Idol of Blood

by Jane Kindred

  He laughed aloud, a weak, unconfident laugh. Perhaps he could learn to hate Ra for stealing his hate.

  When Ra woke, she seemed renewed. Jak had sensed the rousing of her body and moved away against the wall, uncertain what to expect. Ra stretched and yawned and turned to look at Jak with a quizzical smile.

  The smile turned to a frown, and she ran her finger over the cut on Jak’s cheek. “What’s this, lif? What did you do?”

  Jak let out a breath that seemed to have been held all night. Should Jak tell Ra what she’d done? Would it help or hinder? Jak equivocated. “I was handling something I shouldn’t have. It’s nothing.”

  Ra, hungry for Jak as she always was in the morning, put a hand on Jak’s shoulder and drew closer for a kiss, arrested by a wince Jak tried to contain. “What is it?” Her brows drew together as she focused on Jak’s throat. Jak tried to hide the discolored skin, but Ra pulled back the collar of the work shirt and stared at the terrible bruises.

  Her look turned to fury. “Who has—” She stopped and held her hand to them. Her own fingers fit against the marks that ringed Jak’s neck. “Ai, Meershivá!” Ra’s treacherous hand flew to her mouth. “Ai, Jak!” She scrambled away, nearly falling to the floor as she escaped the bed.

  “Wait. Ra.” Jak reached for her, but Ra jumped back.

  “No! Stay away from me, Jak! Meershivá!”

  The exclamation was strung together with the emphasis on the ultimate syllable, and Jak surmised that Ra wasn’t calling for her mother, but cursing.

  Ra began to wring her hands and pace frantically. “Maseh—I knew—I felt something was wrong.” She was speaking to herself. “My mind is old, if not my body. It’s happened.”

  “What, Ra?” insisted Jak. “What’s happened? Tell me.”

  Ra stumbled, whirling to face Jak, startled at the presence of another. “We’re mad! The Meer are mad.” She began to conjure nervously, muttering the things she wanted in an unintelligible barrage of words. Her arms filled with garments, a cloak, a satchel.

  “What are you doing, Ra? Stop it. Speak to me!”

  “Nai, nai,” Ra protested as Jak stood up. “Don’t come near me.” Her lip trembled as she hugged the conjured items to her body and backed away. “I’m so sorry, midtlif. I ought to take my life, but I’m afraid. I don’t want to leave you. I’m so sorry. Forgive me.”

  “Leave me?” Jak exclaimed. “You will not!” Jak reached out for her and Ra held up her hand. Jak was stunned, overwhelmed with the force of Ra’s will. Whether held somehow physically or simply influenced, Jak couldn’t approach her.

  “Your family was right to refuse me.” Ra backed toward the steps. “Our madness is not a folk tale. The stronger we are, the worse it is. MeerShiva—the great one—she’s as mad as they come.” Ra had reached the door. “I thought I might escape it. Or at least, not yet. I’ve never been a powerful Meer.”

  Jak doubted this last, and the thought drove home the knife of fear. Jak shook it away. “No, Ra. Don’t go. You could never hurt me.”

  “My beautiful liar,” said Ra softly. “It’s written all over your face that what you say is untrue. Last night—was it last night? I have no idea how long I’ve been unconnected.”

  “It was only an instant,” said Jak. “Just a passing weakness.”

  The dark eyes were sorrowful. “In an instant, I could snap you in two. Ma lifta, Jak. I’m going.” Ra disappeared through the door.

  At last able to move, Jak ran to the door and threw it wide, shrieking Ra’s name. There was no storm this time. It was only the white flurry of sunlight that cloaked Ra’s flight. Jak saw her, running barefoot, moving faster than a human ought to be able. But it was abundantly clear, finally, that she was not human. She was already out of distance of an easy pursuit, but this time Jak saw where she was going. She was headed for Winter.

  Twelve: Continuance

  Pearl was grateful not to be given implements to draw with. What he saw with his Meeric eye chilled him to the bone. He couldn’t make sense of the images, couldn’t make out whether he was seeing past, present or future. It was as if the Meeric flow were contaminated, toxins spilling out like In’La’s industrial waste into the Anamnesis to pollute and poison it. The language these pictures spoke was indecipherable, and what words he did understand, Pearl wanted never to see or hear again.

  He was physically ill from the onslaught of Ra’s mad rambling. For the remainder of their crossing to the continent, he huddled in the corner of their berth, dizzy with nausea, the rocking of the ship a perfectly wretched accompaniment and the perfect cover. Pike assumed Pearl was seasick. He had vomited once, and Pike had been so angry at the smell in the close quarters that he denied Pearl food for the rest of the journey.

  There was only one mercy, in that the farther they traveled, the more occluded the images became. It would have terrified Pearl before to be so cut off from the Meeric flow, but as the distant shores of Soth Szofl appeared on the horizon, the images became dark and vague, and mercifully silent.

  Szofl itself now commanded his attention. He felt its influence before the ship came into the harbor. There was magic here he hadn’t felt before, and Pearl clung to it like a life preserver. There were no pictures in it, only whispering. Echoes of a time long past that clung to the place like a mournful but benevolent ghost.

  There had been no Meericalities on the Eastern continent for hundreds of years. The grand Meeric Age had waned here long before it came to a close in the Delta. Soth Szofl’s Meer had been one of the last on this side of the sea and had reigned only a handful of years. Pearl liked the feel of the place, and he liked what he sensed of the essence of the Meer who’d built it.

  As they disembarked, Pike affixed the leash to Pearl’s collar, not wanting to take a chance on losing him among the bustling, foreign docks. Pearl kept his head down, ashamed, though at least Pike had covered him in a hooded cloak to keep people from staring. The Meerhunter paid for a coach to take them to the city’s center, where the ruins of the temple sat according to Pearl’s drawing. This, Pearl knew, was the assumption Pike had made, that Ra would set herself up close to the former seat of Szofl’s Meeric wealth.

  Where the spires of a great gothic structure had once stood—one that Pearl could still see superimposed upon the present—a stately building of polished marble had taken its place. The ivory marble rose in simple, strong lines that Pearl longed to draw, a row of four massive columns supporting a grand pediment. Real windows instead of the open arches of a Deltan temple were decorated in stained glass pieces. The rich colors formed pictures Pearl wanted to examine up close. There wasn’t time to linger over it, as Pike was on a mission, and Pearl only saw it in passing.

  Conversant in the language of the province, Pike made discreet inquiries of the locals at a nearby tavern, loosening their tongues with a bit of Deltan coin and liberally applied pints of Szofelian ale. Though Pearl had never left the Delta, he had no trouble understanding the foreign speech. The Meeric ear was uniquely attuned to language.

  The Meerhunter began the day in high spirits, believing himself close to his goal. By afternoon, however, it had become glaringly apparent that no one even remotely matching Ra’s description had been seen in the vicinity—or anywhere in Soth Szofl. Ever. If she’d been here, she would have been seen. Ra’s looks were striking in any location, but in Szofl, where the average height was a full head shorter than a typical Deltan, and every man, woman and child was almost as fair-haired as Pearl, Ra would have drawn crowds.

  Visiting tavern after tavern, Pike became more frustrated and more surly with drink as the day wore on, and Pearl could sense he was beginning to suspect he’d been hoodwinked. When they put up for the night, the Meerhunter grabbed Pearl by the collar and threw him down onto his knees.

  “I ought to whip you until you can’t stand.” Rage smoldered in his bloodshot eyes. “She was never her
e, was she?”

  Pearl stared up at him mutely, waiting for his punishment.

  “What use are you to me? Last Meer ever born and he can’t even conjure.” Pike cuffed him on the side of the head, and Pearl took it stoically, which seemed to enrage the man more. But Pike seemed to recognize that he might be inclined to go too far in his current state, and with a furious snarl, he yanked the cloth case from the pillow on the bed and shoved it over Pearl’s head, then bound Pearl’s hands behind him and locked them with the chain to the steam radiator that heated the room.

  “I’ll decide what to do with you in the morning,” Pike growled at him. “Perhaps I can still fetch a price for you from one of the boy-peddlers at the wharf.”

  Under the darkness of his covering, Pearl listened to the sounds of Pike throwing off his boots and dropping heavily onto the bed. The Meerhunter was soon snoring loudly from drink. He couldn’t blame the man for wanting to sell him after how Pearl had tricked him, but he dreaded the prospect of being sold to a peddler. Still, Pike didn’t know that Pearl had regained the full use of his voice—such that it was. Perhaps Pearl could conjure his way out of his next master’s hold before being forced to take another vow to obey. If he was bound to such a master, his fate would be dark indeed.

  Pearl closed his eyes beneath the hood and let Szofl’s subtle flow of magic lull him into a trance state that would allow him to stop seeing the dark possibilities of his future and sleep.

  When Pike rose in the morning, he didn’t bother to unchain Pearl or remove his hood, going out and leaving him where he knelt. He didn’t return until late in the evening, and Pearl’s limbs were cramped and aching by the time Pike unchained him and dragged him to a stool at the table. Pike removed the hood, and Pearl blinked his eyes for a moment, adjusting to the light. On the table before him was a pad of thick paper and a graphite pencil, and beside it was a glass of water.

  Pike slid the glass just out of his reach. “You’ll get this when you’ve proven yourself useful. I want to know exactly where MeerRa is hiding. No more bloody pictures. Start writing.”

  Pearl stared at the paper. For once, he actually didn’t know. The last image he’d had of Ra before moving out of range, if that was what it was, had been her mad flight from Mound Ahr. The only word-image he’d gotten from her was “End”, and he had no idea what that meant.

  Pike struck Pearl’s fingers with the handle of his leash. “Write!”

  With his fingers smarting from the blow, Pearl picked up the pencil. I do not know, he wrote, what has become of MeerRa.

  Pike scowled as he turned the paper toward him to read it. “What do you mean, you don’t know?” He wasn’t a fool. He knew Pearl couldn’t write words that were untrue.

  Pearl read violence in his eyes, or worse, serious intent to make good on his threat to sell Pearl into prostitution if he could get nothing more out of him. Pike was his master, and Pearl had promised to do as he said.

  He turned the pad of paper back toward himself. Ra traveled to the settlement of Haethfalt in the falend, but she has gone. Her mind is chaotic. I no longer see her.

  Realizing how thoroughly he’d been duped. Pike was livid. Pearl had lured him in the opposite direction from Ra until they’d both lost the trail.

  Closing his hand around Pearl’s upper arm as he rose, Pike yanked him up from the stool. “As worthless as you are to me, I take no pleasure in what you’ve forced me to do. Since I will have no bounty to show for all my trouble, you’ll fetch a price for your physical attributes.”

  Pearl clutched the pencil, scrawling on the pad as Pike dragged him away, and thrust the pad at his master to show him what he’d written. As Pike raised his hand to swat it away, his eye caught the words and he stopped in his tracks.

  I can conjure.

  Pike grabbed the pad and stared at the words, then studied Pearl’s face intently. “Show me.” He thrust the pad back. “But remember your vow to me. You can’t do me harm.”

  Pearl concentrated on the odd magic of this land as he wrote another word: Gold. As the letters formed beneath his pencil, a trail of gold thread followed them like a flourish in the margins of an ancient book. It wasn’t conjuring as he’d been used to doing it. He’d thought of a more specific source of gold, a priceless bust of Ra he remembered from the temple, which he was sure would have pleased his master well.

  But Pike was running his fingers over the thread, his eyes narrowed shrewdly. “You realize, boy, that you’ve demonstrated that I ought to take your head in for a bounty after all. And for one such as you, that bounty would be enough for me to retire on.”

  But you won’t, wrote Pearl quickly. You won’t harm me, as I will not harm you. The words wouldn’t cause direct harm to Pike, so there was no conflict in binding his master to them, and they couldn’t be nullified without nullifying Pearl’s own promise.

  Pike nodded slowly and put Pearl back on the stool. “Clever little bastard, aren’t you? Never mind the Meerhunter’s bounty, then. You can conjure me a bounty.” He tapped his finger hard against the table. “A thousand pieces of Universal Deltan coin.”

  Pearl closed his eyes and meditated on the image of the coins. He sensed he might achieve more accuracy if he spoke the words aloud, but it was better not to tip his hand. He wrote the words as Pike had said them—A thousand pieces of Universal Deltan coin—but instead of solid coins, the same thread appeared, spinning across the paper and forming images in gold relief. A thousand coins spilled over the paper, but they were made of this ethereal golden thread, like a priceless, glittering textile.

  “Not exactly what I asked for,” said Pike, running his fingers over the peculiar surface. “But I think I may have a use for you after all. There’s men would pay money for such a skill.”

  The wharf at Soth Bessaht was not the sort where a highly regarded courtesan such as Ume Sky could safely travel on her own. Cillian Rede would have to go instead. Ume hated traveling in the guise of her childhood self, but it was preferable to fending off unwanted sexual advances—or more likely outright assaults. There was a bustling trade in flesh here that had nothing to do with the attributes of the divine, and everything to do with commodities, women and children used as currency in the commerce of power and powerlessness.

  Cree would have said it was the sort of place that made her skin crawl trying to pass herself off as one of their kind—though she’d had to do it in a few places along their travels just to keep them both safe. Ume loved her for it.

  And missed her like the devil right now. Was she back from the lake yet? It tied Ume’s stomach in knots to imagine Cree finding the note in Ume’s stead. But she couldn’t dwell on that, or she might turn back. Right now she had enough to deal with as Cillian. Because Cillian was not the sort who could pass himself off as any kind of “man’s man”. As Cillian, Ume looked perpetually boyish. Her smooth skin that afforded her such ease in traveling the world as a woman marked her as the sort of “boy” who would have only one role among the men in this commodified society. While she didn’t relish providing oral pleasure for money to these sorts of men, she was exceedingly good at it. And offering it kept her relatively safe from the threat of having to provide the service for free.

  She asked after a ship called The Lady’s Bounty and learned from her patrons that it had sailed for the shores of Soth Szofl a week before her arrival in Bessaht, the only ship this time of year to travel the route. She’d hoped, somehow, to be wrong, to be told there was no such ship or that it hadn’t yet sailed. Any chance she had now of finding Pearl was in a distant land. It meant waiting for The Lady’s Bounty to return from Szofl and working her way across the ocean on the ship herself. And it meant traveling that many weeks and that many miles farther away from Cree.

  Thirteen: Exposure

  The mound was as quiet as a tomb. It was early yet, though the sun had already risen. If Haethfalt days in winter were oppr
essive in their brevity, highland summer days were blissfully long.

  Jak hesitated at the door, not quite a stranger, but no longer a name in this moundhold. A knock with the iron ring before entering seemed the best compromise. Jak knocked and peered into the peaceful pale that was characteristic of morning in this mound, and felt a pang of homesickness. The hobnail glass brick decorating Mound RemPeta just above ground level allowed a diffuse illumination that trickled overhead in rays of glowing dust and left the rooms below subtly touched with the suggestion of light. Rem had been a master mound builder in his day, and this mound was truly one of the finest in the Haethfalt settlement. The stillness seemed sacred and unpierceable, but Jak had violated it already.

  “Hello?” Most likely no one was up. For a moment, silence returned Jak’s greeting, and then a creak in the gathering room at the bottom of the stairs revealed a figure in one of the high-backed, overstuffed chairs. Geffn was seated in the haze. “Geff.” They observed one another, and Jak tried to summon words. “Forgive me for intruding.”

  Geffn rose and waved Jak in toward the mound’s interior. “You’re still welcome here.” There was a distinct emphasis on the word “you’re”.

  Jak descended the stone spiral of Rem’s unique staircase, one hand moving along the banister in a wistful caress of the polished wood. Geffn was quiet, and uncharacteristically calm. They’d passed over some threshold of their relationship—or he had—that had softened his resentment. Forgiveness seemed possible. Perhaps they were finally to be friends. Jak was willing but for the injury of Geffn’s betrayal of Ra—and even that, Jak conceded, had been just after all. Look what had become of her.