The Bronze Key

“Over here,” Aaron said, pointing at an empty cell. “This is where Skelmis was — its name is engraved in the plate. So the elementals in this room had to have seen something.”

Call walked up to one of the cells, and a creature with three big brown eyes on long eyestalks and a body that seemed more miasma than solid looked back at him. He wasn’t even sure it had a mouth. It didn’t look like it had a mouth.

“Did you see who freed Skelmis?” Call asked it.

The creature just stared back at him, floating gently in its prison. Call sighed.

Tamara went up to a cell that opened into an enormous space where three eel-like elementals swam through the air. They were the same elementals that had carried Call, Tamara, Aaron, and Jasper back from the Enemy of Death’s tomb in their bellies, only much smaller now. Maybe all elementals could change their size like Chalcon could.

Remembering flying inside the elementals also made Call remember where Jasper was now. On a date. With Celia. Who was almost definitely not trying to kill Call, but who might not be his friend anymore, either.

“Are air elementals all pretty dumb?” Call asked, annoyance at Jasper bleeding into his voice. They had only a short amount of time before the Masters figured out who’d sent the guard and came down here, ending the whole operation. If they didn’t have anything by the time the Masters arrived, the trouble they were going to be in would be for nothing.

“Harsh,” Aaron said.

“Harsh, but fair.” Tamara was watching the placid movements of the eel-like creatures. “Let’s try the earth elementals. They’re friendlier.”

They backtracked up the path, past Chalcon, who stared hungrily at them, trilling in a super-eerie way. Call’s leg felt as if it were full of jabbing knives. They’d done a lot of walking, but taking the steep slope up made his muscles burn. By the time they were back in the main corridor, despite this being his plan, he kind of wanted to give up. Tamara was studying the stone, trying to figure out if there were markings so they could tell which archway led to the earth elementals. Aaron was frowning, like he was trying to puzzle this whole thing through.

“I hear you there, apprentices,” someone said from the farthest archway, a voice that seemed ominously familiar. “Come and find me.”

Call froze. Was it the spy? Had they stumbled on the person who wanted him dead?

Aaron whirled with the torch. The archway was empty, the space beyond it glowing a deep red-black, like old blood. The corridor seemed full of ominous shadows.

“I know that voice,” Tamara whispered. Her eyes were wide, her pupils enormous in the darkness.

“Come and find me, Rufus’s children,” the voice said again. “And I will tell you a secret.”

Aaron raised his torch over his head, the fire spitting and crackling. In the greenish glow his expression was determined.

“This way,” he said, and took off, running toward the sound, Tamara right behind him.

That’s what heroes did, Call guessed. They ran straight toward danger and didn’t ever give up. Call wanted desperately to go in the other direction, or just lie down and cradle his leg until it hurt less, but he wasn’t about to let Aaron have to fight without his counterweight.

Aaron wasn’t his enemy.

With a gasp, trying to ignore the pain, he followed them.

It was immediately evident what element they’d fled toward. Oppressive heat blasted from the archway and the corridor beyond. The walls were made of hardened volcanic rock, black and full of ragged holes. The roar of fire was all around them, like the blast and crash of a waterfall.

Aaron was standing partway down the hall, Tamara beside him. He had lowered the hand that was holding the torch, though it was still shedding a weird greenish light over them. “Call,” he called, and there was a strange note in his voice. “Call, come here.”

Call limped down the hall, passing different cells in which fire elementals were imprisoned. Their cages weren’t closed off by clear walls but by gold-colored bars sunk deep into the earth. Behind the bars, he could see creatures made out of what looked like black shadow with burning eyes. One was a circle of flaming hands. Another was a cluster of fiery hoops linked together, drifting and pulsing in the air.

The heat was so oppressive that by the time Call reached Aaron and Tamara, his shirt was soaked in sweat and he was close to passing out. He could see immediately, though, why Aaron and Tamara were so still. They were staring through the bars of a cage at a sea of flames, and in the center of that sea of flames, a girl was floating.

“Ravan?” Tamara said in a cracking voice that Call had never heard before. “H-how are you here?”

Ravan. Call felt a shock of horror go through him. Ravan was Tamara’s sister. He knew she’d been swallowed up by the elements, becoming one of the Devoured, but it had never occurred to him that she would be down here.

“Where else would I be?” the flame-girl asked. “They lie to us, you know? They tell us that the pitiful magic we learn in the Magisterium is the whole of what we can do, but I am so much more powerful now. I no longer call up fire, Tamara. I am fire.” The iris of her eyes flickered and danced with what Call at first thought was a reflection of the flames — but then he saw there was fire behind her eyes, too. “That’s why they have to lock me up.”

“A touching family reunion,” a voice said from the other side of the room. Call whirled. Marcus the Devoured was looking out at them from an almost identical cage, grinning. “Callum Hunt,” he said in his crackling, roaring voice. “Aaron Stewart. Tamara Rajavi. Here you are. It seems not all my prophecies have come to pass yet, have they?”

Call remembered Marcus’s words from two years ago, a terrible echo of his own fears: One of you will fail. One of you will die. And one of you is already dead.

They knew, now, which of them was already dead: Call. He had died as Constantine Madden. Already dead. The words hung in the air, a terrible proof that what Marcus had said was the truth.

“Marcus.” Aaron frowned at him. “You said you had a secret for us.”

Tamara couldn’t seem to wrench her gaze away from Ravan. Her fingers reached out for her sister’s burning hand, as though she couldn’t quite accept that her sister wasn’t human anymore.

Marcus laughed and the fire around him leaped and danced, flaring up volcanically. Even Tamara turned at that, jerking her hand back as though just realizing what she’d been about to do.