Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) (21 page)

For as long as he could remember, Daryan had suffered a recurring dream – it always started well enough, with him waking up in his own bed, in his own dark room. Nothing would be out of place – the outlines of his few simple possessions were familiar and unthreatening – yet a deep sense of dread would begin to creep over him, as if something evil were massing in the shadows, just out of sight. He would reach for the lamp, but when he tried to strike the flints, the stones would crumble into dust in his hands, and at that moment, his vague fears would crystallise into terror.

He felt something like that now, standing in the hallway in the doorway of Shairav’s unlit room, staring at a sliver of light running mysteriously from the floor to the ceiling in the far corner of the chamber. The outlines of his uncle’s rather opulent collection of furniture – the tables and chairs, the little ornaments, the bed heaped with cushions, all purchased from the Nomas with the governor’s gold – were all familiar, but something about that light in the corner evoked the nightmarish feeling of nefarious forces gathering strength around him.

He crossed the room slowly, moving towards the light. On the way he had to pass by the heavy chair in which his Aunt Meena had spent her final days. He remembered her sitting there, day after day, her frail body pinned down under a blanket, staring past him with rheumy eyes. Most of the time she was oblivious to his presence, but every now and then he would catch her looking at him. The expression in her dull eyes would barely change, but he had the uneasy feeling that she hated him. She had already been ill when he had first arrived in the temple and she’d died soon after. No one had ever explained to him what was wrong with her. She had terrified him.

The light was shining through a fissure in the wall no wider than the edge of the coin – or actually, he quickly realised, it was
exactly
the width of a coin, for a single Shadari sudra was wedged in the opening near the floor. He put his eye to the crack. He had the sense of a room on the other side of the wall, but he couldn’t make out anything specific. He heard nothing but silence.

He put his shoulder to the wall and shoved.

With a soft scraping sound, the entire wall pivoted from the centre, widening the opening to the width of a hand-span. The sudra rolled free.

‘What the—?’ he began, backing away until he knocked into the back of a chair. Through the gap he could see the shapes of furniture, and the glimmer of a lamp burning on a small table. But he saw and heard no one who might have been responsible for lighting the lamp and leaving it there.

With a cautious look back at Shairav’s dark room, he turned sideways and slid through.

‘Huh!’ The air rushed out of his lungs as if something heavy had hit him in the chest. He found himself standing in a child’s bedroom. In addition to the bed there was a child-sized table and a couple of stools, baskets spilling over with painted balls and wooden swords and crude carvings of animals, and a cradle from which a heap of dolls regarded eternity with unblinking eyes. An inch of reddish dust gave everything the soft, mottled texture of rotten fruit. No one was there, but a track of smeary footprints led across the room and then disappeared behind a high pile of furniture covered with old rugs. He started forward, but on the third step his foot came down on something soft and he hopped backwards in alarm.

He bent down slowly and picked up the Shadari doll. Sand sifted through rips in its cloth body and leaked out between his fingers. Someone had gone through the trouble of altering it: the brown threads of the left eye had been picked out and replaced with a splotch of green; the doll’s right arm was a mess of fat red stitches, crisscrossing over each other in no particular pattern. He glanced over at the other dolls in the cradle. They were all the same.

‘I remember you,’ he whispered to the doll, squeezing its lumpy body tightly. ‘Now I remember you.’

He remembered twilight in the desert, and his mother holding his hand so tightly that she was hurting him, but he wasn’t trying to pull away. His mother was crying – she wouldn’t say why, but he blamed Uncle Shairav – Mama called him Shairav’Asha. He was afraid of his mysterious uncle, and he refused to be impressed by the fact that Shairav’Asha could pilot a dereshadi just like a Dead One. His mother had shooed
him away so that she and Uncle Shairav could talk about grownup things.

He was throwing stones at a dead snake when he saw her. Her red Shadari cloak dragged behind her through the sand and she had the hood pulled up over her head. Her hair was black, like a Shadari, but her skin was very pale. She was probably a year or two older than Daryan and quite a bit taller. As she came closer, he saw that there was something wrong with her left eye.

She stood a little way off and watched him throw the remaining stones in his hand. When he bent down to look for more, she asked, ‘Do you like living here?’

‘It’s all right.’ He looked up at her. ‘Why? Where do you live?’

When she pointed up to the temple her cloak swung open. He caught his breath in wonder: enflamed red and pink scars crawled over her right forearm, like a cluster of engorged worms.

‘Wow!’ he exclaimed appreciatively. ‘What happened to your arm?’

‘It burned – a long time ago, when I was a baby,’ she said. Her voice sounded funny, as if she had a sore throat.

‘Does it hurt? Can I touch it?’ he asked eagerly.

‘No,’ answered the girl, apparently to both questions, and tucked the arm away again under her cloak.

‘Lahlil!’ Uncle Shairav’s harsh voice cut through the air as he ran towards the two children. Daryan noticed with cheerful malice how funny he looked with his robes flapping out behind him. ‘I told you not to get down,’ he reminded the girl sternly. ‘We’re going now. Come on.’ Then he called to Daryan’s mother, ‘Until midnight, then, but that’s all. Have him ready this time.’

‘Who? Me?’ He watched his uncle and the girl climb back on the dereshadi and fly away. ‘What am I getting ready for, Mama?’ he asked, as she flung her arms around him and pulled him into a smothering embrace. She was crying too hard to answer his questions. A few hours later his uncle had returned, alone this time, and taken him to the temple. Less than a year later, Daryan received word that his mother was dead. He never saw her or the girl again after that day.