The Moonstone moved in her hands. She pressed it against her navel and it melted into her.
“Every act has consequences.” Her voice was soft as the wind whispering through the cedar fronds; she spoke with a formality that was almost chanting, using memories from school to give her the confidence she needed. She was young and untried. Serious and a bit pedantic. She could not afford to doubt herself once the search began if she expected to emerge from it alive and intact. “Every refusal to act has consequences.” Her voice comforted her, grounded her; ten years’ study spoke through her. “Consider them. Look beyond the moment. If I kill them all, will their kin kill more folk to avenge them? The people of Kol Sutong are dead. They can’t be hurt. What about other villages? Karoumang and his crew? There are other boats. Will they be more at risk?” She smiled as she saw fireflies flickering among the trees and heard an early bird twitter close by, life balancing death, a small beauty balancing a great horror. “No. Raiders raid; it is their purpose. Raiders kill for loot more often than vengeance. The death of those men will help more than hurt those who live by the river and on it.” She mourned a little for them; she owed that to herself. They were brutal bloody murderers, but they were also men. “Fifty-five men dead because I willed it. I don’t know them. I don’t know anything about their lives. I don’t know why they do what they do. I reach out and they cease. What am I? Maksim fed a child a month to BinYAHtii for fifty years because he considered it a small evil compared to the good he was doing. Am I going to walk that road? I don’t know.” She mourned for herself, for her loss of innocence; this virginity cost more in blood and pain than the first had and there was no pleasure in its loss. “Do what you must,” she sang softly, “but do it without pride, without anger, knowing they are simple, stupid men, helpless before you.”
Centered and ready, she sank into silence, letting the sounds of the waking forest flow through her. Hands on thighs, she sat not-thinking, not-waiting, open to whatever came to her.
Presently she was swimming among the realities as she had on the third night of her Ordeal. At first she wandered without direction, then she felt a tug. She flashed faster and faster past the layered realities, the infinite, uncountable elsewheres, faster and faster until she burst into one of them, a universe of heat and light where salamandri swam in oceans of sunfire.
She drifted, pushed here and there by the lightwinds. Salamandri swam to her, hovered about her.
She contemplated them. Pulsing slippery shapes, constantly changing, growing extra limbs, absorbing them, growing denser, attenuating, shortening, lengthening, they were vaguely like the rock skinks she played with when she was a child. She caught one in a mindseine because once upon a time she’d caught a skink in a net she’d knotted for herself. It lay passive, eyespots fixed on her though she doubted it actually saw her. She caught another and another with no more reason than the first, went on catching them until their weight began to strain the meshes of her mind.
She drifted with her captives. They glowed like coals at the heart of a fire, redgold-whitegold, flickers of blue. She was reluctant to release them though she had no thought of using them. It took no effort to hold them, they were not struggling, they seemed content to stay with her. They warmed her, pleased her eyes and oddly enough her palate.
She felt a sudden twinge and started to move.
She came to the membrane at the edge of the reality. The salamandri stirred, gracefully undulant.
She thought about releasing them. She thought about taking them with her. Vaguely she understood the danger in that. She knew it in her mind but not in her bones. Yes, she thought. Yes. I can, I must, I will.
Dragging the netted salamandri behind her, she broke through the membrane. Faster and faster she fled, running for her homeplace. Faster and faster until she was sitting within the pentacle, the salamandri swooping in swift orbits about its outer rim, turning the moonsilver red with their fires; around and around they raced, keening their anger and their triumph in a high, terrible whine.
They fought her. They were wiry, wild, leaping against her hold, their bodies were hard and strong, bumping, bumping, bumping against her. They’d lain passive all this time to catch her napping; they knew what she was, they knew she’d come for them, knew it before she did; they knew there was a world they could plunder and burn. They fought her and nearly won free before she hardened her hold on them.
She hadn’t actually handled demons before, that was meant to happen when she had a Master backing her, but she drew on analogs from her training and descriptions of the process from her teachers; she cast lines at them, sank hooks into them, seven lines for seven salamandri. They lunged at the cedars with their enticing explosive resins. She jerked them back. The tips of several fronds sizzled, filling the air with an acrid green fragrance. That was all they got, the trees stood intact, untouched.
She laughed. “I’ve done it. I’ve really done it,” she shouted to the night. “I have summoned demons.” She was sweating though, and underneath the laughter she was shaking. She refused to acknowledge that and broke the demons to her hand. They swung round and round her, keening, sad. Round and round until she rode their senses and reined their bodies. Round and round until they answered her will as swiftly and surely as her own body did.
She sent them arcing up over the trees, out along the river, racing faster than the wind, pulsing eerie unsteady fireforms flitting over the water.
They came to the Lock House_ The windows were shuttered against them, the door was barred. They burned through a wall. The deadpriest tried to turn them. The lead salamander shot out a long red tongue and licked his face off the bone. The warleader slashed at one and saw his blade melt. The salamander wrapped itself about the man and a moment later dropped a chalky skeleton and swooped on.
What Korimenei received through their senses was strange beyond anything she could have imagined, but she learned to read it and kept them from the House, its furniture, everything but the men. Only the men, she droned at them, over and over, only the men. She kept them from the captive girls, though a quick hot death might have been more merciful than life after what the raiders had done to them. She counted the kills and when the number was fifty-five, she jerked on the leashes and called the salamandri back to her.
They didn’t want to come. They wanted to burn and burn until the world burned with them, hot and glorious and wholly theirs. They fought her; they turned and twisted and contorted themselves, trying to throw out the hooks. They flung all their weight and strength against the lines again and again and again, they never seemed to tire. Every inch she won from them was contested with a fury that seemed to increase as her own strength decreased.
She faltered. A salamander leaped away; it almost broke free. The jerk tore something inside her. She struggled to enfold and smother the pain and at the same time keep her hold on the demons. If they got loose… She didn’t dare admit even the possibility of failure. She pulled the demons to her and they came, slowly, painfully, but surely, they came. They brushed against tree tops and the trees burned. They cawed their pleasure, jarring shrieks that started high and squeezed to a thready wail as the sound soared out of hearing; they swung at the ends of, the lines, back and forth, back and forth, working at her, changing the direction, the force, the intensity of the pull. She trembled. She was so weary. She couldn’t think. She /led on and held on. Inch by slow, torturous inch, she dragged them back to her. Strength oozed out of her. So tired. So tired. Her muscles were mush. Every nerve in her was vibrating raggedly. She was going to give way. There is a point beyond which will cannot drive body. She was reaching it, but she held on, she held…