Flame's Shadow

by Anna Eluvae

  She hadn't escaped the fight unscathed. She was still deaf in one ear and the other ear made everything sound like it was underwater. Her hearing would return, but worse than before, as it had too many times before. Older illustrati had spoken of a constant sound of ringing or a dull roar of thunder that became their unwelcome companion. The other wounds had been dealt with by Wenaru. He had returned the chunk of meat that had been taken from her calf, complete with skin to cover the wound. He hadn't had the domain of skin the last time she'd been back. She didn't ask about it.

  There were many things that Nemm didn't ask about these days.

  Lexari came into the room where she was taking her bath and cleared his throat loudly. There was a folding screen between them, a token piece of modesty left over from the Iron King's time. An ancient memory came floating up, unbidden. Nemm had been twenty years old and freshly inducted as an illustrati on the Zenith. She had tried to seduce Lexari, first through flirtation and then, in a moment of bold stupidity, by shrugging off her clothes in his cabin. That moment was now so embarrassing that it was still capable of making her stomach do a flip. Lexari had thought she was only trying to increase her own standing by adding him as a conquest, which was precisely true. It was a wonder that they had been able to move past that.

  "I am sorry that I was not there to greet you upon your return," said Lexari. He sounded stiff and oddly formal, even for him.

  "It doesn't matter," said Nemm.

  "Wenaru tells me that you fought the remainder of the Allunio, five against one," said Lexari. "He believes it to be a suicidal gesture."

  "He worries too much," said Nemm.

  "Did you transfer from those you fought?" asked Lexari. He never called it draining, though everyone else did. It was always a transfer, meant to call to mind an orderly handing over of power from one person to another.

  "Two of them," said Nemm. "Of the domains I can feel, I have …" She closed her eyes. "Steel, copper, gold, sand, rust, heat, cold, fire, birds, horses, insects, skin, hair, vines, wood, light, lightning, and glass. Lightning I have twice now. It's more powerful for it."

  "Excellent," said Lexari. For the first time some real emotion crept into his voice, an oozing satisfaction that Nemm found maddening. "Eventually we will find a way to return those links to their rightful owners."

  Nemm didn't challenge that narrative. The Iron Kingdom was in complete disarray. They had rescued a number of men and women from captivity, including the nominal king Quill, but most of the drained illustrati must simply have been killed. There wouldn't often be a person to return the link to, if they even had a way to separate out the links, which they did not. Nemm couldn't decide whether returning the powers was something Lexari said to assuage his own guilt or a piece of fiction he intended to sell the world on.

  "I have some good news," said Lexari. "It is overshadowed by your own good news of course, the end of the Allunio will bring a conclusion to the civil war and no doubt be cause for celebration throughout the Iron Kingdom, yet I feel that I must chime in with my own success."

  Nemm laid her head against the porcelain of the bathtub and said nothing. If Lexari wanted to talk, he would get no encouragement from her, no witty repartee or leading questions.

  "Quill has not taken to the throne," said Lexari. "The loss of his domain hit him hard and his imprisonment did not agree with him. He never had any desire to rule." He went silent behind the screen that divided them.

  "We had said that we were going to find a replacement," said Nemm, damning herself for responding. "Someone who wanted the job. Once the war was over."

  "I have found him," said Lexari. "It took time to pore over the books, to untangle the bookkeeping of earlier eras. In his later years the records became immaculate, but I was looking in those years before the reforms had been enacted. Eventually I found the document that I had been seeking, the one which confirmed a nagging suspicion. All of the pieces of the puzzle clicked into place."

  Nemm wanted to scream at him. She had just survived a difficult battle. She had been using her daggers with extreme prejudice for the last few months. This was not a time for him to be delivering a story to her, no matter how well-crafted he might think it was. Instead, she asked the question that Lexari clearly wanted her to ask. "And what puzzle is that?"

  "Sometimes the solution comes from small details," said Lexari. "The puzzle isn't even clear until the solution is nearly in sight. In this case? A child who was taken into the custody of the kingdom at a young age and brought to the attention of the king — but perhaps it was the king who cultivated the boy in the first place? And why would he have done that? The boy turned into a brilliant man. He was given more freedom than almost everyone in the kingdom. Yet there were more questions. Why, on his deathbed, would the king have spent so many resources in trying to track down yet another physician, where so many had failed before?"

  Nemm wanted to slam her head against the bathtub, but she would have only succeeded in breaking it. "Wenaru," she said.

  "The Iron King sowed his seed widely," said Lexari. "He would have been old when Wenaru was born, but not implausibly so. The Iron King was known to make trips to the Highlands on a regular basis, sometimes without much in the way of fanfare. He would have had the power and the authority to pull a woman into his chambers and have his way with her. It wouldn't have mattered whether she was married. And then, once the child was born, the Iron King would keep an eye on the boy. He would ensure that the boy was selected for presentation at one of the stadiums, so that his domain could be known. He would ensure that the boy was sent to get an education, so that his mind could be shaped and his future controlled. It explains the resources that were devoted Wenaru's way when he was running his hospital, the latitude that he was given. It explains why so many letters came from the Iron King while he was dying. The Iron King knew that Wenaru was brilliant. He knew that of all his bastards, there was one who was both intelligent and humble, one who would do what it took."

  Nemm resumed her silence. It was all lies, even if those lies came naturally to Lexari's lips. She idly wondered how good the forgery of the documents was. Would they withstand inspection? They didn't need to, not really, not with all of their enemies dead. Lexari's command would become law. Wenaru would take the throne and behind him would sit the Sunhawk, pulling all the strings that needed to be pulled. If there were any way that Lexari could have claimed the throne for himself, Nemm was certain he would have taken it.

  "I look forward to your support in these coming weeks," said Lexari. "I've spoken with Quill already; the transition of power will be seamless."

  "This will mean war with Torland," said Nemm. She moved her hand back and forth in the water, feeling the currents. "The parliament we installed there put Wenaru on trial. They won't accept him as king."

  "They're too busy consolidating power," said Lexari.

  "What better way to unite than a ready-made enemy?" asked Nemm.

  "Wenaru is the rightful ruler of the Iron Kingdom," said Lexari. He sounded slightly confused, as though he couldn't understand her objection and was slightly put-out by it. That was one of his methods of manipulation that Nemm had once thought was base childishness.

  "As you say," said Nemm. She was too tired to argue, too emotionally drained to point out every reason this was a bad idea.

  "This is the dawn of a new era," said Lexari. "We will pull the Iron Kingdom to its feet and institute a new, just rule that corrects for all of the Iron King's excesses. The story of rebellion is concluded; a new story must rise to take its place."

  Nemm made no response. Lexari gave a polite cough from behind the screen that separated them, but certainly even he would be able to realize that she didn't want to speak with him. It took some time for him to move away. Once he was gone, she climbed from the bathtub and dressed herself in clean clothes, slowly and mechanically, then began forming the lump of glass she'd removed into armor again. There was still work left to do. She needed to g
o wait for Dravus.

  * * *

  It would come down to violence. Dravus recognized that. There were other salient questions, like whether he could somehow bring Nemm to his side, or whether he would be able to face Lexari down somewhere that Wenaru wouldn't be able to render aid. At its heart though, the problem was Lexari. There was no other solution than a violent one. There would be no way of talking Lexari down.

  That left the question of how. If they had been of equal standing, with evenly matched domains, Dravus would still have been soundly beaten in any fair fight that he could imagine. Lexari had made his name as a combatant. He had mastered every possible technique. Dravus had a month of training in swordsmanship. He was rusty now, two months out of practice, which meant there would be no contest when he faced down what might have been the greatest spear fighter in the world. Dravus had no way of knowing whether Lexari had more than just light and shadow. That was something he would have to figure out before trying to get into Castle Launtine.

  It wouldn't be even remotely heroic, but Dravus could try to slit Lexari's throat in the middle of the night. Sound was one of the five domains he'd taken from Faye, which would allow him to move silently around the castle and cover the noise of picking whatever locks were on the doors. Lexari had to sleep sometime. The thought of killing the man in cold blood didn't sit right with Dravus, but it offered odds that were far better than trying a straightforward fight. Perhaps he could even find one of the artifacts and use it to steal his own power back from Lexari. That was a secondary goal, but one that Dravus would try for if it was at all possible.

  He tried to exercise his new domains as much as possible. The fifth one was weak, likely taken from someone whose fame had begun to wane, or never fully develop. Dravus had almost laughed when he'd realized what it was: light. He could make simple constructs, but it was slow work and the details were difficult. Sound and blood were the most powerful of the two that he had received, but blood seemed as though it wasn't going to be useful, given that there was little chance he would be able to make skin contact with Lexari. Still, Dravus practiced with both blood and flesh, making alterations to his own body and undoing them again. He tried to keep his experimentation to places that weren't vital, just in case he did something which couldn't easily be undone. Steel, blood, flesh, sound, and light, there had to be some way to use those.

  Sound was the most distinct of the domains. It allowed for keen hearing and a differentiation of sounds, so that he could tune his hearing to different places or listen for different things. He could amplify the sounds around him and reduce them to almost nothing. He tried the amplified shout that he'd heard from Korata and found it to be loud enough to shake the trees around him. It would be a powerful attack, but that hadn't saved Faye. He had no idea how she had managed to speak without the use of her voice, but he imagined that this was a matter of practice. Dravus tried, but he could only make sounds that had no relation to words. He finally made a single word by stringing sounds together, but that took far too much preparation and concentration.

  A plan was beginning to form in Dravus's mind, of silently stalking into the castle with the domain of sound to keep his footsteps from being heard. All thoughts of that were driven from his mind when he heard a human heartbeat coming from behind a small group of rocks some twenty feet away from him. Dravus's own heart began to beat faster. He was still miles from Castle Launtine, too far for there to be patrols, but the person in question was only barely moving.

  "Hello?" asked Dravus. He was ready to run at the first sign of trouble.

  "Dravus," said a familiar female voice. Nemm stepped out from around the outcropping. "You really are a fool, you know that?"

  "I know," said Dravus. "But something has to be done."

  "The Bone Warden's people aren't with you?" she asked.

  "They didn't want to upset the balance of power," said Dravus. "I think they'll probably stick around for long enough to establish ties to the new regime."

  "Typical of the Bone Warden," said Nemm.

  "Are you going to stop me?" asked Dravus.

  "Lexari thinks you're dead," answered Nemm. "More specifically, he thinks that I killed you. You can imagine that I would have some problems if you showed up unannounced."

  "No one else is going to do anything about Lexari," said Dravus. "I don't know how many of the rumors are true, but … some of them are. He was going to kill me, like it was nothing. He's hiding secrets. Not just from the world, but from you as well."

  "So you want to kill him for it," said Nemm. "You're taking something small and personal and turning it into an international affair. You really want to go up against the most powerful man in the world? Over pride? Over revenge?"

  "Yes," said Dravus. He felt the urge to deny it, to explain that his aims were somehow noble, but he'd been thinking about slipping into Lexari's room and slitting his throat only moments before. He was confident that a world Lexari stood on top of was worse for it, but he doubted he would feel so strongly if there were no personal connection. If they had parted amicably, Dravus might have said that Lexari was unfit to hold his position of power, but no more unfit than any number of other rulers.

  "Fair enough," said Nemm. "And your plan?"

  "I was still working on that," said Dravus. "If I could get into his room in the middle of the night, act while he was defenseless, then maybe —"

  "Let me tell you how I sleep," Nemm interrupted with a wave of her hand. "I seal my door shut with every single domain available to me. I make a seal of glass around the door, then a second seal of copper and gold. I suppose I have steel now too, so I'll be adding that to the barriers. I do the same for the windows, leaving only enough of a gap that I can still breathe. It is, in most other respects, a tomb. If I'm feeling especially paranoid, I deploy caltrops across the floor of the room, razor sharp so that they would slice straight through all but the thickest leather."

  "You're a multistrati," said Dravus. He had known that, but it was another thing to hear it come from her so casually.

  "Yes," said Nemm. "Lexari is too."

  "And so am I," said Dravus. Nemm showed no sign of surprise. "There has to be a way. If I can use the domain of sound to keep him from hearing, it won't matter how indelicate I am in getting to him. He won't know I'm there until he's dying."

  "You speak as though I'm going to let you by," said Nemm. "As though I'll stand to the side and let you do whatever you'd like to a man I've worked side by side with, day in and day out, for nine years."

  "I asked you whether you were going to let me by. You decided to play games with words," said Dravus. "You already declined to kill me once, when Lexari gave you a direct order. I don't think you're going to kill me now."

  "It wasn't a direct order," said Nemm. Her voice softened slightly. "He was going to take matters into his own hands, I'll give him that, but when I stepped forward he was happy to have me do it. Lexari would never give a direct order for me to dirty his hands."

  "He kept you around because you knew when to act without him having to say anything," said Dravus. He disliked thinking of this line of conversation as manipulation, but it was, in a sense, even if he was trying to get her to do something that was in her own interests. "It made you the perfect cover for him. He could admonish you later, even though you'd done exactly what he wanted you to do. A better man would have been partner to the lies that needed to be told. He would have accepted his part in it instead of pretending to be a paragon."

  Nemm said nothing.

  "Let me by," said Dravus. He tried his best to sound confident.

  "Let you by?" asked Nemm. "So that you can march to Castle Launtine and make your best attempt at killing Lexari?" She shook her head. "Do you think I'm so much of a hypocrite that I would allow you to dirty your hands while pretending that my own were clean? It's what I would do, if I were Lexari. I would make a show of pleading with you, telling you not to do it but hoping that you would. I wouldn't stop you, of cours
e. Then, if you managed to strike the killing blow, I would have speeches and stories prepared, ones that might agree with your goal but not your method. That's how I would do it, if what I cared about most was perpetuating a myth of myself as a good person. I could do all that without even doing anything that someone would mark as wrong. I could do it without ever seeming duplicitous." She sighed. "Do you know, I still don't know how much he thinks about these things? There's a part of me that believes he's cold and calculating behind the mask of himself. But sometimes it seems that's truly who he is, a man who is fooling himself as much as he's fooling the world, bound by the part he's playing."

  Dravus stood his ground. The meaning of Nemm's words wasn't clear to him; there was discontent, but he wasn't sure whether it was a discontent that he could use. He didn't even know whether he should be trying to use Nemm. She was a friend. She'd saved his life a few times and he'd never really gotten the chance to return the favor.