Black Sun Light My Way

by Spurrier, Jo

  If that was the case then Kell had anticipated Isidro freeing himself. At once, Isidro froze, not daring to move. Could Kell know of his trick of absorbing power? Rasten must have told him — Rasten knew almost everything of what he’d learnt of mage-craft during his time as a slave.

  In that case, why had he left Isidro in a position from which he could free himself? It seemed to imply that he didn’t just anticipate this — he’d planned for it.

  What now? Isidro wondered.

  The sight of the water-skin was as much a torment as the throbbing device around his wrist. Isidro closed his eyes to spare himself, and opened his senses to the power coursing through the room.

  There was a concentration of energy against one wall — the wall on which the lantern-stone hung. As he explored the enchantment further, Isidro detected a shield bound against the stones, fuelled by the same ritual that drew power from the stone around his wrist. His own strength was being poured into the wall, and breaking through it would be a task akin to beating himself into submission.

  He should have expected as much. Isidro gingerly felt across the wires with the fingertips of his clumsy and useless right hand.

  Kell had taken the brace from his right arm. Isidro greeted the news glumly, another thing he’d more or less expected. The pieces of his secret weapon had been hidden alongside the splints. He’d known all along it was a poor hiding-place, but he’d been unable to come up with anything better. Everything else he’d considered had seemed too vulnerable to discovery or loss to one of Kell’s capricious whims. Isidro pushed it from his mind, and reached for the blasting-stone instead. He was grateful to have any weapon at all, and perhaps he could find another use for it.

  As he sat, mind empty apart from those idle thoughts, another tickle of power had slowly come to Isidro’s attention. He turned his mind to it, trying to track it down, but it faded like a wisp of steam. After a moment he was convinced he’d imagined it, and turned his attention back to the shielded wall, but as soon as he did it returned, an irritating little buzz, like a mosquito that falls silent when one arises to hunt it down.

  He’d felt something like it before, Isidro realised. That same maddening phantom of power, there one moment and gone the next. It felt just like the camouflage enchantment Delphine had recreated from Vasant’s texts. It had taken them an age to track it down, and that was with two of them searching for the cursed thing.

  He couldn’t tell just where it was, but that was part of the device’s protections. On open ground it could make for hours of frustration, but this chamber was tiny.

  Isidro ran his fingers through the loose earth, gathering up a handful and sifting it through his fingers, then turned to the water-skin. Checking it over carefully, he discovered a web of power wrapped over the vessel. It was a trap, intended to temporarily blind him with a flash of light, and as it was Isidro took a stinging slap from the unravelling power as he teased the threads apart. Once it was done he sniffed cautiously at the spout, but couldn’t tell if the water had been contaminated. It was possible that it was entirely clean, and somewhere Kell was amusing himself with the thought of Isidro not daring to drink when it was perfectly safe.

  On the other hand, perhaps it was not.

  Isidro sloshed a little water onto the floor, where it soaked into the yellow dust. He scooped up the dollop of mud and formed it into a ball. Turning in the direction that the tickling breath of power seemed most often to come from, he lobbed it at the wall.

  It hit with a splat, leaving a damp streak on the stone.

  Undeterred, Isidro turned to his left and tried again. This time, the clump of mud sailed right through.

  Right, Isidro said to himself. Right. Here we go. He didn’t have a sash to tuck the blasting-stone into — he was barefoot, wearing only shirt and trousers — so he tied a corner of his shirt into a knot, tucking the stone inside for safe-keeping. Minor workings might be possible with the enchantment throbbing at his wrist, but the complex act of making more blasters was beyond him. He could not afford to lose it.

  Once the stone was safe he opened his senses again, feeling for any other traps Kell had left to hinder his escape, but he found nothing other than the tickling distraction of the camouflage enchantment. At first Isidro simply couldn’t believe that Kell would devote so much time and effort into creating the decoy of the shielded wall, but leave the true exit unguarded. But in the end there was nothing for it — Isidro gritted his teeth, and stepped through the wall.

  By the time the sun rose, Sierra and Rasten were underground and in the shade, covered with yellow dust and grit from the stone pulverised as they cut down into the ruins. They took turns, one resting while the other worked, but shortly after Rasten took the lead once more in the spiralling tunnel, he stopped and pressed his palm to the stone with a frown. ‘Sirri, I think we’re there.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘You can’t feel that?’

  Sierra tossed her head and shrugged. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ Rasten, like Delphine, had tried to teach her about enchantments, but in each case her teacher soon gave up in favour of more productive lessons. Making enchantments, or reading the fine currents of energy bound up within them, made Sierra feel like a giant trying to thread a needle. She was as strong as a bear when her power ran high, but as a consequence she lacked any kind of subtlety or finesse.

  Rasten turned to her, shaking grit from his hair, and raised one eyebrow.

  He took her up against the wall, pressing her hard against the stone with one hand buried in her hair, reaching all the points of pleasure mingled with pain as only he could. Sierra dug her fingers into the pressure-points he had shown her, and with threads of power she bit deeper still, so that when he gasped and moaned against her there was no telling whether it was the pleasure or the pain that drew his cries. By the time they were done she was sated, riding so high on a wave of power that she was barely aware of the fresh bruises and scrapes from the rough stone, and when she looked at Rasten all she could think of was the power he had given her, the delicious crackling rush that lifted her above this world of struggle and dirt and pain. ‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

  Rasten pulled her into his arms and kissed her, hard and hungry still. The dirt encrusted on his sleeves stung the scrapes on her back, but Sierra felt only the thrill of power it sent to him and then spilled over into her.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Rasten murmured into her ear.

  As Isidro stumbled through the shield an awful noise surrounded him. It reverberated through the cavern, a raw and gut-wrenching sound like an animal bellowing in agony. It reminded him of the aftermath of a battle, as injured men screamed and howled, but this was just one voice, crying out over and over again.

  It took Isidro far too long to realise that the sound was him, caught in some sort of magical echo. He tried his best to ignore it, but between that and the awful throbbing of the device around his wrist, it was harder than ever to concentrate.

  From this side Isidro could see straight into his prison — from within it had appeared to be a perfectly sealed cell, but from here he could see it was little more than a niche. How long had Kell stood here, he wondered, looking on as Isidro writhed and screamed from the agony of the device? The thought filled him with such revulsion that he had to turn away.

  Isidro worried at first that Kell might be lurking nearby, but after careful exploration he felt certain that that was not the case. Of all the Blood-Mage’s enemies, Isidro was the least powerful and the smallest threat — he hadn’t even bothered to imprison him securely.

  All their gear was strewn around the chamber, heaped in untidy piles, but in the centre the ground-sheet had been laid out with an array of gear arranged upon it like a merchant’s offerings. Isidro pressed his lips together as he took in the things spread out so temptingly, along with the bands of power that surrounded them, defences far more powerful and more dangerous than those in his cell. Delphine had taught him the Akharian tr
ick of viewing power as lines of force, and he could see it clearly as a cage of energy wrapped around the display.

  At the centre of the spread was the other half of the device he wore around his wrist. If he could pick that up, the awful pain would stop, if only he could do so without triggering the trap. Beside the device was the brace, with the pieces of his secret weapon hidden alongside the splints. There were weapons as well — knives, a sword, even a crossbow, and dozens and dozens of stones, even some of the milky-white ones Delphine prized so highly.

  He couldn’t use the weapons anyway. The one thing he could use was what he would have constructed from the components concealed within his brace, and once again Isidro berated himself for not finding a better hiding-place. With an effort, he shoved that thought aside and began to examine the trap, trying to determine if there was any way he could dismantle it.

  After some careful study, he thought he’d found a weak point and reached for it with the finest thread of power he could manage. He deliberately made his probe frail, meaning to break it off the moment danger presented, but before Isidro even made contact something within the trap stirred and struck as swiftly as a snake. It coiled around his thread of power and then swarmed along it to latch onto him. Isidro tried to pull away, but it was too strong; it sank in and stripped away the energy he’d absorbed taking down Kell’s bonds.

  When he felt himself begin to panic, struggling like a beast in a net, Isidro forced himself to lie still and think. Once again, there was something familiar about this situation, and after a moment he placed it — Sierra had done this to him, back in the Spire. He had been unconscious when Rasten had coached Delphine through the technique of cutting the sap-threads and cauterising the wounds, but afterwards she had explained what she’d done.

  Isidro set about cutting himself free. It felt like he was carving away chunks of his own flesh, and at the end of it, all he could do was lie panting on the floor with all the energy gained in his escape lost. The gear he’d pinned all his hopes on lay within arm’s reach but utterly unobtainable on the other side of that life-sucking shield.

  The threads hadn’t sunk as deep as Sierra’s had, but he still had to cauterise the wounds left from cutting them out. Doing so while he lay so close to the trap would be suicide — as he lay there Isidro saw it reach for him with blindly questing threads. He hauled himself away, dragging himself across the yellow earth until he was out of reach, and then summoned the power to close the wounds. When it was done he could no longer deny the need to rest, and closed his eyes with his head pillowed on his good arm.

  How long he drifted, it was impossible to tell, but when Isidro woke again the echoing screams rang on unchanged, and he was tempted to crawl back behind the shield, which somehow blocked it out. It would be a coward’s act, to be sure, but what other use could he be? He lacked the power to play any part in a battle against Kell, and he couldn’t even disarm the traps Kell had left to taunt him. If only he’d been clever enough to find a way to keep his secret weapon, things might have worked out differently, but he’d failed there, too.

  The thought of the water-skin he’d left back behind the shield tempted him further, and out of shame Isidro bit his lip, and tasted blood. No, he would not play the coward. This might not be a natural cave, but he could taste moisture in the air. There had to be water somewhere. If he could just find a few mouthfuls to wet his throat, he would begin to think more clearly, he was sure of it.

  Isidro forced himself to his feet, turning towards the passage, but at his first step his foot struck something that rattled with a dull and metallic sound and almost sent him sprawling again. He glanced down to see the old cooking pot, almost burned through on the base and now dented from the impact of his bare foot. His toe was bleeding, but Isidro barely noticed that — all his attention was fixed on the iron pot. It was poor quality and rusted, but it was still iron, just like the fragments of swords and knives he’d painstakingly shaped and hidden between the splints.

  Iron, Isidro thought to himself. It doesn’t take much power to reshape metal.

  Isidro snatched up the pot and sat right there on the dirt, reaching deep within to gather the little power he had left. It isn’t much, but it might be enough, he thought as he touched the blasting-stone, grasping it like a talisman. He could do this. He could. He might have only one shot, but when the time came he would make it count.

  As the stones crumbled away to reveal the dark passage of the ruins, Sierra felt power pulse in the void beyond. In the darkness, a light flared, bubbling and swelling into a great jet of heat and flame that filled the cavern with an unearthly roar.

  She and Rasten both snapped up shields to catch the blast, but as Sierra’s flickering blue light overlapped with his seething, ruddy flame Rasten glared at her. ‘Pull back! I’ve got this, and we waste power by doubling up.’

  With a mutter, she did as he said. The jet seemed to last for an age as it hammered against Rasten’s shield. Once it faded they were left in darkness until Sierra created a globe of lightning and tossed it into the air, then clawed sweat-streaked hair away from her face. The heat of the blast had soaked into the walls, and this portion of the passage felt like a furnace.

  Rasten cast his own globe of light and stepped through the hole. The movement triggered another blast, and this time Sierra held back. She let Rasten take the brunt of it, but the heat was immense, as fierce as the blaze of a blacksmith’s forge. She added her own power to his, and when Rasten turned to snarl at her she snarled right back. ‘We’ll be roasted alive if we skimp, and I can always raise more power.’

  ‘If we have time,’ Rasten snapped, but then he was silent as Sierra counted long seconds until the blast ended. It was too hard to talk over the roar of power, and when it died, her ears were ringing.

  Then another noise cut through the stifling air, a dreadful howl like the screams of some wounded beast. Her guts went cold and hard as her hearing cleared enough to recognise those shrieks — she’d heard their like often enough in her years in the dungeons. It was the sound of a man screaming in agony, and as the cry dragged on, she realised that the voice was a familiar one, and it wrung her heart to hear.

  Sierra stepped around Rasten, turning her head this way and that as she tried to gauge the source of the sound. They’d broken through into a straight section of tunnel, but a little way to the right it branched into two, and to the left it turned a corner and vanished from sight. This was no natural cave, unlike the ones beneath the Spire — these tunnels were neat and regular, the walls built of stone blocks and the ceilings vaulted. Only the floor seemed natural, buried under soft yellow dirt sculpted by wind and cut here and there by dried rivulets. The screams echoed off the stone walls in such a confusion of sound Sierra couldn’t tell where they came from. She turned to Rasten. ‘Which way?’

  He frowned, peering through the darkness. The light did not reach far, and the passages beyond the branch swiftly faded into blackness.

  ‘Which way?’ Sierra demanded again.

  ‘I don’t know!’

  She turned left, heading down the single passage. ‘Then we try this one.’ She took a step — just a single step — and felt lines of force tangle around her feet. Power pulsed with a flash of heat, and Sierra snapped up her shield to catch another raging jet of flame, and once again counted seconds until it passed — ten, twenty, twenty-five. Then she began to move forward again, but Rasten caught her arm.

  ‘Sirri, don’t.’

  The scream rang out again, and there was no mistaking it for anything other than Isidro’s voice. It brought stinging tears to her eyes — she’d heard him cry out like that once, back before she even knew his name. He’d tried his best to control himself that day, to keep Kell from having the satisfaction, but exhaustion and the long hours of torment had worn him down. By the time Rasten had finished shattering the bones of his arm, he’d screamed himself hoarse.

  She yanked her arm free from Rasten’s grip, but within an i
nstant he had her again, this time digging his fingers into the nerves buried beneath the muscles. They were still linked by the ritual mark freshly scored into her back, and she felt power flowing into him from the burning of the pressure-points. ‘Sirri, stop,’ he growled in her ear. ‘Think. We need a plan. He’s torturing Balorica to draw us in, and he’s filled the tunnels with trip-lines to burn through our power. He’s laid a trap — we can’t go rushing into it.’

  Sierra felt at war with herself. She knew he was right, but every scream felt like a knife to her heart, and all she could think of was Isidro trapped in a nightmare made real. Finding himself helpless in Kell’s hands again had been his greatest fear. She tensed against Rasten’s grasp, willing herself to tear away, but unable to do so. The long months she had spent under his tutelage had conditioned her not to fight this kind of pain, but to switch off the part of her mind that cared that it hurt, to simply submit and wait for it to pass. There was nothing else she could do.

  After a moment Rasten let her go, and with the release of pressure her arms flooded with pins and needles. Sierra took a step away from him, and felt lines of force winding around her legs like cats. It would not take much more movement to set off another blast.

  ‘Sirri, we can’t play his game. He knows we’re here, and he wants to make us come to him. We should pull back, make him find us instead.’

  ‘Why would he? He has Isidro, and he’s gaining power from him with every moment. Isidro’s brought us here — he’s served his purpose. If we don’t act, Kell will kill him.’

  Rasten momentarily closed his eyes, dropping his head. ‘It … seems likely.’

  When Sierra made to pull away Rasten grabbed for her again, but this time she fended him off with a glowing shield that stung his hands with brilliant blue sparks.

  ‘By all the Gods, Little Crow, use your cursed wits! Kell knows Balorica has power, he knows he’s clever. He couldn’t take the chance that Isidro would turn on him and fight. If I were in Kell’s place I’d make sure he was incapacitated before this fight even began.’