Salvation's Fire

by Justina Robson

  “But he’s, my dear, he’s already quite dead. There could be no trouble for him.” He peered at her forehead. “My goodness. The Mirror of…”

  A screeching sound, claw on glass, dividing. She dropped him and as she let go the creatures all turned as one and rushed towards Taedakh, onto his feet and up his legs as they climbed him like a tree and gathered in a mantle upon his shoulders; a mantle that winked with hundreds of glimmerless eyes.

  “Why didn’t you go for the sceptre?” she spat with fury at Dr Catt. “Can’t you even manage to get greed right?”

  Ralas didn’t understand but he saw the satchel swing with something short and heavy inside it as Catt re-established his hold and his footing.

  “How little you reckon with my abilities. One might think you had sent me here on purpose,” Catt said, puffing and clutching his chest for a moment.

  “If one weren’t pursued by ghedkhani one might give some time to that thought,” she agreed, reaching for Ralas’ hand. “Time for a game of dare.”

  Something screeching, creaking, picking its way on the tips of needle-sharp points came clacking around the corner at the end of the hall. It moved like a spider, a body suspended in the middle of many-jointed legs, but with a long tongue-like neck emerging here and there from it in thick, muscular outgrowths of rippling bristle. Each ‘neck’ ended in a mouth filled with tiny teeth. There were no visible eyes or ears. Instead its attention showed when the necks all craned in the same direction, mouths gasping for a taste of air.

  “What are those?” Ralas asked as more of the things appeared, one walking the low arched roof as though it were another floor.

  “Like Vathesk,” Tricky said, “only much faster.” She did something with her mirror.

  Ralas was suddenly taller, thinner, made of something tough. Taedakh let out a sound of surprise and the eyes of the vholes winked on and off. Ralas found himself looking at another Taedakh, only smaller and leaner, on all fours like he was, like the shadow dogs that had taken Tricky to Vadakh. Only Dr Catt was left unchanged but he was reaching into his bag and then—just like that—he vanished.

  The things at the end of the hall paused.

  “While they’re confused,” Tricky said and Ralas felt a pull as if she had tugged on an invisible skin that he had and then he went running after her, thrilled above all to find that his human pains were gone even if his spine was bent and his arms too long, his head front heavy with bony jaws. Quills and poisons burst from his back. A miasma that was both scent and toxin spread around him. They were plague on legs. One touch would be fatal to anything of his own world and things of many others. Things all over this place had been touched by that darkness, and died of its creeping claim. Now their bodies called to him to come and take them home.

  They ran for the surface levels, three monsters and one invisible collector of ancient heirlooms, faster on his feet than any ordinary man thanks to the iron rod in his left hand, pulsing with the energy of shackled, distant suns; their faint gravity his faithful horses, he their ungainly plough.

  Tricky knew the way very well. Ralas remembered only snatches of it from strange angles, having been dragged and carried in various manners through it. Whilst it had been in use Nydarrow was immaculate, for a place made to be uncomfortable, efficient, full of the marching steps and well-shod determination of thousands of Yogg soldiers and miners. The Kinslayer himself had glided along avenues of perfectly laid rock with the anguish and misery of hundreds set out to either side for his amusement. It had nothing on what had happened to it since his death. Ralas felt he’d really missed a trick.

  The place was teeming. Monsters from far and wide had been carted in and dumped in various places for purposes that had been long forgotten, but someone had been industriously letting them all out. Many of them had been eating and hunting each other, probably in desperation; others, maddened by years of starvation and darkness were simply hurtling about in frenzied agitation or lying, gasping wherever they fell when their energies ran out. Judging by the bones and entrails still recognisable there had been a lot of wyverns and cockatrix at one point, but the favourite dinner had been Yogg in various degrees of roasted, seared, flambéed and fricasseed. Side dishes of some kind of vegetable lifeform had been included, then discarded. Well, Ralas thought, that was salad for you. The leavings were slowly being digested by slowly roving globules of semi-sentient slime which were handily giving off the light they were using at the same time, so he had the pleasure of being filled equally with gratitude and repulsion. Other plant forms with black leaves and scarlet bark were growing in avid pleasure out of the blood and gore, tunnelling the walls with suckers and rootlets, forming black garlands and avenues perfumed with disgusting smelling flora mimicking the stench of various glands in order to lure whatever it was they were luring. Veils of easily broken tendrils hung from the roof in places and when crossed they stung horribly with an acidic burn. Barbs and thorns curved like scimitars, entirely blocking some ways. Huge rats with long faces lined in needle teeth skittered about. The only upshot was that everything that could run ran like stink as soon as it saw them coming. As Tricky explained, “Everything wants to live.”

  They came to the library. He could tell it was the library by the heaps of squelching paper residue and the greyish suppuration of glue and ink oozing out of it.

  “Never figured him for a reader,” Ralas said as they entered cautiously, Taedakh behind them and the shrieking terror-breath of Dr Catt providing a wheezy accompaniment to the plop and slurp of roving slimes.

  “These weren’t for reading. They were the accounts,” Tricky said, stalking between heaps carefully. “The Meldi-slimes have collected these. They’re digesting them.”

  “Into a readable short format?” Ralas suggested and found Dr Catt’s wheezing starting to sputter with unexpected laughter.

  “No, they’re taking in the information and using it back at their main host—wherever that is. I think they’re one of those things from the branching. The Kinslayer had a hole into a lot of other worlds. I wouldn’t like to guess the purpose or even if purpose is a thing there. One thing I know. I came here before to try to find out what was this link between Lysandra and the damned Book. I didn’t get much. It’s all lost. I had hoped that Dr Catt would have better insight, having come to contact with so many things over the years. But time has got away from us now. Wanderer has his mission on the go.”

  “You say that like it’s not your mission,” Ralas said, picking his way, as a helldog, over a mound of scrolls. The parchment was slower to work on than the papers and had mostly survived intact so far.

  “It’s not my mission,” Tricky said, stalking towards an area of racks and shelves. “I’ll be honest with you, honey. I don’t have a good feeling about this. Somewhere in here is the reason all of this started in the first place. Lysandra was part of his plan even if the Tzarkis did booby trap her, and she still is. If Wanderer takes her to the gods after they’ve been cut off—was that part of the deal or was it not? I just can’t see the moves. I have to find out. I have to know if he is still playing me, because I’m damned if I did all the things I did for him to win from beyond the grave.”

  “You’re after The Book of All Things,” Dr Catt said, having gained enough ground to speak.

  “No. I know where that is,” she said offhandedly as though it was of no interest. Her hound form snuffled around the base of the shelves, looked sideways through its glowing, violet eye at the marks and scrolls remaining in place. “I’m after knowing what’s happening to Taedakh’s world, actually, because he says that if the two places become… what’s the… if they kind of mix, then they’re both finished and that means we’re all done here, and so are the gods. Do you suppose that was the plan, or is it only a terrible accident? Because I’ve seen things in Vadakh—” She paused, listening, “—that have no answer here.”

  “By answer you mean—” Ralas began.

  “I mean they’re not defeatable
, yes. Not even with a magic sword.” She shuffled around. “Something here made Reckoner change his ways.” She sounded lost; she knew she wouldn’t find it. Ralas started to see that she was in the grip of an obsession and his blood ran colder. He’d found her charming, he’d never thought about mad. Then Taedakh crouched low, folding up like a bundle of old broken spears. The furry mantle flowed down and along his arms and onto the mire of records. It broke up into individuals who scattered, with a speed that unnerved Ralas to the point of wanting to run away himself. They were over everything in seconds. Outside the room the screaming came, not far off.

  “Just shut the door for a minute,” Catt said quietly, going to do it himself. As it closed they heard the heavy wooden bar slide across, the locks clatter and whir. There was no sign of Dr Catt.

  “He shut us in, didn’t he?” Ralas said, wondering how he managed to feel surprise, but feeling it quite strongly.

  “No doubt he got what he wanted and is hoping to get away,” Tricky agreed, not bothered apparently. “Doesn’t matter. No lock can hold me and the bar is on the inside. At least it buys a few minutes.”

  “These creatures are from Vadakh,” Taedakh said. “The Kinslayer brought them here to do the job you speak of. It’s their nature to cross worlds, using gaps none other can perceive. They memorise but only together as a group. They bring order as pattern. If they were here then they may remember what you want to know, but many of them have perished.”

  The creatures scurried, seemingly aimless, constantly regrouping and then scattering again, never following the same path twice. It looked as if they were trying to form a shape, but at the last moment they forgot their purpose, were driven off, then compelled back to try again.

  “Who brought you from Vadakh? How were you on a piece of paper?” Ralas asked, realising that there might be more to the connections here than was obvious.

  “I made him,” Tricky said. “I wrote with charcoal ink, the ink of burned things, and I wrote him in the symbology of the Kelicerati, which is why he’s like the burned things and like the Kelicae, a little. When I saw the portal to Vadakh and I first went in I knew there was no surviving it. It wears you away very fast, even if the creatures don’t come. I had to have a protector, someone to ward off the things who was more powerful than they were. Vadakh is raw energy looking for form, so I gave it a form. But I wanted to hide him from the Kinslayer, just like I wanted to hide things in Vadakh, so I can put him on paper if I have to. See?”

  “Oh, yes, when you put it like that it’s obvious,” Ralas said uneasily, trying to grasp the implications. “And these disguises?”

  “Borrowed them from the bloody shadow dogs, didn’t I? Might as well get some use out of the greedy bastards. Ah shit, that’s it!” Dog Tricky stood with her hideous jaws open, oozing a bit of dark drool onto the undulating slime below her, her piggy little red eyes as wide as they would go in astonishment. “The Book is memories, not a written record. Written in flesh and bone. He destroyed the people and he destroyed the Book—they would never remember what he’d done to open Vadakh so it couldn’t be undone. They knew how he cut off the gods. He took it from them. But now they’re gone. All of them. Except Kula.”

  Ralas’ jaw dropped too. He tasted a sudden astonishing taste, the sweet flavour of order, but it didn’t knock out his amazement and horror. “But she’s the one with Lysandra. And they’re in Ilkand, maybe even left by now.”

  “Going to Wanderer’s circle because it’s the only way into Vadakh if you’ve got a body and want to keep it,” Tricky said. “If you don’t have the smarts to make yourself your own god.”

  “God?”

  “Taedakh,” she said proudly. “God of the underworld.”

  Ralas fished around in the leavings of his mind. “You made a god?”

  “Well, what do you want to call him?”

  “An imaginary friend?” He turned and looked at Taedakh, sitting in his own private gloom, a bundle of what could have been giant sticks, rather small now he was dwarfed by the library’s arches of bioluminescent gloom. “But isn’t that what the Tzarkomen were doing. With Lysandra? In their own way?”

  Tricky turned to him and her face lit up. “You’re right. All these silly words they used stopped me from seeing it. What they were doing. What he was doing. They were making their own god. Shit! A god of what, though?”

  She studied the roving vholes and paused, her mercurial mind off on another tangent. “Ralas, you have to sing. These little things need structure, to be ordered, so they can focus. Sing them a work song. Something easy to remember.”

  He was already dreaming of the music he’d heard during their jump through the world, that strange symphony that was so vast and complex that he could only hear one thread at a time, though he knew the rest was there; but he picked the working song he’d heard Heno and Nedlam sing once, one without real words, because words got you killed. With his dog mouth words were out of the question anyway. It was hard to sit down in his dog form, but he managed it. It was harder still to sing and impossible to talk. The black mice, or vholes, or whatever they were—he didn’t like the notion of a vole that was a hole or a hole that made itself into a vole or whatever so Ralas was sticking with mice—had briefly paused. He began the tune.

  Within moments of finishing the first line the mice were attentive. Then they began to cluster. At the song’s repetition the mice clustered and then formed themselves up into neat lines, then circles, then more complicated shapes, before clustering and bursting out time and time again to make increasingly complicated patterns before they swarmed back to Taedakh and reassumed their position as his living mantle.

  “You are fortunate,” Taedakh said, his long head stretching up and seeming to lift him to a standing position. “The Kinslayer’s Bride was meant to enter Vadakh at his command and to bring forth from it the power of eternity. Or power of creation. Or of destruction. The last part is unclear, but it is something comprehensively vast which he intended to use to claim what he considered the dues of the other races from the favoured humans. She would be the channel and the director of that power at his will.”

  Ralas was sitting in a pile of glop. A faintly happy notion of days long past was still with him in the turn and march of the song. “If you’re the Lord of the Underworld, can’t you find the gods?”

  “They are falling,” Taedakh said.

  “Falling where?” Tricky asked, going to the door and standing on her hind legs to use her snout to push the bar back.

  “Apart,” came the reply.

  “Shit,” Tricky said and had to drop her dog form, suddenly reappearing small and busy, her fingers fiddling some magical patterns at the door. “Damn it, these locks are full of crap. Wait till I get my hands on that Catt.” She struggled with lockpicks like fine hooked needles, slim but the same to Ralas’ mind as those his grandmother used to crochet lace and thinking of her made him sentimental and watching Tricky made him even more so, until he felt like this was a new kind of torture.

  “I…” he began without a clue as to what he was going to say. It wasn’t, “Will we finish here and go out, back to Cinquetann? Are we to join Celestaine?” but that’s what he came out with. In his mind he’d been going for something much more like “Can’t we leave all this and escape? The world must be much larger than these concerns.” But of course they wouldn’t. And it wasn’t.

  She glanced at him and he saw with a sweet sense of—yes, of all people ever to understand, you are the one—that she knew exactly what was passing through him. “We’re going to meet them in Vadakh. Get this sorted out, close the holes. Is what we’re going to do.”

  But even if they were going back down all the way at least she was there and that made him happy for a moment, until he said, “Did you know this before? Is that why you brought me? For the music? So that I could fix these creatures?” Not for any other reason. Because he was simply useful. He couldn’t believe it.

  She glanced at him, a heavy
clicking whirr betraying the undoing of the lock. The vault swung open. She smiled, a dazzling, victorious smile.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  KULA WRAPPED HER cloak tighter about her and tucked in her hands and feet. The brisk wind was cold and the spray from the sticky saltwater colder still. Surging through the waves, strengthened by the air, she felt she was so big. At the same time she could feel that she was only a mote against the mass of life that lay beneath them: down, down and down. She had never been above something so deep that was still filled with living beings. She was a small thing, cold, huddled on her rope, but she now knew that there was so much more to the world than she had seen or imagined. For this she loved the sea.

  It was time to let go of the life she had borrowed. She could have kept it. She held it now, and felt its potency, waiting to be unfurled, like a seed within her mind. She didn’t know how the magic of her people worked, only what it felt like. She had read the pattern of this beast, preserving it, and had taken out the life from it. Now she wanted to put it back in. For that she needed Lysandra. They had worked it out between them, with Horse’s help, tested it on midges and ants and leaves and twigs and one of the riverboat’s few remaining rats which had become cunning enough to navigate the galley without encountering any otters. It hadn’t navigated Horse, however, who summoned it to her hand for Kula to witness.

  Together they’d pored over the creature, but it actually wasn’t as complicated as the midge pattern. Only when she sought to see this particular rat in all its individual, momentary detail—then it got complicated. She’d thought herself sitting a few minutes for the task, but hours had gone by and they were only lucky that the rest of the group had no interest in them or her stillness and fixity would have been noticed.

  Under the cover of night they had crept off to the river-dragon’s nest where it had laid its stillborn eggs. Guarded by Lysandra, she had studied the beast and they only made it back to the craft in time to pretend to wake up. The creature was strange but it wasn’t the Ur-beasts of old, which had rivalled the gods for scale and ambition. She saw nothing unnatural in it. It wasn’t even as interesting as the midge in some ways and that seemed a shame to her. So in the night of boring adult business out at the Widow Demadell’s house, Kula had sat at one of the tables with the stone fruits and daydreamed about how it could be made better, more aware, more suited to this world, more great and impressive, more capable of being the thing she had wanted it to be—a creature of amazing powers.