The Well of Prayers

by Anne Boles Levy

  I darted in front of Valeo to face the Gek and I threw my arms open wide. “They’re after me. They won’t fire at me.”

  “Get behind me, dammit. I’m protecting you.”

  “You’re arresting me, remember?”

  I could make out more shadowy forms scuttling down the walls of kiosks and taking on a mottled gray to match the cobblestones. The Gek crept forward, shoulders low to the ground, weapons at the ready, visible only because I knew to look for them. They made no sound, no hissing or croaking or clicking, as they stole forward, stone by stone. But the arrow tips pointing from alleys and doorways didn’t fly loose. They wanted me alive.

  I knew that already, from their chanting. I drove that out of my mind. I wasn’t their Undoer. I wasn’t their anybody. I was only Hadara, who’d gotten herself into unimaginable trouble for being a tiny bit more rebellious than usual. I was infinitely sorry, I prayed silently in my head. I won’t do this again, Nihil. I’ll go back to believing in you. You can be god of all Kuldor or just this one wharf. I don’t even need an Eternal Tree. I’ll go back to school and memorize your jillion incarnations and your infinite list of long-dead wives and their names and character flaws and birthmarks and favorite tea blends. Just please leave me alone, leave my family alone, leave my entire beautiful, unruly, mish-mash of a city alone.

  Valeo pushed my arm out of the way and sprang in front of me again. “I’ll take care of them.”

  A half-dozen javelins soared toward us, missing by finger-widths.

  An ugly thought jumped into my head: escaping would be easier if I let the Gek kill him. I hated the idea and hated myself for thinking it. I clenched my good fist and bobbed and weaved behind him, hoping the Gek would think twice before firing, lest they hit me. It worked, and the next volley of javelins was a thin, half-hearted effort that mostly landed wide of us.

  Elsewhere, the battle raged as guards fought to get to us across Callers Wharf. Gek arrows flew in every direction, with the guards creeping forward behind walls of shields to either side of us. Valeo and I were alone on this stretch of wharf and utterly exposed. The next volley of missiles wouldn’t miss. I ducked under his elbow and in front of him again.

  “You can’t take care of them. You’re outnumbered.” I put one foot ahead of the other, staggering my stance so I wouldn’t budge when he tried to push me again. He edged me aside like a curtain.

  “You’re also outnumbered—and unarmed,” he said, his broad back to me. His swords were useless here—and his shield was somewhere at the bottom of the swamp.

  “They want me alive.” I dodged to one side, faked him out, and ducked under his other side. I faced the Gek again, who’d paused on the cobblestones, watching. I panted, my pulse throbbing in my head, sweat trickling down my back.

  “They can’t have you.” He elbowed his way ahead of me, working both swords in wide arcs, yet artfully missing slicing me in half.

  “Nihil’s earlobes, Valeo. This can’t go on forever.”

  “Nihil’s earlobes? That’s how you curse?” He batted javelins away. I had never seen that before. I hadn’t known it was possible, but he swatted them like sting flies. They split and splintered, ricocheting wide of us.

  “I’m the only thing standing between you and the Eternal Tree.” If there is one, I added silently. This was a lot of effort for a god I didn’t believe in.

  A gust of wind blasted my side, sweeping javelins and even arrows wide of us. The wind fizzled around me—magic. The wind hit hard at the Gek, and they fell back to regroup, giving us a moment’s respite.

  A shout came from the pavilion. It was S’ami, behind a wall of shields. “What are you doing, dancing? Get that woman to the Ward.”

  Valeo shouted back. “She won’t go.”

  I had to speak up, too, even if no one believed me. “They won’t harm me. His Highness won’t let me protect him. I can be his shield; it’ll work, I know it will.”

  If it didn’t kill us both first.

  From the corner of one eye, I could spy S’ami flailing his arms, exasperated. “We’ll write ballads about your doomed love. Before we commemorate your tragic and untimely ends, however, do you think you can at least try to move away from the enemy, instead of toward them?”

  From further back, Reyhim’s gravelly voice carried across the wharf. “We’ve got wounded here. We need that wharf retaken.”

  Valeo lowered his voice to a growl. “Alright, then, you go in front.”

  I obliged, with a sense of triumph, but it was short-lived. The Gek resumed their forward creep. Behind me, Valeo muttered. “Now what?”

  “Now we edge closer to the bridge together, with me in front.”

  We both stepped sideways, one tiny, crab-like move at a time, not daring to make a run for it with the Gek aiming at us from several directions at once. If Valeo and I separated, he was as good as dead.

  And I couldn’t let that happen, even if it defied all logic.

  They rushed us. A thousand shadowy forms leapt to their feet at once, racing at speeds I didn’t think any two-legged creature could achieve. Valeo grabbed my arm—hard—and made a run for it. I tried to match his pace, panting, lungs aching, as we raced for Pilgrim Bridge. The men at the bridge charged forward with shouts, echoed behind us from the pavilion. I looked up from pounding Valeo’s back to see the guards storming the wharf from that direction as well.

  Our long legs made short work of the wharf, but the Gek were faster. They formed a wedge that drove hard between the two halves of the Feroxi pincer, a band of them reaching us as the guards closed in. Then Gek were all over us, shoving us over the railing and into the Grand Concourse.

  The waterway caught me sideways, knocking the wind from my lungs. I resurfaced sputtering and began treading water. I needed to get my bearings—quick. I had to get away from any crossfire. Valeo had lost his swords and fought bare-handed, pushing Gek away, grabbing their hands from his throat, trying to work a few swimming strokes in my direction. “Hadara, get out of the water. Get to the men.”

  I looked up. Guards fought at the edge of the wharf. Several broke free of the battle and were extending hands to us, but the Gek had already pulled us too far to reach. One called to me in a croaking voice. “Come with us, Undoer. We won’t harm you.”

  First things first. I shook my head and tried to swim toward Valeo. He shot up out of the water and was pulled straight down with a look of surprise. The last I saw of him was his fingertips as he strove for safety. The Gek had him. They’d pulled him under.

  I dove.

  I dove and dove, desperate to see through the murky, green water, desperate to push boats and punts out of the way, knocking my wrist painfully against wooden prows, splashing and parting the water in front of me, toward where I thought he must be. I could make out the gyrations of water and bubbles being forced aside and around and a flash of limbs and boots. I hadn’t known how well Gek could swim until I saw them swarming over Valeo underwater, anchoring him to them.

  Drowning him.

  They pulled at my arms and clothes, dragging me to the surface. “Undoer, leave these nest-burners,” one called.

  Another croaked. “You’re safe with us.”

  I fought against them to dive again, but I was being pulled and dragged farther from the spot where the river rippled and burbled from Valeo’s struggle. I turned toward the nearest Gek and made the sign for mate. It was all I could think of. I flashed it again and again. Mate mate mate mate.

  Several Gek nodded and dived away. Others held me above the waterline and pulled toward where the Grand Concourse fed into Sapphire Bay. I was a strong swimmer, but I couldn’t battle the choppy bay even on the best of days, which this clearly wasn’t.

  Valeo’s head burst through the surface and he gasped and gagged. I thanked Nihil for those vast Feroxi lungs and screamed Valeo’s name as loud as I’ve ever screamed anything in my life.

  His long arms sliced through the water toward me, and the Gek cleared from his
path. The distance between us vanished in a few quick strokes. Water streamed from the gaps in his leather armor. His helmet was still on, stuck over that un-handsome, bashed-up face I was so grateful to see. He sucked giant lungfuls of air as the water lapped against his armor, which sagged on him like a shell he’d outgrown. “I fought them off.”

  I blinked back tears. “No, you overgrown turtle. I told them you were my mate.”

  “And here I thought I was a hypocrite of the worst kind.”

  I drifted closer to him. I wanted to hug him or at least put my arms around him, wipe away the water streaming around his face, but all I could see was the leather and bronze of his armor. I reached my good hand up and brushed my knuckles against his cheek—it was the only part of him I could touch.

  My chin quivered. “The Gek will probably take both of us now.”

  He shook his head, treading water around me, and gave a long, serious stare at the Gek paddling around us. “I can’t let them do that.”

  “Because why? I have to go on some sort of rigged trial? Be made an example of? Like my grandmother?”

  “You’ll have to trust S’ami. He has it all figured out.”

  “Trust S’ami? Is this a joke?”

  Instead of a reply, Valeo eased his helmet from his head and tapped the bulge in the forehead, the one only half as deep as his comrades’ helms. “Had this made for me in Ironhills. Sorry to see it go.”

  It slid into the water and sank. He undid shoulder straps next, then the buckles along his sides, letting his leather corselet fall away and ease beneath the lapping waves. Two oversized boots bobbed to the surface and began drifting out to sea. “Much better. Ready to swim for it?”

  “Swim for where?”

  He nodded toward where the Azwans’ ships were berthed. “Closest one’s the Sea Skimmer.”

  “The Gek will pull us back.”

  “Up there on deck.”

  Both Azwans stood on the bow of the Sea Skimmer, dwarfed by the towering masts. They held their arms up, rays of sun flashing off their gold totems. S’ami must know any spell directed toward me might vanish. I didn’t know how to prevent it or how he could help me.

  And I knew I didn’t want him to. I was going to end this.

  I leaned back in the water, feeling the current catch me sideways and tug me along. I did a lazy backstroke, testing the Gek’s reactions as much as the waves. The Gek resumed their darting and diving, giving the waves momentum around us without touching us. Valeo swam toward me, only to find the Gek flickering around us like a school of baitfish, bright and silvery and entirely too close.

  I took another stroke, my injured wrist slicing the water as well as I could manage, watching as the two Azwans aboard their respective boats cast spells that danced in the air and fell uselessly around me. Apparently, my un-power affected the water, in much the same way as water could carry the aftershock of lightning bolts.

  It dawned on me that I was assessing this like I was looking for a weakness, as though their use of magic had a soft spot or a fracture or a hidden tear of some sort. I thought of everything in the way a healer sees things—but these two men represented an infection whose only cure was amputation. They had to go. And only I could make them. Once they were gone, Nihil’s influence on our island would fade, too.

  So I pushed away from my city and all the people I ever knew, the girls who’d jeered at me and the boys who’d never noticed me at all. The same Grand Concourse I’d learned to swim in towed me out of the reach of everything and everyone I loved—the din of the market, the full-throated songs of sailors, the busy sick ward and the kindly healers who ran it. Back on shore, and moving farther away, was the mother who’d raised me to find my way in the world. She had given up that freedom for a title. She had made her choice, and I was making mine. Mami would be pacing and fretting, but someplace deep within her, she would know she could trust me out here.

  And I felt her presence like a prayer, guiding my arms as I turned around in the water to swim away.

  “Where by Nihil’s nuts do you think you’re going?” Valeo shouted above the waves and breeze and splashing lizardfolk.

  I called over my shoulder: “Don’t you want to see what the Gek want?”

  “No.”

  I tried a different tack. “You’re my guard. So come along and guard me.”

  Before he could protest, I flipped underwater and raced below the waves. I resurfaced only when my lungs demanded it, popping up many body lengths from the two ships and the arcing currents of increasingly bright, angry spells launched from their decks. The Azwans must have been manic. I grinned and enjoyed the surge of static that built within me as the spells dissipated in the water around me.

  “Undoer has decided.” A Gek bobbed next to me. A crest atop his head told me he was male, and his small size meant he was their equivalent to a teenager, like me.

  I nodded. For now, I signaled with my one good hand. Just for now.

  Valeo lurched in the water at some distance, Gek weaving around him as he struggled to evade them. I took stock of my misery. My wrist had stopped throbbing already but the brackish water stung the rope burns on my ankles. I shivered in the cool current. I’d lost my head wrap some time ago, Nihil knows when, and my loose locks dripped shamelessly down my back. My dress was ruined and clung in all the most immodest places. My sandals were useless for swimming, and my toes were cold.

  And yet I felt good—very good. The rightness of my actions settled deep inside me, like being tucked under warm blankets, tight and warm and cheering. Amidst all this chaos, my actions had made sense, and Valeo and I were alive, and I was finally going to get answers and perhaps find out my purpose in all this. The Temple and its horrors were at least temporarily behind me. I would find answers, and I would return—but whether it was to wield power or authority or what have you in S’ami’s terms didn’t seem likely, or even appealing.

  Meanwhile, Mami and Babba were safe, and they’d see to my sisters. If they could claim I’d been captured by the Gek, I might not have to worry about the shame they’d face.

  Yes, I felt good, and even my wrist felt better for being in the cool water. I dragged it through the current as I pushed on.

  I turned to the crested Gek, treading water as I signed. “I’m a strong swimmer, but your swamps are too far for me.”

  He cackled a laugh. “We have logs.”

  The logs, it turned out, had been hollowed into canoes. The Gek took up crude paddles as we climbed aboard. Valeo clambered into my craft and wordlessly took up the paddle, shooing away any Gek who approached us. He gave me a disapproving look, then I turned to face forward as he quickly caught up to the lead canoe.

  That felt right, too. I didn’t want to go on any misadventure without my hulking, drooling dromedary of a bodyguard. And he could help me get out of trouble if I needed it. I was beginning to believe he could do anything and that nothing was beyond Valeo’s strength and skill, but that was the foolish little girl in me, wanting a hero. Maybe he wasn’t anything like a hero, but he was what I had, and he was tagging along.

  24

  The insurrection began, as ever, as words; some whispered, some shouted, some spoken behind partitions, some delivered in impassioned speeches. The priests heard these words and did their best to cut the rebellion at its stem.

  The priests scolded: How does one rebel against god? What tools and weapons could you wield against the Temple?

  —from “The Fall of B’Nai,” Verisimilitudes 13, The Book of Unease

  We didn’t head toward the swamps at all, but glided parallel to the shore as it wound southward. The shoreline smoothed out and the fens beyond the edge of the city gave way to stretches of rocky beach.

  The remains of the swamp gaped at us blackly, a dreary, ash-covered place. I’d pictured the normal ruins of a forest fire, with scorched crowns and blackened boles in an uneven line. This devastation was complete. Sunlight streamed unfiltered across the skeletons and charred gh
osts of a forest that should’ve been a thousand shades of green. Blackened, bony limbs bore silent testimony to the stilled cries and chirps and calls of all that had fled or died. It was a butcher’s boneyard, dead and left to rot.

  Neither Valeo nor I spoke or moved much, except to glance back at the charred landscape. The green crept back in slowly when we were far enough to measure the distance in what sailors call rowing lengths, or the distance a twelve-man crew could row in a hundred strokes. We had gone many dozens of rowing lengths before the shore was more verdant than not.

  The Gek turned toward a spit of shoreline littered with volcanic rock as black as anything we’d seen in the swamp, but covered with lichen and moss. I waded ashore, my hair a knotted, ratty mess, my limbs still sore from swimming, my skirt stiff with drying saltwater. I was grateful for the heat of the midday sun and suddenly hungry.

  Valeo plunked down next to me on a boulder overlooking the log flotilla as Gek shoved their impromptu craft ashore. On land, the fleet looked like a new forest growing sideways across the rocky beach.

  “Now what?” Valeo said. He didn’t look my way.

  “We see what they want.” I had so much more I wanted to explain to him, but I sensed it wasn’t the time. He wasn’t ready.

  “We? There is no ‘we’ here. There’s you.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have brought him along. Did he have to be so hurtful and demoralizing? It’s not like I had set out to have some grand little adventure, as though I was oblivious to the danger. I tried to shake off my bruised feelings. Why did I need him to like me? I didn’t need an official, embossed seal that I’d passed his inspection. I cast him a quick, sidelong glance. Valeo had bent one leg and propped an arm on it, a casual pose that did nothing to hide his rippling muscles, now only thinly covered by his soggy togs. I looked away. My stomach growled, but I was too irritated to feel embarrassed or apologize. And honestly, I really didn’t care if he knew I was hungry, of all things.