Blue Fire

3. The Gap

3

The Gap

The night dripped, and Petra dripped with it.

For the fourteenth time, he passed the gate where the guard had discovered the girl beneath the cabbages. For the fourteenth time, he met Cort marching in the opposite direction. For the fourteenth time, Cort’s pace quickened. He didn’t look at Petra. Petra looked at him, but somehow the water soaking his friend still failed to burst into steam. Then the night swallowed Cort again, and Petra continued his endless, useless march around the Temple, “guarding” it against entirely hypothetical intruders who would promptly be fried by the Fire Curtain anyway if they were stupid enough to try to get past it. In which case, his and Cort’s entire function would be to call for Priests to cart away the charred bodies. Smaller victims, they had to deal with themselves. He’d already picked up three cooked birds and a crispy rat, tossing them into the bins located at each corner of the compound for disposal in the morning. “They take them straight to the cooks,” the Priest-Apprentices joked.

At least, Petra hoped they were joking.

If he were to touch it, the Curtain would turn him crispy, too, so he gave it a wide berth. It glowed on his right, a glowing, translucent wall of Blue Fire, hissing and steaming in the rain. Every twenty feet within its ghostly glimmer stood a thick square post of black wood. On the side facing the Temple, each post bore a magical sigil, a complex symbol cut into the wood and filled with gold. From each end of a crosspiece atop each post hung a sparkglobe, a glass sphere containing a bright tongue of Blue Fire. Supposedly, the sparkglobes lit his path around the Temple. In practice, especially in the rain, each illuminated only a small circle of ground, making the shadowed spaces between the posts appear even darker, the Blue Fire of the Curtain itself being far too dim to light much of anything.

Occasionally, the gloom was lit by distant lightning-like flashes from atop the dark bulk of the Temple. All around City Primaxis, magical Hearths took in that Blue Fire and turned it into the light and heat Petra was currently in such desperately short supply of.

As he and Cort passed each other at the gate, the rain redoubled its efforts to drown them. Even through the tin-roof patter of the drops on his steel helmet, Petra heard the Curtain hiss like a giant teakettle. Vast clouds of blue-tinged steam rose from it into the night.

The icy water poured over Petra’s helmet and down his neck. Useless and sodden, his blue woollen cloak hung heavy as lead from his mail-clad shoulders. His boots squelched with every step. His damp leather trousers chafed his thighs. He couldn’t even feel his fingers; they’d gone numb inside his soaked gloves eleven circuits ago.

They’d be nice and toasty wrapped around Cort’s neck. The fact that Cort was equally cold, wet, and miserable made his punishment a little easier to bear. Warming his fingers with a good long squeeze of his friend’s throat would have made it a lot easier to bear. But the Priests would make him do something even worse than this as punishment for murdering Cort, although he suspected they’d have a great deal of sympathy if he resorted to violence: they all knew Cort, too.

He swiped his sodden arm across his runny nose as he rounded the bin into which he’d earlier tossed the burnt rat, started down the backside of the Temple for the fourteenth time . . . and stopped.

Perhaps a hundred feet away, a patch of darkness interrupted the double line of sparkglobes and the steaming blue wall of the Curtain.

Heart suddenly racing, Petra blinked rain from his eyes. Sparkglobes did go black from time to time, the Blue Fire leaking through a flaw in the glass, but the Curtain? Never! Which meant someone must have deliberately opened that dark gap, to gain access to the Temple.

Someone who might still be inside.

He wouldn’t encounter Cort again until he’d rounded the far end of the Temple’s long, dark rear wall. For the moment, he was on his own.

He took a deep breath and started forward again, step by cautious step, grateful now for the rain, whose endless rush would surely mask the squish of his steps from the intruder.

There is no intruder, he tried to tell himself. How could there be an intruder? The Temple has never had an intruder.

Cort’s fault again, putting silly ideas into his head. Once every third fortnight, Cort received two days of leave to visit his parents, who ran the Three Stones Inn by the Great Gate. Last time, he’d come back with his cousin’s wild tale of naked dancing girls in the Freefolk camp—and an even wilder tale from a just-arrived traveller.

“Someone robbed the Temple in City Pentaxis,” Cort had whispered in the dark as they lay in their hard, narrow beds after lights-out.

“Robbed?” Petra whispered back. “And took what exactly?”

“Nobody’s saying.”

Petra shook his head. “The traveller was just trolling for free drinks. My father is First Keeper. He hasn’t said—”

“He wouldn’t, would he? What if a thief stole a firelance? That could start a panic.” Cort barely mouthed the words. The walls between rooms in the Priest-Apprentice’s dormitory were notoriously thin, and the outrageousness of his words could earn him a beating, or worse.

“You know what I think?” Cort continued, barely audible. “I think it’s tied up with that ‘Unbound’ cult. All those malcontents, packing up and heading off into the wilderness, claiming they’re going to start their own city. I figured they’d be Nightdweller food by now, but I’m starting to wonder.”

Petra had rolled over and said nothing more, but he’d stared into the blackness for a long time afterward, recalling the day a Priest had demonstrated the use of a firelance on a sheep carcass. He had learned many things about firelances that day. He knew they could only be used within the city walls and a short distance outside those walls, perhaps a quarter of a mile. He had learned one of the great secrets of the Priests of Vekrin: that it was not the blessings of the Priests that made the firelances work, but their careful construction and the magical sigils inscribed on their wooden shafts. Which meant that if someone stole a firelance, that person could not only use it within any city but also make more.

Such a person would not be using the weapons on sheep. The thought of a living man reduced to charred meat the same way that carcass had been was the stuff of nightmares.

There is no intruder, Petra told himself again as he drew almost level with the dark opening. If the Priests thought there was the slightest chance anyone would break into the Temple, they wouldn’t have put me and Cort—of all people!—on guard duty.

Right?

But even as he thought that, a low moan rose from the night beyond the Curtain.