Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) (11 page)

Faroth checked on Dramash and then limped straight up to Meiran. ‘Are more of them coming?’ he asked, brandishing his unstained sword.

‘They didn’t call out to anyone.’ She paused to take another drink. ‘Maybe no one was nearby. Maybe they wanted to kill me themselves. They wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.’

Faroth glanced over at the unconscious guards. ‘But you didn’t kill them. Why not?’

‘Why should I?’ She wiped a splash of wine from her mouth with the back of her disfigured forearm. ‘I don’t work for you, remember? You didn’t like my terms.’

Jachad leaned back against the bar.

Faroth turned to the man beside him and exchanged his battered weapon for one of the captured broadswords. Then he hobbled over to the two Norlanders. Without pausing, he
plunged the blade into the back of the first guard. Blue blood swelled around the wound. The body twitched for a moment and then lay still. Faroth awkwardly changed his grip on the sword and yanked it out of the dead man’s body, then methodically repeated the procedure on the other man. He turned and handed the dripping sword to his follower, who dropped it as if it were red-hot.

Only then did Jachad notice the boy standing next to the bar, gazing at his father with the grave expression and the round, unblinking eyes of an owl. There was something truly terrible in that look. It had never occurred to Jachad that a child’s innocence could be lost in a single moment, but if it were possible, surely he was seeing it now.

‘You could never understand how much I want this,’ Faroth told Meiran.

Jachad saw her smiling back at Faroth. He shut his eyes.

‘Then we have a deal?’ asked Meiran.

‘We have a deal,’ Faroth replied.

‘Faroth, I think Dramash just ran outside,’ said Elthion, poking around noisily behind the bar.

‘What? Why didn’t you stop him?’ Faroth’s eyes flashed. ‘Sami, go and find him. He can’t have gone far.’ To Meiran, he said, ‘The mines, then. Our people will be there, waiting for your signal. Before sunrise.’ He limped out of the tavern with his retinue, leaving Jachad and Meiran alone with the two corpses.

Jachad took a deep breath and gathered his thoughts. ‘Meiran, if you don’t—’

He had intended to plead with her to call off this arrangement
– or at least tell him what it was all about – but he never got the chance. Before he could get in another word, a dim rumbling shook the air and then built to a grinding roar. The lamp went out, drowning the tavern in darkness as the ground beneath him dipped. The shelves behind the bar crashed down, shattering winejars and mugs. He no longer knew where to find the door; all he could think of was the ceiling over his head, which he felt sure was about to crack and tumble down on them.

‘Jachi!’ he heard Meiran cry out, and a moment later he felt her hands on his arms, shoving him. The tepid glow of her skin made him remember himself. He rubbed his fingers together and a little point of flame danced above his hand. They had nearly reached the door when it all stopped.

Meiran let his arm go.

‘Is it over?’ he asked raggedly as a soft cloud of chalky dirt drifted down and settled on his hair and shoulders.

‘I don’t know.’ Her silver-green eye gleamed at him.

‘Come on.’ His voice was unsteady. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

But she walked back towards the bar, found the lamp and the flints and lit the wick again. He checked the ceiling above him nervously, relieved to see that it looked solid enough, then crossed behind the bar and sifted through the wreckage until he found an unbroken jar of wine. He tore off the wax seal with his teeth and spat it into the dirt. ‘We have a deal,’ he repeated her words with a sigh. ‘Then I suppose I’m done here.’

‘Not yet. I need you to deliver a message.’

‘What message?’

‘You need to go after Faroth. He’s not going to be at the mines – he’s going to get his long-lost sister back.’

‘Really?’ he asked wryly. ‘That’s nice for him. And what about you?’

She walked over to the dead Norlanders and picked up the bloody sword lying next to them, then aimed the point at the two corpses. ‘I need their heads.’

Jachad took a long, deep drink, and said, ‘Of course you do.’

Harotha shuddered, her spine tingling. Her back ached terribly after the long walk from Saria’s house, and her ankles were so swollen that she could feel them throbbing. Waiting up ahead of them was a derelict building, mottled with dark patches where the whitewash had flaked away from the red clay bricks. The doorway was a black maw, stretching wide to swallow her up. This was the abandoned house where she had lived, alone except for Saria’s infrequent visits, for the last five months: five months shut up in the dark, of no more use to anyone than if she really had been buried in the Dead Ones’ tombs.

‘I can’t,’ she said faintly. ‘I’m not going back in there.’

Saria stopped too. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no other place for you to go.’ She looked away and with a soft, frustrated sigh she added, ‘You should have gone away with him, Harotha, like he wanted. You should never have come back here.’

The two women were completely alone. The neighbourhood around them had been abandoned long ago, the houses left to crumble where they stood. The Shadari population had been shrinking steadily since the coming of the Dead Ones,
and the remaining families now huddled together in the centre of the city, like a litter of abandoned pups. The Dead Ones didn’t even bother patrolling here. The chalky-red face of Mount Asharamon, flanked on either side by the smaller peaks of Esramon and Sharamon, rose up in the near distance. Occasionally they could hear the tuneless tinkle of a goat-bell drifting down from the scrubby slopes of its low summit.

‘I still don’t understand how you could have let it happen, that’s all,’ Saria grumbled.

She looked into the dark doorway. ‘I didn’t think it mattered what I did. I’d been
so sure
I could convince Shairav to use his magic, at least to open up the ashas’ secret passage so we could coordinate a rebellion between the city and the temple, but nothing I said made any difference to him. Even getting Daryan on my side didn’t help. After that, I didn’t think I’d ever come back to the Shadar. There was no way to escape; I was trapped, just like everyone else.’

‘You didn’t
want
to come back. You didn’t want to tell Faroth he’d been right about Shairav’Asha.’

‘By then I had become Eofar’s servant, so I could work on making Daryan into something like a real king without his uncle hanging over him. How could I have known then—? You don’t understand, Saria. Eofar is different from the other Dead Ones. While I was up there in the temple – while we were together – everything was so simple. It all made sense.’

‘Because it was a secret,’ Saria said in her frank but not unkind way. ‘A secret in the dark. Shine a light on it and it doesn’t look the same, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t.’ She felt a hard lump in her throat and wished, not for the first time, that she had the easy gift of tears like other people. Harotha never cried; she couldn’t even remember crying when she was a child.

‘Do you think he’s still waiting for you?’

‘Yes.’ She rubbed her bottom lip with her thumb. ‘I think that’s why he let the White Wolf take over the mines, to make it easier to run away with me.’

‘You know how I feel about what you did, and about him,’ Saria said. She could never bring herself to mention Eofar by name. ‘And since only the gods know how these things are going to turn out I thought you should stay here until you were delivered. But now I think you should go – leave the Shadar, right now. Go and have your baby and forget this place ever existed. And let it forget you.’

‘I can’t,’ she said quietly.

‘For the gods’ sake, why not?’

She looked at her sister-in-law. ‘You remember earlier, you said you thought the gods had abandoned us? Well, they haven’t.’

Saria drew back suspiciously, and for a moment her courage failed her. But no: she needed Saria’s help, and this was the only way.

‘I want to show you something, but I need you to be brave.’

‘What is it?’

She knelt down, bending awkwardly to balance the baby’s shifting weight. Then, unconsciously holding her breath, she began writing in the sand. Saria shrieked and backed away with her hands over her eyes.

‘Stop, stop!’ cried Saria. ‘How dare you! Oh gods, forgive her! Forgive me—’

‘Don’t be childish,’ Harotha snapped, not realising until the words left her mouth that Faroth had said exactly the same thing to Saria just a short while ago. She was nervous, and that didn’t make the situation any easier. She glanced up at the stars and saw them shining brightly now – maybe that would help. She chose the prayer that had worked for her more often than the others, though it still failed much more often than it succeeded.

‘I convinced Daryan to teach me how to write,’ she explained to her sister-in-law as she carefully formed the letters. Saria was standing stock-still with her hands pressed firmly over her eyes, as if blinding herself would render her invisible to the offended gods.

‘All right, Saria, look! Take your hands away.’ She struggled up off the ground and took hold of Saria’s wrists, pulling her hands away from her face, but Saria just turned her head away.

Harotha looked over at the words she had written in the sand and waited. She bit her lower lip. ‘Please,’ she whispered.

Nothing happened.

Defeated both by her own failure and by Saria’s all-too-predictable reaction, she walked back over to the letters and swept them away with her foot. ‘All right, it’s gone. You can look now.’

Saria slowly lowered her hands away from her face and looked suspiciously at the sand around her feet as if she suspected a trick. ‘What did you think you were doing?’ she asked, quivering with outrage. ‘Who do you think you are?’

‘I can do it – I have done it, many times. I just can’t do it all of the time.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Daryan taught me how to read and write a few prayers when we were in the temple together. And I had all that time here, alone, so I began … I didn’t want to tell you until—’

Saria stretched out a finger accusingly. ‘Only ordained ashas have the power. That’s why you went to the temple in the first place. Shairav is the only one who can speak to the gods. Everyone knows that!’

‘That’s what we’ve been told, but it’s not true,’ Harotha said. ‘Maybe it’s because my mother and father were both ashas, or maybe something’s changed. Who knows? Maybe it was never true in the first place.’ She took another deep breath, and moved closer to Saria. ‘So you see why I can’t leave now? Why I have to tell Faroth about this before we end up at the mercy of the Mongrel?’

‘Be quiet! Be quiet!’ Saria shouted, clamping her hands over her ears. She walked to the doorway of the house and put a hand out to brace herself against the wall. ‘You and Faroth are so much alike it makes me want to spit. Even though the thought of what that baby represents makes me ill, I hoped that maybe if you became a mother, you’d have enough to worry about without trying to save…’ Her words trailed off strangely and she looked up towards Mount Asharamon. Harotha saw an unfamiliar look of intense concentration cross her face.

‘What—?’

‘Quiet!’ Saria interrupted in a tense whisper. Then she beckoned Harotha over. ‘Do you hear that?’

She stood by the wall next to her and listened. After a moment she heard the rumbling again, like a heavy stone rolling along, and felt a kind of buzzing under her feet. This time, instead of fading away, both began to swell in intensity; a shifting sound came from within the dark house and a wet crash broke the stillness, as if something heavy had fallen on the water cistern.

The women both jumped, and Harotha cried out, ‘Saria! Get away!’ and pulled her sister-in-law away from the doorway. ‘It’s the roof – it’s coming down!’

Together they lurched over the sliding sands, making instinctively for the open space at the foot of the mountains. A house on their left collapsed in on itself with a terrifying roar just as they stumbled by, and Saria screamed. But in a few moments they were on open ground. They both dropped to their knees.

‘Listen!’ she shouted over the noise, squeezing Saria’s arm tighter. Saria threw her other arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. ‘Listen! Do you hear that?’

‘Like an egg, cracking,’ Saria cried in return. ‘What is it?’

She looked around for the source of the sound. The cracking sound grew louder, and then the rumbling grew louder as well, but this time the rumbling was coming not from underneath them but in front of them.

‘Oh, no,’ she gasped, staring at Mount Asharamon. The moonlight was bright enough to show cracks zigzagging up the rocky face, more and more of them, even as she looked. ‘No, no—’

With a heavy thump the surface of the mountain face broke away and slid down in one long, majestic sweep.

‘Run!’ screamed Saria, pulling wildly at her arm. The view in front of them disappeared, choked with dust. Rocks and boulders bounced over the sand towards them.

‘It’s too late,’ she breathed and threw herself down in the sand. She grabbed Saria’s legs and toppled her down onto the ground beside her. ‘Stay down,’ she commanded as she wrote another prayer into the dirt. ‘Cover your head!’ She finished writing the prayer and then scrambled over next to Saria, tucking herself into a ball with her arms around her belly. Sand and dirt rained down on her and she shut her eyes and her mouth tight, listening to the concussive thud of rocks striking the ground all around them. Saria whimpered with fright.

And then it all stopped.

Harotha opened her eyes. A few small rocks skipped by but the ground was no longer rumbling. In fact, there was no sound at all. A heavy cloud of dust hung in the air, stinging her eyes until they watered. She wet her lips and stood up as quickly as her ungainly body would allow, arching her sore back and looking around thoughtfully.

Saria raised her head, eyes wide and glassy with fright. ‘We’re still alive?’ she gulped.

‘We appear to be,’ Harotha reassured her, and then added, trying to keep her voice calm, ‘Why don’t you get up?’