Child of Flame

by Kate Elliott

  Kel exclaimed aloud. The enemy line was breaking. Freed of her guard, Adica ducked low and dashed away along the cavern wall, into shadow.

  The woman below Alain struggled to get up. Alain placed the heel of his hand on the center of her chest to pin her to the ground. Her eyes widened: they flashed green, like jade, bright and penetrating. Sanglant had such eyes, startling with their gemlike intensity. He stared at her and she at him, he in wonder at her beauty and fierce heart, she in a puzzlement that expanded into surprise and respect. Without a word, Alain granted her passage to leave. She sprang up and retreated, dragging the stumbling youth with her. Rage tumbled, unhurt, out of the melee to take up her position beside Alain.

  Beor hadn’t as much luck. White Feather struck him hard in the shoulder, rocking him back, and jumped to his feet, calling out in a voice that reverberated through the chamber. His warriors, some still struggling and some in retreat, formed up into a stout line with their wounded at the rear.

  Where was Adica?

  The skrolin, many of them leaking a greenish-tinged blood, waited in an eerie silence, as though they would not, or could not, speak. Alain sensed, then, that they were biding their time, delaying their enemy. Waiting—but for what?

  Beor got to his feet, slipped on his own blood, and staggered back to stand beside Kel. Adica broke free seemingly from out of nowhere and tumbled over corpses to reach their side.

  With angry cries, the masked warriors charged the four humans and the remaining half-dozen skrolin. That quickly, the skirmish dissolved into confusion again. With bound hands Adica grabbed for, and dropped, a spear fallen to the ground. A second time she got her fingers around it and lifted it just in time to clumsily parry a blow. A sword stroke hit Kel’s back as he turned in the wrong direction in confusion, but the wood frame of the pack protected him. The leather sacking sagged, sliced open by the blow, and provisions spilled out. One warrior slipped on dried fish, falling hard. But the rest pressed forward under White Feather’s command, seeking Adica. Kel fell back, unable to hold his own, and slammed into Adica, who stumbled. Half bent over, Beor set about himself, still a threat despite his wound.

  Where had that clarity gone, that had made of the battle a brightly woven tapestry? It had seemed so easy before, for those brief moments drawn out like thread into an unbroken present. Now Alain was barely able to block a blow thrown at Adica’s head by the white-crested warrior as the captain’s sword cut into and hung up in his oak staff. Sorrow was missing, and Rage had dashed out of his sight again. Claws scraped at his calves. Maybe it was possible to die twice. The thought struck him more with astonishment than fear.

  Then the world came apart.

  Light failed between one breath and the next, drowning them in blinding darkness. The ground buckled and heaved beneath him. Kel shouted out in fear. Sound cracked like thunder in his ears. The earth splintered between his left foot and his right. He grabbed for Adica and dragged her backward but felt himself sliding forward on his knees toward a new chasm. Heat blasted up from black depths, unseen but felt as a narrow gulf of empty air blasted by a blistering wind. When he opened his mouth to shout a warning, the air scalded his tongue. He couldn’t hear his voice above the scream of the wind.

  Teeth grabbed him. A jaw closed on his right foot. The hounds were trying to stop his slide. Adica scrabbled for purchase. A spear slid past him. Its cool length brushed past his calf and then tumbled away, and away, and away—it never hit bottom. It seemed an eternity he slid inexorably toward the chasm with Adica struggling upward beside him. His straining hand, trying to brace against the slick stone, scraped on the edge, and he was falling forward as his spare torch slid out of his belt, bumped back against him because of the force of that wind, and tumbled away.

  A small hand caught his linen tunic, then his rope belt. A hundred hands swarmed him, poking and pinching everywhere as they hauled him back. He was helpless in their grip, his back scraping on the ground.

  The hands released him, all but one, which searched his torso with wickedly sharp jabs. Its breath, made pungent by a sulfurous tang, tickled his face. Those claws scrabbled up his right arm and gave it a hard pinch, twisting the skin so he yelped. Blood welled where a claw had scraped through the skin. A cool pressure twisted onto his arm. At once, the hounds were all over him, licking and nosing him. The creature assaulting him had vanished.

  “Adica?” His throat hurt, and his back ached. Utter darkness hemmed him in. He couldn’t hear anything except for the wind.

  A lamp flared.

  Adica lay beside him, looking half stunned.

  Their enemy glared at them from the other side of the chasm, a dreadful fissure out of whose depths boiled that searing wind, which shot straight up toward the cavern’s hidden ceiling. The flame trembled and steadied as the captain sheltered it with a hand. Of the dozen warriors still able to fight, six had bows, which they had readied and nocked with arrows during the blackness. White Feather barked a command. Alain threw himself over Adica’s prone body. They shot.

  None of the arrows made it across the fissure. The blast tore them away, spinning them up toward the ceiling, lost to sight.

  “Hei! Hei!” shouted Kel, a call for help.

  Alain jumped up, wiping the sting of the wind from his eyes. Beor and Kel clung to the edge of the fissure. Alain dragged them up. In a strange way, the blasting wind helped him. Beor had lost his torches, and his injured shoulder still bled, but he could walk. Kel’s slashed pack dangled dangerously. They hadn’t any weapons, but on the flat plateau between them and the bridge a few spears lay scattered. Kel hurried, limping, to gather them up as Alain knelt beside Adica, cutting the rope that bound her hands. Shaking her head and wincing, she got to her feet.

  The fissure had split the ground in such a way that they could no longer reach the larger passageway toward which they had originally been heading. Instead, only a single, smaller tunnel opening offered escape from their section of the cavern.

  White Feather shouted something very much resembling curses, but there was nothing he and his men could do. His proud face twisted with thwarted anger; a livid cut ran from lip to chin, and a bruise mottled his left cheek. Blood dripped from one ear, dribbling down to stain the leather armor that protected his shoulders. He wore a breastplate of beaten bronze incised with a vulture-headed woman, fierce and commanding. With a snarl, he turned his back on his enemies.

  One archer masked with a boar’s face loosed a second arrow, but the wind caught the arrow and lifted it high until it was lost in the cavern’s murky heights as wind roared. They couldn’t leap the fissure, and the chasm had fractured like a trident into three crevasses, slitting the cavern’s floor into tiny islands surrounded by gulfs of wind. The most youthful of the warriors made as if to cast his spear, but a companion restrained him. After a brief conference, they walked cautiously across the length of floor left them, hauling with them three comrades too injured to walk, and crossed into a small tunnel so low that most had to duck as they entered.

  Kel swore furiously. As the lamplight faded, Alain looked to see that the bridge over the first abyss had split down the middle, each half dangling down the face of the chasm.

  They were trapped in the middle, caught on a narrow ridge poised between two crevasses.

  White Feather vanished down the small tunnel, and his light with him. Blackness descended again. From out of the fissure boomed a throbbing like a giant’s reverberant footfalls, each one as loud as a thunderclap. The wind ceased in the next instant.

  Rage barked as if surprised, and then all was still and utterly dark.

  2

  HER hands smarted as blood rushed back into them. She flexed them as she took steadying breaths in the darkness. Free, but not yet safe. Still, it was better than being trussed up as a captive of the Cursed Ones.

  “Hallowed One, can you speak?”

  “Beor, how came you to follow me? What happened at the village? Who else was taken?”

&nbs
p; He stood to the right of her, panting in the way of a fighter trying to overcome the pain of his injuries. “One of Weiwara’s infants was stolen, but the foreigner won it back. Nay, Hallowed One, no others were taken. Only you. It was all a feint.”

  “To get me.”

  He grunted to show his agreement.

  “We’re trapped.” Kel’s voice cracked, hitting a boy’s pitch before sliding down again.

  “Adica.”

  She couldn’t see Alain, but she felt him as she would have felt a roaring bonfire. He stood about an arm’s length from her. Instead of answering, she extended her hand into the blackness and, searching, found his arm. He squeezed her hand. That was all. The darkness in the cavern was so absolute that she could not even see his face.

  Or was it?

  Light rose gently, with the gleam of magic in it. At first she couldn’t see where it was coming from. Kel swore.

  Alain was glowing.

  Nay. An instant later she saw an armband the color of bronze, wound three times around Alain’s upper arm. This object glowed. By his expression, Alain was as surprised as she was. He fingered the armband cautiously, twisted it, and grimaced in pain when it would not come off.

  “There’s an old story told by the grandmothers,” said Beor in an odd tone, “that the Wise Ones give precious gifts to those who aid them.”

  Alain turned away, hiding his face as he examined the strange armband. The breeze blowing up from the fissure, light and cool now, stirred his linen tunic. From the back, with his fine black hair and his slender build, he might have been a cousin of the Cursed Ones—but he was not. He had felt human enough to her, by the birthing house in those moments before the Cursed Ones’ raid, when she held him close and kissed him.

  “Rope,” said Kel. She looked over at the sound of the youth’s voice and saw him beside the fallen bridge, staring down into the gaping chasm with his expression painted with overflowing youthful frustration. He held salvaged rope from his pack. With his gaze he measured the distance between the posts on either side of the chasm. Beor limped over to test the strength of one of the bridge posts. She crossed to him at once and made him sit so she could examine his wounds. He had several, chiefly cuts in both legs and a deeper injury to his left shoulder. Someone had thought to put a compress and a length of loosely woven cloth for wound-binding into Beor’s pack. She used herbs from her own pouch to make a small charm, and bound it in with the compress and the cloth.

  He grunted his thanks, no more.

  Kel had a funny lopsided smile that betrayed his fear, although he wanted to look brave. “Will the Wise Ones kill us for trespassing in their territory?”

  “Surely they could have killed us by now,” said Beor, “if they meant to. How did it come about that they fought with the party who kidnapped you, Hallowed One?”

  “I do not know. At first I thought the white-feathered one, he who was the leader, meant to take us to the loom.”

  Both Kel and Beor looked shocked. “Surely the Cursed Ones do not know the magic of the looms,” said Kel, voicing what Beor knew better than to speak aloud. “Isn’t that the only power we have that keeps us free of their dominion?”

  “So I have always believed,” murmured Adica. “In any case another party ran up to the stones, perhaps as a decoy. White Feather and his soldiers dragged me into the queens’ grave, and there, as you found, was a tunnel built by the Wise Ones who live under the hills.”

  Beor coughed judiciously, as might a person who meant to step from hiding out behind an armed adult. “I never heard tell stories of a passageway leading beyond the graves of the holy queens.”

  “Truly, neither did I. It may be that the Wise Ones attacked White Feather and his party simply because they trespassed. The Wise Ones are not our allies, to come to our aid.”

  Kel said nervously, “I wasn’t sure they really existed.”

  At once, Adica drew a complicated spell in the air to ward off bad luck. “Do not speak so! Just because you have not seen something does not mean it cannot exist! Have you seen the ocean, as I have? Nay, you have not. Have you seen your mother’s mother, may her soul be at rest on the Other Side? Does that mean she did not exist, to give birth to your mother, who in turn gave birth to you? The elders were not fools, to tell stories idly. Listen to their words, and do not close your ears to what they have to say!”

  He bent forward, touching his forehead to the ground in apology, fearful of the spirits that always eddied around her, smelling death. “I beg your pardon, Hallowed One. Do not curse me!” He was almost weeping.

  She felt immeasurably ancient, watching his young face, even though they had been born in the same season, the same year. He wasn’t even old enough to grow a proper beard, although fuzz shadowed his jawline. “I won’t curse you, Kel. You were brave to rescue me.”

  “Nay, it wasn’t my idea,” he said, and added defiantly, “nor even Beor’s. It was Alain. We only followed him.”

  Alain gave up fiddling with the armband and, turning, paused when he realized that they were studying him. The grandmothers told many stories about ancient times. Adica had always supposed that some were true and some were not, and yet now Alain faced her wearing an armband woven of magical substance. She had always known that the Wise Ones who live under the hills existed, but she—who had seen so much!—had never seen them nor had she believed the tales about the potency of their magic. She had witnessed their magic today: light without flame and the ability to split the very rock. Truly, what she had seen awed her, for she did not understand the root of their power.

  Yet here also stood Alain, wearing an armband forged and shaped by the Wise Ones. She had seen him fighting, when she had had time to look. Nothing had touched him. He hadn’t hesitated. Nor did he seem afraid now, watching them with a puzzled expression on his face, as if he expected them to ask him a question. The armband’s light cast strange shadows on his face, but somehow it only made his eyes seem brighter and more sweet.

  Maybe she understood then that he was not quite like other people. Some unnameable quality separated him from the rest of humankind, perhaps because he had walked on the path that leads to the land of the dead. Except he had stepped off of it. He had come back to the land of the living. He had been touched by a power outside any she understood.

  She loved him.

  One of the dogs brushed up against her legs and leaned into her so heavily that she staggered sideways, half laughing because her heart was beating so hard already. The other dog, standing at the edge of the light, whined softly and padded a few steps away into the blackness, down the ridge toward the far wall of the cavern, made invisible by darkness.

  “I think we must follow the spirit guide.” Her fingers still hurt as she collected three spears and two arrows from the floor. It was hard to really get a good grasp on anything, but her legs worked well enough.

  As Alain moved, the light shifted, and together they walked cautiously along the ridge of stone, a crevasse gaping on either side.

  The dogs had found an opening. This tunnel lay low to the ground, an easy height for the Wise Ones or for dogs, but Alain had to bend almost double to follow the dogs inside.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” said Kel.

  “Come.” Alain’s voice echoed weirdly out of the stone passageway.

  Kel smiled weakly, and went after him.

  “Go,” said Adica to Beor. “You’re wounded. Carry what you can. I’ll bring up the rear.”

  Beor had many flaws, but arguing when he was wounded and their party possibly trapped was not one of them. They crept forward through the low passageway with the dogs in the lead.

  The passage struck straight, only a few smaller tunnels branching off. In time, the ceiling lifted and they could walk upright, although never more than single file. After some time Beor tired, and they rested, sharing drink and food. They walked again, and rested again. The loss of Kel’s provisions hurt them; they only had enough to gnaw off the edge of th
eir hunger, not to satisfy it.

  They spoke little. Beor had enough to do to keep going, and the silence and darkness frightened Kel too much to break it with words. Now and again Alain whistled softly under his breath. At intervals he would call lightly ahead to the dogs but otherwise he, too, remained silent.

  Adica worried. Would the Cursed Ones stumble upon them, here in the dark? If they knew who and what she was, then had they kidnapped her six comrades as well? If there were not seven to cast the spell, then the spell would fail and the Cursed Ones would spread their empire of blood and sacrifice and slavery across all human lands.

  Worst of all, did they understand what the human sorcerers meant to do? Had they learned the secret of the looms? Humankind could never triumph if they lost the power of the looms.

  These troubled thoughts distracted her. She didn’t hear the scrabbling behind her until it was too late. An object, then a second, fell heavily at her heels, knocking her forward. She cried out just as Alain exclaimed out loud ahead of her. A dog barked, and Alain’s light vanished.

  She whirled with her spear raised to face the threat from behind, but nothing stirred in the black tunnel. Finally, hearing Beor question her, she knelt. Feeling along the floor, she discovered their lost torches, the ones that had fallen into the crevasse. A moment later she realized she could see her hand as a pale blur.

  “Hallowed One! We’ve found a way out!” Kel called from up ahead. She gathered up the torches and followed the sound of his voice. He was helping Beor up a rugged slope of rock. At its top, light bled through tree roots. By getting purchase with one foot on the rocks and grasping the stout tree roots in a hand, she was able to drag herself up into a dense copse. The light hurt her eyes despite the protection of leaves. By the position of the sun she judged it around midday, but they had been so long underground that she supposed an entire day and night had passed since the raid. She gulped down cool, fresh air.