Authors: Sharon Shinn
“Foley!”
she shouted, not sure if her voice would carry over the clangor of combat. “Foley! I’m up here! At the top!”
No one answered, unless a renewed frenzy of fighting could be considered an answer. Hoping to get a better view, she gripped the railing more tightly and bent so far over it that she almost tipped herself off the platform. The huge door in the base of the tower admitted a wavering square of light that flowed over the ground, and in that square she could see black silhouettes feinting, parrying, and falling back. It was like watching a shadow show created by the spinning of an enormous lantern, and Corene felt herself grow dizzy from the imagined motion. Another pair of fighters clashed and disengaged, clashed and disengaged, but she couldn’t tell if she should celebrate or despair because she didn’t know who was winning and who was losing. She tightened her grip and leaned over another inch, hoping to make the shadows seem more solid within the bright light.
It shouldn’t be so bright. The tower’s interior illumination was a tube of faint gaslight that spiraled up the wall, casting only an eerie glow. That deep yellow color was too vibrant, too intense, full of its own shivering shadows—
“Oh no,” she whispered.
She yanked herself upright and ran to the trapdoor, falling to her knees and thrusting her face through. Heat and color soared up at her, decorated with bits of ash and the smell of roasting wood.
The stairwell was in flames.
TWENTY-FIVE
C
orene pushed herself to her feet and backed away from the trapdoor as if it were a rabid animal that had suddenly focused its mad eyes on her. This was her fault. She had doomed herself with her own frantic actions. One of the soldiers she set on fire had lain too long against those wooden stairs, and the dry tinder had caught with an eager elation. The great chimney of the tower would pull the blaze upward in a matter of minutes, the fuel of the stairway laying a direct track to Corene. The wooden platform itself was hardened to almost ironlike density, but it wouldn’t resist the siren call of flame for very long. How could it? After centuries of lying so quietly, so tamely, next to the prismed cauldron of fire, it would abandon itself to flame with joyful immolation.
Corene was about to be burned alive.
Behind her, she felt the thin barrier of the railing stop her retreat. The metal was even hotter now; she could feel its muted brand through the cloth of her trousers. The air around her was clogging with acrid smoke. Soon it would be almost impossible to breathe.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t give herself over to the conflagration. She would turn elay and fling herself into unsupported air; she
would become torz and smash into the unforgiving earth. She was a sweela girl but she could not meld herself with fire.
She turned around and stared down, trying to nerve herself to make the leap.
“Corene!”
The voice was so hoarse that at first she didn’t recognize it, but that hardly mattered; clearly someone was here looking for her.
“I’m on the top of the tower!” she shouted back. “Where are you?”
“You have to get out!
Now!
” came the answer.
Below her. Standing in the square of rippling yellow light. The shape of a man she would recognize from any vantage point in the world. “Foley?”
“Yes!”
“Foley! You’re alive!” For a moment—despite the heat, the peril, the many shocks of the night—she felt herself filled with an almost insane happiness. “I’m so glad! I’m so glad!”
“Corene, you have to come down—the tower is on fire!”
Somehow, it didn’t seem so terrible to die if Foley was still alive. It was illogical, but this night wasn’t made for logic. It was as if she could bear anything as long as he survived. There was practically a lilt in her voice as she called back, “Foley, I can’t come down—the tower is on fire!”
Another shape heaved itself into the brilliant light. This one was burlier, shorter, moving less freely but with a certain latent power. “You can make it out of there,” this figure called up to her. “I’ll hold back the flames.”
“Nelson!” That crazy delight swirled through her again. They were both alive; they were both here to save her. Suddenly the whole night seemed brighter, and it wasn’t because of the raging fire. “But are you sure?”
“You’ll be safe enough,” Nelson shouted. “Just come on down the stairs.”
Even as he spoke, she could feel the air around her radically cool. The molten light rising from the trapdoor turned faint and ghostly; even the leaping flames within the stained-glass blossom dropped so low she could hear the buzz of the gas feeding through its tube, though the fire was not completely extinguished.
She took a deep breath.
I can do this,
she thought.
I can walk through fire. I can live through this night.
Nonetheless, it took all her will to crawl to the trapdoor and drop her legs blindly through the opening, feeling for the first stair with her toes. The minute her thin slippers touched the step, she yelped and curled her legs back up. The metal of the plank was so hot it seared her soles.
“What’s wrong?” Foley shouted. The men must have stepped inside the tower the minute she disappeared from view at the railing; the timbre of his voice echoed differently off the smoke-filled interior walls.
“I burned my feet. The stairs are hot.”
“I can’t do anything about that,” Nelson bellowed. “You’ll just have to be brave.”
“Courage,” Foley called. “Remember. That’s always been your blessing. Show courage.”
She took a deep breath and lowered her legs again, biting her lip against the stinging pain. Maybe if she moved really quickly, running from stair to stair, her skin wouldn’t have time to blister. She put all her weight on her feet and dropped through the trapdoor to land in a crouch on the top stair.
The dying fire had filled the tower with smoke and reduced the ambient illumination to almost nothing; she could barely see three yards in front of her, and the stairway circled down into an ominously impenetrable fog. She swallowed a whimper of terror and braced her hand against the wall.
Courage,
she thought, and rose shakily to her feet.
It wasn’t possible to run down the stairwell, after all. The swirling smoke not only made it difficult to see the descending steps, it drifted around her face and resulted in a sort of poisoned vertigo. She focused on her feet and took first one stair, then another, each time trying to find the original wood instead of the supporting metal. That worked until she placed her weight on a plank of wood, and it gave way beneath her. She shrieked and pitched forward, her hands outstretched to break her fall, while her leg smashed through the shattered lumber almost to her knee.
“Corene! Corene! What happened?” came Foley’s instant cry.
Painfully, she pushed herself back to a sitting position and extricated
her leg. It was scratched and bleeding and prickly with splinters, but it could have been worse, she supposed. It could have snapped in half.
“My foot went through a stair and I fell!” she called back. “I think I’ll be all right.”
“I can’t come up after you,” he replied. “You have to come down.”
She tried to stand, but the battered leg buckled under her and she hurriedly dropped back down. Very well, she’d descend on her buttocks, the way very young children did. At the back of her mind, a question circled:
Why can’t Foley come up the stairs?
She didn’t ask, because both possible answers were terrifying. Either he was too hurt to navigate the steps, or the stairwell was too compromised to hold his weight. In which case . . .
She didn’t feel as dizzy in the seated position, so her pace actually picked up as she continued downward. But the air grew denser with smoke, harder to breathe, and the stairs were increasingly dangerous—full of charred holes where the wood had burned away, many planks still smoldering with sullen fire. In multiple places she had to rise briefly to her feet and step carefully down on the remaining metallic skeleton, because all the wood was gone.
“Where are you? How far down?” Foley called.
“I can’t tell. I can’t see to the bottom. Can you see me?” She tried waving her hand through the gritty haze.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Just keep coming down.”
“If Kayle was here, he could blow all this smoke away,” Nelson grumbled.
This time Corene had to swallow hysterical laughter. If she was going to start wishing for impossible things, she’d wish for something a lot more useful than the elay prime. For instance, a handrail or a rope or an intact set of stairs. She bumped her way down two more steps.
“Where are you now?” Foley asked.
This time she did laugh. “I still don’t know.”
“Just keep talking to me,” he said. “It helps me gauge the distance.”
“What happened at the palace?” she asked breathlessly. It took a lot of effort to shout and scoot down the stairs at the same time, especially when the air was so thick. “Garameno didn’t kill Greggorio.”
“I know,” Foley said. “How did you figure it out?”
“Because I found Lorian—”
“Lorian!” Foley exclaimed. “But he—”
“I know! When I told him about the body, he got—got—so crazy—”
Nelson’s incredulous voice came next. “The murderous steward?
That’s
who you told?”
“Well, I didn’t know he was murderous until he sent soldiers after me—”
“And that’s why you ran?” Foley asked.
She giggled, and then she cursed when her backside landed on a particularly hot sheet of metal. She hurriedly descended to another step, but it wasn’t much better. The fire had apparently started at the base of the stairs and roared its way up; it would get dicier and dicier the closer she got to the ground. “I didn’t run, I
drove
,” she corrected him. “I stole Filomara’s smoker car!”
“We found it outside the tower,” Foley said. “That’s when we knew for certain you were here.”
“Very smart,” Nelson added. “Kayle would approve.”
Corene paused to catch her breath and try to assess where she was. She could hear the others more clearly now but she still couldn’t see them; she might be the equivalent of three or four stories up.
On the roof of the Great Market,
she thought, her spirits rising.
You can climb down that far.
“But how did
you
find out about Lorian?”
“He came running through the maze with soldiers at his back, screaming, ‘Kill them! Kill them!’” Foley said dryly. “I drew the logical conclusion.”
“Oh no! How many soldiers? How did you fight them off?”
“Four soldiers, as well as Lorian. Garameno and I could retreat to the gazebo and make a stand, but it was hardly much cover.”
“Can he fight? Really?”
“I’m guessing there are a lot of things young Garameno can do,” Nelson put in. “As soon as I met him, I could tell he was concealing a big secret, but I don’t read foreigners very well, so I couldn’t guess what it was.”
“He can fight,” Foley confirmed. “But he didn’t have to. Because
moments after Lorian arrived, another set of soldiers came running through the maze—”
“Garameno’s troops,” Corene said. “I knew he must have some.”
“He’d sent his man after them the minute he found Greggorio. They made quick work of the soldiers.”
“And Lorian?”
Foley was silent a moment. “On his knees by Greggorio’s body. Holding him. Weeping. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Corene came to her feet to navigate another mostly nonexistent stair and felt the whole structure shudder beneath her. She held her breath until the shaking stopped, clinging to the red stone with her fingernails—as if that could possibly help—then eased down one more step. Her heart was pounding so hard it was difficult to keep her voice steady.
“So what did you do with him?”
“I didn’t need to do anything because more royal guards started pouring through the maze. Hacking their way through, really—just leveling the shrubs. Filomara was with them. I saw her confront Garameno and I decided it was time to come look for you.”
“But he found me,” Nelson interposed, “because
I
was looking for you. Some fool had gone running through the grounds yelling about a woman stealing the elaymotive, and since it sounded
exactly
like something you would do—”
Corene managed a breath of laughter as she sank back to her buttocks and curled her fingers around the stair. This just felt like the safer method of locomotion. “I was afraid Lorian’s men would kill me,” she explained, feeling ahead of her for the next step. “So I thought I should—”
The entire stairwell before her ripped from the wall and collapsed in a mighty crash of sparks and splinters and rending metal. Corene shrieked and scrabbled for a hold, wrapping her arms around the final stair still attached to the wall, feeling it pull slowly away from its anchoring. The hot metal burned the skin of her forearms; her feet danced precariously over nothingness. “Foley!” she cried. “
Foley!
It’s coming down!” She heard the remaining bolts groan as they scraped through the stone.
“You’ll have to jump!” he called. “I’ll catch you!”
She felt panic gallop through her chest; she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think. “I can’t! It’s too far!”
“No, it’s not. I can hear you—you’re so close.”
“I can’t see you! You can’t see me! I’ll just fall straight to the stone and die!”
“You won’t,” he said, his voice calm and reassuring. “I can hear you. I’m right under you. I’ll catch you.”
“I’m too high!” she choked out. “I’ll fall on you and crush you and
you’ll
die!”
“Then take my life,” he answered. “Take it. I don’t want to live anyway, if you’re dead.”
She whimpered. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t kill you to save myself.”
A section of the stair above her shifted and swung free from the wall, scraping along the rough stone. She shrieked again, almost mindless with terror. Her whole body was dangling from the bottom stair as she clung to the searing metal, but her sweaty hands were beginning to slip. “Foley!” she wept.