She was not talking of Zahir anymore. Or not simply Zahir. She was talking of herself.
He knew it, just as she did. She could read it in every line of his face. His gaze was shattering soft, his face an open carapace.
“What did you see in the ash?” he asked, urgent. “What did it show you, beyond death?”
He did not deserve to know. He did not.
But perhaps deserve was a pointless measure of the right to know. Did Arwa deserve the truth? She had been nothing, done nothing, saved no one. Not even herself. The truth needed to be known. That was enough.
In the night the bruises around his neck were deep and dark.
“We can go back into the realm of ash,” she told him. “If we had still had our roots twined together, you would have seen some of it. As I saw what you saw, the first time we entered the realm. We can go into the realm, and I can show you. Come with me again. Let me show you what the Maha did. Follow the lamp of truth, my lord.”
He exhaled, a low, shaky breath.
“I’ll begin the fire,” he said, and turned on his heel into the next room. Arwa sagged.
Their blood had barely touched the flame when Arwa felt the pull of it. As if she already slept, a void had opened in her mind. A door. She shivered.
But she didn’t tell Zahir. Only drank the tea. Only slept.
They entered the realm of ash fast. Arwa knew it better now. The red roots unfurling around her gossamer body; the new ash that clung to her dream skin. She turned to Zahir and reached her hands out to him. Stopped.
“Are you sure you’re prepared to see?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “Show me the way.”
They crossed the realm, through familiar shadowy trees, to the white sand, to the dead.
Arwa raised her hands before her. The roots rose with her. Ash gathered between her fingertips. Ash from her own path. Ash from within her own soul.
“I can show you,” she said. “But the choice is yours.”
He looked at her hands. He always looked at her hands.
“For good or ill, then,” he said. “I promised you a bond of trust.”
She did not know what compelled him—curiosity, thirst for knowledge, trust, or guilt—but he placed his head in the space between her hands. The ash rose from her skin to meet him. Her mind filled all the memories her soul had consumed: Nazrin, Tahir, Ushan. The blades. The mystics. The Maha. Great wings; a parent’s love.
She saw gray creep through Zahir’s blood roots. His skin. He closed his eyes. The storm around them, on Arwa’s path, rose wilder and wilder. Closed upon them, neat as a lock.
When Arwa next opened her eyes—her true eyes—she was lying on the workroom floor. The fire had guttered. Dawn was beginning to brighten the sky.
Zahir was slumped against the other wall.
“Lord Zahir,” she said, and clambered to her feet.
“Well,” he said hoarsely. “You have lit the lamp, Lady Arwa. If I could have…?”
“Yes,” she said. She brought him water from the library. Placed it next to him.
“I see now,” he said. “I saw.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw people forced into unbreakable vows. I saw those people—those Amrithi—forced to use their magic to manipulate the dreams of the Gods. I saw them used to death. I saw a people and civilization decimated. I see. I saw…”
He stopped.
“I saw what he did, Lady Arwa. I saw it all,” he said finally. He sounded raw, broken. He turned his face away.
She didn’t comfort him.
“The Empire’s strength,” he murmured, “was built on Amrithi magic.”
“Yes,” she said.
“That brings us a little closer to the truth. To… the nature of the curse upon the Empire.” He spoke slowly, as if piecing the truth together through a numb veil of horror. “Our mortal world is shaped by the dreams of the Gods—multitudes of dreams, woven into the fabric of everything. Dreams of life and death, light and dark, growth and decay. He used Amrithi magic—”
“Amata,” Arwa put in quietly.
“Yes. He used—amata—to crush the ill dreams, that would have brought the Empire ill fortune of any kind. He forced them into the dark. And brought only good fortune up to the light. To our world.” She heard him exhale, slow, shaken. “It was not his innate glory or the worship of his loyal mystics that made us strong, after all. It was the Amrithi.”
“He built the Empire on their blood,” said Arwa. “On their dead. My dead.”
“The knowledge he must have had.” Zahir’s voice was cold, a whisper. “The knowledge he must have had. Of reality. Of all things.”
She flinched from that. Her body drew back, back. There was a wall behind her, holding her steady.
“Do you admire him for it? For this—monstrousness?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. To know so much, as he must have done, to know the world is shaped by the dreams of the Gods and to then consciously, arrogantly, pervert the laws that govern reality, without thought or care or ethics—to commit a genocide…” He stopped sharply.
Then, after a moment, the fire dying between them, he said, “The Maha is gone. He cannot use the Amrithi any longer, and it is clear he has left the world… wounded. The unnatural terror, the sicknesses sweeping the Empire, the floods and the failed crops, the strange ill-starred luck our Empire suffers—Arwa, I think they are all the Empire’s dark dreams, long suppressed, finally coming for us. And every day, they grow ever worse.”
She saw him raise a hand, hold it before him, watching his own fingers tremble. “He broke the world, Lady Arwa. The curse is growing worse. Growing swift and strong. I have never read a book that could put to rights his work. There is no theory that can encompass the damage he may have wrought, because the act was… untested, unmeasured. The consequences—we see them all around us. Thousands of people will die. The Empire will be a husk, empty of the living. I do not know how to fix his ill work.” His hand lowered, still trembling, trembling. “I do not know how to fix it. But he still might.”
He must have sensed her horror, seen it written upon her face. His eyes were reddened; his cheeks tracked with tears.
“No,” she said. “No. You cannot still mean to seek his ash. You can’t, can you?”
“To fix a broken tool, you must understand the intent of its maker,” said Zahir. “The Empire is broken, Lady Arwa, but it is a terrible weapon, built of the living and the dead alike. If it falls, all the people within it…” His voice cracked like kindling wood. “He is a monster. I do not deny it. I saw what you saw. And yet I cannot see—cannot imagine—what else to do but seek what he knew.”
She made a sound—almost a howl, that rose out of her unbidden. He looked at her with those eyes, those eyes that saw too much, and yet he didn’t see at all, she was at the center of her own storm and he did not see her.
“You would not speak this way if he’d murdered your people,” she forced out. “If your Hidden Ones were strung up upon the city walls. If everything your mother loved and learned was stolen from you—you would not dare. You have your history, Lord Zahir, in all these books around you. Your father’s history is the Empire. But I have a void where half my history should be. My sister is dead. And all my life I have thought myself cursed. Tainted. You can’t possibly understand how that feels.”