Blood's Pride Read online

  “No, it doesn’t.” She felt a hard lump in her throat and wished, not for the first time, that she had the easy gift of tears like other people. Harotha never cried; she couldn’t even remember crying when she was a child.

  “Do you think he’s still waiting for you?”

  “Yes.” She rubbed her bottom lip with her thumb. “I think that’s why he let the White Wolf take over the mines, to make it easier to run away with me.”

  “You know how I feel about what you did, and about him,” Saria said. She could never bring herself to mention Eofar by name. “And since only the gods know how these things are going to turn out I thought you should stay here until you were delivered. But now I think you should go—leave the Shadar, right now. Go and have your baby and forget this place ever existed. And let it forget you.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “For the gods’ sake, why not?”

  She looked at her sister-in-law. “You remember earlier, you said you thought the gods had abandoned us? Well, they haven’t.”

  Saria drew back suspiciously, and for a moment Harotha’s courage failed her. But no: she needed Saria’s help, and this was the only way.

  “I want to show you something, but I need you to be brave.”

  “What is it?”

  She knelt down, bending awkwardly to balance the baby’s shifting weight. Then, unconsciously holding her breath, she began writing in the sand. Saria shrieked and backed away with her hands over her eyes.

  “Stop, stop!” cried Saria. “How dare you! Oh gods, forgive her! Forgive me—”

  “Don’t be childish,” Harotha snapped, not realizing until the words left her mouth that Faroth had said exactly the same thing to Saria just a short while ago. She was nervous, and that didn’t make the situation any easier. She glanced up at the stars and saw them shining brightly now—maybe that would help. She chose the prayer that had worked for her more often than the others, though it still failed much more often than it succeeded.

  “I convinced Daryan to teach me how to write,” she explained to her sister-in-law as she carefully formed the letters. Saria was standing stock-still with her hands pressed firmly over her eyes, as if blinding herself would render her invisible to the offended gods.

  “All right, Saria, look! Take your hands away.” She struggled up off the ground and took hold of Saria’s wrists, pulling her hands away from her face, but Saria just turned her head away.

  Harotha looked over at the words she had written in the sand and waited. She bit her lower lip. “Please,” she whispered.

  Nothing happened.

  Defeated both by her own failure and by Saria’s all-too-predictable reaction, she walked back over to the letters and swept them away with her foot. “All right, it’s gone. You can look now.”

  Saria slowly lowered her hands away from her face and looked suspiciously at the sand around her feet as if she suspected a trick. “What did you think you were doing?” she asked, quivering with outrage. “Who do you think you are?”

  “I can do it—I have done it, many times. I just can’t do it all of the time.” She took a deep breath. “Daryan taught me how to read and write a few prayers when we were in the temple together. And I had all that time here, alone, so I began … I didn’t want to tell you until—”

  Saria stretched out a finger accusingly. “Only ordained ashas have the power. That’s why you went to the temple in the first place. Shairav is the only one who can speak to the gods. Everyone knows that!”

  “That’s what we’ve been told, but it’s not true,” Harotha said. “Maybe it’s because my mother and father were both ashas, or maybe something’s changed. Who knows? Maybe it was never true in the first place.” She took another deep breath, and moved closer to Saria. “So you see why I can’t leave now? Why I have to tell Faroth about this before we end up at the mercy of the Mongrel?”

  “Be quiet! Be quiet!” Saria shouted, clamping her hands over her ears. She walked to the doorway of the house and put a hand out to brace herself against the wall. “You and Faroth are so much alike it makes me want to spit. Even though the thought of what that baby represents makes me ill, I hoped that maybe if you became a mother, you’d have enough to worry about without trying to save…” Her words trailed off strangely and she looked up toward Mount Asharamon. Harotha saw an unfamiliar look of intense concentration cross her face.

  “What—?”

  “Quiet!” Saria interrupted in a tense whisper. Then she beckoned Harotha over. “Do you hear that?”

  She stood by the wall next to her and listened. After a moment she heard the rumbling again, like a heavy stone rolling along, and felt a kind of buzzing under her feet. This time, instead of fading away, both began to swell in intensity; a shifting sound came from within the dark house and a wet crash broke the stillness, as if something heavy had fallen on the water cistern.

  The women both jumped, and Harotha cried out, “Saria! Get away!” and pulled her sister-in-law away from the doorway. “It’s the roof—it’s coming down!”

  Together they lurched over the sliding sands, making instinctively for the open space at the foot of the mountains. A house on their left collapsed in on itself with a terrifying roar just as they stumbled by, and Saria screamed. But in a few moments they were on open ground. They both dropped to their knees.

  “Listen!” she shouted over the noise, squeezing Saria’s arm tighter. Saria threw her other arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “Listen! Do you hear that?”

  “Like an egg, cracking,” Saria cried in return. “What is it?”

  She looked around for the source of the sound. The cracking sound grew louder, and then the rumbling grew louder as well, but this time the rumbling was coming not from underneath them but in front of them.

  “Oh, no,” she gasped, staring at Mount Asharamon. The moonlight was bright enough to show cracks zigzagging up the rocky face, more and more of them, even as she looked. “No, no—”

  With a heavy thump the surface of the mountain face broke away and slid down in one long, majestic sweep.

  “Run!” screamed Saria, pulling wildly at her arm. The view in front of them disappeared, choked with dust. Rocks and boulders bounced over the sand toward them.

  “It’s too late,” she said and threw herself down in the sand. She grabbed Saria’s legs and toppled her down onto the ground beside her. “Stay down,” she commanded as she wrote another prayer into the dirt. “Cover your head!” She finished writing the prayer and then scrambled over next to Saria, tucking herself into a ball with her arms around her belly. Sand and dirt rained down on her and she shut her eyes and her mouth tight, listening to the concussive thud of rocks striking the ground all around them. Saria whimpered with fright.

  And then it all stopped.

  Harotha opened her eyes. A few small rocks skipped by but the ground was no longer rumbling. In fact, there was no sound at all. A heavy cloud of dust hung in the air, stinging her eyes until they watered. She wet her lips and stood up as quickly as her ungainly body would allow, arching her sore back and looking around thoughtfully.

  Saria raised her head, eyes wide and glassy with fright. “We’re still alive?”

  “We appear to be,” Harotha reassured her, and then added, trying to keep her voice calm, “Why don’t you get up?”

  Saria stood up, staring in disbelief at what Harotha was regarding with growing satisfaction. A dune had risen up from the sand in front of them, crested at the top like a wave that had frozen just as it reached its apex, at least twelve feet high and twice as long. On either side of the dune, rocks ranging in size from tiny pebbles to huge boulders lay strewn all about. Moonlight filtered through the dust. Behind them, the abandoned houses had been completely flattened.

  Harotha began to laugh raggedly to herself. “I did it,” she whispered hoarsely. “I really did it.” She turned to Saria, triumph roaring in her heart. “I did it: I saved us!”

  But Saria
’s face was dark with fear. “You did nothing,” she said blankly. “It was the gods, not you.” She backed away a step. “Not you.”

  Harotha walked around to the other side of the dune and looked up at the mountain. The landslide had left the mountain face even sheerer than before: almost completely flat, in fact, like a wall. It was odd, an unnatural way for it to break, she thought as she walked toward it. The dust was still settling, but the moon was bright, illuminating something on the side of the mountain that had not been there before; something had been unearthed from beneath all that red rock.

  A shadow flicked over the ground, racing away over the rocks, then another one, right behind it.

  “Dereshadi!” Saria cried out, and Harotha ran back to find her cowering under the swell of the dune as she looked fearfully up at the sky, where dereshadi were rising from every corner of the city. One skimmed by right over their heads, the moonlight shining through its wings to reveal a tracery of veins as delicate as a spider’s web. They were all heading in the same direction.

  “Trouble at the mines,” said Harotha.

  “I have to go,” Saria said suddenly in a voice hushed with dread. “My son— I have to go. Dramash is out there.”

  “You can’t go now. They’ll see you,” Harotha answered practically. “Listen, Faroth won’t let anything happen to Dramash, you know that. Look, can you see that, over there?” She tugged Saria out from under the dune and pointed at the thing she’d seen: shadowy lines in the rock that moved against the natural grain of the stone, and below it, something black that might be a cave-mouth, though only a sliver was visible above the piles of fallen rocks. “There. Do you see where I mean? It’s just above that—”

  Saria slapped Harotha, hard, across the face.

  For a moment everything turned red. Then Harotha slowly raised her hand to her burning cheek. Her mouth opened, but she was too stunned to say a word.

  “You have no idea what’s really important,” Saria told her, regarding her with a cold kind of pity. “Maybe when you’re a mother you’ll understand.” Then she turned away and fled in the direction of the mines.

  Harotha watched her go, staring across the unfamiliar landscape of broken rocks, sand and fallen houses long after Saria was out of sight. The night air felt colder beneath the dune’s shadow, and she shivered and wrapped her arms around her belly. She had never felt more alone.

  Chapter Ten

  Rho was watching Frea, who was watching one of the hands turn slowly in the air. Something in the way the small, delicate movements played in the dappled shadows of the torchlight had transfixed her. She was regarding the turning hand with such serenity that Rho could almost feel the soft, heavy silence of the snow-covered mountains of Norland—a place Frea had never even seen, except maybe in her dreams.

  The moment didn’t last long; even as she stood there watching, the hand wilted like a flower on a broken stem. The entombed slave to whom the hand had belonged had finally suffocated.

  A formation of triffons thumped by overhead and Rho looked up from the collapsed entrance to the mine. The fly-over elicited a chorus of fresh screams from the hysterical slaves who were already flailing around Frea’s normally well-ordered mining camp, beating their breasts or clawing uselessly at the stones, dirt and Shadari corpses blocking up the shaft. By his tally more than a hundred slaves had been trapped underground by the collapse.

  Frea called. Then she turned the eye-slits of her silver helmet on Rho. she began, walking toward him,

  He looked around at the havoc playing out all over the camp.

  Her warning clamped down like a suffocating hand over his mouth.

  he amended, stressing her title, feeling the acid burn in his stomach: yet another reminder that she’d nullified any claim he might have to familiarity.

  Ongen rushed up with panic oozing around him like a stench.

  she snapped.

 

  Rho followed her gaze over to the southern end of the camp where the roofless smelting huts were huddled against the mountain-face. Frea wiped the sweat from the back of her neck.

 

  Frea gave no response beyond the sheer black wall of her mood, forcing Ongen to try again. His silver eyes twitched at their reflection in her helmet before he hastily refocused them elsewhere.

  Rho echoed in dismay. The continued wailing of the slaves behind him sounded like a chorus of shrieking gulls.

  Frea sheathed Blood’s Pride and charged off toward the huts, darting around a few hilt-less black sword-blades stuck in the sand to cool. She was swiftly followed by Rho and Ongen. Rho envied the guards who’d served in the early days of the colony, when all they had to do was mine the ore and ship it back to Norland. As soon as the empire began to expand, the raw value of the ore had made it irresistible to pirates, so they’d shifted to sending the blood for the imprinting to the Shadar and making the swords there. Imperial ships came twice a year now to drop off jars of blood for the new blades and to pick up the ones already made. Since the blades were only valuable to those whose blood had been used to imprint them, robbing the shipments now was hardly worth the risk.

  She disappeared inside the hut while Rho stopped in the doorway. The place was in a shambles. Most of the furniture and equipment had been damaged, and large red rocks were lying among the wreckage. The crates were in the corner, smashed into splinters, and from between the broken boards the blood of Norland’s finest warriors dripped to the ground like the silver-blue tracks of so many snails.

  Ongen asked as they backed out into the cooler air.

  Rho cut him off.

 

  he lashed out impatiently.

  Ongen’s anxiety shifted to resentment, pushing at him like a shove to the shoulder.

  he asked as Ongen drew his sword and lumbered off back toward the mine.

  Ongen scoffed.

  As Rho started after him, Frea emerged from the hut and walked past him among the sword-blades. She looked up at the faint lights winking in the temple windows high above the city.

  he said, careful to keep any trace of pity to himself. He wished that she would take her helmet off. Just looking at it made him feel claustrophobic.

  she answered darkly.

  Rho had never cared about the garrison’s reputation—his only goal had been to get as far away as possible from his family’s infighting—but Frea had far grander aspirations, and her only chance of being recalled to Norland was to somehow impress the emperor with her management of the colony. Now it looked as though all of her efforts had gone up in smoke in a single night.

  he said, moving closer to her, trying to reach the vulnerability that he k
new was buried somewhere beneath the silver and leather, so much more alluring to him than the chiseled perfection of her face or the erotic promise of her flawless body.

  she commanded, marching toward the center of the mining camp. His stomach muscles contracted. What had Ongen called him—a mangy dog? But he still followed.

  The situation in the camp had not improved much. The slaves were frantically trying to dig out the shaft, but the more they dug, the more rocks and dirt—and dead—came pouring out. The ground in front of the shaft was already littered with crushed bodies, some unlucky enough to still be breathing. Those slaves who’d escaped the collapse were being rounded up, but many were just flopping around on the ground, howling and weeping.

  another soldier cried, rushing up to her,

  Frea asked, bristling.

  But before the soldier could answer, a strange, taut silence swept through the compound, flattening the noise and confusion like a shockwave. The emotions of the Norlanders charged the air like an electrical storm; Rho felt his skin bristling with it. He turned and looked in the same direction as everyone else, over the entrance to the mines.

  The Mongrel.

  She was ethereal but unmistakable: the eye-patch like a hole on one side of her face, the tangle of black hair and the aura of invincibility pulsating through the air around her. She was bare-armed, and stood with both hands behind her back.

  How the piss-poor Shadari had ever managed to hire the most notorious mercenary commander who had ever lived, he couldn’t begin to imagine, but there she was, standing on a rocky outcrop over the entrance to the mines.

  Just then a sibilant noise scratched at his ears: the Shadari were whispering. The Mongrel brought her hands out from behind her back to reveal a bundle hanging from each fist. The two round objects transcribed an arc against the moonlit sky and landed in front of Frea’s boots with a thump. The metallic smell of fresh blood wafted up to him. With a twinge of satisfaction that shocked him, he recognized the one on the left as Beorun, her latest lover, his successor to her bed.