Obsidian: Retribution (Book 2)

Thirty-One: A Raviyani Night Before Dawn

They came with fire on a Raviyani night before dawn.

It was the last thing Hasheem remembered from the raid. For eight years, the night had been a knowledge, a mere fact left on his mind like an old wine stain one had forgotten how it happened. He couldn't recall when he'd lost that memory. Some time during the raid? A day, a week, a month while he was imprisoned at Sabha? Somewhere between his first scream and the last grunt from one of the men he'd satisfied? Which man?

'It doesn't matter,' Dee had said, patting him on the shoulder the first day Hasheem came into his service. 'What happened happened. Sometimes the past shapes who we are, other times it's far better buried.'

'Is it,' he'd wanted to ask a many times, 'better off buried?' Because Dee didn't look like he'd meant it when the mess had to be cleaned up. He'd looked like a man trying to cover up a mistake he couldn't fix. It hadn't happened too often, and while he could count those incidents on one hand, including the one involving Mara's husband before he'd left Rasharwi, to believe said incidents would never catch up with him outside of the city was like wishful thinking to a dying man. A change of identity couldn't help it. A change of scenery had never made a dent. Deep down, he knew it was going to come back one way or another, that it was only a matter of time something or someone would kick the door open, and then the memory would come flooding back to him, along with the unidentified tune that had caused every mess in the past eight years. Only this time, the one who would have to answer for the mess would be Djari.

'I know you,' was all it had taken to kick open that door. 'You're Soraya's son. Yeva's little brother.'

It had caught him unaware, like stumbling out of a tunnel into the searing sunlight, the sudden explosion of pain that had been there the first time a soldier had ripped him open, the day he'd walked into his room to find Mara's body swinging from the wooden beam, or the night Djari was trying not to scream as the man tore into her. It ripped something apart. It broke something out of prison. It brought the tune back to life.

He killed the man.

How, he couldn't remember, the same way he couldn't remember killing the general, or any those people he'd taken apart in Rasharwi. He'd killed the man's companions too, without knowing how or why. Every time that tune started playing, the memories of what he was doing disappeared like a candle being snuffed out before being lit up again. This time, the unidentified tune hadn't stopped when he came back, not while the rasp of Saya's steel was rising above it, not when she was yelling at him to put down the weapon. It was still there when the sight of her walking toward him had begun to waver and fade, when everything around him had turned into an unconvincing image from the past, a dream vaguely remembered, or a premonition of the future that might or might not happen, before something that had came back to life.

They came with fire on a Raviyani night before dawn...

It began with a shriek of a woman, the kind that reminded him of juvenile eagles screeching to be fed. Only at ten he was old enough to know eagles didn't feed at night, and no birds nor animals ever screeched so loud, so high a sound as people when they were about to die. 'Humans,' a raid survivor had said, 'when burned alive could silence anything with their scream.'

The night did go silent. The music and laughter did stop. For a moment that lasted too long, conversations hung unfinished, confessions of lovers paused mid-sentence, young mothers turned from the babes at their breasts to listen. And then, when the second shriek began, what started as a celebration turned into a massacre.

Through the smoke screen formed by the fire that began on the eastern side of camp, the Rashais rode in with their torches already lit. Black helmets over black hair above black armors poured in from the horizon like an unstoppable storm of dark sand, snaking into the gaps between tents to drown all their inhabitants. Only this time the tents weren't being uprooted by the wind and sand, they were being lit on fire along with its inhabitant, and while sandstorms would kill anyone, Shakshi or a Rashai, tonight, the killing was one-sided. It occurred to him then that he'd made the comparison unfairly. This was no wrath of god or nature that came to end their Raviyani. Nature didn't discriminate which life to take, humans did.