“So Wizards and sorcerers in some way oppose the divine plan through their personal power.”
“I wouldn’t say all of them do.”
They were still moving through the abbey. Within, there were more dead, but less carnage. There had been stone vaults, many of which were well-built and had withstood the shaking of the rocks under their footings. Those who had died here had died of the searing air and poisoning. They found the library; the books within were shelved and orderly. There was no sign of the librarian.
Nizhvashiti walked to the shelves. It placed a hand on a rack of scrolls, closed its inhuman eyes, and prayed.
The Gage had grown accustomed to the rising and falling chants of the followers of the Good Mother and the Good Daughter. They were not so different, in truth, from what the people of Messaline sang as they went to worship the great gods of that city. Well, three of the four, anyway. Silver-masked Kaalha was not the sort of goddess one sang to.
Hers was the house of silence. In her house was the end of pain.
I must not be dead then, the Gage thought, abruptly ashamed of his own moment of introspection. It felt too close to self-pity.
Nizhvashiti, he decided, was praying for the books. For the safety of the knowledge, histories, and memories contained therein. For the protection of the tomes themselves, because what they contained was sacred. It was a prayer the Dead Man would have appreciated.
He missed the Dead Man.
There was no sign whether the Godmade’s goddess heard them, or if she responded in any way. If a miracle came it came silently, without a ripple of power. Without a ghostly flutter of light.
But eventually Nizhvashiti stopped praying and turned back to him. “I have done what I can here,” it said. “Perhaps someone will be able to come back for them. If they survive.”
“If any of us do,” the Gage said. “Tell me why you said that thing about Wizards and sorcerers? That they oppose the divine plan with personal power.”
“No offense,” Nizhvashiti said. “But have you looked at yourself in a mirror?”
“I am a mirror.”
They walked—or the Gage walked, as softly as he could out of deference to the flagstones, and Nizhvashiti drifted. Perhaps the Godmade was taking them to a postern gate. Perhaps they were just wandering.
“In the normal course of events, would you not be dead by now?”
“Look who’s talking.”
Nizhvashiti laughed like dry leaves rustling. “I put myself in the hands of my god, and this is what She made me.”
“Can you say with confidence that no god wanted me to be here, as I am?”
“You were made by the hand of man.”
“I feel like we have had this argument already.”
Nizhvashiti made a cutting gesture. “If we struggle against fate, fate will befall us anyway. And we and those we love may suffer more than if we bowed our heads and acquiesced. More innocents may perish than if we bent a neck upon the first demand.”
“Does the gazelle lie down for the leopard because it is only staving off the inevitable if it runs? For an hour, for a year.”
“Ah,” Nizhvashiti said. “There you have the heart of it.”
The Gage might have smiled, were he made for smiling. “And if you accept that we live in a world without destiny, you accept that you are alone with your actions and their consequences. There is no fate. There is no divine plan. There is only you, opposed, with imperfect knowledge, making a flawed series of choices that will likely turn out terribly.”
“But what,” said the Godmade, “if you do not accept the lack of a divine plan?”
“Then you must accept that God puts up with a lot of bullshit,” the Gage replied. “And probably isn’t a nice person making good choices Herself.”
They turned the corner into a blasted courtyard.
And found a woman standing there, her back to them, smoke rising from the fingertips of her left hand.
* * *
She turned to them. There were bodies around her feet, but they were not fresh. She did not seem to need any protection from the poisoned air, though the smell of sulfur was strongest here.
The Gage could see now that the smoke rose from a rolled cylinder stuffed with shreds of some dried leaf that she held in a peculiar fashion, between the fingers. She put it to her lips and inhaled through it, as if sucking through a hollow stem. Smoke billowed through her nostrils a moment later, trickled from her lips as she lowered the hand. The Gage thought of forges.
He had seen people smoke pipes, of course, loaded with a variety of intoxicating substances. But he had never seen anybody smoke what looked like rolled-up slips of age-browned paper before. The scent was heavy, aromatic, a little unpleasant. More like burning stone than smoldering plant material.
Nizhvashiti said softly, “This wasteland sure is full of mysterious loners.”
The stranger breathed in her own smoke, which swirled like water. Her hair was long and coarse, without luster, the brown-black color of basalt weathered in the sun. Her moderate complexion had an unhealthy, ashy color, as if the smoke of her odd recreation had smudged her. The irises of her eyes were a transparent, unearthly shade of orange-red.
She drew on her cylinder again, and again let the smoke escape her. She smirked them up and down like a madam surveying the clientele. When she snorted laughter, a flood of smoke came with it.
The Gage might almost have stepped back. The woman wore a heavy collar of jewels—diamonds, the Gage thought, though could stones so large truly be diamonds? There was a king’s ransom on her throat, if so—cut so that they sparkled and shimmered as brilliantly as stars in the sky. A real sky, not this vacant and dimmed one. Her gown was loose, diaphanous, in layered silks of all the ocean’s shades of greens and blues. It fell from her shoulders with slit-topped sleeves that billowed when she smoked, and showed a long bare arm.
The Gage had an unsettling sensation that there was another shoulder and another arm behind it. That the woman he and Nizhvashiti faced was not one woman, but the foremost in a long line of identical women moving in perfect unison, stretching back to infinity, as if two mirrors had been faced to reflect and reflect and reflect her.
“Well.” Her voice was as strange as her eyes, full of hisses and crackles. “I was wondering what was taking you so long.”
“You were expecting us?” the Gage asked, when Nizhvashiti remained uncharacteristically silent.
Her lips curved. She winked, then turned her gaze on the Godmade. “Surely you know me, one such as you are, ansha.”
“I do,” Nizhvashiti said. “I have nothing to offer you.”
The woman nudged a body with her toe. “What’s this? Oh, pork roast. Very nice. You shouldn’t eat pig; it will give you trichinosis.”
A sort of rage that the Gage had thought he was past stirred in him at her disrespect of the dead. Perhaps he shifted or creaked, or perhaps it was all too obvious what he would think, because Nizhvashiti shot him a warning glance—and the ashy woman an amused one.
“So protective of the dead,” she said. “Would you have felt so strongly for them when they were alive? Never mind, I see you would. So nurturing for a metal … man. A metal thing. An artifice.”
She smoked again. The diamonds on her bosom flashed as it rose and fell. She reached into her gown, and this time the Gage did step back, not knowing what to expect but knowing that no one so unimpressed with something like him was to be taken trivially. But she only produced another papery brown cylinder and, puffing, lit it from the first.
Nizhvashiti’s stiffness might have been nothing but death. But its wariness was nothing the Gage had seen before, in all their encounters. This was a being who, when less powerful and still mortal, had waved off an ice-drake as if it were of very little consequence indeed.
“Who is this person, then?” the Gage asked. “Since you know her, Godmade, would you be so kind as to introduce us?”
Nizhvashiti’s wariness rolled from it in palpabl
e waves. “She is not precisely a person.”
“More or less a person than you … or than I?” The Gage made his voice relaxed, amused. A benefit of not having the traditional means of speech at his disposal. The Godmade’s discomfiture was catching.
“More than a person.” Nizhvashiti’s eyeless gaze never varied from the stranger’s face. “And other than one.”
Sulfurous smoke wreathed the stranger’s words. “I am relieved you do not find me less, ansha. You may call me … Deep. If you like that.”
Nizhvashiti’s steepled hands rose and fell before its breast in a manner the Gage recognized as a gesture of fearful respect. “Did this city offend you, O great one?”
Deep flicked ash negligently. Residue and sparks fell on her bare foot, on the bodies, and on the paving stones. None of these reacted to the heat.
“Not as such,” Deep admitted. There were gray strands in the coils of her hair, among the faded black. “Maybe it was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe it was not worthy of attention.”
She prodded the flagstones lightly with the front of her foot. To his awe, the Gage saw that they yielded. When Deep drew her foot back, she left behind the impression of five pearl-like toes and the ball of the foot.
“But here you are, O great one,” Nizhvashiti said. “Manifestly.”
The Gage began to experience what would have been a queer feeling in the pit of his stomach, if he had such things as queer feelings, or stomachs for that matter. To Nizhvashiti, he said, “This is the being that destroyed Ansh-Sahal.”
The Godmade nodded. “Perhaps collaterally? O great one, were you invited here? Did you come here on some purpose of your own? I am, of course, your servant, and it would help me to understand what you need if you could trouble yourself to recall.”
Deep frowned at her twist of dried herbs. “I came to see.”
“What the eruption had done?” the Gage asked, ignoring Nizhvashiti’s hushing gesture.
Deep smoked and smoked again. Was this what agitation looked like in a goddess? “These people were true believers.”
It did not help them, the Gage thought.
“So am I,” Nizhvashiti said. “Look at me. I am your sacrifice. Not these poor people.”
“That definitely took some gall,” Deep agreed. “Making that of yourself.”
She seemed to struggle to follow the conversation, the Gage realized. As if only the most recent thread remained to her. Like that game where people in turn wrote a line on a paper, then another, then folded it to hide all the story but the last sentence.
“Is it a sacrifice more to your taste than pork roast?”
“It was not in my name that you did that thing.”
The Gage held a tongue he did not have, and settled in to watch the Godmade remonstrate with its recalcitrant deity. Or, he thought, a chipped-off piece of same.
“Are you not all part and parcel of one another, you and your sisters?”
“I am not the Good Daughter. I am ruthless in a different way.” A smoky sigh of remembrance. “In days of old they would toss strong youths and maidens into the flames.”
“That was a long time ago. Something woke you, great one.”
“Yes.”
“On purpose?”
The goddess began to pace, and did not answer. Under the Gage’s feet, the earth shuddered softly as a cat dreaming.
“Do you remember what it was that woke you? Or for that matter, whom?”
Deep turned away. Another smoke lit from the stub of the second one decorated her hand. She was so thin the lines of her skeleton showed through the shoulders of her sea-colored gown. The Gage imagined he could see a thousand other women turning with her.
“I serve your sister,” Nizhvashiti said, with every appearance of calm. The Gage, for no good reason except experience, was certain the Godmade was dissembling. If its heart still beat, it would be racing.
Deep’s head snapped back around.
“Then go bother her!” Deep’s raised voice was a rumbling crack like stone shattering. The earth lurched, and the foundations of what remained of the abbey shifted.
Nizhvashiti’s hand shot out and clasped the Gage’s metal wrist. The Godmade bowed as if hinged at the hips. The Gage, who was hinged at the hips, followed suit. They backed away without another word, heads down, Nizhvashiti gliding and the Gage sliding his feet as if on ice. They did not turn their backs until they were well out of Deep’s line of sight, at which point they let go of one another, turned tail, and fled.
It occurred to the Gage as they hurried from the abbey that a volcano was one of the few things that could probably put an end to him. Melting down would probably put an end to his consciousness.
Probably.
They did not further seek the postern gate, but returned the way they had come. The earth struck the soles of the Gage’s feet once or twice, jumping and trembling, but the abbey did not collapse upon them. They made it to the gate alive.
The sea still seethed and bubbled far below.
* * *
They continued down the road for a long few minutes before the Gage deemed it appropriate to remark, “So that was the Mother.”
“An aspect of her. Perhaps. Unless it was something much older.” The Godmade paused. “There are still older things.”
“She did not seem … nurturing.”
“Not all mothers are good ones.”
“An ansha?”
Nizhvashiti laughed shakily. “A god.”
“A volcano.”
“The Bitter Sea. The volcano is only part of it.”
“She seemed a little vague for a divinity.”
“Are you at your best when you’ve just awakened?”
“I’ve heard of smoking mountains,” the Gage admitted. “But that was hardly what I would have expected.”
Nizhvashiti closed pupilless eyes and slowly shook its head.
The Gage made half a laugh. Not a happy one. “So Ansh-Sahal was not destroyed by accident.”
“Indeed,” Nizhvashiti agreed.
“So who woke the volcano up?” The Gage’s tone was not meant to conceal that he already thought that he knew.
“At a guess?” the Godmade said, with the same timbre of resignation. “The same person with a use for thousands of bodies.”
“The sorcerer can’t be acting alone.”
“It doesn’t seem likely, does it? So the question is, who is the sorcerer working for?”
“Anuraja?”
“Anuraja might be a dupe. I have a feeling that this is something larger. Something more.” The Godmade shook its head again. “Well, we can do only the work our hand can reach.”
* * *
The Gage’s steps continued tirelessly north and west. Nizhvashiti had taken its leave and gone. It had offered a blessing first, which the Gage had accepted without prejudice or any real belief. Then it had returned to Sarathai-tia in order to bring Mrithuri the news that the problem they faced was much larger and less well understood than they had thought. And hardly limited to a little internecine warfare and a particularly violent family dispute.
After a day or two, he came into a place that had days, and that did not reek of poison. Vara rejoined him, and he told it his story in case Mrithuri was listening. In case Nizhvashiti had somehow not managed to make it home.
The Gage had time to make up now, and a mortal fear to push him.
After the first day of accelerated walking, the Gage began to pass by refugees in the road. They stared and pointed. Some fled in terror. Many were too tired to do more than edge over, away from where he went. He kept to the edge of the road and tried not to terrify the animals. He did not stop to speak with them. They made way for him. These were not Mrithuri’s people, but they lived under the same Cauled Sun.
They might have information, it was true. But it would be far too easy for him to become distracted by a thousand side errands, and for the time being, he had chosen to believe that the erran
d he had been sent upon would be useful in the long run. It was possible, after all, that the Eyeless One knew something. Possible, and even likely, based on the weight of experience.
The Gage was pleased to note that one of the groups he passed seemed to be comprised of priestesses in the raiment of the ruined abbey. They surrounded a woman he took for the abbess. So a few had made it out.
For a moment, the Gage thought of stopping to tell them that their goddess had dropped by and was, to the best of his knowledge, poking around the empty halls they’d left behind, searching for her memory.
But there would be no point. They couldn’t go back.
So, as much as it saddened him to think of Deep alone in the abbey’s library, flipping through books and looking for answers her own mind could not supply, he steeled himself and walked on.
Soon he was beyond any humans, and he parted company with their highways and began to follow the legendary series of markers men called the Dragon Road. They were flat stones, vast and smooth, like pavements set into the earth, and they were often an hour’s walk or more from each other. They would have been very evident from the air, however.
And he thought of Chaeri.
They were slightly confused thoughts. It was possible her interest could be genuine, he supposed. She hadn’t gone out of her way to dissemble or conceal her opinions, he thought, even when they challenged his. His experience was that women who intended to manipulate someone into romantic interest tended to conceal their personalities behind a mask. And she had done nothing to seem coy, which was another common plot.
But what would anyone want with him?
She had seemed to decide that she did. Want him, that was. And that it was a foregone conclusion that he, in turn, would want her. Her confidence that she would be desired by any object of that desire made it seem … rude not to reciprocate.
In all the time that the Gage had spent as a man of metal … well. Not one single person had ever made a pass at him until now. Most didn’t even seem to recognize him as sentient, as anything other than an automaton.
He thought about how people related romantically. He could not really recall from his own experience how it had been. He did remember that it had seemed tremendously important once.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 23