The Firebird's Vengeance (29 page)

A faint path emerged from the floor of the thinning forest. The cat followed it lightly, padding steadily, pausing to clean its fur and then bounding forward to hurry on. Gradually, the evergreens gave way to maples, oaks, and ash, which in turn gave way to birches. The cat passed underneath the branches of one decrepit tree, and those limbs lifted themselves to allow it free passage. Ahead of the cat appeared a rickety fence that looked to have once been made of wood, but it had long since been propped up and mended with bleached bones. Two great, black mastiffs flanked the sagging gate, sitting with heads and ears erect, watching the path. Their gazes did not flicker as the cat leapt onto the gatepost and then jumped down into the rutted yard.

Beyond the gate waited the house Ishbushka, turning on its scarred and scaled legs, its great talons gouging the dirt beneath it with each movement. The cat stopped before the nightmare house and sat upright, its tail curled around its legs. The house ceased its restless turning and knelt. The cat disdained the worm-eaten stairs and splintered door. It leapt onto the sill of the open window and ducked inside.

Like the guardian fence, the interior of Ishbushka was framed in bone. Bones curved overhead and gleamed on all sides, holding up the roof and crumbling walls in place of timbers. Human skulls were stacked to make the fireplace and chimney. The bones and skulls of animals hung from the roof beams, left to dry as herbs or onions would have been in a more homely house. Beneath the bones waited a great loom made of grey and ancient ivory and strung with sinew. An old woman wrapped in a tattered black robe sat at the grisly loom, working away with a shuttle made of a jawbone. She did not look up as the cat sauntered over to the hearth.

“What did you see?” asked the witch. The treadles clicked and clacked as she worked, shuttling the jawbone back and forth and back again.

“I saw the Vixen’s favorite daughter take the Vixen’s favorite prey.” The cat sprawled in front of the fire, stretching its belly out to catch the warmth of the flames. “I do not think she knows what she has done.”

“No.” The witch sprawled her bony hands across the pattern she wove, touching it gently here and there. “She cannot bring herself to doubt her eyes, although she has been warned.”

“So.” The cat twitched its whiskers.

“So.” The Old Witch grinned, displaying all her iron teeth. “The Vixen began this game of daughters. We shall see how she likes this new player.”

The rabbit ran through the trees. It skimmed the ground between its great bounds, speeding along like flight or flame. All it truly knew was that its pursuers were no longer there, waiting for its exhaustion so they could bring it down. It was free.

Free, free!
The word beat in its mind like the heart that had once beat in its breast.

In the manner of things in that land, the rabbit shifted and changed, and it was no longer a beast, but a black-haired man, naked as a babe.

Valin Kalami huddled exhausted in the shallows of the thousand-named river that ran through the Land of Death and Spirit. Its one true name was Life. Life flowed in its brown waters, life and all the worlds there were, but he could not even manage to wet his skin with it. He must have died, somewhere, sometime. How strange not to know when he had died. But it must be so, because otherwise he could have walked the river and found his life again. If he had been alive still, he would not have heard the voices. Mumbling, whispering, whimpering, wailing, the thousands of voices of the Shifting Lands engulfed him. They were the voices of ghosts, powers, demons, memories, lost souls, the fae and the fearful. They were voices of the place itself that swaddled all the worlds there were, that would disgorge them as they were born and absorb them as they died.

He could not remember when he had begun to hear the voices. All he knew was that they had become his constant companions in his endless flight, and that they threatened, mocked, cajoled, and distracted as he ran. For all he knew, they even now led the Vixen and her sons back to him. Terror lanced through him at the thought of that terrible hunt, of the gleaming, joyful eyes and the yellow teeth that sank deep into his neck and tossed him high to break back, and let him be still only long enough for panic to grow greater than pain so he would try to run again with all the voices laughing around him. They would find him again, had already found him again, it mattered little. There was no single current of time for the dead as there was for the living. The Vixen had, would, did, find him and she renewed the chase, and there was no power that could protect him from her.

Kalami lifted his head. No power, perhaps, but one.

As a living man he would not have considered this, but he was a shade now and had only eternity surrounding him. At least this slavery — if slavery it became — would be his choice, and he had turned such slavery to his advantage before.

Steeling his nerve, Kalami focused all his will on a single name and as he had so many times before, he began to run.

Chapter Twelve

The road out of T’ien was hot, dusty, and crowded. People overflowed the track, jostling each other with elbows and handcarts. Some cried as they went, others hurried by in stunned silence, unable to believe that behind them the Heart of the World was being burned hollow.

Mae Shan led Chen and Kyun off the road and into the high green hills as soon as she could. She carried Tsan Nu against her chest. Despite the noise and the motion, the girl did not wake, or even stir. They were not by any means the only ones who fled across the countryside, but the open ground was nothing like as crowded as the road they left behind.

At sunset, Mae Shan called a halt. She laid Tsan Nu on the cool grass under a linden tree. Chen and Kyun collapsed unceremoniously beside them, but Mae Shan let that pass. The touch of the grass seemed to revive Tsan Nu somewhat and her eyes fluttered open. Mae Shan uncapped one of the water bottles and dribbled some into the child’s mouth. She drank it neatly enough, and Mae Shan gave her some more, glancing up to signal the trainees that they could take their share as well. They did not hesitate, but uncorked one of the bottles and drank greedily.

Tsan Nu focused her eyes briefly on Mae Shan. Her mouth moved as if to smile or speak, but she drifted back into sleep before she could do either. However, Mae Shan was sure she saw recognition in Tsan Nu’s brief glance, and was reassured.

Under Mae Shan’s direction, Kyun lit a small fire. She chose not to notice how his hands shook as he started the small blaze. Her own were not as steady as they should have been for this most mundane of tasks. Chen cooked a measure of rice porridge in the pot he had had the foresight to bring. They ate in silence with Mae Shan spooning some of the porridge into Tsan Nu. The child swallowed, but did not wake.

Darkness settled close around them, allowing them to see other small campfires like distant candles dotting the hillsides. The sound of motion, voices, creaking axles, and feet on hard dirt drifted continuously up from the road, but the world still seemed too quiet, and the scent of burning still tainted the wind.

Mae Shan set the watches, and took the first one herself. The night passed slowly, divided into times of waking and times of sleeping with one arm draped across Tsan Nu, but the sounds of motion and the scent of burning remained constant.

In the morning they ate the remaining porridge cold and drank sparingly of their water. Tsan Nu still did not wake, but her breathing had slowed and deepened, and her color was better. Mae Shan shared out her burdens, except for her bow and arrows, to the trainees and slung Tsan Nu into her arms.

Then they walked on.

The hills around Tien were heavily terraced for the growing of rice and fruit. Mae Shan tried to make sure their passage disturbed as little as possible and forbid Chen and Kyun from raiding the orchards they passed, even when it was clear that the house had been thrown open and the occupants fled. It was also clear from the scuffs and the gouges in the paddies and the dirt, and the cores and seeds on the ground, that others had not been so scrupulous. Chen’s face went hard, but he obeyed. Quiet warning stirred in the back of Mae Shan’s mind, and as she led them on that day, she often glanced back, and more often than not she saw the two trainees whispering to each other. The warning grew stronger.

They spent their second night in such an abandoned house, because the woods were growing more crowded with people on the move and Mae Shan did not wish to risk another night with nothing at their backs. Tsan Nu was able to sit up then and take a little water and some dried fish with her rice porridge, although she nodded off again with her bowl halfway to her mouth.

On the third day Tsan Nu was able to walk a short distance on her own. They settled in another farmhouse, this one a little less ransacked than the first. Chen found a full cellar with salt fish and bread still good. By now their own supplies were all but gone, so she permitted him to take enough for another three days. In the empty bedroom, she opened her private purse and tucked one of her few coins under the mattress where hopefully the owners of the house would find it upon their return. Not to do so would be theft and a direct breaking of her oaths as a soldier of the Heart. It was by small derelictions that the greater came into being, said her trainer, and she believed it. She had to. It was all she had at the moment.

But it did raise the question of what to do with the trainees. Mae Shan stared at the faint coals they’d carefully banked in the cottage hearth. They were growing discontent with her insistence on maintaining discipline. The last thing she needed at this time was a confrontation with the boys, a confrontation she was sure to lose, because they were realizing they had few reasons left to obey her.

She picked herself up and stood in the scarred and splintered threshold of the farmhouse door. In the red dawn, she took in the lay of the land. Then she sat down and counted four of the six remaining coins out of her purse.

Coins in hand, she stepped around Tsan Nu, and shook the trainees awake where they slept in the workroom by the back door. As they blinked their eyes open, she gestured to them to keep silent. Their faces were sullen and sleepy as she led them outside. The wind was freshening, but there was scarcely any ash in it this morning, and Mae Shan felt the relief of just being able to breathe.

She pointed between two terraced hills to the northwest. The mountains rose blue and misty in the distance behind them.

“Over those hills is the town of Nhi Tao. It’s no more than half a day’s good march. The captain of the city guard there is named Kein. Give him my name and tell him I sent you to shore up his garrison.” Kein would understand she truly sent the boys to him for safekeeping. He had always understood what she truly meant. For a moment, Mae Shan imagined collapsing into his arms and being cradled like a child while she wept for all she had seen. Perhaps one day.

She held out two coins each to Chen and Kyun. “This is all I have to give you, apart from my thanks for your aid to my mistress.”

The trainees stared at one another, and then slowly accepted the coins.

“Are you certain, Lieutenant?” said Chen, tucking his meager pay into his sleeve. “We are ready to accompany you the rest of your way.”

Mae Shan would have found that statement more convincing if he had not taken the coins first, but still, it was a show of courage.

“My mistress’s way takes us to the barbarian lands, and I do not know how long we may be gone. Hung-Tse will need all her sons, and most especially her soldiers in the coming days. I cannot take you away from her.” She gave them a brief smile that she did not feel. “Get your gear and go. Remember, the man you want is Kein.”

Chen looked at Kyun, who nodded. The boys snapped to attention, folded their hands in front of them in formal salute, and bowed crisply to her. She bowed in return and they went back inside to collect their things. Mae Shan made a circuit of the house, assuring herself that no one still on the road was coming too close to “their” house, and that no one was watching what was happening here.

She went back in the front door and sat beside sleeping Tsan Nu with her back toward the hearth and her face toward the door. She twisted her sigil ring on her finger and tried hard not to feel she had just cut her last tie to the Heart of the World.

I will return. I will, and I will find my family and I will help rebuild, and Wei Lin will have a spirit tablet in the temple of the Goddess of Mercy and a monk to say all the proper prayers
.

She repeated that thought to herself until she found the strength to believe it.

When Tsan Nu woke, she was well enough to be unhappy. She hunched in front of the fire, staring hungrily at the porridge Mae Shan cooked with some of the salt fish from the cellar.

“How much farther, Mae Shan?”

Mae Shan considered. “A day’s walk, maybe two.” They had to bypass Nhi Tao and head downhill to the river.

“Couldn’t someone give us a ride in a cart?”

“Not over these hills, mistress.”

“We need my father. He’d find a way to take us there in a heartbeat.”

“I have no doubt, mistress. Unfortunately, we cannot bring him by wishing …” But before Mae Shan finished the sentence, she straightened up, remembering who she was talking to. “Can you, mistress?”

“He gave me a spell,” said Tsan Nu. “He said that I was to use it if things went badly for me in the Heart of the World.”

And they were not going badly enough before this?
Mae Shan wondered incredulously at the logic of the child. She would not think to call her father while she was escaping from a burning city, but would to escape a pair of sore feet?

Tsan Nu’s father was a powerful sorcerer. How quickly could he cross the Silent Lands to come to her? To take her safe away to the northlands and let Mae Shan look after herself? She would be released from her oath then, having fulfilled her assigned duty. She could make her way across country, find her parents and her siblings and help them through what was to come.