Page 76 of Inferno

Nerik climbed out of the cage, slowly and cautiously, so as not to alarm anyone. He knelt down beside the small pile of wood and straw and simply snapped his fingers, and instantly, a flame came to life in the nest of straw. It spread quickly to the handful of sticks, then to the larger logs.

Then, much as he had that day in Yorin’s kitchen, Nerik stepped back and drew a plume of fire towards himself. He wove it into shapes, a horse, then an eagle, then a bear. Then he caused the fire to flare brightly, flames leaping skyward and heat rolling over the crowd in waves. And then, just as suddenly, he brought his hands down, dragging the fire with it, shoving it back into the pile of logs… and it went out. A thin wisp of smoke trailed up from the pile, but that was all that remained of the fire.

Renfold’s face was a mix of awe and disbelief. “And you can do that to the forest fire?” he asked Nerik.

“Not quite as quickly. But in essence, yes.” Given his earlier statements, that was probably stretching the truth. But wrapping the whole thing up in a lot of ifs, ands and maybes wasn’t going to get them the chance to try.

Renfold glanced northwards, where billowing clouds of black smoke were now drifting over the town. “We’d best get you out there in a hurry, then.”

“How about you ride the unicorn?” Stanley offered, leading Rayken forward. “Since you’ve done it once already.”

It would be my honour to carry you,Rayken said, and once again, Yorin suspected he was missing something.

It’s usually considered an enormous insult to ride on a unicorn,Nerik told Yorin, even as he swung a leg over Rayken’s iridescent back.When you’re ready,he said to Rayken, and with that, they were off. The unicorn thundered across the square, bystanders leaping out of his way, and then the pair of them disappeared up the road to the north.

“Oi, he’s just… He’s not supposed to…” Henrick was stammering and gesturing after Nerik, careless of the fact that he still held his sword in his meaty fist, and Yorin used the opportunity to sidestep away from his grasp, though he didn't go far.

Renfold came to stand beside him, ignoring the astonished comments from the rest of his team. “You got any idea how much I’m risking on him?” he asked, looking more than a little apprehensive.

“He’ll come through,” Yorin said. A two-hundred-year-old fire demon against a raging forest fire? Yeah, no pressure, or anything.

Then he felt a nudge on his shoulder and turned around to find that Stanley had unhitched Rimdolen from his cart. “Come on, lad,” Stanley said. “You’d best be following your boyfriend out there. The gods know he’s going to need your help.”

Yorin didn’t know what to make of that. “How on earth would I help him? I’m just a human.”

Stanley glanced in the direction Nerik had gone. When he spoke again, he lowered his voice to a murmur. “Look, the lad’s downplaying it, but what he’s just been asked to do is about twice as hard and ten times more dangerous than he’s letting on. I don’t have time to explain it all, but he’s going to need you there. He’ll need you to stand your ground and remind him what he’s fighting for. Don’t back down. Not even for a second.”

Yorin frowned at Stanley. The man was a human, and yet he seemed to know more about infernals than most of the Chalandrians. And Yorin was starting to have some serious questions about where he’d got that knowledge from.

“All right, if you think it’ll help,” he said. Then he looked at Rimdolen and faltered. “But Nerik said…” He dropped his voice to a mere whisper. “He said riding a unicorn was an insult.”

Desperate times call for desperate measures,Rimdolen said.Come on. Time’s a-wasting.

“We’ll be right behind you,” Stanley told him, offering his hands to give Yorin a boost up onto Rimdolen’s back.

Thank you for this,Yorin said to the unicorn, as he took the offered lift and settled himself as comfortably as possible onto Rimdolen’s back – a task that was harder than usual given the lack of a saddle. But if it was a rare thing for a unicorn to allow a rider, Yorin was certain that putting a saddle on one would be a gross insult.

Hold on,Rimdolen told him, then, as soon as Yorin’s hands were buried in his mane, he took off after Rayken and Nerik.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Nerik clung to Rayken’s back, the unicorn’s gait surprisingly smooth. Not that Nerik had ridden a lot of unicorns.

He could see the smoke clearly now, as they passed the last of the cottages on the way out of town, and he knew that he was going to have his work cut out for him to stop the fire before it reached the city.

Rayken didn’t hesitate, bolting straight past the thin line of people setting themselves up with buckets of water and wet sacks. There were already embers flying through the air, and Nerik knew that their paltry efforts to defend their homes would do little good.

A tired part of himself wondered why he was even bothering to try and save the city. What some of the others had said was true; the humans were slaughtering thousands of Chalandrians every cycle, and nothing anyone said seemed able to get them to question their course of action. Was it foolish to want to save the humans, to believe that in doing so, he might somehow get the people of Minia to see that the ‘demons’ weren’t all bad?

But the truth was that even if it achieved nothing, Nerik was still going to try his best to save the city. Regardless of the way the humans chose to behave, Nerik had his own morals to live up to, and his own conscience to answer to at the end of the day. And doing nothing, just letting the city burn, was not something he was prepared to face.

Finally, Rayken slowed to a halt, as the smoke became too thick for him to breathe.Head straight back to town,Nerik told him.It’s too dangerous here.He slid off Rayken’s back, scenting the air and getting a measure of the wind.

The gods aide you,Rayken said, before spinning around and bolting back the way he’d come.

Left alone, Nerik held out his hands, feeling the heat in the air coming towards him. He was still a good few hundred metres from the fire front, but he could feel the power of the flames even from here.

There was more than one danger to him here. If he lost control of his own internal fire, he could get consumed by the flames of the forest, and it had taken him decades to learn enough control before he’d dared to merge himself with anything larger than a bonfire. Aside from the first few weeks of life, the period that humans called ‘middle-aged’ was the most dangerous period for an infernal. At thirty or forty years old, a lot of them started experimenting with their abilities, seeing how much water they could tolerate, or how big a fire they could merge with. It was a sort of late adolescence, a period of risk taking and pushing the boundaries that ultimately claimed the lives of roughly half the infernals who reached that age. Impatience and arrogance were killers for a daring infernal, and Nerik had survived as long as he had by curbing both dangerous attitudes.