Child of Flame

Or was it only the ladder linking the spheres? She toiled upward, the current pushing her on from behind. Beneath her feet the land dropped away into darkness. Above, stars shone and yet began to fade into a new luminescence, one with a steely white light like that of a great, shining wall, the boundary that marked the limit of the lowest sphere. Low, like the delicate thrumming of plucked harp strings, she heard an eerie music more pulse than melody.

Rivulets sprang away from the main stream, so that the river itself became a labyrinth winding upward. On the currents of aether, insubstantial figures shaped in a vaguely humanlike form but composed of no mortal element danced in the fields of air through which these rivulets ran. The daimones of the lower sphere, those that lived below the Moon. If they saw her, they gave no sign. Their dance enraptured them, caught in the music of the spheres.

The thin arch of a gateway manifested in the shining wall that marked the limit of the sky. With a shock like the sight of a beloved kinsman thought dead but standing alive before her, she recognized this place. She had known it all along. Da had trained her in its passages, in the spiraling path that led ever upward. Although the way seemed obscure and veiled before her, she had a feeling very like that of homecoming as she ascended to the first gate, the gate she knew so well from the city of memory in whose architecture Da had trained her.

Had he known that the city of memory reflected, like a hazy image in a pond, the true structure of the universe? Or had he merely taught her what others had taught him, and by this means passed on to her what had remained hidden to generations of magi before him?

No matter.

She knew where she was going now. Each gate was part of the crossroads that linked the worlds.

As though her thought itself had the power of making, an archway built of aether and light flowed into existence against the shining wall. Before it stood a guardian, a daimone formed out of the substance of air and armed with a glittering spear as pale as ice.

“To what place do you seek entrance?” Its voice was as soft as the flow of water through a grassy side channel.

“I mean to cross into the sphere of the Moon,” she replied, determined not to quail before this heavenly creature.

“Who are you, to demand entrance?”

She knew well the power of names. “I have been called Bright One.”

It stepped back from her, as though the words had struck it like a blow, but kept its spear fixed across the gateway. “Child of Flame,” it whispered, “you have too much mortal substance. You are too heavy to cross. What can you give me to lighten your load?”

Even as it spoke, she felt the truth of its words. Her belongings dragged on her and, in another instant, she would plunge back to earth—or into the Abyss, falling forever. She had no wings.

Swiftly, she tugged off her boots and unpinned her cloak. As they fell away, she rose. A breath of aether picked her up bodily, and the guardian faded until she saw it only as a spire of ice sparkling by the gateway.

The way lay open.

She did not look back as she stepped over the threshold.

PART TWO

QUEENS’ GRAVE

V

IN THE AFTERLIFE

1

PROBABLY he was dead.

But when the fish twisted and slipped out of his hands to escape back into the river, it acted like a living fish. The men who laughed uproariously around him sounded lively enough, and the stocky man who had yesterday threatened him with an ax had certainly looked alarmingly alive.

He knew what death felt like. Just yesterday he had held a newborn infant in his hands that was blue with death, but he’d learned the trick from Aunt Bel that sometimes newly reborn souls needed chafing to startle them into remembering life. Just yesternight he’d stumbled through a battlefield with his own life leaking from him in flowering streams of blood.

It was hard to believe that he was alive now, even standing up to his hips in the cold river as the tug of the current tried to drag him downstream. It was easier to believe that he was dead, even if the fish in the baskets up on the shore churned and slithered, bright sunlight flashing on their scales. His companion, Urtan, clapped him on the shoulder and spoke words, none of which meant anything but which sounded cheerful enough. Maybe death wouldn’t prove onerous as long as God granted him such good company.

The other men, Tosti and Kel, had started splashing each other as soon as the last weir had been hauled into the shallows and emptied of its bounty. Now Kel stoppered up the weir with a plug of sodden wood and flung it back into the river, and they swam a little, laughing and talking and with gestures making him welcome to join them.

He let the current jostle him off his feet as he lay back into its pull. Didn’t death claim its victims in exactly this manner? Perhaps he was only streaming upward on the River of Heaven, making his way toward the Chamber of Light through a series of way stations. But as the water closed over his face, he heard the hounds barking. Just as he heaved himself over and stood, Sorrow bounded out into the river, paddling madly, while Rage yipped anxiously from the shore.