The Gathering Flame

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “She’s right, Jos,” said Errec. “We have to leave.”

  Jos clenched his fist and swore under his breath. As he strapped back into the webbing of the pilot’s seat, he could hear Tilly and Rak arguing.

  “Tilly, go across.”

  “I can’t—”

  “I’m still in charge over here. You do what I say.” Rak’s voice changed pitch and volume, the better to carry over the link to the ship. “Warhammer, one to transfer.”

  A spray of light burst around Warhammer as the Mage ships got into range and began firing. The power-drain indicator on the shield panel flickered.

  “Jos,” said Errec, “I recommend that you take evasive action now.”

  The ’Hammer’s dorsal gun was firing continuously. The internal comm link clicked on. It was Tilly, her voice sounding tight and unhappy. “I’m across.”

  “Seal the doors and go take your gun,” Jos said. He picked up the external comm. “Rak, hang on. We’ll be back.”

  “Don’t worry about me. Worry about the Mages. Go!”

  Jos put the ’Hammer’s realspace engines hard forward and darted around to the far side of the merchant craft. The merch dwindled away astern over the Hammer’s aft viewscreen.

  Errec was watching the readouts. “Losing pressure in upper stores, losing pressure in engineering. The warships are still on our tail.”

  “Good,” Jos said, tight-lipped. “That’s exactly where I want them.”

  It took two days for Jos to fight the Mages to their destruction, in the cold dark beyond Ferianth. By the time he got back to the merch it was too late for Rak Barenslee. Though she’d been right again. This was a particularly rich load.

  XXV. GALCENIAN DATING 978 A.F.

  ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 3 PERADA

  PERADA SHIFTED her grip on the wooden chest holding the Iron Crown, and tried to walk faster. She didn’t want to slow down Tilly and the others—not even Nivome—but she couldn’t run. Some time in the past day or so the baby’s weight had settled lower, and her hips ached whenever she tried to lengthen her stride.

  I shouldn’t have let Tilly talk me into this, she thought. Her head felt light and strangely cold without the weight of the braids she’d worn ever since her hair was long enough to plait. I should have told them to go on without me.

  But it was too late now. Her shorn braids lay on the floor of the shelter behind her, and she was stumbling down the tunnel to the emergency hangar—the last, secret way out of the Summer Palace. The Consort-architect who’d built it, long before Veratina’s day, had spoken of the project as a safety measure; not until some years after the hangar’s completion had Domina Ilea learned of his clandestine departures from it to visit a common shopgirl in An-Jemayne. Ilea had dispensed with her Consort shortly thereafter, but she’d kept his well-designed private bolt-hole.

  “ … if the entrance isn’t blocked by rubble,” Nivome was saying, when another energy strike came down on the palace somewhere above their heads. The sound was muffled and distant, but the vibration made the floor quiver underneath their feet.

  Perada lost her balance—with her arms full of the chest holding the Iron Crown, and her body warped out of its normal shape and weight by pregnancy, she couldn’t compensate in time. She felt Tillijen’s strong spacer’s hands catching her before she could fall.

  “It’s no good,” Perada said, as soon as her feet were back under her. “I can’t run, and you shouldn’t have to wait on me.”

  Tillijen ignored her. “You,” she said to Nivome. “You’re the strongest of us. Pick her up and carry her.”

  Perada opened her mouth to protest, but the Minister of Internal Security lifted her up before she could speak. Nivome had never lacked strength; in spite of her awkward contours he carried her easily, striding down the tunnel at a pace that Tillijen and Ambassador Aringher had to stretch to equal.

  The emergency hangar was deserted when they got there. A portion of the stone roof overhead had collapsed, crushing most of the waiting aircars. A fire burned in one of them, filling the air with bluish-grey smoke and acrid, choking fumes.

  “Over there,” Nivome said. He swung Perada to the ground and pointed to an aircar with a sleek body and stubby wings. “That one looks undamaged.”

  The aircar was tiny—a two-seater, which meant that Tillijen and Ambassador Aringher, as the leanest members of the party, had to squeeze in by standing against the rear bulkhead. Perada struggled to pull the safety webbing into place across her abdomen. It was a tight fit—the baby kicked and squirmed in protest, and when the latches finally clicked, she could scarcely breathe.

  Nivome took the pilot’s seat. He glanced over the controls, and began to snap switches with an expert hand. I was right, Perada thought, remembering the interminable flight up from An-Jemayne, after the attack on the Palace Major. He can do this perfectly well when he needs to.

  The turbines fired with a whine and the aircar began to vibrate. At the same time, a booming noise from outside told of another strike. The aircar began to turn, heading toward the launch tunnel. More rumbling and booming noises came from up above. The walls of the hangar quivered and blurred as a piece of the ceiling came loose and crashed down ahead of them.

  Nivome kicked the car in a tight circle around the rubble and aimed for the tunnel again, gaining speed as he went. More rocks fell behind them and to either side. Perada heard Tilly swearing under her breath in a steady monotone.

  “Stand by,” Nivome said. He hit a control on the console, and the car seemed to leap forward. Perada felt the seat cushions giving under the acceleration, and the separate, protesting pressure of the baby’s weight inside her.

  They entered the tunnel. Painted guidance and timing stripes on walls flashed by, quicker and quicker, in the glare of the aircar’s landing lights. A brighter, redder light appeared in front of them, filling the cockpit with its lurid, monochromatic glow.

  “Fire up ahead,” said Aringher quietly. “We may well be trapped.”

  “We’re not dying down here, Ambassador,” Nivome said. The light from the approaching flames gave a grim and bloody cast to his heavy features. “I have other plans for my life.”

  He nudged the speed upward. Perada felt the aircar quivering with its readiness to lift—all but flying through the tunnel. The guidelines flickered past in a blur.

  “Four,” said Nivome. “Three, two, one … .”

  They entered the fire. The walls and ceiling vanished in a rippling curtain of red and yellow. Nivome pulled back on the controls. Perada felt a quick, stomach-churning drop as the floor of the tunnel fell away beneath them, then a sudden heavy pressure as the aircar lifted.

  The sky was black with smoke ahead, the ground was red with fire. The little aircar jerked and tossed on the updrafts. Perada choked back the bile rising in her throat—If I’m abandoning everything, she pleaded with the universe, please let me not embarrass myself while I’m doing it. She heard a soft moan from Tillijen behind her and when she looked at the aft monitor she understood why: nothing now stood on the mountainside where the Summer Palace had once been except a heap of rubble filled with dancing flames.

  Then a curl of smoke obscured the wreckage, and the aircar sped on above the burning landscape.

  Warhammer drove inward toward the surface of Entibor. Tres Brehant and the few ships of the Fleet remaining in-system followed as closely as they dared, keeping the Mage warships at a distance until the ’Hammer could reach atmosphere.

  “We’re losing aids to navigation,” Errec said. “All the dirtside beacons are going down.”

  “Orbitals?”

  “None active.”

  Jos looked at the sensor readouts. Errec was right—the screens were showing more garbage than sense. “Then we’ll have to do this the hard way,” he said. “Errec, you found Mages for me when I asked you to. Can you find Perada for me now?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “That’s all I ask. Stand by for atmosphere translation
.”

  Jos pulled back on the throttles and brought Warhammer skipping into the atmosphere, bleeding off speed with friction. When he’d slowed enough to go in without burning, he was over the nightside of Entibor, and the planetscape below him made his breath stop in his throat. The whole surface of the planet was marked and lined with fire—continents and mountain chains and archipelagoes picked out in crawling lines of scarlet and crimson and angry gold.

  “Sweet fortune,” Jos said. “What the hell is going on down there?”

  “The working,” said Errec. “The lives and minds of every Circle on Entibor, turned to this alone. They can’t destroy the world in a single night—but they can set in motion such changes that soon nothing on-planet will be left alive.”

  “And ’Rada’s down there in the middle of it? We have to find her, Errec—find her fast.”

  The sky was dark, full of smoke from the flames and rubble of the Mages’ energy strikes, and from the vents that opened up in the earth below the speeding aircar like ragged, red-lined mouths. The glow of the burning world lit up the roiling clouds in shades of deep red and dull orange. Perada couldn’t recognize any landmarks—the Palace Major was gone, and the Grand Plaza, and the business towers and the warehouses and the suburban shopping galleries that had spread out over the flat ground between the central metropolis and the spaceport complex.

  Nivome piloted the aircar expertly through the clouds and the drifting smoke—sometimes it seemed to Perada as if he were keeping the tiny craft steady by the strength of his arms and shoulders alone. Finally, he brought the aircar down onto flat ground at what Perada supposed was the field at An-Jemayne. None of the buildings in the port complex remained standing, and grit and ash lay drifted on the cratered tarmac like snow.

  “This is it, Your Dignity,” he said. “We’re here.”

  Perada needed Tillijen’s help to get out of the safety webbing and down onto the field. Her legs had lost circulation during the long time she’d spent under the straps, and wanted to fold under her. The air was full of choking fumes—a vile, throat-clogging soup in which smoke from burning wreckage combined with gases belched up from underneath the earth. The smell made her gag and retch, leaning against Tilly’s arm for support until the spasm passed.

  “Wrap a bit of cloth around your nose and mouth,” Aringher advised quietly. “It’ll filter out some of the solids.”

  Perada swallowed hard. She wanted a mouthful of water, but she didn’t think she wasn’t going to get any—not now, maybe not ever—and her back and legs ached wretchedly. “I can spare a yard or two from the skirt of this gown,” she said. “Tilly, you’ve got a knife.”

  Tillijen cut off strips of the finely woven fabric, and they bound them around their faces. Perada took shallow breaths and tried not to think any longer about the smell.

  “Which way is the courier ship?” she asked.

  Nobody answered. At last, Nivome said, “Your Dignity, there is no courier.”

  “But—” Her voice cracked; she forced control onto it with all the strength she had. “What happened?”

  Nivome shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Who can tell, Your Dignity? You see what it’s like. Maybe they came and couldn’t find us, maybe they never made it down through atmosphere. Maybe they couldn’t wait. We did the best we could.”

  “Yes,” Perada said. “You’ve done well, all of you. And now it’s over.”

  She opened the small wooden chest she’d carried from the Summer Palace and took out the Iron Crown. She settled the black tiara’s heavy, rough-finished weight onto her head—it fit poorly on her new-cropped skull, without the thick, intertwined braids to anchor it in place.

  “So I die on my planet after all,” she said, “and wear the Crown to my public burning. May fortune be kind to my people who got away.”

  The ’Hammer was a superb starship—sturdy and well armed, and admirably constructed to run on a straight line to a jump point faster than almost anything else of her size in space—but her mass and her shape made her ill-suited for atmospheric work. Keeping the freighter on-course and stable in the thermal updrafts and the firestorms of Entibor’s destruction took all the skill Jos possessed.

  “The Summer Palace should be up ahead somewhere,” Errec said.

  “I don’t have it on visual.” Jos squinted at the mess outside the viewscreens. Smoke and ash instead of atmosphere; nothing but garbage on the sensors … I’m lucky I haven’t smashed into the side of a mountain. “How about Perada? Can you tell me where she is?”

  “Ahead,” said Errec. “I can’t tell how far. There’s too much Magework.”

  “You mean we’ve still got Mages alive down here?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Can’t we get under this smoke?” Nannla called over the internal comms from the gun bubble.

  “I don’t think so,” Jos replied. “It looks like it goes right down to the ground. But this ought to be the Summer Palace.”

  “Maybe it is, boss, but you couldn’t prove it by me.”

  A fireball rose from the ground below, flooding the cockpit with brilliant light, dwarfing the ship with its size.

  “She isn’t here, Jos,” Errec said.

  “How sure are you?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Right, people—everyone look sharp,” Jos said over the intercom. “We have to stay down here a little longer. Errec, get me a new direction, fast.”

  “That way,” Errec said. He pointed. “She’s that way.”

  “Let me know when we’re getting close.”

  “If I can.”

  Jos pushed main engines forward, and started in the direction Errec had indicated. A roar of dismay came over the internal comms from the engine room—young Wrann, who still wasn’t accustomed to how much power the ‘Hammer had in her to give when she had to. After that, they flew on in silence, except for the roar of the ’Hammer engines and the constant background rattling and chinking as firestorms and turbulence buffeted the ship.

  Finally Errec said, “We’re getting near.”

  Metadi looked over at the dead-reckoning indicator on the navicomp. “According to this, we should be right over the Palace Major, and I can’t see a goddamn thing.”

  “She isn’t here, Jos.”

  “Which way is she, then?”

  Errec pointed again. “That way. The landing field.”

  Jos turned Warhammer in the direction Errec had indicated and slowed the ship as much as he dared. He couldn’t afford the time he’d lose if they overshot the field and had to come back again from the other direction.

  “This should be the An-Jemayne spaceport field,” he said a few minutes later. “But I still can’t see anything. We’ll have to go down and take a look.”

  “Perada’s here,” said Errec. “Somewhere close. But be careful. The surface isn’t what I’d call stable anymore.”

  “Then we won’t set down on it. Stand by to lower ship.”

  Jos cut in the heavy-duty ventral nullgrav units that under normal circumstances would slow the final stages of the ’Hammer’s landing and settle her down properly onto her legs. This time, though, he didn’t hit the toggle that brought the heavy metal landing legs unfolding out of their niches in the freighter’s belly. The engines growled in protest, and the nullgravs echoed the note, but they responded without stinting to the increased demand. Warhammer hovered obediently, no more than a tall man’s height above the broken ground.

  Jos unstrapped his safety webbing. “Hold her, Errec. I’m going to drop the ramp and see for myself what’s out there.”

  He made his way to the ’Hammer’s main hatch and hit the button to open the door and lower the ramp. The view he got wasn’t encouraging—if he hadn’t trusted Errec’s word on it, he’d never have known that this broken-up expanse of rock and metal was the landing field for Entibor’s largest spaceport.

  It didn’t look like there was anybody left alive. The fumes in the air made his eyes water and st
ing. Then he heard a voice calling his name.

  “Jos! Over here!”

  He jumped off the end of the ramp and ran as fast as he could over the uneven ground in the direction of the cry. He came to where four people stood close together in the lee of a small stubby-winged aircar that looked at first glance like part of the surrounding rubble. One was Tillijen, and one was—of all the people to meet again in this place and time—the pale, clerkish-looking man whom he’d surprised and tied up with curtain cords in the back room of the Double Moon. And one was Nivome do’Evaan of Rolny, and the last—the last was a small and extremely pregnant woman wearing the Iron Crown of Entibor.

  She was the one who had called out his name.

  “’Rada,” he said. He hadn’t expected to get here in time, in spite of everything he’d said to Errec and everything he’d done. He’d hadn’t expected it, but she was alive. “You’ve cut your hair.”

  “I had to,” she said. “If I wanted to leave the planet. We were going to meet a courier ship, but it never came … . We were waiting for the fire, but then I saw the ’Hammer come down through the smoke, and I knew that you’d come back.”

  The captain’s cabin aboard Warhammer hadn’t changed. It was still a spare, unadorned bit of cubic, scrupulously tidy, with the same faint but unmistakable shipboard smell to the recirculated air. Perada—too numb from the sudden change of fortune to raise a protest—let Gentlesir Aringher strap her into the acceleration couch while Jos and Tilly hurried to take their places for liftoff.

  “There are, it seems, still a few Mage warships in the system,” Aringher said as he worked on the buckles of the safety webbing. “After all the trouble these nice people have gone through to rescue us, it wouldn’t do for us to get blown up on our way to hyper.”

  “No,” Perada said. “I suppose not.” For herself, she wasn’t sure she cared. “What about you and Gentlesir Nivome? Has the captain given you places?”