“Kneel.”

  The command from the bone throne was like a hammer blow on a forge. The air in the Pyre Throne room grew heavier, laced with the scent of sulfur and impending violence. Gunther felt the heat of the molten moat singe the hairs in her nose.

  She moved, knees buckling as if compelled, but her body was a coiled spring. Her right hand, hanging loose at her side, drifted down to the seam of her high boot. Beside her, Jacob went to one knee, head bowed, but his shoulders were tensed, ready to uncoil. Sihar wobbled, her theatrical stumble a perfect cover as she lowered herself, her staff clattering against the stone bridge.

  The Pyre Lord watched from his island of obsidian, a faint, contemptuous smile playing on his lipless mouth. He raised a hand, perhaps to beckon them closer, perhaps to signal the guards.

  Jacob exploded.

  He didn’t rise. He lunged sideways from his kneeling position, a blur of ragged cloth and hardened muscle. The guard to the right, a brute in dark scaled armor, had a moment to widen his eyes before Jacob’s elbow smashed into his knee with a sickening crack. The man bellowed, his leg buckling. Before he could fall, Jacob’s hand shot up, fingers rigid, and drove into the soft hollow of the guard’s exposed throat. The bellow cut off into a wet gurgle. Jacob caught the falling axe from the guard’s nerveless grip.

  Chaos erupted. The other four guards on the bridge roared, weapons clearing sheaths. The guards on the far side of the moat began to scramble, but the narrow bridge was a bottleneck.

  Sihar was already on her feet, her feigned weakness gone. She didn’t chant. She stamped the butt of her staff down on the stone bridge. A ripple of force, invisible but tangible, shot out in a concussive ring. It wasn’t aimed at the guards, but at the river of magma below.

  The molten rock didn’t cool. It reacted. A geyser of liquid fire erupted from the moat, not towards them, but upwards in a furious, roaring column. It bloomed into a canopy of dripping, incandescent death between the bridge and the far side of the chamber, cutting off the reinforcements. The heat became a physical wall. Screams of surprise and pain echoed as droplets of magma rained down on the far ledge.

  On the bridge, it was close-quarters hell. Gunther’s fingers closed on the hilt of the boot knife. It was small, a sliver of honed steel, but it felt like the only real thing in the world.

  The Pyre Lord was on his feet now, his amusement vanished, replaced by cold fury. “Insects!” he snarled, his voice cutting through the roar of Sihar’s magma geyser. He didn’t reach for a weapon. He raised both hands, palms facing the bridge.

  Gunther didn’t think. She threw the knife.

  It was not a warrior’s throw, but the desperate, overhand fling of a street urchin aiming for a fruit cart. The blade tumbled end over end, a flash of steel against the orange glow.

  The Pyre Lord’s eyes tracked the blade. He flicked his hand dismissively towards it. A whip-crack of superheated air, a shriek of metal, and the knife vaporized into a puff of molten droplets.

  But it was a distraction. A second of his focus spent.

  Jacob was a whirlwind with the stolen axe. He parried a sword thrust from one guard, using the momentum to spin and bury the axe-head in the shoulder of another. Blood, black in the hellish light, sprayed across the stone. The guard Gunther had kneed earlier was struggling to rise, drawing a dagger. Gunther lunged, not for the dagger, but grabbed the man’s helmeted head and slammed it down onto the stone railing of the bridge. Once. Twice. The man went limp.

  “The island!” Sihar shouted, her voice strained. She had both hands on her staff now, holding the magma geyser aloft like a terrible standard. Sweat poured down her face, steaming on her skin. “The moat is mine, but I cannot hold it and breach his shields! You must reach him!”

  The Pyre Lord’s hands were weaving now, tracing intricate patterns in the air that left afterimages of flame. The temperature in the throne room spiked. The very air began to parch Gunther’s throat, to crack her lips.

  Jacob finished his opponent with a brutal kick that sent the body tumbling over the side into the magma. He looked at Gunther, his eyes wild. “The bridge ends ten feet from the island. We jump.”

  A jump over a river of liquid rock.

  The Pyre Lord completed his spell. From the molten moat itself, great serpentine necks of pure fire coalesced and rose. They were draconic, mindless constructs of his will, three of them, their maws opening to reveal throats of white-hot annihilation. They struck.

  One aimed for Sihar. The mage didn’t flinch. She twisted her staff, and a portion of her own magma geyser detached, forming a crude, massive fist of rock and fire that met the flame-serpent head-on. The collision was silent, a fusion of destruction that rained more fire down into the abyss.

  The other two converged on the bridge.

  “Go!” Jacob roared.

  They ran. Not away, but towards the end of the bridge, towards the obsidian island and the waiting sorcerer. Gunther’s legs pumped, every footfall a prayer. The heat from the moat below seared the soles of her feet through her boots.

  A flame-serpent’s head darted in, jaws wide enough to swallow a man whole. Gunther felt the deathly heat, saw the world dissolve into yellow-white light.

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  Jacob intercepted it. He didn’t have magic. He had the axe, and a fury that was just as potent. He leapt into the thing’s maw, not away. The axe flashed, not at the fire, but at the partially solidified core of magmatic rock the Pyre Lord was using as an anchor. The blade struck with a clang and a shower of sparks. The serpent’s head jerked, disrupted, its bite deflecting upwards. Jacob fell, landing hard on the bridge edge, his clothes smoldering.

  The end of the bridge. The obsidian island was a ten-foot chasm away, across a glowing, roaring river of death. The Pyre Lord stood before his throne, his hands now conjuring a swirling vortex of cinders between his palms, his eyes fixed on Gunther.

  There was no knife. No plan. Just the gap.

  Gunther jumped.

  She pushed off with everything she had, arms windmilling. For a terrifying moment, there was nothing under her but the orange-yellow glow, the heat blasting up, threatening to crisp her skin. The world narrowed to the black stone rushing towards her.

  She hit the edge of the island. Her chest slammed into obsidian, the breath blasted from her lungs. Her fingers scrambled, clawing at smooth, glassy rock. She began to slide back, towards the moat.

  A hand clamped around her wrist. Jacob. The big man had jumped right after her, landing with a grunt, and now he hauled, muscles corded in his neck, dragging her onto the solid ground of the island.

  The Pyre Lord’s vortex of cinders flew at them. It wasn’t aimed to kill instantly. It was meant to scour flesh from bone, slowly.

  Gunther rolled. Jacob dove the other way. The vortex passed between them, howling, and struck the bone throne. The ancient, carved bones didn’t burn; they blackened and crystallized, then shattered into a million obsidian shards.

  The Pyre Lord hissed. His concentration on the flame serpents wavered. One of them dissipated. Sihar, seeing her opening, roared a word of power and slammed her staff down. The entire magma moat shuddered. A wave of molten rock, twenty feet high, crested and crashed over the far ledge, swallowing the remaining guards there in a single, final, silent gulp.

  It was just the three of them and the Pyre Lord now, on the island.

  The sorcerer was not a warrior. He backed towards the rear curve of the island, his hands moving again. “You think victory is a blade’s reach away?” he spat. “This chamber is my flesh. The fire is my blood.”

  The ground beneath them grew hot. Not the ambient heat, but a focused, intensifying burn. The obsidian began to glow from within. Gunther could feel the soles of her boots starting to melt, sticking to the stone.

  Jacob charged, axe held high. The Pyre Lord flicked a finger. A jet of condensed flame, no thicker than a rope, lashed out from the floor itself and wrapped around Jacob’s ankle. He cried out, stumbling, as the fire-rope tightened, searing through leather and flesh.

  Gunther was moving, not at the Pyre Lord, but along the edge of the island. Her mind was empty of everything but the lessons of a hundred street fights: when you have nothing, use everything. The ground was burning her feet. The air was poison. Her ally was down.

  The Pyre Lord focused on Jacob, preparing a finishing blast. He didn’t see Gunther scoop up a handful of the obsidian shards from the shattered throne.

  They were sharp. They were hot. They were something.

  Gunther threw them not at the Pyre Lord’s body, but at his face.

  The sorcerer flinched, throwing up a hand. A shield of shimmering heat haze appeared, and the shards vaporized inches from his skin.

  But flinching was enough. Jacob, teeth gritted against the pain, brought his axe down on the fire-rope binding his leg. It severed, the magic dispersing. He surged up, limping badly, but his momentum carried him forward.

  The Pyre Lord turned back, anger making him reckless. He blasted a cone of raw fire from his palms.

  Jacob dropped, sliding on the slick, hot stone under the stream of flame. He slid into the Pyre Lord’s legs.

  The sorcerer stumbled, his spell shooting wild into the cavern ceiling, dislodging a rain of molten stalactites. He fell, his robe flaring around him.

  Gunther was there.

  She had no weapon. She saw the Pyre Lord’s exposed neck, the pale skin stretched over a prominent adam’s apple. She saw the man’s hands, already coming up to weave another death.

  She did the only thing left.

  She jumped on him. She landed knees-first on the sorcerer’s chest, driving the air from him in a shocked whoosh. She grabbed the Pyre Lord’s wrists, forcing them down, pinning them to the scorching obsidian. The man was stronger than he looked, magic thrumming in his veins, and he bucked, trying to throw her off.

  “Sihar!” Gunther screamed, her voice raw.

  The mage was at the edge of the bridge, staff held high. She was pale, trembling with the effort of containing the moat’s fury. She met Gunther’s eyes. She understood.

  Sihar didn’t attack. She released.

  The sustained magma geyser holding back the far side of the moat collapsed. But she didn’t let the energy go. Instead, she funneled it, with a final, desperate shout, into the moat around the obsidian island.

  The river of fire did not rise. It contracted.

  The ring of magma tightened like a noose, climbing the smooth sides of the obsidian plinth. It rose faster and faster, a rushing tide of liquid stone and heat.

  The Pyre Lord felt it. His eyes, inches from Gunther’s, widened in true, primal fear. He stopped fighting the grip on his wrists. He began to struggle wildly, trying to throw her off, to get up, to flee.

  There was nowhere to flee.

  The wall of magma reached the top of the island. It didn’t spill over gently. It crested, a perfect, circular wave of annihilation, and crashed inward.

  Gunther saw the glowing death rush towards them. She saw Jacob, on his knees nearby, staring at it.

  She threw herself sideways, off the Pyre Lord, dragging Jacob with her towards the only cover the blasted, stump-like base of the bone throne.

  The world turned orange, then white.

  The sound was a deep, subsonic thrum that vibrated in Gunther’s teeth. The heat was beyond pain; it was a total, consuming presence that sucked the moisture from her eyes, her lungs. She buried her face against the hot stone, holding onto Jacob, waiting to dissolve.

  The wave of magma hit the Pyre Lord. There was no scream. Just a hiss, like water on a hot griddle, extinguished instantly.

  Then it receded. The magic guiding it spent, the molten rock flowed back, draining down the sides of the obsidian island, returning to its channel.

  Silence fell, broken only by the distant rumble of the mountain and the crackle of cooling stone.

  Gunther pushed herself up. The air was still oven-hot, but breathable. She looked.

  Where the Pyre Lord had lain, there was a shadow. A silhouette burned into the glassy obsidian, already filling with slowly congealing, blackening rock. Nothing else remained.

  Jacob groaned, clutching his leg. The flesh was blistered and black.

  Sihar stumbled across the narrow stone bridge, which now ended at an island ringed with smoking, solidified magma. She looked old, drained. She leaned heavily on her staff as she stepped onto the island. Her eyes went from the shadow on the floor to Gunther, then to Jacob.

  “It is done,” Sihar said, her voice a dry whisper.

  From deep within the mountain, a groan echoed, the sound of shifting rock and diminishing fire. The light in the chamber began to dim, the molten moat cooling from furious orange to a sullen, darkening red.

  The Pyre Lord was dead. His stronghold was dying with him.

  Gunther stared at the empty throne, then at her own hands, blistered and raw. They had no weapon, no army, and no way home.

  But the first link in the cult’s chain was broken.