Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 by Chaz Brenchley

knotted into a crude double loop, the sign of the God in whom she had no faith at all: that had been the best that she could manage. Any woman of the tribes who travelled in the Sands would wear such a robe, of that deepest blue that filled the spaces between the stars; her people—Julianne's people now that she was married, married again, so newly married and how careless her husband was of her, to lose her so very quickly — the Sharai claimed it for their own colour, a gift from their own God. Any woman of the Sharai might have hair of such a length, and only a few shades darker than Julianne's; not for the first time in her life she could have wished to be a golden blonde, to leave a clearer message. But surely no woman else would leave the God's sign in this land, for any friendly eye that could find and read it ...
    So she had done what little she could and suffered all else that had come to her, bad food and bad water and the constant, dreadful stare of the 'ifrit, which had seemed to see no more of her leavings than Morakh did, though she'd held her breath in terror every time she dropped another tiny tangle of thread and hair. Every time its claws closed about her she had held her breath again, not to scream aloud as she was wrenched from the grip of solid ground. The effort of forcing air into her constricted lungs had been a blessing, almost, like the effort of keeping her eyes closed against any sight of the long long fall below.
    By the time Morakh had used the last of his fuel, there had been scant water left in his skin and less she thought in hers; she'd felt parched and withered, wrinkled like a raisin. Either they must seek a well and a source of firewood, or else they were close to journey's end.
    The weight of what was to come had hung over her; she'd felt almost as numb and quiescent as she pretended. She'd known that their direction was westward, ever westward, but not what that might mean. She'd had no vision of the land they travelled over, nor of what might lie ahead. Her inner sight had been as blinded as her eyes, and almost as deliberately.
    It had been late and getting later in the day when she realised that they'd finally arrived. She'd learned by then to tell when they were climbing, when flying level and when falling - no, not falling, coming down to land. It hadn't all been chaos and terror in the air; now it could be terror understood, precisely calibrated.
    So she'd known that the 'ifrit was descending, but what of that? It had done the same a dozen times already. She'd waited for the impact of crusted sand beneath her bare feet, the jolt that would knock her to her knees or send her sprawling. This time, though, they had plunged into a sudden, utterly unexpected shadow a moment or two before they hit; and what they hit had not been sand. Sandy, to be sure, but there had been level stone beneath the grit. The shock of it had made her yelp aloud; it had also jerked her eyes open against her will, as she'd fallen and rolled. She'd glimpsed walls, sky, more walls before she came to rest on her belly, aching and shaking all over.
    Some kind of courtyard, long disused: they were stone flags that she had landed on, but they were cracked and broken under their coat of sand. Desert cold had been at them, since they were laid. Sitting up slowly, Julianne had seen rough-worked stones strewn around, where they had fallen from the height of the walls. Likely an earthquake had done that damage: it would take generations of frosts to do so much, cracking the mortar and shifting the stones fraction by fraction with every year that passed. She didn't think these walls had stood long enough. Even in the deep shadows of the courtyard there were tool-marks to be seen, the scars of axe and chisel surviving on the stones; they looked quite fresh, cruder work than the Ransomers had made of the Roq but surely no older ...
    Then she'd felt Morakh's deformed hand grip the back of her neck. She had shuddered, once