The stone floor felt cold beneath Dransig’s head as the sounds of battle erupted behind him. “Goodbye, Shad.” And he found that he still bore the capacity for tears.
Chapter 74: End of the Road
Herrin Fayel gripped the sheggam—which, until moments earlier, had been the human Shad Belgrith—by the hair. Or at least, he held part of the sheggam. During their battle, he had managed to pry the beast’s jaws apart and, in a single jerk powered by the shegasti running through Herrin’s own blood, rip the sheggam’s head from its body. He tossed the head away, which landed wetly, and picked up the edge of his cloak before stepping over the corpse.
Killing the sheggam had taken less time that Herrin had expected. But then it had been a new sheggam, still getting used to its changed body. Herrin had trained his own body for many years for just such an occasion. He had to remind himself that this time, he had been lucky to face one so inexperienced.
He clucked disapprovingly as he knelt down next to Dransig. “You don’t look well, old friend,” Herrin said. Dransig was alive but barely, looking as if in the throes of a seizure, he was shaking so hard. Sweat darkened his gray hair, yet the old traitor had the gall to open his eyes and fix Herrin with a hard glare.
“That … was my daughter you killed,” he said through chattering teeth.
“Your daughter killed herself,” Herrin said. “Just as you had. It just took a little longer for you.”
The fire went out of Dransig’s eyes. In its place was the look of defeat. “The … others?”
Herrin shook his head. “I fear they’ll be gone before the night is out. There are just too many sheggam for them to deal with.”
Dransig bared his teeth in a snarl. “Vin …dication.” The snarl turned to a grimace as the pain overtook him. “We’re … the last … of our damned order.”
“No, old friend.” Herrin unbuckled Dransig’s belt and gently lifted the tabard and mail shirt over the old man’s head. “I’m the last.” He continued to remove Dransig’s armor and clothes until he was wearing nothing but his loin wrapping.
Herrin stood and studied the older man. There were scars crisscrossing his body—or at least they would have been scars, but the wounds looked as if they had never healed. Like the skin was just … held there, stitched together by something far more ephemeral than gut.
Of course, that was exactly the case. Shegasti, far more than a normal man could take into himself, bound his body together.
Many of the wounds Dransig had suffered over the years—some of them delivered by Herrin himself, when Dransig turned traitor—would have been fatal, even to a normal Knight of the Eye. But a normal Knight of the Eye tapped into only a trickle of shegasti, through a single piercing of sheggam bone.
Dransig had twenty-two piercings. Stolen from the Knights the night of his betrayal, heaping injustice upon injustice.
Yet that betrayal was finally catching up with him.
Herrin crouched down, removed a glove, and brushed his fingers along the thin curved bone hooked into the skin beneath Dransig’s nipple. “You are worse than a traitor to your oath,” he said quietly. “You are an abomination. You are the very thing our Order was created to destroy.”
Dransig squeezed his eyes shut. “Then may it destroy you, too.”
Herrin clucked again and yanked the thin bone out of Dransig’s skin. Dransig’s eyes shot open. His back arched as if he had been struck by lightning. He groaned between tightly clenched teeth as a narrow line of blood blossomed across his shoulder, slowly sheeting his collarbone in glistening crimson.
When the next piercing was pulled out, a chunk of flesh from Dransig’s back flopped to the ground as if it had been severed free by a phantom sword. Dransig’s eyes rolled back into his head.
By the time Herrin had pulled out the sixth piercing, Dransig finally stopped thrashing. By the time the twenty-second piercing had been pulled out, Dransig was in pieces.
His duty complete, Herrin stood and looked down at the mess at his feet. “Goodbye, old friend.” There was the faintest tremor in his voice. His cloak flapped about him as he spun on his heels and walked away from the two corpses who were once father and daughter.
Chapter 75: Making the Best of It
Yarid stepped over the remnants of a dish cabinet. The contents—polished white bowls and cups of the finest quality seen in the Accord—crunched under the soft leather sole of his boot like brittle bleached bones. To his right, the window to his pantry had been broken in. A body hung over the sill, arms draped over the counter. Not all of the glass had been broken out; a single, thin shard stabbed up through the woman’s chin. She wore the servants’ garb of his house; he should know her face. But as he stared at her, he could recall nothing about her. As if his mind refused to acknowledge she had ever existed.
Perhaps it was always that way, he thought, more disturbed by this thought than by the scene of violence surrounding him. He shuddered and stepped into the hallway.
More bodies. Yarid had no idea why he was here. He had never felt truly at home on his estate; the Council Chambers brought him far more comfort than this place ever had, as odd as that was. Shouldn’t he have felt at home in his home? Perhaps that question, more than anything else, was what had driven him here when the chaos began.
Or maybe the fact that a sheggam emissary had been standing in the Council Chambers earlier that day, tainting his true home with its presence. Where else could Yarid have gone?
A moot point, he thought as he quickened his pace. The sheggam invaders had clearly been here already. He had been searching his manse for someplace he could hide, somewhere where he could wait for this disaster to pass him over. So far, he had found nothing. Perhaps there was nothing. Anywhere.
He tried not to look at the man with his chest split open. He tried not to look at the severed head whose body was nowhere to be seen. He tried not to look at the faces he should have known. If he looked, he might not be able to keep choking down the mad scream that was stuck in his throat, clawing its way up to his lips.
Yarid’s eyes blurred with tears and he ran as fast his soot- and mud-stained robes would allow.
Shores take me. What have I done? Never mind that nothing he did had had any effect. This would’ve been the result no matter what, thanks to what he had done in helping that sheggam emissary. He had been ready and willing to help the monsters that had brought this destruction.
When they found his body, would anyone recognize his face?
Would anyone care?
He staggered into his sitting room and leaned against the doorjamb to catch his breath. Much to his surprise, the room seemed to be relatively untouched. A single lamp hung from the center support post, casting deep shadows around the room.
Two figures sat in the near-darkness.
Yarid gasped in horror. They’re here! Waiting for me!
“Yarid,” said one of the figures. It was certainly human. And old.
Yarid let out a shaking sigh. “Don’t scare me again like that, old man. What are you doing here?”
Gorun rose with a groan and took the lamp from the post. The light shifted, revealing Jordin on the hard sofa, the one that Tirfaun always sat on.
Yarid looked at him. Then back at Gorun. “Ah.” Of course. Someone had used Jordin to threaten Yarid, someone with the wit to keep Yarid in the dark. Who better than Gorun? “Well played, old man. So, you’ve come to finish the job, have you?” Yarid crossed the room and slumped into a chair near Jordin. Yarid’s old servant, sitting stiffly, did not meet his eye. “Make it quick. I’m sure you’ve got more important things to fuss over.”
“I’m not here to kill you, Yarid.” Gorun stood over him. “You did what I asked.”
Yarid couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “You mean the Runeway? A lot of good that did anyone. It will never be completed, and if it were, so what? Everyone will be too dead to use it.”
“Not everyone.” With his thin, spotted hand, Gorun lifted a silver
chain out of the neck of his robe. Hanging from the necklace was a pendant of a sort Yarid had never seen before. It looked ancient, like a tooth, or a bone, but not quite as solid. Strands of light gray fiber looked ready to peel off. The length of it, no longer than a man’s finger, was capped at both ends by poorly hammered iron. Yarid could just make out tiny etchings all over its surface.
“It’s hideous,” Yarid said. “Don’t tell me you’ve been getting fashion advice from Jordin.”
Gorun smiled. “It’s what is keeping me alive. It can keep you alive too, if you stay near enough to it.”
Yarid didn’t like the look of absolute calm, of absolute certainty, in Gorun’s eyes. “I suppose you’re not going to stay in my house, are you?”
“No, Yarid. My loyal servant,” Gorun nodded at Jordin, “and I are headed somewhere else.”
“And where might that be?”
“Sheggamur.”
“You’re mad, old man, for two reasons. One. You think you can just hop over Andrin’s Wall. Two. You think I’m going to put myself in a worse situation than this.”
Gorun sat down. “You’re smarter than this. The Wall is nothing now; the sheggam have proved that. And Sheggamur, for all its problems, is now a safer place than here.”
Yarid narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“Orthkalu, the sheggam emissary, wasn’t lying. At least, not about that. Sheggam and humans coexist up there. There are even opportunities for enterprising humans to rise within the ranks of sheggam society. Of course, we wouldn’t have the same level of luxury that we had as Councilors of the Wall. But sometimes sacrifices must be made for the sake of survival.”
Yarid’s mind reeled as he worked through Gorun’s words. He leaned forward, eyes wide as the pieces of the puzzle all fell together. “Shad Belgrith was not the one who made all this possible. You were.”
Gorun set the lamp down on the table between them and shrugged. “Her father was my protégé before he abandoned his old life. So she came to me for help when Orthkalu approached her. I’m the one who actually negotiated the deal.” His gaze sharpened. “You seem to think any of this was avoidable. It wasn’t. The sheggam were coming one way or another. It’s one thing to sit back and let it happen. It’s quite another to make the best of it.”
Yarid leapt to his feet. “Make the best of it?” He swung his arm in the direction of the hallway and the horrors it held. “How do you intend to make the best of that?”
Jordin quickly—and easily—wrestled him back down to his seat.
Gorun shook his head. “I understand you’re upset. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t too, by the things I have seen.”
Yarid scoffed and looked away.
Gorun continued. “But we can’t change this. It was inevitable. The sheggam were always going to come. There’s a reason the sheggam hunted mankind down until Andrin built the Wall. Because the Wall was all that could keep them out. Once that was no longer true, we were lambs for the slaughter.” He seized Yarid’s hands in his own. “Think, son. Not on what should have been. But on what is.”
Yarid wanted to shake his hands free of Gorun’s cold, wrinkled ones. But he didn’t. “That pendant,” he said after a moment. “What does it do?”
Gorun smiled. “It keeps the three of us from becoming sheggam food.” He stood, pulling Yarid up with him. “Come. Let’s put this awful mess behind us and start fresh.”
Start fresh, Yarid thought uneasily as Gorun tugged him out of the house with Jordin quick on their heels, in a land full of sheggam.
Chapter 76: The Dangers of the Night
Tharadis’s eyes flashed open.
He inhaled sharply, struggling to make sense of surroundings, then relaxed. The scent of the crackling fire in front of him and the weight of his sleeping daughter in his lap reminded him where he was. The caravan.
Countless people, now maybe several thousand, huddled on this hill around fires just like his, seeking protection in the circle of wagons and the handfuls of weary soldiers standing guard at its edges. They hadn’t stopped him at the line of wagons. They had taken one look at his face, carrying a soaking-wet Nina in his arms, and admitted him without question.
All it had taken to get here: the constant fighting in the city, finding Nina, escaping through the river until the two of them washed up at the caravan’s edge … it was all a blur, like a nightmare he wanted to forget. A nightmare he knew he would never wake up from.
Four more familiar forms slept around the fire, huddled under filthy scraps of blankets—forms he had believed he’d never see again. He was happy to see that Chad and Erianna had made it out alive. So had the red-haired librarian, Alyssa, though she suffered worse injuries than the rest. She flitted in and out of consciousness, but at least the gash in her head wasn’t bleeding so much now.
But what Esta was doing in Garoshmir was utterly beyond Tharadis. She hadn’t spoken when he and Nina first arrived. She hadn’t even noticed them standing there. Erianna said something about the night being too much for her, that she needed time. Tharadis had simply nodded, sat down, and slept, letting all his troubles wait for when he could deal with them again.
He was so exhausted he doubted if a sheggam gnawing on his hand would have stirred him. He wondered what, then, had woken him.
A sharp throbbing in his wounded hand answered him.
He lifted the hand to inspect it. Blood was crusted on both the front and back of the bandage, but fresh blood no longer soaked through. Still that promise of healing and pain pulsed within the wound. Tharadis felt a moment of panic, wondering if in his exhaustion he had let his guard down, letting the shegasti take him over. He wondered how he would know if it had already begun.
He forced the panic down. He hadn’t turned into a sheggam. Not yet, at least. But how much time did he have? How long before he was a threat to everyone he loved?
Tears burned his eyes as he brushed a strand of damp black hair from his daughter’s sleeping face with his uninjured hand. Would he have to leave her so soon after becoming her father in truth?
If that’s what it takes, he thought. If that’s what it takes to keep her safe.
Another throb came, but this time, something was different. The promise was still there, buried within. But something else was there: a call.
A call to come south.
His eyelids fluttered. Whatever it was, it could wait. He was simply too tired to comply.
The call came again. South.
Come south to me.
Tharadis’s chin lowered until it rested against his chest.
Come south to me. Protect your master.
South. The Rift.
Tharadis lifted his head. The fog of sleep cleared. His eyes widened as he remembered.
The sheggam from the Council session. He had built the Runeway.
He was going to the Rift.
Tharadis had to go. Now. He moved to wake Nina and say goodbye. To tell her he loved her. But his hand froze an inch from her shoulder.
Goodbye. He knew it might be the last time. He knew it was mad, but some part of thought that if he didn’t say goodbye, it wouldn’t have to be. He slipped out from under Nina and nearly broke into a sprint. But he stopped to stare down at her face. Beauty once more, he thought, wiping at his cheeks before breaking his gaze and running for the caravan’s edge.
“Warden?”
Tharadis stopped at the familiar voice and turned. A trio of soldiers jogged over to him. Sentinels, Tharadis realized when they were close enough. The man in the lead removed his helmet, revealing close-cropped red hair and an angular face. As one, the three of them saluted him.
“Lieutenant Metsfurth,” Tharadis said, returning the salute. “I’m glad to see you and your men are alive.”
“You, as well, Warden.” Dim firelight flickered over the planes of Metsfurth’s face, revealing a troubled expression. “Warden, sir. Captain Firnaleos hasn’t arrived yet. And given the situation, we … don
’t know if we should expect him.”
Tharadis knew better than to mutter some meaningless words of encouragement. He knew how hollow they would sound. Besides, he could see what the man was really trying to ask him: tell us what to do. “I don’t know what you expect of me, Lieutenant. I know very little about the Sentinels.”
“I understand that. But you are the Warden of Naruvieth. And our captain … thought highly of you.”
Tharadis sighed. He wanted to help, but he knew the situation in the south, whatever was going on down there, was far more critical than whatever the Sentinels would face. He simply didn’t have time to stay here and order them around.
But perhaps he didn’t have to. “Lieutenant, you are the ranking Sentinel officer here. That means it’s up to you to keep this caravan safe. Until all of this gets sorted out, that’s going to be your primary task.”
Metsfurth studied him with his brow furrowed, but after a moment, he nodded. “You’re right. Of course you are.” He exhaled as if a great burden were lifted off his shoulders. Sometimes a few simple words were all a person needed to get their head straight. “But what about you?”
“I … have to head south.” Tharadis shook his head. “I think this invasion was just a distraction, for whatever’s happening down there.”
Metsfurth lifted an eyebrow. “The invasion is a distraction, you say.”
“I don’t really know. Possibly. All I know is that I need to go south to stop something that might be even worse than this.”
Metsfurth stared at him as if he had just said the moons were falling. The two Sentinels behind him shared a glance. Tharadis had to admit it sounded crazy even to himself, but he didn’t know how better to explain it.
“Well,” the lieutenant finally said, “I can’t imagine what that might be, but I wish you all the luck. You’re going to need it if it truly is as dire as you say.” Again, they saluted.
Tharadis returned it. “Thank you.” He seized the man by the arm before he could leave. “If it’s not too much to ask, my daughter and my sister are over there.” He nodded in the direction of their fire. “Along with some friends. If you could—”
Shoreseeker Page 48
