Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom (22 page)

They followed her. For a moment, Zerai almost suggested that Lamia make them lighter again so that Samira could whisk them north to the distant town, but since neither of the clerics were suggesting the idea, he didn’t feel it was his place to ask. So they walked on, and it didn’t take long before he saw the limp in Samira’s stride and understood why they were going so slowly.

An hour passed in silence, with only the groaning of the western sea and the soft breath of the eastern desert to remind them that the world was still alive, and still quite deadly. But then Samira stopped on a jagged, broken plate of cold stone and said, “We’ll rest here until dawn.”

No one objected.

Then Samira raised her hand and three smooth walls of stone rose up from the ground at gentle angles to each other and met at a peak to form a protective shell, a small three-sided pyramid with its back to the sea and its narrow entrance facing the desert. They slipped inside and lay down on the smooth floor, out of the wind, without saying a word.

Zerai put his arm around Nadira, who was sound asleep, and he closed his eyes and hoped he would fall into oblivion without thinking or dreaming.

He had barely closed his eyes when the ground shuddered, and his skull shook against the hard stone. Scooping up Nadira, he sat up and braced himself against the wall, but Lamia and Samira both bolted to their feet and out of the shelter as the ground continued to thunder and shake, so he crawled out after them and knelt on the cold stone outside.

Lamia took his arm and made him walk a few paces away from the shelter, and she held on to him for a few moments as the earthquake exhausted itself, and the ground fell still, and the world fell silent once again.

“What the hell was that?” Zerai asked.

“Earthquake,” Lamia muttered.

“I know that. I mean… is that all it was?”

“No.” Samira limped out in front of them to the edge of a low cliff overlooking the desert. “It’s her.”

“Her?” Zerai felt a chill run through his bones as he peered out into the night. The sand glowed softly with the pale light of the stars, and out there among the smooth curves and shadows he saw a sharp black figure on the crest of a dune.

“Her.” A blast of wind heavy with sea salt whipped through the cleric’s silken robes. “I’ve felt her out there since the moment I reached Shivala, but she never showed herself.”

“Why now?” Lamia asked.

Zerai grimaced. “Because we’re out in the open.”

Samira nodded. “Stay here. I’ll deal with her.”

“But you’re hurt,” Lamia said. “Stay here and we can deal with her together.”

“No.” Samira stepped forward off the ledge to drop down to the next outcropping.

A hot shriek of desert wind struck Zerai in the face. The flying sand clawed at his skin and Nadira jerked in his arms. He wrapped his jacket around her to shield her, but the sandstorm ended a moment later.

“Get back!” Lamia shoved him, hard.

Zerai staggered away and saw Samira dangling at the lip of the rock, held in place by a smaller woman, short and slender, dressed in silvery gold that shimmered in the moonlight. The stranger had one thin hand wrapped around Samira’s throat, and with the other hand she carefully adjusted the silk wrap covering her hair and tucked a few loose strands behind her ears. To the falconer, she looked young, younger than twenty, but he knew that appearances meant nothing with the djinn. Samira didn’t look any older than himself, but she was nearly a hundred years old. And that was still young for a djinn.

“Good evening,” the stranger said. “So nice to finally meet you.”

“Put her down,” Lamia ordered.

“Or what? You’ll throw a mountain at me?” The stranger smiled a wide, dangerous smile. There was no laughter in her lips or eyes, but there was hunger. Her eyes flashed with an uncanny crimson light, and the locks of hair that fluttered free of her scarf were black streaked with fiery copper.

“The biggest one I can find,” the Sophirim said.

The stranger shoved Samira toward Lamia, and the cleric staggered as she rubbed her throat and coughed quietly.

“What’s your name?” Zerai tried to keep his voice level and calm, but his heart was hammering as though the earthquake had never ended. In a fight, he had no chance of winning, or even escaping. On his best day he could catch a djinn off guard, but this stranger was not only inhumanly fast but a cleric as well, of some sort.

The stranger paused, still smiling a little too wide, as though trying to decide whether she would answer. “Danya Kaviim.”

“From Ramashad?”

“Yes.”

“And a cleric?”

“Ah… no.” The djinn named Danya shook her head and paced over to their shelter, which she inspected and stroked lightly with one finger. “Not exactly.” The rock wall that she touched crackled, and cracked again, and then it shattered into gravel and sand, collapsing to the ground in soft mounds that quickly scattered on the breeze.

“Do you know Jevad Tafir?”

She looked at the falconer sharply. “Do you?”

Zerai blinked. “Yes.”

Danya shook her head again. “No. I think not. You only know the name itself. The sound of it. The hard and soft letters. But you don’t know what it means.”

Zerai glared at her. “It means a two-faced djinn slaughtering innocent people in Maqari two years ago. That’s what it means.”

Danya laughed and covered her mouth. “Then maybe you do know. Not that it matters.”

A score of stone spears lanced up out of the ground without a sound or a tremor, and they flew straight at Danya Kaviim’s head and throat and chest. Two dozen stone blades flashed in the star light, and they struck the djinn woman in a single moment, pinning her upright, lifting her off her feet.

Zerai looked over at Samira, who had not moved at all in launching her attack, and he looked back at the djinn. “You killed her. That was… You…”

The stone spears shattered just as the rock wall had, reduced to dust in a single instant, and Danya dropped back to her feet and proceeded to brush the grime and debris from her thin, shimmering clothes. “That was sad.” Danya pouted at Samira, but her pout sliced apart into a toothy smile. “So sad. Is that all Tevad could teach you? I expect better from you, but no, that’s all you can do, isn’t it? That’s all you know. Make the stone move. Make it move back. So small. So sad.”

“What are you?” Samira demanded. “We know that Jevad had the power of an angel, the soul of an angel. I assume you do as well. What angel? How?”

“Oh, please, stop, you’re embarrassing yourself.” Danya shook her head. “I didn’t come here to answer your questions, or help you save your city, or your clerics, or whatever it is you think you’re doing here. I came here to play with you, and kill you. Why would I tell a dead person anything?”

“You told me your name,” Zerai pointed out, and instantly regretted opening his mouth and drawing her attention back to him.

“Well, yes, of course. Manners, and all that. I don’t want you to think me rude, before I kill you all.” She smiled again, radiating confidence and desire and… something else. Something dark, something twisted.

Chapter 18

“You’re not killing anyone,” Samira said quietly. She raised her hand and from the rock at her feet, an enormous sword of solid stone emerged from the ground, growing taller and taller until it loomed high over all of them, balanced precariously on its pommel.

Lamia dashed forward and grabbed the stone sword in her bare hands and whisked the massive weapon off the ground as though it were no heavier than a child’s toy. The cleric lunged at the sparkling djinn Danya, smashing the huge sword down into the ground. Danya slipped aside faster than the eye could follow and the sword crashed into the earth, cracking the rock slab and hurling dust and slivers of stone into the air.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Lamia swung again, sweeping the huge sword from left to right to cleave her enemy in half, but Danya merely dashed away in a blur of shadow and moonlight.

And straight into Samira’s hands. The Tevadim wrapped one arm around the renegade’s throat and the pair of them vanished in a burst of dust and wind, sweeping the ground clear.

Zerai stared at the empty spot, and then he spun around and around, scanning the darkness for some sign of the two djinn women, but all he saw were shadowy rocks and dark clouds gliding across the starry heavens. “Where?”

“Quiet.” Lamia looked left and right, searching, listening.

The earth exploded and Zerai fell backward, rolling and tumbling as he struggled to keep his arms and body wrapped around Nadira to shield her from the fall and from the flying shards of stone. He crashed his shoulders and hips into sharp rocks and slammed his head against the ground more than once, but he clung to the little girl clawing at his arms, and for the first time in years, he actually prayed a silent, brief entreaty to heaven that this cold, dark moment not be his last.

And it wasn’t. His body ached and his senses spun as Nadira babbled angrily and clutched at his shirt with her tiny fingers. When the debris settled, the falconer sat up and peered into the dust cloud. Lamia lay far off to his left, lying on her belly and protecting her eyes with one hand as she looked back toward the epicenter of the eruption, and he scanned right until he saw them.

Samira and Danya both lay face down in the dust, their arms and legs splayed at strange angles. Neither one moved.

Lamia dashed to her feet and snatched up her stone sword. The huge blade had broken, leaving a smaller, more jagged weapon in her hand, but Zerai knew that size was meaningless to a Sophirim who could make a boulder as light as a leaf or a leaf as heavy as an avalanche. He scrambled back behind a small stone lip to better protect himself and Nadira just as Lamia reached the djinn and brought her sword down on Danya’s head.

The stone sword exploded and collapsed under its unnaturally massive weight, burying Danya’s head and chest in a mound of red rubble. Lamia stepped back, her chest heaving, and she leaned forward with her hands on her knees to catch her breath, but she never took her eyes from her motionless enemy.

Samira moaned and moved her head. Zerai hesitated, not wanted to move any closer to Danya, but then he got up and jogged over to Samira, slid his free arm around her chest, and dragged her away from the body under the pile of stone. The djinn cleric weighed almost as little as Nadira, so he managed to carry them both back behind his little shelter before sitting down again.

Samira opened her eyes and peered at him. “Is she dead?”

“Maybe.” He peeked out to see that Danya had not moved. “What did you do? Where did you go?”

“I hurled us up into the air,” Samira muttered. “With no ground under her feet, she had no speed, and with no contact to the earth, she had no power.”

“But neither did you.”

“Obviously.” Samira sat up slowly, clutching her chest and head, her breaths coming in dry wheezes.

“Well… thanks.”

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“Thanks anyway.” Zerai peeked out again. He called out, “Anything?”

“Nothing,” Lamia called back. She straightened up and started nudging the rocks aside with the tips of her boots.

“Idiot.” Samira sighed. “Humans never stop to think. That woman could have explained everything. She could have led us to Ramashad.”

“Or she could have destroyed Shivala.” Zerai frowned at her. “I’d say Lamia made the right choice.”

“What choice? Don’t make it sound rational. That was just blood-thirsty revenge,” Samira muttered. “Nothing more.”

“Whatever keeps me alive.” Zerai stood up and moved a little closer to the body. “Lamia?”

“Hm?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” The cleric brushed away the last of the rocks and dust, and then rolled Danya over onto her back. “What the hell happened to her face?”

Zerai came close enough to see that the djinn woman no longer looked like the hungry young predator of a few minutes ago. Now her face was lined and ashen, her fiery hair dull and gray. “Samira? Can you take a look at this?”

The djinn cleric limped out to join them. She took one look at the body and shrugged. “So?”

“So, what’s happening to her?” Zerai looked again and could have sworn that the lines on Danya’s face were settling into deeper wrinkles with each passing second.

“She’s dying.” Samira shuffled away to sit down on a nearby rock. “That’s how we die. Aging and falling to pieces, all in a matter of moments. Quick to life, and quick to death.”

“Dying? As in, not dead yet?” Lamia reached for a rock.

“No, wait!” Zerai knelt down over the dying djinn’s face, searching for some trace of life in her eyes. “Here, give me your hand.”

“What?” Lamia frowned. “Why?”

“Just do it!”

Lamia knelt beside him and held out her hand, and he quickly took her wrist and held it against Danya’s chest, saying, “Now make her chest lighter. Just a little. Just enough to help her breathe.”

“Why?”

“Please! There’s no time!” Zerai juggled Nadira onto his hip as he knelt down closer to the djinn’s face. He heard a whisper of air passing through the dying woman’s parted lips, and a moment later that breath seemed to grow a bit deeper and clearer. “Danya? You’re about to die. There’s nothing we can do to save you. But you can save your people from open war if you tell us how to find Ramashad. Where is it? Where is your city? Where are your people?”

For a moment he heard nothing. And then a soft sound escaped Danya’s lips. “In hell.”

Zerai glared at her, fighting back the urge to strike her. “Where is it?”

“…in the darkness…” Danya’s watery, yellow eyes searched aimlessly across the starry sky above her. “…in the fury…of Zariel…”

She said no more, and her whisper of breath fell silent as well. Zerai leaned away from the dry, cracked lips, the dull blind eyes, and the pale spotted skin to look up at Lamia as she took her hand away from the corpse’s chest.

“Did she just say my name?” The falconer looked up at Samira.

“No. I think she said Zariel.”

“In the fury of Zariel?” The falconer frowned. “What does that mean? Who is Zariel?”