Chapter 52 Karinna
Karinna
Ruh was here. But Ruh was dead. And for a moment, when Karinna saw him, he’d looked so alive that she thought everything in the past two years had been a nightmare and finally she was waking up and he’d never died and she’d never failed him.
But then she touched him. His skin was cold. He had no pulse. Where his heart used to be, his shirt had pooled, as if there was a depression beneath.
The pain of his loss felt as fresh as the day Div killed him. Like some enemy had broken past her defenses and shoved a stake into her heart. Karinna’s body trembled, and she held him to her, shaking him, as if that would make him live.
Shouting erupted nearby. A scream. Pleading.
Two-legs. Abzi appeared out of the dark, her green eyes bright in the strange blue light of the cave. Something is in the chamber beside this one. Something not safe for your kind or mine.
Karinna hardly heard her. She didn’t care. Because Ruh was dead.
Cero knelt beside her and she wanted to explain. She wanted to say, This is my baby brother who I didn’t protect. This is my Ruh, who loved me, even if I didn’t love myself.
But then Cero spoke.
“Ruh,” he whispered. “What is he doing here?”
Karinna’s tears stopped as if a faucet had been shut off. She replied with bewilderment, “How the hells—”
Two-legs! Abzi nudged her. Quiet!
Karinna dropped her voice to a whisper. “How do you know what Ruh looks like?”
“I’ve dreamt of him,” Cero said. “For—for months now.”
“You were dreaming of him.” Karinna tried to keep her voice down as Abzi trotted toward the chamber where the shouts were coming from. “And you didn’t bleeding tell me?”
“The dreams made no sense. He—he knew who I was—” Cero glanced up at Karinna, his pale green eyes almost glowing. “He knew what I was.”
The Tel Ilessi, Cero didn’t say, but Karinna understood his implication.
“He was in a horrible place. The same place I saw in the portal. Dark seas. A yellow sky. These—things in the water. Bigger even than what you and I saw in the Southern Ocean, Karinna.”
Karinna frowned. She’d heard such a place described.
“The Sea of Suffering,” she said. “The old name for it is the Owa Khel, the Empty. But that’s where the Soul Catchers cast the pain of the dead.
Their misery. Their sadness. Why in the hells would Ruh be there?
And why would the portal from Old Kegar bring us here? ”
Through the doorway, the shouting intensified. Karinna crouched over her brother’s body, baring her teeth. No one was going to take him away from her. But no one entered the chamber. Cero stood and padded silently toward the door. After a few minutes, he came back, his voice barely above a whisper.
“There are jinn,” he said. “Seven of them. They were trying to bind Sirsha—”
“Quil’s Sirsha?”
“Yes, only…I touched her mind.” He sounded apologetic, but Karinna waved him on, for now was not the time for him to be shy about his magic.
“It’s not Sirsha in that body,” Cero said. “It’s Div. The thing that killed Ruh—the creature that helped Aiz. Div is connected to this place—I can’t quite work out how. But I can feel it through my magic.”
A scream from the chamber now, and the eerie echo of laughter. A low, steady male voice that Karinna knew well.
“That’s Quil,” she said. “Can you—” She waved a hand in the general direction of Cero, and he tilted his head, as if listening.
“He—he’s trying to uncover a memory using some sort of magic. That creature—Div—it is a memory. Not a single spirit, but the many spirits of the jinn children murdered by the humans long ago. Their souls got stuck somehow, in the Owa Khel.”
“The same place you saw Ruh,” Karinna said, and now her neck prickled.
“The place we travel through in the portals. That’s not a coincidence.
It can’t be. Also—” She gasped as she thought of all her mother’s stories.
“The jinn died a thousand years ago, which is right around when the Jaduna poisoned the Ikfa.”
A crash from next door. A roar, like a great wind rising. But Cero hardly noticed.
“A thousand years,” he muttered, looking between the walls, the void, the outer chamber.
“There’s so much magic here. I can feel its connection to Div, through the mindsmithing.
That metal above us.” He pointed to the blue ore.
“It’s not Loha or Ikfa. But it’s alive, like both of them.
Karinna—this is where it happened. This is where the Jaduna poisoned the Loha.
That writing”—he pointed to the carvings on the wall—“it looks like Jaduna script. But I don’t understand why we are here. Why Ruh is here.”
Karinna looked down at her little brother. She thought of how everything had gone upside down after he died. Not just in her world, but everywhere.
“Cero,” she said. “Loha was created with life, yes? That old ghost said so. An outpouring of life, she said. The Ikfa is its opposite, so it must have been created with death. Maybe—maybe we’re supposed to fix that.”