The Labyrinth of Flame

by Courtney Schafer

  “If this trade goes bad, ditch your pack. See those two rock slabs with the purplish streaks?” I jerked my chin at the rocks poking skyward on the bowl’s far side like a giant stack of broken plates turned on end. Two of the slabs midway along the line had purple layers of azemite slashing across their ruddy sandstone surface. “Run for the crevice between them.”

  Before ever blowing that bone flute, I’d scouted an escape route through and over the slabs. Clanfolk must have some skill at climbing, living as they did in this wilderness of stone, so I couldn’t count on us simply spidering up to safety. But in a slot as tight as that crevice, any attackers would be forced to come after us one at a time. If we stemmed up the walls quickly enough, we could kick rocks down on pursuers’ heads, then climb out and over the slab’s back side to escape into the maze of stone fins and canyons behind it.

  Assuming I could get Kiran up any difficult climbs fast enough. After a month spent scrambling over the Whitefires’ ridges and couloirs, he’d gotten a lot more agile, but he was still far from an expert. I resettled my pack’s contents so our coil of makeshift rope sat right on top, ready for quick access.

  Eyeing the rope, Kiran shook his head. “If it comes to a fight, you run. I only have to touch any attackers to stop them. Then we might at least gain any water they carry.”

  Touch them and rip the life straight out of them. Memories of blackened trees and dead drovers flashed through my head. “Awfully risky, don’t you think? What if Ruslan feels you do it?”

  “He won’t,” Kiran said, all cool assurance. “It’s not spellcasting. Ikilhia drawn by touch causes no traces in the aether, and I don’t have to drop my barriers to take it. So long as I wear the amulet and my barriers remain in place—”

  “Yeah, yeah, Ruslan can’t find you. You said that last time. Next thing we knew, Ruslan was seeing through your eyes, about to tear straight through your amulet’s warding.”

  Kiran’s gaze dropped from mine. I knew he didn’t remember it, not directly. During our unwilling visit to Ninavel last month, Ruslan had burned away years’ worth of Kiran’s memories, including those of our first desperate flight through the Whitefires earlier this year. But Kiran had seen my own memories of that trip—hell, he’d scrutinized them so hard and so long, seeking some sign they were false, he probably knew them better than I did. So why would he be so cavalier about the risk?

  Kiran said, “Last time, Ruslan was actively seeking me—or pretending to, anyway. He isn’t now. Since he believes me a prisoner in Alathia, unreachable behind their border wards, his attention will be on…other matters.”

  Like the demons of legend. Specifically, how to find them and convince them to raze all of Alathia to blood and ashes. Not to mention savaging Cara and Melly, since Ruslan hated me almost as much as he hated the Alathians. He wanted us all to pay for helping Kiran escape him, but he couldn’t take revenge in person. He’d made a blood vow never to cast against either me or Alathia in exchange for getting his hands on Kiran when the Alathians dragged us to Ninavel last month. If he broke the vow, he’d burn. But a man as viciously clever and determined as Ruslan wasn’t about to let a vow stop him, especially after an Alathian mage had forced him into giving Kiran back.

  So Kiran and I had to stop him. A task so difficult as to approach impossibility, but I had to believe that we could pull it off. The alternative was too terrible.

  Kiran’s eyes had darkened, the bruised shadows beneath them all the more pronounced. Not hard to guess his thoughts had followed paths as grim as mine.

  I said, “Just tell me you’re being honest in weighing the risk. That you won’t get sloppy because part of you still thinks the solution is to turn yourself over to him.” While captive in Alathia, Kiran had insisted he could talk Ruslan out of bargaining with demons. As if Ruslan would listen to a word he said, rather than use the mark-bond to fuck with his mind until he became the devoted, willing tool that Ruslan wanted.

  I’d promised Kiran we’d find a better way, one that wouldn’t condemn him to life as Ruslan’s lapdog. Yet I had the uncomfortable suspicion that I hadn’t done as good a job of changing Kiran’s mind as I’d hoped.

  “That’s not why!” Kiran protested. At my sharp gesture, he lowered his voice back to a near-whisper. “I would never reveal myself to Ruslan, not while I travel with you. I wouldn’t risk you that way.”

  Not while I travel with you. Oh yeah, he was still thinking about it. I swallowed harsh words; now wasn’t the time for an argument. He sounded sincere enough in his concern for me—a damn good thing, since if Ruslan got hold of Kiran through the mark-bond, the very first thing he’d do was compel Kiran to slit my throat. The blood oath prevented Ruslan from casting against me, but it didn’t prevent him from killing me by physical means.

  Yet for all Kiran’s evident concern for my survival, I still felt unsettled. The Kiran I’d known before Ruslan took his memories wouldn’t have so readily suggested draining men’s lives with magic. This Kiran…I suffered another flash of memory: Kiran with his head thrown back in ecstasy, his knife buried in the heart of Stevannes, an Alathian mage who’d been our ally.

  He’d killed Stevan to spare Melly from dying at Ruslan’s hand, and he’d used the death-born power to save all of Ninavel. I couldn’t fault his reasons. How could I, when he’d saved everyone I loved? I wasn’t so blindly prejudiced as the Alathian Council, who saw only that he’d murdered their top arcanist and cast the very sort of magic they loathed Ninavel for tolerating. Yet these last weeks I’d suffered far too many nightmares in which Kiran licked blood off a blade and looked at me with Ruslan’s cold, cruel smile.

  I said, “Look, how about you try running first? Save the…other thing…for if that fails. Safer if we can double back on any pursuers and track them to water. Assuming we need to do anything at all. Chances are the trade’ll go just fine.”

  “Because things always go so well for us.” Kiran gave me a crooked little smile. “I’ll run if that’s what you want. But Dev, if you trust me in anything, trust this: I’d never do anything to harm you.”

  “Well, yeah. You said Ruslan bound you.” Ruslan’s vow not to cast against me had been made on behalf of his apprentices as well. To make sure Kiran and his mage-brother Mikail didn’t cast anything that’d result in all three of them burning to ash, Ruslan had done something to their minds so they couldn’t even consider hurting me with magic. Not deliberately, anyway, as Ruslan had vowed never to knowingly cast to harm me. Which left a boulder-sized loophole that Ruslan was all too happy to exploit.

  “I don’t just mean by casting.” Kiran’s eyes on mine were dead serious and his shoulders tight with strain. He knew the Alathians weren’t the only ones upset by his killing Stevan.

  “Glad to hear it.” Did I trust him? I wanted to. The old Kiran I would’ve, no question. But Stevan’s death wasn’t the only dismaying decision I’d seen Kiran make in Ninavel.

  Kiran added, lower yet, “If I ever must take ikilhia, I promise you I’ll take as little as I can. Enough to stop an attacker, but not to kill.”

  Slowly, I nodded. Might be safer in the long run to kill anyone that threatened us, but I couldn’t help feeling relieved at his words.

  Silence fell. Sweat trickled down my sides. Not long, the clansman had said, but it already felt an eternity. The way he’d stared at Kiran kept nagging at me. What had he seen? I squinted at Kiran again. His shirt was laced tight, hiding his amulet, and I didn’t see anywhere the dirt had rubbed off his skin.

  Kiran gave me a quizzical glance. “What?”

  “Nothing.” I hadn’t ever asked Kiran why he stayed so freakishly pale, but I had my suspicions. The demon we’d faced in the Cirque of the Knives had had hair as black as Kiran’s—if the demon’s snaky, subtly moving braids were truly hair—and skin the stark, inhuman white of moonlit ice. The demon had said of Kiran that he was molded in our image.

  A gust of wind skirled through the rock bowl, stinging my skin with sand.
I blinked away grit and caught movement in the rocks above. I hissed at Kiran in warning. He stood, his face taut with worry.

  The clansman eeled around a boulder with fat, sloshing waterskins dangling from his hands. To my surprise he wasn’t alone; a young woman stalked right behind him. Her trousers and tunic were of the same coarse cloth as his, but her skin was ordinary Arkennlander brown like mine, without the coppery hue that spoke of Varkevian descent. She looked whipcord-tough, with a lean, rangy build, a fox-sharp chin, and prominent cheekbones. Her dark hair was caught up in a thick topknot bound by rune-marked jade, and a bronze amulet hung from a chain around her neck. The amulet’s spiked, interlocking loops reminded me of the useless little devil-ward charms that superstitious streetsiders wore in Ninavel, but this amulet was far larger and more complex than any devil-ward I’d ever seen.

  She couldn’t be any older than I was, early twenties at the most, but she moved with all the arrogant confidence of the wealthiest of Ninavel highsiders.

  Or Ninavel’s mages. Oh, hell! Kiran had told me a mage’s soul burned so brightly there was no hiding it from another, not this close. The gods only knew what would happen if she sensed the truth of him. I caught Kiran’s gaze, my brows raised in urgent question.

  He shook his head minutely. She wasn’t a mage? Thank Khalmet. But still…

  “Who’s this?” I demanded of the clansman.

  He halted some twenty paces away. “Our godspeaker wished to see you. To determine if you are touched by Khalmet as you said.”

  I was beginning to wish I’d come up with some other story. Any other story. I racked my brain for any mention of a godspeaker in tales I’d heard from convoy drovers, and came up with nothing. Maybe the clansman meant to squeeze more profit out of us by claiming this “godspeaker” could lift our misfortune.

  She stalked around us in a wide circle, moving with a sandcat’s lithe, predatory grace, and her piercing black gaze never once left us. Could Kiran be wrong about her? She sure acted like a mage. A cold pit yawned open in my stomach.

  “Thought we had a bargain,” I said.

  “We do.” The clansman held out the waterskins. “Full as they’ll hold. Give over the price.”

  I approached warily and first sniffed, then tasted the water in each skin. No warning bitterness or other hint of contamination. Safer to check for poison or foulness with a sweetwater charm, but we didn’t have one. In the end, I gestured to Kiran, all too aware of the godspeaker still circling at my back.

  Kiran tossed an oilskin packet containing gems and charms to the clansman. I slung one waterskin over my shoulder and retreated to tie the others to our packs, moving as fast as I dared. The godspeaker prowled back around to the clansman’s side. He asked her a soft question in what sounded like oddly inflected Varkevian.

  The godspeaker grinned wide. “My dream spoke truth,” she said in a high, clear voice pitched far too loud to be for his ears alone. “Today we are Shaikar’s hands and will earn his favor. Khadijjah ashtok meit vas!”

  She stabbed a slender finger straight at us, and a horde of yelling, knife-wielding clanfolk boiled out of the rocks.

  Chapter Two

  (Kiran)

  The clanfolk howled in savage chorus as they rushed down the sandstone. Kiran froze, power flaring from his ikilhia in instinctive defense. The urge to release his mental barriers and strike was overwhelming. But he must not cast—he must not. He struggled to rein in wild magic and hold his barriers firm, lost to all else.

  A violent yank on his wrist sent him staggering. “Run, damn you!” Dev’s green eyes were white-rimmed in his mahogany face, his teeth bared in a snarl. The godspeaker howled in concert with her oncoming kin, her head tipped to the sky and her slender arms thrown wide. The wizened trader remained in a defensive stance at her side, with a knife in one tattooed hand and the bag of gems and charms still clutched in the other.

  Kiran lurched away in a stumbling run. The very air seemed to resist his progress, as if he ran through thickened syrup. Sweat coursed into his eyes, his lungs laboring. The dark line of the crevice between the purple-streaked slabs looked impossibly distant across the open expanse of the bowl.

  Dev overtook him, darting past with agile speed despite his shorter legs and the bulky packs clutched under each arm. Eager yells sounded close behind. Kiran strove to run faster.

  Something struck his legs. He crashed down onto sun-heated stone, releasing an inarticulate shout. Ahead, Dev skidded to a halt, calling to him. Kiran struggled to rise, but his legs wouldn’t move. A leather strap weighted by two rocks was wound tight around them.

  The frontrunning clansmen were closing fast. Kiran snatched up his belt knife and hacked through the leather binding his legs. He kicked free of the strap and jumped to his feet. Thoughts tumbled through his head in a frantic, quicksilver rush.

  Futile to run with his pursuers so close. But to fight so many—when he’d spoken so confidently to Dev of taking ikilhia, he’d imagined facing a few men, not an entire army. He could take power by touch without alerting Ruslan, but if he drew too much into his own ikilhia and did not release it in a spellcasting, his barriers would fail under the pressure. Or if the clansmen used the knives gleaming in their dusty hands, if they hurt Kiran too badly before he could stop them—his barriers would likewise crumble, his body reaching blindly for the power needed to heal. Either way, Ruslan would know instantly the truth of Kiran’s location.

  Temptation rose in a sick, terrible wave. If discovery was inevitable, why not fight properly? Throw the gates of his ikilhia wide, and let a glorious cataract of power blaze through his blood. One lash of magefire, and his attackers would be charred stains on the stone. An outcome Ruslan would applaud. He’d come to reclaim Kiran, take him back to Ninavel and the embrace of his mage-family, and when he did…Kiran knew exactly what he might offer Ruslan that would turn him aside from his search for demonkind. An offer that would save countless lives, including Dev’s.

  No! A voice deep within screamed in furious denial. The price of that salvation was far too high. How could he even consider surrender? There might still be a chance to prevail. The clanfolk were surely ignorant of the danger they faced in attacking him. If he could shock them, frighten them enough to inspire a retreat—

  For that, he’d need to do more than take mere sips of ikilhia. Vivid and jagged as lightning, the memory of the soul-consuming joy he’d felt in killing Stevannes lanced through him. Kiran cast a wild glance over his shoulder at Dev, who had tossed aside the packs and was racing toward him.

  “Stay back!” Kiran shouted. No time to see if Dev heeded the warning. Kiran sheathed his knife to free his hands, and faced the onrushing clanfolk.

  The first to reach him was a young man who bounded over the sandstone with a swift energy terribly reminiscent of Dev’s. Sweat sheened the corded muscles of his bare arms, and his dark eyes were alight with the keen anticipation of a hunter who sees his prey falter. He leaped at Kiran, metal glinting in his hand—not a knife, but some type of charm.

  Charms, Kiran didn’t fear. He grabbed for one ruddy brown arm.

  The young man twisted aside with astonishing agility. A blow slammed Kiran face-down onto stone. Crude magic crawled over his barriers, seeking. The amulet flared hot against his chest in protective response, even as hands wrenched his arms behind his back. More hands gripped him, feet crowding all around, ululating cries of triumph ringing out—somewhere, Dev was shouting, the words lost in the clamor—

  Kiran focused on the hands pinning his limbs and sought through the contact. Multiple dim coals of ikilhia flickered in his inner vision. He pulled savagely at the coals, taking every spark of life he could reach.

  The victorious yells above turned to agonized screams. Power poured into Kiran, the separate small coals of life merging into one intoxicating blaze. Not as strong as what he’d channeled from Stevannes’s rich fount of ikilhia—that inferno, Kiran could never have contained within his barriers—but oh, so
sweet a fire after long weeks without a single spark!

  The hands slackened and fell away. Kiran rolled and saw crumpled, lifeless bodies. Beyond, clansmen scrabbled back from him with panicked cries, their faces sallow with shock.

  Kiran rose to his feet, buoyed by a swell of hectic satisfaction. A tide of power surged with every beat of his heart, the sensation so deliriously intense he wanted to shout for the joy of it. Dizziness swept over him, his vision blurring.

  He must not betray weakness. Already the song in his blood made it desperately hard to maintain his focus. If he took in any more ikilhia, he’d never succeed in holding his barriers.

  He glanced back. Dev was crouched over their packs amid a sparse ring of clansmen, all of whom had twisted to gape at Kiran. The charms on Dev’s wrists glimmered with fading fire, and his chest heaved in harsh, rapid breaths. He too was staring at Kiran, his expression a tangled mixture of relief and dismay. He’d lost his little belt knife; the largest of the clansmen held it. Red streaked the blade, a sight that sent worry lancing through Kiran’s giddy intoxication. But another of the clansmen had a hand clamped over a forearm, blood trickling through his fingers, while Dev showed no sign of wounds.

  The clansmen were turning back to Dev, their shock fading into grim resolve. Kiran yelled, “Touch him, and you die like your kin.”

  The men froze, darting nervous glances at the sprawled bodies around Kiran. Five dead, he realized; all men in their prime, including that first eager young hunter. Their palms were blackened and charred where they’d once gripped him, and their mouths hung open in airless screams. Yet the beautiful, seductive fire that leaped behind his eyes left no room for horror or regret.

  Eight men surrounded Dev, and at least another thirty clanfolk faced Kiran at a wary distance. These were a mixture of ages, from lanky youths up to grizzled, hard-eyed elders, and included a scattering of women, wiry and muscled as the men. Most of the crowd flinched from his gaze, but some few—close kin, perhaps, to those he’d killed—glared back at him, fingering their knives with hatred hot in their eyes.