Voices of Blaze

by H. O. Charles

  With a tremor in her hand, she poured out the last piece of drinkable liquid from the fermenting barrel to the bottle. If there was one thing she knew about, it was how to make fungus turn plain food into excellent food. With a good harvest, a perfected technique and a little help from the Blazes, this was most certainly her finest batch of wine to date. She tasted a sample of it, and smiled to herself in spite of her own fears. Dry, tangy and rich: this was not just good wine, this would be the finest wine the world had ever seen. And what better time to enjoy such a creation than when the world was about to end?

  The barrel gave out a small creak as she set it straight again, and Lannda began the laborious process of hammering the corks into the bottles. She had owned this tanno vineyard for a good thousand years or so, and had only been forced to off two owners who presumed to buy it upon her deaths. Such small competition was surprising really, given the perfect nature of the land for the crop and the maturity of the vines. But then, it was said that the local village folk constructed stories about her, and that they were afraid. It did not matter; they still drank her wine.

  Lannda looked to the east. “Sister?”

  “I am here.” Mirel approached on silent, graceful feet. There had been times when Lannda had envied the skills her sister had, but swords and blood had never been her strength. Lannda had another purpose, and another hundred roles. The Law-keepers knew it, just as they knew all. “Things are changing,” she said, setting her hammer on the floor. “I can feel the advance of the decay. It moves faster through the air now.”

  Mirel nodded. “The girl-queen knows it too. She has scouts monitoring the deserts as they grow. They merge with Tegra’s now.”

  “That is nothing new.” Lannda sniffed. “Something else has changed. Something important. I hope you are ready for this fight, warrior.”

  “I have always been ready.”

  “Good. It is time for you to receive your instructions. You are to travel to Hirrah to find a young man and one other. You must take the Sky Bridges tonight and ride as fast as you can. The man’s name is Kalad Jade’an. I’m told it is a mission you will very much enjoy. Now, the details of it are this…”

  The cold fabric of a glove clamped over Medea’s mouth before she could scream, and another arm wrapped around her waist tighter than a lasso. She wriggled and squawked, and then tried to wield to push her attacker away, but the form melted to nothingness as soon as she had finished making it. She tried a second time, but again a kanaala tore her form out of the air. Fires burn him! Couldn’t her guards hear her muffled shouts, or even her wriggling?

  She kicked out hard with her feet, and managed to dislodge a bowl from a side cabinet as she was dragged past it. The bowl fell to the floor and shattered noisily, pieces skittering and tinkling across the crystal floor.

  Hah! Her guards would hear that and come to her rescue in an instant. Except, as she was manhandled all the way to the doors to her chamber, they did not come for her. Blazes, had they been… had they been murdered? They would not have dared to fall asleep at such a time, not when so much was at risk.

  Her captor kicked the door open with one foot and pulled her into the hallway, where she writhed and wriggled as violently as she could. But it was no good. The man had a hold on her like a damned vice! She glanced quickly around the corridor, but could see no sign of her soldiers alive or dead. What in the fires was going on?!

  Medea tried wielding again, but the form was snuffed out before she could blink. Whoever he was, he was worryingly capable. He all but carried her into a side-passage, though her feet still flailed, and Medea realised that this man must have had access to information about her security arrangements. Few people knew about this corridor, and few could possibly have known it was the route with no guards along it. Her heart sank as the truth became clear to her: someone close had betrayed her, and now they planned to use her for ransom. If they had planned to kill her, then she would have already been dead in her chambers.

  Perhaps this was the work of the di Firenzans; perhaps they had offered a great deal of money for her capture so that they could lay claim to her throne. And perhaps Koviere had been right; perhaps she had nominated an heir too soon.

  Stupid Medea! Why had she not realised her own fool weakness, instead of parading around as if she were the most powerful queen in all of Sennefhal? She should never have sent Kalad to those peace talks; doing so had only demonstrated how unsoundly she truly sat upon the Crystal Throne! At least if she had gone, her message to her people would have been consistent!

  She stopped writhing then. There was one weapon she still had to wield, though it would require rather more concentration than the others. Medea closed her eyes and reached for the current of power that coursed beneath the Blazes. As always, it fought her for control like an unbroken horse with anvils for hooves, but Medea persisted, and soon she had the energy that ran from The Crux under her control.

  But before she could wield it, the world went black.

  When colours came into view again, and evidently at the point she found herself awakening from her unconsciousness, she was hauled out of the glow of the palace and thrust onto the grass beneath a star-filled sky. Her hands were bound at her back and her legs tied together at the knees. Medea did not even bother to fight back this time. It would have been a pointless waste of energy, and she would probably be quenched soon, in any case.

  Blazes, was there any reason to struggle? Her rule had to have been the shortest ever in the history of the Jade’an family, and probably the shortest in Calidell. What a disappointment she would be to her parents, and to her beloved, dead brother. Even Kalad, for all of his disdain of royalty, would have been embarrassed by it. In her mind’s eye, something indistinct and shadowy shifted slightly.

  “Too easy,” boomed a very familiar voice, and it meant Koviere was one of her traitors. Blazes, even he had lost faith in her, and he had been with her family for two-hundred years!

  “I think she knows,” said another voice – this time a woman’s. It had to be Korali di Certa. Bloody, blazed and damned di Certas! Medea’s father had always told her never to trust them. Tallyn should have listened – light of – what if Korali had played a part in his death after all?

  “Let’s just gag her and get her out of here,” Koviere said as quietly as he was able.

  No! No Shade panther and traitor could be permitted to win here!

  Medea was duly trussed like a duck ready for roasting, and placed somewhat roughly over the front of a saddle. Her captor, who had hitherto remained silent, hopped onto the saddle behind her and kicked the horse into a canter. She tried twice more to wield Crux power to escape, but her captor seemed to know exactly what she was doing, and exactly how to break her concentration each time. After that, she tried three more times wield her way free with ordinary Blaze, but twice he unpicked her forms, and the third time he turned it into an enormous bolt of lightning that shattered the temporary defences of the East Gate. With the timbers still smouldering, they rode out of the city unchallenged.

  It was too late, Medea lamented. Too late to save herself, and too late to save Calidell.

  Onward they rode and into the moonlit forest, where owls still hooted and cicadas hissed, and there was barely a crunch from the dirt beneath the animal’s hooves. Once they were away from the road and too deep inside the woodland to be seen, the horse slowed to a walk and then stopped. Medea was offloaded onto the ground and her gag removed, and it was then that she remembered the friends she had here. While her captor hitched his mount to the tree, Medea closed her eyes and searched for all of the panthers that prowled close by. She found only two that were some distance away, but she called to them anyway.

  Hah! Try and unpick my beasts, idiot kanaala!

  The man soon finished tying bridles to tree branches, and afterward he approached to study Medea from a rather more intimate distance. It was too dark to see his eyes, or really to pick out any of his features that were not obscu
red by the mask he wore.

  “What is your plan, fool?” Medea asked him through her gag.

  The man tilted his head and tutted. There was something familiar… “That nightdress does not suit you. It should be made of thinner material, and be smaller,” he said in a Calbeni accent.

  Tallyn Hunter?! Tallyn?! “You!?”

  “Well, whom did you expect?”

  “I… what is the meaning of this!?”

  The Hunter removed his mask and grinned, though it was only his teeth that were really visible in the shadows. “You’re too stubborn to see sense, queeny. It’s not safe for you back there, so I’m taking you away for a while. Just a little while. You could do with the rest, and I think it would also help if you learned how to escape capture. Really, it was far too easy to take you, and you gave up much too soon. Your parents ought to have taught you better than that.”

  “No. I demand that you take me back. Now. I have things to do and my people need me.”

  “They’ll survive for a few weeks and your secretaries will keep everything in order. You’re mine until then.”

  A few weeks?! The country would have fallen to ruin by then! Medea struggled against her bonds. “Let me go!” She began to wield a fireball to let him know she was serious, but of course he trounced it in a split-second. Fry him and his follocking ancient abilities! This was why she never practised wielding with him; the man was infuriating to battle against!

  “No,” he said with a smile in his voice. “I have found a lovely little smuggler’s lodge for us to stay in. It looks out over the sea from the top of a cliff, and you can hear the ocean waves lapping the shore at night. It is beautiful.”

  “This is ridiculous. I cannot g-”

  Tallyn Hunter shook his head. “You do not have a choice. And if you cannot sit here quietly, we shall have to move on.” With that, he picked her up and threw her back onto the horse. For a moment, Medea considered ordering the panthers to tear him to shreds when they arrived, but she decided that perhaps he didn’t deserve quite that tough a punishment. Not even for rendering her unconscious, though she would have to make him pay for that one way or another. Perhaps she would go to this lodge with him for a day - maybe even two. But no longer than that. The Queen of Calidell was not about to give up her responsibilities for a silly man.

  Chapter 11

  Morghiad’s eyes snapped open suddenly. The moon had departed its frame in the window, but there were no signs that the sun would replace it soon. There were enough stars however, to shed just enough light into the chamber for him to see its contents clearly. He could see the curtains that hung from the posts about the bed, and the unmoving shadows in every corner of the room. He could see the armchairs, the rugs and the piles of clothing that lay upon them. Beyond were lamps and a glossy table and ceiling-high shelves, filled with hundreds of leather-bound books. They were coloured the same shade of grey by the poor illumination, but some of the spines were still legible.

  Amidst a thousand others on the shelves, his sight was drawn to one volume, larger than most of the others. “Chronicles,” it read, and he did not have to move closer to know what the rest of the title was. He had fallen in love with the woman in those pages, years before he had even met her. The Artemi of legend did not betray those she loved. She did not bring harm to them, no matter the cost of protecting them.

  And then his eyes fell to the shining knife that lay on the floor beside Dorinna’s clothing. It was no plain dagger for waving at enemies or for picking at meat or hurling at feast days. The metal of it shone blue, and the blade was decorated with writing. In House Kantari, House Jade’an sees fire and the future. Had his first father ever betrayed his mother?

  Somehow, Morghiad doubted that very much.

  He looked to the woman who now slept soundly in his arms. The warmth from her body was the only thing that kept him from shivering, but he feared things other than the cold far more if he let go of her now. The monsters had remained silent throughout the encounter, and he was sure that they would have a storm of screams and words for him the moment he left the room. And he feared that Dorinna would wake, declare herself unsatisfied and make more demands of him. Perhaps she would decide not to sign the treaty at all.

  But right in that moment, at that time as he gazed in the darkness, he could hold to his hope that everything would work out for the better. He checked for Artemi’s stream again. Still missing.

  That hope continued to fragment as he studied the mass of wielder streams in the blackness of the ether, and piece by piece his hope faded to the tiniest pinprick of light in the darkness. It was now or never.

  He shifted his weight to slip one of his arms out from under Dorinna, but she mumbled something, and awoke before he could move any further.

  “Morghiad?” she said.

  He kept his voice low, perhaps out of some misguided belief that she would fall back to sleep from it. “I have to go now.”

  “Hmm.” She looked at him from beneath lazy eyelids. “I do not want this moment to end.”

  No. Please, no – don’t say it! “I must return to my son and make sure he is safe.” You have what you wanted from me, wench!

  She knows we rule now, said the multiplicitous whispers.

  Her eyes seemed to look upon him for an age, but eventually they lowered. “Go then. I shall see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Morghiad said, and left the warmth of the bed to find his clothes. To his relief, there were no guards waiting for him beneath her window, and no secret team of soldiers ready to poison and capture him or drag him into a prison cell. Instead, he found himself walking the red-rug corridors of the Hirrahan palace as if nothing remarkable had happened at all.

  The monsters kept their silence for the most part too, though there was the occasional grumble or murmur from them as he approached corners he could not see around, or passed by areas that were not well illuminated. They were a paranoid bunch alright.

  “Morghiad!” exclaimed a familiar voice ahead behind him. “I am so glad I found you!”

  Blazes, what n-

  His mood darkened when he turned to see a caramel-haired woman skipping toward him. Her manner had been childlike nearly forty years ago, and clearly nothing had changed about her. Morghiad supposed that her smiles and never-ending questions would have seemed a happy distraction for him when The Daisain had chosen her for the engagement. But he must have known that the wedding would never happen. Jurala had been nothing more than a tool for his plans, to be used and cast aside when she was no longer needed.

  “Good evening, Jurala.”

  “Betrothed,” she said with a smile and a nod, but dipped her head and covered her smile as a guard walked past.

  “We are not betrothed,” Morghiad replied once the guard was gone, “But I hope you are well?”

  She nodded eagerly, grey eyes sparkling and nose wrinkling with her smile.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “Why, to see you of course. And talk of our times in the Cadran forests – those kisses we stole beneath the oak tree…”

  Morghiad sighed heavily. Fate hated him, or perhaps the Law-keepers in Achellon wanted to punish him repeatedly for stealing Artemi away from them. He was not sure which it was. “Then I’m afraid you’ve wasted your journey. I am married…” …though he no longer deserved to be… “… and I do not wish to relive those years. My father tortured me and used you to keep me from running away or drowning myself in a lake. You were a good friend to me through that time, but nothing more. I’m sorry.” He sniffed, and realised he could still smell Dorinna’s scent on his clothes. Blazes, if anyone had come close to him…!

  “Oh,” was all Jurala said. Her innocent smile fell from her rosebud lips, her cheeks reddened and her eyes watered suddenly. She began sobbing quietly.

  What was he supposed to do with her? Comfort her? Leave her like this? Abruptly, Morghiad felt the eyes of someone else watching him. It could have been a guard, or a frie
nd… or enemy. He could not take any chances with Mirel on the loose. Morghiad put his hand on his hilt, and spun rapidly to face them.

  Burn them, burn them, burn them! chanted the voices in his head.

  Instead, he saw that the woman before him was not Mirel, but Cass. What was wrong with these women that they had to travel in groups? But as the thought departed his mind, so followed the sound of footsteps running away from him. Jurala had fled amidst her floods of tears, and Morghiad could not help but feel relieved that she was no longer his problem to solve.

  “Can I help you?” he said to Cass. Her eyes were very blue, he thought as she drew near to him. Almost… ice blue. “Cass?”

  She did not reply. Instead, she continued to walk toward him, her ringlets bobbing and her rose-coloured dress swaying with the movement. Morghiad reached up for his sword in that moment, leapt forward and grabbed her by the throat. Her bright blue eyes bulged. He squeezed firmly, but something… something was not right.

  He tilted his head to try and work out what it was. He knew Mirel was irrevocably quenched, and that he would never feel fire from contact with her, but those eyes… there was genuine fear there. And the mask of Blaze – why could he not see the form that made it? Who would have been skilled enough to engineer it so perfectly to match Cass’ face?

  Kill for freedom. Kill for light. Kill to live, they sang.

  Morghiad let go of her neck slowly, and released his hand from the sword hilt.

  Cass was blinking fast, trying to swallow the air that was left in her throat. The woman was… terrified.

  Oh… Morghiad cursed loudly, and with words blue enough to have offended Silar. They only made Cass step back in deeper fear. “I – I’m sorry, Cass. I thought-”

  But she turned and ran from him before he could finish.

  Bloody blazed light! Morghiad growled in irritation and stamped back toward his rooms, but on the way, he encountered his son. Kalad was wearing a brand new, black silk coat with red embroidery up and down the sleeves. His beard was trimmed and the buckles on his boots shone brightly. He looked rather more like a kahr, Morghiad thought to himself.