Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  “It is a good story,” he said and hung his head. Stories. She was all stories.

  She saw him and her voice was bitter as she spoke, “Sometimes we must make a better story than the truth and believe that. This is how the world is made anew.”

  He would have thought her the most callous person in the world at that moment were it not for the fact that he could see her face was wet and turned up to the sky and her voice full of so many new beginnings that there was no end to them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  FISHER PUT UP the shrouds, transforming the little shop into an abandoned building, rank with webs and filth, a suggestion of rat gnawing on the few bits of old counter and bench left long ago. An air of damp and neglect sank down over the place. “I always hate doing this,” he said. “One day it will be real, won’t it?”

  “Don’t think of that,” Catt said gently, patting Fisher on the arm. “Think of it bright and full with the best of the new collection, the Book for me to read, the snake in the hearth, burning with jewelfire through any night of cold. We will have cosy feet.”

  “I hope so,” Fisher said, closing the door behind them and pocketing the key. They turned and went in different directions, one on foot, striding out with a staff. He covered the ground deceptively fast. The other climbed up onto an ornate chariot and took the reins of his heavily-horned rams and gave them a little shake. “Hup, boys,” he said, quietly. “Hup hup.” And the sheep pulled and the chariot, much taller than they were and with a semblance of being really far too large for them, rolled quietly over the stones and was a cause of much merriment all the way to the gate for there was no dignity in sheep, apparently.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  BUKHAM SAT ON the prow of the Shelliac ferry and watched the slow passage of the banks. They were moving through hills crowded with woody vegetation, not large enough to be a forest, not small enough to be much else. Here and there where the river curved, broad mud and sand banks stretched down to the water in crescents, pockmarked by the hooves and paws of animals coming to drink. The mist of earlier in the afternoon had passed off and the strip of sky above them was clear. Multiple globes of midges whirled around beneath every overhanging bough. Bukham was plaiting a fistful of long reeds together to make a whisk to keep them off as he kept watch.

  Bukham liked the Shelliac, even though they were somewhat hard to look at with their mouths full of moving fur-like strands and their multifaceted eyes which never blinked and shone like fancy buttons. The Shelliac and the Oerni shared a fondness for Wanderer as their Guardian of choice, so Murti was now deep in conversation with them and Horse, who was forced to take her place at the only point she was secure, amidships, near the back of the boat.

  Beside him one of the small Shelliac women was squatting, demonstrating how they had taught their otters to do different tasks in the water. She was distinguished from the men only by the upper part of her dress which covered the part Bukham found hardest to look at on any of them because, through their tough, shell-like skin, their hearts and other organs were visible. It made him feel almost sick with vulnerability on their behalf although he was by far the less armoured. The lower half of this particular woman’s body was swathed in a practical skirt which all Shelliac wore, embroidered with clan sign and little pictograms of moments from their lives. Her otter was sleek and well-fed, skimming easily on its back as it watched for her signal. She told it to check the bottom of the boat for clearance on the riverbed and it flipped and was gone in an instant, leaving only rings on the water. At Bukham’s other side Kula quivered with excitement and thumped the deck with her hand. She could seemingly hardly contain her excitement at seeing the otters work. Lysandra peered over her shoulder. Of Deffo and Celestaine there was no sign and he guessed they were napping below.

  The Shelliac were a quiet, efficient background on their boat. They communicated by sign and whistles, a language in which he was fluent thanks to some mutually beneficial trade alliances between Taib and several of the Shelliac clans. This particular one was of the highest cadre, with an ancient lineage whose history was painted in every detail upon its panels and stanchions. With the most favourable routes on the widest passages they had the means to build a grand boat. It was broader than most and boasted a welcoming space for passengers besides its cargo holds. Even the resident otters wore barding of coloured leathers and necklaces of shell and half-pollys. They had their own cubbies on the deck for when they were not fishing, checking the waterways for dangers or maintaining the underwater sections of the craft. They became acquainted as the boat passed smoothly along midstream using only the current to make its way towards Ilkand.

  Once the business niceties were over the Shelliac sign and chatter was less reassuring as they told Bukham in detail of the river-dragon’s wrecking of large parts of the country all around them. He had translated for the others.

  “Sounds like one of the many warbeasts let loose to roam,” Celestaine had said but the Shelliac seemed doubtful. They showed where they had placed harpoons on the boat and where there was a water butt with multiple buckets available for putting out fires. Over its gunwales the boat had been cladded in temporary defences. The wooden sides of this armouring were solid, slitted for arrows and charred in places. At first they hadn’t wanted to go to shore when they saw Deffo signalling them from the bank, but they had sent a reluctant patriarch over to see if there was a negotiation worth the risk and the story of their narrow escape from the beast had secured them a place, though the jewels Celestaine offered didn’t hurt any either.

  Only Lysandra and Kula remained oblivious. Bukham’s gladness for their safety had begun to pass into a mild panic at the thought of their imminent danger. The boat was not so short that he couldn’t hear enough words coming towards him about the terrible happenings at the Freeport. Phrases about Templars clashing, city burghers, tradesmen in riot, a host of horrors descending unexpectedly from the south west, suspected at first to be a plague of some kind of bat left over from the Kinslayer’s cache but turning out to be more like malicious leaves blown on a wind of their own sorcery. Monsters were one thing but bodiless entities were worse. Of all the things to end their reign, it was a snowstorm coming in off the sea that finished the plague: the melting flakes stuck to their filmlike bodies and the water melted them into a nasty sludge. Apparently, fish and rats liked to eat it though everyone had lost the taste for fish for a couple of days, and the rats had a brief surge in fortune. Then, however the talk returned to dragonish matters: where it was, what it was doing, why it was there, how to get rid of it, the fact it didn’t much like a sharp pointy thing brandished in its face, though fire was no deterrent. They were not sure if fire attracted it.

  Bukham made sure to watch carefully but it was Lysandra who was worrying him—she was so much sharper today than she had been yesterday and so much more alert this afternoon than this morning, although the others were too wrapped up in their own business to notice. Now she and Kula were busy at the prow, making the otter cots more luxurious and learning how to offer treats, as if there was no trouble in the world.

  “Mind if I join you?” It was Heno. There was hardly room for another big body on the planking at the ship’s side but Bukham shuffled over and the boat tilted very slightly as the big, grey form of the Yorughan sat down. He folded his long, dark coat around him so it didn’t drag into the water. They were riding very low thanks to the extra passengers and the armouring that had been hastily applied to the deck roofs. Water passed by only inches from their feet.

  He felt nervous. Heno had a lined, canny face with a heavy battering ram of a forehead and tusks which made him seem doubly beastlike. In addition he had the fabled magic, and Bukham wanted nothing to do with that. It frightened him but he was too big to show it. He tried to console himself by remembering Taib Post and that it was still there, but then he didn’t know if it was there or not. Celestaine liked Heno. He tried to stick that notion to the person sitting beside him. He
found he trusted Celestaine.

  Out on the water some expanding rings showed where trout were surfacing and he put down his spear and reached instead for the small fishing pole that had been secured beside him to a slot in the hull. He brought in the line, attached a lure, and twitched it out over the water in their direction. The ferry was moving slowly, almost silent except for the steady wash of wavelets from the tiller oar. There was a chance of a fish.

  Heno watched him closely. “This is the fishing?”

  “Mmn,” Bukham nodded. Without thinking he held out the rod and Heno took it. There was an awkwardness to the movement, quickly covered. “The boat is doing the work. After we pass, pull in the line and we can cast it again.”

  He made some show of looking up and around to make it clear that he was doing his job on watch, but there was no sign of any flying horrors or wisps of smoke. The river was broad and they were skilfully weaving down between fast flowing currents, far out of reach of the banks. It was peaceful. Only the bite of the midges spoiled an idyllic journey. That and what lay at the end. He liked Ilkand but he was terrified of Templars, especially the Termagent Phylactery whose strict codes cast suspicion on everything they saw. Thinking about them made him more glad to be with the Yoggs, strangely enough, as if they would be his allies when the Termagent discovered something they didn’t like about him and selected him for sentencing and death. He pushed the image away and concentrated on helping Heno attach bait from the pot. They cast a few times, one then the other, until Bukham was sure that Heno could feel the play of the line. “If it catches, give it a good yank. Either you will free it from the weeds or get the fish hooked on. Either’s good.”

  Heno grunted and they both watched the greenish water.

  “You never fished before?”

  “We lived in the mines, mostly,” Heno said. “No fishing there. No sky. No rivers.”

  “No soft beds, no nights under the stars, no sun, no wind, no nothing.” It was Nedlam, who had come up behind them, very quietly for a woman of such scale. She had a slingshot in one hand and was turning over a few stones in the other. She glanced at Bukham and his face became hot.

  “You have a lot of catching up to do,” he said, carefully, in case they took offence at being so close to someone soft who had done nothing in the war but drop the price of grain when he should have put it up for scarcity. Up close their scars were terrible to see—they had them everywhere. Bukham had only one, on his foot, from stepping on a cowbite thorn when he was little.

  “You never had a weapon in your hands?” Nedlam asked, scratching her nose with a finger before gesturing out before them at a low hanging branch. “Think you can hit that?” She held out the sling.

  “I… no… it will disturb the fish,” Bukham said, but then had a thought. “May I borrow it?”

  He took it from her and dropped a few bits of old bread from the bait pot into the cup and then briefly whirred the sling around before releasing one end. The bread pellets flew out over the gloom beneath the shade of the overarching trees where Heno’s fishing line was slowly being dragged behind them. Within moments the surface of the water rippled and then suddenly there was splashing and vigorous movement. Heno yanked the line with a sudden, almost girlish, exclamation of surprise.

  “A fish! Did I get it?”

  “Let me help with the line…” Bukham was reaching, reeling. Heno was gripping the rod as if it was the last straw in a fearsome ocean and he unable to swim.

  “Ooh,” Nedlam said, stepping forwards to see what was happening.

  The combined weight of the three of them concentrated in one spot caused the boat to dip a little—only a fraction because she was a big vessel and well loaded—but it was enough for Bukham who was already off balance, and who dare not grab onto Heno or Nedlam. His foot slid off the side and then he was falling into the river, rotating, his last sight two comically surprised grey and white faces gawping at him like giant fishes, a tiny fish flapping between them on a thin line.

  After that there was coughing and flailing and the sad memory that it had been a long time since his boyhood on the banks of the Tularesi during which there had been something of a large mass gain and a skill loss. But his skin felt the cool grip of the river and his leg hairs twitched with old memories of the currents and somehow he kicked to the surface without bashing his head on the hull to find a huge grey hand reaching down for his wrist.

  Nedlam lifted him out of the water with one arm and he laid on the boards of the deck coughing and flapping, the little fish beside him in the same spasms of life searching for breath. The Yorughan were laughing and he heard the conversation had died and others were merry behind him. He reached out and found the fish, took it off the hook. It wriggled but he had its measure. In his hand it was like liquid metal. He held it up towards Heno as he sat up.

  “Your call. Eat it or throw it back.”

  A rainbow of colour flashed on the trout’s side, its scales bright, its eye glaring.

  “No eating Bukbuk here. He cooks good,” Nedlam said, clapping Bukham’s shoulder with a force that almost had him over the side again.

  Everyone was laughing. Even the little one had her head out of the otter cabin to goggle at him. Lysandra stared, mouth half open, looking like any young mother, if she had lately been at a fancy human ball and run away through the woods for a week to live feral by her wits.

  Heno stared at the fish. He stared, and licked his tusks, and then he grinned. “Throw it back,” he said.

  “Ahh!” Kula said and jumped with joy, clicking her fingers together. It was the first time he had ever heard her voice try to say something. It was raspy and high pitched and raw but its delight was clear.

  Bukham tossed it. The fish landed with a rich plop in the swirling current and was lost to sight immediately.

  After that even Lysandra smiled and there was a brief sense of oneness among the crew, even the Shelliac, bound by that moment of the fish’s fate under the falling sun. Bukham, pulling off his wet shirt to dry it, saw Murti nodding quietly.

  Later as they were watching the river, halberd at hand in case of dragons, he said to Bukham, “You see, only a holy man can do such a thing as has been done. You have united disunited things.”

  “Keep your ambitions,” Bukham replied, but without any of the resentment he’d had before. “I’m just a fool who sells vegetables and I don’t even have any of them.” A strange happiness had engulfed him and he wanted it to stay.

  Dusk had started to come on and a mist had begun to form as the air cooled. Their progress remained stately within the river’s broad meander. Fisherbirds darted into the water and out again, catching rising moth larvae as they came up to feed in the shadows. Aboard the ferry he could smell dinner on the make and hear voices, quiet. Murti was lost in thought, or asleep, as the water rippled nearby and a few bubbles rose to the top and burst one after the other.

  Bukham found he was watching those bubbles. They made a line of steady progress and then he realised why it was odd. They matched the boat’s speed and position. He was suddenly aware of how close Murti was to the edge of the boat as he lay carelessly in his half-sleep, and moved, halberd tightly gripped, gunwale held fast for safety, to position himself as a guard for anything rising from the water.

  Horse called from the boat’s centre at the same moment, his name or something like it, her voice a warning note that went through him from head to toe although it was quiet, barely above the plash of the ripples against the hull. Right in front of him the water domed upwards for a moment and he saw the curling foil of a large fin and the silvered flash of a large, sinuous body rolling away beneath them at an angle that would take it beneath the boat. He grabbed the old man’s ankle, dragging him backwards to the safety of the centre. Murti woke up and flailed about in protest.

  The Shelliac were pushing past him, the rudimentary nature of their faces become quite blank with anxiety as they scouted, javelins and harpoons in hand. They swarmed over t
he boat, their unblinking, faceted gaze on the furls and strands of the river. They were talking about dragons again and poling the craft over into the fastest part of the current. Celestaine came up, buckling her breastplate on, but was beaten to a view by the shadowy slip of Kula, one moment not there, the next hanging out over the water to stretch her thin fingers down into the flow.

  Bukham released Murti and shouted at her before remembering it could do no good. He threw himself flat in an effort to reach her before anything could pull her over the side.

  KULA FELT THE beast much more clearly when she touched the water. It had an age beyond most she’d encountered. When she’d first sensed its slow circling of them she’d been afraid but her curiosity had drawn her closer and closer to the water’s edge. When the big man fell in she’d been terrified for a second but surprised more than anything. His face was so funny as he tumbled over that she couldn’t help laughing. The splash he made had caused the creature to come closer, though it was used to boats and especially this kind. It came to taste the newcomer, as she came closer now to discover more about it.

  She was fairly certain that it wasn’t Bukham that it cared for. It was drawn to the deeper, more complex flavours of Wanderer’s dark flame and the weak pulses of the Undefeated’s signature. Now it was hunting the source of that rare scent which stirred ancient memories inside it, but weakly. It searched to remember something that had happened generations past, to river creatures that had swum and hunted here before the ages of men.

  Kula told it that humans didn’t see these things. They were so blind that they thought this creature was the same as the one that had flown in the air earlier that day but this was only a river beast. She warned it off as it turned in the muddy depths and felt a sluggish notion stir within it as the otters came to see what she was doing, whiskers tickling her cheek.