Twenty Two – A Meeting of Minds
Sunrise in the desert. The woman with grey flecks in her hair has led the six to the hole. Very few things come out of the hole but a lot goes in.
Whiny boy is, unsurprisingly, whining. Bleating on and on while the po-faced daeva entertains the idea of putting a bolt through his skull. But that would be messy and one bleating whelp is not going to be her undoing.
‘Can I pray?’ asks Tommy as they reach the hole, peering over into black. His eyes are watering; nervousness turned into full-blown panic. There’s something thrown in about kittens and a grandmother that the woman doesn’t fully understand. Blonde she-rogue and robed monk are arguing; Venecians are performing some sort of ceremonial jig. The winds never fail to leave out the important bits: the set of eyes the behemoth has in its back; the mutant rats the innkeeper is breeding in his basement; the six, deranged companions that inspire lunacy in anyone they come into contact with.
Whiny boy is pining.
‘Alright, fine. Make it quick.’
Boy does. But then she-rogue states that she’s going to as well, not even bothering to ask for permission. She throws herself to the floor in a thinly-veiled act of indulgence. Head Venecian is whispering to her, saying her head should be facing down, not up. He promptly gets an elbow to the stomach. The grey-flecked woman approves. Silently.
Alas, they will likely try to delay her further. That can’t be allowed to happen. She’ll blow them down the hole and be done with it.
That’s before the rumbling.
‘Not a sandworm! Not again!’
‘Silence!’
No, couldn’t be. Girls with years of training have been lost to that place.
With no time to second guess, a geyser shoots up from the hole, bringing with it a drowned rat of a girl. The woman wraps the wind around Anna and ushers her back down to sand, six shouting and running over and cosseting enough to make the woman gag.
‘You took your time,’ she says, walking over to Anna, who splutters a remark one cannot repeat. ‘I suppose that was to be expected. When you’re done insulting me I’d recommend getting up. You’re on a nest of flesh-eating scarabs.’
The girl never rose to her feet faster.
‘Time to get moving. We’ve got a meeting to attend.’
Anna is not feeling much of anything, mostly due to her still being in her nightdress. Offering up a facade of disbelief, she questions whether they will listen.
‘Of course they will,’ said the woman. ‘I’m their leader.’
A bunch of dogs in heat, Kara reckoned. Multi-racial, aloof, vaguely intimidating dogs with too much sun and not enough sense. And the bony-looking waif – you know, the one that probably carries weights around in her pockets so as not to be taken by a brisk wind – she’s especially odious. Glaring. Plainly glaring.
‘Where are these good reasons, Caris? I haven’t heard a single one. We have done as you have told us and let these – I can’t believe I’m saying this – these men stay here, given you twenty four hours to do as you please, and you convene this meeting of the Circle early to try to persuade us with this? You let the girl live. Went against the Covenant. And now you’ve made a real pig’s ear of covering it up.’
Caris inspected Tevran, bony-looking blonde. The woman reeked of desperation. If she’d come and yanked the circlet off Caris’ head it would’ve been more subtle. ‘I will repeat myself since you seem not to have heard it the first time. She has passed the Gauntlet. Not a day of training by our hands and she has passed it.’
‘That is a feat, isn’t it? So powerful she can summon storms, lay bridges of ice at her feet, and crack open the earth like a nut. The Aether itself flares up to protect her when she cannot, and she dashes through the Gauntlet and gets out with hardly a scratch. And yet, conveniently, she cannot demonstrate a single of these abilities in our presence.’
‘You forget what it is like after the elixir. Her strength will be severely depleted for some time.’
It was the perfect moment for Anna to tell them she’d sorta, kinda not drunk it. Except she’d not said anything to Caris when they’d talked on the way over and she wasn’t going to do it now with the daeva sizing her up like a pack of hyenas on a snared gazelle, all teeth.
Tevran, invisible soapbox underneath her, deemed this moment ripe for the taking. ‘My sisters, we have listened to this nonsense for long enough. It’s clear our leader has lost what remains of her mind.’ A nod to Caris’ supposed premature senility. How touching. ‘Girl aside, men have not been allowed in this settlement for four hundred years and for good reason. They seek to destroy everything we strive to create and then leave us to pick up the pieces. We have paid our dues, defending Torrodil from the worst excesses of men once this millennium. Are we to overlook how many of our kind were lost? How our sisterhood shrank from two thousand strong to forty in one day, never to recover? Our foremothers paid in blood for their folly. We would be wise not to forget their mistake, and wiser still not to repeat it.’
The daeva concur, thoughts lingering on the Battle of Ephalus. Tevran prepares a fireball and takes aim at the seven. The men must die because they are men; women because they know too much. Caris, ambivalence turning to irritation, bolts from her chair in the temple’s assembly room, intent on reminding the swiftshot of her rung in the ladder. As the fireball blazes a trail through the air she covers it in a silken cloth of water, dousing it into nothing. ‘You disobey me? I do not forget the Great Sacrifice but you forget the sanctity of the Gauntlet and profane against its decree. Daeva have been struck down where they stand for less.’
Tevran shrinks under her penetrating gaze, wanting a hole to run back into, settling for a seat.
‘Women of the Circle,’ Caris says gingerly, linking the nine daeva in front of her with a grand gesture of the arm, ‘I do not expect to be granted pardon for my deceit. Yes, I have broken the Covenant and let this girl live. I have hidden it from you, accepting the mantle you have bestowed on me without accepting my duty to you and to the truth. But there are pressing matters that supersede even this betrayal.’ She moves out of Anna’s way, pauses and waits for her to fill in the blanks. When she doesn’t Caris chalks it down to the elixir and lack of sleep and continues. ‘The Aether speaks of this girl. Its vibrations carry in the air and across the water. I am not the only one who has heard it. Many of the windrunners have come to me in private to voice their concern and I have listened patiently, saying nothing due to fear of retribution. Yet I do not fear anymore. There was a force that stayed my hand that day eleven years ago. A reason for my madness. Today I see this girl was not meant to die an ignoble death. She was meant to restore our sisterhood to its former glory.’
The Circle erupted into cries of astonishment, ordering Caris to withdraw her outrageous remarks and criticising her for uttering such blasphemy, surrounded as they were by stone paragons of their ancestors. The women were raring to haul her over the coals (and where the daeva were concerned that expression was not just figurative). Wunderkind Caris, the tempest of her generation who’d assumed leadership too young, had at last built her own funeral pyre and climbed giddily to the top.
‘Caris,’ began Sophel, second-in-command and with a cadence suggestive of a larynx scraped dry. ‘You have brought dishonour on your people by letting these men into our home and allowing this girl to be judged in our hallowed rite of passage. She shares our ability. We can all feel that. But she has not been nurtured by our hand, or listened to the parables that have instilled wisdom and chastity since the dawn of this sisterhood. Any lessons would fall on deaf ears and any training on a mind in shade, deluded by a lifetime of half-truths. She is no more one of us than the company she keeps.
‘The girl and her human companions will be judged by this Circle, as will you. They can at least blame ignorance, whereas you have executed a conscious betrayal. You are hereby stripped of your coronet and the responsibilities it signifies. We will divide up and perform th
e duties you are clearly no longer fit to bear. Until the time of our verdict you will not leave these walls, am I understood?’
She was. Regrettably.
‘As for you, Anna Gray, there can be no doubt in our mind that you were not complicit in this deceit. Is it true? Have you passed the Gauntlet and drunk its elixir?’
Again, an ideal time to say, ‘No, actually I haven’t. Honestly it looked pretty disgusting fizzing down Bale’s chin. Bale? Riiiight, you haven’t heard. Yeah, I cooked a man. Overcooked really—’
Sophel was clearing her throat, not that there was much there to clear. ‘I will take your silence as confirmation. I assure you it will factor heavily in our verdict. For now you and your friends will be confined to the Old Quarter. Make no mistake: should you interfere in any way it will be the last place you see.’
Walking down the temple steps and counting them as they went, Tommy and Mateo were oblivious to their tawny-skinned chaperone, Shivanni, who didn’t care to notice the slack-jawed youths behind her as she guided the group at a snail’s pace round her city. Blah blah historical obelisk. Blah blah related to the air goddess. Oh, Andres, that is the blah who summoned a tidal wave at the Battle of Blah!
Anna vaguely heard Shivanni explaining the different types of daeva, saying that she wasn’t, like, really supposed to be telling them this but they could keep a secret, couldn’t they? And it was just so nice to be able to speak to outsiders because she was cooped up in this place all day and they never let her out apart from to the city for supplies every now and then but that was, like, so incredibly rare and, oh look, there’s a windrunner practising in the Silver Oasis, and she’s a windrunner too and they can shape the wind and run super fast and even make others run super fast, and there’s a swiftshot and they can summon fireballs and icebolts and, well, just about every missile there is! And, by Helebrin’s light, there’s the conjurist Acanthi and her air elemental and she’s, like, crazy powerful and a little bit menopausal and am I boring you?
‘Er—’
‘And there’s an enchanter by the Mausoleum of Ephalus and it’s definite avoid zone, ‘kay? Caris is, you know, obsessed with it and she’s a tempest, the only tempest, and she’s the most powerful of us and she’s, like, totally nasal, right? And here’s the courtyard and you and Kara will be living up there and the boys over there and, I know I shouldn’t ask, I so know, but, like, are you, you know, with them? Like, all of them? I mean, not judging, so completely not judging, ‘cause the stuttering one – I never said this – he’s like dive-in-the-deep-end dishy. But the monk… Wrong, hun. Total ick factor.’
Lysander politely prised Anna from the chatty teen. After the meeting he’d passed Elder Francis’ note on to Caris, who despite the demotion was probably the group’s closest ally in Thrace. Whether something would come of it he didn’t know. In the meantime Anna was his primary concern. There was a new weariness in her that troubled him.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said evasively. Meaning that’s not how I do things. I’m not one of those weak-ankled city girls who can’t be done with carrying a loaf of bread. I’m resilient. Taught to keep my troubles to myself even when I’m knee-deep in doo-doo.
He didn’t force it out of her, just let her know that when she wanted to talk he’d be there. Naturally that made Anna feel obliged to say something. Wheedling monk. Forget interrogating people by force; send Lysander in and you’ll get your information in record time.
‘I saw something.’
‘In the Gauntlet?’
‘Mire and jungle too.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
When she didn’t reply he made no effort to press her.
‘It looked like him just before...’ A pang of shame. ‘First time I said to myself, “It’s a trick. This place plays tricks.” When it came again and stood there and talked to me like it knew me, like it knew every secret, then I realised it was no trick.’
‘You need to tell the others.’
‘That’s the last thing I’m going to do.’
‘Caris then.’
Remembering the elixir fizzing on Bale’s face, Anna shook her head firmly. If the daeva knew, there would be consequences.
‘I’m tired, Lysander,’ she admitted. ‘I know it’s selfish of me to say this but I want to go home. I want to sit down to a simple meal and play with my brothers in the garden and have a day without monsters and demons and creeping doubts. You heard these women. I’m not one of them.’
‘Give them time.’
‘So they can submit me to some sacrificial rite?’
‘I was thinking more like naked lunar worship but whatever you prefer.’
Anna smiled languidly. ‘Do you think everyone would hate me if I decided to pack it in? Go back and see if my family’s okay and pretend like nothing happened?’
‘You know it isn’t that simple,’ he replied, cushioning the blow with, ‘but I don’t think they’d hate you.’
‘Promised the Venecians I’d see them home.’
‘Out of everyone they’d understand.’
Shivanni was prattling on in the distance. ‘A-ma-zing, right? He saws the woman in half and then a minute later she bursts up from the floor, throws a set of daggers at a chipmunk who catches them mid-air, and takes off her mask to reveal she’s actually the magician. I mean, one of my friends was so surprised she accidentally set the man’s hair on fire. We sorta had to clean up that mess. It blew. It really did. Oh! That reminds me of an awesome story—’
Turning his head round to face them, Andres rolls out his tongue like a dog that begs to be rescued.
‘I swear,’ says Anna, steering the conversation back to small talk, ‘there’s no worse punishment than that girl.’
It was a familiar dream. She was running, not turning around because she knew what she would see. The leg was dragging, toenails scratching across tiles. A church and a woman on her wedding day turned and smiled, bleeding strawberry seeds from the mouth. Two lovers danced while the roof collapsed and Anna said, ‘The ceiling, look at the ceiling.’ Filed teeth when they smiled and pointed to her lips, bathed in the seeds.
When Anna awoke her sheets were covered in sweat. At the window she studied the stars and remembered the constellations Gazon had taught them. Gazon who is no longer with us, isn’t that right? Dearly departed. Passed on. ‘Cause to say where he really is would be too honest. Perhaps a daevan messenger could be dispatched to tell his family. She’d ask Shivanni in the morning.
Candlelight from the Mausoleum of Ephalus beckoned her eye and as even her dreams were turning against her she decided on a late night stroll. The streets were all hers. Gazing down avenues she made out the oases glittering in moonlight, a faint desert wind cooling her back and filching her cares away. Normally she’d blow stray strands of hair out of her face, making a game of it. Tonight she didn’t bother.
She peered up at the mausoleum’s pediment. A goddess was flanked by fighters that fought lumbering, two-headed giants with elemental spears, blows lessened by mystic armour as vibrant as the day it was painted.
The height of the indoor space was lost to the darkness, but standing torches lit up the mausoleum walls covered in a script she couldn’t understand. A vague shape in the distance did not startle her. She moved closer and saw it turn into Caris, lighting two sticks of incense and placing them inside a small, black-figure vase that lay at the feet of a mural. The central motif was a caged songbird.
‘Couldn’t sleep? Me either.’ Caris adjusted the sticks so one faced east to the rising sun, the other upward to the heavens.
‘What is this place?’
‘Memorial. Tomb. Take your pick. Only place I can think, and there are a lot of empty places around here.’ The incense’s smell had become stifling. ‘The daeva’s hatred of men is not entirely unfounded,’ Caris said, though to whom Anna didn’t know. ‘You were right when you said we were in hiding, but isn’t that a small price to pay to be safe? To be understood?’<
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‘I didn’t come here to judge you.’
‘Then why did you?’
After consideration, ‘To be safe. Understood.’
Caris kneaded the words into her already lumpy mind. It was some time later when she started to explain the significance of the mural, saying how a songbird in a gilded cage is not unloved, it is kept in good health and adored by its owner, yet its morning tune will be spiked with malice until it is free. In fairness to Anna, who appreciated the metaphor as much as a kick in the teeth, it had been a long day.
‘Why aren’t there any male daeva?’ Anna asked, cutting to the chase.
‘Who can say.’
‘That’s rubbish and you know it.’
The songbird and its black eyes watched as each stood mutely, chewing on the scenery.
‘Don’t know why there aren’t any now, but there were some once. The writings that survived the purge after the Great Sacrifice say the sons of the Aether were good men. They could not make children with us but they were loving fathers to the young chosen. Together a band of our people escaped persecution and built Thrace as a refuge, guiding the young here, building temples to our gods, wanting the best food, wine, art, slaves. Our numbers swelled and soon we were tired of living separately. Most abandoned Thrace for Haradi beyond the desert wastes.’
Anna remarked that she had never heard of it.
‘Seeing as how your society thinks we women are myth, I’m sure you can take a leap of faith. If you can suppress the desire to interrupt, I will continue.’ Anna feigned submission to appease her. ‘Most of our kind left Thrace four hundred years ago, but a few thousand women and children stayed behind. The other daeva had less luck. The Haradim did not see them as equals, and they returned the favour, using the Black Aether to punish guilty and innocent alike.
‘Some returned to Thrace to inform the leader, Nerith. She and a few from her Circle headed for Haradi, intending to bring the others back into the fold. Few against many, and the few failed. Eyes black, the renegade daeva rained meteors down on Haradi’s houses. There weren’t even bones left when they were finished.
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