Voices of Blaze (Volume 5 of The Fireblade Array)

by H. O. Charles

  place, he clearly had not had time to practise proper control over his thoughts. The door opened before him, and stark, empty darkness was revealed beyond it. “Stay here,” he instructed, but Artemi would have sooner given herself up to the fires of The Crux than do that.

  She marched in behind him and waited for her eyes to adjust to the low light. Almost immediately, the sensation of the Blazes flooded back into her,

  burning brightly and fiercely at every edge of her consciousness. And that was a good feeling! It was every joy and light that taqqa had come so close to bringing her, and so much more besides.

  “No wielding!” Morghiad barked.

  If her face had been visible to him, she would have grimaced to let him knowjust how she felt about that. She had wielded whilst pregnant in another life, in another world, and it had not

  harmed the children, though at the time, that particular pregnancy had been more advanced. Morghiad was definitely being over-cautious. Her thoughts paused there, however, as she realised she could not detect any wielding ability in this child. Another son?

  Tallyn, her mind whispered back in hope, but she stamped down on that voice before it ran away with her.

  “If you’re coming, you stay

  behind me,” Morghiad whispered firmly.

  “As you command, my king.” She could perfectly imagine the feelings of annoyance and irritation that would have roused in him from the comment.

  Slowly, her eyes acclimatised to the cave into which they had stepped, and the door behind them eased shut. It mirrored the one in Gialdin with its thick bar of light and pool of water upon the floor, but the

  rock that surrounded them was of an altogether different nature. It was blue and pale like the Kemeni mountains themselves, and that same colour would have faded seamlessly into the white of any snow that drifted in. But here the rocks were not frosted with ice water. Instead, every surface had been covered in the glutinous silk of a spider’s web, and strands of it arced from wall to wall in a complex tapestry of spun silver. Its creator appeared to be absent. “This is no place for my wife-”

  “It will be no worse than any of the others.”

  Morghiad made a deep growling noise and stepped forward, withdrawing his sword. He began cutting through the web with long, slow sweeps of his blade, and Artemi could not help but feel frustrated at it. Her blades were probably still locked somewhere in Gialdin. She waited patiently while he cleared a way

  for them to the exit, and then padded behind him toward the glowing door.

  air was too light and thin to be natural. Air ought to move about and have some substance to it, Silar thought to himself. And what was the point of these trees if nothing lived on or around them, anyway? He leaned closer to examine the bark of one of them, but could detect neither insects nor egg casings, nor anything of note. It was a playground, he decided – a playground for people who wanted nature without the

  horrors of it. There was no life to this place because the truth of life had become too abhorrent for its creators to bear. This was a dream world for fools to live in without living.

  And who had created this dream world? Not Artemi – she had realised the stupidity of it the Law-keepers! And as his mind came to think ofthem, a memory returned to him. This was all a ploy – every moment he had spent here, every puzzle he had

  been set to solve and fire he had been urged to tend – it was all a ploy to keep him trapped here! The unseen hands of the Lawkeepers were guiding his movements, but he had been too damned stupid to see it!

  “Fires of Achellon!” he shouted to the trees. But they remained impassive and lifeless. They did not even waver in the breeze nor creak in sympathy for his realisation. Blast those stupid, false trees made of nothing but

  mist and wishes! Burn them for turning his memory to Jarhoan cheese in this place! How was he to achieve whatever it was that he had come for if he could barely remember anything for longer than five minutes here! Blast them to the deepest depths of nothingness! He kicked at the will die pieces that still lay at his feet, and then blinked. There was something beyond them – something that looked different from his usual trail of clues. He

  strode toward it.

  When he drew close, it became apparent that this was Achellon’s version of a house. Though windowless and plain, it did have a door on the side that he faced. Well of course it follocking-well would, wouldn’t it? And naturally, there would be no handle on the thing. Silar approached it anyway, but as soon as he did, it swung open before him.

  He waited for someone to

  come out and attack him, or remonstrate with him for being here in the first place, but no one appeared. Silar withdrew his sword, stepped quietly through and found himself in a vast room that was really far too big to have fitted into the structure that lay outside. Blazes, how he hated this place!

  The room, though stark and with walls that glowed brighter even than those at Gialdin, was not empty. A group of women lay

  sleeping at the far end of it, so Silar decided to investigate. Perhaps they would be pretty women, he thought to himself with some excitement.

  With an assassin’s walk that even Artemi would have been impressed by, he tiptoed silently toward them and held his breath. He need not have bothered however, for when he got there, he realised that none ofthe women had heads. There was no blood, no mess or evidence of a

  fight. There were just three glowing bodies, and only air above their shoulders.

  Wait... there was something bulky underneath one of them. Silar pushed the woman over gently, but sighed forlornly at what he saw. It looked to have been a boy, no more than eight years old, who had met a similar fate to these women. No child, not even the offspring of the evil gods or whatever they were that ruled this place, deserved such a

  fate.

  Where were their heads? And almost immediately he knew the answer would be behind him. He turned slowly to see it, and found the four of them neatly arranged upon pedestals, facing away from him. When he went to inspect their faces, he instantly recognised three ofthem as the Law-keepers, and each one had their eyes closed. The boy’s eyes were wide however, and though devoid of fire, they shone a very

  vivid shade of blue. Silar could not help but think he had seen those eyes before, but where, he could not identify.

  “What I do not see cannot exist until I see it, and even then it is a world of my own making.” Had Silar done this somehow? He certainly had not intended to. It could well be another puzzle set for him by the Law-keepers, though it seemed a very odd one indeed. At least when they had set him puzzles before, they had

  hinted that there might be an answer worth pursuing.

  He closed the boy’s eyes gently with the tips of his fingers, but as soon as he removed them, the eyes snapped open again. Burn this place! Silar cursed again, hissed through his teeth and spun to leave the room.

  Something was wrong here. Even for this place, with its peculiar rules and torments designed especially for him. Something was not right about it. Once outside, he sat against one of the glowing walls of the building to ensure that it did not disappear while he was not looking, and tried to think of what he had learned so far. He had seen Morghiad; he was fairly sure that had not been any design of his captors, and he had finally won a game of will die against himself. Before that... there had been the flagon of ale. Some dreams had come from drinking its contents, and... his

  mood darkened as he remembered the dreams.

  Oslond, he thought, Oslond must pay.

  But there was a reason he could not immediately march to his revenge - something else that itched at the back of his mind. What was it? A name? He shook his head. Whatever it was, he would remember if it was particularly important. No, the Law-keepers had revealed Oslond’s nature to him because

  they wanted him to understand something beyond what had happened to his mother. They had wanted him to see the sacrifice she had made, and they had wanted him to see what he was: a
creation oftheirs, a tool to be used for their purposes.

  They wanted... someone to see into the future for them. The will die game – that had been about playing against himself, except it had not been him. It had been another version of him: The

  Daisain.

  Silar sprang to his feet so that he could pace and swing his sword through the grass. He was not the same as The Daisain, and yet he was. They were not the same person, except that they were. The Law-keepers had made them both, but the earlier version had been killed when he could not see through the chaos of Mirel’s insane mind. They had needed a second version: Silar, but something had not worked as

  it should have. Silar had not developed as quickly as they had hoped, or he had disappointed them when they saw he could not anticipate Morghiad’s actions.

  Chaotic minds... Talia. His jaw hardened and his teeth ground as he remembered his original reason for coming here, and how the Law-keepers had led him on a merry chase to forget her. But he was better at manipulating this place now. He could make things happen.

  Silar closed his eyes and envisioned a ball of flame in the palm of his hands. He imagined it wild and chaotic as she had been, and he pictured arms and legs sprouting out from the middle of it. Talia, he thought, and he imagined the ball of flame growing too large for his hand and spilling out onto the ground. It grew into a handsome woman with blood-red hair and sky-blue eyes. She winked suggestively at him. Talia.

  But when he opened his eyes again, she was not there. Follocks to it, he wanted to say, but the words hurt too much. Perhaps it really was not possible to bring her back, and perhaps the Law-keepers had managed to bring The Daisain back because he had never truly been dead. It was then that something fell into place in Silar’s mind, as a cog might fit into machinery and permit it to start to turn.

  The Daisain would have

  been sensible enough to have known that Morghiad would side with Artemi no matter what. He had to have known that he would not kill his own son when it risked hurting her. No amount of chaos in Morghiad’s mind could have made that decision difficult to see, and if it had been, The Daisain would have made arrangements for future possibilities in the event of his capture. No, he had known that capture and imprisonment would

  most likely happen. He must have wantedit to happen.

  Had the Law Keepers even known what they had created, and how powerful The Daisain truly was? They were simple enough - predictable enough to be his toys.

  And then Silar saw it. He saw the truth that The Daisain had revealed to them – a truth that had been an incomplete truth. And he saw how they had been manipulated and turned

  like soft lead on a cart’s wheel. The Daisain wanted the end to come; he had always wanted it. It was his route to controlling all ofthe worlds, bright and night, and it was his route to ruling from a grand seat of power in The Crux. Silar trotted back into the building and swallowed in disgust at what he saw. The bodies ofthe Law-keepers were still there, only this time they floated in rippling pools oftheir own blood. There was more spattered against the

  wall, and their heads had been mounted on spikes. Even the boy’s. They truly were dead. No... Silar had to stop it now. He had to prevent it from going any further than this!

  from its hair-filled face, each of them stacked atop one another like misshapen black marbles on a gaming grid, and four great, pointed fangs curved outward from its mouth. Those were covered in sparse yellow fur, and beneath that shone the hard black casing that passed for its skin. The creature was as tall as two warhorses, with a dozen spindly legs that could have formed a cage about a good-sized house. And it moved rapidly, so

  very rapidly!

  “You stay there,” Morghiad instructed, and Artemi would have been content to humour him ifthe giant spider had not hissed noisily the moment he drew near to it.

  Artemi looked about at the cave, and her eyes soon fell upon numerous bundles of spun web. The shape ofthe bundles matched perfectly with the shape of bound bodies. “Mor-”

  But he kept moving toward

  the creature, evidently hoping to distract it so that she could escape. This would not be like the eisiels, Artemi told herself; there was no pinh poison here. She strode forward boldly, and placed herself beside her husband. “What are you doing?” he hissed, but she ignored him. Quite unexpectedly, the spider lowered its body to the ground and drew its legs inward. It was... bowing to her. But of course it was. The guardians of

  the gates ought to behave before her as an Achellon-born – she was essentially their mistress.

  Morghiad blinked, but his expression rapidly turned to a grin. “Perhaps that is why I seek to please you so.” He placed an arm about her waist and began leading her out ofthe cave.

  “Your mother never did.”

  “I didn’t realise you did not get on with her.”

  Artemi pulled her mouth to one side. “We did get on, and she was an excellent queen to her people. But it was always a cool accord we had. It is sometimes difficult when you have known a woman’s husband longer than she has known him. And there was a time when I was concerned she would distract Hedinar from his duties. That was all.” “Distract him from his-?” Artemi shrugged. “He was a brilliant warrior and leader. I did not want the world to lose those things because of a woman. I

  suppose it was for the best though, no?”

  Morghiad’s eyebrows rose and fell briefly, and they remained low when he stepped outside ofthe spider’s cave. A long, sloping beach led down to the shoreline, where azure seas rolled and rocked toward a distant coast full of mountains. Artemi inhaled the fresh air deeply. It smelled of fish and seaweed and of life and living. “I have missed this,” she said

  quietly.

  “Let’s see where we are,” her husband said, trotting up the hillside behind them. Artemi followed, and with a better vantage point, it became clear they were on an island. Several more stretched out into the ocean beyond them, while a spit of craggy rock jutted out from the mainland and toward the middle isle in the chain.

  “We’ll need a boat,” Morghiad said with a grumble in

  his voice. “I hate boats.”

  The landscape around them was almost entirely grassland and rock, with little sign of any animal living upon it but birds. It was unlikely that men ever bothered coming here, and that meant there would be no boats. Artemi felt her brow knotting as she thought of how the next fortnight would pass. They could not wander too far from the cave, but food here was likely to be scarce. There were no buildings, no

  shelter from the wind or the rain, no blankets for babies or animals to skin for fur. Morghiad would have a fit if she tried to wield anything useful to solve these problems, and there were definitely no wet nurses. Blazes!

  “Are you any good at fishing, husband?”

  His green eyes fixed on her for a moment, but he sighed when he looked away again. “At least there will be no eisiels here, and no Mirel to hurt you. We can be thankful for that. I had been looking forward to some time alone with you.”

  “We will not be alone for long. And there’s Kalad and Med to think about. We must make sure they are safe.”

  Morghiad nodded slowly. “After the baby is born.”

  Artemi put his hand to her stomach, sliding it beneath her bodice so that his fingers touched her skin. Fire spread out from the point of contact and right

  through her body to her fingertips and toes. “Can you tell yet? If it is male or-”

  “I cannot sense a wielder,” he said. “So it must be another son.” He smiled.

  Three sons and a daughter then? Or Tallyn? Blazes, let it be Tallyn! Artemi smiled back, though she did not want to hope too deeply – such hopes could only ever lead to more heartbreak. She removed his hand and studied it as it lay in

  hers. It was long-fingered and strong– a strong hand that had held another woman close. She released it and resumed her study ofthe landscape. “There is a sinkhole in the grass over there. It will guard us f
rom the winds at least.”

  Morghiad nodded, and they made their way to it to begin setting up a camp. By the time evening came, they had a small shelter built from driftwood and two sizeable piles of bracken

  upon which to sleep. It really ought to have been one pile, but Artemi could not yet bring herself to lie beside him without her mind filling with torturous thoughts. Even with Morghiad several feet away from her, she still found herself wondering if Queen Dorinna had wrapped her fingers amongst those ebony lidir, or if she had squeezed the bottom that had once been Artemi’s to squeeze.

  It troubled her that

  Morghiad did not seem to concern himself with the same worries. In truth, Artemi could not read anything of what went on inside the man’s mind at that moment, and that only made her muscles tense. Sleeping with him might have renewed their link and solved the problem, but she was certainly not ready to do that yet. Not in the absence of a great many pints of ale, anyway.