Inherit the Flame

by Megan E. O'Keefe

  Ripka would have spent more time admiring the place, if it weren’t her prison.

  “She cannot keep us cooped up here,” Ripka said, as she paced the narrow lane between the door and the room’s small, singular window.

  “But she is.” Honey sat on the edge of the bed, her sturdy legs not quite long enough to touch the floor, so she swung her feet in small, rhythmic arcs. Ripka gave her a solid side-eye, genuinely not able to tell if the woman were being sarcastic or not.

  A polite scratch at the door interrupted Ripka’s train of thought. She scowled at the thick plank of wood, knowing it was locked, and forced herself to sound somewhat amiable. It wasn’t the guards’ fault she was locked up here.

  “Come in.”

  A key clanked in the lock, and the door slid open to reveal a rather contrite-looking Tibal and Enard, a black-clad guard their constant shadow.

  “You have half a mark,” the guard said, then ushered the men within and shut the door behind them.

  Enard moved forward immediately, barely checking himself from gathering Ripka up in his arms. Tibal lingered behind him, a surly shadow, arms crossed as he scowled around the room as if he could find fault in the furniture for all the misfortune that had yet befallen him. Despite his body language, it was Tibal who spoke first.

  “As, despite my best wishes, you have successfully drawn me into your mess of a scheme, you had better tell me the details.”

  His posture, she realized, was not wary acceptance of his fate. Though Tibal had his arms locked down around him, he had a slight forward lean, a subtle gleam in his eye. He might pretend annoyance, but Tibal was intrigued by whatever Ripka had dragged him into. Despite the weariness of a long night, Ripka felt a little lighter. This was the first time she’d seen a spark of the old Tibal re-emerge since Detan had left them behind at the Remnant.

  “The part regarding the Valatheans you know well.” He grunted, a disgusted agreement. “The rest I have uncovered mostly recently.”

  She launched into her early suspicions that Thratia would use similar methods to those she had used in Aransa to such great effect, and her first investigations into the cafes, and what she found there. The forum seemed to spark some interest in Tibal, his brows raising high in appreciation, but she didn’t bother lingering long on that feature of local politics.

  Keeping her voice carefully controlled, she explained the events of the night. Their run-in with Dranik at the Ashfall Lounge, and his subsequent confession to her that his movement for freedom was not as pure as he had thought.

  With every word laid down, Ripka only had eyes for Tibal’s response. She felt Enard stiffen near her, but his reaction was a known quantity. It was Tibal who had proven unreliable in recent months, and Tibal’s help they needed now. Ripka was clever, Enard calm in a crisis, and Honey a willing accomplice, but Tibal had bent his recent years to the very type of subterfuge they must attempt to flush out and befuddle Thratia’s vile network.

  By the time she was done telling the tale, Tibal was still as a boulder, every hard line of muscle stiff beneath his dusty, grease-stained clothes. While Hond Steading’s future had not previously roused him to any emotion at all, being confronted with the very human reality of it – of people disappearing, and Thratia’s network at hand – had clearly unsettled him. Tibal wouldn’t fight for a city, any city. But he would fight for a city’s people, and that was the distinction he’d drawn sharp as an obsidian blade.

  “I see,” Tibal said, and managed to lay into those two simple words the full scope of his intention. He saw, and he would help, and he would not stop until he’d fixed what he saw was broken.

  “We must get away from our jailers to do any good at all,” Enard said.

  She flashed him a small smile and squeezed his arm. “Escaping jails is something we have recent experience in. But you’re right, and the sooner the better. If I miss my meeting with Dranik tomorrow I fear he’ll go to ground, and that will be a hard trust to rebuild, if we can even find him.”

  “That sister of his,” Enard said, “is she in it, too?”

  “Hard to tell. She’s an exuberant woman, and often disgusted with her brother’s melancholy nature. She brushes off his obsession with things political, but…”

  “She knows,” Honey said, soft as always. “Women like that know everything that goes on in their house.”

  “What time are you due to meet him?” Tibal asked.

  “Nightfall, at a place very near the lounge I spoke of.”

  Tibal puffed his cheeks up and blew air out in a great gust. “Not a lot of time to get us out of here. Six guards on two stories of building, and we haven’t been here nearly long enough to know their habits.”

  “And these two need rest.” Enard glanced pointedly at Honey, whose head was lolling to one side, though her eyes were open. Ripka had to admit that the very thought of making any escape now, when her muscles were still screaming from her earlier flight from the watchers, made her feet feel like anchors.

  “Daybreak, then,” Ripka said. “No doubt our guardians will rouse us early for a meal. We’ll take account of things then, and wing a plan if we must.”

  Tibal asked, “Are you prepared to follow my lead, if it comes to that?”

  A week ago, she wouldn’t have trusted him to lead her anywhere but a bottle. But he had a spark back, one she hadn’t seen since he and Detan had joined their heads together to figure out the best way to get Nouli out of the Remnant.

  “You’re the expert,” she said.

  He grinned like a rockcat who’d caught a viper for his supper, and tipped his singed, floppy grey hat to her. In all his surly rebuke of Detan’s abandonment, he hadn’t stopped wearing the hat they’d fought over as long as she’d known them both.

  A heavy pounding on the door startled them all – well, all except Tibal. While she and Enard and Honey flinched from the sound, Tibal just smirked, eyeing the door with quiet contempt. He was in his element, and the very sight of his confidence buoyed Ripka’s worn-down spirits.

  “Time’s up.” The guard who’d let the men in opened the door and stood glowering at them all, a false bluster that may have fooled a child, but told the four in the room only one thing: the guard was tired, and anxious, and resented her post. Ripka turned her head to hide an instinctive smile.

  Hond Steading had no idea the force it harbored. She hoped, deeply, that if its people knew then they might be grateful.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Detan found food in his room, a cold plate of hard cheese and crackers left sometime in the morning. The sustenance wasn’t much, but he’d eaten worse fare, and the solidness in his stomach was enough to spit some vigor back into his veins.

  Best not to think about veins.

  A niggling itch had anchored itself in the crook of his elbow. Nothing based in reality, he knew it was little more than his mind reminding him of what it was missing. Still, hard to ignore a figment of your imagination when it was working up real, physical distress. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and froze.

  Cursed skies, he was a mess. Passable for any working man of Aransa, sure, but that was hardly the point. His hair, still wet from the wash-water, slumped across his forehead, and though his clothes were fine he’d put no care into wearing them. They hung untucked and loose, rumpled and just as ragged as his face. He looked the part of a drunkard and a wastrel, not a lord of high station. Certainly no fiance to Thratia Ganal.

  And his image mattered now, make no mistake. He’d hardly enter into any con game playing a nobleman in a state like this. Why was the simple fact he was playing at being himself any different? Tibs would have slapped him upside the head, to see him now. This was not how the game was played. Loose and by ear, surely, but not sloppy. Never that.

  With renewed vigor he straightened his clothes and made close acquaintance with a comb. Now he was ready. People were keen to let a man in a crisp suit go wherever he wanted.

  Down on the dock, wh
ere so very much of his recent life had turned for the worse, he paused for a quick reconnaissance. Aella’s ship, the Crested Fool, drifted lazily from its rope ties. The ship was a solid transport vessel, but Thratia’s dock had been built for a grander ship, for the Larkspur he had once stolen from her and handed into Pelkaia’s care. The Crested Fool looked like a child’s toy in comparison. It just so happened that this particular toy belonged to one demented child.

  No guards made their presence known on the dock. In fact, the place was practically deserted. Detan huffed and tugged his freshly ironed lapels. All that work to prepare himself, and he didn’t even have a keen-eyed servant to charm his way past. Such a waste of his brilliance.

  As he jogged up the gangplank, it occurred to him that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make it look as if this ship was of no consequence.

  “Ahoy!” he called, pausing while his voice echoed throughout the apparently empty ship. No response. Not even a board creaked under his boot to welcome him. He eyed the ship from keel to bowsprit, recalling what little he’d had access to during the long transit from the Remnant to Aransa.

  Aella had kept him cooped up in his cabin at the aft end of the ship, allowing him time to roam the deck but otherwise corralling him to his room and her laboratory. Both rooms were in the ship’s aft. And though Aella’d never struck him as a particularly reasonable girl, it did make sense that she’d cloister those things which she did not want him stumbling across toward the fore.

  He shoved his hands in his pocket and affected a merry saunter so that anyone who happened across him would think him out for a stroll, not a snoop. The Crested Fool stretched long and flat, looking more like the worn leather of an old shoe than an airship. Its buoyancy sacks were practical things, a careful network of sewn and waxed leather held snug under a knotted net of flax rope. All of the cabins were clustered in the center of the ship, a smaller mirror of the vessel’s overall shape. Some stroke of genius had inspired the maker to be certain the buoyancy sacks kept the cabins in their shade for most of the day, shielding weary travelers from the harsh desert sun.

  A cute little ship, purpose built for hauling people, but not a ship he’d ever want to steal. Pity, that. He was itching for a good heist.

  Casting a glance around to make sure he was still alone, Detan strolled along the cabin building, testing doors until he found one unlocked. The hall was dark, the lanterns shuttered tight, but not yet coated in dust. Detan frowned at the nearest lantern, grabbing it from its loop. They hadn’t been in Aransa long, but dust was quick to settle in this city, and someone had gone to a whole lot of trouble to make it look like this ship was being neglected. Certainly the servants weren’t popping on board to give it the occasional dusting. Someone used this lantern – recently, and regularly. But whoever that was, they hadn’t been kind enough to leave behind a flint.

  He glared at the cold wick and gave the lantern a shake, just to hear the oil slosh in its base. He didn’t dare go back to his room, or leave the ship to trouble a servant for a flint. No one knew he was here, and every chance he took had to offer a really fucking great payoff to be worth it.

  But with the door shut behind him, as it must be to hide his presence, the hall was pitch black. He glared at the hall, glared at the lamp. Neither obliged him with a solution.

  He wasn’t carrying a flint, but the selium Aella had given him to practice with was still tucked into his pocket, returned there on a whim after he’d washed and changed. Aella’d worked him until his senses were numb, but still… He had been practicing, and improving, hadn’t he? And what good was all this work, all this pain and sacrifice, if he could not use the things he’d learned to further his own goals?

  He was not stressed. Not angry. No one was about to watch him struggle at his work. The shadows certainly wouldn’t judge him. Before he’d consciously made his decision, he breathed out, long and slow, forcing some of the tension out of his muscles.

  The selium bladder was no bigger than the palm of his hand. The kind of thing rich families used to send strips of painted paper into the sky at celebrations. He extended his senses even as he whisked off the cap, holding the selium in the bladder against its will to rise. He sectioned off the tiniest fragment he could imagine and still control, a sliver no larger than his pinky nail, and floated it free before clamping the cap back on.

  Easy, now. With deliberate movements he slipped the bladder back into his pocket and let awareness of it fade from his mind. For just a breath his senses threatened to extend to the mass of selium hidden in the ship’s buoyancy sacks above, but his long practice with Aella allowed him to shunt the greater mass away and focus on the smaller sliver.

  It came so simply to him he almost shouted with triumph, but the surge of pride threatened to overwhelm his control. Easy, he reminded himself. Smooth and focused.

  Measuring his breathing, he steadied himself. He’d trained for this so many times, been taunted by Aella every time he failed. Now, on his own, when he truly needed his power, it would not fail him. He would not allow it. Fingers calm as stone, he flicked open a pane of glass on the lantern and crouched to set it on the floor just in front of him. He stayed in that crouch, sweat seeping through the back of his shirt, but ignored the dual exertion of mind and body.

  His senses screamed for finer control still. Never before had he been so keenly aware that his senses were deadened to the reality around him, never before had he felt the ache of that loss. Callia’s injection, and later Aella’s, had opened up a world to him that he had never even imagined might be real. Coss’s world. A world suffused with selium on every level, so small as to be invisible to the naked eye.

  Skies, but he missed that extension of his power. Curse Aella and her games – for that’s what they were. The girl played cool-hearted, she even had keen-eyed Misol fooled, but Detan noted the subtle pleasure she took in fencing with him, and winning. No body numb of heart would bother with such an endeavor. No matter what Aella thought about herself, or tried to present herself as, that girl could feel, deep down. Maybe not as strongly as the rest of the world, but without motivation driven by emotion she would have been an automaton long ago, a husk bowing to whatever Callia ordered of her.

  Instead, the girl had poisoned Callia into helplessness, stolen her and her subjects away to serve under Thratia, and usurped her position as researcher of deviant sensitives. What that had to say about Aella’s emotional core… well. Detan knew he’d be well to never trifle with that young lady. Their verbal fencing aside, to truly raise Aella’s ire would be a death sentence – no, not that. She’d find something worse for him than death. He’d never claim she wasn’t creative.

  He shuddered and snapped back to himself. Focus, it seemed, would forever be his greatest obstacle. That, and controlling the flow of his rage.

  He reached for his anger. It leapt to him, ready as always, a stoked bed of coals deep in his chest hungry for outlet. Even in his most serene of moments he’d known it was there, hiding beneath his flesh, lurking in the shadowed corners of his mind. He liked to think he was not a hateful man. Liked to think that his desire to do good with his skillset was proof enough that his anger was not his master.

  But he could never get away from it. No matter how powerfully Aella made him focus, or meditate, his mind was never truly empty. He could not change the manner in which his deviant power affected selium, no matter how much she hoped otherwise. He could move it, shape it, and urge it to tear itself to shreds.

  He wondered if that meant that he secretly wanted to tear himself to shreds, too.

  But that line of thought was not helpful now. One task. He’d set himself one simple job – find Clink and Forge and engender their help. Aella’s lessons yoked his every thought, but he could not allow them to master his every movement.

  He was stalling. Avoiding applying his carefully measured anger into the little sliver of sel that he had, without conscious thought, floated over to rest on the wick in t
he lantern. It shimmered there, its pearlescent structure evident even in such a small amount, taunting him. A flame that shone but cast no light.

  Aella had taught him the benefit of physical movement, a mirror of his intention, and so he visualized himself snapping his fingers to ignite the small globule and then, giving himself no more time to worry nor secondguess his ability, made the movement in truth.

  Snap. Anger. Shut it down.

  The speck of selium tore itself apart, and with a muted whoosh lit the wicked-up lantern into life.

  He jumped to his feet and pumped the air with a fist, very nearly knocking the lantern over in the process. He bit his lips to stifle a cry of triumph. Such a simple thing, that tiny flame, but that thing existed at the very edge of his control. It’d been harder for him to light that wick than it’d be to blow the bulk of selium floating the ship. Or, at the very edge of his sphere of awareness, the massive firemount that loomed near Aransa, and all the secret pockets of selium bubbling within.

  That froze him in his celebration. At the moment he’d reached for the sliver, his awareness had expanded, wider than it ever had. Standing here, toward the peak of the mountain that housed Aransa, he could feel all the small and large pockets of selium hidden beneath the solid stone of the firemount a half-day’s walk away. In all the time he’d spent in this city in the past, never before had he been able to reach so far with such accuracy.

  The thought chilled him to the core, snuffing the sparks of his victory.

  Never mind that. Focus on finding the girls.

  The lantern cast sharp shadows as he scooped it up and sauntered down the hall, testing every door handle he passed. Locked, all of them. But he wasn’t here to snoop behind locked doors. He was here to find two trapped women. Each handle he made sure to jiggle, until at the fifth down the line an irritated voice called, “It’s locked, you moron. You locked it your damn self.”