The Firebird's Vengeance (30 page)

“Are you sure you can do this, mistress?” she asked warily. “You are still weak from your last working.”

In answer, Tsan Nu pulled off her slipper, one of the pair she had risked the fire to retrieve. Now Mae Shan could see a small tear in the lining. Tsan Nu stuck two fingers into the tear and pulled out a circle of braided cloth, black, green, blue, and red.

Tsan Nu held up the amulet for her guard’s inspection. “This is different than before,” she assured Mae Shan. “My father did the working already, I just have to set it into motion. It will take very little magic from me.”

Mae Shan swallowed, unlooked-for hope forming inside her. “Then work your spell, mistress, I will keep watch.”

“I will need a bowl of water.”

Mae Shan wiped the cooking pot clean, filled it from one of the water bottles, and set it before Tsan Nu. The child held up the braided circle, and started to work at the knot that held its complex weaving closed. As she did, she began to speak, but the words sounded strange. They were not the singsong of the spell tongue she had used before. These words were harsh and clipped. They had the rhythm of the drum rather than the zither. Mae Shan realized she must be speaking one of the northern tongues to work this northern spell.

Mae Shan turned her attention to the house door. Come for your daughter, Master Kalami, I pray you
, she entreated silently.
Let me give over the care of your family so I may go aid in the care of mine
.

Kalami ran through the Shifting Lands for a long time, for a short time, for no time at all. He held tight to the name he sought as he ran through the thick forest of evergreen trees, his footsteps rustling and crackling on the carpet of needles underfoot. The trees whispered and creaked as their branches lifted to move themselves from his passage. Eyes watched him, he knew that, but he was permitted to pass, so they were not the Vixen’s eyes and that was all that mattered.

He caught sight of a birch tree, stark, white, and incongruous among the pines. Then there was another, then a grove of them, and hope leapt in him and sped his feet and tightened his thoughts. He was near.

A small stream trickled across his path. He vaulted over it. An ancient birch, craggy from the weight of its years, raised its branches, whipping them back and forth, into his eyes, against his back. But Kalami had known far worse pain and greater fear than this, and although he slowed his pace, he did not stop.

Beyond the birch waited a fence. Human bones tied with leather and sinews had been used to shore up the wooden staves. Kalami had thought now that he was dead such a sight could have no terror for him, but as he approached the fence, he found he had been wrong, and he trembled. And the fence was nothing compared to what walked in the dirt yard beyond it. The house Ishbushka turned slowly on great, taloned legs. He had stood here before, but now he heard the grating as its claws scraped the ground, the screech as they scraped against stone, its muscle creaking like timber. The obscene dwelling measured its restless pace by its fearful mistress’s will, allowing her to see all the worlds from its windows if she so wished.

A sagging gate hung between two fence posts. It was shut tight, and Kalami reached out tentatively to push it open. But before he could touch it, a black blur leapt up onto the right-hand gatepost. He started backward, and then realized it was nothing more or less than a black cat with a white blaze on its chest. The creature regarded him steadily and with intelligent recognition in its eyes. Kalami was not surprised. He had met this cat before. What did surprise him was the wave of cold he felt wash over him. It came from the animal’s bright gaze, from the bones of the fence, from Ishbushka itself. How could cold touch him as he was? But it did, that cold turned his mind thick and heavy.

Drawing his composure together, he reverenced politely in the courtly Isavaltan style.

“And what brings the great sorcerer of Tuukos to this house?” the cat inquired.

“I am come to seek an audience with your mistress,” Kalami said as he straightened.

The cat tucked all four of its legs up under itself, settling comfortably onto the post. “Why should she grant such an audience?”

“I have power I would place in her service.”

“You are dead,” said the cat flatly, twitching its tail. Cold emanated from its voice, from the whole of its being. “You are nothing beyond the boundaries of this place. If you had power she wanted, she would have taken it by now.”

The cold and the paralysis it brought threatened to overwhelm Kalami. He had one last cast.

“The Vixen claims me for her own. Perhaps that fact would be of interest.”

“Ah!” The cat’s yellow eyes gleamed and the cold subsided just a little. Kalami felt his mind clear again. “Now you have said it. Now you understand your place.” The cat stretched out its hind leg and began washing it lazily. “If you step through the gate, she will grant you audience.” The cat stopped washing and regarded him again, this time with hunger in its eyes. “And perhaps more than that.”

The gate opened with a long shriek. Beyond it waited two huge, black mastiffs, their eyes as awake and intelligent as the cat’s. Cold and weak, Kalami went through. As he crossed the line of the bone fence, the voices that were the constant background of his journey fell silent. Kalami felt light, alone, and small, as if he were a moth or a feather and that any wind might blow him away. Ahead of him waited Baba Yaga’s fearful dwelling. The dogs stalked beside him, their ears alert, but for what he did not know. One scratched at the dirt. In response, Ishbushka knelt, and its door hissed as it fell open. Still escorted by the mastiffs, Kalami mounted the steps that creaked and groaned underneath him, although he could not feel the touch of the boards.

Inside Ishbushka’s single room, built of bone and hung with bone, Baba Yaga worked at her loom. A bright fire burned in her hearth of skulls. The flicker of the flame drew his gaze and for a moment he saw in there a palace with a golden tower at its center. Saffron walls protected its lovely gardens and wide stone court. Voices rose whispering from the flames, and Kalami drew back. The Heart of the World gleamed in Baba Yaga’s hearth, and in a moment it was gone.

“So,” said the Old Witch, looking up from her work with black eyes that glittered in the firelight. “You would come to me?”

Kalami tried to pull his wits together. He had faced Baba Yaga in life. He knew her ways. He was still a sorcerer. He still had his powers and his learning.

“I do, mistress. I am …”

“Would I have admitted you, little spirit, if I did not know you?” Her bone-thin finger traced the pattern of her macabre weaving. “You are Valin Kalami. You were trapped by the Vixen while you were yet living, and now you come to me.”

“Because it is only you who are great enough to shelter me from her.” Kalami reverenced deeply. “You are the only one she cannot deceive.”

“You seek to flatter me,” said Baba Yaga. “You will not do so by speaking such simple truths.”

“I seek shelter,” said Kalami. “In return I offer my service.”

“You are dead,” said the Old Witch bluntly. “You have no service to offer, only self.”

Kalami thought of the
lokai
, of the horror of the hunt, and of knowing that he would be caught, and wrenched in two, set to run and caught again. “Then I offer myself.”

Baba Yaga’s cold eyes gleamed and she clacked her iron teeth. “I am not as your other mistress, and this is not as your life. You seek to barter, and think you may yet escape any bargain that you make. You are a fool, little ghost, without blessing or true understanding.”

Kalami felt how small he was, how light and fragile, as if he were only a dream, or a memory, which, in truth, he was. He could drift away and be caught on a thorn like a cobweb.

But Baba Yaga laid her finger again on her cloth of sinews and hair and bared her teeth at what she saw there.

“Your daughter calls you.”

Kalami started. He thought to say the child’s name, and but held his peace.

Baba Yaga’s gaze warmed slightly with something like approval. “She calls her father for succor, for the Heart of the World has burned down.”

She was using the amulet he left her. He should feel it, tugging at his mind, opening his inward senses. But he felt nothing at all. He was beyond all such bindings.

Baba Yaga considered for a moment. Kalami sensed the currents of the room shift and slip, as if the world around him was being woven. He glanced at the fire and again saw the Heart of the World in its depths. A seer had once told him that all fallen things belong to the Old Witch. He had not known until now what that truly meant.

“You will answer your daughter,” Baba Yaga said. “I will permit it.”

“Thank you, mistress.” Anna, Tsan Nu, the daughter of his blood, his sorcerous child. There were ties between the two of them that might save him yet. It was strange that he had not thought of her before. Truly he was not what he had been. Not yet.

Again the witch clacked her iron teeth. “You should give thanks to Bridget Lederle for this. Without her intervention, even the call of blood could not have reached you.

“Return to the river, speak with your child. Do this and you will find the shelter you seek, but do not forget the words you have spoken here.”

Kalami wanted to say “I never could,” but he found he feared the response, so instead he reverenced and moved toward the door. The dogs stood aside to let him pass. He traveled down Ishbushka’s rickety steps, across the yard and to the bone fence. He passed through the gate under the watchful eyes of the cat, and became at once immersed in the ocean of noise. The birch drew back its branches for him, revealing the brown river that had been so far away before he entered Ishbushka.

Kalami stared out at the surface of the rushing water, hearing in its chatter and song all the noise of life and wondering when it was he had died. Anger ran through him as strong as the current of the river before him. He did not know what to do, what he was or what he would become, and his ignorance infuriated him.

He also did not know what would happen next.

Then, the water roiled, the murmur of the water and the roar of the voices around him faded, and he heard one clear word.

“Father.”

Tsan Nu stared into the pot of water. It was so hard and so long. She had never felt her magics reach so far. She had told Mae Shan this working would take little effort from her, but that was not the entire truth. This particular amulet’s spell would use her own magic, drawing it out until it touched her father, as easily as if she reached out her hand to him.

Or so it should have been. But now she felt stretched so thin it became painful. It was as if she crossed whole worlds instead of a single country. Every noise around her seemed unbearably loud. Even the sound of Mae Shan’s breathing grated against her eardrums. Then, faintly and from far away, she heard her father’s voice. It echoed up from the cooking pot, weakened by distance and effort.

Anna?

Relief gushed through her, so strong it almost broke her concentration. Only Father called her Anna. It was her birth name, and he had told her she should not speak it in the Heart, especially not before the Nine Elders, lest they use it and her horoscope against her. She closed her eyes and forced herself to focus. “Father, I need you.”

I know. Anna. He sounded sad. The Heart of the World is gone
.

That jolted Anna. It had not occurred to her that he might have known. “Where are you, Father? Why didn’t you come for me?”

Anna, you must be strong, my child. I have died. Anna. I am speaking from the Shifting Lands
.

Anna’s eyes flew open and she stated at the shimmering water before her. She couldn’t understand. She felt as if she had stepped outside herself and this was someone else. Father had never been with her, not since she was a tiny child, but he had always been there in the background. He had been in letters and in the amulet she hid in her shoe. That he had gone on, that he would soon fade into the Shifting Lands, and she didn’t know, hadn’t felt … that he wouldn’t be there, ever again … that he wasn’t truly there now …

“I wanted to reach you before,” she said, trying to find a way to understand how she could have not known. “But the fire was too bad. Mae Shan wouldn’t let us stop.”

Your Mae Shan was right
.

“I should have drawn your horoscope. Then we would have known and I could have saved you and then you could have saved me.”

Father was silent for a long moment, and Tsan Nu wondered if he felt as sad as she did.
Where are you going, Anna?
he finally asked.
I cannot see
.

“Mae Shan is taking me to her family. We were going to wait there for you. Mae Shan says it will be very bad in Hung-Tse. She says the Phoenix is angry with everyone. I tried to tell the Nine Elders that.” She wanted him to know she had done her best, as he always told her she should do, that she had listened to him, and to her teachers.

Father’s voice grew soothing.
You are both right. The Phoenix is very angry, and you must leave Hung-Tse
.

“How?” Tsan Nu felt the fear growing close around her again. “Master Liaozhai hasn’t taught me to walk the Shifting Lands yet, and Mae Shan only knows Hung-Tse. Will the dowager help us?” Father had often spoken of the dowager empress and how much she depended on him.

The dowager is gone as well, Anna. There is no one in Isavalta who can help you now
. There was an undercurrent to his voice turning it tight and brittle. Was he angry? She couldn’t tell.

“What should I do?” Her voice came out very small.

Anna, I want to help you, my daughter, but I need your help to do so
.

Hope slipped between her and her fear. “Just tell me how, Father.”

Father spoke carefully, as he did when he was trying to make absolutely sure she understood. Tsan Nu strained to hear every word.

We are bound by blood, Anna. If you open your heart to me, the spirit that I am can enter into it and from there I will be able to guide you and help you return to Tuukos, where you have other family
.