She shook her head. “You don’t know me,” she said, even though he knew her better than most by now. “I must seem so small to you, so insignificant, hiding behind walls and layers of fabric, more a story than a person. But there are parts of me you don’t know, parts you haven’t seen.”
“I don’t think you’re small or insignificant,” he said. His gaze softened, solemn rather than fierce. “I think you have so much power within you that it scares you, and that you make yourself small on purpose because you don’t know what you’ll become if you ever stop.”
He let go of her hands, and neither of them spoke as they continued on toward the dakhmeh. Their trek was almost over, and before long, Soraya saw the shadowy cylinder on a hill up ahead. The sight of it should have filled her with dread or disgust, but she barely paid it notice. She was repeating Azad’s words to herself over and over again until their cadence matched her heartbeat.
* * *
It was only when they had come to a stop at the foot of the hill that Azad’s words lost their enchantment. The dakhmeh loomed over them, and Soraya’s stomach lurched in revulsion. The wrongness of being here—of being here alive—settled over her, coating her skin like fine grains of sand. She was breathing shallowly, not wanting to inhale the contamination of death in the air.
As they neared the top of the hill, Soraya saw a pale orange light glowing from inside the dakhmeh. I was right, she thought. She supposed it could be a different yatu, someone other than the false priest, but she couldn’t help feeling that whoever was inside had been waiting for her all along.
She kept expecting Azad to tell her she could turn back, that she didn’t have to go through with this, but he didn’t, and she wasn’t sure she wanted him to. Instead, to her surprise, she was the one who offered a way out. “You should wait here.”
Azad shook his head. “I can’t do that. We both go in or we both go back.”
There was the excuse she’d been waiting for to turn back, but Soraya knew she couldn’t take it, not when they had come this far. “My curse will protect me,” she argued. “I want to go in alone.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was true. There was an intimacy to this unraveling of her life that she didn’t want to share with anyone else.
He frowned at her, but he must have believed the resolve in her voice, because eventually he nodded. “I’ll stay close. If you need me, call for me.”
Soraya agreed, and after taking one last breath of the cool night air, she continued onward. She had never seen the inside of a dakhmeh, of course—only the corpse-bearers came inside—and so she walked in expecting the worst. Would there be corpses laid out, decayed or half eaten by scavenger birds? Would a yatu be committing some unholy ritual with parts of the dead? Every story meant to scare children away from the dakhmeh swam through her mind. If you step into the dakhmeh, or if you linger too long around a dead body, then the corpse div Nasu will find you and make you fall ill.
But as soon as Soraya stepped inside the dakhmeh, she no longer felt any terror or disgust—the only sensation was one of overwhelming emptiness.
The dakhmeh had two layers, she discovered, and she was standing on the top one, a jutting platform that formed a ring around the dakhmeh’s perimeter. And all along the platform were rectangular indentations, the right size for a grave. To her intense relief, each of the shallow graves was empty. There was no roof, of course, in order to grant access to the birds, and so the air was not as stale and foul as she had expected, and the stars still shone overhead.
The platform gently inclined downward to a pit at the center of the dakhmeh. Soraya carefully made her way down the footpath between the graves. There were three rows of them, and when she passed the third row, with the smallest graves, she realized these must be for children.
At the end of the platform, she hesitated. She saw a fire burning in the pit below, the source of the light they had seen from outside. But otherwise, she saw nothing and no one, and she began to regret telling Azad to stay behind.
Why should you ever be afraid of anyone? she heard Parvaneh’s voice asking her. And she was right, wasn’t she? Soraya was always the most dangerous person in any room. With this surge of confidence, Soraya sat on the edge of the platform and slid forward to land on the ground below.
A fine white powder rose up from the ground with the impact of her landing, and now Soraya knew what happened to the bones once the vultures finished their meal.
In the firelight, Soraya could make out the shapes of grates set into the wall—drains, she supposed, for rainwater. She went closer to the fire and found a waterskin and an empty bowl with the remains of some kind of stew. As Soraya began to wonder where the owner of these objects was, she heard a voice, like stone scraping against stone, from behind her.
“Who are you?” came the voice—a voice she recognized. “What are you doing here?”
Soraya turned at once to face it. In the shadow under the platform was a grizzled man, his gray hair and beard unkempt, his eyes red. He was not as tall as she remembered, but still, the sight of him made her want to shrink back, to escape the judgment of both him and the Creator. Why should you ever be afraid of anyone? she reminded herself again, and her fists clenched at her sides, grounding her.
“Do you remember me?” she asked him in a steady voice.
He stared at her blankly at first, but then he sucked in a breath and said, “Show me your face.” He came toward her. “Show me if you are who I think you are.”
Fear returned to her, but still she turned toward the firelight, removed her shawl with shaking hands, and pulled her hair away from her face to show the old man the rivers of poison under her skin, made visible by her rapidly beating heart.
His eyes shone when he saw her face, and he nodded slowly. “I remember you, shahzadeh,” he said. “I remember that night.” He snickered. “I frightened you, didn’t I?”
Her face burned with anger. I could reach out and touch him right now, she thought, and then see which one of us is more frightened. But no, she couldn’t harm him. She still needed him. “Have you been hiding away here all this time?” she said. “I thought yatu were more powerful than that. Can’t you use your magic to help you escape?”
His smile turned sour. “Why do you think no one has ever found me here?” He spread his arms wide. “I lay a spell on the dakhmeh’s boundaries, to keep away those who mean to do me harm.” His arms fell. “But without my books, I can do little else but cast petty curses on the villagers using the remains of their relatives.”
The word curses echoed in her mind like the hissing of a snake, reminding her of her purpose. “I could find your books for you, if they haven’t been burned,” she said.
He let out a skeptical snort. “I assume you want something in return,” he said.
“As high priest, you would have known the location of the simorgh’s feather. Tell me where it is.”
If her request surprised him, he didn’t show it. He only briefly considered her offer before nodding. “The simorgh’s feather is the heart of the Royal Fire,” he said.