“I see the end, Rafen,” Etana said.
Rafen was too tired to respond.
“You’re rasping, Rafen,” she said. Her voice tightened. “Zion, please don’t let him die.”
“I’m not dying,” he said. “I’m just tired.”
Their new surroundings distracted him. They were now standing on a large, long step that was part of a tremendously steep staircase along the mountainside the bridge had led them to. Gargoyles and odd carvings in the stones amid the crags stared down at them with dead, flinty eyes.
Etana forced him to sit down on a flat rock, and she tore his cloak and coat from him and delved into his shirt. Her sharp inhalation told him she had discovered precisely what he had determined to hide from her. He was too exhausted to resist. He all but reclined there, his eyes closed and his bleeding jaw hanging.
After what felt like an age, she passed him a water pouch and a little dried meat that was impossible to chew with his latest injury. He reached out his hand absentmindedly and found her diaphragm. He felt a little lower and smiled faintly. Already, there was a small bulge.
“The child is healthy?”
“Oh yes,” Etana said. “She doesn’t take after you at all.”
“She?”
He opened his eyes to gaze into hers.
“I’m sure it must be a she. I need some female company in these mountains.”
“Ha,” Rafen said with a grin.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, glancing backward and straightening. “They are coming.”
By her tone, Rafen knew she wasn’t talking about Naztwai. When he started to get up, Etana stopped him, pressing a hand to his chest.
“Please don’t,” she said. “I’m going to give water to Trinity while we wait.”
She moved away to where the horse was standing nearby, vainly looking for moss to eat. The time dragged while he waited for the others to come where he could see them. Sherwin made it first. Then Etana gave a cry of delight at seeing her grandfather and brother with Francisco.
“Hush,” Fritz said from somewhere nearby. “We need to plan where to go from here, Etana. Do you have a map?”
Sherwin’s face was completely white, and his clothes were covered with yellow Naztwai blood. His mouth hung open with sheer weariness, and he wore a look of horror as he climbed down from the step Rafen was on, making for an alcove amid the crags of the mountainside.
Rafen forced himself to straighten somewhat, so that he could see what Sherwin was looking at. It was a large rectangular door, entirely of stone, and framed with Ashurite runes. A little below Rafen, Sherwin was standing directly before it. He was rasping.
Get up!
Rafen heard Demus in his head and felt again the blow of the gnarled black stick. He forced himself to his feet and lowered himself off the step he was on.
“Sherwin,” he said, sounding stronger than he felt. “Get away from there.”
“Why?” Sherwin said, gazing back at Rafen, his eyes glazed.
He’s not himself, Rafen thought wildly. He’s too tired to resist the spirits in this place.
“Get away from the door,” Rafen said, stepping between Sherwin and it. As he did so, he felt the strange magnetic pull of Nazt. He was inexplicably driven to touch the stone.
Zion, help me! he thought, resisting as much as he could.
“Rafen!” Etana shouted. “What are you doing down there?”
“Yeah, what’re yer doin’?” Sherwin yelled. “I jus’ want to look at it, tha’s all.”
He made to shove Rafen aside, and Rafen fought with his meager strength. A small flare of flame threw Sherwin back. At the same time, Rafen’s foot slipped, and his back hit the door. With a scream of pain, Sherwin rolled to put out the fire on his clothes. They wouldn’t go out. Rafen lunged forward and absorbed them, swaying weakly, guilt flooding him.
Etana had clambered down the stone step too. She screamed and pointed at the door.
Rafen looked back. The runes on the door were glowing green as if a strange fire had been lit beneath them. A cloud of green smoke seeped out of the cracks. The humming was very loud now. The smoke rolled forward, and as it did so, the stone it touched began to cascade down like a dusty waterfall.
“GET UP!” Etana screeched at Sherwin, heaving him to his feet.
Rafen flung up a fiery shield. The smoke trickled through it, undaunted. Sherwin looked stupefied. Then he threw himself toward the stone step.
Rafen ran with Etana. They pulled themselves back up to where the others were. In horror, Fritz dropped the map he and Kasper were perusing.
“What in Zion’s name—?”
He darted over to Francisco, assisting him with kesmal to get Trinity up onto the next step. While Kasper scrambled upward frantically, Fritz erected a giant yellow shield. The smoke passed through it as if it wasn’t there.
“Climb!” Etana gasped, forcing Rafen to do so.
The next step was higher than his waist, so it was with an effort that he managed to get onto it. He and Etana had scarcely left the previous step when the green smoke, which now moved eerily fast, swept across it and left it as falling debris. The bridge was severed from it and started to collapse.
Rafen and Etana were on their third step now. Sherwin had overtaken them. He howled from above, “COME IN ’ERE! RAF, ETANA, COME IN!”
“Come on,” Etana said, dragging him up his fourth step.
The smoke surged higher now, and its warm breath tickled Rafen’s ankles as he clambered up beside Etana.
Etana swung herself up onto the fifth step so quickly that Rafen was frightened for the baby. She reached down to help him when something dragged her from sight. Her shriek of anger reached his ears.
“Etana!” Rafen shouted, struggling to find himself a foothold so he could heave himself up.
Kasper appeared above him, his face pale but determined. His eyes widened as he looked down at Rafen, and Rafen glanced down too. The smoke was nearly at his feet; his stair was disintegrating beneath him. He felt himself drop suddenly. Kasper grabbed his arm, which jerked in its socket as his descent was arrested, and hauled him up. The smoke billowed up behind Rafen as he reached the fifth step, his wound searing. He was on his hands and knees because the pain was so bad. All thought of doing kesmal had left him.
“This way!” Kasper cried.
The humming of the Ravine had become an intense ringing in their ears. Kasper dashed ahead of Rafen and pulled him toward a narrow opening in the mountainside. Rafen crawled through it, his limbs trembling terribly. Kasper gave him a shove from behind, and Etana wrenched Rafen in from within.
Kasper gave an odd, surprised cry, and Etana screamed again.
Rafen turned his head to see the step behind crumbling. The smoke had Kasper. He was swathed in it, and it lifted him into the air. Behind the luminous green, Kasper’s hands scrabbled at his throat. He was slowly suffocating. And then, as if the knot of smoke had been pulled tight, it closed around him altogether, a dense pillar of green. As it dispersed, a gray trickle of dust joined that of the destroyed rocks.
Kasper’s cry repeated itself over and over in Rafen’s head. Surely this was merely another practical joke of his.
Chapter Twenty-One
Alakil’s Tomb
Alakil had had no idea he was incomplete, just as Sherwin had not suspected it until he reached his teenage years. Even then, Sherwin only really felt the lack of his phoenix feather. It pinched him, ate him up, made him a misfit, and kept him in the dark. He felt that if he ever once grasped the feather that haunted his dreams, he would know who he was, and he would understand his connection to the strange fantastical life he lived while experiencing reality. He would no longer be a child possessed by illusions.
Alakil, on the contrary, had left neediness behind in his childhood. After the Sartians attacked his father, his mother took him to the edge of a cliff and told him they were going to bring her dying husband back. He believed her. He thirsted for i
t. He looked over the rocky edge and down at the frothy waves and steamy spray and thought he could see his father alive and healthy amid it all. And then she shoved him over the edge, and the razor-sharp rocks shot toward him like spearheads.
It was an old Ashurite tradition. When an elder of the clan was dying, it was believed their life could be redeemed for the life of another. Children were normally chosen, because they had no real value yet. Alakil had never thought it would happen to him. He was the son of a chief; surely he was worth something.
Alakil’s powers saved him. The instant before he was impaled on the rocks among the churning waters below, he managed to perform kesmal. A beam of blue that sprang from his arm wrapped itself around an outcrop of rock on the cliff above, and he hung, attached to it, while he mustered the courage to climb.
He almost let go. She thought his father was more worthy of life than her son. Why shouldn’t he agree? Yet, in that moment, he resolved he would never be a sacrifice. He gritted his teeth and decided, at eleven years of age, that if greatness must be preserved, others were to make the sacrifice. Not him. Never him. He would be even greater than his father one day.
The phoenix feather confirmed it. At fourteen, he heard a new voice in his head, and faint though it was, he followed it to the cave in the Cursed Woods where the Sartians’ god appeared before him. He had thought it was all a lie up until that point. When he saw the fire smoldering in the Phoenix’s eyes, he had known there was truth in all the Sartian worship. Still, he told himself the Phoenix was a facet of Nazt, an inferior representative. He himself would be the new one. The Phoenix had drawn a feather with a blood-red spine from its wing, and Alakil accepted it, not because he wanted connection with Zion, but because he wanted to know exactly why he was special.
He had found out. He had learned he was one of the preexistent spirits that had helped protect the world in ancient times. Later, when Fritz the Explorer had found him, Alakil had introduced himself as what the philosophers and seers termed a Runi – a “by-God”, one who had lived in proximity to the Phoenix for thousands of years.
Later, Alakil had judged he had progressed, because he had moved from closeness to the Phoenix to communion with Nazt.
So the Nazt-worshipper had received the sign, and Sherwin had been abandoned.
*
“I’ll get him,” Rafen said, turning around to crawl back through the narrow opening to retrieve Kasper.
“No,” Fritz snarled, dragging him back roughly. “He is gone, Rafen. We must travel through this place now. It has some kesmalic protection from… from that.”
He looked up at the green smoke, which was continuing to ascend yet could not, for some reason, touch the rocky wall behind which they all hid.
Etana had one fist stuffed in her mouth, her face distorted with tears. Rafen whirled around to face the way he had come again. It was ridiculous of Kasper to upset his sister like this. When he opened his mouth to roar Kasper’s name, a scrap of sanity restrained him. This had happened before. He had called Erasmus; he had called Elizabeth; they, too, had had no business leaving when they did. He had even screamed out to Torius when he was beyond answering.
He remained frozen to the spot, unable to tear his eyes from the thick green smoke outside, trying to make sense of the ringing and the voices in his head. Kasper was dead. He could look at the fact quite coldly now, he discovered. A plunging in his stomach told him he was responsible for this. If he had not touched the door in the side of the mountain this wouldn’t have happened. It was a trap after all, as Asiel had said. A trap that only the Fourth Runi could and would trigger. Shame swallowed him as he thought of the Phoenix.
“Rafen, we must continue,” Fritz said, pulling him up by the shoulder.
Rafen staggered over to Etana, who had begun a muted howling. He put his arm around her, even though his own legs were giving way.
“We must continue,” he said in a measured voice. “Come, Etana.”
She resisted him, flinging herself back toward the rocky entrance they had passed through. He held her back, his grip tightening.
“Etana, you have to listen to me. There’s nothing we can do.”
“There has to be – there has to be—”
She sounded as if she were hyperventilating. Rafen pulled her away from the stone opening.
The interior of the mountain was a large and interminable hall with a ceiling so high it was nearly invisible. Tremendous pillars, reminiscent of castle turrets although ribbed and carved with Ashurite runes, upheld the distant rocks overhead.
“Ride the horse, Rafen,” Fritz said. “You are too weak to walk.”
Reluctantly, Rafen allowed Fritz to help him onto Trinity. Francisco led the horse on by the halter, and Fritz strode forward to join them. Rafen reached down to grasp Etana’s shaking hand. He couldn’t speak. His throat was so tight he felt like he couldn’t breathe. Sherwin looked back at Rafen, hollow-eyed. Rafen thought his expression was that of a suicidal person.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he forced himself to say.
Sherwin shook his head at Rafen.
“Sherwin, don’t despair,” Rafen said, even though it seemed a ridiculous thing to say. “Don’t.”
Choking on her own tears, Etana stared at him as if he had lost his mind.
“I would give my eyes to know who is behind this,” Fritz said at last.
“What do you mean?” Francisco said numbly.
“Who sent the Naztwai?” Fritz said. “And the spirit’s pall back there?”
Francisco’s watery eyes widened. “For a surety, I cannot tell,” he said sarcastically. “Perhaps the Lashki?”
“I am sorry,” Fritz said crisply, and waited for Francisco to repeat himself.
“Do you not know who the Lashki is?”
“I have never heard any such name,” Fritz said.
“What did you mean when you said in your message you were the current royalty?” Francisco asked.
“I meant the truth,” Fritz said, turning to him in surprise. “I am the current royalty of Siana. And whichever rebels have done these things I will make an example of.”
“What brought you to the Mountains in the first place?” Francisco said.
“I was going with my standing army to finish the devils in yonder Den,” Fritz said. “They took fright at the voices in the Mountains. One man accompanied me, and he too deserted me in the end. So you and I emptied the Den Nyolam together.”
“Ah,” Francisco said with a trace of bitterness. “This explains why you do not understand anything. My brother has combined the times. You conquered the Den Nyolam the same year you conquered Alakil on the Plain ki Naag. This was all some forty years ago.”
Fritz raised an eyebrow. “You mistake me,” he said.
“No,” Sherwin said darkly, in a strangled voice, “yer mistake us, unfortunately. But I’m sure yeh’ll get to see Alakil presently, and then yeh’ll find out who exactly the Lashki is.”
“I welcome the chance to meet Alakil and finish him,” Fritz said. “Yet I do not wish to be foolish. Let us travel quicker.”
He urged everyone into a run. The bumping of the horse aggravated Rafen’s wound still further.
Sherwin was all too right. Ten minutes hadn’t even passed before Rafen’s phoenix feather seared him through his shirt. He glanced behind.
Standing on the length of a fallen pillar that they had all wended their way around, the Lashki pointed his copper rod at Rafen. Annette and Asiel mounted the pillar on either side of him, blood lust in their eyes. Asiel’s unnaturally long face was fevered.
Giving a broken cry, Etana clutched Rafen’s hand tighter. Rafen made to draw his sword, but King Fritz threw himself between them and the Lashki, his own blade glittering with kesmal.
“What new fiend is this?” he asked Rafen.
The Lashki stiffened before laughing low in his throat, his dilated eyes flicking to Rafen’s face. A thrill of gratification passed through Rafen at the
ghoul’s fear.
“What is this mirage you have summoned up?” the Lashki said, poised uncertainly on the pillar.
“Oh no,” Rafen said. “This is not a mirage. This is real.”
At the Lashki’s voice, Fritz blanched. He gritted his teeth, though his sword arm trembled.
“It is you then, Alakil,” he said. “What have you done to yourself? Has my victory over you driven you to this abomination?”
The Lashki’s frame became taut.
“My enemies and followers alike call me the Lashki Mirah,” he hissed. “And this is no abomination, Fritz. This is the final purification.”
“Yeh’re deluded!” Sherwin yelled at him.
The Lashki’s black eyes swivelled to him reluctantly. He looked at Sherwin as if he were some kind of vulgar insect.
“I do not expect a human to understand,” he said. “Rafen knows what I do to humans.”
His face split into a rotten-toothed smile, and Rafen knew he was talking about the death of his mother. With a roar, he whipped his sword out and raised it, driving kesmal into the blade with an effort. He cursed his own weakness. Today, he would be lucky to survive five minutes fighting against the Lashki. It didn’t matter. None of that mattered except Kasper’s death, still so vivid in his mind. He made to drive Trinity forward, but Fritz seized the halter and stayed him.
“No!” he said. “I will deal with Alakil. He has taken his misguided philosophies too far this time.”
The mutinous look on the Lashki’s face was likely one Fritz was familiar with. Although he didn’t even flinch, Rafen knew what was coming. He shoved Etana toward Francisco. Etana howled and pulled Trinity away from her grandfather as the explosion of blue from the copper rod rent the air. Fritz’s shield was an instinctive reaction; an arc of captured sunlight against which the wave of the Lashki’s fury broke.
“Get on the horse!” Francisco shouted, shoving Etana toward Trinity.
“Get me down from here!,” Rafen bellowed at Francisco. “I’m going to help Fritz!”
The Fourth Runi (The Fledgling Account Book 4) Page 20
