The Fire Seer (4 page)

Mandir heard the hesitation in her voice. Did she think he might force himself on a woman? Her opinion of him must be low indeed.

“Maybe you don’t commit the atrocities, but you’re part of the organization that allows them to happen,” said Rasik. “Your organization also takes children from their families and burns people alive if they don’t comply with your laws.”

“I’m hardly going to apologize for enforcing the Coalition’s laws,” said Taya. “When people use unlawful magic to commit murder, as someone has done here in Hrappa, they must be stopped. And you’re forgetting the good work the Coalition does. We heal people and plants and animals. And we keep the mountain tribes at bay.”

Rasik rolled his eyes. “The mountain tribes are nothing but starving, disorganized savages—hardly a threat. As for your healing, it’s not charitable. To heal a sick animal, you charge half the animal’s market value. To heal a person, you charge so much that he must choose between death or poverty.”

“We must cover our expenses,” said Taya. “Healing may seem like a simple procedure to you, but it took years of training for the
ilittum
to learn the skill.”

“Also,” said Mandir, “the mountain men are neither disorganized nor savages. You only think they’re harmless because you’re not the one out there fighting them.”

“Are you telling me your people lack for gold?” said Rasik, pointedly looking Taya up and down.

Mandir spurred his horse forward, placing it between Taya and Rasik. “She’s under my protection. You keep your eyes to yourself.”

“Is that a new Coalition law?” said Rasik. “I’m not allowed to look at your women?”

“Leave him be,” said Taya to Mandir.

Rasik sent his horse into a trot, heading for the city gates. Taya followed.

Mandir cantered after them, annoyed at everyone, including himself, but he couldn’t remain in ill spirits for long. A gentle breeze brushed his face as he passed out of the city gates into the river lands. Taya’s black mare, seeing the fields open up before her, threw up her head, opening her nostrils wide to take in the scents. She half reared, eager for a run.

“Easy,” Taya soothed, turning her in a tight circle to regain control.

Mandir rode up beside Taya and murmured, “That mare’s as spirited as you are.”

Taya’s brow furrowed with suspicion.

Mandir sighed inwardly. Could he not pay her a simple compliment, tease her in the most harmless way, without making her think his intentions were ill?

“This way,” said Rasik, clucking to his brown horse and sending him eastward, away from the river.

Taya’s high-mettled black mare followed him, and Mandir fell in line behind the two of them. He despised floodplains. There were never any roads because every year the Lioness overflowed and destroyed everything. It was the curse and gift of Agu the Water Mother, who humbled mankind by laying low his works. But after the inundation, the soil was so rich the farmers could grow anything.

The farmers had been industrious. Although the season was early and the young plants had barely emerged from the ground, the land was already a mazework of irrigation canals, sluices, and gates. Mandir gave the bay his head, letting him pick his way through the mess.

“I had not realized so much cotton was grown in Hrappa,” said Taya.

Mandir blinked. How did she know what the farmers were growing? The plants were just tiny things, and they all looked alike.

“Many of our farmers have contracts with our cloth merchant requiring them to grow cotton,” said Rasik.

“Are you sure these aren’t banana plants?” said Mandir. He hated it when Taya knew more than he did, which meant it was time to tease her. He could always get a rise out of her with a reference to her banana-farming past.

Taya sent him a look of contempt. “A banana plant would be higher than your head. And they’re never grown in floodplains.”

He grinned at her. “My mistake. You’re the expert on bananas.” Flood and fire, what was he
doing
? He should just leave her alone.

“For your information,” said Taya, “this is cotton, and that, and that.” She pointed to several vast fields. “Over there is a melon field. That’s wheat, behind it is mustard, and to the right is naked six-row barley. But you can see it’s mostly cotton.”

“As you say,” said Mandir, disappointed she hadn’t responded with as much indignance as he’d hoped.

“This is where the boy was killed,” called Rasik.

He’d ridden ahead, so Mandir and Taya hurried to catch up. Rasik sat his horse in the middle of a large bare patch of ground, a neat rectangle bounded on all sides by irrigation channels and sprouting with young weeds.

“I don’t see any evidence of fire,” said Mandir, dismounting from the blood bay for a closer look.

“The ground was still wet from the inundation and had been freshly tilled,” said Rasik. “It was little more than bare, damp soil. Only the boy himself was burned.”

“What was done with the body?” asked Taya.

“He was given to Isatis,” said Rasik.

Taya hopped off Pepper. Mandir involuntarily moved toward her, mesmerized by the motion. She was lovely enough when standing still, but when she moved, she had the grace of a gazelle. “Are you going to scry?” he asked.

She jumped, apparently unaware he’d been so close. “Yes, of course. I can’t guarantee Isatis will tell me anything, but if she does, we’ll know it’s the truth. Agu mostly lies.”

Taya ground-tied Pepper and headed toward the murder site.

“The Water Mother lies?” said Rasik. “What does she mean by that?”

“Exactly what she said.” Mandir took one more look around the horizon for possible enemies—unlikely in such open country—and settled down to watch Taya work.

Chapter 5: Hrappa

Taya paced the bare ground, searching for hazards, anything flammable that might catch while she scried. Scrying required great concentration because of the high level of language proficiency Isatis demanded of her, and she didn’t want to have to devote even a corner of her mind to worrying about safety and keeping the fire under control. She also looked for signs of Hunabi’s death, anything to indicate where his body had lain, but time and weather had erased the physical evidence.

“Where was the body found?” she called to Rasik.

“Move to your left.”

She obeyed.

“Back a step. There—more or less.”

Here Hunabi had burned to death. She called fire out of the air in front of her. In the distance, Rasik gasped. She smiled at his naiveté. Calling fire in midair was an easy trick; even untrained jackals could do it. Scrying was the difficult task.
Come in power, Mother Isatis
, she called in the mother tongue.
Come in greatness
. She rotated in a circle, slowly, with her hand outstretched. Fire flowered from her hand, blossoming into a great wall that encircled her in a sweltering wheel of death.

She was in the world of Isatis the Fire Mother. The heat was brutal; she could not survive long in the Fire Mother’s embrace.

She spoke in the mother tongue, her words crisp and clear.
Mother, you are death and you are rebirth. You are the seed of vengeance, the lioness in the grass, the light that shows the way in the darkness. I am your humble daughter, who loves and fears you. I come to ask a favor.

Isatis responded, filling the wall of fire with images. A pack of onagers galloping by. A flood so vast it tore down trees. A pair of lovers sneaking away for a tryst in the fields. All images from the past. Some of them might be centuries old.

Taya spoke again.
A boy died here, your prey, when the soil lay dark and heavy from Agu’s receding. I would know more of how he died.

Images followed: men burning on stakes. A woman flung onto a burning funeral pyre. A man struck with a flaming arrow.

Taya paused, momentarily flustered. These were images of anger. She’d offended Isatis, but she was not sure how. Even the slightest mispronunciation or misuse of a word could draw her ire. Taya would try again.
Great Mother, it was not the boy’s time. He had many fields yet to sow.
This was a slight deception. Hunabi had been destined for a bureaucrat’s life, not a farmer’s, but Mother Isatis was old-fashioned. She liked farmers.

This time there were no images in response at all. The flames burned clear and empty.

Taya swallowed, her throat parched, her body boiling with sweat.
Great Mother, you hunger for the flesh of the unworthy. Grant me this vision. I will find his killer and satisfy your craving.

Instantly an image appeared in the flames, and Taya had the disconcerting feeling that Isatis had been waiting for her to name exactly that bargain. She peered at the image. A young woman and a young man quarreled in the middle of an empty mud plain that could be the very place she now stood. The young man could be the murder victim. She wasn’t sure, but he was about the right age, and of similar coloration to Kalbi, the magistrate’s living son.

The woman was visibly upset—frightened of the man, Taya thought, but also angry. The young man was angry too. Words were exchanged, though Taya could not hear them, since fire visions were soundless. The quarrel seemed to be the woman’s, because twice the man tried to walk away and the woman grabbed his arm and turned him back around. Taya watched closely, observing and memorizing details—what the couple were wearing, their size and age, the color of their hair and eyes. Isatis would never show her a vision a second time.

The man walked away again and then, without warning, burst into flame. Taya had been half expecting it, but it took her by surprise all the same, and it took the woman in the vision by surprise too. Her screams looked so real, and her eyes were so wide and horrified that Taya instantly wrote off the possibility that the woman herself was the jackal. Hunabi fell to the wet ground and rolled to suffocate the flames, and as his frame dropped from the middle of the scene, he revealed a third figure, another young woman, who had been standing behind him in the distance.

Taya estimated this new woman’s age at seventeen or eighteen. She was dressed in peasant’s clothes—homespun cotton, undyed, with an indigo belt. Her dusty brown hair would look pretty if cleaned up, Taya thought, but it didn’t appear she’d looked after herself, or been looked after, for some time. The girl was too far away in the vision for Taya to judge her eye color or register any identifying marks.

Hunabi dug himself into the mud, trying to extinguish the flames, but the flames reignited, again and again. Meanwhile, the woman Hunabi had been arguing with ran away. The mother goddess showed Taya Hunabi’s entire death, which lasted a long time. The teenaged girl stayed for all of it, stone-faced. Then the vision faded.

May your greatness endure forever, Mother
. Taya let her fire walls drop. Exhausted and sweating, she staggered out of the field to her black mare. Rasik and Mandir stared. She knew she must look a fright. Striking bargains with Isatis was hot work. She pulled her copper cup from where it was tied to the saddle pad and swirled it gently. She called to the invisible water droplets in the air. The droplets materialized and began, slowly, to fill the cup.

“So,” said Mandir. “Was Isatis in a talkative mood?”

“She was,” said Taya. He would have to wait until later to hear what she’d seen. It was Coalition policy not to reveal the contents of visions to people outside the Coalition, and Rasik was present.

A few swallows of water had gathered in her cup. She gulped them greedily and began to call more.

Mandir appeared at her shoulder and poured some water from his own cup into hers, apparently having called it himself.

“How do you
do
that?” asked Rasik. “Make water out of thin air.”

Taya leaned against Pepper and closed her eyes, too tired to answer the question. It was funny how people not accustomed to Coalition
ilittu
were impressed by the simplest tricks. Calling water was a second-year talent.

“As initiates at the temple, we learn some interesting things,” said Mandir. “One of them is that there is water in the air all the time, even on dry days like today.”

“Nonsense,” said Rasik.

“On damp days you can almost feel it,” said Mandir. “The heaviness in the air, that’s water. But on dry days it’s there too, just not as much. We merely call it out of the air and into our cups.”

Her eyes were closed, but she could feel the heat of Mandir’s body nearby, and his arm moving in counterpoint to hers as he swirled his cup. He stopped her hand for a moment and added his water to hers. She opened her eyes and drank. She was beginning to feel less parched.

“Should we head back for now?” asked Mandir. “Perhaps stop by the public baths?”

“Yes,” said Taya. A bath sounded delicious. Then, like it or not, she’d have to discuss with Mandir what she’d seen, write it up—her least favorite part of Coalition work—and figure out how to track down an adolescent murderess in a town the size of Hrappa.

Chapter 6: Mohenjo Temple, Nine Years Ago

The food at Mohenjo Temple was weird. Sitting alone at a table in the dining hall, Taya picked through it, searching for something appetizing. The flaky white stuff was probably fish, just not a variety she’d eaten before. And the barley she recognized, though it was mixed with unfamiliar yellow and green vegetables. But what were those little brown things that looked like fungus? What were those red round things on the side of her plate?

Her stomach churned in warning. Maybe she’d made a mistake coming to Mohenjo Temple. She couldn’t imagine taking the
kimat
and leaving, but nobody wanted her here, and everything was so different and strange. Would she ever adjust to this new way of life?

Perhaps she just needed to take the newness in small doses. She decided she would eat the fish and the barley, no matter how bad they tasted, and leave the fungus things where they were. As for the red round things, she’d try one and see what she thought of it. She’d never eaten anything red before.

She popped one in her mouth and started to chew. Instantly she regretted it. The fruit—if it was a fruit—was tough and bitter. Her eyes watered, and she glanced around the hall to see if anyone was watching. Could she remove it from her mouth without being seen?