by Paula Volsky
“Yes, what about it?” echoed the king. “Is your wrist really scarred, Nevenskoi? Push back your sleeve, let’s have a look.”
“Majesty, this is absurd.”
“You refuse?” Miltzin IX’s smile vanished.
“Sire, what signifies a scar? It means nothing and proves nothing. I—I do not deserve this.” Not after all my hard work, he wanted to say. Not after I’ve come so far and accomplished so much. I am creator of Masterfire, a great marvel. What does it matter where I came from, or who my father was, why should anyone care? All of this and more he wanted to say, but the words caught in his throat, the familiar nervous pangs lanced his belly, and he clutched his middle with a gasp.
Owww! A cry of silent sympathetic pain burst from the mind of Masterfire.
Nevenskoi scarcely noticed. Preoccupied with miseries both physical and mental, he allowed his link with the sentient flame to falter, along with his control.
“Owww!” This time the yelp of pain came from Miltzin IX. Abruptly dropping the green woman’s hand, he inspected his own palm, which was deeply reddened and no doubt destined to blister.
The woman of flame suddenly roared into greatness, stretching to a height of some twelve feet. For a moment or two she stood there fully intact, wild cloud of hair scorching and blackening the ceiling, intense heat radiating from her body. Then the limbs flickered and twisted, the sculpted curves of the torso gave way to glaring chaos, the head appeared to explode, and a formless mass of ungoverned fire blazed at the center of the king’s study.
Miltzin squawked and backed away, both arms up to shield his face. Giggy Neeper screamed, dashed for the exit, was through it and gone in an instant.
The carpet beneath and around Masterfire blackened. The brocade window curtains vanished in a green flash, and the polished wood of the desk began to char.
“Stop!” Nevenskoi was not aware that he spoke aloud. There was no reply, no intimation that he had been heard, and it took all the experience and expertise at his command to force himself to pause, to order his thoughts and collect his faculties, before addressing Masterfire again. Stop.
EAT! The green flame sent excited experimental tentacles snaking toward the bookcases. DANCE! BIG! EAT!
Stop. Pain and alarm still rocked his concentration, and Nevenskoi forcibly suppressed both. Stop. Now. Obey.
DANCEDANCEDANCE! I am Masterfire, and I am feeling FINE! I am glorious, I am gorgeous, I am me. The musical scores littering the desktop went up in flames.
Stop. Consume nothing more. Dwindle. Small. Small.
Don’t wanna. A stack of unopened correspondence vanished.
Stop that. Soon I will be angry. Obey. Now.
Nevenskoi strained his will to the uttermost, and his creation, struck by the desperate force of the assault, submitted without further resistance. In an instant Masterfire shrank, great mass dwindling to a fist-sized ball of flame. Nevenskoi’s shoulders sagged and a long sigh gusted from the depths of his lungs. After a moment he ventured a glance at the king.
Miltzin IX stood poised for flight. His face was white and the palm of his right hand was red. He was staring at Masterfire, his expression shocked as he observed, “She attacked me.”
“An overspill of youthful high spirits, Majesty,” Nevenskoi soothed. “Unsuitable perhaps, but essentially innocent.”
“She would have killed me. I was unprepared for the violence, the treachery.”
“Sire, there was no malice in this. It was an accident. Masterfire is like a child, unruly and impetuous at times, but—”
“A child full of cunning and duplicity,” the king interrupted. “And where did she learn them, I wonder? Who was her master? It is not a difficult puzzle. Who is the habitual liar, the cheat, the impostor? Push back your sleeve, Nevenskoi, or whatever your name is. I want to see your wrist.”
“No need, Sire,” Nevenskoi returned. He stood up straight and spoke without a trace of Rhazaullean accent. “It is scarred, as Giggy described.”
“You do know him, then? You admit it?”
Nevenskoi nodded, almost with a sense of relief.
“And everything he said was true? You admit that too?”
Another mute confirmation.
“I see.” For an instant Miltzin looked childishly disappointed, but rallied quickly to accuse, “Then you have lied to me from the start. You’ve always lied.”
“About the small things, Sire. Not the large ones.”
“You dare to qualify your guilt? You’re a charlatan, a common fraud.”
“But there is nothing common or fraudulent about Masterfire. The Sentient Fire is all that I have promised, and more.”
“You’ve betrayed the trust of a king. That’s more than a personal insult, it’s a criminal act.”
“Punish me as you see fit, Sire. Banish or imprison me, but don’t extinguish Masterfire’s light. A discovery of such importance—”
“Hold your tongue. I don’t want to hear your voice. I don’t want to see your face, either, so take yourself out of my sight. I’ll decide presently how to deal with you. In the meantime, just get out.” King Miltzin’s eye fell on the ball of fire squatting tamely at its master’s feet. “And take that green harlot with you!”
“COME, DECIDE QUICKLY,” the pilot commanded in tolerable if impatient Vonahrish. “Which of you two is it to be?”
“I will go first,” Karsler informed Luzelle. “If the machine supports my weight safely, then it will easily support yours.”
She nodded reluctant agreement and watched as he ascended to take his seat. She would gladly have gone with him despite the horrifying fragility of the conveyance, but the gorgeflier was built to carry no more than one passenger at a time. The launching mechanism, reminiscent of a gigantic crossbow, had been readied by the pilot’s trio of assistants; its two huge arms—each powered by the tension of a twisted fiber skein—pulled back by means of a cord attached to a windlass, its great stock angled to loft the glider high.
There was not much time to worry about it. Karsler settled into his seat, the pilot signaled, and one of the assistants released the trigger. The bow responded too quickly for the eye to follow, and the glider shot out into the air above the Gorge of Vezhevska.
There was nothing holding the thing up. No balloon, no giant mythic bird, no magic. And yet it was not dropping straight out of the sky, as Luzelle had half expected. The pilot, through inspired manipulation of rudder and movable bits on the featherweight wings, was somehow holding his craft aloft and riding the air currents toward Rhazaulle. For now, at least.
She watched without blinking, almost without breathing, for another thirty seconds or so, after which the glider disappeared into the mists. She strained her eyes after it, but saw nothing. Karsler was gone, and a sense of uneasy gloom filled her. It was, she realized, one of the few times they had been truly separated since the afternoon he had dragged her fallen Quiet-fellow free of the mud, back in Aveshq. Her palanquin had carried them both on as far as the town of JaiGhul that day, and they had traveled more or less together ever since. Not that either had intended to do so, she reminded herself. Things had simply turned out that way.
Unlike Girays v’Alisante, they had not reached the tiny train station in time to catch the only train of the day. JaiGhul possessed nothing resembling an inn, so they had spent the night dozing fitfully on the hard wooden benches in the waiting room. The next day, reaching rain-drenched ZuLaysa, they had taken separate rooms at the same hotel in the thoroughly westernized section of town known as Little Sherreen. They had boarded the same train departing Central Station for the port of Rifzir, sailed the same ferry across the Straits of Aisuu, run consistently neck and neck northwest through the Emirate of Mekzaes by oxcart and canoe, and shared the services of the same native guide across the grassy Tribal Territories of H’fai.
Through it all they had never quite caught up with Girays, who never seemed to increase his twenty-four-hour lead, but did not lose it either. Likewi
se they had never quite returned to the moonlit moment of near intimacy that they had shared in Xoxo. Luzelle often thought of it. She would have let him kiss her that night and he had wanted to, she was sure of it, but he had declined to exploit her momentary weakness. Her lapse was unlikely to repeat itself; she was now quite prepared to rebuff indecorous advances with an ironclad propriety that would have won the Judge’s wholehearted approval. But the opportunity to flaunt her virtue never arose. Karsler Stornzof did not try to kiss her; he did not even try to hold her hand.
At first she thought him high minded, and admired the strength of his principles, but later on the doubts began to infiltrate her mind. What if she had simply been wrong about that moonlit exchange? What if he had held back not through principle, but rather through preference? Perhaps he found those pouty red lips of hers gross and repellent. Nonsense, he had explained himself clearly that night. But what if he had simply been trying to spare her feelings?
The doubts persisted and pestered. Often when he looked at her they subsided, but never for long, and presently she began to wonder if she could make him try to kiss her if she worked at it. She wouldn’t actually let him, of course; it would not do to cheapen herself. She only wanted a little reassurance. But not at Karsler Stornzof’s expense. It wasn’t fair or even decent to mislead him, so perhaps she should just let him kiss her. That might be the truly right thing to do.…
But she never found the right moment to perform the experiment, for the guide was with them night and day every step of the way through the Tribal Territories, and she did not relish an audience. And when they crossed the border into the Dhrevate of Immeen matters worsened, for Immeen was one of the great bastions of Iyecktori purity, a land wherein women adjudged guilty of immodesty—a term open to broad interpretation—were publicly stripped and whipped. And therefore, as they made their way north into chillier climes over increasingly rugged terrain, she attempted no flirtation.
Now, however, they were leaving Immeen for the colder, harsher, but legally looser land of Rhazaulle, where the Gifted Iyecktor wielded little official influence. The River Vezhevska marked the border between the two nations, and the newfangled gorgeflier carrying them across eliminated a two-day journey to the nearest accessible fording place at the base of the cliffs. The gorgeflier offered tremendous advantages, offset by the possibility of sudden death.
The duration of the flight itself, she had been told, was something under ten minutes, depending on the whim of the winds. Ten minutes across, ten minutes back, a few extra minutes thrown in for positioning of the glider for relaunch on the far side, and the little craft should reemerge from those mists within the half hour, assuming that all had gone well—a considerable assumption.
Luzelle scanned the skies. No sign of the gorgeflier, and surely the half hour had elapsed. She glanced at the pilot’s assistants, who, having rewound the cord to re-flex the two great arms of the vast crossbow, now lounged around smoking their wide-mouthed wooden pipes. They displayed no uneasiness, so everything must be all right, probably, but she could not banish the mental image of the tiny glider suddenly losing altitude, plunging from great heights to dash itself to pieces on the rocks below.
She shivered a little, cold despite the protection of the heavy, musty-smelling parka and fur-lined gloves that she had acquired from a tribesman of H’fai in exchange for her penknife and a box of matches. She had hated to let the knife and matches go, but would have hated even more doing without an overcoat, for the air at these high altitudes was pure but perennially bitter, even in the long-delayed springtime. Back in Vonahr the freshness of spring would by now have given way to the languor of early summer, but here in this scoliotic spine of northern mountains known in Immeen as “Hul Noveez” and called the “Bruzhois” in Rhazaulle, winter had scarcely loosened its grip. The jagged peaks were armored in ice and likely to remain so.
Her breath misted before her face, and she hugged herself, rubbing her arms and stamping her feet. The native Immeenis, she noted with envy, went gloveless and wore their long vests unbuttoned over homespun shirts, evidently deeming the weather balmy. They seemed very much at ease, and she heard them laughing among themselves over some incomprehensible joke or other. For a moment she wondered if they were laughing at her obvious discomfort, but quickly dismissed the notion. They could not be laughing at her because they were scarcely aware of her. To them she was simply a piece of luggage belonging to a Grewzian overcommander. This perception, demeaning though it was, actually worked to her advantage. Had she traveled on her own, a woman unveiled and unattached in Iyecktori Immeen, the natives would have taken her for a prostitute and regarded her as fair game, natural target of insult, abuse, and worse. But the property of a foreign officer was another matter altogether, and nobody had offered so much as an unpleasant word. She did not much care to think what might have befallen her in Immeen, but for the presence of Karsler Stornzof.
Where was that glider? It should certainly have returned by now. She paced back and forth, worrying. The men ignored her. Just as she was steeling herself to attempt an interrogation, the gorgeflier emerged from the mists, glided smoothly down onto the snowy flat expanse topping the cliff, slid a distance on its runners, and eventually slowed to a stop. The pilot got out.
Long before the glider halted, the assistants were on their feet and plowing toward it through the snow. Running ropes through a couple of lugs attached to the light body, they hauled the craft back to the launching device and positioned it with care. The pilot reboarded, then looked at Luzelle and beckoned.
“You come now,” he commanded.
She hesitated. The glider perched atop the crossbow was pale and fragile as a giant dead moth, and probably just about as reliable. She wanted nothing to do with it.
“Now,” he insisted. “Come, it is safe.”
She was not aware that she shook her head.
“You do what you like, then,” he told her. “But either way, I keep the money. It is mine now.”
Out of the corner of her eye she noted the assistants watching and grinning, and that decided her. Her chin came up and she advanced with an air of grim resolution that only broadened their smiles. Somebody helped her to board and she settled into the passenger seat, hoping they would launch the gorgeflier before she could change her mind.
They obliged.
The trigger snapped, the windlass claws released their grasp, the cord blurred, and the glider shot sickeningly into space, the force of its sudden ascent pressing Luzelle back hard against the seat. Her humiliating squeal was drowned in the rush of the wind. Eyes screwed shut, she clung to the horribly flimsy body of the craft.
For the better part of two minutes she remained paralyzed, conscious of little beyond the blast of the freezing wind in her face and the nauseating sudden dips, tilts, and accelerations of the gorgeflier. Presently curiosity overcame terror, and she opened her eyes to gaze down through mists at the River Vezhevska, rushing along the bottom of its rocky gorge hundreds of feet below. The snow-clad mountains rose all around her, their grim grandeur a sight to remember for a lifetime. Soon she began to admire the skill with which the pilot tweaked the movable bits of his craft to exploit every current of air. A new and tentative exhilaration stirred to life within her, and by the time the glider started its descent toward the snowfield on the far side of the river, she was almost sorry to see the trip end.
The glider’s belly bumped snow. The white scenery flashed by, and then the craft gradually slowed to a stop. Within moments a couple of bearded laborers were there to haul the glider back to a stretch of flat clifftop space, site of a great crossbow identical to its counterpart on the Immeeni side, and of three very stoutly constructed wooden buildings. As she drew near, Luzelle saw that one of the buildings sported the big painted sign of a commercial establishment, but she could not read the Rhazaullean print. A livery stable of some sort, she hoped.
The glider stopped again. Pilot and passenger alighted onto slick,
hard-packed snow. Luzelle saw Karsler coming toward her, and the exhilaration born of the recent flight heightened. He had waited for her. He had sacrificed the chance of a half-hour lead—not much, but conceivably significant—and he had waited. He was smiling at her, and she had to suppress the unsuitable impulse to run to him.
“I am gratified to see you safe and well,” Karsler declared.
She had grown accustomed to that formality, which no longer struck her as quaint or cold.
“I was concerned for you,” he added.
“And I for you,” she returned, resisting the urge to reach out a hand and touch him. “I still am. I’m very glad to see you, but you shouldn’t have waited. We’re competing in a race. Remember what you said—”
“I have not forgotten,” he assured her. “Nor have my convictions altered. In this case, however, I was obliged to wait. It seems that the proprietor of this establishment here”—his gesture encompassed the building with the incomprehensible sign—“has at this time but a single sleigh available for hire. Aware of your approach, he refused to rent the sleigh to me alone, but insisted upon awaiting your arrival in order to collect a double fare.”
“I see.” She nodded, a little disappointed, but then the thought struck, And how did he know of my approach? Of course, the pilot might have blabbed. That probably explained it. She chanced a look into Karsler’s eyes, which revealed nothing beyond the glory of their color.
“We must share the sleigh,” he continued. “It is the only arrangement the owner is willing to consider.”
“Then we must,” she murmured philosophically.
“He will furnish us with a driver.”
“Oh.” She still would not be alone with him.