The Destroyer Goddess (65 page)

"Where did you
get
that?" Elelar asked her faintly.

Mirabar tucked the
shir
back into the boot where she'd kept it hidden. The feel of Cheylan's blood and vulnerable human flesh were still hot on her hands. She wanted to vomit or weep now; but she forced herself to speak calmly. 

"We were ambushed at Gamalan last night." She paused and added, "Well, I
think
it was last night... And I killed an assassin." She had kept the
shir
because she knew that her own power might not be enough of an advantage against Cheylan when she finally faced him. 

The
torena
stared down at Cheylan's corpse, then took a few steps back as the pool of blood spread towards her feet. "Even if he had left Sileria, he would have come back."

"He never would have left," Mirabar said with certainty, gazing at his body with mingled loathing and sorrow. "Cheylan had gone too far down his road to turn back. He never could have admitted he'd chosen badly. Never would have accepted that anything mattered but what
he
wanted, or that his desires weren't the same thing as his destiny."

Elelar glanced at her in surprise. "You
planned
to stab him," she guessed. "That's why you got so close."

Mirabar nodded. "Once I realized that, just as I'd feared, I couldn't beat him with fire, I knew I had to use the blade. But I'm not skilled with the
shir
, not like Najdan. So I couldn't let Cheylan see it in my hand, see the blow coming. He had to be concentrating on something else for me to take my one chance and succeed with it."

"Something else?" Elelar repeated. "Like breaking your neck?"

Mirabar rubbed her throat. "Actually, I was hoping he'd kiss me. It was how he usually tried to influence me in the past."

"Sex or violence. It's how men
always
try to influence a woman," Elelar said, sounding more like her old self.

Mirabar shuddered with delayed reaction. "The attempt to break my neck... That scared me."

"Yes," Elelar said dryly. "I can see how that might be alarming."

The roar and rumble of the mountain got louder. "We have to get out of here," Mirabar said, dragging her attention away from the man she had just killed.

Elelar nodded, then gestured to the lava flow. "Can you think of any way..." Her dark eyes widened and her voice trailed off as the cavern started shaking. "Oh,
no
."

Oh, no
.

Mirabar looked around, trying to guess where they'd be safest as the earthquake began. She felt Elelar clutch her hand, and she returned the grip, as scared as the
torena
. 

"Against the wall," Mirabar shouted, hoping she was right. She started to drag Elelar with her. 

The cave suddenly rocked hard, throwing them around like feathers on the wind. Mirabar lost her grip on Elelar, who staggered backward as Mirabar stumbled forward.  Elelar fell down, then screamed and rolled away a bare instant before shattering rocks landed where she had fallen. Mirabar sought to protect her unborn child from harm as she was hurled down onto the shuddering ground while the mountain roared and the cavern ceiling groaned.

"Elelar!" she shouted, trying to crawl to the
torena
as this hidden world of fire and water tore itself apart.

Elelar was trying to shield her head from a shower of falling rock and dust. "Stay back!" she shouted at Mirabar, pointing to the cavern ceiling. "It's coming down!"

Mirabar looked up and froze with horror. The high cavern ceiling moaned hideously, then bulged and writhed as if coming to life. "
No."
She looked at Elelar again. "Run!"

Elelar looked behind her, to where the lava flow blocked her path to any passages on that side of the cavern. She turned her desperate gaze back to Mirabar, then pushed herself to her feet, took three staggering steps toward her, and was again thrown to the ground by the heaving and shaking.

Mirabar crawled forward as she kept her own gaze fixed on the bulging ceiling. "Yes! Come on! It's your only chance!"

"Go!" Elelar shouted at her, hauling herself forward over broken rock. "Go now! Don't wait for me!
Go!"

"Come
on!
" Mirabar screamed, crawling closer, stretching out her arm. "Faster!" She was thrown sideways as the ground quivered roughly again. 

Elelar scrambled to her hands and knees—then collapsed  without making a sound when a falling rock plummeted straight into her head. She lifted her bleeding face from the ground and tried again, fumbling clumsily as Mirabar tried to move forward over undulating, shivering rock.

There was a terrible explosion. Blood-chilling. Bone-freezing. Then Mirabar heard the sound of cracking walls, tumbling rock... and the fury of lava bursting through solid stone. She looked up and saw the bulging ceiling glow gold, then orange.

"
No!"

The ceiling collapsed with a furious wail of protesting rock and explosive fire. Elelar's scream of terror and agony was high-pitched as the enormous river of falling lava engulfed her, sweeping her into its fiery, destructive embrace.

"
Elelar!
" Mirabar screamed as the
torena
disappeared in the torrent of liquid fire.

No! No, it couldn't come to this! No!

In her fury and despair, Mirabar barely remembered to shield herself in time as the river of fire flooded the cave, engulfing her, too, and swept her into its raging current.

Chapter Twenty-Four

 
This is Darshon, where all stand 

helpless and hushed before the goddess.

                        —Jalan the
Zanar

The sea became even rougher as another grimly black night took the place of the dark gray day. The Lascari boat heaved wildly as the volcano roared and the distant coast rumbled with another earthquake. Wave after wave of sea water washed across the deck. They tried to keep lanterns burning so other boats could see them and avoid collision, but the sea kept dousing them. It probably didn't matter, Zarien knew; no one could really navigate on tonight's vicious sea, anyhow. Some would collide and perhaps die. That was the price of being sea-born when the sea was wrathful and cruel.

"No, don't!" Zarien shouted at
Toren
Ronall as he tried to tie himself to the mast. "If the boat goes down, you'll drown."

"I thought I was supposed to stay with the boat?" Ronall shouted back.

"Not if it goes down!"

"Let's not talk about the boat going down! Agreed?"

Zarien looked over at Najdan, noticing that even he looked as if he wanted to be sick tonight. 

"So, Zarien," Ronall shouted above the roar of sea and land and sky. "Do you indeed feel safer here, farther out at sea?"

Zarien laughed. Ronall shook his head. Najdan looked mean.

"Zarien!"

He turned to Linyan, who ordered him to help haul down the foresail, which had come loose, unrolled, and was now flapping wildly. Zarien, who could scarcely even see it in the intense dark, shouted his acknowledgement. It would be too dangerous to brail the sail back up to the yar again right now, and they couldn't leave it flapping like that.

"No!" Ronall shouted, reaching for him as he moved to go do the work. "Stay here!"

"I'll be fine," Zarien shouted back. 

"No!" Najdan said, for once in agreement with the
toren
about something.

Zarien evaded Ronall's grasp. "It has to be—"

"I said no!" Najdan warned him.

"This is no time—
Agh!"

Zarien blacked out for a moment as something struck him in a blur of motion. Vision dark and head pounding, he found himself lying on the deck, confused and stunned, with someone's foot planted in his back. He groaned, then he felt hands hauling him to an upright position.

"Are you out of your mind?" Ronall demanded, his voice coming as if from a distance.

I was only going to...
Zarien's tongue wouldn't obey.

Then Najdan's voice. "He is overconfident and reckless. It's clearly not safe."

"You didn't have to hit him!"

"It's easier than arguing," said Najdan. "He is a
very
argumentative boy. Tansen should beat him."

"
Tansen
doesn't approve of people hitting the boy."

"That could explain his bad behavior."

Ronall said something critical about assassins. Zarien started pulling his senses together. Now he heard Linyan shouting at Najdan. 

"If he is not one of you," Najdan snapped at Linyan in common Silerian, "then don't expect him to do your bidding on your boat. Your habit of excluding him until it's convenient for you to include him is very distasteful." He added ominously, "Tansen wouldn't like it."

The roar of the sea got louder, and Zarien couldn't hear whatever else they all said. There was another explosion in the distance. This one seemed skull-crushingly loud... but maybe that was because Najdan had just hit him in the head. 

I really hate him
.

Feeling indignant and ill-used by everyone, Zarien grabbed a rope tied around the mast and started hauling himself to his feet. 

Furious at them all, he began, "If anyone
else
..." 

But they'd forgotten him. Instead, they were all staring past him with horrified expressions which were clearly visible even in the dim light from the sole remaining lantern. Their faces suddenly looked so alike it would have been comical if it weren't so terrifying. He whirled around to see what held them all frozen with dread even at the same moment that the screams of the other Lascari aboard this boat made his stomach clench.

We're dead
.

It was all he had time to think before the enormous wave hit them, sweeping him off the deck and into the furious sea.

Tansen hauled Faradar to her feet. She was breathing hard and looked dizzy, having been thrown to the rocky ground when the earthquake hit. Faradar looked up as something exploded in the sky, then she gasped and flinched. Tansen looked up, too, and saw lava shoot straight up out of the caldera, piercing the colored clouds and shifting lights at Darshon's summit. The fountain of liquid fire glowed brightly against the black sky before falling through the air to paint the mountain with hundreds of fiery rivulets which began flowing down Darshon's slopes.

"How can anyone survive here?" Faradar asked hoarsely.

"But they are surviving," Tansen said. "Some of them, anyhow. Can't you hear them?" Their noise was faint but discernible as the mountain's roar slowly faded.

"Hear..." She blinked, then drew a sharp breath through her nostrils. "What
is
that? That... wailing, that chanting, that... Those
sounds?"

"The pilgrims." He'd known about this from local gossip, but it was the first time he'd heard it for himself. "Praise singers. Worshippers. Ecstatic devotion."

"They sound insane," Faradar said.

He looked up at the menacing peak of Darshon beneath which the pilgrims lived and said, "They probably are."