The Straits of Galahesh: Book Two of The Lays of Anuskaya (75 page)

He focuses on Muqallad’s spell, tugs at its threads, which are tied around him so tightly that the effort feels futile. As he pulls the threads away, new ones form like spider silk. He tries harder, becomes desperate to rid himself of Muqallad’s taint, but soon his efforts bring pain—they disturb the delicate balance he’s found—and he retreats.

He is about to pull away, buoyed in defeat by the notion that he’d finally found the source of his inability to touch Adhiya, when he feels something in the village far below where he stands now.

In the ballast tower, near the place where Soroush and Bersuq were kept prisoner for long months and years.

Fahroz is there. She lies on the floor of the room.

And Kaleh stands over her.

A knife gripped tightly in one hand.

Nasim woke.

He stood immediately and began running for the nearest of the paths. “We must go! Fahroz is in trouble!”

Ashan looked like Nasim had scared him nearly to death. “What did you see?”

“Send help to the lowest section of the ballast tower!”

“Wait!” Ashan called.

Nasim heard them chasing after him. The paths here were not familiar, but he soon found some that were. In little time he was bolting through the village’s warrens, heading ever lower. On a wooden deck, a qiram kneeling with her young disciples stood as he ran past. She looked worried, even angry, when she heard the calls behind him, but Nasim moved on before she could react.

He reached one of the lower entrances to the tower. He took the spiraling staircase downward, moving as fast as he dared.

He came at last, breathless, to the room he’d seen in his dream, a dark place no longer used as a prison. A lone siraj lit the room. It cast deep shadows against Kaleh, who kneeled above Fahroz with the khanjar held over her chest.

Nasim froze in the doorway. “Please, Kaleh! Stop!”

Kaleh looked to him, her expression resolute.

Then she turned back and thrust the knife into Fahroz’s chest.

“
Neh
!” Nasim screamed.

Fahroz jerked. Her eyes went wide, but she made no sound, as if she’d just been awoken from a vivid and horrifying dream.

Kaleh turned back to him. Nasim shivered at the emotionless expression on her face.

“Why?” Nasim asked, his hands shaking in front of him.

The answer came moments later.

The wall behind her, made from some of the stoutest, thickest wood in the entire village, opened like a wound. It yawned, wider and wider, until it was large enough for her to step into. He knew then that she’d killed Fahroz so she could open this portal. She was fleeing Mirashadal, and the qiram at the edge of the village had surely prevented her from doing so.

Despite her words the day before, she was returning to Muqallad. That much was clear.

Kaleh stood and squared herself, as if she thought he might attack. She glanced over his shoulder. She could hear—as Nasim could—others coming down the stairs. “Goodbye, Nasim an Ashan.”

She took a step toward the gap in the wood, but the notion that she would leave after what she’d done so incensed him that he felt the blood pounding through his veins. His heart beat powerfully. Madly. An anger welled up inside him—an anger so intense it threatened to blind him with white rage.

As Kaleh took another step, the world around him slowed.

Her movements decelerated until they matched the pace of the tides, the pace of the seasons.

Kaleh halts short of the opening. A shimmering curtain surrounds them, contains them.

Nasim takes one stride forward. And another. Soon he stands just short of her.

She holds in her left hand the knife, the blade still slick with blood. He reaches out to take it. Her hands are cold and stiff.

As he touches them, he feels a stirring within her.

Whether it is because of his touch, or because she’s learned what he’s done to her, he does not know, but her motion accelerates. Like a hare in spring, she is rousing from Nasim’s spell.

He has an urge to back away, to protect himself, but it is distant and small. Much larger is the desire to plunge the khanjar deep into her chest, doing the same to her as she did to Fahroz.

And then he realizes. The khanjar… He’s seen it before.

By the fates above, it’s the same knife that Muqallad and Sariya used to murder Khamal.

“Will you kill
me
?” she asks. She turns slowly, ever so slowly, toward him.

Nasim stares into her eyes. “Why would you follow him?”

“I follow him because he is right.”

“He brings us to ruin.”

“He brings us to our better lives.”

“You’re a fool if you believe that.”

Kaleh’s eyes soften. She looks upon him with pity—with
pity
, as if
he
is the one who will never understand.

“I had hoped you could join me, but when I saw what happened to Khamal—saw your reaction to it—I knew that you were not ready.” She stares down at the khanjar. “Kill me if you would.”

Nasim grips the handle, feels the braided metal dig into his skin. He feels the weight of it, and a part of him—a part he is only distantly aware of—feels the keenness of the blade.

Were he to use the blade, he would kill her. She would die and would never deliver the knowledge she’d gained to Muqallad.

He considers this. He actually
considers
killing another. Is he so like Khamal that he could be brought to such a thing? Killing in cold blood? It triggers a memory of Khamal when he hid the piece of the Atalayina in Sariya’s tower, when the two of them had made love.

And Kaleh… Nasim looks at her anew.

She has none of Muqallad’s features.

She isn’t Muqallad’s daughter at all. She’s
Khamal’s
.

A shiver runs through him as the implications work themselves through his mind. He is
not Khamal
. He is
Nasim
. He is his own, linked to Khamal only by the whims of the fates and the threads of souls. He knows this, and yet Khamal feels like his sire. Kaleh feels like his kin. A sister, a cousin, blood of his own blood, though he knows this isn’t true.

As he breathes, he stares into her pitying eyes and finds that he cannot do this. He isn’t made for such things, and yet it feels, however disturbing the notion, like failure.

What have things come to that the lack of will to kill another feels like
failure
?

He finds—perhaps through his confusion, perhaps because of the simple awareness of it—his control over the curtain around them slipping.

As the world returns to normal, Kaleh turns and walks into the opening, and as the sounds of footsteps upon the stairs resume, the opening closes around Kaleh.

Nasim stood near the village’s central tower. The qiram still stood at the edge of the circle facing outward, protecting the village against another attack though everyone knew Muqallad had already done what he’d come to do. His retreat after Kaleh’s arrival had all been a ruse so that she could remain in the village and become close to Nasim once he arrived.

How easily he’d been fooled, Nasim thought. How quickly he’d believed her story. He’d been so desperate to speak to someone similar to him—someone who understood at least in part what it was like to be of the Al-Aqim—that he’d overlooked all else. That Fahroz and Ashan and the wisest of the village’s mahtar had also been fooled was no consolation. He should have known better.

On the platform, Majeed, the mahtar that would take Fahroz’s place as Mirashadal’s leader, held a burning torch. It guttered in the wind but remained lit as he touched it to the skiff that held Fahroz’s body, which was wrapped carefully in a white shroud.

The wood within the skiff lit. Another mahtar touched the wood. The skiff lifted and floated eastward.

Nasim could see Fahroz lying within, the white cloth catching fire.

“Fare well,” he said softly, his words taken by the wind.

Ashan, standing next to him, put his arm around Nasim’s shoulder. He allowed it to remain for a moment, but such closeness still discomfited him, and he shrugged it off.

He remained while many left. He watched the skiff drift away as the smoke trailed black against the incessant gray of the high clouds. He remained until he could no longer see the skiff against the sky.

“There was so much I wished to say,” he whispered, “and now you’re gone.”

Dozens of memories played within his mind, each of them begging for a voice. But anything he thought to say sounded weak and miserable, unworthy of being spoken in Fahroz’s honor.

He caught, near the horizon, one last wisp of smoke. A tear slipped down his cheek as he watched it disperse, Fahroz’s final farewell.

“I don’t know who my parents were,” he said softly, “but surely, if Ashan is my father, you are my mother.” He took a deep breath, and while he released it, his chest shook with the emotion he was keeping inside. “Thank you,” he whispered.

He cried then. Cried for a long time, but in the end, he knew this was no time for lamentation, or for grief.

He left without another word, retreating to his room. He began gathering his few belongings into a bag, but before too long, a knock came at his door.

He sighed, closing his eyes, wishing he could leave without seeing another soul. But he knew he would have to speak to Ashan. It might as well be now.

When he opened the door, he was surprised to find not Ashan, but Sukharam.

“If you’ve come to lecture me, you can leave now.”

“I wish to speak.”

“
I
don’t.”

Nasim tried to close the door, but Sukharam held his hand out, preventing Nasim from doing so. After a glance behind him, he forced his way into the room and closed the door behind him. “I know what you’re doing.”

Nasim went back to his bag, putting the last of his clothes into it. “I suppose you’d like a ribbon.”

“I want to go with you.”

Nasim cinched the bag, refusing to turn. He didn’t want help, and he certainly didn’t want it from Sukharam, who would only be a constant reminder of his failures.

“You can’t control a skiff,” Sukharam continued. “Not in these winds. Not alone.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You won’t. Whatever you did in the tower with Kaleh, we both know it was only in passing. If you leave alone you’ll die before you reach Galahesh.”

Nasim turned to face Sukharam. “How did you know I’m going to the straits?”

“Because that is where Muqallad must go.”

“The question was how
you
knew.”

Sukharam was pensive for a moment. He looked around the small room, looked toward the dying light through the window over Nasim’s shoulder. “I never thought your goals were foolish, you know.”

“You merely thought me incapable of achieving them.”

Sukharam laughed sadly. “I was upset because you refused to include us. You refused to let us in, including Rabiah. You refused to ask for help.”

Nasim grit his jaw. He wanted to walk past Sukharam, wanted to leave this room and take the skiff as he’d planned, and trust to the fates that he would be able to reach Galahesh on his own.

But he couldn’t. Sukharam was right. And there was a part of him that knew it would be a grave disservice to Fahroz and Rabiah if he were to refuse Sukharam’s help.

Especially Rabiah.

In the end, there was nothing for him to do but step forward and embrace Sukharam for all he was willing to do. After all Sukharam had been through, after all he’d risked already, he deserved the chance to see this through. He kissed Sukharam’s cheek and pulled him away. “I’m glad to have another.”

N
ikandr, blinking sleep from his eyes, stood on the deck of the old six-masted yacht he’d taken from Elykstava. He was standing in Jahalan’s position near the base of the starward mainmast. It felt wrong—like a dishonor to Jahalan—but in his heart he knew Jahalan would be proud. It was something they’d rarely talked about—his ability to commune with spirits of the wind—and now that Jahalan was gone, Nikandr was sorry for it. Jahalan could have taught him much, and now he’d squandered the opportunity.