431 - A voice from the sky

Muunas… this is it. “My son.” His accent is Imperial. His voice is in my mind, like the lightning flash.

I am surrounded by light, my eyes burning; I clench them shut and it is still so bright they burn; I throw my hands over them, it is still so bright they burn; I bury my face in the crook of my arm with my other hand still over them, and it is still so bright they burn. I see the outlines of my bones through my flesh, so bright is the light.

I remember something Itasas said to me. “It is said that when the Highest God is angry, he burns people so thoroughly that nothing is left of them but their shadows on walls.”

“I must open myself to You, mustn’t I?” I say. His voice is flame in my mind. “Yes.”

“I do that by looking at you, don’t I?” I say. My eyes will be turned to ash in my head, perhaps my brain too, behind them, as if they were magnifying glasses. “Yes.”

I tell myself, don’t even hesitate. I do not even allow myself the thought, ‘If I hesitate, fear might prevent me entirely.’ That thought would be too much hesitation. I tear away my hands, open my eyes.

I—am flying. In a ball of pure sky, blue above and below and to all sides, as I was with Aba Tyriah the night I did the shulpiteh. Tears of relief spill out, as if the destroying light was sealing them inside my eyes with fire before, and now it is gone they can flow freely, like lifeblood. The sky is blessedly like cool water, all around.

I am in a branmoy; I can feel the lifting as if I had the senses of a Niah. The wing coloured like the national banner that Oweda made perfectly for me is whole and unbroken again, carrying me. The blue of the sky deepens as I rise, the air thinning so it becomes harder to breathe—have I softened to that, with all this time I’ve spent on low land? I see the spark of one star above, and another. They say that if you rise high enough, day turns into night; but you can only do it after you are dead, and you are nothing but a soul, because there is not enough air so high.

“You dare come into My realm.” The God’s voice is all around me instead of inside me now, like the voices were when I did the shulpiteh. The sun burns above me, too close; I am too high. Even though the wing I feel it give me a sunburn that should take all day in a bare moment… what must it be doing to the wing? I look up, and see a hole, then another, melt open between the spars, molten silk falling away in lava droplets.

I am the boy in the ancient story, who flew too close to the sun and so got his wings burned. I pull in the chamir hard, curling my body most of the way through it, to throw myself into a dive, but the spars are burning now, and the rising wind of my dive fans the flames. I feel that sickening lurch of losing my hold on the sky again, then my dive turning to sheer fall as my wing becomes a burning skeleton, like that of the ancient flying reptile, in my hands. But there is no Niku to save me.

“Cannot keep up, lad?” the God taunts me. My harness releases itself, the cords burned through; I feel the heat of fire spread through my hair, as it must have felt for my poor mamokal at the first battle of Chinisinal; I am spinning down, the destroying sun whirling all around me, clutching the chamir and the disintegrating embers of wing with one futile, sentimental hand. But there is no ground beneath me; will I just fall, and live in the terror that is part of falling, forever? The same as bad Arkans in Hayel stay eternally in the abject moment of death by smothering?

The sun is growing bigger, closer; I am falling, I see, into it. The last of the wing crumbles glowing out of my hand; my skin begins to do as the silk did. I will burn the dross from you. The wing was dross, I see; so now is this carnal matter my soul rides like a bad, ill-bred horse, and it will be seared away in its turn as the wing was. My bones will be the last to go, as the chamir was.

“Father Muunas.” The blue sky is all gone now, swallowed up by flames and flares of sunlight, as I fall into its face, a fall much faster and heavier than one onto the Earthsphere. I see with the eyes of my soul, same as weapon-sense, my bodily eyes boiled away; my skin is all gone, flaked away in blackened bits like burning paper, and the fluid that is my flesh starts boiling inward, simmering my blood like Mahid’s Obedience. “I give myself to You.”

My bones are embers, then ash, then smoke streaming away. No more substantial than air, I am inhaled by the sun as a fire inhales wind.

Then exhaled, and I am lying with my eyes open staring up at the tent ceiling, while Niku snores delicately beside me. I hear the sand-timer laid on its side, a sound that has become so familiar it is comforting, like the distant memory of a mother’s lullaby. I hear wind rub gently across the tent-roof, a flap flapping. I hear the God’s voice, much more gentle and human and near.

“You have much fire to pass through yet.”

We encamped on the mountainside to the east of the plain of Finpollendias, to rest for a day. That evening, at my fire, the topic turned to vengeance. Megan was there. She began speaking.

I knew the story, but she told it for everyone else’s benefit: she’d lost her merchant house to an underling who’d drugged her, sold her into slavery and announced her dead. Fighting free and finding allies, including Shkaira, she resolved to win it all back and take vengeance on him, all the more hotly for him having been almost a lover. She had journeyed back up the Brezhan in a ship carrying a cage on its bow, her intention to imprison him in it.

“It almost ate me alive, that anger,” she said. “If caged and killed him I had, tied myself to his memory forever, I would have.” She paused, thoughtful, scratching at one steel claw, that flashed in the firelight. “I’d have driven everyone else away and bug-fikken crazy, gone.” In the intimate way that only someone you’ve made love with can, she looked meaningfully at me.

“What?” I said, with a bit of a laugh. “You are worried I might lock myself in such a cage forever with Kurkas, as you would have with Habiku?”

She smiled a slanting smile, making her face more heart-shaped. Incidentally, she was not grieving for Shkaira, still holding out hope she’d come back. “That thought might have crossed my mind,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes.

Peyepallo snorted. “I’d have just killed him and that’s the end of it—nice and clean, and so easy to forget and go on. If I were you, Invincible, that’s what I would do. Death ends all disputes.”

All the other conversations had gone quiet, people wanting to listen to this. I had to be clear. “One thing to get out of the way first,” I said. “You spared your tormenter, though he did get killed; for your part, you let him go, uncaring whether he lived or died. I can’t do that. Mine must die, as a matter of political necessity.” That was a lesson my conquest consultants were trying to grave in me deeply, worried that I might be too merciful: never leave old powers living, because they are the best at working trouble underground and keeping alive the hope of return to the old ways. Peyepallo said, “Yes,” knowingly, reminding me of Segiddis.

“Have you decided how you’re going to kill him?” asked Esora-e, as if it were my sacred duty.

I hadn’t. I’d been too busy. Now the question was put in my mind, I tried to imagine doing it. I could not see myself even touching him; each time I raised the image of him in my inward eye, and myself close to him, it slid away sideways or wisped off like smoke. “In truth, no.”

That led to a rain of suggestions, so many of which were unfit to write that I think I will write none of them. “Then it seems vengeance doesn’t obsess you,” said Salao. “So you needn’t worry.” He added, “Though anyone who harms you should come to an end, as the Mahid like to say, ten times worse.”

Salao, incidentally, had never been as close to me as Mana or Krero, yet at the beginning of this war he’d called me Cheng and we’d come to know each other well. Now he called me Beloved or Invincible only, leapt at my orders, would guard me like a watch-dog even when off-duty, and try to see what I wished even before I spoke it. When I bared my heart to him about it—“I want you as a friend, not as a lackey”—he didn’t see it. “But we’ve never been closer, Beloved,” he said, “and I have never been happier.” Nothing changed, and I grieved, for feeling him slip away from me.

“With all due respect, Shaikakdan,” said Orshakal, “I know what happened to you in Arko, as everyone does. It is not natural for a man, even a kind-spirited one like you, who’s had done to him what you have, and who has a good prospect of getting the one who did it into his hands, to have no thought at all about what he means to do to him.”

The wine-skin came by. Though I had been mostly abstaining, since we’d fight tomorrow, I felt like taking a long swig now, so I did. I found myself suddenly irritated, also, thinking, What business is it of yours, Lakan? I took a deep breath, thinking that perhaps I was being a child, evading. I couldn’t find words to answer him, though, at least not before Alaecha cut in.

“Chevenga… I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this. But, Kurkas… he had you, you can’t deny, he put you in fear, he mastered you… I’m sorry, forgive me… he broke you.” I remembered, she had seen me on Haiu Menshir. “If you don’t take his life yourself, if you give it to someone else, will you be able to say to yourself afterwards that you truly did overcome what he did to you, and defeat him, in the end… or will you, in some part, feel at his mercy forever?”

I had never thought of this either. One’s friends, if they are good friends, will sometimes be one’s psyche-healers. Sorala and Kunarda argued over how I would or should answer, until someone else smacked Kuna on the shoulder and said “Why don’t you just let him?” Around the fire there was silence, but for the crackling of flames and the sizzle of meat that some were still cooking.

I tried to think of an answer. I felt distant from myself. I forgot what the question was. They waited, eyes shining and open, fixed on me.

“Listen,” I said, finally. “However it goes, I will not come away feeling the victim. Believe me.” Laughter broke out all around, snapping the tension. Good friends will take a hint, too. I saw several elbows nudge several sides, and we went on to other things.

Day broke bright and clear, an Arkan day like those I remembered, though cooler up here in the hills. We’d fight mid-afternoon, we’d decided, when the a-branmoy were at their best, so it was a lazy morning. Toward noon, Niku strapped Vriah to her back, flying-style, and asked me if I’d like to come.

We rode the branmoy high, then both set our course the same way, without a word. I saw why she’d brought Vriah instead of leaving her with Ada; the three of us were a family forged in Arko.

In daytime, it was more familiar, even with the buildings shrunken and foreshortened by distance. There was the huge circle of the Mezem, much clearer than when we’d flown over it last time, and the feeling of being there came roaring back, even down to the rhythm of the days in my bones: two days from now is fight day; am I on? I wondered who was there now, knowing for certain only Iliakaj was. There was the Avenue of Statuary with its express-chair lanes clear, the crossroads with Feliras’s Glory, the University—the smell of books filled my nose as if I were inside—and the Marble Palace, white and grave and blue in the shadows with its gold turrets gleaming.

Arko had not been entirely real to me on the night we’d rescued the Haians, I realized; it was only real to me now, and that made me feel surreal again, wondering if I was in a dream, and I’d soon hear Mikas’s voice or feel Selinae’s hair inside me. I wheeled in the palm of the wind, as free as is possible for a creature that is not a bird, and even so, my mouth went dry, and my arms felt weak. Sweat broke out all over my skin, and I felt empty within it, as if it were a bag. Commanding a hundred-thousand-strong army, poised over all this for the death-stroke, and I still felt so helpless and alone that my wing showed it, and Niku cried out to me. Such is the power, by which we can fly or be bound, of the mind.

Be bound, or fly. I turned my wing, and looked down again, this time reminding myself of how things were now. In the streets, I saw the people walking ant-like, the dots of their heads all blond or hatted; I could hear, if I was quiet, the bustle as they went about their business as if the City weren’t about to fall.

Arko, I wanted to say. Don’t you know I am here? Did you think I would never come back, when I said I would? Then it occurred to me; it was almost noon. The bells would ring, then would come the tiny girls’ screams they call the chimes of noon, and then all would stand silent, hands cupped at their temples, listening for a voice from the sky.

So I went lower, readying myself. “Arko!” I cried in my battlefield voice, when the silence was complete. “Aaaaaarkoooooh!” The words came, and I let them pour out. “Do you know whose voice this is? Can you guess?” I was low enough, to see faces turn up.

“When I said I would come back, did you think I was lying? Did you think that I, and the rest of the world, would wear your chains and endure your whip forever? Everything is different now, isn’t it, Arko, city of masters, that rules the world! To whom do you pray now, with your last breath? Do you think your Gods listen to you when it comes through one who thinks of Them only as helpmates in ruling you? Pray to the one who matters, Arko, to the one who will listen, and hear. Pray to me! Your fate is in my hands! It’s my will, that you will dance to, starting very soon! It is I, who will hold your chain! Pray to me, Arko! Pray to meeeeeee!!”