by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 51
Khylar filled the doorway, suddenly seeming much larger than his wiry, almost scholarly frame. Those rain-cloud eyes cut through Siniq-elb, made sharper by the smile on Khylar’s face.
The su-esis’s smile broadened as he stepped through the doorway. Behind him, struggling as he held her by the throat, came Mece, her feet a half-inch from the floor. “I’m rather fond of it, actually. The box. A friend made it for me, and although it’s not much to look at, the lock is quite solid, and it means something to me.” Mece let out a strangled gasp as Khylar tightened his grip.
For a moment, Siniq-elb could feel nothing but cool wetness at the stumps of his legs; he glanced down, sure that the wounds had reopened, that he was standing in his own blood. With detached disappointment, he saw that the water in the stained carpet had soaked through his bandages. Just water.
The moment passed, and the situation at hand pressed in on Siniq-elb. Mece choked and coughed, her toes scraping the ground, but Khylar held her almost indifferently, as though she were no more troublesome than a stray cat. He should not have been able to do that, not without the brachal. Siniq-elb’s stomach sank, but he brandished the box at Khylar.
“Let her go,” Siniq-elb said. “I know what you have in here. Let her go, or you won’t get it back.”
“By the stones,” Khylar said, a tight smile stretching across his face. “Did you really think I was that stupid? That I couldn’t hear a cripple hobbling after me through the basement? That I didn’t know about Dakel, sitting next to me while this bitch filched my dew? Who do you think you are, Sikkim of Evirin? How much did Dakel pay you to steal the brachal? Why did he want my dew? What does he want?”
“Father take me if I know,” Siniq-elb said. “We saw a chance to get ahead; can’t blame us for trying, can you?”
“You’re as arrogant as that whore you call a mother,” Khylar said. “A chance to get ahead—what did you think this was? The marketplace? Tair help you, you stupid boy, this is the Garden. The merchants think they’re the new power in Khi’ilan, that the temple and the days of the tair are waning. Cowards, riding on the tail of the rebels. Kishar and Gemel Ayaou, the perfect pair, proud and stupid.”
“Don’t speak about my parents that way,” Siniq-elb said.
“What will you do? Tair help me, you still don’t realize, do you? You’re nothing now. Less than nothing. Not a man, not even kitchen help, no matter how much you might wish to be. Tair, even Zeyn, pathetic as he is, is more of a man than you.”
“That didn’t help him stop me,” Siniq-elb said.
“You’re nothing,” Khylar repeated. “You should have seen the way your mother begged—begged!—when she heard we had you. You’d think she was the most temple-going woman in Khi’ilan. And after the chastisement, by the tair’s body that was sweet, they couldn’t even bear to look at you. Siniq-elb Ayaou, the most promising bachelor of Khi’ilan, prized soldier of Sword-bearer Qilic, left a shattered wreck. They were so willing to comply with temple policies after that, so eager to withdraw their petition to end the street harvests.”
“My parents saw me?” Siniq-elb asked. The words swelled in his mouth, so thick he could barely force them out, and they hung in the air.
“Just think of it—end the street harvests! The Thirteen Paths, Nakhacevir, is built on the harvests. The High Harvest is the heart of who we are.”
He was still speaking, his pale cheeks flushed, his gray eyes fixed on something distant. Siniq-elb no longer heard him. His parents had come to see him. They had tried to save him. And the temple had used Siniq-elb to control his parents.
In a flash, Mece’s frustration, Vas’s disillusionment, it all came together. If there were heretics in the Garden, they were accidental; the Garden was a place for hostages. And Siniq-elb had not seen it because he had bought into the temple’s rhetoric completely.
Rage like Siniq-elb had never known flooded into him. They had turned him into a knife to be wielded against people who loved him. His parents, who had been trying to help innocent people. Inara. Perhaps even Qilic and Natam. Siniq-elb, who had dedicated his life to serving Khi’ilan, had been turned against the people he had sought to protect.
And in his self-pity, in his blindness, he had allowed it to continue.
“Catch,” he said. With all his anger, Siniq-elb hurled the box at Khylar, right at the su-esis’s face.
Caught off guard, in mid-sentence, Khylar could only blink before the box caught him on the cheek, snapping his head back with a crunch. The su-esis stumbled, but he kept his grip on Mece. The box fell to the ground with a thud.
Siniq-elb was already moving. He launched himself forward, letting out a howl when his still tender stumps caught his weight at the landing. The pain only fueled his anger though. He swept out with one crutch, catching Khylar at the knee, and the su-esis stumbled and let Mece fall. The second crutch whistled through the air, straight for Khylar’s jaw, where the box had hit.
Faster than Siniq-elb had thought possible, Khylar’s hand whipped up and caught the second crutch. The su-esis twisted his hand and Siniq-elb was forced to let go of the crutch or have his wrist broken. Rubbing his cheek, Khylar got to his feet. Mece scrabbled toward him, her hands reaching for his face, but Khylar knocked her aside with a back-handed slap. She hit the plastered wall with a crack and slid to the floor.
“No!” Siniq-elb shouted. He struck again with the crutch. Khylar caught it and tore it free.
With a shake of his head, Khylar took up both crutches and, like a child snapping twigs, broke them in half.
“You can’t,” Siniq-elb said. “Vas saw you. You didn’t have the brachal.”
“Did you think, after that bitch stole my dew, that I wouldn’t be suspicious? Tair help you, you could have gotten dew from anywhere; stealing it from me was idiotic.” Khylar stretched, passing one hand along his jaw where Siniq-elb had struck him, and then pushed up his sleeve to reveal the brachal. “Now, there it is, so you can see for yourself. Where is Dakel? What does he want?”
“Father take you.”
Khylar’s mouth twisted into a snarl. “Where is he?”
Siniq-elb shook his head; the dark waters of desperation were washing up around him, carrying him out to sea. Not only had he failed, but he had been a blind fool. Not to recognize the Garden for what it was. Not to recognize Vas and Mece for who they were. Not to have understood anything really. Now he would die, and Vas, and Mece, and though Siniq-elb felt no sorrow for himself, he knew Vas and Mece would have been better off if he had never woken from his stupor. And so, between one heartbeat and the next, Siniq-elb let the undertow of his thoughts drag him away from Khylar, away from the bedroom, away from his failures, and into a space beneath waking.
Dimly, he heard Khylar’s questions repeated, and eventually the su-esis struck him, hard enough that Siniq-elb found himself contemplating his wavering reflection in the side of the copper tub, the taste of blood attenuated in his mouth. And then the click of the door shutting, more final than the sheathing of a sword, more final than the last beat of a heart.