“I’m sorry, Your Majesty. I didn’t know they were being held in here. I’ll have them removed at once.”
Shananara shook her head. “No. Leave them. Just keep them out of my way.”
“Are you sure?” He studied her warily. He knew the Harshini were incapable of doing harm, but right at that moment he wasn’t that certain Shananara could be trusted.
The queen nodded then took a deep breath and walked past Tarja towards the centre of the Hall. The Defenders cleared a path for her, pushing the priests back, being none too gentle about it.
Shananara looked about her, ignoring the priests and the Defenders, then she closed her eyes and the Citadel began to tremble in earnest.
Silence descended, fractured only by a whimper that came from one of the priests as the Harshini queen stood in the centre of the Hall, her head thrown back, her eyes closed in concentration. Certain he was imagining it, he thought he saw a faint glimmer of light surrounding her in a soft, white nimbus. Small white flakes began to fall from the whitewashed ceiling.
The Citadel rumbled beneath his feet.
It was only a few at first, and Tarja thought them simply the result of the building’s movement. But soon the flakes of whitewash began to fall faster, until he felt as if he was caught in a snowstorm. A sudden popping made him jump as a plug of plaster burst out of a small alcove in the pillar on his right. It was followed by a dozen or more tiny explosions as the plastered-over niches spat out their fillings, which shattered into powder as they hit the floor.
The Hall shook so hard it rattled his teeth.
The paint on the ceiling was coming away in strips now, and he could just make out the first signs of the paintings underneath. The walls blistered and their whitewash began to fall off, too. He was powdered in flaking whitewash and plaster as he glanced at Garet, who looked as if he’d been dipped in flour. The commandant’s eyes were dark sockets of incomprehensible horror set in a bone-white face. The priests began to wail in terror as the building shuddered so hard that Tarja could barely stand upright.
Shananara did not move.
Then a splintering sound echoed loudly through the hall. Tarja looked in the direction of the sound through the swirling white storm and noticed a large crack had appeared on the wall at the back of the podium. Another crack appeared and then another, sundering the painted symbol of the Sisters of the Blade that decorated the far wall. Shananara had claimed the Citadel was not easily harmed, but she appeared to be bringing the building down on top of them. The wall cracked even further and began to crumble, but amazingly, the half-cupola over the podium held fast.
As the wall tumbled down in a shower of plaster and white dust, taking with it the last vestige of the Sisterhood’s imprint on the place, Tarja saw the reason why. The wall had been nothing more than a false front, concealing the rest of the podium behind it. Red light from the setting sun flooded the circular alcove, turning the falling white dust into glittering motes of fire. The cupola was tiled in an intricate pattern, resting on a curved wall that was painted with a glorious fresco, although from where he was standing, he could not make out the detail.
But it was not the fresco, or the gilded dome that made him stare in wonder. In the centre of the podium was a massive crystal, taller than a man, mounted on a block of polished black marble. He had no idea what it was, or what its purpose might be, but it obviously held pride of place in the Temple of the Gods. He realised then why the wall had been built to hide it. Too massive to move and probably indestructible, there would have been no way to get rid of the Stone when the Sisters of the Blade had tried to remove all vestiges of the Harshini from their new home.
They had done the next best thing and hidden it.
The shuddering slowly trembled to stillness and Tarja looked about him in awe. Shananara had restored the Hall to what it had been during the reign of the Harshini. Although it was almost nightfall, the pillars shone as bright as day. The ceiling had a painting on it that depicted the Primal Gods. Along the gallery was a mural dedicated to even more gods. It looked as if a hundred—maybe a thousand—different craftsmen had added to it over the years. The parts of it he could see were magnificent. There was writing—songs perhaps—covering some of the walls, too. The pillars supporting the gallery now had alcoves set in the side of each one and he wondered for a moment at their purpose.
Then he noticed the priests and forgot all about the Hall.
To a man, they were on their knees. Some were sobbing like broken-hearted children. A few others were tearing at their robes, howling with despair. One man was clawing at his own face until the blood flowed. Then a shattering scream pierced the sudden silence as one of the priests leaped to his feet and ran blindly towards him.
Tarja felt his stomach churn and had to forcibly stop himself from vomiting. Where the priest’s eyes had been was nothing but two bloody sockets. In his hands he held his own eyeballs. The fool had clawed his own eyes out rather than witness the return of the Harshini.
Tarja caught the man and wrestled him to the ground. The man was howling in pain and outrage. Tarja looked up angrily at Shananara, who had finally lowered her head and opened her eyes. If she was distressed by what the priests were doing to themselves, she gave no indication.
Garet helped Tarja hold the hysterical priest down as Shananara approached. The commandant looked as pale as the powdered paint that coated him.
“Is this your idea of doing no harm?” he snarled at the queen.
Shananara looked down at the blind priest for a moment before she answered. “This is Xaphista’s work, not mine, Commandant. To heal him would mean forcing him to break his faith and he holds that more dearly than his eyes. Even if I could restore his sight and remove his pain, he would just claw his eyes out again as soon as your back was turned.”
There was a strange twisted logic in what she said. A Karien priest would rather suffer and die than acknowledge the existence of the Harshini or the God of Healing. Tarja had no doubt that she could heal him—he had seen the Harshini ability. He also had no doubt that she was right when she claimed the man would simply try to harm himself as soon as they let him out of their sight. They were a sick breed, these priests. The sooner R’shiel did something about Xaphista the better.
“Get him to the infirmary,” Tarja ordered, standing back to let two of the guards pick up the struggling, howling priest.
Tarja looked at the other priests, who had been stunned into silence by the courageous action of their brother. They wore the look of men who thought he had done something to be proud of. How many more of them were contemplating the same thing? Suffering for Xaphista was more than just a hopeful wish for these men; it was damned near a job requirement. He had to put a stop to it. Now.
“The next one of you that tries to harm himself,” he announced loudly, “will be delivered to the Harshini for healing. And he’ll stay there until he denounces Xaphista and swears allegiance to the Primal Gods.”
Shananara looked at him in surprise then nodded approvingly as she realised what his threat would mean to these men.
“How long is that going to last?” Garet asked, ineffectively brushing the white dust from his jacket.
“Tarja’s threat is very real to these men, Commandant. They will avoid stubbing a toe rather than risk being touched by one of my people.”
Garet stared at her coldly then looked around the Hall. “Did you make this much mess redecorating the dormitories?”
“Not quite.”
“And what the hell is that thing?” he asked, pointing at the crystal on the podium.
“It is the Seeing Stone.”
Garet stopped trying to clean his jacket and stared at the crystal with a thoughtful expression. “I thought that was in Greenharbour?”
“There is also a Stone in Greenharbour. This one belongs here.”
“What does it do?”
“It channels the power of the gods, among other things.”
Garet
absorbed that piece of information silently and then looked at the priests. “I suppose we’d better get them out of here. I’ll move them to the Lesser Hall.” He looked at Shananara and added frigidly, “Unless of course, you’re planning to do this to every building you walk into, Your Majesty?”
“I will not disturb your prisoners again, Commandant,” she assured him.
Garet obviously doubted her word, but didn’t voice his scepticism. He looked at Tarja and shook his head. “Look at this place, Tarja. They haven’t been here a day yet.”
“I’ll get everything sorted out,” Tarja promised, not at all certain he believed his own words.
“Well, you can start by making the Harshini clean up this mess. After all, she caused it.” With a pointed and very unfriendly glare in Shananara’s direction, Garet Warner moved off to organise moving the Karien priests from the Great Hall.
“I’m sorry, Tarja,” Shananara said as soon as Garet was out of earshot. “I thought only to help by calming the Citadel.”
The Harshini could not lie, so legend claimed, but he wondered if she was bending the truth a little. She must have known what making the priests witness her power would do to them. Or perhaps she really didn’t understand. If she couldn’t contemplate the thought of violence, how could she imagine a man willing to put his own eyes out?
“The damage is done now. At least the tremors have stopped.”
“That’s because the Citadel is awake.”
“Is that going to cause problems?”
She smiled suddenly. “Come and see.”
Grabbing his hand she pulled him towards the doors. He noticed that the bronze sheathing had peeled away and they were now carved with unbelievably intricate knot-work designs that chased themselves across the doors in a complex pattern.
They stepped out of the Hall into a street that was crammed with people. The sun had set, but it was as bright as day. The walls of the Citadel had brightened and dimmed with metronomic precision for two centuries, but now, when they should have faded to darkness, they were burning with vibrant light. Every building he could see was ablaze, banishing the night.
“Founders!” he murmured in awe.
His sentiments were reflected in every face he saw. Although crowded, the street below the Great Hall was strangely silent as the people tried to make sense of what they were witnessing.
Then he heard the noise, like a distant wail of despair, coming from the distance, from the other side of the walls. The Kariens.
“Come with me,” he ordered abruptly, running down the steps. Shananara followed him as he pushed through the crowd. It took a while and a great deal of elbow work to get to the main gate, and he didn’t stop when he reached it, or bother to check if Shananara was still with him. He bolted into the gatehouse and up the stairs to the wall-walk to look down over the plain.
The plain below was in chaos. The Kariens seemed to have moved from their earlier panic to utter desperation. Some cried out in horror at the sight that transfixed them. Others were fleeing in terror. Tarja glanced back over his shoulder at the tall towers and then looked down at the walls.
The whole Citadel was glowing like a beacon in the darkness, casting its benign light as far as the bridges over the Saran.
CHAPTER 54
Without consulting him, or giving him a reason, R’shiel announced that rather than return directly to the Citadel, she wanted to check on the progress of Damin and Hablet and the armies they were bringing to relieve the Citadel. He wondered at her decision but did not question it, suspecting that it had much to do with the night they had spent in Sanctuary. She didn’t want to face Tarja so soon, he guessed, or the Harshini who would know what they had done.
He wanted to explain to her that the unique Harshini way of sharing pleasure was not riddled with the same emotion-laden guilt that humans insisted on attaching to sex. For the Harshini it was a celebration of life; simply another way to express their joy for living. Harshini didn’t marry and the concept of jealousy was unknown to them. They shared their bodies and their irresistible, magical gift with no thought to the consequences, or any real understanding of the importance humans attached to it. Among them, it was never a problem. For the Harshini there was no need to explain and nothing to justify.
But when they shared that gift with humans, things got complicated. He had told R’shiel that life had been peaceful and happy before the Sisters of the Blade, but it was jealousy of that peace and happiness that had given rise to the Sisterhood. Their whole sick cult had grown out of the fear of a handful of human women afraid they could not compete with the impossibly perfect, magically gifted Harshini. The original First Sister, Param, had been a bitter old woman whose younger husband had had a fling with a Harshini woman and never recovered from the experience. Param never understood that what had driven her husband away was not the loss of love, but the fact that no human coupling could ever compare with the magic a Harshini could weave.
Only Brak knew that the Harshini woman who had so thoughtlessly shared her body and her gift with the handsome young human who took her fancy was actually Shananara té Ortyn.
She had told him about it a few days after it happened, afraid that she might have conceived, aware that any half-human child of hers would be a demon child. He understood her predicament a little better than her full-blooded kin. She was fearful of explaining what she had done to her uncle, Lorandranek—or worse, the gods, who, back then, would never have contemplated such a child being allowed to exist. Xaphista wasn’t as strong then and the other gods paid him little mind. When her moontime came and went a few weeks later, Shananara swore off humans, claiming they weren’t as satisfying as Harshini in any case, and thought nothing more of it. None of them had.
Until Param and her Sisterhood overran the Citadel and set about destroying the Harshini.
He glanced across at R’shiel as the dragons flew southward, following the silver ribbon of the Glass River, and decided not to tell her. She had too much going on inside that head of hers already. She would cope with what had happened in her own way, and if he had done nothing else, he had freed her from the last vestiges of her grief over Tarja. Although she didn’t realise it, her Harshini heritage was strong. Her conversation with Mandah in the hall outside the First Sister’s office sprang to mind. Letting Tarja go like that, being so willing to stand back and let Mandah have a clear field, was probably the most Harshini thing he had ever seen her do.
They were a few hours north of Bordertown when they spied the Fardohnyan fleet. Brak was amazed they had come so far so quickly, even with Harshini help. The ships were strung out in a line, their oars dipping and rising in perfect unison.
Maera, the Goddess of the Glass River, and Brehn, the God of Storms, were assisting their passage. While Maera hadn’t gone so far as to make the river flow backwards, the strong currents that characterised the river were now so mild that the oarsmen could keep up their steady pace for hours. Between Maera’s help, the winds that Brehn provided (which conveniently changed direction with every bend in the river) and the Harshini, who had flown south to join them, the Fardohnyans were likely to be in Brodenvale within a couple of weeks.
Satisfied that the Fardohnyans were on their way, they did nothing more than swoop down over the fleet and wave before turning south-east towards Hythria.
It took them nearly a week to find Damin. His call to arms had been answered, but the same problem that had plagued Damin when Greenharbour was under attack was still causing trouble. The Warlords’ armies were scattered throughout Hythria and it was taking a mammoth effort, both logistical and magical, to gather them all in one place.
They found him eventually, still in Hythria, but close enough to the border that he would be over it in a few days. They landed on the edge of Damin’s camp at sunset. The High Prince was waiting to greet them, with Adrina at his side. She was noticeably pregnant, but was glowing with good health. Brak frowned when he saw her. Damin should have had more se
nse than to let a woman in her condition ride into battle. Then again, when it came to Adrina, he guessed Damin probably didn’t have much say in the matter.
“Nice of you to drop in, demon child,” Damin said as he stepped forward to greet them. His good mood no doubt had as much to do with the fact that he was off to war again, as it did with his pleasure at their arrival. Brak had always liked Damin, but he was a warrior at heart. The responsibilities of a High Prince, a wife and a child on the way weren’t likely to change him.
R’shiel smiled, just as pleased to see her friends as they were to see her. She eyed Adrina with a slight frown and shook her head. “Adrina, what are you doing here?”
“Not much, if the truth be known. Damin won’t let me do a damned thing.”
“He shouldn’t have let you come at all.”
“As if I had any say in the matter,” Damin complained. “Hello, Brak. How was Fardohnya?”
“Interesting.”
Damin laughed. “I want to hear all about it. We’re waiting for Rogan and his Raiders to catch up with us at the moment so we’ve a day or so to spare before we get moving again. Are you here to stay?”
“No,” R’shiel answered for him. “We have to get back to the Citadel.”
“Well, we might as well enjoy the evening, then. Will the dragons be all right out here?”
“They’ll be fine. Is Glenanaran with you?”
“He’s resting at the moment. It’s taken a lot out of him to get us this far so quickly.”
“Did the others arrive safely?” He wasn’t sure who among the Harshini had volunteered to join the Hythrun, or even how many there were.
Adrina nodded. “They arrived a couple of days ago. I’ve never seen so many Harshini before.”
“Neither has anyone else,” R’shiel agreed. Then she caught sight of a small figure half hidden behind Adrina. “Mikel! What are you doing hiding back there?”
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