Fire Dancer

by Ann Maxwell

  “But the child,” she repeated in a strained voice. “We can’t leave it with the gtai . . .”

  Yet they must do just that. She knew it. They had been lucky. The child had not. She must accept that as she had accepted Deva’s end. She must put away that burned face, hide it in the dark places of her mind with all the other burned faces, Senyasi and Bre’ns scourged by their own sun. She had survived so much already. Surely she could survive the memory of one more burned child. Just one more.

  “I’m all right,” she said numbly. “I can walk. Put me down.”

  Kirtn hesitated. He had first heard that deadness in her voice after Deva burned. He had not heard it so much lately, even in the echoes of his mind.

  “I’m all right,” she repeated. “I won’t be so stupid again.”

  “I was right behind you,” he said. “I didn’t remember Jal’s warning until you were attacked.” He set her on her feet and looked at the marks on her back. “Welts, mostly. How do they feel?”

  With a shrug of indifference, she reached up to coil her hair once again. Kirtn saw the four puncture marks on her neck. Jal had said nothing about gtai poison, but that was no comfort.

  “Light,” snapped Kirtn.

  Automatically, she wove a palm-sized glow of cool light and handed it to him. He looked carefully at the wounds. There was no sign of discoloration or unusual swelling.

  “Hold still.”

  She stood without moving while he sucked on each puncture until blood flowed freely. It hurt, but she said nothing. She would willingly endure much worse at her mentor’s hands, knowing that he would hurt her no more than necessary, and feel it as painfully as she did.

  Kirtn spat again as the glowlight died. “Didn’t taste anything more than blood,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  “Like throwing up, but it has nothing to do with the marks on my neck.”

  He had felt the same way since the first moment he saw the child’s face and realized there was nothing he could do. Someday he would not be a slave. When that day came, the creators of the Fold would know hell as surely as Deva had.

  They resumed walking down the path, legs almost brushing with each stride. Erratic cries rode the wind, and at the margins of the haze were forms seen and half-seen but never fully known. Her fingers curled among his as they had when she was no taller than his waist. He caressed her fingers and said nothing, enjoying the comfort of familiar flesh as much as she did. The Fold made children or corpses of everything it touched, even a Bre’n.

  The mist concealed, but not enough. They saw dead slaves mutilated by scavengers. The diseased, the injured, the despondent, all were clumped near the path, pleas and curses in a hundred languages, despair the only common tongue.

  The children were the worst. It was their faces that would scream in Rheba’s and Kirtn’s nightmares, new faces among the chorus of Deva’s dead.

  As they walked, the mist waxed and waned capriciously, revealing startling varieties of plants. Occasional cries and complaints punctuated the silence. Rheba and Kirtn taught themselves to hear only those cries that seemed to be following them. No one came out of the mist, however. Either Kirtn’s size or the certainty that new slaves had nothing worth taking prevented them from being attacked.

  Yet they had the persistent sense of being stalked. The mist was part of their unease, maddening, changing shapes before their eyes, teasing them with half-remembered nightmares. The trail wound between and around low hills covered with thick trees that quivered in every breeze. The brush grew higher and sweet flowers unfolded. Rheba trusted the flowers least of all, for they looked gentle and she had learned that gentleness died first in the Fold of the Loo-chim.

  The trail divided around a smooth, wooded hill. They took the side that seemed to be most heavily traveled, the left side. Half-seen shapes condensed out of the mist, blocking the trail. Kirtn stared, counting at least twenty six men and women of every race and size. He waited for one of them to speak. None did. One of the men gestured toward Rheba, then toward his genitals, then toward Rheba again.

  Kirtn and Rheba sprinted down the right fork of the trail. Nothing followed them but hard laughter and harsh words of encouragement. Suspicious, they slowed. The voices came no closer. The trail curled off to one side, winding among the beautifully faceted ruins of a small city.

  Abruptly, Kirtn froze, afraid even to breathe. From the rains came an echo of ghostly harmonics. His hand closed around Rheba’s arm, silently urging her backward. Jal had warned them most particularly about singing ruins. Other than a Darkzoi brushbat, there was nothing deadlier in the Yhelle Equality than the First People waiting along the trail ahead.

  The harmonics seeped into Kirtn’s bones, making him ache. It was nothing to what would have happened if they had run innocently into the midst of the faceted city, where buildings were intelligent minerals who spoke among themselves in slow chords that dissolved organic intelligence with terrible thoroughness.

  “No wonder those slaves didn’t follow us,” she said. “They knew we’d come wandering out sooner or later with no more brains than a bowl of milk.” She made a bitter sound. “Trader Jal is a liar. More than one out of two slaves die in the Loo-chim Fold.”

  “But no one counts you until you reach the well inside the two blue circles,” he said softly.

  Rheba wished ice and ashes upon Jal’s Inmost Fire, but felt no satisfaction. Kirtn measured the surrounding hills with metallic gold eyes, but there was no comfort there either. Only traps where First People shone in the sun.

  “We have to go back,” he said finally.

  She did not argue. There was a chance that they could survive the attentions of their fellow slaves. There was no chance that they could survive the resonant speech of the First People.

  Slowly, they walked back to the fork in the trail.

  VI

  The shapes waited at the edge of the mist, shifting restlessly, talking with the many voices of an ill-disciplined pack. Rheba’s hair unknotted and fanned out with a silky murmur of power. Kirtn felt her hair brush his arm and knew that she was gathering energy again. A fire dancer, especially a young one, should not fill and hold her capacity so many times, so quickly; but neither should a fire dancer die young. He regretted the strain on her, and knew there was no other choice.

  “They have stones, clubs, bones,” he said, summing up the slaves' crude armaments, “no more.”

  “And a fifteen-to-one edge,” she said. “I wonder what would happen if we tried to go around them.”

  He looked at the boulders and trees just beyond the grassy margin on either side of the trail. Many things could be hidden out there. Perhaps even safety. “Do you want to try outflanking them?”

  The mist swirled, revealing the waiting slaves. They did not seem worried that their prey would escape. Rheba stepped boldly off the trail and began to cross the grass. The slaves watched, smiling in grim anticipation. No one moved to cut her off. After a few more steps, she turned back to the trail where Kirtn waited.

  “They know the territory better than we do,” she said. “Anyplace they’ll let me go, I don’t want to go.”

  He agreed, yet he hesitated. “There are too many of them to be kind, fire dancer, and you’re too tired for finesse.”

  The Bre’n said no more. In this he could not advise his akhenet. It cost a fire dancer less energy to kill than it did to stun. A simple touch, energy draining away; a heart could not beat without electricity to galvanize its muscle cells. To stun rather than kill required an outpouring of energy from the fire dancer, energy woven and channeled by a driving mind. She was too tired to stun more than a few people.

  Rheba remembered the child in the gtai trap, and the other children she had seen, the lucky ones who had died cleanly. None of them had chosen to die. These slaves, however, had chosen whether they knew it or not. “I’ll kill if I have to,” she said tonelessly, “but it takes more concentration than making fire. It’s not easy to . . .” Her vo
ice faded into a dry swallow.

  He stroked her hair. “I know,” he said, wishing he could protect her, knowing he could not. “I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe I could just scare them. They’ve never seen a fire dancer at work.”

  He said nothing. It was her decision. It had to be, or she would never trust him again.

  She concentrated on a bush midway between the slaves and herself. When the bush finally began to quake, she raised her arm, pointed at the bush, and let a filament of yellow energy course from her finger to the bush. The gesture was unnecessary, but it was satisfying.

  The bush burst into flames. The slaves muttered among themselves but did not back away. The leader walked up boldly to the bush, saw that the flames were not an illusion, and began warming his wide body by the fire. Soon the slaves had regrouped around the bush, snickering and congratulating their leader as though he had conjured the fire himself.

  Flames whipped suddenly, called by an angry fire dancer. Bright tongues licked out. There was a stink of burning hair. Scorched slaves leaped back, only to find that the fire leaped with them.

  Rheba worked furiously. Her hands and lower arms burned gold with the signature of akhenet power at work. Fire danced hotly across the shoulders of the slaves. A few people fled, but most of them had seen and survived too many malevolent marvels to be routed by a few loose flames. With an enraged bellow, the leader called his slaves to attack.

  A hail of stones fell over Rheba, stunning her until she could no longer work. Streamers of fire winked out or drained back into the bush. Before she could recover, the slaves swarmed over, swinging wood clubs and fists with rocks inside them.

  Most of the slaves who attacked chose to concentrate on Kirtn instead of the woman whose hands had called fire out of damp shrubbery. Even so, she was swept off her feet in the rush, her head ringing from a glancing blow. Screams and curses in several languages showed that Kirtn was a deadly opponent despite being badly outnumbered; but even his huge strength could not survive the onslaught of thirty enraged slaves. He vanished under a tumult of multicolored flesh.

  Rheba pushed herself to her knees, head hanging low, hair and blood concealing her view of the fight. Kirtn’s whistle sliced through the confusion, a sound of rage and fear. The shrill notes commanded her to run away if she could. Abruptly, the whistle stopped.

  His silence frightened her more than any sound he could have made. She lunged toward the melee, heedless of her own danger. One man grabbed her, then another. Instantly they reeled away, numbed by the shocks she had reflexively sent through them. She screamed Kirtn’s name, desperately grabbing energy from the still-burning bush, from the sunlight, from every source within her reach. Thin lines of fire sizzled over the slaves who covered Kirtn.

  The pile of flesh heaved and a Bre’n roar echoed. Kirtn clawed his way out of the pile with three men and the leader clinging to his shoulders. The leader’s pale arm flashed upward as a club took lethal aim of Kirtn’s skull.

  Even as Rheba screamed, fire flowed like dragon’s breath from her hands, more fire than the bush had held, more fire than she had ever called before. Her hands and arms seemed to burst into flames. Lines of molten gold burned triumphantly on her arms, answering and reflecting a fire dancer’s will, stealing energy from the day and weaving it into a terrible light.

  The leader’s squat white body suddenly crawled with flames. He screamed and dropped his charred club, trying to beat out the fire with hands that also burned. The other slaves saw what had happened and fled in panic, leaving dead and injured behind.

  Rheba sucked back the flames, but it was too late. The leader had breathed pure fire. He was dead before he fell to the damp ground. She stared, horrified. She had seen others die like that, Senyasi and Bre’ns screaming when the deflectors vaporized in one station after another, Deva’s fire dancers blistering and dying . . . Sobbing dryly, she forced down her memories and horror. She knelt by Kirtn and sought the pulse beneath his ear.

  “Kirtn?” she said softly, hesitantly, trying not to think of what her fire could have done to him.

  After what seemed like a very long time to her, his eyes opened. They were as gold and blank as the lines of power still smoldering on her body. He tried to sit up, groaned, and tried again. On the third attempt he succeeded. He saw the pale, scorched body sprawled nearby and the smoking club that had been ready to smash his skull. He looked at her haunted eyes and knew what she had done. He caressed her cheek in wordless thanks, not knowing how else to comfort her.

  Slowly he stood up, pulling her with him. The light from the burning bush washed over his eyes and mask, making them incandescent. “I’m sorry,” he said, speaking finally, looking at her. “Not for him. He deserved to die, and die more slowly than he did. But you, little dancer, you didn’t deserve the job of executioner.”

  “It wasn’t very hard . . . I didn’t even know what I was doing. All I knew was that I didn’t want you hurt. I didn’t want to live if you died.” She rubbed her lower arms and hands where new lines of power had ignited. As the lines faded, the itching began. She was grateful for the distraction from her own thoughts. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She began walking up the trail as quickly as her shaking legs would allow. She lost track of the passage of time. Mist and the trail conspired to create a dream that she moved through long after she wanted to stop. Fatigue became an anesthetic, numbing. She did not fight it, but accepted it as she had accepted her itching hands, gratefully.

  Trees loomed out of the mist, their supple, tapering branchlets swaying like grass in a river current. There was no wind. Kirtn and Rheba stopped, staring. When they looked away from the trees, they realized that the trail divided. A small spur took off to wind between the graceful, slim-trunked trees. The spur ended in a liquid gleam of water.

  Kirtn stared at the small pool caught among the grove’s lavender roots. Water so close he would only have to walk six steps to touch its cool brilliance. As though sensing his thoughts, the pool winked seductively, catching and juggling shafts of light that penetrated the mist

  “Kirtn, something’s wrong.”

  “I know. But what?”

  “I wish I weren’t so thirsty. Makes it hard to think.” She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the seductive pool. Then her eyes snapped open. “We haven’t come far enough yet. Jal said there was water in the center of the Fold. This can’t be the center.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She closed her eyes, reaching out to the subtle currents of energy that flowed along the Fold’s unseen fence. “Yes. The fence is closer to us behind and to the left. We aren’t in the center.”

  Kirtn looked around until he found a fist-sized stone. He measured the distance, drew back his arm, and fired the rock into the pond. Silver liquid fountained up, spreading pungent fumes.

  “Acid!” said Rheba, stepping back. Then, “Look!”

  The trees bent down, sending their branchlets into the disturbed liquid. As the trees sampled the nutrient mix, delicate sipping sounds spread out like ripples from the pond. The rock, however, had contained little of the organic nourishment the grove required. With whiplike grace, the trees straightened again and resumed waiting, patient as all predators must be, especially carnivorous plants.

  “Morodan?” asked Rheba, remembering Jal’s lecture.

  “Or Trykke. Either way, one of the Second People.”

  She stared, fascinated in spite of her uneasiness. She had never before seen intelligent plants of this size. “I wonder how they got here, and what they talk about while they wait for a thirsty animal to come to their acid pond.”

  “I don’t know, but from their size, they’ve been talking about it for thousands of years.”

  “They’re insane,” she said suddenly, her voice certain.

  “Maybe. And maybe they’re only Adjusted.”

  She shivered. “That’s not funny.”

  He turned back toward the main path. She followed. They w
ere still within sight of the grove when a low moan of pain made her stop suddenly. Just off the trail, in a small clearing, a sleek-furred mother huddled with two very young children. She was badly injured, unable to move. Her children cowered next to her, seeking what warmth and safety they could.

  When Rheba walked closer, the stranger spoke in Universal, ordering her children to hide in the ubiquitous waist-high shrubs. The children, who were not injured, half disobeyed. They stayed close enough to see their mother, but far enough away to be safe from the trail.

  “We won’t hurt you,” said Kirtn gently in Universal, “or your children.”

  The woman’s only answer was the slow welling of blood from a wound low on her side. She watched Rheba’s approach with eyes that held neither fear nor hope, only an animal patience for whatever might come. Slow shivering shook her, fear or chills or both.

  Warily, knowing she should not but unable to stop herself, Rheba stepped off the trail. Kirtn followed, close enough to help but not close enough to be caught in the same trap with her, if trap there was. While he stood guard, she crouched by the wounded woman. The stranger’s body was thick and muscular, but its power was draining inexorably from the inflamed wound in her side.

  There was nothing Rheba could do. She had neither water nor medicines. She did not even have clothes to tear into bandages. The woman’s lips were cracked with thirst, her breathing harsh, her thoughts only for her children.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Rheba, helpless and angry at her helplessness. “Is there anything I can do?”

  The woman’s lips twisted in what could have been a snarl or a smile. “My children are cold. Go away so they can come back to me.”

  “A fire,” said Rheba quickly. “Would you like a fire?”

  “I might as well ask for water—or freedom.” The woman’s voice was as bitter as her pain and fear for her children.