Mirabar pulled the icy blade out of his gut and then scrambled awkwardly away from him. She was soaked in his blood. Her right arm was especially bright with it, from the elbow all the way down to the small hand which clutched...
"A... shir?" he rasped.
Cheylan collapsed, falling face down on the floor.
He dimly heard her rise to her feet. His blood thundered with frantic pain. He felt a hot pool spreading around him... The huge wound she had opened in his body was gushing his life out onto the cavern floor.
No...
Where was Dar now? Where was Her favor?
He was so talented. So full of promise gone unacknowledged, ability gone unrecognized, merit gone unrewarded....
Dying?
No!
He saw the lava flow glowing in the encroaching darkness. The betrayal was horrible. Cold, so cold. Dar, the only one with whom he had ever kept faith—always, without fail—had forsaken him.
Why?
Dar, as I have been faithful and true...
"Mirabar," he mumbled.
The mountain was rumbling violently now. So loud, so fierce. Or did it just seem that way because his ear was pressed to the cave floor, so rough against his cheek?
The pain wasn't so bad now. But he was terribly cold. And the lava flow... It was gone. Everything was gone. All black now.
"Mira..." he called.
Maybe she heard him and understood. Because now she who had killed him began chanting, praying for Dar and the Otherworld to welcome him. It was his right, to die with the proper prayers.
Dying? No! No, please!
It was his right... He was a Guardian, and he had always been faithful to Dar.
Yes, the mountain was roaring now. Angry. Hah! Mirabar would regret this work. Dar was enraged. She had not wanted him to die with all his promise unfulfilled.
Yes. Dar would punish Mirabar for this.
It was a pleasing thought to embrace as death reached out for him.
"Where did you get that?" Elelar asked her faintly.
Mirabar tucked the shir back into the boot where she'd kept it hidden. The feel of Cheylan's blood and vulnerable human flesh were still hot on her hands. She wanted to vomit or weep now; but she forced herself to speak calmly.
"We were ambushed at Gamalan last night." She paused and added, "Well, I think it was last night... And I killed an assassin." She had kept the shir because she knew that her own power might not be enough of an advantage against Cheylan when she finally faced him.
The torena stared down at Cheylan's corpse, then took a few steps back as the pool of blood spread towards her feet. "Even if he had left Sileria, he would have come back."
"He never would have left," Mirabar said with certainty, gazing at his body with mingled loathing and sorrow. "Cheylan had gone too far down his road to turn back. He never could have admitted he'd chosen badly. Never would have accepted that anything mattered but what he wanted, or that his desires weren't the same thing as his destiny."
Elelar glanced at her in surprise. "You planned to stab him," she guessed. "That's why you got so close."
Mirabar nodded. "Once I realized that, just as I'd feared, I couldn't beat him with fire, I knew I had to use the blade. But I'm not skilled with the shir, not like Najdan. So I couldn't let Cheylan see it in my hand, see the blow coming. He had to be concentrating on something else for me to take my one chance and succeed with it."
"Something else?" Elelar repeated. "Like breaking your neck?"
Mirabar rubbed her throat. "Actually, I was hoping he'd kiss me. It was how he usually tried to influence me in the past."
"Sex or violence. It's how men always try to influence a woman," Elelar said, sounding more like her old self.
Mirabar shuddered with delayed reaction. "The attempt to break my neck... That scared me."
"Yes," Elelar said dryly. "I can see how that might be alarming."
The roar and rumble of the mountain got louder. "We have to get out of here," Mirabar said, dragging her attention away from the man she had just killed.
Elelar nodded, then gestured to the lava flow. "Can you think of any way..." Her dark eyes widened and her voice trailed off as the cavern started shaking. "Oh, no."
Oh, no.
Mirabar looked around, trying to guess where they'd be safest as the earthquake began. She felt Elelar clutch her hand, and she returned the grip, as scared as the torena.
"Against the wall," Mirabar shouted, hoping she was right. She started to drag Elelar with her.
The cave suddenly rocked hard, throwing them around like feathers on the wind. Mirabar lost her grip on Elelar, who staggered backward as Mirabar stumbled forward. Elelar fell down, then screamed and rolled away a bare instant before shattering rocks landed where she had fallen. Mirabar sought to protect her unborn child from harm as she was hurled down onto the shuddering ground while the mountain roared and the cavern ceiling groaned.
"Elelar!" she shouted, trying to crawl to the torena as this hidden world of fire and water tore itself apart.
Elelar was trying to shield her head from a shower of falling rock and dust. "Stay back!" she shouted at Mirabar, pointing to the cavern ceiling. "It's coming down!"
Mirabar looked up and froze with horror. The high cavern ceiling moaned hideously, then bulged and writhed as if coming to life. "No." She looked at Elelar again. "Run!"
Elelar looked behind her, to where the lava flow blocked her path to any passages on that side of the cavern. She turned her desperate gaze back to Mirabar, then pushed herself to her feet, took three staggering steps toward her, and was again thrown to the ground by the heaving and shaking.
Mirabar crawled forward as she kept her own gaze fixed on the bulging ceiling. "Yes! Come on! It's your only chance!"
"Go!" Elelar shouted at her, hauling herself forward over broken rock. "Go now! Don't wait for me! Go!"
"Come on!" Mirabar screamed, crawling closer, stretching out her arm. "Faster!" She was thrown sideways as the ground quivered roughly again.
Elelar scrambled to her hands and knees—then collapsed without making a sound when a falling rock plummeted straight into her head. She lifted her bleeding face from the ground and tried again, fumbling clumsily as Mirabar tried to move forward over undulating, shivering rock.
There was a terrible explosion. Blood-chilling. Bone-freezing. Then Mirabar heard the sound of cracking walls, tumbling rock... and the fury of lava bursting through solid stone. She looked up and saw the bulging ceiling glow gold, then orange.
"No!"
The ceiling collapsed with a furious wail of protesting rock and explosive fire. Elelar's scream of terror and agony was high-pitched as the enormous river of falling lava engulfed her, sweeping her into its fiery, destructive embrace.
"Elelar!" Mirabar screamed as the torena disappeared in the torrent of liquid fire.
No! No, it couldn't come to this! No!
In her fury and despair, Mirabar barely remembered to shield herself in time as the river of fire flooded the cave, engulfing her, too, and swept her into its raging current.
Chapter Twenty-Four
This is Darshon, where all stand
helpless and hushed before the goddess.
—Jalan the Zanar
The sea became even rougher as another grimly black night took the place of the dark gray day. The Lascari boat heaved wildly as the volcano roared and the distant coast rumbled with another earthquake. Wave after wave of sea water washed across the deck. They tried to keep lanterns burning so other boats could see them and avoid collision, but the sea kept dousing them. It probably didn't matter, Zarien knew; no one could really navigate on tonight's vicious sea, anyhow. Some would collide and perhaps die. That was the price of being sea-born when the sea was wrathful and cruel.
"No, don't!" Zarien shouted at Toren Ronall as he tried to tie himself to the mast. "If the boat goes down, you'll drown."
"I thought I was supposed to stay with the boa
t?" Ronall shouted back.
"Not if it goes down!"
"Let's not talk about the boat going down! Agreed?"
Zarien looked over at Najdan, noticing that even he looked as if he wanted to be sick tonight.
"So, Zarien," Ronall shouted above the roar of sea and land and sky. "Do you indeed feel safer here, farther out at sea?"
Zarien laughed. Ronall shook his head. Najdan looked mean.
"Zarien!"
He turned to Linyan, who ordered him to help haul down the foresail, which had come loose, unrolled, and was now flapping wildly. Zarien, who could scarcely even see it in the intense dark, shouted his acknowledgement. It would be too dangerous to brail the sail back up to the yar again right now, and they couldn't leave it flapping like that.
"No!" Ronall shouted, reaching for him as he moved to go do the work. "Stay here!"
"I'll be fine," Zarien shouted back.
"No!" Najdan said, for once in agreement with the toren about something.
Zarien evaded Ronall's grasp. "It has to be—"
"I said no!" Najdan warned him.
"This is no time—Agh!"
Zarien blacked out for a moment as something struck him in a blur of motion. Vision dark and head pounding, he found himself lying on the deck, confused and stunned, with someone's foot planted in his back. He groaned, then he felt hands hauling him to an upright position.
"Are you out of your mind?" Ronall demanded, his voice coming as if from a distance.
I was only going to... Zarien's tongue wouldn't obey.
Then Najdan's voice. "He is overconfident and reckless. It's clearly not safe."
"You didn't have to hit him!"
"It's easier than arguing," said Najdan. "He is a very argumentative boy. Tansen should beat him."
"Tansen doesn't approve of people hitting the boy."
"That could explain his bad behavior."
Ronall said something critical about assassins. Zarien started pulling his senses together. Now he heard Linyan shouting at Najdan.
"If he is not one of you," Najdan snapped at Linyan in common Silerian, "then don't expect him to do your bidding on your boat. Your habit of excluding him until it's convenient for you to include him is very distasteful." He added ominously, "Tansen wouldn't like it."
The roar of the sea got louder, and Zarien couldn't hear whatever else they all said. There was another explosion in the distance. This one seemed skull-crushingly loud... but maybe that was because Najdan had just hit him in the head.
I really hate him.
Feeling indignant and ill-used by everyone, Zarien grabbed a rope tied around the mast and started hauling himself to his feet.
Furious at them all, he began, "If anyone else..."
But they'd forgotten him. Instead, they were all staring past him with horrified expressions which were clearly visible even in the dim light from the sole remaining lantern. Their faces suddenly looked so alike it would have been comical if it weren't so terrifying. He whirled around to see what held them all frozen with dread even at the same moment that the screams of the other Lascari aboard this boat made his stomach clench.
We're dead.
It was all he had time to think before the enormous wave hit them, sweeping him off the deck and into the furious sea.
Tansen hauled Faradar to her feet. She was breathing hard and looked dizzy, having been thrown to the rocky ground when the earthquake hit. Faradar looked up as something exploded in the sky, then she gasped and flinched. Tansen looked up, too, and saw lava shoot straight up out of the caldera, piercing the colored clouds and shifting lights at Darshon's summit. The fountain of liquid fire glowed brightly against the black sky before falling through the air to paint the mountain with hundreds of fiery rivulets which began flowing down Darshon's slopes.
"How can anyone survive here?" Faradar asked hoarsely.
"But they are surviving," Tansen said. "Some of them, anyhow. Can't you hear them?" Their noise was faint but discernible as the mountain's roar slowly faded.
"Hear..." She blinked, then drew a sharp breath through her nostrils. "What is that? That... wailing, that chanting, that... Those sounds?"
"The pilgrims." He'd known about this from local gossip, but it was the first time he'd heard it for himself. "Praise singers. Worshippers. Ecstatic devotion."
"They sound insane," Faradar said.
He looked up at the menacing peak of Darshon beneath which the pilgrims lived and said, "They probably are."
Mirabar struggled to survive as the searing river of lava gathered speed, shot her forward like an arrow loosed from a bow, let her fall like a dead bird, and then dumped her on some unyielding surface, the lava's fluid texture being her only protection against the force of her landing.
She couldn't breathe. She had to breathe. She would die if she couldn't get air in another instant.
She lifted her head, praying the insane journey was over, and started trying to break through the fiery lava covering her. She felt weak, exhausted, at the end of her strength. She had to get out of this flow or she'd be dead in moments. She couldn't protect herself from this liquid fire any longer.
Mirabar brushed lava from her face as if it were sticky syrup, then inhaled the hot, fume-thick air as soon as her nostrils were clear. She choked, wiped her mouth, then shook her head and rubbed at her eyes.
Screams assaulted her ears as the lava started melting away from them. She looked around in scared confusion and saw areas of blackness. Darkness. Something which wasn't lava, whatever else it might be. She started crawling towards it, relieved the current was no longer so strong. It was as if the lava were now willing to release her.
I'm not dead. I'm not dead. Dar be praised, I'm not dead.
She reached the rough ground, free of the flow, and started commanding the remaining lava to melt away from her body. Only then did any other thought enter her mind.
Where am I? And what is all that noise?
She looked around.
Darfire!
There were people everywhere, many of them holding torches—spots of golden light amidst the mingled black of the land and the glowing orange rivers of lava flows. Lava everywhere. Some of these people gaped at her in wide-eyed shock, which she supposed was understandable. Others were screaming, though they seemed more exultant than scared.
Lava flows everywhere...
Mirabar looked up and saw Darshon's tumultuous summit above her. She was just below the snow line.
"I'm on the slopes of Darshon," she murmured.
Mirabar studied the lava flow she had just escaped. It was coming from the summit. It had evidently carried her straight up from the underground caverns and through the caldera itself. Tears misted her eyes. She had been in Dar's presence, in Dar's abode, in the very womb of Dar's divine power! She had been where no one else had ever survived going except for Josarian himself. The Firebringer...
She gasped as she realized who else Dar might have wanted to survive such an ordeal.
"Have you seen another woman?" Mirabar demanded of the people surrounding her.
"What?"
"Someone like me. Someone else who, uh..." She gestured to the lava flow.
"Someone brought here by Dar?"
"Yes!"
"Only you, sirana."
"She may still be alive! I've got to find her!"
"Are you... are you Dar in the flesh?"
"No!" she replied, startled. "I'm Mirabar."
"Mirabar?"
"Mirabar! Mirabar!"
"Not now!" she shouted. "I've got to find Torena Elelar! You've got to help me!"
But they were already chanting louder, lost in a delirium of blind worship and joyful rapture.
"Mirabar! Mirabar! Mirabar!"
"Zarien!" Ronall screamed—then choked as water filled his nose and mouth.
No!
Gone. Zarien was gone.
Ronall couldn't see, breathe, or speak. The boat plunged and keeled madly as
the enormous wave assaulted it, nearly drowning them all. For a long, horrifying moment, he was absolutely sure the vessel would go under. There seemed no hope, no escape. Then, by some miracle, it righted itself—heaving so hard that he hit the deck head-first and almost lost his grip on his rope. Then he felt someone move past him and realized it was Najdan, going after the boy.
Ronall tried to grab him, sensing that pursuit was futile. Certain death. Hopeless and pointless.
Then Najdan was gone, too.
Of course, Ronall realized. The assassin had pledged his life to protect Zarien. So he'd rather die than stay with the boat while letting the boy drown.
Zarien...
"No!" Ronall howled.
He could hear the frantic screams of the Lascari. There was a hideous shudder and terrible crashing noise as the sea tossed this boat into another one. Then they sprang backwards, rebounding from the blow, only to be slapped around by another wave.
"Dar!" Ronall screamed, choking on the sea water battering him as he flailed around, clinging to the rope and being repeatedly flung against hard surfaces. "Stop, damn you! Stop!"
Zarien...
That boy, so lost, so young, so confused. And Najdan, such a complete contrast to the boy.
They had been Ronall's friends, in a way. At least, he wanted to think so as he wept for their deaths.
Their deaths...
It came to him then, what he must do, why he had come here. He couldn't save the Valdani in Sileria—how could he even have imagined himself meeting such a formidable challenge? Perhaps he couldn't even save the drowning sea-born boy, nor the grim assassin... But he would die trying.
He had left Shaljir so long ago, it seemed, fleeing Elelar's hatred and seeking death. Seeking an end to his pointless existence, an escape from his soul-deep hunger for something he could never even define.
"Zarien!" Ronall screamed again.
May the Three have mercy on my soul. May Dar welcome me as I travel to the Otherworld...
Weeping with terror and a terrible elation, Ronall let go of the rope as another wave assaulted the boat. He staggered as the boat heaved, then he flew overboard with sickening speed as the sea attacked, engulfed, and carried him away.
The Destroyer Goddess Page 44