Flare: The Sunless World Book Two

  FLARE

  The Sunless World Book Two

  Rabia Gale

  * * *

  The mages of old saved their world, but left it in eternal darkness. Now it’s time to bring back the light.

  After two years of training his magical gifts, Rafe returns home to a land wracked by war. Desperate states struggle to protect their resources of luminous quartz. Magic pulses and earthquakes devastate a world on the brink of extinction.

  Rafe’s old enemy Karzov has gathered a band of prodigies obedient to his will. He seeks the power of the ancient mages for an audacious and sinister purpose. It’s up to Rafe and his ally, Isabella, to stop him—and undo the mistakes of the past to put their world right again.

  Flare is a fantasy novel.

  Published by Rabia Gale

  Cover art and design by Yocla Designs

  Copyright © 2016, by Rabia Gale. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This e-book is licensed for your enjoyment only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  * * *

  Thanks

  Books by Rabia Gale

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Isabella

  DARKNESS CALLED TO DARKNESS.

  The inky blot inside Isabella tugged like an extra sense, an alien appendage. It sought its kind with a blind, ceaseless searching, murmuring, always murmuring, like a constant trickle of water against her ears.

  Chill wrapped scarf-like around her neck and shoulders. Fine sand clung to her ankles. Isabella ignored them both, just like she did the emptiness of her belly.

  Three days since her way fare had run out. One day since the last water. She’d been out in the cold and the dark for more than ten days, though it seemed more like eternity. The sky had cracked her head open and poured in its silence and emptiness, until Isabella was overflowing with it. She had nothing to keep her company—

  —save the nattering of the parasite within.

  It hungered.

  The train tracks Isabella followed were half-buried in sand and warped. Several of the ties were missing, as if they’d been pried up by scavengers. Isabella passed by a long-abandoned station, set in a maze of tracks and sidetracks, switches rusted into place, signal lights cracked and posts toppled.

  No ore or stone had gone out of here for a long time. Isabella stepped into the cargo areas. Once, cranes had loaded and unloaded crates, sacks, pallets, and boxes here. Now they were mere rusted skeletons of themselves. Isabella stooped and ran her fingers through sand and debris. Glassy shards, smoke-grey and deep-water-green, glimmered.

  Quartz. This place had once mined quartz. Isabella nodded, unsurprised.

  No wonder the krin had come here.

  Isabella felt the people long before she saw any physical signs of their habitation. Thanks to the unwelcome parasite, their minds pressed against hers in chaotic blurs, in all colors of a fungal garden, a banquet, delicious… hungry… want…

  Isabella quashed the desire, quashed the thing within her, focused instead on the oily film clinging to each of those minds.

  An entire population enslaved by demons.

  Better get this over with. Isabella drew her light dagger, Eya, its blade starlight and pale in the darkness of day. There was no fighting an infection like this. Amputation was the only way.

  Strike off this gangrenous limb from all of humanity, so the rest of the body might be saved.

  Attuned to Eya, she felt the ka gathering around the dagger. Tainted strands slithered across her skin, raising fine hair in its path. Isabella swallowed back the sour-acid taste of it on her lips. Eya glowed softly as it took in the corrupted magic, then spun it back out again in clean unseen threads.

  Raw ka, filtered and cleansed. The abomination inside her joined hunger in gnawing at her belly, whining to be let loose. For a moment their desires blurred, hers for fish in a tangy honey sauce, its for the cool stream of clean ka. Isabella blinked and pushed it down with ruthless, practiced ease.

  She topped a sand dune and began the weary trek down the other slope. Rivulets of sand trickled underfoot into a basin. Ramshackle huts ringed around a well; an opening in the rock-face nearby led to whatever agri-caves these people had scratched out in the bleak stone. They came out of their homes and stumbled out of the adit, gaunt figures wrapped in rags, and turned their faces as one to look at her.

  Her stomach clenched, as if a fist had closed around it. These people were puppets upon strings, played by their masters. The demonic krin inside them had noticed the light dagger. In their longing, the people leaned forward, mouths open, eyes intent.

  No, don’t think of them as people. Think of them as animated corpses.

  They were the walking dead.

  Isabella walked to the outermost ring, tension bunched in her shoulders. Weaker krin still lurked in huts, some oozed through the ground, but none challenged her. She walked towards the well at the center.

  Heads swiveled, gazes riveted on the light dagger.

  “You want the ka?” Her voice was whisper-soft, velvet and steel and menace all folded around each other. “Come and get it.”

  For a long while, no one moved. Then one man stepped forward, a considering, careful movement as if he walked on broken glass. His mouth opened, but the words came to Isabella’s ears without the benefit of sound.

  Welcome… krin-slayer. We have… waited… for you.

  “I give you one warning, krin,” said Isabella, with weary patience. They wouldn’t listen. They never did. Their need was too strong. “Begone from within these people and from this place. Or else suffer my judgment.”

  Bodiless krin flowed and huddled closer. Isabella let loose some ka from Eya as a lure. A krin, bolder or more desperate than the rest, pounced upon it. For one moment the demon was a puddle of oil upon the ground, shiny black with a slick swirl of rainbow. Then Isabella moved, and her dark dagger was out of its sheath and flying. It stabbed through the krin and pinned it to the ground.

  A shriek, like a knife against a glass bottle, ripped down Isabella’s nerves. The oily blackness heaved and rippled around the dagger, shooting out tendrils, grabbing for rocks, for leverage, for help. Its distress echoed in every mind, human and krin, as Voya sucked it in.

  One moment it was a flailing vortex. The next it was gone.

  Isabella raised the light dagger and its glow brightened. The light singed the edg
es of the bodiless krin; they fled before it disintegrated them. The ones inside the people, the puppeteers, held their ground, though they turned smarting human eyes away and flinched human bodies from the brightness.

  Isabella strode forward, plucked the dark dagger from the ground. Eya, silver and warm in one hand; Voya frigid and gathering shadows to her in the other. Cold snaked through the bones of Isabella’s right hand and sent shards of ice down her arm.

  Light and dark, as it always had been.

  Isabella looked at each face as she spoke. “This, too, shall happen to each one of you. I promise you that, krin.” Eya blazed, hot in her hand. Krin began to shrivel, tightened themselves into knots and burrowed deeper into their puppets.

  Slayer… The voice was old and dry, like a leaf past its time. You know what light does to us… You know what it will do to… them…

  “They are dead, anyway, leached of life and emotion. You dangle empty husks before me, expecting me to have mercy. You misunderstand who I am and what I do.”

  You misunderstand… us. Not dead, they are… but alive.

  “You leave nothing and no one alive, not after you are done burrowing in like cankers within buds.” Past bitterness lay on her tongue.

  They… live! It insisted, even as the light grew. They… invited… And then its voice disappeared.

  And one of the men, the one who had moved forward first, spoke. His voice was thin, thread-like, breathy, as if he had been running hard. “It is true! They live within us with our permission! We offered them our bodies as their homes.” He blinked rapidly.

  Isabella’s hand tightened around Eya. The light dagger dimmed. “Say that,” she said softly, “again.”

  “We invited them,” said the man, face sheened with sweat. He was afraid, but not of the krin.

  Of her.

  Both voices spoke, the man’s and the krin’s, doubled. We are allies.

  And Isabella saw.

  She quested and saw within each person a pouch, a bubble, a safe-place. A krin curled up within each pouch, bumped up against the living, buzzing mind of its host. Saw how the fluid, dark tendrils of krin reached and retracted within each person, taking and giving way. Saw the krin draw back and heard a ragged chorus speak.

  “Please… we were hungry… there has been no help… they found us quartz… we need each other…”

  Humans allied with krin? Her stomach churned. “Stop!” Isabella’s voice sheared through the excuses like a knife.

  “Your children,” she said harshly. “Send out your children.”

  “The light…” began the man. Her look silenced him, but she let Eya fade into glassy coolness.

  The man gestured to one of the huts. His hands trembled as he did so. After a long, hesitant pause a woman edged out. With one hand, she drew out a thin ragged child. Twined around the child’s fingers was a black shadow. It glided out next to the child, pressed against its legs.

  Two, then three, four children emerged. Less than a dozen in total from toddler to cusp of adulthood, standing there, each with a krin puddled around bare feet.

  Krin companions, but at least they had not stooped to offering their own children. At least they had that decency.

  A tall woman, intense-eyed and sharp-boned, thrust forward. Her words were hard. “They choose. We choose.” And the words were all her own, powered by the force of her own will, her krin a knot inside of her. “Will you kill us for our choice, Slayer?”

  A wild, angry, “Yes!” sprang to Isabella’s lips. Years of training, discipline, and struggle surged over her in a hot tide. How easy it would be to take out all these people and krin, weakened as they were from lack of food and ka. How easy to fight them, clumsily connected as they were, two entities trying to control each body.

  They were mad.

  Yet what could she offer them that was any better than this alternative? Once she could’ve fed and clothed them, resettled them, given them another way.

  Not anymore. Not since she’d thrown away the Rocquespur name and the Rocquespur wealth.

  For answer, Isabella thrust one, then the other, dagger into their sheaths at her belt.

  “You have dug your own graves,” she said curtly. “Now you must lie in them.”

  She turned to go.

  “Wait!”

  Isabella looked over her shoulder at the man.

  “Aieera says”—he swallowed—“he has something to give you.”

  Urgency hummed through all of them, krin and human both. It pulled at Isabella’s head and body, she turned back almost without thinking about it. Her hand want to Eya, she spread out her senses in a wide net, looking for a trick, a trap.

  Nothing jumped out at her as a threat, just the taut-string-exhaustion of individuals from two races living on the brink.

  “What is it?”

  Silently, the man held out a key. A battered bronze key, lacking in quartz, merely inert metal. The blade was a complicated tangle of loops and blocky protrusions. Isabella took it with thumb and forefinger. She couldn’t envision what kind of lock it was supposed to open.

  Tell him… tell the young kayan that he must use this and save us all.

  Chapter Two

  Rafe

  THE TRAIN FROM CLEARWATER jolted over the tracks. Metal vibrated, wheels whined, and parts clanked together. In the cargo compartments, refugees sat on the floors, wedged between their neighbors and their bundles of worldly possessions. Cushioned thus from the inevitable bumping, they sat silently in the silvery dim, gazes in the distance, conserving their strength.

  There were no jobs and no room for them in Clearwater. Now their choices were to join a small settlement and eke out a miserable living there, or be swallowed up by Blackstone’s insatiable appetite for laborers to run its military and industrial machines.

  Neither of those was a pleasant option.

  Rafael Grenfeld leaned his head against the jittery iron wall of the car, and pulled his senses back to himself. His muscles felt leaden and pain burned behind his eyes, blurring what little sight he had been able to glean from the stretching of his kyra, the essence inside all living creatures.

  His mastery of it was still poor. Kyra could not replace the sight he had lost two years ago.

  The familiar darkness, falling like a black curtain, took over his vision once again. Sound and smell sharpened—the orchestra of metal parts rumbling and ringing together, a hushed whisper, the soft whimper of a hungry child, the sour smells of shut-in bodies, the sharp scent of mint drops as mouths sucked and sucked, holding hunger at bay just a bit longer.

  Not that Rafe’s short look at the landscape beyond the train had shown him much beyond sharp broken rock, cracked and crumbled land, and bleakness laid bare under Selene’s silver light. This was the Barrens. One could not appreciate its austere, otherworldly beauty from inside a moving train.

  But it was home. His heart constricted at the thought.

  He was home again.

  Back on this side of the Divide, that long gash that almost cut the landmass of Rafe’s disc-shaped world in two. Back into the tangle of war and politics, desperation and heartbreak, and the fates of nations setting individuals against each other.

  And they were counting on him, one barely-trained blind kayan, to do something about this.

  Rafe’s hands tightened around the walking stick laid across his knees. A gentleman’s accessory, though he hoped its battered state and his own worn, shabby-genteel garments would add to his down-on-his-luck appearance.

  The walking stick was more than an aid, though. Concealed within the metal knob at the end was a chunk of quartz. The soft purr of the pure ka within it was his true power.

  The train decelerated, wheels squealing against the tracks. Boxes slid, people tilted, Rafe braced himself against the wall. The train jerked to a halt and three short hoots, followed by a long whistle, signaled the end of the line.

  Time for everyone to get off, unless they wanted to risk arrest and labor camp
s back in Clearwater.

  Sounds of rustling, shoving, moving. Of bundles and children being picked up. A battery of footsteps. Rafe listened and stayed where he was. No one disturbed him, no duffel whacked his head, no box pressed against his arms. It was as if he existed on an island, with invisible boundaries that no one dared cross.

  Everyone treated him this way now. People he knew, chance-met strangers, children and animals. As if on some deep unconscious level, they all knew he was different.

  He didn’t like that. When someone small and light tripped over his foot, he almost smiled at the joy of having even that brief human touch. He quested out with his kyra towards the child, a shadowy figure whose features he could not make out.

  “Careful, Benny!” A woman grabbed the boy’s arm. Her voice was sharp with fear. “Sorry, sir.” She ducked her head in Rafe’s direction. “He’s a young’un, just woke from sleep, not looking where he’s going.”

  “Not to worry, ma’am,” Rafe said. “I’m sure I’m taking more than my fair share of space.” The smile in his voice invited a response from the woman, but she bobbed her head again at him and hustled her son away.

  No one else spoke to him, and the sphere of space around him expanded, till there was no one else left.

  With a sigh, Rafe rose stiffly to his feet, bringing his duffel over his shoulder, walking stick dangling from his hand. The car shook with his footsteps as he headed for the pale rectangle that was the doorway.

  Rafe sent his kyra out ahead of him, and it showed him light and shadow, movement and shapes. He felt his way down the steps, using the stick to guide his way down.

  His kyra was not so good at depth perception.

  Mega-lamps flooded the platform with a particularly harsh and unforgiving brand of light. People milled about in dazed confusion. Rafe knew just how washed-out and haggard the refugees’ faces would look in it, their eyes sunken and the lines cut deep around their mouths.