Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

Then the world came apart.

Light failed between one breath and the next, drowning them in blinding darkness. The ground buckled and heaved beneath him. Kel shouted out in fear. Sound cracked like thunder in his ears. The earth splintered between his left foot and his right. He grabbed for Adica and dragged her backward but felt himself sliding forward on his knees toward a new chasm. Heat blasted up from black depths, unseen but felt as a narrow gulf of empty air blasted by a blistering wind. When he opened his mouth to shout a warning, the air scalded his tongue. He couldn’t hear his voice above the scream of the wind.

Teeth grabbed him. A jaw closed on his right foot. The hounds were trying to stop his slide. Adica scrabbled for purchase. A spear slid past him. Its cool length brushed past his calf and then tumbled away, and away, and away—it never hit bottom. It seemed an eternity he slid inexorably toward the chasm with Adica struggling upward beside him. His straining hand, trying to brace against the slick stone, scraped on the edge, and he was falling forward as his spare torch slid out of his belt, bumped back against him because of the force of that wind, and tumbled away.

A small hand caught his linen tunic, then his rope belt. A hundred hands swarmed him, poking and pinching everywhere as they hauled him back. He was helpless in their grip, his back scraping on the ground.

The hands released him, all but one, which searched his torso with wickedly sharp jabs. Its breath, made pungent by a sulfurous tang, tickled his face. Those claws scrabbled up his right arm and gave it a hard pinch, twisting the skin so he yelped. Blood welled where a claw had scraped through the skin. A cool pressure twisted onto his arm. At once, the hounds were all over him, licking and nosing him. The creature assaulting him had vanished.

“Adica?” His throat hurt, and his back ached. Utter darkness hemmed him in. He couldn’t hear anything except for the wind.

A lamp flared.

Adica lay beside him, looking half stunned.

Their enemy glared at them from the other side of the chasm, a dreadful fissure out of whose depths boiled that searing wind, which shot straight up toward the cavern’s hidden ceiling. The flame trembled and steadied as the captain sheltered it with a hand. Of the dozen warriors still able to fight, six had bows, which they had readied and nocked with arrows during the blackness. White Feather barked a command. Alain threw himself over Adica’s prone body. They shot.

None of the arrows made it across the fissure. The blast tore them away, spinning them up toward the ceiling, lost to sight.

“Hei! Hei!” shouted Kel, a call for help.

Alain jumped up, wiping the sting of the wind from his eyes. Beor and Kel clung to the edge of the fissure. Alain dragged them up. In a strange way, the blasting wind helped him. Beor had lost his torches, and his injured shoulder still bled, but he could walk. Kel’s slashed pack dangled dangerously. They hadn’t any weapons, but on the flat plateau between them and the bridge a few spears lay scattered. Kel hurried, limping, to gather them up as Alain knelt beside Adica, cutting the rope that bound her hands. Shaking her head and wincing, she got to her feet.

The fissure had split the ground in such a way that they could no longer reach the larger passageway toward which they had originally been heading. Instead, only a single, smaller tunnel opening offered escape from their section of the cavern.

White Feather shouted something very much resembling curses, but there was nothing he and his men could do. His proud face twisted with thwarted anger; a livid cut ran from lip to chin, and a bruise mottled his left cheek. Blood dripped from one ear, dribbling down to stain the leather armor that protected his shoulders. He wore a breastplate of beaten bronze incised with a vulture-headed woman, fierce and commanding. With a snarl, he turned his back on his enemies.

One archer masked with a boar’s face loosed a second arrow, but the wind caught the arrow and lifted it high until it was lost in the cavern’s murky heights as wind roared. They couldn’t leap the fissure, and the chasm had fractured like a trident into three crevasses, slitting the cavern’s floor into tiny islands surrounded by gulfs of wind. The most youthful of the warriors made as if to cast his spear, but a companion restrained him. After a brief conference, they walked cautiously across the length of floor left them, hauling with them three comrades too injured to walk, and crossed into a small tunnel so low that most had to duck as they entered.

Kel swore furiously. As the lamplight faded, Alain looked to see that the bridge over the first abyss had split down the middle, each half dangling down the face of the chasm.

They were trapped in the middle, caught on a narrow ridge poised between two crevasses.

White Feather vanished down the small tunnel, and his light with him. Blackness descended again. From out of the fissure boomed a throbbing like a giant’s reverberant footfalls, each one as loud as a thunderclap. The wind ceased in the next instant.

Rage barked as if surprised, and then all was still and utterly dark.

2

HER hands smarted as blood rushed back into them. She flexed them as she took steadying breaths in the darkness. Free, but not yet safe. Still, it was better than being trussed up as a captive of the Cursed Ones.

“Hallowed One, can you speak?”

“Beor, how came you to follow me? What happened at the village? Who else was taken?”

He stood to the right of her, panting in the way of a fighter trying to overcome the pain of his injuries. “One of Weiwara’s infants was stolen, but the foreigner won it back. Nay, Hallowed One, no others were taken. Only you. It was all a feint.”

“To get me.”

He grunted to show his agreement.

“We’re trapped.” Kel’s voice cracked, hitting a boy’s pitch before sliding down again.

“Adica.”

She couldn’t see Alain, but she felt him as she would have felt a roaring bonfire. He stood about an arm’s length from her. Instead of answering, she extended her hand into the blackness and, searching, found his arm. He squeezed her hand. That was all. The darkness in the cavern was so absolute that she could not even see his face.

Or was it?