Black Sun Light My Way

by Spurrier, Jo

  ‘Isidro’s tough,’ Rasten said, still honing the blade. ‘If he was going to crack he’d have done it by now. He’s clever —’

  ‘And Kell knows he’s clever. He knows Isidro will give us all the information he can. He’ll see to it that Issey can only tell us what Kell wants us to know —’

  ‘And do you imagine Isidro will be ignorant of that?’ Rasten shook his head. ‘But that’s only a part of it, Sirri. There’s more we can do to prepare, more things I can teach you —’

  Sierra was about to reply when a strange crackling sound came upon them. It sounded like flame in dry grass, but with an odd, tinny ring, a thin, stretched sound like echoes ringing along a dry gorge.

  ‘What in the Fires Below is that?’ Sierra snapped.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rasten replied. ‘Hush, let me listen.’

  She reached for her own power as she felt him reach for his, stirring within him like liquid flame.

  Sierra? A familiar, feminine voice crackled inside her head, and it was only then that Sierra realised the sound she’d heard was not a real noise after all, but only an echo inside her skull. For a moment she was too stunned to reply — she had to shake herself before she could gather her thoughts to form a response. … Delphine?

  Oh, by the Good Goddess, it finally worked!

  Sierra closed her eyes, trying to get a sense of where the Akharian was and how she’d managed to reach her, but instead of the hazy image she’d see through contact with Rasten or Isidro, she saw nothing. ‘It’s Delphine,’ she said to Rasten.

  ‘I know who she is,’ he snapped. ‘I spoke to her once, remember?’ How are you doing this? he demanded.

  I-is that Rasten? Delphine stammered. I could try to explain, but it’s a little complicated, and it’s taken me more than a week to get the Gods-forsaken enchantment to work. It’s still looking a bit unstable — I’m not sure how long it will hold …

  She sounded rattled, a far cry from the cool and superior woman who had been her teacher in the caves. Have the Akharians had you contact us? Sierra said.

  Them? Gods, no! They’re hunting us, but we’re safe for now, I think. Sierra, I’m with Cam, and we’ve been following you for the last two weeks. Mirasada’s kin have made an alliance with the empire, and they meant to hand us over to Akhara as tribute. Mira wasn’t able to protect us, so we struck out on our own. Cam says we’re a good week behind you, and he wants me to ask what you know of Isidro — does he still live?

  He’s alive, and as well as can be expected, Sierra said. We’re four or five days behind them. It still seemed hard to believe that Kell, crippled as he was, could ride hard enough to stay so far ahead. Cam’s there with you now?

  Yes, he’s right here. Do you have a message for him?

  Sierra squeezed her eyes shut, wishing that she could see his face. In the weeks between sending him off from the fort and Isidro’s news that he’d been found safely, she’d been utterly consumed by fear her best efforts to save him wouldn’t be enough. Tell him … well, Kell hasn’t been able to lay a hand on Isidro, but that’s just made him dream up other ways to attack him. He tricked Isidro into completing a ritual, and now he’s been initiated and marked as a Blood-Mage. Kell’s been forcing him to develop those powers, or starve.

  Delphine’s breath caught in a sob and she gasped a No. Is … is he alright? Have you been able to talk to him? How he must feel …

  Something about her reaction, the tension and emotion in her voice, put Sierra on edge.

  We don’t dare have too much contact when Kell is listening, Rasten said.

  I — oh, of course, Delphine said. Yes, of course. Let me pass that on to Cam.

  As Delphine withdrew, Sierra raised her eyes to Rasten. He was watching her closely, with unfamiliar warmth in his eyes — some emotion she couldn’t identify.

  In the Spire, Delphine’s manner with Isidro had been anything but kindly. So why, then, did she seem so overcome at the news? There was only one explanation. Isidro had always respected Delphine, and Delphine had admired him before his betrayal turned her regard to disgust.

  With a crackle of noise, the Akharian mage’s voice returned.

  Cam says we’ll deal with that once this is over, Delphine said, and her voice was stronger now, once again steady and controlled. He says Issey will pull through. Anyway, we just wanted you to know you have friends at your back. I know Kell plans to lead you somewhere remote and deserted, and I had an idea about that. There is a possibility that I can make contact with the army and the Battle-Mages on your behalf, if you do decide that this task is too big to handle on your own. I know it can hardly be an appealing option at the moment —

  Sierra and Rasten shared a glance. You can’t seriously expect us to trust them, Rasten said. The Akharians would turn on us the moment Kell breathes his last. You’d be signing our death-warrant, and Balorica’s, too.

  That is a problem, Delphine said, and one I’ve yet to solve. But I wanted you both to think about it, as a last resort if all else seems lost. I … oh, by all the hells, the cursed stone’s melting. Mention it to Isidro if you talk to him — he may well have an idea to contribute. I’ll speak to you again later, right now I —

  Delphine’s voice cut off dead, along with the crackle of power, and its absence left the silence of the night ringing obscenely loud in Sierra’s ears.

  The bread had begun to burn, and Sierra pulled it away from the heat, sinking the twigs into the earth to let them cool. Then, she stood and walked numbly away from the fire.

  ‘Sirri,’ Rasten called after her.

  Sierra paid him no mind. She kept walking, even when she heard him rise and come after her. ‘Sirri!’

  She whirled to face him. ‘You heard it, too, didn’t you? I wasn’t just imagining it.’

  He searched her eyes for a long moment, and Sierra suspected he was trying to find the right thing to say. ‘I did,’ he said at last.

  ‘I thought so.’ Her legs suddenly seemed too weak to hold her up, and she sat heavily with feet and ankles crumpled beneath her. ‘I don’t know why I’m surprised. I don’t have any right to feel this way. I mean, I’m the one who left. After what I did, I don’t have any claim on him at all. Why shouldn’t he fuck her if they’re both willing? I gave up any right I had to be upset when I lay down with you.’

  Rasten looked at his hands, and then clasped them behind his back as he crouched on his heels.

  ‘I should be pleased he found solace,’ Sierra said.

  ‘Sirri,’ Rasten said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She locked her gaze with his. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t … I wish …’ He struggled to find the words. ‘I wish you weren’t feeling this pain.’

  ‘Why?’ she snapped. ‘You never concerned yourself with that before.’

  ‘It was necessary before,’ Rasten said. ‘There was a purpose then. There’s none here.’

  Sierra covered her face with her hands. Tears stung in her eyes, but they refused to spill. ‘I don’t have any right to be hurt, or to be angry. I just … I wish he’d told me. When Cam was captured, he must have felt so alone … I know why he did this, I just wish I’d known.’ She gulped down a sob and lifted her head, looking towards the horizon with bleary eyes. ‘I suppose I never gave him the chance, did I? And it’s none of my business, now.’

  ‘If they weren’t so far behind, I’d say let them catch up and go on together,’ Rasten said. ‘Or could you not stand the sight of her?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t blame her any more than I blame Isidro,’ Sierra said. ‘He’s a good man; he deserves to be happy. But you’re right — they’re too far away, and Kell has too great a lead on us as it is.’

  Rasten remained silent, just watching her. After a moment, he began to offer her a hand, but then hesitated and, looking down again, started to withdraw.

  Sierra seized his fingers. The spring night was cold, but his hands were warm. ‘You did what you had to do,’ Rasten said. ‘He of all people o
ught to understand that.’

  He doesn’t deserve me, Sierra thought. No one deserves to be lumped with a wreck like me.

  Rasten’s power pulsed through him like fire in his veins. He’d barely touched her since the night of the volcano. The abrasions Kell’s chains had worn into her wrists had healed over with fresh pink skin.

  Sierra closed her other hand around his forearm, and pulled him closer.

  Rasten froze, still as a hunted beast, but beneath his skin his power throbbed and rose. ‘Sirri —’

  ‘Make me forget. I did what I had to do, but I can’t bear to think of what it cost. I know you can do it, Rasten: please make me forget.’ Before he could protest or react at all, Sierra pulled him towards her and kissed him hard and hungrily.

  He moved towards the tent and the blankets, but she held him back. The evening air was cold, but she didn’t care. They had power enough between them to block out the chill as she fumbled out of her clothes and Rasten ran his hands over her smooth, clean limbs. She thought fleetingly that he was trying to be what he believed she wanted — his hands trembled with unaccustomed tenderness — but it was not enough. Sierra craved more, and so with hands and thighs, arms and lips she drove him on until at last he gave in and overwhelmed her with sensation then carried them both away on crashing waves of power.

  Wrapped in a filthy and bloodstained fur, Isidro lay on a bed of warm earth and watched impassively as sensations drifted over him on currents of power. His own power — or rather the power he’d been forced to take in — coiled and oozed through his veins like poison, but he was growing used to it. Beneath the blankets, he ran his fingertips over the shards of metal he’d collected, pieces of sword-blades and arrowheads shattered when Kell attacked the men who’d wielded them. While Kell slept, Isidro harnessed the tainted power coursing through flesh and bone, using it to carve and reshape the fragments while in his head he ran over and over the memory of the afternoon he’d spent with Cam, scrambling over the hillsides to bury blasting-stones and then watching the rubble fly. There was one in particular that he could picture with perfect clarity — a narrow crevice filled with river stones, which at detonation had been hurled into the air with the force of arrows leaving bowstrings.

  Kell could corrupt and torment him with power as much as he wished. He could mark Isidro as a Blood-Mage and let him be hounded by the Akharians and his own people for the rest of his life, but none of that changed the essential facts of the matter. Kell was going to die, no matter what it cost. There would be an end to this.

  Chapter 20

  Cam scratched at the fresh scar on his palm, smearing the grime beneath his nails. It was late spring, and the roads beyond the fens had carried them south as well as west. The air here in the northeastern corner of the empire was warm enough that they both rode in shirtsleeves.

  ‘When we reach the town we should have a physician look at that,’ Delphine said.

  ‘No need,’ Cam said. ‘It’s healed cleanly. All scars itch at first.’

  The livid scar was a reminder of the worst part of their journey. In the weeks it took to cross the swamps that marked the border, the weather had turned foul and the Akharian soldiers closed in on them so tightly that they’d never stopped for more than a few hours at a time. One day, Cam had killed a rabbit with a lucky shot, and as he jointed it for the pot the blade slipped and gashed open his hand. Trembling with cold and weariness both, Delphine had scrambled through her gear for a needle and teased a thread from the hem of her shirt to sew it closed. Looking back, she was still astounded that Cam had suffered nothing worse than a few days of fever, and now a flushed and angry scar across the mound of his thumb.

  Cam scrubbed his hand against his filthy trousers and squinted at the town ahead of them, half-hidden by the haze of dust and the sun reflecting off the sea beyond the buildings. Then he twisted around in the saddle to look back the way they had come.

  They were going the wrong way. Delphine held her breath, waiting for him to say it once again … they’d argued over this like dogs chewing over an old bone. ‘We should be riding on again by this time tomorrow,’ Delphine said. The sun had passed its zenith and was sinking behind them. This diversion was taking them east, away from the trail Kell and Isidro had left and the path Sierra and Rasten had taken. But with their supplies gone and the horses’ hooves chipped and cracked from the empire’s hard-packed roads, the detour was a necessity, not a luxury.

  Cam nodded to show that he’d heard, but he said nothing.

  The village of Dhurant lay right on the edge of the empire’s breadbasket, between the grain-producing coastal lands and the dry inland regions. As one travelled west, away from the coast and from Ricalan, the country grew arid, and it was into that harsh, deserted region that Kell seemed to be leading Sierra and Rasten.

  For the moment, Cam and Delphine shared the dirt road with goat and cattle herds, ox-wagons and mule trains, among which they rather stood out with their foreign clothing and tired horses.

  As the tramped earth gave way to paving stones and gravel, the town seemed at once foreign and familiar to Delphine. The houses were small, built of mud-brick and rammed earth with shallow roofs but wide eaves to protect the walls from rain. Only a handful had more than one storey, unlike the huge northern dwellings which could house two dozen people and their livestock. Children played in the streets, darting through traffic with a flash of bare brown limbs beneath ragged tunics. Slaves made shuffling progress along the dusty roads, carrying loads balanced on their heads. Through one doorway, Delphine saw a young woman sweeping the foyer of a house, dressed in a soft blue gown belted with rope and with a shawl wrapped around her head and shoulders for modesty. Delphine was struck by the thought that in the year and more since she had set out from Akhara with the army, the rest of the world had simply been going on with their lives, utterly unaware of the desperate struggles in the cold and distant north. ‘Are you glad to be home, Delphi?’ Cam asked as they picked their way through the busy streets.

  ‘This isn’t home.’ Akhara itself, the city at the heart of the empire, was far to the south and a different world: a humid metropolis of cool marble and deeply shaded colonnades.

  The main thoroughfares were hot and exposed, but the central square to which Delphine led Cam was shaded by plane trees. There was a public horse-trough beside the central well and, while Cam watered the horses, she soaked her only handkerchief and washed her face and hands. Her clothes and her hair were filthy despite her best efforts, but she did what she could to make herself presentable before rummaging through the packs for her documents. Leaving Cam to watch the horses, she went to find a banker.

  A merchant directed her to a niche opening onto the square, where Delphine introduced herself and presented her documents, hoping that those hunting her in Ricalan would not have thought to freeze her accounts. Since all mages were legally bound into the service of the emperor, they had access to the Imperial Bank. Had she applied as a private citizen, Delphine would have had to find a banker who knew the firm she used in Akhara, but there was nowhere in the empire where one could not do business with the Imperial Bank. For the first time since Cam had been found in the sodden ranges, it seemed things were going well: the clerk took down her details and counted out the money without hesitation. With the coins carefully tucked away, Delphine asked the clerk’s recommendation for an inn, and he came out into the square to give her directions before bidding her good day.

  The inn was one of the few two-storeyed structures that was not a civic building. She knew at first glance that it would be expensive, for the lower portion of the walls was built from stone and the windows were screened with carved lattices that gave the rooms light and air as well as privacy. Delphine ordered a chamber with two beds and an evening meal to be served in the room, and a writing box, which the porter carried upstairs for her.

  The room was well furnished, with table, chairs, sideboard and washstand as well as a bright and cheerful rug on the
floor, and at last Delphine began to feel as though she was back in civilisation. Once they were alone she pulled out her pouch of coin and counted it again while Cam frowned at the piles of gold, silver and bronze coin. ‘Is that a lot of money by Akharian standards?’ he asked.

  ‘I haven’t beggared myself, if that’s what you’re asking, but I’d rather entirely deplete my savings than risk another meal of frogs and grubs.’

  ‘Are you still upset about that?’ said Cam. ‘It was just one night.’

  ‘And I spent the rest of the week turning my guts inside out!’ Just the memory of it made her feel queasy again.

  She sorted the money into three piles, one for the rest of her errands that day, and two formed by dividing what remained. Delphine gave half to Cam, who split it between the pouch at his neck and the one he carried beneath his shirt, while she secreted hers away in a similar fashion. ‘You said the horses need attention?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If we stay on these roads we’d best get them shod. The men in the stables should be able to recommend a blacksmith.’

  ‘No doubt they can tell you where to buy feed and supplies, too,’ Delphine said. ‘You know how to provision us better than I do, Cam.’

  When the money was tucked away Delphine laid out the writing-kit and began to grind fresh ink as Cam turned for the door. ‘I’ll see to it now, unless you have any further need of me,’ he said.

  ‘No, I just have this letter to write and then I’ll be off to the civil office.’

  Cam hesitated with his hand on the latch. ‘Delphi … I’m still not so sure that this is a good idea …’

  Delphine paused with the quill pen poised. ‘Cam, we’ve spent hours talking about this. Days, even.’

  ‘I know —’

  ‘Cam, Etenia is my oldest friend, and she’s going to hear some horrible things about me when word of what I’ve done gets back to her — if it hasn’t already. I swear I’m not going to tell her anything that could be used against us. I just want to tell her my side of the story, and let her know that I’m alright … and just maybe it will win us some support from the Sympath house. Etenia is a Sympath herself, and I know she’ll be moved by Sierra’s situation. Sympaths may not be warriors, but they’re still a force to be reckoned with. Do we really have so many friends we can afford to turn down any chance for a few more?’