The Labyrinth of Flame

by Courtney Schafer

  “So you found nothing of use.” There was an odd note in Zadikah’s voice; something dark, constricted.

  “I didn’t say I learned nothing.” He’d been too cautious; he saw that now. If he wanted to defeat Ruslan, he had to learn to think like him. In this situation, Ruslan would not cower in ignorance. He would be bold, just as he’d been at the temple. I once burned a confluence to claim you for my own. If that was how Ruslan had destroyed the bone mage and covered his theft of Kiran, no demons had come in time to prevent it, or even to shake Ruslan’s complacent belief that demons were nothing more than superstition.

  They’ve little skill for distinguishing human mages, the bone mage had said of her ssarez-kai allies. Yet Kiran might be different. The scarred demon had said his blood sang of kinship.

  He couldn’t afford to guess. He had to know. Kiran shoved to his feet, focusing on the distant song of the earth-current. The dunes had become a black sea. Anyone moving across them would blend into the shadows.

  “I have to find out before we reach the pools if the ssarez-kai can sense me. Stay here; I’m going to the earth-current.”

  Teo protested, “Kiran, you’re upset. You’re not thinking clearly—”

  “The scarred demon wanted to keep me from being taken by the ssarez-kai. If they can sense me through the earth-current, so can it. It will come to warn me, and I’ll demand more information before I run. If no demons come, then I’ll know I can seek Dev without fear of currents or confluence.”

  Zadikah demanded, “What if the ssarez-kai come first to take you?”

  She didn’t want to lose her weapon against Gavila. He hadn’t told her yet how Teo had hobbled him. “Then you can rejoice in the knowledge that demons will trouble your lands no longer.”

  Teo gripped his wrist, clamping as hard as the sour man had in his memory. “Kiran. Think. If you make this gamble and lose, what of Dev?”

  “How can I hope to help him when I don’t even know if I can get near him?” Kiran yanked free with strength he only wished he’d possessed as a child.

  “Kiran, wait—”

  “Stay back!” Kiran ran. Sand dragged at his feet until his breath came hard, but he didn’t slow. If he couldn’t drop his barriers to release the whirlwind still tearing at his heart, he could at least spend some of the storm’s fury in the burn of his muscles and the savage pumping of his blood.

  As he approached the earth-current, its flow remained an innocuously slender, shining stream, without surging or taking on the chill signature of demon magic. Kiran stopped, panting in heaving gasps. The aether around him remained calm. No clouds marred the stars sprinkling the indigo sky. No tendrils of alien power crept over his barriers.

  Yet he sensed a subtle whiff of a silent, watching presence that slipped away from him like a snake burrowing into sand whenever he tried to focus on it.

  Anger boiled up until Kiran was dizzy with the effort of holding his barriers. “Show yourself,” he snarled at the darkness, willing a pallid, scar-browed apparition to materialize from the shadows.

  A faint mental whisper reached him. Stop spreading your desire on the currents, foolish child, lest the ssarez-kai hear your call. Keep your soul still and small.

  Kiran wrestled his anger down and layered his barriers tighter. The implication that the ssarez-kai might not hear him was promising, but still…“How is it that you can so easily find me?”

  I have talents the ssarez-kai do not. Whereas your talent appears to be for idiocy. I thought you would seek out the ssarez-kai’s former stronghold that lies now in the deadlands, protected only by remnants of human magic. It’s so close to where you now walk. Do you not wish to learn the reason behind your creation so you and I might bargain? Yet instead you run straight toward the human servants of the ssarez-kai.

  The stronghold the demon spoke of must be the veiled temple. Zadikah had told him of her search through the Demon’s Maw with Bayyan; she’d even said the Maw was only a day’s walk from the black-daggers’ sacred pools. Her failure to see any sign of the temple within the Maw made perfect sense if remnants of the bone mage’s defenses remained. The bone mage must have anchored some of her veils far enough from the confluence that the spells had survived its destruction.

  “I do intend to go to the veiled temple. But first, I have to rescue my friend. If you help me, I could—”

  The demon interrupted, disdainful and distant. You are not ready to bargain. I will give you no more aid until you are.

  “I am ready to bargain!”

  Nothing. Silence stretched on, thick and obdurate, though Kiran could feel the demon still watching. He choked back a howl of frustration.

  “Kiran.” The sharp whisper was human in origin. The darkness had grown deep, but Kiran didn’t need to see with his eyes to recognize the spark of Zadikah’s ikilhia, accompanied by Teo’s far brighter bronze flame. They should have stayed back as he asked, but now he was glad he needn’t lose more time in returning over the dunes.

  “The scarred demon spoke to me. It’s not happy I’m rescuing Dev instead of going to the veiled temple, but I think we’re safe to cross straight to the caves.” Kiran hurried through a quick explanation of what the demon had said and the conclusions he’d drawn from its words.

  “Good. Then we go,” was all Zadikah said in response, coolly practical once more. She strode past, and Kiran wasted no time in following.

  Teo caught up to him. “You were fortunate just now, but have a care, Kiran. You were worried that Ruslan wants you to recover your memories. I think that fear justified. I think he knew exactly how deeply they would upset you, and how rash you would be in reaction.”

  Reminded of the inner whispers encouraging him to seek his past, of Mikail’s exasperated guidance in his dream, unease flickered through Kiran. But what he’d done hadn’t been rash. It had been necessary.

  “Perhaps that’s what Ruslan hoped, but I’m not what he thinks. I never have been,” Kiran said, and shut out the memory of his own voice insisting that he could be exactly what Ruslan wanted.

  * * *

  Kiran wriggled through a rock passage so cramped he had to shimmy along like a worm. He couldn’t see a thing. Zadikah had a glowlight charm, but the faint blue aura was wholly blocked by her body as she squirmed along the passage ahead of him. Kiran’s heart hammered with far more than exertion. When Zadikah had spoken of traveling through caves, he’d imagined walking through man-high tunnels like those in a mine, perhaps with the occasional crawl through a hole or scramble over rocks.

  The reality was far different. Scrambling through the caves was as strenuous as anything he’d done with Dev in the mountains, and far more disorienting. Zadikah led them on a route that constantly changed direction: climb a jumble of rocks, squeeze sideways through an improbably small gap, wriggle down a crevice that was sharp with crystals or slick with moisture. Worst of all were long, terrifyingly tight passages like the one he wormed through now.

  He kept seeing Dev’s memories of the coal mine in Alathia—specifically, that terrible final day when an earthquake had caused a collapse of the tunnels, crushing and trapping hundreds of miners. What if such a quake struck here? Or what if he got stuck while crawling, wedged so tightly that only magic could free him?

  If he got injured or trapped and had to cast, and Ruslan came for him…

  He would not panic. He would not. Kiran counted breaths and constructed mental patterns that were first simple and then ever more complex.

  It did not much help. Dev had said that once he hated Ruslan, everything would be easier. But what he felt in the wake of his memory of the temple was not easy or clean, but a murky maelstrom so violent and deep that Kiran was terrified to examine it. Instead, he wrestled it away from his consciousness, like forcing a leviathan into lightless depths. Yet his control felt as fragile as spell-spun glass. At any moment the leviathan might shatter it and rise to swallow him.

  Safest was when he could focus on something outside himsel
f. Inching along, rock scraping his fingers raw, Kiran recalled how Zadikah had led them through soaring hollows choked with stone pillars that looked like melted candles. Dagger-sharp icicles of stone speared downward from the rock above, and the cave walls were wrinkled into folds like hanging curtains. Some formations were so intricate that Kiran thought they must have been shaped with magic, but when he’d asked, Teo had denied it.

  The world is full of wonders that have nothing to do with magic, he’d said. Any scholar at the collegium will tell you as much. You should see the journals of those who’ve explored the far north, or the lands over the eastern sea.

  The wistfulness of Teo’s words struck a chord in Kiran. He too had always loved to read of adventures in foreign lands. Curiosity drove him to ask, Why did you leave the Seranthines?

  Zadikah had glanced back, her steps slowing. Kiran suspected it was her evident interest rather than his that prompted Teo’s reluctant answer.

  The matria’s daughter gave birth to a baby that did not thrive. The apt-Scholar of healing believed it was an imbalance in the blood and treated it as such. But my mage-sight showed me the truth: the child had a hole in his heart. Such a thing can’t be treated with herbs, but spells can repair it. Rather than keep silent and watch the child die, I told the matria what I saw, after swearing her to secrecy about me. She hired a mage from Ninavel. The child lived, and I left.

  Why? Kiran asked. You said the matria swore.

  She knew the truth of me, said Teo. And I knew a day would come when she would consider some goal so important she would break her vow.

  Zadikah had spoken then. You revealed your nature for the sake of a child you had no bond with, yet you wouldn’t lift a finger for Veddis?

  I didn’t cast on the child, Teo had protested, sparking off an argument that subsided only because it was too hard for Teo and Zadikah to hear each other while squirming through a passage as tight as they traveled now.

  Blue light glimmered down the tunnel. “Gets wider again up here,” Zadikah called.

  Kiran gladly wriggled faster. He squeezed between two crystalline pillars and into a space not quite tall enough for him to stand up straight. He edged forward, neck crooked awkwardly sideways—and stopped, at a shiver of power in the aether.

  “There’s an earth-current ahead.” To find one amid so much inert rock was a certain sign that a confluence lay beneath the black-daggers’ sacred pools. Kiran glanced at Teo, who was grunting his way out from between the pillars, and couldn’t resist adding, “A good thing we know I can safely cross it.”

  “Unless the ssarez-kai have waited for you to have nowhere to run,” Teo said dourly. “How much longer until we’re out of the caves?”

  “We’re near the pools.” Zadikah moved away. The glimmer of her charm illuminated ranks of protruding, blade-thin sheets of translucent stone. “Soon, we’ll even travel real tunnels.”

  “Thank the goddess,” Teo said, heartfelt. Kiran had to agree. His sore neck and abused knees and elbows were certainly eager for easier travel.

  He asked, “Real tunnels? Who made them?”

  Zadikah answered, “When the black-daggers’ ancestors were first exiled from the Kaithan tribelands, exile wasn’t considered enough of a punishment for their heresy by some of the other tribes. Their warleaders banded together in secret and hired a Varkevian mage to kill all who revered Shaikar over other gods. But Shaikar did not abandon his servants; it’s said he touched the soul of a black-dagger child, granting the girl enough power to protect all her kin. She cast to create the tunnels so the black-daggers might hide within them. Then she trapped and killed the mage who hunted them. The black-dagger elders sent the mage’s body back to the tribelands, and the other tribes were wise enough to send no more hunters.”

  Kiran was seized by a desire to know more of this long-ago girl who’d fought so bravely and prevailed against an older, deadlier mage. This was an even better distraction than the cave formations. “How did she trap the mage?”

  The light of Zadikah’s charm faded as she negotiated another narrow passage. “Who knows? We’ve a hundred versions of the story. In one, Cadah—the girl—asks Shaikar’s children to make her a ring of fire from which her enemy can’t escape. In another, she entices the mage into a mineral pool that absorbs all his magic. If I told them all, it’d take hours.”

  She didn’t sound as though she wanted to keep talking. A shame, but Kiran could sympathize; he needed all his breath to worm his way after her. The passage ended in a hole so small it took three tries and some shoving from Teo before he squeezed through. Beyond, he found Zadikah climbing down a rockpile to a circular opening far too wide and smooth to be natural.

  The tunnels from Zadikah’s story. Kiran helped Teo struggle out of the hole, and they scrambled after Zadikah. A steady plink of water was loud in the silence, a sound that brought Kiran tantalizing visions of glacial icemelt and mountain streams. Inside the tunnel’s round mouth, stone glistened in the light of Zadikah’s charm. When Kiran trailed a hand along the wall, moisture slicked his fingertips. The tunnel had surely been made by magic, just as Zadikah had said, but so long ago that no trace of patterned spellwork remained. Easy enough to see where the mage-girl had gotten the power to cast. The earth-current had become a bright stream spiraling so close around the tunnel that Kiran felt he might sink his fingers straight through the stone into its rich, seductive flow.

  Thanks to Teo’s cure, he felt no pain at the current’s proximity, only yearning. He ached to let the power race through his blood and transmute the darkness boiling at his core to joy.

  Instead, he blocked out desire and kept watch for any change in the current’s flow, or any sly demon whispers. Ahead, Zadikah stopped at a split in the tunnel. No, not a split. What he had taken for a second tunnel was an arched opening to a dark void too large for Zadikah’s little charm to illuminate. Beside the arch, spidery lines of pale crystal threaded the tunnel’s black stone. The crystal threads almost looked like a pattern, reminiscent of the jagged, complex spiral he remembered from the bone mage’s workroom wall.

  “What is that?” When Kiran looked closer, the pattern wasn’t the same as the one in his memory. He brushed a finger over it and felt nothing. If this pattern had been for a spell, the magic had long since died.

  “A map of the tunnels,” Zadikah said. “Part of them, anyway. Took me months to realize, but when I did, it made exploring much easier.” She traced one of the lines.

  A map. Could that also be true of the pattern from his memory? Perhaps it was a map of the temple’s halls.

  “We’re close now to exiting the caves,” Zadikah said. “I don’t think Gavila will have scouts watching the tunnels, but I can’t be sure. If either of you sense black-daggers ahead, now’s the time to tell me.”

  Teo said, “I sense nothing, but Kiran has far greater range than I do.”

  Kiran shut his eyes and concentrated. With his barriers so thickly layered, it was hard to distinguish anything beyond the earth-current. Yet much like catching movement in the corner of his eye, he sensed a wisp of energy ahead, too faint and elusive to properly identify.

  “I feel something, but I’m not sure it’s a person. If I get closer…” Kiran took a step toward the arch, then paused, caution rising. What if the elusive wisp was some signature of a quiescent ward? He didn’t wish to trigger anything that might bring the black-daggers’ attention.

  The amulet he wore would hide him from even the strongest of human-made wards, and the wisp didn’t carry that icy, unmistakable aura of demon magic.

  “Well?” Zadikah’s question was as taut as Kiran’s nerves had become. If clanfolk did stand guard over the tunnels, he’d have to make clear to Zadikah that he would not take anyone’s ikilhia. She wouldn’t be pleased. She was only tolerating him because she thought him useful.

  So he had best prove his usefulness to her in ways that did not involve fighting.

  “Wait here.” Kiran edged beneath the arc
h. That wisp, so diffuse. He could almost make it out, almost… He took another step.

  A cataract of power burst to life around him. Kiran leapt for the arch with a yell, only to slam into an unyielding barrier. He toppled backward, his amulet searing his chest. Scores of crystal lines blazed white on the walls, the floor, even the rocky roof overhead; a net of magic completely enclosed him. The seething chaos of the spell was foreign—not the icy dissonance of demon magic, but not the intricately structured spellwork he knew, either.

  “Kiran!” Teo’s horrified shout echoed off stone.

  “Stay back!” No magic assaulted Kiran. The crystalline net was apparently meant to contain, not kill. But containment spells were often designed to allow one-way passage. Once triggered, objects and even people could cross within their boundary, but nothing could leave it. If Teo or Zadikah entered the net, they’d be trapped with Kiran.

  “Can you get out?” Teo asked.

  The blazing lines inscribed all around him illuminated the entire chamber, which was empty but for him. The only entrance was the arch where Zadikah and Teo stood silhouetted.

  “I’m trapped,” Kiran said, realization settling heavy on him. The power caging him might be oddly unpatterned in its flow, but it was also seamless and viciously strong. Even if he cast, he hadn’t the power to break the spell. Not without some other source than his own ikilhia to draw on.

  A source such as the amulet that still burned hot beneath his shirt. But if he siphoned away the amulet’s magic to break free, the moment the net failed, his mind would be left wholly open to Ruslan. He might as well throw himself straight into Ruslan’s arms. But why hadn’t the amulet’s veiling hidden him from the wards and prevented the trap from triggering?

  His gaze fixed on Zadikah, who was lowering a hand from the rock beyond the archway. Blood dripped dark from her fingers.

  “You triggered the magic,” Kiran said, airless with shock. He’d been so certain her hatred of Gavila was real. “This is how your ancestor trapped her enemy, and the black-daggers still know the key to spark her wards. You lied about Gavila, didn’t you? What did she offer you to cage me for her?”