The Purifying Fire p-2 Read online

  The Purifying Fire

  ( Planeswalker - 2 )

  Laura Resnick

  Laura Resnick

  The Purifying Fire

  Is that the scroll the monks are talking about?” Brannon asked.

  “Yes, it is.” Chandra Nalaar smiled at the ginger-headed boy as she held out the scroll, neatly rolled up and encased in an ancient leather sheath. “The brothers are done with their work, so I thought I’d take a look at it, see what all the excitement is about.”

  “I heard it has strange writing that only a few of the monks can read,” the boy said.

  “That’s right,” Chandra said, sitting next to Brannon. “I can’t read it, but the monks will tell me what is says.”

  The two of them were in a common room at Keral Keep, a place of learning and study for the fire mages of Regatha.

  Brannon asked, “Where did you get the scroll?”

  “Far away.” Chandra was used to dodging questions about her travels throughout the Multiverse. It was easier for most people to accept lies than to understand what it meant to move back and forth among the infinite planes of reality. “Do you want to look at it with me?”

  She had looked at the scroll before, but that was on a plane called Kephalai where she had “liberated” it from the Sanctum of the Stars. Once back on Regatha, she had handed the scroll over to the monks at Keral Keep.

  The scroll was said to be unique, the only record of a fire spell more powerful than any known. Its origin was utterly mysterious, and it had been fiercely protected on Kephalai. Chandra might not be able to interpret its meaning on her own, but she was curious enough to want another look.

  The monks in the monastery’s scriptorium were very interested in the scroll, enough that young Brannon was curious about it too.

  “Yes,” he said eagerly, “let’s look at it. Unroll it!”

  “All right. But remember,” she cautioned. “It’s very old and fragile, so-”

  “Uh, Chandra?”

  “-we have to be careful not to-”

  “Chandra.” Brannon was looking past her, his eyes wide with alarm.

  She turned to look at whatever had captured his attention and shot to her feet when she saw a tall, menacing stranger standing at one end of the room.

  “Chandra Nalaar, give me that scroll!” he said, his tone as much a demand as the words.

  How does he know my name?

  “Brannon, get out of here!” she said. “Now.”

  “But-”

  “Go!”

  Recognizing her tone, the boy turned and ran, seeking the safety of the stone halls of the monastery and the presence of others.

  “Give me the scroll,” said the stranger, “and no one gets hurt.”

  Chandra’s attention was immediately drawn to the cold, cerulean intensity of his eyes, glowing in the shadow of his cowled cloak. She could sense his intrusion into her thoughts. A telepath.

  Chandra had only just returned to this plane, and her comings and goings at the monastery passed without fanfare. No one on Regatha knew about the scroll unless one of the monks had renounced his vows and become loose-lipped. This stranger, she realized with a hot flood of surprise, must have come from Kephalai.

  “You’re a planeswalker,” she breathed.

  “I’m not going to ask again,” he warned her. “And you won’t live long enough to be sorry you resisted.”

  If he had followed her?ther trail through the Blind Eternities, he must be very skilled. A trick like that wasn’t for beginners.

  But he had picked the wrong person to follow.

  “I see there’s only one of you,” she said, feeling her blood heat for combat.

  “One is all it will take,” he replied.

  With hair-trigger speed, Chandra’s fists lit up like torches as she thrust them toward the stranger, hurling a pair of fireballs like meteors.

  But the mage was ready. As if he knew what she would do even before she did it, he met the fireballs with an ice-blue liquid mass that issued from his outstretched arms.

  The counter attack was followed by a surge of power that flowed forth and encircled Chandra, glowing with the same cerulean intensity of his eyes. With Chandra momentarily paralyzed, the mind mage started mapping her consciousness, looking for the lynchpin he could use to disable her.

  Chandra loathed mind mages. What could be more despicable than poking around in another person’s private thoughts and feelings? The violation, along with the stranglehold of the spell, kindled her rage like phosphorous.

  By now, conscious thought was no longer an option for Chandra. The world around her slowed to a geological pace, and she could feel the power of the mountain inside her. Immovable, dominating, volcanic in its fury, it grew from that darkest part of herself, that diamond of rage deep in her core until…

  Boom.

  An incomparable concussive blast left Chandra at ground zero, leveling everything around her and blasting a hole in the wall where the mind mage had been.

  An eerie quiet pervaded the room. Sparks flickered and died in the dead air. “Didn’t mean to blow my top like that,” she muttered to no one in particular, as she surveyed the damage.

  Chandra was sure he wasn’t dead, though. She knew it wouldn’t be that easy to kill an experienced planeswalker.

  “Chandra!” Brannon cried from beyond the hole in the outer wall.

  “Brannon! What are you doing out there?” she shouted. “Get inside the monastery. Now!”

  Instead of listening to her, the boy turned and ran again. What is the matter with him, she wondered.

  Not daring to leave it behind, Chandra took the scroll and went after him. She couldn’t leave it unprotected with a mind mage running around.

  As she stepped through the hole, she saw the stranger standing on a rocky ledge that overlooked her position, holding the small ginger-haired boy by the throat. Just like a kid to get in middle of things, she thought.

  Brannon struggled to breathe, his feet dangling just above the ground.

  “No!” Chandra’s stomach knotted with fear at the sight of her young friend in the planeswalker’s powerful grip.

  “Don’t make me kill the child,” the stranger said.

  Brannon kicked and gasped in pain even as he tried to speak. “Let me g… aaagh…” The phrase trailed off in a choked gurgle. Tears of pain and fear rolled down his reddened cheeks.

  Chandra hated to lose. She absolutely hated it!

  But she knew the scroll in her hand, however unique, wasn’t worth Brannon’s life. She held it up as an offering and called, “Don’t hurt him! You can have the scroll.”

  Chandra heard how hoarse with dread her voice sounded. She watched the mind mage give Brannon a sharp shake, to make him stop squirming.

  “That’s all I came for,” the planeswalker said. “As long as I get it right now, he’s fine.”

  He looked cold, but not cruel. She believed that capturing Brannon was business, not pleasure.

  So she tossed the scroll up to him.

  It landed a few feet in front of him. “A wise decision. My impression is that you don’t make many.”

  But before he could turn the boy over, Chandra heard her name called from the monastery. She turned to see Brannon looking out from the hole she had blasted in the wall.

  “Chandra! What’s happening?” he shouted from a distance.

  An illusion!

  “All right, mindbender… You want to play?”

  With a quickness to match her temper, Chandra leaped into the air, an aura of flame surrounding her as she recited a spell. Spreading her arms and expanding her chest like a bellows, all the air in a thirty foot radius went dead as she sapped the oxygen she needed as fuel
for her fire. She paused at the top of her breath until it felt like she would explode with the effort, and when she let go, explode she nearly did. With all her might she exhaled, eyes wide, tongue extended like some primal totem. Her breath had the force of a cannon and burned with chemical intensity.

  The stranger balled up, shielding his body with his cloak. The force of the blast unsteadied him, but he obviously had been able to conjure some protection. He emerged merely singed when everything around him had been reduced to charcoal. The scroll had fallen from his grasp, but lay out of both their reaches.

  “Nice trick,” he mocked. “I bet you’re a big hit with the boys.”

  Jokes? This guy has to go down, Chandra thought.

  But he was just getting started. The mage’s eyes glowed brightly, and his skin changed, newly streaked blue-grey. Chandra knew something was coming but she didn’t know what. Still, she should have known this guy wouldn’t fight his own fights. He summoned an massive cloud elemental that swooped down to knock Chandra off her feet before veering to where the scroll lay on the ground.

  Two can play at that game, thought Chandra as she summoned her own fire elemental to meet the cloud. The two titans collided with a sharp hiss, flame and vapor locked in a mercurial embrace.

  With the elementals occupied, the mind mage made a move to recover the scroll himself, but Chandra was on point as she raised a wall of fire between him and his quarry.

  “You’re going to have to work for it, mindbender.” Chandra was just starting to have fun.

  Still, the stranger was undeterred. He ran down the wall to where he had last seen the scroll and stepped through the flame, an icy corona surrounding him. Chandra was waiting, though, her fist cocked, blazing hot. She hit him with a left cross that had the weight of the world behind it, and sent the mage flying backward, his body like a rag doll’s as he tumbled over the rocks.

  As the flames died down, Chandra surveyed the scene. She had done well. The elementals had died fighting and there was plenty of scorched earth, but she had done well.

  “Chandra, that was amazing!”

  She turned to see Brannon. “You shouldn’t be out here, kiddo.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He took a nasty spill. He won’t be back again.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked pointing in the direction of the mage. There were several cloaked figures, all exactly alike, moving in different directions.

  “He’s just trying to trick me. He doesn’t want me to know which one is actually him,” said Chandra pointing to the illusions. “Look, he’s running away.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the boy in a strange voice. “I think he’s going to get that scroll.”

  When she turned back, Chandra saw the familiar eerie blue glow in Brannon’s eyes and she knew… But right in that moment of realization, the mage hit her with a mental attack that caught her completely off-guard. She crumpled as her vision faded to black.

  “Chandra, are you all right?” The real Brannon reached her side and started helping her rise from the ground. “What happened? I saw your fire elemental. Wow, I’ve never seen anything that big! Not even Mother Luti can make ’em that big.” The boy was nearly ecstatic. “And then there was a sort of… a blue wave of light or something. What was that?”

  “That was the stranger,” Chandra said grumpily. “Being… clever.”

  “The scroll!” Brannon said, seeing that her hands were empty. “Where’s the scroll?”

  “What are you talking about, Brannon?”

  “He got it. He must have taken it!”

  “The scroll?”

  “I know you said the monks finished their work. But don’t we need it any more?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did they copy it in their workshop? Is that what you said?”

  “Kiddo, this is crazy talk. Everything is all right. He’s not coming back,” she assured him.

  “Well I hope so, ’cause he was creepy.” Brannon asked, eyeing their surroundings a little anxiously.

  “Yes,” she said. “But he’s gone.”

  Chandra tried to clear her head. Something was missing. Why did that fight just happen? Who was that guy?

  But the more she tried to think about it, the more it hurt. What is that kid talking about with the scroll?

  Chandra was mad. And when she got mad, she liked to set things on fire. Call it her little weakness.

  She felt heat racing through her, turning her blood into curling flames of power that sparked out through her fingertips, her eyes, and the auburn tendrils of her long hair.

  “You’re saying you copied down the scroll wrong?” she demanded of Brother Sergil. “After all the trouble I went through to steal it? After how important I told you it was? You’re saying that you and the other brothers made a mess of your part of the job? After I nearly got killed doing my part right?”

  Brother Sergil, who evidently didn’t feel deeply attached to his mortal existence, snapped, “Perhaps if you hadn’t let someone steal the scroll back so soon after you brought it here, we wouldn’t have a problem now!”

  “Oh, really?” Chandra could feel her skin glowing with the power that her anger unleashed. True, she had lost the scroll, but that mage had been good. “And if anyone had bothered to help me fight off that mage, maybe the scroll would still be at the monastery, instead of who-knows-where?” Her memory of the scroll had not come back. The mind mage had been thorough in cleansing it from her mind. She remembered everything she had done retrieving it, everything about the fight… But he had cut the scroll out with artisanal precision.

  “All right, that’s enough,” said Luti, the mother mage of Keral Keep. “From both of you.”

  Chandra said, “What’s the point of my bringing you something so valuable if you can’t even-”

  “Stop,” said Luti.

  “We’ve done our part as well as anyone could expect!” Brother Sergil said. “All I’m saying is-”

  “Not as well as I expected! How did you-” Chandra stepped back with a sharp intake of breath as a small fireball exploded between her and Brother Sergil. The monk staggered backward, too, stumbling on the rough red stones that paved the monastery courtyard.

  They both looked at Mother Luti in surprised silence.

  “That’s better,” Luti said, her fingers glowing with the lingering effect of forming and throwing that fiery projectile between them. Her glance flickered over Chandra. “Quench your hair, young woman.”

  “What? Oh.” Chandra became aware of the haze of fiery heat and pulsating flames surrounding her head. It wasn’t a roaring blaze, but it was certainly a loss of control. She took a calming breath and brushed her palms over her hair, smoothing the dancing flames back into her auburn mane until Luti’s nod indicated they had disappeared altogether.

  “Until you can master your power better,” Luti said, “it would be a good idea to learn to manage your temper.”

  Chandra let the comment pass without protest. She didn’t like orders or reprimands, but she had come to the Keralian Monastery to learn to master her power, after all. And she had once again just demonstrated how little control over it she had.

  “You have an extraordinary gift,” Luti said. “Tremendous power. But as it is with our passions, it is with the fire you wield; they are good servants, but bad masters.”

  “It would help,” Chandra said, glaring at Brother Sergil, “if people wouldn’t-”

  “Nothing will help,” Luti said. “Certainly not other people. Only you can change the way your power manifests. Only within yourself can you find a way to master it in a reality which will, after all, always contain annoyances, distractions, fears, and sorrows.”

  “Right.” Hoping to avoid another of Luti’s lectures on the nature of life, Chandra hastened to change the subject. “Now what about the scroll?”

  The pyromancers, scholars, and initiates at Keral Keep had no idea where the scroll had come from. An
d neither did Mother Luti, for that matter, but she alone did know where Chandra got it. Luti ran the haven for pyromancers and firemages, who came to study and practice in the monastery on Mount Kerlia, a potent source of power. She knew a lot.

  There was wisdom to be learned from her, to be sure, but the great stone walls of the fortress that crowned the summit of Mount Keralia pulsed with mana as red as the rock it was built upon. This was why mages came from all over Regatha.

  The most skilled fire mages on the entire plane dwelled within the stony halls of the monastery, but none of them, including Luti, were as powerful as Chandra.

  Perhaps Luti would have suspected the truth about Chandra even if she hadn’t been told: Chandra was a planeswalker.

  Luti was well-versed in the legend of Jaya Ballard, the bombastic fire mage whose long-ago sojourn on Regatha had inspired the founding of this monastery. Jaya was a planeswalker, too. And planeswalkers were… different.

  When she witnessed, first-hand, the magnitude of Chandra’s power, Luti could only think of the celebrated pyromancy of Jaya Ballard, stories she assumed had grown like mushroom clouds with the passage of time. In any case, Chandra chose to privately reveal her nature to Luti soon after coming to Regatha, after deciding it wouldn’t make sense to seek instruction in controlling her power while concealing what she could do.

  It was a choice, Luti later told her, that demonstrated Chandra was capable of reasoned decisions when she applied herself.

  Luti kept Chandra’s secret mostly out of a desire that fire remain the most tangible of the visible mysteries on Regatha. She feared the acolytes at Keral Keep would look for answers in Chandra, rather than find their own path. To everyone else at the monastery, Chandra was simply an unusually powerful young mage who came from somewhere else. And since Chandra, like so many others, didn’t want to talk about her past, no one pried.

  Apart from Luti, none of the Keralians knew that Chandra had traveled the Blind Eternities, bridging that chaotic interval between the planes of the Multiverse, to steal that scroll on Kephalai, a world they’d never heard of and could never visit themselves.