Chapter 38 Jaya
JAYA
A Sesharian is a hard worker, but they are not honest. The ones with a higher pedigree must be watched closely, for they have tasted freedom and power, and they will not so easily give them up.
—from A Manual on Employing a Sesharian for Jantari Gentlefolk
Jaya surveyed the holos of Samson’s Agni in the darkness of their makeshift encampment.
All Arohassin operatives were housed in the western district of the city, close to the command center—close enough for Chandi to keep an eye on them.
But Jaya had taken great care with her holos.
If someone were to glance at her panel, they would only see battle schematics and gameplans of their last mission.
Not the terrible truth of Samson’s fire.
Jaya cast a glance at Akaros as he paced.
“See this?” She pointed to a holo full of temperature readings. “See how it flares when he summons his urumi. How quickly it rises, then drops. His urumi is his channel. That is how he controls his Agni.”
Akaros chewed on his lip. “And what of Elena?”
“I’ve heard rumors that when she and Samson fought, she needed no weapon to call her fire. She twirled, or spun, or made signals with her hands—”
“She dances,” Akaros said. “The Goddess’s Dance. Of course.”
“So Elena’s channel is dance. Samson’s is his urumi. I wonder, then, what the third’s will be,” she mused.
Akaros pointed. “What about that? Did you get a reading?”
Jaya brought up a holo of a video recording of the Cyleoni courtyard, where she and the others had watched Elena kneel above Samson and raise him from near death. Samson still had the metal lotus in his pocket then.
“There was an alteration. His temperature was dropping rapidly, but at the exact moment Elena summoned her flames, it went haywire. Spiked beyond what I could measure.” She remembered the blue brilliance of Samson’s fire, the red earthiness of Elena’s.
How, for a beat, they had twined together when she healed him.
She sighed. “Something happened there. I felt it—didn’t you? Like lightning in the air, except there was no storm. And the way he revived…” She trailed off, thinking hard. “You don’t suppose she did something to his Agni?”
Akaros deftly slipped a coin in and out of his fingers. It was a nervous tic. His only tell, or the only one she had found. “If she did, then she can endanger the third.”
She thought of Div. The burns lacing his throat, the quiet rattle of his lungs as he lay trapped in a coma on borrowed time. The night before she had left for Magar, she had sat with him in his ghostly chamber and whispered her promise against the glass.
I will revive you, come what may.
“I will not allow it,” she growled.
“So why haven’t you given Elena a metal lotus yet?”
He finally met her gaze. Before, long ago, Akaros had frightened her in the way he so easily cut his mark to the bone.
He was always watching. It had intimidated her, his casual hunting.
But now Jaya chided herself for not picking up on the details he had seen, for ignoring what had been before them all along.
If she meant to fulfill her purpose, how could she be so ignorant?
“I will,” she said hotly. “I just haven’t had the chance—”
“The longer we wait, Elena becomes stronger. The third grows more unstable. Div gets weaker.”
It was not a provocation. Not a threat. She knew Akaros well enough now to understand how he delicately manipulated others to his bidding. She knew his tricks. And yet, Div’s name sent a searing, blearing hurt through her.
“I’m not hesitating. You know that. I just—I’m not—”
“You’re not a fighter, I know.” Akaros slid his coin back into his pocket. “And I know you’d rather hide behind a panel, safe with your bank of holos. But you need to grow a fucking spine, Jaya. Elena won’t bite your head off.” He rapped his knuckles on her panel. “I won’t let her.”
Jaya stared at him, then the holos, and then the second metal lotus, a perfect mirror of the one she had given Samson.
It was not that she feared Elena any more or less than Samson.
They were both so laughably transparent in their obsession with each other, she almost felt pity for their stubborn blindness.
But Jaya had not forgotten who had burned down her house.
The gold caps had sworn fealty to Leo, to Elena, and had erected a gold statue brazenly in the heart of Rani to declare, Look how she is one of us.
Jaya feared that if she faced Elena, she would lose her objectivity in the face of her own hatred, and it would lead to a fatal mistake.
Jaya carefully picked up the lotus. “I don’t know if I can pretend in front of her.”
Akaros gripped her shoulder. “You will. You must.”
Jaya threaded through a throng of people crowding the street. Taller than most, she spotted the ruined spire of the temple in the distance, and the retinue of guards standing outside its walls.
She stopped on the corner of the street, observing the guards.
There were seven Black Scales in total, three posted by the entrance, the others along the wall.
She noticed how some passersby cast quick glances in their direction and hurried past the temple.
Others knelt or lay prostrate, kissing the ground and showering it with rose petals.
There were Ravani and Sesharian devotees, all of them marked with a black serpent on their cheeks.
“Why are there guards by the temple?” she asked a Sesharian woman carrying a thali of offerings.
The woman gave her an odd look. “Have you not heard? The Prophet nearly killed the queen here. He enacted his deliverance, and this is now a holy site.”
Jaya frowned. She saw no sign of battle, no evidence of a scuffle. “When?”
“Weeks ago. Are you daft, girl? Were you living out in the rocks?”
In a tunnel in the desert, so about the same. Jaya watched as one unmarked Ravani man knelt with hands clasped around a rosary. Trinkets of the Phoenix and the Serpent dangled on its end. “Look, he’s praying to both. I thought the Prophet ended the worship of the Phoenix goddess.”
The woman spat and made a quick sign. “Blasphemous. He’s afraid to let go of his old god.”
“Why isn’t anyone stopping him?”
“And risk a riot? Not everyone is willing to give up their Phoenix icons, even if our Blue Star burns Her down in front of them.” The woman snorted. “Some are just too stuck in their old ways.”
As the woman hurried to the temple gates, Jaya sat down on the ruined steps of what had once been an old sari shop.
She noted how the guard on the far right favored his left leg, how the one in the middle kept tapping her finger against the butt of her pulse gun.
The ones by the temple doors looked bored.
Odd. This square had been the sight of a bloody, sacred battle, and the guards looked indifferent.
Jaya chewed on a nail, thinking, when she caught a whiff of a conversation in Ambari.
“—buried, every last one of them.”
She stood, tracking the speaker. It was a Sesharian talking to another, and though they spoke in the old Sesharian tongue, Jaya had spent suns learning it under Maya’s tutelage. She followed the pair as they carefully avoided the prayer circle.
“—he could destroy the mines, but he couldn’t save his own.”
“Hush, Bemon,” his companion said, a small woman with narrow shoulders. She glanced around them, and Jaya quickly hid behind the side of a building. “His followers are everywhere.”
“And? They will do nothing. Ours are too weak to call him out, the Ravani too stupid. How can he free us if he is killing us in turn?”
“This is war, Bemon. We are lucky to even live. Let’s go back to the temple, pray for the dead.” She tugged on his arm, but the man shook himself free.
“I’m not setting foot in that temple,” he snarled. “Prophet or not, he’s still a rustblood. His father bent the knee to the Jantari. And now he sold our brothers and sisters for a little piece of their cursed metal.”
Jaya followed them at a distance as they traveled deeper into the Sesharian quarters.
Here, the buildings cramped in, as if to shield themselves and others.
Mothers sat on the thresholds, peeling vegetables, while their children dashed through the alleys, laughing.
Neighbors called to one another in Ambari.
Conversation flowed loosely, addled by drink, by song.
There was an ease here, a slow breath released.
No doubt, a Sesharian Prophet added a sense of security.
They all bore his mark. They all lit a diya in his name before their doorsteps.
But as Jaya slipped through the shops, the children, the gossiping fathers and tired mothers, she sensed something else too.
A quiet turmoil. She heard it in the quick way conversations dropped into whispers when discussing a delicate subject.
She saw it in the stiff, mechanical movements of a mother relighting her diya, as if the task was a burden she must bear, rather than a prayer to a savior.
Jaya stopped, uncertain. Were the Sesharians losing faith in Samson? The couple slipped down an alleyway, and Jaya followed when the wall on her right caught her attention.
On the side of a building, she saw it. A simple number.
400.
Four hundred Sesharians lost in the mines.
Four hundred of their own, buried by their Prophet.
A sick sense of satisfaction settled in her stomach then, and Jaya turned back.
She needed to tell Akaros. If the Sesharians were losing faith in their leader, then the Arohassin could use that to their advantage.
And if Samson could be removed, then Elena—
She stopped short of the temple courtyard as the guards snapped to a salute.
People suddenly shoved one another, craning their necks, whispering.
Even the pilgrims had abandoned their supplications to raise their thalis.
Jaya elbowed past one, earning her a glare, but once he saw her eyes, her hair, he fell back.