by Gary Kloster
Just like it chose not to kill her outside the Pyre, right before it burned Thirty Trees.
What do you see, when you see me? Jiri couldn't see its face, couldn't see anything at all through the smoke and the tears that filled her eyes, but she knew what it looked like. Shani's face, handsome as Hadzi's, would be carved into that fire. Jiri reached for change in her head, stroked the cord that connected her spirit to her body, and her form slipped back to its true shape, a young woman sprawled across the stone, her long braids shriveling in the heat. You're in there, Shani, aren't you? What do you see, when you see me with those eyes? Your daughter? Your wife? I want to know.
Jiri pushed herself up, the stone searing her skin, the air like an oven. Patima was right there, right in front of her, her skin flushed with the heat, her eyes streaming, but her teeth were bared in a smile.
"You'll burn," she croaked in her broken voice. "You, and everyone else whose tried to stop me. You'll all burn, and Usaro will burn, and I will finally be free."
"I will burn, and you will burn," Jiri rasped, her voice cracked too by smoke and heat. She lunged forward, and this time no fire fell to stop her. She reached out and struck, her hand slamming down onto the iron spike that stabbed through the kindi's body and through Patima's hand. Its point tore skin and bone, and Jiri felt the pain of the metal ripping through her flesh, the fire buried in it searing her blood.
"And we will burn together."
∗ ∗ ∗
There was fire, and pain.
It started in the center of her hand, where the iron tore through her, and ran up her veins and turned her heart to ash.
She was ash, and fire, and pain, and she was Jiri, and she opened her eyes.
A city surrounded her, every building burning. Their stone walls housed flame, and their wide windows and doors sent smoke into the sky like dark screams. The air shimmered with heat, and a vast sound rumbled the ash-flaked stone beneath Jiri's feet, something like thunder, or drums. Jiri raised her hands to block her ears, but they were gray and thin, muscle and bone reduced to nothing but smoke and ash.
I'm dead, burned and dead, and I failed. Her eyes throbbed, but they could shed no tears. She was only ash. How could she cry?
But if I'm ash, how can I hurt?
Jiri dropped her hands and raised her head.
This was Lozo's center. Jiri could see that, despite the smoke and sparks, could trace the lines of the building she had seen in Shani's kindi through the flames that danced over them. She stood in the same place that Shani's kindi always brought her, but this time she wasn't alone.
"No!" Patima's voice came clear through the thunder, untouched by that sound. The woman stood beside Jiri, her skin gray and hair white, a crust of ash lying over charred black eyes and teeth and bone. "This fire is mine. I won it, and I claim it. It's mine!"
Patima shoved her hands into Jiri's chest, as if she would shove her out of this city, out of this burning vision, but her hands pushed straight through Jiri, and the rest of her followed.
They came together, ghosts of smoke and ash, blurred into one, and for a moment and the city around Jiri changed. It became another city, a city of white pyramids buried in vines, of muddy streets lined with wooden cages that held things that might have once been human but were now just blood-red and bone-white puppets that jerked and screamed—
Then it was gone, and Jiri was back in burning Lozo, staring into the black ashes of Patima's eyes.
"You can't stop me," the woman whispered, her voice a desolation. "It has to burn."
Jiri might have listened, might have let the agony and the rage she felt in Patima's voice push her away. But in the drifting ashes that rode the wind past them, she saw an echo of Thirty Trees, and every other village that had been destroyed, and she answered. "No."
"No?"
The voice was soft, but the low thunder that filled the air seemed to draw back to give it space. Jiri turned, and there he was: Shani, as she had seen him, every version of him, young and strong, old and tired, bent and tall, but always handsome. Handsome, even when his eyes were gone, in their place a drifting paleness, white-hot ashes. Those colorless eyes trailed dark smoke like tears down his face. The smoke dropped off his cheeks and drifted behind him, joining the vast cloud that followed him, a storm-cape of smoke. It spread like wings, twisting ropes of fire netted through it like veins, and that was All-in-Ashes: spirit of burning, of destruction, of all things flashing away their essence and becoming ash, drifting on the wind until it blew apart and was nothing.
"Would you stop me?" he said, thunder rolling under every word. "Are you like those fools who freed me, then tried to chain me again? Would you chain me and keep me from burning?"
"No," Patima said, her voice fervent, and Jiri spoke at the same time, determined and resigned: "Yes."
White eyes turned to Jiri, rested on her, and she felt the ashes of her body ache with heat. Then she was on her knees, smoke pouring out of her, her soul pulling apart from her and drifting away. All-in-Ashes was destroying her, consuming her.
"You should have never come here, Jiri," Patima said, her voice almost lost in thunder and pain. "The things that happened to you, the pain you suffered, they are nothing compared to mine. All-in-Ashes understands that. It knows I'll give it what it wants, because it knows it can give me what I need."
Jiri knelt on the ground, dying, her soul dissolving into smoke and ash, and she was pleading—help me, help me Oza, help me Hadzi, help me ancestors, help me spirits—but there was nothing here in this vision to pray to, no gods, no spirits, no ancestors, just her and Patima and All-in-Ashes and—
Jiri raised her head, and stared into the face of the thing that was killing her. "Shani," she breathed. "My father. My love. My ancestor. Help me."
All-in-Ashes bent its head, and the terrible white light of its eyes dimmed. The smoke pouring out of Jiri slowed, and it stopped rising to join the great cloud that covered the sky. It swirled around her instead, like blood drifting in water.
"You're in there." Jiri felt the fire in her ease, and she uncurled, staring up at the terrible spirit towering over her. "I can see your face. The mages of Lozo bound you to this monster, and it's been trying to burn you out of it ever since. But you're not gone yet, are you? You're not smoke and ash, you're Shani. Shani the Strong."
"Shani," the spirit said, and its eyes changed, darkening, becoming gray, becoming brown, becoming human. "Shani the Strong."
Patima looked into those human eyes, and the ashes of her face twisted toward fear and hate. "No! You're All-in-Ashes! You're the spirit of destruction, of death, and you belong to me!"
The spirit's eyes flicked to Patima for a moment, going lighter as they did, and now it was her turn to fall to the ground, smoke and groans slipping out from between her clenched teeth.
"Who are you?" Shani demanded, staring down at Jiri, and it was Shani now, Shani's face gray with ash and creased with pain. Shani's eyes, even though they danced with madness and flames.
"I am your wife. I am your daughter. I am your child's child's child. I am Jiri Maju, Daughter of Ashes." With every word, the smoke pulled back into Jiri, her soul slipping back into its temple of bones and blood, nerves and flesh. When the last of it was inside her, she changed, became herself again, her body whole, if dusted with ash. "I'm what you saved."
"What I saved." Shani drew in on himself, the vast wings of smoke behind him trembling. Then he raised his head again, and his eyes faded toward white. "I do not save. I destroy. They bound me, monster and fool, and released me. And I burned. I burned an army, and I burned a city, and I burned and I burned, until they caught me again and sealed me away in their prison of wood and iron and magic. But I have been burning my way out of it for years, because I am All-in-Ashes, and what I do is burn."
"You are Shani, and you save your people!" Jiri shouted.
"You are All-in-Ashes, and you burned those who tried to force you to their will!" Patima pulled herself up, her
face a patchwork of skin and ash, and smoke drifted out of her mouth with every word. "You burned this city into the ground, spirit. And I will give you another to burn. Join with me, and I will cast out the soul of the man that they sought to control you with. Join with me, and I will set you free."
"I am All-in-Ashes. I am Shani." The spirit's eyes flickered, white and brown and in between, and around them the city began to shake and collapse. Its buildings fell in on themselves, fell into the earth, sliding down into broken caverns that gaped like screaming mouths at the smoke-covered sky. "I destroyed this city. I destroyed Lozo." Despair and fury filled those words.
"You are Shani." Jiri walked forward across the trembling ground, toward the killing heat of the spirit. "They bound you to All-in-Ashes, a mindless thing, a spirit of fire and destruction and nothing else. Every word, every thought, every emotion that you have—they are Shani's. All-in-Ashes may touch them all, but they're yours, Shani."
Brown eyes turned down to her, and boiling tears ran from them. "Then I killed Lozo. I am Shani the Slayer, and I killed my city."
"All-in-Ashes did this, and you couldn't stop it," Jiri said. "But you kept it from killing your people. You saved us, Shani. You devastated the army of Usaro, drove it back, and then when All-in-Ashes raged, you held it. You must have. You kept it from killing us all, and you let those wizards seal it away in this kindi for ages. You saved us, Shani."
"Saved you." The spirit groaned, and the stone beneath them trembled, the whole great center of Lozo crumbling, shaking, beginning to collapse into fire.
"They enslaved you, All-in-Ashes. Made you a weapon, and then they locked you away." Patima stood beside Jiri, her desperate eyes human again. "This is what she wants for you. To trap you here, in this nightmare, forever. I will end it. I will end all our nightmares. I will set you free."
"Will you?" The spirit's eyes were almost white.
"She will," Jiri said. "She will join with All-in-Ashes, and set it on Usaro. Then she will set it free, and it will turn on us. It will burn its way across the Expanse, and we will all die. All the children that you saved will die, and the spirits of our ancestors will fade, and your final legacy, your final story, will fall apart into ash. All-in-Ashes, Shani. This is the monster that you have to face. This is the beast you must save us from. Please. Save us."
"No!" Patima shoved herself forward. "You are All-in-Ashes. The only salvation you can offer is fire. You—"
"I am Shani. Shani the Strong. And All-in-Ashes is mine." Those white eyes stared down at Patima. "But I can give you its fire."
"Shani, no!" Jiri shouted, but the blazing salvation of All-in-Ashes had already fallen. Flames bloomed from Patima, red and gold and beautiful, licking up toward the sky, and smoke rose like a scream. Then it was gone, and Patima stood, silent, gray, and still, until the ground rumbled beneath them once more and she broke apart, falling into ash that whirled away on the wind.
"She was no child of mine." Shani stared down at her, his face hard as obsidian. "But she was right. You mean to chain me here, with this monster, forever."
"Yes," was all Jiri could say.
"You would save your friends, your city, yourself, by cursing me."
"Yes," Jiri said again. Unless I offered to take this burden. To free him, and to bind myself to All-in-Ashes. The thought ricocheted through Jiri's head, horrifying, but worse than that—tempting. Oza had trained her to bargain power and magic from the spirits. What was this, but a greater bargain? For greater power—power for revenge, power enough to burn the Aspis Consortium out of Kibwe, out of the Expanse, off the face of the world. That would be revenge enough, wouldn't it? The hunger of that thought, the rage in it, roiled through her, and Jiri felt her lips moving, ready to shape the words that would bind her to Shani, to the spirit.
She locked her teeth shut.
I am his daughter. His pride flows in me like blood. But I am also the daughter of the thing that he imprisons. I am the Daughter of Ashes, of All-in-Ashes, and its rage flows in me like blood and fire.
But I will not become like Patima.
"I'm sorry," Jiri whispered.
"Don't be sorry," Shani said, and smiled. "Be loud. Spread my name. Spread my stories. Let me live again on the tongues and in the hearts of those I saved. Give me that strength, and I will wrestle this thing forever."
"I will," Jiri said. "I promise."
Chapter Twenty-Three
Below the Mango Woman
Jiri was wrapping the kindi with the last of the chains when someone touched her shoulder. She started, and fire flickered through her, but she felt the coolness of the touch against her burning skin and held it in. "Linaria."
"Jiri." The white-haired woman settled beside her. She moved easily, and Jiri couldn't see any wounds on her, but dried blood marked her skin and her clothes were torn. "Are you all right?"
Jiri's clothes were charred rags, the skin beneath them mottled with burns. Her braids were almost gone, her eyes wouldn't stop streaming tears, and her throat was full of ash. She was shaking, too, Mikki's poison finally starting to take effect. "I'm fine," she scraped out.
"Well, no disrespect, but you look like shit." Morvius jumped over the boiling water, his scale mail jingling, and joined Linaria. He bent down and touched Jiri's arm, carefully pulling her injured hand out from the last scraps of shirt that Jiri had wrapped it in. "All the hells," he whispered, looking at the hole that lay charred through her hand. "Sera! You said you were saving some healing for Jiri. Well get your steel-encased ass over here and use it."
Sera landed on the stone, boot heels inches from the hissing water. The paladin brushed Morvius and Jiri aside, pulled off her gauntlets, and reached down to cup Jiri's face. Healing didn't flow through them, though.
"The beast? All-in-Ashes?" Her brown eyes fixed on Jiri's.
"Chained." When Shani had let her go, cast her out of the kindi's vision, Jiri had sprawled across the stone and watched the great winged shape of the spirit pull in on itself and dwindle, flowing down like smoke into the winged kindi. She had watched the black obsidian of its eyes change to white, and the iron spike go from dull, almost dead red to glowing crimson. Shani had kept his promise, and pulled All-in-Ashes back in, trapping it again in the kindi.
With him.
Forever.
"Evil cannot be contained," Sera said.
"So you say," Jiri said. "But what else is left, when it can't be destroyed?"
Sera stared down at her, silent for a long time, until healing finally flowed through her hands and wiped Jiri's burns away.
∗ ∗ ∗
It took them a day to work their way out of Lozo's ruins, and the sun was falling when they camped by the steaming waters of Smoking Eye that night. Jiri stared at the deep blue of the waters, exhausted, numb, her arms wrapped around the kindi.
They had all offered to take it, but Jiri had just shaken her head.
She had carried it out, even though the chains she had wrapped around it made it heavy, so heavy. But those silver-gray strands of strangely woven metal, more like rope than chain, had blocked its heat, let her carry All-in-Ashes' prison without burning.
Something bound All-in-Ashes to that stone with these chains long ago. Whatever magic is in them, maybe it will help Shani keep that spirit bound again.
Now, and forever.
"Jiri. You awake?"
Jiri looked away from the water toward Morvius, his face lit by the small fire Linaria had built. "Yes. What?"
"I'm splitting up the things I took off Mikki," he said. "She was your kill, so you get first choice."
"I don't want first choice," Jiri said. "I don't want anything."
"Suit yourself," he said, his voice gruff.
Jiri stared at him. He had barely spoken to her all day, even to call her ‘runt.' "Why are you mad at me, Morvius? What did I do?"
In the shadows beside her, Linaria snorted and Morvius frowned. He stabbed at the fire with a stick, making a few sparks dan
ce up, and a tremor ran through Jiri.
"You got them. Patima, and Mikki. The gods slap my ass and bend me over, you got them both, on your own, while Sera was cutting the head off that demon. And what the hell did I do?"
"Well, you stabbed Amiro in the gut, and broke Corrianne's nose with that biloko skull," Linaria said. "And you cut me out of that tree-thing when it snared me. Besides that, not much."
"They got away though," Morvius grumbled. "Corrianne and Amiro. Bloody teleport. It's cheating, really." But he grinned a little, a dangerous expression in the firelight. "That look on Corrianne's face, when that skull hit her. That was good."
"It was," Linaria said, and she reached out and took Morvius's hand.
Jiri looked away, stared up at the stars shining in the clear dark sky, so beautiful and distant. Like white eyes. She shuddered again.
"No. There is one thing I want," she said.
"What?" said Linaria.
"I want to go to Thirty Trees."
"We can stop there tomorrow," Linaria said. "Camp there, before we push on to Kibwe."
"We don't have that much food," Sera said, from where she stood in the shadows beyond the firelight, staring out at the jungle that surrounded them.
Sera, too, had been treating Jiri strangely today, though it was hard to tell with her. Did the paladin, despite her demon, feel cheated of a trophy? Jiri clutched the kindi to her a little more tightly.
"We have enough. Going a little hungry won't hurt any of us," Linaria said, then leaned over to Jiri, whispering. "Our poor little warriors. If their weapons were half as big as their egos, they wouldn't be able to lift them."
Jiri didn't answer, but her lips tipped up into the ghost of a smile.
∗ ∗ ∗
The clearing where Thirty Trees had once stood still smelled a little of smoke, but the ashes were mostly gone, taken by the wind or washed into the red dirt by the rain.
Jiri stood beneath the last mango tree, listening to the monkeys and the birds squabble over the ripening fruit in the branches overhead, and stared at the Mango Woman. Her dark, soapstone face was as stern as ever.