No Flame But Mine Page 9

  Curiously mellow, this near explosion, and dim …

  Far off the muted flutter of fire.

  Jemhara. Her cool hand, healing flowing from it like wine through glass, and he the glass.

  He pulled himself up. Jemhara supported him. Strange, how strange. He had felt the pressure of the ring he gave her, there on her middle finger, pressed into his forehead.

  Despite the thaumaturgic shield all the façade of the house was down and lay across the alley. The hail, quieter and almost delicate now, was pattering like white rice over it. The opposite house where the woman had cried had mostly tumbled and was burning with a blue flame.

  His hearing came back with a shock, and he could see.

  He held her and Jemhara lay against him.

  They seemed to be beneath a bowl of nothingness, but it was neither temporary deafness nor their own protective power. Arrows and pins of lightning still howled earthwards, but no more landed here. Their trajectory had changed.

  An irrepressible notion seized him. The bolt had looked precisely at them, studying them both with some implausible and non-existent eye. It had indeed come searching for them; or – it had come searching for her. He had used his magic as a rank beginner would, unkempt, injuring himself – his solar plexus, the inner core of his brain, felt stung. But there had been no space for sophistry. And they had lived. Wildly it crossed his mind that this primal thing, whatever it might be, which hated them, was perhaps handled better by brute force than by wisdom and cunning.

  ‘Are you unhurt?’ he asked her.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The rubble of the other house over the way grumbled and gouted bilious sparks. Both of them considered the trapped woman who had not escaped in time.

  ‘The hail’s less,’ Jemhara said.

  ‘Yet the lightning bolts—’ He pointed. ‘They’re running all one way.’

  They stared. The galvanic missiles streamed by overhead. Each ran horizontal now before diving downward somewhere to the northern west.

  He thought of the weapons of Ru Karismi. He had never seen their flight, save with his inner eye. They would not, he believed, have looked like this. Even the lightning ‘flash’ he had heard described by those from the city who had been aware of it and still survived had not been the same, let alone the detonation.

  New explosions racked north-west, echoing against the ice-shelved sea. Something else had drawn off the bolts of heaven it seemed, something more attracting than Jemhara.

  They moved forward from the house. When they were twenty paces off, picking over the bright shale and debris, the stairwell they had so carefully negotiated plunged inward behind them with a cloud of brown dust.

  Beyond the alleys they found many corpses lying in the road. The gemmy hail was finally disintegrating, showing all the clever things it and the lightning had done.

  The concussions of the bolts were fewer now, he was certain of it. A count of thirty or seventy could be made between them, and now a hundred.

  He glanced at her again, assaying her as he had before in the attic room, wanting to be sure all was well. But everything of her had remained in perfect connection, beautiful as some magical mechanism. And what else was the human body after all? At the centre of her too the flame-heart of the second life lay tucked safe, immutable.

  The house had been two streets from the shore. It was not in Paradise either, but among West Villagers, and Beebit had had to buy her way into the zone with her body. But that was easy and reasonable. Made of petrified wood and stones the dwelling had not held out under the onslaught either of Lionwolf’s rampaging invaders, or of subsequent weather.

  It took Beebit many days to locate it, for everything was down. But, just as she had at last identified the jumble of her former home, so she was convinced she would know the bones of her father.

  Yes, she had loved him. She knew of others of their kind, their profession, who broke in their daughters and sons personally to the trade. The dad had not been one of these. He had brought to her a young good-looking minor noble of the city, who had a little cash and was grateful to find a tasty virgin, particularly one who could do such tricks with her ‘honey bones’. ‘Don’t fall in love with him,’ her father warned her. ‘He’s from the idle class, and we belong among the proper aristocracy, the working class who are creative and useful.’ She had listened seriously, absorbing his advice. And although her first experience of a man was acceptable she felt more pleasure in her own abilities.

  All these years after, day by day she grubbed through the layers of rubble. She had got down to the foundations of their house that morning and was singing softly, thinking of her own wonderful daughter, hoping that this moment, or this, Azulamni would achieve the release of her inevitable powers.

  When the astounding sky-crashing bang sounded above, almost every one of those who dug in the ruins leapt up and stared. Beebit herself had not got to her feet. She was holding apart two slabs of broken stuff; she had just got a glimpse of cadaverous white. She did glance at the sky.

  The sparkling hail began seconds later.

  Skittish and separated it only needled and pricked the skin. Beebit pulled the hood of her cloak over her head, and bent again to her task.

  A cloven skull and heap of bones lay in the cavity. She knew it was him. She leaned nearer, ignoring the scrambling and calling and shouts of the others round her, and the hail’s increasing thrash.

  Then the hail altered. This was between one breath and another. It passed from insectile venom to whips and mallets.

  A hundred prismatic assassins broke Beebit’s neck in half a blow and stove in her cranium with the other half.

  Did she realize what had happened?

  Pain beyond pain. Then none.

  ‘Daddy—’ she said.

  For her father was stepping out of his grave under the house, all done up in wholesome flesh and not much older than when she had been twelve.

  ‘It’s all right, flower.’ He took her hands.

  ‘But I thought you were dead—’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  Beebit, who had herself been Azulamni, looked about and saw the world becoming very small while something else lavishly opened all around.

  She knew and flung out one fist to clutch back her life, screaming, ‘My girl – my daughter—’

  But a cool liquid wave moved over her, what now she was. It was like waking from a dream where everything had been entirely real and involving, but it was a dream …

  At the start of the storm the second Azulamni, daughter of Beebit and Chillel, ran out of the mageia’s room despite Aglin’s protest. She sprinted through the alleys, going northerly and west towards West Villagers. People dashed past her, groping for shelter, some yelling and many offering prayers to various Rukarian gods.

  Azula ducked and wove through the hail. When the second thunder came she paid it no heed. At no time did she have any fear for herself, though the hail sometimes grazed or slashed her. When the spearing lightnings began to drop she did not know they were lightnings, or thunderbolts. A group of standing houses was struck not ten feet ahead of her, all of them exploding, fires unreeling and bricks flying round her head, and still Azula had no dread – for herself.

  It was her mother she was frightened for.

  Because she had grown up so swiftly, all memories of her time with Beebit were condensed to a shining acuity. With adult commitment Azula ran to aid her mother, but also with the leftover need of a child.

  At the barricade of West Villagers dead burned guards lay on the ground, smothered by hail, only a crisped hand, a bloody foot, stuck out. The gate itself had taken a direct hit and burst.

  Azula raced over hail and bodies and walls.

  She had visited the site of the house before. No one, that was no one alive, remained in the vicinity.

  The girl flew up the escarpment of cast-out stones.

  Beebit lay face-down on the other side.

/>   Thoughtless, Azula crouched and pulled her over.

  Ah.

  Beebit’s face, unmarked save by the tiniest scratch on the cheek and a faint flushing from the coldness of the ground, ended just above her eyebrows. Her forehead and her greened brown hair had vanished. Her opened head was filled like a cup by the glittering hail-jewels, while the old scar, there since she was fifteen, had been removed along with the top of her skull.

  There was nobody else left out on the street. Either they had crawled to some dubious refuge or they were corpses.

  Azula bent low over her mother.

  The hail broke round Azula, smarting, doing nothing more.

  Strong as most young men, Azula lifted her mother in her arms and stood up. She slung back her head so the hail-beads tinkled in her two-tone hair. Her own face, exposed to the sky, received no serious wounds.

  Like a wolf she howled. On and on.

  In the howling was the death of love.

  The storm seemed to pause at it. Perhaps this was a delusion.

  Then high overhead in the black-white parasol of cloud a sort of eye appeared, tracking the howling and the thing which uttered it.

  A purple vein ruptured.

  Out of the vein the levinbolt came down, straight for the howl, to silence it for ever.

  Azula saw it come. She bared her teeth and bellowed into the core of it.

  If anyone near could have been watching, and none could but the dead, the bolt would have been seen to strike the earth directly through Azula.

  A cannonade erupted at the place. A ball of ice and white fire surged skywards sidelong – and caught in the midst was the fragmented, exploded body of lifeless Beebit. But no sooner had the flames sprung out than they failed. Like fire meeting water they were distilled, losing their light and all velocity. Smoke and a low rumbling were the only evidence of the strike. One object stood upright where the bolt had landed: Azula.

  She had ceased her lament. Her brown skin bore a faint silvery tarnish, and in her hair all the coloured ornaments were dust. Aside from that there was no sign on her. She was yet alive, and turning her head slowly like a snake, her teeth still bared and her eyes gleaming with rage.

  The next bolt coursed in moments later and struck home. It too boomed out with a brief incandescence, fading almost instantly to spume and smoke. Then the others knifed down after it. They came one on another, now and then two or three together. Each cut into the spot where Azula stood, head back and feet planted wide, her arms and hands stiffly stretched as if still supporting her mother’s shattered body.

  What does she feel now, the goddess’s child, Beebit’s daughter?

  Nothing unique. Only fury and a sort of furious drunken gladness as the potence of this enemy reaches and is destroyed by her.

  This then is her magic? She does not think of that. There is no truly unusual sensation as the bolts disintegrate around and within her. A kind of fizzy fieriness, not nasty, let alone epic. Nothing much.

  Across the decimated city any living spectators behold the spears of the storm flying all one way, zooming to the ground somewhere in West Villagers sector, detonating more feebly, defused.

  Azula, as she earths each lightning, stays fixed in one endless loop of approach, impact, dissolution.

  The storm however wilts. The hail sprinkles to a stop. The lightnings are growing fewer, thinner, nearly flimsy. Some perish in mid-sky.

  One last bolt stumbles towards Azula and triggers itself midway down, filling the upper air with a long, spreading blue ripple and the metallic reek of ozone.

  Quiet returns. There is only some crying and calling that hovers, like an afterthought.

  Azula kneels and sees a bone. That is all she can see of her human mother, now. There are bones everywhere, naturally, but she knows whose this was. Of course she does.

  Saphay the crone was sitting in a corner of the joyhall of the Holasan-garth.

  She spied under her seamed lids, watching Nirri talking to the four men who had ridden out to search for Arok and his hunting party. They had found no trace. Snow had fallen in the night, they said, as if Nirri might not know. No doubt the men of the hunt had taken shelter, but any tracks were wiped away.

  Nirri was worried, Saphay could see that much, but she behaved well and steadily, and now had the men sit. She herself brought them heated ale.

  When I was a garth queen, Saphay ruminated sarcastically, I was never any good at it. It takes the low-born, she mentally decided, to do such things well.

  She asked herself if she should go personally to search for Arok. It would be nothing to her. She could fly, or more properly levitate, over the snows. Had he died? As a god she ought to know such things. She did not seem to. Perhaps she was afraid to find out. The tumult here resulting from his demise would interrupt her own concerns.

  Arok’s son was having a nap upstairs. True Jafn, he already resisted the enforced periods of sleep given small children.

  Arok’s son.

  Saphay scowled. One of the women going by with food for the searchers skipped round a pillar to avoid the crone’s eye.

  All these days and nights Saphay had haunted the garth. She was bored beyond patience with it all and angry with Athluan. How dare he try her in this way, reborn an infant. Every time she saw him she felt a rush, not of love, but of confusion. She must wait at least sixteen years for him to become a man again; she would have no lover’s feeling for what he was until then. She thought even had she been a child herself and he as young, she would not have liked him till he had grown. In her own youth the only males who ever caught her eye were always three or four years older. Athluan had been thirty when first she met him, she seventeen. His ghost had since informed her she had loved him then and he her. But she had never been sure; was not now. The little white-haired boy she regarded, in gentler moments, with nervous, wary tenderness. Lionwolf had been wrenched from her twice. Other surrogate sons too. One of those had died. Athluan, a sort of son-figure mingled with a perhaps-lover due to meet her later, might also, once more, be snatched away.

  He was mortal. Therefore he could die, again.

  Saphay swept to her feet at the very instant Nirri walked up to her.

  ‘No news of my lord,’ said Nirri in a calm way. Unease was held firm behind her eyes.

  ‘Well, he’s off hunting.’

  ‘They’ve been gone eleven days. An Endhlefon.’

  ‘Thoughtless,’ said Saphay. ‘Men. Hunts, wars.’

  ‘Can you help me, lady? To learn if he’s safe. All our house mages left us. We’ve only the wise-women and the werloka, who have—’

  ‘Less ability than scrats,’ Saphay observed.

  Nirri said, ‘Their talents vary.’

  In another corner the old werloka was playing a noisy board game with two of the older men. Respectful, they always let him win. The wise-women were out in the garth at a birthing. Which meant, Saphay thought, their eating and drinking, and sometimes chiding the groaning or shrieking woman in labour for her laziness.

  ‘Finding spells are not my province,’ said Saphay.

  Nirri nodded and looked away. ‘I should have thought they might be. You knew what had become of Dayadin.’

  Saphay flinched. She had not, did not, admit why and how she had known, having been there and unable to save him. The glimpse of her past cowardice did not improve her mood.

  ‘You have your other son,’ ironically she said.

  ‘Yes. But I’d wished to ask you – is there some way in which you might secure my son?’ Saphay stared. Nirri said slowly, ‘This is an unknown land to us. My husband the Chaiord is long gone from home. Men are lost, as well as children. My other boy, all I have, is here. Witches can make charms, protect human things.’

  She had spoken without desperation, and carefully. She saw, through the crone’s withered exterior, continual strange hints of other elements – youth for one, and eccentric irresolute powers. When Saphay was with Athluan Nirri also saw what she took
for a latent or foiled maternal instinct. Is she too searching for a lost child? But there was more. Perhaps, Nirri concluded now, this one has been widowed of her husband.

  Saphay though turned on her sprightly old heel and marched down the joyhall and out through the door.

  In the yard a man was hoisting oranges along from the hothouse, poor wizened objects but even so reminding her … of the Klowan-garth. Where she had lived with Athluan, then.

  She heard his steps behind her.

  Without looking round she knew them, as she seldom knew another step of either adult or child, even of god.

  ‘You were laid down to sleep.’

  ‘Only the dead can’t avoid sleeping.’

  She gazed at him and there he was, standing beside her on the snow.

  ‘That is a cliché of the Jafn,’ she said. ‘Why use it?’

  But, ‘I dreamed of another brother,’ he told her, pleased. ‘He was called Like-a-Lion. He was nice.’

  ‘Conas,’ said Saphay.

  ‘That’s it. You never met him.’ His face clouded. He would lapse into the other life, then falter. It was terrible for him. He had reached for her hand and held it, and led her to the yard gate. Together they looked at the winding ways of the garth. ‘I remember a pear tree, all knotted over, and you broke the ice and got out the pears. But it doesn’t grow here. Oh, look,’ he added.

  She looked. Where her gnarled claws clasped his small hand, an ember of light had formed. It was warm; even she could feel it now. It seemed protection of him seeped from her automatically.

  ‘What do you want most?’ she asked.

  He gazed at her now. ‘To grow up. If I could grow up, I’d marry you.’

  ‘I’m an old woman,’ she said. She felt it, or thought she did.

  ‘Not so much,’ he said. ‘I saw you. You were in the air and you were young. Well,’ he amended justly, ‘young enough.’

  She laughed. ‘Ungallant.’

  He only smirked at the Rukarian word and concept, and rubbed his face on her hand, and the amber ember of light curled round his head like radiance freed from a lamp.

  Saphay doused it. Someone else might see.