No Flame But Mine (11 page)

‘Wouldn't Aglin help you?'

‘Shift bricks? Don't you think she's got enough to do already? Off now, girlie. Off to school.'

They embraced at the doorway of the hovel, under the roof hole pegged over with an ancient sealskin, mother and daughter who appeared to be sisters, not an inch or an ounce or a year between them.

No sooner was Azula out on the street, however, than she began to pick up on some other element. This was most like dully hearing something, or mistily seeing it at the back of her brain. Now and then the effect had occurred before. Azula never referred to it, or took much notice. Perhaps she had assumed others experienced similar moments. And perhaps they did, some of them.

Skimming along the alleys, Azula hurried to Aglin's room. The snowfall grew thicker as she went. It turned both colours of her hair to white. In the background, hundreds of miles away, something jangled dimly above in the sky, and Azula, who had no magic, listened with half her inner ear. Generally she did not think a vast amount. She acted as events happened. When they were over she filed them tidily behind some mental cupboard door.

Running along the passage to Aglin's apartment, Azula found the mageia awaiting her with a suppressed look of impatience. What could be worse, said the suppressed look, than trying to get blood out of a snowball? Fond mothers, said the look, always reckoned
their
kidlet was a genius. And if the other parent was a god – well.

This did not distress Azula. She bowed to the mageia and closed the door. Turning, she listened with her own patience for the umpteenth time to the proper rules and chants, and watched Aglin bring fire from the air. ‘Now you try, Azula.' And hey presto! Nothing.

Dressed for the outdoors, Thryfe and Jemhara had remained in the attic. She had put on more beer to heat, and poured it for them, but the two cups stood untasted.

Peculiarly, and both noted and thought this, they had begun to reminisce aloud over their pasts, as if they had grown very elderly and had nowhere now to go save backward. She had confessed to him her sins, which he knew of and had already witnessed replayed in the oculum at Stones, when he began to search for her. He talked of his training, of his journey to the Insularia at Ru Karismi, of the eagle familiars of his boyhood – stories already told to her.

Then, step by step, they brought their two histories together. To the capital, to the death of the king Jemhara had murdered at the will of the king's brother Vuldir, to Thryfe's tenure of office and his riding away, and the last mission imposed on Jemhara by Vuldir, which had been to pursue Thryfe and somehow ensnare and destroy him.

She had done it too, although she had not meant to. She had never suspected she could.

It was their love they would have spoken of next, and sex and possession, and how time or their grasp of it had frozen the mansion over and caged them, willing and unknowing prisoners, inside an endless night of concupiscence.

Something then suddenly interrupted the mutual narrative. Before they could reach the nostalgic peak of their idyll, a fearful revelation interfered.

Speaking of his sleekar ride from the city to his house, and how the windows had been white with warning, and his gargolem servants out on the snow standing guard against some sorcerous invasion, and how the invasion had been Jemhara's shape-shift to a hare, Thryfe abruptly grew silent. He was staring at an anomaly never before seen.

Recalling how Vuldir had sent her to Stones and her own comfortless ride to the village, an hour's journey at least from Thryfe's mansion; her sulky sojourn there – she too beheld abruptly the
same
anomaly. It lay like a boulder on their path to meeting.

They sat in the attic, halted by discrepancy.

After some minutes he said to her, ‘You see it too.'

‘I see it. How can it be?'

‘I had left the capital some days before you.'

‘It was
because
you had gone that Vuldir read such danger in your attitude and forced me to follow.'

‘But that very night I reached the house the windows shone to warn me – and that night too I went out across the snow and found you at the Stones, in your shape of the little hare.'

‘And I had been already at Stones two days and a night. How can I have arrived there
days after
you yourself, yet been there two days before you, and still you met me, I you, on the first day of your return?

Unlike this discrepancy of a mysterious and awful glitch in time, before them years and spotted only now, neither was aware of the world or the sky outside.

The daylight had flattened and smoked over. For a long while only the brazier had given either light or dimension to the room.

It was as if some perfect scene-stealing effect took place, and no one paid any attention. Of course, whatever had expended such effort out there,
up
there, might be affronted that the audience ignored it.

Without prelude the
bang
sounded high above. It shook the house, the built streets beyond. From walls and roofs solid slabs of snow dislodged and crashed in the alleys of Kandexa.

Jemhara and Thryfe, along with some thousands of others, were on their feet.

The noise had been as if the sky itself had blown up, split right across, and might now give way like a damaged ceiling.

There came an immediate gushing rattle.

Past the window flared a sparkling, straight-dropping hail of what seemed tiny embittered glittering stars. As they hit the walls and ground in turn, a million sharp and metallic impacts resounded. Below, out in the alley, a man screamed unpleasantly. Next moment the pane of glass in Jemhara's window, closed still for the night, was smashed. A cascade of diamonds shot through into the attic.

Thryfe spoke. Another pane, this one of energy, dashed up to fill the window-frame.

Like maddened wasps hatched from some defrosting orchard, colourless gems flew and smacked against the barrier. Splintering appeared in air—

Jemhara flung the wooden shutter closed and fastened it.

In near total darkness – the brazier fire had sunk down like a frightened dog – they stood listening to the arrows of ice striking on every outer surface over and over. There was distant shouting too and wailing cries.

Another roaring bang bisected the sky overhead. It had seemed impossible the concussion could be repeated. The house shook again. In one wall a hair-fine crack undid itself and powder sprayed across the room.

Jemhara smote the brazier. The fire regained its courage, jumped up. Across the floor white wasps of ice sizzled malignly, not melting.

In the alley outside a man, arms and back broken, was calling, his howl weakening, lost too in the rattle of the hail. He had attempted to crawl to shelter. His track had been like that of a snake, but was already obliterated, and his body half covered by prisms of ice. Jemhara had seen this in the instant she slammed the shutter. She had not been able to help the man. She said nothing.

Above, a low grunting complaint stirred from the roof.

A beam twisted a little, over their heads.

The shutter too had been dislodged. They watched as it slid sideways like a turning page and thudded in on the floor.

‘We must go down,' he said.

She snatched her cloak, a handful of things from the table and Ranjal's twig off the peg. They went towards the door.

A new note sounded – a whistling tearing screech—

Everything flamed white.

Jemhara saw something like a gigantic blazing spear cast from the sky, parting the jewelry hail – it fell to earth perhaps half a mile away. Where it hit home white fire and blue detonated outward from whatever it had struck. A barking explosion followed, unlike the vast noises of the sky.

Despite the danger, Jemhara had looked back at the window, transfixed, staring. Now a second blazing shaft lit the gloom – now another – and another—Scores of these things tore through the hail, rushing from the sky each with its shrilling note and blank white flash of light. Wherever any struck anything below there was the yap of explosion and blast of harsh iced fire.

‘Jema—' He pulled her from the room and out on to the stair beyond. The stairwell was very dark but neither of them conjured a lamp.

The stair kept creaking, swaying a little.

Thunder-stones
– these were the things that fell, a sort of lightning. He had read of them in old manuscripts, never entirely assured of their nature.

Visible through a freshly made aperture in the wall by the stair, another shaft shrieked by. It had a broken and terrible shape, all angles. Now the strike was only a street or two away. Their own building recoiled at the blast, and he heard some other neighbouring architecture sharply snap, the crush and push of stones plummeting.

Down the shuddering stair they eased. This house could offer no refuge. But where they went to next he had no idea. He had cast a cordon of force about them, which to some extent held, but loose plaster and chips of brick pierced it nevertheless. As with the ice-avalanche that had encased him here something in this weather shorted out other powers, considerable though they might be. In all his life he had never witnessed a storm of this character, and only the sheet lightning of a brief thaw, or the flicker of northland lights reported to him, at all resembled thunder-stones.

Reaching the house doorway they lingered. A curtain of vicious hail deterred them from any further step.

The other occupants of the house he supposed were out. In the alley Thryfe detected a dead man under the glistening heaps of hail, a dead animal and a smashed cart.

A woman was leaning from a window across the alley, waving her arms and whimpering in panic. It was this property they had heard crumble; part of the lower storey had collapsed, only a stair and wall holding up the higher rooms.

Jemhara called to the woman above the drizzling spat of the hail. ‘Come down. Throw yourself out – I can guide you to the ground. You won't be harmed—'

‘I'm afraid—'

‘Do you know me? I'm Jemhara the mageia, Aglin's friend. Trust me – I will guide you down.'

Thryfe thought perhaps she could not. Her powers too might be impaired. He put his hand on her shoulder to warn her of this, but in that instant the sky directly over them opened a violet seam. He saw it descend then, a solitary thunderbolt, its evil zigzag of frozen brilliance and the blind white revelation thrown out all about it. It dropped towards them single-purposed on a tail of frayed splitting silver.

Thryfe hurled Jemhara back into the well of the stair, and from his guts drove out a shield of energy that seemed to rip his bones and blood out with it. The doorway and frontage of their shelter turned opaque – but exactly then the lightning bolt met the street.

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
.