by Jane Kindred
“It is a vetma. Soth AhlZel asked it of me, and I gave.” Hraethe had never heard of such a request. “He will replace me.”
“Replace you?” Hraethe’s brow wrinkled. “Why would your son not reign beside you? Those in the greatest of houses have done so.”
“Not the greatest,” she corrected with a tone of reproach. “And it is not what they want. I am despised.”
Hraethe traced the tense lines of her face. This was everything to her: Soth AhlZel. She had raised it, given herself to it, and legend said that Shiva had been the first, her city spawning all of modern civilization.
“How could anyone despise you?” He whispered the words against her skin, eliciting a laugh that bordered on the obscene. Hraethe silenced her with a worshipful kiss. No one had ever been this close to her. He knew it. He’d been granted a divine and unspeakable privilege.
“How long time is, and how uncompanionable,” he murmured against her. “Why have you been so solitary?” Shiva said nothing. Hraethe covered her with his Meeric length of hair and hovered over her, the two of them cocooned within her dark tresses and his light.
She gave a cool shrug of one shoulder. “Perhaps I should simply have let them eat me and had done with it.”
Hraethe laughed as he looked down at her. “I will eat you. Your vetma will burst into my mouth.” He held himself aloft a moment longer, tormenting himself with anticipation, his next words a sensuous murmur of appreciation as he drank her visually. “Such tales they tell of us.”
Without warning, Shiva’s cat-green eyes flashed like fire, and she grabbed the hair at the sides of his head with a sharp and painful jerk and held him at her mercy. “They are not tales,” she hissed. “I have seen a thousand Meer picked off one by one and carelessly devoured for an insidious trinket! That is our destiny, MeerHraethe.” She spat the name. “To be the fodder for their insignificant greed. To line their bellies and pass through them as shit.”
He was stunned, frightened of her and horrified by her words, and wounded by the cruelty of her pun. “Hraethe” meant “swift” but could also imply “premature”. His skin had begun to crawl with a feral dread he’d never felt before, a black worm that traveled through his veins and would grow there as his heart cycled blood.
Shiva softened her grip and stroked his cheek with one hand. “Don’t be afraid, young god.” Just as suddenly, her voice had shifted to a gentle whisper. “It robs you of your power. You are Meer, but the time is coming.” Her lips curved up in fondness and longing. “You are but an infant, Hraethe.” She shook her head in wonder at him. “Let me have you again so that I may drink your youth.”
The sudden tenderness of her touch persuaded him, though despite the interruption of fear, he needed little persuasion. They came together once more, and the sounds of Shiva’s delight again filled the quiet temple. Shiva returned the vetma he’d conferred on her, devouring and conquering with his cock between her teeth. With a sharp, delightful pain, Hraethe discovered that her words had been more than metaphorical. She’d pierced him at the base of his scrotum and drank indeed from him, a surge of blood rising up the length of his erection more powerfully than any ejaculation of semen. He wondered fleetingly if he would bleed to death, but the indescribable sensation was worth death. Even a touch from Shiva was worth death, and he surrendered.
Surprised to find he’d slept—an unforgivable waste of time with this goddess beside him—Hraethe roused and turned to gather her to him and serve her once more. The bed was empty.
Hraethe sat up in distress. The room had changed, and at first he couldn’t understand what had happened, thinking he’d been transported somewhere else in sleep, but it was only the opening of a covered window that had transformed their bower into a more ordinary room. It was day—which one, he didn’t know—and his clothes were laid out beside him.
He dressed and wandered into the corridor, strolling beneath the arches as they crossed and vaulted one another. Ludtaht Shiva was a brilliant maze that fascinated so that one might wander without concern for destination, attentive to the vast and awe-inspiring details. It was like being inside Shiva, exploring her, enchanted, and Hraethe was content to follow the course of her conduit.
The waiting-maid who’d conducted him to Shiva on his arrival appeared before him from an unlit room. Hraethe smiled quizzically.
She bowed before him. “You will leave. The MeerShiva has spoken.”
Hraethe’s gut lunged as though he’d been kicked, and his mouth opened on a pointless stammer. “Is she—what has—where—?” He moved toward the dark room, and the child bowed down before him once more in his path. “Where is your mistress?” he demanded.
“The MeerShiva has spoken,” she said again, her voice trembling. “I would rather die at your hands than at hers, meneut, if you must destroy me. The MeerShiva has spoken. Her words cannot be taken back.”
Hraethe wrestled with fury and desolation. He knew too well what the delicate messenger said was true. Shiva had said he was to leave, and he would leave. A Meer’s words were irrefutable.
He returned to Soth Szofl, despondent. He was a fool. What, after all, had he expected? She’d said it herself: “You are not here to play at domestic bliss.” He’d come to give her his seed, and he had done so and more. Shiva had given of herself in so profound a manner in return that it still stunned him to know what he’d done. No agreement had been breached.
This logic, however, couldn’t soothe the terrible hole in his core. The black worm of Shiva’s chilling talk of “Meercatching”, as it was known, began to fill the hole, and he nursed a dark obsession with the fate of Meer who’d gone before him. His prior mistrust of his templars and servants became a raging paranoia, and he looked for assassins at every turn. His head felt sick, and he knew something had gone wrong within it, but the knowledge of his loss, the memory of the divine body melding with his, drove him in agony and fear toward this more welcome preoccupation.
He determined after a time that he’d divined the knowledge of a plot against him, conspired by every citizen of Szofl. They waited for him to sleep so they could take him—he had a vision of a crushing blow to the skull and a body tumbled, twisted, on temple steps—but he wouldn’t sleep. He would confound them.
In the end, he suffered a continual burning in his lungs, and the muscles around his eyes stung from keeping watch as though pins kept them open. Assassins came at him from every corner of the temple, lunging to overtake him, but somehow escaping from him before he could execute his vengeful defense. He locked himself in his tower and filled the small chamber with an inferno of divining flame, calling upon the quicksilver threads of life to sever before their time. He took them all. None could be trusted. He was gleeful with victory when he emerged.
A sickness had come over every one of his servants, and a dying messenger had come to cry alarm from the plague-ridden city. Hraethe found himself in the midst of the smell of death, his frenzied thoughts suddenly still. A silence stole over the temple that wasn’t only in his brain. He left the messenger convulsing at the arch of the court and raced back up the steps to the height of the tower. Below, he could see all of Szofl, and all he’d wrought. A terrible pall lay over the lifeless city, an ugly fog that had threaded in from the coast. MeerHraethe saw no signs of life. There were only the dim sounds of the dying and a terrible stench.
Shiva, he thought desperately as he climbed to the top of the buttress. The beauty of her skin, her smell, her sound and taste tormented him despite the despicable distraction of the plague below. “I will never see you again,” he said to her, and was inconsolably sad. He let go of the latticed stone and found himself soaring into the devouring granite fog.
Twelve: Necromancy
“MeerHraethe,” said Shiva once more, his blood falling unheeded through her fingers. It was the same she’d said from beneath her veil at the entrance of the temple with Ra the night before.
He’d heard “Merit”, a name so like his other that it had seemed only an insignificant difference of inflection. “You must sit down.” She took Merit by the arm, her touch sending an electric jolt through him, and led him through the temple to the dark Sapphire Room the staff had prepared for her, which she hadn’t used. He couldn’t speak, could only follow her and weep this cataract of blood.
She directed him to the bed, its velvet cover, as everything in this room, the shade of the room’s namesake. Merit sat and gazed up at her. She’d brought his sword, and she laid it beside him on the bed, but it was meaningless to him.
Shiva observed him, hands and robe now stained with his tears. “This is dangerous—to remember a life with such suddenness when one has been vagrant. You must stop the weeping, or you will be ill.”
He could no more stop the flow of unearthed Meersblood than take back the long-ago day he’d spent in thrall to her.
“You returned to a common family.” She was attempting to piece together his details, attempting to distract him. “There was no blood in your line?”
“Blood?” His mouth trickled with it as it opened.
“Our blood. The same that you are now pouring onto the ground.”
He felt the current of it, pulled into him from somewhere and leaving him rapidly. It was a peculiar sensation of loss, as though the edges of his soul unraveled and dripped with the tears into the space outside himself. But how could he lose what he hadn’t known was part of him?
Shiva was studying him as though he were an interesting stranger. She’d perfected her avatar of ice.
“Do you expect it all to drain from you?” She rubbed her thumb and fingers together, slick with his blood. “That will not make you common again. It will kill you. An act of suicide.”
“I have done that before,” he mused, recalling that he had. He remembered now the time after. He’d fallen on the post of something, impaling him swiftly before he’d even been crushed and rent against the stone. And then he’d lain there, surrounded by the smell of his dead. Neither the fall nor the spearing had killed him. Death hadn’t come until outsiders had set the city itself on fire to eradicate the poison that had infected its citizens.
The blood was slowing, and he staggered to rise, but Shiva caught him and propelled him back onto the bed.
“You must replenish yourself.” She sighed as he looked at her without understanding. “Ai. You are still so new.”
He didn’t feel new. He felt old, destroyed. He had the body of a fifty-five-year-old ordinary man, and a host of aches from his years of bearing the weight of his Meer.
“You must sleep,” Shiva clarified, speaking slowly, as though to a child. Her eyes penetrated him.
He realized too late she was bending his will to hers, and his body was drifting into a deep state of relaxation. Merit slipped down to the pillows, and Shiva, satisfied, turned to go. He wanted to punish her for what she’d done, yet he was once more helplessly intoxicated by her. If she left, and he slept, what reality might he wake to? He might lose again the memory of their tryst, and though it was an unbearable sword in his side, he wanted it now that he’d found it.
He tried to open his mouth, to speak, to stop her. He managed one bare word: “Stay.” Shiva’s back stiffened in the corridor as she halted, and Merit succumbed to the irresistible pull of sleep.
“Stay,” he’d said. She couldn’t deny his request. He was Meer, after all, and he had spoken.
Shiva sat on the bed beside him and watched the rise and fall of his chest beneath garments heavy with red, noting the signs of age: his hair was silver instead of bronze, and his face was lined. Having hidden himself so completely in the vagrancy of this changeling incarnation, he’d believed he was ordinary, and had appropriately deteriorated.
She brushed her fingers through the hair at his forehead, resisting the memories the touch evoked, though the sound of her own pleasure echoed through the halls of Ludtaht Shiva in her head. As then, he was a danger to her.
Shiva leaned over him and slipped her hand behind his head, her mouth against his ear. “Young god.” He stirred, half waking from the hypnotic sleep, and blinked up at her. “Drink from me,” she whispered. His lips parted obediently, and she offered her mouth to his. He made soft moans against her, closer to sorrow than pleasure. Closing her eyes tightly against desire, she let her tongue slide over his, then bit down until she’d pierced them both. A sharp cry of surprise escaped him as her blood flowed into his mouth and mingled with his own, but as he swallowed, the sound was swiftly truncated.
She withdrew, and placed a kiss on his forehead, and his puzzled eyes fluttered closed.
Blood rolled down Pearl’s cheeks in a steady stream as his hand looped and scrolled over his parchment in the dark billowing strokes of the ruins of Soth Szofl. He hadn’t known why he’d sketched the ruins for Merit the first time. The images had come to him when he’d meditated on what to draw to make Merit forget him. He’d created one drawing for Merit and another for Ahr, not wanting them to trouble over his departure when he went in search of the captive Meerchild who’d contacted him—a child that turned out to be nothing more than a cruel trick designed by the Meerhunter, Pike, to lure him away.
Remember Pearl, he’d inscribed Merit’s drawing, as you remember this—knowing the words would erase him from Merit’s conscious mind, though he hadn’t known precisely what those words had meant when he’d put them on the paper.
As he drew Soth Szofl again, the memories Merit had hidden inside himself came pouring through the Meeric flow. Merit had been the golden-haired Meer whom Pearl had seen in his visions, but Pearl hadn’t recognized him.
Pearl was weeping now for a multitude of reasons—because he missed Merit and Ahr; because he’d been a fool to leave them; because Ahr was gone; because Merit’s heart had broken so many times, not least before he’d taken his own life as MeerHraethe; because he couldn’t help it when the visions took hold of him so strongly; and because Pearl knew now that he had to be mad.
It wasn’t that anything he saw was untrue, but that he now clearly understood what flowed within his veins, what it meant to be Meer. It was a sickness that couldn’t be stopped. It was just as well he was under the hill where he could do no harm. Somehow, he had the worst of all their blood. He could hear and see the darkest places inside them. Nesre had bred him that way, he supposed, training him to look into the darkness of his mirrored glass and see what even the Meer hid from themselves.
He paused in his drawing, realizing he’d spattered it with his tears. The result was shocking, but fitting. He’d drawn MeerHraethe speared on his pike at the base of the temple tower, and Pearl’s own blood seemed to flow from the wound.
Pearl fingered the ribbon that was now part of his wrist, remembering how the blood had curled from it into the warm water as he’d lain in the tub in Szofl, waiting, as MeerHraethe waited in the drawing, for the end to come. Pearl’s confinement under the hill was only just. The Permanence were right to think he was dangerous. Under the hill, he couldn’t speak and destroy an entire population because of a whim in his blood.
Thirteen: Mitigation
Jak paused on the steps, watching the winter sun paint the Anamnesis in tones of lilac and lavender through the arches of the temple, debating whether to wake Merit and say good-bye. He must understand that Jak couldn’t stay. Whether she was mad or not, Ra’s presence was intolerable.
Jak had heard Ra claim to be recovered, had heard Merit succumb to her sorcery. He couldn’t be blamed; his life had been Ra. Without Ahr, she was the only thing that might keep him alive. But Jak had witnessed Ahr’s destruction, had been scored beneath the white heat of Ra’s madness. Jak was forever changed.
The mantel at the base of these stairs held the capsule of Ahr’s soul, the dust and bone that couldn’t be burned, that kept Ahr in the twilight of the median of lives. Until it had disintegrate
d and dissolved into the clay of the jar itself, Ahr would sleep, and Jak didn’t have the Meeric stamina to wait. Ra would have that privilege, still prowling the earth a hundred or a thousand years from now, and Ahr would return to her. Ahr would forgive. Jak could not.
Standing before the urn, Jak curled one hand around the neck of it, deliberating for a moment, and then swept it up from the mantel and turned toward the other staircase—the regal, solitary set that led to the master’s chambers. Ra would not escape her culpability.
Arriving in Ra’s room, Jak stood immobile at the foot of the grand bed, clutching Ahr’s receptacle in both hands. There was Ra. She was painful to look at. She’d fallen asleep on top of the silk coverlet, and her ornate robe was open at the throat so that her milk-white breasts lay bare and vulnerable. Jak looked away. It was the same temptation Ra had first conjured to bring Jak down: her body, unabashedly and casually presented to one who had then been a stranger.
The scar on Jak’s cheek from Ra’s attack at the onset of her madness seemed to itch, and Jak rubbed at it. One of Ra’s scars from the equally mad Shiva, more prominent, as if more recent than the others, was curved like Jak’s. It was the same cheek, and the same place. Coming closer, Jak saw that ghostly white marks curled also from the corners of Ra’s mouth: one up and one down. Another laced her throat. Jak felt a twinge of satisfaction. Ra had been at the mercy of one more demented than herself. It was fitting. Jak noticed then a semicircular white line traversing the healthy swell of Ra’s breasts—it was impossible not to look; it had always been impossible. There were two lines, in fact.
Jak’s eyes followed the curious path of the scars. Like sidelong S’s, they circled the top of one and the bottom of the other. There was an identical pair curving symmetrically from that breast back to the first, so that the effect was like an artisan’s design carved into the flesh of a fine wood. Like something Jak might have done on a custom chest of drawers. It was disturbing. What act of madness could have made such deliberate strokes?