Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  “Yes.”

  “And now Tricky, and whoever she’s with, which includes at least one Slayer who probably does have quite a good memory of the Reckoner and a being made in Tzarkand who uses necromancers’ magic, are going with Wanderer through the ice gate into Vadakh to find the gods.”

  “I still don’t…” Dr Catt stopped and sat up. He looked down at the tablet. He looked up at Dr Fisher. “Oh I say, Fishy. That doesn’t mean what I think it means, does it?”

  “I’d say it’s all up in the air,” Fisher said. He leaned back and reached over to a little bookshelf upon which several gaming boards rested and took out a carved wooden trinket box, opening it up just enough that they heard the soft chime and whirr of a mechanism and then the sweet, distinctive sounds of a melody began to play.

  “‘The Gambler’s Last Wager’,” said Dr Catt, naming the song.

  “Mmn, I’m going to need this,” said Dr Fisher. He snapped it closed before any more of the distinctive, roistering tune could ring out, even though it was so quiet it was barely audible outside the Domicile. “You head back in the morning. I have business I must deal with elsewhere. I’ll meet you at the shop in a few days’ time.”

  “You will take care, won’t you?” Dr Catt said anxiously as Fisher popped the box into his satchel and began to do up the straps.

  Fisher looked back at him and grinned. “Straight home now. No dawdling for hawkers.”

  Catt showed a small gap between his finger and thumb to suggest he might dawdle a little bit if the hawkers were very good.

  After the door had closed and he was alone again he recovered his toast and found it was burned along one edge. He looked at it from every angle but there were no secret runes there or anything to show what the future might hold.

  “Damn,” he said softly, and tossed it onto the coals. He got up and began to pack everything away as fast as he could. If he was quick enough and Tricky slow enough he could catch them up without them realising he had gone far. He wasn’t going to let Fisher go into this alone. Not if the Kinslayer was going to bring himself back the hard way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  EVEN WITH THE seahorses keeping a good pace it was the better part of a day twining around endless islets, which all looked the same to Kula, before they got near their destination. They spent the night skirting islands, following channels and negotiating with the complex currents which rushed between the shores. Once or twice they dampened lanterns and sat tight as the faintest gleams of other traffic reached them but by the time dawn came they had reached the shore of Galdinnion without being challenged. Kula had to spend most of that time below decks. The weather had turned noticeably and keeping warm was an art form made much easier without the wind. A small settlement of low buildings and sturdy moorings marked the water’s edge. Two vessels of a strange, bulky design with two masts and fat, rounded hulls lay at dock in the lee of a curve of hills which functioned as the best harbour that could be achieved, slight as it was.

  Kula managed to sneak up on the Captain at the front of the skiff, little by little, clinging tightly to the deck rail, a smile at the ready, so that she could enjoy the last moments of their arrival to the port. She wanted to see the seahorses again and would have asked if she could hold the reins but she was too shy so instead she settled for a good view which brought her close enough to overhear the Captain talking to the white warrior, as Kula thought of her, the hero who was brave enough to love a monster.

  “Icebreakers,” Kalliendra said to Celestaine, standing beside her on the driving plate. She indicated the other ships with obvious admiration. “They can’t be nipped, like this skiff. If it all freezes up the boat goes up too, onto the ice, ’stead of sinking to the bottom.” She hissed as she worked, not enjoying the temperature very much.

  Celestaine nodded politely. As she looked ahead Kula followed her line of sight and saw that a dusting of snow and ice covered the roofs and blanketed the land where they were about to go ashore. The clouds had dropped and the air was still, so mercifully they were not frozen by the time they managed to turn the skiff and bring it up to the quay. Inside her mittens her hands were cosy though as she looked over the side she could see sludgy ice in the water. The swell was steady and the seahorses riding easily at rest, stretched out like eels just beneath the surface. A party, clearly expecting them, came to meet them, clad in furs and skins so thickly tied on that they were indistinguishable as to any individual features.

  Kula watched as they brought food for the horses first, lowering baskets with long necks down into the water, the feelers of large shellfish poking out of the basket bellies. Then they assisted the unloading of the skiff. Kula went with Lysandra, Bukham with Murti, as their hosts, invisible within their fur-lined hoods, escorted all but Kalliendra and her crew to the shelter and warmth of the main hut where a door was quickly opened for them and shut after. As soon as they were safely within the building Kula nearly tripped up as Bukham threw himself down on the first clear space of rug and clutched the ground, weeping. After a minute she realised it was because he was so glad to be off the boat.

  Inside it was so warm that the first few minutes for everyone was spent shucking outer clothing. As layers were discarded the identity of the people settling this place were revealed. They were humans, like Celestaine, but short and stocky with dark hair and pale skins. Broad features, flat faces—but nothing distinctive otherwise to mark them as special. Their grey eyes were friendly, men and women both bearded, though the women more lightly. A strong air of stolid confidence radiated from them all as they moved about in the small space, making it and all the conditions outside seem perfectly manageable. Their leader was a man, who introduced himself as Dern of Tesval.

  “Tesval is this place,” he said as they all were given bowls of hot, brackish tea with honey. “Tesval is also the worm. We are of Tesval, the worm and its lands. We are the wanderers of the ice.”

  Murti was greeted with particular care and celebration and Bukham, as his assistant and someone of a human-kind they hadn’t seen for themselves, was equally feted. There was a quiet happiness here that was something Kula hadn’t felt or seen since the day her people were taken away. Probably it was because they had avoided the Kinslayer. It wasn’t her peace, but she recognised it, and immediately felt trust in the strange, pale folk with their hairy faces. That allowed her to forget where she was and the adult dealings that went on around her. She closed her eyes to explore the land here as she had explored the sea all night.

  The land, she realised now, was living, in its soil, in a way she hadn’t noticed before. Her sensitivity had grown, her refinement grown, and she felt a joy in expansion of her awareness of these things. The sea was living in all its depths—the volumes of it had bewitched her, seduced her, to a point of bliss she had never felt when she was aground. She had followed mites of life so small they were a dust in the water, and discovered hearts the size of towns, in whose chambers she could have set up house and lived. They had passed close to an empty place which she recognised as the thing the dragon had told her of. It was the strangest thing, more empty than anything she could think of. In comparison it made the whole world vibrant. She was glad she had seen it although it made her afraid to think of it there. All things were swallowed there. Nothing could pass it. Even the dead were more present in several ways than this space. She had thought she knew what absence of life was but she had not known it.

  Even here, in this place where the ground was frozen and ice and snow covered the land there was plenty of life, small and slow, but burning with the same purpose and presence as any living thing. She greeted it, shyly, as she had greeted the sea, and extended herself outwards, checking the people here, staying well away from the burning heart of Murti and the vortex that he concealed. Him she did not want to study further, purely on grounds that he was of the Kin that slew her kin and she felt instinctively that there was a part of him that could do much damage to her if he chose. They had decided
to let another alone, for now, but it was very much a temporary state of affairs. She knew he had a purpose where they went, which included Lysandra, but other than that the details were unsure. Unlike the others whom she could have read as easily as books or the weather, he was opaque. She felt that there would be some tug of war over Lysandra in the future and she must be very careful because it was possible that there was no value at all in Kula to these people. Their thoughts and feelings rarely included her and if they did it was only to manage her, not to know her. Because she couldn’t hear and kept to herself they assumed she didn’t think much. She wasn’t interested in them anyway, all their designs were of things she cared nothing about, but she knew they could be dangerous. They only lit up when they were involved with something dangerous or difficult. They had no peace in them. Except for Nedlam. She was at peace always, even in the midst of a brawl. Kula valued Nedlam highly. She could have been family.

  Her meandering found nothing new among the people. Even the most odd of them in appearance, the Ystachi, was an ordinary life that she knew well the feel of. But a short distance away, below them, lay two huge beings, resting but perceptive. She fell asleep immersed in the strangeness of their world, in long lines and deep burrows and labyrinths far beneath the ice.

  She didn’t see them until the next day.

  They were equipped and ready, a sense of expectation in the air that this was the day upon which something would happen. The Tesval led them on a short march through their huts and into a tunnel which had been dug out of the hill behind them. This was only two ordinary people wide and barely high enough for Nedlam to walk at all, even without a hat. They had to go single file, except for Kula and Lysandra, who were in the middle of the pack and able to enjoy the view of Heno’s coat and a bit of floor for a quarter of a mile—although Kula didn’t mind that as she was trying to decipher how far down life went here, and the answer was further than she had suspected, but not that far. The ice itself held life but it was slow, slow and old. She was so caught up in this sudden intensely aged presence hidden within the tiniest and coldest places that she walked right into Heno’s back, and bumped her nose hard enough to make her eyes water when they stopped.

  They had come to an opening where a platform stretched out into a wide underground cavern. A strange and spectral light lit the area with a dim blue gleam from two massive circular ports which headed out into the ice wall that made up the cavern’s furthest end. As they emerged onto the wooden structure and one by one began to descend the staircase that ran against the rock, Kula strained to get a glimpse of the creatures she knew only by the focused mass of their living energies. She held Heno’s coat tail for balance as they all paused at the sight of the giant furred worms that were coiled in the heart of the cave, their heads raised and marked out by special larger tufts of thick whiskery feelers that grew like a mass of droopy fringes and moustaches around the four petals of their mouths. They had a grey fur with regular masses of white bristles poking through at varying thicknesses and lengths, and one of them was busy being harnessed up with a huge apparatus of ropes and straps designed to hold carriers along its sides.

  Lysandra paused to adjust Kula’s furred hood and mittens, check the lacing on her coat and the position of her scarf, then they crossed the floor of the cavern towards the enormous worm and its handlers who were moving about purposefully. Kula saw quickly that they were a mixture of the Ystachi and the Tesval but then, as she got closer, she realised that the ones she had thought were Ystachi who had been clinging to the beast’s head were living inside its skin, their entire bodies to the chest concealed within the fur so that only their arms and heads remained free. Although it was invisible to the eye she could feel how they were connected, that the Ystachi were not the humanoid type like Kalliendra, but another form whose lower bodies had mutated and grown into their worm host, sympathetically linking up to it so that they acted as extra eyes and ears and minds for what would otherwise have been a fairly simple beast.

  She shared the insight with Lysandra and they both smiled, delighted to find new and strange things as wondrous as this. They privately agreed not to tell the others. Most people found the Kelicerati repellent, though Kula found them only interesting because they could share thoughts and that was similar to the way that her people had shared and now that they were gone, only she and Lysandra could do so.

  She gripped Lysandra’s hand very tightly as they went forwards and set foot onto a tiny hoisted platform which raised them up until they were able to install themselves into one of the ice worm’s many howdahs. These seats were padded and just large enough for two to sit between bristle rows about a third of the way down the animal’s flank.

  A packet of food was given to them and instructions to hold onto it tightly by a free moving Tesval woman who climbed about over the harness and through the hairs even more quickly than Kula could have walked. Ahead of them Bukham and Murti were seated, and behind them Celest and the others. Along the length of the worm supply packages of various sizes were already tightly rigged. A warm, slightly musky or fungal odour rose from the thick fur and Kula sneaked off a mitten to touch it as she was on the inside and partly shrouded from lap to foot by the overhair. It was rough to the touch and damply matted, but deep beneath it there was a fine down that was exquisitely soft, even more so than the fur on her hood. They rocked slightly as the worm adjusted itself and then there were people moving with purpose. Through Lysandra she heard horns sounding a booming call throughout the cavern, suddenly answered by a vibrant bellow from the worm that carried them—so loud that the entire thing, even their seat, shivered with the sound.

  From far off down the blue tunnels an answering call came echoing, faint but distinct, and then without warning they were speeding forwards suddenly, the shiver of the worm’s rapid but million tiny movements a burr in their fingers and toes as they shot towards the leftmost tunnel. Bitterly cold air, sharp as knives, made Kula quickly pull her scarf right up over her nose and then they were inside and hurtling at a great rate with blue ice only a half-arm’s length away from Lysandra’s side, a mass of bristly, waving forest all around them and a roar that Kula could feel in the deepest of her bones that was the sound of every individual hair on the ice wall. Lysandra nudged her and she looked up. The light was sunlight, coming through thick, thick ice that streaked above them in pink and blue tones of breathtaking beauty. Lysandra pulled her glove off for a moment, and Kula’s mitten, to trace something important into the palm of her hand with one finger. It took a minute but then she understood as they began to bend slowly rightwards into a long turn, the black, sudden maw of a cross-tunnel flashing by—they were entering the largest and most complex of labyrinths, a mandala created naturally by the worms, layered and shaped by their attendants into the fully worked symbol of the ultimate journey. Murti, the Wanderer, returns to the beginning.

  Lysandra looked at her and carefully adjusted her scarf. “Where we are going is the origin and the end of all worlds,” she told Kula. “You will see things there which are not yet, and which have been and are almost done. Don’t fear the shades, but also, don’t remember them. Stay quiet and I will take you home.”

  Kula nodded. “Will my family be there?”

  Lysandra thought about it. “No. They are gone.”

  Kula nodded. She had thought so, but had to ask. Sometimes the things which she remembered didn’t make sense to her, but when she gave them to Lysandra her mother was able to explain the meaning of them. They were the memories of her people, who had walked the worlds once long ago, like Murti did, but as women and men, sorcerers of great power who had been outlawed when the necromancers took power and forbade them from walking in the world any more. She wondered why they had been allowed to do that, but there was in Lysandra’s making something by way of an apology. Lysandra did not walk a path. Lysandra was a path. A way out, perhaps, but come too late for the way intended. And too late for whatever the Kinslayer would have had. He had not ev
en noticed that he had destroyed the thing he looked for because he had never recognised it for what it was.

  The sad thoughts hurt her. She didn’t want a world full of these things. So she thought about their river dragon, whom they had saved, and restored. She thought about Heno the Yorughan and how the love he felt for the blonde woman was changing him like a slow fire, making long forgotten moments live again, making the past change and darken as he changed and saw things in different lights. She wondered why they were here and now. She looked at Murti in the howdah ahead of them, the worm burring busily, the ice flashing past in darkening hues as they descended deeper into the glacier. She tugged Lysandra’s hand.

  “Where will you go when I die?”

  Lysandra looked at her, eyes bright. “I don’t know. You’re not done making me yet. I’ll go where you tell me.”

  Kula nodded, thoughtful, wanting to get matters right. “If the gods made the Guardians—did they just let them go?”

  “I don’t know. They had a purpose, once.”

  “Do you think they lived too long and when things didn’t go as they wanted it to, that they lost their way?” She watched Murti and then Bukham, who was open like the sky, still thinking that this was only the extension to a delay before his life returned to the point he had left it. Like Celestaine, he was Murti’s chosen. So even the Wanderer had a purpose of some sort.

  Lysandra held Kula’s hands fast, warming them in her own. “Each of them has a nature which is fixed. They can only be what they are and nothing else. No, they’re not like people. They do what they know to do. They will not learn. They will not change. They were set to guard the human races and that’s what they do.”

  “Well, why did the Reckoner want to kill us all? You said he had to do it to wake us up.”

  “I don’t know. I am not the Reckoner. He must have had a reason. But even if you knew it, would it change anything?”