by Ian Irvine
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, avoiding his eye. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’
As she took another sliding step onto his chest, Maelys heard his helm slip. She swayed wildly, left then right, and her right hand went into the flame. The prickly warmth of it ran up her arm, and it fell leadenly to her side. The paralysis, or petrification, began to creep down her right side and up her neck. She could feel herself stiffening and knew she would not be able to stay upright much longer. She tried to move, but couldn’t.
The paralysis crept across her chest and belly, which grew hard; she felt sick, faint and weak. The octopede’s curving fang grew burning hot as she became icy cold wherever she’d felt the creeping paralysis, then suddenly it was gone.
It had to be the fang: perhaps the octopede had spent so long in the abyssal flame chamber that it was immune to its effects. The young soldier’s helm scraped again; he couldn’t last long. Her next step should have been onto his face, for she was afraid to stretch too far in case she pushed him in, but she couldn’t bear to walk on those pleading eyes.
‘Please help me,’ he whispered, but she stepped over him onto the floor and kept going, and did not look back even when his helm slipped the rest of the way and he fell to his death with a gasping, boyish wail.
The steps had been reduced to a ragged skeleton of stone that might collapse at any moment. What Art could have eaten them away? They’d been solid when she’d looked out the door not long before.
She had to force herself to inspect the two blood-drenched corpses, and then to pull the locked bodies apart. Her heart was racing as she exposed their faces, but she did not recognise either of them. Did that mean Flydd and Colm had escaped, or had they been taken away? She looked up but there was no way to tell, and if the soldiers had taken them, there was nothing she could do about it. That made her decision simpler; she would go up, after Vivimord.
Further up, a pair of soldiers were jammed into the tread of a step that was just a skeleton of stone. There was blood everywhere, still oozing from the base of the step and from one severed, dangling arm, though their bodies were incomplete. The rest had fallen through. Eyes averted, Maelys climbed around them, clinging to the ribbons of stone which were all that remained of the stair. The floor began to shake in circular motions that made her feel seasick, and the skeleton stair wobbled with every quake, shedding flakes of rock like confetti.
She scrambled up and up, knowing that there was virtually nothing holding the stairs together; its stony skeleton could fall apart at any moment. She forced herself on, afraid she was walking into a trap but having nowhere else to go.
The flame roared in a great ring around her. It was licking across the ceiling now, and charred lengths of octopede web plus flakes of swamp-creeper crust began raining down. What was up there? She couldn’t tell; everything shimmered with heat haze.
She reached the top and saw an upcurving ledge through the flame. Dark entrances ran off it, to left and right. She would have to jump through the flame onto the ledge and hope she survived paralysis, for the stair was about to collapse and she could not go down. Maelys eyed the roaring flame, worked her legs up and down a couple of times in practice, and sprang.
A blast of heat, then instantaneous and total paralysis struck her. She landed stiffly on the ledge, hitting her knee and the side of her head. She felt nothing through the numbness, though it was going to hurt once it wore off. She lay there, growing even colder, and afraid she would never move again.
The fang began to burn and the paralysis faded, though not as quickly as before, nor as completely. The power of the fang must be exhausted and she’d better not touch the flame a third time.
She got up, aching all over, sniffed her away around until she picked up the faint odour of Vivimord, then hobbled after him into the darkness, holding the rapier out in front of her.
The mere thought of him made her heart race and her fury rise in a hot wave. Just let him try and take her now. Just let him try.
FIFTEEN
Flydd, who was lying on his back on the steps with Colm staring down at him, realised that he’d screamed. Every bone ached, his teeth felt loose and the hand that had grasped the bubble was strangulation-purple. The bubble had burst, though before that he’d been looking out through eyes not his own, at something happening far away. The body he’d been clothed in had, unmistakeably, been that of a woman, and the transition had really hurt. But what had she been looking at? He couldn’t make sense of it.
He shuddered at an echo of the pain and his knife hand tingled; the blade was alive again. He cut an experimental arc in the air between himself and the soldiers coming up the stairs. The knife screamed – no subtle weapon this – and carved the leading soldier’s head and shoulders off his torso as though it had been no more than a joint of meat at the dinner table. The man to his left lost the top half of his head. The soldier below them fell down several steps, trying to scrub the blinding blood out of his eyes, and the rest retreated to the floor.
Flydd, shocked, turned it towards the robed mancers and the cold-eyed scrier behind them, who was studying him via a wisp-watcher mounted on his back. Jal-Nish selected his scriers from the most depraved men in his realm, and Flydd had no compunction about cutting him down.
The mancers ducked for cover and the scrier slipped behind a column, out of reach. Klarm alone had not moved; it was as if he was testing Flydd. Flydd couldn’t kill his former friend in cold blood but he waved the shrieking blade at the wall above Klarm’s head: a warning.
He somersaulted backwards through the double doors, then thrust his head and hand around the left-hand one, the knoblaggie out, and its blast tore chunks from the stairs below the butchered soldiers. With a shrilling swish, Flydd gave him a haircut. Smoke rose from Klarm’s hair and he ducked out of sight.
Flydd cut down a pair of soldiers crossing the body bridge and they fell into the flames. Another two died at the base of the steps. ‘Up, Colm,’ he gasped. ‘All the way.’
A wing-ray shot at them out of nowhere, eyes green with reflected flame, wing tips rippling. He carved it in two and it fell into a squad of soldiers, bringing half of them down. The others dragged the pieces off the crushed and thrashing men.
Colm plodded up, out of sight. Flydd followed painfully, for his bones seemed to be slipping and sliding inside his leg muscles again, and his bruised feet hit each step with a thud.
He couldn’t work out what he’d seen through the eyes of the woman in red. She’d been crouched behind a brass-mounted lens the size of a small cartwheel, swinging it this way and that, and staring frantically through it, but at what? He’d seen only billowing mist shot with shifting, wraith-like shadows – ice-white and soot-black. Did the lens look into another place – or another dimension? Her heart had been thundering. What was she so afraid of?
He vaguely remembered seeing those peculiar shadows before, back in the cavern with Jal-Nish. Or had it been earlier, during renewal? He could not recall. Flydd’s unease deepened. She was manipulating him to do something she could not do herself, or was afraid to, and he could see no way out of it.
The stair appeared to terminate a span up through the circular opening in the ceiling, where Flydd made out entrances to left and right. Another knoblaggie blast shattered the step below him, slamming chunks of broken rock into his left leg.
He scrambled up around the curve of the steps until he was sheltered from Klarm’s line of fire. Flydd felled two more soldiers walking across the body bridge, though it would not delay the others long. Jal-Nish could call upon thousands of men, and would not care how many lives he wasted.
Klarm kept blasting with his knoblaggie, but the range was long now, and Flydd was not hit directly, though by the time he crawled up the last steps into the ceiling opening he had been peppered by stinging fragments of stone and the lower half of his body was a mass of bruises.
He leapt off the stair, through a gap in the flames, onto a sloping ledge with passages runn
ing to right and left. Below, at least a hundred troops had lined up to cross the body bridge, while Klarm, the two mancers and the scrier were in conference behind them. Flydd crept up to the right-hand opening, keeping low, but ran into a solid wall. The way was sealed, and so was the passageway to the left. He could cut through, but the enemy would only follow. He had to stop them.
Flydd put his back to the wall, still puzzling about what he’d seen through the woman’s eyes, and whether she’d meant him to see it. He didn’t think so, and that was chilling, for it implied that something was out of her control.
He was watching the soldiers when he felt her presence within him again. Flydd could feel the tension in her, and sense a fear that all her plans were going to come to nothing, for some shadowy nemesis was drawing ever closer to her.
He almost saw it, then, in her mind’s eye – a wraith-creature (he could think of no other name for it) formed of white shadow and black fire, creeping, darting and continually changing its form to blend with its surroundings. He certainly felt it – a rage that had been burning for an eternity, and a determination to recover … what?
Flydd shook his head and the extraordinary feelings faded like a dream. He was back in her mind and she, fuelled with a resolve born of desperation, was trying to find the courage to take a momentous step. Dare I defend myself with the most awful power of all? I must!
She was at the obelisk in some past time, for it stood upright and the glyphs carved into it were fresh and clear. At its base, a round opening was lit from below by the cursed flame roaring up the chimney from the flame chamber. The woman in red was looking fearfully over her shoulder, clutching a handful of flame; she touched it to her forehead, pain speared through his and he saw her portal spell clearly for the first time.
Springing up, cat-like, she snatched a long spike off a table and held it out in her extended arm, pointing towards the base of the flame. The tip of the spike turned red and began to sing in the way his knife had; a beam carved down through the opening and shortly the flame changed to abyssal green. She caught some in her hand but did not use it, just pointed the spike down, growing ever more tense. The flame gushed higher but a shudder racked her. I dare not. She closed her hand, extinguishing the flame, and her image slowly faded from his mind.
He couldn’t tell what she dared not do, but in that fleeting moment Flydd had seen her Art and thought he understood it. He could feel power within him now, the power of her Art, and he used it to complete his renewal at last. She was using him but he would worry about that later. His loose bones settled into their enclosing muscles, his saggy sinews snapped tight, and for the first time he felt at home in his renewed body. He slid out into the open.
‘What are you doing?’ cried Colm.
Flydd didn’t answer; there wasn’t time, for half a dozen troops were on the stairs, holding out shiny shields to reflect any knife-beam back at him, and the rest were waiting their turn. Leaning over the edge of the ledge, he focused her Art, though not to shear flesh this time. The knife had to be forced to cut rock, metal, and anything else in its path. He sent the power of the shrieking blade slanting down through the annulus to sever whatever was anchoring the stair below and, with luck, collapse it into the abyss. Drawing every bit of power the woman had woken in him, he sent it into the knife.
Its scream made Klarm and the mancers clap their hands over their ears; the last wing-ray, gliding in circles below the ceiling, dived headfirst into the floor and did not move. Klarm blasted up at Flydd, knocking pieces out of the ledge.
Flydd swung the knife and bisected the dark-robed scrier, who died with a squeal that lasted until the air in his lungs was gone. Flydd felt no pity for him; scriers were vicious and merciless, and it was fitting that he die as he had lived.
The stair shook in wild circles, hurling the soldiers many spans to the floor, or into the abyss; he heard bones break. He cut down through the annulus again, expecting the stair to collapse, but it stilled, creaked, fell silent. Only then did he realise that it was fading, parts of it disappearing as if painted with an invisibility brush.
Klarm sent up another blast, narrowly missing him. He wasn’t holding back now. Flydd ducked out of sight. Klarm prodded at the lower invisible sections with his knoblaggie, then ordered another half-dozen soldiers to climb the stairs, and the rest out through the double doors. The six soldiers started up, anxiously, and Flydd couldn’t blame them. He allowed the first to climb halfway before slanting a knife beam in behind the reflective shield and cutting him down. The second and third fell to their deaths when the steps they were standing on vanished, leaving a mere skeleton of stone around the edges. Klarm ordered the surviving three down.
With a grim smile, Flydd turned back to Colm, who was standing at the entrance to the blocked tunnel. ‘Our first victory.’
‘They’ll soon cut us off.’
Without warning, the cool green flames beside them darkened to a deep green-black, and grew hotter, though not nearly as hot as normal fire. Something had changed.
‘What is it?’ said Colm, panting like a dog on a hot day.
‘I should have been more careful. I think I’ve cut open the reservoir that feeds the flame.’
A minute ago the abyssal flames had been bouncing harmlessly off the ceiling, but now the stone began to droop. The ring of fire thickened into a circular column, sending tongues of flame licking out towards them. White fumes crept along the ceiling.
‘The flame’s out of control,’ Flydd said, ‘and it’s not going to stop. Run!’
He carved a hole through the wall blocking the right-hand entrance, and leapt into the tunnel behind it. Colm followed and they raced up a steep slope into the darkness.
‘Where are we going?’ panted Colm.
‘To the obelisk, as quick as we can.’
A few minutes later a passage ran off to the right, but the sound of marching feet echoed from it.
Flydd swore. ‘Klarm’s soldiers have found another way up. They’re trying to cut us off.’ He pressed on hastily, but soon the rising tunnel curved back and they heard the flame again. They turned the corner and saw that it had dissolved up through the floor not far ahead, flinging globules of rock at them, and eating ever upwards.
‘They have cut us off,’ said Colm. ‘There’s no way out.’
Flydd checked the knife in his blistered hand. Rainbow colours swirled across it, as if the metal had been overheated, and the blade was bent. Its steel could not withstand the uncanny stresses imposed on it and if he used it again it was likely to fail, but he dared not take the risk of swapping it for Colm’s scimitar. It might not sing at all; the blade might even shatter.
Ahead the roof was sagging, the flame dissolving a circular shaft up towards the surface of the plateau.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Flydd said. ‘The flame seems to be unbinding the very forces that hold solid rock together.’
Tramp-tramp. ‘They’re close!’ said Colm. ‘And I’m not going to be taken alive.’
He seemed to have gained some control over his fire phobia and could glance at the column of flame without cringing. There was a defiant gleam in his eyes and an aggressive angle to his chin that Flydd remembered from the first time he’d met Colm.
Shield.
It hadn’t been a voice in his head this time, just the image of a transparent cone standing on its base. ‘There is one way out,’ said Flydd. ‘Straight up.’
SIXTEEN
Colm’s eyes widened. ‘Look what it’s doing to the rock. It’s unnatural.’
Liquefied rock formed puddles on the floor of the tunnel and began to dribble towards them, sweeping up the debris in its path. A piece of dry grass, blown into the tunnel in ages past, was carried along on top, yet did not even smoke. The liquid rock wasn’t hot, and that was downright uncanny.
Flydd squirmed at the thought of what the flame would do to them, but there was no other way. He studied the circular opening. ‘The abyssal flame
isn’t nearly as hot as normal fire, and once it eats through into the cavern above, a tunnel slopes up steeply towards the surface, as I remember it. If we can get into it first …’
‘You’re insane.’
‘She wouldn’t have sent me this way unless there was a way out.’
‘You don’t know this is the way!’ Colm hissed. ‘She might be trying to trap you.’
‘No, she needs me to do something for her, and I’m sure I’ve got to go up.’ Flydd edged towards the flame with the tip of the blade out. The flame was only warm on his skin, but the knife grew so hot that he could barely hold it. As the tip grew red-hot, bordering on white, the blade bent into a half twist at the hilt.
Jerking his hand away before the blade failed completely, Flydd stumbled backwards and reached as high above his head as he could, praying that he’d understood what she’d shown him. ‘Duck down! Make yourself small.’
Colm crouched, pulling his arms and legs close together. Flydd angled the blade down and out, then rotated, careful to keep the tip pointing out beyond any part of himself or Colm. The blade hummed as it carved a circle around them, and as he completed it a grey cone sprang into being, just like the one she’d shown him, enclosing them on all sides. The warmth of the flame was cut off, though its dazzling light was barely diminished.
Flydd stopped channelling power through the knife and took a step forwards. The cone moved with him. ‘Come on.’
‘Where?’ A muscle twitched along the line of Colm’s jaw.
Flydd couldn’t blame him. The cone would protect them from many dangers, but could it survive where he had to take it? ‘There’s a way to get past the flame,’ he equivocated. He could not tell Colm the truth.
Colm looked askance at the flame. His larynx bobbed up and down, and his eyes dilated until Flydd could see twin flames reflected there. ‘You’re mad.’
