by R. K. Thorne
A guard unlocked the manacles, and Thel stood gingerly, grunting.
“No games. I may feel like leaving you loose, if you play nice, boy.”
Thel nodded, feigning beaten cooperation. Of course, the day they’d arrived, the images of the burnt Akarians still fresh in his memory, that would have been a fairly accurate description of his mental state. But his newfound knowledge from the last few hours and days had reinvigorated him. Cooperation would likely get him no further with an enemy than resistance would anyway. Detrax had relished that stab wound in his thigh enough that Thel doubted anything would stop the beast from “cutting” if it was on his mind.
“All right, then. This way.”
Detrax led Thel—flanked by eight guards, which seemed a little overkill—to another room, where a table and two benches awaited them but not much else. An interrogation room. But for this interrogation, the map of Akaria lay on the table, with the two points Thel had marked.
As a hand shoved Thel into one low bench, he considered whether lying, cooperation, or outright defiance would be best. It probably didn’t matter; he was in for a tough time either way. Detrax of course eschewed the chair and slowly began pacing around him.
“All right. Have it out. The rest of the locations of the mines.”
Thel didn’t move.
“I don’t exactly want to slice you in twain, but maybe just a finger…”
“How exactly would that help? Hard to hold a charcoal with sliced-off fingers,” said Thel. Apparently outright defiance was his doom of choice for today.
Detrax continued as if Thel had said nothing. “I could just break your fingers, but I favor blades. There’s just something beautiful about steel. The way it slices through and opens a dog up. You see the insides of people. What they’re really made of.” He stopped straight in front of Thel and leaned on the table, a grin showing off wolfish teeth. For the first time, Thel wondered if the request for the mine locations was even sincere. Maybe it was just an excuse to justify whatever truly dark urges lurked behind the mage’s eyes.
Thel was probably going to find out. He swallowed, in spite of himself.
“Or I could break your legs,” he mused, continuing his pacing in a circle around Thel. “That’d be a mite inconvenient for you, I think. Don’t know as I’d like to deal with the stench that follows.”
“You already have Niat for that, if my experience is any indicator.”
To his surprise, Detrax chuckled, and Thel felt a little dirty. “Aye, I do.” He stopped in front of Thel again. “I also could just rip it all from yer mind, ya know.”
Thel froze.
Right. Creature mage. Shit. Could they really do that? If so, there were a lot of things Detrax could rip from his mind, beyond Anonil’s fortifications and mine locations. What options did he have? His mind was only a blank slate of fear, though, shocked still by the unknown.
Detrax drew a dagger, bringing Thel back to reality. He resumed his slow pace, chuckling softly to himself.
Thel picked up the charcoal but couldn’t bring himself to move his hand. If he marked the wrong locations, certainly Detrax would know. Would he dip into his mind to check anyway?
If there was any way to keep him from doing so, Thel needed to try. If Detrax knew about his magic… Thel pushed the thought from his mind. He wouldn’t think it, lest that be the moment Detrax chose to dig into him.
Detrax’s footsteps stopped directly behind him. Thel held his breath, shoulders tensing as the silence stretched on.
Two strong arms seized Thel’s, while a third snarled into his hair and pulled his head slowly to the right side, exposing his throat. Thel forced a deep, ragged breath, straining to pull his head upright again.
The cold, hard point of the dagger slid along the skin of his neck, almost sensual, not breaking the skin. Yet.
“Course, there’re some wounds that bleed out so fast they can’t rightly be healed. Or I may not be motivated to try.”
Thel swallowed, unsure if the threat had any teeth.
“Think your precious family will miss ya, boy?”
Thel spoke cautiously, careful not to move against the blade. “How will you get information out of me if I’m dead?”
Detrax chuckled softly again. “A smart one, eh? Maybe I don’t need your information.” He lowered his face and his voice so the next words were a whisper in Thel’s ear. “Maybe I can rip it from your flailing mind while you writhe down into hell.”
Thel did his best to shrug without cutting himself. “That tickles.”
Detrax guffawed now, and all three hands shoved Thel toward the table, slamming his ribs into the table edge. The charcoal dropped from his hand, but he slowly picked it back up, gritting his teeth against the pain.
“Mark the map, and mayhap you’ll get dinner again tonight. Finish it.” Detrax’s voice was soft and not soaked in its usual rancor. Had to be a trap. But what difference did it make if he could pull the information from Thel’s mind? It was only a matter of time now before the beast would reach in, at the very least to verify that information.
Grudgingly, flattening his lips together in defeat, he marked three more spots on the map, these accurate, and labeled them all.
“Aye, that’s a good runt.” Detrax cuffed him on the back of the head, sending Thel’s hair flying into his face, but not hard enough that it hurt for more than a moment. The creature mage circled the table and sank down on the bench before Thel.
“What, no cutting today?”
Detrax shrugged. “I haven’t decided as yet. There’s always the seer.”
Thel glared at him. “I can’t imagine that helps her visions.”
Chuckling again, Detrax said, “You’re mighty concerned about that seer, no? She is a pretty slip of a thing.”
His glare hardened into a scowl. “She’s a traitor. Just like you.”
“I’m Kavanarian, I’m no traitor to you. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t betray the Masters, if I had much of a choice in the matter.” Detrax grinned, showing off his teeth again. Were they unnaturally pointy? “Still irks you the seer’s not on your side? How can you justify gettin’ in those holy robes if she’s a traitor?”
“She could look like a goddess, and I wouldn’t care one whit about her.” Thel let his face go bored in hopes that the subject would drop. “And she’s not on your side either.”
Detrax grinned even wider. “You’re a hoot, runt. Too proud to admit you’ve got it hard for her?”
“I’d have the same concern for any of Akaria’s subjects.”
“Suit yourself with whatever lies you like. You can’t hide from me.”
Detrax lowered his head, and Thel had only a split second to realize just what that meant and why Detrax had finally sat down.
A deluge hit him, and everything went black. Who needed eyes? Who had a body? What even existed anyway? He gasped for air, unsure he even had lungs to breathe, and groped blindly around him, searching for something, anything, of the world he’d been in a moment ago. He tried to shout, to scream, but if he succeeded, there was no sound. He thrashed violently now, searching for the table, the map, lunging toward where Detrax should be. Anything.
There was nothing. Everything was gone, and he was beyond alone.
He sank into the utter blackness of empty space.
The smelter was barely warm today, but thankfully, even this part of the smithy was warmer than it was outside. Tharomar took a deep breath of the familiar coal-smoke smell in the air. A tinge of burnt honey floated in there. Someone was working with beeswax.
He and Jaena had something much more unpleasant to toy with today.
Jaena pointed to the cloudy glass of the bowl that sat on the floor of the king’s smithy. Tharomar had talked the smith into giving them the smelting area again and getting out of the way. He hoped they weren’t going to do anything to make the smith regret relenting to his charms. But if the brand was finally destroyed, so be it.
No larger
than a washbasin, it had steep sides, and the clear liquid inside had a slight yellowish cast. Tharomar shook his head. How were they going to destroy the brand in that?
“I know,” she said. “This is all I could get my hands on. I’ve been all over the city and bought up everything I could find.” A dozen different glass bottles of different shapes and sizes lay uncorked and empty on the nearby table.
“We’re lucky Aven gave us a generous stipend then.” He couldn’t tell how much acid was in the bowl, but it’d take forever to dissolve a whole rod of metal in that. Or would disintegrate be a better term?
“Yes, I’d say so. Also, the alchemists warned that putting iron into this could be very unstable. We should stay back as far as we can.”
Well, he knew a thing or two about staying back from dangerous things. “Let me get some tongs.”
It’d taken two days to find this stuff. While acid was sometimes used for etching swords, that wasn’t done terribly often by most smiths, and the amount they’d need to destroy something the size of the brand? It was ludicrous. Maybe just the bottom would suffice.
Tharomar had spent the intervening days bent over the star map, and much of his nights too, occasionally answering a question or fifty from Wunik on the Serabain alphabet. Working by starlight each night, he’d transcribe some ancient Serabain to its modern version, and by daylight, he’d translate it. It was meticulous work and, sadly, not something he really needed help with, so he’d spent it mostly alone.
With some instructions, though, Jaena had been able to canvas the city healers, apothecaries, and smiths, gathering up as much acid as she could. The idea of getting it from so many different sources made him nervous about combining it all, but she’d done it already, apparently without issue. And what else could they do? Say a prayer and have a healer on hand?
His labors over the star map also bought him time to think. The temple’s message weighed on his mind, but as each hour and day passed, he was able to convince himself the translation was more important; he would reply and break the news to them soon. Just a bit later.
He had tucked the missive in a drawer in the desk in their room and hadn’t mentioned it further. Not to Jaena, not to anyone. What was the point? He wasn’t going to act on it. He wasn’t going anywhere. And explaining the message meant admitting… a lot of things he wasn’t too keen on talking about. Jaena still thought of him as a man of honor, and integrity, and morality, and while he didn’t expect such an idealistic, romantic vision to last, he had no interest in hurrying her toward the truth.
So he had focused on the scroll, and when his work was done for the day, they’d headed back to the suspicious royal smith and his smelting room to have another go at destroying the cursed thing.
“Let’s see this thing done,” he said, returning with long tongs, apron, and gloves that stretched up his arms. They were made for heat, not acid. A leather apron wouldn’t do much of anything, but he gave Jaena one too. He eyed the bowl for a long moment. He didn’t have a good feeling about this.
Jaena pulled the brand from the pack and held it out. He took it in the tongs and moved forward. She backed toward the far wall, slipping the apron over her head and pulling her braid of braids out and over the shoulder strap.
Leaning his head back as far as he could from the bowl and the brand, he sank to one knee and lowered the iron into the yellowish liquid.
He listened, not sure he even wanted to turn his head at first. Iron scraped against glass from the slight shaking of his hand. He smelled nothing new. The tings of the smiths’ hammers in the background and the wind whipping outside met his ears, but there was no sound out of the ordinary.
Finally he looked. The iron might as well have been sitting in water.
“Did they say how long it should take?” he said. But his heart was already sinking.
“What’s it doing?”
“Nothing.”
“They didn’t say.”
“Any chance this isn’t acid, and those alchemists lied?”
“Several took a dropper and showed me some reactions. Not that I knew what to look for. They were… fairly happy to have an audience.”
Ro smiled crookedly at that. A pretty young woman as an audience probably hadn’t hurt. “Think you could run back and ask how long it should take? Any of them close by?”
“Yes—hold on.”
He wasn’t sure how long he waited, but he’d devised in his head an elaborate system of tongs, barrels, crates, and a bellows to hold this damn thing for him indefinitely when the door finally opened. He considered himself fairly strong, he could hammer with the best of them, but even his arms were starting to shake, holding the thing without a break. Just a little, but still.
She strode right up beside him.
“Bad news, huh?” He could sense it in the air.
“He said five minutes, maybe. He agreed I added enough water. That we should see some bubbling. Fizzing. Something. He wanted to come back and help us, so I spent half the time talking him out of that.”
Ro scowled at the thing. A faint line beside the edge of the circular brand caught his eye. He squinted—a reaction? Maybe one of the samples had been weaker or not quite right, and it was just taking a little longer.
No. As he looked closer, he could see it now.
“Is there a… bubble around the metal?” he said slowly.
“You mean it’s starting?” she said excitedly.
“No, I mean, I think it’s not touching the acid even. It’s pushing the acid away.”
“What?” she took a step even closer. “Gods, I see it.”
“Go out and ask our best, most loyal friend the royal smith for just a regular piece of scrap iron he doesn’t need back.”
“Got it.”
As she left, he slowly raised the brand from the liquid. There was no submersion line, no darker wet portion. No drips. No nothing. He carefully set it aside in the dirt, several feet away, near the smelter. Nothing bubbled or fizzed near the end that had been inside the acid—or supposedly had been.
Returning, Jaena held out another piece of iron, not even the size of his hand, and he took it and plopped it in with much less caution this time, dropping it fully into the deep bowl.
It was a good thing he didn’t need to hold it, because clouds of something sprang up from bubbles that frothed and hissed angrily to life. He staggered back, Jaena with him.
“Well, donkey balls. That’s more what I was expecting,” she said softly.
He smothered a laugh. “Donkey balls? Some diplomat you would have been.”
She waved him off, sobering, and he followed suit. “This isn’t going to work, is it.”
“I don’t think so.” He backed away another foot as the piece let out another bout of bitter bubbling and hissing.
“Maybe it can’t be destroyed,” she said, voice faltering. “Maybe it’s hopeless.”
He gritted his teeth. Normally he was optimistic. Normally he’d say, we’ll keep trying, we’ll find a way.
Normally iron and acid did not peacefully mix.
Rock jutting into his cheekbone was the first sensation Thel regained. He groaned.
The memory of the blackness returned to him, and he shuddered, forcing his eyes open. How long had he spent adrift in the nothingness, searching for… for what? For anything and everything. It was as if someone had seized his senses and ripped them away.
Not someone. Detrax.
A chill went through him, and his whole body shook again, something between a shiver and a shudder. He was back in his cell, and the air was icy around him. But he also shook at the realization that… creature mages could do that. Whatever that was.
Horrifying. No wonder people were afraid of mages. No wonder Niat thought Thel was evil.
They were all terribly, horribly right.
Thel forced himself to sitting, every joint screaming in protest. How long had he lain there? How much time had passed? In spite of the ache, he ran his fi
ngers over the stone beneath him, delighting in the rough scrape of rock against his skin. The light of dusk or dawn filtered through the arrow slit faintly, but even that and the chilling wind were reassuring, grounding. Detrax might have the power to steal away the world from him, but it had all returned. For now.
What had Detrax discovered?
If he had discovered Thel’s magic, there was no sign of it. The cell was very much the same. He either hadn’t discovered it or had deemed Thel not to be a threat. Which, well, might be true. He sank into the stones, warming them, and he leaned back against the wall, pleased to connect to the rock around him, to feel the solid, quiet hum of it, to smile at its silent acceptance of his request. Rock didn’t mind if it was warm or cold. It might even prefer warm, or he might be having a fit of overactive imagination.
He hadn’t noticed closing his eyes, but they shot open as a thought hit him. The book. He reached for it in his jerkin pocket.
It was still there. He heaved a sigh of relief.
He spent a while sinking into the stone, tired in a deep way he couldn’t remember having ever been before. He let his mind glide through the crevices and seams in the masonry around him, a join, a hunk of limestone here, a slab of sandstone there. A seam, a weakness.
A crack.
Opening his eyes, he leaned his weary form toward the spot in the outer wall he’d sensed… Had it been a glimmer of hope, a flash of intuition? Or was it possible he was merely mad from exhaustion?
Focusing his attention hard on the spot, he gave it the slightest push.
Stone scraped against stone. Barely half a finger’s width, but it had moved. He’d made it move with his will alone. Well, and his magic.
Leaning back again, he stared at the slight change in the wall. How far was it down? If he could break the wall open, what would he do next? If he could get out of the fortress, could he survive out in the increasingly wintry forest? And was there a way he could rescue Niat at the same time? He couldn’t wait forever—Detrax had shown him he likely didn’t have that long—but he also couldn’t see leaving her to their blue vials either. And that meant two of them escaping and surviving in the dead, cold woods.