6: Broken Fortress (5 page)

Kahlil hadn’t remembered the river reaching so far north. He had been almost certain that it had required railways to reach Vundomu from Nurjima. When he said as much, Ji nodded her gray and gold head.

“During the Seven Years’ War we destroyed their trains.” She briefly flashed her yellowed teeth. “Jath’ibaye brought the river up over their stations and tracks. Now if they want a war they have to swim upstream.”

A shudder shivered down Kahlil’s spine at the thought of the Rifter unleashing such force. His memory flickered with the images of crumbling mountains and shattered kingdoms that had filled so many holy books. Just how far would Jath’ibaye go to protect his Fai’daum?

Kahlil turned his attention back to the kingdom that Jath’ibaye had forged from the ruins of the northlands. Gazing down, Kahlil could make out the traces of the Vundomu he remembered. The original walls curved like ribs around new domes and towers of red stone and glittering glass. From the steep southern walls, the structures of Vundomu cascaded in gentle avenues of shops, cottages, clock towers and raised walkways down to the vast lake at its feet.
 

The three verdant islands that rose from the lake reminded Kahlil of gigantic shells in their perfect symmetry. Stately white buildings dominated what appeared to be a village occupying the largest island. The other two seemed lush and wild, even this early in the northern spring. Hundreds of small boats darted across the lake’s glassy surface, sailing between the islands.

Carefully, Kahlil adjusted the lenses of the telescope, focusing in on one bright blue boat. The women on board seemed to be line fishing. Kahlil watched as a blonde girl hauled a tiny fish up from the water. An older woman held the fish up to a caliper, then shook her head and tossed the fish back into the lake.

“What are they doing?” Kahlil asked.

Ji looked up at him from where she had curled up near a heating pipe. She yawned, showing her yellowed teeth.
 

“Where?” Ji’s voice sounded soft and still half asleep.

“Out on the lake. They’re throwing fish back.”

“Probably featherfin.” Ji lowered her head back down to her foreleg. “They have to be as long as a hand, otherwise they aren’t old enough to have bred yet and there won’t be any left next year.”

“You have fishing regulations now?” Kahlil asked. He supposed he should have expected as much. After all, John had been an ecologist. Briefly, Kahlil wondered how differently the Fai’daum homeland would have turned out if the Rifter had been a different man, a theater arts professor, for instance. People’s clothes certainly could have been a bit flashier.
 

“We only introduced the featherfin six years ago, but they have established themselves well enough,” Ji said. “They give the blue eel something to eat other than little moonfish. They seem to be attracting crown geese as well.”

“Right.” Kahlil’s knowledge of fish was limited to what he had experienced in Nayeshi and that, for the most part, had come in the form of breaded sticks. Or perhaps that had been chicken. He wasn’t sure anymore.

“It bores me too,” Ji sighed, “but it matters to him, you know. The fish, the plants, the animals, the stone and soil, it all matters to him.”

“Jath’ibaye, you mean?”
 

Ji nodded. “After the fall of Rathal’pesha, all these lands were in ruins. Just miles of mud, ash, and shattered rock. He brought it all back. It took years, but he did it.” Ji cocked her head. “He brought you back as well. I never would have thought he could have done that, but here you are.”

“Yes, here I am.” Kahlil frowned, thinking how odd it was that he should be so comfortable with this woman and that she should seem so at ease with him as well. “Did you know me, Ji? I mean, before now. I think I remember you from some other time.”

“I knew you and have known you many times over,” Ji replied. “Once, you were meant to kill me. I saw it when I was still a captive within the issusha’im. It was the price I was to pay for the destruction of the Great Gate.”

Inside Kahlil, a distant memory stirred. The shattered yellow stones. The broken blade.

“I was to lead an assault into Umbhra’ibaye, send a false message to the Kahlil in Nayeshi, and then destroy everything.”

“I think I remember. My sister was there.” Kahlil closed his eyes, trying to pull the faint memories into focus. He recalled a weight against his back. Something whispering words softly into his ear. He thought there had been flowers and then the smell of a cigarette. Each impression faded even as he tried to concentrate on it.

“But that never happened,” Ji said gently.

“That’s not true. Umbhra’ibaye did fall.” That, Kahlil was sure of. All of the Payshmura strongholds had fallen.

“Not as I had seen it and not as you saw it either. Years before then,” Ji replied. “Jath’ibaye destroyed it.”

“But I remember—” Kahlil stopped himself. He wasn’t sure what he remembered.

“You remember what never happened.” Ji shifted to scratch at her side with her back leg. Kahlil fought to keep a sense of reality. It was disorienting to be having this conversation with a dog. Even knowing that Ji was an escaped Issusha Oracle speaking from inside an animal form didn’t keep all this from seeming like it should have been a dream.
 

“It’s the same thing that drove so many issusha’im mad. They saw what happened and what never happened—lives, kingdoms, endless histories that the Payshmura altered and destroyed before they could come into being. Only the issusha’im lived them, knew them, and at the same time, knew that they had never come to pass.” Ji shook her head. “To cling to what is lost, no matter how real it once seemed or once was, will lead only to madness.”

“But I do remember you,” Kahlil said. “Not just from Umbhra’ibaye.”

Ji’s gaze lifted and she studied him for a few moments. Kahlil thought she might be weighing her response, but just the fact that she took pause told him he was right.

“Yes,” Ji admitted. “When you were a child, before the Payshmura came and took you and Rousma, I lived with your family for a while. Eventually, I left to join the Fai’daum. But when you were just a tiny baby, I talked to you. I used to play with you.”

“Oh,” Kahlil said. That was not at all what he’d expected. As a child he’d been cared for by a large dog? It seemed utterly strange and yet there was a deep warmth, an almost soothing reassurance that he felt when he looked into her big brown eyes.

“But that isn’t what you remember, is it?” Ji asked.

“No,” Kahlil said. “I remember…” The heat of her blood on his hands. His black blade driven into her body. He realized that he didn’t want to tell her these things. In Nurjima she had helped to save his life.

“You remember killing me,” Ji put in smoothly. “In the rain, beneath the apple blossoms, we fought. You won. But what you did afterwards, what you did in Nayeshi, changed all of that. Our battle never occurred. That entire history was written over by a new one.”

Kahlil knew this, and yet hearing Ji say as much disturbed him. For the first time he allowed himself to consider the full implication of the changes he’d wrought by allowing the Rifter to enter Basawar unguarded and unrecognized.

“And I’m not part of this new history, am I?” Kahlil asked. “That’s why my memories are all wrong.”

Ji only nodded.
 

“I was in Nayeshi and then lost between the worlds. I missed the changes.”

“Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t.” Ji lowered her head onto her paws again. “Tell me, are there things that you recall, but you know couldn’t have happened?”

“Yes,” Kahlil said, but he didn’t elaborate.

“I had them as well.” Ji nodded. “Dreams, thoughts, brief flashes. Visions of another life. I imagine that you resist them. I imagine that you suppress them as much as you can.” She paused, but Kahlil offered no confirmation. Ji went on, “You are carrying two lives. One belongs to this history and another does not. You may not want to know the life you lived here. You may not want to be the man you were, but let me tell you that there is danger in not knowing. There are mistakes that you could avoid if you would just allow yourself to know.”

Kahlil scowled at Ji. She sounded very much the Issusha Oracle now.
 

“Or not.” Ji closed her eyes. Kahlil turned back to the telescope. He focused out past the farthest mountains, out to the very brink of the telescope’s limit. A churning cauldron of white clouds and mist filled his vision. Faint gray shadows seemed to move just behind the swaths of vapor like bones beneath translucent skin.

“I died, didn’t I?” Kahlil asked at last. “I mean Ravishan—he died.”
 

Ji didn’t immediately respond. Kahlil thought that she had fallen asleep again. Then he heard her voice.

“There is no difference between you and Ushiri Ravishan. You are one and the same. But yes, you died when Rathal’pesha fell.”

He’d had dreams of this death. The fire and confusion of battle, and then agony. Jath’ibaye had been there—holding him and shaking with desperation. Kahlil felt cold and sick.

“You died,” Ji said gently. “But now he’s brought you back. And he needs you more than you can know—”

Kahlil cut her off with a shake of his head. He wasn’t the man Jath’ibaye needed—not the one who had rescued him on the Holy Road, not the one who had fought an army here at Vundomu. Not the one who had died like a hero.

He was the man who’d lurked in shadows and silence. He was the assassin.

“Kyle?” Ji asked softly. “Is something wrong?”

He almost laughed at that. Something was very wrong and it was him. Here.

 
“No. I…I just need to be alone for a little while,” Kahlil said. “I need to go somewhere and think.”

“What should I tell Jath’ibaye?” Ji asked.

“He told me I was free to do as I pleased.” Kahlil could see from Ji’s expression that she would try to persuade him to stay if she could. She would want him to talk to her and to Jath’ibaye. But Kahlil didn’t want to talk. He needed to be alone.
 

He brought his hand up and split open the Gray Space.

“Be careful,” Ji called to him. She might have said more, but Kahlil was already far away.
 

Chapter Fifty-Five

Kahlil went north, as far north as he could before the Gray Space turned treacherous and contorted with distortions. Unconsciously, he supposed, he was searching for Rathal’pesha, the place where he had grown up, been tested, trained, and died. But Rathal’pesha had long since crashed into the sea. He dropped out of the Gray Space on the northern edge of the chasm.

He knelt down and touched the pale soil. It was dry and cold, each distinct pebble looking like some broken bit of shell or eroded bone. It felt nothing like the rich soil surrounding Vundomu. He opened his hand and the grains fell through his fingers like fine sand. The desolate white plateau stretched out to the very edge of the land and then dropped straight down to the ocean below.

Kahlil couldn’t see the waters. Mist and fog rose up from the ocean in thick, swirling walls. Distantly, he could hear the crash of waves more than a mile below. Only the utter silence allowed him to notice them at all. He had never seen the ocean of his own world, and briefly, he wondered if the waters were as emerald and fertile as the northern Pacific of Nayeshi. Or were they as dull and gray as the lands above them?
 

He shifted the weight of the yasi’halaun against his back. He had not wanted to leave it in Vundomu. Not after he had almost died to retrieve it in Nurjima. He had almost died so many times—come so close to it so often that he supposed that it shouldn’t have been a surprise to discover that in another life he had died.
 

Kahlil scowled out at the rolling fog. Rathal’pesha once stood out there, somewhere. Perhaps the remains of his body were out there as well. It would have been nearly thirty years. There would just be skeletal remains, if anything.

What would it be like to touch his own bones?

Kahlil glanced down at his hands. Whatever remains that might lie out beyond the mist weren’t his. They were Ravishan’s. Though Ji had said that there was no difference, Kahlil knew otherwise. Ravishan had died. Kahlil was still here, the vestigial remnant of a history that never existed.

He supposed he could do as Ji wished. He could usurp Ravishan’s life. If he wanted to, he could lay claim to everything Ravishan had known and felt, to Ravishan’s entire existence.
  

Kahlil closed his eyes. Already he could summon memories that could not have been his own.