Carnival of Deepest Desire, Part 6
Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire
This serial is a sequel to North of Midnight. Carnival of Deepest Desire can be read as a standalone, but if you’d like to read North of Midnight first, click the button below.
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Khalid and I did the only thing we could—we slammed the door shut and, having no way to lock it, braced ourselves against it.
“Maybe this will work,” said Khalid. He wasn’t all that good at concealing his feelings, though, and I could see the doubt in his eyes.
“The Dulluhan wants to sell both of us and has already got a buyer for me,” I replied. “Surely, he can’t intend the Sluagh swarm to kill us. We’re worth more alive that dead.”
“I’d rather be dead than be someone else’s property,” said Khalid, but his voice was shaky. I couldn’t blame him. He was only fourteen, after all, and he’d had to deal with more menacing situations than most adults dealt with in their entire lives.
“Maybe Shar and Carlos will find us,” I suggested. I wasn’t sure whom I was trying to cheer up—him or me. “Shar’s anti-magic sword looks like a pretty good defense, right?”
“Yeah—if there were any way to let him know where we are.”
The Sluagh shrieks were almost deafening as they gathered right outside the door. However, they didn’t strike against it or peck at it with their beaks.
“Maybe…maybe the Dulluhan is using the Sluaghs to guard the door,” said Khalid.
“Why would he bother, though?” I asked. “The red caps were doing a fine job of guarding me, and we don’t even know if the Dulluhan realizes you’re here.”
Khalid looked around the chamber in which we were trapped. “No other door, no windows—no way out.”
“Maybe if you turned invisible again—” I began.
“That only makes me invisible to ordinary eyesight. Hunters like the Sluaghs could doubtless sense me magically. Even the red caps probably could have if they’d had the discipline to focus properly.”
“Any way you can signal the others?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“We’re part of a mental network, as you know, but in this atmosphere, we don’t seem to be connected anymore. I think we’d have to be really close together to exploit our connection. You and I could probably restore our connection, for example. But for anyone more than a few feet from us, there’s no way.”
“If you shot enough of your arrows at the door, would it catch fire?”
I wasn’t sure how I came up with that idea. The words just sort of popped out of my mouth. Did they spring from some psychic insight? I felt a tingle like the warning I used to get when vampires were near. Was that now a sign of increasing psychic ability, or was it something totally different?
I knew the process that had awakened my ability to see and sense magic might theoretically have increased other insights as well, but I had no idea how—or even if—such an increase would manifest itself.
“The door’s wood,” replied Khalid. “But the various blessings on the arrows are designed to react if an arrowhead strikes something evil or at least hostile. I’ve never tried them against an inanimate object. But why would you want to start a fire?”
“The Sluaghs might retreat. Even if not, maybe the smoke and fire would help Shar and Carlos find us.”
Khalid looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “We’re in an enclosed area, and you want me to start a fire at the only exit? Being a half djinn, I’m immune to fire—but you aren’t.”
I touched my amulet as if I could draw power from it. “What about this?”
“Based on what Vanora told us, it will offer some protection against various kinds of magic attacks. But if magic causes some physical change, like starting a fire, I doubt the amulet will do anything.”
Logically, Khalid was right. But I had learned that magic wasn’t always logical. Besides that, the tingling sensation was becoming more intense by the second. That had to mean something.
“I can’t be sure, but I think I might be developing at least some ability as a seer,” I said. “I feel as if firing arrows into the door is the right thing to do, even though I can’t explain my reasoning. Somehow, I just know.
“The fire effect comes from the protective quality of hearth fire. What if the resulting flames are magical rather than ordinary fire? Would the amulet work then?”
Khalid’s eyes widened. “You may have hit on something. I’ve never really thought about it, and normally people shot by the arrows don’t catch fire. But it is possible that if something did catch fire, it would be magical flame—in which case the amulet, powered in part by the same fire, would probably allow you to pass right through it.”
“Worth a try?” I asked, hoping he said yes. The cries of the Sluaghs were shredding every nerve in my body.
“I…I don’t want to risk your life.”
By now, my tingling felt almost like a burning sensation.
“I’ll take responsibility,” I said. “What I’m feeling has to be more than just an ordinary hunch.”
“All right,” said Khalid, sounding as if he still wasn’t convinced. “Get away from the door.”
We both stepped back cautiously, just in case the Sluaghs started bashing themselves against the door. They did nothing except continue their incessant racket.
Khalid fired an arrow. The tip dug into the wood—but nothing else happened.
“Magic is partly intent, right?” I asked. “Should you concentrate on starting a fire?”
Khalid looked at me skeptically, as if he was wondering again about my sanity. “This isn’t like casting a spell. Hephaestus created the arrows and got them blessed by the associated powers. They have the same effect when I shoot, regardless of what I’m thinking.”
“But the arrowheads weren’t designed to serve as protective amulets. That didn’t keep Vanora from repurposing them.”
“That’s true,” said Khalid, his brow wrinkling as he pondered the idea. “And Tal can do things with his sword, White Hilt, that the blacksmith that created it never anticipated. But they both have spell-casting ability, and we don’t. Also, Vanora’s got the accumulated wisdom of the Ladies of the Lake, and Tal was apparently a son of Hephaestus in a previous life, which we think is one reason he can sometimes make magically crafted objects behave a little differently from the way they were designed to work.”
The Sluagh shrieking was giving me the mother of all migraines, and the tingle was so intense that I wished I could jump out of my skin to be free of it. “Please try. The power we’re trying to invoke is fire, and you’re a half djinn. I’ve seen the fire in your blood. Please try!”
In the brief time I’d known Khalid, I’d seen his stubborn streak. But I’d never seen him refuse a heartfelt plea. He nodded grudgingly and took aim at the door again.
“Wait!” I said and moved around behind him, placing my hands on his shoulders as if I were about to massage his muscles. “This is for luck.”
Like my idea about starting a fire using the arrows, I had no idea where this one came from. It just felt right. As he prepared to fire, my tingling concentrated itself in my hands. Khalid shifted position slightly as if he felt whatever was happening inside me.
His second shot sparked when it hit the door and caused a tiny plume of smoke to rise toward the ceiling.
“Again!” I said. The tingling sparked through my hands, and he jumped a little.
The third arrow struck with a satisfying burst of flame, and the door began to burn. The Sluaghs fell silent as if they were as surprised as we were. Either they sensed the fire, or it was already burning through to the other side.
Now that he had the knack, Khalid shot three more arrows into the door to accelerate the blaze. The fire chewed hungrily at the wood, rapidly spreading until it was burning across the entire surface.
As far as I could tell, though, the Sluaghs held their ground and started shrieking again, this time even more loudly.
“The surrounding surfaces are all stone,” said Khalid. “We’re going to run out of fuel pretty fast—and then they’re won’t be a door between us and them.”
I couldn’t have made our situation worse, could I? Faced by adverse evidence, my certainty cracked like old cement.
“Can you catch them by surprise?” I asked as the door developed holes. “Shoot through the gaps!”
Either Khalid was an excellent shot, his bow was magic—or both. Every single shot went through a hole. William Tell couldn’t have done better. But crowded as the Sluaghs were on the other side, even an amateur archer couldn’t miss once each arrow cleared the burning door. The Sluagh shrieks now sounded more like panic than aggression.
As the door disintegrated, the flames continued to cover the doorway, making clear their magical nature, which I could also see through the whitish aura around them. But they also looked thinner, so Khalid was right to think that they needed fuel.
“It’s time to see if the amulet protects me,” I said, drawing my faerie sword.
“Let me get the Sluagh infestation back a little,” said Khalid. He fired several arrows, each one felling another Sluagh and sending the remainder into a frenzy. He ran in their direction, passing through the flames unsinged, as if to show me how. I followed, and the flames parted to let me pass.
Ordinarily, I thought the Sluagh host would have overcome us with their far superior numbers. But the destructive power of Khalid’s arrows and the presence of hearth fire, both fading in the doorway and blazing from Sluagh corpses, took some of the fight out of them. They shrieked away at high speed, leaving us standing alone in the corridor. The Dulluhan must have reassigned the red caps, of whom there was no sign.
“What now?” asked Khalid. “We did start a fire, just as you said, but there isn’t enough fuel here to keep one going, let alone send up a smoke signal. And I have the feeling the Sluaghs will take another shot at us once we step outside.
“Torches,” I said, looking at the nearby ones casting feeble light down the corridor. “We relight the torches with hearth fire. I sheathe my sword and carry one in each hand. That should keep the Sluaghs off our backs—at least, I hope so. The torches might also increase our chance of being seen by Shar or Carlos.”
Khalid was less skeptical than before, but it still took a long time to get the arrows to relight the torches properly. The first couple of attempts incinerated them. A gentler approach, sticking the arrowhead into a current flame, did nothing. But after a few minutes, Khalid managed to get two torches to burn with hearth fire. Once that was done, he hurried out the door.
The surrounding darkness still seemed oppressive, but I noticed ripples within it. As far as I could tell, it was recoiling from the hearth fire, and I could see a little farther—not anywhere near far enough to figure out where Carlos and Shar were, but at this point, I’d count even a small improvement as a win.
Unfortunately, my tingling had stopped. If I had started to become a seer of some kind, from what I’d heard, that ability could be more erratic than I’d like—bits and pieces of wisdom flung haphazardly at me by a means no one fully understood.
I wasn’t asking for a road map—but a general indication of which direction to go might have been nice.
“I’m surprised that the Dulluhan hasn’t come back for us,” said Khalid. “Those torches will help protect us, and the Sluagh horde didn’t attack again—but they’ll also make our location obvious.”
“Right you are there, lad,” said the Dulluhan’s voice, sounding ominously close.
“The Carnival of Deepest Desire” is related to the Spell Weaver series. (The action takes place between the sixth and seventh books, just after the end of “North of Midnight.”)
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