“This is the ritual of Drakhash,” Esah-Zhurah said, remembering, “the passing of honor from one warrior to another. But what does it have to do with me? I am not of the Desh-Ka, nor is…”
Pan’ne-Sharakh nodded as she saw the dawning of understanding on Esah-Zhurah’s face. “Now all is clear to you, is it not, my daughter?” she asked.
Esah-Zhurah slowly nodded. Her eyes were wide with surprise, and they opened still wider when Pan’ne- Sharakh brought a sheathed knife from within the folds of her robe.
“This,” she said reverently, carefully placing the weapon in the young warrior’s hand, “I have saved for many, many great cycles, from when I was almost as young as you are now. It was the first weapon I made for a young warrior of that time, a mere child I could have bounced upon my knee, who one day would become the flesh and blood of the Empress Who now reigns.”
Esah-Zhurah’s hand trembled as her fingers closed around the weapon, about as long as her forearm, the curved and ornate blade perfectly balanced against the weight of the handle. It seemed to burn her palm, even through the thickness of the armored gauntlet she wore as a second skin.
“After the Ascension,” Pan’ne-Sharakh went on, her eyes misting with the memory, “She called me unto Her, and gave me this as a gift, a token of Her love and remembrance. I have kept it safe and hidden from my own extravagances, knowing that there would come a time when it would be needed. And last night, in the dreams possible only for one whose Way is coming to an end, I knew that the time had come, and to what use it must be put.” Reluctantly, she took her hands away, her fingers brushing over the ancient metal one last time. “The next step,” she said quietly, “is up to you.”
Reza heard Esah-Zhurah coming long before he could see her, especially now that the fire had died down to glittering coals of deep cherry red and amber. He was startled that she was not walking as she usually did, using the nearly silent step that was now his own, but was treading the earth as if afraid of nothing, as if stealth were alien to her. The unease that had been building in him since earlier that evening had reached a feverish peak.
“Esah-Zhurah,” he called softly, knowing that she would be able to hear him easily, “what is wrong?”
She knelt down next to him, a shadow in the darkness, and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close.
“Do you trust me?” she asked, her face close to his. He nodded once. Words were unnecessary. “Then do as I ask this night, and sleep. Rest, that we may leave early tomorrow for our free time. And then I shall explain all. I dare not here.”
He suddenly felt her lips pressing hungrily against his, parting to release the warm tongue that set his body aflame. She lingered for but a moment that was itself an eternity in Reza’s mind. Then she drew away, leaving him breathless and flushed with a mad desire to hold her, to touch her in ways that came to him with force of instinct, but with the tenderness of the love he felt for her.
“Esah-Zhurah,” he rasped, reaching for her, holding her close. She knelt close to him, but did not let him kiss her again. It would have been too much to resist, such was the pounding in her breast and the desire working between her thighs at the thought of what could be, what must be, in the days ahead.
“No, my tresh,” she told him, gently but firmly pushing him back down on his skins, running a hand across his forehead before laying down next to him, a painful moat of distance between them. “Patience is a warrior’s virtue. There is much about which we must speak, but it must wait until tomorrow.”
The word echoed in Reza’s mind as he lost himself in the wondrous pools of starlight in her eyes.
Reza sat with his legs crossed, his arms draped over his knees. He stared past the mouth of the great caldera whose edge lay just beyond his feet, his thoughts lost in the sprawling horizon that lay in the distance. The faint rumble of the waterfall was broken only by the whispers of the wind and the rustling of the lush ferns that covered this part of the mountain like a vast forest.
The ride to this place, the grotto that had been their refuge and escape each cycle since coming to the kazha, had been a long, silent one. Reza sat upon old Goliath, with Esah-Zhurah beside him on her mount. Their only contact had been an occasional brush of thigh against thigh, and once he had reached out to take her hand, squeezing it in reassurance. She had refused to tell him what was on her mind until they arrived at their destination. But the mourning marks that streamed from under her eyes, the marks that had been hidden in the darkness of night, did nothing to lift his spirits. After they had arrived at the grotto and set up their camp, she had taken him by the hand and led him here to the overlook, a ledge jutting out into space from which one could see forever.
But to Reza, forever had been reduced to three sundowns hence. For, according to what Esah-Zhurah had just revealed in a halting, agonized voice, he would be dead upon the sands of the arena by the time the sun set upon the day of his seventh Challenge.
“And if I should win?” he asked quietly.
She looked away. “If you win, I am to take your life and your hair to the Empress.” Her whole body seemed to tremble. “Reza,” she whispered, “easier it would be for me to tear my beating heart from my breast than to spill a drop of your blood this way. I would gladly spend eternity in the Darkness to spare you, but I am forbidden even that. I must wait for death until the Way brings it to my doorstep.”
He took her hand in his, and gently turned her face so that he could look into her eyes. “It is Her will, my tresh,” he told her, the sincerity in his heart echoed on his face. “If that is what the Way holds for us, then it must be so. I am only grateful that, should I have the honor of winning the Challenge, yours will be the hand that sends me from this life.” He stroked her face, smiling with a confidence that came with his acceptance of his own mortality. “It shall be as it must.”
She pulled him close and wrapped her arms around his neck, holding him tightly. “When you are ready,” she said, her voice muffled as she pressed her face into the hollow of his shoulder, “come to me. There is something we must attend to, something that can wait no longer.” Pausing only long enough to kiss him lightly on the cheek, she stood up and began making her way back down the mountain. She did not look back.
After Esah-Zhurah had gone, Reza turned his attention back to the horizon, concentrating not on the future, which had already been written by another’s hand, but the past which none could deny him. As if reading a most treasured book, he turned the pages of his life, reviewing the memories held in the storehouse of his mind. He paused on the few remembrances he had managed to keep alive from before he had come to the Empire, saving them as treasured icons of an existence long since past. But even those visions that he had labored to keep fresh seemed to be from another person’s life, yellowed and faded with time, the faces now indistinct and the names awkward to his tongue. Yet, they were a part of him, and the feeling the ancient images engendered in his heart warmed and comforted him as the evening breeze swept over the mountain and the sun fell toward the far horizon.
But the humanity left in him was merely a vestige of a human boy who had metamorphosed into a Kreelan warrior, alien to his heritage in nearly every way but the very flesh of which he was made. The imprint of any human society on a prepubescent boy was simply not enough to hold back the cultural onslaught to which Reza had been subjected. And now, reviewing in his mind the few mental tokens that remained of his previous life, he discovered that he could not remember the last time he had really thought of himself as being human, of having descended from the people of Old Earth. Even though the peers called him “human,” or “animal,” he had come to think of himself as a Kreelan, and that perception of himself had grown ever stronger the closer he had come to Esah-Zhurah. There had been a time when he would have feared the loosening of his grip on what had been human in him, the part of him that was now little more than an afterimage in his mind. But that had passed with his acceptance of the code by which he had lived most of his life; the code by which he would soon die.
He thought for a while about what death would be like. Death, a force that had pursued him relentlessly for most of his young life, would finally get its due. Like an old relative who had dropped by many times to visit, only to miss Reza by a shard of time, it would at last embrace him and welcome him into whatever lay within its dark domain. Reza had never been terrified of death, but had evaded it because he had loved life enough to suffer for it. But now he found death a welcome thing, for then his greatest quest would be over, the search for the answer that was the very reason for his coming here: to discover if he had a soul. Long having forgotten the Christian teachings of his childhood, he now wondered only what the Bloodsong must sound like, the thing that united the Children of
