Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  ‘Forgot what, Zero?’

  ‘Forgot to ask me to come with you. So I’m reminding you.’ The Marak lad stuck his chin out stubbornly. Tymon noted with relief that he did not call him ‘Lord’.

  ‘I promise you, Zero, you don’t want to come with me,’ he assured his friend. ‘I’m going back into the mine. Into the dark.’

  ‘I know. I’m not stupid. I got all the right stuff, torches and everything.’ Zero indicated his own travel pack. ‘You’re the stupid one. You forgot to ask.’

  Tymon stared at him in surprise. ‘Alright,’ he admitted. ‘I might be the stupid one. Do you really want to do this?’

  Zero rolled his eyes, as if he had enquired whether the sky was blue. ‘You’re doing it, aren’t you?’ he pointed out. ‘We evil folks should help each other.’

  Tymon nodded dazedly. How could one disagree with such striking logic? He continued up the ledge towards the fissure, followed by his friend. Below them, the others watched and waved. When he glanced down one last time before plunging into the tunnel, he could no longer spot Noni’s red head among those in the group. She had already climbed into the machine and was lost from view.

  It was then, too late, that he remembered his dream of the Oracle; he had never told Noni about it. But would she have listened? It seemed he always spent half his time arguing with his fellow Grafters. Maybe, he told himself sadly, he was better off on his own. He turned his back on the outside world and walked into the darkness of the mine.

  Over that day and the night that followed, as celebrations for the Saint’s Eastern Crusade took over Argos city, the temperature in the Central Canopy plummeted. The shift in weather was abrupt and cold, and frost descended like an icy shroud over the leaf-forests. A thick coat of white covered the leaves and twigs, causing bark to crack and split in the moonlight, and a white pall crept over the roads and terraces of the town, appearing in a brittle bloom on the rooftops.

  The late-night revellers still celebrating in the streets hastened indoors, their eyebrows dusted with particles of frost. It was the most dramatic cold snap in living memory; people said the Tree itself was preparing for war.

  The change caused a great deal of anxiety for the crew of the military vessel Stormbringer, already five days out of Argos city when the cold snap hit and about to enter the permanently frozen Upper Fringes. The dirigible had been dispatched in haste before Rede’s arrest, the last of over fifty ships carrying troops to Marak city. The Saint, buoyed by the successes of his southern campaign, had decided to take his war games a step further. The Eastern Crusade had been planned long before Fallow’s rousing announcement to the citizens of Argus, of course, and the bulk of the fleet already moved into position for a conflict weeks in the making. But the Stormbringer was also a messenger ship, bearing an edict from the Saint ordering Admiral Greenly to begin a wave of attacks against Nurian targets. It took a shortened route across the Tree in order to reach the Domains in time for the first planned offensive.

  The Upper Passage was a secret held tightly by the Argosian military, for though the way through the canopy’s icy crown was fraught with dangers, it more than halved the travelling time to Marak. In favourable weather, the Stormbringer could make the trip to the Domains as fast as a messenger bird, in about nine days. Favourable weather, however, was key. Sudden storms were known to bedevil the summit of the Tree, maelstroms of wind and hail no dirigible could survive. The sailors on the army vessel noted the frost on that fifth night with dread, fearing a return of the snowstorms that had battered the Central Canopy after the Kion’s execution.

  Their fears proved unfounded. By the next morning the clouds had lifted and the voyage through the snowy branches took place in brilliant sunlight. But even if the wind did not threaten, the ice did. The frozen twigs were laced with hanging icicles that sometimes reached the size of a man; they sparkled in the sunshine above the ship and could be deadly to the ether sacks. Apart from the occasional far-off crashes of loose ice, therefore, the silence on board the Stormbringer was complete. All on board watched anxiously as the captain steered the vessel through the treacherous forest of vertical blades. The sailors seemed equally frozen at their posts, hardly daring to carry out the tasks required to keep the ship on course, wheezing painfully in the thin air; the environment at the crown of the Tree was hostile to most life, the branches frostbitten and as shorn of their leaves as the Eastern Canopy. No one breathed, no one moved, as the ship slid through the white silence.

  After the initial moments of awe at the sight of the ice-fields, the young soldiers travelling on the ship were sent below deck and issued with strict orders to remain there, for fear their noise might dislodge the deadly blades. They spent the time drinking barley-beer and throwing dice. The Saint’s recruits were young and poor in the main, second sons without prospects at home, who had signed up for a military life in quest of regular food and pay. Such troops would have been sent in former times to man the colonial outposts; now, they were being sent to destroy the Freeholds.

  It was a job that excited rather than perturbed the young sons of Argus. Many had greeted the official announcement of the crusade with a rousing cheer, and an impromptu rendition of ‘The Merry Bells’. Most agreed that this was a chance to prove their very recent entry into manhood and only a few seemed less than enthusiastic about being sent into active service before their training was complete.

  But one of the soldiers did not sing at all, apparently caring little for his manhood. Bolas had received his conscription papers long before Rede’s arrest, finding himself summoned to present himself at the Stormbringer within the hour, on pain of court martial. He had barely been given the time to bid farewell to his anguished family and friends, taking leave of the weeping Nell on the quays. His shocked sisters and his grief-stricken mother had bewailed this sudden turn of events, incomprehensible to them. But Bolas knew very well why he was being sent to the Eastern Canopy. He knew that in spite of Tymon’s attempts to save him, his jail sentence in Argos city had merely been commuted, not revoked. He was paying the price now for all his childish delusions of free thought, and for having helped his friend. Fallow had waited patiently to exact his revenge, sending Bolas to serve in a war that filled him with dismay.

  PART TWO

  BELOW

  And Saint Usala answered, ‘This I believe.

  The End is within. The Beginning is always.

  We call up Jury, Judge and Witness,

  And play executioner to ourselves.’

  — Saint Usala the Green, chapter nine, closing stanza

  11

  Wick hated flying. His first hour in the Freeholders’ machine was spent crouched miserably on one of the passenger benches, bracing himself against the shuddering wall and wondering if he were going to vomit. He eyed Gowron at the controls with envy. His companion had the instincts of a born pilot, and sent the ugly vessel soaring out of the Tree-cave and up above the frost-bound leaves without a qualm. Gowron was endlessly impressed by the air-chariot’s speed, remarking on the fact to Wick with wearying regularity over the course of their journey. At this rate, they would pass Ethis the next day, he announced triumphantly. The Saint was a fool to suppress this invention, according to Gowron: it would cost him his hold on power.

  Wick could not have cared less about the Saint’s power at this juncture. He attempted to ignore Gowron and kept his nose near the open window. The cold wind alleviated his nausea. They followed the instructions given them by their master before leaving Argos city, travelling south in a wide arc about the circumference of the trunk in order to avoid the inhospitably cold regions at the summit of the canopy. He wondered gloomily how his queasy stomach would fare once they began to negotiate the turbulence of the Gap.

  It was past noon when he first glimpsed the specks wheeling over a hole in the canopy, slightly north and east of their route. Carrion birds, hundreds of them, circled in a funnel shape over some quarry on the branches below. Wick blinked at them, his
nausea forgotten for a moment in his fascination. Then he straightened, gripping the edge of the window with whitened fingers.

  ‘Turn left!’ he cried to Gowron over the din of the propellers. ‘You have to turn left! Now!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ The other scowled at him over his shoulder. ‘That’ll take us back north!’

  Wick quelled his unease as best he could, lurching up from the bench to join Gowron by the controls. ‘Just a short distance,’ he said, indicating the wheeling specks through the front viewport of the machine. ‘I want to take a closer look at those birds. It’ll hardly cost us any time, not at this speed.’

  ‘The birds?’ Gowron shouted back in surprise. ‘Why?’

  ‘They’re curse constructs.’ Wick only hesitated a moment before answering. ‘The master and I — we sent them after Tymon and Jedda. I want to know which of the two they’ve found.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re not ordinary birds?’

  ‘They’re mine,’ muttered Wick. He gave an involuntary shiver. ‘I can feel it.’

  The sensation was almost worse than the flight nausea: an uncomfortable slicing in the gut, as if he were being heaved out of himself, his innards stretched taut towards the creatures circling over the canopy. He leaned against the wall of the machine, clutching his stomach. His discomfort increased as Gowron steered the air-chariot towards the birds. His fellow acolyte laughed knowingly at his predicament.

  ‘What does it feel like to be a pregnant woman?’ Gowron mocked. ‘Chin up, darling. The worst will be over soon. I used to give birth to the master’s babies, too. Just breathe and release.’

  ‘Shut up,’ groaned Wick. ‘You’re not helping.’

  ‘Breathe and release,’ chuckled his companion. ‘Lie back and think of Argos.’

  ‘Go to Hell!’

  ‘Oh, we are, I assure you.’

  They spiralled down over the hole in the canopy, descending into the well between the branches. As the machine approached, the birds separated and scattered, passing the air-chariot in a blizzard of flapping black, and Wick began to breathe more easily. By the time Gowron brought them down with by-now effortless skill on the back of a horizontal limb, the last of the curses had disappeared and the air-sick acolyte was able to disembark rather shakily from the machine, staggering through the ice and slush alongside his companion. They walked a short distance down the road that followed the crest of the branch, making for the bloodied human form they had spotted a few hundred yards away, huddled under a piece of canvas. Before they reached it, however, Wick stopped and withdrew the Envoy’s mask from his cloak pocket, placing it over his face. Whichever of his two former associates lay sprawled there on the bark, he felt unable to confront such incursions from the past without the protective illusion of normalcy. Gowron raised a wry eyebrow at his action, but mercifully made no further comment.

  The curses had found Jedda. She lay face down and unconscious in the slush, pecked raw by the attacking birds and half-rolled up in a canvas cover of the sort farmers used to protect vine-stumps from the frost. She had succumbed at last to exhaustion, it seemed, harried to breaking point by the creatures. This was how the ‘constructs’ wore down their intended targets, pursuing their quarry until fatigue and exposure did their worst. Although the cuts inflicted were not deep, infection, and most of all injury to the eyes, would eventually cause death to the victim. Jedda would probably not have survived had the attack not been interrupted. As it was, she was still alive, her breath a slight shudder between her shredded shoulder blades. Wick stood a moment over the torn body of the girl who had rejected him, feeling the thud of triumph in his veins.

  ‘Happy now?’ asked Gowron laconically.

  ‘She betrayed me,’ said Wick.

  ‘I would have used her a little differently to get my own back,’ yawned Gowron. He rubbed his arms; the weather was cold, despite the sunlight. ‘But there’s no accounting for tastes. Have you seen enough? Shall we go?’

  When his fellow acolyte did not answer, he stamped his feet in the slush and turned away.

  ‘Wait.’ Wick frowned down at Jedda. ‘You say you’ve done this before …’

  ‘What, wasted time? Yes, ever since I met you,’ snapped Gowron.

  ‘No, I mean: given birth.’ Wick winced. The sensation of movement beneath the mask was odd, as if the artefact had bound with and frozen the muscles in his face. ‘How long do they last?’ he continued. ‘The curses, I mean? How long can we expect them to track her down?’

  ‘Between the phases of a single moon, generally. After one cycle, they lose cohesion.’

  ‘We sent them out about two and a half weeks ago,’ mused Wick. ‘So we have just under a fortnight left.’

  ‘Left?’ asked Gowron. ‘For what?’

  ‘To play with.’ A slow smile spread over Wick’s perfect features. Surely his master would not begrudge him this opportunity, even if he were spying on them with the orah-clock. And if Gowron was right, and Lace had been sidelined from involvement in their expedition, he might not be watching them at all.

  Gowron glowered at him. ‘What in hell are you talking about?’

  Wick grinned. ‘You said yourself you’d use her differently,’ he said. ‘So let’s make this more interesting. Let’s take her with us, and have some games. We can always turn her out again in a few days and watch her die.’

  Her life, Jedda thought, had grown thunderous. The surface beneath her lifted and jerked, and there was a continual sound like the beating of a hammer or thresher in her ears. Death would have been a blessed silence in comparison with this reminder that she was still alive. It was deafening. She wished she could die.

  As she struggled with consciousness, she found herself piecing together what had happened, sorting out the pieces of recent memory, though she yearned to simply let go of them and slip away. She had spent the past two weeks on the run, travelling mostly by night, stealing food from the farms and holdings she passed in order to survive. At first the desire for stolen orah-energy had been overwhelming, the lack of it a grinding misery. But as the days passed the sensation had ebbed and become less troublesome. Simple survival, and most of all the need to escape the Envoy’s curses, had preoccupied her. She had lived from moment to moment and shelter to shelter, always harried by the infernal birds, unable to snatch more than an hour of broken sleep at a time or a mouthful of raw root to stave off hunger. On the few occasions she had found a secure bolt-hole to spend the night in — a dry rain-well, a rundown shed with a door that locked from the inside, a derelict bird-keep — she passed out for long periods, losing hours, perhaps days to oblivion. Time became warped in its passage. And even space seemed now to have left its normal parameters behind. Where in the Tree was she? And what was this unbearable pounding noise about her head? She had emerged from a period of forgiving blankness, but her final memory was not of finding refuge. She must have lost consciousness, she thought, during the last attack of the birds.

  The curses had assailed her again while she was trying to cross a stretch of exposed road. It had been a savage onslaught, worse than the previous ones. She had tried to use a piece of canvas salvaged from a vinefield to protect herself, unable to fight off the curses any longer with rolls of parchment. And then — what? She must have fainted from pain and fatigue; the birds would have had her at their mercy. But that particular doom had been replaced by another, deafening one. Her eyes blinked open, wandered over the curved ceiling of a structure shuddering with the noise. She was lying on the floor of a vehicle. Her skin was covered in lesions, crawling with the bloody memory of beak and claw. Abruptly, she identified the thudding noise coming from above. The Freeholders’ machine! She struggled up to a sitting position, almost shouting aloud with joy. She was safe!

  But the hope that had flared briefly in her heart was snuffed out as her eyes focused on the figure before her, seated on one of the air-chariot’s benches.

  ‘How are you feeling, Jedda?’ asked Wick solicit
ously.

  She gazed at him in speechless dismay. The acolyte’s words were as smooth as his face, but something hateful juddered beneath them, like the noise of the engine, causing her to shrink back. So this was the machine that had accompanied her on her first voyage to Argos city, the Lyla. And this was the boy she had watched suck the life out of Pallas, as if her countryman were a tender morsel to be feasted upon rather than a human being. She wanted to scream at Wick that she felt awful, thank you, and that his presence did nothing to improve matters, but a glance at who was manning the air-chariot’s controls caused the retort to die on her lips. The sight of Gowron’s familiar form dredged up a rush of unpleasant memories. The older acolyte seemed to feel her horrified gaze on him, for he glanced around, leering at her.

  ‘Welcome back to the world of the living, doll,’ he said. ‘Lucky for you we dropped by, eh?’

  She did not answer, not trusting herself to speak to Gowron just yet. These two would not have rescued her from the birds out of any humane motivation, she knew. The realisation that they could now be taking her straight back to Lace, after all she had endured, caused her heart to quail. Painfully, she manoeuvred her aching limbs up from the floor. The skin of her face, neck and hands was raw, scored by cruel marks. None of the wounds on its own was particularly deep or dangerous, but the sum total was torture. She installed herself gingerly on the bench opposite Wick.

  ‘Are you taking me back to the seminary?’ she asked the young acolyte.

  ‘Oh no,’ he assured her. ‘The master’s pretty angry with you — as you can probably guess.’ He watched her intently as she shivered with pain and fatigue under her torn clothes. When she said nothing, he pressed on. ‘He’s the one who sent the birds, you know,’ he added, with smug commiseration. ‘If we go back he’ll have you thrown in prison. Or worse.’