Page 212 of Of Empires and Dust

“They need to see I am alive.”

“No,” she corrected. “They need you tobealive. Which you will not be if we stay here. You are my queen, but I need you to start listening to me.”

“You cannot fight for something you think is gone.” She grasped her sister’s arm. “I will listen to you, but I am right in this. Trust goes both ways.”

Erani bit at her cheeks but nodded.

“My queen.” The red-haired dwarf pressed his hand over his heart. “May your fires never be extinguished and your blade never dull. We will fight for you. Just say the word. Tell us where to go, and we will be there. By Hafaesir’s hammer, I swear it.”

“For now, do nothing,” Kira answered. “Wait. I will not be idle. And when the time comes to rip the usurper’s heart from his chest, I will have need of your steel.”

“You will have it, from now until we are returned to the stone.”

As Kira and the others pressed on, Erani insisted on doubling back on themselves multiple times and forging false paths, twisting and turning to the point that Kira almost lost all sense of where she was.

“It’s your fault,” her sister said as they turned a corner. “That was stupid. I don’t care what you say.”

“Watch your words.” Vikmar glared at Erani, his stare cold and hard. “You speak to your queen.”

“I speak to my sister, whose naked arse I helped wash as a babe. I will speak to her how I please.”

Vikmar made to argue, but Kira waved him away. There was no sense in it. Erani was as stubborn as a rock at the best of times. There was truth in her words – which would only makeher more stubborn – but Kira also believed in what she said. Her people needed to know she lived.

“It’s here,” Kira said after what had felt like an eternity of wandering alley after alley. She stopped in front of a metal door that looked no different to the other six hundred or so metal doors they had already walked past. But she knew it. She had been there several times across her years as queen. Always alone. And even before then, she had seen it in the memories of the past rulers. This would be the first time in hundreds of years that any soul except for the ruler of Durakdur would set eyes on what this house contained.

Vikmar and Ahktar took up positions on either side of the door while Kira produced the key from her pocket and turned it in the lock.

“Light?” She held out a hand to Vikmar.

The dwarf reached into his pack and produced a small brass lantern with a hand loop. He pulled the cover from the circular opening, blue-green light spraying outward from the handful of Heraya’s Ward within.

Once the others had stepped over the threshold, Kira locked the door behind them and led them through the antechamber and into the main room.

The home was decorated with the finest of furniture: hand-carved stone tables with rubies set around the rim, reliefs worked into a ceiling twice as tall as it needed to be, and busts on pedestals that displayed the depictions of kings and queens of old. On the eastern wall there was even a clock crafted entirely from arisenim – a crimson gemstone, deeper in colour than ruby, that could be mined in deposits as large as twenty feet wide. That clock would have been worth twenty times its weight in gold. And yet, for all the opulence, thick layers of dust had gathered on every surface.

“This place is like a tomb. Are you sure you’re not lost, sister?”

“I had the key, Erani.”

“Hmmm…” Erani ran her finger over the top of a stone counter, drawing a line through the dust. “Then perhaps you’ve simply lost your mind? Because there’s nothing I see in here except an abandoned home of an old king.”

“That’s the point.” Kira stepped past her sister and over to the back wall. She pulled a knife from her belt and ran the blade over her left forearm, drawing a thin stream of blood. She brushed her right hand through the blood and then placed it onto the stone.

“Are you sure you’ve not lost your mind?”

“Patience, Erani. Something you’ve always lacked.”

A moment passed, then awhooshsounded and dark lines formed in the stone, air rushing out around them. The creak of cogs and wheels echoed in the wall, and the door pulled back and receded into the wall.

“The blood of the ruler leads the way,” Kira said, repeating a passage spoken to her when she first took the Rites of Leadership after King Turak had returned to the stone and passed into Hafaesir’s forge.

“Well, that’s certainly one way of hiding something.” Erani stepped past Kira into the corridor beyond, staring at the doorway from the other side – likely trying to decipher its mechanisms, as she had a habit of doing. When they were younger, Erani was forever in trouble for dismantling and reassembling anything she could get her hands on.

“Come, sister. There is much more to see.”

Erani traced her fingers over the seam in the wall into which the door had receded, trying to see within. “Are they theruvan crystals? They couldn’t be, could they? How else could they have recognised your blood?” It had not really been a question. Atleast not one for which Erani awaited the answer. She had a tendency to ask questions of herself out loud. “I’ve never seen one with my own eyes. The books say they were all destroyed in the great wars. All except the three in the mountains of Marin.”

“Erani.”

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