5: The Holy Road by Ginn Hale Read Free Book Online

least he’d kept that from happening. That offered him consolation.
    John lifted his hands, feeling the air stroke and curl around his fingers.
    If only he had realized what he was capable of, perhaps he could have saved more lives. John frowned at his bandaged palms. The Fai’daum would still have attacked. Could he have stopped them as well? If he had, then Saimura would have certainly been burned.
    No matter what, someone would have died.
    He couldn’t have saved everyone. In a way that idea was relieving. If he couldn’t have succeeded regardless of how hard he might have tried, then his actions couldn’t have been of that much importance. John wanted to believe that. It suited his idea of himself.
    All his life he had cultivated insignificance. He had been quiet in classes, well behaved at home. Neither good nor bad, just bland. He had been that young man who could speak at length about lichens but was never asked to do so twice. He had perfected the presence of a potted plant, a form filling space where a void would have been too notable. He had taken pains to remain unremarkable. No one cared where a boring man spent his nights.
    The persona he had refined from Sunday school through catechism had kept him free from invitations to games of spin-the-bottle as well as from the infidelities between professors and students. It had served him in Nayeshi and saved him in Basawar. Even as alien as he was to the priests of Rathal’pesha, he had lived among them, passing for nearly ordinary.
    When Dayyid had offered him the curse blade, he had suppressed his response to it. When Ravishan had asked him how he could tear Fikiri out of the Gray Space, he had passed over it as if it were a quirk—something as happenstance as finding change in the street, just a little good luck.
    He had done it all so easily, so naturally that he hadn’t noticed the deceptions himself. He had built an identity of being ordinary and done it so well that even he had forgotten that it was a lie.
    No ordinary man, not even one from Basawar, could crush God’s Razor. Nor did they tear apart wood and iron simply by lifting their hands and willing it to happen. They did not close their eyes and see into distant cities. They could not see or feel the scars left in the Gray Space. They did not sense the life within the stones, earth, air, and water surrounding them. And the issusha’im did not hunt them.
    John lowered his hands back to his chest. They felt hot even through the bandages. The pale canvas curtains surrounding him swayed and then went still.
    There was no point denying that the Issusha’im Oracles had been hunting him. Not after last night; not after they had found him.
    At first he had thought that it was just a dream, a distant memory returning to him in his sleep.
    He watched himself climbing up the sun-warmed rock faces at Emerald Lake. The stone was hot, but he hardly felt it through the calloused soles of his bare feet. His eleven-year-old body was long and lanky, and slightly absurd in his wet, baggy swim trunks. What little hair that had remained after his weekly buzz cut had been bleached nearly white from the summer sun.
    Honeybees darted between clusters of goldenrod and thistle blossoms, humming. The air smelled of pollen and nectar. Dark brambles of blackberries offered glimpses of ripe fruit hanging between their thorns. He stole a few berries as he climbed. His fingers were already stained and scratched from previous plundering.
    At last, he reached the outcropping. Below him, the dark waters of the lake lay perfectly still, reflecting the wide blue sky like a mirror. His father and two brothers looked like toys out on their white fishing boat. At the water’s edge, his sister sat in her bright red bikini, reading a romance novel. Laurie and her mother lounged on faded beach blankets. A spread of tarot cards lay between them. Laurie’s mother was telling fortunes again.
    His own mother was somewhere beneath the cover