Blood Storm: The Second Book of Lharmell Read online

  He frowned for a moment, and I could see him wondering why the occasion should vex me. ‘Oh,’ he said at last. ‘Of course. Your mother.’

  ‘Yes, my mother. My responsibilities. You’re not the only one people are relying on. The only one who has to make sacrifices.’ My anxiety, I felt with a flutter of guilt, was for myself right then. But I was worried about my people. If I had been infected with Lharmellin blood as a baby, so could other Amentines have been. I knew my place was out here, fighting, and not married and hidden away in a castle giving some king or prince heirs.

  Even if nobody else knew it, I thought sourly.

  Rodden gave me a long, steady look, and I could see a spark of annoyance in his eyes. He spurred his horse forward without another word.

  I don’t know if it was the foul mood I was in or the fact that Rodden had spoken of it so fondly, but I found Pol to be a squalid, dirty dump of a city. It was enormous, too, spreading only laterally where Brivoran architects would have built upwards to make the most of space. Shacks were haphazard, one supporting another and so on like a trail of dominos waiting to be knocked down. Women squatted in front of cooking fires, dressed in rags, while scruffy children played nearby. Older children queued forty-deep for a well, a motley collection of vessels clutched in their hands. The men made ceramic pots at foot-pedal wheels, or sewed beadwork, or butchered carcasses within a cloud of flies.

  And everywhere there were drain-cats, lounging atop walls with their scrappy kittens or seated next to filthy gutters, gleaming silver and fastidiously clean. Their silhouette and attitude were familiar to me, but their numbers were astounding. The humans and cats seemed oblivious to one another, and I guessed that familiarity accounted for their companionable disregard.

  Rodden looked about him, his manner attentive but grim. He peered down alleyways and into faces as they passed. He seemed to be searching for something. Or someone.

  We found rooms in a mud-brick house and he spoke Verapinian to the clerk, the words coming to him as easily as breathing.

  Showing me to my room and stowing his things in his own, he turned to me.

  ‘I must go out for a little while, and I must go alone. I’m sorry.’ His eyes flicked to my face, wary.

  I shrugged, pretending not to care.

  ‘Promise me you’ll stay inside where it’s safe? And lock the door?’ He reached out and squeezed my forearm. ‘Don’t forget you have a knife in your pack.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. Please stop fussing,’ I snapped.

  His hand dropped back to his side, and his face clouded. Had I hurt his feelings?

  Good.

  He disappeared onto streets that were familiar to him, leaving me to the loneliness of a traveller who does not speak the language. In less than five minutes I was regretting my coldness, but didn’t dare venture onto the streets alone to find him. What a strange city Pol was.

  I may have regretted my harsh words, but I was still furious with Rodden. It wasn’t fair that he knew all about me, my history, my future, and could read me like one of his precious books, but to me he was an enigma. I had no idea where he was going or where he had come from, except for the few words he’d told me about Verapine.

  There was parchment and ink in my room so I tried to write letters to my sister. But the words wouldn’t come. I sketched Leap and Griffin, watching them doze, but my efforts were so unsatisfying that I screwed the sheets into balls.

  When the sun set, I went to bed. I lay sweating on the sheets with the inadequate window open as far as it would go, listening for Rodden’s return. His room was next to mine and close to midnight I heard footsteps. His door opened, and clicked shut. We’d barely spoken a word to each other all day.

  With a pang I realised that he could be searching for this Ilona, his own private quest that had nothing to do with the task we’d set out to do. What if that was really it? What if my idea to get bennium was just an excuse for him to return home after all these years and find her?

  A thick, ugly feeling spread through my guts. I was incapacitated by the strength of it, unable to do anything but clench my fists and stare at the ceiling as if I could burn right through it with the force of my gaze. It was jealousy, vicious and crippling. But betrayal also; if Rodden had lied to me about the true purpose of this journey, I’d never speak to him again.

  As soon as he left his room the next day, I followed. I just had to. I’d rather be with my mother and a dozen eligible princes than here with Rodden being tricked.

  I’d dressed in my simplest, darkest clothing and thrown a scarf over my head. Keeping twenty paces behind him, I felt for his thread, keeping it as thin as gossamer and trying my hardest to remain undetected. That way I’d be able to follow him even after he’d disappeared from my sight. If I concentrated, and he remained distracted, I might just get away with it.

  Rodden roamed up and down the warren-like city streets. Every now and then he stopped to question someone. Then, as I began to discern landmarks above the roofline of the city – the smart blue and gold flag of the Pergamian embassy, a wagon train hitched in a circle on a sand dune at the edge of the desert – I realised his method. He was dividing the town into a grid and searching each square.

  Late in the afternoon I stood in an archway, chewing at some flatbread I had purchased from a street vendor while Rodden questioned yet another old woman just out of my line of sight. Then he was on the move again, nearly running. I panicked when I found he was doubling back, heading straight for the laneway I was standing in. I pressed myself into a doorway, which was barely any cover at all, but in his haste he flew past without noticing me.

  I waited thirty seconds, and then pursued, jogging to keep up. Several times I stopped and closed my eyes, letting our thread go taut. I ran this way and that for a time before realising he was no longer on the streets but had entered a building.

  I found the right place: a mud-brick house like the one we were staying in. The windows were shuttered. I skirted my way round the block and found the rear entrance in an alleyway. It was blocked by a rickety fence, and the courtyard was empty. Praying that Rodden or anyone else wasn’t about to burst outside, I crept across the paved expanse. There was a window high up and I needed to stand on a crumbling brick ledge in order to peek inside.

  Everything was bare but clean, as if the premises had been vacated recently. I was wondering if I had the right house after all when Rodden came into the room. I immediately ducked out of sight, wobbling a bit on my precarious perch. After a tense minute, curiosity got the better of me and I peeked in again.

  All traces of triumph had seeped from him and I could detect only disappointment. He leaned against the wall and slid down, defeated. I rose on tiptoe to keep him in my sights, but suddenly the wall gave beneath me and I tumbled off, the shock of the landing making me forget to cloak my presence.

  I felt a burst of alarm from Rodden as he heard me fall, and then a surge of anger as he realised who it was.

  Winded, I scrambled up and was out the gate in three seconds flat, darting this way and that down darkened laneways, hoping I wasn’t about to hit a dead end. My chest was tight but I didn’t dare stop.

  I felt rather than heard the thunder of his pursuit.

  I spotted a drain just large enough for me to crouch in and scrambled inside. There was an inch of brackish water and a drain-cat standing paw-deep in it, not seeming to mind the run-off in the slightest. I, however, did, and gathered my clothing to me to keep it out of the wet. The smell was appalling and I covered my mouth and nose with my scarf. The cat regarded me with astonished eyes, then sat down and purred like a one-cat welcoming committee, her tail undulating sociably in the water. Welcome to my humble abode. I guessed that humans did not often grace these parts with their presence.

  I concentrated on building my wall up again and thought I had outwitted Rodden, b
ut then heard his familiar, imperious voice somewhere over my head.

  ‘I’m prepared to stand here all night, Zeraphina. Do you think you can stand the stench that long?’

  I dropped the wall I had so carefully built and let him feel how annoyed I was. In answer I felt a surge of pure fury.

  I looked into the blackness of the drain, wondering if I dared to crawl down it.

  I didn’t.

  So I got out.

  With all the composure I could rustle up I emerged back onto the street and brushed myself off. Rodden regarded me silently, his arms folded.

  I drew myself up to my full five feet seven inches and said, in my best princess voice, ‘Excuse me.’

  I moved to pass him but he caught my arm.

  ‘We need to talk.’

  He took me west, to the edge of the city where laneways and haphazard buildings gave way to desert sands. The sun was setting and everything was drenched in orange light. On a dune several hundred feet away I saw the ring of wagons that I’d noticed earlier, and a motley crew of men and women practising acrobatics in the early evening light. They were lithe and beautiful, all with thick brown curls and ropey bodies. Their coloured clothing flashed as they tumbled and twisted.

  We sat on the slope of a dune and stared across the vast, empty expanse.

  ‘You were following me,’ he said.

  I scooped up a handful of sand and let it slip through my fingers.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘I needed to know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  I shrugged. ‘Something. Anything.’

  ‘Why are you so determined to know my business?’

  I shook my head, exasperated. ‘Don’t you see the unfairness of it all? That you should know everything that matters about me, and I should know nothing of you? It’s driving me mad.’

  His voice was soft, but I could hear the anger in it. ‘I thought you’d given up on snooping, but here you are, back to your old tricks.’

  ‘I have no choice when you keep things from me.’

  ‘Maybe you should try minding your own business for a change.’ The words were said without malice, but they stung. If he’d yelled like Renata or Lilith did when they were angry, I might have borne it easier. His quiet fury unnerved me.

  ‘This isn’t why I came. I thought we were done with secrets.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. But we’ll be in Amentia soon and . . .’ He trailed off.

  ‘And?’

  He looked at the acrobats, who were laughing as they swept their dark curls from their faces.

  ‘Maybe you should stay when we get there,’ he finished.

  Tears stung my eyes. I realised I was more wretched at the thought of being left behind, of being without him, than I was frustrated by his secrets. I remembered the heaviness of his skull in my lap; the taste of his blood on my tongue. His fingers were laced together, and my ring glinted on his right hand. I thought of him one day removing it and giving it back, unable to meet my eyes.

  It was tempting to tell him it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t ask again, please don’t leave me behind. But pride is a stubborn thing, and it reared suddenly through my wretchedness. Maybe I didn’t need to know – but I should at least know why I didn’t need to know.

  ‘Perhaps –’ I said, hesitating, ‘perhaps if you gave me a reason for keeping things from me, I might understand. I might not need to know.’

  ‘Besides the fact that they’re my secrets and have nothing to do with you or our undertaking?’

  I nodded.

  He sighed, and his eyes searched the horizon. ‘There are things I’ve done that are painful to speak of, and even less pleasant to hear.’

  ‘Things that happened when you became a harming?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I felt some of my frustration slip away like the sand through my fingers. I could understand that. Hadn’t I kept my confusion and terror to myself for as long as I could? I was still unable to tell my own sister the truth about what I was.

  ‘I don’t want to be left in Amentia,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to leave you there.’

  With these words the tightness left my chest, and I discreetly blinked away tears. ‘I won’t ask any more,’ I said. ‘And I won’t follow you. They are your secrets. But . . .’

  He glanced at me. ‘But?’

  ‘But if you should feel like talking, I’m well equipped to be understanding. Being a harming myself.’

  He brushed sand from his fingers. ‘You are probably right.’ He stood, offering his hand to help me up. ‘But that doesn’t make the speaking any easier. Come on. We’ve got things to do.’

  I took his hand and he pulled me to my feet. ‘You’re right. It is beautiful,’ I said, looking at the city lit by golden light. It was just as he’d described. ‘Do you think you’ll come home for good one day?’

  Rodden looked long and hard at the city. ‘This isn’t my home any more.’ He turned to the desert again and nodded at the wagons. ‘Those are the Jarbin.’

  The Jarbin. I felt a thrill run through me. These were the people who would give us access to bennium. ‘Do you know them?’

  ‘Not personally. Shall we go and talk to them?’

  Together we walked down the dune towards the troupe, and I was content to let secrets lie.

  For the moment, at least.

  NINE

  The glassblower’s shop became a theatre at night, a bright hot coal in the centre of the city. Rodden and I gathered with the locals to watch the show. The meeting with the Jarbin had gone well, Rodden slipping easily into the dialect. We would be leaving with them in the morning.

  The workshop, a twig-and-mud roof on posts, was lit by an enormous furnace at the rear and many coloured-glass lanterns. The audience gathered around sweet-smelling pipes that were placed here and there, tall as a child and made of brilliant brass. Men sucked on nozzles and blew reams of apple- or strawberry-scented smoke, always with one eye on the glassblower.

  We chewed on flat bread wrapped around spiced potatoes, and watched. The sun had set and the air was cooler now, and I had a scratchy woollen shawl gathered about my shoulders.

  A boy worked the bellows, exciting the flames into a roar. The furnace was closed but the doors glowed red-hot at the edges where the seals met. The glassblower limbered up, cracking his knuckles and arranging his tools on a rag. He picked up a clay pipe about as long as my arm, checked it for cracks and then peered through it at the crowd like it was a telescope. His face was serious, but I saw a twinkle in his eyes.

  He barked a command at his apprentice, who leapt for a rag and eased open the first door. I was yards away but I felt the heat of the fire blast my face. The glassblower eased the clay pipe in and twirled it like he was gathering honey on a spoon. Still twirling, he took the pipe out and turned to the crowd. We watched, mesmerised, as he lowered the glowing red ball of molten glass onto a marble slab and began rolling back and forth, shaping it into an elongated bulb.

  He barked another command and the apprentice dashed forward and put a damp pad of paper into the master’s hands. They switched places, and the boy knelt and blew into the tube while the man shaped the growing vessel with the wet paper pad. Steam and smoke billowed up around him.

  At the glassblower’s command, the boy put the glass into the second chamber of the furnace – which seemed even hotter than the first, if it was possible – while the glassblower strewed bits of coloured glass on the marble slab.

  The pipe was now back in the master’s hands and he rolled the glass in the blue chunks on the table. The pair repeated the process, blowing, shaping and reheating, until they had a brilliant blue vessel two feet long and a foot across suspended on the end of the pipe. With a set of s
hears the smith severed it from the pipe and the boy placed the glasswork in the third chamber of the furnace.

  The glassblower gave a curt nod to the crowd and after a smattering of applause they began to disperse.

  Rodden passed his bread to me and stepped forward to speak with the craftsman. I watched as they moved to one side of the shack where an enormous crate stood and Rodden eased off the lid. He brought out a sphere covered in rags, cradling it with two hands. Unwrapping it, he revealed a glass ball the size of his hand-span. After examining it, he held it aloft to show me.

  They covered the crate and secured the lid, and stood talking a moment. Then the glassblower clasped Rodden about the shoulders and kissed his cheeks three times. They murmured to each other for a moment. Then, with a tight smile, Rodden said his goodbyes and made his way back to me.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he muttered, taking his bread back from me and giving it to a clutch of cats that had gathered atop a wall.

  ‘You hardly ate,’ I protested.

  ‘Not hungry.’ He strode back towards our quarters, leading the way through the maze of streets.

  ‘You knew him,’ I said in the darkness, keeping to the edge of the laneways as I walked to avoid the muck that had collected in the middle of the street.

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was flat.