The Drowning City - Amanda Downum [40]
If the captain laughs, she knows she’ll throw herself at him, fight until he kills her and she joins her mother in the twilight lands. But he turns away, indifferent to her grief as he is to her life, and begins overseeing the removal of the last prisoners.
The Sivahri guard watches her, weary lines carved on his face. Forest-clan, she guesses. He could be kin to any of the bodies that litter the dust. His uniform is damp with blood and sweat.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly in Sivahran.
She was wrong—she does have some pride left. Xinai spits. It strikes the dirt yards from his boots, but he flinches as if it hit him. She lowers her head to her mother’s lifeless shoulders and closes her eyes, waiting for the darkness to claim her.
And as it had twelve years ago, darkness waited for her. Not the shallow red-lined black of exhaustion, but a deep and icy pit that fell forever.
“Leave her alone!”
She flinched at the shout and opened her eyes. A mottled gray-green face hovered close to hers, white hair tangling in an invisible wind. A gangshi. She might have known—spirits that feed on suffering would love the site of a massacre. What a feast she must be. Xinai flinched again, stronger, jerking awkwardly away from the gangshi’s gaping hungry mouth and empty eyes. A charm bag pulsed and throbbed around her neck.
A woman lunged between her and the spirit, a blur of black hair and shining kris-blade. Xinai scrambled back on all fours, fetching up against a twist of banyan trunks. Her dagger trembled in her hand and she coughed as she drew a deep breath. A few more heartbeats and the gangshi would have drunk down all her pain and fear, and her life with it.
Her vision grayed and she leaned against the tree for strength. Her face was slick with salt and snot and her back burned with phantom wounds.
“It’s gone now,” the woman whispered, turning back to Xinai. And then, even softer, “You’re back. I knew you would come home.” Her voice was wind in leaves, water through river-reeds; the sound sliced through Xinai, deeper than Assari whips could ever reach.
The woman stood over her, watching with lightless eyes. Her hair hung in snarls around her narrow face, her clothes in tatters. Her skin was ashen, paler than the earth beneath her feet. Xinai’s charm bag hummed against her chest.
“I knew you’d come.” The ghost stepped forward and passed through a hanging root. Xinai couldn’t speak as the dead woman knelt before her. Her throat was slashed; the wound gaped when she moved, flashing bone white as pearls amid ruined flesh and crusted blood.
“Don’t you recognize me, child?”
Xinai’s dagger dropped to the dust. Her vision blurred again, glazed with fresh tears.
“Mother—” The word broke on a wet hiccup.
Shaiyung Lin smiled a sad, terrible smile and stretched out a cold gray hand to stroke her daughter’s cheek.
“They showed me—They made me see—” She choked on snot. The gangshi’s trap had undone all her defenses and she could only sob, helpless as she’d been twelve years ago.
“Don’t worry,” Shaiyung whispered, wrapping her icy insubstantial arms around Xinai. “You’re home, and we’re together, and it will be all right. We’ll put things right.”
The sun dipped into afternoon by the time they reached the last landing. Isyllt slumped against the carven cliff-face, trying not to double over from the sharp stitch in her side and the burn in her thighs. Stone benches circled the small platform, but she feared if she sat she’d never stand again. Wind keened around the crags, threatening her hat and tugging at her sweaty clothes.
More wards ringed the upper slopes, different from those along the road. “What do these do?” she asked, moving closer to the nearest post.
“If too much pressure builds inside the mountain, it will erupt,” Asheris said. “These shunt the energy aside, bleed it off into the air.”
“Or let you channel it into the stones.”
“Exactly.”
She reached out, not quite touching the ward-stone. Its magic shivered warm through her fingers. The edges shimmered, like the air around a flame. An intricate spell, cunningly wrought.