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Blood's Pride

Page 23

by Evie Manieri


  “Do you want someone to come with you?”

  “No, no, I’ll only be a moment.”

  Trini turned around to respond to a question about her sister’s health and Harotha took the opportunity to slip away through the crowd, all the while feeling as if her flesh were tightening and turning transparent under their scrutiny, like a jellyfish on the beach. She noted a fair amount of dark looks coming her way, too, and comments whispered behind fingers and received with grave nods. Trini never could keep a secret.

  By the time she reached the door, her hands were tingling unpleasantly and she realized that she had forgotten to breathe. A few people saw her heading outside and asked where she was going, but mercifully, no one insisted on accompanying her when she said she just wanted a little air.

  The midday sun was blazing as she lurched to a large flat rock under a spreading palm tree. She sat down, rubbing her forehead with her hand as the baby wiggled inside her. She shut her eyes and circled her arms around her belly, trying to feel the soothing coolness that she had to admit was probably only a product of her imagination. For the moment, the politics of rebellion felt as unimportant as the revelers’ gossip. The only thing that she knew clearly was that she wanted to feel Eofar’s touch, more than the secrets of the ashas, more than a free Shadar, more than living another lonely day.

  But longing was an indulgence she couldn’t afford, and time was running out. She had to make a choice. If Faroth’s mission to the temple met with success, Daryan was almost sure to expose her lies with his usual feckless candor; if not, and she ran now, she would be abandoning her people just when they needed her leadership most. She had to have more information.

  The little bottle of elixir she’d taken from Eofar felt warm in her hand. She had no time for indecision; at any moment the women from the party would come looking for her. The time, the place, the circumstances were all wrong, but she’d be the worst kind of fool if she squandered her only chance by waiting for the perfect moment. With a steady hand, she wormed out the stopper and drank the liquid down in one swallow. If history judged Harotha, daughter of Ramesh’Asha, it would not be for a fool.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Undoubtedly the ashas had elaborate rules and caveats for the elixir’s use, but as Harotha knew none of them, she just focused her mind on what she wanted to know and waited for something to happen. She was anxious, of course, but she needed to know what to do and she would not allow fear to ruin her only chance to learn what the future had to tell her.

  The visions, when they came, were not at all the vague, static images she’d been expecting. Instead, they were whirling, furious things that surrounded and buffeted her. The bright daylight saturated into a storm-driven red as the townscape around her faded into smoky outlines. Hurriedly she slid down from the rock until she felt the relative safety of solid ground beneath her.

  Ashen faces streamed past her, shouting, eyes filled with anger and terror. The vision whisked her to a red rock wall set with a small rectangular window, through which she could see ships with storm-torn sails listing in the harbor and a city burning: a city invaded.

  “No!” She clenched her fists. “This is wrong—this is the past. This isn’t—”

  But the vision spun her round into the midst of a furious argument: the ashas, the last ashas. She didn’t want to look at their faces, in case her father or mother were among them; it was better not to remember them at all than to remember them like this, on this day—

  They were arguing about what to do, she realized. She couldn’t hear them properly—their voices sounded thin, far away—but she could read their gestures well enough. Some wanted to go down and fight; others were afraid that their powers over the sands would be useless against the dereshadi.

  Then Harotha saw one old priestess take a vial like the one she was still holding and put it to her lips. The future, she thought eagerly; they would see it together.

  Then she felt herself yanked backward, the scene around her retreated to a speck in a fraction of a heartbeat and she flew backward through time at an impossible speed, years rushing past in an indistinguishable blur. She clenched her teeth and shut her eyes, but it made no difference. The eons screamed by, pulling at her limbs, squashing the breath from her body.

  “No!” She forced the word from her lips, fighting against the vision, trying to use her physical reality to swim against the current of time. “This is the wrong way. I need to—”

  But as if in answer, she was suddenly struck by the unmistakable feeling of being watched. She opened her eyes. The visions overlaid her reality with their own, but she could see that the street was empty. She understood now that she had no control over what was happening; someone else was deciding what she would be shown. The gods? Were they speaking to her at last? But why would they want to take her so far back?

  She shut her eyes again, this time surrendering to the dizzying spectacle. Time slowed and then stopped, and she found herself looking into the mouth of a cave. Her pulse quickened because she recognized the place: it was the cave she had discovered only hours earlier, there was no mistaking it—only now the doorway was wide and tall and open. The vision pulled her inside to a great cavern with a smooth, domed roof painted all over with stars of the night sky: the gods. The beauty of it brought tears to her eyes, but she blinked them away as quickly as she could, because covering the spaces between the stars was writing, actual writing. This was not a picture or a map, it was some kind of— She didn’t even know what to call it, but her heart faltered in greedy wonder at all of the secrets that were there to be read. When she was finally able to tear her eyes from the ceiling she saw that all around the vast cavern were tables and cases and boxes spilling over with scrolls and papers and pens and ink. It was just like the places Eofar had told her about in Norland, where scholars met to study and debate and write down what they knew for others to read. She had never imagined such a thing had once existed in the Shadar. With a deep pang of regret she wished that Daryan could have been with her to see it, too.

  Time jumped again; the scene changed, but not the location. A crowd had gathered in the cavern, but no one was reading or writing now. Grim-faced men and women, even some children, stood in anxious clusters. Some were frightened, or angry; some were weeping. They were ashas, but they weren’t like the ashas of Harotha’s era: they wore no ceremonial robes, and obviously they did not shut themselves up in the temple, for they were here with their families close around them. She understood intuitively that their powers had not been granted to them in a secret ceremony—they had come by them naturally, just as she had.

  She could follow enough of their bitter talk to learn that they had been betrayed by one of their own. They spoke no name, but it was clear that his powers far outstripped their own.

  Time began to dash forward again, this time in jerky little jumps through a series of confusing tableaux, but she recognized a war when she saw one. The ashas were battling their betrayer—conspiring, planning and attacking—but each time they were beaten down, their numbers dwindled and their enemy’s wrath grew, and harsher punishments were meted out on the despairing cityfolk.

  And then she was transported from the beleaguered city to a magnificent, shining palace where she flitted through rooms glowing with color. She was dazzled by gilded and jeweled ornaments, beguiled with richly carved images. She thought she must be in some other country, some place far from the Shadar, until she came to a cavernous rotunda open to the sky and realized with a shock that this palace was the temple. This is what it was like when it was first built, she thought. She couldn’t conceive of the magnificence and power of the being for whom a citadel like this would be required.

  And it was here that the ashas tasted victory at last. The vision coyly refused to show her how they had finally brought it about, but as she followed the ashas out onto the roof the cost of that victory was clear: the city below them lay in ruins. The people limping to the base of the temple were shatter
ed and broken and as they looked up she could see the exhaustion and hopelessness in their faces. They felt no joy at their liberation; only a cringing relief, and they watched their oppressor thrown down from the cliff with dull eyes.

  Harotha winced and felt her stomach drop as the figure, indistinct in the bright sun, tumbled through the air, but before the body shattered on the rocks the vision changed and time cranked forward once more.

  And now she witnessed the great, impossible lie: the ashas—the few that were left—had only one purpose now, and that was to prevent this horror from ever happening again. Their battle-scars ran so deep that they were unable to stop fighting a war that had already ended, or to see that the real enemy was now their own fear.

  From the depth of this fear came the decision to protect the future by erasing the past. Harotha watched with a deep, howling loss as they threw their books and scrolls onto the bonfires, consigning all their knowledge, all the Shadari’s history, to the flames. She saw the cave blocked up and the sumptuous walls of the palace blasted bare, until what had once been a mansion become a prison—one without doors or locks—where the inmates thought incarceration the highest of honors. And over the people they set a secular king, to deal with the city’s terrestrial affairs.

  All this was preparation for the conspiracy of an entire generation to deceive their own descendants: a new initiation rite was invented, ostensibly to confer the power of the gods on those they favored, but whose real purpose was to cull those already so endowed from the rest of the population. These initiates—the ashas—were then schooled in the use of their powers in a manner so ritualized it guaranteed they would never discover their full potential, nor dare to use their powers in any way except in the pre-sanctioned service of the gods. No one person would ever again develop the capability to throttle the nation.

  It had all worked perfectly: no one had questioned it, not in all of the generations of Shadari and ashas who came after—until Harotha.

  Time wrenched her forward again, moving with bone-crushing force, this time to her parents’ time. There was the old priestess, still with the vial to her lips. She drank, and Harotha’s vision merged with hers …

  They saw the city blackened, destroyed, drowning in ash. The temple had been obliterated, nothing left but a pile of rubble. The people were homeless, dying of disease and hunger, and still they were fighting and murdering each other. It was the end of the Shadar and the Shadari—and it was not the Dead Ones who had brought about this terrible future; the damage had been done by one of their own, someone whose power was virtually limitless.

  This was precisely what those ancient ashas had tried so hard to prevent: someone rising with power so strong that it could not be contained. Harotha remembered that bright figure, falling in the sun.

  As the old priestess spoke, Harotha saw a young man step forward—and all of her thoughts dried up and blew away.

  This man was her father.

  He was telling the ashas they had a sacred duty to make sure that not one of their company was left alive with the power to do this terrible thing. The elixir must have shown them this future for this reason: the gods were demanding that they sacrifice themselves.

  The ashas listened to him gravely, silently, as Harotha wept furious tears. “No, no,” she cried, “they lied to us! It’s pointless for you to die—you can’t stop it that way. I know why you think it has to be one of you here, but you’re wrong. You’re still not the last ones who will have the power. It could be anyone! Don’t, please, don’t do it—!”

  And now she was pleading with both the elixir and the ashas as she was forced to watch her father embrace the woman who was her mother. She could hear them beat the drums to summon the people of the city to bear witness. With streaming eyes she watched them all climb out onto the roof and stand on the edge of the cliff, their hair and robes blowing in the cold evening wind.

  “Please,” she whispered uselessly as the first body fell and the vision shattered into a thousand fragments, then drifted away like embers on the breeze. She sat in the empty street with her back hard against the rock, staring in frantic relief at the dusty houses, the scrubby trees, the pitted road.

  “They did it for nothing,” she said through clenched teeth. She had watched her parents act nobly, bravely, but that was no comfort. She had always tended a little flame of hope: that if one day she could understand why her parents had killed themselves, she might find some meaning in their deaths. The vision had snuffed out that flame forever. “They died for nothing—because of a lie. They didn’t end anything; they didn’t change anything. It’s still going to happen. It could be anyone.” She blanched.

  “It’s not me—it can’t be me,” she muttered. She remembered the dune she’d conjured to save Saria and herself from the landslide. She hadn’t known she’d had so much power—was it enough to destroy the temple? “I couldn’t. There has to be another explanation. There has to be someone else.”

  The baby kicked, and she reflexively crossed her arms over her belly, her eyes fixed on the heat-baked earth. Then she stood up, carefully composed the expression on her face and went back to the party.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  As soon as they heard the shouting outside everyone crowded into the street, and the news tore its way through the throng: Faroth and his men had returned from the temple. Harotha followed along with the rest, painfully aware that she still had not decided whether or not to tell her brother about the elixir and the visions.

  There was a shriek of joy and Elthion’s mother rushed forward to embrace the tall, skinny man. He pushed her away with a scowl. Harotha could hear the dereshadi snorting and stomping up ahead, and she could hear Faroth’s bellowing voice, but her way to him was blocked. Then Sami came pushing toward her through the crowd, his head down.

  She caught his arm as he went past. “Sami!”

  “Let go,” he said dully and tried to pull away, but Harotha held on until he looked at her. When he recognized her, the dark look on his face sagged into something like relief. “Harotha,” he confided to her in a low voice, “we didn’t get any of them—not one. We couldn’t get Dramash away from the White Wolf. We almost had him—I think we could have got him out, if it hadn’t been for that last earthquake.”

  “What earthquake?” she asked. “There haven’t been any more since you left for the temple.”

  But Sami went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Then Daryan refused to come back with us, and just as we were getting ready to leave, Shairav—“He stopped for a moment and swallowed, then whispered, “Harotha, he just died. His heart gave out, they said. Dead—just like that. It wasn’t Faroth’s fault—he did everything he could—but where does this leave us with the Mongrel?” He scowled and shook his head wordlessly, then pulled away from her and disappeared into the crowd.

  She pushed her way toward Faroth, a cold knot of anger in the pit of her stomach. “What happened?” she asked. “You couldn’t get any of them? Not even Daryan?”

  “Daryan!” Faroth burst out. “He refused to come. He doesn’t give a damn about you, by the way.” He was upset and he was trying to make her angry, she knew that. She could see the dark circles under his eyes and the lines of exhaustion around his mouth.

  “He knows I can take care of myself,” she told him, refusing to take the bait, “but why did he stay behind?”

  Someone pressed a jug into Faroth’s hands and while he paused to drink deeply, Binit answered for him. “He wants to stop the White Wolf in the temple. No one knows what’s going on up there—the governor is dead and the White Wolf has taken over. We think she’s already killed Lord Eofar—at least you’ll be happy to hear that. She’s organizing the soldiers for something, so Daryan stayed behind to try to figure out what they’re up to.”

  “Lord Eofar is dead?” she asked, keeping her voice as steady as she could. “Who said so? Why do you think that?”

  “Well,” said Binit, sympathetic for all the wrong reasons
, “I can’t say for sure, but he was supposed to be the next governor, wasn’t he? So, how can the White Wolf take over if he’s still alive?”

  “I never wanted Daryan here in the first place,” Faroth said, staring into the distance with smoldering eyes, “but Shairav—it figures he would decide to die just when he might have made himself useful. And he took everything he knew with him.”

  “Harotha, you don’t look well,” said Binit. “Maybe you should sit down somewhere?”

  “I’m all right,” she muttered. They all moved aside to make way for the two nervous dereshadi, who were being led away to a quieter, shady spot. “And Dramash? What happened there?” she asked, unable to keep the harshness from her voice.

  “I’ll tell you this,” Faroth vowed, to no one in particular, “if Daryan comes back here without my son, I don’t care who he is—I’ll kill him myself.”

  Alkar came trudging toward them, his maimed hand tucked fastidiously under his opposite arm. “I just talked to Sami,” he said to Faroth as he reached them. “He’s right about one thing, anyway. They must be planning something up there. There’s not a single patrol left anywhere in the Shadar, and no guards at the mines. We’ve been keeping watch the whole time.”

  “Maybe the Dead Ones really are going to leave the Shadar,” Harotha mused, stroking her bottom lip with the tip of her finger, “just like Saria said.”

  She became aware of a change in the level of noise around her, a sudden silence, and she looked up to find Faroth staring at her intently. Even before he asked the question, she realized the horrible mistake she had made.

  “How did you know Saria said that?”

  She twisted her mouth into a derisive grimace. “Oh, these women! They never stop gossiping. I know more than I care to about the last two years—it’s no wonder I have a splitting headache.”

 

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