Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  ‘Where are you off to, Bolas?’ grunted one of his companions as he hopped across the cabin towards the door.

  ‘This place stinks of chamber pots,’ Bolas replied. ‘I’ve had enough of it: I’m going to sniff out the Storm.’

  It was hard to stagger along on his crutch with the ship listing wildly, and harder to open the latch with one hand, but he was determined to do it. No one called him back as the door slammed shut.

  Gingerly, he negotiated the corridor outside the ward, following the sound of singing. He was not familiar with the layout of this dirigible, but guessed he would have to go down at least one more flight of stairs before reaching the hold. He passed steps leading up on his right to an open hatch in the deck, and flattened himself against the opposite wall as someone thudded by the entrance, calling for more rope. He was not sure if he were more fearful of hurting himself, or of getting caught by Swallow. At last, he reached the other end of the corridor and found it blessedly equipped with a stairwell to the lower levels. Step by step he descended, leaning on the handrail, while the voices of the Jays rose ghostly from below, and the wind rattled outside. Foot followed crutch as he went down, drawing ever closer to the haunting chant. Just as he reached the last step, another strong gust of wind hit the dirigible and he almost fell again, slamming his right hip against the door at the bottom of the stairs.

  He leaned against it to catch his breath and stop his heart from racing. Footsteps echoed dimly on the deck above, accompanied by renewed cries from the sailors. Through them the voices of the Jays chanted in descending harmony.

  Ye are the call raised at the break of day,

  The trumpet blast to banish darkness and dismay.

  Bolas opened the door to find himself in a long and lightless corridor, illuminated only by air-shafts leading to the deck two floors higher. There were closed hatches on either side of the corridor, extending the full length of the hold. He guessed from the odour of frogapples, mixed with lint, that he had entered the storage area of the hospice ship. The corridor pitched and creaked alarmingly as he hobbled towards the reinforced hardwood door at the far end. It had a barred hatch for passing food and water to the prisoners, and it was through this opening that the Jays’ voices came.

  Only when he finally reached it, panting with the effort, did Bolas realise his folly. Why had he come all the way down here? Whatever was he going to say to the Jays? As it turned out, he did not have to say anything because, at that moment, the dirigible tilted violently. His crutch slipped from his grasp and clattered away; he lost his balance and went crashing to the floor with a yelp of pain.

  The singing stopped abruptly, and there was an immediate scuffle on the other side of the door. As Bolas struggled up into a sitting position, nursing his half-leg, he heard a whisper through the barred hatch.

  ‘Who’s there?’ said a voice. It was a woman’s. Bolas cursed himself for his stupidity: she would be able to see him lying there, helpless and legless on the floor.

  ‘Friend?’ enquired the voice, again.

  Bolas caught a glimpse of a dirty face peering down at him through the opening, eyes white in the gloom. He took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he answered, after a beat.

  In the pause that followed, the alarm horn sounded dimly for the second time. ‘It’s a bad storm,’ Bolas muttered, aware of the futility of the remark as the ship was buffeted by the wind.

  ‘This is no storm,’ said the girl quietly. ‘It’s the end of the world.’

  Bolas was taken aback. He had heard about the Jays and their odd beliefs, but had not expected anything quite so apocalyptic, on such short acquaintance. He groped on the floor for his crutch, rising with difficulty. He could barely see the girl’s face through the hatch, a smudged grey oval framed with black and pierced by two gleaming eyes. He remembered that he should be offering the Jays his condolences.

  ‘One of you died, I think, before we left Marak Harbour?’ he asked uncertainly.

  The girl’s gaze was luminous between the bars. ‘My partner,’ she answered. ‘He was beaten to death by the Saint’s soldiers.’ And when Bolas could not speak, chagrined, she added, as if it explained everything, ‘They took him for a traitor.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Bolas finally said. He was depressed to be involved in such a loss, if only by association. ‘They’re ignorant, that lot, and brutal, and they’ve been lied to.’

  The girl might have shrugged, a slight shift in the darkness behind the door, sidestepping issues of pardon or blame. ‘You’re also wounded, I see,’ she said. ‘Are you a soldier, too?’

  ‘Hardly,’ he mumbled, embarrassed by the stark difference between the loss of life and the loss of a leg. ‘I never even fought. Just an accident with blast-poison.’

  ‘No accident,’ the Jay said. ‘Caro’s men rigged the cask.’

  Her assurance surprised Bolas. He tried to recall the gossip circulating in the cabin a week before. ‘You mean the Nurian with yellow hair?’ he asked.

  ‘Tanata, our host and Nurian sister in Marak, knew Caro,’ the girl explained. ‘She told Anise about the attack, and he tried to warn the Argosian captain on that ship. But they didn’t believe him. They arrested him, instead.’

  Bolas winced as another roll of the vessel almost sent him hurtling against the opposite wall. He imagined the Jay trying to reason with the soldiers, trying to tell them something about a cask of Treesap wine, and being bludgeoned into silence. Anise: where had he heard the name before?

  ‘Why did they arrest you?’ he asked the girl.

  ‘For distributing what they call “rebel tracts”.’ There was a further gleam of the Jay girl’s teeth as she smiled through the bars.

  Her cellmates had evidently decided Bolas was no threat, for their voices rose up again in harmony from behind the door. Although the wind had grown fierce once more, rattling the hull, their chant throbbed like the still heart of the storm.

  Before you, armies lay their arms to rest

  And ravening beasts learn gentleness.

  ‘What are those words?’ Bolas asked the girl behind the bars. That, he realised, was what he had come down here to find out. ‘Why are you singing them?’

  ‘The words of the Kion,’ she replied. ‘We sing them because we believe in her. That’s what we were arrested for — bringing Samiha’s promise back to Nur.’

  At the sound of the Kion’s name, the others broke off their chant, calling out from behind the door.

  ‘The promise of peace!’ cried one.

  ‘The words of the angel,’ said another, followed by a babble of other voices.

  ‘She who rose up from the temple into the sky.’

  ‘She who fell into the Storm and returned.’

  Bolas found the intense ardour of the Jays easier to take in song, rather than speech. ‘I know she died,’ he interrupted them impatiently. ‘But how did her testament come to you?’

  ‘Samiha’s song belongs to everyone,’ said the girl behind the bars. ‘But we have it because the Syon entrusted it to us.’

  ‘The Syon!’ echoed the Jays behind her. ‘Her flaming messenger!’

  ‘Whoa, just a minute.’ Bolas shut his eyes and pressed himself against the door as the dirigible pitched and swayed. He had heard that word, Syon, before as well — heard it in Tymon’s tale of his adventures, related in Masha’s apartment many weeks ago. And then he remembered the Jays who had given shelter to his friend. Anise and Jocaste.

  ‘You knew Tymon!’ he blurted out. ‘You’re the ones who brought him to Argos city! Is your name Jocaste?’ he asked the girl belatedly.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, a faint note of surprise in her voice. ‘How did you know? The soldiers never asked.’

  ‘Tymon told me about you. He’s my friend, too,’ said Bolas, thinking with regret of what Tymon had done in Argos. ‘He gave himself up to save me from jail …’

  ‘Syon!’ breathed the Jays, in a rustling whisper.

  ‘The Syon is a friend to all in ne
ed.’ Jocaste’s tone had the conviction of fervent belief. ‘Our peace depends upon him.’

  Their suffering had made them fanatics, thought Bolas suddenly. They had come to think of Tymon and Samiha as prophets of change and doom, spinning fantasies out of the lives of ordinary people, to give themselves hope. He wondered what violence Jocaste must have suffered for her to speak in that fervent tone, clinging to the idea of peace.

  ‘Peace will come, you know,’ she said softly, as if sensing his thoughts.

  ‘Will it?’ Bolas replied, glum.

  Despite the Jays’ optimism, it did not seem a likely prospect, with the threat of the Saint’s crusades and the ship shaking and quaking about their ears. There was something different about this storm, Bolas thought, with a stab of uneasiness. It was not like the winter tempests he had seen on the way over to Marak. The turbulence came from below, buffeting the ship like a leaf, and he was hearing strange sounds, a groaning and cracking of wood in the distance, ominous to his ears. After each long, tearing crack came an echoing boom of finality. It sounded, almost unthinkably, like the ruin of entire branches.

  ‘How can you be so sure of that?’ he asked Jocaste.

  ‘Because Samiha said so,’ the girl answered, her logic unabashedly circular. And the voices of the Jays filled the air. ‘Our green lady,’ they whispered. ‘Our prophetess.’

  ‘But she told us the world would end, first,’ continued Jocaste. ‘Before peace comes the test. Before light comes the fire. This is just the beginning.’

  This is the Fire, this the test, sang the Jays. The promise kept and all signs manifest.

  Another heart-wrenching crack echoed through the hull. ‘Good grief!’ gasped Bolas, staggering back from the door. ‘If that really is the canopy breaking apart, then we could be swept into the Maelstrom!’

  ‘No, friend,’ said Jocaste fervently. ‘We will be swept into a new world.’

  Bolas frowned. More fanaticism? How could the world be new, if it were ending? But before he could reply there was a cry from above, a panicked shout from the lookout. Something was happening outside. He had to go on deck, thought Bolas. At the risk of Swallow’s rage, he had to climb upstairs and see what was going on.

  The sun had set, blood-red in the west, by the time Bolas finally staggered up to the deck. No one reprimanded him for being there, for all the ship’s crew and not a few of the wounded were already glued to the deck-rail, peering through the twigs where the dirigible was moored. The gale had lasted two hours and devastated the south fringes of the Central Canopy, stripping foliage from the twigs. No rain had fallen, but every surface of the dirigible was coated with broken bark dust, littered with leaf-shards. Some of the ether sacks had snapped off their tethers, and the safety balloons were torn from their struts and swept away. It was clear that the hospice ship had been lucky to survive at all. But as the moon rose, equally red over a disturbingly low eastern horizon, and flocks of screaming margeese flew high above the ship in droves, the sailors realised that something far more terrible than a storm had occurred. Nothing the Jays had said could have prepared Bolas for the sight that met his eyes as he approached the deck-rail.

  To the south, through the wind-bared twigs, he glimpsed a huge cloud of red dust, hanging like a glittering mushroom over the South Canopy. But instead of the misty reaches of the Lantrian leaf-table spreading below him in the evening light, instead of the rolling plateau of green where the Lantrian mines and the Spur of Sails and the Grand Duchy of Lant should have been, there was — nothing.

  There was no South Canopy to be seen under the lurid moon. In its place was a New Gap, a southern Void as fathomless as the eastern one was wide. But this Gap was transparent: there was a clear hole in the cloud that had replaced the canopy, quite empty but for wisps of gathering mist. The ship was overlooking a well of nothingness. And through that gaping hole, in the gathering twilight of that unquiet evening, Bolas glimpsed something else, something dark and solid-seeming under the blood-tinged rags and whirling tatters of the Storm.

  ‘Lacuna,’ he whispered, remembering the old tale in amazement.

  The cold of the Veil was absolute, the stars above the plain of ice no more than faraway pinpricks in the dark. A breeze rose up, whipping ice-particles into a vortex in the sky, then died down again, leaving cold, glittering silence in its wake.

  A moment later, abrupt as a thunderclap, the icy surface of the Veil cracked open, revealing a black and jagged fissure. As the sides of the hole groaned apart, tall figures were thrown up like flotsam onto the floor of the prison world, rigid and frozen themselves. They were spewed out to lean drunkenly against each other, broken statues vomited up on the plain of ice. Then the fissure snapped shut and the Masters stood speechless, stunned into temporary submission, their faces angled up towards the stars. At that instant, they fleetingly resembled creatures of Matrya’s ilk, their wide eyes and deep foreheads marked with the traces of lost wisdom.

  The resemblance did not last for long. The Masters soon shook free from the torpor of the ice, the glittering particles streaming from their shoulders as they stirred and settled themselves into their familiar humps of shadow again. Their shapes wavered, their features losing definition. They discarded all hint of ancient majesty, and opted instead for vague, ill-fitting crowns and cloaks, a mere echo of kingliness.

  ‘Well, at least we’re rid of Matrya,’ said one, spitting out the name with the last of the ice-dust on his lips. ‘It took a whole canopy to kill her, but we did it.’

  Hollow laughter greeted this comment, an attempt at triumphant bravado from the other Masters, but it soon died out, leaving uncertain silence.

  ‘Shame we lost the boy’s body, though,’ opined a second.

  ‘Cursed human vermin,’ said a third, drawing his tattered robes about him haughtily. ‘We don’t need their filthy bodies, anyway.’

  ‘But what about the Key?’ asked another. ‘It wasn’t where we thought it would be: the acolytes were mistaken in their choice, it seems. We all were.’

  There was an uncomfortable pause as the Masters brooded over this fact, hunched in their shadowy remnants. ‘She tricked us,’ complained the first. ‘Matrya. She let us think the Key was a prize, an object to be won.’

  ‘She led us astray,’ said the others. ‘She lied to us.’

  ‘So, what now?’ persisted the one who had asked the question about the Key. ‘Matrya may be gone, but we have a new enemy. What should we do?’

  His comments provoked a ripple of nervous reaction. The Masters glanced up at the sky, as if they felt themselves watched over by some nebulous foe. ‘Wait and see, wait and see,’ they whispered. ‘We’ll gather our strength, to fight again another day.’

  ‘There is, of course, something else we could do,’ put in the questioner.

  He seemed less sure than his companions, his expression torn between pride and dim hope as he frowned up at the stars. ‘We could sue for mercy,’ he said doubtfully. ‘We could make an appeal to the New Authority, now that the Old One has gone. We were told we could appeal.’

  His comment was met by stony silence in the group. The other Masters seemed almost frozen in place, looming figures in the gloom. No one spoke a word.

  ‘Or perhaps not,’ mumbled the questioner, after a moment, faced with this mute resistance. ‘Perhaps that won’t do.’

  He said no more. There was silence in the circle of the Masters, beneath the starry dome of the night sky; silence in the black and frozen wasteland of the Veil.

  23

  The noise was coming from above. Tymon struggled back to consciousness, feeling the thud of it in his veins, sensing a haze of red through his closed eyelids. He wondered dimly whether more Collectors had found him, and whether he would wake up in the execution chamber again. But that was impossible, he reasoned sleepily. The chamber had been destroyed and, besides, he was feeling warm all over; the hall of the living dead had been ice cold. Or perhaps the glow he felt pulsing on his eyelids was
some fearful weapon Wick or the Masters were wielding over him. But no, he remembered with a pang of aching sorrow. Wick had wielded his weapon already, to devastating effect.

  The innocence of sleep fled, and the image of Samiha lying dead in his lap flooded back to Tymon. He was no longer angry, no longer blaming himself or others. But his will to live seemed to have fled along with his fury. Now that Samiha really was gone, he felt that nothing he could do would ever matter. And with that thought settling in his chest like one of the sharp rocks of the World Below, he rolled over with a groan, and hid his face in his arms.

  But the steady thrumming continued, insistent, mocking his despair. The noise grew louder, and the air grew warmer. That was when he finally opened his eyes and glanced about him. The first things he saw were the heads of his sleeping companions, lying on the green grass nearby. Zero’s hair was the colour of fire and Jedda’s matted curls gleamed like orah. Tymon blinked at the angelic creatures beside him in amazement: had they died after all, and was this the heaven the priests of Argos always talked about, where the faces of the blessed shone and their hair was spun of sunbeams and flame? And yet these angels looked decidedly grubby. Their faces were streaked with dust and tears, and Jedda’s cheek bore a long red gash from Wick’s knife stroke.

  The light, Tymon realised, came from the sun itself. Long shafts of sunlight shone down through the fitful gaps in the Storm, bathing his friends’ forms in a halo of warmth, and casting a pink and yellow glow over the grassy slope. He blinked up through the ring of rock sentinels, at the bright rays spilling through the clouds in the east. And then he saw the specks moving against the light, soaring high over the plain at the foot of the Tree, still plunged in shadow. A line of them, dotted across the low clouds.