A Torch Against the Night

“I would know.” The creature ignores my slack-jawed shock. “You should find a teacher.”

“Are you volunteering?” I must be insane to say it, but the thing makes a queer sound that might be a laugh.

“I am not.” He sniffs again, as if considering. “Perhaps … one day.”

“What—who are you?”

“I’m the Reaper, girl. And I go to collect what is mine.”

At this, I dare to look into the man’s face. A mistake, for in place of eyes he has stars blazing out like the fires of the hells. As he meets my gaze, a bolt of loneliness rolls through me. And yet to call it loneliness is not enough. I feel bereft. Destroyed. As if everyone and everything I care about has been ripped from my arms and cast into the ether.

The creature’s gaze is a writhing abyss, and as my sight goes red and I stagger back into the wall, I realize I am not staring into his eyes. I am staring into my future.

I see it for a moment. Pain. Suffering. Horror. All that I love, all that matters to me, awash in blood.

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_fc2c9516-b60b-5dcb-8cea-3c25a5c5fc39)

Laia (#ulink_fc2c9516-b60b-5dcb-8cea-3c25a5c5fc39)

Raider’s Roost juts into the air like a colossal fist. It blots out the horizon, its shadow deepening the gloom of the mist-cloaked desert. From here, it looks still and abandoned. But the sun has long since set, and I cannot trust my eyes. Deep in the labyrinthine cracks of that great rock, the Roost teems with the dregs of the Empire.

I glance at Elias to see his hood has slipped back. When I pull it up, he does not stir, and worry twists in my belly. He has been in and out for the past three days, but his last seizure was especially violent. The bout of unconsciousness that followed lasted for more than a day—the longest stretch yet. I do not understand as much as Pop about healing, but even I know that this is bad.

Before, Elias at least muttered, as if he was fighting the poison. But he hasn’t spoken a word for hours. I’d be happy if he said anything. Even if it was more about Helene Aquilla and her ocean-colored eyes—a comment I found unexpectedly irritating.

He’s slipping away. And I cannot let it happen.

“Laia.” At Elias’s voice, I nearly fall off the horse in surprise.

“Thank the skies.” I look back to find his warm skin is gray and drawn, his pale eyes burning with fever.

He looks up at the Roost and then at me. “I knew you’d get us here.” For a moment, he’s his old self: warm, full of life. He peers over my shoulder at my fingers—chafed from four days of clutching the reins—and takes the leather straps from me.

For an awkward few seconds, he holds his arms away from me, as if I might take umbrage at his closeness. So I lean back against his chest, feeling safer than I have in days, like I’ve suddenly acquired a layer of armor. He relaxes, dropping his forearms to my hips, and the weight of them sends a flutter up my spine.

“You must be exhausted,” he murmurs.

“I’m all right. Heavy as you are, dragging you on and off this horse was ten times easier than dealing with the Commandant.”

His chuckle is weak, but still, something inside me relaxes at the sound of it. He angles the horse north and kicks it into a canter until the trail ahead rises.

“We’re close,” he says. “We’ll head for the rocks just north of the Roost—lots of places for you to hide while I go in for the Tellis.”

I frown at him over my shoulder. “Elias, you could black out at any moment.”

“I can fight off the seizures. I only need a few minutes in the market,” he says. “It’s right in the heart of the Roost. Has everything. Should be able to find an apothecary.”

He grimaces, his arms going rigid. “Go away,” he mutters—though clearly not at me. When I look askance at him, he pretends he’s fine and starts asking me about the last few days.

But as the horse climbs the rocky terrain north of the Roost, Elias’s body jerks, as if yanked by a puppeteer, and he pitches wildly to the left.

I grab the reins, thanking the skies that I’ve roped him on so that he can’t fall. I wrap my arm around him awkwardly, twisting in the saddle, trying to keep him steady so he doesn’t frighten the horse.

“It’s all right.” My voice shakes. I can barely hold him, but I channel Pop’s unflappable healer’s calm as the convulsions grow worse. “We’ll get the extract, and everything will be fine.” His pulse skitters frantically, and I lay a hand against his heart, fearing it will burst. It cannot take much more of this.

“Laia.” He can barely speak, and his eyes are wild and unfocused. “I have to get it. Don’t go in there alone. Too dangerous. I’ll do it myself. You’ll get hurt—I always—hurt—”

He slumps over, his breath shallow. He’s out. Who knows for how long this time? Panic rises like bile in my throat, but I force it down.

It does not matter that the Roost is dangerous. I must go in. Elias will not make it if I don’t find a way to get the Tellis. Not with his pulse so irregular, not after four days of seizures.

“You can’t die.” I shake him. “Do you hear me? You can’t die, or Darin dies too.”

The horse’s hooves slip on the rocks, and it rears, nearly ripping the reins from my hands and throwing Elias. I dismount and croon at the beast, trying to temper my impatience, coaxing it along as the thick mist gives way to a wretched, bone-chilling drizzle.

I can barely see my own hand in front of my face. But I take heart from it. If I cannot see where I’m going, the raiders cannot see who is approaching. Still, I tread carefully, feeling the press of danger from every side. From the sparse dirt trail I’ve followed, I can see the Roost well enough to make out that it is not one rock but two, riven in half as if by a great ax. A narrow valley runs through the center, and torchlight flickers within. That must be the market.

East of the Roost yawns a no-man’s-land where thin fingers of rock rise up out of plunging chasms, punching higher and higher until the rocks meld together to form the first low ridgelines of the Serran Mountain Range.

I search the gullies and ravines of the land around me until I spot a cave large enough to hide both Elias and the horse.

By the time I’ve tethered the beast to a knob of jutting rock and dragged Elias off its back, I’m panting. The rain has soaked him through, but there’s no time to change him into dry clothes now. I tuck a cloak around him carefully, then rifle through his pack for coins, feeling like a thief.

When I find them, I give his hand a squeeze and pull out one of his kerchiefs to tie about my face as he did in Serra, inhaling the scent of spice and rain.

Then I pull up my hood and slip out of the cave, hoping he’ll still be alive when I return.

If I return.

«««

The market at the heart of the Roost teems with Tribesmen, Martials, Mariners, even the wild-eyed Barbarians that harass the Empire’s borders. Southern traders move in and out of the crowd, their bright, cheerful clothing at odds with the weapons strapped across their backs, chests, and legs.

I don’t see a single Scholar. Not even slaves. But I do see plenty of people acting as shifty as I feel, and so I slump down and slip into the masses, making sure the hilt of my knife is clearly visible.

Within seconds of joining the crowd, someone grabs my arm. Without looking, I lash out with the knife, hear a grunt, and wrench away. I pull my hood lower and hunch, the way I did at Blackcliff. That’s all this place is. Another Blackcliff. Just smellier and with thieves and highwaymen, in addition to murderers.

The place stinks of liquor and animal dung, and beneath that, the acrid bite of ghas, a hallucinogen outlawed in the Empire. Ramshackle dwellings squat along the defile, most tucked into the natural cracks in the rock, with canvas tarps as roofs and walls. Goats and chickens are nearly as abundant as the people.

The dwellings might be humble, but the goods within are anything but. A group of men a few yards from me haggle over a tray of sparkling, egg-sized rubies and sapphires. Some stalls are filled with slab after slab of crumbling, sticky ghas, while others have firepowder barrels packed together in a dangerously haphazard fashion.

An arrow zings by my ear, and I’ve bolted ten steps before I realize it isn’t intended for me. A group of fur-clad Barbarians stand beside an arms dealer, testing out bows by casually firing arrows every which way. A fight breaks out and I try to shove past, but a crowd gathers, and it’s impossible to move. At this rate, I’ll never find an apothecary.

“—sixty-thousand-mark bounty, they say. Never heard of a mark that big—”

“Emperor doesn’t want to look a fool. Veturius was his first execution, and he botched it. Who’s the girl with him? Why would he travel with a Scholar?”

“Maybe he’s joining the revolution. Scholars know the secret of Serric steel, I hear. Spiro Teluman himself taught a Scholar lad. Maybe Veturius is as sick of the Empire as Teluman is.”