Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) (29 page)

‘Thank you,’ she said faintly. ‘This is really—’

‘Oh, let her sit down!’ cried a woman from across the room. ‘Look at the poor thing – she’s going to faint!’

Far more people than were necessary sprang forward to help Harotha down into a comfortable seat. A cup of cooled tea
found its way into her hand and once again the room filled with the noise of thirty chattering voices. She took a sip of tea and looked around, starting to recognise some of the individual faces of the women surrounding her.

‘I know it probably doesn’t feel right,’ said a low voice in her ear. Elthion’s mother, Trini, was sitting next to her. She had much more grey in her hair than the last time Harotha had seen her, and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. She patted Harotha’s knee. ‘But I think it’s what Saria would have wanted. She would have been so proud of you, you know. To think, she missed knowing about this by just a few hours.’

Harotha gasped at a sudden flutter of panic in her chest.

‘Oh, my!’ cried Trini. ‘Was that a contraction?’

‘No, no,’ Harotha reassured her quickly, trying to smile. ‘He just kicked me, that’s all.’

‘So it’s a boy?’ someone cried out.

She shrugged, still smiling tightly. ‘I think so.’ She raised her voice to be heard over the celebratory shouting. ‘At least the signs say so – but they’re not always right, you know.’

‘I knew it! She’s carrying high. Boys are always like that,’ someone announced.

‘Were you dizzy a lot at the beginning? I was dizzy with both my boys, but then when I had my girl, I wasn’t dizzy at all.’

The babble of conversation quickly rose in volume as everyone presented their own theories for determining the sex of an unborn baby.

A young woman she didn’t know came over to refill her tea. As the liquid trickled into the cup, she asked shyly, ‘So what’s the daimon like? Is he very handsome?’

Those guests close enough to hear the question immediately fell silent to listen to the answer. Harotha smiled with relief. Here was one question that she could answer with perfect honesty. ‘Yes, he is. Very handsome.’

Her interrogator sighed happily and swung the teapot around to offer it to someone else.

‘I’m so glad you finally came to your senses and decided to leave the fighting to the men,’ Trini told her complacently. ‘What the men don’t understand is how much braver we women have to be. It’s much harder for me to sit here and worry about Elthion, up to the gods know what out there with your brother, than it is for him to fight. And you’ – she leaned closer, whispering in her ear – ‘these others don’t know, but Elthion told me what you had to do to get away. I can’t imagine how horrible it must have been for you, with that Dead One, all those months. You were very brave to endure it – most girls I know would have given up the baby, daimon or not, or even done themselves in. At least now you know that monster will never be able to touch you again. It is too bad they didn’t kill him when they had the chance, though. Oh, well – maybe they’ll get him now, in the temple. My dear, are you feeling all right? You look very pale.’

‘There are so many people here,’ she explained. ‘I’m feeling a little light-headed – I think I need some air.’ She put down her teacup and stood up.

‘Do you want someone to come with you?’

‘No, no, I’ll only be a moment.’

Trini turned around to respond to a question about her sister’s health and Harotha quickly took the opportunity to
slip away through the crowd, all the while feeling as if her flesh were tightening and turning transparent under their scrutiny, like a jellyfish on the beach. She noted a fair amount of dark looks coming her way too, and comments whispered behind fingers and received with grave nods. Trini never could keep a secret.

By the time she reached the door, her hands were tingling unpleasantly and she realised that she had forgotten to breathe. A few people saw her heading outside and asked where she was going, but mercifully, no one insisted on accompanying her when she said she just wanted a little air.

The midday sun was blazing as she lurched to a large flat rock under a spreading palm tree. She sat down, rubbing her forehead with her hand as the baby wiggled inside her. She shut her eyes and circled her arms around her belly, trying to feel the soothing coolness that she had to admit was probably only a product of her imagination. For the moment, the politics of rebellion felt as unimportant as the revellers’ gossip. The only thing that she knew clearly was that she wanted to feel Eofar’s touch, more than the secrets of the ashas, more than a free Shadar, more than living another lonely day.

But longing was an indulgence she couldn’t afford, and time was running out. She had to make a choice. If Faroth’s mission to the temple met with success, Daryan was almost sure to expose her lies with his usual feckless candour; if not, and she ran now, she would be abandoning her people just when they needed her leadership most. She had to have more information.

The little bottle of elixir she’d taken from Eofar felt warm
in her hand. She had no time for indecision; at any moment the women from the party would come looking for her. The time, the place, the circumstances were all wrong, but she’d be the worst kind of fool if she squandered her only chance by waiting for the perfect moment. With a steady hand, she wormed out the stopper and drank the liquid down in one swallow. If history judged Harotha, daughter of Ramesh’Asha, it would not be for a fool.

Undoubtedly the ashas had elaborate rules and caveats for the elixir’s use, but as Harotha knew none of them, she just focused her mind on what she wanted to know and waited for something to happen. She was anxious, of course, but she needed to know what to do and she would not allow fear to ruin her only chance to learn what the future had to tell her.

The visions, when they came, were not at all the vague, static images she’d been expecting. Instead, they were whirling, furious things that surrounded and buffeted her. The bright daylight saturated into a storm-driven red as the townscape around her faded into smoky outlines. Hurriedly she slid down from the rock until she felt the relative safety of solid ground beneath her.

Ashen faces streamed past her, shouting, eyes filled with anger and terror. The vision whisked her to a red rock wall set with a small rectangular window, through which she could see ships with storm-torn sails listing in the harbour and a city burning: a city invaded.

‘No!’ She clenched her fists. ‘This is wrong – this is the past. This isn’t—’

But the vision spun her round into the midst of a furious argument: the ashas, the last ashas. She didn’t want to look at their faces, in case her father or mother were amongst them; it was better not to remember them at all than to remember them like this, on this day—

They were arguing about what to do, she realised. She couldn’t hear them properly – their voices sounded thin, far away – but she could read their gestures well enough. Some wanted to go down and fight; others were afraid that their powers over the sands would be useless against the dereshadi.

Then Harotha saw one old priestess take a vial like the one she was still holding and put it to her lips.
The future
, she thought eagerly; they would see it together.

Then she felt herself yanked backwards, the scene around her retreated to a speck in a fraction of a heartbeat and she flew backwards through time at an impossible speed, years rushing past in an indistinguishable blur. She clenched her teeth and shut her eyes, but it made no difference. The eons screamed by, pulling at her limbs, squashing the breath from her body.

‘No!’ She forced the word from her lips, fighting against the vision, trying to use her physical reality to swim against the current of time. ‘This is the wrong way. I need to—’

But as if in answer, she was suddenly struck by the unmistakable feeling of being watched. She opened her eyes. The visions overlaid her reality with their own, but she could see that the street was empty. She understood now that she had no control over what was happening; someone else was deciding what she would be shown. The gods? Were they
speaking to her at last? But why would they want to take her so far back?

She shut her eyes again, this time surrendering to the dizzying spectacle. Time slowed and then stopped, and she found herself looking into the mouth of a cave. Her pulse quickened because she recognised the place: it was the cave she had discovered only hours earlier, there was no mistaking it – only now the doorway was wide and tall and open. The vision pulled her inside to a great cavern with a smooth, domed roof painted all over with stars of the night sky: the gods. The beauty of it brought tears to her eyes, but she blinked them away as quickly as she could, because covering the spaces between the stars was writing, actual
writing
. This was not a picture or a map, it was some kind of— She didn’t even know what to call it, but her heart faltered in greedy wonder at all of the secrets that were there to be read. When she was finally able to tear her eyes from the ceiling she saw that all around the vast cavern were tables and cases and boxes spilling over with scrolls and papers and pens and ink. It was just like the places Eofar had told her about in Norland, where scholars met to study and debate and write down what they knew for others to read. She had never imagined such a thing had once existed in the Shadar. With a deep pang of regret she wished that Daryan could have been with her to see it too.

Time jumped again; the scene changed, but not the location. A crowd had gathered in the cavern, but no one was reading or writing now. Grim-faced men and women, even some children, stood in anxious clusters. Some were frightened, or angry; some were weeping. They were ashas, but they weren’t
like the ashas of Harotha’s era: they wore no ceremonial robes, and obviously they did not shut themselves up in the temple, for they were here with their families close around them. She understood intuitively that their powers had not been granted to them in a secret ceremony – they had come by them naturally, just as she had.

She could follow enough of their bitter talk to learn that they had been betrayed by one of their own. They spoke no name, but it was clear that his powers far outstripped their own.

Time began to dash forward again, this time in jerky little jumps through a series of confusing tableaux, but she recognised a war when she saw one. The ashas were battling their betrayer – conspiring, planning and attacking – but each time they were beaten down, their numbers dwindled and their enemy’s wrath grew, and harsher punishments were meted out on the despairing cityfolk.

And then she was transported from the beleaguered city to a magnificent, shining palace where she flitted through rooms glowing with colour. She was dazzled by gilded and jewelled ornaments, beguiled with richly carved images. She thought she must be in some other country, some place far from the Shadar, until she came to a cavernous rotunda open to the sky and realised with a shock that this palace was the temple.
This is what it was like when it was first built
, she thought. She couldn’t conceive of the magnificence and power of the being for whom a citadel like this would be required.

And it was here that the ashas tasted victory at last. The vision coyly refused to show her how they had finally brought
it about, but as she followed the ashas out onto the roof the cost of that victory was clear: the city below them lay in ruins. The people limping to the base of the temple were shattered and broken and as they looked up she could see the exhaustion and hopelessness in their faces. They felt no joy at their liberation; only a cringing relief, and they watched their oppressor thrown down from the cliff with dull eyes.

Harotha winced and felt her stomach drop as the figure, indistinct in the bright sun, tumbled through the air, but before the body shattered on the rocks the vision changed and time cranked forward once more.

And now she witnessed the great, impossible lie: the ashas – the few that were left – had only one purpose now, and that was to prevent this horror from ever happening again. Their battle-scars ran so deep that they were unable to stop fighting a war that had already ended, or to see that the real enemy was now their own fear.

From the depth of this fear came the decision to protect the future by erasing the past. Harotha watched with a deep, howling loss as they threw their books and scrolls onto the bonfires, consigning all their knowledge, all the Shadari’s history, to the flames. She saw the cave blocked up and the sumptuous walls of the palace blasted bare, until what had once been a mansion become a prison – one without doors or locks – where the inmates thought incarceration the highest of honours. And over the people they set a secular king, to deal with the city’s terrestrial affairs.

All this was preparation for the conspiracy of an entire
generation to deceive their own descendants: a new initiation rite was invented, ostensibly to confer the power of the gods on those they favoured, but whose real purpose was to cull those already so endowed from the rest of the population. These initiates – the ashas – were then schooled in the use of their powers in a manner so ritualised it guaranteed they would never discover their full potential, nor dare to use their powers in any way except in the pre-sanctioned service of the gods. No one person would ever again develop the capability to throttle the nation.

It had all worked perfectly: no one had questioned it, not in all of the generations of Shadari and ashas who came after – until Harotha.

Time wrenched her forward again, moving with bone-crushing force, this time to her parents’ time. There was the old priestess, still with the vial to her lips. She drank, and Harotha’s vision merged with hers …

They saw the city blackened, destroyed, drowning in ash. The temple had been obliterated, nothing left but a pile of rubble. The people were homeless, dying of disease and hunger, and still they were fighting and murdering each other. It was the end of the Shadar and the Shadari – and it was not the Dead Ones who had brought about this terrible future; the damage had been done by one of their own, someone whose power was virtually limitless.