waves.
This bond had always felt like something he should be ashamed of-partially because Nikandr was Landed, but also because it had felt like it was keeping Nasim from standing on his own two feet. His shame is like a glowing brand, and it grows brighter as he thinks not just how he treated Nikandr, but Ashan and Sukharam and Fahroz and nearly everyone he’d come to know. Everyone except Rabiah. And Rabiah is now dead.
He focuses on Muqallad’s spell, tugs at its threads, which are tied around him so tightly that the effort feels futile. As he pulls the threads away, new ones form like spider silk. He tries harder, becomes desperate to rid himself of Muqallad’s taint, but soon his efforts bring pain-they disturb the delicate balance he’s found-and he retreats.
He is about to pull away, buoyed in defeat by the notion that he’d finally found the source of his inability to touch Adhiya, when he feels something in the village far below where he stands now.
In the ballast tower, near the place where Soroush and Bersuq were kept prisoner for long months and years.
Fahroz is there. She lies on the floor of the room.
And Kaleh stands over her.
A knife gripped tightly in one hand.
Nasim woke.
He stood immediately and began running for the nearest of the paths. “We must go! Fahroz is in trouble!”
Ashan looked like Nasim had scared him nearly to death. “What did you see?”
“Send help to the lowest section of the ballast tower!”
“Wait!” Ashan called.
Nasim heard them chasing after him. The paths here were not familiar, but he soon found some that were. In little time he was bolting through the village’s warrens, heading ever lower. On a wooden deck, a qiram kneeling with her young disciples stood as he ran past. She looked worried, even angry, when she heard the calls behind him, but Nasim moved on before she could react.
He reached one of the lower entrances to the tower. He took the spiraling staircase downward, moving as fast as he dared.
He came at last, breathless, to the room he’d seen in his dream, a dark place no longer used as a prison. A lone siraj lit the room. It cast deep shadows against Kaleh, who kneeled above Fahroz with the khanjar held over her chest.
Nasim froze in the doorway. “Please, Kaleh! Stop!”
Kaleh looked to him, her expression resolute.
Then she turned back and thrust the knife into Fahroz’s chest.
“ Neh!” Nasim screamed.
Fahroz jerked. Her eyes went wide, but she made no sound, as if she’d just been awoken from a vivid and horrifying dream.
Kaleh turned back to him. Nasim shivered at the emotionless expression on her face.
“Why?” Nasim asked, his hands shaking in front of him.
The answer came moments later.
The wall behind her, made from some of the stoutest, thickest wood in the entire village, opened like a wound. It yawned, wider and wider, until it was large enough for her to step into. He knew then that she’d killed Fahroz so she could open this portal. She was fleeing Mirashadal, and the qiram at the edge of the village had surely prevented her from doing so.
Despite her words the day before, she was returning to Muqallad. That much was clear.
Kaleh stood and squared herself, as if she thought he might attack. She glanced over his shoulder. She could hear-as Nasim could-others coming down the stairs. “Goodbye, Nasim an Ashan.”
She took a step toward the gap in the wood, but the notion that she would leave after what she’d done so incensed him that he felt the blood pounding through his veins. His heart beat powerfully. Madly. An anger welled up inside him-an anger so intense it threatened to blind him with white rage.
As Kaleh took another step, the world around him slowed.
Her movements decelerated until they matched the pace of the tides, the pace of the seasons.
Kaleh halts short of the opening. A shimmering curtain surrounds them, contains them.
Nasim takes one stride forward. And another. Soon he stands just short of her.
She holds in her left hand the knife, the blade still slick with blood. He reaches out to take it. Her hands are cold and stiff.
As he touches them, he feels a stirring within her.
Whether it is because of his touch, or because she’s learned what he’s done to her, he does not know, but her motion accelerates. Like a hare in spring, she is rousing from Nasim’s spell.
He has an urge to back away, to protect himself, but it is distant and small. Much larger is the desire to plunge the khanjar deep into her chest, doing the same to her as she did to Fahroz.
And then he realizes. The khanjar… He’s seen it before.
By the fates above, it’s the same knife that Muqallad and Sariya used to murder Khamal.
“Will you kill me?” she asks. She turns slowly, ever so slowly, toward him.
Nasim stares into her eyes. “Why would you follow him?”
“I follow him because he is right.”
“He brings us to ruin.”
“He brings us to our better lives.”
“You’re a fool if you believe that.”
Kaleh’s eyes soften. She looks upon him with pity-with pity, as if he is the one who will never understand.
“I had hoped you could join me, but when I saw what happened to Khamal-saw your reaction to it-I knew that you were not ready.” She stares down at the khanjar. “Kill me if you would.”
Nasim grips the handle, feels the braided metal dig into his skin. He feels the weight of it, and a part of him-a part he is only distantly aware of-feels the keenness of the blade.
Were he to use the blade, he would kill her. She would die and would never deliver the knowledge she’d gained to Muqallad.
He considers this. He actually considers killing another. Is he so like Khamal that he could be brought to such a thing? Killing in cold blood? It triggers a memory of Khamal when he hid the piece of the Atalayina in Sariya’s tower, when the two of them had made love.
And Kaleh… Nasim looks at her anew.
She has none of Muqallad’s features.
She isn’t Muqallad’s daughter at all. She’s Khamal’s.
A shiver runs through him as the implications work themselves through his mind. He is not Khamal. He is Nasim. He is his own, linked to Khamal only by the whims of the fates and the threads of souls. He knows this, and yet Khamal feels like his sire. Kaleh feels like his kin. A sister, a cousin, blood of his own blood, though he knows this isn’t true.
As he breathes, he stares into her pitying eyes and finds that he cannot do this. He isn’t made for such things, and yet it feels, however disturbing the notion, like failure.
What have things come to that the lack of will to kill another feels like failure?
He finds-perhaps through his confusion, perhaps because of the simple awareness of it-his control over the curtain around them slipping.
As the world returns to normal, Kaleh turns and walks into the opening, and as the sounds of footsteps upon the stairs resume, the opening closes around Kaleh.
Nasim stood near the village’s central tower. The qiram still stood at the edge of the circle facing outward, protecting the village against another attack though everyone knew Muqallad had already done what he’d come to do. His retreat after Kaleh’s arrival had all been a ruse so that she could remain in the village and become close to Nasim once he arrived.
How easily he’d been fooled, Nasim thought. How quickly he’d believed her story. He’d been so desperate to
