Read 6: Broken Fortress for Free Online

boat. The women on board seemed to be line fishing. Kahlil watched as a blonde girl hauled a tiny fish up from the water. An older woman held the fish up to a caliper, then shook her head and tossed the fish back into the lake.
    “What are they doing?” Kahlil asked.
    Ji looked up at him from where she had curled up near a heating pipe. She yawned, showing her yellowed teeth.  
    “Where?” Ji’s voice sounded soft and still half asleep.
    “Out on the lake. They’re throwing fish back.”
    “Probably featherfin.” Ji lowered her head back down to her foreleg. “They have to be as long as a hand, otherwise they aren’t old enough to have bred yet and there won’t be any left next year.”
    “You have fishing regulations now?” Kahlil asked. He supposed he should have expected as much. After all, John had been an ecologist. Briefly, Kahlil wondered how differently the Fai’daum homeland would have turned out if the Rifter had been a different man, a theater arts professor, for instance. People’s clothes certainly could have been a bit flashier.  
    “We only introduced the featherfin six years ago, but they have established themselves well enough,” Ji said. “They give the blue eel something to eat other than little moonfish. They seem to be attracting crown geese as well.”
    “Right.” Kahlil’s knowledge of fish was limited to what he had experienced in Nayeshi and that, for the most part, had come in the form of breaded sticks. Or perhaps that had been chicken. He wasn’t sure anymore.
    “It bores me too,” Ji sighed, “but it matters to him, you know. The fish, the plants, the animals, the stone and soil, it all matters to him.”
    “Jath’ibaye, you mean?”  
    Ji nodded. “After the fall of Rathal’pesha, all these lands were in ruins. Just miles of mud, ash, and shattered rock. He brought it all back. It took years, but he did it.” Ji cocked her head. “He brought you back as well. I never would have thought he could have done that, but here you are.”
    “Yes, here I am.” Kahlil frowned, thinking how odd it was that he should be so comfortable with this woman and that she should seem so at ease with him as well. “Did you know me, Ji? I mean, before now. I think I remember you from some other time.”
    “I knew you and have known you many times over,” Ji replied. “Once, you were meant to kill me. I saw it when I was still a captive within the issusha’im. It was the price I was to pay for the destruction of the Great Gate.”
    Inside Kahlil, a distant memory stirred. The shattered yellow stones. The broken blade.
    “I was to lead an assault into Umbhra’ibaye, send a false message to the Kahlil in Nayeshi, and then destroy everything.”
    “I think I remember. My sister was there.” Kahlil closed his eyes, trying to pull the faint memories into focus. He recalled a weight against his back. Something whispering words softly into his ear. He thought there had been flowers and then the smell of a cigarette. Each impression faded even as he tried to concentrate on it.
    “But that never happened,” Ji said gently.
    “That’s not true. Umbhra’ibaye did fall.” That, Kahlil was sure of. All of the Payshmura strongholds had fallen.
    “Not as I had seen it and not as you saw it either. Years before then,” Ji replied. “Jath’ibaye destroyed it.”
    “But I remember—” Kahlil stopped himself. He wasn’t sure what he remembered.
    “You remember what never happened.” Ji shifted to scratch at her side with her back leg. Kahlil fought to keep a sense of reality. It was disorienting to be having this conversation with a dog. Even knowing that Ji was an escaped Issusha Oracle speaking from inside an animal form didn’t keep all this from seeming like it should have been a dream.  
    “It’s the same thing that drove so many issusha’im mad. They saw what happened and what never happened—lives, kingdoms, endless histories that the Payshmura altered and destroyed