10: His Holy Bones (2 page)

“Yes, most holy lord.” Wah’roa’s voice was hushed with awe. “Many of your faithful are trapped on the lower terraces and cannot escape the fires. We have attempted to reach them, but most of the walkways between the terraces have been destroyed. The few still standing are badly cracked and we’re afraid that they may collapse.”

John closed his eyes and briefly allowed his senses to spread over the ravaged mass of Vundomu. He’d all but demolished the first three terraces. The fourth terrace remained, but its buildings, walkways, and walls were all collapsed. Huge fires blazed where an armory once stood. Most of the buildings still stood on the fifth and sixth terraces, but they were riddled with oil fires and cracked infrastructure. Only here on the seventh terrace, where the watchtowers and the Temple of the Rifter stood, did the buildings retain their structural integrity.

If people were trapped on the lower terraces, he had to help get them out. He didn’t want to leave Ravishan, but he knew he was of no further use here in the infirmary.

“I’ll do what I can.” John stood.

Wah’roa and the other two kahlirash’im followed him out. In the temple’s central chamber, the huge black statue of the Rifter gazed down upon a sea of dirty, injured refugees. John guessed that several hundred people now huddled in the temple’s shelter. They crouched on saddle blankets and prayer mats. Nearly all of them looked cold and very few of them had coats. Most of
the men wore the thin work clothes and leather aprons of metal smiths. The few women and children were dressed in simple shifts. They lowered their heads as John walked past.

“I pray that you will forgive us, most ho— Jath’ibaye.” Wah’roa seemed almost unable to address John by just his name. “We gave shelter to the women accused of witchcraft. We did not intend to defile your sacred temple with their presence. We will put them out at once—”

“No, let them stay,” John said. “I’d be far more offended if you didn’t allow women inside the temple than if you did.”

Wah’roa raised his brows but said nothing. The other kahlirash, a skinny young man with a badly bruised face, quickly wrote something down on a small roll of paper.

“What are you doing?” John asked him, though he already had an uneasy feeling that he knew the answer.

“I am recording your sacred edicts, my most—most, my lord, Jath’ibaye.” The young man flushed dark red and bowed his head.

“My sacred edicts can be recorded later.” John tried not to let his frustration creep into his voice. Of course they expected edicts; they probably expected far more. He was the Rifter and they had dedicated their lives to him. The trouble was that their Rifter—that magnificent, righteous deity whose statue loomed up in the temple—was not John. Their Rifter was the promise of divine justice and unfailing courage. John could promise neither of those things. He was tired and hurt and worried that all he could bring to these people was more ruin.

 “Right now I’m…” John glanced at the black walls of the temple where golden script invoked divine wrath and salvation and then to the proud ferocity of the statue of the Rifter. Both Wah’roa and the young kahlirash stared at him.

He couldn’t be their Rifter. He could just barely manage to be a Fai’daum witch.

“I think we should just concentrate on rebuilding the walkways and putting out the fires,” John said at last. He glanced to the young kahlirash. “Look…what’s your name?”

“Sen’an, my—Jath’ibaye.” The young kahlirash said his name
with almost breathless reverence.

“Sen’an,” John said the name, trying to impress it upon his exhausted mind. “There’s no need to write down everything I say. All right?”

Sen’an stared at John for several moments and John wasn’t sure if the young kahlirash was too startled by being directly addressed to respond or if he just didn’t believe what John had said. Then suddenly Sen’an bowed. He tucked his paper and clay pen back into his pocket. Wah’roa studied John with his head cocked slightly to one side but said nothing.

Outside the temple, the bodies of dead kahlirash’im and ushiri’im still littered the steps and shattered tiles of the courtyard. Freezing rain pelted down through violent gusts of wind. The cold lashed over John’s bare chest. He shuddered. Both Wah’roa and the young kahlirash looked a little surprised. Wah’roa began to pull off his own coat, but John stopped him.

“It’s too cold for anyone to be out without a coat,” John said.

He knelt down beside the body of a kahlirash who had died in the shelter of the temple steps. Blood soaked the left side of his coat, but otherwise it was dry.

“I don’t mean any offense,” John said. He glanced to Wah’roa.

“It’s filthy,” Wah’roa said. “I can get a coat from one of the men in the temple.”

“People are going to need their coats, and you know that I’ve worn worse than this,” John said.

Wah’roa looked a little confused.

“Remember when Alidas told you about first meeting me? I was dressed in rags and weasel pelts,” John reminded him.

Wah’roa stared at John for a moment and then seemed to remember.

“You came here as the Kahlil’s attendant,” Wah’roa said slowly.

John nodded. “That’s how I knew your name.” Briefly John wondered how Wah’roa had imagined that he had known his name. Divine knowledge? John supposed people expected deities to simply know their names. Maybe that was why Sen’an had seemed so startled when John had asked.

“Yes, I remember now.” Wah’roa regarded him levelly. John
thought he could almost see Wah’roa attempting to merge his memory of an awkward attendant with his concept of the Rifter. He wondered if this might be the kind of experience that made a man lose his faith. John almost hoped that it was. Instead, Wah’roa said, “You were in Gisa as well, at the prison gates.”

“I was.” John gently lifted the dead kahlirash and stripped off his coat, socks, and boots. He whispered a blessing over the body, then dressed quickly in the dead man’s clothes. As he set out for the lower terraces of Vundomu, Wah’roa and Sen’an followed him, both seemingly dazed.  

The shortest path to the edge of the terrace was easy to find. John had created it himself on his way to the temple. Each footstep and brush of his hand had left a path of shattered walls and cratered flagstones. Once or twice John noticed men staring out at him from the pitted buildings that lined the street. When he looked up to meet their gazes, they bowed their heads.

From the crumbling wall at the edge of the seventh terrace, John took in the vast devastation that he had wrought on Vundomu.

As his gaze descended the terraces, the damage became more severe. Cracked stone and exposed iron supports on the seventh terrace gave way to shattered walls, ruptured buildings, on the fourth. Tangled railroad tracks, and oil fires were all that remained of the first. Plumes of smoke rose on the wind, only to crumple under the onslaught of the rain.

Beyond the walls of Vundomu, wreckage spilled out across the valley in a chaos of splintered rock, limbs, and mud. And past that, a huge chasm spread north for miles. The bodies of men and animals, crushed supply wagons, and cracked mortars littered every inch of the ground.

Sickness washed over John. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. He noticed movements on the terrace directly below him. A group of kahlirash’im hauled rubble from the remains of a stable. John could hear the distressed cries of the tahldi trapped inside. One of the kahlirash’im looked up.

“I think the central supports held,” the kahlirash shouted up to Wah’roa.

“We’ll have a walkway cleared and stabilized by the time you get them out,” Wah’roa called back.

John realized that now was not the time for self-recrimination. He might not be the Rifter that the kahlirash’im expected, but he could stabilize a walkway and clear rubble. So right now, he was the Rifter that they needed.

Chapter Ninety-Nine

 John went to work at once, examining the remains of the wide walkway that had connected the sixth and seventh terraces. A few iron supports jutted out from the terrace wall. The rest of the walkway lay strewn over the street below in massive fragments of stone. John drew long filaments from the exposed iron struts and painstakingly pulled arches and supports up from shattered heaps of granite. He fought against the natural, simple forms of the stone and metal, forcing them to flow into architecture. His body ached. He drank strength from the fury of the storm above him and then descended to the sixth terrace. As he built another walkway and then another, the brutal rain ceased.

All around him, workmen and kahlirash’im looked on in awe. Most of the workmen backed away as he strode near them, but the kahlirash’im bowed down. John heard them uttering prayers to the Rifter and whispering his praise as he moved past them. Behind him, Wah’roa gave his men quick orders and commanded the workmen back to their endeavors.

 John only stopped when he reached the remnants of the walkway connecting the fifth and fourth terraces. Wah’roa and Sen’an halted just a little behind him. Below them entire blocks of the fourth terrace blazed. Munitions from the armory exploded, spewing fragments of rock, metal, and burning wood into the air. Without the rain to restrain them, geysers of flame shot up over the streets, nearly reaching over the walls of the fifth terrace. The heat rolled over John, scorching his bare face.

 John stared down at the sea of fire. The smoke burned his eyes and caught in his throat. Even after all the crushing, bloody injuries he had endured, the thought of being burned alive still terrified him. The memory of the writhing, charred bodies on the Holy Road curled up in his mind, triggered by the sharp scent of smoke and veru oil. He couldn’t imagine any worse pain than burning. But the fires needed to be extinguished and there was no one else to do it.

“You should probably stay up here,” John told Wah’roa and Sen’an. Wah’roa bowed his head. Sen’an nodded, but his gaze hardly wavered from the roiling flames that arched and roared all across the fourth terrace.

John’s heart hammered in his chest. His entire body trembled. He closed his eyes against the blinding light. Then he drew a brutal wind around him and descended into the inferno.

He braced himself against the agony of burning, but the pain never came. Flames rushed over him and died instantly. Reflexively, he drank them in as he had the storm. The wild energy twisted and churned inside him, but John refused to release it. He walked through the flaming armory, devouring heat and light and leaving cold ashes in his wake.

Sometime near dusk he completed the last walkway, cleared the wreckage of the railway, and reached the shattered remnants of the valley. The bodies of dead men and tahldi blanketed the earth as far as John could see. He turned away.

When he returned to the sixth terrace, he found the kahlirash’im and their loyal ushvun’im still searching for survivors in the wreckage of the stables and barracks. John joined them. He lifted stones carefully by hand and reached deep into the spaces between the stones. He found bodies and terribly crushed remains. He dug one mutilated boy free only to watch him die in his arms.

John almost broke down then. He could never even hope to mend the damage he had done here. The destruction seemed endless and irreparable. He didn’t know if he could stand to see any more burned remains or crushed bodies. He wanted to walk away to somewhere quiet and safe to escape from the all-encompassing ruin.

But he knew he couldn’t give up. He had brought this devastation down on Vundomu and he had to do all he could to make amends. He hauled stones away and pushed shattered beams aside. There were still people alive in the wreckage. He couldn’t stop. Even after darkness fell, John continued to dig through the rubble for those last few faint lives he sensed buried beneath the perfect masses of stone.

He freed seven workmen trapped in the lift shafts and another ten who had been buried inside boxcars in the train yard.

By the time the sun rose, John had freed another twelve men and five tahldi and he knew that there were no more left alive. His arms felt like dead weights. The muscles of his back and waist ached from the constant exertion. It hurt just to breathe.

John glanced up to the seventh terrace where the morning sunlight gleamed off the black tiles of the Rifter’s temple. He wanted to see Ravishan.

But there were still more collapsed buildings. And there were oil fires to be dealt with as well. John dragged himself back to work. He extinguished the fires threatening the two remaining grain silos. He dragged bodies to a stone warehouse where they could be given rites and then burned.

In the afternoon, while Wah’roa’s men took stock of the meager supplies remaining in Vundomu, John returned to the infirmary. He knelt beside Ravishan’s cot and curled his hand around Ravishan’s.

Ravishan’s fingers were like ice. The memory of so many other deathly cold bodies knifed through John. He stared at Ravishan, watching him breathe, reassuring himself that Ravishan still lived. He was too tired to say or do anything else.

Behind him the old priest still tended the wounded men. Two other men had come to join him. All of them shied away from John, never meeting his eyes or speaking to him. Out in the main chamber of the temple, John could hear men praying. The kahlirash’im prayed for strength. But common priests and workmen wept. They begged the Rifter for mercy, begged him not to end their world.

John watched Ravishan in silence. Steadily three days of exhaustion crept over him. He bowed his head against the edge of the cot and closed his eyes.

He slept, but not peacefully. His dreams were a chaos of flames and the shrieking Gray Space. He caught glimpses of Ravishan. Strange black forms writhed over him, and when John reached out to pull Ravishan free, his arms came back filled with nothing but dripping black tar.