by Ginn Hale
An intense warmth flooded over Kahlil as if the summer sun had broken through the dark ceiling of the cavern and come shining down onto him. He lifted his face into the radiant sensation and realized that it was the Rifter’s presence that he felt, pouring into him through his sacred bond.
Jath’ibaye had come for him.
Jath’ibaye was here.
Chapter One Hundred and Six
The ruins of Rathal’pesha rose up from the northern sea in twisting spires and almost impossible collisions of stone and architecture. The high chambers of the Black Tower burst up through the white-tiled roof of the old Rathal’pesha infirmary. Labyrinthine walls from Umbhra’ibaye twisted through abandoned herb gardens and bisected watchtowers. Gnarled apple trees clung to the bare rock steps that rose up from the sea. Weasels and white seabirds nested in the crevices of the countless holy carvings.
John descended into a courtyard on a howling wind. He touched the ground and recognized the feel of the earth beneath him. Despite the surrounding apple trees, these grounds had once been the bare practice fields of Rathal’pesha. A few feet ahead of him a statue of Parfir lay on its side, its outstretched arms broken off and its face blackened with curses and English obscenities.
The spidery white form of hungry bones skittered between the shadows of the trees. John shifted his grip on the yasi’halaun, preparing for an attack, but the hungry bones retreated back into a dark hollow between two sloping stone walls.
John closed his eyes and searched for Kyle. His vision sank down into a dark, cavernous chamber hung with burned and broken skeletons—the ruin of the holy chamber where Payshmura nuns had carved the flesh from women being inducted into the isshusha’im. He saw wet, pooling blood spreading across the marble of one of the sacred beds.
Long red marks also streaked the floor. But otherwise the room was uninhabited. Then his vision slipped farther into the depths of the ruins and came to rest on those bones that he knew so well. Ravishan’s bones were still laid out on the long, crystalline altar John had constructed to cradle them years before. But he found no sign of Kyle.
A deathly cold wind swirled around him, called down from high in the darkening sky. Sea doves flushed from the apple trees.
“I’m here, Laurie!” John let his voice boom over the ruins. His words echoed through the building, ricocheting off the shattered stones. No answer came. He tried again, “Where is Kyle?”
Across the grounds, he could see the façade of the old chapel from Rathal’pesha. The huge iron door that he had walked through with Samsango the first day he had arrived at the monastery now swung open, groaning on its hinges.
As John crossed the uneven paving stones, he sensed the movement of hungry bones all around him. Beneath his feet, he could feel the deep fissures that spread through the foundations of the chapel. The stones themselves seemed to ache to be released from the burden of standing and be allowed to finally crumble into the sea.
He strode up the cracked stairs and stepped into the darkness of the chapel. The interior wasn’t as he remembered it. Most of the central chamber had collapsed. A narrow isle of stone pillars created the only open space: a cramped hall that led to a dark staircase. Its worn steps seemed to descend far below the chapel. John could feel other spaces below, vast caverns, and deep pools of water flooded by the sea. In one of these, standing on a walkway overlooking a circle of yellowed stones and stagnant water, he glimpsed Laurie. As if sensing his attention, she extended a skeletal hand and beckoned him to her.
John had to hunch as he descended the cramped stairs. Wreckage and rough pieces of stone formed the ragged walls and ceiling. His coat caught on exposed nails. Remnants of iron cables tangled around his boots. John kicked his feet free. From above and beside him he heard clawing noises, like the scrabbling of rats in old walls.
Then a spear of bone shot through a tangle of wooden beams. The bone slashed John’s shoulder. He caught it and snapped it in two. A second bone jabbed his thigh. John grabbed for it, but it jerked back into the chaos of the surrounding walls. The ground shuddered and John struggled to restrain his growing rage.
John continued his descent deep down beneath the ruins. Hungry bones assaulted him from the shadows and crevices of the walls. He broke the ones he caught, crushing them in his hands, but there always seemed to be more. Laurie intended him to suffer before he reached her, John realized. She wanted to bleed him.
He could have brought the tunnel down on the hungry bones, but he was too aware of the fragility of the entire ruin. The impact would set off a chain of collapses any one of which could crush Kyle wherever Laurie had hidden him.
By the time John reached the end of the cramped stairs, his clothes were soaked with his own blood and his body was punched through with dozens of shallow wounds.
The yasi’halaun hummed with a strange excitement. John guessed that it was in response to the spilled blood and John’s growing anger. White arcs danced along the deeply grooved blade. John could feel the yasi’halaun’s longing to devour the hungry bones surrounding him.
John gripped the hilt tightly. He didn’t trust its wild power and animalistic hunger, particularly not here among the Payshmura ruins. The white arcs flashed and hummed all across the blade as if it sensed that this was the place it had been created to return to.
Cold saltwater washed up around his thighs. From the carvings in the walls, John guessed he’d entered some ruin from the heart of Umbhra’ibaye.
The floor beneath his feet was cracked and entire sections of the foundation were unstable. He waded ahead carefully, feeling the streams of cold water flowing up from beneath the flagstones. A stagnant humid smell of decay saturated the air. John could hear hungry bones swimming behind him, and when he looked up, pale forms skittered through the shadows overhead.
A single iron door stood at the end of the hall. John placed his hand against its surface and the door swung easily open to reveal a vaulted circular chamber flooded with murky green water and lit only by diffuse shafts of light that filtered down from distant cracks in the very heights of the ruins.
At the center of the room a rusted iron dais rose up to a chaotic tangle of copper wires and cursed stones. Laurie stood there, nearly as still as the countless skeletons bound and braided into the chamber walls by the wires that extended from the dais like an immense spider web.
Between John and the dais, pitted and strangely twisted pillars of yellow stone rose out of the still water like mangrove trees growing wild through a swamp. As John took a single step closer he felt a wave of revulsion roll over him. They were pieces of the Great Gates, he realized.
A hum of excitement vibrated through the yasi’halaun. It pulled in John’s hand and brilliant white arcs skipped up and down its grooved blade.
Copper wires shuddered overhead and a shiver passed through the wall of children’s skeletons. One gaped its jaws at John, but none uttered a sound.
The symbols carved into their skulls looked oddly familiar to John. They seemed to be some amalgam of Payshmura script and English cursive. Despite the decades since he had last seen them he recognized the curling l’s.
Another wave of anger surged through John. Pesha’s brothers were there, along with other children whom he had known, cared for, and ultimately failed to protect. But John forced his guilt and anger down to hard dispassion. He could do nothing for them now, except release them to true death. And that would have to wait until he dealt with Laurie.
On the iron dais Laurie stood, beading brilliant red stones onto a fine copper wire. She moved with practiced care, avoiding all contact with any of the other hundreds of wires stretching from the central dais and winding through the carved skeletons on the walls. A spray of other, finer wires dangled down into the dark waters. Beads of condensation dripped from the curse stones strung high overhead.
A simple rung ladder led down from the dais to the water. This appeared to be the only area not webbed with delicate wires.
“Well, you certainly can move
quickly when you want to.” Laurie’s voice drifted down to John.
She didn’t look to John right away but instead continued beading a brilliant red stone onto one of the wires.
“Tell me where Kyle is,” John demanded.
“Where you can’t find him,” Laurie replied. She straightened and pushed a lock of her pale hair back from her face. “Come on, John, you didn’t actually expect me to just set him out here for you to whisk away, did you?”
Her light tone surprised John, as did her relaxed expression. She smiled at him as if they were discussing a friendly game of chess. She looked and sounded so much like the woman he remembered—like the Laurie who had been his best friend since kindergarten—that John suddenly felt unprepared to fight her.
“I could hope,” John replied.
“Never hurts to hope,” Laurie agreed. “But no luck this time. I have him tucked away and he’ll remain hidden until you and I are done here.”
John nodded.
“I brought the yasi’halaun.” John held the blade up.
“Yes, I see that.” Laurie cocked her head slightly. “I suppose you were hoping to use it to kill me.”
“I’ve never wanted to kill you,” John said.
Laurie stared down at him for several moments. Her wide pale eyes and delicate mouth lent her the appearance of a sad but lovely doll. A shaft of light haloed the voluminous black robe engulfing her too-slender body as she took a single step closer.
“You’re so sentimental, John,” she said, sighing. “You always were. This world has ruined so much about you. But not that.” Laurie brushed her hand over several of the wires dangling from her dais. Hisses rose from the corpses on the wall and the green water began to slowly churn.
John felt a sickening force begin to swell out from the twisted yellow pillars in the water. The air around them warped and spit tiny geysers of flame. Even broken, the remains of the Great Gates were too ready to yawn open.
“You’re trying to get back to Nayeshi,” John commented, if only to buy himself a little time.
“Of course,” Laurie replied.
“You know that this world might not survive another gate being opened. Ji didn’t think it would.”
“You say it like I should give a damn,” Laurie responded with a quick, sardonic smile. “Why would I care about Basawar? What has this world ever done for me?”
John had no answer. Basawar had destroyed Laurie. She had been brought to this world full of hope and in love with Bill and she had lost everything here; her husband, her child, even her humanity had been stripped from her.
“If you hadn’t withdrawn to these ruins things could have been different. Ji…” His voice shook just saying her name and knowing that she was dead now. “Ji would have taught you what she knew. She would have helped you—”
“Helped me what?” Laurie countered, though her tone was still light, almost laughing. “Win best in show like she was busy doing? Become someone’s pet?”
“Ji wasn’t an animal!” John growled.
“Maybe not to start with, but that’s what this world reduced her to,” Laurie said. “It’s what you’d like me to be as well, John. You just don’t want to admit it. You want me to sit down and be a good girl. You don’t want me chewing up the furniture or shitting all over this perfect life you’ve got here.” She stared at him intently. “It must be annoying as hell to be a god and have one miserable bitch like me ripping the fuck out of your little kingdom, huh?”
“It’s not my little kingdom.” Anger gnawed at John’s instinctive compassion for Laurie. “Basawar is an entire world. There are millions of people here. There are animals and plants that are unique and beautiful. There is life here and it deserves respect!”
“You know, all of that’s a little hard to really appreciate when your husband has been murdered, your baby has been gutted, and you’ve been skinned alive for the sake of all that unique, beautiful life.” Laurie raised her hands, exposing the bare bones of her arms. John flinched from the sight.
“I know you suffered,” John said. “But that doesn’t mean that things can’t change. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“No, it doesn’t. When I’m done, it won’t be like this anymore.” Laurie smiled as if amused by some private joke. “I know you think you have to kill me, John. I know you think that I’ve become some kind of monster, but I haven’t. I’m finding our way back. I’m going to save us. Not just me and Bill and our daughter, but you too.”
“What do you mean?” John felt a chill at the dreamy tone in Laurie’s voice.
“Why do you think I want to go back to Nayeshi? To live out the rest of my life as the star attraction of some freak show? I’m going back to stop us from ever coming here. I’m going to save us.” Laurie’s gaze shifted past John into empty space. “I’ve seen our lives the way they should have been. Bill and I name our son after you, you know. Our daughter is going to be a singer. She has the most beautiful voice. I hear her singing to me some nights. You spend every Christmas with us.”
Laurie smiled into the empty distance. John gripped the hilt of the yasi’halaun. If it could destroy the hungry bones, he had no doubt that it could devour an issusha as well. He hoped that somehow it would bring Laurie a quick death.
“Don’t think I don’t see what you’re thinking.” Laurie’s pale blue eyes snapped back to him. “I’ve done this before, you know. I’ve seen all your devious plans.” She smiled, showing her white teeth. “And don’t forget, Ravishan is in my power. It could take nothing more than a stroke of a single string for me to end his life.” Laurie touched one of the wires meaningfully. “So don’t be an idiot.”
Frustrated fury surged through John and somewhere far above them thunder cracked the sky. But he didn’t move.
Laurie was right. Until he knew where Kyle was he couldn’t afford to attack her outright.
“Would it make it any easier if I told you that in every vision the best you’ve ever managed is to kill us both?” Laurie asked.
“Did the rest of Basawar survive?” John couldn’t keep from asking.
“How would I know?” Laurie replied with a laugh. “I died.”
John scowled down at the yasi’halaun. “What do you want me to do?”
“It looks like you’ve already fed the yasi’halaun with plenty of your blood,” Laurie replied, and her expression was so smug that John wondered if she had known this would happen all along, if all the threats of invasion and attacks from the hungry bones had been a manipulation to ensure that the yasi’halaun was suffused with his blood and power.
“So now,” Laurie continued, “I just want you to bring the yasi’halaun to the center of the room and slide it into the incision in the floor.”
John started towards the ragged yellow stones.
“But first.” Laurie raised her hand and John stopped. He prayed that she would bring Kyle to him or at least allow him a glimpse of where she was keeping him. Instead Laurie held up a small clay jar.
“Catch,” she called as she tossed the jar through the air. John caught it easily.
“Good reflexes,” Laurie said, smiling.
John studied the plain jar. It was unmarked, though a thick layer of red wax had been melted over the lid to seal it tightly closed.
“There’s a ritual to all of this, remember?” Laurie said.
“You poison the Rifter with tumah’itam,” John recalled. Long ago, Samsango had fed him the terrible, numbing poison to spare him the agony of being burned on the Holy Road. It hadn’t saved him from pain, but it hadn’t killed him either. He wondered if Laurie knew as much. From the way she gazed at him, he guessed that she didn’t.
“They call it the blessing of painless death,” Laurie said. “Drink up. After this is all over you’ll have your old life back. Basawar will never have happened to us. None of this,” Laurie gestured to the corpses hanging from the walls, “none of it will have happened. Everything will be set right.”
&nbs
p; “But Basawar will have been destroyed,” John said. “More people will have died than just these children.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, but I think that you do,” John replied. “I think you’ve seen what will happen.”
Laurie shook her head, but John knew he was right. He had seen the flicker of guilt in her expression.
“Do you want me to kill Ravishan or not?” Laurie demanded, and for the first time her voice was cold and her expression hard. John glimpsed the anger that she had held back from him, the hatred she had to feel towards him for their different lives in Basawar.
“No,” John said.
“Then shut up!” Laurie snapped. “You aren’t here to talk. Drink the tumah’itam and bring the yasi’halaun here. I’m tired of wasting time.”
John broke the seal on the small jar. An earthy, almost chocolate scent rose up over his hands. Previously the poison had acted on him within minutes, numbing his senses until he was little more than dead weight. If he was going to stop Laurie, he didn’t have much time. He still had no idea where he would find Kyle. He closed his eyes, and as he lifted the jar to his lips, he searched again for any glimpse of Kyle. Again he found nothing but Ravishan’s remains.
The tumah’itam was sweet and subtle. Its numbness spread slowly through John’s mouth and then seeped down his throat. John knew he only had minutes left.
He swung the yasi’halaun up and raced forward. The water lapping his legs steamed as rage rolled off him.
Overhead, wires hissed as if they were burning. Curse stones flashed and cracked as John rushed past them. A deep pulse throbbed through the yasi’halaun. John hardly felt it through his tingling hands. But the sympathetic pulses that pounded through the surrounding stones rocked him, nearly knocking him off his feet. Beneath him, John felt the fine fissures splitting the stones apart. The Great Gates were already fighting to open.
They were responding to his mere presence just as Ji had once feared they would.
John reached the center of the chamber. Wild, swirling water lapped at his thighs. John sensed the incision in the floor. All around him, wires glowed white hot and brilliant letters lit up across the yellow stones. The yasi’halaun almost sung with excitement.