The Unbroken by C. Clark (ebook reader .txt) 📕

Shāl, have mercy on us, Luca thought, squeezing the handle of her knife in her left hand while blood welled from the new cut on her forearm.

She glanced furtively over her shoulder. She had barricaded herself in her office in the town house, all the way upstairs, just so that she could have privacy. The last thing she wanted was for Gil to walk in and catch her.

The slice Luca had made was just under the cut Aranen had made earlier that day. The blood was a deep wine burgundy in the lamplight, stark against her pale skin. Her dinner of stewed lamb and chickpeas was mostly gone—she’d requested it especially for this. It was a local dish, flavored with dried fruit and warm spices, and the scent lingered.

She squeezed her fist to make the blood come faster and closed her eyes, like Aranen had done. Shāl, have mercy on us.

Luca peeked one eye at the small wound. Nothing. Nothing but the sting of the cut and the tickle of blood sliding down her arm toward the crook of her elbow.

She tried again, thinking the words in Shālan, murmuring them under her breath. She tried different combinations of phrases she’d heard Shālans utter automatically or when they thought Balladairans couldn’t hear. She even resorted to simply asking Shāl to hear and heal her.

Still, nothing happened.

Luca had seen the magic work. She had seen Aranen do it with her own eyes. That was proof enough that Shāl existed, and so Luca no longer doubted. And yet it wasn’t enough. Apparently, you couldn’t simply ask a god to intercede. You couldn’t simply want badly for a god to be real, or believe in phenomena created by a god.

The vision of herself on the Balladairan throne, banishing the Withering and healing the people, the greatest queen of an age, died with a frustrated whimper. She snatched up the cloth towel on her desk and wrapped it around her still-bleeding arm, grateful for the way the burn of the cut matched that frustration.

Shāl, she thought petulantly, at least give me a sign that you’re real.

A resounding boom vibrated through Luca’s chest and left her ears ringing.

“Shāl?” she said in a strangled whisper. She cast about sheepishly for some angry deity but saw nothing.

But someone was pounding frantically at the door and shouting.

Luca wound the cloth tighter around her forearm and hid the bloody knife in the drawer.

“What?” she called. “What’s happening?”

Gil burst through the door. Was Luca imagining it, or were his eyes rimmed red with tears? The last time she’d seen him like this, she’d been trampled by a horse. Maybe she had struck a nerve with her questions earlier. She hadn’t meant to hurt him.

“What?” she asked again.

“The temple, Luca.” Gil’s voice was thick with horror. “Blackcoats destroyed the Grand Temple.”

PART 4MARTYRS

CHAPTER 35AN UNEARTHING

The early evening sun shone through a sky streaked with smoke. The Grand Temple was a mountain of cracked marble slabs, pebbles, and dust. Touraine’s boots crunched on pulverized glass. She pulled her scarf up to keep from inhaling enough dust to make mud in her lungs. The wreckage smelled like prayers. She wasn’t a Shālan, not yet, but she ached for this. She replayed its collapse in her mind, the earth shaking beneath her feet. She imagined the explosion echoing in the corridors. Even buildings along the outside of the courtyard hadn’t been safe. Cracks splintered like rivers across their walls; one wall had crumbled.

The Qazāli resistance was just as broken. It seemed like half the city was unaccounted for. On the other side of a chunk of the temple’s walls, Malika’s face fell as she understood the extent of the Qazāli losses. Until this year, Touraine had never thought it possible to see a heart break. She had been naive. Finally, Malika met Touraine’s eyes and held them. Desperately, like a piece of flotsam in the sea.

“Ya! There’s someone here!” a person shouted in Shālan.

Touraine jumped at the voice, picking along the heap of rubble. Delicately, to keep from collapsing the rock and killing someone they hadn’t found underneath. Quickly, so that this someone wouldn’t suffocate. There had been survivors. There had also been corpses.

“Shāl, be gentle,” someone prayed as two men shifted rock.

Touraine’s fingers were scraped and bleeding, coated white. She and the others—including Sands who had abandoned their uniforms—formed a line to shuttle rocks away from the buried person. Her breath came in anxious, hopeful bursts.

“I have a leg!” the man at the front of the line called.

“Quicker!” she shouted.

They worked harder. Touraine realized she was passing her rocks to Jaghotai. She nodded. Like everyone else, she wore her scarf up for the dust, and like everyone else, her eyes were red rimmed. Dust mingled with the gray hairs in her dreadlocks.

A voice tunneled from the rocks. “Shāl is merciful,” it said, over and over.

Touraine gave a relieved laugh as two men pulled up the last massive rock enough for a man to sit up.

“His legs are broken!”

“Carry him!”

“Healers!”

The last was a reflex, and it met a solemn hush. There were no more healers. They were all in Cantic’s—in Luca’s cells.

Another pair of Qazāli pried the man out of his crevice. Onlookers cheered.

Touraine clapped with them, but her mind had already moved on. She went to Jaghotai. “We need to figure out our next position. Attack or retreat, is there somewhere we can set up a defense—”

Jaghotai frowned incredulously. “What is wrong with you?”

Touraine should have known that Jaghotai of all people wouldn’t want to work with her. If Djasha had been here instead of Jaghotai, they would have had a plan already. Instead of answering, Touraine circuited the excavated parts of the collapse to the far edge, where a Qazāli woman worked with a Sand. Noé. He always managed to get body duty. He tapped his forehead in solemn salute. He’d been one of the Sands who’d joined the rebels in the chaos the night the