Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  Nedlam shook her head. “Lot of steak on there,” and she gave Horse’s rump a friendly open-handed whack.

  “The hide must be valuable though,” Bukham said, tentatively, fear causing him to stammer slightly. “And the er… teeth and bones and whatnot. For souvenirs and medicine and that.”

  “I used to hunt men for sport,” Horse said in a pointed note of protest and a mild warning. “I can start again anytime.”

  “We are not hunting it,” Celestaine said although now that they had started the subject she wondered if that wasn’t exactly what they should do. She was watching Kula skipping along at the front of the line, performing a strange leaping jig that at first she’d thought was part of the tracking but later realised was simply playful. Lysandra strode behind her with the free and easy gait of someone in blithe ignorance of just about everything.

  We might have to hunt it, she thought, considering that was the only thing left to do if it was already eating livestock and burning people.

  They saw the fin-like wingtip again many times over the next hour. It circled them in a way that Celestaine could have sworn was teasing. The whirlpools of mist were greeted by leaps from Kula, her hands outstretched, arms like wings, dipping and curling, Lysandra swooping around her in a perfect mirror. Their faces were gleeful. Sometimes they snarled in passing, pretending to be wild dogs, but only as a joke. The entire thing took place in silence. The thunka thunka of Horse’s triple-hooves, the patter of their feet and the clink of metal bits of gear were the only muffled sounds.

  “Am I the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on?” Bukham said from behind her after about ten minutes had passed and the game had subsided into ordinary walking again.

  “Nope,” Celestaine replied.

  “Is that some kind of—creature?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is it a dr—”

  “Don’t say it,” Celestaine said, interrupting before he could get the word out.

  “We should kill it,” Nedlam said, closer than expected, trying to whisper ineffectively. “It will bring a bounty or at least goodwill. I can do it.”

  They did need it. People couldn’t eat diamonds but they would like anyone who saved them from becoming monster food.

  “I’m leaving it for now,” she said and gestured at the woman and girl. “They seem to like it.” She wanted to know what Kula was doing before she made any rash decisions.

  “They like it now,” Bukham said. “But later, when it’s hungry. Then what?”

  Celestaine turned sharply and he almost walked into her, as she’d planned. “You talk too much.”

  “Yes but it’s a dragon and it’ll eat us sooner or later. Ned’s right. It’s got to go.”

  Celestaine unclipped the scabbard and took out her sword, held it to him hilt first. “Go on, then. Have at it.”

  “No, no, I can’t, I…” Bukham looked about, pleadingly, but only Murti’s chuckle answered. “If this mist lifts we’ve had it though,” he said, more plaintively. “Haven’t we?”

  “Maybe,” Celestaine said. She let the sword slide back into place with some reluctance but she had no plans other than a vague notion that the Draeyad might be able to spell her spear into taking it out of the air. On the ground they had some kind of chance, although nothing that could pierce a dragon’s skin with the possible exception of Horse’s spear. She was hoping that better land would turn up, but at that point a consistent squelching that had been getting steadily more present underfoot became the outskirts of a bog, limed in green and with mud thick enough to sink over the ankle. They had reached the river. She took a bearing and decided they must head further north, and was just about to announce it when she found Kula standing before her, hands on her hips, glaring up at her. Lysandra paced up behind her, silently, her hems dragging in the mud.

  “Yes?”

  Kula was fidgeting again, making gestures that Celestaine suddenly realised weren’t the jabbings of an angry child but the jabbings of an angry child who was using a very fast and clever way of talking—to Lysandra, in silence. Because she was deaf. And apparently Celestaine was slow off the mark but now she glanced up at Lysandra for a translation and saw a look of tender, maternal care on the young face as it inclined to Kula. One which quickly became cool and business-like as it moved to her.

  “She says it heard you. Because you want to hunt it, it will go away.”

  “It talked to you?”

  Some more fast handwork.

  “No talking. Understanding. Heard you on the inside.”

  “But—if you can talk to it then, ask it where it came from?”

  The girl’s stare became a little contemptuous.

  “She already did. It said it came from the hole in the world.”

  “And where’s that?”

  A shrug. Like, who cares about that kind of thing? As if it mattered.

  “I think it might matter.” Murti had come up behind her while they were talking. She felt startled and angry.

  “Are you reading minds now too? Is everyone suddenly able to do it but me?”

  He looked up at her for a moment from his stooped position. The mist had made strange dew on his rough beard and the straggly ends of his hair. Behind him the bulky figure of Bukham looked like a clay golem made of two muds, louring in the gloom. “I wander. But you’re right. It matters a lot. If there is such a thing we might avoid the necessity of a long journey.”

  “Just—” Celestaine paused to look about the skies in which nothing figured but the gloaming fog. “Just what is going on here? First you say we’re off to find the gods and we have to go far to reach some place but you’re short on detail and suddenly this dragon business and fires and Draeyads is making me very keen on the details. I’m not going a step further until you tell me what’s on your mind. Wherever it’s been. Is going. You know what I mean.”

  “It’s not far to this boat…”

  Celestaine turned neatly on her heel and punched Deffo firmly on the jaw, mid-sentence. “Stop sneaking around.”

  Nedlam guffawed with a sound like a bear coughing. Deffo went over like a felled tree and lay looking up at the barren clouds.

  Celestaine straightened, eased her fist. “No more godly fannying around. Now you’re here. Now you’re not. It’s as far to this boat as it is to the moon until I get some answers.”

  Murti sighed. “I feared that it would come to this but I never thought it would happen so soon.”

  “What would happen?” Celestaine felt that her head would soon burst from the inside if she had to restrain herself much more. She’d run with the Guardians a few times, that was true, and it had all flowed nicely in the simple necessity of stopping the Kinslayer, but now that was done with all of their goals seemed far muddier and less noble in comparison and she wasn’t about to get tangled in bad business. There had been a lot of that. She rubbed her forehead, thinking of the Aethani as Deffo said quietly from his spot on the ground,

  “What he did to the gods has made the structure of the world a bit leaky. Stuff seeps through. S’why we need to go see what he did and undo it, or fix it, or fill it in, or whatever it is. Find the gods, find the problem, fix it.”

  “That sounds… like a good thing?” Celestaine asked, looking to the two of them, rubbing the knuckles of her punching hand gently with her fingertips.

  “It’s more a case of a necessary thing. Mending.” Wanderer said. “Otherwise there’ll be a lot more wandering going on and not of a kind that is going to help anyone. Things out of their places, stranded, causing havoc. You’ve seen it. Need I go on?”

  She thought of the Vathesk. Immortal beings from another world, ever-eating, never sated, insane. He need not go on. “I want the world to go back to being stable and a place where people can live in peace. Somehow.” She said it aloud, centering herself on that. It had always been her goal, one which she realised as time went on that was possibly only ever to be a dream. A twinge of an emptiness she had been staving
off for years pulled at her. She turned to look for Heno and found him standing patiently, watching the whole group of them very closely with his keen eye for the turn of a head or a heart. He glanced at her and nodded.

  “We have much to make up for. It’s all right to spend a lifetime trying to fix broken things. The world can be remade better than before.” He nodded to her and she knew that he was referring to his own past, a butcher, a breaker of beautiful things. No longer.

  Her sense of purpose abruptly returned.

  She looked down at Kula who was watching her with an expression remarkably akin to Heno’s. “What do you recommend, if we want to find this hole?”

  The girl turned and pointed north north-west. She flickered her rapid hand signs to Lysandra.

  “It is too hard to tell you how to get there because she has not seen the land, but she can see the hole. North, beyond this land’s edge.”

  Celestaine went to Deffo and offered him her hand. She didn’t feel like reconciliation but she didn’t need it, she realised. “Let’s find this boat, then.”

  “You will say this time how I was helpful, won’t you? This time you will say I got it right. They will make a song about this most heroic journey.”

  “Boat,” Celestaine said. “Before something from another world makes us its dinner.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE SHOP OF Messrs Catt and Fisher was located in Cinquetann Riverport. It was in the wrong direction for the rest of the party but Tricky was able to get them there in double quick time, using Pond Hopper’s Drop, a trinket that the Kinslayer had never missed and which had served her admirably well since she’d found it in a shipment of valuables looted out of some Grennish place or other. She’d been in charge of the museum and the

  armoury at the time, an oversight of the kind anyone only made once, but once was enough.

  The Drop was a phial of murky green water and persuading Ralas to take a drop of it was more than she could have stomached what with all the questions that were bound to flow and then the even worse lengthy explanations of how you could move from any watery stop to any other watery stop. Being a Guardian, or demi-Guardian probably helped, she figured, as the phial itself had been wrapped in an alchemist’s vellum containing many painstaking notes that ended with a volley of epithets and damnations about its inefficacy so virulent that they had made her eyes water. For her it had worked a treat, however. She had a way with making things work.

  So instead of telling him, she’d gone to some great lengths making mint tea at their rest stop and popped a drop in there. From then on all she had to do was be sure to hold his hand. That had proved harder to engineer, so she’d had to add some wine into the mix. After that it had been a doddle to encourage him to think of some roistering old marching tunes and then sing along as they went. The day was damp and rainy and sure enough within an hour she’d found a muddy puddle of suitable size. From there on it had been a simple matter to be sure to grip his hand and swing his arm in time to the music in such a way that he simply followed her as she jumped into it.

  Then they fell through the world and came out with a massive explosion of water, weeds, mud and leaves from a little fishing hole just the eastern side of the riverport town.

  Both of them were quite dry, although Tricky had to remove a medium-sized trout from her hood. She watched Ralas closely as he spluttered with surprise, standing in a braced position as if he expected the world to tip him off it when he wasn’t vigilant. He was still mostly drunk and she wondered if she could pass off the entire thing as a wine-induced hallucination rather than magery when he turned and threw up suddenly into the long grass beside the pond.

  Across the water she saw an old man, Cheriveni by dress with his regular blue tunic and matching trousers, his neat and ever-so pragmatic wide hems and edged pockets: but he was much too ragged for public consumption at any civilised spot. He sat watching them, fishing pole in hand, his jaw slack.

  “What ho, squire!” she called merrily in her best weaving voice, meant to mend any social break. “Sorry, sorry!”

  She tossed him the trout, which flapped vigorously in objection, but it merely slapped him around the cheeks and then dropped back into the grass at his feet before flipping itself into the dark water.

  “Useless old duffer,” she muttered, angry that her effort was wasted. People were terrible fools most of the time, in her experience, and while this could be made amusing it was now only annoying. She grabbed Ralas’ hand most firmly as his retching stopped and hauled him with her as fast as she could make him go. He felt like skin and bones in her grip, something only a few days short of being scrying material, and she had to bite down on the surge of guilt that came with that comparison. A dead brother who deserved it was one thing, but Ralas hadn’t deserved what had happened to him. Fortunately there were bushes close by into which she made sure they disappeared before the old man could get his wits about him. The painful slap of brambles across the face had her saying sharply to Ralas. “Snap out of it, man.” And she was herself snapped out of it.

  “What. What,” Ralas was saying and she began to regret everything she had ever said or done that had brought her to this point.

  “You’re a terrible soak,” she said, covering her lies with more lies which were completely irrelevant as the magic that held him outside death and beyond healing had no effect on regular alcohol intake. She hoped her bluster would act as a smokescreen as well as annoy him out of putting two and two together and figuring she’d conned him. “Drinking all the way. I expect you’ve even forgotten what day it is and now I have to fish you out of a pond because you can’t even walk straight. And you call yourself a friend.”

  “But, but…” Ralas staggered a little, trying to tug himself free of her but in a way that suggested his heart wasn’t really in it.

  “There must have been something in the wine,” she added, wondering if he really was going to fall for it. “You can’t trust anything the clans trade, they’re always thinking they can get one over on you. That Forinthi woman definitely looked suspicious to me.”

  “Forin… do you mean Celestaine? She’s the last person to trade… actually she’s the last person to have wine. Also, I don’t drink. I was only pretending to so that you’d stop pestering me.”

  He was too sober and in a minute, he was going to start asking questions and then they’d never get on. She took a leap out of logic and sailed far beyond it. “I’ll forgive you the terrible things you said about my mother, but you need to make more of an effort. Honestly, you’re a burden. Don’t you want them to succeed? Who knows what terrors they’re already facing if this really is the Kinslayer’s unfinished business?” And with that medley she had given it her best obfuscating shot. “There’s an inn up the way here. We need to clean up and get organised. This is Cheriveni territory and we need to get in and get out quick. They write everything down, the little pests.”

  “Anyarrgh,” he seemed to be saying, holding his head as if holding it together. “You… can’t go there.”

  She hauled on his arm, setting off at a smart pace so he had to spend all his focus on staying upright. “Don’t worry, so sweet of you to think of it but really I have all the right paperwork. Let’s just keep going so we can get changed. We’ve nearly made it. And you could apologise. It was all very hurtful.”

  The magic of the phial, or the pond water perhaps, had not agreed with him and he was unable to muster a response other than to stumble along with her. His bony arm felt too much like a stick in her hand so she let go of it and went for sleeve instead, of which there was far more than she expected. Nonetheless she was able to keep up a good degree of fishwifery all the way to the small inn, at which point she turned rapidly very convivial and comforting for the benefit of the family who owned it and to whom she was known as a regular, friendly little travelling tailor. They were so pleased to see her that the oddness of her companion and his starveling condition didn’t bother them in the slightest onc
e she had explained his bruised face and hobble as the result of single-handedly fighting off a gang of ruffians in the woods and the prospect of a musical evening even had them offering the best room and a hot bath.

  Tricky arranged for Ralas to get the bath first and sent for new clothes for him while she chatted and mended a few items here and there which the family had put by in case of her return. When he came to find her at the fireside of the small receiving room he found her changed into a small, neat red-headed young woman with a freckled face and a snub nose, one hand thrust into a large woollen sock, the other darning neatly across the wooden shape of the egg she held in place. Two others of similar age were close by, folding laundry or forgetting to whilst she regaled them with some story about Rezmire, the southern limit of the known world which may or may not still exist depending on how the war had gone.

  To Ralas she didn’t look the same, she didn’t sound the same, but it was indisputably her, just as the dark seductress, the rogue and the drunken singer were all her. She gave him a look that told him to play along or else, and then introduced him as her cousin and said they were off to the Riverport to look for new buttons and for him, a wife. That gave rise to a lot of giggling and, standing there with his hair wet and in his newly acquired clothing, with a body that would never be healthy, he felt quite foolish for a moment. He was an idiot for even going this far with the burden of his condition which he could never put down and certainly would never impose on someone else. But then, someone like her couldn’t possibly be serious about someone like him and clearly she was only using him for some reason that had yet to clarify.

  That noted he pulled himself together. Two could play any game. He straightened up and made an affable grin of the kind he offered at the start of every ham performance, said, “She’s having you on. It’s we who are to be wed.”

  Her face in that moment was priceless in its genuine surprise, perhaps a hint of respect, that quirky eyebrow she had lifting so far up her forehead it was almost in her hairline, and he felt his heart lift and soar with a streak of sweetness in its wake that boded very ill for him indeed. He almost forgot to add, “Isn’t that right, darling?” and to smile at her with a smile that was filled with what he found to be genuine adoration. The thought came to him that he was a dead man who could only lose this fresh stupidity, and the irony made him laugh.