The Oathbreaker's Shadow

by Amy McCulloch

  Wadi pressed through the crowd. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look!’ He showed her what Oyu had brought. ‘That’s not from this tribe, is it? It must be from another! They could be close!’

  ‘Where did you find this?’ she asked, urgency filling her voice.

  ‘Oyu brought it to me.’

  ‘Do you think he can show us where he found it?’

  ‘I could try.’

  Raim held the piece of leather in front of Oyu’s face and dangled it. Immediately the bird took off into the sky before they had a chance to follow.

  ‘He’s heading north, a temporary settlement.SV t exover that dune,&im cringed as

  22

  No matter how much Raim tried to apologize, the Alashan would have none of it. The increased speed and purpose with which they moved scared him – but so did the sight of the four lonely waterskins they carried, which contained all the water they would have to divide between the entire tribe until they reached Lazar. They still didn’t move during the daylight hours – the risk of dehydration was too great.

  Raim didn’t want to think about what might happen if they didn’t reach Lazar in time. Maybe then he would see the Alashan savagery come out. But he couldn’t find it in himself to fear for his blood.

  The Chauk moved with renewed energy too, relieved to be finally travelling to Lazar. But the thought of finally getting his wish – at the cost of the worm – made Raim feel sick to his stomach. So he stayed far away from both groups, as far as he dared. Oyu still followed him, and he also couldn’t find it in his heart to hate the silly creature. It hadn’t known what it was doing. The only thing that comforted Raim was the fact that he knew soon he would be leaving the Alashan behind. He would no longer have to be a burden to them and they could live their lives in peace again. Wadi, especially. Each time she tried to reach out to him, offer him some small kindness – even friendship, maybe – he found a way to throw it back in her face. Soon he would be gone, swallowed up by Lazar, and she would never have to think of him again.

  The faster they moved, the faster the landscape changed. As they entered the second Eye of Sheba, giant rocks jutted up from the ground, like a forest of stone. By sheltering in their long shadows, they could squeeze extra hours out of the night.

  Raim took to wandering in the hours when the sun was low, jumping from long shadow to shadow, taking a lantern with him but preferring not to use it most of the time. He wanted to challenge himself, racing imaginary foes from stone to stone. He had been feeling so weak lately, so unfit and lacking in training. It felt good – he relished the feeling of his feet pounding against the sand, enjoyed the ache in his thighs as he pushed himself harder. He flew past the rock he had dared himself to reach and aimed for the next one further along, putting his head down and swinging his arms to match the frantic rhythm of his sprint. When he reached the rock he barely stopped himself from flying headfirst into it with his arms, and he collapsed, breathless but, for the first time in a long time, happy.

  He lay there, sweat trickling down his neck, and let his breathing return to its normal rate.

  Loud voices suddenly set him on edge. He thought he had run far enough from the tribe that he wouldn’t come across anyone. He peered round the edge of the rock and saw Wadi arguing vehemently with Old-maa. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, of course, but Wadi’s clenched fists and Old-maa’s inability to control the volume of her voice meant it must be something serious.

  ‘What’s got their tunics in a twist?’ Draikh asked.

  No idea right handQ from the It was had made, thought Raim. Must be something big, though. Definitely something he didn’t want to get caught in the middle of. He sidled away from his rock, careful not to fall within their line of sight.

  Draikh, two steps ahead as always, cried out, ‘Over here! Look at this!’

  Raim sped over to where Draikh was floating, and had to catch his breath in awe. They were at the edge of a large basin of blindingly white sand, glowing despite the darkness – as if it had captured the sun’s rays and kept them there on the floor of the valley, only slightly dimmed. Raim felt a shiver run through his spine as he looked down on a forest of trees – the ghosts of trees really, black and hard as rock, indicative of a time, centuries before, when parts of the desert had running water. Now their skeletons stood scorched a rich ebony by the harshness of the sun.

  Raim slid down the side of the basin, sand tumbling after him, but his footing remained sure – a sign he was becoming more accustomed to life in the desert. He picked up a dead branch and in that instant it felt like a sword. Suddenly the tree closest to him was Lars and the basin was the arena. He gripped the hilt of his branch in both hands and swung hard at the tree, an almost three-hundred-and-sixty degree launch with all his might.

  There was an almighty crack like thunder and the dead tree burst to life in a sea of splinters and black dust. Remarkably the branch remained intact, but he swung again and again at the tree, slashing and chopping until the last tendril holding it together snapped and it tumbled to the ground.

  ‘You do know that tree was probably a thousand years old.’

  Raim spun round, breathless, and looked up to the top of the basin where Wadi was standing, hands on hips. She slid gracefully down the side of the dune and picked up a branch of her own, turned it over in her hands and took a couple of swipes at the air.

  ‘Fancy a real opponent, instead of taking it out on some dead wood?’

  Raim grinned and nodded as they began to spar together. Wadi was better than most opponents he had faced but her swordplay didn’t even come close to her hand-to-hand skill. She was throwing all her effort into the bout, though, her face glowing red with effort. Raim felt the anger in her blows, but somehow knew it wasn’t directed at him.

  He waited for the right moment, then swung the branch and hit her upper arm. She winced and called for time, clutching at her triceps. ‘Ow!’ First annoyance, then curiosity showed on her face. ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘It’s your footwork that’s off. You need to stay balanced. Keep your stance tight, the target small. It means I won’t be able to get round you like I just did.’

  Wadi nodded, her mouth set in a firm line, and they started again. This time, her footwork was better, and they sparred until they both called for a pause.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said between breaths. She tossed the branch-sword to the ground and rubbed her hands clean against her loose trousers. ‘I needed that.’

  Raim shrugged. ‘Me too. The tree was getting pretty boring anyway. Hey – are you all right? I heard you and Old-maa . . .’

  Wadi kicked at the ground. ‘She won’t let me go to Lazar.’ The horror on Raim’s face must have registered because she quickly corrected herself: ‘I don’t mean to stay in Lazar – I just want to see it. And now that we are finally going, she’s forbidding me to go with her on the last leg of the journey. It’s not fair. Before, she used to tell me I was too young – and I accepted that. But ever since I’ve been “old enough”, she’s refused to bring any Chauk there. Except now, of course.’ She looked sidelong at him. ‘You must be the unluckiest person I know.’

  Raim didn’be. Let’

  23

  When the mountains first appeared on the horizon, after they had left the second Eye, the mood in the tribe changed dramatically – a mixture of excitement and anticipation and, prevailing over all, dread.

  ‘Lazar is . . . through . . . those cliffs,’ Wadi told him between breaths of a deep meditation session.

  ‘You’re not . . . supposed to . . . talk while meditating,’ Raim replied, opening one eyelid a crack to see what Wadi was up to. She had slumped back on the ground, out of the lotus position. Raim relaxed out of it as well.

  ‘I don’t think meditating is for me,’ she said.

  ‘My grandmother taught me it was as important as the rest of my training. Keeps the mind sharp,’ he said, tapping his forehead.

  ‘So about tw
o seconds of meditation will do it for you then?’ laughed Draikh in his ear.

  Raim grimaced. Wadi saw the look but she was used to it by now – to Raim responding to things she couldn’t hear. In fact, she had even started to ask questions about Draikh and the rest of the haunts.

  ‘Rude joke?’ she asked, nodding in the direction of Draikh-as-shadow.

  ‘Always,’ Raim said. And then: ‘Those mountains seem like pretty big markers for Lazar.’

  ‘They are, but if you don’t know the way to the city you will lose yourself in them. No one has ever found it without being led by someone who has been before.’

  ‘Maybe no one has wanted to try hard enough to find it.’

  ‘Good point.’

  Raim pulled out the dagger from inside his boot and turned it over in his hands. The last remnant of his Yun life – of what could have been.

  ‘Can I see?’ Wadi asked.

  Raim flipped the dagger over and handed it to her, hilt-first. ‘Of course. Careful, though – it’s sharp.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘I know how to handle a blade just as well as you, Yun boy.’ She considered the blade, testing the edge with her finger, quickly realizing just how sharp it really was. ‘Very nice,’ she said, before laying it down carefully in her lap. She gestured at the blade, then made the hand movements for the word ‘kn0">

  mostly use hand signals, with very few actual words. Those words were accompanied by a multitude of clicks and sounds Raim could hardly hope to replicate. Wadi laughed at his attempts until she admitted to him that the Alashan were born with an extra flap of skin in their throat – something she had inherited from her mother – to help keep the dust from their lungs, but which also helped make some of the stranger noises of their language. That hadn’t stopped her from laughing at him as he attempted to replicate the sounds before finally revealing the truth.

  Raim stood up and took a swig of water from his skin, which contained his tiny ration of water to last until Lazar.

  Then, the faintest of rattles sounded from his left, a barely audible rat-a-tat-tat. The bottom of his stomach dropped. He dared to flick his eyes to Wadi, whose face confirmed his fear: it was drained of colour, her eyes wide as moons, hands deathly still.

  He peered down at his left and there was a viper, its head and a quarter of its lithe body swaying a few inches from the ground. Its scales were mottled gold and copper, glowing in the dying dusk-light, its eyes tiny specks of onyx tipped with menacing horns, glaring at him, devoid of feeling. It flicked its tongue, a flash of pink, tasting the fear that emanated from Raim’s body.

  Then, before a moment passed to think, it lashed out at him, curved fangs bared.

  Raim stumbled backward in panic.

  ‘No sudden movements!’ Wadi hissed, almost like she was talking to the snake itself. In fact, while Raim had been paralysed with fear looking at the snake, Wadi had begun the agonizingly slow process of inching towards the reptile without attracting its attention.

  Raim stilled his muscles, but his eyes kept moving, darting from the snake to Wadi. The snake lashed out again, but Raim realized it was probably just protecting its territory. For now.

  He locked eyes with Wadi. Looking at her calmed him. He read the countdown in her eyes. Three . . . two . . .

  One!

  Wadi darted forwards and grabbed the snake just behind its head. Its body and tail squirmed in her grasp, a hideous hissing sounding from its throat, but Wadi’s grip held firm, the dagger poised in her other hand just in case she miscalculated. She reached to the belt at her side, and from it pulled a small canvas bag she used to carry her food for the day. She dumped the food in the sand, and wrangled the snake inside instead.

  Raim felt relief flood his muscles, but in that instant a stone shifted beneath his foot, turning his ankle. He rebalanced before he hit the floor, but not in time to save his skin of water, which flew out of his hand. The spout was open and the skin seemed to drift in slow motion to the ground. If the water spilled from the spout, Raim would be without anything to drink until they reached Lazar, which was still two days away at the very least. His heart felt caught beneath his tongue and all the muscles in his neck tightened. He tried to reach towards it but only the tips of his fingers brushed the bottle as it fell, tipping it in the air slightly so that water blossomed out of the spout. Raim felt a rush of air behind him and saw Draikh swoop down over the skin and catch it deftly in his hands.0">

  None of the water touched the ground.

  Raim was about to take the flask back from Draikh without thanks or thought, but a gasp from Wadi made him falter. She was gaping at the flask in Draikh’s hand.

  Raim stared from Wadi to Draikh and back again. He didn’t understand what was making her look so surprised. He tried to see what she saw. Then it dawned on him. She couldn’t see Draikh. But she could see the waterskin.

  Raim held out his hand and locked eyes with Draikh. There was a glint of understanding in the spirit’s eyes. He floated towards Raim, moving ever so slowly, until the skin slotted neatly into Raim’s open palm.

  Wadi was not someone who allowed shock to paralyse her for long. She quickly looked from side to side at the rest of the tribe, but no one seemed to be watching – except for Ryopi, who was sprinting over to the pair as fast as his legs could carry him.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you could do magic?’ Wadi said, her voice barely rising over a fierce whisper.

  ‘But . . . I can’t do magic,’ Raim replied, still barely managing to retain a grip on the waterskin. His mind was whirling with consequences he didn’t truly understand.

  ‘You have the skills of a sage,’ she stated.

  A sage. Raim tried to remember what he had felt on that first day he had witnessed a magician, on the day of his brother’s wedding. It seemed like so long ago, that sojourn up to the mountains. A different lifetime; a different Raim.

  ‘So how did you do that?’ she continued.

  ‘I told you, I didn’t do anything. I dropped my water bottle, Draikh caught it. That’s it.’

  ‘The shadows do this?’

  ‘We can do more,’ Draikh said, floating ominously behind Wadi. Raim’s eyes flickered towards him, and Wadi spun round, searching the air for what Raim was seeing.

  You can do more? But this time, Raim thought the words inside his head.

  ‘Yes,’ Draikh replied. ‘Send the girl away, and I’ll show you.’

  But before Raim could answer him, Ryopi had reached them. ‘Did Draikh just . . . catch that . . .?’ he asked, breathless. ‘Do you think I could learn how to do that with him?’ He shot a nervous look at his father.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ said his father. ‘But that’s right; I don’t even have a body.’ He released a gruesome cackle that made Ryopi shiver, yet instead of crawling back to the Chauk as he might have done before, Ryopi stared eagerly, hungrily, at Raim.

  Suddenly, Raim felt overwhelmed. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know what just happened. Leave me alone – both of you. I need can do everyt

  24

  Raim found Wadi sitting on the peak of a sand dune, her fingers stroking the smooth edge of her pendant. She had avoided him after the water skin incident. But now the day for the Chauk – and Raim – to enter Lazar had come, and he had searched for her to say goodbye. He asked Draikh to respect his privacy and stay below as he climbed up to reach her. For once, Draikh agreed.

  He attempted to say her name in Alashan, but it came out a garbled mess. Luckily, she just laughed. He breathed a sigh of relief and took that as permission to sit down next to her.

  ‘You could stay with us,’ she said, not yet looking at him.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ he said, and he began to trace a pattern in the sand with the tip of his finger. ‘I may not have knotted it as an oath, but going to Lazar was the last thing Mhara asked of me. I owe that much to her.’

  ‘But with the Alashan, you could be useful too – surely that is all that Mhara wanted?’ She looked
up at him now, her eyes not pleading, but full of determination. ‘She just wanted you out of Darhan, where you would be punished for the scar you have no memory of. How do you know you will find answers in Lazar? Here, you could teach the young ones how to fight. With Draikh . . . you could practise more of your sage arts, away from the exiles. Look at Oyu. He belongs in the desert. You would keep him cooped up in the city, punished for no other reason than he sees you as his master?’

  ‘Wadi . . .’ He reached out to put his hand on her shoulder, but she angrily shrugged him off and turned away.

  ‘Wadi away.

  ?’ he said again.

  ‘What?’ She ran the back of her hand across her cheek, wiping away a tear that had escaped her normally tough exterior.

  ‘I want you to have this.’ He took out his Yun training blade and laid it on the sand. ‘You are more worthy of it than me. The owner of this blade should be a free person, not someone confined to a city of exiles.’ He reached over andhoulder again, and this time she didn’t flinch. He ran his hand down her arm, over the smoothness of her da touched her s

  PART THREE

  25

  Raim couldn’t decide which ached more: his wrist from the ropes that bound him to Ryopi in a single-file line, or his neck, from the strain of looking up at the mountains that contained Lazar. These mountains were nothing like the Amarapura range in the north of Darhan. From afar, the Amarapura mountains looked like the points of a thousand knives, their tops covered in snow or shrouded in cloud. These peaks, the Ailing mountains, were not as tall, but the rock thrust out of the ground in smooth vertical lines, and their tops appeared flattened out like tables. Old-maa paused briefly to allow the accompanying Alashan guards to light the lanterns; the cliffs at the mountains’ base not only swallowed the heat but blocked the light almost completely too.