The Burning City (35 page)

Travel went fast. The mare grew stronger as they traveled, and larger, but she wasn't giving them any trouble. Behind them the trail's outline blurred with green.

Coyotes had discovered the travelers' abandoned middens. That was scary. That evening Whandall and Carver crawled under the wagon to sleep, back to back and armed.

A voice in the dark. “This magician who killed your father. Did you try to kill him?”

“No, Carver.”

“Good.”

Whandall believed he had nothing to hide from Carver: nothing so monstrous as the open truth of what he was. Still, sharing secrets outside the family seemed unnatural.

Into the quiet dark Carver said, “Did you know that
plague
is a kind of living thing? Wizards can see it. Wizards can kill it and heal the client. Otherwise it grows. Without a wizard, other people get sick too, more and more. We need wizards. But wizards don't like the Valley of Smokes.”

“‘Course not. No magic.”

The dark was silent a while longer. Then Carver asked, “Why not?”

“Kill Morth? Why?”

“Your father.”

“Morth did what kinless do. Sorry,
taxpayers.
What we do too. If Pothefit caught a looker taking the cook pot from the Placehold courtyard, he'd've killed him.”

It was too dark to see Carver's expression. Whandall said, “The Burning killed Pothefit. In the Burning you can have anything you can take. They couldn't take Morth's shop.”

Silence from Carver. The woods stirred: something died violently.

“
That's
what I was trying to remember,” Whandall said suddenly. “
Morth
could follow us. I keep forgetting Morth. Carver, we wouldn't
see
him. That lurk spell.”

Near sunset of the next day they reached the crest of the mountains and found two dead coyotes near a dead campfire.

Carver ran.

Whandall watched him disappear into the rocks. He almost followed. Coyotes might menace Willow and the children! But Whandall was trying to learn kinless ways, and what about the wagon?

Unhitching the mare wasn't easy. She tried to pull the rope out of his hands. He hung on long enough to tie it to a tree stump. The length of it would let her reach forage. She had her horn if coyotes came back.

Then—but wait. What had killed these beasts?

He stooped over one of the corpses. Not a mark on them. Wide blood-red eyes, mouths wide, tongues protruding. He touched the slicked-down fur, expecting to find it wet, but it wasn't.

He caught Carver far downslope at the next dead campfire. There they slowed to a walk, blowing hard. Willow and the wagon must have taken a full day to cover this distance. Carver's hands held his sling and a handful of rocks cracked to get sharp edges. He said, “I wish I had a knife.”

Whandall said, “With
that
you don't have to let them so close. I wish I had a sever.”

Day was dying. They smelled meat cooking, and they slowed.

They saw the fire first, and a young looker standing tall and straight, backlit, with orange-red hair falling to his shoulders. Willow had the horses tied and a fire going. Then a whiff of corruption showed an arc of dead coyotes at their feet.

Willow saw two men coming at a grim half-run, Whandall's knife point, Carver's whirling sling. She leaped up from her cooking and stepped quickly to the man's side.

“He saved us!” she shouted. “The coyotes would have torn us apart!”

Carver's sling drooped. He said, “Morth?”

Morth smiled faintly.

“Morth, you're young!”

“Yes, I found this!” Morth held out a handful of yellow lumps. Whandall had never before seen the magician
gleeful
. “Gold!” he said. “In the river!” He stepped forward past Whandall's knifepoint and pushed the gold into Whandall's unresisting hand.

Whandall said, “This is dangerous, isn't it? Wild magic.”

“No, no,
this
gold is
refined.
I've taken the magic,” Morth said. “Can't you see? Shall we race? Shall I stand on my head for you?
I'm young!”

Carver backed up a bit, and so did Willow. Here was no lurking spell. Morth
wanted
to be noticed. He babbled, “Gold
is
magic. It reinforces other magic. Look!” He leaped straight up and kept rising until he could grasp a branch twice Whandall's height above him. He shouted down, “Not just young! I used to
fly!”

He dropped lightly. “Give gold to a wizard, most of the power leaches from the gold. After that it's refined gold, harmless. People use it as if it has value, but the original meaning was,
I gave gold to a wizard to touch. A wizard owes me.
Whandall, keep the gold. Morth of Atlantis owes you.”

Whandall put the nuggets in the pouch beneath his waistband. He asked, “Why?”

Morth laughed. “You're guiding me out.”

Whandall's fingers brushed his cheek: the tattoo he couldn't see. “And every wizard in the world can track me?”

“Every Atlantean wizard,” Morth said, and laughed like a lunatic.

Willow had roasted a half-grown deer and some roots Morth had found. The adults held back—even Morth, even Whandall, ravenous but following their lead—until the children were fed. Then they dug in.

Carver suddenly cried out. “Lordkin! Did you do anything about the other wagon?”

Whandall told him what he'd done. “But the mare doesn't like me, so you'll have to go get her yourself. Unless you think we should both go?”

Whandall enjoyed what Carver's face did then. Leave Willow with Whandall? or leave the wizard with Willow and no Whandall to guard
him?
or take Willow, leaving the children alone with the wizard
and
the Lordkin and nobody who could handle bonehead stallions?…

“I'll go.”

“It can wait till morning.”

“I should hope so.”

The night was black as the inside of a lion's belly. Whandall had to imagine: Carver, Willow, Morth, the gently snoring Carter, and himself, arrayed in a five-pointed star in the dirt near the wagon, feet pointing inward, severs ready to hand. The children in the wagon. Hyacinth dropping over the side, sleepy and clumsy,
thud
, crawling away to use the pit.

“It's the biggest burn patch we've seen. It took us all day to cross it, and half of yesterday.” Willow's voice in the dark, wondering and content.

Joking, Whandall said, “This fire wasn't mine.”

“Lightning,” Willow said. “Lightning hits the highest tree. It burns. Afterward the redwood grows in two prongs. Sometimes coals fall and a patch of forest catches.”

“Why doesn't the whole forest burn? Woodsmen just go home when they see a fire.”

She said, “Patches burn, then they go out.”

Morth said, “Yangin-Atep spends most of his time in a death-sleep, but a big fire wakes him. Feeds him. Fire is Yangin-Atep's life.”

A companionable silence. Then Carver said sleepily, “What if you don't believe in Yangin-Atep?”

Whandall raised his voice above Morth's laugh. “Carver, firewand seeds don't sprout unless there's been a fire. Neither does redwood. This land is fire's
home.
Tep's Town—”

“Valley of Smokes.”

“Smokes. Would have been burned out before I was ever born if some power weren't snuffing the fires. Yangin-Atep is the reason fire won't burn indoors. There's a truce between Yangin-Atep and the redwoods, so they don't burn. I tried to tell Kreeg Miller… a taxpayer woodsman?”

Willow said, “There are a lot of people named Miller.”

Whandall had nursed a hope that he was helping Kreeg Miller's relatives. There was an old debt he'd never acknowledged.

Willow said, “Outside the forest there's no Yangin-Atep. You could cook indoors. Get your food still hot. Yes?”

“Yes,” said Morth and Whandall.

“Well, I never heard of such a thing, but we'll see.” Willow turned and was asleep.

Whandall rolled his blanket tighter around him, wishing he could get up and stroll around, knowing that a thorn plant or laurel branch would surely slash him if he did. They had left the rain behind. The sound of the night was wind and sometimes a tiny cry of mortal agony.

For a time the wagon moved easily downhill with Willow at the reins. Then they had to use the severs, sliding the poles under nettles and morningstars and lordkin's-kiss to cut the roots with the blades, to shape a path wide enough for children and a wagon. They could have used Carver's help, but Carver had gone back for the mare and second wagon.

Willow spoke: “This yellow blanket,
this
we use to clean the severs, to get the poison sap off. Use the rough side only.
You
don't
ever
touch it, right, Hammer? Iris? Hyacinth? Opal?” The children nodded. “This one blanket, because there's nothing else that color. The blanket hangs here on the wagon tongue, never moves, so anyone can find it.”

They saw problems before they happened. Looked for them. They lectured each other as easily as they lectured a Lordkin male.

Carter and Hammer were assigned to hold the other children together. They moved fairly rapidly. Half a morning later, Whandall remembered part of the deer left in the wagon from last night. He dropped the sever, stood up—

“Whandall. Don't try to save work. Touch-me venom can stay on a blade and brush off on the wagon and then on a child. Someone could sit on it. It's clean when it leaves your hands, every time,” Willow said. “Understand?”

A blank face hid his rage. Whandall picked up the sever and wiped the blade clean. Willow had treated him like a child, a bad child, in front of Morth and the children. Carter and Morth both had the grace to be paying attention to something else. If Carver had been here, Whandall might have had to hurt him.

In a later, calmer moment, it came to him that she hadn't spoken by chance. Willow had been watching, waiting for him to do what he did.

A stand of lordkiss blocked Whandall's scorch-path, its leaves barely singed. Morth called, “Whandall! Don't burn it! You'd strangle us all. The smoke is poisonous.”

Whandall had reached for Yangin-Atep's rage and found only a dying ember. The fire god was leaving him.

They had to dig a path around the lordkiss. He thought of it as showing off his strength, to make it feel less like work.

In early afternoon they broke through the undergrowth above running water.

Through sparse branches Whandall saw a far distant mass floating in the sky: a cone with its base in cloud, gray rock and green-tinged black capped with blazing white.

Morth gaped. “What is
that?”

“The legends said it would be there,” Carter mused. “Before the Lordkin came, there was a path through the forest.”

“Mount Joy,” Willow whispered. “But the story said you could only see it if you were worthy. One of the heroes—”