Child of Flame

by Kate Elliott

  “Come.” Alain looked delighted, like a child whose innocence frees it from fear.

  Adica touched Laoina’s elbow. “Come,” she said, for she saw that the Akka woman was frozen in terror. “You have seen the dragons rising. Surely these creatures are not more perilous than dragons!”

  “Only because we war against the Cursed Ones,” muttered Laoina with a resigned sigh. “This I must do as my part.” She made a complicated gesture, a sign against evil spirits, and without warning ran to the second lion woman. Adica stepped out onto the stingingly hot sand. The grass bound into her foot coverings sizzled as she ran. Jumping, she got her chest and belly over the forequarters of the third lion woman, then heaved a leg over so that she sat astride as she had once ridden on the back of the Holy One. Its rumbling purr shook through its body and her legs as it rose.

  Rocked from her precarious balance atop it, she grasped at its shoulders, groped for a handhold, and finally hooked her legs tightly around its wings and simply threw herself flat against its neck where she held on as well as she could.

  It proved, after all, easier than she had feared to stay on. Its stride was smooth and supple, although its rough fur chafed the skin of her thighs. Her pack of regalia bounced uncomfortably on her back, striking the same spot along her spine over and over, but she dared not let go with one hand even for an instant to adjust it.

  The sun’s light hammered her. They came up over the hill, and she saw the stone circle below them just as a wave of dizziness swept her. The air seemed to boil and the sands to heave and shake. Sparks spit from within the loom. Without warning, arrows hissed out from the stones. Laoina shouted out in pain. Adica’s sphinx threw her head back, crying out, but no sound came from her open mouth. Her hind legs bunched under her as she readied to leap, all coiled power and fierce anticipation.

  But the lion woman on whom Alain rode veered away at the last moment as a second arrow flight showered out of the stones.

  “Cursed Ones’.” cried Laoina.

  Figures with the bodies of men and the faces of animals lurked behind the stones. The glare of the sun painted their feathered cloaks bright.

  Her steed lurched, and Adica barely caught a leg around a wing as she slipped, dragging herself back up. If she fell now, she would be dead. The trilling war cry of the Cursed Ones rose from the stones. A dozen of them bolted out from the shelter of the stones. The sphinxes turned tail and raced away into the desert. Adica was too busy holding on even to call a spell of distraction.

  The cries of the Cursed Ones receded in the distance. Faintly, Adica heard the blatting of a ram’s horn, sharp and urgent. The sound faded as the sphinxes crested a hill and descended onto a plain so flat and devoid of vegetation that it looked as though fire had scoured it clean. Her head pounded mercilessly. A wind had come blasting off the sun, and sweat streamed down her back until her thighs became slick with it. Her skin rubbed raw against the sphinx’s coarse fur coat as they ran on, and on, and on, endlessly on until she shut her eyes, hoping for respite, praying for water.

  The Cursed Ones had learned the secret of the looms. All of humankind was doomed. There was nothing they could do to stop the Cursed Ones from winning the war if they could walk the looms.

  Waves of dizziness spun her. She had a death grip on the sphinx’s fur, finding the places where it was looser along the skin. Spots danced before her eyes. The earth radiated the sun’s heat up like a mirror, battering her, and her vision faded to gray before she struggled back to consciousness. How far were they going? Where did the lion women mean to take them? Would she even manage to hold on long enough to get there?

  As if in response to Adica’s thought, the sphinx slowed to a walk together with her companions and unfurled her wings to provide a gleaming tent through which the sun’s light filtered, muted and made pale. When Adica looked at the ground, her eyes stung with the jolt of heat and light, so she shut her eyes instead and rested her head against the creature’s neck. Inside the shelter of its wings, the air flowed in cool currents around her as they went on, and on, but she could endure it now. She could hold on.

  If only they could rid themselves of the Cursed Ones, she could do anything.

  2

  ALAIN’S heart was still pounding from the unexpected attack, arrows whistling darkly out of the stone circle, the bright flash of feathered helmets. Maybe Kel was right. Maybe the Cursed Ones were simply bloodthirsty savages bent on destruction and war. He licked his lips with a parched tongue. Reflexively, he groped for the water pouch tied to his belt, but an arrow had punctured it.

  The sun slid westward. In time they came to a range of steep ridges carved into the earth as though a cat ten times the size of these had clawed scratches into the ground. The sphinxes brought them to shelter in the shadow of a cliff where the afternoon sun could not reach. A spring lay hidden among the rocks. Alain let Sorrow and Rage drink, then pulled them back before quenching his own thirst. While Alain rubbed a salve into the hounds’ paws, Adica investigated the shallow graze along Laoina’s left thigh, festering from whatever poison the Cursed Ones dipped their arrow points in. With spring water and a mash of lavender, Adica cleaned the wound. When she was done, Laoina leaned back against the rock face to rest.

  Alain crouched beside Adica, stroking her hair. Even when she acted strangely, as she sometimes did, she was a joy to watch. Like Spits-last, she was full to overflowing with vitality, such a contrast to the remembered grief that often touched her eyes that he always wanted to make her smile. She leaned against him as he settled back against the rock. They shared a hank of bread, but he dozed off with it still in his hand.

  When he woke, it was gone. Sorrow and Rage sat with their big heads on their forelegs, staring at him mournfully, hoping for more.

  Beyond the shadow of the rock face, the three sphinxes sat enigmatically in the sun, tails lashing. One had her paws crossed. Another licked a gash on her foreleg. Their gaze, on their charges, did not waver.

  “Surely mice feel like I do now, before being swallowed,” murmured Adica.

  He laughed softly, draping his arm comfortably over her shoulders. “They will not eat you.”

  Content, she settled her head against his chest and dozed off again. He sighed, well satisfied by her weight leaning against him, the symbol of her trust. Wasn’t this what mattered most in life? They would live many long years together, raise children, rig a better plough, one with a coulter and moldboard. Somehow it would all work out….

  A cough woke him. He started awake, shivering. Sunset gilded the ridgeline in rose and purple. The sky had not a breath of cloud in it. The line between earth and sky seemed as stark as though it had been drawn by a human hand wielding charcoal and paints. He was alone except for Sorrow, sitting on watch. What had coughed? He felt the prickle of an unseen gaze, not malevolent but merely curious.

  He rose gingerly. His neck ached because he had slept at an awkward angle, and his hands, knees, and calves stung horribly, red from sunburn and beginning to blister. Thirst had dried out his throat. Fortunately the hidden spring, bubbling up among the rocks, flowed boundlessly. Moss grew along the bowl of rocks that bordered the spring, and he used this as a sponge to wash his face and arms.

  “Where is Rage?” he asked Sorrow. “Find Adica.”

  The hound rose with a massive yawn and a grunt, yipped once, and padded silently away. Alain grabbed his staff and followed him. Spires of rock loomed above them, swathed in darkness. Only the eastern ridges still caught the last of the sun.

  He met Laoina coming back around the rock face. “You come, quick.” Laoina pointed to the sky. “Night come. Stars come.”

  They collected their gear before following the tracks. The cliff face gave way to a defile, descending in stair steps. Here, the air smelled of water. Hardy plants grew in the walls, finding any purchase that they could. Some had prickly skins, harsh to the touch, and others lay low along the ground, snaking through tiny crevices.

  The defil
e ended in a steep wall. Here an unknown tribe had erected a stone loom of peculiar design, constructed out of pillars instead of megaliths. Adica walked among the pillars, measuring their distance and angle, glancing frequently at the sky as twilight fell. The pillars had the sheen of granite but the feel of snakeskin frozen into stone. The upper portion of each column was carved into the torso of a woman, arms pressed flat along a scaly gray side. Fanciful stonework decorated the capitals, stonework ropes and vines that half-concealed the sly faces of smiling girls. It took Alain a moment to see that these wreaths of vines and ropes were actually carven snakes.

  A flash of gold caught his eye. He knelt at the base of one of the pillars. Sand poured over his hand as he fished out a gold necklace constructed of small squares of gold, each one impressed with the image of a winged goddess dressed in a layered skirt, attended by two lions and flanked on either side by rosettes like those that decorated the palaces of the Cursed Ones. How had it come to be lost here?

  He held the necklace up against Adica’s throat. “It looks most beautiful when worn by beauty.” The gold squares looked uncannily cold against her skin, as chill as the touch of death despite their grave among the warm sands.

  Shuddering, she pushed his hands away. “That is not mine to wear. Old magic haunts it.”

  Surprised at her vehemence, he buried it back in the sand. “I take not that thing which is not ours. Where are the lion women?”

  She rose, glancing up at the heavens. “We must walk the loom. Come.”

  Rage growled softly, standing stiffly alert at the opening of a crevasse that thrust into the rock face blocking the lowest end of the defile. A threatening scent wafted out from the crevasse. Behind them, Laoina whistled a breathy melody as sinuous as a charm. Sorrow trotted over to Rage and took up the watch.

  “Quick.” Laoina pointed toward the dogs with her spear. “We go, quick quick. Some thing comes.”

  The first stars popped into sight overhead.

  “I do not know how much time has passed,” said Adica, backing away to find a vantage point to get her bearings. “Do you see the moon? Hei, let the days not have passed too rapidly, I pray you, Fat One. Let it not be too late.”

  “What must I look for?” asked Alain, coming to stand beside her. “Teach me how to help you weave the looms.”

  “Two Fingers’ land lies west of here. So if we would travel west, I must weave west.” She studied the sky, intent and purposeful as she held her mirror poised by her chest. “The stars do not move in relation to each other. But how high or low they stand in the sky can change. See there.” She pointed to a bright curve of stars, glittering in the clear desert air. “At our village, the Serpent crawls along the hilltops. Here in the desert lands it gains invisible wings that allow it to soar. There is its red eye, that bright star. Yes, that one. Step back, now. I’ll bind the first thread—”

  Lifting her mirror, she angled the reflective face until the image of the star caught in it. She had already forgotten him as she fell into the rising and falling chant of her spell. So quickly, she pulled away from him, as though a chasm had ruptured between them. Yet how could he help but stare as she worked her magic? She looped her weaving around the stars known as the Holy Woman’s Necklace, still high in the sky and setting toward the west, and wove a gate to western lands. He had never stood so close before. He could actually hear the thrum of the threads through the soles of his feet, deep in his bones. The gate arced into being just as the hounds yelped with fear and skittered backward. Alain raised his staff as they bounded into view. Night fell.

  “Go!” cried Adica, caught in the maze of her weaving.

  A sibilant hiss echoed along the stone cliffs around them. Laoina needed no more urging: she bolted through the threshold.

  “Go!” cried Adica when Alain hesitated. “I will follow you.”

  “I won’t leave you!” he cried. The hounds raced through the gateway, vanishing through the archway, abandoning them—or scared off.

  What on Earth was dreadful enough to make his faithful hounds run off like that?

  A grinding weight scraped along rock behind him. He whirled, holding his staff ready, keeping his body between the crevasse and Adica, but all he could see was shadow. A heavy footfall shuddered the ground as one of the lion women padded past him, eerily silent.

  “Alain!”

  A hiss answered Adica’s call. A serpentine creature emerged from the crevasse, winding sideways in the manner of a snake. Except it wasn’t a snake.

  It had creamy-pale skin and a torso like that of a woman with the face of a girl newly come to womanhood, fey and curiously aloof. Her hair writhed around her head as though in a whirlpool of air, or as if her hair itself were alive, a coil of hissing serpents.

  “Alain!” The gate glimmered, threads snapping. The sphinx leaped forward to attack, and Alain heard Adica’s fading cry. He jumped back through threads sparking and hissing into a blinding sandstorm.

  Drowning in sand, he flailed wildly. He could not breathe.

  Hands grabbed him. He stumbled as they dragged him along. Bowed down by the force of the sandstorm, he tugged up a corner of his cloak to shield his face. Sand dribbled down his chin. Dry particles coated his mouth, and every time he swallowed sand scraped the moist flesh of his throat until he thought his throat was on fire.

  They stumbled over rough ground for an eternity as sand battered them, scouring his exposed skin. Certainly he could see absolutely nothing. All at once he felt a massive wall looming before him. A strong grip tugged him sideways, and he fell forward down a smooth slope and cracked his knees on stone. Far away up the tunnel, wind screamed. He spit and coughed and finally vomited a little, so choked with sand that he shook helplessly. His eyes stung with sand, and sand clogged his ears. His hair shed gritty particles with each shudder.

  Where was Adica? Had she escaped the storm? He struggled to his feet just as a man spoke to him in a language he did not know. He spoke again in the tongue of the White Deer people, with an accent even stranger than that of Laoina but a rather better grasp of the niceties of the language.

  “Rise, stranger. Walk forward, if it pleases you. A place we have for you to bathe yourself.”

  Alain squinted through sand-scoured eyes. A swarthy man with a proud face and an aquiline nose examined him. Was that compassion quirking up his mouth? With an elegant gesture, he indicated a tunnel lit by oil burning in a ceramic bowl. Alain glanced back the way he had come. Three robed figures hunkered down at the entrance, armed with spears. They stared out into the storm, a void of wind and earth and spirits howling in the air. What they feared beyond the storm itself he did not want to consider, not after he’d seen the face of that snake woman.

  He had never expected to see so many strange things, like visions drawn out of the distant past. The forest around Lavas Castle boasted a herd of aurochs and the occasional chance-met unicorn, swiftly seen and as swiftly gone, and there were always wolves, but the great predators that plagued humankind in the old legends, the swamp-born guivres, the dragons of the north, the griffins that flew in the grasslands, did not wander the northern forests and in truth were scarcely ever seen and commonly believed to be nothing more than stories made up to scare children.

  Maybe the three men were only guarding against their enemies, the Cursed Ones. It just seemed impossible that anyone could navigate through such a storm.

  “Where is the Hallowed One?”

  “She came before you, before the storm hit. Come with me.”

  “I must see that she is safe.”

  The guide’s glance was honed like a weapon, cutting and sharp. “This to me she says you will ask. She already goes to Two Fingers. I shall show this to you, from her, to mark she is safe.” He opened a hand to display one of Adica’s copper bracelets. “The dogs also came safely to our halls. Now, we go.” He turned and walked away down the tunnel.

  Ceramic bowls had been placed just far enough apart along the tunnel that the last
glow of light from one faded into the first share of light from the next as they walked. In this way, they never quite walked in darkness and yet only at intervals in anything resembling brightness. The rock fastness smelled faintly of anise. Alain shed sand at every step. Probably he would never be rid of it all.

  The tunnel emptied onto a large chamber fitted with tents of animal skins stretched over taut ropes. The chamber lay empty. A goldworker had been interrupted in the midst of her task: her tools lay spread out on a flat rock next to a necklace of surpassing fineness, a pectoral formed out of faience and shaped into two falcons, facing each other. Two looms sat unattended; one of the weavings, almost finished, boasted alternating stripes of gold, blue, black, and red. A leather worker had left half-cut work draped over a stool. A child’s wheeled cart lay discarded on the ground; a wheel had fallen off, and the toy cart listed to one side.

  His guide waited patiently while Alain stared about the chamber, but at last the man indicated the mouth of a smaller tunnel. “If it pleases you.”

  This second tunnel, shorter and better lit, opened into a circular chamber divided by a curtain. The guide drew the curtain aside and gestured toward a pool. He wasn’t one bit shy. He watched with interest as Alain stripped, tested the waters, and found them gloriously warm. With a sigh, Alain ducked his head completely under. Sand swirled up all around him before pouring away in a current that led out under the rock.

  “You are the Hallowed One’s husband,” said the man as he handed a coarse sponge to Alain. “Are you not afraid of her fate eating you?”

  “I am not afraid. I will protect her.”

  The man had a complexion as dark as Liath’s, and bold, expressive eyebrows, raised now in an attitude of skepticism. “Fate is already woven. When the Shaman’s Headdress crowns the heavens, then the seven will weave. No thing can stop what befalls them then.” He touched a finger to his own lips as if to seal himself to silence. “That we may not speak of. The Cursed Ones hear all things.”