He had everyone’s attention now.
“You mean to go out there? The two of you, alone?” My father was baffled, and I couldn’t blame him. He might have expected such behavior from Jurnus or Lista, but not me.
“And what do you seek?” My mother, full of stories, had any number of answers, but she wanted to hear it from Gannet, from me.
I wanted to tell her the truth, but I couldn’t. They’d never let us go if I did.
“We believe it is a weapon from the ancient world. Powerful enough to change the tide of the war.” Gannet glossed over what little we knew of a threat they would understand. I felt my father’s alarm, my older sisters’ blind panic, all their feelings all at once. I picked out from the scramble of emotions only Jurnus’s wounded pride, his outrage.
“Why should we do anything you ask? You return with our sister and some wild tale, you have intelligence we don’t, and you offer no explanation,” he spat, a litany of grief. Even his love for me was tangled up with distrust, uncertainty, and grave underestimation.
My father laid a hand on Jurnus’s arm and stepped forward. Despite the sweat that trembled on his brow, and the chill I knew he held in his heart, my father’s voice was steady, his countenance that of a king.
“You ask a great deal. My son is not alone in being not altogether satisfied with the explanation we’ve been given,” he said carefully, watching Gannet’s face for a reaction. He didn’t twitch, a preternatural stillness settling even below the mask. Gannet held my father’s eyes with his when next he spoke.
“The force from the north believes it is Theba who drives them. There is an imposter with the army, posing as the Dread Goddess, compelling them to war. They fear her displeasure more than they fear their own deaths.” Gannet’s tone was cool, belying the heat of his next words. “Your daughter has risked herself, returning here, to warn you. To stand against them. If you will not come to her aid, I cannot help you.”
A younger Jurnus might have drawn his blade on Gannet, but this one only tightened his hand on the hilt. Lista looked at him for guidance, her own posture betraying her uncertainty. Esbat and Anise huddled near my mother, fear and outrage warring in their faces and their hearts. My mother and father only looked sad, and in my father’s mind, the grief over a lifetime of war dogging his passage toward peace was so heavy I couldn’t bear it, and I had no idea how he managed it.
“We’re lost,” Esbat whispered, at last, pressing a fist to her mouth. “How can we stand against such madness?”
Jurnus shook his head and my father’s hand from his shoulder, expression peevish.
“Who is this imposter? She’s just a woman. We have the advantage in this city.” Jurnus’s words roused a look of doubt from my mother and reluctant nods from my sisters.
“I’ve never heard a story of a siege that ended well for the ones on our side of it,” I interrupted before he could get more carried away. I looked between Jurnus and my parents, my eyes pleading. “Gannet and I must search the city. The fight will come to us either way—but if we aren’t prepared, we will pay with our lives, this time.”
“Why are you afraid?” Esbat interjected with a scholar’s curiosity. “If you’re really Theba, why don’t you just kill this pretender?”
“Exactly. We have the real Theba on our side,” Jurnus insisted, pointing at me as he addressed our family.
“Theba isn’t on anyone’s side.” I felt a stir up my spine like trailing fingers. She would not let me stop with killing just the imposter, perhaps next time would not let me stop killing again, ever.
“And I’m not immortal,” I continued, calmly as I could manage. “I couldn’t stand against thousands, and even if I could, they may not all be serving her willingly. I won’t kill innocents.”
Again. I won’t kill innocents again.
“But you’re Theba,” Lista argued, though she didn’t sound completely sure of herself.
“It isn’t like that.” How could I make them understand? “Her powers are violent. Her appetites…dark. I cannot control her.”
You are right now.
I heard my mother’s thoughts and was grateful she did not voice them. I had no justification against her hope.
“I have done terrible things. If I give in to her again, I don’t know what I’ll do. I am afraid I’ll never return to myself,” I said after a tortured moment. I sensed that they still didn’t believe me, not any of it, not really.
“There are other assets we may uncover,” Gannet interrupted, sparing me from further explanation. “Re’Kether has many secrets, subterranean passages that will allow you to surprise the enemy, ancient caches of potent fire oil, and the golems.”
“The golems?” This from my mother, who alone hadn’t taken her eyes off me.
Gannet nodded, posture commanding, like a man preparing to deliver a lecture.
“Tirce fashioned soldiers of mud and clay for Shran, a gift to his friend when he was no longer a boy and their childhood games were behind them,” Gannet intoned, and I couldn’t help but admire how easily he diverted their attention from me. “They guard his tomb still, and an icon’s touch could persuade them to serve you.”
“But that’s just a story,” Jurnus said dismissively, and Gannet shot a surprised look at me. I could imagine his brows arching behind the mask.
“I thought your people put great faith in stories.”
“Some of us do,” Anise answered quietly. “But to take them literally? How can you be sure these golems exist?”
“I can’t,” Gannet answered honestly, turning my heart over again with a response that was so typically his. A lesser man might’ve shrugged, seeking an apology, but Gannet wanted none. “But you have very little time and fewer resources. Allow us to explore the ruins. We have no martial skills. We’ll be of little use to you anyway.”
I could see as well as feel my father weighing what Gannet had said, the likelihood of our finding anything of use, of getting ourselves killed in the process. Jurnus was flatly against it, but it wouldn’t be his decision to make. I wasn’t familiar with the story Gannet had spoken of, though it fit my understanding of the relationship between Shran and the youthful god Tirce. Was believing in an ancient army of stone men wilder than anything else I had come to believe? No. But it still seemed unlikely that we would find them. I had always believed the location of Shran’s tomb was lost, though Re’Kether had never warranted a mention in the stories my mother had told. Perhaps there was a reason. Perhaps it was here.
“Fine,” my father announced, at last, eyes passing between Gannet and me. “We will share what we know. We can spare an armed escort as well.”
“No,” Gannet replied, and belatedly added, “but thank you. We’ll move more quietly and be less likely to be seen without one.” He caught my eyes, his own cold with knowledge. My stomach twisted.
I could not stand against thousands, it was true. But if we encountered a rogue patrol, I could easily dispatch a handful of men.
Chapter Eleven
Even after everything, I had to convince my mother and father to release Gannet from his cell. We were both shadowed by guards back to the subterranean chambers our people had reclaimed, and couldn’t speak together. I didn’t even reach out to touch his mind, for I was watched every moment. My sisters and mother believed that I had lied about our relationship, and I didn’t want to give them any more reason to think so. I cared for him, but it was not some easy dalliance that I could blush and giggle over as I might have done if our lives had ever been normal. It was dangerous. There was no future in it. They would not understand.
I felt drained, besides, by the necessary telling they had already required of me, the display of fire, the prospect of the imposter’s arrival within a few days’ time. Gannet and I would rest for what remained of the night and begin tomorrow. Exhausted though I was, I didn’t know how I would ever sleep. The shadows of the past were growing brighter, softening the edges of the present, making it difficult to
determine what was real and what was not, what was and what had been. Putting one foot in front of the other became a challenge; I couldn’t be sure if I would meet freshly swept stone or sand-dusted ruin.
And then I saw the woman crouched on the stair, a mere outline, bright, fuzzy, and wrong. She was looking right at me, through me, and I whipped around, as though I expected to see something behind me.
There was nothing.
But when I turned back, the woman was still there, standing, several steps closer than she had been the moment before. I took an instinctive step back up one stair. Esbat noted my faltering, her worried face flickering with doubt. She opened her mouth to speak.
“Do you see that? Do you see her?” I managed, voice shaking with terror. Esbat looked alarmed when she shook her head.
The woman reached forward.
“Ji, it’s me. Ji?”
The woman’s face imposed upon my sister’s for but an instant, her voice pitched at a stranger’s tone. I did not recognize the name on her lips, on the lips of the other.
“Eiren, are you well?”
“Ji, come on. They’re waiting.”
The not-woman’s hand connected with my chest and two women flashed before my eyes: Esbat, who dominated my earliest memories, and another whom I couldn’t even place. Both were looking at me, speaking to me, the sudden chaos of knowing and not knowing threatening to make me sick. Beyond Esbat there was a changing scene, as well, the crumbling facade of an ancient artifice replaced with an imposing wall hung inexpertly with many faded tapestries. Underneath, the stone was the same. I didn’t know how I knew but I knew.
Esbat’s brow furrowed, yet even as she spoke my name her features changed, her nose flattened, her hair unraveled from its careful plait into wild tangles.
“Eiren?”
I had thought that there was no madness beyond Theba, no madness beyond the haunts of this place, but I was wrong. As the new face came completely into focus, the blurred edges of the other world imposed utterly over the one I was only just becoming accustomed to, I felt myself slipping away. As Esbat changed, I changed, too. It wasn’t like it had been at the fountain in the courtyard, where I had seemed to pass as myself into some distant vision of Re’Kether. I felt the threads of my own consciousness unravel as another weaving began, another person, another set of knowledge and memories. I wasn’t me. I forgot myself.
I was eclipsed entirely by someone else; I was someone else.
“Ji, have you been chewing leaves again? Get out of there before they decide to come looking.”
I scrambled from a tall wardrobe, hitching the waist of artfully loose trousers with my free hand. In the other, I clutched a slip of paper folded around a blade, the trickle of blood from my palm revealing the message scrawled there. More knives were in the belt I wore beneath the trousers, a final and most deadly blade strapped to my thigh. Lucky it was the fashion.
“If she wants to know what I’ve got to tell her, she can wait a little,” I hissed, neither confirming nor denying the accusation that my dalliance was due to the cappa leaf. Another fashion. Another vice.
“I think you overestimate just how much she likes you, Ji. Or what you can do,” Mara returned, grinning. Her eyes were warm beneath a fringe of graying hair tucked behind one tattooed ear, heavy with the weights that identified her as a medium. She walked between the worlds, delivering orders from one into the hands of those charged to carry them out in the other. From our lords to the lorded over. To us.
I didn’t argue with her. Mara’s skills of perception were greater in the other world than they were here, but she was probably still right.
Her eyes flicked to the message in my hand, to the blood that oozed from the pressure of my closed fist. A drop fell, so slowly it was as though it were caught in time, and she swept a leg out to catch it in a fold of her skirt.
“Precious stuff. Don’t want to waste it.”
“And don’t want to leave any evidence behind.”
Though I was bred of the First People, I felt I had more to offer than what flowed through my veins. And that was why we were here.
“Come on,” she said again, gesturing to the door that allowed a sliver of torchlight into the cloister where we waited. At the same time, there were families who could afford only enough fuel to cook their week’s meat, and there was a temple on every corner with fires alight in every empty chamber. This was part of the problem.
We slipped into the corridor, the soles of our shoes weathered soft and soundless. More tapestries hung here, a few flapping in the wind that threatened to bring another storm. It was the month of fury, and the heavens were appropriately thunderous. We made our way down, and then down, deep into the temple’s storehouse. I seethed at the great casks of ritual wine, the bolts of shroud cloth, the rice and grain sealed in spelled jars that repelled the elements and curious rodents alike. Mara laid a hand lightly on my arm, sensing my distress, and I shook her off. I knew she felt the same as I did, that she scoffed at such excess. That was why she used her gifts for our cause and not the temple’s, as they’d been bred to be.
But we couldn’t work fast enough for my tastes.
When we neared the meeting place, Mara withdrew a key from a discreet pocket in the scarf she wore around her neck, inserting it into a dusty lock. Our contact clearly had other means of entering this particular room, and I half considered asking her, wondering if she’d value daring as much as information. Unlikely, but if we were going to be working together, she’d do better to know me for who and what I was.
It was dark in the chamber, and when we entered and closed the door behind us, there was no answering illumination.
“You have a message for me.”
The voice was hale and deep for a woman, though I assumed she pitched her voice to disguise herself if she couldn’t be bothered with a light.
“And no way for you to read it,” I said conversationally, feeling the sharp bite of Mara’s elbow in my side.
There was a pause that another person might’ve filled with a laugh or a snort of dissatisfaction. Our contact did neither.
“I don’t need light to read. Give it to me.”
The message clung to my palm with the blood that had rendered it readable, and I held out my hand, a challenge. The blade I drew back with my opposite hand, sheathing it, but only just. Even if this was the only knife on my person that she could see, I didn’t want her to think that I was too trusting. Trust was part of what had gotten our world into this mess.
I heard her breath, slight and shallow as she read the short missive. Then came the snort, throaty and most certainly displeased.
“A medium and a First Blood, and this is all you’ve brought me?”
“We can bring no more than what is given,” Mara insisted, betraying the teachings that had dominated her early life. I tensed in anger, torn between wishing our contact could see just how much she frustrated me, and thinking it was probably best she couldn’t. Someone placed within the temple was an asset we could ill afford to lose, as valuable as Mara, as valuable as me. Likely more than both of us, though I would never have admitted it aloud.
“What did you expect? There’s discord on both sides,” I said, rising to Mara’s defense.
“But you didn’t read it.” Now her voice was a challenge. My fingers clenched again against my wound.
“Of course not.”
“Why not?” the hooded woman asked. This was a surprise. The temple had all the power, more than the king, more, certainly, than his courtiers. There was nothing they could learn from us, not a thought in our minds they could not extract without waiting for us to voice it. I was flummoxed, not having anticipated the question, and this made me more irritated.
“Interpreting messages isn’t my job.”
Another pregnant pause.
“And you’re afraid you’d misunderstand them.”
I bit the inside of my cheek and tasted blood. She was being purposefully cruel, voicing
what I would not have wanted Mara to hear.
I thought of challenging her, to strike her, but even as I deliberated on the least sensible course of action, a sudden flood of light filled the room, my skin buzzed as though stung all over, and I was Eiren again.
It was more disorienting even than Theba’s strongest possession of my heart. I was myself, and then another self, and myself again. I was in the corridor with Anise, Esbat, and my mother, my brother, and Lista, the guards and Gannet having gone on a little ahead. They were slowing, too, and Gannet cast a searching look over his shoulder even with blades bristling about him. As far as I could tell only a few seconds had passed. Had my body gone on while my mind wandered? I could hardly ask. They already thought I was unhinged, and if I had truly experienced what I had seemed to, they were probably right. They would never let Gannet and me do what we needed to do if I couldn’t be trusted to remain in control of my senses.
Who was she? When was she?
“Eiren, are you well?” Lista searched my face, Anise over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes at me.
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“What did you mean just now, when you asked if I saw her?” Esbat’s gaze narrowed, sensing the lie.
“I thought I saw someone in the shadows,” I answered. “But I was wrong. It’s just exhaustion.”
Esbat didn’t seem convinced, but she let it go. Ever the logical sister, I had offered her a reasonable explanation for erratic behavior.
I couldn’t think what this other woman, Ji, had to do with me, or make much sense of what I had seen. The ghost of Mara, if she had been a ghost, didn’t reappear on the stair. Even as I tried to make sense of the thoughts that had filled me while I had been Ji, the details began to fade, like a story I had heard as a child and never had cause to repeat. I remembered, but not truly. Only an impression of the conversation she and Mara and the nameless woman in the dark had had. I hadn’t been myself, but it was still strange, to have known the things that she did for a brief moment and all, only to forget them in the next. One crumbling hall looked the same as another, and I couldn’t tell if it was the same one I had seen in the vision or not. I was deposited at the chamber where my mother had met me, but I couldn’t settle. I waited until I was sure that the guard who patrolled this corridor had passed on before I slipped out of the room and into the dark ruins. I would go back to the stair, to see if the ghost was there again. Perhaps I could talk with her, or she would drag me into the past again. I would try to remember more this time.
The Dread Goddess--Book of Icons--Volume Two Page 11