Chabra: The Lone Tower

It hurt no matter which way she turned.

She sighed; Karadi snored beside her.

She thought she’d be used to it by now. After all, this would be her eleventh child. According to the other Lajita, her last child. One every year or two, and as much as she loved them all, she still hated this part of it. In fact, she realized, Paramjit would be her seventh son… was that what the other Lajita had been trying to warn her about?

Why didn’t she just come out and say it, she wondered.

Knowing that he was the last one didn’t make it any easier to sleep, though, with a huge belly, a body that hurt in all sorts of places, and the constant need to pee. It didn’t help that he kept kicking at odd moments, either.

She sighed again and rolled a little more to her left, trying to find a more comfortable position.

Dawn was still hours away, but she could already feel the first twinges.

It wouldn’t be long now.

* * *

“A beautiful boy!” exclaimed Zlatka, handing the newborn baby to Lajita. “Came out smiling, he did, and he’s smiling yet!”

Zlatka had been her midwife for all of her children, starting with the twins sixteen years ago. She was very old now, unable to do many of the required tasks herself; instead, her own granddaughter performed them under her watchful eye. Soon Tuli—the granddaughter—would take over completely as midwife.

Lajita clasped the swaddled babe to her breast, looking down into his face.

It was terribly wrinkled and red still, and the eyes were unfocused, seeing nothing, but instead of screaming at the shock of birth he was smiling, flexing his fingers aimlessly, making the same cooing noises as any happy baby might.

As any baby two or three months old might, she thought. There was nothing sinister in making baby noises this early—and you couldn’t get any earlier than right after birth—but it was unusual, to say the least.

And he was indeed a beautiful baby in spite of the strangeness and the red, wrinkled face.

She smoothed back the few strands of hair on his head, still damp, and kissed his forehead.

“Hello, Paramjit,” she whispered as Tuli and Zlatka finished cleaning up. Tuli left the room with a basket of towels and sheets to be burned, and was stopped by Karadi just outside the door.

“How is she? Is she alright?”

“She’s fine,” laughed Tuli. “Not her first birth, after all. Mother and baby boy are both fine.

“You can go in now, Master Karadi,” she continued. “All of you can.”

Behind Karadi was a small flock of children, headed by twins Dhruv and Atisha and ending with five-year-old Arun and his stuffed turtle.

Behind them lurked the head housekeeper, Mistress Batauta, for once overlooking the fact that the housekeeping staff was standing and watching instead of working.

Karadi turned around and shouted “It’s a boy!”

There was a cheer and a stamping of feet, and suddenly everybody burst into motion again. Karadi led the charge into the room, kneeling next to Lajita to join her in admiring Paramjit, while the rest of the children gathered around the bed to stare at the new addition to their family.

The twins, being the oldest, had seen it all before many times, but it was a new discovery for little Arun, and even for Hansika and Habib, who had been too young when they saw Lajita give birth last.

“This is your brother, Paramjit,” said Lajita, holding him up for everyone to see.

“Why is he so red and winkled, Mother?” asked seven-year-old Hansika. “He looks like an old man!”

Gitanshu answered her with all the scorn and infinite knowledge of a twelve-year-old boy: “They always come that way. They dry out quick.”

“This is Kamera,” announced Arun, holding up his stuffed turtle to mimic the way Lajita was holding Paramjit. “She’s a turtle.”

“All you alright, Lajita?”

“I’m fine, Karadi, relax. Popped right out like a melon pip,” she answered, turning to the baby. “He’s going to be such a beautiful boy…”

Her comment, whether personal opinion or actual prophecy, came to pass, and Paramjit grew into a stunningly beautiful child.

* * *

At the age of three, Paramjit was already quite well-known throughout Shiroora Shan. Quiet, inquisitive, friendly, he was a common sight, little legs pumping madly as he hurried from one place to another, frequently with a harried nanny chasing after.

His looks always attracted attention among the adults, with pitch-black hair cut short above deep brown eyes and Aquiline nose, but the children were fascinated more by the way animals trusted him. Animals were common in Shiroora Shan, still a small city very much in the country. Farm animals such as cows, horses, pigs, goats, and sheep, as well as raptors and deinos, could be seen everywhere, their bellows and calls echoing in the alleys day and night.

Paramjit was especially drawn to the animals, and would often walk into a shop or home, ignoring the people there, to walk straight to an animal pen, and hold out his hand. Without fail, the animal, even wild beasts that had never known the touch of a human being, would approach, sniff, and rub their heads on his fingers as might a dog to its owner.

“I saw that boy walk right up to a fox we’d caught in the chicken coop,” said one farmer. “Vicious beast, jumping and snapping at us with one foot caught in the snare. I missed with my first arrow, and before I could draw the second, the boy was standing right next it!

“Damnedest thing. It just lay down and rolled over to have its belly scratched, paw still snared and bloody.”

“And then what?”

“The Chabra boy said he wanted it, so I just loosed it, and damn if it didn’t just walk away right next to him like a trained dog, on three legs.

“Damnedest thing I ever saw.&rdquo

Standing at the bar, Karadi took another sip of ale and held his tongue.

If they recognized him, which was likely if he lifted his head out of his glass, they’d change the subject, and he really wanted to hear what they had to say.

Paramjit seemed to be a hyperactive kid, precocious for his age, whom everyone liked. He was stunningly beautiful, some internal radiance that just charmed everyone off their feet, he was kind, he was quiet, speaking softly and gently, and he slept cuddled up next to Lajita like any boy that young might do.

But he also played with animals more than other children, even dangerous animals, and had never been bitten by a raptor or panther, kicked by a skittish horse, or even stung by a bee. Never.

Once when a viper was discovered in the bath and the maid was screaming in terror, Paramjit calmly picked it up like a scarf, holding the middle with the ends drooping down on both sides, and carried it outside.

“Kill it!” screamed the maid, but Paramjit merely shrugged and set it down at the edge of the woods and watched it slither into the darkness.

* * *

As Paramjit grew from a child to a young adult, he was drawn to the numinous: not only organized religion, but sacred places that instilled feelings of awe and reverence in the onlooker, such as the dark face of the Agnid Mountains where they met the Night Ocean as sheer cliffs, or the giant boles of the forbidden jungle stretching between Dothur and Eudoxia, even the sunrise as it set the sky afire in the east. He trekked the mountains to the north, some say as far as Irem, and the endless steppes to the east, and the deserts of Cuppar-Nombo, unafraid of the wild beasts and deadly monsters said to await the traveler.

There was an infinite array of gods and godlets to choose from in the Dreamlands, but after witnessing the fiery vortex of a funeral, Paramjit felt an indescribable presence from the resulting soulstone, an invisible pull on his awareness that he could not ignore.

That very day he called upon the Temple of Nath-Horthath in Shiroora Shan, and sought permission to join the Godsworn. The head of the temple, Godsworn Monterosi, was more than happy to accept a new acolyte, especially one with such a close relationship to powerful House Chabra, and so Paramjit in a very short time found himself entirely bald and dressed in a simple black robe.

As the newest of Monterosi’s acolytes he was naturally put in charge of caring for the temple’s animals, a chore which consisted primarily of feeding and brushing them, and cleaning the stables. He didn’t mind the work, especially as the normally obstinate and at times dangerous horses mildly obeyed his lightest touch or beckon, to the amazement of the other acolytes.

The acolytes learned to read and write, and mathematics, and history (such as it was, as history was subject to change without notice in the Dreamlands), and especially about the myriad gods and their magics. As a son of House Chabra Paramjit of course was well versed in reading, writing, history, literature, mathematics and so much more, to the extent that he soon found himself teaching mathematics and sometimes other courses.

He had little interest in those mundane subjects, instead turning his attention to the sacred texts of Nath-Horthath, and knowledge of the spiritual.

What was that transcendent feeling he received from the soulstones?

He attended numerous funerals as an acolyte of Godsworn Monterosi, and finally what he had been waiting for, happened: the Godsworn dropped a soulstone by accident, and asked him to pick it up.

Half in fear, half in wondrous anticipation, he grasped it between thumb and forefinger, and a surge of raw power ran though his body, his heart, and into the infinite. It was gone in an instant, leaving him stunned, motionless, until the Godsworn cleared his throat and brought him back again.

That night he thought of what he had felt, that power that had shocked him so.

It was the raw power of the soul, the spirit of the dead, still linked to the world of the living and the world of the dead, a bridge between two realms, a window into the other side.

It shattered the blinders he had worn all his life and never seen, opening up a new dimension of possibility. He was no longer entirely of the Dreamlands of the living, but now of both realms.

And, he realized in a sudden clarity, he was addicted to the feeling.

The next morning he had vanished, and with him vanished the four soulstones that had been in the temple.

Seeress Lajita wielded the full weight of the name of House Chabra to smother the scandal, and in time it was said that poor Paramjit had been killed by a wild animal, perhaps a mountain lion, or some said a venomous snake. Stories of his beauty and his animals faded, and merged with legend until only House Chabra itself could say for sure what was true.

And they never did.

* * *

Paramjit searched for the sacred, the touch of the “other” in lands near, and then increasingly far beyond the reach House Chabra.

Some time later he was found, close to death from thirst and the heat, in the Eastern Desert between Nurl and the forbidden city of Irem, by a small party of Ibizim who would have left him to die without a second thought had not their camels refused to leave his side.

Left with no choice, they gave him water and loaded him up onto a camel, taking him with them to one of their secret oases, and left him there.

Two days later, largely recovered although still burned red and black by the sun, he sat with the Ibizim trooper—a young woman named Geriel—who was the solitary guard there. She poured him a warm, sour ale.

“You would have died if they hadn’t found you,” he said. “You’re a very lucky man!”

“Who found me? I would like to thank them.”

He shrugged. “The Ibizim found you. They could as easily kill you next time, you know… we generally don’t rescue anyone silly enough to wander into the desert. They were Ibizim, and saved your life. That is enough.

“But who are you? A youth of such radiant beauty should be famous, yet I have never heard of such. Some godlet, lost in the desert, perhaps?”

Paramjit frowned, sipped, tilted his head in apparent confusion.

“I… I have no idea!”

He put the ale down and stared at the other.

“I said nothing in my fever?”

“Nothing in any language I could understand, I’m afraid.”

“…I do not know who I am…” said Paramjit slowly. “Where am I? Who am I?”

“Your memory may return, with time,” said Geriel. “Or perhaps you are a godlet after all, bringing beauty and love to this barren land.”

“Beauty? Godlet? Why do you mention such?”

“Look at yourself, then, and see,” urged the Ibizim, holding out a mirror.

Paramjit held the mirror up to his face, examining it as if he had never seen it before, turning his head, peering, touching his own cheek and nose.

“Is that… I mean, of course it’s me,” he whispered. “But I’ve never…”

He turned his head this way and that, looking.

“Looks like a perfectly normal face to me,” he said finally. “I mean, maybe better than average, on the whole, but I wouldn’t say beautiful.”

Geriel looked at Paramjit’s reflection in the mirror, frowned.

“That’s strange… you look the same in the mirror, but… just… not beautiful anymore. It’s the same face, but it’s just a face. In the mirror, I mean.”

She looked back at Paramjit’s face.

“When I look at you, it’s something special. Not just the face. Some radiance, warmth, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s beauty.”

They fell silent for a moment.

“So you’ve no memories, then?”

“I remember watching the waves break on the shore, a young girl’s face—my sister, perhaps. I remember carrying a viper outside from… from… from the bath, I think… and the maid… was it a maid? …screaming to kill it.”

“Waves on the shore? An ocean, then. The Night Ocean?”

“I have no idea,” he said, handing back the mirror. “I can recall only tiny fragments of the whole.

“But I can clearly recall the thrill, the sense of presence, that I felt as I wandered the desert. I was searching for something, some god or spirit, and I felt it, then.”

“Before they found you.”

“Yes, somewhere.”

“You had these in your bag,” said Geriel, holding out four soulstones in a small dish.

“My soulstones!”

He took the dish and poured the soulstones into his hand, glittering like gems.

“Your family, or loved ones?”

“I don’t know… I can’t remember! But they are important to me,” he cried. “They… whisper to me.”

Geriel was silent for a moment.

“Stay until you are well,” she said finally. “You aren’t Ibizim, I think, judging from your hands and face—you’ve not spent years in the desert, that’s clear—but you are welcome, and would be good company.”

In about a week he was fully recovered, sharing the simple meals with Geriel: chicken, beans, and corn, for them most part. They sat and talked for hours and days.

He could recall no more of his past, but he did learn a bit about the Ibizim.

The Ibizim of the Desert, as they called themselves, were masters of the Eastern Desert, roaming its wastes on camelback or foot. They had secretive cities scattered throughout, usually in protected mountainous sites, but sometimes surrounding a major oasis, or even underground in the strange caverns left by the Children of the Night, the lizardfolk.

Each city was ruled by a matriarch in accordance with their laws and traditions, and the matriarchs, in turn, selected one of their own to be the Matriarch of the Ibizim of the Desert, commanding them all.

The tale told that the Ibizim came to the Dreamlands long, long ago, and lived mostly in peace for centuries here in the Eastern Desert, once a fair land of green forests and plains. Thuba Mleen, a sorcerer who may have been Ibizim or may have come from the distant East, was determined to conquer it all. Some of the Ibizim followed him, but others stayed true to the traditional matriarchal system, and resisted.

The war between Thuba Mleen and the Matriarchs turned the land into desert, and the Ibizim fled into hiding. The Ibizim who stayed in those lands, hiding in the depths of Xinaián, the Sunless Roads of the Children of the Night, became the Ibizim of the Desert. Others fled to distant mountains in greener lands, hiding in their crags and gorges, now known as the Ibizim of the Mountains.

The sorcerer vanished, nobody knew why, but the desert remained, and the Ibizim stayed hidden, and so the situation had remained, almost unchanged, for centuries. “Almost,” because after long years of hiding the Ibizim began to build a few cities above ground, in hidden valleys deep in the mountains of the northern Hills of Noor, cities secret from prying eyes on pain of death.

His body grew strong, his skin healthy and deep, dark brown, but his memory remained elusive.

And throughout it all he held those soulstones, feeling their warmth, their whispers, deep in his heart.

“You should release them, you know,” said Geriel one day.

“I don’t even know who they are,” replied Paramjit. “I must been keeping them for a reason, though.”

“If you can’t remember why, free their souls, boy,” advised the Ibizim. “You cannot give them whatever they were waiting for; let them go.”

Paramjit looked at the four milky-white soulstones in his hand.

“Perhaps you’re right…”

That night he lay on the sand looking up at the countless stars overhead, and held up one of the soulstones. He could almost see the starlight shining through its hidden depths.

On a sudden impulse he clenched his fist, crushing it.

There was a small pop, and a faint, whitish vapor drifted upward.

His body threw itself forward, of its own volition, and breathed it in.

Sacrilege! And of the vilest sort!

His mind recoiled at the thought of inhaling another’s soul, barring it from Release.

But his body savored the smell, the taste, like a rare drug that brought visions of Paradise.

He watched in shock as his hands poured out the other soulstones, crushing them all at once with the strength of the possessed and breathed in that pale white mist.

He could feel Geriel sleeping nearby, the sandsnake coiled at the corner of the hut, the individual fleas in the bedding… he turned his attention farther, sensing a group of camels some kilometers distant, Ibizim riders, and the wild sand lizards hunting, and he quailed under the cold cognizance of the stars.

He could not move, his mind frozen by the torrent of sensation and awareness that flooded in, his mind spreading out over the desert, scenes flashing by, until…

He was in front of a tower of rock, weathered by centuries of wind-borne sand. It stood some twenty meters high, or more, solitary in the starlight.

It pulled at him, a siren call he could not resist.

He smiled as he rose and walked into the desert night.

* * *

Geriel awoke, unsure of what had awakened her.

She listened, and heard nothing but the usual night sounds—scuttling insects and mice, an occasional hoofclop or muffled whoof from the horses, wind-blown sand skittering. Nothing unusual, she thought.

Then it hit her: she couldn’t hear the stranger’s breathing.

She quickly rose and looked through the hut, confirming that he was gone. A quick trip to the toilet confirmed he had left entirely.

She bit her lip.

She was only recently accepted as a trooper, and sent here as one of her first assignments.

He must be out in the desert again, she realized, possibly possessed.

She had no obligation to rescue him, but she’d enjoyed his company in this lonely posting, and thought she’d hate herself if she didn’t at least try to save him. At the same time, though, her duty was here at the guard post.

It was a boring, almost meaningless job, and she’d get little credit for doing it properly, but she knew she’d be in serious trouble for leaving her post unattended.

He couldn’t have gone far, she reasoned, and saddled up her camel. Just a quick walk around the area to find him, she thought to herself, and back by dawn.

Still, as any responsible Ibizim, she filled her pack with plenty of water and a few other things that might prove necessary in the desert.

The half-moon and the stars were bright enough for her to make out his tracks a few minutes later. He was walking straight east toward the Flats, making no effort to hide his sign at all.

The Flats. The hottest, driest, deadliest region of the entire Eastern Desert. No trees, no oases, no shade, no hope of crossing alive. And he was walking into it with, apparently, no water or gear at all!

She goaded her camel to a faster pace, hoping to catch up to the stranger before the sun rose and brought the heat.

Two hours later she still hadn’t caught a glimpse of him, and dawn was approaching fast, the peaks of the Ifdawn Marest ahead of her already limned in yellow.

He must have left hours before she got up, and been walking steadily since. Actually, she realized as she looked at the spacing of his footprints in the sand, it looks like he’s been on an easy run, not just walking.

Should she quit the pursuit now and return to her post? Or…

She decided to continue on until dawn, and then head back if she hadn’t found him.

Some time later, as the orange sky brightened and the sun was just about to peep over the top of the distant Ifdawn Marest, the mountain range to the east, beyond cursed Irem, she spotted a black dot loping over the bare white flat ahead.

She snapped the reins for a new burst of speed from the camel, and chased after, gradually drawing closer.

All of sudden, in the middle of the naked desert, with barely a pebble in sight to break the monotony, the figure dissolved like salt in water.

A shimmer!

Out here, in the middle of the Flats!?

She rode closer to where he had disappeared, and dismounted as the wavering outlines of the shimmer’s effect became visible. From a distance it was invisible, especially in the heat-dancers twisting up from the hot, packed sand, but up close the distortion was obvious.

She drew her sword and stepped through.

She was looking down into a huge pit, not unlike a sand-roach might create, an upside-down cone of sand. In the center, where the sand-roach would normally wait to knock prey down into its fanged jaws, stood a stone column.

The stranger was sliding down the slope, trying hard to keep his balance in the shifting sand.

She didn’t trust that loose sand, and stopped a little ways back from the edge to watch.

There was movement on the flat sand at the bottom, but it was hard to make out from here… she took out her looking glass for a better look, and gasped.

Red-bellied scorpions!

She could count at least a dozen from where she stood.

One sting and a grown man would writhe in agony for days, three and he’d be dead in minutes.

And the stranger was blithely strolling through them without a care in the world!

She couldn’t save him now, she could only watch in horror as he died a hideous death.

But…

He’d already walked past several of the creatures, without a single sting! They were ignoring him.

No, not ignoring, she realized… some of them were actually following him!

She continued to watch in amazement as he stood in front of the stone column, looking up at an obvious hole a little above his head.

She focused her looking glass on the hole, noticing tiny movements. Hornets.

That black hole, maybe large enough for a man to crawl into, was a massive hornet’s nest.

She switched back to the stranger.

Sure enough, he was climbing up the column, straight toward the hornet’s nest. As she watched in disbelief he squirmed inside, head first.

His feet waggled a little bit, as if he were moving about, but certainly not as if he’d been stung by hundreds of angry hornets.

A minute later he emerged, holding a small gold box under one arm, and scaled down the column. He casually brushed the waiting scorpions to the side with his hand and sat cross-legged on the ground, placing the box in front of him and opening the lid.

With the lid up she could clearly see the sigil it held.

Her breath caught in her throat as she recognized it.

He reached in and picked up something, something small, holding it up to the light in admiration.

It was a soulstone.

So he was dead all these long years. And his soulstone had been hidden here in the Flats all that time.

As she watched in horror he placed the soulstone in his mouth and crushed it between his teeth.

The stranger was deathly still for a moment, expression locked in a rictus that could be agony or ecstasy, eyes blank, unseeing, then took a long breath, and awareness returned to his eyes.

He turned to look directly at distant Geriel, and spoke.

“Geriel of Ripplesnake of the Ibizim of the Desert, you healed me, and I repay that debt by allowing you to live. Carry my message to the Matriarchs, to all the kings and queens and petty rulers of the Dreamlands.

“Thuba Mleen has returned. Go!”

He waved his hand at her, and she realized with horror that the hundreds of scorpions in the pit had started clambering up the slope toward her.

She fled to her camel, and together they raced the rising sun west.

END