I let it hurt.
‘Sometimes, you hurt the ones you care for, to open their sight.’ One blink she is there, and then she elongates, skin morphing into a wrinkly blistered thing; her white hair vanishes, replaced with spiking bramble. We no longer look alike. Her eyes bulge until they droop from the sockets. Her tongue pulses against four rows of sharp teeth, greeting me witha pointy smile. Her legs morph into hundreds of beetle legs, inchitteringsounds that screech against my ears. Her face nestles in its oily body.
Terror paralyses me. She’s become a dîv.
What the Hellsareyou?
She cocks her head. ‘Oh, Khamilla.’ Her voice is soothing. ‘You wanted this. And I no longer take orders from you.’
She lunges and I dart back, feet slipping on the rocky ground. Then I am sprinting across the mauled quarters of Stone City, past Katayoun who calls after me, past the towering palace gates. I dive against an abandoned hovel.
No-Name crawls upwards on to the reed roofs, scurrying so fast she’s a black blur, until she reaches the hut. I barrel forward, stamping my foot until the cracked door bursts open.
‘Khamilla,’ she calls out, desperate – sounding almosthurt.
As her talons scrape my back, I slam shut the door. No-Name hurtles into it, threatening to split the stone apart. I slink into the corner, her accusations turning over in my head.
Is she right? Perhaps my ties to both empires bar me from exploring my Heavenly potential?
You have become bored of your own suffering. The emperor is gone, so No-Name must remind you of the consequences.
Outside, No-Name bangs and shudders the walls. I unclench my aching fingers and peer inside my satchel toward the sageism text, at the triangular seal etched on the red parchment. This jinn-folk’s knowledge is a translation, and translations are contingent on civilisations; with the passage of time, languages alter, making the knowledge incomplete.
Outside, No-Name quiets. To my surprise, the shadows around her wisp beneath the door and into the text. The words that challenged me before become clear.
If I want to access the Eight Gates of Heaven, I would need to reform my Heavenly bonds to strengthen them. So I begin reading.
Using the scroll’s instructions, I meditate with incense using herbs with cold energy instead of hot. After seven-breath patterns, carefully, I enter a visualisation meditation, beginning with white dahlias before easing into the warm colours of gold, rose and then blood.
With it, the incense wafts into my sensorial experience, dancing on my tongue. Instead of a controlled state, it boils against my soul.
Shadows traverse against the golden light, manifesting into lines. I do not immediately understand what I am seeing, so I cross my legs in the psychospiritual world, simply gazing. But I don’t draw near, afraid that if my bonds in this metaphysical realm detect me, they will snap away and disappear. Here, I’m a visiting stranger, watching something wonderful unfold from afar.
The gold dust scatters to reveal gates trailing to different realms, eons away. I distinguish from my Qabl studies the Gates of Time and the Unseen Gates, and then some anomaly into the unknown. There are the gates of the barzakh – the world of souls – where stepping through them guarantees death. I feel in this periscope like a speck, the vista too overwhelming for a mortal.
Eventually, I call on Heaven and my bonds fall into thick seventy-seven bonds. I run my fingers over them, stunned at how they materialised so solidly. They criss-cross my soul like capillaries – like strings attached to my body, as if I am a puppet dangling below Heaven. Each rod hinged in a position so arbitrary, there may not be human logic to its patterning – only Divine reason.
But at second glance, a theorem forms: the bonds are like coded inscriptions of divinity, twisting like a maze.
Based on this finding, instead of focusing on thickening power from the Heavens, I only need to rearrange the twisted bonds and combine the rods together like parts of a machine. If I take one piece of rod and connect it with another, the bond energy doubles.
An instinctive knowledge tells me that these bonds form the vastest, prettiest machine, an engine of unparalleled complexity. It’s so dizzying, I can hardly savour its aesthetic pleasures.
The thoughts also evoke a dark suspicion: the reason no monk has spoken of this technique is because it’s forbidden, and things are only forbidden if there are terrible consequences. But could I use it to access the Gates of Heaven to defeat Akashun?
Before I latch on to more bonds, the psychospiritual world shimmers. Faces form, and oddly, I see the Keeper of the Great Library. I blink. ‘Keeper? Is this real?’
He shrugs. ‘Is anything real in the spiritual planes? You opened the sageism text – I am its guardian, as I’m the guardian of many scrolls from the Great Library.’
‘Oh.’
He sighs again, the most serious I’ve seen him. ‘You have understood the text. A shame. The meanings derived may seem empirical, but your bias justifies your thoughts and therefore your actions. The book maintains one purpose: simple objective knowledge – until it’s bestowed upon you humans. You think yourself better than the jinn-folk? Free will is the most powerful weapon in the world, and it comes from knowledge. But knowledge is a storm changing the terrain, harming its receivers, irrevocably shifting the fabric of existence. I warn you, this technique... what you are to do with that emperor will change this era.’
‘For better or worse?’
He shrugs and yawns. ‘I do not know.’
I hear it then. There’s an undercurrent of rage humming beneath the Keeper’s words. In his ancient existence, how long has he witnessed wars being fought for the same reasons but by different civilisations?
