“But his blood does not sing,” Esah-Zhurah lamented, wishing she could see something on the horizon other than darkness. Death.
“No,” Pan’ne-Sharakh answered, “it does not.” She looked up at the young woman beside her. “But still, the Ancient Ones wait. I have heard the priestess speak on the matter, and she believes they are no longer interested in the goings on at our humble kazha. I believe differently.”
“How, mistress? What is to be gained by their silence?”
“They wait, child, as if holding their breath, as if a single whispered word would snuff out the candle that flickers here, beneath the Empress Moon. They wait for you.” Seeing that Esah-Zhurah did not understand, she went on. “Why, child, does the human’s blood not sing?”
“He is not of the Way,” Esah-Zhurah replied. “He is not of Her blood.”
Pan’ne-Sharakh smiled as if Esah-Zhurah had just explained the answer herself. “That is so, child. He is not of Her blood. And what is there to do about such a thing?”
Esah-Zhurah shrugged in the Kreelan fashion, pained frustration showing on her face. Her patience was wearing thin, mistress or no.
“Do you remember, child, the history of this order, the Desh-Ka, since the times even before the First Empress?”
Esah-Zhurah shook her head. She had been born into and raised in another order, the Ima’il-Kush. Her knowledge of the Desh-Ka, the oldest order known among their people, was far from complete. “No, mistress,” she said. “Little is taught of those times, for it is said that the Empire and the Way have always been one, and that what was then, remains as now.”
Pan’ne-Sharakh waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Long was the Way before even the First Empire, child. But no matter. In those times before Keel-Tath and the Unification, before the curse She later wrought upon our blood, the Desh-Ka were the greatest of the warrior sects that lived on our world. Many outsiders aspired to come among them, but few – terribly few – were ever chosen.” She took Esah-Zhurah’s hands in hers. “Once there was a ceremony, long since forgotten in the minds of most, which was the mark of one’s acceptance into the Desh-Ka. And even over the thousands of generations since Keel-Tath’s birth, every warrior bearing the great rune of this order has also borne a scar,” she explained as she ran a callused finger across the palm of Esah-Zhurah’s right hand, “that marks their acceptance by one who has gone before them.”
“This is the ritual of Drakhash,” Esah-Zhurah said, remembering, “the passing of honor from one warrior to another. But what does it have to do with me? I am not of the Desh-Ka, nor is…”
Of course, Esah-Zhurah thought, the truth striking her like a bolt of lightning. It was not just a passing of honor, but of blood as well.
Pan’ne-Sharakh nodded as she saw the dawning of understanding on Esah-Zhurah’s face. “Now all is clear to you, is it not, my daughter?” she asked.
Esah-Zhurah slowly nodded. Her eyes were wide with surprise, and they opened still wider when Pan’ne-Sharakh brought a sheathed knife from within the folds of her robe.
“This,” she said reverently, carefully placing the weapon in the young warrior’s hand, “I have saved for many, many great cycles, from when I was almost as young as you are now. It was the first weapon I made for a young warrior of that time, a mere child I could have bounced upon my knee, who one day would become the flesh and blood of the Empress Who now reigns.”
Esah-Zhurah’s hand trembled as her fingers closed around the weapon, about as long as her forearm, the curved and ornate blade perfectly balanced against the weight of the handle. It seemed to burn her palm, even through the thickness of the armored gauntlet she wore as a second skin.
“After the Ascension,” Pan’ne-Sharakh went on, her eyes misting with the memory, “She called me unto Her, and gave me this as a gift, a token of Her love and remembrance. I have kept it safe and hidden from my own extravagances, knowing that there would come a time when it would be needed. And last night, in the dreams possible only for one whose Way is coming to an end, I knew that the time had come, and to what use it must be put.” Reluctantly, she took her hands away, her fingers brushing over the ancient metal one last time. “The next step,” she said quietly, “is up to you.”
***
Reza heard Esah-Zhurah coming long before he could see her, especially now that the fire had died down to glittering coals of deep cherry red and amber. He was startled that she was not walking as she usually did, using the nearly silent step that was now his own, but was treading the earth as if afraid of nothing, as if stealth were alien to her. The unease that had been building in him since earlier that evening had reached a feverish peak.
“Esah-Zhurah,” he called softly, knowing that she would be able to hear him easily, “what is wrong?”
She knelt down next to him, a shadow in the darkness, and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close.
“Do you trust me?” she asked, her face close to his. He nodded once. Words were unnecessary. “Then do as I ask this night, and sleep. Rest, that we may leave early tomorrow for our free time. And then I shall explain all. I dare not here.”
He suddenly felt her lips pressing hungrily against his, parting to release the warm tongue that set his body aflame. She lingered for but a moment that was itself an eternity in Reza’s mind. Then she drew away, leaving him breathless and flushed with a mad desire to hold her, to touch her in ways that came to him with force of instinct, but with the tenderness of the love he felt for her.
“Esah-Zhurah,” he rasped, reaching for her, holding her close. She knelt close to him, but did not let him kiss her again. It would have been too much to resist, such was the pounding in her breast and the desire working between her thighs at the thought of what could be, what must be, in the days ahead.
“No, my tresh,” she told him, gently but firmly pushing him back down on his skins, running a hand across his forehead before laying down next to him, a painful moat of distance between them. “Patience is a warrior’s virtue. There is much about which we must speak, but it must wait until tomorrow.”
The word echoed in Reza’s mind as he lost himself in the wondrous pools of starlight in her eyes.
Tomorrow.
***
Reza sat with his legs crossed, his arms draped over his knees. He stared past the mouth of the great caldera whose edge lay just beyond his feet, his thoughts lost in the sprawling horizon that lay in the distance. The faint rumble of the waterfall was broken only by the whispers of the wind and the rustling of the lush ferns that covered this part of the mountain like a vast forest.
The ride to this place, the grotto that had been their refuge and escape each cycle since coming to the kazha, had been a long, silent one. Reza sat upon old Goliath, with Esah-Zhurah beside him on her mount. Their only contact had been an occasional brush of thigh against thigh, and once he had reached out to take her hand, squeezing it in reassurance. She had refused to tell him what was on her mind until they arrived at their destination. But the mourning marks that streamed from under her eyes, the marks that had been hidden in the darkness of night, did nothing to lift his spirits. After they had arrived at the grotto and set up their camp, she had taken him by the hand and led him here to the overlook, a ledge jutting out into space from which one could see forever.
But to Reza, forever had been reduced to three sundowns hence. For, according to what Esah-Zhurah had just revealed in a halting, agonized voice, he would be dead upon the sands of the arena by the time the sun set upon the day of his seventh Challenge.
“And if I should win?” he asked quietly.
She looked away. “If you win, I am to take your life and your hair to the Empress.” Her whole body seemed to tremble. “Reza,” she whispered, “easier it would be for me to tear my beating heart from my breast than to spill a drop of your blood this way. I would gladly spend eternity in the Darkness to spare you, but I am forbidden even that. I must wait for death until the Way brings it to my
doorstep.”
He took her hand in his, and gently turned her face so that he could look into her eyes. “It is Her will, my tresh,” he told her, the sincerity in his heart echoed on his face. “If that is what the Way holds for us, then it must be so. I am only grateful that, should I have the honor of winning the Challenge, yours will be the hand that sends me from this life.” He stroked her face, smiling with a confidence that came with his acceptance of his own mortality. “It shall be as it must.”
She pulled him close and wrapped her arms around his neck, holding him tightly. “When you are ready,” she said, her voice muffled as she pressed her face into the hollow of his shoulder, “come to me. There is something we must attend to, something that can wait no longer.” Pausing only long enough to kiss him lightly on the cheek, she stood up and began making her way back down the mountain. She did not look back.
After Esah-Zhurah had gone, Reza turned his attention back to the horizon, concentrating not on the future, which had already been written by another’s hand, but the past which none could deny him. As if reading a most treasured book, he turned the pages of his life, reviewing the memories held in the storehouse of his mind. He paused on the few remembrances he had managed to keep alive from before he had come to the Empire, saving them as treasured icons of an existence long since past. But even those visions that he had labored to keep fresh seemed to be from another person’s life, yellowed and faded with time, the faces now indistinct and the names awkward to his tongue. Yet, they were a part of him, and the feeling the ancient images engendered in his heart warmed and comforted him as the evening breeze swept over the mountain and the sun fell toward the far horizon.
But the humanity left in him was merely a vestige of a human boy who had metamorphosed into a Kreelan warrior, alien to his heritage in nearly every way but the very flesh of which he was made. The imprint of any human society on a prepubescent boy was simply not enough to hold back the cultural onslaught to which Reza had been subjected. And now, reviewing in his mind the few mental tokens that remained of his previous life, he discovered that he could not remember the last time he had really thought of himself as being human, of having descended from the people of Old Earth. Even though the peers called him “human,” or “animal,” he had come to think of himself as a Kreelan, and that perception of himself had grown ever stronger the closer he had come to Esah-Zhurah. There had been a time when he would have feared the loosening of his grip on what had been human in him, the part of him that was now little more than an afterimage in his mind. But that had passed with his acceptance of the code by which he had lived most of his life; the code by which he would soon die.
He thought for a while about what death would be like. Death, a force that had pursued him relentlessly for most of his young life, would finally get its due. Like an old relative who had dropped by many times to visit, only to miss Reza by a shard of time, it would at last embrace him and welcome him into whatever lay within its dark domain. Reza had never been terrified of death, but had evaded it because he had loved life enough to suffer for it. But now he found death a welcome thing, for then his greatest quest would be over, the search for the answer that was the very reason for his coming here: to discover if he had a soul. Long having forgotten the Christian teachings of his childhood, he now wondered only what the Bloodsong must sound like, the thing that united the Children of the Empress to Her will. But he had never heard it, neither from himself nor the tresh around him. He did not even know what to listen for, or if it was really a “sound” at all. All he had was question upon question, all without answer as long as he lived and breathed. Did he have a soul, or was he merely an animal, as the peers believed? Was he nothing more than animated clay fashioned into human form by Her hands? Would he pass through the portal of Death to something beyond? Or would he simply cease to exist, turning to dust and ash as Esah-Zhurah set his body ablaze in a funeral pyre that was the tradition of Her Children? It seemed that only in death would he discover the truth of what Her Children knew from birth.
As the sky above turned from the pastel magenta of day to the inky darkness of night, he welcomed the stars as they emerged from their celestial slumber, and made a silent wish upon the five stars of Her name.
He wished for a soul, and that all would not end when his body suffered the final blow.
***
When Reza returned to the grotto, he found Esah-Zhurah kneeling, her pensive face turned to the fire that burned beside her, the flames licking quietly at the air as if afraid to disturb her thoughts. Slowly, as if breaking herself away from a hypnotist’s swaying talisman, she looked up at him, and his heart skipped a beat at the black marks that swept down from her eyes, a window to the pain in her soul.
“Kneel,” she said, gesturing to the skins that formed the floor of their makeshift abode.
Reza took his place before her, his knees just touching hers, his hands spread, palms down, on his thighs.
“There is an ancient tradition,” she began, “that predates even the First Empire, that was part of our Way before Keel-Tath ascended to the throne, before we became what we are now. It was not a tradition of all our people, but of the Desh-Ka. It was begun from the first day their rune was engraved in the stone of their temple, and which all Desh-Ka have followed throughout the ages. It is the rite of Drakhash, the blood bond.
“In those days, as now, the blood of the tribe was considered most sacred, and to share it with another was both a great honor and a great responsibility, often with terrible consequences during the Reign of Chaos. So legend tells us.” She paused, reaching beside her for a knife that lay unsheathed near the fire, a blade that Reza had never seen before, but whose exquisite workmanship was unprecedented to his eyes. “You, Reza, of human birth and blood, have shown the skill and fire that are the marks of our warriors. You, whose blood does not sing, who cannot hear the Bloodsong of Her Children, are as a stranger to our tribe, our people, yet worthy of our respect and trust.” Holding the knife between them, the dagger blade pointed at the sky, she said, “Although I am not Desh-Ka by birth, I am a True Daughter of the Empress, born of Her womb, blessed with Her very blood. And thus I may speak without falsehood, for my will is Her will, and it shall be done.”
Taking off his gauntlets, as she had her own, she took his hand in hers, clasping it tightly as her other hand kept the dagger aloft, still pointing skyward. “I ask you only this: do you accept Her in your heart of hearts, that you shall follow Her will unto death, that the Way of our people shall be the Way of your heart, of your mind?”
Reza’s mind was spinning at the enormity of what his tresh was doing. He knew that the priestess would have categorically forbidden such a thing, yet Esah-Zhurah could not go against the Empress’s will. In whatever incomprehensible way these people were bound together, he knew that to be impossible as surely as he could not spread his wings and fly from this mountain to the plains below. But his thoughts were preempted by the words spoken by his heart. “With all my heart, Her will is mine, the Way of Her Children is the Way of my soul. To die for Her honor is to die for Her grace and Her love. So has it been, so shall it forever be.”
Esah-Zhurah nodded. Wordlessly, they raised their clasped hands into the air, and she placed the knife between them, the flat of the blade cool as it rested against their palms.
“With this knife, forged long ago for one who would ascend to the throne, wielded by Her in battle, are we now joined.” With a slight twist of her knife hand, the blade’s razor edge broke the boundary of skin between them, drawing a deep line of blood as she pulled it downward, the weapon slipping from their joined hands like a newborn infant from the womb. Esah-Zhurah set the knife aside, then wrapped her free hand around their joined fist. She felt the warm pulse of her blood, and his, as their wounds sought each other out, mated.
Reza’s hand was tingling as if Esah-Zhurah was sending electric currents through it, and as they knelt there, face to face, the sensation began to sp
read up his arm, then his shoulder. And looking into her eyes, he could see that she felt it, too.
“I must tell you something,” she said, her cat’s eyes pools of glittering fire, stars in the blackness of mourning that besieged her face. “I feel fear, Reza, such as I have never before felt. I fear losing you, losing your voice… your scent… your touch. In my language, even the Old Tongue that you have not been taught, there are no words to describe these things I feel for you.” Slowly, she placed her free hand over his heart. “The only hope of my soul is that the blood now in your veins may sing to Her, that She may know thy voice.”
“Esah-Zhurah,” he whispered, “I love you.” She leaned close to kiss him lightly on the eyes, her fingers in his hair. “Had I my entire life to do over,” he told her, “I would change nothing, would suffer anything, that I could be with you.”
She kissed him softly on the mouth, and then slowly rose to her feet. He made to rise also, but she gently pushed him back to where he knelt. “Stay,” she whispered huskily. “I have learned the tradition of the Old Ways, before the Curse,” she told him, her breath warm against his face, “when male and female touched in desire, not desperate need. So it was then, so shall it be now.”
The tingling sensation still spreading through his body, she separated her bloodied hand from his. Slowly, she began to undress. She undid the belt that carried her weapons, letting it slide to the ground. Then she began to unfasten her armor, placing it in an orderly stack beside her. Her black undergarment disappeared in the shimmering firelight, then her sandals.
Reza watched, enraptured, as she discarded the last of her clothing. Her blue skin glowed as she stood before him, backlit by the flames. Her muscles were taut in anticipation, and he could see the gleam of wetness between her thighs. He could hear her quickened breathing, the rapid beating of her heart. Her musky scent touched him, teased him, arousing him to the point where he was sure he would explode without her ever touching him.
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