Through the Fire and Flames Read online

any more scraped from rough stone.

  The walls of the tunnel bulged out and contracted back in along its length, so that sometimes Rel and Taslin could almost have stood, and sometimes they were unpleasantly close to having to squeeze through bottlenecks. Rel tried not to watch the stone too hard - it would be shifting, however subtly, and his logic was worn enough as it was. It was harder to not stare at Taslin's behind, directly in front of him. The Gift-Giver really did move like a cat when it came to crawling on all fours.

  As the light from behind them faded away, the rock began to show truer, stranger colours. They shifted over the lumpy surfaces of the stone, sometimes like reflections, other times like shadows. A few times, a glint of some particularly alien shade stuck a rough probe into his brain, testing his fatigue, but the sensations passed quickly.

  Abruptly, the tunnel began to ascend, much more steeply than it had descended. Ridges began to form in the smooth surface under Rel's hands, giving him the grip he needed to keep climbing. Despite her confining skirt, Taslin seemed completely comfortable as the slope sharpened. The ridges lifted up from the rock underneath, became the steps of a ladder.

  Rel made the mistake of glancing down. He could count all too many steps already below, and the tunnel seemed to have stood on its end beyond them, a speck of pure blue that might have been the sky outside held in its eye. The rungs of the ladder chose that moment to start bloating out, growing difficult to hold. His hands came afire with fresh pain as he scrabbled and clawed for better purchase, aches and stinging burns blurring together.

  Taslin slowed above as Rel struggled. Her motions grew fluid and sluggish, but it seemed deliberate rather than any effect of the slope. Probably this didn't even seem like a climb to her. Rel's foot slipped, and he cursed, the exclamation flying as a lightning-blue arrow and stabbing into the rock in front of his face.

  With his hands growing slippery with sweat and tremors starting to run through his knuckles and shoulders, it took a long time to regain his footing. The rungs were growing wider, their tops flattening and turning smooth as if polished by too many feet. The concept stuck despite the fact that probably Rel was the first human ever to come this way or think of this route as a tunnel.

  Reaching up for the next handhold, Rel missed and stubbed his fingers on its lip. For a moment, he thought the steps had to be getting further apart, but as he blinked his eyes to better focus, it looked more as if the next step was twisted back slightly out of line. Up above, where Taslin was still ascending with effortless grace, the whole tunnel seemed to follow that twist, steadily turning into a helix.

  Rel grunted and forced himself up the next step. A tingle shot up his arm as his fingers slipped, but he managed to keep his grip. His head throbbed in time with his thumping heart, his pulse rising. Clenching his jaw did nothing to help. Still, he pushed on up for another step.

  From above, Taslin's voice reached down, her tone warm and strong. "Not far now. Keep going." Somehow, the reassurance worked even as leaning forward to reach up again made Rel bang his knee on a rung somewhere below. He choked back another curse, distracted himself with trying to think how to respond to the Gift-Giver.

  Whatever pride suggested, the best response was to get to the Court and sort it out there. Rel heaved himself upwards again, the steps beginning to press cold ridges across his chest and legs. He rested his chin on the one at his neck. Up close, the stone looked like it had been finished, maybe even fitted, as if this was some particularly torturous staircase. The Court had been designed, after a fashion at least. Perhaps this was some defence mechanism.

  That thought made him peer upward, unease crawling down his spine. How easy it would be to pour a few gallons of water down here and wash him out completely. Taslin surely wouldn't have brought him this way if there was a risk of that, as long as she was being honest about needing him. Wildren were honest, particularly in their own Realm, but Taslin was more human than any Wilder Rel had ever known. And maybe she'd only needed him for the Sherim...

  Well, his options were still trust her, and take the risk for the sake of the chance to make some amends for Vessit, or not trust her and burn out or die on the way home. The Gift-Giver was powerful enough not to need elaborate traps to kill him, anyway, particularly in his current state. He closed his eyes for a moment, and despite the shudders running through his exhausted arms it was hard to open them again.

  "Rel?" Nothing hostile or irritated in Taslin's tone. Dora would have climbed back down and started hauling him up by his ears by now. "Are you alright?"

  He looked up. Taslin was a good twenty feet above, the curve of the passage beginning to obscure her, but she hung out from the stairs, craning to look down at him. She had one hand on the opposite side of the tunnel, braced with an air of durability that the girders of old Federas would have envied. Rel drew strength from the sight and levered himself into position for another step.

  Taslin smiled at him, and light spilling down from somewhere above haloed her head. She called, "If you need a rest, I think you'll do better a little bit further up."

  Somehow, he found breath to speak. "I'll be fine." The words sounded like a snarl in his ears, but left his mouth as a spray of dark, lumpen pellets that ignored gravity and ricocheted from the walls as they climbed towards Taslin. They vanished before reaching the Gift-Giver, who nodded and turned back to the ascent.

  Rel pulled himself up another step, then another. The ladder was definitely turning into a spiral staircase, inhumanly steep but steadily becoming manageable. After a few more moments he was able to spread his forearms across the top of a step, elbows pressed to the sides and chin resting on his wrist. His forehead pressed against the welcome relief of cool stone, and the steps below gave enough purchase to take his weight off his fingers and toes.

  He hung there, breathing hard, for a moment. A dithering cloud of black and white spots passed across his vision. Maybe he did need that rest Taslin had offered. Despite the weird angles involved, his perch was oddly comfortable. At very least, he could almost pretend his fatigue was entirely physical instead of mainly mental.

  No. He'd said he didn't need a break. Getting Keshnu to the Court came first, however close they were to doing so. He levered himself up and pushed on. As the steps broadened, his arms seemed to forgive him. He could feel the unsteady tiredness in his shoulders, but it was beginning to be possible to climb using mainly his legs, keeping his arms ahead for balance.

  Taslin let him catch up, so that he climbed just behind her heels. There were hypnotic patterns stitched impossibly small on the hem of her skirt, drawing the eye to deeper and deeper levels like a fractal. That, too, helped him ignore his headache, until the stairs grew shallow enough to lift his head-height past Taslin's waist.

  Even then, it was hard not to become absorbed in the Gift-Giver's grace. Sure, she was back on home turf and already recovering from her fatigue, but the level of detail she seemed to put into projecting humanity to him was stunning. Every hair in her high ponytail swayed perfectly, no two making quite the same movement.

  Only when the tickle of a stray hair against his nose almost made him sneeze, sending a fresh thud of pain through the space just above his eyeballs, did he realise how close to her he was following. He let himself fall back a step, then another. However much he'd tied his fate to the Gift-Giver's, there was no reason to stand where she would sense his thoughts whether she liked it or not.

  The diffuse light that had bathed them through the ascent grew more focussed, stronger and more natural, but Rel was still surprised when they rounded the spiral again and passed a window on the outside wall. The glare from it was fierce, the scene outside typically chaotic, but having a window there was so right, so normal, that Rel paused to savour it.

  Taslin glanced back at him, eyebrows raised in curiosity. He shrugged and gestured for her to keep going. A few steps later, they passed another window. This one sat at the boundary where rough stone walls gave way to shaped and finished bloc
ks. The stone was dark, with flecks of colour sparkling in its illusory depths.

  Rel took a deep breath and let it out in a long, relieved sigh. They'd made it to the Court. At least here there would be some semblance of sanity to succour his fatigue. He rubbed his brow and picked up his feet. Somewhere outside, a voice called some phrase that distance and the wall mangled, but it was the first noise Rel had heard since the Sherim which hadn't come from him or Taslin.

  Well, there were always a few humans at the Court. The Realmquake ought by all rights to have sent more here to see if the Gift-Givers knew anything about it. Rel frowned to himself. On the one hand, if he knew any of them - and it would be the northern towns whose Gifted reached the Court first - the emotional support could be welcome, but on the other, he had enough explaining to do as it was.

  An archway in the outside wall of the staircase opened to one of the Court's many yards. Taslin stepped through, and Rel followed, blinking against the glare of the pink sky. Today, kites in dark shades of red and green danced and twirled up there. The high walls of this yard hid two of the Court's spires, but the rest stood proud. No sign of damage from the Realmquake, though there was no telling how the quake would