The Labyrinth of Flame

Author:Courtney Schafer [Schafer, Courtney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: North Col
Published: 2015-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Kiran thrashed free of the past and back into the strange world of colored sands and deadly currents. The demon backed away from him. Its braids writhed as if in violent agitation.

What did you learn? Kiran demanded, his mind still racked by echoes of remembered pain. The soap-skin of his protection felt thinner than ever.

Ashkiza’s ban, the demon said, shock underpinning the mental words. Does the greed of the ssarez-kai know no bounds? To break Ashkiza’s ban and wield the greatest of weapons… A burst of alien emotion swept over Kiran, so tangled he could not make it out.

What weapon?

Saving you was not wise. Sand whipped upward from the dune at the demon’s feet to obscure its form. In Kiran’s mage-sight, currents frothed and churned. In another instant, both sand and currents subsided, but the demon was gone. Kiran was alone amid the creeping dunes.

Curse the creature; where had it gone, and why? All Kiran had seen was that Ruslan and Lizaveta had indeed burned the confluence, far more literally than Vidai had ever dreamed of doing in Ninavel. The spell Ruslan had set around the dais had transmuted the energies backlashing through the silver ring into physical fire. Any nathahlen in the temple would have burned right along with the bone mage, caught in an inferno too sudden to escape. Adults and children alike…how many small bones lay amid the temple’s scorched ruins?

He heard Teo say again, Wherever you go, death follows.

That death was not his choice. It was Ruslan’s, and the pattern would never change if Kiran did not survive to break it. He sifted the currents surging past him for any hint of demon presence and nearly lost his grip on his shield.

The demon had left him to die. He couldn’t maintain this balance of energies forever. He would tire, his shield would fail, and the currents would destroy him.

The amulet was still in his hand. Kiran tightened his fingers around its cold metal. He had to find a way out of this realm before the currents killed him. He’d felt the demon take him here. Ruslan had sometimes cast spells and demanded that he and Mikail reproduce them without any information beyond what they had sensed during his casting. Kiran didn’t have Mikail’s innate gift for pattern analysis, but he’d learned to compensate with a combination of stubborn determination and meticulous experimentation.

He must replicate the demon’s magic and escape into his own realm. If he survived, then he’d worry about making sense of the demon’s talk of bans and weapons. Kiran shut out fear and frustration. He’d felt the demon cross between realms more than once. Each time, he’d sensed that same dissonant flare of power.

Again and again he relived the instants when the demon had ripped open the fabric of the world. He studied the shift of energies and examined every nuance of sensation he’d felt.

Then he tried to re-create it, using the same slender flame that fueled his shield. Casting without disrupting his protection was horrendously difficult.

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