The Labyrinth of Flame

by Courtney Schafer

  The second adult was a plump woman carrying a book whose brown cover bore no words, only a gleaming silver clasp. “We don’t need their minds. Better, perhaps, if they haven’t the will to rebel.”

  The woman, Kiran saw often. She was always there, always watching, when he was taken from his room and made to hold charms and recite strange words. She’d stare at him with the flat, black gaze of a snake. The only time she looked away was when she scribbled in the book she carried everywhere. When the other adults spoke to her, they stared at their feet and hunched as if they were trying to make themselves as small as Kiran.

  The sour man said, “They need enough intellect to speak. If they can’t claim kinship, we’ll have no protection. This child”—he nudged the body at his feet—“is so far gone she’ll soon forget how to breathe. Useless. The Tainted are more suited to—”

  “The Tainted may touch the sacred fire without harm, but they are utterly blind to its currents. I suspect it is that very blindness that preserves them. No; to do as Shaikar’s children have asked us, we need a tool that can see the currents as well as walk within them.” The woman looked at Kiran, her black eyes piercing him like cold knives.

  “This one we were lucky enough to find while he was yet in the womb. I cast to mold him; you see how well he resembles a child of Shaikar? More, his fire burns stronger than the others. Perhaps he’ll serve our purpose.”

  Kiran hated the way she talked about him. As if he was some mindless thing she’d made, no better than a water jar or a table. Something to be used until it broke and then cast aside. He hated her. He clung to the thought, as if it could stop the fear from crushing him.

  The man grunted. “It’s those children whose fire burns strongest that die soonest when you cast your bindings. But very well; if you insist on continuing to try this path, then have at it.”

  He walked away, his footsteps echoing off vaulted stone. The woman set her book on the lowest step and ascended the dais. Her deep blue robe was covered in pale symbols that seemed to crawl like leggy spiders. A light burned inside her, brighter even than the flames in front of Kiran. The closer she got, the more his head ached, colors spangling over his vision until he wanted to throw up.

  The woman took a bone from within her robe. She snapped it, chalky dust coating her fingers. She touched Kiran’s forehead, then his chest, her fingers cold, each touch sending a sharp pain through him. He glared at her, hating her more. The scorpions were whispering again in the corners, eager, greedy.

  The woman hummed a low, atonal song. The shards of bone she held glowed, as did the wards surrounding Kiran. A tendril of flame snaked out toward him from the blue fire in the ring.

  Terror beat in his chest. The room darkened around him until all he could see was the oncoming fire.

  The fire touched him, slid into him. Pain swallowed Kiran in a searing wave so terrible it blasted away both fear and hatred. All around him, crouched white figures sprang into view. They smiled bloody grins and whispered in scorpion voices, Embrace the pain, little rat. Yield to our fire or it will destroy you.

  Kiran catapulted back to the present, choking, his throat locked tight. He buried his face in his hands, abruptly aware of night air cold on his sweat-soaked skin. He was in the desert, not a temple. There was no fire here to hurt him. He was an adult, not a terrified, helpless boy.

  He raised his head—only to scramble backward in blind, panicked horror.

  The demon crouched before him laughed, piercing and sweet. “Found you, child.”

  Chapter Nine

  (Dev)

  I wriggled higher in the black slot of the crack in the Khalat’s cliffs. Inhaled to wedge my chest tight enough against the sandstone to hold me, and lifted my boots a few precious inches before jamming them heel-to-toe again. Outriders called this type of a crack a devil’s joke. Too narrow to brace knees and back against opposing walls, too wide to easily wedge fists and feet—ascending was a slow, strenuous struggle. In the hours since Zadikah and I had started our clandestine climb, I’d lost what felt like half my skin despite the protective woolen strips I’d bound around my elbows, knees, and knuckles. Every inch of me was layered in bruises.

  Not exactly my favorite sort of climbing, but every agonizing inch upward brought a certain satisfaction. This type of fight, I was damn good at and knew exactly how to win. Besides, what other outrider could say they’d been crazy enough to climb a devil’s joke in darkness? The crack’s confines were all inky shadows despite the moonlight spilling over the cliffs beyond.

  The real trouble lay in finding suitable spots to anchor the rope so Zadikah could ascend after me. She’d insisted we shouldn’t chance using glowlight charms. At the end of each pitch I had to grope over the crack’s walls, searching by feel for flaws in the rock where I might wedge in pitons.

  Zadikah had proved surprisingly patient about the crawling pace of our ascent. When we’d left the raucous crowds of the night markets behind to slink over boulder-strewn shale to the base of the Khalat’s cliffs, she’d been jittery with anticipation. I had braced myself to endure all manner of snappish demands to climb faster. But she’d obeyed my every order with swift efficiency and never once complained despite all the time she spent waiting for me to struggle up each successive pitch. Still, I wished with every breath that it was Cara at the other end of the rope, skilled and strong and wholly trustworthy.

  I leaned my head out of the crack and peered up the moonlit face of the butte. All along the clifftop, rock jutted outward in a massive shelf with an underside so sheer I doubted any outrider could spider over it.

  A good thing I didn’t intend to try. I doubled one arm between my chest and the crack wall to brace myself, and slid my other hand upward, questing. My fingertips found a hairline fracture in the rock, far too thin for a piton. Then another flaw, too wide, but possibly narrowing to a better crack at the back. I poked my fingers in.

  Pain stung my middle finger, another stab on my knuckle, and fuck, something was scuttling over my wrist—in convulsive reflex, I jerked my hand away so fast I bashed it against the opposite side of the crack.

  Another scuttling noise, and I saw a scorpion silhouetted on the crack’s edge. Its barbed tail was poised a mere inch from my cheek. I whipped my head aside and promptly lost traction with my feet. I pressed my doubled arm against the crack with desperate force and managed to halt my downward slide, at the cost of the remaining skin on my forearm.

  The scorpion remained poised above, stinger arched in warning. I dragged a piton from the sling around my chest, heaved upward again, and smacked the scorpion away into empty air. Gripping the piton, I peered into the crack’s lightless interior. No more scorpions crawled out.

  I leaned my forehead against the rock, breathing hard. My stung hand throbbed and burned even more than my newly raw forearm. Some scorpions were poisonous enough a man might die within moments, unless he was lucky enough to have a blood-cleansing charm handy. Which I emphatically did not.

  Nothing for it but to pray for Khalmet’s favor and keep going. I poked again at the crack’s interior, this time using the piton and not my fingers, and found another fracture. I worked with panting haste to set an anchor. I didn’t feel about to keel over, but the pain in my hand wasn’t fading. If the hand swelled up so much I couldn’t use it, I’d be in serious trouble. I didn’t have to climb the looming overhang to get into the Khalat, but I did need to traverse out onto the smooth sandstone of the cliff. Dicey, delicate climbing of the sort I ordinarily excelled at—when I had two properly working hands.

  It seemed an age before Zadikah grunted up the rope to me. The ascender cords she used meant she didn’t have to squirm her way up the crack like I had, but she was hauling the rest of our supplies in a bulging pack that was no featherweight to carry.

  I helped her tie off to the piton. “Give me the stonemelter charm, quick. A scorpion stung me and my hand’s swelling up.”

  Zadikah cursed and dug in the pack. “Can you
still do the traverse?”

  I flexed my fingers, which felt hot and already fat. “If I hurry.”

  She handed me a leather pouch. I tied it onto the sling around my waist and settled the pouch so it sat at the small of my back, where it’d be out of the way as I climbed.

  “Brace,” I said. “And for fuck’s sake, hold the rope tight if I fall.” I’d taught Zadikah the rudiments of belaying, but there’d been no chance for any proper practicing.

  “Move fast,” Zadikah said. “With the moonlight, if anyone sees you on the cliff—”

  “Trust me, I won’t be dallying.” More because of my hand than any risk of discovery. We were on the opposite side of the butte from the guarded tunnel, and how many cityfolk living in the shadow of a familiar rock formation bother to scrutinize its cliffs at night?

  “Sorry,” Zadikah said—a first, from her. “We’re just so close.”

  “I know.” I slowed my breath, seeking the calm concentration I needed to make the climb. The tent city far below glowed with lanternlight; the stars above were clear, hard pinpricks. To the north, a dark boil of cloud flickered with lightning, soundless with distance. There was an odd sense to the night, as if the very cliffs were watching us. But I’d felt that on occasion scaling highside towers in my Tainted days; it was just nerves talking.

  Pain isn’t real, neither is fear, nothing exists but the rock beneath me.

  I slid out of the crack, balancing on nubbins of stone, my fingers searching out divots and sliver-thin cracks. A gust of wind skirled past, tugging at me. I clung all the harder with my left hand. The right one…ah gods, closing my fingers was swiftly becoming an exercise in agony. I kept going, my entire being focused on my balance.

  I crossed a distinctive dark streak on the sandstone that I’d made careful note of through the spyglass. Yashad’s maps had shown that the Zhan-davi hadn’t been content to build atop the butte, but had cut rooms and tunnels within the butte’s upper stone. Here, behind five feet of solid rock, a little-used tunnel unprotected by wards made its closest approach to the butte’s outer cliffs.

  All I had to do was make a tunnel of my own. Clinging to the cliff with my good left hand, I fumbled open the pouch at my back with fat, frighteningly clumsy fingers. I pulled out a rune-etched disc of silver set with rubies and stamped with the sigil of a Ninavel mining guild.

  Thanks to my abused forearm, I had plenty of blood on hand to spark the charm. I swiped the disc over my raw flesh and muttered the charm’s trigger word.

  The disc heated in my hand. I gripped it all the tighter with throbbing fingers, desperate not to drop it. Violet fire flickered on the charm’s underside. I pressed the charm to the stone and yanked my hand back. Stonemelters were expensive and effective, but not the safest of charms to use.

  The charm ate straight into the stone. A thick, dark slurry of melted rock boiled out of a deepening hole the size of my head. Spilling down the cliff, the slurry hardened in fat lumps and globs like candlewax. I counted breaths through clenched teeth, waiting for the slurry to stop pouring out, praying I’d judged the distance right and the charm would eat all the way through to the interior passage before its magic died. The fingers of my right hand wouldn’t bend anymore. My left forearm burned with strain and my legs trembled in increasing rhythm.

  The heat baking out of the hole faded, the last trickle of slurry congealing into rough runnels. I peered inside the hole. No fire of sparked wards, no shouts, nothing but silence and darkness. I shoved my useless right hand deep into the hole and wedged my elbow to lock me onto the cliff and free up my left hand.

  Outriders scorned stonemelters because they left the surrounding rock dangerously brittle, liable to shatter under a climber’s feet or pitons. I was counting on that just now. I pulled a miner’s hammer from my belt, sparked the quiet-shroud charm bound around its head, and whacked at the hole’s edges. The quiet-shroud muffled the sharp clink of the hammer on rock to a faint tapping no louder than a seep’s steady drip. It took only a few blows before rock cracked and crumbled away, widening the hole further.

  I kept whacking. As soon as the hole was broad enough, I wedged my body within. More hammer blows, more head-first wriggling, more praying the rock immediately above wouldn’t give way and crush me. With only one good hand to use, it took damn near forever before I broke through into a cool, empty void.

  I sparked the glowlight charm I wore on a neckchain, and saw stone steps and rough rock walls. No footsteps, no sound of voices. I checked my hand, which had swollen to twice its normal size. Two hard red knots marked where I’d been stung. I touched one and hissed as a shock of pain burned through me.

  Zadikah had a couple pains-ease charms in her pack. I hadn’t dared to deaden any sensation while climbing, but now I couldn’t wait to silence the screaming of my hand and my bruised, flayed skin. I slithered out of my makeshift tunnel, then turned right around with hammer in hand and worked back through, broadening the cramped passage to the point Zadikah’s taller frame and wider hips would fit.

  I backed out to stand on shadowed steps. At my feet, the stonemelter lay in a crater a few inches deep. The silver was cool and the rubies dull. I tucked the charm back into the pouch I still wore. The magic might be dead, but I could still sell the charm for the price of the silver and stones.

  I drew the rope taut and gave three sharp tugs to let Zadikah know she should climb. All she had to do was swing herself over from the crack and haul her way up.

  Another eternity later, the pack thumped out of the tunnel, followed by Zadikah. She was panting hard and covered in rock dust, but her eyes glittered in jubilation.

  “Welcome to the Khalat,” I said, cradling my throbbing hand. “Get me a pains-ease, would you?”

  As she dug in her pack, she flashed me a wide, fierce grin. “Good work, shadow man. That was one hell of a climb.”

  It sure had been, scorpion or no. But my thrill of satisfaction was muted by the knowledge of how much work yet remained.

  Zadikah tossed me a silver bracelet set with a single oval of jade. “Trigger word’s avasan. When you seek the herbs for Kiran, look for arrowleaf too. Chew a pinch of that every few hours and it should help your hand.”

  I sparked the pains-ease, slid it on my good wrist, and sighed in gratitude as the clamor of my much-abused body faded to a mere nagging murmur. Zadikah pulled out two loose robes of blue silk embroidered with the scroll-and-lantern crest of the Seranthine scholars. I pulled mine on over my clothes, awkward with my swollen hand. The sleeves were long enough to hide my bloodied arms. At night, hopefully nobody’d notice how worn and dirty my boots were beneath the robe’s hem. I stashed the rope and the now-empty pack inside our rough tunnel.

  Zadikah was busy stuffing various charms into her robe’s inner pockets. Some of the charms were covered in enough gems to rival Kiran’s amulet.

  “Yashad gave you quite the stash, I see. Got any spare boneshatters or ward charms?”

  Zadikah chucked another bracelet my way. Copper, not silver, and without any gems. I squinted at the simple runes. “Seriously, this is all you have for warding? This looks barely able to stop a single knife thrust.”

  “Yashad’s coin isn’t infinite. It’s those of us who’ll be fighting who need strong charms, not you.”

  I certainly had no intention of joining in any battles. Zadikah’s plan involved finding the Zhan-davi’s private entrance to the Khalat. A stairway far more direct than the citadel’s main access, located in a separate tunnel protected by wards keyed to the Zhan-davi’s matria and her immediate family only. The stair hadn’t been on the scholar’s maps, but Yashad had winkled out the location from some other source. Zadikah meant to break the wards there to let Bayyan and his warriors into the citadel.

  But that was Zadikah’s business, not mine. All I wanted was to get the herbs Kiran needed and get out.

  “How about you give me a wardbreaker now?”

  Zadikah slanted me a glance. “You think these
are simple wards I’ll be breaking? No more charms for you until my task’s done. Come on; this won’t take half so long as climbing that cursed crack.”

  Damn near anything ought to be faster than climbing a thousand feet of a devil’s joke. Following Zadikah up the passage’s broad stone stairs, my blood fizzed with jittery energy like I’d eaten another ball of Raishal’s mouth-burning herbs. I thought of Kiran, waiting for me out there in the canyons. If he’d seen my message, he’d know what I was doing tonight. Probably he was worrying himself sick over it.

  At least he was safe. And once I brought the damn herbs to Teo, I could keep him that way.

  * * *

  (Kiran)

  Kiran’s back hit rock. The demon blurred forward to halt mere inches away. The creature was no nightmare, no hallucination, but real. Its coldly beautiful features gleamed with crystalline clarity in the moonlight, and the chill, alien aura of its magic was undeniable.

  Instinct screamed he should strike with every spark of magic he could summon—or failing that, run. Yet Kiran held his ground, a wild, reckless defiance rising in him. He was so tired of running. Tired of living in terror of creatures whose purpose he didn’t even know.

  “What do you want of me? You could have taken me in the mountains, had you wanted. Instead you creep after me and whisper in my dreams. Why?”

  The demon bared its fanged teeth. “So the akheli finds his spine. Tell me, child, was it something you saw in that poisoned, damaged mind of yours that stops you fleeing from me as you did in the gorge?”

  The pallid figure he’d seen at the junction of canyons, the languid, beckoning hand…that had been real? Staring at the demon, Kiran realized another truth: this was not the same creature he and Dev had faced in the mountains. The demon in the Cirque of the Knives had seemed masculine in its proportions despite its lack of genitals. This one’s naked body was slimmer, even more androgynous. Moonlight glimmered on skin the unnatural bluish-white of marble, but an odd dark splotch marred the demon’s brow—a scar or a tattoo, as black as the demon’s many braids. Its chiseled face was inhumanly perfect, yet subtly different from the one in his memory. The line of this demon’s jaw was sharper, the flame of its eyes closer to indigo than azure.