Aliyah

A stolen sun-lamp flickered in one hand, red and dying. She’d scooped it out of a box of spares in a cleaning cupboard—easy enough to coax it back to life with a little magic, but not to full strength, so as to limit the glow giving her away at the end of the hellish dungeon staircase. She clutched the nausea-inducing gate keys in her other hand as she made her way downwards.

She suspected that Zahir hadn’t been thinking all-too-clearly when he’d colour-coded the keys; the lamp cast a distractingly red tint over everything, for one. The white light emanating from the keys themselves was better for checking the colours, but only if she avoided looking at their glinting source.

The halls had been empty. She had made it down to the last gate and all she could focus on was the fact that she felt like dry-heaving. It had been so tempting to try her spare spell-slip on the key runes, but she’d worried that it might affect their use. And besides, the maidservant-trained part of her kept arguing that it never hurt to save an extra of something in case it was ever needed in a tight pinch. Damn it, it might have been worth it after all to have asked Rana for tips on illegal rune-breaking. She thought of the Magicians, felt even sicker, moved thoughts of Rana out of her head.

The guards had gone, but the warden was probably still around.

She peeked through the final keyhole. There he was, sitting on an upturned crate and sipping at a steaming metal soup flask. She noted the sheathed shortsword at his hip, double-checked that she had the correct key, and set the lamp down onto the step behind her.

Her heart was pounding even as she tried to take slow, deep breaths. She pinched the bridge of her nose, tried to focus.

What had Zahir been thinking? That she was anywhere near capable? She practiced on rats, goats, and only rarely the occasional human—mostly herself, rarely him, never anyone who meant to fight back.

Focus, she scolded herself. This was no time for self-doubt. What advantages did she have that the warden didn’t? The ability to induce vasodilation and to knock him out, yes, but she wasn’t a master who could manipulate without near-skin contact—which meant having to get within stabbable range. She could break one of his bones, but that would take even more effort, with the same risks. She wasn’t especially fast or agile, nor did she have much stamina to speak of; burning through her magic at the colonnade had left her head pounding and her eyes gritty. She was already flirting with magical exhaustion.

There was, as far as she could see, absolutely no cover in the dungeon. There was also next to no chance of convincing the warden that she was meant to be there in the early hours of the morning with keys that weren’t hers, and no apprentice’s badge or cloak. She had one spare spell-slip that she wasn’t sure what to do with, since it seemed geared towards breaking an enchantment and the material it was bonded to; the warden was not an enchanted material. His sword, perhaps? She’d get injured trying to grab it. How many deep cuts would she be able to heal in her current state? Not many. And then there was the problem of the warden himself even without the sword; a man his size could kill her with a hard punch to the jaw, no question about it. A physical fight simply wasn’t going to work.

She had a bunch of mystery spell-slips that she wasn’t willing to gamble with, so she chose to ignore them in favour of getting them into Kionah’s hands where they could be used best. She also had a set of keys which made people sick to look at, so perhaps they could serve as a distraction? Her stomach lurched reflexively. Or perhaps not, if it meant she had to look at them too. Still, she moved them to her left hand and grasped them with the teeth pointing out. Worst-case scenario, they could be used to poke him in the eye while he stabbed her to death.

Interesting, that her anxieties kept circling back to knives and stabbing and violence. She knew she was too weak to deal with fighting and wounds. She considered it, and decided that she needed to seem unthreatening, civilian enough for him to instinctively move to restrain rather than maim. She shrugged off her cloak to reveal her plain grey uniform. There. Now she looked more like an unarmed maidservant, which tipped the scales a little more in her favour.

Cause confusion, not aggression. Knock the warden out, get Kionah out, in and out, quick and easy. Easy—hah. What a joke. She breathed in deeply and a little unsteadily, pulling vasodilation to the forefront of her mind as she glanced once more through the keyhole. He was still distracted by his post-midnight snack; now was as good a time as she was going to get.

She rolled up her sleeves, unlocked the gate, and went for it.

The warden’s head jerked up mid-sip as she threw the door open.

“Oh help, please help, it’s horrible up there,” she cried in her best fearful voice as she rushed towards him, free hand outstretched in what she hoped looked like an innocent and imploring motion. “There’s—there are people throwing spells around, and they say it’s because of faeries, goodness gracious—”

She wasn’t a master of charades like some of the sewing circle girls—she was probably overdoing it a bit.

He rose to his feet, still holding his soup flask, and caught her by the wrist of her outstretched arm.

“Now then, young lady—” he began, furrowing his brow.

Working through her wrist was a little trickier than through her fingertips, but it was close enough. His blood pressure dropped, and so did he.

She caught him by the shoulder and swore; hot soup splashed over her skirts as the open flask slipped from his limp hand, bounced, and rolled over the floor, trailing thick beige broth. She staggered as she lowered him to the ground—he was a full foot taller than her and about as dense as true iron. Thank the stars her helpless maiden act had worked. She kick-started the production of a few chemicals that would give him some semblance of a sleep-cycle. Her hands shook as she took his keys and sorted through them for the one to Lady Kionah’s door. It took a few heart-pounding tries, but at last, one of them slid in and turned smoothly.

Kionah was still chained to the table, uninjured. She had been practically staring a hole into the doorway. Her eyes looked bloodshot.

“Salutations, apprenticeling. You certainly took your time.”

“My name isn’t ‘apprenticeling’,” she snapped, nerves raw and frayed as they were. Her hands were still shaking.

Kionah pursed her lips. “Right, Aliyah. My apologies. Could you please get me out of these?”

Aliyah yanked one of Zahir’s spell-slips from her skin-pocket. Five chains in total; one per shackle on each of Kionah’s limbs and one more attached to the heavy collar around her throat. They were all pulled close to full tautness, seemingly anchored to the underside of the table.

“Do these all connect underneath?” She ducked under the table to look even as she asked.

“I don’t know. Feels like it.”

“The chains all feed into this like, really big bolt under here. Do I use the slip on that part?”

“If it has runes on the surface, then give it a go. What could it hurt, hm?”

Aliyah held the rectangle of spell-paper against the bolt, careful not to brush her skin against the dark symbols curling over the surface. She sounded out the phonetic notation written on the slip; her gums bled as the paper started to hiss. There was a flash of light that made her flinch and hurt her eyes. She squeezed them shut as metal cracked and shattered under her fingertips.

Kionah hopped off the table, brushing crumbs of metal off her lap.

“You have my gratitude,” she said. Her voice abruptly dropped in pitch, losing some of its melodious quality. Aliyah froze at the change in tone. “Now get the fuck out from under there. We have to leave.”

“Wh-where do we go now?”

Kionah wasn’t going to kill her, right? She could heal, and she was more useful alive than dead.

“Out past the walls, obviously.” Kionah glanced around the bare room as she followed Aliyah to the door. “Got any weapons?”

“No—” she opened the door, and there was a Magician on the other side.

Several things happened in quick succession. Kionah threw up a golden dome-shield. The Magician sent forth a bolt of white lightning. The shield fractured, repaired, then fractured again in terrible tessellations all over its golden surface.

Aliyah screamed. Kionah snarled, blood beading at the corners of her mouth.

“Shut the fuck up and help me! Hells-fucking-hells, apprenticeling—”

“I’m not a spellcaster!”

“You’re the apprentice, aren’t you!? Stop his heart! Swell his throat shut! Something!”

“I can’t—that’s not how it works—” Pure, animal fear crowded into the edges of her thoughts, brain afire, awash with the theory of metabolic equilibrium and stupid, blinding terror.

“Stand down, you traitors,” the Magician shouted, even as he sent forth a fresh wave of spell-light.

The Magician withdrew a spell-slip from the depths of his cloak. Aliyah only had second to glimpse it’s size and startling blueness before a wall of white fire roared towards them. This time, they both cried out reflexively.

Kionah’s shield exploded.

They were flung backwards. Aliyah’s shoulder thwacked against the edge of the torture-table and she fell to the floor. Her head was killing her. Kionah twisted in the air, rolled to her feet, and started casting.

A spell hit Aliyah square in the chest. It—it boiled. Her blood felt as though it was clotting and curdling, though it was all pain, no illness, that she could tell for sure. Her blood cells weren’t actually bursting. It was all pain, just a disabling spell. Nothing scary, just pain. It was just pain.

Aliyah groaned and clutched at her ribs. She tried to shunt numbing chemicals around. No response. Stabbing pains shot down her sternum and across her ribcage in waves. Panicked, she grasped for her magic. She didn’t find it.

What.

She tried again. Found nothing but the barest of tendrils. The awareness of her body draining away but for the blood simmered in her veins. She fancied that she could trace the path of every capillary by how much it hurt, a fine meshwork—agony. Anti-haemolytic. She should’ve taken it. But Rana—

Kionah snapped a fresh dome-shield into place over them. The Magician was advancing, focusing his efforts on her.

Kionah called forth new spell-light. Her first shots sank into his cloak, but she sent fresh bolts on a one-way course through her shield, gold-and-blue spells that twirled in the air and slipped up his sleeves. Something sizzled—perhaps flesh. He swore loudly and fumbled his next shot.

Aliyah sweated against the floor, her face inches from a drainage grate. Everything hurt. She felt like she was going to vomit.

“Get up and help me,” Kionah growled through a mouthful of blood. “I can’t keep this up forever!”

“I can’t…his spell—not enough magic,” she managed to grit out.

Kionah swore. “Give it a minute,” she snapped, sending a twisty silver at the Magician. “No sigils or circles, yes? Then it’ll wear off.”

The Magician made an incoherent sound of rage.

Aliyah grasped for her magic, searched her body and her mind for a whisper of it. Her fingertips tingled and she closed her hand into a fist.

There.

She tugged, and her magic welled back up. She numbed the pain as best as she could and lurched to her feet, her ribs buzzing, not fractured. No pain? Not quite—but less pain. That was good.

She wracked her throbbing brain for something, anything, of use. She put her hand into her pocket, the skin-pocket with the dungeon keys inside. The breaker spell-slip. No, that was no good. The Magician wasn’t an enchanted material. Her hand went to the other pocket, the one she’d forgotten about until now.

“Could spell-slips help you?”

“What kind of spell-slips?”

Aliyah yanked open the clear pouch and pulled out a fistful of papers. She scanned the tangled snarls of characters and runes, cursing her ineptitude with the symbols. Rana would be of far more use here, right now. The thought made her stomach twist.

“This one says, uh—fire-something-cloud?”

“Give it here!” Kionah snatched it out of her hand and formed an arrow in her upturned palm, a glowing white arrow of pure spell-light. She wrapped the spell-slip for fire-something-cloud around the shaft and hurled it at the Magician.

A silent explosion formed where it landed. Blooms of red-white fire roiled through the air. Aliyah drew a sharp breath, smelled burning flesh.

Had Kionah just killed him?

The Magician lunged out of the smoke, a thing of singed hands and blue cloth.

“Stand—down—and—yield!” he screamed hoarsely.

His mask was cracked and his cloak was in tatters. Blue fire blazed in his bleeding, burnt fists as he sprinted forwards and started hammering at the other side of their shield. The golden surface buckled and started to crack.

Aliyah yelped again, cursed her reaction, gritted her teeth. The shield was going to break. She flexed her free hand and thought, vasodilation. Kionah’s panicked voice punctured her focus.

“Pass a slip, quickly—”

She did, obeying the order instinctively even as she tried to form the working for vasodilation in her mind; a mocking headache throbbed at her temples.

“No, no, not an illusion one!” Kionah snarled, and snatched another slip out of the many clutched in her hand.

She thrust it through the fractured shield. The paper shrivelled and started to burn. Shivery green smoke rolled off its sizzling surface, worming its way under the Magician’s mask. He hacked and coughed, putting a hand up to his face before crumpling to the ground. The smoke faded as his body went limp. He crumpled and fell onto his face, his mask cracking against the stone.

“Is…is he dead?”

“Not quite. Not that type of spell—but he’ll wish he was when he wakes.”

Kionah dissipated her shield and wiped the blood from her mouth. She stepped forward and delivered a vicious kick to the unconscious Magician’s stomach with her bare foot.

“Ah, hey, that’s kind of unnecessary,” Aliyah said. “He’s already out.”

“You think? They sliced me open for hours,” she spat. “I should think that I am entitled to a few knocks. Now give me the bag of slips. We’d best hurry and hope there aren’t more on the way up.”

Aliyah swallowed and handed the clear pouch over; she thought of bloodied skin and missing fingernails as Kionah’s slender hand closed over it. “I—I’m sorry.”

Kionah didn’t reply as she riffled through the little bag of papers and plucked one out. She tucked the pouch into her belt and grabbed her by the wrist. Then she stuck the spell-slip to herself and murmured the activation word. The paper crumbled into dust and Aliyah felt a cool shiver run down from her head to her toes, like a night breeze across the salt flats.

“Illusion,” Kionah said by way of explanation. She let go and took a step back for good measure. “Your master didn’t skimp out on these, thankfully.”

They crept out into the main chamber of the dungeons. Kionah spotted the unconscious warden and darted over to pluck the sword out of his belt. Runes skittered across the surface of the blade as she unsheathed it. She made an appreciative noise, then tutted.

“Why didn’t you take this when you killed him?”

“I didn’t kill him,” Aliyah hissed, aghast. Did Kionah take her for some ruthless murderer? Was she hoping that she would be? “He’s sleeping, sort of. And I don’t know how to use a sword!”

Kionah wrinkled her nose. “And I prefer daggers, but a blade in the hand is better than none. Be ready to fight in the future, won’t you? I don’t run well with dead weight.”

“I already told you, I can’t fight.”

“What rubbish has Zahir been teaching you?” she scoffed. “Will you die like a pacifist? Use your magic like a knife.”

“I can’t do anything to anyone without touching them first, okay?”

“Well that’s a bit useless, isn’t it?” Kionah snorted, face caught in a half-sneer. “Let me guess, you burned through a lot of magic even getting here.”

“I—I’m tired, but I can still cast.”

She omitted the additional reasons for her exhaustion, suspected that Kionah would see helping Farzaneh and her friends as an additional black mark against her; just some idealistic Healer-imitator foolishness. Well, it would have been, if she’d failed. But she hadn’t failed. She had a brain with plenty of judgement inside and she could use it. It hadn’t been a terribly difficult decision.

She thought back to Zahir saying ‘you cannot save everyone’. He was right; there were still hordes of lowborns waiting to die and she couldn’t, wouldn’t, do anything about it. It wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t a martyr. But she’d done what she could.

Kionah stared at her coldly with those pale eyes of hers. “You can heal though, correct? Zahir’s not just covering for you?”

“Yes, I can heal.”

“Hmph.” Kionah strode over to the exit-gate and turned the handle. It didn’t budge. “It’s locked.”

Aliyah’s heart stuttered in ice-cold terror for a moment before she realised that the Magician they’d fought must have re-locked everything on the way down. She frowned. This skittishness had to stop. Kionah was already looking at her funny for all of the yelping and screaming.

“Oh, here,” she said, as she took Zahir’s horrible nausea-keys from her pocket and held them out.

Kionah blanched, gagged, and then glanced away as she reached for them. She yanked her fingertips back as soon as they brushed the metal and hissed. “Nope. You open it. They’ll melt my hands off.”

She stepped forwards and unlocked the gate, careful to keep the keys in her peripheral vision. A brief thought flitted through her mind—you got Kionah free, she’s not going to die now and it won’t be your fault, so your job is done—before she glanced back at the unconscious warden and remembered the not-dead Magician back in the torture room. Her hopes extinguished themselves like a flame plunged into dark water.

There were still flocks of Magicians about, and still some incomprehensible faery battle to sneak past, raging beyond the walls of the city.

“Okay,” she said as the lock clicked open. “Let’s get out of here.”

===

She felt like she was on the brink of a panic attack the whole way up—in near-darkness, too. The Magician must have stomped on her lamp on his way down, because they had found it shattered over her discarded cloak, wholly extinguished. She had offered it to Kionah, who had been starting to shiver. They climbed. The light cast by the dungeon keys was hardly comforting.

Once they got back into the castle proper, she realised with a jolt that, under the borrowed cloak, Kionah was still in her blood-stained underclothes. That little detail had kind of blended into the background, down in the dungeon and through the awful spell-light and spell-pain of the fight. But Kionah was still clearly trying not to shiver.

“We, we n-need to go that way,” she whispered through chattering teeth. “Out the North gate f-first—”

“I’ll get you something to wear,” Aliyah muttered back. “Just—stay here, I think that cupboard is a laundry drop-off.”

She ducked into the drop-off and pulled out a clean-ish looking smock and a pair of battered garden-slippers, which were pretty much the only things within that would be suitable for walking around. Kionah put them on, then led the way out of the castle with the warden’s sword in one hand and a set of readied spell-slips in the other. Her expression was grim, and the wind blew her hair back like a banner.

Aliyah glanced back, just once, at the outer wall. She vowed, fear and uncertainty churning in her chest all the while, to return as soon as she could. Once this whole thing with the Magicians was over…a couple of years wasn’t all that long, was it? She swallowed around the lump in her throat, pushed the thought aside, and hurried onwards.

Wishes could wait. Survival hinged upon now.

===

“Where, exactly, are we going? I thought we were heading for the skyship port?”

Aliyah shivered in the cold night air. They were trekking through empty, dilapidated zephyr-boat sheds at the outer castle wall and her maidservant’s uniform was hardly woven for the weather. Though, it seemed a bit of an understatement to call the boat sheds mere ‘sheds’; each was almost as vast as a skyship hangar. Perhaps they would have been more impressive if they weren’t falling apart. The hole-spotted roof loomed over her head and flakes of rust crunched beneath her shoes.

“Skyport? Wherever did you get that idea from?” Kionah strode ahead, probably shivering even more than she was. “The skyport was only an option when Alhena was still alive. Not a good one, though. Too big, too bulky, too noticeable. Anyways, I don’t know about you, but I certainly can’t pilot one.”

“You said that you—that we—were going to Glister, right?” She swallowed. “There’s a…a great big Killing Field in the way. How else would you get there?”

“There are tunnels to the North-West,” Kionah said, as if stating something obvious. “A great big secret warren of them, see.”

“…tunnels?” Her head spun at the very thought. “You want us to walk through a bunch of secret uncharted tunnels, all the way to Glister?”

“They’re a remnant from the Last Faery War, so no, they’re not uncharted per se, just hazardous and unknown. I procured a map from a secure source.”

“But—it must take days to walk there. Where’s the survival kit, with all the medicine and food and water?”

“Alhena left a supply cache in the tunnels. But first, we need a zephyr-boat.”

“You can pilot a zephyr-boat?”

Kionah snorted. “Had a couple days of practice. I did steal a mage-chariot once; the steering can’t be too different, eh?”

“You stole a—what? I heard one got bogged down in the salt flats last month. Was that you?”

“Nah. It was a long time ago. Back in Glister.”

“You…used to live in Glister?” Kionah hadn’t struck her as ethnically Songian, but she’d assumed that she was just from one of the newer merchant families, for a given value of ‘newer’.

“Born there. You don’t keep up with the court politics, do you?”

“Not really,” she said warily. “I just hear whatever gossip-juice filters down into the sewing circles. I don’t think I ever heard anything about you.”

“Probably not.” There seemed to be a note of self-satisfaction to those words. “I always did succeed in being uninteresting.”

“So you left a zephyr-boat here.” Aliyah glanced around, seeing nothing. “Illusioned? Or maybe someone stole it.”

“Alhena left a zephyr-boat here,” Kionah huffed, her breath steaming ever-so-slightly in the air. “Allegedly under a very strong concealment. Sixth shed in, she’d said. We’ll see about that.”

Kionah stuffed her spell-slips back into their pouch, laid the sword on the ground, and brought her arms over her head, hand clasped over fist. She furrowed her brow, breathed in as if she were concentrating deeply. Cool violet light poured from between her fingers as she murmured a spell under her breath. The light washed over the inside of the shed in concentric ripples and the ghostly outline of a boat shimmered into view at the far end of the building.

“Oh,” Aliyah said.

“Gotcha.”

Kionah dropped her arms and walked-glided-hopped over to the boat-outline—there was a peculiar agility to her movements. A courtly grace with a savage undertone, halfway between dancing and ready to take off running. Sparks of spell-light sputtered from her fingertips as she touched the sharp sweep of the prow. The zephyr-boat shucked off its decaying illusion, as if it were a spectre sinking into the shape and colour of reality.

It was rather small and it had been painted a dull, unflattering shade of sandy-beige, but it’s form was wickedly sleek. Aliyah knew next to nothing about zephyr-boats, but she could see, even with the sails tucked away, that this one looked sharper and more well-crafted than the creaky old hulks which shuttled them around for occasional desert errands and sacrifice-execution ceremonies out on the salt. This was a vessel that practically oozed royal money, a vessel that looked like it went fast.

“There we go,” Kionah said with a slight air of satisfaction. “Only the very best for the princess. I never doubted her after all; hop in.”

===

Kionah took the wheel and flew them North-West.

Cool night air tussled with her hair and soothed her still-aching head as they skimmed over desert sands under a bruise-coloured sky. Heavy rumbles shook the air intermittently.

The boat did not seem to need much piloting; bottled spell-winds blew them forth, with Kionah only moving to make occasional adjustments to their course.

Aliyah sighed, and it felt like long-awaited relief. She wasn’t being told to help with anything and besides, she wouldn’t know what to do with all of this anyhow. Finally, a moment to rest. Exhaustion was sinking into her marrow, making her limbs heavy and nudging her eyelids downwards. They were out of the castle and skirting around stone outcrops now, entering the foothills. The noises of battle—more rumbling, metal clashing, shouts, the roar of battle-spells—were steadily increasing as Kionah stuck all of her remaining illusion-slips onto the deck.

“We’ll be in view of the, ah, conflict, soon,” she said as Aliyah glanced over. “Quite close to the outskirts, by the sounds of it.”

“Won’t they hear us?”

“I’ve masked our sound.”

“But, the…faeries? I heard they had…strange hearing…? Woodland creatures, singing enchantments or something like that?” Aliyah rested her head against the mast. The words were dropping from her mouth like sailing stones, slow and heavy as they tumbled forth and carved rambling meanings into the air. She ached for a full night’s sleep. “One of the sewing girls…she said her grandmother had met one once. Big golden person with flute…asked her true name, or something.”

Kionah laughed, a short, sharp noise. “You really believe all of that crap? Ever talked to one before?”

“No…? I…I’ve never even seen one in real life. How should I know?”

She found that she couldn’t bring herself to care. Here she was, on the most finely engineered of vessels, wrapped in illusion-shields and heading for refuge. She was bone-tired and felt almost safe enough to fall asleep. The boat’s fully-fueled engines purred with a smooth, predatory cadence. The sails were blown wide by spell-winds. She hadn’t been killed. She was okay and everything was going to be okay. At least, that was what her exhausted brain cooed at her.

“I forget,” Kionah said, “that you’ve never been out of this dust-bowl of a kingdom. Keep looking, you’ll see some soon enough.”

Despite herself, the smallest speck of morbid curiosity sparked to life within her. She scrubbed at her eyes and fought to sit up straight. She peered over the rim of the boat, partly to satisfy the curiosity and more to oblige Kionah than anything else. Hellgods, she was tired.

They crested a high dune, and the battle sprawled out before them like a bloody tapestry.