5: The Holy Road (6 page)

He had done it all so easily, so naturally that he hadn’t noticed the deceptions himself. He had built an identity of being ordinary and done it so well that even he had forgotten that it was a lie.

No ordinary man, not even one from Basawar, could crush God’s Razor. Nor did they tear apart wood and iron simply by lifting their hands and willing it to happen. They did not close their eyes and see into distant cities. They could not see or feel the scars left in the Gray Space. They did not sense the life within the stones, earth, air, and water surrounding them. And the issusha’im did not hunt them.

John lowered his hands back to his chest. They felt hot even through the bandages. The pale canvas curtains surrounding him swayed and then went still.

There was no point denying that the Issusha’im Oracles had been hunting him. Not after last night; not after they had found him.

At first he had thought that it was just a dream, a distant memory returning to him in his sleep.

He watched himself climbing up the sun-warmed rock faces at Emerald Lake. The stone was hot, but he hardly felt it through the calloused soles of his bare feet. His eleven-year-old body was long and lanky, and slightly absurd in his wet, baggy swim trunks. What little hair that had remained after his weekly buzz cut had been bleached nearly white from the summer sun.

Honeybees darted between clusters of goldenrod and thistle blossoms, humming. The air smelled of pollen and nectar. Dark brambles of blackberries offered glimpses of ripe fruit hanging between their thorns. He stole a few berries as he climbed. His fingers were already stained and scratched from previous plundering.

At last, he reached the outcropping. Below him, the dark waters of the lake lay perfectly still, reflecting the wide blue sky like a mirror. His father and two brothers looked like toys out on their white fishing boat. At the water’s edge, his sister sat in her bright red bikini, reading a romance novel. Laurie and her mother lounged on faded beach blankets. A spread of tarot cards lay between them. Laurie’s mother was telling fortunes again.

His own mother was somewhere beneath the cover of the trees, unpacking their lunch and sneaking a cigarette. At the time, John hadn’t known that. Only later, while the ambulance sirens tore through the warm air and she clung to him crying, only then would he notice the smell of Virginia Slims on her. It would make him realize that she, too, had secrets she kept from the family. It would make him wonder if anyone was ever perfectly honest.

But none of that had happened yet.

He stood on the outcropping of stone, high above the deep waters. He grinned, feeling the warmth of the sun on his skin and basking in the brief moment before his leap. He took in a breath, preparing for the rush of fear and excitement that would surge through him the moment he’d step off the rocks.

Both Laurie and Bill screamed when they jumped, but John never did. John’s father had proudly pointed that fact out to Bill’s father a year before. Since then John had taken pains to maintain his silence. He pushed the air out of his lungs and stepped towards the edge.

Then something above him caught his attention—a flash, like some distant mirror catching the sun. John looked up as a blinding white bolt slammed down into him.

He saw their skeletal faces then, heard them hissing and whispering through him. He felt them searing words into his bones, binding him. The boy who John had once been screamed, while the man he now was clenched his jaws shut against the burning pain. Very distantly, he heard Laurie calling out to him. Her voice sounded like a thin whistle caught within the hundreds of growls and whispers that the issusha’im poured down over him.

Blood to bone, we binds it.

Where it goes Kahlil finds it.

Bleed the seas, burn the skies,

Tear the earth before its eyes.

Where it walks, Kahlil follows,

No respite in shades or hollows.

Fires burn, rivers flood,

Still it calls Kahlil’s blood.

Break iron, shatter stone,

Still we binds it, blood to bone.

White light seared into him. The weeds and flowers near him burned to ash. The rock beneath his feet cracked like glass. John watched as his skinny body arched up as if caught in powerful electrical current. Then the light was gone and he collapsed. Later, his mother would tell him he’d been struck by lightning. She would say that he had been so lucky to come away unscathed and that a host of angels must have been watching over him.

If she had been able to see those angels, made of skulls and bones strung together on thick wires, with bright red drops of blood pouring from them like rain, she might have thought otherwise. John himself had been terrified by the idea of those angels watching over him.

And now he knew. They hadn’t been angels or lightning. They had been the Issusha’im Oracles, binding him to the Kahlil. So now the Kahlil could cross through the Great Gates and would be drawn though the chaos of time and space straight to him.

John stared at the canvas panels beside his bed. The prayer bells had stopped ringing. Everything was so quiet that he could almost imagine that nothing existed beyond the enclosure of white canvas. The world was just him, lying in a small rectangle on a soft bed.

The dull glow of sunlight pushed through the panels, illuminating a corner of his bed. Very distantly, John heard the calls of birds. Most had already started on their migrations south. Only tiny blackbills remained. In another month they, too, would be gone. He could smell incense and the aroma of baking taye. No matter what he might want, the world intruded. Lying here behind a curtain would not keep it at bay. It would not keep him safe from the world.

Nor would it keep this world safe from him.

Before last night that thought wouldn’t have even crossed his mind. But now he knew that he was the Rifter. He knew what the Rifter did. It tore down mountains, turned skies to soot. He had already felt the sky shudder and crack in response to him. Stone and soil had answered his motions. He had pulled rain from the air. It had all come so easily that he hadn’t even noticed. He had no idea how easily it could slip out of his control.

He had seen the pictures of the Rifters before him. Their expressions were always wild and terrified as they stared at the earth shattering beneath their feet. The last one had cracked the entire Eastern Kingdom down to pieces of rubble, now lost beneath the sea. The Great Chasm was all that remained of that vast empire.

That kind of destruction was something bombs did, something earthquakes and volcanoes did. It shouldn’t have been within the realm of a human being. John couldn’t imagine himself doing something like that. And yet he couldn’t be certain. Until a week ago, he had also believed himself incapable of murder. Then he had killed Dayyid, without hesitation or any real regret. Now a mistrust of his own nature pervaded him.

Could such destruction be a reflex, something that he would do as instantaneously as he had torn apart that wagon? Was it some inherent characteristic, a choice, or a reaction? He knew that the Payshmura had unleashed previous Rifters upon their enemies. They had to have discovered the means to trigger the Rifters’ devastating capacities.

He had read the holy books. Again and again they spoke of poisoning and bleeding the Rifter. Maybe that was the means. Perhaps the destruction was a response to pain and fear. Or maybe it was controlled by the Kahlil, who was bound to the Rifter.

He couldn’t know, and he couldn’t afford to guess. He had to be careful. He had to keep himself from manipulating the world around him no matter how easily it came to him. He had to control himself.

John pulled the blankets in around himself. Laurie had taken this so much better than he had. Of course, she hadn’t re
ally believed John when he had told her that she was the Rifter. Chalk another one up for Laurie, John thought grimly. She’d been right. He wondered if she’d give him a smug little grin when he told her. Probably.

That revelation could certainly wait until they were all safely back in Nayeshi.

There was a soft knock at the infirmary door. Then John heard the door open.

“Jahn?” Ravishan’s voice was hushed.

John wasn’t sure that he was ready to talk to Ravishan. But he couldn’t hide behind these curtains forever.

“Over here.”

Ravishan walked to his bed quickly and opened the canvas panels. His face was pinkish from scrubbing and his black hair still wet. Thick white bandages engulfed his right arm. Ravishan crouched down beside the bed. He offered John a shy smile but then winced as the motion pulled at the tender scars on either side of his mouth.

John gazed at Ravishan’s mouth. The small scars curved up from his lips, giving the illusion of a slight smile.

If John hadn’t been there in Candle Alley when Dayyid had attacked Ravishan, then the wounds would have been far worse. They would have nearly severed Ravishan’s lower jaw. The scars remaining after Hann’yu treated them would have formed two pale lines running almost to Ravishan’s ears. John remembered stealing quick glances at those scars and wondering how a man got them. Now he knew.

John felt suddenly cold. He glanced up into Ravishan’s excited eyes. Even without the Prayerscars, John recognized Kyle’s face looking back at him.

All this time he had been living with Ravishan and he had never realized. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that they were the same person. John had recognized the similarity between them the first day he had seen Ravishan, but he hadn’t understood that the gates crossed time as well as space. Kyle had been a man in his early thirties, while Ravishan was a boy in his late teens. John couldn’t have known then that the gates had brought him back through time to Kyle’s youth.

But now it was obvious.

“I have good news.” Ravishan pulled a stool up to John’s bedside and sat. “The Issusha’im Oracles found the Rifter.”

“Oh?” John did his best to seem surprised.

“I have been chosen to be the Kahlil.” Despite his lowered voice, Ravishan’s tone reverberated with pride. “Last night I was bound to the Rifter.”

“How did that go?” John asked. It was all he could manage.

“He’s just a skinny boy.” Ravishan gave a soft laugh. “I could hardly believe it until the issusha’im struck him. The ground beneath him burned to black glass, but the issusha’im’s spell didn’t even scratch him.”

“What about you? Did it hurt you?” John eyed Ravishan’s bandaged right arm.

“They needed my blood for the binding,” Ravishan replied.

John gave a tired nod. Most rituals that Ravishan endured involved the spilling of his blood. So much so that, at twenty-one, he hardly took note of it.

John studied him, contemplating the future he already knew.

After fifteen years of spells, passages through the Great Gates and the Gray Space, Ravishan’s right arm would be a mess of ropey tissue. He would wear bandages with the same ease that other people wore sunglasses.

“For a moment,” Ravishan went on proudly, “I felt as if I were there with him. I could smell the air there and feel the heat of the sun. I even heard a girl call out his name.”

“His name?” John asked. Alarm prickled through him.

“Toffee,” Ravishan said firmly.

John nodded again, relieved. That was his nickname—Laurie had screamed it when she had seen him caught in that white bolt.

Ravishan grinned but then lowered his voice. “Once I receive the blessings of the Usho, it will be time to cross to Nayeshi. We’ll be free of this place.”

John had seen the blessings in holy texts. They were embodied by the Prayerscars, those black tattoos over the Kahlil’s eyes. Tattoos that would make Ravishan’s ignorant roommate wonder what kind of freak he was.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” Ravishan asked.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, you look…are you angry at me?” Ravishan lowered his gaze to his hands. “I wanted to tell you I was sorry about what happened in Candle—”

“No. It’s not that.” Everything that had happened in Candle Alley now seemed utterly insignificant. “I’m not angry. I’m staring because I’m amazed by you.”

Ravishan flushed.

John felt almost absurdly proud of Ravishan and of the man he would become. He would endure years alone in Nayeshi. He would never abandon his duty.

“It’s one thing to stumble into another world like Bill, Laurie and I did,” John said quietly. “But to choose to go—to abandon everything you know and give yourself to a foreign world—that takes true courage.”

During their time together in Nayeshi, John had seen Kyle watching the world around him with fearless fascination. He had eaten apples as if they were precious rarities. He had studied coffee pots, phone bills, baseball games and even sock puppets with a benevolent interest. John hadn’t been so accepting of Basawar’s alien qualities. Kyle had remained true to his purpose as a Kahlil, and yet he had seemed to cherish Nayeshi.

“I haven’t done it yet,” Ravishan said.

“But you will,” John replied.

Ravishan nodded as if he, too, knew that it had already happened. He was so assured, and he was right to be, John supposed.

“When you arrive,” John asked, “what will you be expected to do?”