by Evie Manieri
Frea released Isa’s arm and pushed the broken shutter back into place, though it didn’t close completely.
Arnaf had no need to respond in words. A tangle of emotions snaked up from the guards as they took in the news.
Her father was dead.
She turned to a nearby table and picked up a jug of wine and a cup. Isa watched her sister pour herself a cupful and drink it down, then pour another.
Her father was dead, and she didn’t know what she felt. When her mother died she had ached with missing her – the feel of her arms, her scent, her presence like a soft mantle, the way she’d lift her into her lap to brush her hair. What would she miss about her father? Judgment had been the only thing he had to give, and Isa had been found wanting. There would be no appeal now, except maybe in Onfar’s Hall – though if her father was right, that was a place she would never see.
She walked past the gaping soldiers and their uncertain mess of feelings, past the plates of half-eaten food and splashes of spilled wine, past Frea, past Arnaf, towards the door. She didn’t know where she was going; she just wanted to move. She wanted to surround herself with a blankness that was as still and empty as her heart and she wanted to merge with it, to disappear into nothingness.
Isa turned back and saw Frea pointing to the sword that she still held, unsheathed, in her right hand.
The air in the room became perfectly still. Isa’s measured steps rang out on the stone floor as she walked up to her sister and looked into her silver-green eyes. She slapped the cup out of Frea’s hand.
Chapter Nineteen
For as long as he could remember, Daryan had suffered a recurring dream – it always started well enough, with him waking up in his own bed, in his own dark room. Nothing would be out of place – the outlines of his few simple possessions were familiar and unthreatening – yet a deep sense of dread would begin to creep over him, as if something evil were massing in the shadows, just out of sight. He would reach for the lamp, but when he tried to strike the flints, the stones would crumble into dust in his hands, and at that moment, his vague fears would crystallise into terror.
He felt something like that now, standing in the hallway in the doorway of Shairav’s unlit room, staring at a sliver of light running mysteriously from the floor to the ceiling in the far corner of the chamber. The outlines of his uncle’s rather opulent collection of furniture – the tables and chairs, the little ornaments, the bed heaped with cushions, all purchased from the Nomas with the governor’s gold – were all familiar, but something about that light in the corner evoked the nightmarish feeling of nefarious forces gathering strength around him.
He crossed the room slowly, moving towards the light. On the way he had to pass by the heavy chair in which his Aunt Meena had spent her final days. He remembered her sitting there, day after day, her frail body pinned down under a blanket, staring past him with rheumy eyes. Most of the time she was oblivious to his presence, but every now and then he would catch her looking at him. The expression in her dull eyes would barely change, but he had the uneasy feeling that she hated him. She had already been ill when he had first arrived in the temple and she’d died soon after. No one had ever explained to him what was wrong with her. She had terrified him.
The light was shining through a fissure in the wall no wider than the edge of the coin – or actually, he quickly realised, it was exactly the width of a coin, for a single Shadari sudra was wedged in the opening near the floor. He put his eye to the crack. He had the sense of a room on the other side of the wall, but he couldn’t make out anything specific. He heard nothing but silence.
He put his shoulder to the wall and shoved.
With a soft scraping sound, the entire wall pivoted from the centre, widening the opening to the width of a hand-span. The sudra rolled free.
‘What the—?’ he began, backing away until he knocked into the back of a chair. Through the gap he could see the shapes of furniture, and the glimmer of a lamp burning on a small table. But he saw and heard no one who might have been responsible for lighting the lamp and leaving it there.
With a cautious look back at Shairav’s dark room, he turned sideways and slid through.
‘Huh!’ The air rushed out of his lungs as if something heavy had hit him in the chest. He found himself standing in a child’s bedroom. In addition to the bed there was a child-sized table and a couple of stools, baskets spilling over with painted balls and wooden swords and crude carvings of animals, and a cradle from which a heap of dolls regarded eternity with unblinking eyes. An inch of reddish dust gave everything the soft, mottled texture of rotten fruit. No one was there, but a track of smeary footprints led across the room and then disappeared behind a high pile of furniture covered with old rugs. He started forward, but on the third step his foot came down on something soft and he hopped backwards in alarm.
He bent down slowly and picked up the Shadari doll. Sand sifted through rips in its cloth body and leaked out between his fingers. Someone had gone through the trouble of altering it: the brown threads of the left eye had been picked out and replaced with a splotch of green; the doll’s right arm was a mess of fat red stitches, crisscrossing over each other in no particular pattern. He glanced over at the other dolls in the cradle. They were all the same.
‘I remember you,’ he whispered to the doll, squeezing its lumpy body tightly. ‘Now I remember you.’
He remembered twilight in the desert, and his mother holding his hand so tightly that she was hurting him, but he wasn’t trying to pull away. His mother was crying – she wouldn’t say why, but he blamed Uncle Shairav – Mama called him Shairav’Asha. He was afraid of his mysterious uncle, and he refused to be impressed by the fact that Shairav’Asha could pilot a dereshadi just like a Dead One. His mother had shooed him away so that she and Uncle Shairav could talk about grownup things.
He was throwing stones at a dead snake when he saw her. Her red Shadari cloak dragged behind her through the sand and she had the hood pulled up over her head. Her hair was black, like a Shadari, but her skin was very pale. She was probably a year or two older than Daryan and quite a bit taller. As she came closer, he saw that there was something wrong with her left eye.
She stood a little way off and watched him throw the remaining stones in his hand. When he bent down to look for more, she asked, ‘Do you like living here?’
‘It’s all right.’ He looked up at her. ‘Why? Where do you live?’
When she pointed up to the temple her cloak swung open. He caught his breath in wonder: enflamed red and pink scars crawled over her right forearm, like a cluster of engorged worms.
‘Wow!’ he exclaimed appreciatively. ‘What happened to your arm?’
‘It burned – a long time ago, when I was a baby,’ she said. Her voice sounded funny, as if she had a sore throat.
‘Does it hurt? Can I touch it?’ he asked eagerly.
‘No,’ answered the girl, apparently to both questions, and tucked the arm away again under her cloak.
‘Lahlil!’ Uncle Shairav’s harsh voice cut through the air as he ran towards the two children. Daryan noticed with cheerful malice how funny he looked with his robes flapping out behind him. ‘I told you not to get down,’ he reminded the girl sternly. ‘We’re going now. Come on.’ Then he called to Daryan’s mother, ‘Until midnight, then, but that’s all. Have him ready this time.’
‘Who? Me?’ He watched his uncle and the girl climb back on the dereshadi and fly away. ‘What am I getting ready for, Mama?’ he asked, as she flung h
er arms around him and pulled him into a smothering embrace. She was crying too hard to answer his questions. A few hours later his uncle had returned, alone this time, and taken him to the temple. Less than a year later, Daryan received word that his mother was dead. He never saw her or the girl again after that day.
‘Daryan.’
He looked up from the doll. Shairav was standing in front of him.
‘It was her.’ His body felt as heavy as stone. ‘That girl in the desert – the girl with the burned arm – you called her Lahlil. That was the Mongrel.’
His uncle nodded. The small sack he carried in his right hand jingled and Daryan realised that the old man was shaking. He thought of the lone sudra stuck in the doorway. ‘She’s coming to kill us.’
‘Why?’ he asked faintly. ‘What did we do to her?’
Shairav circled past him and moved towards the secret door. ‘Later. First, we must get to the stables—’
‘No.’ He squeezed the doll a little harder, but he didn’t move from the spot where he was standing. ‘Tell me now.’
The old man turned back. ‘She knows about this place. She’ll come here.’
‘All right, then talk fast.’
Shairav stared at him for a moment with his lips pursed. ‘Very well. What do you want to know?’
‘Who is she, really? She was just a girl when I saw her with you in the Shadar.’
‘Lahlil is the governor’s daughter. His eldest daughter.’
‘His daughter?’ Daryan repeated, finding himself not as surprised as he might have been. Eofar’s older sister. He remembered the cowed way Eofar had shuffled behind her in the stables. ‘Go on. What else?’
‘The burns on her arm, that happened when she was just a few months old. It was an accident – a shutter with a bad latch.’ Shairav glared at Daryan. ‘Do you know what the Dead Ones do with their injured and deformed?’
‘They abandon them in the wilderness,’ he answered stonily. ‘They think they’re cursed.’
‘Well, the governor’s wife, Eleana, she was different. She pretended to everyone – even Eonar – that the baby had died from the burns. Then she found Meena in the Shadar and brought her here to nurse the baby. She thought Meena’s milk might keep her alive.’
‘Aunt Meena?’ Daryan asked, confused. ‘But wasn’t she here already? I mean, wasn’t she your wife?’
‘Temple servants aren’t allowed to marry,’ his uncle reminded him impatiently. ‘Meena was nobody important, just a penniless woman whose own baby was dead.’
‘Oh.’ He blinked at this new fact, but then he forced himself to return to the story. ‘And then what happened?’
Shairav smiled grimly. ‘Lahlil got better. She grew strong on Meena’s milk. Her arm healed, but it was obvious that the scars would never go away. And soon her hair began to grow in dark, and then her eye … Well, you’ve seen her. You know how she looks. It must also have made her able to withstand the sunlight, but of course none of us knew that then.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ Daryan interjected. ‘Just from having a Shadari nurse? Shadari milk couldn’t have done all that—’
‘That’s what happened,’ the old man snapped. ‘Who are you to say what’s possible or impossible?’
Daryan drew his elbows in tighter against his sides, holding in his impatience. ‘No, you’re right. I’m sorry. Go on.’
The creases around Shairav’s mouth deepened. ‘Meena became frightened that the governor would find out what she and Eleana had done and punish her, so she came to me for help.’
‘You helped them hide her – that’s right, isn’t it?’ he interrupted. ‘You hid Lahlil here – this was her room. For how long?’ He was afraid that he already knew the answer. He remembered Lahlil in the desert, pointing up to the temple with the scarred arm that had made her an outcast. She had looked older than him then, but Norlanders were taller …
‘Nine years.’
Daryan shut his eyes. He could feel the walls of the chamber pushing towards him, boxing him in. ‘Nine years,’ he whispered to himself.
‘Meena was there for her, always, and Eleana gave us money – she wanted for nothing. And Eleana came often; she even brought the other children with her—’
‘The other children – do you mean they all knew about her? Frea? Even Isa?’
‘Of course.’
‘But then why didn’t I ever see her, except for that day? She couldn’t have been here when I came, I would have—’ A chill of fear pulsed through Daryan and he stopped abruptly. Another idea had just occurred to him, this one too terrible to be true.
‘The governor found out about Lahlil,’ Shairav went on matter-of-factly. ‘I still don’t know how it happened. He sent for me, told me he knew what we’d done, but instead of punishing me, he asked for my help.’
‘Your help.’ His mouth had gone dry.
‘He told me to name my reward – I expect he thought I’d ask for gold, or my freedom, but there was something more important to me than that.’ He fixed his eyes on Daryan.
‘Me?’ he asked numbly. He shut his eyes again. ‘Please tell me you didn’t—’
‘I told him I had a nephew that meant everything to me. I told him my only wish was to save this boy from the mines,’ Shairav informed him pitilessly. ‘You see, then: I traded her for you.’
His stomach cramped and he thought he was going to be sick. ‘No – you couldn’t have—’
‘I did.’ The old man’s eyes were as hard as stones, but his mouth twisted for a moment. ‘I did what I had to do. I took her into the desert that night and I left her there, and then I brought you to the temple.’
Daryan opened his eyes and stared down at the doll in his hand. It was damp with his sweat. ‘Was I worth it?’ he whispered to the doll. ‘That’s what she wanted to know: was I worth it? How could I be? How could anyone?’
‘Perhaps you’ll take your responsibilities more seriously now that you know the sacrifices that have been made for you.’
‘Aunt Meena – she hated me. It wasn’t my imagination,’ he muttered. ‘Of course she hated me. She lost her child because of me.’
‘Come, we must—’
‘The next day – the day after I came here – no one knew why Eleana took the girls out on the dereshadi that day, but you had just taken Lahlil. She was looking for the daughter you stole from her – that’s what she was doing when she fell, looking for Lahlil!’
‘Of course!’ his uncle bellowed. He gestured towards the door. ‘Now do you finally understand? None of us realised Lahlil would survive in the sunlight, but she did, and now nothing will stop her from having her revenge. Our only hope is to escape!’
But Daryan didn’t move. Somehow the insanity of everything he had just learned had synthesised into a moment of searing clarity. As if she was standing right beside him, the Mongrel’s whispered words repeated themselves in his mind, only this time they made perfect sense. And he knew what she wanted him to do.
He turned around and followed the trail of footprints – Shairav’s footprints – away from the door towards the dark end of the room.
‘Daryan!’ Shairav called wildly behind him, but Daryan ignored him. He picked the lamp up from the table and kept going, around the pile of furniture. There was a heavy tapestry hanging on the wall, and when he held the light close he found exactly what he’d expected to find: a smeary handprint, just where someone would grip the material to push it aside. He matched his own hand to the handprint and lifted the tapestry.
‘Stop!’ Shairav shouted.
He blew out the lamp as he crossed the threshold and set it down on the floor. He didn’t need it any more.
The tiny round chamber was bright with morning sunshine. The room was barely five paces across in either direction, and open to the seamless blue sky. It was entirely empty. The only reason for the room to exist was the hole that took up most of the floor. He peered over the edge. The sides of the shaft disappeared into blackness
and he couldn’t tell how deep the hole went. But the walls weren’t entirely sheer, like those of a well; triangular shapes were recessed into the sides. They looked as if they’d been designed to slide in and out.
It was a staircase, or would be, with the steps in the right position.
Of course he had also noticed the sand strewn over the floor around the hole. With a pained smile, he read the prayers that had been scratched there just as easily as he read the splatter where a fist had pounded the floor in frustration.
‘He never had the power,’ he said softly, repeating Lahlil’s words aloud. The sun felt warm on his face. ‘He never did. That’s why they let him live.’
He heard Shairav’s heavy breathing behind him in the doorway. ‘Come away!’ the old man insisted, wheezing in distress.
‘This is the way out – the ashas’ way out,’ he confirmed, pointing to the secret staircase. After all these years, all of the people imprisoned in the temple with no hope of escape, it had been right here all the time.
‘We can’t go this way – I would need to use my powers to make the steps slide out and my vow—’
Daryan looked into the old man’s eyes. ‘You were trying to open it. Just now.’
‘I was doing no such thing!’ he shot back as he pressed a hand over his heart. His skin had an unpleasant, waxy sheen.
‘It’s true,’ Daryan told him quietly, ‘you can’t make it work. You never could.’
‘I’m an asha.’ His voice sounded thin and unsteady. ‘An ordained asha. The last one.’
Daryan waited, watching curiously as Shairav’s face flushed, turned pale and then flushed again.
‘Smug, self-important—’ he finally blurted out, ‘all of them. They hated me – your precious Harotha’s parents, they were the worst. It was all your father’s fault; he insisted they take me after I failed the initiation. He said it would be too embarrassing for the king’s brother to fail, but I know he really just wanted me out of the city – out of the way.’