10: His Holy Bones (15 page)

He thought he heard Rousma shout something, but he couldn’t be sure. His senses receded, both sound and vision fading to faint impressions against a numb darkness. Even the bones beneath him seemed to have lost their hard edges, almost as if they had melted into his body. There was nothing more he could do. Nothing left for him, but the senseless emptiness of death.

He wished that he could see Jath’ibaye one last time, but that was all. Then he thought nothing more. A perfect darkness swallowed him.

Then, from the depths of nothingness came a tiny spark, a shock in the deep chambers of his heart. It grew hot and then spread. A tingling, electric heat rushed through him like the burn of liquor. It surged from his chest outward, coursing over his face and head and down all the way to his feet. His skin felt flushed and hot. His muscles tingled. Kahlil opened his eyes.

Though his body was still slumped across the marble altar, the deep gashes on his arms had closed to fine white scars. The ring finger of his left hand was no longer missing. Instead intricately carved finger bones and delicate copper wire protruded from his hand. They were Ravishan’s bones, Kahlil realized. His blood had awoken the spells Rousma had carved over the skeleton. Kahlil could feel the heat of the rest of them inside him.

He straightened, marveling at the ease of the motion. Under his left hand he found the shining golden key.

“You see,” Rousma said. “You lives!”

Kahlil gripped the ush’hala. He glanced to Rousma. “What happened to me?”

“You lives.” Rousma bounced excitedly on her skeletal feet. “You is whole now and you lives. I told you. I seen it.”

Rousma seemed right. Not only were his wounds healed, but he also felt, somehow, whole. That gnawing sense of inevitable failure had left him for the first time in what seemed like years. He was still the man who had failed to save the Payshmura Church, but now an assurance seemed to rise up from his bones—or perhaps they were Ravishan’s bones. He felt a surge of pride. He had turned his back on a corrupt church. He had fought for what he believed in and awoken the Rifter’s divine justice.

Both halves of his life melted into each other and what had once felt like contradictions, like losses and failures, now seemed unified and blessed. If, as Ravishan, he had betrayed the Payshmura, it had only been because he had served the greater divinity of the Rifter. And all the pain that he had endured in this life as Kahlil—all of the loneliness and suffering—had been necessary so that he could be here, now, at this moment. Both his lives seemed to converge to a central purpose.

Whether it was the Rifter, or John, or Jath’ibaye, it no longer mattered. They were all one. At the center of both of Kahlil’s lives was his dedication to that single man who was his deity, ward, friend, and lover.

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?”