Her father bent his head slightly, then met her gaze again. “Not dead. No. Ruined, possibly. He spoke a few words to me. They did not make sense. I do not quite know what the Kieba did to him. Or what Bherijda did.”
“And you left him lying up there by himself!”
“Do you think he would be better brought down here, into the midst of all this?”
Oressa had to admit that her brother must surely be much safer where he was, alone on the slope of the mountain. But she said furiously, “If anything has happened to Gulien, it’s your fault! I told you that you’d be a fool to ally yourself with Bherijda!”
“So you did,” her father said, his tone quite neutral. “If this unfortunate chance determines that you must be my heir, my daughter, it’s as well you are not stupid. Of course, I did not ally myself with the Tamaristan prince, whatever he might have believed. But nor did I expect your brother to complicate matters by coming here before me.”
Oressa glared at him, still utterly furious, but no longer quite sure what she ought to blame her father for. He might not have known about the Kieba’s special doors that let one step across the miles in a heartbeat, but she had forgotten about them, though Gulien had told her. She knew now, too late, that her brother had never forgotten about those doors. Or maybe the Kieba had reminded him, sent for him, required him to come here to her mountain. She stared helplessly up the mountain, wanting to run up and see for herself whether Gulien was all right, afraid of what she might discover. Her father thought her brother had been ruined. That sounded terrifying. It was true that Gulien was probably safer out of the way—
Then Prince Bherijda came up, panting, and stepped right in front of her father. Oressa was distantly amazed that he had the nerve to do anything of the kind, but her father only lifted a scornful eyebrow. Bherijda, ignoring the king, grabbed the reins of Oressa’s horse. He said hoarsely, “Your Highness! What a surprise! And how convenient!”
Oressa stared down at him. She could see that he was consumed by a wholly unexpected self-satisfaction that was really frightening. She began, “You—the Kieba—” Bherijda tapped the carved disk on its chain around his neck. It had changed color, Oressa saw: It was now bloodred, shot through with thin black lines. And the carving in the middle had changed too: All the patterns were different. It should have looked like a different artifact entirely, and yet she could tell somehow that it was the same.
“All the mysteries of the ages—all the secrets of the gods!” said Bherijda, and laughed. He looked exalted—he looked drunk—he looked mad. Oressa wanted to back her horse away from him, but he still held her reins. He said, speaking fast and emphatically, “She thinks me defeated? She broke me free of her kephalos, but that was a favor! I thought I knew how to use my power before, but I knew nothing, and she doesn’t even know she showed me herself! She thinks she cast me out of her dead-gods-damned mountain? I’ll level that mountain—I’ll do more than level it. I’ll leave a pit so deep it will take blowing sand a thousand years to fill it! Ten thousand years!” Laughing again, Bherijda reached up to take her hand and told her, with horrifying satisfaction, “Carastind can join to Tamarist. We can have the wedding right here. There are plenty of witnesses—”
Leaning forward, Oressa slapped him across the face as hard as she could.
He let go of her hand and of her reins, his hand going to his cheek. He wasn’t laughing anymore, Oressa saw with mingled terror and pleasure. He looked stunned. But behind the stunned expression, fury was gathering. Worse, light was also beginning to condense in his medallion: bloodred light struck through with streaks like flashes of black lightning. Oressa tightened the reins, backing her horse a step—another—then she kicked her right foot free of its stirrup, grabbed the pommel of her saddle, leaned dangerously out, and snatched for the medallion. She got it too, only it jerked like a live thing out of her hand, and rather than catching her balance and kicking her horse into a run as she had planned, she fell. She never fell, but this time she did, and the horse jolted forward without her.
Bherijda laughed, with malice rather than humor. He took a step toward her, his mouth twisting. He didn’t say anything. He raised a hand as though raising a weapon, and the gritty soil beneath and around the medallion began to . . . dissolve. The medallion’s red light shone through a growing haze as the very earth turned to fine dust.
Oressa knew she should run, but she couldn’t move. The haze extended toward her, reaching with a horrifying kind of mindfulness. She knew Bherijda was directing it, and she knew she should run, but though she thought the haze moved slowly, she seemed to have no time at all to gather her wits and actually do anything.
Bherijda said something Oressa couldn’t properly hear. He didn’t speak in Esse nor in Tamaj, but in some language never meant for men. Black-streaked red fire crept through the air around him, and the medallion rose up to his hand, and the air glittered with dust, and she cowered as the dissolution slid toward her. She knew she was going to die. Everyone would die, even after they’d all tried so hard. Bherijda was going to kill her and defeat her father and then Gulien, and he would turn on the Kieba, and with his power, he would cast her down too. He was going to rule the world. She couldn’t make a sound.
“Unacceptable,” said her father flatly. Drawing his sword, he took one long step sideways, putting himself between Oressa and the dissolution that reached for her. The star ruby on the hilt of the sword blazed to sudden vivid life.
Oressa’s eyes widened. A small object with lines through it. She had seen that star ruby a thousand times at least, but she would never in a thousand years have realized it was an artifact. Now it seemed to spin itself outward, away from the sword, crimson light dyeing her father and the sandy earth and the very air the color of blood. It was Parianasaku’s Capture, and whatever the artifact was and whatever her father had been doing with it, Oressa was suddenly, ferociously glad he had it after all. She glared at Bherijda triumphantly, no longer in the least afraid of the glittering haze spreading outward from his artifact.
Her father did not look frightened or angry. His lips were thin and straight. But he met Oressa’s eyes, and for just a moment she almost thought she saw the faintest trace of humor in the lift of one eyebrow.
Then Bherijda’s artifact’s dissolution took both Osir Madalin and Parianasaku’s Capture, and both the king and his artifact crumbled to dust. Oressa’s father did not even have time to look surprised or annoyed. The crimson light was gone as though it had never been. The dust blew away on the wind. The haze was gone too, leaving a hole in the world through which a different and more natural wind blew. Oressa stared through empty space at Bherijda and felt just as empty and blank as the space where her father had been. She felt as though the very air had disappeared and left her smothering, as though the world itself shuddered underfoot.
Bherijda only looked mildly disappointed. “Not exactly as I remember,” he muttered in Tamaj, speaking to himself or to the air. He turned the now quiescent medallion over in his hand, staring down at it.
There was a sudden, hard, explosive sound, and everyone turned to stare up at the mountain. Oressa turned with the rest, though even that small movement felt strange. She had never really imagined there could be a time without her father in it, and now she found there was a moment, and another after that, and she was standing in it. The world hadn’t stopped after all. Time somehow proceeded forward unchecked along its ordinary course, carrying them all with it. Prince Bherijda was still here, and the confusion of men, and beyond them the mountain and the burning crops.
The Kieba stood high on the mountain, beside Gulien. She bent briefly to touch Gulien’s shoulder before she strode down the slope of the mountain toward Bherijda, and Oressa almost found that she liked her for that, even if the Kieba was frightening and unpredictable and far too powerful.
“You see what you have done!” Bherijda called up to the Kieba. He was smiling again. His hand was resting on his medallion. Red light gat
hered in it, and he shouted, “I remember this! And you were never a god! Why should you have such pretty toys?” And he laughed.
The Kieba did not answer. She walked swiftly toward them. Her wall tumbled down before she reached it, though no hand touched it. The stones clattered over one another and rolled out of her path, and she walked across the line where it had stood as though there had never been a barrier there. She wore no medallion such as Bherijda had. She appeared to possess no tool of that kind. But the steel falcon flew out of the smoke haze and perched on her shoulder, mantling its wings and hissing.
“You may have your kephalos, and much may it profit you,” sneered Bherijda. He stroked his medallion with the tips of his fingers.
“Prince Bherijda, you have been and are and will be a fool, and I see no help for it,” answered the Kieba dispassionately. “Tonkaïan’s Resolve was never meant for the hands of men. Have you not realized even yet what becomes of the tools of gods when men attempt to wield them? And the use to which you mean to put that one is worse. You wish unrivaled power—unrivaled indeed—but do you not know what will happen to the world without my ceaseless efforts to preserve it? Against just such tools as you hold, misused by just such hands as yours?”
“The generous Keppa! The selfless Keppa! The only fit keeper for the gods’ power!” Bherijda mocked her. “A tale for children, a tale to keep men cowering like children in the dark, while all the time you have kept the gods’ power very close, have you not—but not unfailingly. I have my own power now, and you know it, or you would never have left the place of your strength to come after me. But nothing you do will avail you now.”
The Kieba did not deny this. She said nothing, so that Oressa realized that Bherijda was actually right. That was impossible, because the Kieba was supposed to defeat him and rescue them all, or why had she come out of her mountain? Except that now Oressa thought maybe she had come out to challenge Bherijda in the hope that she could face him before he learned to use that artifact. And that was no use. Because whatever he’d done or seen or learned inside the Kieba’s mountain, he had already mastered it.
Bherijda laughed again, black lightning flickering through the red light that surrounded him, and Oressa, furious and terrified and grieving and outraged by Bherijda’s petty smallness even as he reached after a power no mortal man should hold, snatched the farmwife’s little knife from her pocket, stepped forward, and thrust it into Bherijda’s back, low, aiming for the kidney, exactly as the woman had told her.
Bherijda gasped. The Kieba stepped swiftly forward, moving more quickly and abruptly than any ordinary woman, and caught his medallion as he dropped it. The artifact shattered to dust in her hands, scattering on a hot wind that blew up out of nowhere. The red light stretched out in all directions, wavering and suddenly thin, though black lightning still hummed through it. But the Kieba, with a coolly satisfied nod, held up her hands, empty now, and the wind died, and the light went out.
Bherijda collapsed to his knees and then rolled over sideways. He was still gasping, which was awful, but his eyes were fixed and staring, and even as Oressa hesitated, torn between stabbing Bherijda again and just backing out of the way and begging anyone else to finish him off, his breath suddenly choked him and he coughed and died. Oressa stared at him, hardly able to believe he was dead, not knowing what she should feel or think or do.
“Well done,” said the Kieba, and Oressa looked up quickly. The Kieba did not look kind, but she did not look angry either. She looked, in an indefinable way, grieved. She nodded toward Bherijda’s body and said, “I will take that. It may yet contain the seeds of a plague, which though now inert might someday give rise to terrible peril.”
Oressa nodded shakily. She didn’t even want to imagine what that haze would do to a city if it were ever released without direction. She didn’t say the first thing that came into her head, which was that the Kieba could certainly take Bherijda’s body and do anything she wanted with it, as long as Oressa herself never had to see it again. She said instead merely, “Thank you.”
“The debt lies, unexpectedly, entirely in the other direction,” the Kieba said. “If your family required redemption in my eyes, then you and your brother have redeemed it, Oressa Madalin. Call upon me, if you wish.” She tossed her falcon into the air and turned to go.
“Wait!” said Oressa, but bit her lip when the Kieba turned back because she was afraid to ask. But she did ask at last, because she had to. “What . . . what about Gulien? My father said he was . . . he wasn’t making sense.” She glanced up the mountain, toward her brother. She could see now that her worst fears had not been realized: Gulien was sitting up. She had been so afraid he might have died after all. She was still so afraid he might have been seriously hurt by whatever had happened. Gulien was sitting up, but the way he was sitting, with his head in his hands, that didn’t look good. She looked furiously at the Kieba. “He’s all right, isn’t he? He is all right?”
“He poured himself out like a stream into the ocean to protect me,” the Kieba told her. “Truly, he offered me more than you realize. An anchor to life. Fortunately, his gift allowed me an opportunity to find an alternative anchor. I put him back as well as I could. But one cannot do as he did and remain unchanged.”
“But . . .” Oressa was bewildered. “But what did he do?”
“He poured himself out,” repeated the Kieba, not without sympathy. “I poured him back into himself. Time and patience may complete what I have begun. Or complete it enough. You understand me?”
“Yes. Maybe. I think so.” Oressa found her eyes stinging. “I think I understand enough.”
“Good.” The Kieba looked around and frowned. “You must see to your brother. You, first. Try to recall him to himself. I have a great deal to do here, urgently so. I will come back, however. As soon as I may.”
She walked away without another word. Oressa stared after her for a second. Then she went up the mountain to find Gulien. She walked at first, but by the time she had crossed the remnants of the Kieba’s wall, she was running.
CHAPTER 26
He sat on a bench at a table, in an unfamiliar house, in a warm kitchen, surrounded by people who came and went. He was aware of this, but only tangentially, around the edges of his awareness. Someone talked to him, trying and trying to get him to answer her. She patted his hands and his face. He half recognized her, but his recognition was like his awareness of his surroundings and of himself: distant and without context. Her voice came and went, seeming first close and then far away. Sometimes he understood a word or two, but more often he did not even recognize the language she spoke.
When she folded his hand around a cup of hot tea, he lifted the cup automatically but then paused, struck by the sight of his hand. It was thin and brown, strong but bony. Two of the nails were broken. He did not recognize this hand. Though the fingers opened and closed in response to his will, the hand seemed as foreign and strange as the kitchen, as the young woman who had pressed the cup on him, as the language she spoke. Yet he did not know what hand he had expected to see lifting the cup. He wanted to speak to her, but when he spoke, his own words felt unfamiliar on his tongue, and the young woman looked at him in astonishment and he faltered.
Others came in and went out again. Sometimes he almost knew who they were, but more often he did not. It occurred to him that he ought to care about the uncertainty of his memory, but he did not remember why. The young woman . . . he knew her. He thought he should. Her eyes were wide and dark, her strong-boned face tight with long strain and new anxiety. Her name was . . . Her name was . . . He thought he knew and tried to hold it, but it slipped away from him. He ought to know things. He ought to know everything. When he reached after memory it should be there, safe and clear. But everything was uncertain, and familiarity came and went in the world according to no pattern he recognized.
Then at last Tanothlan opened the door and came into the kitchen, leaving the door open behind her. The sun glowed low and
red over her shoulder. The breeze that came in with her smelled of smoke and dust and blood, of hot earth and horses, and more distantly of the river and cool shade. It was all familiar, but not as familiar as Tanothlan.
He knew her at once, with a welcome surety. She wore a golem, but it did not mask her to his eyes. He knew her in any guise. . . . He had known her all her life. . . . He had put a crystalline key into her young hand and set the kephalos loose in her living blood. He remembered that.
Then he shuddered, the memory sliding away, uncertain once more. Tanothlan seemed to shift between young and old as he stared at her, at once a child and an old woman . . . but she met his eyes, and he knew her. He did know her, and he knew the kephalos that rested behind her eyes and looked back at him as she did. She settled in his vision, then, to the woman he knew. Had known. Knew. Time shifted around him dizzyingly. He rose, clumsy, not understanding why he should be clumsy. Perhaps he had been injured, but he did not remember it. He gripped the table with his hands. For a moment he recognized those hands, and then he didn’t.
“Gulien,” said Tanothlan. She came close and looked into his eyes and said again, “Gulien!”
Gulien blinked. That was his name. He knew it; he knew himself. The world swung around him, and settled. And then shifted again, so that he tightened his grip on the table with hands that now seemed half his and only half foreign.
“You are frightening your sister,” Tanothlan told him.
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