created a difficulty. It was time for Herzu’s fury to tear them apart.
Eyul and Amalya rode through another night. Eyul slouched in the saddle, his mind clenched around the visions the ruins had shown him. Every so often he looked up, checking that Amalya still kept her seat. She swayed as though in her cups, jolting with every footfall.
A chill wind picked up two hours before dawn, snatching sand from the ridges to give each gust a stinging edge. Eyul wrapped his desert scarf in the manner of the nomads to hide his face, reducing his view to a slit. In the palace treasury Eyul had seen the iron helms taken from the Yrkman invaders; those men had chosen to confine their vision to a slot, showing as little of the world as Eyul saw now. Perhaps such helms sat well on men whose narrow view of the world led them across treacherous seas to impose their will and die at such a distance from their homes.
For a while Eyul rode beside Amalya. “We were meant to die in that city,” he said. “That pattern was set to crush us.”
“Yes.”
“But something went wrong with it-something changed. Somehow a door was left open, or forced open, and an old ghost found his way in.”
“Old ghost?” Amalya spoke through teeth gritted against the pain.
“The Emperor Tahal. He showed me how to break the pattern. I thought it would be difficult, or complicated, but it was simple.”
How is evil destroyed? With the emperor’s Knife.
Amalya managed a tight smile. “The solution is generally simple when you know what it is. Strike at the centre. But sometimes that’s most of the problem-finding the centre.”
They rode without speaking from one dune crest to the next, until he asked, “What did you fear in the Mogyrk temple?”
She turned. Her eyes rolled white in her head for a moment before she found focus. “Everything.”
“What’s to fear in a new god? The invaders, men of Yrkmir and Scyhtic and other places you can’t say without spitting, they carried Mogyrk with them. What’s to fear in that? There’s no magic in their lands, just coldness and mountains without end. All peoples bring some or other god with them and Cerani swallows them whole.” Eyul realized he was quoting Tuvaini, and stopped.
“The Mogyrks see no shades,” Amalya whispered. Her camel jolted and the pain sharpened her voice. “They see only one path, one design, and they have just one evil. Think of that, assassin: one temptation, one Lord of Hell, with dominion over all things dark. The devil the Mogyrks carry on their back can turn the hearts of many men.” She straightened in the saddle and watched him with a quiet intensity. For a while only the creak of leather and the soft noises of padded feet in sand filled the space between them.
The wound on Eyul’s leg burned as if new. “You think such a devil would find easy meat in the Knife- Sworn?”
“You’ve taken scores of lives.” The moonlight caught her cheekbones, sculpting her beauty. “Women and children, perhaps?”
We live in a world of sorrow, of pain and hard choices, Eyul wanted to say. Somehow the words that had always brought him comfort felt too hollow to speak here in the desert. “I-” I bring peace. I send souls to paradise. I give an end both swift and kind. Few in this world have one at their side strong enough for mercy in their final moments.
He said nothing.
“You think loyalty will hold you safe against corruption?” Her words stumbled and she swayed. Already the wound was poisoning her blood.
“I am loyal to the empire,” Eyul said, “if nothing else.”
Amalya coughed a laugh and then muttered, “Loyalty is the easiest of all virtues to subvert.” Her words rang like steel on steel.
Caution bent Eyul’s lips. “Who gave you the Star of Cerana?”
She struggled to lift her head. “Are you loyal to the Star? Or the honesty of its delivery?”
“Who gave it to you?” Eyul fought the impulse to shake her. Amalya bent over the pommel of her saddle, the breath harsh in her throat.
“Who!”
“Ask me again, at the end.” And she would say no more. The moon dropped in the sky and still they rode on, an hour of ups and downs, punctuated by grunts and winces. “We could rest.” Amalya’s voice came dry and cracked.
Eyul pulled up his camel and dismounted. A lost hour held no water. It made no difference whether Amalya found her end on this dune or on the sands another day to the west. He told himself it made no difference.
Amalya dismounted like an old woman. Something had broken in her, to make that plea for rest. Eyul felt it break when she spoke. She caught his eyes in the grey light and manufactured a smile. “I could make us a fire,” she said.
“Are you cold?”
“Burning up.” She tried a grin, but sudden pain erased it. Eyul imagined he could feel the heat coming off her. At sundown, when he had lifted her onto her camel, he had smelled the wound and felt the fever on her skin. Why? he almost asked aloud, but the answer closed his mouth. She didn’t want to die useless.
“A fire would be good. It will be a while before the sun finds us,” he said.
Amalya’s brow glistened where her sweat ran in trickles. He started on the straps to his saddle-pack. “I’ll find us something to burn.” He remembered Amalya’s fastidiousness when it came to cooking over camel dung.
“No.” The word held a crackle that made him drop the ropes and turn to her.
Her dark eyes caught the crimson hint of dawn and threw it back at him. A wisp of flame played over the skin of her wounded arm and was gone. Amalya held her good hand before her, brown fingers clawed; she spoke one hot syllable, and fire woke on the dune. A white flame leaped up between them, higher than a man. Eyul stumbled back, the heat beating at him like a fist, and his already burned hand roared a protest.
“Amalya!” he shouted over the camels’ terror, reaching out for one as it broke past him, and missing.
The flame made no sound save for a faint but angry roar, higher pitched than the wind. It neither wavered nor flickered but stood like a white lance against the sky from which all trace of dawn had been driven. Eyul could smell his headscarf smouldering and he stumbled backwards.
“Amalya!”
She stood before the flame, one hand extended as if she were pouring out her fever into its hungry brilliance. The desert sun at its zenith in a steelblue sky would shed a kinder light than that which now lit the dune. Under its illumination all color fled. Amalya stood robed in utter white, her flesh cut from pieces of night.
For a moment the flame flared brighter still. Eyul raised one hand to his eyes, but his vision had already left him. An echo of Amalya against a white-lit sky lay in every direction.
She gave a short cry, and the fire fell cold and silent. Amalya’s after-image died with the flames, leaving Eyul in a world of black.
“Amalya!”
She didn’t answer.
Eyul groped a blind man’s path to where he’d last seen her. For the longest time he thought himself lost beyond redemption-his hands could find neither Amalya, nor any sign of their camp. Questing fingers caught only sand, sand, and more sand. He called out, softly at first, and then more stridently, but only the wind answered, filling his mouth with grit. He crawled in an ever-widening circle, though his leg and hand smarted and his back protested. He ignored them. He would find her.
At last there was a soft whisper to his left. “Here…’
When at last he caught a handful of cloth he sighed with relief and reached out again, this time finding firm flesh within the robes. He’d had no plan beyond finding Amalya, and so he gathered the woman to him and sat with her cradled in his lap. He could feel that the fever had left her, expelled with the heat of the flame. She was limp, unstrung, but breathing smoothly.
“You lost control of your fire,” he told her, “but I suppose it’s better this way. You can’t feel it now.”
Eyul sensed the dawn, felt the fingers of its warmth pushing back the chill of night. He turned his face to the sun and stroked her hair as a mother would her child’s. A tear rolled down his cheek. He checked the Knife at his
