17
The Gatherer had meditated, he had prayed, but it was not enough. It was never enough. In the end, when the mind forgot prayers and lost the ability to meditate, all that remained was the terrible, ceaseless gibber of raw need. Only one thing could silence that need. In the morning they would come, in the morning they would come; this became his reason for existence. Until then, nothing to do but endure. Distract himself. A boy lay pinned beneath him with eyes shut. An offering. The Gatherer lifted his free hand to stroke one of the boy’s cheeks, marveling at the beauty and innocence of youth. He could devour that beauty, paint himself with that innocence. Would that erase the sins of his life? Perhaps he could find out.
He felt no rage when he first drove his fist into the boy’s belly. It had been a way to distract himself, nothing more. But as the boy’s eyes opened wide, filling with shock and agony and the horrible sick awareness of what death might feel like when it came, something replaced the drumming, churning need: relief. The boy had never experienced such pain before. He was terrified. And at the sight of another’s fear and agony, the Gatherer’s own diminished. Just a little, but even that helped.
Oh, yes. And such lovely eyes the boy had. Like desert jasper.
So he lifted his fist and brought it down again, and again, soon finding himself delighted by the boy’s cringing, his whimpers, his hoarse garbled pleas. Eventually there was blood too, and that gave him the greatest pleasure of all.
*
Ehiru came awake with a gasp, his heart pounding in the cool darkness of Etissero’s house.
It could not have been a dream. He had hardly enough dreamblood to sustain his life at the moment, and even if he’d had more, it could not have been a dream. He had not dreamed in twenty years.
A vision, then—but a horrible, sickening one. Ehiru sat up, putting his forehead in his hands to dull the ache that was caused by exhaustion, sleeping outside of his normal pattern, and his soul’s growing need. He could barely think around that ache, but he knew his basic narcomancy well enough. Most visions were born from memories. Nijiri had never served him in the pranje, and therefore Ehiru had never beaten Nijiri. He couldn’t have. To deliberately inflict such pain on another was not just corrupt, it was alien to his very being.
Unless his memories were not so clear as he believed. Or unless the images plaguing his rest had been not a vision of the past, but a true-seeing of the future.
He moaned, too empty of peace even to pray.
“Ehiru-brother.”
His hands formed fists and his body swung upright, coiling itself to attack. But the figure that sat on the couch opposite Ehiru in the breezeway did not move, waiting for him to calm. That consideration cleared the sluggishness from his mind so that he could think at last. Nijiri.
Ehiru’s belly clenched. Did I ever hurt you? he wanted to ask, but he could not muster the courage to face the answer.
Nijiri’s dim form stirred and came over, crouching beside his couch in a pool of Waking Moon’s light. Ehiru’s fear eased at the naked concern on the boy’s face. Could someone he had used so cruelly still love him? Surely that was his proof.
“You’re not well, Brother,” Nijiri said. He spoke in the softest of whispers, as on a Gathering. “You need an infusion.”
“I need peace,” Ehiru replied, and winced as his voice cut the silence, hoarse and louder than usual. “But She denies me that even in sleep.”
Nijiri took Ehiru’s hand, fumbled with it, and lifted it to his face. He held the fore and middle fingers apart, trying to lay them on his own closed eyelids. An offering—
“No!” He jerked away; Nijiri frowned. “My control is weakening, Nijiri. I might not stop with just a little.”
“Then take it all, Brother.” Nijiri gazed up at him steadily. So trusting! “You know I’m not afraid.”
The words teased forth a memory of their first meeting: the bringer of death and the child who welcomed it. That memory had always brought Ehiru peace and it did not fail to do so now, pushing back the confusion and misery that the false-seeing had caused. He exhaled. “Hananja hasn’t chosen you yet, and I will not risk your death. I can hold for a few days more. There will be others who need Gathering. There always are.”
The boy scowled. “I don’t like that plan, Ehiru-brother.”
“Nor do I. But the only alternative is to return to the Hetawa, which we cannot do yet.” He paused as the implication of the boy’s presence finally sank in. “You should be there, though. Why aren’t you?”
“Sonta-i-brother and Rabbaneh-brother sent me to help you escape the Sunset Guard.”
“What?”
Nijiri squeezed his hand to silence him; Ehiru had been too shocked to keep his voice down.
“The Reaper is an abomination against the Goddess,” the boy whispered. “The Superior and the Prince have not done their duty in destroying it, therefore we—you and I—must hunt the creature down.” He hesitated, then added, “Doing so will also prove your purity, Brother. We’ll be able to return to the Hetawa then.”
Blessed Hananja, was I such a fool at sixteen? If so, thank you for letting me see forty. “Rabbaneh and Sonta-i should have known better than this. Even if we destroy the Reaper, we can no longer trust the Hetawa. Someone there created that monster.”
“And once we return to the Hetawa we will find that person, or persons,” Nijiri said, doggedly. “Easier from within the Hetawa than without. We can seek aid from the Council of Paths—”
“Whose members may themselves be involved in this nightmare—”
“Then we’ll purge them, too!” Startled, Ehiru looked at Nijiri and saw that his expression had gone fierce and cold. It was a fleeting glimpse of the Gatherer that Nijiri would one day become, and in spite of everything Ehiru felt his heart swell with pride.
“Sonta-i-brother reminded me of our path’s role,” the boy continued. “Must I remind you? If the Hetawa has become corrupt then it is our duty to purify it, under Hananja’s Law. It is that simple, Brother.”
That simple.
Ehiru sat back against the wall, feeling his world invert once more. Could it really be? He took back his earlier prayer, instead thanking Hananja for once more granting him the clear vision of sixteen, if indirectly through Nijiri’s eyes. Two days’ worth of unhappiness and confusion faded from his heart, and for the first time in what felt like ages, he smiled.
“Sometimes it’s wise for the mentor to listen to his apprentice rather than the other way around.” Ehiru squeezed Nijiri’s hand, then waved toward the other couch in the breezeway. “Rest. In the morning we leave with the Kisuati woman. We’re going to Kisua.”
“Kisua? But the Reaper is here.”
It was, but the answers that Ehiru needed—the who and the how and the why of it—were not. Killing the creature would not eliminate the corruption underlying the whole affair; he could trust no one in Gujaareh. But the woman Sunandi sought the same truth as he, and in her homeland she had the resources to perhaps uncover it. Corrupt or no, she would be useful to his cause.
“We’ll return here afterward,” he told Nijiri, “but first we resolve the matter of the woman’s abeyance. If what she says is true, then the Reaper may be only a symptom of much greater sickness.”
“In what way?”
Ehiru sighed as some of his peace faded. He had known it could only be fleeting. “A purge may be needed throughout all Gujaareh.”
By the time we finish, the Hetawa’s stores of dreamblood will overflow.
SECOND INTERLUDE
This truth Gujaareh has never liked to acknowledge: our Hananja is not the greatest of the Dreaming Moon’s children. She is not artful like Dane-inge, who dances rainbows across the sky to mark the end of floodseason. Nor is She industrious like Merik, who grinds down the mountains and fills up the valleys left by his father’s rutting. Yet it was given to Hananja to see to Her family’s health and happiness—an important task in any lineage, to be sure, but even more so among immortals. Thus did She create the place we call Ina-Karekh, where Her fellow gods might entertain themselves with every wonder in imagination. But because there was nowhere to put this place—for Ina-Karekh is vaster than both the heavens and earth—She kept it within herself. She taught Her brothers and sisters to separate out their innermost selves and send only that to Ina-Karekh, leaving the rest behind. And because the gods found our kind entertaining, She shared this gift with mortals too.
One might say this was a kind of madness, however. Consider: our Goddess has invited so many to dwell within Her mind. How does She think Her own thoughts? Where in all of Ina-Karekh are Her own dreams hidden—if She permits Herself anything at all?
Then consider the following.
When the Gatherer Sekhmen was a child, he could not sleep unless the Moon Sisters sang to him at night. He tried to sing their songs to his siblings in the House of Children, but they heard only silence.
As an acolyte, the Gatherer Adjes conversed most earnestly with Gujaareh’s Kings on their Thrones of Dreams.
The Gatherer Me-ithor showed signs of the dreaming gift early, but his parents were faithless and tried to keep him from the Hetawa. At seven floods he slew his mother in her bed, thinking her a monster.
In the Gatherer Samise’s times of pranje—of which I speak only to illustrate my tale—it was necessary that his nails be wrapped in hekeh strips, with a wooden bit strapped into his mouth, or he would bite and claw himself to free the insects beneath his skin.
Do you think I malign their names in saying these things? Did I malign the Goddess, by suggesting that Her madness infects her Servants? I mean only for you to understand this: the dreaming gift has always been a two-edged blade. But as She taught us—is it not wisdom to seek the treasure in what others might scorn as a curse? Is it not civilized of us to make of madness, magic?