Beyond the Shadowed Earth

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  “Immigrants, many of them. Seeking their fortune apart from the Empire, or going to work in Halda’s stone quarries and send money home to their families.”

  “Why would they want to leave the Empire?”

  Lady Rinar shrugged her thin shoulders. “There’s very little opportunity for common Enduenans to improve themselves or their stations. Land and power are squabbled over by the nobility, like my late husband, and there’s nothing left for anyone else. If you’re born poor, you are very likely to die poor.”

  Eda thought about Niren, who would have lived and died a sheep farmer’s daughter if not for her. Didn’t that mean Eda had improved her lot? And what about the temple? Eda had constructed it specifically for the common people. A traitorous thought wormed through her mind: Temples do a poor job of filling anyone’s belly. She pushed it angrily away, forcing her thoughts back to the present. “Are you an immigrant, too?”

  “I’m a pilgrim,” said Lady Rinar softly. “Journeying to Tal-Arohnd. My son Torane made a pilgrimage there two decades ago and stayed to become a monk. I want to see him one last time before I die.”

  Eda didn’t ask if Lady Rinar was ill—clearly her age would not allow her to make another such trip, if she even survived this one. “Tal-Arohnd,” Eda mused. “The monastery in Halda.”

  The old woman nodded. “Then you’ve heard of it?”

  Eda felt woozy again, her heart beating overly fast. She laid her head back against the wall and shut her eyes, fighting against the memory of Ileem lounging on the roof tiles, the moonlight kissing the curve of his cheek. The monks believe Tuer himself is there, somewhere, he’d said. Trapped in his own mountain. They claimed they could hear him sometimes, his weeping tangled up with the wind.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of Tal-Arohnd. That’s where I’m headed, too.”

  By the afternoon, Eda felt strong enough to drag herself out of bed. The ship still tilted alarmingly, but she remained upright, and the little bits of food she’d managed to get down stayed where they were supposed to.

  She had no wish to stay cramped inside with strangers and sickness, so she stumbled out onto the lower deck.

  Sea air hit her square in the face, cold and damp and salty, and beyond the ship’s metal railing there was nothing but the endless waves. She clapped her hand over her mouth and turned away from the dizzying view—she was helpless out here, at the mercy of the merciless gods, impossibly far from land in every direction. She shuddered, and wondered what in all of Endahr would ever possess someone to become a sailor.

  She wasn’t alone on the deck. A mother sat nursing a baby on a rough wooden bench that butted up against the outside wall of the horrid steerage cabin. The mother looked sickly and thin but the baby seemed content, one tiny fist curled tight around a length of the mother’s dark hair.

  For a moment, Eda stared at the child, seeing her own future with Ileem, a false future, one that had never truly existed.

  And yet her traitorous heart still longed for it. What would her and Ileem’s child have looked like? Smooth skin, black hair, dark eyes, surely. But what else? Ileem’s singing voice, perhaps. Eda’s dimples. Treachery, engraved into the child’s very soul.

  They weren’t very different, her and Ileem. Like, calling to like.

  Eda jerked her gaze away from the mother and baby, her insides roiling with more than nausea.

  An Enduenan man and his teenage daughter emerged from steerage and went to stand by the rail. The daughter stared longingly out over the water, a faraway look in her eyes, and for some reason, she reminded Eda of Talia.

  Caida’s bleeding heart. Eda didn’t want to ponder her old rival’s fate, or contemplate with slightly guilty pangs the elaborate lengths she’d gone to to make doubly and triply sure Talia would be miserable for the rest of her life. Eda didn’t want to think, even for an instant, that perhaps she had wronged Talia. Talia had been all the things Eda wanted to be, and was not: the true heir to the Emperor, a daughter of royal blood. Somebody.

  But Eda was nobody, now.

  She always had been.

  The steerage passengers ate in a cramped mess hall adjoining their sleeping quarters. Portholes looked out to sea, where the setting sun sank fiery into the waves, and an Odan chef in a dirty apron spooned what looked like pig slop into tin bowls.

  Eda took her slop, plus a mug of beer, and sat at a rough wooden table near Lady Rinar. Eda tried a bite from her bowl. It was some kind of stew, and thankfully tasted rather better than it looked.

  “I was hoping you would join me,” said the old woman with a smile in Eda’s direction, though Eda had no idea how she knew it was her. “What did you say your name was?”

  Eda opened her mouth to give Lady Rinar Niren’s name, but found she couldn’t do it. Her grief and guilt choked her. So she gave her own name. “Eda.”

  “Like the Empress,” said Lady Rinar.

  Eda looked at her sharply, but there was no suspicion in the old woman’s face. “Like the Empress.”

  Lady Rinar sipped what appeared to be overly watery tea from a chipped mug. It smelled like dishwater. “What sends you to Tal-Arohnd? It is rare that the very young have any interest in religion, although you have the air of one who has seen the gods. Even treated with them.”

  Unbidden, the green meadow from her dream in the holding cell came into Eda’s mind. She saw the stone temple where the scarred man sat writing in his book. All around the temple shadows slipped through cracks in the sky—shadows with teeth.

  “I’m going to find Tuer,” said Eda without meaning to. “He wronged me, and I mean to make him answer for it.” She couldn’t quite speak her true purpose out loud.

  Lady Rinar’s blind eyes fixed on her face. “That is a dangerous quest, little one. But I fear you won’t find him. The stories say he’s trapped in the Circle of Sorrow, though no one but the Bearer of Souls could know that for sure.”

  The boat swayed, and Eda’s stomach dropped. “What is the Bearer of Souls?”

  “Who is,” Lady Rinar corrected gently. “The souls of the dead cannot reach paradise—that land which dwells beyond the Circles of the world—on their own. Every century or so, the gods choose a mortal to be the Bearer of Souls—they are the one who gathers the dead and brings them through the other Circles to their final rest.”

  “I am a devotee of the gods. I have never heard that before.”

  “It is a Haldan tradition—my son wrote of it to me in his letters.”

  “How does the Bearer of Souls pass through the Circles?” Eda asked, a horrible suspicion unfolding inside of her.

  Lady Rinar reached out one quavery hand and brushed her fingers gently across Eda’s forehead. “I believe the gods mark the Bearer somehow, but it’s been a long time since my son wrote of it tome.” She dropped her hand. “I’m afraid I don’t quite remember.”

  Eda crawled onto her pallet that night, the awful suspicion growing. Had the gods chosen her to be the Bearer of Souls? Was that the reason for the ghosts she’d seen back in Eddenahr, for the visions she kept having even now? Was that what Tuer wanted from her, not the temple she’d struggled so long and hard to build?

  Is that why he’d taken Niren and driven Ileem to betray her?

  She dreamed she was standing on a green hill pressed up against an iron sky. A shadow passed over the sun, slowly devouring its light. The world seemed to stretch out from her, out and out, so that she could see beyond the shadowed earth to the Circles of Death and Time. A host of dead souls, clothed in gray, marched between the Circles, and Niren stood before them all. She looked straight into Eda’s eyes. “Help us,” she said. “You’re the only one who can.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  EDA HAD NEVER REALIZED BEFORE HOW MUCH she thrived on activity. There was nothing to do onboard the steamer but sit on her pallet or stand at the rail or eat slop stew and stale biscuits in the mess hall and pine for her luxurious cabin on the upper deck.

  She spoke with Lady Rinar sometim
es, but the old woman grew weaker and weaker as the voyage wore on. Soon she couldn’t stand at the rail or even sit on the bench. Before a month had passed Lady Rinar couldn’t leave her pallet bed anymore. Tears leaked continually from her eyes, her lips moving always in prayer to the gods pleading that her body would sustain her for one last glimpse of her son.

  Eda sat with her as often as she could bear it, but she hated the old woman’s unshakeable faith in gods who didn’t hear her. She hated the sound of Lady Rinar’s breath, rattling in broken lungs, the way her skin shrank against her bones, the way her nails yellowed and her hair fell off in matted white clumps. But most of all, Eda hated the way Lady Rinar’s dying reminded her of the Emperor’s, of how his suffering, the unraveling of his spirit from his body, was her doing. An empty vial of poison for a crown on her head.

  Two months into the voyage, Eda sat with Lady Rinar in the hush before dawn, half dozing over the old woman’s paper-thin body. All at once Lady Rinar’s eyes flew open and she seized Eda’s hands with a sudden, desperate urgency.

  “Hold me back!” Lady Rinar rasped. “Don’t send me into the dark. The Bearer is trapped and cannot get through. I don’t want to go to the shadows. Don’t let me go! Hold me back!” Her body convulsed and she gave one last sharp cry before growing wholly, irrevocably still.

  The ship rocked beneath Eda’s feet, and she stared with horror at the husk of Lady Rinar. The gods were cruel. She had died far from her home, far from her son.

  Eda jerked upright, stumbling through the steerage cabin to call for the steward.

  Out on the deck, the wind was whipping, icy and wild. Eda leaned against the railing, and the freezing metal seared through her clothes down to her skin. The steward had sent two sailors down to steerage. They had unceremoniously wrapped Lady Rinar in sailcloth, then hauled her outside and hefted her over the rail, surrendering her to the sea. The waves had swallowed her whole, erasing her from existence as if she’d never lived at all. The sailors had uttered no benediction, just gone back to their duties on the upper deck as if they’d completed a routine chore. They didn’t seem to care that they’d sent Lady Rinar’s body to the fathomless depths, to be devoured by monsters, by time.

  Eda hadn’t moved since they’d gone. She just stood staring out into the fathomless sea, wrestling with her rage, her grief for this woman she barely knew. Was this how Eda would end? Alone and forgotten, with no one to mourn her?

  She shuddered with more than cold and rubbed her arms to try and get some heat in them.

  A wave broke against the side of the ship, drenching her arms and face; it tasted of salt and bitterness.

  Would that she had the power of a goddess—she would break the world in half. She would bend it to her will, make it take the shape that she wished.

  Clouds knotted tight and dark over the sun. Beneath the ship, the waves grew wild, angry, lashing the steamer, seeking to tear it to pieces.

  And then the sea began to boil.

  Eda gasped. A high, piercing wail echoed on the wind, an inhuman screeching that caused her to let go of the rail and clap her hands over her ears.

  The world shook.

  There came a resounding crack like some enormous piece of wood splitting in two.

  The sea stopped boiling, but the waves rose high, and music seared the air: voices tangled up in an ethereal melody that made her want to weep and shout and leap into the sea all at once.

  But then the music calmed, became a lament instead of a lure.

  Something flashed out among the waves, a bright light that was immediately extinguished.

  And then, impossibly, a chariot rose from the depths, filled with shadows and pulled by nine luminous horses. The chariot shot through the sky and disappeared in the clouds. Eda hardly had time to wonder about it before something else rose from the waves: a huge white bird with shining wings, carrying something in its talons. She had a glimpse of dark hair, a silver tail, and then the bird too was lost in the clouds.

  For a moment, Eda thought that whatever had happened was finished, that all was well and calm again. But something angry muttered in the iron sky. Cracks splintered through the air, like lightning made of shadow. Darkness seeped through the cracks, a formless nothing that resolved itself into hundreds of … she could only call them spirits. They had dark wings and jagged teeth and wicked swords. Looking at them made her feel like a thousand fire ants had burrowed beneath her skin and were eating her, eating her through muscle, down to bone.

  Eda scrambled back from the rail, shrieking and falling, covering her head with her arms.

  And then—

  The whisper of a touch on her shoulder. A glimpse of movement, passing around the curve of the ship. Eda got to her feet and followed.

  The sky still crawled with those winged spirits, but she kept her eyes straight ahead, stopping as she saw who waited for her beneath the shelter of the upper deck.

  He was less solid than he’d been in the ballroom; she could see through him to the waves that lapped silver beyond the ship.

  But she knew the form of the god who had betrayed her. For an instant he turned, and his shining eyes met hers. “Come,” he said. And then he stepped through the railing and out onto the sea, vanishing into the spray.

  Eda followed the god.

  She expected to hit the railing or plummet sickeningly into the icy waves, but instead she found herself stepping through a doorway into an ancient stone temple, open to a star-swept sky. Leaves rattled brittle over the flagstones, and in the midst of the temple, a white flame burned on a marble plinth, though there was no wood or oil to feed it.

  It took her a moment to see the four gods.

  Raiva Eda knew; she stood tall and solemn in a stone archway, her hand on the pillar. Another deity came toward Raiva, a rippling form of feathers and wind, rain and lightning tangled together in yellow hair: the wind goddess, Ahdairon.

  Mahl, the wind god, stood in the center of the temple. His skin was dark as obsidian, his hair white as cloud. He was crowned with lightning, and his cloak was made of eagle feathers woven together with rain.

  The fourth figure was more monster than god: he had the head of a lion and the twisted spine of a sea dragon. Tendrils of ragged weeds hung from his shoulders, and his mane was knotted with broken pieces of coral. At first Eda thought he must be the sea god, Aigir, but looking closer she saw he wore no Star on his finger—he was Hahld then, the river god. He stood apart from the other three, at the far end of the ruined temple, as if he was ashamed.

  There was no sign of Tuer’s Shadow.

  “What are we to do?” said Raiva.

  Eda didn’t know where the rest of the nine gods were, or even if they still lived, but she understood that in their absence Raiva was their leader. Perhaps even their queen.

  The goddess of the trees turned from the archway, and Ahdairon, Mahl, and Hahld looked toward her. “The Immortal Tree is no more. The Billow Maidens will bear the Dead of the sea as far as they can, but in the end they will be like all the rest: left to wander in the darkness, eaten slowly by death itself.”

  “We cannot help them,” said Mahl. “The world is broken. The Circles sealed. The spirits we trapped in the void long ago begin to break free. Soon the Words we bound them with will not hold them; soon all will be lost.”

  “Then we bind them again,” said Ahdairon, “and we find a way to unlock the Circles.”

  Hahld shook his lion’s head. “It cannot be done. I was trapped for centuries by just one of those spirits—none can withstand all of them.”

  Lightning crackled from Mahl’s crown. “Then it is to be war.”

  Raiva strode to the center of the temple, her gown dragging over the stone. “A war we cannot win. We four are not enough against the fathomless spirits, honed for centuries in darkness.”

  “If we could free Tuer,” suggested Ahdairon.

  Darkness clouded Raiva’s face. “There is no help to be found in the god of the mountain. He made hi
s choice long ago. He chose to leave us and loose his Shadow, and in so doing, break the world.”

  Ahdairon bowed her head.

  “There is nothing we can do,” Raiva went on, her voice the barest thread in the dark, “but watch, and wait, and hope that when the world unravels we are able to gather as many souls as we can and bear them through the shattered remains of the Circles to the One.”

  “That is not our purpose,” said Mahl.

  Raiva shimmered with sudden light, her sorrow so strong Eda could almost taste it. “And yet it is the only purpose remaining to us.”

  Eda shook herself as if from a daze and walked farther into the temple, meaning to catch Raiva’s sleeve, to demand more answers. But in the darkness, where the starlight did not touch, loomed the Shadow she had followed here.

  He turned toward her, becoming more solid than she had ever seen him. Dark wings grew from his shoulders, folded now against his back. There was a white sword at his side and a fiery crown glimmering on his head that burned but did not consume him.

  An icy fear curled round her heart, tangling with her rage. “You haven’t spoken to me since I was a child. I called for you. I screamed for you. I bled for you, and you didn’t answer. Why didn’t you answer?”

  “Because you didn’t need me, then.” His voice grated in her ears, like stone scraping stone. “And because I was bound to another.” The shadow-god slipped through the wall and out onto the hill.

  Eda followed, stone parting around her like so much mist. “Do you mean Ileem?”

  He stood silhouetted against the stars, the wind ruffling through his wings, his crown blazing brighter. “You still care for your enemy, little Empress?”

  “You are my enemy.”

  “You think he would have been different were he not bound to me? He would not have. He would have put a knife in your heart the instant he saw you. All his lies were mine.”

  She hardened before him. “Have you abandoned him, now that you don’t need him anymore?”