by Evie Manieri
‘I can’t,’ she said faintly. ‘I’m not going back in there.’
Saria stopped too. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no other place for you to go.’ She looked away and with a soft, frustrated sigh she added, ‘You should have gone away with him, Harotha, like he wanted. You should never have come back here.’
The two women were completely alone. The neighbourhood around them had been abandoned long ago, the houses left to crumble where they stood. The Shadari population had been shrinking steadily since the coming of the Dead Ones, and the remaining families now huddled together in the centre of the city, like a litter of abandoned pups. The Dead Ones didn’t even bother patrolling here. The chalky-red face of Mount Asharamon, flanked on either side by the smaller peaks of Esramon and Sharamon, rose up in the near distance. Occasionally they could hear the tuneless tinkle of a goat-bell drifting down from the scrubby slopes of its low summit.
‘I still don’t understand how you could have let it happen, that’s all,’ Saria grumbled.
She looked into the dark doorway. ‘I didn’t think it mattered what I did. I’d been so sure I could convince Shairav to use his magic, at least to open up the ashas’ secret passage so we could coordinate a rebellion between the city and the temple, but nothing I said made any difference to him. Even getting Daryan on my side didn’t help. After that, I didn’t think I’d ever come back to the Shadar. There was no way to escape; I was trapped, just like everyone else.’
‘You didn’t want to come back. You didn’t want to tell Faroth he’d been right about Shairav’Asha.’
‘By then I had become Eofar’s servant, so I could work on making Daryan into something like a real king without his uncle hanging over him. How could I have known then—? You don’t understand, Saria. Eofar is different from the other Dead Ones. While I was up there in the temple – while we were together – everything was so simple. It all made sense.’
‘Because it was a secret,’ Saria said in her frank but not unkind way. ‘A secret in the dark. Shine a light on it and it doesn’t look the same, does it?’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ She felt a hard lump in her throat and wished, not for the first time, that she had the easy gift of tears like other people. Harotha never cried; she couldn’t even remember crying when she was a child.
‘Do you think he’s still waiting for you?’
‘Yes.’ She rubbed her bottom lip with her thumb. ‘I think that’s why he let the White Wolf take over the mines, to make it easier to run away with me.’
‘You know how I feel about what you did, and about him,’ Saria said. She could never bring herself to mention Eofar by name. ‘And since only the gods know how these things are going to turn out I thought you should stay here until you were delivered. But now I think you should go – leave the Shadar, right now. Go and have your baby and forget this place ever existed. And let it forget you.’
‘I can’t,’ she said quietly.
‘For the gods’ sake, why not?’
She looked at her sister-in-law. ‘You remember earlier, you said you thought the gods had abandoned us? Well, they haven’t.’
Saria drew back suspiciously, and for a moment her courage failed her. But no: she needed Saria’s help, and this was the only way.
‘I want to show you something, but I need you to be brave.’
‘What is it?’
She knelt down, bending awkwardly to balance the baby’s shifting weight. Then, unconsciously holding her breath, she began writing in the sand. Saria shrieked and backed away with her hands over her eyes.
‘Stop, stop!’ cried Saria. ‘How dare you! Oh gods, forgive her! Forgive me—’
‘Don’t be childish,’ Harotha snapped, not realising until the words left her mouth that Faroth had said exactly the same thing to Saria just a short while ago. She was nervous, and that didn’t make the situation any easier. She glanced up at the stars and saw them shining brightly now – maybe that would help. She chose the prayer that had worked for her more often than the others, though it still failed much more often than it succeeded.
‘I convinced Daryan to teach me how to write,’ she explained to her sister-in-law as she carefully formed the letters. Saria was standing stock-still with her hands pressed firmly over her eyes, as if blinding herself would render her invisible to the offended gods.
‘All right, Saria, look! Take your hands away.’ She struggled up off the ground and took hold of Saria’s wrists, pulling her hands away from her face, but Saria just turned her head away.
Harotha looked over at the words she had written in the sand and waited. She bit her lower lip. ‘Please,’ she whispered.
Nothing happened.
Defeated both by her own failure and by Saria’s all-too-predictable reaction, she walked back over to the letters and swept them away with her foot. ‘All right, it’s gone. You can look now.’
Saria slowly lowered her hands away from her face and looked suspiciously at the sand around her feet as if she suspected a trick. ‘What did you think you were doing?’ she asked, quivering with outrage. ‘Who do you think you are?’
‘I can do it – I have done it, many times. I just can’t do it all of the time.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Daryan taught me how to read and write a few prayers when we were in the temple together. And I had all that time here, alone, so I began … I didn’t want to tell you until—’
Saria stretched out a finger accusingly. ‘Only ordained ashas have the power. That’s why you went to the temple in the first place. Shairav is the only one who can speak to the gods. Everyone knows that!’
‘That’s what we’ve been told, but it’s not true,’ Harotha said. ‘Maybe it’s because my mother and father were both ashas, or maybe something’s changed. Who knows? Maybe it was never true in the first place.’ She took another deep breath, and moved closer to Saria. ‘So you see why I can’t leave now? Why I have to tell Faroth about this before we end up at the mercy of the Mongrel?’
‘Be quiet! Be quiet!’ Saria shouted, clamping her hands over her ears. She walked to the doorway of the house and put a hand out to brace herself against the wall. ‘You and Faroth are so much alike it makes me want to spit. Even though the thought of what that baby represents makes me ill, I hoped that maybe if you became a mother, you’d have enough to worry about without trying to save…’ Her words trailed off strangely and she looked up towards Mount Asharamon. Harotha saw an unfamiliar look of intense concentration cross her face.
‘What—?’
‘Quiet!’ Saria interrupted in a tense whisper. Then she beckoned Harotha over. ‘Do you hear that?’
She stood by the wall next to her and listened. After a moment she heard the rumbling again, like a heavy stone rolling along, and felt a kind of buzzing under her feet. This time, instead of fading away, both began to swell in intensity; a shifting sound came from within the dark house and a wet crash broke the stillness, as if something heavy had fallen on the water cistern.
The women both jumped, and Harotha cried out, ‘Saria! Get away!’ and pulled her sister-in-law away from the doorway. ‘It’s the roof – it’s coming down!’
Together they lurched over the sliding sands, making instinctively for the open space at the foot of the mountains. A house on their left collapsed in on itself with a terrifying roar just as they stumbled by, and Saria screamed. But in a few moments they were on open ground. They both dropped to their knees.
‘Listen!’ she shouted over the noise, squeezing Saria’s arm tighter. Saria threw her other arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. ‘Listen! Do you hear that?’
‘Like an egg, cracking,’ Saria cried in return. ‘What is it?’
She looked around for the source of the sound. The cracking sound grew louder, and then the rumbling grew louder as well, but this time the rumbling was coming not from underneath them but in front of them.
‘Oh, no,’ she gasped, staring at Mount Asharamon. The moonlight was bright enough to show cr
acks zigzagging up the rocky face, more and more of them, even as she looked. ‘No, no—’
With a heavy thump the surface of the mountain face broke away and slid down in one long, majestic sweep.
‘Run!’ screamed Saria, pulling wildly at her arm. The view in front of them disappeared, choked with dust. Rocks and boulders bounced over the sand towards them.
‘It’s too late,’ she breathed and threw herself down in the sand. She grabbed Saria’s legs and toppled her down onto the ground beside her. ‘Stay down,’ she commanded as she wrote another prayer into the dirt. ‘Cover your head!’ She finished writing the prayer and then scrambled over next to Saria, tucking herself into a ball with her arms around her belly. Sand and dirt rained down on her and she shut her eyes and her mouth tight, listening to the concussive thud of rocks striking the ground all around them. Saria whimpered with fright.
And then it all stopped.
Harotha opened her eyes. A few small rocks skipped by but the ground was no longer rumbling. In fact, there was no sound at all. A heavy cloud of dust hung in the air, stinging her eyes until they watered. She wet her lips and stood up as quickly as her ungainly body would allow, arching her sore back and looking around thoughtfully.
Saria raised her head, eyes wide and glassy with fright. ‘We’re still alive?’ she gulped.
‘We appear to be,’ Harotha reassured her, and then added, trying to keep her voice calm, ‘Why don’t you get up?’
Saria stood up, staring in disbelief at what Harotha was regarding with growing satisfaction. A dune had risen up from the sand in front of them, crested at the top like a wave that had frozen just as it reached its apex, at least twelve feet high and twice as long. On either side of the dune, rocks ranging in size from tiny pebbles to huge boulders lay strewn all about. Moonlight filtered through the dust. Behind them, the abandoned houses had been completely flattened.
Harotha began to laugh raggedly to herself. ‘I did it,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I really did it.’ She turned to Saria, triumph roaring in her heart. ‘I did it: I saved us!’
But Saria’s face was dark with fear. ‘You did nothing,’ she said blankly. ‘It was the gods, not you.’ She backed away a step. ‘Not you.’
Harotha walked around to the other side of the dune and looked up at the mountain. The landslide had left the mountain face even sheerer than before: almost completely flat, in fact, like a wall. It was odd, an unnatural way for it to break, she thought as she walked slowly towards it. The dust was still settling, but the moon was bright, illuminating something on the side of the mountain that had not been there before; something had been unearthed from beneath all that red rock.
A shadow flicked over the ground, racing away over the rocks, then another one, right behind it.
‘Dereshadi!’ Saria cried out, and Harotha ran back to find her cowering under the swell of the dune as she looked fearfully up at the sky, where dereshadi were rising from every corner of the city. One skimmed by right over their heads, the moonlight shining through its wings to reveal a tracery of veins as delicate as a spider’s web. They were all heading in the same direction.
‘Trouble at the mines,’ mused Harotha.
‘I have to go,’ Saria announced suddenly in a voice hushed with dread. ‘My son— I have to go. Dramash is out there.’
‘You can’t go now. They’ll see you,’ she answered practically. ‘Listen, Faroth won’t let anything happen to Dramash, you know that. Look, can you see that, over there?’ She tugged Saria out from under the dune and pointed at the thing she’d seen: shadowy lines in the rock that moved against the natural grain of the stone, and below it, something black that might be a cave-mouth, though only a sliver was visible above the piles of fallen rocks. ‘There. Do you see where I mean? It’s just above that—’
Saria slapped Harotha, hard, across the face.
For a moment everything turned red. Then Harotha slowly raised her hand to her burning cheek. Her mouth opened, but she was too stunned to say a word.
‘You have no idea what’s really important,’ Saria told her, regarding her with a cold kind of pity. ‘Maybe when you’re a mother you’ll understand.’ Then she turned away and fled in the direction of the mines.
Harotha watched her go, staring across the unfamiliar landscape of broken rocks, sand and fallen houses long after Saria was out of sight. The night air felt colder beneath the dune’s shadow, and she shivered and wrapped her arms around her belly. She had never felt more alone.
Chapter Ten
Rho was watching Frea, who was watching one of the hands turn slowly in the air. Something in the way the small, delicate movements played in the dappled shadows of the torchlight had transfixed her. She was regarding the turning hand with such serenity that Rho could almost feel the soft, heavy silence of the snow-covered mountains of Norland – a place Frea had never even seen, except maybe in her dreams.
The moment didn’t last long; even as she stood there watching, the hand wilted like a flower on a broken stem. The entombed slave to whom the hand had belonged had finally suffocated.
A formation of triffons thumped by overhead and Rho looked up from the collapsed entrance to the mine. The fly-over elicited a chorus of fresh screams from the hysterical slaves who were already flailing around Frea’s normally well-ordered mining camp, beating their breasts or clawing uselessly at the stones, dirt and Shadari corpses blocking up the shaft. By his tally more than a hundred slaves had been trapped underground by the collapse.
He looked around at the havoc playing out all over the camp.
Her warning clamped down like a suffocating hand over his mouth.
Rho followed her gaze over to the southern end of the camp where the roofless smelting huts were huddled against the mountain-face. Frea wiped the sweat from the back of her neck.
Frea gave no response beyond the sheer black wall of her mood, forcing Ongen to try again.
Frea sheathed Blood’s Pride and charged off towards the huts, darting around a few hilt-less black sword-blades stuck in the sand to cool. She was swiftly followed by Rho and Ongen. Rho envied the guards who’d served in the early days of the colony, when all they had to do was mine the ore and ship it back to Norland. As soon as the empire began to expand, the raw value of the ore had made it irresistible to pirates, so they’d shifted to sending the blood for the imprinting to the Shadar and making the swords there. Imperial ships came twice a year now to drop off jars of blood for the new blades and to pick up the ones already made. Since the blades were only valuable to those whose blood had been used to imprint them, robbing the shipments now was hardly worth the risk.
She disappeared inside the hut while Rho stopped in the doorway. The place
was in a shambles. Most of the furniture and equipment had been damaged, and large red rocks were lying among the wreckage. The crates were in the corner, smashed into splinters, and from between the broken boards the blood of Norland’s finest warriors dripped to the ground like the silver-blue tracks of so many snails.
Rho cut him off.
As Rho started after him, Frea emerged from the hut and walked past him among the sword-blades. She looked up at the faint lights winking in the temple windows high above the city.