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

by Emily Croy Barker

“It is a very good question,” Hirizjahkinis said. “A snake that big would need to eat a lot. There are serpents in my country, not so large, that can eat a whole cow.”

  “There is nothing to eat in these caves,” Nora said, starting forward.

  “There is you,” Hirizjahkinis said. “And me.”

  They went on. Another bend to the left. Nora was trying to remember what Olenan had said about the caves. She’d claimed to have been born there. A lie, obviously. And she’d quoted a hymn, one that Nora had sung several times since. Where the last true darkness dwells. That was certainly true. No shortage of darkness here.

  They came around another curve, and abruptly the stairs ended. The passageway continued for a few yards and there, Nora saw, was unmistakable proof of human agency, an archway framed with twisting pillars, an inscription circling the top. She went up to read it, but the letters were from an unknown alphabet.

  “Can you read this?” She looked back. Hirizjahkinis had paused some distance behind her.

  “Something here is very—old,” Hirizjahkinis said. “And it is not pleased to see me.”

  “What do you mean?” Cautiously Nora looked through the archway. Something about the quality of the darkness and the draft that touched her face told her that on the other side was a much larger cave. Her eye went to a spark in the darkness. “There’s a light,” she said hopefully.

  She was concerned by the expression she read on Hirizjahkinis’s dark face—lips pressed together, eyes fixed stoically, as though she were in pain. It was out of character for Hirizjahkinis, and a strangely intense reaction to the vast vacant silence of the cavern beyond the archway. “Do you think we should leave?” Nora asked.

  “Yes, I do, little one. I cannot go any further, and you should not.”

  Hirizjahkinis’s words, spoken so emphatically, almost drowned out something else that Nora wanted to hear. She waited for a moment, concentrating, breathing as quietly as she could.

  “Listen, do you hear that?” Nora said wonderingly. “Someone’s calling my name.”

  She walked through the archway.

  Chapter 27

  Whispers clung to her ears, too low for her to understand, and then dissipated like smoke. Her footsteps sounded small and light on ground that was more level than any other surface she’d walked on in the cave. She moved steadily toward the light, which was tiny but seemed uncannily bright after all this time in the dark. It wavered, casting a pale yellowish haze into the air.

  A candle flame, not a chink of daylight. Oh, well. She went closer.

  The candle stood at one end of a long, squared-off piece of stone, about waist-high. It was a hollow box, Nora saw as she approached. Its sides were crudely worked into a crowded design: leaves, flowers, a snake’s sleepy curves. She looked inside.

  The candlelight fell on a face, very still, that she did not recognize at first. Then she did. It was like looking into a mirror—although, she thought, your eyes are always open when you see yourself in a mirror, and these eyes were closed.

  The corpse had brown hair, matted, spiky, and wore a purple maran that was stained even darker with blood. Its mouth hung agape; the tongue inside was unmoving. The skin had a dull, sickly cast. There was a blackish, dried smear on one side of the forehead, and something misshapen about the head. The hands were crossed neatly on the chest.

  Nora stepped back. Her own body felt frantic, as though she were about to vomit. “Not possible. That isn’t me. No.”

  Priestess.

  Nora stood still, listening hard. Had she imagined it? The candle flame guttered, and shadows whirled overhead. Let the lamp affix its beam, she thought madly. It took her a moment to place the line of verse. The only emperor—

  I know who you are. Priestess.

  She glanced around, seized with an apprehension that the voice—if it was a voice—was coming from the corpse in the sarcophagus in front of her. But it was hard to say where it came from. It was a low, inhuman vibration that pulsed through the rock around her. She had the sense that she was hearing it with her bones, not her ears, tap-tap along her spine and into her skull.

  I have been waiting for you. You are mine. You see.

  Nora was trying to look everywhere but at the crude, broken figure inside the coffin. It was impossible to look anywhere else.

  Your death belongs to me, child. Have you come to pay your debt?

  Nora’s throat was tight, but she forced out a few words: “I—I don’t owe you anything.” It would be best to leave now, she thought. She could not move. On the cave ceiling, shades of dark and light fluttered and circled in huge, restless, shifting patterns.

  You have taken life, you have given death. You are mine.

  “That’s not right,” Nora said, but it was as though an arid wind blew through her. Everything I have ever done, everything that has ever happened to me, has been leading me to this point, she thought, and there is no way out. She thought of Hirizjahkinis, just a few dozen yards away, of Aruendiel. They seemed infinitely far away.

  A second sarcophagus appeared next to the first.

  “No,” Nora said again, recoiling. Somehow she found the strength to make her frozen legs move. Shakily she took a few steps toward the exit—toward where she thought the exit was. But the archway through which she’d entered was gone.

  Nora found that she was facing the two stone coffins again. Either they had moved or she had, or she was losing her mind. “What do you want from me?” She could hear the hysteria in her voice.

  Look.

  “I don’t want to. I can’t.”

  Look, child, at what you have made. Do you not owe the dead that courtesy?

  Nora swallowed, smoothed her tattered maran with quaking hands. Hesitantly she moved past the sarcophagus that held her corpse—it looked pathetically vulnerable from this angle—and came close enough to the other coffin to see inside.

  As she’d expected, the second sarcophagus held Raclin. Raclin’s body, that is, laid out so carefully that you would not know that his head had been sliced off until you saw the slim white gash just above his collar. Although the corpse filled the coffin, big shoulders touching each side, Raclin seemed oddly diminished, the bulk of his body somehow unconvincing. His mouth was slack and pouting. One eye was open, a cold blue marble, and Nora found herself holding her breath for a moment in case it might start rolling in its socket to meet her gaze.

  It occurred to her that always before she had regarded Raclin with desire—induced by enchantment, and therefore myopic at best—or with fear. She had never simply looked at him. Now she did. The fine, manly nose had begun to seem pinched; the stalwart jaw was loosened; but you could still marvel at the cruel, exquisite lines of his face, even as they began to soften with death. Beauty is dangerous, Nora thought, not for the first time. There is so much it can hide.

  “Why isn’t he in his monster form?” she asked sharply of the shadows above.

  This is what he was when you chose to kill him.

  “I didn’t choose—” She dropped her eyes to the corpse again. “To do what I did.”

  And Raclin’s beauty had so much to hide. Maybe he would have liked to be a dragon all the time. Nora had never asked him about that. Ilissa preferred him to be a man, or a simulacrum of one, and perhaps he was secretly afraid of being a despised, lonely monster. So he had worn his polished mask faithfully, with aplomb and evil brio. Now this shell was all that remained of him, now it would rot away, and whatever it had concealed was gone forever.

  Good riddance, Nora thought. At the same time she felt a deep, secret, impersonal sorrow, as emphatic as a judge bringing down a gavel, that she knew she would never quite forget for the rest of her life.

  “I killed him,” she corrected herself.

  Very gently, without a sound, Raclin’s body began to dwindle. His limbs shifted and crumbled. Witheri
ng, his face collapsed into unrecognizable dust. For a moment Nora caught a glimpse of something intricately formed, the grinning puzzle of a dinosaur skeleton, and then that was gone as well.

  The sarcophagus was empty.

  Involuntarily Nora glanced at the other coffin. Her dead twin still lay there, unchanged.

  Nora raised her head, scanning the darkness. “Who are you?” she whispered. Then: “No, wait, I know who you are.”

  Do you? The voice sounded almost sad. I am she who was born into darkness, but always I remember the light.

  “I sang hymns to—to someone like that. She wasn’t who she said she was.” Nora wet dry lips. “But now I think it was supposed to be you.”

  Yes. They pay tribute to me, above, but they do not understand who I am. In the beginning they called for me because they needed me, and I came.

  Nora considered this. “What did they need from you?”

  They had learned death, and they were afraid. I helped them make death their servant, so that it would come or depart at their bidding. I am their teacher and their companion, I protect them, and I chastise them, and I walk with them in darkness, wherever their path leads them. As I have walked with you, priestess, when you took life and when you sought to save it and when you finally gave up your own life to save another’s. I was there, I was with you.

  “I don’t remember that,” Nora said, very softly.

  You did not know me, but you knew me better than the others. You protected the weak, the guiltless and the guilty, in my name.

  Nora shook her head. Too many riddles. (The guilty—did that mean the condemned prisoners?) “I don’t think I’ve protected anyone. Not really.”

  You found the light in the darkness. The truth among the lies.

  “What truth?” Inwardly she shuddered. “Why me?”

  Priestess, I am hungry.

  Oh, dear, Nora thought.

  My house is defiled with blood and lies. Do they think they can feed me with the death they make? Blood is not enough. It will never be enough.

  “But what you just said about death—”

  I do not wish them to make death for me! I am tired of blood. They blind themselves with the blood they spill. Let them come to me with their eyes seeing and their lips speaking truth and their hearts grieving for the death they have dealt, that I may chasten and cleanse them. Always, always I remember the light. I am hungry for the light.

  Through dry lips, Nora said: “What do you want from me?”

  My house has been stolen, polluted, filled with lies. You will purify my house so that the truth dwells there again. Let my people know me truly.

  What if they are better off not knowing you? Nora thought but did not say.

  Purify my house, priestess! I am hungry for the light. The voice revved to a grating, subterranean roar that for an instant blurred everything in Nora’s sight with strange tremors.

  “I’m not anyone’s priestess,” she said, her teeth chattering only slightly. “Not anymore.”

  You are mine. You died into my service, and I claim your death.

  Nora shook her head. Her body felt tight and brittle, as though it might break at any moment, but she forced herself to survey the dim expanses of the cave to see if she could find the archway again.

  “You know, even the gods can be wrong.”

  Nora flinched with shock, a yelp caught in her throat. A woman—not Hirizjahkinis—stood next to her. She had dark hair, some of it escaping from the knot on her head, and taut, strong-boned features that gave her a fierce look.

  “And frequently the gods are wrong,” the woman continued. “It’s not as simple as she makes it out to be. Not quite.”

  Nora drew back. “Are you—” She swallowed hard. “Are you Sisoaneer?”

  “No!” The woman frowned. “You’ve met me once, although you don’t remember, because it never happened. Just as that never happened.” She pointed to the sarcophagus where Nora’s corpse lay. “Don’t trust everything she says or shows you. You are alive. You must realize that, surely.”

  One more task, priestess. Purify my house. And then you shall rest with me forever.

  “You can leave here anytime you wish,” the woman said.

  “But the door is gone,” Nora said, hearing the hysteria in her own voice. “And that’s—that’s me. She has my body.”

  Her gaze was locked on the coffin. The pale figure inside was so precisely detailed—not lifelike, that was the wrong word, but it had a horrible verisimilitude that made her wonder, against her will, whether the voice in the darkness was right, whether the warm flesh in which she moved now was a dream, a mistake. She had a sudden urge to stroke the cold, quiet hands.

  “Don’t be foolish.” The other woman’s eyes were like flecks of sky, chilly and kind at the same time. “Go! Just go. Now!”

  One more task, priestess. The air grew dimmer, full of twisting shadows.

  “What about you?” Nora asked.

  “Run!” The woman stabbed the air with a long finger, pointing behind Nora.

  Nora stepped backward once, twice, keeping her eyes on the sarcophagus, and then turned and ran on trembling legs that could not even keep to a straight course, but she veered and staggered though growing darkness until suddenly her left side banged into something hard, knocking the breath out of her. She edged around it, touching carved stone; it was one of the columns framing the archway through which she’d entered. She hoped.

  “Hirizjahkinis! Hirizjahkinis!” No answer. Running, Nora tripped on the first, invisible stair step and went sprawling. “Hirizjahkinis?” She ran her hands over the steps as far as she could reach, in case Hirizjahkinis had fainted or collapsed or died where she had been waiting, but touched nothing that might have been warm or even cool skin. “Hiriz-jahkinis?” The name came out as barely a whisper.

  She was suddenly aware of the archway yawning behind her in the darkness. No sound came from the room beyond, no disembodied voices speaking into her brain, nothing from the woman who thought that gods could be wrong, but the silence was not enough to reassure her. Nora went up the stairs, scrambling on her hands and knees because taking the time to stand up would slow her down too much, and also because she had the confused idea that she would be less of a target if she stayed low.

  Then she stopped, straining to hear. It was the ghost of a sound, a faint scrape-scrape, and it seemed to be coming from somewhere far ahead.

  “Hirizjahkinis?” Nora waited until she could not bear the darkness any more. The water-magic spell streaked the walls with a bluish glimmer that was almost spookier than no light at all. She listened again, and this time the silence around her seemed infinite.

  Straightening, she continued up the steps. The way back seemed to take longer than she’d expected, probably because she was climbing, and because she was alone now.

  She kept an eye out for the snake bones, but they never appeared. Perhaps she had passed them in the dark. She called Hirizjahkinis by name every few minutes, more and more out of a sense of obligation than from any hope of a response. She made the water light as bright as she could, feeling some comfort in having the water respond to her. In her mind she began to ask it simple questions and puzzled over its oblique and shifting answers.

  The steps ended, and the cave floor leveled out. She splashed through an ankle-deep puddle, maybe the same one that Hirizjahkinis had stepped into on their way down. How long ago had that happened—an hour? Two hours? Six? She had lost her sense of time down here, away from the sun.

  What would Ramona say if she could see Nora now? So, this magic thing isn’t quite working out the way I hoped, Nora told her sister.

  The Ramona in her head, though, was undeterred. You’ll find your way out, she insisted. And you met a goddess! A real one, this time.

  Nora almost laughed at that. She was glad that Ramona
had not seen the dead Nora in the coffin, though.

  That scraping sound again, dry as a finger riffling the pages of a book. She was not imagining it.

  The passageway was wider now, thick with stalagmites. Nora walked cautiously, straining to listen for even the slightest noise. The water light was showing her details of the cave she had not noticed before. A shaft angled downward to the right, under an overhanging ledge like a balcony. A rock formation bulged like a pile of pillows.

  Ahead of her was another mass of stone, black and dense, eroded into sinuous curves. As Nora approached, she watched beads of reflected light slide along its surface, broken into tiny facets—like scales—and she heard the light, papery sound of rock scraped by something smooth and supple, and in that instant she made a wild, fearful, lucky guess. She stopped.

  The snake raised a sleek, black head, improbably massive. Nora got a good look at its flat eyes, the pair of round nostrils, the neat vampire fangs tucked into the sides of its mouth, and she began to back away. With another slow dry rustle, the long dark body unspooled itself effortlessly to follow her.

  She watched its leisurely tracking grace with a kind of fascination. The weaving head was almost level with her eyes. Was it a venomous snake or the strangling, crushing kind? Why had she never learned a spell that would destroy giant snakes? Or turn them into something smaller and harmless. A pencil, maybe.

  Nora tried a paralysis spell that she had once read, but she could not pull enough magic from the water nearby. She fell back on the levitation spell that had once worked on a normal-sized snake. Again, not enough power; she could not budge the creature. Still—

  The surest way to defeat a snake, Aruendiel had once said, is to tie it in a knot. Nora tried the levitation spell again, this time aiming at the snake’s tail. The tip rose precipitously into the air. Taken off guard, the snake turned to see what was happening to its opposite end; Nora thrust the tail under its chin—if snakes had chins—and pulled it up to make a loop.

  But the real problem, she saw now, was what sort of knot to use. It had taken her an entire summer of Y camp to learn to tie a bowline. Out of the hole, around the tree—but the snake, now thoroughly suspicious, cracked its tail like a whip. Its coils slid free from her precarious magical hold.