by Shannon Page
He stared at her like a cornered mouse.
“Revenge against whom?” Arian asked him gently.
“The Census Taker.” His whole body sagged. Broken, once again. “And his family, my lady.” He looked up at the Factora, seeming more sad than frightened now. “Yes. You can be certain, I have followed Escotte Alkattha’s career quite carefully. I know better than most what his job was, and how he betrayed his mandate at every turn. I despised him. And hatred sharpens focus. But the god … finally took that hatred from me. Brutally and effectively, my lady. I did not choose Sian Kattë that night because of her connection to House Alkattha. The god did.” He turned back to Sian. “Nor was anything I did in service of the god meant to bring down the Alkattha family. Not by me, at least. I wished only to serve the vision shown me. To see Alizar awakened. And healed — your family included.”
“As it has been,” Sian told him. “Do you still think I cannot see that?”
“I grieve my husband’s death, young man,” said Arian. “But neither have you or your god done anything to bring down House Alkattha. Instead, it has been cleansed. Escotte is disgraced and gone, and whatever role you played in … transforming Sian led to the healing of my son. He’s the future of House Alkatthas. My future. Where is there revenge in this? I see only proof, not negation, of all you’ve been, and done, in service of the god who healed me as well one night, through Sian’s hands.” She gazed at him, and shook her head. “There is only one thing I am still unsure of. Do you believe your own story, young man? … Can you?” She smiled at him, almost maternally. “I must know your answer, before I’ll dare ask you to consider such a demanding new calling.”
He gazed back at her, and drew a long, shuddering breath. “May I sit down?”
“Of course.” Arian waved him toward the canvas chair beside her own.
He came to lower himself into it, rubbing at his face, and staring at something only he could see. “How much do you wish to know, my lady?”
“Everything,” she said. “As much as you trust me to hear.”
He nodded. “Very well, then. My name was … is Kalesh Salmian.” He gave Sian a sad and weary smile. “My father once served Escotte Alkattha, very well, and was ruined by him for it …”
Sian awoke to moonlight, streaming through the open shutters and the gauzy curtains around her bed, across the smooth back of her lover, not gone back to his ship. Never to go back there now.
Arouf now lived in Monde & Kattë’s townhouse on Viel; he’d surrendered Little Loom Eyot, and this home, with no real struggle. He’d misplayed his cards quite badly. Even he could see that now. Sian had not turned out to be the social disgrace or the threat to their business he had once imagined. But what was done, was done. They had agreed to continue their business partnership. That was what he really cared about, and, in all fairness, what he had worked at hard enough for all these years to have some right to still. Sian would need a business partner anyway, more badly than before, in fact, with so many new distractions to be managing. With his new shipping fleet to run, Reikos had no more need of, or interest in, Monde & Kattë than Arouf did of or in their onetime marriage. It would be good for him, Sian suspected, to be forced out of his kitchen-puttering and back into the world. To do some real business once again. It might even be empowering.
So Arouf was gone, and Little Loom Eyot belonged to herself and Reikos now — who had told her just that evening of his grand plans for their garden. The world was new.
As they’d sat together quietly, after the delicious dinner that Bela had cooked for them, she had told Konstantin about what Pino had tried to do for him the night he’d died, and been dismayed when Reikos had responded by telling Sian about the true extent of Pino’s own affection for her. These men and their strange courtesies to one another. Such news had only further salted her grief, but, deep down, she understood. It could be hard to carry such secrets alone. Justice to the dead. Acknowledgement, however belated. Yes. She understood.
She lay now, thinking, listening to the soft music of night sounds outside the house, and to Reikos’s quiet snoring at her side. It had been a long time since she had regularly shared a bed with a man. She watched the moonlight shift across their covers onto the floor, and finally rose, as stealthily as possible, to don her silk nightgown and go find a glass of something warm to help her back to sleep.
In the kitchen, moonlight poured as thick as cream through all the windows, and Sian went to stare out at the gilded sea. It felt as if the light were calling her. A thirst. A vision not quite clear enough to name. She found herself outside a moment later, in pursuit of … something.
Twenty minutes later, she sat on the newly planted lawn atop her island’s highest hill, beside Pino’s burial shrine. To the west, Little Loom Eyot stretched out before her, moon-burnished in the fragrant, luminescent darkness. To the east, the hilltop plunged severely down into the quicksilver sea, whispering and sighing up at her. A call. A thirst. A vision not quite clear enough to name … much less to satisfy …
“Are you at peace?” she whispered over her shoulder to Pino. “Have you finally caught up with the light you chased?”
She listened to the crickets and cicadas humming their night-songs in the forest far below her. To the wind. The distant water. The air smelled of dew, and soil, of night-blooming flowers and moist tree bark. Was Pino’s answer somewhere in this quiet chorus?
She recalled his sunlit smile, his eager attention rowing or sailing her to and from the central island cluster. How had she been so blind? But what could she have said to him, even if she hadn’t been? Had he sacrificed himself that night to prove his love somehow, or in despair of its futility? He’s really a very good man, Domina, and loves you even more than you may guess … How much had that cost him?
“That priest you led me to is going to be the country’s Census Taker now. The Factora you saved has made that possible. Do you know, wherever you are now, how much you changed the world?” The grief welled up again inside her. All at once, from wherever it had been hiding since she’d first heard the news of Pino’s death. “I hope you know,” she said as she began to weep. “You should be here to see it, Pino.” She lay back on the grass and surrendered to the desolation she felt. “If I could change just one thing,” she pled. “If I could choose one power. For just one moment …” She broke down completely then, her grief, her helplessness, too great for words. He had loved her. This sweet, pure, darling boy. And all she’d had to give him in return — all she had to give him now — was death.
Now, my lady! NOW!
The memory of his voice came out of nowhere, like a shout within her mind. Telling her to leave the boat that night.
Yes! Leave the boat! His voice again — almost audibly, so forceful was the thought.
She sat up, and looked back at the crypt, a darkened silhouette against the moonlight. There was a new sound on the night air. A grumbling. Almost too low to hear, though it began to grow. For a startled instant, Sian thought it was coming from inside of Pino’s shrine, then realized it came from everywhere at once, just as the stones of Pino’s shrine began to grate against each other, and the ground began to sway beneath her.
“Oh!” She tried to scramble to her feet, but could not keep her balance, as if the very island had become a boat at sea. “OH! OH NO!” she gasped more loudly, understanding that it was an earthquake only as the ground began to buck and fracture all around her.
SWIM, MY LADY! WEST!
East of her, a great slab of hilltop vanished suddenly, plunging down into the sea with hardly any sound above the quake’s own mighty rumble. As more ground split open and the collapse surged toward her, Sian scrambled on her hands and knees in abject terror past Pino’s tomb, half running, half crawling toward the moonlight, while more hilltop fell away behind her. Only once did she glance back to find great chunks of ground thrusting up into the air now as others continued tumbling from the hill. She had no thoughts left beyond a deafening,
wordless reflex to flee. She flailed across the gelid lawn, the fractured, grinding walks, until there was hardly any hilltop left in front of her to flee toward.
And all the motion ceased. As suddenly as it had begun.
For a moment, she just lay upon her patch of lawn, breathing hard, still gripping the ground itself with hands and feet, waiting for her mind to clear, for thought to reassert itself. For some further reassurance that the quake was truly over.
Finally, she looked behind her. Everything there was gone — including Pino’s shrine and crypt. Hardly any of the hilltop remained except the patch she clung to. But that was not what made her turn and sit to gape in disbelieving terror.
Looming high above her, dark against the night, was a giant, even taller than her island — made of earth and rock, it seemed. It stood, motionless and silent, gazing down at her.
I am dreaming, she thought. I am in my bed still. Lying beside Reikos. She willed herself awake, but nothing happened. I am dreaming. Or I’m dead?
“Sian Kattë,” the monster rumbled softly, its voice composed not just of the earthquake’s rumble, but of the sea, the wind, the nocturnal insects even, all woven into those two words. The monster nodded at her, gravely. “Not badly done.”
Despite the voice’s massive scale, its impossible composition, its terrifying source, Sian thought she heard something wry in this second utterance, and a little of her terror slid away. “Who are you?” she hardly more than breathed. “What are you?”
“You know,” it rumbled. “Who else can I be?”
“But … he said you’d gone,” she whispered in a daze. “They cut your body up. On Cutter’s.”
“A god is not His body.” He turned, ponderously, to gaze across the moonlit ocean, east of Alizar. “You were told this. Fare well.” One of his massive earthen legs pulled forward, and Sian heard the water’s distant roar as his first step dragged through the roiled surf into which half of her hill had fallen.
Sian realized that he was leaving. Just like that, without any further explanation. “Wait!” she called. “Why have you done this to my island? What was all this for?” When he just continued walking, out into the ocean, she stood up at last, becoming angry, against all sense. “Look at what you’ve done to Pino’s grave!” she shouted. “It’s completely gone now! Tumbled into the sea! Have you no respect for anything? He was devoted to you!”
The monstrous figure swayed to a halt, and slowly turned his head to look back at her across one enormous shoulder. “To make the world new, even bodies may be taken up again, if necessary. Was this not what you requested?” His gaze swung away once more, and he resumed his slow course out to sea.
It was then that Sian’s eyes caught some small movement on the giant’s other shoulder. Something tiny sat there in the darkness. Something she’d not seen when the god’s great new body had still loomed above her. It looked for all the world like a person. Looking back at her, perhaps. The giant was already so far off that it was difficult to be certain, until the little figure raised an arm. Just once. As if to wave goodbye.
Sian’s mouth fell open as she stared after them in silence, watching the god walk ever farther out to sea, until the moon was covered by a bank of fog rising in the west behind her, and she lost sight of them completely.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
SHANNON PAGE was born on Halloween night and grew up on a commune in northern California’s backwoods, where a childhood without television gave her a great love of the written word. Her work has appeared in numerous venues including Clarkesworld, Interzone, Tor.com, and the award-winning anthology Grants Pass. Her first novel, Eel River, was published by Morrigan Books in 2013; in 2015 Per Aspera Press will release The Queen and The Tower, the first book in The Nightcraft Quartet. Shannon is a longtime yoga practitioner and an avid gardener, and lives with her husband, Mark Ferrari, in Portland, Oregon. Visit her at http://www.shannonpage.net.
JAY LAKE was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, an award-winning editor, a popular raconteur and toastmaster, and an excellent teacher at many writers’ workshops. Jay won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2004, and was nominated multiple times for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. His other recent books include Kalimpura — the final novel in his Green cycle — and Last Plane to Heaven from Tor, and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime Books. Following his diagnosis of colon cancer in 2008, Jay became known outside the sf genre for his powerful and brutally honest blogging about the progression of his disease. Jay Lake died on June 1, 2014.