Sharani series Box Set

by Kevin L. Nielsen

  The rock around the cavern’s mouth was scoured as if by long claws, though Lhaurel knew it was made by the passage of hundreds of sailfin spines. She shuddered at the thought of the writhing, swarming, monstrous bodies fighting for entrance into the warren.

  They found the first skeleton a few spans into the passageway, metallic ribs glinting in the light filtering in from the cave’s mouth. Only the bones remained, two and half spans from skull to tail. Even the spines were gone.

  “They eat each other?”

  Tieran grunted from behind her, and Kaiden paused momentarily, looking down at the massive skeleton.

  “What do you think they eat when they can’t get Rahuli?”

  Lhaurel felt bile rise in the back of her throat. “But wouldn’t they have killed themselves off by now, doing that?”

  Tieran chuckled. The lack of humor unnerved her. “They only eat their own if they get injured. It’s the blood. This one probably got cut on a rock or something, which started the frenzy. We’ll find others, I’m sure.”

  “Besides,” Kaiden called back from deeper in the caves, “they breed much too quickly for the ones they eat to make much of a difference. There’s another one up here.”

  Several ribs were broken on this skeleton, as if something heavy had crashed into it. The broken ends were jagged and stained dark.

  They moved on, finding three more skeletons before they even made it out of the main passage. Lhaurel steeled herself when they got to the offshoot. To the left were the hot springs, where she’d bathed before her wedding. A little further down and to the right the passage opened up into the greatroom. The passage was dark, hiding the beads of nervous sweat on her forehead.

  “Go that way, Tieran,” Kaiden said, gesturing to the left. “We’ll go this way to the greatroom. Meet us there when you’re done.”

  Tieran nodded, though his expression was bleak. He smiled at Lhaurel as he passed, but it didn’t reach his eyes. His shoulders were slumped, his posture limp.

  Kaiden nodded to Lhaurel before turning down the passage on the right. Lhaurel bit her bottom lip and followed.

  The greatroom was the picture of chaos and destruction. Lhaurel dropped to her knees only a few feet from where the passage opened up, ignorant of the darkened sand beneath her knees. New holes in the ceiling bathed the room in sunlight, illuminating the broken rock and metallic skeletons of dozens of dead sailfins strewn about the room. Broken baskets, furniture, and pieces of the ceiling lay amidst the dead, like cairns marking mass graves.

  There were no human bodies left, not even skeletons. No, Lhaurel knew from how they’d left the hard skeletons of their own behind that there’d be nothing left of any human body. Only blood. Pools of it stained the sand. Splashes of it made the walls look wounded in a hundred different places. It smelled of death, rust, rot, and decay.

  Lhaurel tried holding her breath, but she couldn’t force herself to hold in the foul air for very long. Instead, she cupped a hand over her mouth and nose to try and filter the smell. It didn’t help much.

  “They were lucky here,” Kaiden said softly. “I was able to warn them in time. Some of the others were hit harder.”

  “This is lucky?”

  “Very. They could prepare. Some of them were already running when the sailfins hit. And this was a small pack, maybe only a hundred of them.” Kaiden’s voice was cold, detached, and factual. It made Lhaurel shudder.

  “How many died?” Lhaurel asked.

  “Sailfins? You can count the skeletons yourself.”

  “How many Sidena died?” she repeated.

  Kaiden shook his head. “I don’t know. A lot. Some of the others held off another pack while you ran and escaped afterward, if you recall. They said there were only a few hundred running toward the Oasis.”

  “A few hundred?” Lhaurel brought her other hand up to her mouth, though it wasn’t for the smell.

  Then Kaiden’s words clicked in Lhaurel’s mind. “Wait, the Roterralar were there. Why didn’t you stop this? You could have protected them, couldn’t you? They didn’t have to die.”

  Kaiden sighed, and his expression darkened. “You’ll have to speak with Makin Qays about that. The short answer is no, we couldn’t have stopped it.”

  Lhaurel felt cold tears run down her cheeks. This was death on a level she’d never imagined. There was nothing that could stop this level of destruction.

  Booted feet crunched on sand, and Lhaurel turned to see Tieran approaching. Kaiden turned toward him as well.

  “There’s nothing here worth saving,” Kaiden said. “You find anything down there?”

  “Just lots of blood,” Tieran replied. “And this.”

  He reached into a pocket and pulled out a thin, white object. A wide-toothed comb made of bone. The comb Saralhn had given her, forgotten at the springs. Lhaurel reached for it, and Tieran handed it to her. She held it carefully, though with white-knuckled strength.

  “Saralhn,” she whispered, and she pulled the comb to her chest, rocking back and forth as she wept.

  * * *

  The door swung open. The scent of sweat and spice wafted in with the light.

  Kaiden and Tieran had left her waiting in the small room when they’d gotten back from the Sidena Warren. Saralhn’s comb rested in her waistband. She’d waited here, quiet and subdued, for what had seemed like an eternity. And—simultaneously—only an instant.

  Lhaurel got to her feet, though the man who had opened the door remained standing on the eaves, framed by light and a strange red penumbra. She squinted against the sudden brightness.

  The man’s clothes were of a simple cut, practical rather than ornamental. His long grey-brown hair was held back from his face by an intricate silver chain and a long genesauri bone. A medium-length beard adorned his chin. His skin was deeply tanned, browned by long years of toil in the blistering desert sun. He must have been in his fifth or sixth decade, which was extremely old by Sidena standards, almost as old as Old Cobb.

  Lhaurel felt as if she were being weighed on invisible scales, though she did not know the bargain being struck or the measure of the counterweight.

  “Are you coming in or going out?” she asked wearily. “It’s hard to tell since, you see, you’re currently halfway from doing either.”

  “Actually,” the man said without taking his eyes from her face, “I am doing both. I am entering this room and leaving the passage behind. It is the nature of entering a place that you must, of necessity, leave the place you’re already in.”

  Lhaurel gave him a wan smile.

  “I believe that it is wise to start off a conversation with both parties being able to call each other by name,” the man began. “I am called Makin Qays. You are called Lhaurel.” He paused for a moment as if he expected her to say something but then continued on after only a heartbeat’s passing. “I am the Warlord of the Roterralar—”

  “How come I’ve never heard of the Roterralar clan before now? We all just think of you as the crazy people who wander into warrens from time to time.” The question escaped her lips before she’d consciously decided on which of her hundred questions to ask.

  “A worthy question. One I would have answered had you allowed me to continue with what I was saying. Please do not interrupt me again.”

  Lhaurel nodded.

  He continued calmly. “I lead these people. What they do, they do by my command and with me at their head. Even the mystics follow me. We protect the clans from the genesauri. And sometimes even from each other.”

  Lhaurel sat up straight. “Protect us? How in the seven hells do you protect us from the genesauri? Where were you when the sailfin packs attacked my clan?”

  Makin Qays put his arms on the table, interlocking his fingers. The short sleeves of his warrior’s coat pulled back, exposing muscular forearms covered in an array of colorful banded tattoos. She counted seven different colors.

  He leaned forward and placed his chin on top of his fingers. “We, the Roterra
lar, swear to protect and defend the Rahuli people. Defense, in part and in whole, from all enemies, from the enemy, and from all that threatens their existence. To this end, should our lives be required in this defense, then they are lain down. Hope is a solitary flame standing alone against a gale. What is the test of honor? To uphold the flame, or to snuff it out? This is our oath. We are always there, but never where you can see us.”

  Lhaurel frowned. What?

  “Stop and think for a moment, Lhaurel. What would the clans do if they realized there were people who would be there to protect them? What would they demand of us then?”

  “They’d demand that you do your jobs,” she responded instantly. “Protect them.”

  “All of them? Every time?” The look he gave her was sharp, penetrating.

  “Yes! Every single one of them, every single time.” Even as she said it, though, her thoughts returned to the memories of the Sidena Warren, broken and destroyed. How could anything stand against that? And that had been a small sailfin pack, according to Kaiden.

  “Is that all they’d do? Demand that we protect them?”

  Lhaurel paused, pushing aside her frustration, emotion, and memories to consider the question. No, they wouldn’t just do that. “They’d probably fight you. They might even band together to take this place from you, or at least the aevians.”

  Makin inclined his head toward Lhaurel in acknowledgement. “The genesauri often attack in many places at once and in massive numbers. You’ve never seen a true sailfin pack. What makes it to the warrens is what remains after we get done with them. But we are not infallible. We barely have enough warriors to face one pack, let alone many. You saw what a small pack did to your warren. Imagine what a larger one is capable of. Imagine what all of them can do. And that’s just the sailfins. The marsaisi are worse, the karundin hell incarnate.”

  “Why don’t you get more warriors? There are over a hundred aevians. I’ve only ever seen a handful go out at one time.”

  Makin Qays smiled ruefully, shaking his head. The wrinkles on his face deepened, making him appear even older.

  “It is not so simple as that. There are other factors involved. We have neither the resources nor the capacity to support more than the few hundred we have here. Less than a quarter are warriors, though they have all upheld the flame. Suffice it to say that we must remain hidden because we do not have the numbers to protect everyone, everywhere—including ourselves—from the rest of the Rahuli. We do what we can so that the race can survive. We get new warriors, but only a few at time by means where they will not be missed. Finding you was enough work on its own, an endeavor that took several years.”

  Lhaurel swallowed hard and clenched her fists to keep them from shaking. “You are all cowards,” she whispered. She didn’t really mean it, but it slipped out before she could stop herself.

  Makin Qays rose to his feet slowly, keeping his gaze locked onto hers. His face didn’t change expression, but his eyes smoldered with a deep blue flame. He raised one of his arms, brandishing the tattooed bands. There were over thirty banded rings on that arm alone.

  “These rings represent each time someone dies because we couldn’t protect them. We find each body we can and give them the honors that they deserve, no matter how grisly the remains. When you understand what it’s like to have to choose which clan to protect and which to let flounder on its own, when you feel the guilt of each death as it is inked into your flesh as a reminder, when you kneel in the sand clutching a little girl’s hand as her guts leak out of her stomach and her eyes slowly fade and there’s nothing you can do but hold her, when you know what that’s like, then you can call us cowards. Then you can presume to understand why it is that the clans do not know us.”

  He dropped his arm and turned around, pivoting on the heel of his boot. Without looking back, he pulled open the door, exited, and shut the door behind him.

  Lhaurel remained where she was. Slowly, her hand dropped onto the comb in her waistband for a long, lingering moment. Then her head fell into her waiting hands, and she cried. The tears were cold.

  Chapter 7: The Strength of Steel

  “We lost half the clans today in our struggle with the enemy. Briane cried over the loss of an uncle. What would it be like, I wonder, to have a family who cares about you? I didn’t know how to comfort her, but she didn’t seem to need much comfort after her tears were done. The cause, she said, was worthy of the sacrifice.”

  —From the Journals of Elyana

  The first thing she noticed when she entered the room was harnesses. They hung from pegs on the walls, each line or lead neatly attached to separate pegs or hooks hammered into the rock so that none of the varying pieces of leather would get tangled. There were hundreds of them, stretching down both side walls, up and over the door, and even hanging from the ceiling. She was so enthralled by the sheer number of them that she barely noticed the man who had softly closed the door behind her. He stepped back into the shadows and watched her as she studied the room.

  Lhaurel took a step forward into the long, narrow room to better view the furnace and metalwork that rested in the center, nearly dominating the middle section. A metal flume carried the smoke of the massive ceramic furnace up and out through the ceiling, the metal darkened with years of soot. The smell of leather and ash and the odd odor of heated oil hung heavy in the air.

  The man cleared his throat behind her. She jumped.

  The man was short, smaller than Lhaurel, with plain features and a wide nose. But what he lacked in height he made up for in sheer brawn. His arms alone were bigger around than both Lhaurel’s legs together. A leather vest strained against a chest large enough to seem nearly grotesque. Corded muscles on his shoulders and arms showed through the skin like bands of iron. And his skin. It was flecked with small specks of a dull greyish cast, like freckles, that glittered in the lamplight. It was almost as if long years working at the forge had fused flakes of metal to his skin.

  “Welcome, Lhaurel,” the man said, his voice raspy.

  “Thank you . . . sir,” she said.

  He flourished one hand, gesturing for her to move back toward the center of the room, where the forge rested.

  She obliged.

  He shuffled along behind her, his step a rasping sound against the sand. The man walked with one leg trailing behind the other, almost dragging it along. It pulled against the loose sand, making the grating noise. He noticed her watching him and growled deep in his throat. She turned away hastily.

  She stopped in the middle of the room but heard the man shuffle along behind and pass around her. Heat radiated from the open forge where coals glowed a deep, dark red around a layer of white.

  Tieran had come to get her after Makin Qays had left. Khari had wanted him to bring her to see a man named Beryl. Despite herself, Lhaurel found herself liking the jovial Tieran more and more as they’d walked through the warren before he had deposited her here.

  The man limped into her periphery, headed toward one of the various bins secreted beneath the long tables nestled against the wall. His limp gave him a decidedly hunched look, and Lhaurel almost took a small step back. “Why am I here?” she asked.

  Beryl didn’t respond. Instead, he righted and tossed something from inside the bin at her. A practice sword—straight blade, almost no guard. She caught it deftly as it twirled toward her. Lhaurel looked up at him quizzically, only to find him swinging a sword of his own down toward her head in a powerful overhead chop. She brought her blade up in a mad scramble to block. Wood cracked against wood. Pain shot up her arms from the force of the blow.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  His answer came in a sudden flurry of blows. His eyes were hard, focused, as he spun his practice sword in a dizzying pattern of blows. The wooden sword seemed almost alive in his hands, spinning in and hitting her once, twice, three times in rapid succession before she could get her feet under her and slip into a middle guard position. With each blow that
connected, her arms ached. The strength in his arms was incredible! She marveled that someone so crippled could move with such grace.

  Suddenly, his onslaught slowed. He broke into a more measured, steady rhythm, spinning the sword in a sequence of moves that she recognized. She had memorized all the practice sequences that the Sidena warriors trained with and so slipped into the form designed to counter the smith’s movements. Still, she was wary. Why was he attacking her?

  The man shifted into a second sequence, and she responded in kind, slipping into its counter sequence and matching him blow for blow. The blood pounded in her ears, pushing adrenaline throughout her body, and her muscles loosened with the warmth of motion. The blacksmith was good, incredibly so, yet she almost smiled as she slipped into the forms. He shifted to a third sequence, and again she responded with the appropriate counter.

  Their speed picked up, practice swords coming together with more force behind each blow. Lhaurel had never drilled so long before. Her muscles ached, her arm felt leaden with fatigue. But she felt a thrill of happiness running through her.

  With a muffled grunt, the blacksmith executed a sudden twist on his blade, and Lhaurel’s practice sword was ripped from her weakened grip and dropped to the sand.

  Sweat dripped down Lhaurel’s face. She breathed heavily, almost panting. The blacksmith didn’t even look winded.

  “What . . .” she gasped. “What was the point of coming at me like that?”

  “Would you have fought an old cripple if he’d just asked you?”

  She pondered the question for only a few moments before answering, “No.”

  “First thing you need to learn is to never trust what you see,” the smith said, bending down with a groan and picking up Lhaurel’s discarded sword. “Trust is more precious than water. You can’t trust anyone, not even your own eyes. Trust only your weapons.”