The Purifying Fire p-2

by Laura Resnick

  “Do you know how he died?” For a planeswalker, there were so many possibilities.

  “A pyromancer killed him.” His voice was calm, without expression.

  There was a long silence between them.

  The ground they were walking over was particularly damp. It squished under Chandra’s feet as she kept pace beside Gideon in the dark, neither of them speaking.

  Ahead of them, Jurl trudged along, his shoulders stooped. He started to pant a little, and his steps got slower. Apparently the goblin was feeling fatigued. At one point, he asked to rest. Gideon refused the request.

  The continuing cool silence between her and Gideon gradually got on Chandra’s nerves. After all, it wasn’t her fault that his teacher’s teacher had been killed by a fire mage. For all she knew, he deserved what happened to him.

  “So did you know him?” she asked abruptly.

  “Know who?” He sounded mildly puzzled, as if he’d been thinking about something else entirely.

  “The pla-” But before she could finish the word, she recalled that Jurl could hear them. The goblin was stupid and ignorant, but nonetheless capable of plotting and scheming. The less he learned by eavesdropping, the better. “The one who owned the sural. The one who died.”

  “No. He died many years before I met my teacher.”

  “How did you meet your teacher?” she asked.

  Chandra had encountered very few planeswalkers. In her experience, they were a rare breed, and they were loners. They didn’t congregate, and they weren’t necessarily friendly to each other.

  “He… found me,” Gideon said.

  “After you…” She phrased it in a way that would make no sense to the goblin, in case the creature was feigning fatigue and listening to them. “Crossed over?”

  “You mean after I traveled?” Gideon sounded a little amused by her attempt to question him without being understood by their captive.

  “Yes.”

  “No, we met before that.”

  “How did he find you?”

  “Jurl, you said it wasn’t far,” Gideon reminded the goblin. “This seems far.”

  “Yes,” Jurl agreed wearily. “Seems far.”

  “If you’ve lied…”

  “No.” Jurl added, “Don’t take hands.”

  “Well, maybe I’m just little tired,” Gideon admitted to Chandra. “Does it seem far to you?”

  She couldn’t see his expression. Instead of answering him, she prodded, “You were about to tell me how you met your teacher.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m bored.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “Of course, we could talk about something else. The scroll, for example.”

  “Then I’d be bored.”

  “So how did your teacher find you?”

  “Well, you’ll identify with this,” he said. “I was a criminal.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.” She asked, “What did you do? Attack women and take away their valuables?”

  “Very funny. As a matter of fact, we sacrificed the cutest animals we could find and drank their blood from our victims’ skulls by the light of the moon.”

  “Then this place should bring you back to your roots.”

  “To be serious, we mostly broke into rich people’s homes-”

  “We?”

  “There was a group of us. I was the leader, more or less. We stole money, goods, valuables. And, uh…”

  He seemed reluctant to continue his story. “Yes?” she prodded.

  “Then we gave it away.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “To the poor.”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “We were…” He seemed to search for the right word. “Idealistic.”

  “That’s a far cry from drinking animal blood.”

  “I was very young. I wanted to change things,” he said. “But I didn’t know how. I was good at stealing. Good at fighting. Pretty good at handling a group of wild boys my own age.”

  “That’s easy to believe.”

  “But I had a lot to learn.”

  “Where were your parents? Didn’t they try to rein you in?” Her own parents had certainly tried, back when she was a girl.

  “My mother was dead by then,” he said.

  “And your father?”

  “Who knows?” He sounded indifferent. “I never met him.”

  They all walked in silence for a while. Chandra really started to feel, deep in her bones, how helpless she was here without her power. Even if they did get some answers from this wise woman Jurl was taking them to, what would they do to get away from this plane? She tried to stop thinking it.

  Finally she broke the silence: she had to find something to distract her from these thoughts.

  “Your teacher,” she said suddenly.

  “What?” She could tell by Gideon’s reaction that he had been far away. Perhaps lost in thoughts similar to her own.

  “How did your teacher find you?” she said urgently. “How did he get you to give up your life as an outlaw?”

  There was a pause. Then he said, “What makes you think I gave it up?”

  She released her breath on a puff of surprise. Then she smiled-and felt grateful to him for making her smile. “I stand corrected.”

  In fact, for all she knew, he was an outlaw. She had assumed he followed her here to capture her and take her back to Kephalai. She had vaguely supposed he was some sort of inter-planar bounty hunter. The Prelate had employed someone with extraordinary abilities to go after Chandra last time. Why not this time?

  But since the Prelate’s forces didn’t know where the scroll was, this planeswalker obviously hadn’t returned it to them.

  Perhaps Gideon was still an outlaw. Or at least playing all the angles and working on both sides of the fence. The thought warmed him to her.

  “As long as you stick to our bargain and don’t try to deliver me to the Prelate,” she said aloud, “I make no judgments about the path you have chosen in life.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “So were did your teacher find you?”

  “I was in prison,” he said.

  “We do have a lot in common.”

  “He was respected, and the prison wasn’t well equipped to hold someone with my abilities,” Gideon said. “So I was released into his custody.”

  “And that’s how your education began?”

  “Yes,” Gideon said. “More easily than he expected, I suppose. After my initial resistance-and an attempt to escape his custody-I became a dedicated student. Eager.”

  “You liked the power,” she said, remembering her own obsession with it when she had started discovering some of the things she could do, things that no one in her community had understood or condoned.

  “Yes, I liked the power. I liked developing and honing it. Mostly, though…” Gideon paused pensively. “Mostly, I realized that my teacher was the first person I’d ever met who could help me find what I was looking for.”

  “Which was?”

  “Direction. Focus. A path for my life.”

  “Direction…” Chandra hadn’t thought about direction before. She had gone to the Keralian Monastery to learn more about her power. How to access more of it, but also how to control it better. And her recent experiences demonstrated that she still had much to learn in that respect.

  She didn’t want to think about any of that now. Besides, she didn’t even have access to her full power at the moment. And that wasn’t a subject she wanted to dwell on, either, just now. So she asked Gideon, “When did you find out what you really were?”

  “When the time came,” he said. “When my Spark was ignited.”

  The Spark, Chandra had been taught, was a suffusion of the Blind Eternities within a planeswalker’s soul. It was what gave an individual protection against the entropic forces of the?ther. Although it happened differently for everyone, the ignition of a planeswal
ker’s Spark was the trigger for their first walk.

  Gideon added, “But my teacher knew before I did.”

  “How did he know?”

  “Because of my power. As I dedicated myself to my training, my strength grew. To me, it just seemed to be the result of studying and learning. But later, after I knew the truth about myself, he said that he had known for some time, because he’d only ever seen one other hieromancer as powerful as I was.”

  “Ah. The one who had given him the sural all those years ago.”

  “Yes. A long time before it happened, he believed my Spark would be ignited and I would become… what I became.” Gideon said, “So he prepared me.”

  “He told you what you were?” she asked.

  “No. He told me about our kind, and about the one that he had known. He related what he knew about the Multiverse, the?ther, and the Blind Eternities. How to prepare for a walk. How to survive it.”

  “So you knew what was happening?”

  “Yes. I was fully conscious of what was happening.”

  “Did you know before it happened?” she asked in astonishment.

  “Not exactly. But when I felt my Spark ignite, I understood. It was…” He hesitated. “I killed someone,” he said quietly. “Someone very powerful. Very dangerous. I knew I shouldn’t have lived through that confrontation. Not logically. I was shocked at how much power I had accessed. I sensed a clarity in the world around me. I felt an intensity of experience, an awareness of simply being that I had never known. I had a moment, however fleeting, where I understood everything around me. I understood the Multiverse on a fundamental level, if you can imagine such a thing, so that when I slipped into the?ther I knew where to go.”

  “Is it like that every time?”

  “No,” he said. “As soon as I had landed on another plane, it was gone. I have tried to achieve that state of awareness for most of my life since then, but I have yet to come close.” He let out a slow breath. “But the planeswalk worked. Very much the way my teacher had described it. And also by following his teachings, I found my way back. So that I could tell him what I was.”

  Chandra felt a mingled surge of wonder and envy. “I can’t imagine

  …”

  “Imagine what?” he asked.

  “What my first walk would have been like, if I had known those things. If someone had told me.”

  “You didn’t have any idea what was happening to you?”

  “None,” she said. “I’d never even heard of a planeswalk.”

  Chandra blinked as she realized they’d become indiscreet. She looked uneasily at the goblin walking ahead of them, its hands bound behind its back. But Jurl seemed to be paying no attention to them. Instead, he seemed jumpy, anxious, and wholly focused on their surroundings, as if expecting an ambush at any moment.

  “That must have been hard,” Gideon said.

  “I didn’t experience anything like you. I thought I was dying,” she admitted. “Or dead. Or… I don’t know. It was very painful. And, um, terrifying.”

  She didn’t know why she was telling him this. She had never told anyone, not even Mother Luti. She’d never had a teacher except for Luti, and she had not known her long. Chandra had never even met another planeswalker before her most recent encounters. All that she knew about planeswalking, she’d taught herself, and all that she learned about her kind, which wasn’t a lot, she learned from Mother Luti.

  “Some combination of desperation, survival instinct, and…” Chandra shrugged. “Sheer luck, I suppose, helped me find my way out of the?ther and onto a physical plane that first time.”

  “And will,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Will,” Gideon said. “You have a very strong will. That makes a difference in who survives a walk like your first. And also like the one that brought you here.”

  “How did you follow me?” She knew it couldn’t have been easy.

  “Actually, you leave a pretty bright trail.”

  She supposed that was why that mind mage with the cerulean cloak had been able to find her on Regatha.

  “But the trail was erratic and seemed to…” He searched for the right word “… bounce all over the place. I could tell it had been a rough journey.” He added, “And to come here of all places…”

  “I didn’t exactly choose it,” she said.

  “I knew even as I approached that it was a bad destination.”

  “So why did you follow?”

  “Why did you steal that scroll?” he countered. “Twice?”

  “Why did you steal it?”

  “I didn’t exactly steal it.”

  “Then where is it?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Now that there is no Sanctum of Stars to keep it in, I suppose it’s somewhere in the Prelate’s palace, under lock and key.”

  “No, it’s not,” Chandra said. “The Prelate’s pets were going to torture me to find it.”

  “That was before you escaped. Since then, the scroll has been found.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t even think about it, Chandra,” he said. “If it’s in the palace, you might get inside alive, but you’d never get back out. Not even you. They’ll be watching for you. And now they know they made a mistake by not killing you the moment they identified you. They won’t be that careless again.”

  “You gave back the scroll?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  They walked along in silence for a few paces.

  “You gave it back?” she demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  He said nothing.

  Her thoughts whirling, she said, “Why did you give it back?”

  “It seemed like the most sensible thing to do. You know, to calm things down after you left.”

  “That’s It?”

  “More or less,” he said. “More or less of a reward?”

  “Well, there was a reward.”

  “So that’s why.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I didn’t precisely give it back.”

  “If you didn’t give it back, then what did you do. Precisely?”

  “I left it where it would be found by someone who would recognize it and turn it in for the reward.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “You stole it from me. You didn’t keep it. You didn’t sell it. You didn’t take credit for retrieving it, and you didn’t collect the reward.”

  “Actually, you seem to understand perfectly.”

  “If you didn’t want it,” she said, “why take it in the first place?”

  “I thought that if the Prelate didn’t have the scroll and didn’t know where it was, then she wouldn’t execute you immediately. She’d want to find it before she killed you. And since you didn’t know where it was, there would be some delays.” Gideon concluded, “I thought that would give you time to try to escape.”

  “You wanted me to escape?” She felt bewildered. “Why didn’t you help me instead of manipulating me with your passive little ploy?”

  “I didn’t know about the Enervants,” he said. “Or I might have been a bit more proactive.”

  “If you didn’t want them to execute me, then why did you help them capture me?”

  “Because you were about to start a battle with those soldiers in a street full of innocent people.”

  “In a… I was…” She realized what he was saying.

  “You were thinking about yourself,” he said. “I was thinking about the dozens of people who might get killed.”

  “Whatever.” After a few long moments of tense silence, she said, “So you didn’t want the scroll.” When he didn’t bother responding, she said, “And you don’t want me to go back to Kephalai.”

  “I think it would be stupid.” He added, “And fatal.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” she demanded. “Why did yo
u follow me? Why were you looking for me on Kephalai? Who are you?”

  Jurl said, “Stop talking.”

  “What?” Chandra snapped.

  The goblin raised his head, his pointy ears perked alertly.

  “He hears something,” Gideon said in a low voice.

  Their captive raised his head and sniffed the damp night air, apparently oblivious to their presence.

  Chandra looked at Gideon. The grove of twisted, leafless trees that they were walking through cast so many shadows in the silvery light that she couldn’t see his face well. But she sensed that he was as tense as she was.

  Then Jurl’s demeanor abruptly changed. He flinched, crouched low, and turned toward them, panting and making little noises of distress.

  “What’s wrong?” Gideon asked in a low voice.

  “Riders,” the goblin rasped.

  “Riders?”

  A moment later, Chandra heard the distant pounding of hooves. Approaching fast.

  “Bad”

  Jurl said, “Hide!”

  Jurl scurried toward a thicket of bushes. The steel leash prevented him from going more than a few steps before he stopped, grunting in pain.

  “Hide” The goblin sounded terrified.

  Gideon took Chandra’s arm. “Come on.”

  Moving fast, they followed Jurl into the bushes. The thundering hoof beats were already much closer. As the three of them crouched down low behind the bushes’ naked branches, Chandra was grateful for the dark. These shrubs were thick, even without leaves, but she knew that she and her companions would be visible in the light of day.

  She leaned forward and looked off to the left, past Gideon, where the hoof beats were coming from. As she swayed slightly in that direction, unsteady in her crouching position, her shoulder came into contact with Gideon’s.

  He turned toward her. It was too dark to see his expression, but she could see his eyes looking directly into hers. Neither spoke. Then he, too, looked in the direction of the approaching riders.

  Chandra heard a sharp whinny as the galloping horses entered the grove. Peering into the darkness, Chandra could see them faintly now. Fortunately, they weren’t coming this way. They passed through the withered grove at some distance from where they crouched in the bushes, moving diagonally away. She counted three riders… No, four, she realized, as they galloped into a pool of moonlight.