The Book of Fire Read online

  Paia stares at him. “Assassin? Prostitute? Was it so clear to everyone but me? Oh, no!” Somehow this is worse than practically losing her virginity right there in the Hall of Audiences. She throws herself back on the bed, sobbing.

  Luco slows his pacing, then sits down beside her. “Well, not everyone. Most of them were half-asleep by then. And, I admit, he was beautiful.”

  This makes her sob all the harder. “Why, Luco? Why do they do it? What have I ever done but serve them as the God requires?”

  “It’s simple: they go after you because they can’t get at him. And this was a novel strategy, using your own worst impulses against you. The guy planned it very well, I must say.”

  His pragmatism soothes her, despite a certain undertone of relish. She rolls over to look up at him. “All by himself? A heresy of one?”

  “Most likely the Greens again. He was only the weapon.”

  “Was? Surely, the God would want him kept alive for questioning?”

  “I thought you’d rather the God didn’t hear about all this.”

  “No . . . yes, he must know. I mean, how could someone get a knife through all his security procedures?”

  Luco crosses his legs. He roughs his long hair back and lets his top leg—still wrapped in its gilded sandal—swing restlessly. “Stupidity or betrayal. It’s always one or the other. And I suppose I’ll have to bear part of the blame. Our only hope is that he’ll be too distracted by this business over the hill to care.”

  “What business?”

  He waves a dismissive hand. “Oh, some minor disagreement with one of the villages. He’s down there dealing with it.”

  Paia has never been to the villages. But for the God’s frequent evangelical forays, she might even forget they’re there, supplying the Temple with food and service personnel in return for the God’s protection. “Well, anyway, you won’t take the blame. It was my fault. Besides, you saved me!” She realizes she hasn’t even thanked him yet. Maybe she is just a spoiled brat. She gets up on her knees and puts her arms around him from behind to kiss his cheek. She’s never been that familiar with him before, and is not sure why she’s doing it now, except that the . . . incident has left her feeling unusually vulnerable. She needs to assure herself of Luco’s loyalty and support. He accepts her embrace but does not particularly warm to it. “I’ll tell him everything, I promise!”

  “You better.”

  It occurs to her how much the God will enjoy hearing her tell this particular story. “Oh, Luco, I wish you could just be my Suitor. Everything would be so much easier.”

  Luco barks a dry laugh, pats her arm. “I don’t think so, dear girl. I don’t think so.”

  Then Paia remembers what the God had said: choose someone you’ll tire of quickly. Sometimes she thinks Luco understands the God better than she does.

  When he’s pulled himself together and straightened all his priestly regalia to his satisfaction in front of Paia’s full-length mirror, Luco delivers a stern warning to think twice the next time she’s about to do something foolish, then puts on his Temple face and leaves her alone.

  Paia immediately strips off her ceremonial garb and digs out her beloved T-shirt and sweats. It’s not the right time for hot water, so she douses herself with cold, regardless of the waste. She feels exposed, rubbed raw by this near-fatal encounter and the madness that precipitated it. Her madness. Luco is right. What could she have been thinking? The shapeless soft garments enclose her. They comfort her with concealment. She braids up her damp hair, pulling it back tightly from her face. She hopes she looks awful. She stows the God’s little gun in a hip pocket. She won’t let herself be without it ever again. Now she feels sleek and efficient, and calm enough to confront the guards outside her door who will, no doubt, be shocked by her undecorated appearance, and will try to dissuade her from leaving her rooms.

  A doubled contingent of chastened faces slew around to stare at her when she opens the door. The duty captain is an older woman whose eyes are already exhausted by the vision of her own anticipated incineration at the hand of an angry god. Right now, she couldn’t care less what the High Priestess is wearing.

  Paia nods. “I’ll be working in my studio until dinner, Captain.”

  “Yes, Mother.” The woman looks faintly relieved to see her alive and apparently unharmed. And no doubt she has feared some further madness to be dealt with, some scheme or reckless journey by their unruly High Priestess that the Guard will be duty-bound to keep up with. But these windowless, dead-end corridors, even half-lit, are easy to defend. The captain bows, and when Paia turns down the hall, she signals four of her squad to follow at a discreet distance.

  Paia gains the tower entrance. Light sifts down from an invisible skylight high at the top of the shaft. She starts her climb without a backward glance. She knows the guards will not follow. The deal is, when she’s up in the studio, they guard the bottom of the stairs. She takes the steep stone steps as briskly as she can manage, driving herself up without a rest even after she’s gasping for breath. A dose of self-punishment, Paia reflects, and minor enough, given the severity of her offense.

  In truth, she cannot believe how stupid she was, letting appetite win out like that over good sense and training and the God’s constant reminders that his High Priestess is always a target. Mere appetite? Ha. The blinding force of the need she’d felt in the Hall still lingers in her body like a drug, evaporating her calm with its little aftershocks. It was almost as if the urge had come upon her from outside. Like the evil eye, or a spell, she muses. But Paia does not believe in such things, so the blame must be turned inward, on herself.

  On the top step, she stands panting. The big room is bright with hot afternoon glare. The shadows are long and as sharp-edged as knives. She’s not even sure why she’s come, except that she felt compelled to. Not by the familiar eager stirrings of an idea brimming in her head. Paia hesitates. Her eyes are drawn to the shrouded easel, and she can no longer deny it. She’s come to see the painting. To take comfort from its lush and restful tones. Usually, when she finishes a painting, she sets it aside. None of her stark portraits of the neighboring slopes and crags decorate the walls of her bedchamber, or any other walls in the Citadel.

  But this painting calls out to her. The mysterious circumstance of its creation hints at some pernicious heresy rising in Paia’s soul. But perhaps it can offer her some corrective insight or message of truth, if only she can decipher it.

  She moves quickly to the easel and throws back the concealing tarp. Once again, the rich, moist life of the landscape leaps out to envelope her. The tree-softened curve of its hills and the lost peaceful sweetness of its silvery river bring a start of tears to her eyes.

  Then Paia notices two things.

  The sky overhanging her pristine imaginary valley is not as clear as she remembers. Clouds are massing behind the smoothly rolling horizon, a dark crenellation as architectural as the ruined skylines of the cities she secretly reads about in the House Comp’s library. She can’t imagine how she missed noticing them before. But she’d been spent and bleary-eyed after the long night’s work, and one of the miraculous qualities of a painting is how it often reveals itself over time. If you bother to go back and look at it again, which Paia rarely does.

  The thing she is sure was not in the painting when she left it is a small, folded scrap of paper. It’s pinned to the tray of the easel with the sturdy blade she uses for cutting canvas.

  Her first reaction is to grab at her hip pocket for the God’s gun, and take a swift look around. Someone has been here, and might be still. After the treachery in the Hall of Audiences, Paia is no longer confident about either the skill or the loyalty of her guards. But this room has few corners that could hide an assailant. A quick search confirms that it’s empty.

  Her next thought is almost as unnerving. Someone has seen this painting. Some other person has shared this revelation of her inner longings. Longings more secret and forbidden even than sex. Someon
e who might report her to the God.

  Paia’s hand trembles as she jerks the heavy blade free and unfolds the paper. The note is brief, neatly handwritten in a reddish-brown substance that Paia fears is blood.

  It reads: “What price survival?”

  Paia folds the note away in her pocket and walks quickly toward the stairs.

  The God does not come visiting that evening, as she has feared he would. When her chambermaid has arrived with the evening ration, helped her undress, turned down the bed, and bowed her way from the room, Paia takes a cup of water to her window alcove and draws the heavy drapes aside. She unwraps the note in the light of an oil lamp, and reads it again.

  What price survival? What could it mean?

  To the south, the ruddy sky is brighter than usual. In the ragged notches between the crags, she sees a distant glow and flicker. Somewhere out there, something big is burning.

  CHAPTER NINE

  He looked exactly as she remembered him, not as she would have wished to remember him, as the golden lord in that fateful barn in Erfurt. He was as she remembered from her dreams, which had revealed to her so clearly the sad progression of Baron Köthen’s disillusionment. She should not have been surprised by Rose’s unflattering description. But she had not wanted to accept the truth of her dreams quite so literally.

  From a shadowed corner of the great room, Erde watched Köthen move into the lantern light as if into a dungeon. She saw his eyes sweep the borders of the room the way he’d swept the night air with his sword in the clearing where he’d found the murdered prince, arc after glittering arc of shamed outrage. He wore civility like an ill-fitting garment. He stopped in the middle of the room, and as he stood there uncertainly, his face for an instant was as raw and open as a child’s, exposing to any who observed him his impatience at being kept from the battle, his horror at being suddenly powerless to command his own surroundings. Erde had seen that he’d arrived with his hands bound. She could not imagine what could have induced Hal—who should have understood him better than anyone—to submit his former foster son and squire to such humiliation. Rose said events had been hard on Baron Köthen, but this was clearly an understatement. All the ease in him was gone. Now he moved like man whose skin was filled with broken glass.

  A moment later, his face closed again, as he let habits of breeding and pragmatism master his outrage. As a guest of the house, he would be expected to behave. Yet Erde saw how close he was to the limit of his own good sense, how his dry humor had turned bitter, how rage was eroding his optimism as well as his grace. And how, when she stepped bravely out of the shadow to greet him, his eyes swept past her as something unrecognized, unfamiliar, unimportant, in his single-minded search for answers to his predicament.

  She saw all that, and also saw how Hal eyed him with covert concern. How the third man’s attention never left him. The two of them, watching Baron Köthen sidelong, as one might a drunk or a madman, to keep him from hurting himself, or someone else. Soon, she couldn’t bear to see it any longer. She slipped out of the room into a back hall and fled to the consoling company of the dragon in the barn.

  “Under the protection of women, Heinrich? You think less of my skills than ever I thought.” The Challenger grins in a death’s-head sort of way and tosses his wet cloak down on a stool.

  Coming in behind him with the others, N’Doch notices how this guy walks into a room like he owns it, or if he doesn’t yet, he will soon enough. Idly, N’Doch wonders if he could learn how to do that.

  Deliberately, Rose picks up the cloak and hands it off to one of the twins. “Do you intend to leave him, then, Heinrich?”

  The Honcho spreads his hands. Now N’Doch understands his air of apology. “If you’ll take him, Rosie. Don’t know how else to keep him alive.”

  “Or even if you should,” remarks Rose.

  The Honcho sighs. N’Doch reads pain in him, and not a little ambivalence. “His last escapade cost me three of my best men.”

  “How I love being talked about in the third person!” The Challenger turns neatly on his heel. “My lady Rose. Forgive my ill manners. I haven’t yet greeted you.” He bows to her, low and crisp. “The years have not diminished your beauty nor your fabled wisdom. But I was unaware that you had gone into the business of arrest and detainment.”

  Rose returns his satirical stare. “Don’t be sullen, Adolphus Michael. It doesn’t become you. Don’t worry. We’ll keep you employed and busy. You’ll see it’s all for the best.”

  “I fail to see how.”

  Rose moves past him like he’s some misbehaving son she’s ignoring. She catches the tall guy’s cloak as he shrugs it off, and passes that one, too, into waiting hands. The issue of why the Challenger is here seems clear to everyone but N’Doch. “Come, warm up by the fire. You must be cold and hungry.”

  “An understatement,” mutters the Challenger.

  “Rosie,” says the Honcho, “This is Dolph’s captain, Kurt Wender. The best of men. If you’re willing and up to this, he’ll be keeping our good baron company.”

  The Bodyguard steps forward with a bow, much more polite than the Challenger’s. “My lady.”

  Rose smiles at him. “I’m nobody’s lady, Captain Wender, except perhaps Heinrich’s. Call me Rose. Please, come by the fire. You are welcome.”

  Wender nods gratefully. He finds a bench by the fire and drops onto it with a sigh. He accepts a mug of heated wine from the other of the twins. N’Doch’s glad to see he’s too much the man’s man to carry all this bowing and scraping any further.

  Raven fills another mug from the big crock warming just inside the fireplace. She offers it to the Challenger, who looks her over. N’Doch sees speculation but little interest. Still, he can’t help eavesdropping.

  “Where have you been, Raven?”

  “Oh, here and there. Mostly here.”

  “Ever since?”

  She nods. “I was sorry to hear about your father.”

  “It’s seven years since I assumed the title, Raven.”

  “Still. He was always kind to me.”

  The Challenger frowns, as if he resents any pleasant memory. “A good man.”

  “Yes. And you? You look thin, Dolph. Slim pickings along the road?”

  “Is it any different here? Out there, people are killing each other for food now. Blizzards in September! The countryside is starving.”

  “Can’t something be done to help?” Raven asks mildly.

  The Challenger flicks her a disbelieving glance, then shakes his head. “That, dear Raven, is what I was trying to do.”

  Raven just smiles at him and again holds up the steaming mug. He takes it, then looks at it as if he’s forgotten what it’s for, and sets it aside. He’s already moving about, measuring the walls of his prison. “The hell with war and politics. By the way, where is here?”

  “Welcome to Deep Moor.”

  “Many thanks. What’s Deep Moor?”

  “A place apart. Away from the ills of the world. Or so we thought.”

  The Challenger snorts. “Until I arrived to spoil your idyll.” He paces back to her, stops, brushes her chin gently with the back of his hand. “You’ve grown no less beautiful, Raven.”

  “Nor you, Dolph.”

  “Are you the bait, then?”

  “Pardon?”

  “To keep the prisoner docile and pacified during his incarceration?”

  Raven tilts her head. “Such bitter thoughts, Dolph.”

  “I have cause,” he growls, and turns away.

  Raven shrugs. She joins Rose as she draws the Honcho into the warmth of the big stone hearth. “We were just making dinner when you arrived.”

  “Dinner!” The tall guy’s booming laugh is over the top, N’Doch thinks. Like the poor man’s hoping the black mood he’s brought into the room can be denied by applying the proper amount of cheer. “Wender! When d’you figure our last meal was?”

  “Two days past, my lord, at least.”

  “
My count also. And a poor meal it was at that.” He reaches eagerly for the mug Raven has put on the table beside him. “I’m any day glad to ride into Deep Moor, but this time gladder than ever. It’s bad out there, Rosie. It’d be bad even if we weren’t trying to fight a war. Stores are running low everywhere, and when the hell-priest provisions his armies, he leaves nothing behind for the villages. Not a scrap, not a bean! So they’re angry at any soldier who rides their way, no matter whose side he’s on!” He pauses, looks at the floor, his cheer deflating into frustration and despair. “Truth is, we could use a good feeding.”

  “And you shall have it.”

  The prospect seems to buck him up a bit, and he grins. “You might even get Dolph to eat something. He’s not been fond of my cooking.”

  Over his shoulder, the Challenger retorts, “If you can refer to hacking at a hunk of frozen bread with your sword as ‘cooking.’”

  “Picky, picky,” mutters the Honcho, but N’Doch can see he’s pleased to have raised even a sprout of humor from such stony ground. He sips from his mug, shaking his head with grim appreciation, and sips again, drawing Rose aside. “But what news? If the travelers have returned, where is Milady Erde?”

  “She’s . . .” Rose looks around. “Oh. Well, she was here . . .”

  From her seat by the fire, Raven says, “I think she went out to the barn.”

  “Not here to greet me?”

  “Well, he’s in the barn, no doubt expecting a visit.”

  “Ah. Yes, that’s it.” Again, he looks pleased, “Then we must comply immediately. Did all go well with their journey?”

  “News over dinner,” says Rose, “and a visit after. First, there are other introductions to be made.”

  She looks N’Doch’s way. Suddenly he realizes that the group he came in with has evaporated quietly to the other parts of the house. In the kitchen, the clatter of food preparation starts up like background music. He and the dragon-as-Sedou are left stranded by the door, with the girl nowhere to be seen. Rose beckons them forward out of the shadows. All three men turn at the creak of their footsteps across the old wooden floor.