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Those guided by love. Who do not turn their back on those who pretend to do the same, even if it leaves them skin-drenched and heartbroken.
My skin is not drenched now. Not yet. But the first sweat beads are forming. I can feel that premier half-hitch in my throat, a prediction of the gulps, the gasps I could start needing if I push just that much harder. No wonder I can smell blood. Zakariya must have scratched himself half to pieces to have moved at such a clip.
But it still doesn’t make sense.
The shadhavar is home. That first leaping bound into the foliage’s maw should have been enough. We are not wolves to lope after a fleeing prey. And even the fastest of such predators could not keep pace here. In the daylight on horseback? Perhaps a human might stand a chance. Even then, though, the odds would be minute at catching the beast.
And yet Zakariya has not lost its trail. Something that should have happened about five seconds after the creature started moving.
We are now minutes into this impossible hunt and that makes no sense. Zakariya’s destructive blundering through the woods might keep him ahead of me. But it should not keep apace of the shadhavar.
Something is wrong. And it is enough to make me quicken my pace, to push till the breaths are gulped down at last. For the Guardian, yes. But it seems I have kept some of my humanity after all. Because Zakariya is my charge.
The Guardian’s heart is so big, he might forgive me his loss. My pride will not.
So I push myself as I always have. To be faster. To be stronger. To be better than I am expected to be. The expectations of others are always so narrow, so petty, so marred. I have my own expectations.
Those are what I live up to.
Of course, a key ingredient in that is living. Rock soup without the rock is just water, after all. So when I see the clearing ahead, when the breeze brings stronger that smell of iron and loam that speaks of earth and blood, I release my were-light and surround myself in the dark. But I do not plunge out into the glade, treating the air like a swan-dive into a mirrored water’s surface. Do not lunge from the dark’s embrace towards the moon-lit sward however much I want to.
And I do want to. Because I can hear the shadhavar’s song.
Chapter Three
Mount Lebanon, 3 May 1211
Travel has defined me. This new me. The one after my first life. The one who walked the deserts for two hundred years, seeing the stories about me grow. At times being the monster the stories made me into. The me who rose from the ashes of a burnt down life. Who tasted the flames and found her talent in the scorching sands.
The one only a hair’s breadth away from becoming the ruinous creature tales already make me out to be. Aicha Kandicha. Killer of Men. Death to see. A vengeful djinn. A tale twisted because of what I did to save those I loved. For daring to use my body and my blade. And sometimes?
Sometimes it would be all to easy to become her.
The things I’ve done: battling ifrits – towering columns of dust and fire the desert brought to malevolent life; seeking words in the whispers of long dead sorcerers, kept inside bottles that sought to drink me down to keep them company; fed on ghouls I tore limb from limb to learn what their hunger taught them, then smiled at the knowledge through blood-painted lips.
And I have walked alone. For most of the time. Accompanied by the music that sings the world into existence, life itself. Wheeling bird cries to accompany the drumbeat of my feet falling in the dust, carrying me onward, away from the world of the Talentless, of their precious normality that judged me and made me a thing to fear in the legends that sprang from lies spun off a few tiny fibres of truth.
Always moving forward. But when I paused in my journeys? Touched once more into the world that men have made? It was to see art.
And what is more artful than encountering a true master, one who can twist a lifetime of study into a single moment, a single note? When you encounter a singer, a musician, perhaps both. who’s aged, gnarled like the twist of their strings around pegs. An unavoidable quaver embedded in their song voice by years gone by.
But, oh, what depth it gives. When they sing their heart into the world. Not only love, no. The whole of their heart. All that it has been made into by life’s wonders and woundings. Their scar tissue peeled back, cracked open to let what lives inside out.
Those are the moments I treasure. The ones I let still ring in my ears to keep the wahsh’s voice at bay.
The shadhavar? Sings with a thousand lifetimes in a single note.
I cannot put it into words. I have heard the poets talk of describing a colour to a blind man. This is not that. It is more like describing warmth to a block of ice. To explain to a buried stone what it feels like for a feather to ruffle in the breeze of the winds aloft. To explain what it is to be alive to the unhearing dead.
I can almost understand why Zakariya ran headlong in pursuit.
Almost.
Because beautiful though it is, enticing as it is…I recognise a snare. The urge to draw in is the tightening noose.
I am no hungry coney. Nor am I easily led.
So I edge towards the edge of the light-pool, the illuminated opening, the trees pulling back to allow in the sky. The strength of the moon, waxing bright even for normal eyes, is like a summer’s dawn after the forest’s Stygian enfolding, the inky pitch-black of the depths of the undergrowth.
