No Flame But Mine (22 page)

‘Did it live?'

‘It seems so. It's got a lusty yell, Catnose says – he heard it. Though the shack's quiet now.'

‘And when was this?'

The spy was uneasy. ‘Forgive me, I said, my lord, that fire—'

As Bhorth swung round to leave the terrace Sallus came up to him. For the first time in their lives together Bhorth raised his hand to ward off his son. ‘Not now. I must do this. I meant to have spoken with you about it. We never have. And you'd prevent me.'

‘Her child's born and you'll kill it.'

‘If I can. It's a god from Hell.'

‘The Lionwolf. Father—'

‘
No
.'

Sallusdon, stationed on the terrace, watched Bhorth pound, shouting for his men, into the palace.

A midnight bell had struck by the time Bhorth and his ten soldiers reached the refuse tip.

There had been no pretence at secrecy on this occasion. Curtailment was imperative. Concealment could wait – that was, if any of them survived.

Having broken in the door, as Zzth's tantrum had already broken it in all but a physical way, the Rukarian soldiers clustered, dejected.

‘Fled, my lord.'

‘How hot it is in here,' Bhorth pointlessly remarked.

Thryfe emerged from the blank tunnel of coma, but not into awakening or the real world.

He was in flight. An eagle, his vitality unimpaired, the huge wings spread, speeded by the thermals over a map of cold mountains, and above zircon stars grouped in constellations like question marks.

The eyrie resembled a dish of wires and sinews. The starlight slid along its arteries. Inside, she had plucked out her own feathers to provide a lining. They were thick as fur. She—

He did not know where she had gone to, his mate. All that remained was the egg. It too was englamoured by starlight.

Like a winged sword the eagle set down on the nest's wide rim. Instantly he saw the cracks that patterned the eggshell.

He craned forward the predatory length of his neck, and with a measured blacksmith hammering began to tap on the undoing shell.

Thryfe, high up in the chamber of the eagle's brain, stared out impassively.

I have lost her. I shall never see her again. Only this shall I see. This – which has used us
.

As one, like a chord of music, all the particles of the shell gave way. Star-like, jewel-like, they rained upward into the sky.

And it emerged, the eagle's child.

‘Snow! Hard snow—'

‘It's hail – great chunks – beware – look out!'

Look out, look out, the sky is falling—

Over Kol Cataar, Phoenix from Ashes, the lid of ice, disintegrating, spiralled and sprinkled and rumbled down.

Pieces of ice big as house storeys dashed on Rose Walk, but they were thin too, and hitting home did little damage. Other lesser fragments were more harsh and stabbed like pins. A couple of chimneys crashed behind on the market. A man who had not taken cover was knocked senseless but revived after half an hour.

Even as the sky plummeted the city began to make out behind the drizzle and bustle of the jettisoned ice the proper sky of night, with one full moon and two skinny lunar attendants, and stars everywhere like unstrung necklaces.

Five centuries of Winter, and it could still play tricks. Ice in the sky. Who would have thought it?

Tireh the queen and her ladies were spectators behind the relative safety of palace windows. The two little princess daughters had been allowed up to see.

Sallusdon, roped by the snake, had drawn his sister Azula to shelter under an overhang. There he said to her, ‘Our mother is calling to me. Chillel. I must go to find her. Do you feel that?'

But Azula only looked at him and replied, ‘
My
mother is dead.'

Deep in the grey architecture of the labyrinth lies motionless colour. The labyrinth knows it, has grown used to it. It lives here.

That is, if it does live.

How long then has the child, the newborn, sprawled on the weighing slab of stone against which sacks of milled flour had reposed? A month. At that age, they grow so quickly. One moment the floppy babe-in-arms, and then, and then—

Rats that exist in the underpalace have sometimes come and stared at this motionless yet undead thing. Their eyes are sequined with rubies. So would the child's eyes be if ever they moved, to catch the light.

For there is some light here.

An old man, tall, gaunt and stooping, goes about the storeroom, always slowly. There is an aura to him of great presence, but it
wobbles
, as if he had become displaced from it, as if all that was ever anything in him has entered the aura, and inside he is just a memory, something left over.

The eyes of the baby are even so phenomenally blue.

The magician looks into them.

‘What do you want? You have crushed the world in your hands. I should destroy you. But I don't, do I? Is it because she bore you? I doubt that. Even the rats won't have you. You'd choke them, probably.'

The baby does not stir. On the floor around the slab where the flour once was are pieces of what look like broken eggshells.

The baby itself is
vivid
. He is mottled with rings of dark tan and the red of a banner. He is less like a child than like a fabled insect.

Thryfe the magician seats himself in the chair Bhorth's men have brought him.

Since the miraculous child appeared here in the chamber where Thryfe had lain in his trance, no one will enter. Thryfe is well aware the king expects him to throttle or smother the child, as the magus himself had advised.

‘In the dream,' Thryfe says, ‘you emerged as an eagle, fully fledged. And you are a sun god. So too you told me some while ago, there in the oculum which never lies, wish it would as one might. Not even in a dream.'

Thryfe has tried, without undue cruelty, to be rid of the perilous creature on the slab. For it is
not
a child. He laid a pillow over it and pressed down. There was no struggle. After what seemed an hour of personal torment he straightened and beheld the child exactly the same, mottled, bald, breathing, serene, eyes wide. There have been other methods since. After each assault Thryfe fell back shaking in the chair. It must be his fault. His ability and knowledge have bled out of him.

The stories told how the Lionwolf, Vashdran, had grown in ten years to be a man of twenty-one. Other legends had wafted about that it had asked only ten days for the god to grow to manhood. The god now has been on earth a month. He does not seem to require sustenance, not even a mother's milk. He does not move or cry or show any even quasi-natural reaction. His eyes do not follow anything. Yet when you stand above him, they gaze deeply into yours.

For the hundredth, thousandth, time Thryfe nerves himself to stare into the blue eyes of Vashdran.

‘
What do you want
?'

Minutes pass.

Thryfe leaves the monstrosity where it lies and goes back to his seat. On his instructions they have walled up this chamber. The air at least is dying. The mage thinks of his lover, and how he has no power to help her.

In a sort of dream again, Thryfe is viewing Bhorth in an inner room. No one is with him.

Bhorth's beloved son, the witch-seed of Chillel, has gone from the city. Whatever scenes attended Sallusdon's quittal leave no mark, except in furrows between the king's eyebrows, and below his eyes. He has put on weight again and looks older.

Thryfe recalls Bhorth's heavy portentous steps finally descending to this area of the underpalace, and how Bhorth had demanded to come in and free the city, and Thryfe himself, of the burden of Vashdran.

Thryfe's own weariness and disgusted boredom by then perhaps had exceeded Bhorth's panic and ruthlessness.

‘Wall up the entry here,' had said Thryfe. ‘I told your man that when I told him the child was here.'

‘Don't be a numbskull, mage! Already it's shifted itself from one solid place into another. It can pass through stone.'

‘Not any more. Perhaps it's exhausted. It doesn't move, perhaps can't. And too I shall watch that it doesn't.'

‘How can you prevent it?'

Thryfe had smiled unseen and drearily. ‘I am its physical father. I believe that has tethered it. And I am, even now, one of the Magikoy.'

They had argued then, and for some days after off and on. Or Bhorth had done so. Thryfe did not speak again, nor did the king enter the chamber.

The child lay throughout motionless, and iridescent with its unnerving, insectile colours.

At length Bhorth went away for good, and then his men came and there was the noise of the walling up.

It is true Thryfe has also spoken words to anchor the god-thing where it is. But really Thryfe believes it will not be able to leave him. Ironically, while the heroic demi-god Sallus has removed himself from the care of a loving father, the fiendly Vashdran has come psychically running to his hating progenitor – who thereafter has attempted many times to destroy this son.

What binds Vashdran to Thryfe is not really any mantra. Presumably it is habit. The first father, Zzth, had also hated his son, and attempted wherever possible to kill him. The rubbed place in the heart most often attracts the blow. Men are caught by this snare. How can gods be immune?

The magician pushes off his meditation. He drinks from the crock of water on the floor. There is nothing else. He sits in silence until the rats steal out again and watch, then steal again away.

Something in the air.

The rats are dazzled.

They have stars in their eyes now, not rubies.

A starry filtered flicker and glister ensues, a circular unravelling, that swarms through the storerooms over and around jars of oil and preserves and closets of frigid meat, eddying always inward to one goal.

Like snowflakes the stars infiltrate the walled-up room.

Is anyone here aware enough to note them? The magus has again sunk in deathly sleep. But does the uncanny baby see? The eyes of it still do not move, yet the stars obligingly dance about the child's head before prancing on and amalgamating high up in the chamber's darkest corner.

And there the stars form something. If stars do this the something will be spectacular.

Nondescript in his garments coloured like biscuit crumbs, Ddir descended, walking down the wall as if it were a flight of stairs.

Ddir, the third of the trio of gods active in, or somehow swept up in, this supernatural tragi-comedy from the start, was the artisan, the maker. His arrangements of stars and their subsequent portents had brought him much attention. Ddir himself seemed never to be aware of that.

Now the genius of his unmind was already working. He had forgotten – if he had ever known – what had attracted him to this storeroom. Nothing was of consequence to him apart from the creative process, in this case represented by the child on the slab.

There had been something like this before. Years ago, or minutes. Or centuries.

The gaudy baby was not a blank canvas. More a spoiled one.

He stood looking at it.

Then he began.

The fleshly bundle became instantly formless. It was a lump of dough or wet cement, the colours swirled in it. Only two blue dabs of light hovered now here, now there, under its surface. The eyes, perturbingly able at last to move, were swimming about through its mass like busy fish.

Then the doughy mixture parted in the middle. Two halves slicked back. Inside, a light like a dawn sun rayed upward. Although of such intensity this light
lit
nothing and cast not a single shadow.

Ddir gazed into the ray, causing and monitoring its realignment.

The two halves of mass fell off on the floor. They shrivelled to husks and went to crumbs.
More
crumbs. The light however spread and now it swiftly assumed a shape. That of a tall and full-grown man.

The body was of perfect proportion – what else could one expect from an artisan such as Ddir, no doubt obsessed by flawless maths? Lean, and long of leg, wide at the shoulders, hair streaming out behind a mask of face that quickly accumulated features. In seconds every correct anatomical element was present. The closed eyes were lashed, the brows drawn, the lips sculpted and the mouth equipped with faultless teeth. Male nipples gemmed the flat muscles of the strong chest. At the groin the phallic weapon lay impressively sleeping. The hands and feet took on their nails. Even this time a navel formed, not having been forgotten. Whether it might have been extant anyway was debatable.

Ddir looked on intently. But the blue eyes, those independent fish, hovered about, watching too. Did they approve?

Apparently. As the fiery substance of the madeover god began to cool to a golden opacity, fire now only in the hair, the eyelids lifted. Into the sockets dropped the vagrant eyes like two blue spoonfuls of water.

Something shuddered in the stonework. An unphysical quake.

The atmosphere settled.

Ddir closed his hands and put them away in his sleeves like valuable tools.

And on the slab the god sat up. He was a young and beautiful man of about twenty-five years of age, his nakedness resplendent as any new suit of clothes.

‘My thanks,' he said to Ddir. ‘That saved some time.'

Ddir did not speak. He was losing interest. The project was complete. He levitated upward. When his head brushed the room's ceiling he simply continued on and ebbed through and away. His bare feet went the last, already transparent, and the toes not well manicured.

Lionwolf stretched himself, and rose.

He crossed the room as a man would have done. He had been a man in life, and death. Humanness remained comfortable and appropriate for him, despite so many talents.

Thryfe lay crookedly sleeping in the chair. Lionwolf set one hand quietly on the magician's head. Thryfe, though starved of air, was not yet dead.

Lionwolf nodded to the doorway that had been walled up. Stones and mortar mellifluously crumbled and powdered down. Outside ran a dim corridor of the labyrinth, empty of anything except a dead torch. But when the eyes of the god touched the torch with their glance it sprang into hot flower.