4: Witches' Blood (11 page)

 
“Rousma says that the Issusha’im Oracles have almost found the Rifter,” Ravishan said casually.

“Here?” John’s thoughts jumped immediately to Laurie.

“Of course not. In Nayeshi. You think I’d be this calm if the Rifter were here?” Ravishan shot him a disbelieving look. “They could find him in a year or so. Then they’ll have to send out the Kahlil.”

“That’s not too long,” John said absently. A sweet, fruity scent rolled over him. Someone was baking apples.

Ravishan dropped his voice to a whisper. “It means we could be leaving for Nayeshi in a year.”

“We might miss the next Harvest Fair.”

“I wouldn’t mind that a bit,” Ravishan replied and he looked suddenly hurt and haunted. Ravishan needed the escape Nayeshi offered. Perhaps he needed it as much as John did.

As they walked on, the buildings they passed appeared better kept. John picked out shop signs hanging over freshly painted doors. A few blocks away, a street vendor called out that daru’sira and taye cakes were for sale. If they hadn’t needed to reach the church hostel as soon as possible, John thought he might have hunted the vendor down. A taye cake would have settled his stomach. As was, they kept walking. John caught the voices of other street vendors offering more dishes and passed them by.

John could see the gilded silver dome and golden filigree of the church hostel a few blocks ahead of them. It was the only building in Amura’taye adorned with such extravagance. While the last few decades of crops and grazing lands had been stunted and sickly, the tithes the Payshmura church demanded remained high. With their massive holdings and wealth the gaun’im could afford it, but most common men and women barely managed subsistence. With such blatant inequity, it was no wonder that the Fai’daum had come into being.

He wondered what Ravishan made of the Fai’daum. Before John could ask, Ravishan suddenly waved to someone ahead of them. Hann’yu rushed down the block towards them. As he came closer John saw that he was carrying a bundle of blue leaf cakes. The smell reminded John of sage.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Hann’yu said. He smiled with obvious relief.

“Dayyid isn’t already sending people out to find me, is he?” Ravishan glanced up and down the street with a hunted expression.

“I don’t think so,” Hann’yu said. “Are either of you hungry?”

“Starving,” John admitted.

“Have some. They’re best when they’re still hot. A very kind woman made them for me, though I think she over-estimated my appetite.” Hann’yu offered them the bundle of blue leaf cakes.

Both John and Ravishan helped themselves to the steaming, fragrant loaves. John ate his with a famished intensity. Once he had something in his stomach, he seemed to realize how hungry he really was. Ravishan smiled at him as he eyed the last cake in Hann’yu’s bundle. Hann’yu, too, noticed John’s attention.

“Have it,” Hann’yu told him. “I’ve already stuffed myself on them.”

“Thank you.” John picked up the warm cake but years of Nayeshi etiquette stopped him from just devouring it. “Would you like half?” he asked Ravishan.

“Yes, thank you,” Ravishan replied.

John handed him half the cake and they both ate quickly.

“I’ve found myself in something of a bind,” Hann’yu said while John and Ravishan chewed. “I was thinking that the two of you might be able to help me out.”

John simply nodded and took a last bite. Ravishan made an affirmative noise around his food.

“Last night the rain woke me up and I saw the two of you leaving so I followed. I had thought we three could share accommodations but I lost my bearings before I even got out of the fairgrounds. I wasn’t in the best state.” Hann’yu gave John a slightly embarrassed smile. “In any case, a widow happened to notice me and took pity on me. She invited me back to her house since it was close.”

 
“That was nice of her,” Ravishan said. He took the last bite of his cake.

“She’s a kind woman,” Hann’yu replied. “But you can see my predicament. It looks bad if I return saying I spent the night alone with a woman. Dayyid might make a fuss over it. It would be a terrible way to repay the woman for her goodness.”

Knowing so little of women, Ravishan seemed to accept Hann’yu’s story with no apparent suspicion. But John suspected that Hann’yu might actually have something to hide. It wasn’t just any woman who invited a strange man into her house and then who got up and baked him breakfast. Especially not in Basawar, where most women wouldn’t have gone near a Payshmura priest for fear of offending him in some manner. Hann’yu plainly needed a cover story even more badly than Ravishan and he did. Their mutual corroboration could shield all three of them.

“Why don’t we tell Dayyid that all three of us spent the night at the same hostel,” John suggested.

“That would be an excellent idea,” Hann’yu replied.

“It’s nothing.” Ravishan shrugged. “If the weather hadn’t been so bad, you probably would have been with us.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Hann’yu agreed. “The rain certainly came on suddenly.”

John didn’t know why, but a slightly guilty feeling crept through him at the comment, as if he were somehow responsible. Perhaps it was just that he had been so relieved that the storm had broken. If only it had come earlier.

They reached the hostel and found Dayyid. He seemed angry until he heard that Ravishan had not been alone. After that, he sent the three of them down to breakfast with a warning not to wander away before prayers. It went much more easily than John had expected.

He supposed that was because he wasn’t used to having alliances. He was accustomed to thinking of himself as a lone foreign man set against the world around him. But he had friends now and soon he discovered that he’d also gained a kind of respect.

He noticed it throughout the next two days at the fair when his fellow ushvun’im as well as several of the ushiri’im paid him passing compliments on his battle prowess. Samsango pronounced him Parfir’s protector of all men’s sisters. Ravishan grilled him about which holds he’d used to defeat a rasho so quickly. John noticed two other ushiri’im listening intently to his response, though Hann’yu looked immensely bored by the entire exchange.

After they returned to Rathal’pesha, the ushiri’im’s interest in him only seemed to grow. Most of them already recognized him from the times that he treated them in the infirmary. But after the Harvest Fair, they seemed overtly friendly towards him. In the halls of Rathal’pesha, they greeted him casually and struck up conversations with him as they would never have conversed with the other ushvun’im.

Soon it became obvious that they wanted to test their own battle prowess with him. John agreed to it, so long as they fought without blades. It was a good excuse to see more of Ravishan. Dayyid couldn’t criticize them for practicing battle forms together.

Familiarity with the ushiri’im gave John another advantage. They often allowed him into forbidden chambers, if he was walking with them. Slowly, over the course of several months, he gained access to room after room of Rathal’pesha’s greatest heights.

Soon he was familiar with the barrack-like chambers where the ushiri’im slept as well as the small treasuries where relics from Nayeshi were housed. Locked cabinets held tattered white T-shirts, work pants, a baseball and a wide variety of postage stamps. One glass case contained bills and coins from a scattering of years. The earliest John could find seemed to be 1940, but he didn’t look too long or too intently. He wasn’t supposed to be capable of reading any of it.

An ushiri named Ashan’ahma even pointed out that John’s ignorance rendered his presence in the sacred rooms harmless. “It isn’t as though he could carry our secrets to the Fai’daum. He can’t read a word of the holy script.” Ravishan had added his agreement to Ashan’amha’s and the matter had been settled among the ushiri’im. None of them mentioned it to Dayyid. They simply allowed John to go where he pleased.

The highest chamber both drew and repulsed him. It was like a scabbed injury that he wanted to forget about but always found himself scratching. When he stepped onto the stairs leading up he felt a change, as if the stones themselves had become infused with something terrible. As he ascended, John heard voices. They were not the clear human sounds of the ushiri’im speaking through the Gray Space. These were quiet and strangely distorted, almost indiscernible. But they piled over each other. They bumped and muttered through each other, building hundreds of tones, thousands of words. As John came closer, the voices grew louder but not more distinct. He only became more aware of the chaos of them. Their disjointed sentences crashed and jarred, hissed and murmured, like the ramblings of a hundred paranoid schizophrenics.

At the top of the stairs, the gray stones of the floor and walls seemed to have been infected with the same disorder. They were pitted and yellowed, like diseased teeth. The grain of the stones jutted in one direction and then abruptly broke into a different formation. Wisps of bluish smoke curled out from the edges of the single iron door in front of him. The smell of seared ozone mixed with an odor of taxidermy.

John stepped closer and placed his hand against the cold iron of the door. A feeling of utter revulsion swept over him. He pulled his hand back. The same feeling had come to him from the yasi’halaun and from the broken stones of the Great Gate.

“
The men in red ride south. We holds them back. Then men in red ride north. We cannot sees them. We cannot sees...”

John picked out one murmuring voice only to lose it in the hisses of another. “
We sees the tower. Falling. The tower is falling. The tower falls. The tower burns...”

“It is near water. The water knows it, loves its flesh...”

“Blue eyes. We sees it. Yellow hair. Running. Dirty feet...”

“The convent burns. We smells our bones blackening. We smells us...”

“Traitors in the palaces. Gold and guns to the men in red. Traitors...”

Then a shriek suddenly broke through all of the soft whispers.
“NO! IT HURTS! I HATES YOU! It hurts! It hurts, it hurts, it hurts...”
Slowly the cry died to a whimper and then was lost in the depths of thousands of other murmuring voices.

“Quiet her, can’t you?” This time the voice was distinct and familiar. It was Ushman Nuritam.

“Forgive us, Ushman.” The response came from a strong, female voice. “Rousma is young and still not broken into the collective of the issusha’im. But her potential is great. She has given us our first glimpses of the Rifter.”

Rousma. Ravishan’s sister. She had sounded like a little child. It was wrenching to hear her in such obvious pain and yet John knew there was nothing he could do. She was one of the issusha’im now, pared down to a skeleton, strung together with copper wires and carved with Payshmura incantations.

The issusha’im were kept in the southern convent of Umbhra’ibaye and yet it had seemed like they were just behind that door. There had to be some kind of gateway between the two places, here in the highest chamber of Rathal’pesha. He remembered Ushman Dayyid and Hann’yu both mentioning conversations with the ushman’im in the Black Tower of Nurjima. Perhaps there was more than one gate.

“I dislike her outbursts.” Ushman Nuritam’s harsh voice cut through John’s thoughts.

“She will be reprimanded,” the woman assured him.

“Very well. What of the Rifter?”

“Rousma has caught glimpses. We hope to bind him to the Kahlil within two years. That is, if a Kahlil has been ordained by then.”

“He will be.” Ushman Nuritam sounded slightly annoyed at the question. “The issusha’im have seen as much, have they not?”

“What they have seen changes, Ushman,” the woman replied. “You have heard them yourself. Since Fikiri’ro’Bousim survived his passage over the Holy Road, their visions have broken and altered. They have become divided even among themselves.”

“And there is nothing to be done about it?” Ushman Nuritam asked, but his tone was more accusatory than questioning.

“The problem does not originate from the Issusha’im Oracles, Ushman.” The woman’s voice remained calm and even. “They can only look into the future. They cannot alter it. That is the work of the Kahlil. Perhaps your question should be put to him.”

“Yes, I’m sure it will be,” Ushman Nuritam responded coldly. “But, for now, you can tell me nothing?”

“We can tell you many things, but none are certain and many are lies.”

“Spoken like a true sister of the bones, Ushvrun Polima,” Ushman Nuritam said.

“I could hope for no greater compliment.”

John heard Ushman Nuritam’s derisive snort, but if the woman did, she made no response. The voices of the issusha’im continued to mutter and mumble. John caught whispers of ruin and fires, the lost key, the demoness, the Rifter, and Jath’ibaye.

“If there is nothing more for you to tell me, then I will be going,” Ushman Nuritam said after a moment. “I have no wish to further exhaust the bones.”

“Of course,” the woman responded. “Peace to you, Ushman.”

“And to you, Ushvrun.”

Outside the door John felt a sudden shudder of cold pass through him. He knew the feeling from witnessing the ushiri’im move through the Gray Space. The gateway inside the room had closed. The place was instantly silent. Then John heard Ushman Nuritam’s footsteps slowly approaching.