The Oathbreaker's Shadow (18 page)

Raim slid down the side of the basin, sand tumbling after him, but his footing remained sure – a sign he was becoming more accustomed to life in the desert. He picked up a dead branch and in that instant it felt like a sword. Suddenly the tree closest to him was Lars and the basin was the arena. He gripped the hilt of his branch in both hands and swung hard at the tree, an almost three-hundred-and-sixty degree launch with all his might.

There was an almighty crack like thunder and the dead tree burst to life in a sea of splinters and black dust. Remarkably the branch remained intact, but he swung again and again at the tree, slashing and chopping until the last tendril holding it together snapped and it tumbled to the ground.

‘You do know that tree was probably a thousand years old.’

Raim spun round, breathless, and looked up to the top of the basin where Wadi was standing, hands on hips. She slid gracefully down the side of the dune and picked up a branch of her own, turned it over in her hands and took a couple of swipes at the air.

‘Fancy a real opponent, instead of taking it out on some dead wood?’

Raim grinned and nodded as they began to spar together. Wadi was better than most opponents he had faced but her swordplay didn’t even come close to her hand-to-hand skill. She was throwing all her effort into the bout, though, her face glowing red with effort. Raim felt
the anger in her blows, but somehow knew it wasn’t directed at him.

He waited for the right moment, then swung the branch and hit her upper arm. She winced and called for time, clutching at her triceps. ‘Ow!’ First annoyance, then curiosity showed on her face. ‘How did you do that?’

‘It’s your footwork that’s off. You need to stay balanced. Keep your stance tight, the target small. It means I won’t be able to get round you like I just did.’

Wadi nodded, her mouth set in a firm line, and they started again. This time, her footwork was better, and they sparred until they both called for a pause.

‘Thanks,’ she said between breaths. She tossed the branch-sword to the ground and rubbed her hands clean against her loose trousers. ‘I needed that.’

Raim shrugged. ‘Me too. The tree was getting pretty boring anyway. Hey – are you all right? I heard you and Old-maa . . .’

Wadi kicked at the ground. ‘She won’t let me go to Lazar.’ The horror on Raim’s face must have registered because she quickly corrected herself: ‘I don’t mean to
stay
in Lazar – I just want to see it. And now that we are finally going, she’s forbidding me to go with her on the last leg of the journey. It’s not fair. Before, she used to tell me I was too young – and I accepted that. But ever since I’ve been “old enough”, she’s refused to bring any Chauk there. Except now, of course.’ She looked sidelong at him. ‘You must be the unluckiest person I know.’

Raim didn’be. Let’

When the mountains first appeared on the horizon, after they had left the second Eye, the mood in the tribe changed dramatically – a mixture of excitement and anticipation and, prevailing over all, dread.

‘Lazar is . . . through . . . those cliffs,’ Wadi told him between breaths of a deep meditation session.

‘You’re not . . . supposed to . . . talk while meditating,’ Raim replied, opening one eyelid a crack to see what Wadi was up to. She had slumped back on the ground, out of the lotus position. Raim relaxed out of it as well.

‘I don’t think meditating is for me,’ she said.

‘My grandmother taught me it was as important as the rest of my training. Keeps the mind sharp,’ he said, tapping his forehead.

‘So about two seconds of meditation will do it for you then?’ laughed Draikh in his ear.

Raim grimaced. Wadi saw the look but she was used to
it by now – to Raim responding to things she couldn’t hear. In fact, she had even started to ask questions about Draikh and the rest of the haunts.

‘Rude joke?’ she asked, nodding in the direction of Draikh-as-shadow.

‘Always,’ Raim said. And then: ‘Those mountains seem like pretty big markers for Lazar.’

‘They are, but if you don’t know the way to the city you will lose yourself in them. No one has ever found it without being led by someone who has been before.’

‘Maybe no one has wanted to try hard enough to find it.’

‘Good point.’

Raim pulled out the dagger from inside his boot and turned it over in his hands. The last remnant of his Yun life – of what could have been.

‘Can I see?’ Wadi asked.

Raim flipped the dagger over and handed it to her, hilt-first. ‘Of course. Careful, though – it’s sharp.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘I know how to handle a blade just as well as you, Yun boy.’ She considered the blade, testing the edge with her finger, quickly realizing just how sharp it really was. ‘Very nice,’ she said, before laying it down carefully in her lap. She gestured at the blade, then made the hand movements for the word ‘kn0">

Raim found Wadi sitting on the peak of a sand dune, her fingers stroking the smooth edge of her pendant. She had avoided him after the water skin incident. But now the day for the Chauk – and Raim – to enter Lazar had come, and he had searched for her to say goodbye. He asked Draikh to respect his privacy and stay below as he climbed up to reach her. For once, Draikh agreed.

He attempted to say her name in Alashan, but it came out a garbled mess. Luckily, she just laughed. He breathed a sigh of relief and took that as permission to sit down next to her.

‘You could stay with us,’ she said, not yet looking at him.

‘No, I can’t,’ he said, and he began to trace a pattern in the sand with the tip of his finger. ‘I may not have knotted it as an oath, but going to Lazar was the last thing Mhara asked of me. I owe that much to her.’

‘But with the Alashan, you could be useful too – surely that is all that Mhara wanted?’ She looked up at him now, her eyes not pleading, but full of determination. ‘She just wanted you out of Darhan, where you would be punished for the scar you have no memory of. How do you know you will find answers in Lazar? Here, you could teach the young ones how to fight. With Draikh . . . you could practise more of your sage arts, away from the exiles. Look at Oyu. He belongs in the desert. You would keep him cooped up in the city, punished for no other reason than he sees you as his master?’

‘Wadi . . .’ He reached out to put his hand on her shoulder, but she angrily shrugged him off and turned away.

‘Wadi away.

‘What?’ She ran the back of her hand across her cheek, wiping away a tear that had escaped her normally tough exterior.

‘I want you to have this.’ He took out his Yun training blade and laid it on the sand. ‘You are more worthy of it than me. The owner of this blade should be a free person, not someone confined to a city of exiles.’ He reached over andhoulder again, and this time she didn’t flinch. He ran his hand down her arm, over the smoothness of her da touched her s

Raim couldn’t decide which ached more: his wrist from the ropes that bound him to Ryopi in a single-file line, or his neck, from the strain of looking up at the mountains that contained Lazar. These mountains were nothing like the Amarapura range in the north of Darhan. From afar, the Amarapura mountains looked like the points of a thousand knives, their tops covered in snow or shrouded in cloud. These peaks, the Ailing mountains, were not as tall, but the rock thrust out of the ground in smooth vertical lines, and their tops appeared flattened out like tables. Old-maa paused briefly to allow the accompanying Alashan guards to light the lanterns; the cliffs at the mountains’ base not only swallowed the heat but blocked the light almost completely too.

They walked only a few feet away from the cliffs, the lanterns’ uneasy glow casting their hunched silhouettes onto the rocky surface. At first, the cliff faces appeared
impassable, solid and buffed almost opal-smooth by the frequent sand storms. But every now and again he noticed tiny fissures in the rock, like slashes from a sword, barely wide enough to allow the passage of two people. Old-maa beckoned them into one of the gaps, no different from the hundreds they had already passed. He thought back to what Wadi had told him about the passage to Lazar: ‘Only Old-maa knows the way. One day, she will pass that knowledge on, but for now . . .’

He wished he could see where they were going; all he could make out was the back of Ryopi’s head, his black hair matted, full of sand, and thinning at the crown. The walls were so close, his shoulder snagged against stone if he slipped out of the line even by a step. Still, when he touched the walls he thought he could feel them vibrating. It was the sense of a city nearby, a hum of activity, of humanity, which he hadn’t felt since Kharein. The path beneath his feet was well trodden. One of his footsteps placed him directly in the indent left by Ryopi. He was walking in the footsteps of a traitor, and of a million traitors before him. His stomach churned, and when he looked up to try and catch a glimpse of sky he could see nothing but the cliff walls, rising into darkness. On the wrist of the Alashan guard closest to him, held there by a thin piece of rope tied around his foot, Oyu shivered his feathers, clearly un settled by this skyless passage.