Phoenix Unbound
Page 12

“Where are you taking me?”
He didn’t answer. It hurt to talk, to walk, to breathe. The last two were unavoidable actions, but the first he set aside. She didn’t harangue him for an answer but fell silent, her hands still buried in his tunic. Azarion thanked the Fire Mother that his captive didn’t retch.
By the time they reached the gate, he thought his chest had cracked open and his lungs had caught fire. Though the night was cold, sweat slicked his skin and dripped into his eyes. The agacin, tall and slight, was an anvil on his shoulder. He halted and tipped her down until she found her feet. “We’re here. You must walk the rest of the way,” he said, holding his side as he breathed hard and tried to stay conscious.
She braced a trembling hand on what remained of the gate. “What is this place?”
She’d figure it out sooner than later, so he didn’t bother lying. “Midrigar.”
The agacin jerked back as if bitten. Her wide eyes nearly glowed in the dark. “You would shelter in a grave.”
“We’ll shelter from the Empire.” He captured her elbow. “Don’t fight me. You have more to fear from me than any spirit still trapped behind these walls.”
He expected more resistance from her and was surprised when she only stood tense beside him. Her expression spoke more than any words of her loathing for him, even greater than her terror of Midrigar. “I hope whatever waits in there devours you.”
“Pray it finds me tastier meat than you, since you’ll be in there with me.” He tugged her along behind him as he stepped over the rubble partially blocking the entrance to the shattered gate.
The agacin edged a little closer to him, shivering hard enough to make her teeth audibly clack together. Azarion turned, signaling for quiet with a finger to his lips. Every hair on his arms stood at attention. The dead didn’t sleep in Midrigar; they listened, and they heard.
If the ruins stretched before them gave truth, then he and the fire witch were the only living souls in the city now, and the hush hung like a shroud over its crumbling ramparts. He’d hear the tracking party from Kraelag long before it ever reached the gates. For now, the silence reigned, unbroken except for the occasional gust of cold wind that swirled through the gaps in the wall.
The city gradually revealed itself in a jumbled sprawl half lit by the moon’s rays, half obscured by the night’s shadows. Scorch marks licked up the outer walls of roofless buildings, testament to old fires that must have raged through Midrigar when the Empire chose to punish her for her rebellion. Even now, when the stench of burnt bodies had long since faded and the fires were nothing more than the memory of ash, Azarion fancied he caught the acrid scent of smoke.
He half dragged, half carried the witch across the courtyard toward a temple, ears straining to catch the sound of their pursuers drawing closer. A lone howl caught on the wind, and Azarion didn’t dare hope it was a wolf. The witch added her own voice to the wind’s mournful tune in a wordless hum inspired by pain and misery.
He’d made the same sounds more than once as he nursed injuries obtained in the arena. He hummed so he wouldn’t scream as the pain swelled and ebbed and swelled.
He halted at the temple steps when she fell to one knee. The agacin’s features were drawn as he crouched and tilted her chin up with his thumb for a better look at her. Lines bracketed her tight mouth and furrowed her forehead. The humming continued unabated.
She favored her leg and flinched away when his fingers edged closer to her back. He saw no blood on her clothes, no signs of attack, no singe marks from the conflagration she had called forth in the arena. “What causes your pain?”
Her eyes swallowed him whole in a gaze dark as the shadows that crawled down the temple steps. Her breathing was labored, her words short. “I burn. I burn.”
He frowned, recalling her telling him in his cell that she was impervious to fire.
She remained docile while he helped her stand and turned her until her back was to him, hissing softly when his fingers clasped the hem of her tunic to lift it. The humming resumed, rising in pitch as he inched the garment past her waist, toward her ribs and higher. He caught only a glimpse of red, blistered skin—some of it overlaid across a patchwork of old burn scars—before she jerked away from him.
“Enough,” she said in a shaky voice. Her gaze swept the shattered cityscape before settling on Azarion. “We shouldn’t be here,” she said in a trembling whisper.
His own senses thrummed warnings. In this dead city, they weren’t alone. He could feel it. “We have no choice,” he said in low tones to match hers. He tried to distract her. “I thought you couldn’t burn by fire.”
Her jaw flexed with the failed effort to hold back a pained whine. He didn’t think she’d answer until she inhaled a careful breath. “It isn’t fire that burns me; it’s the magic I use to summon it. It comes with a price.”
“And you pay each time you summon it?” She nodded, and he touched her arm, a poor offering of comfort. She pulled away. “Come,” he said. “We’ll shelter there.” He pointed to an undamaged section of the temple’s portico.
She didn’t argue or resist his light nudge to her shoulder, choosing instead to hobble along just behind him as they picked a narrow path through the rubble to the cracked stairs that led to the portico.
The heavy feeling of being watched only deepened as stars gleamed above them. Azarion kept a hand on his knife and an eye on his surroundings. The shadows cast by the gutted buildings were odd. Instead of cutting across the ground in sharp angles, they seemed to undulate, their edges undefined and ever shifting, as if they were alive.
He reached back for the agacin, capturing her cold fingers in his. “Up the stairs.”
She paused, teeth chattering, either from fear or pain or both, and peered at the black chasm in the temple’s archway. No light penetrated that darkness. “I’m not going in there,” she stuttered.
Injured he might be, but she was no match for him physically. If he chose to force her into the temple’s shelter, he had only to lift and carry her up the steps and through the archway. But even in the straits they found themselves now, he wasn’t that desperate. The longer he stared into the fathomless murk, the more certain he grew that something stared back. Waiting.
“Neither of us is,” he replied. “We’ll rest outside, against the wall there.” He pointed to a spot away from the archway but still under the temple’s roof overhang. The deep angle of a corner and the girth of a massive pillar offered a little shelter from the chilly breeze and a small bit of concealment from any who might come searching for them. They’d be cold and uncomfortable, but they wouldn’t freeze.
She nodded and freed her hand to clasp her arms in a futile bid for warmth. “Walk up the other side. I don’t want to go near that door.”
If something decided to hurtle out of the temple and attack them, taking the steps at a different spot wouldn’t make much of a difference, but he did her bidding and helped her climb stone treads cracked and blackened by fire until they reached the spot he chose for their rest.
“Tuck into the corner,” he instructed. “I’ll sit in front of you and block the wind.”
She gave him a puzzled look before hobbling to the place he indicated. Her lips pressed flat against her teeth as she carefully folded to the ground and lay on her side.