That explained the curious
barriers he had walked in and out of during his travels through the compound. “Fine. Come with me then.”
She took his hand without question, but slipped under his arm to support him when she saw he was limping. “What happened to your leg?”
“Gilkore.”
“Is he dead?”
“Unfortunately not.” The screams and howls from the eisiel pit had grown even more rabid. Strangely, they also sounded as if they had moved closer.
“We have to get the other
wielders as well-”
“Already done. Ulena led them out, or at least I hope she did.” They passed the body of the dead guard, whom Morghiad had not realised was female. Not that it made a difference. Anyone involved in this business deserved to greet death.
“I’m impressed,” she said with a grin.
When they stepped into the huge yard full of barrels, they were met by the deafening toll of the siren and a sizeable, blocky shape. Gilkore.
“You damned idiot! Do you realise what you’ve done?” The siren
stopped abruptly. “They’re everywhere!” As the last word left his mouth, a black figure leapt from the darkness and struck his shoulder. He was knocked to the floor instantly, and the eisiel dug its shining claws deep into his chest. Somehow, Morghiad had helped the things escape.
“We have to go now,” he said, pulling Artemi up with him to walk across the tops of the barrels.
“No!”
“No?” He looked about himself, checking for anymore attackers form the shadows.
“We cannot leave the place like
this, not if there are eisiels running around. They could get to the city.”
“Artemi, do I look like I’m in good enough shape to fight them? And I’ve read the stories – Blaze wouldn’t have any effect. I need to make sure you are safe.” Gilkore’s killer seemed to be biting chunks out of him. Blazes alight, but he wanted to get out of this place now!
“We’re both dead, husband.” She looked about herself, and seemed to spot something. Her face lit up with a smile. “We don’t need Blaze. Gilkore left us with a fail-safe. Clearly he wanted to destroy everything if he was
ever found.” She jumped back onto the floor and picked up a handful of the sand. “I’ll need to make a fuse.”
“A bomb? You’re going to build a bomb with these things swarming?”
“No, just the fuse. Obviously you’ve never studied the earth elements.” She pointed to the sand. “That’s not sand. It’s magnesium salts. Add a little fire and the pinh will blow this place into the skies.”
“Pinh burns?”
“In ordinary fire and with a bit of magnesium to get it going, yes. It’s in just about every textbook.” She ran back to the building and began tearing
up bits of paper, which she then rolled into a thin tube with some of the white sand from the ground.
There were hissing noises all around them from the approaching eisiels. Morghiad kept his sword ready, but he could see nothing moving in the blackness nearby. Blazes, how had they escaped? He recalled that he may have cut a few free whilst trying to get to the Blaze bundle, but that did not explain how they might have scaled the walls of the pit. Could they have climbed, one on top of the other? Surely they were not capable of that much thought and planning.
He put the thought out of his head. They were not people anymore.
“Ready!” Artemi ran out ahead of him and began positioning her fuse into the top of one of the barrels. As she knelt, Gilkore’s eisiel snapped its milky white eyes onto her, and it lips pulled apart across its thorn-like teeth.
“Artemi...” Morghiad limped forward as fast as he could, blade brandished.
She looked up just in time, hopped out of the way of the eisiel’s attack and allowed Morghiad to take a swipe at the distracted creature. He succeeded in beheading it, but not
before it had screamed and pulled a razor-sharp claw through his clothing.
He made to grin at Artemi, hoping she would be impressed by the move, but found her wide-eyed and staring at something beyond. Morghiad followed her line of sight. All around them, eisiels crouched and bobbed with teeth flashing and eyes glowing. Their bodies were wet with their own black blood. Without a word, Artemi lowered the burning torch onto the fuse and almost immediately it sparked up. Time to move.
Seizing her arm, he dragged her into the building behind them. There
was no way back to the farm gates for them now. They were completely trapped.
“Can’t you do your accessway trick?”
“I’ve never taken another person through before. It could kill you.” Plus, it was a nasty enough experience, and not something he wished for her to go through.
“We’re both already dead.”
He looked about himself for other options, but found none. The eisiels were closing in upon their prey. There was nothing else to be done. “I’ll have to hold you close. The smaller the
area we take up, the better it’ll be.” And just where was he going to open this accessway to? He knew nothing of the area, and Hestavos would require too much space to be folded. They would be travelling blind.
Morghiad took a breath, pulled Artemi’s warm body to him in as tight an embrace as he could manage, and began to wield with her fires. She had been right about the limits set upon this place. As much as he tried, he could not form anything larger than the slimmest strand of blue fire. It was enough to tear apart, and still enough to draw shrill, rasping cries from the
eisiels.
The void opened before them, dark and empty, and they both toppled through it.
Freezing, biting, horrible cold dug into his flesh and made his bones feel brittle. But he held on fast to his wife, and buried his face amongst the heat given off by the fibres of her hair. They hit the ground hard, and the accessway snapped shut behind them.
She was shivering in his arms while they lay upon the sand, catching their breath. Morghiad felt like death had already taken a part of him, but that the piece that remained alive only
did so out of fear and hope for Artemi. Once his blood had begun to thaw, and he felt as if his muscles might operate again, he uncurled himself from around her. She smiled at him prettily, and helped him to his feet.
There could be no doubt that they were in the middle of the desert; on all sides there was black sky, stars and below that was a sea of sand. A thunderclap to their left caused them to spin in its direction, but the sound was delayed. Already a huge pillar of smoke was clawing its way to escape the confines of ground. The farm was destroyed.
Morghiad realised he was holding her too tightly, and he began to ease his arm from around her waist. He muttered a brief apology and hunted the horizon for a sign of the road. He could see none. Damn. Deserts had a habit of becoming awfully cold at night, and already he could feel the second bite of the frost that wanted to form from his sweat. “Artemi...”
When he turned to face her again, his lips were met by hers. She kissed him softly and briefly, but it was enough to take his breath from his lungs. He loved her; there were no other words that came close to
expressing how he felt, and at that moment, there was nothing else but love. He brushed the loose strands of hair from her face and held their heat between his fingers. “I don’t want to be away from you again, and I want to give you a chance – I want you to survive this. My life for yours.” Artemi did not speak. She did not even bother to display any acknowledgement of his offer to save her. Instead she planted her face upon his again, and started pulling his clothing from his body. Far be it from her to demonstrate any kind of gratitude for his sacrifice and all the
effort he had put into saving her! Not even so much as a, ‘Thank you, dear husband’! And after the fire ants! Blazes, how he’d hated those damned fire ants! In spite of that insult, hidden inside his boots so many years earlier, he’d come here to save her. He ought to have demanded that she a
pologise for it once and for all, but he failed to arrest her kisses.
There was a moment of panic in his mind, a moment where he feared the creature he would become might resemble those images of horror he had encountered at the farm, but that fear was gone before he had time to think
on it. Artemi’s fire poured through him in surges of inferno that promised to scour him clean of all negative emotions and all pain. Nalka ran from him with the haste of a creature harried by something fiercer, and he was happy to see it gone from his life.
Her power had grown more intoxicating with its advancement, and the more he imbibed, the more he hungered for another drop. There were things he could better see when The Blazes coursed along his veins: the grains of sand about him, the structures that lay beyond the horizon and the people that moved through the city
miles beyond. He could feel the fires that ran through them, through everything that existed in the world. It was all energy – even the most basic of creatures were made of it. And the cold, stone rocks that they crawled upon could be broken down and made into fires too.
Artemi was the knot in the fibres of it all, where vast amounts of that power had become tangled and concentrated into one, small body. She was his route to freedom. If he died from this, then through her he could walk The Blazes and become a part of them, perhaps even control them. He
could escape true death and find a way to save her.
“I am yours,” Artemi whispered to him, and he desperately wanted to tell her that she had it the wrong way round. But before he could, he fell into the fires that wanted to destroy him with ecstasies he could not bear, and the world turned silent.
Chapter 13
The horizon had darkened and the air had grown cold. Artemi was no longer in the cell; there was open sky above her and a sand dune at the periphery of her vision. She had parted company with her clothes at some point, though she could not recall when or how. The sun hid beyond the horizon, and stars still hung like candle flames that felt no wind. The desert had a sort of silence to it that was thick and heavy, so much so that she was sure she could hear music playing in her head. She brushed some of the
sand from her arms and clambered slowly to her feet. Her joints felt unusually stiff, as if they had not moved in some time or she had just engaged in another one of her lengthy battles with Morghiad.
Artemi stumbled to the top of the dune to gain a better vantage point across the land. As she neared the top, an oil-covered, jet creature flew out from behind it and knocked her onto her back. Its teeth were hideous things that jutted out from its face; an unidentifiable liquid dripped from them and onto her neck. The eyes were gone, but there was something she
recognised about its face. Oh... please let this not be...
In her mind, she felt as if she were running. There was something wrong with her left leg, but she dreamed that she had a sword in her hand, and that she would soon end the life of this poor creature. It was no longer a thing capable of conscious thought or reflection. Out of nowhere, a blade slashed through the eisiel’s neck and a foot kicked it hard in the side. The dead eisiel fell to the ground beside her. And there, looking as smug and arrogant and pleased with himself as she had ever seen him, as well as
being naked as the day he was born, was Morghiad.
“Burn you, idiot! I thought that was you!” Alive? He was bloody well alive!
“I am sorry to disappoint you.” He helped her up and kissed her, which she felt happen through his lips. Oddly, the strangeness of it was awfully familiar.
“You’re inside my head.”
“You’re in mine,” he frowned. “I did not give you permission to do that to me.”
“You’re assuming I want to be there.” Inside, she was thrilled by her
relief, but Artemi gave him a coy smile and went to collect her clothing. Much of it had been buried beneath the sand. As she faced away from him, she felt the force of his feelings for her, and light of Achellon, they were powerful! Never in a thousand years would she ever have supposed that he had felt that way about her. It was like bathing in the full strength of the sun! Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. Though, now that she thought about it, the way her heart had ached for his presence during her captivity had been equally as formidable an emotion to contend with. Artemi
savoured the feeling of him watching her, and took her time getting dressed.
They found the road back to the city by sharing her power to sense the environment around them. Hestavos was quite distant, and the dead farm felt like a horrid pit of burned decay nearby. They also sensed the figures of eleven individuals, walking toward the city. It had to be Ulena and the wielders.
Morghiad and Artemi picked their feet up and marched, double time, toward the escapees. Artemi would have pressed for a faster pace, but her husband was weary to the bones. He
had put everything he had into rescuing her, and his leg was only just beginning to mend itself properly. She owed him a great deal, and she was glad that she now had a future in which to pay her debts to him. She smiled at the thought of that.
“Temi!” Ulena cried when she saw them trotting over the top of the sand dunes. She threw her arms about Artemi as soon as they were close enough. Unlike Morghiad, who was cut about, scraped and pinh-covered, Ulena looked remarkably neat and clean. It was as if she had simply walked into the desert for a pleasant
day out. Behind her were the withered figures of the wielders. Four of them clung to each other for support while they walked; their confinement having made them barely strong enough to stand.
Artemi felt a flash of embarrassment from Morghiad, who was now looking firmly at the ground. Blazes, she had not even noticed that they were naked. And why would he care about that? Morghiad had never been bashful about her body or anyone else’s. Unless... did he think she would become jealous? Over a group of nearskeletons? Fool man!
She tried to communicate to him through their link that it was alright to look at anything but the floor, though she was sure that all she really succeeded in doing was demonstrating her approval at his current shame. If this was how complicated their relationship would be, she was going to have to find a way of properly managing this river of emotions that now coursed through her head.
Ulena looked at them with some puzzlement. “I assume you’ve sorted out your... problem?” Her hand moved to her hip. “And should I be addressing you as Lady Fevtari, or something?”
“No,” Artemi said, just as Morghiad corrected her with, “Lady Calyrish.”
Ulena’s puzzlement turned into a frown. Evidently she had decided it would be necessary to educate Morghiad. “In Sunidara, no names are written over by marriage, and all sons take the mother’s name.”
“I’m not Lady anything.”
“Yes you are,” Morghiad hissed. He was going to have to be worked upon.
Ulena threw her hands up. “I see that nothing has changed. Let’s get home so that I can sleep in my bed and
get some peace.”
Artemi met eyes with her husband as her friend walked away, and smiled at him. He was really very good-looking. She thought about telling him so, but decided to use her eyes to communicate the thought instead. He seemed somewhat surprised by it.
There was a considerable amount of excitement and confusion when they arrived at the city, though Artemi’s exhaustion was too great for her to enjoy it. The wielders were each put up at an inn, where Artemi was very glad to be reunited with her horse. She and Morghiad rode upon Cloud to Fate’s together, and arrived to a rather shocked-looking Mirke. He was the first to receive a custom-made prison formed from Blaze.
They found four more sword masters during their sweep of the school, and each one was rounded up like a loose horse using Artemi’s fires as fetters. The Blaze masters were tied up too, using gar-siras, which they had taught Artemi about in the first instance. It was more than a little satisfying to see them all locked away in the very cells that she had been placed in. When
the rest of the cadets
returned, there would be a great deal of explaining and discussing and arranging to do. For the moment, it was all Artemi could do to keep walking, and Morghiad was barely able to stand.
“Let’s go back to my room,” she said softly.
He shook his head. “You don’t want to go in there. We’ll sort it out tomorrow.” A peculiar set of emotions came from him with those words. They were sensations of success, but also of guilt and disgust. She did not ask any further, and instead they returned to his chamber. The first thing Artemi did was to pour a bath for herself, while
her husband went to lie down on the bed.
“Do you want to come in with me?” she called. But there was no response. The river of his emotions that had been coursing through her mind was now still and quiet, like a pond with no wind across it. When she went to inspect him, she found that he had fallen fast asleep.
The Fireblade Array: 4-Book Bundle Page 179