Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  His heart misgave: were these the Envoy’s infernal curses once again? Had Lace found them, even here? But it was the specks that made the thrumming sound, he realised, and after a moment he recognised the distinctive silhouettes of the new air-chariots. There was a whole squadron of them. The Freeholders had come!

  He scrambled up, staring at the five thrumming machines for a moment in disbelief. Then he leapt out of the ring of rocks with a cry, waving frantically to catch the attention of the air-chariots. But it seemed the pilots had already seen him. The machines were descending in slow spirals towards a patch of level ground about three hundred feet below, a grassy hillock on the lower slopes of the mountain.

  ‘Zero! Jedda!’ shouted Tymon over his shoulder to his sleeping companions. ‘Look who’s come for us!’

  As the others sat up, rubbing their eyes and gazing at the arriving squadron in wonder, he began to run down the slope, tripping on the rocks and skidding on the earth to reach the place where the air-chariots had alighted. Soldiers in the long Farhang cloaks were the first to descend from the machines, equipped with crossbows and striding purposefully out to secure the perimeter of the hillock. They nodded to Tymon as he skidded to the bottom of the slope, but did not approach him. It was only when Oren and Noni stepped out of one of the air-chariots and ran to meet him, beaming with joy, did he realise there had been no need to try to signal their attention. His fellow Grafters had Seen him from afar.

  An instant later, he was in their arms. It had been so long since he had tried to contact the Focals, that the first words out of his mouth as they drew apart were a chagrined apology.

  ‘I never kept in touch,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry, my friends.’

  ‘It’s we who are sorry,’ answered Noni. ‘We couldn’t get through to you — we gave you up for dead. If it wasn’t for the old scientist insisting on your behalf, we’d have gone on thinking there was nothing to find, just because we couldn’t See it.’

  ‘Even so, fog only lifts from our Sight last night,’ said Oren, his merrily truncated Argosian now a balm to Tymon’s ears. ‘We do not know why: it is miracle. Before that, blindness was cloud.’

  ‘That’s partly my fault,’ Tymon confessed, shamefaced. ‘Since leaving you at the mine, Noni, I’ve made some horrible mistakes —’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault!’ interrupted Jedda as she slithered down to the foot of the slope to join them. High above, Zero could be seen negotiating a slower descent of the mountain. ‘The Envoy and his Masters are to blame for everything,’ Jedda continued, appealing to Oren and Noni. ‘Tymon’s been through Hell. Don’t let him tell you otherwise.’

  ‘And you brought me back from it,’ answered Tymon, widening their circle to include her, though the two Freeholders stiffened slightly at Jedda’s approach. They had not spoken to her since she defected, Tymon remembered.

  ‘Jedda saved my life, you know,’ he told them gently. ‘She rescued me from the Veil. It’s a long story.’

  ‘It seems we all have tales to tell each other,’ said Noni, inclining her head in a restrained but kindly greeting to the red-faced Jedda.

  ‘Well, I’m glad of that,’ called out a familiar, jovial voice. ‘I love stories, and anyone who manages to prevent this young scamp from throwing his life away deserves my hearty thanks!’

  Tymon turned around, with a thrill of surprise, to see a frail figure being helped out of the Grafters’ air-chariot by Gardan. When Noni had mentioned Galliano, he had not thought the scientist would have accompanied the Freeholders himself.

  ‘Apu!’ he cried in amazement. ‘You’re here!’

  ‘Did you really expect me to miss out on a trip to the World Below?’ scolded Galliano, his sightless eyes fixed unerringly on Tymon. ‘I almost thought I’d have to do it without you, though.’

  ‘Well, I’m here now,’ said Tymon, as he squeezed his old friend in a tight embrace. ‘You’ve fulfilled the old dream after all, Apu. And you’ve brought company, it seems!’

  Judges from both Farhang and Sheb, as well as others who appeared from the subtle differences in their clothes and dialect to come from further afield, were stepping out of the rest of the air-chariots. They paid Tymon and Jedda little heed, absorbed in the spectacle of the widespread destruction of the South Canopy, laid out below them in the morning light. About twenty Freeholders had travelled to the World Below, and they were clearly not all there to rescue the fugitives.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Galliano nodded vigorously to Tymon. ‘It’s everyone’s dream now. Everyone wants to see Lacuna.’ He bent down with a rheumy grunt to scoop up a handful of earth from the hillock, sniffing it and rubbing the granules between his fingers. ‘And it’s all made of this stuff, they tell me, for miles and miles!’ he muttered in awe. ‘Well, well. That would account for the extra mass in the equation …’

  ‘The United Freeholds are considering establishing a base in the World Below,’ put in Gardan, stepping up to shake Tymon’s hand with a smile, though her expression grew more reserved as she set eyes on Jedda. ‘We’ve survived one of the Saint’s crusades, but it won’t be long before there’s another. We have to think of alternatives. We left Farhang yesterday evening, right after the battle —’

  ‘Battle?’ interrupted Tymon, aghast. He turned to the Grafters. ‘Is this true? You’ve been attacked again?’

  ‘More long stories,’ said Oren. ‘We tell them later. Let syora go on.’

  ‘We’d just put down for the night, south of Marak,’ continued the Speaker, as Tymon subsided in embarrassment, ‘when Oren said they knew where you were. I have to say, Tymon, your friends obviously love you: between Oren, Noni and Galliano, I was given no rest until we’d agreed to travel through the night to find you. It’s a good thing there was a moon out.’

  She broke off, gazing pensively at the plain of shards below the slope. ‘Of course, by then, we knew something far more dramatic than a Tree-quake had occurred in the South, and wanted to see it for ourselves,’ she said. ‘And what a sight it is.’

  ‘The whole Lantrian leaf-table!’ exclaimed Galliano, lifting his face to sniff the wind. ‘Though the phenomenon was not entirely unpredictable. Those branches have been weakened for years.’

  ‘It’s because the Oracle died,’ sighed Tymon. Oren and Noni’s faces fell at the news. ‘And also — someone else,’ he added softly.

  He could not bring himself to say Samiha’s name, and glanced away, his chest tight. It was Jedda who came to his rescue.

  ‘The Kion wasn’t killed in Argos,’ she said to the astonished Freeholders. ‘Tymon freed her from a prison here in the World Below. But one of the Envoy’s servants followed us, and killed her last night.’

  ‘Last night,’ said Noni meaningfully to Oren. ‘When the blindness lifted.’

  Gardan seemed less impressed with Jedda’s announcement, however. ‘Another interesting tale, I’m sure,’ she noted gravely. ‘I’m sure we’ll want to hear all you have to say for yourselves in a little while — especially you, Jedhartha Aditi.’

  She fixed the young girl with her steady blue eyes, and Jedda wilted under her gaze. But Gardan did not push the matter further. ‘For now, you have travelled far and sustained great loss,’ she continued, turning back to Tymon. ‘I suggest we all eat something and replenish our strength. There are provisions in the air-chariots.’

  Zero finally reached the bottom of the slope and limped to Tymon’s side, grinning. ‘Such a fine lot of evil friends you have!’ he said approvingly, glancing about him at the Nurian judges strolling around the hillock, or gathered in small groups to inspect the earth and rocks. ‘We’ll survive anything now, Syon.’

  Although they would have seen any interloper approaching on the open slope from a mile off, no one was able to rest easy with the thought of Wick roaming free. Gardan promised Tymon and his friends, as they all sat down to eat their breakfast on the grassy hillock, that the judges would send out an air-chariot as soon as possible to scour the slopes of the mounta
in, to see if they could pinpoint the whereabouts of their enemy. The assurance was good enough for Tymon, who at that point wished never to speak of Wick again, though he knew very well he would have to relate the story of the acolyte’s attack sometime.

  For now, after a day of fasting, the simple Nurian travelling rations were a heavenly respite. No seminary banquet had ever tasted better to Tymon than this feast of dried figs, cheese and flatbread. Better yet, he was finally able to dispel his anxieties regarding the battle with the Argosians. During the meal Gardan told him the tale of how the Freeholders had prevailed against the Saint’s first crusade, despite the Envoy’s near-fatal interference. Sorcerers’ powers, it seemed, had been given a little more credence by ordinary Nurians since the encounter with the unnatural cloud. Although the battle was narrowly considered a victory for Farhang, the Freeholders were under no illusion as to their future prospects.

  ‘Fallow will fight this war for another hundred years, with or without his Envoy,’ sighed Gardan, when she had finished her account. ‘He’ll see it as a way of proving his legitimacy as the Saint. And the Argosians have ten such fleets to throw at us. They don’t need spooky clouds to wear us down! There’s nothing to stop them from doing an about-turn on the question of air-chariots, just as they did with the blast-cannons; and the day they do that, the Freeholds are finished.’

  ‘So you see, I convinced them,’ Galliano crowed triumphantly from the sidelines. ‘I finally got it through their sensible heads. The Freeholders will never be able to defend themselves, long-term, against Argosian attacks. And a good thing, too.’

  Tymon shook his head in puzzlement. ‘What’s so good about that?’ he asked.

  ‘Our future lies not in defending miserable little corners of the Tree, but in settling a whole new world,’ said the old man. He ran his fingers through the light loam of the hillock beside him, a smile stretched across his blind face. ‘This is perfect soil, by the way. It only needs a bit of sunlight to be useful to us.’

  ‘Soil?’ Tymon stared at him. It was another one of those words.

  ‘Better yet, grass.’ Galliano pulled up a hair of feathery green. ‘Anything will grow here now, my friends. Anything!’

  To their astonishment, he began a lecture on the fertile properties of soil, and how it contained a thousand invisible and ancient grains, known to the Old Ones and long disused in the Tree, some of which were edible and some of which were not. They could establish a colony in the World Below, announced Galliano: they need not fight over the dying Tree and its pitiful rainfall. They could simply start again here, start anew. With that, Tymon remembered Samiha’s last injunction: bring them down, all of them, and wondered belatedly if she had meant that humanity should settle in the World Below. In that case, he thought ruefully, the old scientist was already far ahead of him in carrying out her wishes.

  Tymon’s reprieve from the judges’ scrutiny did not last for long. Galliano’s speech was interrupted when Aythan joined the group, accompanied by two other sombre-faced judges. They had come, they announced, to hear the testimony of the travellers, if they were sufficiently refreshed; they had come, they said, as their eyes slid coldly towards Jedda, to hear the strangers explain themselves. Aythan, once Jedda’s identity had been confirmed, was clearly shocked to see a traitor treated with such hospitality. In fact, he stood up as soon as she was named, pulling his Farhang cloak about him in deep umbrage, and would not even hear her testimony until Gardan vouched personally for her good behaviour.

  So it was Jedda, pale and ill at ease before the scowling judges, who gave a first brief account of her break with Lace, testifying to Pallas’ death at the hands of the priests and her own departure from Argos, and humbly begging her hosts’ forgiveness. A temporary freedom on parole was granted her by Gardan, pending the vote of the judges on her status. When Tymon protested that Jedda deserved a full and immediate pardon for all she had done to help him, and that they had not heard her whole story, Gardan assured him in a kind but brisk manner that the judges would give due weight to his testimony.

  ‘Then you will hear it,’ he said hotly. ‘The testimony — the whole story. Right now.’

  And that was exactly what he did. He told them everything that had happened since he left Noni, making no bones about his own foolishness in following the Masters. He spoke of his journey with Zero through the mine, their arrival in the World Below, and the orah-couches in the ancient hall. He told his listeners how he had allowed the Masters to trick him out of his body. Then he told them, insisting on it although she tried to interrupt, of Jedda’s battle with the Envoy’s curses, a part of her story she had omitted to mention. Two spots of red embarrassment appeared in the Nurian girl’s cheeks as he spoke of her bravery, corroborated by Oren and Noni, who shared the details of their vision. She reddened still further as Tymon went on to recount how she had survived capture by the Envoy’s acolytes and attempted to save the Kion’s testament, only to suffer a mortal attack from the Masters. And he told them all, as Jedda sat hunched and crimson over the remains of the meal, how she had died on the beach and been called to life again — by Samiha’s voice.

  He choked then with emotion, and there was a moment of silence as the judges and the Focals waited for him to command himself. For in all that had been said, in all that had been shared so far, Tymon had barely been able to speak Samiha’s name. Noni gazed at him, her face full of compassion. Oren turned aside and bowed his head. Only Jedda had the courage to reach out, slip a very grimy hand into Tymon’s, and squeeze it.

  He allowed her to be the one to continue the story of the Kion’s awakening in the hall, and all that followed, for he was still unable to put words to that dry lump of grief. Jedda’s voice was stronger now as she faced the judges, the confidence back in her tone as she told of their journey up the mountain with Samiha, and Wick’s final treachery. When she finished recounting their fruitless hunt for the murderer and the Kion’s burial, no one said a thing. The other Freeholders, who had gathered one by one at the fringes of the group to listen to the tale, stared at the three travellers with renewed respect. Not even Aythan made any remark; the silence on the hillock was broken only by the wind whispering in the grass.

  Tymon cleared his throat and stood up, pulling Jedda to her feet beside him. The young Focals, Gardan and Aythan rose too, feeling the solemnity of the moment.

  ‘I ask the Freeholders to pardon my twining sister, even as the Kion did,’ Tymon said to them, lifting Jedda’s hand cupped in his own, and directing her towards Gardan and Aythan. ‘And I ask my fellow Focals to receive and forgive one of their own, for she is truly a Grafter.’ He glanced towards Oren and Noni, who immediately nodded, tears in their eyes.

  ‘I ask you also to receive my brother, Zero,’ continued Tymon formally to the gathered judges.

  He had to pull the red-haired lad up by the arm and into their circle, for Zero had remained seated by Galliano, preoccupied with his meal. Gardan smiled at him kindly, and Zero’s face beamed with joy. With his fellow travellers on either side of him, Tymon looked at each one of the judges, holding their eyes in turn.

  ‘If you must pass judgment on someone after this, do so on me,’ he finished quietly.

  But his plea had the edge of a challenge, and no one dared speak a word about freedom on parole after that, or voting on Jedda’s status. The usually sceptical Freehold judges even refrained from questioning Tymon’s story of uncanny creatures from other worlds, though the tale of the Masters went far beyond any accepted notions of what a Grafter could or could not do. Galliano, who had listened to Tymon without making a single objection, nodded and made approving noises at his descriptions of the Old Ones’ technology. Perhaps, the young man thought wryly, the Freeholders were feeling more indulgent towards such ideas, because they had recently set foot in another world themselves. Lacuna, too, had once been derided as a myth. As to Jedda, she threw a grateful glance at Tymon following his staunch support of her, and held her head higher fr
om then on, meeting the Freeholders’ eyes directly and without fear.

  While Gardan and the other judges conferred in low voices, and Galliano continued to hold forth on soil to anyone who would listen, the young people occupied themselves in activities that were blessedly mundane. They gathered up the remaining food, made a fire with tinder sticks and warmed some water so that Jedda, Tymon and Zero could wash away the stain of their trials. Noni arranged for a bundle of spare supplies to be opened and one of the air-chariots to be used as a changing room, where they were able to strip away their rags, and dress themselves in warmer clothes. The cut on Jedda’s cheek proved to be shallow, though long and ugly, and Noni was satisfied it would heal well with proper care and attention.

  It was only then, as the five friends talked in the air-chariot, that Tymon and Jedda heard the full tale of the victory in Farhang, beyond air-chariots and military manoeuvres. Oren showed them the precious roll of the Kion’s testament which he kept stowed in his pack, passing it with great reverence around the group. At the sight of this full copy written in Anise’s flowing script, Jedda burst into another abrupt tempest of tears; all the others were able to understand from her garbled confession was that she was very glad the Jays had survived long enough to bring the Easterners their copy, and that she was very sorry for any indignities they may have suffered as a result.

  Then, too, with the Kion’s testament in his hands, Tymon related the exact circumstances of Matrya’s death to his friends. He had glossed over the details of the Oracle’s physiognomy to the judges, unwilling to challenge them further with tales of a blue-eyed giant whose life was enmeshed with that of the Tree. The Focals were as mystified by the Oracle’s so-called ‘seed-form’ as Tymon had been, though Jedda said she had once heard Lace claim the Born had come from another world before creating this one, a world far up in the sky. Perhaps that was why, she suggested humbly, Matrya looked so different.