Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  At first he thought he imagined her as a figment of his private, well-deserved hell. After the first creature went down—they didn’t know if it was dead and there were by then two more amalgams of horror bearing down so it didn’t matter, only down mattered and that they could walk on, run on together—then he noticed her. But after the second and the third, when Nedlam was poisoned and began to stagger like a drunk, and Celestaine lost her shield to the crunching maw of something with bone blades for jaws, after that he saw that Kula looked back at them and she saw Azu too. As they ran Kula stretched out her hand to the ghostly girl. The ghost looked up at Heno, trustingly, if that was what that black emptiness meant in her eyes—and took the hand that was offered to her, instantly changed from transparent to solid, built of sand but alive and running, the details of her face and hair sharpening. At the same moment the storm of black, predatory motes gathered itself anew and fell, touching them with a little taste of death, licking away the thinnest layer of them at a time and hurtling off with it into the grey beyond. Heno had to call the fire, there was no choice. He called it, and then they all saw her. Azu grew with each cast. As they survived, as the darkness burned, so Azu became real.

  Nedlam saw her. Gathering herself, she pointed, her eyes wide. She knew who it was. She remembered. The story of where the children had gone so that after the war there would be a safe, pleasant place to grow, to be untouched by adult nightmares, to walk under the sun as free women and men, to make the sacrifices of the parents mean something. This story was something they hadn’t quite believed but they had all held it close as a hope—their only hope upon which to build a future. Nobody spoke of it but it was there in references, in chance shared looks. Yes, somewhere that land could be real, the children were safe, they were only waiting to be found. All Yorughan knew it. Now Nedlam was staring at the grey, dust-made Yorughan girl with her jaw loose in astonishment when a huge, snaking tentacle whipped out of the storm and lashed her flat, face-down in the powdery ground. She was rapidly coated in a clinging black snow.

  “Hell, no!” Celestaine was rushing over to her, glaring at Heno, meaning fire now, now! And he had to call it down again and again until somehow Celest got Nedlam to her feet.

  Bukham shouted out then, and there was something looming at them and over them out of the murk. It wasn’t even bothering with a complex manifestation. This was a huge wave, rising higher and higher, the top starting to break and fall—and Heno realised it was a mass of the same black stuff, the hunger, as if every particle of it in the world had come together to swallow them whole so that it didn’t matter about Celestaine’s fight or Nedlam’s strength or his power. Nothing could have stopped it. But he was the only one who had a hope of stalling it.

  He looked towards Bukham, struggling to keep Murti upright as they pressed on, stopped now to look at the overarching hill of whatever it was about to crash on them. He looked at Lysandra, standing, her mouth ajar, staring up, at Kula, her hand holding tight to the hand of a Yorughan girl as the two of them stared, wide-eyed and the wave had teeth, mouths everywhere, filled with lacerating, working jaws, grinding, razor edges… and behind him Celestaine, getting off her knees, and Nedlam, barely on her feet with empty hands.

  The surge stripped his bones. The fire swept upwards out of him, burning, burning him, and through its roots he felt how it ran, from him to them all, taking them and burning them to sustain its incredible force, feeding it upwards through the conduits of his nerves, moulded by his intent into the tree whose dazzling branches cauterised the falling waves, cut it into bits, made it into ash. Made them all into ash…

  “No more!” Lysandra had stepped up to him, had got between him and Murti, seized him, seized the Guardian and used them both— the fire of heaven, so he’d heard the Kinslayer call it and laugh as he set the Draeyads ablaze in eternal torment. Now he felt it rip through him, cauterizing every fibre of him that had drawn the lightning, sealing it shut as it followed the path of least resistance through every jagged tendril and up into the plunging maws of the hunger. He saw the fire touch the black wave and, in an instant, transform it also into a thunderous, falling eternity of blinding white and yellow. The last thing he saw was Kula sweeping the Yorughan girl around into a tight clutch, enveloping her for protection in the heavy fur of her coat.

  Celestaine saw Heno fall, collapsing in a cloud of grey beneath the falling wall of fire. She didn’t move for she could never have reached him. She felt Nedlam’s grasp on her arm tighten enough to break it as the warrior braced to face her death and she gripped back in return, feeling her hair singe and her forehead scald with the descending heat. She saw two girls, and Murti, his face aghast, his skin lucent, leaking light, Bukham trying to protect him with his cloak, standing in the way of the fall as the lightning vanished and Heno fell. Heno fell and she was not there. They were all falling and nothing she could do. Here, it had happened so fast. She was bewildered. This was hell. It was the moment in the room with the hand of the Reckoner falling at her strike and then the ravaging of the Guardian, but working against her favour this time, events out of hand, time ending.

  She saw Lysandra step over Heno protectively, her arms raised to meet the fire she had lit into that thing, lit it up like a damn inferno, not with some internal spooky blaze but with a fire that ended all things and it was so big, she could see it now it was all fire—a mass of twisting ropes and threads, every part of its surface boiling with a sea of faces that came and went, faces of every kind of thing, every animal, every creature, every scrap of anything it had gleaned as it dwelt in the half-light of aeons.

  Lysandra opened her mouth and a note came out of her, sung so pure and so bright for just one instant. The wave exploded. For one moment it was blown apart and then it ceased to exist utterly and there was a mighty thunderclap in its place so powerful that it knocked her down, Nedlam landing awkwardly across her legs and both of them sinking down into the deep, pale powder.

  Then a hand came, helping her up. She was raised, coughing, into the dim gloom of that place she hated now above all other things, and she saw an old man peering anxiously at her and behind him another, with a long face she knew. “Deffo? Dr Fisher?”

  “You must come away,” Deffo was saying insistently although she was sure she had to stay, to find Heno. It was all she wanted.

  “Get off me,” she said, ungrateful.

  “Mmn, off!” Nedlam said, shoving at Deffo and missing, throwing herself down on the ground again. Fisher sidestepped neatly.

  “I’m afraid he is right. We should seek to evacuate as fast as possible,” Fisher said.

  She was not to be deflected. “Where’s Heno?” She pushed past Deffo, sheathing her sword. There was a body on the ground in a dark coat. She made it there, fell on her knees to turn it over, bent close to press the fingers of her hand into his neck as she looked at his bald, burned head, tusks cracked and yellowed with the heat that had gone through him. “Come on,” she whispered, feeling, hoping. “Come on, come on.”

  “We’re tidying up loose ends, I think.”

  She turned, not able to believe her ears. Striding out of the fog of dust came a familiar figure, somewhat raddled and filthy, hobbling in a characteristic way, his long hair matted and his face pale and sickly. “Ralas?!”

  “I see you made it,” he said. “Capital effort, old friend. Not everyone survives both a Guardian and a God.”

  The sound of something enormous moving beyond the horizon. The tread of a god, dragging the corpses of a world behind it.

  “Ah, dear,” Deffo said behind her. “I believe the time has come for us to be more scarce.”

  And then she felt it, a flutter, and then a steady movement confirming that Heno lived, and the will to move came back to her in one moment more. “We can’t leave him here.” She saw Bukham bent over Murti a short distance away, as though trying to get him to stand.

  “She’s right.” It was Lysandra that spoke, her voice carrying with a peculiar reson
ance that made it quite clear, as though it was coming from the land itself. “You have done enough. And you have done all that was asked of you to bring us here.” She stood and faced the direction of the terrible sound, she looked back at Kula once and the girl nodded to her, firmly. Lysandra nodded back and smiled.

  From the city, so near and still so far, a black bird was descending through the air. As it fell it tumbled and unravelled itself into the form of Tricky. Celestaine saw Ralas looking at her with the kind of expression she had never mastered—sheer, unbridled admiration. Tricky, the fourth Guardian now present, went to stand with Murti and Bukham. Bukham was taken aback by something. Then Fisher and Catt blocked her line of sight as they hugged one another and began to gabble, both at once, about being hunted by lorebeasts and vhermin and greater spirits and of all the treasures that must be here, lost in the sands and…

  She bent down, to feel that heartbeat again, and under her other hand, placed on the ground, she felt the tremor of a much larger approaching dread. Someone sat down beside her in a puff of dry grey. She glanced over and saw Kula, sitting with her to look at Heno’s face. The girl was dirty but otherwise seemed fine. Celest tried to smile but it wasn’t in her at that moment enough to make it onto her face.

  “Stand aside.” It was Wanderer’s voice.

  Celestaine looked up as Fisher and Catt stepped back.

  Wanderer didn’t look the same. He was grey, only the shape of a person but without features save a mouth. The light that glowed out of him was the soft planelight. He had a sword in his hand, made out of the same grey that he was, the shape of the blade familiar to her as the one that the Kinslayer had worn and never wielded, every part of him covered over so that he was erased, remade. She realised, looking at him, that he meant to kill her. She was first, Nedlam second, Heno third. “What?” she said. “You can’t be serious. It’s not even possible!”

  She felt Kula take her hand. Behind Wanderer Deffo was standing, and Tricky, engaged in some kind of argument which was immediately a fight, Deffo getting beaten down, Tricky furiously striking, searching him, tearing at his garments as they rolled in the dust and were lost to sight.

  Then the grey brown nothing behind them began to form shapes of its own. They were made up of nightmare collections of features, masses of this and that, the leavings and traces of a million years of life’s rise and fall, their wings storms of cloudy shadows, arching to block the lake overhead. The hunger storm skirled around them in its deadly dance, gathering at their backs.

  “This was always your purpose on the journey,” Lysandra said to her, confidential. “Mortals cannot survive here, but your demise would feed an army of revenants, enough to distract them while the gods were recovered.”

  “I told you it was wrong! Now you must give up!” This scream came in Tricky’s voice, her limbs and Deffo’s lit by flickering blades of light as they fought one another and—to Celestaine’s appalled amazement—their bodies began to come off, breaking free in shards and plates, a clay that was brittle now and falling away, revealing a strange, viscous, luminous core to each of them. She thought that Deffo glowed pale, white and blue, while Tricky was every hue imaginable, smaller, more liquid. Their shapes came and went as they tangled. It was beautiful, but savage to see and she looked to Lysandra again, seeing her dark figure illumined in a thousand shades, the most solid thing. Her anger focused and she turned to Lysandra.

  “What? How do you know this all of a sudden?”

  “I have always known it,” she said. “I am of the Tzarkomen. We sacrificed our being to become the dealers with this place, the arbiters of the dead. Anything not here as a sorcerer is here as a sacrifice. All of us came here in the end, in order to survive him, the Kinslayer, and here they all are now.” She touched her own chest to indicate that she was referring to herself. “As they fight, the gods possess their vessel. He cannot help it. His nature is to be the way.” Lysandra gestured with her arm to where Bukham and Murti had been.

  Celestaine looked past Wanderer’s grey form and saw Bukham on his knees. The dust had fallen enough to reveal that the young Oerni had not been taken aback. He had been stabbed by the old man. As she watched he toppled over and from behind him came flowing massive dark shapes; the shreds and tatters of what had once been unimaginably mighty beings. They were clustering around him, veiling him from sight. As they neared the fallen body they began to reform, little by little, a hand here, a foot there—as if trying them on for size. And from the midst of them suddenly there came a figure in grey, unmistakable, his overgrown form huge, like a walking statue, both hands restored and sword raised.

  Celestaine said, “I don’t believe it. He was the one who brought them here to die.”

  “He knew you would come,” Lysandra said, pointing at Wanderer, or what was once Wanderer but was now the gateway for the Kinslayer’s return, so that Celestaine realised she actually meant the Kinslayer. Her head was high, her gaze contemptuous. “He counted on you bringing some of the Guardians with you. People with godly strengths, who remembered him so very well” She gestured at Tricky and Deffo. “And here you are, walking someone else’s path, warrior, into the trap. Doesn’t suit you.”

  Tricky was blurred suddenly, shimmering. For a moment she was there, with Deffo, a rainbow smear. Then at the same time she was in her woman form, beside Kula, pressing something into the child’s hand. Then gone. Celestaine looked down into Kula’s small palm to see what Tricky had given her.

  “It’s a trick!” the little Guardian whispered in the midst of her incredible speed, in two places at once. She said it to Kula, in hand sign and with her voice. “Quick, be not the book, be the blank slate, unbind them!” Brown bones there, fingerbones, the kind that necromancers used to tell fortunes. A shiver went through Celestaine from head to toe, all wounds and woes forgotten. It could not be…

  Wanderer’s new, impressively featureless head jerked around to her. He didn’t look much like the Kinslayer, but then, he didn’t look like Wanderer. He was a blurred, in-between thing, not one or the other, sluggish as if animated by two conflicted wills. He raised his sword, but Lysandra was in his way. The sword slashed down, but missed. Lysandra was to the side of the mark. He had missed. A roar, soft, from a throat full of sand, blasted a wave of furious particles over Lysandra as she stood and—yes—straightened up her dress and adjusted the thick matted mane of her hair as though in preparation for a ceremony of importance. She didn’t seem perturbed as the sword became metallic, sharpened and was drawn back for another swing.

  Celestaine stared at the things Kula was holding.

  “Are you telling me those are his bones from his hand that I…?”

  Kula’s fist closed around them, tight shut. Her eyes sharpened, intensified, reading what nobody else could see in swift moves back and forth. At the same time she thrust her free hand down, into the sand. She looked at Celestaine, met her eye and for a moment Celestaine saw him, knew that gaze anywhere, the cold judgement of it, the absolute knowledge, the condemnation and utter contempt. There was no mistaking such a pure hatred.

  She groped for her sword in the powdery muck, flapping about. In the darkness and distance Bukham toppled over.

  “No, no, you shits, what have you done?” She was grappling around, couldn’t find it, couldn’t find anything. He could not come back. He could not make all that death and suffering into nothing. It must not, could not happen. Then she focused on Kula’s fist upheld right before her face. It was turned upright, thumb closed on top, and from it a grainy dust was falling. The girl opened her mouth and her odd, awkward voice came out, so seldom used it cracked as she spoke the words clumsily, croaking.

  “Forgotten,” she said, and smiled into Celestaine’s desperate face. “All gone.” She opened her hand and showed her empty palm.

  The figure that had been Wanderer and was trying to be the Kinslayer stopped in his tracks motionless, empty as a statue to a king from millennia past, waiting for time to grind it t
o nothing. The blade of the sword, frozen mid-stroke, just brushed the top of Lysandra’s head and gently tangled her hair as she turned back to her daughter.

  “Well done.”

  Celestaine gawped. He was gone. Just like that. He was gone. She slumped, relief and hope making her want to laugh, exhaustion suddenly making itself known now the worst seemed past.

  Kula glowed with pride. Behind her the gods’ revenants circled, hungry, the black storm at their backs like an honour guard, only waiting for a fresh opportunity. The gods were terrifying, fermented brews of every kind of imagined power and form, surging, starving, little morsels of command slipping out in snatches of sound.

  ‘…feed the pure…’

  ‘…smite the wicked…’

  ‘…cleanse the unworthy…’

  ‘…worship me….’

  ‘…bring help to those who… to those who… to those who…’

  ‘…be kind to each other…’

  ‘…slay the evil doer… let none remain…’

  Lysandra looked down at Celestaine and Kula and smiled, a gentle smile, as soft as spring rain on new grass. The decorations in her hair, the golden wire, the flickers of silk, gleamed faintly. Her face was veiled with pale dust. She looked at the statue of the Kinslayer-thing. “Come, my dear, let us be wed.” She made a pulling motion with her outstretched hand, as if yanking on a chain.