The Broken Eye(33)

Maybe none of it made sense. Maybe Lucidonius was merely more right than those who’d come before him. Maybe what I’m about to do isn’t a sin against Orholam, that odd desert god who lives in the sky and everywhere, invisibly, rather than walking the earth like a proper god. Maybe it is. He’ll have to forgive me, for though I am no longer an aħdar qassis gwardjan, I cannot stop being a gwardjan. It is who I am. Who Orholam made me, if Lucidonius spake true.

I draw on the light, and my green jinnīyah is there, familiar to me as my dead wives’ faces—my beloved wives, forced into the orgiasts’ flames to expiate the shame and crime of my apostasy.

“I’ve missed you,” Aeshma whispers along my skin, her touch caresses.

I’ve missed her, too. Of course I have. But she knows that.

I expect her to be angry, haughty, to punish me for turning my back on her. But she’s more canny than that. First she’ll get her hooks into me. Later, she’ll punish. Nor does she go to my libido, once so potent, now seemingly dead since my ’Annaiah and Siana burned. Instead, she waits. Perhaps she sees from my face that the only pleasure I seek is the pleasure of battle, of red vengeance. Perhaps even after all this time she feels me directly.

“I would have made you the next Atirat,” she says, mournfully. She puts her hand on my wrist as I start to pour luxin forth from my skin there. “You were to be a god.”

“The daemon’s in your eyes,” Auria says. “Do you see her true, or do you see how she wants you to see?”

I remember when Lucidonius bent the prism toward me as my jinnīyah stood in front of my eyes, shouting blasphemies in my ears. The sudden wash of other colors had shown me what the priests of the other colors saw when they looked at her. In every other color, Aeshma was a horror. No wonder the other qassisin kuluri warred with us, called us daemon-worshippers. And then Lucidonius had flipped a mirror out, and in that full-spectrum light, I’d seen that even the green was a thin mask.

Aeshma was no beauty. She was all disease and ugliness.

I’d shattered the prism, shattered the mirror, swearing Lucidonius had ensorcelled it, that he’d tricked me, shown me lies. But I was wrong. Later, I’d done the same trick when I found other djinn foolish enough to manifest themselves in their priests’ eyes. The prism we used was a mundane prism, the mirror plain silver and glass. Eventually the Two Hundred had learned that we could expose them. They came up with elaborate lies to those they snared to explain why they no longer would appear at all—blamed it on the stain Lucidonius had brought to the world. Truth was, they didn’t want to be so easily unmasked.

Aeshma says nothing more. I know she was one of the foremost of the Two Hundred, nearly one of the Nine. A new Atirat is not born solely of one man’s conquering all human contenders. His partner jinnīyah must conquer all of her rivals as well.

The armor wraps around my body. I hold open only points at each joint. It’s not as efficient or flexible or reactive as how I had once done it—with every pore, every sweat gland, every hair a point of contact. Back then, I’d let my jinnīyah control the armor, shifting it, reacting to dangers I couldn’t even see, her immortal will complementing my mortal will. The two of us had been one in a way I couldn’t share even with my wives.

I draw on blue, looking above the frames of my green spectacles at the lightening sky. Blue is safe, for me. I never bound my will to blue’s. To me, it is only a tool, albeit one that cools my passions. My jinnīyah would never let me draft much blue. She was too jealous. I’d thought it was simply her nature, but now I see that she needed me all to herself if she was to win her fights with the other djinn. An Atirat who was not a pure green? Impossible.

As Pride is the first sin, so Power is the first temptation.

Funny how Lucidonius put that in the present tense, though telling a creation story. Not, Pride was the first sin. It made the thing applicable to us, as much as to the First Light. Good trick.

“My heart is yours, Darjan, but I cannot save you if you don’t let me help,” Aeshma says. Her voice is so like my dead ’Annaiah’s that I know she’s stolen even that. Clever, clever wench.

“You can’t listen to what she says, Darjan,” Auria says in the mundane world, voice weakening. “You know she lies.”

I know.

“Show me I can trust you,” I say aloud. I hope Auria thinks I’m speaking to her; I hope my jinnīyah thinks I’m speaking to her.

The light is good now. I start running toward the village. Another color might sneak in, hoping to find the raiders asleep, exhausted from a long night of murder and worse. That isn’t the way of green. My jinnīyah sings battle rage and bloodlust, and I know that she knows me too well.