The Labyrinth of Flame

by Courtney Schafer

  Cold tendrils crept over his barriers, probing, testing. Kiran gripped his amulet so tightly his fingers hurt.

  “I’ve run enough. Now I want answers. Why do you hunt me?”

  The demon made a sharp sizzling noise. “A fine time for you to ignore fear. It is not I who hunts you tonight. Can you not feel the moon-tide rising? The red-horned hunters rise with it, soon to burst from our fire into the air of this realm…and you are their quarry.”

  Ice speared down Kiran’s spine. “Why? I thought it was Ruslan’s life that was forfeit.”

  “They do not seek your life,” the demon said. “They seek you. For a purpose I think you know.”

  “Ruslan sends them.” Reckless bravado drained out of Kiran, leaving behind heavy, frozen horror. If Ruslan had made his alliance, how could Kiran possibly stop him?

  The demon laughed at him, softly mocking. “The hunters loosed to satisfy a lowly mud-creature’s desires? Never. Think harder, child.”

  “Do they seek me thinking I can lead them to Ruslan? I would do that. Gladly.”

  The demon cocked its head. Its waist-length braids coiled over each other like live serpents. “You rats are so fickle with your loyalties. You wish your master to feed the hunt? You are too late for that. He has achieved what I thought impossible: found something the ssarez-kai desire so strongly they will spare a thieving rat from vengeance.”

  The name ssarez-kai teased at Kiran as Zadikah’s mention of the veiled temple had done, the meaning of it dancing maddeningly out of reach.

  “What has Ruslan offered?” One last gasp of hope cried, If you can find out, then maybe you can make a better bargain. Deeper yet, the panicked child he’d once been whispered, Please let him not have offered me.

  The demon’s fangs showed again, dark in the moonlight. “Shall we bargain, you and I? The ssarez-kai despise humans, crude ugly animals that you are. They scorn to taste even your pain. Yet here you stand, a thread of our realm’s fire burning at your core and your blood singing in warning of ssarez-kai kinship. Tell me why they made you, child, and I will speak of your master’s bargain.”

  Kiran struggled to parse the demon’s words. It spoke of ssarez-kai as “they,” and said his blood sang in warning of kinship. “Are you of a different house than these ssarez-kai?” The name came unexpectedly easily to his tongue.

  The demon made an irritated chuffing sound. “I hold no kinship. You waste precious time; the moon is rising. Will you bargain?”

  “It wasn’t a demon but a bone mage who cast to make me what I am.” Whatever that might be. “I don’t yet remember enough of my past to know what spells she cast upon me, or why.”

  “But I think you will find out—and then you will bargain, oh yes.” The demon grinned viciously wide. “And so I struggle to preserve you in the face of your own stupidity. You let your blood fall into your enemies’ hands. Now it stains the tongues of the hunt, and they will find you despite your veils.”

  The godspeaker and her spelled knife. The ssarez-kai might despise humans, but clearly they had no issues with using them.

  “How can I escape?” Thunder growled overhead. Wind stung Kiran’s face with sand. The current of earth-power was swelling, rising toward the surface.

  “Even on a night such as this, the hunters cannot stray far from our fire. Here you are too close to its currents. You must reach a place where the world is dead around you. If you need the other bright-souled rat, take him with you. The hunt will feed on what lives they can, the better to seek you out.”

  New dismay struck Kiran. He must get Teo, Veddis, Raishal, even their snake-eater protectors to safety, yet Raishal could not easily run. Belatedly, caution arose. Was this a trick? The demon might intend to send him where he could not pull power to strike in defense.

  “Why should I trust you?”

  The demon snarled at him. “Did I not preserve you once already? Driving you into the arms of those who might aid you, on the night you stumbled blindly through the canyons? If you had continued down that gorge, idiot child, you would have been taken by rats groveling for the favor of the ssarez-kai.”

  The demon had meant to keep him from the black-daggers? That might explain why it had not pursued him into the slot. Kiran’s gut still warned against trusting the demon completely, but he would heed the demon’s words.

  “How long until the hunters come?”

  “Not long.” The demon’s eyes blazed brighter. “Run fast, akheli, and run far. The ssarez-kai will call upon your kinship. Heed the call, and you are lost. Were you in our realm, you could not resist their command, but in the deadlands you have a chance. I can stay no longer, lest they taste my presence.”

  The demon vanished. No trace of its chill aura remained. Yet the earth-current beneath his feet had swollen to a rush of power grating along Kiran’s senses. When he focused upon it, he heard scorpion whispers, sly and sibilant.

  Kiran ran for the camp. Stumbling over rocks, crashing through clumps of spinebrush without care for the branches tearing at him, he’d never been so glad to have Dev far from his side. He didn’t know if it was possible to get Raishal and the rest to safety before the hunters came. But even if it meant he failed to escape, he had to try.

  * * *

  (Dev)

  “I thought you said the Zhan-davi’s entrance was guarded only by wards,” I said into Zadikah’s ear. We were crouched in the shadow of a statue of some crazy animal that looked like a sandcat crossed with an eagle. The bone coin of the moon riding high above the tower at our backs illuminated a host of other fantastical stone creatures around us. Instead of the gemstone mosaics and flowering gardens popular in highsider courtyards in Ninavel, the Zhan-davi apparently went in for sculptures, the more bizarre the better.

  This particular statue garden sat right against the Khalat’s warded outer wall. On the wall, two carved horse-things with curving horns and fangs that would’ve done a direwolf proud bracketed a gate of filigreed copper. Wardlines spiraled thickly around the gate. More worryingly, in front of the gate stood two men and one woman wearing the Zhan-davi’s barbed-sword crest. All three guards were heavily muscled and carried ward charms, long knives, and hackbuts—hackbuts, of all things, which I’d only ever seen traders sell as curiosities. I’d heard hackbuts were all the rage in Sulania, where mages were rare and folk were fascinated with explosive powders, but nobody with any coin in Ninavel bothered with weapons so easily countered by charms. Proper charms, that is. The pitiful little ward bracelet I wore would be lucky to stop even one round of hackbut fire.

  Zadikah whispered back, “Guess you’ll need to earn yourself that wardbreaker. Go distract them.”

  “Earn a wardbreaker? What, hauling you up a thousand feet of cliff while scraping half my skin off and getting scorpion-stung doesn’t count?”

  “Do you want a wardbreaker or not? I’m not asking you to fight; I’ll do that. But against three armed foes, I need an opening.”

  Great. I studied the guards again. The hackbuts implied the Zhan-davi had spent all their money on wards rather than proper battle charms. But the guards weren’t lazy; no lounging about playing tile games, no drinking on the job. They stood piton-straight and silent.

  I slashed rents in my scholar’s robe and smeared blood from my scrapes liberally over myself. After a last dark glance at Zadikah, I stumbled around the statue, groaning.

  “Help…help me, please…”

  The guards aimed their hackbuts straight at me. “Dazhi!”

  That word of Varkevian I knew: stop. I halted, swaying, hoping I looked like someone in shock. “Men attacked me, a whole gang, they said they were here to burn the library—please, you have to stop them!”

  The woman sparked a glowlight charm. Peering at me, her face relaxed into disgust. She muttered something contemptuous in Varkevian to the other two—I caught the word sivayyah, but nothing else—and said in heavily accented Kennish, “Broke the curfew, did you, madakkis? Run afoul of your betters and now
you think you can trick us into retribution? Crawl back home to the collegium before we give you a second lesson in why you should keep your ugly mongrel face off the streets.”

  Khalmet’s hand, the Zhan-davi really were assholes. And idiots to boot; what if I’d been telling the truth? Still, I could work with idiocy. I lurched away and muttered a few choice insults I’d learned from Varkevian drovers, just loud enough for the guards to hear.

  Their attention was now firmly fixed on me. The men reversed their hackbuts, ready to use them as clubs, and the woman strode forward to grab at me.

  “Asking to be taught, are you? Come here, you little—”

  Something small and silver arced out of the shadows. I dropped to the ground, my eyes squeezed shut. A flash lit the inside of my eyelids red. Howls, and the thunder of hackbut fire—I rolled for the safety of the shadows.

  One guard was already down, his ward charms dark and his throat a sticky mass of blood. Smoke curled from the barrels of two hackbuts lying beside him. Zadikah and the guardswoman were leaping and spinning and slashing at each other with fluid, deadly grace. Their knives weren’t the real threat. A dragonclaw charm glittered in Zadikah’s hand, a heart-rot in the guardswoman’s. The third guard was clawing at his eyes, his hackbut abandoned apparently unfired on the stone. Red powder spattered his face and clothes—Zadikah must’ve thrown devilweed at him.

  Zadikah struck with her dragonclaw. The guardswoman’s ward bracelets flared, dissipating the charm’s spell, but the bracelets’ light was dim, their magic nearly spent. The guardswoman twisted and nearly caught Zadikah on the chest with her heart-rot, but Zadikah eeled aside.

  If I could throw something to distract the guardswoman, or even get to that unfired hackbut—shit! The hackbut remained on the stone, but the devilweed-spattered guard was gone. Where was he? I squinted at shadows and statues, seeking any hint of motion.

  A blow slammed the side of my head. Stars spangled over my vision despite my little ward charm’s protection. An arm crushed my chest, pulling me back against a muscled body, and a series of vicious blows hammered my gut. I struggled to get free, to no avail. The last blow drove the breath from my lungs, my charm’s magic spent.

  A knife pricked my throat. My captor yelled at Zadikah, “Throw away your charms, or your friend dies.”

  Zadikah turned. Her opponent crumpled with blood arcing from a severed throat. Zadikah laughed, dark and contemptuous, and cold certainty filled me. She wasn’t going to throw her dragonclaw anywhere. Hell, what did she care if I died?

  I gasped for air enough to speak. “She’s no friend of mine, you idiot—she’s the one who attacked me! You want to stop her, there’s a charm I stole from her in the pouch at my back, take it—” The stonemelter was wedged between us. Even through the pouch’s leather, he must be able to feel the charm’s hard edges and the raised lumps of its multiple gemstones.

  Zadikah rushed the guard as if desperate to stop him taking the charm. He pulled back to yank out the stonemelter, and his knife hand slid from my throat to my chest. I threw myself sideways. The blade sliced a burning line across my bruised torso, and then I was rolling on the ground.

  Grunts and a choked gasp from behind me—I scrambled to my feet and looked back. My captor lay in a pool of blood. His chest was a gaping ruin, the stonemelter gleaming in one lax hand. I ran shaking fingers along my own wound. A long, shallow slice, no worse. But the hurt of it was enough to swamp the pains-ease on my wrist.

  “Good thing he wasn’t long on brains.” Zadikah wiped blood off her dragonclaw charm. “You really should insist Lord Sechaveh pay for some proper training. Bayyan was right; I’ve known children still at their mother’s breast who could better defend themselves.”

  The mockery was good-humored rather than nasty, the sort of ribbing I’d exchanged with many another outrider. I didn’t crack an answering grin. I still figured she’d been ready to let him slash my throat. “Good thing I brought an expert to do the killing for me. Hurry the fuck up and break the wards. Somebody’s bound to have heard those hackbuts fire.”

  Zadikah ran to the copper gate and pulled a jeweled spiral from her robe. “Bayyan signaled me. He and his warriors are climbing the stair even now, so let the Zhan-davi come.” She smeared blood over the spiral, whispered a harsh word, and slapped the charm onto the gate.

  Orange fire exploded outward along the wardlines, which blackened under the fire’s touch. All along the crest of the wall, more wards sparked to furious life, lightning stabbing upward into the night. Shouts echoed in the distance, bells clanging. Every guard in the Khalat must be stampeding this way.

  “How long until I can have the gods-damned charm?” I needed to be gone from here.

  The copper gate flared brilliant blue and all the wards around it went dark. The jeweled spiral fell to the gravel.

  “Now,” Zadikah said, exultant. She wrenched the gate open. Carved stairs spiraled down into the darkness beyond, but the darkness wasn’t complete. A greeny-yellow glow grew brighter. Under the crackling blaze of the main wall wards, I heard pounding footsteps.

  Bayyan burst out of the tunnel, a glowlight charm around his neck, more charms glittering on his wrists and knives bright in his hands.

  I snatched up the fallen wardbreaker with my good left hand and stuffed it into my robe. “I hope you’ve brought an army, because one’s coming this way.” More bells were clanging, the formerly distant shouts a lot louder and closer.

  Bayyan said, “We have warriors enough. It’s why I ran ahead, to warn you: the black-daggers have joined us.”

  “The black-daggers?” I spoke in shocked chorus with Zadikah.

  “Every man and woman of them.” He turned to Zadikah. “Yashad says she made the bargain you would not.”

  The rage that swept me was so great I couldn’t even speak. I lunged for the unfired hackbut. Bayyan’s ward charms might be strong enough to stop me shooting him dead where he stood, but if he’d given Kiran over, I’d fucking ruin this revolution.

  “You broke your word and let the black-daggers onto your lands?” Zadikah was staring at Bayyan as if she’d never seen him before.

  “My word is unbroken. Gavila didn’t ask for permission to cross my territory, or even for me to give her Kiran.” Bayyan looked straight at me. “She only asked Yashad for you.”

  I backed, clutching the hackbut. Of course she had. She knew Kiran was dangerous, and she needed a way to force his cooperation. So she thought to use me just as the Alathians had done, as bait and leverage.

  Bayyan said, “I told her I’d go first and capture you before you realized the danger.”

  “But you don’t trust Gavila.” His words had thrown me into the same cold, sharp clarity I used on climbs. “You think once she has me, she’ll abandon the fight. That’s why you brought warning. You want her to hunt me down.”

  Bayyan’s teeth showed white. “Clever to the last. That’s right, shadow man. I want her to fight her way through the Khalat to find you. So run. Now.”

  Yipping shrieks echoed out of the tunnel, quickly growing louder. I backed away, calling to Zadikah, “Tell me the wardbreaker’s trigger!”

  “Dev, forget the herbs. If Yashad’s told Gavila what you intend, you’ll never find them in time to escape her. Get yourself out! I’ll get the herbs for you.”

  Maybe she really did regret Yashad’s betrayal, but I couldn’t trust her. Not with something as important as this. “The trigger word, Zadikah!”

  Zadikah flung out a hand in a gesture that said, Be it on your head, then. “Jabirkavi.”

  I turned and ran, even as the war cries from the stair were joined by a thunder of booted feet beyond the statues. To Shaikar’s innermost hell with Gavila. I hadn’t come this far to fail Kiran now.

  Chapter Ten

  (Kiran)

  Kiran crashed through a wall of spinebrush onto the moonlit sand of the campsite, and nearly impaled himself on Raishal’s bared knife. She yelped and thrust him aside.


  “I heard you running—have the black-daggers come?”

  Better to explain the truth after the others had woken. He gasped out, “Summon the snake-eaters.”

  Raishal stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled a shrill, kreeling call. Veddis jerked awake mid-snore, snatching at his knife. Teo slept on without even twitching.

  “Wake up!” Kiran shook Teo’s shoulder. Teo only made a noise of complaint and flopped onto his side.

  Did the man have no caution at all? The defensive wardings guarding his ikilhia remained so thin as to be near nonexistent. Kiran gripped Teo’s bare wrist and sent a swift jab of power spearing through the contact.

  Teo jolted upright with a yell. He twisted free of Kiran’s hand and scrabbled backward as if he were the one facing a demon.

  “We have to leave.” Kiran grabbed a pack and threw it at Teo. “Bring your herbs. Also water and food, but nothing too heavy.” You must reach a place where the world is dead around you, the demon had said. The formerly slender thread of the earth-current had grown into such a cataract that if they tried to run across the desert, it’d take miles of travel before no magic stained the aether.

  But if they climbed high enough on inert rock, the aether might feel dead. That seemed a frighteningly thin gamble, but Kiran saw no better option. His heart pounding, he scanned the spires looming dark around them. They needed a formation massive enough to block the earth-current’s power, yet not so steeply angled that Raishal couldn’t make the ascent.

  “We’ve got to climb that dome.” Kiran pointed at an enormous misshapen lump of rock perhaps a half mile away. The pallid eye of the moon seemed to leer at him, every little skirl of wind a mocking whisper.