The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya) (66 page)

As she steps forward, Atiana feels a probing. Sariya reaches beyond these walls as well, perhaps wondering how Atiana came to this place. Sariya doesn’t turn as Atiana reaches the middle of the room. She speaks not a word. She doesn’t have to. There is an undeniable feeling of sisterhood between them. They have been enemies, true, but the two of them understand the aether like few ever have. They have also shared their lives with one another, albeit unwillingly, when Sariya became lost in her tower on Galahesh. In some ways Sariya knows Atiana better than anyone, even Nikandr or Mileva or Ishkyna. It’s an uncomfortable conclusion, especially when Atiana stands in a world of Sariya’s own making.

“I was trapped on this island for centuries,” Sariya says, “and yet those days feel shorter than the handful of years I’ve been gone from Ghayavand.”

Sariya turns, and Atiana gasps.

There are changes about Sariya… She had always been so beautiful, so youthful, that it seemed as though nothing could take those qualities from her, but here she stands, her skin lusterless, her eyes sunken. Deep wrinkles form in the skin around her lips as she smiles, and she looks down at herself, as if to acknowledge all that Atiana sees.

Again, Atiana feels her probing. She goes farther now, perhaps searching for Kaleh, searching for the bounds of her imprisonment.

“Your Nischka did this to me. Did you know?”

Atiana shakes her head, failing to comprehend how anything Nikandr might have done could have resulted in this.

Sariya glances to the eastern window on her left. “Did you know that Nikandr came to me? Here in this very room?”

“Not in this room,” Atiana replies. “It was in your tower in Alayazhar.”

Sariya laughs, more the croak of an old crone than the sound of a vibrant woman. “Make no mistake. It was here.”

“
Neh
,” Atiana replies, her voice stronger than Sariya’s. “This is a vastly different place than the tower you created on Ghayavand. That was a place that gave you knowledge and strength. It was the place where you learned the secrets of the world, where you returned after taking breath on Sihyaan. It was a place that nurtured you for years before the sundering, and for decades afterward.
This
place”—Atiana waved to the room around her—“this is a place of decay.
It
draws from
you
, not the other way around. This will become your grave, daughter of Vehayeh.”

“Do you think so?” She turns back to the window, the northern, the direction the Aramahn associate with winter, with end of life, but also rebirth. “I wonder.”

Atiana approaches and stares through the window. There she sees not the empty landscape she expected, but a boy sitting on a mountaintop with his back to a pillar of obsidian nearly hidden by tall grass. Sage-colored moss grows on the face of the exposed stone, making it difficult to recognize, but it is not so different from the one that she’d seen on the hillock before she’d taken the dark.

It takes her long moments to realize the boy is Sukharam.

“Why does he cry?”

“Why, indeed?” Sariya glances her way, regards Atiana from head to foot. “Do you know that after I woke from the sundering, I remembered almost nothing from the ritual? I recalled only white light, the shattering of the Atalayina. I knew we had failed, and little more. But there was a lament within me, Atiana, daughter of Radia. A lament so deep it nearly smothered me.” Sariya turns away from the window and stares into Atiana’s eyes, and Atiana wonders about her apparent age. In this place, Sariya controls all. She can make herself as young as she wishes to, as Kaleh can, so why doesn’t she? What has changed: her ability to control her appearance or her will to do so?

“At the time,” Sariya continues, “I thought our collective failure was the sole source of our pain—not merely our failure to reach indaraqiram, but that we’d torn the veil between worlds.”

“And now?”

“Now?” Sariya takes in a deep breath, and her eyes go distant. “It was all there before us. We had only to look.” Tears well in her eyes and slip down her cheeks. “I nearly died on Galahesh, at the foot of the Spar. It brought me to the very edge of the veil, not between Erahm and Adhiya, but between our worlds and the heavens above. I looked beyond the veil, and I saw it.” Her lips quiver. “The fates. They had gone, fled to another realm. Either that or we killed them that day. The reality of it matters little. What matters, daughter of Radia, is that we failed. We failed ourselves. We failed the Aramahn. We failed you and the people of the desert and those who live on the wide plains of Yrstanla. We failed, for without the fates, the world is truly doomed.” She points out the window, where Sukharam is staring up at the sky in pain and bewilderment. “He knows that now. That is why he cries. He has realized the world can no longer be saved.”

Atiana shakes her head. “It
can
be saved.”

“Do you think so?”

“It must be so.”

“And why is that?”

“We have lived three hundred years since the sundering. If the fates were dead, all would have been lost long before now.”

“If you take a man from the helm of a windship, does it begin to list that very moment? Does it immediately fall to the ground? Or does it continue along its path until eventually crashing to the earth?”

“We have the ancients.”

“
Yeh
, your ancients. They protect you, do they not?”

“They do!”

“And who protects
them
? Who do you think were there when the first of your ancients crossed to the other side?”

“The fates may have given us life, but we decide our
own
paths.”

Sariya nods. “That doesn’t contradict their ways, Atiana. They granted us free will. But there are many paths to the same place, are there not? So it is with the fates. We choose, but they guide what choices are available. Whether you like it or not, we cannot go on forever without them. The
world
cannot go on.”

“So what will you do? Remain here in this place, locked in Kaleh’s mind, refusing to let her go?”

The smile on Sariya’s face is humoring. “
Neh
, I will not do that.”

“Then release her.”

“If I do that now, I
will
die, and I would see the end of the world. Kaleh will remain mine.” The way Sariya speaks those words… They seem distant, as if she is looking not to the days ahead, but to the eons beyond.

“I will fight you.”

“You are welcome to try. But you will have to find me first.”

Suddenly the probing, which hasn’t ceased since Atiana first felt it, grows much stronger.

And then there is nothing.

And Sariya is gone.

Atiana is left alone in the tower, which is now bare and nearly ruined. Through the window she sees not Sukharam but the same landscape she saw upon entering. And then she hears a rumble, a sifting of dirt and stone.

She flees down the levels of the tower as more of it crumbles and falls away. She reaches the doorway ahead of the tower’s collapse—clearly Sariya doesn’t wish for her to die—but it’s still a shock. As the rubble settles and a cloud of dust rises into the air and drifts on the wind, it feels final. It feels like a note heralding the end of all things. Sariya may get her wish after all, Atiana realizes. She removed the world of the Tashavir, and now, with the wards gone, she will simply watch as the rifts open wide and the end of the world comes at last.

Is she right? Could the fates truly have died when the sundering occurred?

It doesn’t matter, Atiana decides. She cannot simply wait for the world to end. She won’t.

“She’s gone.”

Atiana turns and finds Kaleh standing behind her. “What?”

“I can no longer feel her at all. She’s escaped, Atiana Radieva.”

Atiana goes cold. The probing. Sariya was searching for something, not merely reaching out for the boundaries of her imprisonment. And then it all falls together.

She was tricked from the beginning.

It started with Habram and Bahett and their pleas to have Atiana merely speak to Sariya. They had allowed Atiana to demand help. And that connection, her own connection to Mileva, is what allowed Sariya to escape.

Rarely has she had difficulty leaving the aether, but it is so now. She tries to pull back, to rise above the currents of the dark to reach her own form, but finds she cannot.

She rails against her bonds. She reaches out for Mileva, for Kaleh. She searches for some way to escape.

But there
is
no escape. She has been trapped as surely as Sariya had been only moments ago.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Atiana walks along a gully. By her side, a stream gurgles on its way toward a forest of impossibly tall trees. As she jogs into the trees, a fecund scent fills the air. There is no wind. The trees, their leaves and branches, move not at all. She goes further into the forest and finds a place where there are walkways and homes within the trees above. This is the village of Siafyan on the Maharraht island of Rafsuhan. Atiana has never been to Siafyan, but she flew through it in rook form when Nikandr rescued Soroush from the floating village of Mirashadal and brought him there.

How long ago that seems now.

Atiana has been trapped in Kaleh’s dream for what seems like days. She knows Kaleh has been driven into hiding. She just has to find
where
. She decides she’s been looking in the wrong places and starts to push herself to touch Kaleh’s mind, to find her greatest fears, her greatest source of pain. Those are the places she will find Kaleh.

And she
must
find Kaleh if she’s ever to leave this place, for Kaleh, much like Nasim, is bound up in this tale of the sundering, and unless Atiana is sadly mistaken, Kaleh will have more to say about it before all is done.

She wanders aimlessly though the village, calling Kaleh’s name, and then continues to the forest beyond. She realizes she’s walking toward the clearing. She had never seen this place of misery, but Nikandr had told her about it—the clearing where the children, the akhoz, had been sacrificed by Muqallad. The akhoz were chained to posts and burned while Bersuq held the two pieces of the broken Atalayina. Their sacrifice, the heat from their dying souls, had fused the two pieces together, and Muqallad had moved on, leaving them like the forgotten embers of a still-warm fire.

Atiana has often wondered how Kaleh viewed that time and that place. Did she justify the pain and anguish of the children as a necessary inconvenience? Or did she see herself in the eyeless faces of those children?

How confusing it must have been for her to have aged so strangely. She was clearly a gifted child. Yet still, a child—no matter how smart and how perceptive—cannot absorb years upon years of experience.

She arrives at the clearing.

Ashes layer the ground. The blackened stumps of the posts, as high as Atiana’s knees, stand from the bed of ashes like the clawing fingers of the dead. As Atiana approaches a wind picks up. White ashes are drawn up toward the sky, higher and higher until they’re lost among the low clouds. It looks as the roiling column of fire did, except this is grey, completely devoid of color, like a distant memory half remembered.

Atiana waits for Kaleh, thinking surely the ashes must be a sign, but Kaleh doesn’t come, so she continues on into the woods. She allows her mind to wander, but she knows there is a place she is being taken—by her own mind, by Kaleh’s, she doesn’t know. She cares only that for the first time since being trapped here, she has some sense of direction.

She wanders through the damp wood and comes to a mound of earth overgrown with moss and littered with red and yellow leaves. Nearby she hears the slow ticking of the bark beetles. She becomes aware of the beating of her own heart. Moments ago, she felt it not at all, and now she can think of little else.

This is the place, she realizes.

She puts her hand against her chest. For long moments she can feel only the pumping of her own blood, but then she feels another pumping in time with hers. It’s beneath the hillock. There is a heart beating somewhere beneath the earth.

She approaches. Kneels next to it. Places her hands against the soft earth. She lowers herself until her cheek and ear are pressed against it.

And she listens.

She hears it—
THOOM-thoom
,
THOOM-thoom
—and if she remains perfectly still, she can feel minute vibrations against her cheek. This happened to Nikandr as well, but that was in the real world. This is different. This is a place of Kaleh’s own making.

“Kaleh,” she whispers. “Can you hear me?”

The beating does not change.

“Kaleh, hear me,” she says louder. “Sariya is gone. She’s on her way to Sihyaan.”

Still the beating remains the same.

“She goes to tear the rift open. All you’ve done. All you’ve worked toward in trying to stop her. It will mean nothing if she reaches the mountain before we do. Come, Kaleh. Join me, and together we will stop her.”

She waits. The sound of the beating heart slows. And then the earth beneath her cracks. As Atiana steps back, the crack widens like overbaked custard, revealing dirt so black it looks like the night itself lies below this thin crust of earth. In the center of the gap lies a girl in a simple white dress. The dress is wet and smeared with mud, as is her white skin. The sound of the beating heart—muted moments ago—is now loud, like the rhythmic fall of a wood axe.

Kaleh looks up—not the woman, but the girl Atiana had seen when she first entered this place. “She cannot be stopped.”

“She can, and you will do it, for there are no others.”

She is silent for a time, as if considering Atiana’s words. She looks down at her hands, which are cupped tightly around something. Atiana is sure it is the heart, yet when Kaleh opens her hands, there is nothing there. Kaleh herself seems confused by this. She stares up at Atiana as the sound of the heart slowly fades.

“There is Nasim.”

“
Yeh
,” Atiana says, smiling. “There is Nasim.”