Storms (Sharani Series Book 2) (25 page)

Something hard—probably the pouch of metal disks—slammed into his head again and he knew no more.

Gavin awoke with a throbbing headache pounding on the back of his eyelids like the beating of a drum. For a moment, before he came fully awake, he wondered why he had his eyes closed in the middle of one of his grandmother’s performances. Then he opened his eyes.

Darkness greeted him like an old friend. He groaned and sat up, feeling at the large lump on the side of his head. Thankfully, his fingers didn’t find any broken skin. His vision swam, noticeable as lighter patches through the darker shadows within his sight, but he didn’t lose consciousness. He cursed silently to himself. Once again he’d made a decision without thinking it all the way through. A small part of him knew there wasn’t anything he could do about Kaiden’s abilities, but he still cursed himself anyway. He couldn’t afford to keep making these mistakes. Kaiden was right. He wasn’t ready.

A small noise alerted him that he wasn’t the only one in the lightless room. He sighed, pushing aside the memories of the last time he’d found himself a prisoner like this. At least this time he didn’t have a dagger wound in his gut. Despite that, he growled as his head throbbed and he crawled along the ground toward the sound. His hands found the person making the sound and a quick check discovered the bandage on the man’s chest. A few more moments of careful crawling found the other man not that far away. Gavin sighed and leaned back against the wall between the two men.

“Send me to the seven hells,” Gavin muttered to himself.

How had he landed himself a prisoner again? Things had been looking up, despite the setbacks. He was finally starting to see himself as the man his grandmother had always said he was. Farah was a large part of that, but he was now a nobody again. No, he was
learning
again.

The longer he waited, the longer he lived, he was coming to understand the reality of life. Sometimes you could do all the right things and
still
not amount to anything in life. Sometimes becoming something more than ordinary required doing the
wrong
things in order to learn what not to do. Sometimes failure was more important than success because it gave you the chance to learn and grow.
If
you survived, that is.

It was a choice.

Gavin ground his teeth and tried to clear his mind. Thinking hurt, but he had to focus. Part of him vaguely wondered what had come of Nabil, though he also knew there was absolutely nothing he could do for the aevian in his current state. Maybe if he could access his powers . . .

He tried to clear his mind again and reached out to the energy in the sand and rocks around him. It was like trying to pull a large boulder up the side of a sand dune. He felt like the harder he pulled, the deeper he sank into futility. He sighed again, massaged one temple—the one opposite the lump on his head—and tried again.

This time it felt like he hit a barrier in his mind, a wall over which he had to climb. Ignoring the pain, ignoring the headache and the throbbing beat of his heart flitting at his temples, Gavin pushed his consciousness over the edge. Energy flooded into him.

Awareness and mental clarity struck him like slap. Pain fled like darkness before light. Gavin seized on that power, seized on the strength and used it to batter down the wall in his mind. Energy
thundered
through his body and Gavin swung to his feet. Crackling white energy erupted from his hands and ran up his arms in an almost perfect imitation of the large Orinai man. Light flooded into the room and Gavin recognized it almost immediately as the exact same room within which he’d been confined with Lhaurel nearly two fortnights ago.

The energy called on him to move, to act, to do. He took a step toward the door, a vague idea forming in his mind as he approached. Gavin only made it a single step before a hand closed around his leg.

Gavin reacted instinctively, twisting out of the grip and slashing out with one hand as he’d seen the Orinai do. Energy streamed from him in glittering arcs, though they fizzled out only a few inches from his hand.

“Where am I?” the Orinai man gasped. It took Gavin a long moment to puzzle out what the man had said, though the tone made it clear it was a question. The man spoke the language Gavin’s grandmother had taught him, but with enough of a difference that Gavin was only partly sure he understood.

Gavin let the energy crackling up his hands die. It was like releasing a storm. It left a surreal sense of calm behind.

“You’re in the Sharani Desert,” Gavin replied in the common tongue of the Rahuli. “Imprisoned within the walls of the Oasis.”

The Orinai man made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a squeak. Gavin heard him struggling to rise and felt the motion through the rocks. Part of Gavin urged him to press the man back toward the ground and tell him to take it easy, but Gavin was done being naïve. This was the man who had attacked him and Farah without provocation. This was an Orinai.

“Who would dare imprison me?” the man shouted, switching to a highly accented version of the common Rahuli tongue. “Do you know who I am? I am Samsin, thirteenth incarnation of Samsinorna, and a Storm Ward! My family has influence with all seventeen of the other major houses and can buy all the minor ones.”

Gavin listen to the man ramble for a long moment, not understanding half the things he said, then interrupted him. “Are you going to sit there and whine or are you going to help me figure out how to get out of here?”

The Orinai made a strangled noise, like a rashelta being trodden upon. Gavin smiled in the darkness.

“I am a Great One,” Samsin growled. “And I will not be spoken to this way by a slave.”

Gavin chuckled, the sound echoing faintly in the small room. “I don’t care if you’re the master to the gates of the seven hells. Right now all three of us are prisoners. None of us are slaves. Your friend here will die if we don’t figure out a way to get out of here and make it back to the healers.”

“Nikanor’s here?”

Gavin noticed a distinct change in the man’s voice. The pompous, haughty tone slipped and a note of something real came through.

“If you mean the man with the chest wounds, yes,” Gavin said. “I did what I could for him, but I’m not a healer. I sent the woman who was with me to fetch the wettas.”

Samsin groaned and Gavin felt him finally succeed in getting up. Gavin felt the man shuffle over to him, hands probing the ground, until they found the other man, Nikanor.

“My head is fuzzy. What happened after you arrived, sla—” Samsin bit off the last word, though his tone had regained some of the condescension it’d had earlier.

“Well, you tried to kill me and then I decided to help you and your friend—Nikanor is it? Then I was attacked by an old enemy I had thought contained. My mistake. I’ll never underestimate another mystic again.”

“Mystic?” Samsin pronounced the word as if he were speaking around a mouthful of food.

“Magic user. A magnetelorium to be precise.”

“Your words mean nothing.”

“He manipulated metal.”

Samsin made a deep, hissing noise. “A slave mage using powers without a master-at-arms? What devilry is this? Speak truly, did I see you use electricity powers before?”

Gavin frowned at the unfamiliar word.
Electricity?

“I have some powers, yes,” Gavin said, haltingly, “but they are untested and new to me.”

Samsin grunted and Gavin wasn’t sure if it was a good sound or not.

“Will Nikanor live?” Samsin asked.

“Not if we don’t get out of here.” Gavin replied.

Samsin grunted again. “Well, you should get on with that then, sla—” Again he bit off the end of the word.

Gavin got to his feet, a sudden anger burning through the wave of dizziness and nausea that rose with him. “I am
not
a slave. I am not your servant. I am the man who saved your life. Now either help me find a way out of here or stay here and rot.”

Gavin didn’t wait for Samsin to respond, but instead turned his back on the man and strode through the darkness in the direction he knew the door was located. He didn’t, however, ignore the man completely. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. But he did give the majority of his attention over to the door. He didn’t remember much about the last time he’d been here. That time he’d been next to death’s door and was only saved by Lhaurel slamming it shut in its owner’s face. What Gavin
did
remember was the same thing he was beginning to understand now. While most of the doors in the Roterralar Warren where ill-fitted and warped wood, this one was as hard as stone and Gavin couldn’t feel any place where he could even find purchase to pry at it.

Gavin sensed Samsin approach before he heard him. He shifted to one side as Samsin thundered by and, to Gavin’s absolute and utter shock, began pounding on the door with a fist that sounded like iron against the stone.

“Release me at once!” Samsin bellowed. “I don’t know who you are or why you have me here, but by the Seven Sisters and the blood of the Bleeders, I’ll bring this place down around you if you don’t get me out of here now!”

Gavin stared in Samsin’s direction, though it was too dark to actually see the man. If it
had
been light in the room, Gavin was sure his expression would be a slackened one, wide with disbelief and incredulity.

“What in the seven hells are you doing?” Gavin asked when he finally found his voice.

Samsin ignored him. The Orinai pounded on the door again, each strike a double echo of the sound bouncing about within the room and in the corridor beyond.

“The Sisters are the representations of the seven Progressions. They are the holy order which guides our beliefs.”

—From
Commentary on the
Schema, Volume I

Lhaurel leaned back against the wall, massaging her temples against a headache. She was tempted to ask Khari to try and heal her, though Lhaurel wasn’t sure what was wrong with her or if it was even something Khari
could
heal. Besides, Khari already seemed to be approaching her breaking point.

Lhaurel sighed and tried to figure out how long the young boy she’d sent to find Khari had been gone. She’d made it partway through the warren before she’d been unable to take another step. Stubbornness and pride could only take her so far. Fighting against her weakness and the reality of the situation was as futile as trying to walk the sands during a Migration. Except she’d done that.

She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the ground. Her legs protested and she was sure the back of her robes were frayed from the rough surface of the wall, but she didn’t care. Setting aside her cane, Lhaurel crossed her arms over her knees and let her head fall down onto it. She allowed her eyes to close and breathed deeply. In moments, she was asleep.

Dreams greeted her in the darkness.

Elyana was walking in the dream, Lhaurel looking out through her eyes, as she always did. By now, she was more intrigued than panicked, having grown accustomed to the process. She didn’t know how much, if any, of the dreams may have once been real, but she walked through them now without any fear.

As with the last, Elyana was alone as she strode through the long stone corridors, though she held aloft a lamp which lit the way. The light bobbed and danced against the walls, swinging in accompaniment to Elyana’s quick pace.

Where was she going?

Ahead of her in the passage, more lights appeared. Elyana’s pace quickened. Sounds drifted down and Lhaurel was able to pick out angry voices, arguing back and forth. Elyana slowed suddenly, walking with a calm, demure step as the lights drew close and those carrying the lights came into focus.

A handful of large, muscular warriors surrounded another massive man in their center. A woman with blood-red hair and nails walked to one side, shorter than the men, but with far more presence. Elyana raised her lantern and the prisoner’s face came into view.

Beryl.

“What has transpired, Sister?” Elyana asked. Lhaurel marveled at the dead calm in her voice, though Lhaurel watched Elyana’s gaze flick to Beryl twice before she met the other woman’s eyes

The other woman raised a hand and the procession halted. Beryl raised his head, chains clinking, and looked Elyana in the eye for a brief moment, then returned his gaze to the floor.

“Your Bondsman has been aiding the slaves and spreading blasphemies against the Sisters,” the woman said. “I do not blame you for being blind to this, Sister. He is quite skilled at what he does, something he learned under your care, I imagine.”

“How has he been helping them?”

The procession started walking again and Elyana fell into place alongside the other woman.

“He had been providing them with weapons.”

“Isn’t that what we charged him to do?” This time the confusion in Elyana’s voice was plain.

“We charged him to arm them, yes,” the woman said, voice cold. “Not to provide them with greatswords or other weapons we cannot manipulate.”

“No, we did not charge him with that.” Elyana’s voice was pensive. Thoughtful. Elyana’s eyes roved to the side, though all Lhaurel saw was a stretch of wall.

“You will need a new Bondsman, I’m afraid,” the other woman said. “He will not be around to serve you much longer.”

Elyana nodded. “As it should be, Sister.”

How could Elyana be so heartless?
Lhaurel had thought she loved Beryl—at least that’s what she’d gotten out of the dreams so far.

The rest of the procession passed in silence until they reached a long set of stairs leading upward. They stepped up them and one of the soldiers hurried forward to open the door, allowing sunlight to stream down into the tunnels with blinding brightness. They walked out onto the plateau above, the soldiers fanning out on either side of the Sisters and Beryl. Lhaurel recognized the tops of the Oasis walls and the lush greenery below, though the walls were far smoother than she remembered, like they’d been in the other dream.

Elyana’s gaze fell over one of the soldiers. Lhaurel noticed the greatsword at his waist and the bow slung over one shoulder. Elyana looked down to Beryl and then back to the soldiers.

Elyana’s companion stopped and moved to one side, allowing the soldiers to push Beryl forward to the edge of the plateau. Ropes and chains hung from his arms and neck.

“He is your Bondsman, Sister,” Elyana’s companion said. “His execution is your responsibility.”

One of the soldiers stepped forward and unshouldered his bow. He drew a stone-tipped arrow and drew it back, sighting at Beryl.

Elyana stepped up alongside the archer. Beryl raised his head and looked Elyana in the eyes. The archer released. The arrow hissed through the air and hit Beryl in the arm. He started to bleed.

“Take him, Sister,” Elyana’s companion hissed.

Elyana hesitated. Her eyes dropped toward the ground.

One moment Elyana was watching Beryl, the next, Beryl had freed himself from the ropes and there was a greatsword in his hands. One of the soldiers lay on the ground clutching a gaping wound. Two of the other soldiers battled the remaining three.

“What are you doing?” Elyana’s companion demanded as Beryl rounded on her. Before she could move, before Elyana reacted, Beryl ran the other Sister through the chest. She fell, eyes going wide, as Beryl slammed the blade down into the ground. Lhaurel heard the grating sound and the tip dug into the stone beneath the Sister’s body.

“What have you done?” Elyana gasped.

Beryl turned to look at her. “You know what your Sisters are and what they’ve done. It’s time you chose a side.”

For one brief moment Lhaurel existed in two places at once. Her real self, the one inside the Roterralar Warren, started and recoiled from the face which sat a few inches away from her own. Her other self, the one still lingering in dream, strode down a dark passage of dreams. Then the dream shattered, like a sheet of glass breaking on stone.

“Khari,” Lhaurel gasped, rocking sideways away from the woman. “I—um—well, I . . .” Lhaurel trailed off. How was she supposed to even begin to explain the dream? Lhaurel herself wasn’t sure what they were. If she spoke to Khari about them, Lhaurel knew the Matron would only think her daft or crazy. Or, perhaps even that it was a lingering effect from her ordeal in the Oasis. Lhaurel chewed on her bottom lip, not entirely sure herself that those assumptions wouldn’t be true.

“You shouldn’t be up and about like this, Lhaurel,” Khari scolded. “Not if you fall asleep simply leaning against a wall.”

“I’m fine, Khari,” Lhaurel lied. “Though something seems off with Beryl.” Lhaurel quickly recounted what had happened between her and Beryl earlier that day.

Khari’s expression darkened as Lhaurel finished, brows coming together over the bridge of her nose. Lhaurel breathed an internal sigh of relief that Khari did not press the sleep issue, now that she had been told about Beryl.

“He’s always been an odd one,” Khari admitted. “Even back when I first met him decades ago.”

“Well, he does seem a little odder lately, doesn’t he?”

Khari frowned, an expression which aged her already lined face. “He does at that. I’ll talk to him. First, though, tell me about the scrolls you’ve been reading.”

Lhaurel told what she knew about the Schema and the Seven Sisters, highlighting the few points she was sure of and then continuing into some of the more speculative information she actually had some confidence in. She knew she was completely unprepared and untested when it came to the mystic arts in general, especially since one of the scrolls she’d read had stated that she wasn’t a mystic at all, but something far greater than that, far greater than just about everyone else. Still, she recounted the facts as clearly as she could remember them, which, by most everyone’s standards, was as best as anyone could hope for.

“Maybe Beryl will know more,” Khari mused. “I will speak with him. I assume the old fool headed down to his forge?”

Lhaurel shrugged. Beryl hadn’t announced where he was going, so any speculation was altogether meaningless. Besides, Lhaurel had a feeling the man would be difficult to find.

“I’ll go speak with him,” Khari said, turning to leave.

“Wait. I’ll come with you.”

Khari shrugged, but didn’t argue. Lhaurel, honestly unsure why she wanted to go along, was glad Khari hadn’t pressed for more information.

Since the Oasis, everyone had been a little different. Some people had grown more subdued and introspective. Others had decided to take the opposite route and become much more outspoken, blunt, or belligerent. Khari, who Lhaurel had found to be as hard as steel, had softened. Some of the fire within the woman had gone out. Lhaurel wasn’t sure if she liked it or not, but at the moment, she was grateful for the change.

“About what you did earlier,” Khari said as they walked. “Do you think you could do it again?”

Lhaurel gnawed on her bottom lip. With everything else that had happened since then, Lhaurel had almost forgotten about how she’d managed to break the man without his even having to be a willing participant.

“I—I think so,” Lhaurel said. “But I don’t know if I really want to. How many more were you able to help break by themselves?”

“One.”

“So three total.”

Khari nodded. “There won’t be enough.”

“For what?” Lhaurel asked, though the nausea she felt in the pit of her stomach already told her the answer. She couldn’t put a name to it, couldn’t form it into a cogent thought, but she knew it was there. Change. Danger. A storm on the horizon.

“For anything,” Khari replied, kicking a loose stone across the passageway floor hard enough to send it bouncing off the wall and then skipping back across the ground. “For the scattered clans, for the rough time we’ll have ahead of us finding the supplies we need, for anything at all.”

Lhaurel recognized the hidden meaning behind the words, though the reasons she’d given were all good, solid ones. She too felt the helplessness and worry gnawing at the edge of her consciousness.

“I—” Lhaurel hesitated, remembering that fateful day at the end of the battle for the Oasis. “I’ll think about it, Khari. I do owe you something, but I’m not sure this will be it. Can we rest here a few moments, please?” Her legs, still not fully recovered yet, were threatening to give out on her.

Khari slowed and then stopped, allowing Lhaurel to lean against a wall for support. Lhaurel had left her cane behind, but was now regretting that action. For whatever reason, she wasn’t recovering nearly as well as she would have liked to, nor as well as Khari had hoped she would, but at least she did see some progress. She’d been able to make it this far without the cane. That was something to be proud of, at least.

“Are you doing alright, Khari?” Lhaurel asked, looking over at the woman. “After—after everything in the Oasis? I never asked.”

Khari’s entire posture stiffened for a moment and Lhaurel worried that she’d misjudged the level of friendship the two of them had started to develop, but then the tension eased from Khari’s body and she ran a hand over her face.

“I can’t even begin to describe the pain of losing my husband, Lhaurel,” she finally said. “Makin and I didn’t start out loving one another. Our marriage was partially arranged. True, mostly by us because we had similar goals, but it was still an arrangement. I guess, looking back on that now, that’s what love really is—a union of goals, understanding, and hopes. We were never given the gift of children, Makin and I, but we were able to see so many of the Roterralar grow from childhood into adulthood. The Roterralar became our family, in a very real sense.”

Lhaurel smiled to herself.

“These last few years were good to Makin and I,” Khari continued, staring off into the distance. “It wasn’t a child’s love, not the kind girls talk about with one another, but this was a true love of unified dreams for our children, the Roterralar, and—to a lesser extent—the Rahuli people as a whole. He and I, well, we made a good team, together. Without him, I feel incomplete, somehow. Maybe that’s why I feel so close to you now. Maybe I’m just trying to find someone to fill that void.”

Lhaurel felt an overwhelming wave of sympathy wash over her at Khari’s words. She pushed off the wall and walked over to the older woman and put her arms around her, pulling her into a hug. Lhaurel held her there for the space of several long breaths, then Khari shrugged out of the hug and strode out into the hall.

“Are you rested enough?” Khari asked, voice returning to her normal emotionless snap.

Lhaurel shrugged and pushed herself forward.