First look: Call the Fire by Nerine Dorman
- 9 hours ago
- 17 min read
Dearest feral reader,
We are only a few weeks away from the launch of Nerine Dorman's Call the Fire, the first book in the adventure fantasy series Scatterlings of Fate.
What's it about?
Conn has spent his life as a weapon of the Iron Thorn, trained to track down warlocks and burn out heresy wherever it festers. He believes in order. He believes in duty. He believes the gods of old are dead.
He is wrong.
When a captured warlock dies whispering of ancient relics and a rising power, Conn is sent beyond the empire’s borders to stop a threat that should not exist. Instead, he finds Garyn.
Garyn’s home has been razed to ash. Enslaved and torn from everything he loves, he carries a secret buried in his bloodline. An old god is waking, and it has chosen him.
Forced into an uneasy alliance, hunter and fugitive must cross wastelands, evade imperial soldiers, and descend into a ruined temple where something vast waits beneath stone and bone. Behind them, the empire closes in. Ahead lies a ritual that could shatter the world.
Faith will be tested. Empires will fall. And when the fire is finally called, neither of them will walk away unchanged.
First look: Call the Fire
As a very special treat to you, our very special friends, here's the first chapter, to whet those appetites!
Chapter One
He returned from the Makhal a changed man – often waking at odd hours, insisting that he’s being watched, a cloaked figure standing always at the periphery of his vision. Naturally, I’ve booked him a two-week stay at the Narrowport Sanitarium. There is a Pheresian physician recently employed there who is experienced in matters pertaining to the spirit that afflict the body and the mind, and I am confident that my Jacob will be much recovered upon his return.
—Excerpt from a letter, Lady Agatha Mossgarden to her cousin Cecilia Temple
Dusk has laid its sooty mantle on the streets of Ananai, and I’d rather be anywhere else but this warren of dead-end alleys and sewage-clogged lanes. The drunken buildings lean so close to each other their roofs almost kiss, and ragged laundry hangs limp on lines webbing between them.
Despite the mugginess, I pull my coat tighter. The reinforced leather weighs me down when I’d give anything to walk freely. I’m stifled, flushed, perspiration beading my brow, yet that damned coat is all that stands between me and a blade, as I’ve discovered more than once this past week. It’s only with Ae’s grace that I’m even still on my feet. I can endure mere sweat plastering my clothing to me if it means I don’t get myself skewered by a cutthroat.
I pause on a corner, diagonally opposite a trio of locals huddled beneath the tattered awning of a public house. The men of this city are short, swarthy, and eye me with undisguised antipathy I try my best not to return, much as one would not look a stray dog in the eye.
The trail I’m following is faint now. When I close my eyes and draw a breath – through my mouth, so the stench is not so fierce – I can barely detect the electric prickle of the warlock’s path. He came this way, only this morning, from the apothecary. Whatever charm he’s using to obscure his presence did its work in the market, and I’ve wasted precious hours circling before I’ve connected with the trail again.
The echo of his power prickles along my skin, like tiny needles, and I simply know where my feet must tread. Like all other warlocks, this one doubtlessly hates me for this skill. They try everything in their arsenal of cursed powers to throw me off their trail – to no avail. I always find them. Ae’s glory vanquishes their foul magic the way the noon sun banishes shadows.
The foetid mud sucks at the soles of my boots as I continue my hunt, keeping to the shadows when I can, where I’m less likely to be seen. On my periphery, perhaps a tickling at my nape, I can sense my brothers follow – at a discreet distance so as not to alarm citizens – but it’s abundantly clear to any of the inhabitants of this slum that I’m hunting this eve. The shutters are pulled to as I approach, and a hush falls in my wake. The way little mice still when an owl ghosts past.
By law, no one can deny ingress to a paladin of the Iron Thorn. Though Ananai is a cesspit of debauchery, she is still home to three graceful shrines belonging to the Temple of Aemandir, and she will open her doors to us regardless of how the locals curse our names when they assume we’re outside of earshot.
By the time true darkness smothers the district, I’ve lost track of how much foulness I’ve squelched through. My little warlock has gone to ground in a dead end off a nameless square. The traders are long gone, their trestle tables stacked to one side and covered in tarpaulins. Discarded apples not even a pig would eat are scattered among the litter of bones, onion skins, and crumpled papers. Dim alchemical lights wink with their blue-green light from the occasional lamppost. None of the fancy new gaslights here. Those are for the wealthier parts of the city. The only tree I’ve seen all day presides over this squalor, its weeping, leafless branches brushing the mire. I pause, one hand placed on the trunk, where the barest suggestion of life essence flickers against my skin.
Decades of names have been engraved in the bark, making it almost impossible to discern the original texture. Inexplicably, this fills me with a peculiar wistfulness. This tree, stunted and warped by its environment, bears testament to the scratchings of fools and dolts. A far cry from the majestic, spreading ficus that shaded the farmstead of my childhood, sunlight dappling the hard dirt beneath. I shake my head, as if that will dislodge the memory. It’s been a long hunt, and I cannot afford distractions.
My little warlock paused here, too, perhaps halting to gain the measure of his surroundings, to discern how closely he’s being pursued. His banishing ritual failed to cloak his passing, for it sizzles here in the aethers. A sad little circle sputtering out even while I snatch at its remnants. Either he’s exhausted – he is well aware how closely we’re dogging his heels – or he’s resigned to his fate. This is how we catch all of them, eventually. Resignation. Acceptance. There’s no point in running anymore; the Temple of Aemandir’s hound will never stop seeking.
I don’t have a name or a face for my warlock yet, though I’ve followed this soul for six weeks. We almost brought him to bay in Narrowport, and he thought he was being awfully clever heading out into the Riverlands on a barge. Then he fled through the eastern foothills of the Giant’s Keep, fleeing along old prospectors’ trails and loggers’ routes until he rode his pony to death. Waste of a good mount, if you ask me.
He’s more resilient than the others whom we trapped in basements, attics or even flushed like game birds in a sudden frenzy of escape. I flare my nostrils, scenting the air, untangling the latrine stench from around the base of the tree from the general miasma of slow-moving river water, thick with rotten vegetable matter, sewage, and clotted with the half-burnt remains of the pyres near the river shrine.
Mostly, I linger here because my quarry is watching, at this very moment paused in the second-storey window of the tenement overlooking the square. His fizz-crackle of agitation makes all the small hairs on my arms rise—so close.
Almost.
A pale hand twitches a curtain. I know.
My brothers close around me; they’ve been observing me, been drawing nearer in this dance. Wolves circling. Lips pulled back in snarls to reveal teeth.
Soon.
The sky’s murky underbelly presses down, and sheet lightning flashes a diffuse violet before the lazy rumble of thunder swallows it. Rain will come, perhaps within the next half-hour, but by then we’ll have our little rat.
Whether it’s the paladins who make themselves visible at key locations or that my little warlock has decided to go out in a blaze of glory, who knows. His attempt to slip out unnoticed at the back entrance where one of my brothers is already stationed is an anticlimactic conclusion to this chase. I’m there in a few strides.
He tries to shoulder past my brother, but the bigger man knocks him off course, and he ricochets towards me, bouncing off the wall to stumble to a halt a few feet from perceived freedom, eyes white-rimmed, chest heaving like a blacksmith’s bellows.
The whine of him drawing power is subsonic, fingernails on metal, and I grit my teeth, call on Ae as my shield. The rush is glorious, the air around me hazing as though with a mirage, though I will pay for this later. My heart is galloping, heat building in my chest.
The actinic flash in the alley has nothing to do with the incipient storm, and the stench of ozone is doubtless acrid enough for even those who cannot smell magic. The warlock shouts, in anger, surprise as his spell fizzles against my god-granted barrier, and he staggers and drops to his knees. As one, the paladins swarm, hunting dogs to a boar.
Sergeant Seger has the unfortunate warlock shoved face first into a wall next to a ramshackle stack of barrels, his legs spread while Sergeant Harrit relieves him of his bag and small sundry items secreted about his person.
My little warlock is about my age, around eighteen; he barely has the beginnings of a beard. His eyes are white and wild in his dirt-smeared face, his fine dark hair plastered to his scalp. Yet a moment of stillness dilates between us as we lock gazes. He knows me, understands then exactly who I am.
“Tolth damn your soul!” he screeches. “Damn your—”
Ae preserve me. Mention of the Betrayer’s name is a spike to my heart.
Sergeant Harrit silences him with a fist to the face, and he sags into Seger’s arms, momentarily dazed. The two manhandle him back to the square, as if he is of no more consequence than a village drunk.
Someone grips my shoulder, and I hiss an indrawn breath before I force myself to straighten, turn around calmly like a man and not some beast.
Captain Forzot’s grin is turned, for an instant, into a rictus with another flash of lightning. “Well done, lad.”
I allow myself a tight smile. “He certainly led us a merry chase, captain.”
“That he did, but you did good. That’s three of these miscreants this year. Soon, you’ll be nipping on Tamas Weaver’s heels, you mark my words.” That toothbrush moustache of his is smooth, his salt-and-pepper side-parting completely unruffled. Not even a five o’clock shadow or a sheen of sweat on his forehead, though all my brothers are flushed and out of breath from a full day’s running. How does he manage to look as if he’s ready for a uniform inspection after hours of hunting? The rest of us need to visit the ablution block.
I shrug, try not to smile, appear uncomfortable with the man’s praise. His grey eyes miss nothing. “It’s what I’ve been trained to do.”
“No, but you’ve exceeded expectations, but come, our work is not yet done. You should sit in on the interrogation.”
I fall into step with him, our boot soles slopping in the muck. “Are you certain? I’m not ranked—” Hound that I am, I’ve never been involved beyond the chase, and a dim part of me understands that I’m being offered an incredible honour, that this is meant as another good report under my name. A promotion.
“You’ve the makings of corporal by the end of the year.” He’s smiling under that damned perfect moustache of his.
My pulse quickens. “Corporal, captain, but I’m too—”
“Nonsense! I made corporal by eighteen. There’s no reason you can’t.”
“But you’re different, you—”
“Just because I was born and bred for the military doesn’t mean those who’re drafted can’t excel.” He offers me a meaning-laden look.
“I— I don’t know what to say.” My father might even grudgingly be proud. Moving up in the ranks may even make up for the fact that his son is a wretched hound, tainted by the very foul magics he hunts down.
“Then don’t say anything. You’ve succeeded here today where Captain Savo and his patrol failed. We’ve broken the back of this den of vipers.”
“There’s always more of them, captain,” I say with a sigh. It’s been a long haul that started in Narrowport and has ended here. My exhaustion goes beyond today’s successful capture.
“Aye, that I know, but we’ll root them out. Just you wait.” He claps me on the back then barks out orders to the brothers securing the prisoner in the coach. Our warlock doesn’t have much in his possession, as we discover. Apart from his blades, only a pouch with a scattering of coins – Ananai City silver, newly minted. He has no identification papers, and those two daggers could use some care to remove the rust – they’re clearly not his primary means of defence. Even the pipeweed appears to be the ordinary kind, and not the sort that could see him locked up for possession of contraband. This seems to upset the captain, because his lips tighten, and he gets that tic in the corner of his eye that suggests he’s suppressing his temper. We need concrete proof of insurgency in order to open a docket.
Although my testimony about the trail that has led us to this young man should already be damning enough. If he’s tested for magic, he’ll light up half a city block. He knows it as well as we do.
Yet this is not enough for the captain, who keeps checking the warlock’s bag for hidden pouches. Then the warlock’s boots are turned inside out. Ae’s grace, I’m certain he’d call for a cavity search here in the coach if it weren’t for the fact that this would be unpleasant for all concerned.
What exactly he’s searching for, he doesn’t say. The warlock keeps his eyes shut and his lips pressed together, as if pretending we’re not here will make it so. We ride back in tense stillness – nine men jammed into a coach meant for six, the prisoner kneeling between us at our feet, head bowed. The interior of the vehicle reeks of foul things caught in boot-soles perfumed with the pungent sweat of men in dire need of ablution facilities. Captain Forzot is in quiet communication with our headquarters via the comm jewel at his lapel, the faint blue-green light painting his face in an eerie glow while he issues terse commands to the tinny voice that replies. I hate these devices, a blend of magic, alchemy and mechanical engineering that sets my teeth on edge. The magic adds a tint of ozone to the melange of stenches swirling about us, but for obvious reasons I’m the only one who would complain about the effects of the damned thing. So I clench my jaw and endure it, all the while fighting back nausea.
Eventually, when the captain’s done, my brothers natter about the ales they’ll quaff at the public house down the road from the barracks. They don’t mention the ladies who’ll be waiting there, at least not in front of the captain. Some decorum, I suppose. Their gazes skitter over me, as if they don’t really want to see me. I make them uncomfortable, but then I’ve known that ever since the captain had me promoted to squire and assigned to his patrol three days before my eighteenth birthday.
The regular imperials, in their khaki uniforms, give us a wide berth as we disembark at the station courtyard with its shadowed, arched ambulatories. The matched pair of Riverlands greys snort and shake their heads, and give me the eyeball, so I move to the side, so that I don’t bother them so much while the captain and the others sort themselves out. It wouldn’t do now for the horses to spook because of me. This wouldn’t be the first time. I’m tired, sweaty, and thirsty, and still have a long night ahead of me. I can do without the drama.
The captain indicates that the rest of his men are dismissed, leaving only me and the captain to escort the prisoner to the administration wing, our coattails flapping behind us like bats’ wings. The passage is long and echoing, only every other gaslight burning, which only serves to add to the gloom. The sting of an astringent chemical used to clean the floors assaults my senses, makes me swallow back bitterness.
Our little warlock shuffles along, his hands cuffed behind his back. Sweat sheens his nape, and his lank hair has fallen forward to obscure his face. He keeps his eyes downcast, and I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to lock gazes with anyone in this place either if I’m on the wrong side of the law.
“You gave us quite the runaround, eh?” The captain nudges him in the ribs.
The young man only grunts in response then we arrive at administration with its long, scarred wooden counter. Only one officer is on duty at this hour, an older woman with round seeing glasses that gift her the mien of a permanently startled owl.
She straightens immediately as we enter. “Captain Forzot!”
“We need to book in this miscreant, but it’s Temple business, so prepare the transfer papers to Narrowport, will you, love?”
The woman offers a curt nod, her cheeks flushed, then reaches behind her into one of the pigeonholes for the relevant papers. I suspect the captain’s one of the few people she’ll permit calling her ‘love’. The way she cuts glances at him suggests that she’s not immune to his looks. Yet I may as well be invisible. Her gaze slides sideways when she encounters me.
“We’ll question him in one of the interrogation chambers,” says the captain to me. “Take him there so long. Six B.”
I swallow back a sudden pang of fear. Me. Alone with the warlock. If I mess things up now…
“Yes, captain.”
He thrusts a sheaf of papers into my hand. “And you can start filling these out. You have a pen?”
I nod.
A test. Ae guide me.
“Come on, then,” I say to the warlock, give him a tug.
He doesn’t move at first, so I grip him round his upper arm with my free hand and shove him along. His limb is little more than bone and sinew, and it’s then that I figure out how weary he must be. Both of us have been going for nearly a full day without rest.
I stop, turn. “Captain?”
The captain looks up from where he’s leaning on the counter. “What, hound?” There’s no “lad” or “squire” when he’s annoyed.
“Um, we’ve— May I request some water? Or some form of refreshment for us, sir?”
His forehead creases as he peers at me until the reason for my request penetrates. “Ah yes.” He turns to the woman. “Officer, do make arrangements for my man, and see that it is brought to him at your earliest convenience.”
I start shuffling along as she makes her muffled response, down yet another shadowy corridor where it seems even fewer gaslights gutter.
The prisoner stumbles as we step over the threshold, so that I must catch him before he falls. It’s obvious how he trembles, how desperately ill he seems with those hollow cheekbones. The whites of his eyes are as yellow as that of an unrepentant swillbowl.
“Eh, are you all right?” I ask as I help him to one of the two chairs set at a rickety table then uncuff his hands and refasten them before him, his irons hooked into the ring set in the table for this very purpose.
“Do I look all right?” he snaps.
I go shut the door, rest my sweaty forehead against the cool wood for a few heartbeats. “No.” It could be me in that chair, if my situation with magic had played out any differently.
“Then why do you ask?” He’s glaring at me with all the tatters of his fury, and I almost feel sorry for him. As sorry as a follower of the Light could feel for someone who’s wilfully chosen to follow a dark god. Dolothbaros. Tolth. Different names, same foulness.
I sink down opposite him, arrange the onion-skin-thin forms with their smudged print so that they’re facing the right way. The click as I ready my pen is a sharp crack in this bare room with its slime green walls and corners filled with nests of cobwebs. A single gaslight hisses overhead, brighter than all the rest, so that I feel as if I should shut my eyes. Gallows moths almost as big as my hand flit and bump against the glass casing.
The skin of the warlock’s face is pulled so taut with stress the contours of the bone beneath are visible reminders of the skull, the dark hollows of the eye sockets, the flash of teeth bared. His cuffed hands rest on the table, but he clasps his trembling fingers as if they’re the only things keeping him upright.
“Name,” I say, nib pushed down on the correct field.
His indrawn breath is loud. If he could incinerate me with simply a glare he would. Whatever magic he had at his disposal is held at bay by his shackles – blessed iron. The kind that makes my teeth ache in their roots merely thanks to proximity.
“Name.”
He continues to stare right through me, so tense the fabric of his shirt strains against his shoulders. Then he exhales, slumps forward.
“Perrin Lanth.”
I jot this down. “Age.”
“Eighteen.” He licks his lips. “You know, when, not if you stop being useful to them, you’ll end up before the firing squad.”
I squint at him, grit my teeth. “Place of birth.”
And so the interrogation goes. After I get his particulars – he’s a native of Narrowport, far from home in a foreign city-state. A Pheresian mother far from home. His father a Saleki sailor lost at sea. So, a typical Dabeshian mutt. My age, though I no doubt weigh more than he does. Then we get to the meat of the story, and he shuts his mouth, turns his face slowly from side to side like a child forced to eat food he despises.
That’s when the captain enters. He moves soundlessly, but I know it’s him. There’s a presence to the man, a heaviness in the way he displaces the world around him. I could find him in a darkened room, without any trouble at all.
Wordlessly, he comes to stand behind me, his hands on the back of my chair as he leans forward. The wood creaks.
Perrin blanches, swallows hard. Fixes his attention on the tabletop.
Our little tableau holds like this for a fragile eternity, but then the prisoner moans quietly. To give the man credit, he’s lasted this long under the captain’s regard. I’d have looked away much sooner.
Perrin huffs out a breath, his shoulders slumping. “I was asked to retrieve the keystones for another of our order.”
“You mean you stole the keystones,” the captain rumbles.
The prisoner gives a little grunt. Keystones? I straighten a little. This is the first I hear of objects of interest. No wonder the captain was so distressed while going through Perrin’s belongings earlier.
“Where are they now?”
Another shake of the head.
“I needn’t remind you that we have ways to make you talk.” The captain’s flat, bored tone is one I know well, and I cringe inwardly. I’ve had the misfortune to be on the receiving end a few times.
I inhale and exhale slowly, four times. And it doesn’t help. I can feel the storm building. Before I’ve drawn the fifth breath, the captain slams his hand on the table so hard it squeaks a foot to the right.
The prisoner jolts as if he’s been bitten.
I implore him silently, try to catch his gaze. Please, you don’t want the captain angry.
The unfortunate young man groans, as though he suffers a great internal anguish. “They will have me killed.”
“You are already dead,” the captain says. “Only I can offer you a clean, painless passage from this world as opposed to one involving undue suffering. And I can offer to reconcile you with the One True God, and you can repent of your evil, and at the very least spare yourself eternal separation.”
Perrin’s throat bobs as he gulps. Rivulets of sweat pour down his temples. What must it be to truly know that one’s death approaches in terms of hours, days? Yesterday, the prisoner was a free, albeit hunted, man, who had hopes, dreams. Now…
I squeeze shut my eyes for a moment, centre myself. I shouldn’t be identifying with a criminal. We’re doing the right thing by removing this deviant from society. I’m doing the right thing by making myself a tool of Aemandir’s will, imperfect as I am.
“The keystones. Where are they?” the captain growls.
“I don’t have them anymore.” A hint of defiance has crept into Perrin’s voice.
“Who does?”
“I can’t… I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
Perrin shakes his head, tremors passing through his body. “C-c-can’t.”
“You had them when you arrived here, didn’t you? You were paid. In Ananai silver. So it’s someone who’s local.”
The man’s tremors grow worse, and a thin line of blood trickles down his left nostril. Tenebrous thick tendrils of magic ripple deep within Perrin, wrapping around his spine the way an octopus strangles its prey.
Before I can respond, the captain kicks the table so that it flies over onto its side.
He jumps back, papers flying. “Shit! Under a fucking compulsion!” As if the magic will reach out to take him, too.
My pen snaps in my grasp, bleeding darker patches of ink on my black, mud-spattered uniform. A splinter pricks my finger, but I remain frozen, staring deep into the rolled-over eyes of the prisoner directly opposite me, who begins to convulse, bloody foam bubbling out of his mouth.
This could be me. It’s only a twist of fate that had my parents handing me to the order as opposed to casting me out the instant I manifested the first inkling of magical taint. And while I am useful to the Order of the Iron Thorn, I do not share Perrin’s fate. The realisation, along with an unexpected wash of pity for this poor fool jerking out the dregs of his life on the floor in a spreading pool of urine, leaves me short of breath and scratchy behind the eyes.
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