Sacrifice: The Queen's Blade (23 page)

"I cannot. I have not the strength. Help me, Blade."

He regarded her coolly. "Did your mother require your help?"

"She was one and fifty years old. Her time was up, and she had lived a good life. I am only six and twenty."

"You made the decision." He leant on the plinth, watching her.

"A decision is easy to make. Carrying it out is much harder." She stepped closer to him, the cup between them. "Help me, please."

Blade lowered his eyes. "I am not a poisoner, My Queen. It would be easier to slip a dagger between your ribs. Ask me that, and I shall do it."

She stared at him. "Yes, I believe you would."

"Of course, I am an assassin."

"Then do as I ask. You feel no grief at my demise. It means nothing to you, so aiding me should not pain you."

He raised his head, sighing. "It does not, but since it was your decision, why should I be the one to make you do it? I find the prospect of pouring poison down your throat vaguely repulsive. If you have not the courage to take your life, then you must face the consequences. You cannot place your burden upon me."

Minna frowned at him, angered by the truth of his words and her own weakness. "You are insolent. Lesser men would find themselves on the gallows for speaking to me thus."

"I am on the gallows, just as you are. We have nothing left to lose and no need for niceties."

The Queen hesitated for a moment longer, then raised the goblet to her lips, suppressing a shudder as the acrid vapour stung her nose. His words goaded her, mocked her cowardice and shamed her with their harsh truth. She would not go to the Everlasting as a coward, nor would she have Blade think her one, her pride dictated it. The cold metal touched her lips, and she forced them open, shivering at the first chill touch of death. Blanking her mind to the consequences, she took two gulps before the sacred water's vile, fizzy taste made her throat close. Lowering the goblet, she gasped, fighting the urge to vomit.

Blade commented, "Now it will be easy. Your fate is sealed."

Minna grimaced. "It may be easier, but no less vile."

He glanced at the goblet, which was still more than half full. "More than six days."

Minna lifted the cup and drained it to half, grimacing again at the foul taste as she replaced it on the plinth.

He smiled. "Well done. It is easy to go on when there is no turning back."

"It will be easy for you, who care nothing for those you leave behind," she shot back, angered by the needless waste of his life as well. "I have much to live for, yet I must die. I care about those who will mourn me. It saddens me to think of the grief I will cause them. You could still choose to live, if not for yourself, then for those who will be hurt by your loss."

"There is much to be said for not caring. It makes many things easy."

Minna made a curt, angry gesture. "For you, but not for those who care about you. Chiana will mourn you, and Lirek, Jayon, Arken, many others. But you do not care if they are sorrowful, or that Chiana will live the rest of her life in misery because of you. She loves you."

"I did not make her so. I did not ask for her love."

"That does not matter. I must die, but you have a choice, yet you choose to throw your life away."

He shook his head. "I have no choice, and I have nothing to throw away. My life is worthless, and whether I live or die, I will make Chiana miserable. Do you not see that I have no love to give her?"

"She loves you enough for both of you. Just being your wife makes her happy."

"She will not mourn forever. Mayhap one day she will take another husband and have children."

"She cannot. As a priestess she is forbidden, and she has Kerra to raise as her own. She needs you."

Blade noted the spots of colour that flushed her cheeks and smiled again, sadly. "I am not worth having, My Queen. When I crawled out of the desert all those years ago, I was more dead than alive, and quite mad. I lived in the forest like an animal. I dug up roots and tubers, ate nuts and frogs and killed ducks with my bare hands to eat their flesh raw.

"Then I waylaid a traveller one day and killed him with a rock. I took his money and horse and rode to a city. I sold the beast to buy food, and when that ran out I begged. But I starved, so I started killing. I waited in dark alleys and smashed my victims' heads with a rock just for the few coins in their purses. I was a common murderer long before I became an assassin."

His smile had faded, and his flinty eyes bored into her. "You do not know what it is like to be kicked and spat on, to sleep in the street with the rats and be woken by some drunkard urinating on you. I was beaten many times for stealing. I found killing a more blameless crime, with no one to punish its accomplishment. I fought with dogs for scraps in the gutter. This is the man you wed to your chief advisor."

Minna shook her head, her eyes filled with anguish. "No, that is what you were, not what you are now. You were a frightened, hungry boy with no one to care for you, mutilated by the Cotti."

"I died in the desert." He smiled at her look of confusion. "I died here." He tapped his chest. "All that I was before died with my sisters and brothers. When I watched the last of them fall dead from exhaustion and sickness, something snapped within me. I felt it. That was the moment I ceased to care, the moment I died. Perhaps that is why I am so hard to kill. I am already dead inside. Look into my eyes and see it. There is nothing there, no feeling, no soul, just an empty shell."

The Queen stepped closer and raised a hand to stroke his cheek. "No, you are not dead. Not yet. You can still feel, if only you would allow yourself to. The pain you carry within you is too great to be borne, so you bury it under hatred and indifference. But it is still there, and the only way to be free of it is to let it out."

He spun away, moving beyond the reach of her hands. "You do not understand my pain. It is not buried or forgotten. It lives in me. It gnaws at me every day, and I do bear it. When I watched my sisters die I swore vengeance, and I have had it, but it did not bring me the release I craved. I did not see them all die, but I saw their bodies thrown to the birds."

He turned to face her again. "So you see, nothing can fill the emptiness within me. No one can bring back what I have lost, and only death can free me of my hatred."

Minna's knees buckled, and she grabbed the plinth, her eyes widening in surprise. Blade reached her in two swift strides and swept her up in his arms. She sagged against him with a sigh, a strange numbness stealing over her and a sleepiness invading her mind.

"I am afraid, Blade."

"Hush, do not think about it." He laid her on the silken cushions that covered the plinth. "Think about what a terrible person I am, so cold and unfeeling. Do you not agree?"

She smiled. "Yes. Tell me something good about yourself."

"Good?" He chuckled, leaning over her, his closeness strangely comforting. "That will be a short telling, My Queen."

"Call me Minna. No one ever calls me that now."

"Minna."

"You are a good man. I see in you a kindness, a shining goodness, like a saint."

He smiled. "A saint who kills? If I was a saint, I would weep for you now."

"No. Death is your friend, ever at your side, and you see no sadness in its coming because you walk in its shadow."

His smile faded, and his eyes flicked over her face. "Very good, Minna. Well done."

The guttural roar of a mighty bell shattered the stillness, boomed through the palace and made him jerk in surprise, frowning.

Minna smiled. "It tolls for me. The Queen is dead."

"Not quite."

"Hold my hand," she whispered. "It grows dark."

The assassin clasped her hand and leant closer as her words became softer. "Are you still afraid?"

"No. Death is at my side. He has grey eyes and black hair, and he is holding my hand. Who better to be with? I shall die in the arms of my assassin, one of many who has found death there."

The great golden bell tolled again, and he waited for the sound to fade. Minna's eyes closed, and he leant closer still, his breath fanning her face. "Death is nothing to fear, Minna. It comes to all of us in the end. It is the one thing about life that is unavoidable."

"Yes." She sighed. "And soon you will be at my side to comfort me on my last journey."

A banshee scream filled the room, followed by a heavy thud as Shista flung herself at the door. The great bell tolled again, drowning out the grief-stricken sand cat, and Blade glanced at the door as it shuddered under her attack.

Minna gripped his hand. "Do not leave me, Blade."

"I will not. I am here, Minna, right beside you."

The door rattled, and Shista's claws screeched on the wood. Her scream rose to an ear-splitting wail of keening sorrow. Minna's eyes opened wide, filled with anguish and pain that was not her own. Shista reached out to her from beyond the door in a last, desperate attempt to call her friend back from the brink of darkness, and for a moment the two became one.

Minna's eyes dulled and fluttered closed, and the cat's scream rose to a broken howl of unfettered agony. The Queen sighed and went limp. Blade held her hand for a little longer, then folded it over her breast, arranging the other one and straightening her gown. She continued to breathe in shallow gasps, her skin pale. He gazed down at her, then turned away. The bell tolled again, reverberating through the palace, and Shista howled and battered at the door.

Chapter Eleven

Kerrion gazed up at the walls of Minna-Satu's city, its battlements lined with rows of men in glittering silver armour. No flags or banners flew above Jondar, and no battle pennants fluttered in the breeze. The silent army atop the walls made no move to defend it, but stood like living statues, their weapons sheathed. As he rode up to the gates, the bolts were drawn back with a loud scraping and the mighty portal creaked open. He reined in his mount, wary of a trap, and allowed a company of his men to precede him into the city.

They marched unchallenged down the wide street that led through it, and he followed. A vast, silent crowd lined the road, its members' hateful faces turned towards him, watching him pass. Kerrion's scalp prickled at the tension around him, and he waved one of his advisors forward. The man spurred his beast to walk beside the King's, and Kerrion turned to him.

"What is going on?"

The advisor shrugged. "It seems that Jashimari has surrendered, Sire."

"Never. I would rather expect them to kill themselves than surrender. Why are there no banners?"

"I do not know, Sire."

"This is very strange. I do not like it."

"Perhaps you should camp outside and let your men sack the city first," the advisor suggested.

"No. I will lead my army, not cower behind it."

The boom of a vast bell shattered the eerie silence, and Kerrion's horse reared, cavorting with fright. At the knell, the people faced the palace and sank to their knees, prostrating themselves. A keening arose from them, a wordless, tuneless lament that chilled the Cotti King's bones. He struggled to control his horse, and turned to the advisor again.

"Now what?"

The man fought his own beast. "I do not know, Sire."

A man at the edge of the crowd drew his sword and fell upon it, and a woman near him screamed, "The Queen is dead!"

Kerrion's blood turned to ice. "No."

A portion of the crowd began to chant the Queen's name, the dirge growing in volume as more and more joined in, while other people kept up the anguished wailing that made the King's hair stand on end. The powerful emotion that arose from the people made the Cotti soldiers look around in confusion. Veterans of many battles, they had known grieving before, but not in this intensity. Women wailed and threw themselves on the ground, tearing their clothes in an orgy of misery, their high shrieks piercing the low chanting of the crowd. From a nearby temple the singing of priestesses formed a melodic counterpoint to the crowd's unbridled and tuneless mourning. Kerrion glanced up at the golden bell and dug his heels into his steed's flanks.

"Follow me!"

The horse leapt forward, and he galloped towards the distant palace with its gilded minarets and pale walls, his soldiers parting to let him through. Some shouted a warning as he raced past, but he ignored them. The crowd's chant grew louder, and the great bell, high in its tower, glittered as it swung, tolling again.

Behind him, hooves clattered in pursuit as his mounted troops followed him in his wild race towards the palace. The bell tolled, booming over the city in a bull-roar of sound. The crowd howled the Queen's name, and men fell on their swords beside the road, reddening it with their blood. Kerrion glanced back, glimpsing the silent, unmoving Jashimari army that occupied the city walls. Like the crowd, the soldiers knelt where they had stood, facing the palace, their weapons laid before them on the ground.

The great bell tolled twice more before he reached the palace gates and clattered through them, his sword ready to meet any challenge, but the Jashimari soldiers offered no defence of their Queen or her palace. He pulled his mount to a halt and leapt from its back, striding towards the doors.

Cotti soldiers overtook him and thrust their way inside, drawing their swords even as he put away his own. Armoured Jashimari warriors watched them pass with dull eyes, their swords idle in their scabbards. Kerrion paused inside the doors and glanced about in confusion. His soldiers ran ahead, most disappearing down the hallways, but a group stayed with him. Hooves clattered outside as more of his soldiers arrived, and he turned to the nearest officer.

"Find the Queen! Go!"

The man ran off with a group of soldiers as more rushed in. Kerrion sent them in different directions with the same instructions, then set off with a troop at his heels. His memory of the Jashimari palace was hazy. He had seen little of it when he had been here, and it was not enough to find his way around now. Apart from the soldiers who stood in the doorways, the place seemed to be deserted, and, after several minutes of fruitless searching, he grabbed one of them and demanded the Queen's whereabouts. The Jashimari soldier glared at him, refusing to speak, and Kerrion thrust him aside. The golden bell pealed again.