Blood Warrior

CHAPTER FIVE

He’ll kill them anyway,” Tallis said calmly.

Pashkah focused his intense eyes on Tallis. Neither malice nor temper shone in those shaded depths. “Pendray can speak? You learn something new every day. Next I’ll expect dogs to write poetry.”

Tallis held back his temper at the slight. He focused instead on Kavya. She was more calm in the face of her brother’s threat than she had been on the receiving end of Tallis’s kisses. What that meant would have to wait. Getting out alive was all that mattered.

“You know I’m right,” Tallis said to Kavya. “They’re damned by an accident of fate.”

“And you believe in fate, you blood-hungry Reaper?” Pashkah’s soft voice was mocking with laughter, although his unnerving expression never changed. He reminded Tallis of how Kavya had appeared when addressing her flock—that slippery facade—but he couldn’t tell whether it was a Mask or some Indranan trickery. The man was rich with the power of madness. “You’re such primitive creatures. It’s a shame we’re obligated to include you among the Five Clans.”

“Go.” Tallis had sheathed his seaxes to move the boulder, which meant he felt damn near naked. He flicked his gaze between Pashkah and Kavya. “Get your woman out of here and go.”

“I’m not leaving while he lives,” Chandrani said.

Pashkah blinked . . . and Chandrani screamed.

She collapsed onto her knees. She pressed her hands around her skull.

“That’s what you get for being a thorn in my side for too long, Chandrani, dear. Anyone who protects or harbors my sister will receive the same.” Pashkah trained his viciously vacant expression on Tallis. “I wonder how little effort it would take to lobotomize a Pendray.”

The charged-up urges gathering in Tallis’s blood had become a hurricane contained within skin. He smiled broadly. “I’m up for it if you are.”

That unreserved joy seemed to upset Pashkah more than the words, with his brow drawing into a blink-quick frown. “Try me, Reaper beast.”

Tallis let himself go.

With seaxes instantly in hand, the world whirled into shades of scarlet and lead. His peripheral vision became steam. Formless. Irrelevant. His focus trained on Pashkah’s sword. In the heartbeat’s worth of time between ordinary and extraordinary, Tallis had identified the weapon as the crux of the standoff. Without it, Pashkah could injure but not kill. The Black Guardsmen still held their captives. They might kill the young women if they escaped through the archway, but Tallis wouldn’t let their vulnerability influence Kavya. Nor would he divert his energy.

The sword was the key.

He homed in on the glinting golden glow. The power of the Chasm lived within its luster. Tallis’s swords would be cleaved in two if struck by that blade. Nothing commonplace could withstand its potency.

He whipped his body into a greater, faster rage—hyper-focused, yet frighteningly mindless. The part of him that had lived too long among the humans dropped away. He was a creature of energy and the elements. The earth flowed up through his feet. He struck quick-patter steps across the valley’s granite floor.

Slicing Pashkah’s hand off should’ve been an easy task. But the fleeting moments before he sacrificed his rationality left him open to telepathic attack. Pashkah lanced his body with pain and filled his thoughts with bile, sugar-spun lies, and dizzying misdirection. Tallis saw images of flowers, bloody teeth, entrails, grains of sand in an hourglass no larger than a child’s palm. He felt the wind against his face as if fire and acid had joined with a tempest to flay his face.

His gift fought back. He hadn’t given in to its entirety in years. The monster was immune to Pashkah’s meddling, because the monster dwelled deeper than consciousness. Whatever Pashkah was doing to his higher thoughts no longer bothered Tallis. Whatever had sparked the confrontation no longer mattered. All that his deepest instincts remembered was the sword.

He spun his seaxes like fan blades. But when he attacked Pashkah, he did so with his teeth.

He bit.

A scream echoed down to where Tallis existed, as if his mind had plummeted into a well. His jaw locked. He wouldn’t let go. Only when a chunk of flesh ripped free did he rear back. The sword was limp in Pashkah’s hand, but he was strong. He held on to it, swung, missed.

Tallis spat the mouthful of flesh onto the ground and smiled.

Clutching his wrist, Pashkah continued to rage in a distant corner of Tallis’s mind, but Tallis attacked with his seax. Steel sliced skin and muscle. A crack of bone was satisfying. A second splintering sound was even better. His enemy shrank back. Female shrieks split the air. Only when Pashkah fled through the archway did Tallis turn on the guards.

It was intoxicating to be so pure, so graceful, so at one with his body.

The first guard lost a foot. The second tried what his leader had done—mental attack. Yet he was quicker to give up a useless tactic. He shoved his captive away and drew a broadsword that had originated in the Isles where berserkers ran mad. Did this Indranan expect to best Tallis with a Pendray weapon? He nearly laughed. He was smiling with the contentment of a man who’d been unexpectedly released from prison.

Two strokes later, the guard’s sword clanged to the ground. The hand that held it still gripped the hilt.

The women had stopped screaming. They huddled around golden, silken Kavya.

Tallis needed to get them out before his rage subsided. The return to his waking mind promised untold pain. Whatever Pashkah had inflicted wouldn’t dissipate quickly. Tallis needed the animal to protect himself from that crippling agony.

“Kavya,” he said, like a wolf given leave to speak. He shouldered his pack. “We go.”

She glanced at the freed women, who continued to whimper. “They’re coming with us.”

“We go. Now.”

“With them.” She was angry and terrified. Disgusted and amazed.

Beautiful.

The animal was honest. Tallis wanted her. He wanted her in every way a man could have a woman. Rough. Fast. Merciless.

With tenderness.

He would take her. One day. She would fight it and love it and he would hold her in the aftermath.

Tallis beat back his animal cravings. He needed to get her free before he could indulge in primitive thoughts. Other than visceral pleasure, a Pendray wanted nothing more than freedom. No walls to keep him contained. There were too many walls in that blood-drenched valley.

The big woman led the way. Tallis surprised himself when he handed a seax to Kavya. She stood up and gripped it, both hands steady. Tallis liked that. He couldn’t protect her if she cowered like her charges. Only then did he realize that he’d never lent one of his weapons to anyone.

“Out.”

She obeyed, after hurrying the two weaker women through the exit. Had he already possessed her? Claimed her? His animal rage knew the truth. He’d tasted her, kissed her, touched her.

But he’d never bedded the woman called Kavya.

His goal was not to enjoy her sultry charms and resilient spirit, but to make her look a fool. The reasons no longer aligned, especially when he crawled behind her into the escape tunnel. The tight space and his heightened awareness of taking up the rear guard consumed his attention. He couldn’t rely on his gift in that tight space. While crawling, Tallis battled to overcome the sense of suffocation that whipped his beastly side into a fit of panic. Two states of mind fought for control, but not entirely because of the necessities of war.

They fought because of a woman.

Tallis wanted Kavya of Indranan as much as he wanted to destroy the Sun.

—

Kavya didn’t like the idea of Tallis following her in that confined tunnel. He was the most vicious creature she’d ever seen.

Yet, hadn’t she needed just that? Some ferocity on her side? The women she urged forward, toward the open air, would be dead without him. Kavya would be prisoner to her brother. Would he have dragged out his torture and taunting? Or would he have simply pushed her against the altar for two Black Guards to restrain? One slice later, she’d have met the Dragon in the afterlife.

She shuddered even as she crawled. For the most part, the hollow beneath the mountain was natural. A few of the smaller passages had needed to be widened because none of her armored bodyguards could’ve traversed the narrow length. A few modifications to nature had created a tunnel she’d never thought she would need.

Her sense of self-preservation had kicked into the stratosphere when faced with her brother’s insane placidity. Although they hadn’t seen each other in more than twenty years, he’d recognized her as surely as she’d recognized him. The Masks had done their jobs, but now he would be able to track her mind’s false persona. He knew what she looked like as a grown woman and knew who accompanied her in flight.

Even if he stopped for the night to tend to his arm, which she doubted, he would be in pursuit. Soon. Relentlessly.

His arm . . .

She shut her eyes for the span of a panting inhalation. Tallis had bitten her brother. Her shock had been nothing to Pashkah’s expression of agonized surprise. When Tallis had spit and smiled, Pashkah of the Northern Indranan, so insane and formidable, had appeared afraid.

That was a precious memory she would keep as long as the Dragon granted. It softened her hatred of the man following at a steady crawl, behind where she sought purchase on the slippery rock. Tallis of Pendray had saved her life, and he’d done so by terrorizing her brother—a treasure to offset whatever misguided vengeance had brought him into her valley.

She heard Chandrani’s voice in her mind. “Almost there. Another hundred meters.”

That eased Kavya’s anxiety. Chandrani had recovered her telepathy. But what awaited them at the end of their crawl? How fast could Pashkah’s men circle around? Would they be able to find the exit in the dark? Of course they would. They’d only need to search for five conscious minds emerging from the side of a mountain. Select few Indranan were skilled Trackers. If Pashkah had tempted one to join his rabble, he would be able to find them at a distance of twenty or more miles—some rumored as many as a hundred.

Locating a half-crazed Pendray mind should’ve been the easiest means, but during his rage, Tallis had seemed impervious to Pashkah’s attacks. Kavya had felt that ambient energy like the heat of an open oven.

Chandrani had hurt Tallis. Pashkah had done something. Maybe he wasn’t shielded from every Indranan. Only Kavya? Why?

Tallis was a complete unknown . . . aside from his exceptional means of fighting. He’d been able to take down Chandrani without the use of his gift. Kavya had never known a man able to achieve that feat.

Chandrani’s mind linked with hers again. Kavya could see what her bodyguard saw, which was near-total darkness. At least the darkness was empty of Guardsmen with glinting swords and voracious thoughts, eager to use their twice-cursed powers on any susceptible mind. Their intentions had been clear enough when holding the young women who continued to crawl through the tunnel. They’d hoped Kavya would go peacefully into her brother’s custody, and that in return for their service, they would be awarded the women. They’d each clutched soft flesh a little tighter, greedily, ready to use force.

The Indranan had been damned for generations. Force—force against women—was the heart of their divided, hateful clan, as intrinsic as murderous violence between siblings.

Kavya felt Chandrani withdraw from her mind. She would need all of her faculties to scout for trouble or, worse, to attack if guards materialized from the shadows. Kavya returned her attention to the women she shepherded. She touched their thoughts, one after the other. She was the Sun. Bright. Warming. Such intense focus left her drained, but she wanted them calmed by generous stores of hope. The draining part was concealing how little hope Kavya yet retained.

First one, then the other reached the exit. Kavya quickly followed. When she stood, she recalled the seax in her hand. The mental rigors of the crawl had turned the weapon into an extension of her body. How? She’d never held one other than to face the man who’d given it to her so freely.

The man who crawled out of the tunnel.

Tallis of Pendray.

Whatever remained of his berserker rage was visible only in his eyes. The night darkness was almost absolute. In fact, she was sure that the only clues she collected were drawn from her gift. Could it be possible? To read him at last? But no. It was his gift shining in the blackness. His rage was a blue beacon. And his loathing hadn’t eased.

He adjusted the strap of his knapsack and held out his hand. “I’ll have that back now.”

For a moment, she was tempted to hack his palm—an impulse born of frustration and fear. But her hatred had dimmed compared to the terror of standing face to face with Pashkah. How could she have compared the two men?

“I didn’t want it in the first place.” Kavya swung the sword and presented him with the hilt. The needle tip of the seax pointed directly at her heart. She already bore two cuts on her neck. She knew the blade’s lethal potential. But this was a show of . . .

Trust?

And a warning.

She wasn’t afraid of him.

“Thank you.” He sheathed it behind his back.

“Why?” The tremulous voice belonged to one of the young women. “Why did you do it? You’re the Sun. You were supposed to bring us together.”

Kavya knelt beside the crouching pair. “You’re Sarbani. You share a family pod with Divyesh and his wife.”

“That’s right.”

To the other Kavya said, “And you’re Jayashree. Your brother was killed by your husband three years ago. You’re safe from that constant fear.”

“We have your brother to fear now,” Jayashree said. “How is that much better? Sarbani is right. Where were you when he killed those Leaders? I know what it is to be terrified of one’s brother, but we were depending on you.”

They were too distraught and angry to be consoled now that the immediate danger had passed. “Will you accept my apology and my vow to make this right? Will you come with us?”

A shimmer of thought flitted between the two women. Kavya couldn’t tell what they said, only that they were conferring without words.

In tandem, Sarbani and Jayashree stood. “No,” said the latter. “We’re Northern Indranan. We know these mountains. The last thing we need is a hunted woman and a mad Pendray dog. We’ll find the people of the North and let it be known that the Sun has fallen.”