Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom (31 page)

“And she’s half human.”

“And I am a Tevadim. I can protect her in ways you cannot.”

“You can also signal to other djinn where we are and put us all in danger,” he said mildly. “Which has already happened once, as I recall.”

Samira stopped. “Talia was my friend. I helped her give birth to Nadira. I helped raise her.”

“I know.” Zerai kept walking. “I said you can come along.”

“But I can’t have her? You don’t trust me that far?”

“Listen, sister, you’re a cleric and that means you have certain priorities, certain responsibilities, and sooner or later all of that is going to rear its ugly head and Nadira will be right in the middle of it. But I don’t have any of that on my back. I don’t have anything at all. Just her. She’s my priority. She’s my responsibility. Just her. Her life, her happiness. No politics, no destiny.”

“I don’t understand. She’s not your blood, and you hadn’t even seen her until a few days ago. You’ve never even raised a child!”

“That’s sort of the point.” He eyed the djinn woman. “Look, I know you don’t like me, or humans in general, and I don’t particularly like you either, or djinn in general. So I’m not expecting us to see eye to eye here. But this little girl has no family. And I have no family. And I don’t want anything to do with clerics and djinn and angels anymore. No more wars, no more disasters, not for me. Just a nice little house, somewhere quiet, with dates and fish and almonds, catching rabbits and singing after supper. That’s all I want for us. Telling stories, watching the stars, listening to the rain on the roof.”

“That sounds nice,” Lamia whispered to herself.

“Talia died because you wanted to sail across the sea in a storm,” Samira snapped.

Zerai stopped and grimaced at the trail ahead.

She’s not wrong. But she’s not right either.

“Or, Talia died because you couldn’t steer the damned boat,” he muttered. “So let’s just say we both failed Talia, and we both don’t want to fail Nadira, and let that one lie.” He walked on.

They climbed up onto the high bluffs between the desert and the sea, and Zerai frowned at the familiar path ahead.

“Are we sure we want to go north again?” Samira asked. “Danya was in this area. Others could be too.”

“Maybe. But she attacked Shivala from the southeast, and since she’s not someone who needs to pick her targets carefully, that makes me think she was coming from the southeast,” Zerai said. “So my gut tells me north is safer.”

“Fair enough,” the djinn agreed.

They walked on, and when they came to the place where they killed Danya they saw the gray ashen stain on the ground where the strange djinn had died, but they walked on without a word spoken.

The sun set and darkness quickly swallowed up their path, so they made camp. Samira raised a stone enclosure from the ground and Lamia built a fire of white halograss, while Zerai changed Nadira’s underclothes and fed her the juicy chunks of a ripe peach he had taken from one of the groves they had passed in Shivala.

Morning brought a stale scent to the still, cool air and Zerai sat up squinting into the pale, colorless light filtering through the dusty haze of the desert to the east. But then the dark shadow of a tall serrated blade cut through the mist and he dashed to his feet, yelling, “Lamia! Samira!”

The women lunged out of the shelter, hands raised for clerical battle, but they froze at the sight of the dark shadow looming above them. It stood there, still and silent.

“What is that?” Lamia asked.

“I’ll look.” Samira vanished in a blur of dark robes and a cloud of dust, and then she returned a moment later with a deep frown etched across her brow. “Come and see.”

“Is it safe?” Zerai asked.

“Safe enough,” the djinn answered.

They stepped softly and carefully down the rocky slope past deep black cracks and bright glimmers of quartz veins, all the while with the dark shape of the thick serrated blade towering over them like a giant’s scimitar, until they reached the desert floor. There the morning mist and dust lay thinner and the air stood clearer, revealing a strange sight. Before them lay scattered the dry and empty carapaces of hundreds of monstrous crabs, all split and cracked, all slowly crumbling apart in heaps of legs and shells, some with brittle eye stalks still raised blindly toward the morning sun.

The body of the smallest one could easily house a family of six, and the hollow legs lay in piles like fallen timbers, half as large as full-grown cedars. Most of the shells were white chased with flakes of silver like mother of pearl, and many of the horns and spines along the edges were a dark, bloody red, but scattered across all the remains were dusty black streaks peppered with gray powder. The lone serrated blade that had so startled Zerai was revealed to be the shattered remains of a single enormous claw, partially broken and left to lean up against the rock wall, raised in a defiant and perhaps profane gesture against the heavens.

“A graveyard,” Lamia whispered.

“Or a waste heap,” Zerai muttered. “If something was eating these things, it might toss the remains here to rot.”

“Eating? These?” Lamia gestured to the giants. “What could possibly be feeding on these?”

He shrugged. “There’s always something bigger.”

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Samira asked as she laid her hand on the smooth, cool surface of a giant, broken leg.

“I’ve heard of elephant bone yards,” Zerai said. “But I have no idea what these are.”

“They’re sandwalkers,” Lamia said. “They used to be a common sight, marching across the dunes between the sea and the mountains, back in my grandmother’s day, but they’re rare now. I guess we know why.”

Zerai nodded as he gazed up at the crooked piles of white and red chitin. A part of him was fascinated, and a boyish voice inside him urged and taunted him to explore the strange box canyon and its giant corpses, to see how strong they were, how light, how old. To look for strange new things, to hunt for buried treasure.

“Sand.” Nadira blinked up at him and pointed at the ground. “Sand.”

He smiled. “Yeah, sweetie. Sand.”

“Sand.” She patted his cheek and pointed at the ground again.

Zerai glanced down and saw the loose white grains shuddering and sliding past his feet. “Oh shit.”

Nadira clapped tiny her hands and smiled. “Shit!”

The falconer grabbed Lamia’s wrist and started running back up the rocky path, up from the desert floor, up to the red stone heights where they had slept. “Run, run!”

“Is it an earthquake?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

When they reached the top, Samira was already there and peering down calmly at the white sands swirling and rippling across the mouth of the canyon. A few hollow crab legs and carapaces shifted and fell, crunching as they crashed to the ground. The djinn pointed. “There.”

Zerai looked and saw a shadow sweep around a sudden bulge in the sand, and as the desert bubbled upward, the sand poured down until it revealed the angry red horns and bright white legs of a living sandwalker. The massive crab shuffled sideways, its hideous mandibles working furiously as it cleaned the sand away from its toothless maw, and it snapped its long, curving claws in the air over its head.

“Can it get up here?” Zerai asked.

“I doubt it.” Lamia shook her head. “Too steep. I think.”

For a time they stood and watched the giant crab, but the creature seemed content to merely stand at the foot of the cliff and occasionally snap its massive claws at them.

“We should keep moving,” Samira said. “It’s going to be very hot soon.”

So they moved on, following the spine of the red bluffs north with the odd blast of hot sand from the east and the odd blast of snow and frost from the sea to the west.

Lamia walked along the eastern edge of the bluffs, keeping watch over the desert. They hadn’t gone far from the canyon of the sandwalkers when she called out to them, “You’re not going to like this.”

“What?” Samira asked.

“It’s following us.”

Zerai looked down and saw the lone crab skittering along the white dunes below, dashing from one perch to the next, its mandibles still working furiously, its claws still raised in a warlike salute. “Well, that’s unsettling.”

They carried on north through the rest of the morning, with their eight-legged shadow following along below. Around noon Samira raised a stone shelter from the ground and they rested in the shade for a few hours, and when they emerged to carry on in the late afternoon, the sandwalker carried on with them.

“I have to say, I’m not thrilled with the idea of sleeping up here while that thing is down there,” Zerai said. “For all we know, there’s a low slope up ahead where it can climb up here and eat us.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Lamia said. “If it’s still with us when we make camp for the night, then I’ll take care of it. One quick boulder to the head should do it.”

When the sun set and they made their camp, the sandwalker squatted down on its sharp white legs to rest below them, and Lamia paced to the edge of the bluff to watch the monster. “It’s sad,” she said. “So many of them dead. And this one, what was it doing at that canyon? Guarding the dead? Do you think they do that? Care about the dead? Mourn their dead?”

“Maybe. I’ve seen stranger things,” Samira said. “Why? Would you rather not kill it?”

“If I don’t have to, no.”

“Then we’ll keep watch,” the djinn cleric said. “It’s no danger to us. You or I could kill it easily, if we needed to. So we can wait. For now.”

Zerai frowned but said nothing, focusing instead on Nadira’s clothes and supper. They all ate and then settled down to sleep, with Samira taking the first watch.

Hours later, Zerai awoke to a strange sound, a distant woofing and growling, but it didn’t sound like any animal he knew. Seeing that Lamia and Nadira were soundly asleep, he crept out of the shelter and joined Samira on the edge of the overlook, gazing out across the dark silvery ripples of the desert beneath the stars.

“I heard something,” he said quietly.

She pointed north. “Watch there.”

A moment later he saw a flicker of red light in the distance, followed by the soft sound of a fire’s brief growl. The horizon went dark, but the flame returned again, and then twice in quick succession, and then again shortly. The spurts were irregular, but always quick.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Whatever it is, our friend seems interested.” She nodded down at the desert floor where the sandwalker had risen up on its eight legs and begun slowly marching sideways toward the flames.

Zerai nodded. “Good. I could do with some baked crab for breakfast.”

“Should we follow?”

“Probably. I don’t want any surprises in the morning.” Zerai glanced back at the shelter. “I’ll wake Lamia, and then we’ll go.”

They shadowed the sandwalker along the top of the bluff, easily keeping pace despite the creature’s size because where it had to scramble up and down the shifting dunes, they could stroll along the high stone path. And all the while, the red flame sputtered and growled in the distance.

Soon they were almost on top of the strange fire and could see the jets of flame erupting from a narrow ravine in the bluffs below them. As the sandwalker approached the dark mouth of the crack in the stone wall, warily snapping its massive claws, the falconer and the djinn cleric crept closer to the top of the ravine and peered down into the darkness.

The flame spat once, twice, each time revealing the rough walls of the rocky defile in angry reds and oranges, as well as a dark lump sitting on the sandy stone floor. A figure. A person.

Zerai exchanged a silent, questioning look with Samira, which told him nothing except that she too had no idea what they were looking at.

The sandwalker hesitated on the crest of the nearest dune, wavering, dancing on its serrated legs, and then it darted forward, turning to ram itself sideways into the ravine and contorting one of its arms to aim its vicious claw into the gap, aiming for the figure sitting in the dark.

A column of red flame roared out from the mouth of ravine, engulfing the giant crab utterly, and the beast staggered its last few steps before collapsing on the sand where its charred carapace slid down a ramp of shining glass and collided with the rock wall with a dry crunching noise. Zerai watched the display in silence, the skin of his face pulling tight as the heat scorched the air, but when the flame vanished and only starlight illuminated the desert, he saw something else. Something new. He saw his breath, curling in the air under his nose like white smoke.

“Careful,” Samira whispered. She pushed him back from the lip of the rock, and as he took his hands off the cold stone he saw the shining crystals of ice slowly rising from the cracks in the earth, each frozen blade groaning and crackling as it grew, and each one exhaling a pale white vapor into the sultry desert air.

Ice? Here?

Zerai frowned.

Fire and ice. It must be a Juranim. And whoever it is down there, they’re drawing the heat from the earth to create those fires.

He frowned deeper, and looked off to his left where the light flurries of snow still whirled and sliced through air on the sea breeze, full of salt and fish and oil scents.

Heat from the earth… or from the sea!

He reached for his sword.

This is the storm-bringer.

This is Talia’s killer.

Chapter 25

Zerai stood up, sword in hand, and looked for a way to climb down to the bottom of the ravine.

Samira stepped in front of him, hissing, “What do you think you are doing?”

“Killing a killer.”

“What?”

“Don’t you see? He’s one of them, one of the renegade djinn. He’s freezing the sea. He’s the reason we lost Talia!” Zerai growled as quietly as he could. He gripped and regripped his sword as the deadly nature of the proposed duel weighed on his mind, giving him terrifying thoughts of being burned alive as he charged the djinn cleric.

“You don’t know that,” Samira said. “We don’t know anything. Let me talk to him first.”