Spark

by Anna Holmes

  Elle is fast for a sick little kid. She’s already disappeared around the corner of one of the weathered gray buildings in the distance. I touch Alain’s arm and start running ahead. “I’ll get her.”

  “Thank you.”

  It means that promise to stay with him gets broken relatively quickly, but I know his sister is more important to him. I round the corner too and look around the loose spiral of deserted, splintering buildings. A pit settles in my stomach. “Elle?” I shout, my voice bouncing back to me off the structures and the stony basin we’re entering. I glance down at the powdery red ground, hunt for footprints. The dust is so fine it seems to immediately fill in any divots not caused by the strong gusts of wind that cut through at inopportune moments. I throw up an arm to shield my eyes from a blast of dirt, then look again. Spared from the wind, there’s a small heel print between the buildings—a space too small for me, of course. “Elle. Stay where you are, please.”

  No answer again. I keep running this circular maze, passing a barely walled barracks, some building with barred windows, a set of posts with chains dangling from them. My stomach churns. This place is worse than the Eastern Shore camp already. The next turn is into the center of the basin, where it gets worse still. A gallows stands in the middle, the pivotal point of the entire orbit of buildings. The empty noose flies in the wind, a flag to spur fear instead of loyalty. I stand in its shadow and cast wildly around myself. “Elle!”

  From behind the opposite set of buildings, a piercing shriek cuts through the dead air. My heart rams itself up my throat. “Elle, hold on, I'm coming!”

  I cast about. No time to mess about with that spiral, so there’s only one route I can see. I take my running start and jump up to the railing surrounding the nearest building. It creaks and starts to bow dangerously under my weight. I lunge forward, grasp the edge of the slanted roof, and with no small effort haul myself up. It takes a moment for me to get to my feet and start running. When I crest the roof, I spot her—alone, no attackers, thank gods. She crouches next to the edge of a slope I can’t quite spot from my vantage point. I skid down the roof, taking a couple shingles with me when I go, and grasping the eave, drop down. I barely hit the ground before I take off again, skidding to a stop next to her. “What happened?”

  Elle covers her mouth and points with a shaking hand. I turn and crane my neck over the ledge. The smell and the sound of the swarming insects hit first, well before the image of this pit and the bodies therein. Hastily thrown together pyramids of wood jut up from between limbs, the tops scorched. The pyre didn’t catch, and the makers abandoned it. Some bodies wear rags. Others, the blue uniforms of the Elyssian guard. A few wear Rosalian green. Indiscriminately horrible to the last.

  At my side, Elle hunches forward and retches. I set my hand to her back and make circles until her stomach has emptied. I hand her my handkerchief, and she clenches it over her nose and mouth, still breathing hard, tears rolling down her face. She still stares at the pit. I move in front of her, lift her, pull her away from it and back into the spiral where we find Alain. He pants up to us, slowing when he catches sight of Elle. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I was too slow.”

  Elle hyperventilates a little longer, and at last balls my handkerchief into her small fist and swings it into my breastplate repeatedly. “How could you?” she shrieks. “How could you?”

  The beating doesn't hurt, but I am left a little stunned. She thinks I did this. Of course she does. Why wouldn't she? Alain darts forward to catch her hand. “She didn’t know,” he tells her firmly, clasping her still balled fist in both of his hands. “She didn’t know, all right?”

  “Then why did she just leave them there?”

  That is a very good question. I distinctly remember ordering the dead cared for and the living notified where possible. “They weren’t meant to have been left there,” I answer. “I intend to find out why they were.”

  Alain looks briefly surprised, but holds Elle close. “What were you doing, rushing ahead like that?”

  She wipes at her eyes with an arm. “I was looking for the lowest point. For the focus.” He frowns, some words rolling around his head, but in the end, he says nothing. Elle’s head droops forward, her forehead hitting my breastplate with a resonant thud. “They could have been you,” she whispers.

  “I’m still here.”

  She twists in my arms, flinging her own around him and burying her face in his shoulder. He hugs her tightly and places a kiss to the top of her head. “Listen,” he says. “I need you to stay with Gavroth. We don't know if there are still people hiding here.”

  This time, she nods without argument. Alain sets his hand to the top of her head and looks over his shoulder. The others are beginning to catch up. “The focus is likely in the lower ring, maybe in one of the buildings. He can help you look, if that’s what you want to do. You’ve found the worst of it, I think. I hope.”

  Elle looks up at me, her cheeks flushed. “S-sorry.”

  Carefully, I set her down, letting her find her balance before taking my hands away. “No. It was a fair question.” I should have looked into what happened here after the initial reports. I should have known.

  She starts to walk toward the rest of the group, then doubles back and snatches Alain in a hug again. He gives her a squeeze and watches her go. “How much did you tell her about this place?” I ask quietly.

  “The barest minimum,” he answers. “I hoped she wouldn’t have to know more than that.”

  Riley comes jogging up, red dust trailing behind him in plumes. “What’s going on?”

  “Why,” I ask, my voice low, “is there a pit full of bodies left open here? I asked for the dead to be respectfully interred, not—thrown in a heap in an uncovered communal grave.”

  “They were,” he says, confused. “We returned the remains that could be identified and buried the rest in their own graves in the grove to the south. There’s a memorial and everything.”

  Alain frowns. “The pit was always here. You mean to tell me it was emptied?”

  “Yes,” he says emphatically. “I came here myself to oversee the work.”

  “Oh no.” He paces a few steps, stops, listens in that extremely focused way that means he's hunting for magic. His face contorts. “This is bad.”

  “What’s happened?” I ask.

  “Rosalian deathmages. They were here.”

  "What the hells is that?”

  “A cult. A sect of the old Rosalian religion. They use the energy that still cycles through the dead to…reanimate them for brief periods.”

  My stomach turns. “Why?”

  “They believe that all energy is placed on earth to be manipulated by mages. None is sacred, as it is in the new Rosalian religion or in the Elyssian tradition.” He shakes his head, his arms folding tight against his chest. “Deathmages in particular think it’s their divine right to use the dead.”

  “For what possible purpose?”

  “Fighting, usually, or labor. There are…rumors of deathmages among the Legion, but it’s rare. The only confirmed deathmage is a Prince. Dustrise.”

  “The one Jori killed at the lake? He wasn’t a mage, was he?”

  “Not him. His wife.”

  “So if he was here for the cryst….”

  “She was likely here for the focus,” he finishes. “And if she used all of those people….”

  She probably found it. “Can you tell how long ago that happened?”

  He shakes his head. “Deathmagic is unlike almost any other casting in that it leaves behind a void of energy. Null. When I listen for magic, I’m listening for the strength of the resonance left behind. There isn’t any here to be found.”

  Riley turns to take in the looping rows of buildings. “We don’t know that she found it. We’ll look until we find it or evidence that it’s been taken. As for the dead….”

  “They’ve been drained,” Alain says, sounding drained himself. “They’ll not be useful to her until t
he void fills again.”

  “I can’t disrespect them by leaving them to be possibly toyed with again,” I say. “We give them their rites again and we give them a king’s flame burial.”

  Alain nods. “I can do that.”

  “Are you all right to do that?”

  “If you’re with me,” he answers.

  Riley looks a little uncertain, but at last he says, “We’ll search. Join us when you’re ready.”

  I take Alain’s hand and wait. Riley pats my shoulder with a gloved thump as he leaves us to it. I wait some more until Alain has steeled himself with another breath and pulls me back toward the pit.

  The words come too easily. I have spent too many quiet moments like this, my forehead pressed to the ground, my hands stretched out in front of me, laid flat against one another. “We bid you take your place in the weft of what is, what was, what will be. In the name of the Nameless, we, the left behind, send you to your….” Here I stumble, because it’s different than I have ever known. “Truly final rest this time. Forgive us our vagaries and be at peace, hallowed souls.”

  I lift my head and stand, my hand closed over my heart. It’s not a gesture made much by a monarch, but this…I don’t know where the souls have gone. I don’t even know for certain that anyone heard this prayer. But if they do, I want them to know that their earthly bodies’ final moments were not ones of servitude. Alain takes in a breath, pushing the palms of his hands flat towards his waist, then lifts them one at a time. The orbs of flame he conjures glow blue in his hands. With a flick of his wrists, he sends them floating through the air to the wooden pyramids. The wood sparks and sputters for a second before catching at last.

  When he’s managed to keep them burning steadily, he pulls some of the flame away and ignites the remaining two. I look at him out of the corner of my eye. He’s gone blue, but no growths, and the heat coming off him is not yet the nigh-unbearable warmth of his overextended states. He lowers his hands again at last, watching. I take his hand. It’s clammy, shaky. “All right?”

  He continues to gaze into the fire, eyes averted from the bodies, following the sparks flying in the air. “They were as hard on the guards as they were on the prisoners. Now I understand why.” The upper ranks were Legion, the lower Elyssian. So many of them were confused about their duties, told that I’d decreed this for the safety of the island. He looks at me now, his expression hollow. “Are they dead because of me?”

  “No—of course not.”

  “It was my development they were forced to work on.”

  “Darling, if it weren't you….”

  He nods slightly, looking back to the fire. “It would have been someone else. Still. All these people—for this.” He gestures bitterly at himself, at the blue light flaring and fading from his skin. “Not feeding their people. Making better soldiers to kill and ensnare more people they won’t feed.”

  There’s really nothing I can say to make that better. No reassurances for the horrible truth. So I don’t try. I slip my arm around his narrow body and hold on.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Alain

  I don’t know why, but having set fire to the pit helps.

  Not the exhausted molasses feeling. On the contrary, wringing that little bit of magic out of myself was agonizing.

  Knowing the pit is empty— for good this time— takes some of the oppressive weight out of this place. It was constantly used as a cudgel.

  Do you want to go in the pit?

  The last man who tried that wound up in the pit.

  I’ll whip you so hard the only place left for you is the pit.

  We came to resent it more than fear it. It swallowed some of the only people who made this place livable. The kind. The careless.

  I don’t know if I believe in peace for the dead, but I like to think that if they can look back on us here, they’d be relieved to be free of the pit. That thought makes picking through the hollowed out bones of my prison easier.

  The buildings always smelled of decaying wood, but no one’s here to make even the slapdash repairs that birthed abominations like this three legged table with one corner nailed to the wall. I stop, lean on it, listen for magic. There is some sort of vague hum consistent with the steady bass of an enchanted item, but once again, not in this room. I set my jaw. There’s a very good chance that what I’m hearing is the focus, since everything else not nailed to the wall seems to have been plucked from the rooms. We’ve been through most of them at this point, and the sound only seems to be getting closer by tiny increments. What are we missing?

  A loud crack and a jolt force me out of my thoughts and back into the room. I’ve leaned the table out of the wall and now it’s halfway through the floor. I growl, “What the hells?”

  The porch creaks outside and Caelin pokes her head through the door. “All right?”

  I disentangle myself from the splintering floor and shake myself free of the dust. “Yes. Just breaking everything.”

  “Being fair, you don't have to try hard at all to do that. There are some floors Elle couldn't even get across.”

  I rub at my chin, shake my head, look around. “What is it we keep overlooking? There is something here, something strong enough to overpower the null. Why can’t we find it?”

  “What is it she said when we caught up to her? She was looking for the lowest point.”

  “Yes, because something that powerful has to be tapped into leylines, so it’d be buried in the bedrock. We’ve searched the lowest buildings.”

  “What’s below the buildings?”

  “Below.”

  “Yeah.” She inches over me to avoid rotten spots in the floor and yanks the table out of its hole. There is a considerable space between the floor and the layer of rock the thing is built on. Caelin kind of tosses the table aside and squats to examine the hole. “Looks pretty empty down there.”

  “But,” I interject, “this isn’t the lowest building.”

  It makes sense, I guess, that the lowest building in this camp is the warden’s office. It also makes sense that it’s the building that I hate the most. I was dragged here often—as an example, as a punishment, for interrogation. The noxious musk of the warden’s pipe lingers in the wood—of course of higher quality here than the rest of the camp. It’s the wood that’s got Caelin and Gavroth flustered. “I don’t understand,” he pants. “It’s breaking. Why haven’t we gotten through yet?”

  She wipes at her forehead, tossing her gloves and her cloak aside and leaning down to examine their work. “This is ridiculous. You’re sure there’s no magic stuff here?”

  “Not directly in the room. There’s definitely something under it.” I listen again. The thrum is louder here than anywhere else, but just barely. A second higher hum, degraded to a whine, sounds from somewhere else in the room. There was some sort of enchantment here, but it’s fading. Not strong enough to repair the floor as Caelin and Gavroth throw their considerable strength at it.

  I start to wander through the room, largely still as it was. The desk in the far corner from the door. The metal loop on the floor through which my chains were fed. A cabinet against the wall with the window which looks out onto the courtyard where the alchemists were put to work. A few overturned benches remain. The cabinet doors have been left flung open, revealing the emptiness within. The whine of the enchantment grows louder the closer I get to the desk. The closer I get to the hitch they chained me to when they wanted to leer at me.

  I feel the past trying to stopper my throat again, making my blood run much too hot, threatening to overtake me. That damned little ring stuck in the floor. I’ve been fighting this all day and this is what sets me off?

  Maybe I should let it. I remembered scraps after my explosion in the war room. Tentatively, I relax my shoulders a bit, focus on the metal loop. The panic immediately surges to the fore again. My body clenches instinctively to try to push it down. I have to force my muscles slack. Let it come, I coax myself. It'll be unpleasant,
but the sooner it comes, the sooner it’ll pass, and I can stop fighting, at least for a bit.

  The memories rush in in a flood, as cold as the water of the lake. The guard, nervous, young, handsome, kind to me, leans down to chain me to the hitch. His red flamefolk eyes keep darting in the direction of the warden. “You wanted to see me?” I ask dryly.

  He swivels in his chair, his pipe clutched between large sausage-like fingers, tapping the end of it against his mouth. “I’m disappointed in your progress. A month with us and you still haven’t figured out your place.” He rounds his desk and perches on the edge of it. “I’m told you have a terrible problem with authority.”

  I lift my chin and look him in the face. “Because I don’t recognize yours?”

  The warden pulls up his bottom lip, folds his arms, and nods to himself. “Hmm.” His plain face is mottled, and he scratches at his short gray hair for a moment. At length, he eases up from the desk and stands up at his full height—considerable, to square off with mine. He looks me up and down in silence. I stare right back at him. At last, he starts to turn away. As he goes, he sends a boot directly into my bad leg. My vision goes white. Agony explodes from my leg into every available part of my brain. The metal ring slams into my ribs with a crack and forces the air out of me as I hit the ground.

  I lay there, stunned, unable to move, unable to breathe. Each nerve screams in concert. As the paralysis starts to lift, I try desperately to raise my head, get my bearings. All I see is a table leg and an oddly shaped scuff it’s made on the floor. I twist and see the warden hand the guard a whip. “Do it.”

  He hesitates. “Sir—I was trained not to use corporal punishment on prisoners. We all were.”

  “This is no normal prisoner. Do it, and that’s an order.”

  The guard looks at me, his eyes flickering, the oranges and reds of his skin shifting constantly. Then he looks down at the whip in his hand in disgust. He tosses it to the ground. “No. It’s not right.”