Gods of the Flame Sea

by Jean Johnson

  And Adan says that fire generates anima quickly because even wood that is dead and dry has retained its anima properties; destroy the wood through burning it, and the anima is released. But we cannot see it’s there in stones and tree branches without some sort of strong technological or magical means of magnifying our vision.

  If it truly is a ratio of the greater the lifesource size is, the greater the anima generated . . . and the longer it steeps in anima, he thought, puzzling through it, mind racing as he bit off another morsel of the piece of bar in his hand, then the Fae as the most anima-soaked life-forms on this world should technically be an incredible power-source, far more than anything else I’ve encountered. Stone can store a lot of anima, far more than wood, but it takes a lot longer to regenerate its magic once depleted . . . which would be consistent if it comes from bacteria.

  But a Fae stores a lot of magic, like a whole mountaintop’s worth in a single body. They’re like those super-absorbent sponges the medjant imports from offworld. Humans would be like bundles of straw, capable of absorbing and wringing out some liquid . . . the half animals among the Dai-Fae are like piles of cloth in that they can absorb and use a lot more . . . and Father’s people are like unglazed clay; they can generate and use it, but the Efrijt can only store tiny amounts at best.

  Since I cannot use all of my own lifeforce in generating anima—not without killing myself—and everyone but a Fae has less magic within them than I do . . . if only I could get my hands on a captive Fae no one would miss! I don’t even have to do any arcane calculations to know that the amount of power I could tap into with just one anima-soaked Fae could get me exponentially closer to—

  “Udrin!”

  The shocked gasp startled him into looking up. Fali stared at his fingers, beige eyes wide with what looked like horror. He had them tucked into his mouth, caught in the act of licking them clean . . . and could feel the powder from the vermillion dust on his lips. Visible, no doubt, given her shocked, dawning comprehension and hurried steps to get to his side.

  “You’re eating cinnabar dust?” she hissed, and snatched at his wrist, grabbing it to pull his fingers free for closer examination.

  Frozen from the stupidity of getting caught eating it, Udrin saw something shimmering at the edge of his vision. Anima, he realized. Small spheres coalesced and angled up out of the rocky ground around him, drawn to the Fae in her agitation. She tried to say something, tried to figure out what to do about this fact, one that clearly offended her to the point of forgetting her normal, required anima-discipline.

  In a flash of insight, Udrin realized he could feel her anima. That her self-shielding efforts were in such deep turmoil along with her troubled mind, they did not shield her properly. Against attack. His other hand came up and snatched at her wrist, sealing over her pulse point in a grip fierce enough to feel each beat. She gasped at the strength of his grip, opening her mouth to say something.

  Stabbing his will at her, like he’d stab it into a desert hare he wanted to use for an experiment, Udrin spread his powers throughout her body like a thousand hooks, a thousand straws, and pulled the anima out of her. For two, three stunned heartbeats, she struggled against his attack. Anima flung itself up out of the ground in an attempt to fill the sudden void, surging out of the bushes and tufts of grass . . . and then she collapsed.

  It was all he could do not to grin or clench his fists—or worse, crow in triumph at having bested a full-blooded Fae. As it was, his jaw had dropped. Udrin barely kept the corners of his mouth from turning up. Instead, mind racing under the effects of the mercury he’d ingested, he gasped, “Fali! You . . . what happened? What’s wrong with you?”

  Dropping to his knees, he made a show of trying to rouse her . . . but drew again on the magic in her body even as he shook her by her shoulders. It filled him with each pull, a flooding of energies more heady than even a mouthful of pure, liquid quicksilver surely would have been.

  The human hunt leader, Kadu the Elder, hurried toward the two of them. However, he hesitated at the edge of the area where Fali had drawn anima out of the plant life. The grass blades and leaves in the ragged circle were still green, but visibly limp, even withered. “Fali? Udrin! What happened? Why did she collapse? Why did the anima rise up around her?”

  “I . . . I can’t say . . . I think the anima attacked her!” Udrin found himself blurting. That in turn inspired him to add, “I need to get her back to the others, so that they can examine her!”

  “It attacked her?” the hunter repeated, eyes widening. He quickly touched the edge of his first two fingers to her forehead. “If it attacked her, she needs to go straight to Taje Djin-taje-ul, and we need to get word to Éfan-taje!” Whirling, he barked orders. “Straga! Doldj! Run straight back to Ijesh and get word to the Mother-of-All and the Chief Animadj!”

  Two fifteen-year-olds, female and male, broke off from the others with sharp nods and bolted for the south. At first, they sprinted away, then settled into a lope that would devour the distance of a normal hour’s travel in half the time. Udrin blinked and frowned.

  “Why are you sending them off? I was going to craft a floating disc and fly it back to Ijesh,” he protested, gesturing at the stones. “I can fly her far faster than any of you can run!”

  Kadu flinched and quickly held up a hand. “Don’t use your anima, Udrin! You could trigger whatever it was that hurt Fali-taje. You four,” he added to another set of hunters, gesturing at them. “Bundle your spears together, and use your hunting ropes and nets to make a stretcher. You three, come with me. We need to move the Taje away from the ground that attacked her—Udrin, don’t just stand there. Get away from there! Don’t tap into any more anima, until we know this area isn’t some sort of poison-pool of bad energies.”

  Annoyed to no end, Udrin stalked away from Fali. He knew what had gone wrong with Fali . . . but by lying and saying it was the anima attacking her, he had backed himself out of the chance to haul her off somewhere private for an hour or two so he could finish draining her life-energies. If he could.

  He also realized he needed to do something with all the magical energies buzzing under his skin. Udrin strained his mind to think of a good spell. Unfortunately, the mercury failed him. Finally, the others got Fali loaded onto a stretcher made of belts, ropes, and spears, and started back toward the settled parts of the wadijt to the south. Udrin trudged along in their wake . . . and snuck two whole bars.

  Within half an hour, as his body shook and spasmed in a rambling, odd dance that earned him occasional confused looks from the animals . . . Udrin had an epiphany. The magic did come from the rocks . . . and the clouds . . . and the water, and the fire. Not from living things but from molecules vibrating, producing not just kinetic energy, or thermal, or electric, but animadjic energy. Fae magics resonated in a way that vacuumed the animadjical energies, sucked it up like a child sucking up fruit juice through a hollow reed.

  He didn’t need to turn himself into a Fae, he just needed to turn himself into a sponge. No wonder the Fae and the Efrijt had struggled for so long; they both came from realms where the energy was tied to living entities because it was generated by life, whether that was plants, or animals, sentient beings, specific bloodlines . . . This world was just a big acoustic sound stage of magic!

  Utterly tickled with his insight, Udrin hummed as well as twitched, dancing and crooning. That earned him dirty looks from the humans, but they were little better than tool-wielding animals. Experimenting with touches of anima, Udrin tried to find the right tune, the right way to vibrate, the right natural, inherent jostling of his atoms and his cells as he twitched and hummed and danced his way back to Ijesh.

  ***

  Ijesh

  Flame Sea Territory

  Dizziness struck Jintaya without warning a handful of hours after the other three left. Normally graceful, the pantean leader stumbled and dropped, landing painfully on the
sculpted stone ground. Shocked, the handful of humans in the plaza nearest her hurried over. They helped her check her palms and knees, washed the grit from her wounds, even sent for an animadj healer as she sat there on her hip, dazed by her inner imbalance.

  It took effort to sort out the sensations. The first and strongest came across as a deep draining sensation, like water being sucked down a pipe at great speed. Not a tiny straw of a pipe, but a much greater one, a thousand bundled all together. Yet at the same time, from the same direction, a wild surge of energy that flared and fluctuated like wind-tossed trees sending shafts of hot sunlight swaying and dancing over a single spot on the ground.

  It pulsed within her, this pressing surge, stirring a buzzing feeling inside her body, strangely familiar, yet bearing overtones of caution, even danger. The two conflicting sensations churned within her, making it difficult for her to regain enough equilibrium to even consider standing. But the fact that they had a direction finally penetrated her inner turmoil. Blocking it instinctively once she realized that, Jintaya gained enough clarity in her thoughts to determine the source.

  Specifically, it came from the awareness-web she carried within her as the chief healer of everyone living within the territory claimed by the Flame Sea Tribe. Two people were experiencing polar opposite sensations, some sort of sudden, debilitating, energy-draining illness, and a wild surge of excessive energy that endangered the possessor’s health.

  Someone spoke in her ear. Forced to switch from thinking in Adanjé-lon to Faelon, Jintaya focused on the words. Éfan’s voice, she realized. They used the earrings so infrequently these days, she had forgotten she even wore one. Touching the curve of golden metal cupping the back edge of her pointed ear, she ignored the murmurings of the humans and Dai-Fae around her in favor of Éfan’s words.

  “Does anyone know what happened to Fali? Do any of you know where she went, or what she planned to do today?”

  Fali’s mate, Adan, replied. “She and Kadu—the Elder—were supposed to take a dozen young hunters up to the northern wadijt to look for game animals. I think . . . ibex and warthog?”

  Jintaya spoke in Faelon, answering the call. “I can feel someone up north—two someones—who are in some sort of strange peril, but they are far enough away, I cannot tell . . . Oh. Udrin,” she muttered. Jintaya winced and pressed the edge of her first two fingers to her pinched brow. “Udrin went with them to the north.

  “One of them has lost a lot of energy, to the point where they are ill from their lifeforce being depleted, but the other one is fluctuating with a great deal of it, and the erratic surges are wrecking his health, pulsing in a pattern that feels like mercury poisoning. The fluctuating one must be Udrin, suffering from the mercury we’ve learned he’s been taking, though I do not know how he could be suffering from massive energy on top of his quicksilver sickness.”

  “I can guess. The drained one is Fali,” Éfan stated grimly. “The fluctuating one is Udrin. You all know I’ve been tracking the flow and saturation of anima in our bodies since the first of us arrived several decades ago. It’s how I’ve been able to warn each of us when it gets too strong, to the point of ‘buzzing’ in our bones and blood.”

  “Yes, we spend it on various great works, on building new dwellings and constructions,” Parren sent through the earring link. “Kaife and I have been planning a second settlement in the northlands for the day when we have enough of it to carve a whole new city.”

  Her palms now healed, Jintaya murmured in the human tongue that she was fine, though she did accept a hand up from Bargo. Listening to the debate, she dusted off her golden garments, her attention tuned more inward than to the people around her. It was not common for a Fae to trip and fall, and her attention had become understandably divided. Still, she did not forget her manners, murmuring her thanks and her apologies to the puzzled tribe members.

  “We’ve even ‘bought’ great caravans of grain and other foodstuffs by building catch-basins and stone housing for other settlements,” Rua agreed even as Jintaya murmured her thanks.

  “That’s all fine, but how did Fali end up drained?” Adan demanded, worry for his mate making his voice sharp as he dragged the conversation back to the original topic.

  “Kaife and I are gathering up a rescue kit, Adan,” Zedren interjected. “We’re going to take the repaired sky barge, in case whatever happened has injured them too much and they need a ride back to safety.”

  “Good. I’m coming,” Adan asserted.

  “I am not certain that is a good idea just yet,” Éfan interjected, cautioning all of the pantean members within earring calling range. “Fali has somehow lost much of the anima saturating her body. Udrin has gained a great deal,” Éfan continued. “I dislike accusing anyone, but I suspect he has pulled some sort of trick to siphon energy out of her.”

  “If this is true, then Udrin is a potential danger to the pantean,” Krue stated. The Guardian spoke flatly, not quite hiding his distaste for the younger male. “He may have done it under his own cognizance, or he may be acting upon orders from his Efrijt kin.”

  “Jinji, have you seen him yet?” Jintaya asked.

  “I’m still looking. There are a lot of ravines and canyons to the north, and I’ve been having to check every single one on the way. I’m only just now getting close to the midland sands,” the younger Fae stated, naming the section of rolling hills that had only a few jagged valleys and peaks between the northern and southern parts of the hard desert. The terrain in that area had enough softness to it, some of the sands of the great dune desert surrounding their bit of mountainous terrain washed up through the low pass from time to time.

  “I want him found and scried,” Éfan instructed her. “I want to know what is happening with him and with Fali, before any of us go looking for either of them. This could be Udrin doing something stupid, or it could be an attack by hostile animadjet.”

  “You have a good point. I apologize for jumping to conclusions,” Krue added.

  Again, Jintaya winced and pressed at the tension spot between her golden brows. “Udrin is juvenile, arrogant, and erratic in his thoughts, impulses, and self-control. Add to that the favor-currying influences of his paternal kin, and I have reason to jump to a conclusion. The Efrijt crave access to the animadjic of this world. Whether or not they actually requested it, they would no doubt have instilled a greed for it within Udrin.”

  She almost missed the furtive way a few of the humans around her pressed their own first two fingers sideways against their brows. The locals were copying her gestures again. She made a mental note to talk to Grandmother Siffu and her descendants yet again about not worshipping the Fae, dammit, and then set that thought aside. Udrin’s erratic behavior concerned her far more deeply right now.

  “You think he deliberately reached for too much anima?” Shava asked.

  “I do,” Jintaya agreed. “That’s why his energies are so erratic. He’s just Fae enough—without any human tempering—to tap into the local magics the way we do. To absorb it radically.”

  “So then what happened to Fali?” Zedren asked.

  Grimly, Jintaya oriented herself, turned to her left, and headed for the nearest entrance of the pantean’s hidden stronghold. “I suspect—though I know I do not yet have proof—that Udrin has stolen Fali’s energy.”

  If anyone gasped at that, Jintaya did not hear it; the enchantments in their earrings were designed to carry noises that were intended to be shared. Instead, she heard Jinji’s voice, dry and unsurprised.

  “That does make a lot of sense. He’s arrogant enough to want to grab power,” Jinji allowed. “If he’s succumbing to quicksilver poisoning, then he could have gotten the wrongful idea to drain Fali’s magic. Though what he’d want to do with—hello!” she interrupted herself. “Two running humans, heading home on the best route south. They’re young . . . I think I know where they’re coming from. Just ov
er that rise . . . got them!”

  “Fali is down! I repeat, Fali is down. Kadu the Elder and some of the others are swarming around her. Udrin is . . . huh . . . he’s all twitchy and looking like he’s frowning a bit. Whatever he did, if he did something, they didn’t let him keep doing it. Then again, those are a lot of fairly accurate spear and bow wielders in that group of younglings . . .”

  “Is she injured?” Adan asked anxiously. “Did he attack her?”

  “She’s not moving much, other than breathing. Other than that, I couldn’t say. Calm yourself with deep breaths,” she added before he could interrogate their scrying member further. “Jintaya says she’s still alive, and the humans will do their best to keep her that way.”

  “I’m on my way to you, Jinji,” Éfan stated. “I want to try to use the scrying kite to see if I can discern what he’s doing with the energy he has acquired. I also want to see how Fali is recovering from her abrupt draining, and whether or not it is ongoing.”

  “I have a similar need,” Jintaya agreed. She walked straight at a solid-seeming stretch of cliff wall, closed her eyes at the last moment to avoid the about-to-walk-into-a-solid-surface disorientation, and opened them again two yards later, safe and sound on the other side of the barrier. “Éfan will investigate their magical health, and I will investigate the physical side. Krue, assist Kaife and Zedren in preparing the barge for departure, and decide who will stay and who will go. Éfan, you should also try to reach Ban, Muan, or Kefer. Whatever they learn from the Efrijt about Udrin’s recent activities may have an impact on what we choose to do when we get to the two of them.”

  “I was assisting Zuki with her advanced students. I will stop by the communication crystals when I return to the pantean grounds,” Éfan promised her. “If nothing else, the Efrijt will be given a few words.”

  “I’ll handle that, not you,” Jinji countered. “With Kefer accompanying Muan and Ban to their stronghold, I’m the default liaison for dealing with them. You can come and take over this scrying kite thing first, and do with it whatever you like.”