by Evie Manieri
The air moaned beneath him and Frea shot out in front of him again.
He locked his eyes on the silver helmet and flew toward her. She would not evade him again.
He looped the reins around the saddle and gripped Strife’s Bane with both hands. This time Frea was prepared to fight, and she swung Blood’s Pride around in a tight loop by her side as she came on. The steel blade sliced through the air with deadly promise. He raised himself up a little higher in the saddle and readied his sword. The space between the two triffons closed until both beasts snapped their wings back simultaneously and Eofar swung his sword forward.
She dropped her arm back behind her shoulder and sheathed Blood’s Pride, leaving Eofar blinking in confusion at her unprotected torso, and just like that, the two triffons passed each other.
He was left alone in the dark sky, burning with the ridiculousness of his failure.
The black knife slapped back into her palm and her fingers closed around the hilt: Eofar stared at it in confusion. When had she drawn her knife? He unhooked the reins from the saddle and tugged hard to turn his triffon back around—and with a horrifying lurch rocked backward, out of control, as the severed ends of his harness flapped in the wind.
He seized the saddle with his left hand and let the wind carry the useless straps off into the darkness. She had cut the harness with the black knife as the two triffons passed—just like before. Just like she’d done with Mother …
He was still holding his useless sword in his right hand. He tried to sheath it, but in his panic he could not guide the blade into the scabbard. Nothing was keeping him in the saddle except the stirrups and his one-handed grip on the pommel, and now he could feel the wind, pulling at him. He saw Frea’s arm draw back, and her knife came streaking toward him across the sky. He hated that knife and he hated Strife’s Bane and everything they represented: every pointless hour, day, week, month and year of his wasted life compressed down into the brutal hardness of black steel.
With a strength born of fury and a precision that was only possible with an imperial blade or by the will of the gods, Eofar struck down with Strife’s Bane—and cleaved the knife in two. The two pieces went flying off into the night in different directions.
Frea’s wrath exploded outward from her, a scarlet shockwave of anger that slammed into him like a wall. Now, finally, she drew her sword and came for him, and his heart swelled in triumph. He had finally succeeded in making her fight him.
It was not until he began to stand up in the stirrups that he remembered the broken harness—but it was too late for him to evade her, so he jammed his boots as far into the stirrups as he could and clutched the pommel with his left hand. Her first blow was a thrust, aimed straight at his chest, but it was only a feint; by the time he had brought his sword up in defense she had aimed a slice across his right side. He managed to get his blade up in time only by releasing it and twisting his arm to grab it after the fact, but it was still an imperfect move and Blood’s Pride slid along the length of Strife’s Bane with a teeth-shattering scrape. Sparks flew out into the dark sky, then the blades came apart.
And then his left foot slipped out of the stirrup.
His triffon, sensing something amiss in the sudden weight change, bleated nervously and thumped its tail in the air. The air in Eofar’s lungs turned to daggers as he saw the beast twist his great head around to see what was happening. The saddle lurched and he grabbed on to the pommel, kicking around desperately, trying to find the stirrup. He needed both hands; he would have been forced to drop a normal sword, endangering the people below, but he was able to guide Strife’s Bane into the scabbard built into the saddle. Then he seized the pommel with both hands as the frightened triffon rolled into a turn, but he felt himself sliding helplessly over the side. His right foot was still in the stirrup but it did little to support his weight. Below his dangling body he could see the desert floor rushing up toward him. He wouldn’t be able to hold on for long—a few more moments, that was all. A few more heartbeats.
The sky around him was empty. Frea was gone. He was alone.
The triffon’s wings hit their downward stroke, and Eofar, suddenly inspired, writhed in the air and managed to wedge his left foot against the thick cartilage where the triffon’s wing protruded from its body. With his weight supported at last, he slapped the stray hair away from his eyes and tried to hoist himself back up into the saddle. If he could only get his leg back over the saddle and his foot in the stirrup he should be able to land—but before he could haul himself up, the triffon’s wings arched up again and with sickening inevitability he felt his foot clamped tight. He’d waited too long. The triffon’s wing came up, his bones cracked and splintered, and he screamed in agony. A dark mist swam in front of his eyes: he was going to lose consciousness—but if that happened, he’d be dead. The wing came down again, and flinging his whole body into the air like a hooked fish, he finally managed to flop up and over onto the saddle. With numb hands he guided his left foot into the stirrup, trying not to notice the strange shape of his boot, hinting at the wreckage inside. Despite the pain-addled haze, he snatched up the flapping ends of the broken harness and managed to tie them around his legs.
He had to go down. It took him a few moments to summon enough breath for a weak whistle, but at last he managed to give the triffon the signal, and the traumatized creature obeyed with an eager relief and sent them streaking to the ground. They hit the sand with a jolt; Eofar plucked weakly at the knots in the harness until he’d got them untied, then he slid from the saddle. He screamed in agony as his left foot touched the ground and he fell face-first into the sand, where he lay beating his fists until the skin had been flayed raw and he’d exhausted his last ounce of strength.
He’d failed them all.
His body crumpled up and he shut his eyes as unconsciousness dragged at him, pulling him like a lead weight. He wondered why no one came; he thought that the Shadari would have come to finish the job that Frea had started. But then he became aware of a noise in his head, a rhyt
hmic thumping that at first he mistook for his own pulse. As the noise grew louder, he realized someone was walking toward him across the sand.
He opened his eyes and tried to lift his head, but found he could not. In the foreground, only a few steps away now, was a Shadari carrying a coil of leather straps looped over one shoulder. There was something important about the straps.
The young man stopped in front of Eofar and looked down at him with a smile: a tight, humorless twist of his lips. In a slow, deliberate gesture, he slid the coil from his shoulder and let it fall to the ground.
“We’re done with you,” said the Shadari. “Your kind is finished here. It’s over.” He began to laugh. He hooked his sandalled foot under the straps and kicked them at Eofar. The hard leather smacked into his face, splattered sand into his eyes and mouth.
The Shadari walked away, still laughing.
Elthion: the Shadari spy Isa had chased from the cave. The one Daryan had tied up, making sure the knots weren’t too tight so he could reach the water they’d left for him. They’d tied him up because he knew about them—about Daryan and Isa, about Eofar and Harotha. He knew about the baby.
Eofar pushed himself up onto his knees and drew his right foot underneath him, placing it determinedly in the sand and standing up. The instant his left foot touched the ground he knew he was going to faint. He began to fall—he had never known it was possible to fall so slowly, or that the world around him could sharpen into such minute details. He could see the separate sparkle of each grain of sand; smell the unmingled scents of smoke and sweat, sea and rock; hear the sounds of wind and wing-beats. And as the ground finally reached up to take him he felt a pressure in his head that slowed time down to an airless pause, wrapped everything up in a bubble that swelled and swelled until he could feel it ready to burst. He had never felt anything like it before in his life, and yet somehow he knew exactly what it meant.
It meant that the world was about to end.
Chapter Forty
“No, the other way—the other way! To the left,” Daryan cried out. Isa’s white braids flapped out behind her, only a hand’s-breath from his face. She twisted her shoulders, trying to give her one-handed pull on the reins more force, but she was pulling the dereshadi in the wrong direction, and the rider they were chasing was getting further and further ahead. “Isa, you’re going the wrong way!” he shouted again, and she glanced back at him with an icy glare—just as he finally saw the other rider just in front of them: the one Isa was actually chasing. There was a flicker of flames beneath the pierced metal guard as the Dead One brandished his torch.
Aeda’s powerful wings flexed beneath Daryan’s feet: she was as intent on the pursuit as her riders. He tightened his grip on the saddle, ignoring the muscles cramping in his hands. Isa had assured him over and over again that he didn’t need to hold on, that the harness was enough to keep him in the saddle, but surely not when every downward stroke of Aeda’s wings tossed him up into the air, and every upstroke sent him crashing back down again onto the hard leather.
He leaned cautiously over to one side, trying to see the ground below—they were flying so low that he could see individual people running through the streets as flames licked at their homes. He chewed his lip angrily. Left or right, it hardly mattered which way they went—what difference could they possibly hope to make? Even if they stopped this Dead One, what of the dozens of others who’d made it past Eofar’s defenses?
“He’s landing!” Isa’s shrill cry flew back to him on the wind, and as she wheeled the triffon around yet again, he felt as if a heavy stone were rolling from one side of his stomach to the other. He tried shutting his eyes for a moment, but that was worse. But then the ground rose sharply beneath them and before he could catch his breath, Aeda had made an abrupt but not ungraceful landing in the middle of a narrow street. He started unbuckling the complicated series of straps, and when he had freed himself he swung his right leg over the saddle. The ground looked much further away than he’d expected, but he gamely pushed himself off with enough force to clear the hump of Aeda’s folded wing.
He landed in a sprawl in the dirt, and immediately caught a flash of light moving between two of the houses to his left.
He whirled back around, expecting to see Isa charging past him in pursuit, but she was still in the saddle and he realized with a sharp pang she was struggling to undo the buckles by herself. He started toward her, but she cried out in a harsh voice, “Go—don’t lose him!”
Without stopping to think, he plunged into the alley and soon found himself pushing his way through lines of drying clothes and dodging heaps of rubbish twitching with vermin. It wasn’t until he neared the end of the alley that the fact that he carried no weapon began to feel important: the only thing he could think to do against an armed Dead One was shout, and he probably wouldn’t be able to do that for very long. His mouth dry, his pulse racing, he burst out of the alley, to be greeted neither by a Dead One’s sword nor the leap of flames, but by half a dozen strangely dressed women—Nomas—who turned toward him with exclamations of alarm. All of them were carrying things: bundles that looked like clothes or blankets, small sacks and jars that exuded a pungent medicinal odor.
“A man with a torch—a Dead One—did you see him?” he asked them, as he looked around for the object of his pursuit.
“No,” said their leader. She wore a large silver medallion around her neck and the blue of her eyes was striking even in the darkness. He and Isa had been checking Aeda’s harness when the Nomas had arrived at their makeshift camp in the ruined palace in a riot of bright colors and chattering, incomprehensible voices, as if they’d come for a holiday rather than a battle. With only a few words from the Mongrel, they had quickly and efficiently formed themselves into armed companies, fire brigades and a host of other useful groups—and Daryan was absolutely certain that this imperious woman and her stealthy companions had not been among them.
“Who are you? You didn’t come with the others, did you?” he asked.
“No,” she confirmed, but she did not seem at ease. “We—”
But before she could continue a tremendous crash sounded from somewhere behind them and they turned in alarm to see a ball of flame shoot up into the air over the housetops and unfurl in a blinding arc of sparks.
“Oh, no!” he breathed. Cursing himself for getting distracted, he leaped down the street in the direction of the flames. He rounded the first corner and a woman darted out at him from a shadowed doorway, hissing “Daimon—thank the gods!” As if the sound of his title were a signal, the district’s residents tumbled out of the shadows and bore down on him. They were carrying blankets for smothering the flames, pots and jars for flinging sand, brooms and rakes for beating. They pressed in close, their frightened faces seeking reassurance.
“The Dead One, where is he?” Daryan demanded, seizing the woman’s arm.
“Over there.” She pointed up the street to a doorway glowing brightly in the dark night; a moment later a house on the other side of the street collapsed inward, sending a cloud of acrid smoke into the sky and exposing the burning interior. A black cloud of fury gathered over Daryan: this was his city. These were his people.
A muffled scream came from further up the street. Another woman lurched out of the smoke, this one half-carrying, half-dragging three small children. “Dead Ones!” she shouted. “The Dead Ones are here!”
“Get those fires out—don’t let them spread or we’ll lose the whole neighborhood!” he ordered as he ran toward the fires. Over the crackling of the flames he caught the unmistakable clang of swords, and he chased the sound around the burning buildings, through a tiny echoing alley and into a small square with a boarded-over well. A torch sputtered on the ground, and flames flickered in the doorways of the houses on either side of the square.
Isa was fighting a big, lumbering man with arms like tree trunks—but she had already backed him against the wall of one of the burning buildings. She battered at him
relentlessly, the rapid blows coming at him from every conceivable angle while the man lunged and twisted in an almost comical attempt to defend himself. Daryan found himself flushing with stupid pride at her prowess. Just as he was about to call out to the other Shadari to come deal with the fires, Isa plunged her sword into the man’s chest.
The Dead One crashed back into the wall behind him, smacking his head against the stone with an unpleasant crunch; his arms jerked and blood welled out from the wound. He dropped his sword as his hands stiffened into claws and he writhed in pain.
She yanked at the blade, but Truth’s Might had sunk in so deeply that it took her three tugs to free it, and when she did, the blood poured out and pattered audibly into the dirt at the man’s feet. Then he crumpled to the ground, his unfocused eyes and slack muscles leaving no doubt whatsoever that he was dead.
Isa stood for a moment with her sword in her hand, breathing hard, looking down at the soldier’s body; then she bent down and methodically wiped the blood from her blade on the dead man’s cloak. Only then did she turn around to face Daryan.
And he saw a Dead One standing there in Isa’s place, with a blank face and a deadly sword: a cold, silent, remorseless killer. That’s what any other Shadari would have seen.
And in that instant the fantasy that he had been stealthily tending in the hidden corners of his mind for the last two days came crashing down: there would be no grand, glorious day when Shadari and Norlanders would celebrate their common victory. There would be no toasts of new-found trust, no speeches about new beginnings, no merry banquet where he and Isa would sit, side by side, in front of the entire world. There would be no time when the Shadari would be able—or willing—to forget what the Dead Ones had done to them.
“Your face—what is it?” she asked, sheathing her sword as she walked over to him.
“Are you all right?” he asked, deflecting her question.