Flesh and Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Clear the debris,” Jerzy ordered the nearest slave, a man decades older than he. “You, and you, help him. You”—he pointed at a younger slave who had been hanging back, staring in fascination at the wreck-age—“take the horse back to the enclosure, have them check for injuries, and report back to me what they say.”

  The boy made an odd ducking move, then moved forward, slowly and carefully, to take hold of the leather reins and urge the horse forward. It snorted, a plume of warm wind in the cold air, and resisted briefly, then allowed the boy to take it away from the chaos, heavy hooves stepping delicately around the wreckage.

  “Those other men?” Jerzy asked Detta, who had come to stand next to him. Her skirt was covered with dirt and blood, and her hands twisted in the fabric, but her face was composed and her eyes were dry.

  “One dead. One with a broken leg. The other seems unharmed but is unconscious.”

  “Move the dead one aside. Get someone to splint the broken leg.” He spoke almost absently, the orders a distraction from his main concern, the man being uncovered from the ruins of the wagon. He hefted the flagon and took a step forward. “I will see to the other slave when this one has been treated.”

  A path cleared. Jerzy moved to the bleeding slave’s side, and went down to his knees in the wet dirt. The man’s face was ashen under his weathered sun-browning, and his eyes were not focusing.

  “Fox-fur? Thought you were dead. Are we dead?”

  “Not yet,” Jerzy responded. He didn’t know this slave, didn’t recognize the voice or the face. “Rest easy; we’ll take care of you. I need you to concentrate on the pain now. Focus on it, make it everything.”

  “Not much trouble with that, Fox-fur.” He closed his eyes and concentrated, sweat running down his face and mixing with the blood. Jerzy lifted the flagon to his lips and took a scant swallow, letting it roll and rest in the hollow of his tongue. Specifying, and a year or more of aging, and the spellwine would have aged and strengthened into a smooth flow of power. Now it was raw, rough, and untried—exactly like the one about to decant it.

  Once to direct. He let the flavor of the vin magica rise through the roof of his mouth, learning the essence of it, then swallowed it, slowly, so slowly, feeling the magic fill his throat, coat his stomach, and rise through him until he was near dizzy with the power. The first step was simple: “Into that body, go.”

  His hands reached out to touch the slave, cool fingers touching fevered bones, bloody flesh. Would it work? Would the vina recognize the words? No time to worry, keep going. Second step. What were the words of the second step? He reached, searched, and found them, drummed by dry rote into his memory.

  “Bind and seal, as before. Go!”

  He could feel the magic surge from his hands into the slave, the torn and battered body rising off the soil as though struck by lightning. Jerzy’s eyes hazed over with a red mist, as though the vin itself coated his sight, his mouth filled with the lingering taste, and his skin tingled from the power. Caught, he lost himself in the sensation.

  “Jerzy!”

  Detta’s voice, urgent. Jerzy blinked, and the red mist receded. Beneath his hands, the slave lay in the road, a red haze of magic covering his entire body. The haze hovered, then sank into the wounds, healing him from bone on out, as Jerzy had commanded it.

  “Good lad,” Detta said. “Well done. He will live. Let them take him now, and you look after the other.”

  Lost inside himself, Jerzy let her lead him away, while slaves came to carry the injured man back to the sleep house, where a physic brought up from the nearest village would attend to whatever damage remained.

  The second slave had been turned onto his side, a warm puddle of bile evidence that his stomach had emptied at some point. Long brown hair was plastered to his skull, and his features were slack, no obvious wounds bleeding or bones protruding, only an ugly purple shadow on the left side of his face and top of his shoulder. He wasn’t in pain, at least. After the screams and moans of the other slave, Jerzy was relieved, and then felt guilty for that relief. Better the slave was awake and screaming than this motionless, soundless death-in-life.

  “Can you do anything for him?”

  The urge to say of course he could, to be confident in the face of Detta’s doubt, welled in him and then faded. “I don’t know. If I knew what was wrong, or if he could tell me. . .”

  The slave’s chest rose and fell, shallow but steady, and a hand held under his nose felt the faint exhale of air. Jerzy peeled back one closed eyelid, but the eye itself rolled back in the socket, unseeing. Death-in-life. Jerzy had seen it before, years ago, when another boy in the slaver’s caravan had not woken up one morning. The caravan master had let him be for a week, but when there was no change, they had left him on the side of the road. There was no hope for ones like that; even if they recovered, the slavers said, there would be no use to be gotten out of him.

  The weight of the flagon in his hand reminded Jerzy that he had an option the slavers lacked, an option and an order to do whatever was needful. He lifted the flagon to his mouth and took a sip. The acrid taste of the vin magica was familiar now, and the pattern of sip, hold, and swallow followed without conscious thought. The magic slipped through his skin and bones, filling his veins.

  “Find the cause.”

  The direction was simple; the decantation less so. How could even a Vineart heal an ill that could not be identified? If the magic could not find the cause, no decantation could work—

  Do not hesitate, or the vinespell will slip from your grasp. Malech’s voice, stern in memory, was like a cuff to the ear. The magic worked only so long as the first flush remained; delay too long, and the second sip would not be so potent. This was not a spellwine, not yet, but the difficulty was the same.

  He needed to know the damage done to the slave, but only the slave could tell him. The slave could not tell him. Therefore, the first step. . .

  “Wake the mind.”

  “Go!”

  The magic surged, obeying his will. . .and then faltered, fading even as Jerzy forced it forward again. Any man might cast a vinespell, Malech had taught him, but a Vineart commanded it. Only a Vineart could command vin magica.

  “GO!”

  The magic drove itself into the slave, making his limbs twitch, and his eyelids flutter as though he were waking, but then the body flopped back down onto the ground like a broken doll. The wine turned bitter in his throat, and Jerzy gagged on his failure.

  A moment of anger and self-disgust consumed him—if he had taken a flagon of the Master’s crafting, the decantation would have worked! It was his fault, his failure.

  Jerzy sat back on his heels and lifted his hands from the man’s face. His fingertips tingled from the residue, but the magic drained from the rest of him as swiftly as it had poured into him, and he felt his body quiver with exhaustion even as his mind worked sharp and cold, still riding the thrill of magic through his system. His thoughts were sharp and clear, and could not be escaped.

  Failure. He had failed. The body lived, but the flesh alone was useless, and everyone knew that there was no place in this world for a useless slave.

  “There is nothing I can do. The body has gone too far to be roused; even if the body healed, the awareness is gone.” The words were for himself; Detta had gone off somewhere while he worked, and none of the slaves still working to clear the road would acknowledge that he was there, much less stop to listen to him, ducking their heads and looking away when they passed. The realization drained the last of the spell-fog from his brain.

  Six months and more past, he had been one of them. Six months past, he too scurried past the Master, head down and eyes averted, trying to remain unnoticed, unpunished. Had he not sensed something amiss with the mustus that day during Harvest, one of the slaves on this wagon today might have been him.

  Had it been him, he would not have the weight of a man’s death on his hands.

  “Jerzy?” Detta came to stand beside
him. “Oh.” Her voice was soft as her steps, and full of regret. “Should we. . .should I have someone. . .?”

  “No.” Jerzy shook his head, only now noting that sweat had dampened his scalp and the back of his neck, despite the chill of the day. It was a small inconvenience, not even worth noting, except once he had noted that the rest of the world came roaring back in like a summer’s storm; the sound of the slaves carting debris away, the creak of leather and thud of wood, the murmur of voices and a slight shushing of wind overhead through the bare branches of trees on the far slope. The sun was well over the vineyard now, but it cast little warmth on the scene. On a normal day, he would be at lessons with Cai, in the workroom, or the cellars, or walking the land here or at the Master’s other fields farther south, to check on their progress and learn their cycle. He would rather be any of those places than here, now.

  Leaning forward, Jerzy gathered the fading wisps of magic, and pressed his hand down firmly on the slave’s fever-warm forehead. This required no decantation, only a whisper of magic. Healspells were crafted to end suffering, however that end might come, and to a body in this condition, the final ending required no command, but a merest suggestion.

  Rising to his feet, Jerzy stared down at the cooling body, and prepared to explain his failure to Malech.

  “I TOLD YOU I don’t have time for this, boy.”

  It hadn’t taken much to determine where Malech had gone; he hadn’t been in the circular workroom, and his clothing was too fine to be in the cellars, so that left only the study, the room where Jerzy had been tested, that first day. By now the study was as familiar to him as any other room in the House, and the awe he had felt on that first day was replaced by an almost casual acceptance of its wonders. Unlike the cellar workrooms, the study was finely furnished, with a table and chair made of ancient vinewood that gleamed with polish, and where on his first visit there had been the image of bottles—now, he knew, shifted from the storeroom below in a bit of magic the Master had yet to explain— shelves of scrolls and books lining the far wall, away from the window.

  Malech was standing with his back to the door, fussing with the silver cups on their tray. Silver cups for vin ordinare; metals debased vin magica, diluting their taste and leeching away their potency. For ordinaire, it did not matter. The expensive glass vessel resting beside them held a liquid of deep golden amber. Ordinaire, but not ordinary, that. The color only gave hint about what a wine might do, but that particular shade and depth—and the fact that Master Malech was using glass to serve it—told Jerzy that the wine was from the mountains behind them, where the gilded vines grew. No magica came from those grapes, but a minor Vineart named Bartelt picked them at the last moment of harvest and then dried them on beds of straw, making a sweet vin ordinaire that brought as much gold as any spellwine from the princelings and their households.

  “Master.”

  Something in his tone must have alerted Malech, because he turned to look then. “How many died?”

  “Three.”

  “And how many lived?”

  “Two will recover by the morrow, most likely. One man’s leg is broken, but he should be able to do sit-work until it is healed. The overseer sent for the physic to ensure it is set properly.”

  “So. Five slaves on the wagon, and three dead.” Malech seemed to consider those facts. “You were unable to prevent the deaths?”

  “I. . .two died in the accident. The other was in death-as-life. I could not tell what was wrong, to heal it. I had only vin magica, and the slave could not tell me. Master, had I thought to bring a flagon of your crafting, true spellwine. . .”

  Malech sighed, his hand pausing as he reached for something on his desk. “I left you to your own devices because your work had been acceptable, Jerzy.”

  Acceptable. The word stung, on top of the burn of failure. He needed to be more than acceptable. A man was dead because he was merely acceptable.

  Malech frowned at him, as though sensing his thoughts. “If the slave was unconscious and not to be roused, then there was nothing to be done. Some harms cannot be undone, some bodies even the most potent of healwines cannot cure. Not even Sin Washer could save a body from death, only prepare him for it. Slaves die all the time. They live, they serve, they die.”

  Malech’s voice was not harsh, merely matter-of-fact, and Jerzy bowed his head in acceptance.

  “The bodies have been taken away?” his master asked.

  “Detta is seeing to it.” They had an agreement with the physic—he handled minor ailments among the slaves, and in return he took away the bodies of those who died, no matter the cause, for his own studies. It was gruesome, but useful; they had no time or place to bury the bodies, and the slaves had no family to object.

  “Then the matter is done. Consider it your lesson for the day. You have enough to occupy you otherwise?”

  “Mil’ar Cai is coming back this evening,” Jerzy said. The Caulian had been away for a week, traveling on his own business. “He said that he was going to bring me my own cudgel.” Jerzy wasn’t sure if he was excited about that or apprehensive. His own weapon in all likelihood simply meant that he would be hit harder, if he did something wrong.

  “Ah, good, good.” Jerzy suspected he could have told his master that the stones had started speaking, and the response would have been that same distracted approval. “Then I will see you in the morning. Now, if you will—”

  “Lord Malech.”

  Detta appeared at the door, a man with her. Jerzy had never seen him before, a short, bald man wearing a long robe like those of the Washers, only a rough brown instead of Washer’s red, and splattered with mud from the thawing roads.

  “Lord Malech, as you requested. . .” Detta let her words fade away, and gestured to the man.

  “Yes. Thank you. Come in, meme-courier, please.” Malech waved the stranger to a chair, and turned back to the vin, pouring it into two glasses and handing the stranger one. “Jerzy, that will be all.”

  Clearly and obviously shut out, Jerzy bowed his head again in acceptance and left his master and the stranger to their discussion, the door closing firmly behind him.

  There was no use in feeling as though he were being punished: if Malech had been disappointed in his actions, the Vineart would not have hesitated to say so. Jerzy would see him in the morning for lessons, as usual. And perhaps Cai would be able to tell him who—or what—a meme-courier was, and what his appearance meant.

  Chapter 9

  To Master Malech of The Berengia, from Master Seth of Iaja. Greetings, a query, and a warning.”

  Malech sat back, the now half-empty glasses of Bart-let’s gilded vin on his desk in front of him, and listened to what the meme-courier had to repeat.

  “Your communication came to my attention this week past, and I admit that your words brought both comfort and dread. You are the first I take into my confidence, and only because I am troubled beyond my ability to handle, and as much as I fear creating worse problems should word of this escape, I fear even more remaining silent. In the past ten-month, there has been a marked increase in the number of pests and infestations discovered in my lands, and I begin to suspect that it is not mere foul chance but a part of something larger, perhaps something we have need to look deeper into. . . .”

  When the meme-courier finished his message, he stood silently, as still as he had been during his recitation, waiting to see if Malech had a response for him to bring back.

  Master Seth was no fool. Infestations in their season were the normal course of a Vineart’s life; for all their magical properties, the vines were still mere plants, and subject to the crisis and calms of all growing things. For all that the wines could heal and force growth, call the winds or encourage rains, there was no true way to control nature’s creatures or make them dance your tune; that was the purview of the gods, and the gods had been silent since giving them Sin Washer and setting them upon this course, millennia before.

  Malech preferred life th
at way. To live in a time when gods spoke and miracles occurred. . .he could only imagine that it would be messy, and complicated, and all-around disruptive to the order of things. Malech approved of order, and routine. A well-run vineyard thrived on routine.

  But he, Malech, was no fool, either. That was why, after the root-glow scare, he had sent carefully worded queries out into the world. This was the first reply. He suspected it would not be the last.

  “This is my response,” he told the meme-courier. “To Master Seth, greetings. Your words are well considered, and well heard. We have had only one such troubling incident”—no need to tell the other Vineart that it had come close to succeeding—“but that one was fierce enough to concern me.”

  He paused then, struck by a thought, all the more troubling for not having been considered before. How had the wagon happened to have broken, so suddenly, and without warning? Was it a sad accident, as sometimes happened, without dire import? Or had something—or someone—struck it down? And if so. . .how?

  It was, he decided, possible that an outside force had somehow, for some reason, sabotaged the wagon. But unlikely. The wagons were of an age where such things could happen of their own, especially on winter-rutted roads, and his shame for not replacing them sooner.

  “You were wise indeed to watch and wait, for we have no need of panic flitting through the villages.” Or indeed, the great houses of the princelings who bought most of the spellwines and expected only perfection in the vintages they used. Rumor of crop failures, even if untrue, might cause his usual customers to go elsewhere. “I shall, as you request, inquire discreetly and determine if this is merely a time of natural trials, or if there is, as you fear, a pattern and intelligence behind these incidents. I will inform you of anything I determine. Until then I remain, Malech, Master of the Valle of Ivy, The Berengia.”