The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya) (42 page)

“Hurry, everyone! Hurry!”

Moments later a blast of fire issued from a ledge high upon the mountain.

Nasim watched in horror as Tohrab flew outward from the mouth of the tunnel, carried by the massive blast of flame. He called upon the wind to cradle Tohrab, but before he could summon enough of it, Tohrab was gone over the edge of the escarpment.

Sariya was coming along that tunnel. She’d sensed them.

Nasim grew worried, for he’d dearly wanted to save Ahar, the strongest of the Tashavir, but the moment the flame had gouted from the tunnel, he’d realized Ahar was dead. They’d come too late. Sariya had beaten them here, destroying Nasim’s hope to save another of the Tashavir.

Tohrab was now the last of them, and he too might now be dead or dying at the base of the cliff below.

He should have come more quickly. He should have taken the chance and gone ahead himself to protect Ahar.

But if he’d done that, it would have left Tohrab unprotected.

And a fine job you’ve done of protecting him
, Nasim thought.

Sariya was coming. She was nearly ready to step from the tunnel, and Nasim was suddenly petrified. Spit gathered in his throat. His hands tightened into fists and his body began to shake.

“Stop it!” he shouted.

Sariya stepped from the tunnel, holding the Atalayina easily in one hand. By the fates who shine above, she looked older than only days before. She looked more mature, a woman who’d left all traces of childhood behind. She looked, in fact, more like Sariya than she ever had before, but there were still many traces of Kaleh, the confused girl who’d grown up on an island that sat between worlds.

She turned—this woman in Kaleh’s frame—and leveled upon him a cold stare that shook him to his core.

“She will not save you,” Sariya said with Kaleh’s lips. “Not this time.”

There wasn’t a trace of doubt in those words. She was in supreme control. But how? How could she have regained her strength so quickly? How could she have come here and taken another of the Tashavir as weak as she’d been?

The answer lay in the glittering blue stone she held in her left hand.

The Atalayina was brighter than he ever remembered it being here in this valley. It was brighter even than on Galahesh, when the walls of Adhiya were so close he could almost touch them.

Sariya faced him, the hem of her simple yellow dress billowing and flowing in the growing wind. “Did you know it was you that gave me the clue?” The look on her face sent chills down his spine. “I remembered so little of the sundering. I’d thought for long years that the experience itself was too painful to look upon, even through the dim pane of our memories. But when you slowed the world around us”—she stared deeper into Nasim’s eyes, as if trying to sift through
his
memories; it became so strong and felt so foul that Nasim took a step back—“I saw it once more. And I saw how to touch the Atalayina as we did that day. Do you remember, Khamal? Do you remember holding it? Do you remember the feeling that we held not a stone, but the world itself in our hands?”

Nasim wished he did, but he could only shake his head.

Sariya laughed. “You restored my memories to me and you don’t remember yourself?”

The wind was growing stronger. It tossed her long brown hair about, pressed the fabric of her dress against her lithe form.

“There is only one left.” She sidled toward the ledge where Tohrab had fallen, keeping her eyes on Nasim until she’d reached the very edge. Then she looked down, searching. A crease formed on her brow and her eyes snapped back to Nasim.

He wanted to draw upon the same powers he had in Tohrab’s tomb. He wanted to stop her, to take away the Atalayina and drive Sariya from Kaleh’s frame, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t truly know how he’d done it those other times. Even when he’d stood upon the Spar of Galahesh, the place he’d been most aware of it, he was unable to retrace his steps. It wasn’t something one could teach, or that one could learn. It was more like the sensing of a limb—he didn’t need to see his arm in order to move it. And yet now, when he needed help the most, the ability eluded him. Perhaps it was because he was weakened, or because Sariya was more aware of it and was preventing him from using it, or perhaps the death of Ahar or the power behind this growing wind was acting as a barrier. Whatever the case, he found himself cut off from it.

As his desperation grew, he became more aware of what was happening in the valley. The wind was only one of the symptoms. Since he’d arrived here, Adhiya had felt distant, but the feeling of it now was strong and growing stronger.

Sariya took one smooth stride toward him. “You can feel it, can’t you?”

Nasim took a step back, drawing on this newfound power from beyond the veil.

With but a look, a wave of her hand, Sariya cut him off from it.

He coughed, not from the dust upon the wind, but from the sudden feeling of emptiness that yawned within him.

“The walls are falling.” She looked out toward the desert plain. Much of it was obscured by dust, drawn up from the wind. It was coming this way. Moment by moment the wind became biting and the air became thick with a red haze. “The walls are falling here, as they soon will around Ghayavand. It’s time to return, Khamal.”

Nasim stepped back and fell. He struck his head on a rock behind him and winced from the pain as Sariya approached and held out her hand.

“Come,” she said. “You know there’s little time left. These winds will die, but not around Ghayavand. Those will build until they have consumed the world. Join me, and I will show you what the Al-Aqim may still do.”

He stared at her hand.

It did not shake. It was as steady as a rock. As steady as the mountain beneath them.

He’d thought on this long and hard, how the world had lived. How it would die. He’d often wondered whether Khamal had thought like Sariya and Muqallad. There had been glimpses in the memories he’d inherited from Khamal—memories of doubts and uncertainty and wondering whether the sundering hadn’t been a sign from the fates that the time was ripe to begin anew.

Sariya’s eyes stared deeply into his. There was a part of him that didn’t want to believe her. And yet, despite everything he’d told himself up until now, he did. She was right.

How could he not have seen it before?

Slowly, he reached up for her hand.

His fingers were mere inches from hers when a swath of red blossomed at a point just above and to the right of her heart.

A moment later the sharp report of a musket reached him.

Nikandr and the others pushed their ab-sair hard after seeing the flames from high on the mountain. They’d seen someone or some
thing
fly down from those heights and crash into the trees above them. They rode up, pushing their mounts harder than they had before, and soon they came to the place where the form had flown down.

“Go,” Nikandr said to Ashan and Sukharam. “Do what you can. We’ll continue up.”

Ashan nodded as he and Sukharam rode their mounts deeper into the trees.

Nikandr and Soroush took their ab-sair as far as they could, but soon the way became too steep, the pathway too narrow, so they slid off their saddles and continued on foot, running up the steps that had been cut into the stone. The wind came stronger now, and it bit, the red dust and sand from the valley below rising and driving against them, making it difficult to see. Soroush wrapped the long tail of his turban across his face. Nikandr did the same with his ghoutra. Still, it was difficult to see far ahead.

They took a switchback, and Nikandr could see through the haze two forms standing at the ledge they’d seen from far below. One was Nasim. His back was to Nikandr, but it didn’t matter; Nikandr could live to a hundred and never fail to recognize the younger man.

He cringed as Nasim fell and struck his head on a large rock.

While the other…

Nikandr shook his head.

“Can it be?” Soroush said beside him. “Sariya?”

Nikandr looked more closely. “It’s Kaleh.”

“She’s too old,” Soroush replied.

Indeed, she appeared years older than Nasim. She had been five years younger than Nasim when they’d left Galahesh.

“I don’t understand it either,” Nikandr replied.

Kaleh held the Atalayina in one hand, the stone a deep blue that stood out against the blowing red sand. Kaleh’s other hand was stretched out toward Nasim. This was no simple offer of help, Nikandr realized. It was an offer of allegiance. It reminded him—as did Kaleh’s physical appearance—of Sariya, of how she could with a simple twist of the mind make you believe that she was your ally, that she was in the right. Perhaps Nasim had somehow broken from her, and this one simple motion would bind him to her once more.

It was something he couldn’t allow.

Nikandr looked along the path. It continued westward before curving back and heading up to the ledge where Nasim and Kaleh stood. He would never reach them in time.

“Nasim!” he called, but the blowing wind was too fierce for his voice to reach them.

Nikandr pulled his musket to his shoulder and sighted along its length.

The wind howled. The sand bit.

Nikandr breathed out.

And fired.

The musket bucked. A swath of red along Kaleh’s shoulder.

She fell, lost from view.

Nikandr sprinted up the steps, Soroush close on his heels. The wind picked up. It pressed against them, threatened to toss them from the carved trail if they weren’t careful.

They were halfway up the final stretch when the wind stopped. And the air became dead.

Sand began to fall, and with it came a sound like an early autumn drizzle over a field of blooming heather.

When they approached Nasim’s fallen form, Kaleh levered herself up and stared at Nikandr and Soroush. The Atalayina was held tightly in her left hand. Her eyes went wide and she turned toward the center of the valley.

In the moments that followed, there came a low rumbling. Nikandr felt it deep in his chest, and in the pit of his stomach. He felt it on his skin, a tingling that seemed to cover every square inch of him.

Out over the valley he could see little more than a red-haze sky and the dark hint of trees below.

And then the wind rose and the world fell apart.

Nikandr was pressed against the hillside like a ship against rocks. A sound like the groaning of the earth itself stormed over the valley. It grew in intensity, drowning all other sounds.

The air was sucked from his lungs. The bones of his arms and legs and chest ached. His skull felt as though it were being pressed in a carpenter’s vise. He couldn’t move. Not an inch. He dare not open his eyes for fear they would be cut by stone and sand and the needles from the nearby pine.

He heard a groan. It was Soroush, and yet it took this to realize he was doing the same.

Another sound came, like mountains crashing, like worlds crumbling.

And then the pressure began to ease.

Slowly, it receded and the sound began to die away.

A whine came from the valley below and rushed upward.

“Quickly,” Nikandr said, pushing himself to his feet. “We must make it to the top of the ledge.”

Soroush nodded. His turban was gone. His long hair whipped in a wind that was rising to new heights. They’d only gone ten strides when a blast of sand and branches and ancients knew what else descended upon them. Nikandr could barely breathe. He held his sleeve to his mouth and felt for the next stair. The wind shrieked. Branches and stones tore at his exposed skin.

At last, he found the rock where Nasim had fallen. Nasim wasn’t there, however, nor was Kaleh.

He continued, crawling forward lest the wind pick him up and throw him from the ledge.

“Nasim!” he yelled as he felt his way forward. “Nasim!”

He found more rocks along the grass-covered ledge, but nothing else. Nothing else.

He tried to open his eyes to see, but was blinded by the biting wind.

He scrabbled along, searching more frantically than before.

“Nasim!”

“Here,” he heard faintly, somewhere to his left.

He moved, patting his hands before him.

He found a larger stone, and on its leeward side, he found Nasim huddling with his back against the mountain.

Nikandr grabbed a fistful of robes and pulled him away from his hiding place. Nasim stayed in a ball. Soroush was just behind, and together, the two of them dragged Nasim into the tunnel they’d seen earlier. They pulled themselves deeper and deeper into it as the wind continued to howl and scour and blind. All the while, Nasim coughed so heavily that Nikandr feared he was going to pass out. Long, wracking coughs overtook him, his entire body convulsing from it.

Ten paces they dragged Nasim. Then twenty. And finally they came to a place where the wind was no longer as fierce. They stayed there in the darkness—for little light entered the tunnel now—and waited, panting as the wind’s anger slowly eased. Nasim’s coughing eased as well, but it sounded wet now, perhaps from blood.

Nikandr took off his water skin and pressed it into Nasim’s hands.

He heard him unstopper it and cough between sips.

The sun was beginning to shine through the haze of dust, and at last Nikandr could see Nasim. He was completely covered with fine red dust, as the rest of them had been not so long ago. Strangely, it felt good, as if the ancients had seen fit to tie them even in such a small way as this.

“Are you well?” Nikandr asked.

Nasim took another drink. He stared at Nikandr, then Soroush. Something passed across his eyes—pain mixed with confusion and gratitude—and then he nodded. “Well enough,” he said in a croak.

He passed the skin to Nikandr, who took a long pull from it and handed it to Soroush.

“That was Sariya, wasn’t it?” Nikandr asked. He’d heard the words from Safwah, but it was still hard to believe.

Nasim smiled. “I suppose in a way it was.”

“Sariya and Kaleh,” Soroush said, wiping the dust from his face with the palm of his hand. With the sun coming stronger now, he looked primal, like some ancient tribesman, half his face smeared by the deep red stains of blood, the other half covered by light red dust. Nikandr was sure he looked little better.