by David Hair
Kazim dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘If any of the shihad come here, tell them that Kazim is near. That he has become a Zain.’ That should lead them to the monastery. He pressed two silvers into the man’s palm. ‘Other than that, forget we came.’
Dhani nodded, then bade him good day.
She apologised on the way home, much to his surprise. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I thought the worst of you, and you were only being kind to that widow.’
He blinked. Well, in truth, if her son had not looked at me like that, I’d have screwed her. Did deeds or actions matter more? It was a question for the Scriptualists, not him. He met Elena’s eyes and decided he too could do conciliatory gestures. ‘I am sorry also: you are right, about the gnosis.’
Elena blinked back at him. ‘Really?’
‘It is part of who I am now,’ he conceded. ‘I have to learn to control it.’ Or at least control my desire to use it – or I am going to kill someone.
She looked pleased, though it was too late for her to begin gnostic teaching once they’d stowed the new stores so instead they sparred for a little. He was conscious of a new tension between them, a physical tension. He’d not purged himself with the widow, and the desire he’d felt to hold someone and be held was still beating inside him. Watching her walk away set it off again. Elena … I am wrong about her: she is not an old ferang jadugara. She is a woman.
Ramita’s father used to say that some people connected emotionally and others intellectually, but he and Elena had a physical connection. They were both athletes – competing athletes, yes, but there was mutual respect too, maybe even more than respect now. He sometimes saw a heat in her eyes as they fought, and now he knew it was in his also. But it was twisted around the need to kill and replenish the gnosis, and that frightened him.
Next morning, he spent a shaky few minutes in the privy, his bowels loosened by fear of what he was about to take on. I must master this, or it will destroy me. But he also slipped a dagger inside his tunic. They had a tacit agreement that no real weapons were to be worn while training, but he was suddenly afraid that he badly needed one. If she learns what I really am, she may need to die – though I cannot imagine dealing that blow, especially after the vow we made …
When he returned to the gardens she was dressed in a salwar kameez and sitting cross-legged on a stone bench. At her gesture he sat at the other end of the bench, in easy reach of her, cross-legged also. He blanked his mind as Jamil had taught him to steady himself. Only then did he meet her eyes. ‘I am ready.’
‘Okay. First, let’s get an idea of what you can do,’ she replied. She reached out with her right hand, palm facing him. ‘Touch my hand,’ she told him, closing her eyes.
He blanked his mind utterly, dropping his purposes in behind a mask of compliance. His right hand he pressed to hers, palm to palm, and closed his eyes too. And sent his left hand to the hilt of his dagger.
She sighed softly as their auras touched. Her mental presence was much stronger through the touch-link, and it had a certain texture, a warm, astringent dampness that was distinctly her: herbal and fragrant, like a mint paste. Initially it felt unsettling, but it wasn’t unpleasant.
‘You’re sensing my gnosis,’ she whispered aloud and in his mind. ‘My prime elemental affinity is to Water.’
‘How do I seem to you?’ he asked, curious despite himself.
‘Restless. Pricklish, like little jabs of lightning. Your touch is … unusual … draining, even.’ She reflected a moment. ‘Your prime affinity is to Air.’
That made sense to him. He recalled the joy of soaring alongside Molmar through the night skies of Kesh and Javon, and the way he’d been able to help the pilot-mage by feeding energy into the keel of the skiff.
She must have followed his train of thought, because it felt like she was there in the memory, in the bow of the skiff, her hair unbound like a pennant. She turned to face him and grinned.
His inner vision changed: suddenly the skiff was gone and there were just the two of them, arms spread like wings as they soared above the desert, the land spread beneath them like rumpled sheets. The sun and moon shared the sky and his sight went on forever. Elena’s face was lit by the same joy he was feeling, the sheer unbridled pleasure of being weightless and free.
She looked across at him, smiling slyly.
He fought for composure, forcing himself to calm.
She’d caught that stray thought. What else had she heard? He hunched behind mental shields, closing her off a little, and the intensity of her mind’s presence in his receded considerably. She looked a little hurt, as if she’d felt that the brief moment they’d shared meant something, then her face became business-like again.
He gave reluctant acquiescence. His right hand was still entwined in hers. He wondered if she realised.
He slid the dagger out of its sheath and held the blade still inside his tunic.
The sensation of her changed as her liquid warmth washed over him with a tang like summer rain. Her face swam behind his eyes, her gaze penetrating as knives.
He followed, shaping the crackling energies of the lightning in his hand, then sent it blazing after her. It was her turn to squawk as she corkscrewed away from the searing bolt.
He pursued, feeling like a bird of prey as he tore across the skies in pursuit. Then suddenly she was that bird: an eagle, shrieking in hunger and fury. He gained swiftly, calling his challenge across the heavens as he knifed through the air towards her. His claws raked at her, but an instant before he caught her, the vision winked out and suddenly he was facing her again, panting slightly.
she said, her voice light and animated.
He ignored the question.
Her voice trailed off. A series of images flashed inside his head, a train of thought he couldn’t seem to switch off. They ended with Ramita screaming, and Antonin Meiros collapsing at his feet.
And a soul like mist flowing into his own mouth.
Elena spoke aloud. ‘Oh.’
She opened her eyes as she let the link fall. His were already open.
She looked down at the knife he’d pressed to her left breast and went utterly still.
*
I am so blind. Elena stared at him, at his striking young face with its beautiful bone structure and haunted eyes.
Dokken. Souldrinker. Shadowmancer.
No wonder he hated his own power. What she’d seen inside his mind played out again in her memory as she tried to hope she might emerge from this moment alive. Vivid, harrowing images surfaced: the blind and burned father he’d never really known, and who’d never told Kazim what he was. An old woman, Sabele, manipulating him into becoming what she wanted: a weapon for her ambitions. Emir Rashid, enacting the crone’s plan for his own gain. And his beloved sister Huriya, turning into a monster before his eyes.
And most of all, the girl he’d loved. Ramita. He’d crossed a continent to find her, only to lose her by the very act of killing the man who’d taken her from him. She saw the Lakh girl as he did: the personification of goodness and gentleness, too dutiful to ever think of herself, too virtuous to not return kindness with kindness, love with love – but also too judging to ever forgive him. Without her, he didn’t know what to do.
He’s a lost soul.
She wanted to hold him, to soothe him, but there was the point of a dagger gouging the flesh above her heart. She remained motionless.
He can’t replenish because that’s not how Dokken recover energy. He needs to kill. But he doesn’t want to. She felt her regard for him deepen. All the power in the world and he doesn’t want it. It’s burning him up, and he hates it.
She’d grown up hearing the legends of the Dokken. Kore’s Rejects, the Church called them. Every so often someone found and killed one. But she’d never encountered one herself before now.
She realised that her next words would either save her or kill her. He believed with all his heart that at this revelation, she would attack him, and yet he’d not fled her, because he knew she would have found him. So he’d confronted the matter head-on instead, with a secret edge that she’d never suspected until too late.
She clung to the fact of his remorse, his self-loathing at what he’d done and what he’d become, and gambled on the right words to say.
‘Kazim,’ she said softly, opening up herself entirely to him, letting the truth of herself flow through her hand and into him, giving him back as much as she’d stolen. ‘It’s okay. I believe in you.’
*
I believe in you.
She might have been lying to him. These magi lie. But it didn’t feel that way, not when he was suddenly drowning in her, and all that she was. It was as if he’d already killed her and this was her soul, flowing into him. The wild girl playing in the woods around the big house – Anborn Manor, the vision told him – and a brilliant and fiery elder sister, her best friend and most spiteful rival: Tesla. Tears and laughter, and then shock at her sister’s horrific disfigurement. A new grimness of purpose: months and years of blade-work that made what she’d put him through look like child’s play. The triumph of awards, and then the Revolt. A massacred city: Knebb. Gurvon Gyle … he reeled at the intimacy of her memories, leapt ahead, to Javon, to Cera … to betrayal.
She is sincere. She wants Gyle dead, even though he was her lover. She wants the Crusade to be destroyed, even though it might cost the lives of her people.
And she doesn’t hate me, though I deserve to be hated.
He dropped the blade and fled to his room before he shamed himself in front of her.
22
Fishing
Opium
The wealth of the Sultans of Mirobez, Gatioch and Lokistan is based upon one thing: the drug trade. From their high mountains, the poppy-seed flows westwards, out into the plains of Kesh and even to northern Lakh, conquering all before it. Gold and riches beyond imagination flow the other way.
ORDO COSTRUO COLLEGIATE, HEBUSALIM
The seed of the poppy is the greatest curse to befall this land, worse than the Crusaders.
SULTAN SALIM OF KESH
Isle of Glass, Javon Coast, Antiopia
Shawwal (Octen) 928
4th month of the Moontide
Ramita clung to a slick outcropping barely five yards above the place the last wave had crashed. She was drenched in sea-spray, her salwar kameez clinging to her ungainly form as she clambered awkwardly down the face of stone. Beside her, Justina was walking as confidently as if this were a path through the gardens at Casa Meiros, her feet apparently glued to the rocks – which they were, through the gnosis. Supposedly Ramita’s were too, but she could not yet learn to trust them. They were here, according to Justina, to go ‘fishing’, whatever that was.
Another massive valley of water opened up beneath them, revealing the depth of the pillar of volcanic rock, as smooth as the glass that had lent its name to the place. Then abruptly it boiled up again and another wave slammed down. All visibility was lost as spray engulfed them and Ramita shrieked in fright and locked herself to the rock. Justina laughed aloud, apparently purely at Ramita’s discomfort.
As the spray fell about them like rain, the jadugara shouted through their mind-link,
Ramita tried, casting her mind into the alien depths of the water. Her mind’s eye filled with darkness, and the water on her skin seemed to wrap itself about her.
Ramita groaned. Part of her was still aware of her body, locked rigid to the walls of the pillar of stone. The rest of her was casting about, seeking … seeking …
There!
She felt something, another being, cold and utterly alien, but it had a heartbeat and it slid through the water as a bird flew through the air. Then abruptly she found another, and another, and then there were hundreds of them swarming about, made silver by the light gleaming from above, darting about her as she flitted from heartbeat to heartbeat, all kindred, each the same yet different, all a part of a whole that barely comprehended itself. The ocean was alive with calls, shrill squeaks and whistles that she could almost comprehend. She felt as if she were dissolving into them, feeling every sensation in a dim palette of experiences: hunger bite swallow better hunger hunger hunger …
Justina touched her arm.
She chose one and with difficulty separated it from the others, and then began to pull, using the telekinetic gnosis, the mental muscle that Justina had been building in her these past weeks with her repetitive exercises. She felt the creature panic, heard the alarmed calls of its fellows as she wrenched it upwards. The others scattered, alarmed by the frightened movements of the captive creature, scared its uncontrolled thrashing would bring a predator.
A minute of pulling slowly on the invisible cords of her gnosis saw a dark shape break the surface. She quailed a little as she saw it, almost letting it slip. It was massive, with great heavy-lipped jaws and a body that was as big as her own, with lantern-like eyes as large as her hand. Its greenish belly-scales gleamed but its upper body was dark.
Justina yelled triumphantly and a great bubble of water rose and wrapped itself about the fish. ‘It’s a fish the Yuros men call a “Groper”,’ she shouted above the waves. ‘I’ve got it now! Come on!’
Together they ascended the side of the pillar of stone, Earth gnosis enabling them to cling to it so it was as easy as if walking upstairs. It is still tiring, Ramita thought; there are a great many ‘stairs’. Beside them, wrapped in water and gnosis, floated the great fish. Every so
often it tried to break out of the bubble of water, and Ramita could feel its fear as the light of the sun shone brilliantly through into its clear prison. She sent soothing energies, tried to calm it, which perhaps worked as its movement became less frantic.
Together they got the fish all the way back up the one hundred yards or so to the viewing platform. Getting it inside was harder, down all those flights of stairs, and they left a trail of seawater behind them as they moved it into the seldom-used communal bath, which Justina had filled with seawater through a special tap. As they released the groper into the water, it flashed about in fright seeking an exit, before gradually subsiding into watchful stillness.
Justina turned to Ramita. ‘Now, try and do what we’ve talked about.’
Ramita looked down at the fish and back at Justina, and then cleared her mind of all things but the link she still shared with the fish. Trying to ignore her fear, she waded into the icy water, just down to the second stair, and sat, dangling a piece of defrosted raw fish from the ice-room. She lowered it into the water.
It took a long time to coax the creature from where it hid, and when it did come it almost snapped off her fingers as it wrenched the chunk away. It gulped down the meat and shot away.
By the third piece of fish, she had managed to convince it to stay. She stroked its head, staring back into its huge eyes, not realising that she’d submerged herself until she felt water in her throat and panicked, thrashing for the surface, spluttering, while Justina hooted derisively. The groper flashed away, and could not be lured back all day.
By the end of the week, she was swimming with it and had learnt to change her skin to fish-scale, and breathing underwater no longer held any fear.
*