“Certainly I am not dead. And you are not dead, either, I see.”
Nora laughed shortly. “Not yet. Some people have certainly been working on it.”
“Oh, but you did die,” Hirizjahkinis said. “Although it was a short death. Or I should say that Aruendiel undid it quickly.” She pursed her lips to expel a small puff of amusement. “For all his grumbling about how he would much rather be dead, he is very fond of bringing people back to life.”
“That’s not right.” Nora shook her head. “I think I’d remember dying.” As she spoke the words, she had an unsettling sense of déjà vu.
“It was all so quick, I would have missed it myself, but the Kavareen saw everything.” Hirizjahkinis touched the leopard pelt draped over her shoulders.
“The Kavareen!” Nora had not noticed the leopard skin before, but there it was, just the way Hirizjahkinis had always worn it. The empty claws dangled like the ends of a tatty scarf. The golden-eyed head resting on Hirizjahkinis’s chest wore an expression of dull menace. “You made it go back to being a—a shawl!”
“It is not a shawl,” Hirizjahkinis said. “It is the Kavareen. We have made peace, he and I.” She stroked the skin again. “He does not regret it, exactly, doing what he did, but we have resolved our differences.”
“But he ate you,” Nora said.
“He won’t do it again!” Hirizjahkinis laughed. Then she looked more serious. “We understand each other better now. He does not like to be alone, he does not like having to decide everything for himself, he does not understand the purpose of human beings. He needs a master who protects him and does not let him do foolish things.”
“Like eating people,” Nora said. “How did you get out? What happened in there?”
“What was it like to be dead?” Hirizjahkinis asked. “Aruendiel would never tell me.”
Nora was unsure how to answer. This conversation felt a little like hearing from someone else about the wretched things you’d done when you were drunk the night before. Except she hadn’t been either drunk or dead. She shook her head. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Hirizjahkinis’s smile was skeptical. “Well, the next time you die and someone takes the trouble to bring you back to life, you must remember better. But for now—” She looked past Nora, across the pool. “We must find a way out of here. I am very tired of these caves. They are damp, which is bad for the lungs, and they are not very friendly, not at all. Look at those bones in the water, ugh!”
Nora looked down. The light from Hirizjahkinis’s necklace glittered on the surface of the pool. Underneath was a chalky tangle of pale, oblong shapes—curved, straight. Now she saw what they were. The shadowed, vacant eyeholes of a human skull stared up at Nora. With an effort she kept herself to one small shriek. This talk of dying had affected her nerves.
“I guess I’m not the first person she’s sent here.” Nora looked up and was not much surprised to see that the cave wall above the pool was unbroken stone.
“It is a good trap. Who is she?”
“Olenan. She’s a magician who claims to be a goddess, but she’s not. I was her, um, priestess for a while—it’s complicated—but I resigned, and she didn’t like that. And things got ugly. I hid in the cave entrance in her temple, and just as Aruendiel was arriving, the rock slammed shut.” She added: “You’re right about this place not being friendly.”
“Well, that is just what you did to me. That is, to the Kavareen and me, when you crammed us into the mountain.”
Nora grimaced. “Oh. I’m sorry. It seemed like a good place to put the Kavareen. Is that how you got into the cave?”
Hirizjahkinis nodded. “It was very cramped! But I found my way here, and I have found you. Now we will seek for an exit together. Aruendiel will be too occupied for some time to come looking for you. I hope that he is not so busy that we will have to rescue him.”
“You don’t have a spell that would get us out?” In the back of her mind, Nora was flipping through images of Aruendiel wounded, unconscious, dead by Olenan’s magic. There was an alternate vision, Aruendiel and Olenan suddenly reconciled, reunited in each other’s arms. (Why do I torture myself like this? Nora wondered.)
“Do you have a map spell, maybe?” she asked Hirizjahkinis. Aruendiel had an entire shelf of books on map and direction spells, but Nora had only begun to learn the elements of orientation magic. There was a lot of precision involved; you had to have the angles and distances just right. It all came back to control. Nora sighed.
Hirizjahkinis shook her head. “I told you, these caves are not friendly.” For a moment she looked weary, her eyes shadowed, the few lines in her face stark and deep.
“That’s probably because the fake goddess keeps all the magic around here for herself,” Nora said.
“That is very greedy of her. And not clever. Like the little boy in the story, who killed the antelope and tried to eat it all himself.” Turning her back on the pool, Hirizjahkinis moved toward the opposite wall of the cave and indicated a cleft in the rock about five feet high. “This is where I came in. And here, there is another.”
Her light skittered over the cave walls, glinting on the wet stone; Nora glimpsed surrounding stalagmites like robed old men. Behind a column of fused rock was a long, crooked gash in the wall, taller than Nora, full of darkness.
Nora felt a chill emanating from the opening. “There’s a draft.”
“I have been frozen to my bones over and over again, going through these drafty caves,” Hirizjahkinis said, pulling the Kavareen’s hide tighter around her shoulders. But she moved closer to the gap. By the light of her necklace, Nora saw that the new passageway widened farther in.
“Do we try this one, or go back the way you came?” Nora asked.
Hirizjahkinis pursed her lips. “The way I came is not so easy. There are holes that are very deep—and odd. Well, let us see where this one goes.” With a silky motion, she climbed through the opening. Nora followed.
The new chamber was shaped like an irregular gallery that angled away to the left. Limestone had flowed down the walls and dripped from the ceiling like candle wax, like caramel, like cream. Nora could not resist touching the rock to see if it felt as malleable as it looked; her finger slid on the moist, glossy stone. Hirizjahkinis only made a soft grumbling noise and moved forward. They began to pick their way through a lush hanging forest of stalactites.
“What about the little boy who tried to eat the antelope alone?” Nora asked.
“Why, there was no one to help him chase the lions away.” Hirizjahkinis glanced back with a slightly mocking smile. “And they ate him. You know, when I was a witch priestess, long ago, my goddess was truly a goddess.”
“How did you know?” Nora asked.
“Oh, we knew. We prayed to her and sacrificed, and she did what our spells asked her to do. Most of the time. Sometimes she did not listen. That is one reason we knew that she was a goddess.”
Nora laughed rather bitterly, but Hirizjahkinis was unperturbed as she climbed deftly over a tilting, broken log of stone. “No, it is not a joke. The gods have their own ways, they are different from men and women. There is no knowing what they think or feel. What is the name of this false goddess of yours, again?”
“She pretends to be the goddess Sisoaneer, but her name is Olenan. She’s one of Aruendiel’s former mistresses. I seem to keep running into them.”
Hirizjahkinis chortled, her dark eyes gleeful. “Well, they are not rare, his old loves—or at least they were not rare once upon a time, before he decided to hide himself away in his dreadful castle and let his heart dry up like an old apple.”
“Mmm,” Nora said, wondering what to say next. There was quite a bit to explain—including parts, she thought, that Aruendiel would rather Hirizjahkinis not know. But her silence had already lasted too long. “You are very quiet, little one
!” Hirizjahkinis said. “You are keeping something under your tongue.”
“Oh—” Nora began.
“Ah!” The beads in Hirizjahkinis’s braids rattled as she gave Nora a grinning sideways look. “Tell me, has my old friend recovered his senses and taken you into his bed?”
“Oh, well, yes and no—”
It took a long time to tell the entire story, especially with frequent interruptions from Hirizjahkinis, pressing for more details as the tale wended its twisting path from Micher Samle’s apartment to Erchkaii. Under her questioning, Nora found it impossible to be fully discreet.
“You said he was old, that he was dead!” Hirizjahkinis gave her a look of mock horror. “I am sure that he has never thought such things to himself, never.”
“But that makes it worse, for me to say awful things he was already thinking—”
“You were not polite, no,” Hirizjahkinis said. “Aruendiel is not always very polite himself, have you noticed that?”
That reasoning did not entirely assuage her own feelings of guilt, Nora found, but the conversation itself had given her at least a momentary sense of release.
“And you say that this woman taught him magic, as well as bedded him. For seven years! He has never, never named her to me,” Hirizjahkinis said. “Why not, I wonder. I would not have tormented him about her more than some other things.” She gave a deep, satisfied chuckle, like a strutting pigeon’s coo. “But I am pleased that my friend Aruendiel has suddenly become so amorous again. Taking a goddess as his mistress! Even if she is not really a goddess. That is the old Aruendiel, the one who seduced the queen.
“Don’t look so crestfallen, little one,” she added, catching sight of Nora’s face. “It is because of you. You have been good for him; you have roused the sap in the cold wood.”
“Not so that he could sleep with other women,” Nora said gloomily as they rounded a cluster of stalagmites melted together into one immense trunk.
“But he was ready to leave his false goddess, you said—and to leave with you.”
“And then what? It’s confusing. He’s still convinced that I secretly despise him, because Faitoren magic is all about suppressed desires.”
“Whenever Aruendiel talks about the Faitoren, he always feels a little sorry for himself,” Hirizjahkinis said. “He cannot forget how Ilissa tricked him. Well! My advice is to tell the truth.” She was still smiling, but a new kind of gravity had come into her face. “If you despise him, you must tell him that. You have a mouth and a tongue and a brain—you do not need Faitoren magic to say what is in your heart.”
“I don’t despi—” Nora began.
Hirizjahkinis interrupted with an impatient cry, stumbling and splashing. “Dear night, it is wet! These puddles!” she said, righting herself. “I fell into a dozen yesterday. Or the day before. It is hard to know how much time passes down here.”
Three days since Nora had buried the Kavareen inside the mountain—and how many weeks or months since the Kavareen had swallowed Hirizjahkinis in the first place? “You must be starving,” Nora said.
“I am famished,” Hirizjahkinis said with a flash of her white smile, an unsettling intensity in her tone. “But I am still strong.”
Nora herself was beginning to feel empty, not just cold. “If we could use magic here, could we turn a rock into food?”
“I have done that, once or twice in the desert. And afterward!” Hirizjahkinis grimaced. “Transformations do not last forever—most of them. Here is more water to step in, take care. This one is deeper. At least we will not die of thirst.”
“No.” The moist stone around them glistened diamond-like in the light of Hirizjahkinis’s necklace. The wet skirt of Nora’s maran clung clammily to her legs. She was regretting that they had been so quick to choose the passageway with the chilly draft. “I wish I could dry off a little,” she said.
“What, are your clothes still wet?” Hirizjahkinis laid a hand on Nora’s shoulder, then pulled it back quickly. “They are soaking! Did Aruendiel not even teach you a simple spell for driving water out of your clothes?”
“He did, but Olenan controls all the mag—”
“Water likes to change its mind! If you are kind to it, it will not be so loyal to Olenan. She is not here; it is only us. Go on, tell the water to leave your garments.”
“I’ve tried to do my own magic before, I can’t tell you how many times, since I got here,” Nora said, but dubiously she began to address the water soaking her clothes, asking for its attention, listening for its silent response. At first, nothing, the water not even acknowledging her presence. But it knew her already, a little. It could not ignore her entirely. She kept calling to the water softly, calmly, and she felt its interest quicken and grow stronger. Do you know me? she asked, and the water said yes.
Will you do this for me? she asked.
Water dripped madly from the folds of Nora’s clothing; rivulets streamed down her legs. The wool fabric began to feel lighter on her body. After a moment, she found that she was standing in a small puddle, and her maran was still grimy and creased but was now completely dry.
“Better?” asked Hirizjahkinis.
Nora laughed, surprised by a new sense of well-being. “Oh, yes.”
“You were freezing all that time, and you did not even think of trying a water spell! Aruendiel would be beside himself.”
“It’s not just the dry clothes.” Nora put her hand to her head. The heaviness, the sense of constriction, had dissolved. She had become so used to having a headache that she had stopped noticing it, until it was gone.
She felt more present, more alert, and even the stale darkness that surrounded them seemed fresh, nuanced, almost dazzling in a way that she would not have suspected a minute ago. It was like having your ears finally unblock after a bad cold and rediscovering the ordinary musicality of the world.
“Ah, you have found the magic again,” Hirizjahkinis said. “Isn’t that better than asking your goddess to give you some of hers? Although, I warn you, you will not throw the Kavareen into a mountain with magic from that little trickle of water.”
“I don’t care,” Nora said. “And she didn’t give me her magic as a gift. There was a price. Which I was stupid enough to pay.”
Hirizjahkinis’s smile carved deep lines in her face. “I do not think you were stupid,” she said. “When someone offers you such great power, it is not foolish to take it. Sometimes you do not have a choice.”
“I gave up too much for it, though,” Nora said. In her mind, she sought out the water again and was reassured to find it still listening to her. And it was not just the water that had run out of her dress; now she could sense the droplets clinging to the walls of the cave, the slow dribble from a crack behind them, a shallow pool hidden in the shadows.
“I suppose I will miss all that power,” she said slowly. “But real magic isn’t just about power. It’s about knowing the world around you.”
“Yes, but that is not why most people become magicians,” Hirizjahkinis said. In a slightly different tone, she asked, “Do you know the water light spell? No? It would be useful now. Water has a good memory, for all that it is so changeable, and even in a dark, nasty cave like this one, water remembers the sunlight. If you ask politely—very politely—it will show you what it remembers.”
What the water remembered, Nora decided after working the spell, was more like moonlight than sunlight, a fitful, silvery sheen on the cave walls and floor that was brightest when you caught it out of the corner of your eye instead of looking directly at it. In the new light, Hirizjahkinis looked like a hollow-eyed ghost of herself, and Nora guessed that she looked the same. But now they could see more precisely the shape and dimensions of the passage that they had been following.
Hirizjahkinis clicked her tongue in annoyance. “It goes down and down! That is not the right way.”
“It is a trick of the stone,” Hirizjahkinis said. “And if anyone went to the trouble of carving a staircase here in the belly of the world, it is because they wished to go up, not to go down.” She did not laugh when Nora did.
“I think it’s artificial. Someone has been here before sometime,” Nora said. She felt a flutter of expectation. “It might be a way out. Just a little further, all right?”
“You are as stubborn as Aruendiel, little one,” Hirizjahkinis said. “And no, that is not a compliment.”
They began to descend. Here and there, Nora thought she saw chisel marks, but when she pointed them out, Hirizjahkinis was uncharacteristically silent. Once she said, “This is a cold place.” The cave narrowed as they went along; it curved to the left, then back to the right. They passed a ledge with a large, flattish animal skull posed on a pile of bones.
“Ribs and vertebrae,” Hirizjahkinis said coolly. “I do not see any leg bones.” Nora reached out to touch the skull, but Hirizjahkinis’s hand closed around her wrist. “Let the dead rest.”
“Are these bones here because a big snake died here, or are they here because a big snake lived here?” Nora asked. There was a subtle but important difference between the two possibilities; she hoped that the answer was no longer relevant.
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 35