Ignite the Fire: Incendiary

by Karen Chance

  The beast did not hurry up and tossed its eagle-like head with what looked like disdain at the suggestion. But it did allow us to mount the saddle affixed to its back. It felt completely unlike a horse under our body, being lithe and low to the ground and heavily muscled, and it moved with a fluid grace that a horse could never match.

  Caedmon, Aeslinn’s old enemy and the fey king currently occupying his capitol, had told me once that Svarestri warriors sometimes came into his lands, trying to steal gryphon eggs. Caedmon’s fey used the creatures, which had an eagle’s head and wings and a lion-like body, as sky mounts, as the adult ones were powerful enough to carry a fully grown fey. I’d gotten the impression that very few Svarestri had succeeded in doing likewise, but it looked like at least one had.

  Because a second after the gryphon gulped down the last of his meal, we were off, loping and then running down the hill, before taking off in a whoosh of huge wings and a mental shout from me, because holy crap, that was a rush!

  The beast soared effortlessly skyward, and I held on for all I was worth, despite knowing that I was only in some fey’s head. I didn’t understand what was happening, but that had been so true for so long, that I was honestly getting used to it. I knew I needed to get out of there, to find a way to pull back into me, or into whatever version of me had just been dragged out of the leaf pile, but . . . but I could do that in a minute, right?

  Because this . . . was seriously awesome.

  The rider didn’t seem to think so, treating it as pretty ho-hum. But I craned my neck to see out of the corners of his eyes, not wanting to miss anything, and was rewarded with a bird’s eye view of more villages. Some were nestled in snowy valleys, while others were perched on craggy mountain fastnesses as if they’d been dropped from on high by one of the eagles riding the wind currents around us—and carefully keeping their distance.

  Unlike the simple architecture of the valley towns, the mountain ones had massive walls and soaring spires, and open ledges beside which half frozen waterfalls gushed into the gorges below. They looked like they’d been magicked straight out of the mountains themselves, and they probably had. The Svarestri were lords of earth, and it never ceased to amaze me what they could do with it.

  Like that, I thought, catching sight of a stone creature the size of a small mountain, hauling a pack of wood up a cliff face, toward one of the higher villages.

  The pack was woven out of ropes as fat as the anchor chains on an ocean liner, and looked to contain half a forest’s worth of trees. Yet it had been slung over one gigantic shoulder with the same ease that I’d carry a large handbag. That was probably because the shoulder in question, along with the rest of the man-shaped creature, was carved out of what looked like reddish-brown granite, with the stone sparkling dimly despite the haziness of the day.

  But it hadn’t been left as plain rock. It was crowned by a hedge of fir trees, giving it the illusion of hair, and had a flock of goats grazing on some dried grasses on one shoulder and down its great back. It turned its head as we passed and lifted the arm that wasn’t clinging to the almost perpendicular cliff.

  I saw my gauntleted hand raise in return.

  And, because I was looking for it, I glimpsed the tiny figure of a fey, the master of the creature that had been pulled out of a mountain and set to work, perched on the shoulder with the goats. He was sitting outside a tent, roasting something over a fire, and had a young boy with him. The boy had a baby goat in his arms and, like the older fey, was waving along with their creation.

  It gave me a weird feeling, but not because I hadn’t seen something like it before. Aeslinn had used similar rock creatures at the battle for his capitol, with catastrophic consequences. They’d taken a terrible toll on our forces, running us down, pounding us like massive pile drivers, and being responsible for more of our casualties than the fey themselves. They were like tanks, only bigger, faster, and more maneuverable.

  Which was why it had seemed like insult to injury when the Svarestri had personalized their war machines, painting their faces with stripes of ore, and decorating their bodies with enormous crystal formations. It had felt like they were mocking us.

  But now . . . I didn’t know what I thought now. I craned my neck to the breaking point to keep the creature in view for as long as possible. It had already gone back to work, lugging more useful stuff up the mountainside than a whole fleet of trucks could have done.

  Was this what they were meant for? Helping the fey to tame their rugged homeland, and allowing people to live where no one would have thought possible? Were they usually cranes and trucks and construction equipment, rather than tanks?

  It made me uncomfortable, like seeing some farmer’s tractor turned into a war machine. Plowshares into swords, I thought, and felt uneasy some more. Which was stupid! Yes, we had invaded them, but if the gods came back, we all died, and probably a lot of the fey as well. We hadn’t had a choice!

  But had they known that? The nobles, the ones giving the orders—probably. I assumed they were in on whatever Aeslinn was doing. But the regular Joes, or Svens, or whatever? What had they seen?

  An enemy army coming out of nowhere, laying siege to their capitol and slaughtering them in droves. And now threatening to do it again, while hunting their scattered soldiers, all that was left of their army—their sons—across Faerie. No wonder we weren’t getting any cooperation.

  I thought of Kåre and his little flute, which he’d probably much rather be playing back on his grandfather’s farm than dying like his father probably had. Like I’d rather be back with my court than killing him. But what was the alternative?

  The mountains didn’t answer me back, and there were plenty of them right now, as we’d left the villages behind and started moving through a range taller than any I’d seen on Earth. It was cut through by a narrow valley with a river frothing with rapids at the bottom, and sprinkled with tiny fisherman’s villages, just a cluster of cottages at a time. But eventually, even that gave way to a winter wonderland of pure snow and ice and stone.

  The highest peaks were wreathed in clouds and lost to sight, but even the lower ones towered on either side, row after row clad in stark colors of gray, dark gray, black and white. There were no villages here, or any sign of life at all. Just an occasional glacier filling the gaps in between pinnacles, like a sleeping giant under a blanket of snow, but holding strange blue fire at their hearts.

  And then I was treated to something that made all of that look like nothing, just nothing at all.

  We had been climbing for a while, steadily fighting our way upward with every powerful beat of those great wings, and finally rose high enough to break through the clouds. A cascade of light rewarded us, flooding the scene and making me blink. I didn’t know what the fey called their star—I’d never thought to ask—but it was dazzling.

  But not as much as that, I thought, as a city appeared in the distance. It was carved into a magnificent cliffside, with multiple towers, domes and terraces. It was hard to make out details at this distance, hard to see it at all in fact, but not because of the clouds. Most of them were below us now, spread out like a vast white sea. They boiled up against the bottom of the cliff like waves crashing against a rocky shore, to the point that I half expected to hear the roar of the ocean.

  No, the problem was that the city was carved out of stone almost as pale as the clouds surrounding it, like cream right before it turned into butter: off white with occasional veins of pale gold. The bulbous look of the domes also blended in perfectly with the surrounding cloud banks, fooling the eye, and making the city seem like just another part of the sky. If the fey hadn’t been looking right at it, I might have missed it all together, or thought I was seeing a mirage.

  I still sort of did because I’d already seen Aeslinn’s capital. Issengeir, the City of Ice Spires in their language, currently lay in ruins at the center of a gigantic plain, inside a protective ring of mountains that hadn’t proved so protective, after all. But thi
s was even grander. It looked like somebody was trying to copy Olympus which . . . knowing Aeslinn a little now, he probably was.

  But he’d done a damned good job of it.

  So, why hadn’t he used it? I wondered. Was that other city considered more impregnable? Because that didn’t seem likely. Or was I seeing something from the past? Was this vision, or whatever it was, from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and showing an older capitol now abandoned?

  Because I couldn’t imagine anyone abandoning this.

  I stared at it some more; it was hard not to. Under the bulbous domes, it looked like someone had brought a gigantic sword down, shaving off a third of the mountainside, to reveal the heart of the stone within. And then carved a city inside it, a massive sculpture that was largely invisible, being deep inside the rock, but could be glimpsed through terraces, balconies and open-air windows. There were some external staircases as well, linking two or more terraces and running for ridiculous distances down the cliffside, and making me dizzy at even the thought of traversing them, especially with the force of the wind currently whipping the fey’s hair around.

  The same was true for a second fey who pulled up beside us a moment later. His silver hair was flying, and his body was half leaning out of a strange, wooden contraption that looked like a small, four-sided pyramid, except for a rounded top. It had several open sides and several closed ones and wasn’t much larger than the basket on a hot air balloon.

  Only there wasn’t any hot air. Or any balloon. Or any visible means of support, yet it was keeping pace with us.

  “Up for another go?” My fey yelled, his voice almost whisked away by the wind.

  “You never get tired of losing, do you?” the pilot of the small craft said, grinning.

  “Usual stakes?”

  “Agreed. I can always use another flagon. Where to?”

  “Same as always.”

  The door on the opposite side of the small pyramid slammed shut. “Be waiting when you arrive,” the pilot said, and dropped like a stone.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  W e immediately dove after him, a sudden move that had me screaming internally, because our mount had turned into a brown and white bullet shooting straight at the ground. I could see it through a gap in the fluffy white nothingness below, which parted to reveal a beautiful blue lake. It was almost perfectly round, and reflected the mountains in its placid surface like a mirror.

  Will we splat or drown, I wondered, staring at it.

  Probably splat.

  Even water, when hit from this high up, would be as hard as concrete.

  But the fey didn’t seem to be experiencing the same terror. He laughed instead, an exultant, natural sound that I’d never expected to hear from one of them, when we hurtled past the small wooden craft mid-air. And before I could scream again, he banked and swooped and headed for the side of the mountain, talons first. I had a moment to stare at the massive wall of stone rushing at us like a huge, pale fist, but found that I couldn’t utter a sound.

  And then we landed, on a tiny shelf of rock that I hadn’t even seen, maybe because it jutted out just above the sea of clouds, which partly hid it from view.

  “Perhaps next time!” my fey called out, to the pilot who had just drawn up alongside the cliff.

  “That makes you one out of four,” he replied, laughing. “I like my odds!”

  “And I like Sorjen red. See you below.”

  The pilot nodded ruefully, and the small craft spiraled upward again as we dismounted.

  My legs felt like jelly, but the fey’s were strong and steady, as if he did this every day. And maybe he did. He pulled messy hair out of our face, still grinning, as an older fey came running up.

  Unlike the other two, the new arrival wasn’t in armor, but wore a simple brown tunic over gray leggings, and had straw in his hair. He also looked about as freaked out as I felt. “You’re going to splatter all over the cliffside one of these days,” he said, before he’d even reached us. “Mark my words!”

  “Duly marked,” my fey replied. “Unfortunately, in that case, I won’t be around for you to say, ‘I told you so.’”

  “You will if you get another mount—a normal one—like everyone else!”

  “But I like this one. And I did go to a good bit of trouble stealing him.”

  “Bah!” the old fey said, and reached for the bridle. “You’d have done better to—”

  He never finished the sentence, because the gryphon clearly didn’t like anybody but its rider touching it. It tossed its great head, hard enough to drag the old fey off the ground and almost off the cliff. My fey grabbed him just in time.

  “Let me handle Azurr?” he suggested, setting the old fey back on his feet.

  “You’re damned right I’ll let you handle him! They’re nasty, bad-tempered, dangerous beasts, every one—”

  “Nonsense. They’re brilliant, intuitive creatures. You just have to get to know them.”

  “I don’t want to get to know him! Put him in the stables with the proper mounts, and let’s hope he doesn’t eat one, this time!”

  “Perhaps you should try feeding him on time,” the rider said carelessly, and led his mount to a stable in a cave just ahead, where a bunch of horses started whinnying and looking seriously unhappy as soon as we came in.

  “Azurr,” the old fey grumbled, moving to quiet several stallions. “I assume you were being sarcastic with that name? He never listens to anyone!”

  “He listens to me,” my fey stopped to pet the great neck, marveling as always that he could tell where feathers met fur, even with his gauntlet on. “Most of the time.”

  “Well, tell him to stop disturbing them! They’ll be in a panic soon!”

  “War horses should be stouter of heart. Perhaps you should train them better?”

  The old man grumbled something just out of hearing, and my fey looked sternly at his mount. “Be good?” he suggested, taking off the bridle and hanging the saddle over a rail.

  The gryphon ignored him with kingly aplomb, settling into a larger than usual stall with the air of one who was only staying because he felt like it.

  That was probably true, since the muscles on the great body looked like they could destroy the sturdy wooden sides without effort, but I didn’t get to see if they did. Because we were on the move again, through a series of similar stables, with the inner ones having a symmetry that natural caves never did. Like the shallow depression we turned into suddenly, and then spun about to face outward again.

  For a second, I thought that the fey was lying in wait for someone, because I couldn’t imagine why else he’d be standing in a hole, in a dark corridor, all alone. But then the stone on either side of us began pushing together, not caving in but closing in front of us, until there wasn’t even a crack anymore. It blocked out what little light the corridor had, leaving us entombed in darkness.

  And solid rock.

  I felt my pulse start to pound as I stared around at nothing, with my breath coming faster in my throat. The rock had closed up all of a couple inches away from our face, to the point that it felt like being sealed in a coffin—or a stone sarcophagus, ready to wait out the ages until some poor archeologist got the fright of his life. I was way ahead of him there, desperately wanting to push against the wall, to force it open, to beat and bang on the cold, unfeeling surface—anything to get out! But the fey just stood there.

  And before I could give in completely to fear, the floor jerked under our feet and we started to—

  Well, I’ll be damned, I thought, staring around some more, because a little ambient light had just come on, from where I wasn’t sure. But it allowed me to see that the little capsule or shield or protected area—whatever we were in—was moving quickly upwards, through solid stone. But it wasn’t carving a path; there were no sparks or flying shards here. Instead, I watched the rock slide around us like a river, parting to let us through and then closing back after us again.

  I remembered
Pritkin doing something similar, although with great effort, in medieval Wales. We’d been captured and confined in a room surrounded by disgruntled fey. We’d had zero chance of reaching the door, even when a bevy of pretty girls brought dinner to everyone, creating a small distraction.

  Until the wall behind us, composed of huge old stones, had liquified and let us through.

  It wasn’t a great memory to have right now, because Pritkin’s ability with earth magic was pretty minimal, which had resulted in us getting stuck halfway. I vividly remembered the feeling of claustrophobia, of being entombed in stone, of running out of air and of everything getting too hot and too close while terror clawed at my throat. I’d wondered if I was going to become a permanent resident of the wall, a Cassie-shaped fossil for someone to discover, centuries later, and marvel about how I ended up there.

  But then we’d popped out the other side, with Pritkin red faced and panting, and me practically kissing the ground underneath my clutching hands.

  I’d never been so happy to see open air in my life.

  Kind of like now, when the ‘elevator’ stopped and the ‘door’ opened, and we stepped calmly out. At least, the fey did. I was having a silent hissy fit, trying to gulp in extra oxygen because that had been a really small capsule, only his body wasn’t cooperating.

  But then I looked up and forgot all about it. A huge, flat cave spread out before us, as big as a couple of football fields placed end to end, with a jagged, horizontal fissure in one side that looked out over the snowy vista beyond. The fissure spread across most of the length of the cavern, and was tall enough to serve as an exit point for the strange, pyramid-shaped craft that were lined up in rows, what had to be hundreds of them. Including one that had just zipped in and was slowly rotating in the air, while several fey jumped out.