Daughter of the Dark: Shadow Through Time 2

by Louise Cusack

He smiled back, the dimples very much in evidence. ‘Yet now I know tenderness.’ He gazed into her eyes, ‘And should you choose me to father your child, I will be a gentle lover, who in the daylight hours stands strong at your side for as long as I remain on your world.’

  Sarah blinked back tears. ‘Can’t ask for more than that,’ she said, and then realised why she was crying. Because she could ask for more.

  Could, but wouldn’t.

  ‘Then let us begin,’ Pagan said, releasing her hand. And for all her fantasies, Sarah found she was suddenly shy.

  She stood and watched Pagan pull the covers from the bed, didn’t know where to put her hands, held them awkwardly at her sides. ‘Okay, but don’t bruise me,’ she said, and her face felt too stiff to smile. ‘I don’t like the healing process.’ Although, now that Pagan was going to be her lover, it might be far less torturous.

  He stood in front of her and searched her eyes. ‘Bruises of the flesh can heal of their own accord,’ he said, ‘’Tis your heart we must care not to harm.’

  Don’t worry.’ she told him, ‘You won’t break my heart.’ And that was the biggest lie Sarah McGuire had ever told. But as Pagan took her gently into his arms, she didn’t let herself think about the possibility of suffering. Only about how long she could stretch out the conception period. If she got him into the habit of making love with her, he might not want to stop.

  Slim hope but it was all she had.

  Pagan gazed into her eyes before saying, ‘I will give you a son, Sarah.’ Then he lowered his head and blotted out the light. She closed her eyes, wanting to concentrate on the feelings, to remember them, but as his lips pressed against hers she lost her place. There was nothing slow or tentative about his possession of her mouth. It was as though they’d done this a hundred times before and he knew exactly how to kiss her, how to make her head swim. Sarah had known she would be putty in his large, very capable hands, but she hadn’t realised she’d be jelly in the first five seconds.

  Then his hands slid down from her waist to her hips to press her against him. Sarah felt the hardness between them and she woke up from her sensual daze and began to kiss him back.

  Ennae and the ‘betrothed’ who waited for him there were suddenly very far away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Kai was dreaming.

  And wished he was not.

  It was dark and the castle was creaking around him. He ran but his feet moved no distance on the pale sandstone paths. The walls swirled at his sides, the stones turning into scales, yet still though he ran Kai made no progress towards escape. The long tunnel narrowed before him and though he could see a light at its end, he knew he would never reach it.

  ‘Kai,’ the voice of his God whispered. ‘Awaken and do my bidding,’ but in the dream it was Kraal who was awakening and changing from a castle into a serpent, trapping Kai within him. The scent of sulphur was choking and Kai tried to scream, but as always in the dream no sound emerged. The face of the fool came and went, jeering, mocking, his fingers sliding like clinging swamp weeds against Kai’s arms and chest before he pushed against him, thrusting him back into the belly of Kraal.

  In desperation Kai reached for his dagger and grabbed the fool’s arm, plunging his blade into his assailant’s heart, again and again. Weak, womanly cries fell from the fool’s distorting lips and the metallic tang of blood splashed across Kai’s face, yet still the castle walls writhed around him as Kraal took form. Blood flowed like water and Kai’s feet slipped beneath him. He threw out a hand to balance himself, and just as he hit the squelching surface of Kraal’s stomach he woke from his nightmare with a jerking breath.

  The room was quiet around him, but blood pounded in his ears. He blinked in the darkness and realised the warm weight on his chest was real, not the remnants of his dream. He sat up and shoved it away.

  The body of his youngest wife fell to the floor with a quiet thud.

  Kai stared at her, unable to comprehend what had occurred. Was this still part of the dream? Slowly his gaze fell to the bloodied dagger in his hand. His fingers opened and it clattered to the floor. He looked back at his wife whose body sprawled awkwardly on the pale sandstone. Faint moonlight from the window gilded her dark hair and the tips of her breasts which glistened with her blood. The same blood that covered his bed. The scent overwhelmed Kai in a way it never had before, even in the heat of battle.

  ‘It was a mistake …’ he whispered.

  ‘Life is a mistake’ Kraal said, and Kai froze. His God was here, in his room, not only in the dream.

  Kai immediately looked to his dead wife, yet she was unchanged, and therefore could not be Kraal in disguise as he had feared. ‘My … Lord and God,’ he whispered. ‘How may I serve you?’

  ‘Would you have her back? The deep commanding voice whispered into his soul, awakening Kai’s soft feelings for the wife he had just killed. To have her again in his bed. But would it be his wife? Or was Kraal toying with him. One day his God would appear again on Ennae, and Kai feared that time more with each passing day.

  ‘I did not mean to kill her,’ Kai said, ‘but I am glad she is dead.’ The temptation she offered him was gone. That would be a relief. But the child who had died with her may have been a son. His first. Kai could not begin to experience the grief that loss would cost him. Not now while his God watched and listened. ‘Yet let us not speak about my life,’ he said, ‘but rather how I can serve my God. Are you able to return to Ennae now?’ he asked, stepping off the high bed and over his wife’s body. Plush draperies covered the walls and hung from the back of the bed, but all were still. Kai tracked blood across deep-pile rugs towards a low couch, his glance surreptitiously inspecting the room, ‘I do not see you, My Lord and God.’

  ‘I am in Haddash,’ Kraal replied. ‘Only my voice and my minions may touch Ennae.’ It was a familiar reassurance, but each time Kai heard it he mistrusted it.

  ‘We cannot find the White. We have searched,’ he said and forced himself to sit on the couch, believing that the arms could not encircle him and squeeze his life from him. Hoping.

  ‘I cannot aid that search’ Kraal replied. ‘Blood of the Ancients, while they are alive, is hidden from my sight.’

  ‘Alive …?’

  ‘There is a half-life I can penetrate, but that does not help me find The White that blocks my entrance to this world.’

  ‘I will continue to be your hands and your eyes,’ Kai promised.

  ‘Then go to the castle of the one they call The Dark. Collect my prize.’

  ‘The traitor found the talisman?’ Kai knew fear then. The Dark had succeeded where he had failed.

  ‘No. My harbinger in the Echo Mountains bears the talisman. Take the prize to him.’

  ‘Your harbinger, My Lord and God? Is this a minion?’

  ‘A Plainsman,’ Kraal replied.

  Kraal had found the keeper of the talisman.

  ‘Do not harm the Plainsman’ Kraal rumbled. ‘Only he can bring my prize and I grow impatient waiting for it.’ The undertone in that command urged Kai to his feet.

  ‘I go instantly, My Lord and God, to do your bidding,’ he said, snatching up clothes and weapons before heading to the kitchens to find provisions for his journey. ‘Wake my lieutenant,’ he barked, kicking a dozing sentry in the hallway before pulling on his loincloth. ‘Tell him to meet me at the fortress gate. I leave within the hour.’

  The sentry jumped up ready to obey, but stopped, staring at Kai’s hands instead. Kai looked down at them. They were splashed with blood. His wife’s blood.

  ‘Gloves,’ the sentry said.

  Ceremonial gloves of blood. Kai looked back up at him. It was the perfect excuse. ‘Kraal demanded a sacrifice to cast good omens on my journey.’

  ‘The journey must be of great importance,’ the sentry said, shock mingling with horror on his face. Had he seen Kai’s young wife enter his room?

  There were many jealous of his right to have her, and Kai knew that no man could
understand why he had kept her from his bed. To have killed her for no good reason would surely earn him the enmity of many.

  ‘We all must do Kraal’s bidding,’ Kai said, then continued to the kitchens, filling his mind with the mundane planning of provisioning his journey. He did not want to think of his wife’s lifeless body on his bedchamber floor, or the horror she must have felt, coming to him in seduction and finding instead a violent death. He must think of her life, and the life of his child, as a sacrifice to Kraal, just as he had told the sentry.

  Kai kept that thought in his mind as he briefed his lieutenant, and all through the days of his march towards Be’uccdha. But the nights … Kai wished he did not have to sleep. He dreamt of her ascension to Haddash and saw her in Kraal’s court, her child still growing in her belly, food for a hungry serpent once it emerged. Always in these dreams his wife’s eyes implored him to take her back. And Kraal merely smiled, content in the knowledge that he had driven Kai to the act.

  Grief and anger at his God grew until Kai was hot with it, as though sickening from a fever. He arrived at the traitor’s castle heavily cloaked and was admitted through a secret entrance the Northmen had been instructed to use. Though there was no reason for the traitor to keep his alliance with them secret any longer, Kai observed the ritual, anger building within him as the traitor led him towards the birthing room of the Southwoman Kai had seen his God impregnate.

  ‘The prize I am to collect is a child?’ Kai kept his eyes on the flagstones beneath his feet while his mind grappled with a fury he could scarcely control.

  ‘I married her to keep her here,’ the traitor said, walking at Kai’s side, his gleaming dark hair and haughty manner in sharp contrast with Kai’s filth and exhaustion. ‘Tell your God that. Her brother wanted to take her back to Verdan. You would not so easily have retrieved your “prize” from him.’

  Kai nodded. ‘My Lord and God is currently in Haddash. I will pass on these words with the child.’

  ‘My Lord Be’uccdha,’ came a croaking voice as they entered a locked room. A wispy-haired hag in the ochre robes of a healer lurched forward. ‘Her hips are too narrow. It will not pass through.’

  The traitor strode past her and the old woman fell back as though swept by the winds of his passage. Kai followed behind, a dark presence beside the richly embossed robe of his host.

  ‘Is she dead?’ he asked, seeing the limp form on the bed, huge belly mounded under a delicate nightdress from which painfully thin arms and legs emerged. Even in the faint candlelight of the shadowed bedchamber Kai could see that the girl’s face was also emaciated, as though the child had sucked all of her into itself.

  The traitor leant forward and opened an eyelid. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘My Lady of Verdan has been struggling for hours,’ the old woman said, laying a gnarled hand on the girl’s twitching belly. ‘She has no more strength.’

  ‘Call my physician.’

  The old hag scuttled off and Kai waited in silence until she returned with a heavy boulder of a man, dark-skinned like his lord but half the height.

  ‘My Lord Be’uccdha.’ The physician bowed, then ignored Kai as he skirted the table to await his lord’s commands.

  ‘Cut it from her,’ the traitor said. ‘But do it neatly so her brother does not think us careless.’

  The physician nodded, but his eyes were troubled.

  Kai’s were like dark ice. ‘Do not look on the face of the child when it comes,’ he warned. ‘It can kill with a glance.’

  The traitor showed interest in this. ‘What form will it take?’ he asked, clearly wondering, as Kai did, whether a small serpent would emerge.

  ‘My Lord and God did not indicate that,’ Kai answered, wondering for the first time how he would control a serpent, how he could contain it. Kraal would not thank him if the small beast flew away.

  ‘When the next contraction has passed,’ the physician said, his hand poised above the belly, a thin blade glittering from beneath her knotted knuckles. ‘It will not be long now.’

  But as Kai watched the girl’s belly, he felt his gorge rise. It heaved and vibrated, as though the Maelstrom their God had predicted was raging within it.

  ‘This is unusual,’ the physician said, and put down the knife before resting both hands on the surging mound before him. A second later the girl’s eyes snapped open and she screamed, a long, dark, horrible scream that Kai thought they must surely hear at Fortress Sh’hale. Was the serpent trying to eat its way out of its fleshy nest? The girl’s legs and arms flew wide and Kai stepped back, awe in his eyes as the mound of belly moved smoothly lower. It stopped, as though hindered, and the girl abruptly fell silent, lying with mouth and eyes wide open as the bones and flesh of her lower body cracked and ripped. The mound slid lower still and, with a splintering snap, her legs parted impossibly wide.

  Kai, who had seen Kraal tear heads from living bodies, winced at this desecration of an innocent girl. It was not the clean death of sacrifice, not even as quick as the terrifying death his own wife had suffered at his hands. This was torture and a thought came to him then for the girl’s brother who knew nothing of the child’s parentage. He was fortunate not to be witnessing this scene.

  ‘It’s encased,’ the traitor said curiously, his voice showing none of the horror Kai felt.

  They watched as a smooth oval, volcanic black and glowing like the Serpent God’s eyes, emerged from between the girl’s bloodied legs. The hand close to Kai, which had trembled in agony a moment earlier, now fell limp as the oval slid out onto the bedclothes, and though her eyes were still widely open, Kai knew the mother of Kraal’s child was dead.

  ‘There is no face to look upon,’ the traitor said, turning to Kai who could only nod in agreement, swallowing back distaste as he looked upon the bloodied container of his Lord and God’s first offspring.

  ‘Perhaps Kraal protects me from his child as I take it to him,’ he said.

  ‘Or protects the child.’

  ‘From me?’ Kai frowned as though surprised at this thought, yet wondered if his God could see the anger he felt towards him, the fury that Kraal’s child should live while his had died.

  ‘Why does Kraal not come to collect the child himself?’ the traitor asked and Kai suddenly understood the need for the child’s protection.

  ‘The White!’ he said. ‘There is a White on Ennae and for this reason Kraal cannot let his child be born completely.’

  The Southman traitor shook his head. ‘Your God spoke to me of his aversion to the descendants of the Ancients, but our king is dead and with his sister in Atheyre. I saw them rise myself. There is no other White, unless my son has returned from Magoria.’

  ‘There is still White on Magoria,’ Kai assured him. ‘This is another.’

  Again the traitor shook his head. ‘There can be no other,’ but Kai saw the hesitation in his eyes.

  Perhaps this was an opportunity to hand over his burden of finding The White. ‘My Lord and God has found the talisman you could not. Yet you may redeem yourself in his eyes by destroying The White,’ he said.

  The traitor gazed at him, as though to assess his honesty. Then at last said, ‘Have your people breached the Volcastle?’

  Kai shook his head. ‘Nor will they. Do you think The White lies within its walls?’

  ‘If Mihale did sire a child, I know who will be protecting it,’ he said and turned to notice the hag hovering over the bed, a swaddling cloth in her arms, yet her hands seemed unable to perform the simple task of lifting the Fire God’s child. ‘Prepare the encased child for its journey,’ he said coldly, and dismissed the physician with a nod.

  Kai could see the old woman was terrified, yet she took the smooth oval in her hands and moved it away from the birthing blood before wiping it with a damp cloth and rolling it in a dry one.

  ‘My Lord,’ she croaked, offering the bundle forward, her head lowered.

  The traitor nodded to Kai who took the oval from her and put it in a satchel t
hat hung over his chest. The warmth from the child permeated the cloth and he wondered how hot it would become. The four-day march to the Echo Mountains would be interminable, but at least he did not appear to need food for the child. Kai had feared he would have to take the mother with him to nurse it, yet Kraal appeared to have thought of every thing.

  ‘Cleanse the body of my wife,’ the traitor said to his healer, ‘and bind her lower half carefully to hide the damage. I want her dressed in her best finery for her journey to Verdan.’

  The old woman nodded and no further words were spoken as the Be’uccdha lord escorted Kai to the secret doorway through which he had entered the castle. As they parted the traitor said, ‘Give my good wishes to your God and assure him I will find The White.’

  Kai nodded stiffly, eager to be away from the harsh smell of the ocean and the constant drone of the waves breaking below. To a warrior raised amid the silence of pure mountain air, Castle Be’uccdha was like an agitating nightmare. As he hastened his footsteps he wondered how anyone slept in its confines.

  Djahr turned from the secret exit and instructed a Guardsman to send Tulak to his dining room. The birth of the Fire God’s child had given Djahr an appetite and while he dined he would hear the account of his newly returned Guard Captain’s patrol. All Djahr knew was that Tulak had lost his men and had returned with a heavily cloaked prisoner whom he had secreted in the furthermost regions of the dungeon. Ellega’s birthing screams had distracted him from discovering anything further.

  ‘A more substantial meal than irtin soup,’ he told his steward with a meaningful glance.

  ‘My Lord,’ the man said, bowing before he turned away. No Plainsman children had been taken recently but Djahr knew there would be Cliffdwellers delivering oceanweed to the kitchens. If a small one should go missing …

  ‘Tulak.’ Djahr turned as his Guard Captain entered, noticing the way his shoulders sat straighter within his uniform. Promotion had indeed changed him. ‘Tell me of your prisoner.’ He had no interest in the lost patrol. ‘I know he does not bear the talisman I sent you for.’ Let Tulak think The Dark’s powers of discernment were still strong. Djahr had been fortunate that the Altar Caves had flooded, alleviating the necessity to hold services, which, without his Shadow Woman at his side, could only embarrass him.