City of Blaze (The Fireblade Array) (2 page)

Prologue

The third day of the first month, 3216 P.D.

Pain tore down his arms and legs, crossing through his chest, reverberating around his head. His knees hit the polished stone floor. Breath would not come to him; his throat was tightening inexplicably. He reached out with a hand to steady himself, grasping at the rough wooden legs of a foldaway table. His hand found no purchase and struck the glassed flagstones instead. They seemed to whirl before him in a vomitous display of monochrome monotony. The kahr lifted his eyes.

A wry smile was working its way slowly along Silar’s smooth features. “Come now, it’s barely a scratch! Do you want more or did you hit Baydie’s wine t -?” Silar’s brow furrowed. “Morghiad?”

Summoning what strength was available to him, Kahr Morghiad rocked back onto his feet and rose from the floor.

He could smell Silar’s fresh sweat as it combined in a too-familiar blend with the old melange of the practice room. All the world turned to dancing shades of crimson and scarlet. Morghiad stumbled toward where he thought his sword had fallen. It was there: cold and singing. He caught hold of it, turned from Silar and ran. He ran as fast and as hard as he ever had. The pain was still there. It burned like fire, coursing through his veins in a fierce assault of all that was combustible in him: bewildering, weakening. He pushed it forcefully into a corner of his mind. He knew it wasn’t his pain.

Silar reacted quickly, starting after Morghiad. “Men!” He did not check to see if they had followed his command. There was no time. Both men were over six foot and, although he could match Morghiad in height, he had never matched him in stride or speed. He catapulted himself down the arched corridors. At this pace there was no point in softening one’s feet; the sound of his footfalls seemed to thunder between the rough-hewn blocks, making the place even more oppressive and weighty than it typically was. The castle had always seemed to him an elaborate, yet damp, cave. It was full of unyielding turns and mismatched lumps of rock. Here and there, braver rays of light dared to touch the basalt walls. The rest shied away, choosing to illuminate the surrounding town instead. Even that appeared unnecessarily dim at the surface. Often he wondered why he had ever chosen to stay in such a place.

He could hear Morghiad sprinting ahead, but the sound was fading by the second. He was rapidly losing ground. By his best guess they were headed to the royal and guest quarters or the gardens below. The extent of either area meant that one could spend an entire day searching for a single person. He had to keep up. The men were behind him; maybe five or so had managed to follow this far. Silar shouted out to Morghiad.
That blasted kahr needed his help!
No reply came. Silar was now sure there was nothing wrong with Morghiad. His reaction could only mean that Artemi was in danger.

Morghiad had an odd sort of compass in his head for that woman. Silar had seen it once or twice before, when the kahr had started off in a seemingly random direction looking for her. They had stridden purposefully through the streets, reaching three dead ends where Morghiad seemed eager to go
through
the obstructing houses. Then there had been the embarrassment upon reaching her, discovering that they were on the wrong street level. Morghiad had evidently detected that she was close but was unable to sense if she was above or below them. The kahr gave away nothing in his classically stoic face. But Silar remembered the amusement in Artemi’s smile when they had finally arrived. She must have felt their mistake.

She had looked especially handsome that day, with hair the colour of old gold and fire that streamed over her shoulders and the curve of her breasts, almost to her waist. Her eyes were deep-set, dark and warm. Her skin was pale, almost translucent but flushed in her cheeks.  The soft light of the lower streets had been sufficient to pick out her strong jaw and delicate cheekbones.  She was not a tall woman, broad or particularly imposing, especially not in the green scarves of a benay-gosa. But she was
the queen
.

He could no longer hear Morghiad’s steps over his own. The corridor opened into three hungry mouths. To carry on running down the wrong corridor could slow him by minutes. He stopped to listen.

“Left fork, men!”

Silar set his pace again. At the next intersection he would have to gamble on Morghiad’s direction. Chance was no good to him when there was nothing to tilt it. He called out for the kahr a second time. Nothing. This must be bad. How seriously had she been hurt? Perhaps the king had discovered her secret, though that was unlikely. Silar’s network knew more than the king’s own spies and even they weren’t aware of it. A very fine gift from his late mother, that network had been. Along with her teachings – she had picked a few skills up as an agent herself – until she’d fallen in love with her quarry.
Even the wittiest of us are victims of our hearts
, she’d often tell him with a grin.
Yet I am both foolish
and
a victim
, he reflected.

The bare, grey walls gave way to plain pictures of characters in history, and most were war leaders, generals or hunters. Silar and Morghiad had spent an afternoon trying to find Artemi among them, quite unsuccessfully. The paintings were exclusively male, likely by request of the king. That man didn’t seem to like women much. Heavy, dark-oak doors punctuated the regularly spaced portraits. A bed-maker peered nervously out of one of them, meaning that Silar was on the right trail. The floors here were irregularly covered with geometric wool rugs of the local style, and soon the historical war portraits gave way to long-forgotten royalty. Ahead lay another junction. Soft carpets to the right; descending stone steps to the left. He shouted for Morghiad once more, stopping to listen for a clue as to his whereabouts. His patience was rewarded by a distant woman’s yelp and a crash of metal dishes. “That’ll have to do,” he muttered, and followed the sound along the carpeted corridor.

He pursued another league of darkened likenesses and scenic landscapes. The faces became more recognisable as he pushed forward. The carpets gave way to marble and the hallway opened out nearly twenty feet in width. The ceiling ascended from a heavy arch into sprawling vaults. To one side a wide-eyed serving lady hurried to clean up her dinnerware. These were the guest quarters, typically filled with brown-nosing nobles and spoiled, royal children from across the borders. It still seemed like a cave to Silar, just a slightly larger one, populated with wealthier vermin. His earlier pause had given the men time to catch up. Three of them had made it through the catacomb-like passageways. Silar signalled them to hurry, still tearing down the hall. He rounded a corner to find Morghiad hurling his weight at one of the heavy doors. The kahr did not stop to acknowledge Silar. His expression was determined, his mind focused only on the task in hand. His black hair dripped with sweat from the exertion; his shirt clung to his back. Those green eyes glittered with something... different. Silar and Morghiad synchronised their drive at the door without a word. Cadra’s army training had been very effective. The frame began to crack and splinter.

One more.

Stocky Beodrin, an improbably fast soldier, joined the battering ram for another push. The door gave out a wistful moan and, before it had completed its descent to the travertine floor, Morghiad had stepped onto the centre panel, leapt and came to land in the middle of the room beyond. In an extension of this motion his sword arced left and he moved immediately to his right, twisting his shoulders.

Silar fell into the room with the others. Instantly he froze, for he knew the outcome of the scene progressing before him. His role in this was finished. Morghiad, still moving, turned his blade to perform a slide-cross and proceeded to deliver it with deadly precision upon his opponent. The recipient made no sound. His arms were out straight, reaching down. Clasped in his hands was the neck of a pale, red-haired woman. As bright red blood sprayed outwards from the man’s throat, Artemi fell from his grip, hair swirling upwards into the air around her.

Silar’s legs weakened. He struggled to inhale. His only thought at that moment was what the sight reminded him of. It was oddly reminiscent, he pondered, of throwing a pitch log on the fire and watching as the newly agitated flames blossomed around the sides.

Chapter 1

The fourteenth day of the ninth month, 3210 P.D.

It was a fine day in Cadra, the heavily built-up capital city of Calidell. Some have described it as a feast day layer cake of green limestone houses and streets. In the very richest areas there were only two levels, in the poorest there were six. The streets curved between these levels with bronze guardrails skirting the sides and channels for rain driving clear blood down to the ground.

Life on the lowest levels was a rather gloomy affair; the only daylight came from foot-wide wells that bore their way to the surface. Orange paraffin lamps shed their own, weak light here and there. The noise of cart traffic, footfalls and chatter was constant even at night as it tended to reverberate down the raised roads and through the fabric of the stacked houses.

Cadra had long been a city of war and the outer walls were beyond vast. Their height seemed to caress the clouds while their width took a full minute to traverse. A thousand years earlier the city had outgrown its massive walls and no one had the money or inclination to rebuild them or add extensions. And so new residents had set up home on the outskirts, only to be obliterated with each successive assault on the city. One day, following a particularly vicious attack, a brilliant Cadran mason hit upon the idea of building up instead of out. King Rugosa ordered that each new resident would finance their own construction and consultation with the mason. In the early days, the poorer district suffered numerous collapses and the lower residents charged extortionate rents. Murder rates in the city rocketed as developers vied to buy the best base properties.

A millennium had quieted the controversy and had seen the construction reach its zenith. At the centre lay the castle, a giant black urchin now deeply embedded in the surrounding stone network. Only its spine-like towers protruded above the other buildings.

The castle boasted two open-air courtyards and some heavily shaded gardens. In one of those courtyards there was a broad fountain, cut from white marble. Water spouted from the top at high pressure and tumbled down over depictions of mysterious sea creatures where, at the bottom, it filled a wide pool of several yards in diameter. The afternoon’s yellow sunlight skittered off the white marble lip, across the water, to where Morghiad and Silar stood mocking each other over the previous night’s events.

Lord-Lieutenant Silar Forllan was one of
those
men, often seen with beautiful women and on several occasions observed suffering the pangs of
nalka
. But Kahr Morghiad did not socialise much with females, which only served to add to the gossip about him. The kahr’s father, King Acher, had repeatedly insisted that he should take a benay-gosa in order to prove his masculinity. In truth, Morghiad had as much desire to sleep with one of those as he did a viper. He also found the noblewomen to be shallow and manipulative harridans. Oh, it might be fun for a few nights but when it was over he’d have to go through the horrors of separation. Too many men depended on him now that he was captain. He couldn’t afford to be crawling around on his hands and knees, helpless and in agony while his men died. A good army could not sleep around. There was already too much of that. Worse, his cast-off women would become property of the king. And King Acher’s cast-offs usually ended up without a head.

Morghiad stripped off his sweat-soaked shirt. It had been a tough session lasting the entire morning, working through every move in the book. He was sure it was much harder leading the formations than following them. Even though the leader repeated them fewer times, one still had to walk between the men: checking, correcting, shouting and instructing. It surprised him how some had been fighting for Cadra over a hundred years and yet they still made foolish mistakes. Left-armed sweeps too extended; down-slices far too heavy. A few had become exhausted after only half the session was complete. It really wasn’t acceptable for an army this well-established. They needed more discipline and less wine, with fewer casual women. He intended to see at least some of these changes made while he was captain, assuming he lived long enough to implement them.