Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  He’d had the chance to take the Kinslayer’s crown and use its remaining and much-weakened magic to solve his problems, but he’d cast it aside to keep his pain and weakness rather than touch a device made by the monster. But now it was in him, this little hope, a tiny extra thorn, and with every step it worked itself deeper, exactly as she had felt it when she’d set out to give the Aethani their wings back.

  Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more difficult to bear, she thought. There was always more.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HENO LED THE way steadily, sensing nothing other than a few birds they routed from the shrubs. Within a few minutes they had left the peak and begun to follow the Wanderer’s Way more or less, always going downhill in the trail of crushed grasses until at last they emerged from the scrubby bushes onto the road by which they had come. At that point he saw that they had no further need to look.

  A few yards off on a grassy bank, a filthy child and a woman in a queen’s finery were sitting together, each eating hungrily from fruit and nuts that filled a cloth bag in the queen’s lap. The woman was dark and of one of the humans he would have considered Tzarkomen, though he’d never seen any of them dress so outlandishly. She sparkled, bejewelled, and he wondered about that, thinking of Celestaine’s cousin. The child was obviously not hers, he thought. It was dark, barely distinguishable as boy or girl—he’d never been good at telling boys and girls apart in humans—and starveling thin, as dark as the darkest bark of the trees in Nydarrow, cast with their same indigo tones, but both matt and pale where the light caught its skin so that it seemed nearly unreal in the afternoon sunlight. The matted hanks of hair festooned the child’s head and shoulders, full of twigs, leaves and a fancy diamond pin in the shape of a flower stuck on at an odd angle. It was eating with the ferocity of a wild animal and only the whites of its eyes suddenly showed up as it looked at them. Otherwise it did not move other than to nudge the woman and point a finger.

  Heno and the rest emerged one by one from the verge and halted in a line at the road’s edge, though only the woman stopped chewing. She leaned over to put the child behind her but it pushed forwards, looking over her arm. It swallowed and Heno found its dark gaze fixed with unerring malice directly upon him with such a focus that he had the sudden sensation that only the two of them were real and everything and everyone else present was an illusion.

  He’d been looked at with hatred before but until this moment he’d never experienced another’s hate as a strike in the gut, distinctly physical and threatening so that his heart lurched an extra beat and he felt a frisson of fear, so long discarded from his life that its rediscovery was thrilling. He found his hands automatically moving together to the spellcast shape but the child’s gaze watched them, knew it, and as if it was a sensitive animal, scared of the light, the power did not come. He was so surprised he just stood and then glanced at the other, for a break from the oddness as much as for help with understanding who they were and what it meant. He was dimly aware of Celestaine going forward, her hand keeping the rest of them back: she cast a concerned glance at him to see what he made of it but he gave the tiniest shrug.

  The decorated woman’s face was harder to read than the child’s. It seemed to have no emotion at all as it watched them, moving from one of them to the next and the next, though it had an intensity and acuity that made every hair on the back of Heno’s neck stand up in a way he’d only ever felt beneath an imminent thunderstorm.

  They were all stopped in their tracks, even Celestaine in front of him. Only the wind moved, turning the ends of her long, white-blonde hair. The strange woman in the dress was first to move. Never taking her eyes off them she slowly stood up. The bag of fruit tumbled to the ground. Without regard she stepped over it and, lifting her voluminous skirts up with one hand just so that she was able to walk, came towards them, the child behind her, almost entirely hidden. Now that this blocked her sightline to him Heno felt suddenly that he was back in reality, his wits returning. For a moment he had the strange idea that the woman was the child’s puppet, not alive at all, but then, as they crossed the broad rutted lane he saw the breathing, the juicy mess the berries had made, the eye-popping wealth of a massive dowry stitched into all the bewitching sigils of what was clearly a wedding dress. His skin prickled. He felt the cold conviction that this was as large a sorcery as he had ever come across and he had witnessed the construction of more than three of the Kinslayer’s dragons in Nydarrow’s birthing cauls.

  Horse had said the woman ate the fire of Hathel Vale. He knew that fire. It was the soulfire, summoned out of another plane by the force of the Kinslayer’s will; something only gods and demigods could muster. So this creature, whatever she seemed, may be his equal, or worse. Meanwhile the look on her face was that of an explorer moving into a new land, as though she’d never seen people before and didn’t know what they were for. Heno had seen Tzarkomen raise their dead and had cut down many of their zombies and their faces displayed very much the same amazed, witless gawk when they were not stuck in the rictus of their death throes. They never changed, no matter how many pieces they were chopped into. The animation only left them once the necromancer in charge realised they were unresponsive. Then his convictions shrivelled and blew away as the child came back into view.

  Ragged and wretched, her smallness was the inverse of his own strength and power. If looks could kill he would have been dust on the wind.

  “What…?” began Ralas but Celestaine shushed him.

  As Ralas shut his mouth the bride re-fixated on Heno. She stood, the top of her head level with the top of his shoulder, her face inches from his chest as he remained still, his empty hands falling to his sides. Slowly, as the child clung behind her skirts, the young woman’s hand lifted and traced his cheek, the curl of his moustaches, the carvings on his scrimshawed tusk. He didn’t move a muscle. Their lives hung on it in a way his thoughts could not grasp.

  “Who are you?” The bride whispered it clumsily in the Travellers’ patois used throughout the kingdoms, though all the curiosity was on the child’s face, not her own. A terrible fear suddenly ran through him as fast as lightning itself: she knew him and he knew her. It wasn’t personal, it was deeper than that but there was a truth in it that scratched at the very parts of himself he’d had to bury to survive Nydarrow. He swallowed it all down, hard. Feelings belonged out of sight, in the dark, subterranean, where home had been.

  “Heno. Yorughan.” He didn’t know why he clarified his race. He wasn’t sure what she was asking, only that he wanted to have the truth out before she could think of some intuitive way to pry him open, lay everything bare.

  “Made by the monster.” There was a distinct Tzarkomen accent to her word endings, or he imagined that they held a great menace to his health and everyone else’s.

  He was quick to clarify. “No. Enslaved by the monster. Never of him. And now free.”

  Ralas stepped forward with a bow. “One of the liberators of the world, milady…” he said, and got no further as the bride’s gaze fell on him and rendered him mute. She looked back up at Heno.

  “Heart Taker,” she said quietly, as though the words were new and unfamiliar. They all heard it anew in her speaking and they all flinched.

  Frowning, she glanced back down at the child who nodded vehemently. Yes. She was turning back, her touching fingers stretching out when there was a sudden thump that made them all jump back. The bride collapsed in a heap of incalculable wealth and Heno caught her, purely on reflex. Nedlam’s gauntlet slid off the side of her head and a rounded stone rolled out of it into the dirt of the road.

  The child screeched in a high-pitched voice and threw out her hand, open, in Nedlam’s direction. Heno saw the big Yorughan suddenly fall to her knees, eyes crossing, overwhelmed. He felt the prickle of fear as his own throat tightened and a sudden exhaustion came to him so that he had to use all his strength to stand and hold the unconscious woman up.

  “Stop!” Celesta
ine cried. “Ralas, Heno, stop everyone!”

  As he gasped for air Heno looked at the child but found only fury and relentless, righteous hatred in the black eyes as her gaze darted between them. She looked like he felt when he woke up nights, sweating in the dark, thinking he was going to die for his deeds before the false alarm collapsed into a sadness he could not be rid of until dawn came. He saw that she had lost so much. Thousands of people had. He’d never cared. Now it was hard to see it and as soon as he did see it he felt it and that was much worse. He was almost dizzy. He didn’t want it.

  As Celestaine gently extended a hand to offer some kind of comfort the girl saw the recognition in Heno’s face and her eyes filled with tears. The grip she had exerted on him and on Nedlam vanished. Air rushed into his lungs. Nedlam sat down hard on the ground, panting. Heno felt that in one more moment everything that held him together might be unravelled and then he would confess all he had done: the Aethani mutilation, the countless acts of torture and the things which were clouded in his memory and would never come into focus but had served to cover his skin with the static sparks of magic. But before it could happen—

  “Ne’Thuh!” said a deeper, more powerful voice in a kind of whisper and the spear of the centaur came down with a sudden impact in front of the child’s feet, making a twanging noise and a burst of light, startling her enough to make her drop back and shrink down into a ball. Ralas and Celestaine shrank away, hiding their faces from the light of the Draeyad’s cast.

  Horse came pacing forwards, a scowl on her face. She disdained to help Nedlam, who struggled to get back to her feet, gasping for air, and went directly to retrieve her javelin. She smacked Ralas with the side of it and he was suddenly on his arse on the ground, breath coming at last to his purpled face, surprised injustice in his glare. She stabbed the spear into the earth, which held it firmly, and then carefully bent to take the unconscious woman from Heno’s treacherous grasp. She carried her a few steps and then with a heavy grunt she put her front knees down on the road, sat down heavily next to the grubby, silently crying child, and looked at Celestaine as their leader.

  “This is how you treat people who have saved the Draeyads?” Disgust was in her every tone. Heno resolved himself to stand, face what must be faced.

  “No,” Celestaine said. She spun to face the Yorughan. “Nedlam, why?”

  “She wanted to kill Heno,” Nedlam said, on her feet now but leaning down, hands on her hammer haft for support, as though she’d run for miles. “Sorcerers. You have to stop them before they start.”

  “Child,” the centaur said gently. “Do not fear, I am here to serve those who serve the Forest. What say you?” In her arms the woman became suddenly, actively awake, pushing herself free. Heno found himself on bended knee offering his hand for the gods only knew what, though she didn’t need him; she had rolled and stood in a moment. The bride crouched, a feral light in her face that was sizing up each one of them in an order to dispatch; and then the child made some noise and immediately she turned, ignoring the centaur as she gathered the small one up into her lap.

  Heno found himself close-flanked by the others who had taken up arms, but now held them loosely in the hopes they weren’t needed. He had been flanked before, many times, by battle-hardened colleagues whose interests and his own ran to slaughter and survival. This was new. It somehow baffled him that these, excluding Nedlam, would side with him. His hands remained at his sides to show he meant no harm.

  Blood from a cut on the bride’s temple dripped down onto the sleeves of woman and child, blooming into red red roses. A small hand went up and touched the spot and as it came away the flow had already slowed and become sticky. A moment later there was no wound at all. Heno and Ralas shared a glance but none of them on Celest’s side dared speak in case they broke the peace. After a time the child stopped sniffling and pushed her way out of the bride’s embrace. She pointed at Heno and her face lifted regally.

  “Kinslayer,” said the bride.

  Then the child pointed at Nedlam.

  “Kinslayer,” said the bride.

  The child thumped her own chest with her small fist and the woman said, “I speak for this girl, Kula. This girl speaks through me. I am—” She struggled to find the words with the frustration they all knew from trying to speak languages they were new to.

  “Tzarkomen,” Heno said, gesturing in only the slightest way at the bride to show who he meant.

  “Tzarkomen,” the bride snarled in a way that clearly indicated what the child thought of Tzarkomen—not much. Then she placed her hand softly on her own chest, “Lysandra. My name. I. Am. Uht’eltehi.” She clearly struggled to find any other way to translate the last word and failed.

  Nedlam scratched her head suddenly, causing them all to jump. “I don’t know what Uht’eltehi is. Uht’tlemakli is big Tzarkomen war sorcerer who leads a legion of zombies. Hard to fight, harder to kill. This kid must be from Caracu. The first legion went there when I was new. Before the war began. They were purple too, purple and darker than the Tzarkis.”

  The woman said, forcefully, with the first sign that she had a mind of her own, “Uht’eltehi.”

  “And that, my dears, is a very strange thing to say,” Ralas interjected, dusting off his clothing unnecessarily. Heno was starting to see it as necessary though. Ralas arranged what could be fixed and he kept his pain in check that way. But Ralas was talking again, “Because Uht means extreme-most and Eltehi is a word for the other plane that the Tzarkomen claim the spirits wander about on before and after life.”

  “Xinmat,” the bride said firmly, bringing both her hands into fists with a swift action and bumping them together, one on another.

  “Xinmat means ‘union’ and also ‘solid’.” Ralas said, testing his jaw to see if it was still working. It seemed to be.

  “Lysandra. Uht’eltehi xinmat.” The bride nodded and added, more softly, “Mama,” as she tenderly took the child’s hand.

  Heno felt himself crack. A fine crack, almost unnoticeable. He was baffled by it. After all he had seen and done, it made no sense.

  “That’s all very nice, but what are we going to do?” Ralas looked to Celestaine. It had begun to grow dark as they talked and the vale was becoming noticeably cool and damp.

  “Let’s make camp,” she suggested. “We can find out more about where these two are headed and if we stay close to the Avenue then Wanderer can find us.” Which sounded like more of a plan than it was but Heno knew she couldn’t just let them go. She was ever on the lookout for something that needed mending and here it was, right in her hand.

  “I shall create a space in the forest where we may be secure,” Horse said, sticking her forelegs out and getting up carefully, spear retrieved. “Follow my trail.”

  Heno looked at her and shrugged with Nedlam-esque brevity.

  Their camping spot was within the lower curve of the Avenue at a place where hazels grew in a natural ring and were overseen by the larger, thicker trunks of bromantain. In the broadleaf canopies a troop of flying squirrels argued furiously before being ousted by the centaur’s double stomp of command. A brief hail of tain-nuts and poop pattered down in their wake as Ralas and Nedlam set about making a fire, cautiously watching Horse in case they made a wrong move.

  As the heat warmed them and they handed around their food to share the ragged girl seemed to cheer and the icy aloofness with which her ‘mama’ had held them softened somewhat, although they sat as far from the two Yorughan as they could get and didn’t look in their direction. Ralas began to tell a story, a simple one, about the origins of the races, accompanied and dramatised by music on his lute. He was interrupted briefly when Horse gave a cry and hoisted herself across the tiny clearing in a single bound. With surprise Heno saw her target was Nedlam, standing by a tree, her belt knife in her hand.

  Horse, of an equal height to Nedlam, furiously snatched a wrist-thick branch away from the Yorughan’s grasp. “Do I try to cut off your arms? This is a living
tree!”

  Nedlam held up her hands. “I wanted to make a toy,” she said, pointing with her knife blade at the pair across the fire.

  “Then make it out of seasoned old wood or it won’t last a week without splitting,” Horse snarled and used the point of her javelin to flick a fallen branch up at Nedlam, who caught it easily, a kind of smile around her thick tusks.

  “All right, Horsie. Take it easy.”

  Horse lashed her tail in a swift whisking action of annoyance, but she withdrew and went back to her guardian position near the little girl, Kula.

  The rest of them sat down again and Ralas resumed his lengthy story, hoping, Heno saw, to draw the child’s interest: but it was the woman who watched Ralas with hawkish attention, her eyes following every movement of his hands as he played and his mouth as he spoke. Her eyes widened whenever he dramatised something with a different voice or expression. She looked like she was devouring him through her gaze. Heno understood the hunger for softer, better things. He glanced at Celestaine.

  Nedlam whittled steadily as one by one they talked. Once or twice she tried to ask questions of the girl, but Kula would only stare at them mutely, sometimes looking at her ‘mama’. Eventually Ralas sighed and gave up too and put his lute to the side, only to have the young woman immediately reach out and grab it by the neck. Her beaded bracelets jangled and shot the clearing full of reflected colours as she snatched it to herself and gave him a calculating look, to see if he was going to try to stop her. Heno watched covertly, pretended that he had much to do with Celestaine’s care of her armour and the horses’ saddles.