by J L Forrest
She nudged Kwlko from the grove, made last adjustments to her weapons, then eyed Turo’s saddle as well; the Atreiani had set her tack and harness ably.
So long as she weaves her magic as well as she has set her reins, Nyahri thought, we may do well.
“I feel for them, yw Sabi, for what we are about to do.”
“Empathy is a virtue, but for now you must lay that aside.”
They returned to the mesa edge. In the valley, hundreds of homestead lamplights twinkled in the dusk. The sun poised at the brink of the world, the first stars appeared in the east, and green Mars outshone them. From the farmsteads drifted the sweet smells of cooking.
Hot corn, chicken, potatoes.
Nyahri imagined the Oudwnii at their family tables. She pictured their gentle, secure, and unsuspecting comforts.
Mistress and claimèd descended from the mesa, avoiding the roads, going westward beyond the last farms into thickets of brittle willow and tall grass. The evening downslopes swung predictably from the mountaintops. Nyahri thought of her ancestors, they who in her father’s youth had torched the libraries.
I go to outdo you!
After sunset, they cantered by moonslight, the horses finding their way. They crossed an open field and reached the sycamores.
In the distance a dog barked. Nyahri waited ahorse in the chilling air, fine hairs standing on her skin. Yw Sabi’s moons-lit silhouette appeared against the trees, and she slid from the saddle and settled in the grass. Soon after, a witch-light shined, and yw Sabi held it forth as if plucking a star from the sky. Its glow spread to the horses and across the earth.
She unpacked tools from her saddlebags, set the light on a stump, and unrolled a cloth-wrapped bundle of black pins.
Dangerous things, Nyahri thought. These too she had seen during her first hours with yw Sabi.
“We have sixty,” yw Sabi said. “We’ll place them prudently, evenly spaced.”
“How?”
“Stake the ground on the forest’s edge and along the ditches. Come, I’ll show you.”
Yw Sabi dimmed the light and they left the horses, following the trickling drainages. Beyond the willows and cottonwoods, unharvested cornfields stood tall, their stalks rustling. A wet, green odor of good soil sweetened the air.
The Atreiani knelt, and she stabbed the ground with one pin. After that, she walked awhile longer and placed another. Nyahri watched, but she also afforded attention to the woods, fearing they might be seen, but only quiet and crickets and autumn breezes followed them.
Yw Sabi set a bundle of pins in Nyahri’s hand.
“No closer than fifty paces between them,” yw Sabi said. “String them from north to south, from one edge of the valley floor to the other.”
Nyahri shuddered at the cold metal. She prayed to the bison god, he who also brings evil deeds to good ends.
While yw Sabi went south, crossing the icy-cold river on foot, Nyahri crept along the tree edge nearer the ditches. She counted her steps before pressing each pin into the clay, close to the open fields, then chose her direction by moonslight alone, Lwn and Stashwn and Trwl all aglow, the former two quite bright. Distant hounds bayed, answering one another from farm to farm, but no men walked the nighttime wilderness.
Why would they?
Cohltos’s people sat by their hearths with their spouses and children, the day’s last chores done. They loved, told stories, and played. They expected no treachery.
One by one, Nyahri set the pins. As she drove the last black-magic token into the soil, her heart and her cold fingers ached. The task had taken less than an hour, and she returned to the horses.
She and the Atreiani rode not toward Sojourn, but away from it. Nyahri counted the paces.
Five hundred, a thousand, two thousand.
Yw Sabi stopped. “You wear a Magistress’s collar,” she said to Nyahri. “One day it will be in your power to command such things as we’re using tonight, many of the technologies we Atreianii created. But not yet, not for a long while. For now, simply observe and stay close to me. Follow our plan.”
“Yea, mistress.”
Yw Sabi lifted her witch-scepter and tapped it. A deep resonance spread from it, the clearest ringing glass. In an instant the fields and forests erupted into white-bright fire, showered in sparks and bursts, a conflagration two thousand paces wide from the river to the northern hills. Nyahri closed her eyes against the magnesium-pale flares. Soon after, the fire rumbled, savaging the dry trees and shrubs and grasses and reeds. It crawled to the nearest corn and wheat fields.
Half the breadth of the valley roared with flames six hundred hands high, old cottonwoods afire as if only kindling sticks. Beyond them the fields blazed and the wildfire began an uphill march, where it would take the mountainsides and every stone and timber of Cohltos.
All will burn, Nyahri thought, save the Citadel.
For a long moment, she wanted to gallop through the streets, to warn the people herself, to lead them to the ways she knew would be safest. Instead, she and yw Sabi rode lazily, always behind the fire line. As they passed over burnt ground, a low pulse emitted from yw Sabi’s scepter, and the flames around them guttered and died. The soil cooled, safe enough for horses’ hooves, and even smoke retreated.
Kwlko and Turo shied, but Nyahri gathered her stallion’s reins, heeled his ribs, and clicked her tongue. She urged him toward S’Eret Fortress.
◆◆◆
The riders kept the wind at their backs. As they crossed a hillock, Nyahri observed the exodus beyond the smoke. Bells rang throughout Cohltos and, at first, the Oudwnii gathered impotently to fight the fire. Soon, the flight began, the fires driving the masses south across the bridges.
A smaller number fled west. Households loaded carts with their possessions, herding livestock, and ran as the fire wreathed their homes.
“Idiots!” Nyahri cried. “They make the wrong choices—”
“We cannot help them now,” said yw Sabi.
“—race their families against the flames. Idiots, idiots, idiots.”
Some, she knew, would not make it.
The faraway shouts of children reached her ears, babes in arm, youths running aside their fathers, their short legs faltering. The fire chased the outlying waterways first, snaking like dragons through the willows. Minute by minute, it lapped the tight streets of Cohltos itself. The fires fed the updrafts, strengthened them, and fueled their own burning.
“Yw Sabi, it moves too quick.”
The E’cwni nudged her stallion onto an expanse of still- smoking clay, protected only by the sphere of yw Sabi’s scepter, by the way it repressed the worst of the heat. The grasses here had burned, the fires spent, the ground cooling also in the wintry night air.
“We cannot control that,” yw Sabi said, her tone as icy as those mountain winds. “Let it go.”
The moonslight and starlight vanished in smoke. Papery ash dusted the earth, the world painted gray and red. A few abandoned houses still stood, but a number of scorched corpses lay among the charcoal of buildings.
We are near Ahlon’s house, Nyahri thought, and what of sweet Colhina?
“The fire goes too fast,” she repeated. “There are areas surrounded. Please, we should help them.”
“We are behind the fire line, where my scepter offers some security. Ultra-low frequency does good here, but there—” She gestured to the raging edge of the blaze. “—we would do nothing but die. I’ll not have you in front of it. No, my claimèd.”
“Mistress—”
“If the flames kill anyone now, they’re caught by stupidity, not by fire.”
“The weak, elderly, sick?”
“They best have had family, friends, or neighbors good enough to carry them.” Yw Sabi regarded the scene coldly, then turned to the torching of Cohltos, watching it as she might view a sunrise. “We’ve done the best we can.”
By midnight, much of the city still burned, but in the firestorms surrounding S’Eret Fortress, qu
arters of Cohltos went dark. Yw Sabi steered toward them. The great masses of Oudwnii now crowded the streets throughout the southern stretches of the city. Bells still rang there.
“Time for the bridges,” yw Sabi said.
Once more, the Atreiani raised the scepter and it chimed.
The bridges exploded, their fire rising skyward, shattered stones pelting the river. Screams arose from the stragglers, the last refugees beginning their flight westward and southward, and the booms echoed through the valley. Many thousands of paces east, the remaining incendiaries flared blindingly, cutting a wall of fire from the far side of the river to southern mountains. The blaze now crept along the entire valley, where it would destroy the rest of Cohltos.
The Oudwnii refugees had one choice left to them: flee west or die.
For breathless minutes, Nyahri watched wide-eyed, shoulders fallen. Tears coursed her ash-covered cheeks. She had imagined such power, but to witness it, its heat, the fumes acrid in her mouth and the blasts still ringing in her ears—
The land smoldered into a surreal hell, smoke as clouds, ash as rain, the city ablaze and dead and empty. The minutes lengthened into hours, until most of the valley lay clear. Within only a few hours of dawn, the fire widened north and east, fingering along the mountainsides too. The vast majority of the Oudwnii trailed west, gone ten thousand paces or more, their torchlights mere pinpricks in the distance.
“Come,” said yw Sabi, “the Citadel awaits.”
They ascended a gentle slope of blackened earth. Building husks lit the kindling landscape. Through a smog, Sojourn’s pillar glowed in its relentless ghost-lit rhythm, heedless of any human suffering.
Nyahri coughed, covering her mouth with cloth. Here, the smoke thickened, though it also flowed around them like fog around a stone, pushed back by the resonance of yw Sabi’s scepter. Nyahri watched for any unexpected turn in the fire, for survivors, or for Dhaos and his men.
“Where are the Templarii?” she asked. “They can’t flee, can they?”
“So long as Sojourn Temple still exists, they can’t leave their geofence. We’ll encounter them soon, I’m sure.”
Yw Sabi set her last explosives at the entrance to S’Eret, enough to pull down its gate.
The blast twisted the fortress’s iron-braced doors. Thin vapors filled the inner chambers, carried by wind which howled through the passages. Ignited by drifting embers, smoke poured from the libraries. A priceless record destroyed, unguessable hours of work undone in a single night.
Nyahri tethered Kwlko and Turo in the courtyard, protected as it was by stone on all sides, open to the air above. Ashen clouds drifted over it, but the worst had passed. She slung her quiver and short bow at her back, and she carried her spear before her, staying at her mistress’s right side. Together they hurried into the darkness, a witch-light aglow in the Atreiani’s hand.
By memory, Nyahri led yw Sabi, following a particular arch, a recognizable lintel, a specific collection of dusty artifacts. When they neared the center, though, they found it blocked by stone, rubble, and broken beams.
“Destroyed by fire?” Nyahri asked, though no charcoal shown in the debris.
Yw Sabi shook her head. “Pulled down.”
“Find another way round?”
“We don’t have the time.”
Nyahri glanced behind them.
Nothing followed them, so she set aside her spear. Stone by slow stone they unblocked the way. Dusty air roughed Nyahri’s lungs, and her knuckles bled, but when at last a narrow gap appeared in the passage, she peered through it. They cleared enough to let them through, then Nyahri retrieved her weapon.
“Here we must almost crawl,” she whispered. “Swyn Templr’s door lies at the next chamber.” She knelt, peering into the dark.
“How far before the ceiling rises again?” yw Sabi asked.
“Ninety hands or so.”
“The Templarii will be waiting.”
“On all fours our beheadings will be easy.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.”
“Will your scepter not work as it did on the C’naädii?”
“The Templarii are immune. They’re yeh Mowan’s creation, not mine.”
So much I still do not understand, Nyahri thought.
“Could we use fire here?” she asked.
Yw Sabi tilted her head. “I’m out of incendiaries, so unless you want to strike flint?“
“Still, this can be done,” Nyahri said. “You can drive my longspear beyond me, mistress, and give me cover.”
“I don’t like this idea.” Yw Sabi furrowed her brow. “You know how many times I’ve wielded a spear?”
“You have a better plan?”
Yw Sabi sighed heavily, but took the spear. Nyahri shuffled forward, her thighs near the ground, knees and head bent, and she drew her longknife. Her legs burned and her neck ached with the strain. The spear haft touched her hip, the long point driven awkwardly beyond her. Yw Sabi crawled behind, one hand holding the spear, the other keeping her balance.
“Light,” she said, and the witch-light revealed the opening, the floor and walls fashioned with human bone, the glint of glassy metal. “Kepler!”
He answered, “I’m here.”
“You want me to descend? I’ve come.”
“I was hoping you’d changed your ways, Atreiani, but you remain the Betrayer.”
“You know my reasons.”
“Reasons your peers rejected more than fifty centuries ago. We will stop you here, yw Sabi.”
Nyahri inched toward the opening.
“Sure you want it to happen this way?” yw Sabi asked. “We could let you out with your lives. After the Citadel’s gone, you could run anywhere you like. You won’t be bound. No geofence.”
“You know we cannot abandon Sojourn.”
“You’re nothing but yeh Mowan’s sad little machines, then, seeing out your program.”
“There can be no compromise?”
In the last step, yw Sabi thrust the spear. Unskilled as she was, she whipped the point in an powerful circle. Nyahri rolled beyond it, arcing her knife.
“Brightest!” yw Sabi said, and the witch-light illuminated ten thousand grinning skulls.
Nyahri struck the first flesh walker she saw. Habit told her to strike for the heart, but no scream escaped its throat, and it struck back at her. Its cold blood drenched her fist.
Facing more than a dozen Templarii, armed with Oudwn longknives, Nyahri set her back against the wall. Her first opponent seemed a shriveled old woman, but the Templari swung her weapon in a strong overhand arc. Nyahri sidestepped it, bringing her own blade behind her enemy’s knees.
She backed once more to the wall. At her feet, the flesh walker squirmed, its ichor darkening the floor’s gray bones.
As their comrade fell, the Templarii attacked en masse. Nyahri dodged another. Without a clear opening, she pierced the groin of an old man’s body, hoping at least to slow the monster within the corpse.
Yw Sabi drew forward, swinging the spear clumsily. In a wild blow, she caught a Templari across the skull. She skewered another, threw him, then stabbed a third, pinning him. Awkward, unable to draw the haft back, she tore the longknife from his hand. Kneeling, the Atreiani wrapped her fingers around his neck and crushed it.
Nyahri slid her blade through the next attacker’s spine. His weapon fell, he lurched against her, and she tumbled under him. Blood oozed from his ghost-fire eyes, the flesh peeling from his skull, his nose splitting. The monster within struggled to escape its cage.
She tucked her feet beneath the body, lifting with all her strength, driving her longknife beneath its jaw. Metal twisted against sparking metal, and her arm tingled with the charge. The Templari’s ghost-fires sputtered into darkness, and she kicked him aside as another foe came.
They were strong but, whatever the Atreiani yeh Mowan created the Templari to do, combat was not their gift. The corpses piled.
A few Templarii survived the des
truction of their hosts, and they ripped from their broken shells and skittered away. Their spindly limbs clacked against the bone walls. Nyahri shoved her longknife through one’s carapace, and the shock flashed through the blade, numbing her fingers. Without hesitating she stomped another. Yw Sabi smashed one more with her boot heel. Templarin ichor smeared the floor, and it coated Nyahri’s arms and legs.
At last, Nyahri stood back to back with her mistress. Nothing else moved.
Only carrion, Nyahri thought, and broken machines.
She let go a scream, not from fear or horror or disgust, but only to let go, the bound-up energy of the fight. Yw Sabi laid her hand on Nyahri’s shoulder.
“Wounds?” she asked.
Nyahri checked herself. “Only bruises. Did we kill them all?”
“No.” Yw Sabi nodded toward the passage, the way they’d come, the way their enemies had fled.
“Kepler?” Nyahri kicked the broken human husk he had so recently abandoned.
“Forget him for now,” the Atreiani said. “Good chance most of them won’t survive long without a host.”
Nyahri reclaimed her spear, grasping it tightly. Together, she and yw Sabi approached the Citadel’s glassy-metallic skin and its unyielding portal. Yw Sabi set her scepter to the surface, a glassy chime sounded throughout the chamber, and the door receded. Beyond it, a much different passage lit in pure white, and yw Sabi extinguished her witch-light.
Nyahri’s neck tingled, a peculiar warming of the collar at her throat. The sensation carried with it an immediate familiarity, as if something she had known a thousand times before.
“What am I feeling?” Nyahri asked.
“The Citadel’s network is identifying us.”
“Why is it warm?”
“It’s a psychosomatic response. The collar’s telling you it’s active, ready to defend you if it needs to.”
“Defend me?”
From what?
“Come on,” yw Sabi said. “Time is ticking now.”
They entered Sojourn Temple, Citadel and House of Hell. Nyahri tugged back her fear. She walked and breathed where none had in five thousand years.
