Chapter 43 Rasha
Rasha
Langzu – Kluehnn’s den northeast of Bian
By decree of the Albanoran ruling family, any traveler passing through our fair capital must surrender their books to be copied by our scholars.
Before departing, you may collect your books at the Royal Academy.
We appreciate your contribution to our vast library and to the education of scholars throughout the realms.
I didn’t know what to say to Mull. I took my robe from him and let him go back to the room he shared with several other converts.
Naatar was right, I couldn’t stay on this path of doubt.
I had to re-commit to my faith. I had to earn back my dagger.
I could protect my cohort by being at their side, leading them to victory.
What did I think I was doing here in the archives, reading pages not meant for my eyes?
I wasn’t a scholar; I’d never been a scholar.
Unwilling to face Naatar again, I curled up on a few cushions by one of the windows in the archives, surrounded by the smell of old parchment and ink. Fitfully, I drifted off to sleep.
I woke in the early-morning hours. A cold breeze brushed my legs. Hakara was slipping out from beneath our blankets. She was going down to the sea to dive. This time, she might not come back. I reached for her. “Hakara, don’t.”
I knew how she’d respond. A last squeeze of my hand. A kiss to my forehead. But then she’d be gone and I’d be in the tent, where she told me I was safe.
I wasn’t safe. We were never safe. My heart clenched.
I knew she needed to protect me, I knew that if I pushed against that, I’d be taking away the best reason she had for being brave, yet I chafed against it.
Before Mimi had died, I’d protected her too.
In smaller ways, yes. But I still needed Hakara in that way, I still needed a sister, and she’d abandoned me.
My hand groped at empty cushions.
I rolled onto the hard ground, coming fully awake.
The archives were dark, the quiet of the tunnels telling me it was still night-time.
It took me a moment to orient myself. I wasn’t in Kashan.
I was in Langzu, and it wasn’t time to open the shutters, not yet.
The air outside was still too moist and would damage the books.
Unsure of what else to do, I rose to my feet, testing the weight on my leg.
It held, so I left the crutch by the window and wandered toward the room I shared with Naatar and Khatuya.
I’d have to face him sooner or later and I’d not had the chance to see Khatuya yet. I didn’t know if he’d told her what I’d said, but I couldn’t avoid my cohort forever, and better to have these conversations in the privacy of our room.
I opened the door, expecting darkness.
A lantern was lit, the light low. I caught the outline of Khatuya’s bare back, her rough brown skin beaded with sweat. She was moving on her bed and hadn’t noticed me.
And then I saw Naatar’s scaled hands on her waist. She bent low over him, a moan in her throat.
I felt frozen in time, every detail of this moment excruciating, my heart a drumbeat in my ears. Khatuya’s head turned. I didn’t know what my face looked like, what expression was painted across my features.
I was stumbling away, unsure of what I was doing.
She gasped and pulled the bedsheet over her body. “Rasha! Rasha, wait…”
The door was shutting behind me and I was running, trying to put distance between myself and what I’d just seen. While I’d been here in the archives, reading forbidden pages, they’d been out in the wilds together. Without me. Something must have happened between them.
Was it love, or just the closeness of a cohort? Was it a closeness either of them had thought to include me in, or had I always been an afterthought, unknowingly on the outside? They’d known one another before I’d joined them, they’d been friends. That had apparently blossomed into more.
And here I was, a bystander, an unwelcome intruder.
I’d thought we’d become a cohort of three, that we were all on equal footing.
Apparently not. My toes caught in a crevice.
I couldn’t get my injured leg in front of me in time.
The ground rose to meet me. No one was awake yet to see me fall.
I lay there, fresh new pain radiating up my leg.
The idea of returning to the field with Naatar and Khatuya felt foolish.
I was healing, but I wasn’t ready yet. They’d be sent out again before I could earn another blade.
I’d be stuck here, with Mull, who didn’t even like me.
He might have been altered, but I saw the way his gaze kept flicking toward my horns, lingering on the one Kluehnn had eaten away.
I wouldn’t ever be his friend – to him I would always be a monster.
To my sister, I’d always be a girl who needed protection.
And to Sheuan, the only person who had made the two sides of me fit peacefully together?
Someone to love, briefly, and then leave behind. I was always going to be left behind. I dragged myself to my feet, my leg burning. It held my weight, though my knee threatened to buckle. Without knowing where else to go, I limped back to the archives and lit a lamp.
A figure stood by the window. I couldn’t make out his features, but I knew his silhouette. Mull. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I owe you an explanation.”
I’d forgotten, in my turmoil over Khatuya and Naatar, that he’d taken my robe. I seized my crutch from where I’d left it, unwilling to sit, not right now. “Tell me.”
“I’m not here to spy, no matter what you might think. I came here to find a tomb. The tomb of Tolemne’s family. I’ve found his writing on the walls of the den, and I think the tomb is somewhere in these tunnels.”
I couldn’t make sense of it. “You came here just to find some dead people’s resting place? You risked your life for that?”
“I’m a scholar. My friends died because” – he licked his lips – “we were searching for Unterra. There weren’t two aeroclines. There were three.”
I scoffed. “There are two.”
“Yes, and the gods and mortals never mingled, never had children together. That’s what the books say, isn’t it?”
I had no retort for that. A large part of me yearned for the days before I’d spoken to that god in the forests of Kashan. The days before I’d lived with doubt.
He let out a sharp breath. “There are carvings here that match the ones made along Tolemne’s Path.
One of the carvings on Tolemne’s Path says that he was headed here, to the tomb, to write the truth of this world.
The writing here leads me down to a stone that blocks the way.
I think the tomb is behind it, but it’s too heavy to move by myself. ”
He left the last words hanging in the air, an unspoken question.
I should have shut it down then, refused to speak to him again, focused on my work, as Naatar had bade me.
But if I were truly alone, and Kluehnn was lying to me, then why not?
Why not do this? Find the truth? I closed my eyes, and the image of Khatuya and Naatar was there behind my eyelids, together, sharing something I never could.
I shook my head, trying to force it away.
“I’ll help you. We go now. While the den is still asleep.”
I followed Mull at a limp, my heartbeat thudding like the hooves of racing horses.
My mind seemed to float somewhere above me as we made our way down the tunnels, Mull stopping every so often to touch words that had been etched into the walls, muttering to himself.
He stopped at a fork before leading me down the left-hand tunnel.
“The next one says that Tolemne can trace his lineage back to Barexi. He’s not pleased by the information. He did not like the gods.”
“Understandably,” I whispered back. “They all refused to grant him a boon.”
“Except one,” Mull said.
“Yes.”
He stopped at the end of a tunnel, fitting his fingers into a crack in the wall. “The stone is here. I can get my fingers behind it, but I can’t move it.”
I obliged, setting down the lantern and moving next to him, reaching over his head to find a spot I could grip. I gave an experimental tug. He was right. The thing was heavy. “Together. If we do this together. One… two… three!”
Both of us pulled. The stone moved with an echoing, grinding sound.
I gritted my teeth, hoping no one had heard.
Did Kluehnn’s aspect ever sleep? I wasn’t sure.
“Lift. Lift!” Mull strained, and the stone moved silently.
We let it rest when we’d opened it enough that we could wedge ourselves through the gap.
Mull ducked inside first, before I could caution him that we didn’t know what lay beyond.
Creatures sometimes lived in the deeper tunnels, ones I’d never seen on the surface.
But the man was frustratingly single-minded.
He didn’t even have the benefit of a light.
I grabbed the lantern and hurried after him.
The space beyond was larger than I’d expected it to be. The wall opposite had been carved into a facade, complete with pillars and a darkened entryway. A geometric design decorated the area above the doorway, bookended on either side with seated wolves.
The other walls were covered in more writing I didn’t recognize. Mull was already tracing it with his hands, too impatient even to wait for the lantern.
“‘The surface is barren’,” he read. “‘There is not enough water, not enough food. Every day is misery. They keep burning the Numinars, and that living wood fills the corners of the sky with lingering black smoke. We are choking on it.’”
He traced some carvings lower down. “‘My wife died first. And then our children. All while I searched for a way to Unterra, to ask the gods to fix the surface. They refused.’”
“What about Kluehnn?” I asked, casting my gaze over the facade. I lifted the lantern, trying to see what was inside without walking into the tomb.
Mull stopped, his hand moving over the carving again. “Tolemne’s wife and children. They died before he went on his expedition.”
I waved dismissively. “These carvings sound like the ravings of a madman. He was confused. Maybe he came down here and got lost.”
He pointed to the tomb. “There’s a whole tomb carved here. You can’t get lost and then do that. That’s ridiculous. First you’d run out of fuel for your lamps. Then you’d run out of food and water. Do you think that is the work of one man?”
I shrugged. “Maybe someone else carved it before he got here.”
A disgusted sound left Mull’s mouth. “Think about it for more than just one moment.” He swept past me and toward the entrance of the tomb.
“Wait, you don’t know what’s in…” He was already gone into the dark.
Cursing, I followed him, lifting the lantern to light the walls.
Except for a few small cave spiders, the tomb was blessedly empty of life.
A couple of shelves had been chiseled into one wall, and four urns had been placed there, names carved above.
Mull beckoned me over. “His wife,” he said, pointing to the one at the top.
Then at the shelf below. “His two daughters and his son.”
I peered at the top shelf. There was an empty space next to the wife’s urn. “And Tolemne himself?”
Mull scratched at the fur on his chin. “According to the texts, Tolemne remained in Unterra and was entombed there when he died.”
We both stared for a while at the urns. I touched a shelf but didn’t dare touch any of the urns themselves.
It felt a little too close to sacrilege to do so.
“If there’s anything else down here that you want to see, you should do it now.
We need to get back out of these tunnels before the den wakes up. ”
Mull took the lantern from my hands without asking – a privilege he was used to, I was sure – and turned to the rest of the tomb.
It extended into the darkness, the walls lined with some more etchings.
He ran his hand along the stone as he explored.
I followed him a few paces back. The air here smelled of damp earth and dust.
He suddenly stopped, swinging the lantern around – first to a short phrase carved into the wall, and then down toward his feet, where an opening descended into the ground. “We must be deep.”
“What is it? What does that say?”
He put a hand beneath each word as he spoke them. “‘I made a bargain.’” Then he pointed to the hole in the ground. The air at his feet shimmered, the space beyond distorted.
I knelt, dipped a hand into the shimmer.
It was slightly warm, and thicker than the air we stood in now.
The first aerocline. When Mull crouched next to me and held the lamp next to the hole, I could see some of the space beneath.
There were carvings down there too, but I couldn’t make out their edges past the distortion of the aerocline.
“I wonder what’s down there,” I murmured.
I realized, startled, that I’d forgotten about my encounter with Khatuya and Naatar, those morose thoughts overtaken by curiosity, by the thrill of this discovery.
“You don’t have to wonder.” He took a deep breath before pulling something out from beneath his shirt and fastening it over his nose and mouth. Some sort of cloth contraption. “Wait here.”
Before I could stop him, before I could ask him what in all the depths that thing was, he’d slipped down into the hole. Beneath the first aerocline.