Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

A cough woke him. He started awake, shivering. Sunset gilded the ridgeline in rose and purple. The sky had not a breath of cloud in it. The line between earth and sky seemed as stark as though it had been drawn by a human hand wielding charcoal and paints. He was alone except for Sorrow, sitting on watch. What had coughed? He felt the prickle of an unseen gaze, not malevolent but merely curious.

He rose gingerly. His neck ached because he had slept at an awkward angle, and his hands, knees, and calves stung horribly, red from sunburn and beginning to blister. Thirst had dried out his throat. Fortunately the hidden spring, bubbling up among the rocks, flowed boundlessly. Moss grew along the bowl of rocks that bordered the spring, and he used this as a sponge to wash his face and arms.

“Where is Rage?” he asked Sorrow. “Find Adica.”

The hound rose with a massive yawn and a grunt, yipped once, and padded silently away. Alain grabbed his staff and followed him. Spires of rock loomed above them, swathed in darkness. Only the eastern ridges still caught the last of the sun.

He met Laoina coming back around the rock face. “You come, quick.” Laoina pointed to the sky. “Night come. Stars come.”

They collected their gear before following the tracks. The cliff face gave way to a defile, descending in stair steps. Here, the air smelled of water. Hardy plants grew in the walls, finding any purchase that they could. Some had prickly skins, harsh to the touch, and others lay low along the ground, snaking through tiny crevices.

The defile ended in a steep wall. Here an unknown tribe had erected a stone loom of peculiar design, constructed out of pillars instead of megaliths. Adica walked among the pillars, measuring their distance and angle, glancing frequently at the sky as twilight fell. The pillars had the sheen of granite but the feel of snakeskin frozen into stone. The upper portion of each column was carved into the torso of a woman, arms pressed flat along a scaly gray side. Fanciful stonework decorated the capitals, stonework ropes and vines that half-concealed the sly faces of smiling girls. It took Alain a moment to see that these wreaths of vines and ropes were actually carven snakes.

A flash of gold caught his eye. He knelt at the base of one of the pillars. Sand poured over his hand as he fished out a gold necklace constructed of small squares of gold, each one impressed with the image of a winged goddess dressed in a layered skirt, attended by two lions and flanked on either side by rosettes like those that decorated the palaces of the Cursed Ones. How had it come to be lost here?

He held the necklace up against Adica’s throat. “It looks most beautiful when worn by beauty.” The gold squares looked uncannily cold against her skin, as chill as the touch of death despite their grave among the warm sands.

Shuddering, she pushed his hands away. “That is not mine to wear. Old magic haunts it.”

Surprised at her vehemence, he buried it back in the sand. “I take not that thing which is not ours. Where are the lion women?”

She rose, glancing up at the heavens. “We must walk the loom. Come.”

Rage growled softly, standing stiffly alert at the opening of a crevasse that thrust into the rock face blocking the lowest end of the defile. A threatening scent wafted out from the crevasse. Behind them, Laoina whistled a breathy melody as sinuous as a charm. Sorrow trotted over to Rage and took up the watch.

“Quick.” Laoina pointed toward the dogs with her spear. “We go, quick quick. Some thing comes.”

The first stars popped into sight overhead.

“I do not know how much time has passed,” said Adica, backing away to find a vantage point to get her bearings. “Do you see the moon? Hei, let the days not have passed too rapidly, I pray you, Fat One. Let it not be too late.”

“What must I look for?” asked Alain, coming to stand beside her. “Teach me how to help you weave the looms.”

“Two Fingers’ land lies west of here. So if we would travel west, I must weave west.” She studied the sky, intent and purposeful as she held her mirror poised by her chest. “The stars do not move in relation to each other. But how high or low they stand in the sky can change. See there.” She pointed to a bright curve of stars, glittering in the clear desert air. “At our village, the Serpent crawls along the hilltops. Here in the desert lands it gains invisible wings that allow it to soar. There is its red eye, that bright star. Yes, that one. Step back, now. I’ll bind the first thread—”

Lifting her mirror, she angled the reflective face until the image of the star caught in it. She had already forgotten him as she fell into the rising and falling chant of her spell. So quickly, she pulled away from him, as though a chasm had ruptured between them. Yet how could he help but stare as she worked her magic? She looped her weaving around the stars known as the Holy Woman’s Necklace, still high in the sky and setting toward the west, and wove a gate to western lands. He had never stood so close before. He could actually hear the thrum of the threads through the soles of his feet, deep in his bones. The gate arced into being just as the hounds yelped with fear and skittered backward. Alain raised his staff as they bounded into view. Night fell.

“Go!” cried Adica, caught in the maze of her weaving.

A sibilant hiss echoed along the stone cliffs around them. Laoina needed no more urging: she bolted through the threshold.

“Go!” cried Adica when Alain hesitated. “I will follow you.”

“I won’t leave you!” he cried. The hounds raced through the gateway, vanishing through the archway, abandoning them—or scared off.

What on Earth was dreadful enough to make his faithful hounds run off like that?

A grinding weight scraped along rock behind him. He whirled, holding his staff ready, keeping his body between the crevasse and Adica, but all he could see was shadow. A heavy footfall shuddered the ground as one of the lion women padded past him, eerily silent.

“Alain!”

A hiss answered Adica’s call. A serpentine creature emerged from the crevasse, winding sideways in the manner of a snake. Except it wasn’t a snake.

It had creamy-pale skin and a torso like that of a woman with the face of a girl newly come to womanhood, fey and curiously aloof. Her hair writhed around her head as though in a whirlpool of air, or as if her hair itself were alive, a coil of hissing serpents.

“Alain!” The gate glimmered, threads snapping. The sphinx leaped forward to attack, and Alain heard Adica’s fading cry. He jumped back through threads sparking and hissing into a blinding sandstorm.

Drowning in sand, he flailed wildly. He could not breathe.