Fire: Demons, Dragons & Djinns

by Rhonda Parrish

  Today the screaming is canine. Skoll and Jinn never got along as young ones, both temperamentally and elementally unsuited, but the Ice Wolf is still her kin. There ought to be some grand realization in the howling but Jinn can’t hear it. The idea of dying without figuring it out makes her angry.

  Worse, she will apparently soon be stripped of even the mournful dignity of a burnt offering; she’s part of a tour. The Doctor, the lab-coated monster of her nightmares, mounts the stairs with two other men. A soldier with cold blue eyes and his adjutant. She would know those eyes at the end of the world, but he doesn’t recognize her immediately.

  The Imperial academician is in an expository mood.

  “Well, Captain. I have shown you every aspect of this facility but it has been merely an introduction, a prelude to your admission into the highest realms of the empire. You alone captured one of these magical creatures single handedly; your reputation precedes you!”

  The Soldier looks seasick, dazed. Summoned by the Empress herself, he had expected something else. Well, this exactly, if he’s being honest with himself, just not like this. He is a man without doubt, but touring the facility, doubt coalesced around him like the condensation that coats the infinite brass pipes. He faces the consequences of his victories, the aftermath of glory.

  The gravity of what he’s done bores into him when the Doctor shows him a siphoning. A giant beast, like a dog with a coat of crystalline frost for fur, is suspended in one of a hundred crystal tubes, barely twitching as current flows through it.

  “This one is close to finished,” the Doctor says.

  The Soldier likes dogs. The Ice Wolf twitches as vials fill with something luminous. Mounting the stairs to the next demonstration, the Doctor’s speech flows with the confidence of a young river.

  “Everything we are is born here. These animals provide the power that fuels our citadel, our Guardians, our empire. Even the charges in your pistol would be impossible without their by-products. Magic is a resource we cannot neglect; it is far better than water or wood or electricity! It is wasted in them, as are so many things in nature, and we must use it to the maximum. It is our manifest destiny!”

  They mount steel stairs to Jinn’s platform. Inestimable lengths of tubing carry spurts of beautiful liquid all around them. At the top is another crystal prison, too large for the little creature that inhabits it. The tower of the soldier’s faith is leaning, but doesn’t fall until he hears the Ifrit speak.

  “You,” she says.

  The Soldier’s face is a mask.

  “This one in particular is an Ifrit, or Creatura Flammidemia, if you want to be perfectly accurate.”

  They scrutinize her. Her skin has the glow and texture of brazier coals. Instead of hair, she has a luxurious mane of slow burning fire. Her shape is small and broad-hipped. Clearly female to the Doctor, uncomfortably so to the soldiers. She is floating an inch above the brushed metal base of the cage. She rises a little as they approach.

  “Look, Captain. It remembers you. Interesting. Did you know that when they die, they leave behind gems? Living essence. It is my greatest discovery; there are many uses for it.” The Doctor laughs fatly, “Including the creation of the Badge of Order. No matter what your military rank, there is no greater promotion than this. Destroy this thing and join us. We need a man of your courage and loyalty.”

  “You drain the life out of them,” the Soldier says, “and then turn them into decorations?” His face is ashen. The Doctor finally notices. Even now, Jinn feels a faint trill of irritation. There is no limit to how much time a human will waste. As if there was an infinite supply.

  “Captain, the extraction of magic from these creatures causes no harm. Their cries are the squeaking of springs, the clicking of clockwork. The concept of soul is a pretension of the flesh. It perishes. The empire we build with these stones will last forever. Courage, love, hope, honour; all these things die,” he taps the glass and the Ifrit flinches, “don’t they?”

  Jinn knows she ought to grovel, so she roars. The Doctor flinches in his turn, then angrily depresses a lever. Energy courses from a bulb at the top of the chamber. Jinn stretches and writhes. The crystal gives her screams polytonal resonance. After a moment the surge stops and the doctor taps again.

  “Courage, love, hope, and honour all die,” he says again, “don’t they?”

  “Yes,” Jinn says, and her voice would be less beautiful without pain, “but hope dies last.”

  Everything slows, like time won’t pass. The look she gives the Soldier is not anger or hate, which are easy for a man to dismiss. It’s scorn.

  “Your badge will be red, I suspect,” the Doctor fingers his own with great complacency. “Fitting.”

  “It is,” the Soldier says. “Thank you for this demonstration, Academician. I learned a great deal.”

  It is only when the Doctor sees the agony of spirit in the Soldier’s eyes that he truly begins to worry. “What’s wrong? This is a singular honour.”

  “Wrong? We are creating an empire founded on death, not immortality. These things aren’t killing our country, you are.”

  I WAS WRONG. I don’t want to hear it. It makes me feel sick.

  “Stop. I know the rest,” I say.

  “You don’t. It isn’t in the legend. It can’t be.”

  “I do. It wasn’t the Empress who travelled back to the dark ages in search of magic. She didn’t put me in that cage. You did.”

  “You remember,” the Soldier says.

  “I believe. It’s the same thing. Were you ever able to tell her why?”

  “There are no reasons, other than that I was following my orders.”

  The sun has set.

  “Did I forgive you?” I say. He looks surprised, as though he expected me to ask something else, as if there was anything else.

  “I don’t know,” he says, “but all the evil I did, I did in some way because of you. All the good, because of you.”

  THE IFRIT KNEW the Soldier at once, more deeply than he can conceive. Up on the bluff, he used the glowing nets to catch her and so many of her brothers and sisters. She listened to his troops call him a man without fear. Jinn might have found some satisfaction in watching him fall apart, but there’s too much pain to care.

  What she has sensed is a chance. This miserable human can make right what he’s done. She watches him. He closes his eyes to her captivity and walks away.

  Jinn has long since accepted that there is no way out. Has listened to her fellows cry in the night. Has taken her turns under the siphon. She hasn’t any tears left and wouldn’t shed them for him if she did. She tried using them to burn her way out. It didn’t work. She hammers her tiny fists against the concave crystal.

  “Coward!”

  The soldier puts a hand on the rail to steady himself.

  “Turn away then, fool!” The Doctor screams, “turn away if you don’t have the stomach!”

  When the Soldier answers, the tone of his voice makes Jinn look up. She sees total loss in his posture, and understands what she has taken from him. Only faith, not courage. Good.

  “It’s funny you should put it that way,” he says.

  The Doctor has scarcely voiced the obvious question when the Soldier’s coat billows outward like a sail catching the wind. A crashing report careens between the brass tubes. He has fired his pistol without turning, close to his body. The Doctor collapses as if the strings supporting him have been cut.

  The Soldier operates his weapon with the fluidity of an automaton. He breaks the gun open as he turns, and his steps follow the path of the red-hot casing that jumps from the breech.

  “Captain?” his adjutant asks, dumbstruck, half reaching for his own weapon.

  “There is no reason to follow orders if you cannot trust in their justice,” he says, and levels the weapon again, “I’m sorry.”

  As the second shot fades, the Soldier turns back to the Doctor to find him gone. He looks at the pistol in his hand. Brass, ironwood,
ornate locks and levers. He can’t bring himself to look at her.

  The Soldier turns his gaze from Jinn the way children shy from the sun. He touches the controls of the infernal machine.

  “If I let you out of there,” he says, “are you going to kill me?”

  “Yes,” Jinn says, “I’m going to burn every single one of you.”

  “Fine,” the Soldier smiles in spite of himself, “but I can help you escape. Wait until then.”

  14.

  THE DAY IS an afterglow. Faint smells catch the wind and carry the city. They were alien, once, but now they just remind me I’m hungry. I rise and pull him up with me.

  “Walk with me down the hill. We’ll eat.”

  In a book, it would be the soldier who takes the girl’s hand. Instead I drag him down the hill and away from the bluff. The reunion is the last chapter of the story. We keep walking, finding our way carefully so as not to slip in the fading light.

  I have scales to balance, but he can help me find home; I can wait until then. Actually, if I’m being honest with myself, I’ve already decided how the legend ends, but that’s only my second favourite part. I like beginnings, and the feeling that you never know where the path will end.

  15.

  HIGH ON THE bluff, cold wind courses between cutting edges of light.

  “You’re a slave,” the Ifrit says, and her voice is laden with rage and the faintest note of melancholy.

  “You’re an animal, and your time is up,” the Soldier re-joins.

  “We’ll see whose time has passed, child of man,” Jinn says, and her smile belittles the sunset, “we shall soon see.”

  Strange Attractor

  Kevin Cockle

  LAURA DRISCOLL DIDN’T spook easy.

  She heard the noise in the back and knew it wasn’t her imagination this time. Something was loose in the container-hold of the semi—loose and moving around. “No questions asked” was one thing, but it was still her job to make sure the cargo arrived in good order. She had a reputation to uphold: that made decision-making easy. Check it out, lock it down. No excuses.

  Blue eyes the colour of anti-freeze worried in the rear-view mirror.

  Thin white-blonde brows frowned.

  “All right,” Laura said to her reflection.

  Laura pulled the semi over to the narrow shoulder of the highway, put her blinkers on, reached into the glove compartment, and checked her Sig Sauer 9 mm, taking the safety off. She was alone on the road over three hundred days a year and though she’d never fired the weapon outside a range, she’d shown it once or twice. Early on in her career, while she was still driving-truck for Corona Western, she’d had the odd run-in, and cause to show force. Once she’d bought her own rig and became an established owner-operator however, the testing of her boundaries had stopped. Guys knew how hard the life was, and if she could pull it off, then her youth, slight build, and elfin face couldn’t be held against her.

  The gun was for people outside the life. People who didn’t know her accomplishments, didn’t know to respect her. Roads were full of people who didn’t respect much of anything these days.

  A waning moon shone cold over the deserted stretch of highway north of Peace River. Normally, Laura would have put pylons out, but they were in the back, and that was where the noise was. Stepping down out of the cab, her boots made a solid, reassuring sound against asphalt. She held the gun in both hands, pointing the barrel down and away from the truck as she walked with measured strides to the back of the container, feeling the autumn breeze frigid upon her cheekbones.

  What distinguished Laura from the competition was her engine-craft─learned from her foster dad like other kids would learn sports or yard-work─and her phenomenal driving-endurance. She’d never told anyone, but it had slowly become legend, that Laura Driscoll never slept. She’d passed every drug-test she’d ever taken too, so it wasn’t pharmaceuticals that had led to her record turn-around times. She just didn’t need sleep, not like regular folks did, and that, along with her maintenance expertise, had been her leg up. You free up all the time you waste sleeping in your life, and you can get to a place at twenty-nine that most folks don’t reach until their forties.

  Laura reached up to shoot a bolt and brought her hand back on reflex. The door to the container was warm. Not boiling hot or anything, but startling, given the conditions of the night. And then, as she stared at the door, she heard a loud whump against a side panel. She took a step back, licked suddenly dry lips.

  There it was all right. Proof positive. Truck wasn’t moving, so something inside had to be.

  It did occur to her that there were other ways of handling the situation. She knew Constable Swartzman was maybe an hour away—she could use the radio to call the shop, and she had his personal cell as well. But that could backfire, given how lucrative the load was, and how off-book the shipping had been. She’d picked up the freight at the terminal in the Port of Los Angeles from a business-lady identifying herself as Ms. Burke. Ms. Burke had been fairly specific about the bonus structure, schedule, and the need for discretion. That was fine with Laura: wouldn’t be the first time she’d run something into or out of the oilsands that may or may not have been strictly legal. She was looking at a second truck, hiring a driver, partnering-up in a small warehouse to store parts and inventory. She wasn’t in the business of asking questions that might get in the way of her goals.

  “Girl like you can make people do things,” her dad had once counselled. She’d been thirteen then, starting to get phone calls from boys. She and her pop had spent that rainy Saturday in the covered work-shed, re-engining a restored Fiero with a V8 for one of his friends. They were taking a break, sitting on lawnchairs in the open doorway to watch the water come pelting down. “You know that. You can count on that, I suppose—your call. But my job is to make sure you can do for yourself, whatever you decide.” He’d often talk about raising Laura as his “job”. He saw it as a duty to his dead wife, the woman who had taken Laura in as an infant orphan from Child Services, raising her to the age of five before the plagues swept north and made their claim. Not that Ed Driscoll hadn’t loved Laura in the way any natural father would have. But the duty to Willa was always there too.

  What would you do now, Dad? Laura asked the ghost of her father’s memory. Stroke had paralyzed him when she was fourteen, and she’d spent a year taking care of him before the end. Left school, got herself legally emancipated. Took care of it all—every last problem—because she could.

  She knew exactly what her old man would do.

  Holding the gun in her right hand, she stepped forward, worked the eerily warm bolts to the container door with her left, and flung the door wide. She stepped back and raised the gun with elbows locked, taking grim pride in the lack of arm-shake despite the Sig’s heft.

  A gust of warm air hit her face, blowing strands of blonde back from her hairline. The air was moist, salty, tropical. She recognized it from her Cozumel runs. Definitely not Canadian air.

  The container was dark, largely empty. As her eyes adjusted, she could see the single crate she’d been carrying, sitting basically where it had been secured. In the far corner she saw the murky outline of the dolly and other pieces of equipment, also secured. She cursed herself for forgetting the flashlight in the cab, but the door was open now and some kind of line had seemingly been crossed. In the distance, she could hear a guitar riff on the radio, couldn’t place the song.

  With her left hand, she tugged the step-extender down, and lunged her way up into the darkness. The smell of the ocean was unmistakable, along with hints of rotten seaweed.

  She moved slowly towards the crate—a wooden box about a metre-square—and saw that the lid was off. That was weird, as she could have sworn they’d used packing-nails on it, but it was also a relief. It was an explanation. Something rational in a situation that had been threatening to slither away from her.

  She didn’t fully relax until she’d got close enough to look in behi
nd the crate. There was enough shelter there to hide someone, if someone had been there, but someone wasn’t. The box had been tied down, and the lid had come off in transit—that much made sense. The sound she’d heard when she’d stopped the truck and gotten out of the cab still remained peskily mysterious, but it was starting to seem like an anomaly, something that might safely be ignored.

  She peered down into the box, frowning in the gloom. Packing straw obscured the details, but the thing appeared to be a stone statue or figurine of some kind. She could make out a misshapen, inhuman skull, slanting into a body of sluggish, repellant proportions. She was about to reach in and feel for better resolution, when a man’s voice spoke from outside, on the highway: “Miss?”

  Laura whirled, raising the gun and advancing two steps. It was her instinct to advance, despite a small, reasonable impulse she had to retreat farther into the darkness of the container.

  A man stood on the highway, his outline dimly visible in the taillights and moonlight. A wolf emerged from the grass behind him and curled in around his leg. Another wolf stood in the middle of the road, staring back the way the truck had come.

  The man’s eyes glowed like red embers in a face otherwise obscured by darkness. “Miss,” he repeated, his accent striking Laura as being vaguely Irish, or Scottish. “Would you mind lowering your weapon?”

  “I would,” Laura said. Her voice was steady, but her heart was slapping about in her chest. The wolf nearest the man had moved towards the extendible-steps: she could hear it sniffing at the metal.

  “Away wi’ya,” the man said to the wolves, and they immediately responded, bounding back off the highway towards the treeline. Then to Laura, he said: “Show of good faith?”