The Seekers of Fire Read online

  "And what, my lord, are people like me?"

  "People, my lady, that are connected to me. What did you think that I meant?"

  She did not reply, but the answer was obvious. She had thought that he had referred to her as a commoner, a lower quality person to whoever the Lord of Waltraud was.

  Rianor sighed. "Never think that again, will you? And I do have a reason to tell you to listen carefully and act accordingly." The shadow was back in his eyes, and Linden found herself simultaneously desiring to hit him, and embrace and comfort him.

  "I told you that most probably this was our door. If I were certain, I would have said so. It might be the door to any House. Or it might lead somewhere else entirely."

  "I see." Linden thought to apologize, but this was interrupted as Rianor held her more tightly and then released her and stepped in the direction of the door.

  "Well," he said just as he reached for the handle, "let us see if it will open for me."

  The door screeched open just as Linden threw herself against it. The twilight beyond glimmered with silhouettes of dishes, pans, pots, and an image on the wall that looked much like that on the vial and the handkerchief; then her shoulder collided with the steel, and the door slammed closed.

  "And who is heedless now!" she shouted as Rianor murmured, "This is my House, all right."

  Linden gripped his shirt. She wanted to shake him and did not do it only because of his broken ribs. "Rianor, how much mind does a person need to know that attacks that do not work on another might still work on him?" She inhaled sharply, resisting the urge to scream. "I don't have whip-marks on my face, but you do!"

  Rianor was watching her with a strange expression on his face. At the same time, a part of his attention seemed to be somewhere else, and finally Linden did shake him. "You don't know me and what may or may not hurt me! I might even be one of the Waltraud people and this the door to my House!"

  Now all of his attention snapped back to her, and he gently but firmly caught her wrists.

  "Linde, you are right, and I do owe you an explanation about why I would do the same thing I was angry with you about."

  Linden sighed, disengaging her fingers from his clothes.

  "An explanation? You owe me many of them."

  Rianor smiled faintly.

  "You will get two for now. The first one is that I certainly knew that you were not connected to Waltraud. Or to any others I would not have liked you to be connected to, for that matter. As for the second one,"—he reached his left hand towards her—"look at this."

  Slowly, he traced his wrist with his thumb, making sure that she was watching. A moment later, a glittering watch of white metal emerged on his wrist. Its hands moved, but its face showed not numbers but the engraved symbol .

  Linden suddenly found it hard to open her mouth and speak. "Oh, Master ..."

  Rianor nodded, the hint of a smile gone.

  "Yes, if you are going to mention the old man's name in connection to anything, this is it. What do you know about it?"

  Linden regarded the symbol carefully, revulsion fighting sharp curiosity inside her, then both feelings were displaced by something else.

  "How much does it hurt you?" she whispered, grateful that her voice was not shaking.

  "It does not hurt me at all, my fair lady," Rianor replied softly, then seemed to read something in her eyes and added, "not any more. Now tell me what you know."

  "I don't know much." Linden gave the watch a look of mixed feelings, then lightly placed her fingers on Rianor's elbow. "I have only seen symbols of that kind on Mentor Maxim's whip." She swallowed, the memory of the Mentors' attack and the old Mentor's unmoving body still too fresh.

  "I am not supposed to have seen them, I think, but I wanted to know as much about the whip as I could, so I sneaked close to him once, after Confession. He was just talking to my mom about me, telling her"—Linden laughed nervously—"what a good girl with a spotless quintessence I was. He had whipped everyone in the temple but me that day, and the whip was still out, as if he had forgotten about it."

  She shivered. "There was a moment when I thought that he had seen me—that I would taste the whip for the first time then—but he must have not, for he did nothing. I also noticed that the whip was not the only strange thing about him, that he had something on his hand, which was, however, hidden by his sleeve. I do not know if you noticed, but tonight, too, they were talking about something on the young one's hand." She shivered again. "Also, I once heard Factory clerks talking about symbols on the doors to the Factory's Inner Sanctum. Something, they said, must be important about symbols and the days new wretches arrive—Do you know what they say about Factory wretches, that even if they ever go out again, they are never the same?"

  "I do." His face was yet again, unreadable. "But I did not know about there being such symbols in the Factories."

  "Well, this is all I know, it is not something you are encouraged to learn about. Someone—" She sighed. "A woman who later disappeared told me once that the Bers used glyphs of pain, meant to punish those who deserved it."

  "And what do you think of that?" There must have been something on her face or in her voice, for now there was something in his and it seemed a reaction.

  She met his eyes.

  "I do not doubt the pain part. As well as I do not doubt that it should not be up to the Bers to decide who deserves what."

  Rianor nodded. "I would really like to hear more of your opinions once we are at the other side of this door. Now listen." He glanced at his watch, then back at Linden. "This here is the proof that I am the real Lord of Qynnsent, and your parents asked to see it. You should have, too. Were I an impostor, I could have stolen the clothes and everything that bears the Qynnsent crest. But not the watch. It cannot be removed."

  "May I touch it?"

  "I do not mind if you try."

  Still holding his elbow, Linden slowly moved her other hand towards the watch. When she brushed Rianor's wrist with her finger, the watch was gone as if it had never been there.

  "Interesting," Rianor murmured, "it would not let most people so close before disappearing. Well, you see that it cannot be stolen. Even cutting my hand would not help."

  "I do hope that anyone considering cutting your hand would think of that first," Linden said softly. "Why it is in the shape of a watch, when it doesn't show the time?"

  "Oh, it does measure something. Only, I do not know what." There, the anger was in him again, this time deeper, more hidden and controlled, barely a breath of an emotion, and yet a breath that made her cold.

  "Linde, I want you to know about the watch before we go through this door. I need to use it to make sure I get you inside safely, and I would not use it on you before telling you first. You are getting one as well, by the way, when you are officially a Qynnsent lady. The Bers will make it. It will not hurt you—I hope—and yet no one else will be able to take it from you. It will open doors and do other useful things, but it will not give you the protection this one gives me."

  He fell into silence, his eyes focused far, and Linden tried to not interrupt his thoughts, knowing already how irritated he became if she did. Then his breathing became slightly uneven, and with a sinking heart she realized that his last reserve of strength was waning fast.

  "Rianor, tell me later."

  "Do not worry, my caring apprentice. I will tell you most of it later anyway, it is too much. The watch, or more accurately my status as a High Lord of Qynnsent, was the reason that trying the door was less dangerous for me than it was for you. You see, noble Houses are not always friendly towards each other, and you can expect a dagger in your back even from the ones that are supposedly allied to you. Because of that, throughout the centuries some Houses have almost been obliterated by others. But never completely obliterated. The Bers want all Noble Houses to persevere. So, one thing they did was to protect the doors to Noble Houses from those who neither belong to the respective House nor are guests or workers who a
re there with the High Ruler's blessing."

  He sighed.

  "Other doors are protected in similar ways, but now is not the time to talk about them. As for the House doors, a correct House wristwatch will open them, but invaders will be stopped. The doors themselves would determine how much invaders suffer in the process, and some High Rulers had been known to convince the Bers to make them some quite nasty doors. Selective, too, sometimes, hence my comment regarding Waltraud. Yet, in all these cases, a High Lord or High Lady of another House would only be repelled, with no suffering at all."

  "Isn't that fair," Linden said with a twisted smile, and steel and something that looked like a hint of pain glinted in Rianor's eyes.

  "Would you care to give me a definition of 'fair,' Linde? I thought it fair enough when I became a High Lord. And you did not complain that it could never be you who entered a Factory's Inner Sanctum, either. Your fairness, my dear lady, is never the same as somebody else's. Together with freedom, justice, and other such things that Bers, Mentors and poets love to throw in your face as Master-crafted to suit them, it exist in your mind and nowhere else."

  Linden stared at him, shocked by the aberrant opinion so similar to the ones she'd had throughout her life but always kept to herself.

  "Rianor, were you not a noble, these words would have doomed you," she whispered, with both fear and respect.

  "I would not advise you to share similar viewpoints in public even after I have presented you as a lady," he replied softly, then a small smile flickered on his lips. "But you can always share them with me."

  She watched him carefully for a long time, wondering just how far she could afford to go, and he watched her back, measuring something of his own.

  "I will like that," she finally said. "Sharing will certainly be a new experience." Then her lips trembled as she added, " But, Rianor, I would also like to believe that things like fairness, freedom and justice exist somewhere besides inside all stupid minds. If they do not, what is the sense of living at all?"

  "One of the reasons that we are Scientists is to find out, isn't it?"

  She could only nod.

  Then the evasive thought from before returned to Linden's mind, somehow enhanced by Rianor's ideas.

  He stepped closer to her. "High time for us to go inside, Linde. I already consider you to be a lady of Qynnsent, but you don't yet have a watch. I don't want you to get hurt. I need to touch your face in order to, for now, officially make you a guest."

  "Guest, you are welcome inside the Great House Qynnsent of Mierenthia," he murmured a moment later, his voice as impersonal as his touch. He had just traced a circle on her forehead with the index finger of his watch hand. It was, in a way, disappointing. He seemed to not even be seeing her, even though his hand was on her skin. He must have said these same words and repeated these same motions so many times and with so many people that he did not notice them any longer—but they were new to her.

  "Was there truly a need for that?" Linden said, realizing that her voice sounded sharper than she had intended. "The door did nothing to me, did not hurt me at all before."

  Rianor's eyes focused on her; he was seeing her again now. "You are right; I wondered about that myself. I would have thought that the door should physically react to someone trying to open it, even if not in a particularly painful manner. Yet, it did not."

  Linden's earlier vague thought returned stronger, albeit not yet fully formed, and she followed it, the disappointment momentarily forgotten.

  "Rianor, you performed a rite to make me a guest. You do not know what exactly it does, do you? You did not even seem to notice what you were doing."

  He said nothing, but she knew by the look he cast her that she had guessed correctly. Well, at least rites, unlike dangerous doors with opinions of their own, were familiar to Linden. They were common enough in commoners' Mierber. Small, insignificant rites such as greeting a person by simultaneously taking his or her right hand with your own right hand and his or her left hand with your own left, or big ones like Initiation or Judgement: people did them not because they understood why, but because they knew that they must. Often, people were forbidden to even try understanding.

  "Well, my lord, I have always been taught that you cannot communicate with something nonliving, and the door seems to be just that, even though I might of course be wrong. A nonliving thing, we are told, is—well—nonliving, something without vitality and without a mind or a quintessence. Of course, water, too, is nonliving, but we are taught that it is treacherous—and wondering about how something without a mind and a quintessence can be treacherous is already an aberrant thought ... Yet, as you already know, I can communicate with water. At least, I can sometimes make it do what I want. Your rite, too, is about communicating with something non-living, about telling a door that a stranger is now a guest. I have never seen such a rite before. So, what if the same communication is possible without the rite? What if we did it with the door, without realizing, earlier, which is why the door did not react to me at all? Or what if it had some other way to know? We might have established a connection with this door, like we established one between you and the samodiva. Or, perhaps a connection has always been there, but you have to know that it is possible for it to exist, so that it does exist. 'Nothing is as it appears but I'll kick you and you shall see all!' "

  She was almost jumping with excitement now.

  "Rianor, what you earlier said about fairness being only in your mind, it is a part of something bigger. You know that objects always interact in the world, and that things affect other things. I have watched the effects in my Science, I am sure you have, too. But now I have a feeling that it is not about things only, or that things are not just things."

  Linden watched the door and the interplay of light on it. Light was not just a thing, either. What was it, then? She almost knew, the knowledge darting past her mind and fleeing not too far away, fluttering at a distance where she could feel the wind it caused and sense its teasing and caress. Knowledge was the province of thought, but strange as it were, she could sometimes feel knowledge. She turned to Rianor again.

  "We have already communicated with nonliving things. We know that it is possible. Tonight we even know that Bessove or fairytale creatures exist, even though all my life I have been vehemently taught that they were unreal. We have been 'kicked' tonight and thus we have 'seen.' So perhaps, as a result, we can now see—and walk—further than others can, but we do not yet know the way. But a way there must be, and perhaps we can find it; perhaps we can deduce the rules of walking it if we don't dismiss what we are so often taught to dismiss."

  "This is interesting." The words did Rianor's expression no justice. For some time, he had been watching her like a starving man feeding on her words—as if her words were something he must have been seeking all his life and had suddenly found—as if she were. "Very interesting, indeed." He moved closer to her. " 'And thou shalt hail wise Stone and River, and thou shalt praise kind Sun and Wind, for else inside thy heart shall quiver, for else the path shall break and bleed.' Do you know what you have just said?"

  He had suddenly come so close that she could feel his breath on her face, his eyes piercing hers in a way no other person's eyes, even Mentor Maxim's, had. There was a subtle change in him. He emitted a feeling of both danger and thrill, and Linden found herself thrilled but not frightened at all.

  "Oh, I very well know what I said, my lord," she whispered. "I admit this night has been a bit taxing, but I am still capable of remembering what I said a minute ago. I am currently more interested in your words."

  "Witch." His fingers captured a lock of her hair that had fallen between her eyes. He slowly brushed her nose with it, then, almost imperceptibly, her cheek and jaw. So much for the indifferent touching. "My headstrong, Science-minded witch."

  "Witch?" Linden leaned slightly back, and her shoulders suddenly felt the cold metal of the door, chill spreading through her until she was shivering, even though
her face was hot under his caress. "What do you mean, witch? Do you consider me a Magical reprobate who deserves Ber punishment?"

  He smiled, but still the chill spread, making her limbs numb and her breathing ragged. It was cold. Cold like the extinguished firewell had been, four days earlier. Cold like ... like the dust of a burned Mierenthian forest and its dried creeks, after the gleaming fire monsters had spread their wings and flown away. Cold like a stake just before the flames would spur into frenzy, claiming her body but never her quintessence, never conquering fully, never finding the way to the other world, which her murderers wanted but could never burn. Cold like it could only be after fire had burned and smoked and raged and killed, until there was nothing left to feed it, until everything, even fire, had faded into a vague memory.

  As if in a dream, Linden felt her body sob and Rianor's arms tighten around her, heard his voice but could not distinguish the words. There had been another world. A world where the leaves were both green and sprinkled with snow, where seasons, light, and darkness flowed and pulsed together, blending with magnificence and peace to form something new. Something living. It was a world which was but an arm's reach away, and yet no paths could lead there. It was a world she longed for, but which the stone and steel of the tunnel sealed away.

  Or was it her who longed for this world? Linden shook her head. For a moment the coldness of the door had done something to her. She had, for lack of a better word, read in the stone and steel the imprint of what she thought Dimna's sorrow, as well as perhaps some other woman's—some witch's—life.

  Flames. Linden now knew what flames were, and she knew burning and the bitter taste of smoke.

  But the moment was gone now. She took a deep breath of air that was chilly only with the tolerable chill of an underground tunnel, even though the chill inside her refused to go away. Then she turned to Rianor and told him.