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Synopsis
The second book in the action-packed new trilogy from epic fantasy author Matthew Ward, the Soulfire Saga is set in a world ruled by an immortal king, where souls fuel magic and a supernatural mist known as the Veil threatens to engulf the land. Perfect for readers of John Gwynne and Anthony Ryan.
The sprawling Kingdom of Khalad stands alone. Severed from the rest of the world by an ancient, arcane war, its folk toil behind a wall of living mist, beholden to an undead king and his barons.
But hope lies with two figures: Kat, an accomplished thief, and Vallant, a rebel and folk hero. Together they will light a fire that will burn away the corruption and tyranny of King Diar's rule.
But only if they succeed . . .
Release date: June 11, 2024
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 544
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The Fire Within Them
Matthew Ward
Being reborn hurt more than dying.
White-cold flame seared extremities for which she’d no name. That weren’t even her. Not yet. She wasn’t anything to which they could belong. Not yet. But somehow the instinct that she had been – and could yet be again – held her together in the darkness.
Little by little the pain receded. Icy fire thawed beneath a warm, heavy pulse.
Blind endurance yielded to the first stirrings of awareness. Of echoing screams – her screams – fading into a pervasive, distant shudder more heard than felt, and cracked tiles beneath hip and shoulder. Half-lidded eyes creaked open on a circle of gloom-edged starlight. Decades-old dust and jasmine incense ash choked her first conscious breath to a ragged cough. Only touch remained distant, defiant, offering no sensation of the air moving across her naked body.
Limbs remained truculent, yielding only to supreme effort of will. Rotted carpet bunched and tore beneath her fingers as she dragged herself into a sitting position. Starlight streaming through the broken roof shaped rows of fluted columns marching into the darkness. The statue of a figure in lamellar armour lay on its side just beyond reach, severed head and shattered sword arm forlorn in the dust. Just visible beyond, the yawning, ragged arch of a stained-glass window rose above a bare altar.
Another hacking, jasmine-scented cough set her chest heaving. She sank onto splayed fingers, head hanging, and froze.
Trembling, she raised her left hand full into the starlight. Though self and memory remained disarrayed, both recalled smooth, lily-pale skin – not the charred, blackened limbs of a pyre-burned corpse. Hurried, horrified examination confirmed it was not her hands alone, but every inch of her.
“No…” Her cracked, raw whisper echoed back from the darkness.
Gagging, she formed a fist to ward off rising panic. Black ash crackled from her crusted knuckles. Indigo flame sparked from the fissures. Barely a glimmer and then gone. Just enough to awaken a stirring. A name. Her name.
Tanith.
Glimpses of memory hardened to certainty. Tanith flexed her fingers, perversely offended by the lack of pain. She pressed fingertips to her cheek and her scalp. They offered no sensation, only pressure and a grinding whisper as black ash trickled away.
Perhaps it was for the best she’d no way of seeing her face. A life that had given her little had at least granted her a simple, delicate beauty – winsome, beguiling or threatening as her mood dictated. She’d revelled in the power it offered, a way of touching the world and its people that made her feel… like she belonged. The prospect of its loss hurt more than the memory of rebirth, for the latter pain at least lay in the past. Only her left forearm retained any semblance of who she’d been. The ebony spider-work lines of her aetherios tattoo had survived where her creamy skin and golden hair had not; embossed dark and sullen in her scorched flesh. Her father’s gift.
The curse that had bound a daemon in her blood, and had turned that blood to flame.
Of course it had survived.
Tanith set her jaw. It didn’t matter. She was alive. Or at least as close to alive as she’d ever been. The rest…? She’d been hurt before, but never like this. There was an eternity of difference between reknitting sword wounds and recoalescing a body torn apart by the Deadwinds. How she’d done so, she couldn’t imagine. But then, so much of what she did was instinct.
She gazed up through the splintered rafters and shattered tiles. The night sky offered no glimpse of the distant Deadwinds, swirling far away atop the roof of the world, and no clue as to how she’d arrived here… wherever here was. Memory remained evasive, indigo vapour concerning everything after the Deadwinds had consumed her.
Before was a different matter, offering dim recollection of a standoff above the clouds, the deck of the tiny skyship bucking and heaving beneath her feet. Starving, she’d feasted on the Deadwinds, and the Deadwinds had feasted on her in exchange. All as her sister had looked on, eyes blazing with triumph.
The recollection provoked a flash of anger. Kat. Always their father’s favourite. She should have helped. But instead, she’d tricked her.
Weariness turned Tanith’s anger ashen. She’d been half mad with hunger by then, raving as the daemon within had asserted itself. And perhaps Kat had tried to help and the Deadwinds had consumed her in turn? Or perhaps the stricken ship had finally surrendered to the seething air currents and plunged from the skies, killing Kat and her pathetic friends?
She shook the past away. Only the present mattered. The present, and the empty, sly slither in the hollows of her heart that presaged rising hunger.
But Kat’s final, triumphant sneer refused to leave the darkness behind Tanith’s eyes.
Shaking with exertion, she collapsed against the altar. Impact jarred every bone and woke brief tongues of indigo fire from her creaking, cracking skin. A walnut-sized chunk of her left arm fell away. It struck tile in an explosion of black ash, prompting a rat to skitter from one shadow to another in terror. She stared dully at the remains. There’d been no sensation to mark its departure, no pain. With numb fascination, she entertained the notion that her rebirth might not be so permanent as she’d assumed.
Hunger pangs took hold, gnawing inside out.
Cold fear seeped in their wake. She was running out of time.
Back braced against the altar, Tanith closed her eyes and sought meaning in the distant sounds. Beneath the hoots of owls and the rasping trill of nightjars, she heard the rumble of wagon wheels and the clop of hooves. What might have been a railrunner’s steam whistle. And behind it all, the deep, breathy growl of mill and forge.
A city then, but which? It didn’t matter. Better a city than some abandoned wayshrine out in the wilds. Cities meant people, and people meant… everything she needed to survive. Cities also meant ifrîti – the fragments of mortal souls pressed into service as watchdogs to messengers, or to cast light and govern mechanisms. She stared down at her aetherios tattoo, cold and dark against her forearm, spent of the Deadwinds’ soulfire. Had it been otherwise, she might have been able to reach out to those nearby, learn something of her surroundings – maybe even draw sustenance from their thin scraps. But its flame – her flame – was all but spent, and fading further at every moment.
Her left hand spasmed, its fingers drawing inwards like claws. She clasped them with her right and willed herself to stillness. Panic only fuelled the hunger, scratched away the veneer of civilisation she worked so hard to cultivate. She couldn’t afford that.
She had to move. While she was still capable of making decisions.
Pushing away from the altar, she lurched to her feet.
The hollow boom of a door slamming back echoed through the darkness.
“Still nae sure about this, Rathiq.” A man’s voice, leavened with a hint of northland burr, the speaker lost in the gloom. “Alabastra disnae like folk picking o’er its bones.”
“Stop squalling,” Rathiq replied, his gruff tone re-treading a well-worn path. “The temple gave up on Qosm years ago. Just us and the darkness. Maybe a shîm-head lurking…”
“Or reavers.”
Rathiq snorted. “Reavers got out before the wall went up. Got more sense than to hang around waiting for the lethargia to take them. Not like you, Gifra.”
Tanith slunk behind the nearest column. Even that small effort set her shaking, her fingers twitching where she pressed them up against the discoloured marble.
A hooded lantern flared into existence, the lumani ifrît within spurred to radiance at the wielder’s command. The cold spill of whitish-indigo light revealed three figures. The lantern-holder was a heavyset, stubbled fellow of late middle years whose bronzed features bore the scars of lost brawls. A cadaverous man with a scavenger’s twitching body language threaded the columns to his left. The third mirrored him on the right, watchful, but unconcerned. All three had short scimitars buckled at their waists and a practical mix of travel-stained silks and leathers.
Tanith rested her charred brow against the column. Street skelders: petty criminals scratching whatever living they could while staying one step ahead of custodium law. Bad news for her.
“We just need to find the starfall,” said Rathiq, now revealed as the lantern-wielder. “Looked like a bright one. Meteoric iron. Astoricum. Maybe something shinier. Enough to bribe the custodians on the watch gates, even after Faraqan takes his cut.”
“If it landed here,” said Gifra, his craggy face done no favours by the lumani-cast shadows.
The third, watchful man pointed up at the hole in the roof. “They don’t build temples like that. See? The tiles are smouldering.”
Gifra scowled. “Then where did it land? Tell me that. Starfall leaves a crater.”
“Then find it,” replied Rathiq, with thinning patience. “And make it fast. We weren’t the only ones saw it come down.”
Footsteps tracked closer, the concealing darkness blurring to grey twilight.
The hollow in Tanith’s heart grew deeper as the hunger gained ground. She couldn’t fight them, but she didn’t need to. Just leave them to their precious starfall meteor and escape into the night. Find some clothes. A friendlier face… or at least an unwary one. It had to be now, while the choice was hers to make – while the skelders were distracted by their search for plunder.
She gave it another five-count and scrambled for the next column along. Nearer to Gifra, but out of the lantern’s immediate path.
“Reckon this is the spot.” Rathiq’s fingers traced the broken tiles where Tanith had awoken. His gaze tracked through the dust towards the fallen statue. “Hello? Footprints. Guess we weren’t the first ones here.”
Tanith stifled a curse and flattened herself again the column. Rathiq was smarter than he looked. Not a difficult proposition, but ruinous now.
Gifra twitched, accusation in his voice. “I told ye. Reavers.”
Rathiq rounded on him. “Reavers run barefoot, do they?”
“Maybe.”
Tanith broke for the next column. A chunk of rubble scuffed away from her foot and skittered into the darkness.
“Who’s there?” Rising to his feet, Rathiq swept the hooded lantern around, bringing its light to bear on the column she’d left. He dropped his free hand to his belt. Steel glinted as he eased the first couple of inches of his scimitar free of its scabbard. “Come out. Nothing to be worried about.”
His companions drew their swords and sidestepped out of the light and into the shadows.
Tanith shrank completely behind her column. Nothing to worry about. Even if she hadn’t been a walking horror show, trusting to that sentiment was a guarantee of being left dead… or worse. Folk with hooded lanterns weren’t generally counted among the upstanding.
The lantern swung left. She stumbled right, making for the safety of the next column.
She all but collided with Gifra, who flung her away with a startled yelp. She missed her footing, crunching against a column. Gasping, she clutched at the fluted stone to steady herself.
Gifra levelled his trembling sword, its point level with her breastbone.
Rathiq brought his lantern to bear. “Stars Below,” he breathed, lip curling in revulsion. “A skrelling grave crawler. Used to be a woman… I think.”
Used to be? He thought?
The nerve of the man.
“Maybe the hierarch’s right.” The watchful man moved to stand at Rathiq’s shoulder. “Maybe Qosm is cursed.”
Gifra stepped closer, his twitching eyes never leaving Tanith’s. His scent was all sweat and spices, wrapped in leathers long overdue a cleaning. But beneath it the sweet, peppery aroma of his soul, as thin and unremarkable as his appearance. A muscle leapt in Tanith’s gut. He daemon-half sighed. She was in no position to be choosy. Even a threadbare skelder could be a saviour.
“Ye reckon that thing stole the skyfall?” asked Gifra.
Rathiq gave a heavy-shouldered shrug. “Nah. Look at it, poor trallock. Just a wisp of soul that doesn’t know it’s dead. Put it down. Make it quick.” He jerked his head back past the altar. “Attar? We’ll check the other side.”
Tanith braced her palms against the column as Rathiq and Attar withdrew. Three paces. Four. Enough time and distance to offer hope.
“Please…” she breathed. “Help me.”
Gifra blinked. His sword point dipped. “What the—?”
With her last strength, Tanith flung herself at him and bore him to the ground, her knees straddling his waist, her crackling, crumbling hands planted in the dust either side of his neck and her nose an inch from his. She dimly registered Rathiq’s alarmed bellow from somewhere ahead… and ignored it, taking Gifra’s head in her hands.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and pressed her cracked, blistered lips against his.
Her pulse blossomed to a sonorous roar as the fire in her blood embraced him.
Gifra struggled for a heartbeat before the cold outer flame of his being peeled away and hissed to nothing. Last breath, the shriversmen called it when they tended the dying – the first part of the soul to flee upon death and possessed of healing properties more valuable than gold if stoppered. Tanith took everything Gifra had to offer. Heard his sword clang onto tile. His wail at a pain that went deeper than muscle and bone.
She shuddered with delight as strength returned. Charred skin sloughed away and wasted muscle reknitted. Sensation blazed in fire-deadened flesh, the cold of the night air sweet after the numbness of awakening. The spiderweb of her aetherios tattoo crackled to life, her fires rushing along its lines.
And that was just the first course in a banquet. Even as Gifra went limp, Tanith closed her eyes and plunged deeper, stripping away his soul’s fire to replenish her own.
There was joy in the feeding. There always was. Ecstasy and revulsion. The fulfilment of what her father had made of her: an amashti, a soul-drinking daemon that knew nothing of righteousness and everything of appetite. Part of her – the innocent she’d been before her father had first inked her forearm – cared about that. Hated it. But she’d learned to live with it, for food and drink had long ago lost the power to ease her cravings.
The other part lived for this. Loved it.
Rathiq’s desperate shout penetrated the flame-lit darkness. “Kill it! Kill it!”
A hot red flash set Tanith’s skull ringing. She slewed sideways into the dust, the joy of the feast dispelled by stinging pain. Rolling to hands and knees – for the first, glorious time since awakening, her limbs responding as they should – she pressed a hand to her scalp. Indigo flame rippled out from the wound and twisted to vapour about pale, perfect fingers. Pain ebbed as the lingering backwash of last breath closed the wound as if it had never been.
Gifra lay motionless, his corpse spattered with the black ash she’d shorn in rejuvenation, his desiccated body already crumbling in on itself as the last, pitiful sliver of his soul hissed invisibly skyward to join the swirling Deadwinds.
Rathiq’s scimitar shook in his hand, the lantern rattling in its chain loop. “Wh-what are you?” he stuttered.
Smiling softly at the itch of fresh stubble under her fingertips, Tanith dropped her hand from her scalp and rose to her feet. How to answer? Even a man like Rathiq deserved some truth before he died. She settled on the words her father had used when he’d first set the needle to her flesh.
“I’m glorious.”
She sprang. Her right hand found the grips of Gifra’s sword. The blade gleamed, scything out in a vicious arc.
Rathiq’s lantern shattered against the tiles before his gurgling, terrified scream faded, the lumani ifrît preceding the skelder’s grubby soul to the Deadwinds.
Tanith stood alone in the starlight as the adrenaline rush receded. She stared down at her handiwork, as ever proud and appalled. Every food chain had its apex. She couldn’t help that. But killing was a choice.
She shook away the tendril of guilt. They were all in the gutter together. Some floated. Some drowned. Better a murderer than a corpse.
She froze, remembrance piercing the tangle of remorse and elation. The third man. Attar. If he made it to the streets, raised a hue and cry…
She started at the thud of a falling body. She spun around. Attar lay face down in the dust.
“Very impressive.” The sincere, basso tone turned wry. “But I’m afraid you missed one.”
The speaker – a tanned man of middle years, bulky without yet having run to fat – stood on the edge of the starlit circle behind Attar’s corpse, black robes blurring into the surrounding gloom. Silver glinted at the temples of a brushed-back receding hairline and where his full beard touched the corners of his lips. His expression was as avuncular as his voice, all save in his unblinking hazel eyes. He seemed almost not to be aware of the bloodied dagger dangling from his hand.
Tanith turned side-on and shifted her grip on her borrowed sword. How long had he been lurking in the darkness? Watching. Waiting. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, softly rejoicing in the feel of muscles behaving as they should. At the indigo flames rippling along her tattoo. “Who are you?”
He held up a placatory hand. “I mean you no harm, I assure you.” Melodic vowels and gently rolling Rs imbued the words with benevolence she dared not trust. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Not that I imagine I could offer you any. Not from what I just witnessed.”
He remained on the far side of the starlit circle, out of easy reach. A very different proposition to Rathiq’s band. Maybe even a dangerous one. Revived, Tanith knew herself to be faster and stronger than most, but she was hardly impervious. Silver burned like the hottest fire. Blackthorn blossom sapped her strength and disoriented her senses. The list went on, and was nowhere near as short as she might have liked.
“And yet you’re not afraid of me?” she asked.
“No. As a matter of fact, I’ve waited a long time to meet you.”
She snorted, doubting he’d have offered the sentiment freely to the charred thing she’d been minutes before. “Am I supposed to blush?” She rolled her eyes. “You’re a scavenger, just like them.”
“Not so. They came looking for starfall metal, whereas I sought something infinitely more precious – the one prophesied to restore Nyssa’s third face and usher in a new age for this poor kingdom of Khalad. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Where are my manners?” He stepped fully into the starlit circle and offered a low, generous bow. “My name is Ardoc… and you and I are going to change this world.”
Tanith favoured Ardoc with a long, slow look. “Of course we are.”
What had she gotten herself into now? The man was either having a joke at her expense or entirely mad. His reasonable, melodic words might have concealed either. In her experience, insanity cloaked itself in affability as often as malice.
A breeze stirred the dusty flagstones. She shivered and folded her arms, gooseflesh raising beneath her fingertips. She glanced down at Rathiq’s corpse. In life and death he was a good bit larger than her, and his skelder’s garb was hardly something she’d have chosen, but she wasn’t in any position to be picky.
She set to work with her fingers, pleased to discover that Rathiq’s black silk robes were a rather better fit than she’d expected, at least when cinched tight at the waist with his studded belt. The sleeves reached down past her wrists, long enough to shield the tattoo’s cold flames from idle observers. The leather overtunic and vambraces were as oversized as she’d feared, so she abandoned them. So too were the boots, and a glance at Gifra and Attar’s corpses revealed no help to be had there. A half-step forward at best, but given that she’d awoken as a crisped and disintegrating corpse, even half-steps counted.
Smoothing the last errant fold of silk into place, Tanith retrieved Rathiq’s scimitar. She breathed mist onto the blade and buffed it away with a sleeve to catch her reflection in the starlight.
Even with cheeks and brow smudged with ash from the charred corpse she’d been, there was enough to recognise. Sapphire eyes stared back from a pale, smooth-skinned face. Better. So much better. Everything was as it should have been, except her golden hair, but that would grow in. Another notch of tension bled away. She was truly herself again.
Maybe – maybe – Nyssa did love her, just a little.
She laughed bitterly under her breath. What she’d taken from Gifra would sustain her for a while, but the hunger would return. She’d again be forced to sacrifice a piece of herself to retain anything at all. Be the daemon – the amashti – just long enough, and no more.
Nyssa didn’t love her. No one loved her.
Ardoc gave a soft grunt of approval. “Feeling more composed?”
“What do you care?”
A weighty shrug. A glint of teeth revealed the half-smile beneath his beard. “Ah. You’re watching me closely. Maybe wondering if I’m a violent lunatic as well as a deluded one?”
“Maybe.”
His smile broadened. “You needn’t trouble yourself. I’m well accustomed to sceptics.”
“Good for you.” She made to turn. “Goodbye.”
“You’re really not going to make this easy, are you?”
She halted, mid-step, curious despite herself. “Why should I?”
He prodded Attar’s body with his foot. “I was of some small assistance. That should at least buy me a hearing.”
Tanith strained her ears, searching for a breath, a scuff of sole on stone… anything that would betray Ardoc’s accomplices. She found nothing. That made those accomplices very good indeed, or Ardoc as alone as he appeared. “I could have handled him.”
“And if he’d had a fistful of blackthorn? Perhaps a silver pendant?”
She stifled a wince. He knew – or had guessed – entirely too much. “You’re very bold, old man.” Bold or not, he’d made no attempt to move towards her. Wisdom born of fear, certainly. But whose fear? His, or hers?
“The goddess makes me so.”
“Then she did better by you than she ever has by me.”
He spread his arms. “Those she loves above all others, she tests above all others. And she loves you deeply…” For the first time, he scowled. “I’m starting to feel ridiculous. Won’t you tell me your name?”
“You came here looking for me, and you don’t even know that?”
“Why ask otherwise?”
Tanith hesitated. As far as the world was concerned, she was dead, burned away aboard the deck of the felucca and blown to ashes on the Deadwinds. Offering her name would begin the process of undoing all that. On the other hand, her name was her only remaining possession. Better to stake the claim before Ardoc bestowed another. He looked the type. “Tanith.”
The family name would keep. Besides, she’d had so many, and none of them felt as though they belonged to her. She’d worn both her mother’s married and maiden names in her time, the former to claim authority she didn’t wield and the latter in hopes of snaring an inheritance. Both had opened doors as only a fireblood’s noble bloodline could. Her father’s, she never used. A cinderblood commoner’s name got you nowhere in Khalad, even if Terrion Arvish had been a celebrated artist.
Besides, prudence dictated not telling Ardoc more than she had to. Which begged the question why she’d given him her real name at all. She could have told him anything. The answer was as obvious as it was infuriating. Part of her liked Ardoc – or was at least sufficiently intrigued by him as made no difference. More accurately, part of her wanted Ardoc to like her. He’d seen what she was capable of and had neither run away screaming, declaimed her as an abomination, nor tried to kill her. In all her twenty years clinging to Khalad’s shadows, only one person other than her parents had ever reacted thus.
Of course, she’d saved Yennika on that occasion, painting the night with the screams of fireblood twins whose drunken braggadocio had turned darker once away from the bright lights and potential witnesses of their uncle’s palace, so the circumstances were hardly the same. She’d wanted Yennika to like her too. She’d thought they were friends, but that had slipped away as soon as Kat had come onto the scene, Tanith banished to the shadows as Yennika trailed around besotted after her elder sister. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that Kat had betrayed her to the Deadwinds. Their whole lives, she’d stolen everything. People couldn’t be trusted – those who claimed to care most of all.
And still she wanted Ardoc to like her.
How pathetic was that?
Ardoc nodded slowly to himself and pursed his lips. “I am honoured to meet you, Tanith.”
“Because you think I’m the herald from your prophecy?”
“I know you are. After all, you fell from the Deadwinds, wreathed in flame.”
“Don’t be ridiculous…” She stared past the fallen statue to the scorched and cracked patch of tile where she’d awoken. Directly beneath the roof’s gaping hole. Rathiq had come searching for starfall – a meteorite from the firmament, laden with rare metals. The Deadwinds had consumed her and… what? Spat her out? Had she broken free? Had someone – or something – helped her escape? Helped her re-form from dissipating spirit to some semblance of mortal flesh? She’d no recollection of that, but then everything was so jumbled.
Maybe the goddess had freed her from the Deadwinds.
And if she had, who was to say that she wasn’t this herald Ardoc expected?
She stared up through the hole in the scorched timbers into the midnight sky. One thing was for certain: the Deadwinds had carried her a long way from Athenoch. “Where am I? What city?”
“Zariqaz,” Ardoc replied. “The Qosm district, if you need something more precise.”
Tanith snorted. Of course she was in Zariqaz, Khalad’s gloried capital and the one place she never wanted to be. No matter how she tried, it always drew her back. But then it wasn’t called the City of Lost Souls for nothing. In life, death and rebirth, the past kept her anchored there. “And this place?”
Ardoc spread his arms, his voice filling with passion as his words gathered pace. “Long ago, the faithful worshipped Nyssa within these walls. The true Nyssa, not the simplistic concepts of judgement and benevolence the Alabastran Church impose upon Khalad. They all died, of course. The archons who led the ceremonies were rounded up and beheaded on the Golden Stair for refusing the Eternity King’s orthodoxy. Centuries passed and their great temple became merely another forgotten ruin.” He offered another smile, this one with a touch of darkness beneath, and pressed on in quiet, reverent tones. “But some of us keep the faith.”
Zariqaz – like all of Khalad’s cities – crawled steadily skyward. The buildings of yesteryear were repurposed as foundations for those of tomorrow, raising a great spire above the sprawl of Undertown slums and the sprawl of Gutterfield shanties beyond the outer walls. Zariqaz’s spire was an amalgam of abandoned mansions and bricked-up warehouses, the thoroughfares of the past become tunnelling, skyless streets, only winding into the open air across viaducts and bridges when they served the palaces and gardens of the fireblood nobility. Altitude was the highest status.
At last, the pieces fell into place. “You’re part of the Obsidium Cult.”
He raised an admonishing finger. “Ah. The Obsidium Cult does not exist. Alabastra are quite firm on the matter, and have expended considerable effort in the hopes of making their words truth.” The humour returned to his voice. “But if the cult did exist, I might concede that I do, in some small way, contribute to its efforts.”
“Would it have killed you to just say ‘yes’?”
“Or you to tolerate an old man’s eccentricities?”
Tanith rolled her eyes. “You’re not afraid that I’ll tell someone?”
Ardoc gathered the skirts of his robe and sat on the toppled statue’s plinth. “Whom would you tell? Alabastra? The custodians? The Eternity King’s redcloaks?” He waved dismissively at the darkness. “Let them search these old bones. They’re long since picked clean. Besides…”
“I’m Nyssa’s herald, so I won’t betray her cause?”
“Precisely.”
“You’re very certain of yourself.”
“No, but I am very certain of her. Change is coming to Khalad. An Age of Fire that will see the world reborn.”
“I was reborn less than an hour ago. It was unpleasant.”
“The necessary often is. There’s nothing natural about the order of things in Khalad. Nyssa has been stolen and subverted. They’ve sealed pieces of her away and used what remains to prop up the Eternity King’s throne. If it is to change – if Khalad is to be truly reborn in Nyssa’s image – we all have our part to play.”
There it was. “So you want to use me?”
“We’re all of us used, Tanith. It’s merely a question of whom we permit to do the using.”
“Oh, that’s deep,” she said, not caring to conceal her bitterness.
“It’s a simple truth. They can’t all be palatable.”
Yennika had always said that you found your place in Khalad, or one was found for you. Submit. Conform. Do as we say, or you’ll
White-cold flame seared extremities for which she’d no name. That weren’t even her. Not yet. She wasn’t anything to which they could belong. Not yet. But somehow the instinct that she had been – and could yet be again – held her together in the darkness.
Little by little the pain receded. Icy fire thawed beneath a warm, heavy pulse.
Blind endurance yielded to the first stirrings of awareness. Of echoing screams – her screams – fading into a pervasive, distant shudder more heard than felt, and cracked tiles beneath hip and shoulder. Half-lidded eyes creaked open on a circle of gloom-edged starlight. Decades-old dust and jasmine incense ash choked her first conscious breath to a ragged cough. Only touch remained distant, defiant, offering no sensation of the air moving across her naked body.
Limbs remained truculent, yielding only to supreme effort of will. Rotted carpet bunched and tore beneath her fingers as she dragged herself into a sitting position. Starlight streaming through the broken roof shaped rows of fluted columns marching into the darkness. The statue of a figure in lamellar armour lay on its side just beyond reach, severed head and shattered sword arm forlorn in the dust. Just visible beyond, the yawning, ragged arch of a stained-glass window rose above a bare altar.
Another hacking, jasmine-scented cough set her chest heaving. She sank onto splayed fingers, head hanging, and froze.
Trembling, she raised her left hand full into the starlight. Though self and memory remained disarrayed, both recalled smooth, lily-pale skin – not the charred, blackened limbs of a pyre-burned corpse. Hurried, horrified examination confirmed it was not her hands alone, but every inch of her.
“No…” Her cracked, raw whisper echoed back from the darkness.
Gagging, she formed a fist to ward off rising panic. Black ash crackled from her crusted knuckles. Indigo flame sparked from the fissures. Barely a glimmer and then gone. Just enough to awaken a stirring. A name. Her name.
Tanith.
Glimpses of memory hardened to certainty. Tanith flexed her fingers, perversely offended by the lack of pain. She pressed fingertips to her cheek and her scalp. They offered no sensation, only pressure and a grinding whisper as black ash trickled away.
Perhaps it was for the best she’d no way of seeing her face. A life that had given her little had at least granted her a simple, delicate beauty – winsome, beguiling or threatening as her mood dictated. She’d revelled in the power it offered, a way of touching the world and its people that made her feel… like she belonged. The prospect of its loss hurt more than the memory of rebirth, for the latter pain at least lay in the past. Only her left forearm retained any semblance of who she’d been. The ebony spider-work lines of her aetherios tattoo had survived where her creamy skin and golden hair had not; embossed dark and sullen in her scorched flesh. Her father’s gift.
The curse that had bound a daemon in her blood, and had turned that blood to flame.
Of course it had survived.
Tanith set her jaw. It didn’t matter. She was alive. Or at least as close to alive as she’d ever been. The rest…? She’d been hurt before, but never like this. There was an eternity of difference between reknitting sword wounds and recoalescing a body torn apart by the Deadwinds. How she’d done so, she couldn’t imagine. But then, so much of what she did was instinct.
She gazed up through the splintered rafters and shattered tiles. The night sky offered no glimpse of the distant Deadwinds, swirling far away atop the roof of the world, and no clue as to how she’d arrived here… wherever here was. Memory remained evasive, indigo vapour concerning everything after the Deadwinds had consumed her.
Before was a different matter, offering dim recollection of a standoff above the clouds, the deck of the tiny skyship bucking and heaving beneath her feet. Starving, she’d feasted on the Deadwinds, and the Deadwinds had feasted on her in exchange. All as her sister had looked on, eyes blazing with triumph.
The recollection provoked a flash of anger. Kat. Always their father’s favourite. She should have helped. But instead, she’d tricked her.
Weariness turned Tanith’s anger ashen. She’d been half mad with hunger by then, raving as the daemon within had asserted itself. And perhaps Kat had tried to help and the Deadwinds had consumed her in turn? Or perhaps the stricken ship had finally surrendered to the seething air currents and plunged from the skies, killing Kat and her pathetic friends?
She shook the past away. Only the present mattered. The present, and the empty, sly slither in the hollows of her heart that presaged rising hunger.
But Kat’s final, triumphant sneer refused to leave the darkness behind Tanith’s eyes.
Shaking with exertion, she collapsed against the altar. Impact jarred every bone and woke brief tongues of indigo fire from her creaking, cracking skin. A walnut-sized chunk of her left arm fell away. It struck tile in an explosion of black ash, prompting a rat to skitter from one shadow to another in terror. She stared dully at the remains. There’d been no sensation to mark its departure, no pain. With numb fascination, she entertained the notion that her rebirth might not be so permanent as she’d assumed.
Hunger pangs took hold, gnawing inside out.
Cold fear seeped in their wake. She was running out of time.
Back braced against the altar, Tanith closed her eyes and sought meaning in the distant sounds. Beneath the hoots of owls and the rasping trill of nightjars, she heard the rumble of wagon wheels and the clop of hooves. What might have been a railrunner’s steam whistle. And behind it all, the deep, breathy growl of mill and forge.
A city then, but which? It didn’t matter. Better a city than some abandoned wayshrine out in the wilds. Cities meant people, and people meant… everything she needed to survive. Cities also meant ifrîti – the fragments of mortal souls pressed into service as watchdogs to messengers, or to cast light and govern mechanisms. She stared down at her aetherios tattoo, cold and dark against her forearm, spent of the Deadwinds’ soulfire. Had it been otherwise, she might have been able to reach out to those nearby, learn something of her surroundings – maybe even draw sustenance from their thin scraps. But its flame – her flame – was all but spent, and fading further at every moment.
Her left hand spasmed, its fingers drawing inwards like claws. She clasped them with her right and willed herself to stillness. Panic only fuelled the hunger, scratched away the veneer of civilisation she worked so hard to cultivate. She couldn’t afford that.
She had to move. While she was still capable of making decisions.
Pushing away from the altar, she lurched to her feet.
The hollow boom of a door slamming back echoed through the darkness.
“Still nae sure about this, Rathiq.” A man’s voice, leavened with a hint of northland burr, the speaker lost in the gloom. “Alabastra disnae like folk picking o’er its bones.”
“Stop squalling,” Rathiq replied, his gruff tone re-treading a well-worn path. “The temple gave up on Qosm years ago. Just us and the darkness. Maybe a shîm-head lurking…”
“Or reavers.”
Rathiq snorted. “Reavers got out before the wall went up. Got more sense than to hang around waiting for the lethargia to take them. Not like you, Gifra.”
Tanith slunk behind the nearest column. Even that small effort set her shaking, her fingers twitching where she pressed them up against the discoloured marble.
A hooded lantern flared into existence, the lumani ifrît within spurred to radiance at the wielder’s command. The cold spill of whitish-indigo light revealed three figures. The lantern-holder was a heavyset, stubbled fellow of late middle years whose bronzed features bore the scars of lost brawls. A cadaverous man with a scavenger’s twitching body language threaded the columns to his left. The third mirrored him on the right, watchful, but unconcerned. All three had short scimitars buckled at their waists and a practical mix of travel-stained silks and leathers.
Tanith rested her charred brow against the column. Street skelders: petty criminals scratching whatever living they could while staying one step ahead of custodium law. Bad news for her.
“We just need to find the starfall,” said Rathiq, now revealed as the lantern-wielder. “Looked like a bright one. Meteoric iron. Astoricum. Maybe something shinier. Enough to bribe the custodians on the watch gates, even after Faraqan takes his cut.”
“If it landed here,” said Gifra, his craggy face done no favours by the lumani-cast shadows.
The third, watchful man pointed up at the hole in the roof. “They don’t build temples like that. See? The tiles are smouldering.”
Gifra scowled. “Then where did it land? Tell me that. Starfall leaves a crater.”
“Then find it,” replied Rathiq, with thinning patience. “And make it fast. We weren’t the only ones saw it come down.”
Footsteps tracked closer, the concealing darkness blurring to grey twilight.
The hollow in Tanith’s heart grew deeper as the hunger gained ground. She couldn’t fight them, but she didn’t need to. Just leave them to their precious starfall meteor and escape into the night. Find some clothes. A friendlier face… or at least an unwary one. It had to be now, while the choice was hers to make – while the skelders were distracted by their search for plunder.
She gave it another five-count and scrambled for the next column along. Nearer to Gifra, but out of the lantern’s immediate path.
“Reckon this is the spot.” Rathiq’s fingers traced the broken tiles where Tanith had awoken. His gaze tracked through the dust towards the fallen statue. “Hello? Footprints. Guess we weren’t the first ones here.”
Tanith stifled a curse and flattened herself again the column. Rathiq was smarter than he looked. Not a difficult proposition, but ruinous now.
Gifra twitched, accusation in his voice. “I told ye. Reavers.”
Rathiq rounded on him. “Reavers run barefoot, do they?”
“Maybe.”
Tanith broke for the next column. A chunk of rubble scuffed away from her foot and skittered into the darkness.
“Who’s there?” Rising to his feet, Rathiq swept the hooded lantern around, bringing its light to bear on the column she’d left. He dropped his free hand to his belt. Steel glinted as he eased the first couple of inches of his scimitar free of its scabbard. “Come out. Nothing to be worried about.”
His companions drew their swords and sidestepped out of the light and into the shadows.
Tanith shrank completely behind her column. Nothing to worry about. Even if she hadn’t been a walking horror show, trusting to that sentiment was a guarantee of being left dead… or worse. Folk with hooded lanterns weren’t generally counted among the upstanding.
The lantern swung left. She stumbled right, making for the safety of the next column.
She all but collided with Gifra, who flung her away with a startled yelp. She missed her footing, crunching against a column. Gasping, she clutched at the fluted stone to steady herself.
Gifra levelled his trembling sword, its point level with her breastbone.
Rathiq brought his lantern to bear. “Stars Below,” he breathed, lip curling in revulsion. “A skrelling grave crawler. Used to be a woman… I think.”
Used to be? He thought?
The nerve of the man.
“Maybe the hierarch’s right.” The watchful man moved to stand at Rathiq’s shoulder. “Maybe Qosm is cursed.”
Gifra stepped closer, his twitching eyes never leaving Tanith’s. His scent was all sweat and spices, wrapped in leathers long overdue a cleaning. But beneath it the sweet, peppery aroma of his soul, as thin and unremarkable as his appearance. A muscle leapt in Tanith’s gut. He daemon-half sighed. She was in no position to be choosy. Even a threadbare skelder could be a saviour.
“Ye reckon that thing stole the skyfall?” asked Gifra.
Rathiq gave a heavy-shouldered shrug. “Nah. Look at it, poor trallock. Just a wisp of soul that doesn’t know it’s dead. Put it down. Make it quick.” He jerked his head back past the altar. “Attar? We’ll check the other side.”
Tanith braced her palms against the column as Rathiq and Attar withdrew. Three paces. Four. Enough time and distance to offer hope.
“Please…” she breathed. “Help me.”
Gifra blinked. His sword point dipped. “What the—?”
With her last strength, Tanith flung herself at him and bore him to the ground, her knees straddling his waist, her crackling, crumbling hands planted in the dust either side of his neck and her nose an inch from his. She dimly registered Rathiq’s alarmed bellow from somewhere ahead… and ignored it, taking Gifra’s head in her hands.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and pressed her cracked, blistered lips against his.
Her pulse blossomed to a sonorous roar as the fire in her blood embraced him.
Gifra struggled for a heartbeat before the cold outer flame of his being peeled away and hissed to nothing. Last breath, the shriversmen called it when they tended the dying – the first part of the soul to flee upon death and possessed of healing properties more valuable than gold if stoppered. Tanith took everything Gifra had to offer. Heard his sword clang onto tile. His wail at a pain that went deeper than muscle and bone.
She shuddered with delight as strength returned. Charred skin sloughed away and wasted muscle reknitted. Sensation blazed in fire-deadened flesh, the cold of the night air sweet after the numbness of awakening. The spiderweb of her aetherios tattoo crackled to life, her fires rushing along its lines.
And that was just the first course in a banquet. Even as Gifra went limp, Tanith closed her eyes and plunged deeper, stripping away his soul’s fire to replenish her own.
There was joy in the feeding. There always was. Ecstasy and revulsion. The fulfilment of what her father had made of her: an amashti, a soul-drinking daemon that knew nothing of righteousness and everything of appetite. Part of her – the innocent she’d been before her father had first inked her forearm – cared about that. Hated it. But she’d learned to live with it, for food and drink had long ago lost the power to ease her cravings.
The other part lived for this. Loved it.
Rathiq’s desperate shout penetrated the flame-lit darkness. “Kill it! Kill it!”
A hot red flash set Tanith’s skull ringing. She slewed sideways into the dust, the joy of the feast dispelled by stinging pain. Rolling to hands and knees – for the first, glorious time since awakening, her limbs responding as they should – she pressed a hand to her scalp. Indigo flame rippled out from the wound and twisted to vapour about pale, perfect fingers. Pain ebbed as the lingering backwash of last breath closed the wound as if it had never been.
Gifra lay motionless, his corpse spattered with the black ash she’d shorn in rejuvenation, his desiccated body already crumbling in on itself as the last, pitiful sliver of his soul hissed invisibly skyward to join the swirling Deadwinds.
Rathiq’s scimitar shook in his hand, the lantern rattling in its chain loop. “Wh-what are you?” he stuttered.
Smiling softly at the itch of fresh stubble under her fingertips, Tanith dropped her hand from her scalp and rose to her feet. How to answer? Even a man like Rathiq deserved some truth before he died. She settled on the words her father had used when he’d first set the needle to her flesh.
“I’m glorious.”
She sprang. Her right hand found the grips of Gifra’s sword. The blade gleamed, scything out in a vicious arc.
Rathiq’s lantern shattered against the tiles before his gurgling, terrified scream faded, the lumani ifrît preceding the skelder’s grubby soul to the Deadwinds.
Tanith stood alone in the starlight as the adrenaline rush receded. She stared down at her handiwork, as ever proud and appalled. Every food chain had its apex. She couldn’t help that. But killing was a choice.
She shook away the tendril of guilt. They were all in the gutter together. Some floated. Some drowned. Better a murderer than a corpse.
She froze, remembrance piercing the tangle of remorse and elation. The third man. Attar. If he made it to the streets, raised a hue and cry…
She started at the thud of a falling body. She spun around. Attar lay face down in the dust.
“Very impressive.” The sincere, basso tone turned wry. “But I’m afraid you missed one.”
The speaker – a tanned man of middle years, bulky without yet having run to fat – stood on the edge of the starlit circle behind Attar’s corpse, black robes blurring into the surrounding gloom. Silver glinted at the temples of a brushed-back receding hairline and where his full beard touched the corners of his lips. His expression was as avuncular as his voice, all save in his unblinking hazel eyes. He seemed almost not to be aware of the bloodied dagger dangling from his hand.
Tanith turned side-on and shifted her grip on her borrowed sword. How long had he been lurking in the darkness? Watching. Waiting. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, softly rejoicing in the feel of muscles behaving as they should. At the indigo flames rippling along her tattoo. “Who are you?”
He held up a placatory hand. “I mean you no harm, I assure you.” Melodic vowels and gently rolling Rs imbued the words with benevolence she dared not trust. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Not that I imagine I could offer you any. Not from what I just witnessed.”
He remained on the far side of the starlit circle, out of easy reach. A very different proposition to Rathiq’s band. Maybe even a dangerous one. Revived, Tanith knew herself to be faster and stronger than most, but she was hardly impervious. Silver burned like the hottest fire. Blackthorn blossom sapped her strength and disoriented her senses. The list went on, and was nowhere near as short as she might have liked.
“And yet you’re not afraid of me?” she asked.
“No. As a matter of fact, I’ve waited a long time to meet you.”
She snorted, doubting he’d have offered the sentiment freely to the charred thing she’d been minutes before. “Am I supposed to blush?” She rolled her eyes. “You’re a scavenger, just like them.”
“Not so. They came looking for starfall metal, whereas I sought something infinitely more precious – the one prophesied to restore Nyssa’s third face and usher in a new age for this poor kingdom of Khalad. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Where are my manners?” He stepped fully into the starlit circle and offered a low, generous bow. “My name is Ardoc… and you and I are going to change this world.”
Tanith favoured Ardoc with a long, slow look. “Of course we are.”
What had she gotten herself into now? The man was either having a joke at her expense or entirely mad. His reasonable, melodic words might have concealed either. In her experience, insanity cloaked itself in affability as often as malice.
A breeze stirred the dusty flagstones. She shivered and folded her arms, gooseflesh raising beneath her fingertips. She glanced down at Rathiq’s corpse. In life and death he was a good bit larger than her, and his skelder’s garb was hardly something she’d have chosen, but she wasn’t in any position to be picky.
She set to work with her fingers, pleased to discover that Rathiq’s black silk robes were a rather better fit than she’d expected, at least when cinched tight at the waist with his studded belt. The sleeves reached down past her wrists, long enough to shield the tattoo’s cold flames from idle observers. The leather overtunic and vambraces were as oversized as she’d feared, so she abandoned them. So too were the boots, and a glance at Gifra and Attar’s corpses revealed no help to be had there. A half-step forward at best, but given that she’d awoken as a crisped and disintegrating corpse, even half-steps counted.
Smoothing the last errant fold of silk into place, Tanith retrieved Rathiq’s scimitar. She breathed mist onto the blade and buffed it away with a sleeve to catch her reflection in the starlight.
Even with cheeks and brow smudged with ash from the charred corpse she’d been, there was enough to recognise. Sapphire eyes stared back from a pale, smooth-skinned face. Better. So much better. Everything was as it should have been, except her golden hair, but that would grow in. Another notch of tension bled away. She was truly herself again.
Maybe – maybe – Nyssa did love her, just a little.
She laughed bitterly under her breath. What she’d taken from Gifra would sustain her for a while, but the hunger would return. She’d again be forced to sacrifice a piece of herself to retain anything at all. Be the daemon – the amashti – just long enough, and no more.
Nyssa didn’t love her. No one loved her.
Ardoc gave a soft grunt of approval. “Feeling more composed?”
“What do you care?”
A weighty shrug. A glint of teeth revealed the half-smile beneath his beard. “Ah. You’re watching me closely. Maybe wondering if I’m a violent lunatic as well as a deluded one?”
“Maybe.”
His smile broadened. “You needn’t trouble yourself. I’m well accustomed to sceptics.”
“Good for you.” She made to turn. “Goodbye.”
“You’re really not going to make this easy, are you?”
She halted, mid-step, curious despite herself. “Why should I?”
He prodded Attar’s body with his foot. “I was of some small assistance. That should at least buy me a hearing.”
Tanith strained her ears, searching for a breath, a scuff of sole on stone… anything that would betray Ardoc’s accomplices. She found nothing. That made those accomplices very good indeed, or Ardoc as alone as he appeared. “I could have handled him.”
“And if he’d had a fistful of blackthorn? Perhaps a silver pendant?”
She stifled a wince. He knew – or had guessed – entirely too much. “You’re very bold, old man.” Bold or not, he’d made no attempt to move towards her. Wisdom born of fear, certainly. But whose fear? His, or hers?
“The goddess makes me so.”
“Then she did better by you than she ever has by me.”
He spread his arms. “Those she loves above all others, she tests above all others. And she loves you deeply…” For the first time, he scowled. “I’m starting to feel ridiculous. Won’t you tell me your name?”
“You came here looking for me, and you don’t even know that?”
“Why ask otherwise?”
Tanith hesitated. As far as the world was concerned, she was dead, burned away aboard the deck of the felucca and blown to ashes on the Deadwinds. Offering her name would begin the process of undoing all that. On the other hand, her name was her only remaining possession. Better to stake the claim before Ardoc bestowed another. He looked the type. “Tanith.”
The family name would keep. Besides, she’d had so many, and none of them felt as though they belonged to her. She’d worn both her mother’s married and maiden names in her time, the former to claim authority she didn’t wield and the latter in hopes of snaring an inheritance. Both had opened doors as only a fireblood’s noble bloodline could. Her father’s, she never used. A cinderblood commoner’s name got you nowhere in Khalad, even if Terrion Arvish had been a celebrated artist.
Besides, prudence dictated not telling Ardoc more than she had to. Which begged the question why she’d given him her real name at all. She could have told him anything. The answer was as obvious as it was infuriating. Part of her liked Ardoc – or was at least sufficiently intrigued by him as made no difference. More accurately, part of her wanted Ardoc to like her. He’d seen what she was capable of and had neither run away screaming, declaimed her as an abomination, nor tried to kill her. In all her twenty years clinging to Khalad’s shadows, only one person other than her parents had ever reacted thus.
Of course, she’d saved Yennika on that occasion, painting the night with the screams of fireblood twins whose drunken braggadocio had turned darker once away from the bright lights and potential witnesses of their uncle’s palace, so the circumstances were hardly the same. She’d wanted Yennika to like her too. She’d thought they were friends, but that had slipped away as soon as Kat had come onto the scene, Tanith banished to the shadows as Yennika trailed around besotted after her elder sister. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that Kat had betrayed her to the Deadwinds. Their whole lives, she’d stolen everything. People couldn’t be trusted – those who claimed to care most of all.
And still she wanted Ardoc to like her.
How pathetic was that?
Ardoc nodded slowly to himself and pursed his lips. “I am honoured to meet you, Tanith.”
“Because you think I’m the herald from your prophecy?”
“I know you are. After all, you fell from the Deadwinds, wreathed in flame.”
“Don’t be ridiculous…” She stared past the fallen statue to the scorched and cracked patch of tile where she’d awoken. Directly beneath the roof’s gaping hole. Rathiq had come searching for starfall – a meteorite from the firmament, laden with rare metals. The Deadwinds had consumed her and… what? Spat her out? Had she broken free? Had someone – or something – helped her escape? Helped her re-form from dissipating spirit to some semblance of mortal flesh? She’d no recollection of that, but then everything was so jumbled.
Maybe the goddess had freed her from the Deadwinds.
And if she had, who was to say that she wasn’t this herald Ardoc expected?
She stared up through the hole in the scorched timbers into the midnight sky. One thing was for certain: the Deadwinds had carried her a long way from Athenoch. “Where am I? What city?”
“Zariqaz,” Ardoc replied. “The Qosm district, if you need something more precise.”
Tanith snorted. Of course she was in Zariqaz, Khalad’s gloried capital and the one place she never wanted to be. No matter how she tried, it always drew her back. But then it wasn’t called the City of Lost Souls for nothing. In life, death and rebirth, the past kept her anchored there. “And this place?”
Ardoc spread his arms, his voice filling with passion as his words gathered pace. “Long ago, the faithful worshipped Nyssa within these walls. The true Nyssa, not the simplistic concepts of judgement and benevolence the Alabastran Church impose upon Khalad. They all died, of course. The archons who led the ceremonies were rounded up and beheaded on the Golden Stair for refusing the Eternity King’s orthodoxy. Centuries passed and their great temple became merely another forgotten ruin.” He offered another smile, this one with a touch of darkness beneath, and pressed on in quiet, reverent tones. “But some of us keep the faith.”
Zariqaz – like all of Khalad’s cities – crawled steadily skyward. The buildings of yesteryear were repurposed as foundations for those of tomorrow, raising a great spire above the sprawl of Undertown slums and the sprawl of Gutterfield shanties beyond the outer walls. Zariqaz’s spire was an amalgam of abandoned mansions and bricked-up warehouses, the thoroughfares of the past become tunnelling, skyless streets, only winding into the open air across viaducts and bridges when they served the palaces and gardens of the fireblood nobility. Altitude was the highest status.
At last, the pieces fell into place. “You’re part of the Obsidium Cult.”
He raised an admonishing finger. “Ah. The Obsidium Cult does not exist. Alabastra are quite firm on the matter, and have expended considerable effort in the hopes of making their words truth.” The humour returned to his voice. “But if the cult did exist, I might concede that I do, in some small way, contribute to its efforts.”
“Would it have killed you to just say ‘yes’?”
“Or you to tolerate an old man’s eccentricities?”
Tanith rolled her eyes. “You’re not afraid that I’ll tell someone?”
Ardoc gathered the skirts of his robe and sat on the toppled statue’s plinth. “Whom would you tell? Alabastra? The custodians? The Eternity King’s redcloaks?” He waved dismissively at the darkness. “Let them search these old bones. They’re long since picked clean. Besides…”
“I’m Nyssa’s herald, so I won’t betray her cause?”
“Precisely.”
“You’re very certain of yourself.”
“No, but I am very certain of her. Change is coming to Khalad. An Age of Fire that will see the world reborn.”
“I was reborn less than an hour ago. It was unpleasant.”
“The necessary often is. There’s nothing natural about the order of things in Khalad. Nyssa has been stolen and subverted. They’ve sealed pieces of her away and used what remains to prop up the Eternity King’s throne. If it is to change – if Khalad is to be truly reborn in Nyssa’s image – we all have our part to play.”
There it was. “So you want to use me?”
“We’re all of us used, Tanith. It’s merely a question of whom we permit to do the using.”
“Oh, that’s deep,” she said, not caring to conceal her bitterness.
“It’s a simple truth. They can’t all be palatable.”
Yennika had always said that you found your place in Khalad, or one was found for you. Submit. Conform. Do as we say, or you’ll
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The Fire Within Them
Matthew Ward
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