Balefire

by Jordan L. Hawk

  While she dove, Rupert and Iskander dragged some of the flotsam from the waves. Oars, Christine’s bow—now sadly waterlogged—and Rupert’s box.

  “My alchemy supplies,” Rupert said as he carefully set the box down. “Or what little I could bring. If you will allow it, Mr. Flaherty, I have a salve that will aid with the pain and speed healing.”

  Griffin nodded. “I’d be grateful.”

  Christine wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t suppose you have any warm blankets in there?”

  Though the sea was no colder than that off the coast of Widdershins, it was cool enough to discourage prolonged immersion. The shadow of the island fell across us, and the wind bit through our sodden clothing.

  “Perhaps I can help,” I said. “I sense an arcane line.”

  Griffin nodded. “I can see it. And others. The vortex here isn’t as large as the maelstrom by any stretch of the imagination, and the lines feeding into it are much thinner, but we shouldn’t be very far from one anywhere on the island.”

  Though the line might be thinner as Griffin said, it provided more than enough energy for what I needed. I placed my hands on the rock and carefully channeled my fire spell into the stone. The surface quickly warmed beneath my fingers, and I let it spread out from me.

  “Ah, that feels much better,” Christine said as she lay on her back against the stone. “I don’t suppose you can dry our clothes?”

  “Not without the risk of setting them aflame,” I replied ruefully. “I can heat smaller stones to put into our pockets or hold in our hands, as I did in Alaska.”

  Mother emerged from the waves, carrying Hattie’s knives gingerly in one hand, Griffin’s sword cane thrust through a loop on her skirt. While Rupert tended to Griffin, I took stock of our surroundings. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see. A large rock protruding from the waves, surrounded by smaller rocks. Barnacles clung to the tide line, clicking and popping as the incoming surf splashed against them. Above us loomed a sheer wall of dark gray stone. Though the cliff face was weathered and split by countless storms, I couldn’t imagine scaling it, even if we’d had the equipment to make the attempt.

  “I must say, this doesn’t look very promising.” Iskander eyed the cliff above us as well. “Perhaps we can swim out a bit and return to land at a more favorable location?”

  “No,” Griffin said. Rupert had finished his ministrations, and though the abrasions still looked painful, their redness already seemed to be fading. “The barrier re-sealed itself behind us.”

  “Or someone caused it to,” Rupert said darkly. “And it reaches all the way to the sea floor, to keep ketoi from swimming under. Sod it.” He caught himself and took a deep breath. “Forgive my language.”

  Hattie snorted. Rupert ignored her.

  “There must be something we can do.” Christine sat up and glared at the cliff face and scowled, as though she meant to collapse it through will alone. “Kander, did my lunch survive? I think better when I’m not hungry.”

  “You ate immediately before we left the ship,” I pointed out.

  “Just be happy she’s not invoking the custom of the sea, my dear,” Griffin said. “At least, not yet.”

  Christine cast him a withering glare. “For that remark, you’re first on the menu.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Mother said. “I think I spotted something when I was retrieving Griffin’s sword cane. If you can wait a few minutes before resorting to cannibalism, I’ll be right back.”

  With nothing to do but watch the tide encroach on our very temporary refuge, I sat beside Griffin. Hattie and Christine both inspected the cliff face, Hattie going so far as to climb a short distance before giving up.

  “Never thought I’d wish the manor was a bit less well defended, eh Rupert?” she said.

  I took Griffin’s hand, curling our fingers together. “You frightened me,” I confessed. “I thought you’d drowned.”

  “I won’t leave you that easily,” he said with a smile. “Though I am glad Heliabel was with us.”

  “Indeed.” I shuddered to think what would have happened if she had remained behind in Widdershins, or with the ketoi at Seven Stones Reef.

  Mother returned a few minutes later. I rose to my feet at the sight of her smile. “You found something?”

  “Yes. Not a solution you’ll care much for, Percival, but our options are limited at the moment.” She gestured to the waves. “The drop-off here is fairly steep. Carn Moreth must have been defensible on this side even before the sea drowned the land around us. But when I swam down to retrieve the sword cane and knives, I noticed what looked like a cave, or at least a split in the rock. I found it again and swam up it. It comes out somewhere within the island, in a…well, not a cave. More a passageway.”

  Rupert frowned. “A passageway?”

  “You’ll see. The air is fresh, and it seemed to lead up. I’d say it’s our best chance for now.” She glanced from one of us to the next. “I’ll swim you down one at a time.”

  “Oh,” I said, at the same moment Hattie muttered, “Bugger.” I started to exchange a commiserating glance, then recalled she’d tried to kill me in cold blood, and scowled instead.

  “I don’t see as we have any choice,” Rupert said, taking a step back from an encroaching wave. “Heliabel—cousin—do you have the strength to take all of us?”

  “Of course. I can swim for most of a day without tiring.”

  “I’ll go first.” When Christine opened her mouth to object, I said, “You don’t have a weapon, Christine.”

  “My bow is probably ruined, but I still have my cudgel,” she argued.

  “Even so, Whyborne is best equipped to face any danger alone, at least in the short term.” Iskander put a gentle hand to her arm. “If anything attacks, he can draw on the sea and try to drown it, at least long enough until you can arrive and finish it off.”

  “Oi!” Hattie exclaimed. “My knives ain’t nothing, you know.”

  “I know,” I said darkly.

  “Here.” Rupert opened his alchemy case and retrieved what appeared to be two sealed bottles of clear glass. I took the one he held out to me, mystified.

  “Read the Aklo phrase inscribed in the metal ring around the mouth, then give it a good shake,” he said.

  I did as instructed, and within seconds, a greenish-white light shone steadily from the liquid in the bottle.

  “Witch lights,” he said, holding up his own bottle. “They should glow for a few hours, though they will eventually fade.”

  “Thank you.”

  Those of us wearing coats stripped them off in preparation for the swim. I took a secure hold on the witch light, glanced back at Griffin, then walked to the edge of the crashing waves. My mother stretched out her clawed hand. I took it, and followed her into the sea.

  Chapter 21

  Griffin

  The wait for Heliabel to return seemed interminable, though in truth it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. I started forward the moment she appeared, intending to go next. But she held up a hand. “Percival asked for Christine,” she said.

  Iskander and I exchanged a look. Christine, however, marched forward, her skirts swirling in the incoming current. “Naturally.”

  Once they vanished, I leaned toward him and said, “Let’s hope Christine doesn’t get any hungrier than she already is. I fear there won’t be much left of him.”

  Iskander let out a quiet laugh. “I made the mistake of reminding her the babe is quite small at this stage.”

  “And you’re still ambulatory? I congratulate her on her restraint.”

  “Indeed.” His eyes hadn’t left the spot where Christine had vanished beneath the water.

  “Perhaps you should go next,” I said.

  He cast me a grateful look. “I’d prefer it.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder. Soon enough, Heliabel returned, and he was gone.

  “Me next,” Hattie said. “Don’t want the ketoi
to get any funny ideas about leaving the two of us here to drown.”

  “We have a truce,” Rupert reminded her.

  She looked at Rupert as though he’d gone mad. “You don’t trust them, do you? Been talking with Basil a bit too much.”

  “Basil is—”

  “A coddled idiot,” Hattie shot back. “The Seeker should have drilled some sense into his granite skull years ago.”

  I made myself still, hoping they would forget my presence. It sounded as though there was more than one split within the Endicotts. The information might not offer any immediate advantage, but it might come in useful at some later date.

  Unfortunately, Heliabel’s return interrupted their discussion. Hattie’s face paled, but she took Heliabel’s hand without complaint.

  “She is an interesting woman,” Rupert said unexpectedly, once they were gone.

  “My mother-in-law? She embraced me from the start,” I said, in case he was plotting to sow some sort of discord between us. “And, should you ever doubt her resolve, know that Theo and Fiona took her hostage. She stabbed herself to avoid being used against her children.”

  Rupert’s brows arched in shock. “Truly? Then I take my initial assessment back. She is an extraordinary person.”

  Had the Seeker sent Basil to be the Melusine’s windweaver, or had Rupert requested him? When I’d first met Rupert, he hadn’t hesitated to call Whyborne an abomination. Still, perhaps his views had already been softer than those of other Endicotts, as he’d been willing to treat with Whyborne from the start.

  I didn’t want to push the matter at the moment, however. “She is that. There’s a reason Whyborne always said he was his mother’s son.”

  When Heliabel returned, I gestured to Rupert to go first. I didn’t believe she would abandon him on the beach, but I knew for a fact she wouldn’t leave me behind. “Percival wants to speak to you,” she told me cryptically, before taking Rupert and his alchemy box with her.

  With nothing to distract me, I became aware of the scrapes on my back, the ache in my throat from my brush with the sea. I peered out across the water; past the barrier, I could see empty, drifting boats and one or two objects that might have been bodies.

  God. How many Endicotts had drowned today? We’d come so close to being among them, both in the water, then after. Had Heliabel not been with us, we’d be trapped here while the waves crawled ever higher.

  Unless someone else armed with anti-magic weapons had made it through by slashing blindly at the barrier until they happened to hit a weak spot, we were probably the only ones who had set foot on Carn Moreth. It was up to us, and us alone, to take back the manor.

  I drew in a deep breath, seeking to calm my nerves. We’d faced bad odds before. With any luck, Hattie was right, and the Endicotts had winnowed the Fideles’s numbers to the point where we had a real chance against them.

  Heliabel reappeared. “Are you ready?” she asked, holding out her hand.

  “Yes,” I said, but I hesitated. “Heliabel, I don’t think I’ve ever properly thanked you. For…well. Everything. Including saving my life a few minutes ago, of course.”

  She smiled. Like all ketoi, the expression was borderline disturbing, showing rows on rows of shark teeth. “Of course, Griffin. You have been a gift to us all.” Her hair rose from her shoulders. “Now, if I don’t escort you below, Percival will probably swim back to get you himself.”

  I took her hand and joined her in the water.

  ~ * ~

  Despite taking the deepest breath I could, my abused lungs ached by the time we reached the opening in the rock. The weight of the ocean pressed against my eardrums as Heliabel guided us into the darkness of the cave. One of her arms tightened securely around my waist as her powerful legs propelled us through the water at a speed I couldn’t have hoped to achieve on my own. Her certainty kept me from panicking. It couldn’t be much longer until I took a breath. A few seconds at most. Just a few more. A few more…a few more…

  Light shone through the water. But not from above, as I’d expected. Rather, arcane power threaded through the stones themselves, outlining a submerged passage that seemed far too regular in shape to be natural.

  Then we were moving up, fast. The pressure against my eardrums decreased—and we broke the surface.

  I took a great, heaving breath. My heart felt as though it wanted to pound out of my chest. “Magic,” I gasped. “All around us.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Christine said grimly.

  The passageway gradually sloped up, growing shallower and shallower until it rose above the level of the water. Whyborne held aloft the witch light, peering closely at walls that had obviously been carved out of the living rock itself.

  I saw instantly why he’d asked for Christine to be brought next. Bas-reliefs covered the walls of the passage, interspersed with curious clusters of dots that might have been writing. Combined with the magic threaded through the stone itself, the connection was obvious even to my eye.

  “It’s like the city in Alaska,” I said, as I stumbled out of the clinging water and onto dry land. “Dear God. Balefire is built atop a city of the masters.”

  Chapter 22

  Whyborne

  “There must be some mistake,” Rupert insisted for at least the third time. I started to wish Mother had left him on the rock.

  “There isn’t,” Christine replied. She traced the bas-reliefs with one finger. “Look, Whyborne—there were cycads like these depicted in the city of the umbrae, do you remember? Was this once a tropical climate?”

  “Science has discovered the fossils of clam shells atop mountains,” I said. “Certainly it is possible.”

  The sheer age of the place seemed to press down on me, just as it had in the city of the umbrae. These ruins were older than the pyramids. Older than Jericho. And yet they looked to have been abandoned only recently. No cracks showed in the walls, no masonry had collapsed. The reliefs were as clear as the day they’d been cut, thanks to the magic permeating the stone.

  “I can’t believe Balefire was built atop the ruins of some abominable city,” Rupert said, staring aghast at the walls. “How could we not have known?”

  “You believed Morgen’s Needle to be the work of the masters,” Griffin said. “Why wouldn’t you expect this?”

  “Because this is our home!” Rupert’s shout echoed eerily up and down the passageway. He caught himself, closed his eyes, and took a series of deep breaths. “This isn’t some…some mining camp in Alaska. This isn’t an abandoned stretch of desert, or desolate valley no one with any sense would set foot in. I grew up here.”

  “And I grew up atop a monstrous arcane vortex.” Of which I carried a fragment inside myself. In terms of shocking revelations, I rather thought Rupert didn’t have that much to be upset about.

  Hattie had remained silent throughout. Now she roused and said, “Do you think the Keeper knows?”

  Rupert’s lips parted. “I don’t…perhaps?”

  “If he does, he’s kept it a secret for a reason.” Hattie nodded, as if that settled the matter.

  “But why?” Rupert stared at the walls, as though he expected them to alter into something more palatable. “If we’d known, we could have investigated these murals, not to mention the magic in the walls. Perhaps we might have learned something of the masters, rather than being blindsided by their return.”

  Hattie shrugged. “Maybe it was investigated. A lot can happen over five centuries, things that end up sealed away in the Keeper’s archive and meant only for his heir. The Keeper knows more than we do—that’s his job, innit? Same as with those artifacts the fish want back.”

  “I suppose.” Still, Rupert looked as though it had been a blow. “At any rate, we have more important things to attend to at the moment. We need to focus on finding a way out of here.”

  I turned to Griffin. “Does your shadowsight tell you anything that might be of use?”

  “Not really. But the stone is completely thr
eaded through with magic, just as it was in the city of the umbrae.” The one they’d taken from the masters, before being sealed away within. “Which hopefully means our way forward won’t be blocked by any collapses. As for finding a way out, I say we walk until we find a fork, then take whichever seems to lead upwards.”

  Rupert removed a belt equipped with a series of pouches from his waterproof box, then tucked away his supplies in the belt for ease of transport. Once he was done, he took the lead, holding up his own witch light to guide the way. It gleamed off the damp walls, the play of light and shadow making the carved images seem almost to move.

  As we followed, Christine and I took the opportunity to compare the bas-reliefs with those we’d seen before. The groupings of dots, which seemed to form the language of the masters, were clearly the same. If only we had some version of a Rosetta Stone, that would allow us to translate it.

  “Perhaps, if we survive the end of the world, we might write a paper,” I suggested. “We can’t bring the city of the umbrae to the attention of the wider world, but perhaps the Endicotts would allow scholars on Carn Moreth.”

  Mother had been listening to us closely. “I would have had Ship-bane add that clause to the agreement, had I known.”

  “A shame I wasn’t able to take any photographs of the other city,” Iskander remarked. “Not that I suppose we would have brought them with us, but at least we might have compared them at a later date.”

  “If you don’t mind, we have other things to worry about more important than archaeological zeal,” Rupert snapped. “Stop dawdling.”

  “Hmph,” Christine muttered. “More important than archaeology, really.”

  Soon after we started walking, we came across an interruption in the murals. A band of featureless greenish-black stone had been inlaid in floor, ceiling, and both walls. Rupert slowed as we approached.

  “That looks like a trap,” Christine said.

  But Griffin shook his head. “No. An arcane line passes through here. For some reason the masters wished to mark it.”

  “Could they have considered it a boundary of some kind?” I stepped across it, felt the energy spark beneath and around me.