Raising Fire

by James Bennett

  “Jia …”

  Von Hart screamed.

  The echoes threatened to shatter the nether, the bridge shuddering under their feet. White light washed through the darkness, cast by the Emperor’s tentacles, thrashing in the void.

  Grimacing, Ben stumbled forward, his hands reaching out, for Jia, for the harp. If he could just get her out of here, away from—

  Too late. Sitting in the burning maw above, Von Hart was muttering an invocation, his power flooding into the beast around him, drawing on the strength of phantoms, directing spectral energy. The Emperor lashed out, the tip of a tentacle whipping around Jia’s waist, wrenching her back along the bridge.

  With a wail, she found herself plucked into the air, into the non-space of the nether. She struggled, kicking at nothing, the beast drawing her towards his radiant maw.

  “No!”

  Shielding his eyes, Ben raced towards her. One of his hands swelled into a claw, ready to rend and tear, release her from the ghost-beast’s clutches. But the Emperor had little interest in the sin-you, her purpose served. Her complicity denied. With another tentacle, the beast plucked the partly formed harp from her grip, swinging her roughly left and right, then flinging her away, into the darkness.

  She landed on the edge of the bridge, an arm and a leg dangling over the edge, scrabbling with one hand at the shimmering surface.

  Skidding onto his knees, Ben reached for her, a claw stretching out …

  A shrill whine filled the depthless gloom. Done with the argument, his resolve unchanged, the envoy offered Ben a ferocious smile, his triumph, his agony, crazed by the shining objects in his hands—chiming in metallic expectation—as he brought the column, the unicorn’s horn, up to meet the harmonic curve and the soundboard, re-forging the Cwyth, the mnemonic harp.

  Silver exploded in the gulf.

  The blast forced Ben onto his back, a melodic tide, as heavy as the sea, washing him along the ley. The smell of fusing lunewrought coated the back of his throat, pricking ice water from his eyes. Everywhere there was light, glassy beams pushing back the darkness, illuminating the depths of the nether, scorching the void with a boundless and alien magic.

  Somewhere above him, a thin thread of chanting, a feverish invocation, wove through the flood of music. Against his better judgement, Ben looked up, peering into the ghost-beast’s maw, a white and whirling inferno. He couldn’t work out what he was seeing, the mathematics of his betrayal. The words were a garble of echoes, an incomprehensible stream of symbols pouring from the envoy’s lips. Von Hart was a spindly silhouette, a charred match in the gusting brilliance, the Cwyth made whole in his hands.

  Ben found himself in the eye of the storm, the cataclysm blazing above him. The harp was warping, he saw, the triangular instrument rippling and stretching in Von Hart’s grasp. Around him, the Emperor pulsed and throbbed, argent veins riddling his vaporous body, his weaving tentacles, radiating from his blinding core. But the creature inside the beast wasn’t strumming any strings, Ben noticed, nor summoning the lullaby. He gripped the instrument with both hands, his muscles straining, his bones showing through his skin. He was pulling at the lunewrought, his brow creased with a desperate intent.

  The realisation struck Ben like a physical blow.

  He never meant to play the blasted thing. He means to destroy it. Why?

  Aching, he climbed to his feet. He glanced at Jia, watching her drag herself back onto the bridge, pulling herself along flat on her stomach, panting. Wounded, but safe. A situation that he knew wouldn’t last.

  Up there, locked behind the ghost-beast’s maw, Von Hart struggled and screamed, lost in the force that sought to devour the harp, to devour him. His sacrifice. His price. The spark of war. Ben sucked in the cold, the void matching the blood in his veins. From beyond the world, the envoy had called to him. Who knew what energy that had taken, what desperate, dying spell?

  There was a choice here.

  When the time comes, let me fall.

  And a plea.

  Catch her.

  But Ben would never listen to the fairy again. He’d have his answers or die in the attempt.

  The giant phantom loomed over him, a mass of fluctuating light, drinking in the magic of the harp—although the artefact obviously burned him, blackening his ghostly flesh. It only took a second for Ben to see the blisters forming on the Lurker’s skin, to guess what was happening.

  Squaring his shoulders, he leapt forward, grabbing one of the Lurker’s tentacles and swinging himself up. The cold burned his hands and feet, frost puffing out around him, his skin hardening with scales. He moved fast, navigating the limb like a slippery branch, climbing towards the grille of bone, the beast’s ornate visor. Arms held out for balance, he could feel the appendage tensing under him, shocked by the warping lunewrought. Monkey style, he jumped, landing, scrabbling, on the front of the ghost-beast’s maw. Squinting into the light, he peered inside, his lips curling as he met Von Hart’s eyes.

  “You’ve got … a lot of explaining to do,” he managed, grunting as he lodged his feet against the spectral grille and wrenched at a tusk-like bone, as solid and unyielding as quartz.

  Von Hart, pale, weak, shook his head, withdrawing against the inside of his cell. Bone—or a substance resembling bone—cracked, loosening. Muscles straining, Ben reached through the gap, his outstretched claw grabbing the envoy with more force than necessary.

  And then the world came apart.

  The lullaby. The lullaby shrieked in his skull.

  Before he could taste his own failure, the chiming resolved into a symphony, deafening and cold. He heard strings, innumerable strings, plucked by a fairy hand and washing over him, a silvery cascade. The strings were the strummed lengths of umbilical cords, stretching from the embryos of gods deep in the womb of the cosmos. The glittering track of a pure white moon, smooth and unscarred, gliding up over the horizon in a ceaseless carousel. The music was the grinding of plates under the sea, the roar of volcanoes breaking the earth, showering lava on the land. Above, he heard the laughter of the speeding stars, spinning, flashing into eternity.

  Unseen fingers, diamond sharp, played upon the keys of his soul. The lullaby pressed upon his every nerve, his every thought, hitting every note. In his mind, there swirled hatched eggs and forest caves, village maidens and moonlit kisses, burning bridges and mean-faced kings, white-winged serpents swooping low over blood-soaked plains …

  The lullaby echoed around him, a maelstrom pulling him into its heart, and he knew it for the song of the universe itself, a rhapsody to summon Creation from the dark. To split atoms, birth cells, fling genes through the primordial muck, bound to an earthly destiny. In the musical storm, Ben saw fish ripple into lizards and lizards rise as apes, eventually flowing into human form, creatures of flesh and flame. He saw the strands shatter, a prism of existence carried on the tide, warping into freakish shapes, strange mutations, the hide and horns of fabulous beasts …

  And in the brightness, he saw his death. The death of them all.

  Clutching his head, he tried to shut out the music, to hang on to himself. The nether went wheeling around him, a shimmering void. The strings snapped, a sharp caesura, the cords broken, the gods falling, falling in the dark. Falling to walk through the dusk of debasement, clinging to the shreds of their art, their lost magic, their magnificent, terrible children. Caught in the eye of the opus, he witnessed the making of his forebears, the seeding of the dragon at an other-worldly hand. A salamander coiled in a glass, which he saw cast into the blackest flame, the liquefied substance imbibed by a naked, screaming man, some long-lost prisoner of history, transformed by the mystic science of the Fay. And then the First-Born surrendered to despair, abandoning the Old Lands and their sorcerous spawn, leaving the Remnants to the fire at the End of All Things.

  All this the lullaby showed him, exploding from the harp, shedding the memories of the past and the future. It was the music of death, yes. The souring of magic. His destiny. Hi
s ending.

  Ben swore, shaking the visions from his head, the sense of them fading, scattering into the gulf. Fear eclipsed their meaning.

  The music changed. The knowledge, a blink of enlightenment, gone. Discord whined through the darkness, the gulf washing in to challenge the light.

  In Von Hart’s hands, the harp jangled and warped, rippling with straining energy. There came a blast, a blinding ring of wildfire like the world caving in. The light punched Ben’s skull, his teeth threatening to dance down his throat. The next moment, the Cwyth reached its limits of resistance and shattered, the silver and ivory unicorn undone.

  Shrapnel showered into the gulf. Chunks of lunewrought thudded into the phantom’s flanks, the Ghost Emperor howling. Then the great beast himself was flying apart, an explosion like a startled school of fish, deep in the blackest ocean. Lurkers, freed from the magical lure of the harp, shot off in all directions, squirming into the dark.

  Below him, the Silver Ley, the bridge, evaporated in sparks and mist. Instantly dispelled. Clutching Von Hart, Ben realised that he was falling, dropping like a stone into the nether, into a bottomless well. A death that would go on forever, dragon and envoy drowning in the immensity, falling and falling until the two of them ran out of breath, starved or froze. Or just went on falling, plunging through the outer limits of Creation, motes in the unformed abyss.

  Beneath him, he noticed Jia. The sin-you screamed and spun, her hands scrabbling at nothing, her braid flying out, a rope that couldn’t save her. Her eyes wide and clear with the shock of her fall.

  In the piercing rays, his flesh rippled and surged, the muscles bulging under his suit, blossoming into red-scaled limbs. With a grimace, his face lengthened into a horned snout, his spine shooting out in a bladed tail, the arrowhead tip whipping the dark. Wings, great sails, billowed out, catching the wind, slowing his descent into nothingness.

  With Von Hart held limp in one claw, Ben reached out. He reached out for Jia, the tip of his claw inches from her, trying to snag her suit, her braid. Her flesh if necessary.

  She looked up at him, her scream silenced as she met his eyes. With impossible grace, she crossed her arms over her chest, her green-gold body becoming rigid, assuming the posture of the youxia, the monk, as she tumbled into the gulf.

  Her gaze sent a silent message—loud and clear in his panicked mind—squeezing the gristle of his heart.

  Farewell.

  Ben’s roar shattered the void. She smiled up at him, a look that held no triumph, no reproach, only calm acceptance. Then she was spinning out of reach, the tides of the nether sucking her down. Down into the nothing.

  Light burst again, drawing back into its fiery source. A second blast, a wave of imploding power, hurled Ben and the envoy away through the boundless darkness. He spun and spun, his sense of direction in this, a place that held none, thrown into lunacy. A mess of wings and tail, a pale figure clutched in his claw, he reeled across the nether, sailing on the echoes of an alien song. A song that was no more.

  Eyes closed, trailing tears, Ben fought to master his wings, to saddle the shining tide.

  He let it carry him towards that distant eye, a faint octagon ahead, a shadow etched on shadow.

  The hole in the world. The black doorway to home.

  Wheeling, tumbling, the wind between reality and elsewhere howling in his ears, Red Ben Garston burst from the large octagonal mirror that stood on the altar in the temple of stones. In a wave of scattering debris, his momentum carried him across the dais and down the shallow steps, a red-scaled wrecking ball. The painted gods in the alcoves watched his ungainly entrance into the chamber, each one exploding in plaster and dust as he crashed along the length of the nave.

  As he rolled, the walls shuddering, his body instinctively dwindled in size. His wings folded in, his tail coiled up and his snout shrank, his protean flesh accommodating his return to the world. To all that was solid and real and … dying. Done. Although the Ghost Emperor, the endless gulf and the one he’d left behind felt only too real to him.

  Cradling Von Hart—who, he knew, he must now think of as a captive, a situation as fraught with danger and as unlikely to last as the notion itself—the one-time Sola Ignis rolled and rolled, waiting for gravity to catch him, the natural laws to take hold. For the sweet earth to welcome him, whatever cuts, bruises and broken bones it held in store.

  With a resounding boom, he finally came to a halt a few feet from the wide double doors leading into the temple. The smoggy glow of dawn across the Pearl River fell on his face like a kiss after the chilly darkness of the nether. For a long minute or so, all was silent apart from the trickle of rubble from above, a slow but ceaseless cascade that told Ben he couldn’t lie here forever. With the destruction of the Ghost Emperor and the harp, the spectral pull from beyond the mirror had dissipated, no longer suspending or supporting the bricks above him. Sitting up, he snorted grit and spat out blood, a feather of flame swirling in his nostrils as he grasped what he was seeing. The stones, old and crumbling, were settling. Broken block by broken block. Crack by crack. He could hear the edifice groaning around him, rough echoes in the still, and he knew—in that special way that always told him his troubles were far from over—that soon the remaining spire would fall. Fall and bury him under the stones. He was willing to bet that he’d survive that, a quick switch back to his crimson shell and ridge of horns saving him from an early grave. The envoy, however, would probably be crushed to death.

  Ben wished that he felt some deeper concern about that other than a need for answers.

  He let out his breath, a slow exhalation of weariness and pain. No broken bones, thank Christ. That’s new. He’d made the full transformation into human shape and lay spread-eagled on his back in the dirt, his suit covered in dust, his shaven head pale with the stuff. The streaks of blood on his face looked gaudy in the early light. The wyrm tongue symbol on his chest rose and fell, rose and fell, as he gathered the dazed thread of his thoughts, his brain spinning, and accepted that he had survived. He was back. Back on solid ground.

  But some will never be. The bitter truth of it stabbed him in the middle of his chest. Jia Jing will never walk in these lands again. You couldn’t save her.

  He groaned, shaking his head in his heads. There was no time to rest, surrender to unconsciousness. His ears rang with echoes, the aftershock of the shattered harp rippling out from the mirror on the altar. The door of Creation. Blinking, Ben looked up at the thing, regarding nothing more than a blank black octagon, a silent, depthless hole, devoid of magic and monsters. But the sight gave him little relief; he didn’t want to guess how long such a silence would last, and the music, the sickly-sweet chiming of bells, did nothing to reassure him. The temple trembled with the sound. And the breeze through the doors behind him, he noted, met and carried the strain, the residual tinkling, silvery and clear, spilling out down the steps.

  He shook his head again to clear it. Straining his eyes, green flints in his battered face, he was sure that he could make out a faint light in the space around him that had nothing to do with the dawn. Glimmers of silver borne on the music like tears or drops of blood, the blood of the lullaby. Flowing from the mirror, through the shuddering temple and out into the world.

  Not good.

  Even in this solid and earthly place, he sensed an ominous prelude in the sound—no doubt to a whole fanfare of shit. This isn’t over. Oh no. The notes stirred his old serpentine heart despite himself, and he imagined that he was listening to a requiem, the orchestration of a great death, the ending of an age and maybe, just maybe, the beginning of another. A dark one.

  A breath before the storm.

  Yeah. Ben knew the music wouldn’t last. But how far would these echoes go? Would they dissipate over the river, disturbing the dreams of some kraken or other? Or as the story went back in the old days, would the lullaby circle the globe before fading? Before its enchantment was utterly undone? Thinking of all the destruction and terror that the unra
velling spell would leave in its wake, he admitted to himself that he simply didn’t know. Sweet, sour as it was, the song was brief, like an unexpected pleasure followed by unexpected distaste. A bite of an apple and finding half a maggot. As always, the wheel turned. The balance tipped, back and forth. Well, now the cosmic seesaw had bloody well snapped in half. The Lore was broken, the harp shattered, the lullaby undone. Soon, he reckoned, things long buried would stir and rise. Even gods, and the ghosts of gods, might somehow manage to return, searching for a way back to the light. Ben screwed up his face, bitter memories, most of them recent and raw, pressing against the inside of his skull. Not all of those gods meant well. And as for the Remnants …

  He knew that the coming storm had a name.

  “The awakening. Christ, no …”

  Next to him, Von Hart coughed and moved weakly in the dust, lying face down in the gloom. His bare limbs were indistinguishable from the rivers of dust streaming from the shifting stones above. The envoy rolled himself onto his back and, in a sudden motion that gave Ben a start, his spine arched in the grit, his fists clenched, his head thrown back on the floor as he vented an echoing howl.

  But Ben didn’t give a crap about the fairy’s grief. All this had been his fault. All of it. He’d taken a gamble and succeeded in re-forging the harp only to break it—for surely that had been his ambition all along, for whatever nefarious purpose—but as Von Hart’s cry faded to silence, carried by the wind along with the music into the air, Ben realised that the envoy had also suffered a loss. If this was his victory, then it was a bitter one.

  They’d escaped from the nether. One of them hadn’t made it. One of them was going to sleep forever.

  With a snarl, Ben was up in an instant, up and kneeling over Von Hart, one hand clutching the envoy’s throat, the other balling into a fist that was drawn back to his shoulder.

  “What the fuck are you playing at? You destroyed the goddamn harp. You summoned the Lurkers to destroy it. That’s what you wanted all along, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”