Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Bron lay across Disaris, certain his heart was about to burst from sheer terror. Fear combined with fury, and he struggled with the conflicting needs to crush her to him and shake her until her teeth rattled. “Answer me, Disa!”
She lay still beneath him, then suddenly surged upward with such speed and power, she managed to throw him off her as if he weighed no more than a pillow.
“No, no, no!” she cried, gaze fixed on the thinning pillar of violet light coiling up from the pavestone as she crawled toward it.
Runes carved into the stone pulsed with the same light, their glow brightening and fading until finally going dark.
Disaris kicked at Bron when he grabbed her leg, screaming her frustration.
Afraid she’d slip out of his grip and throw herself into what remained of the luminescent column, he stood and scooped her into his arms, carrying her, squirming and twisting, a safer distance away from a portal that was now a death trap.
“Stop it, Disa! He snapped, grabbing her wrists with one hand to keep her from clawing his eyes out. The woman he held was not the one he’d known most of his life.
This was a panicked animal caught in the throes of madness.
It was a battle to hold her, and he imagined this might be what it was like to wrestle one of the legendary great serpents that hunted the jungles of far-away Izindas.
She refused to quiet, reduced to feral grunts as she thrashed in his grip. The soldiers who’d accompanied them to the temple raced toward them, weapons drawn as they prepared to fight off whatever men or monsters were attacking their leader.
“Stand down!” Bron’s command boomed throughout the nave. His men lurched to a stop, their faces masks of confusion when they saw no enemy, only their commander and the wild-eyed itzuli he held in his arms.
“Commander,” one of the men said. “Who’s attacking?”
“No one,” he said, thrusting his chin toward the thin streamer of light that was all that remained of the awakened gate.
“She somehow activated a lim gate and almost fell through. I caught her in time, but she’s frightened.
” A lie, but they didn’t need to know any more than what they’d just seen with their own eyes.
“Go back to your posts and your duties,” he said.
“I’ll take care of things here.” They leapt at his “Now!” and disappeared the way they’d come.
Bron was not yet through shouting at people. He returned his attention to his captive and employed a tactic he’d once seen used on her to great effect by a woman who could have been a general instead of a farmer’s wife.
“DISARIS JIN GHEZA, MIND YOUR GALL!”
Disaris froze, wide-eyed and gaping at Bron as a semblance of sanity slowly crept back into her eyes. She went lax in his arms. Bron slowly let go of her hands, mostly assured she’d no longer blind him.
She stared at him, lower lip quivering. “Why do you sound like my amman?” she asked in a shaking voice, then covered her face with her hands and began to cry.
Between the muffled sobs, he thought he heard her say her sister’s name.
A frisson of alarm snaked down his spine. Why was she crying for Luda?
When the sobbing dwindled to sniffles, he eased her out of his embrace to help her stand, but kept a hand on her arm, wary of what she might do next.
She leaned to one side to see around him, her face splotchy with tears and the tip of her nose red.
All the crazed violence that had turned her into something rabid had disappeared, and she stared at where the column of light had once been.
Despair drooped her shoulders and the corners of her mouth. “It’s gone.” The way she acknowledged the gate’s closing sounded like the grief of someone attending the burial of a loved one.
Bron took a small step back, lowering his hand from her arm. “If I turn away, will you run?”
She sighed, the faint uplift of her lips merely a parody of a smile. “Where would I go? That was my way out.”
He wanted to comfort her, tell her that she was alive thanks to the failure of her plans, that he would have tossed her over one of the walls if necessary to prevent her from hurling herself straight toward her own gruesome death.
He couldn’t be sorry for that, but he could sympathize with her sense of defeat.
It was an emotion with which he was intimately acquainted during his tenure in the Daesin army.
Choosing to believe she wouldn’t try and flee, he walked to where her frock still lay on the ground, one corner crumpled so that the symbols stitched there took on even stranger shapes.
His instincts had steered him true when he’d doubted her story that the ragged garment had been a last gift from her amman, and it stung that, once more, she’d lied to him.
Willingly, knowingly. He had no doubt she’d do so again in the near future.
He held up the skirt portion of the frock, studying the embroidered symbols while also keeping one eye on a now-docile Disaris.
During the first years as a new recruit training as a battle mage, Bron had been taught the languages known as Ezkutuan and Erakutsi—Hidden and Revealed.
They were the languages of grimoires and rituals.
The teaching of them was mostly reserved for priests and scholars blessed with magic, and sometimes those low-brow but especially useful and dangerous battle mages.
Bron was both fluent and literate in Ezkutuan and Erakutsi.
The symbols decorating the skirt were not part of either of those, though they weren’t unfamiliar.
This was the arcane language of the lim-folk, and Disaris had read them as easily as if she recited from one of the schoolhouse primers they’d used as children.
If he’d had any doubts before about her talent as an itzuli, they were gone now.
He turned to Disaris, holding up the skirt. “What do these say?”
Docile didn’t necessarily mean cooperative, at least not with her. She looked away and stayed silent, except for the occasional sniffle.
Bron returned to her, offering her the garment.
She snatched it out of his hand, hugging it to her breasts as if it were a shield.
“I ask out of curiosity, not necessity,” he told her.
“The lim don’t carve the same key spell on their portals twice, and since your Daggermen mostly destroyed this gate’s ability to work correctly, your instructions are useless to us now.
” He scowled. “But deadly to you. Why do you so badly want to cross that threshold, Disa?”
Her eyes had widened in disbelief the more he spoke. “But it did work. We both saw it.” She clenched the frock in her hands. “Why would they do such a thing?”
“Because preserving the secret of the Hierarch’s whereabouts is more important to the Daggermen than feeding or retrieving information to and from the disciples fortressed at Baelok.
They always knew if we discovered they were using the gate, we’d find a way to do the same and capture their leader.
” He considered her surprise. For all that she was the itzuli, it was obvious she didn’t belong to whatever inner circle of Daggermen had controlled Baelok.
And where had Ceybold stood within the ranks of the fanatics?
High or low, it seemed he hadn’t shared much with his wife.
Just calling Disaris that in his mind left a sour taste in Bron’s mouth.
“Surely, the Daggermen of Baelok noticed when the messengers who usually appeared at regular intervals no longer showed?”
She nodded, her gaze distant. “They just assumed the Hierarch chose to halt contact for a time. He’s done that before.” Her bowed shoulders slowly straightened, and it was she who regarded him with suspicion. “Do you know what’s on the other side of the gate?”
His eyebrows rose. “Do you?”
“I have a suspicion.” She looked away a second time.
Bron closed the space between them until they were chest to breast. While she still refused to meet his gaze, she didn’t step back.
He framed her face with his hands and tilted her head up.
“Look at me,” he said softly. She did, affording him a view he’d only seen in his dreams for the past three years until yesterday.
Pallid and thin, with sunken eyes and tear-stained cheeks, she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. “I am not your enemy, Disa.”
For an ephemeral moment, she pressed her check into his palm.
Her half-smile wobbled and disappeared as quickly as it appeared.
“But to the Daesin army, I’m yours,” she argued.
“You’re a Daesin battle mage, and I’m the widow—hopefully—of a Daggerman.
A war captive of your general. Tell me that every word I speak won’t be relayed back to him? ”
She asked the question such a way that it made it risky to answer. She was right to be suspicious. An unguarded tongue carried serious, even fatal consequences. “It depends on what I consider important enough to tell him,” he replied.
Her eyes closed. “Please, Bron, I beg you. Let me go through the gate.”
He gently massaged her temples with his thumbs.
“I can’t. I won’t. The gate might look like it works, but it doesn’t.
We found the last messenger—or part of him—who tried to come through after the stone was broken.
” The memory of what they discovered still made his stomach turn, even more so now that Disaris had almost suffered the same terrible fate.
Her eyes snapped open, and her face paled even more. “What do you mean ‘part of him’?”