It wasn’t the pools he wanted, but the confluence beneath them. He meant to cast. New horror settled over me like drifted snow. Ruslan couldn’t cast anything that’d harm me, oh no. Instead, he was destroying an entire fucking city on the off chance he could drive Kiran out of hiding.
I shook my head at Kiran, despair and fury choking me. “You set one foot near that confluence, and the ssarez-kai will grab you before you ever get a chance to cast.”
“I have to try.” Tears streaked his cheeks. He didn’t brush them away; I didn’t think he even knew he was weeping. “If I had let Lizaveta kill me, this wouldn’t be happening. But I chose life. I can’t let an entire city burn because of it.”
“I know what you feel.” Horrors like this were what Vidai had wanted to end by destroying Ninavel’s confluence. I’d believed the cost of his solution far too high. I’d helped save Ninavel and Ruslan with it, and now a different city was dying because of that choice. “But don’t let guilt make you stupid. Going to that confluence will only help Ruslan, nobody else.”
“I can’t watch them die!”
“Kiran, the confluence is too far.” Cara was right at my shoulder, her voice tightly controlled. “You’ll never reach it before Ruslan burns the whole city to ash. Those people need help now. Can’t you do anything from here? I don’t care what danger it brings us.”
I did care. But faced with the charnel-house horror of the city, that worry felt too selfish to voice. If Kiran could do something to save lives, I couldn’t gainsay him.
Lena held out her hands to Kiran. “My strength is far less than yours, but I’ll give you all I can.”
Kiran shook his head wildly. “I can’t take from you. I’d need far more than mere sips of your ikilhia, and Ruslan bound me not to harm you.” He flung his hands wide, indicating the barren stone of the ridgetop. “There’s no life here! Nothing I can use.”
“Yes, there is.” Teo shoved past Lena to confront Kiran. “Take my life. You’ve no binding stopping you from that.”
Lena made a strangled noise of protest, but I understood. Didn’t matter how much Teo had railed against magic in the past. Raishal was in Prosul Akheba. If I were in Teo’s place, I’d slit my own throat in a heartbeat if I thought it’d give her the least chance to live.
Kiran backed away, thrusting his hands behind himself—a gesture that told me just how tempted he was to take Teo’s offer. “Ruslan is casting a channeled spell using the full power of Ninavel’s confluence. Even if I take all your ikilhia, it’s not enough to stop him.”
Teo lunged at him. “But you could bolster the citadel’s existing wards. Give the scholars and patients in the collegium that much longer to reach shelter in the Khalat’s tunnels before the wards fail.”
Kiran threw an agonized glance toward the magefire and lightning obscuring the Khalat. “Maybe, but—I’d have to kill you, Teo, I can’t—”
Teo’s hands clawed into Kiran’s bloodied shirt. “Raishal is in the collegium. Do you think I can live with myself after watching her burn?”
Kiran let out a shuddering breath and gripped Teo’s wrists.
Mother of maidens, he was going to cast. I shut my eyes, my stomach twisting into a barbed knot. Teo had saved my life. I couldn’t watch him die. I especially didn’t want to see Kiran’s ecstasy while killing him.
Or imagine Ruslan’s triumph when he felt Kiran murder a friend.
Chapter Twenty
(Kiran)
Teo had ripped away the gossamer protections around his ikilhia. Desperate determination blazed from the unguarded flame of his soul, accompanied by a swirl of horror and guilt that matched Kiran’s own.
Deeper yet was a despair that stabbed Kiran like a poisoned blade. Teo didn’t believe Kiran’s casting had any chance of saving Raishal. He thought her death a certainty, a judgment from his three-fold goddess for his curing of Kiran. He meant to save what other lives he could and fling his soul like a burning ember into Nakoali’s endless night, a cry of rejection and accusation: I will ensure I can never again fall. I will not be the curse upon humankind that you made mages to be.
Holding Teo’s wrists, Kiran’s certainty was equally bitter. He didn’t want to cast. One thing to take Stevannes’s life in the mountains. He’d barely known the man. But to take the life of someone whose pain he understood, whose joys and terrors he knew…
The more lives you take, the easier it will become, Lizaveta had assured him in Ninavel.
He was terrified she spoke truth. That he would prove Teo right about a mage’s nature even as he killed him. But he could not stand by and let the city burn the way he’d watched Veddis die. There was hope for Raishal and everyone in the citadel. Ruslan’s true target was Kiran, not them. If Kiran could hold the wards long enough for them to reach safety—
Kiran swept aside revulsion and regret. “I will save as many as I can,” he whispered to Teo, and drew upon the shining flame of Teo’s soul.
Power gushed into him. Fire sparked bright in his blood, the rapture of it terrible. Pressure built on his barriers, a tide begging for release. Kiran hurried to bind energies into a shielding pattern that he might cast onto the Khalat.
Under the force of Teo’s life pouring into him, the damaged wall surrounding Kiran’s oldest memories juddered. The entire spell-structure fractured.
With a cry, Kiran thrust Teo away. The flow of power was broken, but he hadn’t acted fast enough. The wall shattered in a soundless explosion of energies. His consciousness fragmented into shards of sensation and emotion.
He was screaming, fire scouring his soul while the scorpions laughed—
He was curled up still and small on his bed, his hands over his ears, but still he could hear the drip of Ralia’s blood in the silence—
He was crying and reaching for his favorite amaya in the child garden, as rough hands dragged him away—
Kiran fought free like a drowning man gasping for air. Something was wrong with him. He wasn’t a child, he was… he…
Dark crawling in his eyes—the slumping shadows of beasts—copper-sharp stink on his skin—
Inside his mind, red mist boiled out of the wall’s wreckage and spread into an intricately patterned net. Shocked into a brief, freezing instant of sanity, Kiran recognized it: a compulsion spell. Ruslan must have woven it into the block when he first walled off Kiran’s memories, as a safeguard meant to be triggered if the block should fail.
Kiran snatched at the power still burning in his blood and cast a strike against the coalescing spell. But his strike was too hurried, too wild; he failed to sever the pattern. The spell tightened over his ikilhia, binding him fast, even as he slid back toward madness.
People were shouting at him. Shadowy figures crowded around him. Some looked more real than others. A girl with fire in her remaining amber eye, though her body was a flayed, gore-streaked ruin; a scarred clansman who looked at him in silent sorrow; a uniformed, red-haired man with a great wound in his chest and an air of cold contempt. Kiran ignored them. They didn’t matter. Neither did the pain pooling hot in his head. He knew what he had to do.
Find Ruslan. Yet all else beyond that imperative was confusion. He didn’t know where he was or where his master might be. He sent a frantic, wordless cry for aid into the aether, but received no answer.
Your amulet, little brother. A new figure joined the throng around Kiran. His body flickered between that of a boy and a man, but his slanted gray eyes, sandy hair, and flat cheekbones stayed reassuringly familiar regardless of his age. Take the charm off. Then Ruslan will hear you.
The amulet. Yes; he sensed now the thick, muffling blanket of its spellwork. Kiran lifted the charm off his chest, but the chain was snagged in his hair. Deep in his mind, something prickled like a sleep-numbed limb waking up. The prickling intensified into thorns driving deep—oh, he did not like this, but he had to get the amulet off. Before he could free the chain and remove the charm entirely, a bruising grip caught his wrists.
“Kiran, stop!”
The nathahlen who held him was lean and brown with startlingly green eyes. His ikilhia was a dim but familiar spark, his body shot through with jarringly dissonant threads of power. Kiran knew him, though he couldn’t name him. Nor could he obey him. He had to remove the amulet and find Ruslan. If the nathahlen would not release him, he would strike the man down.
Yet another, deeper imperative seized his soul in bonds of steel, saying in Ruslan’s voice: Cast no spell that would harm this man.
Kiran tore his wrists free, heedless of pain. The green-eyed man promptly tackled him. Kiran twisted and thrashed and kicked, but his captor was strong, and he had help. A woman joined him, tall and blonde and grimly determined, and Kiran could not cast against her either. Together she and the green-eyed man wrestled Kiran prone and wrenched his arms up behind his back. The man’s knee dug hard into Kiran’s spine, pressing him against stone, and the woman was a weight trapping his legs.
He had to find Ruslan. He could not surrender. He heaved against their hold.
The man yelled, “Lena, get in here quick! He’ll break his arms if he keeps this up.”
Hands touched his temples. A new presence filled his head, cool and clear as a sunlit stream, yet full of dismayed concern for him.
The sandy-haired youth shouted at him, Fight her, brother! She’ll stop you reaching Ruslan! But the newcomer was another of those he could not touch with magic. Kiran struck instead at the spell pattern bound in his amulet. If he couldn’t remove the charm, maybe he could break its power.
The newcomer hastily wrapped the amulet in a protective veil of energy that disrupted his attack. Kiran, wait. Please. Let me help you. She flowed through his mind, dispelling specters and shadows, healing raw wounds, coaxing him into reasserting order where there had been chaos and darkness.
Like fog burning off in the sun, his confusion cleared. He knew now who helped him.
“Lena,” he croaked, and felt her assent, the blaze of her relief.
But Ruslan’s compulsion remained. Kiran fought on against Dev and Cara, straining to reach and remove his amulet. This was not like the ssarez-kai’s summoning, a diffuse call possible to ignore through sheer force of will. He could no more refuse to obey Ruslan’s imperative than he could stop the sun rising. The best he could do was channel that obedience into physical effort rather than casting again at his amulet.
A response flowed from Lena, swift and urgent. Kiran, you have been so long in Ruslan’s shadow that you still see him with the eyes of a child. He is not some invincible, infallible god. The compulsion binding you is old and not tied into your mark-bond. I haven’t the strength left to break it, but you can. You must.
The depth of her weariness was a dragging undertow. After her effort to repair his mind, her reserves were little more than a nathahlen’s.
But how could he break Ruslan’s spell? He’d already spent most of the power he’d taken from Teo. Kiran’s muscles cramped with the effort of his struggle to escape Dev and Cara. They too were panting with exertion.
Dev gasped out, “Melly! Look in Teo’s pack and bring Lena any vials you find.”
“No drugs,” Kiran protested. Conscious, he retained enough control to stop himself drawing power from Janek or even Teo, who lay sprawled mere feet away. Teo’s ikilhia was the barest of flickers, but he still lived. Nor would Kiran change that. Taking Teo’s life to help Prosul Akheba was far different than taking it to save himself—or worse, stealing it in a haze of drugged confusion so he might break the amulet’s spellwork.
You are still the Kiran I knew in Tamanath. Lena’s thought was a brief, wistful flash, but behind it, he felt how strongly she had feared that his time at Ruslan’s side had irrevocably changed him.
She said aloud to Dev, “He’s right, drugs are too great a risk. Can you tie him so he can’t reach his amulet?”
A quick scrambling of feet on stone, and Melly said, “Here’s the rope.”
Dev grunted to Cara, “I’ll hold. You tie.” He levered his knee into Kiran’s back and yanked Kiran’s arms higher. Kiran thrashed harder yet when rope touched his wrists, but Dev’s grip didn’t relent, and Cara worked with swift efficiency.
She bound his wrists and ankles tight. “Melly. Take Janek and stand watch. Keep your eyes searching the desert, hear? No gawping at us.”
“Got it,” Melly said, crisp as a guardswoman. For a flashing instant, Kiran wondered if all Tainted children were so self-possessed in a crisis. But yes, they must be. Dev didn’t like to speak of his past, but Kiran had heard enough to understand that Tainters who panicked or froze in the face of danger didn’t survive long.
Dev forced Kiran onto his side. Cara lashed his wrists to his ankles, leaving his back arched in an awkward bow that rendered his struggles futile.
“Don’t take your hands from me,” Kiran begged them. While Dev and Cara were so close, he could not cast any spells that might hurt them. “If you let go of me, I might—might set my bonds on fire or melt the amulet…” He didn’t think he could stop himself, especially now he knew mere physical effort was certain to fail.
Dev leaned on Kiran’s shoulder and hip, pinning him to the stone. “You’re not going anywhere.” To Lena, he said far more sharply, “Tell me you’ve got a plan, here.”
Lena’s hand settled cool on Kiran’s cheek. Kiran. If drugs are too dangerous, you must help me find another way to preserve you from Ruslan.
He was trying to think, hard as it was with Ruslan’s imperative clanging in his head. “The city. Is Ruslan still—still casting?” He couldn’t see southward, and the aether roiled with unsettled echoes.
Dev said, “The magefire vanished right after you pushed Teo away. All we see now is smoke.”
Ruslan knew, then. He’d stopped the attack on Prosul Akheba because he’d felt Kiran’s first, failed strike against his compulsion spell. With cold clarity, Kiran understood: triggering the compulsion had been Ruslan’s plan, all the way from when he’d handed Kiran to Marten in the mountains. He had indeed wanted Kiran to seek his childhood memories. Every attempt Kiran had made to get through the block had brought him closer to this moment. When Ruslan had searched Kiran’s memories after Lizaveta’s death, he must have seen how close the block was to failure. He’d forced Kiran into casting, knowing the block would shatter under the strain. Now Ruslan waited, attentive and patient as a hunting spider, ready to strike at Kiran the instant the mark-bond opened.
But Ruslan hadn’t known Lena was here to aid him. She was right; he wasn’t infallible. Ruslan had tailored the spell to Kiran’s childhood self, not the adult he had become. There might be spots where the pattern was ill-fitting, weaknesses he could exploit.
Mikail had once told him, You always want to hammer your way past a spell. Think it through first, little brother. Sometimes pincers are more effective than a battering ram.
Alone, neither he nor Lena had enough power to break the spell. But if they worked in perfect concert as he and Mikail had been trained to do—if they found a flaw in the pattern, and struck in simultaneous precision, Lena from outside the spell, he from within—there might be hope. If Lena was willing to try despite her exhaustion.
I am willing. Yet Lena’s agreement was flavored with doubt. She’d never been trained to merge minds so deeply as he and Mikail; nor had Kiran any experience with her style of casting.
“Need—need blood contact,” Kiran panted out.
Lena said, “Give me a knife. Dev, hold him still.”
“Believe me, I’m trying.” Dev forced Kiran’s head onto the stone and leaned his weight on Kiran’s shoulder.
A blade traced a shaky, stinging line over Kiran’s exposed collarbone. A hand closed over the cut, and Lena’s presence sharpened in his head. Every detail of the ordered layers of barriers protecting her innermost self sprang into brilliant, painful clarity—as did the ugly scar where he’d burned a gap into her memories.
They both cringed back from that thou
ght. But Lena reached for him again. Come, Kiran. Show me what we must do.
Achieving any kind of unity proved as challenging as learning to cast all over again. Lena kept wanting to braid their thoughts together with strange songs too complex and unfamiliar for Kiran to follow. When he tried to simply slide into her mind the way he’d learned to do with Mikail, she couldn’t control her instinctive recoil.
Yet she was as determined as he. One by one, she let down her inner walls, even as he held himself open, letting her be the one to press deeper. It wasn’t easy. Shame stung him as it never had with Mikail; there was so much he didn’t want her to see. But Ruslan had taught him well in the art of surrender.
Sinking into his mind, she was no less uncomfortable. She too had much she would have preferred to keep private. That he was so beautiful it stole her breath, yet she could no longer look at him without seeing him plunging a knife into Stevan’s heart. That she was envious of the friendship he shared with Dev, because she had forever severed her own deep-held bonds of friendship in leaving Alathia. Everyone she cared for would believe her a traitor, all but Marten, whom she’d left to face imprisonment and execution without even trying to fight for him. She would never see him again, and if she ever returned to the home she so loved, she too would be condemned as an oathbreaker. She was determined to defeat Ruslan and demons alike, but all she saw for herself beyond that defeat was shadows and ashes.
Kiran’s heart ached for her, even as she mourned Ruslan’s abuse of his love and trust. Out of shared sympathy and sorrow, they achieved a precarious union. A clumsy, uncertain merging compared to what Kiran experienced with Mikail, but it would have to suffice.
Together they searched Ruslan’s spell for flaws, melding Kiran’s experience in bindings with Lena’s ordered precision. There. A spot where the pattern was thin and warped, mismatched to Kiran’s adult ikilhia. They readied a blow: dual needles of power, slender but sharp, that would pierce the spell from without and within to disrupt its pattern.
The Labyrinth of Flame (The Shattered Sigil Book 3) Page 37