The Oathbreaker's Shadow (16 page)

The world slowed, the flies floating down and around him like black snowflakes in a buzzing blizzard. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he saw colours dance before them: greens, blues, reds.

Khareh’s voice drifted into the back of his mind and Raim both heard it and felt it, like the sound of his subconscious. ‘Hang in there, Raimanan . . .’

Finally, darkness.

When he awoke he was inside a tent, lying flat on his back. The flickering light of a lantern burned his eyes and he quickly shut them again. He ached all over. There was no
part of his body that wasn’t in pain. He opened his eyes again to a squint, as someone placed a damp cloth on his forehead.

It was Wadi.

He groaned. It was the only sound he could make. His cheeks and tongue were so swollen they seemed to engulf his mouth.

‘Don’t try to speak,’ Wadi said. Raim was instantly reminded of his strange dream. Why had he dreamed of Khareh as his saviour, of all people?

Wadi continued. ‘You’re even more stupid than I thought . . . stupid, but stubborn. I thought you were dead. We all did. The flies were all over you. The amount of poison that must be in your system . . . The tribe has decided you are Sola blessed, and if Sola wishes to keep you alive, who are we to argue?’ She made a clucking sound in the back of her throat. ‘Now, drink this.’ She forced open his mouth and held his tongue down with her finger. Then she emptied the liquid into his mouth. It burned all the way down his throat, and the added pain caused him to descend once again into oblivion.

He awoke to silence. He raised his tongue gingerly up and down in his mouth and was relieved to find that he could actually move it this time. He sat up. The pain in his palms as he put pressure on them was intense. He looked down at his hands. The ends of his fingers were tied together with thick strips of cloth that were soaked red with blood.
His palms were covered in huge, pus-filled boils. The skin was raw and peeling. He tried to close his fingers into a fist, but the swollen bites prevented much movement. It was the same for the rest of his body.

‘Sorry about the bandages.’ Wadi entered the hut from the outside. ‘We had to tie your fingers up to stop you from scratching. You will have a difficult night tonight. Now that you are conscious, your body will want to rid itself of the poison. You are lucky it did not get to your brain. If they had attacked your face more, you would be dead or mind-lost now. Sola protect you.’ She unwrapped his fingers, then offered him a sip of water from her skin.

‘So.’ The word came out with great difficulty. His throat was so dry. He allowed her to give him more to drink before he continued. ‘I guess I earned my water. But I thought I wasn’?’ asked Raim.bl clearly dt allowed in the Alashan camp?’

Wadi shrugged. ‘As I said before, you are Sola-blessed. The tribe convened, and they agreed that despite your scar, you are not fully Chauk. So until we reach Lazar, you may stay within our camp.’

‘What were those things?’

‘Behrflies. You’ve heard of them?’

Raim nodded, and winced at the effort. ‘I’ve never seen them before . . . only what was left of someone after an attack.’ He paused, feeling lucky to be alive. He didn’t want to think about those flies now. ‘How did you learn to fight like that?’ he asked as he tentatively leaned back against the bundle of rags that was acting as his pillow.

In a matter of seconds, he was drenched with sweat.

Mesan picked Raim up and cradled him in his arms. Raim’s skin was so slick Mesan had to hold onto his clothing to maintain a grip. Wadi led them away from the tent, picking her way through the maze of shelters to the edge of the Alashan camp, out past even where the Chauk’s dwellings were set up. Ryopi was the only Chauk who stirred, standing with his arms folded across his chest and his mouth in a firm line. Wadi sped past him until they reached the edge of the Eye, where the stone turned back to sand. She pointed at a nearby sand dune and spoke a few quick words to Mesan. She repeated them for Raim’s benefit.

‘He’s taking you to the sand, so it can absorb the poison in your sweat. Come back to the camp when your skin is dry and your legs can support your weight again.’

Mesan walked slowly onto the sand and placed him
down on the very top of a small dune, then backed away.

Raim rolled over so he faced away from them and he shivered, although the sand boiled beneath him. Tremors wracked his body; his spine kept stiffening and relaxing, his arms flailing out of control. He was slowly losing control of his body. While he still could, he lay down onto his back and dug his head and shoulders into the sand. He knew the sense of stability was false, but it made him feel better anyway.

Still, poisoned liquid poured off him, collecting in the crook of his elbow and in the palms of his hands. It felt thicker than water, more like honey, and he had to fight his tongue from reaching out and tasting it. He tried to focus on the sky. There were millions of stars and a bright round moon above him. As he stared they seemed to blur and blend into one, the poison swilling behind his eyes until he wasn’t sure whether he was seeing reality or dreams. He saw Mhara, Dharma, his grandfather Loni – even a brief glimpse of his brother Tarik as he disappeared down the tunnel into the mountain.

But above all those faces, dominating them all, he saw Khareh.

Khareh, who would now be thinking of him as a traitor, and a murderer.

Khareh, who would now be without a Protector.

Khareh, who had promised to protect Dharma from danger.

It pained him so much to be away from his best friend.
He would have followed Khareh to the end – but after Mhara, what choice did he have? He had to find answers, and if the only place for that was Lazar then he owed it to Khareh too. And yet . . . he couldn’t forget that Khareh had made a promise to him in those last moments together. They were bound to each other now. Still he wondered if he would ever gain hi the other apprenticesat felt intensitysecos full forgiveness.

Ironically, Raim knew Khareh would have loved to be in his place. Well, perhaps not recovering from a behrfly attack, but to be in the desert, learning all the tricks of the desert people. It had been Khareh’s ultimate dream to cross the desert.

‘And they say no boats have ever crossed from the Xel Sea because it is so dangerous and would take years and years, and that’s even before the impossibly long camel journey to Aqben!’ Khareh had divulged this juicy tidbit to Raim a few months ago, as they skipped stones on Lake Oudo. He had been listening in on one of his uncle’s meetings, and he was always keen to talk to Raim afterwards about how he would do things differently.

Raim had laughed. ‘How could anyone live on a boat for that long? It takes two hours to cross Oudo, a lake that is never anything but completely flat, and still everyone except the Erudees just end up drowning!’ He’d watched as one of the boats passed them by in the distance, just some logs tied together with braided rushes, and a narrow strip of cloth for a sail. They were the most primitive mode of transportation Raim had ever seen. He had never been on
the water, and he had no desire to. He liked his feet placed firmly on the ground.

‘I can’t believe you don’t know.’ Khareh had put on his most authoritative voice. ‘But in the south they have boats as big as houses. Bigger even. And they sail in them for months and months. They can explore wherever they want.’

‘Right. And your elephant has three trunks.’

‘Still,’ Khareh had mused, ‘the quickest way to get down there would be to go through the desert . . . if you could reach the oasis in the Western Eye of Sheba, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.’

Raim had been horrified. He’d looked around quickly to make sure no one was close enough to hear them.

They were alone. ‘The desert? You’re crazy. Why would anyone willingly go to the land of the Alashan and the Chauk?’

‘You’re right,’ Khareh had said, after a long pause.

‘Anyway, I overheard some of the old timers saying that the south was all a myth. The desert just goes on for ever and ever.’

‘I don’t believe that. And the first person to get across there would be thought of as truly great.’

Khareh would have ordered them to breed a million worms, Raim thought.

With a start he realized that neither Batar-Khan nor Khareh had their Protectors. He wondered who Khareh would choose as his replacement. It was too painful to
speculate. And now that Khareh was no longer going to be Khan, the person he chose would no longer be Chief Yun. Even that wouldn’t have mattered to Raim. He would still have been Khareh’s Protector, even if the only people Khareh commanded were lowly goatherders.

Raim stopped daydreaming once another tremor – the biggest one yet – shuddered through his limbs, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut tight. When it was over, Raim gingerly opened his eyes and realized that his sight had cleared, and the pain in his body had left him. He gingerly lifted a finger, ran it across his forehead, and it was dry.

He sat up, but instead of moving towards the camp he remained facing away from it. He sat with his eyes closed and his legs crossed, his hands balancing on his knees in the same meditative position Yasmin a temporary settlement.SVgCC f had forced him into so many times. Something gnawed at his memory, like a behrfly in his brain. The bites around his head were fewer than anywhere else on his body, that couldn’t be denied. As Wadi told him, there was no natural explanation for their absence.
What if . . .

The promise-knot he made to Khareh had been hidden under the cloak. He ran his finger around the thread, feeling the knot and knowing what it meant. After learning from Ryopi that shadows were really the spirits of the person the promise was made to, he spoke to the knot as if through it he could communicate with Khareh: ‘I did not betray you. I will come back and I will prove myself to you.’

Strangely, though, that did make him feel better. He lay back down in the sand, stretching his arms above him. As he felt the warmth beneath his head, he was amazed by how silent it was and by how much the desert had changed to him in such a short time. Maybe it was just having company that made it better.

Beneath him, the ground trembled. At least, he thought it did. By the time he realized it was shaking, the movement stopped. Something sharp stabbed his forearm. He grimaced in pain, sat up abruptly and clutched his arm to his stomach. A thin line of blood trickled from a wound gaping like a mouth.

He looked at the sand and ran his hand over the granules. Everything was smooth; there was no sign of anything jagged. Finally he decided he had spent enough time out on the dunes and that he should go back to the camp. Wadi had said he could join the Alashan now; he no longer had to be alone. He wondered whether he could live as Alashan for ever. Would it be better than living permanently in Lazar, with the oathbreakers? But Raim knew better than that. Mhara had said he might find answers there. And more than anything else, Raim needed answers.

He stood up with renewed determination, but as he did something burst out of the dune, sending plumes of sand into his face. He shielded his eyes with his arms and stumbled backward.

Immediately the creature started attacking his chest, ripping the tunic off his body and stabbing at his skin.
Raim yelled and tried to beat it back with his hands. The moment he felt the creature falter, he started running back towards the camp.

It chased him, and he could tell now that it was a bird. And not just any bird. It was trying to attack his promise to Khareh, which meant only one thing: it was a garfalcon – a mythical bird of the desert than hunted promise-knots. Raim had thought them only a story to stop honest people from entering the desert, but here was one in the flesh. Its wings pounded against his ears and his shoulders as it tried to dig its talons into his arm and its beak into his chest. Raim came to an abrupt halt, hoping to throw the bird off him with the momentum. It worked for a moment, and he reached out with his other hand and punched the bird hard on a wing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Wadi running towards him.

The bird was startled momentarily, and flew up. For the first time Raim got a good look at it. It was ghastly in the moonlight. The beak was long and curved, with a thick streak of red that ran down the centre; though the gash in Raim’s arm meant the beak could have been stained by his own blood. The bird itself was a magnificent blue-black, and its wingspan was huge, the wings seemingly too big for its body.

It swooped down, lightning fast, and latched onto Raim’s wrist. It dug its beak deep into his chest and ripped at the promise-knot. Then, the unbreakable broke. It snapped from around his neck and he could do nothing
but watch that?’ble?din horror. The bird’s talons remained fastened to his arm, the knotted string dangling from its mouth like the tail of an unfortunate rodent.

Wind rushed past his ears. The bird screeched and was pulled off his arm. It remained suspended in the air, a few feet away from Raim. Holding the bird by the throat was Khareh. Or rather, dream-Khareh.

‘I’m god – perh

‘Well, boy. What a surprise you are. You never told us the oath you’d broken was to the
Crown Prince
. You must be brave.’ Ryopi sidled up behind him, the mutterings of his haunt following him like a bad smell. The whole tribe – Alashan on one side, Chauk on the other – were gathered around Raim and Wadi.

Raim shrugged him off in disgust. ‘I
told
you, I didn’t break an oath out there.’

Ryopi eyed dream-Khareh, who was hovering near. ‘Looks like you did to me.’

‘No!’ Raim almost launched himself at the man, but Old-maa held up her hand, which was enough to stay him.

She spoke, and Wadi translated. ‘As Alashan, we do not knot our promises. We make them in the name of Sola, and that is all. She knows our hearts and she is the sole judge of our intentions. But we recognize the shadow that accompanies the oathbreakers. And a shadow has
descended upon you. This we cannot ignore. You must keep away from the Alashan, and remain with the Chauk.’