Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) (45 page)

Jachad woke up in hell, rocks prodding his flesh and cracking against his skull. He clamped his eyes shut, and a scream swelled torturously in his chest – but he couldn’t squeeze enough air out of his lungs for anything more than a helpless whimper, and he was afraid to conjure up even the smallest flame for fear of sucking up the last remaining gasp of air. He tried to move his arms and legs, but the effort only jostled the rocks against his bruised body and choked him with dirt. Panic squashed his lungs; froze his heart.

Alone, buried under stone and sand, he prayed to his father, far off on the other side of the world, and to the moon goddess Amai and to the Shadari star-gods to take his message there. He prayed to anyone who would listen, and he was still praying when they dug him out.

‘Damn! It’s just that stinking Nomas,’ someone growled.

Rough hands pushed away the debris until they’d freed enough of his body to be able to hoist him up out of the rubble. A dank, evil-smelling cloth was passed over his face, and then – ah,
praise Shof
– a flask of water was poked between his lips, and he drank.

‘That’s enough.’ The flask was yanked away from him, the supporting hands disappeared and he fell back against the rocks. ‘I’m not wasting any more time on this one. Come on.’

His dissatisfied rescuers departed before Jachad could produce even one syllable of thanks. He lay there blinking, watching the red flares in front of his eyes gradually fade away. He could feel no broken bones, and yet he felt shattered: a collection of parts that had never been meant to fit together.

After a while he got up, stiffly and painfully, and looked behind him. He remembered standing not far from the foot of the temple, looking up at the battle in the sky above him, trying to count the number of Eofar’s men still left aloft. Frea had succeeded in getting enough of her men through the line to set the city ablaze. Then he had seen one triffon streak to the ground with its rider slumped over in the saddle, somewhere out to the west. The pair had been far away but he had been certain it was Eofar – he had just begun to run in that direction when the world had come crashing down on top of him.

Now the temple slumped in the near distance like a dying thing, wreathed in the dust of its own smashed bones, its torn vitals exposed to an empty sky. Its destruction had effectively ended the battle, both on the ground and in the air. He could not see any living triffons anywhere; he didn’t know if they had all been killed, or if they had gone to ground. Now he could see ghostly figures drifting through the piles of debris, stumbling along with their heads bent down to the ground. Wounded of indeterminate race and gender sprawled amongst the rubble, and many Shadari survivors were sobbing and
wailing and clawing at the piles of stone and dirt and detritus. He bore witness to their grief with a strange, emotionless pity. He still had a heart, and a mind, but there no longer seemed to be a connection between the two.

He thought that might be just as well, considering what he intended to do.

After a moment he made out men and women coming and going from one particular spot, and when he got there he found Omir distributing mining equipment to the stream of blank-faced volunteers. No one spoke more than absolutely necessary, and the atmosphere was as stifling as the smoke hanging over their heads.

He walked straight up to Omir. ‘The Mongrel – where is she? Has anyone seen her?’

‘You and that—’ Omir began as a snarl, but stopped when he saw the look on Jachad’s face. ‘In the palace,’ he said, twisting the loose ends of a shovel’s leather-wrapped handle, ‘with Faroth.’

‘Just Faroth? What about Daryan?’

Omir’s eyes remained as motionless as if they had been chiselled into his face, but his mouth moved tellingly before he answered, ‘No one’s seen him yet.’

Jachad turned towards the city.

‘King Jachad,’ Omir called out to him. Jachad waited until the big man found the words he needed; in his still, dark eyes was a savage grief, a living thing that writhed and twisted, struggling to free itself. ‘Is it over?’

‘No,’ said Jachad, ‘but it’s about to be.’

He began picking his way over the uneven ground back
towards the city. The terrain had changed completely; what had once been a flat plain of sand and scrub was now all heaps of broken rocks and smashed things that he avoided examining too closely. A weak, sanguine light shone in the sky overhead: not the dawn yet, but the light of the still-burning fires reflecting from the heavy clouds of dust and smoke.

He passed into the city streets where fires still smouldered everywhere. Whole neighbourhoods had been reduced to smoking ruins, and most of the landmarks had been obliterated or obscured. People moved about with an aimless confusion he found exhausting just to watch. As he neared the old Shadari royal palace the crowds grew larger. He made his way towards the heart of the ruin, to that same spot where the council of war had been held earlier in the day. Despite their numbers the people were eerily quiet, and the expressions on the faces around him were not the simple, mute fatigue he might have expected, but a feverish, wide-eyed uneasiness that needed only a spark to flare into full-blown hysteria.

He pushed his way forward to the southern entrance of the roofless hall. The broken wall was highest on this side, and he could not see over it.

A Shadari, clearly delighted with his role as sentry, puffed his chest out and crossed his arms when he saw Jachad approaching. ‘No one goes in. Faroth’s orders.’

Jachad could hear voices: ‘You’re not getting a damned thing from us,’ Faroth was saying heatedly.

‘Pay me.’

He winced at the sound of Meiran’s voice. He hadn’t realised how badly he’d wanted her to be long-gone, away to some
distant land where he would never find her even if he spent the rest of his life looking.

Faroth snorted a derisive laugh. ‘Pay you? For
what
? You didn’t win this battle. My son did.’

‘Pay me,’ Meiran said again. ‘The battle is over. You won. I get paid. That was our bargain.’

Jachad looked calmly into the sentry’s eyes and said, ‘Move aside.’

‘Go away, sand-spitter,’ said the sentry disdainfully. ‘No one wants you here.’

Beyond the doorway, Faroth answered Meiran with triumph in his voice. ‘You can’t do anything to me, and you know it. If you’re smart, you’ll leave while you still can. You’re not going to get what you want.’

‘You don’t know what I want.’

‘Of course I do,’ Faroth snapped. ‘You want Dramash.’

Jachad raised his left hand so that the Shadari sentry could see the orange flames curling around his fingers. ‘Move aside,’ he repeated, and this time the sentry’s face went slack and he drew back against the doorframe.

‘I don’t want Dramash,’ Meiran said as Jachad silently entered the hall. ‘I want Harotha.’

For a moment Jachad felt himself back underground again, trapped and suffocating, with a knife of pain slicing through his lungs. What could she possibly want with Harotha? Then he reminded himself that it didn’t matter, because she wasn’t going to get her. No one else would die because of Meiran; that was the bargain he had made with the Shadari gods, under the ground, in exchange for air and light and life.
No one else.

He saw Faroth standing at the far end of the hall. Five or six men – Faroth’s inner circle – were clustered around him, but despite the growing crowd pushing and jostling beyond the walls there was no one else in this vast room except those few men. And Dramash, of course, sitting on the ground near his father’s feet, absently tracking his fingers through the cracks in the paving stones. And Meiran, with a gleaming Norlander sword in her hand.

‘Harotha? You mean my sister? What does she have to do with anything?’ Faroth repeated. He glanced behind him, and now Jachad could see Harotha, rising from where she’d been hidden in the shadows of the crumbling wall. He could see the tracks of tears streaking her face, but they were old tears, already dry. She was staring at Meiran.

‘That’s what I want: your sister. That’s my price,’ Meiran answered, ‘and I’m going to take her. Now.’

Faroth moved a little closer, staying outside the reach of her sword and staring intently into her scarred face.
Surely
, thought Jachad,
he’ll never let her take his sister, his own twin sister. He’ll stop her, and then I won’t have to—

‘You want to take Harotha away?’ Faroth began to laugh. ‘You want her? Then go right ahead – take her!’

Jachad’s heart shrivelled.

‘She made her choice. Daryan is dead, and he was the last daimon the Shadar will ever see.’ Faroth’s followers raised nervous voices in approbation and his mocking laughter rang out across the smoky yard. ‘Go ahead, take her – you’ll be doing me a favour.’

Jachad finally stepped forward. ‘I’m not going to let that happen,’ he announced grimly.

‘Jachi?’

One glance into Meiran’s silver-green eye and at her lips, still parted from saying his name, confirmed all of his suspicions: she had known exactly what was going to happen to the temple; she had known from the beginning. When he had left her to fight in its shadow, she had not expected him to come back.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she warned him, speaking in Nomas. ‘Stay out of this. Stay out of my way, I’m begging you.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘No?’ he said bitterly. ‘Tell me – when have you ever done anything else?’ A fireball roared into shape in his right hand.

‘King Jachad!’ Harotha called out to him from across the hall. From the corner of his eye, he saw her circling towards him.

‘Run, Harotha,’ he cried out to her. ‘Get away from here!’

Meiran began to advance and he stood his ground, arching the flames towards her. She swung her sword and batted them away as she came, but then she suddenly stopped. Thrusting her sword out towards him, she cried, ‘Look out – the fire! Put it out!’ She had noticed what he had not: Harotha was rushing towards him. He clapped his hands to his sides and snuffed out the flames.

‘Harotha, what are you doing? I told you to get away from here!’ His fingers still flickered with sparks.

‘Something’s wrong – you need to stop what you’re doing.’ She laid an urgent hand on his arm but she was looking across the cracked paving at Meiran, whose sword sagged in her hand
as if it had grown suddenly heavier. Behind her, Faroth and his cronies watched with the grim anticipation of gamblers baiting dogs. ‘This isn’t what you think. We’re missing something. I don’t think she wants to hurt me.’

‘Don’t let her fool you,’ he told her. ‘I should have stopped her long before now, before all of those people—’

‘She isn’t trying to trick anyone – it’s just something I know,’ said Harotha, gripping his arm. ‘I’m not sure why; I can just feel it.’

He stared back at her incredulously. If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn she had lost her mind.

‘I was there when the temple exploded,’ he told her. ‘I was right underneath it. People
died
– in the air, on the ground. People are still dying—’

‘And that was Faroth,’ Harotha said quickly, ‘I know. I saw him do it.’ Her voice caught, but she forced herself to say the words. ‘Faroth goaded Dramash into destroying the temple – it wasn’t the Mongrel. She didn’t do it.’

‘She didn’t try to stop it, either,’ he pointed out, lifting her hand from his arm.

She looked like she was about to answer him, but then she inhaled sharply and listed; he lunged forward and caught her in his arms. ‘It’s the baby,’ she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut in pain.

Meiran darted towards them. ‘Let me take her, now!’

‘Stay back,’ Jachad yelled, raising his left hand as far from Harotha as he could and launching a plume of flame into the air. Meiran gripped her sword with both hands and held it aloft, but she couldn’t move forward.

‘I have midwives, everything, waiting for her,’ Meiran growled. ‘Let me take her!’

‘No,’ he roared back. The flames died down again, but not by his choice: he had overused his powers tonight and they were weakening. ‘Elixir be damned – I don’t care what you think you saw, you’re not going to take her.’

Harotha reached up and grabbed the front of his robe, pulling him down to her. ‘The elixir,’ she said, gasping for breath, ‘she’s right: you can’t change anything. I thought I could – I was wrong …’ She trailed off incoherently.

‘Jachi, listen to her,’ Meiran urged, inching forward. ‘Don’t stop me – you can’t—’

He released Harotha carefully and then straightened up. ‘You keep saying that,’ he seethed, ‘but if you really believed it, you could have told me everything from the beginning. So why didn’t you?’

Her eye locked into his and he felt himself being rent wide open, like a fish being gutted. When she spoke it was in Norlander, with an onslaught of emotion that burned him like acid, stripping him bare of all of his resolve.

‘No!’ he grunted in Nomas, pushing her out of his mind. ‘I don’t want to know. It’s too late.’

‘All right, then,’ she cried, throwing her arms out wide. She tossed her sword away and he heard it clatter on the pavement. Her normally flat voice rose to a shrill pitch and her luminous eye burned behind the smoke. ‘Go ahead, stop me!’ She ripped off the eye-patch and dashed it to the ground. ‘What are you waiting for?’