The Fire Seer

by Amy Raby

  Rasik was gesturing at some building for Taya’s benefit. Mandir had seen the city already, having arrived a day earlier, and even if he hadn’t, Hrappa was like every other agricultural river city in the Valley of the Lioness. They were all laid out in the same pattern: well planned, with city walls surrounding three separate districts. The farmer caste lived nearest the gates, the artisan caste in the middle, and the ruling district in the rear. Since the city gates were the first point of failure when the Lioness flooded, the back of the city was the most desirable real estate. But the less fortunate could always retreat to the Citadel, the great fortified building on high ground in the middle of the city, if floodwaters breached the walls.

  Rasik said something Mandir couldn’t hear. Apparently it was clever or funny, because Taya flashed him a grin. Jealousy and anger flooded Mandir.

  No, he told himself. No, no, no. There was his beast again. For four years as a troubled initiate he’d wrestled unsuccessfully with it, damaging himself and damaging others. And then one night he’d almost killed Taya. It was an accident. He would swear until the day he died that it was an accident. He’d meant to scare her, intimidate her, not harm her. But he’d lost control of the situation. She had suffered burns and nearly died of smoke inhalation, and the Coalition had intervened.

  At the time, he’d resented his punishment, but since then he’d learned to appreciate the way it changed his life. During his Year of Penance, he’d come to terms with and tamed his beast. Then he’d finished his training at Rakigari Temple and became a fully trained ilittum. Finally Taya had ceased to haunt him. Sure, he fantasized about her at night sometimes, and often when he made love to another woman, he imagined she was Taya. That was probably why his affairs so often ended badly. But at least he was no longer out of control.

  Or was he? The moment he’d laid eyes on Taya here in Hrappa, all the old feelings had come rushing back.

  “Murderers!” The voice jolted Mandir from his thoughts. “Betrayers!”

  An elderly peasant was running at them with a knife in his hand. Mandir kicked his horse into a gallop, driving the animal in between the peasant and Taya. There he reined up sharply. With a few harsh words of the mother tongue, he called fire into the hilt of the man’s knife, turning it red-hot.

  The man yelped and fell to his knees, clutching his wounded hand to his chest. The knife fell into the dirt. Mandir glanced back at Taya. She appeared stunned but unharmed. A knot of onlookers gathered about them, some of the faces worried, others angry. While Coalition law permitted Mandir to punish the old man for the unprovoked attack, even burn him to death if he chose, Mandir didn’t have the stomach for it. And he didn’t like the look of this mob. The attack had been so inept it might have been a suicide attempt, or a setup of some kind. He wasn’t going to take the bait, not with Taya at risk.

  “Someone fetch water to soak his hand,” Mandir called to the crowd. He nodded to Taya and Rasik, who clucked to their horses, and they cantered away.

  “What was that for?” asked Taya when they were out of the mob’s range. “Is hatred for the Coalition so strong here?”

  Mandir’s eyebrows rose. “It’s strong everywhere.”

  “Not where I grew up,” said Taya. “I mean, yes, people didn’t like the Coalition. But they weren’t murderous.”

  “How often did the Coalition pass through your village?” asked Mandir.

  “Almost never,” she said.

  “Hrappa is a farming town,” said Mandir, “but it sits on the Silk Road. Coalition ilittu pass through here all the time.”

  “That shouldn’t make people angry,” said Taya. “The Hrappans can sell them supplies. It ought to be good business.”

  Rasik swung his horse around. “Three Coalition men passed through here last season on the Silk Road. They grabbed two farm girls and ravished them. One of the girls didn’t survive.”

  Taya was stunned into silence. After a moment she recovered her voice. “But men of all sorts commit atrocities. Not just Coalition.”

  “When the Coalition do harm, we have no recourse against them,” said Rasik.

  “Of course you do,” said Taya. “Rape is proscribed by law, even for the Coalition.”

  “Coalition members are subject only to Coalition justice,” said Rasik. “We reported the crime to your organization. They took no action. Why should they? No money in it for them.”

  Taya shook her head, disbelieving. “I’m sure you’re wrong about that.”

  “I believe him,” said Mandir. “I’ve seen cases like that before.” Poor Taya. Part of her charm was that she’d led a rather sheltered life, the first fourteen years of it in a remote farm village so backward it made Hrappa look sophisticated, and the remaining nine secluded in a Coalition Temple. It had made her easy to tease, back at Mohenjo.

  “Even if that’s true,” said Taya, “and I’m sure it’s not, we’re not all like those three men. I would never hurt somebody like that, obviously, and Mandir...wouldn’t either.”

  Mandir heard the hesitation in her voice. Did she think he might force himself on a woman? Her opinion of him must be low indeed.

  “Maybe you don’t commit the atrocities, but you’re part of the organization that allows them to happen,” said Rasik. “Your organization also takes children from their families and burns people alive if they don’t comply with your laws.”

  “I’m hardly going to apologize for enforcing the Coalition’s laws,” said Taya. “When people use unlawful magic to commit murder, as someone has done here in Hrappa, they must be stopped. And you’re forgetting the good work the Coalition does. We heal people and plants and animals. And we keep the mountain tribes at bay.”

  Rasik rolled his eyes. “The mountain tribes are nothing but starving, disorganized savages—hardly a threat. As for your healing, it’s not charitable. To heal a sick animal, you charge half the animal’s market value. To heal a person, you charge so much that he must choose between death or poverty.”

  “We must cover our expenses,” said Taya. “Healing may seem like a simple procedure to you, but it took years of training for the ilittum to learn the skill.”

  “Also,” said Mandir, “the mountain men are neither disorganized nor savages. You only think they’re harmless because you’re not the one out there fighting them.”

  “Are you telling me your people lack for gold?” said Rasik, pointedly looking Taya up and down.

  Mandir spurred his horse forward, placing it between Taya and Rasik. “She’s under my protection. You keep your eyes to yourself.”

  “Is that a new Coalition law?” said Rasik. “I’m not allowed to look at your women?”

  “Leave him be,” said Taya to Mandir.

  Rasik sent his horse into a trot, heading for the city gates. Taya followed.

  Mandir cantered after them, annoyed at everyone, including himself, but he couldn’t remain in ill spirits for long. A gentle breeze brushed his face as he passed out of the city gates into the river lands. Taya’s black mare, seeing the fields open up before her, threw up her head, opening her nostrils wide to take in the scents. She half reared, eager for a run.

  “Easy,” Taya soothed, turning her in a tight circle to regain control.

  Mandir rode up beside Taya and murmured, “That mare’s as spirited as you are.”

  Taya’s brow furrowed with suspicion.

  Mandir sighed inwardly. Could he not pay her a simple compliment, tease her in the most harmless way, without making her think his intentions were ill?

  “This way,” said Rasik, clucking to his brown horse and sending him eastward, away from the river.

  Taya’s high-mettled black mare followed him, and Mandir fell in line behind the two of them. He despised floodplains. There were never any roads because every year the Lioness overflowed and destroyed everything. It was the curse and gift of Agu the Water Mother, who humbled mankind by laying low his works. But after the inundation, the soil was so rich the farmers could grow any
thing.

  The farmers had been industrious. Although the season was early and the young plants had barely emerged from the ground, the land was already a mazework of irrigation canals, sluices, and gates. Mandir gave the bay his head, letting him pick his way through the mess.

  “I had not realized so much cotton was grown in Hrappa,” said Taya.

  Mandir blinked. How did she know what the farmers were growing? The plants were just tiny things, and they all looked alike.

  “Many of our farmers have contracts with our cloth merchant requiring them to grow cotton,” said Rasik.

  “Are you sure these aren’t banana plants?” said Mandir. He hated it when Taya knew more than he did, which meant it was time to tease her. He could always get a rise out of her with a reference to her banana-farming past.

  Taya sent him a look of contempt. “A banana plant would be higher than your head. And they’re never grown in floodplains.”

  He grinned at her. “My mistake. You’re the expert on bananas.” Flood and fire, what was he doing? He should just leave her alone.

  “For your information,” said Taya, “this is cotton, and that, and that.” She pointed to several vast fields. “Over there is a melon field. That’s wheat, behind it is mustard, and to the right is naked six-row barley. But you can see it’s mostly cotton.”

  “As you say,” said Mandir, disappointed she hadn’t responded with as much indignance as he’d hoped.

  “This is where the boy was killed,” called Rasik.

  He’d ridden ahead, so Mandir and Taya hurried to catch up. Rasik sat his horse in the middle of a large bare patch of ground, a neat rectangle bounded on all sides by irrigation channels and sprouting with young weeds.

  “I don’t see any evidence of fire,” said Mandir, dismounting from the blood bay for a closer look.

  “The ground was still wet from the inundation and had been freshly tilled,” said Rasik. “It was little more than bare, damp soil. Only the boy himself was burned.”

  “What was done with the body?” asked Taya.

  “He was given to Isatis,” said Rasik.

  Taya hopped off Pepper. Mandir involuntarily moved toward her, mesmerized by the motion. She was lovely enough when standing still, but when she moved, she had the grace of a gazelle. “Are you going to scry?” he asked.

  She jumped, apparently unaware he’d been so close. “Yes, of course. I can’t guarantee Isatis will tell me anything, but if she does, we’ll know it’s the truth. Agu mostly lies.”

  Taya ground-tied Pepper and headed toward the murder site.

  “The Water Mother lies?” said Rasik. “What does she mean by that?”

  “Exactly what she said.” Mandir took one more look around the horizon for possible enemies—unlikely in such open country—and settled down to watch Taya work.

  Chapter 5: Hrappa

  Taya paced the bare ground, searching for hazards, anything flammable that might catch while she scried. Scrying required great concentration because of the high level of language proficiency Isatis demanded of her, and she didn’t want to have to devote even a corner of her mind to worrying about safety and keeping the fire under control. She also looked for signs of Hunabi’s death, anything to indicate where his body had lain, but time and weather had erased the physical evidence.

  “Where was the body found?” she called to Rasik.

  “Move to your left.”

  She obeyed.

  “Back a step. There—more or less.”

  Here Hunabi had burned to death. She called fire out of the air in front of her. In the distance, Rasik gasped. She smiled at his naiveté. Calling fire in midair was an easy trick; even untrained jackals could do it. Scrying was the difficult task. Come in power, Mother Isatis, she called in the mother tongue. Come in greatness. She rotated in a circle, slowly, with her hand outstretched. Fire flowered from her hand, blossoming into a great wall that encircled her in a sweltering wheel of death.

  She was in the world of Isatis the Fire Mother. The heat was brutal; she could not survive long in the Fire Mother’s embrace.

  She spoke in the mother tongue, her words crisp and clear. Mother, you are death and you are rebirth. You are the seed of vengeance, the lioness in the grass, the light that shows the way in the darkness. I am your humble daughter, who loves and fears you. I come to ask a favor.

  Isatis responded, filling the wall of fire with images. A pack of onagers galloping by. A flood so vast it tore down trees. A pair of lovers sneaking away for a tryst in the fields. All images from the past. Some of them might be centuries old.

  Taya spoke again. A boy died here, your prey, when the soil lay dark and heavy from Agu’s receding. I would know more of how he died.

  Images followed: men burning on stakes. A woman flung onto a burning funeral pyre. A man struck with a flaming arrow.

  Taya paused, momentarily flustered. These were images of anger. She’d offended Isatis, but she was not sure how. Even the slightest mispronunciation or misuse of a word could draw her ire. Taya would try again. Great Mother, it was not the boy’s time. He had many fields yet to sow. This was a slight deception. Hunabi had been destined for a bureaucrat’s life, not a farmer’s, but Mother Isatis was old-fashioned. She liked farmers.

  This time there were no images in response at all. The flames burned clear and empty.

  Taya swallowed, her throat parched, her body boiling with sweat. Great Mother, you hunger for the flesh of the unworthy. Grant me this vision. I will find his killer and satisfy your craving.

  Instantly an image appeared in the flames, and Taya had the disconcerting feeling that Isatis had been waiting for her to name exactly that bargain. She peered at the image. A young woman and a young man quarreled in the middle of an empty mud plain that could be the very place she now stood. The young man could be the murder victim. She wasn’t sure, but he was about the right age, and of similar coloration to Kalbi, the magistrate’s living son.

  The woman was visibly upset—frightened of the man, Taya thought, but also angry. The young man was angry too. Words were exchanged, though Taya could not hear them, since fire visions were soundless. The quarrel seemed to be the woman’s, because twice the man tried to walk away and the woman grabbed his arm and turned him back around. Taya watched closely, observing and memorizing details—what the couple were wearing, their size and age, the color of their hair and eyes. Isatis would never show her a vision a second time.

  The man walked away again and then, without warning, burst into flame. Taya had been half expecting it, but it took her by surprise all the same, and it took the woman in the vision by surprise too. Her screams looked so real, and her eyes were so wide and horrified that Taya instantly wrote off the possibility that the woman herself was the jackal. Hunabi fell to the wet ground and rolled to suffocate the flames, and as his frame dropped from the middle of the scene, he revealed a third figure, another young woman, who had been standing behind him in the distance.

  Taya estimated this new woman’s age at seventeen or eighteen. She was dressed in peasant’s clothes—homespun cotton, undyed, with an indigo belt. Her dusty brown hair would look pretty if cleaned up, Taya thought, but it didn’t appear she’d looked after herself, or been looked after, for some time. The girl was too far away in the vision for Taya to judge her eye color or register any identifying marks.

  Hunabi dug himself into the mud, trying to extinguish the flames, but the flames reignited, again and again. Meanwhile, the woman Hunabi had been arguing with ran away. The mother goddess showed Taya Hunabi’s entire death, which lasted a long time. The teenaged girl stayed for all of it, stone-faced. Then the vision faded.

  May your greatness endure forever, Mother. Taya let her fire walls drop. Exhausted and sweating, she staggered out of the field to her black mare. Rasik and Mandir stared. She knew she must look a fright. Striking bargains with Isatis was hot work. She pulled her copper cup from where it was tied to the saddle pad and swirled it gently. She c
alled to the invisible water droplets in the air. The droplets materialized and began, slowly, to fill the cup.

  “So,” said Mandir. “Was Isatis in a talkative mood?”

  “She was,” said Taya. He would have to wait until later to hear what she’d seen. It was Coalition policy not to reveal the contents of visions to people outside the Coalition, and Rasik was present.

  A few swallows of water had gathered in her cup. She gulped them greedily and began to call more.

  Mandir appeared at her shoulder and poured some water from his own cup into hers, apparently having called it himself.

  “How do you do that?” asked Rasik. “Make water out of thin air.”

  Taya leaned against Pepper and closed her eyes, too tired to answer the question. It was funny how people not accustomed to Coalition ilittu were impressed by the simplest tricks. Calling water was a second-year talent.

  “As initiates at the temple, we learn some interesting things,” said Mandir. “One of them is that there is water in the air all the time, even on dry days like today.”

  “Nonsense,” said Rasik.

  “On damp days you can almost feel it,” said Mandir. “The heaviness in the air, that’s water. But on dry days it’s there too, just not as much. We merely call it out of the air and into our cups.”

  Her eyes were closed, but she could feel the heat of Mandir’s body nearby, and his arm moving in counterpoint to hers as he swirled his cup. He stopped her hand for a moment and added his water to hers. She opened her eyes and drank. She was beginning to feel less parched.

  “Should we head back for now?” asked Mandir. “Perhaps stop by the public baths?”

  “Yes,” said Taya. A bath sounded delicious. Then, like it or not, she’d have to discuss with Mandir what she’d seen, write it up—her least favorite part of Coalition work—and figure out how to track down an adolescent murderess in a town the size of Hrappa.