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  Though he would not give her the satisfaction of telling her, Kian decided he liked that better than the anger and scorn she had first directed at him.

  Chapter 22

  As the small company finished packing the last of their scant supplies and saddled the horses, a booming clap of thunder exploded overhead. Ellonlef, who had been considering a way to thank Kian for his decision, ducked like everyone else. The abrupt movement flared the pain of her wounds and stole her breath.

  A second boom followed the first, then a third.

  The horses fought against their staked lead ropes. The Asra a’Shah, wearing dismayed expressions, ensured none broke free. As the rumbling peals faded away, Hazad pointed skyward, his jaw slack.

  Ellonlef’s heart began slamming in her chest. Streaking across the smoke-laden sky, a handful of massive fireballs burned with the brilliance of falling suns, trailing tails of fire and smoke. The roar of their passage crushed all other sound. After a few moments, the thundering began to diminish, and the fierce light of the fireballs was lost over the horizon. A few moments later, a succession of flashes pulsed back toward them. Several moments longer, and the ground began to shake under another long, steady rumble.

  “By Peropis’s poisoned teats,” Hazad shouted, “what was that?”

  The tears of Pa’amadin, Ellonlef thought, recalling when she had first seen the stars falling from the sky over Krevar. Before she could say this aloud, another explosion rippled the air, and the pebbles at her feet began to bounce over the roadway. All eyes searched the reddish sky. At first Ellonlef thought she had lost track of time, for directly overhead she saw the hazed glow of the sun-but it was not the sun.

  “To the rocks!” she screamed, her voice small under the rumbling onslaught.

  No one seemed to hear.

  She quickly limped to Kian’s side and dragged his startled face close to hers. “Take shelter in the rocks!” She pointed at the mound of boulders she had used to escape the Bashye. When he nodded, she moved for cover as fast as her injured knee would allow. She did not know what protection the outcrop would offer, but anything was better than standing in the-

  An explosion of light and sound flung her and the others to the ground. In her distress, she felt no pain, and instantly rolled to her feet. Off to the south, not more than a quarter mile away, a flaming pillar rose skyward, mushrooming at the top. At the column’s base, a ring of flames, sand, and dust billowed out and away. Several more claps of thunder, one after another in rapid succession, propelled her back to her original course. Overhead, more small suns had been born in the sky.

  As she reached the first weathered boulder, brilliant flares to the east drew her eye. Like arrow-straight bolts of lightning, a half dozen fireballs streaked into the earth. The blinding flashes and subsequent peals of thunder ripped at her senses. Where those flashes originated, pillars of grimy fire and ash rose up like malignant toadstools.

  Ellonlef slapped her hands over her ears, trying to ward against the concussive blasts, but their noise was too huge. Each one shuddered the earth, the air, her flesh. She wanted to dive into a deep black hole and bury herself under the sand of the Kaliayth, but she could not close her watering eyes against the terrible sight.

  Streaks fell near and far, and in all directions sooty plumes rose up and up. Thunder rolled incessantly, until it all became an unbroken wall of sound. Across the road, the horses were mad with terror, jerking against their lead ropes, but she could not hear them trumpeting. Asra a’Shah scrambled amid the rocks around her, blindly seeking shelter. One man, terrorized beyond reason, flung himself flat and began clawing at the ground with his bare hands, his eyes bulging.

  Ellonlef felt herself succumbing to a strange and horrified wonder. She forgot about everything, save what could be no less than the true end of all things-all that had happened before were but the first sparks of the coming inferno.

  She did not know how long she stood there, watching as the midmorning sky went from a reddish brown to a deep and poisoned sable. The scent of burning rock stuck in her throat, choking her, but she could not look away from the awesome destruction all around. Buffeting winds, coming first one direction then another, pelted her with stinging grit, brought with them the heat of nearby blazes. If this was the end, then she would see it.

  Another brilliant flash, brighter than any so far and so close as to leave her momentarily blinded, sent her reeling despite herself. A hot, grainy cushion of air slammed into her. She landed hard on her back and stayed there, looking straight up. The sky above roiled like a cauldron of ash and blood. Now true lightning flashed, bolts of blurred crimson.

  A face appeared over hers, framed by the nightmare sky. Kian’s braided ebon locks hung down, almost touching her nose. Rather than fear or panic, his blue eyes were wide with a reckless excitement, and she was glad of that. If she had seen him in a terrified state, a man in whom she sensed great strength and resilience, she might have begun shrieking and never stopped.

  He was shouting, but his words were buried under a sound like that of mountains dying. She could only look at him, and he did not look away. Again, she was glad of it, though she did not know why. It did not matter. In that moment, she decided that if he was the last thing she ever saw, it was enough.

  When she did not answer whatever he had asked, he looked her over, his hands following his eyes. His touch, somehow rough and gentle at the same time, brought a queer tingle to her skin, and she could not help but smile.

  He abruptly stopped what he was doing and peered at her with that same mistrust as before, as if she were dangerous in some way. Then, with a shake of his head, he spoke again, and his hands pushed under her shoulders and the back of her knees. Seemingly with no effort, he lifted her. Tentatively, she reached her arms around his neck and drew herself close, pressing her head against his broad chest. Again, seemingly without effort, he began leaping through the tumbled boulders.

  Despite all the grinding roar that filled the world, Ellonlef was sure she could hear the strong galloping beat of his heart. She pressed herself closer to that sound, taking strength and comfort from it, relishing the heat of his skin pouring through his clothing. Even his scent, that of sweat and horse, steel and the dust of the desert, brought a sensation of peace that she had not realized she needed, let alone wanted. She closed her eyes.

  She opened them again as the noise of the crumbling world faded. She was surrounded by absolute darkness. Cool air washed over her skin. Everything was still shaking, but at least the deafening blasts were reduced.

  “Where are we?” she asked, surprised that she could actually hear herself.

  Kian did not answer for a moment, and she sensed his reservation toward her in the darkness. “This heap of stoned is riddled with hollows and crevices,” he said after a time. “Hopefully the others, gods help them, have all found places to hide from … whatever this is.” When he spoke again, his words were hesitant.

  “Your order is different than that of the Magi Order, but the Sisters of Najihar are said to have great knowledge of many things.”

  “Ellonlef,” she said, for no reason she could understand she wanted him to say her name.

  “Ellonlef,” he said gruffly. “I would know, do you have any knowledge of what is happening? Is this the end of … of life, too often spoken of by the begging brothers?”

  She heard his concern and, too, a thread of deep foreboding. The same trepidation lurked within her own heart. She reached for him, seeking to reassure him-and, as well, to take from him a measure of his vigor, that she might comfort herself. Though she could not see, she imagined his visage in her memory. She reached out, knowing her shaking fingers were within an inch of the hard line of his jaw-

  The darkness exploded around them in a shuddering flicker of blinding white, and then something slammed into her head. The pain was immediate, crushing, worse than anything she had ever felt, and blessedly short-lived. Then an enormous, suffocating weight landed on her
, crushing her down against the sandy floor of their deadly sanctuary.

  Tomb … this is a tomb, she thought distantly, sensing with a dreamlike clarity that she was dying.

  From a long way off, Kian shouted in a desperate voice. “On my life,” he cried, “I will protect you.”

  Then blackness, like a living thing, swallowed her down….

  The next Ellonlef knew, someone was carrying her into a monstrous daylight the hue of old blood. The very air stunk of char and molten rock. A few men were shouting back and forth to each other, and somewhere someone was howling in agony. From the poisoned sky fell what looked like gray-black feathers with the reek of a hearth fire. Ashes, she thought, falling like snow on the highest mountains of Rida. What manner of fire could produce such amounts of ash within a desert devoid of all but the barest vegetation?

  “Rest easy,” Hazad said, gently settling her on a folded saddle blanket. The big man’s face was covered in sweat-streaked grime. Where he usually seemed quick to smile, now he was quick to leave her.

  Ellonlef sat up, carefully, but no pains troubled her. The same could not be said for the others. When she had first surveyed Kian’s company, she had estimated there were just over a score of men. Now, she counted less than half that.

  “Ellonlef?” Kian said tentatively, as he came next to her.

  She looked up, remembering snatches of what had been going through her mind when he had carried her to safety, and her face flushed. He was not a handsome man, at least not in the foppish way counted as handsome by highborn women of a king’s court. His face was rugged, even craggy, and just now covered in drying blood. And his eyes were the color of the ice fields of his homelands, harsh and unforgiving, yet beautiful in their own right. Within in him lay a strength that far exceeded that of his sword arm-

  Ellonlef abruptly halted that line of thought. The man before her, while he might have commendable attributes, was a mercenary. As well, he was also a man with too much pride by half in his own abilities and opinion-this her training as a Sister of Najihar told her.

  She glanced away from him to take in the surroundings, but could see no farther than a hundred paces in any direction. Beyond that, a choking fog of smoke and dust blocked all sight.

  “What is it?” she asked, her tone cool.

  He seemed taken aback.

  As well he should be, she thought. She had lived and thrived in this inhospitable land nearly a decade, alone amongst strangers. She was more than capable of seeing to herself. And besides, she had a husband promised to her already-

  Again, Ellonlef cleaved her random thoughts, though not without some measure of bemusement. Here the world was coming apart, and her mind was contemplating promised husbands and the beauty of a mercenary’s ice-blue eyes.

  It was shock, of course, she reasoned, that was clouding her wits.

  “One of my men is dying,” Kian said, matching her tone. “It would be well if you could comfort him … before the end.” He took pains to hide his emotions, but she could tell that he held a deep commitment for those under his command.

  “Help me up,” she ordered, and Kian obliged.

  As she strode along at his side, she demanded, “Why did you not send for me straight away?”

  He looked askance at her. There was a deep cut across his brow, and a fan of blood and dirt had dried down one side of his face. When he spoke, it was obvious he was striving to remain civil. “As Hazad and I just managed to get you free, and since we did not know if you were hale or dead at the time, it seemed premature to ask anything from you.”

  Ellonlef ignored the rude edge in his voice. When she saw the screaming Asra a’Shah, she raced forward.

  “Get me hot water and bandages,” she said, staring at the Geldainian’s mangled leg. “As well, wine and swatarin.”

  She eased herself down, unconsciously preparing for the pain in her knee-a pain that never came. She did not have time to think on it. “Azuri, hold him down.”

  The Izutarian obliged without a word. With deft hands, she pushed up the hem of the injured Geldainian’s saffron robes. Something, a large stone presumably, had nearly smashed the man’s leg off below the knee, and blood was pouring from the wound. Acting quickly, she unbuckled the leather belt that held the sheathed scimitar to his back. The weapon she set aside, but she wrapped the belt around his leg and cinched it tight. As soon as the pressure began to mount, the mercenary started thrashing and yelling. Ignoring this, she pulled harder, until the blood rapidly pooling in the sand under his knee became a weeping trickle. Next, she wrapped the loose end of the belt around his mangled leg several times, and tied it off. With the bleeding staunched, the man flopped back, panting hard, his black skin ashen.

  Ellonlef noticed that Kian had not moved. “Is it beneath you to fetch and carry?”

  He eyed her, jaw flexing. “We have jagdah, some water, and little else.”

  Kian glanced at the Geldainian, and his expression of tightly reined anger became one of deep regret. He handed over his waterskin and a soiled rag pulled from a pocket. It was the tunic she had used earlier to dry herself.

  “Do what you will,” he said, “but this man will soon be dead.”

  Ellonlef thought she was going to be sick. Never had she seen such heartlessness. He might be ready to give up, but she was not.

  “Start a fire,” she commanded. “After I remove what cannot be saved, I will use flame to seal the wound.”

  She drew her dagger and leaned over the ruined appendage. Very little meat and sinew attached the leg to the man. Before she could make the first cut, the mercenary began shaking and his breath came quick and frantic. And then he went still. A bit of ash drifted down, landing in one of his glazed eyes. He never blinked.

  Kneeling at the man’s head, Azuri said, “He is gone.”

  A moment later, the sound of Kian’s boots crunching away told her he was leaving. She almost called him back, but decided she did not want him near. He was a brutish man, born of a brutish land, and could be nothing more.

  What else would you have him be? a small voice asked in the recess of her mind. Surely he is nothing to you, save a tool to be used against Varis.

  She pointedly ignored that voice.

  After a time, Azuri left to help find other survivors. Ellonlef sat with the deceased Geldainian, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, listening to the preternatural quiet that had fallen over the world. It was all too easy to imagine that the end had come. Yet, somehow, she was alive. This despite knowing she had died. This idea startled her, but she remembered all too well the blow to her head, the sensation of being crushed, and feeling the press of a darkness that had nothing to do with the light of the world, but rather the empty blackness of death.

  She stretched out her hurt leg, but there was no pain. Despite the lack of hurts, relatively fresh blood covered her robes and exposed skin in large splotches. She blinked in confusion. Her thoughts awhirl with uncertainty, she carefully pushed a hand beneath the fold of her robes, feeling for the bandage wrapped about the arrow wound. Where there should have been soreness, there was nothing. She folded the bandage down, and again her fingers searched for what should have been there, but found nothing save whole skin. There seemed to be a small bump, like a scar, but she would not know for certain until she was able to look on the wound directly. Confused and not a little nervous, she looked up.

  To one side of the outcrop, Kian stood with his back to her, unmoving as he gazed down at a growing line of dead Asra a’Shah. While not positive in the dim light, when he looked away and revealed his profile, she saw a man struggling under a great weight. As well, she recalled the words she had heard while buried under stone and a blinding wave of pain: On my life … I will protect you.

  In her memory, she had a hard time believing the voice was his, for it had been filled with a despair that did not fit his outward appearance. But it had been him. Who else could it have been? Just as sure, she knew that she had been dying when he spoke t
hem. Yet now she was alive, seemingly unblemished. Even her old wounds were healed.

  Still gazing at him, her heart softened. She understood now that his harshness toward the dying Asra a’Shah had not been a merciless indifference, but rather a carefully sculpted cliff of solid granite that he hid his pains behind, hurts that no man-of-arms could allow to show to those under his command.

  What else are you hiding? she thought, considering the miraculous healing she had undergone. A moment later, she wondered if he even knew he had done something to her, something like Varis had done to the people of Krevar, yet altogether different. Without question, she felt as she always had, unlike Varis’s followers, who had come back from death, somehow changed.

  “The power of creation,” she murmured to herself, awed. She did not know if what Kian had been blessed with would be enough to stop Varis, but she began to hope.

  Chapter 23

  Prince Varis Kilvar sat motionless astride his horse, while the wind pushed back his long, pale hair. He was not exactly sure how it had grown, other than that he had dreamed it so some nights past. When he had come awake, the dream and reality had become one. At the moment, however, his mind was not focused on his locks, but rather the wide chasm gouged into the face of the world before him.

  The deep gorge ran from the southern horizon to the northern, its sheer sides of freshly broken rock plunging hundreds of paces before meeting crashing waves that churned and tore at all they encountered. The waters smelled of the sea mingled with mud. The Gulf of Bakaal lay over a hundred leagues south, off the coast of Tureece, and yet, here before him, salty waves roared far inland. It was not the first evidence he had seen of the recent disasters that had fallen upon the world, and he could not help but wonder at the breadth of the world’s destruction.

  Some days before he had watched, awed despite himself, as stars fell from the heavens like bands of molten silver to strike the earth far ahead of his vast company. Where those stars fell, great pillars of seared rock and ash had billowed up, higher than any cloud. By the following day, those columns had dissipated over the desert, becoming a fog of smoke and dust denser than what had already been in place from the fires burning in the Qaharadin Marshes. Storms had come next, with lightning the hue of blood and torrential rains. The deluge cleared the air for a short while, but an hour after the last drops had fallen, the acrid smoke and drifting ash rushed back, thicker than ever. And with that choking fog, Varis had noted that the usual blistering wasteland of the Kaliayth had grown much cooler.