Kage Baker - The Anvil of the World

He tried to call out, to get his father to turn and stop. Somehow, the striding figure never heard him. Smith ran, slipping on the patches of black ice, determined to catch his father, to ask him why he’d never…never…

He was lost in a cloud. The gloom enveloped him, and all he could see was a sullen red glow—

He was holding a staff. It rang, struck sparks from the rock as he swung it. He could not stop, he could not even slow down, for he was following True Fire though he could not see her, and she would not wait for him.

You bear my name.

I do? No, I don’t, it’s an alias. How could you be my father? I never knew my father. My aunt always said he might have been a sailor. This is a dream.

You walk in my footsteps.

You don’t leave footsteps! You never leave a trace. Not one shred of proof. Damn you anyway for never being there.

You kill like a passing shadow, just as I had to kill.

Never liked it. Never wanted to. Never had a choice, though.

Neither did I.

Things got out of hand.

Things got out of control.

I just wanted a quiet life. Why can’t people be good to one another?

Why didn’t they learn? I should have made them better.

Whose fault is it, then?

You bear my fault.

Like hell I will.

Try to put it down.

Smith attempted to fling the staff away, because somehow it had become the fault, but it wouldn’t leave his hand. Instead it shrank, drew into his arm, became part of him.

I don’t want this responsibility.

It’s your inheritance. And now, my son … you’re armed.

He tried to run away, but his feet were frostbitten. The right one, especially. He slipped, skidded forward and crashed into a painful darkness that echoed with voices…

“I didn’t know you were really in danger!” Lord Ermenwyr was saying.

“Neither did I, until I looked out the window and there they were,” a woman was saying in a bemused kind of way. She had an alto voice, a red velvet voice. “Things became rather horrible after that; but until then, I was enjoying myself with the puzzle.”

“How the Nine Hells did they know you were here?” Lord Ermenwyr demanded, panic in his voice. “How did they know it was here?”

The woman’s shrug was audible.

“Spies, I suppose.”

“Well, what are we going to do?”

“Hold them off as long as we can.”

“Hold them off? You, me, and a handful of monks hold off an army?” Lord Ermenwyr’s voice rose to a scream. “They’re fanatics who’ll stop at nothing to see my head on a pike! Yours too!”

“It’s not as though we can’t defend ourselves. We’re demons, remember?” The woman’s voice grew bleak. “The Adamant Wall ought to keep them out for another week. And if the poor man dies, they won’t even be able to get what they’ve come for. Is he likely to die, Willowspear?”

“Probably not, my lady.” Willowspear was speaking very close at hand, speaking in a voice flat with shock. “He’s responding to the antidote.”

“That’s something, anyway.” Lord Ermenwyr seemed to have got up. Smith could hear his pacing footsteps. “As long as we’re here, let’s have a look at this spell of yours.”

“It’s a terribly old Portal Lock,” said the woman, and she seemed to be rising too, her voice was suddenly coming from a long way up. “That was why I thought of you at once. You were always so much cleverer at that kind of composition.”

Their voices were moving away now; with their echoing footsteps. Smith could hear Lord Ermenwyr saying, “Ah, but you were always better at research,” and the woman was saying something in a tone of chagrin when the echoes and distance made it impossible to hear more.

Silence, a crackle of fire, breathing; several people breathing. A hesitant male voice; “Brother Willowspear?”

“Who is that?”

“Greenbriar. I made the Black Mountain pilgrimage five years ago. You brought us bedding in the guest bowers.”

“I remember.” Willowspear’s voice still sounded unnatural. “She was teaching Fever Infusions that season.”

“Will She come to us, at the end? When we are killed?”

“You must trust Her children’s word that we will withstand the siege,” Willowspear replied, but he sounded unconvinced himself.

“I don’t know how I can face Her,” the other man said, with tears in his voice. “We failed Her trust. They came like a grass fire, they wouldn’t even talk to us, they just laid waste to everything! Brother Bellflower tried to save the orchard. He stood before the palings and shouted at them. They shot him with darts, then they marched over his body and cut the trees down. Thirty years of work killed in an hour…”

“It’s an illusion,” said another voice, too calmly. “She will bring the garden back. She can do such things. They have no real power over us.”

“They are madmen,” said a third voice. “You can see it in their eyes.”

“One can forgive the Children of the Sun, but these people…”

“We must forgive them too.”

“It was our fault. How could we keep the secret from Her own daughter?”

“Pray!” Willowspear’s voice cracked. “Be silent and pray. She must hear us.”

They were silent.

Smith was regaining the feeling in his limbs. Surreptitiously, he experimented with moving his fingers. He squinted between his eyelids, but could make out nothing but a blur of firelight and shadow.

He was moving his left hand outward, a fraction of an inch at a time, groping for anything that might serve as a weapon, when he heard the echoing voices returning.

“…right about that. I wouldn’t reach in there for an all-expenses-paid week in the best Pleasure Club in Salesh.”

“This was probably a bad idea,” said the woman, sighing.

“Well, I’m sure our poor Smith would prefer you should get hold of it than the Orphans,” said Lord Ermenwyr briskly. “We can make much better use of it.”

“I only wanted to study it!”

“My most beloved sister, it’s Power. You don’t study Power. You wield it. I mean, it pays to study it first, but nobody ever stops there.”

“I would have,” said the woman resentfully. “You really don’t understand the virtue of objective research, do you? Even Mother isn’t objective.”

“Mother especially,” said Lord Ermenwyr. His voice drew close to Smith. There was a pause. “Poor old bastard, he’s in a bad way, isn’t he? I suppose you can’t use him if he’s unconscious, either? If all you need is his hand—”

Instinct took over again in Smith, and if it had been able to make his body obey, it would have propelled him out of the room with one tigerlike spring. Unfortunately, his legs were in no mood to take orders from anyone, and he merely launched himself off whatever he was lying on before dropping heavily on his face on the floor.

There was a stunned silence before Lord Ermenwyr asked, “What was that? Premature rigor mortis?”

Smith felt Willowspear beside him at once, turning him, lifting him back on the cot in a sitting position. They were inside a cavern whose walls were lined with racks of bound codices. There were hundreds of volumes. He saw the light of a fire, and Lord Ermenwyr and the stately lady standing before it, staring at him. There were robed Yendri in the near background, seated in attitudes of meditation, but even they had opened their eyes and were staring at him.

He glared back at them.

“You lied to me,” he told Lord Ermenwyr, in a voice thick with effort and rage.

The lordling looked uncomfortable, but he lit his smoking tube with a nonchalant fireball, and said, “No, I didn’t. I just wasn’t aware I was telling the truth. Here’s my sister, see? Svnae, meet Smith. Smith, you are privileged to behold the Ruby Incomparable, Lady Svnae. And she is in mortal danger. It was uncanny precognition, gentlemen.”