Voices of Blaze

by H. O. Charles

  Kalad chewed his lip briefly. “But why… why kill Dorinna?”

  “As I said, I do not know. Interesting puzzling it out though, isn’t it?”

  He dropped into a nearby armchair, and pulled Mirel into his lap so that he could nuzzle her hair as he thought. It smelled of the jerberries she had used in the dye. “My mother told me that you killed many Calidellian soldiers-”

  “Those were lies,” Mirel said with a hiss.

  “Why would she lie to me about that?”

  “Because I have lain with your father. She was consumed by jealousy over it. Your father killed those men because of his madness and she covered it up. Then she raised her children upon lies, and conspired with your sister to imprison me. I was subdued, gagged, and the truth could never be told.”

  Kalad gripped her by the arms and forced her to look at him squarely. “My mother is not a liar!”

  “She told you your father was a hero, did she not?”

  “Many people told me that.”

  “And from where do you think they received that wisdom?” Mirel asked.

  Kalad shoved Mirel off his lap and began to pace the room. “If you believed my father was no hero, then why did you go to bed with him?”

  Mirel tilted her head in thought. Her voice was as calm as a mountain lake as she said, “Long lives lived as a powerful wielder can become lonely, Kal. I spent many years searching for an equally powerful kanaala.”

  “Perhaps you were looking for the wrong man.” He grabbed her roughly again, and forced another kiss on her lips. She was his now, and she would learn to see the world as he did. His father may have made mistakes, and may have been described as strange at times, but he was no murderer. He was a hero; heroes brought peace between warring nations, and they certainly did not kill without good reason.

  “It is a selfish thing for me to take a lover – a true lover,” Mirel said as she urged him toward the bed. “I have a duty to this world that must come before men, and I will kill you or allow you to die if I have to, Kalad. You must remember this.”

  “Fool woman. I would never put you second,” Kalad said, tearing open the buttons that ran down the side of her dress. He began raining kisses along the sliver of skin that was exposed, wishing that he could feel the fire upon his lips that had been stolen from her, and that she could feel the same from him. It did not detract from the desire he felt from her, however. Nothing – no crime nor folly or flaw could diminish that.

  Chapter 13

  Morghiad kicked at the leafless floor as he walked. The Law-keepers were fools and idiots and cruel with it! What right had they to send his Artemi to a place of darkness?! She was no longer theirs, and no longer deserving of their erroneous, ill-informed judgements! They had no right to control the lives of others, and certainly not the intelligence to do so with any competence.

  But Morghiad was furious with himself at how his meeting with them had proceeded. He could have attempted to control his temper at least a little, and he ought to have tried to gather more information from them before their discussion collapsed. He shook his head and growled under his breath; it was too late to put that right now, and time was running as free as his monsters had.

  With his mind focussed, it only took him a few steps to reach a gorinne pool. These shallow bodies of water, as he had learned, were the windows onto the many worlds that were tied to The Crux. Of course, the pool’s water was nothing like the normal water of his home. Instead it swelled, rose and fell in peculiar humps as if some restless creature rolled about beneath its surface. Had Artemi viewed his actions through one of these? He had to hope not.

  Morghiad leaned forward to look into the depths, and saw only mists and clouds. He tried to summon an image of Artemi in his mind’s eye, but even that did not produce anything helpful from the pool. Something more was needed. He reached out with a hand and touched the surface. It rippled suddenly, as if the liquid had become less viscous, and a moving image appeared.

  It was suffused with such darkness that Morghiad could barely make it out, and that had to be right for the Nightworld. Within it, a rather effeminate-looking man held something in his hand – a thing that exploded noiselessly. In front of him, another man, or perhaps it was a woman, fell to the ground, blood spurting from her middle. The exploding thing had to be a weapon of some kind - perhaps a tool to wield the Blazes. Strange that Morghiad could see no glow from it however, and perhaps it meant the Blazes were not visible in the Nightworld.

  He prodded at the pool for a while, cycling images from this strange world and trying to understand how he might find his way back from it again. Eventually, he found Artemi. Only… her face and body were different in a manner he could not quite identify. She looked to be poisoned from something too, or sick as animals became sick. Could that happen in this world?

  “Artemi?”

  Clearly the pool did not convey sound as it did images, for she did not seem to hear him.

  “Stay alive. I’m coming for you,” he said anyway. Blazes, but wherever she was did look shadowed. When he moved his gaze from the pool, his eyes settled upon a door that now stood beyond. Like all Crux doors, it had no handles or latches to speak of, but it was beyond black in colour. Things in The Crux ought not to have absorbed so much light. Not even Silar had appeared so… dark.

  Morghiad took a step toward the door, and then thought better of taking his white sword with him. Though it might have been useful against the curious weapons of the Nightworld, it would certainly have glowed like a torch there. The light from it was already enough of a problem in the Darkworld, and he imagined it would be blinding in this place. He unhitched it from his back and set the blade, complete with scabbard, onto the ground by a false tree. Then, he waited for the black door to open before him, and stepped through.

  It was a long while before he could see anything at all through the darkness, and even that was nothing more than a row of distant lights. It was cold here – a very different sort of cold from the icy bite of Kemen’s mountains, or the slice of Forda’s winds, or even the cold Morghiad had become accustomed to in his own skin. The air here felt emptier.

  He pulled his cloak closer and strode toward the glimmering lanterns that decorated the stone building in front of him. As he did so, he noticed that his fingers were unusually long, and that his cloak was not so much a cloak as a pair of… wings? That did not matter now. Artemi would be inside the building, and he felt his excitement grow at the thought of seeing her again. His heart ached for her now more than ever. He broke into a quiet jog as he approached, and it was only through this exertion that he noticed how different his body felt. It was lighter somehow, as if he no longer carried as much muscle upon his bones as before.

  Well, that would not be for long. He slowed his pace as he reached the entrance, and pushed open the huge, wooden doors to step into the darkness beyond. Inside, there was a great racket of machinery and hiss of pistons.

  “Artemi!” he called through the noise. The heavy scent of oil and burning coal filled his nose. “Artemi!” He stopped abruptly. Before him, some partially illuminated machinery pumped and hissed, with glowing metal plates stamped closed by bolts, air-filled bellows and great pipes that reached all the way to the murk of the ceiling. Morghiad had never seen anything like it. What could anything that complicated possibly do?

  He stepped forward to touch the surface of one of the pipes, but rapidly withdrew his hand when he felt the heat of it. It reminded him of the old boiler system in Cadra, but that had been far simpler than this. Morghiad blinked himself free of his own awe, and returned his thoughts to the business of Artemi. “Tem?”

  There was no reply, and upon instinct, Morghiad looked to the streams of Blaze within his mind. Only, they were entirely absent. Perhaps it made sense that a world without the fires would turn to machinery to solve its problems. King Acher had already pushed Cadra partway down that path when he had banished wielders, and no other country had seen their technology
accelerate as fast as Calidell had during that particular reign. Why would they need to? Even in Gialdin, Artemi and the other wielders had solved the problem of moving hot water around the palace by building a system formed entirely from Blaze Energy. There was no other way in which they could have moved so much water in and out of the cisterns that lay beneath the city.

  Morghiad made a note to himself to find out more about this world when he had the opportunity, and continued on his search of the premises. When he reached the door at the opposite end of the building, he had neither seen nor heard any sign of his wife. He frowned, walked between the machinery again, and then stepped outside.

  He could see more now that his eyes had adjusted to the impossible darkness of the place, and it was clear that he was in a working area of a city rather than a residential one. Blackened alleyways spidered into the night around him, and more barn-sized buildings, carved from cones of rock huddled against this one. It seemed odd that he had not encountered them upon his arrival, and even more peculiar that he had not met a single, living person on the ground either. He squinted up at the sky. It was black as pitch, but was there…? There was something flying around up there.

  He began to tour the outside of the building, and very soon he spied a pair of feet poking out from a doorway. They were too lumpen and hairy to be Artemi’s, and as Morghiad approached, it became clear that those feet belonged to a man. There were more bodies curled up about him. A strand of reddish hair trailed across the arm of one man-woman, and Morghiad traced it to its owner.

  She was covered in dirt, half-buried amidst the other ragged-winged people who had crammed into the doorway with her, and she looked… unwell. “Artemi?” Morghiad said softly.

  She did not stir.

  Morghiad reached into the mess of arms and legs, and succeeded in extracting her limp form from among them. She was definitely warm and breathing, though she did not seem very close to consciousness. He held her tightly, and carried her away from the building toward an area that looked more lived-in. Ahead of him, he could see more winged people stood like hunchbacks with their hands dragging upon the ground. They milled about and talked to one another as if nothing were amiss with the night.

  How was it that she had ended up in this condition when there were people so near to her? Was this a normal state here, or did they simply not care? He decided he would think of ways to make them pay later, and carried her to a building that looked to be the nearest thing to a public house. In truth, he would rather have taken her straight back to The Crux, but finding the gateway again would be a mission for the daytime rather than the night. Besides, he needed to rest.

  When he arrived at the tavern, he soon discovered that he looked like an oddity in this place, and that he sounded like one too. Morghiad did his best to communicate that Artemi required help, but found himself ushered toward an outbuilding in the proprietors’ courtyard rather than a comfortable room. It was a meagre act of charity, but he had to make do with what he was given. At the very least, this was a roof over their heads, and that soon proved useful as tar-coloured mist swirled in around them.

  Morghiad set his wife down upon a stack of grain sacks, and began to check her body for injuries or evidence of poison. He found nothing that would indicate her condition, other than the pallor of her skin. Judging by the raggedness of her clothing, or what was left of it, and the filth all over her, she had been like this for some time. “What happened to you?”

  Artemi made a quiet sound in her throat, but it was nothing approaching a word. Blazes, but even in this peculiar, shadowed and twisted body she was a handsome woman! Morghiad could still see how the fires shone from her, even in their weakened capacity here.

  He removed his doublet, which appeared to have transformed into a tabard, squeezed into what space was available on the sacks and wrapped his arms about her. She smelled strange here, and the scents of the building were pungent in the extreme. Perhaps that had something to do with the balance of this place: feebler light and stronger smells. Was there a lightless world out there - one with nothing to illuminate it at all, but filled with odours robust enough to knock a man into unconsciousness? All things seemed possible.

  Morghiad soon fell asleep from exhaustion, and when he awoke again, there was still no light to work its way under the doors or through the windows. Artemi stirred in his grasp.

  “Are you awake?” he asked.

  She mumbled a little, but it did sound very much as if she had said, “Morghiad?”

  He brushed aside her hair and regarded her in the little light that was available. Her skin did tend to catch that light. “It’s me. I’ve come to take you home. Are you well enough to travel with me?”

  “Home,” she repeated.

  “Yes – Gialdin, Calidell, the Darkworld. All the places you love. Medi is looking forward to seeing you again, and Kalad. He has some news for you. And your father, Sindra and Sidav, The Hunter and everyone else. Perhaps we’ll even bump into Silar on the way.”

  “Morghiad…”

  “I came looking for you. I’ve missed you so much.” His eyes were beginning to feel hot with tears.

  “Morghiad, I- I betrayed you. I’m so sorry.”

  That stopped his thoughts where they were. “Betrayed me how?” he asked, though he knew precisely what she meant.

  “With a – a man. I didn’t- I… It was wrong. I was wrong to do it.” Her voice wavered with the last words, as if she were crying. “I’m sorry.”

  Morghiad’s body had become numb, and his mind was rendered sluggish by its attempts to process her words. How was he supposed to feel? Angry? Jealous, perhaps? None of those emotions presented themselves, and not even the Shade creatures had anything to say on the matter. And even if any anger did come to him, what right did he have to feel it after what he had done? “Why did you do it?” he eventually spluttered.

  “I wanted to know what it would be like. You had known Mirel and might know others in the future, and I was jealous. I was angry at what the world had denied me and allowed for you. It seems so stupid. It was stupid.” Artemi’s words were much clearer now, which meant she was becoming more lucid.

  Curiosity and indignation. Of all the aspects of her nature to drive her to do unruly things, those had to be the two most likely to land her in trouble. Morghiad could have laughed heartily at how Artemi-like her behaviour was, if only it had not involved something that she had promised to him alone. But then, he had never truly possessed any part of her. He had always known that was impossible. A man could not own fire, and grasping it in his fingers would only burn them.

  “None of that matters now,” he said to her, “It’s time for you to come home. Do you think you can stand?”

  “I need… I need… taqqa,” she croaked.

  “What is that? Will it make you better?”

  She smiled as if in a dream. “Yesss.”

  “How did you get like this, Tem?”

  She gazed at him through lazy eyes and bit her lip. “I upset Rav. He thought I was his, and when I did what I did, he made sure that I was banished from the home he had provided, and he made sure my lessons ended. And he cut my supply of taqqa, but he didn’t realise how much I needed it - how much I needed the light. I tried to show him. I tried…” Her voice broke off in a whimper.

  “Hush,” Morghiad said in as soothing a tone as he could manage. Blazes, who was this Rav character?! Another one he would have to add to his list of men who had brought harm to Artemi? “What is this taqqa? Where do I find it for you?”

  “Oh, it is the most perfect substance on this blaze-forsaken world! When it enters your body, it gives you such strength, and the dreams… the beautiful dreams!”

  Morghiad felt his forehead creasing into a series of frown lines. Aside from the curiosity that had landed her in trouble, this was not the wilful Artemi who had left him at Gialdin’s gate. This place had done terrible things to her. “Where do I find it?”

  “Search the bins. The
re is always a box with a little left in it.”

  Search the bins. Right, well, if that was what she needed, then that was what he would do for her. It wouldn’t be the first time Lord Calyrish of Haeron had rooted through bins for her. He opened the door to peer through the crack. “It’s still night out there,” he said quietly, though perhaps that would be the best time for digging into refuse.

  “This is the day time.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s quite a nice day, today,” his wife said. “Clear skies. You can see the sun.”

  He stroked her hair and smiled thinly at her. She needed to return to the Darkworld as soon as she was well enough; the airs there would put her right in no time at all.

  He stole away into the darkness to search for the items he needed, and was surprised to see many more winged individuals hunched and skulking about the streets than there had been before. Some did not have wings, though they looked as if they might soon grow into them, while others had great flaps of skin that dragged on the floor behind them. Morghiad glanced back at his own, and saw that they were large enough to drag on the floor by quite some distance.

  He did his best to tuck them up so that they did not become dusty, and resumed his search for the substance Artemi so needed. Along the way, he saw more of their kind slumped against walls and passed out on the street. If anything, they looked like drunkards outside a tavern. Was this any different? Perhaps Artemi was nothing more than very drunk indeed.

  In any case, Morghiad soon found a hardwood casing that contained a few drips of sweet-smelling liquid inside of it, and he returned with it to his wife. Along his journey, he also found several small, square and metal objects that he presumed were coins, a bucket that he was able to fill with water, and a sponge that did not appear to be too filthy.