A Flight of Broken Wings, page 31
part #1 of The Aeriel Chronicles Series
He had believed Tauheen not because she had been telling the truth, but because he had needed a purpose. A reason to live. A reason to justify his continued existence to himself, and to the ghost of Misri that haunted him every waking second. And revenge was as good a reason as any.
Something wet streaked down the sides of his face and he gasped. It hurt. He must have cracked a rib when he crashed against the wall. The pain was almost a relief, a distraction.
A distraction from the memory of all that he had lost.
Because it wasn’t just the love of his life that he had lost when Misri died. He had lost himself. The man he had been. The man she had loved.
He had lost his humanity, and he didn’t think there was anything left to find anymore.
What happened next wasn’t so much a decision as a reflex. Ruban was his nephew, his blood. His family. The son of the brother who had practically raised him. The brother he had betrayed, killed, because of his own weakness.
He should have loved Ruban like a son, protected and nurtured him. Instead he had orphaned him, taken everything from him. And then used him, remorselessly, for his own ends.
Subhas wasn’t naïve enough to think that there was any forgiveness to be had, any redemption. But for once, it wasn’t about him. It was about the duty he had neglected all these years. That he should have fulfilled years ago.
Gathering every last fragment of strength that was in him, he dragged himself to his feet and darted across the hall to Ruban, pushing him out of the way less than a second before Tauheen’s shell hit the already wreaked wall, blowing it out of existence.
The building shuddered under the force of the blast, the wall against which he had been standing reduced to ash and dust. Ruban staggered, trying to find his feet, trying to process what had just happened.
For a moment, he thought it was Ashwin who had pushed him out of the way. But that couldn’t be right. Ashwin would have been behind them, where he had left him when he approached Tauheen to reclaim his blade. And yet he knew with absolute certainty that whatever had shoved him out of the way of the blast had come from the side.
He frowned, disoriented, even as something soft collapsed heavily against his feet. The stench of scorched flesh filled his nostrils, making him dizzy.
He looked down, confused, and retched violently, biting down on his lip hard enough to draw blood.
His uncle lay at his feet, whimpering, his back a mess of charred flesh and blood, bits of bone visible under the carnage.
Ruban dropped to his knees even as another soft moan escaped Subhas’s bloodless lips. His eyeballs had rolled back in his head and tears streaked his grimy face, although his eyes were dry now. He was gasping, and flinching with every gasp, as if it hurt him to breathe.
Gently, Ruban took his uncle’s face into his hands, placing his head on his own lap as carefully as he could. A blast sounded somewhere in the distance, but he didn’t care. Some rational part of him told him that he should, that Tauheen would take this opportunity to finish them both off. But rationality was beyond him at this point. Another part of him wondered if there was anything at all left to fight for. And if not, then why bother?
Subhas’s lips parted, moved, but no words came out, just a sort of formless gurgle, accompanied by some blood. Ruban felt hot tears singe his face, blurring his vision, but he barely had the strength to wipe them off. With the little energy he had left, he ran his fingers through his uncle’s thinning hair, trying to give comfort he knew he didn’t have the power to provide.
“It’s okay,” he said. He was saying it over and over again, the words tasting false on his tongue. Meaningless. Nonetheless, he couldn’t bring himself to stop. “It’s okay. We’ll get you out of here. Get you back home. You’ll be alright.” It was like a mantra, a chant almost religious for the fervent hope it inspired in his broken soul. If he said it enough times, maybe it would turn out to be true.
Once again, his uncle’s lips moved. Ruban brought his head down, his forehead almost touching the other man’s nose. A sob threatened to escape him, but he couldn’t let himself cry. Not now. If he bit any harder, he thought his teeth would cut clean through his lip. He wondered, discordantly, what Simani would say about that.
“I’m sorry,” Subhas said at last, the words barely a whisper brushing Ruban’s ear. Ruban shook his head, his eyes beseeching his uncle to understand what he couldn’t say. That it didn’t matter, not now. That he loved him. But his throat was locked up, a giant lump lodged somewhere over his vocal chords that made it impossible for him to speak. If he tried, Ruban thought that he might scream.
“I’m sorry,” Subhas said again, voice slightly stronger. His fingers gripped one of Ruban’s hands with surprising strength, and he pulled him closer. Ruban went willingly.
With a long, rattling breath that seemed to cost him all he had left, Subhas parted his lips one more time. Almost desperately, Ruban leaned closer, all but pressing his tear-streaked face into his uncle’s shoulder. “What is it? What can I do?” he asked, forcing the words out of his clogged throat.
Subhas choked, coughed, spitting blood into Ruban’s face, his hair. After a blood-soaked eternity, he murmured, still retching copper: “Take care of Hiya. Ruban, please, take care of my daughter.”
Ruban wanted to tell him that he would. Wanted to promise him that he would never let her out of his sight again. Wanted to say a million other inconsequential things that he hadn’t said because he’d thought they had time. Because he’d thought he had a lifetime.
But there was no point. Subhas was gone. His moans had quieted. His wracking gasps had stilled.
Trembling, Ruban ran a hand over his uncle’s blood and dirt stained face, sliding his eyes shut. As gently as he could, he lifted the body and lay it down on the floor amidst the dust and debris of the destroyed wall.
Then he stood and turned back to face the Aeriels.
Mother and son faced each other across the breadth of the entrance hall, crimson-tipped wings unfurled, fingers alight. A long, jagged tear ran down one of Ashwin’s sleeves and some of his bottommost feathers looked singed. But that was nothing compared to the sight that was Tauheen.
Apparently, the prince had managed to hit his mother with one of his own fire-shells, which Ruban knew from experience were nothing to scoff at. Tauheen’s back was a study in devastation, little more than a mound of burned skin mingled with ruined cloth.
Ruban was gratified to see that facing the two of them at once without a moment’s respite had apparently taken its toll on the Aeriel Queen. And the stab-wound from the sifblade was obviously draining her, though far more slowly than it would any other Aeriel. The light forming around her fingers flickered and blinked, as if struggling for the solidity of a proper shell. Her magnificent wings, though still huge, seemed lacklustre, somehow diminished.
Ashwin released his shell and Tauheen dove left, out of the way of the oncoming projectile. She dodged a direct hit, but the fiery ball singed the tip of a wing, eliciting a cry of agony. Her own half-formed shell dissipated around her fingers, the wisps of gathered energy fading back into the air. Ruban didn’t think she had the stamina for another blast, not without a chance to recuperate first.
And Ashwin didn’t look like he had any intention of giving her that opportunity.
Ruban’s feet moved of their own accord. He didn’t have a plan. He had lost any semblance of clarity or logic a long time ago. All he knew was that Tauheen had to pay for what she had done. And if it was the last thing he did in his life, he was going to make her pay.
Even as Ruban moved closer, the queen’s eyes remained focused on her son, so she did not notice his approach. At least not until it was too late. Barely a foot away, he leapt, hand outstretched as he swung his blade into Tauheen’s left wing, cutting through hollow bone, muscle and tendon. Light spilt from the butchered appendage along with a hellish fountain of feathers and bits of flesh.
Piercing, hair-raising screams fell from Tauheen’s lips, her limbs flailing, wide eyes glassy with pain. Ruban ripped the blade out of the ruined wing, taking torn muscle and feathers along with the weapon even as one of his legs shot out to deliver a vicious kick to the back of Tauheen’s knees.
With an aborted yelp, the Aeriel sank to her knees, spasms rocking her body as light continued to spill weakly from her injured wing, casting flickering shadows on the carpet. Almost on instinct, one of her hands jerked outward as she fell – perhaps in a futile attempt to break the fall – and hit Ruban square in the stomach, sending the Hunter flying across the room with unexpected, supernatural force. As he hit the wall, toppling a chair in his path, he lost his grip on the blade and it clattered to the floor, out of his reach.
Ruban blinked, rubbing splinters of God-knows-what from his face, when another explosion sounded a few feet away, along with the sounds of cracking concrete. Ashwin was attacking his mother again. Ruban tried to get up, get back to his feet. Sharp, debilitating pain lanced through his torso. Ruban’s breath hitched. Gods, had he broken something? He couldn’t afford to be an invalid. Not now!
Another explosion rocked the house and suddenly – in a blast of wind and singed feathers – Tauheen was upon him. Hair wild, half-naked body smeared with dirt and bloodstains, she looked like a vision of death; her feral eyes and bared teeth a glimpse into chaos personified.
Time seemed to slow down in his vicinity as her long, claw-like fingers closed around his throat, squeezing the air out of his lungs with the slow relish of a predator savouring its prey. Ruban’s own fingers clawed at her arms, but to no avail. She held like a vice, giving not an inch even as his chest burned for air. His body convulsed, limbs thrashing like a fish out of water, gasping in the throes of death.
Spots appeared before Ruban’s eyes as his vision began to fade. He redoubled his clawing, one hand reaching for his blade even as his legs tried to kick the Aeriel off him. But a part of him already knew that it was futile. The blade was too far away and his opponent too strong. He was losing strength by the second. There was no way he was going to reach it in time, and no way to dislodge the Aeriel without the sifblade.
His vision blackened, his limbs turning to lead and falling away from Tauheen’s still clutching fingers. He convulsed one more time, his body trying desperately – if vainly – to draw breath.
For a second, the Aeriel’s otherworldly eyes gleamed, victorious. Then they widened – a strange light flooding Ruban’s fuzzy vision – as shock coloured her pale, gorgeous features. Moments later, her fingers slackened and she toppled from his body, a marionette with its strings snapped.
Air flooding back into his deprived lungs, Ruban spent a few moments in a dizzy state of bliss. Then his mind cleared, reality seeping back in bits and pieces. He sat up, rubbed a hand over his eyes. The room was in shambles, several of the walls and much of the furniture blown to smithereens, the once beautiful hall destroyed beyond repair.
At his feet lay Tauheen – unearthly light spilling from her back, both wings in tatters. But for the aforementioned appendages, he could almost have mistaken her for a human. A human corpse.
Her lifeless eyes stared unseeingly up at the ceiling – crystal orbs reflecting electric light. He glanced at her back. There was nothing left in it but charred flesh and twisted, exposed bones.
He frowned. Something wasn’t right. Mingled with the lumps of blackened tissue and splintered bone were tiny, jagged rocks, sticking out at odd angles.
Ruban reached a trembling hand forward, extricating one of the little rocks from the mess of flesh and gore, and held it up for inspection. He swore.
Lifting his eyes to the other side of the room, he saw Ashwin sprawled on the carpet, body as still and lifeless as his mother’s.
His mother was going to kill Ruban.
Shwaan supposed he finally understood why Safaa had been so obsessed with Tauheen all these years. Their mother was a formidable foe. In the six hundred years since he had last seen her, Shwaan had allowed himself to forget that.
He couldn’t ignore the fact any longer, though. Fighting Tauheen had drained him. He felt like a kitten that’d been attacked by a vulture, and by some miracle lived to tell the tale.
Simply moving felt like an impossible challenge. His muscles – bruised and battered from the confrontation – refused to budge. All he wanted was to curl up and go to sleep.
And yet his mother was strangling Ruban even as he watched.
A part of him – the part that was Tauheen’s son, he was sure – wondered why he couldn’t just leave the Hunter to his fate and retreat. Go back to Vaan, recuperate and then return with a large host from Safaa’s army to apprehend Tauheen.
It would be the sensible thing to do. He didn’t have much of a chance of defeating his mother on his own. All he would do by staying was to ensure that neither he nor Ruban left the villa alive. And then who would be left to stop his mother? He was certain Safaa would send more people to finish the task he had started. Perhaps Shehzaa or Wakeen; or maybe both.
But they wouldn’t have the information Shwaan had acquired over the months, and would have no one to help them. They would have to start the entire investigation from scratch. And who knows what his mother would have accomplished by then, now that she had almost perfected the reinforced sifblade formula.
And what was he risking by leaving, really? Ruban would die, yes. But then, he was human. He would die anyway, sooner or later. And what was fifty years more or less, in the grand scheme of things? The time would pass in the blink of an eye, for Shwaan at least. Where was the wisdom in risking the fate of generations stretching out over millennia, in order to give one man fifty more years to live?
There wasn’t any. It would be a stupid thing to do. A reckless thing. And yet, Shwaan knew with a certainty that surprised even him, that he was going to do it. Ruban had lost his father, his friend, his aunt and now, his uncle – and in a way, Shwaan was responsible for all of it. All of those deaths, almost every tragedy in the Hunter’s life, had been caused, directly or otherwise, by Tauheen. By his own mother.
He had not chosen to be her son, and yet her actions were his to answer for anyway. He owed Ruban his allegiance, if for no other reason than simply to make up – to begin to compensate – for what his mother had done to him and his family.
But quite apart from any feelings of guilt or gratitude towards the Hunter himself, what kept Shwaan from leaving was Hiya. After all, if there was one person who had suffered more from Tauheen’s actions than Ruban, it was Hiya. Both her parents had been murdered by his mother. And if he now allowed her to kill Ruban, Hiya would be well and truly orphaned, in every sense of the word.
It was that thought, more than any other, that sealed his fate. And perhaps that of the world with it.
Staggering up the stairs, he slid into an alcove behind the latticed wall that had sheltered them earlier that evening. Zeifaa, had it just been a couple of hours ago? He felt like he had been fighting for days.
Kneeling, he undid the knot on the abandoned bed sheet carrying the detritus of the destroyed safe. If they died here, it would all have been pointless. And if they lived? Well, he supposed it would still be pointless. It was little use, collecting evidence against dead men or Aeriels.
Rummaging through the contents, he finally found what he was looking for. Gripping the little metal case in his hands, he raced back down the stairs to the entrance hall.
Ruban’s struggles had slowed to nothing more than some listless flailing. From what Shwaan could see of his face behind the silhouette of his mother, the Hunter’s eyes had glazed over. He was fading, fast. Even if Shwaan had felt capable of prying his mother off the man without hurting him in the process – which he didn’t – there wasn’t enough time. Ruban would be dead long before he had come even close to overpowering Tauheen.
No, this was the only plan that had any chance of working. The only course of action that might end with Ruban still breathing come dawn. And if he failed? Well, Shwaan supposed it wouldn’t matter. Not to him, anyway. It was oddly freeing, that realisation.
Opening the case, he took the contents into his hands.
Gloves had been in fashion the last time he was on earth. He wished the trend had lasted another six centuries; not that satin would have been much by way of protection against sif. But anything had to be better than this.
The pain was overwhelming. Debilitating. But it was far from the worst thing about sif. No, the problem with sif wasn’t that it hurt, though hurt it did. The problem was that it drained you. It was not the pain that killed you, it was the exhaustion.
His limbs were like lead. He was hundreds of leagues underwater, the liquid pressing down on him inexorably from all sides, crushing him, choking him. The pain he could have borne, but the exhaustion sapped him even of the will to escape it. The world darkened around him, light fading from his eyes, and all he wanted to do was to lie down and let the fatigue take him.
He lifted his eyes to where his mother was still trying to asphyxiate the Hunter. He could tell she was succeeding. Ruban wouldn’t last another full minute.
Not that Shwaan cared if he did.
Sif-induced apathy had its uses, apparently. When you were too exhausted to care about your own life, you didn’t much care about anybody else’s either. Fear of his mother, apprehension for the safety of his friend, even his concern for Hiya – all of it took a backseat to that single-minded, overwhelming desire for sleep that had overtaken him the moment the ores touched his skin. He could do anything because at that moment, he didn’t give a damn if he did any of it right.
Lifting his hands – the ores clutched within them like bits of smouldering coal – he gathered every little speck of energy that remained in his sif-drained body and created a shell that probably wouldn’t have killed a puppy, infusing it with the sif clutched within his benumbed fingers. Then he aimed it at his mother’s heaving back and let loose, allowing the force of the attack, the momentum of the shell to carry the rocks with it as it flew at Tauheen.
