Storms (Sharani Series Book 2) (24 page)

Though the man was at least a decade Lhaurel’s senior, she resented being called ‘girl.’ Cobb was one thing, he’d called her ‘girl’ her whole life, but this man, this stranger? “You’re right, you don’t. You volunteered for this, if I understand correctly. If you don’t want to pay the price for the magic we don’t want you. But the next time you’re about to die, the next time you look death in the eye and realize you can’t escape its clutches, don’t expect anyone here to save you.”

By this time, everyone in the room was watching their exchange. All work had stopped and the silence became deafening. The man stared at Lhaurel, hands clenching and unclenching at his side. The two other men who had been working on the stone with him had stepped back, probably seizing the moment as an opportunity to rest.

“You’re right,” the man hissed. “I shouldn’t have stayed. You Roterralar women don’t know how to act properly. You’re not meant for leadership.”

Lhaurel noticed Khari move forward, her expression dark, but Lhaurel held up a hand to stop her. This was her fight. She felt sick prodding the man, but at the same time part of her thought he deserved it.

“And you think you are?” she said. “You can’t even lift a stone or channel your own rage to be of any use. You think that is strength? You don’t even understand the word. Try asking a woman who’s born a child what true pain is.
That’s
strength.”

The man spat at her.

Lhaurel lashed out at the man on instinct, not with her fist, as she half-expected herself to do, but with her powers. She reached out, using her own blood as fuel to reach out to the man. Acting purely on instinct, she felt through his blood and seized on that part of it which controlled his magnetelorium powers. The man gasped, in pain, in shock, in pure terror, eyes wide. Lhaurel yanked and suddenly the man was on his knees.

Lhaurel pushed her powers away, stunned at what she had just done. What
had
she just done? She honestly didn’t know.

The man got to his feet, cheeks wet from tears, whole body trembling. No one around them moved. The man stared at Lhaurel and there was confusion, pain, and fear there. He raised a hand and Lhaurel saw a nimbus of red-grey mist form around him. A little metal talisman suspended on a leather thong around the man’s neck lifted and seemed to float in the air before him. He stared down at it and his expression slid to include awe in the mix of emotions present there.

“What did you do?” Khari asked. Her voice was tinged with the same awe reflected on the man’s face.

Lhaurel turned to her, equally awed and feeling more than a little weak. She leaned heavily against her cane.

“I broke him,” she said.

“Can you do it again?” Khari whispered, looking around at the awed, startled, and shocked faces.

“I think so,” Lhaurel said. “But not all at once. That alone took more strength than I’d care to admit. I need to rest. I . . . Can you get someone to help me down to the room where we left Beryl’s scrolls?”

Khari nodded. “Yes. Rest for now, but hurry. See if you can’t find something in those scrolls that will help us with this lot. Or at least explain what in the seven hells you can do.”

Lhaurel wasn’t so tired that she didn’t hear the note of confusion and fear in Khari’s voice. The woman knew more about Lhaurel than anyone else alive, understood her abilities’ true source, but that didn’t mean she didn’t fear the unknown.

Lhaurel nodded. “I’ll see what I can find. This—” She glanced at the other people there, felt their eyes on her and saw them look away when she tried to meet them. “Well, I’ll see what I can do. I owe you, Khari, but I don’t understand this any better than you do.”

Khari sighed and gestured for one of the other women to assist Lhaurel. “I know, but figure it out soon, if you can. We need this to work out.”

Lhaurel leaned back against the wall, head once again throbbing as she dug through the scrolls scattered across the stone table in search of something she had read earlier. Her mind refused to cooperate with the work. She wasn’t sure if part of it was the consequence of what she’d done earlier or the fact that the reading itself was dull work, even if the content of the scrolls was vastly interesting.

The one thing she
was
sure about was her own disappointment in herself. Though she’d never consciously decided, she’d intended to never use her powers against another human being again. She would use it
for
them as much as she could, but not against them, not as a weapon.

Yet what had she just done? She’d instinctively lashed out at the belligerent man and changed him. What she’d done was an invasive, horrifying act.

She’d come to recognize something about her powers, something discussed in these scrolls. There was a deep, hidden need within her—a desire to use her magic, to reach out and control everything around her—that she didn’t know how to contain. She hadn’t recognized it until just now, though now that she thought about it, it had been there since the moment she’d realized her true potential.

She found the scroll she was looking for and tugged it closer to herself. She scanned through it until she found what she was looking for. Unlike the other scrolls, which seemed more instructional and informative, this one appeared as if it were once a self-recorded history. Something about it tugged at her memory, but it floated there just beyond her grasp. She found the passage she was looking for.

What is the nature of dreams? Are they real or purely illusory? If they are real, what is the nature of this realm of dreams? If illusory, why do they have such a powerful effect upon the dreamer?

Dreams. Lhaurel shook her head, feeling the headache swell. Had Kaiden been plagued by dreams that had driven him to madness? It was possible. Lhaurel half felt she might be headed that direction herself, though her most recent dream was far more pleasant than the nightmares that had plagued her before.

The door opened with a creak of rusty hinges. It was an old door, the wood poorly fashioned and starting to fall apart in places, so it groaned almost as much as the hinges did as Beryl pushed it open and limped into the room. The lamplight reflected off the metal embedded in his skin and cast strangle little motes of light across the room which danced like dust in the wind.

“Have you finished yet, Lhaurel?” Beryl asked. His voice was pitched low, but it carried an intensity that sent shivers down Lhaurel’s spine.

“How could anyone have read all this in just a day?” Lhaurel asked, gesturing vaguely over the scrolls scattered across the table.

Beryl grumbled something unintelligible as if to himself, then spoke up. “You must hurry.”

“Why?” Lhaurel asked, feeling her irritation and confusion grow. “Why should I hurry? What did you mean when you said this stuff was why Kaiden did what he did? I’m tired of all this confusion and mystery.”

Beryl scratched at the stubble on his chin and regarded her impassively for a long moment. Lhaurel was just about to say something else, this time even more pointed than the last, when Beryl shook his head.

“You must hurry because the Orinai are coming,” Beryl said, his voice hard and without its typical rasp. “I don’t know when, but they will come.”

“The who?”

“The Orinai,” Beryl said. “They built this place, this Arena. They were driven out centuries ago, but only because they thought the Rahuli doomed to death.”

What was he going on about? What Arena?

Lhaurel raised an eyebrow at him.

“They’re coming!” Beryl suddenly thundered, and the room seemed to shake with the volume of his shout. “They will come and destroy you all. You’re not prepared, you’re not ready. Kaiden knows this. Somehow he knows. He wished to burn away the dross in the crucible of battle, cut everyone away who could not stand against the coming storm. The Seven Sisters will destroy you and everything you’ve come to know.”

“What are you talking about?”

The look Beryl leveled at her burned away any doubt she had about his sincerity. Whatever it was he was saying, whether it was really true or not, Beryl sincerely believed it.

“You thought the genesauri were a nightmare,” Beryl whispered. “They were a light breeze to the coming sandstorm. I’ve seen what they can do. You won’t be ready.”

He didn’t wait for Lhaurel’s protests or questions. Beryl got up and limped out of the room, muttering to himself. Lhaurel felt her headache swell and massaged her temples. She needed to talk to Khari about all this.

“Storm Wards are also, among other things, generally the most arrogant of the Great Ones and most likely to remain at their Iteration and return to it for multiple incarnations of their lives.”

—From
Commentary on the
Schema, Volume I

“I told you they would come,” Kaiden said, not looking over at Gavin. “I told you the enemy would come.”

Gavin’s eyes darted to the red glass blade sitting in the sands a few feet away. If he made a dash for it . . .

Kaiden kept talking as Nabil hissed and puffed out his feathers in a threatening manner.

“I read the scrolls, I knew what was coming. Now we will all die.” There was a deep, tremulous quality to Kaiden’s voice, which matched his outward appearance but was dissonant to the true age shown in the man’s eyes.

Gavin took a careful step forward. Though Kaiden didn’t appear to have any weapons, he was wearing brown robes similar to the ones the mystics had worn before everyone knew who they really were. Anything could be hidden within those folds, not to mention Kaiden’s magnetelorium abilities. Kaiden’s face was a maze of craggy wrinkles, like canyons with a thousand spidery branches, and his grey-white hair clung to him despite the light breeze.

“What are you doing here, Kaiden?” Gavin asked, taking another careful step forward. He was directly in between the two prone giants and only a foot or two away from the glass knife. He could easily bend over and snatch it from the ground.

Kaiden glanced over at him and blinked owlishly. Gavin wasn’t sure if Kaiden was really seeing him or not, as his gaze seemed to wander and remain unfocused.

“Here? I’m here to protect you,” Kaiden said, his gaze seeming to fixate on some point over Gavin’s right shoulder.

“Protect me?” Gavin took another step forward and then bent down and scooped up the red glass knife. Kaiden didn’t seem to notice. Or care.

“Protect you all. The horrors I’ve read about, the terrible darkness, the Seven Sisters.” Kaiden shuddered and closed his eyes.

Gavin seized that moment to dart forward and tackle Kaiden to the ground. The man didn’t offer any resistance, and as a result they ended up slamming into the ground with twice as much force as Gavin had expected. The dagger flew out of Gavin’s hand and he felt a rush of panic before it registered that Kaiden wasn’t resisting at all.

Gavin scrambled to his feet and whistled for Nabil, who hopped over the prone figures to land next to Gavin. Kaiden turned his head to regard the aevian with one corner of his mouth twisted up into a half-smile. Gavin hastily pulled a length of cord from the satchel on Nabil’s back and used it to tie Kaiden’s arms behind his back.

“Nabil,” Kaiden said, speaking over Gavin’s shoulder to the aevian. “I haven’t seen Skree-lar in a long, long time. Do you know where he is?”

Nabil hissed and flexed long talons, which dug into the sand and scraped against rock hidden beneath. He clacked his beak and let out an ear-piercing screech that made Gavin wince and cover his ears.

“Hush, Nabil!” Gavin snapped.

Kaiden chuckled, though it was the sound of falling stone and grating earth.

“Enough games, Kaiden. What are you doing here and where are the others who helped you escape?”

“Didn’t you tell Farah that these would die if you didn’t administer to them?” Kaiden asked. It was the first time the man had looked directly at Gavin when he’d spoken, and his words dripped with menace.

“Don’t try and ignore the question,” Gavin said, retrieving the dagger and half-glancing at the two prone giants at his feet. “Why are you here and where are the people who helped you escape the Roterralar?”

“As I said, I am here to protect you. You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re doing or what you did when you pulled that sword from the dead Orinai atop the cliffs. The sandstorm is coming and I’m your only hope.”

Gavin almost rolled his eyes. Kaiden reminded him of the old Sidena Warlord, Jenthro. Full of talk and show, always trying to scare people into doing what he wanted. His grandmother had told him about these types. She’d said they were all secretly cowards. A confident man doesn’t need to act tough or be brutal to try and scare you. A confident man already knows his own strength. A coward though, they needed the constant reminder of their own stupidity.

“You’re doing a fine job protecting me all tied up like that,” Gavin said. “Nabil, kill him if he so much as moves in the wrong direction.”

Gavin wasn’t sure if the aevian understood, but Nabil chirped softly as if in acknowledgment and fixed beady eyes on Kaiden’s form. Kaiden had the nerve to look amused, which was an odd look on his prematurely aged face. Gavin ignored him, but was careful to keep his glass dagger close. So far Kaiden hadn’t shown any hint of his former powers, but Gavin wasn’t going to leave anything to chance by assuming they really were “former” powers.

He turned to the two prone giants and did another quick check of their wounds. He then pulled the waterskins from Nabil’s back and removed the makeshift bandage around the wider, shorter giant’s chest.

Kaiden made a small noise at the smell, but Gavin had grown a little more accustomed to it at this point. Blood, pus, and fluid dripped from the man’s wounds. Gavin used a miniscule amount of water and a piece of cloth torn from Kaiden’s robes to clean parts of it up. Gavin wished he had some alcohol or even some tigerroot, but he made do with what he had, as his grandmother had taught him.

He let the wounds air out for a bit after he washed them, taking that time to go over the cuts on the taller man’s shoulders and hands. The ones on his shoulders were similar to the long gashes across his shorter companion’s chest, but the wounds on the taller man’s hands and arms were puzzling. Long gashes, scrapes, and cuts covered him from fingertip to elbow almost as if he’d fallen half a hundred times against rock.

Kaiden noticed Gavin’s inspection of the wounds.

“It is a difficult journey, coming here,” Kaiden whispered, half to himself.

Gavin shot Kaiden a withering look, but the man’s statement bounced around in his thoughts as he worked on the wounded man’s shoulders. It was obvious that these men, whoever and whatever they were, were not some of Kaiden’s men. There were no Rahuli this large nor mystics as powerful, and none of the original seven clans had that accent.

They had to have come from . . .

No, Gavin shook his head, to think they’d actually come from beyond the Forbiddence was preposterous, wasn’t it?
There wasn’t anything
beyond
the Forbiddence, was there?

The man stirred beneath Gavin’s gentle ministrations and pulled Gavin from his thoughts. He finished washing the wounds as quickly as he could and then looked around for something he could use for bandages. This had been one of the reasons he’d left the other man’s chest wounds open to the air. Gavin wasn’t sure what he could use as a bandage to replace the fetid mess which remained of the old bandage.

“You know,” Kaiden said, almost off-handedly, while Gavin rummaged through one of the small travel sacks, “I’m surprised you would ally yourself with the Roterralar. You do realize they could have saved you and the other outcasts at any time if they’d wanted to. No one would have missed the outcasts, you know.”

Gavin didn’t respond. He knew Kaiden was just trying to annoy him. He rummaged through the packs again, though there wasn’t anything large enough to serve as a bandage for one of the two men, let alone both.

“Maybe it’s a good thing you are, though. You’re a mystic and we’ll need you before it is done, I imagine.” Kaiden said this in a soft voice, almost as if to himself. Maybe the man really was still a little cracked.

Gavin turned and looked at the other man out of the corner of his eye. The breeze picked up and tugged at Kaiden’s robes. Gavin grinned.

Half an hour later, Gavin finished tying off the last of the bandages around the taller man’s arm. Kaiden grumbled under his breath from where he sat, almost naked in the sand, but that only made Gavin grin even more. Though he felt somewhat guilty about it, he felt some minor vindication for the deaths of his friends in the Oasis, most notably Shallee’s husband. And there was nothing else to use as bandages. At least that was his justification.

Gavin flopped down into the loose sand in the shadows cast by the stoneway pillar and cleaned off the blood and gunk with a handful of sand. Nabil hissed as Kaiden fidgeted—Gavin had shifted him out of the shadow and into the direct sunlight—and the man stilled, eyeing the aevian with a malevolent look. Gavin was pleased to see that Kaiden was at least cautious around Nabil.

“Who helped you escape?” Gavin asked.

Kaiden gave him a flat look. With the man’s now grey eyebrows and the wispy strands of grey hair tossed in front of his face by the breeze, the effect was somewhat lessened. It was hard to be intimidated by a man who looked as ancient as stone.

“So were you really insane earlier or was that all just an elaborate ruse?” Gavin continued, fishing out some dried meat and taking a bite.

“Is the man insane who does what he must in order to survive?” Kaiden asked. “What did you do as an outcast in order to survive? What laws did you break? What atrocities did you commit?”

“None that would give me any trouble sleeping at night.”

“I sleep soundly,” Kaiden said.

“I don’t doubt that,” Gavin said around another mouthful of dried meat. “Wrapped up tightly in the blanket of your own depraved mind.”

Kaiden gave him a grin. “Always.”

Gavin shook his head and gave up. There was no point talking to the man. Instead he set about poking through the things the two wounded men had with them. There was the hammer, a massive monstrosity covered in strange etchings that looked like words, and the taller man’s fancy clothes made from a material with which Gavin was not familiar. The clothes on both men were far more colorful than anything Gavin had ever seen, though the shorter man’s clothes were made of wool and were of a less ornate design.

A search of the shorter man’s pants revealed several pouches tucked inside the waistband and a few miscellaneous odds and ends in the pockets. One of the pouches gave an odd metallic clink as Gavin lifted it and set it aside. There was also a thick, folded piece of paper in one pocket. He set this with the pouches and then shifted over to the other man. He only had one thing on him, just a single, heavy pouch that also clinked. Gavin went back over to the larger pile.

He picked up one of the pouches and pulled at the drawstrings. He was glad to see the pouch made of a simple leather and the drawstrings thin leather thongs. Kaiden made a sharp noise that may have been a note of protest or warning, but Gavin didn’t pay him any attention. He’d already lost enough time today dealing with the man.

Gavin managed to get the drawstrings open and dropped the contents into his hand. A large, bluish stone rolled out into his hand. The stone wasn’t perfectly round—it was flattened in the middle, like a scroll, but with rounded ends. There were three long grooves cut at an angle through the middle. The center mark seemed to glow with a reddish light. Gavin’s pulse quickened and he felt an involuntary surge of fear creep up in this throat, but he tried not to let it show. Kaiden was studying his every move like a mother might watch a babe learning to walk for the first time. Gavin set the stone aside, careful to keep his expression hovering somewhere between curious and uncaring.

The next pouch was filled with a number of thin, metal disks. Though the sizes and the metal themselves were all different, they all bore the same engraving of an unknown female on one side and a series of dashes and lines on the other. What possible purpose could these have served? Gavin poured the assorted bits of metal back into the pouch and tied it closed.

The other pouches had a small assortment of thumbnail sized round stones, some string, a number of small foodstuffs, and an odd medallion on a chain. Setting all this aside, Gavin finally picked up the folded piece of paper. He unfolded it carefully, though the paper was thick and clearly not prone to ripping, having survived intact inside the man’s pocket. On the inside were words written not in the language the Rahuli generally spoke, but in the script his grandmother had taught him. The script in which the scrolls inside the Oasis walls had been written.

Sudden understanding hit him like the initial wave of a sandstorm. He looked from the two prone men, to Kaiden, and then back over his shoulder toward the Oasis.

“They’re the Orinai,” Gavin whispered, mind racing. “They’re the enemy the scrolls were talking about.”

Kaiden smiled. “Now you begin to understand.”

Gavin looked back over at him at the exact moment the pouch of metal disks shot up from the sand and struck him in the side of the head. Pain blossomed along one side of his head, his vision blurred, and the page slipped from his fingers as he found himself toppling toward one side. Nabil screeched distantly, like a far-off echo. Gavin blinked rapidly, trying to clear his head and regain some measure of control. He focused, trying to draw in his powers, but nothing came.

Kaiden walked toward him. Somehow the man had gotten himself free.

“You’re so naïve,” Kaiden hissed. “You should have killed me when you had the chance. Both times. You’re not ready for what’s coming.”