No Flame But Mine Read online

  ‘Now he’s made something else.’

  Sallus pointed. Even the flex and stretch of his arm, ebony with a single gold wristlet, was a marvel.

  Bhorth forced himself to regard not the arm but the sky. The three quarter-moons were in a row, and bright.

  ‘I can’t quite—’

  ‘He knows,’ said Sallus, with a grin.

  Bhorth noticed the chaze, the snake which should have slain Sallus about two years before when it bit him in childhood. It lay coiled under Sallus’s cloak, but the flat head had come poking out, weaving a little, one quartz eye on the heavens.

  Bhorth was accustomed to the snake by now. He recalled how he had sucked the poison out, and how his son, less than two years old, had himself already killed the snake. Bhorth had feared Sallus would die too – but neither did. Sallus survived; the snake came back to life, and was his son’s pet.

  ‘Well, he can see, and so can you. I can’t.’

  ‘Follow my finger, sir.’

  Bhorth did so. Instantly and unerringly the finger described for him up high, in the blue circle of moons, a faint, lit scribble.

  ‘I do see. It’s like a snake too. One that seems to move forward—’

  ‘Westward, after the star city,’ said Sallus. ‘Or towards this one.’

  ‘Here? A snake? As you say, he’d know.’

  The chaze swung its head, darting Bhorth a glance. Had it learned human speech? That was not inconceivable, seeing whom it belonged to.

  Sallus said, ‘I don’t think the stars really show a snake. The snake symbolizes some other thing.’

  ‘I’ll send to the Magikoy women. Get them to toil over it. That’s their job.’

  Sallus looked across. His face was calm yet alive with interest. ‘Father, I think it’s a caravan of people. Suppose instead of looking up at it one looked down from the air – then the shape might resemble something of that kind.’

  Bhorth was musing. No Rukarian, apart from ourselves, has journeyed here before. I always thought others would come. Splendid and rotten, the canny and the indigent and the useful, the useless. Why now?

  In the long street recently named Rose Walk, which led across the city to the so-called Great Market of Kol Cataar, the priesthood were abroad and gathering alms.

  It was about an hour after sunrise. The carts from Second Hothouse and the farmed ice-fields beyond Eastgate had mostly trundled through. People were about, to sniff the air, or here and there they had stopped a vendor to buy. When the priests shifted into view, swinging their brass censers of incense, several doors slammed. It had never been like this in the old capital. For a start Ru Karismi’s high-nosed priesthood had never begged. But this fellowship, revived from the dregs left living by the Death, was slight in number and needy. It was a fact too their temple-town here was very small, a handful of buildings on the north side of Kol Cataar and not one of these yet rendered in anything more durable than ice-brick.

  Then, at the head of the column a boy began to sing.

  Dressed in deepest blue, their hair impoverishedly greased with candlewax into long stiff tails, the priests advanced, each holding out his left or right palm for coins or other presents. The boy was dressed in the same way. He was about eleven. His face was almost boneless with youth, his fair hair only slicked back with water. His voice however was sheer and faultless, less like that of anything human than some instrument of the old city, a flute perhaps. It peeled effortless as a golden wire off the side of the morning.

  After all hands delved in pouches and pockets. ‘Here—’ ‘Take this—’ ‘All I can spare – religion is familiar with you. Bless us with a lucky day.’

  The grabs of the priests shut like the mouths of certain sub-oceanic beasts found only far off in moveable water. The boy himself did not even seem to see. Eyes glazed he sang on, praising the kindness of divine otherlings, gods no one could recognize. Yet something had given him a wondrous voice. For an instant faith in gods seemed credible.

  Only as the priests flowed away into the market did those loitering on Rose Walk grow aware of another noise to the east.

  ‘It’ll be some feud. Like before. The dilf-cutters fighting with the vinery wagons.’

  Presently five or six men bolted down the road, pushing off onlookers eager to gossip.

  ‘What are they saying? Strangers? What strangers? Is it enemies again?’

  Fearful, the refugees of old war huddled on the street. Soon another group trotted by, going more slowly and more ready to talk.

  ‘About five hundred of them there are, a big caravan. Rukarians—’

  ‘What are they running from?’

  ‘Have they drawn it after them?’

  ‘Will it now fall on us?’

  ‘We’ve borne enough.’

  Not long after, hurrying soldiery from the palace of the King Paramount clattered the other way along the thoroughfare. In passing they urged citizens back into their homes. The road must be cleared to allow representatives of the caravan to enter. The king wanted to interview them.

  Again doors slammed.

  All through the new city by now the tidings flooded, and either the barricades went up or else the crowds stepped out to see.

  ‘And your name?’ Bhorth asked.

  ‘Svurnar, lord king. I’m leader of this caravan, under the authority of our Magikoy.’

  ‘And who is that?’

  Svurnar, a metalsmith of Paradise-in-Kandexa, looked glum.

  ‘Probably more was than is, lord king.’

  Bhorth was seated on a gold chair from the former capital. He glowered direly back. ‘Why, what’s happened to your Magikoy?’ The palace hall was choked with people, the ten allowed in from the stranger caravan, many more from the royal household, all ears and eyes.

  ‘We had two maguses, lordliest. Very fortunate for us – till recently.’

  ‘Both of them are dead,’ Bhorth pronounced with leaden disfavour.

  Svurnar bowed his head. ‘As good as. It was when the terror-weather attacked us again.’

  ‘Attacked you?’

  ‘So it seemed. First thunderbolts – that’s why we left Kandexa. But then when we’d begun our journey, the other calamity. The plateau opened in huge fissures. A multitude were swallowed down.’

  ‘A storm,’ barked Bhorth. ‘Then a crevasse which had partly thawed—’

  ‘Oh no, lord king,’ said Svurnar with abrupt composed assurance, meeting Bhorth’s frowning eyes. ‘The maguses themselves were certain it was an attack. Something personal.’

  Bhorth marshalled his ideas. ‘Then you’d offended some god.’

  ‘Perhaps Yyrot, Lover of Winter, maybe.’

  ‘And your Magikoy are dead.’

  ‘Entranced, lordliest. Not to be woken. Shut in cold sleep.’

  ‘This is a bizarre tale, metalsmith. It sounds like a tale, something for the evenings by the fire.’

  Svurnar hooded his eyes again.

  At his shoulder the middle-aged woman clicked her tongue, so Bhorth noted her for the first time. She was a mageia apparently; vestiges of fresh blue streaked her greying mop.

  ‘You, mistress. You stand forward. Are you their witch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Like all her kind she was not overly polite to kings. She must have credentials then. Bhorth gave her after all a deferent nod. He said, ‘This story seems a funny one. Can you explain it better, lady?’

  ‘In private I will,’ she said.

  Bhorth shot a look now at his two resident Magikoy. Both women were staring at the mageia, alert as hunting dogs. They judged her valuable, it seemed.

  ‘Very well then,’ said Bhorth, getting up. ‘You and I and the Magikoy of Kol Cataar will discuss this.’

  His court grumbled and surged about, but with the assistance of the guards he chaperoned the mageia through into a side room. Handy, this little chamber had only been added on ten months back. The two Magikoy women entered last. Left out in the crowd Bhorth saw his queen Tire
h, seated as if only gravely attending to everyday matters. Her presence of mind never failed to please him.

  Bhorth himself shut the door with a thump.

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘See,’ said the mageia.

  Her eyes turned white and appeared to fragment – crooked shafts of boiling lightning clove the ceiling and lanced into the floor. Screams and shatterings splintered the air. Bhorth beheld and smelled acrid smoke. Blue fire expanded and for a moment he glimpsed crashing brickwork and dead bodies cast about as if in battle.

  Somehow he kept his own self-control.

  This was a show, a demonstration from the near past. And the ability of the mageia who gave it must be extremely potent.

  A gust of dark swept the awful mirage away.

  It was replaced at once by its partner in horror.

  Bhorth watched as, amid a crack and roar, constituents of the Kandexan caravan plunged miles down into the guts of the hellish fissuring plateau, women and children, men and animals and wagons, a facsimile of the world toppling like shards of a brightly painted bowl.

  Then the shadow stirred again and brushed the chamber entirely free of the sights, sounds and odours of calamity.

  Bhorth glanced about.

  The Magikoy had remained firm, of course. The solitary guard Bhorth had kept by him seemed likely to lose his wits. Bhorth turned to him and said very low, ‘Brace up, or I’ll tell you in detail what your wife did with the butcher’s best goat.’ And observed the man’s face alter – ash, red, normal, and the shaky laugh. ‘Yes, she only fed the brute, since the butcher is her uncle and the goat so fine. You’re steady again. Well done.’ Outside there was no beating on the door, no yells. The scenes and sounds of mayhem had been contained in here.

  The mageia herself stood quietly. She seemed ordinary enough now.

  ‘Where did you get such a prodigious talent, madam?’

  ‘I was taught it by one of our Magikoy.’

  ‘One of the two now in sleep-death.’

  ‘They’re not,’ said the woman, cheeky, almost irritable. ‘But it was all I could do to stop it. What attacked us wanted them. They needed to seem dead.’

  ‘And you managed that.’

  ‘I, king. I told you, she trained me.’

  ‘Give me,’ he said, ‘the names of both your Magikoy.’

  ‘Very well. Her name’s Jemhara. She was lesser queen to your brother Sallusdon, when he ruled in the capital. You may recollect her.’

  ‘By the—’

  ‘He is Thryfe.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thryfe, Magikoy Master, Warden of Ru Karismi.’

  Bhorth’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His throat shut then undid in a brief fit of coughing.

  When he finished, Kol Cataar’s younger female Magikoy, Lalath, said softly, ‘She speaks truth. Everything said and shown is fact. This woman has vast powers. Thryfe meanwhile lies at Eastgate.’

  ‘And the other one, Jemhara, that bitch—’

  ‘A bitch no longer, Bhorth. She is Magikoy too,’ said Lalath icily. ‘Redeem your temper. My kind don’t make such mistakes as bitchery.’

  Less than twenty minutes later Bhorth, paced by a phalanx of eight guards, was himself belting down Rose Walk making for Eastgate.

  The caravan was a sorry draggled sight. But, like Kol Cataar, it flew, if raggedly, the crimson and silver banners of the lost capital.

  A great number of the people waiting there recognized Bhorth instantly. A wild response between anger and relief gurned through the mass of carts, slederies and slees. Half of them would suppose he had run away from the final battle and only so escaped the White Death. Oh, he had heard all that. In fact he had ridden against the Lionwolf and his horde with every man he could muster, while that villain Vuldir, then Paramount King, sat on his arse and provided nothing. Bhorth had been captured. And then the Death tore out the whole page and burned it to white cinders.

  But there was no time today for any of that.

  An unguessable threat hung all around. An enemy without a face but equipped with the fangs and claws of natural disaster – those acts of gods.

  ‘Take me to him,’ Bhorth commanded the first man he reached. There was no need to translate. The man took Bhorth to Thryfe.

  Despite the rest Bhorth could not quite hold off the memory assembling itself in his mind. The figure of Thryfe, imposing, haughty and absolute, standing so tall and faultless before himself and Vuldir. Both of them had then been only Accessorate monarchs. It was thirteen, fifteen years ago – more. In retrospect time seemed pleated.

  ‘I’ll tell you plainly,’ said the impressive Thryfe of memory, ‘you will be accommodating some force which will eventually destroy you.’

  ‘I?’ Vuldir had been amazed.

  ‘You,’ said Thryfe, ‘and all your line. All the line of the Ruk. The land, the people. It will set the world on its ear.’

  And Bhorth, that fat fool, had grumbled, ‘Unending Winter has done that …’

  And Thryfe replied: ‘To this, Unending Winter will be Summertime.’

  ‘Good morning, Highness,’ said Bhorth to the pale gaunt man lying in the wagon’s back.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Thryfe. He smiled. He – Thryfe – smiling. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I do well enough. I was – improved, shall I say. By a brief dalliance.’ In Thryfe’s eagle eyes, ringed by dark shadow, a flicker of alertness. But it sank. ‘I see you, Highness, don’t do so well.’

  ‘No. I was injured. This thing – has the woman Aglin told you?’

  ‘The mageia? She has. An elemental foe.’

  ‘These people are in extreme danger. Let me be frank, you also and your brave little city, if you take us in.’

  ‘My brave little city has had to be strong before. Not quite our first test.’

  ‘No. But this—’

  ‘The mageia says you’re attacked by crazed natural forces.’

  ‘It seems so. She, I mean Jemhara, carries a child. The child is the focus of its rage, whatever it is that rages.’

  ‘Whose child?’

  ‘Ostensibly mine.’

  ‘Oh? Some other was before you?’

  ‘Not exactly. Listen to me, Bhorth. Do you believe in the gods?’

  Bhorth hesitated, gave up. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘That’s sane. Why not sometimes? Try to believe in them now. Jemhara’s baby is to be a god.’

  Bhorth scowled. ‘Your get. My, my, sir. How proud you must be.’

  ‘I, and she – our getting is only the carapace of what this – thing – is to become. He was here before. Vashdran. Saphay bore him the first time.’

  Bhorth, who had been standing bent over under the wagon’s roof of stretched skin, decided to seat himself on the stool by Thryfe’s improvised couch. Incorrigible faith clouded his thoughts. Although this was absurd, he had known the second it was spoken that it was real and disgustingly immediate.

  ‘I don’t want some dramatic argument,’ said Thryfe. Indeed, he looked as though he could not sustain the mildest squabble. ‘Remember what I was. Trust me.’

  ‘Very well, Highness, I do. You and she have coupled and now she carries some sort of third party’s seed. I can reckon to know that gambit. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Whatever searches after us means to destroy the child. In doing that it’s quite sanguine on the matter of killing in random vast quantity. Therefore we try to hide. I shall go down again into a kind of sleeping death. For me that’s now quite simple. I may even truly die there. I apologize if you had other plans for me. It can’t be helped. But she—’ A sudden violence blazed in Thryfe. He raised himself off the cushions and caught Bhorth’s forearm in a grip like granite. ‘She must live.’

  ‘Because of this obscure supernatural child in her.’

  ‘Fuck the child. For her. For her. She must live.’

  ‘Jemhara?’

  Thryfe lapsed. He let go Bhorth’s arm and absently, muscular resil
ient Bhorth massaged the aching bruise Thryfe’s grasp had given him. ‘She isn’t what she was. She has become what perhaps she always should have been, if in the beginning people had left her alone.’

  ‘Very well. If you tell me so.’

  ‘I do tell you. Forget her as you knew her. She’s been reborn.’

  ‘And you say the accursed Vashdran is to be reborn too?’ Bhorth anxiously leaned forward.

  Thryfe’s vision had blurred over. He was glad of Bhorth’s uncluttered acceptance; it saved much time.

  ‘Yes. Maybe somebody can smother it in the moments after birth. But be quick. It – will mature fast, and to colossal vitality.’

  ‘I’m used to that. I have a son like that.’

  But Thryfe’s face had slurred away into the pillow as if every bone in his neck were water. He was unconscious. Already this mighty magus of whom, those years back, Bhorth had been if he were honest in extreme awe, appeared more than two-thirds a corpse.

  Bhorth sat there. He considered the predicament. He considered how, after his capture, he had met Vashdran in his war camp of the barbarian Gullahammer. The golden creature which had talked to him in such a courteous and friendly, winning way. ‘Won’t you accept my hand?’

  ‘I will not,’ Bhorth had said.

  ‘Oh, then,’ said the Lionwolf, ‘I must take yours.’

  ‘By all gods,’ Bhorth now murmured. Bewildered, blank, he gaped at nothing.

  But something else darkened the entry to the wagon. This dark was warm, and shone.

  ‘Father?’ said a caring voice. And then, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  When she opened her eyes she saw the three women, two unknown, watching her intently, each in a different way.

  Jemhara drew herself upright. She was weak still from the last six days of induced sleep, which had followed after Aglin had punched out her lights. No mark showed of the blow except in Aglin’s concerned physician’s gaze every time they met.

  That was Aglin’s look now. Aglin had acted intelligently and ruthlessly and saved many lives, Jemhara’s – as she herself was quite sure – among them.

  The other two women were Magikoy, Jemhara assumed. They had that special concentration in their look all of their ilk came to have. Even Thryfe had it. She, Jemhara, did not. She had not been Insularia trained. She would never consider herself a member of this elite.