Chapter 27 #3
I cannot feel anything – cannot hear anything. My mind disappears from the material realm, and horrifyingly . . . my seventy-seven bonds connected to Heaven flash and stutter. To my disbelief, four bonds snap and wilt to the ground of the psychospiritual world. Those were my feet bonds.
A laugh pulls me back to the present.
Fayez stumbles forward, clutching his bloodied face, laughing and laughing. Dread spears through me.
‘Enlightenment,’ the crowd murmurs in a sardonic swell.
The scholars exchange long, impressed glances.
Older clanhouse generals look on with cocked heads from the top of the amphitheatre, and some nod, content that one of their own has reached the maxim of the spiritual arts.
Only Yabghu is on his feet pushing against the Veil, fear naked on his face, with the look of a teacher about to watch his student die again.
My overseer warned me. Enlightenment: the martial phenomenon where the Heavenly bonds are heightened; where one’s senses are all-seeing; where eyes flash white as their spiritual energy encompasses everything. One blow can sever a Heavenly bond.
I’ve caused a man to evolve into a monster.
Even Fayez did not expect this. He shudders. ‘I have never been able to master a maximum iron-fist,’ he says, as if the awakening of Heavenly Energy has him baffled.
But this warrior is powerful. This warrior is Za’skar.
From the lessons of Sister Umairah, the maximum iron-fist is the densest punch of iron-bone that martial masters can use; it snaps the connection of several Heavenly bonds.
In my case, my foot bonds. It will take me weeks to recover, after a spiritual cleanse, from such a brutal attack.
My nails dig into the sand, scooping pebbles and dirt. My eyes search the uneasy crowd, moving up to the advisers. I cannot give them the satisfaction of watching me concede.
With a prayer, I use a tree to pull myself out of the debris, leaning on my right leg.
Fayez’s smile ceases. ‘How are you still moving? You should be done for; your crucial Heavenly bonds have snapped.’
My legs tremble, but I grit my teeth, imagining a string pulling me up forcibly.
Fayez rolls his shoulders, then lunges so quickly in his state of enlightenment that I cannot see or predict his movements; they no longer form a pattern. Use your environment.
I hardly blink before pain explodes in my torso, then jaw, then throat with bone-crushing force. One after the other, his scaled half-quqnoos fists pummel me in an iron-fist barrage, obliterating more bonds.
‘At least fight back,’ he laughs, enjoying this.
He spins, and the heel of his maximum iron-bone foot smacks into my chest so hard I find myself against the other side of the amphitheatre, crumbling the entire wall in a human-shaped crater.
He gives me no time to recover, whooshing high in the air at an inconceivable speed, both hands clasped to hammer on to my face.
‘Run!’ I hear Yabghu screaming at me from the other side of the Veil.
I will myself to push away, knowing Fayez’s move will crush my entire skull.
Use your environment, I remember, feeling the sand still clutched in my fist.
When he is a split second away, I throw the pebbles and dirt into his eyes and roll. It slows him for a breath that saves my life. My arms go up and suddenly he’s behind me, scoring his khanjar across my shoulder blades. He tears it deeper and deeper, cutting through sinews, and I finally scream.
He laughs, and with all my strength, and sheer instinct, I swing around on my right heel.
His eyes flash like ivory flames again and his ankles wedge in, flipping me on to my torn back.
He slams his longer charay blade down, but with another rock flicked into his eye, I manage to shove my knifed hands into an X to parry his thrust.
My weaker wrist snaps. With a cry, I gather my bonds under my hand and brace the khanjar against his blade even as my muscles splinter from his mount.
‘Your affinity fails at critical moments,’ he says, not with a sneer, but a solemn look. His eyes grow almost completely white. My knife wanes while he leans harder.
My head turns sideways, lungs contracting. The crowd bends forward, sensing my end. Yahya buries his face in Arezu’s chest.
The humiliation crests with the despair. Searching inside, the anger is there, holding out her arms, and I cling to her with the fervour of an abandoned soul tracing light to the mouth of a cave. If only I had mastered the Third-Stratum. If only this battle would tide in my favour—
Fayez’s knife tickles the thin linen of my battered tunic, death breathing down the nape of my neck. This is inevitable, is it not: the hare clenched at last in the jaws of the leopard. But the thought breaks off, refusing to accept its finality.
Hovering behind him, No-Name reaches out a hand. Our eyes lock. ‘Heavens, please acknowledge me!’ I scream.
The metaphysical world claims me.
In the tales of old warriors, even the strongest found themselves backed into corners. But Eajīz, the first monk and apprentice of the Heavenly Birds, had simply prayed.
I am cross-legged, breathing through the attar in a space of the psychospiritual world. My lips beg in prayer.
‘O, Divine, I ask you, throughout the Heavens, to grant me the power I was born with to defeat my enemies. For I am a daughter born from an alchemy of blood. I am the vengeance of every wronged clan, and I am the reddest storm sweating the warriors facing its wrath. Bestow this mercy.’
I know not victory, but I do know pain. I am war. And its anger will shrivel the sharpest fighters at my feet.
In the present, my hand reaches from the immaterial into the material world, the answer from the Heavens appearing in my head.
As Fayez’s blade punctures my neck, my left fist buries through the dirt, feeling the Heavenly Energy pulsing through Brother-Nature throughout – a lesson from my girlhood where I meditated on the harmony of the Heavenly Crane.
Every bond in both of my legs are disabled, so my left-hand bonds absorb the energy from the natural world, evoking a ribbon of nūr to slither beneath my sweat-slicked body. Like a gold wire, it wraps around a chunk of boulder from the crumbling amphitheatre wall.
Use the environment. My fingers, grasping the dirt, clench into a fist. The ribbon of nūr answers the call, smashing the engulfed boulder into the back of Fayez’s head. His eyes flicker from white to black, his scaled body slackening for a valuable second.
I imagine the Qabl monastery. If I believe my body is light, not weighed down by my injuries, this can work. I breathe: I am the bone of a light Heaven-bound corpse. My left hand pushes off the dirt, the force sending me soaring above Fayez before he overwhelms me again.
I twist in mid-air, condensing my last conserved power. I send all of my Heavenly Energy from my body into my hands, pouring like water off a cliff. The spiral in the core of my soul alights.
The Third-Stratum of summoning rushes into me at once, unlocked. Upturned in the air, I cry, ‘Seventy-seven Binding Art,’ to the back of Fayez’s head. My fingers pinch into a snap.
The cosmic light protrudes into seventy-seven glowing arms.
Fayez whirls around. ‘What is this?’
‘Gambling.’
I release the snap and the immaterial arms surge forward. I land, wobbling on my right knee, watching the sheer force of the nūr’s compressed arms wrap him like bandages, sealing him in silver agony. The impact sends him tumbling to the ground, an inhuman cry ripping from his throat.
Blood reverberates in the air and I breathe it in.
I do not wait. I sway upwards, and heave into his trembling body, with No-Name at my back, her palm pressing between my shoulder blades. ‘Finish this,’ she whispers softly into my ear.
My left hand curls. With no Heavenly Energy inside me, I have to rely on pure martial arts to end this with the risky Ifrit’s Strike.
My hand lashes around Fayez’s blood-slick throat, pinning him to the Veiled wall. Above me, officers and warriors – who bet on Fayez – rush down to us, but the Veil does not break.
With my broken right hand, I claw three fingers before stabbing one finger after the other in successive strikes into his abdomen.
Yabghu said to use three-fold strikes, a way of dispersing energy to attack the opponent from the inside of their soul against pathways of bonds, rather than inflicting physical damage outside first.
Fayez’s bleary gaze widens, a fellow martial artist understanding the danger of this predicament. My internal energy paralyses his movements.
He is a tree, I chant. And I, the martial pupil, must drill a hole.
At the third multiple, his knees scramble to jam upwards.
With convulsing fingers, I begin another multiple, daring myself to reach twenty-one.
Faster and faster I jab, recalling how the Sepāhbad used this on me.
My hand cracks at the twentieth count and when his left foot sneaks to shift balance, I spin, curling my broken fingers.
Now or never. I stab below his heart, reaching the twenty-first multiple and disabling his strongest bond.
My finger snaps from the pressure, a wave of pain rushing in. Fayez collapses, squirming like a spider. My eyes catch on the bone-pendant at his throat that he’s always toyed with. It’s small, as if belonging to a child. I yank it forward.
A loud mewl spills from his mouth.
I take the string and snap it. Then I crush the bone, to snap his will too.
Backing away, I hack blood. My head leans down.
‘This is the natural order that you speak of. I am the Azadnian standing atop you. I have made you bleed. And I savoured every second of it.’ My tongue tastes copper. Whose blood, I do not know. I smile, realising I am only capable of grinning in the thoroughfare of destruction.
My foot rolls him over and I pretend he crawls like a dog; I pretend I am his master. For once, I maintain a semblance of control, and though it is control over one man, the power crashes in intoxicating waves. Even the blood slithering about him is fascinating.
‘Warrior,’ the par? hisses. ‘The Duxzam is finished.’
‘But he did not concede,’ I say, a little disappointed that he is alive.
The Veil falls. My hands drop. The amphitheatre is silent.
I did not know I was capable of this, not the battle, not the power.
Nobles of clanhouses descend on to the sand pit, staring after Fayez as healers lift his body in disgrace.
From the astonished faces of advisers and warriors, including Yabghu, nobody predicted this.
Even my pazktab pupils are stunned. But I have won against a high-rank.
It pleases me in a sick way to bask in their begrudging validation.
‘Rise,’ a voice rings out. Sister Umairah steps down from her row and raises the flat end of her khanjar to her forehead.
Slowly, with a scowl, Scholar Mufasa lifts his blade.
Then Yabghu, and Katayoun. Great warriors around the amphitheatre, thousands upon thousands, raise their khanjars and bow.
Only Cemil does not. He stands with an unreadable expression, and I realise this enmity has not ended; it has simply grown, for his potential as a martial warrior far exceeds Fayez’s.
But the other warriors’ gazes do not hold the anger I presumed. Instead, I sense an unexpected acknowledgement, bonds built on spilt blood.
I study the deep callouses on my palms. These warriors understand the hold of power. When it is thrown into your lap, you refuse to let go. The line between virtue and evil has always been fine. How often have I crossed it?
Staring at their lifted khanjars, empires and clans fall away, until what remains is a warrior acknowledging another warrior. I take the khanjar that the vizier bestowed to me and raise my blade back, slamming it to my forehead.
‘The bond to Heaven is forged in war,’ Sister Umairah declares.
‘The bond to Heaven is forged in war,’ I repeat back.
My only hope: that I haven’t yet crossed beyond the possibility of mercy. Someday, evil might devour me. If it does, it would be a fool’s dream to long for return, because I would be no different from the ones I call my enemies.
Uma once said humans are made from the dirt of our graves, thus all clay-beings have sown in them a part of death. I think of what the emperor taught me, a part of me sown in violence. And I, the child, always to return to the true womb: death.
‘Go on, warrior.’ Sister Umairah nods to the tunnels, and I realise I must walk on my own. I must leave the duel on both feet.
My gaze moves to the pazktab students. Only Arezu’s lips break into a smile, and a warmth shoots through me, bringing me down from the high of victory.
The pain hits me. How many bones have been shattered, I cannot tell. But the pain is engraved in my soul. My vision tilts, my legs quake. Go, I urge myself, lungs rattling as I limp, dragging my left leg. I know I won’t make it. Yabghu rushes down the amphitheatre, Katayoun beside him.
As darkness blotches my vision, delirium takes over. I see a young man in monastic robes, and a girl beside him.
‘Eliyas . . .’ I blubber. My hand grasps, trailing his jaw; and then I see Yun instead of my traitorous brother. To his left a girl, no longer Katayoun, but instead my sister. ‘Zhasna.’ My voice catches. ‘You are alive.’
Their hands surround me, pushing me onward. ‘You must walk alone. To fall is to show them weakness.’ The voice wavers between the present and my past.
‘Yes, Older Brother,’ I speak through bloodied teeth. The vision fades as I walk past notables and scholars. I no longer have my siblings. That was simply Yabghu and Katayoun. No, our enemies, I remind myself.
Staggering through the tunnels and sand fields, the monastery looms ahead, and just as I reach the staircase, I collapse. With a cry, I see the skin on my forearms tug and pull. Something crawls beneath.
‘Come now,’ a warm arm lifts me up, ‘you are almost there, Usur-Khan.’
‘I do not understand.’ I try to speak but my tongue spasms.
‘Bring forth the olive oil, and incense.’ The cold voice floats above before he glances down at me.
‘The shaking you feel are shai’tain attempting to possess you, to break your Heavenly Contract.
In the duel, you overused your soul. Your vulnerability allowed the jinn to attack you.
’ His calm gaze meets mine. ‘Meditate through it.’
The monks swarm me with oils and blown words of script. A growl emits from my mouth, not belonging to me, but to something worse.
As a child, I vowed never to become this. My hand scrubs the flaking blood upon my cheek. Before me, No-Name grows taller, her smile as raw as an open wound. But of course this is our only path now.