The Fire Opal (22 page)

The fire, as if in magical league with us, formed a circle around the window, and the ice dripped away. Breeze waited with a small cup to catch the fire, to keep some of it alive when the rest went out.

Soon I was dismantling big opaque chunks of ice and managed to dislodge the glass from the window. I got down and brought the vat of lit, pulsating ghost matter close to the window. The girls opened the vat, releasing floating figures of light, the sound of many individuals taking in deep breaths. Glowing spinal columns appeared and remained on the air, with very faint images of men forming around them. The ghosts floated there, orienting themselves on the air.

“La Luz,”
one of them whispered, and they all began whispering different words in Spanish.
“Santa Rita, La Madre de la Luz, Santa Maria.”

“The names of their ships,” I explained to the girls, who looked puzzled. “Up there,” I said, pointing to the window that led outside. The ghosts gazed at all of us in recognition, whispering
“Gracias”
and bowing their barely visible heads. A few times, I saw a pumping heart appear to one side of a spine and illuminate with sudden floods of bright rushing particles before fading.

“Nuestra Señora de la Soledad,”
several whispered at once as they passed me.

“You know Francisco?” I asked.

“Sí,”
one answered.

“Is he here?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“No sé. No sé.”

Each bent to fit through the window and began swimming on the air. I got up on the stacked wheels and metal again to watch them glowing on the evening air awhile before they moved away, many of them wearing ghostly forms of the jacket Francisco had worn. My heart was battered with remorse when I thought of the one I’d lost.

I lifted the little girls one by one and held them up high, so that they could watch the procession of brilliant spines glowing in the twilight like traveling candles.

When the last one was too far away to see, we all sat in a circle and talked.

“I have to devise a way to get the Fire Opal. There is going to be a reception tonight. Tom Cavan has said that Uria will be there.”

“That will be her emanation,” Breeze said.

“Do you think the emanation might wear the Fire Opal?” I asked.

“No,” they all chimed, shaking their heads.

I explained about the narcotic pastille that the Swan Woman had given me, and told them what she had suggested.

“Yes. I have an idea,” Breeze said. “We can burn it down here and send the smoke through the air current during the singing of ‘The Canticle of Fire.’ This way, anyone, including any guards Uria has around her lair and even her mermaids, who will be gathered on the low deck to hear the singing, will be affected.”

“Once I get the Fire Opal, if I can manage it, I am supposed to take a small boat into the western sea and try to find the Holy Isles.” But I felt uneasy about the plan. “I’m worried that some won’t be in the range of the pastille smoke and they will catch me.”

“Oh, don’t worry. Absolutely everyone on the barge listens to ‘The Canticle of Fire,’” said Breeze.

“Why?” I asked.

Breeze peered into my eyes. “It stirs a kind of nostalgia in everyone who hears it. It must be in our nature to long for our true origins, even someone as corrupt as Uria herself. Although, without compassion in one’s nature, listening to it is only a kind of lonely indulgence.”

“What if the smoke doesn’t work on Uria’s body in the ice cocoon? How would I dare trespass to search for the Fire Opal?”

“If one of the Swan Women gave you this pastille, it
will have power over Uria,” Floreen said, and all the others chorused their agreement.

“As soon as you see her and everyone else dozing off, follow the fleshy cord from beneath the emanation’s dress. It will lead you to her lair,” said Breeze.

I gave them pieces of the leaf and told them to eat them before burning the pastille. I left them all gathered in a flurry of whispers around the cup of true fire.

CHAPTER 19

T
he finished ceremonial dress was extraordinary, much more formidable than the soft metal dress in Muldoon’s, and unapologetically armored with little metal platelets in areas around the chest, waist and hips, including numerous small compartments made of tin.

As Gudrun helped me into it, I told her everything that had transpired with Tom Cavan and the ash girls, then breathlessly explained the plan.

“Shouldn’t I have something to replace the opal with, just in case it’s obvious that it’s missing?” I asked.

“Take one of those large crystals from the chandelier that fell,” Gudrun suggested. “One the size of an apple, because that is how large the Fire Opal is.”

We heard two sets of footsteps approaching from a distant corridor. “We have only a few minutes before
they get here and Uria starts to listen,” Gudrun said hurriedly. “I was thinking that you should take Phee with you into the western sea. She knows her way through those waters of the Shee, where you will be in danger.”

The footsteps stopped just outside in the corridor. Without speaking, Gudrun showed me a deep pocket in the soft, attenuated skirts just at my belly, made specifically, I knew, to hide the Fire Opal. Quickly I slipped her a tiny piece of the antidote leaf.

She seemed to want to share something about the dress, and was about to whisper to me when Tom cleared his throat outside the door. Gudrun pointed at the hems, but immediately dropped her hand and stepped back as Tom came brusquely through the curtain.

He stared at me with wide eyes and a smile growing slowly across his face. Then he grabbed my arm and pulled me after. “Let’s go.”

I was flanked by Tom and his mother as we walked a long, circuitous path to the ceremonial room, a way I had never gone. I tried to take note of every right and left turn, and found myself astonished by the many empty, elegant rooms the barge contained.

Finally, we reached two great doors thrown wide open onto a large icy room well lit with lamps and candles. Vulture women were lighting flat dishes of incense on stands in each corner. I heard the same terrifying mechanical clanking from the night before. Uria’s emanation, a figure about ten feet tall, was entering on a metal platform with wheels, wearing a metal gown. She had high cheekbones and a falcon’s gaze. Her metal dress had
none of the delicacy of the one I wore, and was brazenly armored, its iron sleeves formed to look like powerfully muscular arms. Uria’s emanation clenched her metal fists open and closed and seemed to be concentrating, her brow furrowed, her eyes narrowed.

There was a striking difference between the heavy solidity of her armor and the insubstantiality of her face and neck, which deepened and dissolved, like something both there and not there. A few times, she seemed to stop concentrating, and her emanation under the dress trembled and shook slightly like it was filled with air and not subject to gravity. Without the weighty metal of her garment, that airy emanation might have escaped upward like a balloon.

Though there had been an attempt to hide it with curtains, I could see the fleshy cord, part of it disappearing into shadow. Several times, Uria’s eyes flashed in my direction, then looked immediately away, and though I sensed her strong awareness of my presence, she refused to address me.

Through a side entrance, more vulture women were entering, transforming themselves as they came. As humans, their shoulders remained hunched up high, and their heads hung low and oddly forward from their necks, reminiscent of their bird forms. Their yellow eyes, darting and suspicious, raked the shadows of the room. As they took seats, I saw Uria’s face deepen and clarify. At that moment, a fanfare began.

Nighttime darkness filled the vast room, and twinkling snowflakes wheeled and swirled all around. I saw
the curtain near the floor move, the cord of flesh undulating and coming momentarily into the light. It quivered, riddled with veins and flecked with blood.

Uria lifted an arm, and a simulation of the northern lights began in the air all around us. The vulture women oohed and aahed. Then, lifting her other arm and pointing a trembling finger, Uria caused storm clouds to congregate and flash near the ceiling. I was numb with amazement, swept into the spirit of the grand theatrics. When the clouds were cleared, the room went a deep, dusky blue. The tundra girls all filed in and began to sing, a sweet high-pitched song in a strange language filled with
shhhs
and
chhhs
, lilting ocean sounds. At first the song was quietly poignant, but it built in tension and volume until it was wild with longing. The pitch-perfect voices infused the tissues of my mind and heart, and tears spilled from my eyes. I ached for Mam and Ishleen, for my da and my brothers and for Ard Macha itself, as if it were a distant country I might never make my way back to.

Tom Cavan was looking at me, impatient with my display of emotion, as if it suggested I was too far away from him or not enough under his control. I was not sure what made him so irritated with my tears. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out the two small iron boxes.

The horror that must have appeared on my features made him smile. He was the cause of that emotion in me, and that must have been what gratified him. Then, to deepen the insult, he slowly traced my arm with his index finger as if he owned me. I pulled away from him, my
heart pounding now with anger, and that served to deepen the resolve I felt about the task ahead of me. I reached into the pocket where I’d hidden the antidote leaf and as unobtrusively as possible put it into my mouth and swallowed it.

The woodsy-smelling incense that had been burning suddenly took on a new note, something flowery and cloying, almost overwhelming. The narcotic began to work, and heads were lolling, falling into slumber. Tom and his mother, along with most of Uria’s henchwomen, dropped with thudding reverberations to the floor, causing interminable echoing booms.

Uria’s emanation was fading, but managed to gather herself momentarily, her fleshy cord stretching and twisting convulsively as if in attempted revolt. She looked directly and knowingly at me, and for a terrifying second, all the light in the room was sucked into the vortex of her eyes. But then those eyes fell closed, and her metal dress opened like a trapdoor from which the emanation rose, drifting weightless and limp to the ceiling; the fleshy cord was the only thing keeping her slightly weighted in her floating.

I climbed over Tom’s and his mother’s bodies, and the bodies of all the others, careful as I moved through the tundra girls, and followed the fleshy cord on the floor, where it snaked out of the room and down numerous corridors. My breaths were coming in great, audible gusts. As carefully as I could, I peeked into the vestibule that led to Uria’s lair.

This close to the source, Uria’s heartbeat and breathing were deafening and reverberating, though her heart sounded slow and irregular and her breathing broken and uneven. The strange centaur, lying with his mouth open and his eyes half closed, twitched when he saw me but could not seem to make himself move. When his eyes glazed over, and I knew he was completely unconscious, I struggled past him, still not fully trusting that he wouldn’t suddenly revive, and was as deeply struck as I had been the last time by the familiarity of his face. The spiders lay in a stupor, their mouths open and eyes sunken, though each time one of their legs trembled, I jumped.

I pushed open a door of ice into a cave hung with icicles and lit cold blue with fires burning in three hanging lamps. I kept following the cord of flesh, now as thick as the middle of my body, until I saw where it originated, growing like the trunk of a huge vine from out of a kind of pond or icy cocoon. In this frozen and partially petrified tomb of ice, wax and amber, the very large figure of a woman lay, reminiscent of the emanation with her high cheekbones, her sharp falcon’s nose and brows. But it was her eyes that caused every nerve and sinew in my body to vibrate. They were very pale blue spheres, cloudy and marbled, staring in frozen horror at me and through me.

She wore archaic platelets of armor similar to the emanation’s metal dress, though these were broken and many were missing pieces, the clothing beneath torn and
twisted into ropy fabric, partly destroyed. Wounds were visible, red and swollen, as if she had just fallen at battle.

I felt faint when I saw that the walls around the tomb were pulsing and appeared to be made of flesh, red and riddled with capillaries and veins.

And there it was, the large Fire Opal, right at her chest and sewn and held in place by the torn fabric and ropy threads. Everything was frozen except for the area around the Fire Opal, which gave off a gentle heat, the ice there partially melted. I struggled to work the opal free of the dress, the water around it so cold my fingers ached and burned, pulsating stiffly as if they might fall off. Finally I extricated the opal carefully, managing to release it while keeping in place the threads that had caged it. Once I had the opal, I put it into the special pocket and took out the chandelier crystal to replace it.