No Flame But Mine Read Free Page B

but only sense them. Some strong mage then had died there.
    After Sofora he wandered back and forth, searching.
    As she had done if he had known, and in some manner he did, Thryfe came to settlements where men remained, and where needed he helped them. He rebuilt by sorcery their walls and homes, healed them, secured their husbandry and assisted their beasts. Perhaps curiously they took him only for a talented mage, some minor intelligent magician with no one else left to care for. In Jemhara’s case as he had learned, she had been instantly taken for a Magikoy. This amused him. He was both glad and sorry, paternally proud of her, and ashamed of his own descent – not from pride but because it showed him, he thought, he had been too sure of himself in the past.
    There were nights seated in the open against some scarp or rock, protected from the cold only by his craft, when he dreamed of her. These dreams were never sexual. Sexuality, now he had again accepted it as inherent in him, lashed him with its thorns and fires during his conscious hours. Asleep Jemhara was his mother, the young woman he had as a boy seen torn apart and eaten by a wolf. Or else she was his daughter. A little child, he led her by the hand, astonished by that hand’s smallness, while she looked up at him with shining, happy eyes.
    She is what I missed. All that I missed. Or never allowed myself to have .
    The Magikoy had no stricture against the sexual act. Even union was possible, providing it never clashed with the role of magus. Celibacy had been Thryfe’s choice. He had fought ferociously with his own self to achieve it. Letting celibacy go he was bereft. He no longer knew himself or what he was. He had never been, he supposed, what he reckoned.
    Aside from that the Magikoy were mostly gone. The White Death had proved impartial in its sentence.
    Only his idea that he, had he returned to Ru Karismi at the proper time as he had meant to, might have prevented use of the pan-destructive weapons – only this still nagged at him. Yet even there he was no longer certain. For who was he to assume he alone might have altered destiny? If the weapons had remained unleashed, instead Vashdran, that demonic bi-bred of god and mortal, would have sacked the city and razed it, exactly like Sofora and the rest.
    Thryfe’s physical search continued. Which way then to seek?
    North lay the Marginal Land; within and beyond that the lairs of the Olchibe nation, what was left of it. Further north Gech opened, long spoiled from ancient wars. Ice swamps, mountains and ice desert tumbled eventually back into an ice-plated sea. East was Jafn territory. But again Jafn was depopulated after the Death. All north and east had joined with the Lionwolf to consume the Ruk, and so perished.
    Thryfe had on his travels nevertheless heard some talk of a new Ruk capital in the far west. Kl Ctaar it seemed to be called: Phoenix Risen from Ash . He was ignorant of where it lay precisely. He tended to think it a legend quickly invented to salve the horror of aftermath. One of the royal line too was said to be in charge there, and that also convinced Thryfe it was a fable. All the kings of Ru Karismi, one way or another, were unrisen ashes.
    He wondered now and then if Jemhara had made her way southward towards the unknown country of Kraagparia. There every man, woman and child had thaumaturgic ability … it was said. Elder writings spoke of the Kraag but no one from the northern end of the continent, reportedly, had met with them for centuries. The Kraag dictum was that reality was unreal, unreality real. Maybe such a thought would have tempted Jemhara as she had come to be.
    One night there was a blizzard. The wind raced by visible as silver lances. Thryfe strode through this wind, which widely parted either side of him.
    His power was yet very mighty. Reminded, he sat humbly on the ground with the torrent searing past, smoothed the ice beneath the snow to a