The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [192]
The wooden walls of Zakh Gral still blazed when Salamander reached them. The heat drove him back, a searing second wall, far more impassable than mere wood and stone. A memory from his brief time there surfaced. He ran down to the cliff edge on the north side of the fortress and found what he was remembering, a breach in a stretch of half-finished stone wall, probably left for a postern gate. The stone blocks now lay cracked and steaming, but he could pick his way through. The heat still clawed at him. He gasped for breath and pushed himself onward.
Once he got inside, he stopped running and considered his position while he panted for breath. Where would Rocca have gone? Eventually, she would try to flee, but he knew that she’d never leave without making sure the sacred relics were safe. He ran towards the little stone shrine, or rather, what was now the ruins of the shrine. The dwarven fire had burnt out the roof beams, and the roof itself had collapsed. Flames had cracked and blackened the fine stonework.
All around it lay dead and dying Gel da’ Thae. They had tried to save their goddess’s shrine and failed as Westfolk arrows rained down, killing the lucky ones outright. The others—the bitumen mixture had stuck like fangs to their flesh wherever it had struck them. Tiny flames still danced on blackened faces and arms turned to cinders. One man raised his charred head and called out to Salamander, ‘Kill me, kill me! For her sake!’ Salamander broke into a run and hurried past. Here and there an overturned bucket lay in a pool of water, but the black fire floated, still burning, in the puddles.
In the smoke and the dust, in the midst of shrieks of terror and cries of pain that hung as thick as the smoke and dust, Salamander finally found Rocca. Muffled in a shabby cloak she had wedged herself in to a corner of stone ruins, and she sat so still that he thought her dead, but when he knelt down in front of her, the cloak trembled as she moved an arm. In her lap lay a cloth sack, crammed full.
‘It’s Evan,’ he said in Deverrian. ‘Are you hurt?’
Slowly she raised her head and even more slowly lifted a hand to shove back the cloak’s hood. Soot and grime caked her face, except where tears had embroidered a patten on each cheek. Blood crusted the hand that lingered beside her face.
‘You are hurt. Tell me where!’
She looked up and smiled at him, a radiant burst of joy.
‘Evan!’ she whispered. ‘You’ve come back. It be that you’ll be bringing me to our goddess, isn’t it?’
‘Tell me where you’re hurt.’ He saw, then, the blood seeping through her cloak, a spread of crimson all down her side. When he folded the cloak back, he could see her blood-stained dress, half-torn away to reveal worse-torn flesh beneath. As far as he could tell, some heavy but sharp thing had fallen upon her, to do its worst damage when she struggled to get free. As carefully as he could, he picked her up. She cried out in pain, but he settled her against his chest. Staggering under her weight, he headed for the breach in the stone wall.
The smoke hung so thick that at first he feared he’d gone in the wrong direction. He could barely breathe, and her added weight made him gasp as he staggered onward in the parching hot air. One foot after the other—his world shrank to that, one foot after the other, until at last he saw ahead of them the opening in the stone wall. He was coughing and spitting, but he carried her through at last. He managed to get a few yards beyond the dying fortress before he could go no further.
When he laid her down she whimpered. He knelt down beside her and realized that he’d come too late. Blood soaked her dress and his shirt where she’d lain against him. Her face had turned a ghastly white.
‘Will I see her soon?’ She whispered the words.
‘You will, truly.’ Even if I end up mad again, he thought, you will have that.
Salamander summoned every bit of dweomer he had and thought of Alshandra, built up an