The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya) (33 page)

“A keep like that would have had a reinforced door,” Rodion said.

Styophan nodded. “Look at the char above the door. It would have taken a long time to burn through.”

“Not if a hezhan had crossed,” Edik said. “An elder could burn through it like tinder.”

They watched for a time, waiting for any sign of life, but there was none.

“We should go before it gets dark,” Styophan said.

They were going to wait until shortly after dusk for their attack, but things had changed, and Styophan wanted to inspect this place in the daylight if they could.

Datha nodded and together, their band of men marched down. As they neared the fort, weapons were readied. Styophan held his musket, pulling it to his shoulder and staring with his good left eye along the wall and up to the tower. His men did the same, but they were not met with resistance. They did not, in fact, see a single sign that anyone still resided within this place.

They reached the gap in the western wall. There was a large area where the snow around it had melted, revealing matted, winterdead grass—part of a nearby field—and the brown, singed remains closer to the wall itself. The air smelled strongly of cardamom and myrrh. Just inside were the blackened remains of a dozen men. Some had been burned down to their bones. Others had cracked and charred skin over much of their bodies. Beyond, in the courtyard there were more. They lay scattered here and there. There was little grass to mark the passage of the suurahezhan—for by now it was clear that one had crossed over and attacked the fort—but there were places where the earth was cracked and split like a mud puddle drying in the summer sun. Styophan walked the very same path the suurahezhan had. The remains of the dead lay along its path. Sometimes in ones and twos, and in one case eight men had died together.

To a man, they clutched things in their arms. A few bore muskets, others tools from the smithy, but all were proper pieces of iron. One even held an old wooden shield banded with iron. Only one had a proper dousing rod. They’d been trying to stop the suurahezhan from entering the keep.

Styophan glanced to his left as Datha joined him. “Do you see?”

Datha looked more closely, for he hadn’t recognized what had truly happened. “They were trying to stop it.”

“They should have been able to.” This was from Edik, who knelt and picked up the blackened shield. It crumbled in his hands. “Unless it was an elder, this should have been able to stop it, at least force it to take a different path. But look”—Edik stood and pointed—“its path never wavered.”

He was right. The hezhan’s path continued straight and up to the keep doors. He locked eyes with Styophan, both of them immediately understanding the importance.

Datha glanced between the two of them. “Speak, Styophan son of Andrasha.”

“It’s a symptom of the change. Things have been growing worse, but even among the islands, I would have thought this much iron would have stopped the hezhan.”

“Yet it didn’t,” Datha said.

“Even here, the rifts have grown wide. I would never have thought… This far from Ghayavand…” Styophan looked over these men. They’d wanted desperately to prevent the hezhan from reaching the keep. “Come.”

They continued past the burned wreckage of the doors where the smell of cardamom became almost overpowering. Beyond, in the great room, they found a large charred circle where the suurahezhan must have crossed back to Adhiya. More of the dead—another twenty, both men and women—lay scattered about the room like forgotten toys. There was one near the back of the room, however, that drew Styophan’s attention. It was a man who wore black boots and baggy pants and armor of hardened leather.

Styophan almost thought he recognized the man by his shape alone. It was one of the Kiliç Şaik. One of Bahett’s men.

They’d come here, then. After fleeing Hael, they’d come to this keep, and they’d been here—Bahett included—when the suurahezhan had attacked.

“You think we’ll find him?” Edik asked in Anuskayan.

Styophan stood and looked more closely at the remains of the other bodies. None had the same leather armor. “Something tells me our friend from Galahesh escaped.”

“Bahett?” Edik said as he crouched and looked impassively at the Kiliç Şaik. “Why?”

They continued up to the second floor. At the back of the keep near an open window was the body of a man who’d been burned badly along his right side. He was face down, and he wore red robes of a cut and style Styophan had never seen before.

Styophan kneeled down by him. He had swarthy skin. He looked like a young man, but the deep wrinkles around his eyes marked him as a man from the desert. A man from the Gaji, perhaps, which made a strange sort of sense. It was where Nikandr and Atiana had gone searching for Kaleh and Nasim and the Atalayina. There were no others they’d seen—Aramahn or Maharraht—that might have summoned the suurahezhan. It was possible that the qiram had left with Bahett and the other survivors of the attack, but Styophan had the distinct impression that this man had summoned the spirit. Why he wasn’t sure. Nor did he understand why he now lay dead. Perhaps he’d tried to send the spirit back. Perhaps he’d wished to send it into the land of Hael at the behest of Bahett and had lost control.

Styophan would probably never know, but he did know this: the world was beginning to fall apart at the seams. He’d felt it in his heart already, but to see such strange things before his very eyes… It made him feel as though they were already too late, that no matter what they did the rifts would continue to spread and bring about the end of the world after all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Rare clouds hid the moon, plunging the chill desert night into total darkness, but Nasim could still feel the tomb ahead. He’d opened his mind to Adhiya to draw upon a vanahezhan, and he could feel the earth beneath his feet, the immensity of the peak above him. The lay of the land was open to him, its twists and turns, its hills and valleys. He’d drawn upon a dhoshahezhan as well, and he used it to feel the life around him—the towering spruce and the moss and small ferns that grew upon the forest floor. The sweet smell of the sap that seeped through the bark was heightened, as were the dried pine needles, and the pungent odor of the tiny mushrooms that lay hidden among them. He took the time to draw upon more hezhan. He’d not done so until now for the fear that Sariya would sense him, but he could wait no longer. He was too near the next tomb, and he refused to allow Sariya to catch him off-guard.

First, he called upon a jalahezhan, a spirit of water—difficult to reach in these places but easier now that he had two others to help draw it near. Through it he felt the pathways of water as they slipped down mountain streams and through cracks in this great mountain.

Next, a havahezhan. He called upon one—not the nearest, but the eldest. It came easily. Willingly. The touch of it made Nasim want to soar among the dark clouds above.

Last was a suurahezhan. This was the most difficult. There were few here among the valley. Years ago he might have forced one closer. But he’d changed. He’d grown, in no small part due to the Atalayina; the stone had opened secrets to him that he’d never have found on his own. He stood resolute, beckoning. Not demanding, nor begging, but
urging
—a simple call to an equal. The eldest among them, an old spirit indeed, was intrigued. It drifted closer. Nasim offered himself to the spirit, and for a moment it scoffed.
What need have you of me,
it seemed to say,
when you’ve called on so many others
.

Nasim shared his need, his will to right the world. Even the spirits knew how unbalanced the world had become, he was sure. Still, it retreated, perhaps ready to move on, to go wherever it is that hezhan go in their ephemeral world, but then it paused. It reconsidered, perhaps sensing something in Nasim it had not seen before, something it would like to taste of. Or perhaps its hunger outweighed its better judgment. Who knew the minds of the spirits?

It reached out.

And Nasim took it.

Suddenly it stormed over Nasim. Tried to consume him.

Nasim fought, but did not push the suurahezhan away. Instead, he embraced it. He allowed the hezhan to feed on him, to feel what the world of Erahm was like. It raged against him, but he refused to allow it thought, instead feeding it the dark sights of the forest around him, the smells, the solidity of the earth beneath his feet, and the touch of the wind that sighed through the needles of the spruce.

Like a child in a world filled with wonder and delight, the suurahezhan lost itself. It struggled only once more. A swirl of flame lit the forest. It twisted and churned, lights of yellow and orange twisting like a flock of starlings, and then it was gone, its energy snuffed as it gave itself to Nasim at last.

Despite this strange response to his offer of communion, of bonding, Nasim held no grudge. He did not command these hezhan. Any of them could leave if they truly wished. But they did not. They had all come willingly.

At last he was ready. The entrance to the tomb loomed before him. He could not see it with his eyes, but through the vanahezhan he could feel the sculpture on the stone. It was of a man, taller than Nasim, his arms folded across his chest. In his left hand was a wreath of mountain laurel, in the other an olive branch. When Sariya had opened the door she’d sent cracks through the stone, weakening it while using the smallest amount of energy she could. Nasim touched the stone with the tips of his fingers and called upon the vanahezhan, asking it to weaken the stone. He asked the jalahezhan to draw the moisture forth. Asked the suurahezhan to heat it. Bit by bit the entrance began to ablate, stone becoming sand and the sand being drawn away by the wind, and soon the way was open.

Nasim entered, but before he’d gone three paces he turned and crouched and picked up a handful of dust. He held his hand high and allowed the dust to slip through his fingers. He called upon the vanahezhan and the dhoshahezhan, both, stone and vitality bound together, and the dust billowed toward the entryway, creating a barely discernible gauze. If Sariya came, she would pass through this, and when she did, he would feel it.

He moved faster now. After a long trek he reached the door to the crypt. He could already sense the bas relief sculpture carved into the door with the senses granted him by the vanahezhan, but he would look upon it with his eyes, so he drew upon his suurahezhan, creating a bright flame that floated in the air near the door. The same sculpture as at the entrance was worked into the stone, but here the man did not hold an olive branch, nor a wreath of laurel. Here his hands were held together near his navel, the place that breath comes from, and cupped there, as gently as a robin’s egg, was a stone. It had the same striations of the Atalayina. They even glinted under the light. The stonemason who’d built this door had taken the time to work metal into it, which was very difficult, as most metal was anathema to bonding with hezhan. It took a deft hand indeed to work with it at all, and this man or woman had done it so masterfully that Nasim doubted anyone alive could still do the same.

Sorrow filled him for what he was about to do, but he stepped to the door and touched it as he had the last.

And nothing happened.

He placed his hand on it again, but this time he fed his dhoshahezhan into the stone to a greater degree, and still the stone stood resolute.

Worry grew within him like ivy, creeping through him slowly but surely as thoughts of Sariya’s eventual arrival came to him.

He pushed such thoughts away and examined the stone more closely, wondering if it was of some different quality than the last. It certainly
looked
the same—it had the same red color of sandstone—but beyond this, if there were qualities he’d missed, something its maker had granted it, he didn’t know what they might be.

It may have been the Atalayina’s mere presence that had allowed him to open the others. But if that were the case, why hadn’t they opened for Sariya?

Nasim stopped. Took a deep breath and released it slowly.

He was rushing.

He stepped away from the stone. Allowed the light from the suurahezhan to extinguish, plunging the tunnel into pitch darkness.

He stepped forward and placed his hands flat against the stone. Pressed his cheek against it as well, and his chest, so he could feel more of it. He had felt stone before—felt its weight and age and solidity—but he had never done anything like this before, and suddenly he felt the poorer for it.

He slowed his breathing and felt the cool, gritty surface. If this were water, he would have submerged himself in it. If it were air, he would have floated within it. But this was stone. This was earth, and so he made himself rigid. He felt it run through the palms of his hands, through the soles of his feet. He felt his muscles harden, felt his blood slow, felt his breath release under the unrelenting pressure of the weight of the mountain above him. He did not fear this change, but neither did he welcome it. He simply waited for it to happen—like an impending landslide, like the slow rise of the mountains, like the birth of the world itself.

He could feel the hand of the stone’s maker. Could feel the magic that ran through it, magic that had been painstakingly crafted and woven into the very warp and weft of this doorway.

He paused in his examination, marveling. By the fates who watch above, the woman who’d done this had woven not just with a vanahezhan, but with a dhoshahezhan as well. He could feel how the spirit had been infused into the stone. It watched over this place still, guarding not just this door, but the tomb within.

The other tombs must have been the same. So why would they have denied Sariya but allowed
him
entrance? The answer was not in the Atalayina—both he and Sariya had held it—so what? The answer must be wrapped up with his very nature—who he was as opposed to Sariya. Either that or it had somehow sensed his intent. The qiram who’d created these tombs would have been gifted enough to do such things, and they might have done so given the importance of this place. But if it had opened itself to him before, why wouldn’t it now?