Firestorm Read online

  As they flew further north, the air became colder. The pattern of foliage below them shifted gradually from orange to brown to bare, skeletal branches. Low cloud hid them most of the time, but occasionally they’d emerge into clear blue, where the clouds were wispy and scudding high over narrow valleys. Mountain goat became a staple, though Char once managed to flush out a deer. Despite his huge wingspan, he was getting better at navigating the rocky gorges.

  Every evening, Kyndra would ignite solid stone with a touch and they would sit around the flames, discussing what they might encounter when they reached Magtharda. That the eldest would send du-alakat to stop them was a given, but they could only guess at their numbers. Then there was the time prison itself; Kyndra envisioned it as a vast bubble, its walls invisible to the naked eye.

  She caught her first glimpse with the first snow. They’d been flying steadily north-west until the land had pushed itself into peaks around them. Now, wherever Kyndra looked, she saw mountains. Steel-clad, white-capped, they were a line of silent priests, oddly menacing in their stillness. The sky was flat, reducing their world to a palette of greys – they’d left the colourful autumn valleys behind. Char was the only one who looked at home here; his dusky scales could have been sculpted out of the mountains’ hide. Kyndra’s hair was an alien streak of fire on the wind.

  Magtharda appeared between one blink and the next. At first, Kyndra thought its towers were merely spires of rock thrusting free of the mountains, but, looking closer, she saw windows cut into them; dark, eye-shaped portals that marched around the outside of each soaring barbican. There were half a dozen, guarding the buildings beyond.

  Char made a strange sound in his throat; perhaps he’d attempted to whistle.

  They flew beneath a great arch, a portal carved from solid rock. No gate or portcullis hung from its frame; it was unnecessary, Kyndra thought, when only those with wings could reach it. The ground was lost to view.

  Magtharda lay on the other side. A tiered city, vast courtyards open to the sky, it rose in levels, keeping pace with the mountains that cradled it. Everything was built of the same greyish rock, left rough to echo the landscape. Waterfalls spilled over stone, falling hundreds of feet into deep channels that bisected the streets. The water was the only thing that moved.

  With two quick beats of his wings, Char landed on one of the wider thoroughfares and lowered his head to drink.

  ‘Stop,’ Ma said sharply. Both she and Kyndra slid off the dragon’s back, scanning the empty streets. ‘Can you tell if it’s safe?’ the mercenary asked Kyndra. She was frowning at the water, rushing opaque under the dull sky.

  Kyndra bent down and scooped up a handful, calling on Lagus. Clean, the star told her. ‘If there was poison in the water, there’s no trace of it now,’ she said.

  Char gave a huff of relief and plunged most of his head in.

  Ma’s profile was rigid. She watched the streets, as if expecting an ambush, but nothing leapt out to break the city’s stillness. Kyndra, too, stood tensed; something was out of place here, out of step.

  ‘You feel it,’ Ma said. Her eyes travelled over the high buildings, the large, graceful arches, searching. ‘They are here, the Lleu-yelin, all around us.’

  ‘What?’ Char shook out his mane, showering them. He scanned the courtyard too. ‘Then where are they?’

  ‘Frozen,’ Ma said. ‘They are being held.’ She briefly closed her eyes. ‘I can feel the strands of it linking them together.’

  ‘The strands of what?’ Kyndra asked.

  ‘A focus.’

  Char’s brow bunched. ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘It might not be an it, but a who,’ Ma said, a touch evasively.

  Char took a few clawed steps towards the centre of the city. ‘You mean a Khronostian?’

  Ma shook her head. ‘I don’t know. We need to go further in.’

  It was an eerie walk, as they crossed Magtharda, their footsteps ringing on grey stone. The wind blew and the water tumbled and still they saw no sign of life. The windows of the buildings they passed stared down at them unblinking, the stone doors closed. With the sky above and the city below, it was a colourless world, save for the hues they brought with them.

  Great flagstones paraded up the thoroughfare, bisected by a straight dark line that branched off at ninety-degree angles into smaller lines. These ran to unlit lamps and then onwards into the smaller streets. ‘What are those for?’ Kyndra wondered aloud.

  To her surprise, it was Char who answered. ‘Ambertrix.’

  She frowned. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I feel it,’ the dragon said, swinging his head around to look at her. Grounded, he wasn’t nearly so graceful. ‘There’s none here now, but—’ He broke off and lowered his muzzle to the nearest line. Kyndra watched his belly swell, ribs expanding as he drew in a breath. It emerged again as a thin blue stream, slowly, with none of the force he’d used during their earlier battle with the Sartyans.

  ‘You’ve been practising,’ she said, pleased.

  The stream of ambertrix touched the line and Kyndra heard Ma gasp as the tributary flamed into life, blazing blue. The light spread towards the lamp, igniting it and moving on. Wherever it flowed, more lamps blazed. It touched the doorstep of a house and from inside came a series of clicks and clacks as if some long-dead contraption were groaning to life. Char looked proudly at his handiwork. But then the blue light faded and darkness travelled up the line, dousing lamps, stilling the house until all was silent once more.

  Char gave a huff of annoyance and drew in another breath, but Kyndra laid a hand on his flank. ‘There’s no point,’ she said and knelt, tracing the dark line with a finger. ‘The Lleu-yelin must have had another way to keep them alight. Whatever you do will just be temporary.’

  ‘I wish I knew what this place looked like before the Khronostians came,’ Char rumbled. He turned away. ‘Let’s find this focus.’

  The city changed gradually as they moved further in. The buildings became more elaborate, the carvings above their lintels painting a picture of Lleu-yelin life. One house with a wide veranda carried some faintly disturbing images of serpentine creatures intertwined with humans – humanoid, Kyndra corrected herself. Their limbs were too long, their faces too pointed for ordinary people.

  The main thoroughfare ended at a triangular archway set into the largest structure they’d seen yet. Several Chars could fit comfortably through with room to spare. Kyndra felt dwarfed as she passed into its shadow and shared a look with Ma. The woman’s face was drawn, as if something she dreaded waited around the next corner. Kyndra summoned a sphere of starlight, which she sent up to hover over their heads.

  Under its chill glow, they saw a vestibule. A pair of doors confronted them, their carvings showing a dragon with a figure upon its back. Ribbons streamed from the rider’s wrists, as they held them out to either side, head tipped back in the ecstasy of flight. The dragon’s slitted eyes were rubies, scales picked out in the same topaz as the rider’s shining hair. Kyndra and the others stopped, transfixed by the image. Then Ma stepped forward and laid her ouroboros palm on the door.

  ‘In here,’ she said.

  Without being asked, Char reared onto his hind legs and pressed his front claws against the carving. The doors swung open.

  Red suffused the chamber beyond. A vast mandala had been burned into the floor. White sand traced its curving lines, so intricate that it made Kyndra dizzy. They ebbed and flowed around each other, beautiful, deadly, rather like the du-alakat themselves. But they all led, inevitably, to the centre.

  ‘No,’ Ma whispered in horror.

  An ancient dragon towered at the mandala’s heart, blood seeping from dozens of wounds. It ran unerringly into the white sand, turning it black before being absorbed. Little flashes of blue flickered over the dragon’s flesh; its wings were spread wide, cords in its neck straining in evident agony. The chamber was bitter with the stink of blood. Char let out a snarl.

  �
�Monstrous,’ Ma said, still in a whisper. ‘They have trapped it in the moment they attacked. It will bleed forever, but never die.’

  ‘Him,’ Char growled. ‘They have trapped him.’

  ‘How does the prison work?’ Kyndra asked, studying the dragon with interest. A part of her felt queasy upon seeing the injured creature, but Era’s fascination was stronger. They have interrupted the cycle of time, the star said in its echoing way, used the blood to bind the rest of his kin.

  ‘Then where are they?’ Kyndra asked aloud.

  ‘We cannot see them,’ Ma answered, as if she had heard the exchange. ‘This one is the focus, so it is visible in the present, but the others are imprisoned in the moment the creature was captured, bound by the mandala and the power of their shared blood. Abhorrent.’ She shook her head. ‘And unbearably clever.’

  ‘We are glad you think so,’ said a voice.

  2

  Gareth

  The man who was and was not Gareth Ilda-Son craned his neck to watch the airship pass overhead. Torn leaves leapt like sea spray before the keel and whirled down around him – brown leaves, dead leaves. He stood on the fringes of the Deadwood, aptly named, for where the trees had not been reduced to kindling, they loomed around him in seared rows and the sound of leaf against dry leaf was a death rattle.

  It was a sound he knew intimately.

  Gareth forced the dark smile from his lips. Apart from waking up on the deck of the airship with a heart that no longer beat, he remembered little of preceding events. What he did recall was too unpleasant to dwell upon. The sailors’ whispering on board the Eastern Set had followed in his wake, whispers that spoke of bad luck, of fear, of a dead man walking. They are right to fear me, he thought, and then wondered whether it was his thought.

  Gareth looked at the trees surrounding them and flexed his fingers. They opened stiffly, reluctantly. He had to fight the rigor mortis that had set in since that night a week ago … the night he’d died. He shuddered and found himself touching his chest again. The flesh was cold and still beneath his hand.

  ‘Gareth?’ came a voice and, grateful for any distraction, he turned to Brégenne. She regarded him with wary eyes, the plait of her white-blond hair pulled over her shoulder.

  ‘Yes, it’s me,’ he said.

  She seemed relieved. ‘Are you ready? Do you need to rest?’

  Gareth glanced at the gauntlet on his arm. He didn’t need to rest, not since awakening to this death-in-life existence. He shook his head.

  ‘We should wait until dawn,’ Kul’Das said. The woman from Ümvast’s – his mother’s – court carried her usual air of arrogance. ‘My staff does not function at night.’

  Brégenne huffed. Gareth knew she’d been trying to convince the shaman that the staff was just an inanimate length of wood, but Kul’Das remained adamant. ‘No,’ Brégenne answered irritably. ‘Until you’re ready to be honest and admit you’re a Wielder, we travel at night.’

  Gareth didn’t protest. Although he, too, was a Wielder, the Solar power seemed different now; he hadn’t touched it in a week. Suspecting the gauntlet’s influence, he studied the ebony metal enclosing his right wrist. It left his fingers bare but reached halfway to his elbow, fully part of him now. If only he’d known the danger when he’d stolen it from Naris’s archives …

  The memory made him think of Shika and Irilin and he wondered where his friends were. Perhaps he should be glad that they couldn’t see what he’d become. Serjo. The thought, not his own, came right atop the other. Once we were friends, Brother.

  ‘Ben-haugr is west,’ Brégenne said, her voice muffled by the surrounding trees. She gave Gareth a narrow glance. ‘Are you sure you can find it? We might come out too far to the north or south – Kyndra only gave me a rough idea of its location.’

  ‘I can find it.’ As soon as his feet had touched Acrean soil, Gareth had felt a nagging pull to the west, an itch no amount of scratching could relieve. When he closed his eyes, an image came to him of twisting stone, sunken pathways, a labyrinth leading to a vaulted chamber, an occupied throne …

  Gareth quickly blinked it away. That pull had to be the other gauntlet – once he united the pair, he’d be free of this curse. But he knew it must lie deep inside Ben-haugr, in the tomb of Kingswold, built atop the ruins of an ancient city. The thought of what else he might find there turned him cold.

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ Kul’Das said. The sun had already fled the sky and the Deadwood lay before them, wreathed in shadows. A cry came and the three of them started. Halfway between owl and wolf, it would have raised the hairs on Gareth’s neck if they still responded to feeling.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Kul’Das repeated. Her fingers tightened around the staff, knuckles bone-pale in the fickle moonlight. ‘This forest is wrong.’ She cast Gareth a reproachful look. ‘I still say we should have kept the warriors.’

  They’d left the handful of warriors who’d accompanied them from Ümvast aboard the airship. Gareth knew they were there on his mother’s orders; if he’d been himself, he wouldn’t have had the authority to send them away. But he wasn’t himself. They’d seen what he’d done to the bandits who’d attacked the airship. They’d watched living flesh rot before their eyes with a single touch from his hand. They’d witnessed Gareth die and wake again. So when he’d asked them to stay behind, they had stayed and nothing Kul’Das had said could force them to return to their duty.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ Gareth told her now. ‘The warriors will be safer with Argat.’

  ‘I notice it’s not too dangerous for us, though,’ Kul’Das said with a touch of indignation, but she looked oddly satisfied all the same.

  ‘Let’s go.’ It came out harsher than he’d intended. Silently, Brégenne took his lead and started out, her eyes glowing silver in the gloom.

  Gareth’s senses seemed heightened as he walked. They, at least, still functioned. He could smell charred earth, though whatever fire had swept through here was long extinguished. The rattlesnake leaves blew fitful in the breeze and his footfalls stirred up little puffs of ash. Some trees had weathered the flames, scarred but whole, while others were bent and broken, branches littering the forest floor. Gareth found himself thinking of Vorgarde, the lightless land; warriors of Ümvast believed they would forever roam those dim battlefields after death.

  That was how the night passed, with Gareth’s every sense taut, primed for trouble. It was almost a shock to see the sky lighten above them, dawn painting the trunks red. Gareth felt the Solar power wake, a shining golden thread he could follow to the heart of the sun. Except that his connection to it felt strained somehow. The thought of reaching for it wearied him, but he’d put this off long enough.

  Wan gold, streaked with shadow, formed in his hands and Brégenne turned sharply to face him. He was aware too of Kul’Das watching. Neither woman totally trusted him. He didn’t trust himself.

  Gareth opened his mouth to speak, but the golden light in his hands grew hotter and began to burn. It took him a moment to recognize the feeling as pain – the first pain he had felt since his death. How many times had he held the Solar, feeling that warmth, that life, like the beating heart of the world? Now, weak as it was, it scorched him. He released it with a yelp.

  ‘Gareth,’ Brégenne said, advancing a step towards him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The Solar,’ he mumbled. ‘It hurts to hold it.’

  For a moment she seemed speechless. Her eyes moved from his face to the gauntlet and he knew what she was thinking; he was thinking it too. The Solar is life … and I am dead. He had to crush his surge of revulsion. Brégenne made to lay a hand on his shoulder, but perhaps she thought better of it, for she drew back.

  ‘We may as well rest here,’ she said, inspecting their surroundings. There was little shelter – or camouflage – to be had in the Deadwood, Gareth realized. They wouldn’t do much better than the slight hollow they currently stood in; its curving sides offered scanty protection from pryi
ng eyes.

  ‘I will take first watch,’ Kul’Das said, though she sounded weary and leaned heavily on her staff.

  ‘No.’ Gareth’s voice was quiet. ‘Let me watch. I don’t need to rest.’

  Their answering looks said it all. He tried to tell himself he didn’t care whether they trusted him or not, but … He glanced at Brégenne. After the months they’d spent travelling together, it hurt to see the doubt in her eyes. He saw himself reflected in them: skeletally thin, waxen, mottle-skinned, his eyes like flat black pools. Gareth looked down at himself. He’d been large all his life, big boned like the rest of his people. Now those bones stood out starkly, the flesh lying slack over his shrunken chest. He felt another wave of disgust; he barely looked human any more. Ghoul-like, the gauntlet had fed on him, stripping away his life, layer by layer, until even his heart stopped beating.

  And still it wasn’t finished with him.

  As the women slept, or pretended to sleep – he was sure one of them kept an eye on him – Gareth watched the sun slide between the black trunks. Even his friend Shika, who always found something to laugh about, wouldn’t laugh this time. He won’t recognize me.

  The day passed as uneventfully as the night. Once or twice Gareth thought he heard a twig snap and he rose to his feet, listening. But nothing disturbed the stillness of the burned-out forest. By the time the moon climbed again, Gareth’s caution was somewhat blunted. ‘So where are these “unsavoury types” Kyndra warned us about?’ he asked Brégenne, as the Wielder swung a cloak around her shoulders. ‘I thought she said people lived in the Deadwood.’

  ‘Are you so keen to meet them?’

  Gareth looked away. ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps we’re out of their range.’ Brégenne briefly laid a hand on his arm. ‘Are you sure you don’t need to sleep?’

  He nodded, uncomfortable in her presence. Brégenne might have trusted the old Gareth, but she didn’t trust him. He missed the easy friendship they’d struck up along the road to Market Primus. Together they’d escaped the Wielders sent to subdue them. They’d fought back to back against the wyverns attacking Ümvast’s fortress, he with the Solar, she with the Lunar. When he’d … when he’d killed those men, she had risked her life to bring him back to himself. Yet now there was a wall between them and he didn’t know how to breach it.