The Isle of Blood

“The island of the magnificum.”

He was struggling for breath. The way was steep; he was not used to the heat.

“For what are these pits?” he wondered aloud.

“To keep the town from flooding.”

The dry tanks were flooded with deep shadows; they appeared to have no bottom. If you fell into one, you might fall forever.

The corpse bearers take the boy and bathe him in Taro, the urine of the white bull. They dress him in a Sudreh-Kusti, the garments of the dead. Only his face is left exposed. He is nasu,

unclean. The boy’s spirit watches them and does notunderstand. It does not remember that this was its body. The spirit is an infant again; it has no memory. It is now the sixth hour of the third day.

“How much farther?” Plešec asked.

“It’s just over that next rise,” I answered.

“You better not be lying to us.”

“This is the place,” I said.

“If you are lying to us, I will gut you. I will cut out your intestines and throw them down the mountain.”

“This is the place,” I said again.

It is the hour of the Geh-Sarna. The

Dasturs pray the verses of the Avestan Mathras over the body, to strengthen his soul and help it along its journey. After the prayers the body is carried up and into the Dakhma, where it is laid upon the stone. It is now the twelfth hour of the third day.

“Something is not right,” Rurick said. “This place, it is deserted.”

“He told me to come here.”

“Do you remember rule one?”

“He said he would be here.”

“Here,” Plešec repeated. “But where is ‘here’? What is this place?”

“It’s called a Dakhma,” I answered.

Rurick pressed his hand to his mouth. “What is that smell?”

I decided Rurick had to be first. Rurick had the gun. I dropped my hand into my jacket pocket.

Give it to Will Henry; I’ve nowhere to put it.

If you carried a smaller weapon, you could stick it in your garter.

“Something is not right here,” Plešec said. He turned to Rurick. “Something is not right.”

There is the boy in the inner circle, above the pit in which lies the dry bones and the dust of the dry bones. He is for the sun now and the flies and the birds that take his sightless eyes first. It is the first hour of the fourth day, above the pit, at the summit of the abyss.

Rurick’s eyes widened. His mouth came open. The last thing he saw before the bullet tore into his brain did not make sense. Having been a very self-assured man, he died very confused.

Plešec lunged forward; the knife blade flashed in the final, dying embers of daylight. His thrust tore into my shirt-front; the knife’s tip struck Fadil’s present that hung around my neck, the scarab to bring me good luck; and I fired point-blank into his stomach.

He fell face-first at my feet. I stumbled backward until I smacked against the white wall of the tower, and then my >knees gave out and I sank onto the stony ground with Plešec, who was not dead but bleeding badly and crawling toward me, and his blood shone wetly on the bare rock, trailing behind his jerking legs.

I raised the doctor’s revolver to the level of his eyes. I held the gun in both hands, but I still couldn’t keep it steady.

He stopped. He rolled onto his side. He clutched his bleeding stomach with one hand and reached toward me with the other. I didn’t move. He was nasu, unclean.

I looked past him, to the sea framed in the arched opening of the wall, to the line formed where the water met the sky. The world was not round, I realized. The world was a plate.

“Please,” he whispered. “Don’t.”

Unlike Rurick, Plešec did not die confused.

The boy’s spirit comes to the Chinvato-Peretu, the bridge of sighs joining the two worlds. There he meets himself in the form of a beautiful maiden, his Kainini-Keherpa, who guides him to Mithra to be judged for what he has done and what he has left undone.