by Evie Manieri
He pushed his way forward to the southern entrance of the roofless hall. The broken wall was highest on this side, and he could not see over it.
A Shadari, clearly delighted with his role as sentry, puffed his chest out and crossed his arms when he saw Jachad approaching. ‘No one goes in. Faroth’s orders.’
Jachad could hear voices: ‘You’re not getting a damned thing from us,’ Faroth was saying heatedly.
‘Pay me.’
He winced at the sound of Meiran’s voice. He hadn’t realised how badly he’d wanted her to be long-gone, away to some distant land where he would never find her even if he spent the rest of his life looking.
Faroth snorted a derisive laugh. ‘Pay you? For what? You didn’t win this battle. My son did.’
‘Pay me,’ Meiran said again. ‘The battle is over. You won. I get paid. That was our bargain.’
Jachad looked calmly into the sentry’s eyes and said, ‘Move aside.’
‘Go away, sand-spitter,’ said the sentry disdainfully. ‘No one wants you here.’
Beyond the doorway, Faroth answered Meiran with triumph in his voice. ‘You can’t do anything to me, and you know it. If you’re smart, you’ll leave while you still can. You’re not going to get what you want.’
‘You don’t know what I want.’
‘Of course I do,’ Faroth snapped. ‘You want Dramash.’
Jachad raised his left hand so that the Shadari sentry could see the orange flames curling around his fingers. ‘Move aside,’ he repeated, and this time the sentry’s face went slack and he drew back against the doorframe.
‘I don’t want Dramash,’ Meiran said as Jachad silently entered the hall. ‘I want Harotha.’
For a moment Jachad felt himself back underground again, trapped and suffocating, with a knife of pain slicing through his lungs. What could she possibly want with Harotha? Then he reminded himself that it didn’t matter, because she wasn’t going to get her. No one else would die because of Meiran; that was the bargain he had made with the Shadari gods, under the ground, in exchange for air and light and life. No one else.
He saw Faroth standing at the far end of the hall. Five or six men – Faroth’s inner circle – were clustered around him, but despite the growing crowd pushing and jostling beyond the walls there was no one else in this vast room except those few men. And Dramash, of course, sitting on the ground near his father’s feet, absently tracking his fingers through the cracks in the paving stones. And Meiran, with a gleaming Norlander sword in her hand.
‘Harotha? You mean my sister? What does she have to do with anything?’ Faroth repeated. He glanced behind him, and now Jachad could see Harotha, rising from where she’d been hidden in the shadows of the crumbling wall. He could see the tracks of tears streaking her face, but they were old tears, already dry. She was staring at Meiran.
‘That’s what I want: your sister. That’s my price,’ Meiran answered, ‘and I’m going to take her. Now.’
Faroth moved a little closer, staying outside the reach of her sword and staring intently into her scarred face. Surely, thought Jachad, he’ll never let her take his sister, his own twin sister. He’ll stop her, and then I won’t have to—
‘You want to take Harotha away?’ Faroth began to laugh. ‘You want her? Then go right ahead – take her!’
Jachad’s heart shrivelled.
‘She made her choice. Daryan is dead, and he was the last daimon the Shadar will ever see.’ Faroth’s followers raised nervous voices in approbation and his mocking laughter rang out across the smoky yard. ‘Go ahead, take her – you’ll be doing me a favour.’
Jachad finally stepped forward. ‘I’m not going to let that happen,’ he announced grimly.
‘Jachi?’
One glance into Meiran’s silver-green eye and at her lips, still parted from saying his name, confirmed all of his suspicions: she had known exactly what was going to happen to the temple; she had known from the beginning. When he had left her to fight in its shadow, she had not expected him to come back.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she warned him, speaking in Nomas. ‘Stay out of this. Stay out of my way, I’m begging you.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘No?’ he said bitterly. ‘Tell me – when have you ever done anything else?’ A fireball roared into shape in his right hand.
‘King Jachad!’ Harotha called out to him from across the hall. From the corner of his eye, he saw her circling towards him.
‘Run, Harotha,’ he cried out to her. ‘Get away from here!’
Meiran began to advance and he stood his ground, arching the flames towards her. She swung her sword and batted them away as she came, but then she suddenly stopped. Thrusting her sword out towards him, she cried, ‘Look out – the fire! Put it out!’ She had noticed what he had not: Harotha was rushing towards him. He clapped his hands to his sides and snuffed out the flames.
‘Harotha, what are you doing? I told you to get away from here!’ His fingers still flickered with sparks.
‘Something’s wrong – you need to stop what you’re doing.’ She laid an urgent hand on his arm but she was looking across the cracked paving at Meiran, whose sword sagged in her hand as if it had grown suddenly heavier. Behind her, Faroth and his cronies watched with the grim anticipation of gamblers baiting dogs. ‘This isn’t what you think. We’re missing something. I don’t think she wants to hurt me.’
‘Don’t let her fool you,’ he told her. ‘I should have stopped her long before now, before all of those people—’
‘She isn’t trying to trick anyone – it’s just something I know,’ said Harotha, gripping his arm. ‘I’m not sure why; I can just feel it.’
He stared back at her incredulously. If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn she had lost her mind.
‘I was there when the temple exploded,’ he told her. ‘I was right underneath it. People died – in the air, on the ground. People are still dying—’
‘And that was Faroth,’ Harotha said quickly, ‘I know. I saw him do it.’ Her voice caught, but she forced herself to say the words. ‘Faroth goaded Dramash into destroying the temple – it wasn’t the Mongrel. She didn’t do it.’
‘She didn’t try to stop it, either,’ he pointed out, lifting her hand from his arm.
She looked like she was about to answer him, but then she inhaled sharply and listed; he lunged forward and caught her in his arms. ‘It’s the baby,’ she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut in pain.
Meiran darted towards them. ‘Let me take her, now!’
‘Stay back,’ Jachad yelled, raising his left hand as far from Harotha as he could and launching a plume of flame into the air. Meiran gripped her sword with both hands and held it aloft, but she couldn’t move forward.
‘I have midwives, everything, waiting for her,’ Meiran growled. ‘Let me take her!’
‘No,’ he roared back. The flames died down again, but not by his choice: he had overused his powers tonight and they were weakening. ‘Elixir be damned – I don’t care what you think you saw, you’re not going to take her.’
Harotha reached up and grabbed the front of his robe, pulling him down to her. ‘The elixir,’ she said, gasping for breath, ‘she’s right: you can’t change anything. I thought I could – I was wrong …’ She trailed off incoherently.
‘Jachi, listen to her,’ Meiran urged, inching forward. ‘Don’t stop me – you can’t—’
He released Harotha carefully and then straightened up. ‘You keep saying that,’ he seethed, ‘but if you really believed it, you could have told me everything from the beginning. So why didn’t you?’
Her eye locked into his and he felt himself being rent wide open, like a fish being gutted. When she spoke it was in Norlander, with an onslaught of emotion that burned him like acid, stripping him bare of all of his resolve.
�
�No!’ he grunted in Nomas, pushing her out of his mind. ‘I don’t want to know. It’s too late.’
‘All right, then,’ she cried, throwing her arms out wide. She tossed her sword away and he heard it clatter on the pavement. Her normally flat voice rose to a shrill pitch and her luminous eye burned behind the smoke. ‘Go ahead, stop me!’ She ripped off the eye-patch and dashed it to the ground. ‘What are you waiting for?’
He answered in Norlander too – like her, he wanted her to feel what he felt: to know in her bones exactly what this cost him, down to the last drop of his unnameable feelings for her.
He watched the contemptuous expression on her face crumble and fall away. She was the Mongrel, it was true; but he was the son of the sun god, and he could feel the dawn with every drop of his blood. She had been too distracted to notice the subtle brightening of the sky above the smoke-clouds, but he had timed it to the very moment and he saw the pang strike. She tried to steel herself, but her chest contracted as if she’d been struck and she fell to her knees.
He walked towards her, tongues of flame dancing fretfully between his fingers. He tamped them down: he would not use Shof’s gift for this; he needed to do it with his own hands. He needed to feel it.
She fought her way to one knee and tried to drag herself to her sword, but the sickness had full hold of her now and she collapsed onto the stones.
By the time he reached her, she was barely conscious. He knelt down beside her and circled her bare grey throat with his hands. She batted weakly at his arms, but already her mismatched eyes were rolling vacantly beneath fluttering eyelids. Her skin felt dry and feverish and he forced himself to look into her face, to watch the scar on her mouth twitch as she fought for air. From a long way away he heard Harotha, shouting at him to stop. He wanted to pretend that none of this was real, that someone else’s hands were around her throat, but he wouldn’t allow himself to do that: he needed to make himself remember this, every detail of it, for as long as he lived. That would be his penance.
Then a scream tore through the air behind him and he turned away from Meiran’s lifeless face with the feeling of passing from one nightmare into another. Harotha was being hauled to her knees by a Shadari who had a knife pointed at her pregnant belly. Her eyes were wide and glassy with horror. He sprang up with his hands already blazing, but they were too far away. There was nothing he could do.
‘Elthion!’ shouted Faroth, lurching forward. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are, coming in here like this?’
‘I’m doing what you should be doing, Faroth!’ Elthion yelled back. His face was cut and bruised and his wrists were covered with bloody scratches. He had his arm around Harotha’s neck, holding her fast. ‘They’ve made a fool of you!’
‘Nobody makes a fool of me,’ Faroth warned darkly, glancing back at the others. ‘Watch your words.’
Her brother wasn’t going to do anything to help her; he was angry at Elthion for overstepping his place, not for attacking the sister he’d already renounced. Jachad stared at the knife, trying to think of some way to get it away without endangering her. But then Harotha’s desperate eyes found his and he understood that her fear wasn’t for the knife at all. She saw the realisation on his face and nodded, almost imperceptibly.
‘He knows,’ she mouthed.
‘I knew you wouldn’t listen to me,’ Elthion was saying to Faroth, ‘but I can prove it – I’ll cut this – this thing – out of her and show you, all of you!’
Jachad sent a mass of flames roaring up to the grey dawn sky. He could sustain the fire for only a moment, but it was long enough to get Elthion’s attention.
‘I’ve been looking for you, Elthion!’ he shouted, pointing as he advanced on the lanky Shadari with quick, angry strides. ‘Did you really think I was going to let those things you said about me and my people stand?’
Elthion’s mean, narrowed eyes turned to him with a look of almost joyful hatred and Jachad knew at once that he had hit upon the right tactic: Elthion wanted to be important – important enough to be hated and pursued, to have mortal enemies.
‘What do you want here, sand-spitter?’ sneered the Shadari, flecks of spit flying from his mouth. He still had one arm circled around Harotha’s neck and the knife pointed at her belly.
‘I’ll give you one chance to take back the things you said,’ Jachad offered reasonably, stopping about ten paces from him. ‘No one needs to get hurt.’
‘Do you think I’m afraid of you?’ Elthion snorted, responding exactly as Jachad hoped.
‘Afraid enough to hide behind a woman, I’d say,’ he returned contemptuously. He heard a murmur from Faroth, but no one made any move to interfere. ‘What’s the matter, Elthion, was your mother too busy to let you hide behind her skirts this time? Or did she finally decide it was time to wean you?’
Elthion let go of Harotha, who slumped to the ground in a faint. The Shadari glared down at her with a look of utter disgust, then kicked her in the back with a cruelty that scorched Jachad’s blood.
He whisked his knife out of its sheath. ‘You’re a worm, Elthion,’ he told him. ‘You’re nothing – nobody – and I won’t waste one spark of Shof’s fire killing you.’
The Shadari flew at him and Jachad fell back, pulling him as far away from Harotha as possible before standing his ground. Elthion slashed at him with no skill whatsoever, but his arms were long and Jachad had a hard time dodging his crazed attacks. He stayed on the defensive, steering Elthion further and further away from Harotha, conscious that he needed to keep them all distracted while she got herself to safety. He glanced anxiously at her slumped body, praying that he was right in thinking her swoon feigned.
Elthion struck at him, close enough that the knife ripped a gash in his sleeve, but for a moment it caught in the fabric and gave him time enough to grab his arm and thrust with his own knife. Elthion stumbled backwards to break Jachad’s hold and tripped over the uneven stones. Jachad flung himself down on top of Elthion, squirming to avoid the blade, and they grappled frantically for a moment before Elthion threw him off – he was stronger than he looked. Jachad scrambled back to his feet.
A sharp moan cut underneath their ragged breathing, and both men turned to see Harotha – already halfway to the doorway and freedom – stagger and fall to her knees. There was nothing feigned in her collapse this time.
Elthion whirled back to Jachad, his face twisted into a caricature of loathing. ‘Tricks!’ he choked out. ‘You’re with them – you’re one of them! I’ll kill that whore and her bastard child and I’ll make you watch!’ He lunged towards Harotha, but Jachad’s hands were already surging with fire and he bounded after Elthion and grabbed for his legs. He caught the Shadari’s robe with one smouldering hand and Elthion screamed in outrage, but the dirty hem singed away under Jachad’s fingers and sent him crashing to the ground holding nothing but ash.
Elthion rolled on the ground and sprang up again. He loomed over Jachad, brandishing his knife in triumph and shrieking, ‘I’m going to cut that monster out of her!’
Jachad raised his hands, praying that he had enough fire left to incinerate them both—
—when a strange buzzing skidded along the ground and vibrated through his body, like a sound too low to be heard. There was a thin splintering noise, like the sound of ice breaking, and tiny cracks began snaking through the pavement beneath and around him.
Jachad jumped up in alarm, but a heartbeat later the whole floor shattered into a thousand tiny pieces; sand bubbled up from the ground like a living thing, submerging the broken shards of stone until the area around them was roiling.
Jachad understood what was happening and he knew that his only chance was to run, but fear immobilised him. The ground slid out from beneath him and he fell to his knees. He could not get up; instead, he was slipping steadily backwards, as if pulled by a retreating tide.
‘What—?’ Elthion cried, looking around him, his mouth gaping foolis
hly. The sand rippled around his ankles and with a lurch, swallowed him up to his knees. He kicked his legs, trying in vain to climb out.
Jachad grabbed the ground sloping up in front of him, but his efforts were useless. Sand lapped against his chest, rising up higher and higher as he sank. He and Elthion were caught up in a funnel; they were being dragged down into its depths.
He could hear Elthion screaming for help. The Shadari had long since dropped his knife and was now clawing madly at the sand, trying to dig himself out of the hole that was steadily deepening beneath him. His self-important smirk had given way to a look of abject terror. ‘Faroth! Faroth, help me!’
‘Not again,’ Jachad prayed, shutting his eyes as the dirt crested his shoulders. ‘Please Shof, not again. Anything but this—’
A clammy hand grabbed his wrist and he opened his eyes to see Meiran, her lithe body balanced on the slope in front of him as she clung to his arm, her muscles taut with the strain. She clamped her other hand around his wrist and with one massive tug hauled him out of the hole. They tumbled backwards together, falling onto more level ground, safely out of the funnel’s reach.
‘Faroth! Faroth!’ yelped Elthion, now up to his neck at the epicentre of the funnel. On the other side, half-hidden by the swirling smoke, Jachad saw exactly what he had expected: a small figure standing tense and still, watching silently, his fists clenched tight.
Elthion’s arms flapped frantically over his head as another surge pulled him down to his chin. ‘Faroth! It’s Dramash – Dramash is doing this! Stop h—’ And as Jachad watched, breathless with horror, Elthion’s pleas changed to a wordless shriek of terror that died away as sand sifted into his mouth and nose. For a moment longer the sand swirled, and then it lay still.
‘He wanted to hurt the baby,’ Dramash explained in a voice too old and too tired to have come from that young body. He turned around and walked back to his father, who was staring blankly at the spot where Elthion had disappeared.