Chapter 6 of

Eyes of Fire

by Lauren Stinton

Hamal knew he was asleep. He was a healer, so all he had to do was set his hand on his chest and his gift would tell him what his body was doing, even when unconscious. Based on his heart rate and breathing, the way the blood moved through his body, and several other signs, he knew he was asleep.

That meant this scene before him was a dream. It did not exist the way the inn existed or the way the dirty town of Redsprin existed.

And yet, as he turned around in a slow circle and stared, it seemed to him that this place did exist—and in the same way the town and the inn existed. Something he could touch. He could smell the smoky air and feel the sand shift under his boots as he adjusted his weight. The sun was a dull, orangey globe above his head, and the sky was a strange shade of brown, almost like cinnamon. He frowned up at the sky and didn’t even need to squint or shade his eyes as he peered at the sun, because the brightness that should have been there wasn’t.

A dream with a brown sky and a sun that looked shadowy? How strange, he thought.

Lowering his gaze, he examined the land around him. Everywhere he turned, he saw nothing but dry, lifeless sand and—oddly—wide, uneven puddles of black wetness. They reminded him of ponds or some kind of swamp, despite the sand, but they didn’t appear to be filled with water. He thought it might be tar, though he could not smell anything but the smoke. So much smoke in the air. Tar, he knew, could be quite smelly. His head was starting to feel tight, and he lifted the collar of his tunic and held it over his mouth and nose. This dream was turning out to be stranger and stranger—now it was trying to give him a headache.

He stood there for a long time and waited for something to happen. That was usually how dreams began—someone came along, or something changed, or you realized you had to be somewhere.

But nothing changed. The dream stayed exactly the way it was, and Hamal’s head felt tight, and the sky was brown, and he barely cast a shadow, because the sun seemed to be covered up with blankets.

Shel Galen, his grandfather, had much to say about dreams and how the gods sometimes spoke through them. Hamal shook his head. Well, if this dream was a message from a god, that god must not be very happy.

He paused. Wait.

Rosy.

He knew the little girl was asleep in the room with him. And she was an oracle—a powerful gift that could peer into the realm where the gods lived and see what they were doing. Was this a Rosy dream? Did this place look and seem real to him not because of his gift—but because of hers?

Oh no. Was this horrible place where she lived all the time? Was this what she saw whenever she used her gift? Hamal’s heart began to ache. This place was not a good place. No child should live here or even visit here. It wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t healthy. He had to find her.

He let go of his tunic, and the protective fabric fell away from his face. He took a deep breath of the foul air and called out, “Where are you, Rosy? Where are you?”

She did not respond. The land lay empty and still.

He had no idea where he would find one tiny child in this huge, smoke-filled place, but he didn’t want to keep standing here and doing nothing. He couldn’t keep standing here, so eventually he picked a direction and started walking.

He walked and walked. A hot wind came by and told him more about this place and how it wasn’t good for children. The wind carried a smell much worse than smoke; he could tell that something had died very close by. One time he stopped walking and cocked his head, listening as an animal shrieked in the distance. He didn’t recognize the cry and—considering the rest of the dream so far—knew he probably wouldn’t like the animal, whatever it happened to be.

Step after sandy step. The sun slowly moved in the sky and revealed the unexpected passage of time. He repeatedly called Rosy’s name and tried not to think about what his grandfather would say about the dark, sticky puddles that lay like dozens and dozens of traps in his path.

“Oh, Rosy,” he said and felt like his heart was breaking. “We are going to get you out of here. We are going to find you and we are going to save you. And you will come back with us to King’s Barrow, and you will do what a good god is doing, and you will be able to be a child again.”

As far as he could see—and everything was flat in this place, so he could see a long way—the land looked exactly the same. No changes in the scenery. No signs of growth. No good things at all.

He kept walking.

The sun was slowly changing from orange to a deep red-brown as it dipped toward the horizon. The weak shadow he cast was trying to stretch as tall as Cale and Satha’s house, and suddenly Hamal found something.

Until this point, the ground had been like a sand-covered table under his boots. There were no hills or mountains or trees or anything else to break up the flatness. He trudged through a little girl’s dream where nothing changed.

But all at once, he came to the edge of the table. At the toes of his boots, the earth dropped away, and he barely managed to catch himself before he toppled off a cliff that had appeared out of nowhere. He teetered on the edge, arms flailing as he looked down into some kind of ravine.

His heart jerked.

There, in the ravine’s center, surrounded by dull flames that moved and twisted in a wind Hamal could not feel, stood a large black desk. It was the size of the king’s dining table, but somehow Hamal knew it was a desk, a space meant for working in. Stacks of coins covered the desk’s surface—a forest of coins—and someone was counting them. The man seated in the chair behind the desk matched the desk length for length. His bare shoulders were like the shoulders of a mountain, and his arms were twice as long as Hamal’s entire body. A black crown encircled his bald head, and—as Hamal tried not to topple into the ravine—he saw the man’s skin change colors, and none of the colors were the colors of men. Gray. Silver. Yellow—a sickly kind of yellow, like an old bruise no one had bothered to heal.

Hamal thrust himself backward and dropped into a crouch on the sand. For a moment, he just squatted there, frozen like the land around him, and then eased forward slowly and looked over the edge.

One at a time, the man picked up the coins and moved them from one pile to another. Every ten coins, he stopped to pick up a quill pen and scribble something in a huge book. Then he would lay the quill aside and resume his counting.

Hamal released his breath slowly. Those were not real coins. They looked like coins, but even from this distance, he could sense them almost the same way he could sense another healer. A horrible feeling began to rise up inside him. This scene, those coins the monster was counting—this was something bad, something so wrong that the land itself tried to hide what was happening. It buried the desk, the chair, and the monster in this hole in the ground.

A dream, he thought, his heart pounding fiercely. Rosy’s dream. Why is this terrible thing in Rosy’s dream?

He knew he hadn’t spoken aloud. Not here, with this creature facing him from the floor of the ravine. But the large head with the black crown lifted, and dark, vile eyes met Hamal’s gaze. The creature looked right at him, and with its gaze came a torrent of thoughts and emotions. Not Hamal’s thoughts, not his feelings, but things he suddenly and swiftly knew to be true about this being. He knew in less than a breath that this creature was something that loved death and longed for death. Something that captured souls and counted them for pleasure. Something that eagerly desired brokenness and twistedness.

Never in his life had Hamal sensed this kind of brokenness—this type of disease. That’s what this was like: a horrible disease that had taken on a humanlike form.

The monster-god did not rise from its chair to chase after him. Instead, it smiled, slow and wicked, and reached over to pick up a coin. A single coin from the desk covered with coins. Between powerful-looking fingers, the creature lifted the coin and turned it so Hamal could see its face. Distance and shadows stretched between them, but somehow in Rosy’s dream, these things didn’t matter, for Hamal could still see the image etched on the coin’s surface.

A crown and a jewel.

Confusion rushed through Hamal’s system. He could feel it everywhere. He stared at the emblem and tried to understand. A crown and a jewel? Was this Rosy’s coin? He could not understand how this coin went with an oracle. She was not a jeweler. Nor was she a queen.

The wicked smile widened. The monster-god set the coin back on its stack and resumed his counting, marking the book for every ten coins. He didn’t look up again. It seemed he didn’t even care that Hamal was there.

A wind rose, spilling into the ravine from the north. The flames burning along the ravine floor shuddered at the wind’s strength. All breathable air disappeared from Rosy’s dream, and Hamal gasped. He jerked backward and—

—upright in the bed.

The old frame creaked beneath the sudden change in his position. His heart felt like it shouted in his chest and in his ears. A fire gleamed on the hearth, and a lamp burned on the small table next to the bed, but the light was not enough. Not enough light. The room seemed horribly dark.

A hand landed on Hamal’s arm. A strong grip held him. “Hamal.” Cale’s voice. “It is I—Cale. Are you all right?”

Gasping for breath, Hamal scanned the room a second time and saw no fire other than the one on the hearth and the small one burning cheerfully in the lamp. There were no fiery eyes to greet him. “Where’s Rosy?”

“Peace, Hamal,” Cale said before—slowly—letting him go. “She’s fine. She’s in the next room with Chestirad, who seems to think he’s good with children.” Cale shook his head and paused.

Hamal felt the seer’s eyes.

“What happened? You have been asleep for two full days.”

Hamal gaped at him. “What? Two days?”

“We could not wake you, no matter what we tried. And departing with you in that condition did not seem wise. So we have remained here in Redsprin. What happened?” he repeated.

“Two days? It was hours and hours, but it did not seem that long.”

“What was ‘hours and hours’? Can you tell me?”

Hamal touched his face and discovered he was covered in sweat. He groaned, remembering the dream—if it was a dream; perhaps it was more than a dream—and rubbed his face with both hands. “I think I saw the god that Rosy is shadowing.”

Cale grew still. “Yes?”

Hamal nodded sadly. “Oh, Cale. This is not a god we want in King’s Barrow. This is a bad god. I don’t know who it is, but I think it’s the one in charge of diseases. Plagues and horrible things like that. It had a desk full of coins—hundreds of coins—and I think they’re all the people who are sick. It was proud of its coins, and it was counting them.”

Cale leaned back slowly in his chair, looked at Hamal, and did not speak. A log cracked on the hearth, and a small cloud of sparks stretched toward the bottom lip of the chimney.

“You were wise, I think,” Hamal said at last. “You chose to sleep in a different room last night!” He laughed once, but it was not a happy laugh.

“Two nights ago,” Cale corrected. His brows rose. “Last night none of us slept. Except for you.”

“I want to see Rosy. I want to make sure she’s all right.” Everything Hamal had seen in the dream returned to him, and his stomach felt strange, and he just wanted to hold her—to hold this little girl who had known only pain and had no idea that there was any good in the world at all. He knew more about Rosy than even what her bones had told him, and he wanted to comfort all the fear from her.

The chair scraped across the floor as Cale stood. “Let us go now.”

They stepped out into the hallway and crossed to the next room, which held a few more people than was naturally comfortable for such a small space. Chestirad was pacing back and forth by the fireplace; Masly Hawl was pacing by the window. Gregory Almes was writing rapidly in a notebook. Hamal could hear the pencil scrape the page, which gave him an idea. A good idea, but it needed to wait for just a few minutes. Right now, there was only a little girl who needed kindness.

Rosy was sitting on the floor in the corner. Again she had returned to the corner, Hamal noticed with sorrow. She was watching the door as he and Cale came in, and she didn’t take her gaze from Hamal as he walked up to her slowly and crouched down.

Brown eyes just now. She watched him steadily.

He wanted to touch her, but he remembered what her bones had felt like and every detail of the place he’d seen in her dream. So he just squatted there and didn’t try to lay his hands on her. “Rosy.”

The room grew even quieter.

“I know what you see when you use your gift,” Hamal said, speaking slowly so he wouldn’t scare her even more. “You see a large, terrible land filled with sand and smoke and a monster-god who sits in a ravine, at a desk, and counts coins.”

When he heard the jump in her heart, he wanted to put his arms around her even more. Not a single spot of emotion appeared anywhere on her face. There wasn’t even a twitch. She was used to hiding, to revealing nothing to those who might cause her pain. But her heart gave her away.

“There, there, Rosy,” he said, lifting his hand in what he hoped was a soothing gesture. “It is going to be all right. I don’t know how to do this, not yet, but I am going to find a way to rescue you. One day you will turn your back on that evil place and never go back there again.”

She didn’t move.

He waited a moment, giving her time to respond. When she did nothing, he nodded to her once and stood up. He turned and looked at Gregory, who had paused, pencil in hand. He, too, was staring at Hamal.

Hamal pointed to Gregory’s notebook. “May I borrow that?”

– H –

Comment below or click here to find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2021 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.