“There was corruption in his soul.” Ehiru still gazed out at the river, but Nijiri suspected he did not see the palm trees on the far shore, the reeds waving in the wind, or the flatboats bobbing gently at their moorings. His hand, in Nijiri’s, felt cold. “Not enough to make him criminal, but enough to taint his dreamscape with ugliness and violence. I tried to take him to a more pleasant place, but then he had a true-seeing.”
Nijiri frowned. “Foreigners don’t see truly in their dreams, brother. They wander helpless in Ina-Karekh every night. A fourflood child has more control.”
“Foreigners have the same innate abilities as we of Gujaareh, Nijiri. Anything a skilled narcomancer can do, they can—though only by accident.”
Nijiri held back a snort; the notion of a barbarian managing the same feat as the most highly trained Sisters, Sharers, and Gatherers seemed ludicrous. Did children write treatises?
“In this Bromarte’s case…” Ehiru sighed. “Up to that point he had been no different from any other stubborn, frightened dreamer. But then he said to me, ‘They’re using you.’ ”
Nijiri frowned. “What did that mean?”
“I don’t know. But I felt the truth of his words. And tonight, when the Kisuati woman said the same thing…”
“So that was it.” Nijiri squeezed his hand. “She is corrupt, Brother. A professional liar by her own admission.”
“Then you dismiss her tales of dead prisoners, and a conspiracy to begin a war?”
“Dead prisoners would hardly begin a war. And anyhow, every account that I have read of war speaks of its terrible destruction and suffering. No one would start such a thing deliberately.”
Ehiru glanced at him, and Nijiri was startled to see a smile on his mentor’s face. “Ehiru-brother?”
“It’s nothing. Just that I forget your youth at times.” Ehiru drew up his knees and wrapped his arms about them, gazing up into the sky. Tiny pale Waking Moon peeked timidly out from behind her greater sister’s curve; sunrise would come soon. “I envy you that youth.”
Nijiri gazed at Ehiru in surprise and read faint lines of regret and worry in his mentor’s profile. “You believe the woman’s tale.”
Ehiru sighed into a breeze. “When the Bromarte had his true-seeing, I mishandled the dream out of surprise. But after he was dead, I saw something else. A man, I think, on the rooftop across. He was wrong, Nijiri. I can’t explain it. His movements, his shape, the feel of his presence; I have never been so frightened in my life.”
Nijiri shifted uncomfortably. “A vision. A manifestation of your guilt.” He had heard that strong narcomancers were sometimes plagued by such things. The dreaming gift was not always easy to control. “Flush with dreamblood—”
“No. The dreamblood was rotten; I was sick with it, not enraptured. What I saw was real.”
“The Kisuati’s Reaper?”
“I can think of nothing else that would have sent such dread through my heart.”
“But to become a Reaper, a user of dream magic must fail the pranje, refuse the Final Tithe, go un-Gathered by our brethren for fourdays, somehow remain unnoticed by others while he goes slowly mad…” He shook his head, unwilling to believe. “It’s impossible. Our brothers are too wise and faithful to let such a thing happen.”
“I imagine those long-ago Reapers had faithful brothers too, once.”
Nijiri sucked in his breath and stared at Ehiru. Ehiru smiled bleakly, his eyes lost in the distance. The words settled into Nijiri’s heart like stones, and he fell silent beneath their weight. Perhaps out of respect for Nijiri’s turmoil, Ehiru stopped talking as well, and they both brooded for a while.
Eventually, though, Ehiru sighed. “I saw what I saw, Nijiri. And if there are twenty dead men who saw the same thing…”
“Well, that’s for the Superior to determine.” Nijiri got to his feet and brushed off his loindrape decisively. Ehiru glanced up at him, a look of mild surprise on his face. “We must return to the Hetawa and report this. And you must go to the Sharers to request an infusion.”
Ehiru raised an eyebrow. “One display of ill temper does not make me out of control.”
“Not alone. But there have been other signs, haven’t there?” It was unseemly to speak of such things, except when they had to be said. Ehiru squared his shoulders, radiating stubbornness; Nijiri pressed on. “I was trained, Brother, though I never got the chance to properly serve. Have you seen more visions than usual? Have there been times when your hands shook?”
Ehiru lifted a hand and gazed at it. “The morning of the Hamyan.”
He’d let himself suffer for two whole days? Nijiri scowled. “Then it must be done. You Gathered no tithe tonight. By tomorrow night you might be hearing voices, seeing enemies under every leaf—”
Ehiru got to his feet and faced him. “I believe I know my own pattern, Nijiri, having experienced it every year for the past twenty.”
It was a mild rebuke as such things went, but it silenced Nijiri anyhow. He bowed his head, fists clenched in shame and anger at being reminded of his place. But a moment later Ehiru sighed and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll go to the Sharers if that will ease your fears,” he said. “And then we’ll both go to the Superior—”
He paused then, cocking his head. Nijiri frowned and opened his mouth to ask what was the matter, but before he could speak, Ehiru held up a hand to shush him. He pivoted slowly toward the north, squinting along the flow of the river. The rooftops had become still as the Dreamer’s fat curve at last sank out of sight, leaving only the deep monochrome darkness cast by Waking Moon’s pallid light. No birds sang; not even a breeze stirred the laundry-heavy clotheslines. The city was silent.
No. Not silent. A few blocks away, echoing up from the street, Nijiri heard the slap of sandals on stone. Running.
“Light,” Ehiru whispered. “A woman, perhaps. Or a child.”
Nijiri swung about to orient on those running feet as well, tensing as a thousand possibilities—most of them dire—ran through his mind. “A messenger. A servant on an errand.” A rapist. A murderer.
They fell silent again, listening. The rhythm of the runner changed, skidding now and again, faltering and then resuming. Nijiri frowned, for there was something indisputably urgent about the sound of those running feet. Something frantic.
Ehiru lifted a hand in a quick signaclass="underline" follow in silence. Nijiri obeyed at once as Ehiru abruptly set off, leaping from the roof on which they stood to the next, and then running along another. Their course, Nijiri realized as he ran behind his mentor, would intersect that of the runner in a half-block or so.
Ehiru stopped at the edge of a squat storage house’s roof, peering over its wall into the street below. No one was in sight. The patter of feet had stopped.
From an alley on the other side of the building—the direction in which they’d last heard the runner—they both heard a sharp, frightened cry.
Ehiru was moving before the cry’s echo faded, running with no further attempt at stealth. Nijiri scrambled to keep up. Even after ten years of acrobatics training, it still shocked him when Ehiru reached the roof-edge and slowed not one whit before leaping off. He flipped in the air, his hands reaching back to catch the wall as he fell; his feet braced against the stone to cushion the impact. An instant later he let go, dropping another man-length to land on fingers and toes, his eyes fixed on the dark beyond the alley’s entrance.
From that darkness came a soft hiss.
Nijiri skidded to a halt on the rooftop, his heart pounding. There was no easier way down. Swallowing, he took a deep breath to focus as the Sentinels had taught him, and concentrated on the opposite wall of the alley as he repeated Ehiru’s flipping trick. He fouled the final leap, however, landing without injury but stumbling.