Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  But it was too late to resist. He had offered himself to the music just as he used to do with his panic and fantasies, and it drew him inward. The sound burned into his ears. His teeth buzzed with its ravening drone. But the light pressure of Liphar’s hand remained in his awareness, a faint but steady beacon pointing the direction home to reality, as the roar of the waters rose around him.

  The dark river was a torrent, a flood of raw aggression. Stavros tumbled in the current, coughing up bile sucked like water into drowning lungs. Pain folded his chest in a vise. He could not gasp, so let the reflex go, gave himself once more to the darkness, and sank.

  Willing…

  He sank through the black water, his lungs filling, expanding, himself expanding, heavy with water, heavier than the current. Sank into the shock of enveloping mud, cold as death, and still. The still, cold mud wrapped the current with arms as wide as a river of stars.

  His arms.

  Power seared his veins with fire. He raised his arms of mud to cradle the torrent.

  Raellil…

  Circuit.

  Carrier?

  Susannah signalled Ghirra to wake Danforth when the pulsating sky began to spit showers of static spark. Stavros was immobile in the next chair. Liphar curled close beside him.

  Asleep, she presumed, preoccupied with keeping the Sled in the air.

  The Sled bucked and dropped. The fan whine deepened briefly. The aft engines stuttered. Over the cockpit com, CRI reported a momentary disruption in the power beam.

  “Jesus! Not now!” Danforth struggled groggily into the pilot’s chair, dragging his rigid leg behind him. “We’ve got another whole mountain range to get over. What’s Clausen’s position?”

  Susannah helped him strap in, then crouched at his shoulder, kneading cramp from her forearm. She had been gripping the stick as if their lives depended on the strength of her hands. The cloud ripples blinked electric blue sparkles far to the east where the sky was faintly darkening.

  “Nearing forty degrees,” CRI replied. “Slowing. He has asked me to plot gravitometric measurements and complete detailed mapping of a discrete magnetic field detected at forty-seven degrees.”

  “He’ll be looking for its center of symmetry,” remarked Danforth, “where the source is most likely located.”

  “So he is looking for more than his lithium.”

  “Oh, yes. That power surge’ll have him worried, though.” He patted the plastic encasing his thigh. “That’s what happened to us last time we went for a spin.”

  “So maybe he’ll stick closer to the ground,” Susannah said. “Slow him down a bit.” Beyond the windscreen, the final range rose without the polite preliminary of foothills, as if a giant fist had sheared the forward half away with a cleaver the size of a small planet. The white cloud veil seemed balanced on the very tip of the peaks.

  “Distance, CRI?”

  “Eight hundred and eighty-seven kilometers.”

  Danforth flashed Susannah a wan smile of approval. “Kept right up, didn’t you, girl? He’s only three, four hours ahead now.” He glanced at the copilot’s chair. “How long’s Ibiá been out?”

  “Don’t know. Not long. Should I wake him?”

  Something in Stavros’ slump made her look more closely, something in his loose-curled upturned palms. His bowed head and his long eyelashes had camouflaged his half-lidded stare. His eyes were focused somewhere far beyond the silvered metal of his belt buckle. But as Susannah reached to shake him, Liphar’s hand shot out to catch her wrist.

  “No!” he hissed.

  Susannah stared. “What’s the matter? What’s happened to him?”

  The Sled dropped again sickeningly as a shell-burst of tiny fire lit the white cloud ceiling above. The force field flickered, the fans coughed and whined back up to speed.

  “Shit,” Danforth muttered at the approaching blank wall of mountain. “What now?”

  “Ghirra?” called Susannah shakily. Liphar, raised up on his haunches like a cobra over Stavros’ knees, still gripped her arm without apology, as if holding her back from an unwitting blasphemy. The weirdness of it fueled her panic. “Ghirra!”

  The Sled shuddered. Light broke around them like a wave cresting into sunlit foam. The white landscape pulsed rainbows of color. Instant black shadows bloomed like inky smoke behind boulders, inside crevices, then faded as instantly.

  Ghirra forsook the safety of his seat and struggled forward to crouch unsteadily beside Susannah. His long jaw was tight from resisting fear. He took in the frozen tableau: Liphar the hovering acolyte, Susannah uncomprehending, Stavros in the grip of his mystery, lit by prismatic flashes from a sky gone mad. He gasped a question at Liphar.

  The younger Sawl answered with fervent conviction, his determination temporarily overriding his fear of the seesawing Sled and his awe of the Master Healer’s authority.

  Ghirra hesitated.

  “What is it?” Susannah demanded.

  The healer’s voice was flat with ambivalence. “He says ’TavrosIbia looks for his dance.”

  “His what?”

  His reply was lost in his own intake of breath as the Sled swayed side to side with the casual floating violence of a leaf in a hurricane. The polished vertical face of the mountain loomed like a speeding nightmare.

  “Get everyone strapped in!” Danforth yelled. “We’re going over!”

  The Sled tilted wildly as he rammed the stick forward. Ghirra clung to the back of Danforth’s seat, his nails scrabbling against the hard plastic as he fought to keep from sliding down the sloping deck. He searched desperately for Aguidran. Liphar cringed back against the gray hull in terror, wedging himself between the ribs. Freed from his grasp, Susannah forgot Stavros for a breathless moment.

  “Tay, what can I do? Is there anything I can do?”

  Danforth was snarling at CRI over his comset. “Just hold tight,” he roared between clenched teeth. “Damn boat is like a wild animal all of a sudden!”

  Aguidran battled her way uphill from the rear of the hold, and tumbled into the bench behind her brother. She wrapped a loose strap across her chest, then hauled Ghirra back against the padding beside her, shoving his own harness into his hands.

  The Sled banked crazily as Danforth swerved to clear the rock face. It cut sharp right and rose, fans and engines screaming, struggling for enough altitude to clear the unfathomable cliff. The sky glowed pink, then salmon, then gold.

  “We lose power now, we ain’t got a prayer!” he swore, louder than he had intended. “These piss-poor emergency batteries hold enough for about thirty seconds at this weight!”

  “Thanks, I really needed to know that!” Susannah yelled back.

  The bright sheer rock fell past the windscreens meter by meter as they rose, ripple-scorched with color. Danforth searched for a break, a pass, even a ledge with space enough to allow him to land and sit out the sky’s latest inventive malice. Nothing. He circled out, away from the cliff’s rough-edged proximity, and headed west, still rising along the faceless wall. The white clouds loomed above, too close. From two thousand dizzy meters below, the rocky desert plateau stared back at him unrelentingly.

  “Motherfucker’s not built for this!” muttered Danforth. “Come ON!” His whole body jerked and swayed as if to amplify the frustratingly slight motions of the stick. Susannah leaned hard against his seatback and prayed.

  Suddenly the sky exploded. Danforth bellowed a useless warning. Atop the mountain wall, the white clouds tore and gaped open.

  The glowing rent belched fire. Flaming spheres fell like a torrent of giant hailstones, consuming themselves in trailing smoke before they hit the distant ground. The rent closed over as another appeared directly above the Sled. Danforth fought an onslaught of turbulence, yelling directions to himself like curses. St. Elmo’s fire danced across the delta wings. Bright tongues sparked against the force field.

  Stavros’ cry rang out over the straining roar of the engines as the Sled sank in a downdraft. Dis
tracted, by her own battle against panic, Susannah heard the cry as a summons, and lurched to his aid.

  His eyes were open but unseeing. His fingers twitched, curling and uncurling around his upturned palms. His lips worked convulsively, and Susannah cringed away revolted, as her mind overlaid on her lover’s youthful beauty the remembered image of a muttering, dessicated priest.

  Liphar’s head jerked out of the protective shield of his arms. In his cramped burrow against the hull, he gathered his legs beneath him, watching Stavros intently. A devout hopeful joy softened the rictus of fear twisting his narrow face.

  The sky exploded again. The Sled veered, slicing past the mountain face. Fire cascaded around the windscreens and fought with the force field. The cockpit glowed orange. The muscles of Danforth’s neck bunched against the strain as he struggled to guide the bucking craft away from the rock. His eyes stared with concentration. Susannah held her scream like a needle of ice in the back of her throat, physical enough to choke on.

  Stavros cried out again, but this time it was a yowl of terror. His back arched. His hands flew up to shield his face. He fought the restraints of the flight harness as if desperate to escape.

  Liphar sprang instantly from his crouch, his terror of the flight submerged in a greater panic. He screamed for Ghirra, straddling Stavros’ thighs, throwing all his slight weight against Stavros’ arms to press him back against the padding. The Master Healer whipped off his half-fastened straps and balancing against the Sled’s lurch and rock, he swayed forward like a sailor in a gale and flattened himself against the back of the seat. He unhooked the comwire from Stavros’ ear, then pinned the resisting head between strong hands, his long fingers curling around Stavros’ jaw. Stavros’ struggling eased. Ghirra’s fingers slid up to work at his temples.

  The Sled leaped abruptly as if catapulted. It coasted upward to sail high and wide over a break in the sheer mountain wall. Danforth cheered incredulously.

  A sharp cut lay before them, the snowless summit peaks crowding to either side like stained, misshapen teeth. Danforth eased off the throttle and slipped the still-swaying craft into the narrow pass. Sparks ran off the wings like rain water and vanished. The sky closed over, whiter and hotter than before. The Sled steadied and flew straight.

  Ghirra relaxed his hold on Stavros’ head and slumped against the back of the seat. Stavros’ eyes sagged closed, then opened listlessly. He did not move.

  Liphar slid back into his crouch against the hull. His fingers fluttered around Stavros’ knee, suddenly unsure.

  Susannah leaned in. “Stav? Are you all right?”

  Stavros stared dully. “Yeah.” Flexing his palms, he reached to still Liphar’s nervous hands. He gazed at the young man solemnly, then whispered, “I’m sorry, Lifa. I couldn’t do it.”

  Liphar shivered with negation. “Give good strength, you, to Valla, so she send back Her Sister’s fire soldier this time.” He gestured at the sky’s solid lowering white.

  “I did nothing.”

  “This is not learn one time, Ibi.”

  “You don’t understand.” Stavros shook his head slowly, as if its weight were an unbearable burden. “I couldn’t face Them. I was scared shitless. Kav Daven was wrong. I am not the one he hoped I was.”

  He shook his head again and would not speak again or move until Danforth had cleared the heights of the Grigar and set the Sled down on a descending plateau in the southern slope.

  “Quite a view.” Danforth stumped to the edge of the drop, balancing on his crutches at Stavros’ side. At their feet, eroded pink rock fell away into a twisted landscape of deep ravines and flat-topped pink and white mesas that stretched as far as they could see, blurring into sooty gray on a distant curved horizon.

  “Not a bush, not a twig, not even a dried-up thorny old cactus,” Danforth remarked companionably. “I’ve seen uninhabitable worlds nicer than this.”

  Stavros stared silently southward.

  “Lot of water here once, though. All that channel erosion.” Danforth nosed in the dust with the toes of his cast-bound right leg. “Sky’s starting to pulse again, you notice?”

  Stavros’ eyes flicked across the glowing white and back to the horizon without comment.

  Danforth uncovered a stone with his toes and pushed it around with awkward stiff-legged little kicks. “CRI was just babbling about some ninety-second phase correlation with Weng’s music being twice as long as the one before. What one before?”

  Stavros swayed slightly, moving away.

  Danforth grabbed his arm and jerked him back. “Listen, if you’re gonna crap out on me, I gotta know it. Fast. What’s going on?”

  Unresisting in his grasp, Stavros turned dead eyes on him. “Crap out on you? I just crapped out on the whole goddamn thing.”

  The bitter tone reminded Danforth of his-own. He let the limp arm go. “Care to explain?”

  “Weng’s music. It was a great bit of insight, but dangerous, as it turned out. I mean, They did hear it. I brought it to Them and They listened, sort of. Actually, They absorbed it. Played with it like a toy. Incorporated its violence right into the Arrah until the weather was expressing it, instead of the other way around.” His mouth began a smile that quickly died. “They made Weng’s game music a part of the Game.”

  “They.”

  “Lagri, mostly. This being Her turf.”

  Danforth ran his tongue around the inside of his cheek, kicked his stone toward the edge and saved it from death at the last minute. “Hunh.”

  “The music was a key—your instinct was right. It brought me to Them. The problem is, it only encouraged further violence. It’s too much like Them. Their struggle inspired it in the first place.”

  “You’re saying Weng’s music made fire rain from the sky? You mean, like some kind of signal to the machine?”

  Stavros turned back to the smooth southern horizon, held out a raised palm and curled it slowly into a fist. “I could feel Her, fire-eyed Lagri, like it was myself, feel Her joining with the music as it flowed through me, out of me, to Her, She making it Hers, warping it to Her abiding obsession, the Game, the game, the one becoming the other as seamless as an interface…” He dropped his hand. “And I was a flood-tossed mote, the infinitesimal messenger, She no more aware of me than of that rock. Or of the millions of Sawls who have been murdered by Her blind passion to annihilate Her Sister.

  “So I thought, if I manipulate the music, if I play little tweaking games with a signal She has already internalized, might She not notice? Might that not get Her attention? And that is where my courage failed… failed in the face of a Power vaster than… ah, that old man! My Christ! He had Their fire boiling through him for decades! How did he stand it?”

  Danforth had no answer for that. “Tell me, Ibiá, What would you do with their attention if you had it?”

  Stavros’s laugh was like a sob. “That’s the problem! It’s sort of like sailing into the middle of an air war, broadcasting on all channels. Unless you know the right code, you’re likely to get blown out of the sky. The old man didn’t leave me his signals.”

  He paused, regarding Danforth quizzically. “This is hard for you, isn’t it?” he murmured. “I can hear you being patient with me at the top of your voice.”

  Danforth smiled, liking him in earnest. “The madman’s ravings?”

  “Just so. You still think I’m imagining all this?”

  “You got me, Ibiá.” He glanced down, rolling the stone under the ball of his foot. “There’s something down there, though, at forty-seven degrees. CRI has just completed mapping a magnetic field two thousand kilometers in diameter, plopped right on a highland exactly opposite the middle of the northern ocean. Clausen’s got her determining a center of symmetry. He’s asked for high-res as well, plus she’s been able to link the pattern of gravitational variations with the peaks of weather activity.” Danforth shrugged. “So no, I don’t think you’re imagining everything. And while Emil fumbles around down there with this t
est and that test, he’s showing us where to go and we’re gaining on him, slowly but surely.”

  “We don’t need him to show us,” said Stavros quietly. “I can take us right there.”

  Danforth raised an eyebrow at his stone as if it had misbehaved.

  “Tay, I swear. I don’t know how, but it’s true.” He held up his palms in offering. “I’m keyed into that magnetic field. I’m… aligned. Like the little iron filings. I know exactly where my poles are. I can feel the pull.” Stavros raised his arm and pointed, slightly south of due southwest. “There.”

  Danforth chuckled, shifting his crutches, and kicked his stone off the ledge. “Well, you’ll be happy to know CRI agrees with you on that score. But if you’re done with your magic tricks for the moment, can I convince you to come back to the Sled and eat something?”

  “My thought precisely,” said Susannah, coming up behind them and taking both their arms.

  Stavros shook his head, but pressed Susannah’s hand close to his side.

  “Talk to this boy,” Danforth told her gruffly. “Tell him some of those sweet things you women are so good at. We’re due back in the air in twenty minutes and I want him fed and watered by then.”

  He disengaged his arm with a crooked smile, and swung uphill over the crumbly rock toward the Sled and a cold trail breakfast.

  40

  The pink and white desert slid past tediously. Danforth flew for a long stretch, surrendered the stick to Susannah for several hours, then resumed the seat when at last the smooth arc of the southwestern horizon broke into a jagged line. The sky shuddered with chasing waves of color, but the cloud veil was thinning, its glowing white tinged with pink.

  After a long silence, Danforth cleared his throat over the com, calling up satellite photos on the tiny cockpit monitor. “No cloud at all over the area of the magnetic field.”