The Whitefire Crossing (25 page)

“Sounds lovely,” I muttered, then paused. “Both of you? Is that like what you said before, that it takes two mages to do a difficult spell?”

“Yes. One to control and direct the power within the channels, and the other to focus it through the lens of his will and cast the spell.”

“What’s it like?” The question slipped out before I could stop it. Gods, the Taint had been pure joy. Savage longing tore my heart at the very thought.

Kiran was silent for a moment. “Glorious,” he finally said. I recognized the echo of my description of Kinslayer, and the pain in his voice, twin to my own.

Damn it, when he talked of magic, he didn’t mean anything so innocent as either climbing or the Taint. “How many channeled spells does a blood mage cast?” I figured that was a nicer way to put it than
how many people do you kill
?

He didn’t answer right away. “I only cast practice spells, where we didn’t use full power. But I think...I think Ruslan casts channeled spells often.”

I wondered what “often” really meant. How many people disappeared in a city the size of Ninavel? I thought of the streetside slums, all the beggars and whores and gangs. All the immigrants that flooded into the city, hoping to strike it rich and failing more often than not. Ninavel must be a perfect haunt for a blood mage.

The sun had set while we talked, the haze on the horizon glowing a dusky, burning orange. Through the twilight, I spied a clump of twisted dwarf pines amidst a set of rocks.

I pointed. “Will those work?” If so, we might be spared hours of stumbling in the dark.

“They’ll help.” Kiran’s eyes were dark holes, his expression indistinct in the gathering gloom. The careful way he held himself told me his arm was hurting him badly.

“Then we’ll stop there for the night. I’ll run ahead and set up camp before the light fails completely,” I said. He nodded, and I picked up my pace, glad to put extra distance between us.

When I reached the trees, I found a nice dry patch of ground between two boulders big enough to act as windbreaks. I set up the tarp, and lit the fire stones the moment Kiran arrived.

He didn’t say a word, just went straight for the nearest tree and grabbed a branch like it was a lifeline. I don’t know what I’d expected. A flash like a mage ward would give, or a sound, or something—but there was nothing like that. His head fell back, his eyes closed, and the look on his face made my skin crawl. I’d seen that same slack-jawed pleasure in lionclaw addicts when they swallowed a dose.

The needles of the tree withered to brown, then curled and blackened as if burned.

“Khalmet’s bony hand,” I breathed, suppressing a shudder. Those charred-looking patches of catsclaw before Broken Hand Pass...Lightning strikes, my ass. It had been Kiran. I remembered his wild-eyed desperation right after the storm, and felt an uncomfortable shock of recognition.
Don’t touch me,
he’d said, much as he had after the rockfall. I swallowed hard at the thought of how close my hand had been to his shoulder. I’d always thought the Alathians a bunch of priggish idiots for their restrictions on magic, but this trip was changing my mind fast.

Kiran worked his way through the entire clump of trees. When he returned, his arm still lay in the sling, but the pinched look had gone from his eyes and mouth, and he sat without wincing.

“Is it better?” I wanted to ask,
is it safe
, but I didn’t want him to know how unsettled I really was.

“Not all the way.” He poked his arm. “I’ll have to wait until we reach more trees to finish the healing. But it feels much better.”

“Good.” I tried to sound matter of fact, and not look at the blackened husks where living trees had once stood. “We’re over the worst terrain, so no more climbing or rappelling. But we’re still two days out from Kost. How long do you figure we have before Ruslan tries something else?” How long, before he murdered some other Khalmet-touched convoy member? I struggled to blot out an image of Cara, bloody and screaming.

Kiran rubbed his forehead, looking unhappy. “Two days...I think he’ll cast again, in that time. If he believes we’re still above timberline, he may try a series of earthquakes to trigger rockfalls and avalanches over a broader area—or if he realizes we’ve reached the western slopes, perhaps wildfires...”

Wildfires. Great. I’d better make sure we stuck close to streams.

Kiran hastily added, “The closer we get to the border, the safer we’ll be—the wards are so powerful they’ll disrupt other workings.”

“We’ll rest up for a few hours, then, and keep going once the moon rises,” I said. If we headed straight west, another half day’s walk would put us at the rim of the Elenn gorge, as close to the border as we could get until Kost. I prayed that’d be close enough.

***

(Kiran)

“There it is, the border with Alathia.” Dev stood balanced on a prong of rock that jutted out over the dizzying chasm of the Elenn Gorge.

Kiran had no intention of joining him on a perch so precarious. He edged closer to the rocky rim. Far below, the shining silver ribbon of the Elenn River twisted along the narrow canyon bottom. The leaden gray cliffs of the gorge’s steep sides had a stern, foreboding aspect after the bright rock of the high mountains.

The forest on the far rim appeared no different than that on Dev and Kiran’s side. Yet when Kiran concentrated, even through his barriers he sensed a deep, soundless thrumming, warning of quiescent power. He wished he dared release his barriers and examine the border properly. When he’d researched the Alathian wards, every scholar he’d read had agreed on the wards’ strength, but none had any certain knowledge of their design, or the source of their enormous power.

Kiran had his own theory, based in part on a disparaging comment Ruslan had once made about Alathians being narrow-minded fools using forces they barely understood. Certain historical treatises spoke of strange artifacts found in the far west, the remnants of a vanished ancient civilization. Most were useless or broken, but the few that worked were said to be curiously powerful, as if a vast host of mages had worked together to create them. Kiran suspected the Alathians had found such an artifact and discovered a way to exploit its power for their own use. Yet even with that assumption, the potential design of their wards still eluded him. How could any passive, charm-bound spell generate a barrier of that extent and strength? Not even the purest of metals could hold so much energy.

Perhaps if a mage were to construct a spell that spiraled back on itself, like one of the eddies Kiran had seen in Garnet River...

“Kost lies downriver, to the south,” Dev said, dissolving the fascinatingly elegant pattern taking shape in Kiran’s head. “The gorge widens out beyond the next bend, and we can scramble down a side ravine to the Elenn.”

Dev paused. His green eyes turned calculating, in a way that rekindled Kiran’s nerves. “Back at the convoy you said I’ve got to stay within five hundred yards of you, or else Ruslan pounces on me. How fast, exactly, would Ruslan find me? Far safer if I could stash you somewhere well clear of the gate, before I go through to talk with Gerran. Otherwise, we’ll have to risk an Alathian spotting you.”

Kiran’s nerves clamored louder. Dev wanted a way to leave him before they’d even reached the gate? He glanced involuntarily across the gorge, at the silent forest beyond.

He was so close to safety—closer, in truth, than he’d ever thought to reach. To have freedom jerked from his grasp now would be all the more terrible, yet he’d failed to discover anything specific to offer Dev that might ensure he kept his word. Kiran had thought last night a promising start, but ever since he’d taken
ikilhia
to heal his arm, Dev had retreated into blank-faced efficiency, refusing all attempts at more than casual conversation.

If only he might offer Dev a way to regain the Taint! Dev’s yearning had been startlingly clear. But so far as Kiran knew, not even magic could provide that. He’d rejected the idea of a lie—even if Dev believed him, when Kiran didn’t follow through on his promise in Kost, Dev might easily go to the Alathians in revenge.

Yet if Dev meant to abandon or betray him, he could do so just as easily with Kiran standing right outside the gate, as with Kiran hidden deep in the forest.

With a swooping, vertiginous feeling in his stomach, Kiran said, “An untalented man like you, traveling so close to a source of magic as powerful as that of the border wards—for Ruslan to isolate your
ikilhia
now would be like attempting to identify a single spark amidst a wildfire. He can do it, but not quickly or easily. You’d have half a day to reach the border, perhaps more.”

Dev raised his brows. The faint twist to his mouth said he hadn’t missed Kiran’s reluctance to share the information. Kiran braced for a sharp comment, but Dev only nodded and said, “There’s an abandoned cabin partway down the ravine—we can reach it by midafternoon. If I leave you there and run straight for Kost, I’ll pass the gate by sunset. I’ll get everything arranged and return to the cabin by mid-morning.”

A full night in Alathia. More than enough time to speak to the authorities and give testimony under truth spell. Unease gnawed at Kiran’s gut.

“Wouldn’t it be better for me to wait off in the woods somewhere? What if someone decides to visit this cabin?” If the Alathians came for him at Dev’s instigation, he might be able to hide in the forest...though he had no idea what he might do after that.

Dev slanted him a glance. “Small chance anybody’ll wander up a trailless, nondescript side ravine—but if someone comes, either hide, or tell ’em you’re meeting up with a prospector. See, I’ve gotta take our camp gear with me. I’ll be playing solo prospector at the gate, and the Alathians’ll notice if I don’t have a full set of supplies. At the cabin you’ll have shelter, and a food storage locker. Bears roam these woods. I’m thinking you’d rather not try and beat one off with a stick, after it smells your food.”

“Bears?” Kiran tried to decide if Dev was joking.

Dev’s one-sided grin appeared, for the first time since the avalanche. “Yeah. Alathian prospectors don’t carry charms powerful enough to keep them away, so they’ve gotten bold.” He tilted his head, the amusement dying out of his expression. “I guess if a bear came, you could just, you know—” he made a vague hand gesture, and grimaced.

Kiran was startled into a disbelieving laugh. “Oh yes, I’ll get close enough to touch a wild bear.” He shook his head. “Any magic from a distance means releasing my barriers, and that means—”

“Ruslan crashes down on you like a two-ton boulder and makes the bear look like a fuzzy kitfox cub, yeah, I got it.” Dev turned away. “Look, we’ve made it over the mountains, and you said Ruslan couldn’t cast anything strong at us so close to the border, right? Try and relax a little.”

Kiran swallowed a sharp reply. Though Dev’s voice had brimmed with confidence, he knew Dev well enough now to see the tension in his stance that put the lie to his bravado.

He followed Dev back from the lip of the gorge into the forest. In a move that by now was almost habit, he brushed a hand across a pine trunk.

The forest in front of him abruptly shimmered, as if seen through a heat haze, and changed into a panorama of snow and rock. Startled, Kiran stumbled, and the ghostly image vanished. He rubbed a hand over his eyes. His barriers stood firm, and no hint of magic tinged the aether. Perhaps exhaustion was catching up with him.

Dev glanced back. “How’s the arm?”

Kiran rotated his wrist. He’d been skimming off bits of
ikilhia
from trees all morning to finish the healing. Unmarked skin now replaced the torn, bruised flesh left by the rock, and the throbbing pain had gone. Better yet, the pulse of wrongness that last night had burned in an unceasing scream for power had now faded to a whisper so faint Kiran could ignore it with ease. “Almost completely healed,” he told Dev.

Dev’s eyes were narrowed and thoughtful. “Can you heal yourself of anything, that way?”

“Any physical injury, yes. But the greater the injury, the more power is required.” Kiran didn’t explain that the greater the injury, the more instinctive and uncontrolled the power draw. No need to make Dev more wary of him than he already was. He cast about for an innocuous subject that might ease Dev into further conversation.

“What kind of pine trees are these?” The trunks weren’t quite as broad as those of the bristlebarks in Garnet Canyon, but these pines were far taller. Kiran couldn’t even see their tops, his view blocked by heavy branches laden with blue-green needles.

“Cinnabar pines. See how red the bark is? It reminded people of cinnabar ore.” Dev’s face settled back into impassivity, and he picked up his pace.

Kiran sighed. His thoughts returned to the momentary visual distortion he’d experienced. Had it been a hallucination, brought on by stress and lack of sleep? He feared it signified some new assault by Ruslan, yet he’d felt no magic. He worried at the question, as he and Dev wound their way between cinnabar trees and hopped over trickling streams half-hidden by arching ferns.

The vision had happened just after he’d taken a flicker of
ikilhia
from a tree. Everything he knew about magic said touch-drawn power shouldn’t affect his barriers...but just in case, he refrained from any further attempts.

Yet an hour later, it happened again. One moment he was trudging after Dev up the side of a gentle ridge, the next the world before him blurred and transformed. Not to snow and ice this time, but to a marshy meadow lined with trees of a kind Kiran had never seen, thin slender things with white bark and tiny fluttering leaves. Kiran stopped dead. He searched his barriers for any flaw, hunting for any suggestion of magic.

Deep within his mind, the tiniest twitch, so subtle it was barely detectable. The meadow scene dissolved back into cinnabar forest even as he isolated the sensation.

“What is it?” Dev had turned to stare at him. “Has Ruslan cast another spell?”

“No...” Cold descended over Kiran. That faint twitch, like the brush of questing fingers across a barred door...“Not in the way you mean. But I have a suspicion...tell me, where do you find trees with trembling, heart-shaped green leaves, and bark pale and smooth as stone?”