The Labyrinth of Flame

by Courtney Schafer

  But he saw no weakness in the spell. Exhaustion crept up to blur his focus. His mind drifted, slipping into dream, and the wall before him changed…

  Alkali dust whipped past Kiran, carried on a rising wind. He hurried along the outside of Ninavel’s massive sandstorm wall, trailing his fingers across the pale granite blocks. An oddly painful mutter of quiescent wards abraded his inner senses. Where was the gate? He had to enter the city. Ruslan had set him a task. The particulars of the task were strangely indistinct, but he knew he must hurry. To the south, a bulging russet cloud swallowed the Painted Valley, stretching from sand to sky and sweeping northward toward Ninavel. The alkali flats held no shelter, only scattered sagebrush and fireweed. If the storm arrived before Kiran passed the gate, wind-driven sand would flay the flesh from his bones.

  “You always make such a hash of things, little brother.”

  Kiran turned, startled. Mere feet away, Mikail leaned with complete nonchalance against the wall’s warded stone. His sandy hair lay loose on his sturdy shoulders, untouched by the wind, and no dust marred the sigil-marked black of his clothes. More, Kiran felt no blaze of his mage-brother’s ikilhia in the aether, only a faint ripple of magic, barely noticeable against the blazing sea of Ninavel’s confluence. A scry-sending, then. Cast by the real Mikail from some far safer location. Perhaps their home high in Ninavel’s Reytani district, protected from storms by wards and walls—oh, how Kiran wished he were safe at Mikail’s side.

  “How far to the gate? I must find it!” Already Kiran could barely see the mountains.

  “No need,” Mikail said. “Cast. Shatter the wall. Or disperse the storm. You are no nathahlen to live at the world’s mercy. The world is at yours.”

  “I can’t.” He couldn’t touch the confluence’s inferno without the protection of channels, and he had no silver or copper to build a pattern. His own ikilhia wouldn’t suffice to breach the wall wards, and he felt no other sparks of life within reach. None at all, as if the city was deserted. Were the wall wards interfering with his senses? He wanted to seek further, but there was some reason he shouldn’t release his barriers, a danger he could not quite recall—

  “You must,” Mikail said. “Look: the city burns. Who will put out the fire if not you?”

  Craning his neck upward, Kiran saw the soaring spires visible above the wall’s great bulwark were wrapped in crimson flames. This must be why Ruslan had sent him.

  Kiran stumbled into a run. “I have to get inside!”

  Mikail reappeared in front of him. “Then stop and look properly, brother.” He backed away from the wall, beckoning.

  Kiran followed, uncertain, squinting against the grit stinging his face. Mikail halted and stabbed a finger back at the city. “Look.”

  At first Kiran saw only the wall, broad and blank and impenetrable. But the wall wasn’t truly blank. The stone was discolored in spots—no. Lines. An entire pattern revealed itself to his wondering eyes. A jagged, inward-spiraling maze of lines with a strange symbol at the center. Familiar somehow, though Kiran couldn’t summon the meaning of it.

  Mikail shouted over the swelling howl of the wind, “Look closer!” He urged Kiran back to the wall and pointed where the outermost line of the spiral swept low to the ground. The line was not merely a discoloration. A crack marred the stone, zigzagging along the line’s path.

  “Go on,” Mikail said in his ear. “Look within, and make your own gate.”

  Deep inside the crack, a flicker of indigo crawled and twisted. Power slithered along Kiran’s barriers, the taste of it cold, alien. Kiran’s breath came short, fear sweeping him. Make his own gate? If Mikail meant him to cast, he could not, dared not…but the wind was shrieking around him now, sand scouring his skin, Mikail’s scry-sending a hazy shape at his side.

  Kiran braced his hands on the stone and put an eye to the crack. Indigo fire exploded over him and ripped a howl from his throat. Years sloughed away, his body shrinking to that of a child’s. The fire died away into darkness, and he saw—

  Scorpions above him, crawling in the black recesses of the stone ceiling above his cot. Inching closer whenever Kiran looked away. In daylight, you couldn’t see them. They hid, somehow. Back when she could still talk, Ralia said Kiran imagined the scorpions. She might be a year older than he was, but Kiran knew better. He could hear the scorpions whispering, in harsh, hissing voices. They would crawl down and sting him, hundreds of them, and no one would come to save him.

  He clutched at his woolen blanket, rubbing it against his cheek in a vain search for comfort. Kiran missed the amayas in the child garden, who had soothed his fears with hugs and lulling chants. Here in the upper temple, the adults’ faces were hard, their voices cold, and they ignored any cries for help at night. Even during the day, they never listened. They only ordered Kiran to stand still, draw this same stupid pattern over and over, learn these nonsense words. And all the time they watched him with narrowed, impatient eyes, as if they wished he would hurry up and get as sick as Ralia so he couldn’t bother them with questions anymore.

  The room was dark but for a pale bar of moonlight striped across the small, unmoving lump of Ralia, asleep on her cot across the room. In another, closer cot, Jain whimpered and twisted, muttering words that didn’t make sense. He hadn’t talked right in days, but he was better than Ralia. She never talked at all now, only stared at nothing and scratched her cheeks bloody.

  A hot lump swelled in Kiran’s throat. How long before he got as bad as Jain and Ralia? His head ached all the time, and colors sparked and flashed in the corners of his eyes, just like Jain said he saw before he stopped talking right.

  Jain keened, panting. A whisper louder than the rest drifted through the air, followed by a sizzling noise that sounded horribly like a chuckle.

  Something was there. Shadowed shapes as big as men, three of them, crouched beyond Ralia’s cot. Kiran wanted to burrow beneath the blanket and hide, but he didn’t dare move, not even breathe. Go away go away…

  One shadow moved. Pallid fingers slid into the moonlight. The fingers traced the air above Ralia’s black curls and drifted down to hover over her body. The whispers turned into words. Weak, the scorpions said, disgusted, disappointed. The rat-child’s fire dies to ashes. Better to take her blood now, before it turns bitter.

  A whimper escaped Kiran. A tiny sound, quickly choked off, but the shadow turned. Eyes blinked open in the darkness, two pits of blue flame. Horror froze Kiran’s marrow. In his head, a sly voice said, Do you hear us, child? Ah, now that is more promising.

  The pale fingers clenched into a fist. Ralia jerked upright on her cot. She clawed at her chest, gagging. Blood burst from her mouth to splash on the flagstones.

  The shadow laughed, and Kiran screamed.

  Chapter Four

  (Kiran)

  Kiran thrashed awake with the echo of a child’s shriek ringing in his ears. Overhead, the tip of a rising moon pierced a slender line of stars. Yet darkness surrounded him, shadows that might hide anything. His mind still hazed with fear, he reached to pull power from his ikilhia, desperate to spark a magelight.

  He caught himself just in time. The desert. Ruslan. Dev. Kiran raked shaking hands through his hair. Sandstorms and scorpions and dying children…the fragments of nightmare he recalled made little sense, and yet each felt as terrifyingly vivid as his memory of Alisa’s death. Even now, the sound of spattering blood would not leave him.

  The noise was real. Something was splashing onto the ground.

  Kiran snatched for the firestones and sparked them by touch. Only to gape in stunned disbelief at what the renewed flames revealed: Dev emptying a waterskin into the sand.

  “What are you doing?” Kiran lunged for Dev and yanked the waterskin from his hand.

  Dev’s eyes glittered fever-bright, and heat baked off his skin. “We have to get rid of it. That’s how they’ll track us. Dye in the water…I used that trick once.” He grabbed for the waterskin.

  “No!” Kiran
scrambled back, holding the skin out of reach. “My amulet, remember? No spell can track anything near me!”

  Confusion passed over Dev’s face. “Pello doesn’t have an amulet. Give me that.” He snatched again and almost overbalanced into the magefire.

  “The fever—you’re delirious. And you—” Kiran stopped, dismay stealing his breath. Not far from the packs, five more flaccid skins sat amid a wide circle of darker sand. “You poured out all the water?” Frantic, Kiran skinned off his shirt and clawed up handfuls of damp sand onto the cloth. If he could squeeze the moisture through the shirt and back into a waterskin, they might avoid utter disaster.

  “Leave it!” Dev kicked Kiran’s shirt aside. “We’ll get more at the lake. It’s right over the pass.”

  “There is no lake!” Kiran shouted. Dev shoved past him, reaching for the one remaining skin. In pure instinct, Kiran grabbed Dev’s bare wrist to pull ikilhia.

  He only meant to weaken Dev enough to stop him. But the prohibition Ruslan had set in him in Ninavel blazed fire through his mind, shackling him tight. Do no magic that would harm this man.

  Kiran gasped and let go. Dev convulsed and crumpled to the ground. He lay sprawled on his back with his eyes rolled up to the whites and his limbs twitching in spasmodic jerks.

  Kiran froze for one horrified instant. Had he done this? He couldn’t have. Ruslan’s will-binding had stopped him from taking even a sip of ikilhia. He yanked Dev’s shirt open and pressed a hand to his chest.

  Dev’s ikilhia was a horrifyingly dim pinprick that faded further with every ragged breath. Terrified, Kiran pushed deeper. The rhythms of Dev’s body were all disordered. Heat blazed through his organs, his heart racing and stuttering. Deep within, the unbroken chain of the binding Vidai zha-Dakhar had cast upon Dev in Ninavel gleamed with chill, icy light, brighter than ever, as if Vidai’s demon-borrowed magic fed upon Dev’s distress. Odd spirals of energy twisted up to pierce the ugly unhealed wound that still lurked at the heart of Dev’s mind, a remnant of his encounter with the demon who had been the source of Vidai’s power.

  Had Kiran’s aborted attempt to pull ikilhia inadvertently triggered some backlash of the binding’s energies to cause this terrible disruption? Regret and fear were bitter in Kiran’s mouth. He should have cast on Dev to break Vidai’s binding when he still safely could, before Lena passed them through Alathia’s wards. He’d been too focused on the need to escape before the Watch could recapture them, and he’d thought Dev in no immediate danger. Vidai’s intent with the spell had merely been to tie Dev and all those nathahlen he considered corrupt to Ninavel’s great confluence in a similar manner to the oaths that bound all Ninavel’s mages. With Vidai dead, the confluence was no longer at risk of a catastrophic disruption.

  Dev’s breath came in ever more erratic gasps. Kiran cried out, a wordless howl of desperation. If he had to choose between watching Dev die right here under his hands or revealing himself to Ruslan by casting, he would cast in a heartbeat.

  But cast what? Even if Vidai’s magic was responsible for Dev’s condition, breaking such a deeply entrenched binding in a nathahlen already on the verge of dying was not an option. Dev would never survive the attempt. No, Kiran must somehow repair the damage. He sought frantically through memories of spell patterns. He might lack knowledge of healing, but he recalled plenty of bindings. If he could link himself deeply enough to Dev, perhaps he could impose order upon the failing rhythms of Dev’s body. Force Dev to live.

  Bindings. Vidai’s binding. Kiran dared not break it, but could he use it? Kiran snatched up his belt knife. He slashed open his own palm, then Dev’s, and joined their bloody hands.

  A shock of connection burned through him. Every last thread of dissonant, alien magic lurking in Dev’s body stood out in brilliant clarity, and Kiran could now touch the strands as easily as if they were rooted in his own flesh. The demonic magic might be unfamiliar in its particulars, but the binding’s purpose was to create a link, and links could be appropriated. If Kiran insinuated his own ikilhia into the binding’s weave, he might link himself to Dev as tightly as he needed without ever releasing a single wisp of magic past his barriers to alert Ruslan.

  All his training screamed warnings. Vidai’s binding was anchored in the immense forces of Ninavel’s confluence. The slightest error in working with the spell’s unfamiliar energies could trigger a lethal backlash. If he and Dev burned to ash, nothing would stop Ruslan.

  Yet he could not let Dev die. It was as simple as that. Kiran shut out fear and reached for the shining, sinister strands of magic. Ruslan’s will-binding stirred, but Kiran focused fiercely on his intent to save Dev, not harm him, and the will-binding subsided. Working as fast as he dared, Kiran wormed tendrils of his own ikilhia into the spell linking Dev to the confluence. He strove to match the dissonant pulse of the binding’s energies even as he held his own barriers firm.

  It hurt. Cold seared him, and a sudden cacophony of sibilant voices clawed at his mind. Flashes of incomprehensible images assaulted his focus. Energies writhed against his grasp, threatening to explode free.

  Kiran tightened his hold and slid deeper, melding with the alien magic, opening himself to the pain. Until he felt a shock at a level so deep his heart nearly stopped. He was Dev, his lungs struggling, his body failing—

  Kiran yanked power from the distant cauldron of his own ikilhia and poured it into that dying pinprick of life. Simultaneously, he dragged the disordered rhythms of Dev’s body into lockstep with his own.

  Dev convulsed again with a strangled cry. Fear for him threatened to shatter Kiran’s focus. But Dev’s inhalations grew regular, his heart hammering in perfect time with Kiran’s. His ikilhia brightened by infinitesimal degrees.

  Kiran was dimly aware of sweat soaking both him and Dev despite the phantom cold gnawing at his bones. The fever still raged in Dev’s blood, and Kiran didn’t know how to stop it. The binding’s energies kept shifting, maddeningly unpredictable. Icy magic speared through Kiran’s ikilhia until he wanted to scream with the agony of it. He couldn’t hold the connection any longer. He could only hope that Dev’s breathing and heartbeat would remain stable when he withdrew.

  Extricating himself from Vidai’s binding was as painful and difficult as infiltrating had been. Concentrating with grim intensity, Kiran eased his way free.

  Dev’s breathing sped up, but without any hitching or gasping, and the candleflame of his ikilhia did not dim. He groaned and muttered something unintelligible.

  Kiran pressed his hands to his eyes, overcome by exhausted relief. He’d held his barriers. Ruslan should not have sensed what he’d done. But Kiran was shivering as if he’d been climbing in the highest reaches of the Whitefires, so dizzy he could barely remain upright, and his ikilhia was a flaring, seething mess. He fumbled for the drug vial and managed to shake a few precious drops into his mouth.

  Dev groaned again. His head turned restlessly on the sand. Kiran touched Dev’s brow and winced at the heat of his skin. If he awoke, he might remain dangerously delirious.

  So he must stay asleep. Kiran crawled over to the packs and dug out the copper circlet of the clansman’s sleepfast charm. He raked aside Dev’s coarse dark hair, now sticky and lank with fever-sweat, and settled the circlet onto Dev’s brow. Kiran didn’t know the charm’s trigger word. He’d have to risk sparking the magic by touch.

  His vision doubled when he sent a thread of ikilhia into the metal. Kiran breathed an imprecation; he couldn’t afford to take more of the drug. Only a few drops remained in the vial, barely enough for one final dose. Assuming he could avoid using any more magic, he had perhaps a day’s grace before he faced that last, terrible choice between death and surrender. Reaching Prosul Akheba was out of the question.

  It didn’t matter. Dev’s condition changed everything. He lay quiet now under the charm’s spell, his lean, brown face deceptively slack and peaceful, but the peace wouldn’t last. If the fever continued unchecked, nothing would stop Dev from dying
.

  Not even Ruslan. Kiran knew with sinking, awful certainty that he’d missed his chance to bargain. If he’d contacted Ruslan earlier, when Dev’s condition was not so dire…but now? Ruslan would feel Kiran’s desperation through the mark-bond. Impossible, to hide the truth of Dev’s condition from him. Ruslan would see in Kiran’s mind how little time Dev had left, and he’d use that knowledge as a weapon. Most likely, he’d force Kiran to choose. Dev’s life, or the thousands of other lives that hung in the balance, including Cara’s and Melly’s. A choice Kiran couldn’t bear to make.

  There must be another way. There must—

  The godspeaker. Whatever she wanted, Kiran was certain it involved more than a knife’s-worth of his blood. The clanfolk must know some remedy for their poison. He could lure them to him and then force them into providing an antidote. With merely verbal threats, preferably—they’d seen enough to fear him—but if it came to casting…

  He wouldn’t let fear of Ruslan stay his hand. He’d already lost all hope of escape. Yet casting would tax his unstable ikilhia so severely that Kiran wasn’t certain if the scant remnants of the drug could stave off his collapse. If he cast, it must be a spell of compulsion. Something that would force the godspeaker and her kin to ensure Dev’s survival.

  Kiran shook his shirt free of sand and pulled it on, leaving the empty waterskins where they lay. He snuffed the firestones and put them in his pack along with the last remaining waterskin. He would leave Dev hidden here and move up the gorge some distance before he drew the clanfolk’s attention. Best if the godspeaker didn’t know Dev’s location before Kiran secured a remedy. He didn’t like to leave Dev defenseless in charm-sleep, but at least Dev had said sandcats and other predators were rare in this type of desert, and he was well hidden from any human hunters. If Kiran hurried, the risk of mishap might be small.

  He dragged Dev over to lie beneath the deepest part of the boulder’s overhang. If the sun rose before Kiran returned, Dev would be safely in shade. Kiran put a palm on Dev’s chest to feel the reassuringly steady beat of his heart.