“Climb?” Raishal repeated, incredulous.
“That’s a terrible idea,” Veddis protested, cramming supplies into a pack. “There’s no cover up there. With the moon so bright, the black-daggers will spot us in a heartbeat.”
“It’s not the black-daggers he fears.” Teo shoved past Veddis to confront Kiran. “You said your enemy could not find you. You promised we were safe from him. Now you lie again! What protection could climbing possibly bring us against a mage’s spellwork?”
“What mage?” Raishal demanded.
“This isn’t a mage’s doing!” Kiran hadn’t time to think of clever lies. He’d have to use the truth, insane as it sounded. He turned to Raishal and Veddis, who would have grown up steeped in stories of demons and gods and likely believed every one.
“You’ve heard tales of the Ghorshaba. One of them came to me just now with a warning. The red-horned hunters are coming to this valley and they’ll kill anyone they find. We have to climb, now, or none of us will survive the night.” Kiran backed away, beckoning them to follow.
Raishal made a grab for him, ignoring Teo’s strangled protest. “Teo, he must be ill. Dev raved about demons in his fever, too. We’ll need some bladeleaf—”
“I’m not sick!” Kiran caught Raishal’s hand and pressed it against his brow. “You see? No fever.”
Raishal said, surprised, “Teo, his skin is cool. But…the red-horned hunters? The tales of the hunt are ancient. No clan has even seen a demon in the flesh in long years. Besides, the Ghorshaba have no reputation for kindness. Yet you say one was so considerate as to appear and give you warning?”
Kiran wanted to scream in frustration, cast upon them all to force them into belief. Time was slipping away with nightmarish speed.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve met a demon. Zadikah told you that Dev is a shadow man in Lord Sechaveh’s employ, didn’t she?”
Teo made a sharp, startled noise. Raishal stirred, glancing at him. Kiran didn’t wait for her to answer.
“In Ninavel, Dev and I helped stop a man who used a demon’s power against the city. See that storm?” Kiran stabbed a finger at the lightning-laced clouds spreading toward the moon. “I’ve seen its like before. When demon magic was used to murder Ninavel mages. So please, please, believe me and get up that dome!”
Raishal said, “But the snake-eaters—”
“We can’t wait for them. They’ll see us climbing. We’ll have to hope they come after us.” Kiran started off through the spinebrush. To his vast relief, the others followed.
He heard Raishal mutter, “The black-daggers I could understand, but the hunt…is this real? Or am I trapped in a nightmare?”
Kiran’s heart twisted within him. “I’m sorry I’ve brought this on you. I didn’t know the demons would send these hunters after me. If I had…” He couldn’t complete the sentence. If he could return to that moment when he first met Zadikah, he would still bargain with her, still force Teo into helping him and Dev. How could he not, when so many more lives than these few hung in the balance?
“We never should have come with you,” Veddis said bitterly. “My kin warned us of bad omens. I’m a fool to have thought the gods would stir themselves to send warning of nothing more than a pack of mangy black-daggers.”
Teo strode over sand and rock with such violence it was a wonder he didn’t break an ankle. “It wasn’t you who was the fool.” He caught Kiran’s arm, his ikilhia flaring fever-bright. “I should have refused you at the first and chanced the consequences. We’ll climb as you say. But afterward, I want you gone. Take your lies and your enemies and find another healer to threaten.”
“He threatened you?” Veddis’s knife came up in a sharp silver arc.
“We haven’t time for this,” Kiran snapped. “You’ve every right to be angry, and I’ll give you truth, give any recompense I can, but later.”
Hurrying toward the moonwashed bulk of the dome, no one else spoke. The growls of thunder grew louder as the fiery river of the earth-current rose higher. The twisted spires of rock seemed to loom closer, black and threatening, as if they were the fingers of some giant hand about to close and crush the tiny humans in their midst.
Kiran jumped a narrow gully, and a dark figure slid out of the shadows right in front of him. He sprang back with a strangled yell.
The shape spoke a rush of Varkevian in a clear, youthful voice he recognized. Sivyan, one of the snake-eaters—a stocky girl who looked no older than her late teens but who carried herself with the same brash confidence as the older warriors. Kiran swallowed in relief and beckoned Raishal. The warriors Bayyan had left behind didn’t speak much Kennish. Raishal’s clan dialect was close enough to the snake-eaters’ that she’d long since taken over the task of communication.
“Say whatever you must to make them come with us.” Kiran hurried onward, hoping Raishal was far faster at explaining the situation than he had been.
Raishal spoke, urgent and commanding, drawing Sivyan with her. No other figures slunk out of the shadows to join them.
Kiran called to Raishal, “Where are the others?”
“Her brother is on watch atop the righthand horn. She’s the only other warrior here. The rest were summoned away by Bayyan.”
“What?” Veddis said. “Why would he—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Whatever Bayyan’s reasons, Kiran was glad of them. Fewer snake-eaters meant fewer lives to worry over. “Tell Sivyan her brother should climb as high as he can on the horn, and ask her to show us the easiest route up that dome.”
After a series of hawk-whistles that were distantly echoed by her brother, Sivyan led them on a winding course between bulbous mushrooms of rock to the great swelling wave of the dome’s side.
The whispers in the aether were constant now, a spate of sibilant, unfamiliar words that sizzled along his nerves. Kiran threw himself at the rock and scrambled upward. The slope was far from vertical, but still steep enough he needed hands as well as feet.
Close behind, Teo panted, “How high must we climb? If the storm crosses overhead, we’ll be exposed to lightning.”
“The demon said we must find a place where the world is dead around us.” Kiran was aware of Raishal and Veddis listening, but he no longer cared about secrecy. Survival was all that mattered. “I’d rather face the chance of a lightning strike than the certainty of murderous hunters.”
Kiran scrabbled higher, Teo right on his heels, Sivyan helping Veddis assist Raishal. His sense of impending catastrophe heightened until it was a struggle to hold his barriers. His ikilhia roiled and seethed as if in echo of the raging earth-current below. Ominous in more ways than one—proximity to so much wild magic was disrupting his ikilhia as badly as casting would have. Yet another reason to put as much rock as he could between him and the cataract.
The whispers in his head spiraled up to a howling crescendo. The earth-current fountained outward in a coruscating blast of power that sent Kiran to his knees, pain scattering his thoughts. Beside him, Teo yelled something, but Kiran couldn’t make out the words through the cacophony in his head.
“Look!” Raishal’s voice, higher and sharper, cut through his distraction. She pointed back down the slope.
The sand throughout the valley glimmered a chill foxfire blue. Skeins of fog boiled out of the ground, spreading in billows and swirls to fill the air between the spires. Within the fog, violet lightning flickered, yielding flashing glimpses of huge, indistinct shapes, sleek and swift and sinuous. Kiran could make out no individual pulses of ikilhia, only an inchoate mass of energy that hurt to concentrate upon.
“Don’t look at them!” Raishal shouted. Kiran turned and stumbled higher. The babble in his head coalesced into a single, silvery voice, underlaid by a tidal pull that slowed his feet.
Come to us, child. We taste your blood, kin to ours, oh, we feel you close. A chorus of eerie, gibbering howls echoed up from the fog.
“No!” Kiran layered his barriers stronger, deeper
. The pull didn’t lessen. He sensed no chain of magic within his ikilhia such as bound Dev. The tug felt oddly diffuse, spread over his entire body, as if his very flesh were the source—or, he realized with a shiver, the blood in his veins.
The amulet hung cool and inert on his chest. Its human-made spellwork was no protection against the demons’ strange power. But their summons wasn’t like the absolute, implacable imperative of Ruslan’s will exerted through the mark-bond. This he had a hope of resisting. He forced one foot in front of the other, climbing higher.
An arm thrust across his chest, stopping him. “What’s wrong with you?” Teo shouted.
“They’re trying to make me go to them. I will not.”
“You’re about to walk off a cliff!”
Kiran blinked and saw with a cold shock that he stood on the edge of a great crack in the dome. The chasm was wide enough it made Kiran’s palms sweat to imagine jumping it, and so deep it must extend all the way to the ground.
Or it would extend that far, if the sand had not become a shifting sea of fog. Half-seen shapes rolled and coiled just under the fog’s surface, oddly hypnotic.
Lightning flashed overhead, and an answering flicker of foxfire raced over the fog. The voice in Kiran’s head laughed louder even than the crash of thunder.
Come to us, child. Did you not claim our kinship in the mountains? We call on you now to obey, or your blood-right is void and the lives you claimed for your own will be forfeit.
Kiran’s breath stopped. The demon in the Cirque of the Knives had said of Mikail and Dev and the Alathians, They are yours to kill. If that protection was revoked, what of Dev, scaling the Khalat?
The Khalat was long miles away, and the hunters had needed Kiran’s blood to find him. They didn’t have Dev’s blood.
“No,” Kiran said again, and didn’t know if it was bravery or cowardice that prompted his refusal.
Teo said tautly, “That fog is rising.” Mist was creeping up the sides of the chasm, tendrils licking higher like hungry tongues.
“We’re not high enough yet. We’ve got to jump over the gap and keep climbing.” Beyond the chasm, the dome swelled upward again. The summit was a black curve hundreds of feet above, silhouetted against stars streaked by encroaching arms of cloud.
Sivyan drew herself up and said something determined. She backed a few steps, then raced forward and hurled herself over the chasm. Kiran feared to see the fog surge up to engulf her in midair, but she landed safe in a crouch on the steeply slanted stone beyond. She turned, straddled her feet wide, and held out her arms. Veddis gripped Raishal’s hips and helped her jump, propelling her across the gap with a yell of effort. Sivyan staggered upon bracing Raishal’s landing, but neither woman fell.
Teo ran and jumped. When he hit the chasm’s far slope, he toppled backward, arms flying up, but Sivyan and Raishal caught his hands and pulled him upright.
Kiran’s legs felt leaden, his mouth dry. The pull on his body was so insistent that merely walking was a struggle. Gaining enough momentum to clear the chasm felt impossible.
He must jump. The fog was creeping higher, greedy flickers of foxfire crawling over its surface. The voice in his head was speaking of blood and death and kinship, and he didn’t want to listen, he wanted it gone—
Strong hands grabbed his waist and lifted. For one horrible instant he was sure Veddis meant to pitch him straight down into the fog. Instead, he was catapulted through the air into Sivyan’s sturdy arms.
Howls rose from the fog, echoed in his head. Kiran fell to hands and knees. The inexorable pull was becoming ever more difficult to resist.
Lightning flashed, blindingly bright. A hammer blow of thunder deafened him. The echoes subsided into frantic, human shouts. Kiran twisted around.
Teo lay flat on the stone, desperately reaching for Veddis, who clawed at the chasm’s side a few feet below. He was slipping ever farther down, the fog billowing perilously close to his boots. Sivyan braced Teo’s legs, her arms tight with strain. Beside her, Raishal dropped to her knees, shouting for Veddis to hold on, for Teo to hurry.
Veddis must have jumped and lost his footing, tired from helping Raishal and Kiran, blinded by the lightning. But Teo had only to cast to save him—even the weakest of mages possessed enough ikilhia for a lifting spell, surely he would—
A snakelike limb lined with glowing red spikes whipped out of the fog and curled around Veddis’s legs. In an eyeblink he was gone, ripped off the stone and yanked screaming into the fog. Kiran threw himself forward, tearing at his barriers.
Too late. The shock of violent death blasted through the aether, the hallmark of ikilhia forcibly taken.
In the fog, vast bodies rolled and thrashed. Blood gouted up to spatter black on the stone. Raishal shrieked in anguish, plunging forward with her knife drawn as if she meant to throw herself into the chasm and do battle. Sivyan caught her and forced her back, shouting at her.
Teo lay frozen on the stone, hands still outstretched.
“Why didn’t you cast?” The cry burst from Kiran, propelled by horror. But he was equally at fault. Why hadn’t he ripped down his barriers the instant he saw Veddis in danger?
Teo leaped up, jumping at Kiran before he could even flinch. Hands closed like manacles on Kiran’s biceps. Another searing flash of lightning illuminated Teo’s face, twisted in animal fury, mere inches from Kiran’s own.
“This is your doing.” Teo’s hands tightened, forcing Kiran toward empty air. They were teetering right on the chasm’s brink. Kiran had no leverage to fight; he feared any attempt to break free of Teo would result in both of them tumbling into the hunters’ grasp. All that remained of his barriers was the barest scrim of power holding his ikilhia in check—and the terrible, insistent pull had redoubled in strength, fueled by Veddis’s death. His entire body yearned toward the fog and the hungry creatures within. He could not cast and resist the summons at the same time.
Come to us, child, and no more blood will be spilled, no more lives fed upon.
Clear as if Dev stood right beside him, Kiran heard him snarl, Don’t you fucking dare roll over.
Kiran yelled at Teo, “Zadikah believes you refuse to cause harm. Was that another lie?”
Teo made a raw, awful noise. His hands dropped from Kiran’s arms. To his horror, Kiran found himself leaning toward the emptiness below, his balance giving way.
New hands grabbed him, no gentler than Teo’s, jerking him higher on the rock. A blow knocked Kiran to the stone, and then Raishal was leaning over him, her knife cold against his throat.
“You will not go to them, Ninavel man.” Her voice was so thick with grief and anger he could barely understand her. “You will not escape me so easily. My husband is dead because of you. You will tell me why, and then I will decide what fate you deserve.”
His muscles twitched with the blind urge to crawl back to the chasm. Kiran shut his eyes, shaking with the effort of holding still, sick with the memory of Veddis’s scream. “I don’t want to go to them. But they’re calling me, and it’s so hard to fight. Leave me and climb. I don’t want anybody else to die.”
Angry voices argued, and his arms were yanked over his head. He was dragged up the rock, stone rasping painfully against his exposed skin. Kiran barely noticed. All his concentration was devoted to the silent, desperate battle within.
Someone shoved a vial against his lips. “Swallow,” Teo said in his ear, cold and hard. “You can’t go to them if you aren’t conscious.”
Dev spoke again in his mind. If you’re unconscious, you won’t know what they do to you. What if Raishal changes her mind and kicks you right off this rock?
But Kiran couldn’t keep fighting much longer. His ikilhia was spiraling out of control, his barriers thinning to a wisp on the verge of dissipating. Warning halos distorted his vision. He swallowed liquid that tasted of bitter oranges. A slow, spreading numbness took him; he surrendered gratefully. Here there was no guilt, no fear, only darkness.
*
* *
(Dev)
“I want icelight powder and oil of soleius, now. Or I’ll fire this into a spot you won’t like.” I aimed the hackbut straight at the groin of the owl-eyed young Seranthine before me. We stood among ranks of stone shelves. Hundreds of shelves, extending far beyond the ability of my little glowlight charm to illuminate them, and every one was one jam-packed with tins and jugs and jars. I’d no idea of the order, and while I’d carefully memorized the Varkevian script for the herbs I sought, I couldn’t read any of the storeroom’s other labels.
So I’d made sure to bring someone who could. The collegium’s outer hallways and courtyards were clogged with scholars milling about like goats trapped in a slaughter pen, all babbling in Varkevian and goggling at the fiery glow still painting the sky from the Khalat’s wall wards. I’d picked this scholar out for his scrawny build, his wrists bare of charms, and the healer’s crest on his rumpled robe. One look at the blood coating my robe and the hackbut in my good hand, and he’d gone sallow and obeyed my every order. He’d stayed nice and quiet, too, beyond a shocked exclamation at the fireworks show when I breached the storeroom’s wards.
Now he bobbed his curly head without so much as a murmur and scurried down the alley between shelves, darting nervous little glances back at me. I followed and tried to look like I knew what the hell I was doing with the hackbut. I wasn’t even sure the Shaikar-cursed thing would fire if I squeezed the lever or if it’d blow up in my face. Give me a proper dragonclaw or boneshatter charm any day.
The scholar took a jar from the shelf and held it out with shaking hands.
I peered at the label. And stepped back, aiming the hackbut for the scholar’s heart. “Nice try.” Whatever was in that jar, it wasn’t icelight or soleius. “I’ll give you one more chance. Fuck with me again, and I’ll kill you rather than waste more time.”
He stammered a frantic apology, but I caught a glint of something harder in his eyes. Maybe not so much the scared roundtail as he’d seemed. Damn it, I’d never been good at picking marks. Like fighting, it was a skill I hadn’t needed to practice back when my partner Jylla could read people as easily as I could climb city walls. Three sentences from her, and she’d have had this little weasel panting to find everything she needed and personally escort her out of the Khalat.
The Labyrinth of Flame Page 19