Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  “What is that?” It was the unstoppable question now and it came unbidden from Bukham’s mouth as they all halted and grouped up to face what was coming.

  The creature’s slow, inevitable approach matched its growing clarity. Bukham saw with disbelief the corpse of a large human in the process of being preyed upon by three giant spiders. Each spider was made of web and visible inside their transparent bodies was a squirming goo filled with eyes—human, animal and insectoid—which rolled and blinked, looking in all directions. It approached them on all fours, walking like a bear. The goo, exposed to the air here and there through the holes in the webbed bodies, gave off a glowing miasma which trailed behind the thing like a rotting veil. Upon this veil a cluster of small, formless shadows dipped and settled, flew up and settled, like flies. As it got closer Bukham, his throat closed so tight he could barely breathe, expected to see the spiders more clearly but instead the distinction between spider and corpse became less and less obvious until he was forced to see that it was not a human preyed on by spiders at all, but something whole, as if it had naturally grown that way right from the start. When it was within a short distance the shadow swarm detached and drifted towards them. He felt their hunger as they came down and began to coat them as dapples of darkness.

  Heno’s cry startled him so much that, semi-paralysed by fear, he tripped over himself in his urge to flee and fell flat into the dust. The shout was accompanied by a burst of lightning that broke over them in a net of crackling white fire. Where the lightning touched the motes of darkness they immediately extinguished one another and, seeing his power, the swarm drew back and circled, lazily, awaiting the arrival of the creature’s sluggish main body.

  Nedlam had never liked waiting and her patience had been eroded to nonexistence by the sea voyage. She strode forwards, bracing the hammer back, balancing it finely for a good whack. In defence the spider-thing reared up to a height that matched her. Long limbs that had wrapped around its middle suddenly whipped out, their tips like blades. She dodged them, sent the hammer crashing in and down on the thing’s shoulder area, its haft snapping off a couple of limbs on the way. The thing exploded in a snotty blurt of sickly green matter, a huge piece of it breaking free and revealing a core of soft, sponge over threads that hung and wiggled freely in the air once exposed.

  It made no sound—it had no mouth or anything to make a sound with—but it staggered, giving Bukham a moment of hope, but then regained itself, the horrible, glowing veil drawing up and shivering as it raised it high. Like a fisherman it flung this blanket of gas out over Nedlam. The veil dropped, clinging and fouling her backswing. Bukham’s view was obstructed as Heno spun suddenly and another flaring web of white lightning shot across them. Moments had passed but it felt like years, Celestaine poised, looking for an opening, Bukham cowering, getting up off the sand, his awareness suddenly widening as he made it to his feet at last and he noticed, with a clench in his gut, that as they had been involved with this fight a number of larger ghostly forms had crept up on them. They hovered at the edge of the circle of clarity, crude and nebulous effigies of the most basic bodily forms, sending creepers along the ground where they seemed to gain strength in reaching desperately for a touch of the living. Only Heno’s repeated blasts kept them at a respectful distance, but at the same time it seemed that the more often the fire struck them the more persistent they became.

  Murti had noticed their resilience as well. His voice barely carried over the background duet of Nedlam, Celestaine and Heno: the sodden thunk of Lady Wall’s weakening impacts and Nedlam’s hoarse shouts of war fury, Celestaine’s fierce exclamations as she hacked at the creature, Heno’s buzzing magic. “We must move faster. Do not use the magic unless you must. Resist them by commanding them to obey you. Make your presence too real for them to touch. Those who have form here hold all the power. As long as we are beneath the Lenses you are strengthened.”

  Bukham glanced up to the lake water. Its surface with the soft ripples formed a billion lenses. He imagined himself stronger, then he pushed the vision into his body, as if he were Murti, a Divine Wanderer, as if it were true. He didn’t know if it was him but someone had got the hang of it, for the circle of clarity widened sharply and the shadows slunk away. Now they had a better ground for themselves.

  He looked around to check on the others and saw Nedlam tangled in webs of slime, struggling to breathe and having to fight a constant war to free her limbs enough to break it apart. Every time she snapped it open it simply grew back again, thickening in tough strings, binding her slowly more close to the main body. Above her head a long, fine black straw-like antennae with a needle tip was making fumbling stabs down towards her, each one closer and closer.

  Celestaine ran up easily. Taking one foot onto Ned’s bent knee and another onto her shoulder she launched herself into the air, shield held, sword fast and sliced off the needle limb before continuing over the monster’s head, the sword point braced downward, her body in a crouch with the shield held under her left foot like a child’s sled. He heard the solid sound of her impact on its back and then a slow, tearing rip followed by a massive splattering and a gush.

  The net over Nedlam recoiled in agony. Loose whips of it writhed in unmistakable torment as it snaked back and began to wrap itself quickly around its own body like bandages, knitting itself back together. Freed, Nedlam strode forward and began to smash at the head of the thing with swift and massive swings of Lady Wall, one, two, one, two. If it had ever been human it was quickly turned to an unidentifiable grey pulp.

  “Dis shit want to eat me!” she exclaimed and then, “No, NO, NO!” Every word with an added whump of Lady Wall’s head. Grey globs of matter flew everywhere from the huge metal hammer, the smaller bits evaporating, the larger chunks landing with wet noises, immediately leapt upon and fought over by the lingering ghouls beyond the circle.

  “Bukham, we must make your destination!” Murti’s voice brought him back to himself. He looked up. “You are the only one who sees it. We must go before more things come.”

  He nodded and began to move, fearful but going because it was the only chance of safety and there was no cover in any direction. He thought he might have wet himself.

  “We’ll catch you up when we make sure this is dead!” Celestaine called, going to Nedlam’s shoulder. “Go! Heno, stay with them!”

  Bukham began to hurry, aware of Lysandra moving swiftly up to his side. There were low hills in the way, and plenty of ground to cover, some of which was already beginning to dance with odd shapes that came and went. From the corner of his eye he saw Kula turning slowly, her small coat skirt out flung as she spun around, dancing as she went. Her hands were free of their dangling mittens and stretched wide. Around her a tiny flurry of shadows was circling and she was leaping and dancing to catch them, one by one. As she spun she caught his eye and her smile was bright, a delight that was like a shot to the heart; it was so unexpected in this moment, at this place.

  She snatched a shadow out of the air and then rubbed her palms together and cupped them. When she opened them to show him, a black bird flew out between her fingers and high up into the air. It arrowed away from them towards the crumbling towers and vaults of the ruins.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  "RUINED WORLDS COLLIDE here,” Taedakh said as they walked through the city. His voice was a necessary sustenance for Ralas, who listened as he watched Tricky scale walls and leap from roof to parapet, investigating, pausing to slay things here and there as she circled them, although Taedakh seemed to cut a wake through most beings that came near. Ralas walked just behind his shoulder in only the usual pain, his pleasure mostly unalloyed even by that, though the crumbling architecture was vast and dwarfed them all in a way that suggested none of them were worth time’s considerations.

  “All the things of this place strive to survive by eating the memories of the living. Vholes and my own kind are as the predators and the scavengers of your world. All that dies comes
here and unless it is consumed quickly it is forgotten. It becomes dust. The ghost of memory. The dust you walk on is what remains of millions of years of living dreams from countless places.”

  Cheery, Ralas thought. Cheery with a side order of magnanimous. It was a great relief to know you didn’t matter a jot. It left him feeling lightheaded with opportunities although he still missed his lute. Instead of focusing on that he hummed a little light wedding music from the operatic magnificence of the compositions of the Cheriveni’s most famous and least appreciated domestic musician, Tarilas the bard. Once in a few generations you spawned someone like Tarilas who seemed to come out of nowhere, fully fledged, proficient as only a deity ought to be. Then as often as not they proved themselves human by dying a wretch’s death and Tarilas had been no exception, dead by twenty-five from an outbreak of winter cough that left any number of lunk-headed nothings alive instead. Ralas felt briefly proud to have at least avoided that fate.

  “Not all dust is equal though. Dust of Ages is here, in this place. Tricky searches for it now. Your companions will arrive soon and so will all they have sought. We need to find it by then.”

  “Dust of Ages? Sounds like something Dr Catt would like.”

  “It is something Dr Catt would like,” said Catt, huffling as he made his way along behind Ralas, always pausing to have a little look and then a little hurry to catch up. Having resolved to find Fisher again he’d hurried back just in time to meet up with them as they descended beneath Taedakh’s lake sky, all the way muttering about his terrible losses, the fate of the sheep chariot unattended for any old fool to meddle with and all the rest of his unique and valuable research gone to waste as the vaults of the Kinslayer were sacked by ignorant morons and unequivocally unqualified subspecies. “The Dust of Ages is the essence of memory—all of the structure and none of the contents. It is the only trap worth knowing about, for most of the terrible things lurking down here as they can’t resist it, but as soon as they take it, it imprisons them, leaving them nicely harmless for collectors like myself to carry away for further examinations.”

  “Peachy,” Ralas said. “Who were you hoping to get a last smidge of?”

  “The gods of course,” Catt said, coughing to clear his throat. “They are a few of the greater beings which had attempted to breach the Upper Realms by sheer force in ages past and so were seen as gods by the living already up there. They created worlds, we think, by bringing together scraps of memory and place. So they were the hyper-predators of this realm, successful over millennia of collection, curation and restoration. Master craftsmen, if you will.” His enthusiasm gave him a little extra speed and he drew alongside Ralas, watching for Tricky as she zipped across their path from a collapsed townhouse into the tumbledown blocks of some mighty temple. She moved so quickly that they only really saw her hood and cloak in the vague greyness. It felt like even the light was being rendered down.

  Taedakh spoke, as much like a living book as Ralas had ever encountered. “Those of whom you speak made every effort to preserve and to grow, but they fell prey to the dust in the end. The more of themselves the great spirits put into their works the less resistance they had to time’s decay and they forgot things. They fled into the upper worlds to save themselves.”

  “And then the Reckoner threw them back here,” Ralas said, feeling that he was due a high grade for his efforts at grasping the depth of their situation.

  “It does seem.” Taedakh plodded on, his long, clawed feet relentless, silently pacing along a dust filled avenue of broken cobblestones. They passed beneath precipitous arches supporting walkways that had once led to great chambers and now led nowhere.

  “Is it the Dust of Ages that made me like I am?” Ralas asked, not with any hope of success.

  “Maybe,” Taedakh said, “but if so we can only get it out of you by making you back into dust.”

  “I’ll pass for now.” He shivered involuntarily and cleared his throat to renew his song, keeping it to a hum.

  “The gods gather, and hunt here,” Taedakh said. “Monuments are always the last to go. They are such strong shapes. They hold a lot. They make good caches.”

  “So… we’re walking through their storehouse?” Ralas kept looking all over for any sign of the lute case. Ahead of him he saw Dr Catt also peering about, his hands anxiously washing themselves over and over in front of him as he trundled through the dust.

  “We are. That is why we may find the Dust of Ages here. Anything they keep outside themselves will be hidden here or in a place like this one.”

  “How many places like this one are there?”

  “An infinite number.”

  Ralas felt that the statement of this didn’t fit with the apparent confidence in their ability to find the dust or Celestaine’s party. “So how do you know we’re in the right place for the others?”

  “It was decided when they made it their destination.”

  Which was an answer and did make sense, in a way, if Taedakh was a god who could know when something had become significant—when it had taken on a meaning for someone in his domain. Ralas didn’t feel like getting any more new about the gods. They didn’t sound the way he had imagined them. He was foiled by Taedakh, who added, “My kind don’t like the gods of your world. Here they are parasites. They hunt us to steal our ability to retain our form across all the planes of existence. We always kill them when we can.”

  “How is it that you’re helping out this little Guardian, then?” Dr Catt asked as they crossed an open square and came to a place where six roads met, each leading to a less promising looking destination than the last, dark entryways and exits on all sides. ‘Fishy?’ he called out hopefully now and again in a plaintive little bleat like a constant accompaniment. ‘Fishy? Are you there?’

  “Because she gave me music.” The god, or whatever he was, Taedakh, turned around to look at them and Ralas felt he was being smiled at, although the general hideousness of Taedakh’s form didn’t give much clue of that. “Your music,” he said. “She brought me up to hear you sing while you were in the depth of Nydarrow.”

  Music, Ralas remembered, was what everything was made of, knit, line and stitch. A stitch in time. A rhyme that binds. A glue and a thread. He felt abruptly humbled, and grateful, and scared, in case he was going to be asked to do something he couldn’t but before he could articulate just what had got him bothered Taedakh stood up to his full, massive height and tilted his long head, scanning.

  “They come,” he said, slumping down again. “We cannot look any longer. We go to the gates. Come.” He called out and Tricky came leaping down from a series of huge columns that were the end of a walkway for people who must have been a good deal larger than any people Ralas had ever seen.

  “But she said she made you.” The words were out before Ralas realised he was talking aloud.

  The god ahead of him gestured for him to come along. “That could be.” He was moving quickly now, so that he started to draw ahead of them.

  “How could it be?” Ralas hissed at Dr Catt, looking at the Cheriveni’s intent expression as they struggled to keep up in the dusty wake.

  “I’m a collector, man, not a theologian,” he replied between breaths.

  Tricky appeared between them, her hand outstretched. She held a vial, stoppered with a silver stopper, and inside it a fine, golden powder could be seen, unremarkable except for its container. “Keep this for me,” she said and handed it to Catt.

  “Is it…?” he said, and paused to try to look but she was dragging them both by the sleeve now. They were slow and Ralas was trying to run and about to apologise for failing when a gigantic shape came bowling out between two buildings and took Taedakh down in a giant, tumbling destruction that knocked both of them into the vertiginous masses of a high tower and brought it down upon them as they smashed through what was left of a beautiful palace, something fine and delicate and quite out of place, Ralas thought, seeing it go up in clouds of dust like smoke as he ducked and
Tricky yanked them the other way down a side street. They could hear detonations and blows in a muffled, slow series of booms and thuds.

  “What…” Ralas began as the whole area darkened and something like a million strands of thread, utterly black and boiling together, flowed around them, trying to go through them but unable to because Tricky’s cape was acting as a shield. Catt cowered into him and they had to run again as she tried to ward them from another direction as the threads left and a storm surrounded them, made of feather and bone and tiny bits of reeking flesh.

  “The gods are here,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  HENO FELT HIS power beginning to wane.

  Before he had never had to use it for long periods of time. Always there had been a few bursts, and then pauses, bought by defeats or by the surrender of those facing him. Among his cohorts in the armies of the Kinslayer he had fought at the melee and used it sparingly, as instructed. The reason for this was never clear, but he had never sought to know. When he had first come here he had been through to the underlake for moments only, enough to see the seizure of the child he had brought with him and the gift of its heart taken in by the roiling darkness of something he had never wanted to understand, or remember. But he remembered it now. With every draw of the fire and the light he felt himself tiring and his own heart had begun to feel a remorseless and debilitating ache.

  Beside him the ghost of his cousin’s child, Azu, was walking. He thought it was madness at first but then every one of his casts had caused the dust to cling to her more firmly, giving it the strength to adhere and join. As she grew more distinct so his power faded, little by little, and his heart ached more and more he had to recall that he had stolen her, on a promise to take her somewhere far from the war, somewhere that only he, a favoured soldier of the Kinslayer, could know. He had even believed it himself, right until the moment he stood before the portal and let them take her from him and push her through its seething black core. Then the portal master had caught his eye, this new, soon-to-be mage with so much power, the Kinslayer’s elite—and the look of contempt and hate on that face had stuck with him and stuck with him in a baffling conundrum of the exchange of the girl for the power until he had been forced to sit down in the dark of the barracks and think it through. And from then on he’d never been able to stop thinking things through, questioning every story. The secret world far from the war. It was one way of saying dead.