Fire & Chasm

by Chelsea M. Campbell

  Slowly, I get to my feet. My legs are still a little wobbly, but I can move again. “You said you’d never let me go back. Maybe you’re the one who let me escape in the first place.”

  His voice is dangerously low, burning with rage. “You think I would sabotage my own top secret experiment and let a weapon I created—a killer with ties to my daughter—loose on the streets?”

  “And yet,” I say, keeping perfectly calm, despite his outburst, “those are exactly the reasons why you would have done it. I was your project, and you knew what you were doing to me was wrong. The guilt was eating you alive, wasn’t it? You’d cast a spell to keep Leora safe from me. You didn’t know I would find her.” Or be drawn to her. And now I wonder if it was a coincidence I ended up in Ashbury, in the same town as her, or if it was something else. Except I refuse to believe that. I’m meant to be with Leora, and not because of some spell. “The first day you put me in that chair, when you made the blood sacrifice to the Chasm, you didn’t know it would be her blood you were sacrificing, too. When you went home and found her bleeding all over, in all the places you’d cut me—”

  “I didn’t.” Hadrin’s voice shakes. “I never held the knife. I never touched you!”

  No, not then, and not with the knife, but he told them what to do and he was the only one with the authority to stop it. “You were scared. You were worried about her. But you were worried about me, too. You saw how terrified she was, and she wasn’t even in any pain. You must have thought about me then, about how I had no one—”

  “Enough. This is all speculation. And that was years before you escaped. You know that.”

  “So you let me suffer for years, the guilt building up in you day by day, until you couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “It wasn’t my job to coddle you. In order for the spells to take, we had to make you suffer.” He glances up at me, then looks away.

  I take a step closer to him. He flinches, as if I’ve made a move to attack, which I haven’t. I think if I’d drawn the knife he would have held still. “You ranked high enough.” My voice is a whisper, as if we’re talking about something shameful. “You could have gotten the keys to all those doors. You would have known who’d be on duty and made sure they were on break or something. It’s funny that no one got hurt, don’t you think? That all the timing worked out so I never had to confront anyone. Not until later, when they’d come after me.”

  “You’re saying that out of the entire guild, you think I’m the only one who could have done it?”

  “No. But you’re the only one who had a reason to.”

  “It could have been anyone. A janitor. A guard. Someone who felt sorry for you. Some misguided sap who thought he was doing a good deed by releasing you.”

  “I don’t understand why you can’t admit it. It’s not like I’d tell anyone, not if you don’t want me to, not even Leora.”

  “No matter what you want to believe, it wasn’t me.”

  “Chasm take you! You saved an innocent kid. I didn’t deserve to be there, and you let me go. Why can’t you admit it? What’s so horrible about it, about me, that you’d fight so hard to deny it?!”

  He’s quiet for a minute, just watching me. Then, his voice heavy, like speaking at all takes a great effort, he says, “Because I was the one who brought you there. I was the one who ordered all of the horrible things to happen. And I was the one who thought about calling it all off a thousand times, yet never did. And then it was too late. The Guild decided the experiment was a failure. You were too dangerous, and we didn’t get the spells we were after. One day there was an order from higher up that my team was to permanently end the experiment. I was supposed to kill you, Azeril.”

  “But you didn’t.” He could have. He’d already cast the spell to keep Leora safe.

  “You’d been through enough. All because of me. But I won’t say I let you go, because if you ever thought I had done something to bring about your escape, then you might start to think you had a reason not to hate me. That I was somehow even the least bit worthy of your forgiveness, which I am not.”

  “Lucky for you, I would never think that.”

  “I should hope not,” he says. “But, thankfully, there’s no chance of it, since, like I said, it wasn’t me.”

  “Right. It wasn’t you.”

  “I’m glad we understand each other.” He brushes off his robes. “Now, we’d better be off. If you’re done with your little diversion, we have a High Priest to thwart.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I wake up in the night, sweating and terrified. I kick the blankets off, struggling to get free, gasping for breath.

  Leora stirs next to me. Here in her bed in her room. She pulled a rug over the dark stain on the floor, so neither of us has to see it. I would have slept in the guest room—not because Hadrin wanted me to, but because of that stain—and had her come with me, but the guest room felt so impersonal. There’s something comforting about being so close to her here, near all her old toys, the remnants of a childhood I never had.

  I take a few breaths, trying to calm back down. I dreamed I was there again, at the guild. Not surprising, given what happened today. Just catching a glimpse of it sent me running.

  I rub my face with the heels of my palms. Maybe some fears are meant to stay. Maybe they get so ingrained that they become a vital part of you, like a second heart, so that if you actually got rid of them, you wouldn’t be able to function anymore. I slide out of bed. My heart—my own, real heart—is still racing from the dream, and I don’t think I’m going to fall back to sleep anytime soon.

  The floor is cold against my bare feet. Leora stirs again, and I pause, waiting to see if she’s awake, sort of hoping that she is. If I could hear her voice, maybe it would banish the lingering feeling that it wasn’t just a nightmare—that the wizards’ guild is the reality and this place, this dark room with blood staining the floor, is the dream.

  But she doesn’t wake up, and I slip out into the hall. It’s so dark out here. It could be any hallway. It could lead anywhere. I swallow down a growing sense of unease and consider going back into the room. But I hate myself for being so afraid. I couldn’t even look at the guild, and now a dream is going to make me a prisoner?

  Okay, so I do slip back into the room, the door making a slow creak as I push it open, but only to grab my belt and my knife. She left it out for me the other day, on the table, like she said, and I didn’t last five minutes before taking it. Its familiar heat flares to life in my hand as I grip the hilt. Its fire creeps through my veins, burning my skin and lighting up my brain. Any traces of fear vanish. I exhale, finally myself again.

  The boy creeps back into the hall, a wicked smile tugging on one side of his mouth. Let the wizards come for him now that he has the knife. Just let one of them run into him here, in the dark. The spells are fun, but they take too long to kill them. The spells make them scream, but the boy must stay unnoticed. Some of the wizards have those spiral tattoos, like the one on the boy’s wrist, that protect them from his magic. But the knife . . . The knife is silent. Always. Most of them don’t get a chance to scream, not if he doesn’t want them to. And the knife’s so good at slicing through their fragile skin, right through those tattoos they love so much, rendering them useless. Just let them try and protect themselves from him with the knife in his hand.

  I blink, though the hall is still pitch black, trying to get my bearings. Something’s not right. I’m mixing things up. And . . . there are no wizards here, are there?

  But . . . I was there, just now. In that room. They had me in the chair. I remember. I don’t want to, but I can’t forget. That was too real to have been a dream. So I give in a little more to the knife’s heat, letting it sear away all the thoughts I don’t want to have.

  The boy presses forward, through the silent hall, his heartbeat loud in his ears.

  There’s a creaking sound behind him.

  Fire races along his nerves. The hairs on the back o
f his neck stand on end. He holds perfectly still—a boy, a weapon, a murderer—there, in the dark.

  The creak came from the room. The one with the blood. With his blood spilled across the floor, from when they cut into him. He closes his eyes and still feels their knives. How they were so sharp it didn’t hurt at first, and he thought maybe nothing had happened. But he was wrong—so, so wrong—and now they’re back for more. So the boy presses himself against the wall, silent and waiting.

  He holds his breath for a long time, his whole body tense, but nothing ever comes. It was just a sound. Just the walls settling. The boy thinks about casting something, feeling for energies to draw from, just in case. There’s only one source besides himself, one life to drain. But that doesn’t mean anything, not here, not when they have those tattoos. There could be a whole slew of wizards, just waiting for the boy to let his guard down, their energies hidden from him by the spiral marks.

  The boy listens, straining to hear even the slightest hint of breathing. Anything that might mean they’re here, coming for him. But there’s nothing, not a sound, and the air only smells of dust, not of bitter herbs.

  He starts to wonder if maybe there aren’t any wizards here, after all.

  No . . . not here. But close. They’re not all that far from here, over in their guild, asleep in their beds. And here the boy lurks with his knife and his spells, and they have no idea. He wonders how many of them he could kill before they managed to stop him.

  It wouldn’t be enough—it wouldn’t be all of them—and yet there’s really only one that matters. The boy doesn’t even have to think about it, to know which wizard he would kill if he could hurt only one.

  And he knows exactly where to find him.

  The boy walks up the hill to the wizards’ guild, right up to their front doors. Four wizards stand outside the main entrance—four bright spots of energy to be drained. They’re here, even though it’s the middle of the night, talking and laughing.

  Not for long.

  The wizards see him coming, but they don’t know to stop him. They don’t recognize the monster they created, finally coming home. He gets close—way too close—before one of them holds up a hand and says, “Kid, you can’t—”

  But that’s as far as he gets before the words to a spell are on the boy’s lips. The first spell he used to kill. The one that turns the lungs to ash. He pulls from the wizard’s own energy to destroy him and watches as he falters, choking, taken by surprise.

  The other three wizards rush toward the boy. One of them tries to cast a spell to silence him, but the boy draws the knife and slits his throat. It feels so good for the knife to taste flesh. Blood sprays from the wizard as he falls to the ground, joining the first, who’s no longer moving. The blood sizzles when it touches the blade and burns away.

  Two wizards left. They try to run. The boy recites a different spell, one that makes the blood vessels in their feet shrivel until every step causes insufferable pain, like walking with broken glass in their skin. The wizards stumble, screaming for help. For the hundreds of others inside the guild walls who might save them.

  Might, but won’t. Not tonight.

  The boy catches them and slashes their throats, one and then the other. He sees the fear in their eyes, the moment when they know their fate is decided. And then they lie on the ground, silent and unmoving.

  He doesn’t even try opening the doors. They might be locked. But the boy doesn’t need to find out. He casts a spell that makes the doors wither and decay so fast they explode into dust. A surge of power made possible by having so many wizards nearby to draw from. Wizards who can’t see him, who don’t yet know he’s here. So many sources of energy, so that his spells seem limitless.

  It feels almost as good as the knife’s fire, letting his spells take over.

  A door in the hallway opens. A wizard rushes out, terror on his face. The boy knows that he heard the screaming outside. He casts the spell to desiccate him. To shrivel his organs until he’s only a husk. It happens so fast. The wizard never gets anywhere near the boy, doesn’t even know what’s happening to him, and then he’s crumpled on the floor.

  The boy smiles. Another wizard appears, coming at him from behind, from another hallway. The boy feels the wizard’s energy before he sees him. He twists and buries the knife in the wizard’s chest. His hands shake from the euphoria. From the sweet pleasure of cutting into this wizard, especially so soon after the others.

  But there will be more flesh to cut, more pleasure to be had, when he finds the one he came for.

  The boy sees a map on the wall. He locates the living quarters, where the wizard will be. It would be easier to get there without the wall in the way, so he casts the decaying spell again and blasts a hole through it. The spell is silent, the wall in front of him disintegrating into dust. Now he’s in another hallway. One with numbers on the doors.

  45B flickers in his mind. It’s where the wizard sleeps. The wizard. The one that deserves to die more than all the others. The boy doesn’t remember how he knows this number, but it doesn’t matter. The wizard will be there, in that room.

  The boy turns a corner. A wizard standing in the hall stares at him, his mouth open, not sure what he’s seeing. There are so many energy sources here, in this part of the guild, that the boy can’t tell which ones are in their rooms and which are lurking in the hall, like this one.

  The wizard hesitates, fumbling at his belt for ingredients to a spell. But then fear takes over as the boy gets closer, as the wizard sees the knife in his hand and the blood on his clothes, and then the wizard is going to scream. The boy considers letting him. Let them all come for him. Let them all die.

  But if that happened, he might not get to spend time alone with the one he came for. That one might get away. Or he might die a quick death, and then it would be over, and that would not make the boy happy.

  So he casts the decaying spell on this wizard before he can make a sound. One moment the wizard is drawing a breath to scream, and the next he’s a pile of dust. When the wizards wake in the morning, they won’t even find his body. They will never know what happened to him.

  The boy moves on. He finds room 45B and uses the door to get in, so he can close it again. So no one will interrupt.

  The wizard is asleep in his bed, as the boy knew he would be. The boy crouches next to the bed, the obsidian burning in his hand, begging to be used. The wizard said he never held the knives that cut the boy. He only pulled the strings. But none of it would have happened without him. The boy would have stayed whole, unbroken, if it weren’t for this wizard. And the boy has his own knife now, and the wizard’s throat is right there, only a hand’s breadth away. One quick movement and he could slice it open. The wizard would wake up just in time to bleed out all over his bed while the boy watched. He’d see the recognition in the wizard’s eyes. And the wizard would wonder at first if this was really happening, because it couldn’t—it couldn’t—be real, but it would be.

  Except that would be too quick. And the wizard deserves so much worse than that.

  The boy whispers the words that make a little ball of light appear in the air. There’s a zap of energy that runs down his arm, since he can’t use this wizard’s life against him—not with the tattoo—but the knife’s fire burns so hot he barely feels anything else.

  The sudden light wakes up the wizard. He raises a hand to shield his eyes and scrambles to sit up. Then he notices the boy. “Azeril?” He glances around the room, as if he’s not sure where he is. “Chasm take me, did something happen to Leora?”

  “Oh, the Chasm’s going to take you, all right.”

  He squints at the boy. “I can think of only one reason why you’d be here. Is she—”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about. It couldn’t be anyone important—the wizard doesn’t have a heart. Or does he?” The boy gestures toward the wizard’s chest with the tip of the knife. “We could find out.”

  “Azeril?” There’s a tre
mor of fear in his voice. A sound the boy has never heard before. It’s like the wizard doesn’t recognize him when he’s not in the chair.

  The boy smiles. The obsidian blade gleams in the light he cast. “You’re right. There is only one reason I would ever come here again. I think I’ll start with your stomach. Long, shallow cuts at first. Though it will be difficult. The knife will want to go further than that. I might lose control of it. But don’t worry—if I do, I’ll heal you up and start again. Oh, but wait. I can’t. Not with that tattoo on your arm.” The boy flashes the matching one on his wrist. “So maybe I’ll start with that instead. Should I slice through it, or should I cut it out of your skin completely, just to be on the safe side?”

  The wizard stares at him. At the blood that stains his hands, that’s spattered on his clothes. His mouth moves a little, but no words come out. Then he says, “This isn’t you.”

  “Because I’m not screaming? Or bleeding?” The boy laughs. “You’ve seen so much of me. So much of my blood escaping to the floor. But it’s only one part of me. And I’ve only seen one part of you—just the outside. Tonight we’re going to trade. You’re going to watch me slowly slice you into pieces, and I’m going to see what’s inside you.”

  “Azeril, listen to me,” the wizard says, his voice steady and almost maddeningly calm, though his face is pale. “You don’t want to do this.”

  But he does. There’s nothing else he wants more. “Don’t I? You never showed me any mercy. I was innocent then, I didn’t deserve any of it, and you didn’t care. So why should I spare you now?”

  “Because you’ll regret it tomorrow. When you’re yourself again.”

  “This is who I am. Get up. Off the bed. Now.” The boy motions for him to move.

  The wizard hesitates. His eyes dart to the boy’s, searching for something. The boy doesn’t know what it is, but he’s certain it isn’t there.

  Then the boy reaches out with the knife and slashes the wizard’s arm, cutting right through the spiral tattoo that protects him. The wizard cries out.