Call of Fire

by Beth Cato

  “You learn by living. You fail by dying.”

  “I failed to kill Ambassador Blum earlier today, when I had the opportunity. I could have ended this—”

  “You mean well, Ingrid Carmichael.” The qilin’s invocation of her name caused Ingrid to break out in chills. “But you wield what is yours, and we wield what is ours. You also presume to know the purpose of the guandao.”

  Ingrid bowed her head in acceptance of the rebuke. “Then why did you guide me to the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, and not Lee?”

  “If he had found the guandao blessed by green dragon blood, his arrogance would have caused him to carry it with him. That could not be. It was safest with you on this day, and it will be safest on this ship through the next.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it is guaranteed to be safe here.”

  “That is correct.”

  “What do we do about Ambassador Blum in the meantime?”

  “Survive her.” The qilin sounded quite matter-of-fact. It bowed, one leg extended, and as light as a dandelion puff, the qilin took to the air and leaped over Ingrid. She turned in time to see it bound over Fenris and Cy and down the hatch. Gone, just like that.

  As though a lamp had been extinguished, a sense of full reality returned. The Palmetto Bug reeked of vinegar. The lights were low, much of the hallway cast in shadow.

  “Damn you and your cryptic answers!” Ingrid yelled after the qilin. It was easier to rage with the entity gone. “You tell me I have powers, and a frail body, and your only advice is to survive?” She rocked on her knees and resisted the urge to pulverize something.

  She could scream and cry in her very own Garden of Gethsemane, but this changed nothing. She truly was a fantastic—the granddaughter of a goddess—caught in a war between rival fantastics, with millions of lives cast with her as flotsam.

  “You know, jeremiads against godlike beings are ill-advised, even if they aren’t physically present,” said Fenris.

  “Ingrid, are you all right?” asked Cy as he scrambled toward her.

  “No, I’m not. I’m angry. I’m frustrated. I’m sick of all of this.” She swiped tears from her cheeks.

  “We couldn’t hear anything the qilin said to you, but I think we picked up the gist pretty well from your side of the conversation. You know where Lee is?”

  “Yes. He’s being held captive in Chinatown. I know the building.”

  “I see.” Cy looked contemplative.

  Fenris approached at a crawl and passed Ingrid to pat the place where the qilin had stood. “I’ll be damned. It’s like the thing wasn’t here at all. Not a mark on the tatami.”

  “The qilin came here for a reason.” Ingrid looked around. “Do you have any imagery of a qilin on the ship?” She looked at Cy.

  “No.” He frowned. “Actually, yes. But I only found it when I was making up the beds earlier today.” He stood and motioned over to the top bunk where Lee had slept.

  Ingrid stepped up a few rungs to peer over the rack. The light was dim. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Go up another rung and look at the back wall.”

  She did just that, leaning into the gap in the railing and onto the thin mattress. A qilin had been carved into the back wall. It was maybe five inches long, the nicks coarse, but it was recognizable. She wondered when Lee had carved it during their journey, and if he had known the power within this action.

  She hopped to the floor again, her legs wobbly. The heaviness of her burden weighed on her like an anvil. She sat, knees bent, her face tucked against her skirt. The cloth stank of mustiness and dirt, or maybe everything smelled worse in the absence of the qilin. She wanted to curl up in a ball and hide away in a closet, like she used to do as a girl. She wanted to tell the world to go to hell. She wanted, she wanted . . . Lee safe. Mr. Sakaguchi safe. For all of this to stop.

  Cy hovered close by, his brow wrinkled in concern. She reached out for him and he was there. His arm wrapped around her shoulder, her head fitting just so against his neck. God, but he felt good and right. She needed this, she needed him.

  “Tell us what we need to do,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  A strange quiet had descended on the city of Seattle. No music blared from windows. No autocars or wagons traversed the streets. People ducked in and out of houses like ghosts in their own neighborhoods. A catfight rang out from an alley, shrill and loud, the crash of a metal trash can like a gunshot. A gentle drizzle fell and pattered in puddles and gutters, the smell of moisture and fireplace smoke strong on the wind.

  Curfew had been declared. It didn’t need any grand proclamation. Tension carried in the air, sure as electricity.

  Ingrid walked arm in arm with Cy. Sylphs surrounded them in a gray halo. She hadn’t needed to descend into her power to communicate with them; simply holding up a jamu-pan was enough to elicit a whir of delight from the full hive. Ingrid supposed it was just as well that they worked off the sugar through their magic. If they kept eating bread rolls at this rate, they’d end up as lazy and plump as the pet fairy that street brute had worn on his hat.

  It would have been nice to mingle with nighttime carousers or traffic, but instead, she felt utterly conspicuous as they walked along the empty street. Cy didn’t appear to be invisible to her eyes either.

  The street dipped down as it led to the waterfront. Past the angled roofs, massive Behemoth- and Tiamat-class vessels glowed in a way that made her eyes ache if she looked for more than a few seconds.

  “Soldiers,” Cy said in a murmur as they passed through an intersection. A block north, troops in Unified Pacific navy blue almost blended in with the night. Electric streetlights showed the shine of hat brims and guns in hand. “Doing a sweep block by block. Looks like they’re working east more than south so far.”

  “Will they give Fenris a hard time?”

  “The fact that I paid folks from the police station to accompany the Bug to the dock should help matters along.” She still couldn’t believe his nerve to walk into the precinct like that, but Cy could work miracles with his drawl and easy smile. “Fenris’ll need to show his papers, but so long as he doesn’t talk too much, he should be able to moor properly and do a complete check-over of the ship. He’ll fly up to Edmonds, and we’ll meet him there soon enough.”

  “If the curfew doesn’t keep ships grounded,” she whispered.

  “The opposite.” He sounded especially grim as he pointed upward. The pale ovals of airships stood out against the starless sky. “If Blum’s moving in on Chinatown, every working airship’ll be encouraged to lift off. When Durendals are at work and bombs are being dropped, you don’t want airships around. Enchanted helium isn’t highly flammable like hydrogen, but sometimes, all it takes is a spark on the breeze striking just the right spot.”

  “The buildings around here are brick but they’re still awfully close together. The whole city could go up.” The Chinese would be bound to catch the blame again, too. She shuddered at the memory of San Francisco.

  Cy’s hand squeezed her waist. “Don’t think about that right now, and don’t think about San Francisco either.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “These past few days, I close my eyes and I see San Francisco again, the way it was when we left. Sometimes, I swear I still smell it.” His voice was low and hoarse. “Seeing Manila and Peking years ago did something terrible to me, but they were never places I called home. I had empathy, but not intimacy with those cities.”

  “You used to live here in Seattle, too.” Voices carried from farther away. A woman dashed across the street, both hands clasping a hat onto her head.

  “I did, and I like the city just fine.” He sighed. “Ingrid, here’s the way of it. Something awful’s about to happen here. It’s not our fault. It is what it is. We need to control what we can and get out of here as fast as a dragon after gold.”

  Ingrid nodded. Control what they can. Not exacerbate the situation. “The energy of the earth hasn’t fluctua
ted yet.”

  “We’re ready as can be if it does.”

  They’d brought along as much kermanite as they could quietly and conveniently carry. Her coat pockets were filled as full as she dared, with energized kermanite on the right, empty on the left. Cy had more in two old gunnysacks tied to his waist. Over a thousand dollars’ worth in all, a wealth of stones that the auxiliary normally would have transported with armed guards.

  A dog trotted into the street. It was a German shepherd, black ears erect. It paused a moment then trotted straight for them, tail swaying.

  “Cy?” Ingrid whispered.

  “Keep walking.” Another, smaller dog emerged, a little mongrel more gray than white. It likewise bounced their way with a wagging tail.

  “Is this the point where we assume that dog sorcery really did the trick? Dogs typically don’t pay me much mind.”

  “Me neither, though as Fenris loves to mention, cats follow me like I’m a Pied Piper. Come on, dogs, shoo!”

  They didn’t. Both dogs whined and bounced along at Ingrid’s side as if they’d found a new playmate. This required some magic, and fast, before people—soldiers in particular—wondered at the dogs’ behavior.

  Ingrid partly closed her eyes and focused on the heat writhing in her body. She’d taken care to absorb the rest of the energy from that big chunk of kermanite to make sure she had enough power to shield her skin for another walk with the sylphs.

  “Dogs,” she whispered. “Go home.” To her surprise, the words tumbled from her lips with the slightest trace of blue fog. The color dissipated as it stretched toward the dogs. The German shepherd emitted a tiny whine, and then both dogs bolted away.

  “Did you see that?” she whispered.

  “I saw the dogs leave. Was there something more?”

  She might have laughed if she had dared to make loud noise. Her earth magic had somehow melded with the dog sorcery, no question about it. Could she instill that sort of power into other kanji? Would it work with other animals—horses, perhaps, or maybe even fantastics? Why confine possibilities to creatures? The potential was staggering.

  A loud engine roared somewhere close by, accompanied by a terrible grinding noise. “A Durendal,” Cy muttered. “That’s the sound of treads on wet pavement.”

  “It must be a few blocks away, then.” Their street was still dirt; the paved avenues of downtown were north.

  “Not far enough away.” She felt the tiredness in his words, and knew the exhaustion went far deeper than physical weariness. He loathed the machines that were his legacy.

  They both grew silent as more soldiers emerged from buildings on both sides of the street. The soldiers in Unified Pacific blue escorted families carrying carpetbags and birdcages and bundled blankets folded to transport belongings. A businessman carried an entire till. Lights shined from upstairs windows and revealed other people throwing items together, soldiers waving them on.

  A wagon lurked in the street, a bored horse in the shafts. Soldiers stewed in wait. Ingrid did a double take—none of them were smoking. Quite odd, considering the popularity of the vice.

  “Going to dynamite soon,” Cy said in a hiss. “Firebreak.”

  She nodded. These blocks around Chinatown were poor, their residents disposable. The UP had to take precautions so that their offensive on the district didn’t set the whole city aflame.

  Ingrid smelled Chinatown before she saw it. The streets throughout Seattle stank of garbage, but here the potency of sweet-sour rot increased exponentially. They rounded a corner to see a building at a dead end ahead. The windows of the brick structure were boarded, and the base of the building mounded with garbage. More had been flung high at the walls—pieces of rotting meat and fruit and unidentified foulness adhering in a spatter. Sticky, foul trails showed where other trash had slid down to join the piles below. A dead dog lay on its side, rib bones exposed and swarming with dark flecks. Farther down was the decaying body of a horse, or part of one. Ingrid tried not to breathe as they hurried past more and more dead animals.

  The sheer number was no accident. It was intent.

  The city had degraded to medieval-style warfare. Dead animals and disease as weapons against the Chinese. It galled her. This was supposed to be a civilized age, with the Unified Pacific as the pinnacle of technology and education, and yet . . . and yet. She again thought of the Quakers and the Chinese imprisoned in Portland, and forced the memory away.

  Cy was right. They had to focus on what they could control in the here and now, or they’d go mad.

  The street had been blockaded by broken bricks, lumber, and what looked to be the stacked chassis of a few old autocars. The wall stood a good ten feet in height and sloped outward. The top featured carved wooden spears angled outward. It was impossible to tell who built the wall: the whites and Japanese, or the Chinese, or both, each engaged in a flurried effort to protect themselves from each other.

  “The spears are smart,” murmured Cy. “I imagine folks were flinging firebombs over the side. Chinese need to stay on guard.”

  “I expected more guards on this side, too, police or soldiers.”

  “They’re here, though not exposed.” He motioned to windows across the way. “Trust me, both sides are watching.”

  Tension carried in the air, in the darkness, in the suspicious silence of thousands of people awaiting an explosion.

  “We need to find a good place to break in,” Ingrid whispered, looking around. Their spinning barricade of sylphs was starting to slow down. The long walk and the effort to cloak two people had drained them far too fast. Good thing Cy was packing pastries along with a pistol and Tesla rod.

  Dodging trash, they continued along the street and to another brick building against a dead-end alley. It faced a business that looked to be closed, the windows partially boarded and the interior gutted by fire.

  “Here,” he muttered, motioning to the Chinatown side. “Take care when you push out power. It’s hard to know how well built these places are.”

  “That’s a comfort,” she muttered as she glanced up. A two-story structure, all brick. She could shield them if the entire wall collapsed, but she couldn’t do anything about the noise. Forces on either side of the wall would assume the attack had started, and she and Cy would be right in the middle.

  She addressed the sylphs in her mind and felt prickles from their focus on her. Ingrid showed them how she would place her hand on the bricks and vent power, and that they needed to avoid direct contact with her outward hand or the area around it. She didn’t want to hurt them.

  A happy hum came in the affirmative. They understood.

  Cy shifted to unholster the Tesla rod. He planted a quick kiss on Ingrid’s cheek and edged back while keeping his left hand on her waist. The elliptical flights of the sylphs adjusted around them.

  Ingrid worked her boots forward into the garbage, gagging slightly, and planted a palm against the coarse red bricks.

  Power surged in her arm, eager to be unleashed. She breathed in, out. She only needed a small pressure wave. Like the tap of a doctor’s hammer on a knee, not a jackhammer. She pushed out energy.

  Cracks expanded from her hand with a soft rumble. A small cascade of brick chunks and red powder joined the refuse below. She glanced up. No sign of an imminent collapse—that was good—but damn it, she’d been too gentle.

  “Try here.” Cy motioned a little farther over and down. His pointer finger was still painted black, his knuckles red from the fight earlier in the day. Ingrid moved her hand. This time when she pushed out, several bricks completely crumbled. More cracks appeared, like zigzag lightning bolts.

  Cy tugged on her shoulder. “Warn the sylphs that I’m about to kick a few times.”

  Ingrid passed along the message. The sylphs’ trajectory altered. “Do it,” she said. “I’m not sure how well they can cover us right now.”

  Cy kicked. The first impact caused a few bricks to fall inside, but the second kick punched a hole that mom
entarily snared his foot. Once he was freed, it took a third kick to cave in a portion of the wall some four feet high. Ingrid turned away, smothering coughs against her arm. The dust cleared to reveal pitch-blackness within.

  “Oh yes!” She softly clapped her hands.

  Cy surmounted the pile of rubble and trash first and offered her a hand to help her over. Debris rumbled and slid beneath them. She hopped into the dark room. Something crackled underfoot and she eased back, terrified the ancient floor might be caving in.

  “A chair,” said Cy, the words a mere breath. He pulled her forward. More pieces of the brittle chair shattered underfoot and were kicked against a nearby wall. She cringed. Invisible or not, she made for a poor ninja.

  They ducked through a doorway, the sylphs a gray smear in the darkness, and into a hallway lit by gaps in the roof far above. This building, like its neighbor across the wall, had been abandoned, and with reason. Scorch marks colored a full wall in black, while the stairway wall wore the words die chankoro in thick white paint. Nooses swayed from a railing far above. A few had loops that had been cut, the ends dangling unraveled.

  Male voices speaking Chinese echoed from another room. Cy guided her near a wall. His head angled downward, his expression worried. She felt a spike of panic—had their footsteps shown in dust on the floor? The light, dim as it was, illuminated a well-worn path through the foyer. She felt a smidgen more at ease. If they were caught, it wouldn’t be for that reason.

  Two men burst into the room. One hoisted up a lamp. Both held knives. They chattered softly as they moved toward the outer wall. Cy nudged Ingrid, and they dashed through a doorway without a door to the outside.

  More male voices approached. Ingrid’s first instinct was to duck into the shadows, but Cy nudged her again. He motioned to the sylphs. They had slowed more, their flutters more like those of sparrows than hummingbirds.

  Ingrid tried to gauge their location based on the qilin’s vision. She nodded Cy forward. They traversed a somewhat paved street that was crackled and sunken in spots. Some of the dips were quite deep. This was likely made ground, like in downtown San Francisco, where dirt was dumped into natural marshland. Such land quickly liquefied during an earthquake.