The Book of Fire Read online

  Her shoulders sag. Her chambermaid is right. The High Priestess of the Temple of the Apocalypse needs to be protected from her own impulses.

  However . . .

  She just cannot imagine going back to bed. There is still this swarm of images inside her head, demanding to be dealt with. Even if she could resist, this opportunity is too precious to waste. She peers at the snorers more carefully, then eases around the edge of the door and ghosts it shut behind her.

  Scattered about the hall, tilted this way and that in their straight-backed chairs, the sleeping guards look like a child’s tin army abandoned after play. Paia negotiates a slalom course through red-clad legs and spit-polished black boots, careful to create no draft that might alert their soldier’s instincts. She’s counting on the booze to keep them oblivious.

  To her left yawns the wide, dark well of the stairs, leading down to Level Five and further, younger contingents of the Honor Guard. To her right, several shadowed doorways, more chairs and windowless corridor: true darkness. But this is the most “secure” part of the house, and Paia’s feet know the way by heart. Now she welcomes the darkness as an ally, abetting her escape. She pads along with her arms stretched low to either side, in case some forgetful cleaner has moved a chair. Sensing a turn, she slows but continues straight ahead until her fingers touch the cut-velvet wall fabric and the hard edge of a deactivated picture box. She does a silent right-face, gliding one hand along the wall—no furniture left along this corridor to avoid. She moves down one long hall, a left turn, down another, until her fingertips find and trace out the intricate profile of the molding that frames the entrance to the tower. Just inside the arch is a little niche for a lantern and matches.

  This rising stair is narrower than the formal staircases leading down, which are sized like the corridors to allow a regiment to march through in formation. The tower’s steep steps, barely one person wide, coil up serpentlike around a central stone shaft. Paia’s hands are shaking with eagerness to be at the top. As if her head might shatter like a dropped melon if she can’t let loose the raucous crowd inside. She strikes a match. Once upon a time, the House Monitor’s sensors would have provided light, and then betrayed her presence to an on-duty House security guard. But all those banks of screens are dark now. Raising the lamp, Paia begins her climb.

  It’s a long climb, but Paia claimed this part of the house as her own precisely because of the tower, knowing that its claustrophobic dimensions and its exhausting, dizzying spiral would discourage any but the most determined visitors. She’s counted the steps: there are sixty-six of them, carved from the rock of the cliff itself. The front edge of each bears a shallow depression, worn smooth during the two and a half centuries since her family’s retreat to this stronghold. There is a faint stain of handprints at waist level along the outside curve of the wall.

  She gains the top and steps into a large vaulted chamber lit by the dim red murk pressing in from outside through a far wall of armored glass. A polished stone floor gleams ruddily. Paia’s lantern illuminates a chair and a few simple tables, and then the unfinished rear and side walls, still as coarse-textured as if blasted out of the rock only yesterday. Leaning against the walls, rows and rows of stacked canvases. In front of the vast glass wall, a tall wooden easel, empty now, but not for long.

  The thrumming in her body intensifies. Paia sets the lantern down on a table, afraid she’ll drop it. Then she hurries around the room, gathering up every available lamp and candle, sets them near the easel, and lights them all. She’s only adding to the heat in the room, but she doesn’t care. Her hands move almost without her knowledge. The image waves are breaking harder and faster now. Her brain is a tornado, a storm at sea. She doesn’t want to have to grind and mash and mix and measure, the patient, painstaking process of paint-making that she normally enjoys. She needs to get right to work. She gathers in a hopeful breath, uncovers her palette, lets out the breath in a rush. The paint is still workable. She finds brushes, oil, and an unused canvas. She sets the pale, blank oblong up on the easel and stares at it for half a millisecond. Then she dips her brush and begins to paint.

  When the red murk lightens to pink, then to dusty orange, Paia stands back to look at what she’s done. Hours have passed unnoticed. Her palette is scraped dry. She has used every last daub of paint available, often not caring what color it was; at least she would lay down form and texture on the canvas while the inspiration burned in her. Even as her candles and lanterns guttered and went out, she kept at it, in the end painting as much by feel as by sight. Not until she lays her brush aside does she realize how tired she is. “Spent” is a better word, she decides. Tapped out. Like she feels after the ten-hour Harvest Festival. As if the whole complex engine of her body has suddenly run out of fuel. Only now does it occur to her how unusual this is.

  And what has this frenzy produced?

  Impulsively, she’d chosen a large canvas, two meters wide by a meter high, and she has covered every inch of it. The brushwork is taut and kinetic, even for her, and it turns out, the painting is mostly about color, or the sense of light and life that color can convey. Vibrant purple, magenta, and blue shadows stretching beneath sunlit golds and viridian and mauves. Colors she hardly ever uses, which is why they were left over on her palette. She can see this even in the too-amber light of early dawn, before the sun outside has broken the horizon, and she finds it mildly uncanny, since color was the thing she’d given up all control of, sure that she lacked the right pigments.

  But her definition of “right” is being challenged by the canvas in front of her. It’s a landscape, or rather, a fantasy landscape, because it’s like no landscape she’s seen or could have seen within her own lifetime. For one thing, it’s full of greens, or the colors that green can become when suffused with sunlight. She’d hardly any true greens on her palette, so she made do with what she had. Another thing—it’s full of trees. Hardwood trees. She recognizes their shape and texture from the trees left in the little Sacred Grove within the Temple walls. But in this painting, there are entire hillsides of them, a whole valley, in fact, lined with oak and birch and maple as if with the richest velvet. Nestled within the velvet, like the finest satin, a vast and rolling meadow. And the shining jewel caught in its luscious green folds: a silver ribbon of water . . . a river.

  A river! Paia is transfixed. How has she done this? She guesses she must be recalling images from her recreational research forays into the family archives—old photographs, prints and paintings, and even video, when the God allows her use of the machines. She frowns, looking around at the other canvases stacked against the walls. Painting after painting of barren hills, dry streambeds, and rocky crags, of air swirled with dust and soot, of sun-parched villages huddled among dying scrub pine. All dry browns and reds and bleached-out yellows. She had thought them beautiful, perhaps because the God always admired them. Now she is not so sure. Since she first picked up a brush, Paia has painted only what she saw in life: what she saw from the upper terraces of the Temple, what she saw from her bedroom balconies or from this luxurious stretch of glass, her giant eye upon the world, perched high in a tower embedded in the sheer rock face of a cliff.

  All of a sudden, as if her eyes have turned inside her head, she has painted a landscape she could only hope to dream about.

  CHAPTER TWO

  That first night back at Deep Moor, Erde was so weak with joy, and so wrung out by all she’d been through, that she forgot to worry about the dreams.

  Besides, she felt safe at Deep Moor, even in the snow and wind and unnatural cold. The women there knew things. Surely the dreams would not dare to follow her there.

  And it began innocently enough, of course, with a calm and silent landscape, sunk in winter. Gentle mounds of snow scattered here and there across a frozen white plain. A rasping of ravens above. A gleam of river ice in the distance, and mountains.

  But then she saw, or rather, understood—in the way of dreams—that the mounds were bodie
s, soldiers dead on the field and covered with snow. Even in her drifting dream state, Erde was shocked. What kind of army would not make time to bury its dead?

  Suddenly, a far-off echo, a drumming of hooves. She wanted to turn toward the sound but could not. Her dream gaze was fixed: on the bodies, on the frozen river, on the mountains beyond. The hard rhythm approached, like metal on stone, and with it, an aura of terrible urgency. As the lead horse pounded past, the urgency snatched her up, as if an arm had been hooked around her throat. She was dragged in the horse’s wake, and still she could not look behind, could only hear the hoarse cries of the men and the struggle of their horses to catch up.

  The lead horse was a tall and powerful gray, well lathered but not yet winded. His rider was oddly unhelmeted, despite the cold and the peril of his horse’s mad race. He was hunched forward over the gray’s outstretched neck, and Erde could not see his face. But she knew this rider anyway. She knew him from the bold blue and yellow of his worn battle tabard, from the stubborn set of his ice-flecked shoulders, from the wind-whipped gold of his hair. And because it was always his life that the dreams drew her into.

  Her enemy. Adolphus, Baron Köthen. A man she had met only once. Allied with her traitorous father against the King. Or had been. Now his loyalties were unclear. But enemy or no, in the way of dreams, she had no choice but to ride with him. She found this both terrifying and exhilarating.

  Behind, the men cried out again, incoherent with distance. It seemed that she recognized one of the voices. But her gaze was still fixed, as Baron Köthen’s was, and he did not look back. She would not have expected him to. He was too intent on urging the utmost out of the speeding gray. As usual, he was unaware of her presence, as she flew along at his ear like a gnat. Only once had he seemed aware, had he seemed to listen when she spoke to him. That time, she had saved his life. Or she thought she had, and it confused her that she’d done so. The man had been her enemy, perhaps still was. Of course, dreams were just dreams, mere illusions, with no connection to real events. Erde told herself this, but in her heart, she did not believe it. Her sense of being there with him was too . . . complete.

  The gray swerved suddenly, then launched himself over a snow mound too massive to be avoided. The corpses were strewn more thickly as horse and rider neared the river. The harsh valley winds had scoured the concealing snow, exposing terrible amputations and dark faces frozen in pain and horror. Köthen glanced up now, and Erde saw that there were horses and soldiers between him and the ice-bound shore. Many of them. Ten, twenty knights at least, plus a squad of infantrymen, all of them armed and ready, and watching Baron Köthen’s full-tilt approach. But Köthen did not slow the gray horse or turn him aside. Instead, he reached across his thighs for the sword tucked into its saddle sheath, and aimed the gray straight into the middle of them. Soon they were close enough for Erde to recognize the hell-priest’s colors on some of the infantrymen. Just like Brother Guillemo, Erde thought grimly, to put uniforms even on his foot soldiers. The thought of Guillemo made her shiver. Could Köthen and the hell-priest have made up their differences after all, and was he racing back to rejoin the usurping army? If so, he was her enemy again. Erde’s beloved grandmother the baroness, may she rest in peace, had brought Erde up to be a loyal subject of the King.

  Or perhaps the soldiers ahead were some of Baron Köthen’s own men, gone renegade from the priest’s army out of loyalty to their lord. But that hope died in the flash of steel across the closing distance, as the knights converged into defense formation. Erde understood that Baron Köthen’s charge was an attack. What was the man doing? He would be cut to pieces, without a doubt. And still Köthen drove the gray toward them.

  Enemy or no, Erde did not wish him dead. In fact, the idea filled her with a surprising dread. She imagined again that, through the dream, she could speak to him, and she begged him to turn aside. She knew he was a brave man, but she had not thought him reckless. Why would he charge willingly into such overwhelming odds? Had he been driven into this trap by the men behind him?

  But then those riders’ desperate shouts came to her more clearly, particularly the one voice that had seemed so familiar. They’d been calling him back, and now gave up their shouting to ride as hard as they could. Erde heard their horses coming, faster than before, or was it only that she hoped so for them to catch up? Surely they were too far behind to be able to save him. She pleaded with Köthen to be sensible, to slow down at least, to wait for the others. Dream-wraith that she was, she still could feel the anger in him, heating him like a fever. He was too full of blood-rage to hear her or to listen to reason. Or perhaps he did hear, for once she saw his head jerk when she spoke, as if shaking off a fly. But he neither stopped nor slowed. And glancing ahead, Erde saw why. In their shifting protective dance, the mounted knights drew briefly aside, revealing the man at the center of their formation: the hell-priest himself.

  Guillemo. Her nemesis. Stocky and dark, and with his once wild beard now trimmed to obsessiveness, he looked almost ordinary. His white monk’s hood was thrown back from his mailed head as he barked orders to his men and raised his short, southern sword as if it were a processional cross. His big horse gleamed as pure and white as the snow around him, or the frozen river beyond. But, oh, what a danger, to think Guillemo either pure or ordinary! Erde’s blood ran as cold as that ice-bound river. The snake-eyed priest was staring straight at her, his full red mouth curled in a sly smile of welcome.

  So, witch. We meet again.

  His voice, right there in her head as she slept. Deep, rich, insinuating. Erde was horrified by how surely he homed in on her. No casting about this time, no sniffing the air. He saw her, as surely as if she were a visible presence in his world. He could speak in her mind.

  She recoiled from the fierce beam of his stare as if from a blow and pulled herself inward as if she could become infinitesimal and so escape him. Or conceal herself behind Baron Köthen’s head, safe in the warmth beside his ear. But Köthen was barreling full-tilt toward his own destruction, his mind empty of everything but rage and revenge.

  The horses behind did seem to be nearing. Erde thought to distract him in some way, if only to slow him down until his allies could catch up, before the big gray burst into the midst of twenty well-armed knights. Forgetting the disembodiment of her dream state, Erde wrapped both invisible hands around Köthen’s bridle arm and hauled back hard. His head jerked up. He tossed a sidelong glance behind him and shook his elbow as if to free it from a thorn branch. But there was no branch. Encouraged, Erde hauled back on him again, with all the strength she could imagine. Köthen’s eyes rolled sideways, widening in confusion and a touch of fear. The gray horse sensed his fear and missed a step, slowing, nearly stumbling. Erde counted the seconds gained.

  But ahead of them, she saw the hell-priest grin.

  He fears you, witch girl! Remember, he is only a man, without understanding. Whereas . . .

  NO!

  She screamed it with all her dream-strength, drowning out his poisonous murmur. As much as Baron Köthen drew her, the hell-priest repulsed and terrified her. At first, she’d assumed he was only after her to burn her at the stake. Now it was clear that he wanted something else. His ability to find her in the dream world was frightening enough. If he ever found her again in the real world . . . Erde’s only thoughts were of escape. Her entire being contracted in denial, a vast implosion toward the infinitely small. As her consciousness faded, it occurred to her that anything, even death, would be preferable.

  And then someone was shaking her gently awake.

  A woman’s voice said, low and calm, “Erde? Come back to us. Come back to us, sweeting.”

  “I’ve been trying that for ten minutes!” said another, not nearly as collected as the first. “Ever since I heard her cry out! Look! She’s not even breathing!”

  “Shhh. She’s breathing. Help me raise her up a little.”

  From the verge of the infinite, Erde heard the women’s voices l
ike a faraway whisper, carried on the wind. The priest was after her, searching, but she knew these voices. These voices meant safety. Moments from the edge, she veered away and sped homeward toward them.

  The snow began falling on their way across the meadows, even before the storm clouds closed in. Big crystalline flakes floating down like autumn leaves. Erde tilted her chin to let their weightless ice melt on her tongue. Even the snow of Deep Moor tasted sweet. She’d never thought snow could be so welcome.

  But welcome only because familiar, she reminded herself. Welcome to her as proof that she was home. Not so welcome to the two women walking beside her or to anyone in Deep Moor, or even to the laden pony that trudged along behind. Erde wished she could race about kicking up drifts and making snow angels as she might have done months ago when she was still a child in her father’s castle. Snow angels were a proper way to celebrate. She thought she restrained herself out of respect for Raven and Doritt, but in truth, after the events of the early morning, her heart wasn’t in it. Gratitude and relief were the best she could manage. But even that offended the taller woman’s gloom.

  “It’s all right for you,” Doritt grumped, winding her knitted scarf one more turn around her long neck. Erde would swear Doritt was taller than she remembered. But surely she was too old to be still growing? Perhaps it was her chin-to-ankle-length coat, snugged around her sturdy frame like a woolen shroud. Or perhaps, her man-sized leather-and-canvas boots.