Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “Lifa, please, is there water?”

  Liphar made a quick blind search of the darkened guildhall and returned with a half-filled jug. Stavros’s hands would not work to grip the handles. Murmuring worriedly, Liphar held the jug while Stavros gratefully gulped stale water.

  “Better,” he lied hoarsely, but Liphar took him at his word and urged him to be moving again.

  Stavros let himself be led among the empty worktables to the far end of the guildhall. Liphar eased open another carved wooden door. Dim light leaked through the crack. He stuck a cautious head into the corridor, then ventured out. Stavros followed, sliding his good hand along the wall for support. The corridor seemed suddenly wide and bright. Opposite, the doorless archway to Keth-Toph was invitingly dark.

  Liphar nodded at it. Stavros returned the nod and pushed himself away from the wall.

  They heard Clausen move at the end of the corridor, a stone rolling under his boot as he took aim. Liphar shouted. Stavros bolted for the darkened arch with Liphar tight at his heels. Hot lightning lanced past their ears. They ran through the entry hall and into the storehouse tunnels, past silent looming ranks of crates and shelves. At the end of a long tunnel, Liphar grabbed at Stavros’s belt.

  “Ibi! Wait, you!” He screeched to a halt, feeling in the dark for the upright support of a heavily laden shelf. Stavros turned back to lend what little strength he could. They heaved and grunted, and a twelve-foot block of shelves tipped and collapsed. Behind them, Clausen roared as tall jars of oil and bundles of lamp wick cascaded into the narrow aisle, shattering pottery, spilling gallons of thick lamp oil. The laser was knocked from the prospector’s hand, his shot deflected.

  Liphar contained his triumph to a shuddering sigh of relief and shoved Stavros down the next tunnel.

  In Keth-Toph’s vast RoundHall, a single dim blue flame glowed in the great wheel suspended above the central guild table. Liphar dashed ahead toward a remote corner behind the rendering cauldrons, where the smoothly sculpted curve of the hall was broken by a series of natural rifts. He vanished into the third in the row, then peered out again.

  “Ibi! Hurry you!”

  Stavros stumbled across the hall. Deep in the shadow of the rift, a low hole pierced the rock, a hidden shaft barely the diameter of a small man’s shoulders. Liphar pointed to it eagerly.

  “You go, ah? You go, then I go next.”

  Stavros shuddered, a moment of weakness. Breathing was an agony. His head rang, his shoulder was on fire. He was unsure he would fit in the narrow shaft. But the vicious clatter of broken pottery echoed across the hall as Clausen fought to clear a path through their impromptu barricade. It would not hold him for long.

  Stavros shook his head, willing the return of clarity. He dropped to his knees and crawled trembling into the shaft. A cool draft touched him with blessed moisture. The inner surface was finely ribbed, like corduroy. Several meters inward, the shaft turned and widened. It was faintly luminous and greenish like glass. With his knees and his good elbow, Stavros dragged himself forward at a snail’s pace. Pain flared in his shoulder as it knocked and scraped against the shaftway.

  “How far, Lifa?” he rasped, dizzy and struggling.

  “Very soon, ah?” Liphar returned urgently.

  A last effort, thought Stavros. I can manage that.

  But sensation was receding before a new tide of numbness, spreading inward from his outer limbs. Distantly, he wondered if he was already dying.

  Isn’t this how it goes when you’re bleeding to death? This creeping chill, this weakness, this… fog?

  He felt himself slipping toward nonexistence as quietly as into sleep.

  Am I moving at all?

  He forced a memory of motion into his legs and begged them to respond. His body jerked forward, an inch, a precious foot, almost by will alone. The pale glow of the shaftway framed a round darkness ahead but he knew it could be a failure of his vision. Not the ending of the shaftway, but his own ending. He was sure that the corduroy glass was increasingly slippery, that it was melting without benefit of heat, liquifying, pooling around him. He sensed it swell and begin to turn, a vast maelstrom with the slow patience of a galaxy, spinning him toward the dark void at its heart.

  “No stop, you!” Liphar grasped his unfeeling leg and shook it.

  Stavros nodded, or thought he did, as the slow maelstrom spun him away. A worry for Edan slid through his brain as the last light faded, like a specter in a mist, calling for him to wake. But it was too late. He had already given himself to the relief of darkness.

  Liphar felt Stavros stall and go limp.

  “Ibi?”

  He shook the slack leg harder, whimpering at the chill dead weight of it. He squeezed himself forward in the narrow shaft and pushed at the bulk of Stavros’s body, easily twice as heavy as his own. “Ibi!”

  He strained determinedly, muttering encouragements as if Stavros were listening, and bit by bit, his burden inched along the glassy curve. The circle of blackness ahead broadened into a perceptible opening, the end of the shaftway. When he could push no longer, Liphar rested, his face pressed against Stavros’s still back, taking reassurance from the faint but continuing heartbeat. When his thin chest had stopped heaving, he renewed his efforts, until the opening was within reach. He grasped the outer rim and hauled himself past Stavros into the room beyond.

  It was a long, domed space, its far end diffused with gentle bluish light. A pair of tall doors dominated one long wall. The cool dimness smelled of moisture and ash, and sighed with the soft plash of falling water.

  Shaking with the effort, Liphar wrapped his arms around Stavros’s chest and pulled him out of the shaft onto a smoothly tiled floor, dragging him in to a secluded corner away from the shaft opening. His hands came away wet as he laid the body out, gently as he could, and sat back on his heels. He tore off his tunic and folded it to pillow Stavros’s head, then dashed off toward the soft blue light.

  He returned with wet cloth and a lantern, which he lit as he knelt again at Stavros’ side. Gingerly he touched the damp fabric to the wound. The burnt smell and the blackened weeping flesh frightened him. The elementary first aid taught to every Sawl child did not cover this nasty sort of Terran hurt that was both a burn and a slash. He knew he must above all stop the bleeding. He sacrificed his blousy pants, tearing them into strips to wrap the damaged shoulder as tightly as he dared.

  One clean strip he retained to wipe a dark smear of blood from Stavros’s face. Then he wiped his own, and his hands, sitting helplessly wiping and wiping at himself until the tears he had held back overtook him silently. He put his face in his hands. His thin shoulders heaved. But soon he straightened and roughly brushed his tears away, muttering apologies to Stavros, scolding himself for his weakness when what mattered was finding help.

  He blew out the lantern and rose. He gave Stavros a last grieving look, then loped across the room and slipped noiselessly through the huge double doors.

  The outer hall was vast and silent. Ruddy dawn light drifted from a high clerestory to settle like dust on a marble floor patterned with interlocking circles. Stern jewel-eyed figures of the Goddesses stared down from wall-sized friezes that marched the full length of the hall.

  Liphar sped through the silence, pulling up at a wide ramp-head to peer cautiously downward. Satisfied, he descended the long slope and dashed across the open plaza at the bottom. He paused briefly at a stone trough in the center. The spring was low but the water chill and clear. He splashed his face and his naked blood-streaked chest, then gulped several hurried handfuls. The gurgle of the water echoed loudly across the still plaza. Liphar retreated in haste past the deserted shops of the MarketHall, down a long, dim corridor, toward another descending ramp. He exchanged caution for speed as he drew further away from where he had hidden his injured fugitive. He met no one on the way but slowed again as he slipped into the tunnel to the PriestHall. Suddenly he flinched and shrank against the wall.

  Lantern light
bobbed around the turn at the end of the corridor. Someone was coming up from the cave mouth.

  The mammoth carved doors of the Woodworkers’ Hall faced him uselessly, so recently barred by himself from the inside. Liphar fled down the corridor, seeking shelter in the PriestHall archway. He did a small midair skip of elation when he heard Sawl voices accompanying the approaching light. He ran on to meet them, already chattering his urgency.

  Two worried FoodGuilders rounded the corner, lanterns in hand, deep in discussion. A senior priest and the girl apprentice followed, supporting Kav Daven between them. The Kav’s blind eyes were wide. He struggled fitfully against his companions’ benevolent restraint. The girl crooned a low voiced chant to sooth his distraction.

  Liphar called out, speeding toward them as a shadow materialized in the darkened entry to the PriestHall. Clausen lunged into the corridor, corralling the fleeing Sawl with an elbow clamped around his neck. Liphar was jerked off his feet, slammed hard against the prospector’s hip and held tight. Clausen wiped his hand across the young man’s damp chest and rubbed the bloodstain into his fingertips.

  “So, my young friend, what mess have you been into?”

  Liphar flopped about like a hooked fish, screeching for help.

  “Where is he?” Clausen hissed at his ear.

  The two FoodGuilders shouted and ran forward with their lanterns raised. The little laser flashed in Clausen’s free hand, shattering the rock at their feet.

  The FoodGuilders froze in terror. Kav Daven ceased his distracted struggles. His back stiffened. His high voice rang down the corridor, bell-like, a curt demand to the struggling Liphar.

  Liphar blinked, gasping for breath. The Kav had spoken in ritual OldWords. He answered him with a stammering flood of the ancient words that were never used except in priestly celebrations. Clausen snarled and tightened his vice-hold on the young man’s throat. Liphar gagged and cried out, and the older FoodGuilder blew out his lantern. The younger lobbed his at Clausen’s head. The prospector sidestepped the fiery missile neatly. Glass flew. Burning oil splashed against the rock. Flames rose and died. The laser flashed wide in the sudden darkness. Clausen backed down the hall, dragging Liphar with him.

  Silence settled in the blackened corridor. Face pressed to the floor, the elder guildsman hissed a query. The other answered breathlessly. Behind them, the senior priest groaned and stirred. The apprentice girl called to Kav Daven, softly at first, then more urgently when she received no reply. The two guildsmen listened to the rustling sounds of her searching in the darkness, then cautiously, the elder struck a spark and relit his lantern.

  Clausen was gone, and Liphar with him. Smoking oil pooled among broken glass and ceramic on the floor. The senior priest struggled to sit up. His horrified exclamation brought the FoodGuilders to their feet.

  In the middle of the corridor, the apprentice girl knelt stunned and empty-handed. Kav Daven had vanished.

  22

  The dust towers roared across the dawning Dop Arek, Lagri’s legions marching out of the dry, dark southwest, advancing on Valla’s mountain stronghold. The wind noise rose in the ravines like the screams of the damned. The flood courses filled with blowing sand and shards of shattered vegetation as the wind soldiers swept by in disciplined ranks.

  A frail old man threaded an astonishing path through the vast moving grid of turbulence.

  He followed a broken rhythm of scurry, halt, wait and scurry again, like a wise stray dog wading through speeding traffic. The heat parched his ancient wrinkles. His eyes squeezed shut against the bite of the sand. But the wind merely toyed with his leaf-brown garments, while five meters in either direction, an advancing vortex ground pebbles into gravel and brittle stems into dust.

  The old man carried no food or water. His lips moved in a soundless chant. He stumbled once and kept going, as the first volleys of lightning arced above his bare head. He headed northeast, with the army as his escort, straight into the heart of the battle.

  23

  When the wind ceased tearing at his protective tarp, Danforth lifted a corner and squinted out past the dark trusswork of the landing strut. The hot air was still thick with dust but the rear guard of the storm had wreaked its havoc among the planted terraces and passed on toward the central Dop Arek and the mountains beyond. The slow pink dawn returned as the air cleared. The sun had not yet shown above the horizon. The fields around the Lander looked like a deserted game of giants’ pick-up sticks.

  Danforth coughed. He raised himself on his elbows, spat out some grit, swallowed a lot more. On the other side of the strut, a tarp wrinkled and fell back in sandy folds as McPherson sat up, shaking her head like a dog.

  “Tay? You okay?”

  Danforth nodded, glancing around. “Commander?”

  Weng unwound the silverfilm blanket she had wrapped herself in Indian-style, huddled cross-legged against the angled truss. She untied her dust mask, a scrap of Sawlish linen, and delicately blotted her face.

  “Unreal,” Danforth muttered inadequately.

  Weng murmured her assent.

  McPherson stretched. “Shit. Look at those fields.”

  Weng uncorked a water bottle and passed it around.

  Danforth felt precariously close to a final loss of faith in the unerring logic of natural processes. He threw off the hot tarp and struggled to pull himself upright along the crossbars of the landing truss, thrusting his cast-bound leg beneath him as a lever and support. McPherson scrambled up to help him.

  “Better uncover the dish,” he said gruffly. “We ought to see if we can raise CRI.”

  “Sure.” She backed off and brought him his makeshift wheelchair without comment, then trotted away to check on the dish. Danforth lowered himself stiffly into the chair and wheeled across the sand-drifted Underbelly to the lashed and shrouded computer table. Weng helped him untie the wind-tightened knots, then drew the silvery plastic aside and stood with it awkwardly balled up in her arms as if reluctant to set it anywhere that it might not be immediately available.

  “Ron, what’s the word out there?” Danforth called.

  “Seems okay to me,” came the reply. “Give her a try.”

  CRI came back on line with a vengeance, inquiring after everyone’s health and the condition of the equipment, demanding first-hand visual data to supplement her instrument record of the storm. She could offer no information on the welfare of the trade caravan, but reported that vast lightning-sparked brush fires were sweeping many areas of the habitable zone, among them the dry Dop Arek.

  “But who won the war?” Danforth joked sourly.

  “A mere battle, surely, Dr. Danforth,” Weng reproved.

  CRI added without hesitation, “Upon consideration of the data, matched with Mr. Ibiá’s files, I would have to award the victory to Lagri.”

  “Lagri?”

  “One of the two Sister-Goddesses,” Weng reminded him. “The fiery one. You’ve noted the PriestGuild seal? A flame suspended over water?”

  “Fire and water.” Danforth pursed his lips, staring off into the distance. “Heat and moisture…” He shrugged helplessly. “Okay. Let’s just go with this… this preposterousness for a moment: that would make it Lagri controlling the heat and the other, whatsisname…”

  “Her name. Valla Ired.”

  “Her, then. She’s got the water end of the thing. And each uses her gig as a weapon against the other. Jesus. That’s one hell of an X-factor. Pretty neat, if you could believe it.”

  “Er, Commander…?” McPherson padded back into the Underbelly. “I think maybe you oughta… they’re doing something weird out there.”

  The little pilot pointed. A solemn crowd of Sawls was collecting along the ravaged perimeter of the Lander clearing. Their numbers swelled rapidly as one by one, the entire home guard filed down the dusty path from the Caves or appeared from out of the broken fields. Their grouping was informal, most sitting, some kneeling or crouching, others standing, but all faced the Lander with a silenc
e that was neither grim nor threatening but, rather, bewildered.

  McPherson squinted, pointed again. “Look. Over to the right.”

  A dark shape lay in a stretcher on the ground in front of the gathering. It was too distant to be recognizable in the still-dim dawn, but all three knew they shared the same instant worry.

  Danforth grunted. “Whatever it is, doesn’t look very alive.”

  McPherson brushed her damp brow with a forearm, wet her lips nervously. “Better go see, huh?”

  Weng nodded. The two officers started across the clearing together, the tall old woman suiting her pace to the obviously somber moment.

  Danforth put CRI on hold and wheeled himself to the edge of the Lander’s overhang. His sweating palms were slippery on the wooden wheels.

  Christ. Don’t tell me the kid’s actually bought it? It had to be now, when I really need him?

  He wiped his hands on his damp T-shirt, more disturbed than he could make sense of. He stared up at the looming wall of the cliff, stained with the salmon blush of dawn. If this was Ibiá, brought down dead or dying by the mourning Sawls, where the hell was Clausen?

  Damn, the kid didn’t deserve this!

  Danforth shoved the crippling bulk of his cast against the side of the chair, cursing his helplessness and vulnerability. Not only the weather, but events, too, had stopped making sense. He missed the comforting texture of reality. He imagined he could actually see it fading behind the wavering curtains of heat that were cutting them off from each other, and each from the dust-dry landscape. He sniffed, smelling distant smoke. Weng’s lecture about the Coal Sack floated to mind, along with an image of the planet consumed in fire.

  Perhaps when that sun finally does roll over the horizon, it’ll be swelled up on us, engorged like a tick, sucking up atmospheres, cannibalizing its own system.

  “This heat,” he muttered. “This bitching heat!”