Heir of Iron (The Powers of Amur Book 1) (16 page)

“He is the head of the Uluriya.”

“But you are a miserable specimen of your little cult. I know you, Navran. My search for you, even from this distance, taught me much about how you’ve spent your life. Most of your time has been among unclean people, working unclean jobs, and drowning yourself in drinking and debauchery. Tell me, how often have you been sanctified by ram’s blood in your life? How often have you prayed? Do you cleanse yourself as your law requires? Do you even
know
the requirements of your law?” He gave Navran a contemptuous glare. “You were born to the cult of Ulaur, but that’s all. You have no claim to it, and it has no claim on you. So why should you suffer rather than give me the name and place of the Heir?”

It was all true, and for a moment he considered answering. But—no. Cauratha was an innocent old man. Navran had taken his money and abused his hospitality, but he couldn’t betray him to the Emperor. He wasn’t as far gone as that.

Or so he hoped.

“I don’t know anything about the Heir,” he said.

Ruyam examined Navran for a moment through half-closed eyes, his tongue flicking out between his lips like a serpent. “Do you want to see the Emperor?”

Navran bowed his head. “I dare not lay eyes on the Emperor.”

“You dare not. As if you’ve suddenly learned prudence and proper speech. But you do not have a choice. Follow me.”

Ruyam rose to his feet in a single fluid motion, his silk robe rippling around him like a curtain of oil. Navran cautiously rose from his knees and followed Ruyam around the cushion and deeper into the darkness of the chamber. They passed through the thin curtain of an inner door and came at last to a wholly lightless alcove. Cinnamon and frankincense cloyed the air, masking an underlying smell of urine and an unwashed body. Somewhere in the darkness pottery scraped against stone, and Ruyam’s face appeared lit by a coal. He blew on the coal to light a lamp.

“Here is your Emperor,” Ruyam said. He swung the lamp around until the light fell on a ghastly figure lying on a mat on the floor.

Navran stepped back with a gasp of disgust. The man’s face was a waxy sheet of skin stretched over a skull, his lips pulled back from brown, rotting teeth. The man’s eyes were completely occluded with white. He raised a hand to paw at the air, as if trying to grab a hold of those who had disturbed his sleep. A white tongue appeared between his teeth, and a phlegmy gasp rattled in his throat. His lips pressed together with a horrible, wet, rotten smack, dribbling yellow saliva from the corners of his mouth.

“When I first came here in disguise ten years ago, his mind was already weak,” Ruyam said. “It was simple for me to ascend to his favor, even in disguise. If he has any mind left now, it whimpers helplessly inside his rotting body. I keep him alive until I’m ready to make myself public.”

“Why are you showing me this?” Navran said. He had backed into the edge of the door frame trying to put distance between himself and the
thing
struggling on the floor.

“So you understand who I am. There is no emperor who restrains me. The Red Men have sworn their loyalty to the Hand. I have the gift of farsight and the mastery of fire that I learned at Ternas. Amur is mine more surely than it ever was the Emperor’s.”

He leaned close to Navran and whispered in his ear. “All that remains is to find out whether I’ll destroy the Uluriya with your help or without.”

Navran stepped back and fell through the curtain onto the floor. His stomach turned. “Why do you want to destroy us?”

Ruyam bent and seized Navran’s arm, then yanked him to his feet. “It doesn’t matter. You can give me the Heir and reap my gratitude, or defy me and be destroyed with your kin.”

“No. I can’t.”

Ruyam dragged him back to the entrance of the chamber and threw him to the ground before the curtain. “Kirshta!” he shouted.

The boy crawled on his knees through the curtain. “Yes, master?”

“Rise and take this man away. Tell the Red Men to put him in the lower dungeon.”

“As you wish.”

Kirshta’s arms clasped over Navran’s shoulders. Navran shook free, but in a burst of movement Kirshta wrestled Navran to the ground and pinned his face to the floor.

“Do I need to call the Red Men?” he hissed. “They’ll do worse to you.”

Navran went limp. “No. I’ll go.”

Kirshta grabbed Navran’s hand, jerked him to his feet, and led him from the Emperor’s chamber. The guards at the entrance to the foyer let the two of them pass without comment. Once they were past the guards and alone on the descending marble stairs, Kirshta leaned over and whispered in Navran’s ear.

“Did you resist?”

Navran couldn’t fathom what Kirshta wanted by asking this. Was the boy Ruyam’s apprentice or not? Was this some elaborate scheme to break him? At a loss, he decided to answer simply, “I’m going to the dungeon.”

“That you are. If you can resist that as well, there may be a chance for both of us.”

Navran broke off his tale. Something was wrong with Gocam. The hermit had closed his eyes and clutched his fists to his chest, and his lips moved in a silent mantra. He exhaled slowly, a sound like a single subdued sob creaking out of his throat, and he looked at Navran.

“My child lives,” he said. “My weakness is nearly complete.”

“Your child?”

“A child of the spirit, not of the flesh. Ruyam was my disciple. That was why I ascended the mountain.”

“I don’t understand.”

Gocam rubbed his hand on his chest and closed his eyes. “Did you think I always lived on the mountain? Forty years ago I was the Lama of Ternas. Ruyam came as a young man, the child of a khadir who had shown some promise in the way of the Powers. So I taught him. I taught him everything I knew, and then I drove him out.”

He sighed and opened his large, milky eyes to stare at Navran. His expression was guileless and unafraid, but its very openness unnerved Navran. “Should I confess the evil in my heart to you,” Gocam asked, “as you confess to me?”

“I have no advice for anybody,” Navran said.

“I don’t need counsel. Listen: I hated him because I was the strongest in Ternas, and none surpassed me in farsight or the mastery of fire. Until Ruyam came. When I saw he was nearer to the Powers than me, I drove him away so he could not threaten me. The imperial court is a comfortable, respectable position for a young monk, and I thought he would molder there far from my leadership. But I underestimated him. He gained the Emperor’s ear and turned the Red Men against the Uluriya—and then I realized my folly. I renounced my position as Lama, ascended to this cave, and set out to become someone new.”

“Because Ruyam turned against the Uluriya? That wasn’t your fault.”

“But it was. How do you suppose he knew to oppress the star-cult?”

“I don’t know.” He had wondered sometimes why Ruyam sought to drive out the cult of Ulaur but had never dared ask. Mandhi and Cauratha seemed to take it as a matter of course.

“It was because I told him. I didn’t tell him to slaughter them, but he learned from me the secrets which lie in Amur’s bones. Among those secrets is the fact that Amur will fall to the Uluriya, unless the Emperor destroys them first.”

“I have never heard this prophecy.”

“It is not a prophecy as most people think of prophecy. This fact has long been known to the thikratta of Ternas, not because we foresaw it, but because we understand the nature of the Powers.”

Navran shifted on the bed of pine beneath him. The cold seemed to be leaving him at last. And despite himself, he found that he was glad to talk and listen to Gocam. He would never admit it to Mandhi, but he no longer regretting coming to Ternas.

Gocam went on. “The union of Amur depends not on the might of the Emperors alone but on the union of Powers which undergirds him. Before Aidasa began his campaigns he wedded Am and Ashti and unified their temples, binding together the great powers of Sravi and Davrakhanda, and turning Sravi into Majasravi. And under the aegis of Am and Ashti he subdued the cities of Amur and made their Powers subservient to his patrons. Jakhur, Chaludra, and Dhashi bow to Am and Ashti, and so the peace of Amur is maintained. But there were two Powers whom Am could not subdue, the oldest and most terrible Powers in Amur. One of them sleeps, and the other is Ulaur.”

Navran laughed. “If the Uluriya hinder the empire, we’re doing a terrible job of it.”

“The Uluriya themselves do nothing to hinder the Emperors. But your existence means that Am is not the only Power in Amur, and Ulaur kept you safe long after the center of Manjur’s kingdom fell. Rajunda fell and became a byword. Manjur fell, and yet his descendants prosper. Aidasa knew this, and he attempted to exterminate you for it. Later Emperors abandoned Aidasa’s policy as pointless, but Ruyam knew that it mattered. So he persuaded Jandurma to revive the purge.”

Navran exhaled and pressed his head into the rough blanket. He had thought more about Ulaur and the Powers in the past few minutes than he had in his entire life. And still he understood nothing. “You are not Uluriya,” he said.

“No. Ternas has no Uluriya.”

“Then why do you care?”

“The Lamas of Ternas have been your allies since the dawn of the empire. Aidasa threatened the thikratta as much as the Uluriya when he took power, and we took refuge with each other. And also… I consider Cauratha my friend. I regret the sorrow I unleashed on him and his people.”

“If that’s the worst you’ve done, then I have you beat.”

“It is not a contest, Navran. And the corruption of the soul isn’t so easily weighed. I actually went to Majasravi once, after Ruyam had begun the purge but before he marched to Virnas. I urged him to recant, offered to take him back at the monastery, and implored him with the alliance between Ternas and the Uluriya. He laughed at me. He was too much my disciple: sick for power, eager to subdue, too proud to listen. Such was I when I was the Lama. Am I so easily absolved of his actions? I taught him to be who he is.”

“You’ll think worse of me when I finish my story.”

Gocam was quiet for a while. The fire spat. Wind moaned in the entrance of the cave. “When I came back to Ternas, I renounced my position as Lama. And I climbed the mountain to this cave, where I have lived ever since.”

“Are you stronger than Ruyam now?” Navran had a vague notion that the thikratta derived their power from their ascetic disciplines. Surely, after thirty years of living in a cave, Gocam must be nearly one of the Powers himself.

“Stronger?” Gocam shook his head. “I came here to forget power and learn weakness. If it comes to a contest of power with Ruyam, he will destroy me.”

“Then what was the point?” Navran said, his voice suddenly loud and jarring against the walls of the cave. “Did you go up the mountain so that you could defeat Ruyam or just to feel sorry for yourself?”

Gocam leaned forward, his eyes fixed on Navran, and reached into the fire. Navran gasped and lurched backwards, prompting a spike of pain from his limbs. The flame passed through Gocam’s hand like water through a sieve. He grasped a coal which lay in the heart of the fire and lifted it from the flames. Its edges flickered with red and white, growing brighter and cooler as his breath passed over it.

“When I studied power, I had the mastery of fire. I could pour flame from my hands and burn flesh from bones. That is the way of strength and dominion.” He watched the coal for a moment then glanced over to Navran. “Put out your hand.”

Navran extended his hand towards Gocam. Gocam dropped the coal into it. Navran yelled, batted the coal back into the fire, and pulled his hand away. His palm was scalded from the heat.

Gocam reached into the fire and picked out the same coal, holding it casually in two fingers. “When you study the way of weakness, you will put your hand in the fire, and it will not burn you. And then, how will the master of fire harm you?”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“You asked me if I had the strength to defeat Ruyam. I do not, nor should you seek such strength. Those who summon flames will be consumed by them in the end. Even I will not survive the fire which I stoked in my ignorance.”

“How is that supposed to help me?”

Gocam was quiet for a while. His eyes were closed, and his chest heaved. “I don’t know how the Uluriya will be delivered from Ruyam, but it will not be by power. More likely, Ruyam will be burnt by his own fire. But you should sleep. In the morning, I want to hear more of your tale.”

Navran rolled over. The mat was thin, the stone cold and hard under his shoulders. He did not want to sleep, though as soon as he let his mind wander to sleep his muscles cried out for it. “I still don’t want to be Heir,” he said quietly.

“It would be a problem if you did,” Gocam said. “Now sleep.”

Navran awoke screaming. His legs thrashed against wet stone. His hands flailed wildly, beating on slime-covered walls and bloodying his knuckles. His voice echoed back at him in a cacophonous howl. He blinked. He saw nothing. He blinked again. And then he remembered.

He was in the dungeon beneath the imperial palace. He saw nothing because there was nothing to see except darkness. If he
did
see something, it would mean he was going mad. Was he going mad yet? It would be a relief if he were.

He looked up. Still nothing.

He was alone. He was never getting away.

His cage had originally been a cistern in the lowest keeps of the palace, or so he inferred. The cistern was mostly empty, but water still condensed on the stones and trickled to the bottom, where a few inches of foul water stank around his ankles. The walls were damp and slick with grime. The bottom was mud, which churned up a bilious, sulfurous odor when he stepped. He had screamed and kicked when the Red Men brought him, but they had forced him into the hole, and when they let him go he slid, shredding fingernails and the flesh of his toes all the way to the bottom. A wooden cover sealed the top. When they first put the cover over the hole, he could see a rind of torchlight around its edges, but in a few minutes it shriveled away. Then the darkness was total.

He had yelled and beaten the walls until he was hoarse. No one answered. Eventually he slept. He had no idea how much time passed. Waking was like sleeping, full of nothing but darkness and nightmares.

Many-legged things crawled over his hands. He shook them off, sputtering curses. He pissed and shit in the muck of the cistern. He slammed his head against the stone, hoping to knock himself out, fall into the water, and drown. When he failed at that, he fell into the water and sobbed and licked at the hot blood that dribbled down from his forehead.

Time passed. He lapped at the trickles of water on the wall to slake his thirst. He thought of trying to catch and eat the many-legged things crawling on the walls and mucking up the water, but failed to lay a hand on them. He rested his head against the wall and waited to die.

He slept.

He dreamed.

“Navran!” Father shouted. “You piece of goat shit. Where are you?”

The pile of firewood beside the house hid him from Father’s view. He crouched and peeked through the gaps between the sticks to see if Father was getting close. The man’s face was red and inflamed with rice beer, and he held the halves of the sickle handle in his hands.

“You keep hiding, boy, and I’ll break your bones like you broke this sickle.”

Navran pressed himself closer to the mud wall of their house. On the far side of the woodpile, he heard Father stumble in his drunkenness and fall to the ground. He swore loudly and smacked the halves of the handle against the ground, then rumbled to his feet, cursing and yelling down the road. Navran let out his breath.

An insect ran over his hand. He reached suddenly to scratch it, but his movement made the sticks rattle. With a monstrous groan Father turned towards the sound and lurched around the corner. Stealth had expired—Navran jumped to his feet and ran.

He didn’t get far. Father’s long arms snagged him by the wrist then jerked him around to stare into Father’s spittle-flecked face. He grabbed Navran by the throat and squeezed.

“Do you have any idea how much a sickle handle costs to fix?” He shook Navran violently then threw him to the ground.

Navran choked and gasped for air. Father began to beat him with the splintered halves of the handle, screaming incoherently. Navran curled into a ball and covered his face. The blows battered the top of his head and ribs. He did not cry, though. He never cried.

Father stopped for a moment and grabbed Navran by the wrist, jerking him to his feet again. “You hiding down there on the ground? No, you look at me.” Father grabbed Navran’s jaw and jerked him around to face him.

His other fist punched Navran in the ear. An agonizing ringing exploded in Navran’s head, and he crumpled to the ground.

“You filthy, worthless child,” Father said, kicking him in the shins. “Go away and leave me alone.”

He threw the halves of the sickle handle to the ground and stomped into the village, his curses following him like a tail.

Mother meekly washed the wounds with goat milk and gave him a half a bowl of rice to eat. He drank four cups of water before he went to bed. Then he lay awake on his dirty reed mat until late in the night, when Father came stumbling through the door smelling of beer and collapsed next to the fire. A moment later he was snoring.

The moon was high in the sky, and sheep and goats bleated outside the window. Navran crept forward and picked up his father’s leather beer flask where it had rolled from his hand. He tip-toed out the door and found a spot in the shade where he could pour out the beer. It fizzed and crackled as it soaked into the ground. Then he hitched up his dhoti and peed into the flask.

Once the flask was nearly half-full again, he screwed the cap on. Inside the house, he hooked the flask on the nail in the mud wall where it belonged, then lay down on his own mat in the far corner of the room. Aching and satisfied, he slept.

Navran woke up in darkness. He began to thrash his legs in a panic, splashing chilly water and muck against the walls. It smelled of urine and rot all around him. Then he remembered.

He had been dreaming or remembering. Was there any difference in the darkness? Memory and madness were one and the same.

His chest heaved for a few moments while he sat in the muck, then he lurched upright and felt the walls. There was the trickle of water. He pressed his lips against it and drank, licking the mold-covered wall until his thirst was slaked. Then he collapsed against the wall and cursed.

Sometime later he had to pee. The sound of the splashing trickle and the slight warmth spreading through the water around his ankles were the closest he came to pleasure in the darkness. He smiled.

“You know how to play sacchu?” the man said.

“Like how we played sheep knuckles back in Idirja?” Navran asked.

“Idirja?” The man laughed. “Where in Am’s asshole is that?”

“Up the river. I just got here—”

“You just got here?” The man smiled at Navran in a way that momentarily disarmed his wariness. “My name is Amitu. Yours?”

“Navran.”

There were three other men playing with the carved whale-tooth dice on the dirt floor of the guest-house, who barely looked up as Amitu rose and clasped Navran’s hand. Aside from the four gamblers, the only person in the guest-house was the owner, who was in the kitchen banging pots together. The smell of boiling rice soaked the room.

“So here’s how it goes. First, you put a chit into the pot and throw a pair once…” Amitu explained the rules and the technique in rapid-fire jargon which Navran barely understood. After racing through it once, he suddenly looked surprised, and then leaned close to Navran and asked, “Do you have money?”

“Yes,” Navran said, clutching the parcel to his chest. He had stolen it three days ago. It was Mother’s stash, the one Father didn’t know about, where she piled up whatever spare coins she could scrape together. At midnight he had dug it up from its place at the corner of the house, wrapped the handful of coins in a wool rag, and disappeared.

“Then you’re fine. Cakthi’s with you and you can double that tonight.”

He played. And to his surprise, he won. The little pile of coins got half as big again, and when he looked up from the game the moon was up and the guest-house was half filled with people eating rice and glancing at the gamblers.

Amitu grinned at him. “You have fun?”

Navran stood up. “Yes, but I should get some sleep. I’ve been walking for twelve days.”

“You’re not staying here, are you?”

Navran hesitated. “I was going to.”

Amitu shook his head. “Listen, we play here, but I can get you a better place to sleep. You come with me?”

“Sure,” Navran said.

They descended the stairs in front of the guest-house and walked a few blocks. The other gamblers followed them in a loose knot. Then, once the moon hid behind the crown of a temple, a blow hit him on the back of the head. The world spun and fists battered him on every side. It only lasted a moment, and then he hit the ground with a grunt.

Amitu and the other three ran cackling down the alley, his money jangling in their fists.

He crawled through alleys cursing and fuming until he found a covered nook. He stared up at the moon as it crawled through the sky, until at last sleep found him.

When he woke up, he realized that if he stopped drinking the water, he would die sooner. How long would it take? Two days? Three days? Three days with a dry tongue, rasping and hacking and craving a taste of liquid as it crawled down the wall next to him.

He would never make it. He was too weak to die like he wanted to.

It would be starvation, then. It would take longer, and be just as painful, which is why he deserved it. Mercy was not for him.

Perhaps Ruyam and the Red Men would have pity on him and simply kill him directly.

The eastern sky was turning filthy gray when a boot in his side woke him up. He opened his eyes. The haze of beer had receded, leaving a headache like a demon’s bite, and his bones creaked from the cold and the stone underneath him.

“Get up,” the voice said. “What are you doing here?”

A face emerged from the blurry gloom. An Uluriya man, his long hair untied, still dressed in the salwar kameez in which he had slept.

“I was sleeping,” Navran said. “I collapsed here. The stars upon you, will you help me?”

“Get out, you unclean animal.”

“Please, by the stars. I follow Ulaur….”

Contempt curled the man’s brows. “You lie. How did you get here?”

“I have no money. I was robbed months ago. Please, believe me—”

“Where is your family?”

“Far upriver. Idirja.”

The disgust written on the man’s face softened into curiosity. “Idirja! That far? Why don’t you go back to them?”

Navran stared at him with a cold, horrified expression.

“Fine,” the man said after a moment. “Come inside.”

The house was a modest tailor’s home, with a tile floor beyond the front door and a tiny walled courtyard beyond. The man and his wife gave Navran a laver to purify himself, though it had been so long that he had to stop and remember how. The ablutions in his own household had been so perfunctory and so sloppy that he was afraid he would offend them if they saw how he did it, but fortunately no one intervened. Then, with clean hands and clean clothes, they let him sit at their table and eat rice and soft cheese. They asked his story, and he gave it. Most of it. He left out the money he stole from his mother, and his own drunkenness and gambling. The rest was the truth.

The wife berated her husband for his poor hospitality, and she insisted that Navran spend the night. He sat listlessly in their courtyard all day, helping the man cut cloth when asked but otherwise enjoying the unusual feeling of having food in his stomach.

The man’s tailoring knives were fine, well-honed bronze with ivory handles. He couldn’t help but notice them. Worth as much as anything else in the house, he guessed.

That night he slept, but the betrayal in his blood woke him before dawn. He hated it, but he knew what he was going to do. He found the knives where the man had hidden them, under a mat in the courtyard. He hid them inside his shirt, where the bronze bit into his ribs with cold vengeance. His steps to the door were silent, and he escaped.

At dawn he sold them then he found a guest-house and drank until he passed blissfully into unawareness.

He awoke, desperate with thirst, and pressed his lips against the trickle on the side of the wall. He licked the putrid stone, getting every drop of moisture he could find, then he collapsed to the bottom of the well. The briny muck sloshed over his thighs.

How long had it been since he had tasted beer? As many days as they had marched him up from Jaitha, plus as many days as he had been in the dungeon, however many that was. This was as long as he had been sober in years. He hated it.

Time passed. He might have slept, but sleeping, waking, and remembering had all grown hard to distinguish.

Scraping and footsteps above him. Boots stamped through puddles. Voices echoed. Yellow light etched the circle of the well above him. He had already seen visions and heard voices, so at first he didn’t stir.

Wood scraped over stone. A torch appeared directly above the well. Its brightness scalded his eyes. He shouted and put his hands up. A curse echoed down the well, and a harsh voice commanded, “Grab the rope.”

A rope? He squinted and saw a cord dribbling down the green walls and drooping into the water. He leaned forward and grabbed it. The man above heaved the rope up, but the coarse fibers ripped through his hands and burned his palms. He cried and fell back into the muck.

“Wrap it around your arms, idiot,” the voice above commanded.

The rope descended again. Navran attempted to do as instructed, wrapping the rope multiple times around his forearm and clutching the mass to his chest like a monkey seizing a branch. When the rope was heaved again Navran began to rise. The skin of his shoulders scraped against the slime-covered walls of the well, and his knees banged against the stone. But he rose.

When he reached the lip of the well he squirmed over the top and collapsed onto the muddy floor of the dungeon. He gasped for air, and made no resistance as two Red Men bent over him and unwound him from the ropes.

“Let me see him,” a new voice commanded. Ruyam’s.

Navran heaved himself up to his knees. A swish of silk brought Ruyam before him, the green and turquoise of his robes dancing in the flickering torchlight. Ruyam knelt and seized Navran’s face in his long, bony fingers.

“Eat,” he said. He thrust a soggy crust of roti into Navran’s hands.

Navran stared at the food. Was it a trick? Poisoned?

He didn’t care. He shoved the roti into his mouth, chewed it once, and swallowed.