Primeval Fire (Scarlet Odyssey, #3)

by C.T. Rwizi

On one side of the valley, a rearing sphinx of burning moongold floats above an empty pedestal, metal wings spread like those of a redhawk, three Faraswa people seated around it still as rock formations. On the other side of the valley, a circle of mounted Ajaha cheers as two of their comrades duel to the death. Ilapara is in motion as soon as her boots touch the ground, Jomo and the Sentinels close behind. One of the dueling rangers is bleeding from cuts on his chest and face, and now a spear pierces his abdomen even as Ilapara runs to save him. He falls to his knees, gurgling blood. She runs ahead anyway.

He thrusts. She turns him away. He tries to outmaneuver her, but she’s too fast. A proud Ajaha who proved himself in the bullpen, and yet here is a woman dressed in foreign garments who can mimic his fighting style and match him in speed.

The one Ilapara kicked is awakening. She points her typhon at him when he tries to pick up his spear. “Don’t.” He freezes, his eyes widening at her use of Sirezi. Burns weep all over his face and arms. She might have felt sorry for him had she not just seen him try to murder another of his own. “Just go,” she says. “And remember we did our best not to kill you. Come back again and we won’t be so merciful.”

“He needs urgent care. I’ll fly him over on the skiff.” “Understood. Ijiro!” The youngest Sentinel comes over, his carbine still in hand. “This ranger’s name is Aneniko. He’s Salo’s friend. We need you to keep pressure on his wound until you get him back to the ship.” Any displeasure Ijiro might feel remains hidden behind his green lenses. “Sure thing, boss.”

When the skiff lands in the Vigilant camp, he’s waiting for it with Priscille and a wheeled stretcher. The last time he saw Niko with his own eyes, he was riding away from the kraal while Niko looked down at him from the top of a watchtower. Salim thought it the end of their complicated friendship, that he’d driven Niko away by being too defective a man. But they would meet again in their shared dreams, and the same boy he thought he’d disappointed would come to make him feel like he was loved and admired, not in spite of his eccentricities but because of them. Like he was perfect just the way he was.

“Salo?” comes his muffled voice. “Yes, Niko. I’m here.” “Am I dead?” Salim brushes Niko’s forehead in an attempt to soothe him. He tries not to let his voice crack. “You’re alive, and you’d better stay that way. You hear me?”

The last time she cast a binding spell, she was plummeting from a height with a girl who was as much a friend as a rival. They both carried the queen’s blessing in their bones, having studied the spell for months in preparation. But it was Alinata who successfully mastered her fear in the end, capturing the flock of ravens while her friend fell to her death. There’s no fear today as she casts the same spell. At first it seems a breeze has disturbed the grains of sand near her sandals. But then more grains leave the ground, looping and eddying around her, and soon she’s enveloped in a revolving curtain of her new medium: a whirlwind of fine sand.

“Is everything Alinata told us true?” Sibu says, speaking into the communicator. “Did you really die and come back as a . . . what did she call it?” “An atmech,” Jio tells him. “Yes, are you an atmech, Salo? Are you . . . like a tronic human, now?” Standing by the navigation table, Salim lets himself chuckle. “‘Tronic human’ isn’t far from the truth, actually.”

Four high mystics dead before the alarm could be raised. Salim covers his mouth and nose with his hands, horrified. “Your assassin friends are very effective,” Balam remarks, his eyepiece flickering with green light. “Look: the masked warriors on the battlefield are already in chaos. Makes me wonder why the sorcerers spread themselves out like that, with limited line of sight to each other and no means of communicating remotely. It’s like they didn’t expect anyone to target them. The other three still don’t know what’s happening.” Precisely the weakness Salim identified and exploited. The emperor himself should know: the best way to kill a high mystic is to do so quickly, with no advance warning. Salim just didn’t expect the reality to be so . . . brutal.

Adamus. “You’re free, which means you may do as you please, so long as you don’t attempt to harm me or any of my friends.” Adamus seems to think about it; then his amber eye returns to the Professor, now trying to hide behind Faidon. “Then you must let me claim my vengeance,” Adamus says. “The things that were done to me, that I was made to do . . .” A tear spills down his cheek. “I deserve justice.”

“I have no compulsion to hurt any of you,” Adamus says. “But I have rage that needs venting, and it seems you have a war to fight. Put me on a battlefield, and let me be useful.” Adamus once unmade Salim so thoroughly he screamed himself nearly out of a voice. But now they shake hands. “I hope your offer is sincere, Adamus, because I’m going to take you up on it.”

She doesn’t need to go any closer to recognize her queen among the three figures. Magnificent as ever, she stands in a golden gown with a collar of spikes flaring out from behind her neck. Powerful and commanding, a goddess. Alinata’s heart breaks at the sight. She knows the queen isn’t evil. In her heart, all the queen has ever wanted was to strengthen her tribe and build a lasting legacy. If she knew who she was consorting with, she surely wouldn’t have gone through with this.

“Priscille,” Salim says. “Tell Niko . . . tell him everything we shared was real. Tell him . . . I love him.” Priscille takes a moment before she replies. “As you wish.” “Salim, there must be another way!” “I’m blessed to have known each of you. Thank you for all your help, for who you are. Use your freedom well.” After discarding his bracer tool, Salim takes one last breath, prepares to release his spell, and leaps.

Ijiro and Kito follow behind them, shooting from their carbines to cover Jomo’s retreat. Inside the barrier, Jomo falls to his knees, weeping, but he stops when he sees Ilapara, eyes widening in shock and surprise. He crawls over in a hurry, and they fall into each other’s arms.

Demons burst out of the sands beneath the warlord and bite into his mount, tearing chunks of flesh out of its belly. It collapses with him, and he is likewise swarmed. No sound comes from him as the demons take a leg, an arm, a piece of his face, feasting on his bowels. Ilapara looks away just as the woman outside wails like she’s tearing herself apart, the storm of ash and cinders thickening to almost blanket the barrier again. Who knows how long the storm rages, but when it finally settles down, neither disciple nor warlord is there. The demons are gone, too, destroyed by whatever spell the woman released. Just as Ilapara starts to think that maybe her ordeal is over, a huge shadow crashes onto the barrier, then another, then a third.

The calm in his voice rubs off on Ilapara. They will all die here, despite everything they did to stop it. “We tried our best,” she says. “I suppose we did,” Jomo says, and she leans deeper into him, grateful that she will meet her end by his side.

“There are so many of them,” Neropa murmurs. “How did we not know?” Alinata has no answer for her, so they continue to sit in silence and watch as the rangers slowly fall to the demons. Then a popobawa notices them as it flies by overhead, and it starts circling them, assessing them with its terrible eye. Alinata gets up, dread rising up her gullet, not because she’s afraid to die but because she could swear she recognizes the sinuous copper circlet sitting on the creature’s head. It can’t be.

Alinata can hardly believe her eyes, but all her doubts wither away when the first of the arriving redhawks pierces her ears with its characteristic shriek. The demon screams in anger and flees, but a redhawk swoops down on it from above and tears the thing apart with its beak and talons.

“Did that just happen?” Ilapara finally whispers. “You saw it too?” Jomo says. “Oh, thank the Mother. I thought I was going insane.”

Broken on the ground after falling from a height, Salim coughs out sand from his mouth. He should be dead, ripped to shreds by the spell he used to summon all the redhawks of the deep black and compel them to fight for him. And if that didn’t kill him, his collision with the ground should have done it. But he isn’t quite human anymore, so he survived. Death might claim him yet. He tries to move, but his limbs are twisted wrongly. He blinks his eyes open, but his spectacles fell off, and the light is unkind to him. An hour passes, perhaps. Then another. He drifts in and out of awareness, clinging to life by a fraying thread.

Niko smiles down at him, eyes glittering like sapphires and diamonds. “In a sense.” “Am I dead?” “No. And you’d better stay that way.” Salim decides he must be hallucinating, that he’s probably still waiting to die on the sands of the desert. But he doesn’t want to wake up just yet, so he rests his head back onto Niko’s chest. “My friends,” he says. “They will be fine. Don’t you see? You did it, Salim. You ended the war.”

As Niko places him on his feet, Salim takes another look into his eyes. They’re not quite blue, not quite clear either. Still soulful, still sincere, but the wisdom shining within is not human. “You’re not Niko, are you,” he says. “And this isn’t a dream.” “The Veil has shattered, and the gods can now walk the earth in person,” Niko replies, “but Vigilance remains too weak, so he asked for my help, and I agreed. Think of him as a passenger. He gives me directions, but I’m in control. He won’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.”

They enter the atrium, a circular hall where two pillars stand on a dais like the posts of a gateway, and it is here that Salim finally meets the devil. They might have looked alike once, but the shadow his reflection contained has burst out of its shell to reveal a being of black mists and skin like volcanic rock. The face is capricious, overwhelmingly beautiful one moment, chillingly horrifying the next, and so is the shape of her body, talons becoming hands becoming talons.

her tone hardens as she looks Niko directly in the face. “The gods should not have returned from the Infinite Path. To be a god in this universe is to suffer the great disadvantage of having nothing more to learn. Limitless power with no challenge or adversity breeds only decadence, and cruelty, and the belief that you can play games with human lives.

“Learn,” says the king. “With the fall of the Veil, the Great Forgetting curse has lifted. All the knowledge the gods came with from their home stars is in this city, and you”—she places a hand on his chest, a flash of heat and arcane knowledge passing into him—“are now its custodian. I trust that you will use it for the betterment of your world.”

The sun sets, the alien world dissolves, and the city returns. When next Niko opens his eyes, they are the same rich brown Salim has come to know and adore. He holds Niko by the shoulders and takes a closer look just to make sure. “Niko? Are you all right? Is he really gone?” “Most of him,” Niko says, then stretches out his left arm, now marked with scripts of Fireblue that pulse with light before fading into his skin. “He left . . . something. I’m still trying to make sense of it.” Finally, his attention returns to Salim, and he beams like they’re seeing each other for the first time.

Salim pauses. That name coming out of Niko’s mouth doesn’t ring true to his ears. Not anymore. Whatever inhibition refused his old name is gone, and now it’s the new one that doesn’t fit. “I’m Salo,” he says. “And as for kissing me, I’m not sure what you’re waiting for because—” Musalodi, no longer Salim, does not finish whatever he was going to say, his lips captured in a sudden and forceful kiss. It is familiar and yet different in electrifying ways, and it goes on and on until they hear the drone of the Ataraxis as it arrives with the rest of their friends.

“Thank you, AmaSiningwe.” Lacing his hands together respectfully, Salo steps deeper into the hall so he is visible to everyone present. The sudden quiet makes his ears ring. “As my aba and a few of you already know,” he says, “I’m here to announce my imminent departure for the city in the Dapiaro. The Plains are my home, and I’ll visit as often as I can, but any role I play in this society will be from a distance.” The tribal leadership looks to each other, muttered grumbles and whispers disturbing the silence.

“You’ll have to fly on one if you want to come visit,” Salo tells her. “Hmm. We shall see.” He hesitates. “And . . . when you decide you’re tired of clan politics, there’s a place for you on the council, should you want it.” “That’s . . . an offer I may actually accept,” she says after taking a moment to think about it. “Being clan mystic has its perks, but I’m a scholar at heart. Research is my calling, not the minutiae of running a clan. I still need to train a few more apprentices, but soon there’ll be enough suitable candidates to replace me. Then maybe I’ll come to your city.”

“Exactly,” Salo says. “So I was thinking, we’ll probably need someone to watch over us. Someone to keep us safe.” “Someone?” the ranger says, finally turning his face. The heat in his eyes is still intoxicating to Salo even after a month of camping trips and midnight swims and secret trysts wherever and whenever possible, as if their hands were glued to each other. Salo moistens his lips. “Someone dashing, maybe. And strong. And maybe I’ve met his parents, and they thoroughly approve. He might also be very good at . . . that thing I like.” A wicked grin. The ranger straightens from where he was leaning against the tree and comes closer. “Is he now.” “Very.”

“Perhaps, but everyone has a threshold. In any case, we’ve come to an understanding. He’ll manage local security with your brothers and Mafarai. Alinata and I will handle external business. I’ve already laid the groundwork for a network of spies and assassins—” “Tuk, we talked about this.” “I meant operatives,” Tuk says, impenitent. “People who can solve problems your ambassadors can’t.” His eyes go distant, losing a shade of color. “It’s getting wild out there, Salo. And whether you like it or not, that city is a big target. It won’t survive on diplomacy alone. There are already plots to seize it, or destroy it if that fails. We’ll need to stop those plots before they get too far.”

“Is that Jomo?” Tuk says, looking at the distant figure in a leg brace coming down the plateau with Ilapara and her mother. “I’ve missed that big oaf.” “You should go say hello,” Salo suggests, to which Tuk’s eyes crinkle in the corners. “I probably should.”

“I finally figured out what our blue friend left for me,” Niko says. “You have? What is it?” Niko slides closer. “I’d show you, but I think maybe the world has seen enough upheaval for now. Once things have calmed down a little . . .” “Don’t you dare keep me in suspense,” Salo says, poking him in the side. “What is it?” Niko glances upward, an enigmatic look in his eyes, and Salo swears he sees a flash of blue pass through them. When Niko looks back at him, a wide grin splits his face.

city to someone else and let Niko take him to the heavens. They could visit alien worlds; they could live their lives without responsibility, be young and lustful and free. They could have it all. Salo reaches over to caress Niko on the cheek. “One day, my love,” he says. “One day. For now, let’s do what we can to fix this broken world. Then you can give me the stars.”