Chapter 4 #2
My grin disappears when I glance down. ‘You ignored my last opening, and let me win.’
‘The fact that you noticed shows your tact. Remember, some battles are worth losing for the greater war. I like conceding to you, little bird.’ He winks before pulling me to my feet but his words perturb me.
‘What war?’
A breeze sweeps fast, a gust of dirt and damp before it scatters. With it, I hear shouts. I turn toward the beaten paths winding into the meadow. A group of monks runs past the beekeeper huts, shouting at each other in a hurry.
‘Why are the monks running?’ I ask. A flurry of black kites swoops past us and . . . buzzards.
A distant memory slams into my head, hard. Sooty buzzards curl against my neck. I fasten a leather creance to their talons before the hunt. A folkteller carries the histories of our sorrows, a woman tells me sadly.
Caught in the memory, I find myself standing up, running after the birds.
‘Don’t go!’ Eliyas protests.
The birds soar toward the orchards and I chase after them. I realise how far I’ve run only when I catch up to them.
The birds surround a young woman leaning against a juniper tree, panting.
Initially I think her clothed in a fine lace, but as I go nearer, I see her brown skin is webbed by black veins with a thick jumble of red scars between her breasts.
Her pupils swallow her eyes, pitching them black.
As she stumbles and trembles, the birds descend to peck at her neck, and she shouts unintelligibly.
Eliyas yanks me behind him, eyes widening at the woman. ‘You have to go,’ he instructs me.
‘But this woman needs help and clothes. She’s naked!’ The woman turns at the sound of my voice and Eliyas covers my eyes. I jab my elbow into his gut. ‘I know you are looking, deceitful monk.’
‘This is not a time for humour.’
I push him away. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
He thins his lips. ‘I must summon the monks. This woman is under their care. Nothing for you to be concerned about.’
The woman’s nose raises, and she sniffs like a beast prowling its prey. She catches my eyes and her lips twitch, teeth and nails coated in red. Blood.
Eliyas shoves me away, but the woman bounds forward, so fast it cannot be humanly possible.
Her hands curl around my arms and she wrenches me from Older Brother. ‘M-Mitra,’ she rasps. Spittle lands in my eye as she throttles my shoulders. ‘B-by the Divine – the bond – in the Unseen,’ she cries in a strange dialect.
I lift my hand, instinctively muttering a prayer, and a flicker of white nūr dances on the tip of my finger. Summoning has become easier.
But as I summon my nūr, the woman’s eyes latch on to the two gold bonds rising from my hand. The only thought that crosses my mind is, if she can see the Heavenly bonds, she must be an Eajīz, before the woman throws me down on to rough bramble, knocking the breath out of my lungs.
Eliyas lunges forward, foot twisting, his leather moccasin slamming into the woman’s sternum. She goes flying into a cluster of wild orchard bushes.
‘By the Divine,’ Eliyas commands, and reaches into his belt, spinning a small red jade pot over his hand.
His corded muscles bulge beneath his robes as he leaps forward, reminding me that he is as much warrior as he is monk.
His fingers dip into the pot, and I smell the potency: blessed Navian olive oil.
Clawing together his fingers, he rakes it down the woman’s forehead in a criss-cross motion, and she convulses and screeches.
He yanks his finger across her throat, and slams the butt of his palm into her collarbone while reciting something low and fast before blowing across her. She crumples and does not move.
Eliyas helps me up, scowling. ‘What were you doing? Never summon your affinity against anyone on the palace grounds. There are eyes and ears waiting to sell any information against you!’
‘B-but she attacked me.’
‘You don’t need an affinity to defend yourself against a young woman, when you’ve been training—’ As he crouches before the unconscious woman, slathering her arms in olive oil, he goes on in a lecture.
He yanks off his robes, shrouding her naked body.
When he tires of berating me, he leans against the juniper tree, shaking his head, the covered woman now in his tremoring arms.
Any objection dies on my tongue. Exorcising the woman must have drained him of energy. But I do not need him to protect me. Training my affinity in secret over the past two years has grown my Heavenly bonds. I should be allowed to use it.
‘Older Brother, it’s my affinity. Subduing the nūr is like cleaving half of myself from the other. I want to train openly, without fear of the Zahrs targeting me in envy. Surely they wouldn’t now.’
His eyes darken. ‘You would not be the first sibling murdered in envy despite being our kin.’
My mind drifts to last evening. After incense and remembrance, I questioned the most senior monk if there was more to Eajīz training.
He quietly admitted that monasteries in Azadniabad were finite in their knowledge about Eajīzi.
Not even our most remote monasteries could be of help, because ancient Eajīz texts were all horded in enemy lands: the Sajamistan Empire and their army.
Begrudgingly, in my weakest moments, I wondered about the Eajīz schools in Sajamistan.
Eliyas’s deceptively pleasant voice returns me to the present. ‘If you’re desperate to train in the open, perhaps we should send you away again, to the remote north. I heard the mystic schools are smaller, but if you’re so eager . . .’
‘Not again,’ I yelp.
‘I thought so.’ Eliyas begins to trudge forward with the unconscious woman in his arms. ‘Did she hurt you?’
I follow at his heels; my gaze flits to the old scars ribboning her collarbone. ‘I’m fine. But is she dead?’
‘No. The oil only burns the jinn inside her. My hand against her neck is a spiritual strike to behead the jinn, but it inflicts very little mortal damage.’
‘She’s possessed?’
‘Yes, by foul jinn, a shai’tan like the ifrit. Only the wickedest jinn-folk can possess a human like that and damage their soul. She is under the monks’ care. They perform exorcisms, but the possessing jinn makes the mortal flee rampant.’
In the monastery, I’d seen possessed persons seeking a priest’s help, but never someone like her, as if their insides had been thoroughly blackened.
‘The woman saw my Heavenly bonds. She must be an Eajīz,’ I say.
‘She is?’ Eliyas asks – but without intonation. He must already know this.
‘She saw the Heavenly bonds from the points on my hands,’ I say firmly. ‘Only another Eajīz can see them. She is an Eajīz.’
‘Was,’ he says quietly.
I recall Eliyas’s first lesson, that an affinity’s bonds represent a contract with Heaven. It occurs to me . . . can an Eajīz break their Heavenly Contract?
‘Eajīz are still mortal,’ he speaks shortly.
‘Any mortal, as the story of Adam shows, can fall to temptation. When an Eajīz becomes unfaithful to the Divine – if they summon their affinity from the Hells instead of the Heavens, by turning to the worst jinn – they no longer practise as an Eajīzi. They become no better than a magician.’ Eliyas warns me with a long look.
‘Magicians are people who seek refuge in jinn-folk to practise black magick. Not long after the Great Flood, magicians rose from a Sajam city-state and subjugated this continent, beginning the Jinn Wars. If it was not for the Divine gifting us the Heavenly Birds, and through them, the gift of Eajīzi, we would have been annihilated. You must never break your bonds with Heaven.’
A shiver courses down my back. ‘Magicians sound like the clans of Sajamistan – obsessed with jinn-folk and death. If this woman is an Eajīz . . . and she is possessed by jinn, does that mean jinn can hurt me too?’
He pauses at the steps of the monastery. ‘I will not let them. Fear not, you have the monks to guide you.’
‘If what you say is true, she broke her Heavenly Contract,’ I point out, heart still hammering from her attack. ‘If she’s corrupted, she’s like the Sajamistanis. You should kill her.’
He jumps at this, nearly dropping the woman. ‘Killing should not be your first instinct.’
I pull away from him. ‘I’ve killed before. Uma says I killed many Sajamistani invaders in Tezmi’a. Though in truth, I do not remember much of it.’
‘That was different.’ He seems troubled at my casual tone. ‘Preserve life when you can, promise?’
I place my hand on my heart. In his presence, I feel abashed. My chest loosens, the heat inside me dispersing. ‘Of course, Older Brother.’
I follow Eliyas up the stone steps, but ahead of me, he suddenly gasps. I smell it before I see it. A metallic tang carried in the wind. From the archway, a gathering of monks shouts for the emperor.
‘What is it?’ I draw up the steps before my brother can order me away.
Two bodies with necks bent at odd angles are strewn across the entryway. Their heads hang limp by a string of sinews on the cusp of snapping, connected to a stump, spine bone peeking through. Blue robes are bunched around the corpses, belonging to young monks.
I fall to my knees. The corpses’ chests are open as if long nails ripped the tawny skin down the middle. In the gaping cavities, black locusts chitter inside, thin legs crawling over each other in an eager lump to chew at quivering organs.
My eyes snag on a purplish organ, tossed on the steps, that was once a heart but now is a mesh of muscle and blood. I wince. I should look away, but a quiet curiosity compels me instead. The heart appears as if some creature chewed and spat it out.
In a daze, I glance at the unconscious woman in Eliyas’s arms, her lips coated red. He seems to come to the same conclusion, quickly dropping her into a monk’s arms to take to the exorcism ward.