Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Weng and McPherson neared the edge of the clearing. McPherson ran the last few steps, as if in surprise. She dropped to her knees beside the stretcher, her puzzled voice ringing clearly in the silence.

  “It’s Edan! I know this one. She’s Aguidran’s top tracker. I thought she went out with the caravan.”

  Danforth watched her bend over the still form.

  “I think she’s dead, Commander.”

  Danforth shut his eyes in guilty relief. Not Ibiá, then. Not yet.

  But the thin veneer of civilization was crumbling, sure enough. Melting with the planet into the maddening heat.

  McPherson sat back on her heels and spread her arms sadly at the nearest Sawl. “What happened?”

  The seamy-faced ranger who had come down earlier to warn them about the storm thrust himself through the crowd. “Clauzen,” he accused, his voice dark with outrage. Around him, the others murmured, as if his forthright anger made them uneasy.

  McPherson turned to Weng. “What do we do, Commander?”

  “Clearly we need to hear the full story,” Weng replied steadily.

  “Which you will, Commander,” came Clausen’s voice from behind the crowd. The Sawls drew back instinctively. He strode down the path dragging a half-naked and frightened Liphar in firm tow. “Just as soon as I take care of one little detail.”

  The prospector’s bearded face showed no anger or passion, only a chill, almost weary determination. Weng stepped in front of him.

  “I’d like to hear it now, Mr. Clausen, if you don’t mind.”

  Clausen stopped with a shrug, as if chatting with a customs official over some questionable imports. “Sure, fine. Not at all. I’d spotted Ibiá up in the Caves and nearly had my hands on him, when that young woman jumped me in the dark. I reacted, ah, in kind.”

  McPherson bolted to her feet. “You broke her fucking neck!”

  Clausen nodded soberly, looked to Weng, experience appealing to experience. “A regrettable accident. Commander.”

  Weng’s reply was steely. “Regrettable, indeed, Mr. Clausen.” She nodded at Liphar, whose eyes pleaded in misery and terror. “And what may I ask are you doing to this poor child?”

  “Ah yes. Very simple.” Clausen seemed to have just remembered the boy held in his iron grasp. “He’s hidden Ibiá up there, and I intend to find out where.”

  “I don’t think so, Mr. Clausen. You are under arrest for murder.”

  Clausen smiled tightly and jerked Liphar toward the Lander. “I’d like to see you make that one stick, Commander.”

  Danforth told himself he had always known killing would come easily to Clausen, and wondered why the actuality left him stunned. He watched the prospector drag his prisoner across the dusty clearing. The Sawls settled back into their eerie passive vigil beside the dead ranger’s body. Weng stared after Clausen, as still and palely erect as a marble statue.

  Danforth swivelled his awkward chair and wheeled back to the equipment table as fast as he could manage.

  “CRI, get me Captain Newman. We’ve got a big problem down here,” he began in a harsh whisper. His ears monitored Clausen’s rapid approach at his back, but his eyes were drawn to the thick black smoke rising from the bright line of fire advancing almost as quickly from across the plain.

  “A real big problem…”

  24

  Stavros heard water, falling softly, like rain or sleep.

  In vain, this dying, but not alone, at least.

  His first coherent thought in many hours was at once submerged in a noise of pain that drowned out thinking. He struggled to think again, to hear the thought through the noise. And there was one about a way to master pain, a Connection to be made, a Power waiting to be tapped. Sometimes he heard a voice advising him, but the words were singsong and the lesson unintelligible, lost with his thought in the din and the shimmering haze of fever and the sinking into nothingness.

  Kav Daven’s young apprentice girl sat at Stavros’ side untiringly. The long hall glowed dimly, almost cool. At the far end, a slim, glassy cylinder shimmered in a column of water that rose from the center of a tiled pool. The cylinder enclosed an unwavering spear of pale blue light. The water soared, crested and fell back to sing its gentle falling music on the surface of the pool.

  The girl rewetted the cloth pressed to the dying man’s forehead and changed the iced herbal dressings on his shoulder.

  His torn flesh rebelled with purulence and heat. Fever raged.

  The elderly Master Herbalist Ard sat cross-legged on the cool tiles for long hours, watching, pondering new strategies to combat the infection.

  Stavros floated in and out of consciousness. In his fever dreams, he was terrorized by continuous pursuit through an endless falling dark. At those times, he recoiled from the girl’s gentle touch, certain he was eluding capture. And the girl pleaded desperately with him to rest but his inner voices clamored that survival was in resistance, not surrender.

  He thrashed about uselessly. Hard-won strength was lost in battling nightmares. His rare instants of clarity brought only a clearer awareness of unbearable pain. Each retreat into oblivion was longer, each rise to consciousness more reluctant.

  Ard cursed the inadequacy of his medicines. He wished for his guildmaster’s special healing skill.

  He knew he was going to lose this patient.

  25

  The last ranks of whirlwinds tore past the circled wagons. A single roaring tower of dust smashed straight through the center of the largest circle, grinding a FoodGuild wagon into splinters and upending four others. The spinning funnel blackened, sucking up smoke and charred debris along with several hjalk and their helpless driver.

  The hjalk fell screaming to the salt pan a hundred meters further. The driver was swallowed by the storm.

  Susannah stirred numbly in the tangle of bodies huddled against the cargo beneath the Infirmary wagon. Ghirra’s thin, strong arm, curled around her back, relaxed and drew away as he rolled out from under the wagon and sat up, dazed and frowning.

  “Is it really over this time?” Megan croaked. She blinked, palming grit and black ash from her cheeks.

  “Please god,” Susannah breathed fervently.

  They crawled into the open. Xifa followed with the two children who had been thrust into the wagon earlier in the storm. They accepted sips of water with the touching stoic gratitude of young ones coming to grips with possible orphanhood.

  Susannah scanned the ravaged caravan. Bodies lay scattered, wagons flattened and smoldering. Smoke drifted in sullen clouds across the dawning sky. Nearby, a man wept softly, holding his dead wife to his chest. A groaning hjalk struggled to right itself on blackened legs.

  So many dead and injured, people and animals. So much destruction.

  “If only it had waited one more throw, we’d have been in reach of shelter,” she mourned.

  “Wheres Ampiar?” asked Megan worriedly.

  Ah Lord. Not another, begged Susannah. Another will break his heart.

  Ghirra answered her glance with wan distraction. Grief and dull rage clouded his eyes. He looked away.

  “Why do not they think of us, the Sisters, when they play their stones?” he asked.

  “As flies to wanton boys…” Susannah murmured. She shook her head, then sighed with relief as Ampiar trotted up, even more solemn than usual but unscathed, having found shelter beneath a string of lashed-together hakra carts.

  Aguidran strode past, gripping her brother’s shoulder briefly without stopping, urging haste as she pointed northward. Through a break in the circle, Susannah saw the long smoky curve of an advancing brushfire. The Master Healer shook himself out of his black gloom and began giving quiet orders to his reassembled staff.

  When they had patched up the many injured and made the end a little easier for the dying, Susannah stood with Megan out on the salt pan as Ghirra prepared Dwingen’s body for cremation. The charred wagon remains had been piled into hollow waist-high squares, then stuffed with dr
y brush and ruined cargo. The dead were placed on top, two or three to a pyre, grouped by family or by guild. Gently, Ghirra laid his young apprentice next to the mother of the two little children. A guildsman of the father stood near, gripping the children’s hands tightly as they bade their mother a silent goodbye.

  “The father was badly burned,” Susannah told Megan, “but he will recover.”

  The living formed concentric circles around the dozen pyres as Aguidran and her rangers put the first one to the torch. A breathless hush settled as successive columns of oily smoke rose straight into the still and lightening sky.

  Megan noted Ashimmel standing quietly among the rest of the mourners. “Seems that the PriestGuild has no formal function in the marking of death,” she murmured to Susannah. “I really should be taking notes, but somehow…”

  “I know.” Susannah leaned into her friend’s side as the flames licked up around Dwingen’s sad little corpse.

  To the south, the rising sun touched the distant cliffs with its own, pinker fire. The sky glowed like hot burnished bronze. Sooty low-lying clouds obscured the plain in all directions. Ghirra rejoined them, his shoulders slack, rage still simmering behind his tired calm.

  “At DulElesi,” he said, “they see our smoke now, and they wonder who is lost.” He pointed toward the cliffs. “But you see? We must wonder also.”

  Susannah studied the sun-bright line of rock. A single faint thread of black curled ominously from the cliff top. “Ah,” she replied, feeling surrounded by a tightening ring of fire and death.

  Still gazing south, Ghirra stiffened suddenly. He stretched to his full height to stare over the assembled heads, then left the mourners’ circle abruptly. He drew his sister aside from her grim task. Aguidran glanced quickly southward, then called together several of her scouts. They listened, nodded and melted through the ranks of mourners, trotting off in the direction of the cliffs.

  The tiny dark speck wavering against the dawn-lit amber of the plain could have been a mirage.

  Or it could be moving toward us.

  Susannah nudged Megan. “I think there’s someone coming from the Caves.”

  The pyres flared and roared. The mourners’ circle broke as the full red eye of the sun pushed free of the rounded hills of the Talche.

  Later, while the pyres smoldered, the work details labored to bring the caravan back to some suggestion of order.

  When the fires had died, Aguidran fidgeted, while the guild elders gathered the ashes of their dead. The circles of wagons were rejoined into a long south-facing curve. The hjalk and hakra had been rounded up and counted. The herdsmen eased them back into harness, rationing handfuls of grain and the last of the water. The undamaged cargo was restowed and reapportioned among the surviving wagons. Aguidran allowed only the fastest repairs and got little argument. The added heat of the sun was being felt already. No one wished to spend a moment longer than necessary frying on the griddle of the Dop Arek.

  “Perhaps the real funeral rites are yet to come,” Megan remarked as she watched a stout old Leatherworker kneel with difficulty to sweep her guildsman’s final gray dust from the glittering slick of the salt pan.

  Susannah continued repacking the Infirmary wagon without comment.

  “We’ll have a team to haul the Sled,” Megan added. “There are more hjalk now than there are wagons left to pull.”

  “Great.” Susannah bundled dirty linens into a wooden trunk and buckled the straps. “Lot of good that Sled is going to do these folks.”

  She wiped sweaty, sooty palms on her tunic and signalled Ampiar to grab one leather handle. With a duet of grunts, they heaved the bulky trunk toward the wagon.

  “Good god!” Megan exclaimed suddenly.

  The trunk clattered heavily onto the tailgate.

  Susannah turned. “What is it?”

  “Aguidran’s scouting party’s returned. Look!”

  The four scouts approached through the bruising desert heat, their young brown faces blank with reserved awe. They escorted between them a scrawny old man. His clothing hung limp with a weight of dust and soot. The rag-ends of his sleeves were singed black. The young rangers neither guided nor supported him. They kept even pace with him as he moved in stiff disjointed strides, as if each muscle were being told what to do separately.

  Susannah thought of a puppet or a mechanical toy.

  “How did he get here?” asked Megan incredulously.

  As the strange quintet passed down the line, the frenzy of repacking and repairing ceased in shock. A rising buzz of unbelieving whispers followed their progress. An apprentice priest gasped, dropping his bag of counters, and ran, yelling for Kav Ashimmel.

  Ghirra and Xifa hurried from behind the Infirmary wagon. Ghirra moved forward instinctively as Kav Daven bore down with renewed energy, as if nearing his goal at last.

  The blind priest halted directly in front of him. His cracked lips quivered, his jaw flapped, but only a dry whine pushed past his swollen tongue. He took a short jerky step and his knees gave. His joints crackled like brittle sticks as he toppled into the Master Healer’s arms.

  Ghirra eased him to the ground, calling urgently for water. The old man clung to him, his blind eyes blinking, his fingers digging in like claws. His lips labored to form words.

  Xifa ran up with a bowl of water. Ghirra dribbled measured drops into Kav Daven’s mouth, then wet the hem of his tunic to wipe the gray dust from the ancient face. Barely conscious of the water. Kav Daven continued his struggle to speak. The moisture eased the cracking in his throat enough to allow a hoarse whisper to escape.

  Ghirra bent his head close to listen.

  “Can you understand him?” Susannah crouched beside them. “It sounds like he’s saying the same thing over and over.”

  Kav Ashimmel arrived looking thunderstruck, firing questions at the scouts. At Ghirra’s desperate signal, she dropped to her knees and leaned in to interpret Kav Daven’s broken mutterings.

  “Old Words,” Ghirra murmured to Susannah.

  When she had listened for a while, Ashimmel took the Ritual Master’s shrivelled hands and began to answer him, softly repeating as he did an indecipherable phrase again and again. Their combined whisperings settled into a regular rhythm of statement and reply, like the antiphonal work chants. Slowly, Kav Daven’s hoarse music faded as he ceased his straining for speech. His eyelids fluttered shut. His body relaxed into Ghirra’s embrace.

  Ashimmel sat back, her face dark with incomprehension. Susannah felt worriedly for a pulse. She was astonished to find it whisper-faint but steady as a well-sprung clock.

  “He’ll need replacement fluids,” she said automatically.

  Ghirra laid the old priest gently on the ground and sent Ampiar for the stretcher. His hands hovered searchingly over the frail body. He shook his head. “I do not understand how still he lives.”

  “I don’t understand how he made it here in the first place,” Susannah returned. “What did he say?”

  Ghirra handed the water bowl to Xifa so that she could continue bathing the old priest’s skin. He moved aside to query Ashimmel. Her tight-lipped replies seemed to puzzle him. She repeated herself, stumbling again over a certain word and ending with an irritated shake of her iron-gray curls. Ashimmel did not appreciate being left as much in the dark as everyone else.

  Ghirra translated pensively. “The Kav begs help for one who is dying. Someone he calls raellil. Kav Ashimmel says it is very old word, this.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Now, this is one who carries the priest’s message, an apprentice. But when this Kav speaks the OldWords, this is the old knowings, the Ritual. Kav Ashimmel says she knows not this old raellil.”

  Ghirra spread his hands and stood up, turning his troubled gaze southward. The bright cliff face was fading behind a veil of smoke. “Raellil,” he muttered intently, as if meaning could be induced to reveal itself spontaneously.

  “Would he risk his life like this for one appre
ntice?”

  “This does not matter. The Kav comes like this for my help. I give it. With one hjalk only, I will travel two times fast to the Caves.” He turned back to stare down at the unconscious old man. “You must take most good care of him, Suzhannah.”

  “I will,” she replied, frightened. He would be facing the sun’s heat and the spreading fires all alone. But then, so did the Kav…

  Ghirra sent one of the ranger scouts to liberate a fast young hjalk for the journey. The normally irrepressible Phea, who had hardly said a word since Dwingen’s death, slipped away to a nearby FoodGuild wagon to beg enough water to fill a travelling jug.

  “It would help to know what’s wrong with this mysterious person the Kav is worried about,” Susannah pursued. “I think I should give you part of my medikit to take with you. Painkillers, antibiotics… Ghirra, it couldn’t hurt. It’s always better to have more options than less.”

  The Master Healer acceded with gravity that expressed thanks but no commitment to use her pharmacy. Susannah tossed him a crooked smile and went to the wagon to prepare a mini-kit.

  Megan had watched in thoughtful, uncharacteristic silence.

  “Isn’t this all a little strange?” she asked Ghirra, when Susannah was out of hearing.

  “Strange, Meghan? Yes, this is.”

  “I mean, that old man has to have one hell of a reason to walk twenty-odd kilometers through a forest of tornadoes.”

  Ghirra regarded her seriously. “Yes, this is strange. Yet…”

  “I have an awful feeling I know what you’re thinking.”

  Ghirra’s wide mouth tightened.

  “You think it’s Stavros, don’t you. You think Clausen’s got him.”

  Ghirra nodded slowly. “I do, yes. This Kav sees some purpose with him. For Ibi, he would wager his life, I think. No other one. But do not say this to Susannah.”

  “No. No point in that.”

  The Master Healer’s gaze turned south again. “Live you, my friend,” he whispered fervently. “Too many dead already this time.”

  26