Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) (46 page)

He answered in Norlander too – like her, he wanted her to feel what he felt: to know in her bones exactly what this cost him, down to the last drop of his unnameable feelings for her.

He watched the contemptuous expression on her face crumble and fall away. She was the Mongrel, it was true; but he was the son of the sun god, and he could feel the dawn with every drop of his blood. She had been too distracted to notice the subtle brightening of the sky above the smoke-clouds, but he had timed it to the very moment and he saw the pang strike. She tried to steel herself, but her chest contracted as if she’d been struck and she fell to her knees.

He walked towards her, tongues of flame dancing fretfully between his fingers. He tamped them down: he would not use Shof’s gift for this; he needed to do it with his own hands. He needed to feel it.

She fought her way to one knee and tried to drag herself to her sword, but the sickness had full hold of her now and she collapsed onto the stones.

By the time he reached her, she was barely conscious. He knelt down beside her and circled her bare grey throat with his hands. She batted weakly at his arms, but already her mismatched eyes were rolling vacantly beneath fluttering eyelids. Her skin felt dry and feverish and he forced himself to look into her face, to watch the scar on her mouth twitch as she fought for air. From a long way away he heard Harotha, shouting at him to stop. He wanted to pretend that none of this was real, that someone else’s hands were around her throat, but he wouldn’t allow himself to do that: he needed to make
himself remember this, every detail of it, for as long as he lived. That would be his penance.

Then a scream tore through the air behind him and he turned away from Meiran’s lifeless face with the feeling of passing from one nightmare into another. Harotha was being hauled to her knees by a Shadari who had a knife pointed at her pregnant belly. Her eyes were wide and glassy with horror. He sprang up with his hands already blazing, but they were too far away. There was nothing he could do.

‘Elthion!’ shouted Faroth, lurching forward. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are, coming in here like this?’

‘I’m doing what you should be doing, Faroth!’ Elthion yelled back. His face was cut and bruised and his wrists were covered with bloody scratches. He had his arm around Harotha’s neck, holding her fast. ‘They’ve made a fool of you!’

‘
Nobody
makes a fool of me,’ Faroth warned darkly, glancing back at the others. ‘Watch your words.’

Her brother wasn’t going to do anything to help her; he was angry at Elthion for overstepping his place, not for attacking the sister he’d already renounced. Jachad stared at the knife, trying to think of some way to get it away without endangering her. But then Harotha’s desperate eyes found his and he understood that her fear wasn’t for the knife at all. She saw the realisation on his face and nodded, almost imperceptibly.

‘
He knows,
’ she mouthed.

‘I knew you wouldn’t listen to me,’ Elthion was saying to Faroth, ‘but I can prove it – I’ll cut this – this
thing
– out of her and show you, all of you!’

Jachad sent a mass of flames roaring up to the grey dawn sky. He could sustain the fire for only a moment, but it was long enough to get Elthion’s attention.

‘I’ve been looking for you, Elthion!’ he shouted, pointing as he advanced on the lanky Shadari with quick, angry strides. ‘Did you really think I was going to let those things you said about me and my people stand?’

Elthion’s mean, narrowed eyes turned to him with a look of almost joyful hatred and Jachad knew at once that he had hit upon the right tactic: Elthion wanted to be important – important enough to be hated and pursued, to have mortal enemies.

‘What do you want here, sand-spitter?’ sneered the Shadari, flecks of spit flying from his mouth. He still had one arm circled around Harotha’s neck and the knife pointed at her belly.

‘I’ll give you one chance to take back the things you said,’ Jachad offered reasonably, stopping about ten paces from him. ‘No one needs to get hurt.’

‘Do you think I’m afraid of you?’ Elthion snorted, responding exactly as Jachad hoped.

‘Afraid enough to hide behind a woman, I’d say,’ he returned contemptuously. He heard a murmur from Faroth, but no one made any move to interfere. ‘What’s the matter, Elthion, was your mother too busy to let you hide behind her skirts this time? Or did she finally decide it was time to wean you?’

Elthion let go of Harotha, who slumped to the ground in a faint. The Shadari glared down at her with a look of utter disgust, then kicked her in the back with a cruelty that scorched Jachad’s blood.

He whisked his knife out of its sheath. ‘You’re a worm, Elthion,’ he told him. ‘You’re nothing –
nobody
– and I won’t waste one spark of Shof’s fire killing you.’

The Shadari flew at him and Jachad fell back, pulling him as far away from Harotha as possible before standing his ground. Elthion slashed at him with no skill whatsoever, but his arms were long and Jachad had a hard time dodging his crazed attacks. He stayed on the defensive, steering Elthion further and further away from Harotha, conscious that he needed to keep them all distracted while she got herself to safety. He glanced anxiously at her slumped body, praying that he was right in thinking her swoon feigned.

Elthion struck at him, close enough that the knife ripped a gash in his sleeve, but for a moment it caught in the fabric and gave him time enough to grab his arm and thrust with his own knife. Elthion stumbled backwards to break Jachad’s hold and tripped over the uneven stones. Jachad flung himself down on top of Elthion, squirming to avoid the blade, and they grappled frantically for a moment before Elthion threw him off – he was stronger than he looked. Jachad scrambled back to his feet.

A sharp moan cut underneath their ragged breathing, and both men turned to see Harotha – already halfway to the doorway and freedom – stagger and fall to her knees. There was nothing feigned in her collapse this time.

Elthion whirled back to Jachad, his face twisted into a caricature of loathing. ‘
Tricks!
’ he choked out. ‘You’re with them – you’re one of them! I’ll kill that whore and her bastard child and I’ll make you watch!’ He lunged towards Harotha, but
Jachad’s hands were already surging with fire and he bounded after Elthion and grabbed for his legs. He caught the Shadari’s robe with one smouldering hand and Elthion screamed in outrage, but the dirty hem singed away under Jachad’s fingers and sent him crashing to the ground holding nothing but ash.

Elthion rolled on the ground and sprang up again. He loomed over Jachad, brandishing his knife in triumph and shrieking, ‘I’m going to cut that monster out of her!’

Jachad raised his hands, praying that he had enough fire left to incinerate them both—

—when a strange buzzing skidded along the ground and vibrated through his body, like a sound too low to be heard. There was a thin splintering noise, like the sound of ice breaking, and tiny cracks began snaking through the pavement beneath and around him.

Jachad jumped up in alarm, but a heartbeat later the whole floor shattered into a thousand tiny pieces; sand bubbled up from the ground like a living thing, submerging the broken shards of stone until the area around them was roiling.

Jachad understood what was happening and he knew that his only chance was to run, but fear immobilised him. The ground slid out from beneath him and he fell to his knees. He could not get up; instead, he was slipping steadily backwards, as if pulled by a retreating tide.

‘What—?’ Elthion cried, looking around him, his mouth gaping foolishly. The sand rippled around his ankles and with a lurch, swallowed him up to his knees. He kicked his legs, trying in vain to climb out.

Jachad grabbed the ground sloping up in front of him, but
his efforts were useless. Sand lapped against his chest, rising up higher and higher as he sank. He and Elthion were caught up in a funnel; they were being dragged down into its depths.

He could hear Elthion screaming for help. The Shadari had long since dropped his knife and was now clawing madly at the sand, trying to dig himself out of the hole that was steadily deepening beneath him. His self-important smirk had given way to a look of abject terror. ‘Faroth! Faroth, help me!’

‘Not again,’ Jachad prayed, shutting his eyes as the dirt crested his shoulders. ‘Please Shof, not again. Anything but this—’

A clammy hand grabbed his wrist and he opened his eyes to see Meiran, her lithe body balanced on the slope in front of him as she clung to his arm, her muscles taut with the strain. She clamped her other hand around his wrist and with one massive tug hauled him out of the hole. They tumbled backwards together, falling onto more level ground, safely out of the funnel’s reach.

‘Faroth! Faroth!’ yelped Elthion, now up to his neck at the epicentre of the funnel. On the other side, half-hidden by the swirling smoke, Jachad saw exactly what he had expected: a small figure standing tense and still, watching silently, his fists clenched tight.

Elthion’s arms flapped frantically over his head as another surge pulled him down to his chin. ‘Faroth! It’s Dramash – Dramash is doing this! Stop h—’ And as Jachad watched, breathless with horror, Elthion’s pleas changed to a wordless shriek of terror that died away as sand sifted into his mouth and nose. For a moment longer the sand swirled, and then it lay still.

‘He wanted to hurt the baby,’ Dramash explained in a voice too old and too tired to have come from that young body. He turned around and walked back to his father, who was staring blankly at the spot where Elthion had disappeared.

For a moment Jachad thought the others had all gone, but then he saw them, huddled together in the far corner of the room, their faces white with dismay.

Meiran touched his shoulder and said, ‘We have to go.’

He lurched to his feet. She was already sprinting towards Harotha, who seemed to have recovered, at least physically. Her face was red and swollen and fresh tears were streaming down her cheeks.

‘We have to help him – he’s just a little boy,’ she told Jachad chokingly as he and Meiran ushered her towards the doorway.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘but we can’t do anything now. We have to get you out of here.’

The same sentry was still at his post. He had his back to the doorway, but he turned as the three of them came out. ‘Was that Elthion shouting?’ he asked, glancing nervously through to the courtyard. ‘I let him in because he swore Faroth was waiting for him. What’s happening in there?’

Jachad paused, subtly giving Harotha and Meiran enough room to exit behind him while he spoke with the guard. ‘Faroth’s going to make a speech,’ he told the sentry in a voice loud enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear. ‘He wants you to let everyone inside.’

‘If he wants—’ began the sentry, but just as Jachad had intended, the crowd immediately began pushing their way past him into the hall.

Meiran took Harotha’s arm and steered her through the press of bodies. She had to squint with her Norlander eye in the absence of her eye-patch. Some people recognised her and cried out or jumped back, but most were so intent on pushing forward that they took no notice of them. By the time Jachad, Meiran and Harotha reached the edge of the palace ruins there was no one else in sight.

‘I need to rest, please,’ begged Harotha suddenly, and slumped onto the low stone wall by her side. Jachad watched her in alarm: her face had gone pale, except for patches of hectic colour on her cheeks. ‘Don’t worry, I’m all right,’ she reassured him, smiling thinly as Meiran helped her to sit. ‘The pains have stopped again. I’m just tired.’

When she shut her eyes, he moved off a little further along the wall to give her a moment’s solitude. Meiran joined him. The colour had faded from the sky, leaving the unbroken clouds the flat, dull colour of smoke; he saw Meiran glance up and rub her arms as if she felt a chill.

‘I’m trying to make some sense of this,’ he said quietly. ‘You saved my life, even after I tried to kill you – even after you let me go off to fight under the temple, where you
expected me to be killed
.’ He cleared his throat and focused on the wall, watching the breeze gently rustling the dry weeds poking out between the stones. ‘Can you explain that? Why didn’t you just let me go down with Elthion?’

The heavy silence lengthened, until Meiran finally said, ‘You know why.’

He did know, now. He had felt it in that one unguarded moment they had shared, but he wasn’t ready to acknowledge
it yet. He unwound the scarf from around his neck, and sand hissed down around him. He shook out the rest from its folds. ‘She tried to tell me you weren’t going to hurt her. I suppose if I hadn’t interfered, you could have got her away before Elthion even arrived – and then – what, spirited her away before her brother or the others came after her?’

‘That’s right.’

He looked straight into her mismatched eyes. ‘So that mess back there was
my
fault, then?’

She held his gaze, but said nothing.

‘You’re wrong,’ he told her coldly. He twisted the silk in his hands, pulling it taut. ‘It’s not my fault – it’s yours. You expect me to trust you when you give me nothing.
Nothing!
’ He threw the scarf to the ground. ‘If you had told me what you were trying to do, I would have listened to you. All I’ve asked you to do is trust me—’

‘Why should I?’ she burst out.

‘Why?’ He laughed incredulously. ‘
Why?
What about the years we spent growing up together? What about all of the mornings after you ran away when I woke up next to your empty bed feeling like a part of me had been cut out? What about all of the stories I had to endure about the infamous Mongrel, knowing all of the time that you were out there somewhere, not caring enough to send one word, not even to let us know you were still alive?’

Her face twisted up with contempt. ‘Don’t pretend you think of me any differently than anyone else does,’ she insisted. Her raw voice scraped like fingernails across a stone.