Chapter 13
~The Ex-Priest~
“War is always an excuse for the monstrous,” Auria tells me. We’ve climbed high enough we can’t see the raiders’ torches anymore. The light filtering through the fog on the headland is weak, but rising.
“Anyone who kills Angari is doing Orholam’s work,” I say.
“Darjan, all are his children, even the disobedient, and what you’re planning is forbidden,” Auria says. Her dark curls are matted with blood, her face blanched from its usual mahogany—from the bad light, I hope, and not from blood loss. I know it isn’t fear. Auria has never been afraid in her life. There are a hundred good reasons why I should listen to her. Karris Shadowblinder herself—Lucidonius’s own widow and heir—put Auria over me in our training. She’s older than me. Wiser, too.
But I’m stronger.
“I hate waiting for the light,” I say. I have a pair of Lucidonius’s marvelous spectacles, crafted by his own hand. Since he’s passed, you’d think they’re holy relics with how everyone treats them. Well made, though, anyone would admit. And utterly revolutionary. It hadn’t been that no one had thought of melting metal ores into molten glass for their color, it was that they couldn’t get the fires hot enough, couldn’t get the ores pure enough. Lucidonius had solved that, too, showing himself to be a mundane genius as well as a magical one. He’d been infuriating that way, but those lenses had changed everything, for drafters everywhere. A lens grinder, their mighty Lucidonius. In addition to everything else. Changing our lives in a thousand ways. Drawing us along behind him like leaves in a gale.
And leaving a terrible mess when the storm passed.
“As Pride is the first sin, so Power is the first temptation,” I intone. Lucidonius preached that, and became powerful, more powerful than the pagan priests and prophets. Pagan priests like me. I begin drafting.
I was a kaptan of the a?dar qassis gwardjan. Lucidonius’s words had somehow changed my heart, but I still wonder if they ever changed my mind. Or maybe it was the other way around. His words were enough to make me give up my comfort, my position, my place, my prestige, but now as I look down toward my new home, where doubtless the streets run red with the blood of my new neighbors and only friends, I think perhaps Orholam didn’t change me enough.
Every color is from Orholam, Lucidonius had said, holding a prism above his head as he preached peace and brotherhood between colors and countries. It had made sense to many, but perhaps especially to those like me, who can draw more than one color. In my land, my mastery of green had always been praised, but my use of blue condemned by my brother qassisin. Even though it made me a better gwardjan.
Maybe none of it made sense. Maybe Lucidonius was merely more right than those who’d come before him. Maybe what I’m about to do isn’t a sin against Orholam, that odd desert god who lives in the sky and everywhere, invisibly, rather than walking the earth like a proper god. Maybe it is. He’ll have to forgive me, for though I am no longer an a?dar qassis gwardjan, I cannot stop being a gwardjan. It is who I am. Who Orholam made me, if Lucidonius spake true.
I draw on the light, and my green jinnīyah is there, familiar to me as my dead wives’ faces—my beloved wives, forced into the orgiasts’ flames to expiate the shame and crime of my apostasy.
“I’ve missed you,” Aeshma whispers along my skin, her touch caresses.
I’ve missed her, too. Of course I have. But she knows that.
I expect her to be angry, haughty, to punish me for turning my back on her. But she’s more canny than that. First she’ll get her hooks into me. Later, she’ll punish. Nor does she go to my libido, once so potent, now seemingly dead since my ’Annaiah and Siana burned. Instead, she waits. Perhaps she sees from my face that the only pleasure I seek is the pleasure of battle, of red vengeance. Perhaps even after all this time she feels me directly.
“I would have made you the next Atirat,” she says, mournfully. She puts her hand on my wrist as I start to pour luxin forth from my skin there. “You were to be a god.”
“The daemon’s in your eyes,” Auria says. “Do you see her true, or do you see how she wants you to see?”
I remember when Lucidonius bent the prism toward me as my jinnīyah stood in front of my eyes, shouting blasphemies in my ears. The sudden wash of other colors had shown me what the priests of the other colors saw when they looked at her. In every other color, Aeshma was a horror. No wonder the other qassisin kuluri warred with us, called us daemon-worshippers. And then Lucidonius had flipped a mirror out, and in that full-spectrum light, I’d seen that even the green was a thin mask.
Aeshma was no beauty. She was all disease and ugliness.
I’d shattered the prism, shattered the mirror, swearing Lucidonius had ensorcelled it, that he’d tricked me, shown me lies. But I was wrong. Later, I’d done the same trick when I found other djinn foolish enough to manifest themselves in their priests’ eyes. The prism we used was a mundane prism, the mirror plain silver and glass. Eventually the Two Hundred had learned that we could expose them. They came up with elaborate lies to those they snared to explain why they no longer would appear at all—blamed it on the stain Lucidonius had brought to the world. Truth was, they didn’t want to be so easily unmasked.
Aeshma says nothing more. I know she was one of the foremost of the Two Hundred, nearly one of the Nine. A new Atirat is not born solely of one man’s conquering all human contenders. His partner jinnīyah must conquer all of her rivals as well.
The armor wraps around my body. I hold open only points at each joint. It’s not as efficient or flexible or reactive as how I had once done it—with every pore, every sweat gland, every hair a point of contact. Back then, I’d let my jinnīyah control the armor, shifting it, reacting to dangers I couldn’t even see, her immortal will complementing my mortal will. The two of us had been one in a way I couldn’t share even with my wives.
I draw on blue, looking above the frames of my green spectacles at the lightening sky. Blue is safe, for me. I never bound my will to blue’s. To me, it is only a tool, albeit one that cools my passions. My jinnīyah would never let me draft much blue. She was too jealous. I’d thought it was simply her nature, but now I see that she needed me all to herself if she was to win her fights with the other djinn. An Atirat who was not a pure green? Impossible.
As Pride is the first sin, so Power is the first temptation.
Funny how Lucidonius put that in the present tense, though telling a creation story. Not, Pride was the first sin. It made the thing applicable to us, as much as to the First Light. Good trick.
“My heart is yours, Darjan, but I cannot save you if you don’t let me help,” Aeshma says. Her voice is so like my dead ’Annaiah’s that I know she’s stolen even that. Clever, clever wench.
“You can’t listen to what she says, Darjan,” Auria says in the mundane world, voice weakening. “You know she lies.”
I know.
“Show me I can trust you,” I say aloud. I hope Auria thinks I’m speaking to her; I hope my jinnīyah thinks I’m speaking to her.
The light is good now. I start running toward the village. Another color might sneak in, hoping to find the raiders asleep, exhausted from a long night of murder and worse. That isn’t the way of green. My jinnīyah sings battle rage and bloodlust, and I know that she knows me too well.
Rage is not only red’s. I draft enough blue to make sharp edges for the thorn swords that sprout from my hands. My legs are sheathed in luxin, protecting my knees, adding springiness to each step, adding the power of my will to my movement, allowing me to jump farther than any mortal, to land safely, to run faster than a charging grizzly. I am become a beast.
I see the dead: a young woman, Luzia Martaenus, lying on her side with her head cracked like an egg, her baby-swollen belly run through half a dozen times. Her younger sister is dead, cut down closer to town. They’d tried to escape together. Ruy Garos lies facing town, his pitchfork lying in the sticky pool of his blood. Perhaps he’d tried to cover Luzia’s escape. He’d always loved that girl, though she’d married the town drunk instead.
Usually, the Angari raiders treated the people of Atan’s Town like a crop. Weed out the men who can fight, cut off the thumb of the right hand of the young men so they can still work, still breed, and take the prettiest women for slaves and concubines. Then the Angari would come back years later, long enough that the people could have built up a little wealth, but not long enough that they could build up enough strength to give the raiders much trouble. Of course, the raiders killed those who irritated them, too. Sometimes they killed for sport. Sometimes they maimed for fun. But this … this was something else. This was pure punishment, a massacre.
Everyone is dead. I see little Gonzalo, the farrier’s simpleton son. He’s been impaled on a pike, sodomized, the point of the pike sticking out of his gaping mouth up at the sky.
I howl, waking the whole goddam camp, and my Aeshma comes back over me, putrid and beautiful, a diseased whore. She is as ugly as what I plan to do, and my soul is a small price to pay for vengeance. It makes me monstrous. I am become a beast. I am become a god. Vengeance is mine.