And Legaba told her the man’s name: Kyroun.
Here is your true enemy, Legaba said. If you do not destroy him, he will destroy you.
Even as Legaba’s call for Retribution Time thundered through her throat, straining her vocal cords beyond their limit, Jass Imbiah had experienced an emotion unlike any other the Spider God had ever shared with her when he rode her.
It was not fear. The notion that fear could touch one of the Jagasti was inconceivable to Jass Imbiah. What Legaba had imparted to her was ... apprehension. And if this new god and his Seer could cause such disquiet to Legaba, how could she, a frail mortal despite the power that she wielded, prevail?
But she knew she had no choice. Her god had declared that the moment for which generation after generation of Uloans had waited had finally come. Preparations for Retribution Time would be long and hard. Jass Imbiah would need all the strength she could muster, and all the ashuma Legaba could infuse into her. And she knew even that might not be enough for the task ahead of her.
“Legaba,” she whispered hoarsely. “Help I.”
And the flames of the candles tilted toward her, as though she were drawing strength even from the feeble energy of their glow.
PART TWORETRIBUTION TIME
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Adaptations
1
Shortly after dawn, Tiyana found Kyroun at Khambawe’s City of the Dead. The immense cemetery extended well beyond the outskirts of the city of the living, sheltering the remains of a hundred generations of Matile. The Matile interred their deceased in oval-shaped crypts of stone. Simple piles of gravel covered the graves of commoners; those of emperors and the Jassi were surmounted by carefully carved miniature palaces that proclaimed their occupants’ grandeur in the afterlife. The corpses of rich and poor alike were carefully mummified to enable their flesh to remain as close to whole as possible in death to what it had been in life.
Long ago, a small section of the cemetery had been set aside for visitors from the Fidi countries who had died in Khambawe back in the days when the two lands were still in direct contact. That was where the bodies from the dead of the White Gull were buried. Dardar Alemeyu had allowed the present-day Fidi to observe their own funerary customs, even though he and other Matile found those practices as incomprehensible now as their ancestors had centuries in the past.
Kyroun stood in front of a row of earthen mounds, each marked by a single slab of stone at its head. The mounds were strewn with flowers, and the names of the dead were inscribed on their markers. Beneath the mounds, the Fidi dead were interred in flimsy wooden boxes rather than the stone crypts that held the Matile. The markers on the older graves were weathered by the long passage of time; their inscriptions barely legible, the flowers that had been laid upon them long since vanished, their dried petals blown away by sea-winds.
The White Gull survivors had politely declined the Matiles’ offer to build crypts for their dead, or to mummify their bodies. They could not understand their hosts’ compulsion to preserve corpses and keep them forever in stone cells. And the Matile could not fathom the impermanence of the wooden coffins the Fidi carpenters had built.
“But the wood of the boxes will rot away, and the flesh of the bodies will be eaten by ground-worms, and, ultimately, absorbed by the soil,” Jass Gebrem had said to Kyroun during a discussion in which the Seer had tried to explain the Fidi practice. “They will become as one with the earth.”
“Exactly,” the Kyroun had said.
Shaking his head in bewilderment at the Fidis’ unfathomable disregard for the sanctity of the flesh of their forebears, the Leba had politely ended the conversation. And the foreigners were allowed to practice their peculiar customs without comment or interference, just as they had in the distant past.
When Tiyana reached Kyroun’s side, she remained silent while he stared at the graves. Gebrem had told her of his conversation with the Seer, and she remembered it now as she stood next to him.
Kyroun had conducted funeral rites for his people months ago, consecrating the souls of Almovaads and non-believers alike to the afterlife promised by Almovaar. And every day since then, he had visited their graves in the City of the Dead. Only the Seer went there; never the Acolytes, the Adepts, or the other Almovaads. It was as though Kyroun was performing a penance only he could understand.
Sometimes Jass Gebrem joined him among the dead; sometimes Tiyana. Kyroun had not said a word to either of them during his daily vigil, although he talked willingly before and after his self-imposed ritual. But he had never discussed his sojourns in the burial place.
Not until now.
“So many lives lost,” he said in a near whisper.
A breeze stirred the petals on the graves. Unlike the ones that had been strewn on the mounds of earlier burials centuries ago, these flowers neither wilted nor faded. They remained as fresh as they would have been had they been placed there the day before. But Tiyana knew that no else had put flowers on the Fidi graves since the burial ceremonies – Kyroun had forbidden his followers to do so.
More Fidi magic, Tiyana thought as she looked at the undying blooms. However, thinking about the sorcerous power the Seer commanded no longer stirred suspicion or uneasiness within her. The passage of time had diminished her distrust and suspicion of the newcomer. So had Kyroun’s unfailing kindness and courtesy, to which she could not help responding. Eventually, Nama-kwah’s warning during the First Calling ceremony had become little more than a faint echo in the back of her mind, easily ignored.
“So many deaths on my hands,”
