5: The Holy Road Read online

“Get down!” John shouted. Beside him, Saimura and Sheb’yu dropped to the ground. But the people gathered at the city gate continued to stare up at where the flames had been.

  The God’s Razor descended, slicing through everything in its path. The limbs of trees instantly shredded to splinters. Then it cut through the crowd at the city gate. Bodies tore open. Arms, hands, heads were severed as people tried to run or shield themselves. The God’s Razor swept forward towards the blood market. It ripped through stalls, tearing apart the people and animals sheltered within as if they were paper.

  John knew he should drop to the ground and hope that the God’s Razor would pass over him. He wanted to crouch down and just hide from clench sights and noise of the massacre surrounding him. And yet he didn’t move. He fixed his eye on the edge of the God’s Razor racing towards him. It had to be stopped. The people hiding in their tents and stalls couldn’t do it. The children crouching beneath carts and the animals trapped in their pens wouldn’t stand a chance.

  John drew in a deep breath and lifted his hands. He had broken Dayyid’s Silence Knives more than once. The God’s Razor was just an extension of the same thing. Thousands of times stronger, but essentially the same. The wood of the wagon cracked and burned as the God’s Razor ripped through it.

  “Jahn, get down!” Saimura gripped the hem of his cassock and jerked desperately, but John remained where he stood.

  Tremors of fear shook John’s hands as he reached out to block the advance of the God’s Razor. The Gray Space bit into his palms and that sick, familiar pain flickered through him, but it felt like nothing compared to the rush of fury that surged through John at the contact. He burned with rage and the single desire to destroy the God’s Razor. He clenched his fingers down, crushing the thin expanse of the Gray Space closed. The length of the God’s Razor trembled and then collapsed.

  John slumped against the wagon. Exhaustion played through his muscles in tremors and sweat soaked his cassock. His hands felt as if they were on fire. He didn’t want to look down at them and see how deeply they had been cut. Still, he forced himself to take in the extent of his injury. The gashes in his palms were deep but not the worst he’d endured.

  “How did you do that?” Saimura stared up at him from the ground. Sheb’yu slowly lifted her head.

  “He broke the God’s Razor,” Saimura told her.

  “Can he do it again?” Sheb’yu stared past both Saimura and John to the city wall. John followed her gaze. The ushiri’im and ushman’im once again raised their hands and ripped open the Gray Space. This time the sound rang out like a monstrous howl. The flames shot feet into the air. John’s stomach flipped with sickness and he felt the blood draining from his face.

  “You both need to run,” John said. “Now!”

  Neither Saimura nor Sheb’yu argued. They bolted from the cover of the wagon and raced for the woods beyond the blood market. City guards let arrows fly after them but the arrows burst into dust the moment they struck the God’s Razor. All around, wounded and terrified survivors followed Saimura’s and Sheb’yu’s example. They ran, not for the security of the city wall, but away from it.

  Behind them, the God’s Razor descended with terrible speed. John didn’t wait for it to reach him. He concentrated on the searing line it cut across the sky. He focused on the air around the God’s Razor, willing it to withstand the advance of the cutting edge. Suddenly a wind rushed up. The air seemed to thicken in John’s lungs. The God’s Razor slowed—sparks and flames skipping along its length. John’s skin felt hot, as if the fire were burning around him. Pain throbbed through his hands.

  He felt the ushiri’im and ushman’im pushing the God’s Razor against him and once again anger flared through his chest.

  He would not allow them to win this.

  Massive geysers of flame shot up along the gaping edges of the exposed Gray Space. Scorching sensations blazed across his outstretched arms as if he were burning along with the searing air.

  He forced the God’s Razor back, slowly, painfully. Narrow slashes split open across his skin. As he fought the God’s Razor, the cuts ripped wider. Pain rose to blinding intensity. Sweating and swearing under his breath, John felt another pulse of rage rush over him and he almost welcomed it.

  Lightning crashed through the sky and the wind howled. Strength surged through John. He concentrated all of his remaining will into one action. He hurled the God’s Razor back from him. On the wall, the priests scrambled to collapse the God’s Razor as it swung towards them. Stones split and cracked. Priests and city guards braced themselves as the wall shuddered.

  Then came a perfect silence. John waited. One after another the ushiri’im disappeared from the wall. They were done.

  John fell to the ground. It seemed to catch him, gently. He closed his eyes, hardly aware of the light rain that pattered down on him.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Ravishan had found him among the dead and mutilated in the remains of the blood market. John remembered that but not the rest of his journey back to Rathal’pesha. Now he lay behind canvas panels, wrapped in warm blankets on an infirmary bed. He could hear Hann’yu grinding medicines. A bell rang out the hour of praise. John listened as Hann’yu set his pestle aside and went to join in the prayers.

  John could have risen and followed Hann’yu. The wounds across his arms and chest were healed. The deep cuts in his palms were only scabs now. But he wasn’t ready.

  He wasn’t prepared to meet the faces of his fellow priests. He didn’t know how he would react when they told him that Ushman Dayyid had been murdered. What would he say when they described their battle against the Fai’daum demoness, Ji Shir’korud?

  Already, John had overheard ushiri’im talking about it to Hann’yu. The demoness’ ability to break the God’s Razor confused them. She had never done it before. They came into the infirmary with minor scratches and asked in lowered voices how Ji Shir’korud had unleashed so much power. What would they do if she returned to take the city? Had the Issusha’im Oracles known this would happen? Had it been Parfir’s will?

  John clearly remembered Ashan’ahma’s cultured southern voice inquiring how it could have possibly been Parfir’s will that Ushman Dayyid deserved to die?

  They asked questions that Hann’yu couldn’t possibly answer. Hann’yu responded in his usual gentle manner. He admitted uncertainty and ignorance. The ushiri’im seemed to leave more disturbed than they had been when they arrived. John realized that they weren’t really looking for information so much as they needed reassurance.

  Dayyid’s murder had left a gaping hole in their society. Whether he had been a tyrant to them or not, his presence had been the certainty of their lives. From morning to night he’d been there training, punishing, and shaping them. He had told them what to do and how to do it. If they had a question, Dayyid had the answer. He had spoken with the assurance of a prophet. His cause had been their cause; his values had been their values. For many of them, he had been the embodiment of Parfir’s will. His faith had pervaded Rathal’pesha.

  And now they had lost all of that.

  John wanted to feel some sympathy for their confusion but he couldn’t. He had been down there on the grounds of the blood market. He had seen exactly where Dayyid’s regime of unquestioning faith led. Dayyid had taught the ushiri’im arrogant cruelty. He had made them unconcerned murderers, because for all the questions they asked Hann’yu, not one had wondered if using the God’s Razor against common bystanders had been wrong.

  John recognized his own hypocrisy. He had become a murderer himself that very day. And yet he wasn’t sorry for it now.

  The ushiri’im needed to have Dayyid torn from them. They needed to feel fear and vulnerability because those things were reminders of their humanity. They needed some incomprehensible force to rend their lives apart so that they might have some sympathy for the common people they so easily destroyed.

  John sighed and glared into the white folds of canvas surrounding hi
s bed. Or perhaps he just needed to feel that the greater crime of the ushiri’im justified his own actions. He wanted to reclaim that effortless sense that he was a just man—a good man.

  In Nayeshi it had been so simple to think so. Decent was the default of an easy modern society. Atrocities occurred more often in the realm of fiction than in everyday life. Mass murderers were the monsters of the week on crime shows; they weren’t his friends.

  But John’s clear distinction between a decent person and a vicious persecutor certainly hadn’t existed among the crowds who had gathered in the blood market. They had been victims, but they had been no more innocent than the ushiri’im. Most had been there to taunt a condemned man. Most would have cheered and laughed while watching Saimura writhe and scream as he burned on the pyre.

  At least he’d kept that from happening. That offered him consolation.

  John lifted his hands, feeling the air stroke and curl around his fingers.

  If only he had realized what he was capable of, perhaps he could have saved more lives. John frowned at his bandaged palms. The Fai’daum would still have attacked. Could he have stopped them as well? If he had, then Saimura would have certainly been burned.

  No matter what, someone would have died.

  He couldn’t have saved everyone. In a way that idea was relieving. If he couldn’t have succeeded regardless of how hard he might have tried, then his actions couldn’t have been of that much importance. John wanted to believe that. It suited his idea of himself.

  All his life he had cultivated insignificance. He had been quiet in classes, well behaved at home. Neither good nor bad, just bland. He had been that young man who could speak at length about lichens but was never asked to do so twice. He had perfected the presence of a potted plant, a form filling space where a void would have been too notable. He had taken pains to remain unremarkable. No one cared where a boring man spent his nights.

  The persona he had refined from Sunday school through catechism had kept him free from invitations to games of spin-the-bottle as well as from the infidelities between professors and students. It had served him in Nayeshi and saved him in Basawar. Even as alien as he was to the priests of Rathal’pesha, he had lived among them, passing for nearly ordinary.

  When Dayyid had offered him the curse blade, he had suppressed his response to it. When Ravishan had asked him how he could tear Fikiri out of the Gray Space, he had passed over it as if it were a quirk—something as happenstance as finding change in the street, just a little good luck.

  He had done it all so easily, so naturally that he hadn’t noticed the deceptions himself. He had built an identity of being ordinary and done it so well that even he had forgotten that it was a lie.

  No ordinary man, not even one from Basawar, could crush God’s Razor. Nor did they tear apart wood and iron simply by lifting their hands and willing it to happen. They did not close their eyes and see into distant cities. They could not see or feel the scars left in the Gray Space. They did not sense the life within the stones, earth, air, and water surrounding them. And the issusha’im did not hunt them.

  John lowered his hands back to his chest. They felt hot even through the bandages. The pale canvas curtains surrounding him swayed and then went still.

  There was no point denying that the Issusha’im Oracles had been hunting him. Not after last night; not after they had found him.

  At first he had thought that it was just a dream, a distant memory returning to him in his sleep.

  He watched himself climbing up the sun-warmed rock faces at Emerald Lake. The stone was hot, but he hardly felt it through the calloused soles of his bare feet. His eleven-year-old body was long and lanky, and slightly absurd in his wet, baggy swim trunks. What little hair that had remained after his weekly buzz cut had been bleached nearly white from the summer sun.

  Honeybees darted between clusters of goldenrod and thistle blossoms, humming. The air smelled of pollen and nectar. Dark brambles of blackberries offered glimpses of ripe fruit hanging between their thorns. He stole a few berries as he climbed. His fingers were already stained and scratched from previous plundering.

  At last, he reached the outcropping. Below him, the dark waters of the lake lay perfectly still, reflecting the wide blue sky like a mirror. His father and two brothers looked like toys out on their white fishing boat. At the water’s edge, his sister sat in her bright red bikini, reading a romance novel. Laurie and her mother lounged on faded beach blankets. A spread of tarot cards lay between them. Laurie’s mother was telling fortunes again.

  His own mother was somewhere beneath the cover of the trees, unpacking their lunch and sneaking a cigarette. At the time, John hadn’t known that. Only later, while the ambulance sirens tore through the warm air and she clung to him crying, only then would he notice the smell of Virginia Slims on her. It would make him realize that she, too, had secrets she kept from the family. It would make him wonder if anyone was ever perfectly honest.

  But none of that had happened yet.

  He stood on the outcropping of stone, high above the deep waters. He grinned, feeling the warmth of the sun on his skin and basking in the brief moment before his leap. He took in a breath, preparing for the rush of fear and excitement that would surge through him the moment he’d step off the rocks.

  Both Laurie and Bill screamed when they jumped, but John never did. John’s father had proudly pointed that fact out to Bill’s father a year before. Since then John had taken pains to maintain his silence. He pushed the air out of his lungs and stepped towards the edge.

  Then something above him caught his attention—a flash, like some distant mirror catching the sun. John looked up as a blinding white bolt slammed down into him.

  He saw their skeletal faces then, heard them hissing and whispering through him. He felt them searing words into his bones, binding him. The boy who John had once been screamed, while the man he now was clenched his jaws shut against the burning pain. Very distantly, he heard Laurie calling out to him. Her voice sounded like a thin whistle caught within the hundreds of growls and whispers that the issusha’im poured down over him.

  Blood to bone, we binds it.

  Where it goes Kahlil finds it.

  Bleed the seas, burn the skies,

  Tear the earth before its eyes.

  Where it walks, Kahlil follows,

  No respite in shades or hollows.

  Fires burn, rivers flood,

  Still it calls Kahlil’s blood.

  Break iron, shatter stone,

  Still we binds it, blood to bone.

  White light seared into him. The weeds and flowers near him burned to ash. The rock beneath his feet cracked like glass. John watched as his skinny body arched up as if caught in powerful electrical current. Then the light was gone and he collapsed. Later, his mother would tell him he’d been struck by lightning. She would say that he had been so lucky to come away unscathed and that a host of angels must have been watching over him.

  If she had been able to see those angels, made of skulls and bones strung together on thick wires, with bright red drops of blood pouring from them like rain, she might have thought otherwise. John himself had been terrified by the idea of those angels watching over him.

  And now he knew. They hadn’t been angels or lightning. They had been the Issusha’im Oracles, binding him to the Kahlil. So now the Kahlil could cross through the Great Gates and would be drawn though the chaos of time and space straight to him.

  John stared at the canvas panels beside his bed. The prayer bells had stopped ringing. Everything was so quiet that he could almost imagine that nothing existed beyond the enclosure of white canvas. The world was just him, lying in a small rectangle on a soft bed.

  The dull glow of sunlight pushed through the panels, illuminating a corner of his bed. Very distantly, John heard the calls of birds. Most had already started on their migrations south. Only tiny blackbills remained. In another month they, too, would be gone. He could smell incense and
the aroma of baking taye. No matter what he might want, the world intruded. Lying here behind a curtain would not keep it at bay. It would not keep him safe from the world.

  Nor would it keep this world safe from him.

  Before last night that thought wouldn’t have even crossed his mind. But now he knew that he was the Rifter. He knew what the Rifter did. It tore down mountains, turned skies to soot. He had already felt the sky shudder and crack in response to him. Stone and soil had answered his motions. He had pulled rain from the air. It had all come so easily that he hadn’t even noticed. He had no idea how easily it could slip out of his control.

  He had seen the pictures of the Rifters before him. Their expressions were always wild and terrified as they stared at the earth shattering beneath their feet. The last one had cracked the entire Eastern Kingdom down to pieces of rubble, now lost beneath the sea. The Great Chasm was all that remained of that vast empire.

  That kind of destruction was something bombs did, something earthquakes and volcanoes did. It shouldn’t have been within the realm of a human being. John couldn’t imagine himself doing something like that. And yet he couldn’t be certain. Until a week ago, he had also believed himself incapable of murder. Then he had killed Dayyid, without hesitation or any real regret. Now a mistrust of his own nature pervaded him.

  Could such destruction be a reflex, something that he would do as instantaneously as he had torn apart that wagon? Was it some inherent characteristic, a choice, or a reaction? He knew that the Payshmura had unleashed previous Rifters upon their enemies. They had to have discovered the means to trigger the Rifters’ devastating capacities.

  He had read the holy books. Again and again they spoke of poisoning and bleeding the Rifter. Maybe that was the means. Perhaps the destruction was a response to pain and fear. Or maybe it was controlled by the Kahlil, who was bound to the Rifter.

  He couldn’t know, and he couldn’t afford to guess. He had to be careful. He had to keep himself from manipulating the world around him no matter how easily it came to him. He had to control himself.