Memories of Ash (The Sunbolt Chronicles Book 2)

by Intisar Khanani

  My first concern, however, is the mage following me. I don’t want to be standing here if he steps through the portal.

  The main entry to this inner courtyard has been made impassable by the collapse of the buildings that must have once towered over it — but there’s one other option. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I stumble toward a vaguely door-shaped hole in the wall behind the portal.

  Halfway across the open ground, a ripple of magic slips past me, faint but unmistakable.

  I turn in time to see the mage stagger into sight. He bends over, hands clasping his knees, eyes squeezed shut. My eyes catch on his boots, barely visible past the fall of his cloak — deep brown, polished to a shine, with a curving symmetrical design cut from light blue leather and sewn over the ankle. Rich boots for a wealthy man.

  He gasps, shakes his head. He’ll recover enough to search for me any moment now. I’m too close to use a smoker effectively, and anyway he could easily disperse it with a wind. The rubble makes moving silently impossible. I’ll have to shield myself and try to talk my way out of trouble. Keeping my gaze on the mage, I reach out with my senses to gather magic to myself.

  My breath stutters in my lungs. There’s nothing there.

  I cast about blindly, closing my eyes as if I might sense magic more easily that way. I focus on the energy that should be pulsing through this land, through the very stone around me, through the scorching air.

  Nothing.

  With a quiet scrape, jarring in the overwhelming silence, the mage takes a step forward and swivels, surveying what’s visible of the courtyard. I swallow hard, eyes wide. He still has weapons he can use — the sword at his side, whatever martial training he’s had. I have no time to pull out my string of wards and connect them, and besides, they’d only trap me here. My best weapon is my voice.

  “Peace,” I croak.

  His focus whips to me. He lifts a hand, fingers splayed.

  “Peace,” I cry, terrified suddenly that he’ll find power where I found none. But then his features go slack with shock.

  My breath comes out shaky with relief. “There’s no magic here.”

  “What is this place?” His voice is sharp, jagged.

  I shrug, grateful that it’s only half as painful as I’d expected. “Last left turn before Fidanya.”

  “What?”

  There’s really no good way to explain this, but I want to make this man my ally, at least for now. So I keep talking. “I don’t really know. What place has no magic? And why would there be a portal here?”

  “You used a portal without knowing where you were going?” He squints at me, studying my features. He clearly thinks I’m a complete idiot.

  “I changed my mind halfway through,” I correct him. He can’t possibly think less of me.

  “You’re a child.”

  “Journeyman.”

  “What in all the hells were you doing using the portal? And why didn’t you ask permission?”

  “Since when are the portals regulated against mages? You weren’t supposed to be there, and I didn’t want to deal with you. I’m trying to get home to my mother.” Almost true. Stormwind has been both mentor and friend, the closest thing to a mother I can remember. And my own mother could very well be in Fidanya as well.

  The mage snorts. “She lives here?” His voice is heavy with contempt.

  “No. I’m only here because you chased me.”

  “You’re a fool.” That’s really not much of an improvement over being called a child.

  “We need to find a way out.” The words taste familiar. How many times did I use them in the life I cannot remember? Did I often get into difficult situations? “Whatever this place is, I don’t want to spend the night here. Without magic, the portal is no good to us. So…. Peace?”

  He nods stiffly. “For now. But I want answers. Soon.”

  I shrug, bob my head. After all, “soon” can have more than a few interpretations. “There’s a door here,” I say, gesturing at the hole in the wall behind me. He starts toward me. I wait until he’s caught up. I don’t dare turn my back on him. He casts a dark look at me, but remains silent as we walk side by side to the opening. The hall beyond it is dark, lit at irregular intervals by what must be more doorways, some brighter than others. The far end shimmers: an exit to the outside.

  I step over the threshold and send an apprehensive glance in each direction, finding only the same uneven gloom. The mage comes lifts his hand and light blooms around us, the glowstone he holds throwing into sharp relief shards of tiles and empty doorways.

  “Is that wise?” I ask. Ahead of us, there’s a bundle lying on the floor, sharp-edged but too far away to see clearly.

  “Wise?” the mage says, drawing out the word.

  I wave vaguely. “The glowstone. In a magically dead land? It might draw attention.”

  “At least then we would have answers.”

  I bite back my retort. Arguing with him will only slow us down — and the glowstone will make it easier to navigate these hallways.

  I start forward, my eyes drawn to the thing on the ground. I can’t quite make it out. Something pokes out from the bulk of it, reaching across the floor like an errant branch, or dried twigs.

  Filled with foreboding, I move closer, straining to identify the thing in the light of the glowstone. When I do, my throat closes up. The shape stretched out before me is nothing more than papery skin curled over brittle bones — a mummified corpse preserved by the endless heat, untouched by nature, its clothing long since dissolved away. Its bones protrude obscenely, each rib tracing a line around its hollow chest, the skin between the pelvic and hip bones so thin that it seems translucent, as if the light were shining through parchment.

  My stomach tightens into a ball, heavy as lead. The skull bears no expression, dull teeth showing through leathery lips, the eye sockets vacant. But that hand, outstretched…. A plea. Or a single, hopeless attempt to escape death.

  Beside me, the mage breathes a curse.

  I retreat slowly, as if walking through water, gasping for air that’s too dense to breathe. I stumble back to the doorway we just passed, the room dim within. I don’t enter, but peer through the opening — and there amidst a scattering of debris lit by the unobstructed windows, I spot two more desiccated bodies, their arms entwined in an embrace that suggests love and fear and pain and desperation.

  I back away from the door, my eyes roving up and down the hallway. How many rooms are there? And how many—

  “They’re all dead.” The mage stands beside the first corpse, studying it with an eerie calm.

  “I guessed,” I say, hating the waver in my voice. The reality of a fortress — or palace or whatever — filled with skeletons has my body trembling, even as my mind tells me that the dead can harm no one.

  “What else have you guessed?”

  I run the details through my mind, trying to put the pieces together. A place without magic, a place where the people are extinct and the life has been sucked out of the earth itself…. “These are the Burnt Lands.”

  “They are. And you brought us here.” The glowstone transforms him into a nightmare of gray and black and silver, fury radiating from his frame as he stands over the corpse.

  I make myself meet his gaze steadily. “We need to get out of this building.”

  He glares at me a moment longer, then turns and steps past the corpse, striding toward the end of the hall. I follow, wrapping my arms across my chest to clutch the straps of my pack. I hold my breath as I step past the body, irrationally terrified of accidentally touching it.

  The Burnt Lands. Every apprentice — every child, really, regardless of whether or not they have magical talent — knows about the Great Burning. Four hundred years ago, the mages of the Eleven Kingdoms divided into factions, pitting themselves against each other in a bid for power and wealth. They worked enchantments that unleashed catastrophes over the land, draining whole regions of magic in order to rain fire upon their enem
ies, even forcing the ground to sink in upon itself, swallowing whole cities. The Great Burning ended with a conflagration of spells and the annihilation of two entire factions of mages.

  Not long thereafter, the High Council of Mages was founded to regulate magic and mages in the hopes of preventing such a war from ever happening again. The Burnt Lands are what remain of the great, abandoned regions where the magic was drained, making them barren and unlivable.

  The end of the hall opens to what must have once been a wide and fertile garden. The plot is terraced in long low steps with stone paths meandering over the exposed earth or leading down to the next terrace. But the earth itself is desolate. Deep cracks snake across the dirt, some nearly as wide across as my hand. No hint of trees, no brush or shrub. Not even a thorn bush.

  A boundary wall encloses both gardens and building. It rises three or four times my height and is as wide as my arm is long, but one section has crumbled to pieces. A wall like this one doesn’t crumble of its own accord; something must have knocked it down. Hopefully whatever it was is long gone, as dead as the people left behind here.

  The mage starts toward the broken section of wall. I follow, grateful for his silence. But as we reach the edge of the gardens and step down to traverse what might have once been a road, he asks, “Who’s your master?”

  “We have greater concerns right now,” I say. I have no intention of telling him anything about myself.

  “Yes, we do. After what you did, traveling between portals and bringing us here, you deserve to have your magic revoked.”

  His words make me shudder away from him. “That’s absurd,” I say roughly. “I put no one’s life in danger but my own.”

  “I would never have—”

  “There was no reason for you to come after me. The portal is never guarded, and you had no authorization from the Council to be there. You were there to cause trouble. Can you really fault me for wanting to avoid you?”

  His hand whips out, closing around my arm with viselike strength. “Don’t you dare lecture me, girl. You didn’t ask for passage. You’re lucky I didn’t kill you outright.”

  I stand stock-still, outrage flaming in my chest until my breath tastes of smoke. This man, this mage, is one of Blackflame’s associates. He was in Sonapur to keep the portal closed until his friends had raided Stormwind’s valley. He is not my ally. He will never be my ally.

  “We need to move.” My voice is cold and ugly and almost unrecognizable. “We can discuss the rest of this if we get out of here alive.” Before he can argue, I jerk my head at the break in the wall. “I see magefire.”

  He turns toward the wall, then drops my arm to stride forward. I follow, massaging my bicep, thankful to be walking behind him.

  He climbs up onto the tumbled wreckage of the wall, staring out.

  From here, the land drops away steeply. The late morning sunlight illuminates the roofs of a great city spread out below us — vast, multi-layered, and completely still. Just past the last of the buildings, a single orb hangs in the air emitting a flickering blue-green light.

  As I glance toward the mage, I catch sight of a dark spot moving far out in the distance: a bird. I can’t tell if it flies beyond the magefire or above the city, but I’m absurdly grateful to see some sign of life.

  The mage clambers over the remaining stones. Dread curls in my stomach as I watch him descend the barren slope toward the silent city. But there’s no other place to aim for, and I want to escape this land as fast as I can.

  I follow after him warily, the dead earth sliding beneath my feet.

  We weave past buildings that rise two and three stories high until we reach a wide avenue paved with flat yellow stones, pockmarked with age and scoured by the wind. In a few places the pavers appear to have been pressed down, the surrounding stones riding up at angles, as if some great weight had been dragged along them. The mage walks to the center of the road, his boots tapping softly as he casts up and down its length.

  This must have been a major thoroughfare once. Now the buildings that line it gape at us with dark windows. My skin crawls as I stare at the silent structures. Are the people here dead as well, or did they manage to flee this place? And where’s all the trash? The broken wagons, whatever might have been abandoned in the wake of an exodus or sudden extinction? People don’t — can’t — take everything with them when they run. I left Stormwind’s home full of clothes and dishes and food, left chickens and goats to fend for themselves. But there’s no trace of anything here. Even the entrances stand empty: no doors remain, no shutters to close up the windows, nothing.

  No one takes their doors with them.

  The mage continues down the avenue, ignoring me. My internal compass tells me we’re heading roughly toward the magefire. We pass building after building, all of them run down and falling apart, their entries yawning open like hungry mouths. Puffs of dust rise around my boots with each step. Nothing else disturbs the earth, no tracks of wild beasts or birds. The emptiness of the land presses against me like a sheet wrapped a little too snug, making it hard to breathe the magic-less air.

  Something scrapes against stone.

  The mage’s head whips around as he searches for the sound. I stand still, straining to make out any sign of movement. The noise comes again, a heavy scraping somewhere out in the city. The pebbles on the road rattle softly.

  “Run,” I say, breaking into a jog.

  The mage glances uncertainly up and down the road as I reach him. Everything lies quiet.

  “Run,” I repeat, keeping my voice low. “We really don’t want to know what that is.”

  The pebbles rattle again, the vibrations traveling up our legs. That decides him. He races ahead, his boots thundering on the stone underfoot.

  That’s not the way to escape a pursuer. I may not recall running from anyone or anything quite like this before, but it’s simple and clear: move quietly UNTIL you’re found out. But I don’t dare shout to the mage to slow down, step lightly — my voice might only hasten whatever chases us.

  Being left behind suddenly seems as dangerous as being loud. I speed up, searching for a break between buildings that I can use to part ways with the mage, but they’re constructed shoulder to shoulder. My pack thumps rhythmically against my back, reminding me with each slap how much my whole body aches.

  There— an alley up ahead. The mage has almost reached it. He barrels forward, then skids to a stop, twisting and lunging back the way he’d come. His face is nearly white, his eyes so wide they look as if they might pop out of his skull. I pivot and begin running hard. I don’t need to see what he flees to know I don’t want to meet it.

  Behind me, stone grinds and shifts as if beneath an immense mass. The mage pants as he races after me, wheezing with terror. I glance over my shoulder, golden morning sunshine illuminating the road behind me, and I falter.

  A long gray thing ripples around the corner, a line of darkness on the yellow stones. Behind it come others like it, scraping at walls as the creature pulls itself into the avenue. They remind me of squid tentacles, but they’re scaly and end in massive, wickedly curved talons. Far more disconcerting than the strangeness of the limbs is the sheer size of them: some are as wide around as a horse. I can’t tell how long they are, for I can’t quite make out the creature they belong to.

  The longest arm snaps toward us and its claw gouges a hole in the road not fifty paces away. The shock of it — the metal-gray sheen, the thwack against stone — sends me stumbling forward, unfreezing my muscles.

  I sprint down the road, putting all I have into running, my lungs burning. Behind me, the noise of the creature’s progress grows into a rumbling, grinding roar. The strange ripples in the pavers I noticed earlier seem not so inexplicable now.

  It growls, a deafening sound that reverberates through my body, like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It may be huge, but it’s fast and, I bet, hungry. The mage clutches his side, a step ahead of me now. Nor will I be able to continue this
fast much farther. Neither of us can outrun this thing.

  I do the one thing I can think of — I leap through the window of the building next to me, shouting for the mage to follow. He wheels around and clambers over the sill a moment later, his breath coming in short, pained gasps as he drops to the floor.

  “This way.” I pull a glowstone from my pocket and raise it high enough to bring an exit into focus. We barrel through the room toward the hallway. I barely register the eerie emptiness of the place — no cloth, no furniture, no doors — only the shriveled remains of people scattered here and there like fallen autumn leaves.

  The creature howls, an ear-splitting sound of fury. Its tentacles scrabble through the window behind us, stabbing into corners in search of its prey. Boots skidding over the gritty floor, I plunge into the central corridor and find salvation: stairs.

  I don’t say anything, half hoping the mage will choose a different route, but he follows on my heels. I take the stairs two and three at a time, far more worried about the horrific creature behind us.

  As we reach the landing, the beast finds the front entry and a mass of tentacles fly down the hall toward us, smashing against the walls and scrabbling up the stairs. I continue up the next flight, the mage panting out curses in a language I don’t know. At the end of the hall, I see a window, but it’s already filling with tentacles. What is this creature?

  As I turn to ascend the final set of stairs to the roof, something flashes past the window, bright as the midday sun. Magic. I’m not sure what being could work magic in such a place as this, but the pureness of the light gives me hope. I scramble upwards as the tentacles whip down the hall, talons gouging the staircase.

  The mage behind me falters, boots sliding. He’s barely three steps ahead of the creature. It’ll have him in a heartbeat, and he’ll die.