Читать книгу The Blue Eye - Ausma Zehanat Khan - Страница 15

KHASHAYAR HAD WASTED NO TIME. HE’D FREED HIMSELF AND SLIT THE throats of the two men left to guard him. Quiet prevailed over the Shaykh’s tent as they stole out into the night to cross a wide ridge of sand, disturbing only the rest of cape hares burrowed deep in the grass, under a night of no moon, with stars flung up against the stony darkness.

“Horses?” Arian whispered to Khashayar.

He forged the path ahead, his footsteps sinking into sand, setting a harsh pace.

“It’s too risky to head back. We could be intercepted.” Arian kept pace beside him, though Sinnia was the more sure-footed over sand. Her steady hand propelled Wafa along, the boy stumbling more than once, as he kept glancing back to the camp.

“We’ll be discovered,” Sinnia warned. “We can’t outrun them.”

Khashayar herded them over another rib of sand, moving them farther west.

“I did some scouting earlier. They’ve set up a supply depot just south of us. There are camel herders there. If we can reach it in time …” He shot a grim glance at Arian and Sinnia. “Let me carry the boy.”

Without waiting for permission, he scooped up Wafa and settled him on his back.

“Hold on.” Then, to the Companions: “Now run.”

Wafa’s arms fastened around Khashayar’s neck in a death grip that he adjusted with a grimace. He set the grueling pace of a soldier trained from birth to overcome physical discomfort. His strength was enormous, his pace unflagging as he found a depression between two ridges of grass-feathered sand, its surface nearly flat.

Arian stumbled on the downslope of the ridge, falling to her hands and knees. Khashayar grabbed her under the arm and set her on her feet without breaking his rhythm. Sinnia flew beside him. When Arian brushed off her knees, she found herself staring at a startled caracal, whose tawny coat had camouflaged its hiding place in the sand.

She kept moving, hearing sounds of discovery break out in the camp behind them.

Not enough moon to trace their footprints in the sand, but all it would require to track them was a torch. The army of the Nineteen had men enough to spare to follow several different trails at once. Or they could save themselves the bother and ride the Companions to ground. A simpler method still: they could loose their hunting falcons on the night. It was what she would have done in their place.

All these thoughts raced through her mind as the wind whipped her hair against her face. She was the slowest of their party, Khashayar moving with deadly grace and Sinnia as though born to these sands.

Arian made her way across the depression, picking her steps with care over the swaying grass. She couldn’t see the depot ahead and was trusting to Khashayar’s instincts. She’d had a moment when she wanted to tell him to cut his losses and run—to return to Ashfall, to lend his strength to his Khan. But she needed him. She wouldn’t be able to cross the desert without him.

He cut south across the sand, Wafa clinging to his back. As the ridge dipped southward, the roof of stars cast a sharp orange flare against the sand. Her heart in her mouth, Arian feared they had fallen on a desert-dweller’s campfire. But the light dimmed with the curve of sand, and she realized what she’d seen was a field of orange poppies.

Her relief was short-lived. Angry voices carried across the sand, followed by the thunder of hooves. Desert horses trained for speed and agility. And guided, as Arian had feared, by the telltale cry of a hawk.

The Nineteen had found their trail.

His voice gravel-edged and deep, Khashayar urged them to hurry. “We have to reach the supply depot before the guards hear the alarm.”

They sank into another valley, but Arian knew it for a losing battle. They couldn’t outrun the Nineteen’s horses. And the pursuit was too close to give her time to conjure a mirage. Wind snapped her hair against her face again, and she caught the glimmer of an answer.

“Go,” she said to the others. “I’ll meet you at the depot.”

“No, sahabiya. My orders are to stay at your side.” Khashayar grabbed hold of her arm.

Arian shook herself free. “I’m not helpless, Khashayar. Trust to my use of the Claim.”

He didn’t argue further, her self-assurance persuasive.

When Sinnia hesitated, Arian urged her on. “Khashayar will need your help. If I need you, I’ll call you back.” She pressed her circlets; Sinnia did the same.

They split up without further discussion, though Arian heard Wafa’s broken cry of protest.

She moved through a maze of gullies, seeking the valley of sand’s center. A band of caracals followed her high along one ridge, their golden eyes aglow in the dark. She used them to pinpoint her progress, the sound of hooves at her back. A red fox froze as she crossed his path, its black eyes sharp and curious. It darted away again at the earsplitting cry of a hawk.

She was almost at the center of the valley, bringing the riders with her, leaving Khashayar’s way clear ahead.

She moved along curled eddies of grass deep into the valley of sand. The riders approached, a party of six astride the mares that were bred in the heart of the desert, their arrow-straight manes tossing in the wind, their heads thrown up high and proud.

Five commanders of the Nineteen hooted at her in triumph. One man remained silent, dried blood at the edges of his lips, the glaive in his hand starkly poised. Their eyes met, and she knew his strike would be fatal. But the thrill of fear she felt wasn’t because of the glaive. It was at the realization that she’d failed to kill him with the Claim, as she’d thought she’d done in the tent of the Al Marra. She must have faltered in her resolution or in the way she’d shaped the verse—but how could that be when she had seen the breath whisper from his body?

Or had she?

How had Najran been able to resist the verse she had used to strike at him? What powers did he possess?

Then she noticed something else. His hips were girded with his belt of jeweled daggers, the tip of his glaive spiked with blood.

“You killed the child?” she cried in protest.

His eyes hooded, he answered her, “I put a traitor to death.”

His voice was the scrape of a blade, metal crunched against bone.

The group of riders circled her, drawing closer, the hooves of their horses stirring up clouds of sand. The caracals crept closer on the ridge, predators who now assumed a hunting crouch. She met the eyes of one and motioned it away with a wave. The black tufts of hair at the tips of its ears quivered before it bounded down the far side of the ridge, its packmates following behind.

Arian kept moving, one slow step at a time, her eyes on the man with the glaive. His eyes struck sapphire sparks as the riders tightened their circle.

“Fall back,” she warned them, the promise of the Claim beneath her words.

Najran raised his glaive, his head cocked to one side, listening.

Her tone gentle, Arian called up the Claim. “Would any of you wish to have a garden with date palms and vines, rivers flowing underneath, and all kinds of fruits?”

A soothing whisper chased at the edges of the dunes. The riders nodded to one another in answer, loosening the reins of their mares.

Arian motioned at them, just as she had motioned at the caracal. The horses drew away, giving her space to maneuver.

And still Najran watched her with those sapphire-studded eyes, his fingers loose and relaxed around the glaive.

The whisper in the valley rose into the air, gathering traces of sand, the silver pathways of the stars dimming above their heads.

“But you would be stricken with age, your children too weak to tend it, your garden struck by a whirlwind, lashed with fire until burnt.”

Najran raised the glaive high above his head.

But it was too late now for him to undo the power of Arian’s spell. The crests of the dunes that surrounded them exploded in a tornado. The distance between Arian and the riders increased as the vortex rose around them, pierced by ribbons of flame. Hot winds from the north mixed with cold winds from the south: the aesar of the desert put to the test of the Claim.

They were smothered by sand, while fire roared in their ears until it had swallowed their cries, burning the riders to ash, their horses scattered to the winds.

In the eye of the storm, Arian waited until the whirling sand subsided, a shimmering waterfall of fire that circled her until it ebbed into a single line—a wall between the encampment she had escaped from and the uncharted distance ahead.

Flames spun orange-gold patterns on the sand—it was over; it was done.

But when she looked up, one man remained on his horse, his weapon poised in his hand as he watched her across the veil of fire. He lowered the glaive, his gleaming eyes fixed on hers.

She finished what she’d come to say.

“So does the One offer clear signs so that you may reflect.”

The sapphire glint in his eyes dimmed to amber, as he acknowledged the words. He wheeled his horse around, searching for a way through the whirlwind her voice had summoned from the sands. When he realized there was no path that would allow him to cross, he spit out a lengthy curse. Then he bowed at her in respect.

“Until we meet again, First Oralist.”

She nodded and left him on the sands.