No Flame But Mine (28 page)

Guri assumed that what had altered them centuries on was their fall. When, prior to his first life, the Rukar invaded Olchibe and Gech and smashed their universe on earth – and therefore, worse, also in their Elsewhere. Crawling up from the cold mud they had substituted, for the theft of faith in self, a faith in the Great Gods who would assist them to their aim of revenge.

And she, his witch, had smelled on Guri that he was responsible.

‘The future is in my past.'

And was the fate of his nation, which had made him Guri in that future-past of his, now in
his
hand?

Guri overlooked one salient fact.

In
his mortal past he had never wondered what the Great Gods were. They were, that was it. In his day, rather like the God of the barbaric Jafn, they were formless yet omnipresent. One did not portray them even mentally as they were undelineable, and anyway visible in all other things.

Roaming about hero Guri came to be revered. It was unavoidable. All he was and the abilities he demonstrated, often without thinking, showed him off.

Then other adventures happened.

A cluster of huts among pillars of frozen trees and a child throwing a fit. Guri steps forward, what else, and touches the child, which relaxes, revives and is never sick again. A shore village, and a man gored by a horned shark. Guri steps forward … A mammoth dying with her calf trapped inside her. Guri steps … An illness from bad meat. Guri …

There had been more minor events like this in his own sluhtin. But there they had just accepted it. A Crarrow, a
coven
, had reared him. He had picked up some skill.

But now, oh, now. Guri, Guri, Guri. Gurithesput. Star Dog Lit Among the Nights. That was what the composite name meant, if woven in cloth or scratched on a wall.

She
had been able to stammer it out, or nearly, his witch on the road. G-g-god. God. Guri the god.

Like the subtlest whiff of incense-smoke or burning honey from a Crarrow spell-fire, the odour of sanctity floats around the confined world of y'Chibe and y'Gech, under that low horizon.

A day comes, the region not so far from glorious Sham. Two war bands of the Chibe are about to be engaged in battle. But Guri, who had loved battle with the best of them, has learned in his Hell that what is done is always paid for. He wants to forestall the killing.

Guri … steps forward.

Between the two onracing packs of mammoths and men he stands on the snow and only breathes out once.

Not fifteen feet apart both battalions lose their speed. Without being harmed, not skidding or toppling, without even a hint of being jerked back or muscular whiplash, all ceases. They are slowed inside some other space, and come to rest on their own gentle as feathers.

Amazed, the men sit their beasts among the skull banners. But the beasts are much ahead of their riders. One by one, and several together, the white mammoths kneel to Guri, and on their backs the warriors goggle, so shaken by surprise and so
un
shaken physically that they are silent in life as death would have made them.

Guri smiles. He has about him that irresistible sweetness Lionwolf had eventually reached in Hell. Sweetness and calm sadness and antique wisdom in a young face of countless years. He has made peace.

g-g-god …

g-g-God …

Great Gods, what has Guri done?

FIVE

The pair of sentries pacing round outside the palace had met on their nocturnal hourly circuit for a mutual swig of wine. Something had been going on in Kol Cataar for several months. No one was completely ignorant of it. You felt it in the air. After the sky fell, or rather the meteorological ice-lid on the city gave way, any doubt was banished. Despite that few grasped, let alone guessed, the real substance of events. And the sentries had only been doubled after all.

‘I heard he was gone,' said one of the sentries.

‘So did I. None saw him leave. Do you reckon it can be true?'

‘It's unthinkable. The king's son. Unless it's some secretive mission entrustable only to Prince Sallusdon.'

‘But where would he go? There's none of us left. The population of the Ruk was creamed off by the Death. Just the whey left now, steads and little towns like Kandexa – and most of
them
have come
here
.'

‘It can't be true then. Sallus must still be in the palace. Did you hear about the whore?'

‘Which one?'

‘Some woman. They say she carried a big bellyful for thirteen months and then gave birth to a pig.'

‘Some wondrous father then.'

‘Some mother.'

They laughed very low. They were under the windows to the back of the regal house. Below lay a courtyard, frankly a parody of the courts at Ru Karismi. Two trees made of silver-wire had been roughly fashioned. Queen Tireh would walk here and the two infant princesses played ball. Above in the King Paramount's apartments the first family would currently be sleeping.

‘Somebody said a Magikoy had come to the city,' the second sentry muttered. ‘That is, apart from the two ladies we already have.'

‘I heard that rumour too. But he was old, they said. He must have died like our other mage gentleman.'

‘What's that noise?'

Gossip sloughed, each man turned towards the court a combat-machine, all senses alert.

From the unleavened night a slight filmy motion stole up to them.

Being careful to tilt a wall lamp downwards, the first sentry angled its beam on to the paving.

‘
It's a snake
—'

‘
Snakes
– scores of them—'

Both men snatched out their swords. This sound was masculine and positive, the sound and movement below feyly feral.

Long, slender, quivering, questing skeins wriggled and crept and slipped ever onward—

‘Are they chazes?'

‘Never. Too thin – and see, they have
spikes
– is it spikes – gods – gods – see, look, they're growing other snakes out of their own bodies all the time—'

Eyes wide with fear the men kept up their battle stance a cupful of moments more. Then the shaking light picked out the
other
snakes, which were now pouring in like spilled water over the nearest roof.

One sentry shouted, then the second. They must wake the house.

A rumple of other sounds now, and out of these the striking of flame and kindling of lamps indoors. Whole windows flowed up suddenly molten behind shutters of wood and glass. The hind face of the palace flung light across the courtyard, the fake trees, walls, accessory buildings which in their turn were also flaring up.

And so Bhorth's men were the first to see that it was not snakes which had cascaded in over the house and up from the ground, but creepers, black as oil with a sheen of emeraid, and here and there a red, red bud.

Bhorth had not been sleeping, nor was he occupied with his wife. He had been padding quietly up and down like the sentries, though his route lay indoors, through his study, along a gallery with a rough library in it, along corridors, down a stair and back into the study. He had taken up this practice about a year ago on odd nights when sleep failed him. He found it courted slumber better than poring over some unwanted book. He thought too of his former Rukarian estates where he could have prowled nightlong, unchallenged by any and unsettling none. But he had never
been
insomniac then, save through choice with a woman. All this too made him feel old. Oldness had slunk in on him in these years of disappointment, compromise and platitude at Kol Cataar. Before there had been a while when he thought the black witch who left her seed in him, and so prevented his death, had made him invulnerable and splendid for ever. But of course once the seed was expelled, Sallusdon conceived and borne, the sublime insulation leaked away. Bhorth had no designated purpose after this, or only that of the average man, to strive uselessly and reassure falsely, to get fat and sour and feeble. He had tried hard not to mind it. Much as he had seen others do. It was foolish to grow bitter at the inevitable. Yet his short span of believing he could outwit the common fate gave reality an extra vicious bite.

And then Sallusdon went away. He had not explained, or his explanation had been so abnormal as to be inexplicable. My son—

My son
.

Bhorth blamed the strange girl Azula. Her shaved patchwork hair and tawny skin. What was she? Did the young man desire her? Sallus had seemed sure Azula was his sibling, which made a romp unlawful. Had that been the cause?

Her fault anyway. Sullen and draggled, following Sallus about, some commoner's chick—

I am unfair. I can't know his going is due to her. And what are commoners? My subjects and people, of whom I am the guardian. Am I one more filthy Vuldir to judge them nothing, traduce and discount them? We are all men
.

The other thing lay under all this like a leaden chain, slowly weighting the rest, even the sorrow of Bhorth's missing son, down into a black hole beneath the palace.

A black hole that was a walled-up storeroom.

Bhorth had reached his study for the fifth time that night. He was not yet weary enough to go to bed. By the glim of the wax-furred candle he pawed at some papers on a table. They were written accounts of various failures and mishaps in the city. The paper was knobbly and badly made and the inks either too black or too watery.

Some vellum had been brought from Ru Karismi but had been eaten by rats in the chest.

There was a slight quirky movement of one of the lamps outside. Sentries were passing—

Then came shouting, a descant for two voices. ‘Help here! In the name of the kings!'

It was a ritual call, once used even in war.

Bhorth snatched up his swordbelt and buckled it on as he sprang from the room.

In an awful way he knew he was glad to be interrupted, as if boredom and depression were worse than active danger.

Not for a moment did he think this alarm anything less than significant.

Nor for a moment did he, most curiously, connect it to the underlying pull of the leaden chain.

On a terrace of the king's house most of the palace people had gathered. From windows others stretched to see.

But all over the city they crowded out. The streets were full of doors flung wide, lights lit, footsteps, cries.

By now only an hour stood between them and sunrise. The night sky was fraying. The stars ebbed, less as if dying than concealing themselves, the better to spy on everything else.

There was a change in the air. It was
warm
. Some had experienced thaws. These often portended lethal shifts in the general snow-crust, or a flood as undetected frozen waterways threw off restraint, slurrying up to make mess.

In this case the snow and ice had somehow
ebbed
away, like the stars, making themselves invisible, intangible.

Along the avenues of ice-brick, in plots among the houses
earth
had appeared.

The ground there was
black
. It was a compost of firm moist mud, usually about three yards lower than any previous surface. From it stubble seemed to have grown. Grass? Additional botanic things were rising. The formation of an ice oasis, so the Kol Cataarians labelled the change. Some hot spring, dormant for a century, must have been unlocked in the underlay of the city. Would the buildings be safe?

Perhaps they would. Nothing so far had cracked or collapsed. The packed snow around and under their bases had not given way, with the result each edifice now looked nine to eighteen feet higher than road or pavement or courtyard. In parts the surrounding areas went down even further. Porticoes, doorways and steps were stranded more than the height of a man above street level, leaving occupants marooned in or outside. Meanwhile floral sprays rose with sorcerous rapidity. It was just possible to watch the grass growing. Creepers, no longer mistaken for giant worms or hydra-bodied serpents, sprawled limberly up walls and over the plaques of stone paving that had stayed intact. Ancient trees, ribbed birches and the candle-branches of rhododendrons, had shed plates of ice. The blond or black cradles of their boughs thrust through naked as skeletons. Such a marvel had never been seen save in some dwarf form within a hothouse. Oases, as most knew, could begin and perish in months or days. What then would become of all this roused life, woken in the hours before dawn?

Drenched with sights and scents, wet wood, budding plants, blossoms, incipient gourds, soil, rot, minerals, the people of the city named for a risen phoenix did not know if they were enthused or afraid.

Wagons were being rumbled along the vine-seething roadways, and planks thudded against the elevated houses so those trapped inside could jump or climb down, and those outside clamber back in.

In paddocks lashdeer pranced over pads of grass.

As the sky grew ever more threadbare, going up rather as the city had seemed to, they began to see the enclosed fields beyond. What was lifting there out of long pockets in the ice? A smoking-tower, its fume-plume still glowing in the last darkness, had itself let go a sheath of ice. At its foot a round pool gleamed back the reflection.

The palace terrace by now was definitely a good thirty feet above the surrounding complex.

Bhorth peered over, himself stranded too high to jump, like so many others.

The snow-cladding of the foundations held here too. But nevertheless he was well aware the underpalace, basement labyrinth of stores and cubbies and one walled-up room, was now
above
ground. Even as he eyed it, barrels began to roll out of some gap.

He and his court watched them bumbling off along the avenue.

Everything will give way
, thought Bhorth, with a resigned anguish. He had stopped being able to reason, considered in absolutes, gave up.

He
had done this, the evil insane god Vashdran. Any moment the demonic creature would also erupt from confinement, perhaps bearing the chewed bones of the Magician Thryfe in his lion-wolf jaws.