Ghost in the Winds (Ghost Exile #9) (12 page)

“They don’t even need to wait that long,” said Caina, fighting the growing despair that gnawed at the back of her mind. “They just need to delay us long enough to make sure Callatas works the Apotheosis. Then the nagataaru can kill us at their leisure.”

“Clever of them,” said Morgant.

“So what are we going to do?” said Annarah.

Caina wasn’t sure. 

Chapter 7: Flames

They spent the rest of the day exploring the Tomb of Kharnaces and found absolutely nothing useful. 

Morgant followed Caina and Annarah as they climbed stairs, hurried down passageways, and looked for hidden doors. They had to dodge the nagataaru all the while. The undead baboons patrolled the passages without ceasing, and Morgant supposed the creatures would do it for years without stopping until they were certain that he and Annarah and Caina were dead. 

Actually, they wouldn’t need to wait that long. They need only wait until Callatas had finished the Apotheosis, and then the nagataaru would have the final victory. Still, from what Morgant had seen of Kharnaces, the Great Necromancers had been a paranoid lot, and he couldn’t imagine that someone as foresighted and long-planning as Kharnaces had failed to build more than one exit from his Tomb. 

But he hadn’t. 

Morgant helped Caina and Annarah search through the silent stone maze of the Tomb, looking through room after room and corridor after corridor, but they found nothing but the Great Necromancer’s treasures and his army of undead baboons. 

It seemed that Kharnaces’s foresight had indeed failed him. On the other hand, the Great Necromancer had planned to destroy the world, so maybe he hadn’t seen the need for an additional method of egress. 

“We should rest for a while,” said Annarah.

“We can’t,” said Caina. In the glow from her pyrikon staff, her blue eyes were bloodshot, her face haunted. “There’s no time. The longer we delay, the more time Callatas has to work the Apotheosis.”

“And the more time Murat has to sail away with the Sandstorm,” said Morgant. 

“That,” said Caina, “and if you cast a warding spell, at least some of the nagataaru will be able to sense it. The ward will keep them away, but they won’t let us slip past them again. They’ll surround us.” 

“What about the summit of the hill?” said Annarah. “We’ve passed the corridor leading to the spiral stairs a dozen times, and we’ve seen none of the undead there.” 

“That’s probably because we can’t get away from the summit,” said Caina. “It’s too steep.”

“So the nagataaru won’t follow us there,” said Annarah.

“Yes,” said Morgant. “We couldn’t possibly be that stupid, could we?”

Caina let out a sound that was either a quiet laugh or a tired sigh. She did look exhausted. The last day had been tiring, and he supposed the last time she had enjoyed a proper rest had been…oh, probably the day they had left Drynemet. Annarah looked just as tired. Of course, Morgant was tired, but he was over two hundred years old. Tired became a relative concept at that point, and whatever the djinn of the Court of the Azure Sovereign had done to extend his life meant that he didn’t need that much sleep. The two younger women needed far more rest than he did.

And they were so young, weren’t they? Caina, for all her boldness and cleverness, was only in her early twenties. Hardly more than a child, really, especially compared to Morgant. Annarah was a hundred and eighty years old, but from her perspective, a century and a half of those years had passed in a few moments. 

For a moment Morgant felt something almost…paternal? Was that it? 

He really must be getting old. 

“Maybe we are,” said Caina. “If we pass out on the floor the nagataaru will find us quickly. Let’s go back to the summit.”

She led the way through the silent Tomb, up the spiral stairs, and back to the summit of Pyramid Isle’s central hill. The hotter, humid air of the jungle struck Morgant across the face like a wet towel as he stepped upon the bone-strewn hilltop, the ground still scorched and scarred from the colossal spells that Kharnaces and Callatas had flung at each other. The sun was going down to the west, painting the sea the color of blood. The dead jungle covered the island like a thick coat of black mold. 

“When all that starts rotting,” said Morgant, “it’s going to smell foul.” 

“It’s so dry,” said Annarah. “If it catches fire…” She blinked several times. “What about the Hellfire in Kharnaces’s trophy room? Perhaps we can use that against the undead warriors.”

“I’ve thought about it,” said Caina, “but I can’t see how. Those amphorae hold enough Hellfire that opening them to the air will make them explode, and the corridors of the Tomb are narrow enough to amplify the blast. We’d be caught in the explosion.” 

“I suppose it would be a quick way to go,” said Morgant. “Quicker than some.” He had seen a lot of people die in a variety of ways, but he hadn’t seen that many people incinerated in a Hellfire explosion, and every single time had been with Caina. 

Caina stared at him so long that Morgant wondered if she was actually considering it. Then she stepped to the side, walking past him, and he realized she was looking over the edge of the cliff. She paced the perimeter of the hilltop, staring down at the dead jungle, and then rejoined them and shook her head. 

“We can’t climb down,” she said. “The slopes are too sleep. I might be able to manage it by myself if I had the right equipment, but I don’t, and one slip would be fatal.”

“But there are no nagataaru up here,” said Annarah. “At least for now.” 

“No,” said Caina. 

“We do have an abundance of old bones,” said Morgant. “Perhaps we could light a signal fire.”

“Murat wouldn’t care,” said Caina. “He’s not stupid enough to approach the island. He knows what kind of things live here. We have to get to the beach, and we have to get to our boat.” She stared over the jungle for a moment. “But I have no idea how.”

“Rest for a while,” said Morgant. “We still have a few days before Murat departs, and even if a burst of genius explodes inside that cracked mind of yours, we can’t blunder around the jungle in the dark.”

“Cracked mind?” said Caina, though her voice didn’t have its usual edge when she traded insults with him. She really was tired. “This from a man who pretended to be a painter for a century and a half?” 

“Pretended?” said Morgant. “I was, and continue to be, the finest painter in Istarinmul. I’m not the one who hired circus performers to fight an Umbarian magus.”

“You might have a point,” said Caina. She started to say something else, but a yawn swallowed the rest of the sentence. 

“Get some sleep,” said Morgant. “You can’t come up with something clever while you’re exhausted. If we’re about to die horribly, I promise I’ll wake you so that you can appreciate the experience fully.”

“How thoughtful,” said Caina.

“Thank you, Morgant,” said Annarah. She lay down, wrapping herself in her cloak, and fell asleep at once.

Morgant turned to say something to Caina, only to find that she had already stretched herself out on the ground, her eyes closed…and she had fallen asleep. It made her look oddly peaceful, even younger. There was always a hard edge about her, even when she had disguised herself as someone else. He had spotted that hard edge the day they had met in the Ring of Cyrica, the day he had realized that she might be able to help him rescue Annarah from the Inferno. 

For a moment he wanted to paint a picture of her lying like that. The Balarigar at rest, he would call it, with the starlight hitting her face just…so, yes, just like that. Certainly, he could sell it for a large sum of money, though he cared little for money beyond its use as a tool. He had lived too long for that. 

It was strange that he had lived so long. The Knight of Wind and Air had gone to great lengths to make sure Morgant had lived this long just so he would be in a position to save Caina’s life when the moment came. He wondered why the djinni had not made an appearance yet. Samnirdamnus wanted to use Caina for some purpose, that was plain, though Morgant had no idea what that purpose was.

Hopefully, it did not involve dying on this forsaken rock. 

Morgant looked at Annarah and wondered what secret she shared with Nasser, and wondered when Caina would figure it out. For Caina would figure it out, sooner or later, if she lived long enough. That was simply the way that cracked mind of hers worked. 

But she would not figure it out if the nagataaru killed them first, so Morgant settled down to keep watch, his blades resting on his knees.

###

Caina lay down, intending only to rest her eyes for a few minutes, but at once fell into a black sleep. 

Dreams floated through her mind. 

Morgant had been right. Caina had not recovered from the march through the jungle, the fight on the beach, the battle at the Desert Maiden, or even the fight against Cassander Nilas and the Throne of Corazain. So much had happened in such a short time, and it seemed a miracle that Caina had survived any of it. 

As a child, she hadn’t wanted any of this, and the thought of the kind of woman she would become would have shocked her younger self. Caina had wanted to be a wife and a mother. Her own mother had betrayed her, setting her upon this path, and step by step that path had taken her to the Ghosts and halfway across the world until she lay sleeping atop this hill on Pyramid Isle.

The dream solidified around her, and Caina found herself standing in the House of Kularus, the coffee house she had owned in Malarae. 

She turned, her skirt whispering against the floor of white marble. Tables and chairs stood around her, and balconies climbed up the walls, providing booths were patrons could converse in private. Caina herself felt better, no longer sweaty and dirty and exhausted. She wore the same dress she usually wore in these dreams, the dress she had worn in Catekharon when she had met Kylon in the Tower of Study. A hopeful thought flitted through her mind. Maybe one day Kylon could take her here, and they could live quietly together, without war and strife and mad sorcerers…

A booming knock echoed through the House of Kularus.

Caina turned towards the double doors with a scowl.

“It’s about time,” she muttered. 

She crossed the floor, the high heels of her boots clicking against the white marble, and pulled the doors open.

Beyond the doors, she should have seen the Imperial Market, the richest market square in the Imperial capital of Malarae. Instead, she saw the bleak gray expanse of the Desert of Candles, the moaning wind blowing dust over the lifeless ground. Thousands of jagged crystalline pillars jutted from the earth, standing eight or nine feet tall and glowing with a pale blue light. When Callatas had burned Iramis with the power of the Star, the spell he had used, whatever it had been, had left behind these strange crystalline pillars, an echo of the people he had killed. When Caina had touched one, she had been overwhelmed with a vision of Iramis’s destruction, and from a distance, the desert looked like a field of pale blue candles. 

The Desert of Candles stood as the gravestone of Iramis, marking the spot where Callatas had murdered a quarter of a million people and started upon the path that would lead him to the Apotheosis.

Samnirdamnus, Knight of Wind and Air of the Court of the Azure Sovereign, stood just outside the doors. 

This time, the djinni wore the form of Caina’s old teacher and mentor Halfdan. Halfdan had been a stocky man of Caerish birth, with iron-gray hair and a beard that he grew out depending upon his need for a disguise. Today he wore a merchant’s furred robe and cap, the cap adorned with a silver badge denoting his rank in an Imperial merchants’ collegium. He looked just as Caina remembered him, just as he had on the day he had died…save for his eyes.

They burned with the smokeless fire of the djinn of the Azure Court, the harsh yellow-orange glow throwing stark shadows across his beard and the lines of his face.

For a moment they stared at each other, the wind moaning across the desert. 

“Samnirdamnus,” said Caina at last.

“My darling demonslayer,” said Samnirdamnus. “My bold Balarigar. We have almost come to the end.”

Caina blinked. “The end of what?”

“Our path together,” said Samnirdamnus, his robe stirring in the dry wind. 

Her mouth went dry. “What do you mean?” Had he come to foretell her death? It seemed strange, given that he had gone to such efforts to save her life.

“Do you remember what I told you aboard the Sandstorm as you sailed for Pyramid Isle?” said Samnirdamnus.

“That the trophies of Kharnaces would be the key to defeating him,” said Caina. “You were right, by the way. He really should not have kept that valikon in his trophy room.” 

“I am often right,” said Samnirdamnus, and his form blurred, shifting to that of Morgant, looking as self-satisfied as only the ancient assassin could manage. “I am very often right, my darling demonslayer. Such as when you first became known to me, on your first night in Istarinmul. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” said Caina. She had been half-mad with grief for Corvalis and Halfdan and had drunk herself into an insensate stupor, the first and only time she had ever done that. At the time, she hadn’t cared if she woke up again or not. As she lay unconscious upon the floor of the Sanctuary of the Ghosts, Samnirdamnus had come to her in a dream for the first time. “You said that I might be the one you have been looking for.” 

“I did,” said Samnirdamnus. “I’ve been looking for someone like you for a very long time now. Ever since Callatas lifted the Star to burn Iramis and bound me to watch over his Maze.” 

“And this is another test?” said Caina. “Another trial to see if I am the one you have been looking for?” She had had this exact conversation with Samnirdamnus several times.

“No,” said djinni.

Caina blinked. 

“For you, Caina Amalas, are the one I have sought,” said Samnirdamnus. “You slew the Moroaica. You defeated not one but two Great Necromancers. You passed through the shadow of death and became the first valikarion to walk the face of this world since Iramis burned. You, Caina Amalas, you are the one I have been looking for since I began my search.”