Child of Flame

by Kate Elliott

  “Let them carry her,” said Laoina as Alain began to protest. “You are tired.”

  “The hounds.” It was the one point he was fixed on, like an arrow shot true.

  “Ah.” She turned back to the leader, and the two fell into an intense exchange that he was too tired to follow. “So it will be,” she said at last to Alain as three men separated themselves from the others, trading packs with their comrades. “Once the Cursed Ones find the bodies of their patrol, this defile will swarm with them like hornets. You must get your dogs now, before the sun rises, or you will never get them. We will take the Hallowed One to Shu-Sha’s camp. These men will help you with the hounds. That one—” She pointed to a middle-aged man wearing a necklace of jet beads. “—is trained as a Walking One and can speak for you. I will go to be the words for the Hallowed One. Then you will follow after.”

  “I can’t leave Adica!”

  Laoina cut him off. “Then must you leave your dogs. One, or the other. We will go swiftly to Shu-Sha’s camp. The Hallowed One will be safe with these warriors, even until you come.”

  Looking them over, he thought she was probably right. The dozen warriors, three of them women, looked strong, determined, and ruthless. He hated to leave Adica, knowing that the Cursed Ones might still ambush the party carrying her, but clearly these people knew the ground better than he did and he already knew they would kill. To follow her now, he would have to abandon Sorrow and Rage.

  “Very well. So must it be. I will take the waterskins.” He kissed Adica’s warm cheek before a man hoisted her over his back. She gave no response. Her hands remained clenched, and it was hard to make out her features in the darkness. She was only a shadow, really, blurred and indistinct. As the other party faded into the darkness, he lost sight of her hanging helplessly off another man’s back.

  Fear for her made tears burn hot in his eyes. It gnawed at his gut, but he forced it to keep still, to crawl into his aching arms and legs and feed them with its dark energy. He would catch up to her in Shu-Sha’s camp. By believing it, he would make it happen.

  He turned toward his new companions, who eyed him with interest. Two of them looked so alike that for an instant he thought he was seeing double. They wore, like him, neatly trimmed beards, but they had coarse, wiry black hair.

  “We should take water. The hounds will be thirsty. I am called Alain.”

  The man wearing the jet beads looked him up and down. He had silver in his beard and a swarthy complexion. “I am called Agalleos. These two are my brother’s sons, born together, Maklos and Shevros. Be quick.”

  The twins parted the bushes, stationing themselves up and downstream from Alain as he filled all four waterskins. “How did you come to stumble upon us?” he asked.

  “The queen saw you in a vision. She sent us. The Cursed Ones have a fort here. She feared they would capture you. Then that would be the end. You would have been sent to walk the spheres. Skau!” He hissed the word, making a sharp gesture at his throat like a knife cutting into the skin.

  “What does this mean, to walk the spheres?” The phrase niggled at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t place where he had heard it.

  “Hurry,” said Agalleos. “We must get these spirit guides and be gone before dawn.”

  They waded back up the creek. Alain smelled death before he saw it. Luckily, the tumble of corpses was mostly hidden in the darkness, five soldiers lying dead under a sycamore tree where Agalleos’ party had caught them. They had been only a few hundred paces behind Alain and Laoina when they had been struck down.

  Maklos whistled softly, like a bird, and pointed to the scar cut through the undergrowth where Alain and Laoina had thrashed down from the hillside. The waning quarter moon was rising. Agalleos scooped up mud from the streambed and streaked Alain’s arms, legs, and face with it. They started up with Shevros in the lead.

  The twins clearly had experience climbing rugged hillsides; they swarmed up so fast that Alain, less sure of where to place his hands and feet, had finally to ask them to slow down. The moon rose higher. They rested at the abandoned nest and continued on, glancing over their shoulders toward the fort looming darkly on the ridge behind them. They weren’t anxious, precisely, but they were as taut as strings pulled tight. How keen sighted were the Cursed Ones’ sentries?

  Shevros reached the cave mouth first. Low growls trembled in the air. Alain scrambled up beside the young man, heaved himself over the lip, and slid down inside. Sorrow and Rage practically bowled him over with their greeting. When he’d gotten them down, he let them drink. Agalleos dropped down beside him, struck fire, and got a torch burning before moving into the cave, wary of the hounds.

  “Are your spirit guides too heavy to grow wings?”

  “They have no wings. But we have rope.”

  Keeping well back from the hounds, Agalleos prowled the cave, thrusting the torch into every crevice and hole in the limestone wall. “It was the Bent People who brought you here? On what manner of ship or beast did you travel?”

  “I don’t know.” Alain did his best to describe their journey, but gave up after Maklos, who had climbed down after, snorted loudly, and skeptically, when Alain told of the great marketplace where skrolin and merfolk traded their wares.

  “Peace,” said Agalleos sternly. Maklos had a cocky lift to his chin, the kind of young man who believes, with some justification, that the young women of his acquaintance persist in admiring him. “He and his brother are learning to be Walking Ones. That’s made my brother’s son believe he knows more than he does.” His tone changed as he addressed the young man. “Do not forget the lesson of your cousin, who thought he was smarter than the rest of us and became food for the crows!”

  Sorrow padded over to Maklos, sniffing him up and down while the young man held very still, one hand twitching at the hilt of his sheathed sword.

  “Nay, it matters not,” said Alain, whistling Sorrow back. “I have seen many things hard to believe. Have you seen the Bent People with your own eyes?”

  “Not I.” Agalleos shook his head. “Nor any I know. It sounds like a good tale told at the fireside to me. But our great queen Shuashaana knows many things beyond the understanding of simple men like you and I. She is a woman, isn’t she? She is a word worker, a crafter, I think you call it in the language of the Deer people. She is the heir of Aradousa, who was mother of our people, the daughter of bright-eyed Akhini.” He finished his examination of the cave’s depths, easily plumbed, and returned to Alain. “There are caves all through these hills. My grandfather called them ‘the mouths of the old ones’ and he said people would get lost in them and never come out.”

  Maklos grunted. “An old man’s smoke dreams!”

  Agalleos eyed him sharply. “Say what you will about the old stories. My grandfather was a wise man. I do not ignore his wisdom.” Then he grinned at Alain. “Lucky for us that you’re a Walking One, too. That makes it easy to talk.”

  “I’m not a Walking One.”

  “How comes it that you speak our language, then?”

  “I only know the language of the Deer People, and that of my own country.”

  Agalleos measured the hounds, and then Alain. “This is a mystery,” he admitted, “since I started speaking to you in my own language once it seemed to me you understood me well enough.”

  “How can that be?” demanded Alain, alarmed and confused by Agalleos’ statement.

  The sound of a horn calling soldiers to battle rang faintly in through the cave’s mouth. Shevros scrambled in through the opening and jumped down to stand beside his brother. The resemblance between the two was uncanny; Alain could tell them apart only because Shevros had a scar on his belly and because Maklos had belted his linen kilt—the only clothing except sandals that the men wore—lower along his hips than the other two, exposing a great deal of taut belly.

  “The Cursed Ones come,” said Shevros. “The horn has been raised at the fort. They have found the dead ones.”

  A
galleos frowned. “This is bad. They will swarm like locusts into the defile. Now we cannot go down again by the low ground.”

  “Are we trapped here?” Alain asked.

  “There is a longer road back. We must move quickly, before light comes.”

  It wasn’t easy to wrestle the hounds out of the cave’s opening, nor to maneuver them into position. Alain carried Sorrow as a heavy weight draped over his shoulders, and brave Maklos took Rage. Shevros led the way, climbing up toward the ridgeline above, while Agalleos hung back at the rear. Clouds drifted across the crescent moon, but Alain still felt the prickle of unseen eyes watching his back as they ascended. The horn blasted thrice more. Calls and shouts drifted to them across the gulf of air. Just as they reached the ridgetop and let the hounds down, throwing themselves on the rocky ground to rest, a line of torches sprang into life along the fort’s walls, spilling out the unseen gate and scattering like falling sparks down the slopes of the defile.

  Agalleos regarded Sorrow and Rage solemnly. “From here we know only two paths which can lead us safely back to the camp of our queen. But the shorter of these the hounds cannot walk.”

  “Even with ropes, and our assistance?” asked Alain.

  “Even so. It is a worm’s path, underground and underwater. We cannot risk it. We will have to go north and circle around the river.”

  Maklos hissed sharply.

  “Go soon,” said Shevros. “Look.”

  Torches had reached the bottom of the defile and a dozen now began to search for a way to climb while the rest followed the course of the stream. Cursed Ones spread everywhere, as numerous as a nest of baby spiders spilling into life. Pink painted the eastern horizon, the brush of dawn.

  “Will Adica reach Shu-Sha’s camp safely?” Alain whispered, horrified that he had let her be carried away. He should have gone with her to see her to safety. Yet Sorrow, lying beside him, whined softly, and Rage licked his hand.

  “Nothing is certain,” agreed Agalleos, “but theirs was the safest, swiftest path. Oshidos is a strong fighter, and they’ll go anyway through the labyrinth. The Cursed Ones have never caught any of our people in there.”

  With an effort, Alain buried his fear. What use would he be to Adica if he got himself killed by the Cursed Ones because he was worrying about her? “Very well. North of the river, if that is the only path. I have come a long way with these comrades, and I won’t abandon them now.”

  “Crazy outlander,” muttered Maklos.

  “I can see they are powerful spirit guides. The gods have woven a mystery about you, comrade.” Agalleos pushed himself up to a crouch, poised and ready. “To get out of Thorn Valley we’ll have to go by way of the Screaming Rocks. Shevros, you lead the way. Maklos, you’ll take the rear. You must set the trap and follow by the ladder.”

  Maklos seemed pleased to have been given the dangerous assignment. Alain could imagine him boasting of it afterward to his admiring sweethearts.

  If they got back safely.

  So began the scramble, first along the ridgeline, using boulders and scrub for cover, and after that dropping down into the next canyon over where an escarpment of eroded limestone pillars thrust up out of a tangle of vegetation to form a landmark. Thorn Valley was aptly named, a steeply-sloped vale covered entirely with bushy undergrowth sporting thorns as long as the hounds’ claws. There was no way they could get through that.

  Shevros vanished into one of the cavelets worn out of the pillars. “Go,” said Agalleos, glancing behind them. On the ridgeline behind them, a torch appeared, then a second. Inside the cave, cunningly concealed where a fallen boulder seemed to be crumbling into the sloping walls, lay a tunnel. Shevros had shinnied partway down; Alain could see his shield, glinting where he’d strung it on his back. Alain moved to follow him, but Agalleos held him back.

  “He must release the trap before we can pass through.”

  The cave smelled of carrion, enough to disturb the hounds, who wanted to find the source of the scent. Abruptly, Shevros’ shield vanished. Alain crawled after him through the dusty tunnel, which dipped down and rose up, emerging into the midst of thorns in a cavelike hollow carved out of the tangle of growth. He could barely see the sky through the skein of branches above, but a person standing on the ridge certainly would not be able to see the people scuttling along underneath. Broken thorns crunched beneath his feet as he followed Shevros down a dim tunnel hacked out of the vegetation. They waited until the others joined them.

  “The trap is sealed again,” said Agalleos.

  They went on, careful of hands and shoulders as the slope steepened. In this way, they headed down into the ravine. Alain had his hands full making sure the hounds did not tumble into the tearing wall of thorns. After Maklos had eased his passage through a tight opening a hand’s measure of times, Rage decided to befriend the cocky young man and even went so far as to lick his face, which made Maklos spit and sputter. Agalleos trailed at the rear, often lost beyond twists and turns. How much labor had it taken Shu-Sha’s tribe to cut this labyrinth under the thorns?

  Shevros halted at a crossroads to wait and, as if divining Alain’s amazement from his expression, spoke. “The queen’s magic is strong.” Then he scrambled on, bent over like a hunched old man as he scurried down the right-hand fork.

  Alain’s hand was beginning to hurt again, but he gritted his teeth against the pain and went on.

  They emerged out of the last thorn tunnel by shinnying along a depression dug alongside a huge boulder that brought them into a confusing jumble of boulders and scree wider across than an arrow’s shot, the tail end of a massive avalanche that had ripped down the western slope and torn through the thorny cover. Alain expected to hear the wind moaning through the rocks, to hear anything except silence, but all he heard was the scritch of Agalleos’ feet as the man walked forward to survey the devastation. It was still morning, early enough that the eastern slope of the valley remained in shadow. The calls and answers of the Cursed Ones’ scouts rang in the air as they continued their search down the eastern ridge. Sun crept steadily down the broad western side of the valley; it would reach them soon enough. With heat already rising from the rocks, it promised to be a blistering hot day.

  “Come.” Agalleos gestured.

  The fall of rocks, tumbled, fallen, shattered, loose shale and streams of fist-sized rocks snaking paths through larger brethren, made difficult going. It was hard to be quiet as they crunched over pebbles, negotiated a field of boulders as big as sheep, and squeezed through clefts made by two boulders fallen one up against the next. Shevros knew the twisty, dusty lanes well; he led them unerringly, never hesitating. Had he spent his entire life, from childhood on, engaged in this game of life or death, one step ahead of the Cursed Ones? Alain could not think of the child who had swung down before them, at the stream, without shuddering. So young to be sent out already on the hunt, to be trained for nothing but war.

  No plants grew within the rockfall except for an occasional dusting of lichen. No birds flitted to catch his attention. But there was one sign of human encroachment: here and there, tucked away under ledges, caught around a jagged line of sight, scattered out in the open, lay human bones, picked clean by scavengers, scattered by wind and erosion or caught in spring streams that had, by now, dried up. The sun rose higher, light cutting down. The rocks grew hot to the touch as they picked their way forward, bearing on a diagonal line upslope.

  “Why are they called the Screaming Rocks?” Alain asked at last when they paused to catch their breath in the shadow of a leaning slab of rock, some giant’s finger torn loose from the escarpment above. He let the hounds lap water out of his cupped hands, their dry tongues eager on his palms. “I thought there would be pipes in the rock, some natural sound.”

  Agalleos smiled softly. Shevros had gone ahead to keep watch. Alain saw a corner of his kilt flapping out as the breeze caught it; otherwise, the young man was hidden from view. Maklos had dropped behind to guard the rear.

&nbs
p; “It is not the wind that screamed here. In my father’s youth the Cursed Ones set fire to the great city of my people, the one built in the time of Queen Aradousa. A battle raged among these rocks for days. It was the men who screamed, the ones who had been cut down, injured, left for the scorpions or the crows, left to die of thirst in the sun, because no one could reach them.”

  “Who won?”

  Agalleos picked up a finger bone and rolled it along his palm. “Death won. My father died somewhere in these rocks. His body was never found. As you have seen, he had many companions on the road to the other side. The Cursed Ones do not like this place. Queen Shuashaana says that is because they can still hear the screaming of the ghosts who were never laid to rest.”

  Alain heard nothing but their own small noises: Rage’s snuffling, the press of Agalleos’ feet as he shifted. A golden eagle glided overhead. Wind picked up, casting grit into his face.

  “Come,” said Agalleos. “We are almost there.”

  They reached the far side of the slide although by this time they had climbed well up the western slope. Above them the valley’s slope cut into a long escarpment, dark and brooding, that ran all the way down the rest of the broad ravine. Beyond the slide, thorns grew in profusion. It was hard to see where they could go from here. Maklos caught up with them, grinning like a boy ready to play a trick on his rival.

  The sun had reached zenith, so bright and glaring that its light seemed like an actual weight. Alain was slick with sweat, and the hounds were laboring. His hand was swelling again. He hunkered down in such shade as he could find—there wasn’t much, with shadows so short—and shaded his eyes to stare back across the valley. Was that movement on the eastern ridge? Hard to tell.

  Agalleos pointed. “Twenty or more of them.” After a moment, Alain thought he saw a darting movement at the fringe of the distant thorn growth, there on the eastern slope, but when it fluttered up into the sky, he realized it was only a bird.