The Flame Iris Temple Read online

  He said, “We need to head for the Jupol River, southwest of here.”

  “I will follow you,” she replied.

  Sandun had intended to head due south, making his way through the lesser karsts. But now, with the girl in tow, the river was the better route. As they walked through the autumn forest, the afternoon sun descended behind the branches. A few leaves still hung from the twigs. The forest floor was covered with bits of broken foliage. It had rained here recently, and the air was heavy with the scent of moist earth. He could feel the season in the air. At times, the wind gusted, roaring through the branches overhead and then falling silent.

  Suddenly, his stomach rebelled. He stopped and breathed heavily. His gorge rose, and he leaned against a beech tree, feeling a terrible pain from deep inside. He vomited out the little bits of corn cake he had eaten; sweat beaded his face as he spat out the foul bile in his mouth.

  Lena looked at him with concern and handed him a waterskin. Water he could drink, and he thanked her.

  As they journeyed, Sandun was relieved to discover that unlike the bandits he had slaughtered, the girl’s soul didn’t fill him with disgust. He saw her mind as she looked at him with concern; he didn’t understand what he saw, but it felt wholesome, straightforward.

  “You grew up on a farm?” Sandun asked her, breaking a long silence.

  “To be sure, I did. In the Vale, east of the old city.”

  “What happened?”

  “What didn’t happen!” The girl started chattering as though a floodgate had been opened. Did she talk because she was nervous, or did she find Sandun’s presence soothing? The girl had little reason to trust him, but she now acted like she was walking to the market with her best friend. He listened to the tone of her voice and tried to match it with her mind. The girl was nothing like Ajh, obviously. He remained silent as she wandered from one subject to another. Sandun thought perhaps the robbers had beaten her when she talked and so her voice had been pent up for weeks.

  Lena talked about the Red Swords and her older brother, Enar, who had joined them and then come back with others, requesting food, which of course they gave. “Then Kitran came an’ took our pigs not a week later. Father was spitting blood for days. I didn’t say a peep, not one, not for a whole day! We stayed in the woods one afternoon when a boy ran by and said the Kitrans were taking food again. They found some of what we hid but not all, made a mess of the house but didn’t get the chickens as we kept them with us, wrapped quiet in old rags.”

  The girl paused, clearly waiting for Sandun to reply. He wondered how any farmers could live when their food was taken and their houses ransacked. Did all farmers have hidden storage areas? Perhaps they had dug pits in the earth and carefully concealed the entrances with bushes or some such disguise. Those who didn’t use hidey-holes had to flee from the soldiers or starve.

  After a minute, Lena started up again. “Oh, and then the old city was smoking so much, never like that before. Stories from neighbors were the Red Crane Army from Tokolas, what you said you were part of, had arrived. Then they were gone, but the city kept smoking. And then things got worse. But no one said anything bad against the Red Crane Army, really.” Lena sounded concerned, as if worried that Sandun would take offense. “Father and some of the other men said they hoped the governor would stay and keep order in the Vale. But wishing don’t make the hens lay, nor the corn ripen.”

  “What about the Radiant Prince?”

  “Who?” Lena said with incomprehension in her voice.

  “The leader of the Red Swords,” Sandun clarified.

  “Oh, the Red Boy. Don’t know. The menfolk think he left with the Red Crane Army; why else did the Red Cranes come but to pluck him from the old city and carry him back south? Enar didn’t return. Don’t know what happened to the other Red Swords.”

  Sandun guessed what happened. With Nilin Ulim dead and Lord Jori Vaina’s army heading south away from Kemeklos, the situation in the Vale would have been chaotic as Nilin’s Serice mercenary army broke up and scattered to the four winds. No doubt the bandits Sandun had killed were Serice mercenaries who had stumbled upon Lena’s farm and taken her with them as their slave girl.

  He guessed that Lena’s troubles were a direct consequence of the decisions he and Lord Vaina’s advisors had made months earlier while sitting comfortably in the council chamber in Tokolas and drinking their fine tea. They had ignored the likely troubles that would result from their effort to rescue the Radiant Prince. But what else could they have done? Every decision would have resulted in suffering somewhere. Doing nothing would have been worse. As for staying to take control of the Vale, they didn’t have the strength. Still, he could fix this one problem; he could put Lena back on her feet.

  That evening, he gathered dry leaves from the base of some aspens; Lena, using a bit of ember she had saved from the ashes at the bandits’ camp, blew on it gently, patiently, and finally produced a flame. He sat there, not really looking at the flames but gathering power, akela, from around him, absorbing the hidden heat that was present almost everywhere to a greater or lesser degree. In some special places, like Ajh’s cavern, the akela was so plentiful he could gather all the power he could hold in just a few minutes. But in other places, that was not true. One place Ajh had brought him to was nearly devoid of the secret heat, although to normal eyes it was just a dry, grassy field.

  “You are a holy man, aren’t you?” Lena said.

  Sandun heard her voice as though from a great distance. He brought his attention back to her and the normal world. Was he? If he wasn’t, who had a better claim to the title? It seemed very strange to think in such terms, but the facts were unavoidable. Still, was this something he was going to admit to? “I suppose I am, yes.”

  “Thought so, I did. You come into the camp, no sounds of fighting, just a crack of thunder and with only a few clouds overhead. Saying all the gang are dead and not a scratch on you. And you staring at the corn cake as though you’d never seen the like before. Saying you’re from Kelten…you may as well say you’re from the silver moon in the sky.” She paused and then said in a low voice, “If you’re a ghost, I’m begging you, I’ve no wish to die. Yes, they took me against my will, but I can live with the shame. I was never going to be anything other than a farmer’s wife. I still can be.”

  “You are safe, Lena. I will see you to Jupelos, and they will take care of you there. I am not a ghost.”

  Lena looked at him intently. He sensed questions flickering in her mind, but she set them aside and curled up beside the fire and soon fell asleep.

  Was he a ghost? He didn’t think he was dead, but he didn’t feel normal either. He didn’t seem hungry, and when he tried to sleep, he did not. Instead, he wandered through the hidden world. Ajh had transformed him. A fragment of her spirit was inside him, and he was not the same person he had been. Yet there was no break, no discontinuity. His memories were intact; he remembered every day with Ajh, every thought she had shared with him. He was different, refined, improved. But not dead.

  After midnight, when the girl was sleeping soundly, he stood and stepped away from the fire. Several hundred yards away, he leaned his back against a broad tree and practiced his gift: creating tiny sparks and flashes of light. He even set some leaves on fire and then kicked dirt on them to put out the flames. He returned to their camp and laid a dead branch on the glowing coals. Lena opened her eyes and then closed them again. Sandun meditated till dawn.

  In the morning, the girl offered him another corn cake and ate one herself. Sandun lifted the cake to his mouth and licked its surface. He smelled it: the hints of smoke, the delicate odor of crushed cornmeal. It was a good smell, and it brought back more happy memories of his youth in Hepedion. But the thought of eating food, the idea of chewing and swallowing? No. Not after yesterday’s experience. He wasn’t hungry; Ajh had said food would be a problem for him in the future. He hadn’t
understood her at the time, but that was typical. Most of what Ajh had said he didn’t fully understand.

  Sandun had hoped that he could make for the Jupol River by heading southwest, but the land worked against him as a steep ridge formed a rampart running east–west. Below the ridge, a trail took a more westerly approach, and then, after midday, it began to curve to the north. Sandun was surprised to learn, from a man carrying a sack of charcoal, that the trail they were on met with the Jupol River at the town of Devek. That was where he and the Red Crane Army had defeated Nilin Ulim’s army, a battle that Sandun remembered vividly.

  Lena was not used to walking all day, and he himself was reluctant to come to the battlefield in the evening, so they halted in the midafternoon and found shelter in a small wooden shack. A rivulet came from a spring at the forest’s edge. Judging from the pig droppings, a swineherd used this place a few months ago. Sandun suspected the pigs had all been eaten when the Kitran cavalry swept through here in the days before the battle.

  They purchased some summer squash from a farmer for a few copper coins. Sandun tasted a piece, savoring the salt that Lena sprinkled liberally on the sliced vegetables. After the meal, Lena talked about her life on her family’s farm. Sandun didn’t pay much attention to her words but watched the colors of her mind as she recounted the deeds of their mousing cat and of their dog who barked whenever the chickens came too close to his favorite sleeping spot.

  This was another gift of Ajh: the ability to see people’s spirits. A hidden world existed on top of or within the physical world he had known all his life. The hidden world was confusing, and he understood almost nothing of what he saw. In a real sense, he didn’t see it, not with his eyes. He saw it through Ajh—the piece of her mind allowed him to see what was hidden to all other men.

  The first spirit he had ever seen was Ghost Wolf, the long-dead king of Stead Half Cliff. Later that same night, he had seen Kagne’s spirit when Sandun had used the golden circle to fight off Ghost Wolf’s attack. Two weeks later, he had seen Ell, blazing in the darkness, before Sandun had killed Nilin Ulim. Ajh said that Sandun had caught these glimpses of the secret world because his Piksie sword, Skathris, had given him a partial attunement. Partial was too generous a word, Sandun mused. The difference between what he had seen before and after Ajh’s gift was the difference between a moonless night and a sunny day.

  However, just because he could now see the hidden world and draw power from it did not mean he understood it. The hidden world was best explored when he was not moving, for sticks and stones still tripped him when he walked. The physical world had not become any less real just because he could see the hidden one. In fact, this second sight was dangerous at times, distracting and unhelpful.

  People, by contrast, were interesting. They existed in both worlds at the same time and in the same place. He could look at Lena’s face while she talked and see her brown eyes, her smiles and frowns as she spoke about the animals on the farm. Or he could watch her spirit, see the colors flow and shift as ideas took hold and emotional reactions built up and then faded away once an anecdote was finished. He could see as sleep began to soften her thoughts, and when he bid her good night and she closed her eyes, her spirit gradually changed. This was the second time he had watched her fall asleep, and it was the same both times. Now he recognized sleep.

  Mysteriously, Sandun could move across the hidden world while remaining motionless in the physical world. This was another gift of Ajh. But he could not comprehend how it was done. How could he be away from himself? If his spirit left his body, wouldn’t his body die? Yet the goddess had taught him this power, which felt as though he was following a spark of light, not fully under his control. The spark was not him, though it was closely connected to him. As he sat in silence beside the glowing embers, he followed the spark in a lazy spiral away from his body and into the forest.

  There he found what at first he thought was another sleeper. Had the spark taken him here for a reason? The spirit he was led to was very different from any he had seen before. This was not a sleeper, it was static, locked—dead. Ajh had told him about this: The spirits of the dead sometimes become wedged.

  “Is it possible to unwedge them? Free them?” Sandun had asked.

  You have done this already, though you knew it not, Ajh had replied, and he returned to the memory of the night beside the city of the dead, when he and the others had touched the ghosts, who had then vanished.

  You give them a small push and send them on their journey.

  “Journey to where?”

  I will show you…later.

  Sandun did as Ajh had instructed. He nudged the spirit, or the spark did, and the spirit faintly changed and then drifted away. He wondered if he could find the body in the daylight. Was it buried? Why had the spirit stayed with its body? Sandun returned back to his own body slowly, marking out a path in his mind. Sometimes this attempt to memorize the path failed, as the relation between the physical landscape and the hidden world was inconsistent.

  When the sun came up and after the girl had eaten, he walked into the forest. Lena followed silently with a puzzled expression. His effort to fix the location in the night proved effective, and he found the body after just a quarter of an hour’s search. It was a Kitran warrior who had dragged branches to cover himself and then died. Likely the Kitran was one of the many thousands who had fled from Devek, harried by Lord Vaina’s cavalry and Red Sword irregulars. The warrior had been dead for more than two months; the stench of death was gone, but a cloud of small white moths fluttered around the skull and the exposed parts of the skin and bones.

  “How did you know?” Lena asked. Sandun didn’t try to explain. Waving away the moths, he found the Kitran was armed with a steel axe (somewhat rusted), a bow (surprisingly unaffected by the elements), and two good daggers in sheaths. Sandun had no love for the Kitran soldiers and he had sent the Kitran’s spirit onward, which was more than enough effort on behalf of a dead enemy. Yet instead of turning away, he found he could not leave the body lying there. He used the Kitran’s axe and chopped at the earth, digging a shallow grave. Lena helped him cover the corpse with earth and leaves.

  “He fought against us at the battle of Devek,” Sandun told her. “After their final charge, he and other survivors fled, chased by our cavalry. He took an injury and hid here, off the trail, hoping to recover.”

  “Your cavalry?” she asked him sharply. “Who are you?”

  Sandun thought about her question for moment. He decided he could tell her something close to the truth. “I used to be an advisor for the governor of Kunhalvar. Perhaps I still am. I’ll find out when I return to Tokolas.”

  The girl sank to her knees and bowed her head. “Forgive this ignorant farm girl for her disrespectful words and behavior.”

  “Forgive you for what? That you talked to me as though I was just an ordinary man? You have done nothing wrong, and I have taken no offense.” Sandun raised her to her feet and handed her the two Kitran daggers. She didn’t look at him and instead put the weapons in her sash.

  Placing the rusty axe in his belt, Sandun examined the Kitran’s bow critically. Without a bowstring, it was useless; it could not even serve as a walking stick as its natural shape was that of a semicircle. Sandun braced it against the foot of an ash tree and bent it as though he would string it. No obvious cracks appeared between the layer of horn and wood. He concluded the bow might sell for some coins, so he carried it over his shoulder.

  The two reached the battlefield of Devek around noon. The wind whistled through the dry grasses with a sad sigh, and the temperature was colder now that they were out of the forest—the sun seemed to have no warmth. Signs of the great conflict were present wherever Sandun looked: rotted skeletons of horses, broken spears, scraps of armor, tens of thousands of hoofprints, and piles of horse manure all across the valley.

  As they neared the river, he saw monks: pri
ests of Eston walking around a small rise. That must be the burial mound, he thought. Nearly a thousand soldiers of Kunhalvar were buried there. Sandun hadn’t seen the mound, but he knew the work had been started the day after the battle. He hadn’t known that priests were going to be hired to pray for the dead; it might not have been mentioned because it was so obvious.

  At the riverbank, several boats were drawn up. He wondered if family members came to view the mass grave. Despite the depressing scene, he was hopeful that he could buy passage on a boat heading downriver to Jupelos.

  There were many spirits here. He didn’t want to see them, but he couldn’t avoid it. However, he had a mission, and he truly had no desire to stay and nudge the wedged spirits on. That was what the priests were trying to do, though they did not know it. He wished them success.

  “This was a huge battle,” Lena said quietly. “There must have been thousands of horses and men here. Broken arrows are all around.”

  “It was a great and terrible battle,” Sandun replied. “The final charge by the Kitran army, five thousand horses and buffalo, all in a line that went clear across the valley, from north to south. The earth shook, the dust rose up behind them like giant wave. But we won, they broke, and we didn’t.”

  She looked up at him with a strange expression.

  Half a mile south, away from the burial mound of the Red Crane Army, an impromptu settlement had sprung up: at least thirty tents along with three or four wooden structures. Sandun thought the wooden houses were almost certainly made out of the wreckage of the battleship that had been smashed by Nilin’s log trap on the morning of the battle. At this impromptu village, Sandun inquired about passage downriver. A boatman offered to take the two of them for 950 coins, but Sandun found another boat leaving the next day that would only charge them 700. The cheaper boat was larger and likely slower. He needed money to buy Lena food, so he paid for passage on the cheaper boat. Even though it was going downstream, it would still take five days to reach Jupelos.