by Cat Rambo
The hungry flames would begin feeding soon. The bodies would lie slumbering, smoke tendrils curling from their nostrils, their ears, their eyes, their open and gaping mouths. Eventually some would collapse into ash. When the patrollers returned, when they stooped in horror and disbelief, the flames would rush them. This time they’d control their hosts better, to lurk for additional travelers or unwary refugees. Eventually, though, everyone in the village would burn, and her debt would be a little further along to being repaid.
Moonlight scrawled its impatient signature on the icy shingles. She didn’t see the priest coming until he lunged out of the darkness near the gate.
“Fire-ridden!” His arm clamped over her throat, throttling her. Most of her flames were gone, she was weak, but the two she had left surged from her skin, flaring out to burn him. He released her and staggered back with a cry. Someone shouted in the distance.
She left him with the flames dancing in his eyes, blinding him, and darted down an alleyway. The gate was deserted—everyone was back tending to the priest or some other victim, no doubt. Her luck held—no zombies lurking close outside. The high moon shed a pure white light across the frosty landscape, but she slipped off the well-lit road and made her way to a huddle of haystacks. She curled into the farthest one, beneath a trio of beech trees.
By the time she roused in sunlight, the flames had returned to her. She pulled away from the haystack and let them dance in its depths. Within a few moments, the flames roared, reaching upward. A few raced off in other directions, wavering through the grass. She knew from experience eventually they would meet wall or brook and rebound to her, consuming what they could along the way.
She thought back about the tiny town. Two dozen souls, perhaps. So many, yet only a small portion of her obligation. So many flames to be fed still.
She continued along the road.
Annie neared the town of Barbaruile on sunset’s heels, the sun gleaming over her left shoulder, sitting on the horizon like a fat egg of red flame. The narrow road’s chalky stones led up towards the town through thickets of small, trees whose dark, waxy leaves rattled together in the wind, obscuring the upward view. The roadway wound back and forth, climbing the steep hill as best it could. She was panting hard by the time she was a third of the way up. Further on she sat down by the side of the road to rest, looking back over the landscape and its patchwork of small fields shaggy with untended growth.
The sun sank deeper and the dry leaves rattled like the clatter of rolling dice as her breathing slowed. The flames inside her leaped as though in recognition of some other presence and she cried out into the darkness as it advanced upon her, “Who’s there? Come out now!” The power of the flames was in her voice.
As though summoned, two forms slowly, reluctantly stood from the ditch where they had been concealed. The two women’s similarity of face and frame proclaimed them mother and daughter. They wore clothing like her own, worn and ragged, assembled from cast-offs and corpse-leavings.
“What are you doing here?” Annie demanded. She fought the flames back down. Not yet, not yet, despite their hungry, hot prodding. Two lives were very small when reckoned against the possibility of a village.
The older woman spoke, only the lips moving in her still white face, “We saw you coming and hid. We did not know what you might be.”
The daughter nodded. It made sense to Annie. These were extraordinary times and monsters walked every night. She made her voice soothing, letting the flames caress the intonation’s edges with power. “It’s all right. I’m as human as you. Do you belong to the city up there? Will they give me shelter for the night?”
The two exchanged glances.
“We are strangers here as well,” the daughter said. Her voice was a higher version of her mother’s. “We will not know without asking.”
Together, they progressed up the hill. They did not exchange names.
At the top, the town gate would not yield to their knocking. There was the flare of a torch on the other side of the wooden planks, but whoever was there did not speak, despite the pounding all three made on the wood. Annie beat at it till the heels of her hands ached, feeling the frustration build. She had thought three women would seem harmless, but perhaps she had erred. She cried out, “Please!”
Still no answer from the other side.
The daughter turned away and led them along a narrow path that companioned the wall for fifty paces or so before darting down among close-knit groves. They curled in the hollow of a grassy bank and built no fire. The mother and daughter wrapped their ragged cloaks around each other and fell asleep.
The leaves clattered and chattered, keeping Annie awake. The moon crept a hand span up the sky as she watched between slit eyes. Finally she heard the rustling from the other side of the hollow.
The daughter’s cool hand was on her forehead, cold as ice, sweetly cold in a way she had not felt since the flames first touched her.
“She’s hot,” the girl whispered back over her shoulder.
The mother’s breath hissed in, “Get away!” But it was too late. Flames raced along Annie’s face, flowing from the confines of her breast to dance up along the girl’s arm. She screamed, falling back, arms wheeling. Her voice was high and terrified. The flames took her hair and danced on her lips.
Her mother swept her cloak over the daughter’s head, but the flames only licked at that greedily as well, reaching for her.
The two women screamed, burning candles in the night, as Annie watched. She could smell their flesh cooking. She wondered what the town thought of the screams. They’d never let her in now. Turning her face away, she sobbed herself to sleep.
In the morning their skeletons were rendered in black ash, showing their elongated skulls and their clawed hands. Not human after all, but sorcerer created, like the flames Annie carried. She kicked dirt over them and made her way around the town and northward.
A small, red-peaked tower capped each end of the Valentre Bridge near Cahors. Vines grew up along the brown stone sides, withered, and furred with frost. They wavered feebly despite the lack of wind as she passed and she felt eyes watching her, she presumed from the northern tower. But no one challenged her as she made her way across. The ice-glazed water ate her reflection when she looked down, making her shudder and withdraw.
The Dragon waited at the other end.
It was small as far as Dragons go. Two weeks ago, she had seen an immense one flap overhead, gleaming red against a cloudless blue sky. By contrast, this Dragon was perhaps as long as she was tall, but by the reaction of the flames within her, it blazed brighter than she ever had.
Before she could speak or move, the flames boiled from her, pulled towards the Dragon. It reared upward as they surrounded it, seething, and its wings flapped, although it appeared unharmed. She stood, feeling the wind’s cold bite for the first time. Then as quick as thought, the flames left it and returned to her, somehow subdued and contemplative. The Dragon blinked its golden eyes. Its forked tongue flickered out, sampling the air now vacant of flames.
“You’re not like the other brief ones,” it said. Its voice was smooth as honey, seductive as a spring night’s whisper.
She swayed towards it, feeling her heart throb in syncopation to the syllables. The flames lurched and swayed, and flared in her loins. She blushed.
“Give me gold,” it crooned, then laughed silently as she tried to pull away.
The flames roared in her and the attraction stopped as though burned to ash. The Dragon’s eyes narrowed into cat-fine crescent moons.
“Where are you going, whither do you wander, westward or northward, wickedest of women?”
She shook her throbbing head. Her clothing began to smolder, coils of smoke ribboning the air above her shoulders.
Its wings moved lazily, fanning the flames, and she felt them leap. It leaped into the air even as the fire reached for it, and hung there, wings moving too fast for perception. Her clothing tumbled away in burnin
g fragments.
Just as suddenly, the Dragon was gone. In the sky above her, the huge shadow was moving again. She ducked into the shadow of the tower and watched it pass. Half a mile further on, she found an abandoned cottage and blankets to wrap herself in.
Two days later, she had reclothed herself and reaped another eight souls but was less sure of her path. She thought that the flames under her skin might be subsiding, that she might need to return to the sorcerer to have her soul filled with them again. They replenished themselves more slowly the further north she went and the further into eternal winter the weather slid.
She wavered on the road, hesitating. She was again in zombie territory, but she was stronger than when she took the little town whose name she did not remember. She had slept last night in a deserted cottage, under clean sheets. In the morning the sprites had burned her outline onto the counterpane.
It had taken her three weeks to come this far from Canal du Midi, but she could find a faster way home. She knew the sorcerer was still there. She could feel him across the miles as keenly as though he had set barbed fishhooks in her soul.
She found a cart and a neglected pony, fat on the oats that had been left behind for him. She couldn’t figure out why they would have left him, unless their horses were so fast that his stubby legs would have slowed them down. She lined the cart with wool blankets soaked in the cottage’s well, sodden and hard to carry but also hard to set alight. There were two water tuns, so she filled them and rolled them onto the ramp to load them in the cart. The pony, a mild-faced beast with a black streak along his fuzzy brown nose, protested at first, but she let him take his own pace and she returned southward.
At night purple stars blazed and crackled overhead. She did not know whose emissaries they were. She slept in the cart, and when the flames insisted on being fed, she left the fire behind quickly, trundling on after renewing the water in her blankets.
The next day she came to a frozen pond so wide she could not see the opposite bank. She circled it rather than risk crossing. The pony shied away from the glittering crystals. She was willing to trust his instincts.
When she saw the church beside the road, she turned the pony’s head. It was abandoned. She scavenged through the verger’s hut for food, finding a gnawed flitch of bacon and a mold-ridden loaf.
The pony pushed its head against her shoulder until she climbed the pear tree in the cemetery to throw down an armload of the frozen yellow fruit. She took two of the mushy pears for herself and ate them sitting on a slate tombstone, its letters blurred by time and rain.
Motion caught her eye and she tossed the second core to the pony before she approached the wall, peering upward. She admired the cat-necked gargoyles that leaned out at right angles from the crenellated walls. The closest turned its head with a gritty, grinding sound to regard her.
She stared transfixed as it crawled spider limbed down the ivy-traced wall. The flames inside her did not react as it neared.
It came within reach and extended a stone-taloned paw. She raised her hand and it gripped her index finger with its otter’s long digits. Its mouth worked soundlessly. It sniffed the air with a rasp of intake.
“He’s not sure what to make of you,” a voice said behind her. She turned her head, her hand still caught.
At first she thought him another priest, but as he emerged from the shadows, she saw that his robes did not have a clerical cut. He was her height, dapper and clean-shaven, his smile chilly and perfunctory.
“Leave it,” he said to the gargoyle as he stepped closer. The creature released her hand just in time for the sorcerer to take it in turn.
He was younger than she would have expected, given the power radiating from him. Angry pimples marred his cheeks, and his goatee, waxed to make it shine, was sparse as her pony’s tail.
“Who are you, girl?” he demanded. His arrogant eyes searched hers and she felt him plucking at her thoughts, fraying them into distraction so she swayed, almost dizzy. She tried to pull her hand free but he held her tight. The flames coiled like springs inside her, but she made them bate, waited to see what happened. Despite his power, she felt no menace in him.
“Where are you from?”
“Canal du Midi.”
“I know it well. The plane trees are green beside the canals there.” He studied her. Sliding creakily, the gargoyle climbed back to its original perch.
“They used to be, but they burned down months ago. What are you doing here?” she said.
He shrugged. “It seemed as good a place as any while I consider my next move.”
She frowned. “Your next move?”
He shrugged like a child waiting to be picked at tag. “I am warring with the Conte de St. Jerome, who lives to the east. I assaulted his home a day ago with the trees that grew around it. He dug trenches around the place that drowned all I could throw against him.”
He paused, sniffing, before he slid his arms around her like an old lover and leaned to nuzzle at her ear.
“Oh, you reek of power, like a rose dripping perfume,” he breathed drunkenly, inhaling from her skin.
She pushed at him but he held her firmly.
“I carry sorceries of my own, beware!” she said, and he loosed her to hold her at arm’s length.
“Whose pawn are you?” he said, his nostrils still flared as though to smell her better. “I’ll pay whatever ransom he or she demands, and make you mine. You are cinnamon and cardamom, warm bread threaded with saffron. You are the very scent of love.”
“I must pay ten-score lives to redeem mine and that of my sisters,” she said.
“So few?” he laughed. He touched his lips to the inside of her wrist as though drinking from her pulse. “I will take them for you and lay them at your feet, as though you were a sorcerer yourself.
The flames boiled in her as though she were an iron kettle with its lid on too tight, furious steam building.
“Get back!” she gasped, and his grip tightened, pulled her close again.
Panic flared and the flames were loose. Like a blue film they closed over him. He pushed her away, screaming. The gargoyles far overhead roared with brass and granite voices and she ran pell mell, grabbing for the pony’s reins, flames following in her wake. In the road she mounted the pony and rode him furiously southward until he groaned beneath her and she became aware of the burns on his sides.
Half sobbing, she reined him in and slipped from his back. As soon as her weight had left him, he reared and pulled away from her, then thundered away down the road. She did not see him again.
She knew she was close when she saw the towers of Capestang. The slate roofs of the towers gleamed blue in the late evening light. Southward smoke billowed, an immense impossibility of smoke.
There were two other people on the road.
She did not know how she sensed that they also carried flames under their skin, but she did, feeling a tremulous flicker when they were near. She fell in behind them, but did not join their camp that first night. At dawn, they all rose, leaving the smoldering outlines where they had slept.
They were traveling with each other but rarely spoke—they did not talk to her at all. She followed them, towards the billowing smoke.
At noon, they paused and she asked, “Excuse me, what is that?” She pointed at the billowing column.
“He summoned a volcano out of the water,” the woman, a hard-faced blonde, said. The man resembled her and Annie wondered if they were brother and sister. He nodded, and they turned around to head southward again.
As they neared the immense black slope growing out of the beach, she saw other people. By the time they were trudging upward across the slick black glass, there were dozens.
Her captor hovered in the center of the volcano. She wondered why he floated there. Flames lashed upwards, caressing him, and he shuddered and writhed. Averting her eyes, she looked elsewhere.
There were hundreds of them, she realized. Lining the ledge of the volcano, staring inwa
rd at the sorcerer. She thought two hundred, and then two hundred again. And again. And again. How many lives had he claimed? How many would she claim for him? She trembled. Inside her the flames were building as she came closer to the sorcerer.
Around her on the lip of the volcano, the sorcerer’s minions trembled, feeling their flames swell and multiply. Some had expressions that mimicked the glazed pleasure on the sorcerer’s face, others looked merely horrified. Their flames replenished, they turned to stagger back down the slope and northward again, leaving burning footprints in the blackened grass. Refilled and ready to claim more lives in their master’s name. Had it been worth it, to save her sister? She was very afraid that the answer was no.
She was the only one among the many that leaped, but no one noticed her, no one noticed the flames that floated away like handkerchiefs on the air to flow back towards the sorcerer. The tears that filled her eyes for an instant as she fell were just as quickly gone, and all that was left behind was a twine of flame and then, a moment of ash.
“A Twine of Flame” takes place in the same world as Tabat, but in the last days of the Shadow Wars, when sorcerers fought each other by any means available, including magical plagues such as the one Annie carries.
The Dead Girl's Wedding March
Once upon a time a dead girl lived with the other zombies in the caverns below the port of Tabat, in the city beneath that seaside town, the city that has no name. Thousands of years ago, the Wizard Sulooman plunged the city, buildings and all, into the depths of the earth, and removed its name, over some slight that no one but his ghost remembers. There life continues.
Some dead folk surrender to slumber, feeling that there is no point pretending an agenda. A few, though, pace out their days in the way they once paced out their lives.
The only actual living things in the City of the Dead are the sleek, silver-furred rats that slip through its streets like reversed shadows. On a day there like any other day, a rat addressed the dead girl.
