Flame's Shadow

by Anna Eluvae

  Dravus was light-headed, with wandering thoughts that seemed to run themselves in circles. It wasn't quite a dream and not quite a hallucination, though none of it made much sense. In the stories, people always had portentous dreams that revealed something about their hopes and fears, but Dravus only saw mice chasing after cheese and a fat man belching smoke from the top of his head. He turned to remark on this to Lexari, but realized that he'd gone somewhere. Nemm had gotten up from her chair and was banging against the door again, even though she was using up their precious remaining air.

  There was a hissing sound from the door which caused Dravus to scramble towards it. Nemm had her face stuck near a small, widening hole, trying to suck in more air as it came through. Dravus saw a hand reaching through the hole with calloused fingers, which made no sense until he saw that there was a man behind that hand. He had a knife of light pressed against his neck, held by a hand with missing fingers which had been replaced by constructs of light. They illuminated a face that was pale and splattered with blood. Behind him, Lexari was preternaturally calm.

  "Continue," said Lexari's voice.

  "I feel dizzy," said the man, an illustrati of iron by the way the metal peeled back at his touch.

  "Wenaru will heal you," said Lexari.

  Dravus turned back to look at the chairs. Wenaru hadn't moved at the sound of air. His eyes were still closed. Dravus moved forward to pick him and throw him over his shoulder. He moved past Lexari as soon as the opening was wide enough to permit him to, and laid Wenaru out in the hallway, where the air wasn't fouled. His heart was still beating, but it was faint.

  "Is it clear out there?" asked Nemm.

  "I have no idea," said Lexari. "I've killed too many to have great confidence in our ability to make an easy exit." He looked past Nemm to where the minister was sitting with his head lolled to one side. "They will not take this lightly."

  Dravus slapped Wenaru on the face, just hard enough that he hoped to provoke a response. Wenaru opened one bleary eye, then closed it again. It was a good sign for his well-being.

  "They won't take it lightly?" asked Nemm. "What they've done is an act of war, nothing less." Her breathing had settled down and the color had returned to her face. Both glass daggers were long and pointed, now almost short swords. She had them gripped so tightly that her knuckles were white. "If war is what they want, war is what they will have."

  Chapter 15

  The one-armed man staggered toward Wenaru and laid his hand upon the physician. His face was pale; blood dripped from the stump where his arm had once been.

  "Please," he whispered.

  Wenaru sat up slowly and gave the man a careless touch. The bleeding stopped at once as the meat around his shoulder folded in on itself. The grinding sound of bone touching bone set Dravus's teeth on edge. The man sagged to the floor with a haggard expression and began to cry.

  "It's too quiet," murmured Nemm. She was standing at the end of the short corridor that separated them from the long hallway which led back to the ascending room. "Unless you were exceedingly stealthy, the alarm will have been raised."

  "I'm afraid there was much shouting," said Lexari.

  "Most of the people in this building wouldn't have been aware of what was happening," said Dravus. He helped Wenaru to his feet, barely thinking about their flesh making contact. Wenaru would be able to feel almost the entirety of Dravus's body through that connection. "They'll only know that we left death and destruction behind us." He turned to look at the minister's corpse.

  "Leave the moralizing for later," said Nemm. "What's our next move?"

  "They'll respond in full force, thinking it's an attack," said Lexari. "We must assume hostility. We leave through one of the windows."

  "How high up are we?" asked Nemm. "Three hundred feet? You're the only one with wings."

  Dravus watched the one-armed man while they argued. What was to come after they made their escape from the Ministry? It was clear that they couldn't stay in Parance for any longer than they had to. They'd have to get back to the ship as quickly as possible, trying to outrun the news of what had happened, but if anyone was aware of what had happened here, they would already be racing ahead to cut off that path. In fact, it seemed likely that if the enemy planned for them to be assassinated in Parance, the ship would have been seized upon first word of their arrival. The iron room was a trap, but it was only a small trap nested inside a larger one.

  "We won't be able to escape the kingdom with broken legs," said Dravus.

  "We aren't going to escape," said Lexari. "We're going to confront the Iron King. This story doesn't end with us running away with our tails between our legs, it ends with the ringleader put to the sword and made to answer for his crimes."

  "We're going to kill the Iron King?" asked Dravus.

  "Or whoever rules in his stead," said Nemm. "Seems sensible enough to me, all things considered. If we tried to run, they'd chase us. There would also be our enduring reputation to worry about, if the weight of the Iron Kingdom's storytelling engines was brought to bear against us."

  There were sounds from the corridor beyond where they stood. It was the thunder of footsteps. Nemm's armor had already been built up to be thick, but now it slammed down into place around her, leaving no contact with the outside world save for two vents that passed by either cheek to allow her to breathe. Lexari's armor was nearly as concealing. He held a spear of light in each hand. Dravus tried his best to thicken his armor, but he'd sparred enough to know that he would be a hindrance to the others in the tight quarters of a hallway.

  "I can't fly while carrying another," said Lexari. "But I would be able to use my wings to slow the descent for another."

  "And leave the others to be spitted?" asked Nemm. She furrowed her eyebrows.

  "I could return," said Lexari. "We would move one by one. It would be a matter of minutes."

  Nemm leaned over and looked down the long hallway. She pulled her head back and swore. "They're already in position."

  "All you'll need to do is hold the hallway," said Lexari. "I'll take Wenaru out the window then return."

  "Minutes is too long," said Nemm. "Dravus and I will fight our way down together."

  "Agreed," said Lexari. "I will return to offer what assistance I can."

  "Wait," said Nemm. "Where do we regroup?"

  Dravus heard an unfamiliar sound from down the hallway. They were hidden in their alcove; he trusted Lexari and Nemm to keep them safe, but if they were driven back into the iron room there wouldn't be any hope of escape. The sound was something like hissing. Nemm must have heard it too, since she steeled herself and faced the doorway that separated them from the longer hallway. A metal ball the size of a human head rolled into view. Nemm swept forward and kicked it with her glass boot hard enough to shatter the glass, sending it flying back down the hallway to where it had come from. The explosion happened a half second later.

  The noise came first, followed quickly by a rush of air. The wall between them and the grenade — a term Dravus was only passingly familiar with, but that must have been what it was — burst outward, with small bits of wood filling the air. Dravus's teeth were rattled and everything sounded as though he was underwater. Nemm's armor was shot through with cracks. Her left leg, visible within its shattered glass casing, was red with blood.

  "Move!" shouted Nemm. The word was understandable more from the shape of her mouth than the sound, which barely reached Dravus's ringing ears. She darted down the hallway, moving toward the explosion. Lexari followed, with Wenaru behind him, but they went the other direction when they got to the central hallway, towards the large window that gave the hallway its light. Dravus came after them, just in time to see Lexari hook Wenaru beneath his arms and leap from the window without ceremony. His wings could be seen unfurling for a brief moment before he dropped from sight.

  Dravus followed Nemm through the smoke, nearly tripping over blood and viscera. Lexari had already been down this corridor befo
re, when he'd fought his way out of the iron room; he must have left bodies behind. The smoke was thick enough that Dravus tried to navigate through only his domain sense, but the smoke made the shadows diffuse. He plunged forward anyhow, just in time to see Nemm slice a man in a red uniform across his throat. At his side was a sling with two more of the enormous grenades within it. Nemm moved forward without giving him a second thought, on to the next; there were no obvious illustrati among them, only men with wide-barreled pistols and sabres.

  "Dom, darkness!" called Nemm.

  Dravus deepened the shadows around them, until nothing was visible save for what his domain sense showed him. Nemm had more glass powder to allow her some proxy to sight; she sliced through the helpless men quickly and efficiently, sometimes leaving a glass dagger stuck in one of them while she pulled a spare from the shards of her armor. For his part, Dravus did not fight. The quarters were cramped and he was far less skilled than Nemm was. He could have used his sword of shadow to spear those men that still squirmed on the ground in her wake, but he didn't have the stomach for it.

  "Hold," said Nemm as she lowered a bleeding man to the floor. She was holding him up by the dagger stuck in his stomach. "No illustrati," she said into the darkness. The deep shadows made her a ghostly image to Dravus's eyes. It was harder to read her face like this. "They're preparing something further down. Or at least, that's what I would do."

  "How much further until we can jump?" asked Dravus.

  "I don't know," said Nemm. "Come on."

  * * *

  They had rode up together in the ascending room, carried by unseen ropes thanks to the might of an unseen engine. It had been nerve-wracking to Dravus, in part because of the way the room swayed and shook. This was nothing compared to their journey to the bottom of the Ministry of Legends.

  They were fighting against an unstoppable tide of men. Nemm was favoring her left leg, though she made no complaints about it. If another of those grenades went off at close range, Dravus worried that they would be seriously injured, if they didn't outright die. Most of the men in red had sabres, but a few of them had pistols as well. With her glass armor in place, covering her ears, Nemm couldn't hear the sizzling sound of a fuse running short. She took a single shot to the gut which pierced her armor entirely, but though Dravus saw blood, Nemm only stopped for long enough to kill the man and seal her armor closed again.

  The wooden stairway did not follow a straight path down. It zig-zagged back and forth, occasionally stopping abruptly, only to pick up again at the other side of the floor. This provided a number of ideal choke points for the men in uniform to put up a defense, when they weren't trying to fight a battle on the stairs (one the guards would invariably lose). In the course of descending four floors they twice encountered a grenadier, who pitched forward grenades that ranged in size from an apple to a melon. When they saw one, Dravus and Nemm would both duck behind a doorway or try to scramble out of the way. The explosions caused more damage to the building than to Dravus or Nemm, though Dravus was left with a headache.

  Nemm had killed perhaps twenty men by the time they encountered their first illustrati. He stood at the end of one of the central hallways, dressed in heavy metal armor but with his wrinkled face and gray hair exposed. Nemm whipped one of her daggers at him, but he flicked it aside with a casual gesture as it approached him. Nemm created a second dagger and ran towards him, which was all the incentive he needed to fill the hallway with an enormous wind that slowed her down. Dravus followed behind her, hoping that he could be some use for once; a few weeks of training had not yet made him an expert soldier and they hadn't once discussed how to defeat an illustrati of air. Dravus assumed that one of them had been responsible for sucking the air from the iron room they'd been trapped within.

  As the illustrati redoubled his efforts to create a wind that would knock them off balance, two men came out from a doorway behind him with rifles, which they aimed squarely at Nemm. She cursed and threw herself sideways into one of the rooms. Dravus was nearly thrown from his feet by the wind, but he followed behind Nemm all the same.

  "Darkness," she said. Dravus heightened the shadows until they were standing in pitch black. A quick look around the room showed a long table with pots of inks; this was one of the places where those paints were made. A few of them hung up on the walls, though the room was dominated by its windows. They were still hundreds of feet from the ground. Nemm stood facing doorway with her daggers drawn.

  "It's Gallieae," Nemm said, mostly to herself. "Stupid bastard took up residence in the Iron Kingdom a few years ago. He was a friend once."

  Dravus held a sword of shadow in his hand. It was still unused. The illustrati of air would be coming for them, or summoning reinforcements while they hid. Neither option was good. Nemm seemed indecisive for once, unsure of what the best course of action would be. She couldn't let herself be shot too many times, not even with her glass armor as thick as she could make it. The illustrati of air alone would be an issue. Nemm tossed more glass powder into the air — Dravus's lungs were sore from breathing the stuff — and frowned at whatever she was seeing in the darkness.

  "No darkness," she said. Dravus dropped the shadows. "We're leaving out the window."

  "It's too much of a drop," said Dravus.

  "I don't know if I can beat Gallieae, not if he's got an army behind him," said Nemm. "He's almost certainly an innocent in all this besides that. We're going to have to risk some broken bones."

  "If we break our legs we'll never leave this city alive," said Dravus. "And we don't know how to find Lexari and Wenaru."

  Nemm held a finger to her lips. Her daggers wavered slightly in her hands. She would need to see Wenaru after they got out of here, if they got out at all; her leg and her stomach both showed red behind the glass.

  A gust of wind blew through the doorway, causing papers to fly up from the long table and rip free from the walls. A figure came darting into the room, though not the one that they'd been expecting; this was a new illustrati, someone in burning red, molten armor. The air shimmered around him as he dove towards Nemm. She stepped to the side rather than try to face the heat coming from him. He landed on the floor, causing fires to light up where he touched it, then lunged at Nemm a second time. She tossed her daggers at him and ran, leaping over the long table and then crashing out of the window in a swan dive. The molten man shared a brief look at Dravus then began to advance on him, which left Dravus no real choice besides following Nemm. He sprinted towards the large windows, surrounding himself with more shadows to blunt the impact, but the wood and glass broke away easily. Dravus found himself in free fall.

  * * *

  Dravus was forming the wings of shadow even as he made his exit from the Ministry of Legends. They were small stubs when he began to properly fall. By the time that first second had passed, they were long enough that they might be doing something to slow him down. He began to spin, first a gentle turn and then fast enough that the buildings around him were something of a blur. It was something in the way he'd made the wings that was doing it, by the tug he felt at the point they attached to his armor, but he didn't dare dismiss them to try again. Dravus had no idea how quickly the ground was approaching, nor how much the small wings were helping to slow him down. He focused his efforts on trying not to be sick, which he accomplished mostly by closing his eyes tight. Papers fluttered down around him, some of them printed with the faces of illustrati.

  He landed with a jolt and realized with immense relief that his legs were still working. Dravus opened his eyes and dismissed his wings, only to find himself standing atop a building that was still a hundred feet up from the ground. He took a moment to get his bearings. Dravus was further from the Ministry of Legends than he'd thought possible, more than a block from the shattered window that he and Nemm had leapt out of. There was no sign of Nemm, though that was little surprise; she would have taken a much more direct trip to the ground. Dravus must have twirled like a leaf on the win
d, slowed but uncontrolled. There was no sign of Lexari or Wenaru either, but thanks to twisting stairways, Dravus had no idea which side of the building they'd even left from.

  A flicker of motion brought Dravus's attention back to the Ministry building, just in time to see Gallieae leaping out the same window. For a moment Dravus thought the old man was actually flying, but it was only a sort of glide. A full second passed before Dravus realized that the illustrati's glide was taking him to the rooftop that Dravus was standing on. Dravus deepened the shadows around him once again and began to run, as fast as he'd ever run before.