I owe it to him.”

  “And what do you think you’re going to do when you get to Jaitha?”

  Navran took a heavy breath and put his hand to his forehead. “I don’t know. Help, if I can.”

  Mandhi shrugged and turned away. “Well, I’m going straight to Virnas. By Gocam’s charge to you, you have to come with me.”

  Navran put a hand on her shoulder. “Mandhi, please. I owe enough debts. Let me make good on this one.”

  Mandhi’s contemptuous glance took in him and Bhundi. “What, exactly do you owe Gocam?”

  Navran dropped his voice to a whisper. “He saved me. Saved us. He’s going to Ruyam. Let’s not let him go alone.”

  “And your mother?”

  Ah, that was a problem. Bhundi watched them with a strained mixture of hope and bitterness. He owed her as well… but he couldn’t bring her with them right now. Not to Jaitha, and certainly not to Virnas.

  He took his mother’s hand. “I’ll return to you. I won’t abandon you twice.”

  Bhundi put her hand over his and stroked the back of it gently. Her expression seemed hopeful, but her voice cracked. “Perhaps ye will.”

  Vishitu broke in. “Is this… are ye Navran, Bhundi’s son?”

  “I am,” Navran said.

  “Come back after all these years, eh?” He looked at Navran with an expression of wary surprise. Navran could hardly blame him for his wariness, as he had vexed Vishitu’s garden when he had lived in Idirja.

  “But I’m leaving,” Navran said. “We’re following the man you saw to Jaitha.”

  “I suppose we are,” Mandhi said with a note of resignation. “And if we are, we need to move quickly.” She looked at the sky of monsoon clouds, waiting to burst into rain.

  * * *

  The Amsadhu had fulfilled its yearly promise and buried the rice fields from valley wall to valley wall. The peaks of the dikes between fields poked above the flood, forming long chains of islands that met at right angles, pitted with gaps and forming a patchwork of rectangular lakes all the way to the river channel.

  They moved as quickly as they could on the mud channels that had been roads in the dry season, and stopped when the rains began again. And so they slowly crawled the last days down the river to Jaitha, chasing the rumor of an old man who moved like a ghost through the streets. They found memory of his passing in every village where they asked, and they seemed to be catching up to him. But the rain slowed them.

  There were few guest-houses in the long strand of villages lining the south boundary of the Amsadhu, and they had no money to stay in them, but in this part of the country there were Uluriya. They presented themselves as impoverished laborers returning to Jaitha in search of work and got by with charity. Conversation on the road was quiet and glum. The combination of sorrow and anger seemed to have hollowed Mandhi out, and her superficial curtness was like a scab over a deep wound. Navran persevered with the thought that he was almost free. Gocam had given him one more task to fulfill, and he might actually do it. And then it would be over.

  Jaitha appeared early one morning as a sliver of yellow stone beneath a gloomy sky. A few minutes later they were on the road, barefoot, with their damp, mud-splattered clothing tied above their knees as they sloshed through the muddy ruts of the early morning road. By the time they reached the gates the sun was a hand above the horizon, though it appeared only intermittently between the churning flock of clouds. The gates were open, and Mandhi asked the guards if they had seen an old man in a peasant’s costume pass through that morning. A guard answered in the affirmative and waved vaguely at the interior of the city.

  “Can’t you be more specific?” Mandhi said testily, but Navran put his hand on her shoulder.

  “He said the Emperor’s Bridge. That’s where we find him.”

  “Then we go around.” Mandhi made a grunt of exasperation in her throat.

  “The Emperor’s Bridge is to the east?”

  “Yes, and the inner city is flooded now, with the houses up on stilts and the roads filled with water. We’d either have to pay an oar-man or fight on the walkways to get through. It’s longer, but we have no choice.”

  She started at a near run down the footpath that ran under the city’s outer wall, and Navran ran to catch up. There was real traffic on the road, men pushing carts of night soil and women with jars of water balanced on their hips. Navran ignored their scornful stares as they pushed past. At the east gate, they stopped. A crowd of a dozen people or so was arguing around the gate with the guard.

  “I saw him!” a middle-aged woman shouted. “He passed beneath my window, moving as calm and quick as a duck.”

  “I don’t care,” the guard responded, then was drowned out by an angry chorus of shouts.

  Mandhi grabbed a man’s shoulder. “What happened?”

  “They say,” the man said, his voice dripping with scorn, “that a man was floating on the water through the city, going towards the Emperor’s Gate. And they want someone to go after him.”

  “Not floating,” the middle-aged woman said. “Walking, as if the water were solid stone.”

  “No!” shouted the guard again. He was local Jaitha militia, little more than a boy, but he stamped the butt of his spear against the stone at his feet and said in the most commanding voice he could muster, “This is not our duty to resolve. If he was going to the Emperor’s Gate, then let the Red Men deal with him.”

  “The Red Men?” Mandhi asked, raising her voice. “What Red Men?”

  The guard made a noise of irritation and waved at her with dismissal. The man who had answered her earlier said, “You’ve been traveling? There are Red Men encamped at the north end of the Emperor’s Bridge. Been there for a few weeks, disturbing traffic and bothering the king and the merchants alike. Something about—”

  “Thank you,” Mandhi said and bolted past the man onto the causeway. Navran followed. Neither of them needed to say why.

  The causeway was raised above the level of the flood and ran from the east gate to the Emperor’s Bridge. It seemed unusually crowded for this time in the morning, Navran thought. The traffic on the causeway thickened to a solid crowd as they approached the Bridge, and he began to hear nervous whispers traded from mouth to mouth in the press. An old man, they said. No one can cross the bridge. He just waits there.

  Mandhi stopped. The way forward was almost completely blocked with hand-carts and bodies, all crowded together and looking out towards the span of the bridge with agitated frustration. “I don’t think we can go much farther,” she said. “I don’t understand what’s happening. This is a complete standstill.”

  The dread that had lain in Navran’s stomach since Gocam had disappeared strengthened, but with it came a cool resolve. “I want to see him,” he said. “He’s holding Ruyam’s mark. I want to know.”

  Mandhi nodded. “We’ll have to be very, very rude.” And they plunged ahead, shoving people aside with elbows and fists and clambering over packets of goods dropped on the ground as they pushed towards the Bridge. Until they reached the front, and the stone expanse of the stone opened before them.

  Mandhi stopped, right at the place where the man she pushed aside had stood. Navran intended to follow her onto the bridge, but as soon as he reached the threshold he understood. There was no physical barrier that prevented him from going forward. But there was a compulsion to remain, not to follow, and not to come closer. It was completely impossible for him to take a step forward. He could no more walk onto the bridge t
han he could sprout wings and fly.

  “Do you see him?” Mandhi asked. She pointed across the bridge.

  The first leg of the bridge was thirty yards to the temple island which held the transported temple of Am. On the front step of the temple, beneath the glare of the gods and demons of the temple’s reliefs, sat Gocam in the Lotus posture. He was solid and unmoving as if he were a stone planted there a century ago. The dhorsha of the temple stood on the temple porch and argued with him, their voices reaching the crowd on the causeway as a cacophonous muddle.

  Gocam raised his hand. “You may leave,” he said. “I implore you to leave, in fact.” His voice traveled with strange clarity across the stone of the bridge.

  They yelled back at him. He didn’t move.

  And then, on the far shore of the Amsadhu, a shape stepped from the causeway to the bridge. The dhorsha suddenly fell quiet, looked to the north, and ran into the temple. A tall figure, robed in silk and glinting with gold. The stones seemed to creak as he walked across the arches.

  “You called me,” he said, and his voice was like the growling of thunder, carrying across the wide Amsadhu like a shout.

  Gocam moved. He stood, clenched his hands together in front of his chest, and bowed. “I called you, Ruyam,” he said.

  Ruyam strode across the bridge, flames seeming to burst from his footsteps. They met on the temple island. From the distance at which Mandhi and Navran watched, Ruyam seemed like a giant, a tower of silk and rubies that glowered down at Gocam with stormy malevolence. And Gocam stood there, his face as bland as a sheep’s, dressed in peasant’s clothes, looking up at Ruyam thundering above him.

  “Did I finally get you to come down from your mountain?” Ruyam said. “And what will you say to me after thirty years? Have the stones and the trees taught you something?”

  “Yes,” Gocam said. “And it is not too late for you to learn as well. Repent of power and go into the wilderness like the thikratta of old. It is not too late.”

  “Not too late,” Ruyam repeated and laughed. “With the empire in my hand, it is not too late.”