Dzar-Ghan (Alien Barbarians of Vandruk #3)

34. Chapter 34

The tone in her voice alarmed me. It sounded pressed. I shouldn’t have allowed her to go down there first and by herself. I could only imagine the horrors she was seeing. I grabbed the rope to rappel down myself, but she yelled, “No, stay up there. I’m coming back up.”

It was too late, though; within moments, my palms burning, I rushed down the rope, my eyes searching for her, moving over the small heaps strewn about without seeing them. Peripherally, I was aware that they were all here. My mother, aunts, sisters, and Mynarra, but my only desire was to see Jenna, to make sure she was all right.

The green illumination from the strange, flameless torches she had spread throughout the cave gave off an eerie glow that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It almost felt as if the ghosts of the dead were present, watching us, judging us.

The moment my feet set down on the hard ground, Jenna was in my arms. “You shouldn’t have come. Let’s get back up.”

“What’s going on?” I wanted to know. Too many emotions were washing through me to question her tugging on my arm, her desire to get us back up to form any suspicions.

I held her tight and assured myself that she was all right. Her heart was beating fast, as would be expected, but not abnormally so. Her eyes were beseeching me to leave, but there was something else there: worry and pity.

“I’m prepared for this,” I assured her.

And I was. Not only had it been ten years, but having Jenna at my side for these past days had healed my hurting heart in ways I had never expected.

Last night, all I could do after making sweet love to my khadahrshi, all I could think about was that I would be coming face-to-face with my dead loved ones today. I had made peace with that.

“Dzar-Ghan,” Jenna said warningly as I freed myself from her tight grip. I noticed her wringing her hands and following me close behind as I ever so slowly made my way through the rows of the dead. I picked up one of the artificial torches Jenna had distributed throughout and looked at the faces where they were freely visible.

It hit me like a club. Arranet, Dzur-Khan’s mother; Myrolla, Szur-Than’s aunt; Bryotta, Dragh-Whar’s mother. So many faces.

“Dzar-Ghan,” Jenna whispered behind me, taking my hand. A feeling that I wasn’t seeing something spread through me. In equal measures with the notion that she didn’t want me to see what she had discovered. A shudder moved through me; whatever it was, it had to be bad.

At that point, I had no idea how bad, couldn’t even imagine anything worse than what I was already seeing, what I had anticipated to see. But it didn’t take me very long.

Once I recovered from my surprise to realize how well-preserved the dead were—a true giveaway that Vorag had denied entry to their souls into Koronae—I set out to find my mother and sisters.

The bodies had been preserved until they could be given proper burial, which should have been done years ago. I didn’t care how long it would have taken. We should have had groups here, working on the entrance rock by rock until we could bury our dead.

The thought that these poor gallies had lain here for all this time, their souls suffering inside their dead bodies, locked in a deep, dark cave, rose grief and anger in me.

It took me a bit to walk around the cave before I realized that there should be more. So many more. I wrinkled my forehead and looked through the cave. Really looked. These weren’t the bodies of thousands. Nek, one thousand, maybe, but not more.

Where were the others?

Like all the other males, I had never set foot into this cave and had no idea about its layout. The few surviving gallies had refused to give us any more information besides that there was no other entryway and that it was a vast cave with many tunnels and chambers.

I supposed it was possible that some of the other gallies had wandered off into the other chambers in search of an escape. Then again, the fires would have only burned for so long; the gallies would have been enveloped in a darkness that was absolute, and I couldn’t imagine even the most adventurous gallis setting off. Nek, they would have stayed together here, where their only hope had been for us males to break through the rockslide, giving them back their freedom and saving their lives. Something we had utterly failed at.

How long, I wondered, how long had it taken my mother to realize help wasn’t coming and that she and my sisters would die here? Had she taken Mynarra into her arms, or had Mynarra stayed with her aunt? Her mother had died during childbirth, so it had only been her and her aunt.

“Dzar-Ghan.” Jenna’s voice was merely a whisper but enough to bring me back to the present, which was when I realized something else. Besides there not being enough bodies here, all the bodies were of older women. Mothers and aunts. The youngest I had seen so far was Iragot, the wife of one of my warriors. She had been in her thirties when it happened.

And then I saw her. My knees faltered, and I fell down by her side. “Mother,” I choked out.

She lay like a lot of the others, by herself. Rolled to the side like a babe in its mother’s womb, cradling her stomach. Her light brown hair was hard to miss, and so was the large moonstone bracelet that my father had given her as a present for my birth. She had never taken it off. Neither had she ever taken off the matching ring she had received for my sister Secylly’s birth. With shaking hands, I turned her fragile body, petrified it would fall to dust at my touch, but it was more substantial than I would have thought. She turned easily. There were no eyes, and her lips and nose had sunken in, but it was unmistakably my mother.

Her arms were wrapped around her stomach. I didn’t know what drove me, but ever so carefully, I pried them apart, needing to see Secylly’s ring, but it wasn’t there. The nervous sensation in my stomach intensified even more when my eyes fell to my mother’s faded gown, where she held her stomach. Dark stains surrounded a deep tear in the gown. The stain was unmistakable. I had seen it often enough. Blood.

Dried blood.

Somebody had stabbed my mother to death.

With a roar, I rose.

“What is this?” I thundered.

“Mother!”

“Agglund.”

“Auntie.”

“Ryllyanna.”

Names were cried out in anguish. I hadn’t realized that the other warriors, led by Grohn-Vhyn, had followed us down.

“By the gods, what is this?” Grohn-Vhyn hollered.

“Someone bashed my mother’s head in,” a warrior wailed.

“My aunt was stabbed,” another cried.

Grohn-Vhyn reached my side. His face was a stony mask of anger. “What in the gods names happened here?”

“Maybe they had known all was lost and killed themselves?” Dragh-Whar offered in a quiet voice.

Grohn-Vhyn, Jenna, and I exchanged glances, asking ourselves the same question. Was it possible? They had been mated to warriors. They would have preferred a quick end to weeklong suffering.

“There are easier and better ways to end one’s suffering.” Jenna voiced my own misgivings, and once again, I appreciated her candor.

“She is right,” Grohn-Vhyn agreed. “A sword or knife to the stomach takes a long time to kill someone.”

I agreed. We were all warriors. We had all seen it. The gallies had all seen it.

“Where is my sister? Has anyone seen Lycca?” a male wailed.

Jenna’s head turned. She had already noticed something that we hadn’t.

“What is it?” I asked her, putting my hand on her shoulder and giving it a slight squeeze to encourage her to tell us whatever it was she suspected or had already noticed.

“I don’t know how large this cave is or if there are other areas,” she hedged.

“One of the older gallies who survived told us there was,” I reminded her, having told her that before.

She took a deep breath. “As terrible as this is, these are not thousands of bodies.” Her arm swept over the area, confirming what I had also noticed.

“Sa,” Grohn-Vhyn agreed.

“And from what I’ve seen so far, not only were they all violently killed, but I don’t see any younger women here. Not one.”

Her words were like stabs to my heart and gut.

They’re alive!

The old gallis’ words came back to me.

They’re alive!

Secylly, Halana, Mynarra.

I stared at Jenna, my khadahrshi, and with a stab of pain: Mynarra!