Flare: The Sunless World Book Two Page 4

  “Isabella’s coming with us,” Rafe pointed out.

  “Oh. Well, Isabella’s different, isn’t she?”

  Yes, that was Isabella. You thought of her as Isabella first, dangerous second, and indestructible third. Speaking of Isabella…

  “I can’t remember if I’ve ever known her to sleep,” Coop went on. “I don’t even know where to put her on the Felicity. We’re going to have to rotate sleep shifts and share bunks as it is.”

  “You can put me in a closet, with all the brooms. I can sleep standing upright, you know.” Isabella spoke from behind Coop. He made a strangled sound and gave a little jump.

  Isabella moved to where both men could see her. Rafe was grinning.

  “I’m going aboard now,” she told them.

  “Your, um, bag?” Coop asked.

  “Already on,” she returned. “And safely tucked out of the way. Don’t worry, I stayed under my weight allowance. Unlike, say, Mirados.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, back towards the tunnel leading into the cavern. Echoes of voices emanated from it.

  “… but sir… too much weight… ruin calculations!” This voice was agitated and belonged to one of the technicians Rafe had briefly met.

  Mirados spoke next, loud and bellowing, “… need it all… fools! … you’ll sink in a hundred meters without it…”

  “Have fun,” murmured Isabella. The wicked glee in her voice was so subtle that Rafe was sure Coop had missed it. She went lightly up the ramp, and the two techs still readying the submersible scrambled to give her wide berth.

  Coop turned to Rafe. “You knew she was there!” he accused. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Ah, but you were in such rare form,” returned Rafe amiably. “And it was rather gratifying to hear you scream. Like a little girl.”

  “I did not.”

  “You certainly did. Shall I get Isabella’s opinion?”

  “Wretch.” Coop turned and spoke over his shoulder. “I’d better deal with Mirados. He’s going to turn Stitch into quivering jelly, after which he’ll be useless for the next twelve hours. We have a two-hour window to launch.”

  “I’ll go check out the ka-systems on board,” said Rafe.

  It’s not that I have anything better to do, he thought to himself ruefully. Throwing out his kyra-sight, prodding with his walking stick, he carefully went up the ramp, ignoring the techs who hovered about him as if afraid he’d stumble and pitch headfirst into the water.

  In their defense, it wasn’t as if something like that hadn’t happened more than once in the last two years.

  Chapter Four

  Rafe

  TWO DAYS INTO THE trip, and already Rafe felt like the walls were closing in on him. As if he were in a fist that was squeezing tight. Or in a metal box. A damp, hot, cramped metal box.

  Rafe, get a hold of yourself.

  It was not the darkness that bothered him—after two years of shadows he should be used to that. No, it was the heat and the moisture and the stale air and the smell of unwashed, male bodies.

  He likely smelled just as bad as the rest of the men. He wondered how Isabella could stand it.

  Isabella, it turned out, didn’t sweat. Or stink. Or get greasy hair.

  He thought it was a rather unfair use of her kyra, and when he passed her on the second day, pressed against the curved walls because the corridors were far too narrow, he told her so.

  “I see no reason to join the rest of you in your stench,” she responded with infuriating serenity. “Just think of this as my contribution to the comfort of the crew.”

  “I didn’t realize you were vain.” Rafe mopped at his brow with an already-damp handkerchief. He was stripped down to his shirt-sleeves and trousers—they all were—and wished he could shed even more clothing.

  Not in front of Isabella, though. Coop and the others might not see her as a woman, but Rafe didn’t share their perspective.

  “Not vanity. I don’t like to be detected or tracked, and smell does give one away.”

  “I don’t think anyone cares where you’ve got your nest on this ship, Isabella.” Though he was curious how she’d found a place to secrete herself and her things away during her off-shift hours. It wasn’t as if the Felicity was large.

  Isabella laughed, a surprisingly young sound. “Poor Rafe. You sound cross. Perhaps you should go help Mirados with the mage-tech. He can’t see ka like you can, you know.”

  “Mirados doesn’t want me down there. He claims he’s doing just fine.”

  “Rafe, not being wanted has never stopped you before. It certainly never worked for me.” Her tone grew serious. “You’re different now.”

  “Than when we first met? Maybe it has something to do with this.” Rafe pointed to his eyes. “Or the fact that I’m suddenly supposed to be this great mage. Or perhaps it’s because I no longer know who I am. I used to be a loyal agent of Oakhaven. Now? My king is dead. His son is missing, presumably dead. I betrayed my uncle, and my sister betrayed me to Blackstone. Tell me, Isabella, how am I supposed to feel after all this?”

  She looked at him a long moment. “Battered. Wounded. As though you’re in darkness and Selene will never rise again. But you pick yourself up and go on. There’s nothing else you can do after that. Because there is something greater than you, and it doesn’t care if you’re hurt or dying or breaking apart. You go on.”

  “Haven’t I been?” Rafe rubbed the top of his cane. It was becoming a nervous habit, and as the thought occurred, he forced himself to stop. What happened to you, Isabella, that you speak as if you’ve lived through this same darkness? “Sel, I feel like I’ve done nothing but go on the last two years.”

  “Maybe that was just you running away.”

  Irritation flashed through him. A hot retort rose to Rafe’s lips, You’re the one who sent me away with Sable.

  He forced it down, forced himself to turn over her words. Isabella was the nearest thing he had to a companion these days, what with Coop treating him like a savior, Furin barely saying a word, and Mirados making barbed remarks when he spoke to him at all. She was one of the few people who could fight the krin, he was one of the few who could work with ka. They were equals of a sort, doing what others could not, seeing what others did not.

  “I needed to go,” he said slowly. “I had to see what the shahkayan in the Talar could do. And we needed the space from each other, didn’t we?”

  Her sigh was so soft, he barely heard it. “Yes. I thought the distance and time would help. Help both of us.”

  “And has it?”

  “In some ways, yes. In other ways, no.”

  He could tell she was trying to puzzle him out. It was an odd feeling—for most of their relationship, she had been the enigma.

  “How have I changed, Isabella?”

  “You doubt more. You try not to intrude on anything. The Rafe I knew from two years ago would’ve been all over the submersible, peppering Furin with questions, arguing with Mirados, and getting grease on his hands. You? You sit in a corner and pretend to be invisible.”

  “I don’t want to—” be a nuisance. He shut his lips on the rest of his words. I don’t trust myself anymore.

  Sel! She’s right.

  I have to do something about this.

  Rafe slid along the wall, warm at his back, until he could walk the corridor comfortably again. “By the way,” he said over his shoulder, “Sable sends her regards.”

  “I thought she reclaimed her name. She wrote me she goes by Sura now.”

  He gave a shrug. “She gave me permission to keep calling her Sable. She said it sounded odd to hear me calling her Sura.” Rafe grinned mischievously. “More likely she couldn’t stand my accent. I could never get the hang of the way they trill their r’s in the Talar.”

  “Most likely that’s it,” Isabella agreed. As he kept walking, she called to his back, “Where are you going?”

  “Down to the engine rooms. Mirados could use my help, whether he thinks
so or not.”

  “That’s my Rafe.” And she was gone.

  My Rafe? As he lifted up the round hatch, tossed his cane down to the level below with a clatter, and started inching down the rungs, he smiled wryly. It wasn’t just him who felt that strangely, somehow, Isabella had become the closest thing he had to a friend these days.

  She felt the same way.

  The upper levels of the engine rooms were supposed to be one large space, threaded with pipes and wires and tubing, but there was a definite demarcation between Furin’s territory and Mirados’ domain.

  Rafe ran into one of the differences immediately: he tripped over one of Furin’s machines and banged his head on a pipe.

  “Renat’s balls!” swore Mirados. “This is not the place for a blind man! What are you doing down here?”

  “Are you all right?” Furin reached out as if to steady Rafe by the elbow, then checked.

  “I’ll live. Only thing sprained is my pride, and Coop will tell you that it needs denting once in a while.” Rafe rubbed his throbbing head. Could I come across as any more clumsy or incompetent?

  “Don’t come in here, then,” Mirados hollered. “I have delicate equipment.” The man was bare-chested, clad only in knee-breeches. A damp, sweaty smell clung to him. Rafe was reminded of their first meeting, but that time Mirados had been in costume.

  “On the contrary, this is where I’m most at home.” Rafe had no problem navigating the quartz pendants Mirados had hung up all around his domain. Everything here was limned with and lit up by ka. Unlike the shadows and hulking shapes in Furin’s part of the space, to Rafe’s mage-sight this area was lit up like a Shimmer party.

  Or an Oakhaven ball.

  He swallowed back the sudden sting of homesickness, and caught an escaping strand of ka. He twined it around his finger, then strolled over to the corner.

  “Be careful! That’s—” Mirados bit off the words as Rafe successfully navigated a design of amethyst chunks set upon short stands on the floor. “You could’ve broken the pattern of ka,” he grumbled.

  “It’s not even turned on,” Rafe pointed out.

  “Why are you here, eh?” Mirados grunted. “Come to take over?”

  “No. I thought I could help you.” Rafe was at his meekest. “Make sure the ka doesn’t run away, as it’s bound to.” He’d already found the place from where the ka had escaped and tucked it back in. He used a pinch of red ka to seal the fracture in the crystal. Red promoted growth, and it didn’t take much to persuade the milky quartz to close that hairline crack.

  A bell chimed silver, the sound as incongruous here as a songbird in a mine. A raspy whir turned into a contented hum.

  Mirados twisted to look at his displays. He fiddled with knobs, then said ungraciously, “So you found that leak, eh. Maybe you are useful.”

  “Thank you.” Again he spoke meekly. Isabella and Coop would never have bought it, nor even Leo or Bryony (no, don’t think of them!), but Mirados was oblivious to the laughter underneath.

  Not Furin, though. The Blackstonian looked up for a moment, face flashing pale in his mysterious cavern.

  “There are a lot of leaks in this system,” Mirados announced. “These Ironheart grunts think that ka is just a big pool of oil or a heap of coal, just fuel to be shoveled into their mechanical systems, eh? No idea of ka’s complexity.”

  “They can’t sense ka the way you or I can,” said Rafe. “I don’t understand many of your ka patterns”—true, he had no idea why Mirados was making it all so complicated with so many intermediaries that sucked up ka and did nothing useful that Rafe could see—“but I can find and stop leaks.”

  “If you have nothing better to do.” Mirados leaned over a set of hanging glass rods, finessing them into place, looking at his dials every so often.

  Rafe propped himself against a plain metal cabinet, and held his walking stick in his hand, just below the knob. He drew his kyra back into himself, saw the world only in the colors of ka. It amazed him, even now, how multi-hued and textured and different ka could be. Here it oozed in a dirty yellow puddle, there it misted from a miniscule hole in a spray of rose-colored sparks. A pale haze of it covered all of Mirados’ devices and instrumentations.

  The waste of it was staggering—no matter how intricate and complex the Preceptor’s magic.

  No wonder the Felicity carried so much of her own weight in quartz.

  Stop complaining, Rafe, and do something about it instead. He began coaxing the ka back into its prescribed channels, plugging gaps here, weaving strands together there. This ka was more ephemeral than what he had worked with in the domed cities of the Talar and a far cry from the stinging lashes of ka in the Tower of Light. He remembered the pale ka from Shimmer, and wondered if it was because this ka was so filtered and diluted for rohkayan use that it barely retained any of its potency.

  Or its poison.

  This was why the rohkayan had survived, while the kayan had been wiped out all over the world and the shahkayan existed only in the Talar. Tainted ka was the problem of mages all over the disc. Shimmer rohkayan diluted theirs through layers and layers of quartz. Talari shahkayan filtered theirs through people—sometimes voluntary, sometimes not.

  In many of the Talari cities, being a human ka-cleanser was a death sentence. Only criminals were used thus, and it was a short, painful life and an ugly death. In others, volunteers could buy a better life for their families with their deaths. In one of the Talari states, shahkayan worked in circles, each member taking a turn to act as filter for the rest. Monarian shahkayan had done that before their appetite for ka led them to imposing the harshest of penalties on even common felons. The new Shahrique had returned to the old practice, but relations between them and the rest of their city remained strained.

  Yet, no matter what its practitioners did, ka itself was so beautiful, so full of surprises and marvels, in all its hues and effects. Rafe could get lost in it, and therein lay the danger. Luckily, this ka was so leached he could work it without many mental safeguards. Putting it back into place was meticulous work, and when he lifted his head from it, Rafe was conscious of the weight of the time that had passed. Mirados was no longer at the station, Rafe’s eyelids felt heavy and his neck ached with the strain.

  Rafe unclenched his hands from around the walking stick and stretched out his cramped legs. He turned his face towards where Furin was just a presence in the darkness. He had not the strength to throw his kyra out to where he could even see the other man’s silhouette.

  “He went to get some rest,” Furin offered in his considered way. “He’s worked hard these past two days.”

  “And been as cross as a circus bear about it, too,” said Rafe.

  Furin considered this. “I’ve never seen a bear. Heard about ’em, though. Do they have them in Oakhaven?”

  “No. I saw them across the Point. Well. Saw. In a manner of speaking.” Rafe leaned back. This was as close to a private conversation with Furin as he’d ever gotten. He was curious about this quiet man, who was nothing like what he’d expected. “I met your father, back in Blackstone.”

  “My father. Yes. We did not get along well. At the end.”

  “I’m sorry for his death. If I could’ve gone on without dragging him into this—” Rafe paused. At the time “Pyotr in Moon Alley” had been only a name, a chance for information, a hope that his mission in Blackstone was not utterly lost.

  Not an old man frightened of the dark.

  “No, that was me. I did that, when I gave Berlioz his name. I dragged my father and my son into my rebellion, and they suffered for it. One dead, the other…” His words ended with a tremor.

  His son. A potential kayan. Taken by Karzov and put into his blasted training program. What would a man like Karzov do to a child?

  “We’ll stop Karzov,” said Rafe with a confidence that rang false to his own ears. “And then…” He stopped.

  “You’re not promising me any happy endings,” said Furin.

&n
bsp; “After what happened two years ago?” Rafe shrugged. “I don’t think there are happy endings—not completely, anyway. We cannot undo the dark times that have already passed. We may win, but that will never bring back those who have died, or give innocence back to those who have suffered. That is the way of life, I’m afraid.”

  “You sound like a Blackstonian.” Bleak mirth lurked in the other’s voice. “Though that should come as no surprise, should it?”

  “No. We are kin, after all.” The connection was tenuous, going back generations, but it had suddenly become important. Ka and krin, Karzov’s schemes and the changing times, had bound them closer than those weak blood ties warranted. “Distant cousins—you and me and Coop.” Funny, he’d always thought of Coop as his foreign friend, and Wil and Tristan as his relatives.

  When had his Oakhaven relations become so diminished, that he claimed closer ties with an Ironhearter and a Blackstonian?

  “The kayan blood flows in us all. In you, strongly, and in my son. But I feel an affinity for the ka devices, though Mirados may deny it. And Coop—well. He has been touched and it works in him still.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Rafe sharply. Coop had been possessed briefly by a krin two years ago, before Isabella had taken care of it. She’d warned Rafe that Coop could suffer future ill effects. Had she told Furin as well?

  “I mean…” Hesitation in Furin’s voice, as he searched for the words to explain what he saw. “I mean, that there is a dark edge,” he said finally.

  “How does it come out?” If krin residue still lived inside Coop…

  A boom vibrated through the metal at Rafe’s back. The Felicity rocked violently. Rafe grabbed a safety handle conveniently placed at waist height, quartz pendants jingled frantically, mysterious objects went sliding and rolling all over the floor. The ka fluctuated, flaring here, dimming there, wavering out of pattern. Rafe reached to soothe it, and another shudder ran over the ship.

  Coop came on the loudspeaker. “Rafe?” His voice was terse, tight with stress. “You’d better get up here. Looks like we have a problem.”