Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [133]
There was a moment when her three imagined haunters encroached on her, looming at her shoulders – Achaeos with his load of guilt, Salma’s bright smile, slaughtered Tisamon. In contrast to it, though, they were faint echoes. She had known hardship and horror, loss and remorse. She had seen her father hacked to death, had lost her beloved, had dealt a friend a mortal blow, and small wonder that she had peopled her world with reminders. Only now did she realize that they had been merely her crutch, forever distracting her, forever swatting her mind away.
She appreciated how far she had been from being mad until now, for the momentary glimpses of those three dead men were nothing in comparison to this. My father. Tisamon.
He was gazing at her with that smile he sometimes wore as he fought. How hard he must have fought, indeed, to claw his way back thus from death. She wanted to drop to her knees, but instead she found that she was holding her stance, keeping her blade up ready to fight.
I do not believe in magic. But those words became a distant, waning refrain, banished utterly as soon as she heard his familiar lost voice inside her head.
My daughter, spoke Tisamon. I am proud of you. I have so much left to teach you.
He had his hand held out towards her, and she had a dreadful sense of vertigo, as though she stood at a cliff edge, with a fathomless void below her, and she was leaning out . . . and leaning out, and . . .
Surely this is a terrible mistake. The dead must stay dead. But he was her father, and she was far from home and lost, and more in need of help than she had ever been.
She reached and took his hand.
Twenty-Three
The fires would be seen for miles, making a statement that Dal had not quite wanted yet, but the fire-starters had intended just that, and he had not felt it politic to stop them.
Dal Arche had not known this village’s name before he arrived here, or at least he had not been sufficiently interested to find out. Sara Tela was the name they had later supplied to him, though a piece of knowledge growing fast obsolete. All the houses were alight by now, those nearest the storehouse just starting to catch fire, whilst the first couple to be torched were blazing skeletons, with their outer shutters peeled away, and the inner walls merely ragged strips of charred wood. The wholesale destruction was a little ahead of schedule, for sparks were already drifting on to the storehouse’s sloping roof even as his people were still loading up inside. There was food here, and wine, jars of kadith, bales of silk and cotton, all of it intended for onward barge to Leose. Unexpectedly there was also a small trove of old gold: inscribed lozenges dulled by time that had surely been pilfered by the local headman from some nearby ruin or mound. This discovery had put new heart into Dal’s men, who had been less and less enthusiastic about this particular plan.
‘Speed it up!’ he shouted, letting his wings whisk him on to the storehouse roof, stamping on a few embers as he landed. His watchman was already there, the lean Grasshopper-kinden named Soul Je, one of the three companions who had accompanied Dal Arche since before he came to resume this bandit life.
‘Any sign?’ Dal asked him.
The Grasshopper shook his head. He had kept an arrow nocked to his longbow, but his chief purpose was keeping watch. When Dal arrived here, he had anticipated the possibility of someone taking notice. With the smoke forming a pillar all the way to the sun, such attention was guaranteed.
For the last tenday, Dal had been just testing the waters of brigandage. First there had been a few isolated