Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  ‘We’re in one of the old cities,’ he told her. ‘The Masters let the Collectors take your body. They didn’t want you to die.’ He had really found her this time, he thought numbly; against all hope, he had his Samiha back.

  Her answering chuckle was more of a gasp. ‘No, they wouldn’t, would they,’ she said. ‘Help me sit up, Tymon, so I may catch my breath. And help me remove all this nonsense stuck to me.’

  He raised her up with great care, as if she were breakable, and gently assisted her to disengage the tubes that adhered like transparent leeches to her arms and stomach. She winced as he unhooked their clinging teeth from her. When he had cleared them all away and kicked them into a corner, he took off his own coat — the old House slave’s coat from Chal, torn and dusty from his journeys — and wrapped her thin body in it, securing it about the waist with one of the discarded tubes.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said softly. ‘Someone’s coming now.’

  Tymon glanced up to see Jedda emerging through the clouds of dust, picking her way slowly over the debris in the hall, skirting the fallen limb. The Nurian girl appeared bruised and tumbled, but otherwise unharmed. To Tymon’s great relief, she supported a dazed-looking but wakeful Zero by the arm, aiding him to cross the wreckage. When she arrived before Samiha, she did not speak, but helped Zero to sit down on the floor. Then she knelt in front of her sovereign, bowing her head before Samiha, as if to receive judgment.

  ‘Rise, Jedda.’ The Kion’s voice was strong and joyous as she gave her hand to Jedda, lifting her up. ‘Fear nothing, for you have pleased me.’

  Jedda went red to her ears, stood up and backed away behind Zero. Tymon gazed at Samiha in astonishment. There was a ringing confidence in her tone that he had never heard before. Her body was the same — fragile and marked by her ordeals — but the voice was that of a Being whose inhuman power and authority he felt emanating like heat from her. He could hardly look in her direction. Fleetingly, he missed the old Samiha he had known: the imperfect, very human Samiha who had loved, lived and argued with him on the Freehold. But even as she turned towards him again he knew, drawn to gaze into those fathomless eyes once more, that the girl from Sheb was still there, a spark of laughter at the centre of the power.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, just as if she had heard his thoughts. ‘It’s different. You’ll find me happier now, and stranger. You’re Seeing me almost clearly, Tymon.’

  He was overcome then with the recollection of just how foolish he had been, mistaking the Masters’ paltry shade for his true love, and sank to his knees in front of her just as Jedda had, too ashamed to speak. But Samiha would not allow him to grovel, raising him up with a touch of her hand on his cheek.

  ‘We have far to go before evening,’ she told him. ‘The Tree mourns Matrya: it is not safe here. We must leave this place.’

  ‘The World Key!’ cried Tymon, remembering. ‘The Oracle told me to find it before she died …’ Then his shoulders sagged in disappointment. ‘But the acolytes took it. Who knows where it is, now.’

  ‘The acolytes took a husk, a sham,’ said Samiha, shaking her head. ‘They have nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ he echoed in wonderment. ‘Then … where’s the Key?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ she asked, fixing him with those compelling eyes.

  And then, suddenly, he did know. She was what he sought, of course. She always had been. From his first muddled dreams regarding her arrival in Argos city, to the title of the Nurian queen — all had proclaimed it. She had been the one who opened her mysteries to him, door upon door. He felt as if he had been discovering who she really was, unlocking new facets of her ever since they first met. Every time he thought he finally knew her, she had revealed another persona: pilgrim and priestess, sovereign and martyr, human and Born. Now he sensed he was coming close to the very heart of her. She was the Judge. She was the Key. But what did it all mean?

  ‘Spirits,’ murmured Zero, from the background. The Nurian lad was looking sidelong at Samiha, but smiling, as if they shared a secret. ‘Not cold this time. Hot.’

  Samiha only laughed, inclining her head to Zero in acknowledgment before addressing Tymon again. ‘We should go while the light lasts,’ she said, as he continued to gaze speechlessly at her. ‘Much has become clear to me since you freed me from that tank. We must get to higher ground.’ She held her hand out to him. ‘I’ll need your assistance to make it,’ she said, apologetic.

  ‘That much I can do,’ he answered, rising and helping her up.

  A thousand questions crowded his mind: how much had Samiha, and even the Oracle known in advance about the Masters’ attack? If they had foreseen enough to plant a false World Key for the acolytes, why put up with their enemies’ mischief at all? Why allow Matrya to die and everyone else to suffer needlessly at the hands of the Masters and their Envoy? Although Tymon had come to appreciate his teacher’s tactics and Samiha’s convictions by now, and was sure they both had good reason to do what they did, he would have liked to have a better explanation. He privately determined to seek one, when the time was right.

  That time was not now, however. They needed to leave the unstable hall and the dangerous environs of the city behind as soon as possible. Though the fall of bark had lessened to a steady trickle of dust as Tymon helped Samiha hobble out of the gutted hall, the far-off booming crash of falling limbs could still be heard. Behind them walked Jedda, assisting a wheezing Zero. They found the front stairs and central nave of the building smashed to atoms, but were spared the task of seeking another way to descend from the hall, for the ruin of the South Canopy had engulfed the city in a layer of debris so thick that the bark was piled up almost to the level of the columns. Many of the ancient towers had been crushed or buried under a heap of broken branches, twigs and leaves of the Tree, and Tymon’s main difficulty lay in finding a safe path over the rubble. For a long time he and his friends wandered like ants across the vast plain of the World Below, too anxious and breathless to do more than negotiate the path ahead. Samiha in particular was hard put to clamber through the devastation in her weakened state, though she seemed to know the way out of the city. She guided Tymon unfalteringly forward, leading them roughly south.

  He half-carried her in his arms as they walked, his head bent close to hear her whispered instructions. She told him to make for a line of dark slopes that stood up like a beacon above the dust and chaos on the south horizon. Mountains, she called them, using another of the old words that had fallen into disuse after humanity abandoned the World Below. Tymon could not help remembering the Oracle’s impossible request and puzzling over it. He also watched Samiha with the concerned attention of a mother hawk, lifting her over one broken fragment of branch after another. She was too thin, he told himself worriedly. She looked brittle, her skin like paper stretched tight over the bones. He dreaded she would trip on the jumbled wreckage and break apart. He could see the journey wearing her out rapidly, consuming her small reserves of strength.

  And yet, in a reversal he could not fathom, he knew also that she was strong, far stronger than she had ever been before. Within her frail body burned an indomitable will; her eyes were bright with a knowledge he could not bear to contemplate. As much as the Oracle’s true form had seemed strange to Tymon, Samiha was ten times stranger. His questions returned to consume him — what did it mean, exactly, that she was the World Key? Why had the Masters wished to retrieve such a thing, and what would happen now that their servants had made off with the wrong artefact? What secret was so important that the Oracle had given her life to protect it? By the time the four travellers had left the debris-clogged plain and begun to climb the first rising slopes of grass and rock beyond, the unanswered questions were building up and seething against Tymon’s lips.

  By then, the sun was making its final descent to the west, stretching an occasional ruddy finger through the Storm clouds to touch the mountains. Tymon felt abruptly and ravenously hungry. There seemed no hope of satisfying such banal needs
, for now: he saw nothing edible growing in the World Below, nothing but feathery grass on the slopes, and not a bird in sight. The thought made him remember the last meal he had snatched with Zero that morning, at the foot of the Tree. He could hardly believe it had happened on the same day as this, and glanced over his shoulder towards the towering trunk, just to reassure himself that it was still there. It was the first time he had seen the Tree from such a distance. It rose about ten miles behind them, in his estimation, a bank of shadow stretching from east to west. The vista of destruction lying at its foot, though expected, took his breath away.

  The remains of the South Canopy lay scattered for miles beneath a veil of dust. The southern marches of the trunk had suffered a terrible transformation, and a new topography of heaped bark and jagged rifts spread about the great roots of the Tree. The valleys through which Tymon had walked in a dream that morning were congested with the leaning carcasses of broken limbs and shattered bark; the steep slopes and rising cliffs of roots over which he had toiled, deep in the grip of his illusions, were filled now with new chasms of collapsed branch and bough. The whole plain was littered with fragments of the Tree, the shallow lake choked and obliterated with debris. And above it all, the Storm itself was ragged-edged and incomplete, the clouds swirling about the glittering funnel of red dust rising over the plain.

  High overhead, Tymon glimpsed fitful swathes of azure sky. It seemed the turbulence of the collapse had created two distinct weather systems that spun silently about each other, the sky above encountering the sky below, disturbing the implacable complacency of the Storm for the first time in millennia. He wondered briefly what had become of Wick and Gowron in the cataclysm, but shrank from contemplating the fate of the inhabitants of the South Canopy, the people who had once lived among the fallen branches. It seemed unlikely that anyone could survive such a catastrophe. Slaves and slave-owners of Lantria, young and old alike, were gone. No trace of humanity remained in the grey and broken shards strewn over the World Below. It seemed unjust that both the innocent and the guilty had been destroyed together.

  ‘It’s a tragedy,’ Samiha remarked at his elbow.

  He had not realised that he had stopped walking, and glanced up to see the Kion standing patiently beside him. Jedda and Zero were knee-deep in grass, further up the slope. ‘It’s not fair,’ he muttered, indicating the spectacle of the ruined canopy with a helpless gesture. ‘They didn’t all deserve to die.’

  ‘No, they didn’t.’ She fixed him with those eyes again, waiting for him to express his questions.

  ‘Why, Samiha?’ he asked, searching her face. ‘You’re a Born. You know. Why lose the innocent along with the guilty? Why do people in one place die because of the actions of others, far away? The guilty ones never pay.’

  ‘It’s unjust,’ she said quietly. ‘It can’t go on.’

  She was only repeating his points. He gazed at her in dim frustration, unwilling to be brusque with her, but wishing she would say more.

  ‘You want me to explain it,’ she sighed, after a moment. ‘You want me to make it all alright. I’ll do my best, Tymon. But first you have to get me where I need to go, which is the top of this slope.’

  She must have sensed his dissatisfaction, however, for as they walked on she resumed speaking, her voice subdued with fatigue.

  ‘What happened to you in Hayman’s Point,’ she said. ‘That was unjust.’

  ‘So you know about that?’ He glanced quizzically at her. ‘Do you know everything, then? Do the Born See it all in advance?’

  She shook her head ruefully. ‘I’ve been trapped in a coma, remember, though admittedly much has become clear since I awoke. Matrya Saw that the Masters would eventually find the Seed prophecies and her body, but she kept that knowledge to herself. She was ready to give up her life to save mine, if necessary, and chose to do so when the time came. But prophecies are only the bare root of the matter! How it all happens, the colour and flowering of the whole — that’s what’s important, and can never be predicted. Even in that tank, I was aware of a few things. I dreamed of you at Hayman’s Point, felt your pain, and tried to reach out to you.’

  ‘Then it was you I Saw, after all, standing there during my flogging,’ he whispered, the knowledge warming him in the rapidly cooling evening air. ‘Not all of my visions were false.’

  ‘Certainly not! But what I mean is this: you suffered that injustice for my sake, and for the sake of your friends. Looking back now, would you have refused to go to Argos and stand up to the priests, knowing it would result in great pain?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d do it all again, to try to help you.’

  ‘Then you understand why Matrya Saw her own death, and allowed it to happen. Because of what comes after.’

  He digested this as they trudged along in the failing light, thinking that he did not understand, no. Why suffer the Masters at all? But the thought of his enemies always reminded him of his own foolishness, and he could not help asking her another one of his burning questions. He allowed Jedda and Zero to draw several paces ahead, before whispering his chagrin to Samiha.

  ‘Would they … the Masters, I mean … have found another way to open that door and get to the Oracle, if they hadn’t stolen my body?’

  She did not answer immediately, and this time he could not meet her eye.

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘They are very stubborn and very resourceful when they want something. This is not the first time they’ve sought to overturn the sentence imposed on them, and probably won’t be the last.’

  Her reply did not make him feel any better. He remained miserably silent.

  ‘Tymon,’ she continued after a moment. ‘There are other forces at work in the world besides our enemies. Forget the Masters. Ultimately they have no power at all. People would still do whatever it is they do without them.’

  She was telling him what the Oracle had told him after Laska’s death, that evil had no real existence, and was just a form of blindness or disease in the souls of the living. It was a cold and philosophical comfort, and did not in any way lessen his sense of his own stupidity. He said nothing, staring at Jedda’s back as she helped Zero over the humped grasses. His fellow student had made her own mistakes, and still come out shining, the object of Samiha’s praise. What had he done?

  ‘Not now, later,’ murmured Samiha. Her voice was hardly audible in her fatigue, and she seemed to be speaking to herself, stumbling and almost falling over the tussocks.

  He steadied her, biting his lip with remorse at having troubled her with his questions, after all. ‘We should rest,’ he said. ‘The light’s almost gone and you’re in no state to walk further. We’re safe from the falling branches, we should stop —’

  ‘No!’ she gasped. ‘We must go on. We must reach the top.’

  ‘Just a short rest.’ He peered into her face, coaxing. ‘And then we go on, I promise. Look, Zero needs a break too.’

  He pointed ahead, where Jedda was lowering the evidently exhausted Nurian boy down into the grass. Samiha swayed on her feet, then nodded reluctantly.

  ‘Just a short while,’ she sighed, sinking to the ground.

  Tymon left her sitting in the grass and joined Jedda, drawing her aside to speak privately. ‘Are we making a mistake?’ he asked, glancing back at Samiha’s slight, straight form on the slope. ‘Are we fools to let her drive herself to death? Is there any other way to help her, besides walking on and on like this?’

  ‘I don’t think we have many options left.’ Jedda’s expression was resigned. ‘The acolytes had an air-chariot, but it was parked too close to the trunk. My guess is that either it’s been crushed, or Gowron and Wick have taken it already. The Kion would have led us there if it were usable. She obviously has another plan, and wants to carry it out, whatever the cost.’

  ‘What about Zero? Can he pay the cost?’ objected Tymon.

  ‘He’s tired, but he says he wants to go on. He says the Kion is a strong, hot spirit, whatever that
means. He wants to follow her.’

  ‘And you? What do you think?’

  ‘I think,’ she said, looking at him out of sad eyes, ‘that we should respect Samiha’s wishes at this point, whatever they are. We owe her that much.’

  ‘Very well.’ He bowed his head. ‘So be it.’

  A few moments later, Samiha struggled to her feet and he hastened to help her. She clung to his shoulder and he almost took her whole weight as they continued up the steep slope, though she could hardly be called a burden. She was like a little child, a feather-light, intense presence at his side.

  Jedda walked more slowly, supporting Zero, and the two fell behind in the deepening twilight. After a while the moon appeared, a disk the size of an Argosian half-talek over the eastern horizon, stained orange by the dust in the atmosphere. As its light grew stronger, Tymon realised that the Storm had cleared to an unprecedented degree. He could see the stars shining through a massive circular gap in the clouds.

  He had been walking in a reverie for a weary hour, concentrating on holding Samiha upright and placing one foot in front of the other, when he saw the slope had almost levelled out. He had been waiting for the mountain to fall away again on the other side, as a branch of the Tree would, but the loamy topography of the World Below seemed endless. The moon was paler, shining directly through the gap in the Storm to pick out a peculiar crop of looming grey rocks strewn over the grassy slope, each one as tall as a man. Tymon fancied in his tiredness that they resembled an army of barrel-chested giants squatting on the mountaintop, silent sentinels hunched in the grass. Their bowed shapes were disquieting, and he did not like to pass between them, crossing their bars of black shadow; he did so only on sufferance, when Samiha threw him a pleading glance. They had left Jedda and Zero completely behind by now. As they crossed the field, a faint noise echoed ahead of them, the first extraneous sound in a long while, apart from their own footsteps and Samiha’s gasping breaths. Light but unmistakable, the tinkling of water reverberated between the humped silhouettes of the sentinels.