House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(47)

*



Downstairs I find Harun out of the fever and the fits. He’s moved, curled himself up in his chair, his blanket that Isidro brought him wrapped around his shoulders. He’s still shivering, but just a little. It’s not the violent shaking of fever, and that candle-sick look has gone from his face. Good. I think of Isidro, and how perhaps that leash has finally been broken.

There’s a thick rancid smell of vomit in the air. Although I note he did at least make the effort to throw up in the fireplace. “Feeling better?” I ask. There are matches on the mantelpiece, and I take one to light the fatcandles in their glass prisons.

“Ow,” he says. “Too bright.”

I lower the flames, turning the knob down until the flame is barely more than a glow. “And?”

“And what, you meddlesome woman?”

“Did you see what you wanted?”

He shakes his head. “Not done yet.”

Panic kicks in my chest. “You will not take more scriv,” I say to him. “I will tie you up myself if I have to.”

Harun glances up at me through his sweat-soaked hair. “Right.” He coughs. “Don’t have to take more. Waiting for the last Vision.”

“Oh good.” I step back, putting as much distance as I can between us.

“Last one, always a true one.” He’s still coughing, choking the words out. He fumbles for a handkerchief and spits a wad of black mucous into it, looks at the mess and scowls. “I’ve f*cked myself completely,” he says to himself.

“The children?” I say. I ask him now, or I ask him never.



He looks up from his wadded handkerchief and frowns. “What – oh.” He looks away from me with a shrug. “That’s just one path. It’s – there are others. You can choose anything.”

“Whose were they?”

“Yours, obviously.”

I grit my teeth and speak slowly. “The father, I mean.”

“Does it matter?” He stands and sways unsteadily. “I told you, it’s not a true Vis– Oh sweet f*cking Gris.” His eyes roll back into his head, strange and white. Before I can move forward to catch him, he tips sideways, his head connecting with the wooden armrest. The sound is loud and meatily solid. “Ah f*ck,” he mumbles. “Gris damn.”

I manage to get him upright, but whatever bit of sanity he was hanging on to is gone now. There’s just the eerie rolled-back eyes, the growing swelling on his head, the odd wheezy breathing. This close, I can smell the black vomit on his breath; it’s rotten with clotted blood. He makes a sound I have only heard once before, when a dog was caught in a market wagon’s spoked wheel and dragged through the streets. It makes the flesh on my bones feel like it’s peeling back.

This is it, then. My throat closes up like a sea snail sealing its shell.

“Harun!” I kneel before him and slap at his face, praying that he comes back from whatever future he’s seeing, and that he comes back with most of his mind still in one piece. “You stupid, stupid, stupid idiot.” I’m punctuating the words with slaps and with sobs. My face is wet. I shouldn’t care. Harun has been no great friend to us. Isidro is as pretty and untrustworthy as any well-bred whore. But, as Jannik, has pointed out before, they are all we have.

I give Harun a final slap, so hard that my own bones feel broken. He stops screaming to drag in a ragged breath, and just as suddenly as he began, he falls silent. “Is it done then?” I ask him softly as I try and squeeze the pain out of my bruised hand. The blisters have broken again, weeping over my skin.

He stares around the familiar room, lost and vacant.

“Is it done?” This time I yell, and he seems to finally notice me.

“Where–” Harun shakes his head briskly like a wet dog, then stills and presses one hand to his bruised temple. “Ow. Where’s Isidro?”

“Out – outside.” It’s a version of truth.

“Why did you kill your brother when you could have killed yourself instead?”

No scriv-fuelled beating could have hurt me as hard, or come as more of a surprise. “I didn’t,” I say, almost without thinking. I have told myself this so many times. “I didn’t.”

He lurches to his feet and walks past me to open the door. “Isidro? You can come out of hiding now.” Harun yells it like he’s making a joke, but Isidro does not appear.

I stay on my knees and watch his face, looking for some sign that he will betray me.

Jannik is the one who comes to the door, and from the panic on his face I know what I had only feared before. Isidro has left.

“He’s going to die,” Harun says, and looks from my face to Jannik’s and back again.

“That’s a little dramatic,” Jannik begins but Harun cuts him short.

“Is it? Is it really? When your people are turning up on Lam-heaps with their faces cut off?” Harun sneers. “Do you know how much I’ve been offered for him in the past?”

He coughs another clump of rotted blood into his hand, and stares at it. “Anyway,” he says, dully, with no inflection to betray him. “I saw it.”

I freeze. Of course we don’t know how much people offer Harun for his partner. It’s not like we try to dig up each other’s secrets like earthworms in a compost heap. Was that all Harun’s final vision brought him – the news that Isidro would die? A waste of scriv if ever there was. We all die.