Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  The Aurora sat basking in the winter sun in the Cherk Harbour docks. The morning was fresh and bright after the stuffy darkness of the cabin, and Gowron stood at the deck-rail a few moments, breathing in lungfuls of air. Then he descended the gangplank and made his way down the length of the dock, towards the second largest vessel in the resettlement fleet. Tahu’s ship was already primed for departure.

  There was silence in the Reaper’s cabin. It took a while to separate from the Exchange; the Envoy’s consciousness gradually disengaged from the madman’s death and pulled away, contemplative. It was a relief to be free of the stench of humanity, to be whole and pure at last. For a moment the roving spirit of Eblas hung in the foggy, intermediate state outside the Exchange, neither housed in the Reaper’s mind nor in the half-real construct known as Father Lace. He was reluctant to return to that false body in Argos city, tired of inhabiting those scraps of physicality pulled together with energy siphoned off from his acolytes. He wished for something more. His form in the trance was a thing of light rather than shadow. It stretched tall, craning upwards through the fog. One of the Born should not have to sully himself with such dross, he thought, in a burst of bitter longing. One such as he, who had been there to greet the Tree of Life when it broke the surface of eternity —

  Eblas.

  The name was a chain about his neck, weighing him down, yanking him back like a leash. He could not refuse the call and fell, heavy as a corpse, to the bottom of creation. His form lost all its beauty and became hunched and knotted as it struck the floor of the Veil. The headless Beast scrambled up on all fours, claws slithering on the ice. Its mouth gaped like a wound between its shoulder blades.

  ‘Masters?’ it yelped in surprise, to the avian shadows ranged about it.

  ‘Eblas. Eblas,’ they whispered, one after another. Their towering wings rustled and blotted out the faint stars of the prison-world. ‘Eblas, you have failed us.’

  ‘How can that be?’ protested the Beast. ‘I exist only to serve you, great ones! Even now I return from an Exchange, that filthy tortuous immersion in human excrement, so as to better set in motion our plans against Matrya. All I do, I do to promote your interests, to honour you —’

  ‘The half-caste abomination the humans name Kion,’ croaked one of the bird-kings, his head tilted sideways to blink at Eblas in one-eyed fury, ‘is still alive. Her existence offends us.’

  ‘But I did exactly as you desired!’ objected the Beast-that-was-Lace, bewilderment colouring its voice. ‘It can hardly be called a life, Lords. Her spirit is caught between the worlds, her body imprisoned even as you asked —’

  ‘We do not speak of that paltry physical existence,’ said another of the Masters, stretching out his neck in disdain. ‘Her thoughts are alive. Her words run amok among the humans: one of their Grafters has saved them. You have not silenced her. We hear echoes of her even here — even here.’

  The accusation ended on a note of pain. The other Masters stirred and groaned in agreement, stamping their heavy talons on the ice, making the floor of the Veil shake with their harsh cries. The Beast cringed before them.

  ‘Such incompetence!’ screeched a third. ‘To allow the testament of an incarnated Born to reach an audience! She will now live forever, and not in the way that we seek. Her ideas will take root and flourish.’

  ‘But no one knows if she’s telling the truth,’ whined the Beast. ‘We will circulate false documents to confuse the population. No one will know the difference —’

  ‘Fool,’ interrupted the first Master. ‘The proof is in the words themselves. They will stand the test of time. They will endure.’

  ‘Your decisions,’ snarled the second, ‘have been a little flawed lately, wouldn’t you say, Eblas? Consider your choices for acolytes: a murderer, with the appetites of a mindless animal; the priest, an addict — dead now, of course; a whining, crippled boy-child without the good sense to know how to help himself. Trash, all of them. Your last, the girl, could have been something. And yet you let her go.’

  ‘I haven’t let her go,’ muttered Eblas sullenly. ‘She still has the pendant. She belongs to us.’

  ‘Another gamble,’ said the third bird-king, looming over the Beast. ‘And what about the young Grafter, Tymon? How could you send him out of your sphere of influence? Did it not occur to you that he might do more damage? He has irrevocably altered the prophecies in Argos.’

  ‘The change was so minute as to be completely unimportant!’ protested the Beast, trembling with fury even as it cowered. ‘A shade of grey, a single letter in the story! What difference does an atom’s movement make?’

  ‘The difference between success and failure,’ snapped one of the Masters who had not yet spoken. ‘The difference between desire and repulsion, dark and light. Or have you forgotten the First Laws, Eblas? It takes but a single atom to change the attraction of an entire world.’

  He shuffled forward, beak gaping, to place one of his great claws about the cowering Beast. The Master did not dig his talons into Eblas, but let them rest about him on the ice like the curved bars of a cage, a reminder of potentially crushing force. Eblas shivered at the mention of the ‘First Laws’ but did not answer, crouching in the shadow of the giant talons.

  ‘Luckily, some semblance of victory may yet be achieved, at least over the span of a few generations,’ resumed the first of the Masters. ‘We are taking over supervision of your projects. We will no longer allow you to blunder through your mandate, missing every opportunity.’

  ‘We give you one last chance to prove yourself,’ added the second. ‘The omens are favourable for the Oracle’s death for the first time in eight hundred years: do not miss this chance. Find the Prophecy of the Seed — there should be a copy of it in the humans’ library, if they have not completely lost sight of the truth. Use the abjat, and the Reader you gave your strutting little Saint, to calculate the exact location of Matrya’s physical form. Even you should be able to do that.’

  The bird-shadows spoke in quick succession now, stretching down their necks to hiss derisively at the Beast trapped in its cage.

  ‘The Eastern Grafters must not be allowed to frustrate our plans. You will keep them in check while we supervise the search for the body.’

  ‘Your human minions will answer to us.’

  ‘Hopefully they will not botch their task as miserably as you have yours.’

  The Master who had held the Beast in his talons withdrew his clawed foot at last, and reared up to his full height, beating his shadowy wings. ‘Be gone, Eblas,’ he shrieked. ‘And do not fail us again.’

  ‘Be gone,’ echoed the other Masters. ‘Be gone!’

  The wind from their dark feathers whipped across the icy surface of the Veil, raising a crystalline vapour that swirled and eddied about the grovelling Eblas. The Beast backed away on its belly, growling softly in obeisance. Then, with a flick of its own curved claw, it ripped a hole in the gloomy fabric of the prison world, slipped through the gap and was gone. The bright edges of the tear sucked shut behind it.

  There was a moment of silence as the last glittering crystals drifted to the floor of the Veil. The dead air promised numb peace: the stars shone brighter through the hunched silhouettes of the Masters. But before oblivion could creep over them again, the one that had confined Eblas bestirred himself.

  ‘That dog grows presumptuous,’ he said.

  ‘It mocks us,’ hissed the first Master, nodding in agreement. ‘It sucks on our influence, thinking it is indispensable to us.’

  ‘Might Eblas not remember what else lies in the chamber of the Seed?’ asked the third, craning his neck worriedly up at the stars. ‘Might our servant not seek to gain power over us by its means?’

  ‘Indeed, my Lords,’ answered the one who had held Eblas in the cage of his claws, blinking a malevolent eye at his associates. ‘That is a danger. Perhaps we should find ourselves another slave. One easier to control.’

  The rest of the Masters muttered in
accord, shifting from foot to foot on the ice, feathers rustling. ‘But who?’ asked the first. ‘We have only these human worms to choose from. Which one will do for our purpose? The one named Gowron? The young cripple — Wick?’

  His companion had no lips with which to smile, but cackled with raucous satisfaction. ‘Neither, my Lords. Without direct control, we shall be forever pleasing and propitiating the worms, which is tedious. There exists another possibility we have not yet discussed: the Exchange. I believe I may have found a way of bypassing the cursed laws that bind us.’

  A few hours later, a similar rustling and crackling could be heard in the seminary archives, where a figure as hunched and brooding as the Masters squatted on the floor of the chamber, bending over a storage crate. The Envoy, back in the form of Father Lace, rifled through the contents of the box by the light of a flickering basket lantern. A draught from the open door caused the flame to gutter; a few paces away, his companion in the chamber, Father Fallow, shuffled half-heartedly through a heap of scrolls on a shelf. Lace ignored him. The Saint was of little use in his current endeavour, but he had been obliged to involve him in his research, as only Fallow held the key to the innermost archives. A faint hiss reminiscent of his Masters escaped the Envoy’s lips, a breath of frustration.

  For it all to come to this — to this! he ruminated. He had been sidelined, relegated to the post of research assistant in this repository of mortal dust. He, Eblas, a child of eternity! His efforts were taken for granted, his contributions dismissed. He gritted his teeth as he pulled another box out from a shelf. He knew very well that his Masters were seeking to replace him, deciding even now which acolyte they would use as their lackey, as if a human worm could ever supplant one of the Born. It was a paltry recompense for centuries of loyal service, an insult to be used in such a manner by beings long past their prime — beings whose experience had become so divorced from reality that they could no longer tell truth from lies, light from fire, faithfulness from treachery.

  A plague upon them, decided Lace as he rummaged impatiently through the loose parchments. He would not be shrugged off. The Seed Prophecies were here somewhere, and he was determined to find them. He would gain ascendancy once more. Oh, his Masters would be gracious, cringing before him soon. He knew of just the means to convince them. The Envoy kicked aside the second crate with a snort of contempt. He had not forgotten what legendary source of power lay hidden along with Matrya’s body. He would find her, and then he would be the one to control the Key.

  ‘Are you sure these old liturgies are in the archives?’ grumbled Fallow, still picking in a desultory fashion at the pile of scrolls on the shelf. ‘They’re pretty obscure. I’ve never read them, to be honest.’

  ‘I already consulted the orah-clock — the result was quite clear,’ said Lace flatly. ‘The verses are here at the seminary.’

  ‘I still don’t see why you’re wasting your time with the Nonnians,’ shrugged Fallow. ‘The sect was composed of drug-addled misfits, everyone knows that. They wrote complete nonsense.’

  Lace lifted weary eyes towards the man he had helped reach the apex of human power and achievement in Argos city: this petty, unimaginative Saint.

  ‘Do you remember Juno and Lyla?’ he asked. Fallow stared at him blankly in the shivering lantern-light. ‘The fable of the mystic seeker,’ he continued, sighing. ‘The lover looks everywhere for his beloved, even in the most unlikely of places. According to the theory, if what you have lost is precious enough, you will search for it everywhere. Even among the dust and dross. That way you don’t risk missing it.’

  What had possessed him to bring up that particular story? the Envoy wondered to himself, a moment after he had spoken. He had not thought of the tale of the mad lover for what felt like a lifetime, and frowned in sudden misgiving, remembering that the story had been one of Matrya’s favourites, a maudlin fable she used to instruct her human followers. Was he being influenced against his will? Even such inconsequential yarns could be dangerous. He resolved not to mention Juno and Lyla again.

  But he need not have worried about any susceptibility to the truth on Fallow’s part; the Saint was as blind to the implications of mystic love as he was to the everyday kind.

  ‘You certainly go for the archaic yarns, don’t you,’ he replied to Lace, a little sulkily. ‘Alright. So we’re looking everywhere for a precious thing. What’s so great about the Nonnians that you’d ask me to spend an afternoon rooting for them in the dust?’

  ‘The verses contain clues to finding a powerful Grafting artefact,’ said the Envoy. ‘A relic of the Old Times, one your seminary Explorers did not bring back with them from their journeys. It is called the World Key.’

  Fallow sneezed violently; the mildewed air of the archives did not agree with him. He retrieved an embroidered green handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose with the blast of a foghorn. ‘Let me guess,’ he snuffled. ‘This artefact opens a door to another world?’

  ‘It opens a stable door to the Veil, among other things. It allows the user to enter without the Grafter’s trance, protecting him from all harm and entrapment.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ Fallow snorted. ‘Though why would we want to do that? You’ve told me enough times that the Veil is no more than a prison.’

  ‘Precisely, Holiness.’ Lace regarded him evenly. ‘The one who controls the Key can use it to force others into the Veil — like a more powerful version of that Explorer artefact we were never able to recover, the trance-chair. Imagine being able to lock your enemies bodily in a state that is neither life nor death, with no chance of them waking up. No more dungeons, no more torture chambers: those who disagree with you are simply Veiled. They are invited to leave this world. Their return is dependent on your good pleasure.’

  ‘Interesting,’ conceded the Dean. ‘But how do you explain that I’ve never heard of this World Key? Surely an artefact as important as that would be mentioned in our holiest texts, our most sacred writings, and not in some fantasist’s ramblings?’

  ‘Not if the Council had decided to suppress the knowledge,’ said Lace, shoving aside his crate and rising to join Fallow at the shelf. ‘As far as one can suppress anything while Grafters are around, of course. The Nonnians were a collection of fools and dreamers, yes. But they happened to have a few moments of lucidity. They are the only Argosian prophets who ever spoke of returning to the World Below, for example.’

  Fallow rolled his eyes. ‘I rest my case. There was a great deal of bellweed going into jar-pipes at the time.’

  ‘An idea,’ added the Envoy sharply, picking up and inspecting the scrolls Fallow had abandoned, ‘which you know very well has some basis in theology and history. The Nonnians were systematically discredited for a reason, Holiness. Do not be so unwise as to believe your own faction’s lies. Those dreamers knew something — something the Council at that time did not want repeated.’ He ran his square-tipped finger along the dusty crates, musing aloud. ‘The World Key is one of the greatest buried secrets of this institution, a truth so fearful that it was hidden not only from the masses of the people but from the Fathers themselves. A knowledge deliberately discarded by those who took the secret to their final rest …’

  ‘If they didn’t want it, why would we?’ said Fallow peevishly, his nose embedded in his handkerchief.

  Lace turned to stare at him. ‘Can you really believe that, after all you’ve seen?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘A commoner, a man in the street might say as much. I thought we understood each other when I first repaired the orah-clock for you, all those years ago. There’s one truth for the masses, and another for the elite that guides them. I thought you wished to be part of the elite.’

  ‘There’s no need to be condescending,’ sniffed the Dean. ‘I understand your point. The orah-clock has been a great boon to me. But I’m a man of action, Lace, and it irks me to be forever chasing after a so-called glorious past. We have a military strategy to figure out. Our plans for Nur are still in abeyance, a
nd our policy for Lantria needs implementation. I’m tired of these minor prophecies: I want to go for the big stakes, and that means war. I can’t help feeling it’s time to “cast out the old and bring in the new”.’

  The Envoy’s face was expressionless, his eyes shadowed in the lamplight as he surveyed the Saint. ‘Remember what I am, Holiness,’ he breathed. ‘I am “the old”. And I have no intention of being “cast out”.’

  He continued to stare at Fallow until the Dean twisted his handkerchief into a nervous ball and shoved it back into the pocket of his habit.

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way, of course,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I have the utmost respect for your judgment, my friend. I just meant, do you really need me to do this, right now? I have a meeting with Admiral Greenly before the afternoon temple service —’

  ‘Naturally. You should go to your meeting.’ Lace cut him off with a wave of the hand, releasing him from his deadly gaze. ‘These minor prophecies, as you call them, contain more truth than a roomful of your military strategies. But you don’t have to be here, no. Go plan your war. When you run into trouble, and want some of the power of the old world to help you conquer the new, we’ll talk again.’

  ‘I always appreciate your help,’ protested Fallow. ‘I respect the old ways. But I have to be the new Lawgiver too, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said the Envoy. ‘Was I not the one who suggested it?’

  ‘I’ll check on you again after the service,’ called Fallow, hardly hearing the reply as he hurried away. He paused at the door, glancing back at his colleague. ‘Are you sure you don’t want one of the boys to help you out with this Key business? I know it’s hard to find someone trustworthy, what with one of your acolytes in hospital and the other — he was a peculiar fellow, wasn’t he? — off on that whimsical retreat of his. What a time to leave. Anyway, I could try to find a fifth-year student for you, Ambien might be able to recommend —’