The Labyrinth of Flame

by Courtney Schafer

  Zadikah’s head jerked up, her features blazing with outraged incredulity.

  “Use this!” I chucked the charm straight at her. “Kiran needs Teo, now!”

  Zadikah cursed, still glaring murder at me. But when the circlet smacked into the sand at her feet, she snatched it up and leapt for Nasham.

  Both women disappeared beneath the overhang. Scuffling sounds echoed up, followed by a sharp cry of pain. Nasham bolted away from the cliff, jinking through the spinebrush toward the boulder-strewn ledges of the basin’s north slopes. Zadikah lurched after her in a run that was half a stagger. I saw no blood staining her, but she was clutching her right thigh. The sleepfast charm gleamed in her other fist.

  “Zadikah! The ladder!”

  She didn’t even look back, just pounded onward, picking up speed as she went. Shaikar take her, how was I supposed to get Kiran down?

  “Teo! Help!” I yelled, loud as I could. The meandering line of the cliff blocked the house from my sight, but sound traveled far. Surely Teo, Raishal, or Veddis would hear my shouts. So would any of Nasham’s kin who might be lurking in the basin, but any hope of stealth was already gone.

  I threw a glance back at Kiran, who’d slid down against a barrel. He clutched at his temples, his whole body shaking in great, juddering tremors.

  “I’ll get Teo. Just hold on, all right?” I didn’t wait for any answer. I slithered off the barrels and started downclimbing, yelling my head off.

  Scant feet away from the cave, my muscles already burned with strain. I gave up on shouting in favor of concentrating on my grip. I just had to get low enough I could jump the rest of the distance.

  When I reached the crack that snaked down to the sand, I stabbed fingers and feet in alternating sequence so fast the stone tore the skin from my knuckles. Twenty feet to go, ten…my forearms were on fire, my strength failing. I kicked my feet free of the crack and dropped. My landing was graceless, but the loose sand spared my ankles. I scrambled for the ladder. Kiran might not be in any state to use it, but I didn’t want to run for the house without leaving him the option.

  “Dev! What’s happened?”

  Oh, thank Khalmet. Veddis was racing toward me. Better yet, Teo was panting along right behind him with a satchel slung over his shoulder.

  “Kiran’s sick. He’s still in the cave, but he needs help fast.” I heaved on the ladder. Veddis helped me wrestle the spar over to the cave opening.

  “Where’s Zadikah?” Teo’s knuckles were white on his satchel’s strap.

  “Chasing her mother. Nasham saw me. Zadikah’s trying to stop her telling the rest of the black-daggers we’re here. But Zadikah’s got a hurt leg—not that bad, she can still run, but maybe not fast enough.” Only the crests of the bulging domes still glowed with the sun’s last light. The shadows cast by cliffs and boulders were deep. Nasham and Zadikah had vanished into the rocks as thoroughly as if spell-hidden.

  Veddis backed from the ladder, his scarred face sagging in dismay. “Nasham? Vakash azul ukaim! None have bested her in years, certainly not Zadi. Teo, she needs help—”

  “Go. I’ll handle this.” Teo swarmed up the ladder. Veddis raced off into the spinebrush, following the gouges left by Zadikah’s running feet.

  I hauled myself up the ladder to the cave, heedless of sore muscles, and found Teo wedged behind the barrels with Kiran. Teo held a glowlight charm in one hand and an open vial in the other. Kiran was pressed back in the cave’s deepest corner. His arms were braced against rock and barrels, his eyes wild in the charm’s firefly light.

  “I can’t feel my barriers—I can’t feel anything—what have you done?” He sounded on the verge of total panic.

  “Try to stay calm.” Teo reached for him, but Kiran cried out and struck at his hand. Teo desisted, grimacing. “Your barriers remain. The herb you swallowed has suppressed your inner fire so thoroughly you can’t sense them. You must trust me—this will contain your energies and save you.”

  Kiran’s panic, Teo’s talk of suppression, the rancid oil smell wafting from the open vial—gods, I knew what Teo had done. “You gave him hennanwort?”

  Teo’s glance at me was sharp with surprise. “You know it?”

  “He’s taken it before. He didn’t react well then either.” The one time I’d dosed Kiran with hennanwort, I’d had to wrestle him flat to force a sleeping draught down his throat. I definitely didn’t want to repeat that with a thirty-foot drop an arms-length away.

  I pulled myself on top of the barrels and wormed closer to Kiran. “No need to panic. I got you into Alathia this way—you saw it in my memories, remember?” The hennanwort had suppressed his magic so deeply that I’d been able to sneak him past the detection spells guarding Alathia’s border.

  Kiran caught my wrist with a grip desperate enough to leave bruises.

  “You—you’re sure.” His words were slurring.

  “You’ll be fine,” I insisted, with a confidence I didn’t feel. Hennanwort would leave him helpless for hours—clumsy, disoriented, and utterly unable to use magic, even by touch. Not a happy prospect if the black-daggers were to descend on us again.

  Teo said into my ear, “You took a mage of his strength into Alathia in defiance of their laws?” He sounded like he was trying to decide if I was utterly mad. I couldn’t blame him. Sneaking Kiran into Alathia had been an insane thing to do, no matter how compelling my reasons for it.

  “Long story. Look, the hennanwort—will he have to keep taking it? I need him able to run and think, not so fucked up he can barely crawl.” Kiran’s head had fallen back against the rock, his eyes shut, though his death grip on my wrist hadn’t slackened.

  “He can’t take any more,” Teo said. “That was my only vial. We have to get him back to the house. I need to find another way to calm his soul’s flame before the hennanwort wears off.”

  My stomach sank. “I thought you had a way to help him. He said your potions stopped him from getting sick. What in Shaikar’s hells went wrong?”

  “An excellent question.” Teo wrestled a barrel aside. Underneath was a chipped hollow in the rock that held a coil of rope. Damn it, I should’ve guessed they had something hidden up here in case the ladder fell.

  Teo began knotting one end of the rope around a barrel. He was so slow—I knocked his hands aside and tied the rope myself, fingers flying.

  Teo said, “Kiran has needed ever more frequent doses of herbs. His body’s resistance to them has been increasing so rapidly I feared a relapse. I tried a new combination of ingredients in the last dose I gave him. All I can assume is that the formula wasn’t effective.”

  Why hadn’t he bothered to warn us he’d dosed Kiran with something untried before we left the house? Angry words boiled up in my throat, but I choked them back. Stupid to lash out. It wasn’t really Teo I was mad at, but this entire mess. The hennanwort might’ve averted immediate disaster, but if Zadikah and Veddis didn’t stop Nasham, we’d still be neck deep in a viper pit. I darted a glance out at the desert. All the rocks had gone purple and indistinct in the twilight. No sign of anyone. What was happening out there?

  Teo thrust the other end of the rope at me. “Can you get this on him? We’ll never get him down safely without it.”

  I squirmed back over to Kiran, and Teo spoke again. “If I’d known the black-daggers wanted you so badly as to send Nasham, I’d have insisted Kiran stay hidden at the house. Zadi claimed you had a misunderstanding with them over a trade, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

  He loved Zadikah, probably Veddis too, and they were out there in the darkness risking themselves for our sake. He deserved a little truth.

  “The black-daggers’ godspeaker claims she’s had a dream from Shaikar about us. Thinks if she can grab us and take us to some ‘veiled temple,’ it’ll earn her clan Shaikar’s favor. Me, I think she’s crazy, but I’d sure like to know what and where this veiled temple is.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Teo said slowly. “In a tale Zadikah once
sang for me. But in the tale, only those guided by Shaikar’s children could find the temple. I thought it was a myth.”

  More evidence that it was demons who’d set Gavila on our trail, maybe. But if they wanted Kiran, why not just grab him? Demons could travel in the blink of an eye, and not even Ruslan could stop them.

  I said, “I gave Zadikah a sleepfast charm. If she can use it on Nasham and bring her back, maybe we can find out something useful.” The worry chewing at my gut whispered that it was far more likely Nasham would instead capture Zadikah, or even that Zadikah would change her mind and take Nasham’s offer.

  Kiran stirred as I threaded the rope around him. His eyes opened, wide and unfocused. “The veiled temple…Dev, I saw it, I saw—” He cringed back from me. “You—you’re covered in indigo like the scorpions. They’ve tainted you—no, don’t touch me, I can’t let them find me!”

  Oh, this was just what we needed. I didn’t know what drug-induced delusion he was babbling about, but I feared he’d never see reason. A threat might work: You do exactly what I say, or I give you to the scorpions.

  But looking at his glazed, terrified expression, remembering all Ruslan had done to him to instill such fear, the words wouldn’t come. Instead I said, “Kiran, shut your eyes. Shut them, hear me?”

  I thought maybe he was too far gone to listen, but he squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Whatever you saw, it’s just the drug. You know me. You trust me. Right?”

  He didn’t say anything, his breathing fast and shallow. I pressed on.

  “I’ll keep you safe, I promise. But you’ve got to let me help you.”

  He let out a shaky sigh and gave a barely perceptible nod.

  I hastily snugged the rope tight around him. No telling how long his cooperation would last.

  Behind me, Teo said softly, “He trusts you that much. I’d never have believed it of a mage like him.”

  I hadn’t been certain of it either. “Didn’t I tell you that you had him all wrong? Here, help me get him past the barrels. Then you climb down the ladder, and I’ll lower him.” I pulled Kiran to his feet. Eyes still shut, he swayed like he’d collapse without my hold. I could only pray that once down, Teo could help him without further crippling him—and that Zadikah and Veddis would triumph over Nasham. Yet the cold weight in my gut said I didn’t dare count on any outcome so promising.

  * * *

  “Ah!” Teo straightened from his hunch over the litter of books and herb jars on the kitchen’s stone table. He set down a vial of Kiran’s blood—now tinted a murky, disturbing purple—with a distinct air of satisfaction.

  I stopped pacing. “You’ve figured out something?” Kiran himself lay curled in a vacant-eyed, miserable ball before the hearthfire. The last time he’d tried to speak, it’d been so slurred I couldn’t understand him at all.

  Teo nodded. “The problem before lay in using stewed mallow roots instead of harrowleaf. When the hennanwort wears off, I should be able to keep his energies in check.”

  I sank onto a cushion beside the stone table. One worry solved, but that left plenty more. Zadikah and Veddis still hadn’t returned. Raishal was a shadowed figure leaning against the frame of the house’s entryway, staring out into the night. Her fingers traced ceaseless, nervous patterns on the hilt of the knife strapped to her arm.

  “How long until Kiran can walk?” I’d gotten our packs ready in case we had to run. But Teo and I had needed to half-drag, half-carry Kiran from the cave. He hadn’t been able to manage a single step without falling over. Until the drug wore off, I doubted we could outrace a crippled snail, let alone an army of fleet-footed clanfolk.

  “Some hours, I’d think,” Teo said.

  Great. I dropped my head onto my arms and attempted to cudgel my exhausted brain into coughing up a better plan. The black-daggers knew enough of Kiran to fear him, but Nasham had heard me yell that he was sick. Raishal had said it’d take Nasham until midnight to reach the black-daggers’ territory, which might give us a little time. But I worried the godspeaker and her crew lurked somewhere far closer, waiting for Nasham’s signal.

  Teo said, “I do have one piece of better news. Kiran’s trouble tonight revealed much about the nature of his condition. I’m certain now of how I might restore his body to its natural balance.”

  Yet he didn’t sound at all happy to have found a solution. Without raising my head, I said, “Let me guess. There’s a problem.”

  “I need icelight powder and oil of soleius, neither of which I have.”

  “Who does?” He’d better be telling the truth and not hoping to get rid of us by sending us on some fruitless hunt for imaginary herbs.

  Teo said, “There are merchants in Prosul Akheba who specialize in rarities, but icelight powder in particular costs far more than I have the coin to pay. Or you, unless you have something far more valuable than carcabon stones to trade.”

  We didn’t. Kiran’s amulet was worth entire coffers of gemstones, but that was one trade impossible to make.

  “If I can get to the city, I can work something out.” I hadn’t spent all those years as a Taint thief for nothing.

  A soft, wavering whistle sounded outside. Raishal straightened, her hand falling from her knife. “Teo! That’s Zadi.” She dashed out into the night.

  Teo rushed to the door, relief bright on his face. My own wary hope died when Zadikah limped into the house, leaning on Raishal’s shoulder. One cheek was swollen and bloodied, her clothes were torn, and her expression had nothing of triumph in it, only grim exhaustion.

  Teo caught her in a hug and murmured something choked and heartfelt. She returned his grip with one arm, her other arm still tight around Raishal, who clung to her with equal force.

  I remembered the times I’d held Cara with that same overwhelming relief, so glad to see her alive and safe I felt my heart would burst. Ah, gods, I wanted so badly to know that joy again.

  So I’d better come up with a way to keep Kiran clear of the black-daggers. If only I wasn’t so tired!

  Raishal touched Zadikah’s swollen face with tender fingers. “Oh, Zadi, we’ve been so worried. Where’s Veddis?”

  “He climbed high to keep watch. Nasham escaped us.”

  I’d known it the moment Zadikah walked in the door, but the confirmation sent another stab of urgency through me. What would Gavila do, and how might I counter her?

  Teo helped Zadikah over to the cushions. “Here, let me see those wounds.”

  Zadikah looked from Kiran’s huddled form to me, her gaze hard. “You can’t stay here.”

  If she hadn’t sold us out to Nasham, it was because she clung to the hope she could use me instead of Teo in her schemes. But with not only Teo but Raishal and Veddis under threat from her kin, she was reconsidering, I knew it.

  “Help me get Kiran to the city,” I said. “When the black-daggers come seeking us, Teo can say Kiran and I forced all of you into helping us.” Gavila might even believe it, having seen with her own eyes the threat Kiran posed. “Hell, Teo can beg Gavila for help. Tell her, ‘Those bastards have Zadikah, you’ve got to help us get her safely back!’ You said it before: nobody wants to piss off a healer of Teo’s skill. They’ll leave him and Raishal and Veddis alone to chase after us. If Teo gives me enough doses to keep Kiran alive and you can get us to Prosul Akheba, then anything you want in repayment, it’s yours.”

  Now Raishal was the one giving me a diamond-hard look, probably because she knew what I meant by repayment. I couldn’t tell what Zadikah was thinking. Come on, I willed her. Don’t give up on your plan just because of a little complication. Even if I could imagine what Kiran would say if he wasn’t a drooling lump just now: A little complication?

  Raishal said flatly, “Even at a run, it takes days to reach the city, much of the route over open ground. Kiran’s in no condition to move fast. You’d never make it ahead of the black-daggers.”

  “Not if we take the regular route,” Zadikah said. “But Bayyan of the snake-eate
rs owes me a favor, and his territory extends within sight of the city. If we travel via his lands, his warriors will protect us.”

  Thank all the gods, she wanted so badly to keep Teo’s love that she wasn’t going to ditch us. I might not wholly trust her, but I had to admire her determination. And Bayyan…I recognized that name. He was the clansman Kiran had seen Zadikah meet in the slot. Calling on her co-conspirator for aid sounded like a fine idea to me.

  Teo paused while examining her leg. “That is no small favor you ask of Bayyan.”

  Zadikah shrugged and swiped blood from her cheek. “He’ll pay it.” She peered again at Kiran, who’d given no sign he was aware of her arrival. “How sick is he? It’s only four miles to Bayyan’s territory, but if he can’t walk…”

  I said, “I’ll carry him if I have to.” Somehow. I looked at Teo. “Tell me how to make whatever potions he needs, and we’ll leave you.”

  I’d thought he’d jump on the opportunity to rid himself of us. Instead, he raked his hands through his sleek black hair and said, “Keeping Kiran alive isn’t so simple a matter as scribbling down a list of ingredients. Dosages will need to be adjusted as his body adapts, and while I know the ingredients you need for a true cure, I don’t have any idea of the proportions without more trials.”

  “Easy solution,” I said. “You come too. Raishal and Veddis can say we forced both of you to go.”

  “No!” The vehemence of Zadikah’s protest made Teo and Raishal turn. “Raishal needs him. For her life and her child’s, Teo stays here. He can give you his best guess as to dosages. Once in the city, there are other healers who can help you.”

  She was worried for Raishal, yeah, but she was also worried Teo would find out about her scheming. After all the care I’d taken to keep my smuggling a secret from my outrider friends, I could sympathize. But sympathy wasn’t going to make me back down on this when Kiran’s life was at stake.

  “Kiran almost died tonight because Teo guessed a dosage wrong. What if it happens again when we’re days away from help? If he dies, all this is for nothing.” I put a vicious emphasis on the last word and held Zadikah’s gaze, knowing she’d hear what I was really saying: If he dies, you get nothing.