Alisiyad

by Sarah R. Suleski

  Russ fully expected the rest of the city to come pouring into the temple, ready for revenge, but nothing happened. “Well then,” said Ricalli. “I will go meet the angry masses.”

  Leeton tenderly gathered up Alisiya’s body in his arms, and without a word began to follow. Russ took Liseli’s hand and they brought up the rear.

  They crossed the threshold and stood in the courtyard, wincing in the bright morning sunlight. There were no angry masses gathered for attack . . . strangely there didn’t seem to be a soul around at all.

  “What the . . . ?” Russ wondered uncertainly.

  Ricalli seemed caught off guard, and looked around. Then he sniffed and grimaced. “Death,” he said shortly. “The city reeks of it. Sickness and death. Mortal bodies putrefying and rotting.”

  Russ, having spent the night in the temple full of dead bodies, didn’t exactly notice much of a difference in the smell. But then, he couldn’t say the air smelled fresh, either.

  “Oh my God,” said Liseli quietly, taking a step back inside. “I know what it is.”

  “What?”

  “It’s her.” Russ followed her gaze to where it fell on Alisiya’s body cradled in her father’s arms. “Her blood,” Liseli clarified. “It’s killing them.”

  Ricalli uttered a short laugh of realization. “Of course,” he said, “The trough around the alter leads to the sewers. One of the idiotic rituals the priests came up with was to sacrifice a newborn calf on the altar every new moon and let its blood run into the water system. It’s meant to nourish the city, or something daft like that.”

  “I drained Alisiya’s blood so she couldn’t come back to life,” Liseli finished the explanation. She covered her mouth and said with hushed horror, “It’s my fault . . . I’ve poisoned the water. Now it’s just like the Chaiorra . . . .”

  “All the more reason to leave this place,” Ricalli said brusquely, not sounding very concerned about the fate of his people. “And the sooner the better, they’ll be clamoring after me to save them as soon as they notice I am outside.”

  Russ shot a disgusted glance toward him in reaction to his callousness, but Ricalli didn’t notice, his attention on the empty cityscape before them. Leeton’s reticence on the matter was unsettling, because Russ couldn’t shake the feeling that he was only cooperating long enough to plot something nasty for Liseli or Ricalli. Not that Russ really was concerned about what Leeton tried to do to Ricalli — but he doubted Leeton was content to let his grudge against Liseli slide.

  They walked across the courtyard and down the long flight of steps leading down the hill, casting wary glances around them and each directing surreptitious looks at each other. Russ even watched Liseli out of the corner of his eye. He hadn’t had much of a chance to think about what she’d done to Alisiya’s body — and God knows he’d stand next to her whatever the reason — but that didn’t make it any less unsettling. They really had to get out of the place and the quicker the better. It was turning them both into something he didn’t like to think about.

  They began to hear noises as they walked. From inside the buildings and down the alleys came dying groans, strangely inhuman cries and mumblings. It made them walk a little faster. The city was dying, but not yet dead. They saw crows circling up above, pecking at windows and cawing as they fought over remains. Russ thought of the bird-girls — he’d tried to save them, and now were they among the dying? He blinked, and swallowed hard.

  A few blocks down they saw a woman — she staggered out into the street, dragging a bucket in one hand and holding a grimy rag to her mouth with the other. She dragged the bucket over to the gutter and tipped it. A disgusting mix of blood, bile, and excrement ran out into the street and sloughed toward the sewer drain.

  Suddenly she noticed them, and her eyes widened when she saw Ricalli. She gazed at him with rekindled hope. Then she exclaimed something in Adayzjian and doubled over, coughing uncontrollably. She lifted her face again, blood trickling from her mouth, and she reached out toward Ricalli in supplication, begging for his help.

  Ricalli made a disgusted noise and hurried past, saying, “Come along, faster, every moment I spend in this stinking place is far too long!”

  Russ and Liseli had both been frozen in horror watching the pitiful scene, but reluctantly followed Ricalli. The woman cried and stood in the gutter, looking bereft as her god passed her by. Russ knew that Ricalli couldn’t help her any more than he could, at this point, but apparently the lord of darkness had been absent the day they were passing out compassion in Adayzjian god-land. But what else would he expect from a guy who shrugged at his followers’ ritual torture and murder of innocent people? No . . . Ricalli wasn’t a good guy by any stretch of the imagination. Russ squinted at him as he considered what would happen once they reached Alisiya.

  He caught Leeton watching him as they walked, and stared back at the King as if to say, “Yeah, what?” Leeton turned away, shifting Alisiya’s body in his arms.

  They passed through the part of the city that had been so recently inhabited, and came to the old, bombed out section that Russ recognized as his first impression of Azmanval. How ironic, he thought, that he and the others who had come to this world from that Gate would be responsible for turning the entire city into one big bad side of town. Though with the sadistic Ricallyn ruling things, the good side of town had not been all that great to begin with . . . .

  “It’s here,” he said, standing before the crumbling doorway. He could sense the Gate lurking between the old stones, could feel the edgeworld opening up already, pulling him toward it, could hear the wordless call of the Gate. . . . “Are you ready?”

  “I am more than ready,” responded Ricalli.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” muttered Russ, and reached out for Liseli’s hand.

  “I’m ready,” she said with a faint smile that didn’t reach her eyes. She had been extremely quiet since seeing what was happening to the city, and was still holding the knife crusted with Alisiya’s blood. Russ had wanted to say something reassuring about it not really being her fault, but he couldn’t quite get the words out. She would just shake her head at him and insist that it was, anyway. Well. There would be time later for reflecting on things that had happened . . . now they just had to work on making sure there would be a later for them.

  Russ stepped forward, aware of Ricalli uncomfortably close behind. The Gate opened to welcome him, and he plunged over the edge.

  Chapter 35 ~ Facing the Light

  Russ fell into the deathly gray stillness of the Edgeworld.

  He sat up and shook sand from his hair, thinking that it felt more like ash than sand, when you got right down into it. A disgusted shiver ran through him at the idea of falling into a sea of ash, like drowning in a great big funeral urn. He reached out for Liseli beside him and gripped her hand; she sat listlessly on the ground, wearing that same eerie look of waking sleep that Alisiya had when they came through.

  Reminded of that, Russ looked around to see if the others had made it through behind him. He saw Leeton standing a few feet away, holding his daughter. Ricalli was walking past him, a little to the left, but it was not the usual purposeful stride Russ had seen the god use. He wandered aimlessly, as if his legs remembered that he wanted to be going somewhere but the rest of him wasn’t sure.

  Russ stood, pulling Liseli up beside him. The gray road seemed crowded and strained, as if the presence of five bodies threatened the hill under their feet, and Russ had an unsettling vision of the sand falling away into the infinite darkness, carrying them along with it. The light hovered just over the edge of the hill, as if shy to show its face.

  “So what’s the plan?” Russ asked boldly, and Leeton turned to look at him blankly. “Come on. You’ve had ‘plotting’ written all over you since we left the temple,” Russ prodded. Then he added, “I didn’t want to say anything around Ricalli, though.”

  Leeton regarded him silently a moment, then set Alisiya gently down in the sand. “Very
well,” he said. “What do you propose to do about it?”

  “Depends on what ‘it’ is.”

  Leeton walked around them, giving Russ a wide berth, and Russ turned cautiously, keeping Liseli shielded. Leeton paused and bent down, picking something up from the sand. Russ cursed under his breath when he saw what it was — a knife. The knife, which Liseli had been carrying. You moron! he berated himself. He should have realized she would drop it once she fell into the half-awake state induced by the Edgeworld.

  Leeton looked at the blood stained blade for a moment, then up at Russ. Then his eyes, taking on the same pale shade of gray as the sand, locked onto Ricalli.

  “I was born a weak child,” he said, unexpectedly, and walked toward him, past Russ, still keeping his distance. He turned his eyes to Russ, as if daring him to make a move to stop him, but Russ just made sure he kept himself between Liseli and the King.

  “My father was not a healthy man,” Leeton shook his head, frowning a little as he remembered back. “Thin, pale . . . not that I remember much, of course, he died of consumption when I was very young. That should have been my fate. I spent most of my young life in bed or bound to the indoors with nothing to do but read and dream of being strong. It was only a dream — I should have died young, like my father. Do you know why I didn’t?”

  He had reached Ricalli, and put out a hand to stop his wandering. It was a strange sight — Ricalli, the tall, muscular god being held still by the lank man.

  “Magic?” Russ answered the prompt.

  Leeton glanced at him. “Magic? I suppose. As a means. But I escaped my fate through determination. I learned how to thwart mortal illness, aging, death, because I was determined to live.”

  “I see.”

  “Look at him. He thinks he is a god.” Leeton held Ricalli with a hand on his shoulder, and the god, or whatever he was, just stared uncomprehendingly back. “He’s not a god. Surely he is something other than human, but he was born that way. He is what he is because his parents made him that way. He did nothing.”

  Leeton brought the knife up and with a quick, savage motion, slit Ricalli’s throat from ear to ear. Blood, shockingly dark and red in the dead gray of the Edgeworld, poured from the thick neck. Ricalli wavered, but his expression remained unchanged.

  “In the Gateworld he is not a god,” Leeton said coldly. “That is the one thing he was born without, the only thing that matters in this place. Now I am the god, because I was born with the power.” He turned back to Russ. “Why is he going to die?”

  “Because,” Russ stared him in the eyes, challenging, “I’m not stopping you.”

  Something like a morbid imitation of a smile crossed Leeton’s face, as the light intensified behind him on the hill. With one hand he pushed Ricalli, almost carelessly, over the edge of the road. Powerless, Ricalli fell backward into the darkness. Leeton regarded the blood on his hand, then wiped it on his pantleg.

  “I spent my life searching for something,” he said. “When I was a boy, only seventeen, very young, I realized that the world where I was born was not the only world there was. But that’s not what saved me from death, that’s not what gave me the determination to fight my body’s weakness. Do you know what did?”

  “Stubborn cussedness?” Russ said the first thing that came into his mind, though he suspected it was a line from a John Wayne movie.

  “No,” Leeton said, unamused. “The first time I passed through a Gate, she told me something. Her name was Alpyli and she was a beautiful creature, the most beautiful and frightening thing I had ever seen in my short life. She told me I had a choice, turn back and live out my life as it was, or travel onward and never see my home again.”

  Liseli spoke from behind Russ; “And I, I chose the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

  Russ, shocked, turned to look at her. “Liseli?”

  She stared back, eyes blank, and he thought for a moment he had imagined it.

  “It’s nothing,” said Leeton. “She is aware of everything as if it’s a dream, it is the same way with most without our gift. They cannot fully believe what they are dreaming is real, and afterwards they remember little or nothing of it, except in their dreams.”

  “How do you know?” Russ was skeptical. “You’ve never been one of them.”

  “I have lived a very long time and traveled many Gates. I have taken many non-Keys through Gates with me. I have studied them, in the pursuit of understanding everything I can about the way the worlds work. It isn’t enough to have talent, Markson. You must have knowledge to survive as a Key.”

  “Don’t forget determination,” said Russ evenly.

  “Yes. And a reason.” Leeton took a step towards them. Russ held his ground, because behind them was the nothingness of the abyss. Leeton continued, “A reason to learn, a reason to strive, a reason to live. Alpyli gave me those things when she told me my future. She told me that if I chose to leave my home and everything I knew behind, forever, I would find love.”

  “Love,” Russ echoed.

  “Love. And love is not simple or safe. I didn’t quite understand that then.” Leeton shook his head ruefully at the boy he had once been. “She told me that I would fall prey to a deep, controlling love as I had never imagined possible. A love that had the potential to destroy me. I could not foresee what that truly meant, and naturally I was intrigued; I was young. I wanted to find adventure and love like I’d read about in books.”

  “And did you?”

  “I found her.”

  Russ looked at Alisiya, lying dead in the road, and swallowed nervously. Now he saw where Leeton was going with all of this.

  “When I met Aysha, decades after first entering the world of Gates, I thought I had finally found the great love Alpyli promised. But then she was born and I realized I was wrong. I loved Aysha deeply but it was not all consuming. How could it be? We were two separate people and never could be anything else. But my daughter was part of me.”

  “Leeton,” Russ said flatly, “I didn’t try to stop you from killing Ricalli because I didn’t give a damn about him. He wasn’t a good man, and I never for a minute planned on going along with our ‘deal.’ I don’t need his protection. Or want it. But if you think I’m gonna step aside and let you kill Liseli, you’re just insane.”

  “I know you will protect her to the death,” Leeton said with a measured shake of his head. “And I understand. But I see that you don’t understand why I would avenge Alisiya, monster that you think she was. No one has ever been able to understand why I do the things I’ve done. I am going to die soon . . . I have no reason left to live. Perhaps I am trying one last time to show you that I am not the villain. I am a father.”

  “You’re gonna die soon?” Russ raised an eyebrow. “What’s with the sudden confidence in me?”

  Leeton smiled disquietingly. “You will not kill me,” he said. “You are younger, and stronger, yes. You were able to better me before, but now I have the knife, and the determination. I will defeat you, and take my revenge for my life’s death, and then I will erase my debt to the Gate, and it will all be over. That is all.”

  Russ snorted. “So are you gonna try with the stabbing or just talk me to death?”

  “I have nothing against you, but as long you protect her, you are my enemy. I am sorry.”

  “Right. And I don’t really want to kill you, etc. Let’s get it over with.”

  “Very well,” said Leeton, and rushed at Russ, knife flashing in the Gate’s light.

  Russ’s instincts told him to duck out of the way, but that would only leave Liseli exposed and vulnerable. So he met Leeton head on, reaching out in an attempt to deflect the knife as he tried to knock the King off his feet. He succeeded in the last part, ramming his shoulder into the older man’s chest and propelling them both toward the ground. Leeton’s knife scraped across his side, ripping his clothing, but missed the flesh.

  They tumbled to the sand, coughing and blinking away the blindi
ng ash. For a few moments it was a jumble of limbs, rolling down the slope, no advantage to either. Then they came to a stop and Russ clenched a hand around Leeton’s wrist, straining to keep the blood-stained blade away, hoping to weaken him into losing his grip.

  Leeton seized Russ’s neck with his free hand, holding him at arm’s length and squeezing his throat. Russ tried to peel his hand away without letting go of his other wrist, and felt himself growing dizzy from lack of air. He pulled back and ruthlessly dug one knee into Leeton’s groin, simultaneously twisting his knife-hand. Leeton’s grip on his neck weakened slightly, and Russ let go of that arm to punch the King in the face. He blindly pummeled away, and Leeton was finally forced to release Russ’s neck in an attempt to protect himself.

  Russ gasped in air, but could not relax, because Leeton was trying to force the knife point closer. But then, as he was intent on the blade, Leeton caught him off guard by bringing one foot up and kicking him squarely in the stomach. Russ let go and fell backward, his neck snapping back as his head hit the ground. He sat up, expecting Leeton to be coming for him, but instead saw to his horror that the King had leapt to his feet and was heading toward Liseli instead.

  Liseli had been standing in her own little world on the road, not even watching the men fighting over her. Leeton reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, twisting her around to face him.

  She slapped him. Hard. Leeton’s head snapped to the side, and he wore an expression of shock when Russ’s fist met his face. He fell back, slowly, and landed without any effort to break his fall, in the unmistakable fashion of the knocked-out.

  Liseli stared at him disinterestedly, as if she’d swatted a fly that was bothering her, but when Russ said her name she didn’t respond. Her eyes wandered off to some other point, looking into the nothingness beyond the road with as much awareness as she had focused on Leeton.