The Straits of Galahesh: Book Two of The Lays of Anuskaya (86 page)

Irkadiy had finished unwinding the rope and was looping it around a battlement. He moved with quick hands. Sure hands. He was so calm, where her heart was beating so madly she thought it would burst.

“Quickly,” he said, taking her hands and forcing her to grab the rope.

The soldiers were nearing. “Halt!” they called.

Atiana would be able to make it down, but Irkadiy wouldn’t. There wasn’t enough time.

“Go!” he cried.

Atiana stepped up between the battlements—realizing only then she’d forgotten to wear gloves—and swung over the side. As she began to slide down, the sense of vertigo she’d experienced earlier returned. It was all she could do to hold on. She knew if she loosened her grip on the rope, she would fall to her death. She could do nothing but hold tight.

Above her, Irkadiy turned and drew his shashka.

Just as he was about to engage, a low, ragged caw cut through the night. By the light of the dying flames Atiana saw black wings streak between the two soldiers.

Both paused.

The feeling of dizziness intensified. The air filled with the sound of wings. Dark figures cut above the curtain wall. A dozen. A hundred. A thousand black, fluttering forms.

They chattered, their myriad voices collecting in a cacophony that forced Atiana to duck her head and hide her face against her shoulder.

She thought it would end quickly, a freak passage of birds over the kasir, but it did not. She felt them against her face, against her hands. They flew about her legs, some of them thudding against her coat before flying off again.

“Come, Irkadiy!” she managed to yell, though whether he heard her she wasn’t sure. “Irkadiy, follow me!”

She allowed herself to slip downward. She moved slowly at first, but then, blessedly, she felt the rope above her shift. Irkadiy was coming.

Hand over hand she moved as the wings beat around her and the birds continued to screech.

At last, bless the ancients, she found herself below the cloud of wings, and soon after that, her feet touched ground.

Her nausea began to ebb. Finally the effect brought on by the gallows crow was starting to pass.

As soon as Irkadiy slid down beside her, they moved away from the wall and slid down the steep slope. Standing in their way were an army of thickets and scrub trees and tall stands of wiry grass, making the going arduously slow. They hadn’t gone twenty paces when the sound of the birds faded into the distance.

“There’s a path ahead,” Irkadiy whispered.

They came to it as the sound of pursuit heightened. Again the bells were ringing among the kasir, but this time at a different pace and rhythm—
clang, clang, CLANG… clang, clang, CLANG
—no doubt calling help to this section of the curtain wall.

The path for a time seemed no less dangerous. They struck as many clawing branches as they had during the slide down from the wall, but they were more sure on their feet. They were adding distance between themselves and the guardsmen, but the location of this path was no secret. Their only hope was to reach the bottom of the hill and lose themselves in the city before Bahett’s men could find them.

Lights shone against the wall as the slope leveled off at last. They took one last look up as they reached a dirt road that continued downhill, but as they did they heard the first sound of approaching hooves.

She and Irkadiy ran, but they could already tell that dozens of ponies had been dispatched from the kasir. Bahett’s men knew where this path emptied into the streets of Baressa, and they would start their search there.

The sounds of hoofbeats echoed through the streets. The air was so cold it numbed Atiana’s fingers. It sapped her warmth through the dampness of her coat.

In an alley running between two rows of tall stone buildings, they huddled in a deep, arched doorway. The clop of ponies approached, and soon three men wearing Galaheshi uniforms—red coats with white turbans—came abreast of the mouth of the alley. They rode tall brown stallions, and each carried a lantern.

While Atiana and Irkadiy pressed themselves against the door and made themselves as small as possible, the guardsmen swung their lanterns along the alley.

The light had just fallen upon their archway when a cawing sound came. It was distant, and it echoed in the cramped spaces of the city, so Atiana could not tell the direction from which it had come.

“There!” one of the guardsmen called. A moment later, the ponies clopped further up the street.

As the sounds died away, punctuated by the cough of a pistol being fired, fluttering wings fell through the night and landed in the street. A low caw, loud enough for only them to hear, beckoned them. They approached, and the old gallows crow took flight, heading southwest over the nearest buildings.

They followed the course the crow had set for them. The sound of hooves approached, but each time they did a caw would come again, drawing the soldiers away from their trail. As they made their way toward the poorer sections of the city, the caws came again and again, steadily further away from their current location.

They heard it once more as they came to a large circle where six streets met.

“We should not go through here,” Irkadiy said.

Atiana, taking the circle in again, agreed—there were too many windows, too many eyes—but just as they were preparing to head back, the sound of ponies came again, this time from the west, the direction of the kasir.

The rain had finally stopped and the moon shone down through thin clouds. The wings of the gallows crow flapped from the west. It cawed twice and then landed on the edge of the fountain at the center of the circle.

Atiana and Irkadiy hid among the shadows and watched as five men rode into the circle. They bore lanterns, and they shone them on the crow, making it seem as though they’d been following it for some time. The crow took wing, flying not
away
from Atiana, but
toward
her. It flew straight to their position and landed not five paces away.

The ponies approached.

The light from the lanterns darted toward them like hawks.

The crow hopped closer. It stood just before them now.

The desire to stand and run was overpowering, as was the desire to take a knife to the gallows crow.

“There!” one of the men called.

They pulled swords, and three kicked their ponies into action. All were well trained. The ponies had them surrounded in moments.

“My Lady Princess,” one of the men called in Anuskayan. “Please come with us.”

“Siha
ş
?” Atiana asked, holding her hand up and squinting against the light of the lanterns.

“
Da
, My Lady.”

Before Atiana could wonder why
he
would have been sent to find her, the gallows crow flapped its wings and hopped and cawed.

All eyes turned toward the spectacle. The bird swung its head back and forth in rhythmic patterns that seemed both painful and uncontrollable.

After one more caw, a single word escaped the bird’s throat.

“Hakan.”

No one moved. A chill ran down Atiana’s already-numb skin.

“Leave us,” Siha
ş
said in Yrstanlan.

“My Lord,” one of his men replied.

“Go to the far side of the circle,” Siha
ş
said, more insistently. “I’ll call you when needed.”

They complied, but Atiana could see by the grisly light shining against their faces that they were not pleased.

Siha
ş
swung a leg over his saddle and dropped down to the cobbled street. “What is this about?” he said to Atiana while motioning to the bird.

It was the crow that responded, however. “Hakan is not yet freed.”

“What do you mean?” Atiana asked.

It seemed so distraught, so in pain, that Atiana crouched down in order to touch the crow. It deftly avoided her touch, however, and hopped away. “He is still under Sariya’s spell.”

Atiana stood.

She looked to Siha
ş
, whose face was every bit as shocked as hers. But his look was calculating as well. He had placed much on the notion that Hakan—once Sariya had been wounded and subsequently disappeared—was once again whole. His loyalty to Yrstanla, and even Hakan, had driven him to act against the wishes of the Kamarisi. No doubt he had been relieved when Sariya had fled. But now, if what the crow was saying was correct, he might still have to act against his lord in order to protect his empire.

“There’s more,” the crow said. It cawed once, sadly, and its eye never seemed to leave Atiana.

“What?” Atiana asked.

“You…” The crow cawed several times and twisted its head and flapped its wings. It hopped away, and Atiana thought it was going to take wing and leave them. But it didn’t. It recovered and approached once more, eyeing Atiana carefully.

Atiana stared at the bird, fearful of what it would say when it spoke once more. She swallowed. Something large and raw was caught in her throat, and nothing she did seemed to clear it.

“What about me?” she finally managed to ask.

“You’re caught as well.” The crow pecked the cobblestone near Atiana’s foot. “You have been from the moment you entered her tower.”

Atiana began to shiver. First her arms and shoulders, then her entire body.

“Who
are
you?” Her words were swallowed by the night.

The crow opened its beak and its tongue lolled out. It shook its head and shivered violently. One long, mournful sound escaped its throat, and though Atiana knew it was trying to speak, it sounded more like the sad, soulful cry of a little lost girl.

It tried once more, and then with a noisy flutter of wings lofted itself into the sky. In mere moments, the dark shades of its wings had faded into the night.

Irkadiy and Siha
ş
stared at Atiana with confused looks. They didn’t know who had assumed the bird’s form. But Atiana did. The crow hadn’t needed to say.

As the last of hints of its wings were lost over the buildings beyond the circle, Atiana whispered her name.

“Ishkyna…”

N
asim walked down an empty street toward the center of Alayazhar. He was near the top of a long sloping hill. The empty shells of the buildings cast long shadows beneath the golden light of the lowering sun, and in the distance he could see Sariya’s tower.

How had he come to be here? It must be a dream, he thought. It must be.

Yet when he turned to his right, he realized he was holding hands with Muqallad. As he had when he stood within the cavern near the towering white cliffs of Galahesh.

He had realized something in that cavern just before Muqallad had entered.

“He’s waking.”

This had come from the voice of a woman.

He looked to his left and found her. Sariya. She walked with a hitch, blood still leaking through her robes, but she was also strong. Her
will
was driving her to finish what she’d started.

At this, a spark of memory came.

In the cavern within the cliffs of Galahesh, with the light shining down on his face, he had looked into Sariya’s eyes.

And he’d remembered the tower.
Her
tower. The spire in the forest, linked to the tower here on Ghayavand. He had entered, and from that moment on had been under her spell.

“It need only hold until the sun sets.”

“He’s strong, Muqallad.” Her voice was strained, desperate.

“You will overcome,” was all Muqallad said in return.

They continued down through the city, walking along the empty thoroughfare. Strangely, they turned off the street well before Sariya’s tower. Nasim didn’t understand why, but he
did
understand that they were avoiding the tall, white tower itself.

Nasim tried to work it through, but his mind wouldn’t allow it. All he could focus on were the broken stones of the street and the utter silence that greeted them throughout their long walk down to the sea.