Idol of Glass

by Jane Kindred

  Madness didn’t destroy her; atoning for it might.

  Looking Glass Gods, Book 3

  Ra has ruined everything. Returning to life through “renaissance” was her first mistake. Magical excess was her second. Now she must face the consequences of her reckless conjuring. Her beloved Ahr is dead by her hand, and the comfort she’d found in gender-rebel Jak seems lost to her forever.

  Ra takes solace in punishment—and in communion with her punisher, the mysterious and merciless MeerShiva. But Shiva has spun a skein of secrecy over centuries—secrets about Ra’s origins and the origins of the Meer themselves. And as the secrets begin to unravel, someone else’s magic is at work from the hidden realm. Someone with the ability to redraw the fabric of the world itself.

  As the picture becomes clearer, Ra must face some harsh realities: not everything is about her, and punishment isn’t enough. She must stand before Jak and try to atone for what she’s done. But seeing Jak will reveal one more secret Ra never saw coming—and one that may mean her own undoing.

  Warning: Contains scenes of intense BDSM, non-binary genders, and a preponderance of kick-ass women.

  Idol of Glass

  Jane Kindred

  One: Torpor

  Even spattered in dried blood and pieces of the dead man’s flesh, they cut a striking pair of figures on the dunes of the falend. Jet and dark poppy, their hair hung down their backs in the colors of atrocity. Light caressed them, knowing they were more than human, rippling iridescent over their tresses like quicksilver in the presence of the divine.

  As in the youth of her former life, Ra was attired in the manner of a Meeric prince, the plain kaftan of black silk muting much of the violence that covered her. MeerShiva was less subtle, the pearl-embroidered train of her sheer citrine gown, from the same ancient era, dragging behind her, caked in mud from the heath they’d left behind. They were two livid strokes of pigment on the canvas of sun-blanched sand.

  Satisfied with the decimation of the remains they’d dumped in the marsh outside the small trading post beyond Mole Downs, they had simply walked away, and continued walking until they’d left the high country altogether. Coming down out of the mound-riddled moors and across the lowland heath, they followed the Filial River toward the east, past the falls that plunged beneath the bluff at the wasteland’s edge, and into the high desert north of the Anamnesis delta, until at last even Meeric sensibility demanded rest.

  The palette of the sky behind the scattered stars held the deep lack of pigment that came with the hours after midnight, and they were in the center of nothing, a vast stretch of arid land that separated mound country from the Deltan lowlands. With a few murmured words, Shiva raised a single tower around them, round and made of stone, with windowless walls that stretched up over them into immeasurable heights. Meeric conjuring was often merely out of whim, influenced by the current state of mind and body. They lay on a floor of heather, an anomalous afterthought, with barely a pause between waking and sleep.

  Jak lay at Geffn’s side, staring at the ceiling. They shared a bed for comfort, though nothing more. The question of their long estrangement had been settled once and for all in the formal dissolution of their bond after Ahr’s body had been consigned to the elements in the Bone Fire. During all that ceremony—the harvest rites marking the turn of the year, the final parting with Ahr, the unbinding rite in which Jak and Geffn had cut the red braided strings they’d worn around their wrists to symbolize their union and set each other free—Jak had been in a state of stasis. Unable to feel anything, unable to fully comprehend the loss of Ahr, despite the grand Deltan memorial.

  In mound culture, funeral rites were less dramatic. Haethfalters didn’t believe in the necessity of the destruction of the body by fire to free the spirit for its next life. Hadn’t, at least, until Ra had come, having effected her own cremation from the grave in order to hasten her return, “renaissanced” as a fully formed adult in an instant on a cold winter night. But that was an exception to the rule. Ra’s renaissance was devilry and madness, and Jak should have recognized it from the start.

  Haethfalters practiced a form of sky burial, building a platform for the deceased and laying the body out in the elements to be excarnated by carrion birds. Burying bodies below ground was impractical in a place where the ground was frozen half the year and where underground real estate was at a premium for their souterrain dwellings. When the bones were picked clean, they were taken and placed in the family’s burial cairn—a place that didn’t require such deep digging, and which they had to dig only once, during the warmer months.

  They’d used the sky burial platform as Ahr’s crematory, and Jak had watched his elements spiral up into the warm autumn wind. Smoke and embers and ash. It hadn’t seemed real. It hadn’t seemed like Ahr’s body wrapped in fragrant oils and spices and covered in flower garlands. It hadn’t seemed like anyone’s body at all as the platform was consumed in bright flames against the dusk sky. It had all been too surreal.

  But there’d been no denying the reality once the urn was placed in Jak’s hands. Within the unassuming clay vessel was all that was left of Jak’s dearest friend.

  Jak had led that final ceremony, the procession to the family cairn, the slow march alone down the dank steps beneath the circle of stones, accompanied by Oldman Rem’s mournful highland fiddle from above, to place Ahr’s vessel in the narrow vault that normally held the bones of the dead. By custom, and not belief, Jak murmured prayers to the ancestors—Jak’s mother, Fyn, and Fyn’s parents, whom Jak had never known—and then tried to say good-bye to Ahr somehow. The finality made it impossible, and Jak dropped onto wobbly knees before the vault and wept.

  Ahr was family to Jak, and no one had questioned his interment under the cairn. Family, after all, was a broad term in mound society, having little to do with blood. In the niche beside Ahr’s were the bones of Fyn, the last person Jak had said good-bye to here. And on Fyn’s other side lay the remains of Geffn’s brother, Pim, who’d died before Geffn was born. They were all connected to Jak in one way or another. But kneeling there among the sputter of tallow candles as the sobs receded into sighs, Jak had felt the wrongness of it. Ahr was a Deltan. His ashes didn’t belong below the highland moor.

  Jak sighed, still staring up at the stone ceiling. There was still so much damage in Haethfalt from the rains. It was a terrible time to leave. But Jak couldn’t let this wait until spring.

  “I have to take him home.” Jak spoke in the darkness beside Geffn. “I know I’m needed here to help rebuild, but Merit deserves to know. They were lovers. He should have the ashes.”

  “You do what you need to.” Geffn squeezed Jak’s hand atop the blanket. “The moundhold will be here for you. Whatever you decide to do will be all right.”

  But it wasn’t true. It would not be all right. Nothing could ever be all right with so much gone wrong.

  Two: Efflorescence

  Golden lights seemed to twinkle in and out of his vision like tufts of flaming dandelion seedpods floating above him on the air. They blinked into being and were as swiftly snuffed out. The room smelled pleasantly of burning things as well as the musty damp of stone, and he was warm, but not uncomfortably so.

  “Our Pearl wakes.”

  Pearl sat up and looked to the source of the voice. At the end of his bed stood the loveliest woman he’d ever seen, hair paler than his own—as though each strand were a translucent hollow—hanging over her shoulders and braided in a series of woven plaits, like a basket or a web. The latter idea was reinforced by the network of pearlescent blue veins visible through colorless skin. Though there was something unsettling about her lack of pigment, like a creature that had
evolved without sunlight. He corrected his initial thought. She was almost the loveliest woman he’d ever seen. She wasn’t Ume. And this wasn’t his room in the temple at Soth Szofl.

  He looked down at his arms, stretched bare atop a blanket knitted of some ineffably soft fiber. Wide, shell-pink satin ribbons decorated his wrists, tied in loose knots with the ends hanging long at his sides.

  “You bled yourself.” Her voice was empty of judgment, just a statement of fact. “These ribbons speed the healing of your sutures.”

  Pearl had drawn the sharp edge of a razor against his veins. The act had been the culmination of days of mad thoughts that wouldn’t leave him, days of seeing the madness of MeerRa on her distant mountain, of hearing the call of her tainted blood. Days of her poison bleeding into him through the Meeric flow, unstoppable. He realized now he could no longer hear it. His head was blissfully silent of anything but his own thoughts.

  The poisoned blood had made him want to hurt the people who came to him for vetmas, to hurt Ume, who had been nothing but kind to him. On the day he’d cut himself, a woman had come before his throne with an offering, the lone voice among his petitioners that didn’t grate against his ears. Her petition had been one of desperation, the deep chestnut brown of her eyes imploring him: “Take this burden from me.” In the words, he’d seen the burden in her thoughts. She’d come to take his life, and could not.

  Once his mind had fixed on it, he could fulfill no other vetma but this. In the vetma, Pearl had seen the way out, the deliverance from the madness and the poison in his blood. Take his own life, and he would not have to take any others. He would no longer be a danger to Ume. He would silence at last the terrible words and still the terrible pictures that flowed from the top of Munt Zelfaal into the river of his blood. He would let the blood flow out of him and away.

  He’d watched it curling and billowing, red threads among the bathwater scalloping into lurid, flowery shapes, like a violent bouquet. Like his pictures sometimes did, the blood had seemed to move and form images of its own accord. He couldn’t make sense of what he saw, and thought perhaps it was only the last of his consciousness, meaningless electrical impulses trickling through his brain as the life left him, that made him attach any significance to the images at all.

  And then he’d woken here. But where was here?

  “You have come under the hill,” said the woman, who still watched him without expression. She seemed to read the thoughts inside his head the way Pearl read petitioners. “I am the Caretaker. It is my duty to see that you recover fully.”

  He hadn’t spoken in ages, but he had a question in his head she wasn’t answering. Pearl swallowed, and forced the words past his larynx, sounding like the crinkling leaves of a rice paper wrapper. “Where is Ume?”

  “Ume is no longer of any concern.” The Caretaker smiled, and it seemed not quite a nice smile. “You are with us now.”

  To say things had been strained between them since the Hidden Folk had manipulated Cree and Ume into bringing Pearl under the hill would be putting it mildly. Cree studied Ume surreptitiously over the top of her periodical as they relaxed after dinner. The pretense of reading it was absurd. Cree couldn’t read Szofelian. Which made the fact that Ume accepted Cree’s pretense without question even more depressing.

  Ume had stood by her after Cree had nearly gone through with a scheme to kill her own son. The Hidden Folk had been to blame, their lies and tricks designed to manipulate both Ume and Cree into doing their bidding. After revealing that Pearl was the child Cree had believed stillborn more than a dozen years ago, they’d convinced Cree he was dangerously mad, putting Ume’s life in the balance. Ume had forgiven Cree her foolishness in being taken in by them. But in the days that followed the loss of Pearl to the Hidden Folk, Ume had become withdrawn.

  It reminded Cree of those awful weeks after the Expurgation when Ume had virtually—and then actually—disappeared, retreating into the guise of Cillian Rede, her childhood self. Cree hadn’t understood it then: that the put-on persona had been Cillian and not Ume.

  She’d met Cillian first while working the docks in Soth In’La—a young man down on his luck looking for a meal and a place to crash. The disguise had been Templar Nesre’s design. Nesre had been a temple priest at the time, and not the prelate of Soth In’La he would become as a result of the Expurgation. A patron of Ume’s in the red-lamp district around the temple known as the Garden of God—disparagingly referred to as the Devil’s Garden by anti-Meerists and misogynists alike—Nesre had framed Ume for murder so he could use her to bring down MeerAlya himself.

  After the Meer had been killed in front of her, Ume had wanted nothing to do with the person she’d been, trying to live permanently as Cillian, blaming herself for her unwitting role in the death of the Meer she’d loved. But living as Cillian had nearly killed her. She’d disappeared one day without saying good-bye, and Cree had thought she’d lost her for good. After spending months looking for Ume on the streets, Cree had finally brought her home by reminding Ume of who she was with a gift of one of Ume’s own jeweled gowns redeemed in the market from her confiscated property.

  But Cree was losing her again.

  She and Ume had stumbled out from “under the hill”, as the Hidden Folk called it, into empty grassland just north of Soth Szofl. Their domain, it seemed, wasn’t restricted to a fixed place. With Pearl close to death, the Hidden Folk had been able to bring him under somehow in both body and spirit, and Cree and Ume with him—dispensing with them in the same manner as soon as they had what they wanted.

  Cree and Ume had made their way back to the city in silence, neither of them having the heart to discuss their loss. But before long, Cree saw that respecting Ume’s silence in this had been a mistake. She was failing Ume just as she’d failed her after the death of MeerAlya.

  Watching the firelight glint off the tawny-port hue of Ume’s hair, Cree wasn’t sure how she would ever reach her again. Ume stared into the flame, her expression dull, with a knitted throw blanket wrapped around her shoulders—hardly the sort of presentation Ume liked to make. Cree was afraid to speak to her, afraid that if she did get Ume talking, she would hear the condemnation she’d feared from the moment she’d confessed to Ume what she’d been planning when she sought Pearl out.

  But the silence had to be broken. At fault or not, Cree’s actions had facilitated the Hidden Folk’s plan to take Pearl from them. It was up to her to pierce the veil, regardless of the consequences.

  “Let’s go up to bed, love.” Cree rose and held out her hand to Ume, who took it like a wind-up Szofelian automaton, letting the blanket fall from her shoulders and following Cree up the stairs to their rented room.

  Cree sat on the bed as Ume undressed. Under other circumstances, she would have loved this moment, seeing the smooth honey of her lover’s skin revealed bit by bit.

  “Sweetheart, we have to talk about this.”

  Ume’s fingers paused in unlacing the bodice of her gown, but she didn’t raise her head.

  There was no turning back now. “I know I didn’t know him as you did. And that’s my own fault. I should have gone with you to Rhyman as soon as we knew he was alive. I was a coward. I was afraid to see him, and I’m sorry. But you spent time with him and formed a bond, and I just want you to know that even though I feel the loss inside me like the day he was taken from my womb, I know your loss is greater. And it’s okay to grieve. It’s okay to be angry with me for the part I played—once again—in taking someone you loved from you. I don’t know how to make it right, Ume. But I need to try. I need you to let me try. I need you to talk to me.”

  Ume raised her head at last, amber eyes flashing with all the pent-up emotion Cree had known was there. She braced herself for a bitter tongue-lashing, but when Ume’s anger exploded at last, it wasn’t the anger Cree had expected.

  “My loss?” Ume yanked her fingers from the laces and let
the sleeves drop from her shoulders, revealing her flat chest above the underbust corset. “By Alya’s blood, Cree! You’re acting as if Pearl is dead. Have you written him off again? Out of sight, out of mind? Godsdammit, Cree. Are you actually fucking relieved?”

  Cree wasn’t sure what shocked her more, Ume’s accusation or the crudeness of her language. Ume was nothing if not a proper lady.

  Her face felt hot as the words sank in. “That isn’t fair. I’m trying to deal with this as best I can.”

  “By mourning him.”

  “I—what on earth are we supposed to do, Ume? He’s gone. Yes, I’m mourning him. You’ve been mourning him. You barely speak.”

  “I have not been mourning him. I have been trying to think of a plan to get him back. He’s our son, dammit. And we are not leaving him to those fucking manipulative Hidden Folk.”

  The harsh language threw her again for a moment, and then Cree heard the important words in the sentence: “He’s our son.” Ume wasn’t pushing her away as she’d feared, nursing an ache that Cree could have no part in as she’d done after Alya’s death. She was a mother lion separated from her cub, and Cree was part and parcel of that relationship. To Ume, they were a family. Our son.

  Cree stared at her, amazed that she could love her more than she had a moment ago. “You think—” She had to pause a moment to get her voice under control. “You think we can get him back?”

  The focus of Ume’s anger seemed to settle back onto her internal ruminations and away from Cree. She finished unlacing, and shimmied out of her skirt in the way only Ume could. “I think, love, that the Hidden Folk have messed with the wrong damned ‘Ephemera’.”

  Three: Transience

  It wasn’t Ludtaht Ra or the governor’s palace at Soth Szofl, but the place his new keepers called “under the hill” held charms Pearl had never envisioned, even with his Meeric sight.