Sharani series Box Set

by Kevin L. Nielsen

  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.”

  Something hard—probably the pouch of metal disks—slammed into his head again and he knew no more.

  * * *

  Gavin awoke with a throbbing headache pounding on the back of his eyelids like the beating of a drum. For a moment, before he came fully awake, he wondered why he had his eyes closed in the middle of one of his grandmother’s performances. Then he opened his eyes.

  Darkness greeted him like an old friend. He groaned and sat up, feeling at the large lump on the side of his head. Thankfully, his fingers didn’t find any broken skin. His vision swam, noticeable as lighter patches through the darker shadows within his sight, but he didn’t lose consciousness. He cursed silently to himself. Once again he’d made a decision without thinking it all the way through. A small part of him knew there wasn’t anything he could do about Kaiden’s abilities, but he still cursed himself anyway. He couldn’t afford to keep making these mistakes. Kaiden was right. He wasn’t ready.

  A small noise alerted him that he wasn’t the only one in the lightless room. He sighed, pushing aside the memories of the l
ast time he’d found himself a prisoner like this. At least this time he didn’t have a dagger wound in his gut. Despite that, he growled as his head throbbed and he crawled along the ground toward the sound. His hands found the person making the sound and a quick check discovered the bandage on the man’s chest. A few more moments of careful crawling found the other man not that far away. Gavin sighed and leaned back against the wall between the two men.

  “Send me to the seven hells,” Gavin muttered to himself.

  How had he landed himself a prisoner again? Things had been looking up, despite the setbacks. He was finally starting to see himself as the man his grandmother had always said he was. Farah was a large part of that, but he was now a nobody again. No, he was learning again.

  The longer he waited, the longer he lived, he was coming to understand the reality of life. Sometimes you could do all the right things and still not amount to anything in life. Sometimes becoming something more than ordinary required doing the wrong things in order to learn what not to do. Sometimes failure was more important than success because it gave you the chance to learn and grow. If you survived, that is.

  It was a choice.

  Gavin ground his teeth and tried to clear his mind. Thinking hurt, but he had to focus. Part of him vaguely wondered what had come of Nabil, though he also knew there was absolutely nothing he could do for the aevian in his current state. Maybe if he could access his powers . . .

  He tried to clear his mind again and reached out to the energy in the sand and rocks around him. It was like trying to pull a large boulder up the side of a sand dune. He felt like the harder he pulled, the deeper he sank into futility. He sighed again, massaged one temple—the one opposite the lump on his head—and tried again.

  This time it felt like he hit a barrier in his mind, a wall over which he had to climb. Ignoring the pain, ignoring the headache and the throbbing beat of his heart flitting at his temples, Gavin pushed his consciousness over the edge. Energy flooded into him.

  Awareness and mental clarity struck him like slap. Pain fled like darkness before light. Gavin seized on that power, seized on the strength and used it to batter down the wall in his mind. Energy thundered through his body and Gavin swung to his feet. Crackling white energy erupted from his hands and ran up his arms in an almost perfect imitation of the large Orinai man. Light flooded into the room and Gavin recognized it almost immediately as the exact same room within which he’d been confined with Lhaurel nearly two fortnights ago.

  The energy called on him to move, to act, to do. He took a step toward the door, a vague idea forming in his mind as he approached. Gavin only made it a single step before a hand closed around his leg.

  Gavin reacted instinctively, twisting out of the grip and slashing out with one hand as he’d seen the Orinai do. Energy streamed from him in glittering arcs, though they fizzled out only a few inches from his hand.

  “Where am I?” the Orinai man gasped. It took Gavin a long moment to puzzle out what the man had said, though the tone made it clear it was a question. The man spoke the language Gavin’s grandmother had taught him, but with enough of a difference that Gavin was only partly sure he understood.

  Gavin let the energy crackling up his hands die. It was like releasing a storm. It left a surreal sense of calm behind.

  “You’re in the Sharani Desert,” Gavin replied in the common tongue of the Rahuli. “Imprisoned within the walls of the Oasis.”

  The Orinai man made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a squeak. Gavin heard him struggling to rise and felt the motion through the rocks. Part of Gavin urged him to press the man back toward the ground and tell him to take it easy, but Gavin was done being naïve. This was the man who had attacked him and Farah without provocation. This was an Orinai.

  “Who would dare imprison me?” the man shouted, switching to a highly accented version of the common Rahuli tongue. “Do you know who I am? I am Samsin, thirteenth incarnation of Samsinorna, and a Storm Ward! My family has influence with all seventeen of the other major houses and can buy all the minor ones.”

  Gavin listened to the man ramble for a long moment, not understanding half the things he said, then interrupted him. “Are you going to sit there and whine or are you going to help me figure out how to get out of here?”

  The Orinai made a strangled noise, like a rashelta being trodden upon. Gavin smiled in the darkness.

  “I am a Great One,” Samsin growled. “And I will not be spoken to this way by a slave.”

  Gavin chuckled, the sound echoing faintly in the small room. “I don’t care if you’re the master to the gates of the seven hells. Right now all three of us are prisoners. None of us are slaves. Your friend here will die if we don’t figure out a way to get out of here and make it back to the healers.”

  “Nikanor’s here?”

  Gavin noticed a distinct change in the man’s voice. The pompous, haughty tone slipped and a note of something real came through.

  “If you mean the man with the chest wounds, yes,” Gavin said. “I did what I could for him, but I’m not a healer. I sent the woman who was with me to fetch the wettas.”

  Samsin groaned and Gavin felt him finally succeed in getting up. Gavin felt the man shuffle over to him, hands probing the ground, until they found the other man, Nikanor.

  “My head is fuzzy. What happened after you arrived, sla—” Samsin bit off the last word, though his tone had regained some of the condescension it’d had earlier.

  “Well, you tried to kill me and then I decided to help you and your friend—Nikanor is it? Then I was attacked by an old enemy I had thought contained. My mistake. I’ll never underestimate another mystic again.”

  “Mystic?” Samsin pronounced the word as if he were speaking around a mouthful of food.

  “Magic user. A magnetelorium to be precise.”

  “Your words mean nothing.”

  “He manipulated metal.”

  Samsin made a deep, hissing noise. “A slave mage using powers without a master-at-arms? What devilry is this? Speak truly, did I see you use electricity powers before?”

  Gavin frowned at the unfamiliar word. Electricity?

  “I have some powers, yes,” Gavin said, haltingly, “but they are untested and new to me.”

  Samsin grunted and Gavin wasn’t sure if it was a good sound or not.

  “Will Nikanor live?” Samsin asked.

  “Not if we don’t get out of here.” Gavin replied.

  Samsin grunted again. “Well, you should get on with that then, sla—” Again he bit off the end of the word.

  Gavin got to his feet, a sudden anger burning through the wave of dizziness and nausea that rose with him. “I am not a slave. I am not your servant. I am the man who saved your life. Now either help me find a way out of here or stay here and rot.”

  Gavin didn’t wait for Samsin to respond, but instead turned his back on the man and strode through the darkness in the direction he knew the door was located. He didn’t, however, ignore the man completely. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. But he did give the majority of his attention over to the door. He didn’t remember much about the last time he’d been here. That time he’d been next to death’s door and was only saved by Lhaurel slamming it shut in its owner’s face. What Gavin did remember was the same thing he was beginning to understand now. While most of the doors in the Roterralar Warren where ill-fitted and warped wood, this one was as hard as stone and Gavin couldn’t feel any place where he could even find purchase to pry at it.

  Gavin sensed Samsin approach before he heard him. He shifted to one side as Samsin thundered by and, to Gavin’s absolute and utter shock, began pounding on the door with a fist that sounded like iron against the stone.

  “Release me at once!” Samsin bellowed. “I don’t know who you are or why you have me here, but by the Seven Sisters and the blood of the Bleeders, I’ll bring this place down around you if you don’t get me out of here now!”

  Gavin stared in Samsin�
�s direction, though it was too dark to actually see the man. If it had been light in the room, Gavin was sure his expression would be a slackened one, wide with disbelief and incredulity.

  “What in the seven hells are you doing?” Gavin asked when he finally found his voice.

  Samsin ignored him. The Orinai pounded on the door again, each strike a double echo of the sound bouncing about within the room and in the corridor beyond.

  Chapter 18: Confrontation

  “The Sisters are the representations of the seven Progressions. They are the holy order which guides our beliefs.”

  —From Commentary on the Schema, Volume I

  Lhaurel leaned back against the wall, massaging her temples against a headache. She was tempted to ask Khari to try and heal her, though Lhaurel wasn’t sure what was wrong with her or if it was even something Khari could heal. Besides, Khari already seemed to be approaching her breaking point.

  Lhaurel sighed and tried to figure out how long the young boy she’d sent to find Khari had been gone. She’d made it partway through the Warren before she’d been unable to take another step. Stubbornness and pride could only take her so far. Fighting against her weakness and the reality of the situation was as futile as trying to walk the sands during a Migration. Except she’d done that.

  She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the ground. Her legs protested and she was sure the back of her robes were frayed from the rough surface of the wall, but she didn’t care. Setting aside her cane, Lhaurel crossed her arms over her knees and let her head fall down onto it. She allowed her eyes to close and breathed deeply. In moments, she was asleep.

  Dreams greeted her in the darkness.

  Elyana was walking in the dream, Lhaurel looking out through her eyes, as she always did. By now, she was more intrigued than panicked, having grown accustomed to the process. She didn’t know how much, if any, of the dreams may have once been real, but she walked through them now without any fear.