Firesoul Read online

  She was in a city.

  A city like Kibwe, but not. In places she could see the walls, high and dark against the sky, but mostly they were cut off by the buildings that stood around her. Buildings of hard granite and soft limestone, buildings solid but graceful, their walls crowded with carvings. Beautiful stone inlays made those walls glow with color beneath the too-bright stars, gorgeous as butterfly wings.

  Jiri turned slowly, staring at them all. She stood in a vast open space, a great circle of smooth stone bounded by those buildings. On its edges, high pillars rose, each one topped by a statue. Men and women carved in stone, their features mixed with those of the animals that filled the jungle beyond the city's walls. Men with leopard jaws and women with bat wings, all holding weapons and shields, all looking in. At Jiri, and at the round building that rose beside her in the center of the circle, the city's heart. It was something like the council hall of Kibwe, but instead of carved wood the pillars were malachite and lapis lazuli. They supported a dome of onyx, black stone threaded with thick veins of shimmering white. The floor beneath that dome was granite, so polished that it looked like water.

  "What is this place?" Jiri said, and her soft words echoed in the silence.

  That echo grew. Multiplied. Bounced from wall to wall and filled the air, first with whispers, then words, then laughter, then shouts. It grew into thousands of voices, all talking and clamoring around her, and the city came alive.

  There were lanterns, strung between the pillars and dangling from the tents that now filled the circle, tents of bright silk and painted canvas, gaudy in the oil and mage light. People crowded the tents and the aisles between them, laughing and talking and arguing and dancing. They looked like the people of Kibwe, just more richly dressed, with more gold and copper in their ears and around their wrists and necks.

  "This is the Yeniki, dear one. The festival circle of Lozo, the stone flower of Garund. Have you never seen it?"

  Jiri heard the words and understood them, even though they were strangely accented. Turning, she found a man behind her, leaning against the carved mahogany post of a tent. He smiled, and by that smile Jiri knew him.

  That smile does make him look like Hadzi.

  The man from the carving stepped forward and touched his hand to his lips. He seemed younger than the face carved in ebony—Jiri's age, and alive. Very much alive and real, and Jiri tried to remember the city as she had seen it just moments before, empty and silent.

  It's all a vision, the memory of a man long dead. I must remember that, and not get lost in it.

  "I am Shani, and this is my city. Do you want to see it?" His smile faded a little and his face shifted, aged decades in minutes. "It feels like a long time since I've been able to show it to anyone."

  "It has been," Jiri said. How long ago had the Pyre been raised? How long had those kindi been there, hidden in the dark and the dust while the rocks grew warm around them? "A very long time."

  "Well." Shani's eyes seemed haunted for a moment, worried, and the city around Jiri flickered, becoming something else, something dark and frightening. Then the light was back, and Shani was young and smiling again. "It's good you've come, then. I have so many things to show you."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Shani led her around the circle, through tents giant and small. There were markets, with jewelry and clothes and books bound in ivory and darkwood. There were places where you could lie on thick mats and listen to music, and other places where you could dance. There were storytellers, telling tales with masked figures or clever dolls that danced on sticks and strings or sometimes all by themselves. There were magicians weaving illusions in the air, menageries of trained animals, brothels and poets and wrestlers and philosophers. Jiri and her guide wound past them all, and Shani knew everyone. They all waved and smiled, offered him hands to grasp and lips to kiss, palm wine and little glasses of aga. He took all that was offered, and encouraged Jiri to do the same.

  She trailed him, uncomfortable when any attention was turned on her, and set the drinks given to her aside untouched. It felt so real, so true, like walking through the market in Kibwe, but Jiri found the things that marked it as unreal. There was the temperature—perfectly comfortable, not hot, not cold. There were the smells—so many smells, of food and perfumed oil and spice and flowers, but no hint of sweat, no musky animal smells, no faint reek of excrement, animal and human, that was ever-present in Kibwe. This was an idealized memory of a place, a beautiful lie woven out of truth. Eventually she tired of it, and steered Shani to the center where the great pavilion stood. A low stone bench ran around its edge, and they sat on it in the relative quiet.

  "There's more," Shani said. He set a basket of dates between them, two delicate porcelain cups and a small jug of palm wine. He had pulled them from the air, apparently, but when Jiri took a date it tasted sweet in her mouth. "So much more."

  "I believe you," Jiri said. His face was young again, like it had been for most of their walk, quick to smile and flirt. A handsome face, but she wanted to see him old again. He was more serious when he was old.

  "But what is this place?" she asked.

  "The Yeniki. The heart of Lozo. Like I told you." He splashed the wine into the cups. "When the great festivals come—the birth date of the queen, the turning of the year, or the Orchid Dance—then the tents are cleared and all this space is dedicated to them. But most times, it is like this, wild and beautiful." He took a long drink from his cup, then cocked a sly eyebrow at her. "I could show you the Orchid Dance if you want. All the young couples dress in petals and feathers and bells, and they dance until they fall. Usually on top of each other."

  "No thank you," Jiri said, and she felt an almost smile touch her lips just as a stab of pain went through her heart. He looks like Hadzi, and he acts like him, too.

  "What I meant," she said quickly, before the clouds of grief that she felt inside could gather into a rain of tears, "is what is this whole place, this kindi, supposed to be?"

  "This kindi," he said, slowly.

  Jiri got her wish then, and almost wished she hadn't. Shani's face shifted in front of her, aging in an instant. His dark hair threaded with gray and lines grew around his mouth and eyes. Scars came with those lines, a long thin mark over his right eye, and a twisting, furrowed path along the side of his neck, close to the blood vessels whose severing would have cost him his life.

  "They did a good job on the likeness. They paid me well. Though I wish they had made me look younger. When I was in my prime." He set down his cup. "Shani the Strong. Shani the Slayer. Oh, the names I accumulated. I loved them all. Tell me, did you hear those stories? Is that why you came to visit me?"

  "I'm sorry. No."

  "No?" Shani frowned, aging a little more. "I would have thought..." He looked down at his hands, and Jiri could see the scars on them, too, and she thought of Kalun's hands with all his old battle wounds. Then Shani looked up at her, years sliding away from his face. "I can tell them to you. Do want to hear about the time I defeated Mother Shade and her great slugs? Or the days I spent in the belly of the great western crocodile?"

  "Shani," Jiri said. "I do want a story. About a spirit of fire, a thing that burns and destroys. Did you ever hear about anything like that?"

  "All-in-Ashes." Shani said the words all at once. Not a statement, but a name, and when he spoke it, the little bit of youth that his face had regained fell away. "So you want to know about the war."

  "The war?" Jiri said gently, trying to lead him on.

  "I don't..." Shani looked away, and the city went quiet around them. The circle stood suddenly empty, all the tents and people gone, the lanterns and laughter and the smells of spice and perfume swallowed by the night. Jiri sat in an empty city with Shani, and she was suddenly acutely aware that this city of Lozo was long gone, and that Shani was surely long dead.

  "I don't like talking about the war." The city flickered around them for an instant. Jiri caught something—some great light, the sound
of drums, the smell of smoke and blood. Then the city was back like it was, beautiful and empty. But the stars overhead had dimmed.

  "We were expanding, making a new empire on the ruins of the old," Shani said. "We didn't have the flying cities of the Shory, but we could shape stone and wood better than anyone, making carvings so perfect that they could trap a piece of a soul inside them. We were getting strong. This." He raised his hand, gesturing at the city. "Lozo, a living jewel, constantly changing and growing, was our pride. We were making others, too, carving other jewels in the jungle, raising walls and building roads, making trade with all the nations far around. We grew fast and strong. But not fast enough. Not strong enough. We caught the attention of our enemy, and he came for us."

  "This spirit. This All-in-Ashes?"

  "No." Shani stood. His eyes were red with anger and tears held barely in check. "You want this story, then listen. They came for us from Ocota, the great lake to the north. Bands of charau-ka, raiding our villages, burning our fields, taking our people. Like they've always done, and we fought back, like we've always done. I fought back." There was a spear in Shani's hand—not there, and then there—a tall weapon with a blackwood shaft and a blade of steel that shimmered like water. "I killed many, drove more away, but they kept coming back. Nothing we did kept them from returning."

  The old warrior stared up at the sky, where the stars were half-hidden by dark, curling clouds. "There was something driving them at us. Something they feared more than us. So they kept coming, attacking here, there, bleeding us, terrifying our people. The new cities we were starting were abandoned, their stone walls left empty. Everyone fled back to here, back to Lozo. We rounded ourselves up, ran like goats into the slaughterhouse, and the Gorilla King laughed on his throne."

  "Usaro," Jiri said.

  "So you know that name." Shani looked at her, his eyes angry, tired, despairing. "You don't know mine. You don't know Lozo. But Usaro, the city of demons and apes, that festering abomination—that you know." Overhead, darkness swallowed the stars, a flowing, twisting curtain of black. The smell of smoke was back, heavy in the air. Somewhere far away, a drum began to beat, a deep steady thud, like a fist into flesh. "They won, didn't they?"

  "I don't know," Jiri said, and she didn't but she did. In all his stories, Oza had never spoken of Lozo. Only of cities that had risen briefly, then fallen, their towers pulled down by the jungle and the things that lived there.

  "You know!" Shani shouted at her, his eyes blazing, tears coursing down his cheeks. The air filled with the sound of drums, crashing and booming, like thunder that would never stop, but it didn't drown out the screams. The screams of men and women, terrified, agonized, horrified. "You know them, but you don't know us." He spun away, staring out at the dark, distant walls.

  "We couldn't fight them in the jungle, so we pulled back here. We thought we would hold them, but they poured like ants out of the trees, a flood of demon-ridden apes. We would have broken that first night, but our mages woke the city, brought the statues to life to fight for us. Still, we almost fell. My son—" Shani cut off, his whole body trembling. Beyond him, the stone pillars that ringed the circle stood empty, all the statues gone. In the distance, the sound of drums and screams mixed with the clang of steel on steel, of steel on stone, and the bellowing roars of demon-worshiping apes.

  "My son died." Shani's cheeks were wet, his eyes red, but he cried no longer. "Not far from me. One of those great four-armed apes caught him and tore his arm off, then threw his body off the wall. I killed it for that. I put my spear through its heart, killed it and killed all the others who tried to gain the wall behind it. I am old, but I am Shani. The slayer. I killed so many, and when the dawn came they vanished into the trees. But I never saw my son again."

  Jiri had nothing to say. The smell of smoke wrapped around her, and the sound of battle faded, like a storm rolling away. But not gone.

  "They were coming back." Shani leaned on his spear, his voice thick with despair. "My daughter had survived the night. She stood on the wall with me, covered in blood, but I knew that when they came again I would see her die, like my son. I couldn't let that happen. I had to save her. My daughter. My wife. My city. My people. I was Shani the Strong.

  "I had to save them all."

  "How?" Jiri's question was a whisper. She didn't want to speak, but this, she sensed, was the center of the story she needed.

  "All-in-Ashes," Shani said, and over them the smoke began to glow. Red and gold, beautiful and terrible.

  "It had always been here. Chained in a cavern deep beneath the city. A spirit of fire, not a demon, not an elemental, but something else, something old, something that existed only to destroy." Shani stared up at the glowing sky, the glowing, twisting clouds of smoke. "Some greater spirit had bound it long ago. But when we made Lozo, we dug deep for our stone and we found it. Found it, and sealed it back up. But we remembered. And when Usaro came, the mages— Well. Maybe they went mad. Like me."

  "What did they do?" Jiri breathed.

  "What?" Shani threw back his head and laughed, a wild laugh tangled with madness. "I don't know. I forced them to make this kindi before I gave myself to them. I wanted to leave something of me behind, my memory of this place in its days of glory. My memory of myself in my days of glory." Shani shifted, becoming young, old, scarred, handsome, smiling, furious, despairing. "I can't tell you what they did after that, in the stink of the blood and the smoke of our broken city. I can just tell you what they planned."

  His face settled—old, scarred, and angry—and his eyes flashed with the red light of the hell that blazed in the sky overhead.

  "Revenge."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Other Coins

  Revenge.

  The word rolled over Jiri like crashing drums, and the burning sky fell, covering the city and swallowing Shani. It wrapped around Jiri, fire and smoke, burning her hair, her clothes, her skin, tearing her apart until there was nothing left but ash, ash in the wind, scattering—

  Then cold hit her like scalding water, a chill that clung and burned, and Jiri felt her whole body clench.

  I can't breathe, can't breathe, can't...

  The words ran through her head, but she held onto them. Breathe. She needed to breathe, because she had a mouth, a body.

  I'm not ash. I'm alive. I just have to breathe!

  With one last, twisting bolt of pain her body unclenched and Jiri took a gasping breath, pulling air deep into her. There was light around her, she realized, bright sunlight spilling in through a narrow window, and she was lying on the floor, sprawled across a thin sleeping mat, and there were people.

  Morvius stood above her, holding a dripping hide bucket. Flanking him were Kalun and Linaria. Behind them, in the doorway of the tiny sleeping room, Sera stood watching. Behind her, Jiri caught a flash of something. Fara's head, popping into view when the girl jumped, trying to see into the room.

  "What's going on?" Jiri asked. She sat up and realized that she was soaking, her braids and skin and clothes dripping cold water. "What are you doing?"

  "What are we doing?" Kalun shoved past Morvius and reached down, picking the little kindi up out of the puddle beside Jiri. "By all the bad-luck spirits, what are you doing?"

  "Careful," Jiri said reaching for the kindi, but Kalun glared down at her and she stilled her hand.

  "I know what this is, girl." Kalun's thumb wiped across the carved wooden lips, taking away the last traces of Jiri's blood. "You, though, don't seem to know anything at all."

  "I know the name of the thing that destroyed Thirty Trees." Jiri scrambled to her feet, facing them, still shivering and dripping. She was angry and terrified, but she only let the first show. "And I was learning more, until you broke me out of my vision."

  "You mean when we saved your life?" Morvius growled.

  "What are you talking about?" Jiri snapped, and the man pointed down.

  Jiri looked at the floor. The water was slowly disappearing, sink
ing down into the floorboards' narrow cracks, and she could see the marks on the boards now. The outline of a foot, a hand. Across her sleeping mat, the dark mark was charred deep, the curled curve of her body. For the first time, Jiri realized that her long shirt felt wrong, the cloth of it rough and tattered in the back, and when she reached back with her hand she felt the material give, falling apart to cinders in her hands.

  "I—" she said, staring at the warm gray dust that coated her fingertips.

  "You almost choked to death on smoke. If I hadn't sent Fara up here to fetch you down for breakfast, you might have caught this whole place on fire." Kalun glanced back at the door. "Fara. Stop hopping like a mouse deer and check the room under this one. Clean up any water you find, and apologize to the guests."

  "Oh, Papa," the girl whined.

  "Go," he said. "And knock first." His brown eyes came back to Jiri. "Why?" he asked, his fingers tapping on the kindi in his hand.

  "I found it in the heart of the Pyre," Jiri said. She didn't like Kalun's scowl, but she really didn't like the disappointment that shone in Linaria's eyes. "I thought it might have information in it, something about All-in-Ashes. And it did. That's the name of the spirit that destroyed Thirty Trees. The one that's been attacking villages. That's why."

  "That's why you did it," Linaria said. "But why did you hide it from us? Why didn't you tell us that you found this thing, and why didn't you tell us you were going to use it? Why didn't you tell us what these things really were?"

  The half-elf's voice was steady, her tone free of any accusation, but Jiri knew it was there anyway.

  "I couldn't," Jiri said. "I made a promise. Not to tell anyone about them."

  "Oza," Kalun said.

  "Oza." They had sat on their mats, on the hard-packed dirt of their little house's floor, Oza's light glowing down on them, and he had whispered to her the stories, of the ancestors and the kindi. "Did he tell you?"

  "A little. Enough to recognize a kindi when I see it."