To the Towers of Tulandan

by Bradley Beaulieu

  For a time she and Ashan had been followed by the oprichni, but Ashan had summoned more steam before finally releasing his spirits as well. Khadija worried that the Matri were watching them even now from their drowning basins in Palotza Iyakar, but as time wore on and she and Ashan ate their simple meal of flatbread and black bean paste in silence, she began to worry less, not because the danger was not high, but because she’d promised herself long ago to never fear the Landed again. If the fates willed her to be taken and hung, she would accept it and welcome her next life and begin her long journey of penance from the violence she’d dealt in this one.

  “Where did my message find you?” Khadija asked him.

  Ashan smiled widely, showing his gapped and angled teeth. “Is that where you wish to begin?”

  “It’s a good enough place to start,” she replied.

  “I’ve come from Khazabyirsk, and before that Bolgravya, and before that the Towers of Tulandan, which was where”—he looked up from tending the cooking flatbread with a goggle-eyed expression—“your message found me.”

  Khadija closed her eyes. The Towers… How she wished she could go to that ancient place of learning and read their texts, perhaps share her stories with others and listen to theirs. But she’d chosen another life. Like an eclipse of the sun, the life she’d chosen had long ago stifled her will to learn, had in fact smothered it until the thirst for knowledge she’d once felt so keenly now felt instead like something that had never been hers; but when she came in contact with someone like Ashan, her desires were rekindled, at least until her next act of violence.

  “What made up your mind to come?” Khadija asked.

  While flipping the flatbread with practiced movements, he laughed, a joyous sound she’d nearly forgotten. “One would think you wished I hadn’t come.”

  “I don’t remember you being so circumspect.”

  His smile faded. “I don’t remember you being so violent.”

  Khadija ignored the jab. Behind the smiles, Ashan was shrewd, and he was trying to push her into revealing more than she wished. “Have you come to save me, then? To turn me back to the path of vashaqiram, to enlightenment?”

  Ashan had already lost his humor, but now he became gravely serious. When he spoke, he spoke in low tones. “It is a path you can always return to, daughter of Fassed. Even were you to be caught and hung tomorrow. Even”—he gave her that look again—“were you to kill everyone on this island.”

  At this, Khadija’s breath caught, and to her great shame Ashan saw. Not shame for the acts she and the others hoped to commit against the Duchy of Rhavanki, but for the life she’d left behind, the vows—to herself if no one else—she’d turned her back on.

  “Khadija, what happened to Mirilah does not have to happen to you.”

  “Do not speak to me of my sister!”

  Suddenly the message she’d sent so long ago seemed foolish indeed. What had she hoped in summoning Ashan here? He would never agree to help, or if he did, then Soroush would refuse him.

  “What made you come?” she finally snapped.

  Ashan pursed his lips. He looked strange, as if choosing his words with great care, but then there came a sound from the entrance to the cave, and Ashan turned toward it. A bear of a man with a long grey beard stooped low to enter the cave. Khadija grit her teeth and did her best to hide her disappointment. She’d hoped Soroush himself would come. He at least she could reason with. Bersuq, Soroush’s brother, was like a stone, rigid in his thinking and resolute that others should be the same.

  Bersuq could not come to full height when he reached the open space near the fire, so he crouched and sat on his heels, eyeing Ashan warily. Bersuq wore the clothes of the Maharraht, robes of rough woolen cloth, almond-shaped turban with a ragged tail that hung down his chest.

  Khadija motioned to Ashan. “This is Ashan Kida al Ahrumea.”

  “Ashan is known to me.” Bersuq’s greying beard waggled as he spoke.

  “Forgive me,” Ashan said as he ripped some hot bread free and popped it into his mouth, “but I do not know you.”

  “And why would you?” Bersuq asked.

  “Ashan,” she waved to the man across from him, “may the fates smile as you meet Bersuq Wahad al Gatha.”

  “Peace be upon you,” Ashan said around his food, offering Bersuq his smile.

  Bersuq refused to return it, turning his head to Khadija instead. He said nothing, but his gaze demanded answers.

  “I summoned him here, Bersuq, for I’m running out of answers. In truth, I was running out long before we came here.”

  Bersuq’s face soured. He was not a forgiving man, nor a patient one, and he was beginning to show his anger, which meant surely that considerably more was bottled up inside him. “You imagine that an arqesh will help us?”

  “In this he might.”

  “Why?”

  “Allow me to ask him and you’ll see.”

  The muscles along Bersuq’s jaw worked. His reddened eyes looked her up and down, then they studied Ashan. “Are you Maharraht?”

  “I am not,” Ashan said matter-of-factly.

  Bersuq stood, hunching over, and stared down at Khadija. “Then he cannot come.”

  And with that he left the cave, leaving a dread feeling in the pit of Khadija’s heart.

  The sound of rushing water filled the valley walls. Khadija walked along a trail layered with fresh fallen snow. Two sets of footprints were nearly lost, but she could see them, dimples mirroring one another along the trail that hugged the steep right side of the valley. After a bend in the path the sound of rushing water rose dramatically. On the valley’s opposite face frothed a wide, white waterfall that issued from a gap in the black cliff face and fell to a churning pool below. Standing even with her on an outcropping of rock halfway down the course of the roaring water were a tall man and a young boy, both dressed in the ragged clothes of the Maharraht.

  The man was Soroush Wahad al Gatha, the very man she had been following, her guiding light, these past seven years.

  And the boy…

  His name was Nasim, and he was gifted. Gifted in ways not seen in centuries. Speaking to him, however, communicating with him, that was another matter entirely.

  Soroush crouched next to him, his long black beard blowing in the wind as he whispered in Nasim’s ear. He whispered not because of the falls but because Khadija herself had learned that to whisper so close seemed to reach him more often than other methods. Nasim was not watching the water. He was hugging himself around his waist, as he did so often. Only rarely did he act otherwise, and even more rarely did he speak, though she knew he was not a boy without words. He could speak, but only when the fates and some queer working of Nasim’s mind saw fit.

  Khadija continued on the trail and eventually stepped from soft earth onto black stone wet from the spray of the waterfall. The moment she did, Nasim’s head snapped toward her. Soroush turned as well, alarmed, not from her presence, but from Nasim’s unexpected reaction to it. Nasim rarely noticed the details of the world around him. Khadija had worked with him for nearly three years now, but he’d only spoken with her twice: once while ferrying him across the White Sea north of Bolgravya, and another while cutting across the Great Northern Sea as they’d approached Rafsuhan, one of the few Maharraht refuges. Both times Khadija had felt a yawning inside of her, something Nasim himself had surely caused.

  She felt it again here, a hollow in her gut that felt as though the world were opening up beneath her and that any moment it would swallow her whole. Her instinct was to reach for her gut, to protect herself with the very gesture she’d seen so often from Nasim, but the truth was she was too transfixed by what was happening to do so.

  She stepped carefully toward him. “Nasim?”

  But she realized then he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking over her shoulder. She turned and found Ashan walking along the trail behind her. She glanced quickly to Soroush, hoping to read his mood. She’d asked Ashan to remai
n in their cave, and he’d smiled and nodded, but she realized now he hadn’t actually agreed to her demand.

  Soroush was angry—she could see it in his eyes—but he said nothing as Ashan stepped lightly onto the black stone beside Khadija and approached. Like a man hoping to settle the nerves of a skittish yearling, Ashan glided toward Nasim, ever closer, hands at his sides. The stone set into the golden circlet upon his brow glowed dully in the daylight. He was bonded, then, and Khadija could tell he was bonded not merely to one hezhan, but many. Ashan was arqesh, a man gifted among the Aramahn people. To be arqesh meant many things, but here was one facet of it: the ability to commune with five hezhan at once. Five. All of the elements. Vana, hava, suura, jala, and dhosha—earth, air, fire, water, and life.

  As had always been true, Khadija stood in awe of his gifts, and it made the blood rise to her cheeks as she thought of the things she’d done since leaving Ashan’s side.

  When he judged he’d come near enough, Ashan crouched so that he was looking up at Nasim, not the other way around. “Can you hear me?” he asked as the water roared.

  And now Nasim appeared to be looking over Ashan’s shoulder. He looked around him, to the sky above, to the moist stone below. “They are old,” he said.

  Ashan seemed to know what he meant immediately, for he smiled and replied, “They are indeed. Have you seen them before?”

  Nasim looked again, his brown hair damp from the water drifting on the breeze around them. “Them, neh. But their brothers. Their sisters.”

  Ashan nodded. “I can feel them as well.”

  And now that Ashan said it, Khadija could too. They were speaking of hezhan—spirits, separated from the world of material things by the aether. They stood always on the other side of the veil, in Adhiya, yearning to return to the lives they once led. It was why qiram like Ashan and Khadija could commune with them. Hezhan wished to touch life in Erahm, to experience it through the bond they shared with a qiram. And the qiram… They wished to touch the stuff of Adhiya, a thing the hezhan might grant—that and to learn more about the world beyond. It was an exchange into which both qiram and hezhan willingly entered.

  Sometimes there were few spirits near and communing was difficult, but not here, not on Rhavanki, which was precisely why Soroush had brought them to this island. Khadija could feel gathered in this place hordes of hezhan, many of whom not only yearned to cross, but seemed desperate for it. There were some special few among these that felt old and ancient indeed. Elders, they were called, hezhan with whom only the most powerful could commune safely. Yet Nasim was doing so with apparent ease. And he did so without a stone. He needed no stone of alabaster to commune with a spirit of air, no azurite for a spirit of water. He simply did, like the qiram of ancient days.

  Throughout this exchange Soroush watched, the golden earrings in his ruined left ear glinting as his gaze swiveled back and forth between them. His brother had denied Khadija’s request for Ashan’s presence, and Soroush most likely would have again when Khadija pleaded for him to reconsider. But this was different. This was proof before his very eyes that Ashan could speak with this boy—at least more so than anyone else in the Maharraht had been able to do.

  Ashan, smiling softly, inched closer to Nasim. “Where have you come from, Nasim?”

  Nasim frowned at this. He shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

  Ashan seemed unaffected by his answer. “Who was your mother?”

  And now Nasim’s frown deepened. His eyes rolled up in their sockets until only the whites could be seen. He shivered and doubled up, holding his gut and screaming. He was a boy of nine, perhaps ten, but just then he looked three years old as he curled inward over his knees, muscles taut, his whole body shivering with pain.

  “Nasim!” Ashan reached out to touch him.

  And when he did, the wind rose. In mere moments it was howling around them, tugging at their clothes and whipping their hair. It pressed on them, thrust them around on the stone, and for a moment Khadija thought they might all be thrown from it into the waiting water below, or worse, dashed to the unforgiving stone around it.

  She realized the wind was swirling around Nasim himself. It twisted his clothes, spun the droplets of water around him and tossed them skyward in a swirling maelstrom that went up and up and up. The water from the waterfall was drawn in as well, more and more of it frothing around him until Nasim was completely obscured. Soroush and Khadija both stepped away, but Ashan drew upon his hezhan, he countered the effects Nasim was creating through his own bonded spirits.

  Ashan was shouting something as he stood there, but Khadija couldn’t hear it among the roar of wind and water. His words must have made their way to Nasim, though, for a moment later the water around Nasim and in the column above him burst. It spread outward, spraying the area all around, misting the sky above this hidden vale. Rainbows formed as the water drifted downward, turning a place that had seemed ready to deal death only moments ago into something strangely idyllic.

  The roar became a hush, and Khadija could hear Ashan calling to Nasim. “All is well,” he said, holding Nasim closely. “All is well.”

  Soroush was nervous. Khadija could tell from the way he was watching Nasim, but he didn’t wish to interrupt the tentative peace Ashan had somehow brokered.

  At last, Nasim stood, holding his gut with both arms, with Ashan at his side.

  Soroush glanced southward toward a white mountain peak. Beyond that mountain—three leagues from where they stood—lay Kirishci and Palotza Iyakar, and unless no one lay in the cold drowning basins deep beneath the palotza, the Matri’s attention would be drawn here. Their only chance was to move below ground, where it was said the confluences of aether gave the Matri difficulty seeing. “Come, quickly,” he said, and the four of them walked down a hidden path to a tunnel near the base of the falls.

  Khadija followed as they walked down the tunnel, going deeper and deeper into the mountain. Soroush, at the lead, held a siraj, a stone the size of a pear that shed a bright pink light. Khadija had not been to this place before, and she didn’t know whether it was one of the forgotten Aramahn villages that dotted the many, many islands of the Great Sea. She decided it wasn’t, that this place had been freshly built, for the tunnel they followed, and the others that met and crossed it, all looked to be freshly made, carved by the hand of dozens of vanaqiram over the course of months, even years. She had known that Soroush had been planning their journey to Rhavanki for some time, but she’d had no idea just how long.

  They came eventually to a room, more of a cavern, with many siraj stones set into pedestals throughout. The room itself was circular with a high vaulted ceiling that held the curving traceries of her people. They may have abandoned the tenets of the Aramahn, but not the love of place, of creating; this would never leave them, and it made Khadija yearn for her earlier days she’d spent flying on skiffs and windships among the islands, traveling the world.

  Learning, not killing.

  She shook these thoughts away as she and the others walked toward the center of the room. Groups of Maharraht rested about the place—some standing and talking, others sitting cross-legged, taking breath—but when Soroush clapped his hands, they all left, leaving Khadija and Soroush alone with Nasim and Ashan.

  Soroush set his siraj into an empty pedestal at the exact center of the room and regarded Khadija with dark eyes. “You knew why I asked you to meet me this morning.”

  “I did.”

  “And yet you brought this Aramahn with you.”

  “She did not,” Ashan broke in. “I followed of my own accord.”

  “Why?” Soroush asked, turning to face him.

  Soroush was an imposing man, and a rage was clearly building within him, but Ashan appeared not to notice. “Because the message that Khadija sent me made it clear how special Nasim was, and that you were having difficulty with him.”

  “There have been difficulties, that is true, but whether Nasim is special or not remains to be
seen.”

  Ashan’s look of shock was comical, cast as it was by the reddish light from the siraj. “Did you not stand upon the same slab of basalt as I?”

  Soroush stiffened. “There is no doubt Nasim has the potential to be special—very special, as we saw—but that is a far cry from being special.” He regarded Nasim with a sour expression, as if Nasim were his own son. “Like this he is little more than a burden.”

  “A burden…” Ashan echoed. “And you would rather he be … what?”

  “Why have you come here?” Soroush countered.

  “To help.”

  “So you implied. But why? What do you hope to gain here?”

  Ashan laughed, and Soroush’s mood grew the darker for it. “Does one need to gain from everything they do in life? Might a man not grow simply by helping?”

  “He may,” Soroush allowed, and with that he turned to Khadija. “What did your message say?”

  Khadija’s heart jumped. Soroush demanded extreme loyalty from all his followers. She had known it might come to this when she’d sent for Ashan, but the Maharraht had so few with his sort of knowledge. So much had been lost—particularly among those who followed the violent ways of the Maharraht—but she would tell him the truth; she would not sully her soul by lying. “I told him of Nasim’s abilities. Though Nasim reveals them little enough, I told him they were wondrous, that they were akin to the qiram of old, that he can reach across the aether with but a thought, a wave of his hand. I told Ashan of our inability to reach Nasim, to talk, to tell him what we wish.”

  “And what is it you wish?” Ashan broke in.

  Soroush stroked Nasim’s hair. It was a tender gesture, but it made Khadija’s insides squirm. She’d never been wholly comfortable with using a boy in such a way, but she recognized the need. These were desperate days, and if the fates saw fit to deliver one such as Nasim into their laps, who was she to argue?