Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  Behind the cattle pens a long train of dusty travellers, wagons and pack animals had pulled into the halt and begun unloading. He saw Ghurbat striding confidently that way. A Cheriveni arrival was for celebrating. They always had so many fascinating things to show and tell. Normally he would have been itching to start talking to them but now he watched them with a heavy heart, his eyes scanning the open areas between stands for a tiny, angry figure. Yes, angry, he thought. That was right. He didn’t see anything but when he said goodbye to Forib and turned back to the fruit side of things his throwing apple had mysteriously vanished.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE GIRL THE refugees had called Kula waited in the shadow of the curtains that hung around the fabric shop. She didn’t call herself anything, nor would she have answered to any name. It was clear when people meant her. She could feel their attention like a form of heat.

  Her bare toes poked out into the sunlight until she made herself stand on tiptoe. She held her apple in her hand. It had a good, solid shape, a nice feeling, and it was full of life. There were a number of hiding spots around the covered market which were very good, but this one let her watch the most people moving around and since nobody ever looked at the old tapestry that hung before her she felt safe here.

  Through the weave she could easily make out the familiar layout of the fresh produce stand, the seed merchant’s table full of shallow bowls and the shoe crafter’s bench. Many traders came and went and now there were new people she wasn’t familiar with coming from the caravan that had just set down. They were eager to see the market and went around in groups, talking all the time. They were mostly small, dark people, favouring blue clothing. They didn’t resemble the painted beige and brown giants of the trading post. Most importantly, none of them had the huge forms, strange grey hides and tusks of the killers.

  She was waiting for them. She could feel them out there. Distant, but there. The tendrils of energy that connected them to the web of all life had a very distinctive flavour, especially when it came from those who used magic that was related to the magic her people had once possessed. Once tasted never forgotten.

  THEY HAD WASHED over her home in a wave. All the brightness of her family was extinguished quickly. She felt them go out one at a time, fast, like flames quenched by water. For a few days she had eaten the carrots and other things in the root cellar where she was put, but then those roots began to soften and their rot told her that the earth itself had been made poison. It was coming down slowly. She must get out.

  Above the ground where her village had stood were only wrecks of the houses, ash and mud. Stinking, foul things were stuck in the mud. After a time she realised they were bodies. A body was not like a root. There was nothing in them left to take. She could not tell which of them had been her mother, her father, her brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins. She could have, if they had still had enough faces but there was only ruin, blackened, burnt, savaged apart by scavengers while she had been in her hole. There was no mothering, no fathering, no nothing going on. She felt uncertain suddenly about where she stood, who she was, about what to do.

  But there was something there, stuck in the mud near the river wash, feeble but alive still. Its heart beat, weakly, erratically, as it clung to life. She followed its light, stumbling, coughing with the terrible smell, the flies everywhere coming at her in waves like water there were so many of them. Their tiny, cold bodies were endless surprises on her skin. They battered at her senselessly, sparkling, brilliant. She felt motes of what she had loved in them, rising to the sky in other forms, but not here, not seeing her any more and her heart was crushed suddenly, and speared, and frozen. She hurried to the life, because anything was better than being alone.

  The place that had been the wash, where the shallows of the river spread wide and lapped the shore in a kind of tiny beach was now filth and mud. Amid the objects left there—the forms of the dead and the wreckage of the little pier from which she used to fish—there was a creature, stuck fast.

  It was huge. She could see that once the life in it had burned like fires. It was large and had a heavy head which it lifted as she arrived. Its lips moved in speech around thick tusks as it fought against the clothing it wore, trapped beneath it. There was something wrong with its legs. She could see that it couldn’t move them. Nothing from its chest down moved. Its breathing was quick and difficult. She realised this was one of the destroyers, left behind for some reason to die here in the mud of the wash while the rest of the warband went on. It lifted a shaky hand, and a fine line of white fire twined around between its fingers. In the ravaged face of the thing she saw the eyes narrow, focusing on her, and tendrils of silver fire came streaking out towards her like hunting dogs.

  They were weak. They faded as they stretched. She felt the creature put all its remaining energy into the effort and slowly, surely the silver lines crept up to reach her chest, seeking her heart. The air around them shivered as if trying to brush them off. The tips of the tentacles touched her jerkin and she felt cold and dizzy. She put her hand up and where the silver met her she was burned suddenly, horribly. She snatched it back, the life already gone out of some bit of her and into the thing that reached.

  Her throat hurt her as she jumped back. She landed awkwardly on something and fell into the mud. The silver fire rushed at her. She rolled away. Under her burnt hand a hard object shifted and her fingers closed on a rock. In the echo of the silver touch she remembered that this is how the others had gone. Burning, but only for a moment, then the silence. Flies battered her as she spun, vengeful, made of hate.

  The rock hit the creature’s head. It wasn’t a strong enough throw to kill it but the silver fire went out. A wound opened above one of its eyes and blood trickled. It struggled for breath. Mouth working, working, saying so much.

  She got up and walked over to a larger rock, levered and then heaved it out of the mud. The creature’s arm and hand flapped about, as though looking for something lost. The fire came again, weaker, moving all around blindly in search of her. She carried her rock closer, watching the fire turn towards her. Within its silvery radiance she could see the creature’s essential being, and a piece of her own, as it spent itself in a final desperation. There was almost nothing left in its ruined body, only enough to animate the eyes as she crouched down and looked into them. Big, dark grey, red rimmed and bloodshot, festering with flies at the corners.

  They looked at her. The lips worked around the tusks, stuck to the yellowed carvings that marked one of them. Every line of the whirling signs was full of black blood. They seemed to be pictures, but of what she didn’t know.

  She waited, the fire creeping to her leg, then moved aside out of its reach and hurled the rock onto the thing’s face. It fell back, one tusk broken and a piece spinning away as the rock fell aside. The fire sprawled in the air, losing shape. It took two flies, brightened for a moment, then fizzled away.

  It took two more blows with the rock’s edge, bone crunching, all her effort, before she felt the last of it go. A tiny mote of silver flickered for a moment where she watched for it, right between the monster’s eyes, and she quickly reached out with her burnt hand and took it, that piece of her, right back. Then she straightened up and the pain of her hand and the weariness, the hunger, the grief, the rage overtook her and she did nothing to stop them pouring out of her, a fool, as her mother would have said, spending it all for naught on the flies and the mud, tainting the water with it so that downstream some other thing would catch the flavour and be robbed of something, turned to a darker path all unknowing. But she had no wish to stop it even if she had the strength. Let everything die.

  But it did not. And eventually she ran out of tears and sobbing, lay empty on the ruined earth and stared at the sky until the sky filled her up to the brim.

  She knew later what a fool she was when she had to walk away from that place, alone. She had not even anger to help her feet march or hate to find a direction, though any direction
was good enough. She put one foot in front of the other, watching them. She thought of the creature and its strange, ugly face, its unusual magic that was like hers, and not, because it was connected to the same place. It came through the blood from that hidden world. The Tzarkomen’s magic was like this too. A source of power that could only find its way through living things—her, or the creature, or the rest of the world. Or it could make the recently dead live, if there was enough of it. That’s what the Tzarkomen could do, but not her people. They were a little-known offshoot tribe, whose mastery of it had taken them a different, contemplative path.

  The creature could have taken her life, but it would not have known her, it would only have killed her. All that she could have inherited from it—its knowledge, its thoughts, its dreams, the exacting precision of its body and how it was made—she had ignored, from revulsion. Not one bit of it would she touch, even if absorbing its last breath had been her only hope at life. All that she could have inherited from her own people was forever gone, burned like it was worthless, unseen and unknown forever. They could have lived on in her memory, been taken forwards by her, carried by her, transmitted to another life, another time, when a safe place was found. This was their magic. Saving, remembering, restoring, preserving. But her people, the end of centuries of memory and learning, of gentle and exacting preservation, were lost, gone in white fire, as if they had never been.

  BUT NOW SHE was back in a place where there were many people again; kind people, warm-hearted people. Their sweetness was medicine. She hid among their tents and warehouses, finding little nooks in barns and amid the rafters of the drying houses. Because she could tell where they were long before they got near she was able to avoid them quite easily but acquiring food was difficult. They were extremely cautious with that and she didn’t like being seen, though it couldn’t be helped. Hunger forced her hand, though she knew that this man with the fruits and vegetables would not give her up. She wouldn’t have to reveal herself to wandering mages by using her ability to draw life without eating. So she had started stealing from him and was seen, and not caught.

  A few hours after the apple, she was starving and hoping to get a little more for the night ahead. When she saw the bowl of smooth, green, oily vegetables, so rich and tasty, placed carelessly at the end of a low row, she knew that they were for her.

  A glance at the stall man confirmed it. He was deliberately turning his back, whilst looking over his shoulder now and again. Across the way the other stallholders were attentive to their own business.

  She hesitated from her hiding place behind the tapestry. She waited. Time passed and the sun began to go down. The stalls busied as those who’d come in on the last caravan made purchases, their selling done. They lit the lamps and she heard their few musical instruments being tuned up for a little feast, which they held every time a new group came to stay for a day or two. If there was a safe time to go then it was now. She would avoid the obvious dish, try for something easier. She had her exit route to the cattle pen, which was now complicated by new animals milling about. But as she was about to go she saw a strangely dressed woman appear at the fruit stall and appear to examine the bushels.

  She was small; wiry, black hair tied up in a fancy heap on her head with long red scarves that fell down in a tail along her back. Leather armour straps were set over other red and brown cloth, binding her from neck to knees and elbows. A fierce amount of pouches and sheaths adorned these straps, all small. She wore a knapsack and her boots were tall. Her face, just visible beneath the hanging scarf at her forehead and above the sweep of the one about her throat, was coloured darkly around the eyes and red at the lips. She had a way of moving that made her seem less than she was. The life in her burned with a ferocity that was only matched by the degree she hid it and made herself seem weak and small somehow with a trick that couldn’t be seen.

  Kula stared at the woman, fascinated, compelled by the intensity of that burn and the difficulty she had in perceiving it. She didn’t know what she was looking at. Not any ordinary woman.

  Gold flashed in rings on the newcomer’s fingers and about her wrists. It made a soft tinkling as bangles hit one another. She spoke very softly and she held the attention of the young Oerni stallholder effortlessly and completely. He could not look away.

  Kula realised her chance was here. She dashed out, quiet, low, seized the bowl of shoots and was stuck fast for a moment, not understanding as she began to panic. The bowl did not move.

  Then she felt that it was attached to the stand. It could not move. It was a trap.

  The whole stand trembled. Terror gripped her. She found herself staring eye-to-eye with the golden-bangled, fiery woman on the other side of the stall. The gaze that met hers was curious, warm, amused. It saw her as no other had ever seen her. It didn’t just see her. It saw the fire, the life, the binding cords of magic. One impeccable eyebrow went up. Kula felt recognised, fresh terror starting in her throat. The stallholder turned, slow, as if he didn’t want to see what was going on, because he didn’t want to catch her in the act.

  Kula let the bowl go, grabbed whatever was next to it: some kind of poms.

  There was a commotion suddenly—the large boss man of the place rushing forwards at a jog, a hand on his broad belt to hold his belly down as he came, mouth moving angrily, pointing at Kula.

  The fiery woman winked at her and then, with mouth opening in an obvious scream, clutched both hands to her chest and fell down, crashing through the stall’s front display, sending colours and shapes flying in all directions before she landed in the dust, convulsing and twitching. Fruits rolled everywhere.

  The stallholder turned back to her, agape. The boss man stopped in his tracks to bend down and help.

  Kula fled, into the cattle pen, through the beasts, out the other side and among the tents of the visitors. She ran and didn’t stop until she reached her outermost hiding place—the abandoned burrow of some long dead creature, shrouded by hanging weeds in a reeking stream bank that backed onto the Post’s northern approach. Inside the darkness there she ripped into the poms she had gotten, cramming her mouth, trembling as she ate. When she was done she left the mess behind her and went out on the road, not looking back. She didn’t know what it meant. She had seen Wanderer’s flame settle down here, at Taib, when she was still at the great distance of the Commune. It was why she came here although she was too shy to go close. If he was here among them it was enough. But now she had seen another Guardian flame in the woman’s strange eyes. And she’d been seen.

  She felt too frightened. Wanderer was not her Guardian. It was only his light that she had felt secure by. But he had drawn another. She didn’t know what it meant. She only felt the lingering touch of the Slayer about that woman’s hidden magic, a taint, like a stain, the kind of thing between a mother and a father, between siblings who have been close for long ages and begun to resemble one another. There was only one female Guardian she knew of who fitted this possibility. Most people knew her as a trickster, patron of vagabonds and thieves. She wasn’t a proper Guardian because she’d never been given someone to guard. She had no temples though the people of the roads built little shrines to her out of whatever they found at every crossroads, even if it was only a heap of grass. In the war they said she’d gone to Nydarrow and never come out.

  The woman had saved her, no doubt. But what for? She didn’t want to find out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BUKHAM REALISED HIS little thief was there and his chance was now and that he must do something. But at the very same moment of this revelation the fascinating little woman with the golden bracelets also realised the same thing.

  He saw her look over his shoulder and take a breath—to shout out that the girl was there, he thought, to ruin any hope he had left of not having to catch her in an ugly scene. In his mind’s eye he saw terror in the little girl’s face, screaming, hating him so he was completely thrown when he saw the conspiratorial wink from the woman’s large,
beautifully painted, dark eye. Then the woman screamed and had a theatrical fainting fit. The stall collapsed. It was a bit overdone but effective, no doubt, there was even twitching and spasming among the crushed berries.

  He was so grateful he didn’t pause, but leapt over the remains of the counter, scattering apples and poms, sticks of spice and little trays of fragrant leaves. In a burst of yellow good-powder, meant for helping stomachs ruined by eating the Kinslayer’s leavings, he bent low to the fallen customer, showing himself heroically involved in helping. At the same time he fervently hoped the little one escaped somehow and his obligations with her.

  Uncle Ghurbat was swift on the scene, bringing his box of remedies with him, a moment of two after Aunt Cherti had arrived with smelling salts and Authentic Djinni Waters, which had cost an entire box of dried violet stamens two years back when the last of the glamorous, aethereal Elennae came past, trading their fabulous nostrums. An argument over the twitching body promptly ensued as each insisted their care must be administered first. Bukham was pushed aside as of no interest, his efforts to make sure there was nothing to choke on, no stone too close, all ignored as the physicians went head to head. As he was elbowed away he saw the downed woman cast a quick glance at him through her heavily painted eyelashes and he gave her clear-eyed assessment a helpless shrug. Seeing he was of no use she went back to her twitching, careful to thrash the first dropper of Authentic Djinni Waters firmly away from her face with a well-timed swing of one arm. As Cherti trilled a note of horror and doom Bukham backed off and looked around.