“Well, as to that”—the man spat rock dust at him—”likely she will be carved in a hundred fashions or more. What was left of her after they burned her, so I’m told, didn’t leave much for us to model from.”
Thrasne had him by the throat before the poor man knew what he had set off, and it was only when two people came up from the Temple floor, pulling at him and screaming in his ear, that he let the carver go. They told him then what they knew, which was not much and already overlaid with myths.
“She rose,” one woman whispered. “Like the flame-bird, burning, into the very heavens, singing like an angel.”
Thrasne stumbled out of the place.
There was a hurt place inside him, one he could cover with his outspread hand, a hot burning as though he were being consumed from within. He burned as Pamra Don had burned. The fiery spot widened, spread, reached the limits of his body, and then erupted through his skin in a fleeing cloud of spiritual flame, vaguely man-shaped, the heat of it an emotional blast which fled away as a hot wind flees. He could feel it as a presence departing, an actuality with motivations of its own, now vanishing from his understanding. In that momentary excruciation he felt he had emitted an angel which now expanded to fill all the universe, becoming more tenuous with every breath until all connection with Thrasne was teased away into nothing.
He flexed his hand across the place the angel had left, somewhere near his stomach or heart, an interior place that had nothing to do with thought but only with the tumbling of liquors and the rumbling of guts, the living heart-belly of his being. Where the fire had burned was a vacancy. A hole. He poked a finger at himself, half expecting it to penetrate into that emptiness, but he encountered only solid muscle and the hard bones of his ribs. Whatever the emptiness might be, it was not physical, and there was no pain associated with it. The angel had taken the pain with it when it departed.
“Pamra Don,” he said, testing himself for a response. There was none. Perhaps a twinge of bittersweet sadness, like dawn mist blown across one’s face, carrying the scent of wet herbs, evocative of nothing but itself. “Pamra Don?”
And then again he tried, “Suspirra?”
To find her gone as well.
So, what was it that had fled? A ghost? A fiery spirit? A succubus who had lived beneath his heart?
Or was it some soul-child of his own, self-created, dreamed, hoped-for, stillborn in this world but released into some wider universe?
Whatever it might have been, it would not be. “I can do nothing,” he said to himself in wonder. “There is nothing I can do for Pamra Don.”
Except perhaps, his hands said of themselves, twitching for his knife or a chisel as he remembered what the carver was making in the Temple. Except perhaps. Whatever she was, whatever she had become, Thrasne could show her as she had been.
“I knew her, after all,” he said to himself wonderingly. “I knew her.”
The days of the strike had fallen into memory. In Vobil-dil-go, order had been restored. The heights of the Talons on the eastern skyline were empty of wings. The Tower was empty of Awakeners. Only Haranjus Pandel had occupied a room there when he had come with the lady Kesseret and the widow Plot from Thou-ne. He came down to the town occasionally to greet this one and that one, well accepted by all. To the north, it was said, great armies moved, but at the Riverside there was a precarious calm, like that at the eye of a storm before the great winds come again.
On a stone above the River, Queen Fibji drew her feet beneath her and sat thus, cross-legged, looking across all that mighty water to the place she hoped to arrive with her people in a little time. Below her the Noor and some Northshoremen toiled among the boats, carrying endless bales and barrels into the holds. She approved this, searching among the busy forms for the tall bulky one her daughter had just mentioned. Thrasne. Boatman. Not a Noor and, to hear Medoor Babji tell it, in love with someone else to boot. And yet, her daughter’s choice.