Firesoul Page 13

  "See how you like it," Jiri said as she pulled herself up and grabbed the slimy machete handle, looking around. The biloko were breaking, the ones that could running into the trees or the tall grass. The ones still caught in vines or leaves were thrashing desperately, trying to escape. There was no sign of the branded biloko.

  Jiri looked at the giant frog beside her, saw her muddy face reflected in its great, hungry eyes. "My thanks," she said. "Now eat while you can."

  The frog blinked at her, then turned and leapt into the air, catching a tangled biloko in its mouth. It leapt again and caught another, landed, swallowed loudly, and leapt. And in mid-leap faded, the vibrant green of its skin blending in with the leaves, vanishing, gone.

  "Aww," Morvius said, wiping his spear blade clean with a wide leaf. "I could have watched that all day."

  Chapter Ten

  Return to the Pyre

  I take your point, girl, about the armor. I don't wear it when I don't have to." Morvius had his armor off now and sat clad only in his sweaty smallclothes on the edge of the ruined village of Pakala. He was working at the steel, fixing one of the overlapping scales that had been driven almost off by a biloko spear. "But I'd like to think my point about usually not having time to put it on when you need it has been made." He pointed to where the spear had dug into Jiri's leg.

  That spot was unmarked now, but Jiri could feel the ghost of the pain that had been there. Yes, it would have been better to have had something between her skin and that fire-hardened point. But. "When I fell in the water it might not have helped so much."

  "Shallow water," Morvius said. He finished his repair, and without even looking at her cut off her reply. "And yes, the water's not always shallow. I said I saw your point. Anyway." He set down his armor and looked up at her. "You should be doing push-ups."

  "Push-ups?" Jiri finally looked over at him. She had been watching the survivors of Pakala, the ones who had fled the raid last night and hidden in the trees. When they had come back, these people were wandering the town, dumb with grief and shock. Jiri and Linaria had talked to them, told them that the biloko were gone, that many of them had been killed, that they would probably not return.

  Probably.

  The villagers' raw grief tore at the thin scab of anger and purpose that lay over Jiri's spirit, separating her from despair. Talking about stupid things with Morvius eased her, strangely. His ridiculousness was distracting.

  "Push-ups." Morvius dropped face-first to the ground, then pushed himself up, using only his arms. He did a few, big muscles shifting in his arms and broad shoulders, rippling under the surprising amount of hair that grew on his chest and belly.

  "Why would I do those?"

  Morvius stood up, his skin marked with the mud his sweat had made from the dirt. "When I was a child, training, if I dropped my spear, my grandfather would make me do a thousand of those. Then we would spar, and he would always knock my spear from my hands again. Then he'd make me do more push-ups, until I couldn't move. Then he'd piss on me. Oh, Gramps. Uglier than a dwarven succubus, and twice as mean."

  "Gods, you're not telling her stories about your family, are you? Hasn't she been through enough?" Linaria walked over to them, Sera trailing behind. The paladin had stripped out of her armor and the undercoat beneath and wore just a thin cotton shirt and the tight pants that the northerners called hose. Unlike her armor, these clothes didn't shed dirt, and the white of them was filthy.

  When they had gotten back to the village, the paladin had found a digging stick and made a grave for the burned bodies she had found. While she worked, Jiri had gone back for the body of the woman they had found in the empty tree and brought it back, wrapped in cloth. Sera had nodded and dug the grave wider.

  Jiri had watched her, wondering what went on behind those dark eyes.

  "The burial's done, and the shaman from the village down the trail has gathered all the survivors up. She says she'll take them there, give them shelter."

  Linaria watched Morvius pull on the worn leather of his pants as she spoke, but Jiri knew those words were meant for her. The white-haired woman hadn't questioned her when Jiri had said that she didn't want to be there when that other shaman spoke.

  "So what do we do now?" Linaria said.

  "Back to Kibwe, right?" Morvius jerked the sweat-stained cotton of his shirt over his head. "By Asmodeus's balls, I could use a drink."

  "No." Sera had stepped behind the rough log walls of a goat pen, and Jiri could see her arms raising and lowering as the paladin changed her underclothes. When she stepped back out, she was pulling her heavy undercoat into place, the strange cords and hooks that held her armor to it rattling against each other. "If we start now, we should reach the girl's old village only a little after sundown."

  "What?" Morvius had his arms in his scale armor, ready to pull it over his head, but he stopped to stare at the short-haired woman. "Why by all the good-looking gods would we go back there?"

  "Because we haven't found what I hunt, spearman. Which is what I'm paying you to do." Sera began to pull the metal plates of her armor into place. "So we'll go back to where we saw it last and we see if we can find it again. It, or its track, or some other clue as to where this fire demon might have gone to ground."

  Some other clue.

  There had been no sign of the branded biloko after the fight. It had vanished into the jungle with the others, taking its mysteries with it. The symbols branded in its skin, the same kind of symbols Jiri had seen carved into Kibwe's great walls and the Mango Woman's base. The words the red-skinned creature had spoken, words of Jiri's language, if strangely accented.

  The thing it had held.

  That thing.

  A carving, Jiri thought. Dark wood and something that had glittered like metal. She had barely seen it. But something about it...

  It was like the thing Patima stole from the Pyre.

  It was a feeling, something that twisted in Jiri's guts. There was nothing certain about it, but it wouldn't leave her. That biloko had been carrying something like what Patima had stolen. Its skin had been branded with the marks that were sacred to the ancients who had built the Pyre long ago. And the things it had said to Jiri...

  His fire flows in us both.

  Jiri didn't know how yet, but that biloko was caught up in this too. Whatever Patima had released from the Pyre, its influence was spreading.

  "Sera's right," Jiri said. "We have to go back to the Pyre." To the place where the ancients had tried to bury their nightmares, the place where Oza had died. "We need answers. We need to know what this thing is, what it wants, and what we need to do to stop it."

  "Answers." Linaria picked up her pack, pulled the long braid of her hair out of the way and settled it into place. "That biloko with the magic. Did it give you any, when it spoke to you?"

  Jiri looked at Linaria, wondering how much of the creature's speech she had understood. "No. Only more questions."

  The half-elf stared at her, her strange blue eyes unreadable. "Well," she said. "As long as we're taking Sera's coin, we go where she tells us."

  "And how long are we selling our pretty little asses to Mistress Holy Terror?" Morvius settled his armor on with a jingling clank.

  "Until she runs out of coin, this stops being interesting, or we burn," Linaria said. "Whichever comes first."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Exhaustion was a gift sometimes.

  When they had stumbled again into the clearing that had once held Thirty Trees, Jiri's grief had come roaring back. She had stared at the empty dirt, the last mango tree, the Mango Woman, and felt the tears coming, silent but unstoppable. Linaria had seen them too, and had helped Jiri wordlessly into her blankets.

  There, thank all the spirits, sleep had gripped Jiri tighter than grief.

  Blinking awake, the grief wasn't gone. But Jiri's eyes were dry, and she had cast aside the thin cotton of her blanket, her skin blazing with heat.

  Her dreams had started with memories of Th
irty Trees, so aching, but they had ended with demons, biloko, and flames, and her anger burned in her.

  Rage was a gift, too, sometimes.

  She sat up. Linaria was sitting in the shade of the scorched mango tree, rebraiding her hair while she kept watch. Sera was up, too, but she knelt silent in her armor, head bowed before her sword, praying to her goddess. Morvius still slept, wrapped snoring in his silk.

  "Good morning," Linaria said, and it sounded like a question.

  "Good enough," Jiri answered, rising to her feet. Linaria watched her, her hair shining in the flecks of sun that shone through the mango leaves.

  "Sera is hunting," Jiri said, keeping her words soft, not wanting to wake the man or break the paladin's meditations. "She wants that thing's hide, for her goddess. Morvius is here because she's paying him to be—and Kalun, I suppose—and because he follows you. But why are you here?"

  "I'm getting paid, twice, like Morvius." Linaria smiled, just a little. "Three times, really, since I get to watch him be annoyed. And this thing, whatever it is, seems to deserve having its hide nailed to someone's wall. Don't those reasons suffice for me?"

  "They might," Jiri said. "But it doesn't explain why you're trying to be my friend."

  "And that is such a rare thing, it surprises you."

  Jiri shifted uncomfortably. "I—" Her voice faltered. Oza hadn't been a friend. He had been her teacher—her father, really—but that was different. Hadzi had been her lover, but had he been her friend? She'd thought so, before hearing his schemes. Boro? Maybe. Had anyone else in Thirty Trees ever been her friend, after fire had become so close to her?

  They respected me. They needed my magic. But they feared me.

  "We're different, in that way," Linaria said. "I used to have friends, lots of them. But then I lost them." She tied off her braid and dropped it behind her shoulder, her movements crisp like her words. "I lost my friends, my home, my family. Everything, all in one day. Like you."

  "Were they killed?" Jiri asked.

  Linaria looked away from her, the strange blue of her eyes cloudy. "No. They betrayed me. All of them, all at once, and suddenly I was alone, and everything I had once had was gone. I would have been lost, probably would have died. But someone helped me. Saved me."

  "Morvius?" Jiri looked at the snoring man.

  Linaria snorted, and her eyes swung back, sharp again. "No. It was someone else. Someone I can't repay, except by trying to help someone else, someone who lost all their world all at once, the way she helped me."

  Now it was Jiri's turn to look away, to stare at the jungle around them with a tight throat and burning hands. I have no interest in being someone's charity. But gods and crocodiles, I need her help.

  I think I'm going to need every bit of help I can get.

  They were going back to the Pyre today. Turning away from Linaria and the others, Jiri walked toward the center of the burn, somewhere she could be alone, to speak to the spirits.

  At least she was used to asking them for help.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "I'll come out when this bloody cloud of itching death goes away."

  Jiri looked up from the slightly underripe mango she was peeling. Morvius still lay on the ground, wrapped in his silk covering, with Linaria standing over him.

  "It's just a few mosquitoes," the half-elf said, waving her hand at the cloud of insects. "They're not even biting."

  "You. Between that sickly sweet elven blood mixed in your veins and that ice in your skin, they never bite you. Me, with my delicious, lusty warm-bloodedness, they bite."

  "You're such a baby, you know that?" Linaria sighed.

  "Baby?" Morvius muttered. He rolled in his blanket, cursing as he bumped over roots until he was in the sun. Then he unwrapped himself, stood and shook his cloth through the air, trying to scatter the cloud of bugs that had followed him.

  Linaria snorted with laughter, then slapped at her arm. "They do bite me sometimes," she said.

  Jiri put down her mango and dug through her bag, pulling out a little clay pot, tightly stoppered. "Fever grass oil," she said, working out the stopper. She poured a little of the pungent stuff into her palm.

  "We bought some of that in the market once," Linaria said. "It only worked a little."

  "Did you take it to a shaman?"

  The white-haired woman shook her head.

  "Hmm." How long have they been here, and they don't know even that? Jiri bent her head over her palm, whispering to the spirits, and wove their little blessing into the oil. She dabbed a little on her wrists, ankles, and neck, then held out her palm to the half-elf.

  Linaria watched the cloud of bugs that had been gathering around Jiri drift away and smeared some of the oil on her fingers, applying it the same way Jiri had. "How long does this last?

  "All day, usually. Do you want to give some to Morvius?"

  Linaria looked over at him. "I don't know. I kind of like watching him dance around in his smallclothes. He has such a nice back."

  "Is that why you took him for a lover?"

  Linaria shook her head, reaching out and swiping her fingers through the oil on Jiri's palm. "No. It's because he's the only person I've met who's never lied to me." She smiled sadly at Jiri, then turned away. "Mor. Come here. Our shaman has found a way to keep you from smelling so bad."

  Jiri stood, hand still held out. I didn't lie to her. I just didn't tell her everything. Because she didn't want Sera to hear what that biloko had said. No. I didn't want anyone to hear. I'm not tainted. In Jiri's hand, the oil began to steam a little, hot in her palm. Clenching her teeth, Jiri reined in her anger and turned, heading toward where Sera was getting into her armor. If she wanted to prove that, to believe it, she needed to keep her control, and to keep in mind what she was.

  Shaman. Healer and protector.

  "Sera," she said. "You might want some of this."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  When they went beyond the Mango Woman, Jiri took the lead.

  She walked slow and silent, even though the leather of her armor made her feel awkward. Watching. Listening. Noting all the differences.

  A beetle buzzed past her, landed on one of the stunted trees and closed its iridescent armor over its wings. A tangled line of butterflies drifted past, and in a sunbeam a swarm of gnats danced. Somewhere above, birds flapped and chattered through the branches of the trees that were shedding their crumpled, dark leaves and sprouting better ones. Below their branches, the mud of the ground no longer steamed, and Jiri could see green shoots sprouting. The shallow pools around them were turning green, too, the dark water filling with algae.

  Just a few days ago, that thing had flown free from the Pyre, and already the jungle was pouring into the land it had claimed.

  I should feel happy.

  This was the triumph of the jungle, green and beautiful, over destruction and death. It filled this terrible place with life, but Jiri could only think about what it meant. That thing was gone from the Pyre, free, and the destruction it spread would no longer be limited to just this small, hidden corner of the jungle. It could spread, wider and wider, until...

  Until someone finally stopped it.

  Jiri gripped her spear tighter and kept moving forward until she could see the top of the Pyre rising over the tortured trees that surrounded them.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "What is that?"

  Morvius breathed the words, staring at the pool that surrounded the Pyre's charred stone tower.

  The black mirror of the water had clouded since they were last here. Something drifted on the surface like a rough, dark carpet. It wasn't foam, like Jiri had seen collect in the still pools beneath rapids. It was too low and dark for that. It looked something like a mat of waterweeds, but it was too dark for that, too, and nothing like that could have grown here in just a few days. Remembering the stench of the demon, and the slime that had risen from its body after it had fallen, she would be surprised if anything good grew here for a long time.

&n
bsp; "I don't know," Jiri said.

  "I can hit it with some ice. See what it does."

  "Save that, Linaria," Sera whispered. "We don't want to attract attention too soon if we don't have to."

  This from the person in the shiny armor who isn't bothering to hide behind a tree. Jiri shook her head, but she reached out to pick up a chunk of broken wood that lay beside the tree she crouched behind. Looking at the paladin, she held it up.

  The woman settled her shield and nodded. Morvius lifted Scritch before him and Linaria flexed her fingers, staring intently at the stain that spread across the water. Taking a breath, Jiri stepped out and tossed the branch into the water.

  The wood hit right before the mass. It splashed the water up and sent ripples across the black mirror. Those ripples stirred the carpet, and the mass began to move. It bristled as thousands of legs shifted. It went hazy, as thousands of clear wings spread. Then it roared.

  Not like the roar of a beast challenged. This was a high, grating whine of wings beating, pulling a thousand bodies up into the air, gray and red and black, where they churned like a thunderhead brought to earth.

  "Bloodhaze mosquitoes," Jiri said. They could be nothing else, but these were the size of small birds.

  "I don't suppose your oil will drive these things off?" Morvius asked.

  "I wouldn't count on it," Jiri said, just as the swarm shattered, roaring toward them. "Linaria?" Jiri shouted and raised her hands.

  Fire burst from them, a swath of flames that cut through the swarm, sending smoking corpses crunching down, but the little gap her flames made filled in an instant.

  "Too close for the good stuff," Linaria shouted over the roar. Her hands moved, and a white fan burst from them. Giant insects shattered from the cold of it, but not nearly enough, and then the cloud was on them.

  Jiri felt clawed legs scrabbling over the skin of her neck and hands and face, wings tangling in her braids, the sharp sting of a bite, then another, and another. She gritted her teeth, intensely aware that she must not open her mouth, and made herself concentrate on reaching out to the spirits. She could feel the magic flow, feel the call go out, but she could barely see anything but the jostling, hideous bodies that surrounded her. Morvius was a grunting shadow, swinging his spear in cutting arcs, the weapon little better than a blanket. The bright steel of Sera's shield flashed through the gaps between the bugs when she swung it, smashing insects back while her other hand pulled away the ones that were wriggling against her neck, trying to shove their way under her armor. Linaria was snapping out an incantation, and Jiri could see her weaving her hands through the cloud of swollen insects surrounding her. Then the sorcerer became much more visible. Flames whirled around her, blue and white, and the swollen insects that had been trying to land on her to feed dodged away. The ones that were too slow fell to the ground and shattered.