The Labyrinth of Flame

by Courtney Schafer

  Kiran shouted at them, “I am the bearer of Shaikar’s favor, not you.” Ruslan had always dismissed gods as fables for the weak-minded, saying that akheli—blood mages, as the untalented called them—were the closest thing to gods that humankind would ever know. The creatures known as demons had proved to be real, but Kiran had seen no evidence of the divine. Yet if these nathahlen had such faith in Shaikar, he would use it.

  “Go,” Kiran ordered the clanfolk. “Now! Or every one of you will feel Shaikar’s wrath.”

  The ring of space around him widened. Men and women alike edged back up the slope toward the rocks. But a high voice rang out, biting as a blade.

  “Oh, you are favored of Shaikar. I do not deny it.”

  Silently, the sallow-faced crowd flowed apart to reveal the young godspeaker. She held a long, curved knife as black as obsidian, and unlike her kin, she didn’t look at all afraid. Only dismayingly resolute.

  She called to Kiran: “Why else should the keepers of the sacred fire yearn for you so deeply that their desire touched my dreams?” Her gaze flicked to the corpses, and her teeth showed briefly in an expression far from a smile. “A viper in the guise of a lamb. That, the flame did not see fit to show me. Yet I shall not turn aside from the hunt.”

  The only part he fully understood was the last, but that threat was clear enough. “You’ll gain only death,” Kiran warned. Curse the woman! If he felled her as he had the others, his barriers were certain to fail.

  The wizened trader muttered something to the godspeaker. She shook her head in dismissal and laughed, bright and wild. “Favor comes only to those bold enough to seize it. So, come.” She stared straight into Kiran’s eyes and spread her arms in invitation. “If my dream was false—if you already act in Shaikar’s name, and he does not wish you returned to his sanctum—then strike me down.”

  The clanfolk tensed, looking from her to Kiran. Surprise scattered Kiran’s thoughts. Returned to…? Did she speak of Ruslan? The power seething inside him pressed all the harder against his barriers. Light sparked in his vision, his dizziness growing. It would be so easy to do as she challenged him.

  “For fuck’s sake, stop goading him.” The voice was Dev’s, coldly furious. “Do you love Shaikar so much you want your entire clan consigned to his hells? My friend is trying to show you idiots a little mercy. Trust me, you should run while you still can.”

  The godspeaker raised her black brows and put a slim hand to the charm at her throat. “Is it mercy he shows? Or weakness?” She looked at Kiran. “If you had the power to strike us all down, I think you would have wielded it at the first. There is more than one way to offer you to the flame.”

  She charged straight at Kiran. Caught off guard, he barely managed to dodge the first slash of her knife. Scrambling backward, he tripped over a corpse and fell. She sprang forward and stabbed again, so swiftly he could hardly see the blur of the blade. He rolled the only way he could, toward her.

  She danced aside with a hiss. She’d guessed enough to fear his touch, but she didn’t know his handicap.

  Beyond the siren song of the power in his head, Kiran sensed a faint, contained pulse of magic. A spell, bound in the godspeaker’s blade. His barriers were barely holding against the fire inside him. If they were put under more strain by resisting a spell, failure was all the more certain. He had to dampen the blaze inside him. But how, without casting?

  A chorus of yells, and Dev hurtled past to slam into the godspeaker. They crashed to the stone in a tangle of limbs. Dev grabbed the godspeaker’s knife hand and hammered it against the rock, but she wrenched free of his grip and rolled to her feet. Before Dev could regain his own footing, she kicked him hard in the ribs. Dev’s charms flared silver, their magic warding his flesh from harm, but the force of the blow sent him sprawling. The godspeaker leaped at Kiran.

  The brief respite had given him a vital instant to think. There was indeed a way to use up the power burning in his blood without spellcasting. The risk was frighteningly high, but he must take it.

  The godspeaker struck with her spelled blade. This time, Kiran didn’t dodge. He stepped straight into her thrust.

  Her knife bit deep into his side. Pain stole his breath, but he ignored it, throwing every scrap of will and concentration into holding his barriers. She yanked the blade out—and the magic trapped within him leapt to answer his body’s scream of need. Flesh and muscle knit back together in a silent, secret conflagration of power. His barriers wavered, thinning. Through sheer force of will, Kiran held them solid. A grating ache grew in his head, warning of overstrain, even as the sharper physical pain vanished from his side. Only a guttering glow remained of the former blaze in his blood, and his barriers remained safely in place.

  Blackness bloomed at the edges of his vision. He lunged, desperate, snatching for the godspeaker. He had to take her life before she stabbed him again. He had no reserves left to heal a second wound. His barriers would fall and expose him to Ruslan.

  She was too fast. She darted out of his reach, the obsidian knife held high, the blade scarlet with his blood. Beyond, Dev had disappeared in a heaving knot of clansmen. Faint, brief flashes of power struck Kiran’s barriers—Dev’s defensive charms, warding off impacts. How much longer before the charms failed, all their stored magic expended? Kiran had to end this, now.

  He straightened so the rent in his shirt showed clean, unmarked skin, and beckoned the godspeaker with all the infuriating arrogance he could muster. “Care to try again?”

  She only retreated farther, a savage grin on her pointed face. A wash of indigo shimmered over her knife. His blood soaked into the blade and disappeared, leaving the surface once more an unmarked, glossy black. She whirled and yelled a string of incomprehensible words.

  Every one of the clanfolk turned and ran. They retreated in a silent rush back into the boulders, and the godspeaker with them. Within moments, the rock bowl was empty but for Kiran, a scattering of corpses, and a disheveled, wild-eyed Dev.

  “What the fuck did you do to them?” Dev shouted at him. “Tell me you didn’t cast!”

  “No!” Kiran shook off his own stunned incredulity. “She stabbed me and I healed it, but I used only the power I already held within me. I cast nothing outside my barriers.”

  Dev let out a ragged breath, his eyes closing briefly.

  Kiran took an unsteady step toward him. “You’re all right? They didn’t…?”

  “Oh, I’m terrific.” Dev made a noise too ugly to be a laugh. “Whatever inspired that Shaikar-loving bitch and her crew to take off instead of pounding us to slag, I say we seize the chance to get the hell out of here. But first…” He knelt and ran his hands over a corpse in a rough, hasty search. “I need to see if they carried anything useful.”

  Kiran looked away from the dead man’s staring eyes. He fumbled at the sash around his waist. “The godspeaker’s blade had a containment charm. To hold and preserve an enemy’s blood.” Blood was the best key for targeting spells, whether the spell was charm-bound or mage-cast.

  “You think she means to spark some charm against you from a nice safe distance? Your amulet should stop any spells from reaching us—right?” At Kiran’s nod, Dev gave a relieved grunt and hurried to search the next corpse. “Speaking of spells, you’re absolutely certain Ruslan didn’t feel you heal that knife wound. Or kill these men.” He glanced at the other bodies, his mouth a hard line.

  He didn’t say, so much for your promise, but Kiran heard the accusation hanging in the desert silence.

  “No, I…I held my barriers, but…” He couldn’t get the sash untied. The sunlight seared his vision. His knees gave way, a dangerous trembling growing in his muscles. “Dev. The drug—I need—”

  “Kiran!” Strong hands caught his shoulders, and concerned eyes peered into his own. “All that magic, of course. Here…”

  Deft fingers pulled his sash free and rescued the warded vial from the pouch sewn inside his shirt. Liquid dripped onto his tongue, the familiar,
subtly sour taste. Kiran swallowed, reaching to grip the vial, but Dev pulled it away.

  “No more. Gods, Kiran, we have so little left…come on, get up. Not safe to stay here.”

  With Dev’s aid, Kiran staggered upright. His head still throbbed, the glow of his ikilhia frighteningly erratic, but at least he no longer felt at risk of a seizure. Still, to come so close to collapse after so small a use of power was deeply dismaying. He’d hoped that after long weeks of avoiding the least hint of magic and dutifully taking regular drug doses, his body and ikilhia would have returned to some semblance of proper balance. In Ninavel, he’d spellcast repeatedly for days without the drug and suffered no worse than increasing nausea and dizziness. It hadn’t been until he helped Ruslan cast channeled magic in the Cirque of the Knives that his ikilhia became so disrupted as to send him into convulsions. But then, in Ninavel he’d started out wholly healthy, not struggling to recover from an imbalance so great he’d nearly died.

  Not for the first time, he cursed the cleverness of the Alathians. They’d known about the irrevocable link Ruslan had forged between Kiran’s body and magic. Ruslan had meant to ensure instinctive healing, yet the Alathians had found a way to twist that very protection into the instrument of Kiran’s death. Without the drug, his bodily humors slid out of balance such that the touch of magic drove his ikilhia toward dissolution. But Kiran couldn’t stop his body from drawing on his magic in an attempt to restore balance, hastening the very death it sought to prevent.

  Dev left his side to snatch up their abandoned packs. Kiran glanced back at the ring of corpses. An echo of the heady joy he’d felt while their lives coursed in his veins rolled through him. Kiran swallowed, nauseated. Dev had seen his exhilaration. That flinty look in his eyes afterward…

  Kiran stumbled closer to Dev. “I had to kill those men. I had to frighten the rest badly enough they’d retreat and leave us alone. Even if they only intended to take us captive, we couldn’t afford the delay.”

  Yet as he spoke, doubt crept in. If he’d taken only enough ikilhia from the first men to render them unconscious, he would have had the capacity to take from the godspeaker without needing her to stab him first. More, the clanfolk might have believed their kin’s collapse merely the effect of a powerful defensive charm. Instead, he had revealed himself beyond a doubt as a mage, and further diminished his scant supply of the drug.

  “You did what you had to.” Yet the line of Dev’s jaw tightened, as if he shared Kiran’s doubt. His stride quickened. “We need to discuss what exactly they meant to do and why. Later, when we’re not in the open.”

  Of course, yes. Foolish to waste time worrying over Dev’s reaction and second-guessing a decision impossible to change. Better to puzzle over the godspeaker’s words and actions, but between the ache in his head and the lingering sense of disconnection, it was so difficult to think properly. Kiran needed all his concentration to walk in something approximating a straight line. His legs still wanted to fold beneath him.

  He couldn’t get the sight of the bodies out of his head. Curse it, the dead men had attacked him. He need not feel ashamed of fighting back.

  He tried to banish the empty-eyed corpses by picturing Lena, standing slim and straight-backed in her Alathian uniform in the cabin that’d been his temporary prison after they defeated Ninavel’s enemy. The Council believes you have proved yourself too dangerous to live. I believe you are our best hope of stopping Ruslan. Yet I would not break my oaths and help you escape if I did not also believe you have the strength of soul to choose a different path than the one he taught you.

  But what chance did he have of stopping Ruslan without magic? Kiran had no experience with more innocent methods of casting. He couldn’t think of Lena without hearing her scream of pain as he’d burned away the memories that would have branded her a traitor. He’d destroyed them at her request, but that didn’t make the memory of her agony at his hands any less terrible.

  More disturbing yet was the fear that if she saw his soul now, she’d regret ever freeing him. It wasn’t remorse for the clansmen’s deaths that left Kiran hollow and cold despite the heat baking off the sandstone underfoot. No; what haunted him was how easy it had been to take their lives.

  That, and how badly he longed to taste that fire again.

  * * *

  (Dev)

  I hustled Kiran toward the dark slash of the crevice. This close, the slabs were towering bulwarks of rust-red rock that appeared as formidable as anything we’d climbed in the Whitefires. Thank Khalmet, Kiran’s stride had steadied into a reasonable pace as opposed to his initial turtle-slow stagger. The drug was doing its job, then. I’d worried that I hadn’t given him a big enough dose, and we’d have to use up still more of our fast-vanishing supply. I already wasn’t sure we had enough remaining to last until we reached Prosul Akheba.

  I glanced at the boulders lining the opposite side of the bowl. Nothing. The desert was so silent and still, you’d think the clanfolk had vanished straight into Shaikar’s hells.

  If only. Whatever the clan’s reason for running off—something that still made little sense to me—the godspeaker must’ve left scouts watching from the rocks. Thankfully, spying on us was about to get a lot more difficult.

  I slung off my pack. The crevice ahead was so narrow I’d get stuck fast, otherwise. I’d have to carry both our packs by their straps.

  Kiran reached to take his pack, but I shook my head. “Save your strength. You’ll need it. I can haul both.” He might be moving faster, but his cheeks were sunken beneath the sharp lines of his cheekbones, his hands trembled, and he was squinting like he had a skull-buster of a headache.

  A far cry from the savage joy he’d displayed as he uncoiled from a pile of dead clansmen, wearing a grin as vicious as any I’d seen on Ruslan. I had to admit the godspeaker had guts, taking Kiran on. I’d wanted to run, and he was on my side.

  But then, unlike the clanfolk, I knew what magic Kiran was really capable of if he ever abandoned his conscience. I was supposed to keep him from that, or so Lena had asked of me in return for helping us escape Alathia. Terrific job I was doing so far. We hadn’t even reached civilization yet, and he’d stolen the lives of five men. Not that I minded the clansmen dying. Hell, I’d have killed them myself if I was able. It was Kiran’s delight in the taking that set my skin crawling.

  “Did you find anything on the bodies?” Kiran’s head stayed bent, his shoulders hunched. Out of simple exhaustion, or was it guilt? I couldn’t deny I hoped for the latter.

  “Not much. Just some knives, and one had a sleepfast charm.” More’s the pity. I’d known the chances were slim I’d discover any clue as to the godspeaker’s intentions, but it would’ve been nice to recoup the worth of the charms and gems I’d given that snake-tongued oldster.

  At least we had the water. I took a quick swig from a skin. I might not be as bad off as Kiran, but I felt far from fine. The magic in the warding charms had started to fail while the clansmen were doing their best to stomp me into jelly, and I had the bruises to prove it.

  I offered the skin to Kiran, but he waved it aside. “Lena told me the drug works best if I don’t eat or drink for some time after taking a dose. I had enough water from emptying my skins before the trade that I can wait.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” I warned. “Push too hard in the desert without water and salt, and sun sickness sneaks up on you quick.” In which case, I was guessing his body would draw on his magic to recover, and I’d end up pouring yet more of our dwindling drug supply down his throat.

  “The first part of the route is in shadow. I can wait a little more.” Kiran was wan but resolute.

  Well, his call to make. I hefted our packs and slid into the slot. Right away we had to pass a succession of rocks lodged between the slot walls. Some could be squeezed under, others we had to clamber over. I tossed packs where I couldn’t haul them, setting my teeth against the protests of bruised muscles, and showed Kiran how to brace his back agai
nst one wall, his feet against the other, and shuffle his way up and over obstacles. He tackled it all with the same stubborn determination I remembered from our first trip through the Whitefires.

  When the slot pinched into a crack so narrow only an ant could continue, I led a precarious ascent up the slanted sidewall to reach the slab’s vertical back side. Beyond was an undulating expanse formed of broad ribs and fluted fins of rock, split by deep, yawning crevices, as if the rock had been scored by the talons of some immense storybook dragon.

  “Do you see…any sign of…clanfolk?” Kiran was panting so hard from the effort of climbing that I feared he might tumble off the ledge. I gripped the rope still knotted around his waist and steadied him.

  “Not so far.” I saw no sign of movement anywhere, only stone and sky. I thrust a waterskin at Kiran. “Drink, for Khalmet’s sake. Before you keel over.”

  Kiran obeyed. By the time he stoppered the skin again, his breathing had calmed down enough I felt safe in letting go of him.

  I said, “Don’t suppose you’ve thought up any ideas on why the clanfolk ran. Or why they attacked in the first place.”

  Kiran’s expression darkened. “I’ve no idea why they ran. As for the attack, Ruslan could have cast to send a vision of me to that godspeaker. But if he’s learned of my escape from Alathia, why wouldn’t he simply seek to break the amulet’s warding and reclaim me that way? It’s not like him to trust a task to nathahlen.”

  Yeah, I’d seen Ruslan’s utter contempt for the untalented, not to mention his monumental confidence in his own skill. I had my own theory on the godspeaker’s motive, but it was one I wanted to consider more before mentioning to Kiran, especially with him in such rough shape. The slab’s back side was formed of stacked, jutting layers of sandstone that provided excellent holds for a downclimb, but the descent to the nearest rock rib would still tax Kiran’s concentration. I wanted him focused, not distracted and upset.