The air over the pool wavered like heat rising off an alkali flat. A thin strip of mist condensed, stretching from the lip of rock beneath our feet to the far side of the pool. Streamers of gauzy white curled off the strip’s edges.
That mist didn’t look firm enough to hold us. I shot a questioning glance at Kiran, who shook his head. “Not yet. She’s still anchoring the pattern.”
Whatever the hell that meant. I bit back a plea for Lena to hurry. It wasn’t like she was working slowly on purpose.
Melly said, “I still can’t feel the Taint at all! Does that mean the demon can’t use it either?”
“Maybe not the Taint, but demons can cast spells. We can’t count on the pool slowing it down.” I settled Teo’s pack on my back and the coiled rope over my shoulder, ready to run. The scraping noises of the black-daggers’ approach were fast getting louder, but the misty strip over the pool still looked like we’d plunge right through it. Fuck! If the demon caught up before we could cross, I didn’t see how we could escape without Kiran casting.
Kiran said, “If the demon bound itself into an untalented man’s flesh, maybe it can’t cast, limited by what it inhabits. If we—Dev, the spell’s ready, go!”
The bridge still looked awfully misty, but I swallowed fear and stepped onto the strip of white. My feet sank into the mist, like walking on spongy moss, but the bridge held me. I ran for the rock of the far rim, calling for the others to follow. Beyond the lip of rock was a short drop onto dry sand. Past that, the canyon twisted sharply left, blocking my sightline.
Teo was first to join me. “Let me lead. I’ll watch for bones and patterns and cry warning if I sense any magic.”
“Go,” I said, grateful. That would let me bring up the rear and put myself between the demon and everyone else. Not that I had any idea yet on how to stop a demon, but I meant to give the others the best chance I could.
Teo disappeared around the bend. Melly darted over the bridge, so quick and light on her feet she hardly seemed to touch the mist. Cara was next, shoving a glassy-eyed Janek ahead of her. I hoped he didn’t freeze up entirely. He’d never said much of his time as Vidai’s prisoner, but now I had the nasty feeling he’d seen far more than I thought. Vidai’s demon had killed Tainted children to give Vidai his power. Janek’s father Pello had said, I saw a room of bones, so small and white…
I caught Janek’s chin in my hand and made him look at me. “Keep moving, and you’ll be fine. Just stay behind Teo. Understand?”
“Yes,” he said, a tiny whisper of a word. Cara helped him down the drop. Once on the sand, Melly caught his hand and urged him into a run. I tossed the coiled rope to Cara, and she fixed me with one of her fiercest stares.
“Don’t do anything stupid.” Then she was gone, swift as a sparhawk arrowing through the gloom.
“A little late for that,” I muttered, and yelled to Kiran, “Hurry up!”
He had Lena’s hands tight in his. He backed across the bridge, drawing her with him. She kept singing, her eyes unfocused. I waited, jittering from foot to foot. The clanfolk sounded so close.
Lena stepped onto rock. Kiran said, “Let go.”
She stopped singing and sagged against him. The mist shivered and bled away into nothingness. Kiran put a bloody palm to a scrape on Lena’s cheek, and she jerked as if he’d touched her with a branding iron.
“Kiran, no!”
“You need it.” Now he was the one swaying on his feet. He’d given her some of his own life.
“Come on, get moving!” Suliyya grant neither of them was so drained they’d collapse. To my relief, they proved able to walk, though I had to help Kiran negotiate the drop. After, I slid a steadying arm around his back and hustled him onward.
The slot zigzagged back and forth and back again. The walls closed in so narrow I had to yank off my pack and turn sideways, pushing Kiran forward even as Lena pulled at him from ahead. All the while, I was straining for the least sound behind us. I had to know what happened when the demon reached the pool. If Kiran was right and it couldn’t sense or cast magic while lurking in its human shell, we might have a chance. Might.
The rock belled out, the base of the cliffs rounding into deep, oddly polished undercuts. High overhead, the slot walls closed back toward each other, leaving a gap barely wide enough for a man to fit. It was as if we hurried along a mining tunnel sized for giants, with a roof split by a sinuous crack. The light filtering down from the slot’s upper reaches was muted and gray, leaving the tunnel in ominous twilight. Cara and the kids were flitting shadows ahead. They darted around a massive egg of a boulder sitting smack in the canyon’s course.
A muffled splash behind us, and a terrible, agonized shrieking assaulted my ears.
Stumbling at my side, Kiran flinched, his hands coming up to block his ears. Lena threw an arm hard over her mouth. I felt queasy myself, imagining the spelled water eating away flesh, blood bubbling and sizzling into a meaty froth. Yet nightmarish as the shrieks were, they brought new hope.
“Maybe that’s the demon,” I said, praying it was true.
“Maybe,” Kiran said, but I could tell he didn’t believe it. Still, if the clanfolk couldn’t cross the pool, they’d have to climb back out the slot’s mouth and seek another route.
The shrieking died off into echoing silence. Just when I was really starting to hope, faint words ricocheted from behind us.
“Clever, child. But you are not the only one who recalls the temple’s secrets.” More splashing and scraping, this time without any shrieks. The black-daggers were crossing the pool.
“Shit! That viper must have magic after all.” So much for hope.
“Maybe not,” Kiran said. “The bone mage would have designed the canyon’s wards so her untalented servants could pass them. No telling what the release key is—a trigger word, a pattern of touches, a spelled token—but the ssarez-kai clearly know it. Yet I don’t think the demon knows the spells’ locations or can sense the magic.”
“That’s why it brought along the clanfolk?” Horror and revulsion thickened Lena’s voice. “So it can send them along first to spring any lurking traps?”
“Dev!” Cara’s call echoed down the tunnel. “Another spell.”
I pulled Kiran into a stumbling run. Once past the egg-shaped boulder, the tunnel’s undercut walls lost their smoothness, wrinkling up into folds and lacy, protruding fins. Teo was kneeling at the base of one striated bulge. Cara and the kids stood well back from him. Melly had her arms wrapped around Janek, whose round face gleamed wet with tears, though he made no sound.
As we neared them, Kiran jerked away from me and stopped dead.
“What?” I demanded.
He shook his head. “Safer if I stay back.”
My first thought was that he was worried about triggering a trap. But looking at his white, taut face, I realized the truth. It was contact with Teo and Janek he feared. What he’d given to Lena had left his body starving for power, and there was no binding stopping him from ripping away Teo and Janek’s lives if he touched them. But if his control was that shaky…fuck, this got worse by the moment.
“Where’s the spell?” I asked Teo. Between the neverending twilight and the natural variation of the rock, I couldn’t make out anything on the cliff.
“On both walls and beneath the sand.” Teo swept a finger in a wide arc from one cliff to the other.
“Like a warded gate,” Lena said. “If we cross through, the spell will trigger.”
“And do what?” Maybe we could use it like we had the pool.
Lena hovered her fingertips just off the rock. “Far more power is bound here than at the pool. It sinks deep through stone, down and away to…” Her brows shot high in surprise. “A river within the rock? I sense water flowing somewhere dark and silent.”
That must be the “vanished river” Bayyan had told me about, wending its way underground from the Maw to the Khalat. “So the spell turns the river to acid?” Bad news for Prosul Akheba, maybe
, but I didn’t see how it’d stop intruders from reaching the temple.
“No,” Lena said. “I think it would block the river. Force it to find a new path. But where, and why—that, I can’t read.”
“The holes in the canyon walls before the slot.” Teo sprang up, his eyes gone wide. “Some of the symbols beside them warned of Shaikar’s vengeance. The spell will force the river out those holes and flood the slot like a storm would, only worse.”
I exchanged a dismayed glance with Cara. I’d never heard of an outrider who’d gotten caught by a storm flood in a slot and lived to tell the tale. Water funneled through a channel so narrow soon took on the speed and force of an avalanche. Anyone caught by the flow would be slammed into rock, thrown over drops, likely battered to death before they could even drown.
“Can Lena break the spell?” Melly was trying hard to sound calm, but I saw how tightly she was clutching Janek. Gods, but I wished both of them were far from here.
Lena shut her eyes. “It’s too strong. I’m sorry.”
Kiran said, strained and thin, “Then I have to cast. It’s that or bargain with the demon, and I don’t trust that it won’t harm you.”
“No!” Just because I’d never heard of anybody surviving a flood in a slot didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. We couldn’t outrun the water, but could we outclimb it?
“Cara.” I pointed where the cliffs drew together overhead. The gap was so narrow that even short-legged Janek might be able to stay safely braced inside, high above the canyon floor.
Cara grasped my thought instantly. “Could work, if we can find a spot to anchor a hauling belay.” She turned to Lena. “You said the river’s deep down in the rock. How long after the spell triggers before the water reaches us?”
“I think the spell propels the water as well as diverts it,” Lena said. “I wouldn’t count on having much time once it’s triggered. Moments only before the slot floods.”
Cara cursed, but I straightened, seeing a chain of actions and consequences in a glorious, searing flash, like spotting a route up an insanely difficult peak.
“That’s perfect,” I said, and laughed, bright and savage, even as I reached for the rope.
“You have a plan?” Kiran asked.
“You bet I do.” I grinned wide at him. “I’ll need your help, though.”
Hope sparked in Kiran’s eyes. “Tell me what I must do.”
* * *
(Kiran)
Kiran stood just shy of the pale tracery of the bone mage’s spell. He was alone; Dev and the others were out of sight above him, wriggling and stemming as high as they could get in the slender gap between the slot’s upper cliffs.
His solitude would not last long. The scraping, shuffling sound of the clanfolk’s progress grew ever louder. Soon they would emerge from the narrows into the tunnel section of the slot.
Kiran kicked more concealing sand over the slack coils of rope lying beside him. One end of the rope was bound around his waist in multiple winds so tight it restricted his breathing. The other end snaked up from the coils in the sand to disappear in the crack overhead. The hanging length of line was shadowed by a bulge of rock; it’d be difficult to spot from a distance. Assuming he could keep clanfolk and demon at a distance—but he must. He couldn’t let the demon get near the ward tracing. He wanted no chance the creature could release the spell in time to prevent the flood. Nor did he want the clanfolk warned in time to climb high out of the flood’s path as Dev and the others had done.
In the gloom at the far end of the tunnel, a shadow moved.
Kiran gave a sharp, warning yank on the rope and took one long stride past the tracery of the spell.
A silent inferno of magic flared in the stone, dark and powerful, but nothing showed to the naked eye. The patina of bone remained dull, scarcely noticeable against the rock.
Kiran ran to shelter behind the egg-shaped boulder in the middle of the canyon’s course. Slack rope trailed after him in the sand. He peered around the boulder’s smoothly rounded side, poised to duck back to evade thrown missiles.
Loud scraping, and shadowed figures jumped down into sand.
“Hold,” Kiran yelled at them. “Child of fire, hear me! If you force me into casting, it’s Ruslan who’ll seize my mind, not you. He’s not your servant, no matter what he promised. He’ll use me to take Ashkiza’s weapon for his own.”
The clanfolk tensed, reaching for knives and charms, but a hissed order froze them in their tracks. Five stood in the tunnel with more jammed up in the narrows behind them. Squinting at the figures in front, Kiran thought he could make out Gavila’s rangy form, the spiky bronze loops of her godspeaker charm glinting at her neck. Behind her was a gray-haired, sinewy woman who might be Zadikah’s mother, Nasham.
The bone mage’s spell was a dark, throbbing knot of power behind Kiran. He imagined the magic forcing the underground river out of its channel, a tide racing up a black tunnel toward the holes above the slot. He had only to hold the demon until the flood came.
A shorter, chubbier figure pushed to the forefront of the group. “Ahhh,” said the demon, its borrowed voice clear and youthful and disturbingly human. “The outcast told you of your purpose. Did the kinless one—mad, desperate creature that it is—also confess it cannot touch your master? Whereas we ssarez-kai can and will if that is your desire. Return to our fire with me, reforge the kin-bond you have so rashly severed, and your master’s blood will be yours to savor.”
Kiran didn’t think the demon was lying about Ruslan. The cost and consequences of surrender, however, were a different matter. He had been able to resist the kin-bond’s imperative while he walked inert ground, but the scarred demon had warned him that would not be true amid the currents of the demon realm.
“Oh certainly,” Kiran called to the demon, striving to mimic Dev’s most sardonic tone. “Let you chain me. Once bonded, you’ll force me to retrieve Ashkiza’s weapon, and the moment I give it over, you’ll kill me just as readily as Ruslan.”
“I said we would not harm you. Unlike your kind, we children of fire honor our bargains. Did I not yield to your demands in the mountains?”
“It was you in the Cirque of the Knives.” Kiran’s throat was as dry as the sand beneath his feet. His childhood self screamed at him to be wary. It did not matter what guise a scorpion might hide within; it was far from harmless. He willed the bone mage’s spell to push the water faster.
“It was I who embraced you as kin,” the demon agreed. “Yet you still doubt me, frightened, ignorant little ratling that you are. But look! I have brought you a gift to prove my good faith.”
The clanfolk parted. A lone dark figure was shoved out of the narrows, not gently. The figure landed on its knees in the sand. Two clansmen dragged the person forward.
“Zadikah?” Kiran blurted. Her face had a misshapen look—swollen from blows? A fat silver collar gleamed about her neck, and another band circled her right wrist.
The clansmen threw Zadikah at the scholar’s feet. Zadikah snarled something and started to rise, but collapsed with a cry, clawing at the charm around her neck. Behind Gavila, Nasham stirred, but made no protest as her daughter writhed in agony.
Kiran was deeply glad Teo was wedged too high in the slot to see what was happening. Though Teo might guess, if he’d heard Kiran blurt out Zadikah’s name. Curse the demon, why had it brought her here?
From a pouch at its waist, the demon plucked a shard that blazed cobalt in Kiran’s mage-sight. It stabbed the shard into Zadikah’s shoulder.
Her muscles went slack. She sprawled on her back, but her eyes remained open, her breathing rapid and furious.
The demon smiled wide at Kiran. “Temple child, I hear the cry of your soul for both sustenance and revenge. Come and take both, and consider how much sweeter your master’s life would taste.”
It bent and wrenched the charms from Zadikah’s wrist and neck. Her ikilhia sparked in Kiran’s awareness, no longer shielded from him, a wild flicker of
life fueled by fear and rage.
His starved body yearned to devour that candleflame, scant as it was. But if the demon thought him so weakened that he would blindly yield to that yearning, it was wrong. He would hold his barriers no matter the temptation.
Yet Zadikah would die just the same. The flood was on its way; already Kiran felt a faint trembling in the sand underfoot. Paralyzed, Zadikah wouldn’t even have the chance to run or climb or struggle for air. A stubborn fighter like her, forced to die helpless—that seemed so cruel. Another knife-thrust of anguish for Teo, and for Raishal, if she were alive to learn of it.
Kiran could not stomach the thought. Zadikah had betrayed him, but not out of self-interest. She’d thought it the only way to protect people from a greater evil, just as he’d thought when he betrayed Dev in Ninavel. Kiran had been given so many second chances. Didn’t she deserve the same?
He dared not cast to help her. He had to find another way, and quickly.
Kiran called to the demon, “You mean her as a gift and not a trap? Prove it. Take all your spells from her, and have one of your servants bring her to me.”
“As you ask, child,” the demon said, so readily that Kiran’s hackles rose. It was planning something, but what?
The black-daggers muttered and stirred. None seemed eager to volunteer to approach Kiran. He wanted to scream at them to hurry. The subtle vibration beneath his feet was growing.
Gavila took a fluid step forward. “I’ll bring her to you, but I’m not pulling the godfang out of her shoulder until I’ve dragged her over. I’ve taken too many bruises already, thanks to this sneaking she-viper.”
The shard in Zadikah’s shoulder was the trap, then. It must bear more spellwork than a simple lock-binding. But Kiran hadn’t the time to spare in arguing.
“Stop when you reach the boulder.” Kiran watched closely as Gavila took one of Zadikah’s limp arms and dragged her along the sand. She was gripping Zadikah’s bare wrist; whatever trap lurked in the shard couldn’t be triggered solely by touch. Kiran reached for the rope behind him and stealthily pulled up enough slack that he had a loose coil ready.
The Labyrinth of Flame Page 41