They went past the entrance to the maenads’ underground cave. For a moment Maya’s feet stuttered on the stone. I belong there. My pack. My pack. But the door was shut, and she tightened her muscles—she could not clench her sharpened teeth for fear of cutting herself—and walked past.
They’d reached the place where it was the shortest distance between the outer wall and the temple. Maya looked through the shadows with her sharpened eyes—I’d forgotten what this was like, to see so clearly even in the dark—saw nothing move, and beckoned the others quickly across the open space.
From here it was only a little distance to one of the small entrances to the main temple. The door was locked, of course, but the lock broke easily, with no more than a muffled crack, under Coram’s shifted hand.
They went through into almost complete darkness. Maya could see, as could Sufi, by the way he went looping along the short corridor and up the spiral stairs in front of them, but behind her she caught the others’ breaths of dismay, the almost-silent stumbling of their feet. She reached back a hand and found Aera’s, and linked like that, they made their way up turn after turn of the staircase that wound around the shaft through the centre of the temple.
Aera’s hand trembled within Maya’s, and through the bright, sharp-edged barrier of her maenad state, she remembered that Aera had not come here for five years, and last time she’d been shut in the labyrinth and left to die.
The staircase opened out into moonlight, bright after the darkness within the temple. The temple’s flat roof stetched out around them. Maya swept another look round, but they were safe. There’d been no guards posted up here, either. There was nothing but the flat, unwalled roof, and the dark square that was the centre shaft. It descended throughout the temple, then penetrated farther into the earth beneath, becoming a well so deep it could have been endless.
She let go of Aera’s hand, and between her and the head of the stairs the others dropped hands, too, and relaxed—just a little.
“It’s safe to talk,” Aera said to them, her voice very low. “When the sun comes up we must make sure to keep down—if anyone farther out in the courtyard looks up they’ll be able to see us if we’re any higher than kneeling.”
Before she was halfway through the sentence her words blurred, became sound without meaning. A wave of confusion rose to engulf Maya. Whom had she pursued up here, to kill in the sight of the cold moon? They all smelled like criminals, runaways, those whom the god wanted as victims, but she couldn’t think, she couldn’t remember how she’d ended up here, without her pack, with so many unclean ones…
“Maya.”
His voice pulled her out of the madness, back into clear air. For an instant she looked into his eyes. Her chest squeezed tight, her next breath caught in her throat.
Ah gods, how had she let him have such power over her? How was she going to survive when it was all over and she would have to begin to live without her power and without him?
“I’m all right,” she said, her voice flat, and lowered herself to sit on the cool stone roof, waiting for the dawn, waiting for it to be over, waiting for it to begin.
The dawn came, thin light bleeding slowly into the dark sky. Philos shifted cramped legs, wrapped his cloak closer around him against the chill air. The wait had felt longer than the length of time he knew it had actually taken. He was intensely aware of Maya over on the other side of the roof, as far as she could get from him, aware of every movement she made, every time her hands flexed, the long talons at the end of each finger clicking against the roof. He hoped for her sake that the madness, however much she was beating it down, controlling it, was still strong enough to wipe out the pain he’d inflicted on her. But he knew it wasn’t. Back on the desert floor, when he’d touched her, he’d felt it scorch through him, felt it mix sickeningly with his own.
He had said to Aera it didn’t matter if he didn’t love her, but now he knew that had been stupid. Stupid, and cruel. She might be the only person who could offer him happiness, the only person, as he’d said to Aera, that he’d ever felt anything this strong for, but what had he to offer her? Feelings that weren’t necessarily his own. Promises he wouldn’t be able to keep. And always the risk that he’d do this all over again, but with someone else, falling helplessly into false love in front of her eyes, making stupid decisions that could hurt them all. She deserved better than that—and from her reaction in the desert, she knew that too.
He’d lost her, maybe forever, and if he had, it was fair, he had no one but himself to blame. But…
He glanced at her, in her maenad form, her body a little too angular, her limbs too long to be those of a human, the black feathers of her hair lifting in the slight breeze. He wanted her still. It was stupid, and unfair to her—and, for all the gods knew, unfair to him, to settle for feelings he couldn’t know were real or not—but he didn’t care. He wanted her, even in her alien maenad form, he wanted her so badly that when he looked at her he couldn’t breathe.
The sun came up. Below them, the hush of feet sounded on the stone. A well-chain jangled. Then voices, a low early-morning hum filling the courtyard.
Beside Maya, Aera nodded to Iraus. He took a breath so deep it was like a gulp of air, spread his hands out on the floor and went motionless, only his dark curls lifting slightly in the breeze.
Minutes crawled by. Iraus gasped in another long breath, then all the muscles in his face went rigid.
“It’s done,” said Sufi.
“Are you sure?” Venli asked.
Sufi snapped a look at her. “Yes, I’m sure.” His gaze went to Aera, pleading, anxious. “Do it quickly. I—he’d never say but I think it hurts him.”
“He can hold it, though?” said Coram. “Sufi, tell me we haven’t thrown ourselves into this only to find he can’t—”
“Neither of us would mislead you. He’ll hold it till it kills him. That’s why I’m telling you, make it quick.” He looked back at his friend, and at the expression in his face, Philos could no longer see him as the boy he’d appeared to be. This was a young man watching his lover put himself in danger.
“Very well.” Aera stood. She’d been sitting near the edge of the roof, and as she got to her feet the rose-gold light of the rising sun fell over her, lighting her clearly against the still-dark sky to the west, turning the coldsteel of her dress to the colour of flame.
“People of the volcano-god,” she called, her voice pitched to carry all over the courtyard and beyond. “I am your fire-priestess, chosen of the god himself, and I have returned to you.”
From all over the temple courtyard pale faces lifted. Held by Iraus’s power, people were rooted where they stood, could only move limbs with the slowness of an insect trapped in sticky spider thread. But all the same, faces turned in Aera’s direction, mouths opened, awestruck.
Already bathed in the pale gold light of the sunrise, Aera’s body began to change. Her black hair rippled with a sheen of flame, as if lava were running suddenly over the charred side of a mountain. The gleam of her dress faded into near invisibility as, within it, her lava-form took over, becoming the colour of a candle flame in daylight, then of a statue made of amber, then glowing red-gold, unmistakable: the fire-priestess of the temple, returned to her rightful place.
She called out again, her voice leaping like flame. “Five years ago you were told I’d failed the test, failed the god and died in his lava flood. I’m here to tell you that was a lie. The god found me worthy. I passed his test, I survived the lava. I am the fire-priestess of the temple, and I have come back.”
For a moment she hesitated at the edge of the roof, flaming like a goddess stepped straight out of the rising sun. Then she shifted all the way through to her feet—up until then she had left them unshifted so as not to melt straight through the building beneath her—and stepped off the edge of the roof.
She fell like a comet, sparks flying after her in a vivid trail, and landed in a splash of molten rock.
When sh
e stood, an audible gasp came from the crowd. She was unharmed, glowing through the fabric of her dress. She turned, slowly, then raised an arm to point across the courtyard to where a group of white-robed priests stood.
“You. You remember me. You remember taking me back to the labyrinth, shutting me in and leaving me to starve.” She walked towards the group, her feet leaving glowing prints on the stone. Even from where Philos stood, he could see the shock and dawning fear on their faces.
“What else do you remember?” said Aera. “Do you remember lying to my people? Do you remember mending the bracelets you cut from my wrists so you could show everyone I had died in the lava and left them behind? Do they hang now on the standing stone, waiting for the next girl with power given from the god himself, the next girl you mean to control?”
Iraus’s gift controlled bodies only, not faces or voices. One of the priests—one of the two high priests, by the splendour of his robes—spoke, his voice, like Aera’s, carrying across the courtyard. “No, I do not remember you. You’re not the fire-priestess. You are a counterfeit, a demon sent to deceive the faithful. Do not listen to her. Do not listen!”
Venli gave a murmur of distress. “Gods, they’ll not believe her. Not when the priests say that.”
Coram said nothing, but from the corner of his eye Philos saw the grey colour of stone creep over him as he shifted.
Aera’s laugh came up to them. “What, you have so little faith in the god you serve that you think he would permit a demon to counterfeit the very holiest of his gifts?” She turned, trailing sparks. “People of the temple, hear me. The priests have lied to you. Lied your whole lives, and beyond that, back to I do not know when. I am Aera, the hundred-and-first fire-priestess, proven by the fire of the volcano. Look at me and know me.”
She stood, fiery hair rippling about her, shimmers of molten rock puddling around her feet. Her fiery face paled, the heat drew away. Normal colours came back to her skin: her face, her shoulders and arms. She stood before them all, half lava-shifter, half the girl they’d known five years before.
Not everyone reacted. Some did not recognise her—or still did not believe her. But around the courtyard, recognition and shock swept into face after face, three-quarters of everyone in the courtyard.
“They know her.” Coram’s voice was shaky with relief. “They know her. They believe her.”
But believing the fire-priestess, who spoke with the voice of the god, was one thing. Accepting the people she led—unclean, all of them shifters and runaways and those with unsanctioned gifts—would be quite another.
They’d talked about it over and over during the last five years. Aera would have to walk a dangerous line, both the returning, unjustly deposed priestess and the revolutionary, relying on the people’s instinctive reverence for her gift, their willing recognition of her place at the peak of their hierarchy.
For this reason they had agreed that she would present herself as the servant of the god. And that they would all do the same, ignoring whatever stage of disbelief they had reached in their years of exile, or what fears they had about whether by doing so they were inviting the god’s vengeance. They clung to the knowledge that it had been the priests who lied, the priests who murdered and controlled. Not the god, never—directly—the god.
“If he exists at all,” Leos had said once.
“I know.” Aera’s face had been tense, her lower lip bitten bloodless. “I know everything we have, everything we were told, has come through the priests. Who lie. But my fear…my worst fear…is that he does exist, and he’s evil. That he, not just the priests, wants murderers and assassins at his command. That when the priests sacrificed so many shifters, when they chained Coram, when they left me to die, that they were, after all, doing his will, not just theirs. And going back—it’s not just a question of going against the priests, but against the god himself.”
“I don’t believe that,” Coram had said.
“I know. I don’t either, not really. And anyway—” she had shaken her head, “—what choice do we have? I believe they’ll accept me, I believe I can make them turn against the priests, I even believe I can make them accept the gifts the priests have declared unclean. But if I try to take their god from them all that will do is make them my enemies—or, if I succeed, they will have no reason to believe in me either.” She sighed. “I hate it, though. I hate to deceive them. Even though I, still, have not given up my belief in a god who can be merciful, in a god who does not demand death.”
Philos thought of that conversation now, as he watched the flaming figure with the human face, standing with her would-be killers at her back. Every action she took they had planned, discussed, argued over. Every action was deliberate, intended to evoke the response they needed. And every action held the possibility of failure.
“I bring others with me,” Aera said. “Others who bear gifts given by the god. It is one of them who holds you now. In a moment he will set you free—all of you. My bracelets, that the priests took from me, hang on the standing stone. Fetch them for me, that I may take once again my place as your fire-priestess.” She paused, a long breath of silence, then slanted a look up to the roof where they stood and gave a quick, sharp nod.
“Iraus, now,” said Sufi, and behind Philos he heard the boy’s exhausted gasp as he let go of his gift and slumped face-down to the floor.
In the courtyard the statues came alive. The high priest flung out an arm in the direction of the guards, issuing a furious order. Behind him, Philos felt everyone go still, scarcely breathing, waiting. If the priests still held sway, if the guards came running to the roof, they would have to fight their way out. Then, whether Aera wanted it or not, they would bring the army and there would be war.
Only two guards moved, a swift stride forward, then stopped, looking back at their companions. The priest swung his arm again, an unmistakable gesture: hurry up, do it now. But they didn’t.
Then, all of a sudden, someone took off running. A young woman, one of the novice priestesses, hurrying towards the outer gate. Then one of the guards. Then another, older priestess. Then others, men and women from all over the courtyard, running towards the gate. Towards the standing stone.
Someone flung the gate open and light fell in a sharp-edged slice across the shadow cast by the wall. The people were momentarily black cutouts against it before they blocked the gateway, surged through and out.
It was the young priestess who’d moved first who came back holding the bracelets, but she didn’t come alone. She was being carried on the shoulders of two of the guards, the bracelets a flash of silver in her upraised hand.
The guards set her down in front of Aera, and all three bent low, touching their foreheads to the ground. Philos saw a flicker of discomfort pass over Aera’s face. She had been a long time out of this world, and although she would use its rules of conduct, they sat uneasily with her. She put a hand out as the young priestess began to get up, helped her to her feet.
The priestess held out the bracelets. Her voice was not as well trained as Aera’s, but she clearly wanted to be heard—Philos caught most of what she said.
“We thought you were dead, but you are alive. We thought you had failed, but you have returned to us. You speak for the volcano-god himself—we will follow wherever you lead us.”
“Did she rehearse that?” said Venli, behind Philos.
“She’s the fire-priestess elect.” Maya’s words came as if from a distance, cold and detached, the changed cadences of her maenad voice making it unfamiliar.
“That doesn’t explain why she sounds like an actress performing lines she’s said a thousand times—”
“Yes it does,” came the cold voice, not with a snap like Maya would have given it before, but just speaking, cutting across Venli’s words. “If she’s afraid of the test—and she must be eighteen at least, it’ll be coming in her next year or so—she maybe has rehearsed all this time, hoping someone else would take over from her, hoping she’d be s
pared.”
“Oh.” Philos heard the shrug in Venli’s words. “You know her?”
“I know who she is.” The tone in Maya’s voice drew a definite end to the conversation.
Below them, guards had taken hold of the priests, brought them to stand before Aera. No longer glowing, she was in her human form, her dress hanging cool and silver-coloured about her. But when she looked at them, Philos could have sworn he heard the sizzle of sparks.
“Who mended my bracelets?” she said. “When you took them from me five years ago, who did you take them to so you could mend them and pretend I’d died?”
The high priest who had spoken to her earlier said nothing.
Aera snapped her fingers and fire sparked to shower around them. Now Philos did hear the sizzle, as tiny lava-droplets spattered on the stone, pocking it with specks of red, like blood. “Who mended them?”
The priest’s shoulders jerked, a fearful, not-quite-controlled movement.
“I want answers. I want them now.” She put her hands out, and they were already glowing, the lines in the palms a golden tracery across the flesh, the fingernails crescents of light. “Don’t make me make you tell.”
“You mean to kill us?” The other high priest’s voice was loud with contempt. Next to Philos, Coram stirred, his wings making a stony rustle, his breath going in a sharp sound. “You refused to kill for the god, but you’ll kill for revenge, to get what you want, and you wonder why we found you unworthy?”
For an instant Aera’s eyes shone flat, like coins reflecting firelight. Then, “No,” she said, and stepped back. “I do not kill unless I must. I could make you tell, make no mistake about that—” her voice flared, bright as flame, “—but I need not, not now. Someone will find out for me.”
It was as she turned, lips set in enforced calm, not giving in to the anger Philos could see in her face, that the priest’s knife came out.
Blood of the Volcano: Sequel to Heart of the Volcano Page 21