Demons of the Flame Sea Read online

  The pale blue tracery of fine lines that curled around his eye, ear, and down to the side of his throat had proven far more useful, with far fewer drawbacks. They stood out on his sun-brown skin, like a fine spiderweb of sinuously drawn curls. With that tattoo, he could understand any form of sentient communication, whether it was a written or gestured language, hearing a spoken word, or even speaking a foreign tongue. Provided he could shape the sounds for that language, of course.

  Some of the places he had visited had been populated by people that were so far removed from being human, he hadn’t even realized at first they were sentient, until he heard them “speak” to one another. Nothing here was that exotic, though. Nothing that he had found in the last forty-six years of traveling across this world. Compared to a lot of other worlds he had visited, in universes familiar and strange, this world seemed quite benign. Suitable for human life, if dry and hot in this corner of it.

  A glance at the water in the little side pool showed its eddies clearing away the last of the cloudiness left by the dry lakebed dust scrubbed off his hide. He leaned forward and cupped his hands, scooping up a double palmful for another drink. Dehydration was an unpleasant way to die. Not the worst, by far, but still unpleasant. Even if it had been thick with silt, he would have drunk the liquid. Now that it was mostly clean, Ban drank with pleasure. Actual pleasure.

  Forty-six years of relative peace and safety meant he could feel safe enough to grasp the concept of pleasure again. Except he had detected Veilway resonances in this direction, diverting his original plan to head southwest, down to the western coast region before turning east and heading home.

  A scrape of sand on stone heralded the return of the younger man, Damek. Some of the drying strands of Damek’s long black hair lifted up in the breeze wafting through the rift. Catching sight of them, Damek lifted a carved piece of bone. “I brought back a comb for your hair, and a thong to tie it so it does not tangle. I should have brought one for myself. The winds will be picking up soon as the hottest part of the day passes.”

  “Thank you.” Courtesy. That had been something forgotten for a long while. Some cultures Ban had encountered did not believe in please and thank you, because hospitality and compassion were so ingrained, they were implicit in every word and gesture. In this world, they value courtesy in most places. It said, I notice the thoughtful consideration you give to my needs, even though I am a stranger, and I see that you acknowledge that these things are important to me.

  There had been points in his very long life where even something as simple as a bone-carved comb had been denied to him. Accepting the tool, he scooped his hair forward over his shoulder and started working the teeth through the strands before they could tangle.

  “How did you get your skin so . . . colorful?” Damek asked, settling next to him on the stone ledge circling the little pool. “That light blue by your eye, it is not darkened by the sun—how does that work, that it does not brown with the rest of you?”

  “Animadjic,” Ban explained. He did not explain to the other man that it was not actually animadjic, the local version of magic. He didn’t go into how it was the magic of a world that did not create its own magic simply by things existing for long enough, but rather a world where magic acted like the rain cycle, ebbing and flowing in a cycle between life and death, plants and animals. Here, fire, stone, water, wind, plant life, animals, all those things quickly or slowly generated anima that could be gathered into pulsing, sparkling spheres and used to empower spells, depending upon the type of source. The only time it wasn’t visible was when the anima came entirely from within the wielder, the animadj. He simply used the word as a term the other man could understand.

  Damek nodded. “So that is how you crossed the high pass. You used the anima to draw up water to drink when you found the lake empty. It takes a strong will to make the wind give up enough water to survive.”

  “Are you an animadj?” Ban asked, stirred to curiosity. He continued to comb his hair, a task he had performed far too many times to count.

  “No, but my mother was. She died shortly after the Red Skin Tribe came. Two of my siblings became animadjet. I am more suited to the hunt, and to making leather that lasts a long time.” Damek eyed him. “Do these paintings on your skin have meaning?”

  “They bind the anima to certain actions,” Ban explained. “They give my legs and arms more strength, and they make my eyesight as keen as a hawk’s, among other things. Tell me about this Red Skin Tribe,” he urged, hoping to exchange information. “I have not heard of any such group. Where did they come from? Why are they here, among the Red Rocks? I did not think you had enough resources in this area to support a second tribe.”

  “They bring their own food, their own water,” Damek said, plucking a stray pebble from a crack in the sandstone ledge. “And . . . I do not know where they came from. Sappan swears he saw them step out of a shining cut in the cliff, like a gaping wound made of light that showed that inside the stone lay another place, instead of just more rock.” The hunter shrugged and tossed the pebble at the stream. It disappeared with a plop that the rippling murmur of water half muffled. “I don’t know how that could be. When I cut into a giant rock, there is only more rock.”

  Ban slanted him a shuttered look. To him, that sounded like something the Fae Rii called a Veilway, the opening that strong magics could make in the Veil that separated one universe from the next. His people called it a portal if it spanned worlds, and a mirror-gate if it spanned one location to the next within the same world. Handing the comb back, he began plaiting his long hair, tidying it against the occasional wafting breeze. “Why do they call themselves the Red Skin Tribe?”

  Damek shook his head. “They don’t. They call themselves the Efrijt. We call them the Red Skin Tribe. Their skin is red.”

  Ban stiffened, memories flooding through his mind. Anger, too. “Eh-free-yit.”

  “That’s right. It’s a weird name. Red Skin makes more sense, since it is red—it’s somewhat like a sunburn red for most of them, brownish red for others, but it doesn’t go away, and it’s all over, even on spots not exposed to the sun. A red like that band of sandstone up there,” Damek added, pointing at a particular band of brick-hued rock.

  “. . . I would like to see this Red Skin Tribe before I go on my way. I am curious about someone with skin that color,” Ban managed to state calmly. “Could that be arranged? They don’t have to meet me. I just want to see them.”

  Damek shrugged. “I suppose so . . . We can follow the west side of the valley as easily as the east, though it will be hotter from the sun shining on it all morning long.”

  “I will not suffer from it. Will you?”

  Damek chuckled. “No. Not if we leave at first light. We will be at the working village before the worst of the midday heat, and would stop to rest there anyway, taking the western trail. I think if you walked across the playa for days on end with nothing but the anima to sustain you, then it will not bother you, either. The water down there is sweet. The Red Skins did something to make it sweeter. Before, it caused problems, because it came from the crazy rock hills.”

  “Crazy rock?” Ban asked. “And . . . could you please call them Efrijt? Calling them Red Skin because of their skin color may be accurate, but their name is Efrijt,” he pointed out. “They should be called what they are, not what they look like. That would be like calling Papit boy all of the time instead of Papit. Papit is his name, his identity. He will not always be a boy, but he will always be Papit.”

  Shrugging, Damek gestured off toward the west. “As you like. As for the crazy rock . . . There are reddish rocks up in that section of the mountains. Different from the ones that we turn into iron, the Red Rocks of our tribe’s name, which lie to the eastern side of the valley. It is hard work to dig up the red ore that gives us our name, and requires either the dark, burning rocks from the Black Rocks Tribe on the other side
of the pass, or a lot of wood from higher up in the mountains to make it hot enough to melt out the iron. But we don’t have to trade for copper and tin to make good metal; our iron is as hard as any bronze. Harder, these days, from what the Red . . . the Efrijt have shown us. The work is also hard, but not too dangerous.

  “But those rocks? The crazy rocks are dangerous,” Damek asserted, flicking his hand. “They crumble easily, becoming a powder that holds craziness in it, as well as a beautiful red. The animadjet gather up the anima that comes from grinding the crazy out of the rocks and use it to create spells to make our homes better, and just for digging up the rocks, the Red Skin people give us tally discs in metals stamped with special images, which we can trade for food and cloth and better blades, but . . . I am not sure it is worth the effort.”

  “Efrijt . . . Why do you no longer think it is worth the effort?” Ban asked, curious. He had a suspicion what the “crazy rock” really was, but wanted to hear what this primitive human knew or had figured out about it.

  “Our ancestors used to grind it up to make a pigment to paint everything, because it is a strong color and we wanted to be a strong people. But we realized after a while that it was starting to make our people crazy. Those who deal too much in it first feel sharp prickles in the hands and feet, and then they stagger and drawl like they are drunk on the juice that ferments from boiled grains and fruits.” Damek shook his head. “But that drunken state does not fade. It remains.”

  “That does sound crazy,” Ban agreed, his feelings growing stronger and more sure the more he heard. “Do you still use the crazy rock dust for anything?”

  “We still have a few of those old containers with the red paint, because what is crazy can also be beautiful, but we never use them for anything in which we store water, never for anything meant for food. We still use the dust these days, but only as a pigment for painting ourselves when we go to fight another tribe,” Damek told him. “We do it because the anima that comes out of the crazy rock is very strong and dangerous, and we want to be strong and dangerous, too. But we tried to avoid using it all the time, or for anything but war, once we realized the rocks were making us hurt and crazy. Until the Red Skins came. The Efrijt,” Damek corrected himself when Ban drew in a breath. “They want the rocks, but . . . it does not make them crazy. It is very strange.”

  “The Efrijt want what they can get out of the crazy rocks,” Ban murmured, reviewing what little he knew of that race.

  Damek nodded. “Yes.They have a way of crushing and baking it, and capturing the red mist that rises. They cool it with pipes, and it turns from a red cloud into a shining liquid that is brighter and more reflective than polished iron. They claim their people are not made crazy by the liquid, yet I have seen them stagger around and act drunk for a little while after they drink it, though it does not make them that way permanently. They caution us that we should not touch it, and should never drink it, because we are too weak to handle its power . . . but they make us mine the crazy rock that is its ore.

  “They give us foods we have never tasted in exchange for work, sometimes soft fabrics we cannot yet weave. And they show us how to make the black rock metal even stronger than before, bright as tin, yet strong enough to cut the older, original kind of iron, in exchange for us digging it up.” The human shook his head. “They only showed us how to do that once, though, and our smiths are having trouble repeating what they learned.”

  “Let me guess, they made a bargain, and cling to it exactly?” Ban asked, fingers tightening on the end of his braid. Damek noticed the braiding had stopped, and fished out a length of leather thong for Ban to use to tie off his hair.

  “They say that so long as we dig up the crazy rock for them, they will continue to make sure the water is sweet and always flows,” the Red Rocks member told him. “That they will teach us new things with each fresh amount of liquid they create of a certain size—they require a lot of the liquid before they will teach anything new. As for the miners . . . they do extract the craziness when it gets to be too much, but not, I think, because they want to save us from the craziness. I think only because that means they don’t lose a rock-digger. Some have suffered and had the crazy extracted, but they say that the way the Efrijt pull it out is excruciating, worse than a cross between a dozen bites from a rattlesnake and a redrock spider.”

  “I can imagine how much that must have hurt,” Ban muttered. There had been spells, cruel, excruciating spells that could extract minerals from a person’s blood. Spells to extract metals from his blood. Not cast by the Efrijt, but then those kinds of spells were not limited to any one particular race. Just to a particularly cruel or uncaring mind-set. Goosebumps arose across his hide at the memory of that pain. The outlander ignored their prickle and did not rub at his skin, letting them fade on their own.

  “I am told by the other elders that it is not my place to question Taje Ulanni’s bargain with the Red . . . with the Efrijt,” the hunter corrected himself again. “But I am glad I live in the north end of the valley. I am glad to be a hunter, not a miner of crazy rock. At least the rocks that contain the iron ore do not make us crazy—and when I go to war, I paint myself with pigments made of Red Rocks dust, not the crazy rock. It is more orange than red, but it does not make me crazy. Except, we do not go to war much anymore. The R . . . the Efrijt do all our fighting. So we are no longer picked on by the other tribes.”

  Ban frowned, trying to remember. Finally, he asked, “You mean the . . . Black Fang, the Thorn Hill, and the Hawk Blade Tribes?”

  That earned him a startled look. “You know our enemies?”

  “I did come through here thirty years ago,” he reminded the younger man.

  Damek squinted at him. “You don’t look that old. Maybe you are the son of the man Nandjed remembers, but not the actual man.”

  “My skin does not wrinkle, and my hair does not gray. It never has, and it never will,” Ban murmured. Damek gave him another dubious look, but merely shook his head. Thinking for a long while, Ban finally leaned forward and scooped up another double palmful of water to drink his fill. Rising when he finished, he shook his hands and turned to the other male. “My clothing should be dry enough to wear by now. Will you fetch it?”

  “In this heat, yes, it should be mostly dry by now,” Damek agreed. He uncurled himself from the rock and headed for the path that led back the way they had come. “I will be right back.”

  “Thank you.” More courtesy. These years, when he reached the relative safety of the territory watched over by the Flame Sea, it was easier to remember to be polite. To be friendly. When he traveled, he tended to be more wary, more closed off from such things. Not everyone was friendly in return. Or even to begin with, though thankfully the Red Rocks Tribe qualified as pleasant enough.

  Watching the younger man leave, Ban debated how to react to the news that the Efrijt were on this world. He remembered the Efrijt. Oh, how he remembered them. The demons of the dozen Netherhells he had walked through had only tried to torment and destroy him. Over and over, in creative ways.The Efrijt he had encountered had tried to enslave him. Permanently.

  In the world where Ban came from, mages could be oathbound so that their own magical energies enforced that oath. The Efrijt he had encountered in the past had known this detail, and had refused to rescue him from the hellpit where they found him. Unless, of course, he bound himself by his own magics to be their slave eternally. When he refused, they left him there. Twenty-three more years had passed before Ban found another way out of that universe.

  Efrijt had no respect for anything beyond the exact lettering of a contract. No compassion for a fellow humanoid being tortured every day. Twenty-three more years of agony, violation, and repeatedly dying. They. Had. Left. Him. There.

  Part of him wanted to slay the whole contingent on this world and find a way to seal whatever portal or door they had created in the Veil screening each world f
rom the next. One thing stopped him. Jintaya. He was here because of her. This was her assignment, her pantean trading mission. He was her underling. If he slaughtered anyone without her permission, and without clear need for self-defense, it would cause her harm.

  So. He would spy upon the Efrijt. He would report to Jintaya everything he saw, and he would let her decide what to do about these creatures. If they were the same race, the same culture when calling themselves Efrijt, of course. It was possible they had changed in seventeen hundred years; maybe they had learned to be kind toward others. He wasn’t the same man he had been, back then.

  The decision of what to do about them was hers. He would simply enforce that decision. Ruthlessly. Ban waited, naked and patient, for his host to return with his clothes, not in a hurry to get moving. He had time on his side, after all.

  Chapter Two

  “Sejo Zakal! Forgive my intrusion,” the third-ranked female called out even as she hurried onto the balcony overlooking the mining pits. “There is a stranger at the mining village, and he is asking questions about us. I thought you should know.”

  “Daro Taikat.” Annoyed but schooling her muscles to conceal it, the leader of Medjant Kumon lowered the book she had been reading and tapped the armrest of her chair with a sharp-manicured nail. “I do not need to know about every stranger that comes to this water-forsaken hellpit.”

  “I am aware, wise Sejo,” Taikat Kurukan apologized. The trader moved up to where she could be seen by her House Leader and bowed, clasping her hands in front of her and keeping her gaze low in the presence of her first-ranked cousin. Her burgundy eyes flicked nervously to the still-tapping fingernail, and she tucked a stray strand of orange hair behind one rounded ear. “I would not consider it important, but for three things. The first is how this stranger is not like any other human I have seen on this world. The second stems from the villagers gossiping at how and why anyone would travel when water is so scarce and heat in such abundance at this time of year. The third regards all the questions he is asking about us, including what sort of contracts and their conditions the village leadership has sworn.”