The Fire Seer (25 page)

She gave a brusque nod.

“During my Year of Penance, I learned how to fill that hole by helping people. By being kind instead of cruel.”

Taya looked him askance. “Forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical. You, Mandir, are the last person in the valley I would ever expect to come to such a conclusion.”

Mandir shrugged. “In Tufan’s household, I learned how to dominate, how to manipulate, how to control. In a limited sense, those skills served me well: they brought me status and success. But they also brought me misery, and I have to tell you that Tufan himself has never been a happy man. From Neshi I learned a new way to exist. I’m not good at it yet. I have decades of unlearning to do. I’m stumbling around blind, and I must ask forgiveness for my missteps. But I feel that at long last I’ve found the right path. It’s a hard path, a confusing one, but already it pleases me better than the other.”

He glanced at Taya. Her brows were raised. She looked half doubting and half intrigued. Finally she said, “If you’re telling the truth, there’s more to you than I thought there was.”

∞

As they left the floodplains and began the rocky ascent to the high ground where Zash’s plantation lay, Taya thought about the man riding silently at her flank. Mandir was full of surprises today. She had never considered that he might have taken his punishment, the Year of Penance, at all seriously. She’d always supposed he would just shoulder his way thoughtlessly through it, doing what he had to do, rolling his eyes all the while at the injustice of a royal’s son having to atone for his misbehavior.

Yet the work he’d done during his Year of Penance seemed to have moved him. He was charmingly shy in speaking about it, unable to articulate exactly what he had come to understand about himself. Still, it was clear that the experience had changed him. She’d been seeing signs of it almost since the day she came to Hrappa, but she had not believed it; she’d thought for sure he was employing a ruse to gain her trust so that he could torment her some more. She had not thought a man so prone to cruelty and intimidation could ever learn to find harmony with others.

The slope that led up to Zash’s plantation grew steeper. Pepper, never a horse to shirk her duty, leaned into the work, picking her way up the hill at a trot. Taya placed herself forward over the mare’s neck to aid her in the climb.

“Let me go ahead of you,” said Mandir, surging forward on his blood bay. “I’m not sure we’re entirely safe on Zash’s land.”

She let her
quradum
pass, admiring him as he went. Mandir had never lacked for physical appeal; she’d admired him since the day she met him at Mohenjo Temple. It had never been his form that disgusted her; only his cruelty.

The blood bay disappeared over a final outcropping of rock. Then Pepper gathered herself and made the leap.

On level ground, Taya pulled up the mare. Ahead of her stood Zash’s sprawling wasp’s nest of a house. An evening breeze feathered the fronds of the date palms that flanked the entryway, and she shivered despite the heat. She saw neither Zash nor any of his workers near the house, and it worried her that she didn’t know where the man was. If he had their
kimat
, he could be dangerous.

“How are we going to do this?” asked Taya in a low voice. “Do we accuse him directly?”

“Not yet, I think,” said Mandir. “I want to search his house before we make any assumptions. We don’t know for sure that he was involved.”

Palm fronds rustled. Normally a homey sound, this evening it felt menacing, like the rattling of dry bones.

“I doubt he’s at home,” she said. “Not with the sun still up.”

Mandir hopped off his horse. “Stay where you are for the moment. I’ll go and see.” He pulled the reins over the blood bay’s head and gave them a gentle tug to ground tie the animal. He approached the front door and knocked.

Taya waited in silence, but nobody answered. Perhaps they should look for Zash in the banana fields. She slid off Pepper, who whickered and nudged her arm.

Mandir knocked again. “Nobody home.”

“We can check the fields,” said Taya.

Pepper started at something and leapt sideways. Taya, who had the reins wrapped loosely around her hand, was taken by surprise and dragged a few steps along with the mare.

“Easy,” she said as the mare flung her head into the air. The whites of her eyes showed.

The blood bay, a more placid horse, merely lifted his head in concern.

“You all right?” asked Mandir. He started to walk in Taya’s direction, then turned suddenly and slapped at his rear end as if stung by a needlefly. Normally they were river creatures, not found at this elevation, but perhaps they liked the water in Zash’s irrigation system.

“Something get you?” she asked.

Then pain erupted in Taya’s hip. She swatted at what she thought was another needlefly, and her hand touched something small and hard. A tiny dart, harsh and alien, protruded from her flesh.

“Mandir,” she started to say, and fell to the ground.

Chapter 33: Mohenjo Temple, Six Years Ago

Taya woke with fire roaring all around her and scrambled, panicked, to her feet. Where was she? Last she remembered, she had been in bed. But now she stood on black dirt, surrounded by flames. They traveled along straight lines, forming corners with perfect right angles. This was no wildfire; it was someone’s creation. There was an opening at one end, like a hallway she was meant to enter. Or was she?

She shook sweat from her dampened hair. The heat was a living thing, palpable. As panic bubbled up within her, she forced it back down. She had the Gift—she could invoke the mother tongue and control fire, even a fire as large and powerful as this one. There was no reason to be frightened. Could this be some kind of Coalition trial she hadn’t been told about? Her instructors had said she was unusually gifted at handling fire; perhaps this had something to do with that.

Forcing herself to remain calm, she turned in a circle to see if there was more than one opening in the room of fire. No, there was only the one, a flaming hallway that beckoned. Perhaps it was a trick, and she was not to enter it.

How had she come to be here? She remembered eating dinner with the other initiates. Then she’d gone up to her room for the nightly ritual of practicing her letters. She’d become sleepy and gone to bed early, still in her clothes. She was wearing those clothes now.

If this was a trial, perhaps she was supposed to use her magic to turn back the fire. She spoke a few sharp words of the mother tongue, commanding the flames around her to extinguish themselves. But her mouth felt dull and dry, and though the words came, Isatis did not answer them.

Taya’s heart beat rapidly.
Don’t panic
, she told herself.
You can figure this out.
What had happened to her magic? Was this a test of control, to determine if she could use her magic effectively in a frightening situation? She tried to call a bit of flame onto the palm of her hand, a trivial bit of magic that required only a twist of her mind and no mother tongue at all.

Nothing happened. Her magic was dead.

The hallway of flame seemed to be the only answer. Trembling, she moved into it. The fiery walls formed a sort of corridor which bent to the right and then opened into two possible pathways. She was in a maze. Why would her instructors place her here with no warning and no explanation? She was going to have to mark her path if she didn’t want to get lost. She used her toe to draw a number one in the dirt and an arrow pointing toward the right-hand path.

She entered it.

A terrible roaring noise leapt up behind her. She turned, barely suppressing a shriek of terror. A fire wall now stood between her and the place she’d been.

What was happening? If this was a maze, some sort of Coalition trial, it seemed to follow no reasonable set of rules. How was she to navigate a maze when she couldn’t backtrack? Her heart hammered against her chest. This didn’t seem like anything her instructors would create. This was starting to look more like someone’s elaborate attempt to torment her, maybe even kill her. And if her guess was right, she knew exactly who was behind it. But surely Mandir would not go so far as to burn her to death. There had to be a way out.

Having no other choice, she followed the path before her. It forked again, into three possible directions. She marked the ground, this time with a “two,” and drew an arrow toward the center path. She entered that, and again a fire wall rose up behind her, preventing her from returning whence she came.

The maze didn’t look as well-formed now as it had before. The flaming walls had risen so high they’d joined at the top, and they were no longer confined to their straight lines. A smattering of flame had escaped from the right-hand wall and licked its way across the path in front of her. She could no longer see the night sky above her, and the air was getting smoky.

She had to get out, or she would suffocate.

Leaping over the flames on the ground, she ran ahead to the next intersection, hoping desperately to find an exit. Instead, she found two ill-defined pathways, one filled with choking smoke and the other a mess, with flames on the ground. Neither path could be navigated. Frantic, she spoke in the mother tongue, desperate to extinguish the fire, but still Isatis did not answer her.

Coughing, she ran back the way she’d come, but the conditions had deteriorated even more. The fire wall still blocked her way, and the smoke was so thick she could barely see. Every breath she took wracked her with a fit of coughing. Gasping, she fell to her knees.

All around her, the flames crept closer.

Chapter 34: Hrappa

As Taya clawed her way to consciousness, the flames surrounding her drizzled away. She lay quietly for a moment, panting against the hard, gritty surface beneath her cheek. It had been years since the fire maze nightmares had haunted her. She’d thought herself rid of them, but perhaps seeing Mandir had brought them back. As her breathing returned to normal, gooseflesh rose on her arms. Her skin was clammy with sweat, and she shivered. Why was she cold?

She opened her eyes to darkness. She was lying on a dirt floor. That ruled out the Hrappan guesthouse. The ache of her muscles told her that wherever she was, she’d been here for a while. She tried to move and felt something heavy on her wrists. Also on her ankles. Was she
chained
? She felt her wrists and found the cold bronze shackles.
Flood and fire.
She followed the links to where they originated, a stone wall. A tug on the chains told her they were solidly mounted, not something she could tug free.

Where was she? She had little sense of how large the space was around her. It could be small or it could be enormous. “Mandir?” she called tentatively.

Chains clanked nearby. “Taya?” He sounded weak. For some reason, that frightened her even more.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Can you see?”

“No, it’s black as a thundercloud in here. Where are you?”

She stretched toward his voice, fumbling in the dark to the end of her chains. His searching hand found hers and clamped onto it. At his touch, she almost wept with relief. He scooted closer. She clutched his arm so hard she heard him wince. But he did not pull away. Instead, he drew her into a makeshift embrace, the best they could manage on a dirt floor while shackled, her back against his chest.

For a moment, she just lay there, taking comfort in his big body around her and trying to slow her panicked breathing. He was cold, too, but as they lay together she felt herself beginning to thaw.

“Is this all right?” asked Mandir. “My touching you.”

She had not always welcomed his touch, but right now she did. The thought of his releasing her and disappearing into the blackness terrified her.

She swallowed hard. “It’s fine.”

“I think I’ve been drugged again,” said Mandir. “My mind’s fuzzy. Yours?”

Taya felt a little nauseous, and her breathing was too fast, but her head seemed to be more or less in order. If she’d been drugged with Echo again, its effects seemed to have worn off. What did she remember? Riding Pepper up the hill and arriving at Zash’s homestead.

The dart in her hip.

“I don’t feel the effects of any drug, but perhaps it’s worn off. I think Zash took us prisoner.” She rubbed her hip and found a little knot there, inflamed and sore.

“Right,” said Mandir. “I’m starting to remember now. Zash. That zebu’s ass.”

“Where do you suppose we could be?” She tried to summon fire, just enough to illuminate their surroundings, but Isatis did not answer her call. Sweat broke out on her palms. No wonder she’d dreamed of the fire maze. Once again, she was trapped, with no ability to influence her surroundings. “Mandir, my magic’s gone. Is yours?”

He lifted his hand off her body, and she felt him moving as he tested his magic. She hoped beyond all sense of reason that somehow Zash had made a mistake, that he’d drugged only her with the
kimat
and not both of them. “Yes. It’s gone.”

Her heart sank.

“
Kimat
, I assume,” said Mandir. “Let’s hope the dose wasn’t too high. I don’t know where we are, except that it must be underground. Why would a banana farmer even have a place like this?”

“To lock up his mad sister?”

“I thought that was the burned-out house.”

“Flood and fire, who knows.” She wasn’t sure what to think. This could be Zash’s wine cellar, perhaps. Or did he have a clandestine prison hidden on his property, somewhere away from the house? The theory she’d reluctantly come up with, that Zash had meant to drug her and sleep with her and steal her
kimat
, appeared to be right in its essentials. Now she and Mandir were wholly within the man’s power. Her breathing accelerated. “What do you think he wants from us?”

Mandir hugged her closer. “Stay calm. I don’t know what he intends, but he can’t mean to kill us because he’d have done that already.”

“What use can he have for us alive?”

“Many possibilities,” said Mandir. “We’re Coalition mages. But stop worrying and try to rest. It may be a long time before he comes for us.”