Voices of Blaze (Volume 5 of The Fireblade Array)

by H. O. Charles

  of mush – once homes, walls and a gate to their beautiful city. It even smelled sickly-sweet and cloying as dead bodies might do.

  Some of the Watchers turned to her when she arrived. All still bowed their heads with reverence, but none stared or gawped in awe this time. Unfortunately, they had discovered that she was not powerful enough to put this right, and perhaps suspected that she was weak in other ways.

  “If you please, my queen,” one of the Watchers said, bowing a head that had not been washed in some time, “Have you heard anything from your blessed mother? Will she be returning to aid us?”

  Mother?! Of course, because her mother was a blazed goddess who could fix everything! Medea placed her hands behind her back so that she could clench them into fists in secrecy. “She attends those who are in greater

  peril than we are. She will return when their troubles are resolved. Be assured, we will find a way to curtail this... ailment soon enough. I have been studying the fungus night and day.” And that was no lie. Medea had bottles of the stuff locked in the caves beneath the palace, and she had been fanatical about guarding the contagion while she made her experiments. One could not risk any more structures for the sake of research.

  As she tiptoed around the damage, she gazed across the parts ofthe city that had already been lost. It was an area large enough to fit a Spring Games course inside of, and already the pulp had been patterned by the footprints of feral cats and dogs. Medea had recognised early on that the decay here mirrored the decay she had observed in the Sky Bridges. And she had seen it again in the broken True Spears collected from Mirel’s attack

  upon the city some years ago. The same force was behind all three instances of rot, and whatever it was had some sort of link to Mirel.

  It could not be Mirel, or she would have endeavoured to free herself earlier. It could not be powerful enough to free The Daisain, as he was still safely locked up in the dungeons beneath the palace. What was it?

  “I recall, my lady, that we often had mouldy cheese in the

  Fire Isles, and once we’d cut the green parts off, the rest was still quite edible.”

  Medea did not need to look in his direction to verify the owner of the voice. Its accent and tone might as well have been branded into her consciousness, and she had heard it so very often in her dreams that she sometimes wondered if its owner snuck into her chambers at night. Such behaviours were not beyond him. “Thank you, I do not need

  your advice in such matters.”

  “Your matters concern me. Most especially your more intimate matters. Tell me, my lady, do you still wear the red lace beneath-”

  “I thought I had banished you.” Medea rounded on The Hunter, and her chain ofthought was fragmented into its constituent links as soon as she laid eyes upon him. Burn him for being so pretty with his stupid, exotic features and ridiculous hair that fell about his eyes like spun sugar! Burn him in the hottest blazes that ever razed the lands and the skies!

  No. She caught herself before her thoughts descended any further. She was not her mother, and there was no need to curse a man just for being himself. But Tallyn Hunter had already taken on an expression of indifference. He shrugged and spoke before she could. “I have adhered to the terms of your

  instruction. Now, as for the cheese, or rather the lace – do you still-”

  “That is none of your business.” She could feel the eyes of every member of her guard upon her now, and her cheeks were colouring. Really, it was most unprofessional of her men to allow him to approach her. “If you have a solution to our problem, or knowledge about Mirel that can help us, then I shall hear it. Otherwise, you may

  excuse yourself from my presence.”

  His bearing shifted slightly, and few but Medea would have noticed how his fingers traced over the hilt of one of his daggers. “Mirel will want her vengeance, and she will take it in the bloodiest way. Best for you to leave the city.”

  “Never.”

  “I may have to find other ways of persuading you.”

  Medea fought hard to put

  those fantasies clear out of her mind. Well clear! “My country has need of me here. If you have nothing of more use...?”

  He grunted loudly and folded his arms, muttering something about stubborn blood, but finally said, “Can’t you make a knife to cut the cheese? You made a very sweet knife for your father. Seems to me there should be one for yourself. Or someone else, if you choose.” A broad smile blossomed across his face.

  A knife to cut the... of course! Why had she not thought ofthat? Medea wheeled around and headed directly for the palace. She could not create anything like the white sword without her mother there, inevitably, but she could still make a rudimentary cutting implement.

  Cheese! Ha!

  When Artemi opened her eyes, it was still dark, but no longer enough to be blinding. She had been deposited in a room, and she could see that she lay upon a hammock that had been suspended from the vaulted ceiling. The sling swung with a soft squeak of leather and old

  rope as she flopped out of it and onto the boards below. Ifthis was another prison, it was surely more pleasant than the last one. “Ah, she awakes!” A man’s voice said in the clicky language. Artemi looked to it, and saw that it belonged to a winged creature, long-armed and snarlfaced like the one she had seen invading the city. “What you plan to do with me?” she asked him. “Foreigner, eh? Learkin said you fought hard when he rescued

  you.” The man-thing approached her on spindly legs and with wing folds that dragged on the floor behind him. “Well, perhaps that explains why you are so clean and feeble. Tell me, were you taken from the nest as a pup?”

  “No – I - clean?” She had spent the last few months locked in cells and a dungeon. How could anyone possibly think she was clean? She re-appraised the room again. It was certainly not messy or filthy. Was everything upside

  down in this world?

  He nodded eagerly. “As unsullied as the snows in the Rankled Mountains. Pure, unblemished, immaculate. It is a rare thing to see these days.”

  Artemi looked down at her clothing. It had not been changed, and still stank strongly enough to wrinkle the noses of the Law-keepers as they dreamed in The Crux. “And how I can become... unclean in this place?”

  “How can I become

  unclean?” he corrected. “You really are from another world, aren’t you?”

  She nodded resignedly.

  “Well, you must take the Water of Illumination. You don’t know what that is, do you? It has many names, but we call it taqqa in this city. It is a wondrous thing, conferring strength, deep sight, quick thought and the ability to control the vision of others. You will wonder what you ever did without it when you try it.”

  Artemi recalled how the light had dipped to utter nothingness when the creatures had attacked the city. The lamps had not been extinguished – her sight had! “If it is wonderful, then why you call it unclean?”

  He made an odd sniffing noise. “Mottles the skin; ages the wings. Small prices.”

  “I don’t have any wings.”

  The man grinned broadly at her. “No, not yet. Too young a pup for that.”

  “You think I’m like you?”

  He frowned and tilted his head. “And evidently you seem to think you are a pintrata. Spent too long with them, I think. Have a look in the mirror if you don’t believe me.” He nodded toward a pane of silvered glass that had been fixed to the wall.

  She plumped herself before the glass, but truly had not prepared herself for what she was about to see in it. A wide-eyed, snarl-faced creature gazed back at her. Its nostrils were caverns and its brows heavy enough to require sturdy bone to hold them up against gravity. Wild tufts of red hair sprouted from its head like weeds in a garden gone to wilderness. She was... hideous!

  “You said you had the power to alter the vision of others. You have changed what I see.”

  “I didn’t put you in a prison cell, or try to shoot you – yes, I k
now about all that, but I didn’t

  do it. They did. Ever wonder why?”

  “Because I was foreign. I wasn’t wearing what they wore.”

  The man shook his head. “Because you are mraki. Stronger, fiercer, better.”

  “Uglier,” she said beneath her breath. If the man heard her, he chose not to respond. “Tell me then,” she said more clearly. “What do you do with your days? Hunt and kill the pin- the weaker ones?”

  “Pintrata,” he said slowly. “But of course. They are food. It is what the Father of Storms has designed for us. Animals.”

  “People,” Artemi corrected.

  He shrugged - a strange motion to see on a creature whose arms were so long they had to be kept bent to prevent them from touching the floor. “Animals, people, food. Same thing.”

  “Who is your Father of Storms?”

  “Such ignorance, young pup! Why, he is the one who made all of this. He designed us to be superior in every way.”

  A god. How predictable. Clearly this creature’s deity had not paid much heed to aesthetics when he had been doing his designing. And she was one of them? Was this truly how she translated in this world? “I have survived perfectly well without eating them.”

  “And you are weak for it.”

  “I don’t feel very weak.”

  “Just you wait. Once you have tasted pintrata meat...” his eyes glazed briefly as he compressed his lips. “And don’t feel sorry for them. They wear their uniforms and worship their cherished leader, but they are no good.”

  Cherished leader? That did explain the paintings ofthe person she had seen in almost every prison corridor. They had mentioned his name to her, but

  she had believed they had been speaking of a god rather than a man of flesh and blood. !Candorat, they called him.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “Ravendasor. Rav, if you like. You?”

  “Artemi.”

  He frowned. “What sort of name is that?”

  “Better than Rah-ven-dasorr.”

  He grinned broadly and

  lobbed a pile of folded clothes at her. “I’ll call you Emmi. Makes more sense. Put those on once you’ve bathed and come for a walk with me. You’ll find yourself no prisoner here.”

  After losing some time in finding the appropriate washing materials, Artemi did as instructed and joined Rav in the hallway beyond. Perhaps hallway was not quite the correct word. Cavern would have been a better one. Overhead, great bands of

  black rock reached upward from the walls and toward a ceiling many hundreds of feet high above them. Faraway hammocks swung in the mists ofthe uppermost reaches, and it was clear that the weight of full-grown bodies slumbered within them.

  “Bats,” Artemi said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re just overgrown... bats. Though I suppose I am too.”

  He frowned at her, his great brows drawing downward enough to make even blacker shadows on his cheeks. “I don’t know what bats is. Is it good?”

  Artemi pulled her mouth to one side. “I suppose. When it’s dark. Can you see in the dark?”

  “No. But I can hear a damn sight better than those pintrata can. The way they thump about – hey, you know you’re not too noisy for a pup that’s been raised by yrendu.”

  “Yrendu?”

  Rav paused in his walk.

  “You know – ah, they swing in the trees. Wingless but tailed.”

  “Monkeys?”

  “If that’s what you call them.” His lips thinned and he resumed his walk again, gesturing to a mound of buildings that glowed beneath their path. “That is the main part ofthe city. This causeway takes us right to the centre of it. It’s a long walk, but it would be impolite of me to fly and leave a young thing like you behind.”

  “You are able to fly with those... things? They have so many holes in them, I-”

  “Quite finished insulting me? Yes, they still work. I may be old and worn, but these wings can carry two of me well enough. Ah, let’s try it!”

  “Wai-”

  Without warning, Ravendasor had snapped a wing around her and leapt from the walkway into the cold breezes below. Artemi’s mind scrambled

  for the Blazes by instinct, and she gasped when she found they were not there. To her dismay, her eyelids refused to squeeze themselves shut as the air whistled past her ears, as ifthey wanted to see as much of this death as possible. Burn it! She was not even sure if she could be reborn in this world!

  With a grin slowly spreading across his lumpen features, Rav spread his free wing so that its hundred creases were filled and

  smoothed by the wind it caught. Though three of his fingers could only be described as stretched in appearance, the other three were over a yard each in length. When extended with his arm, his single wingspan must have reached at least as far as the height of two full-grown men. Their descent immediately slowed to a nearelegant spiral, and they glided gently down to one of the roofs in the town beneath. Around them hung a dozen oil lamps to

  illuminate a dozen doors, as if a rooftop entry were quite a normal phenomenon. More winged creatures circled and swooped above, some even heading for the distant mists at the top ofthe cavern. How elegant they looked, and how bow-legged.

  “Looking forward to growing your first webs yet, Emmi?” he said with sparkling eyes. “It can become a hunger, flying can.”

  She had flown on wings of

  Blaze once or twice in the Darkworld, and she had just as surely been torn out ofthe skies by irksome kanaala. There always seemed to be one or two watching when she wanted to have her fun, but this... who but a hunter could prevent a bird from spreading its feathers to fly? “How long before I can?”

  “Hard to tell how old you are. Another year, perhaps two.” He extended one of his ridiculous arms to open a door. “This way.”

  Artemi followed his instruction and entered the bright hallway as a new tension entered her muscles and made her sinew coil. “I cannot stay here that long. I need to get back home.”

  “Home? To be imprisoned by pintrata again?”

  “No. Somewhere else. Another world. I have family – a husband.”

  “You’re not even old enough to be married, girl.

  Juggling two mates is no easy task, believe me.”

  Artemi sighed. She had been young when she had left the Darkworld – onlyjust old enough to have regained her memories, and perhaps some of the youth of that body had carried through to this world. “Where I come from, there are only two in a marriage.”

  He screwed up his features. “Only two? Then who carries the babies?”

  “The woman.”

  “The woman?! What?! Is that safe? Or even wise? What if she wants to leave the nest?!”

  Artemi sighed. “She gets attacked by eisiels.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Rav, I need to get back there. Is there anywhere in this world with light – lots of light? Or some sort of energy and power? A gateway? In my world, it was in a cave-”

  “I’m sorry, Emmi, I don’t think we have anything like that

  here. Taqqa’s the only way to the light that I know of.” Rav pushed open another door and led her into a chamber filled with tables, and more creatures who looked like he did.

  One of the creatures she recognised as her rescuer from the raid on the walled city; the rest were equally as ugly and devoid of smiles. Their chatter broke as they recognised Rav, and their twisted faces appeared to contort even further at the sight

  of her. Rav took a stool for himself at the head of the largest table, and Artemi really ought to have guessed that he was a leader of sorts. He had that air of arrogance that she had seen - and smelled - many times before. “If you would take that seat before us, please?” He gestured toward the smallest stool, set in the middle of an area of polished stone floor.

  Artemi perched atop it, aware that even the manner in

  which she did so would probably
be viewed as peculiar here. In any event, it was really very comfortable. Why had she always thought of such seats as poor things for impoverished people? This one was perfectly made for her bat-like backside!

  “This meeting is called to discuss the reintegration of Artemi,” Rav began. “She has been raised by pintrata, knows nothing of our ways, is poorly nourished and weak without the

  Water of Illumination. What are we to do with her?”

  The most wizened one, with no hair upon her head and wings so full of holes that the light of the lamps shone straight through them, croaked, “What is she good at?”

  “Go on,” Rav urged.

  “I... ah, I can fight with a blade.”

  That prompted some frowns from her new kin.