“But I thought the sacred flames of the rub-aki were the source of your enlightenment,” Delia said flatly. “A Grace gifted by the god Takaminara.”
“There is much speculation about the ways of the Blood-eyed—clouded further by those charlatans who fake a crimson eye. Very little of it is the truth. Takaminara prefers to keep her ways secret. The true rub-aki respect that and do not speak of such matters.”
“Then why tell us?” Delia asked. Her eyes kept shifting to the pyre before the door.
“Because what I must ask will require great trust.”
Delia merely shrugged, noncommittal. “Tell us about the opening of your inner eye.”
“Like I mentioned, it requires darkness. Takaminara is well versed in the relationship between flame and shadow. She has buried herself in her mountain, never stepping under the sun or stars. Yet she is more knowledgeable of this world than any other god. She stands amid the molten flows that run beneath all. Her world is neither flame nor darkness, but the space between. In that fracture, she can see into the deep past and the trails into the future.”
This last was said with great reverence.
“And for those who earn her mark, who serve her, she lets us share the smallest fraction of her sight. But to that we must open our eye. And here is a truth that only a handful of people know.” He stared at each in turn. “There is no Grace involved.”
Delia straightened, loosening her arms, then tightening them again. “Impossible. I’ve heard stories of the rub-aki, great feats of fire and prediction. True stories, not charlatan tales.”
Orquell nodded. “Yet it requires no Grace. Some communing and pryre casting require Grace and blessings from Takaminara. But at its most basic, down deep, every man and woman has this eye, awaiting to be woken.”
“How does one open it?” Laurelle asked “How does darkness open it?”
“It is not just any darkness. Once properly trained, an acolyte descends deep beneath the volcanic peak of Takaminara. Into caverns of black rock, long gone cold, where sunlight has never touched. A darkness so deep that it strains the eye and blinds it, like staring directly at the sun. That alone is a lesson worth noting. That purest darkness and the brightest flame blind equally.” He stopped and his gaze seemed to drift for a moment. Then he began again. “And in that darkness, with the regular eye blinded, the inner eye can open with proper initiation.”
Delia stirred. “But how does this make us trust you? Why did you come to Tashijan during such a dire moment as this?”
He shrugged. “No mystery there. Master Hesharian requested my services to seek a cure for the stone-cursed knight. That is the truth.” He turned to Delia. “But it was Takaminara that sent me to Ghazal, to study the ways of the Clerics of Naeth. It was those same studies that drew the attention of Hesharian. And eventually drew me here.”
“So Takaminara knew you’d end up here? Why? Did she foresee what has befallen us?”
Orquell shrugged. “I do not know. We are her servants, submitting to her will as much as any Hand of a god. We go where the flame directs. Perhaps she saw it, but more likely she cast us out like petals on a flowing river. She can sense the current, but even she can’t tell where each petal will land. Portending is much different than the charlatans make it seem. More powerful in some ways, less in others.”
He must have read the disappointment in Laurelle and the doubt in Delia. Kytt just gaped at the revelations.
“Takaminara once described what portending was truly like. It was like seeing flames in the dark. Fiery pools of illumination, disconnected to everything around it. To place too much significance on what is revealed, without knowing what remains hidden in the dark, is a fool’s paradise. You’d might as well see nothing at all.”
“So then what do you see with your open eye?” Laurelle asked.
Before he could answer, the pyre by the door suddenly burst up with a flare of flame.
Orquell stood. “It seems someone’s come knocking.”
Kathryn faced the pair of wraiths in the room.
A dozen bodies of young boys were strewn among the stacked beds and floor like scattered dolls, broken and ripped. The far window, high on the wall, no more than a slit, seemed too small for any wraith to enter. The iron shutter was peeled back and teetered on a broken hinge, weakened by rust. Such was the sorry state of Tashijan: fallen into disrepair over the centuries as numbers dwindled and the space grew too large.
It shouldn’t have happened. For lack of a solid hinge, twelve boys had died.
One of the wraiths straddled a lad, his chest raked, throat torn. A fistful of claw was buried in his belly. It tore free, yanking out the most tender parts. The wraith’s face was covered in blood and gore as it spit at her, hissing and baring its teeth, protecting its meal.
The other was perched on the top of the stacked beds, also straddling something, but it was not slaking its hunger. It was satisfying another lust. It leaped up to the bed railing, claws digging into the wood. Its manhood swollen and bloody. Wings spread.
Kathryn held her sword up and gathered the room’s shadows to her cloak. She remembered Lord Ulf’s cold words, how he controlled his wind wraiths through seersong and will. Her lips hardened. Was this the manner in which he controlled them?
Behind her, fighting continued out on the stair. Screams, wails, and frantic orders echoed up and down the main spiral. Slowly they were losing levels, one after the other. Blood was spent in order to clear floors. Stormwatch was slowly being driven into ever smaller quarters.
The only advantage: The knights had less territory to guard, and the wraiths had fewer ways to strike them.
As a result, a balance was establishing. They had held this level for an entire half bell. The line was even firming. A glimmer of hope had started to sound in the growl and shout of the knights and masters.
It was such a feat that also allowed Kathryn to hear a scream behind this door. A squire’s lodging. She had opened the door to find this horror. How many other places in Tashijan suffered similarly?
The one atop the bed attacked first, screeching and diving at her, its wings wide. Kathryn shifted shadows in the room and vanished to its left flank. Her blade darted out, lightning out of darkness, blessed with dire alchemies.
The wraith noted her thrust for its heart. Though ilked, it was Grace-born, a creature of air. With the speed of a swirling gust, it ripped around, lashing out with a clawed foot.
Kathryn ducked between its legs, never dropping her sword. She shoved straight up, slicing open its belly, and rolled aside. It wailed and spun, spilling entrails and blood. It struck the wall, writhing, unable to gain its footing, wracked in pain, legs tangled in its own entrails. The more it fought, the more it gutted itself.
From the corner of her eye, movement stirred.
Kathryn swirled darkness and vanished away. The creature atop the table searched with one eye cocked, then the other. But it didn’t hunt on sight alone. Its head swung around, scenting her. It was ready when she folded out of darkness, sword swinging.
It lunged off the table—away from her, craven with the death cries of its partner. Kathryn chopped with her sword before it could fully escape. Her blade sliced through its leathery wing and bony shoulder, cleaving all away.
Now it was its turn to screech as it rolled off the table, off the boy, one wing flapping like a sail in a storm.
Kathryn vaulted the table and landed on the wing, pinning the wraith to the floor. Two-handed, she swung her sword low, cutting off its scream.
And its head.
The body convulsed once, then lay still.
Its head kept rolling.
Kathryn dropped her shadows. Her cloak fell about her shoulders like a death’s shroud, heavy with blood. She stepped back, stumbled away, over to the door.
A knight appeared at the entrance. His eyes above the masklin widened at the slaughter found inside. She pushed past him, sword still out. She clenched her fist on its hilt to co
ntrol her trembling.
“Seal the door,” she ordered as she passed. “Bar it tight.”
Then she was out on the stairs. More calls and shouts echoed down from the main line. She ran the opposite way. Before hearing the scream from the room, she had been headed down to meet Argent. Now she had another reason to run below.
To escape the horrors of that room.
Around and around, she fled.
Finally she stopped, leaned a palm against the wall, and emptied her stomach on the stair. Her belly heaved again, sour and empty. She gasped for air. Her eyes ached with tears that refused to flow.
Not now…
She spat on the stone and wiped her mouth.
Not yet…
Straightening, she sheathed her sword and stumbled a step, caught herself, and continued down leadenly, a hundred stone heavier than when she had gone up to her hermitage.
She quickly reached the fieldroom’s level and headed down the hall to the open door. It was unguarded. There were no knights to spare for such duties. She entered to find the rally already under way.
She was surprised at how few were here. Argent held a dagger in his fingers and made deft instructions on the pinned map, cutting into the ancient vellum in his urgency and fury. He was instructing his second-in-command. Kathryn didn’t know his name. The former second had died during the third bell; there had been no time for introductions after that.
Hesharian stood against the back wall. Unmoving, eyes glazed.
Gerrod was at Argent’s other elbow, suggesting a few improvements with a bronzed finger. “They are particularly sensitive to loam. If we paint the stairs here…and here…with an alchemy of bile and loam, they should weaken before they hit the line.”
The warden nodded.
All their eyes lifted when she entered. Something in her face made them all straighten with concern.
“Did the line break again?” Argent asked.
“It holds,” Kathryn assured him, putting steel in her voice and hardening her face.
Argent looked relieved. Gerrod’s face was impossible to read, armored as it was, but he continued to stare at her.
She nodded to him, indicating she was all right.
It was a lie they all needed to believe for the moment.
There was only one other participant in the rally: the lithe and pristine figure of Liannora, Hand of Oldenbrook. Like Hesharian, she also stood to the side, her hands tucked into a snowy muff. For a moment, Kathryn could not make sense of it. Then she remembered the stone-casting among the Hands, the selection of a representative to the council.
Or rather two representatives.
Kathryn searched the room. “Where’s Delia?” she asked Liannora.
A flash of guilt wavered across her pale features before vanishing. The woman shook her head, indicating she didn’t know. Liannora must have been caught here when all fell apart. She must have felt safer here, leaving Delia to deal with all the Hands. No wonder the guilty demeanor.
Kathryn turned her back on the woman.
Argent spoke. “If the line is finally holding, then perhaps we have a chance.”
“We can’t win this war,” Kathryn said, not letting her steeliness drop, making it plain that it was not despair that prompted her words.
Argent, ever the campaigner, still bristled.
“She is right,” Gerrod said, supporting her. “We can hold out, but night will fall soon. The sun already sets.”
“So?” Argent turned his eye upon Gerrod. “Locked in our tower, what difference does it make if the sun is up or not?”
“You forget Eylan?” Kathryn asked. “What have we faced so far? Wraiths and stormfire.”
Argent frowned.
Kathryn continued. “Eylan came cloaked in an icy Dark Grace, impenetrable. Though the wraiths are fearsome, they can be struck down with steel and alchemy. What if he brings the same icy Dark Grace upon us again?”
Argent’s face grew troubled. She read the dawning understanding in the furrows of his brow. He was stubborn, but not beyond reason—if you could get him to listen.
“Perhaps Ulf weakens,” he said. “The storm must sap him greatly to keep it locked around our town for so long.”
“No,” Gerrod said and stepped to the window.
They followed.
The wide windows were shuttered tight. Gerrod pointed to an opening in the shutter, only a hand’s breadth tall but wide enough for all three to gather.
Kathryn searched outside. The day was indeed almost gone. The storm swallowed the world, but the gray clouds were darkening. They were losing the sun. Beyond the window, a sweeping view of fields and outer towers was shrouded in swirls of snow. Still, she saw shapes winging about and boiling and crawling amid the towers.
Still so many…
“Lord Ulf is not weakening,” Gerrod continued. “The wraiths were only the beginning. He’s been waiting for nightfall, for his wraith legion to drive us tighter and tighter together.”
“Why?”
“Whatever icy Grace protected Eylan, it must not be limitless. Or else he would have used it to shield the wraiths already. I suspect it is an arrow best shot with some marksmanship.”
Kathryn understood. “He intends to have us all confined to one place.”
“So to inflict a killing blow,” Argent said.
Gerrod nodded. “And when that ice comes and we lose the flames of our lower levels, it will open our other flank, where Mirra awaits. Wraiths above, daemons below, and ice all around.”
Argent stepped back, the fire in him kicked to ashes. “When?” he asked, knowing this was the most important question.
Gerrod merely turned to the window—and the setting sun.
Kathryn stared out the window as the darkness deepened.
“We’ll never last ’til dawn,” Argent muttered.
The pyre spit and hissed, scattering sparks toward the roof. The barred door glowed in the flames, revealing every grain in stark relief, as if the fire did not tolerate any shadows.
“To the center of the room,” Orquell ordered, waving his hand.
Laurelle shifted to obey, crowded by Kytt and Delia.
“Stay there until I tell you otherwise,” Orquell said, stepping toward the door.
The other three pyres in the room’s corners caught the excitement of the first and danced higher. Soon the room shone as brightly as a summer day.
Laurelle glanced at her toes, avoiding the flaring glare. She noted that none of them cast any shadows on the floor. With flames burning on all four sides, they were bathed in light from all directions.
She remembered Master Orquell’s earlier words.
Every flame casts a shadow.
Orquell reached to the door’s bar and lifted it free.
“What are you doing?” Delia asked harshly. Suspicion still rang sharply in her.
“We invited the witch here. It would be impolite to refuse her now.”
Orquell tugged on the latch and fought the stubborn hinges to pry the door open. Beyond the threshold, the dark hall waited.
The unnaturalness of the shadows was plain to all. The blaze of the pyre failed to penetrate the darkness, as if the hallway were flooded to the roof with black water.
Orquell stepped back and beckoned. “Castellan Mirra, please come inside. Your black ghawls will have to remain without, of course. The flames here will not let them pass.”
“What do you want, rub-aki?” a reedy voice asked from the darkness. “Your flames foul the hallways here.”
“Ah yes, my rys-mor, the living flames.” He waved to encompass the pyres. “Born from a powder of crushed lavantheum, bearing the blood of four aspects—it attracts them, does it not? Where ordinary flame chases them off with warmth and brightness, my flames are like the fresh beating and bloody heart of the most delicious prey. They can’t stay away. In fact, I wager they are being a bit stubborn about obeying your wishes. Of course, eventually they will, but it will take much effo
rt and concentration on your part.”
“Why are you interfering? Takaminara has never meddled in the affairs of the outer world.”
Orquell took another step back, bowing slightly. “Exactly. So fear not my threshold. I swear your safety here.”
Laurelle heard Delia hiss under her breath.
The darkness parted and a gray-haired old woman slipped out and into the firelight, dressed in a robe, sashed at the waist. She seemed more a kindly great-mother, maybe a bit stern around the edges, but certainly no witch. She entered the room, leaning on a smooth cane. It was only once she stepped across that Laurelle saw her cane was actually some creature’s legbone, carved with Littick sigils.
“Again, what do you want, rub-aki?”
“A bargain for my safe passage. Nothing more. Allow me to reach the central stair, and I’ll douse my flames. You know the word of a rub-aki is inviolate. We cannot go back on our oath.”
“And I also know that the rub-aki are skilled at using their words to the fullest and in a most sly manner.”
“Then I’ll speak plain. I walk”—he mimicked a man walking with two fingers across his open palm—“and once I reach the stairs, I’ll douse all of my pyres. I will tell no one of your presence. But betray me and I’ll use my dying breath like a bellow to fan my four pyres. You won’t like that.”
Mirra studied Orquell, attempting to see a trap.
“To sweeten the deal,” he pressed, “I offer you these three to take.”
He waved over to them.
“What?” Delia snapped and lunged a step forward.
Laurelle grabbed her elbow, instinctively. The master had told them not to leave the room’s center for any reason. He had also asked for their trust. Delia fought her hold. Only then did Laurelle realize Delia was feigning her struggle, for the show of it. Still, Laurelle also read a vein of real suspicion in Delia’s eye.
Could they truly trust this one?
Orquell ignored them. “As you’ve said, servants of Takaminara have no concerns for the wider world. I have no use for these three—a wyld tracker and two Hands.”
Mirra’s eyes shifted closer to study them, stepping to the side to view them better.