by Jane Kindred
Lulled by the steady stroke of Shiva’s hand, Jak felt almost weightless, eyes fluttering closed against the flickering firelight. “No, thank you,” Jak murmured. “I wish to keep my body. It’s only my gender that is…in the median.”
The rolling ship of fever marked the rest of Jak’s journey home, carried once more by Shiva the Terrible after stumbling without progress through the thickening snow. Briefly aware they’d reached the mounds, Jak, in Shiva’s arms, was as vague and empty-headed as Ra had been after her renaissance by the time they arrived at Mound RemPeta, dimly aware of the voices of concern surrounding them.
“What’s happened?”
“Jak’s brought another of them.”
“By the ancestors. What have you done?”
Jak woke rested and damp from the defeated fever, but weighted down with burning lungs. Above was a ceiling of ordinary, iron-gray stones. This was Jak’s bed. This was home. When Jak was seized by a painful cough reminiscent of Merit’s, Geffn’s face appeared overhead in concern, his mop of russet brown untidy with worry as he raked his fingers through it before taking Jak’s hand.
“Sooth, Jak, I thought you were dead.”
“Me too.”
Geffn propped Jak up against another coughing fit. “What were you thinking, heading out alone in the heart of winter without even proper boots?”
Jak smiled at the concern in the soft brown of Geffn’s eyes. It was good to be home with him. Here was an ordinary man, unfettered by the webs of past incarnations. He was, or had been, Jak’s handfasted. He loved Jak. This was where Jak belonged.
“I don’t know.” Jak leaned against Geffn as he sat on the edge of the bed. “Ra was there. She’s well now—apparently—but I just wanted to go home.”
“And you found another Meer.” Geffn shuddered. “That Shiva. Gods. You’re a Meer magnet.”
Jak laughed, and coughed, held by Geffn until the fit subsided. Geffn’s arms were home. “I’m done with all that.” Jak snuggled up to him with a sigh. “I’ve come to my senses. I belong here, with you.”
Geffn drew back from the embrace when Jak tried to kiss him, looking at Jak as though he thought the fever must be talking. “We dissolved our union. We released one another.”
“Because of my foolishness. I’ve been an idiot.” Jak wove their fingers together, trying to pull him close once more. “We can forget that.”
Geffn held Jak away, frowning. “No, we can’t. Jak, I’ve been courting Sevine.” When Jak stared, dumbfounded, Geffn elaborated. “From Mound DarSevineMara—”
“I know where she’s from.” Jak folded up into a pyramid of arms and legs, head ducked between them, and spoke into the blanket. “Oh gods. Oh my gods, I’m such an ass. Shit.”
Geffn rubbed Jak’s back as Jak began to cough again. “You’re not an ass. I love you. You know it. But I’ve moved on.” He gave Jak’s shoulder a comforting squeeze, and Jak peered up miserably between the crook of an elbow. “It was a lovely thought. I’m sorry.”
Jak gave him a sheepish smile. “I guess this means we won’t be having sex again.”
In the cool afternoon shadows, Ra spun the empty urn on the tiles like a child. She was lonely, not even ashes to comfort her, and she had no one to blame but herself. There was Merit, of course; she wasn’t entirely alone, and she had missed him. But he still slept, and the temple was silent. Though it wasn’t his doing, it felt like a punishment of sorts, a refusal to speak to her. She suspected Shiva had done it just for that purpose, and had left her to feel the solitude once more. But why punish Merit, whom Shiva barely knew?
Merit was unwell. Ra had listened at his chest and heard the susurration in his lungs. The old illness, contracted so long ago during the summer of Ahr, had damaged him, and mortal age was now taking its toll.
Temple Ra hadn’t been so desolate, nor Ra’s fate so out of her control since the long years before Ahr. If life was to be only fleeting bliss between expanses of silence wider than the sea, why return? Ra had never had answers to her own solicitations. Even the Meer couldn’t divine themselves. With a wistful sigh, she went to sleep in Jak’s bed, taking comfort in the lingering scent that reminded her of clove and peat, and dreamt of Haethfalt.
Shiva had left Jak with the anxious family and departed, graciously avoiding mention of their rudeness at not inviting her to stay despite the harsh weather. She had business at Soth AhlZel.
Ra had recreated Shiva’s temple in painstaking detail. It was more a restoration than creation. Shiva touched the celadon columns lovingly, entranced by Ra’s homage to her. She spent several hours seated on her dais, looking out at a scattering of centuries.
She had come here, Shiva the Terrible, and demanded the mountain tribes worship her. It was the logical relationship between Meer and the ordinary. Why should she hide in terror from their hunting parties when all she’d ever had to do was fling them away like irritating flies? Perhaps she hadn’t always been this strong, or hadn’t understood what she was, but after taking her revenge, she knew her power. She’d torn bodies apart like cotton pillows. She’d tormented her assailants without even needing to be near them. She remembered this, and not the time preceding it, and regarded herself as an invincible demon with no need of conscience.
That had been the beginning of madness. She’d been harsh with herself for that weakness, but she had every cause to go mad. She would question one who endured what she had and didn’t go mad. Madness was her right.
By her nature, despite her rage, she’d given from the beginning. It was a fair trade, she thought, to grant blessings by consent in exchange for the regard of deity. Those who pleased her received first, and most, and news of the city on the mountain with its own perpetual Meer spread over the land. Soth AhlZel and MeerShiva became the envy of the world, and the hunting of Meer became a quest for the sacred. Men imagined themselves holy in their devotion. Temples rose. The religion was born.
Shiva sighed with the sun as its pale highland winter gold faded into the gray below the arches. Hraethe’s coming had frightened her as nothing else in her experience. She had called him from across the sea and sent him repeatedly away because she’d felt his blood within the Meeric flow. The inexplicable pull of desire had both driven and terrified her.
She’d resisted him through the insult he’d unknowingly delivered to her virgin flesh, and through the soothing fire of passion that had followed, the unmatchable ecstasy that was Meer on Meer. She’d resisted him because she feared his knowing her. It was a nakedness worse than being stripped and derided by a horde of strangers. She’d feared his laughter—the first sound she heard on baring herself to him. And worse, she’d feared needing him.
Resisting her own desire and sending him away once more had felt like an act of power—proving the walls she’d built could not be breached. But Ra’s renaissance had begun to break down that resistance, leaving Shiva vulnerable once more. She hadn’t realized quite how vulnerable until she’d seen Hraethe returned in his mentally vagrant state. She couldn’t be what either of them needed. They would devour her like the Meer of old.
What she could do, however, was what was in her nature to do: to give. She’d offered Jak a vetma. It was the first time anyone—human or Meer—had ever refused. But what she’d come to AhlZel to do—a vetma that would give both Ra and Hraethe what they most needed—would be her gift to Jak as well.
There was one thing each of them longed for.
Shiva took the silver phial from around her neck that contained the last of Ahr. She’d scattered the smaller ashes in the desert beyond the Delta. Within were the larger fragments of his remains, the part that kept Ahr under, the part of his last life not yet relinquished.
She crouched before the silent sheet of glass-blue water that Ra hadn’t understood, her reflection staring back at her. In the Pool of Souls, the living turned to ice, but the dead burned. Poor Ra, so p
ainfully mad that she’d gone against her own self, had severed bits of her soul in creating her “citizens” of AhlZel. Every person she’d imagined she’d created and tormented had only been a projection of herself. The soul was large and, like the tongues of Meer, could be regenerated. Ra had been in no danger, only tremendous pain. Shiva had seen blood seeping from a host of tiny holes in Ra’s soul when she’d last come here. Ra had been like a skin of wine thrust through again and again with a rapier until the wine trickled out like a crimson fountain.
Shiva opened the phial and poured the fragments of bone into her hand. So little, yet so much. “I must disturb you so soon,” she apologized. “But your going under was a mistake.”
Closing her fist over the remains, she thrust it into the water as though punching into the center of a human body. Her palm and fingers, at first shocked with cold, began to burn from what they held, a terrible heat—acid consuming flesh—and she shouted her agony into the empty temple, but wouldn’t remove the hand. Through her fingers, the burning substance flowed and curled red-stained into the water. Her own blood was melting through her flesh like the center of a candle through the twists and flourishes of a gold mesh cage. She cried out Ahr’s name in a long howl, a sound that could be the simple utterance of pain itself, with no meaning; a sound that was the opposite of Ra. Her hand opened, translucent with the glow of red in the water, fingers splayed.
“Return,” she whispered, and drew her hand out. Laying her head on the cold tile, she held the hand before her, a dangling obscenity of ruined flesh. Her eyes drifted shut. She needed sleep.
Sanguine and cobalt mixed on Pearl’s palette, like the curling spread of his own blood in the bath at Szofl. He’d been painting in oils on canvas, filling the mirrored hall with Meeric tragedies and atrocities. These had all been histories, but now he was bombarded by visions from MeerShiva in her new temple at AhlZel.
She’d kept him out until now, which meant something terrible had happened to weaken her magic. The strokes of Pearl’s brush revealed what had befallen her. Beside the glistening sapphire pool, the red became a violent, molten flow against the tile: the remains of Shiva’s hand as she drew it from the water. He felt the pain himself in the hand that held the brush, an agonizing spasm that wouldn’t relent, making his stomach heave and his head swim.
Pearl’s painting became abstract hues repeating the pattern of reds and blues in a swirling, boiling spiral. He couldn’t stop, gripped by the magic Shiva had begun. Paint flung against the canvas from his brush in splotches and splatters, doing what it would, the reflective pool alive with its own magic separate from the Meer, conjuring what it shouldn’t, what it must, until Pearl convulsed and fell from his stool, collapsing with a helpless moan into the scattered oils.
Something was horribly wrong. Ra sat up, ripped from sleep as when the Expurgation had come, believing for a terrible moment she was once more Meer of Rhyman and RaNa was being dragged from her bed and dashed against the steps. But that was long ago.
She climbed trembling from the bed and wrapped the heavy blanket around herself, her skin like ice, and her breath coming in short gasps, as when she’d first come to this life. The cold was the same and her sense of confusion equal. Ra crouched and touched the floor to assure herself of this reality. This was not a rolling plain of brilliant white, but a darkened room at Ludtaht Ra, flat and dry, and far from Haethfalt.
Ra looked into the dim light in the mirror as she steadied herself against the bureau. Where she’d once been wan and pallid, her skin now had a healthy glow, and she was round where sharp angles had once protruded. I have become like her, she thought with a shock. I look like Ahr.
The disorientation struck her once more, and she closed her eyes to listen. The Meeric flow was calling to her. It whispered of blood: the blood she’d taken that had made her whole. It whispered of AhlZel. She opened her eyes. Shiva.
Ra pondered whether to wait until Merit woke, but there was no telling how long the sleep would last. Perhaps Shiva had left him slumbering to keep Ra distracted and unable to prevent her from carrying out whatever dangerous magic she’d undertaken that had resulted in this chaos in Ra’s blood. Whatever the reason, Ra had to go. The sense of wrongness from Shiva’s blood was only increasing, until it felt as though she herself had taken poison, and her veins itched with contaminated plasma.
Despite his sleep and the illness in his lungs, Merit seemed well enough, and Ra recalled his servants to the temple with instructions to keep watch on him.
She moved with the speed of the Meer’s will, and kept to the EldRud, which took a straighter path to Munt Zelfaal and bypassed the mounds altogether. In only a matter of days, she’d begun her ascent.
Sixteen: Navigation
The Deltan Dream sailed up into the mouth of the Anamnesis just as dawn was spilling over it. The sky was a lovely shade of rose quartz diffused through the lilac-blue of morning river mist. Ume stood beside Cree on the deck—no one was sleeping in this morning—mentally cataloguing the color. It would make a divine headscarf in raw silk with beads of bright red spinel. The scarf she’d chosen this morning was a soft mint green, a simple, unadorned cotton she could wrap across her face as a veil with a quick flourish. Not that she needed a veil. She was a married woman as far as society was concerned. But she’d always preferred it.
Cree slipped her arm around Ume’s waist and drew her close to her side in the chilly morning fog. “The color suits you, Maiden Sky.”
Ume snuggled against her, resting her head on Cree’s shoulder. “How do you always know what I’m thinking?”
Cree snorted, somewhat rudely dispelling the magic of the moment. “I never know what you’re thinking, love. You’re a delicious mystery. Sometimes I just get lucky.” She kissed Ume’s nose as Ume scowled up at her. “Scratch that. I’m lucky every single minute you’re beside me. Don’t know how I got this lucky.”
“Oh, stop it.” Ume elbowed her, smiling to herself as she watched the date palms drifting slowly through the mist on the banks as they sailed past the heart of Soth Bessaht. “You’re just trying to make up for that snort.”
Cree grinned. “You caught me. Can’t put anything past my girl.” As she glanced over Ume’s shoulder, her grin faded. “I’ll be glad when we part company with that nasty piece of work.”
Ume didn’t have to look to know whom Cree meant. “At least he’s kept his distance the last few days. He could have made trouble for us.”
The ship anchored just inside the harbor, and the passengers continuing on with the river portion of the cruise—which was most of them, as the little enclave of shipboard life provided a sense of security in a land with which most were unfamiliar—disembarked to see the sites in Bessaht if they chose, or to board the riverboat directly.
Ume had no intention of setting foot in Bessaht again if she could help it. City of Possibilities, indeed. Since the Expurgation, it had become a thriving port for slave trade and the sex trade that went hand in hand with it—the sort that bore little resemblance to the sacred calling of the Meeric courtesan to which she’d once belonged.
As they headed down the gangplank, Ume tucked her arm into Cree’s, grateful she wasn’t traveling alone. A woman on her own in the harbor district was a glaring target for all manner of unpleasantness. The last time Ume had been here, she’d disguised herself as Cillian Rede—the name she’d been given at birth—and even then, the environment had been dangerous.
She glanced up at Cree, guilt needling her over the things she’d kept to herself about that adventure. The voyage to Gundoumu Arazi had been aboard a cargo ship—and Cillian was no sailor. At least Ume wasn’t likely to run into anyone who recognized her. Trade ships weren’t sailing this late in the season, so the crew would have moved on to other seasonal work or gone home to their families.
Or so she’d hoped. She and Cree were the first to board the riverboat, and the captain greete
d them, taking Ume’s hand to help her onto the deck as the gangplank made a sudden lurch. When she looked up into the captain’s eyes to thank him after she’d gotten her footing, her voice came out in an undignified squeak.
“Captain Paravar.” Meeralyá. Why on earth had she said his name? He’d never have recognized her if she hadn’t drawn his attention. His eyes registered confusion, and then widened as he looked into the signature amber of hers, and his face blazed red. “Ume Sky,” she said, as if he’d simply forgotten her name, as her hand dropped out of his. “This is my husband, Cree Silva.” Cree’s eyes narrowed at her as she shook Paravar’s hand.
The captain managed to regain his composure. “Welcome aboard, Master Silva. Mistress Sky. I hope you both have a pleasant journey with us aboard the Delta Pearl.”
Ume remarked on the vessel’s name as they reached their stateroom. “The Delta Pearl. “That’s quite auspicious.” But Cree was having none of it.
“Out with it.” Cree shut the door with force. “How the hell are you and ‘Captain Paravar’ acquainted? He looked like he was about to swallow his own tongue at the sight of you.”
Ume unwrapped her scarf, surveying the little cabin. “You know I’ve had many patrons.”
“Dammit, Ume. This is a riverboat captain in Soth Bessaht, not some temple priest. I’d wager he’s no more than twenty-five summers. There is no way in hell he was one of your patrons in the Garden a decade and a half ago.” Cree’s arms were folded like a tightly bundled cord of wood. Ume imagined Cree had them tucked so firmly in place to keep from wringing her neck.
She sighed and sat on the edge of the narrow bed. “How did you think I made my way to the Eastern Continent? Arvati was the captain of the ship I signed on to.”
“Arvati.” Cree pressed her lips together, breathing out through her nose.
“He needed a cabin boy. Though it turns out what he really needed was to play cabin boy.” She couldn’t help the slight upward tick at the corner of her mouth.