Harshini (40 page)

Damin strode out of the tent without another word. Brak pushed Mikel down onto the cushions and looked over at Adrina.

“Can you talk him out of this?”

She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him so angry.”

“You’ve got an hour, Adrina,” R’shiel pointed out coldly.

The princess nodded. “I’ll do what I can, but he may not listen to me. I was the one who brought Mikel here.”

“Then you’d better do something about keeping him alive, hadn’t you?” the demon child said unsympathetically.

The God of Thieves appeared at R’shiel’s summons, although he looked rather put out by the call. R’shiel had told Brak that Kalianah thought Dace was sulking about something and he wondered if the reason had been Mikel.

The child was a study in abject despair. He sat huddled on the cushions, his knees drawn up under his chin, tears streaming silently down his face. He had said nothing. In the warm glow of the candlelight he was an island of misery and dejection.

“What do you want, demon child?” Dacendaran asked sullenly as he materialised behind R’shiel.

“What’s the matter with you?” she demanded as she spun around to face him. Although she knew he was a god, R’shiel had known Dace as a simple thief in the Grimfield first, and she often made the mistake of still thinking of him that way. Brak wished she were a little more cautious. He might look cute and adorable and wear an air of guileless innocence, but Dacendaran was still a god, and a powerful one at that.

“I’m busy,” Dace muttered, scuffing the rug with a boot that didn’t match the other he wore.

“I want to know what happened to Mikel.”

“You stole him from me,” Dace accused with a petulant scowl.

“
I
stole him from you? Don’t be ridiculous! I’m not a god! How could I steal him?”

“You gave him to Gimlorie.”

“Oh,” R’shiel said, suddenly looking guilty. “That.”

Brak glanced at R’shiel for a moment and then looked at Mikel. “Why did you give him to the God of Music?”

“I needed to make sure the Kariens would leave, so I asked Gimlorie to help.”

“What
exactly
did you do, R’shiel?” Brak asked suspiciously.

“I asked him to teach Mikel a song that would instil an irresistible longing for home in the Kariens. I knew it might be a little bit…dangerous…so I asked Gimlorie to make his brother Jaymes his Guardian. That way, if he got lost in the song, Jaymes would be there to pull him back.”

Brak muttered a curse. “R’shiel, have you any idea what you’ve done? A Guardian is only effective if he’s in touch with his ward. Once Jaymes left his side Mikel was vulnerable to this sort of manipulation.”

“Hey, how come suddenly this is all my fault?
He
tried to kill
me
!”

Neither Brak nor Dace answered her.

“I needed to turn them back,” she added defensively. “It seemed like a really good idea at the time.”

“Gimlorie’s songs are dangerous, R’shiel. They can
twist men’s souls around. You should never have taught one to this boy.”

“I didn’t teach it to him. Gimlorie did. He didn’t seem to mind when I asked him.”

“Of course he wouldn’t mind. Every soul who hears it hungers for him. But it’s what it has done to Mikel that you should be concerned about.”

“Are you saying Gimlorie is the one who turned Mikel into an assassin?”

“No,” Dacendaran said. “Gimlorie wouldn’t do that. But what you
did
do was leave Mikel vulnerable to Xaphista.”

“Humans need faith to believe in the gods, R’shiel,” Brak added in a lecturing tone. “What you did was take away Mikel’s freedom to believe or not believe. You destroyed his free will and made him a creature of the gods. Any god.”

R’shiel turned to the boy and stared down at him impatiently. “Is that what happened, Mikel? Did you go back to worshipping the Overlord?”

Mikel shook his head silently, too distraught to speak.

“Then why? Who told you to do this thing?”

“The old man,” the child replied in a voice so low even Dacendaran had to strain to hear him.

“What old man?” Brak asked.

“The one in Hythria. At the palace. He told me to give the demon child a gift. He said it would help her see the truth.”

“What old man is he talking about?” R’shiel asked Brak.

“It was probably Xaphista himself,” Dace shrugged.

“Can he do that?”

The God of Thieves gave the demon child a withering look.

“Oh, well, I suppose if you can do it, so can he.” She turned and studied the miserable figure hunched on the cushions for a moment then turned to Brak. “Why Mikel?”

“Because he’s young, he’s impressionable, he’s feeling guilty for turning away from his god in the first place, and,” he added with a frown, “you left him wide open to manipulation when you opened his mind to Gimlorie’s song.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know it would do that? The Harshini sang it all the time in Sanctuary. It didn’t seem to bother them.”

“The Harshini are already a part of the gods, R’shiel. But even they will only share it among themselves. No Harshini would ever share the song with a human.”

“So what do we do with him?”

“I don’t know, but we’ve got about half an hour to make up our minds,” he reminded her grimly.

“Dace? Can’t the gods do something?”

The god shook his head. “You can’t
un
teach him, R’shiel, and he’s done the Overlord’s bidding. None of the gods has any interest in saving this child.”

“But he was your friend, Dace!”

The god stared at her. His smile faded and for a moment he let R’shiel see the true essence of his being. The lovable rogue was gone and there was simply Dacendaran, the God of Thieves, powerful, implacable and concerned only with his own divinity. Brak had seen it before and the knowledge of what
the gods were truly capable of was at the core of his distrust of them. But R’shiel had never been confronted with it until now and it stunned her.

She took a step back from Dacendaran in fear.

“Do what you want with the child,” Dacendaran said in a voice that chilled Brak to the bone. “His fate is of no concern to the Primal Gods.”

Dace vanished, leaving them alone in the tent. R’shiel appeared to be having trouble breathing. Mikel had still not moved, resigned to his fate—perhaps even welcoming it. He would soon be dining at the Overlord’s table.

Damin Wolfblade would see to that.

They came for him on the hour, three heavily armed Raiders who were there to stop them from trying anything heroic, Brak suspected, rather than any real need to escort an eleven-year-old to his execution. They didn’t try to prevent the men from taking the boy, even with magic. It would simply have angered the High Prince. The bind that Damin Wolfblade had placed them in was untenable: go to the rescue of those in the Citadel or stand back and watch a child put to death for the crime of being easily manipulated.

Adrina was waiting outside with Damin. Her eyes were swollen and she had obviously been fighting with him. Damin’s eyes were bleak and unforgiving. Behind Adrina were the Harshini who had come to aid the Hythrun in their quest to relieve the Citadel. Glenanaran stood at the front of the small gathering of Dragon Riders. Brak could feel their pain from the other side of the clearing. This was a vicious way to reintroduce them to the world of humans.

One look at Damin and Brak knew that Adrina had not changed his mind.

“You can’t order this, Damin,” R’shiel told him as Mikel was escorted across the clearing to stand before the High Prince of Hythria. “You can’t ask a man to execute a child!”

He looked at her. “I don’t ask anything of my men I wouldn’t do myself.”

“Damin,
no
!” Adrina cried in horror. She ran forward and grabbed his arm, but he shook her off impatiently.

“You don’t have to watch, Adrina. Nor do you, Divine Ones,” he added, looking over his shoulder at the horrified Harshini. “This is none of your concern.”

“Damn it, Damin, be reasonable!” R’shiel yelled angrily as he began to walk away with Mikel and the guards in his wake.

Damin stopped and turned to her, then he walked back to confront her, his eyes blazing in the torchlit clearing among the tents.

“Reasonable?” he snarled. “Define ‘reasonable’, demon child. Is it reasonable that I let this child live so he can turn on you again? It is reasonable that I let an assassin reside in the heart of my family? Suppose Adrina had taken that cup? Suppose Brak hadn’t noticed something was wrong? What the hell do you expect me to do?”

“You cannot murder an eleven-year-old boy for something that wasn’t his fault. He’s a child, Damin, a tool. If anyone is to blame, it’s me.”

Her calming tone did nothing to deter him. “R’shiel, I have lived with assassins all my life. I grew
up afraid of the dark, because for me, the darkness
was
likely to conceal danger. I will not have
my
child raised the same way. I will not have him sleep with armed guards standing over him. I want him to grow up playing with children his own age, not learning how to take down men twice his size in case he’s attacked. I want the whole damned world to know what I’m capable of if they dare to threaten me or mine. This ends now.”

“He didn’t threaten
you
, Damin, or your wife and child. He was trying to kill me.”

“You’re my friend, R’shiel, and he did it under my roof. It amounts to the same thing.”

“Do this thing and we won’t be friends any longer, Damin.”

Brak watched him hesitate for a moment, but the implacable rage that consumed the Warlord wasn’t something so easily swayed. Even faced with the horror of what he was about to do, Brak found himself sympathising with Damin. He’d been alive for seven hundred years and seen worse things done for lesser reasons. He didn’t know how many times they’d tried to kill Damin as a boy, but he could see now the scars that it had left on him. He was willing to do anything, literally, to save his unborn heir from the fear he must have lived through as a child, not realising that in order to slay the monster, he would become a monster himself.

Brak saw the look of horror in Adrina’s eyes and the pain of this confrontation emanating from the Harshini like waves of desperation. And he could see in Damin’s eyes the weight of the decision he had been forced to make. For Damin it boiled down to a
simple decision: the life of a Karien child or the life of his own child.

“I’ll do it,” Brak said, stepping forward into the torchlight.

R’shiel rounded on him in horror. “Brak!”

“I’m sorry, R’shiel, but Damin has a point. If he doesn’t deal with this, he’ll never put an end to it. The child needs to die. He has to make an example of him.”

Damin looked stunned to find such an unexpected ally. “I cannot ask a Harshini to do this. I won’t even ask it of my own men.”

“I’m a half-breed, Damin, and it won’t be the worst thing I’ve done.” He turned to the Harshini and met Glenanaran’s black eyes evenly. “Take the others away from here, Glenanaran. Just pray to the gods that watch over this child that Death comes quickly for him.”

The Harshini stared at him for a moment, while Brak silently willed him to understand. Then Glenanaran nodded solemnly. “We will pray for the child.”

Then do it quickly
, Brak urged silently.

The Harshini turned and vanished into the darkness. R’shiel watched him with dismay as he walked across the clearing and took Mikel by the hand. Damin stood beside her, surprised and a little suspicious of Brak’s willingness to kill.

“How do I know this isn’t a trick?”

“This is no trick, Damin.”

He grabbed Mikel by the arm and pulled him clear of the guards, then drew the dagger from his belt. He turned it for a moment in his hand as if testing the weight, then he glared at Damin.

“Are you planning to watch?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a sick son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“No, just a distrustful one. I don’t believe you’ll do it.”

He’s calling my bluff
. But he could not draw on his power to create an illusion. Damin would notice what he was up to as soon as he saw his eyes darken. R’shiel stood with Damin and made no move to stop him, either. She too was calling his bluff.

He looked into the eyes of the confused child. Mikel had moved beyond fear and stepped over into paralytic terror.

“Are you ready to meet Death, Mikel?” he asked softly, almost gently. Adrina choked back a sob in the background and the torches were hissing loudly in the unnatural silence.

Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, he felt the presence of a god and almost sagged with relief. All around them, the air was suddenly filled with unnatural, crystalline music as the figure of Death appeared in the clearing. He wore a long hooded cloak, blacker than the night surrounding them. His face was a pale skull, his hollow eyes radiated light and he actually carried a scythe in his left hand.

Theatrical bastard
, Brak thought sourly.

“This is the child you wish me to take?” the spectre asked in a musical voice that boomed through the clearing.

“Yes, my Lord.”

“You presume a great deal, Brakandaran.”

“This is necessary, my Lord.”

The being glanced around the clearing until his eyes alighted on R’shiel. Brak noticed, with some relief, that she was more suspicious than frightened. She was a smart girl. She would work out what was going on sooner or later. He just hoped that when she did figure it out, she kept her mouth shut.

“Demon child,” he said, with a slight bow in her direction.

“Divine One.”

The creature swivelled his fearsome head towards Mikel then and held out a skeletal arm to the child. “Come.”

As if in a trance, the Karien boy walked towards the spectre unresistingly. There was no fear in his eyes now, only quiet acceptance. Death took the child by the hand, cast a withering gaze over the stunned humans and disappeared, taking Mikel with him.

The silence that followed was chilling. Adrina screamed.

The sound broke Damin out of his trance and he ran to her, but she pushed him away and turned on Brak savagely.

“Get out! Get away from here! You murderous, cold-blooded bastard!”

“Adrina…” Damin said, trying to take her in his arms.

“Don’t touch me! This was your idea and now look what you’ve done. Leave me alone!” She fled from the clearing sobbing loudly. Damin spared Brak a helpless look and followed after her.

Brak turned to find R’shiel standing alone in the clearing, her arms crossed, staring at him disapprovingly.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Less blood this way.”