Voices of Blaze (Volume 5 of The Fireblade Array)

by H. O. Charles

  “What did you think of mother when you first met her?” Kalad asked.

  Morghiad extracted his concentration from the book again. “I thought she was an

  irritating, emotional distraction who needed to learn some selfcontrol. But I also thought she was the most beautiful woman who had ever lived, and I couldn’t remove her from my thoughts. She had a way of breaking through any barriers I put up against her with her damned stubbornness, and because she is undeniably good in her heart, and always loyal. I had no hope.”

  She wanted to cage us, when we should have caged her.

  Morghiad blinked. Had Kalad heard that?

  “Mother said you almost signed away your crown for her – to a madman.”

  “Her life was in danger.”

  “But he could have killed hundreds or even thousands of Calidellians, or driven the country to ruin... or anything.”

  “Indeed he could.” Morghiad nodded slowly as he spoke. “I just loved your mother more than I loved my own

  people.” And his love had been an avaricious creature. The trouble was, starving it of her only made it hungrier. He checked upon her stream again. Still absent. How much longer would it be?

  Kalad buried his head in the pillows and groaned.

  “It’ll all be over soon, Kal,” Morghiad said softly. His son had only asked him for privacy once during their conversation, and that either meant he had come to tolerate his company, was too weak to fight back, or felt lonely enough to be grateful for the presence of anyone at his side. Morghiad very much hoped it was the first of those things.

  attractive about the rolling black skies and the faint swirls of gold that pleaded to push their way out of obscurity. Few succeeded, but Artemi had come to believe that the light would one day warm this earth. The fires had always been an unstoppable force, and she could not imagine how they would ever remain permanently smothered. Not even in this place.

  “Longest winter I’ve ever known,” a hard voice rasped

  behind her in the Mrakian tongue. She understood it well after several weeks of dedicated lessons with the ancient Girrim, but her speech was still better in the Nightworld’s common tongue. Artemi jumped. She was supposed to be helping with loading cargo, not idling about and thinking of clouds! She jumped again when she turned to find that the man speaking to her was not the dock master, but the Commander of Vaporik. “Ah,

  hello Rav,” she said in her newest language. Really, the collection of tongues she had acquired was becoming far too large for her single head. Why could she have not landed in a world where people had two?

  Ravendasor had not spoken with her since his fight with Wendala and Learkin, and in truth, Artemi had been somewhat disappointed by that. It was not that she desired his friendship, but more that she feared her

  route to someone with influence, and hence information on how she might get home, had been broken. He grinned at her as if they were old acquaintances. “I have been watching you.”

  “Oh?” Artemi tried to smile back and hide her discomfort, before going to the next bale of cloth that required loading onto a cart. When she had first been informed that she was to fetch and carry at the city docks, she had envisioned a brown sea port

  or perhaps a marina on a filthy river, but of course she had been wrong. This dock was located at the opening to a tunnel above the sheer cliffs of a mountain, and that tunnel led to the highest reaches of the cavern. She really ought to have known it would be a sky port given most of these creatures could fly, but her mind still worked the way of a Darkworlder.

  “I have noticed that you spend a great deal of time staring

  at the skies. Do you see anything there?” Rav asked.

  “I am thinking about my home.”

  “This is your home now.”

  Artemi forced another smile. “I have been made very welcome here.”

  “Hmm, that is good to know. And I see you’ve grown some muscles too!”

  She certainly had, and they were not the sort of smooth and slender swellings of strength she

  had come to know in the Darkworld. These were great, lumpen knots that circled her limbs like tree roots. Only Romarr would have been jealous of such things.

  She dropped the bale onto the cart with barely a grunt, recalling that she had found similar loads quite arduous in the weeks before, and turned to face Rav. She needed him as her friend, she reminded herself. “Is there anything I can help you

  with, commander?”

  He chuckled. “Your Mrakian is almost there. Come with me. It’s time you did as the adults do.”

  Artemi’s overseer grimaced at Rav as they drew away, though Rav did not seem bothered by it at all. Many people claimed that Rav was deeply respected by the city’s inhabitants, but few ever seemed to demonstrate that respect in their tone when they spoke of him. Ravendasor, they

  would say, with the corners of their mouths downturned and their tongues ready to spit. And their attitude to Rav was no exception. The port workers spoke of the dock master that way, and the dock master spoke of the city’s mayor that way. In truth, anyone with any degree of seniority was spoken of with eyes narrowed and teeth bared.

  It was the nature of this twisted culture. Every male and female mraki was spoiling for a

  fight, all ofthe time. Artemi counted herself as fortunate that the wingless pups like her were not seen as threatening enough to begin a contest with, and for as long as Rav remained friendly with her, she was content to remain at the bottom oftheir pile.

  He strode alongside her with relaxed shoulders and something of a swagger in his thin-legged walk. Really, he could almost be described as graceful,

  or at least as graceful as mraki could be. “It’s good that you are growing so strong, Emmi, but Dotho told me that you have not been eating properly. Is that so?”

  The pintrata meat. Just the smell of it cooking made her feel ill, and the air reeked of it in Dotho’s cavelet all of the time. “They were people. I cannot eat them!”

  “You were born to. The Father of-”

  “I don’t care about the

  bloody Father of Storms!” She slipped back into the Nightworld’s common tongue. “Peel off his scalp and turn him to ash! He’s an idiot.”

  At first, Rav’s eyes widened in shock at her blasphemy, but then a smile crept along his mouth, and he began to chuckle quietly. The chuckle became a laugh loud enough to echo around the vast cavern. “The more I see of you, the more I like you, Emmi,” he said when he had

  finished. “Now, tell me what have you been eating instead?”

  She shrugged. “Gechyll.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Gechyll? You do know we have not imported gechyll meat to this city in over four-hundred years?”

  “But-”

  “-But I think Dotho has played a little trick on you. It is for your own good. Look how strong you have become! And what’s that?” He placed one of his clawed fingers on a

  particularly knobbly part of her elbow. “Your wings are starting to come through.”

  A sudden wave of nausea hit Artemi, and it was strong enough to make her double over. She tried to empty the contents of her stomach onto the path in front of her, but it had been too long since she had last eaten. All she succeeded in doing was coughing and retching violently. What had they fed her? Women? Injra? Children?

  “Ah, come now, it’s the way you were made.”

  “I was not made to-” Blazes, the thought of it! “Did they suffer?”

  “Suffer?”

  Artemi tried to support herself by placing a hand on a nearby stalagmite. To her deeper disgust, she realised that her arms and fingers had grown long enough that she no longer had to reach for objects over a pace away. “Did they feel pain before

  they were slaughtered?”

  “I certainly hope so. Nasty little things.”

  Artemi groaned. “They are innocent. They don’t deser-”

  Rav’s bearing changed suddenly. “Now y
ou listen to me, pup. They are not innocent! They have warred with us; killed our innocents.” His words hissed with anger. “I will chew through a hundred thousand oftheir bones before I give so much as a spider’s backside about how they

  suffered! They are meat.”

  She closed her eyes and wished him away. All of it! How could a place so soulless exist as this - a place where neither the victims nor attackers had hearts?! When she found her way back to The Crux, she would make the Law-keepers pay for sending her here! There was nothing redeeming in any of the people in this world. Nothing!

  But when she opened her eyes again, Rav was still there,

  and so was the city of Vaporik beneath them. Rav’s expression was one of puzzlement. “You are soft and hard at the same time and I don’t understand it,” he said.

  “Please, I need to get back to my home.”

  He took a step closer. “This is your home. You are one of us.” Artemi could not hold herself together any longer. She burst into tears, and slid into a

  heap on the ground. She

  managed to whimper a, “No,” between sobs.

  “Stop that,” Rav hissed under his breath. He looked about anxiously. “You must stop that. Now.”

  But she continued to cry. She missed Morghiad so deeply! And she so longed to see all of her children again. Tallyn. Tallyn was dead! Artemi wept even harder at the pain she felt in her heart.

  “Ah, bastard pup of a-”

  Ravendasor did not finish, and instead picked her up with one of his concertinaed wings. There was a rush of cold air, and they were descending quickly through it before Artemi could form another sob. They landed on the roof of a pointed building in the centre of the city, and Rav swiftly smuggled her through the only door atop it. The air was even cooler inside the house, or cavelet, as such domiciles were known, and the tunnels inside it were only lit

  sporadically by lamps. Rav carried her through to one ofthe darker rooms and lifted her into a hammock, and once he was satisfied he could do nothing more to quiet her, he began pacing.

  “Not even pintrata... do this,” he said at last.

  “Cry?”

  “Shh! One of my servants will hear you.” Rav went to shut the door, but was immediately interrupted when one such

  member of his staff scampered into view.

  “Commander-” she began. Artemi could not see much of the woman’s face with Rav blocking her view, but she could tell that the servant had a very lithe, very strong body. In spite ofthe manner in which the creature’s knuckles dragged along the floor, Artemi would have described her as having a very attractive figure. Fires, what was happening to her

  “A moment’s privacy, please, Irwal. My friend here has taken ill. Wait a moment - fetch the taqqa band and the new box. The Aeravyan one; not that Yunish rubbish again.”

  “Fine,” the servant said with considerable bite in her tone. Not even a man’s own household treated their masters with respect here. She scurried off without a moment’s hesitation however, and Rav closed the door behind her.

  “Have you finished doing... that yet?” Rav asked.

  When Artemi had been training as Kurusu, her failing had always been her readiness to cry when things became difficult. Show no weaknesses! The Daisain had yelled at her again and again. Even if you are feeble inside, never let them know it! And those words were followed by the inevitable beating. Artemi had learned enough not to sniffle through those, but at other

  times, she simply could not do battle with her tears. “Yes, I’ve finished,” she said. “It’s done now.”

  “Good.” Ravendasor continued to pace in silence until the items he had requested were brought to him, and the door unceremoniously shut once more upon his servant’s pretty face.

  Pretty? Artemi wondered.

  The box Rav had been handed was made of varnished

  hardwood and was decorated by

  an ornate brass lock. Fishing a key out from the neck of his jacket, he said, “One taste ofthis, and you’ll never be that miserable again.”

  The box opened with a click, and almost as soon as it did, Artemi caught a waft ofthe most beautiful perfume she had ever smelled. “Is that-?”

  “It is your illumination. You once asked me where there was light in this world. Well, my young friend, it is right here.” He stood with some peculiar apparatus in

  his claws – apparatus that looked eerily similar to the tubes Artemi

  had seen on the eisiel farm. “Hold your arm out,” Rav said.

  “How much is this going to hurt?” It wasn’t that she feared pain, rather that she feared how incapacitated she might become. Ravendasor might have been the better example, but these were hardly trustworthy creatures.

  He placed a band about her outstretched arm and tightened it. “It won’t hurt.” Next, he placed one foot on a lever inside the box, and a stream of fluid spurted from the end ofthe needle he held between two fingers. “Ready?”

  It did smell... wonderful like winter roses and honey and earth after the rain had fallen, or the sweet scent of fire blossom on a sun-filled day in the Southern Falls. It was all the scents she missed from the Darkworld, all except for the scent of her husband. “For the

  light?” Artemi asked.

  Rav nodded. “You will see.”

  The needle slid easily into her flesh, and when the taqqa began to flow into her veins, it felt like smooth silk rather than the acid she had feared. Artemi’s breathing began to slow, and just as Rav had predicted, her troubles drifted from her thoughts. The room brightened suddenly as if lit by a thousand candles, and in an instant, it was gone.

  Artemi was in the woodland – a verdant wood that teemed with brilliant insects and brighter birds, whose wings shone gold and red in the dusk sunlight. Spring blooms filled the forest floor, and deer sprang about between the tree trunks in a merry rush of white tails and twiggy legs. She inhaled every scent ofthe bell-flowers, the wild garlic, the ancient wood and the soft undergrowth that peeked between her toes. This was an old memory, she realised, of a place that had existed before Hirrah. It was land that now belonged to the Calyrish family, but over three-and-a-halfthousand years before that, it had belonged to one of the greatest kings the Sennefhal continent had ever known.

  Besides Morghiad, Artemi reminded herself.

  She had been a new assassin then, still fresh from the heartache ofthe collapse of her

  Kusuru family, but fast becoming aware of what she could achieve in the world with the training she had. At that point, Artemi had already made it her mission to find good people, good leaders and to help them. And she had met Marteus Arrenfal, later known by the histories as King Ironheart.

  “Tem?” said a man’s voice to her left.

  And there he was, standing in the clearing with his famous

  black and gold sword at his hip. Marteus’ hair was mid-brown the same colour as his eyes – and long enough for the ends to waver in the lightest of breezes. His features were not hard, but rather like a carving that had been expertly smoothed at all of the corners. The shadow his height cast would never be as long as Morghiad’s, but the old king would still have been described as tall and impressive. “It’s a long time since I’ve

  thought of you,” Artemi said to him.

  “Thought of me?” He frowned lightly. “I saw you this morning at breakfast. Are all those memories starting to confuse you?”

  Artemi laughed. “No. Though I suppose you are a memory now. As is all ofthis.” She knew that she should have felt sad about that, but she did not. This place was too beautiful – too perfect.

  Marteus folded his arms. “I hate it when you talk of me like this. I’m not dead yet. Now, come back to the castle and do some blazed fighting for me. The Queen ofGialdin intends to pitch her best warrior against mine, and I fully intend to embarrass her by using you. And perhaps win a few gold coins in the process. So, can I drag you away from staring into the middle distance for an hour?”

 
; “I want some of that gold, Mart.”

  He nodded slowly. “Alright. You can have a quarter.”

  “Three quarters. I am not a toy to be wheeled out for the entertainment of your royal friends.”

  Marteus chuckled quietly. “You can have all of it. Come and do what you do. I know you enjoy it really.” He slipped an arm across her shoulders as he guided her away, but she did not mind it. Marteus was a good king, and a man who kept to his word.

  “What do you think of Gialdin’s queen?” Artemi asked while they walked.

  “I am already married.”

  “Your wife did not rob you of your eyes.”

  “Sometimes I think she would like to.” He sighed and withdrew his arm. “Ah, I do not find Queen Irrean beautiful – not like Bessa, of course – no one is as lovely as her. No one at all. But make no mistake, Irrean is sharp as one of your daggers, and