The Labyrinth of Flame

by Courtney Schafer

  “Only thing I’m certain of is that bloodthirsty bitch isn’t done with us yet,” I said. “The more ground we can cover before sundown, the better. You ready to press on?”

  He squared his shoulders and nodded.

  I looped a bight of rope around a protruding knob of rock in preparation for belaying his downclimb. “Once we’re on those fingers of rock, walking along the crests shouldn’t be too hard, but we’ll have some excitement when we have to cross between them.”

  Kiran groaned. “What you call ‘exciting’ makes sane men want to run away screaming.”

  I grinned at him, and for a brief, blessed moment, the shadow that lay between us melted away. He was once again the friend I remembered, not the mage I feared. “Oh, quit whining. This’ll be nothing compared to what we survived last week. Remember that ten-pitch overhang on the ascent up to Jade Col?”

  Kiran shuddered. “Don’t remind me. I see it enough in my nightmares.”

  I chuckled; that overhang had been the first time I’d ever heard him curse. Awkwardly but fervently, with epithets so colorful I knew he’d learned them from me.

  “This won’t be half so nasty,” I promised. He gave me a disbelieving look, but faced the rock in preparation to climb.

  Sadly, once we made it off the slab, I found my promise had been far too optimistic. The crevices between rock ribs were so deep their bottoms were lost in ominous darkness, and only a few gaps were narrow enough to step over. Crossing between the humped ridges of rock meant traversing in search of a spot possible to jump. Not easy jumps, either. I had to tie into the rope, run to gain momentum, and fling myself across a chasm while Kiran braced himself as best he could with the rest of the rope in case I missed the landing. Following me, Kiran all too often did botch the landing, sliding and scraping down the crevice wall until the rope caught him short and I could haul him back up.

  All of it was strenuous, sweaty work that left my abused muscles screaming. I constantly scanned the barren stonescape for movement, and strained my ears for the telltale scrape of footsteps. I saw only skittering lizards, heard only the occasional croaking call of a raven. At least, I hoped it was a raven and not some clever, hard-climbing clansman signaling his kin.

  Shadows lengthened and merged. The hue of the rocks changed from copper to a lambent, burning orange in the rich light of approaching sunset. I stopped at the edge of a great gash in the stone, where a thirty-foot overhang dropped into a proper gorge instead of a narrowing chasm. Along the bottom, smooth swells of stone alternated with drifted dunes. The bristling, stiff-leaved rosettes of swordplants sprouted from crevices, along with the occasional skeletal spinebrush.

  Kiran trudged up to join me, his head hanging low and his shirt soaked through with sweat. I told him, “I’ll lower you off the overhang, climb down after, and then we can travel easier ground for a while.” The gorge ran southeastward, the general direction of Prosul Akheba. If Khalmet favored us, it’d also be the right direction to take us out of the black-daggers’ territory.

  “Easier ground sounds good,” Kiran said with a weary twitch of a smile.

  No kidding. A burning ache had taken up residence not only in my bruised ribs, but my gut—some asshole of a clansman had gotten in a good kick there. My mouth was as dry as an alkali flat and I had the start of my own skull-busting headache. I didn’t have any pitons to set a proper belay station. I’d have to lower Kiran down the cliff using a braced body belay, and his full weight would be on the rope the whole time. My ribs groaned at the very thought.

  Best to get it over with. The lowering went smoothly, if unpleasantly. But it was the climb down that truly kicked my aching ass. It should’ve been easy. I’d found a nice, fist-width vertical crack to use for feet and hands. Child’s play compared to clinging to fingernail-thin nubbins of granite on the face of some icy peak. But my limbs felt like lead weights, and chunks of sandstone kept crumbling out of the crack when I tried to wedge my feet. Twice I had to stop and hang off locked arms while waves of dizziness assaulted me.

  By some miracle of Khalmet, I made it to the bottom of the cliff without falling. I threw myself down on a gritty slab of ochre stone. Kiran silently offered me a waterskin and a strip of jerky. The gorge had long been in shadow, the sun blocked by the cliffs, and both air and ground felt blessedly cool.

  “A quick rest, then we’ll keep going until the light fails.” I probably just needed the salt in the jerky. I should’ve had some before the climb, but I’d been in too much of a damn hurry. Should’ve listened to my warning to Kiran.

  He nodded. “That sleepfast charm you found, may I see it?”

  I waved a hand at my pack without bothering to speak. He dug inside and pulled out the copper circlet of the charm. He sat silent for a moment, turning it over in his hands.

  “The first man to reach me tried to use this on me. They meant to capture, at least at first, but…” He looked at me, his expression strained and his eyes shadowed. “It’s like I said before. I can’t make sense of why Ruslan would choose this tactic.”

  Well. Time to bring up my own theory, now we were on easier terrain.

  “Maybe Ruslan’s got nothing to do with it. That bit the godspeaker said about the ‘keepers of the sacred fire’? Reminds me an awful lot of things the demon mentioned.” Child of fire, the demon had called itself, and had spoken of the halls of flame. I eyed Kiran, who’d gone as stiff as the dagger-sharp leaves of the swordplant behind him.

  “Have you remembered anything more about this temple Ruslan supposedly stole you from when you were a kid?”

  “I told you, the wall in my mind is too strong. I can’t reach those memories without drawing on some stronger source of magic than what I naturally possess. Even if I…I took ikilhia, as I did today—you saw how the healing affected me. I’d need far more power to break such a deeply entrenched mental warding, and afterward I’d be left in far worse condition. The risk is too great while we have so little of the drug.”

  He’d been spouting excuses like this all the way through the mountains. It wasn’t like I knew enough of magic to argue with his logic, which sounded rational enough. Yet his averted eyes and his clenched fists told a different story. He was scared shitless of what those memories might contain. I couldn’t entirely blame him, given that he was still reeling from the shock of discovering what Ruslan had done to him. I’d played it soft with him these last weeks, even when his reluctance made me want to shake him until his teeth rattled. I’d figured we had enough to worry about in reaching Prosul Akheba. But after today’s disaster, I was done dancing around his fears.

  “Fine, you can’t yet bust straight through to those memories. But don’t sit there and tell me you remember nothing of your life before Ruslan got hold of you. You remembered something in the Cirque of the Knives.” One sentence from a glassy-eyed, feverish Kiran in a foreign tongue I’d never heard, and the demon had backed off in the midst of savaging Kiran’s mage-brother Mikail and agreed to leave us be. You have blood-right, he’d told Kiran. They are yours to kill.

  Kiran flinched. I quashed sympathy and pressed harder.

  “You know how much we need this. It could be our best chance against him.” The demon hadn’t exactly seemed pleased with Ruslan. He’d said Ruslan deserved death for taking Kiran from that temple, and had spoken of “red-horned hunters” that would chase Ruslan down. Whatever those hunters were, if we could somehow lead them to Ruslan before Ruslan managed to talk the demons into forgiving his theft and allying with him instead—hell, I’d snatch at any hope I could get.

  Kiran was gripping the sleepfast charm as if he meant to snap it in two. “Everything that happened after we destroyed Vidai’s wards is all muddled, like some horrible fever-dream. I get only—only flashes of clarity, nothing of use to us—”

  “You’d fucking better try harder,” I snapped. “Think on this: if that godspeaker’s dream was demon-sent, what might a demon do with your blood in its hands?”

  Kir
an went so white under the grime I thought he might faint. “I don’t know! I—” He pressed his hands to his eyes and drew in a long breath. I expected another round of mulish stonewalling. Instead he said, “Most of what I recall after we released the demon is fear. Terror deeper than any I’d ever felt with Ruslan, so strong I could barely breathe. Then the demon attacked Mikail, and I was so certain Mikail would die, so desperate to save him—those words I said just burst out of me. But when I try to remember what the words meant, or why I knew them, or anything of demons or temples—it hurts, like—like holding my hand in magefire while my flesh chars away. Yet at the same time I hear an echo of Ruslan’s voice, urging me to keep trying, whispering over and over that I must remember, and that’s what frightens me most. What if remembering helps him somehow?”

  I got a chilling flash of the last time I’d seen Ruslan: striding forward as the Alathians’ translocation spell took effect, his eyes locked on Kiran, mouthing the word remember. Gods only knew what subtle, nasty spellwork he’d cast on Kiran through their mark-bond in that final instant. Did he want Kiran to remember, or had he anticipated Kiran’s fears, knowing that urging him on would make Kiran balk all the harder?

  I wished my mind didn’t feel so sluggish. “Doesn’t matter what Ruslan might want,” I said at last. “Kiran, we have to know. Otherwise we’re running blind, and today proved how dangerous that is. If that godspeaker’s motives have anything to do with demonkind, we’ve got to be prepared. Ruslan’s got a thousand ways of finding out more about the demons. Right now, we’ve only got you.”

  Kiran pulled his knees up to his chest and dropped his head onto them. “I know it,” he said, muffled. “When we stop for the night, I’ll try again. I didn’t lie to you. I can’t break the wall, not properly. But when my ikilhia is badly disrupted, as it was in the cirque, as it is to a lesser extent now—every part of my mind is weakened, including the block. If I push hard enough, I might get a—a glimpse, as I must have then.”

  “Trying is all I ask.” I levered myself to my feet, unable to suppress a groan as sore muscles protested. “We need to get moving.” The opposite cliffs were fully in shadow, the sky deepening toward indigo, but we’d have another hour before it got too dark to see.

  Dizziness rocked me again when I lifted my pack. I’d hoped our rest break would help, but the burning in my chest and gut hadn’t diminished a whit. Shaikar take those clansmen—and the Alathians, for making such worthless defensive charms. At least we’d be walking on relatively flat ground instead of scrambling over endless rocks. I set my jaw and started off.

  I made it all of ten steps before a vicious cramp seized my stomach. When it passed, I found myself on hands and knees in the sand, coughing up sour strings of bile.

  “Dev?” Running footfalls, and Kiran knelt beside me. “What’s wrong?”

  My breath hissed out through my teeth as another cramp racked me. The waterskins tied to Kiran’s pack loomed large in my vision. An awful certainty grew. “Those rat bastards,” I croaked. “I know why they left our packs alone. The water—it’s poisoned.”

  Chapter Three

  (Kiran)

  “Poisoned?” Kiran stared at Dev’s haggard face. Dread crept up his spine. “But—I drank from the same skins as you, and I don’t feel sick.”

  Yet he had delayed in drinking, and his ikilhia remained so disordered. He’d assumed he simply hadn’t taken a large enough dose of the drug to ensure a full recovery, but what if he were wrong? The continued disruption could be a sign his body was drawing on his magic to counter poison building up in his blood. Between the haze of physical exhaustion blurring his thoughts and the chaotic roil of his disturbed ikilhia, it was difficult to tell.

  Dev said, “When I gave you my waterskin after we climbed out of the slot, was that the first time you drank?”

  “Yes.” Kiran had originally intended to wait longer, but he’d been so dizzy and thirsty after the exertion of the climb that he’d gladly obeyed Dev’s order.

  Dev muttered a curse. “The slot didn’t take us that long. Hour and a half, two at the most, and you might be as bad off as me.”

  “I won’t be affected the same as you.” The disturbingly irregular flare of his inner energies captured Kiran’s attention. He could imagine the disruption steadily worsening until he collapsed into convulsions. No Alathian mages were on hand this time to halt the dissolution of his ikilhia and yank him back from death.

  “I can stave off collapse with the drug,” Kiran said, and saw his own bleak knowledge mirrored in Dev’s eyes: that would gain him only scant time before he faced another, more certain disaster. At least Kiran had the option of delay. What of Dev, who had no magic to help him?

  “If it’s poison, have you any idea what it might be?” Kiran asked. “Is there some desert herb or mineral we might use as an antidote?”

  Dev shoved back on his heels, looking wearier than Kiran had ever seen him. “Might not be poison the way you’re thinking. I’ve never heard of a deathdealer’s potion so tasteless and odorless you wouldn’t notice it in water. But I’ve heard stories of men sickening after drinking from seeps in the desert. Retching up their guts for days, no matter how they tried to settle their stomachs. Some died of it. The ones that didn’t said they wished they had.” As if to emphasize the point, he convulsed in another series of racking heaves.

  Out of reflex, Kiran reached for a waterskin to offer—and yanked his hand back, his fingers clenching in helpless frustration. If only he dared spellcast! While he knew nothing of healing magic—a lack he’d already had ample opportunity to curse these last weeks as he struggled to decipher how the drug affected his body and ikilhia—he did know spells that could find a source of clean water, conceal them from hunting clanfolk, even speed their travel. Yet not a one could be cast without releasing his barriers and alerting Ruslan.

  Dev finally stopped retching. He mumbled something vicious-sounding and pulled his neckcloth free to swipe at his mouth.

  Kiran snatched up a rock and tossed it with a furious twist of his wrist into drifted sand. “None of this makes any sense! Why give us fouled water and then attack straight away? Why not wait until we fell sick?”

  Dev said, “My guess is that crazy godspeaker was too hotheaded to see us as anything but easy prey. But that oldster who first traded with us looked the canny, cautious sort—” He broke off in another flurry of coughs.

  “You think this was his backup plan, in case we were carrying defensive charms strong enough to let us escape.” Kiran put a hand to the cool, comforting weight of the kizhenvya amulet tucked beneath his shirt. “Maybe the godspeaker only wanted my blood so she could track us until we grew ill and became easy prey in truth.” The shielding pattern bound within the amulet blazed undimmed across his inner vision, ready to divert any seeking spellwork.

  “Because things always go so well for us,” Dev said with wry emphasis.

  The echo of his earlier words startled Kiran into a snort of bleak amusement. “I know. It’s too much to hope that she intends anything so easily countered. I was just…trying to be optimistic.” Even though he didn’t feel optimistic in the least.

  “We should—” Dev doubled over, clutching his stomach.

  Kiran grabbed for him. “There must be something I can do to help you!”

  Dev shoved his hands aside and lurched upright with his neckcloth still clutched in one white-knuckled fist. “Nothing for it but to keep walking. Find a spot that’s sheltered from view of any scouts, and boil what’s in our waterskins. If the water’s only from a bad seep and not truly poisoned, boiling might work to cleanse it. Either way…” He let out a long, shuddering sigh. “We’ve got to reach another clan’s territory and try another trade. Or better yet, something stealthier. Get our hands on some healing charms as well as clean water.”

  “How far to the next territory?” Kiran glanced at the darkening sky above the cliffs. They could perhaps walk the easier ground of the gorge bottom at night
, especially after moonrise, but he couldn’t imagine how they’d succeed in tackling any more treacherous terrain.

  Dev grimaced. “It’s not like we have a map. Not even sure there are maps. You know those symbols the clanfolk scratch into rocks? Keep looking for them. When the style of the symbols changes, then we’ll know we’re on a different clan’s ground.”

  “So it could be one mile or thirty. And we don’t know if the godspeaker might have sent word of us to surrounding clans, or if they’ve had their own dreams.” Kiran felt as if he were being backed toward a cliff, all avenues of escape blocked off one by one, until he’d have no choice but to step over the edge. The akhelsya sigil incised into the skin over his heart burned; he imagined Ruslan spreading his arms in welcome, wearing a smile terrible in its triumph.

  Dev caught Kiran’s wrist and forced his hand away from his chest. Kiran hadn’t even realized he’d been rubbing at the spot where Ruslan’s sigil lay hidden beneath his shirt.

  “We keep going,” Dev said fiercely. “Hear me? Yeah, we need to assume the next clan’s hostile from the start. Just means we have to be clever. Hell, I’d turn back and cook up a scheme to steal charms, water, and even that cursed blood-knife right off the godspeaker’s crew if we didn’t need to make ground toward Prosul Akheba. As it is, I don’t care how sick I get, I’ll drag myself with my teeth to the next territory if I have to.”

  But the faint glimmer of Dev’s ikilhia was guttering like a candleflame in a sandstorm. What if it really was poison in the water? Dev might die before they ever reached another clan.

  You know you can save him, Kiran’s mage-brother Mikail’s voice whispered within. Not just Dev, but every one of these nathahlen lives you care so much for. Will you let them die out of stubborn selfishness?

  Better that than surrender, part of him howled in reply, blindly adamant; but the cold horror he felt at the idea of Dev’s death was stronger yet. Through numb, reluctant lips, Kiran forced out words. “There is another way.”