The wooden door led to a spiraling stairwell that took them down, deeper and deeper into the belly of the temple. When they reached the bottom, they encountered another door made of the same nondescript wood as the first. Echo pushed it open, coughing as centuries of dust filtered down on her head. Inside, a soft amber glow emanated from the walls, illuminating a modest, round room.
Shelves lined the walls, carved out of the stone like long, shallow alcoves. Bits of ancient pottery sat in the depressions, hidden by layers of spiderwebs. There was another door set into the far wall, this one much less modest than the one through which they had just come.
A complex lock held the door shut. Echo approached, looking for a way to open it. Any lock could be picked, but this one just might be beyond her skills. The lock’s exposed gears were made of a green metal. Flakes of rust had fallen off the teeth of the gears, and corroded metal peeked through heavy rust.
“What’s all this for?” Jasper wondered aloud, peering at the earthenware pots. The ones Echo could see through the thick layer of white webbing that coated them were sealed with wax gone dark with age.
“Old potions and elixirs, I expect,” Dorian replied as he, too, investigated the lock. “For healing. Or possibly killing.”
Before Echo could touch the large gear in the middle of the lock, it started rotating. The smaller gears followed suit. More and more green flakes snowed upon the floor as the metal creaked and groaned, struggling to turn after countless years of neglect.
Echo could not see the inner workings of the mechanism that held the heavy door closed, but she could hear it turning, the tumblers of the giant lock clicking into place. Propelled by some unseen power, the door began to swing open with painful slowness, evidently deeming them worthy of entry for having survived the series of trials. A distant, detached part of Echo’s brain noted the elaborate carvings hewn into the metal of the door: dragons, at least a dozen of them, flying in a spiraling formation, batlike wings spread wide, ferocious teeth bared in permanent snarls. It was hardly a welcoming image, but then, she supposed that was the point.
Echo was ready to step through the door as soon as there was room enough for her to slip by, but a hand on her shoulder wrenched her backward. Dorian shoved past her, and for a brief moment Echo wondered if he had seen something beyond the door that she had not, some threat or new trial, and was shielding her from it. But when she saw what lay within the chamber, she knew that it had not been altruism or a desire to defend her that had driven Dorian forward with such haste.
“Oh” was all she managed to utter. Behind her, Jasper let loose a curse in strangled Avicet.
The room on the other side of the elaborate door was massive. It wasn’t a room so much as a cavern. The ceiling was high, and the ground opened up a few feet in front of them, revealing a pit that looked like it might actually be bottomless. The cavern walls were stone, and mottled with depressions where it looked as though the stone had been gouged out. A footbridge connected the landing to a round island in the center. And that was where he was.
Just as he had been in the vision provided to Echo by the scrying bowl, Caius was hanging limp from chains connected to the ceiling. Seeing him in person was far, far worse.
His head hung down, dark hair falling messily across his forehead and obscuring his eyes. If not for the shallow and too-quick rise and fall of his chest, Echo would have assumed he was dead. The mere thought of his being dead – and the sight of him so close to it – made her stomach clench. His chest was bare, and he was clad only in a pair of well-worn leather breeches. The clothes he’d had on the day he was abducted were nowhere to be seen. Indeed, there was nothing else in the room except for him – and the chains. A horrified gasp escaped Echo as she took in Caius’s state. His torso was covered in dried blood. Welts marked his skin; it looked as though he’d been lashed with something thick and heavy, like a leather cord or a whip. The manacles around his wrists had rubbed his skin raw. The wounds were an angry shade of red and thickly encrusted with dried blood. His fingers rested on the chain connected to his shackles, as if he were holding on to it to take some of the pressure off his shoulders, wrenched upward as they were. Gods, how long had he been standing like this, dangling like a slab of meat at the butcher’s?
For all his haste to enter the room, Dorian was now as motionless as Echo. His expression was a rictus of pain, as if he himself were the one in chains, left to rot by his own sister.
“What are you waiting for?” Echo’s voice broke halfway through the question as a choked sob threatened to escape her. “Get him down.” Without waiting for Dorian to respond, she crossed the short footbridge to the island. She was mere feet from Caius when Dorian blocked her with an arm flung around her waist.
“I can’t,” he said bitterly. He jerked his chin at the ground.
Echo had been so transfixed by the horrific sight of Caius helpless and hurt that she hadn’t noticed the ground surrounding him, but now she saw what had delayed Dorian.
A circle had been carved into the ground around Caius, with runes spaced evenly along its circumference. They were reminiscent of the protective runes Echo had seen Dorian and Caius use at Jasper’s warehouse in London, though these were far more complex. The Drakhar script was sharp and jagged, and curiously well preserved, as if age could not touch them. There were additional runes drawn in straight lines from the outer edge of the circle and pointing toward its center. Toward Caius. A small moan escaped Caius – it was so quiet that Echo was half certain she had imagined it, but Dorian’s hand tightened painfully where it held her. No, she hadn’t imagined that pained sound.
Jasper drew even with them, slowly, seemingly reluctant to get too close to either Caius or the circle. “What is that?”
“It’s a barrier glyph,” Dorian replied. “Of ancient design, but the construction is similar to the ones we use in the Drakharin military.” His voice was oddly cold. Perhaps he was trying to distance himself from the situation to be objective. Echo spared him a glance. Though his tone was detached, his expression was not. His already-pale face had gone ashen at the sight of Caius, and a slight tremor worked its way through his body.
The longer Echo looked at the circle – and it was easier to look at the circle than at Caius, though avoidance felt cowardly – the more she felt the magic emanating from it. The firebird allowed her to sense magic in the air, like currents. She could feel it. Taste it. She tilted her head to one side, looking askance at the runes. They shimmered with a sickly glow, like an oil slick in sunlight. A faint sense of unease seemed to radiate from the circle. Echo knew without being told that if she tried to cross it as it was, she might not survive the attempt. At least, not in one piece.
“Well,” Jasper prompted, “how do we get through it?” He waved a hand at the chains holding Caius up by his bloodied wrists. “We can’t just leave him like this.”
Dorian whirled on Jasper, fists tightly clenched, and Echo worried that he was actually going to start throwing punches. “Don’t you think I know that?”
To his credit, Jasper barely flinched. His eyes narrowed, but he was otherwise unperturbed. “Then do something.”
Echo stepped between them.
“Dorian,” she said, trying to keep her voice as level as possible. A presence fluttered anxiously at the back of her mind. Rose, drawn by Caius’s suffering, no doubt. Echo pushed it down as best she could. “Is there anything we can do about the glyph?”
Dorian shook his head, not as though he were admitting defeat but as if he was adrift. Lost. His eye strayed to Caius, and Echo didn’t miss the anguish in his gaze.
“There should be a way to break the glyph,” Dorian said, voice thick with emotion, “even if this is the most complicated barrier spell I’ve ever seen.”
“Anything that can be locked can be unlocked,” Echo said. A peculiar quiet calm came over her. If she ignored the body hanging from chains, if she recast Caius as a puzzle to be solved, then she could focus on the problem at hand: how to free him.
With steady, careful steps, Echo walked around the circle, mindful of the barrier she could not cross. One of the first skills she had acquired as a runaway illicitly living in the shadows of one of the finest libraries in the world was the art of picking locks. It wasn’t terribly hard once you knew what you were doing; it required patience and a bit of cleverness. Echo wasn’t always brimming with the former, but she liked to think she had an abundance of the latter.
“Maybe if we …” The words died in her throat as she saw the ruin of Caius’s back.
She remembered the landscape of his back, though not with her own memories – with hands that were not her own, lips that had never touched his skin. Faint scales dusted his shoulder blades, rounding the contours of bone and muscle to meet at the column of his spine, where they descended to the waistband of his pants. Echo knew how it would feel to trace that gentle arc of scales with the tips of her fingers. She knew the way the texture shifted beneath her touch, how the scales were slightly cooler than the skin around them. She knew that caressing the place where skin met scales would make Caius dissolve into laughter that was most unbecoming to a prince of the Drakharin.
She knew all that without ever having done any of it. The memory of how beautiful he had been made what had been done to him worse somehow.
Long angry welts crisscrossed flesh mottled by bruises, some old and yellow, others fresh and purple. Rivulets of dried blood caked Caius’s scales, while split skin oozed thick, viscous crimson.
“Echo.”
She started at the sound of her name. By the look on Dorian’s face, it wasn’t the first time he’d called it. His brow crinkled in confusion before he appeared to decide that her momentary lapse was not something he ought to be concerned about just then.
“There are two ways to break through a barrier glyph,” Dorian said. “The first is with magic. If we had a skilled enough mage, they might be able to undo the spell work that created this one.”
“Too bad we didn’t think to bring one of those,” Jasper muttered.
“And the second way?” Echo asked.
An expression that was too grim to be called a smile but too eager to be called anything else flitted across Dorian’s face. “Good old-fashioned brute force.”
Echo eyed the elaborate carvings on the stone floor. There was a faint vibration in the air, nearly imperceptible but noticeable if one paid very close attention. The glyph radiated with magic. Strong magic. A sense of foreboding flavored its energy, and each step Echo took closer to its outer circle filled her with the threat of malice. The spell work was beautiful in its complexity; it warned you off the closer you got to it, so that when you burned against its barrier you had no one to blame but yourself.
“So we just smash through it?” Echo could not help sounding dubious.
Dorian replied with a brief nod. “Yes.”
“Is that wise?”
Dorian shook his head. “No. Probably not. But it’s our only option to get him out of here before …” He let the words die in his throat, pain and sorrow etched across his face. “We need to help Caius before his wounds prove too much for even him to heal.”
“The clock’s a-ticking,” Jasper said.
Echo nodded as she shrugged off her jacket. If she was going to use her power, she didn’t want to singe the leather. “Then we better get to work.”
Breaking the ground around the seal wouldn’t work, Dorian assured them. The spell had been embedded into the carved inscriptions, but the magic would hold even after their destruction. So that plan was out.
So Echo did what was starting to feel like a natural response to situations that stymied her. She set the blasted thing on fire.
The magic inside her felt strained, but she reached for it all the same. Magic was not an infinite resource, and it did not come without a cost, but Echo would be more than willing to pay later in pain if she could only manage this one task. If she could perhaps burn the magic out of the glyph by overloading it with her own, like an outlet channeling too much electricity. It was a theory she prayed would work in practice.
“Are you sure this is going to do the trick?” Jasper asked.
“Nope,” Echo replied.
She let the magic pour from her hands. There was a little pain, concentrated at the base of her skull, but there was also a strange sensation of relief. Like she had been carrying around a heavy weight that she was finally able to put down. The feeling didn’t last long. The barrier tried to fight back, pushing against Echo’s flames, driven by the only purpose it had: to keep Caius inside the circle and everyone else outside.
Echo threw everything she had into the flame, and when the well of magic ran dry, she dug deeper and found more. Her vision began to black out at the edges. She was vaguely aware of someone shouting her name, telling her to stop, but she could feel it – she was close. So, so close.
Pain blossomed into knife-sharp agony in her skull. But she couldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop. She poured every ounce of power in her body into the barrier. Her legs gave out and she crashed to her knees, only distantly feeling the impact. It was nothing compared with the burning in her head and hands.
Echo summoned a last, desperate lurch of power before collapsing completely. Her forehead rested against the stone floor, blessedly cool against her feverish skin. If it weren’t for the white-hot pain lancing through her, she would have thought she was dead. She couldn’t even open her eyes.
“It worked.” Dorian’s voice floated to Echo through the haze of pain and fatigue that gripped her. Lying there, recovering, she listened as Dorian and Jasper worked to release Caius from his manacles. Echo allowed herself the barest of smiles when she finally heard the chains clatter to the floor.
Caius was free. And together, they were going home.
“I’ve got him,” Dorian said. “Jasper, will you —”
A roar, sudden and viciously loud, consumed the remainder of Dorian’s sentence. It reverberated through the floor, vibrating loose rocks against Echo’s forehead. She pushed herself up to a sitting position, ignoring the aches in her muscles. They all fell silent and still, waiting.
“What the hell was that?” Jasper whispered.
Echo didn’t supply him with an answer. She knew. They all knew, even if no one wanted to believe it.
“That’s not possible,” Dorian said under his breath.
But as the sound of leathery wings drifted up from below, Echo knew his disbelief was futile. The carvings on the walls of the lava room and around the doorframe they had passed through into this room had not been mere decorations; they were warnings to whoever was foolish enough to proceed beyond them.
Echo rose, her legs as shaky as a newborn foal’s, and thought, Here there be dragons.