“Don’t.” It was just a whisper, and it must have cost him. Rustan’s forehead gleamed with sweat and his face worked with the effort of speaking against her order.
Kyra hardened herself and the bonds she had laid on him. “DO NOT MOVE OR SPEAK.”
He closed his eyes, exhausted. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, she thought. Tears blurred her vision, but she turned away from him. She had a task to complete. She could blame and punish herself later.
Although what punishment could be worse than this? The feeling, as she entered the cave, that she was leaving all light and love behind. The memory of the hurt in his eyes, sharp as a blade. And the knowledge, bitter-tasting, that even if Rustan forgave her, she would never forgive herself.
She held out her katari to illuminate the way. “Show me where the kalishium is,” she commanded, but she could feel the reluctance of her blade grow as she went deeper into the cave. Its radiance wavered, unsteady, and a needle of doubt pricked her. She ignored it and continued, following the wall, bending the katari to her will. It was hers. It would do what she wanted.
A faint blue-green light shone in the distance, and Kyra quickened her pace down a narrow tunnel, at the end of which the light grew stronger, brighter, making her blink after the pitch-dark.
Kyra stepped into a huge, luminous cavern. A magnificent white globe glowed in the center. She shielded her eyes and circled the cavern, her heart beating like a drum within her chest. Faces gazed back at her, both grotesque and beautiful.
Kalishium, in the form of hundreds of sculptures, lined the walls. Her gaze skittered over them; she was afraid to look too long, knowing the spell she could fall under. No wonder Rustan had warned her not to seek this place.
But he had underestimated her. An ordinary person might well be sucked into the void and lose their mind. She had her blade, and it would protect her from the worst.
A dark trio of eyes flicked in her direction, and she almost screamed.
But it was only an image of the Mother Goddess. Kyra fell against a pillar and tried to control her breathing. A sculpture of the Goddess in her aspect of Bhuvaneshvari, the World Mother, red-skinned and four-armed, with a garland of lotuses around her neck. A crown with a crescent moon rested on her braided hair.
Was this the right image to take back with her?
No. Kyra didn’t even have to think about it. She could barely bring herself to look at the sculpture. The eyes seemed alive, all-knowing. They followed her as she circled the cavern, as if judging her actions.
Why had the alien Ones carved an image in the likeness of the Goddess? Had they too worshipped her? Or had they made it for their human counterparts? No way to know.
On her second slow circle around the cavern, Kyra’s gaze snagged on another image: a four-legged wolflike creature with a not-quite-human face snarling at her. Her katari sparked a warning, but she ignored it and approached. The image reminded her of Menadin. It was both familiar and unpleasant, but it did not frighten her the way the image of the Goddess had. Before she could think too much about it, Kyra screwed her eyes shut and reached down to grasp the two-foot-high sculpture. Her fingers touched cool metal and a jolt of memory shook her.
I run; I run like the wind with my brothers. I taste the terror of the buck before it falls, crashing to the forest floor. And then we are upon it, tearing open its throat, feasting on its delicious flesh. I eat my fill, growling when a young one tries to push between my legs. But there is enough, enough for all. I sit back on my haunches when I am done, licking my chops. It is difficult at times like this to remember that I am also a man, that I become a man whenever the Araini call. I wear robes and sip tea and study the stars and am greatly envied by the ordinary ones for my duality. And when I ask the Araini why they have made me like this, they only smile and answer that one day I will know.
Come back, Kyra. Rustan reached out to her with his mind, trapped as he was in the bonds of the Inner Speech.
Kyra surfaced from the memory, gasping and shivering. She snatched her hands back from the wolflike image; it gleamed before her, opaque once more.
She had not erred. This was the image she would carry back with her, saving a piece for Menadin. Perhaps it would tell Menadin more than what it had told her, or perhaps it told everyone a different story. But the memory was sharp and clear within her still. The Ones had made the wyr-wolves; to what end, only they could tell.
She went back to the monastery and returned with a tattered rug. She would not touch the statue with her bare hands again. She wrapped it in the rug and heaved it onto her shoulders, lurching under its weight. Goddess, it was heavy. It would be hard to carry it all the way down to the door at the base of Kunlun Shan. She would have to make a sled of some sort out of the pile of firewood.
“I have found the image I need,” she announced as she staggered into the room where she had left Rustan. “I am taking only one.”
Rustan’s eyes were closed; if he heard her, he gave no sign. She set down her load and ran to him, her fingers flying to his wrist. His pulse was faint but even. Thank the Goddess.
“YOU CAN MOVE AFTER TWO HOURS, BUT YOU WILL NOT FOLLOW ME,” she said in the Inner Speech. “YOU WILL NOT USE THE KUNLUN DOOR UNTIL THREE FULL DAYS HAVE PASSED.”
His face twitched and he sighed, as if waking from a dream.
Kyra paused and swallowed. “I love you, Rustan,” she whispered. “If you love me, fight by my side.”
She bent and kissed his damp, cool forehead. “Goodbye,” she said, and rose to leave before she could change her mind, release him from her bonds, and beg his forgiveness.
Before she left, she removed Shirin Mam’s letter for him from her pocket and laid it by his side, where he would see it when he awoke.
Chapter 23
The Secret of the Sahirus
When Rustan woke, he remembered the kiss and Kyra’s parting words, but it took a while to recall everything else.
He sat up, his head spinning, his heart heavy.
She had used Compulsion on him. Compulsion. And she had stolen a kalishium image from the cavern. He had failed to protect the kalishium, and he had failed to protect her.
He had told her he loved her, and she had betrayed him.
Two hours, she had said; he could move after two hours. He still had time to catch up with her if he ran.
But Rustan found he was unable to go much farther than the doors of the monastery with the intention of following Kyra. Every limb ached, and his head began to pound when he tried to descend the path curving down from the monastery to meet the broader track as it disappeared around the side of the mountain. The path the Sahirus had helped him traverse, when he had not the eyes to see it. The path that Kyra had climbed to the monastery without any aid or any knowledge of it. Perhaps the monks had expected her, had wanted her to come. How else could she have seen where to place her feet?
But where were the Sahirus? He had left them less than two weeks ago. Surely they would have sensed his return. Had they hidden themselves from him as yet another test?
Rustan drank fresh, cold water from a stream outside. He sat down to practice the forms of internal strength while waiting for the monks to make their presence known. After a while, he succumbed to fatigue and fell asleep again. When he woke, sandy-mouthed and gritty-eyed, the Sahirus had still not returned.
That was when he noticed the bulky letter, lying a few feet away from him. Rustan, it said on the cover, the t hidden by the jute string that held the sheaf together. He frowned and picked it up, turning it over in his hands. It was smooth and familiar to the touch, as if he had held it before, or as if he knew quite well the person who had written his name in such clear, beautiful script. The letter had Kyra’s scent on it, but it was not her writing.
It was his mother’s.
Rustan began to shake but forced himself to stop. He held Shirin Mam’s last words in his hands. His mother, who had once told him she would acknowledge him to the world and then fulfille
d her promise in the most unexpected way. Here, perhaps, was the secret of his birth, the reason for his existence. Maybe he was part of a bigger plan, and Shirin Mam had foreseen the role he would play and chosen to defy the ancient Kanun to bring him into the world.
Or maybe his birth was an accident, the embarrassing result of a youthful indiscretion, best forgotten.
He wanted to tear the letter open and devour its contents. Instead, he touched it to his lips and tucked it into his robe. While it remained unread, his past and thus his future were limitless. Once he read it, all those possibilities would collapse into one reality, perhaps a banal one.
He scanned the familiar old room, truly observing it for the first time since his return. The kettle was rusty, the fireplace dark. The sunlight that shone through the half-open doors revealed a thick layer of dust on the walls. Only his and Kyra’s footprints had disturbed it on the floor. The food stores were mostly gone, sacks of grain eaten away by rats and tea leaves crumbled to dust. And now that Kyra had left, he sensed that he was alone. Not even ghosts kept him company here.
He climbed the creaky wooden staircase to the second level and checked the three rooms upstairs without much hope. Nothing but dust and age, battered trunks on the floor and frayed hangings on the walls. One hanging in particular caught his eye, because it was illuminated with the ancient script the Sahirus had been trying to teach him. He read it, coldness settling in the pit of his stomach as he translated the words in his mind:
To the faithful Sahirus this grace is given:
All debts forgotten, all sins forgiven.
Keepers of Kunlun, hold on to the ways
Until you join us at the end of days.
Return to bury us. That is all we ask. They had not said when. They had given him no hint how near the end was—or that the end had already happened and they were reading him a story from an earlier time, a different age. He had thought them near-immortal, but maybe the truth was stranger than that. Maybe they had been phantoms.
Or perhaps he was the phantom, unsure and unaware of the part he had to play.
Rustan went back downstairs to the great wooden doors of the monastery. The rope ladder no longer hung below the entrance, but it did not matter anymore. Rustan studied the path and saw the way the monks had taken—how long ago?—up the mountain.
On the roof of the world, in Ice Mother’s arms, you will see and understand everything.
Ice Mother, the name of the highest peak of Kunlun Shan.
Rustan walked down the narrow path of the monastery to where it met the broader one and began to climb. Not the route they had taken up the mountain when they showed him the home star of the Araini, but a different path, to a different peak.
Snow and ice and loose stones slid underfoot, and the sunlight blinded him. Rustan sweated and shivered as he made his way slowly up the steep, treacherous path. He thought of Kyra, and then wondered why he thought of her in this moment, when a strong gust of wind might knock him over and send him tumbling down the cliffs. Perhaps I am close to death, and that is why I think of her.
It took Rustan hours to reach the summit of Ice Mother. By then the sun had dipped into the west, and the sky flamed red and orange above him. The air was thin and sharp, imbued with the many colors of dusk. And it was in this transitory light that Rustan saw what the Sahirus had meant for him to find.
A massive oblong structure, unlike anything he had ever seen, rose from the snowfield before him. Its smooth, silver walls glinted in the dying light. It did not look like a temple, a monastery, or a dwelling place. It looked like the inverted hull of a strange ship, or perhaps a Hub. A few feet in front of it, a boot stuck out of the snow.
Rustan rested, breathing the cold, clean air, letting the exhaustion leach away from his bones. Putting off the inevitable, painful discovery. Trying, and failing, to find his inner calm.
At last he walked toward them, his dead teachers, the two ancient Sahirus buried beneath the snow, frozen in time. He dug them out, his eyes stinging, his hands numb with cold.
How long had they lain here, waiting for him? Months? Years?
He laid out the two tiny corpses, brushing the snow away from their faces. They had asked him to bury them. They had been trying to get inside the oblong building—of that, he was certain.
Rustan rose and circled the building, trying to find a door. There wasn’t one. He touched the cold metallic surface with his palms and nothing happened. He unsheathed his mother’s blade. As a last resort, he would try to cut an opening into the metal walls.
But there was no need to. As soon as the kalishium blade touched the building, the outline of a door shone silver-bright in the dusk. Stunned, Rustan stepped back. The outline faded.
The building had to be an artifact of the Ones. It had survived the war and the burning and eight and a half centuries of snow and wind. Once again, Rustan touched the walls with his mother’s blade, and once more the outline of a door appeared. He pushed it with trembling hands.
The door swung open at his touch. He picked up the bodies of the Sahirus, one by one, and brought them inside. When the door swung closed behind him, blue lights came on, illuminating the vast space. Just like a Hub—but this was no Hub.
Rustan stood at the entrance of a great white hall lined with glass-covered caskets. A hall that was surely bigger on the inside than it appeared on the outside. He walked in, his heart hammering, and peered into the first casket. It held the body of an old woman, perfectly preserved. Her hands were folded on her chest and she appeared to be asleep. A Sahiru?
He walked along the line of caskets, counting as he went. Twenty-two, twenty-three—and there he stopped, for the few caskets that remained were empty. Nearly as many men as women, and all in the same perfect state of preservation.
What art was this? And what would be their ultimate fate?
Rustan laid his teachers in two of the empty caskets, folding their hands and smoothing their foreheads. When he stood back, glass covers slid over the caskets with a smooth hiss. There was nothing now to distinguish his teachers from their fellow Sahirus.
He stood there awhile, remembering what they had taught him, thanking them for all they had done for him, and apologizing for his failures. Only then did he allow himself to check if there were any empty caskets left.
There was one.
Rustan sighed and moved toward it, touched the smooth metal, and closed his eyes. This one was for him. If only he could have lain down on it right away.
But of course, he could not. His time had not yet come.
If you love me, fight by my side.
It was hard, but Rustan made himself turn away, walk out of the building, and into the freezing night. It had begun to snow; the driving wind pelted bits of ice into his mouth and eyes. He tied his headcloth over his face and went down to the monastery, the secret of the Sahirus a burning coal in his heart.
Part III
Shirin Mam’s letter to Rustan
My son. The words feel strange in my mouth, yet you have never been far from my thoughts. If there is one regret I have, it is that I will not set eyes on you until you pass through the door of death and join me on the other side. Many times over the years I have imagined how you must look, first as a boy and then as a grown man. Many times I have longed to make the trip to Kashgar and summon you to my side.
But I lost that right when you were born, and I gave you up into the care of others. And I lost it for the second time when I took you away from your adoptive clan and delivered you to the Maji-khan of Khur.
It is better so. And yet how it hurt. I did not know it would hurt like this, to give you up. Before you were born it was like a game, hiding my condition from my eagle-eyed council. Poor Navroz, she will never forgive me.
Will you?
Let me tell you a story, a story of when I was young. Not yet the Mahimata of Kali, but I was the Mistress of Mental Arts and very proud of myself too. Not bad for a daughter of shepherds from the Uzb
ek Plains, yes?
One day, Ananya Senn, my Mahimata, told me to judge a riddling game at the festival of Chorzu. The prize would be whatever was asked, if it was in our power to give: forgiveness for a crime, a combat lesson, a tour of the caves of Kali—not that anyone ever asked for that.
This might surprise you, but in those days we mingled more with the ordinary folk. We were active participants at the festival, sometimes offering a confessional for those whose hearts were weighed by past misdeeds, sometimes enacting a mock duel. I put a stop to all that, for reasons that will become clear.
The riddling stage was a patch of grass beneath an ancient banyan tree at the edge of Chorzu. Twenty riddlers showed up on the day of the festival, all keen to test their wits against each other. Of the twenty were nineteen I could read and one—a man called Rubathar—whom I could not. He was impervious to the Mental Arts. This is not an unknown skill, but it is quite rare, and it disturbed me. He was disturbing to look upon too, with his piercing eyes, ragged clothes, and wild hair, and the long, curving sword that hung on his belt. A sword that was drenched in the blood of hundreds, if I was not mistaken.
But I did not betray my unease. I paired the contestants and sat back to watch. I reasoned that he’d be gone soon enough, eliminated by the more experienced riddlers of the valley.
The rules were simple. The contestants posed riddles to each other, carrying on until one or the other failed to guess the correct answer. As was customary, the entire village had turned out to cheer the contestants and judge the quality of the riddles posed.
The afternoon wore on and dusk fell. Lanterns were lit, and spice tea was brought to slake the thirst of onlookers and riddlers alike. By midnight, only two riddlers were left: Rubathar and Piyaret, a medicine woman from a neighboring village. I had underestimated the stranger’s abilities, and this annoyed me deeply.
At last, Rubathar stood and stretched. “This is my final riddle of the night, for I grow weary and have a long way to go,” he said. “Listen:
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