Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

Ralas drew alongside. “Is there some trouble?”

  “Aye, right will be plenty of it soon,” the second, panicky Templar said, his voice steadying.

  “Or our heads on pikes at any rate,” the first added. “But you’re that Fernreame champion what was in on the Slaying, are you not?” He glanced at the company as if to show that he knew who was who. “So if you’re looking for a job there may be work in it.” He turned away, making for the road towards the Post.

  Celestaine nodded and was turning to go when she heard Ralas say cheerily, “So your captain died in glorious battle?”

  There was a pause and an awkward halt as they turned to look at one another from mounts headed in opposite directions.

  “He was sadly slain during a defence of innocent farm folk from evil bandits.” This was said in a tone that brooked no controversy but was, at the same time, so clearly a lie that it was easy to infer that the captain had hardly been on the defending side.

  “I wish you a safe journey, then,” Ralas said. Celest raised her hand to salute and cautiously spurred her horse forwards. She felt a chance stretching away from her, a chance in which she burned to ask what was going on, and whether these two were alone or in some kind of organised mutiny against the Cleric or whatever went on in Ilkand these days, but she had other business which wasn’t headed in that direction.

  “Difficult,” Nedlam said as they went out of earshot.

  Ralas turned in the saddle and looked back. “They’re not going towards Ilkand.”

  “Difficult?” Celest asked.

  “Rebelling when there’s only two of you,” Heno said at her stirrup. “It’s difficult. But not impossible.” His hand briefly gripped Celest’s booted foot and she smiled at him.

  “Never thought I’d like a Templar,” Nedlam shrugged. “An’ I still don’t.”

  They journeyed on in silence, making good time now that the weather had cleared. Some hours later they reached the river and made a turn to the north following the Ilkand Road although it now led through their destination. As they came over the next rise they paused to look. There before them lay the long meandering rollback hills of Hathel Vale with the steady rise of the Wayfarers’ sacred hill at its centre, all thick with trees on the crest which they had last seen ablaze. It had burned fit to light the dark for miles. But in this afternoon light it was peacefully, inexplicably, green and brown. The standing stones that marked the edges of the grand Wanderer’s Way avenue were visible here and there amid rusty foliage. The hilltop looked withered but there was no trace of fire, ordinary or otherwise.

  “What the…?”

  “…hells is going on?” Ralas finished for her as they began to descend into the Vale.

  Curiosity lent them speed. Within the hour they had reached the base of the central hill and begun to move along its lone ascending path. To their right the avenue of stones was a broad, grassy swath but the track stayed away from it and out of uncertainty they did too. They had been on it only a few minutes when Nedlam flared her nostrils. Her Yorughan nose was deceptively small for its power of detection which far outstripped a human sense of smell.

  “Grennish,” she said with a nod and a lip curl of disgust. “Others too. Human. On the other side of the hill. They fight. Not too long ago. Blood is fresh. And—” She stretched her neck up, nostrils flaring. “Fruit.”

  “Fruit?” Ralas eased his back, leaning to the side. “Not the season for that yet round here is it? Another few weeks.”

  “Fruit,” Nedlam said with a nod. “Very ripe. Sweet.” She made a small motion of her mouth that said she had tried these and wasn’t sure about them. “Burnt flesh,” she said, with a more approving grunt.

  In the distance further up the hillside Celestaine thought she saw a dark, ragged shape flit between the branches silhouetted against the sky.

  “Did that man say monsters were about?” Ralas asked.

  “He did, but I think he meant further north where the riverboats dock,” Celestaine said.

  “Just a suggestion then, as things have changed here—before the war when anyone came on this hill they went by the proper Way. On that path one is a visitor. Every other path, no matter how it seems to take you forwards, always ends up at the road again.”

  “We are looking for the Wanderer,” Heno said. “And it is his way, apparently. Should we not try it?”

  Celestaine thought of all the stories she had heard about Draeyad hospitality, none of it charming or sweet. “All right. But be alert. Even if there are no spirits someone’s about.”

  She glanced at the massive rocks of the Wanderer’s Way as they passed each one. Some had worn paint on them but most were moss-covered dark granite, lichen-coined, dug into the earth as if they’d been there forever. They were uncarved and bore no marks of any hewing. Hundreds of them laid the trail on either side in two parallel lines that stretched from the hilltop down to the edge of a valley over two miles away. As she had many times in her life she strained to detect some form of magic around them, but there was no sign for her.

  Instead she watched Heno, the Heart Taker, whose name came from some form of magic that he did which she had never asked about in any detail. He moved to the centre of the avenue, dwarfed by the rocks, and she sent her horse after him, taking the path that was furthest from any stone. Nedlam, by contrast, as unmagical as Celestaine, stomped cheerfully along to his flank, swatting at flies with a bunch of grass she’d picked. Ralas was humming behind her, a snippet of the Wanderer’s Song which had different rhythms for all kinds of places and different words—which were never actual words, she’d realised after years of puzzling; they were deliberately nearly words but not quite words. They, their meaning, their sound, must wander.

  She was scanning the woods for signs of devastation and ashes but finding nothing until her gaze snagged on a bright twinkle of something up on the hill. She pressed her horse to a jog and went ahead, carefully, in the middle, until she was level with the glint. Then she dismounted and let the horse amuse itself with the grass while she beat through the bushes to what she’d seen. It was a scrap of fabric, silky and fine as anything her cousin would have worn. A sequin bead had caught the light and shone to her. The colour was dark purple, with pink stitches visible, and there was a vague scent of some kind of incense. Nearby the grass was trampled in a clear path which went down the hill. She noted that but followed it upwards, hearing the others slowly catch her up as she at last made the summit.

  Here there was a clearing, where the ground was soft and covered in a deep loam of needles that were all agitated and thrown up. A large wooden box was half buried there and around it were gathered six or seven large, majestic humanoids of different kinds. They were semi-transparent, outlined in the strange pale fire of the spirit world. A green tint suffused them; neither plant nor person, but in between. Then she recognised them, but only from seeing them burn in agony—Draeyads. Behind them stood an even larger figure of a creature she had never seen before. At first glance she’d thought another rider had made it here ahead of her, but as the horse’s hefty and very solid chestnut rump turned so that it could face her she realised it wasn’t a rider at all, but a centaur.

  The young woman part of the centaur was dressed in sturdy leather ranging gear, and what had seemed a saddle was a hefty belt. It strapped to both her midsections at once as a harness which served to carry her gear. In her hand she held a long javelin which slowly levelled itself in Celestaine’s direction. Her eyes were a shocking leaf green, her hair corn-gold and as thick and long as her horse tail. She lowered her chin and all of the Draeyads turned with the grace of a leaf in the wind, moving as one to focus on the party as they emerged one by one from the thickets that clogged the old Way.

  “Ho, Wanderer,” said the centaur in a traditional greeting. She spoke well but her accent was thick and foreign to Celestaine’s midlander ears. She didn’t recognise it.

  “Ho,” Celestaine said, freezing by instinct. The stern directness, the s
heer force of the Draeyads’ attention made her wary. Where they had been as quick and fluid as light itself they were now as still as ancient oak trunks. She had to fight an impulse to draw her sword. “How… I mean… what…”

  “Your interest is as ours,” the centaur said, the tip of the javelin lifting slightly to a point where it would only carve a furrow out of one of their heads rather than slice them off.

  The Draeyads seethed, their auras crackling and whirling around them in tendrils that endlessly wove and separated. One was headed with an owl’s face, another was so like a tree it had no features, and a third was part deer and part flower, its eyes the blooms of sun daisies.

  “We…” Celestaine began.

  “Seek Wanderer,” said the tree, lifting a twig hand to gesture at her to come forwards. Its voice came from somewhere deep inside it. “He is near. We also seek to know what is the meaning of this.” It pointed down with one finger at the box and as it did so the finger grew and extended. Bright spring green at the tip, it quickly turned brown as it thickened and lengthened until it touched the carved black wood and recoiled slightly. “Is it yours?”

  “No… hey!” Ralas was cut off by his own gasp of alarm. Celest felt a sudden shift in the ground at the same moment and without any warning felt the tendrils of roots and shoots from all the plants beside her suddenly whipping themselves around her ankles and wrists. Here was something she did recognise from legend. She hoped it wasn’t about to turn into the kind of hospitality that necessitated a long, decaying underground stay.

  “We mean no harm,” Heno said quickly but he was already being lifted off the ground by the force of the rising growth, his hands imprisoned. A fresh leaf unfolded beside his face and touched the carved tusk at his jaw in curiosity.

  “You,” the tree said, and the one that was like a bush and a deer came forwards, rustling, ever-connected to the earth and its companions by a twisting swamp mist that shrouded them about the legs. Its daisy eyes blinked slowly, yellow petals folding and unfolding as they came to examine Heno and then Nedlam, who was grunting in an effort to test the bonds and finding herself lashed tighter, her hammer bound to her as if it were part of her body. Ivy had rushed up her neck and now it threatened to go up her nostrils, at which point she stopped and yelled in the language of the Kinslayer’s minions, “Sao yorak nor na!” We are not here to fight.

  “Defiler’s creatures. Why should we not feast upon you?” the tree said, its voice coming from a dark slash in the bark where a face should have been as clearly as if spoken by a man, though there was no movement visible.

  “They’re with me,” Celestaine said, feeling vulnerable as the daisy-face deer came and thrust its delicate mossy nose at her. It had small horns which were heavy with leaves, and the prickly bright green balls of unripe chestnuts swung from the branches of these horns in stiff little clusters. As she watched, their outer spines darkened to brown, curled and with a tumble all fell to the ground. The Draeyad moved off to test Ralas, crushing one of the fruits open with its woody hoof. Inside the rind a tiny brown shape Celestaine figured for a nut was revealed but, instead of lying still, it unrolled: the tiniest of hedgehogs. Within a moment or two it had snuffled around the roots that bound her and then vanished under a turned clump of mud.

  This was the nature magic that had not stopped the Kinslayer. She was so delighted to see it though the joy sat strangely on her apprehension. She could feel something growing up the length of her greaves beneath the metal armoured shin. At her wrist a thorn pierced her skin and she felt her blood run out over the stems that held her.

  “Ow!”

  She guessed by the sounds that the same had happened to all of them simultaneously. They were being tested.

  A Draeyad that was more earthen than the rest, a kind of fungus grown to some mockery of a fox form, moved around and scuffed at the loose dirt to the edge of the clearing. It was hard to see what was going on but she heard Heno exclaim as the creature worked all its weight to drag something new into view. A stench made her gag as she saw it was a corpse, somewhat bloated and outgassing with a few sullen parps in objection to being disturbed. In spite of its condition it was easily recognisable by its bone and paint markings as having once been a Tzarkomen priest.

  “They came here,” the centaur said accusingly. She pointed at the corpse with her javelin. The point gleamed in a shaft of sunlight and as the flies began to gather one of their thousands came close to the metal tip and was suddenly, briefly, made into a white star before being crisped to nothing. “Who are they?”

  “Tzarkomen,” Celestaine replied quickly. The centaur’s stare demanded elaboration. “Humans who practise necromancy, among other things. I’m not sure what else. I always stayed well away from them. Everyone does. They’re secretive. As long as you stay out of their lands they’re no bother.”

  “And if you do go to see them?”

  “Probably end up dead,” Heno hissed, between his teeth. “They don’t wait to ask questions of the living.”

  The centaur’s attention snapped to him. “Why would they bring her?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman in the box. The one who saved us from the fire.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Heno said, gasping with the effort of breathing in the spread-eagled position he was stuck in. Celestaine could just see him from the corner of her eye, and Ralas on the other side, similarly stretched.

  “They know nothing,” one of the others said and abruptly all the prisoning branches were withdrawn, and they were free.

  “Wait, someone saved you? Where is she?” Celestaine asked, rubbing her wrists as she folded up on the ground for a moment, resting.

  The centaur, the only real, solid being among them, looked at Celestaine for a long moment and then she swung her spear point around and pointed in the direction from which they had come, marking a little crushed grass to show where someone had lately passed. “Downhill. They are on the road now.”

  “They?”

  “The child and the woman who ate the fire.”

  “Who ate the fire?” Ralas asked, a tremble in his voice. “She ate it? Are you sure?”

  The centaur turned to look at him, her eyes wide. She nodded. “I am a free spirit. The only one of us to truly walk in this world, the only one of us not bound to her host tree. I serve as the Voice of the Forest. I failed to stop the Kinslayer from burning my kind with the soulfire.” She hesitated, but only for an instant, though her face had changed to show deep sadness. “But the woman from the box took it. She ate it all up. But by the time we were ourselves again and I had grown they were gone. That way.”

  Heno and Nedlam, rubbing their wounds, stared and then glanced at Celestaine for a verdict, although they were all sure of one thing—that they were going to find these people and discover the truth of what had happened here.

  “We have to find them,” Celestaine said. Because someone who could take that fire like it was nothing and ‘eat it all up’ was someone who was possibly a bigger deal even than the Guardians, and that wasn’t someone who should be going around doing whatever they wanted. A monster? There were so many of those now left behind in the wake of the war. She wished Wanderer were there to give a hint but if he were near then he could find them if he wanted to.

  “You’re free to go,” the centaur said, stepping forwards as the other Draeyads and spirits drew back into the shadows of the trees, vanishing into near invisibility within moments as if swallowed up whole. “I shall accompany you. You may find one who saved us from the fire, but you may not harm her. She is under our protection.”

  Celestaine weighed it up, and considered her past decisions briefly regarding the inclusion of other people. She doubted that she could decline in any case and if it came to a fight later then she’d deal with it later. “Very well. What shall we call you?”

  “Bossy tree horse,” Nedlam muttered.

  The centaur smiled at one side of her mouth, “Horse
it is. They are a noble animal, far superior to all of you in every way.”

  Celestaine shook her head. “Fine. Horse. Let’s go. Heno, you lead, in case they have more magic to use.” As she spoke she heard a hissing, rustling noise and felt the earth under her feet tremble. Spinning around she saw the ground swallow up the corpse of the Tzarkomen and reassemble itself over him. Leaves swirled into place until nothing marked that the earth had ever moved. That was Draeyad hospitality right there.

  The centaur saw her looking. “It is a kindness, to use the dead wisely to make new beauty.”

  “He wasn’t dead when he got here, was he?” she asked.

  The centaur smiled, unruffled. “Who comes uninvited decides their fate. They were tested and found undeserving.”

  Heno had paused to observe; now he moved a little stiffly, his rangy, powerful form taking a cautious path as he tracked so that he somewhat resembled a heron. Celestaine went after him, leading her horse and Ralas’, and Nedlam after her with Ralas hastening in her wake the best he could. Horse the centaur came a stately few paces behind them, making less noise than any.

  Now and again Heno paused and handed back his findings: a scrap of lace made out of silk, a silver thread, a ruby the size of a robin’s egg, still cased in a cage of golden wires. They all marveled but they didn’t pause.

  Ralas put the items carefully away in his cloak pockets after an effort to share the viewings with Horse earned him only a frown.

  “You are on the brink,” Horse said to him as they made their slow way downhill, through thickets and hillocks of reedy grass. “For us the fire. And for you, the edge of death. He was an inventive torturer.”

  Celestaine listened, trying to figure out what Horse meant. She must be talking about the spell that kept Ralas alive, but never healing.

  “Right,” Ralas said. “I could put that in a poem but it’s a bit crass to make them about yourself.”

  “But not to make a song about her. Maybe she will find you a way back too,” Horse said, as if everything were simple. Perhaps for Draeyads it was, Celestaine thought. They weren’t human, you couldn’t expect them to be the same. Had their torment been of that kind because only something permanent would work on them—because they had this ability to let the past go as if it had never been? She wanted to learn that trick, and she saw by his face that Ralas did too.