Child of Flame

Sanglant held a candle whose yellow flame revealed the sharp lines of his face and the carefully fanned-out apple, eight slices making a blunt star, two on each side. A silver goblet shone softly in the candlelight beside it.

“Nay, I asked for nothing more,” he said, but he didn’t close the door, he only stood there. After a moment, she slipped past him to go inside.

With that uncanny sixth sense he had, as exquisite as a dog’s, Sanglant looked directly at Zacharias, although surely he ought not to have been able to see him, drowned as the frater was in night’s shadow.

“What is it, Zacharias?” he asked softly.

“Nay, nothing, my lord prince.” Zacharias took two steps back, paused. “All is as you wish, Your Highness. I’ll go now. Wolfhere has promised to teach me to play chess.”

As he walked away, he heard the door close and latch behind him.

X

BEYOND THE VEIL

1

IT was too dark to see the landscape of the sphere of Erekes. As soon as the wind loosened its grip, Liath halted to take her bearings. A hot wind blasted her face. She missed her cloak, which she could have used to shield her skin, and more desperately she missed her boots. The surface she stood on scraped the soles of her feet, but when she moved forward to stand on what appeared to be smoother ground, her foot sank into a viscous liquid so cold that her toes went numb.

She jumped back, stumbled, and for a moment couldn’t put any weight on that leg. At last sensation returned, but that was worse; her skin burned and blistered. Limping, she fell back to the shelter of a high outcropping whose bulky lee protected her from the worst of the blasting wind. The iron wall, and the gate, had vanished. She leaned against the stone, catching her breath, but the slick cold, as penetrating as melting ice, burned her fingers. She jerked away, and an instant later felt that same ulcerous pain lance up her hand.

She stood there in misery, half out of the wind and with a foot and a hand throbbing, and surveyed the landscape, what she could see of it. Beyond the shoreline, more a suggestion of textural change than an actual visible line, the landscape stretched into the distance as smoothly blank as a sea littered with fragments of lamplight. Darting fingers of brilliance moved upon that sea, illusive daimones bent upon unfathomable errands, but she could not hear the music of the spheres above the whine of that endless hot wind.

Was it the wind off the sun? Yet why then did the sun not shine here?

One question always led to another. She puzzled again over her brief sojourn among the Ashioi. How could time move differently there than on Earth? Why did day dawn and night fall with such an irregular rhythm? Why did no moon rise and set, wax and wane, in the country of the Ashioi?

Did it, too, travel the spheres? Or was there another plane of existence lying within or beside the universe which she did not comprehend? Eldest Uncle had shown her the twisted belt, his crude representation of the path on which he and his people had found themselves, but that didn’t explain where they were right now in relation to Liath.

So many mysteries.

And it were better not to linger here, dwelling over them. She might stand here forever, lost in contemplation, except that the wind blew hot in her face and the ground rubbed uncomfortably against her bare feet. Like her heart, her hand and foot were going numb.

Cold crept up her wrist like poison. Wind scalded her eyes. She couldn’t feel the coarse sand under one foot, and the lack of feeling disoriented her so much it was hard to keep her balance.

Time to move on.

The path was clearly marked, once you thought to look for it. Those lamplit sparks were stepping stones, each one about an arm’s length in diameter, set across the blistering sea. The challenge lay in stepping from one to the next with no staff for balance and feeling in only one foot. She hitched her quiver tightly against her body and set off, cautiously at first, more boldly after she got the knack of compensating for her crippled foot and navigating against the constant pressure of wind blowing so hard into her face that her eyes ran with tears.

The dark shore receded behind her, quickly lost, until only the sea surrounded her, yet she felt the presence of hulking shapes around her, impossible to distinguish. The wind stank of bitter wormwood. Will-o’-the-wisps twinkled and vanished in the distance. Even in darkness, the landscape seemed as desolate as a woman’s heart that has been scoured clean.

That fast, just before she took her next step, the wind turned. One instant it blasted her face with heat; the next it buffeted her from behind with an arctic chill. The sudden shift caught her off guard, almost tumbling her off her safe perch on a broad stepping stone. Light washed the landscape.