Fire in the Mist Read online

  "Mama?" Faia called, walking across the main room toward the weaving. "Mama, are you here?"

  Then Faia studied the weaving more closely, and bit back panic.

  It is the same piece she was working on when I left, and there is almost nothing done!

  And her eyes admitted to the other details she'd been denying. Dust coated the tables, the plates that lay out—every single surface in the two-room cottage.

  Her throat ached, and her eyes began to burn.

  "Mama?" she whispered, and walked into the bedroom.

  Her mother's bed was neatly made, her clothes lay stacked in precisely squared piles on the rocking chair, where her mother never left clothes, and on the clothes pegs, everything was present except for her mother's red celebratory dress. Both her house shoes and her boots were stacked under the pegs.

  What do you have on your feet, Mama?

  Faia's pulse began to roar in her ears.

  She turned and began running, screaming "MAMA!" as loudly as she could. She flew outside and around the house and down toward the shed and her mother's garden. She has to be in the shed, Faia told herself. Mama has to be in the shed.

  But that was not where Faia found her mother.

  The earth was still soft, still unsettled over the grave on the hillside, and garlands of flowers, now withered, lay in disarray. Faia studied the wood plaque with blurred eyes, fighting belief.

  Those are her symbols. The healer's wand, the weaver's shuttle, the mother's circles.

  And though Faia couldn't read the words painted underneath, she knew what they said.

  Risse Leyeadote.

  "Mama," Faia whispered, and knelt in the soft earth of the grave, and wrapped her arms around herself to fight back the tears. "Oh, Mama—I did not come back in time. I did not get back... Mama..." And then she collapsed, and lay stretched in the dirt on her mother's grave, as close as she would ever be to her mother again.

  It was much later that she was able to pull herself away from the grave to walk through the village. The reek of decay was worse in some places—and finally, timidly, Faia entered her sister's home. The smell was horrible, and flies were so thick she hit scores of them every time she waved her hands to keep them out of her eyes. She pulled the scarves tighter around her nose and mouth.

  Inside, the beds held the family—though Faia had a hard time recognizing them. A few days dead and badly bloated, with skin gray and edging into the bruised purple of decay, they bore the marks of agonizing disease. She could make out the mottling of pustules and open sores on each of them—Kasara; her bondmate Sjeffan; Liete, their oldest son; Vaurn, the toddler. The splashed brown of vomited blood stained the floor. All lay clutching their stomachs.

  Plague!

  Faia fled the cottage, bile burning in her throat. She pulled the scarves away from her mouth and vomited, then leaned weakly against the house. "Dead. All of them—Mama, Kasara, the kids, and surely my brothers, too, or these would have been buried...."

  Unbidden, an image rose up in her mind—a pale, gaunt, coughing man with his face covered in red spots—Not pimples, but Plague!—the man she had passed the day she left Bright for the highlands.

  He killed all of them, she realized, and knew then that her mother would have been one of the first to die. Mama would have tended to him, even once she knew he had Plague; would have tended to the rest of the village, too, as long as she could have. She probably could have isolated him, too, and prevented most of the deaths—except that the man was a trader, and the winter had been hard and boring and lonely for the villagers; and a little amusement, a little interest, a new face, must have exposed most of Bright to the stranger before it became apparent that he brought disease.

  So Mama, exposed early and a lot, died early. At least she had a grave, Faia thought. At least she was spared the indignity of rotting in her bed, like the rest of my family.

  Faia shuddered as the eyes of rats studied her with speculative hunger, calculating—waiting. She flinched at the hum and buzz of the flies, at the patient smiles of the vultures. She wanted out of Bright, to be well and far away. But hope had not entirely deserted her.

  Has anyone survived? she wondered.

  She closed her eyes and Searched, sending desperate tendrils to the farthest corners of the village. At first, she got nothing but the dim backglow that indicated the rats, insects, cats and birds who had inherited the village. But on the far side of Bright, past the baker's ovens, she finally picked up a solitary glow, unmoving but still blazing yellow with life. And she, who thought her heart had died from despair, felt a final surge of hope.

  Do not die! she pleaded with the fragile light she Sensed. She raced through the streets, fighting back tears. Please, please by-the-Lady, do not die.

  At the house of Sehpura Gennesdote, she stopped. The lifeforce was strongest inside. She shivered and sent a hasty prayer for protection to the Lady, tightened the mask back over her face, and hurried in before her courage could fail her. She knew she was going to see one last wasted, pocked human, dying horribly in bed, but she begged anyway that this would not be the case.

  "Hello?" She called into the darkness and silence, and at first got no response. Her heart fell—this would be as bad as she had dreaded. But she called again anyway, noting with dismay the massed presence of flies, the deathstench, the lumps of unmoving shapes in the beds.

  "Hello? Is anyone here?"

  And a blurred shape suddenly charged her, and grabbed her by her waist, and buried its face in her breasts, sobbing. She hauled the terrified creature out of the house into sunlight, where she could identify—

  A boy. Aldar Maylsonne. He was a few years younger than she—perhaps fourteen or fifteen—unmarked by Plague, so far untouched, though he had been curled up in a corner of his own house, with his dead family all around him.

  For how long? Faia wondered.

  "When did this happen, Aldar?"

  "I don't know... I don't know... I came home today and j-j-j-just found them—"

  Aldar clung to her, lost in wordless sobbing, and she held him, her own grief once again overwhelming.

  But I will not be alone, she thought. If they were all dead when he found them, he has not been exposed. There was a little comfort in that thought.

  "We have to leave." She whispered, and felt his head nod against her breast.

  "I should bury them," Aldar told her. "Mama and Papa, my sibs—" His voice broke, and he started sobbing again.

  "We cannot. There are too many, and only two of us."

  He raised his head to stare into her eyes. "No one else is left? No one?!"

  Faia's fingers clutched at the boy's narrow shoulders. "No one but us."

  At last, he let go of her and wiped viciously at his eyes. "My pack is inside the house. It has all I will need."

  "Go ahead and get it—and take something to keep the wolves at bay."

  She watched him drawing himself together to go back into his family's house.

  He is brave. I wish I could help him. Lady, I wish I could help me. We are all that is left of Bright, he and I. Where can we go? I have no one left in the world. Has he?

  He stumbled out of the cottage, his pack on one arm, his walking stick in hand, with his erda held over his nose and mouth.

  "Let's get out of here," he muttered.

  They fled along the dirt road that led downward, toward the Flatterlands, hurrying as fast as they dared. When they came to the bend that would take them out of sight of Bright for the last time, Faia stopped. It was no good.

  "Wait," she whispered. She gripped Aldar's shoulder, and turned to stare back at the village. Faia's thoughts kept returning to the bodies that lay unburied, to the rats and the flies and vultures—to Aldar's family and hers, who had not been returned to their Mother Earth. She kept thinking of how it would haunt them, knowing that the people they had known and loved lay crumbling in open air.

  I cannot—will not—leave Bright this way. I have to do som
ething. I have to cleanse it—for his memory and for mine.

  Aldar's eyes questioned her.

  "We cannot bury them, but there is something that I think I can do. Give me a minute." Her voice was terse. She was already beginning to draw in energy.

  She had never done anything like this, but something inside of her assured her that she could. She planted her staff on the road and closed her eyes and saw herself drawing up the fire from earth's heart. She raised her left hand and pulled down the heat from the sun, and the deep red blaze of the Tide Mother. She brought them together, and with her eyes pressed tightly closed, she formed the spell that would cleanse Bright.

  She felt enormous energy surge within her. She became a storm of fire, pulling and drawing until she could hold no more. Then with a convulsive shudder, she lifted her staff high over her head and swung it toward the little cluster of houses and shops, screaming—

  "All death and decay,

  All evil, all disease,

  Begone!"

  There was a tremendous clap of thunder, and green flame shot from the point of her staff. Bright glowed with a green light so brilliant the sun dimmed in comparison. The sky darkened as enraged vultures launched into the air, suddenly deprived of their meals; the ground ran black with fleeing rats.

  You killed my mother! Faia raged, seeing the skinny specter of death on his unlucky white-footed horse. Tears streamed down her cheeks. You killed my family, and my lovers, and my friends, and my world. You took it all away from me. And I should have died, too, Faia thought bitterly. I wish I would have.

  Her power grew with her grief and fury. A wind rose as the blazing village drew air to the flames, which leapt higher and brighter. The wind became a storm that gathered force as it moved and drew, until the fierce keening of its galewinds were so great Aldar flung himself on the ground and covered his ears. Clouds streamed from the four corners of the earth to the center of Faia's maelstrom, and the sky grew black and grim.

  Still Faia fed her energy and her anger and her grief into the fire, until the winds began to pull leaves and branches off the trees and into the conflagration, and lightning darted from the towering clouds into the fireball.

  "Stop it, Faia!" Aldar screamed above the roar.

  She kept on, burning her emotions as she burned the city.

  Aldar started pummeling her with his clenched fists, yelling, "Stop it, stop it, stop it!" until the terror in his voice broke through. Stunned and spent, she dropped her staff and crumpled to her knees.

  The hellish green blaze dimmed and flickered and died, and Faia shivered. She stared at the place where the village had been. A cold wind blew up and the first fat drops of rain splattered against her cheeks to mix with the tears.

  There is nothing left inside of me, she thought.

  She pictured her mother, laughing and hugging her, with her beautiful face tipped up to catch the heat of the sun, and Faia felt—nothing. She could not cry for the loss of Chirp and Huss, for Diana, for her brothers and sister, for her nephews or nieces, for her mother's needless death, for her village, of which nothing remained but a blackened circle. She could not cry for Baward, who made her laugh, or for Rorin, who made her lust. She could feel no sympathy anymore for Aldar, who was staring at her as if she were the Goddess Kallee, the bringer of death.

  I have become a shell, she thought. A husk doll with nothing inside but air and darkness. I am dead now. My body just has not realized it yet.

  She sighed, and stared up at Aldar, who was flinching in the torrential rain and pounding wind. She pulled herself out of the mud that the road had suddenly become, and slung her pack across her shoulders. She didn't bother with her erda. She couldn't feel the rain any more than she could feel her soul. Besides, the erda was something a person wore if she cared what happened to her. Faia didn't care.

  "We must go, Aldar," Faia said, voice flat.

  He nodded mutely, stared at her with huge, horrified eyes, and fell into place a few steps behind her.

  In Ariss, far from the conflagration in the tiny village of Bright, powerful mages and sajes were interrupted in their work, as the magic they were working with was drawn off and abruptly, simply gone. They were thrown to the ground by an overwhelming, unseen force, their bodies drained of energy by some monstrous magical entity, by a screaming psychic rush of pure grief and rage, and by an odd undercurrent of evil elation.

  The universal reaction to this was a panicked thought thrown up to the gods and goddesses of the city: What in the hells was that?!

  Chapter 2: WATCHERS AT THE BRIDGE

  "WHERE are we going?" Aldar ventured.

  Faia looked around her and actually saw her surroundings for the first time in hours. It was dark, and she supposed that they must have been walking trudging half the day without food or rest through endless rain and tenacious mud.

  She thought about the question for a moment.

  "I do not know. Does it matter?"

  "I guess not—but I am tired. It is getting dark. If we are not going anyplace in particular, I would really like to stop for the night."

  Faia shrugged, walked to the side of the road, and dumped her pack beside a tree.

  "Would you not prefer to look for a clearing?" Aldar suggested.

  She stared at him. "Do you want to stop?"

  "Yah."

  "Then we will stop here and sleep under the trees."

  Aldar did not say anything else—but as Faia knotted the tiecords of her erda over the low-hanging branch of a tree, she noticed his expression as he watched her. His eyes were wide and scared. She pretended not to notice. Instead, she continued making her shelter for the night. She tied the hood of the erda flat over the neck hole, then she took her roll of fishing net out of her pack, and ran cords through the loops on either end. She hung her makeshift hammock under the angled tarpaulin. It would keep her as dry as she cared to be. Aldar began making his own camp a stone's throw away. He kept his back to her.

  Why should he not be scared? she thought bitterly. I just made our whole village disappear as if it had never been. He must wonder what sort of a monster I am. But then, I wonder what sort of monster I am. She bit her lip and hung her head. I wonder what Faljon would have to say about me.

  She decided she was glad she would never know.

  Aldar shivered and sat under his own staked-out erda, his face pale and miserable. She watched him for a moment, and felt stirrings of pity—he had lost as much as she had. And worse, he was terrified of her, the only person left who might offer some comfort.

  I suppose I should try to set Aldar's mind at ease, she thought.

  "Aldar, what do you have in your pack that we can eat?"

  His face brightened a little. "Well, ah..." He rummaged nervously through his pack and began producing foods. Once he found them, they continued to appear in a steady stream. " Akka-bread, dried apples, gath cheese and mebal cheese, chicken, coffee, a bit of lamb haunch, a few fresh foxberries—not many—" he added apologetically, "and a few raisin-and-grain sweetballs. How about you?"

  Faia grinned in spite of herself. "All that? I have some jerky strips, powdered soup base, and tea."

  "That is all?"

  "Mmm-hmm. I usually do a little foraging while I walk. Or stop in the upland stay-stations. I do not like to carry a lot."

  He brought his pack under the meager shelter of her erda. "I do not mind. I will share."

  Her grin twisted lopsidedly. "I will make a bargain with you. If you can get a fire started, I will make us a stew from some of my soup stock and some of the rest of this."

  He looked bewildered. "Start a fire?"

  "Of course. I can get everything else ready while you get the fire going. I have tinder and quicklights in my pack if you have none—"

  He still looked confused. "I have everything. But if you can do—uh, what you did—why do you need me to build a fire?"

  Ah, yes. To him, that must seem like the most reasonable question in the world. If I can des
troy someone's whole world in a blaze of heavenfire by pointing at it, surely I can also get the cookfire going.

  "Because I am never going to do that again, Aldar. Not ever." She cut pine boughs with her camp knife and twisted them into kneeling pads to avoid looking at him while she talked. "Besides," she said, "faeriefire is the wrong kind of fire. No heat. You cannot use it for cooking."

  There was no need to mention that successful magic required concentrated emotion—and she did not have enough emotion left to conjure a single tiny faeriefire as a camp ward. He would not understand. She just said, "Please build a fire for us, Aldar." And she turned her back on him.

  Aldar struggled with the wet wood but eventually built the fire, and after a few feeble attempts at conversation, lapsed into silence. Faia prepared the meal without seeing what she was doing. Her eyes saw only her mother's grave, her sister and her children lying still and cold, and the tattered fur of Huss and Chirp. It was a grim, dismal meal.

  After the two of them cleaned up, Faia crawled into her bedroll. The rain had gone from deluge to steady downpour. Gusts of wind blew cold water across her face and rocked her hammock and soaked the bedroll through to her skin.

  In spite of that, the exhaustion of the day overcame her, and she immediately fell into dreamless sleep.

  She was awakened by a hand gently shaking her. At first, she could not remember where she was or what had happened. But the blackness of the night and the steady drizzle of rain, and Aldar's hopeless voice begging her to please wake up brought the reality back to her.

  "What do you want, Aldar?"

  "I cannot sleep. I just want to know what killed them, Faia. What killed my family?"

  Faia's eyes flew open. Oh, Lady, he is just a kid—and I did not tell him... . I just thought he would know. Or I did not think.... How could he possibly know Plague when he saw it? I would not have recognized it if Mama had not been teaching me the Healer's lays.

  She rolled over to face him. The few glowing embers of the campfire cast dim light that gleamed in the tears on his cheeks. Eyes round as an owl's—he was determined that he would not cry when he asked her.