The Dread Goddess--Book of Icons--Volume Two

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  Not everywhere.

  I took his hand and placed it on my breast, pulling him near, catching his mouth with mine and providing my own hands the work of tugging his shirt from his trousers. My breath caught and his, too, words turned to sighs in the silence, coupled only with the friction of clothing we hastened to discard.

  He moved quickly, easing me down against the worn mattress, exploring my cheeks, my neck, the tops of my breasts with hot, eager lips. His hands swept up my thighs, brushing the folds of my gown away as easily he might the spindle-thin pages of an ancient tome. Even as he meant to, as I meant to let him, there was the smallest voice in me that protested. Someone could hear. Someone could see. You’re not alone.

  You’re never alone.

  I might have ignored it. But he didn’t.

  Gannet shook his head as though clearing it, lifting himself away from me and rolling to the side, eyes unreadable in the dark, behind the mask.

  “I told you I don’t have any control.” His words were quiet, his countenance severe. I pushed my skirt back down my legs, flushed now from shame and worse, wanting to tuck his shirt tails as eagerly as I had wanted to untuck them only seconds ago.

  “What is this?” I asked quietly, not looking at him, not wanting to.

  “My sister believes we are in love,” Gannet began carefully, not the response I had expected. I held my breath. “I want you. But I feel…pushed. By my own heart, perhaps.”

  Perhaps not.

  We were icons. Whatever we did, could we ever be sure it was what we wanted? My own heart soured. It didn’t matter that I had the same worries, that I wasn’t sure what drove me to him with such force. Was it love, as Morainn believed? I had never been in love. I wanted him to say that he believed that what we wanted was right, that it could not be corrupted.

  But Gannet wasn’t in the habit of telling me what I wanted to hear.

  “We should both get some sleep. You should go,” I said, at last, feeling petty, unkind, and only a little guilty about it. He was still lying on his back in my bed, and he turned his head to look at me.

  “You’re unhappy.”

  “Of course I am,” I answered, sitting up so he couldn’t see my face, only the slumped profile of my shoulders. “Theba takes everything from me. Even the things I didn’t even know I had, didn’t know I wanted.”

  I felt his light touch in the middle of my back, radiating heat.

  “And yet she’s given me so much.” Gannet was trying to soothe me, but he was, in part, sincere. If Theba hadn’t woken in me, we would never have met. “Eiren, look at me.”

  I cast a look back over my shoulder, eyes hooded. He sat up, meeting my gaze and holding it a long moment before speaking.

  “It’s me I don’t trust, not you. I know who you are, Eiren. I am not afraid of Theba.”

  “But does anyone know who you are? Does Adah know?”

  Gannet shook his head, lips pressed to a regretful line. “If he does, he guards that secret very closely. Not knowing has never kept me from anything. But now—” he began but stopped short of saying more. I’d held up a hand.

  “Please, I understand.”

  When he left, he made no more excuses, offered no further apology. There were no kisses, no protestations, nothing an encounter like this one would’ve ended with in a story. It felt like an age before I slept, salting the mattress with tears he hadn’t earned, biting my lip, my tongue, my pillow in frustration.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I was roused by the smell of tea assaulting my nose and my empty belly. I had no other garments but those I’d slept in and the Ambarian traveling gown that was too heavy for the heat, so I smoothed what wrinkles I could and went in search of food.

  The area we occupied beneath the palace made me feel like a rat scrambling through a warren, the natural light needling through broken stone in bursts of white and yellow. There was a large common area which boasted many low tables and assorted supplies arranged in the corners that soldiers coming and going would pick from. Here, too, were the refugees from Jarl who could not fight, the elderly, the mothers, the children. Their faces were lined with the weariness that comes of waiting on the edges of war, for death, or for it to be over. For them, there was nothing else.

  I sought my family around one of the many small hearths. The spread and the company were nothing like I remembered, even in our leanest years in exile. My mother had fed me well the day before, but when I came upon her, Anise, and Esbat, their fast was broken only by hard bread and shriveled olives in a murky looking oil. Jurnus, Lista, and my father were absent, but Gannet sat with them, his legs underneath him, attending to his own meager rations without complaint.

  “Eiren,” Anise said, a desperate edge in her voice. “We’re almost finished. I was nearly ready to come and get you.”

  It didn’t take much prying on my part to sense that Gannet was the source of her discomfort. His features beneath the mask were drawn and pale, his hair brushed severely back into a short tail.

  “Then I suppose I ought to be grateful Lista wasn’t here to eat my share,” I replied, sitting down between Esbat and my mother and helping myself without further comment to the fare.

  “Lista is doing penance for last night’s excursion to the palace above by hauling stones to secure the perimeter,” my mother said, leveling her gaze on me. “I was hoping you or your companion might be able to provide me with a fitting punishment for a god.”

  I blanched. How had she known? And why hadn’t Lista blamed me?

  “We were quite safe,” I said lamely, though it was even less the truth than my mother would believe it to be. Theba had compelled me there, and Lista had witlessly followed. I could’ve argued we had more to fear from the Dread Goddess than we did the Ambarians. “But I should’ve told someone, I know.”

  My mother didn’t respond, only grunted, sweeping the hard crust of her bread through the last of the oil from the bowl of olives.

  “The imposter’s army will make it difficult to give you warning of our comings and goings,” Gannet interjected, looking at my mother, and each of us in turn. “We have work to do.”

  “As do I.” My mother’s expression sharpened on his features, and it was almost as though she had a blade in her hand, testing its weight, its sharpness. “War has never kept me from seeing to the protection of my children. I won’t begin to neglect them now.”

  A tense silence soured what food remained before us. I could hear my sisters’ thoughts, see their memories of the time that war had, in fact, done just that: she had not been able to protect us the day that we were captured, when we were returned to our city without the free use of our arms and legs. But they knew better to argue with her, and I would not give Gannet the opportunity.

  “Then we should get to it.” I popped the last olive in my mouth and, spying an assorted collection of water skins in a pile opposite us, crossed to collect one for the day’s exertions. My sisters were taking it in turns to think of me now, to fret, to doubt, to fear, their thoughts like the pressure of a reed needle in muscle. Except there was no release, no sigh following the sharp pain as it subsided. Instead, I ached, pricked again and again with their wondering and worrying. They did not like that I was to be given leave to roam freely about the ruins, did not like the company that I would have to keep. I had wanted so much to be home, to see them again, but now that I was here, the idea of being in the city above, occupied only with my own thoughts and Gannet’s whenever he saw fit to share them, appealed to me greatly.

  “We don’t have much in the way of intelligence to share,” Esbat said, at last, rising from the table. “But I can show you what we have.”

  We followed her down a short corridor and then a stair that wound deeper beneath the ruins. My skin prickled as the air cooled, and when Esbat stopped to light a small lamp in a cleft in the rock, I stood near enough to Gannet that I could’ve brushed his hand with mine. But I didn’t. I felt my mother’s suspicious eyes on me, traili
ng behind us with Anise at her side. In another time, with another man, what she expected would have been celebrated.

  But not now, not with this man.

  Esbat hadn’t lied. Our intelligence gathering had been primarily to determine the movements of the Ambarian troops, the shifts in their number, the places in the city most open to incursion. So, while there were some rough sketches of the terrain and the surrounding structures to be had for these areas, the rest of the ruins remained a mystery. There were other documents in the chamber, scroll cases, flaking parchments squared carefully on shelves that I expected Esbat to have dragged here for just such a purpose, but these she ignored, favoring what was already laid out on a broad table in the center of the chamber.

  “Much of the city is unstable,” Esbat explained, sweeping a careful hand over the woefully incomplete map she’d laid out before us. She had a curator’s touch, and I could sense her protectiveness over these meager documents, the little knowledge she was given leave to accumulate in the middle of a war. “We don’t usually go inside the buildings for fear of collapse, but I expect you won’t have that luxury.”

  “No,” Gannet answered curtly, looking down his nose at the map.

  “But that doesn’t mean we can’t be careful. This will help us. Thank you.” I tried to capture and hold Estbat’s eyes, but she met mine only briefly, her expression troubled. She didn’t trust Gannet. “Maybe we’ll find a library. I’ll bring you as many books as I can carry.”

  Without looking at me, Esbat anchored the map carefully with smooth, polished stones before recovering a box of writing implements from beneath the table where she’d laid it out. Only then did she continue, looking between Gannet and me. “You’ll want your hands free, if you encounter the enemy.”

  It was a warning, an accusation, a fear, and none of it was lost on me. My cheeks flooded with heat and my lips parted, but my mother was speaking before I could.

  “Go, and safely. I will say a prayer for you.”

  Gannet had his hand on the small of my back then, but I didn’t need him to propel me forward into the corridor, down the stair, past the guards that clustered nearly unseen in holes carved out between broken stone and sand. His whisper in my ear felt more intimate than sharing the thought would have been.

  “And whom will she pray to?”

  “Not Theba,” I muttered, the sound one of very few to be heard as we drew away from the palace. Even the tiny lizards that scurried over the rocks as we drew near passed silently. “Do you know where we’re going?”

  Nothing had caught my eye on the map we had been shown, and good as it felt to have the sun warming my back and my hair, I didn’t think wandering the ruins aimlessly would be the best use of what little time we had left.

  Gannet crouched in the shadow cast by a mammoth stone column, listing perilously to one side but erect still.

  “It is fitting that your mother should send us off with a prayer. I think we should try to find some house of worship, if we can,” he began. “The gods walked here and this relic, this weapon, it makes sense that it would have been in their care, doesn’t it?”

  I bit my lip, thoughtful. “It’s an obvious course but a good enough place to start.”

  “‘Good enough’?” If I’d been able to see the whole of Gannet’s face, would his brow have quirked in amusement? Furrowed in irritation? “I’m glad of your confidence.”

  “You’re welcome,” I answered, suppressing a smile.

  We moved quickly through the ruins then, staying low, driving toward the east and the point on the horizon where the sun crowned each morning. There were many tales of Dsimah’s origins that likened the sunrise to a mother’s swelling belly, to the slick, glossy head of a birthing babe. I shared what I knew with Gannet without words, and he with me, the illustrations he had seen in ancient texts in Jhosch, words from the mouth of the icon of Dsimah herself. If there had been a temple to Dsimah here, it would be where the first light would strike it, and it would mimic the sun’s arrival in its construction.

  I tried to use, too, the strange reconstruction of the other Re’Kether that asserted itself most in shadows, in broken stones reassembled. I found I could see it most clearly out of the corners of my eyes, an ancient world imposed upon a modern ruin, the road swept clean of sand and perfectly maintained, gutters running with water. I could hear the shrieks of children splashing, see their disembodied feet kicking up a spray. The ghosts of mothers hushed them, shop owners shooed them, stately, robed figures ignored them completely, a stark processional down a bright promenade.

  “Eiren, wait!”

  Gannet’s voice was too loud as he grabbed my arm, only just preventing me from walking forward into nothing, a yawning pit before us where the street had collapsed. I fell back against him, dizzy, trying to see both worlds at once. I could see the crush of revelers, advancing into the shadow cast by a domed structure, the light spilling around it, stark as an eclipse.

  What do you see?

  Gannet’s question was a stabilizing touch. I closed my eyes, breathing hard, before opening them and seeing only the world as it was, silent, the pit before us as wide across as ten arms linked and beyond it, all but obliterated by time, the temple of Dsimah.

  Look.

  He held me still, and I lifted a hand to gently turn his face away from mine and ahead, to the temple. The weight of the dome had been too much for whatever had once supported it for it lay now on its side, broken like a round of bread or a crescent moon. It was clear even from this distance that the whole of the temple was exposed to the elements, many ages of sand spilling out of both the temple’s original entrances and those created by the wind.

  “Now how are we going to get over there?” I asked, leaving no room for arguments that we couldn’t, or wouldn’t. I cast around, studying the ruined buildings on either side of the emptiness that had once been a bustling street. These structures appeared no more stable than any we had passed, but there was one, at least, that was still mostly intact, three stories and rounded windows vacant as sightless eyes. Gannet followed my gaze.

  “That’s a good enough place to start,” he said, echoing my earlier sentiment. It was a tense attempt at humor, but I appreciated it all the same.

  We skirted the pit, Gannet keeping a hold of my hand, lest I stray into the past again. But the shade of what had been was distant, and I felt for the moment, thankfully, anchored in the present. As we drew near the structure I saw the ghost of color around each blank window, as though the stone had once been brightly painted in bursts of red, pink, and gold. An outbuilding affiliated with the temple, perhaps? That would be lucky.

  When we passed inside we both stopped, allowing our eyes to adjust. There was nothing but sand and stone within, twists of desiccated wood that might once have been furniture. Still, our steps were cautious, our eyes as much on the stone below as the ceiling above, hoping that both were strong enough to withstand intruders after centuries alone.

  Inside, series of small rooms were connected by a narrow corridor, and I wondered at the purpose of the building, if it had been a home, a place of confession, a storehouse. We entered each room, Gannet bending to examine the walls and floors while I watched, waiting to be shown something.

  I didn’t have to wait long.

  When we reentered the corridor after another fruitless search of one of the rooms, I noted that it lengthened toward where the temple had stood. Rather than the harsh glare of the sun where it should have opened onto ruin and sand, there was a soft light, bobbing like a lantern in darkness.

  “Gannet,” I murmured, catching his sleeve with my fingers, assuring myself of the warmth of his presence before I let go again. “Don’t leave me.”

  I moved toward the light, not surprised when it took shape, the muted outline of a woman in a voluminous headscarf, the folds skimming her shoulders and obscuring arms, hips, legs. She turned when I drew near and I saw nothing but her eyes, glowing, a demand in their ghostly depths. From
beneath the scarf a knife flashed, and I felt it sear hot against my skin, the flesh of my exposed forearm. It wasn’t pain that claimed me but something else. I felt myself slipping again, as I had in the corridor with my sisters beside me. I was claimed by another time, another mind, and I didn’t resist. The light that I had seen blossomed gold and familiar, and I allowed myself to become the other woman, to see not with Eiren’s eyes but Ji’s.

  “Dsimah’s light be with you.”

  Mara lifted the brazier, arms steady, and two acolytes approached with blazing torches. One of them was even male, though it would take a great deal more than ambition to rise in the temple ranks with his sex to discredit him.

  I had little interest in the lighting ritual, though the temple was the ideal place to observe loyalties. From behind my veil I watched those of the First Blood open their veins into the offering bowl, filling it to the very brim with hot, red tribute. More acolytes rushed to bandage the wrists of courtiers and wealthy merchants, the strongest of them tasked with heaving the offering to the head of the temple where Mara stood, still as a statue, holding the now-smoking brazier. To spill even a drop would have resulted in grave punishment. But Mara was strong. I saw the slight quake of her legs only because I was looking for it.

  I didn’t offer my arm, and in my current garb, it would not have been welcome. From head to foot I wore the charcoal-dusted covering of the mortally ill, and I stood with the poor, doubly disguising my heritage as one of the First Blood. It was the perfect cover. There were no First Blood among the poor, and precious few among those who had to work for their living, even if that work was supervising the work of others. We were esteemed by the gods and so lifted above others.

  But to be at the head of a line of sheep bound for slaughter did not seem so great a privilege to me, which was why I hid who and what I was.

  “Speaking of,” I muttered, noting the robed figure who was now being led forward by armed and armored soldiers. My utterance caught the attention of the long-haired youth who stood nearest me. I met his eyes, knowing mine would appear watery with sickness from the oil I had rubbed beneath them. He looked away quickly. Long hair was usually sign of devotion, but many who hoped to hide their allegiance took on the appearance of the devout. But I wasn’t here to determine friend from foe. Recruitment was not our mission, Mara’s and mine.