Salvation's Fire Read online

  “No, no no! I no know anything!” came a voice struggling to pronounce words and doing a bad job of it. It was female, but on the lower, rougher end of the scale, with a burr that suggested smoking. “Please you let me go. I must to go home.”

  “Don’t hurt her!” cried the Grennishman almost in the same instant, reaching under its table to produce a slender knife that it waved furiously in Ralas’ face. “Thieves! Bandits!”

  Ralas backed away, his hands in the air, wondering what he was expected to do. A look around revealed thunderous faces peering from several alcoves and a bustle in the larger street suggested that guards were going to be soon on the way. He looked back, nervously, to find himself alone, no signs of Tricky and only the empty flaps of the shredded tent blowing open in the breeze to reveal a collection of small boxes upturned, bright coloured pigments scattered on the ground and no sign of anyone. “I… uh…” he said and then with a sense of desperation, seeing a large Oerni woman with a wooden cudgel coming around the side of the cheiromancer’s door, dodged around the chair and thrust himself through the canvas gap.

  On the other side ran a common lane that linked the fortune tellers to the stalls behind them via a shared avenue filled with crates and boxes. From his left a man with a sledgehammer was coming out of the back of a small smithy so without thinking Ralas turned the other way and ran, seeing by the marks of bright pink and dots of blue powders scattered here and there that he was probably going the right way. His conviction was confirmed when he ran around the corner at the end of the lane and, instead of coming out between the stands into the square, he went around the same corner, again, and was enveloped for a moment in complete darkness.

  When light returned he found himself inside the smoky bar-room of a minuscule tavern, his head almost knocking on a low beam, his boots on boards and straw instead of the road’s paving. Someone was puffing cherry and rum tobacco. A hubbub of apparently distant clinking, drinking and chatter managed to be at once far away and filling up his ears with a fug of sound that blotted out every other conversation in the room.

  Before him stood Tricky, panting, and with her the taller and more miserable figure of someone he supposed was Zivalah, a middle-aged Tzarkomen, with more bones in her hair and amulets around her neck and arms than he’d ever seen anyone wear. Despite the crowds and the noise they seemed to be in a tiny envelope of calm all their own.

  “I not ever go back,” Zivalah was saying insistently, adding several sharp gestures. Her dark skin was pocked with scars and tattooed everywhere with designs that led the eye one way, then another. He recognised the twisting, turning lines that doubled back and ended abruptly as something he’d seen before. Across her eyes a broad white stripe of paint stood out, applied with apparent carelessness in a single splash, so bright that the rest of her, besides her eyes, seemed almost to vanish into a shadow.

  Tricky glanced at him. “Welcome to the Inn At The End Of The World. Always only a corner away.”

  Ralas tried to see the other patrons but no matter how he stared they remained out of focus, merely shapes that suggested pirates and soldiers, ladies in strange clothing, the long legs and beaked head of a Hegula dipping down from an unlikely height beneath the roof. Their conversations folded in on one another, no word distinguishable.

  At one end of the room there was the suggestion of a bar. He longed for the ability to drink something strong but then Zivalah caught sight of him and the tremor of anxiety that had made her quake beneath Tricky’s insistence turned to a stillness so profound she could have been turned to stone. Her expression of irritation and fear changed to open puzzlement and then she stretched out a hand and made a sign in front of him. He felt a distinctive flicker of electrical energy ripple across his skin. It hurt him where his wounds remained but was gone before he could do more than gasp.

  “You are not alive.” And just like that her difficulty with diction and trouble finding words was gone. She straightened up and put back her shoulders, glanced at Tricky and then stepped forward to examine him more closely. “But you are. Not by Tzarkomen sorcery. By some other means.” She looked at Tricky with a fresh curiosity giving her animation an almost friendly air. “Is this your trouble, Darkness?”

  “Not really,” Tricky said, “He’s more of an ongoing issue, although any news is always appreciated.”

  Zivalah circled him, her study growing more intense. “I have not seen this before. Tzarkomen raised many, many friends and foes but only in the ordinary way. All of them empty vessels.”

  “Well aware of those, thank you,” Ralas said, turning so that she couldn’t get behind him. Her stance had become a little predatory. “Definitely not one of those.”

  “Very different,” she agreed. “It is like… like the life in you is undying, but something stops it always. A heart,” she held out her hand, palm up, and then stabbed down with the index finger of her other hand right into the centre of it. “Pinned down. It goes right through you. You are Kinslayer’s making, hm?”

  “Yes,” Ralas said. “If all you are referring to is my living situation. The rest of me has nothing to do with him, thankfully.”

  “I want to know about the Book and the mazagal that your lot made for Re… for the Kinslayer,” Tricky said.

  “Ahya! That.” The Tzarkomen slumped back to her hangdog look and covered her face with inkstained hands. She had long nails, clawlike, sharpened to points and painted black. They dug into her forehead and she was crying as she said, “This is why I will never go back. It is not an ordinary mazagal. It is a Zafiid. A collector. Like the Book. But the Book was taken. He took it all. After the Tzarkomen now living die there will be no more art. It dies with us. They made it so that he would not destroy us but without the Book we are nothing anyway. Just another set of people with a sad story and no power to do more than make little charms. The Book is gone. The dead will fall. Only the Zafiid remains.”

  Ralas didn’t understand the distinctions she was making but her misery convinced him that what she claimed had truth in it.

  “But he died before he took possession of it,” Tricky said.

  “It cannot be undone,” Zivalah said and her fingernails had dug into her skin deeply enough to draw blood. “All my sisters died for nothing. Nothing. My daughters. My mother. You don’t understand. I left them there to carry away the burden.” She took her hands down. Tears of white streaked her cheeks.

  Ralas watched blood run down her forehead, over her thick, whitened brows and into the creases around her eyes. She blinked and it became a film of pink across the whites, a paler sheen across the dark iris.

  “We always send one daughter away,” she said. “One to tell, to remember. We always save one. But she has to go and not return. She carries the death guilt with her, so that the Gravewife and the Remaker are clean. She will die in the wilderness and not come back again. This was my duty. But the Zafiid is lost, an empty vessel. We had hoped, maybe, it would become powerful enough to collect him. But now it was for nothing.” As she had been speaking the misery and the fear had seeped out of her and with the last words her knees folded and she sat down heavily on her heels and then slumped over to one hip, hands loose in her lap, her face gone slack with loss.

  “Maybe,” Tricky said quietly, “if we could find this Book…”

  Zivalah gave the merest shake of her head. “You don’t understand. The Book was lost at the start of the war. That’s why we made her. Because he had proved we couldn’t stand against him.”

  “Where was it last?”

  “Caracu, near Ghevera, in the south,” Zivalah said. “But you won’t find it.” She turned her face to Tricky. “End it, Darkness. Friend of the Lost. End it for me now? I have years left to bear this alone. End it.” She reached out for Tricky’s hands, cowed and pleading.

  Tricky stepped back. “How can I get into Tzark, to the labyrinth?”

  “They will never let you in to it. Maybe. If you offered them something new.” And she looke
d at Ralas in a way he didn’t like at all which reminded him of examination tables and cold, sharp metal edges. “It would intrigue them to consider new methods of handling death. But by now they are a lost people. It may be they won’t care for anything at all.”

  “Never mind.” There was a faraway look about Tricky that suggested to Ralas her quicksilver mind had already taken another path. She strode around them both to go to the bar, passing through the blurred veil into the distance abruptly. When he tried to follow Ralas found himself rebuffed, walking on the spot, a feeling like heavy cobwebs about his face and hands, and tangling his feet. He stepped back, feeling stupid and awkward, glanced at Zivalah who was still staring at him intently through her self-inflicted crimson facemask.

  “Do you know any songs?” he asked, trying to fill the tiny space and its silence.

  “Songs carry memory, we do not need them. The blood is our memory. We sound out the tones to bring it forward. That is all the singing we do.”

  Ralas blinked.

  “Here you are, drink this,” Tricky said, returned, holding out a wooden cup filled with something dark and faintly steaming.

  “It will finish me?”

  “Definitely will do the job,” Tricky said as Ralas looked on, appalled. “Come on. We have to disappoint some burghers about a wedding.”

  He wanted to resist but her grip on his arm was strong and the world was already spinning around them. By the time Zivalah had drunk all the contents of the cup and flung it away from her they were back in the market and the cup was clattering down on the stone cobbles and rolling under the harness-maker’s bench. A moment later Zivalah was walking back towards her stand as though nothing had happened. Ralas waited, and waited, feeling Tricky tug impatiently at his sleeve. “You didn’t kill her.” He felt baffled by his own bafflement, that the lack of violent death was now so unexpected in him that this surprised him.

  She sighed, but briefly. “In a way I did. That was Furny’s Mnemtastic Tincture, a speciality of the house. One drinks it to forget. So now she’s forgotten she was the scapegoat, and everything associated with it. All she knows is that she must not return to Tzark. Not that I think that’s going to be much of an issue as I doubt there’s much left to return to. It was a mystery for the world before the war and it’s still one now. The only people going into those lands are bandits and chancers, zealots wanting to finish off the undead, possibly a few unwary refugees, maybe the odd expeditionary party on behalf of wealthy entrepreneurs, but most of them won’t be coming back. Dead Tzarkish things are still fairly undead.”

  He looked at her, and saw her again, anew, a committed missionary with a goal of great weight on her shoulders. He wondered that he hadn’t noticed it before. It was the kind of thing you noticed about Celestaine almost immediately. Being around Tricky was like having a strange blindness: her ever-changing ways were a storm around a core he wasn’t sure he’d ever glimpsed and he was humbled because all the Guardians he had met, bland and terrible by turn, had never seemed this close to the divine. All the same, he would welcome a break from terror and undead things didn’t sound like that. “Please tell me that’s not where we’re going.”

  She held onto his arm, a conspirator, a sweetheart consoling a suitor as she let him down. “I’d like to.”

  “You’d like to go?”

  “I’d like to tell you that. But if it helps then we’re not going straight away. First I have to get back to Nydarrow and check a few things. Don’t worry. We won’t be there long.”

  “To… Ny…” She was hustling him away again as alarmed shoppers had begun to look at them and take an interest. It was good because he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear any more.

  They were halfway back to the gate before she started speaking again. “I’m concerned that the business the Forinthi champion and my weaselly brother are all fired up about is not all it seems. I…” She paused in preoccupation of thought and a couple of the many, incessantly present guardsmen almost walked into them.

  “Mind your manners!” one barked, adjusting his cloak and giving his halberd a slight shake. “Stay on the left for the gate, keep moving at a sensible pace or you can pay us five scits for every dawdle and two pollys for waiving the non-buyer’s licence for leaving without a purchase. Town isn’t rebuilding itself.” He and his partner both gave identical sharp nods to emphasise the point.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Tricky said, sounding distinctly unlike herself, but hustled Ralas forwards, half carrying him with her grasp on his arm, and then they were off again. As soon as they had cleared the officials at the gate and paid the exit duty and the safe-streets voluntary donation they passed into the world in which they were old sweethearts, fabricating stories of a past that never was to explain their wedding, and then its delay. “We’ll just put them off a bit,” Tricky said as though this, and not the other dark quest, was her real goal in the world, of the utmost importance. “Better than a blow to the hopes. We’ll go for an engagement celebration. Everyone wins.”

  Ralas managed, “It makes me nervous when people say that. But anyway, if we do that won’t we be actually engaged? I mean is it real or is it pretend?”

  She hugged his arm and drew him close to her side and he fancied he felt a touch of affection through her coats and leather harness filled with knives and potions and the thick wadding on her fencing arm. “You’re a wise one, bard. Not easy to fool you. Let’s just say that there can be some fun and leave it at that. Or are you one of the Gracious One’s devotees?” She looked up at him quizzically.

  “I’m not,” he said. “I was always more of the opportunist, depending on whichever god seemed to have the most benefits for musicians and that depends on where you are.”

  “Exactly! Wise,” Tricky said with enthusiasm and cuddled his arm to her as they went so that even though it hurt abominably, he didn’t let out a single squeak of protest.

  But once they had wound their way out of the surroundings of the town and had come to the thicketed lane which led to the Inn she let go, folded her arms and pushed her hood back and spoke into the air in front of her although she meant it for him. “You know, there’s a labyrinth on that box that matches one inside Nydarrow, well, not exactly but close enough. Like brothers, hm? But not like twins. I knew as soon as I saw it that they must be connected. I’ve been to the one in Nydarrow…”

  “What? When were you there?”

  She took a breath and a careful step onward, measuring now. “I’ve been many times there, but most recently a day ago. I was looking for some news on a thing called the Book, which is also referenced on the Zafiid’s casket. Interesting how those two old scallies failed to mention it, isn’t it? I knew Fishy wouldn’t. He’d try to keep that knowledge to the two of them so that they can go loot for themselves and I get to chase off after that scapegoat. Fishy’s tight. If he’d made it more worth her while she’d have properly got out of town and not just tried to hide among the bins. Sometimes I can’t believe how predictable he is. If I hadn’t scared the poop out of him by threatening to leave the labyrinth right there in the shop he’d have not mentioned anything useful.” She didn’t seem to care that she was carrying it with her all the time but Ralas was getting a little bit of the hang of how she worked now and he sensed that this was a bait he was meant to take to stop him mentioning the horrid suspicion which had begun to form in his mind. He stood still.

  “You were there. You were there with the Kinslayer in Nydarrow.”

  “The Book,” she said with determination. “The Book is not an actual book, I think. It is a reference to something else. But the labyrinth is a place I suspect we ought not to go, and by we, I mean everyone living and by go, I mean…”

  “You were there when I was there.”

  She took another breath, chin down in a kind of nod, the kind that teachers give when they are forced to divulge an unhappy fact. “I may have been there, at that time.”

  “Did you know?”

  She finally l
ost patience with all the calming breaths and the measured strides and spun into his path, her pointed chin firmly down, her gaze scowling. “Trust me, you do not want to follow this line of thought! No profit is to be found there. Did I know you were locked in that cell, keeping his attention, fouling his dreams, measuring his ambitions and finding them pathetic, challenging his soul to its own reckoning and finding him wanting, eating at his sanity night and day, paying with your life over and over again like the joke coin on the end of the elastic string? Were you keeping him occupied whilst others went about their shady business in the distant background, buying their chances with your suffering? I may have known such a thing. Must we go on?”

  He thought about it. She was there. She knew. She saw. She with the spells and the trinkets of magic and the ways and means to get out of trouble. She knew. He had not been saved, not then. She had not saved him. She had let him stay. “No. No need to go on.”

  “Excellent choice. Then, Ralas Dunwin of Forinth, scion of the noble but minor house of Parsleymaine, bard to the courts and friend of the Slayer, tell me again, how did we meet?”

  He repeated his lines in a stunned monotone. “It was during the celebrations after the slaying of Vermarod. I had been with the army and you were with the retinue as a maker and mender and a stitcher of wounds under the auspice of Doctor Panthedreon, who shall never gainsay you as he died shortly afterward of the dragon’s venom spit. We were in the hospital, you as a nurse, me to take the final notes of the dying and the record of the dead.”

  “And your present wounds?”

  “An unlucky meeting with brigands upon the road here two days hence. They wanted your silks and your virtue and I gave an excellent account of myself. We are less the silks but not the virtue.”

  “It’s a good story, I think we can still improve it if we think hard.”