The Heartless Divine

by Varsha Ravi

  A different voice in her head, far more reminiscent of Rohit, scolded her. That is not why you are here. But it was clear that she was capable of doing what she was here for and taking on sundry pursuits in the meantime. And, really, if the boy king and his captain relied so strongly on who—what—laid in those hills and the stone that swallowed them, it was part of her work to seek him out. To understand what kind of threat he posed to her work, and how best to accommodate it.

  If he would not come to her, then she would just have to go find him.

  6

  Lyne

  In between the story of the princess and priest, and classes and work and brief flashes of sleep, Suri and Kiran made routines of their own.

  There was a pleasant irreverence to the rhythm of Kiran’s actions. He spent afternoons reading at Beanzzz, knees hooked over the edge of the windowsill, marathoned Heartbreak Hotel with Miya whenever she happened to come over, and competed against Aza over which one could fit the most marshmallows in their mouth—a competition no one really won after they started laughing and spit out the sugary, globby mess on Suri’s carpet.

  Friday nights were always movie nights, often at Aza and Dai’s place. It hadn’t taken long for the rest of them to realize that Kiran—who hadn’t even known what a movie was until Suri had explained how the technology had been developed—had never seen any of the ‘classics’ they’d grown up with. So they’d taken it upon themselves, Dai and Miya especially, to educate him. He bore it all with the blithe complacency of someone with little idea of what they were getting themselves into.

  It was a new routine, but it already had its own sense of comfort to it. The opening sequence began; Suri hadn’t seen the movie in years, but she vaguely remembered the premise—two people met as children, and then fell in love as adults after years apart. And then one of them died, and the other mourned them. It was all very cliché and depressing and fun to pick apart with other people, but easy to cry to alone.

  She glanced over her shoulder during the final scene, unable to suppress her curiosity. Kiran was stretched along the floor, head at an odd angle and propped up by a slowly slipping arm. Aza and Dai’s corgi mix nosed endlessly at his side; strangely enough, dogs went crazy for Kiran. He didn’t look sleepy, but he didn’t look interested, either.

  He glanced up and caught her gaze, arching an eyebrow and nodding slightly at the screen, as if to say, Can you believe this shit?

  “How is this movie so bad?” Dai murmured under his breath, all awestruck horror.

  “I thought it was cute when I first saw it,” Miya said defensively as the credits began to roll.

  “When?” Aza drawled. “When you were, like, six? Back when all we knew about romance was fairy tales?”

  “Not like you’ve gained any experience since then,” Ellis quipped, and dodged the pillow she hurled at him.

  “Well?” Miya asked, glancing down toward where Kiran was still curled up against the edge of the couch. A bowl of popcorn was securely tucked between his shoulder and the side of the coffee table, and every few seconds, he darted out a hand to pop a piece into his mouth. “What’s your verdict?”

  “Bad,” he said eloquently. “You lot might not have any experience in the world of love—” He paused to say this, stretching out his arms in a gesture. “—But I do, and that is not how it goes. Less tears, usually.”

  “Even when death’s on the horizon?” Aza cut in, raising her eyebrows.

  “Oh, especially then,” he replied, eyes bright and glittering. There was an unsaid joke in his words, hidden where none of them could access it, but they were laughing all the same.

  “I don’t believe you,” Suri said, pushing herself up from where she’d slipped down into the alcove of the arm chair. Her hair hung over her face in a staticky cloud, and she blew it away. “About the love thing.”

  “Really,” he said, mildly amused. He didn’t bother to elaborate, but then again, he rarely did.

  After the movie, Aza pulled out her lifetime collection of board games, and Miya tugged out plastic bags filled with liquor bottles, and they forgot about old love movies. Kiran didn’t drink, like he’d said when they’d first met—she’d held a god at knifepoint—content to move around game pieces and watch them play. Eventually, though, the games slurred to a stop, tilting them back against the closest horizontal surface as time ticked on.

  A little after midnight, the apartment alive with the soft buzz of the radiator, Miya asked, “What would you guys do if you found out you died tomorrow?”

  Suri strained herself slightly to push up on her elbows. Across from her, Kiran was silent and coiled, all languid energy. But his eyes were open, sharp with curiosity. Suri felt a faint stab of bitterness at that; it made sense, in a crude way, that immortals would find humanity’s perception of its own mortality entertaining. Like they were lab rats, ivory-white and scrubbed clean, set to run the same predetermined races, run into the same predetermined walls, and die the same predetermined deaths. He glanced over, and she looked away.

  Dai made a small noise of confusion. “Like, what? A note shows up on my doorstep? Or is it just a hunch?”

  Miya shook her head, and her hair tickled Suri’s arm. “Doesn’t matter. You just know. What would you do?”

  “Go skydiving,” Aza said mirthlessly. Dai shuddered beside her—his fear of heights was why she hadn’t gone skydiving yet. She refused to go unless she dragged him down with her.

  “Maybe…” he made a thoughtful sound. “Go through old favorites, with family and friends. Like a quick recap of my entire life based on things I love. Miya?”

  “Get banned from as many places as I possibly can,” she said cheerfully, though the words came out distinctly slurred. “It won’t affect me, anyway, right? Go big or go home, and all that. Suri?”

  If she died tomorrow. She prided herself on living a content life, but now it felt a little bit like it was simply boring. Suri didn’t dare look over, didn’t dare catch his gaze, but she knew he would be looking at her. “There’s a story I want to hear finished.”

  “That’s it?” Dai asked in disbelief.

  “That’s it,” she repeated, face splotchy. Quickly, she turned her face up. “Ellis?”

  “Spend the day with my family,” he said quietly. His family was chaotic and lovely, and from what she knew, never really in the same place at the same time. “Kiran?”

  Suri opened her eyes. His head was tilted back, brows faintly arched as if he was surprised he’d been called on in the first place. Then his mouth twisted, and he said, “Step in front of oncoming traffic.”

  “Dude,” Dai groaned, nauseated. A chorus of what-the-hells swelled around him. “I did not need that visual right now.”

  “Why?” Ellis asked, genuinely curious.

  He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. There was something oddly disingenuous about the movement, as if he was playacting himself. “Autonomy. At least that way, I have the final say in how I leave this world.”

  Aza shuddered. “Too dark. Too philosophical. Who wants more drinks?”

  Unsurprisingly, they all did. They had more drinks, and more after that, and Suri lost track of the drinks and the minutes and the words, even as she tossed them up in the air. Like juggling. She’d tried to learn juggling in the third grade, but then she’d dropped an apple on her foot and it had hurt so much, so she’d given up. She figured Kiran could probably juggle.

  And then he was kneeling beside her, hands light on her shoulders. As if he was afraid he’d hurt her. She wanted to laugh at the thought of it, but she had no laughs left—she’d been drained of them all. You won’t hurt me, she wanted to say. You promised, so you won’t. So you shouldn’t be afraid.

  Aloud, she said, “What time is it?”

  She heard the smile in his voice. “Late. Your friends are cleaning up. It might take them a while to get to it all.”

  Suri shoved at him blindly. “Go… help them.”

  “I did,” he s
aid, oddly soft. “I cleaned everything up, but they’re drunk, so they think I did it wrong. Maybe they’re right? I don’t truly know where things are supposed to go, anyway. I put a bottle of wine in the oven.”

  She groaned at him, because she was too tired to scold him and knew he’d understand either way. In the distance, she heard rustling, bare feet on carpet. And then, in a profoundly drunk voice: “Suri’s wasted.”

  “Yeah,” Kiran said simply. “I’m going to take her back to the apartment. Will you be alright without supervision?”

  “Fuck,” said her very drunk friend who she could not name but really truly loved all the same, “You. Fuck you.”

  Then there was something like a laugh—but a little too soft to truly qualify, a little bit uneven—and his arms were back on her shoulders. “Suri.”

  “Mm?”

  “Do you think you can get up?”

  “Maybe. I could try?” she pushed herself to her feet, immediately listing to the side. Arms went around her, steadying, and for a moment, she thought she could probably spend the rest of her life like this. Even if it was short.

  I want to change my answer, she thought. Finish the story, but like this.

  “What?” Kiran asked, shifting her in his arms to get a better look at her expression.

  “Nothing,” she mumbled, and then tugged him toward the door. She just wanted to go home and listen to him tell that story, even though she wouldn’t remember anything in the morning, and he’d have to repeat it all later. She just wanted to listen.

  After a few seconds of futile tugging, Kiran wrapped his arms around her shoulders and she gratefully sagged against him. They hobbled to the door in an odd medley of god and human and boy and girl, and it was horribly inefficient, but warm.

  He called something back, and someone responded, and the door shut behind them. Stairs led down into darkness and out into the city. Suri stared down into the dark from the security of his arms, and then untangled herself.

  Kiran made a sound of surprise, but didn’t try to hold her back. Leaning back against the opposite wall, she tilted her chin up, defiant despite the fuzzy feeling in her head. “Explain.”

  “Explain what?”

  “In there,” she said, jerking her head. Words slipped through her fingers; she struggled to organize them, grasping at dissolving thoughts. “You were… weird. Like—” she cut off, waving her hands in a gesture that clarified absolutely nothing. “When we were talking about what we’d do if we died the next day. You were weird.”

  “Weird how?” he asked, tilting his head so hair fell into his face. In the shadowed corridor, he looked incandescent and young. All the right components of a boy slotted into all the right places, but not quite a boy. Build-a-Boy’s singular business failure, she thought hysterically, and then rubbed at her eyes until the smile passed.

  “Weird,” she repeated, dropping her hands to her sides. “It was like you were pretending to be yourself.”

  He was silent for a moment, gaze resting on the cobweb-misted ceiling above. Without looking down, he said, “I wasn’t lying.”

  “Yeah,” she said, pushing off from the wall. She had greatly overestimated her motor control; she staggered forward, teetering on the edge of the staircase. And then his hands were on her elbows, a ghost of a touch, and she held his stare for so long she felt like perhaps she could swallow this moment. She could put it to paper, fold it up, and keep it forever in gaps of skin and bone.

  But she wouldn’t remember this, she knew. She wouldn’t remember how strange he’d acted, and how bad the movie had been, and she certainly wouldn’t remember this—the slant of gold in low light, the unsteadying fondness in the uneven line of his smile.

  She forced herself to speak. “I know you weren’t. Lying, that is. But it wasn’t you. I’m asking why.”

  “That’s a secret.”

  “Even from me?”

  His smile was faintly strained, the way it had been when she’d introduced him to Tarak. Smooth as sea glass, incongruity sanded down at the edges. “Especially you.”

  She frowned at him with the transient irritation of the utterly wasted, then took a step back and held her arms out. “Take me home, then.”

  So he did, scooping her up with the ease of someone who could likely lift cars and buildings and trees. He carried her all the way home, and Suri kept her gaze on the darkness above, the autumn chill insubstantial around her.

  He paused on the threshold, and she gingerly climbed out of his arms. She collapsed on the couch, rolling to one side to make more room. He regarded her with bemusement. “Where am I meant to sleep, then?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Were you planning to?”

  He shrugged, then obligingly took a seat on the opposite side, knees sprawled across her legs. A smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “There’s a story you want to hear finished, hm?”

  Suri flushed. “I’m invested now. It’s your fault for telling it to me.”

  “You asked for one,” he returned.

  “Could’ve said no,” she shot back. Suri watched him through slit eyes, all shadows and smoke. She yawned, and then said, “Tell me a story.”

  “Any story?” he asked. His voice sounded distant, but she hung onto the lilting cadence of it. “You won’t remember in the morning.”

  “I know,” she said, tucking her head in between the couch cushions. “I don’t care, though.”

  And he laughed, bright and consonant like temple bells, but he still spoke, still spun out stories like candied pieces of a world he’d long since left behind.

  7

  Enesmat

  In the quiet of the early morning, the capital looked as if it were simply another appendage of the mountains, all glittering black rooftops and cold shadows. The sun had not yet risen when Suri climbed out of her window, the sky thick with charcoal clouds. This early, the ceaseless din of the city—which she had only recently accustomed herself to—softened into an eerie near-silence, broken intermittently by the screaming of the kaghas, or a faint breeze whistling through the distant tree line at the base of the hills.

  Suri wound around the north gardens, tracing the path down from the temple to a flat, sandy area near a small grove of kino trees a few-hundred meters away. It looked like any other abandoned trail, with no proper gate or plaque to distinguish it from the surrounding brush, save for an engraved metallic square at the base. Suri knelt and blew away the soil that obscured it, squinting to examine it in the near darkness. But it gave away nothing—it was simply an old etching on bronze, depicting a thin line encircling a flame. A marker for the temple, she supposed, when people had actually used it.

  She pulled herself to her feet and dusted her skirts off, retying her sash and blowing a loose strand of hair away from where it hung in her face. She had dressed in what she referred to as Athrian colors, the blouse and skirts done in black and the sash in a desaturated, heady red. They were the colors that covered the kingdom’s war banners when they were flown. The cloak, though, she’d borrowed off an unsuspecting guard, and it was soft but thin, and still smelled of spices and arrack.

  As she climbed up the trail, dodging tree branches as they snapped into her face, the world began to lighten around her. The shadows faded and twined with tremulous streams of light. The sun hadn’t yet appeared, but by the time she reached the top, the sky had turned a deep, wine-red color, the smoky clouds dissolving into ash-gray wisps.

  It bore no resemblance to the grand, awe-inspiring temple it led away from. A water pump dripped onto soil, a gully draining away the excess. Beside it, a handful of worn stone steps led up to the age-smoothed floor of the temple.

  As a consequence of her work, Suri had seen the entire expanse of the peninsula. Enesmati temples varied in design by many factors: climate, architectural styles, different cultural predispositions with regards to patterns and favored gods. But she had never seen a temple without a roof.

  This temple—if it truly could be c
alled that—was small, a little larger than the boy king’s war room. At each of the four corners stood a slim stone pillar, several heads taller than Suri and unadorned by the colorful images that characterized those of the main temple. They were carved with intricate, tangled designs, less concerned with telling a story to devotees and more with a raw display of divinity.

  The altar in the center was also oddly simple—a stone slab that came to her waist, resting on a thick base, differentiable only by the carved ash-gray bird at its head and two indents. One held oil and a yellowing wick that ran the length of it, while a second indent lay empty, incised into the surface so that—if one wished—they could fill it with a thin film of liquid. A symbol was carved into the center of this second recess, the same one that had been on the metal plaque at the base of the hill—a slender circle, and in its center, a single flame.

  The sanctum was shadowed, but the metal grate had been hauled up. Two stone steps separated the karuvarai from the floor of the temple, and the faint morning light revealed a granite statue, glossy but untouched save for a streak of ash across its temple. A few untouched baskets lay beside the base of the statue, holding clusters of jasmine and kino flowers. Below, on the sanctum floor, a clay unthi pot and a camphor lamp shone in the murky light. But there was no sign of a flame.

  Though the temple was simple, it had obviously been cared for. There was no dust, no cobwebs, and the air smelled sweetly—of holy water and fresh incense smoke.

  “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  Despite everything, Suri flinched badly. It had something to do with how quiet it had become, as if she had slipped into a new world up here, bare feet on soft stone belonging to a different life. She hadn’t noticed the presence of another until the words cut through the air, and it was a strange thing; she could not remember the last time she had not been aware of the heartbeat of every living thing around her, as if even the molten core of her had grown accustomed to snuffing out such sounds.