Forged In Flame (In Her Name: The First Empress, Book 2) (32 page)

Swaying under Han-Ukha’i’s weight, Keel-Tath was tempted to ignore Syr-Nagath’s invitation out of spite, but if she did not set down Han-Ukha’i now, she would fall. With a groan of effort, she tried to bend down, but her legs gave way and she collapsed to her knees. Han-Ukha’i, barely alive, fell from her shoulder, and it was all Keel-Tath could do to keep the healer’s head from slamming against the cold stone floor.

“It is said that you have the power of healing,” Syr-Nagath murmured as she stepped close to Keel-Tath, running the back of her fingers across her blood-matted hair. Keel-Tath shivered at her touch. “Why do you not heal her now?” As if by magic, a handful of healing gel appeared in her hand, and she held it out to Keel-Tath. “Here is her symbiont. Take it and heal her wounds.”

Keel-Tath stared at the writhing, ugly mass, tempted to wrest it from the Dark Queen’s grasp to let it fall, untouched by her own hands, onto Han-Ukha’i. If the symbiont touched her, it would know to heal her. 

“Take it,” Syr-Nagath whispered, holding it out closer to Keel-Tath, tempting her with it. “Take it in your hands and heal her!”

But Keel-Tath would not rise to the bait. She knew it was not a test, but a trap. If the gel was Han-Ukha’i’s, the healer would die. 

With a sigh of disappointment, Syr-Nagath handed the gel to Shil-Wular who strode toward the center of the hall where the great fire pit blazed.

“No,” Keel-Tath gasped when she realized what he was going to do. “No! Stop!”

“Take it and heal her, or let it burn,” Syr-Nagath said. “It is your choice.”

Casting a look at the senior healer who had served Li’an-Salir and who had told Keel-Tath about the fate of the healer she had visited when she first came to the city, she pleaded, “You know I cannot take it! Please, have mercy on her. She is a healer!”

“I will show her mercy if you or your companions pledge your honor to me.” Syr-Nagath turned to her other captives. “Just one of you can spare this healer her suffering if you will yield to me.” She moved to stand in front of Drakh-Nur, who knelt on the floor, his eyes cast downward. “You are of my kin, born of the Ka’i-Nur,” she cooed as she knelt down, putting her face only a finger’s breadth from his. “I can feel your agony and your rage. With a few words you can spare the healer her suffering. Would that not be better than to see her this way?”

He looked up at her, his face twisted in grief, marks of mourning cascading down his face. 

“Drakh-Nur,” Keel-Tath whispered, shaking her head. “No! Do not trust…”

A whip-crack echoed through the hall, and Keel-Tath gasped as Shil-Wular’s whip hit her back. Her armor protected her torso, but two of the barbs landed in her scalp, and she hissed with pain as he yanked them out, tearing at her flesh.

“I would see the world turned to ash and dust before I would pledge my honor to one such as you,” Drakh-Nur grated before he spat in her face.

With a smile, Syr-Nagath stood, wiping the spittle away with one hand. “You should have been an oracle,” she told him. “For the world as you know now will be little more than ash and dust before I am through. But for your honesty, I will show the healer my mercy.” Her sword sang from its sheath as she whirled, blindingly fast, and plunged the blade into Han-Ukha’i’s throat.

Ayan-Dar had once taught Keel-Tath a defense against a thrusting blade. It required great strength and skill, and was little more than a last resort when on the cusp of defeat if one had somehow been disarmed. Keel-Tath stared at Syr-Nagath’s blade, now clamped between her own gauntleted palms. The tip was just touching Han-Ukha’i’s throat, where it drew a small bead of blood. The muscles of Keel-Tath’s chest and arms quivered with the effort of holding the blade as Syr-Nagath put her weight into it, pressing it down against Han-Ukha’i’s flesh.

The healer’s eyes fluttered open, and her gaze found the Dark Queen, standing above her, a cruel smile on her face. Then her eyes looked up to Keel-Tath, and she reached up to touch her mistress’s face with a quivering hand. “May thy way be long and…”

The last of the words were lost as the Dark Queen made a savage thrust, driving the sword home before yanking it free. Blood burbled from the wound for a moment before Han-Ukha’i’s heart finally stopped. 

Drakh-Nur roared. Leaping to his feet, he charged forward, but the queen’s warriors surrounded him and beat him with whips and clubs before he could take more than a single step. He collapsed to the floor, unconscious, in a bloody heap.

Keel-Tath knelt there, Han-Ukha’i’s head cradled in her lap. With her manacled hands, she smoothed back the healer’s hair and gently closed her unseeing eyes. “May your spirit find peace in the Afterlife, Han-Ukha’i,” she said in a dead, wooden voice. “I will avenge you.”

Syr-Nagath laughed, mocking her words as she came to stand behind Keel-Tath. “Oh, I think not, child. I would be much more concerned about who shall avenge you.” Reaching out with her free hand, she took hold of the third braid of Keel-Tath’s hair, the one that represented the Blood Bond, and stretched it out as she raised her sword, intent on severing it.

Keel-Tath heard her companions screaming at the Dark Queen, filling the hall with pleas and threats, and watched them rise to their feet, only to be clubbed back to the floor by the queen’s guards. Tara-Khan’s face, in particular, was twisted with agony and grief as he battled with the guards to try and reach her, to protect her. She understood then that he could never protect her. He was not supposed to. It had always been she who should have protected him, who should have protected them all. And she had failed. 

His gaze met hers for just an instant. Keel-Tath smiled at him, an expression of infinite sadness.

She closed her eyes as the Dark Queen’s blade fell.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Inquisition

Keel-Tath was prepared to accept the endless agony and solitude that awaited her when the braid that was the covenant of the Blood Bond, the embodiment of the empathic link to the others of her bloodline, was severed. 

But it never came. As Syr-Nagath’s sword slashed downward, a chill wind swept over Keel-Tath. She thought it was nothing more than a chill of fear until her ears rang with the clash of steel and those filling the great hall let out a great uproar.

Opening her eyes, she looked up to see T’ier-Kunai standing over her, the blade of her sword blocking Syr-Nagath’s. T’ier-Kunai flicked Syr-Nagath’s sword clear and prodded her away from Keel-Tath with the tip of the weapon. Syr-Nagath let go the braid and stepped back, lowering her sword. 

That was when Keel-Tath noticed the others. Five more priests and priestesses stood behind T’ier-Kunai, resplendent in brightly polished ceremonial armor and long black capes with silver trim. At first Keel-Tath thought they were others from the Desh-Ka priesthood, but each one bore a different rune on their breast armor, and she realized they were the most high of the six surviving orders. Before her stood a conclave of the priesthoods: the Desh-Ka, Nyur-A’il, and Ana’il-Rukh of the Homeworld; and the Ima’il-Kush, Kura-Hagil, and T’lan-Il from the Settlements. Such a conclave had not gathered for many, many years.

“By what right do you come here,” Syr-Nagath demanded. “This matter does not concern the ancient orders.”

The high priest of the Nyur-A’il, a tall cadaverous warrior who seemed to radiate cold as the sun does heat, turned his eyes upon her, and the Dark Queen took an involuntary step back. “You came to each of us,” he said, “pleading for the priesthoods to intercede on your behalf to prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy of Anuir-Ruhal’te. You cannot now withdraw that invitation.”

“That was before.” She spat the words. “You could have helped me find her. That is what I wanted! I have done that. You did nothing, and are bound by the Way not to interfere in the world beyond—”

The priest held out his hand toward her, palm out, and Syr-Nagath spasmed. Her sword clattered to the floor as she clutched at her chest. Mouth gaping open as if she was gulping for air, she collapsed to her knees.

“Do not speak to me of the Way.” He favored her with a frigid glare. “Have you more to say?” 

Gasping, her talons scraping at her breast plate as if she was trying to reach her own heart, Syr-Nagath managed to shake her head. 

“Then be silent. We do not answer to the likes of you.”

Whatever hold the priest had on the Dark Queen was gone, and she drew in a deep, gasping breath. She forced herself to her feet, still glaring at the priest. But she said no more.

Keel-Tath turned away from the vile creature to stare at the members of the conclave. Her eyes found T’ier-Kunai, and a great sadness filled her heart. She now knew that T’ier-Kunai must have met with Syr-Nagath, and had withheld the knowledge from Ayan-Dar. “The others, I can understand,” she said softly, shaking her head at the depth of the betrayal she felt, “for they are strangers. But not you. I looked upon you as the mother I never knew. And you have betrayed me.”

The words cut deep, she could see, and she could sense T’ier-Kunai’s shame in her blood. Yet the high priestess did not deny it.

“As I have told Ayan-Dar many times,” T’ier-Kunai said, “I cannot always do what I wish. My task is to preserve the Way, and the Desh-Ka’s place within it. There are times when that requires sacrifice.”

Keel-Tath gently released Han-Ukha’i’s body, easing it to the floor. Getting to her feet, she looked T’ier-Kunai in the eye. “Then do what you must, and all of you be damned to the Eternal Dark.”

The members of the conclave formed a circle around her, and when they closed their eyes, the agony began.

***

Keel-Tath felt as if the flesh of her body was being stripped away, layer by thin layer, as the most high of the priesthoods began to tear her apart, body and soul, to understand the secrets of her existence. In her young life she had known much pain, but nothing could have prepared her for this. She could feel them inside her, burrowing and cutting, tearing and shearing through everything that she was, everything she had ever known or done. Every cell of her body burned, and she writhed on the floor, her mouth open in an endless scream. She was laid bare before them, the violation of her body and soul complete. The only thing she wanted now was to die, even if she was cast into the infinite cold and dark, for that was the only escape from the universe of pain that filled her.

Death would not come, refused to claim her. Her heart stopped beating in her chest. She could feel its frantic hammering suddenly stilled. But an ethereal hand reached inside her, shoving organs and viscera aside to grasp and squeeze it, pulsing the blood through her tortured veins before the muscular organ began again to function on its own. Her blood was ice then fire, fire then ice, at one moment filled with the song of her blood, roaring as it had never done before, and the next was still and silent, as if the rest of her bloodline, her species, had vanished from the cosmos. That, more than anything else, tortured her, for she had never, since the day her heart began to beat in her mother’s womb, truly been alone.

Time lost all meaning as her vivisection went on. Her mind teetered on the brink of madness, the only alternative now that death had been denied her. 

That was when she heard a voice, not from the lips of one who had spoken, but from the heart great and true that she had known for so well and so long. The voice that was the song in her blood of the one who had taken her from her dying mother’s arms, who had put a sword in her hand and taught her to be a warrior, who had tried to make her wise. She could feel his song in her blood rising like an angry wave, could feel him through space and time that was at once nothing, yet infinite. 

Ayan-Dar.

***

In the days after Keel-Tath had departed, Ayan-Dar had slipped toward oblivion. For a time, he had made a show of attending his duties. But the face of every young female disciple became that of Keel-Tath, and after sensing her pain and fear for days, then weeks, he could finally no longer bear to pretend that he cared about the goings-on in the temple, the empty sham that the Way had become. He retired to his quarters, cloistering himself in his room. He barely ate, barely drank, and likely would have starved himself to death had it not been for Ria-Ka’luhr’s dogged perseverance in bringing him food and ale and insisting that he eat. He knew he should feel guilty, that he was acting a fool and shaming himself in the eyes of the others, but he could not help it. He simply no longer cared. His child, his daughter, had been torn from him by her own sense of honor, and he followed her by her song in his blood. His only consolation, the only reason he continued to make a pretense of living, was that she continued to live. He could not watch her more closely, for T’ier-Kunai had forbidden him to follow Keel-Tath with his second sight, and so he lived with her, and for her, through her emotions.

And so it went until the day they came to him. He was deep in meditation as he was most times, when he sensed their approach. “Come,” he growled.

Ria-Ka’luhr opened the door and entered, followed by four others who filed into the room.

Ayan-Dar made no attempt to disguise his annoyance. “What is the meaning of this, Ria-Ka’luhr?”

“Do not hold him in an ill light,” Anakh-Lehr, the priestess, said. She was one of those chosen to guard the creche, and was among the most fearsome of the priesthood. “We asked him to bring us to you, as representatives of those who believe.”

“Believe in what?” Ayan-Dar stared at her with his good eye.

“In the prophecy, of course.” 

Ayan-Dar took a mug from where it sat on the floor beside him and took a drink of ale, long gone flat and stale. “So you believe. And what of it?”

Anakh-Lehr glanced at Ria-Ka’luhr, who frowned. “While you have been wallowing in your grief, Ayan-Dar,” she said, “the Desh-Ka are becoming divided in thought, if not yet in deed. You have not been the only one following the child of prophecy.”

“I say again, what of it?” He was becoming angry now. “It does not matter if you believe or not.” He lowered his voice. “Believe strongly enough and you will end up as I have.”