Fire and Dust

by James Gardner

  The wight, in life a female elf, glared pointedly down at Kiripao's hand plunged wrist-deep into her chest. Kiripao blinked for a few moments, then got the message. «Sorry,» he muttered, and levered the hand out of her thoracic cavity, dragging with it some stray bone fragments and a spill of the red powder that seemed to serve these wights as blood.

  «Could I smell your hand?» I whispered to him.

  «No.»

  * * *

  Kiripao's robes had been reduced to charred rags during the fire-fight. He'd rearranged the remaining scraps into a passable loincloth, leaving his chest and legs bare. The flesh thus revealed was a three-colored patchwork: the angry red of burns, the pale pink of an elf's normal skin, and a milky white as unblemished as a freshly gessoed canvas. I'd seen that white before, and not just on blank canvases – it was new skin, recently regenerated by a powerful influx of healing magic. Over the next few hours, it would gradually adjust itself to match the rest of Kiripao's body; in the meantime however, it showed that the pious brother had taken quite a beating, and someone had patched him up afterward.

  Of course, I told myself, Kiripao must be in good standing with his god. If he prayed for his injuries to heal, the deity would answer his prayers. And he could have patched up Yasmin and Oonah too in the same way… at least to the point where they were out of immediate danger.

  Oonah hobbled from the control room a moment later, working up a warm smile when she saw this was a rescue party. Whatever healing she had received, it wasn't enough – her legs moved stiffly, as if each step brought her fierce pain. Her arms had the same stiffness as she reached to take back her ice-staff from Hezekiah; but once she grasped the staff in her hands, some of her constriction appeared to ease. I wondered if the staff had inherent healing powers, or if she simply felt better holding it. With reverent care, she set the butt of the staff onto the ground, then leaned her weight wearily upon it.

  Several more seconds passed; I held my breath, waiting for Yasmin to emerge from the control room. Kiripao and Oonah said nothing. When I could bear it no longer, I rushed to the doorway and plunged inside.

  When you're a Handmaid of Entropy, it seems you don't respond well to healing.

  Yasmin sat propped against the far wall of the control room, her head sagging, her hands lying limply in her lap. For a moment, I didn't know if she was even alive; but then her chest lifted with a soft and shallow breath.

  In a heartbeat I was crouching by her side, but reluctant to touch her for fear of causing pain. Her dragon-skin sheath had not been damaged by the firewands, but where the sheath hadn't offered any defense – her arms, her bare shoulders – Yasmin's flesh was deeply singed. Her hair had burned down to the scalp. Even worse, there was a patch of wet stickiness on her back, just below one shoulder blade. I guessed that Qi or Chi must have dirked her with a magic dagger, strong enough to pierce the tough dragon hide that was supposed to protect her.

  With a tortured moan, Yasmin lifted her head to look at me. Her cheeks glistened with tears, squeezed out by the pain against her will. In a sighing whisper, she said, «You'll have to… draw another sketch of me, Britlin. The other one…»

  She looked down at her hand and moved the fingers slightly. Flakes of burnt paper fluttered into her lap.

  «What can I do to help?» I asked.

  «Not much,» Oonah said from behind my back. «She's resistant to healing magic – all the Doomguard are.»

  «I tried my best,» Kiripao added, «but her will fought back too strongly.»

  «Entropy… must not be cheated,» Yasmin whispered. «A Handmaid… must stay… loyal…»

  Her voice drifted off. At first, I thought she was simply too tired to continue speech; but her eyes had focused on something at the far end of the room, and I turned to see the others entering the control room in the company of the wights.

  «Wights…» she murmured.

  «Don't worry,» I assured her, «they're on our side.»

  «But they are… they have…»

  A flicker of life pierced through her dull resignation; I had no idea why. «Yasmin, don't get yourself excited – save your strength.»

  «But the wights,» she forced herself to speak. «They could… contribute…»

  She was too weak to finish her sentence, but Wheezle hurried forward. «As a Dustman, I am familiar with the devotions of Entropy, though I am not a follower myself. Handmaids disapprove of conventional curative magics, but they practice a different form of healing that adheres to the precepts of their faith. I believe they can simply… withdraw health from one body and transfer it to someone else.»

  «Not all of the health is transferred,» Yasmin whispered. «Some life energy is simply… dissipated… in the process. Praise Entropy.»

  Immediately, I offered, «If she wants a life infusion, she can have some from me.»

  «No,» Yasmin said, putting great force into that single word. «The wights…»

  «She is correct,» Wheezle nodded. «Once health begins to drain from one body to another, the flow is next to impossible to stop. Better to take the energy from the wights, honored Cavendish. It will lay them cleanly to rest, just as Unveiler would; and it is an obviously noble cause.»

  «Noble!» Petrov snorted. «Pardon me while I puke.»

  Hezekiah calmly threw a backfist into Petrov's gut. The man doubled over, stopped from falling only by the wights who held his arms.

  «Not bad,» said Kiripao, «but try for more snap in your wrist.»

  * * *

  Wheezle asked for four volunteers from the wights. All of them stepped forward, including the ones holding Petrov and Miriam. I wondered if they were simply eager to please the person who held the scepter, or if some measure of generosity still lurked behind those flaming eyes. Perhaps all undead possessed a degree of good will as well as bad; they merely walked down wicked paths because their creators were almost always evil.

  For the sake of simplicity, Wheezle chose the four wights who didn't have their hands full with our prisoners. The first was an orc woman with greasy black hair and a more than usually greenish complexion. She settled gently onto her knees beside Yasmin and actually managed a smile (despite her boar-like tusks). Then the wight hissed softly and held out her hand for Yasmin to take.

  Yasmin's lips moved in silent invocation. I found it difficult to picture an impersonal force like Entropy being able to confer favors on its faithful… but how different was this from the practices of druids? Druids didn't worship any particular deity, they attuned themselves to Nature itself; in time, that attunement let them draw upon the power of Nature to perform magical deeds. Thinking about it, I had to admit the downhill force of Entropy was just as strong, if not stronger, than the vitality surging through plants and animals. If you attuned yourself to Entropy, why couldn't you learn to channel that strength?

  Even as I watched, the channeling began. Yasmin used her last reserves of willpower to reach out and take the wight's offered hand. Weakly, she pulled it in toward her body, pressing it against her stomach. «Do you give willingly?» she asked the wight.

  It nodded.

  For a long moment, nothing discernible happened. Then the wight's lips pursed into a tiny O, and its eyes opened wide. It let out a tiny trickle of sound, a small astonished breath; the noise made me think of a woman in passion, touched by her lover and finding herself swept with a deep surprising heat. The wight reached out with its other hand, taking Yasmin by the arm and holding tight, its talons digging into Yasmin's flesh. I shuddered for a moment as I remembered the wight behind the Mortuary, clawing its victim and withering her arm… but in the blink of an eye, it was the wight who began to wither.

  The orc woman's hair went first. It fell, strand by strand, onto the rotting garment that covered the wight's shoulders. Then her skin puckered, wrinkling, cracking, flaking away. Underneath, her muscles were taut bands of filaments stretched over bone; but as the seconds ticked by, the tautness eased and the filaments separated from on
e another, like threads slipped off a loom, one by one.

  Layer by layer, the wight's body fell away, sloughed off like unneeded clothes. Nothing decayed entirely – all the pieces remained. It was only the life energy that seeped off, drained from each fiber of flesh… and once the life was gone, the stray bits of anatomy had no remaining cohesion. The pieces separated quietly, like strangers who had no reason to stay together.

  Despite the power flooding out of the wight, I could see little improvement in Yasmin. Perhaps the worst of her burns looked a little glossier, covered with an almost invisible veneer of regenerated skin; and perhaps the blood had stopped welling quite so quickly from the knife wound in her back. Even so, her eyes retained a deathly dullness and her hands showed only fatigue as they clung to the crumbling wight. Entropy might be allotting Yasmin a tiny portion of the wight's lifeforce… but it was keeping the lion's share for itself.

  Soon, the wight had devolved to nothing but a meatless skeleton. One hand still pressed against Yasmin's stomach, and the other held her arm in its claws; but with a click of bones, it released its taloned grip and lifted its fingers to cup Yasmin under the chin. The gesture was exquisitely tender, like a mother reassuring her child… and then the skeleton peacefully relaxed into a litter of unconnected bones, their fall to the floor muffled by the dry pillow of tissues that had slumped off first.

  «More,» Yasmin whispered hungrily. And the next wight stepped up, its face composed in total serenity.

  * * *

  Three more wights. Three more subdued collapses. I think Yasmin could have absorbed the energy of a dozen such donors and still longed for more; but the four who sacrificed themselves were enough to repair the most grievous damage. The stab wound under her shoulder blade was closed and clean. The patches of charred flesh on her arms and shoulders had now coated over with milk white, as smooth as the cataract in an old dwarf's eye. There was even a dark fuzz of hair covering her scalp, like red-brown lichen on a stone – not a fashionable coiffure, but my fingers longed to touch that close-shaven beauty.

  «Hello,» she said, a sparkle in her eyes at last. «Hello,» she said again, looking directly at me. «Hello. Hello. Hello.»

  «Can I help you up?» I asked.

  «Please.»

  She reached out both arms, like a child eager for her father to lift her. I had to use one foot to sweep away the remains of wights surrounding her; then I raised her gently, wrapping my arms around her as delicately as I could, no matter how fiercely I longed to enfold her with my full strength. Yasmin had no such reserve – as she rose to her feet, her arms encircled me and pulled me close, squeezing as if she wanted to completely embed her face in my chest. I returned the embrace, clasping her as tightly as I dared and aware of nothing else in the world but the woman I held.

  «Honored Cavendish, Honored Handmaid,» murmured Wheezle as he plucked at the hem of my jacket. «We must go now. There is so little time.»

  «There is no time,» said a new voice. And suddenly the room was filled with a blinding cloud of fine white dust.

  9. THREE DUSTY COMBUSTIONS

  Blinded by the dust, I couldn't see for the next few seconds. Kiripao must have tried something, because I heard him utter a cry of attack; but he was answered with a thunderous boom, and he made no other sound.

  Yasmin, still in my arms, whispered, «Didn't you have someone watching our backs?»

  «Hezekiah was out there,» I replied. «The Clueless little berk…»

  «He's hurt,» said Oonah, somewhere in the cloud.

  Gradually, the dust settled around us. Every face around me was powdered white; every stick of furniture, every scrap of clothing was clotted with the same white silt. The door to the control room had shut tight – the boom I heard must have been the door slamming. Kiripao was straining to push it open, but without success.

  Oonah knelt a short distance from the door, bending over the motionless body of Hezekiah. I could see no wounds on the boy; and as Oonah gave his shoulder a shake, he groaned and rolled over on his back.

  «What happened, Kid?» Miriam asked. Her voice was surprisingly full of concern.

  «Someone blanked me,» the boy muttered. «Shut me down.» He slammed his fist against the floor. «I hate that.»

  «But you're all right now?» Miriam insisted.

  «I'll live,» he said. «But… I'm a bit scrambled at the moment. I won't be able to teleport for hours.»

  «Don't trouble yourself,» Oonah told him. She raised her staff and pointed its silver-wire tip toward the door. «Now that I'm properly armed, this little cage won't hold us for…»

  «Don't!» Wheezle and I shouted in unison.

  «Why not?» she snapped.

  Wheezle shuffled forward, dust dribbling off his ears like flour. «Alas, honored Guvner, this dust is dangerous… at least if you invoke magic. We must exercise extreme caution.»

  «What a shame,» echoed an unfamiliar female voice. «I hoped you wouldn't know what the dust did. It would have been ever so interesting to see what happened.»

  The walls of the control room looked like concrete, coated with the chalky powder that covered us all; suddenly, however, the cement-like material turned as clear as glass, offering us a dust-smeared view of the machine room outside. No wonder this control room didn't have any windows: the walls themselves could become windows, and obviously someone outside knew the secret of making that happen. Quickly, I swept a hand across the wall closest to me, cleaning away enough of the dust to see through clearly.

  A gang of eight wights stood back five paces from the wall, their faces nearly as dusty as mine and ten times as ugly. All of them were huge bashers, their shoulders wide, their claws the size of pine cones. I saw no hint of friendliness in the expressions of these undead; hate blazed in their eyes. Perhaps the hate was inspired by the people who stood in front of the monsters – two humans who could only be Rivi and the Fox.

  I'd seen men like the Fox many times before: grizzled old sods with streaky gray hair and five days of stubble on their faces. This particular example wore an ecstatic leer of madness, and his gaze never stopped swooping about the room, as if he were surrounded by wonders mere mortals could not see. Poor old barmy: his type wandered the streets of Sigil daily, begging for handouts or talking wildly to themselves until they were taken in by the Bleak Cabal and given a bed in the Gatehouse asylum.

  Rivi was much more extraordinary. To say she was an albino would not do justice, either to Rivi or to albinos in general. She had the telltale white hair and eyebrows, the unpigmented skin and the pale pink eyes; but she had decided to paint herself, to apply make-up and dyes in a controlled chaos that only emphasized her pallor. Red eyeshadow made her eyes look like blood-filled sinkholes in her face. The merest touch of blue on her cheeks gave her the icy look of a corpse who has lain overnight in the snow. Her long white hair was streaked with bands of red and green, which would look cheerfully festive on some women; on Rivi, however, the effect was harshly lunatic, as if nightmares had bled from her skull and contaminated her scalp.

  She wore a gown of clinging black silk, sheer enough to betray the stark whiteness of her body beneath; and like many venomous women, Rivi had the body of a goddess, maintained as carefully as a champion fencer might hone her sword. I could scarcely take my eyes off the play of black silk over white flesh, taut fabric stretching over tauter curves. Some sages claim that the powers of evil take delight in bestowing such visceral allure on the most corrupt of souls… and although I have known many beauties with no great darkness in their hearts, I have met a handful like Rivi, demons sporting the voluptuousness of an angel.

  Rivi smiled at me now with the triumph of a viper watching its victim die. «Hello, darlings!» she cooed. «What lovely subjects for my experiments! No sooner do I find my wee trinket than you give me a chance to use it.»

  She held up the «wee trinket»… an artifact of terrifying power disguised as a harmless salt grinder, a small white container with a winding
arm on top. Trickles of pale dust spilled out the bottom. «The crank controls the flow,» Rivi said, holding the grinder up higher. «Anything from a light shower like this to that cloud that coated you all. Think what it can do against those precious wee schemers who use magic in Sigil.»

  «The Lady of Pain will stop you,» Oonah snapped. «She'll seal every portal against you.»

  «Perhaps,» Rivi admitted. «But a little bird told me there are some things too powerful for The Lady to stop. This coy wee grinder is one of the most potent relics in the multiverse; it will be such lovely fun to compare its strength to hers. And even if I'm barred from Sigil… oh, the planes offer a world of opportunities for a woman who can stop magic in its self-important wee tracks.»

  «Who can stop enemy magic,» the Fox put in, speaking for the first time. «The people on our side don't have to worry.»

  He lifted a trinket of his own, a twin to the grinder Rivi held, except this one was tan in color. Holding it over his head, he flicked the crank with one finger, and a deluge of brown dust cascaded down on top of him. «See?» he asked, his gleeful eyes blinking under a cake of dust, «I'm magic and you're not. Hah!»

  «Don't play, darling,» Rivi said, taking the brown grinder from him. «It'll make the other children jealous.»

  «I'll show you jealous,» Oonah muttered, raising her staff.

  Wheezle put a gentle hand on her arm. «Let me try first, honored Guvner.» He moved to the patch of wall I had wiped free of dust and pressed his face to its glass-like surface. His gaze slipped slyly toward the Fox and Rivi, then fixed on the gang of wights. Suddenly he snapped Unveiler up into sight and shouted, «I command you —»