How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  “You turn against me, after all that I’ve given you? Foolishness. I am the goddess Sisoaneer, and I will have my sacrifice.” For a moment she looked almost sad, then she squared her shoulders. “Give me that.” Her hand shot toward the ax.

  Instinctively, Nora yanked it free of her clutching fingers. Olenan made another grab, but Nora brought it down on her elbow, the nearest part of her, and it must have hit the funny bone, because Olenan’s face twisted, and she yelped.

  Someone grabbed Nora’s other arm, not in a friendly way, and Nora swung the ax again. It hit something that was partly soft and partly rigid. Nora jerked around just in time to see Oasme drop to his knees, hand to his face, blood streaming from between his fingers.

  She had to get out of here, find Aruendiel. But there were a hundred worshippers between her and the temple door. Some were shouting for the goddess, pushing forward. The closest pilgrim was familiar, a balding, thickset man whom she’d cured of a skin disease. For a moment he hesitated, and she could read confusion in his eyes; then he snatched for the ax. She felt some reluctance to strike a patient. When he made another grab, Nora feinted, then shoved him away.

  She spun, but her shoulder hit something unyielding. A Ghaki breastplate. A bearded face looked down at her. Black armor on all sides. It clattered like machinery as the soldiers crowded around her.

  Nora raised the stone ax again, aiming at the man right in front of her. With insolent ease he caught the handle and wrenched the weapon from her hands.

  She dived under his lifted arm, twisting between him and the next soldier. Someone tried to grab her, but she was too quick, too desperate. Armor makes you clumsy, she remembered Aruendiel saying. Dodging, she nearly slammed into the prisoners, still in their chains, but the pirate winked at her as she slipped around them. Behind her she heard a curse, a metallic crash and thud. More cursing.

  Ahead, the roiling crowd of pilgrims. She moved swiftly along its edges, looking for a way through.

  Then, Olenan again. Nora almost bowled her over. Olenan laid a hand on Nora’s arm with an air of casual gentleness, as though she were about to invite Nora to have a cup of coffee, but her grip was steely. She steered Nora into an alcove between two columns.

  “I heard you tonight,” she said. “I know you were planning to leave with him.” Nora stared back at her, trying to give nothing away. “I should never have expected anything better from him,” Olenan said. “You were different, though.” Over Nora’s shoulder, she spoke sharply to someone: “No, no, leave us alone.”

  Nora tried to pull her arm away. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I shouldn’t blame you. I should not. You’re so young. Naive. You don’t know what he’s really like. I should have known better, this time.” She shook her head. “What I mean is, I’m not angry at you for wanting to leave with him—I’m really not. He could fool anyone. He almost fooled me.” Olenan sounded increasingly distraught.

  Nora couldn’t resist. “How did he fool you?”

  “He sought me out, and then he lied to me. Every kiss was a lie, every embrace, every caress.”

  Nora thought: Well, I don’t need that much detail. “If he’s that bad, you should just forget about him,” she said. The standard line, but it was still good advice.

  “It was all false. He was trying to distract me. Because of you, I could tell. As though I would want to hurt you!” Olenan’s mouth drew tight in a way that made her suddenly look querulous and old. “Don’t think I didn’t know what he was doing! You can’t trust him at all.”

  “It’s hard to know whom to trust, sometimes,” Nora said, not very sympathetically. “I’ve had that problem quite a bit recently.”

  “Is that why you hit me just now?” Olenan touched her elbow. “You really thought I would hurt you?”

  Nora gave a single nod. “Yes.” Behind her she could hear the Ghaki commander roaring at the crowd to get back, to be quiet.

  “I’m very sorry, this is not what I wanted.” Olenan’s slender brows tilted, weighted down with contrition. “I was angry, and then you said what you said, in front of all these people. I can’t let that go. You must see that. It’s painful for people to lose their faith.”

  “I think it’s worse for them to be lied to, Olenan,” Nora said, pulling away. Unexpectedly, the other woman released her.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said. “I really don’t. But blasphemy must be punished. You understand that, don’t you?” She brought her hands together in a pinching motion that Nora recognized, then yanked her hands apart so hard that it seemed that the invisible thread would break.

  Nora tensed. The spell hadn’t killed the Kavareen, she reminded herself.

  But still she screamed, every nerve popping, sputtering, burning, as a white storm of pain flashed through her body. There was no refuge. Even the fine threads of her maran were razor blades on her skin.

  Nora opened her eyes to discover that she was lying curled on the floor, staring at her clenched hands, fingers bent like claws. Her body felt as though it were made of sand: one touch, and it would crumble. Carefully she breathed in and out, then straightened her fingers, marveling at the absence of pain.

  Probably the whole thing had taken less than a minute. Much longer and that kind of pain could kill you. Slowly she got to her feet.

  Olenan was still there, smiling. From the look on her face, she was about to say something. And then, with what felt like the faintest of breezes, a sigh rippling through the air, darkness flowed through the temple.

  Olenan, two feet away, was suddenly invisible. From somewhere nearby, Uliverat wailed that the sacred fire had gone out. The sooty, pungent smell of extinguished candles filled Nora’s nose. She took some experimental steps in a direction opposite to where she calculated Olenan lurked. All over the temple, people were shouting in a cacophony of languages, in a frantic way that meant that no one was listening to anyone else. Someone large and soft barged into Nora, almost knocked her down, then panted away into the obscurity. Staggering, Nora bumped into another person, who smelled strongly of onions; this time she went down.

  When she got up again, she had lost her bearings completely. Her outstretched hand touched curved stone. She clung to the column for a moment, as though it might hide her.

  “Nora!” It was Olenan, not far away. Nora held her breath. “Are you all right?”

  Nora almost replied automatically, Olenan sounded so concerned, but instead she slipped around the pillar as quietly as she could, moving away from the sound of Olenan’s voice. Striking out into the darkness, within a few paces she found herself against another column. She tried to work out where in the temple she was. Under the tumult of raised voices and hurrying steps, she could hear the steady roar of the waterfall outside, but it didn’t sound particularly close.

  “It doesn’t last long, that pain spell, so you must be feeling better.” Olenan’s voice was coming nearer. Nora backed away. “That’s good. I don’t want to torture you. I only want you to understand that you can’t mock the gods without paying a price.”

  I wasn’t mocking you when I said you’re not a goddess, Nora wanted to say, I was just stating facts. She bumped into another column and veered left. Was the temple door this way?

  “And you don’t have to leave Erchkaii, you know. I mean that. You’re better off here with me than with him. I’ll think of a suitable penance for you—”

  Nora stepped on a small, round thing that broke with an audible crunch. Silently she cursed. One of the small ceramic offerings to the goddess. They were always getting scattered all over the temple.

  Olenan’s voice brightened. “There you are! Will you speak to me, Nora? You can’t keep hiding in the dark.”

  It was strange, Nora thought suddenly, that the temple was still pitch-black, that no one had relit the candles, that Olenan had not conjured a light. With a flutter
of hope, she wondered if this was Aruendiel’s work, a spell for persistent darkness.

  She touched stone again. Something bulky, blocking her path. Long smooth ridges under her fingertips, like the folds of a dress. The big statue of the goddess at the back of the temple. And Olenan was between her and the exit.

  Olenan was still speaking. “—one of the gods. Yes, I am. How could you doubt it? Those who have no other help, they pray to me. I hear their prayers, I answer them. You know better than anyone how great my power is, because I shared it with you. And I will never die, not ever again.

  “I must have my sacrifice,” she added reasonably. “But it doesn’t have to be you. It could be anyone, except for those prisoners that you pardoned in my name. We can hardly kill them now, it would look strange—and you are right, justice is nothing without mercy. You understood that, you understood everything. Almost everything. My beloved priestess!” She was wistful now. “You were better than any of the others, all of them. It wasn’t just the magic. How good it has been to talk to you.

  “Will you say something? You are still hiding.” A note of irritability now crept into her voice. “I can always do the pain spell again, and then you won’t be able to be silent.”

  Nora groped her way around the statue. It seemed larger in the dark. She trod hesitantly, trying to avoid crushing another offering. Yes, here was the crack in the rock wall. Still open. She wedged herself through the gap. It was a hiding place of sorts; she could retreat a short way into the caves if she had to.

  “You could still be my priestess, Nora. Yaioni could be my sacrifice. Would that please you? She still prays for your death, you know. She could die in your place.”

  Crouching in the cave entrance, Nora felt perversely outraged. The enmity between Yaioni and herself was a private matter; Olenan had no right to exploit it that way. “No! Absolutely not!”

  Olenan laughed, pleased that Nora had finally spoken. “Or it could be Aruendiel,” she said slyly. “That would be appropriate.”

  “He’s gone by now,” Nora said quickly. “He said he would leave Erchkaii if I didn’t get back from the temple in a few minutes. You won’t find him.”

  “Liar,” Olenan said. “He’s not fifty paces behind me, trying to break through the wall of power I made.” She laughed again. “You stay there while I deal with him.”

  Nora was suddenly aware of how quiet the temple seemed. The noise of the crowd had completely died away. “Aruendiel?” she called through cupped hands. “Aruendiel?”

  She thought she heard him answer. The syllables of her name, then other words that she couldn’t make out.

  She started forward, but the echo of his voice was already gone. By a sort of instinct she halted, just before she would have cracked her forehead.

  Groping for the opening that she had passed through just a minute before, her panicked hands found nothing but rock.

  Chapter 26

  Nora locked her arms around her knees and leaned back tiredly against the chilly, obstinate stone. Her hands stung and were slightly sticky from small abrasions she could not see. Her throat felt like sandpaper. She was sick of the sound of her own voice battering her ears, with no reply. The mustiness of the cave air filled her nostrils, but by now she was hardly aware of it.

  She’d been trapped here half an hour? An hour? Time seemed more elastic in this absolute blackness. She could discern more noises underground than one might expect: the distant drip, drip, drip of water; an occasional rustle. Once, a musical echo from a falling stone. But she could hear nothing from outside, where Aruendiel was presumably engaged in some kind of negotiation or argument or all-out combat with Olenan.

  On the face of it, the stillness meant nothing. Stone could muffle sound. Magic could work silently.

  The longer she had to wait here in the dark, though, the more likely that Olenan had prevailed.

  Nora’s head ached. She should have left Erchkaii with Aruendiel right away, as he’d wanted. Skipped that absurd, barbaric ritual. She’d wanted to play the merciful High Priestess one more time. The wrong choice, yet again. It didn’t bode well, she thought, that she and Aruendiel seemed to be perpetually out of phase, blundering past each other. Make haste, he’d said. Make haste. He knew, he had lived long enough to understand that there was never enough time, never, to do all the things that you thought were important and also the things that really were. She could see that now, too late.

  Nora stood up, groping the walls to orient herself. Yes, the passage stretched this way. She moved forward with small steps, counting each one, staying close to the right wall to avoid the entrance to the lower caves. She’d come this way in the dark so many times to see Sisoaneer—Olenan—that doing it again now was vaguely reassuring.

  Sixty-nine steps, seventy. She was definitely walking uphill now, the passage trending clockwise. Did the air seem slightly fresher? Olenan might have closed the exit to the mountainside already, just as she’d sealed the entrance to the temple. Or she might have forgotten. She had a lot of distractions. Ninety-nine, one hundred. Nora quickened her pace.

  One hundred nineteen. Something was wrong. She was no longer climbing. The passageway leveled off, then began to descend. She went a few more steps to be sure, then backed up in confusion, trying to imagine where she had taken a wrong turn.

  Her shoulders slammed against something hard, uneven, damp. With a gasp, she reached back and felt stone, and then more stone everywhere her hand touched.

  She could not go back. The tunnel behind her was gone.

  She ran her sore hands all over the rock again, in case she had become disoriented in the darkness. One tiny crack exhaled a stream of cool air, as if to mock her.

  “So that’s how it is,” Nora said to Olenan, as if she could hear. Maybe she could. Nora stood there for a while, considering. Then she started down the passage ahead.

  This downhill part was steeper. She kept having to brace herself against the walls to find her footing. It made her conscious of how horribly narrow the tunnel was. She was still counting steps, as though it mattered. Two hundred five, two hundred six. The only sound, except for the numbers she whispered under her breath, was the scratch of her sandals against the stone.

  From time to time, she reached an exploratory hand backward. Each time she found rock, as though a door had swung shut after she passed. She never had to reach back very far.

  Her toe throbbed; she’d stubbed it somewhere. The numbers mounted. Three hundred eighty steps. Five hundred fifty. Six hundred fifty-seven.

  “Well, Ramona, I’ve had better days than this one,” she said aloud. “It is not working out the way I’d hoped.”

  The stone underfoot felt greasy and slick, except when it was so uneven that she stumbled. Going down is always harder than going up, she thought. She came to sections so steep that she had to sit down and lower herself from perch to perch. The passageway was so tight now that her elbows and shoulders kept scraping the rock. The ceiling was a few inches above her head.

  Her cramped muscles trembled, but there was also a certain calm, Nora found, that came with knowing that you were moving in the only direction you could. It seemed important to stay in motion. If she stopped, she might end up swallowed by the wall of rock that followed her implacably, and as long as she kept sliding, bumping, clambering, groping her way along, she did not have time to fully appreciate how terrified she was.

  Suddenly she stepped into empty space.

  Nora flailed, one foot in the air, then lost her balance entirely and sledded downward in a shower of loose pebbles. She opened her mouth to curse just as she plunged deep, deep into black chilly water.

  For a moment the shock felt as though it would crush the breath out of her, and then she thrashed her way to air. In a blur of panic, she dog-paddled until her knee brushed something hard, an underwater ledge, and the water grew shallow enough to let her c
rawl. The bottom of the pool was bumpy with small rocks or possibly bits of wood that rolled and scattered as she moved.

  Shaking, Nora tried to sort out whether any of the various pains she felt in her legs, back, and arms were serious injuries. Everything seemed to be functional, if cranky. She exhaled and listened. Nearby, water lapped against rock. Cautiously she followed the sound through the darkness until her fingertips found what seemed to be the edge of the pool.

  Behind her, a gentle splash. One final pebble falling? Maybe. And then, from another direction, a different noise. A faint crunch, a rustle. Something moving, unseen.

  Nora tensed, waiting for another sound. Even so, she started when someone spoke not far away.

  “You would have done better to come down more slowly, little one.” A woman’s voice, accented, with a quick, musical rhythm. “But I am glad to see you.”

  “Who’s there?” Nora called sharply.

  “Someone you are not expecting, I think.”

  Nora sat as still as she could, hushing her own breath to listen. She wanted to be absolutely sure. “Tell me who you are!”

  Footsteps, light and assured. “You would be more comfortable out of that water.” A gleam of light appeared in the blackness. Nora caught a flash of gold, a white robe. A bright, steady gaze in a dark face.

  “Hirizjahkinis!” Nora shot to her feet. “It’s you?”

  The flickering light, shining from the twisted strands of the woman’s necklace, showed her features more clearly. Hirizjahkinis was smiling, although the lines around her mouth held a certain fierceness. “You are surprised? You thought I would stay inside the Kavareen forever? Let me tell you, it was very dark and very dull in there. I was glad to make my exit. Here, give me your hands,” she said. “Easier to fall down the well than to climb out again, as we say in my country.”

  Hirizjahkinis’s grip was surprisingly strong. Nora scrambled out of the pool. “We thought you were dead, Hirizjahkinis!” she exclaimed. “Although Nansis Abora said you might not be.” She was ready to embrace Hirizjahkinis, then checked herself, remembering her wet clothes—not only wet but filthy, a downward glance told her. She raised a hand for the ceremonial palm-press that was Hirizjahkinis’s usual greeting, but Hirizjahkinis gave her an amused look, then a quick, powerful hug. When she released Nora, the pleated linen of her long dress was still a pristine white. She had always been fastidious, Nora thought.