Page 21 of Inferno

Groaning sleepily, he pushed himself to his feet and tidied his ‘bunk’, folding the blanket and putting it aside.

Outside, he saw the lead unicorn in the herd waiting for him, next to a pile of gathered logs and branches. He was one of the more cooperative of the unicorns, and he’d helpfully shortened his name to Retidash. He was pure white, like the vast majority of unicorns, but his horn was a pale blue – distinctive and also very beautiful.

Thank you again, Retidash said, bowing his head as Nerik approached.Maissette-de-Von is very grateful for your efforts. As are we. We’ve gathered a variety of types and sizes of wood for you, so you can select whatever you prefer.

“I appreciate it,” Nerik said, already stripping off his clothes. Once he was naked and in his infernal form, he sorted through the pile of wood, selecting three or four sizable pieces, along with a handful of twigs. He pressed each one against his abdomen, opening the wall of ash to accept the fuel into his body. It had been a long night, and it would be a long walk back down the mountain today. Of course, that was after he’d seen to his other duties on the mountain.

“Stanley is working on better ways to keep the unicorns safe from the warriors, and all going well, we could have anything up to another ten up here by the end of the cycle.”

Ten? We’ll have to explore finding new grazing land,Retidash said.Several of the mares are pregnant, and if you keep bringing more refugees each cycle, our herd will soon be too big to remain in this valley. A second colony will be needed.

“Well, that’s a good problem to have, right?”

It certainly is,Retidash agreed.Best of luck for your journey home.

It far as farewells went, it was short and to the point, but that suited Nerik just fine. He reactivated his obsidian gem, dressed himself quickly, then headed away from the unicorn’s grazing land.

But when he reached the road, instead of turning right, to head back down the mountain, he turned left instead. He followed the main road towards Azertel for about twenty minutes, then turned off onto a small track to the north. The path was marked with repeated signs, warning of falling rocks and loose cliff edges – meant to deter idle explorers, though not enough to make dedicated hikers turn back. But then, about half an hour’s walk up the track, the path suddenly ended. It had been hugging the side of a cliff for the last five minutes or so, and here, it simply fell away, leaving a gap that was twenty metres wide and fifty metres deep. The result of a landslide, or so the average human would think. And with a sheer cliff face to the right, and a looming void to the left, it appeared to be entirely impassable.

Nerik paused and checked to make sure no one else was around. Then he found himself a long stick and walked up to the very edge of the crumbling path. For the first two or three feet, the rocks were indeed missing. But beyond that…

He nodded as the tip of the stick hit solid ground, though the path itself was entirely invisible. Making sure he was certain where the path started again, Nerik hopped across the gap, feeling disoriented for the few seconds it took to cross the invisible section of the path.

Invisibility magic was extremely difficult to wield, since it required both a high level of skill and a large amount of energy. Nerik hadn’t been around when this pathway was created, but he could imagine that it had cost a significant fortune to hire enough witches to create it. Fortunately, being an immobile rock path, once the spell had been cast, it would last for the length of the witches’ lives. And if those paying for the spell had been careful with their selection of practitioners, that could easily give them forty or fifty years of protection, before they needed to have the spell replaced.

The reason for such extreme measures was simple, and even among Chalandrians, the existence of the colony he was about to visit was a closely guarded secret. Gosta knew, as did Kit – he’d never been able to confirm it, but he suspected she had been one of the witches to create the path – and oddly enough, Stanley also knew about the colony. Nerik had never heard the story of exactly how he’d come to know about the Chalandrians, but he was clearly a trusted ally who was privy to some high level information.

Nerik continued along the path for another half an hour, with no more interruptions. If he was human, he would have been feeling a keen sense of dread and a strong desire to turn back, but as a Chalandrian, he was immune to that particular spell.

Then finally, he rounded the last corner and caught sight of the reason for all the secrecy. In a wide clearing in the middle of the forest, four infernal females flitted about, collecting wood, raking leaves, and fussing over a gaggle of little sparks. The oldest one was two and a half years old, and he’d just about learned to manipulate his own flame. As Nerik watched, the little bundle of smoke and ash sat down on a pile of leaves his mother had just created, and giggled as he made them burst into flame.

Further back, another of the females was nurturing two tiny little flames, nestled in tidy bundles of twigs and surrounded by thick logs to protect them from the wind. They had been created two cycles ago, only about three months old, and Nerik was gratified to see that they’d survived the initial few weeks of their lives.

This colony – four females and nine sparks – was the sum total of all the infernals living on this side of the gate; the entire hope for the continuation of their species.

Nerik could never decide whether visiting this colony made him feel pride, or just reinforced the weight of the burden he was carrying.

With a shake of his head, he stepped forward into the clearing, immediately getting the attention of every female. Two of them waved, before returning their attention to the sparks. One of them, by the name of Krinika, called a cheery hello, then went back to her task of weaving grass mats together. Back in Chalandros, infernals had typically lived near caves where they could shelter in case it rained – back when Chalandros had had any rain, that was. But here, they had to build their own shelters, and maintaining the roofs was a constant and vital task. If infernals got wet, it would put out their fire and they would die. And with nine sparks to protect, the need for adequate shelter was more important than ever.

But the fourth female, the oldest of the group, approached Nerik. She’d been expecting him, after all; if not today, then sometime in the next week. Her name was Vonta, and she was Nerik’s least favourite of the four females, stern and sour, where as he was naturally playful and mischievous, even in the face of impending disaster.

“Nerik. Welcome,” she greeted him, her red eyes glowing a touch brighter as she approached. She was a fraction taller than Nerik, and her ash was more brown than black.

One of the things he could be grateful for was that there was never any small talk with infernals. They exchanged useful information – news from Minia and the gate, or details about the unicorn and fenrig colonies in the mountains – but infernals had never been interested in filling up time with idle pleasantries. The art of small talk was something Nerik had learned through his various dealings with other species in Chalandros – the chatty hadathmet, or the cautious but intelligent fenrigs, the over-excitable deelees and the energetic fire-dogs.

“We’ve made a pyre of cypress wood and a nest of oak twigs,” Vonta told him, leading him over to a tall stack of wood. The pyre itself was made of sturdy branches, with the delicate nest tucked in at the very bottom. “The pine needles we tried last time were a disaster.”

Still in his human form, Nerik raised an eyebrow. “The spark didn’t survive?”

“Not even two days.” It was disappointing news, but nothing like a tragedy. The simple fact was that nine out of ten sparks didn’t make it past about three weeks of age. Hence the need to keep making new ones. But a greater complication on the human side of the gate was that the infernals had little idea about which types of wood would be most conducive to helping the new spark survive. In Chalandros, they’d had a wealth of knowledge about every single species of tree that grew, from the snow fields in the north, all the way to the beginning of the deserts in the south. Here, it had been pot luck and guess work, trying a variety of combinations at random to see which gave the best result.

“Well then,” Vonta said, casting a critical eye over Nerik. “Let’s get on with it.”

This was the other reason Nerik visited the mountain, the reason he made little protest when Stanley all but demanded he bring a unicorn up to the colony. And it was, in many ways, a sacred duty. To Nerik’s knowledge, there were no more infernals in Chalandros, or if there were, they were hiding in whatever protected valleys might provide enough fuel for them, hunkered down and counting the days until their flames went out. If their species was to survive, they needed to breed new members here, on this side of the gate.

Any infernal could create a flame. But to create a sentient one was a far more complex matter, and could only be done by merging the flames of a male and female infernal. Female infernals could only reproduce once a month at the most, the effort taking a great deal of energy and requiring prolonged periods of recharging their flames before they could make another attempt. Males, on the other hand, could reproduce once every two or three days. It was still an effort, but a lesser one, compared to the females.

As such, Nerik was expected to breed with each of the females once each cycle. It was easy enough to schedule, since Nerik made regular trips up here to deliver unicorns to the colony, or sometimes to guide fenrigs or hadathmet to their own settlements, hidden amid the plunging cliffs and sweeping valleys of the mountain region. And for all that the new sparks required a huge amount of care, no one expected Nerik to take part in raising them. Male infernals simply didn’t parent their offspring. It had been that way for as long as anyone could remember.