His mother was going to kill Ruban.
Shwaan supposed he finally understood why Safaa had been so obsessed with Tauheen all these years. Their mother was a formidable foe. In the six hundred years since he had last seen her, Shwaan had allowed himself to forget that.
He couldn't ignore the fact any longer, though. Fighting Tauheen had drained him. He felt like a kitten that'd been attacked by a vulture, and by some miracle lived to tell the tale.
Simply moving felt like an impossible challenge. His muscles – bruised and battered from the confrontation – refused to budge. All he wanted was to curl up and go to sleep.
And yet his mother was strangling Ruban even as he watched.
A part of him – the part that was Tauheen's son, he was sure – wondered why he couldn't just leave the Hunter to his fate and retreat. Go back to Vaan, recuperate and then return with a large host from Safaa's army to apprehend Tauheen.
It would be the sensible thing to do. He didn't have much of a chance of defeating his mother on his own. All he would do by staying was to ensure that neither he nor Ruban left the villa alive. And then who would be left to stop his mother? He was certain Safaa would send more people to finish the task he had started. Perhaps Shehzaa or Wakeen; or maybe both.
But they wouldn't have the information Shwaan had acquired over the months, and would have no one to help them. They would have to start the entire investigation from scratch. And who knows what his mother would have accomplished by then, now that she had almost perfected the reinforced sifblade formula.
And what was he risking by leaving, really? Ruban would die, yes. But then, he was human. He would die anyway, sooner or later. And what was fifty years more or less, in the grand scheme of things? The time would pass in the blink of an eye, for Shwaan at least. Where was the wisdom in risking the fate of generations stretching out over millennia, in order to give one man fifty more years to live?
There wasn't any. It would be a stupid thing to do. A reckless thing. And yet, Shwaan knew with a certainty that surprised even him, that he was going to do it. Ruban had lost his father, his friend, his aunt and now, his uncle – and in a way, Shwaan was responsible for all of it. All of those deaths, almost every tragedy in the Hunter's life, had been caused, directly or otherwise, by Tauheen. By his own mother.
He had not chosen to be her son, and yet her actions were his to answer for anyway. He owed Ruban his allegiance, if for no other reason than simply to make up – to begin to compensate – for what his mother had done to him and his family.
But quite apart from any feelings of guilt or gratitude towards the Hunter himself, what kept Shwaan from leaving was Hiya. After all, if there was one person who had suffered more from Tauheen's actions than Ruban, it was Hiya. Both her parents had been murdered by his mother. And if he now allowed her to kill Ruban, Hiya would be well and truly orphaned, in every sense of the word.
It was that thought, more than any other, that sealed his fate. And perhaps that of the world with it.
Staggering up the stairs, he slid into an alcove behind the latticed wall that had sheltered them earlier that evening. Zeifaa, had it just been a couple of hours ago? He felt like he had been fighting for days.
Kneeling, he undid the knot on the abandoned bed sheet carrying the detritus of the destroyed safe. If they died here, it would all have been pointless. And if they lived? Well, he supposed it would still be pointless. It was little use, collecting evidence against dead men or Aeriels.
Rummaging through the contents, he finally found what he was looking for. Gripping the little metal case in his hands, he raced back down the stairs to the entrance hall.
Ruban's struggles had slowed to nothing more than some listless flailing. From what Shwaan could see of his face behind the silhouette of his mother, the Hunter's eyes had glazed over. He was fading, fast. Even if Shwaan had felt capable of prying his mother off the man without hurting him in the process – which he didn't – there wasn't enough time. Ruban would be dead long before he had come even close to overpowering Tauheen.
No, this was the only plan that had any chance of working. The only course of action that might end with Ruban still breathing come dawn. And if he failed? Well, Shwaan supposed it wouldn't matter. Not to him, anyway. It was oddly freeing, that realisation.
Opening the case, he took the contents into his hands.
Gloves had been in fashion the last time he was on earth. He wished the trend had lasted another six centuries; not that satin would have been much by way of protection against sif. But anything had to be better than this.
The pain was overwhelming. Debilitating. But it was far from the worst thing about sif. No, the problem with sif wasn't that it hurt, though hurt it did. The problem was that it drained you. It was not the pain that killed you, it was the exhaustion.
His limbs were like lead. He was hundreds of leagues underwater, the liquid pressing down on him inexorably from all sides, crushing him, choking him. The pain he could have borne, but the exhaustion sapped him even of the will to escape it. The world darkened around him, light fading from his eyes, and all he wanted to do was to lie down and let the fatigue take him.
He lifted his eyes to where his mother was still trying to asphyxiate the Hunter. He could tell she was succeeding. Ruban wouldn't last another full minute.
Not that Shwaan cared if he did.
Sif-induced apathy had its uses, apparently. When you were too exhausted to care about your own life, you didn't much care about anybody else's either. Fear of his mother, apprehension for the safety of his friend, even his concern for Hiya – all of it took a backseat to that single-minded, overwhelming desire for sleep that had overtaken him the moment the ores touched his skin. He could do anything because at that moment, he didn't give a damn if he did any of it right.
Lifting his hands – the ores clutched within them like bits of smouldering coal – he gathered every little speck of energy that remained in his sif-drained body and created a shell that probably wouldn't have killed a puppy, infusing it with the sif clutched within his benumbed fingers. Then he aimed it at his mother's heaving back and let loose, allowing the force of the attack, the momentum of the shell to carry the rocks with it as it flew at Tauheen.
As he had expected, Tauheen didn't move to avoid the shell. She didn't even notice it coming. She was herself drained from the constant attacks, not even half as alert as she normally would have been. But more importantly, she was too engrossed in her task, too high on the pleasure of the kill to pay attention to her surroundings.
Not that the shell was worth paying attention to. By itself, it wouldn't even have bruised the queen, much less kill her. It was weaker than the weakest shell he had formed as a tottering babe on his sister's knee. But that was okay. Because its purpose wasn't to kill or injure anyway. Its only purpose was transportation.
The shell detonated on contact with Tauheen's skin. A weak blast, but sufficient, nonetheless, to bury the little rocks of enhanced sif into his mother's already injured back.
For a moment, nothing happened. As if his mother had the power to stop time itself in order to stay the inevitable.
Then she screamed, glowing feathers scattering all around her like leaves falling off a dead tree. Shwaan wanted to scream too, but he didn't have the energy. He had given everything he had into that last attack. He felt like he had drained his very life into it.
Tauheen's fingers slackened around Ruban's spasming throat. For a moment, she swayed on her knees like one of the drunk tourists they had passed on their way to the villa. Then she collapsed, dead.
Something in Shwaan had been keeping him upright. Most likely a repressed, lifelong urge to witness this glorious moment. As Tauheen collapsed, it was like somebody had cut his strings along with hers. An era had ended. And he had wiped the slate clean. Repaid the debt to the universe that he had inherited from his mother.
Whoever was going to write the new story didn't need him for an epilogue to the last one. They could write their own bloody prologue.
Withthat comforting thought, Shwaan closed his eyes and slept.