“The torch.” Rafe fell to his knees, feeling in the dirt. “I threw it away, didn’t I? Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
“They can make people think that they died, and then they do. Death by thought.” Isabella stood close to him, torch held up high. It did nothing to aid his search. “Let it be. We have to keep moving.”
“No, no. Here it is. I found it.” Rafe brushed the torch against his thighs, relit it with his lighter. His hand shook so much that it took him far longer than it should’ve.
Isabella waited, silent, patient, until he was done. She offered her hand, he took it. One strong heave and Rafe was up on his suddenly-wobbly legs. It was the crash, of course, the after-battle weakness, left behind by the retreating tide of adrenalin.
Before they went on, Rafe touched Isabella’s cheek. “Sorry,” he said, hand dropping back to his side.
“If that’s the worst thing that comes out of this, then we’re doing all right,” she said. “Come.”
They took two steps forward.
A shrieking wind bowled into them, punching Rafe in the guts, filling his ears with cacophony. He doubled over, stomach screaming agony, ears crying in pain.
“Keep going!” shouted Isabella. “It’s all in your head!” She pulled at him.
Rafe stumbled on, feeling as if the sledgehammer wind had cracked his skull open, and his thoughts and memories gushed out in a hot black torrent. He grabbed at his head, trying to hold everything in, but memory welled through his fingers, dripped down his wrists.
“They’re taking…” he whispered, trying to make Isabella understand. This was more than just pain, it was himself that was leaking out of him, Rafe running down Rafe’s arms, Rafe dripping into the thirsty hidden dirt underfoot…
Whispers in the dark. Croons. Rest, lay down your head. Sleep, go softly.
Something burrowed in his thoughts, scooped out his memories, made a space for itself. He could no longer distinguish its voice from his own.
You’ve failed.
Failed to find the Tower. Failed to protect your sister, the prince, your country.
Failed.
The litany of his failures fell on him like stones, crushing.
Yes, he would lie down. Let his flesh melt from his bones. He’d failed and there was nothing he could do except not be a waste of space.
“Fight it.” Isabella whirled around to face him. Her white-blond hair was slipping out of her chignon, it swirled around her face like banners, framing a face as pale as marble with eyes like black holes.
She looked so much like a vengeful goddess—Selene come down to chastise him for his irreligious ways—that Rafe shrank back.
“Do you trust me?” asked Isabella, not moving, not touching him. The fire from her torch twined and twisted, crackling, unholy, imbued with mischief. A small fire, a seedling fire, but with lust and passion in its orange heart. It lunged, it danced, it writhed in desire, wanting to eat, consume, burn, take over, destroy.
Fire, calling out to its draconic brethren.
“Put it out,” murmured Rafe. His own torch was out, its weak flame suffocated by his own hand. “It’s going to kill us all.”
“This?” Isabella held it aloft, looked at it thoughtfully. “Yes, it can kill, of course. But it can also give life. You know that. Where would we be without light and heat?” She held it out to him.
Rafe and something-that-was-not-quite-Rafe stepped back from it.
“Take it,” said Isabella. “Take it. Put it out if you want. It’s your choice.” She held her arm steady, and he remembered her holding the platter of appetizers under his nose.
Would you like some stuffed mushrooms, sir?
His choice. Rafe took the torch, held it stiffly away from him. Shadows retreated from his mind, and he saw Isabella again, not as clearly as before, but diminished, just a woman with a collapsing hairdo and dark eyes.
Rafe looked at the fire, and felt
them
all around them, breathing cold thoughts into him.
He didn’t think this meager fire would keep them away for much longer.
“Sing,” he said, voice cracking a little.
She gave him a dark, unfathomable look. “What do you wish me to sing?”
“Something that sounds like drums.” His smile felt like a bow pinned onto a corpse. He shrugged off his jacket, passing the torch from hand to hand. It pooled at his feet; he kicked it out of the way. Then he took out his lighter and liberally sprinkled most of its fluid on the flame. It rose with a hungry crackle.
Head down, torch held low, Rafe stood and waited.
After a moment, Isabella started to hum, a soft dark sound that spun like thread between them. Rafe closed his eyes and listened to the spaces in the music, spaces like the big deep booms of a drum.
He began to dance.
His feet moved first, slow, in small steps, remembering the dignified dances of the ballroom. The torch he held steady, looking into its depths.
Isabella, still humming, moved forward, and Rafe followed, as if the pair of them were tied together, held by the song.
And then she was humming no longer, but singing. Her voice was not a soaring voice, reaching to the heavens, but one that swept down to the depths, into ravines and canyons, searching out the many-hued shades of darkness.
Darkness that could only be searched out by light.
Rafe swept the torch in an arc around him. Sparks showered and scattered like tiny seeds of hope. He brought his heel down hard, took another step, bent, whirled, twisted, moved on again. One moment he held the torch close like a lover, the next he thrust it upraised as if in victory.
And he thought of the fire, he looked into the flames, let the glare sear his eyes, burn itself into the inside of his skull. Fire, dangerous, seductive, vital, necessary.
Taking life, giving life.
Saving his life.
Clapping, loud, rhythmic. He obeyed, following the beat, feet stamping in time. The clapping came faster and faster. Rafe stepped, stomped, ground small stones underfoot, thinking about nothing but that fire, that light and heat. Sweat soaked his shirt; he ripped off the collar, tore apart the fastenings with one hand. Juggle that torch, arcing high in the air, slide off that shirt.
See. Easy.
The thing that had moved into him hissed and scuttled back. He felt the darkness ripple as if several creatures flinched.
Love the fire. Stare into its jeweled heart. Let it warm arms, hands, face, like a lover’s caress.
A tongue of flame licked his skin. Heat and pain shot red-hot sparks up his arm.
Careful. This is fire—a terrible beauty.
On and on, forever, drawn forward by something that was outside both him and that fire. Something dark and cool, like a rope of silver and shadow, something not seen, but present at the edge of consciousness, an anchor keeping him and the fire grounded, safe, protected in their own ecstasy.
And then suddenly, it was gone.
He stumbled. No rhythm. No song. No counterweight.
Light slanted down from a gap in a rock fall just ahead. The fire in his hand was no longer bright and roaring, but small, diminished, bleached. He was without jacket and shirt, naked-chested, sweaty.
His feet hurt.
“Rafe?”
Was that his name? Memories crept back from where the fire had banished them. He knew that voice.
He put his hand around the flame, depriving it of air. It sputtered, gasped, died.
“I’m sorry,” Rafe said, feeling strangely wretched. Then he scrambled up the rocks, to meet Isabella, who peered down at him from the hole.
“Don’t celebrate just yet,” she said grimly. “Shimmer’s under attack.”
R
AFE LAY PRESSED AGAINST
the warm ground, short grass-hairs prickling his skin, and watched the battered tanks—ludicrous amidst the elegant statuary, manicured topiary, and dimpled fountains—lumber through where the opalescent shield-dome of Shimmer had once been.
“Blackstone tanks,” he said flatly. “Completely manned, and look to have been cobbled together from parts.”
“Those tanks are war machines and those soldiers know how to make war,” said Isabella from beside him. “Look at them now.” One of the tanks stopped, and disgorged soldiers with firearms into the greenery. Others kept going, bulldozing right over trellises with trailing vines. A panicked deer bolted from beneath the trees, leapt high. A soldier pointed his gun, a sharp retort sounded, and the animal twisted and fell awkwardly. It staggered up on weak legs, tried to move on, but fell, thrashing until another bullet put it out of its misery.
“They’ve found some way to disrupt the ka,” said Rafe. “The ka failed back at the door to Mirados’ private collection. I felt it. We shouldn’t have been able to enter as easily as we did. The ka’s blocked. I still feel it, deep underground, somewhere. But it’s far away and can’t get to us.”
“How could they do that?”
“Pyotr,” said Rafe slowly, “said that they were appropriating mage-made artifacts. Remember that convoy we took shelter in under the Protectorate? It was full of old stuff. They must’ve found something they could use for this.”
Isabella shook her head. “Ka is the lifeblood of Shimmer. Without ka, Shimmer falls.
Everything
in Shimmer falls.”
Rafe understood. “Their lamps.” He stared up at the sky, but the many-hued light of Shimmer was soft and diffuse, like a high fog, and he couldn’t make out the source.
“Those will come crashing down soon enough.”
“Then the Blackstonians need a quick victory, before all of the infrastructure of Shimmer collapses. They can’t want another battered useless state on their hands.”
“Who knows what Blackstone wants with Karzov at the helm,” Isabella said, with an edge. “Once, I’d have said that the thrill of hunting krin was the only thing that mattered to Karzov.”
“You think Karzov’s here?”
“I think it’s likely. He’s the Shadow. But if he is, that means Shimmer’s doing us a favor by keeping him busy so we can find the Tors Lumena.”
“He’ll have sent his minions to the Barrens.”
“Minions I can deal with.”
“Wait.” Rafe grabbed Isabella’s arm as she started to wriggle down the slope. “If Karzov has something that blocks ka, how long before he gets to Oakhaven with it? All our defenses are coordinated by the Machine. It, too, is connected to quartz, so it runs on ka. Our agri-caves were also set up by the kayan. If ka’s the lifeblood of Shimmer, that’s true for Oakhaven as well.”
Isabella stared at him. “You want to go charging in and confront Karzov?”
“Sel, no! I’m not stupid. I want to sneak in, find out
how
he’s doing it, and disable it, if I can.”
Isabella nodded. “All right. Do you have any idea
where
in or out of Shimmer this device may be?”
Rafe hesitated. “I… think so. I can feel the blockage, like pressure against my chest. The thing causing all this
should
be at the center of it.”
“So your plan is to belly-crawl and/or fight through the battlefield below, while the pressure gets even worse, and hope we can stop the thing before you have a heart attack.”
“Erm… something like that.”
She gave him a sidelong glance. “Just making sure I understood where things stand. After you,
sir
.”
She didn’t do a half-bad job of a lying-down-on-your-belly-in-enemy-territory Oakhaven military salute.
In the end, they had the Shimmerites to thank for distracting the invaders. Despite being denied access to the greatest amount of their ka, the rohkayan mounted a defense at the lacy trees whose graceful tresses had flirted with Rafe on their way to the party.
When a team of Blackstone raiders entered that same grove, the trees went into a frenzy, branches grabbing, tearing, shoving, and wrapping. Several soldiers got off a few shots—shots that chipped off bits of bark, or ricocheted, but didn’t have any other effect on the trees. Vines wound around the neck of one man and jerked; the snap was audible and ugly and the man went all floppy. The others, panicked, tried to run, but the vegetation caught and tripped them up, and the plants gathered in closer around them, blocking them from view.
One of the soldiers, eyes dark with terror, looked straight at Rafe as a branch snaked around his waist. Then the grove swallowed him up.
His gun had fallen and his uniform pants, Rafe noted, had been far too short for him.
Then the screaming came, which died to gurgles, and then to nothing.
Incongruously, a bird started to sing.
“They were just gun fodder,” Rafe said finally, when they’d left the grove behind. “They weren’t trained soldiers. Didn’t know how to run, how to use a gun, how to form a coordinated defense. Just fodder.”
“Fodder sent in first for Shimmer to spend her strength on,” said Isabella, and though her voice was even, Rafe knew she was not without sympathy for the drones who’d been stuck into uniform and handed guns and sent out to get killed.
Shimmer struck back in other ways. Fountains sprayed acid, swarms of deadly insects targeted soldiers, and statuary came alive and attacked with limbs and weapons of stone, forming a kind of defensive circle around Mirados’ neighborhood.
Only once did they run into a soldier, a drone hunkered down in the bushes, trembling and wide-eyed. He started up at their feet like a bird, arms flying up as if he’d take to the sky. Isabella was upon him before he had a chance to flee. She didn’t need any help taking him down, which was just as well because Rafe, shivering and feeling his skull about to explode, couldn’t offer any. The pressure of blocked ka was almost as bad as the searing intensity of the wild ka that caused his quartz sickness. A swift chop at the back of the neck felled the soldier like a stoned ox.
“Hmm.” Isabella looked from the unconscious man to Rafe and back again. “Somehow, I don’t think you’re up to a strong assault on the Blackstone camp.”
“D-decidedly not,” Rafe stammered out.
‘Then we’ll do this the easy way, right through the front door.” Isabella doffed the soldier’s fallen cap. “I think these will fit me just fine. Turn around—no, don’t move. I will.”