Chapter 18

Ahkio clung to the banister looping about the tongue of the grand stairway where Kirana’s husband, Lohin, had fallen. Gaiso huffed blood on the landing just above them, her attempt at joining Lohin and his band of Garika militia cut short by a snarling attack from Nasaka that happened so fast, Ahkio had barely had time to process it.

He felt the heartbeat of the temple beneath his fingers. His mother had told him the temples were living, breathing embodiments of the gods. Oma was already here, pulsing through this temple, bathed in the blood of militia from Clan Garika.

And to what purpose?

Lohin’s breath was ragged. He was a stringy young man with a twisted mouth and kind eyes. The weapon he carried was plain metal; only the militia were issued weapons infused with the power of the satellites.

Below, in the foyer, half a dozen dead Oras and more than twenty of the Garika militia lay dead or dying. Ahkio knew because he’d counted them as he came limping out of the Sanctuary after the novice, Rohinmey, incapacitated Almeysia. But one body he had expected was missing.

“Where’s Yisaoh?” Ahkio asked Lohin.

Lohin huffed at him, something like a guffaw. “I led this coup myself.”

“You’re the sort who doesn’t act without a stronger person’s backing, Lohin. It’s why you married my sister.”

A young novice named Caisa stood below. She was a lean young woman, freckled and high of forehead, with an affinity for Para. She was the one who had pushed him toward the Sanctuary when the militia burst into the foyer. She may have saved his life from the Garikas. And the boy, Rohinmey, had surely spared him from Almeysia’s wrath – whatever that may have been. Almeysia was bound and drugged now, spirited off into the bowels of the temple at Nasaka’s order.

It should not have surprised Ahkio that novices would be more trustworthy than Oras. They’d had less time to choose sides, so they fell on the side of the divine Kai. It gave him an opportunity, and though he abhorred politics and twisted ethics, sitting here in this pool of death made him realize that however much he hated it, if he wanted to live, he had to embrace it.

“Do you have the physician for Lohin?” Ahkio asked. “He’s fading.”

“Ora Matias has been killed,” she said. “The physician.”

“I see.” Ahkio finally saw fear in Lohin’s pained face. “And my cousin?”

“Liaro’s in the infirmary. We’ve called physicians from Clan Sorila. But Liaro isn’t that bad, Kai. He’s just a complainer.” Her color deepened. “I’m sorry. I meant–”

“I know what you meant,” Ahkio said. “Thank you.”

Caisa shifted from foot to foot another moment, looking contrite, then stepped away to help with the bodies.

Ahkio noted the blood pooling on the steps. Lohin would not survive long enough for a physician to walk the three or four hours from Sorila. He wondered if Lohin knew that yet.

“Did Yisaoh tell you I’d marry into Rhin and Hadaoh’s family?” Ahkio asked. “It could have spared you this.”

“They won’t have you.”

His grimace was ugly. “They won’t.”

“You’re likely going to die here, Lohin.”

He whimpered. “Let me alone.”

“You killed Oras, Lohin. You nearly killed my cousin.”

“You aren’t Kai.”

“I’m Kirana’s brother.”

Lohin hacked up a smattering of blood. He whispered, “Your mother’s babies all died, Ahkio. All but Kirana, and she was sick from the start. You aren’t Javia’s.”

“You’re saying my mother stole someone else’s child? You Garikas are all mad.”

“Not stole. Freely given.” Lohin’s breath was shallow.

“Who do you think?”

“My Aunt Etena?”

Lohin hacked out a laugh. “Stupid. So much stupider than your sister. Should have been you.”

“Nasaka,” Ahkio said.

Lohin snarled. “Her, with a stillborn baby?” he said. “Same week… Javia pushed you out… first to live since Kirana. No one believed it. No one.”

The hacking stopped. Lohin’s face softened. Ahkio saw the light go from his eyes; the tension left his body.

Ahkio slid down onto the steps, favoring his injured side, and sat quietly next to Lohin’s body. He remembered that story. Nasaka’s single pregnancy. Was there anything Nasaka wouldn’t do for the Dhai? Below, the militia Nasaka had called from the Kuallina Stronghold worked to clean and bundle the dead. He saw Elaiko and Caisa working among them, directed in the task by Ghrasia Madah, head of the militia at both the Liona and Kuallina strongholds. She was a fierce little woman, wading through blood and bodies like a person well used to death. He recalled her face from many a portrait – she had led the defense of the Liona Stronghold during the Pass War, when the Dorinahs tried to take the country twenty years before.

Ghrasia could have sided with the Garikas, but she’d chosen Nasaka and the temples instead. That loyalty, he knew, had been the only thing to save them today. Without her two dozen militia, they would have had to turn the gifted arts of jistas on the Garikas. That would have ended any hope Ahkio had of uniting the country. The ungifted would have turned on the temples. The day could have been much worse.

He stood, called down to Elaiko, “Where’s Nasaka?”

“Meditating in the garden, I think. Is Lohin-”

“He’s dead,” Ahkio said.

“I’m sorry, Kai.”

“He was no kin of mine,” Ahkio said.

Ahkio forged his way through the bloodied foyer, passing Ghrasia as he did. She gave him a brief nod, and he hesitated, asked, “When did Nasaka send for you?”

“This morning,” she said. “She suspected there may be… conflict. We arrived just in time.”

“Wish she would have expressed that… concern to me,” he said.

“Ora Nasaka’s methods of protecting the Kai tend toward less information, not more.”

“I’d like to change that.”

Ghrasia smiled, almost a smirk. He might have found it insufferable in a novice, but coming from this hard-faced leader of the militia, it was endearing. “I wish you luck with that.”

“Thank you for coming, regardless of why.”

“I would have done the same for your mother.”

“Noted,” Ahkio said. His mother. Yes. Either of them.

“Noted?” she said. “Is that all you have to say, when eight of my best lie dying here, and a good many of your kin by marriage?”

It was an unexpected punch. He rounded on her. “I have half the country out to kill me and anyone who stands next to me. I know exactly what happened here today.”

He strode away before she could reply; he wanted to remember the smirk, not what came after.

Ahkio found Nasaka in the gardens behind the temple, sitting within the stone circle dedicated to Sina, her star. A great violet orb hung suspended over a massive stone base. Tremendous red-and-purple flowers wound up the boughs of the weeping trees. She sat back on her heels, eyes closed.

He waited for her to acknowledge him. She did not.

“I’m going to bring the bodies to Garika,” Ahkio said. “I’d like Ghrasia to escort me.”

“I don’t recommend that,” Nasaka said.

“Blood’s been spilled,” Ahkio said. “I understand why it’s been done, and I need to fix it.”

“You have no idea,” Nasaka said.

The anger and betrayal bubbled up. Like being on fire. “I do have an idea,” Ahkio said. “It has something to do with dead babies.”

Nasaka raised her head. “What are you nattering about?”

“The Garikas seem to think I’m not Javia’s,” Ahkio said. He felt heat in his face and choked on his next words. It made him angry, because he knew. He knew without it being said. “You had a stillborn child, they said. The same week my mother had me. My father said it’s why you cared so much about our safety. It’s why he told you we were going to that camp in Dorinah, even though my mother wanted to go alone. You knew where we were, and that’s the only thing that saved Kirana and me that day. You’re my childless aunt. It made sense to me. Now I wonder if that was just the easier assumption.”

Nasaka placed her hands on her knees and regarded the violet orb. “I had reports last week of a dead way house keeper.”

“Don’t avoid my–”

“Dead right there in her house, untouched… surrounded by the mangled bodies of three men. Men we still haven’t been able to identify. Dhai men without families. Impossible, wouldn’t you say?”

“There are dead Garikas in there accusing me of not being my mother’s child, saying I’m a man with no right to this seat, and you’re going on about a way house keeper?”

“You know what’s important, Ahkio? That this country has a legitimate Kai. Especially now.”

“Ah, yes. Now,” Ahkio said. “Yisaoh tells me you and Kirana knew about the coming of Oma for years. Is that true, too?” He hadn’t wanted to bring it up; Yisaoh played a good game of dividing allies against one another, but if Nasaka conspired to lie to him about his own birth, he couldn’t imagine how many other lies she’d told him.

Nasaka stood. She gestured to the wooded gardens all around them, and lowered her voice. “Can you imagine a time when none of this exists? All turned to dust. Eaten by fire. Did Kirana and I entertain ideas of Oma’s rise? Certainly. But Oma has been spoken of for centuries. It so happens the Garikas were within a decade of being right. Sometimes prophets of the cataclysm get lucky. I have more important things to concern myself with now than the mad rumors of a power-hungry clan trying to get us to eat each other.”

“If I married Meyna–”

“Meyna! Have you learned nothing yet?”

“I’ve learned plenty,” Ahkio snapped. “I know that path is closed.”

“And which have you picked? Or will you mire yourself in this rumor? Curl up and weep on that bloody floor in there and piss about how your life turned out?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll go to Garika and return their kin. And I’ll exile them. Every last one of them.”

Nasaka stiffened. It was a rare day he could shock her, and he found himself grimly pleased.

“If you exile the Garikas, you’ll exile–”

“I know who I’ll be exiling,” he said.

“And I need an assistant, someone I can trust, to start helping me here. Not you or someone bound to you.”

“I’ll find–”

“I want Caisa, that novice parajista who fought with us today.”

“That… would not be my first choice.”

“An even better reason to have her next to me,” Ahkio said. “You’ll be sending scholars north with Ora Dasai soon, is that right? That hasn’t changed?”

“He’s selecting his scholars, yes.”

“Have him send Rohinmey.”

“The novice who attacked Ora Almeysia? Absolutely not.”

“He was defending me from harm. I have my reasons.”

“What does that boy have to do with anything? You realize we just bartered away a kitchen drudge for that boy’s life, and you want to send him to Saiduan?”

“I’m Kai,” Ahkio said. “It’s my business. Do you understand now, Nasaka, or should I repeat myself?”

“Good. You’ll be interrogating Ora Almeysia?”

“Bring her to Osono when you can get her to speak.”

“Because that’s where I’m going after Garika. I want the person who killed my sister, Nasaka. I have no trouble angering you, or Ghrasia, or any of the rest, to find that out.”

“You realize, boy, that you will only sit that seat so long as you have people, like myself, loyal enough to keep you on it.”

“Dead babies,” Ahkio said. Nasaka’s expression was icy. Bile rose in his throat, but if she dared threaten him, he’d call her bluff. “I think you’ll be loyal to the bitter end. As any kin of mine would.”

Ahkio turned on his heel. He felt sick, but he pushed on without looking back. He managed to make it halfway back to the temple before he stepped discreetly behind a stand of willowthorn trees and vomited. He crumpled to the ground and stayed very still in the shadow of the trees.

Nasaka could crush him, he knew. But she would not crush her own son. Not after she’d worked so hard to give him this bloody title.

The massive Ora libraries took up the entire eleventh floor of the temple. Roh bounced in one of the grand chaises in the central reading room while Dasai stood nearby, scowling. After the fighting downstairs, most of the novices were confined to quarters, and the Oras were helping with cleanup. Roh tried to still himself under Dasai’s gaze, but it took a great bout of effort. They waited for the Kai, who’d insisted on seeing them in the libraries instead of his study. It was an odd request, and Roh suspected it made Dasai even more nervous than it did him.

Roh stared at the glass-encased shelves that stretched twenty feet up the walls. He remembered spending hours in here just a few weeks before, searching through old historical texts and geography books for the symbol Lilia had drawn in the back of a book of Saiduan poetry. If caught doing research for a drudge, he expected he could lie his way out of it. Attacking an Ora, though… there was no way to talk himself out of that.

“You think he’ll exile me?” Roh asked Dasai.

“Let’s hope so,” Dasai said. “Using the gifted arts against another Dhai… you knew better.”

“I was defending myself,” Roh said, “and the Kai – the Kai! – against an Ora. We can use our gifts against other Oras.”

“How is it you go from your death bed to attempted murder?”

“It was self-defense!”

“Causing the death of another is always murder,” Dasai said. “All that changes is the punishment.”

“I think she was the one who attacked me,” Roh said. “She stabbed me, Ora Dasai, because she saw me with Yisaoh.”

Roh started at the voice. It was the Kai, stepping through the broad double doors. He closed the doors behind him. His hair was still caked in the blood of the former Kai, twisted back from his face with a fireweed cord. “Ora Dasai,” the Kai said. “I didn’t expect you.”

“The boy is my student,” Dasai said. “In Ora Almeysia’s absence, I wished to speak for him.”

“There’s nothing to speak of,” the Kai said. “Rohinmey… Roh, correct?” Roh nodded. “Roh and I have some things to speak about. More than I thought, it seems. Ora Dasai, I expect you’ll have preparations to make for your journey to Saiduan.”

“We were waiting on Ora Chali, Rohinmey’s brother. He is among my finest Saiduan speakers, and he had some business to complete here before we went north.”

“Roh’s brother? That’s excellent. Excuse us now, Ora Dasai.”

Roh looked to Dasai for direction, but Dasai merely pressed thumb to forehead and retreated. He paused at the big double doors and fixed Roh with a final stern stare before closing them.

Roh started bouncing on his seat again.

“Are you all right?” the Kai asked.

“Yes, Kai. Just… nerves.”

“Ahkio, please.”

Ahkio sat on a chaise at Roh’s right, settling back against the pillows.

“Are you going to exile me?” Roh asked.

“Exile?” Ahkio laughed. He had a good laugh, though there was a bitter bite to it. “No, I’m not going to exile you.”

The threat of exile unraveled, Roh had an irrational hope that this was going to be a romantic encounter. Would the Kai praise him for helping him, and be in Roh’s debt?

“So, you believe it was Yisaoh Alais who attacked you?”

“I know it,” Roh said. He told Ahkio what he remembered of the encounter, and felt suddenly light-headed. He rubbed at his belly, where the knife had pierced him. “Is it odd she used a blade,” he said, “and not an infused weapon?”

“Infused weapons are registered to their owners,” Ahkio said. “A skilled jista could have tied it back to the Ora or militia member it was gifted to. It makes sense she would use a blade.”

“What did I see that I had to die for?” Roh said.

“Yisaoh doesn’t want me on this seat,” Ahkio said. “That’s no secret. But it does interest me that… well, I have others to speak to about that. This isn’t why I brought you here.”

“You want to go to Saiduan,” Ahkio said. “I’ve heard Ora Dasai and Ora Nasaka debating it, these weeks they thought you dead.”

“I want it more than anything,” Roh said.

“Especially now.”

“Where do your loyalties lie?” Ahkio asked.

“My… Oh.” Yisaoh and the dead people downstairs were from Clan Garika, just like him. “I know I’m a Garika, but that’s just my clan. I’m not related to Tir’s kin.”

“You showed me that in the temple this morning,” Ahkio said. “What I want to know is if you’re an Ora first, or a Dhai.”

“If you asked me to swear an oath to you, I would,” Roh said.

“Ora Dasai will permit you to go north,” Ahkio said.

“But… he really doesn’t–”

“He’ll take you with him. I’ve asked Ora Nasaka to speak to him. But there’s a condition.”

“I’ll do it,” Roh said. He pushed his hands under his thighs, because he wanted to jump out of his seat and hug the Kai. A profound sense of relief washed over him. He had pulled on Para, and faced down an Ora in defense of the Kai, and changed his fate. He’d known all along he could do it. He caught himself grinning.

“You’re happy to obey Ora Dasai?” Ahkio asked. His tone was somber. Roh’s grin faded.

“I… well, shouldn’t I?”

“I need you to obey me first,” Ahkio said. “It’s no secret things are very bad and people are divided. I need someone I can trust in Saiduan. You’re a talented boy and a Garika who’ll still defend the Kai. I need you to work for me now, for Dhai. You understand?”

“I think so.” He really didn’t care to understand. All he cared about was seeing the tundra for the first time, and fighting with sanisi, and building some big life outside a farmhouse.

Ahkio said, “My sister, Kai Kirana, is dead. It wasn’t a natural death. There are many who would want her dead, the Saiduan among them.”

“How… how could I help?”

Ahkio pulled something from his tunic pocket – a sheet of green paper with neat rows of Dhai characters set beside jagged lines of script.

“I’m not asking you to uncover any great plot. I’m just asking you to tell me the truth as you see it. I need someone there with fresh eyes who isn’t Ora Dasai. Will you go to Saiduan and tell me all you see?”

“I will,” Roh said. His grin was back, and this time, he could not suppress it. “Thank you, Kai.”

But the Kai’s face was somber. Roh tried to match his expression.

“This is the cipher of the Kai,” Ahkio said. “We’ve used it for thousands of years to pass messages among kin. Today, I’m going to count you as kin and turn it over to you. It’s how you’ll send word of what you see in Saiduan and how the battle is progressing there.”

“I know you’re a smart boy,” he said. “Ora Dasai does not speak highly of the dim-witted, nor does he try to keep them from being exiled. Hopefully, you can learn this in a few afternoons.”

“I will. I promise.”

“Roh, this part is important,” Ahkio said. Roh sat up a little straighter. “You’re not to tell anyone else what you’re doing. Not Ora Dasai. Not Nasaka. No one but me. Put your trust in me, and if anything happens to you, know that I’ll do everything in my power to help.”