Page 75 of The Merciless Ones
I slash at them with a claw. Wait, a claw? I look down at the daggers now sprouting from my fingers, so sharp, they slice easily through the dirt. What is this? Why do I have claws like a deathshriek? Why is dirt pressing down on me?
And then I hear them, the growls sounding all around me. The dirt wriggling, wriggling, as those slithery vines creep closer. What’s happening? Someone help me! HELP ME!
“Deka!”
I gasp, jerking back when a hand tugs at mine. Keita is staring at me, worried. “What just happened?”
“The kaduth,” I choke out, still shaking from what I just saw. “It’s made of jatu blood. No – deathshriek blood. I saw one of them – it was a man, and for a moment, I was him. I was inside his mind, and then he became a deathshriek and he was so frightened, so frightened…” My body won’t stop trembling from the memory.
What was that place? What were those slithery things I saw?
As I catch my breath, Karmoko Thandiwe walks over. “We have to move out, Deka. We have to hurry to those wagons and leave the Warthu Bera before daybreak.”
“And the rest of us have to head to the Grand Temple to see about Idugu,” Belcalis reminds us.
Karmoko Calderis nods. “Well, Rustam will help,” she says, something very near to a blush colouring her cheeks.
“Rustam?” Britta blinks, confused.
Karmoko Huon turns to her, eyes rolling. “Calderis has a friend…among the jatu.”
Confusion furrows my brow as I understand what she’s saying. “But I thought Shadows – even former ones – weren’t supposed to have…friends.”
“Well, we aren’t supposed to become dungeon labour for our jatu comrades either, and yet here we are,” Karmoko Calderis replies drily. “Now, then, are we just going to stand here, or are we going to make our way to the wagons?”
“Wagons,” I reply. “But give me a moment first. There’s something important I have to do.”
When I head over to the wheel at the centre of the forge, Katya and the others have already begun the process of freeing the deathshrieks, who stagger about in halting, dazed movements as they’re released from their bonds. Rian and most of the girls avoid them cautiously, since it’s clear they’re all mostly in altered states of mind. I can see that the jatu not only chained the deathshrieks with celestial gold and gagged them with iron; they also drugged them into docility with blue-blossom flowers, just as they used to when I was here at the Warthu Bera. Now that the deathshrieks are free, however, their agitation is swiftly overcoming that docility. Rattle is rubbing her newly freed wrists when I walk up to her. Her eyes blink in slow surprise, and I notice, for the first time, how feminine they are.
It’s not her lashes or anything as simple as that. There’s just this feeling that emanates from them. Why did I never see her for what she was? Why did I not notice her intelligence? Almost the entire time I studied here, I saw her as a mindless beast – an aid for my studies rather than a living creature with feelings and desires. No matter how many times she tried to communicate to me, I never understood.
But, then, I didn’t really want to, did I? I wanted to believe the lies the priests sold me, wanted to believe I could earn purity and a place in Otera by killing deathshrieks. I can blame the blue blossom all I like, but the truth is, I should have known better, should have understood more. Even if the deathshrieks were drugged and slow in their attempts to communicate, whether I knew it then or not, I was the Nuru, daughter to the Gilded Ones. It was my duty to translate for them. But I was too blinded by my own selfish needs to see what was in front of me.
“Rattle,” I say, fighting the urge to fidget as I remember all those times I forced her to obey my voice in the name of mastering it, “I must offer my deepest apologies for what I did to you while I was here.” I kneel in front of her.
Silence stretches taut as the massive deathshriek looks down at me, her black eyes considering, despite their vagueness. When she finally speaks, her voice is the deep rumble I’m intimately familiar with but never managed to understand. “You look like her, you know,” she says in a strange, halting fashion.
“Like who?”
“Umu…your mother.”
My heart jolts in my chest. “You knew my mother?”
Rattle inclines her head absently, the quills on her back rattling from the movement. It’s almost as if she’s only halfway here, and the cowardly part of me is relieved. I feared addressing the fierce and defiant Rattle, the one who kept me in terror for weeks after I met her.
“She studied combat on me too,” she says. “She always brought me gifts, unlike you. But then you didn’t understand what I was.” When I frown, taken aback, she explains: “White Hands informed her of the truth about deathshrieks quite early on. It wasn’t like it was with you. Umu’s mind wasn’t…poisoned the way yours was when you came here. She never believed the Infinite Wisdoms’ lies. I think she felt guilty, knowing what I was. Knowing that I couldn’t control my primal nature because of the curse the mothers laid on us.”
“The curse?” I’m only somewhat stunned to hear it described that way.
Rattle gestures to herself. “Does this form look like a blessing to you? All that anger, madness…pain. And for what? Freeing the Gilded Ones?” Her quills rattle as she shakes her head. “I even reached out to you, but you couldn’t hear me, could you, Nuru? If you are supposed to be our saviour, then why couldn’t you hear me?”
Her words are like a dagger through my heart.
“My apologies,” I whisper miserably again, even though I know the words are little comfort to someone I have so wronged. “I didn’t understand then. I was too blind to see what was before my eyes.”
The edges of Rattle’s lips lift to display razor-sharp teeth. “Do you see now?”
I nod. “I will do better. I will free all our sisters,” I say.