Chapter 49 Cero
Cero
Cero fell into a nightmare, and it was a landscape of his own making. For in looking into the Fount, he felt the suffering of his people as they starved and died.
He tasted their despair as they reached their hands for someone, anyone, to help them lift themselves from the darkness.
And he heard the question the boy, Ruh, had been asking for months now. Who are you, Cero bet-Dafra? Cero could not speak the answer. He didn’t want the burden or pain of it. He didn’t want to be the Tel Ilessi. He would not accept this mantle. He could not be this person.
Cero opened his eyes and understood what the void was. A portal, like the Jaduna portals, but worse, for the sky growled, the ocean grasped, the air seethed like a hive of hornets.
Karinna’s fingers dug into his arm and a furry body curled into his neck—Abzi.
Get back, he tried to shout, but his voice caught and then it was too late, for they plummeted with him, a torturous free fall. He reached for Karinna and pulled her into his arms.
Karinna’s body shook against his. She feared falling, and now it would not end. Her panic emanated and he held her tight and whispered to her, “I’ve got you. I won’t let go.”
Everything faded into whiteness, and suddenly they were standing together, trees rising up all around them. Her body was curled into his. She held on to him like a vise. Her eyes were wide open as she stared up into his.
“Rebel,” he said gently, letting her go. “We’re all right.”
She did not release him.
“Karinna.” He tipped her face to his. “We’re not falling anymore. We’re alive. Look.”
He gestured to the trees, but it wasn’t until Abzi, still on Cero’s shoulder, nudged Karinna’s face with her own that she seemed to understand.
She let go of Cero abruptly. “Forgive me,” she said. “We fell for so long.”
“The Fount,” Cero said, “is more than a Fount, it appears. Where are we?”
Karinna came back to herself and fixed her attention on the forest.
“These are Jaduna lands,” she said. “But different. Look—the trees. The huts—”
She clamped her mouth shut as a woman passed them, her Jaduna coins tinkling. But the woman said nothing—it did not appear she could see them. There were no structures in the trees, only small huts on the forest floor, wrought beautifully of wood and stone. The forest felt lighter, cleaner.
“This is Kotama.” Karinna gazed about at the mossy forest in wonder. “But long ago. Very long ago. Are we still in the Fount?”
Cero nodded. “I feel the walls,” he said, and distantly, those walls seemed to shimmer.
Harsh shouts broke the quiet. Cero and Karinna followed the sound to a clearing, where two women fought and a crowd gathered. One woman had hard features, a high nose, arched brows, and sharp cheekbones. The other was smaller with large dark eyes and a string of coins across her forehead.
“You cannot sunder our people so, Crensa,” the smaller woman pleaded. “You would destroy families. Tear them apart.”
Distantly, Cero realized they weren’t speaking a language he knew. And yet, he understood. From the way Karinna watched, rapt, she did too.
“I would do no such thing,” Crensa said, “if only you let us explore the magic. Your rules are tyrannical. We will never know the limits of what we can do if we do not explore.”
“It’s dangerous—”
“It’s a necessary risk—”
“It’s foolish—”
“It’s the only way we will find wisdom and perfect our people!” Crensa snapped. Her chest heaved. She looked around. “Any of those who wish to go with us, we leave at dawn, from the Bay of Tears. Bring food and clothing. Water. Leave everything else behind.”
Cero turned, vertigo washing over him; then he, Karinna, and Abzi were no longer in the forest. Instead, he stared down an enormous rocky beach packed with a fleet of ships, more than a thousand. Some were immense and some tiny. Cero wondered how they would make it across the ocean.
Wave after wave of the ships pushed off to the sound of wails from those left behind on the beach. He saw siblings separated and children torn from their fathers. One woman screamed: “Mama—no. Don’t do this!” Beside him, Karinna stared, horrified at what they were witnessing.
The sundering of a people.
Cero blinked and dizziness swept over him. They stood in Old Kegar now. Or at least, what he believed to be Old Kegar. The buildings soared into the sky, and huge colorful Sails drifted above them. People levitated directly into buildings, and everywhere, silver seams of Loha gleamed.
It was omnipresent. The Loha merged with buildings, armor, weaponry—even people, becoming as much a part of them as their own skin.
Builders infused the Loha into their structures so that doors fell away upon approach and reconstituted with nothing but a touch.
Wagons hovered and zipped down streets seemingly as swift as light.
Cero wanted to stop the images, to go inside them, to learn how the Loha was manipulated to create such wonders.
But the vision continued, changing in the blurred, nonsensical way of dreams. Cero and Karinna watched as these Jaduna explored magic in a way they never could in the old country. “We are Jaduna no longer.” The words drifted on the wind. “We are Kegari now.”
The Jaduna visited from Kotama, and the Kegari offered them the Loha. The Jaduna took it reluctantly, fear suffusing their movements.
And then after long years, a visit from someone else. A king in possession of a large piece of Loha. His name was Cain.
He called the Loha piece “the Star.” It was infused with jinn magic, for the jinn, it was clear, had long known the secrets of Loha. Cain had received the Star as a gift and wished to learn how to use it. He was curious and kind and complimentary. He charmed the Kegari, old and young alike.
All but one: a young woman with dark hair and skin, sea-green irises, and an understanding of magic that few others in her city could match. The other Kegari called her the Keeper of the Fount. Her family called her Dafra, after a star.
“We should not tell him our secrets,” she advised her elders. “He is not a good man.”
They waved her off. Cain left. The seasons changed, and time passed.
News trickled in from the old country. Humans had made war on the jinn.
One human, especially: the same king who had visited them.
Cain had taken the knowledge the Kegari had given to him and used it for evil, harming the jinn greatly.
The Jaduna sent a delegation to the Kegari. “What did you tell this man?” they demanded to know. “Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know what you have unleashed upon the jinn, who pass our souls on to the next world?”
The Kegari Elders denied even knowing Cain. But Dafra found the Jaduna delegation before it left and told them everything. “Can you stop him?” she asked. “Can you end this?”
But the Jaduna could not. Soon after, news reached the Kegari that Cain and a coven of his sorcerers had defeated the jinn king, the Meherya himself, the first son of magic. The jinn were imprisoned. And all their children, hundreds upon hundreds, were murdered by the humans in one fell night.
Karinna and Cero saw it, briefly. The Fount, this strange place of memory and movement, showed them baby flames tumbling quietly through the forest that had been their home.
The older children helped the younger and they were so quiet.
“You will be safe,” the older jinn whispered. “We are almost there. Do not fear.”
But they should have feared, for they were tender and vulnerable. Humans came with salt and steel and summer rain and the jinn children fell beneath the onslaught. They took a long time to die.
Before Cero’s mind could encompass the horror he’d witnessed, he and Karinna were watching the Fount change. Small things, at first. The magic was harder to access. The cost was higher.
The Jaduna, he thought immediately. The Jaduna are doing this. He knew it in his bones, as if it was knowledge waiting to be discovered. There was a flavor to the magic that savored of the Jaduna—a precision to the work.
Magic had laws, and one Cero had learned was this: magic cannot be destroyed, only contained or transformed.
Somehow, the Jaduna had conjured a sorcery that would transform the source of all Kegari magic to poison. Revenge, perhaps, for the Kegari had shared the secrets of Loha, and in doing so had doomed the jinn.
Slowly but surely, the Loha withered away.
A storm rolled through, and buildings were destroyed because the weathersmithers could not calm the fury of the clouds.
Children struggled to lift themselves to school, high atop the buildings.
Huge sheets of Loha that had been transformed into windows simply disintegrated.
Dafra was older now. Wiser. She was no longer Keeper of the Fount. She had a husband and children. She warned the Elders to abandon Ibafint, home of the Fount. To leave the magic behind.
They did not listen. So, she left without them, taking her family and those who were willing to listen to her. They found shelter in the wild places beyond Ibafint. Dafra took Loha with her, sneaking away in the dead of night with Sail-loads of it.
The rot spread. The Loha, pure and silver for so long, began to bruise and purple. Those who touched it felt ill. The illness spread and the Loha was not Loha any longer but Ikfa. Poison.
As Cero watched, his stomach dropped. Kegari civilization was run entirely on magic. Without it, who would they be?
They did not have time to learn. The rot spread too quickly. Not just in the land now but in the blood of the people. Families would visit each other only to find entire households dead, their loved ones collapsed as if sleeping, Ikfa oozing from their lips.
Frantic, the Elders begged for help from their long-ago kindred, the Jaduna. But the Jaduna, they soon realized, would not help them.
“The ghosts of your misdeeds seek vengeance,” the Jaduna responded. “And they will have their due.”
The Elders decided that Dafra had been right all this time. They must leave. They had no Sails any longer—they had been consumed by Ikfa. They had no ships, for they had lost the art of sea travel without Loha.
Dafra had Loha. Dafra could save them.
But Dafra was not inclined to help those who had ignored her pleas. Nor were any who followed her, though the Elders begged. So, the Elders gave her a new name. Monster. Div.
Dafra ordered her people to gather as much untainted Loha as possible. She collected those Sails she had left. While the Elders had been ignoring her, Dafra had explored the lands far to the east. She’d found a home, a place with no Ikfa, where her people might survive.
In defeat, the Elders returned to their ruined city. Days later, they saw a flock of birds so massive that it blocked out the sun. But it was not birds. It was their people, leaving them behind, led by Dafra. They cried out, a desperate wail for help, an eerie echo of a shattered past.
Dafra—whose people had taken to calling her Mother Div—did not look back. She was the Wayfinder, meant to take her people home. The Bloodbinder, meant to heal them from this wound. The Diviner, meant to seek out a life for them, a future, and perhaps, one day, a path back.
“She left them to die,” Karinna said from beside Cero. “Dafra knew they would be consumed, and she—”
Cero couldn’t fathom the choice. He couldn’t guess how it must have destroyed her.
The images changed once more and Cero’s stomach plunged, for they stood in the heart of Dafra slum: Emaciated children begged on corners; the streets stank of garbage and sewage; a highborn with shining boots strode through, kicking a skinny old woman out of her way.
Beside him, Karinna gasped. Shame consumed Cero, for it was as if she was seeing the ugliest parts of his insides, this wretched place that he came from. He couldn’t look at her.
She slipped her hand into his, squeezing it tight.
“Look.” She nodded ahead, to where a hooded Jaduna woman slipped through the slum.
U’qaya. The images shifted to follow her as she made her way to the mountain that housed the Kegari prison, the Tohr.
The mountain seemed to glow and for a moment, they could see the deep purple Ikfa snaking through the rock.
U’qaya stood at the base of the mountain, her hand to the ground, shifting rocks and dirt in an effort to slow the Ikfa’s spread. But it continued to ooze forth, poisoning the earth of the city.
This, Cero realized, was why there were fewer windsmithers every year. The curse of the Ikfa had followed his people.
The air shifted again, violently this time. Karinna grabbed on to Cero as they fell, Abzi hunched between them. Strange things flashed past: the seething sea, the sallow sky. Then all was dark. Cero smelled stone and death. It felt as if days were passing, and then mere seconds.
I will hold you, a deep voice intoned. Until it is time.
Time for what? It was the last thought Cero remembered having. When he came to consciousness again, he smelled damp and rot and death. He heard shouts. Screaming. Someone was crying.
Karinna. Karinna is crying. And Karinna never cries.
It was that fact that ultimately forced him to drag his eyes open.
He was in a chamber, perfectly round with a hole at its center—one that looked identical to the Fount.
On one side of the chamber, the earth split into a deep crevasse.
The ceiling glowed a strange blue, and the shouts were coming from close by.
Beside him, Karinna was bent over the clearly dead body of a young boy—her body shuddering.
Cero scrambled up and toward her, on his knees. He took in the still, small form, the brown skin, the dark hair. But even before he got close enough to see the child’s face, he knew.
It was Ruh.