Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  Gowron had shaken Tymon’s hand when it was first extended, but now drew back. At the mention of ‘Eblas’ — a name Jedda did not recognise — the older acolyte immediately sank down on one knee before their visitor. A realisation seemed to have dawned on him that was not altogether reassuring. He pulled the gaping and astonished Wick down onto the loam beside him, whispering in his ear before turning to Tymon.

  ‘We bow to you, great Masters,’ he said huskily. ‘We are honoured by your presence.’

  Masters. With another sick wrench of the belly, Jedda began to understand. This was no Seeming: the real, physical presence of Tymon harped unmistakably in her gut. But neither was it properly her former friend and fellow student, for the mind inhabiting the body was not Tymon’s. Her twining partner had been ripped out of himself, banished to make room for the Envoy’s Masters. They had somehow taken his body over, for she could not imagine that he had been a willing party to an Exchange. That was why he had felt both near and far to her, close and yet at the same time coldly remote. Jedda watched in horror as the false Tymon acknowledged his servants with a nod, and raised them to their feet. Wick and Gowron stood respectfully aside to allow the Masters’ host to approach the hatch. Jedda’s chest felt unbearably constricted as she watched, helpless. The Masters were going to open the door. They were going to kill the Oracle.

  ‘Your information was incomplete.’ The false Tymon’s voice was as flat and hard as the lumps of grit at Jedda’s feet. ‘The combination is not drawn from human prophecy at all, but from a word in the true First Tongue.’ The invisible beings that had inhabited the body of her twining partner began to press what she guessed was a mathematical combination into the door lock. ‘Eblas, it seems, has forgotten the language of the Born!’ The host gave a harsh laugh that seemed to escape from a cacophony of different throats.

  All three men had their backs to Jedda, absorbed in the door again. With a final, desperate burst of energy, she struggled to free herself from her bonds. She had already made the mistake of misjudging the Oracle, had been tricked and used by Lace and his Masters as they sought by any means to overcome their enemy. She could not allow it to happen again. Twisting her wrists and kicking her legs, she strained against the ropes until her skin bled.

  At the foot of the escarpment, the acolytes hovered on either side of the false Tymon like two wings on a hunched and evil-minded bird, their green cloaks billowing in the stiffening breeze of afternoon. The Masters’ combination took a long time to enter in the door, though the host’s fingers moved quickly, punching in the required pattern. This was no ordinary abjat. Jedda found herself wondering, as she felt the ropes grow slippery with blood beneath her fingers, how long a single word in the Born language could be.

  ‘What’s the word that opens the door?’ Wick’s question repeated her thoughts, rising plaintively from the top of the beach.

  He had not been able to resist drifting closer to the Masters’ host, and now stood perilously near, peering over the shoulder of the false Tymon as he worked. Although Gowron glowered at him from a few paces away, clearly wary of the Masters’ power, Wick seemed fascinated by this puppet-Tymon, entirely controlled by an outside will. His eyes devoured its features hungrily, following its every move. Jedda caught the flash of blue in the host’s gaze as the Masters swivelled round to face the younger acolyte.

  ‘Only we can pronounce it,’ answered the harsh voice. ‘Only we know the generative language of the universe, which you humans see in fragments, as Leaf Letters. To speak a single word of that language would consume your entire lifetime. Luckily, this particular word can be translated into one of your numbers, albeit inexactly.’

  Oh let it not be too late, Jedda prayed. With her eyes fixed on the host’s back, she gave her bleeding wrists another wrenching twist, biting her lip to avoid crying out as her right hand broke free at last. With her wrists liberated, it was easier to deal with the ankles. After a final heave, she kicked the loops off her legs and stood up, trembling. At that very moment, the hatch in the slab swung open, with a soft sound like an indrawn breath. Beyond it yawned a long, low-roofed tunnel, disappearing into the blackness beneath the roots of the Tree.

  ‘You can’t do this!’ cried Jedda hoarsely.

  She quelled her rebellious stomach, and began to lurch up the beach in her stockinged feet, her muscles deadened and her legs tingling from the tight bonds. She did not know what exactly she was trying to achieve. Not only did she have no orah with which to focus her Grafter powers, but her physical strength in her current state was barely enough to tackle Wick, let alone Gowron. She was certainly not equal to opposing the Masters in their stolen body, which seemed to be full of a crackling blue energy she had not encountered before. She simply knew that she could not let them enter that tunnel without a fight.

  ‘Ama is our guide and teacher,’ she shouted as she stumbled up the beach, her voice shaking. The Sap give me strength, she thought. ‘You have no right to take her away from us!’

  She did not even reach the door. In a flash, Gowron had stepped behind her and grasped her by the arms, pinning her elbows behind her back and thrusting her down on her knees before the false Tymon. But she found that she did not care what happened to her now, staring up into the host’s deadly blue eyes. She could plainly see the multiple horror that inhabited Tymon’s body, its seething desire for power. Paradoxically, the sight steadied her, calming the contradictory pull of the twining connection. She was filled with indignation at what the Masters had done to Tymon; she would have words with them, she thought, even if they killed her for it.

  ‘What’s this?’ demanded the host of the two acolytes. ‘If you want to bring a pet animal on a serious mission, at least keep it under control.’

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ muttered Gowron from behind Jedda, gripping her arms so tightly that she gasped. Wick winced in embarrassment and turned his face away, as if he were ashamed of associating with her now.

  ‘I don’t care what you do to me,’ said Jedda, through gritted teeth. Her fear faded, and she never took her eyes off the Masters, defiant in her single-mindedness. ‘You won’t succeed, not for long. You know it better than I do: there are powers in this world greater than yours, powers that imprison you. They won’t let you go on like this, bending the rules, using a human body without consent.’

  This answer, delivered without any premeditation on Jedda’s part, seemed to infuriate the Masters. The features on the false Tymon’s face lost their rigidity, a flash of fury jarring the implacable expression. The Masters’ voice cracked like lightning through Tymon’s pale lips.

  ‘There was consent,’ they rasped, bending close enough to Jedda to spit in her face. ‘The young Grafter invited us right in.’

  ‘Then he didn’t know what he was doing,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘You know Tymon doesn’t belong to you. He loves another. They’ll meet again, in the heart of the world, where all divisions cease —’

  ‘Silence!’ snapped the Masters. The host recoiled from Jedda as she quoted Samiha’s testament, its eyes burning as blue as the lightning. ‘You have no right to speak those words, Tree-bitch!’

  ‘I’d listen, if I were you,’ murmured Gowron, a breath of warning in Jedda’s ear, unheeded.

  ‘The words are for everyone.’ Jedda smiled up at the Masters. The defiant mood had taken hold of her again, and she felt like laughing in the face of death. ‘They were written to be shared. Ye are the wind that carries forth the flame —’

  ‘We shall cut out your tongue, slut!’ snapped the host in fury. It swivelled its coldly burning gaze onto the acolytes who cowered beside Jedda. ‘What have you brought here with you, fools?’ it hissed. ‘How does the bitch know these words?’

  ‘I know them because I read them,’ replied Jedda imperturbably, though the question was not addressed to her. ‘The Kion lives on in her testament, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. There is no triumph without loss, no power without weakness �
��’

  ‘We said silence!’ roared the Masters, rounding on Jedda once more with eyes that were now a dangerous, pulsing blue. A raucous cacophony of voices emerged from the host’s throat, grinding out the words. ‘Eat dust and be still!’ they all shrieked.

  Jedda would not be cowed; she opened her mouth to speak again. But even as she did so, the Masters reached out and smote her forehead with one palm, quick as a striking snake. Their touch sent a bolt of burning energy through Jedda and she stiffened in pain, before sagging limp in Gowron’s grasp. The blow chased the breath from her lungs and caused her tongue to cleave to the roof of her mouth. Both acolytes stared at her in consternation as she collapsed. Gowron let her slip down onto the silt on the shores of the lake, where she lay shaking, her back arched by convulsions.

  ‘There.’ The Masters drew themselves up again within the host body, the multiple rasp of their voices subsiding. ‘Now she’ll be quiet. What has this hell cat been reading?’

  ‘I think it’s the papers she was carrying,’ whispered Wick, cringing in fear. ‘These ones, in her clothes. We saw them, but we didn’t think they were important.’

  He bent down and withdrew some of the sheets stuffed into Jedda’s sleeve. But when he held them out, the Masters pulled away from the scrolls with a raucous cry.

  ‘Fools! Idiots!’ Multiple voices burst through the false Tymon’s lips again like cracks of thunder. ‘Those are the Kion’s verses. Be rid of them. Tear them up, throw them in the lake — do what you will, but destroy them now, this instant, if you want our good pleasure. Don’t let that harridan’s words survive!’

  Jedda lay on the wet silt, paralysed and unable to protest as Wick and Gowron obeyed. One by one, they pulled the pages of the testament from under her clothes. They searched every corner of her body, ripping off the old undergarments, tearing out the rolled sheets of bark-paper, strawpaper, smooth pulp and rough parchment she had kept next to her skin since fleeing the Jays. She lay speechless and half-naked on the gritty loam, watching them tear and crumple, stamp and smash the precious sheets to shreds beneath their boots. Wick, even more than Gowron, carried out his task with complete dedication. Fleetingly, Jedda wondered if perhaps he were inspired by the prospect of earning the Masters’ ‘good pleasure’, so eager was he to brutally destroy what was most sacred to her. And she pitied him once more, for she knew he was incapable of comprehending a word of what Samiha had written.

  When the acolytes had reduced the testament to tatters, they collected up the mangled papers and strode down to the edge of the water, dumping them into the lake. A breath of relief issued through the Masters’ stiff lips.

  ‘Now,’ they sighed, as the last sheets sank from view, the ink blurring the translucence of the waters, ‘let’s get on with our business.’

  The host turned and began walking towards the open hatch of the tunnel. Wick hurried back from the shoreline, hastening up the beach after him without a second glance at Jedda. He had eyes now only for the body housing the so-called Masters of the universe.

  ‘What about her?’ Gowron called, pausing uncertainly by the Nurian girl. ‘What happens to her?’

  The Masters barely slowed their pace. ‘She’ll die,’ they said.

  With that, the false Tymon slipped effortlessly into the low-roofed tunnel. Wick caught up with him, peering briefly over his shoulder at the pair on the beach before plunging after the Masters. But Gowron hesitated, looking down at Jedda after the others had gone. She could not escape him: she could do nothing but watch him, her strength ebbing further with every instant. The blow she had received from the Masters had sent her soul reeling from her body. But there was still enough life left in her for her to quail as Gowron knelt down by her. Her body was arced at a skewed angle on the gritty loam, paralysed; she was at his mercy now.

  But all he did was reach out with rough, square-tipped fingers to brush her cheek, in an oddly tender gesture.

  ‘You should have listened to me,’ he whispered to her. ‘You should have stayed with me, all those months ago, and never gone to Argos city.’

  And then he rose and was gone, striding after the other two. Jedda lay alone on the beach as the wind sighed through the grass and the life spilled out of her, grain by trickling grain.

  Tymon beat against the ceiling of his prison, his voice spent from shouting into the icy darkness of the Veil. He felt as if he had been pounding on that immovable surface, crying out in rage and despair for years. How long he might exist like this, as a glimmering shade divorced from his body, he did not know; the thought that it might be a lasting state, unrelieved even by death, caused a wave of panic to rise up inside him, and he pounded again on the ice, screaming until he was hoarse.

  In his misery, he fell back on his first schooling by the priests, on the notion that his misfortune was a punishment. It was his own fault he had come here, he thought with savage self-recrimination. He had let himself be taken in by a lie, betrayed his true love and lain with his enemy. He deserved to be trapped in his own personal hell of cold isolation. Now that he thought back over his encounter with the false Samiha, he could not believe how easily he had allowed himself to be duped. The paucity of the Seeming, its reliance on externals rather than any real appreciation of how Samiha would behave, hit him with renewed force. And he had actually seen through the travesty: he had doubted the vision on more than one occasion. He had known something was wrong when the false Samiha denigrated Zero, ignored the dead mineworkers and finally treated Tymon himself with such disrespect. If he had only listened to that instinct! But he had chosen to ignore the warning signals. He had followed her around like a benighted Tree-puppy, letting her pat him on the head and feed him treats.

  The thought made him groan with shame and fury in his icy tomb. He had been wandering like a fool after the Masters’ delusion for five whole days, with hardly any consideration for what might have become of the Focals and his other friends. And what in the name of the Tree had been happening to the Oracle during all this time? He began to wonder, belatedly, if the attack on her was linked to the one on him. Why had the Masters wanted his body?

  ‘Green grace!’ he whispered to himself in sudden realisation. ‘They’ll use it to kill her!’

  How or when it would happen, he did not know. But it was clear to him now that the Masters, locked away in the Veil and planning their revenge against their jailor, must have somehow located the Oracle’s hiding place in the physical world. They had been trying to do away with her, attacking her hosts through the Envoy’s agency for years, and now they had a chance to deal with her themselves. He wanted to scream aloud at his stupidity in handing them precisely what they wanted, without the slightest resistance.

  In that bleak moment, as he contemplated the full folly of what he had done, Tymon heard a faint sound. Or was it music, the echo of a song? It seemed to come from very far away.

  ‘You can still choose.’ The Oracle’s voice was a faint breath in his ear, no more than a sigh.

  ‘Ama!’ he cried aloud, setting his palms on the ceiling of his prison and straining against it. But the voice, or perhaps the memory of it, like the music, faded away. He guessed he had only imagined it in his despair, and wept then, for there seemed to be no choices left to him at all.

  ‘Oh, my love,’ he whispered to the ice, forgetting his own troubles as he remembered Samiha’s body, floating in the tank. ‘What have they done to you?’

  To have come so close to her, to have stood beside her, then allowed himself to be snatched away through his own stupidity, was excruciating; he yearned to return to that chamber and truly help her this time, even if it meant plucking her out of the tank and allowing her to die at last. And yet here he was, trapped and unable to do anything for her, or for his teacher. He could not bear it. It was not right, not as it should be.

  He had just begun pounding on the unresponsive ice with his half-real hands once more, when he was arrested by another faint breath of melody. Again? He paused to
listen. Was it possible? Had he actually heard music coming from outside the Veil?

  The World Below was not entirely abandoned, thought Jedda dreamily as the darkness crept over her, eating away first at the edges of her vision, then moving inwards, towards the core. Some sensation persisted in her body, ebbing along with the light. When the sense of wet silt at her back faded and the creeping gloom reached the centre of her vision, she knew she would be gone. But the journey to oblivion was slow and by now quite painless. Her sense of hearing sharpened for a while as movement and vision were curtailed, and the world around her that had seemed so empty and silent before became full of busy new sounds. The soft lap of the waters grew loud in her left ear, a repetitive cycle amplified from time to time as a larger wave hit the shore. Other presences made themselves known in the absence of human cacophony: the faint buzz of flying insects, an occasional pop and ripple in the water and the surreptitious burrowing sound of some tiny creature in the granules of the beach. The wind sighed through the grasses at the edge of the lake.

  Jedda was aware that she was dying, the intricate mechanisms of her body fatally disrupted. It did not matter to her now. She let go of her anxieties one by one, bidding farewell to her existence without rancour. It had been a journey of light and dark, pain and joy, nearness and separation, a dance of opposites that did not always contradict. She understood, now, how to pronounce the Letter of Knowledge, having grown it in her own heart even as the Masters had said, for a lifetime. They were wrong about humans, she thought, as the circle of light in her vision shrank to a bright tunnel and the sensation of wetness on her back dissipated. The members of her species, so small and weak in every other way, spoke the First Tongue all the time: they pronounced it in thought and deed, spinning out the fabric of the universe with their lives. So much for the Masters, who had once possessed such power but could not even begin to Read humanity. They were blind to the story unfolding all around them.