Chapter 33 #3
The Sepāhbad wipes blood dripping down his mask.
‘Yes. The governess of Arsduq is one of two prefects in fray with Emperor Akashun. Even at odds with me – her enemy – she is prudent enough to gauge that weakening Akashun works in her interest. The missive was a mad gamble. But victory will come by pinning the Zahr strongholds against Akashun.’
And it worked.
The Sepāhbad glances forward. ‘Direct the nūr downwards to intercept the Azadnians, but hold at the middle before spreading it to the flanks. When our main force withdraws, the Azadnians will rush forward, and our overhead archers are at the ready.’
His arms outstretch, as water swirls from the river, like a slice of the great sea in his hands. It climbs as a watery azhdahak, creasing the light of the pale sun. Two thin ribbons of nūr billow toward the centre, and the water collides.
‘Direct it to the peripheries,’ he orders as he draws forth barriers of water to shield us while I manipulate the last of my nūr through Third-Stratum.
It’s a jumbled symbiosis, for we are not familiar with each other’s affinities.
I glean that the Sepāhbad cannot control bodies of water that equate to more than the total amount of Heavenly Energy inside him.
By subduing a portion of a river... his must be bountiful.
Finally, after I work out the nūr’s correct density, steam surges upwards, clouding the valley.
‘Fire!’ a captain roars from the ridges above our cliff, and the screams begin. Arrows sink in stunning precision; evidence of Za’skar’s cruel efficiency. Bodies drop to the ground in a low thunder.
‘Fire!’ she barks again.
It’s long, it’s drawn-out, it’s sickening. Azadnians crawl like ants from the river toward the tunnels only to be greeted by more archers.
My body begins trembling at their pitched screams. The Sepāhbad glances at me but expresses no reaction. A man who has seen so much mortality in his existence that he has become dulled to death. Bored even, from his skimming glance.
The valley descends into an eerie silence. Above us, the captain orders a retreat to our encampment.
The Sepāhbad scans the surroundings before nodding. ‘Rejoin your squadron.’
But a cold fog arises from the cliffs. The mist clings to my skin, so wet I feel caught in the dour of a lake.
‘This is not our steam,’ the Sepāhbad realises.
A quiver runs across my spine, like fingers scratching lightly. The air tastes foul, not from blood, but rot.
‘Can you disperse the fog?’ I ask before the cliffs rumble below us.
My eyes squint, but the fog makes it difficult to discern anything.
Suddenly, a stink of hot breath fans against my back.
I’ve hardly time to think, let alone turn, before an arm wraps around my torso, yanking me out of the way just as something crashes where I stood.
I stumble into the bedrock, the Sepāhbad shoving me behind him. ‘Are you well?’ he asks, eyes darting down my form.
‘What was that?’
‘We need to retreat.’ He backs me further along the trail while extracting us from the mist. He erects a vertical shield of dense water and clears the fog with a snap.
Ahead of us, a spiked, teal-scaled tail slams into the cliff side as a mountain-sized body trawls up the rocky ledges, a forked tongue the size of tall poplars darting where I stood mere seconds ago.
The blood drains from my face. The demonic falak has not been spotted since Prophet Nuh’s flood.
What contract did the Azadnian emperor create with the Unseen to force a falak from the Veil into the human world? The serpent before us is mangled, with glimmering red wings, three wide pink mouths, and milky eyes on several bobbing human heads embedded in its scales.
‘The bonds from those human souls forced it through the Veil into the human world under Akashun’s control.’ The Sepāhbad shares in my thoughts before extending his barrier to deflect its ramming tail.
He freezes the water into a thick ice-hewn pick before shooting it right into the third eye of the falak.
The creature recoils with a roar and drops off the cliff but its tail wraps around a cluster of pines, saving it from plummeting further.
It roars again, undeniably human-sounding. All the more horrifying.
The Sepāhbad skewers it with another ice pick and another.
As he does, the valley throbs once again.
I watch in shock. Three shadows hurtle from the Heavens, growing in size.
Long-tailed creatures half the size of the first falak, swallowing the grasslands.
In a mangle of sharp scales, the serpents bellow forward to the retreating auxiliary archers.
The Sepāhbad whirls—
Everything happens in less than a blink.
The auxiliary are suddenly no more. A thousand warriors. Disintegrated in a spray of crimson.
Shreds of skin and wet bones clog the valley. It took one fell swoop of those spiked tails, lashing outward.
There is only a mute silence and the thudding of Sajamistani bodies across the valley – not even the time to cry, to accept and embrace death – that blessing, too, ripped away from the lovers of martyrdom. Everything seems out of reach, out of reality.
I fight a cry blubbering in my throat. These serpents have human -no – have what were humans in them. I stare down at my hands; how many souls were sacrificed to make these creatures? What have I done?
The Sepāhbad shuts his eyes, but if he feels the grief, he masks it well as he shoulders forward. Then another realisation: his troops have retreated to the encampment. We cannot take on four serpents alone.
As the falak rages upon the cliffs, the Sepāhbad speaks low.
‘The first serpent should be dead from my blows. Which means, according to the theorems of the dark arts, we must slay the creature as many times as the number of souls sacrificed in its creation, and more than one human was used to bond it.’ He levels me with a pressing stare.
‘I will have to kill the falak a dozen times over, if not more. The Azadnian garrison is prolonging the melee with these Mitra, to summon reinforcements. If we engage, it’s a losing battle, with our forces stretched thin. ’
‘Then we retreat?’
‘No.’ His hazel eyes darken as he looks upwards. ‘I will gamble with Heaven. This will be decisive.’
My gaze narrows. ‘What?’
‘Heed me carefully.’ He faces me. ‘Retreat to the encampment, where the flanks await. Be swift. You have minutes, or you die. Do you follow, underling?’
‘But—’
‘Your life depends on it.’
My protests halt when the serpents scent us. If the vizier wishes to take on four falak, I could not care less, as long as my life is not forfeit. ‘Okay, then,’ I say after a moment. ‘Farewell.’
I begin to stumble along the rocky cliffs. The Sepāhbad raises his palms, flipping them upwards before his eyes shut.
‘Third Gate of Heaven,’ he recites slowly, and I stiffen at the force of the incantation.
A black blur whizzes above us, and to my astonishment, it’s his raven, who perches upon his shoulder.
Its unblinking eyes stare forward, but blue pictograms engrave the air in Adamic glyphs around the bird.
Mist unfurls from the green carpet of fern and sets upon the decaying birch of the valley like a shock of silver fire.
Aglow, the Sepāhbad’s figure cuts a Heavenly aura and I back away. The glyphs encircle his temple like a thin band as golden lines burst forth, spiralling into seventy-seven bonds.
The sky darkens and the clouds split like a river parting around a rock. A bond descends into the Sepāhbad’s chest – a hundredth bond. As if the cosmos are upended. Impossible. The bonds have manifested into the material world.
His body embraces the glow as the calligraphy burns into his forehead, hammered with a vengeance like a blacksmith gone astray.
The largest falak, enthralled, swishes in a blurring lunge on the Sepāhbad.
My eyes widen, but a blast of primordial power staves off the serpent’s attack, as my leader’s mouth chants unfamiliar litanies.
My vision sways, the temporal world threatening to ripple as if the fabric of space and time is being shattered by the Heavens. I do not stop running. Whatever price was paid for that power, the cold truth is, no mortal should have the ability to wield it.
The four falak begin to shriek, the force of their sound making me fall. The Heavens tremble under a weight. Water, as plentiful as the ever-giving seas, pours down.
In the nick of time, I reach the encampment, which is on higher ground sheltered below the mountainous rock, the moans of the wounded carrying all over.
But I ignore them, gazing below at the valley, which now looks like a monsoon, the lands flattened except for flood-flung craters.
Rain and river weep away the blood, growing more ferocious until they gush over the mountain base.
Bodies, Mitra and filth sweep down the mountainside. The land is excreting its poison as though from a liver, the regurgitation pulled from entombed streams and ancient reservoirs. It does not stop. Above the crashing flood come the wails of dying creatures.
The falak serpents thrash in the waves, drowning one hundred times over, a testament to how many souls were sacrificed to create them. To my ears, their whimpers are exactly that of a babe.
The Unseen is no longer Unseen. The Veil has been lifted and monsters are not nightmares in another microcosm. They walk amongst man.
Around me, Eajīz clutch their heads fruitlessly at the strange power thrumming through the material world, but it is a physical movement against an immaterial force, irrelevant in swaying the command of power. I hear murmurs thrown about. Eight Gates of Heaven.
I cannot help but approach Adel, as I point in disbelief at the valley flattened by the Sepāhbad.
‘It’s conceivable for certain Qabl masters,’ he says.
‘But this is impossible. I saw one hundred bonds,’ I say.
He shrugs. ‘In a world where mortals wield powers gifted from the Divine, what is not possible? This is the mastery of the Eight Gates of Heaven. It wrings your affinity dry; it breaks every bond principle, every maxim of human thought, every natural law in Eajīzi. This art form bestows one direct bond from a Heavenly Bird that every warrior who has mastered the Eight Gates can access. Today, the Sepāhbad has only used the Third Gate, not all eight because of its great cost.’
‘The monks never taught this.’
He barks a laugh. ‘Those monks play fools for the rukhs. What business have rukhs to know the Gates techniques? To summon a bond from one of the three Heavenly Birds?’
I blink twice. I assumed the monks had enlightened me, had shattered the thousands of illusions in the world, righted the contradictions and uplifted the veils between myself and the soul. I am a fool. I had only scratched the surface in the cosmic possibilities of Eajīzi.
Hunger burrows in my stomach. I am nothing. Absolutely powerless – compared to what I could be – compared to the paragon of Eajīzi displayed before me.
‘Gates of Heaven,’ I echo. ‘But affinities are already from the realm of the Heavens.’
His thumb and finger pinch together. ‘In this, for a window of time, you surpass corporeal restrictions, for the power is not just an extension from the Heavens, it’s the gates. The gates are flanked by angels, who guard the souls of the Heavenly Birds and the Divine knows what other creatures.’
‘How does one master the gates?’ I ask.
Adel’s lips twist into a sneer. ‘Master? You cannot simply master them. It’s unnatural.
There are high-ranks paralysed in the monastery for toying with the Gates techniques.
You are a low-rank playing with the cosmos where none should.
You would be risking your soul, shifting the balance between Brother-Nature, the clay and humankind. ’
A part of me cannot help but think the balance of power has already shifted.
With Mitra’s existence, the order has been eroded.
Humans have been seduced into a new era in the struggle between peace and violence, and for the first time in history, it seems humankind has chosen violence willingly.
Lines have been crossed; why should we not cross them too?
Beside me, No-Name contemplates this almost eagerly. ‘Akashun wields Mitra. If he is pursuing unprecedented power, how can anyone defeat him without a power of symmetrical strength?’
I would be wise to heed Adel’s warning, for he is a Seventh-Slash. If it were easy to grasp the gates, then surely Adel would do it.
I ask, ‘Can you summon the Eight Gates?’
He seems startled. ‘You do not summon the Eight Gates of Heaven. The gates choose you. In battle, a steep risk. You could be lost in the psychospiritual world for eons. There are legends of Eajīz who have never returned from their state of meditation. Their souls sucked into an unknown realm on a different plane of time, lost amongst the jinn-folk.’ Rather harshly, he adds, ‘And if you accomplish it, it’s the physical manifestation of greed, the Divine’s greatest test to Eajīz – for that’s all power can do – it consumes. ’