Fortress Of Fire (Book 4) (6 page)

Then he slowed, landing with nothing more than a soft thump. His mother danced to a landing, giving him a satisfied smile as she did. “What was it you said about not hurting yourself?” she asked.

“I would have been fine had you not kept ara from me.”

She snorted. “You think
I
can keep you from the elementals?” She strode over to a tree, now covered in shadows. Thin streamers of moonlight filtered through the branches of the tree, not enough to see more than shades of darkness.

Where had she taken him? Not far enough to get away from Ethea. The city glowed softly far in the distance, far enough away that he felt isolated. The connection to Amia came to him as a distant sense, as if his mother’s shaping had severed the intensity of his connection to her.

A few scattered trees rose around them, but otherwise, they were surrounded by brown grasses with splashes of green muted in the night. Tan reached out with earth sensing, straining to learn where she’d taken him, and was surprised to realize it was Ter. He’d been through here one other time, when returning to Ethea with the kingdoms’ shapers. Then, Ferran had led the group and Tan still had the hope that the king could be saved and that maybe he’d learn how to control his shaping.

“The elementals choose their connection, Tannen. I don’t know how it is with fire, with your draasin, but ara must make a choice. Why do you think it took me so long to know whether I could return to help the kingdoms after the lisincend attacked Nor?”

“I thought because you’d died.”

She turned to him and jumped the distance between them on a breath of air. The easy way she shaped still amazed him. She had control over the wind that he only dreamed of having. The closest for Tan was his ability with fire, but even with that, he struggled compared to what he saw from his mother.

“Must we continue to go through this?” she asked.

Tan took a deep breath and shook his head. “You needed to reach ara before you could escape from Nor?”

“I didn’t think ara would respond to me. Not as it once had.”

“Why?”

His mother tilted her head and Tan had the vague sense that she spoke to ara. Then she nodded. “I was bonded once.”

“Once? As in before?”

She nodded. “When I served the kingdoms. You asked me why I was allowed to remain in Nor rather than being drawn back to Ethea? My bond was severed from me. The pain of it nearly killed me. Without your father, I think it might have.” All these years later, there was pain in her words.

“How was it severed?” The idea terrified him. He’d grown so accustomed to feeling the presence of Asboel, of Amia, that he didn’t know if he could tolerate the solitude.

“Elementals can die, Tannen. They can fight with us, but they can die with us, as we can die with them. The breaking of the bond in either way is devastating for the one who remains. Some scholars think that is why the elementals no longer bond as they once did.”

“How? I mean, how did your elemental die?”

His mother moved on a cloud of air, hovering above the ground. “It was a difficult time. The war with Incendin… there were shapers lost on both sides. I was lucky, if you can call it that.” She sighed, looking out into the night. “So when I learned that hounds had come to Nor, know that I understood what it meant. There was little I could do until I bonded again.”

“You can do that?”

She turned and seemed to talk to the air. A slight smile came to her mouth. “I had been Ephra for so long that I didn’t know, but ara remembered Zephra. I was too late to save Nor, but I can still save you. That is the reason ara allowed me claim another bond.”

“I didn’t know.”

She sniffed. “There is much you don’t know.” She swept her arm around and wind rustled the leaves of the trees. A steady drawing to the air told him how she shaped, as did the constant pressure in his ears. “You’ve worried that you won’t learn shaping without the elementals. And I understand that fear. Without my connection to ara, I’m not the same shaper. I would not have been able to disguise myself from you. I wouldn’t have survived as long as I did in Incendin. I wouldn’t have managed to withstand the king’s shaping.”

“You didn’t withstand it,” Tan reminded her but wished he hadn’t, suddenly wondering if it would change her mind about helping him learn to shape.

His mother was a proud woman, and understandably so. Few matched her ability with wind shaping. Still, Althem had used her to get to Tan. Had Althem known about Zephra, he might not have tortured her, he might not have forced her to rely upon Tan saving her, the same as he had saved Roine and Cianna.

“I did not. You’re right. Had I more strength with wind shaping alone, I might not have been as helpless when the First Mother severed my connection to ara. I’ve become reliant upon the elemental. Once, it might not have been the case, though I’ve always used my elemental connection to help with my shapings, but now I truly depend on it.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I should like you to not be quite as dependent as I am on using your elemental. I know you can shape without them. That power is within you. Ara has told me that most of your wind shapings come from you without their aid. That is what I will teach.”

“Not how to speak to ara consistently?” That might be even more useful to him than anything else. Were he to manage speaking to ara with a better consistency, he might not need to worry about shaping. He had come to grips with the fact that he wasn’t a shaper, not like those trained in the university. Didn’t his ability came from the elementals?

“That might be the lesson you want, but it’s not the lesson you need,” she said. With a shaping, the wind died down.

Tan couldn’t tell if it came from what she did or whether ara aided her. Either way, the sudden change was jarring. And impressive.

“I would like you to focus on your feet,” she said. “Call to the wind. You may have to chase it in order to catch it, but let it swirl around your feet. I will know if you try to reach for ara.”

Unlike Cianna, she implied. With the fire shaper, Tan had managed to replicate many of her shapings using the elemental power. What his mother expected of him was different.

Tan wanted to learn. He agreed that he
needed
to learn, especially after what he’d seen in Incendin. There was a part of him that wanted to tell her what he saw, but doing so risked her trying to keep him from it. And he couldn’t deny that what he’d done so far had felt more like luck than anything else. For him to be effective and be able to help the kingdoms against Incendin, he’d need to really master his shaping. That meant knowing how to use both his shaping and that which the elementals let him borrow.

As his mother instructed, Tan focused on his feet. Wind could be difficult for him. Often, pulling a shaping of wind meant that he had to reach for the wind elemental for assistance. The only times it had really come easy was when he attempted to bind the elements together to make a spirit shaping. Then, his intent was different. He did not want to use the shaping of wind, but to use it to make the shaping of spirit.

The dust settled on the ground didn’t move as he focused. Tan tried pulling on the wind, attempting to draw the shaping through him as he knew he needed to do. Pulling from outside of him would only use the elementals. With his mother here, he wasn’t even certain he’d be able to use ara. Would ara respond to him when Zephra stood by, determined to have him master his own shaping, or would the wind elemental bow to Zephra’s request?

Tan focused on what he had to do to simply speak to ara. That came on a breath of air, a delicate way of speaking that he had to be certain he didn’t push too hard or he might upset the wind elemental. There was a playfulness to the elemental, different than what he noticed with the others, but could he use that knowledge to help him find the shaping he needed?

The shaping didn’t come. As much as he wanted to pull from inside him, the shaping wasn’t there. Tan could feel the draw of ara: were he to speak to it, there would be power at his fingertips, but the shaping wouldn’t respond to him.

“I can’t reach it,” he said.

His mother sniffed. “Can you reach fire without speaking to the draasin?” Tan nodded and she frowned. “Why must it be different with wind?”

“I don’t know. You’re the Master shaper. Why can’t you tell me why it’s different for me? I hadn’t even known how different my shaping was until I realized that almost everything I did was powered by the elementals. That was the only way I was able to stop Althem.”

She ignored his frustration as easily as she had when he had been a child. “Try again. This time, focus on your breathing. Listen to the sounds of the wind around you.”

“There
is
no wind around me.”

“No? Then why can I hear it in every breath you take? How can I hear the way the leaves rustle softly? How can I hear the blades of grasses bending ever so slightly? Wind is always around us. More than any of the other elements, it is wind that gives us life.”

Tan focused on his breathing. At least he could control that. At first, there was nothing but the steady sounds of his breathing. But with each breath, he recognized more. Slowly, he began to feel the air moving in and out of his lungs, the way it moved through his nose and mouth, sliding across his teeth. There was an almost imperceptible sound it made as it whistled through his nose.

He listened for other sounds of wind as his mother asked. There was the sound of her breathing, different than his. Her breaths were slow and steady, but he recognized the pattern from growing up around her. He shifted his attention to the sound of the wind in the trees. The air around him felt still, but was it? If she could hear the way it pulled at leaves, could he?

At first, no. Then, slowly, he noticed a distinct faint shimmering sound to the air. Tan focused on this, on the wind that might not be
moving
around him but that nevertheless moved.

With a breath of a shaping, he pulled through him, tying the connection to his breathing to the wind rustling around him. Leaves fluttered with a little more force and then the wind returned, blowing steadily.

He turned to his mother and smiled. “Like that?”

“That’s better, but you take too long with your shaping.”

“It’s not natural to me to focus on my breathing before forming a shaping.”

“And it’s natural for you to simply push fire from yourself?”

“There’s the bond with the draasin,” he said. “That’s why I can use fire.”

“Hmm. I’m not certain it’s quite so simple. You use fire easily, Tannen. I’d like you to have the same skill with one of the other elements. I can teach you wind. You understand the concepts, so I think you’ll be able to reach for it more quickly each time you do. After a while, you’ll gain enough practice that you won’t rely on the elementals. There may come a time when they don’t respond as you’d like.” She took a leaping step on another gust of wind. “Now. Try again. This time, you will need to hold your focus while I try to prevent the shaping.”

“You weren’t preventing it before?”

She shook her head. “I simply caused the wind to fail. This time, I’ll work against you. For you to gain strength, you’ll need focus and speed. Failure of either around a more skilled shaper could put you at too much of a disadvantage.”

“But I can shape
all
the elements.”

She fixed him with a strange look. “Then show me. Stop me using any of the elements.”

A sudden gust of air caught him off guard. She wrapped wind around him, holding him tightly. Tan pulled fire through him, burning the wind away. His mother glared at him and with a renewed shaping, lifted him to the air. Tan shifted his focus, this time reaching for the earth. The shaping didn’t come and golud didn’t respond. Tan reached for fire again, shaping the wind into a funnel, but his mother released the wind, drawing it away, drawing
fire
away, before again wrapping him in wind. This time, it nearly suffocated him.

“Enough,” he managed to say.

His mother squeezed him again for good measure before releasing the shaping. “You rely on fire when another elemental would serve you better. You can fight wind with wind. You could have used earth against me. Even water would have worked. But always you reach for fire.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you.”

She waved a hand as she laughed. “Fire can’t hurt if it can’t burn.” She shook her head and fixed Tan with another hard look. “If I do nothing else, I will break you of the belief that you can only use the single element. Now, let’s try again.”

T
an sat
on the street alone, exhausted from working with his mother. He knew he should return to the room with Amia and get some rest, but after the repetitive practice with wind shaping, he needed time to get his mind right.

Firelight danced in a few windows, and a few lanterns were lit along the street. A cool wind blew in from the north, but there wasn’t much bite to it. Cold didn’t bother him as it once did. Was that the connection to Asboel or was that from the fact that he’d learned how to shape? A hint of the moon peaked from behind dense clouds. The haze that hung over the city remained, but less intense than before. At least now, the stink of everything burning no longer overwhelmed him.

He couldn’t shake the unease he felt at what was happening in Incendin. Even the practice with his mother hadn’t shaken his concern. For the first time, he wasn’t sure he
should
be the one to go into Incendin. He might be able to speak to the elementals, but when his mother took him from Ethea, he had lost much of that connection. Only fire had responded. What would happen in Incendin when only fire
could
respond and he met shapers much more capable than him? What advantage did he have?

He sighed, letting out a breath of air, focusing on his breathing as his mother had instructed. This time, with a whisper, he called to ara. The wind elemental ignored him. That was always the chance he took with his type of shaping, the reason his mother wanted to teach him to master his shaping rather than depend on the elementals for assistance.

Tan still questioned his connection to the lesser elementals. Saa seemed to respond to him. With a quick shaping, he pulled forth a finger of fire, letting it dance over his hand. Once, this type of control would have been beyond him. This time, he actually
saw
saa flickering through the flame, adding to it. With an easy request, saa sent the flame swirling higher. Likely this was how he had shaped when working with Cianna so long ago. At the time, he thought maybe Asboel helped, but the distant sense of the draasin wouldn’t have been enough to help guide his control.

Tan released the connection and then reached for it again, drawing forth fire, letting it flicker on and off. The dancing flame came without a challenge.

Why fire? Earth should be the easiest of the elementals for him. He’d known he was an earth senser first, long before ever learning that he could speak to the nymid or draasin. Earth
should
be the element that he shaped most easily. With wind, he never quite knew if it would respond. Ara treated him with a hint of respect, but nothing like what he sensed for his mother. Zephra was practically revered. Other than with Asboel, the only elemental he’d actually spoken
to easily had been the nymid. After the evening of lessons, wind came easier, but still not easy. Would he ever manage the casual ability with the wind that his mother had?

Tan glanced up at the house. Amia would be there. He sensed her resting, warm by the hearth. He imagined her with a book spread across her lap, taken from the lower archives, one that she studied and tried to better understand.

After working with his mother, he had the urge to understand the elementals, all of them. The greater elementals might not respond to him outside Ethea, but would the lesser? If he could speak to them the same way he spoke to the greater elementals, he wouldn’t need to depend on being in a place of convergence. Regardless of what his mother intended with her instruction, Tan wanted to ensure he could reach any of the elementals if needed. They would augment any shaping ability.

Tan started down the street, listening to the wind as he went as his mother had taught him. Ara was there, he was certain of it. The wind elemental might choose not to speak to him tonight, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try.

He closed his eyes as he felt a particularly strong gust.
Ara
, he called to the wind elemental.
Has Zephra forbidden you speaking to me?

It whistled along the street before coalescing into a translucent face.
Son of Zephra
.

Were you watching today?

Ara seemed amused.
You have much to learn from Zephra.

She thinks to teach me control so I don’t need elementals to shape.

You have much to learn to match Zephra’s control.

Tan laughed bitterly as he continued down the street. Another gust of wind hit him, this time a little warmer than the others. He focused on the way it played across his face and how it blew along the street. A hint of different aromas mixed on this wind.

Are there are other elementals of wind?
Tan asked.

He worried about being too direct. With ara, there was always the risk of offending the elemental and losing the connection, but if he didn’t try anything direct, he could spend the entire night simply trying to get a reasonable answer.

You don’t want to speak to them,
ara said.

At least that was answered.
They don’t listen anyway.

No, ashi and wyln are too serious. Ilaz should not be trusted.
The face twisted, swirling around his head before settling alongside him.

Tan wondered what would make wind too serious or what might make an elemental untrustworthy, but couldn’t come up with anything. What he needed was answers. If ara wouldn’t provide them to him, he might need to find them on his own. That meant going to the archives. He should be exhausted after everything today, but he was too alert to be able to sleep.

Can you take me to the archives?
Tan asked.

Ara pulled at his jacket for a moment and then leapt toward the darkness overhead.
You don’t need ara for that, son of Zephra.

Then ara disappeared, leaving Tan standing with wind drawing around him.

He tipped his head, focusing on the soft breeze and thinking of the lesser elementals ashi and wyln. Could he reach to them as he had with saa?

Tan whispered into the wind, murmuring for ashi, focusing as his mother had taught him earlier to use the steady swirls he felt within the wind and asking for the gusts to pick up. If they were anything like saa, they wouldn’t be able to draw the same level of power as ara.

A sudden burst of warm wind struck him, lifting him off his feet so that he hovered in the air. Tan had the faint impression of a voice, almost as if talking to him. That was different than when he spoke to saa.

He whispered a request to be lowered to the ground. The wind elemental lowered him slowly and he stepped back onto the street. The breeze working around him shifted, now coming from the south. It felt a touch warmer, though that might only be his imagination.

Would it be the same with wyln? He let out a breath of a request, trying the same as he had with ashi. At first, nothing happened. Tan wondered if wyln would even bother answering. Maybe it was too weak to offer much assistance. No answer came. Finally, he tried the other wind elemental ara had mentioned, ilaz, not knowing what to expect. Probably nothing.

A steady, sharp wind tugged at him as it blew in from the east, hissing in his ear. It was a painful sound, almost angry. Tan sent a request for it to stop, but it didn’t. Instead, it increased, pulsing against him.

Tan grabbed his head.
Ara
, he breathed.

The hissing, painful sound continued for another moment. Then it began to taper off, pushed back by a gust of cool air. A translucent face appeared briefly, as if admonishing him, and then disappeared.

With a shiver, he continued down the street, wondering if the other wind elementals served different purposes than ara. He would need to take the time to study and understand. Why was it that ara helped him and his mother, but ilaz seemed interested in tormenting him? Why had ashi lifted him but wyln did nothing?

He hadn’t tried reaching the other lesser fire elementals to compare. Saa responded to him, but would inferin or saldam? Maybe they weren’t even found around the city, though in a place of convergence, he expected to find
all
the elementals here.

Then there was golud. The earth elemental barely spoke to him. It rumbled responses but never really gave him reason to believe it did much more than answer him. Golud had helped several times, though. Using the earth elemental, Tan had managed to hide Asboel from the kingdoms’ shapers. He had managed to ask golud to help put out the flames throughout Ethea. But could he actually speak to golud as he did the other elementals, or would he always be left with nothing more than the rumbling sort of response?

Tan reached the archives. He hadn’t really intended to make his way here, but the questions coming to him seemed to guide his feet, drawing him toward the only place he might find understanding. He hurried through the upper levels of the archives, quickly lighting a few shapers lanterns as he went, before reaching the stairs leading down to the lower depths. He followed them down as they descended beneath the city. At the bottom of the stairs, he considered the doors, almost opening one only someone able to shape with all of the elements could open, but turned instead to a door that remained a challenge to him.

Made of a rich, dark wood, it took up most of the center of the hall, filling it. Tan had never managed to figure out the secret to opening it. It didn’t respond to his shaping each of the elements, nor had it responded when he had pulled on the elementals he could reach.

Tan rested his hand on it. Runes were carved into the surface and up to now, he hadn’t managed to get even a single one to glow. He tapped on the surface, hearing the dull
thunk
as he did before turning away. Now wasn’t the time to go and try to understand how to open doors in the archive that failed to respond to him.

He debated going into the separate archive, the one where he had to bind the elements together to enter, but he wasn’t much in the mood to read through the book there. Instead, he turned to the door leading to the underground tunnels beneath the city. With a shaping of spirit, Tan opened it and stepped inside.

Using a shaping of fire, he held a glowing light in his hand and made his way through the tunnels. He’d explored part of them since Althem’s death, making his way to and from the palace through them, but hadn’t really felt compelled to search how far they went. From what he’d seen, the tunnel extended past the palace, reaching deep beneath the city. Tan passed the pool of nymid where Roine had been destroyed, and barely glanced at the door which would take him into the palace dungeons.

The tunnel began to curve around. Smooth stone arched overhead. The ground was slick with green-tinted water. The constant sense of elemental power pressed on him, that of golud and the nymid. Here, beneath the earth, it was a constant sense.

At one point, another door opened off to the right. Tan paused and looked at it. He’d seen it before. Like the one leading into the palace, it was made of a plain oiled wood. The rune marking for spirit was carved on the surface. Tan touched it but did not shape it open. This led to an empty basement and out into the city. It was nothing more than a way for the archivists to move unseen.

He went on, following the slow curve. Darkness stretched before him, pushed away by the fire he held out in front of him. Tan pulled this shaping from himself, but it would have been a simple thing to ask saa to maintain it. As soon as he started the shaping, he felt saa drawn to it.

Was it like that with
all
shapings? Were the elementals drawn to them like saa was with a shaping of fire? He hadn’t paid attention in the past, but then, he hadn’t known enough about his abilities before. But how could elementals be drawn to all shapings? As far as he knew, spirit had no specific elemental, nothing but the pool drawn by the presence of all the elementals.

With a quick thought, he sent a request asking for saa to hold the shaping and released the effort he pushed into it. The elemental took it over willingly, holding fire in place without objection, almost as if it had only been waiting for the chance.

A steady breeze pulled through the tunnel, rustling his hair and sending the flame flickering slightly. He thought about asking ashi to draw along the wind, but he didn’t know what would happen were he to ask that of the wind elementals. The power was so different than what he knew with fire. When his mother returned, he could ask her.

A little farther down the tunnel, he came across another door. This time, it was on the left side of the tunnel. Tan paused and studied the dark wood, reminded of the one back in the archives. A massive rune was carved into it, but not one that he recognized. The door was wide—much wider than any of the others—and taller than him, almost as if made for some massive person. Tan ran the hand not holding the flame overtop the surface. The wood was smooth and slick, as if the dampness beneath the earth left it saturated. There was no handle or any way that he could find to open it.

He turned away from the door and continued down the tunnel. The ground sloped slightly, leading him lower, though the ceiling appeared to remain at the same height. Tan frowned, pausing to glance up, but not finding any real reason for the changing slope. A few bits of rusted iron hung from the wall in places. He stopped at one of them and ran his finger around it. It crumbled as he touched it. There was a familiar sense to it, though it couldn’t place what it was.

Further down the tunnel, there was another door, this one as large as the other. Like the other, only a single rune marked its surface to give any clue as to how to open it. Tan rested his hand on it, trying to listen for elemental energy, thinking there had to be
some
way for the door to open, but he sensed nothing.

He went onward. Gradually, a soft hissing mixed with the steady thud of his feet on the stone. Tan saw nothing that would explain the sound, but it reminded him of the uncomfortable sound made by the ilaz when he’d summoned it. As the sound intensified, Tan finally stopped, unwilling to go on any further.

How far had he walked beneath the city? How much farther would the tunnels reach?