No Flame But Mine Read Free Page A

fair, maybe I have no target.’
    â€˜This one time you did. And you do know the father,’ Jemhara said.
    Beebit stopped laughing.
    â€˜Her father , lady, was a woman .’
    He had travelled for a vast while, so it seemed to him. And yet his intellect knew it had not been so extended a journey.
    That night he went away, he had seen the Stones, those immeasurable, indecipherable obelisks, looming at the stars. Two half-moons stood over them like guardian spirits. And the Stones, which had always taken colour after dark, flooding with blue, grey, silver, rose and white – at the last with brilliant green – were unlit and empty. He left them behind him yet felt for a space a kind of leash around his ribs, paying out from their core. It was not detaining him, rather going with him. Then he forgot it for it was only an illusion. It was she, the woman he had loved, then hated, then come to love again, it was she who had cured him of his despair and woken him back into the pragmatic agony of life.
    Thryfe, magus of the Highest Order of the Magikoy, had stridden over the lambent desolation of the snows.
    He had turned his back on almost everything that upheld his former existence. Rigorously trained in the occult Insularia at Ru Karismi, he had become the warden of the royal court, disliking his post, wanting to serve mankind not the engoldened hollowness of kings. At the final test, when the horde of the Lionwolf’s Gullahammer swept in to destroy the Ruk, Thryfe had been unaware, knotted with Jemhara in the throes of oblivious lust. For this mistake of his he had not forgiven himself, or her. The self-dealt torture he subsequently underwent she had freed him from. Only after he had once more driven her away did he grasp her innocence of all wrong in his affairs. And – more terribly – her genuine power . For she was as much a Magikoy as any that the Ruk had trained, her natural gifts polished by adversity – the trite truth of the School of Life. And, of love.
    Ru Karismi, the Ruk, were lost by then. The Lionwolf too, and all his legions.
    The steel-white snows Thryfe had trodden had covered huddles of ruins, abandoned villages and little towns, steads where wild elephant fed among the neglected runnels of dormant grain.
    The mage mirror, the oculum, which Thryfe had rebuilt in his house at Stones, had been able to show him all Jemhara’s past, but nothing of her present. Armed with her own new-minted powers, had she veiled herself from him deliberately? At first he thought that must be so, or that her pain at leaving him – for she had surely proved she loved him more than her life – had wiped the superior scrying glass with ink.
    Now he began to think that some other mad force perhaps abroad on the ice-locked earth had got between them.
    He could therefore only use deduction to seek her.
    At first he went towards the small city-town of Sofora.
    Jemhara had grown to her twelfth or thirteenth year in some impoverished village not far from there. But of the village he could find no trace. He entered the town compelled by aversion more than will.
    Sofora it was which had, on viewing the advance of Lion-wolf’s horde, sent word to the capital. They are too many . And later the perilous warning: There is ONE among them …
    Not much remained after the attentions of those that were too many , or that One.
    A single magical cannon of Magikoy design lay smashed below the walls. Neither landscape nor weather had been able to absorb it. Instead it had become like those curiosities of the Jafn coasts, their Thing meeting places, where some object was frozen in ice – a mammoth, a pylon or a bizarre ship. The dragon head of the cannon’s mouth snarled its verdigris jaws. It had never been fired. He had learned, those psychic cannon which had been used at Thase Jyr had blown up and helped obliterate the city.
    Further off a parcel of bones were inside the snow. He could not see