Flame's Shadow

by Anna Eluvae

  * * *

  Gallieae watched Nemm carefully. She must have seen him, but she gave no shout of recognition. She had been in Parance the day before, assaulting the Ministry of Legends. Now she was at Castle Launtine, shortly after a large explosion had blown a hole in the side of it, leaving bedchambers open to the air and rubble down below. A fair number of the dead men at the iron gate were surely her work. Gallieae had no intention of fighting her a second time, especially not if Lexari was with her. He had fought alongside them in the Peddler's War, enough to see that they were killers. He stopped where he was, waiting to see what was going to happen next. If she dropped down to him, he would have to leave his horse behind. He was fairly certain that with the wind at his back, he would be able to outrun her.

  When she propped a body up on the balcony, Gallieae dismounted. The form was vaguely recognizable as the boy he'd chased the day before. His head lolled to the side; he was limp. Nemm was speaking to him, saying something indistinct even with Gallieae's efforts to still the wind. When she kicked the boy off the balcony, she gave a brief glance toward Gallieae, watching him for an almost imperceptible second. The boy fell. Gallieae raced for him.

  His control of the domain of air extended three feet from his body. He ran at a sprint, working the air around him, thinning the air in front of him and pushing a wind at his back. When he reached the rough stone a hundred feet below Castle Launtine, he launched himself upward, using the wind to propel him higher. At the apex of he pushed himself toward the stone with a gust of air, then kicked off from it with a second jump. His timing wasn't quite right, but he managed to snag the boy's limp arm in mid-air. They were both falling. Gallieae pulled the boy in closer, generating the most powerful upward wind he could all the while. They still landed on the ground with a hard thud, but nothing an illustrati couldn't shrug off.

  Gallieae sat up and shook his head. He hadn't done a stunt like that in — well, not since the day before, when he'd taken a running leap from the twenty-fifth floor of the Ministry of Legends. Before that, it had been years. He looked over at the boy and noticed blood on his stomach. A brief check showed that the wounds were only superficial. That only raised more questions.

  "Are you alright?" asked Gallieae. "I get the sense that you and I have things to talk about."

  "Mmmmmrnn," said the boy.

  Gallieae looked closer. He had worried for a moment that the boy was paralyzed, or that he'd been made insensate through a hit on the head, but the eyes were alert and the head at least was moving. When he saw the muscles beneath the skin moving without changing the position of the arms, Gallieae felt a slight sickness in his stomach. That could only be Wenaru's work.

  "Can you speak at all?" asked Gallieae. "Or was that taken from you as well?"

  "Ehh hhoo," said the boy.

  "Come on then," said Gallieae. He got to his feet and brushed the dust from his robes. "Nemm had you at her mercy and chose to give you a superficial wound. It's a message I'll need to decipher." He picked the boy's limp body up from the ground, making sure to cradle the head like he would a child. Riding two to a horse wasn't ideal, especially not with one of them unable to respond to the horse, but Gallieae had taken the sick and injured off the battlefield enough time that he had some practice. It wouldn't be fast, but he hoped that he didn't need to be. It was the work of a few minutes to get the boy situated. Gallieae sat behind him, with his arms folded around the boy's waist. Throughout this, Gallieae glanced up at the balcony where Nemm had been, but there was nothing to see there.

  "Eh weh eh geh," said the boy. His jaw moved, but his tongue was unsteady in his mouth in the same way that head seemed to not want to stay upright upon his neck.

  "I can't understand you," said Gallieae. "We'll get you to someone who can fix you. I'm not sure that I owe Nemm that much, if this is indeed what she intended, but it seems as though the Iron Kingdom is no longer the safe place I had imagined it to be."

  Dravus had never imagined he would understand the expression "impotent rage" so well as he now did. His tongue could move, but only slightly. He could shape his lips and move his eyes. Nothing else was working. He sat on the horse, held in place by strong hands, not knowing where they were going. He had lost more power than most people could dream of ever having. Everywhere he saw a shadow he was reminded of that; when he closed his eyes, the darkness didn't help him forget. It would have been a travesty if he had been reduced down to the level of a mortal man, but it was far worse than that. Perhaps some day Dravus would run again, but for now he was trapped within his own body, unable to speak or move of his own volition. He briefly wished that Nemm had killed him until thinking better of it. He now wished that he had fled on his own, racing away before he could face the moment of truth. Or better, that he had thrown his lot in with Faye from the start and slit Lexari's throat in the middle of the night when he was supposed to be keeping watch. A part of him shied away from the imagined violence, but the anger was bubbling up in him with nowhere to go. It might have been easier to accept what had happened to him if so much of it hadn't been his fault.

  * * *

  Gallieae brought them to a stop for a midday lunch. Dravus didn't recognize the roads they were traveling down, but he was certain that they weren't returning to Parance. While the horse grazed at a nearby pasture, Gallieae propped Dravus up on a rock and trickled water into Dravus's mouth from a water skin.

  "I didn't plan on having to leave the Iron Kingdom today," said Gallieae. "Long habit taught me to bring more food than I expected to need, which I hope you're grateful for." He smiled slightly. "Now, I have a few questions for you."

  "Hrrr ah," said Dravus. His tongue could only make marginal movement, not enough to speak any words.

  "I'll restrict it to yes and no," said Gallieae. "You can manage at least that, can't you?"

  "Ehh," said Dravus. It came out as a low moan.

  Gallieae asked his questions quickly, keeping them simple. Some of it was merely to confirm what he'd already said he suspected. "Ehh," it was Wenaru who had left Dravus in such a state. "Ohhh," Dravus had no access to the domain of shadow. "Ehh," the Iron King was dead. Dravus gave an emphatic "ehh" when Gallieae asked whether Lexari had given Wenaru his orders. Dravus was frustrated by the process; there was so much more that he wanted to say, things that needed explanation, not just about the depth of the betrayal he'd suffered but the artifact that Lexari had used and the conspiracy that Lothaire had headed.

  Gallieae checked Dravus's stomach, where Nemm had left her wounds. If Gallieae was right, it was an odd way of saying that she didn't want to kill him. He'd seen no tenderness in her eyes when she stabbed him. He tried to think of why she might have wanted to save him. He wondered whether she actually cared, or if this was only part of some plot. Perhaps she was hoping that he could be fixed, made whole again and turned useful. Whatever closeness there had been between them was obviously destroyed now. Dravus didn't know whether they'd ever see each other again.

  "Huhur," said Dravus. He didn't know what he was trying to express. Making noises with his mouth was only a way of giving form to his emotions. He would have screamed at the world, if he thought he could manage it.

  "Not the best of times for you," said Gallieae. "Not the best of times for the Iron Kingdom either, if I have my guess."

  "Huhhh," said Dravus.

  "Lexari is at the heart of it," said Gallieae. He dug into his pack and pulled out some meat and cheese, which he ate as he spoke. "I'm fairly certain of that. Nemm handed you to me, a bit ungently, but I don't imagine that she had many options. I could have watched you fall to your death. She had to have known that what she was doing was desperate. If I hadn't been there, do you think she would have leaped with you? But with no way to cushion the fall, you might not have survived. I've heard of that happening before. An illustrati caught a man falling from fifty feet, but his neck still snapped on impact." Gallieae sighed. "Where was I?"

  Dravus looked at the old man. "E
hh," he said.

  "Right," nodded Gallieae. "Lexari is at the center of it. Nemm was acting under some constraints. Of the rest of the members of your merry band, that leaves Wenaru. He's always been Lexari's lapdog, though I mean no offense by it. I had always wondered whether Lexari would take a turn towards villain. It happens often, among illustrati of particularly high standing. Waning glory pushes men towards unsavory acts. They know gossip and scandal can sustain them where good deeds did not." He furrowed his eyebrows. "Yet I don't think that's the case for Lexari. There were always rumors about him, but that must be expected whenever there is someone widely renowned. When he began to call Wenaru friend, those rumors redoubled. You're young enough that perhaps you never knew it to be any different. I'll be interested to see what conversation we might have when we get you fixed?"

  "Eh uhr uh huuh?" asked Dravus. He hoped the inflection would get his point across.

  Gallieae gave a soft smile. "You and I are going to pay a visit to the Bone Warden."

  * * *

  What was Wenaru without Lexari?

  He was asking himself that question again. Ropes of muscle coiled around within his arms, in a way that wasn't natural to any creature that he'd ever touched. There were things that nature had never dreamed of. The construct beneath his collarbone was more conventional, as these things went, modeled on the long tongue of a frog and anchored to the bone so that a quick, hard twitch would send the muscle unrolling itself at a high speed, cracking forward like a whip. It was woefully imperfect, based on a design he'd thought up years ago but never tested, but it was enough to get the job done. Wenaru had looked at proper tentacles before, those which could provide for independent movement without skeletal support. They were far more complicated though; muscles could only contract or relax, which meant that different muscle groups would have to work against each other. Because he couldn't create new nerves from whole cloth, Wenaru would have to rely entirely on his domain sense in order to control the tentacles and take sensory information from them. Worse, domain intuition was failing him; tentacles were instinctual to a squid but these new creations required thought. What he'd ended up making was laughably simple, even if it had proven effective. Given time, he could improve them significantly.

  Wenaru didn't know if he wanted to become a better fighter.

  He had watched dispassionately as Nemm stabbed Dravus in the stomach and kicked him in the chest. It was a curiously cruel way to kill the boy. A slit across the throat with one of those startlingly sharp glass daggers would have been cleaner. The loss of blood would have left Dravus unconscious almost before he hit the ground. The stomach though, that was a longer, lingering death, even if she'd cut through to the renal artery. Wenaru took it for symbolic; he had little doubt that Nemm didn't want Dravus to die, but when Nemm did unpleasant things she liked to make them as unpleasant as possible. She was a sow wallowing in the muck, immersing herself in it because that might allow her to believe that she was there by her own choice.

  Lothaire had said that Nemm was going to kill him. He had little doubt that this was true. They had never quite gotten along. If Lexari weren't there as a common bond, they might have amicably parted ways many years ago. Unfortunately, the fact that they were constantly in each other's presence had turned what was perhaps a mild dislike into a lasting undercurrent of enmity. If Lothaire was telling the truth, then Nemm was going to be a problem.

  Wenaru wondered whether Lexari had figured that out yet, or whether some action would need to be taken on his behalf.

  Chapter 20

  Nemm should have just watched. She had turned away before knowing whether Gallieae would act, before knowing whether Dravus would be saved. She had even said a prayer. It was nothing more than an ill-timed bout of maudlin sentimentality. She would learn what had happened later anyway, once she went looking for his corpse. It would have been better to watch, to remove any doubt and allow her to focus on other things. She tried to take her mind off of Dravus's unknown fate and watch Lexari instead.

  Lexari intended to keep Castle Launtine. Their assault had driven all of the staff away, not to mention the dozen illustrati they'd killed and the score of guards they'd put to the sword. The central question was now who had the legitimate right to rule the Iron Kingdom. The Ministries were located in Parance, but power had always been held by the Iron King himself at Castle Launtine. That had been true for as long as most people had been alive. Keeping the castle meant keeping a claim on legitimacy. To do that effectively meant calling back the common people who had been driven away.

  "It puts us at risk," said Nemm. "We'll have to be wary of assassins in the night for as long as we stay here. We have no money to pay guards. Even if we had the money to pay guards, we would have no way to ensure that they were loyal to us."

  "We'll plunder the Iron King's personal vault," said Lexari. "If I recall correctly, it was some distance from the powder room and should be intact."

  "On whose authority?" asked Nemm. "It might be one thing if we were backing a particular bastard for the Iron King's throne. We're free agents, working on behalf of the idea that there should be a king or queen instead of whatever they were trying to put in his place." She gestured to Lothaire's unmoving body. He was unconscious and drooling slightly, with the Harbinger ring still on his finger.

  "We already assaulted this castle in the name of the divine right of rule," said Lexari. "Taking money is nothing in comparison to that."

  "Then who are we handing power to?" asked Nemm.

  "The rightful ruler," said Lexari. "There are papers to look through here; I believe that the Iron King kept careful track of his bastards. It is well possible that if this conspiracy did not destroy the evidence entirely, we might find concrete evidence of who is meant to sit the throne."

  "Do you understand we're up against the Ministry of Legends?" asked Nemm. "We need to get the story straight. We need to be backing a real, actual person instead of a nebulous principle. We need it today, tomorrow at the latest, because whoever gets moving first has the advantage. I'm sure our names are already smeared thanks to the attack at the Ministry."

  "I will look through the papers then," said Lexari. "Begin thinking about what we might tell the bards."

  It was going to be more complicated than that, of course. Nemm made her way back to the Iron King's bed chambers, both to give herself time to think and so that she could be away from Lexari for a while. Of the two of them, Lexari was better at framing his actions; it was something that he did without any seeming thought, twisting around what had happened so that it was presented in the best possible light. It was one of the reasons that he was revered the world around as a hero. He also acted heroically, Nemm had never denied that, but it was his gift for presentation that had put him so far ahead of everyone else. Someone — one of Nemm's early lovers, whose bed she'd shared when she'd first come aboard the Zenith — had called it a pathology of presentation. The phrasing had always stuck with her. The concept of a story was like a sickness to the man.

  Presentation wouldn't be enough. They would need to build up lies, both about what they had done and what had happened. They needed to be acting on the authority of their chosen heir from the moment that they were assaulted in the Ministry of Legends, not after the fact. It needed to be a story which would survive scrutiny.

  Nemm got to work, happy to have something to occupy her.

  * * *

  The sound of the chimes was slowly driving Nemm mad. The artifact had two tones, one it gave off when a link was taken and a second it gave when the link was given. The first was slightly lower than the second. When they'd begun the day, Nemm had taken some amusement from trying to figure out which notes they were hitting. She'd had music lessons as part of her extensive tutoring, as music was the sort of thing that any noblewoman was supposed to have a passing interest in, if not a complete mastery. Nemm had a pleasant singing voice that she rarely used. She hummed along with the artifact as it made its tone, tr
ying to narrow down the exact pitch. After she was satisfied with that, the sounds of the artifact continued on, wearing at her nerves.

  They'd pulled in the commoners from the village that sat below Castle Launtine. Many of them had worked at the castle prior to the change in ownership and now wished to return; all claimed ignorance of what had been going on. Lexari had flown down into the village and gave a rousing speech, proclaiming that the Iron King had died some weeks ago and that the Sunhawk had personally worked against a cabal of people intent on usurping the royal line. All that was true enough. Nemm had expected that the response would be anemic, even with the announcement of increased pay, but the people had come all the same.