BMT belongs to Trudi Canavan
Chapter 24 – Failing the test
The Sachakan Wastes:
Kariko grasped the bone of some poor, luckless animal in his hand. The greasy juices dripped down his wrist as he gazed distractedly into the flickering flames of a weak, spitting fire. His striking tawny eyes shone with malice. Pure, glittering, poisonous malevolence – the stuff of a child's nightmares – as his mind's eye considered a face, briefly seen through another's thought. The face had gnawed at him as relentlessly as his sharp teeth now gnawed at the bone, pulling on the clinging meat.
As he chewed slowly and deliberately, his eyes narrowed as he considered who the face belonged to, and why she had accompanied Akkarin on the night his last slave had died. The High Lord had always acted alone before.
"Has Dakova's pet got himself a pet?" He mused, and he snorted derisively at his own quip. The face hovered before his vision:
Ivory skin – such a novelty – hollow cheeks, a full, generous mouth and, those eyes! Large and luminous and full of secrets.
The Ichani leader's mouth twisted in what might have been the parody of a smile. Whether she meant anything to the Guild leader or not, that face was worth committing to memory; Kariko very much looked forward to the day he might prise those secrets from those lovely lips.
And that day was coming soon. His day of reckoning with the accursed Guild and their puppet leader was on the fast approaching horizon and, like the rising and setting of the sun, there was nothing Akkarin could do to stop it.
A laugh built in Kariko's throat, rising until it became a maniacal cackling that rebounded off the surrounding barrenness and echoed hollowly through the dusty landscape, like a breeze through the trees that portends a storm.
Suddenly, he sobered, and he threw the bone into the fire. Yes, the time was coming for Akkarin to pay for Dakova's death, and for the mockery he had made of their family honour, and Kariko would use any means that became available to bring suffering down on the High Lord, so that by the time the Ichani leader was done, Akkarin would feel that he was drowning in it...
Imardin:
A chill scraped down the Thief's back as he stood in the shadows of a half-collapsed porch-way. A breeze stirred the dusty floor into a sudden swirl of animation and a plank of wood creaked ominously from somewhere above the young, broad man's head. He glanced skyward with a appraisingly wary eye.
"There's a storm comin'," he muttered to himself before a movement opposite brought his attention back to his purpose for being there.
"Is that her?" Cery asked his companion as his eyes now followed the dark-skinned woman on the opposite side of the street. He caught a glimpse of her blandly beautiful face as she turned to close the shabby, decrepit door of the 'holes' behind her. Apart from the fact she was clearly Sachakan, there was nothing in her plain attire or her manner to indicate that there was anything extraordinary about her.
Nothing to mark her out as worthy of death, Cery thought.
"Yes sir, that's her." A boy on the cusp of adulthood, gangly and uncomfortable-looking in his skin, stared at the retreating back of the woman as she walked away down the alleyway, a rolled up black bundle clutched in her hand.
The boy's eyes hardened and his jaw tightened. "That's the woman we tracked for your employer, and that's the one I saw coming out of Markin's place just before he was found dead. Brazen as anything she was. Pity your employer didn't kill her when he had the chance."
"Yes, pity," Cery murmured darkly as he recalled the mess he'd had to deal with following Akkarin's failed attempt a couple of weeks earlier. It had taken all of his arts of persuasion and charm, not to mention a good deal of bol, to settle the nerves of the witnesses to the battle and to convince them they saw nothing more than a drunken brawl.
Yet Cery himself had not seen this particular target until now, trusting as he did the network of dwells he had built around himself, and as he took in the back of the woman just before she moved out of sight, he was reminded suddenly of Savara . This was the first marked one to be a woman and, now that he had seen her, his stomach revolted at the idea of her being killed; not without being certain she was the right target in any case.
A thin, wry smile touched Cery's lips; he was never this concerned about being sure that the sallow-skinned men whose whereabouts he handed on to Akkarin deserved what the High Lord meted out to them – his smile became grim – which was only ever one thing. Sonea would call him soft, scathing of his chivalrous attitude just because the target was female, and she would be right.
The smile vanished abruptly. If this was the correct woman - and there was no reason to doubt the eyewitnesses - she had led Cery and his spies to her lair by a trail of corpses. A rampage of indiscriminate killing – men, women, even children.
Cery's stomach churned again as he pictured the ashen face of the dead ten-year old boy he had been shown, and he would never forget the terrible, animalistic howls of the boy's mother in those first tearing, shattering moments of grief and loss.
Cery was a Thief now; there was no room for softness and sentiment, and the coldly rational part of his mind knew that women could be just as deadly as men. He turned to the youth at his side, his gaze now steady with resolve.
"Send word to Gol: the target is good and the location confirmed. Tell him to set the chain in motion – my employer needs to get word as soon as possible." Cery's voice was stern and full of command and the boy nodded solemnly, his eyes wide and serious.
"Good," Cery responded brusquely. "I'll stay here and keep watch. You know the password?" The boy nodded again in the affirmative before turning without further instruction and scurrying off until he was swallowed up by the labyrinth that was the outer slums.
Cery watched him go and sighed with grim resignation of foresight. He would have another body to dispose of tonight, and he now found himself fervently hoping it was indeed the Sachakan woman's and nobody else's.
Later.
The air rippled with the expulsion of magic. It made a slow motion tracery, hanging there for the merest of moments, and then it hit. Its fringes shivered wide, knocking aside debris from the fallen roof and causing further groans from the splintered wood above. But the Sachakan woman slave, or rather Ichani as Akkarin had suspected, stood unmoving, unperturbed in the smugness of her power, and her strong shield buzzed mockingly around her. Then she began to move.
And Akkarin began to fail the test.
On first seeing each other, the High Lord and the woman had exchanged threats and taunts, neither in any doubt that blood lay beneath the verbal sparring. The woman had carved a cruel smile from her mouth. She had been enjoying herself, at ease with her superiority; brandishing her new-found knowledge as a weapon before the High Lord, but Akkarin knew better than her that it was deeds that mattered, not words.
Not wanting to let this woman go a second time, and acutely aware of Sonea's hidden presence, he had taken himself to the place where he worked magic, passing through the trapdoor and down through the dark levels of his own mind, pushing deeper and deeper until the sense of space and light of his power surrounded him and seemed ever expanding.
The woman thought she was more powerful, and maybe she was; but Akkarin, too, had power, and something else also, something dearly bought –experience. Of fighting for his life, and not just in the selfish way of the Ichani. Of striving, alone, to save not only himself, but everything he loved. And that gave Akkarin an edge. An, oh so deadly, edge.
His life had become meaningless in its own right; he was a weapon, a thing. He was Kyralia's only defence, and if this woman was the Ichani he suspected, then the enemy had done with espionage. This war was about to begin, and for all her mocking condescension, this woman was about to die.
Akkarin then stepped into his power, the light, the lift, the weightlessness of it, and he pulled threads of it into an intricate weaving of intention, like an ethereal faren's web, and just as deadly to those who found themselves caught in it.
But suddenly the woman moved, a seemingly insignificant sidestep towards her hidden stash of macabre trophies. But something else was hidden there too.
And the High Lord was a thing no longer. He was a man about to fail a test.
The Sachakan woman 's disconcertingly amber eyes were fastened on the tall magician as she sidled in the direction of her hidden store. Unlike their previous meeting, the hood of his cloak was drawn back, his features unobscured and, haughty in her arrogance, the Ichani appreciatively took in the sight of him.
His beauty, she mused, was of the sort that made you fall very still for the merest of moments, all faculties required to drink him in, and his power was deliciously part of it. Therefore, when the High Lord backed away from the woman, towards the door, she, unlike the watching Sonea, was not fooled for a moment into thinking he was losing power.
The raw, wild musk of his energy was undiminished to the Sachakan's honed senses; his black magic, forbidden and damning she knew now, was heady and intoxicating. Just to breathe him in was an indulgence, and the Ichani was far from ready to stop this encounter now. How much power could he give her? What a trophy to take back to Kariko!
"You're not getting away from me this time," she almost purred with a sneering curl of her lip as she blocked his escape with a strong barrier. He may be beautiful, but he was a coward, ready to run. Yes, she would enjoy ending his life, but first things first.
Abruptly, she turned to stare directly at where Sonea was hiding and so missed the fleeting look of panic that knocked the High Lord's carefully secured mask sideways.
Please be shielding, Sonea, Akkarin thought as he threw powerful strikes at the Sachakan woman and, unavoidably, at his novice's hiding place behind. If Sonea wasn't protecting herself she may now well be buried alive, but the alternative was much, much worse.
Akkarin's jaw clenched and his heart hammered and roared in his ears, yet he managed to arrange his expression back into a benign mask, though he fancied he could almost feel the strings holding it in place. Two, maybe three more steps and the woman would have discovered Sonea, would have her cocooned her in her shield, and Akkarin would be nothing more than an observer behind glass as his novice was bled dry of her power, and her life. But maybe she was dead already, maybe he had just...
Please be shielding. Please, please be shielding...
The debris cleared and an eerie silence blanketed the room, as real and palpable as the settling dust. The woman' smug expression was gone and she was taut with determined concentration and effort.
Did she know someone was concealed behind her? Was there something of importance to her in the recess that he had missed? He should have checked more thoroughly before he allowed Sonea to fold herself into place there.
Damn! Akkarin inwardly cursed himself, his black eyes unwittingly flickering to the pile of wood and dirt, and something glittered, darkly intelligent back! A chink only, but of the deepest, glistening loam brown, and it was enough. Unmistakable. Sonea was alive, and shielding.
Akkarin breathed again, easing the oxygen deprived burning of his chest. Around that intake of breath the world hung silent still; silent and dark and bright and dreadfully wonderful! An incongruous mix of truths, all bound up in one thing: Sonea was alive, and her continued... aliveness, was undeniably, inexorably, unquestionably more important to Akkarin, High Lord of the magicians Guild, than any other consideration.
Of course, he had known it; somewhere buried deep he had known it, and Takan knew it too. There was no magnitude of threat - countries or lives at stake – that could have induced him to sacrifice her safety, her life; trapping him in a world where she was not.
Another step.
Akkarin was snapped back to the moment and the woman before him. This was far from over; Sonea could still die.
Another step.
He lassoed the woman in a band of magic, pulling her away from Sonea, but she was no slave and she broke free with little effort.
Another step.
Akkarin looked pale and stricken though the Ichani was still intent, excruciatingly intent, on the rubble behind her, trusting to her strong shield for now. He tasted the bitter bile of panic and dread on his tongue and his convulsing throat struggled to swallow it down into the churning pit that was his stomach.
With a strength of will born from the implacability of rage building inside him, the High Lord focused on the realm of his mind; the within and not the without . The infinite sphere of himself where he went to work magic as he desperately sought for a way to penetrate the woman's shield, or even simply to distract her, away from Sonea.
Time suddenly seemed to stutter and strobe, steps lost along the way, like seconds sliced out and swallowed, and Akkarin felt poised on a single moment.
As the Ichani took her final step and reached forwards towards some unknown prize, the heaped dirt and rubble shifted and, with a keen instinct, the strike Akkarin had been about to let fly died on his fingertips. His eyes widened and the pale light of the moon, shining balefully above through the ruined roof, refracted in the blackness of them.
The open, watching Eye.
And it was not the only witness from above as Sonea unfurled herself from the debris behind the woman and committed, unwaveringly, her lethal act.
There was no shearing, shining arc of an ichani blade, resplendent with embellishment, even in its deadliness. A dusty splinter of wood and a jerk of the arm; a quick draining of power, and it was done.
The woman seemed to not quite understand why all of a sudden her power, her life, leaked from her like a tap, or what the small scratch at her neck had to do with it. She stared at the insignificant piece of jagged wood as Sonea let it fall, clattering, to the floor; stared at it with...condescension. It was if her last living thought was – That dirty splinter of wood cannot be my undoing; cannot be my end.
It was. No neat, clean slice of flesh here. No graceful death. Just grime and mud and a jagged cut; blood and the rasping sound that marked the unglamorous, inglorious ending of a life. Brutal. Base.
Relief. Akkarin's constricted lungs relaxed though his heart pounded and swelled inside him with fear and relief, and more fear, and pride and a surge of anger. Why had this happened now, tonight? She was not ready. He was not ready.
But oh, the sweet, sweet relief. Then, swift on its heels and the most profound of all – sorrow.
Akkarin's angular, adrenalin-fuelled features softened, shifting from wide-eyed shock to a sadness that threatened to overwhelm him with its force.
His eyes glanced to the fallen woman. Sonea would be dead if she had not struck first. Knowing that was one thing; leaving a dead body behind was quite another. The High Lord knew that well enough and his heart clenched at the harshness of his novice's impromptu lesson.
His hands trembled and he clasped them to keep them still and he stepped slowly towards Sonea , focussing once more on the dark, ragged silk of her hair as she stood, back to him and silent.
She had her arms wrapped around herself, her hands hidden, and her head was tilted and hunched into her shoulder like a wounded bird, and she was ...desolation.
An ache swelled in Akkarin's throat. He wanted to fold her in his arms and tell her it would be all right, but he couldn't promise that, and he couldn't, daren't, touch her, not even in her anguish and uncertainty.
And he couldn't bear it – this new and cruel twist of pain.
Sonea began to shake, adrenalin coursing through her without restraint; gleefully pumped by her too fast heart. Her breathing, rapid and shallow, permeated the viscous silence of the room until that too became intermittent as she struggled to pull in air.
She staggered backwards, light-headed, the convulsions sending tremors through her slight frame.
And Akkarin caught her. Of course, of course, he caught her, stopped her falling. Enforced touch. He placed strong, careful hands on her shoulders and she sank into their support, grateful and needing. She did not recoil, and some distant part of him marvelled at that.
"Sonea," and the word pulled long, almost too low a whisper to ring with the richness of his voice.
"Take a deep breath. Hold it."
Sonea tried to obey, the shivering sending her teeth on edge and causing her stomach to clench, threatening to revolt.
With one hand he pulled out a piece of linen cloth from his cloak and gently he prised one of her hands, sticky and dark with blood, away from the curve of her waist. He easily supported her weight, her arm laying over his upturned forearm and her elbow resting in the crook of his.
Lightly, he wiped her hand and her fingers were limp and curled in his palm as she acquiesced to the ministration like an obedient and listless child, and an uneasiness began to grip Akkarin.
He had never seen her this vulnerable, even during the worst of Regin's tormenting; even during her enforced compliance as his novice, her spirit had never wavered. She had wielded a knife before, and had taken blood and had barely flinched.
This new, helpless Sonea was a thing he was unprepared for, and it concerned him. He followed the direction of her gaze and stared straight into the accusing, unseeing eyes of the dead Sachakan. Sonea may have had a brutal and harsh existence before she came to the Guild, but she had never taken a life before.
"It's not pleasant, is it?"
Her hair brushed her shoulders as she almost imperceptibly shook her head.
"It shouldn't be," he murmured as gently as he could. Again, the shake of the head; confused; appalled, and Akkarin knew without seeing that she could not tear her eyes away from the dead woman's.
"Look at me, Sonea." And his voice was tender command, and warm, and so...un-High lord- like, and laced with something strange. But Sonea heard it as if from a great distance and she could not place the emotion.
"Look at me, Sonea. Sonea." Her name was a sad pleading, though he dreaded looking into her face and seeing what he might find there.
But Sonea just stood there, shivering and unmoving, her head hunched in its fixed position and her small fingers still resting in his, clean now from the blood.
Akkarin moved his arm away and hers fell lifelessly to her side. Then, he gripped her shoulders and turned her around. He was so careful with her, like she was made of glass, but she let herself be moved to face him and she did not stiffen at the contact.
He had not been this close to her since that long, long night of dreadful fever, and then she had been barely conscious and unaware of him. Akkarin looked down at her and he was caught by the sight of her black lashes, dusky and trembling against the blue-tinged flesh around her eyes as she gazed down at his boots.
She was so bleak. And so beautiful. Akkarin could not help himself; he looked at her and looked at her and his arms ached for the embrace he denied them.
"Are you alright?"
And she finally looked up to meet his gaze.
Since he began to trust her with the truth, her eyes had begun to unknowingly reach out for him, he was certain; like the creeping rays of the sun beyond cloud. But now, now they shrank from him, like a frightened child's – disbelieving, uncertain - and he frowned.
She was smudged with dust and dirt and there was a small scratch from a stone that had grazed her cheek when she had dropped her shield. Impulsively, Akkarin smoothed her hair from her face, letting it run through his fingers and displacing a piece of debris which fell to the floor, along with his resolve.
He let his thumb linger lightly on her cheek, caressing the rough skin of the graze and silently healing it. The action hauled him back to that night of first meeting when they had been strangers, and when she had fled from him and his help; but that was a long, long time ago. Now, he knew her; and more than that, he had been in her head, had lived with her. Now...now..he...
Akkarin's hand moved to rest on her back and she blinked up at him, her eyes dark and wet and seeking.
Her breathing had steadied and the shivering came now in sporadic bursts; Akkarin's presence, his solidity, his focus and strength calming Sonea in an unexpected way. This man seemed now to manifest in her the very antithesis of the fear and dread and loathing that he had once instilled.
Another tentative hand at her back and she let herself be drawn to him. Akkarin's heart beat against her cheek and his arms came around to hold her and she did not resist. And he held her. He held her.
"It is not an easy choice, the one you have made, but you will learn to trust yourself," he whispered.
Her head moved weakly against his chest and Akkarin's long fingers moved down the length of her hair, again and again, soothing, until he felt the last shudders that convulsed through her fade and release their grip.
His lips brushed her hair and she smelled like citrus flowers and honey. And her augmented power, radiating from her, brushed his senses and it was the high-roaming airs of the mountains, pure and clean.
And it had never felt so exquisite, so right, to fail a test.
They stood there, still and silent; a guardian comforting his novice in her turmoil – but so very, very not.
And the Eye looked down through the ruined roof. And the Eye was open and wakeful and in a mood for mischief, so she called to her emissaries on earth to entertain and amuse her.
And they did. Oblige her; in such a very, very devastating way. If you believe in that sort of thing.
Whatever the reason, at that moment across the city in the Guild, Administrator Lorlen was rudely awakened and brought from his bed by the urgent rapping at his door, and his waking mind unfurled itself through the red ring on his finger until its fatigued fringes touched another's...
And Akkarin abruptly broke the embrace, and it was like tearing. A page pulled in two, so that one half made no sense without the other, and Sonea frowned, disoriented.
She touched her hair, tracing the path of her guardian's fingers from just a moment earlier. She held the glittering blackness of his eyes, and they were like one half of that torn moment. Unreadable.
"We must get away from here quickly," he said in a low, urgent voice. "The Thieves will take care of the body."
Sonea nodded again, her mouth still dry and her throat constricted. She moved in a daze and did not notice the long-fingered hand that grasped her elbow and gently ushered her from the wreck of the room, or the dark brooding of Akkarin's eyes as events unfolded in his mind. Events that would change the lives of many...