Born of Flame

by Oscar Steven Senn

  A Distant Dirge

  THE NEXT DAY was beautiful. Spacebread awakened refreshed around noon again, with glorious green light spilling in through the window of Gorsook’s hut. She yawned and stretched, smiling at the odd figlet furnishing and artifacts, the crusty old figlet’s possessions, especially at the religious tapestry hanging like a door in the hut’s opening. It was woven of colorful plant fibers and depicted the sacred tree with suns and galaxies growing from its limbs, the quaint story the priest had told. She searched through her Foldover bag for breakfast, and at last located some stored mushrooms that tasted like liver, and a forgotten flask of stonewater.

  Outside, life had returned to normal. The Warriors were away in the spice fields, save for a few perimeter guards who prowled the outskirts of the encampment. Uniform chanting came from the learning hut, along with the faint hum of many figlets hovering. Below, dull thumps rose from the factory burrow.

  “Spacebread!” a voice called to her, and she turned.

  “Klimmit. The varnish looks well on you.” She smiled.

  He beamed as he settled down to her eye level. “It still feels strange. Eventually, it’ll wear off, but the stain will stay. I’ll be getting browner from now on as I become an adult.”

  They walked silently through the village together, surveying the activity of his home culture. Klimmit at last looked natural someplace, no longer a strange wanderer. His protective varnish glistened. But the narrow metal band of his helmet rim still hinted of other worlds.

  They found themselves at last on a small rolling hill overlooking miles of veldt. For a while, they just admired the view.

  “I must speak to you of something,” Spacebread said softly at last. “You must consider what I say carefully. I know in the past you have considered me your mistress and guardian. I suppose it stems from when you were a slave and I bought you. But you must no longer think in those terms. Something important has happened to you. You are a Warrior. We are equals.”

  Klimmit looked at her in puzzlement, wondering what she was getting at.

  “I am very proud of you,” she continued, “and I know your people are too. If you choose to stay on Kesterole, your renown will bring with it responsibility. I’m sure you will become a leader, for your experiences will make your advice valuable. Perhaps you will be called to Dacquar to serve in the Council. Now, listen to me …”

  Klimmit had turned indignantly toward her, but she held out her hand.

  “If you come with me once more, I cannot guarantee what kind of life you will have. Adventure, yes, but pain as well. We could end quickly out there, or very, very slowly. Think about it before you say you’ll come with me.”

  Klimmit smiled at her. He placed his small woody hand on hers and looked deeply into her eyes.

  But before he could speak, someone called to them from the edge of the village. Turning, they saw Gorsook waving his good arm wildly at them.

  “Spacebread! Your many legged companion has need of you. Something is wrong with him!”

  A cloud passed over Spacebread’s mind. She glanced at Klimmit, but he was already racing for the village. By the time she caught up, he had already reached Niral. The Korliss was agitated, looking over his shoulder repeatedly, but would only speak to her.

  “It’s them,” Niral hissed. “I can smell their pheromones, stronger by the minute. I have led them to this innocent planet!”

  “Drones?” Spacebread turned and scanned the fields. Beyond them was a dark wall of trees, the only place for attackers to hide …

  It was instinct that made her pull the Korliss to the ground. She never stopped to think. Perhaps it was the distant metallic noise of a cartridge being armed, or a scent on the spicy breeze, or perhaps just a cat’s special sense for danger.

  Shots rang out, four.

  The hut wall rattled as the darts zipped through. Gorsook dove for cover behind a cauldron. Spacebread quickly shoved Niral through the hut doorway, drew her pistol, and ran across the cleared village perimeter for the cover of a hedge. Darts hissed into the dirt around her, but by then she was peering over the edge from safety. She saw a drone lift his rifle to fire again from the trees. Her own pistol fired first as she leaped up and ran through the flowering spice field. The drone ducked and was about to aim again when a shot hit him dead center. He went down with a chattering whine.

  Before Spacebread could slow, another gunshot whizzed past her ear. She threw herself over two rows of plants, rolled, and sprang up, answering fire as she ran. Into the trees now, she crouched behind a trunk. Bark splintered past her from a new volley, but she caught a glimpse of spindly legs scrambling behind a bush. She rolled to the next tree before the drone could aim at her, and fired blindly through a tree fork. The bush burst into flame. The drone buzzed frantically. But before she could finish him off, she heard the crackle of cryo-guns overhead. The drone’s squeal faded. The fire was out—the beams had frozen him to the bush in a block of blue crystals.

  The figlets buzzed into the trees, guns at ready, but they found only Spacebread. She caught sight of the rest of the perimeter patrol beyond the trees.

  “Any more?” she queried the two.

  “One other,” one answered her grimly. “A strangely bundled creature unlike these. It escaped toward the forest on an alien scooter.”

  “Bundled?” she mused. She recalled the driver of the air-car in the Kindarh alley and glanced across the veldt. But her ion-horse was too slow to catch a scooter. She would meet Quan’s bundled henchman another day, she vowed.

  She bolstered her gun and headed back to the village, hoping Klimmit had managed to protect Niral from an attack from the other side. But her walk turned into a trot, and her trot into a run when she saw the crowd gathering around Gorsook’s house. A horrible fear dawned in her.

  “Klimmit!” she called and tore her way through the crowd.

  He writhed on the ground, his small mouth contorted in agony. Gorsook held his arms away from the pale spot where the dart had entered.

  Gorsook looked up. “Priest has gone to analyze the stinger.” He sighed heavily.

  “No,” Spacebread whispered, kneeling to cradle Klimmit’s head. “No, no.”

  Klimmit felt her fur against his face. “Bad aim, those drones,” he hissed bravely. “Looks like I may not be leaving with you after all, milady.”

  Spacebread groaned, and a cry rose from deep inside her. She tightened her grip on him as though she could hang onto his life that way. There were a thousand things she wanted to say to him, a thousand adventures she wanted to share.

  A perimeter guard hurried up to report a rocket blasting off from the forest beyond the ridge, where the bundled alien had fled. But Spacebread scarcely heard him.

  Suddenly the tiny figlet priest appeared, the dart captured in a jar of liquid. He did not hurry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The drug is Candyne. To most species it’s a sleeping potion. But for a figlet … I’m sorry.”

  “No!” Spacebread cried desperately. “There has to be a cure! I’ll find a cure!”

  “There is no time. Just seven minutes,” the priest said calmly as he laid in the dirt the articles for the death ceremony. “Some things are not in your power.”

  Spacebread growled, but suddenly Gorsook was whispering to the twisting figlet. “Klimmit. Klimmit, listen! There is the old way. When Warriors were alone on the veldt and one was bitten by a fandig, he could be sealed into a cryo-box until a priest was found to give the cure.”

  “Bring one!” Spacebread snapped.

  “It must be his choice!” Gorsook snapped back.

  But Klimmit understood. He nodded his head, fighting back the screams and the darkness that crowded his mind. Pale foam speckled his lip.

  While Warriors scrambled to find a cryo-box, Spacebread leaned close to the dying figlet and whispered, “I will see you cured, Klimmit. This I swear. Somewhere in the universe there is a healing for this, and if it takes me the rest of my life, I will find it. And
I will see Korliss Quan destroyed.”

  But Klimmit was already in a coma. If the small wood inlaid cryo-box had not arrived at that moment and Klimmit placed tenderly into its minus-zero-degree interior, Spacebread’s vow would have been worthless. The life-monitor on the coffer’s side was activated, and a clock computed the figlet’s remaining time. Five minutes from death, Klimmit lay sleeping in the cold. They all looked silently at the box that held the darkness at bay.

  “Perhaps this is why I lived,” Gorsook said finally, rubbing his burned side. “For one last battle for my kin was I spared.”

  Spacebread did not hear him. Nor did she hear Niral, who was tearing his cloak in sorrow and moaning that the deadly dart had been meant for him. She stared at the mute and potent box in her lap and heard only the muffled drumbeat that sounded from the village, beginning a slow and distant dirge.

  [8]

  The Quest

  SPACEBREAD paced the control pod icily while Votal whirred and buzzed. Her eyes neither saw the other ships standing in their docks nor the overhead ramps carrying passengers to other parts of Outaire terminal. She did not hear Votal’s squeaky, coded discussions with the other computers he was calling across the Home Worlds. She saw only Klimmit’s face, in a thousand different attitudes, and heard only his brave voice as it struggled against the pain.

  The cryo-box was inside a hidden safe in the ship. It had taken a day and all Gorsook’s intervention to prevent Spacebread from taking it without the Council’s permission. But at last the old Warrior’s persuasion won, and the governing figlets allowed the coffer containing Klimmit’s suspended body to be taken from Kesterole in search of a cure.

  If there was a cure.

  She had to force herself to be calm while inquiries were made across impossible voids of space and institutions of healing were contacted. She had checked the armaments aboard a dozen times and mapped out possible routes to possible locations where a cure might be found.

  She had informed the Inter-System Police of the attack, of course, as soon as she reached Outaire. But the Margh ship was long gone. With one attempt bungled, it would be very difficult for Quan to try to kidnap Niral again. Although Quan was never mentioned because of his high position, alerts were out concerning suspicious Margh ships.

  But it was not attack that concerned Spacebread. She had to have the figlet back. In other times she had been too strong and too aloof to let losses of this sort hurt her. But she could not go alone between the stars, not after this. It was her overconfidence that had put Klimmit in danger where he should have been safest, and her negligence that had closed the trap upon his small life.

  Votal whirred and spoke her name twice before she noticed.

  “Negative, milady. The Calveran Institute replies that there is no known antidote in this case, since plant cells are involved. Likewise the Kednician Brotherhood replies negatively. They have no tapes for figlets, since so few travel the Home Worlds.”

  “What about Brae Tencillan the Mage?” she shot back. “Have you located him yet?”

  “Regrettably, yes. He has disappeared into the dust cloud of Harrh on another of his pilgrimages. A great pity, milady. Since he was the discoverer of Candyne and had stayed on Kesterole studying figlet life, we could have hoped much from him. I’m sorry.”

  Her yellow eyes flared in frustration. “Don’t talk to me of pity or hope or sorrow,” she growled. “You are a machine, a ship’s computer. To you, Klimmit was only an organic intelligence, a—”

  She stopped and folded her arms, gripping each shoulder tightly. “Don’t listen to me, Votal. I—I’m not thinking clearly.”

  “It is very understandable, milady,” Votal replied.

  She sighed long and deep. Her shoulders sagged. “If only there were some god or force I could believe in, Votal. If only I were a child again, with a child’s faith. I would pray or sacrifice or do whatever I had to do. Klimmit must be saved.”

  “It is lonely between the stars,” Votal said quietly.

  Spacebread reverently took the cryo-box from its hiding place and opened it. The figlet’s silent features looked up at her without emotion, the cold having erased the last pain lines. Frost flecked his cheeks.

  “Rest,” she finally said, softly. “Rest, Warrior. The computer says there are no skills of science or medicine to free you from this poison. But there are, somewhere. I pledge my life to find the cure, wherever and whatever it is. We have traveled far through the stars, you and I. I promise you we will travel further.”

  She returned him to his quiet delaying grave and began scanning some of Votal’s more obscure tapes for a hint of other doctors or institutions of medicine, academies or chemists who might hold the key to Klimmit’s recovery.

  She concentrated so hard she failed to hear Votal opening the portal behind her. Two boxes of supplies floated softly inside. Gorsook hummed through behind them, carrying a crate of grenades atop his newly purchased helmet.

  “Ahh,” he said, hefting his package onto the others. “How handy it is to have a Korliss along to float things.”

  Niral came next, hovering through the portal as Korliss Quan had once done. Any effort he expended in transporting himself and the burdens did not show. He alighted soundlessly.

  “Any luck with the computer?” Gorsook queried, though he could tell from Spacebread’s expression there was none.

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Not a damned thing. From one end of the Home Worlds to the other it seems every clinic or hospice either cannot accept figlets or knows of no remedy for Candyne poisoning. I am at my wit’s end.”

  “Something will turn up,” Gorsook ventured, then winced at how flat it sounded.

  Niral stared vacantly for a moment. The packages trembled, then hopped into the storage bin with the other supplies, but not before Gorsook snatched his grenades away grumpily and put them with his meager pile of possessions. Spacebread suddenly lifted her chin from her hand and looked sharply at Niral.

  “You, priest,” she said. “This Ability of yours— why can’t you use it to go into Klimmit’s body and push the poison out?”

  “It is proscribed,” Niral answered sadly. “I am forbidden by Korlann law to—”

  “Forget Korlann law!” Spacebread snapped.

  “—forbidden to enter another’s body; for the Ability becomes unpredictable inside the bodily field. It could cause greater damage, or even turn on its wielder.”

  Spacebread accepted the remarks stonily. It was as if something was cutting off every avenue of help deliberately, to thwart her. The three stood without speaking, deep in thought, for what seemed an age. The air was heavy with failure.

  “Someone approaches, milady,” Votal suddenly announced.

  A whistling, jocular and gay, sounded nearer and nearer the ship until they heard a clambering on the ladder rungs and the tune turned into humming. Spacebread turned coldly. A head appeared in the still open portal, a calico head with broad pointing ears and a patch over one eye. Dundee smiled lopsidedly as he caught sight of her. He stopped on the ladder and held out an extravagant bouquet of lavender and orange catnip.

  “For the beautiful dancer.” He grinned. “A gift of fragrance for a gift of grace.”

  He tossed the flowers to her, but her Thorian sword met them with a whisper, littering the control pod floor with them. “How in the name of—how did you find me?” There was fire in her voice and eyes.

  Dundee stumbled, blinking. He had heard some describe Spacebread as cold, but … “It was not difficult,” he answered as gaily as he could. “I heard a rumor you were headed for Sharn, where I wasted some time. Then I remembered that a figlet Warrior was your traveling companion, and that you had been exiled, so I assumed he would want to see his home …”

  “A rumor of Sharn? The ISP has quite a leak in it, doesn’t it?” she muttered suspiciously. “If it was a leak.”

  “What has happened?” Dundee pulled himself the rest of the way in as Niral tersely explain
ed.

  “Oh, lady,” Dundee whispered. “And here I come like the circus into such an occasion. Forgive me. I should have called ahead …”

  Spacebread still gazed at him with contempt,

  “I’m sorry,” he said, now quite soberly. “He must have meant a lot to you for it to affect you so.”

  “He meant enough,” she said finally.

  “The poison? Candyne! An odd combination. I take it you have checked the hospitals? Yes. The Kednician Brotherhood and the Calveran Institute both? Oh. There is little else to ask about.”

  “Precious little,” she said. “Unless you know of some place or person from your travels. You are a well known wanderer.”

  He dipped one ear. “First Class. I’ve been from one end of … well, I’ve been around. Let me think.”

  Presently Dundee reeled off a list of hopeful suggestions, every one of which had already been crossed off by Votal.

  “I see,” he mused gravely. Then, after a thoughtful pause, he winced. “Missed opportunities. I recall once turning down the purchase of a map that perhaps I should have considered more seriously. An old wanderer offered it to me if I would give him enough money to start a peculoid ranch. It was a computer tape giving the location of Osghan, where lives the Flame.”

  “Do not mock me in such an hour,” Spacebread hissed, “or I shall dance upon your skull. Osghan is a fable told to children to make them dream. The Flame is but a myth!”

  Dundee shrugged. “But who knows for certain?”

  Niral, blinking widely, interrupted. “It is true! There is an Osghan, the lost jewel of the galaxy. Many in the Korlann say it is from there the Ability came to Marghool, distant centuries ago. But it is quite real.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Spacebread scoffed. “My mother sang the nursery songs to me, of the Flame-that-is-not-a-Flame, as she sang of goblins. I think she believed in both.”

  “Listen to them,” Gorsook advised in an unusually quiet voice. “Perhaps if science and learning cannot help us, there is a cure in the other world. The Green world we cannot see.”