Gods of the Flame Sea

by Jean Johnson

  “But with the aid of Ban, you have the chance to see what you are made of without permanently ending another’s life. You have not actually killed anyone,” the Fae Gh’vin soothed. “He is clearly alive and unharmed, no matter what we do to him. No permanent damage has been done. If you wish . . . you may retire from your obligations as our student.

  “You will, however, continue to practice with your bow and your sling, your spear and your knife. You have shown no hesitancy in killing animals, whether wild or domesticated,” Krue added. “You will still be expected to stand guard-watch over the valleys when your time in the rotation comes nigh.

  “Now, go sit with the others, and accept comfort from them,” the Fae stated, lifting his chin a little. Unlike most of his kind, his hair did not flow down his back; even Ban had longer hair than his. Though to be fair, Ban’s straight, black, waist-length locks had been reset alongside every scrap of skin and drop of his blood. “You are not yet dismissed. You still did well, despite your misgivings and hesitations. Sit among them, accept comfort, and ponder whether you are suited to become a warrior of the Flame Sea.

  “If your answer upon reflection is no, there will be no reprisals. If your answer is yes, your training will continue. Either way,” Krue offered, “I will always remain available to listen to your concerns and your fears. I, too, once struggled with the rightness versus wrongness of ending another being’s life.”

  Nadj sniffed and frowned at that. He blinked, confused, before blurting out a question. “Then why do you do it?”

  “Because if the only people who know how to fight and harm and kill other people are the ones who enjoy fighting and harming and killing, then no one will be able to stop them. Beings who are good must sometimes take up unpleasant duties in order to save the lives of others,” Krue instructed. “Evil people often think their cause is good and right and just . . . but Evil will always be quick to blame and quick to judge. Evil is reluctant to help, and loath to give without getting much more in return.”

  A faint scrape and slap of footsteps on stone pulled Ban’s gaze off toward the risers. Or rather, to one of the tunnels under the arcs of seating rising up from the dais where they stood. A shadow, elongated from the daylight beyond, bobbed and wove as its owner walked into the theater.

  “A-And good?” Nadj asked, sniffing and rubbing his nose on his forearm.

  “Good is quick to help others, even without recompense,” Seda instructed. Like Nadj, she had golden hair, though hers, like her paler, golden-tanned skin, came from her father’s mother, Grandmother Siffu, not from her maternal grandfather, Éfan-taje. She wore fitted bits of oil-hardened leather for armor over clearly muscled limbs, in her prime despite having given birth to five children so far. “Good is slow to judge without solid evidence.”

  “Ah, yes, the morality of the Fae,” a tenor male voice drawled, palpably amused. “Good is such-and-such, and evil is so-and-so, and the choice between the two is quite clear . . .”

  Nadj bristled, turning to frown at the red-haired speaker. “The choice is clear between the two!”

  “Of course!” Udrin exclaimed, touching his spread hand to his chest, still clad in the finespun linen his sire’s kin were able to import from other realms. “Isn’t that just what I said? I just said that,” the Dai-Efrijt drawled, flicking his other hand outward. The gesture was Fae, the words in their letter were in agreement . . . but that tone, drawled just so, subtly mocked those words in their spirit. “I swear, half the time no one ever listens to me. Well, Krue-taje, I am here to report to you for fighting practice.”

  “You’re early,” Krue replied, his expression a calm mask.

  Udrin flipped his hand again, and shifted over to sit on the lowest tier of curved benches. “Then I shall watch. What is today’s lesson, anyway?”

  “We . . . we had to kill Ban,” Nadj admitted, strengthening his voice. “It . . . wasn’t easy.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” Udrin dismissed, arm twitching. He fluttered it in dismissal, humming an odd little tune, then gestured. “Anybody can kill Ban-taje. The trick is making him stay dead.” Tilting his head, Udrin studied the tall, tattoo-covered male speculatively. “I do admit that—theoretically, of course—it would be fascinating to try each possible method, experimenting in a methodical, carefully recorded manner. Perhaps a way could be found then?”

  “Longer-lived beings than you have tried, and failed,” Ban stated flatly. “They always fail . . . and I always ensure they never start again, once I get annoyed.”

  The red-haired youth twitched his hand again, then danced his legs a little, lifting and lowering his knees. “Yes, yes, whateve—”

  “Udrin!” Krue snapped, cutting him off. “Be respectful. Watch in silence, or leave. This is not your study hour.”

  “. . . Of course, Krue-taje,” the redhead amended, bowing slightly. “I will be quiet now.”

  Krue didn’t sigh or roll his eyes, or show any other sign of impatience. He did let his gaze linger a moment on the teenaged newcomer, then turned back to the curly-haired youth. “Take your place among the others, Nadj, and remember my words. We will now continue the remainder of today’s lesson with a point-by-point dissection of Nadj’s fight against Ban.”

  A flick of the Fae’s hand, and a quintet of shimmering anima-spheres arrowed down from overhead. They morphed even as they descended, shaped by the warrior’s will. Two formed the slender, muscular form of Nadj, translucent enough that the rest of the theater-like auditorium could be seen through his body. The other three transformed into an equally semisubstantial copy of Ban-taje.

  Nadj was their last student for this lesson. Moving away from the images, which bowed to each other and took up their starting positions, Ban caught Krue’s gaze and subtly tilted his head off to one side. An equally subtle nod gave him permission to retreat, his services no longer needed.

  Jumping off the stage, Ban walked past the Dai-Efrijt and down the corridor leading to outside. With the braziers crackling inside, providing light, the air flowed from the interior of the cavern-carved theater to the outside, where the cool air of the overcast day provided a pressure differential. Only fifty or so people were within view in the broad valley, roughly half of them visitors, some with herd animals for trade, others with goods brought from all over. All of them partially to fully human, no Fae in sight.

  If they were not visitors or the occasional seller of goods, they were residents, busy nurturing the various herbs, fruits, and vegetables in the many irrigation-fed planting boxes that had turned the city into a green oasis. The rest of the locals worked in the fields at this time of year, lending plenty of hands to the tending of all the crops that would eventually feed the ever-growing population of the Flame Sea Tribe. Only in late spring, once the late rains had ceased, would there be leisure, until the height of the harvest in low summer.

  It was an excellent time of year to travel. For desert dwellers who came from a distance of just a few weeks of travel beyond the canyons, ravines, and wadijt here in the heart of the great dune desert, they could come and go at any point between early spring and low summer without fear of broiling heat or flash floods. Most came from within the boundaries of the desert region, from the two mountain ranges to the north and south, and the two vast seas to the east and the west.

  Those who came from the mountains to the south carried wood from those forested slopes. A few even brought ice chipped from the high, cold mountains in winter, packed in furs for insulation and kept stable with anima-forces so that nothing would melt. From the north, locally, traders brought linen from the flax fields of the lower lands, and silk from the caterpillars that ate the trees growing in those upper hills. Already, the people of Ijesh were calling the south mountains the Frost Wall for how cold visitors swore it stayed even in summer, and the north mountains the Cloth Wall, for the textiles woven there.

  The locals had learned over the de
cades that the Flame Sea Tribe was far more profitable to trade with than to raid. They came and went all year, save for the worst of winter and the hottest days of summer. For the far-distant travelers, curiosity seekers, and exotic goods traders, this was the season either to arrive or to pack up and head for home, with the traders either spending the winter or spending the summer here in the valleys and canyons of Ijesh. They spent months coming this far, and spent more months going home, bringing pack animals and helpers to carry and defend the many goods they traded.

  The easiest to spot of the outlanders were the peoples of the Brinnish jungles, swamps, and savannahs beyond the northern mountains. Their woolly black hair and charcoal brown complexions were often coupled with brightly dyed leather and cloth decorated with ivory beads that gleamed in the sun, echoing the pale pearls of their teeth. They brought exotic herbs, hammered silver objects, ivory for carving, and plenty of jars and waxed packets of dye. A few even brought strange, brightly hued birds with fat beaks that could squawk a few words, at least in the tongues of their keepers.

  In contrast, the southlanders were harder to spot. Fair hair was not uncommon among the Flame Sea tribal members, thanks to the constant intermingling of Fae blood, but the locals almost always came with natural deep tans. Those who had paler complexions hailed from the southern lands beyond the glacial mountains, marking them as outsiders . . . but even those who had only just arrived had been browned at least a little bit by the sun as they crossed the weeks’ worth of desert from oasis to oasis, meandering their way northward.

  They brought leathers and furs for trade, gemstones and herbs, shipments of ice, and shipments of pottery crafted from better clay than anything locally made. Oftentimes, those thick furs they hauled around were simply the padding used to protect the fine pots and goblets, plates and jars. Ban knew that if they could not sell the furs here—and often, they could not—they simply used the things to wrap up whatever they got in trade for their other goods, and carried it back home again.

  Most of them had originally heard of the wonders of the Flame Sea from Ban himself. Or well, not these exact traders, usually, but often a neighbor, a relative . . . an ancestor. But he did see one fellow within range whom he did know, and who looked a bit upset. A tall, dark-skinned fellow from the savannahs of this world’s Sun’s Belt, his arms flicked in curt, agitated movements as he wrapped up some of the finely glazed southlander pottery he had apparently just bought from a group of paler than usual blonds. The others in his trading group were busy packing up some of the goods that had been bought, but they carefully avoided their leader’s gaze.

  Seeing the other man stopping to press his palm against his brow, then heaving a visibly heavy sigh, Ban strode that way. “Yusef,” he called quietly when he drew near. He spoke in the western dialect of Ebrin-lon that the trader knew. “Is something wrong?”

  The middle-aged trader barely even looked at him. Instead, he flipped his hand at a basket filled with pottery shards, glazed in the rare seafoam green shade that the southlanders called celadon. “I traded two zebraskins and an ell’s worth of ivory for a full set, and that . . . that boy got me so angry, I broke the ewer that went with the set! And the south-men will not replace it, since it was unique, and I have nothing to trade to buy anything else! . . . I was going to give that to my son, so he could impress the family of his mate,” he added, his tone tipping into quiet despair. “I still have all the plates, but . . .”

  “Which boy?” Ban asked, since Yusef had come with fourteen others in his caravan last autumn, including six who could qualify for that label.

  “The rust-haired one! That . . . that demon of smug insults!” He flapped his hand in the direction of the auditorium entrance, with its deep, pillar-strewn walkway and upper balcony following the bulging curve of the cliffside. “He went off that way.”

  Ban narrowed his gaze. “Udrin insulted you? How?”

  “He stared at us!” Yusef accused.

  Nonplussed, Ban blinked. “He . . . stared.”

  “Yes! Like he was debating whether to step on a bug—I have been the recipient of many stares in my four dozen years, but rarely one as insulting as that,” the trader added, shaking his finger. “And then he laughed, and said something about ‘reshaping’ us so we’d ‘look better next time’ or something—whatever that meant!”

  Again, Ban could only blink. That was an odd thing for anyone to say, but . . . not entirely insulting. “. . . Anything else?”

  “Yes. He twitched, stumbled, and almost hit Matouf,” Yusef told Ban, gesturing at one of the younger boys in his expedition. “He turned it into a dance, but his caperings nearly hit us again. So I turned on him and yelled at him to go away, and he said that he would reshape me with ‘no mouth!’ No mouth!” Gesturing at his face with both hands, Yusef demanded, “Who tells an elder that he deserves to have no mouth?”

  “I . . . have no idea,” Ban admitted warily. He believed Yusef, but could not think of a reason why Udrin would say such a strange thing. “How exactly did the ewer break?”

  Yusef winced a little. He gestured slightly, confessing, “I ordered him to go away, and . . . I swept my arm out too far, and knocked it into Jasef, who had just picked it up. And now . . . now it is broken, and I have no replacement. Look at the sculpting!” he added, stooping and picking up a shard from the basket. From the look of the piece, the ewer had been covered in finely shaped roses, detailed even to the hint of veins on the curved, green-glazed petals. “An ell of ivory, wasted!”

  It truly was well made, even broken as it was. Ban glanced over at the southland traders. While a few met his gaze in silent sympathy for the gesturing, upset northlander, their leader merely shrugged, wordlessly saying there was nothing she could do about the broken pottery.

  A hundred years ago, Ban would not have cared. Even fifty, he would not have stirred. But the decades spent among the Fae in this land had healed most of the centuries—millenias—of abuse he had suffered elsewhere. So instead of shrugging it off, he said, “I will ask Éfan if he can fix it for you.”

  Yusef blinked at the offer. “Éfan-taje, the Lord of All Animadjet? You would ask him? Do you really think he would stir himself for such a small thing?”

  “I have seen him fix worse,” Ban admitted. “Or perhaps Kaife, or Zedren.”

  “Oh, Zedren-taje! Yes, that would be his thing far more than the Taje Animadjet. He is the Lord of Crafters,” Yusef stated, looking relieved, then a little worried. “But it is such a small thing. Should we bother him?”

  Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Ban pointed at the basket. “Are all of the pieces inside?”

  “Even the tiniest fragments, Lord of Death,” one of the youths stated. Jasef, if Ban remembered right. His next words confirmed his identity. “I picked all of them up so that the shards would not cut anyone’s feet.”

  “Then I will take it and go find one of the Fae, to see if they can fix it,” Ban stated.

  Deeply grateful, Yusef nodded and flapped his hand at the teenager. Jasef quickly stooped and lifted the basket, handing it over. From the size of the shards, it would have been a rather large ewer, enough to pour out two dozen drinks, if not more. Nodding, Ban took the basket with him, walking across the plaza toward the recessed, carved entrance to the Animadjet Hall.

  The Fae had come a long way in their understanding of the local magical energies, and how those energies interacted in particular with themselves. They no longer stole all the available magic every time they wielded a spell. The best analogy Éfan had come up with over the years was one that stuck out in Ban’s memory. We are like grand artists of vast, chamber-sized murals who have learned to re-create our masterpieces on the sides of dried lentils.

  An apt analogy. The newest members of the pantean, the group of Fae who had been sent to investigate this world for trade opportunities, had taken over a year to refine their grasp, but only because th
e original wave had spent several years figuring out how. Something like Yusef’s expensive ewer would not be a problem of energy for any Fae asked to repair it. Skill, however, had to be considered.

  Zedren-taje, respected for his skill in various crafting arts, was in the workshop wing attached to the cliff-dug complex meant for training and housing visiting animadjet. However, the pale-eyed Fae looked to be completely wrapped up in his task of examining stem to stern the airboat that had brought Udrin home from his father’s kin. Several pieces actually lay on the stone floor of his workshop hangar, and he muttered epithets every so often in faelon. Deciding to seek someone else, Ban wandered through the halls, some lit by oil lamps, some lit by transom-style openings high on the walls, guiding in bits of light from outside.

  Eventually, he found Éfan visiting with their mutual human friend, Zuki. Seventy-nine and completely white-haired, she was not the eldest member of the tribe. Two others had seniority, age-wise: Lutun—whom Ban had almost killed, way back at their first meeting—and Grandmother Siffu, unspoken matriarch of the tribe, and personal headache for the Fae.

  Zuki was not one to see the Fae as godly beings worthy of covert worship, thankfully. The animadj had a clear, thoughtful view of life, a sharp intellect that did not shy at questioning everything she saw, and a peculiar fondness for the Lord of Death. A fondness he returned by setting the basket on a nearby table as she broke off her conversation with her other visitor, so that he could go straight to her side to stoop and kiss her age-weathered cheek.

  He would lose her, soon—he always lost everyone, cursed as he was—but Ban would remember Zuki. Some of the cultures he had encountered, both here and in other universes, they believed that so long as a person was remembered, they would live forever. Whether that was by a person who had actually met them, or through the writings and objects they left behind, they could be remembered. He needed to remember the good ones, and struggled to forget the bad. There were, unfortunately, a lot of evil beings in his past.