Inherit the Flame

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Ripka lunged, Tibs hauling back on her for all he was worth, Honey singing something dark and dreary and shouts echoed from the brigade all around but Detan wasn’t watching. Wasn’t even listening, not really. He heard it all, saw it, but he was fighting his own, internal battles, and right now he only had eyes for Aella.

She’d clamped down on him, cut off his sphere of influence. But she knew how well that’d worked last time, and… Detan’s vision went white. He pushed against Aella’s shield with all he was worth, and then –

At first he didn’t understand what he was sensing, what he was feeling. Not consciously – this was not a thing that one could come to realize through force, through effort. As Ranalae laughed, lectured, paced and gloated, Detan sensed, for the first time in his life – for the first time in many, many lives – the world spool out around him.

Aella had him shut down, true. But the injections didn’t work on her. The girl couldn’t touch, couldn’t sense the world he was experiencing now. He’d gone beyond her. So far out of her reach he couldn’t even begin to explain it to himself.

Selium. Everywhere. He knew that, of course, in the intellectual way that one knows that sandstone makes brown sand and firestone black sand. Had even caught glimpses of that truth at the height of his control and power. But this. This was nothing like he ever could have imagined. Nothing he had words to describe, to contextualize. Wasn’t fair this was happening to him, probably. Greater minds than Detan’s gravel-sized noggin could probably glean something of use from this moment. But he tried. He was always trying.

And so back to the selium: to it being everywhere.

He could sense the great, vast network of it. Glimmering fragments – molecules, Aella had called them in one of her many lectures. Yes. That was the right term. Molecules of selium drifted in the air he breathed, the air everyone breathed. He could sense them, tiny as they were – impossible as they were – seep through his lungs, seep into his bloodstream. Seep into everyone’s bloodstreams.

With his eyes opened it was like he was seeing another world, the true world, laid in false and shifting color over the world he could touch and taste and scent. This world, this true world, wasn’t for his eyes. It was an extension of his sel-sense – he must derive a better name for it. Seles? No. Ripka would have a better idea. She always did. But he could see it, such as it was, for human brains were adaptable, clever things, and this new rush of information had to be processed somehow.

So it was everywhere. In every pore and breath and cell. He could see it, as he watched Ranalae. She breathed it in, and it escaped her lungs to the flow of her blood and bonded there. Stray molecules of selium which found no blood to bond with leached into her muscles, ate away at her bones instead.

Bonewither. Huh. So that was how that worked.

But the real kicker, the thing that made him breathe slow and easy because he knew – knew now more than he ever had in his life – that the world was about to change for the better, was this: he could see how sel-sense worked. The very thing the Bone Tower had been digging around in bodies for decades trying to puzzle out. He could just look at Ranalae, look at any other sensitive, and see it. He would have laughed, if his throat weren’t so raw.

As the selium coursed through a body it hit a barrier near the brainstem, something he could make no real sense of – Tibs would have called it a valve, maybe, or a filter. Either way, when he looked at Ranalae he saw the sel course pass that barrier, enter the brain, respond to whatever crazy chemistry was taking place there and then the command reverberated throughout the rest of the selium in her sphere of influence. And her strength was huge. Ranalae’s sphere pulsed as she worked at the edge of her ability, slinging selium like it was acid at her enemies. When he looked at Ripka, all that sel that seeped into her body reached that barrier and just… stopped. Coursed back through her blood and escaped through her exhalations.

But he could change that.

And so much more.

His sphere of influence flowed beyond the strength of simple vision. At a certain point the sight of the world ceased, blended into the horizon or a wall or any other everyday obstruction. But he was beyond the lenses in his eyes, now. His senses spiraled outward, a gyrating torrent of awareness that swept from the heart of the palace and out, out, encompassing people and beings beyond his ability to count. Folded in the whole of the neighborhood, the city. Consciousnesses danced like nodes of light amongst the firings of his own mind, prickles of brilliant, beautiful, life. Thousands and thousands, sensitive and not, aged and curled in the womb.

His own reach took his breath away. Even as he spotted the little blots of life he never lost sight of selium itself, omnipresent, trapped in breezes and bellied within the hot, churning core of the planet. Its presence in the air was so thin no unenhanced eye could see it, and only the finest of sensitives could detect it. But to Detan those molecules were as clear as dappled sunlight through leaves, clustering and thinning and occasionally joining together in numbers large enough to break through the eddies in the air and float toward the sky.

But those lights. Those consciousnesses. He selected those with the firm filters, the tightened valves. It took him only a thought, a moment. He breathed in, breathed out, then held the fates of all those banal lives in the wide sphere of his control.

“Ranalae.”

Her head snapped up, jerked toward him, eyes narrowed. He couldn’t blame her. His voice sounded foreign to his own ears. Calm. Distant.

But he was not calm. Anger boiled in his veins, held at a low simmer, and though his sense had extended to show him something heart-achingly beautiful, a tiny sliver of a voice deep in his darkest mind whispered to him to let loose. To leave this place, this whole city – and maybe the whole continent, if he were lucky – a smoldering crater.

But that was an old voice, smoothed over by time and control. Just looking at Ripka, at her pale and sweat-slicked face, he knew he could never listen to it. Never go back to the temptations that had called to him, siren-like, before. He was not his anger’s puppet. He was its master.

He would lash out again, if the need arose. Would burn the whole fucking world if it meant keeping just this city and the people in it safe. He had not lost that ability, he had simply grown into another.

And wouldn’t Aella be just delighted to study him now.

“This city,” Ranalae was saying, and Detan realized she’d been talking while he watched Ripka. “Is under the martial control of Valathea. Order your people to stand down at once.”

“You cannot have this place.” The place where my mother’s bones are buried.

She sneered. “I already have it.”

Ah, right, they were surrounded. Funny how easy it was to forget things like that when you were busy having a sense-awakening. “And what is it that you have, exactly?”

“Detan–” Ripka’s voice, soft and choked with grief. Tibs hushed her, slipped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her back a step. Sweet, stubborn Tibs. He always knew when Detan was about to do something, and he wondered if his old friend could feel him now. Feel the hold Detan exuded over the whole of this city. If he didn’t, he would soon.

His question took Ranalae aback. She scowled down her long nose at him. “A rebellious little city, is what I have. A dog gone feral that needs to be brought to heel. Remember your ancestors, Detan. Remember they founded this city while seeking fertile ground in the name of the empire.”

“Did you ever wonder where my ancestors came from?”

“Why in the fiery pits would I? This is inane. You have one minute to disarm your ragamuffins or I will order you all felled. Do not test my patience.”

The brigade shifted to ready stances, raising weapons, preparing to pounce. Detan made a soft, negating sound, and they eased back, but only slightly.

“History matters, Ranalae, and this city is the confluence of many historical paths. The founders of my family – the real founders, those whose names we’ve lost to the erosion of time – were not Valathean. They were Catari. They must have been. And do you know why they came to the Valathean isles? Do you know why the patient, accepting, kind Catari would ever kick a family out?”

Worldbreaker.

“It does not matter. You will be the last of your troublesome line.”

He smiled. Folded his hands before his chest and tipped his head back, staring at the blank expanse of the ceiling though his thoughts, his sense, was decidedly elsewhere.

“Because we could do this.”

“Detan, no!” Tibs cried. But this time – this time Ripka hushed him.

He didn’t fully understand what he was doing. He lacked the vocabulary to describe it. Maybe, after this was all done, he could seek out one of those Catari enclaves Pelkaia was always going on about and ask them to explain it to him.

But he didn’t need to know the proper words. There were valves – filters – set to varying degrees of openness in every banal mind he held. The mechanism was endlessly complex, but it had a lever. A button, a wheel, a switch. Whatever it was, whatever he’d later decide to call it – Detan had never met a button he didn’t want to push.

He started with Ranalae. Reversing her sensitivity, shutting the valve tight. He moved on to Aella, then Callia. For the rest… He opened them. Blew them wide. Didn’t stop until he’d exhausted the whole of the sphere of his influence, and every one of those banal consciousnesses had switched over to sel-sensitive status.

He opened eyes he didn’t remember closing. Ranalae managed to look white as gypsum, despite the dark cast of her skin. Callia let out a howl to make a coyote shiver, collapsed to her knees and curled in upon herself, shuddering.

Aella had no eyes for her adopted mother. She stared at Detan, eyes wider than he’d ever seen them, every muscle of her body straining as she tried, tried so very hard, to take back what was hers. What she was just beginning to understand he’d taken from her.

The brigade, the imperials, the Honding guards – they all shifted their weight uncomfortably, and Ripka was staring at her hands like she’d never seen them before. She shook all over, Tibs’s support the only thing keeping her on her feet.

“What have you done?” Ranalae rasped.

“See for yourself.” He reached out, snagged disparate particles of selium from the air and congealed them into a fist-sized mass. A task that’d once left Coss sweating to drown the desert now came to him merely as an afterthought. He had no time to ponder what he had become, only what he must do next. “Catch.”

He threw the selium ball at her. Ranalae flinched backward, holding her hands up instinctively, but nothing happened for her. The sel sailed through her upheld fingers, broke into a thousand tiny fragments and faded as it dissolved into the air.

“I’ve taken from you your greatest pleasure,” he said. “And given it to every single banal body in all of Hond Steading. Most of them will be normal. Many of them will be what you call deviant. But you can’t enslave a whole city. You can’t send all of them to the mines, and you sure as shit can’t collect all the deviants up for your little science experiments now.

“This is not your city, Ranalae. This is not Valathea’s city. It is not even the Hondings’ city, though I will do what I can to guide it forward into peace. Hond Steading is a city entirely of sel-sensitives. This is something new. Something of hope. And you. Are. Not. Welcome.”

Fury gathered in her eyes, in every tight line of her body, in the bulging of her veins and the tendons snaking around her neck.

“I could still cut you down, you fool,” she snapped.

He sighed, low and slow, and drew himself up to his full height. “Even if it were your greatest desire, you wouldn’t. Not if you think for just a sands-cursed moment.” He tapped the side of his head. “Don’t you get it? I know how it works. You kill me, that knowledge goes to my grave. I am the only person alive who can give it back to you.”

Aella had a knife in her hand in an instant. Detan stepped back, wary, but she turned to Ranalae and placed the silver edge of the blade against the whitecoat’s throat. “If you order him killed,” she hissed, “you die with him.”

Ranalae paled, and fell silent.

The door to the antechamber slung open, cracking in its frame, and Dame Honding swept into the room with a retinue of a hundred guards on her heels. The sight of them very nearly made Detan weep with relief. Bluster aside, he really wasn’t sure just how long he could keep convincing Ranalae he had the upper hand.

“You’re a little late to the party, Auntie.” He beamed at her, and she scowled back as, with a snap of her fingers, her people swept in to detain Ranalae and her entourage.

“You wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the widespread panic on my streets, would you, boy?”

Even with his awareness a glowing, vibrant thing stretching out to blanket all of Hond Steading, even at the peak of his power and control, that razor-sharp scowl still made him flinch and kick at the ground with one dusty boot.

“I, uh, made some… improvements.”

Hands on her hips, eyes narrowed enough to cut glass, she dismissed all of Ranalae and her people in one gesture and squared her full attention on Detan. “Explain.”

He grinned, reached for sel, and said, “Catch.”

To her obvious surprise, she did.