Destiny

Torghanists come and go from a brazier heaped with glowing coals.

“You were right to watch the temple, my lord,” said one of the Khurs. “How did you know the laddad would return there?”

“I didn’t. But I marked Sa’ida for a traitor long ago. It doesn’t surprise me the elves would remain in contact with her. She was their ally when they were here. Even now she works to undermine your nation and your gods.”

The Khurs’ replies told Kerian that any squeamishness they’d felt at capturing the priestess was fading rapidly. One man asked what was to be done with the laddad woman. “I doubt we’ll get anything out of her,” the foreigner said coolly. “Perhaps if she sees what the priestess must endure, she’ll be more willing to share what she knows.”

The Khurs engaged in ugly speculation about Kerian’s own fortitude in the face of pain. Their leering laughter steeled her for action. When enough of them were looking away, she’d show them what fortitude really meant.

The foreigner uttered a sharp reproof. “Why is the elf not tied?” he demanded. The Torghanists laughed off his concern. They’d worked her over well. She wouldn’t wake up any time soon.

“Idiots. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.” He ordered the closest man to bind Kerian’s hands and ankles.

The fellow’s rag-wrapped sandals advanced toward her. He bent to grasp her slack arm. Using his body to shield the motion, she drew her concealed knife and buried it in the man’s chest. He gasped and sagged to his knees. Kerian put the blade in her teeth and catapulted to her hands and knees. She shoved the dying man at the next nearest thug. Before he could react, she was on her feet. The knife flashed. A second Torghanist collapsed onto the first, his throat slashed.

The room’s dim lighting kept the men from understanding exactly what she’d done. Not realizing she was armed, they thought she was simply making a desperate attempt to overcome far superior numbers. Only their foreign master was disturbed by her sudden revival. Kerian spotted him for the first time. He was seated at one end of a long table on the far side of the room. A lamp on the table before him illuminated his face. Kerian had never seen him before, but he was easily recognizable as a Nerakan. He was past middle age, bald, with bushy brown eyebrows. His thin cloak did nothing to conceal the armor and bejeweled court sword he wore. All of this she took in with one swift glance before he turned down the lamp’s wick.

“Didn’t you search her for weapons?” he barked.

The Torghanists hefted their cudgels and closed in. Kerian dropped to a crouch. She slashed a third Khur across the chest. He let go his weapon and staggered back, bleeding heavily. Taking up his cudgel, she fended off a hail of blows and attacked again. A Torghanist cried out as her knife opened his gut, and the rest backed off.

She gave them no time to organize but hurled the cudgel at the light. The Nerakan, thinking the blow was meant for him, jerked back. The hard wood struck the brass lamp, knocking it to the floor. Oil poured out and tiny blue flames danced across the spreading spill.

“Kill her!” the Nerakan bawled. “What are you waiting for? Kill her now!”

The Sons of Torghan tried. They were rough and ready fighters accustomed to street brawls, but they were out of their depth against the Lioness. Eight Khurs had entered the room with her. Minutes after the Nerakan ordered her death, only three still stood. Meantime the burning oil pooled around the leg of the table and ignited it. Dull orange flames flickered, giving the scene a wild, distorted look.

A Khur landed a stunning hit across Kerian’s shoulders. She whirled, driving him back with knife thrusts but received a nasty whack on the thigh from another quarter. The Khur who struck the blow got a deep cut across the forearm for his temerity.

The room was filling with smoke. The long table was alight, and flames were spreading to a dusty wall hanging. The Nerakan had fled. Coughing heavily, his Torghanist hirelings who could still move were abandoning the fight as well.

Sa’ida still slumped in her chair, unconscious. Kerian cut her bonds and carried her to the door. It was a perfect place for an ambush, but the Nerakan and the Khurs were gone. Kerian paused at the mouth of the narrow alley.

The street was empty and dark and little wider than the alley in which she stood. The fire was not yet visible out here, but smoke was seeping from beneath the eaves. The second-story dwelling above was abandoned. The roof was gone and the shutterless windows showed sky beyond. No one was going to notice the fire until a neighboring structure caught.

The priestess’s weight pulled on her injured arm. She shifted the unconscious woman to her other shoulder. Taking a deep breath, she left the deeper shadows of the alley and hurried away from the house. She prayed she wasn’t following in the footsteps of the fleeing Torghanists.

Her chosen route was north, opposite the way she’d been brought. Heading uphill past a line of tightly shuttered houses, her luck held. She paused several times to listen for sounds of pursuit, but other than the sound of a dog barking, the quarter was calm.

The narrow alleys of Arembeg gave way at last to a wider street. Kerian’s progress was slow, hampered as she was by the unconscious priestess and her own injuries. She had to halt and catch her breath several times. Each time, she tried to rouse Sa’ida, but the human remained senseless. Kerian wished for a fountain with water to revive the priestess, but Khuri-Khan had few public water sources.

After what seemed an endless hike, she came to a small souk. Half a dozen soukats were just beginning to set up for the day’s market. When they realized the elf woman sought water not for herself but for the unconscious priestess of Elir-Sana, a water bottle was promptly produced. Sa’ida commanded the highest respect, and the soukats seemed inclined to think Kerian was to blame for her current state. The Lioness didn’t bother enlightening them. For all she knew, some of them were followers of Torghan. She poured water into her cupped hand and applied it to Sa’ida’s face, all the while urging the priestess to wake.

Sa’ida’s eyelids fluttered and opened. She sat bolt upright exclaiming in shock.

“Calm yourself, Holy Mistress. You are safe.” Kerian said, glancing up at the soukats ringing them. None wore a particularly kind expression. “Much has happened, and we should not remain here.”

Sa’ida offered the water to Kerian. The owner of the bottle was displeased, but when Sa’ida thanked him for his generosity, he did not demand its return. Kerian’s throat was dry as the desert. She drank deeply.

When Sa’ida had recovered sufficiently, she blessed the soukats in the name of Elir-Sana, and the two women left the little square. From various landmarks, Sa’ida judged them to be more than two miles from the Temple of Elir-Sana.

Kerian began to relate the events that had occurred while Sa’ida was unconscious. She hadn’t gotten far in the tale when a clangor of bronze gongs sounded. A column of smoke was rising from the Arembeg district behind them. Its base was painted red by flames. The gongs were summoning able-bodied Khurs to fight the blaze. Kerian urged the priestess to a quicker pace and finished telling of their capture and escape. Sa’ida confirmed what Kerian suspected: there was no Torghanist temple in Arembeg.

The smoke was no longer a single column, but a wide curtain. The fire was spreading. Sa’ida pitied the poor folk who would lose their homes. Kerian was not so forgiving. Those were the same folk who had bolted their doors and done nothing when Torghanists dragged two prisoners, one of them a holy priestess, down their street.

“Our attackers may worship the desert god, but they take their pay from Neraka,” Kerian said. She described the bald man she’d seen in the empty house.

“Lord Condortal!” Sa’ida exclaimed.

She identified him as the official emissary of his Order in Khur, holding the rank of ambassador.

Kerian was not surprised. Wherever the Dark Knights went, subversion and violence followed. She described the pan of branding irons Condortal was preparing for them.

“How dare he!” The priestess’s usually calm countenance was flushed with outrage. “When Sahim-Khan learns of this blasphemy, he’ll have the foreigner’s head!”

“Calm yourself. It’s all part of the game. I’ve had brushes with his kind before.”

“Such insults cannot be borne!” Sa’ida insisted.

“Really? Is that the doctrine of your divine healer, or the creed of Torghan?”

Sa’ida halted in mid-diatribe, ashamed. Her steps faltered and she put a hand on the wall of a house to