Then, though, Raz made out one last sound.
The broken, wretched gulping of grieving, sorrowful sobs.
Putting a hand on the column for support, Raz finally managed to haul himself to his feet, still retching as his lungs struggled to compensate for the boiling suffocation they’d momentarily been victim to. When he finally managed to steady himself, he took several shaky steps around the pillar, his body feeling weak and cold after the onslaught of the fire.
As the expanse of the courtroom came into view again, what he saw nearly brought Raz right back down to his knees.
For a hundred feet around the steps leading up to the trio of thrones, the once-polished floor was blackened and charred. The only clean marble remaining jutted out in lines from behind the columns where the fire hadn't managed to reach, white against the dark soot, like inverse shadows. The red rug that not a minute before had regally led up to the base of the dais was nothing but an ash stain for half its length, starting again in the center of the room in a twisted, smoldering tatter of crimson threads before continuing cleanly back toward Akelo and the others like nothing was amiss. Similarly, above his head Raz saw the banners that had once hung handsome and proud from the ceiling were shredded and burned, pale flames still clinging here and there to what little white-and-gold fabric remained. The glass crest along the ceiling had half-shattered, shards still breaking off to clink or fracture against the floor. Overall, it was a terrifying sight, like witnessing the aftermath of a meteor which had come hurtling through the roof above to crash into the dais steps, reigning devastation in its wake.
And there, at the very center of the chaos, in the blackened ring of splintering marble that was all that remained of the steps where she’d fallen, Syrah still knelt, her pained wails tearing at the air.
It was as he found her that Raz saw, then, the truest horrors of the scene, and he gave a trembling, hissing exhalation of mortified shock.
Of the Tash’s soldiers who’d so foolishly charged her, not a one looked to have survived the wildness of the magic. All that remained of those who’d been closest to the Priestess when the power had broken loose were faint traces of shadow in the charring and soot of the stone, like some pitiful barrier had stood in the way of the rage of the fire storm. Further away, smoldering husks of what might once have been men lay scattered across the steps, limbs twisted and scorched, armor and shields almost wholly burned away to leave nothing but the smoke-darkened steel of blades to glimmer here and there throughout the carnage. To his left, Raz didn’t have the courage to look around at the two forms nearest to him, the bodies of the Mahsadën’s men who’d been caught in the blast. His ears told him that they, too, were dead, but his nose spoke of little more than raw flesh and smoking bone, and he didn’t know if he had the stomach for it in the moment.
Instead, with an uncertain breath, Raz began picking his way across the floor, making for Syrah.
His clawed feet slipped as he reached the steps, their surfaces made only smoother by the thin layer of ash settling over the scene. He climbed carefully, his heart breaking a little more each time Syrah wailed and cried, clutching at herself as she knelt in her small crater of broken stone. He saw, as he neared her, that there was nothing left for the Priestess to hold, now. Lysa’s body was dust, nothing more than soot that stained the front and arms of the Priestess’ robes, discoloring the usual white into a mess of grey and black. With a pang of grief, Raz glanced over to see that Argoan’s form, too, was gone, blasted into nothingness by the hellish force Syrah had let loose.
When he reached her, standing over her shoulder, Raz couldn’t help but hesitate, acutely aware that some small part of his mind suddenly feared the sobbing woman before him.
Then he dropped to his knees, took Syrah in his arms, and pulled her back into him as she continued to sob in horror and grief.
They stayed like that for longer than they should have, Syrah howling out her misery, shaking violently in Raz’s embrace. She didn’t fight him, didn’t even flinch as he touched her, but he felt as though she only slowly became aware of his presence, moment by moment returning to the plane on which he was there, holding her close. Slowly, after nearly a full minute, Syrah’s body began to still, her weeping subduing little by little. Eventually she reached up, grabbing hold of his arms so tightly, it was like she needed something to hold onto.
“No…” the Priestess whispered with anguished desperation between every breath she took. “No… Laor, please… No…”
Finally, after another minute, she stilled completely, lifted her head to look at the shattered glass of the ceiling above, and spoke.
“Raz,” she said in a pleading, broken voice. “Raz… What have I done? What have I done?”
He knew there was nothing he could tell her, in that moment. He had all the answers he would have given himself, all the words that would have allowed him to cope with the ruin that surrounded them. She had been defending herself. She had been protecting him. She had been fighting for the freedom of thousands.
None of it would help, though. Raz knew that. Something had broken, some intangible connection between Syrah and the world, one that he couldn’t really see but understood as wholly as he understood the woman herself.
Syrah Brahnt, Priestess of Laor, had become a killer. She had broken the cardinal rule of her faith, and done so with such brutality that even Raz had trouble looking around at the corpses that lay, burned to hollow nothingness, around them.
In the end, all he was capable of was holding her tight, doing all he could to let her know without words that he was there, that he shared her pain, and that he would do so until the world itself fell apart around them.
Then a sound reached him, and Raz stiffened, ears twitching as he listened.
After a second, he heard it again.
“Syrah, stay here,” he told her quickly, briefly touching his snout to the back of her head.
Then, as she let him pull his arms away, Raz stood and navigated the shattered steps once more, making for the top of the dais.
The sounds came louder as he climbed, and by the time he reached the platform upon which the three thrones stood, Raz had identified its source. In the right and left seats, the bodies of the Hands of Karesh Syl were slumped where they’d been sitting, twisted with their arms over their heads and faces, like they’d hoped the paltry defense of their own flesh would be enough to save them from the magics. Raz gave them a cursory once-over, grimly satisfied that the corpses seemed mostly recognizable in the curled remains of their silks and satins.
Then, with cold, pitiless harshness, his eyes settled on the last form.
The Tash, by some cruel miracle of the Sun, had survived the eruption. He looked—like Raz—to have understood the warning signs of the impending cataclysm, but—unlike Raz—hadn't been able to get out of the way in time, his frail body betraying him. Instead, the Tash seemed only to have managed to throw himself to the floor before his throne, perhaps praying that the angle of the steps would protect him.
Unfortunately for him, he’d been only half-right.
Of the old man’s white-and-violet robes, little was left, the silks nothing more than discolored scraps that clung in frayed tatters about his ruined body. Much of his mottled skin had been seared away, revealing the charred flesh of muscle along his torso and thighs. Raz wrinkled his snout at the unpleasant smell, watching without so much as a twinge of sympathy as the Tash’s raw, blistered chest twitched and heaved while he tried desperately to breathe. More than one of his ribs were visible, as were the bones in his arms and hands, which he too seemed to have brought up to protect his face. There was nothing left that would give the man the right to call himself a “man” anymore, and his dark eyes were wide in fear and agony, fixed on Raz as he shook violently, obviously rapidly falling into shock.
For a long moment, Raz met his gaze impassively, tilting his head to the side to study the Tash with detached disappointment.
“Not half
the death you deserved,” he muttered, grinding his teeth in annoyance.
That, though, gave him an idea.
“Akelo!” Raz roared, whirling and hurrying back down the stairs, sliding into the shallow crater to stand over Syrah. “On me! Away from the doors! Let them in!”
“What?” the old Percian demanded from the far end of the courtroom, his voice echoing between the crashes of the battering ram. “But—!”
“Let them in!” Raz boomed again, no longer paying attention as he knelt down to take Syrah under the arm, whispering to her softly. “Syrah, I’m sorry. I need you on your feet. Please. We still have to get out of here.”
It took a little coaxing, but he got the woman up, helping her to favor her good leg. The moment she stood, Syrah looked around blearily, taking in the blackened corpses scattered about her, and promptly fell on all fours again.
When she was done vomiting, Raz helped her to stand again, guiding her as quickly as he could to the top of the stairs.
By this time, Akelo and the others were joining them, winded from their mad sprint across the chamber. Raz saw once again with a welling sadness that their numbers were not what they were. Aside from Akelo and Karan, of the seventeen he had led into the palace, no more than a dozen looked to have survived the ordeal. He noted, as the men gathered about on the stairs below he and Syrah—every single one of them staring about in horrified fascination at the devastation around them—that Akelo’s kuja now seemed to number only two, most of the newer recruits were nowhere to be found, and Hur was the only Northerner left among the little army they had been.
Offering up a brief prayer to the Moon that She would see them safely into Her Stars, Raz ordered all to settle in and wait.
It took less than two minutes, without the added mass of the men against the timber, for the gilded doors of the court to give in to the hammering of the ram. After a score more reverberating booms, the distant opening cracking a little wider each time, the right door shuddered and split off its bottom hinge, swinging wide. At once, a veritable swarm of soldiers in the white-and-gold armor of the city began vaulting over the splintered wood, pouring into the chamber and flooding down the stairs with a mountainous roar of a hundred voices. Raz’s hands tingled with anxious anticipation as they descended in an endless wash to the chamber floor, charging with the courageous desperation of those whose only purpose was to protect the life of a single man. He worried for a brief moment that there would be no stopping the assault, worried that panic and fear for the life of their sovereign would wipe away any sense of danger the soldiers might have.
But, as the first line of men reached the half-way point of the courtroom, they faltered and slowed, their blades and raised shields freezing in shock as they came to a halt at the very edge of the blackened marble left by Syrah’s loss of control.
“Steady,” Raz said so that only his men could hear as several of them shifted nervously, weapons clenched in tight fists. “No sudden moves.”
He waited, then, until the whole of the guard had quit its rush, five score men gaping in open, paralyzed shock at the scene. He gave them a few seconds more, allowing their eyes to sweep over the still-smoking corpses of their former comrades.
Then he spoke sidelong to the woman at his side.
“Syrah,” Raz said in as kind a voice as he could manage, “I need you with me. I’ll need your help. Can you stand? Can you do it?”
For a second, he worried that the Priestess was going to refuse to answer, or even shake her head. She was still shivering, even as she stood by him, and between the gash in her thigh and the circumstances of their surroundings, he wondered if he wasn’t asking too much of her
Then, with a flush of relief, he saw her give a small, almost imperceptible nod.
He squeezed her hand once, and started his descent down the steps, wings extending as he did.
“Your Tash is gone, friends,” he spoke to the silence calmly, trusting in the echoes of the room to carry his voice over the packed mob of Percian soldiers. “He and his Hands are no more, along with half-a-hundred of your own number.”
In reply, there was a resounding wail of grief and disbelief. Many voices picked up at once, some shouting prayers to the Twins, others hurling denial and slurs his way. In response, Raz swept both hands out at the ruin that surrounded them as he neared the bottom of the steps.
“Look around you. Who is it that you think has fallen? There is no trickery here. You are simply too late. Your city is done for, and there is no reason left for us to fight.”
“Liar!” several calls rose shrilly from the ranks of the soldiers, unanimously desperate. “The lizard lies!”
“It is no lie!” Raz snarled in response, and at once the voices died. Reaching the floor once more, he kept walking toward the palace guard, ignoring the nervous inhalations of his own men at his back. “Look upon the seats of your power! Are those the corpses of my men, do you think, smoking in the thrones of your Hands? Do you now see what punishment the Dragon brings to your kind? You number many, yes, but so did the fifty men who stood in this room before you, as well as the assassins your sovereign kept hidden up his sleeve.”
To make his point, Raz paused to kick a blackened sword over to the front line of the soldiers as he passed it. The dusty blade still gleamed, clattering over the rubble and shattered glass, an edge of curved steel that was very obviously not a blade of the Percian army.
“All of that, in addition to the added cruelties your Tash had in store, and where is he?” Raz twisted to point back up the stairs behind him, though he never took his eyes off the soldiers. “Do you see him standing there? Do you hear him screaming for my death? No. You don’t.” His eyes scanned their ranks. “Would anyone else like to call me a liar, then?”
Unsurprisingly, not a single denial rose.
“I thought not,” Raz growled dangerously, coming to a stop right where he wanted, some twenty feet from the base of the steps. “The Tash is no more. Believe this. He has fallen, along with any who might take his place. This leaves you with a choice.” He stood tall, arms by his sides in loose fists, hoping he cut an impressive figure against the ravaged court. “You can drop your weapons. You can leave this place now. There is nothing left for you to protect here. Do this, and you may yet have a chance to flee Karesh Syl with your families before I raze it and all its vileness to the ground.”
He paused, then, meeting as many eyes as he could. With a spark of hope, he saw more than a few faces paling as they absorbed the threat.
“That is your first recourse,” Raz continued finally, “and the wisest choice. Your second should be reserved for the mad or foolish among you.” As he spoke, he hooked a foot under the weapon on the ground beside him, half-hidden in the soot where he had left her. “Stay. Stay, and face us. Stay—” he kicked up, and the weapon dragged itself out of the dust and ash, leaping up into his waiting grasp “—and die for a man who is no more.”
With a twist, Ahna shrieked and spun in his hands, her dirty blades coming to rest pointing directly at the soldiers as Raz crouched at the ready before them. In the same instant, the faces of the nearest men twisted in fear, and more than one soldier tried to take a step back, colliding with their comrades behind them.
Then, though, Raz saw that hardly any of their dark faces were turned toward him anymore. Instead, they were angled upward, over his shoulder, eyes wide as more prayers to the Sun and Moon were uttered. For a brief moment, Raz was confused, not understanding what had happened. Then, though, he felt the warmth on his back, and noticed the sheen of light against the flats of the soldiers’ blades and the pointed steel of their helmets.
Unable to help himself, Raz looked around to see what it was that had so effectively enraptured the palace guard.
Syrah stood at the top of the dais, robes and hair billowing about in the heat of her spells, her one good eye glaring down at the soldiers like some goddess of fire and magic. Along the steps on either side of her, Akelo, Karan,
and the others were hurrying away from her, hands up to shield their faces from the light and heat exuding from her form. Raz couldn’t blame them. He had expected the Priestess would pick up on the cue, of course, but what he’d hoped for paled in comparison to how fiercely she had risen to the occasion. He’d expected her to summon the spellwork about her hands, or perhaps the lassos he had so often seen.
Instead, though, Syrah had become flames.
She stood in a blazing inferno that completely enveloped her body, like the bulb of a flower made of fire, its petals writhing and twisting around her as they shimmered and mirrored the color of the blood that still trailed down her leg like a sash. She was hard to look at, especially for Raz, who had to half-turn his head away in order not to be blinded. The heat she exuded, even from where he stood, was incredible, and he was glad to have moved so far away.
As Iron Falls (The Wings of War Book 4) Page 59