Pyrebound - 13.4

Chapter 13.4 – Pyrebound
They woke early, feeling stiff, sore, and cold. The path to the mountaintop looked every bit as long and forbidding as it had last night; the mass of shabti was, if anything, bigger. Ram was inclined to hurry everyone back on their way before they could become more demoralized, but Dezri and Nishal only gave him black looks from their bedrolls, no matter how he cajoled. Reppi finally got them up by reheating several mutton-pies from her bag; she even managed to get the crusts crispy again. There were definite advantages to traveling with a handmaiden.

Actually getting them up the mountain was a still greater challenge, though it was the peak of the tetrad and the yellow sun was shining down bright and clear. The light only made the cloud over the crest clench threateningly together, promising a rain of terrors at the slightest provocation. When, after five minutes’ argument, Dezri and Nishal still dug in their heels, Ram, Imbri and Reppi simply set off without them. Their loyalty to Piridur, or their fear of being left behind, prevailed, and Ram heard the clatter of loose stone from below as the two hurried to catch up.

He didn’t look back; the slope was difficult enough without distractions. There was no guessing how many kindlings had passed since human feet had trod on this ground, and the accumulated debris made it like trying to climb a river of broken stones, or a sand dune with grains the size of his fist. There were no plants here to bind the earth with their roots, no life to build up soil, only dust and grit that blew up in great clouds with every disturbance. The ground shifted underfoot, and more than once he came down face-first. The little drainage groove was little better, and wound back and forth in a maddening way.

It was difficult to tell if they were making any progress at all, and Ram’s only consolation was that he, personally, only felt better the hotter it got. Reppi was likewise fine, and he didn’t care about Dezri or Nishal, but Imbri was obviously struggling in her full coat, and after an hour of slogging they had to stop for a rest. “Any ideas?” he said to the two women in a low voice. Dezri and Nishal were taking their time to catch up.

“I could glaze a firm path to the peak, if you gave me a tetrad and five of my sisters,” Reppi said. Being indwelt didn’t make it more pleasant to aspirate dust, and she hadn’t volunteered for this trip to begin with.

“I’ll keep it in mind. Imbri?”

“A moment, please,” she panted, and downed a jug of water at one long draw. “Better. Okay. I could probably speed things up a bit, but there are risks. Do you mind if I ask the rookery for a hand up?”

“I guess not. But what are the risks?”

“They might despise us a bit more than they already do. I don’t know how that will affect our position without knowing the abizu at the other end.”

“Will we look less pathetic if we spend the whole day fumbling up this hill?”

“Good point. All right, I’ll try it. Just let me rest, and think of how I’m going to phrase this.”

“Phrase it to who?” He’d been assuming the rookery was at the top of the mountain. Imbri shushed him with a wave of her hand. Dezri and Nishal finally caught up with them just as Imbri rose to her feet. She got out her inductor, pointed herself at the rookery, and—

All four of them fell down, clutching their ears, as Imbri let out a long, rolling, warbling, gurgling, inhuman screech that echoed off the stones until Ram marveled that the scree of the slope did not give way beneath them. She hadn’t been boasting; as far as he could tell, she was making exactly the same kinds of sound he’d heard a full bloom ago, at the last rookery he’d visited. Hearing them come out of a human throat was more disturbing than the sight of the countless shabti floating overhead.

She went on for a long time, shrieking high and groaning low in a way that might have been bazu speech, or perhaps just a chicken being gutted alive. The shab-cloud rolled in fresh torments as she spoke. Long before she finished, it had thrust out a shadowy arm down the mountain towards them.

“Fucking bazu witch,” growled Nishal, when she was done. He didn’t say it loud enough to be clearly addressing her—but he made no effort to be quiet, either.

Imbri likewise gave no sign that she’d heard him. “Any luck, Ram?”

“I’d say they heard you,” Ram told her, as the long cloud drifted their way. “What did you tell them?”

“Basically, ‘an important human wants to talk to you, but he needs help getting there.’ I had to bury it under several layers of self-effacing bullshit, but that’s normal for bazuu. They wouldn’t deign to listen to a human who refused to grovel. In fact, they’d probably attack.”

“Uh-huh.” The shabti were almost directly overhead now, and condensing as they fell, partially obscuring the wan blue lights of their loci. It was like a whole night sky reaching down to smother them, and every star a little white sun. “Are you sure they aren’t attacking now?”

“Yes. They’d have wiped us all out by now, easily, if I’d offended them.”

“That isn’t reassuring.”

“You’re in the wrong place for reassurance. What are they doing, exactly?”

“Good question.” Slowly the dark mass drifted down, thickening more and more. It was difficult not to flinch or run. “It almost looks like they’re making a kind of ribbon or chain together. You didn’t ask for that?”

“I asked for nothing in particular, beyond an invitation.”

The strand of shabti abruptly fell the rest of the way, its far end landing a bare ten feet in front of them. The impact threw up a great cloud of dust; by the time they were all finished coughing and could see, there was a perfectly smooth, night-black surface leading in a straight line up the mountain, with just a hint of blue shining through every so often. “Looks like we’re invited. They made us a road.”

“Excellent. Lead me there, please.”

The flamekeepers loudly refused to set foot on the road. Even Reppi hung back. But none of them were necessary, and they’d lost enough time. Ram helped Imbri up, and they set off without bothering to answer the complaints—which got louder, but no nearer, as they went on, scaling the mountain more easily than the stairs of a temple. Walking on the backs of tortured, captive human beings, if the stories were true. Where did the bazuu here get them all, and how long had they been trapped like this?

Ram couldn’t do anything to help them now.

Imbri had her inductor out the whole time, pointing them dead ahead. “Just a reminder, Ram, before we get there: the bazuu are not human. They don’t live like us, they don’t think like us, they don’t want what we want. I’ll be speaking for you, and I can censor anything you get really wrong, but don’t waste your time appealing to any kind of moral sentiment, even a messed-up one. They haven’t got any of those. Bazuu believe in authority and power, and they can feel … aesthetically repulsed by things that aren’t the way they like. But that’s it.”

“What do they want, then? What should I appeal to?”

“I lived with them for blooms, and I still don’t know what motivates the bazuu in this world. In fact, I’m not even sure they’re people, in the same way we are. You know they aren’t properly alive, right? Only spirits pretending. And sometimes it’s not a very convincing pretense.”

“So it’s like arguing with Beshi.”

“Maybe a little bit. They do have thinking brains of their own. And I wouldn’t argue.” They were near the summit now; Ram looked back and saw the road behind them had already started to dissolve and lift back up into the sky, shab by shab. Reppi and the boys had no hope of catching up, and didn’t look to be trying. The mountaintop had nothing of note on it save a thin fringe of green catsmoss where the light of the pyre peered over the far peak to nourish it.

Their road ended abruptly as soon as the slope started to level off, and retreated up into the sky the moment they left it. Imbri’s inductor pointed them towards a completely unremarkable rock. Beyond it the mountain dipped down again into another, still deader valley, and another beyond, and so on to the end of the world.

He tried to focus on the much less frightening rock. “Will I even be able to go inside the rookery, though? Or will it be like the gate?”

“It should be okay. The rookery is a … hypothetical space, but it’s not deliberately unmoored from Ki in the way gatespace is. It’s basically in this world. Your spirit won’t like it, but I don’t think it will be provoked to wreck it. We’ve taken dulspheres into rookeries before without incident.”

“You don’t sound very sure.”

“I’m not, but we’ve come this far. We’re probably close enough to enter now.”

Ram shut his eyes. “Don’t keep them waiting, then. Knock on the door.”

There was a familiar, unpleasant disorienting sensation. When he opened his eyes again, they stood in a featureless black space, identical to the one he had visited with Ushna and Bal. Hovering above them were four pallid bazuu, with a resplendent abizu, a terrible vision of rainbow plumes, highest of all, staring down severely on its visitors. It gave a gurgling croon of—welcome? Ram hoped so.

Imbri replied at length, while Ram stood uncomfortably beside her, remembering his last encounter with bazuu. Even if he was now immune to their possession-tricks, his haranu was upset with everything it saw or heard, and its indignation waxed steadily hotter as the conversation went on. But he could, at least, feel other haranuu in the distance.

“All right,” Imbri said. “I’ve introduced myself—it’s heard of me—and you, as an indwelt male human. It’s appalled, but intrigued, and says it hasn’t had such a visitor in … a couple of hundred kindlings, I think.”

“Bazu conceptions of time are as weird as bazu conceptions of everything else. Anyway, we’re here. I got you an interview. What do you want to ask first?”

“Is there a way to change the way the pyres work? Any way at all? Or is the system locked into place?”

Imbri translated—it took a much longer time than Ram expected. But the reply was quite short. “It says there might be, but it has no cause to know, because it’s not human. And … it says receiving humans is offensive.”

“Is it asking us to leave already?”

“I don’t think that’s what it means. Hold on.” She screeched and growled some more, and got another curt reply. After a bit of back-and-forth, Imbri elaborated, “It says it isn’t talking about your being here now. It says you’ll come back later.”

“What? Tell it I don’t plan to. This is our only visit.”

“I already did. It said I was wrong—you will come back. That humans always do. We always … invade where we aren’t wanted, where we don’t belong.”

“Well, we won’t be ‘invading’ here. Give it my word. Tell it I’m from a fire far away, and I won’t wage war against this rookery. I have enough problems without all that. Of course, I can’t promise for anybody else.”

“Right,” she said, sounding unconvinced, and carried on. The abizu turned its gaze on Ram as it replied. “As I expected, it thinks we’re stupid now. It wasn’t talking about you attacking it here. It’s not even talking about invading in a military sense. More … sneaking in and stealing. It’s using some weird constructions I’ve never heard before, a kind of modified subjunctive—“

A modified what? “Forget that for now. Where is it accusing me of planning to steal from? It can’t be talking about that raid I did with Ushna, can it?” This conversation was getting wildly off-track, and he couldn’t tell why, nor think of a way to get it back where he wanted. The abizu and its attendants stared down, cold and impassive, as they spoke.

“No. Not the raid. Not anywhere on this world.” She hesitated. “This is going to sound really crazy, but … I think it’s talking about Kur. It says you—the Dominion—steal from Kur.”

“I know! It’s ridiculous. Human beings can’t live on Kur. But this abizu is convinced we do. At least, the Dominion does. It says we’re always taking what isn’t ours. Stealing from Kur. I’m going to see if I can get a better explanation.” She snarled a question at it, and it responded with a barrage in kind, lasting a full five minutes.

“So, what’s the deal?” Ram asked when it finished. “Has somebody been doing something else horrible that the rest of us don’t get to know about?” It wouldn’t much surprise him, at this point, if the lugals were doing some kind of magical looting. What was one more layer of deceit and misbehavior?

“A lot of that was just the abizu calling the human race incompetent. Not going to bother with that. But, the rest of it? If I understand it right, it’s telling me that the human race has been repeatedly invading Kur for a long, long time. There’s a familiar pattern, it says: a little group of humans comes in at once, and … forces the wealth out of Kur. Actually, what he said was Nidriz. They don’t use our word Kur.”

“I thought Nidriz was their god. Like the moonchildren’s Nythrys. Wouldn’t Nidriz live in Kur?”

“No, Nidriz isn’t a god. More of a placeholder, a symbol of authority. Bazuu are really big on hierarchy, and Nidriz is the top of the heap, the central point, the origin, the place where they all come from. Except it’s not a place, it’s more of a concept. If you ask a bazu where it comes from, it will tell you Nidriz.”

“Okay. So we go and steal from Nidriz, or Kur, and they’re the same thing.”

“That’s just it. It was careful with its phrasing. It didn’t say ‘steal,’ it said ‘force out.’ Like the entrance of humans into Kur, or Nidriz, forced them to give up their wealth … except, now that I think of it, wealth isn’t physical stuff to them anyway. The physical world is an afterthought to them; objects exist to do magic, if they exist for a reason at all, and they make and unmake them as needed. So you could say … oh. Oh!” She put a hand to her forehead. “Oh, shit.”

“That’s it. That’s, that’s the whole thing. It’s bizarre, it’s incredible, but it would explain all this better than anything else I can think of.”

“The abizu told me that the theft, the invasion—that’s the reason the bazuu are here in the first place. That they came to this world to stop us invading and taking, even though they hate Ki, and they’ll go back as soon as it’s stopped.”

“The bazuu are spirits, before anything else. They spend most of their time disembodied, and only take shape because they can’t think and act effectively as ghosts. They say they came from Nidriz, and want to go back, but can’t, because they have to punish us first. That bit’s not news to me, they told me all the time when I was growing up. And I always ignored it, because they’re arrogant hateful assholes who think everything is about them. I’ve never heard a kind word from a bazu in my life.”

“Get to the point. I still don’t know what you’re getting at here.”

“You don’t? But it’s obvious. Humans don’t go to Kur in their bodies. But they could still go in spirit, couldn’t they? With magic.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing happening.”

“Yes, you have. You just didn’t recognize it for what it was. And the abizu’s right—you’re going to have to make the trip yourself. In a little less than thirteen blooms.”

“The kindling? That’s human magic, not bazu. How could it be sending human souls to Kur? They’re exact opposites!”

“Exact opposites. Yes. They work against each other perfectly—like the yellow and white suns. But neither of us knows much about how this magic business really works, do we? And neither does anyone else alive, that I know of. The moonchildren know how to use bazu artifacts. They have a vague, queasy feeling that it’s messed up and wrong, but it’s all buried under heaps of religious rituals and snobbery. They never practice magic directly for themselves, and they don’t trust it. Why would they ask questions like this?”

“Imbri, this is gibberish. I’m going to die, not invade Kur, and I won’t be bringing anything back. I’ll burn, and I’ll re-light the fire. That’s it.”

“That’s what it seems like from your perspective. But you don’t understand it—“

“So you miss what makes it all work. Which, the abizu says, is effectively theft from Kur, or Nidriz. The death of a human being acts as a kind of, I don’t know, unbalancing factor. It forces power out of Kur and into Ki. Which disturbs the bazuu, so they come to try and balance it again. Except … hold on.” She spoke with the abizu again, a lengthy exchange of questions and answers by the sound of it.

“Yes. The white sun. That’s it. Ram, did you ever wonder how people managed to get the temples up and in place to protect them, when they first faced the white sun?”

“Not really.” It was a good question, now that she mentioned it, but he’d always had more practical concerns. “Whoever set all this up obviously knew way more than we do about magic.”

“Magic or not, if they didn’t have a temple already up, they’d be too crippled to do anything but lie there and die when the white sun came up. The simplest explanation is that the temples came up first.”

“Why would they need them, if the white sun wasn’t a problem yet? Do you mean they saw the white sun coming, and planned ahead?”

“Probably not. More likely they only wanted a cheap and basically infinite source of fire-power. Then the white sun appeared, and they realized it wasn’t so cheap after all. But by then it was too late. They were locked in.”

“Yes. It would all fit together. That’s what this talk of stealing and invading means. The magic of the pyres protects against Kur effects because those effects are just the … hangover. The penalty. Whatever.”

“You’re building all this on your interpretation of some stuff one bazu says. What if the abizu’s lying?”

“It doesn’t have much reason to lie. It doesn’t know us, or care what we think. And I don’t think it understands human minds well enough to lie to us effectively.”

“Well, we’re screwed. It sounds like death is the key to making this all work, and it has to keep going. If it stops, the white sun kills us—we knew that already. But it’s also making the white sun appear in the first place! We can’t go one way, we can’t go another, and we can’t stop the cycle. We’re screwed.”

The abizu and its minions still stared down at them, callous and indifferent to the passage of time. Ram supposed that came of being immortal. Or maybe Imbri was right, and the things weren’t really all there. Ram, on the other hand, was fully alive, and had a finite number blooms to work with. “Imbri, please tell it thanks, assuming these things can understand thanks. But it sounds like we’re—“

Between the space of one blink and the next, a bright golden light filled his vision, blotting out the dismal grounds of the rookery. Then came pain, terrible pain, as if every bone in his body had shattered at once. But before he could scream it was gone, and his wits with it, and oblivion took him then and there, as he fell to the floor in a heap.