Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) (12 page)

Saria stood up, staring in disbelief at what Harotha was regarding with growing satisfaction. A dune had risen up from the sand in front of them, crested at the top like a wave that had frozen just as it reached its apex, at least twelve feet high and twice as long. On either side of the dune, rocks ranging
in size from tiny pebbles to huge boulders lay strewn all about. Moonlight filtered through the dust. Behind them, the abandoned houses had been completely flattened.

Harotha began to laugh raggedly to herself. ‘I did it,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I really did it.’ She turned to Saria, triumph roaring in her heart. ‘I did it: I saved us!’

But Saria’s face was dark with fear. ‘You did nothing,’ she said blankly. ‘It was the gods, not you.’ She backed away a step. ‘Not
you
.’

Harotha walked around to the other side of the dune and looked up at the mountain. The landslide had left the mountain face even sheerer than before: almost completely flat, in fact, like a wall. It was odd, an unnatural way for it to break, she thought as she walked slowly towards it. The dust was still settling, but the moon was bright, illuminating something on the side of the mountain that had not been there before; something had been unearthed from beneath all that red rock.

A shadow flicked over the ground, racing away over the rocks, then another one, right behind it.

‘Dereshadi!’ Saria cried out, and Harotha ran back to find her cowering under the swell of the dune as she looked fearfully up at the sky, where dereshadi were rising from every corner of the city. One skimmed by right over their heads, the moonlight shining through its wings to reveal a tracery of veins as delicate as a spider’s web. They were all heading in the same direction.

‘Trouble at the mines,’ mused Harotha.

‘I have to go,’ Saria announced suddenly in a voice hushed with dread. ‘My son— I have to go. Dramash is out there.’

‘You can’t go now. They’ll see you,’ she answered practically. ‘Listen, Faroth won’t let anything happen to Dramash, you know that. Look, can you see that, over there?’ She tugged Saria out from under the dune and pointed at the thing she’d seen: shadowy lines in the rock that moved against the natural grain of the stone, and below it, something black that might be a cave-mouth, though only a sliver was visible above the piles of fallen rocks. ‘There. Do you see where I mean? It’s just above that—’

Saria slapped Harotha, hard, across the face.

For a moment everything turned red. Then Harotha slowly raised her hand to her burning cheek. Her mouth opened, but she was too stunned to say a word.

‘You have no idea what’s really important,’ Saria told her, regarding her with a cold kind of pity. ‘Maybe when you’re a mother you’ll understand.’ Then she turned away and fled in the direction of the mines.

Harotha watched her go, staring across the unfamiliar landscape of broken rocks, sand and fallen houses long after Saria was out of sight. The night air felt colder beneath the dune’s shadow, and she shivered and wrapped her arms around her belly. She had never felt more alone.

Rho was watching Frea, who was watching one of the hands turn slowly in the air. Something in the way the small, delicate movements played in the dappled shadows of the torchlight had transfixed her. She was regarding the turning hand with such serenity that Rho could almost feel the soft, heavy silence of the snow-covered mountains of Norland – a place Frea had never even seen, except maybe in her dreams.

The moment didn’t last long; even as she stood there watching, the hand wilted like a flower on a broken stem. The entombed slave to whom the hand had belonged had finally suffocated.

A formation of triffons thumped by overhead and Rho looked up from the collapsed entrance to the mine. The fly-over elicited a chorus of fresh screams from the hysterical slaves who were already flailing around Frea’s normally well-ordered mining camp, beating their breasts or clawing uselessly at the stones, dirt and Shadari corpses blocking up the shaft. By his tally more than a hundred slaves had been trapped underground by the collapse.

I want everyone clearing that shaft> Frea called. Then she turned the eye-slits of her silver helmet on Rho. she began, walking towards him,

He looked around at the havoc playing out all over the camp.

Her warning clamped down like a suffocating hand over his mouth.

he amended, stressing her title, feeling the acid burn in his stomach: yet another reminder that she’d nullified any claim he might have to familiarity.

Ongen rushed up with panic oozing around him like a stench.

she snapped.

Rho followed her gaze over to the southern end of the camp where the roofless smelting huts were huddled against the mountain-face. Frea wiped the sweat from the back of her neck.

Frea gave no response beyond the sheer black wall of her mood, forcing Ongen to try again. His silver eyes twitched at their reflection in her helmet before he hastily refocused them elsewhere.

Rho echoed in dismay. The continued wailing of the slaves behind him sounded like a chorus of shrieking gulls.

Frea sheathed Blood’s Pride and charged off towards the huts, darting around a few hilt-less black sword-blades stuck in the sand to cool. She was swiftly followed by Rho and Ongen. Rho envied the guards who’d served in the early days of the colony, when all they had to do was mine the ore and ship it back to Norland. As soon as the empire began to expand, the raw value of the ore had made it irresistible to pirates, so they’d shifted to sending the blood for the imprinting to the Shadar and making the swords there. Imperial ships came twice a year now to drop off jars of blood for the new blades and to pick up the ones already made. Since the blades were only valuable to those whose blood had been used to imprint them, robbing the shipments now was hardly worth the risk.

She disappeared inside the hut while Rho stopped in the doorway. The place was in a shambles. Most of the furniture and equipment had been damaged, and large red rocks were lying among the wreckage. The crates were in the corner, smashed into splinters, and from between the broken boards the blood of Norland’s finest warriors dripped to the ground like the silver-blue tracks of so many snails.

Ongen asked as they backed out into the cooler air. way
behind – even without this collapse, who knows if we were going to find enough ore? Lady Frea’s going to—>

Rho cut him off.

he lashed out impatiently.

Ongen’s anxiety shifted to resentment, pushing at him like a shove to the shoulder.

he asked angrily as Ongen drew his sword and lumbered off back towards the mine.

Ongen scoffed.

As Rho started after him, Frea emerged from the hut and walked past him among the sword-blades. She looked up at the faint lights winking in the temple windows high above the city.

he suggested, careful to keep any trace of pity to himself. He wished that she would take her helmet off. Just looking at it made him feel claustrophobic.

always
somebody’s fault> she answered darkly.

Rho had never cared about the garrison’s reputation – his only goal had been to get as far away as possible from his family’s infighting – but Frea had far grander aspirations, and her only chance of being recalled to Norland was to somehow impress the emperor with her management of the colony. Now it looked as though all of her efforts had gone up in smoke in a single night.

he said, moving closer to her, trying to reach the vulnerability that he knew was buried somewhere beneath the
silver and leather, so much more alluring to him than the chiselled perfection of her face or the erotic promise of her flawless body.

she commanded, marching towards the centre of the mining camp. His stomach muscles contracted. What had Ongen called him – a mangy dog? But he still followed.

The situation in the camp had not improved much. The slaves were frantically trying to dig out the shaft, but the more they dug, the more rocks and dirt – and dead – came pouring out. The ground in front of the shaft was already littered with crushed bodies, some unlucky enough to still be breathing. Those slaves who’d escaped the collapse were being rounded up, but many were just flopping around on the ground, howling and weeping.

another soldier cried, rushing up to her,

Frea asked, bristling.

But before the soldier could answer, a strange, taut silence swept through the compound, flattening the noise and confusion like a shockwave. The emotions of the Norlanders charged the air like an electrical storm; Rho felt his skin bristling with it. He turned and looked in the same direction as everyone else, over the entrance to the mines.

The Mongrel.

She was ethereal but unmistakable: the eye-patch like a hole on one side of her face, the tangle of black hair and the aura of invincibility pulsating through the air around her. She was bare-armed, and stood with both hands behind her back.

How the piss-poor Shadari had ever managed to hire the most notorious mercenary commander who had ever lived, he couldn’t begin to imagine, but there she was, standing on a rocky outcrop over the entrance to the mines.

Just then a sibilant noise scratched at his ears: the Shadari were whispering. The Mongrel brought her hands out from behind her back to reveal a bundle hanging from each fist. The two round objects transcribed an arc against the moonlit sky and landed in front of Frea’s boots with a thump. The metallic smell of fresh blood wafted up to him. With a twinge of satisfaction that shocked him, he recognised the one on the left as Beorun, her latest lover, his successor to her bed.

Frea said. She slid Blood’s Pride from its scabbard with a heady anticipation that flooded through Rho’s senses like strong wine. He noticed her exaggerated gait as she stepped over the two disembodied heads, almost as if she could already feel the sway and roll of the ship that would carry her back to Norland in triumph. The mines, the colony, none of it would matter if she became the first – the only – warrior to bring down the Mongrel. Her name would be the toast of every hall; her chair would be pushed to the head of every table. To the rest of the Norlanders, she said

A sound ripped the air behind him, a sharp-pitched yell that set his bones buzzing. He turned to see a Shadari slave standing straight as a rod with one fist upraised.

Frea roared without even turning around, and a white-caped soldier swept over and clouted the slave over the head with the pommel of his sword. Then another
shout sounded from the back of the crowd, and another answered it, and then, with a blaring screech of common intent, the Shadari riot erupted.

Rho said to himself, drawing Fortune’s Blight as Shadari rushed into the camp from all directions.

Many of the slaves were armed, most with mining implements but some had actual weapons, or at least the battered remains of actual weapons. The Norlanders’ arms were more formidable but they were heavily outnumbered.

Frea’s order yanked him back like a tug on a leash.

The Mongrel was forging a path straight towards them through the confusion and he needed all of his self-control to keep from looking away from her. The scaly pink scar-tissue crawling over her right forearm brought the bile to his mouth. Her mangled face was far more intimidating than Frea’s silver helmet.

The Mongrel halted a few paces off and said the last thing he expected.

Blood’s Pride twitched in Frea’s hands.

she answered, extending her bare arms. She spoke the Norlander language in its pure, unaccented form, but she was as emotionless as a corpse.

Frea informed her bluntly.

the Mongrel asked, as impassive as a puddle of water.

Rho flipped his sword around and grasped the un-honed section of the blade just above the hilt. he said, forcing himself to look into her disfigured face.

She glanced at the sword and then at him, and he felt a glimmer of some feeling from her, but it was too veiled for him to identify it. She made no movement to take the sword.

he insisted angrily, and then tossed Fortune’s Blight into the sand at her feet. With a flush of satisfaction, he watched her pick it up.

Frea crowed, and charged.

Her first sweeping blow came down squarely on the Mongrel’s parry with a shock that Rho felt thrilling up through his own arms. He circled back out of the way as Frea struck again, a blow to her opponent’s right side, and again the Mongrel’s block sent waves of sound thudding over the sand. They circled. Frea feinted and changed direction and again they circled. Then she tried a complicated move to her left, a lightning-fast change of grip followed by a thrust that Rho knew well from the vicious sparring matches that she preferred to more traditional foreplay. The Mongrel slid to the side and avoided the blow without contact. Frea was caught off-balance and needed a stuttering step forward to come back on guard, but instead of capitalising on her opponent’s mistake, the Mongrel stepped back.