Can you get her attention?
I asked.
Are you
serious
, Boss?
Firebrand demanded.
I had to admit, Firebrand had a point.
Fine. Can you tell me where the unconscious person is? I can’t see through this hash of light and life-energy.
Gotcha. Circle around to the left. A little more. Okay, you’re as close as we can get. She’s about six or seven feet in from the edge of the fire.
I added some more vocabulary to my previous observations.
I decided there was nothing for it but to try. Still refusing the flames, I went into the pillar of fire.
The column was a quasi-solid cylinder of flame, blazing outward from a center point and blasting upward from there. I felt it pushing against me, almost stumbled over something, recovered, knelt. It was someone, my hands told me; someone small. I lifted her and carried her out of the flames.
Facing away from the fire, eyes slitted against the light, I could see what I already knew. Tianna was unconscious. I had no idea why. She seemed unhurt. I wiped away melted floor from her, much like wiping off mud—she’s a fire-witch; they’re fireproof—and realized she was also naked. Apparently, a fire-witch can defend her clothes from coronal mass ejections, but only if she pays attention. And me without a spare shirt. Well, my cloak was okay, outside on Bronze. Once we got out…
She didn’t wake up, but I did spot that her breathing was almost nonexistent. Was there anything
to
breathe in this inferno? Can a fire-witch be suffocated? Presumably so; fires can be extinguished if you deny them air. It seemed reasonable that it was still an issue for a priestess.
I carried her outside and into fresher air. Once I set her down, I breathed into her a few times; my nighttime lungs don’t use the air they take in. After a couple of boosts, her breathing deepened and she opened her eyes.
“Grandpa!” she screamed. “You came to rescue us!”
“Yes,” I shouted back, not sure what she meant. “Are you okay?”
“Some man hurt Mom!”
I glanced at the pillar of fire again. Yes, that could easily be a dying fire-witch. Given that she was completely out of her body, she might be a dead fire-witch.
Somehow, I didn’t think she was interested in taking a walk with the Grey Lady. Personally, I didn’t want her to, either. Tianna needs her mother, and I don’t want to lose my daughter. If she’s got a body I can put her back into, I decided, she’s going back into it.
“You go over by Bronze,” I shouted, pointing. “You wait right there!”
“I want to help!”
“Good!” I shouted at her. “Concentrate
really hard
on not letting Grandpa catch on fire!”
Tianna looked at me with an expression of surprise and something like fear.
“You can’t burn, Grandpa!”
“I hope not, but help me, okay?”
“Okay!”
She’s a good kid. She screwed up her face in an expression of intense concentration and I hoped that whatever she was doing would help. I jogged over to Sparky’s statue and looked up at it.
“Do you give a damn?” I asked.
Without waiting for an answer, I went back into the fire to find Amber.
Her body was, of course, lying in the exact center of the flaming pillar, half-sunk in the molten floor. I still couldn’t see anything, but I could touch her. There was no heartbeat, and certainly no breathing. Still, I checked for stab wounds with my fingertips, searching for anything that might have hit a vital organ. If it was something I could weld together, maybe I could restart her body and put her back into it.
Nothing here, nothing there, nothing in the other place… and then I tracked up her spine, felt the hole at the base of her skull. It was made by something with a long, narrow blade, much like the one that got me; the difference was that it penetrated her upper spine and probably went into her brain.
And now her spirit was loose. She was definitely dead. Just… not quite gone.
Oh, this is
so
not going to go well
.
I shouted for her, backing it with my mind and will, careful to keep the majority of my concentration on being not-burning.
“Amber!”
She screamed at me, clearly not quite herself. I felt buffeted and rocked by the writhing currents of fire as she looked at me, swirled and flowed around me. There was no sense of additional heat, just the buffeting. It knocked me down, rolled me through the molten floor, swept me around in the pillar of fire. I sank my hands into the glowing rock and scooped, set my toes into the floor and held. Eventually, I slid to a halt and could concentrate on other matters.
If her spirit was still here, maybe it could be stabilized enough to talk to. It might be the only way to calm her plasma-ghost down enough to do anything constructive.
Is this normal for a dying fire-witch? I’ve only ever seen Tamara, and she wasn’t exactly a fire-witch at the time. Does this sort of display happen every time a fire-witch dies? It would help explain why they were generally poorly-tolerated in most communities. Or is it only when they die by violence? Or did splashing Amber’s soul with the spirit-blood of Sparky have something to do with it? Or is it a combination of things?
I don’t know. Maybe I never will. Add it to the list.
I focused entirely on that peculiar portion of my sight that allowed me to see the soul. Eyes open or closed really didn’t matter. It’s not really
seeing
that reveals a soul. It’s not feeling it, nor tasting it. It’s simply there, and that knowledge comes to me in a fashion my brain most often interprets as seeing.
She was there, cut loose from everything, like a kite with a hundred strings loose in a whirlwind.
The image of her struck me forcibly. That’s what I look like when I have a cloud of dark tendrils surrounding me. More of them, yes, and dark rather than light, but the image was so similar… Is there some sort of relationship? Or is it just a coincidence that it looks a lot alike?
Again, not the time. I grabbed strings, tying them off and tying them together. I didn’t have a living body for her; even if we weren’t dealing with a burning pillar of fire, I couldn’t put her body back into working order. Well, maybe, with time to experiment, but not right now.
The loose anchor points of her soul were, one at a time, simple things to handle. Grabbing one, I could wrap it around and around, tie it off, and stabilize it. I already did something like that with my chlorine curse…
Amber’s soul was considerably more complicated than a shark spirit, of course, but at least I had the principles down. I wrapped her around and throughout her fiery pillar, squeezed it smaller, and bound it tightly. Then I took another anchor point, another aspect of her soul, and wrapped another portion of it around and through that seething, pyrotechnic hell. I repeated it again, and again, and again; one strand at a time, one link, one channel, one anchor, each bound around and though and back into it all again.
I didn’t hurry, but I did work quickly. How long until dawn? Long enough? Maybe. Maybe not. I have no idea how much time I took, or what would happen if I was interrupted before I finished. Could I stop and finish after sunrise? Could I do anything like this during the day? It seems unlikely; many of my powers only work at night.
No time wasted. That was the rule. Concentrate on denying the flames and take one strand at a time.
Somewhere along the process, Amber started to talk to me.
Father?
Yes. Hush. Working.
What’s going on?
Talk to Firebrand,
I snapped, my concentration teetering
. Busy!
I was vaguely aware of her and Firebrand holding a conversation, but I had no attention to spare.
At last, I finished tacking the final thread into the woven pattern of her fiery matrix. A lady of flame—a
real
Lady of Flame—stood on the molten floor of what was once a stone building. Slumped walls of smoking rock slowly solidified around us and I realized I was more than knee-deep in goo. Hot, smoking, slowly-solidifying goo.
With some effort, I managed to extricate myself. Amber, meanwhile, stood there, brilliantly bright and rippling, holding up her hands and examining them.
I touched Firebrand to the floor; heat surged through the floor and up into the blade as Firebrand absorbed it. The floor solidified, darkened, cooled. I toed it cautiously and it felt solid. I tried to let go of my concentration on flame-negation but found that some portion of my mind seemed locked into that role. It was like trying to
not
think about something… no, it was
exactly
like that, because that’s what I was. I decided to not worry about it; I’d notice if anything started to scorch.
“All right,” I said, looking at my flaming daughter, “tell me what happened.”
“I… I’m not sure,” she said. Her voice sounded familiar, but there was a rushing sound as an undertone, a cross between a throaty whisper and the sound of air being sucked into a furnace. “I don’t… I don’t feel well at all…”
“I’m not surprised. I’ve never done this with an actual soul. I probably need to do some fine-tuning on your linkage points.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve done something I don’t know how to do; I may not have it completely right. But you’re better and I’ll work on making sure you’re perfect. In the meantime, what’s the last thing you remember?”
“A man came to see me… pounded on the door, said it was an emergency… I let him in… he talked about a Thing that attacked his daughter… I started to go back upstairs to dress… A pain went through my head like the worst headache in the world… I fell across a bench. Tianna screamed, and I tried to get up, but nothing worked. I couldn’t feel anything but the headache, and then I… I felt myself… I couldn’t feel my body, but I could see it, and I couldn’t get into it…”
“Yeah, I have some idea how that feels. I’d hug you, but you’re not too terribly solid. Sorry about that.” Now that I was no longer concentrating so hard, I could take the time to consider what happened and start to feel angry. Amber had a head start on that, but I suspected I might be about to close the gap.
“What did you do?” she asked, her shining face showing the first signs of alarm.
“I’ll explain in a flicker. What happened to the guy who stabbed you?”
“I don’t know. I was stabbed?”
I examined her body. Dammit, she was half-buried in the now-solidified floor. Still, it was facedown; the stab wound was quite plain. She knelt by the body—her body—with me and looked at it. . Getting it out of the floor, later, was going to be tricky. I don’t know why it didn’t burn in the fiery display; Amber wasn’t in it to defend it. Or was her body immune to her own soul-fires? No, then the molten floor should have burned it anyway. Another thing to wonder about.
“Who did this?” she asked, and her voice sounded as though someone was going to burn for it. I agreed in principle, if not in detail.
“I have no idea, but I would bet money that he died after doing it. This is a fatal wound and almost instant. If you blew up as quickly as I’d guess you did, he didn’t get away. Do all fire-witches blow up like that?”
“No. I’ve never even heard of such a thing.”
“There you go, being exceptional again. Good work, daughter mine.”
“You jest. But I am still… angry. Upset. Disturbed. I am… not entirely… me.”
“You’re you,” I assured her. “I know you; I bound your soul into a pillar of divine fire so that you could shape it into your new body. You are entirely yourself. My main concern, right now, is finding the ghost of an assassin, if I can, before dawn.”
“You have very little time,” she offered. “Dawn will be here shortly.”
“How do—nevermind. Thank you for the warning. Excuse me.”
I unwrapped tendrils with considerable malicious intent. If I had done so before, would they have been incinerated as quickly as I could spread them? Or would they have survived because of my defenses? Regardless, I could use them now, hunting for whatever might remain of an oxidized assassin. There was nothing to be found in the immediate area, though. Could Amber have blasted him into oblivion, both body and soul? It was a quasi-divine manifestation of power, so it was possible. I hoped not. I wanted to have a very brief vampire-to-prey talk with him.
We walked out of the ruin of the building. All around us, the town was smoking slightly, but everything that was burning had stopped.
Firebrand?
Wasn’t me, Boss. I can only put out fires by making things burn faster and eating it.
I spotted Tianna. She was sitting on Bronze, wrapped in my cloak, and looking smug. Her face broke into a huge smile when Amber’s flaming form drifted into view behind me, pretending to walk.
“Mom!”
Bronze, at Tianna’s urging, walked toward us. Amber held out her fiery hands and clasped Tianna’s.
“You’re not solid,” Tianna complained.
“It was the best I could do,” I explained. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Grandpa. She’s
pretty
.”
I’m sure every mother wants to hear that a radical change in her physical form is “pretty.”
“Good. I’ll be right back.” While they talked, I hurried in a circles, spiraling outward, tendrils fanning rapidly outward, sweeping through walls, people, wood, stone, metal…
There you are!
Tendrils grabbed, seized, and dragged. The wandering spirit was suddenly bound in dark lines of power and suspended directly before me. I stood in the street and glared at a confused and panicky ghost. Exhausted and sooty people spared enough energy to look at me curiously. They only saw me, standing in the street, illuminated only by a few wizard-lights and scattered lanterns.
I then realized I was still naked. Fine. Let them watch; I was in a hurry. My victim’s spiritual cohesion was already degrading. Unlike Amber, he was still coming apart. Also unlike Amber, he wasn’t about to get any help.