5: The Holy Road (9 page)

The man waved and John almost returned the gesture before he realized that it had been meant for Alidas.

“Wah’roa,” Alidas called out to the slim kahlirash. Despite the awkwardness of his right leg, Alidas bounded ahead to meet him. John hefted his and Ravishan’s packs and followed.

“Alidas! Pivan wrote saying that you would be passing through, but I didn’t know when. It’s good to see you again.” Wah’roa smiled broadly, exposing a set of unnaturally sharp teeth. Ravishan hadn’t been joking about the kahlirash’im filing them.

“I’ve had the good fortune to travel with Ushiri Ravishan and his attendant, Ushvun Jahn.” Alidas gestured towards him. Wah’roa took John in as if he were appraising an unusually large tahldi. John guessed having an animal’s name never helped the first impressions he made.

“Ushvun Jahn,” Alidas introduced him formally, “this is Kahlirash’im Commander Wah’roa.” This close, John noticed the deep wrinkles at the corners of Wah’roa’s eyes and mouth. He was older than John had first thought, probably well into his forties. His energetic motions and youthful build disguised it well.

“Good to meet you.” John bowed and one of the packs slumped into the back of his head. He straightened quickly.

Both Alidas and Wah’roa smiled at John’s clumsy response.

“We are well met indeed, Ushvun Jahn.” Wah’roa lightly touched the Prayerscar on his brow. “I had come to fetch you so that you might join the kahlirash’im in our prayer vigil for Ushiri Ravishan.”

More prayers. John tried to look enthusiastic. If nothing else, the years at Rathal’pesha had more than prepared him to meet that liturgical challenge.

“When it comes to a prayer vigil, I’m your man,” John offered as gamely as he could.

Wah’roa inclined his head as if expecting as much of an attendant.

“Would you be offended if Rashan Alidas joined us for the ride up to the temple?” Wah’roa inquired.

“I’d be glad for the company,” John replied. “Will we be meeting up with Ravishan there?”

“Ushiri Ravishan?” Wah’roa asked, placing a slight emphasis on Ravishan’s proper title. He shook his head. “No, he will receive blessings in the golden chamber and then be honored with a feast. We will pray for the divine Rifter’s swift return and righteous judgment.”

“An uplifting evening, then,” John murmured. To his surprise, Wah’roa laughed.

“We will be lifted up, indeed,” Wah’roa replied, and for some reason, he and Alidas exchanged amused grins. Then Wah’roa strode to one of the rashan’im standing guard. They exchanged a few words and the guard hurried away. A few minutes later he reappeared, leading a third, very large tahldi.

Wah’roa and Alidas both mounted quickly and made it look easy. John only noticed Alidas’ brief wince of pain because he was looking for it. John heaved himself up into the saddle. He scrambled to catch hold of the reins and get his feet into the stirrups before his buck took off. The tahldi clearly wasn’t used to waiting for clumsy men to settle themselves.

They didn’t take the wide road that Ravishan and the rest of the rashan’im had followed into the fortress. Instead they passed through a second, much smaller gate. The road narrowed and seemed to lead directly up into the fortress, instead of encircling it as the larger road did. The tahldi sprang easily up shallow steps that had obviously been designed to accommodate their strides.

As they continued upward, John realized that their path had cut across the wide main road at some point. John couldn’t see past the walls on either side of him, but once he thought he heard the rashan’im calling out their praises to Ravishan from below him.

At last they reached the next tier of black iron walls. Rashan’im in dark uniforms stood guard at another gate. Unlike Wah’roa, none of them wore red Prayerscars on their brows or had sharpened teeth.

“Here.” Wah’roa reined his tahldi to a halt. John’s own mount stopped as well, seeming to realize that Wah’roa was the one to obey, not John.

Wah’roa dismounted. “We should leave the tahldi. They get nervous in the lift.”

Alidas followed him. John took longer, fighting to loose his boots from stirrups that had obviously been designed for a man with narrower feet.

“They belong to the Nassva Stable,” Wah’roa told the guard. “See that they get back there.”

“It will be done, sir.” One of the guards bowed and took the reins of all three tahldi.

The other two guards heaved the heavy gates open, exposing a corridor leading deep into the fortress.

As John followed Alidas and Wah’roa into the gloom, he felt the weight and strength of the stone and iron closing in around him. Behind them the doors swung shut. It was dark but not pitch black, as John had expected. Instead, a pale phosphorescent light radiated from suspended glass lamps. John peered up at them in wonder.

“Moon water,” Alidas told him offhandedly. “There’s a well of it near the temple.”

John would have liked to examine the lamp more closely, but he reluctantly had to abandon his scrutiny when he realized Wah’roa was outdistancing him. Some kind of bioluminescent protozoan probably lived in the water.

John hurried after Alidas and Wah’roa. The walls on either side were rough-hewn stone. It felt more like a cave than a man-made structure. But ahead John could smell veru oil. The air carried the humid warmth of steam engines.

The three of them passed through another set of guarded doors and stepped into a cavernous chamber. Two huge columns of girders and chains shot up from the floor through a giant black shaft in the ceiling. Behind that, a group of men in work pants and leather aprons shoveled coal into the red glowing boiler chamber of an immense engine. Thick links of chain spun out from wheels as a black iron cage descended from the shaft. It screeched and hissed as pulleys and counterweights fought its mass down to an abrupt halt.

It was an elevator, John realized, perhaps the most primitive, open, unsafe elevator he had ever seen. There was absolutely no sign of secondary brakes or fail-safe mechanisms.

Alidas grinned at the sight of it. John felt his face drain of all color. An utterly alien device might have given John pause, but he could have imagined that some detail eluded him and taken comfort in his ignorance. But seeing something that he recognized—and recognized as lacking significantly—horrified him.

“Come.” Wah’roa entered the black iron cage. Alidas went quick on his heels.

“I could take the stairs,” John offered.

Wah’roa laughed. “I know that this must look like the work of some foreign witchcraft, but it isn’t. The lift is perfectly safe.”

“It is, Jahn,” Alidas assured him.

John slumped in resignation. He wasn’t going to be able to take the stairs to avoid riding the substandard elevator. He didn’t even know where the stairs might be. He walked to the iron cage and stepped in. Wah’roa gave him a nod of approval, then turned to shout to the workmen behind them. “All the way up!”

One of the men nodded and then cranked back a huge gear. There was a loud clanking sound and then a hissing noise. The massive chains surged forward, whipping around the wheels and rushing up past the black iron of the cage. John tensed himself for a burst of motion, but none came. The chains continued feeding past at a wild rate.

John glanced to Wah’roa. “Shouldn’t we be—” The rest of John’s question died in his mouth. The cage shot up, with an almost explosive force.

“What were you asking?” Wah’roa glanced to John.

“Nothing,” John said. Wah’roa smiled knowingly. The eerie green light hanging from the ceiling of the cage swayed.

“I suppose they need no machines such as these in Rathal’pesha,” Wah’roa commented. “The ushiri’im simply walk where they will.”

“The rest of us use the stairs,” John replied.

Wah’roa gave him a strangely piercing look. Alidas stiffened slightly and glanced between John and Wah’roa as if he expected some kind of a fight. John understood at once that he had provoked a subject of much greater importance than an elevator, but he wasn’t sure how.

“You speak with the true humility of an ushvun.” Wah’roa inclined his head slightly to John, which lent him the air of a bird of prey eyeing a rabbit. “You may do well to guard yourselves from a machine like this, after all it does not know an ushman from a garrison commander and so treats them equally.”

“You have to make allowances for Jahn,” Alidas said quickly. “Coming from Shun’sira, he’s still a little awed by shaving razors.”

Following Alidas’ lead, John nodded. “It’s true. I saw my first one a little over four years ago.”

Wah’roa’s expression softened slightly. “Really?”

John nodded. “When I was first offered a bath in the Bousim house I tried to eat the soap.”

Wah’roa laughed, giving John a brief flash of his sharp teeth. John guessed that Wah’roa hadn’t wanted to have an argument either; otherwise he wouldn’t have let John’s blunder go so easily. Still, he guessed that the discord between Rathal’pesha and Vundomu must be pervasive and deep to have flashed up so readily.

“We just escorted him up from the first train he has ever seen or ridden,” Alidas went on.

Wah’roa cocked his head and studied John. “And what did you think of it?”

“It felt like I was flying over the land,” John said. “It was exhilarating.”

Wah’roa appeared quite pleased with this response. “If the ushman’im of Rathal’pesha had had their way, none of them would have been built, you know.”

“I didn’t,” John admitted.

“It was long before your time, I suppose,” Wah’roa commented. He glanced to Alidas. “Long before either of you tender youths were born. Back then, the ushman’im argued that the trains would only allow tithe debtors to evade imprisonment and make peasants take on airs, thinking that they too could travel as far and fast as ushiri’im.”

“That’s just asinine,” Alidas replied. But then his gaze jumped to John as if expecting him to disagree.

“You’ll get no argument from me,” John assured him. “I was relieved to get off a tahldi.”

Wah’roa gave John an approving nod.

John remembered noting before that Rathal’pesha, and most of the northlands, were nearly devoid of technological development. At the time he had thought it the result of Payshmura religious codes—part of their devotion to Parfir and nature. But if what Wah’roa said was true, then it had more to do with maintaining the hierarchy of priests, who could walk through walls and unleash divine weapons, over the common people whose lives they controlled.

Machines offered power that the priesthood couldn’t strictly control. A rifle and an ushiri might both kill in an instant, but rifles could be mass-produced. They could fall into the hands of peasants, who, unlike ushiri’im, had no doctrine to keep them from joining revolutionaries.

Clearly, though, this schism wasn’t just between the Payshmura and the Fai’daum. It was fueling an animosity between the priests of Rathal’pesha and the kahlirash’im of Vundomu. John felt certain that Wah’roa’s earlier anger hadn’t just been over an elevator or a train.

Though now Wah’roa studied him with curiosity.

“So you traveled from Shun’sira to Rathal’pesha on foot?”

“All but the last few miles,” John told him. “And that was the first time I rode a tahldi.”

“It was the night Jahn and I met.” Alidas looked to Wah’roa. “Jahn saved my life.”

“Tell me,” Wah’roa said.

“Jahn had been living in the forest when I first saw him. He smelled like a weasel nest and looked like one as well.” Alidas went on describing the night John had come to warn the Bousim convoy. Wah’roa relaxed, watching Alidas, smiling just slightly. Alidas described how John’s solitary life had allowed him to forget speech almost completely.

“Jahn said each word as if he had just learned it,” Alidas commented.

John nodded. It was a fair description. Alidas went on with the story.

As they rose, darkness closed in around them. The shadows of chains rattled and hissed as they dropped past. The air took on the warmth and humidity of exhaled breath. John wondered how far up they were. Then, unwillingly, he considered how far they would fall if one of the chains broke. Would he be killed instantly upon impact?

And that bought up another question: could he be killed by such a fall? Everything he had read about the Rifter implied that he was nearly immortal. According to Payshmura texts, he could only be destroyed through a ritual of bleeding, poisoning, and the use of a mysterious key. But John had scars from injuries. He’d been cut, beaten, and nearly frozen. He wasn’t sure how much credence he should put in the depictions of the Rifter’s invulnerability. He certainly had no desire to test it.

“Jahn protected me while I lay there.”

Hearing his name, John glanced to Alidas. Alidas smiled at him and Wah’roa offered an approving nod.

“He took my place as the attendant to Fikiri’in’Bousim and then was chosen as the attendant to Ushiri Ravishan. Now he’s here, riding a lift for the first time,” Alidas finished.

“Perhaps we should recruit more men born from Shun’sira’s soil,” Wah’roa said. “Or perhaps just those strong enough to have escaped their births.”

Alidas laughed and John smiled.

“Ah, Shun’sira, mountainous hell-hole, I hope you fall into the sea,” John said softly.