The Silver Sparrow

Don't Look Back

Djari watched the scene with a hazed over vision and a detachment of someone not present in the room but above it, looking down. A cold, coiling creature came alive and slithered in her chest as she did, wrapped its length around her heart and began to squeeze. She snatched and crushed the life out of it, made sure it stayed dead with the same determination she had to not move from the spot or stir at the image before her.

On the bed, the healer was bleeding Hasheem into a bucket, trying to drain the poison from his blood. The blood of her swornsword—hers, as they were considered one and the same—dribbled down his arm, thick and almost black like that of Lady when Djari had slit her throat. She had been like this too—her mother's mare—lying still and barely breathing during her last moment of life.

She squeezed her eyes shut, shoved the memory back into a distant corner of her mind, behind the wall over which other things had been tossed. Don't look back. Look forward. Look somewhere else. Anywhere.

There had to be a large, rotting pile of dead things behind that wall now, she knew, and it was growing higher by the minute. She could smell the acrid, nauseating stench of it everywhere she went. It clung to her like body odor, like a dirty, ugly blood stain from past mistakes that would always show no matter how much effort she'd put into covering it or scrubbing it out. They would have to be dealt with soon. Just not now. Not yet.

Not yet, had been the words she used since she arrived at the lair of the Rishi. She couldn't see Hasheem, couldn't talk to him, not yet anyway. It still wasn't clear to her what she was afraid of, but she had been afraid—was still afraid even after the meeting when they'd finally met again. There were things, she supposed, that you could only live with when you didn't give it meaning, or when you didn't see it on other people's face. She had been avoiding him for that reason, waiting for the time when she felt she might be ready to deal with it.

Such a time may never come if he dies tonight.

Another creature squeezed tight around her heart, closed up the back of her throat until she couldn't breathe. She crushed that one too and tossed the carcass over the wall. Don't think about that. Not now. Not yet. Not until it happens.

"Is there no antidote?" Behind her, Sarasef asked calmly, only the frequency at which the Grand Chief shifted his weight before saying it told her he was anything but calm.

Deo di Amarra sighed. The sound carried and filled the room with more toxicity, as if there wasn't enough of it for all of them to wince every time they breathed. "No, there is no antidote. You use it on people you want to see dead, to make sure they stay dead," he replied in a tone filled with too many emotions to name, although pissed might have taken the most prominent note. "That's the fucking point of Zyren."

"So he will die?" Asked Sarasef simply, and yet somehow she could hear him stumble halfway through the word.

Gathering the leftover bits and pieces of her strength, Djari made herself look at Deo di Amarra, asking the same question though in silence.

And winced, when he shook his head in frustration, in anger, in uncertainty loud enough to tear through any hope one might be harboring. "My first class assassins take poisons on a regular basis in case an accident happens. Under normal circumstances, he should be able to withstand its effects," he explained. "But he wasn't exactly in perfect health before this, and being shot twice means there's a shitload of it in his body now. We can only try to bleed it out without weakening him too much. He's going to have to fight the rest, and I don't know if he can. Having pulled an arrow out that way," he paused, as if to swear in the privacy of his own mind, "allowed the poison to spread faster and more effectively."