The Fire Bringers: An I Bring the Fire Short Story (IBF Part 6.5) (3 page)

Amy sighs. “Is Senator Fellman insisting that his daughter be allowed to work in our facility?”

Hoenir nods. “I keep telling him that no matter how magically capable his daughter is, if she doesn’t have a doctorate of veterinary medicine, or at least a certificate to be a veterinary technician, she isn’t allowed to join our staff.”

Amy grumbles. “Kids these days—”

Hoenir shakes his head. “Thinking they can skip the science and go straight to the magic.” He huffs.

Amy walks over and takes the tablet. Reading it, her skin heats. It’s even worse than she expected. The senator’s precious child hasn’t had a day of college-level biology or chemistry. But she did mend a broken bone, and that makes her an expert, to the senator’s mind.

Pulling out her phone, Amy dials the senator’s number. She almost presses the connect button, but then stops herself. If she makes this call, she will explode—she will shout at the senator, and it will become an “incident.” This is a job for Steve, he will chuckle and be charming and convince the senator that his daughter should take an internship elsewhere … or else. He’ll do it by … well, Amy doesn’t know precisely how he does it
—
if she did, she’d do it herself. Hitting the button for text, she clicks on the Darth Vader icon she uses for Steve and starts to type out a message, but then Hoenir says, “Hmmm … where did Durga go?”

Amy lifts her head. Durga and the dragon are gone. Amy sees shadows playing on the walls in the cave. “She’s in the cave, don’t worry,” she says.

Hoenir’s phone beeps with a text. Glancing down, his eyebrows rise. “Oh, a totoro … I’d better get on it. Talk to you later.”

“Sure thing,” says Amy, heading into the cave. “Durga, you know if the baby dragon has found some pennies you shouldn’t …”

She stops. The baby dragon is curled up in a ball at the tiny area at the cave’s end. But there is no Durga.

Amy crawls out of the cave. “Durga?” She peers behind rocks, and even goes up to the perches to see if Durga’s pressed herself against the rocks to hide.

She doesn’t see her anywhere. She must have snuck out of the room while Amy was talking to Hoenir. Feeling frightened and angry at herself, or Durga, or both, Amy pulls out her phone. “Show security cameras in the rehabilitation center.” All the camera views flash on Amy’s phone in a neat grid pattern. Amy sees Durga in the former ballroom that houses the World Gate to the Tenth Realm. Amy clicks on the feed to enlarge it. The guards are talking to Durga jovially as she walks to the circle of tiles that demark the World Gate location. Amy breathes a sigh of relief. During the Magical Renaissance, computerized, technomagical World Gates were invented, but the gate to the Tenth Realm is only accessible to those who can World Walk without technological intervention. Durga’s in no danger, she’ll just walk over to the Gate and—

Durga vanishes.

For a moment, Amy thinks the feed is dying. She taps her phone repeatedly, and then she sees the guards running over to the gate. Amy bolts through the door, down the hallway, and up to the former ballroom that houses the gate to the Tenth Realm. Gripping her phone tightly, she siphons all of the magic off of it, and before the guards can ask her questions, she leaps up onto the platform. Rainbow light envelopes her, and she is in the Tenth Realm.

She blinks down at her feet. The forest floor beneath her is rich black hummus. She lifts her head
—
the mountainous forest around her is unusually dry, and the smell of rotting vegetation is not as strong as usual. On every side, enormous fernlike trees with wilted pastel blue leaves obscure a yellow sun. Magic tickles her senses, and a hum comes from about four feet in front of her. There, on the ground, is a copper and gold circular device, about six inches high. Concentric circles of glowing pink mark its face. It is a magical “blind generator.” It makes the people within a ten foot radius invisible to the Lemurlikes and other animals of the Tenth Realm.

“Dr. Lewis, don’t worry, we’ve got her!” says a voice. Amy spins in place. A Fire Giant woman dressed in human field gear is balancing Durga on one arm.

The woman smiles. “Did she World Walk without you?”

“Yes,” Amy says, running over to the woman and taking Durga from her arms. The team of two human scientists and a Light Elf mage chuckle. The Light Elf says, “When my children started to do that, it was worse than when they learned to walk.”

Amy can’t laugh. Bohdi told her that Durga was exhibiting World-Walk readiness, and he had gone on what Amy had thought was a paranoia-fueled mission to close even the smallest World Gates within a mile of their home—even a public one to Alfheim. The local alderman thinks it broke of its own accord. Only Steve, Bohdi, and Amy know otherwise.

Amy bites her lip and clutches Durga close, overwhelmed by relief, guilt and shame. “Never do that again.” Of course Bohdi would know better than she does; Bohdi spends more time with Durga.

The destructive side of Chaos is great when the odds are against you. Steve’s new administration was happy to have Bohdi on their side in the beginning—even encouraged him to hold onto Laevithin when they had enemies that needed slain. That had changed as Steve had restored order. Suddenly, Bohdi’s ability to break things without even trying was not as welcome.

Bohdi had eventually gotten tired of the hostility toward him in the administration. He remained friends and an advisor to Steve, but he’d gone on to independent career paths. He cleaned up in the stock markets—until he was banned from every stock exchange in the Nine Realms for eternity. And he is barred, by law, from coming within three hundred meters of any gambling establishment. He still occasionally takes jobs in security consulting, but professionally, he isn’t as busy as Amy. He’s been Durga’s primary caregiver ... and it’s worked. She thinks Bohdi’s magic, and the natural childhood inclination toward chaotic death and dismemberment cancel each other out.

Amy presses her nose to Durga’s pigtails. Maybe for a little girl who is blue, and has wings and a tail, having a father who has long since accepted Chaos and change … Well, Durga couldn’t have a better Dad. Her face flushes. She wanted to give him a break today—to let him sleep in, but she should have trusted him …

Completely oblivious to Amy’s pain, Durga leans over her shoulder and pipes up excitedly, “I see blue people!”

Instead of following Durga’s gaze, Amy quickly scans the ground beyond the survey site. All she sees is dense blue foliage that looks drier than normal, and none of the husks of the red nut fruit that are the Lemurlikes primary food stuff. Looking to the sky, she sees none of the small pteranodon-like creatures that normally flit through the trees, either. The Lemurlikes are gatherers first, but they hunt as well—cooperatively in small bands with stones—especially when the red nuts have all been eaten. Since she sees no nuts, and no small animals, it is a lean season, and a lean season means …

“The ceremony hasn’t begun yet,” the Fire Giant says. “It will soon. I’m excited to watch it.”

One of the Light Elfs snorts. “Fire Giants.”

Amy gulps, and a human says, “There are no other kiddie-inappropriate scenes today, either.”

Amy scowls; it’s a reference to rape and murder
—
the Lemurlikes engage in both in normal times.

The other human says, “It will be a few hours before the ceremony.” He nods toward Durga.
“She can stay for a moment.”

“I want to stay, Mommy!” Durga cries.

Amy peers through the strand of trees to where the Lemurlikes are stomping out a patch of bare black earth among the foliage. The Lemurlikes have hairless stomachs, limbs, and backs. The female breasts are slightly more prominent than the male Lemurlikes. Like other hominids, the females’ faces are mostly hairless—or rather furless—the men sport beards of soft fuzz. Aside from those differences, the sexes are nearly identical. Both sexes have triangular ears, covered with fur, close to the tops of their heads. Long sharp, black nails tip their hands and feet, and they have pronounced canines. Males and females alike have manes of longer fur on their heads that go halfway down their backs. They have similar manes of longer fur that cover their genitalia and buttocks. Over their tails the fur becomes short, fine and velvety looking.

“They’re pretty,” says Durga, as other Lemurlikes begin pushing sticks into the ground around the packed earth. Purplish bark strips have been tied around the tops of the sticks. “They’re demarking the edge of the ceremonial area,” the Fire Giant woman says. “How interesting!”

Amy’s jaw tightens. Using flagged sticks to demarcate their “ceremony” areas are about as far as Lemurlike tool use goes. They were already doing it when this realm was first discovered, about two hundred years ago. Amy had accidentally-on-purpose introduced a gene for opposable thumbs into their population shortly after their discovery—sometimes when she wishes for such things, they happen. The creatures did not go on to develop new tools. Nor did opposable thumbs give them any interest in leaving the several hundred square miles of their forest home.

Amy shakes her head … she’d wanted them to be so much more. But it seems like the creatures are stuck in their evolution. Some of the scientists call it “perfect equilibrium with their habitat.” As far as the mages and paleontologists have been able to uncover, the Lemurlikes have spent the last half million years in this forest. Sometimes they’ll go to the edge of the savanna north of their habitat to harvest tubers—but perhaps because of the large carnivores there they seldom stray out of the forest long. Sometimes they go to the sea to harvest salt in the shallows. While they’re there they’ll collect mollusks they catch in the tide waters, but then they return to the forest. The Lemurlikes have brains the size of Homo Erectus—but Homo Erectus wandered all the way to Asia, used primitive weapons, and had fire. The Lemurlikes don’t need either. The forest is warm with only medium-sized predators, and they have salt to preserve their kills.

When they’d first discovered the Tenth Realm, Amy was sure that famine in the forest would force the creatures to leave and spur them on to greater things. That was before she knew about the ceremony.

Females begin filling the circle. They range in age from toddlers to elderly, some are visibly pregnant, others are carrying suckling infants of both genders. The Lemurlikes separate into two teams, and sit facing each other. Lifting their heads they begin to hum.

“They sing pretty,” Durga says.

Amy’s grip on her daughter grows tighter. More Lemurlikes come from the forest to the ceremony site. All the females take a place in the circle. The males fan out into the trees, calling out for any lost females to join the rest. A few of the males come within three paces of the spot where the onlookers are, but behind their magic wall they are invisible. The Lemurlikes, compelled by the same magic that elves had used to ward humans from “faerie paths” in the old days, veer away at the last minute.

“Mommy, I want to talk to them,” Durga says.

“We have to leave soon, Honey,” Amy says.

“But we’ll come back, right?” Durga says.

The hum of the females in the circle grows louder. Throughout the forest, more humming rises. There are other ceremonial circles in the forest, undoubtedly filling with females and separating into teams. In a few hours the females in the circles will attack each other. They will fight to the death with their bare hands and sharp fangs. Any surviving members of the losing female team will be strangled, and all of the dead bodies will be salted, preserved, and slowly eaten. By the time the bodies have been consumed the red nut fruits will be back, and the Lemurlike population will be half as large. With only a third of the remaining population being female, the replacement rate will be slow.

Bouncing in her arms, Durga says, “Mommy, we’ll come back right? They sing so pretty!”

Amy realizes she hasn’t answered. “Maybe someday?” she replies.

Apparently, correctly registering her hesitation as “maybe never”, Durga protests, “No, I want to come back, tomorrow!”

Amy imagines that scene: Lemurlike bodies stretched out on the ceremonial plain being crudely skinned with the creatures long sharp nails. “No, Durga,” she says.

Flapping her wings, Durga shouts, “Tomorrow!”

Somewhere far off a pteranodon calls. From the forest rises a roar, unlike any animal Amy’s ever heard, and then beneath her feet, the ground begins to shake. Amy falls to her knees, and Durga rolls from her arms. Someone shouts. Amy looks up and finds her eyes on a pair of Lemurlike males a few paces from the circle. The creatures are hooting among themselves and stepping backwards. It takes a moment, but Amy realizes that they see her. Durga stands and faces them. “Hello,” she says.

“Durga, no!” shouts Amy, crawling quickly to her feet.

The males screech, and through magic, Amy understands. “Females! In the arena! In the arena!”

“The generator is down! We’re no longer invisible.” one of the scientists says.

“Back through the World Gate!” says the Light Elf.

“They are not us!” cries a Lemurlike. “Eat them, eat them instead!”

All the females in the circle lift their heads and turn toward the scientists. Two rocks simultaneously hit the Fire Giant in the head. She goes down, squarely in the place where the World Gate is, and male Lemurlikes swarm onto her body from the trees, blocking the exit from the Tenth Realm. Amy feels the Fire Giant’s life extinguish. Someone pulls a pistol and starts firing, but the Lemurlikes in the circle are rising and racing toward the scientific team. Durga screams in fright, the world rocks—literally, or figuratively—Amy is not sure. She just manages to will her child and herself into invisibility. She extends the shroud over the Light Elf and the human scientist. “Run to the trees to the south!” she shouts to them, sprinting to the first tree in that direction. “I can open a new World Gate.”

The Light Elf and the man, once again visible to her but no one else, begin to comply, but they’re close to the downed Fire Giant and are knocked down by the swarming Lemurlikes. As soon as the creatures realize there are invisible somethings in their midst, they begin to attack them. The Light Elf, realizing what’s happening, sets their fur on fire—but it’s only small flares, not an inferno like Bohdi could cause. The pistol fires, too—but there are just too many of the creatures. Amy pulls Durga behind the tree. She doesn't have enough strength to open a Gate that extends from where Durga and she hide to the other team members. She has just enough strength to open one for her and Durga. She just needs a few minutes undisturbed.