The Killing Moon (Dreamblood) (15 page)

Nijiri frowned. “Foreigners don’t see truly in their dreams, brother. They wander helpless in Ina-Karekh every night. A fourflood child has more control.”

“Foreigners have the same innate abilities as we of Gujaareh, Nijiri. Anything a skilled narcomancer can do, they can—though only by accident.”

Nijiri held back a snort; the notion of a barbarian managing the same feat as the most highly trained Sisters, Sharers, and Gatherers seemed ludicrous. Did children write treatises?

“In this Bromarte’s case…” Ehiru sighed. “Up to that point he had been no different from any other stubborn, frightened dreamer. But then he said to me, ‘They’re using you.’ ”

Nijiri frowned. “What did that mean?”

“I don’t know. But I
felt
the truth of his words. And tonight, when the Kisuati woman said the same thing…”

“So that was it.” Nijiri squeezed his hand. “She is corrupt, Brother. A professional liar by her own admission.”

“Then you dismiss her tales of dead prisoners, and a conspiracy to begin a war?”

“Dead prisoners would hardly begin a war. And anyhow, every account that I have read of war speaks of its terrible destruction and suffering. No one would start such a thing deliberately.”

Ehiru glanced at him, and Nijiri was startled to see a smile on his mentor’s face. “Ehiru-brother?”

“It’s nothing. Just that I forget your youth at times.” Ehiru drew up his knees and wrapped his arms about them, gazing up
into the sky. Tiny pale Waking Moon peeked timidly out from behind her greater sister’s curve; sunrise would come soon. “I envy you that youth.”

Nijiri gazed at Ehiru in surprise and read faint lines of regret and worry in his mentor’s profile. “You believe the woman’s tale.”

Ehiru sighed into a breeze. “When the Bromarte had his true-seeing, I mishandled the dream out of surprise. But after he was dead, I saw something else. A man, I think, on the rooftop across. He was
wrong
, Nijiri. I can’t explain it. His movements, his shape, the feel of his presence; I have never been so frightened in my life.”

Nijiri shifted uncomfortably. “A vision. A manifestation of your guilt.” He had heard that strong narcomancers were sometimes plagued by such things. The dreaming gift was not always easy to control. “Flush with dreamblood—”

“No. The dreamblood was rotten; I was sick with it, not enraptured. What I saw was real.”

“The Kisuati’s Reaper?”

“I can think of nothing else that would have sent such dread through my heart.”

“But to become a Reaper, a user of dream magic must fail the pranje, refuse the Final Tithe, go un-Gathered by our brethren for fourdays, somehow remain unnoticed by others while he goes slowly mad…” He shook his head, unwilling to believe. “It’s impossible. Our brothers are too wise and faithful to let such a thing happen.”

“I imagine those long-ago Reapers had faithful brothers too, once.”

Nijiri sucked in his breath and stared at Ehiru. Ehiru smiled
bleakly, his eyes lost in the distance. The words settled into Nijiri’s heart like stones, and he fell silent beneath their weight. Perhaps out of respect for Nijiri’s turmoil, Ehiru stopped talking as well, and they both brooded for a while.

Eventually, though, Ehiru sighed. “I saw what I saw, Nijiri. And if there are twenty dead men who saw the same thing…”

“Well, that’s for the Superior to determine.” Nijiri got to his feet and brushed off his loindrape decisively. Ehiru glanced up at him, a look of mild surprise on his face. “We must return to the Hetawa and report this. And you must go to the Sharers to request an infusion.”

Ehiru raised an eyebrow. “One display of ill temper does not make me out of control.”

“Not alone. But there have been other signs, haven’t there?” It was unseemly to speak of such things, except when they had to be said. Ehiru squared his shoulders, radiating stubbornness; Nijiri pressed on. “I was trained, Brother, though I never got the chance to properly serve. Have you seen more visions than usual? Have there been times when your hands shook?”

Ehiru lifted a hand and gazed at it. “The morning of the Hamyan.”

He’d let himself suffer for two whole days? Nijiri scowled. “Then it must be done. You Gathered no tithe tonight. By tomorrow night you might be hearing voices, seeing enemies under every leaf—”

Ehiru got to his feet and faced him. “I believe I know my own pattern, Nijiri, having experienced it every year for the past twenty.”

It was a mild rebuke as such things went, but it silenced Nijiri
anyhow. He bowed his head, fists clenched in shame and anger at being reminded of his place. But a moment later Ehiru sighed and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll go to the Sharers if that will ease your fears,” he said. “And then we’ll both go to the Superior—”

He paused then, cocking his head. Nijiri frowned and opened his mouth to ask what was the matter, but before he could speak, Ehiru held up a hand to shush him. He pivoted slowly toward the north, squinting along the flow of the river. The rooftops had become still as the Dreamer’s fat curve at last sank out of sight, leaving only the deep monochrome darkness cast by Waking Moon’s pallid light. No birds sang; not even a breeze stirred the laundry-heavy clotheslines. The city was silent.

No. Not silent. A few blocks away, echoing up from the street, Nijiri heard the slap of sandals on stone. Running.

“Light,” Ehiru whispered. “A woman, perhaps. Or a child.”

Nijiri swung about to orient on those running feet as well, tensing as a thousand possibilities—most of them dire—ran through his mind. “A messenger. A servant on an errand.” A rapist. A murderer.

They fell silent again, listening. The rhythm of the runner changed, skidding now and again, faltering and then resuming. Nijiri frowned, for there was something indisputably urgent about the sound of those running feet. Something
frantic
.

Ehiru lifted a hand in a quick signal:
follow in silence
. Nijiri obeyed at once as Ehiru abruptly set off, leaping from the roof on which they stood to the next, and then running along another. Their course, Nijiri realized as he ran behind his mentor, would intersect that of the runner in a half-block or so.

Ehiru stopped at the edge of a squat storage house’s roof, peering over its wall into the street below. No one was in sight. The patter of feet had stopped.

From an alley on the other side of the building—the direction in which they’d last heard the runner—they both heard a sharp, frightened cry.

Ehiru was moving before the cry’s echo faded, running with no further attempt at stealth. Nijiri scrambled to keep up. Even after ten years of acrobatics training, it still shocked him when Ehiru reached the roof-edge and slowed not one whit before leaping off. He flipped in the air, his hands reaching back to catch the wall as he fell; his feet braced against the stone to cushion the impact. An instant later he let go, dropping another man-length to land on fingers and toes, his eyes fixed on the dark beyond the alley’s entrance.

From that darkness came a soft hiss.

Nijiri skidded to a halt on the rooftop, his heart pounding. There was no easier way down. Swallowing, he took a deep breath to focus as the Sentinels had taught him, and concentrated on the opposite wall of the alley as he repeated Ehiru’s flipping trick. He fouled the final leap, however, landing without injury but stumbling.

Before Nijiri could regain his balance, something flew out of the dark and struck Ehiru. It looked like a badly packed sack of clothes; it had yellow hair. The Kisuati woman’s girl.

Hananja have mercy!

Ehiru grunted as he was borne down by the dead weight of the corpse. As he struggled to extricate himself from flopping limbs and a lolling head and horrible, horrible sightless eyes,
Nijiri moved to help—and gasped as something else came out of the dark and struck him so hard that his vision went white. He hit the cobblestones with painful force, too stunned to do more than flail weakly at the thing that had struck him. But this thing was no corpse.

“Pretty child,” whispered a voice in Nijiri’s ear. Fear froze him; the voice seemed barely human, low and rough. “I will enjoy your taste.”

Hands as strong as iron caught Nijiri’s arms. One of them pinned his wrists above his head. The other, smelling of dirt and bile and a four of other foul things, fumbled over his face. Nijiri shut his eyes in reflex as fingertips pressed against his eyelids.
Wait, this is—
But just as he understood—

—He woke screaming, somehow freed. Terror pounded through his blood so powerfully that he rolled to his side and vomited a thin sour trickle, then could not find the wit to move away from the mess. Instinctively he curled himself into a ball, praying for the fear to pass and for the sick throb of his head to either go away or kill him and be done with it.

Dimly he heard the sounds of flesh striking flesh, the scuffle of sandals on stone. A feral snarl, like that of a jackal.

“Abomination!” Ehiru’s shout came to Nijiri through his misery and some of the fear faded. Ehiru would keep him safe. “You shall not have him!”

A rough laugh was the creature’s reply, and Nijiri whimpered, for somehow he had heard that laugh in his nightmares—but he could not remember the nightmares.

The cobblestones vibrated as feet pounded over them, out of the alleyway, running away. Then hands lifted Nijiri, cradling
him against warmth and muscle and a hard-beating heart. “Nijiri? Open your eyes.”

It had not occurred to Nijiri that his eyes were closed.

Then fingers touched Nijiri’s eyelids. He thrashed and opened his mouth to scream, terrified. But something sweet and warm and exquisite brushed against his mind, soft as flower petals, soothing away the terror.

When Nijiri opened his eyes, Ehiru’s worried expression brought reality back to him, though in fragments.

“Thank the Dreamer. I thought your soul had come completely untethered.” The world shifted dizzyingly as Ehiru lifted Nijiri in his arms. “The Sharers will be able to heal you fully.”

Then the world began to bob and wheel in a mad dance as Ehiru ran with him. Nijiri’s last sight before unconsciousness was the gem-layered glow of dawn.

It happened so rarely that Ehiru was summoned to perform his duty. Oh, the commissions were summonings in their way—submitted through intercessors, assessed by committee, and sanctified with prayer before a Gatherer ever saw them. So distant, that way. A direct summons was better. Then the Gathering could be performed by daylight, treasured, celebrated. The tithebearer could pass into eternal joy with family and friends near to witness the wonder, and bid farewell.

But so few truly believed in Hananja’s blessing or welcomed it as they should. All the procedure, all the stealth had been designed for them—those of weak faith, or none at all. Even now Ehiru noted the ones who drew away as he walked through the streets in his formal Gatherer’s robe, face hooded, the black oasis rose visible on his shoulder. It saddened Ehiru that so many of Hananja’s citizens feared Her greatest gift… but perhaps that too was Her will. The greatest mysteries of life—or death—were always frightening, but no less marvelous for that.

In the merchant quarter: lovely, sprawling houses surrounded him. He reached the one he sought and found its inhabitants waiting, formally dressed and solemn, flanking the open door in twin
rows to signal that the way was clear. A tall, pale-skinned elder was the master of the house. He bowed deeply as Ehiru passed, but not before Ehiru caught his eyes and read the faith there. Here was one at least who did not begrudge the Goddess Her due.

But for now his duty was to another. Ehiru said nothing as he passed the old man and entered the dwelling. She would be in the servant quarters. He stepped through a hanging and discovered a vast courtyard where a lesser house’s atrium would be. Several tiny cottages clustered here. Some showed personal touches—a flower garden in front of this one, inexpert glyphs decorating the walls of that. He examined each house in turn, contemplating what he’d fathomed of the tithebearer from her note. It had been brief, using the blocky pictorals of a semiliterate rather than the more elegant hieratics taught to higher castes. Simple language, a simple request, written inexpertly but with care… His eyes settled on the nearest of the cottages. Conservatively decorated, comfortable in appearance, linked to the house by a neat path of river stones. Yes, this would be the one.