Nasim shared his need, his will to right the world. Even the spirits knew how unbalanced the world had become, he was sure. Still, it retreated, perhaps ready to move on, to go wherever it is that hezhan go in their ephemeral world, but then it paused. It reconsidered, perhaps sensing something in Nasim it had not seen before, something it would like to taste of. Or perhaps its hunger outweighed its better judgment. Who knew the minds of the spirits?
It reached out.
And Nasim took it.
Suddenly it stormed over Nasim. Tried to consume him.
Nasim fought, but did not push the suurahezhan away. Instead, he embraced it. He allowed the hezhan to feed on him, to feel what the world of Erahm was like. It raged against him, but he refused to allow it thought, instead feeding it the dark sights of the forest around him, the smells, the solidity of the earth beneath his feet, and the touch of the wind that sighed through the needles of the spruce.
Like a child in a world filled with wonder and delight, the suurahezhan lost itself. It struggled only once more. A swirl of flame lit the forest. It twisted and churned, lights of yellow and orange twisting like a flock of starlings, and then it was gone, its energy snuffed as it gave itself to Nasim at last.
Despite this strange response to his offer of communion, of bonding, Nasim held no grudge. He did not command these hezhan. Any of them could leave if they truly wished. But they did not. They had all come willingly.
At last he was ready. The entrance to the tomb loomed before him. He could not see it with his eyes, but through the vanahezhan he could feel the sculpture on the stone. It was of a man, taller than Nasim, his arms folded across his chest. In his left hand was a wreath of mountain laurel, in the other an olive branch. When Sariya had opened the door she’d sent cracks through the stone, weakening it while using the smallest amount of energy she could. Nasim touched the stone with the tips of his fingers and called upon the vanahezhan, asking it to weaken the stone. He asked the jalahezhan to draw the moisture forth. Asked the suurahezhan to heat it. Bit by bit the entrance began to ablate, stone becoming sand and the sand being drawn away by the wind, and soon the way was open.
Nasim entered, but before he’d gone three paces he turned and crouched and picked up a handful of dust. He held his hand high and allowed the dust to slip through his fingers. He called upon the vanahezhan and the dhoshahezhan, both, stone and vitality bound together, and the dust billowed toward the entryway, creating a barely discernible gauze. If Sariya came, she would pass through this, and when she did, he would feel it.
He moved faster now. After a long trek he reached the door to the crypt. He could already sense the bas relief sculpture carved into the door with the senses granted him by the vanahezhan, but he would look upon it with his eyes, so he drew upon his suurahezhan, creating a bright flame that floated in the air near the door. The same sculpture as at the entrance was worked into the stone, but here the man did not hold an olive branch, nor a wreath of laurel. Here his hands were held together near his navel, the place that breath comes from, and cupped there, as gently as a robin’s egg, was a stone. It had the same striations of the Atalayina. They even glinted under the light. The stonemason who’d built this door had taken the time to work metal into it, which was very difficult, as most metal was anathema to bonding with hezhan. It took a deft hand indeed to work with it at all, and this man or woman had done it so masterfully that Nasim doubted anyone alive could still do the same.
Sorrow filled him for what he was about to do, but he stepped to the door and touched it as he had the last.
And nothing happened.
He placed his hand on it again, but this time he fed his dhoshahezhan into the stone to a greater degree, and still the stone stood resolute.
Worry grew within him like ivy, creeping through him slowly but surely as thoughts of Sariya’s eventual arrival came to him.
He pushed such thoughts away and examined the stone more closely, wondering if it was of some different quality than the last. It certainly looked the same—it had the same red color of sandstone—but beyond this, if there were qualities he’d missed, something its maker had granted it, he didn’t know what they might be.
It may have been the Atalayina’s mere presence that had allowed him to open the others. But if that were the case, why hadn’t they opened for Sariya?
Nasim stopped. Took a deep breath and released it slowly.
He was rushing.
He stepped away from the stone. Allowed the light from the suurahezhan to extinguish, plunging the tunnel into pitch darkness.
He stepped forward and placed his hands flat against the stone. Pressed his cheek against it as well, and his chest, so he could feel more of it. He had felt stone before—felt its weight and age and solidity—but he had never done anything like this before, and suddenly he felt the poorer for it.
He slowed his breathing and felt the cool, gritty surface. If this were water, he would have submerged himself in it. If it were air, he would have floated within it. But this was stone. This was earth, and so he made himself rigid. He felt it run through the palms of his hands, through the soles of his feet. He felt his muscles harden, felt his blood slow, felt his breath release under the unrelenting pressure of the weight of the mountain above him. He did not fear this change, but neither did he welcome it. He simply waited for it to happen—like an impending landslide, like the slow rise of the mountains, like the birth of the world itself.
He could feel the hand of the stone’s maker. Could feel the magic that ran through it, magic that had been painstakingly crafted and woven into the very warp and weft of this doorway.
He paused in his examination, marveling. By the fates who watch above, the woman who’d done this had woven not just with a vanahezhan, but with a dhoshahezhan as well. He could feel how the spirit had been infused into the stone. It watched over this place still, guarding not just this door, but the tomb within.
The other tombs must have been the same. So why would they have denied Sariya but allowed him entrance? The answer was not in the Atalayina—both he and Sariya had held it—so what? The answer must be wrapped up with his very nature—who he was as opposed to Sariya. Either that or it had somehow sensed his intent. The qiram who’d created these tombs would have been gifted enough to do such things, and they might have done so given the importance of this place. But if it had opened itself to him before, why wouldn’t it now?
When he thought about it, the answer was obvious. He’d been made simple with the spell Sariya had laid over him, but not only that, he’d had an innocence about him, a curiosity, but little true purpose other than to help the young woman he’d thought was Kaleh. He’d held charity in his heart.
It was no easy thing to hide things from your own mind. It was like trying to keep an image of a blue sky from your mind when someone told you not to. But in this he was uniquely gifted. The first eleven years of his life had been little more than chaos. He’d rarely been able to concentrate on any one thing—either in the physical world or the spiritual—for more than a few moments at a time. He’d grown up confused and unable to relate to those around him. But Fahroz, bless her soul, had been steadfast in her guidance. On Mirashadal, the floating village, she’d forced him to concentrate on things. Some days it was a skiff that was floating away from its eyrie. Other days it was part of the village itself—a bole of a tree trunk or a candle’s flame or the long ballast tower that hung below the byways of the village itself. He’d eventually managed to do as she asked to the point that he could consider the object, consider its nature. And then she’d moved on to concepts. When he became proud from completing the tasks she set for him, she asked him to hold on to it, to grasp it and keep it near his center. When he experienced sorrow from the passing of someone in the village, she’d asked him to focus on this as well. Even anger she’d asked him to grasp onto and retain for a time—not so much that it was unhealthy, but so that he could ground himself in his own body and make sense of the
world around him.
And so it was that he was now able to hold tightly to the same sort of charity he’d felt days ago. He wanted to open this door. He wanted to help the person who lay within. He wanted to heal the rifts and so heal the world. These things he allowed to run through him until they filled him with light.
Only then did he reach out and touch the door with the tip of his forefinger.
A crack as thin as a trail of ink spread from where his finger touched. The crack radiated like lightning strikes until the door shattered and fell with a sound like a mason dumping a pile of bricks. Dust rose and Nasim stepped through it, summoning the flame from the suurahezhan once more. Light stretched before him, revealing a short tunnel that led to a larger room. Inside was the same sort of sarcophagus as he’d seen in the other tombs, and again, on either side stood two statues, a man and a woman, with their hands to their sides, their faces beatific in repose.
Upon the stone lid of the sarcophagus were a laurel wreath and an olive branch. Nasim tried to pick them up, to set them aside and preserve them, but he no more than touched them than they crumbled like ash. With a delicate drawing on his jalahezhan, he made the stone lid slicker than ice, such that when he pushed it, it slid off easily and fell to the floor with a resounding boom.
He looked to the entryway, as the echoes died away, and a horrible thought occurred to him. Sariya was clever. Deceitful. He needed only to look at the times he thought he’d been helping only to find later that it had been Sariya’s plan all along. Could it be she was deceiving him even now? Was the echo of Kaleh merely some ploy that would allow Sariya to get what she wanted?
Taking a deep breath, he decided it didn’t matter. He didn’t know her mind. He knew only his, and he could do only what he thought was right.
He brought the flame nearer until it floated above the open maw of the sarcophagus. Lying within, arms crossed over his chest, was the man whose likeness had been captured in the statue at the tomb’s entrance, a likeness almost impossible to discern. He was so emaciated. It seemed as though he would crumble at the merest touch. On his brow was a crown with five gemstones set within it: tourmaline for fire, jasper for earth, alabaster for air, azurite for water, and in the center, raised slightly above the others, opal for life.
The last one had awoken when the lid had been removed, but perhaps she had sensed the danger she was in, whereas this man—this qiram from another age—did not.
“Can you hear me?” Nasim called.
His eyes opened slowly. They focused on the fire above him as his chest rose. He had not breathed before this moment—of this Nasim was sure—but he took breath now. It was long and full and sibilant.
“Come, grandfather,” Nasim said, hoping that continued communication would help to bring him back from his long sleep.
That was when Nasim felt her.
Sariya. She’d reached the entrance of the tomb. And she was rushing to this place as quickly as she was able.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Nasim helped the ancient man to sit. “Quickly, grandfather.”
The man’s eyes blinked slowly. They took in the room around him with a confusion that spoke volumes. Still, there was a glimmer of recognition. Clearly he recognized this place, but his expression looked too confused for him to have gained an understanding of what had passed since he’d slept.
“Grandfather, can you hear me?” Nasim wanted to shake him, but that was his fear of Sariya speaking.
The old, jaundiced eyes met Nasim’s. He blinked once, twice, and then he uttered something from his mouth that was half croak, half moan.
“Here.” Nasim opened the stopper to his water skin and poured a small amount into his mouth.
Sariya had reached the first of the turns below, and she was now taking the winding way up to the tunnel outside this room.
The old man’s throat convulsed as he drank the water. His drawn grey skin beneath his chin waggled as a shudder ran through him. He blinked, staring ahead, but there was intelligence behind those eyes. He was piecing together the events from before he’d fallen asleep. His brow creased. His eyes became progressively more frantic. He took Nasim in anew, then looked to the door and the sarcophagus in which he lay.
He opened his mouth, and again a croak came, but this time, Nasim recognized it as a word. “How…”
He’d spoken the word in Kalhani, but Nasim knew enough to recognize it.
“How what, grandfather?”
“How…” He shook his head and motioned to the water skin with his shoulder. That simple movement was accompanied by a pop and a crack and a grimace that made it clear just how painful it had been. Nasim poured him more water. “How long?”
“Since the sundering? Three hundred years.”
The old man’s eyes searched Nasim’s. He seemed confused. Perhaps he thought Nasim was lying. But then he turned toward the entrance to the tomb. Again snapping sounds accompanied the slow movement. Again he grimaced.
“One comes.”
“Yeh,” Nasim said in Mahndi. “One comes.”
As Nasim watched, a sound came from the tunnel, a sound of earth shifting, of stone cracking. Sariya was near, and he could feel her burning intent, her will to kill this man.
Nasim could not allow it, and yet he didn’t know how to stop her. He had hope, however. There was one he could count as an ally…
He reached into the sarcophagus and lifted the old man out. He was light as a bundle of sticks, and it was no trouble at all for Nasim to walk with him. He did not notice before, but now that he was so close he saw that the gemstones in his crown not only glittered, they glowed from within. The glow was faint—as faint as this man’s grasp on life—but it was there. The mere thought of it was staggering, a man bound to five hezhan at once. This ancient qiram had done so before he’d entered this tomb, that much was clear. What was also clear was that the hezhan had remained with him the entire time. Three centuries they’d stayed. Three centuries, when today it would be difficult for most qiram to bond with a single hezhan for more than a week at a time. It had been a different time then—the world had been a different place—but this was still hard to believe.
Nasim heard footsteps outside in the tunnel. Sariya was running, but slowed as she sensed him.
Still cradling the ancient man, Nasim stepped out into the hallway—beyond the door that had crumbled at his touch. Once there, he set the old man gently down and turned to face Sariya. He sent the glowing point of flame ahead. It floated in the air between them. It was strange to see her now: Sariya, hiding behind the eyes of Kaleh. The feeling of ages long past was more present than it had been before. In the past he’d written it off to Kaleh’s heritage, but now he was surprised he hadn’t realized her true nature sooner.
“Hear me, Kaleh!” Nasim bellowed.
Sariya looked down to the Tashavir, the Atalayina held tightly in one hand. She looked haggard. She’d pushed herself for weeks, perhaps months, to arrive at this very place, and she would push herself harder still. It was this very thing, Sariya’s unquenchable desire to finish this, that Nasim was counting on.
“Hear me!” Nasim said again, the words echoing down the tunnel.
“She cannot,” Sariya said. “She may have found her way to you before, but no longer, Khamal. No longer.” She raised the Atalayina over her head, pointed the palm of her other hand toward Nasim just before releasing a blast of fire.
The fire splayed across the shield Nasim had erected. Life and fire were allied spirits, but it was through this bond that one could defend against the other.
“Kaleh!” Nasim called above the flames. “Fight her! She will never be weaker than she is now!”
He staggered back, for the heat was rising.
Sariya stepped forward, her hand still blasting flame. He pulled the stopper from the water skin at his side and called upon the jalahezhan to draw the water forth. He launched it against the flames. It did not douse them, but the entire hall flashed to steam,
fogging the area they were in. Nasim then reached out with his hand, causing the stone near Sariya’s feet to soften. She sunk into the stone. Tendrils of stone snaked out from the walls and wrapped around her arms and wrists. Encompassed her hands, including the one holding the Atalayina.
The flames stopped. The stone hardened at his command.
Sariya fought against these restraints, but for the moment she was bound.
Nasim brightened his point of flame until Sariya’s eyes were drawn to it. “Kaleh, please! Fight her! There will be no other time!”
He had hoped there would be some sense of recognition in Sariya’s eyes, but they merely hardened. It wasn’t going to work. Kaleh wouldn’t, or couldn’t, fight her—not when Sariya was fully aware of her attempts to regain dominance.
The muscles along Sariya’s arms tightened like cordage. Nasim tried to strengthen the stone that bound her, but in the end she was too strong, and the stone shattered.
Nasim had slowly been returning to himself since leaving the last tomb and traveling across the plain of Shadam Khoreh to this mountain. But he hadn’t been fully aware of who he was and what he could do until this moment. He didn’t know what had triggered it—perhaps this very conflict. Whatever the case, he remembered what he had done on Mirashadal when Kaleh had murdered Fahroz, he remembered what he had done on the Spar on Galahesh.
And he does so again.
He draws the world in around him, draws it tight, until the mountain above seems to crouch and the heavens seem to stoop.
Sariya slows. The flame in the air shifts slowly, as if caught in amber.
“Kaleh,” he says. His voice sounds dead in this place.
Kaleh does not respond. Sariya still holds her tight.
The Flames of Shadam Khoreh Page 26