by Jane Kindred
Geffn laughed. “I’m afraid I don’t need to. I was so excited when I saw you come…” He grinned and kissed Jak’s fingers. “But thank you for offering. I’m touched.”
Jak lay back against the mattress, holding his hand. “I feel I’ve cheated you.”
“You’re not serious?” He pulled the quilt over the two of them and discreetly wiped himself off. “Do you have any idea how wonderful that was for me? It’s enough to last me the rest of my life.”
They lay beside one another, nothing more needing to be said. The sound of rain returned to their conscious awareness and they both glanced up at the window that looked onto the level ground above the mound. There was a dark line against the bottom of the glass, and Jak made a sharp sound. It was the darkness of saturated earth.
They woke the others, though most hadn’t been asleep for a while and politely pretended not to have heard anything.
Rem inspected the ominous line of dark along the seal of the window while the rest waited anxiously in the doorway. He shook his head. “The ground can’t hold this much water,” he said, his voice thin. “Gather up what you treasure. We’ll have to move to the barn.”
Twenty-Two: Degeneration
Soth AhlZel was alive. Having brought forth a populace of lifeless subjects from the depths of Shiva’s divining pool, Ra had ordered them to rise and serve her, and they had obeyed. She had peopled her temple and her soth. Her power was limitless.
During the years of MeerRa’s reign in Rhyman, he had diligently adhered to the precepts of his templars and would never have dared to indulge in luxuries simply because he was Meer. Every priceless ornament he’d ever worn had been worn out of sacred duty. And on those annual feast days on which he’d worn nothing but gold paint while he sat on his altar like a gilded idol listening to the wealthiest petitioners, he’d submitted to the ritual of being bathed and painted in the golden grease because it was his duty, not because it was his right.
But Ra was done with all that. She was a god, and she would do as she pleased.
Instead of reserving the ritual for a single day of the year, Ra decreed that she was to be painted in gold every morning with the rising of the sun over the crags of Munt Zelfaal, so that not even the radiance of daylight could rival her. A retinue of handmaidens attended her as was the custom of old, chosen from among Soth AhlZel’s virgins.
Ra would tolerate nothing less than perfection, and her wrath when she was crossed was swift. When one of her handmaidens failed to please her, missing a stripe of painted flesh, Ra speared the girl’s throat with nails sharpened to daggers, watching the blood gurgle out of her as though it were a mere curiosity. When another dropped a precious sapphire bead while braiding Ra’s hair, Ra crushed the girl’s throat in her fist. She had the slender corpses tossed from the city walls into the gorge for the ravens to feast upon. She was Ra the merciless.
Starlight illuminated her altar room, the sky above the open dome over Ra’s renaissanced throne the one clear spot within the storm engendered by Soth AhlZel’s raising. Rain was falling all around the temple, but none fell here. Had it not been daylight a moment ago? Disoriented, Ra tried to rise and tumbled from the seat, reeling against the altar and dropping onto all fours, where she huddled retching up nothing from the empty pit of her stomach. Her naked limbs were daubed and crusted with gold. How long had she been mad?
When the convulsing pith of her being yielded nothing, Ra sat back against her heels and found her golden torso smeared with blood, as though she were a sacrifice laid before the throne. Needles of pain in her abdomen suggested she might have been disemboweled, but there were no marks on the skin. Smoothing her hand downward, she saw it too was covered in blood, the fingernails, long and jagged, black with it. Moving her legs apart, she realized the blood flowed from between her thighs. Doubling over against a siege of cramps, she recalled that she’d been menstruating when she came here. But that didn’t explain the condition of her hand.
Overwhelmed with a sudden flood of shame she couldn’t place, Ra was seized with the conviction that what she must have done to herself could not have been enough.
Jak, she thought fleetingly. She wanted Jak. With a searing swiftness, she was overcome with this need. Nothing would suffice but the sweet body of her love. She needed Jak’s mouth, Jak’s breasts, Jak’s fingers, Jak’s cunt. She slid from the altar and crawled on the floor, screaming Jak’s name. She was naked, red and gold, like a violent, undulating snake.
Exhausted and without her voice, she found herself by Shiva’s pool, gazing into it at the ghoul of her reflection. The memory of MeerRa similarly garbed in gold paint before a hall of shattered mirrors—the mocking, indestructible monster that was himself staring back at him—laughed up at her.
The pool was fathomless and colder than thought. She ought to summon courage and throw herself into it while there was time. She longed to. She feared the fading of this moment of reason.
But indigo-eyed Ahr, breathtaking and noble, appeared before her and blocked the way. I will not have your death on my head twice. She stood solemnly between Ra and peace. Ra was not to be allowed to die. This was Ahr’s punishment of her.
“Vetmaaimeerra,” said a voice behind her, and Ra whirled on her knees to face the blue-skinned vassal that waited on her. She couldn’t remember why she’d summoned him. A vein in her temple began to throb.
“Where are my virgins?” Ra demanded.
“Meneut,” said the servant, evoking the insufferably loyal Merit. “You have…dispensed with all who were in your employ.”
“Then fetch me more!” Ra ordered. “I wish to bathe.”
The fragrant bathwater rippled like liquid sunlight with the golden paint now floating on its surface. The waists and forearms of her maidservants were ringed with the glittering pigment as they rose at Ra’s sides to lead her up the marble steps. With their pale blue skin, a minor consequence of Ra’s method of necromancy, they were summer skies tinted with midmorning sun. Above Temple Ra, however, the sky did not mimic them. The great altar room—MeerShiva’s—which Ra had left empty, was flooded with water, as were the streets of Soth AhlZel.
Ra grew irritated with the attentions of her handmaidens as they dried her, and she flung them away, not tempering her Meeric strength to their small bodies. One had fallen against the carved relief of a jade column, blood flowing in a steady stream against her pristine face. Another lay twisted and whimpering on crushed bones. Ra ignored them.
She strode through the temple in her naked glory, agitated and on edge. If this was the power Shiva had commanded, it was dull, and Ra was furious with its banality. Why should she tolerate such dullness and ceremony? This city, these puppets, were hers. She clapped her hands, and her Merit-like servant came.
“Today is a feast day,” Ra announced. “All feasts will now be in honor of me. There will be no vetmas.” She paused as a delicious thought came over her. “Take the virgins you brought me and deliver them to my altar. See that my subjects are assembled to witness their sacrifice. If I am pleased with AhlZel’s offerings, there will be no need for more until I decree it.”
Ra’s citizens came, trembling before her, to worship in honor of her feast day. They filled the court and courtyard—resplendently dressed by the whims of her making—wet, glistening jewels. Before releasing her handmaidens to their sacrifice, Ra had them paint her once more in gold. Delicate, quavering hands stroked her skin, dipped in the golden grease, painting her with fear and reverence in the knowledge that they were soon to be her sacrificial offerings.
When they’d finished, Ra commanded a quartet of brawny young slaves to carry her in an upright litter to her throne above the altar, where the virgins were presented before her.
“Please me with your sacrifice,” she commanded them.
The templar priests lifted the first of the virgins and stretched her across the altar at Ra’s golden
feet. Blue Merit held up the ceremonial dagger for Ra’s inspection. She nodded and waved her hand impatiently at one of the templars. Wrapping his hands around the hilt without hesitation, the templar plunged the blade into the pale blue breast.
A fountain of blood sprayed up with the child’s scream, its tint also darkly blue instead of red. Ra leapt from the throne at the gushing sight of it and crouched over the warm body to drink, her mouth pressed into the torn hole of the dying girl’s chest, ripping at the flesh with her teeth. The body gave a final convulsion. Ra raised her head with a screech of triumph, and the blood dripped over her chin, now red where it had touched her vitality. “Another,” she demanded. “Bring me more!”
She gorged herself on the tender sacrifices, seven virgins in all, taking out the still-beating heart from the budding chest of the last and consuming it. This was what Meerhood was meant to be. All who came before her had been fools. Soth AhlZel would only be the first, her mountain throne, but all the world would eventually bow down to her, existing solely for her, for her appetites, for her indulgence. “Vetmaaimeerra!” she laughed. “Vetma!”
Pearl avoided mirrors, trying desperately to shut out the horrifying images of MeerRa’s reign of terror over the newly renaissanced Soth AhlZel. He could refuse to see, but he couldn’t refuse to hear. His head was full of shrieks and wailing, and Ra’s laughter that sounded nothing like the Ra he’d known. Whatever had befallen her, it had turned her into someone he couldn’t recognize. When he wasn’t sitting for his petitioners or conjuring their vetmas, he huddled in his bed, rocking, and sucking his fist as he’d done when he lived in Nesre’s box.
But worse than the visions of Ra was the feeling of the poison that flowed into him through his Meeric connection. He couldn’t escape it. Dark impulses in the mist of Meeric creation were becoming his own. He had visions of eviscerating Pike. Though he might have wished for the freedom to do Pike harm in order to be rid of him, the violence of these visions made him physically ill. He closed his eyes and felt Pike’s warm blood running from his mouth after he’d torn out the Meerhunter’s throat while the man was still alive.
He couldn’t, of course, do any of these things. He and Pike were locked together, unable to harm one another because of Pearl’s own words. But he’d spoken no such vow not to harm Ume.
Pearl tried to stay away from her, submitting to her ministrations because Pike wished it, but trying to avoid any further contact. She tried at first to speak to him, her kindness unbearable, because even as he craved the kinship he felt through her connection to Alya, every kind word and gentle look evoked an image of him stabbing or strangling her.
He didn’t want to. He liked Ume, and he wanted her to like him, but his blood was treacherous. It taunted him: Speak a word and break her neck. What is she to the Meer? Nothing but ordinary. Pearl wanted to argue with his blood, but he didn’t dare open his mouth for fear of what might escape it.
Twenty-Three: Malignancy
The moorland was a dense marsh. There would be no crop at all when the storm had ended. Jak didn’t want to think what this meant for the mounds themselves. Some across the way had already collapsed. Only aboveground barns, sheds and stables, for those who had them, were habitable now. Two smaller moundholds had come for shelter, sharing the barn with the RemPetans, their few qirhu and a handful of other livestock.
Geffn appeared at the top of the ladder, joining Jak in the dry loft. “Here we are again.” He attempted a smile, but it faded at the soft sound of Mell’s weeping from the corner of the loft she and Keiren occupied.
Keiren looked up at Geffn and Jak leaning together with interlocked arms for comfort. “Despite this mess, it’s good to have you back.” He rubbed Mell’s arm as he held her at his side. Jak nodded in acknowledgment. “Good to see you two have mended things,” he added. “A man needs his mate in times of trouble.”
Geffn spoke before Jak could answer. “A man needs his friends in times of trouble. Jak and I have formally divorced.” Jak glanced at him, grateful he hadn’t misunderstood the morning.
Keiren raised his brow. “Divorced? But she—”
“Shut up, Keir,” Mell interrupted, rubbing her sleeve against her damp cheeks. “And stop insulting Jak with pronouns.”
Keiren looked abashed. “Well, anyway,” he mumbled. “It’s good to see that you’re…friendly again.”
Jak suppressed an urge to laugh, and Geffn turned his head toward the tiny loft window to hide his smile. His expression changed as he peered through the glass. “Well, holy sooth.”
“What is it?” Jak peered around him, worried that something worse had befallen the settlement.
A lone individual stood before the deluged mound, bending down at the hobnail window—Jak’s bedroom window—drenched in the downpour.
Ahr. The word was almost foreign, hadn’t been in Jak’s head in three-quarters of a year. Jak felt a sudden, devastating pain between the ribs. “Ahr!” Foolishly, Jak beat on the pane before scrambling to the ladder and climbing down.
Outside, Ahr turned and straightened at the sound of Jak splashing through the sodden muck behind him. Jak, he mouthed before it was possible to hear him. Jak dashed over the ruined ground and fell on him, arms thrown around him. Ahr returned the embrace and they stood molded together, silent and unmoving in the wash of the storm.
When they parted, Jak observed the cold streams of water snaking over Ahr’s smooth olive cheeks and dripping from his sable hair into his infinite night-sky-blue eyes, and felt such kindred with him it was impossible to speak. He hovered, as Jak had never really noticed, between the boundaries of sex, as gender-ambiguous in many respects as Jak. He was stoically controlled and outwardly dispassionate as Jak was. He was beautiful. Jak loved him. How could Jak have forgotten him?
When they’d shared that single night of awkward intimacy between them, Jak had perhaps consciously begun to put him into that void. His desire had been disarming. Jak had let him close to the thin skin and then bolted, the helpless rabbit of childhood dominating then. Ra, whatever else she’d done, had allowed Jak to step away from the inner portrayal of the self as prey, and others as predator.
This wasn’t the time to confess to Ahr that Jak’s love for him wasn’t fraternal, but Jak would soon, would make up for the distance wedged between them.
“The mounds.” Ahr looked around him with a helpless gesture. “It’s terrible.”
Jak nodded. There was nothing more to say.
“I went home first. Mound Ahr is still solid.” Ironically, Ahr’s impractical insistence on building his mound half aboveground had proofed it against the worst disaster in Haethfalt history. “I saw that Ra had been there.” Ahr’s eyes seemed to deepen. “Is she with you?”
Jak’s chest felt weighted with lead. There was something vaguely disturbing in Ahr’s face as he spoke of Ra, but more immediately disturbing was the awful thing Jak had to tell him.
Ra was drunk on the blood of sacrifice, yet she demanded more. She’d made families in her peopling of Soth AhlZel, mothers with infants. “Bring me the suckling children,” she commanded. “Full of sweet milk from the breast.”
For the first time, her obedient thralls faltered.
“It grows late,” said her manservant. “Have they not satisfied you, meneut?”
She turned a deadly eye on him, and his heart stopped for an instant by the sheer force of her gaze. “Must I slit your throat? I can make a hundred like you.”
He bowed silently.
“Bring—me—the—infants!”
A child in the worshipful throng began to cry as its mother tried to hide it, and the woman looked up wretchedly at the unquestionable Meer. Ra stretched out her golden arm, dripping with gore, and the woman cried out.
“Give it to me,” said Ra. “Or I will have you disemboweled and fed to a pack of feral dogs.”
The woman, impossibly, t
urned and fled, and the crowd parted in terrified confusion to let her through.
“I will tear your eyes from your head!” screamed Ra, rising to her feet. “I will feed them to the dogs myself!”
Chaos had broken out among the throng. Mothers were fleeing, stumbling over one another, and those who hadn’t stopped them saw they too must flee. Ra’s temple servants were joining in the mutiny of cowardice. All but the blue Merit. He stood beside her, fist to his heart as Merit had stood to bid her good-bye on the humble steps at Rhyman.
She paused in her fury as a brief moment of the terror of sanity descended on her. She had drunk blood and dined on human sacrifice. She was fatally stricken with madness. There was no hope of escaping it. She was a plague worse than that which MeerHraethe had released on his own soth. How she hated these moments when she knew herself.
Blue Merit was watching her with loyalty and compassion. Her subjects were escaping on screams of terror, and only he remained in the marbled jade hall. Ra twisted her fingers into his hair and dashed his head against the altar, laughing as the skull splintered. She battered the head repeatedly into the stone. Pink brain matter and red-jagged splinters of bone were flying from it. Pink like the crushed head of my RaNa.
Ahr stood once more before her, the dark eyes of liquid ink regarding her unblinking, and Ra screamed like a great cat. She dropped the unrecognizable corpse and flew at the perfumed body, unveiled and flat chested, as Ahr had never been. Ahr’s substance dissolved in her hands, and Ra fell to the floor crouched on all fours. She ripped her nails across the tile, cutting a razor’s gash into it, and shrieked into the empty air.
The courtyard too had emptied, and Ra ran in her golden paint into the river of the street. She scaled the wall of the temple as though it were a low rock, and stood atop the image of herself she’d placed there. Her feet were on her double’s breasts.