Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  Murti’s voice was quiet and unchanged. “I have a girl to find who is alive. Those people were already finished. Nothing I did to their bodies would make any difference to them. But a few hours on the road might make a difference to her.”

  Bukham in the midst of his agony felt speared by guilt. “And now you’re blaming me! You’re saying I’m stupid and mean when you were saying I was kind!” He knew it didn’t sound like sense but it did make sense to him. And even in the midst of it he knew that he was wrong and the priest was right but he was so hurt that this final knowledge became like a lock, shutting him firmly in the prison of his mistakes.

  Finally he managed to say, “Why didn’t you say this when it could have changed my mind?”

  “Some things are only understood by experience. Actually all things.”

  “So you let me go off to learn something while she could be dying.” Bukham was still furious, but also sinking into a state of despond that seemed to be more powerful than the anger. He groped around, sensing that the anger was more useful and could be some kind of escape from the much worse sensation of futility. “What does that make you?”

  “It makes me right,” Murti said, still apparently unaffected. “We are Wandering Priests. You Wandered off. It’s not my place to call you back from the path. Already you’ve learned more in a few hours than anything I could tell you in a lifetime.”

  “That is a convenient load of cant,” Bukham said, struggling not to swear more than he already had. Why it was important to maintain politeness and decency in the circumstances he was at a loss to know but it felt better, as if he was winning. “And I’m not a priest. And we’re not here to train me, we’re here to save a little girl.”

  Murti said nothing. Bukham waited for the retort or something else but it never came. He was hungry and tired. Everything felt off kilter, broken. “She can’t be this far.” He wanted to go back to Taib. At least there he could catch up with the Templars but then, what would he do? The Post was a place of amnesty, unless that too was of no importance any more.

  To survive the Kinslayer Uncle had taken them far south, to scout new markets, but now Bukham saw that was merely a pretext to get out of the way of trouble. Returning, he’d expected normality as they knew it to resume. But normality was gone.

  Murti’s silence angered him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FOR HOURS KULA had struggled to keep moving towards the glow on the hill. It was a blaze of life, but there was more to it than that—a suffusion of magic so powerful that it felt like the flames of the funeral pyres her family had built for the best of their kind, to bring the soulfire that sent a spirit high to the next world. She wondered if maybe some of them had escaped and she decided to try to find them, more sure with every starving, delirious step that this was going to lead her back to them. In her imagination it had already happened so many times, this happy reunion. She felt that she was going home at last after all the long years alone.

  Now, after a long climb through thick forest the fire’s source was revealed at last. She saw burning but without smoke; orange, yellow and red, even white in places with the heat. Every tree of this part of the forest was on fire and among them the dashing, insane Draeyad spirits of the wood, whose life went on unabated as they burned endlessly, unable to escape even through death. Where she had eagerly rushed to reach and touch them she shrank back now, not daring to. Instead of the happy faces of her family she saw faces of beings lost to an utter madness of agony. In the trees the brilliance was so intense that she couldn’t look on it with her eyes. Here was life all right. Life at its most energetic pitch, too high to survive in a body, in flames, but unable to leave. Their pain was unimaginable. The wide-mouthed, screaming faces rushed at her, looking at her, a creature outside their hell but who saw and knew what was happening. They were calling to her to kill them, kill them all. They tried to tear themselves apart in despair but the fire only mended them as soon as they succeeded.

  Her dreams of warm hearths, glowing faces, happiness creating all that ferment, died in her. All her hope was gone and in its place a spite sat, contemptuous of her, that she would dare to dream of something like that after all she had already seen. The cruelty of her own illusion hurt her more than anything. She fell to her knees in the dry dirt and fallen needles of the dead wood on the hillside and sat there, ready for death, determined now not to move until it came and she didn’t have to feel anything any longer.

  She had been there some time when a movement startled her so that before she knew it she was on her face in the hollow behind a fallen trunk, peering through the hole where the wood had rotted through. She could just make out the jerky, struggling shapes of men toiling at a difficult task. Lit by the fiery glow the sweat on their skins stood out like metal in the dusk, for it was night, and they were hurrying, crouching and cowering in the labour as though hoping not to be seen and to get what they were doing done as fast as possible.

  What they were doing was hauling a wooden stretcher upon two wheels. A long box was atop it, of the darkest black, yellow firelight casting strange shadows from the ornate carvings that covered its surface. Tendons strained and veins pulsed on the bare necks, arms and backs of the party of five as they wrenched the stretcher this way and that between the trees and over boulders, but it was clear that it wasn’t the land causing the problem—they were fit and capable, their red tattoos against their dark skins marked them clearly as warriors of the Tzarkomen, and although slighter than many they were hardly troubled by something so feeble as the stretcher cart.

  At first she didn’t understand what they were fighting. It was difficult to see through the broken tree but she didn’t dare move. She feared Tzarkomen. They had ways with death that she wanted nothing to do with. Their magic could hold her at the gate of death and make her body work for them here until it fell apart, while her spirit fuelled the lethal power of their weapons. But for all the charmed blades and fetishes they carried here it looked like there was an invisible foe that was getting the better of them. For every few steps they managed they had to stop and twist, cowering against the ground, their hands over their ears where their heads were wrapped tightly in bandages. Their bodies shook with the stress of resistance against this force as they ploughed on. When one turned his face to the light, looking for something, she saw the rolling white eyes of madness, the face of an animal in a trap. It looked very like the faces of the screaming spirits.

  Then she understood. She was protected because she did not hear but they could hear the screams of the Draeyads, and the closer they got to the boundary where the burning, incandescent land met the dry, dead earth of the surrounding forest the more unbearable it became. The last few strides took them all their effort, shuddering, pushing the stretcher, only to have one of the wheels founder on a stone half buried in dry needles and crack in half. It had come a long way if they had taken it from Tzark. As far as she had come in all her days. She watched them try to catch the stretcher platform as it spilled its heavy contents down onto the ground.

  The black box slid off the planks and into the earth with a thud that she felt through her body, as if it weighed an enormous amount more than it ought to. Then the cowering warriors got out picks and shovels and began to dig in the burning ground. The tools caught fire, and their boots where they crossed the boundary. Then they were hopping and running, mouths and eyes wide, foaming. They argued viciously among themselves. One threw down his tools and ran off, hands to his head. The leader cast a spear at his back but it missed and then, with their digging undone and unable to do whatever they had come for—to bury that box, surely—they all broke nerve, save for the leader, and went hurling themselves back down the hillside as fast as they could go.

  She felt a little smile on her face. She didn’t like Tzarkomen and they looked very silly, even more so that they were the most feared of all and running like rats. But the last one remained, more afraid to leave than to let his task go undone. He went back to d
igging, focused on the earth just this side of the border. Tears, sweat and his own yelling occupied him as he fought the urge to flee, and so he didn’t see the enormous form of the centaur loom out of the inferno. It was one of the largest and most vivid of all the Draeyads imprisoned there—the horse part of it as large as the mightiest war steed, the human part on a scale of an Oerni or a Yorughan. It reared back silently to gather itself and hurled a ball of fire at him, despair and rage focused so powerfully that the impact knocked him off his feet. There was a sudden darkness as the ball seemed not just to hit him but to pass through his skin and vanish inside him as he flew through the air.

  He landed right beside the dead trunk that was sheltering her, so close that she could see the terror, the horror in his face as he realised he was seeing his last moments. And the bewilderment too, that always came to those who traded in the death of others so freely. Now she knew he felt life, his life, and all that it could have been. A light came on inside his skin as the soulfire ignited. Instinctively, not knowing she would do it, she put her hand out through the hole in the wood and clasped his wrist in her strongest grasp so that he would not be alone, would know how to die without becoming an instrument of greater powers he didn’t want to serve, Those Who Lingered, behind all things.

  His head turned and he looked at her in shock, seeing himself gripped by a dead tree, or no, a child of some kind, a grip like that of death itself into which he could run away from the burning and into which he slipped without a thought as the light within him exploded and blew his body apart into fine, powdery ash.

  Kula lay in the tree. She could feel the attention, the fixated attention of the creatures in the burning wood. Probably they were angry with her for thwarting their rage but the Tzarkomen was safely dead now and not coming back for anyone. She had sent him into the earth, the greatest of all sanctuaries, which could hold anything. His last moment had been peace, though all she had seen of him as he passed was an endless tide of death: ziggurats running in blood, flesh and bone raw under the burning sky. Children dying. That’s what she saw. His own people, falling to blades they had made, one great and endless chain of slaughter. Mothers and fathers had slain their own and then each other until the bodies lay in heaps like strange fruit upon the sand.

  She dug her fingers deeper into the dry, fragile ground, burying that vision he had left her with just as they had tried to bury the box; but where they had failed, she succeeded. She willed the earth to take it, and the earth, always merciful, accepted it from her. After a few moments the vision was gone. She was empty and could remember that it had happened, but not feel any of its horror again. This was why she didn’t remember the day of the killing at her home, she realised now. Because her mother had bound her in the cellar in a circle of wood and bone, her bare feet on the earth. So she would never remember it, only its shell. She missed her mother then with a fierce grief that no spell could stop, but her body stopped her with a sharp pain.

  Her hand was burning. She pulled it back in, splinters of wood coming with her arm. She brushed them off. A white powder of the Tzarkomen was falling now so that a sharp, black shadow of her body lay on the ground when she got up. As she stood she looked towards the fire. The giant centaur was gone. Draeyads of lesser sizes ran mad and threw themselves into the invisible wall of the boundary, trying to tear it down or smash themselves to bits against it. Their efforts were ceaseless.

  She looked down at her feet so she didn’t have to see them any more. Whatever the box was, it was not alive. But there was something strange about it, a peculiar-not-dead quality of something like a seed, something hidden and waiting for the rain, the sun, the soil to draw it into being. It was shielded from her by the box itself and so she felt it only dimly. She wiped tears off her face with the back of her good hand and moved slowly around the broken tree, her feet leaving a black trail in the pale ash.

  The lid of the box had come loose and slid to one side during the fall. She looked at it for a moment and the twisted shapes of the carvings made themselves into tortured animals, faces and limbs, human and not all twining up and out at her as if they longed to escape too, or to drag her in with them. It depended how the burning light fell on them, she saw. It was so hideous she would have left it and gone but for the thing inside. Unlike the box this had no sense of any malice or intention about it. What she was seeing through the gap, she was sure, was bunched cloth and on it the unmistakable shape of a small human hand.

  She didn’t want to touch the vile box. For a few minutes she searched and eventually found a branch that had enough juice in it to survive a little use. She had to stop and wrap her burnt hand in some cloth from her skirt. That took a long time. She was very slow but determined. It hurt and she was so tired and she saw that she could not stop crying though she didn’t feel much of anything, but eventually she was done and able to get the branch into position to lever off the lid completely.

  It was heavy but it gave easily, the hinges already broken. With a thud it hit the ground, toppled over and revealed an entire body laid out neatly, dressed in the most astounding finery she had ever seen. Cloths and jewels winked and shone, clean and perfect in every stitch. Only the hands and face of the body were visible but the face was also covered in a thin gauzy veil dotted with pearls and stitched with symbols that the Tzarkomen used for weddings and bindings of all kinds. Through it a female face glimmered in the quaking light.

  Kula reached out and touched the veil, cautiously. It felt stiff but nothing happened. She wondered what this could be, a thing that Tzarkomen had and were trying to bury here. They had no use for bodies. They burned the flesh of the dead that they did not eat. The pyres were greasy and oily day and night, the stench half smothered with spices and oils but unmistakable when the wind brought it south to her home. On those days they all remained indoors and only the Shroud went out and about, winnowing. They never had anything good to say about Tzarkomen and aside from adding to their store of factual knowledge they kept none of the newly slain.

  This had not been slain, however. That was clear. Without the lid the feeling of potential was so enormous that it made the hairs on Kula’s arms and neck rise, it filled her bones with a simmering sense of brimming sweetness and energy so that in spite of everything she smiled. This thing was a font of life, waiting to begin. Nothing that felt this way could be evil. It wasn’t the antithesis of that, it was only that it knew nothing of it, knew nothing of anything, was ready… to grow.

  She pulled off the ugly veil with its sigils of death and stasis. The face in repose was youthful, smooth, as though carved. A Tzarkomen girl, nearly a woman. She touched it with a fingertip. Once. Twice. The skin was dry and papery but underneath that it was resilient, plump with youth. She felt the chalkiness of the paint on it that had made it perfectly white in the usual tradition for a bride. The expression and the features were serene and lovely with the peaceful sweetness of the innocent.

  She was reminded instantly of her mother and all the feelings that she had felt for her.

  Then a complete despair came over her and she was as crushed and lonely as she had ever felt. She crawled into the box and lay on the unliving woman, rested her head on the rounded bosom. It was comfortable and with her eyes closed the horrid place receded, vanished to a dim fluttering. She pulled the fineries of the dress around her and closed her eyes, waiting for whatever came. After a while the form under her seemed to soften, or she did. She felt the peacefulness of that face envelop her slowly and sank into it, down and down without resistance. The last thing she was aware of as sleep came was the sensation that loving arms were around her and a loving heart near her and she felt this was the essence of her mother come back somehow from the white fires—not the stern and difficult parts, but the best part, the part that forever and first had loved her and known no other feeling. With a little shiver she relaxed, safe and at home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TRICKY WATCHED THE party of the Fernreame Slayer, her Yorugha
n and her bard vanish slowly as they made headway against the wind and dropped below the hilltop ahead of her. She moved casually to the side of the road, a figure wrapped up against the weather in a heavy oilskin cape, hooded, of no exceptional feature at all save for the boots which, if anyone had been looking at them, could be seen to be fine and strangely undamaged by the mud. She hopped over a few low shrubs and climbed up onto a flat boulder beside the track where a stand of thin trees sheltered her from sight. Next to her the figure of an old man, raggedly dressed, a poor creature of no consequence, shivered.

  She turned to him. “So, what news? I couldn’t hear anything over the stink of all that drying peasant.”

  Deffo wrinkled his nose. “They’re sold on it. They’re off to the hill.”

  “Wanderer?”

  “Might show up. But if he doesn’t I can probably explain it.” He glanced at her. “Did you make them?”

  She reached into her cape and brought out a fine silk purse. Tugging it open she held it up and tipped out a cascade of brown nuggets etched with runes into the palm of her calfskin glove.

  Deffo flinched back a little as he looked down at the fingerbones of their dead brother, the Kinslayer. “I suppose you haven’t…”

  With a flourish of her wrist she cast the bones out before them where they rolled and tumbled before settling in the air, some high, some low, their carved faces dull and lifeless in the light of the coming storm. She studied them intently, reading.

  The Undefeated shivered. “What do you…”