“It’s safe,” Lakini told her. “You gave it to me.”
Kestrel shut her eyes.
“I remember you there, and giving you the Key. And then I was very tired and just wanted to lie down with Arna. He was very still, and cold, but I lay with him, anyway.”
“Kestrel, you said your uncle Sanwar gave you the knife. Did he give you anything else?”
Kestrel looked puzzled. “No.”
“Anything? Ever? A wedding gift.”
“I remember now. He gave me a charm. A charm against harmful magic. My mother made me promise to wear it always.”
Kestrel looked away. “Uncle Sanwar married my mother, did you know that?”
“Where is the charm?”
Kestrel reached for something at her breast, then screamed.
“It burned,” she said, gasping. “Something searing over my heart, liquid fire. It hurt, but a pain like a hunger, distracting.”
Her torn, bloodstained gown was fastened up the front with simple bone buttons, and she pulled at the closure, tearing two of them away. Beneath the cambric, the smooth skin of her breast was fearsomely scarred. Either glass or metal so hot as to be liquid had poured on her. Embedded in her skin were blue and green fragments of glass. The charm had melted into her as it fulfilled its true, diabolical purpose.
“Sanwar,” said Lakini. “He gave you that and saw that you would wear it always, until it suited his purposes to activate the trigger. He planted you as an innocent weapon in the heart of his enemy’s fastness. But there’s something behind him. He didn’t know it, but he was being used himself, by a being that considers us nothing but puppets. It’s using Lusk, too.”
Kestrel blinked.
“Yes, I know. It was …” She shut her eyes tight like a child trying to remember a lesson. “Fandour.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know. It’s a name that’s come to me, an echo from the magic of the Key. I know it sounds strange, but I don’t think that even the Key knows who Fandour is.”
The chain around Lakini’s neck stirred and unwound from her. Lakini grabbed at it, but it dodged through her fingers, stretching still thinner as it went. Completely animate now, it landed on the stone floor and wound its way to Kestrel’s feet. By the time it reached her, it had thinned to the diameter of a bowstring, and the links were gone. It was as if a child had taken a figure made of soft clay and rolled it thinner and thinner between his palms, until it had lost all shape and feature. The three red gems along its length winked dully in the grass, spaced unevenly.
The Rhythanko strand, no longer any kind of bracelet or armband, coiled around Kestrel’s ankle and ascended whip-quick up her body, beneath her shift, and emerged at the neck. Kestrel smiled at Lakini, her thin face resembling a death mask. The now-threadlike strands of the Rhythanko nosed at the raw skin around the base of her neck.
To the deva’s horror, the gem-studded thread reared back and stabbed into one of the wounds Kestrel had carved into her flesh. She reached out and tried to grab it, but Kestrel pushed her away, staggering back against the wall.
“It will kill you, Kestrel!” Lakini lunged toward Kestrel again, with the vague thought of throwing her down underfoot and winding the cursed threads inch by inch out of her body.
“It’s not killing me,” Kestrel gasped, wrapping her arms around her body. “It’s becoming a part of me.”
She threw her head back, as if in pleasure, as the last of the Rhythanko and the third gem forced its way into her body. She stretched out her arms. Lakini could see the tiny threads writhing under the skin of her neck, shoulders, and arms, burrowing like worms, and leaving bruised flesh in their wake.
Kestrel relaxed and lifted her arm, watching the Rhythanko move under the dead white, blue-veined skin of her forearm, marred by the scratches she had inflicted and the pool of red and purple-brown where the insistent metal threads were tearing the fascia. She lifted her head and smiled at Lakini with her hollowed eyes. The deva flexed her hands, feeling helpless. She couldn’t get the Rhythanko out without tearing off Kestrel’s skin.
“They can’t take it now,” said Kestrel. “Not without ripping me apart.” Her gouged face looked lost again. “Do I still have a daughter?”
“Yes,” said Lakini.
“Sometimes I think I killed them all. Lakini?”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever killed the innocent?”
Lakini remembered Jonhan’s eyes.
“Yes.”
“How do you forgive yourself?”
Lakini didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t,” she said finally.
The rock knew fire.
It was made in the swell and ebb of fire from the center of the world, born from molten stone that pushed a fiery tide at the surface until it burst forth. The rock pulsed liquid within the volcano that formed there, a mountain’s heart beating slower and slower while it solidified. The mountain slept, and the rock within it, until time and the elements stripped the skin and the sinew and the flesh of the mountain away, leaving the rock naked in black basalt solitude.
Now and then, in the ages that followed, small fires were lit on top of the rock, and the tiny creatures that lit them huddled against the cold. They always moved on, for the rock was a barren place overlooking a desolate plain, far away from anybody’s hearth and home.
Then more creatures came, skilled in sculpting stone to their ends. The rock burned again, worms of fire tunneling deep inside it, deeper and deeper until the delvers burrowed to the root of the mountain. There, beneath the spine of the world, they broke into chambers sealed before the current age was imagined. There they found the raw treasures of the earth-gemstones and rare metals-but also they woke horrors that had coiled there, sleeping. Those few who were not devoured fled for their lives to distant lands, never to return.
More recently a green fire had passed through the rock, not hot but cool as water as it flickered through the long-abandoned passages. The fire came from something small, but, like the sharp tip of a dagger, it had great Power behind it. A human wielded it, locking the substance of the rock and its tunnels to the blood of another, down to the caverns at the foot of the rock, down to the tunnels bored out of the substratum beneath.
But not as far as the voids and passages deeper, which over time had been colonized and abandoned and found again by dark-dwelling creatures rarely thought of by those that lived in the realm of the sun. The green fire sealed off those corridors below, but they remained, like scar tissue deep beneath a healed wound.
The small fires that made a dwelling place for men and their kin-hearthfire, coals for cooking, and torches to light the night at the heart of the rock sparked in it now. And deep underneath, where those who came before and delved too deep had died, beneath the giant anthill of rooms and tunnels, beneath the caves where caravans could shelter, beneath doorways sealed and spelled in a language men had forgotten long since, more fires burned, cold and smokeless.
The ways and desires of men, dwarves, halflings, or elves meant nothing to the rock-nor did the things they made or bought or sold, or their songs and stories, their good deeds and evil, their lives and deaths. Let them hew out tunnels, cast spells, dwell within, or be cast out by fate or a stronger clan. It didn’t care. It knew only the forces that made it: the liquid center of the world, the thrust of continental plates, the force of a volcano, the slow but inevitable grind of wind and water on its surface. It knew fire.
Now a small cold fire burned in the hand of the deva that walked with Kestrel along one of the deep tunnels, an ancient escape route burrowed in time unimaginable.
“You must leave here,” Lakini had told her. “So long as Lusk knows the Rhythanko, the Key, is here, he won’t rest until he has it. Do you know a way out?”