10
“This magic is abomination,” said the Protectors to Inunru, when the beast had been run to ground. “We will not permit it within our borders.” Thus Inunru went north along the path of the river, and with him went the most devout of his followers.
(Wisdom)
The Reaper knows that it is an abomination. If it had a soul left, it could mourn this.
*
Leaving Yanya-iyan had gone smoothly. The palace guards generally concerned themselves far more with unwanted intruders than with departing guests—even those leaving in the small hours of the night. Ehiru summoned another servant-drawn carriage, ordering a drop-off along the quiet streets of the riverfront. Now Nijiri sat with his mentor on a rooftop near the river, gazing out at the Goddess’s Blood as it flowed in the near distance. Dreaming Moon had not quite completed her slow, graceful journey across the sky, but already the horizon was growing pale with the coming dawn. Nights were always short for a time after the solstice.
Corruption and madness and war…
Hamyan, and Nijiri’s conversation with Sister Meliatua, had been only the night before.
At Nijiri’s side Ehiru sat quietly, his eyes fixed on the river but seeing, Nijiri suspected, into some other plane. Though an hour had passed since the conversation with the Kisuati woman, Ehiru showed no inclination to return to the Hetawa. Nor was there any further sign of the temper that had seized him in the woman’s bedchamber—though Nijiri knew the calm was only temporary. If Ehiru’s control had slipped once, it would slip again. That was the way of the test.
He raised his hand, palm up. “Ehiru-brother?” Touch helped a Gatherer focus on reality when his other senses began to betray him; it was a trick taught to all who served as pranje attendants.
Ehiru’s eyes flickered back from that other place, shifting to first Nijiri’s face and then the proffered hand. Sorrow furrowed his brow, but he sighed and reluctantly took the hand. “Have I frightened you so much, my apprentice?”
“You have never frightened me, Ehiru-brother.”
But Ehiru only looked down at their joined hands and sighed again. “She wasn’t lying. In dreams I could be surer, but even in waking, there’s a sense to such things.”
Nijiri used his free hand to begin stroking the back of Ehiru’s. This, too, was permitted in the pranje, but Nijiri suspected he was not supposed to pay such attention to the smoothness of Ehiru’s skin, or the scents of incense and sweat that formed Ehiru’s distinctive musk… With an effort, he made himself lean back. “It’s possible to lie without lying, Brother. She herself admitted that she didn’t know the whole truth.”
“She knows enough to be of concern.” Ehiru gazed down at their hands. “But too much of what she said is… inconceivable. Unacceptable.”
“This business of a Reaper?” Nijiri shook his head. “She must have been mistaken. She was, at first.”
“No.” Ehiru’s expression grew solemn. “That mistake was mine. I assumed she spoke of… of my own error.” He hesitated for a long moment. “The Superior told you?”
Nijiri looked out at the water. “Of course. I made the choice to have you as my mentor in full knowledge.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you failed to fulfill a commission, doing harm to the soul and perhaps even destroying it.” Ehiru frowned as he spoke, however, and Nijiri stopped speaking, concerned. Was there more to the matter, then?
Ehiru took a deep breath, seeming to ready himself. “The tithe was to be taken from a foreigner—a man of the Bromarte. I found him already in Ina-Karekh and followed him in.” Ehiru abruptly went silent; his fingers twitched a little against Nijiri’s.
“Brother?”
“There was corruption in his soul.” Ehiru still gazed out at the river, but Nijiri suspected he did not see the palm trees on the far shore, the reeds waving in the wind, or the flatboats bobbing gently at their moorings. His hand, in Nijiri’s, felt cold. “Not enough to make him criminal, but enough to taint his dreamscape with ugliness and violence. I tried to take him to a more pleasant place, but then he had a true-seeing.”
Nijiri frowned. “Foreigners don’t see truly in their dreams, brother. They wander helpless in Ina-Karekh every night. A fourflood child has more control.”
“Foreigners have the same innate abilities as we of Gujaareh, Nijiri. Anything a skilled narcomancer can do, they can—though only by accident.”
Nijiri held back a snort; the notion of a barbarian managing the same feat as the most highly trained Sisters, Sharers, and Gatherers seemed ludicrous. Did children write treatises?
“In this Bromarte’s case…” Ehiru sighed. “Up to that point he had been no different from any other stubborn, frightened dreamer. But then he said to me, ‘They’re using you.’ ”
Nijiri frowned. “What did that mean?”
“I don’t know. But I felt the truth of his words. And tonight, when the Kisuati woman said the same thing…”
“So that was it.” Nijiri squeezed his hand. “She is corrupt, Brother. A professional liar by her own admission.”
“Then you dismiss her tales of dead prisoners, and a conspiracy to begin a war?”
“Dead prisoners would hardly begin a war. And anyhow, every account that I have read of war speaks of its terrible destruction and suffering. No one would start such a thing deliberately.”
Ehiru glanced at him, and Nijiri was startled to see a smile on his mentor’s face. “Ehiru-brother?”
“It’s nothing. Just that I forget your youth at times.” Ehiru drew up his knees and wrapped his arms about them, gazing up into the sky. Tiny pale Waking Moon peeked timidly out from behind her greater sister’s curve; sunrise would come soon. “I envy you that youth.”
Nijiri gazed at Ehiru in surprise and read faint lines of regret and worry in his mentor’s profile. “You believe the woman’s tale.”
Ehiru sighed into a breeze. “When the Bromarte had his true-seeing, I mishandled the dream out of surprise. But after he was dead, I saw something else. A man, I think, on the rooftop across. He was wrong, Nijiri. I can’t explain it. His movements, his shape, the feel of his presence; I have never been so frightened in my life.”
Nijiri shifted uncomfortably. “A vision. A manifestation of your guilt.” He had heard that strong narcomancers were sometimes plagued by such things. The dreaming gift was not always easy to control. “Flush with dreamblood—”
“No. The dreamblood was rotten; I was sick with it, not enraptured. What I saw was real.”
“The Kisuati’s Reaper?”
“I can think of nothing else that would have sent such dread through my heart.”
“But to become a Reaper, a user of dream magic must fail the pranje, refuse the Final Tithe, go un-Gathered by our brethren for fourdays, somehow remain unnoticed by others while he goes slowly mad…” He shook his head, unwilling to believe. “It’s impossible. Our brothers are too wise and faithful to let such a thing happen.”
“I imagine those long-ago Reapers had faithful brothers too, once.”
Nijiri sucked in his breath and stared at Ehiru. Ehiru smiled bleakly, his eyes lost in the distance. The words settled into Nijiri’s heart like stones, and he fell silent beneath their weight. Perhaps out of respect for Nijiri’s turmoil, Ehiru stopped talking as well, and they both brooded for a while.
Eventually, though, Ehiru sighed. “I saw what I saw, Nijiri. And if there are twenty dead men who saw the same thing…”
“Well, that’s for the Superior to determine.” Nijiri got to his feet and brushed off his loindrape decisively. Ehiru glanced up at him, a look of mild surprise on his face. “We must return to the Hetawa and report this. And you must go to the Sharers to request an infusion.”
Ehiru raised an eyebrow. “One display of ill temper does not make me out of control.”
“Not alone. But there have been other signs, haven’t there?” It was unseemly to speak of such things, except when they had to be said. Ehiru squared his shoulders, radiating stubbornness; Nijiri pressed on. “I was trained, Brother, though I never got the chance to properly serve. Have you seen more visions than usual? Have there been times when your hands shook?”
Ehiru lifted a hand and gazed at it. “The morning of the Hamyan.”
He’d let himself suffer for two whole days? Nijiri scowled. “Then it must be done. You Gathered no tithe tonight. By tomorrow night you might be hearing voices, seeing enemies under every leaf—”
Ehiru got to his feet and faced him. “I believe I know my own pattern, Nijiri, having experienced it every year for the past twenty.”
It was a mild rebuke as such things went, but it silenced Nijiri anyhow. He bowed his head, fists clenched in shame and anger at being reminded of his place. But a moment later Ehiru sighed and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll go to the Sharers if that will ease your fears,” he said. “And then we’ll both go to the Superior—”
He paused then, cocking his head. Nijiri frowned and opened his mouth to ask what was the matter, but before he could speak, Ehiru held up a hand to shush him. He pivoted slowly toward the north, squinting along the flow of the river. The rooftops had become still as the Dreamer’s fat curve at last sank out of sight, leaving only the deep monochrome darkness cast by Waking Moon’s pallid light. No birds sang; not even a breeze stirred the laundry-heavy clotheslines. The city was silent.
No. Not silent. A few blocks away, echoing up from the street, Nijiri heard the slap of sandals on stone. Running.
“Light,” Ehiru whispered. “A woman, perhaps. Or a child.”
Nijiri swung about to orient on those running feet as well, tensing as a thousand possibilities—most of them dire—ran through his mind. “A messenger. A servant on an errand.” A rapist. A murderer.
They fell silent again, listening. The rhythm of the runner changed, skidding now and again, faltering and then resuming. Nijiri frowned, for there was something indisputably urgent about the sound of those running feet. Something frantic.
Ehiru lifted a hand in a quick signal: follow in silence. Nijiri obeyed at once as Ehiru abruptly set off, leaping from the roof on which they stood to the next, and then running along another. Their course, Nijiri realized as he ran behind his mentor, would intersect that of the runner in a half-block or so.
Ehiru stopped at the edge of a squat storage house’s roof, peering over its wall into the street below. No one was in sight. The patter of feet had stopped.
From an alley on the other side of the building—the direction in which they’d last heard the runner—they both heard a sharp, frightened cry.
Ehiru was moving before the cry’s echo faded, running with no further attempt at stealth. Nijiri scrambled to keep up. Even after ten years of acrobatics training, it still shocked him when Ehiru reached the roof-edge and slowed not one whit before leaping off. He flipped in the air, his hands reaching back to catch the wall as he fell; his feet braced against the stone to cushion the impact. An instant later he let go, dropping another man-length to land on fingers and toes, his eyes fixed on the dark beyond the alley’s entrance.
From that darkness came a soft hiss.
Nijiri skidded to a halt on the rooftop, his heart pounding. There was no easier way down. Swallowing, he took a deep breath to focus as the Sentinels had taught him, and concentrated on the opposite wall of the alley as he repeated Ehiru’s flipping trick. He fouled the final leap, however, landing without injury but stumbling.
Before Nijiri could regain his balance, something flew out of the dark and struck Ehiru. It looked like a badly packed sack of clothes; it had yellow hair. The Kisuati woman’s girl.
Hananja have mercy!
Ehiru grunted as he was borne down by the dead weight of the corpse. As he struggled to extricate himself from flopping limbs and a lolling head and horrible, horrible sightless eyes, Nijiri moved to help—and gasped as something else came out of the dark and struck him so hard that his vision went white. He hit the cobblestones with painful force, too stunned to do more than flail weakly at the thing that had struck him. But this thing was no corpse.
“Pretty child,” whispered a voice in Nijiri’s ear. Fear froze him; the voice seemed barely human, low and rough. “I will enjoy your taste.”
Hands as strong as iron caught Nijiri’s arms. One of them pinned his wrists above his head. The other, smelling of dirt and bile and a four of other foul things, fumbled over his face. Nijiri shut his eyes in reflex as fingertips pressed against his eyelids. Wait, this is— But just as he understood—
—He woke screaming, somehow freed. Terror pounded through his blood so powerfully that he rolled to his side and vomited a thin sour trickle, then could not find the wit to move away from the mess. Instinctively he curled himself into a ball, praying for the fear to pass and for the sick throb of his head to either go away or kill him and be done with it.
Dimly he heard the sounds of flesh striking flesh, the scuffle of sandals on stone. A feral snarl, like that of a jackal.
“Abomination!” Ehiru’s shout came to Nijiri through his misery and some of the fear faded. Ehiru would keep him safe. “You shall not have him!”
A rough laugh was the creature’s reply, and Nijiri whimpered, for somehow he had heard that laugh in his nightmares—but he could not remember the nightmares.
The cobblestones vibrated as feet pounded over them, out of the alleyway, running away. Then hands lifted Nijiri, cradling him against warmth and muscle and a hard-beating heart. “Nijiri? Open your eyes.”
It had not occurred to Nijiri that his eyes were closed.
Then fingers touched Nijiri’s eyelids. He thrashed and opened his mouth to scream, terrified. But something sweet and warm and exquisite brushed against his mind, soft as flower petals, soothing away the terror.
When Nijiri opened his eyes, Ehiru’s worried expression brought reality back to him, though in fragments.
“Thank the Dreamer. I thought your soul had come completely untethered.” The world shifted dizzyingly as Ehiru lifted Nijiri in his arms. “The Sharers will be able to heal you fully.”
Then the world began to bob and wheel in a mad dance as Ehiru ran with him. Nijiri’s last sight before unconsciousness was the gem-layered glow of dawn.