The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

  “I will. I swear to you, I always will.”

  Zaira nodded, and released my hands. The wind snapped her skirts behind her like a banner as resolve hardened her face.

  “Exsolvo,” I whispered.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Deep within Zaira’s eyes, a blue spark kindled.

  A pack of chimeras detached from the oncoming army and bounded toward us, flowing fast as water, their scaly backs gleaming in the sun, fanged maws gaping. Behind them, the front rank of soldiers shifted their muskets from their shoulders to hold them crosswise in their hands, ready to stop and fire as soon as they came into range.

  Zaira smacked her fist into her opposing palm, then flung her arms wide. A wall of fire roared up twenty feet in front of us, blue banners streaming hungrily upward, forming a dancing curtain of death. Its ends raced away to the right and left, searing a line across the worn winter grass.

  The foremost chimera couldn’t stop in time, and careened into it. The creature thrashed, covered in fire, tearing great gouges in the earth and uttering awful screams; the others contorted to avoid the flames and backed off, growling and hissing. Several hundred feet behind them, the front ranks of the army faltered almost to a halt.

  Sweat beaded Zaira’s temples. “Come on,” she urged through her gritted teeth. “Turn around. Go back. You can’t win against me, damn you.”

  Somehow, by the Graces, she was still in control, holding up a line of balefire a quarter mile long. But without lives to feed it, she couldn’t keep it up forever. The fire would eat away at her strength and drain her dry and empty.

  Through the distorting shimmer of the flames, the army wavered. I squinted against the blistering heat, my eyes drying, desperately hoping that Ruven’s attention was elsewhere and he would let them run.

  But the lines shifted, and the soldiers changed the angle of their march toward one end of Zaira’s line. The pack of chimeras sprinted in the opposite direction, clearly planning to pass the other end and come at us from both sides.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Zaira growled, and pushed her hands forward. The fire spread and curved inward, cutting them off, racing to flank them.

  I stared at her in awe. Her wall of balefire burned razor-thin, a single sheet of twisting pale flames licking up as if from a narrow crack in the earth to some subterranean Hell. The lines of fire swept fast as the wind up the sides of the hills now, surely a mile across and growing, bending to surround the entire front portion of the army in a blazing half circle. Chimeras paced in frustration behind the shifting and rippling curtain of heat and light, snarling, unable to reach us.

  Still Zaira held the fire from spreading beyond the bounds she set for it, her teeth bared, her fists clenched, her face straining with the effort.

  “You aren’t my master,” she panted. “I can beat you.”

  For a confused moment, I thought she meant Ruven, and glanced around in fear of finding him there. But then the cold realization hit: she was talking to the balefire.

  She was pushing herself to her limits to save the Vaskandran conscripts. To try to give them a chance for Ruven to see the futility of his attack and allow them to retreat.

  Tiny flames began blooming on her skin, like some strangely beautiful pox—no, as if pieces of her mortal flesh were falling away to reveal the creature of fire beneath. Delicate tendrils of blue flame wound themselves through her hair, and flames licked up around her feet. I backed away a few steps, my breath quickening.

  Then beyond the flames, there came a sudden flurry of movement. Three chimeras launched themselves up and over the writhing barrier of fire, springing impossibly high. Their maws full of a hundred teeth opened wide in reptilian faces as they fell toward us; I threw up my arms and ducked instinctively, letting out an unabashed shriek.

  A blinding wave of balefire exploded from Zaira, washing over the chimeras. It stripped away flesh and bone in a heartbeat, devouring them in one gulp like a starving thing. Only ash rained down onto the ground before us.

  I recoiled from the blast of heat and the sudden stench of burned fur and meat and bone, lifting a sleeve to shield my nose and mouth. My eyes stung, parched, and I blinked the gritty dry air off them.

  Zaira stood with her head tipped back, arms stretched wide as if she would embrace the sky. Flames leaped up all along her arms, eerie and delicate, rising from her like steam. Her eyes overflowed with blue fire until it ran in trails down her cheeks.

  “Zaira…?” I asked, nervously.

  She didn’t answer. But like an enormous fist closing, all across the valley, her fire surged forward. The line of ravening blue flame that had been so disciplined, so narrow, roared at the Vaskandran army like the sky itself falling down upon them.

  A sound caught in my throat and died there before I knew whether it was a shout or a whimper. The commotion of terror from the army drowned it out, a thousand screams rising like a storm on the wave-tossed ocean. The ranks surged with wild panic, people pushing and collapsing and falling on each other in their frantic animal urge to escape the roaring wave of death that rushed toward them, trailing a veil of smoke that sent the vultures scattering.

  And then it was upon them, and the screams changed, twisting to the agony of the dying.

  “Let the Grace of Mercy hide her eyes in dread.” The voice that came from Zaira was wild as the fire itself. She stepped forward, reaching out in benediction, trailing a cloak of flames. “For mine is the kingdom of death.”

  Her words resonated with divine majesty of the Graces themselves, but they were from no sacred text I had ever heard of. She was gone, lost utterly to the flames; they spoke through her mouth with a voice of terrible and pitiless power.

  I clapped my hands over my ears against the screaming. The devouring fire swept relentlessly on, closing its circle of destruction, clawing higher into the sky. It billowed in great horrible clouds now, swallowing trees and farmhouses, glutted on hundreds of lives and still starving for more. A vast black column of smoke rose above it, a dark omen befouling the sky and dimming the sun.

  There was no escape for those who had been trapped between the arms of Zaira’s wall. The twin waves of fire met in the middle, turning the valley to a lake of blazing death.

  Where a thousand soldiers had moved in a great bristling mass, a thousand lives that breathed and spoke and hoped, the balefire had performed its mad alchemy of agony and terror; now there was only flame. It towered like an infernal mountain, some great beast older than time and more terrible than death, ripping at the world that birthed it in its fury.

  The back two-thirds of Ruven’s army struggled in a ragged surge away from the fire, trying to flee. The north end of the valley rose toward the steepening hills, and the formerly rearmost stragglers raced up the road, now in front, black dots in the distance running for life and freedom.

  But then they slowed and drew up in ranks, an unnatural order falling upon them when they should be most panicked; the rear of the army was re-forming under Ruven’s control, away from the fire, ready to try again.

  Graces help me. I could end this now, with half the valley drowned in fire and a monster of horror and death unleashed upon them already. I could stop this unnatural killing blaze before it reduced any more lives to ash and bone. But then, unless Ruven actually acknowledged defeat and let his forces withdraw, Ardence would still face an army.

  I kept my silence.

  Zaira stepped forward to the peak of the low rise on which we stood, wrapped in a column of living flame. I could barely make out her shape through the terrible fire that streamed off her. My skin ached with heat, and every cough to clear ash from my lungs brought a dry pain stabbing through my chest, but not one lick of flame bent in my direction. It was as if a great wind came from Zaira, sweeping it all toward her enemies. For now.

  She lifted a hand, palm out, toward the retreating army, and spoke again in that voice of terrible beauty. “All those who would destroy what I protect, I consign to a Hell o
f fire.”

  Oh sweet Graces. I cringed from what I knew was coming.

  The fire cavorting and roiling where a thousand people had stood began clawing its way up the valley, taking more and more of the screaming souls who tried to flee from it. They were far enough away now that their cries came thin and distant on the wind, wails faint as the damned beyond the gates of the Nine Hells. Blue tendrils of licking flame spread like spilled blood, groping toward the hills with fingers of bright, shining oblivion.

  It was impossible to imagine what the valley had looked like before it was made of fire. That it had once been full of life, before Zaira’s flame converted that delicate and profound power to raw light and heat, casting the remains as smoke to stain the sky.

  I fell to my knees, coughing, and pressed my lace cravat to my face to try to filter out the blowing charred grit from the air. The heat stole my tears before they could leave my eyes. Crows circled and cawed urgently overhead, though all the other birds had fled long ago; I wondered if they were Kathe’s.

  I know it’s madness, I wanted to tell them. And yes, I know I need to stop it.

  I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t allow myself to be overcome, and to cower on the ground while the balefire unleashed its fury upon the world. It was my duty to watch, and to speak my word to put an end to this horror as soon as I thought it was safe.

  Safe. For every second I waited, dozens of people were dying. I had to weigh their lives against those in Ardence, and make the scales balance somehow. Who in the Graces’ names was I to make that judgment?

  I was Amalia Cornaro, of the Council of Nine. And I was Zaira’s friend, whom she trusted to bring her back.

  I staggered to my feet, my breath painful in my raw lungs. The balefire raged in a terrifying inferno, consuming nearly the whole valley and spreading up the hills. It was not a landscape of the mortal world, where life could exist; it was the geography of the Hells, made real and written in fire and death upon the earth.

  Zaira paced slowly forward down the gentle incline toward the flames, leaving a wake of fire flickering behind her. I didn’t try to follow. I had no illusions of safety if I should step too close or stray in front of her. I glanced back behind me and saw, a hundred yards away, Bree’s cavalry fighting to keep their horses from fleeing the mile-long raging inferno and the smoke-throttled air; I supposed we should have thought of that.

  It was hard to squint north, across the valley lit up end to end with conquering blue flame. It burned everywhere, on barren earth and charred bone, on rock and grass and the river itself. No trees or houses rose from it, and no movement stirred within its compass save the twisting dance of the flames. Far across the valley, the tail end of the army still fled up the road, a distant and blurry crowd of dots and smudges streaming away from Ardence. But the fire was faster, and it caught them one after another, devouring them. They were too far away now for me to hear their screams.

  There had to be fewer than a thousand left. I wasn’t in a position to estimate, but by the Graces, we’d killed enough of them. If Ruven insisted on sending them against the city again, Bree and the garrison could handle them.

  Enough.

  I opened my parched mouth and croaked out, “Revincio.”

  A terrible silence fell. All at once, the flames vanished, their blue glare gone, plunging the valley into ashen twilight.

  Where there had been the harsh beauty of fire, now there was boundless devastation. What had been rolling fields and pretty farms marked with wandering lines of cypress trees now was a barren wasteland of blowing ash. Nothing remained of the thousands of men and women who had stood here a mere hour ago save bits of charred bone sticking up from the black fields of ruin.

  Zaira collapsed gracefully, almost seeming to float down like a dropped feather, as if the balefire had left her empty as a blown milkweed pod. Ash puffed up where she fell, her curls sprawling on the scorched ground.

  Cold descended upon me, with the fire gone. A bitter wind skated across the valley, blowing clouds of ash. The last of the smoke drifted up into the sky, cut loose from the fire that had tethered it, floating higher and higher to join the thick gray haze that lay upon the air. The River Arden poured fresh clean water between its ash-choked banks, pushing the gray sludge downstream, beginning to wash itself clear again, but it was the only bright thing in a landscape of death and shadows. Zaira had scoured the land of all life, leaving only a terrible blackened scar upon the earth.

  I tottered over to her and sank down on the ground at her side, my legs trembling too much to hold me up anymore. I held her head off the ground and brushed ash out of her hair, then turned my head to spit up a grimy mess onto the blackened earth.

  She was warm, and her chest rose and fell. Thank the Graces. It seemed unnatural that one person could deal so much death and still remain alive.

  Hoofbeats thudded behind me, soft on the unburned ground. A single rider. I didn’t have to look to know who would be brave enough to approach us, or to know whose boots now crunched through the cinders. If nothing else, only a vivomancer could convince a horse to come this near.

  “Graces wept,” Bree said, and knelt down beside me. “Will she be all right?”

  “I think so.” Zaira’s face seemed flushed with health, in fact, as if unleashing so much horror had only made her stronger. The jess gleamed on her wrist; the knot that bound us together had blurred further from the raging power of her balefire, more damaged than before. “What are the survivors doing?” I lifted my head, wearily, to peer across the valley.

  “Milling about in horror, from the look of it,” Bree said. “They haven’t got nearly the force they’d need to attack us now. After I get you two safe, I’ll join up with the Raverran troops and we can run them off.”

  I nodded dully. Thousands dead, the valley scourged with fire that would leave its mark for years, and I doubted Ruven cared. His gambit had failed, but he always had another plan. Perhaps he had not understood what Zaira was capable of. Now he knew.

  Bree stared out at the devastation, then at Zaira, shaking her head in awe. “She’s not human.”

  “But she is,” I said. “She is. And that’s the problem.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Zaira showed no signs of waking. I stayed with her through the last embers of the day and all the long night. They set up a bed for me in her room when I declined to leave, the servants moving quickly and with many terrified glances to where Zaira’s dark curls poked out from underneath her coverlet.

  Domenic visited twice. The first time, when we brought Zaira in, he hurried to her side and held her hand anxiously, asking me again and again if she would be all right. I told him yes, she would be fine; this was normal after unleashing on such a scale. The second time, he was more somber and quiet, staring at her with a worried frown, then glancing northward as if he could see through the palace wall to the blackened valley.

  Bree and Domenic praised my dedication for staying with Zaira, but I had my own reasons. Yes, she was certainly a target more than ever now, and I asked Domenic to post trusted guards at her door. And yes, I wanted to make certain she had a familiar face with her when she woke up, since Graces only knew what she would remember or how she would feel. But more than anything, I needed the silence. No one would bother me when I was waiting by the bed of my fire warlock friend, who had just killed a few thousand people and needed her rest.

  So I sat in the dark through half the night, struggling not to sink into the black swamp that threatened to suck me down. Every time I pushed the sound of distant screaming out of my mind, Marcello’s face replaced it, orange eye staring from its slit pupil, scales running down to the clean line of his jaw.

  The palace had gone still and quiet long ago when I finally curled up and tried to sleep. But still I lay staring into the moon-silvered shadows, listening to Zaira’s steady breathing, reminding myself that it was real and the screaming was not. The scent of smoke kept me awake, clinging to my hair, my s
kin, everything in this room.

  A tapping came at the window.

  I sat bolt upright in bed, dagger in hand. Marcello.

  But this time, there was no human silhouette against the paler square of night sky, no presence in the room. It had been a windblown branch, perhaps, bare with winter.

  Tap.

  Something small moved in the corner of the window. It cocked its head at me and tapped again. A crow.

  “Do you have a message for me?” I went to the window, my heart slowing back to a normal pace, and opened the casement.

  “You should be more careful. That could have been a trap.”

  I bit back a shriek and turned my head to find Kathe perched on the next window ledge over, like a crow himself, the feathers on his shoulders fluttering in the winter wind. The starlight caught in his pale, black-tipped hair, and gleamed in his eyes.

  “Doors,” I reminded him. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with doors. Lots of people use them all the time.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t want to wake anyone up. Are you going to let me in?”

  I glanced back over my shoulder at the lump that was Zaira, still asleep. “Wait there.”

  I closed the casement and slipped quietly through the door to the small sitting room adjacent to Zaira’s bedroom, where Kathe’s window was. The wards on the Serene Envoy’s palace required no special key beyond physically unlatching the window from within to allow entry, and Kathe sprang down lightly onto the inlaid wood floor on a breath of winter wind.

  “Make yourself comfortable.” I gestured vaguely to the furniture in the cramped sitting room, and only then remembered I was wearing my nightdress. Kathe settled on a chair, his legs tucked up under him; if he noticed my flush, he didn’t show any sign of it. Well, it might not be the most flattering garment, but it was perfectly modest; I decided to act as if I received visitors in my nightclothes all the time, and arranged myself on a divan opposite him. “I fear the luminaries are out for the night. I could light a lamp, if you wish.”