Firesoul Read online

  Jiri's tongue shifted in her mouth, dry and gritty, and she stared at the paladin's back, watched her watch the jungle. Sera stood straight and tall, her head high, one hand resting on the hilt of her sword and the other on the top edge of the shield that leaned against her leg. Jiri almost asked why she only stared straight ahead. If a leopard came, it would move through the low branches, and the paladin was close enough to the singed edge of the jungle to be within reach of one of the great cats' pounces.

  Not that any of those cautious cats would approach this place for days, after what had happened.

  The foreigners and their strangeness didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except the thing Jiri didn't want to face.

  They should never have burned.

  Jiri reached up, touched the bone carvings that hung so heavy around her neck, then turned and forced herself to walk.

  The grave was a lonely little thing, a small mound of charred earth. Some bones, Linaria had told her. How many, who—those were things the northern sorcerer couldn't know, couldn't tell Jiri.

  Are you there, Hadzi? Did the bones of her lover lie beneath that thin crust of dirt? Did the handsome flesh that hung from those bones form some part of the ash that stung her eyes?

  Maybe, Jiri thought, and her silent tears fell.

  She crouched before the grave. A piece of wood, crudely carved into the shape of a sword, had been thrust point-down into it. Sera's work, probably. Jiri seemed to recall that the great spirit the paladin followed claimed the sword as a symbol. Otherwise, the mound was empty of anything but ash.

  There should be more. Beads and carvings, bits of cloth brightly patterned, little dishes of food. All the traditional offerings to the spirits of the departed, the gifts that would remind them of the things they had loved in this life, that would comfort them as they prepared themselves for their journey to their new home in the spirit world. This bit of wood, this symbol of some foreign god, wouldn't help them. They needed more. They needed...

  Their families, their friends, their village, and Oza to sing them on.

  Now they had only her.

  "I'm sorry," Jiri whispered, and the words grated from her mouth, came out harsh and broken by grief and ash. The sound of them made the fury and despair burn higher in Jiri. Her fists clenched, and the little wooden sword smoked, darkened, flames dancing up from it.

  "No!" Jiri slapped the burning wooden sword down, smashed the flames out with her hand, each blow raising a cloud of choking ash up from the ground and making a hot flash of pain roar up from her hands. Jiri didn't care, though, didn't stop until the fire was out.

  They didn't deserve this, the ones buried here. They didn't deserve any of this. Kneeling in the dirt, in the drifting remnants of the village and its dead, Jiri forced her lips to move. This was what the dead needed, now.

  The fire of her rage—that was for those had brought this ruin here, and then run.

  Soft, almost silent, the funeral song slipped from Jiri's lips. The last goodbye, the call to the ancestors to reach out and take the hands of those being born into a new world, to pull them through so that no part of them was left to walk unhappy among their people. It was a song she had grown up listening to Oza sing, and she clutched at the necklace that hung from her neck and forced it out of her wounded throat, into the morning air where it was lost in the sound of the monkeys and the birds and the insects and all the other sounds of life that filled the dawn.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "Three hells, why are we still here?"

  Morvius wasn't yelling, but his deep voice rumbled across the clearing. Kneeling in front of the grave, hands carefully arranging the few pitiful offerings she had been able to find or make as the sun slowly pulled itself over the horizon, Jiri heard him clearly. She didn't bother to look back at him, though.

  He wasn't talking to her.

  "We're paying for that pig-sticker you wanted so badly, remember?"

  Linaria wasn't nearly as loud, but Jiri could hear her too. She had been listening to the half-elf moving around since she had ended the funeral song. The white-haired woman had woken sometime during the song, but she had waited until it was done to pull herself out of her silken cocoon. Her strange, almost colorless eyes watched Jiri while she built a little fire and heated water over it, making coffee to share with Sera. But Linaria left her alone to gather her offerings in peace, not saying a word.

  Morvius, though, had words to say the moment he stretched and groaned himself awake. "Paying? We paid. We killed the demon, and you stuffed that hole shut." The northern man was pulling at the silk wrapped around him, jerking himself free of its flimsy embrace. "That was the job. It's not our fault if something broke out after that. We're done."

  "That wasn't all the job."

  "What?" Morvius jerked his feet out of the silk and stood, shaking the cloth out like a bird trying to beat a snake to death. "Oh," he said, following Linaria's gaze.

  Jiri sat sideways to him and the others, head bowed and eyes on her work. Ignoring them, concentrating on her task, but keeping them in sight. She twitched the last offering into place, a leaf with a mango on it, half-ripe and a little charred, but the best she could find.

  "Well, go over there and talk to her. Tell her it's time to go, and she needs to stop playing house with her dead."

  "Morvius—"

  "Linaria, it's too damn hot already, and it's only going to get hotter. The sun is barely above the trees, and I've already got a river of sweat rolling down my ass. And that's without my armor. It's going to be like the mighty Vanji down there when I put that on."

  "Morvius, will you—"

  "Oh, and now I've already got a swarm of those little green bastards flying around my head. Y'know, those bugs whose only purpose in life is to try to bugger your eyeball? Those. Gods, I hate—"

  "Morvius, shut up." Linaria shook her head and stood. "I'll talk to her. You, drink some coffee and get your things together. And if the bugs are so bad, wrap your mosquito cloth around your head."

  "How am I supposed to drink my coffee if I do that?" Morvius waved the silk wadded in his hand in front of his face.

  "Drop it over your head and ask Sera to punch a hole in it. I'm sure she'd love to help."

  "I would do that," the paladin said, frowning at Morvius. The man made some strange gesture with his fingers at her, and the paladin's frown deepened.

  "She's going to kill him, and I really don't care," Linaria muttered as she walked closer. When her shadow stretched beyond Jiri, the half-elf stopped. "Jiri—"

  "I know." Jiri looked up from the grave. Bruises mottled the woman's pale face, and her delicate nose was crooked and smeared with ash, but in her strange blue eyes Jiri could read sympathy. "I heard. I'm ready."

  "Are you sure?" Linaria asked. "Morvius is loud, but he can wait."

  "I've done what I could here. My people need me."

  "Your people?" Linaria tilted her head, staring down at her. "They're gone. I thought you would come back to Kibwe with us. To Kalun."

  "Most of the village fled to Rough Ford yesterday," Jiri said. "If any of the ones that were still here escaped—" Jiri gestured at the burned-out scar surrounding them. "—this, they would have gone there. I need to find them, see if they need help, healing."

  "The thing that did this," Linaria said. "It might still be out there."

  "I know." Jiri stood, feet grinding in the ashes. "Which is another reason I have to find them. If it comes after them..." She trailed off. Across the blasted clearing, a lone mango tree still stood, the branches on one side of it badly singed. In the shadow of its remaining leaves was the Mango Woman, her warning empty now, useless. "I have to go to them. To protect them, to help them. That's what Oza taught me. I have to."

  Linaria stared at her, her mouth a line, her eyes unreadable now.

  "If you have to," she said finally, "then we'll take you."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  A few hours of walking later, the day's rain started, a soft
deluge of warm water that poured down through the branches and leaves and drenched them. Its fall altered, but didn't end, Morvius's steady stream of curses.

  "What the— Oh by the crap demons that have blessed me today, hold up a minute!"

  Jiri stopped in the middle of the thin trail that led to Rough Ford and stared back. The broad-shouldered northern man had just passed through a hanging curtain of vines and was now running his fingers through his dark hair, knocking out leaves and finger-long leeches. Jiri watched him a moment, then glanced at her spear. A leech squirmed across its blade, one of the few that had clung to it when Jiri had used the weapon to move the vines out of her way. It was a good trail they were on, not too muddy, not too dangerous. They should have been to the next village by now. But these foreigners...

  They're taking me? Keeping me safe?

  Jiri flicked her spear, sending the leech arcing out into the jungle. Linaria was going through her clothes now, cursing almost as much as Morvius as she peeled away layers of wet cloth searching for parasites. Sera stood still and stoic, as if she couldn't care less about such things, but Jiri could see her frown, the way her hand kept rising to brush at the back of her neck. How many leeches might have slipped down under the woman's layers of metal and leather, unnoticed and unreachable? Jiri reached for a broad green leaf beside her, held it so that it caught the falling water and took a long drink.

  She would never have been able to stop laughing, before.

  Jiri closed her eyes. The rain had washed the ashes off her, taken the smell of them away, but she couldn't forget them.

  "Come on," she said. "We're almost there."

  "We better be," Morvius growled, and they trailed through the steaming jungle behind her, cursing and squelching.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "Boro!"

  This close to Rough Ford, the trail opened up, linked into the network of footpaths that ran around the small river village. Looking down its green tunnel, Jiri could see the man walking toward them.

  Alone.

  She trotted ahead, leaving the others to trudge after her, her heart swelling. Boro had made it. Boro lived. Maybe...Getting closer, she could see a poultice wrapped around his left arm, could see the slump of his shoulders, the pain in his eyes. "Boro?" she said, stopping.

  "Jiri." Boro stared at her, and everything about him, his expression, the way he held himself, laid a new layer of ashes in her heart. "You shouldn't have come."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  They walked a little way up the trail, back toward where Thirty Trees had been, and found a spot to stand and talk.

  "After you left, we waited in the village," Boro said. "For a while, nothing happened. Then our fire went out." He stared out into the jungle as he spoke, not looking at her. "Hadzi told Cava to restart it, but they argued so I said I would do it. I bent over the pit, looking for coals, when the whole thing just went up again, poom." His good hand cradled his injured one. "I was lucky. It just singed my braids and burned my hand. If I'd been closer, I would have lost my eyes."

  "I can..." Jiri trailed off. She had not opened herself to the spirit world this morning, had not bargained with the spirits for their magic. She had no healing to give him. Stupid. So stupid. Oza might have forgiven her, but he wouldn't have made the same mistake. "Did you use the ointment I gave you?"

  "Yes. I wanted to save it, but Hadzi used it on me. The shaman at Rough Ford said that it saved my hand." Boro cleared his throat. "Hadzi told me to go, then. Told Cava to take me here. I didn't want to, but he was right, and we started walking. We weren't that far away when it happened."

  Boro stared down, his face set. "The heat hit us, a great wind of it, tumbled us down, and we heard a roar bigger than thunder. Then it was over and the air was full of ash. I went back. Cava wouldn't, but I did. I went as close as I could to the heat. I saw the emptiness, where the mango trees had been, where our houses had been. And over them, in the sky and in the smoke, I saw something with wings. Wings of fire, wings of smoke."

  Boro finally turned his head and let his eyes, haunted and red, rest on hers. "What did you— What happened, Jiri?"

  What did you do. Jiri stared Boro in the eyes. She had started to tremble, her eyes hot with tears, listening to Boro, knowing his story meant that Hadzi must be dead. Even though he cut it off, Jiri had heard his accusation. Heard it, and felt fear began to grow in her. And below the fear, burning through it—anger. "Do you think I did something?"

  Boro looked away from her again, staring at his hands, the injured one cradled in the whole. "I— No. Not me. Whatever happened, it wasn't you. Not on purpose."

  Jiri reached out and caught Boro's shoulders, turning the man to face her. "Boro, a group of raiders stole something from the Pyre, and they let something out. Something terrible that our ancestors had sealed away to die underground. They let it out, not me. Do you think I'd burn Thirty Trees?"

  "Jiri," Boro said, and there was pain in his voice, and fear. He jerked himself out of her grip. "You're burning me."

  Jiri felt it then, the heat in her hands, the fire that had rushed into her. On Boro's shoulders she could see the lines of little blisters, the hand-shaped print of burns on his skin. "Oh gods and crocodiles, I'm sorry." She looked down at her hands, at the faint traces of steam that rose from between her clenched fingers. "You do. You think I destroyed my home. My people."

  "I don't. My father, many of the other survivors, they do." Boro spoke softly, just loud enough for Jiri to hear, but he didn't step closer to her. "Oza came from the outside, Jiri. He wasn't Mosa tribe. He never said what tribe he was. But he was kind and wise and powerful, and Thirty Trees didn't have a shaman, so the village adopted him and made him Mosa.

  "When he found you, he probably thought it would be the same, that the Mosa would take you in." Boro shrugged, then winced in pain. "Me and Hadzi and the others that grew up with you, we might have. We knew you. But our parents, all the elders, they knew the village where Oza found you. They knew the people there, or at least they knew the stories about them, that they had fallen deep into the curse that surrounds Smoking Eye. That they kept to the steaming shores of that too-blue lake, away from all others, because their only true friend was fire. They told me that no one was surprised when it burned."

  "I remember," Jiri said. "How the adults stared at me, when things first started to burn around me as a child. I remember how Oza always acted calm, but was so worried." Jiri forced her hands open, and the hot, humid air felt cool against her palms. "But they let me stay."

  "Because Oza wanted you, and they wanted Oza," Boro said. "They never trusted you, though. You know my father didn't want Hadzi involved with you. It wasn't just because he had marriage plans for his eldest son. He worried about you, about what you were."

  "What did he think I was?"

  "A girl with too much magic and not enough control. Sometimes. Other times, he wondered if you were a spirit of fire dressed in stolen flesh, a demon that had beguiled Oza into caring for you, and that might be doing the same to his son."

  "A demon. Beguiling Oza. And Hadzi." Jiri shook her head, and her braids whipped around her face. "Oza was too wise for that. And I didn't need to be a demon to beguile Hadzi, just a woman with a smile and a hammock I was willing to share."

  "I know, Jiri," Boro said. "And I know you. You're no demon. I don't share my father's fears, but I understand them. He's lost almost everything—his home, his wealth, his son. Thirty Trees is gone, and Rough Ford fears that whatever burned our village will come for theirs next. They don't want us to stay, so we'll have to move on, scatter to the other Mosa villages and beg for food and shelter from distant relatives. That will break my father, almost as much as losing Hadzi. He needs someone to blame. So do the others. The elders have already decided. You are not Mosa anymore. "

  "They cast me out?" Jiri heard her words as if they came from a vast distance. Oza, gone. Hadzi, gone. Thirty Trees, gone. Now this. Her people. Gone.

  Lost in ashes, li
ke everything else.

  "I'm sorry, Jiri. I was coming to see if I could find you. To tell you not to come."

  Jiri looked at him, injured and alone on the trail. "They didn't send you."

  "No. They hoped you wouldn't follow. If you did..." He finally looked at her again. "They've set watchers, on the trail. To drive you away, before anything like what happened to Thirty Trees could happen here."

  Drive me away. Would they have killed her? There were good hunters in Thirty Trees, and better ones at Rough Ford. She would have never seen them, intent as she was on getting here to warn them. If Boro hadn't come, would it have been poison darts that met her and her companions as they drew close?

  Jiri could feel her anger trying to grow again, a heat in her that wanted to flash over to flame. Oza had died protecting these people, had given his life so that Jiri could warn them away. He told her to protect them. Oza—

  Oza would tell her to calm herself, to breathe, and let the heat wash away. He would ask her to make the fire burn low and steady, warm and safe. Jiri could hear his voice, saying those words. He had said them to her countless times over the years, repeated them calmly as her adolescent rages had sent flames flickering to life through their home. Spoken them until she believed that she could control herself, control her fire.

  She could.

  Breathing deep, she forced her anger down, down with the fear and sadness and everything else. She made the fire die, and made herself cool.

  "Boro," she said softly. "There was a Bonuwat woman, Patima. She belongs to some foreign group called the Aspis Consortium. She and her friends broke into the Pyre and stole something. When they did that, they released...whatever it was you saw."

  Jiri reached into her bag, fumbled past the dirty leather of her armor and found a little clay pot. Opening it, she caught the clean smell of the burn ointment she and Oza had made. "That thing they released—it destroyed Thirty Trees, not me. You can tell them that, if you think they might believe you. What they really need to know, though, is that I think this thing might be after what Patima and her companions took, and they went back to Kibwe."