No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

‘Yes. Is there any choice? We have lived in Kelfazvor long enough.’ This the first Kelp-born.

  The second Kelp-born said softly, ‘Ah, Kelfazvor. Don’t we also love them, a little?’

  The Vormlander man spoke last.

  ‘Vorkelfaz will do well enough. And love them a little? My birth mother died in the green liquid outer sea. She is my mother, and always in my heart. But She—’

  ‘She,’ ‘She,’ ‘She,’ said the others, low as the distant hint of surf beyond the ice.

  ‘She is Mother. She is a god.’

  ‘Not like poor saff-off Saftri.’

  ‘Chillel is like—’

  ‘The earth—’

  ‘The sky—’

  ‘The snow—’

  ‘The night—’

  ‘And—’

  ‘Like—’

  ‘The—’

  ‘Moon.’

  Alas came the reverberation of the distant surf. Alas.

  In the village of Kelfazvor-Fazkelvor-Vorkelfaz, certain women, men, children, deer, lifted their heads as if at an unheard sound, a flutter of invisible wings.

  While watching, the watcher sees the shore is entirely empty. There are no ships or boats, and no young men in the black of heroes or gods. Only the eerie lambency on the horizon, a dark brilliancy, a cloudy shadow which is – bright.

  Brinnajni opens her eyes.

  Or possibly, if they had been open, closes them.

  She was, is, the watcher.

  She, daughter of Chillel and Lionwolf, conceived during their congress in Hell itself, brought forth on earth painless and divine. A young woman. Her skin is black, her hair red fire, her eyes midnight.

  Behind her Dayadin, her half-brother whom she rescued from the interior of the appalling Brightshade, looks and sees what his sister has seen.

  He too is full grown now. He is twenty-four. His face is self-contained and pensive. His tight-curled hair pours down his back, a black like dusk smoke for his sister’s fire. And sometimes his hair moves too at the whim of a tame wind, a hovor, a Jafn spirit that stays with him.

  Where are they? Oh, one more Ice Age region of snow. Who can tell where they are?

  Dayadin says, ‘Every one of her sons is drawn towards her now.’

  Brinnajni says, ‘And you? Do you wish to go there?’

  He looks at her, whether her eyes are open or shut, with his own eyes that have no tears in them, only sometimes behind them.

  ‘Nirri is my mother. Arok is my father. You are my only other kin.’

  What does Brinnajni do? Her name means Flame That Burns. She goes to pet the black sheep that grazes by the door, and the red curtain of her hair obscures her face.

  No longer a watcher watching. Therefore does the next episode of this collection pass unseen?

  Maybe Brinnajni has already noted it. Or others watch instead.

  The path was a sheet of white beneath two white moons at the full. Anything which moved there showed at once.

  A tall man then, tall and lean, casting a lean, long shadow …

  But it is not any image from before.

  What moves across the snow fields, approximately from the east, is neither man nor woman. Nor mortal, nor god.

  The Gargolem was mechanical. Its metallic body, delicately frosted now and patched in places with rime, was that of a human male, though far greater in height and somewhat in girth. Its head was a beast’s, a beast unknown, maned and fanged.

  It strode across the snow, unimpeded by garments or footwear, or flesh or nerves or any ordinary incapacity. Eyes indescribable yet glowing were fixed on an edifice that dominated the horizon.

  This was a sort of enormous mound, smooth in contour, a kind of dome. The densest ice seemed to have formed it, yet it had no appearance of random naturalness. Surely it was far too regular and finished to be natural. But then again a brain such as that of the Gargolem, former custodian of Ru Karismi’s kings, would be aware of such natural artefacts as ammonites, the crystalline veins of tiny leaves, the patterned structures of plasma and atoms. Perhaps the dome was, in its extraordinary manner, a creation of nature.

  The two strong moons bloomed on it. But inside it had lights as well. These dimly reflected out, making the dome translucent as a lamp of frozen milk.

  Steely tails of winds lashed round about, and as the Gargolem went on it was enveloped by this localized weather.

  Unquestionably the Gargolem was able to shift itself through dimensions. It had had a method of vanishing and reappearing that with the recent years of turmoil had grown more noticeable. Yet it seemed it had stridden all this way from the old city, and now it reached the dome on foot and paused there.

  Kol Cataar was inside the dome. Since the ice had formed no one would have left it and none – if any tried – had entered.

  The Gargolem did not batter on the wall, did not politely knock. Instead the consciousness of the Gargolem separated and delved deep into the ice, deep and deep and out again on the inner side.

  The Gargolem’s thought drifted like a brazen shadow through that barrier known as Eastgate, along that street called Rose Walk. The awareness of the Gargolem reached the edge of the Great Market. A misnomer of course to any who had known the markets of Ru Karismi.

  Torches burned on poles. People were at their late buying and selling. A pretty whore went by. A dog nosed among some cheese rinds. Now and then people lifted heads or eyes to the sky which was not sky. They knew but did not, would not admit, their city was imprisoned. No, no, the ice had piled up by the gates, they said. It would give way some time, or have to be cleared, but the king’s guard were busy. Anyway, why want to go out during such a big freeze? The exterior fields and fruit trees would hibernate as ever. There was still sufficient food in here. King Bhorth had opened the palace stores. That fog stayed so bad though, did it not, smoking heaven up. Not a star. How long since anyone had seen a star? You did? You never did. And only when the moons were two or three and this big could you see your hand in front of your face when you put out your lights. Some muttered that ice had formed high up in the air. None spoke of a lid. Hell had such lidded kingdoms, like boxes, in ancient poetry. But that was Hell.

  Unwitnessed the brazen shadow glided on.

  It crossed areas of commerce and habitat and came to a refuse tip. A shack lay behind. Something – everything – in the shack was not normal. That was to an everyday eye unapparent. To a seeing one, a psychic earthquake had clearly occurred. The environ was in rubble, smeared with ichors and blood, and maybe torn bits of souls smouldered and decayed on the ground. This the Gargolem examined for a while. For there was no immediate hurry. It was already too late.

  TWO

  After she had died among the veils of butterflies, Jemhara spent some while in nothingness. She was partly aware of this, despite its contradiction in terms. It was comfortable, nullity, in fact restorative. Then in the end she decided the time had come to wake. And so she did, and there she was, despite the rest, still lying on the filthy floor of the shack in Kol Cataar, while the child she had borne wailed in a corner. Jemhara felt in that moment grossly cheated.

  She did not know quite why, except perhaps she had glimpsed the balm of death, but now the life struggle was here again, like some exhausting task she could not evade. Nor for a few minutes did she fully recall who she was, either her false identity or her true one. Nor even Thryfe, nor even love.

  But it all came back. Bad and good together.

  Then she sat up at once, mislaying what her body had endured. Yet her body was intact. It was whole as if it had not, only hours before, expelled a child after thirteen months of misshapen servitude. Already she could dimly see in the semi-dark her flesh was returning to its original dimensions and young firmness. Her belly had shrunk, tautened.

  There was nowhere any other sign that parturition had taken place. Not a spot of blood. No odour. Nothing. Apart from the crying baby.

  Presently she went and stood staring down at it – at him.<
br />
  Vashdran’s words in the former trance made a kind of sense at last: When you see me next, I’ll be a fool again for a while, a type of fool.

  Was he helpless, a fool, as any tiny child had no choice but to be?

  The newborn god was magenta in the face, bald and mottled with arrival, not comely, not god-like. She would have foretold, if she had thought to, even at nativity he must be astonishing and fair.

  Jemhara leaned towards him, to pick him up, or only to ask something.

  And this was when the universe parted to let through a roaring elemental force that could only be another god, quite grown up and bent on adult violence.

  Instinctually, barely realizing what she did, Jemhara in straightening dragged the hem of her rags over the being on the floor – which must itself have had some comprehension, for it stopped its noise.

  The manifestation of Zeth Zezeth filled the humble hovel.

  He was the blue of Hell. His malign side. His golden eyes blazed out of it as if his godly brain were on fire.

  A backhander of light hit Jemhara away across the shack. It was a glancing blow, a mild slap. Scorched and gasping she crouched on the earth.

  ‘Why hide it? I could see it shining through the wall of the world, through the ice-lid of this midden called city, let alone your dirty dress. Do not say you were not hiding it.’

  Jemhara hardly needed his instruction. She lowered her head. Logically she expected, again, to be killed. Yet guessed wildly execution was not the penalty.

  ‘Well. There it is,’ said Zzth.

  The internal dimensions of the shack were changed. It had become very high and shambled away for miles all around. Zzth towered upward in it like a violet pillar. Below, the baby stretched small and motionless and dumb. Was Lionwolf already dead?

  Two drops of a blue to rival Zzth’s panoply seared suddenly through the eyelids of the baby. His brain it seemed was also on fire. Without preface, as babies will, he vomited.

  A smell of tinders and fireworks flavoured the air. The vomit was a fountain glittering like liquid gold. It sprayed from the child in a jet, falling back only to cover and enclose him. The golden stuff immediately shaped itself to an egg, which hardened visibly. He was inside.

  Gouging tides of rage, worse than any projectile sick, erupted from the pores of Zzth. He kicked at the eggshell. Panes of air shattered. The egg did not. It disappeared.

  The events that then happened in the shack were soundless, not really visual. The mutilated space shrieked and rocked and exploded and collapsed upon itself. Nothing physical fell, but everything else had come down.

  Outside, the city Zzth had called a midden heard, felt, saw nothing untoward. Only certain occurrences going on amid mankind. A healing wound which virulently burst, a bone that broke without cause, deaths that were expected coming too abruptly, untouched platters smashing on a shelf, a fire going out, blindness striking an old woman, fresh fruit rotting. Only such things. The things that do occur, that are bad luck or coincidence or inevitable and dismissed as such, and that maybe always are the side effects of the invisible and unrecognized and insane wrath of something evil and petty and powerful, near at hand but beyond justice.

  Jemhara felt the thunderclaps of horror rake her through. She gave up and was rolled about the tilting electric floor. Once Zzth’s seizures even cast her across the spot where the eggshell of golden vomit had been. There the ground was fiery hot.

  Then Zzth grasped her. He was vast and towering still, with eyes like topaz windows. She was to be the only prize he could wrest from this débâcle. He had told her in a dream, too, she was to serve him.

  Wavering in her mind came the image of her Magikoy lover. She saw Thryfe dead and she turned to dust.

  Jemhara closed the shutter of her heart and the blue fiend spun her away. He had not even had to pass in or out of the ice-prison that enwrapped the city. Such was the magnitude of Zzth. But an eggshell had defeated him.

  From the outside however the shack had stayed as always, or so it looked. None of the ‘minor’ unpleasantnesses in the city had registered as evidence of anything.

  Near sunfall the priests went wandering through the market. The one who sang would not do so, which meant their takings were poor. Night dropped its conjuror’s black cloth.

  Later, the brazen shadow of the Gargolem gazed into the shack.

  But this too went away.

  A brace of drunks had a fight with knives not thirty paces from the door. Neither was slain though both were rather cut about. One recollected in after hours, ‘There was a temper to that spot. Bad cess.’

  Near midnight the noise of mailed men on the march thumped and jingled along Royal Way from the palace end.

  A man of the spy troops Bhorth had set to watch Jemhara-Apple had met the king on the terrace. Bhorth had still been gaping at the gilded arrow his son had fired heavenward, and which had stuck in the sky as if in a ceiling beam. Nearby was Sallusdon, and the girl with a shaved head Sallus claimed was his sister. And the damned snake, of course.

  Bhorth drew the spy aside. The man was dressed as something shabby and unclean from the alleys, and adorned with the appropriate pong.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Sir, pardon me – I’d have been here sooner, but a wagon of bread caught fire, blocked half the city – no one would take the blame, said it just happened—’

  ‘Is the fire out?’ Bhorth ever on guard for his capital.

  ‘Yes, sir, only she—’

  ‘The bitch Jema?’

  ‘Yes. She’s shat it out.’

  ‘At last. Does it live?’

  ‘No one knows. It’s peaceful as a grave in there now.’

  ‘Then how do you know anything at all?’

  ‘It was one of the priests, lord king. The boy that sings. He’d stopped by the shack for alms; he begs anywhere, they all do. My man Catnose – you know Catnose?’ Bhorth’s face suggested a renewed acquaintance was superfluous and the spy hurried on. ‘He often oils the priests, money and that. He found the boy priest all huddled up so he says, What’s on, my pilchard? And the boy said he’d asked alms at the shack and been turned off, but as he went he heard a cry, so turned round and went back and looked through a gap at the door. It seems the cry wasn’t like anything – average.’

  ‘What did he see?’

  ‘All sorts of nonsense, if you believe him. But he’s crazy, the sing-priest. Lights and stars and butterflies – what are they? Well, but in the middle she drops the brat. Oh yes, he was sure of this one thing. A baby. Dark red as a ripe plum.’

  ‘Did it live?’

  ‘It seems so. It’s got a lusty yell, Catnose says – he heard it. Though the shack’s quiet now.’

  ‘And when was this?’

  The spy was uneasy. ‘Forgive me, I said, my lord, that fire—’

  As Bhorth swung round to leave the terrace Sallus came up to him. For the first time in their lives together Bhorth raised his hand to ward off his son. ‘Not now. I must do this. I meant to have spoken with you about it. We never have. And you’d prevent me.’

  ‘Her child’s born and you’ll kill it.’

  ‘If I can. It’s a god from Hell.’

  ‘The Lionwolf. Father—’

  ‘No.’

  Sallusdon, stationed on the terrace, watched Bhorth pound, shouting for his men, into the palace.

  A midnight bell had struck by the time Bhorth and his ten soldiers reached the refuse tip.

  There had been no pretence at secrecy on this occasion. Curtailment was imperative. Concealment could wait – that was, if any of them survived.

  Having broken in the door, as Zzth’s tantrum had already broken it in all but a physical way, the Rukarian soldiers clustered, dejected.

  ‘Fled, my lord.’

  ‘How hot it is in here,’ Bhorth pointlessly remarked.

  Thryfe emerged from the blank tunnel of coma, but not into awakening or the real world.

  He was in flight. An eagle, hi
s vitality unimpaired, the huge wings spread, speeded by the thermals over a map of cold mountains, and above zircon stars grouped in constellations like question marks.

  The eyrie resembled a dish of wires and sinews. The starlight slid along its arteries. Inside, she had plucked out her own feathers to provide a lining. They were thick as fur. She—

  He did not know where she had gone to, his mate. All that remained was the egg. It too was englamoured by starlight.

  Like a winged sword the eagle set down on the nest’s wide rim. Instantly he saw the cracks that patterned the eggshell.

  He craned forward the predatory length of his neck, and with a measured blacksmith hammering began to tap on the undoing shell.

  Thryfe, high up in the chamber of the eagle’s brain, stared out impassively.

  I have lost her. I shall never see her again. Only this shall I see. This – which has used us.

  As one, like a chord of music, all the particles of the shell gave way. Star-like, jewel-like, they rained upward into the sky.

  And it emerged, the eagle’s child.

  ‘Snow! Hard snow—’

  ‘It’s hail – great chunks – beware – look out!’

  Look out, look out, the sky is falling—

  Over Kol Cataar, Phoenix from Ashes, the lid of ice, disintegrating, spiralled and sprinkled and rumbled down.

  Pieces of ice big as house storeys dashed on Rose Walk, but they were thin too, and hitting home did little damage. Other lesser fragments were more harsh and stabbed like pins. A couple of chimneys crashed behind on the market. A man who had not taken cover was knocked senseless but revived after half an hour.

  Even as the sky plummeted the city began to make out behind the drizzle and bustle of the jettisoned ice the proper sky of night, with one full moon and two skinny lunar attendants, and stars everywhere like unstrung necklaces.

  Five centuries of Winter, and it could still play tricks. Ice in the sky. Who would have thought it?

  Tireh the queen and her ladies were spectators behind the relative safety of palace windows. The two little princess daughters had been allowed up to see.

  Sallusdon, roped by the snake, had drawn his sister Azula to shelter under an overhang. There he said to her, ‘Our mother is calling to me. Chillel. I must go to find her. Do you feel that?’