Page 21 of Fateless

I jerked, wrenching my hand from Halek’s grip, and spun toward the end of the bridge, squinting into the shadows.

Nothing was there.

Halek gazed at me in confusion, then turned as well. “Do you see something?”

My heart thudded in my ears. The shadows were nearly impenetrable, but I knew there had been someone—something—watching us across the chasm. That same frisson of fear and dread crept up my spine, and the section of bridge we stood on suddenly felt very exposed. I needed to get back into the darkness and shadows, out of sight of whatever was hunting us.

“Halek,” I ventured, after we were safely away from the bridge. “You know a lot about other kingdoms, right?”

He cocked his head at me. “A bit,” he replied with an easy shrug. “More than most, I’d say. Why?”

“What do you know about the iylvahn?”

His brow furrowed, and then he smiled. If he was confused by the randomness of the question, he didn’t say anything. “Ah, the iylvahn.” He sighed. “I’ve only met a couple of them on my travels—they don’t leave their homeland all that often. They’re an aloof, secretive people, but their songs can bring tears to your eyes. One of my dreams is to see their great city in person—I’ve heard so many stories and rumors about it—but sadly, it remains as elusive as its legend.”

“But what of the iylvahn themselves?” I asked. “Have you heard of something called a...” I had to think a moment. That conversation in the Temple of Fate had happened only yesterday,but it already seemed so long ago. “A kahjai,” I finished. “Do you know what a kahjai is?”

Halek sobered. “The kahjai,” he repeated. “I’ve heard a few stories of them. Much like the city, the truth about the kahjai is elusive, and is clouded by rumor and speculation.

“The iylvahn have a different view of Fate,” Halek went on. “Very unlike Kovass, where it is believed that every person has a single place in the Tapestry of the World, and once you are born into your fate, you cannot leave it. Beggars are beggars, kings are kings, farmers are farmers, and so on.”

Thieves are thieves, I added silently, and nodded.

“The iylvahn still revere Maederyss,” Halek continued, “though she has a different name in their language. But they believe that Fate is less a tapestry and more of a tree. A beautiful, endlessly growing tree, with individual lives as branches that sprout and grow in different directions. You cannot change the Tree of Fate, but you can... nurture it, shall we say? Cultivate it along a certain path. Like trimming a bush of dead branches to help it flourish. Are you following me so far?”

“I think so.”

Halek nodded. “The iylvahn are said to follow a seer,” he continued. “One who can read the threads in the Weave, or the branches of the Tree of Fate, or whatever you want to call it. They can see which branches are blighted, or which threads are weak. If these spots are left unchecked, they might affect every branch or thread around them. A limb could die, or an entire section of cloth could unravel. The kahjai are the ones sent to remove these problems before they affect the whole.”

I drew in a slow breath of realization. Suddenly, that conversation between the high priestess and the iylvahn in the Temple of Fate made a lot more sense. AkahjaiinKovassinvites only death. “So what you’re saying is, the kahjai are assassins,” I said.

Halek grimaced. “I don’t know if they see themselves as such, but... yes. More or less,” he admitted. “The kahjai are sent by the seer to kill individuals before they can negatively affect the world around them. Snipping the weakened threads from the cloth, or pruning the blight from the tree, so to speak.” He shrugged, and that wry grin came creeping back. “Again, these are only stories I’ve heard, in places I really wasn’t supposed to be. Honestly, with what I know, I’m surprised a kahjai hasn’t been sent for me yet. The iylvahn are quite secretive, after all.”

An assassin. I remembered the night of the circus, that fleeting glimpse of a figure on the rooftops as the man in the square twitched and died. Could it have been the iylvahn, sent to murder that man, even in a crowd?

Or had he been sent here to kill someone else?

Had he been sent here for me?

“But why this interest in the kahjai all of a sudden?” Halek wondered. “That’s a bleak subject. If you want to hear about the iylvahn, I can tell you much more fascinating stories.”

“Maybe later,” I muttered. I didn’t want to hear about the iylvahn, unless it was how to escape a ruthless assassin who might be chasing me through an ancient cursed city. Anything else, I really didn’t care about.

“You have to wonder, though.” Halek’s voice drifted over the empty streets and bounced off shattered walls and crumbledbuildings. Even his hushed tones seemed to echo in the dead silence of the ancient city. “This city is enormous. Bigger than Kovass, from the looks of it. It must’ve been thriving once. A few of these buildings alone would’ve held hundreds. So...” He looked at me, a question in his eyes.

I blinked back. “So what?”

“So where are all the people?” Halek waved a hand at the streets. “Their remains, I mean. We’ve been walking for a while, and we haven’t seen a single bone, skull, or scrap of cloth. Except for the one that was shambling around, anyway.” He grinned, somehow making light of a terrifying situation. “But where are all the others?” He gazed around the street, where a building had collapsed on top of another, crushing it fully. “This city wasn’t just abandoned and forgotten,” Halek mused, sounding more serious than he had before. “Something happened to it a long time ago. Something catastrophic. People would have died. Large numbers of them. It would have been chaos. Not that I want to see a bunch of skeletons lying in the streets, but there are no signs that anyone lived here.”

I shivered. He was right, and the realization just made the ancient city that much eerier.

As I was imagining what kind of disaster had struck the ancient city, and what it must’ve been like for everyone who lived here, we pushed our way through a hole in a stone wall and came upon a massive palace.

I froze, and Halek sucked in an awed breath. In Kovass, I had seen the king’s palace atop its hill, looming over the city. The striking blue-domed roofs could be seen from nearly anywherein Kovass. I had never been there, of course. The high gate and the guards kept out the riffraff so that no unworthy commoner could touch the seat of the king.

Like the rest of the ancient city, this palace dwarfed the one in Kovass.

It was eerily intact, a looming behemoth of marble and stone surrounded by the remains of a dead city. Some of the walls had cracked with age, and several of the huge columns marching up to the doors were shattered and broken, but the palace itself stood like an indestructible giant at the end of the road. Gazing up at the domed roofs far, far overhead, I saw a glimmer of metallic yellow in the drifting spore lights, and realized they were gilded gold.

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