Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  Jedda shivered. She distrusted religions, whether of the East or West. As far as she was concerned, they turned the vibrant reality of the Grafting into a dead thing locked up in books or, worse, promoted the cult-like worship of individuals. She had objected to the Saffids’ idolisation of Tymon and privately deplored Fallow’s claim to be the return of Saint Loa. This new obsession of the Jays’ was just as dangerous, as far as she was concerned. Although she had seen the absolute knowledge in Samiha’s eyes, the irrefutable evidence of her identity, that reality did not have to translate into temple hymns and rituals, in her opinion.

  If Samiha had wished to be venerated, Jedda thought, she would have declared herself openly. She would have caused all Argos city to fall at her feet. The Kion had been an Awakened Born, after all, operating at the end of her life without the strictures placed on outcasts such as Lace. Jedda had read the secret histories in the seminary library: she knew of the ancient war that had forever sundered Samiha’s kind, and torn apart the worlds. In those days, the Born had held absolute sway over their human vassals. God had possessed a human face. It was a story the seminary had been at pains to conceal and forget. But Samiha clearly did not wish to be seen as anything other than a mortal woman. She had wanted her words to be read and pondered, debated and discussed, not accepted without question.

  And that, Jedda reflected, was exactly what Anise had omitted to do. No wonder he refused to countenance any interference with what he took to be his divinely appointed task. The testament was Holy Writ to him: there was no room for discussion or interpretation. He would never accept that it was a personal message. If it were that, his new convictions would come crashing down about his ears. Jedda did not wait to hear more, but rose quietly and left the group by the stove. She slipped out of the main pavilion and sought the relative quiet and chill of her sleeping tent, where only the young mother remained with her infant, singing the boy softly to sleep. Stretched on her pallet, the Grafter girl thought again of the words addressed to Tymon, the words that had been interpreted by Anise as a divine injunction to all.

  I pass the torch on to you now, my love. Fly fast and free, for you are my messenger. You are the wind that carries the flame. My story has the power to change hearts; it will cause armies to fall and cities to crumble. It will be the scourge of the priests of Argos. Do not allow your desires to blind you to the importance of your task: you will either set the world alight, or be consumed yourself. This is the Year of Fire, the beginning and the end. You can be either.

  There was no doubt about it. The testament was a personal message to her friend and fellow student. And it was more than that, Jedda realised, sitting bolt upright on her rumpled bed, gripped by misgiving. It was a warning.

  The moon had risen above the frosty leaf-forests when Jedda stepped over the prone forms of her companions, and left the sleeping tent. The three barges had been lashed together for the night; she slipped over the deck-rails onto the main vessel, as silent as a Tree-cat. Inside the striped pavilion, the hardwood stove in the corner was extinguished and the temperature had plummeted. She trembled spasmodically under her cloak as she hurried to the storage locker in the floor, squatting over the hatch. The hardwood mechanism of the combination lock was intricate, but this did not deter her. It had been enough for her to see Anise open it once: she had memorised his exact movements, and now reproduced them, turning the dials on the device to the required positions. It was something she had always been good at, a slightly heightened power of observation, the ability to remember visual details. She did not think of the talent as having anything to do with her Grafter power.

  After a moment the lock clicked open beneath her fingers. The space under the deck-boards was crammed with maps and navigational paraphernalia, and what looked like old travel journals, a set of valuable antique books. It was an unusual collection for a band of travelling entertainers, and might have caused Jedda to wonder how and why they had come upon such treasures, had she been in the mood for contemplation. She was not. One idea occupied her mind. She rifled through the contents of the storage locker, and lifted out the bundle of variegated paper covered in Samiha’s flowing script. She jumped to her feet, clutching the bundle to her chest, as a soft sound echoed from the doorway, a hiss of intaken breath.

  ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t betray my trust, Jedda. I watched and waited, but I still hoped.’

  Anise had followed her to the pavilion. Jedda’s heart sank as the Jay left the shadow of the doorway and walked towards her; she had hoped to make her escape with the testament without confrontation. Now there would be reproaches, recriminations. She must not waver, she thought. There was no time left for doubt. Already the twining link with Tymon had grown thin and stretched: soon, she would lose him completely.

  ‘You don’t need to do this,’ said Anise earnestly. ‘We’ll make you a copy, if you’re so keen on having one.’

  Jedda shook her head. ‘It’s too late for that. It would take too long to get it to Tymon, don’t you see? I have to find him before he leaves the South Road. Please, Anise: even if you can’t help, don’t try to stop me.’

  Instinctively, she had reached up with her free hand to the orah-pendant at her neck, kneading it under her collar in a nervous reflex. Anise stopped opposite her, his expression sorrowful.

  ‘I thought you would understand when you read it,’ he sighed, breathing white into the cold air of the tent. ‘It isn’t Tymon who needs to hear the Kion’s words. Why don’t you see that?’

  ‘Let’s just say we agree to disagree,’ she growled. ‘Anise, I will do my best to get the testament back to you when I’ve helped Tymon. But for now, I have to take it. Please don’t make a fuss, and let me pass.’

  But he did not let her pass, and continued to hover between her and the door, frowning. ‘Jedda. Be reasonable. What purpose does stealing serve?’

  He reached forward, grasping her by the arm that held the papers. It was an error that was to be his undoing. Her frustration leapt up like a flame at his touch; here was another man who was trying to force his will upon her, she thought. Here was another bully. The pendant at her neck glowed hot in response to her outrage. The orah-power flowed through her without her consciously deciding to use it, latching onto Anise like a hook. He made no move to resist at first, gazing stupidly at her. She did not have to concentrate hard to drain him of his vital energy. The act was easy, a natural extension of her anger. The Sap from his body coursed through her in a giddy torrent of heat.

  ‘You dare speak of stealing?’ she snapped, as he belatedly struggled against her, then sank to his knees. ‘After all you’ve taken from me?’

  ‘Taken from you?’ he murmured in perplexity as he slumped to the floor.

  ‘My innocence!’ she blurted out. ‘My soul. My queen —’

  She choked, the sob in her throat swelling to a cough that hacked through her accusations. She blinked her eyes. She had been so sure for an instant, convinced beyond a doubt that it was the Envoy who blocked her path to the door, stymieing her plans, as always. Her anger had been directed towards him. Now the fog over her vision lifted, and she saw that it was Anise who lay at her feet. The river of Sap abruptly shut off, leaving her achingly cold. The silence in the pavilion was broken by her gasping breath. She had attacked Anise: poor, luckless Anise. Her shock gave way to panic, and she backed away from the body on the floor, the testament pressed against her. She had committed a terrible crime against a person who had tried to help her.

  The thought caused her to stop in her tracks, appalled. The Envoy’s curse! It had faded from her thoughts of late, replaced by Samiha’s invigorating words and her desire to rescue Tymon. She passed a shaking hand over her forehead and stared in horror at the Jay man sprawled on the floor. She had been a fool to think Lace would let her go without a fight. Now, she was a murderer. She was no better than Wick — worse in fact, for the Jays had saved her from the snowstorm and taken her in. Gowron’s sneering prediction to her, long
ago on the way to Argos city, echoed in her memory.

  You will think back to this day and understand. This is all there is to his instruction.

  ‘No,’ she moaned, backing away again through the door of the pavilion. ‘No.’

  Stumbling in her haste, she climbed over the deck-rail of the main dirigible and dropped to the snowy surface of the branch a few feet below. She paused an anxious moment to stare up at the three barges moored among the twigs. The moon shone ghostly white, glinting on her pale hair as on the snow. Jedda turned and jogged down the icy slope of the branch, disappearing at last beneath the gloom of the leaf-forests.

  High above, a swift shadow passed over the moon, followed by another. Two winged forms wheeled high above the twig-tops. Bird-like, but unnaturally large and silent, they criss-crossed the night sky in the wake of the Nurian girl, doubling repeatedly over the moon’s bright disc.

  5

  Lord Dayan treated his dogs like his children, saving choice titbits for them from the dinner table and fawning over them as they lolled on the carpeted floors of the mansion, exposing their foolish bellies to the air. They had pelts the colour of charred wood flecked with white; Dayan maintained they were thoroughbreds of a breed now almost unknown in the Tree. He would whip a slave he suspected of mistreating them, or even bringing them their meat too late in the evening. But the familial tie between man and dogs went beyond mere companionship, extending to a physical likeness. Both the Lord and his animals possessed the same ice-blue, hungry eyes, paler than those of the Saffid, the ferocious gaze of born killers. And Tymon knew, from the start of his tenure at the House, that he must avoid angering either if he valued his life.

  He began his duties as Dayan’s secretary and personal valet the day after his arrival in Chal. The smiling clerk was evidently an old hand at managing affairs in the Lord’s House. After rescuing Tymon from the Tree-dogs with no more than a clipped command to the two animals, he had led the young man into the mansion by a back door, installing him in a small but perfectly adequate sleeping alcove behind the kitchen stove. After that, the knowing little scribe had bidden Tymon farewell, leaving to speak with Lord Dayan regarding his employment. Although Tymon never learned how that first interview transpired, it appeared his tenure at the House had been assured, for he awoke in his alcove early the next morning with the cook already bellowing in his blocked ear, telling him to shift his lazy Argosian rump and take the master his breakfast.

  The cook, Ystafa, proved to be essentially harmless beneath his bluster. All the burly Lantrian required of Tymon was the ability to wait at the master’s table without dropping a plate. Besides him, there were three other slaves residing permanently at the House: the gardener, a dour youth inaptly named Sun, who kept the margoose pens and smelled of margoose dung, and two giggling scullery maids, Talua and Daria, who performed the housework.

  To Tymon’s great relief, Lord Dayan’s personal servants were not required to keep the dress code reserved for most Lantrian bondsmen. The House slaves wore serviceable white shirts and black surcoats over loose-fitting trousers, and there was a thankful dearth of loincloths at the mansion. The girls — both tolerably pretty, though they dissolved into childish laughter whenever Tymon tried to speak to them — wore their hair long, and Ystafa, though bald, sported a magnificent moustache. Tymon himself was given a tablet similar to the clerk’s to hang about his neck and was told that to remove it would earn him thirty lashes of the whip, and thirty more with each subsequent infraction. His designation officially became ‘Hordannan five-hundred-and-twenty-two’, though the Lord’s servants still privately called each other by their given names. They accepted their lot with the same calm fatalism shown by the Nurian pilgrims who came to Argos city. For years, Tymon had thought of it as mindless subservience; now, he knew better. It was simply a desire for survival.

  He found his situation difficult to adjust to, though not in the way he had expected. It was true that he enjoyed a level of comfort at the House that he had not known for weeks. He was given as much to eat as he wanted, and had the whole kitchen to himself once his fellows retired to their attic rooms for the night. But he was keenly aware that he was part of a pampered minority. The mineworkers, he was told, had a very different existence — one few survived for long. Every House slave lived in fear of being sent down to the mine. It was the threat that hung over them all, and kept life at the mansion profoundly peaceful. It was also Zero’s everyday reality, as Tymon knew to his distress. He felt his only legitimate reason for staying at the House was to organise Zero’s rescue. But to do that successfully, he needed help.

  He took advantage of the opportunity, on that first evening, after the scribe had left to speak with Dayan, to launch a Grafter’s trance. As the curling tendrils of the Tree of Being sprang up about him in the shadowy kitchen, he called out to the Focals in the world of the Sap, sensing their connection, their twining with him. They responded almost at once, doubtless engaged in a Reading of their own. This time, there was no painful merging with the Tree of Being: the Focals’ shimmering forms surrounded Tymon even as they had on board the Jay dirigible, appearing as floating ghosts in the bright space between the branches. When they wordlessly embraced Tymon, one after another, their touch was a soft, electric burr. Their long-awaited reunion was both joyous and sad. Sad, because it was the first time they had seen each other since Samiha’s execution, the first time they could share their grief; joyous because this time, Tymon did not enter the trance alone.

  ‘Someone is with you,’ said Oren, after the initial greetings were over, pulling back and peering into his face.

  ‘Yes, there’s a visitor.’ Noni scrutinised him eagerly, while the two younger Focals crowded behind her, agog. ‘We all feel it.’ Her eyes widened with hope. ‘Ama?’

  There was a pause as Tymon struggled with the wonder of it. For he felt it, too: the sensation of another person occupying the same space as he did, a presence far closer and more intimate than any voice in his head. He sensed the Oracle like a heat brimming up inside him.

  ‘May I?’ she asked politely, inside his mind.

  He realised she could only speak through him, even here, in the trance. ‘Of course,’ he answered aloud, aware that the Focals desperately wished to hear from their teacher directly.

  The experience was overwhelming. It was nothing like the Reading in Farhang, when he had been caused to recite the Oracle’s testament. Then, he had spat out her message in fear and pain, resisting all the way. Now, he felt her presence like a wash of tangible light, and was filled with awe. He had had no idea of the extent of his teacher’s power. His trance-form grew bright and hot with her, brimming with the Sap. The red scars of the Veil, inflicted when he had fought Wick and still visible now, shone with a particularly bright light. His shimmering limbs were no longer his own to control; when his mouth opened, it was the Oracle who spoke.

  The words were in Nurian. She spoke to the Focals, as far as Tymon could tell, of the events in Argos city and their journey to Hayman’s Point. She recounted all that had befallen him there — described the terror Tymon had endured at the hands of the soldiers and praised his courage in such glowing terms, indeed, that he wilted with embarrassment to hear it. While she conversed he could not say a word, though he remained intact and very much himself, an observer in his own mind. When she had finished recounting their arrival in Chal, she switched back to Argosian to make a final announcement.

  ‘We are on the brink of great changes,’ she told the Focals. ‘We are moving into the Letter of Union, where all things become whole. Even our enemies enter this state, though they do not know it. Masks and lies will fall away or else become the only reality. The Reaper is dead — the Envoy has chosen to discard his puppet.’

  This piece of news caused a flurry of discussion among the Focals, as they debated the implications of Lace’s withdrawal and its likely effect on the resettlers. After a while the Oracle gently interrupted them. The timbre of her voice
passed through Tymon like a soft summer breeze.

  ‘The main lesson we should draw from this is that Eblas has no further use for Lantria or its politics,’ she said. ‘We should be concentrating on other matters. I fear he will now transfer his sights eastwards, and wage a war on two fronts, both inner and outer. There will doubtless be a physical attack on the Freeholds at some point, which Gardan and her allies are doing their best to prepare for. But I am more worried about his plans for you. If he has divested himself of the Reaper, it is to better concentrate on annihilating Grafters. I suggest you discuss your plans for defence, and consider those who cannot yet defend themselves.’

  ‘The fledglings,’ Noni agreed. ‘The young Grafters must be protected.’ As she said it, Tymon remembered Pallas with a stab of compunction.

  ‘Most importantly, they should be taught how to protect themselves,’ replied the Oracle quietly. ‘But you know best how to achieve that. I will leave you now to talk freely with Tymon. You have much to say to each other.’

  She departed with a final, fond farewell to the Focals. Her withdrawal, the ebbing of that tremendous power, left Tymon feeling as light and dry as a dead leaf. The sensation was not unpleasant.

  ‘Well,’ he sighed to his friends. ‘That was something.’

  ‘Something not many experience,’ said Oren. ‘You have changed much, Syon, since we see you last.’

  He reached out and took hold of Tymon’s shimmering right hand in the trance, turning it over to inspect the marks on the palm. ‘You are blessed,’ he continued, gazing a moment at the battle scars before letting Tymon go with a grave smile. ‘You have lost love, but gained something else. Strength. Beni.’

  The reference to Samiha caused Tymon another pang. He could not help asking his friends, then, what they thought of his vision at Hayman’s Point, an episode the Oracle had mentioned but not described in detail. But even after hearing the tale in full, his fellow Grafters simply repeated what their teacher had said — that the glimpse of the Kion was most probably a hallucination due to pain. Tymon hid his disappointment and plunged into a discussion of the minutiae of goings-on in Farhang. He found out that Galliano was in fine spirits, and busy producing a fleet of air-chariots for the united Freeholds as part of their defensive preparations. Oren promised to send one of the new machines to Chal to pick Tymon up, along with his friend Zero.