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

by Emily Croy Barker

  Nora sighed. “Do you know who Sisoaneer is? What she’s actually goddess of? ‘She gives life and takes it away.’ Hint, hint.”

  “Sisoaneer is a healer,” Olenan said. “As am I. It’s why she’s here. We have an affinity, she and—”

  “She’s the goddess of murder,” Nora said.

  A sudden intake of breath. “Now this is true blasphemy,” Olenan said.

  “She’s called ‘daughter of death.’ I sang that to you every morning. All those hymns were like that. ‘You make your enemies fall dead.’ ‘No knife is as sharp as yours.’ What did you think they meant?”

  “Those are just words.” More confidently, Olenan added: “It means power—power to protect her people.”

  “No, it means she’s in charge of death. Some deaths. Because for her, healing is just the other side of murder. Anytime a person decides that someone else is going to live or die, she’s there. That’s what she told me. I think. So, anyway,” Nora added, “I’d say you do have a real affinity with her.”

  “Speaking of dying,” Olenan said. Nora felt a caressing hand on her hair. “You don’t have much time, do you? You’re delirious from her sacred poison.”

  “I feel some tingling,” Nora allowed. “But nothing awful.” She struggled into a kneeling position, then stood up carefully. “Might as well die on my feet.”

  The snake’s eyes were ancient and unyielding. There would be no escape, they said. Only endless, arid rest.

  “I don’t know which came first, the murder part or the healing,” Nora added. “I’m guessing murder. Human nature.”

  “Myths,” Olenan said dismissively. “Legends. What matters is power and how you use it.”

  Mine. Mine. The whisper was as soft as scales scraping rock.

  “Did you hear that?” Nora asked.

  “Hear what?” Olenan said, too quickly, and Nora knew she was lying.

  “The legends tell you about the power,” Nora said. “She’s here for you, Olenan. She asked me to purify her temple. You murdered a lot of people—”

  “I had to!”

  “—and you did it in her name. She’s goddess of murder, but she doesn’t like it when people lie. She’s tired of blood, she told me that. She has come for you.”

  Mine.

  Olenan pushed past Nora and stared up at the snake as it swayed gently back and forth. Its forked tongue appeared and disappeared mockingly. There was something weirdly inviting about the rhythm of the snake’s movements, as though it were coaxing her to dance.

  “This is a trick, a demon. Something to frighten a child,” Olenan said, clenching her hands.

  “It’s not too late,” Nora said. “Lemoes is right. She’ll forgive you. She judges murderers, and sometimes she forgives them. But you have to ask. You have to own up to what you did.”

  She had a momentary impression that the space around them was suddenly full of shadows, half-seen faces and limbs quivering with sorrowful echoes. Some of them, Nora knew without understanding how, were the same bodies that Olenan had stolen and forced into a clumsy imitation of life not so long ago. But there were many more.

  Olenan also saw them, her mouth twisting unhappily as she glanced up.

  “Justice and mercy?” she asked. “I always tried to give both.”

  “You said that the first time we met,” Nora said. “When you choked a man to death.”

  Olenan looked puzzled for a moment, as though she had trouble remembering what Nora meant, and then she smiled briefly. “That’s right, I could have killed all those villagers, and I didn’t. Because you asked me not to.”

  Nora remembered how one night two women, hand in hand, had raced the setting moon across darkened fields, so fast and free that it seemed that they would never stop. Only their shadows could keep pace. Where were they going, so wild and happy? Somehow they had both come to this place instead.

  “Ask for mercy now,” she said gently.

  Olenan hesitated. Her eyes met Nora’s, full of questions. Then the tender lines of her face hardened and grew austere.

  “I can’t,” she said dismissively. “There’s too much for her to forgive, and my heart is too dry to care. You took the last drops, you and him.”

  Olenan looked back at the snake, then lifted her hands. Thumbs and index fingers together, ready to yank on an invisible filament.

  The snake reared up in a black wave. Olenan cried out. She sounded more angry than afraid, it seemed to Nora. The open mouth struck downward.

  Olenan twitched and crumpled like a rag as the snake’s jaws closed around her. Nora wanted to avert her eyes, but she could not. With fastidious movements of its mouth, the snake gathered Olenan’s struggling bare feet into its maw.

  There was no sound but the low rumble of falling water. It was not enough to fill a sudden silence.

  The great snake lifted its head and bent toward Nora. Its tongue flickered. One could see only the slightest hint of distention in its long throat.

  Priestess, you have done well.

  Nora said nothing. Her mouth felt dry. It would be gracious and good politics to say, “You’re welcome,” at this point, but she could not bring herself to utter the words. The black tower of the snake’s head looming before her blurred. A giant snake, she thought. A giant snake. This is not the God I ever wanted to believe in. It’s not my wise, deceitful, wry, murderous friend Olenan, who was not really my friend any more than she was a goddess. But she tried to be both, in her way.

  Rest. Come to me and rest.

  “No,” Nora said, as loudly as she could. “With all due respect—no. I did what you wanted, didn’t I? The false goddess is gone. You have no claim on me. Let me go.”

  Snakes had an inherently shrewd, calculating expression, she thought. Probably because they had no lips. It told you nothing about what they were really thinking, of course.

  Your death belongs to me.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Nora said. “And even gods can be wrong.”

  The snake peered down at her, swaying very slightly.

  I gave you my kiss. Give me your death.

  “You ask too much.”

  Nora turned, startled, as Aruendiel’s strained voice sounded closer than she would have expected. On the other side of the barrier that was the snake’s body, he was standing up, barely, not quite leaning on Hirizjahkinis, who scowled up at him with what might have been either concern or annoyance.

  “Nora does not belong to you,” he said. “Her life, and her death”—Aruendiel grimaced—“are her own.”

  She owes me a death.

  “If you touch even Nora’s shadow, I will tear down these mountains to bury your temple, I will fill your caves with mud, and any tongue that praises you will dry and burn, until you are utterly forgotten.”

  “And I will eat you again,” Hirizjahkinis said. “If I must.”

  The snake elevated itself a yard higher and opened its mouth to show tidy rows of pointed teeth. It hissed.

  Enough. Give me your death, child. It is mine, I will keep it safe.

  This time, Nora understood.

  “All right,” she said.

  Chapter 34

  Nora fumbled at the pouch around her neck until the knotted cloth loosened. The timestone fell into her open palm, small, malign, unyielding.

  Abruptly she raised her eyes to the snake again. “I want something in return.” She gestured behind her. “All the dead people here. Can you—”

  The snake flexed its neck impatiently and bared its fangs again. Involuntarily she flinched.

  Priestess, you have my kiss. Use it wisely.

  She rolled the timestone between her fingers once, twice, and with a fierce, silent prayer, she tossed it to the snake.

  It darted faster than she would have thought possible. The snout snapped shut around the time
stone. The muscles in its throat rippled, very slightly.

  Nora let out a breath that she hadn’t realized she held. The snake’s eyes shone like dusty jewels now. It lowered its head and gave Nora another long, unreadable look. She felt an unexpected sense of regret. Now she’d never know exactly how the fate encoded in the stone would unspool. How she’d died, once upon a time that never was. And what might have happened after that.

  But it was not her story now, not anymore.

  The snake curled away from Nora with an air of graceful boredom, like a fellow guest at a cocktail party who has spotted someone more interesting to talk to. Its long, curled body shifted, and suddenly the creature was no bigger than any ordinary snake. It whipped across the pavement, a scrawled signature in black ink, and disappeared into the crevice in the temple floor.

  A slow tremor shook the ground. More pebbles rattled down. With a long, unhurried, grinding rumble—of contentment, Nora thought—the rupture closed. Only a hairline crack remained, and then it was gone.

  Snakes are misunderstood, the nature documentary narrators always said. Nora thought that was mostly true, although not in the way the films meant.

  “Nora, are you here?” Aruendiel’s voice was harsh and tense; the snake’s disappearance had been no relief to him at all, Nora realized. He was looking around, in all the wrong directions. So was Hirizjahkinis.

  Nora moved toward them, waving her arms with spastic motions, as though that might fix their attention, but it only made her feel foolish. It would have been nice if Olenan’s invisibility spell had worn off with her death, she thought.

  “Whatever the big snake swallowed just now, it wasn’t Nora,” Hirizjahkinis was saying. “The thing it swallowed was much, much smaller, and full of very clever magic.”

  “The timestone I gave her,” Aruendiel said. “But where is she? That wretched goddess’s pet snake bit her. Is she here somewhere, injured, or did the thing take her underground with it?” His gaze swept over Nora without finding her.

  “A timestone—ah, I see now! Nansis’s, I suppose. Well, if Nora was well enough to feed it to the snake, that is a good sign. If the snake took her into the caves, the Kavareen can find the snake.”

  “And what is to stop the Kavareen from devouring her, once it finds her?” Aruendiel demanded.

  “Myself,” Hirizjahkinis said calmly.

  Aruendiel scowled. “I’ll go after her.”

  “Not alone, Aruendiel. No—” She raised an admonitory finger. “Don’t shake your head like that. I do not leave my friends unprotected. Not Nora, not you.”

  In the set iron of his face there came a flicker of ruefulness. He gave her a long look. “Then I’d rather have your sharp wits on my side, Hirizjahkinis, than the Kavareen’s vicious power, no matter how—”

  He broke off, looking up. Pebbles were falling from overhead. And rocks bigger than pebbles. They hit the pavement with an accelerating rhythm.

  From the break in the ceiling, a new crack extended. It grew darker and wider and longer—the rock above unzipping. Dust billowed downward, and then a new flood poured through the entire length of the fissure, forcing its edges apart.

  Nora yelled a useless warning to Aruendiel and Hirizjahkinis. Blinking hard against the dust, she made herself keep looking up, so that she could aim her levitation spell better, try to hold up thedead weight of falling rock and water to keep them all from being crushed.

  But the unwieldy mass overhead slipped away from the grip of her magic—too heavy, too fluid for her levitation spell. In desperation, she tried something else. A new shape for the water. If she could not stop the temple ceiling from collapsing, she could at least tell it how to fall. Olenan was gone, and the magic she had hoarded for herself was unbound and ready, fresh for the bidding of another magician.

  Nora pushed the slurry of rubble and water away from the center of the temple, toward the walls, and found that her spell was not alone. Aruendiel must have had the same idea. His magic shifted the debris with the assurance of long practice; she tried to match his workmanship. Her spell overlapped his and twined through it, both spells growing stronger and richer, chiming and rhyming, it seemed to Nora, as their shared magic carved a refuge in the mayhem that crashed through the air and made the mountain shake.

  In a moment, it was all over. Nora’s ears rang. The sanctuary was suddenly much brighter, daylight filtering through clouds of dust. Slabs of broken stone as big as cars lay aslant. Water tumbled down the rear of the sanctuary and churned through the debris. Half of the huge columns had snapped or fallen; the others stood uselessly above the wreckage.

  Aruendiel and Hirizjahkinis were dusted gray as statues, and Nora supposed that she would look the same if anyone could actually see her. Aruendiel brushed impatiently at his eyes. “Did you catch that?” he asked Hirizjahkinis.

  “Half of the mountain falling on our heads? Oh, yes, I did notice that,” Hirizjahkinis said. The dust coating her face cracked as she smiled. “Peace, Aruendiel. That was some of Nora’s magic in your spell, was it not?”

  “I’m here,” she said, right to his face. “Here. Talking to you.”

  “Nora?” Aruendiel’s voice sounded hoarse, unusually hesitant. He looked around, then closed his eyes. He held very still, head lifted. Listening.

  “Here,” she said, reaching for his hand again. Her fingers slid away, unable to connect.

  He was working powerful counterhexes; she could actually feel them near her, like weak hints of breeze on a humid day. He opened his eyes, and his gaze swept right across her again.

  “No?” Hirizjahkinis said.

  “It’s as though she has gone out of the world again,” Aruendiel said grimly. He turned his head sharply as voices sounded behind a pile of rubble. “Who’s there?” he called.

  A dust-streaked figure appeared, then another, splashing through the ankle-deep water. A man and a woman. Aruendiel took a step forward, and then his crooked shoulders sank slightly as he recognized Yaioni and Lemoes.

  “Lord magician,” Lemoes said quickly, “I pray for your help. There are injured people here—”

  “I have other concerns,” Aruendiel snapped.

  “You will not help them?” Hirizjahkinis asked, as Yaioni said, “Please, we can’t take care of them all by ourselves.” Her voice shook. “There are so many. I don’t understand it but—”

  “What do you mean, so many? You do not mean the dead that she revivified—”

  “They are not dead anymore,” Yaioni said. “They are alive now, they’re not dead. But they’re badly hurt, bleeding, all of them.”

  “Aruendiel, it’s what I asked for, that she’d bring all the dead here back to life,” Nora said, and something in his harsh expression shifted. For a moment she was sure that he had heard her.

  “I should have asked that she heal them, too,” she added contritely. You had to be careful, when you asked for something, whether it was a spell or a wish or a prayer. Gods could be as legalistic as demons, she thought.

  “Nora is here—somewhere—and she is awake, and I do not think she is dead,” Hirizjahkinis was saying. “I am sure she will not mind waiting a little while to be visible again.”

  Aruendiel gave another impatient glance over the rubble before rounding upon Lemoes. “Show me the ones who can be saved,” he said. “Be quick.”

  With some surprise in his expression, Lemoes nodded, and began wading toward what had been the rear of the temple. Aruendiel plowed through the water with a jerky, purposeful stride. “And, Nora, if you are here,” he added, raising his voice, “come and make yourself useful.”

  The wounded were everywhere. A few corpses remained—those whom Olenan had beheaded had already died again—but most of the bodies that had been dead, undead, and then dead again were now struggling to sit up, rolling over, bleeding, groaning, and Nora could tell at a glance from the
variety of their movements, from the individual lines of pain on their faces, that they were alive and not zombies, not this time. Nushka, the old lady, held her bloody head with one hand, face scrunched, as she tried to crawl on her knees out of the swirling water. Nearby, Aruendiel was giving directions to Lemoes and Yaioni, passing out bandages, needles, and thread that he must have just conjured.

  Nora splashed over to Nushka. Gently—more gently than with zombie Nushka—Nora lifted her out of the water with a levitation spell and placed her safely on piled rubble. She did a spell to slow the bleeding, another to relieve the pain. Nushka, eyes closed, moaning, still looked like the hollowed-out husk of a human being, but Nora couldn’t ask her what else she needed, so she moved on to the next injured person, and the next, until she began to lose count.

  She worked frantically, even on those who were already almost dead a second time from wounds that bled out too fast, from internal injuries, from drowning. She wanted to save them all. That they were alive and in pain—in a way it was her responsibility.

  How much good she was doing, though, she wasn’t sure. She could only summon a small fraction of the power that Olenan had once lent her. But when she had a moment to watch Aruendiel work on a pilgrim’s stab wound, she was struck by how little magic he used, just enough to patch a wound quickly—battlefield first aid. She wanted to ask him about that; it felt strange to hold her tongue, knowing that he could not hear her question.

  When she next looked up, he had worked his way around to Nushka and was examining her head wound. He looked more pleased than the situation warranted, and Nora wondered if he had found the trace of her magic. Meanwhile Nushka was smiling and talking to him and looked about a hundred years younger. Well, Nora thought, it’s far more satisfying to be treated by someone you can actually see.

  Lemoes was leaning over a man half buried in debris, his face blackened by blood and dust. When the man’s eyes fluttered open, Nora recognized Oasme.