Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  SALVATION'S FIRE

  AFTER THE WAR BOOK 2

  Justina Robson

  A decade ago the terrible demigod, the Kinslayer, returned from his long exile in darkness, leading an army of monsters and laying waste everything in his path.

  The nations of the world rallied, formed hasty alliances, fought back the tide.

  A small band of heroes, guided by the enigmatic Wanderer, broke into the Kinslayer’s palace and killed him.

  But what happens when the fighting’s done?

  When the old rivalries are remembered, when those who are hungry and broken turn to their neighbours in need?

  After the War is a story of consequences.

  Published 2018 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-111-4

  Copyright © 2018 Justina Robson

  Cover art by Tomasz Jedruszek

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names. characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  For Daniel

  Thanks for showing me worlds hitherto unknown :-)

  PROLOGUE

  THE GIRL WAS lost. Everyone was lost at the camp. It was a place for lost things: people, dogs, things carried and loved, things carried and hated, things without homes or names. They were put down there because there was nowhere else to be put down, on a land that nobody had cared about enough to set a spade in or fence around. It wasn’t bad land, but it had no particular goodness. Water was far. Trees were sparse. Grass was tough and unlovely to behold. Weed and brambles were endless, hiding the little game. Even the sky was meagre, eked across the hills like a hide stretched too thin which would soon get hard in the rain, and tear, and let everything pour in.

  The girl shared a tent with two angry women. They were not relatives but they had a wider kinship that marked them both as Babohendra, the people of the horse. They were further displaced than she was and their semi-circular hoofs, angled legs and furred skins of chestnut and black were foreign enough to be frightening, though none of them had the energy for fright. The Kinslayer’s armies had seen to that. All of them were exhausted, worn down to the bones by running. Even after the turn of the seasons had thrice counted them in they were always light sleepers, ready to leave, unable to believe that it was over.

  Perhaps it was not over. She wasn’t sure. She’d felt him die. A life like that was distinctive, even at a great distance. It had left behind a kind of silence that resonated against all he had touched that still lived. She knew he was a monster, a death-bringer of unmatched carnage, even among his own kind, but she had seen him as a vivid, vibrant exultation of life right until the last moments of his rending. As a life he had been exceptional and the music of the world was less without him. But without his smothering presence she was able to detect other melodies—the brilliant shapes of other Guardians still active—and so she alone of all the sad rabble in that place was completely confident that he was gone, his armies scattered, his plans awry, his destiny reached and story ended.

  He had wanted to end her story but he had missed her. She smiled when she thought of this. It was her secret gladness and it gave her the power to endure hunger, thirst, cold and starvation of love. He had lost and she was still alive. But she was alone. Her smile faded then, always, as she knew it. None of these people were her people. Their kind no longer existed upon the earth.

  This day, grey and damp, filled with lamenting from one quarter, with glum despair at others, was no different to a hundred other days. The sun had come up, those who were able had gone to hunt and forage, those who were not remained by the smoky little fires and made teas from sticks. A party went out to find out what happened to the last group who had set off to a village some twenty miles distant and not returned. They went armed with sharpened poles, slowly, hoping to be met on the way. Without some kind of trade they were going to die soon in this nothing valley, surrounded by indifferent woodlands, as surely as rabbits in a trap. They had nothing to trade but themselves and a few little trinkets that were precious but of no value to a stranger. There was nothing to be done about it.

  She went out of the tent and stood in the mud, watching the other children sit sullenly or poke about with sticks. They didn’t like her and she didn’t like them. It wasn’t personal. They stared at her, sunken eyes that would have been spiteful but now were losing interest and would soon not care. The adults moved around slowly, as if they were under water. They didn’t see her. She didn’t belong with them. A moment after she had turned away a stone hit her on the head. Probably they were laughing at her, but maybe not. She didn’t know, wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of looking around to find out. It settled the matter.

  She went back into the tent and picked up the rag bundle she used to gather leaves and berries. Heading out past the few log cabins she took the path towards the deeper forest at their backs. They had come this way when they first arrived and she remembered seeing roads.

  A sharp jerk on her sleeve stopped her. She looked up. The younger of the two women whose tent she shared was looking, moving her mouth, making a questioning, cross face. Her hoof stamped, betraying her anxiety.

  The girl pointed to the woods. Mimed picking, eating.

  An expression of exasperation, sadness and concern filled the woman’s long features. Her brown eyes were patient, much more so than her hands, which she folded up against the urge to snatch the girl and hold her too tightly. There was an emptiness there, the ghost of someone left behind. The girl knew it and waited until the woman nodded to say she could go. It was all she had to give as a parting gift to the one who had tried to help her, that moment of kindness. There should be so much more, but there wasn’t.

  She left the camp and moved beyond the briar patches and the glades of wild garlic, the fallen logs where mushrooms came, the boles of familiar trees that were climbable where there might be birds nests and insects within the reach of someone small, light. She knew them all. She touched them as she passed, those slow lives, and felt through their roots across the huge reach of the land to where there were other bright patches, people and their animals. She found a way.

  She dropped the rags at some point before it got dark. She drank from a stream and left her fingers in it to go cold because there were fish there, lively and full of brilliance, that lent her a little joy. Once she looked around, looked back. She took a route through the thorn bushes that no larger person could follow, to be sure.

  She traced her way safely, guided by the beating hearts of the tiny animals, the darting swiftness of the flies. She avoided humans. She kept to the path of the trees, heading to a spot far away in the West where a brilliant shadow was moving; dark candlelight, the grey, ever-flickering silver gleams of the Wanderer.

  CHAPTER ONE

  "RIDDLE ME REE, such fancies are free, the cat’s in the cream and the bird’s on the tree!” Many voices, most of them either intoxicated or excited, the owners full of sweet honey pastries, were united, belting out the words to the old rhyme so enthusiastically that the sound floated all the way across the scattered trestles and decimated feasts to the farthest reaches of the castle grounds. Children playing, dogs barking, infighti
ng amongst various relations, bawdiness and other fine noises of a celebration in its throes circled about the grassy pastures and along the hedgerows.

  At Celestaine’s family home the number of songs known and sung gustily without the slightest concern for sense or melody always amazed her—joyfully for the most part. But today she was simply grateful that it wasn’t another rendition of ‘The Blade of Castle Mourn’ in which she had a starring role as the warrior who slaughtered a dragon, cut off the Kinslayer’s hand and paved the way to human salvation. It would have been unfitting to lie about in a drunken stupor under the blossom-heavy boughs of the cherry orchard and have unwitting relatives find her in the loose embrace of the ‘enemy’, sharing mead with another ‘enemy’. There would have been explaining to do, and shouting about Yorughan scum. There probably still would be. There might be a fight and that would be a pity because she enjoyed a good fight but had now drunk too much to make a showing. The only consolation to the entire tedious day was that finally it was over and she was now free to leave for the open road as she had tried to do three days earlier when Caradwyn had thwarted her. She’d been calling for her horse, her armour, all set to ride off and find out what foolish nonsense Deffo, least useful Guardian, was on about this time (and thank goodness for Deffo, if you could ever say that and mean it, but she did right then, the boredom and the difficulty of being at home already stifling and unbearable) when her cousin had appeared, a spectre of orange and pink silk, blonde braids and rosewater.

  Caradwyn was the family beauty. She shared Celestaine’s height and “silver-beauty” near-white hair, blue eyes and milk skin, but the resemblance ended abruptly at that point. Celestaine was broad of shoulder, straight and strong, trained for combat and endurance. Caradwyn was willowy at the centre and curvy where it counted. Although in childhood she had loved the outdoors she now considered walking a chore and disliked anything that would disturb her sense of order. Despite this unpromising development she and Celestaine had shared happy childhood moments riding out and canoeing along the river tributaries. What Caradwyn lacked in general gusto she made up for with a powerful imagination. She was the storyteller who had Celestaine spellbound with the lives she invented for them; they were troubadors on the run, they were Guardians helping the poor and driving back the ferocious evil of the underground races (Celestaine knew irony was never going to let her go) and they were heroic princesses, freeing flying horses from evil enchanters, fishing up magical beasts from the dark pools beneath the hanging willows, dreaming of the winged demons of the far north who soared high up between icy mountains on wings feathered with steel. Since then they hadn’t seen much of one another. Celestaine had trained for combat and the tough business of every day on the estate, and Caradwyn had travelled to Ilkand as a scholar with her books and scripts to become the master of managing and recording. She took to it with the love of a Cheriveni for numbers and regulation.

  They were already distant by the time Celestaine came back, now a person who really was immortalised in song, a hero with a horse. She hadn’t even talked to Caradwyn, or anyone, on her return. It was hard to say which had been harder to bear—the adulation and awe or the horror and the revulsion—but on balance it was the revulsion that did her in when Heno and Nedlam were revealed as her companions. Caradwyn hadn’t made a tale about that in the good old days.

  Heno and Nedlam, as Yorughan, the vanguard and powerhouse of the Kinslayer’s elite forces, were the evil enemy from below. Heno was the worst of the worst, a Heart Taker, painted like a devil, a tusked beast, filled with eldritch sorcery. Nedlam was the kind of giant monstress that ate babies. You killed them and left the bodies for the birds. You let them die slow for all the thousands they’d killed. You didn’t bring them home. You didn’t lay down with them. You didn’t offer them home and hearth and heart and feel that of all the people in the world they were your closest friends. Closer even than all who had known you before the war.

  So Celestaine had avoided Caradwyn—easy enough given Caradwyn’s responsibilities as Fernreame’s bookkeeper and estates manager—and then, just as freedom beckoned its crooked finger, there she was, as large as life and twice as sweet, her large, grey eyes bright with the tears that suspected betrayal, those full, curving lips that perfectly pouted in a fully justified hurt.

  “You can’t go before the wedding!”

  Celestaine had opened her mouth and nothing had come out. Fully nothing at all.

  She could hear servants in the courtyard without, hauling trestles and benches into place for the wedding of Caradwyn to another newly-returned war hero, Starich the Wolf. He was heir to the titles and privileges of Thistledown; a notable clan. In addition he was a sufficiently skimpy number of warrior-barons short of the throne of Arven to be in with a shot at it, if he successfully united with Fiddlehead, the clan to which Fernreame belonged. This made him a superlative catch, according to Celestaine’s aunt, and a fine fellow according to her uncle, the present Clan head, who couldn’t wait to unite the fortunes of both houses and hand it all over to someone else in order that he would finally be free to go fishing.

  Celest couldn’t wait for Starich to arrive so that their attention would divert onto something they wholeheartedly approved of—something without suspiciously strange frenemies in tow that they must learn to treat nicely instead of beheading. Starich, and not she, could properly occupy the role of the warrior-at-home, thunderously embellishing every tale of battle, relishing feasts, sparring with his fellows and enacting scenes of valor for the amusement of those too old and too young to be sent to fight. Starich wouldn’t be grabbing his coat and heading for the hills unless they told him to, not with all that responsibility to weigh him down. They could fawn over him and fuss over Caradwyn and their plans for a rosy future full of ferocious children so that Celest would be able to slip away without further ado.

  “I…” she said, but there was nothing. She looked at Caradwyn’s face, older now, pale from lack of sunlight, freckled and looking at her with such a longing that was easy to read—only a few days more now of the freedom to be herself, before duty and motherhood came to take the time. She looked exactly as she had looked when she visited years before, hunting out Celest, demanding they continue the adventures of the summer before. But now there would be no more of that. Celest had gone and had one without her. And was now leaving her forever.

  “I… wouldn’t miss it,” she said. “I was just making some preparations. For later.”

  Caradwyn’s despair lightened a little and she gripped Celestaine’s arm firmly, the lie there so plainly to see, the mail freshly oiled and ready. “Good. We must ride out together. I have something I must tell you and you must tell me the truth of everything. I want the whole story.” Seeing Celestaine start to demur she shook her firmly, “No! You will not dare deprive me! Celest. Tomorrow. Tomorrow at dawn we ride. Meet me at the stables.”

  That enthusiasm, that energy, that sense of how much Caradwyn had always liked her—not always returned enough. “Yes,” Celestaine said. “All right. At dawn.”

  “Alone,” Caradwyn shook her finger in Celestaine’s face. “Nobody else. I want you all to myself.”

  “Alone.” Celest managed a smile.

  “I must go see to the chicken man and his money,” Caradwyn sighed, rattling the collection of silver keys and trinkets she wore at her belt to mark her as the head of the clan households. “I have missed you. And here you are now. Exactly as I always imagined.”

  “I’m not what you imagined at all,” Celest said, thinking of Heno compared to Caradwyn’s suitor and at the same moment realising that she was not at home here, and would never be.

  “Yes, you are.” In ignorance of Celest’s thoughts Caradwyn made a motion of buttoning Celestaine’s mouth shut.

  Celest shook her head insistently, feeling like a joy-killer.

  “You did what we always dreamed of.” Caradwyn buttoned Celest to silence more firmly and pointed at her as she walked away, p
icked up her skirts to hurry off, cast a final smile over her shoulder like a ray of sunlight.

  Celest stood, her saddle over her arm, alone in the hall. She felt a thousand years old. Beside her was the old portrait of her dead father which had looked down when two girls had schemed to run the world. Now she was on eye-level. He looked straight at her and she met his gaze and felt she looked in a mirror. Beside him, her mother’s wry humor fought with a stern attachment to duty. She was glad they had not lived to see her now. It made things easier.

  She’d used to hate adult portraits that looked so stern, so disappointed.

  She still hated them.

  She sighed and went to tell the others they were staying.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS TWO days since Deffo had appeared with news of his fellow Guardian, Wanderer.

  Celestaine had a cautious trust in Wanderer, which she didn’t extend to any of his fellow demigods who had been left by the gods themselves to take care of humankind. Reckoner’s transformation into the Kinslayer had pretty much done a hatchet job on a lot of people’s trust in them. But Wanderer had given her the sword that could cut through anything. She had cut off the Kinslayer’s hand with it, besides killing a dragon. It had allowed her to take him down, along with the others; and now it was gone, buried deep in a rock after breaking against Wall’s hammer and flying off. Fate or godly intervention? She didn’t care to know. But there was an urgent appeal in Deffo’s claim.

  “Wanderer’s near. He knows where the gods are!”