Chapter 35
Dalila’s wails echoing in my head, I sprinted for the dungeon.
Get Raksh. The nonsensical command ran through my head; it was the last piece of advice I’d ever imagine Dalila would offer and yet it had clearly cost her to spit those words—Lab, the spindle, whatever monstrous entity it was, violently seizing my friend’s body in return.
And so I ran, no longer bothering with discretion, heedless of the pain lacing deep inside my ribs.
I was fast enough to avoid the few guards I spotted, until I arrived at the stairs leading to the dungeon.
A score of soldiers blocked the doors, the most armed men I had ever seen gathered at once in Khatti Ugal, bearing an assortment of spears and swords, halberds and axes.
The sight brought me up short, my chances of making it to Raksh suddenly dubious.
If I’d been at my best, defeating this many men would be daunting, and likely improbable.
And I was very much not at my best right now.
No matter what magical strength I had been blessed with, I’d been combating the effects of a deadly poison and sleepless nights before battling with not-Raksh and Lab.
This was perilously close to impossible now.
For a moment, I contemplated Dalila’s belt, glancing down at where I’d looped it around my dagger’s hilt.
She had risked so much creating this for me, offering her heart, her body, her very mind to the monster now rampaging with her face.
If I put this belt on, would my pain vanish?
Would the poisoning? Might I live, might I thrive, becoming the sort of mythic warrior that could take on twenty men at once?
Would my injuries heal as they were inflicted, leaving me all but invincible?
Or maybe just leaving you vulnerable. For Lab had also had a hand in spinning and weaving this belt and for all I knew, donning it would be handing over my will to the enemy currently hunting me. I stared at the soldiers, gripping my blades and contemplating my options.
However the decision was made rather abruptly for me when one of the guards let out a piercing wail and threw himself on his fellows.
He was followed shortly by a second, who tried to turn his sword on his own shroud, howling and failing to saw away the fabric, and then it was pandemonium.
I didn’t hesitate, rushing into the fray while it was still chaos.
Lab’s enslaved creations fought well if not imperfectly; a thrust to the belly did nothing but spill dye—but cutting away their cloaks turned them to dust and was an easier maneuver.
“Slice off their shrouds!” I cried to my silent ally.
I had no idea if he could understand me—if he spoke my tongue, if the enchantments the queen had woven into his own cloak even allowed for such comprehension—but when his gaze met mine across the way, I demonstrated, dashing my blade across the knot holding tight my current combatant’s cloak.
It fell away, my opponent vanishing with it. My unexpected partner followed suit with his own foe, and then we made hasty work of his fellows.
Finally, it was over, the two of us surrounded by fallen, faded shrouds.
I turned to thank the rebel guard only to find him on his knees, holding out the clasp of his own cloak.
There was no expression on his face, still a mask of false obedience, but his eyes were pleading.
Perhaps there were yet commands he couldn’t disobey, including destroying himself.
The prospect of returning his assistance with death broke my heart, and I paused, wishing for an alternative.
But there was no hesitation in the guard’s posture, in his begging gaze, and I could not judge any Khatti Ugalan for desiring such a release.
“Thank you,” I said gravely. Then I cut away his shroud and was alone.
Now I just had to save my husband.
The dungeon was as forbidding and dark as when I’d first seen it, every cell I examined empty—Lab clearly didn’t believe in letting prisoners linger.
But at the end of the yawning row of barred doors was a closed chamber.
A pale blue glow, like the afterimage of the sun on one’s eyelids, lit the narrow band between the bottom of the door and the dirty floor.
Raksh. The shadow of our bond kindled in my chest as I approached his cell, but it was a frail, diminishing tie. I’d picked up one of the spears from the fallen guards and used its hilt to break the lock, wrenching the iron door open.
“God preserve me,” I gasped. “What has she done to you?”
Raksh had been torn apart. He appeared to be shifting between his immortal and human states, wildly spotted and striped blue skin giving way to pale brown as his tusks and claws erupted and melted away.
Black hair spilled around his head like blood and his dark eyes were closed.
Far worse was the mess of his belly, flayed open and disemboweled.
But it was not guts and organs spilling out—rather it looked as though Raksh’s innards had been stuffed with ribbons of glittering light.
With power and story and potential, these concepts coming to me not as words but as an indescribable awareness in my heart.
As though all the unseen magic that was Raksh—the spirit of discord, the avatar of chaos and fortune and ambition—had been ripped apart.
The ribbons spooled out in lost and drifting garlands, some motionless, others shuddering as they climbed the bars of his cell and crawled along the floor.
One reached for my ankle, a desperate grasp like a drowning sailor’s, and I shuddered back.
Leave him. You cannot fix this, and he would leave you.
He has left you. But Raksh had also apparently chosen to suffer this instead of giving me up.
And for that, for Dalila’s last despairing request, I couldn’t walk away.
There were too many brushes of kinship between Lab and Raksh, creatures who fed off human emotions and journeys, even if they were opposed: vengeance for past acts and ambition for future ones.
Lab had taken one look at him, this woman who did not abide threats to her people, and neutralized Raksh before he could open his mouth.
There had to be a reason. I stepped inside the cell. “Raksh?” I called softly. “Can you hear me?”
There was no movement, no reaction from the body on the floor. I crept closer, avoiding the undulating ribbons of magic. They didn’t look like glittering light now; they were dappled hues of rich brown and mossy green. The air smelled like earth, like life.
“I have your disgusting pendant,” I whispered, pulling it from my robe.
Though we were alone, I felt the heavy weight of Khatti Ugal and its queen.
Searching for me, waiting with teeth and claws bared.
“And I really need you to wake the fuck up and tell me how to fight this creature, otherwise you’re going to be spooled out like a thrown skein of yarn, and I’m going to be the first goat to captain a ship. ”
I laid the coral medallion on the one part of Raksh’s chest that hadn’t been torn apart, looping it over his head. But it did nothing, my husband barely stirring.
However, the ribbon of magic that caught my ankle when I was distracted very much did.
The world turned over with a violent spinning that made me grateful I had eaten nothing in hours. It settled, and I sprawled back on my ass, expecting to be on the ceiling, the disgusting floor of waste and moldering rushes raining over my head.
Instead, my fingers sank into warm pink sand. A brilliant tropical sea spread before me, sparkling turquoise in the bright light of day. A dugout canoe of a type I had never seen before waited beneath a stand of bowed coconut trees.
This was not Khatti Ugal. And I was not alone. A youth stood next to me, with nut-brown skin and wiry limbs. He chewed his lip, considering the canoe with obvious hesitation.
“Go,” crooned an all-too-familiar voice. It was not in Arabic, nor in any language I knew, and yet the word spoke to my soul. “There is no future for you here. Think of the grand adventures you shall have. New islands to explore, beautiful women to plow.”
“Oh, for God’s sake . . .” I kicked the ribbon away and the vision vanished. The magical intestine landed with an eerie whisper back into Raksh’s flayed midsection and dove under his skin with a disgusting wiggle that reminded me of a burrowing worm.
And Raksh took a single shaky breath.
With new eyes, I stared at the shining lines rippling out from his torn belly. Were these somehow remnants, memories of the people with whom Raksh had partnered and contracted? The ambitions he’d stoked and consumed? If I returned them to him, might he wake up?
God alone knew, but deciding it was better than doing nothing, I began shoving his spilled entrails of witless humans and their terrible decisions back inside him.
It was a messy affair. Having neither the time nor inclination to take a tour through Raksh’s human hosts (I strongly suspected it would leave me abandoning him in disgust on the floor) I used the handle of the meteor blade to scoop them up, but the weapon did not make for an easy shovel of chaos spirit innards and a great many tried to snake away.
There was no avoiding some brushes with memory—from ancient rulers he seduced into disastrous campaigns of conquest to fishermen who drowned trying to bring in one last haul to feed their families.
Finally, it was done, the ribbons of memory and discord shoved back into place, churning and twisting beneath his ruined flesh.
I sat back on my heels, half expecting his skin to simply heal over.
This was Raksh, the creature whom no mortal blade could harm, who survived being left in a locked chest beneath the waves.
But the chasm in his belly remained, a hole in need of mending.