Spark the Fire

by Melissa McShane

  “You’re not giving me much to work with,” Manishi said. “Is there anything else? You said you’ve never seen him—what about personal habits? Known associates? Has he done anything to hurt dragons, or is his enmity theoretical?”

  Rokshan shot a look at Lamprophyre. Lamprophyre hesitated, cast a brief and semi-sincere mental apology Hyaloclast’s way, and said, “He ordered the theft of a dragon egg.”

  Manishi went perfectly still. Her hand closed tightly on the obsidian mirror’s frame. “Did he,” she said, inflecting her words as a statement rather than a question. “Was he successful?”

  “No. We recovered the egg. But we didn’t capture the thieves.”

  “How unfortunate,” Manishi said. She was gradually relaxing. “Do you know if he ever had contact with the egg?”

  “We don’t think so. We believe it was his stooge who did it.” Lamprophyre felt proud of remembering the word.

  “Hmm. Was it your egg?”

  “Of course not!” Lamprophyre’s outrage immediately faded as she remembered Manishi couldn’t know Lamprophyre wasn’t pair-bonded. “Except in the sense that all dragons, all eggs, belong to the flight.”

  “That might be enough.” Manishi let go of the mirror, which canted backwards, and walked to one of the boxes. She took hold of a metal knob and pulled. To Lamprophyre’s fascination, the knob and a square of wood attached to it separated from the box, revealing a smaller box with no top that was full of smoothly polished citrines in every shape from round to irregularly bumpy. Lamprophyre stepped closer to get a better look and received a fierce glare from Manishi. “Stay back,” she said. “These aren’t for eating.”

  “I would never—” Lamprophyre began hotly.

  “She’s just curious,” Rokshan said. “I don’t understand why you don’t keep all this in your rooms at the palace. If all those drawers are full of stones, this place represents tens of thousands of vahas’ worth of magical material.”

  “Because the defenses on this place are powerful, and Father refused to let me set them up anywhere that might destroy the palace if they were triggered,” Manishi said. She scooped up a handful of citrines and returned to the mirror. Pushing down on it until it was horizontal, she shifted parts of the frame to lock the mirror in place, then set the citrines on it. Some were cloudy; others were clear. All of them were varying shades of orange-yellow, from translucent to dragon-bright. Their dull reflections glimmered from within the obsidian surface.

  “This is going to be complicated, and I’m not interested in explaining the magic,” Manishi said. “Do as I say, without questions, and we’ll find your man.” She pushed the citrines around with her forefinger while Lamprophyre waited impatiently for her to do something magical. But all she did was select a stone that was a flattened oval the color of winter sunrise and push the others to one end of the mirror. She handed the stone to Lamprophyre. “Hold that in your non-dominant hand.”

  Lamprophyre closed her left hand over the tiny stone. It was cool for only a beat or two before warming with her body heat. Manishi returned to the wooden box and pulled open another drawer. Lamprophyre smelled the warm, spicy odor of powdered azurite coming from the coarsely woven bag Manishi removed. Manishi took a metal bowl with a complicated handle and poured the azurite into it, then held it over the mirror and shifted the handle. Azurite drifted onto the polished surface from tiny holes that had been concealed until the handle moved, as if it had shifted the holes into alignment. Fascinated, Lamprophyre watched a thin layer of bright blue stone dust build up on the mirror until its surface was invisible.

  Manishi worked the handle again, stopping the sifting dust, and set the contraption aside. She drew a series of symbols in the dust with her finger, starting at the narrow end of the oval and working her way around. Though some of the symbols were letters, Lamprophyre didn’t recognize words, and sounding them out produced nothing coherent. If they were magical, they didn’t make the room feel any different.

  Manishi finished writing and dusted off her hand. “Put the stone here,” she said, pointing at a semi-circular symbol at the top of the oval. “Don’t disturb the dust.”

  Lamprophyre gingerly lowered the citrine onto the surface so it appeared the semicircle cradled it. Almost as soon as it left her fingers, it lit up with a soft glow that looked even more like a sunrise. Lamprophyre backed away, holding her breath so she wouldn’t blow the dust around.

  Manishi picked up another citrine, this one nearly orange and clear enough to see through, and touched it lightly to the glowing stone. The glow bled upward into the second stone, reddening her fingertips. She set the stone down carefully a short distance from the first within another semicircle. A trail of orange light traced a path through the symbols to connect the two stones. Manishi laughed, a low, throaty sound that wasn’t entirely pleasant. “The dragon, and the egg,” she said. “Let’s see how many steps it takes to reach our man.”

  She repeated the steps again, first with a pale stone barely tinged with yellow, then with one mottled yellow and orange and shaped like a knucklebone. The path of orange light extended farther with each new stone. Finally, Manishi picked up a flattened sphere the color of a dying fire and touched it to the knucklebone. Light flared, making Lamprophyre involuntarily close her nictitating membranes and causing Rokshan to exclaim in pain. “It’s just light,” Manishi said, somewhat impatiently. “Don’t be a baby.”

  Lamprophyre squinted at the bright speck in Manishi’s hand. “Does that mean you found him?”

  “It means I have a link to him I can use as I want,” Manishi said. “But yes, he’s in Tanajital. Do you want him dead?”

  “Of course not!”

  “I don’t see why it’s ‘of course not.’ If he tried to steal a dragon egg, I could see your people wanting revenge.” Manishi closed her hand over the stone, making her fist glow faintly. “If it’s not death, what do you want from him?”

  “Answers,” Rokshan said. “We need to get him where we can question him.”

  “That’s harder. Manipulating people to obey you isn’t simple.” Manishi’s eyes were distant, as if she were lost in thought. “I can give him nudges in the right direction, but I can’t force him to do anything. Where do you want him to go?”

  “Hmm. The coliseum is empty today. Better make it there,” Rokshan said.

  “Then let’s see where he is now.”

  Manishi gathered up the citrines she hadn’t used and put them back in their drawer, then carefully swept the azurite dust off the mirror, not disturbing the glowing symbols or the stones powering them. She tapped the citrine in her hand against the mirror’s surface twice, then set it down at the center of the cleared space. The glow redoubled, reflected by the mirror until the little room was bright as day and Rokshan and Manishi’s faces were almost pale. Lamprophyre’s hands were faintly green like new grass. Green like Coquina—for once, the comparison didn’t anger her.

  “Show him to me,” Manishi said, tapping the stone with one finger and then jerking it away as if she’d been burned. The mirror’s surface rippled like a pond disturbed by a rock, then flashed brightly enough that Lamprophyre flinched again. This time, the brightness was only that of a cloudy sky, reflected in a mirror of metal rather than obsidian. A man visible from the waist up stood silhouetted against the reflected sky, his face lit by an unseen sun.

  He looked just as Abhimot had described him: longish dark hair, light brown skin, brown eyes the same color as Rokshan’s surmounted by eyebrows that grew together in the middle. A dark spot on his upper lip that looked like a small round insect made Lamprophyre’s lip itch in sympathy. His image was perfectly still, but the background bobbed slightly, suggesting that they were watching him in motion. Since they would have to be facing him and walking backwards to have this perspective, Lamprophyre was just as happy it was magic and not reality.

  “This doesn’t tell us where he is,” Rokshan said.

  “Have patience. I did mention t
his is difficult, right? I don’t know if I’m getting paid enough for this.”

  “That had better not be a sideways demand for more stone,” Lamprophyre said.

  “It’s not. I’m better off putting you in my debt for later. Now, be quiet so I can think.” Manishi stared at the image of Harshod, who turned his head as if watching someone else go by. Lamprophyre observed him, too. He didn’t look like someone who might torture kittens, but Lamprophyre still had trouble interpreting human expressions and he could well be a hardened criminal.

  “That’s it,” Manishi said. She plucked the central stone from the mirror, and the surface once more turned to glimmering black glass. Bouncing the stone in her hand as if it were a live coal, she hurried to a different wooden box and opened a larger drawer. She withdrew a mass of silver that Lamprophyre realized was a lot of very thin wire. She’d seen wire used in jewelry, but never so much of it in one place.

  Manishi tucked the spool of wire under the arm holding the stone and pulled the loose end, unlooping several handspans of silver to dangle free. She began wrapping the stone in wire, not smoothly, but irregularly until the stone was a lumpy ball of silver, completely invisible. Manishi dropped the spool, which bounced a couple of times and rolled away, and rapidly dug through another drawer until she found a sharp double-bladed tool with which she cut the wire. She threw the tool back into the drawer and bent the cut end of the wire until it was tucked away inside the rest.

  Rokshan had moved closer, watching Manishi with the expression of someone who was bursting with questions. Manishi rolled the silver ball in her fingers, then handed it to Rokshan. “That binds his body and soul in one, rooted in the stone,” she said. “He’ll be drawn to it over time. So I suggest you figure out where you want to meet him and be prepared for his arrival.”

  “Amazing,” Rokshan said. “If this works—”

  “‘If,’ what ‘if’?” Manishi said, sounding offended. “Of course it will work. But get out of here. I don’t like the look of him, and I don’t want him coming here.”

  “Thank you,” Lamprophyre said. “I promise to have your payment soon.”

  “You’d better,” Manishi said.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Out on the street, Lamprophyre looked at the tiny ball of silver in Rokshan’s hand. “Is the coliseum really the best place?” she asked. “It’s rather public.”

  “We can’t have him drawn to the embassy, if Manishi’s right about not being able to override his free will. If he knows what it is, there’s no way he’d go there no matter what magic we use on him.” Rokshan put the ball into his money pouch and climbed up. “Let’s go, and decide how we’ll confront him.”

  Lamprophyre leaped into the sky and rose until she could see all of Tanajital spread out beneath her. She wished Harshod were visible in some way, maybe glowing with the orange light that had tracked him, but the city looked as peaceful and busy as ever, with no sign that their prey was somewhere in those streets.

  She spiraled down to land within the coliseum and ducked to let Rokshan off. “If I know he’s coming, I can conceal myself,” she said.

  “We don’t know what direction he’ll come from. We have to assume we won’t see him until he’s here,” Rokshan said. “Damn, but I wish I had soldiers. Though they’re not good at concealing themselves, and they’d just warn Harshod off. What I need are Tekentriya’s spies, but that’s a waste of a wish.”

  “Let’s get up high,” Lamprophyre suggested. “We can watch from above, and chase him down if he runs.” She hoped he’d run.

  Rokshan nodded and climbed back into the notch. Lamprophyre flapped slowly until she reached the nearest arch and settled herself carefully on it. Only a few people noticed her, and when she concealed herself, they soon stopped looking for her. After a few dozen beats, she let color bleed back across her scales and wings. No one looked up. They almost never looked up.

  Rokshan sighed and settled himself more comfortably. “And now,” he said, “we wait.”

  Nothing happened. The sun slipped inexorably across the sky, broiling the city beneath. Lamprophyre immediately regretted her position, which had very little shade. Rokshan, pressed against her body that was much warmer than a human’s, must be miserable. “Maybe we should go somewhere else,” she suggested. “I could fit inside that box you said your family uses.”

  “It would be cramped, and I doubt you could get out quickly enough to surprise Harshod,” Rokshan said. “I wish this stone had some kind of signal attached to it to indicate when the target is near. Then we could go anywhere we liked.”

  Lamprophyre flexed her wings to make a breeze that cooled the back of her neck and not much else. “Are you watching the west? I’ll watch the east.”

  “All right.”

  More time passed. Lamprophyre’s legs ached from holding position on the arch. She continued to scan the crowds even as despair crept over her. This was a stupid idea. How many thousands or even tens of thousands of humans lived in Tanajital? And they were searching for one human in all that crowd. It was ridiculous to believe they could be successful with such odds as those.

  She looked almost directly down at the wide space surrounding the coliseum. The shadows— She gasped. “My shadow,” she said. “It’s starting to show.”

  Rokshan shifted to her other side. “It doesn’t look like a dragon.”

  “Not now, but give it a thousand beats and it will stand out to anyone who walks past. Including Harshod.”

  “Then maybe—wait. I see him. I think.” Rokshan shifted again and pointed. Lamprophyre followed the line of his arm, barely visible to the left of her face. The crowd still looked like a faceless mass.

  “It’s definitely him. And he’s headed this way,” Rokshan said.

  “I don’t—” Lamprophyre stopped and focused on a group of males walking together past the coliseum. One of them wasn’t as dark-skinned as the others, and his hair was untidy and brushed his collarbone. Instantly Lamprophyre concealed herself against the arch. Harshod didn’t appear to have seen them, but there was no sense taking chances.

  She felt Rokshan shifting position again, this time hunching down behind her neck. “I can’t see him from here,” he whispered, though there was no way Harshod could hear them at such a distance. “Tell me what he’s doing.”

  “Walking in this direction,” Lamprophyre whispered back. It was contagious. “He’s left the other males behind, but he’s not coming directly here. He keeps stopping and looking behind him like he thinks he’s being followed.”

  “I wonder if he can tell the magic is affecting him. Maybe it translates to the sense of being followed.”

  “I don’t know. There, he’s moving again.” Lamprophyre rose up, stretching her legs. “Hold on.” She stepped off the arch and dropped to the ground, spreading her wings to catch herself at the last moment.

  “What are you doing?” Rokshan exclaimed, as loudly as he could without raising his voice. “Now we really can’t see him.”

  Lamprophyre shuddered and turned blue again. “I know, but I was about to lose my concealment, and that might have drawn his attention. Besides, we know he’s coming here, so we might as well wait for him inside the coliseum.” She drew in a breath and concealed herself once more, blue and copper turning rust-red and dusty tan.

  Rokshan nodded and put her between himself and the side of the coliseum Harshod had been approaching by. Lamprophyre spread her wings to give him as much cover as possible. Her heart beat rapidly in anticipation of facing Harshod, even though she still didn’t know what to do with him once she caught him. If he wouldn’t tell her who his commander was, assuming he had a commander, she wasn’t sure she could torture the information out of him. Maybe Hyaloclast should have sent someone more cold-blooded.

  Over the hum of the city’s pulse, she heard footsteps approaching. Her heart sped up until it beat nearly as fast as a human’s, painful and hard. Her skin vibrated with the need to maintain concealment.
The footsteps grew louder, but also more tentative, slowing until the pauses between each step were at least a beat apart, maybe two. The waiting would drive her mad.

  A figure stepped through one of the arched entrances. The sunlight fell fully on him, revealing that his clothing was smudged with dirt and his disordered hair was shiny with grease. He took a few more steps forward. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he said, “I know you’re there, dragon. Show yourself.”

  Lamprophyre’s carefully maintained concealment shivered and fell apart. She stared at Harshod, her mind teeming with questions. He didn’t sound afraid, or angry, just tired. She listened for his thoughts and heard the echo of the words he’d just said.

  Rokshan walked out from behind her and took a position on her right side. “You knew we were here,” he said. “And you came anyway.”

  Harshod shrugged. “You went to a lot of trouble to find me, I figured, why not say hello?” He didn’t move any closer, but it didn’t matter; he was within pouncing distance, and that was all Lamprophyre cared about. His thoughts were still focused on his speech. That kind of single-mindedness was rare even in dragons, and she’d never encountered it in humans before.

  “How did you know?” Lamprophyre asked.

  “I don’t think that’s information you need,” Harshod said. Now he did step forward just a few paces. The breeze brought his conflicting scents to Lamprophyre’s nostrils. He smelled of unwashed human and grease, but more importantly, he reeked of stone, at least half a dozen different stones big enough to catch Lamprophyre’s attention. If it was a stone that was protecting his thoughts, she couldn’t work out which one.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Rokshan said. “Tell us who told you to steal that egg and start a war.”

  Harshod smiled. One of his teeth gleamed gold. “You figured it out. Good for you! Then you must also know I’m not going to answer that question.”

  “So you do have a superior,” Rokshan said. “We wondered about that. Thanks.”