Chapter 50 Rasha
Rasha
Langzu – Kluehnn’s den northeast of Bian
In quiet corners of the world, in basements, in cellars, in secret places in the woods, people still light candles for Irael, for Nioanen, for Rumenesca. They still believe the elder gods are alive somehow and are convinced this dangerous worship brings them good fortune.
What a beautiful delusion.
The early-morning air was cold; rain had fallen across the mountains in the night.
It made the latrine ditch below me smell terrible.
I opened my hand, the blue chalk in my palm.
I couldn’t keep denying the truth, and the truth was that Kluehnn had lied to me, and was continuing to lie to me.
Naatar thought that whatever Kluehnn did, he had good reasons behind it all.
I wasn’t so sure.
If the crow spoke on behalf of a significant group of gods, and they were all willing to return to Unterra, then that meant peace was possible. For whatever reason, Kluehnn wasn’t interested in pursuing it.
The lives of my cohort hung in the balance.
If I marked the rock, if I let the gods know that Kluehnn’s aspect would be leaving, that godkillers would be leaving, and the den was vulnerable, they would launch their raid.
They would do whatever it was the crow had said would make Kluehnn think twice about war.
It would mean fewer gods for Khatuya and Naatar to face.
It meant that maybe, Kluehnn would listen to me.
I marked the largest rock, quickly, and then tossed the chalk onto the ground.
If it rained again before they found it, then it was just fate, doing what was right. I’d done my part. I’d made my decision.
The letter Mull had given me still weighed in my pocket.
I’d thought myself inured against any further hurt from Sheuan.
She’d left me – what more could she do? Yet knowing she was married now dug sharp fingernails into my cracked heart and peeled pieces of it away.
Somehow it made sense, her marrying the Sovereign.
I wondered if she loved him, if she’d known this was what she was going to do before she’d left Kashan. But she’d asked me to go with her. Surely that had meant something to her, the way it had to me. Or maybe this was something she always did, the way some people gathered lost pups.
I hoped I would see her, I hoped I wouldn’t. Either way, I felt I’d be disappointed.
Everyone was finishing preparations to leave by the time I made it back to the road leading away from the den.
A covered cart took up most of the road, probably confiscated from a nearby farm.
Two oxen were hooked to the front of it, their eyes rolling as their noses lifted into the air.
Three cohorts of godkillers surrounded the cart and the oxen, and the animals could smell them.
We weren’t mortal, and neither was Kluehnn.
I hesitated at the edge of the group, as servants loaded supplies onto the back of the wagon, unsure of my place.
A pale hand emerged from inside the wagon, one eye peering out. A finger crooked. “Ride with me, Rasha.”
I obeyed, though I couldn’t help the dread clinging to my spine.
The interior of the wagon was a step up, the dark cloth stretched over the top letting in only a small amount of light.
Kluehnn’s aspect swiped a tongue over its teeth, a coordinated movement by both mouths, as though it had just finished eating.
“It’s a long journey. You don’t need the crutch anymore, but you should rest your leg a little. When we return, I want you to be ready to fight.”
I bowed my head and sat, wondering if I’d be able to lift my gaze this entire trip, or if I’d have to instead memorize the whorls and knots in the wood.
I’d rather be out walking with the other godkillers.
Strange – back when we’d been in Kashan, I would have leapt at the opportunity to spend so much time with an aspect of Kluehnn.
I’d have thought it an honor. Now, though, all I could think about were the small betrayals I’d committed, the lies I’d once believed as truth.
He was sending Khatuya and Naatar to fight without me, for the second time. If I deserved his ire, then I would take my punishment. But it felt unfair to punish them for what I’d done.
The way he was punishing the living gods for the sins of their ancestors?
“You seem troubled.”
Now I was glad of my gaze on the floor. “I’m just thinking about my cohort.” That much, at least, was the truth.
“Recite the precepts to me, child.” The wagon creaked, the wheels beginning to roll. “You will feel better.”
I didn’t.
He let me walk next to the wagon occasionally, when I begged to stretch my legs.
But mostly he wanted me inside with him – day after long and wretched day, as the mountains turned to golden foothills and then to flat plains.
He watched me eat my meals, his five eyes flicking at me and then away as I tried to be surreptitiously quick about shoveling rice into my mouth.
The aspect did not eat and I dared not ask him why.
I slept inside the wagon, lying awake late into the night, listening to the sound of Kluehnn’s breathing, always aware of where he laid his barbed tail.
It took sixteen days to reach Bian, even at a quick pace.
The aspect had taken to sleeping most of the day and night toward the end of our trip, as though it had tipped into hibernation, conserving its energy and strength.
I sat inside, feeling mostly alone, my mind wandering, tracing back everything I knew and thought I knew.
The archive. The books. The pages cut free, the bindings taken apart. The room with the yellow gems where the books came to rest. The gods had made a pact. I didn’t know what it all meant. I wished I’d been able to stay at the den, to question Mull when he’d felt better.
By the time the buildings of Bian rose out of the cracked earth, I felt a little like someone had shaved away pieces of my mind into curling strips, scraps discarded on the side of the road.
Kluehnn’s aspect stirred, one hoofed foot twitching. “You can get out. Tell them to go straight to the castle. The enforcers can take the cart to the stables. I want all my godkillers with me, including you, Rasha.”
Grateful, I hopped off the back of the wagon, stretching my stiff leg and luxuriating in the feel of the sun against my face. It was late morning. They’d have to serve us lunch, and tea, and I tried to focus on that instead of my wayward, treacherous thoughts.
I’d never been to Bian. The outskirts melded into the surrounding grasslands, the buildings seeming to gradually grow in height and size until they stood in the shadow of the wall between the inner and outer city.
The lower half of the plaster walls was coated in brown dust; a few broken shutters caught my eye.
The cobbles here were rough and unsteady beneath my feet.
The wagon rattled over the stones all the way up to the wall.
The gate was closed.
It took some pounding by one of the cohorts, and shouting that we’d come from Kluehnn’s den, and did they not pay fealty to the one true god?
But the doors finally opened, a retinue of wary-eyed enforcers giving us only the narrowest bit of space to pass into inner Bian before shutting the way again.
The difference between inner and outer Bian was stark.
The cobbles became smooth, the buildings mostly free of dust. I spotted several estates, the gates to their courtyards stamped with the seals of the clans.
One looked as though it had recently suffered a fire, half of the main building burned away, exposing the wooden struts beneath.
Several other buildings bore broken shutters, the empty space covered with translucent paper.
I frowned. An accident? Or a purposeful attack?
It would explain the closed and guarded gate.
The castle rose above it all, rooftops layered one on top of the other.
Someone must have sent a runner ahead of us, because the enforcers stood at attention at the bottom of the ramp, one out in front, set to greet us. She wore a silver armband over her upper arm. All the enforcers bowed as we approached.
The wagon came to a halt, and the back half of it creaked as Kluehnn’s aspect slipped from beneath the cloth.
It was no less terrifying by day, in the open city, than in the cloistered darkness of the cave.
All eight of its limbs seemed to stretch as it stood to its full height, its eyes cast down upon the enforcers as though they were nothing but insects blocking its way.
The filaments on its back writhed, each seeming to move of its own volition.
The enforcers fell before it, from simple bows to foreheads touching the ground.
The aspect’s rasping voice took on two separate tones, both mouths speaking at once. “I am here to meet with the Sovereign. You will take our wagon to your stables and you will host us here in the castle. It has been too long since I have myself seen Langzu’s great city of Bian.”
Without waiting to see if they would obey, the aspect started the climb up the ramp, cloven hooves clipping the stones.
I followed behind, aware of the enforcers scrambling, trying to figure out what they should do next.
The two by the doors paled as we approached, one putting her hand on the great handle while the other only trembled.
So only one door had swung open by the time we reached it, the other enforcer gathering himself enough to seize the other one, pulling it wide while Kluehnn stood there waiting.
He stalked into the entrance hall.
There was no one there to greet us. Through a carved square arch, I could see the great hall. The glimpse of a dark chair caught the corner of my eye, figures I couldn’t quite make out carved onto its surface, a red cushion its only adornment.
The aspect’s bulk moved between me and the arch.
The two cohorts spread behind me; I glanced to find them with their hands on their daggers.
Kluehnn rose onto his four hind legs, pale flesh out of place in this castle of delicate, fine things.
“I will meet with the Sovereign alone. Search the castle from top to bottom for any evidence of someone trying to subvert my will. Go.”
That meant me as well. I hesitated a moment before sweeping past the aspect into the great hall, searching for a set of stairs.
Sheuan. She’d walked these halls, feet touching the same floorboards I now walked upon. She could be here, sharing the same space, the same air as me.
And if someone here was subverting Kluehnn’s will, she was likely to know about it.
If it wasn’t her doing the subverting. It was one of the reasons we would never work, could never work.
She was a politician, through and through, and nothing she’d done had disabused me of the notion that they thought primarily of themselves.
For maybe a brief moment, when I’d inhaled her breath in that tent, when she’d twined her fingers in mine, we’d had an understanding. In that moment, we’d been one.
But time and distance had separated us. She would never understand me and I would never understand her, not truly.
I passed the chair, giving it a wide berth without knowing why. This close, I could see that the carved figures were the elder gods, one curved in and around the next. The glassy eyes of stuffed dead animals stared at me from the walls – some of which I recognized from restored Kashan.
The servants’ stairs lay a little ways past the chair, concealed behind a wall lined with potted plants. I dared to cup the green leaves of one. In this hot and dry realm, the air smelling faintly of smoke, the beauty and lushness of restored Kashan felt so far away.
I passed two servants on my way up, both of whom flattened themselves against the wall to let me pass as soon as they saw my gray robes, whispering Kluehnn’s precepts as they bowed their heads.
I knew that at least one of the cohorts would head to the uppermost level, straight to the Sovereign’s rooms, to search there.
Sheuan would have separate quarters on the same floor as the guest rooms.
I opened doors as I passed them, peering quickly inside before moving to the next.
The third room I opened greeted me with darkness, the shutters closed to keep out the heat.
The scent of ginger, mingled with a faint floral smell.
I knew that scent. Without meaning to, I inhaled deeply, living again in that moment when she’d kissed me in the tent, her hands firm but gentle.
What was more cruel? To betray someone you loved or to never love them at all?
What I’d felt for her wasn’t love, it was the shadow of a dream I’d thought I could hold when the sun rose, only to find it slipping inevitably from my grasp.
I left the door open behind me as I ransacked the place.
Kluehnn hadn’t told us to be gentle, or neat, or kind – and I knew his mind.
If I left anything untouched, he’d fault me for it.
So I stripped the bedspread, unbuttoned cushion covers, pulled out drawers.
All I found were books and clothes, all of them smelling like her.
My claws caught on the edges of cloth, scratching marks in fine wood.
How could all of this matter more to her? Just things. She’d spoken of her clan, of her family, yet she’d left them behind as well – all to marry the Sovereign.
I peered into the dresser, now emptied of drawers. Behind and below, in the hidden space, was a satchel. I stilled. If this were hidden, then it held secrets. Carefully, I pulled it free and sat on the edge of the bed, the blanket strewn at my feet.
I’d been angry when I’d turned over the room; now all that heat had fled, leaving me cold. Sheuan had known who and what I was, and I’d known who and what she was. I couldn’t pretend otherwise, no matter how much I wanted to.
And now I potentially held her life in my hands.
I opened the satchel; I couldn’t do anything otherwise. I had to see, had to know. A few clothes. I dug beneath them and felt something else. The edge of something rubbery. I pulled it free, lifting it to the light from the door.
A mask. Meant to be fitted over the nose and mouth.
No. A filter. Just like the one Mull had worn.