by Jim Grimsley
Dekkar shook his head after a minute. “No. It’s his ally, probably something like a priest or a servant. It’s related to the trees, I think.”
“Something like Great Irion, you said.” Kitra watched him.
“Yes.”
“Then what chance do we have?” she asked, almost to herself. She sat down on an empty cot, put her head in her hands. Her skull was pounding.
The boat was quiet. The deception of peaceful surroundings helped her breathing to ease, and the fact that no one else spoke was a relief. She found herself staring at the pack she had brought on board, her equipment for collecting sap from Binam’s tree. She wanted to ask about him; she knew she would feel better if she did. But she was becoming more afraid at the same time. This trip was not like the others. She had only to look downriver at the glare of burning Dembut to remind herself of that. What if there was never any way to find Binam, what if the war had uprooted him, too?
She could just hear the whine of the impeller, the sliding-slapping sound of the river.
“You might as well get some rest while you can,” Dekkar said, after a while. “There’s some time. She can’t fly here herself, a flitter has to bring her.”
Instead of sleeping, though, Kitra lay with her eyes open and watched the others settle into resting posture. Keely drifted to sleep quickly, and Figg slept on the floor beside him. His trousers were covered with dust at the back and his overshirt had creases running along the length of it, caked with mud from some accident during the day. The sores on his face were throbbing-big. Kitra found herself watching his shadow in the dim interior, feeling a fondness for him that was unfamiliar, a bit disarming. He snored lightly and Keely’s breath was deep and even, untroubled.
Later she would realize that, when she spied on Dekkar during what followed, she did so because he permitted it. At the time she had no real inkling of who or what he was, except in the vaguest terms, but later it was clear that he could have caused her to sleep, as he possibly did the others. For everyone else very quickly dropped off, but in her case, it was as if she were stilled but conscious. She had no sense that he was holding her, only that she could not move. Perhaps because he had engaged himself to her, or wanted to reassure her, he allowed her to see the bundle he drew out of the boat chest, untying it near the pilot’s wheel where Pel was standing.
“Do you have to do that now?” Pel asked, and his tone was familiar, as if he had known Dekkar for a long time.
“Why?”
“I thought we could talk a bit.” Pel turned to look at him. “They’re all dead to the world, right?”
“Yes.” He answered after a bit of hesitation.
Pel was giving Dekkar a wry grin, all the while checking the pilot wheel and the heading. “Did you know I had come back before you saw me?”
Dekkar was standing over the bundle, no longer moving. “No. But that doesn’t mean Irion didn’t. I’m only a copy of him, you know.”
“But you knew me when you saw me.”
“Yes.”
They were looking at each other. Pel said, “You don’t seem surprised. I’m back from the dead.”
“I don’t know what to say, to tell the truth.”
“Well, you might ask me something like, ‘Pel, how did you come to cross the mountains again?’”
“All right. But I’m not him, you see, I’m a copy.”
“Pretend.”
“Pel, how does it happen that you crossed the mountains again?”
“She sent me back.”
“She?”
Pel scowled, stepping close to Dekkar. “Don’t pretend you don’t know who. She’s very real, you know. She’s watching your every move.”
Dekkar stood there.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about Kirith Kirin?”
“I told you, I’m not Great Irion. I’m a copy. He doesn’t copy that part of himself.”
“But aren’t you curious?”
Something pained revealed itself in Dekkar’s stance, something indescribably lonely in the pinched set of his shoulders. Kitra breathed carefully and felt herself still unable to move, though likely it didn’t matter. This was a quiet of Dekkar’s doing, too.
“Yes, I am,” Dekkar said.
“He’s there, across the mountains.”
“Doing what?”
Pel shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. You could say, waiting. You could say, not. You could say, being dead.” He shrugged. “It’s hard to explain until you’ve been there.”
Dekkar nodded. “So she brought you back here for what?”
“To get killed again, I don’t doubt. Otherwise I don’t know. Haven’t a clue.”
Dekkar laughed, nodded.
“You’re not him, you said. Just a copy.” Pel was speaking quite low.
“That’s right.”
“You’re a friendly one.”
They were very quiet then, standing close. When they separated, they came apart slowly, as if they had touched each other in some way. The room was full of the charge; it made Kitra ache.
“That’s enough,” Pel said.
Dekkar looked, suddenly, much younger, though only for a moment; pale and dark-haired, taller by a hand. The illusion faded then, and he was himself.
He knelt by the bundle, which glittered when he opened it.
Onto each finger he slipped a ring. He stacked several bracelets on his wrists. Into his earlobes he fastened earrings.
He was beginning to sing, a song so harsh and cold it pierced Kitra through. Her heart was pounding. She was hearing because he wished it. Why?
He stood and turned his palms up and the gems made a sphere around him, and then they began to shine and to move, slowly, orbiting in shells.
Pel had pulled the boat ashore and moored it next to a thick tree root.
“As soon as I’m aground, pull up under the bank, there ahead where you see the overhang.” Dekkar pointed out the pilot’s window.
“You don’t have to tell me my business, I was keeping clear of your like before you were ever a dream.”
Dekkar glided through the hull as if either he or it were not altogether there, calling back, “Our friend the mantis will be in the river to keep the debris off your boat.”
“Your friend? That thing from the farm.”
“Yes. It’s a long story. Don’t be alarmed when you see it.”
Sick with fear, finally able to move, Kitra hauled her mattress near Figg, then lay next to him, and he embraced her as if he knew what she wanted, even though he was fast asleep.
When she was a child, she had dreamed that she was Kraytl and her brother Binam Hanzl and they were lost in the woods where a witch wanted to eat them. Now she felt that same fear coming from the trees all around her, as if everything ashore wanted to eat her, and as protection against that Figg was warm and welcomed her. Beside him she lay through all that followed; the sphere of light that was Dekkar rising through the trees as the Erra Bel took shelter under an out-jutting of the riverbank. From near the boat came the shriek of the mantis, and her skin went to bumps. She envied Figg his deep unconsciousness; even when she tried to wake him there was no way to do it. So she settled against him and lay her head against his back. Let me sleep, too, she prayed, and soon enough, she did.
Embers Floating into Dark
1. Keely
At first it was as if he were dreaming fireworks after a circus, like at the first birthday party Uncle Figg gave for him, when he was acting like he was a little kid because he was under regression. Now that he had all his memories again, he remembered the state of age-regression as being something not-quite-him and not-quite-not. Tonight he felt the rocking of the boat, the lullaby that made him sleepy echoing in his head, and behind that sound the numbers, the constant stream of what he had learned from the math box, which more and more preoccupied him.
For a while he did sleep and dreamed of the sphere again, the machine that unfolded, membranes sliding out of it like long tapes, tent
acles circling his neck, wires shoved deep into his skin, and then the thing filled the inside of him, the voice, his father. The voice sputtered but could not speak. The machine, frustrated, kept trying for a long time, while Keely drowsed.
Lights, a light show, wanted to wake him, wanted to draw him out of sleep. He too wanted to waken, felt that he should. Was it the numbers that were insisting so, edging him out of sleep, nullifying the lullaby? Or was it the desire to watch the priest alight in the trees, his spinning lights and then the storms he and the other singer threw at each other?
First Keely passed through the quiet night and distant thunder and then, all at once, a blaze like a thousand bombs in a million vids on the Surround, the boat full of light, and he was awake and sitting against the hull sweating, looking down at Uncle Figg. Uncle Figg and the lady who flew the flitter were lying side by side with their eyes closed, sheltered against one another; it was as if they knew they were there together but at the same time were somewhere else, were unconscious. Keely’s senses felt more acute than he could remember, so that he could tell the difference between unconscious and asleep. Even Penelope was unconscious, nested near the top of Uncle Figg’s head, legs curled under her.
Outside on the riverbank was confusion, at least on the bank that was visible; with the boat sheltered against one shore only the opposite could be seen. Where there had been trees and their orderly gardens was a nightmare of twisted trunks, fires collapsing branches to embers, crashes sending explosions of embers upward like showers of stars, as far as the eye could see. The boat was safe because the priest was making it safe, but nothing else in the landscape moved.
Outside in the river one of those mantises strode back and forth in the current, sweeping debris away from the Erra Bel.
Keely felt as if nothing else were moving except the mantis and him; then out of the corner of his eye he saw the boat pilot slouched against the railing outside. A narrow plank walkway ran around the edge of the riverboat, and the pilot was standing on it, just beside the hatch, illuminated by the fires from across the river and by the flashes of light from overhead. The shadow of a tall tree was visible slanting down over the river, light in blues and violets, in white light and red; a single tree still standing.
For the first time he heard the voice of Father while he was awake.
“They tell you lies about me,” said Father. “I’m not attacking you or your friends.”
This time he was able to control himself, unlike when he had been dreaming, and he said nothing, kept his eyes fixed on the windows.
“None of this would be necessary if they had given you over to my couriers in the first place. You could be with me now. You could be learning all that I want to teach you.”
He fixed himself on the thought of Uncle Figg, his kindly face, the way he flushed purple when he had to yell at somebody, like when he yelled at the Herman back home in the apartment on Senal.
“I’m very old, Keely. Do you have any idea how old? If I were part of you, you would know everything that I know. There are so many things we could do.”
Sherry hovered in front of him, or he pretended she did, dressed the way she’d been the last time he saw her, in the gown that looked so old and adult, and Sherry getting sick suddenly and falling to the floor and that was that, she was dead. The memory hurt but the hurt kept Keely focused on what he ought to be doing.
“No one around you can teach you the things that I can teach you. You have a rare gift, Keely. You’re called to this. It’s what you’re meant to do.”
Keely shook his head, refusing to answer.
When he crept away from the wall it was over; a silence fell where the voice had been and he knew Father was gone. He felt only dizzy, the numbers in his head like a roaring, louder than the thunder or the wind. He stepped over Kitra and Uncle Figg, both motionless; he chanced a look at the thing that had been Nerva tied up on its bunk; Uncle Figg’s bodyguard asleep on the bunk across from it, curiously still. Pel must have heard Keely because he stuck his head in the door, smiled, and nodded. “You’re awake.”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked a bit surprised. “Can’t sleep?”
“No, sir. Can I stand out there with you?”
The pilot made a gruff sound. “Stay close to the hatch,” he said. “Mind, the boat rocks a bit when a chunk of tree falls too close.”
Across the riverbank the last remnant of a tree went crashing over, this one falling away from the river into blazing underbrush. Heavy smoke blotted out the sky. Light flashed on the undersides of smoky billows, what looked like distant clouds. The canopy that had covered the river from both sides had vanished, as had the visible forest.
“What happened?”
“The wizards are fighting,” Pel said. “Same old story.”
“Wizards?”
“Yes. You know that’s what Dekkar is.”
“He’s a priest. He works for the church.”
The pilot had a nice smile, steady and safe; Keely felt better standing in the open air next to him, no matter how eerie the lights or how sudden the sounds. “You can think of him as a priest, I guess.”
“Do you know him?”
“Yes. For quite a long time.”
“Who are you?”
“Pel. This is my boat.”
Keely understood that part, started to say so, then a flash of light and wind rushed over the river, rocking the boat, so that Keely hung onto the railing. “My stomach,” he said, clutching it.
“You’re smart to keep your hand on the bar, no need to try to prove anything.”
“Are we tied up?”
“Yes. I lashed us tight to a tree root; we’re okay as long as the tree holds. You can feel the impeller kicking in, too, holding us steady in the current.”
Once he said so, Keely could feel the boat doing its work to keep itself in place against the river’s motion. They were sheltered, close to the shore, and the mantis was still moving in the river clearing the debris; he kept reminding himself because it comforted him. “Did you see the bombs?” Keely asked.
“Bombs? You mean the fire.”
“Weren’t there bombs?”
“Not exactly.” Pel shook his head. “Wizards, you see. It’s what they do, make fire where there’s none. The fellow you call Dekkar is from very old stock.”
Dekkar was the priest’s name. It kept slipping from Keely’s mind, but this time he tried to remember. A cascade of lights washed over the river; along the distant horizon were other lights, dim. “Where is he?”
“Up in the tree.”
“Who is he fighting?”
Pel nodded to the lights on the horizon. “That fellow way off there. Or, most likely, that woman way off there.”
“It’s a woman?”
“I expect so, yes.”
“How do you know?”
Pel shrugged. He spit something over the side of the boat; he was chewing a sliver of wood idly, tattering the end in his mouth, biting off bits and toying them on his lips, then spitting. “I’m old. I’ve been around a while.”
“You don’t look old.”
“People don’t always look as old as they are.”
“My uncle Figg is three hundred three. Is that old like you?”
“No. Your uncle’s a young squirt. All these people are young squirts, except you. You’re not even old enough to be called a squirt.”
Keely was smiling a bit. “I am, too.”
“You can’t be more than, what, twenty-five years old?”
Keely giggled. “I’m only eleven.”
Pel snorted, scratching under his chin; he had dirt under his nails, and his fingers were blunt at the end. He reminded Keely of some of the pleasanter people who lived in the Reeks. “You’re barely a sprout. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
Keely stared at the distant lights, rainbow colors along the undersides of clouds. “How old are you?”
“Too old. Never you mind about the number, you wo
uldn’t believe it anyway. I’m so old I could have dated your great-great-great times twenty grandmother. Or grandfather, either one.”
“Why are they so far away?”
“Who?”
“The wizards—why are they so far away from each other, if they’re fighting?”
“That’s how wizards fight. They don’t come close to each other until they’re nearly finished.”
“How long?”
“Till they finish? I don’t know. Sometimes they fight for years and years.”
That was a sobering thought. Keely was always concerned that the Hilda would get tired and quit working; what if the priest got tired and quit fighting? “I don’t think we have that much food,” Keely said.
“Could be we don’t,” Pel agreed, stroking his chin again. His face was bristly; most men stopped their beards growing, so the sight kept drawing Keely back, the funny stubbly stuff on Pel’s face. “Likely these ones won’t fight for so long, though. It’s the wizards in towers can stand up to you forever and a day.”
“You must have been around a lot of wizard guys.”
“And women, too. Don’t forget the women, they don’t like it. I’ve known more than my share, I think. Gods on top of it. When you start mucking about with gods, you’re in for a deal of trouble in your life.”
Keely felt the wind on his face, stronger, rocking the boat. “I don’t think you’re supposed to say stuff like that.”
“About gods, you mean? Oh, no, let me tell you, they like it. A god likes it a lot when you spit right in his face. Or her face, as the case may be. Minding the women again, naturally.”
Keely cocked his head doubtfully. The wind was gusting, throwing up whorls of sparks from the fires, fanning some of them brighter. Wind blew his hair in his eyes and he pulled it out and tucked the longer strands back of his ear.
“Weather blowing up,” Pel remarked, smirking at the haze as if he could see through it to the real clouds. “And that’s another thing you can look for when your average—let’s call them true-language priests for the sake of correctness, I suppose—start to have a knock-down-drag-out. Storms heaving hither, thither, and yon. Wind blowing like Emmen-go-home.”
