The Killing Moon (Dreamblood #1)(50)
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?
18
When death comes unheralded, preserve the flesh. Summon chanters and singers, burn sachets and call ancestors. Beat drums to drive the dead from Hona-Karekh, and make prayers to the gods to guide the soul’s direction. Make tithe to the Hetawa, so that no loved one’s soul might be risked again.
(Wisdom)
Sunandi awakened just after dawn to the sound of Etissero’s angry shouts. Rising from the bed where she’d cried herself to sleep, she pulled on a gown and went upstairs to find Etissero in full form, yelling in three trade-languages. She was unsurprised to see the cause of Etissero’s anger: the Gatherer’s young apprentice had arrived. The boy stood in front of the Gatherer now, radiating that peculiar combination of determination and protectiveness that Sunandi had noted the night before last.
The night before last. Had it really only been such a short time since she’d sent Lin to her death?
The Gatherer-child’s eyes shifted to her. Etissero followed his gaze and broke off in the middle of insulting their mothers in Soreni. Looking abashed, Etissero switched to halting Sua. “Please forgive, Speaker-Voice. I did not mean to wake.”
“It’s all right,” she replied in equally poor Bromarte, then focused on the Gatherers. Ehiru stood with eyes downcast, showing the shame to be expected of anyone who had violated guest-custom. He looked better than he had the day before, but still not quite well. The boy… when she looked at him he narrowed his eyes, searching her face. Gujaareen could read death, Etissero had said, so she gazed back and let him see her grief. He blinked in surprise, then grew solemn; after a moment he nodded to her in understanding. Yes, and Gatherers read death best of all.