Playing With Fire

by Adrienne Woods et al.

  Chapter 13

  The next time she woke, it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. Nothing in the stone chamber had changed, not even the number of flames flickering at the tops of what Rahlizje thought were black candles. She could not be sure. Everything here looked black.

  She summoned just enough strength to push herself up on her elbows, finding herself alone here once more. Fresh bandages wrapped around her calf, and while these too were stained, it looked far more like blood than the sickly green hue she’d been wearing at least a fortnight in the merchant of Gethlem’s cart.

  Her leg still ached more than the rest of her, but it was a low, dull throbbing of torn muscle and weakness. The furious burn of fevered flesh and the poison in her veins had, at least for now, abated. Slowly, she lowered herself back onto the straw pallet and realized just how dry her mouth had become. That didn’t tell her much about the passage of time in this place; she could have been parched after a mere hour of lying here on her own. But she had a feeling it had been much longer.

  Once more from the shadows within the stone walls, a black-robed figure appeared. The short-haired healer approached Rahlizje again and dropped to her knees beside her charge’s leg to inspect its progress without once meeting Rahlizje’s gaze. “You are strong enough again to be conscious. That’s something.” Pale fingers prodded around the bandages, and the thief steeled herself against the pain she knew it would bring.

  To her surprise, the dull ache intensified only a little, but that was all. “That’s not the only improvement,” she said, her voice rasping through a dry throat.

  “The pain has lessened?”

  Rahlizje nodded and knew the woman could see it despite the fact that she studied only the thief’s leg and nothing else.

  “What of your appetite?”

  A whisper of a chuckle escaped Rahlizje’s lips. “I could do with a drink.”

  “I’ll bring water. I trust you can handle the rest of it on your own.”

  “I meant ale.”

  Finally, the woman turned her gray eyes onto Rahlizje and licked her lips in disapproval. “No.”

  “Come now, healer.” Rahlizje tilted her head and tried to smile; she’d never fully trained those muscles, and her weakened state did not produce much more than a grimace. “You’ve done your part. A little ale would go a long way in easing my discomfort.”

  Pressing her lips firmly together, the woman moved her full attention to Rahlizje’s face. Those same cold fingers slipped beneath the thief’s jaw, pressing for a few seconds against Rahlizje’s still-racing pulse. Then she felt Rahlizje’s forehead with the back of her hand, dipped her head, and met her charge’s gaze once more. “I’m denying your request because you will not find ale here. Or wine. Or spirits.” Rahlizje blinked in disappointment. “You do seem much improved. And when I say you are well enough to do your part, let me assure you that you will have no time for drinking. If I were you, I’d enjoy what’s left of your solitude. This very well may be the last time even your thoughts are your own.”

  Rahlizje swallowed, gazing up at the woman who’d been curtly detached from her work as a healer yet surprisingly gentle with her patient, all things considered. And yet, this stranger spared nothing in her words, which did not offer the same healing quality of her actions. The thief was well aware that she might still have been seeing things not wholly real, but she thought she found fear behind the healer’s gray eyes. Slowly, she pushed herself up on her elbows again, both because she could and because she wished to take a closer look at what might in fact have been real. “Is it not also a healer’s duty to generally reassure those in their care?”

  The woman’s lips twitched in what could have been a brilliant smile, had she let it fully blossom. “I am no healer. Merely an acolyte and servant of Imlach. You will understand this soon enough.” For a moment, she let her gaze roam over Rahlizje’s face, that smile quivering behind her mask of composure. One hand lifted from her lap, paused, then reached out fully until the woman was slipping her fingers through Rahlizje’s hair, drawing a portion of it toward her and staring at it as if she’d never seen hair longer than her own. “Pity…”

  Rahlizje sat up fully and caught the woman’s wrist; her leg throbbed at the sudden movement, but the rest of her was well enough to do this. She hadn’t moved much more than a lolling head or a heavy arm in what felt like ages, but her strength was clearly returning. The woman’s wrist was warm in her hand, those fingers still gripping Rahlizje’s near-black hair, and her gray eyes settled once more on the thief’s. “Healer or no,” Rahlizje said softly, “you’ve done more for me than most.”

  “Do not thank me just yet.”

  “I haven’t.” She studied the woman’s gaze, which now reflected something of a challenge at Rahlizje, even with the thief’s weakened grip on her wrist. But the acolyte did not pull away from either Rahlizje’s hand or the newcomer’s face mere inches from her own. Rahlizje tilted her head. “There must be some way to repay you for giving me my life.”

  The woman’s brows flickered together, and this time, she did smile—a sad, knowing smile Rahlizje did not find altogether discouraging. “Another time and place, perhaps. Or if I’d given you another life. In this one, neither of us are free to do as we wish.”

  Rahlizje blinked and cocked her head, growing less and less pleased with her recovery the more this woman spoke. “Are you free at least to give me your name?”

  The woman averted her gaze, let Rahlizje’s hair fall from her fingers, and finally resisted the thief’s hand around her wrist. Rahlizje released her, and the woman stood from beside the pallet with that same restrained smile flickering at the corners of her mouth.

  No, Rahlizje realized. She would not hear the name of the woman who’d saved her life. The acolyte’s black robes whispered across the stone floor, her bare feet completely silent still. “What is this place?”

  The woman paused just long enough to look back over her shoulder at the recovering stranger on the pallet. “This is Arahaz.” Her gaze followed the curving walls of the chamber, and she spread her arms. “This is everything.” Then she turned again and disappeared into the shadows much deeper than Rahlizje could see with her own eyes.

  Taking a long, slow breath, Rahlizje leaned forward a little and studied the bandages on her calf as best she could in the low, flickering candlelight. Her flesh still felt warm despite the chill, her own cold fingers bringing almost as much relief as the acolyte’s when she gently prodded her leg. If she was lucky, she might yet walk again with only the trace of a limp.

  Arahaz, though, was revealing itself more and more as a place which luck, fortune, and chance had completely abandoned. According to the acolyte, so too had freedom.

  Even with the fever lifting, the construct of time was warped in this chamber. Rahlizje might have waited five minutes or a few hours for a sign—any sound or scent or presence at all—that she had not been left to die in some mountain cave and had since conjured the acolyte from the madness of her sickness. She could not see a door or an entrance, and the flames surrounding her everywhere she looked seemed never to grow smaller or wink out in the cold.

  Finally, another figure appeared from the shadows, wearing the same black robes, his light-brown curls, cut no longer than his jawline, fluttering around his face. In one hand, he carried a silver pitcher tinged yellow-red in the candlelight, a small stone cup in the other. Somehow, that silver pitcher seemed an oddity in this place—a mistake—though she could not have said why.

  The priest or acolyte or whatever these people called themselves moved swiftly toward her on silent feet. He set the pitcher and the stone cup beside Rahlizje’s pallet without ever looking at her, as if he were setting a table in an empty room to ready it for guests. The thief reached for the pitcher as the man straightened and turned away. “Should I be wary of this?” she asked his retreating back. She received no response before the man disappeared again into the darkness. A wary sniff of th
e pitcher’s contents almost convinced her it was in fact water, but she poured herself only enough to taste a tiny bit of it.

  It was cold, metallic, leaving a biting dryness on her tongue. But it was water. Rahlizje filled the stone cup and drank deeply. Once she’d filled and drained a second pour, the surprising ache in her belly rose with a debilitating vengeance. The healer—and she would always be that when Rahlizje thought of her, regardless of the woman’s denial—had asked after a nonexistent appetite. It had now most definitely returned, and Rahlizje drank another full cup of the water that tasted like steel and rock in the hopes that it might ease the flare of nausea gripping her. How long had it been since she’d eaten? How long had it been since she’d slept deeply enough to escape the discomfort of her physical body?

  She lowered herself onto her back again, still wary of moving her leg unnecessarily, and stared at the chamber’s ceiling above her without knowing how high it truly was.

  Nothing. That one truth repeated in her mind over and over in the chilly air within the wavering glow of so many candles. Rahlizje had nothing now but the clothes on her back and the proof of her crimes right there on her flesh, wrapped in bandages and—if fortune wished to smile on her in any fashion—on its way to fully mending. She did not even have the certainty that it would mend, that she would walk, that if she could walk, there would be anything waiting for her beyond this chamber.

  A lifetime of being alone to varying degrees did not make her uncomfortable with it now. But before she’d awakened in this room of stone and muted light, before she’d been purchased with a massive purse from the back of a wagon, before she’d been bound in ropes and felt the sharp sting of her own blade against her throat in warning, Rahlizje had always had a choice in her solitude. And she’d always known what would happen next.

  Chapter 14

  She thought she heard the whispers before anything else, but it was impossible to know in this place. The cold seemed almost to double, and Rahlizje stirred from what might have been a few moments of true sleep. The flames flickered all at once around her beneath a burst of frozen air, and she pushed herself up off the pallet.

  Hunger burned in her stomach, and either the pains in her belly or what remained of her fever made her head swim as she searched for the source of those whispering voices. There were no words she could hear, merely hushed breath across black stone walls. Blinking heavily, she gazed around the chamber and stopped on the shimmering silhouettes of four figures emerging from the shadows this time.

  They all wore the black robes of these temples, every foot bare and silent across the stone, every pair of eyes settled on Rahlizje. The woman leading them into the candlelight held a pewter dish in both hands, her dark eyes sparkling in the low light. Rahlizje had seen that pale, deathly white face before—the very same that had inspected her with such scrutiny over the siderail of Taltaz’s cart. The merchant had called this woman Yuhltse, though she could of course have had any other name. But the beads and bones and silver rings in her hair, the startling lack of color in her face, and the thick smears of kohl around those blackening eyes were unmistakable.

  Without being commanded, the three acolytes walking behind Yuhltse stopped as one halfway between Rahlizje’s pallet and the pitch-black edge of the candlelight. The High Priestess, though, continued toward her newest purchase, her eyes wide with an amused curiosity that made the thief want to back away.

  In one fluid, graceful movement, Yuhltse lowered herself to her knees beside the pallet and sat back on her bare heels. Rahlizje caught a glimpse of a black, glistening lump inside the pewter dish but could not keep her gaze from the woman’s face any longer than that. The High Priestess tilted her head this way and that, leaning forward to study Rahlizje in a way that felt much more intimate than when she’d actually touched the thief’s face upon their first meeting. It took Rahlizje a few seconds to realize why the High Priestess’ movements unnerved her this much; the woman’s head moved back and forth on her neck like a weaving snake on the verge of striking its prey.

  “So you near the end of your time between life and death.” The woman’s voice was light, airy, almost playful. But those bright-blue eyes, glistening in the light and within so much kohl like thick smoke, held Rahlizje in a snare she did not understand. “We shall see soon enough how well spent my coin truly was. Before then, I wish to speak with you as you are now.”

  “And how am I?” Rahlizje had no idea where this sudden bout of anger stemmed from, but it would not let her hold her tongue. Whatever this woman meant to do with her now, she had no doubt it would be unpleasant. The thief might have been crippled by a crossbow bolt and at least a fortnight of fever-madness, but she’d never had it in her to submit to anyone without first knowing how it would benefit her.

  The corner of Yuhltse’s mouth twitched. “Unbroken, little flame. Still burning so brightly all on your own.”

  Rahlizje clenched her jaw, half holding the High Priestess’ gaze as the only challenge she could muster and half held hostage by it. “You were wrong to think you purchased a slave, Yuhltse.” The use of the woman’s name did exactly what Rahlizje had wanted it to do only in that it elicited a response. Yuhltse’s reaction, though, was entirely unexpected.

  The woman’s eyes grew even wider within the black circles painted around them, and her lips peeled back into a cold, predatory grin. Rahlizje did not know whether Yuhltse meant to laugh or to physically assault her newest prize, but something brutal quivered behind the woman’s eyes as they moved from one of Rahlizje’s to the other. “Oh, I know exactly what I purchased. I only mean to discover whether or not you know it yourself. Tell me your name, little flame.”

  The word was almost on her lips before Rahlizje remembered the struggle she thought she’d seen between Taltaz and this High Priestess. There was something about a name that meant more than the thief could reason out on her own. She’d had no choice at all in being found and tied up and brought all the way north through the mountains to this chamber. But she could still deny this woman’s request. So she said nothing and narrowed her eyes.

  Yuhltse raised an eyebrow and tilted her head until her ear nearly touched her shoulder. “You certainly do not disappoint, do you? Remember this, little flame, when you can remember nothing else. I expect you continue in that. Though you have yet to rise from the floor”—she slapped her palm against the stone beside the pallet—“I have high expectations of you.” Her eyes narrowed in a warning Rahlizje could not decipher, then she picked up the pewter dish once more with both hands and brought it up to her face until it hovered just in front of her pale lips.

  Those blue eyes focused on the mound of black, glittering substance centered in the dish before flickering up to regard Rahlizje again. It was almost another warning—or perhaps in invitation to whatever happened next—for the thief who would not give her name to watch very closely if she wished to know anything. The High Priestess whispered two words over the rim of the pewter dish, and Rahlizje could have sworn she saw a spark flare between the woman’s lips where her tongue should have been.

  The next second, a thin wisp of blue-tinged smoke rose from the glittering black substance in the dish. That smoke only thickened more, stretching higher and in a widening column even as Yuhltse deposited the dish onto the stone floor beside the pallet. She glanced at Rahlizje and nodded slowly. “You shall see.” Then she stood and turned toward the three acolytes waiting for her in the chamber. Not one of them moved or let their gazes wander until the High Priestess had passed through them. Then they offered their backs to Rahlizje and the smoke and followed their mistress out of the candlelight and into whatever passage lay beyond the black stone.

  Rahlizje stared after them for as long as she could until the acridly burning smoke tickled the back of her throat. It had a sickly sweet stench to it, not altogether unpleasant but entirely overpowering. With a snort, she poured herself another cup of water from the silver pitcher and drank it quickly. It seemed she was m
eant to wait even longer in this room on her own, now with the blue-gray smoke to keep her company. If she was also to wait for whatever passed as food with these people, at least she still had a mostly full pitcher.

  “I know what I am,” she muttered, staring at the tarlike substance smoking on the dish. Yuhltse had certainly paid Taltaz for the right to think she owned the wounded thief from Holjstruke. And while Rahlizje had endured countless others who’d thought very much the same, not one of them had received what they’d truly wanted from her. She belonged to no one but herself.

  She tipped the pitcher one more time and poured, only she did not fill the cup. The clear stream of water flashed in the candlelight as she unceremoniously sought to extinguish whatever conjured flame now burned the tar in that dish. Magic did not exist, she knew, yet alchemy and cheap tricks were plenty throughout Eldynia. None of it surprised her.

  The smoke cut off for a split second as she drowned its source in drinking water. Another burst of cold air whipped through the chamber, followed by an angry hiss on the pewter dish. Before Rahlizje could set the pitcher down again on the stone beside her, the lump of tar crackled and released a column of blue smoke five times its previous size. It puffed into the dark cavern, as if someone now sat beside her smoking the stuff through a pipe.

  The sudden mass of it made her cough, and she tipped the pitcher over once more. Her eyes watered with the sweet sting quickly clouding her vision. Then the smoke ballooned into an acrid blue curtain so thick, it blocked out the light of so many tiny flames around her. Rahlizje could not think what any of it meant, her attention drawn only to the fact that she could not stop coughing at all now. She couldn’t breathe. The smoke felt cold and a little damp as it billowed into her face and washed over her skin, unaffected by her gasping breaths. The silver pitcher slipped from her hand and clattered against the stone floor. Though she realized full well that she’d lost all her strength now and could no longer hold herself upright, she did not feel her body slumping back onto the pallet while the smoke consumed everything else.