The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya) (19 page)

Despite this burning desire to stop her, he can do nothing but watch as Kaleh steps inside the tomb. He watches, impotent, as the lid slides away from the sarcophagus and the sheaf of wheat lying on the top falls to the cold tomb floor.

This man wears a circlet of gold, five stones set within it. His hair and beard are long and curly. It reminds Nasim so much of Ashan that tears form and slide down his cheeks.

As a blast of fire flows from Kaleh’s upturned palm, he lifts an emaciated hand and presses it against the flame. The fire splays where it strikes his hand, flows outward, licking against the low ceiling or the sides of the sarcophagus. The hoary skin of his face is pulled back in concentration. His deeply sunken eyes flare with pain or rage or fear. Kaleh’s face becomes more intense as well.

Please
, Nasim pleads to the fates,
let him win
.

But that battle is over as soon as it began. As powerful as this man might have once been, he has been sleeping for generations, for eons. How can he stand against Kaleh, a gifted young woman who holds the Atalayina in her hand?

He cannot.

And so the flames envelop his hand, then his wrist, and then his arm. Soon it has wrapped itself around him completely. His hair lights yellow, a contrast to the orange flames that surround him. He screams in pain, a sound so sad and forlorn it fills Nasim’s heart with bits of broken glass. When the man falls to the floor of the tomb, a black, broken husk, Nasim stares, raging inside while his body refuses to move. His tears slip wet and warm along his cheek. He feels them patter against his hand, but he cannot look at them, those hands that allowed entrance to this place.

When Kaleh steps from the room, her face is resolute. Emotionless. “
Insa
,” she says as she passes him.

And indeed, he forgets, as he did the last time. And the time before that.

As Kaleh marches down the hall, expecting to be followed, Nasim takes one last look into the tomb, and there he sees, cowering behind the sarcophagus, the dim outline of a girl. He peers into the darkness, but the light of the Atalayina is already too far, and he can see nothing but shadows within the room.

He knows not who the girl might be, but the sight of her sparks a memory. And that in turn sparks more. He’s confused as to why he’s here in this place. Confused where they might now be headed. But he knows who he is—Nasim—and he knows that the young woman walking down the tunnel is Kaleh, daughter of Sariya and Khamal, and he knows that many answers lie within the glowing stone she carries.

This isn’t much, this pittance of knowledge.

But it is a start.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Atiana stared into the campfire as Soroush leaned against a rock smoking his pipe while Goeh sprinkled salt over two freshly dressed desert hares. He skewered them with iron spits and set them onto the makeshift rotisserie he’d made from the fresh-cut branches off a nearby bush.

“Can you turn them?” he asked Soroush.

Soroush nodded as Goeh left to scout the trail behind them, as he did every night they camped. Soroush wore the double-robes of the Aramahn, inner robes of grey and outer robes of sage green. He had not yet taken off his white turban, which he often did at sunset. He was the only one with her at the fire now. Ushai was washing at a small stream at the center of the valley. Sukharam and Ashan were taking breath in a small cave Goeh had shown them.

And Nikandr…

Nikandr was riding ahead to check the way they’d take tomorrow. Atiana knew he was becoming overwhelmed by his urges again—she could see it in his eyes and the way he bowed in the saddle when he’d ridden away—but she had not tried to stop him. She had merely waved when he left. There was nothing else to say. Not anymore. She could no more fix him of this malady than she could summon a hezhan for him.

Soroush blew smoke into the air and turned the hares over absently. The sun was setting, but the sky was unnaturally overcast. The clouds were so uniformly grey that it reminded her of the islands. And that, of course, reminded her of the palotzas, the drowning chambers, entering the aether and expanding her mind as she’d done so many times in the past. She’d been away from it for well over a year. She’d missed it terribly at first, but she found that the desire had faded over time to a dull but persistent ache.

The wodjan had changed everything, however.

Now Atiana thought about it every waking moment. It was especially strong when she woke each morning. Those first few moments from sleep felt like waking from the drowning chamber, and when she realized she
hadn’t
been in the aether, she became despondent.

“Are you off with Nikandr?”

Atiana started, pulling her gaze from the flickering fire as Soroush turned the skewers. The smell of the hares cooking, the sound of the fat dripping and sizzling against the burning wood, reminded her of the grand dinners she and Mileva and Ishkyna—especially Ishkyna—had all loved so much. She managed to give Soroush a smile.

“Thinking of home.” She stared eastward, toward the Grand Duchy. “I miss it terribly.”

“
What
do you miss?”

She shrugged. “Many things. The people. The music. The dancing. But most of all, I miss taking the dark.”

Perhaps she shouldn’t have told him the truth—she didn’t want anyone to know about her thoughts of the aether and the wodjan—but it seemed like the right thing to do. The Aramahn tended to be brutally honest, and it seemed wrong, somehow, to lie to one of them, even Soroush, who she still thought of as Maharraht more than Aramahn.

He took a long pull from his pipe. “What do you miss about the aether?”

She thought about it for a moment. It was difficult to articulate. “Everything,” she finally said.

“Strange”—smoke trailed from his nostrils and mouth as he smiled wistfully—“when years ago you were petrified of it.”

“Petrified?” Atiana laughed. “Perhaps I was. But once you overcome your fears, it is a wondrous place. It connects this world to the one beyond. It runs through all things. I cannot help but marvel at its beauty every time I enter, and when I’m gone from it, a yearning builds within me.”

Soroush turned the skewers and adjusted the flaming logs below them with a spare stick. “You’ve been gone from the islands for eighteen months, and you’ve been here in the Gaji for nearly a year.” He glanced eastward himself. “Why now?”

He was coming dangerously close to the very thing she’d been trying to hide since the wodjan had come to their camp two nights ago.

“I like the Gaji,” she said after a pause. “It holds a stark beauty I hadn’t expected. But we’re coming closer to reaching our goal now. I can feel it. And it makes me wonder if I’ll ever see the islands again.”

Soroush furrowed his brow and pursed his lips. “You’ll see them again.”

“Is that so?”

He smiled for her, a wide thing that was strangely infectious from such a reticent man. “I’m sure of it.”

She returned the smile. “Then I’m glad.”

Ushai returned soon after, and Goeh came an hour after that. They ate in fits and starts, hoping the others would return so they could all eat together. Ushai did not eat of the hare. She merely chewed the bark from a tree that Goeh said would stave off hunger. She did so with her right hand. Her left, a scarred ruin from her time in Sariya’s tower on Galahesh, sat cradled in her lap. Ushai, after stabbing Sariya, had tried to grasp one of the broken pieces of the Atalayina, and the ward Sariya had set to protect it burned her badly.
 

While they ate, Soroush told them of the miserable islands he’d taken breath on during his first circuit of the world, how he moved slowly from desolate island to desolate island, accepting rides on skiffs occasionally from Aramahn who had taken to the winds to circuit the world.

Atiana tore off a strip of juicy meat from the thigh of the hare. “When did you first take to the winds?”

“When I was twelve. My mother left us when I was seven. I remained with my father for five more years until the calling finally convinced me to leave him. Truthfully, though, I felt it years earlier.”

Atiana knew of their practices, of leaving their children when they were as young as seven or eight to do as they would, but it never failed to surprise her when she heard the tales. “He simply left you on an island in the middle of the seas?”

Soroush waggled his head while using his fingers to scoop hamma, a bean paste spiced with paprika and cumin and the sour seeds of a wizened fruit Goeh had found for them, into his mouth. “He didn’t
leave
me, not as you mean it. I
asked
him to go. It was time.”

“Were there others there?”

Soroush shook his head. “Looking back now, it was perhaps a foolish decision. The islands to the east of Anuskaya are mostly barren. There are birds. There are fish. And little else. Only when you near the western border of Yrstanla is there game to speak of.” He shrugged. “But I wished to be alone, and I wished for it to be so as long as the fates saw fit.”

“Meaning what?” Goeh asked, pausing from ravenous bites he was taking from his own pieces of hare.

“Meaning I had no way off the island.”

Atiana stared, unbelieving, but the look on Soroush’s face made it clear he wasn’t joking. “Did your father return for you?”

“
Neh
, nor did I wish him to. I learned much on that island”—he looked more deeply into Atiana’s eyes while the firelight glimmered in his eyes—“not the least of which was patience.”

Atiana finished her food and set the bones roughly aside. “I would never leave a child of twelve on an island by himself, much less my own son.”

Ushai, who had been sitting quietly and watching the exchange with an amused glint in her eye, sat up straighter. “That’s the difference between us,” she said. “The Aramahn allow the world to come to them while the Landed wish to take it. The trouble is, the world cares not for your desire to own it. It laughs at you, while we learn.”

Atiana stared into Ushai’s wide, striking eyes. Her shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a short braid. She wore an Aramahn dress—simple in cut, the cloth dyed the subtle shades of lavender and amethyst. To Atiana it looked like a mask, as if every day she were hiding her true nature as Maharraht and that some day soon she would remove it and stab Atiana in the chest, grinning as she did so.

“And what do you learn by killing?” Atiana asked her.

She had expected remorse from Ushai—some token amount—but in this she was disappointed. Ushai stood, throwing the strip of bark she’d been chewing into the fire. “You learn much from death, Atiana of Vostroma. And you should know. But you and your Landed brothers and sisters are too busy to do even that, aren’t you?”

Atiana stood as well, and faced Ushai as her fingers flexed. “We are not proud of death.”

“
Neh
.” Ushai spat on the ground between them. “Only of the spoils.”

“Enough!” Soroush stood and stepped between them. He took Ushai by the elbow and led her away. Ushai went, but ripped her arm from Soroush’s grip. She glanced back once and stared into Atiana’s eyes.

The venom Atiana saw there…

Why were they allowing her to continue on this journey? Whether she was born in Kohor or not, they didn’t need such an abscess in their midst.

Atiana smoothed down her dress and looked to Goeh, who’d been watching the exchange with a steadily growing unease, but as he studied Atiana, his expression calmed and he smiled awkwardly. “Off to find your sister?”

Atiana nodded. “If she’s there to be found.”

“Then I bid you luck.”

As she was heading downslope, she came across Nikandr. He stopped, watching her carefully. He’d seen the exchange. He’d heard it.

She didn’t care. She walked up to him and grabbed his head with both her hands and pulled him into a long kiss.

She loved Nikandr—she felt this more passionately than she had at any time since leaving the islands—and she knew that deep down, beneath the black layer of yearning he wore around his shoulders like a mantle, he felt the same. He had not lost his love for her. It had merely been smothered by his feelings of loss.

She felt the tension release from him like rain. He melted in her hands. He placed his hands tenderly on her hips, kissed her as deeply as she was kissing him. He didn’t understand why she was doing this—how could he?—but he was allowing his feelings for her to rise to the surface.

She could drown in this. She wished it would go on forever, but she knew that it wouldn’t. This kiss would fade. His feelings would fade. And all too soon he would return to his brooding self, once again a prisoner to the knife that had cut his ties to Nasim and to Adhiya.

Unless she did something about it.

At last she pushed him away, the perfect seal on their lips parting with a smack, and she stared into his eyes.

“You
must
come back to me,” she said, still holding his head in her hands. “You must come back.” She moved one hand down to his shoulder. The other she placed over his heart. “I know you feel pain. I know that the loss of Nasim is like having a child ripped from your arms. I can’t pretend to understand it, but I know this, Nischka. If you continue as you have, you will die. You will lose yourself to the ache that you’ve been nurturing since the Spar was shattered.”

His eyes had slipped down to her hand that was now over his beating heart, but she shook his shoulder until he looked her in the eyes once more. “I’m
here
. I love you. Let me help, because I’ll
not
see you throw your life away.”

“I’m not—”

She put her hand over his lips. “Say nothing now, Nischka. Think on this carefully before speaking of it again.”

He stared deeply into her eyes and nodded. “I will.”

And with that she walked away.

She walked downslope, taking a different path than the one Soroush and Ushai had taken. After minutes of walking she came to a place with an outcropping of rock just off the trail that overlooked the valley below. She moved to this rock and sat, dangling her legs over the side, allowing her feelings of anger for Ushai and her ache for Nikandr to play themselves out. All the while she wondered if the Haelish woman, Aelwen, would come as she’d promised. Atiana wondered if Aelwen could find them so easily, but the proof was in their last meeting. She’d known, somehow, where Atiana would be. She’d known that Atiana would be alone as well.