Page 61 of Silver & Gold
Raider raised an eyebrow. “Well, if that makes you comfortable, Nasrin.”
Her jaw clenched. She insisted, “Its other name is the Life Stone. Do you get that? It protects. It restores. It can ensure that nothing happens to her or to—” Nasrin cut herself off.
“Her child.” At Raider’s whispered words, fear flashed through Nasrin’s eyes. “I would never tell anyone,” Raider assured her (except maybe Seth, he acknowledged privately, but that was different). “But, Nasrin, one of the basic tenets of alchemy is balance. The Life Stone? What’s the balance of that?”
Nasrin sniffed. “When did you become such a philosopher?”
“I’ve had a lot of cause to think about these things. I know I act like I don’t think about them, but I do.”
Nasrin regarded him. That look was back in her eyes. The one he didn’t want to see.
Raider looked away across the sands.
Nasrin insisted, “If anyone can be trusted with the Alchemist’s Stone, it’s her. She’s not like her uncle, or even her father. She’s good. Truly good.”
“Tell that to someone she isn’t blackmailing.”
“Ah. So you do resent her.”
Zooming in on something not quite right out in the sands, Raider replied distractedly, “Not for doing it to me. But she’s doing it to Seth. That’s different.”
“She has to,” Nasrin said, sounding pained. “Look, since you know anyway, I might as well tell you. This isn’t her first child. She birthed another, and the babe didn’t survive the first night. Our daughter—” Nasrin’s voice broke. “I mean, her daughter was poisoned.” She snapped, annoyed by his distraction, “Raider, what are you looking at?”
“I don’t know. Something.” Raider focused on the hump of sand that didn’t quite fit with the contours of the dunes. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be—shit.”
“What is it?” Nasrin asked, her tone alert, all annoyance gone.
“I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s moving this way. Fast. Under the sand.”
“Sand serpent?”
“No. But it’s big.”
“Shit,” Nasrin muttered and took off at a run, shouting for the caravan to spread out and the Hammer to arm itself.
Raider didn’t really want to know what that thing was, but he found out soon enough when a jointed black tail taller than a man came curving out of the sand, its vicious stinger unmistakable.
Raider jolted at the sight, all his instincts shouting at him to run. He did run, but not in the direction that his instincts told him he should (which, obviously, was away). Instead, he raced across the sands, hoping to cut the creature off before it reached the palanquins. Quicksilver cascaded down his left arm, and he yanked his scimitar from its scabbard at his hip.
Sensing Raider’s approach, the gigantic scorpion veered his way. It burst from the sand, stinger poised to strike and huge black pincers snapping.
Raider dove aside as the articulated carapace curled and the stinger came punching down. He swung his scimitar, but the curved blade glanced off the armored segment of stinger.
Shouts behind him announced the arrival of the others, but Raider was too busy to make out the words. He leaped over a snapping pincer and darted around the scorpion, trying to get outside its striking zone.
It spun to face him. The stinger came punching down again, but this time a length of gleaming silver wrapped around it, yanking it back. As the scorpion spun once more, one of its pincers slammed into Raider, knocking him off his feet. He tumbled through the sand.
As he scrambled up, he got one glimpse of Nasrin hanging onto the end of her quicksilver whip as she was yanked off her feet. Then Seth, racing Raider’s way, grabbed him around the waist and hauled him several paces. Raider lost sight of Nasrin as Seth dumped him on the ground.
Bewildered and angry, Raider burst to his feet, ready to dart past Seth to the fight. He assumed that Seth meant to beat him to it. Why the hell didn’t Seth understand why it was so important for Raider to be at the front of these things? If Seth got hurt—
But Seth wasn’t racing toward the fight. He put up an arm, holding Raider back, keeping them both out of it.
“Seth—!”
“Let them deal with it!” Seth shouted, and Raider now saw what he hadn’t had time to notice before.
Two of the palanquins faced the scorpion. Their canopies were retracted to expose the bed of each, where an armored member of the Hammer stood behind a ballista of some kind.