Burning Magic

by Joshua Khan

  “Shhh!”

  “It’s darker here. Try your little spell again.”

  “It doesn’t work,” Lily snapped. “None of it.”

  She felt as if she’d been pulled inside out.

  The last spell she’d used was the shadow-step to flee from the palace. So why couldn’t she do it now? With all this darkness, it should be easy!

  A light shone from around the corner, and boots scuffed on the gravel.

  They crouched down behind a rock as a nomad waved a torch in their direction.

  Lily held her breath, wishing for deeper shadows. Surely the nomad could see them? They were only five feet apart.

  But he just grunted and turned back the way he’d come.

  Both of them sighed with relief when he left. They waited for Pan to venture in, but he never appeared. He must be searching another cave.

  Thorn peered farther along the crooked path. “Keep going? We might make it out the other side.”

  “What other side?”

  He told her about Kismet and her camp in the ancient city.

  “From the time of the Six Princes? Are you sure?” It sounded incredible. To walk the actual streets they’d trodden!

  “That’s what K’leef told me, and I guess he’d know.” He tore his turban into strips and wrapped them into a bundle around two arrows. A minute later, using his flint and tufts of cotton, he lit the cloth on fire, which gave them a few yards’ worth of light. “Waste of two perfectly good arrows,” he grumbled.

  She looked around. The cave walls were strange. Despite their crookedness and all the cracks, they were too evenly proportioned to be natural. “Someone chiseled this tunnel.”

  “Hmm?” Thorn was riffling through his quiver. “Eight left. Let’s try and avoid any big battles, eh?”

  And this gravel. Most of it was ash and dust blown in from the desert, but under that layer lay small, faded squares of stone and tile, all delicately inlaid by master craftsmen a long time ago. Castle Gloom had similar designs in its older halls. There were gaps in the walls that, if you looked at them skew-eyed, might appear to have once been window openings.

  Were these cliffs natural, or were they buildings so old and decayed that they had melded into shapeless rock? No one knew exactly when the Six Princes had reigned—it was back when the sun was young and the world not yet fully formed—so could these be the homes and palaces of the ancients? Wax sagged over time; did stone do the same?

  “The war…” she whispered.

  “Hmm?”

  “When the high king died, the six sons fought for the crown. All the marvels of the golden age of magic were destroyed by their rivalry. Seas boiled, populations were turned to stone, the sun grew black, and the crows all died. Mountains shifted, and they say the world turned on its axis. Storms scoured the earth, flattening kingdoms. It was a cataclysm, and we’re descended from those who survived. Haven’t you ever wondered why so much of our world is empty?”

  “Not really.” Thorn puffed on the flames of his makeshift torch to give it more life. “Let’s go. I reckon we’ve got an hour before this winks out, and I ain’t got the arrows to spare for admiring the decorations.”

  Lily sighed. “You don’t have any interest in the past, do you?”

  “I’m focused on us having a future, Lily. Even if it’s just another hour.”

  “Lead the way, faithful servant.”

  He bowed. “As you wish, m’lady.”

  How did he do it? He knew his north from his south even here, deep inside a mountain. Thorn inspected the dust and found mouse paw prints where Lily just saw faint scratches. He could smell the difference between stale, trapped air and fresh desert wind from outside.

  “It’s like magic, what you do.”

  Thorn was sniffing the ground. “It’s just paying attention. Something’s been this way, not too long ago. Something rotten.”

  “Rotten?”

  He nodded. “I’ve been around zombies long enough to know the smell, Lily. You’re too used to it, so you don’t notice. I’ve said it plenty of times, ain’t I? You need to get out more, spend some time out in Spindlewood and Bone-Tree Forest. Give your nose some exercise.”

  “I’ll start exercising it the moment we get back home.” She couldn’t quite conceal the tremble in her voice. This wasn’t the best news, not now. “Zombies?”

  “Nothing you can’t handle.”

  Could she handle them without her magic?

  They entered a chamber where the ceiling had partially caved in, making it feel tomb-like. Even for someone raised in Castle Gloom, the silence was eerie. Lily felt that she—they—didn’t belong, that the living were trespassers here.

  Was that the sound of wind blowing through cracks, or the ancient souls whispering? Something awful had happened, and the pain of it still lingered, even after all this time.

  “They didn’t want to die,” she said.

  “Reckon that’s what all the dead say. Nobody does. Grandpa…” He looked around at the dusty ruins. “Never mind. Another time.”

  They came to a large underground square. Lily approached a broken column with letters and symbols carved into it. Bones were scattered all around.

  Lily traced her fingers over the deep grooves, her brow furrowed as she deciphered the language of the Old Kingdom. It wasn’t easy, but one name came up again and again. “This is Al Na’im, one of the jeweled cities.”

  “That a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “It means ‘a place of delights,’ roughly. Its citizens didn’t want to take part in the war; they refused to ally themselves with one prince or the other. So all six descended upon it.” She couldn’t stop the tears. “The stories are awful, Thorn.”

  “The more I learn about the Six Princes, the more I hate ’em.”

  She turned to him sharply. “Don’t say that. They were great, great men. They made our world what it is.”

  “Great fools, more like.” Thorn inspected a bone. “And it seems to me the world survived in spite of ’em, not because of ’em.”

  “Will you put that down?”

  “Nope.” He wrapped the remains of his turban around the top of it. “This is a thighbone, but I wouldn’t like to meet the person it belonged to. Must’ve been seven feet tall, easy.”

  Lily shrugged. “They say the people of that age were taller, more handsome, and nobler than those of today. They lived for hundreds of years, and even the lowliest beggar was richer than Duke Solar.”

  “And yet they fouled it all up. Hooray for them.”

  How could he be so dismissive? So ignorant? Lily reminded herself that Thorn hadn’t had a proper education. When they got back to Gehenna, she’d show him the books and tell him some of the tales. Then he’d understand, and he’d come to feel the same way about the Six Princes as she did.

  And yet, as she looked at the ruins, she couldn’t help wondering if Thorn had a point.

  Her best artists could never match the splendor of the art here, not even if they worked for a hundred years. How were they able to sculpt marble so delicately, or make glass so thin and yet so strong? So much had been lost forever because of the ambitions and rivalry of six brothers. Men who should have stood by each other no matter what. Instead, they had made a war that lasted hundreds of years and almost destroyed the world.

  They were great and they were terrible. Perhaps one could not exist without the other?

  “Let’s keep going through,” she suggested.

  So they did, reentering the winding tunnels.

  And they found their first dead body.

  Thorn poked it with the tip of his bow. “One of them nomads.”

  The dead man’s face was frozen in terror, ashen, his lips drawn back in a scream that never made it out. Lily wondered if he was howling in the lands of the dead even now. Dark purple bruises encircled his throat. He’d been strangled, with long fingers….

  Lily jumped at the scream. More cries and yells joined it. Then came
the sounds of fighting from the branch heading left. Thorn pointed right. “Thataway.”

  There was a time to be curious, and a time to escape. This was one of those run-far-away times. “Go! Don’t wait for me.”

  The screams grew louder, wilder, and more desperate. Someone sobbed, another begged and then gave a cry that ended with a hideous gurgle. Torchlight flickered behind them, then wavered, and was snuffed out.

  The path sloped steeply upward. Soon they were scurrying hand over hand, Lily’s skirt tearing and her knees bleeding on the sharp rock.

  “Shall I get behind and push?” Thorn muttered.

  “You’ll get nowhere near my behind.” Lily cursed as a jagged edge sliced her fingertips.

  “Then move it.”

  Lily spun around as a yell echoed down the dark passageway. A figure stumbled around the corner, flailing with his sword.

  Something dark and bony leaped at him, and he slashed its face, a blow that would have killed a man but barely scratched whatever this was. Yet it backed off, waiting for its companions. Their snarls warned Lily that they were not far behind.

  The warrior sagged, and Lily could see it was taking all his strength just to hold his weapon aloft.

  “We’ve got to help him.” Lily skidded down the slope.

  “No, we don’t!” Thorn shouted in despair. “Lily!”

  Lily dashed a few yards to catch up with the man. He turned just as Lily grabbed him. “Come with—”

  Their eyes met, and she gasped at his most familiar face.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Lily blinked again. Uncle Pan!

  “Put the sword down!” Thorn stood there, bow drawn.

  “What are you doing, Thorn?” Lily cried.

  “Outta the way!” he yelled back. Then, to Pan, “Sword down, or by the Six, I will shoot!”

  The arrow zipped over her right shoulder.

  Horrified, she turned, expecting to see her uncle dead. Instead, one of the creatures lay behind them, an arrow buried in its eye socket. It stumbled a few paces before collapsing.

  Thorn pointed his second arrow at Pan. “The next one goes in your eyeball. Drop the sword.”

  Pan complied, and the heavy blade clanged on the stone floor.

  Lily ventured over to the dead creature.

  It was human, or had been once. But its spine was so bent it scurried on all fours, on limbs long and bony, and with fingers filled with a macabre strength. Dirt and dried blood had turned the ragged nails black and broken, and crooked teeth lined the puckered gums.

  “A ghul,” she said.

  Ghuls were cowardly creatures that ambushed lone travelers in remote places and dined on their flesh. She had studied them and knew that whole tribes of them dwelled out here. With little else to eat in the Shardlands, it wasn’t surprising that they had turned to eating the flesh of the dead—even their own. Over time and generations, they had evolved into something not quite alive and not quite dead.

  The magic of the Shardlands altered all of its inhabitants sooner or later, and in unpredictable ways.

  Lily turned to her uncle. “Can you walk unaided?”

  “I’ll manage,” he replied.

  Thorn muttered under his breath, and even she didn’t understand why she was helping her uncle, but the three scrambled up the slope and down the other side. They hobbled on for…how long? Lily had no idea, but eventually the creatures’ shouts and screams died away, and the three of them slowed down.

  Pan limped to the side of the path, pale and panting, and sat down on a pile of rubble. Blood soaked the crude bandage around his leg.

  Thorn yanked her around to face him. “You’ve done some all-out crazy things since I’ve known you, but this is the craziest. What were you thinking? You should have left him!”

  “I couldn’t! He’s my uncle!”

  Thorn threw up his hands in frustration. “You are impossible!”

  Pan laughed. “I can hear you, you know.”

  Thorn scowled. “That leg giving you trouble?”

  Pan nodded.

  Thorn smiled. “Good. With any luck you’ll bleed to death, and that will be that.”

  But Lily helped unwind the turban cloth her uncle had used as a bandage. The wound looked clean—disabling but not fatal. Thorn could put an arrow through one of Mary’s hoop earrings at a hundred paces during a hurricane, so Lily knew he’d done this on purpose. No matter how much he threatened, Thorn wasn’t a killer. Pan’s running had loosened the cloth, that was all. She retied it, adding her own scarf to increase the pressure and reduce the leakage.

  “Thank you, Niece.” Pan stood up, testing it. “I think I can walk now.”

  Thorn pointed back the way they’d come. “Off you go, then.”

  Lily scowled at her friend. “Ignore him, Uncle.”

  Thorn plucked his bowstring. “I’m never gonna complain about Gabriel ever again.”

  Thorn wasn’t wrong to mistrust her uncle. Pan had murdered her parents and brother and tried to kill her. Nothing was ever going to change that, or make the loss any less painful. But without them, he was all the family she had left. She couldn’t leave him to die, despite his crimes and treachery.

  She and Pan took the lead while Thorn held back, constantly checking behind him, as tense as his bowstring.

  “Al Na’im,” said Pan eventually. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how many years I spent looking for the City of Delights? The fortunes I wasted on fake maps and phony guides…This one time, I—”

  “Stop talking. I’m not interested.”

  He shrugged. “You’re in charge, Lily.”

  Thorn snorted, and Lily knew there was a huge “I told you so” on its way from him.

  Yet no one knew the Shardlands better than Pan. Obsession was too small a word for how her uncle felt about the ruins of the Old Kingdom. Lily had sat listening to his tales so often, she’d almost believed she’d been there with him, exploring ancient tombs and digging for buried cities. When her father had become Lord Shadow, Pan had gathered his armor and a handful of men and left, promising to return laden with treasure and with a pet dragon for her. He had come back with neither, but that hadn’t mattered to her. It had to him. The failure had made him feel useless, a feeling that grew in intensity the more powerful his brother—his younger brother—became.

  His drinking had been amusing, at first. Pan the clown, acting out duels and wild stories while he stumbled around the Great Hall. Eventually the laughter faded and was replaced with uncomfortable silences and mockery. Lily remembered dying inside when she’d overheard the servants laughing not with him but at him as they dragged the unconscious Pan to his bed.

  When had his sense of worthlessness become poisonous? When had his envy of his brother turned into thoughts of murder?

  Could she have done something? Said something, anything, that might have made a difference? Should she have told Pan how much he meant to her? Reminded him that when she’d been small and frightened, it was he she’d gone to? That he was her hero?

  But what had that adoration accomplished? It had not stopped him from ripping her heart out.

  She was House Shadow. She thought she was familiar with darkness, but there were dark places within people that she could never hope to understand.

  The rest of her family were in their tombs, and here he was, alive.

  Not merely alive, but vital. Lean, fierce, dangerous, and clear-eyed. The exile had made him new again.

  “You look well, Lily,” he said. “I’ve heard about what you’ve accomplished in Gehenna.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Your father would be proud.”

  “Don’t speak about him,” Lily warned. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Lily…”

  Cold rage gripped her. “I saved you from execution, because I didn’t know who you really were. If I had, things might have turned out differently.”

  “I know you, Lily.”r />
  “You think you do. I’ve changed.”

  “Not in the ways that matter,” he replied.

  “You think I was weak to let you go. That’s what everyone says. Baron Sable would take your head off if he were here.”

  “Mercy is not the same as weakness.”

  Thorn spoke. “Lily, can I have a word?”

  Pan rubbed his calf. “It would be good to rest a minute. Go on.”

  “She doesn’t need your permission,” Thorn snapped.

  They walked a few yards ahead. Thorn kept his eyes on Pan as he spoke. “Don’t listen to him. He’s just a fox trying to get you out of the coop.”

  “That’s one of your grandpa’s quotes, isn’t it?”

  He glowered. “My grandpa’s over seventy, and do you know how many people in Stour are that old? Just him. So he’s been doing something right, don’t you think?”

  “I know what you’re saying. Pan is trying to flatter me, make me drop my guard,” said Lily.

  “Good. So don’t you fall for it. Whatever he tells you, they’re all just lies. No matter how much you want ’em to be true.”

  “I’m not stupid, Thorn.”

  “You should have killed him when you could.”

  She’d had enough. “Go on, then. Shoot him. You can’t miss from this distance.”

  Thorn’s gaze hardened. “I ain’t your executioner, Lady Shadow.”

  Not yet, Thorn.

  Tyburn was her executioner. But no executioner lasted forever. She knew Tyburn had his eye on Thorn as a successor, though he hadn’t yet shared his plan with Lily—Tyburn didn’t share much with anyone. But it made sense.

  Thorn was a born hunter. It was a small step to move from hunting deer to hunting men.

  How would it happen? How did executioners train their replacements?

  It would begin with a first kill. Thorn would have to cross that threshold, take the life of another human being. Then, knowing he could do it, would other assassinations be…easier?

  What would become of Thorn, this boy she knew?

  She smiled suddenly.

  He frowned. “What?”

  “Never change, Thorn.”

  He laughed. “’Cause I’m so perfect already?”

  “That remains to be seen,” she replied. “So, where are we?”