Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  He stood up, trembling, his breath rasping under the mask. ‘I need some air,’ he mumbled to Gowron’s uncaring back. ‘I’ll return in a moment.’

  Jedda had been watching from a distance as the two acolytes knelt by the door, spitting their bile at each other in mounting disagreement. Throughout the altercation, she had been furtively rubbing the rope bound about her wrists against the rough slope of bark behind her, hoping to fray the knot. She had been obliged to halt her attempts when Wick stood up and strode down the beach towards her. He did not appear to notice what she was doing, however, his expression frozen with hatred; he only retrieved a large hunk of water-smoothed bark from the loam, weighing it in his hand as if gauging it as a weapon. Then he discarded it.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked him.

  He did not answer, pacing to and fro on the beach in silence. From time to time he picked up and tested the weight of a fragment of wood, or one of the larger lumps of hard loam. There was an odd light in his eyes, she noticed, the unhinged gleam of madness. It sent a shiver down her spine. She wondered how she was ever going to escape him: the longer she waited, trapped there as the minutes of the cloudy afternoon slipped by, the further Tymon strayed out of her reach. She had lied to Wick regarding her twining partner’s position, for the pull of the link had grown fainter over the past hour, indicating that Tymon was moving away. The knowledge of it made her seethe with impatience.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?’ she tried again, in an attempt to engage Wick. ‘I might be able to help.’

  He stopped to survey her, then, as if he had just seen her for the first time. ‘I doubt it, sweetheart,’ he rasped. His smile was ghastly now.

  ‘Try me. I might be able to open that door for you.’

  ‘No, no.’ He shook a slightly manic finger at her. ‘Don’t you start trying to wheedle information out of me. Can’t have that. Oh, which reminds me. There’s something I should have done a while ago.’

  He squatted down beside her and, with a flick of his small belt-knife, ripped out a section from the hem of her borrowed cloak.

  ‘Oh, not that,’ she pleaded, as he lifted the strip of cloth over her eyes. ‘What if your friend over there decides to bother me again, and I don’t see him coming? It’s bad enough that I’m tied and can’t keep him off. Actually, I was going to beg you to cut at least the leg ropes. Where would I go down here? I’d starve to death if I left you. Please, Wick.’

  The young acolyte hesitated. The mad light faded from his eyes, and a more ordinary cruelty, an enjoyment of her dependence, replaced it. He gazed at her with hard satisfaction, as if she were a prizewinning herd-beast he was just beginning to break in. ‘What guarantee do I have you’re going to behave yourself?’ he murmured.

  It did not please Jedda to deceive even her enemy, but she told herself this was the only way to help Tymon. She picked up on the note of conceit in Wick’s voice, and played on it. ‘I was mean to you at the seminary,’ she said, dropping her voice and peering at Gowron on the other side of the beach; he still had his back to them. ‘I was too proud, and didn’t know a good thing when I saw it. I regret what I said to you, that first day, when you came up to my room.’

  ‘Ah?’ Wick’s eyebrows lifted, two perfect arcs on that smooth, unblemished face. ‘So, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘This,’ she said.

  As she spoke, Gowron struck the grey slab with the flat of his hand, clearly frustrated with his failure to open the door. Jedda took advantage of his preoccupation to lean closer to Wick. It’s Varana all over again, she thought gloomily, as she planted a kiss on his lips.

  She did not feel the slightest attraction to the young acolyte. In fact, his gangling frame and smooth, cherubic face repelled her. But she had not expected to find an actual, physical barrier between them. It was as if Wick’s lips were encased in an invisible shell. She pulled back from him in perplexity. He did not notice her reaction, however, his smile self-satisfied again.

  ‘Oho,’ he breathed. ‘It’s like that, is it? Well, you might just have yourself a deal.’ He unsheathed his knife to saw through the cord on her ankles, kneeling by her side on the gravelly loam. ‘The rest comes off later,’ he grinned. ‘When I’ve seen how well you behave.’

  False face. Was it the Oracle’s voice? Jedda was not sure where the words echoing in her mind had come from, as Wick helped her to her feet and drew her towards him again, still smugly smiling. There was no further sign of her teacher after those two brief syllables. But when Wick pulled her close, glancing surreptitiously over his shoulder at Gowron, she finally saw it: saw why she had been troubled by his expression for days now, by the jarring reality beneath that smooth smile. For a fleeting instant, she glimpsed his true features, hidden beneath a powerful Seeming of normality. His real face was wounded beyond recognition, a map of bubbling blisters and cratered burns.

  ‘Ama?’ she gasped in shock, reaching out for reassurance from her absent teacher. Then she bit her lip at having spoken the Oracle’s name aloud.

  ‘What?’ asked Wick. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied, shaken by a rush of unanticipated pity for Wick. What happened to him? she cried to her teacher silently. But the Oracle was gone, or else had never returned. Jedda was alone with her maimed and twisted companion.

  He must have received the horrific injuries after she had left Argos city, she thought, for she could have sworn he did not have them on the fateful morning before the Kion’s execution. The Seeming that disguised him was strong, the illusion breached only a moment before the false smile was back again. Now that Jedda knew the truth, however, Wick’s expression seemed as rigid as a wax cast. Everything about him was hollow, a lie. Only his eyes blinked at her with any semblance of humanity. Her stomach churned as he bent towards her with that perfect, smiling mouth, but it was the smooth falsehood of the Seeming, rather than what lay beneath, that sickened her. The brush of those unreal lips almost caused her to cry aloud in horror. She stood as rigid as a statue.

  ‘What,’ Wick whispered in her ear, as he ran his hands over her shoulders and breasts, ‘what in heaven’s name do you wear, stuffed up inside your undershirt like that? It feels like paper.’

  Jedda felt her heart skip a beat as Wick plucked one of the pages of the testament out of her bodice. Her hands were still tied, and she could not snatch it back.

  ‘If you can do that — if you can unbind yourself from wanting and winning — then we will meet again at the heart of the world, where all divisions cease,’ Wick read with a sarcastic flourish. ‘What’s all this nonsense?’ he snorted.

  Jedda stared at him, speechless with terror. If he realised what she carried, if he so much as guessed that the verses were addressed to Tymon, he would destroy them and kill her immediately. She waited in anguish. In that same instant, she would have given anything — her chances at safety or comfort, body and soul — to keep Samiha’s words intact. But Wick appeared to have already lost interest in the testament. Incredibly, he let the loose leaf slip from his fingers, and swaggered up to Jedda again.

  ‘Reading romances, are you?’ he murmured, with an attempt at suavity. ‘I could show you another way to keep warm.’

  She could not help it. She jerked away from him as he drew close, unable to bear the cold brush of that death-mask. He took hold of her shoulders and held her in place, frowning a little as he bent towards her. But she could not abide his proximity and turned her face away.

  He was silent, then. When she looked up at him, she found that his smug smile had disappeared. There was no need for words. The look they exchanged was the final admission. She saw him as he was, and he knew that she did. For an instant, there was a spark of something like hurt in the acolyte’s eyes. He would think she spurned him out of squeamish disgust for his injuries, she realised. Her heart was wrung once more with pity for this cruel, broken boy, who hid from everything and everyone, including himself. A moment
later, Wick’s vulnerability was gone: cynicism closed over his face like a shutter, and his eyes became veiled.

  ‘So, can’t bring yourself to touch a cripple, eh?’ he whispered. ‘That’s a shame. It might have saved you some trouble. Maybe you’ll feel differently tonight, when there’s two of us to hold you down.’

  Jedda’s eyes jerked instinctively towards Gowron. The older acolyte had given up whatever battle he was having with the door and had thrown himself down in exasperation on the piled loam, his head in his hands. ‘Green grace,’ he could be heard swearing. ‘None of ’em. Not a single, green, blooming mother of ’em.’

  ‘It’s not you, Wick —’ Jedda began.

  ‘Save it,’ interrupted her captor with a dry laugh, as he retrieved the discarded length of rope, and made her sit down on the wet silt, securing her ankles. ‘You know, you really had me taken in for a while there. Oh, I didn’t believe it was love or anything, I don’t ask for that much.’ The mad gleam was back in his eye, his grin the cackling grimace of a skull. ‘But I thought: “She’s a reasonable lass, she sees what I can do for her. We can be civilised about this.” That’ll teach me.’

  His voice had become harsh and wheezing, each phrase accompanied by a savage pull of the rope. He tied her legs far more securely this time, kicking off her boots and pulling the knots tight around her ankles. When he had finished, he picked up the strip of torn cloth from where it lay on the beach. But he did not bind it about her eyes, weighing it in his hand as he watched her.

  ‘I was going to protect you with this,’ he said in a low, vindictive murmur. ‘The less you knew about our mission here in the World Below, the more likely Gowron would have been to let you live. But now, I don’t really care what he does with you. As you seem to be calling on your Ama to help you, you might as well know. She won’t. She never will again.’

  He bent close to her, smiling cruelly. ‘We’re going to finish the job you couldn’t do in Cherk Harbour,’ he continued. ‘We’re going to kill your stinking Nurian Oracle, once and for all. We’ve found her real body. It’s buried beyond that door. And we’re going to get in eventually, believe me.’

  ‘No, Wick,’ she exclaimed. ‘You mustn’t. You have no idea what you’re doing.’

  But he had already turned his back on her, and was walking away, crunching up the beach towards Gowron.

  ‘No,’ she said again, despairing, and bowed her forehead to her knees.

  She had no doubt whatsoever that the Oracle was aware of the danger. Her teacher had refrained from mentioning the threat to herself, and begged her to help Tymon instead. And now, Jedda thought in anguish, she was unable to help either of them. It was agonising, her weakness; it was a trial to her as it had never been before. She yearned for one last possibility of escape, regretting again her decision to throw away the orah, and more bitterly still her inability to put up with Wick’s mask of lies. The dampness of the silt seeped through her stockings as she cried tears of frustration into her knees. Nearby, on the beach, the page discarded by Wick tumbled back and forth on the wet black lakeshore, worried by the breeze.

  After a few minutes, however, Jedda raised her head, a slow hope dawning in her heart. The quality of the fluttering connection in her belly had changed. Tymon was no longer moving away from her, but drawing steadily closer.

  17

  Tymon bent down to inspect the crumpled form of the creature that had attacked him in the ruins of the city. He had followed and incapacitated the thing, at Samiha’s direction, with a few more lumps of the heavy stuff she called rock. When the creature lay helpless, softly whirring and clicking at him through invisible mandibles, he had crushed it with a final massive rock slab he could barely lift, beneath which it had fallen silent at last.

  On heaving up the slab, he found the so-called demon flattened, its stick-limbs folded up for all the world like a dead spider. It was covered in clumps of reddish fur, festooned with fragments of cloth and other objects unrecognisable to him at first. Now, on closer inspection, he realised the dangling materials were all foreign matter affixed to a squatly spherical core. The inner body and legs were made of the same unyielding substance as the broom-handle, a dull grey colour. When he reached out cautiously to poke the sphere with his index finger, he found it warm and hard to the touch.

  ‘They’re called Collectors,’ said Samiha, hovering at his elbow. ‘Machines the Ancients made to guard and clean their cities. They have a rudimentary intelligence, but they aren’t alive.’ She peered in distaste at the amalgam of materials stuck to the creature’s body. ‘The program must be corrupted. Look at all these trophies,’ she muttered to herself.

  Trophies. As she said it, Tymon realised with a prickling rush of revulsion what was actually stuck to the Collector’s body. Tufts of human hair hung from its back, bleached red by time. Fragments of bone and other organic remains he shrank from identifying were carefully stuck to its greyish belly with gobs of adhesive. He glimpsed a tiny straw effigy dangling between its legs, of the kind thrown into the Void by mourners during a funeral service; the ragged ends of cloth, he realised as he jerked his hand away from the Collector in disgust, were fragments of white shroud.

  ‘By the bells!’ he gasped, scrambling to his feet. ‘It’s been collecting parts of corpses! Things that fell from the Tree — it’s scavenged them!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Samiha, gazing thoughtfully at the broken machine. ‘That would be logical, very like a Collector. It was originally built to guard and maintain … bodies. It has degenerated. Well. We should go now.’ She roused herself, brisk again. ‘Come, Tymon, before more of these things find us.’

  Tymon did not need to be told twice. ‘What would it have done to me, if I hadn’t stopped it?’ he asked, shuddering, as he followed her glowing silhouette over the rubble.

  ‘It would have collected you,’ she said simply. ‘As it does the other remains it finds. That’s what it thinks it must do.’

  ‘How can a machine think?’ he objected.

  ‘How can you think?’ she countered from several paces ahead, without turning around. ‘In a sense, you’re like a more nuanced version of that machine. The Born made your ancestors, and your ancestors made the Collectors. It’s possible, I assure you.’

  It might have been possible, but the idea disturbed Tymon more than he cared to admit as he hurried after Samiha. When she had first murmured her story to him of the idyllic life shared by the Born and their creations, he had thought of the sacred ties of family. The relationship between the Born and humanity had seemed to him like that of parent and child. Now, as Samiha threw out the comparison with the machine, he was taken aback. Could the analogy be appropriate? Was he just a mechanical, half-living thing to her, an organic machine endowed with rudimentary intelligence — rather like the Envoy’s constructs? Jedda’s accusations in Argos city drifted back to him, half-remembered. They cultivate us.

  He pushed away the thought as merely a product of his own fears and anxieties. Samiha loved and respected him; he was simply on edge, he thought, troubled by his strange surroundings. But his unease remained, threading through his shame at how he had treated Zero. He could no longer bring himself to call his friend’s intervention an attack, and the taste of his own dismay lingered, a bitterness in his mouth. The eager daze that had taken hold of him in the Tree-tunnels had begun to wear off: he no longer followed Samiha without a thought for the consequences. As he trudged after her through the ruins, eyeing the shadows between the gutted towers for any sign of the Collectors, he found himself questioning certain aspects of his mission for the first time.

  There were important issues about the World Below that he realised he had not considered. Was this the same region the Explorers had visited on their journeys, where the Dean had recovered his orah-clock and the Doctor had found his abominable chair? He had so far seen no evidence of any expedition, old or new, in the ruins or near the base of the Tree. Of course, Argos city was hundreds of miles away, and any trac
es the Explorers might have left behind would likely be closer to that point of origin. The idea reminded Tymon of the sheer distances involved in transferring Samiha from the place of her execution to this location, a journey of at least three weeks in an ordinary dirigible. It was odd, he thought to himself as he walked, that in all the time he had spent in the wide-open spaces of the World Below, he had seen no indication of the Envoy’s servants — unless it was the unexplained flashes of light. Who had brought Samiha’s body all the way from Argos? Who kept her prisoner now? Might she herself have worked out that puzzle, as she appeared to have worked out so much else since he first found her in the Tree-mine?

  But before he could open his mouth to speak to her about it, he glimpsed a sight ahead that banished all other considerations. In front of them, on the summit of a gentle slope, a building had come into view. Though ancient and weathered by the elements, this construction was not a gutted remnant, like the others in the ruined city. It was free-standing and rectangular, its peaked roof intact and made of what appeared to be overlapping tiles. The whole building was more than two hundred feet long and at least three storeys high, built of a whitish-grey substance like rock. Fluted columns ran along its four sides, enclosing a portico that reminded Tymon very much of the temple Hall in Argos city. In fact, his first reaction was that it must be a place of worship. There was even a decorative frieze on the triangular pediment that depicted human figures, so eroded over time as to be almost invisible. A long flight of stairs led up to a porch on the front façade, and beyond that to a pair of gigantic double doors, fashioned from what appeared to be a yellowish polished hardwood.