22
Jungissa stones may be touched only by those in the service of Hananja.
(Law)
The Reaper does not serve Hananja. It no longer needs a stone.
*
Niyes was a fool to think he could escape this nightmare, thought Charris.
Now General Charris, elevated to Niyes’s place. Once Charris might have been pleased with the appointment and with the oblique victory over his old rival, but no longer. Now he would have given anything to be able to hand the title back to Niyes, and the foul duty that came with it.
The prisoners knew they were to die. They moved reluctantly, only after much shoving and shouting on the guards’ parts; Charris could see the despair in their eyes. They could not have seen the heavy-walled, locked wagon that Charris had brought with him to the prison, and which now stood in an adjoining courtyard. They could not have known about the monster locked inside it—yet still they seemed to sense the imminence of death. Criminals they might be, but they were true Gujaareen as well.
Because of that, Charris—normally more pragmatic than devout—prayed for them. May Hananja watch over you in the dark places you’ll inhabit for eternity, he whispered in his mind. And may you die better than Niyes did, for I saw his body when that thing was done with him.
“Sir.” Charris turned to see one of his message-riders standing at attention, escorted by one of the prison guards. The rider was sweaty and filthy, all but swaying with exhaustion. Charris narrowed his eyes and ordered the guard to go fetch lemon-water and salt. Then he pointed toward the floor, and the rider gratefully sat.
“Report.”
“Orders were delivered to the southeast garrison by messenger bird two days ago,” the rider said. “Another bird was dispatched from there to the southwest. The southeast commander distrusts birds for critical information, so he sent me to deliver the message to—” He hesitated. “To the high desert. I killed a horse getting there, but delivered the message successfully. On the return journey I passed through the border town of Ketuyae. The minstrel caravan crossed the river there a fourday ago.”
“Just four days? You’re sure?” Barring storms or accidents, the fastest desert route to the Kisuati Protectorate’s northernmost trade-town was usually seven days. Ketuyae was a day out of Gujaareh. They would be past Tesa by now, half their journey completed.
“Yes, sir. But the desert commander assured me that his troop would be able to catch up to the caravan. They have good trackers. And they have Shadoun horses, bred and trained for the high desert and twice as fast as any camel.”
Which meant that it would take another day, perhaps two, for the garrison troop to find and catch up with the minstrel caravan. Right at the border. Charris could only pray that Sesshotenap, the commander of the desert force, would have enough sense to send his men without Gujaareen livery. All they needed was for a Kisuati patrol to catch a party of Gujaareen soldiers where they weren’t supposed to be, dispatched from a garrison that wasn’t supposed to exist, trying to kill a Kisuati ambassador. War was coming—Charris wasn’t blind—but an incident like that could precipitate it sooner than the Prince wanted.
And if that happens, I’ll be lucky if he only beheads me. Which reminded him of the task at hand.
The guard returned with a salt biscuit and a cup of lemon-water, which he held for the messenger, as the man’s hands would not stop shaking. “Take a fourday’s rest,” Charris said, “but you must leave this place to do it. Guard, help him to the stables.”
The messenger started and spilled a little of the water down his chin; out of habit he wiped his chin and licked the moisture from that hand. “Sir? Begging your pardon, but my horse is half dead, and I’m not much better—”
“You may have a fresh mount from our stable. But you should go quickly.”
“It’s a whole extra day to the city from here, sir!”
Charris scowled. “Stay, then,” he snapped. “But when you hear what’s about to happen and the sound haunts your nightmares for the rest of your life, remember that I tried to spare you.”
He turned on his heel, ignoring the messenger’s confused “Sir?” behind him. As he walked off the parapet into the tower stairwell, he heard the prison guard telling the messenger to leave and not be a fool. Ah, but of course; the prison guards had witnessed this horror before, though on a lesser scale. They knew what was to come better than Charris himself did.
On the ground level the warden of the prison met him, his craggy face tight with nervousness. “Your, ah, guest has been restless, sir,” the man said, turning to walk with Charris. “We tried to put food through the window-bars, but he growled at us and flung it out. We could try again—”
“No,” Charris said. He reached for his hip-pouch and took out the rough chunk of jungissa-stone that the Prince had given him. “Food isn’t what he hungers for right now. Make certain your men are out of the courtyard, and then wait.”
He walked through the arched corridor that led to the other courtyard. Normally prisoners were let out to exercise here, but at the moment the dusty yard held only the reinforced wagon. The horses had been unhitched to stop them from chafing against the harness; they kept trying to get away from the wagon. As Charris walked toward it he heard nothing from within, though he sensed the attention of the thing inside. The window-shutters had been nailed closed save for the one used to feed its occupant. This one was barred, but as Niyes drew close he saw only darkness within.
He stopped just beyond the range of any arm that might extend through the bars and took a deep breath to school his thoughts. The Prince had given him explicit instructions, but between the pounding of his heart and the knowledge of what was to happen, he could barely remember them.
Then he heard something stir within the wagon. A halting voice, thick and clotted, spoke from the darkness. “Is it sunset, Brother? Will… will we go out tonight?”
Charris swallowed and tapped the back of the jungissa to set it humming. “Not tonight,” he said, keeping his voice soft, no louder than the stone’s hum. “But there is work for you here. Can you feel them? Gath—” He faltered, sought another word. “Assembled nearby. One hundred men in the next courtyard over. They have been judged corrupt and require your aid.”
There was a shifting sound from within the wagon; the faint clink of chains. “I feel them. So many…” Then the voice hardened. “So many corrupt.”
Charris swallowed. “Yes. You must take them, Brother—all of them at once. Do you understand? From where you are, without touching them. Can you do that?”
The scrolls were explicit, the Prince had told him. In every account, Reapers could do this and more, Charris—see without eyes, kill without hands, drink life like wine and spit back wonders. Magic to rival the gods themselves. Don’t you want to see that for yourself?
Not for all the riches in existence, Charris had thought, though he’d known better than to give that answer aloud.
Within the wagon, Charris heard a long slow breath as though the creature tested the air through the barred window. “Filth and hatred. Do you feel it, Brother? Their fear?”
“Yes.” That one Charris didn’t have to feign. “I feel it.”
“Filth.” The Reaper’s voice was hard again, almost angry. “They always fear us. No faith… blasphemy. I must purify them all. I must… I must…”
The first screams caught Charris by surprise. He’d thought there would be some warning. But Charris could still hear the creature muttering to himself within the wagon even as the individual screams blended into dozens, then a great chorus of anguish—which then began, voice by voice, to fall silent.
Then the chorus resumed, closer by.
Charris turned toward the archway and froze in shock. The warden stood there, his body rigid, his face twisting into an expression like nothing Charris had ever seen before—though his eyes were shut tight. Asleep. It was the guards who were screaming at the sight of him; the warden himself was silent. As Charris watched, the warden began to shake all over, his hands clenching and unclenching in rapid spasm, urine splattering the dusty ground beneath his loindrapes. His eyes snapped open suddenly, awake but not awake, white as cowrie shells. The muscles of his neck stood out in taut cords as his teeth ground audibly.
“No,” Charris whispered.
“No faith,” snarled the Reaper.
It was happening all around now, throughout the prison fortress. The prisoners were dead. The guards were dying.
“No!” Horror woke Charris from his stupor at last. He ran to the wagon and banged on the bars. “Stop it! Not them! They—they are your brothers, you shouldn’t, not them—”
“My brothers would not fear,” came the voice from within, sounding more lucid now. More than lucid; there was a fierce, gleeful undercurrent in its voice.
“Stop it, gods damn you! You’re killing everyone!”
Something moved in the shadows and then suddenly the Reaper was at the bars. His eyes, the color of pitted iron surrounded by bloodshot whites, saw beyond the world into some nightmarish place Charris prayed he would never visit. Housing them was a painfully gaunt face, skin stretched so tightly over the bones that it shone like leather. That skin crinkled now—he expected to hear the sound of its flexing and folding, like dead leaves—in a rictus that Charris realized hours later was the Reaper’s attempt to smile.
“I do not ‘kill,’ ” the Reaper said.
Nearby, the last of the guards fell silent. Staring into those eyes, wishing he could close his own, Charris abruptly became aware that the only sound he could hear other than the wind was the jungissa’s soft hum. Everyone else in the prison was dead.
Everyone but him.
Only the jungissa protects me, he realized.
And as that understanding came, his hand began, treacherously, to shake.
He whimpered, sensing with instinctive certainty that if he dropped the stone, the Reaper would take him. He could see that in the thing’s mad eyes. It—for Charris could no longer think of the Reaper as a man—would burrow into his mind and rip loose his tether and drag him into the dank, shadowed cavern at its own core. There it would devour him mind and soul, leaving his flesh behind to rot.
As if hearing his thought, the Reaper nodded slowly. Then it moved back from the bars, fading once more into the shadows. By then trembling uncontrollably, Charris dropped the jungissa. It fell into the dust and stopped humming, leaving only the low sigh of the wind.
Some time passed.
Later, Charris could not have said how long. He had no thoughts during that time, as he waited for the first cold, invisible caress of death. But as his mind gradually resumed functioning, he became aware of slow, heavy breaths from within the wagon. The monster, having fed, now slept.
Charris looked up and saw that the stars had come out, framing the massive hemisphere of the rising Dreamer. By its multihued light he bent, stiffly, and picked up the jungissa. After a moment’s thought he set it humming again and attached it to the gold-and-lapis collar his wife had given him at their marriage. The stone’s faint whine resonated against the metal in a monotone song. That song comforted him as he finally turned to make his way out of the courtyard, heading to the stable to find the horses. For a moment the prospect of riding through the night with that thing hitched behind him almost made him stop thinking again, but the jungissa’s song gradually lulled away his fears. It would keep him safe. Even monsters respected some boundaries.
He stepped carefully over the messenger’s body as he prepared to return to Yanya-iyan.