Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

When Jill first asked if there was a sequel, I said no – until it became impossible to keep saying that, because I was holding it in my hand.

So this one is for Jill, with my thanks.

Water. They were lost in a world of it, their ship slicing through the silky waters of the open ocean, prow pointed to where the sun rose out of the water every morning. The ocean was smooth, cobalt blue, reflecting only sky. Sometimes there would be porpoises racing the ship or playing in its spreading wake; sometimes, a long way away, something huge and dark broke surface with its fin, blowing spray – but days went by with nothing in the world but sun and sky and sea, and the days were long.

The nights were longer still; quiet, soundless except for the creaking of the ship and the splash and lap of water against the hull. Out on the prow there was a space where ropes were coiled. Empty barrels were tied up in a raft right up near the bow of the ship. It made a good, comfortable nest, and the hiss of parting waters as the ship cleaved through them made for a gentle, soothing lullaby.

It was there that the first dream came to Amais.

Curled up in a comfortable loop of thick twisted rope, she might have believed that the sounds of water lapping against something hard and solid actually came from the sea and the ship she was on – but the sound was wrong for that. It was the sound of water breaking on something stationary, not a travelling ship’s hull. And after that, when she blinked and looked around, it was easy to see that she had left the ship far behind and was in some strange and yet oddly familiar place.

There were two people in the dream, aside from the dreamer herself: a woman and a little girl, holding hands. They had their backs to the dreamer and she could not see their faces. She could not see the woman clearly at all, just the shape of her in silhouette through a translucent parasol which covered her slender body down to her waist. They were both wearing old-fashioned, almost antique gowns, court garb which existed only in paintings and in stories; the little girl wore her long dark hair loose except for a topknot high on her head, held by two black lacquer hairpins. Behind them, steps with a broken wooden hand-railing led down into dirty water splashing against the bottom step. Floating debris bobbed in the water and piled up against the rise of the stair. It was dark, but there was a soft light about, something that resembled the way the sky looked when it was reflecting a huge but distant fire.

That was all. The water, the stairs, the two incongruously clean and elegant women in their rich court gowns, as though waiting for death or for rescue, trapped on a high point while fire and flood raged around them. Just like on the ship – there was water everywhere, but this water was dark and bitter and lifeless and life-taking. It was the aftermath of something, a disaster beyond words. Only a little bit away from the edge of the lowest stair the water was black and opaque and somehow passively threatening, as though it were about to rise, engulf even this last little spot where they clung to survival and safety.

Water, lapping. Water, spilled, insistent, all-enveloping – like a primeval world, the world where the earth had yet to rise from the sea of creation. As though a world was ended…or was about to begin.

The little girl turned her head slightly – just enough to cast a glance back to the spot from where the dreamer watched, hovering like a transparent and incorporeal ghost behind the two figures on the platform at the top of the drowned stairs. The child’s face was obscured by strands of wind-tousled hair, but she had huge dark eyes, enormous in her pale face, glittering with their own light, the light that might have been knowledge, or recognition, or pity.

Then she turned away again, her hair spilling back across her shoulders, falling to where a formal sash was tied in the ceremonial way, so that a long train of it fell over the knot at the back of her waist and flowed down the back of her gown. The train had writing on it, but it was not something that the dreamer could read – at least not here, not now, not in this half-light, not before the rest of the dream was made clear. The little girl held on to the older woman’s free hand with an air that managed to be both terrified and protective at the same time.

The sky was pearl grey, streaked with improbable shades of cinnamon and apricot; the air was alive with breezes that whipped and collided and teased the waters below into an unquiet whispering sound.

It was the end of the world.

It was the beginning.

Cover Page

Title Page The Embers of Heaven Alma Alexander

Excerpt

The Language of Lost Things

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Paper Swords and Iron Butterflies

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

The Street of Red Lanterns

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

The Golden Rising

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

The Embers of Heaven

I almost expected

I have dreamt this

Historical Note

Glossary and Characters

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Alma Alexander

Copyright

About the Publisher

The old gods dwell in their abandoned temples in your memory – sad places dusty with disuse, with dark altars empty of offerings. But they endure the weight of these with what power they may claim as long as their names are remembered, until the hour in which they are finally and irrevocably forgotten. Then they blow away like dust in the wind, like the cold ashes from the dead altars. On such ashes as this our world is built. In it the footsteps of new gods may one day leave traces of their passing, on their way to their own cold oblivion.

The Book of Old Gods

There were only two questions that governed Amais’s existence.

She would wander out of the house, still wearing some esoteric item of Syai clothing her mother, Vien, kept carefully folded away in a wooden chest, or proudly step out to the snickers and astonished stares of her peers with her hair in what she fondly believed was a good rendition of a hairstyle once worn by empresses at the Syai court. Her mother would strip off the offending garments or impatiently tug Amais’s wealth of thick curly hair out of its badly pinned and unruly coils into a semblance of order with a wooden comb, and murmur despairingly,

‘Why can’t you be like everyone else?’

But when Amais rebelled at learning the long and ancient history of her ancestral land and her kinfolk, or refused to go hunting for incense or some out-of-season fruit required for sacrifice to the spirits of those ancestors in the small shrine set apart in what was in effect a larger shrine to Syai itself in her mother’s childhood home – citing the fact that none of her friends had to do such outlandish things – the wind would change. Vien’s face would assume an expression of martyred sorrow, and she would ask instead,

‘Do you have to do what everyone else does?’

Perhaps it would have been easier if it hadn’t been for the two grandmothers and the games they played for the souls of their bewildered granddaughters, Amais and, in her turn, Nika.