Idol of Glass

by Jane Kindred

  Ra blew into her hands and stopped before the barn, her eyes, as always, meeting Ahr’s with the deep and silent communion that had been Ahr’s downfall on the streets of Rhyman.

  “You should have worn a coat.” Ahr took the scarf from her neck and placed it around Ra’s.

  Ra caught Ahr’s gloved hand in her bare one and held the back of Ahr’s fingers to her bruised cheek. “I’ve given you more than ample cause. There’s no need to apologize.”

  Ahr pulled her hand away, unable to look into those eyes any longer. “There will be. And I am sorry, but not for any of the things I’ve done to you.”

  Ra looked puzzled, but before she could work out what Ahr meant, Pike stepped out of the shadows of the barn. He caught the ends of the scarf, spinning Ra about and onto her knees, and pulled up with a tight yank on the finely knitted wool to cut off her air. Ra’s eyes went wide with surprise and shock. She had entirely underestimated Ahr.

  Twenty-five: Consequence

  Ra’s head ached as if she’d just woken from a lethargic sleep following the ceremonial consumption of a soth’s offerings after the annual People’s Blessing. She’d lost consciousness from lack of oxygen with Ahr’s lovely conjuring around her neck—the threads of the scarf still held the elemental resonance of Meeric creation. It made her ache for Ahr, her unreachable maiden.

  The knitted lilac wool hung loosely at her neck now—as did her throbbing head—though her wrists were chained behind her back to the frame of an iron chair, and her mouth was bound by a leather strap. The Meerhunter had thought of everything.

  “Coming around, are we?”

  Ra lifted her head and regarded him with a sigh.

  Seated across from her in the darkened room, the Meerhunter smiled through several days’ growth of whiskers, his clothes rumpled with travel. He looked extraordinarily pleased with his luck.

  “Name’s Pike. I’ve been seeking you for quite some time. You’re the elusive white elk, reports of you here and there, no one ever quite believing them, but everyone with a tale to tell. Whenever I arrive, you’ve just slipped away. But not this time.” He spat tobacco juice through his teeth over the side of his chair. “I imagine your head feels a bit thick. That’s down to the elixir I funneled down your throat while you were out. Needed you to stay compliant until I had you transported to this special accommodation I made for you.”

  Pike took the cover from a lamp on the floor by his chair. The flame reflected infinitely behind and around him in the glass of a mirrored chamber. “I believe you’ve seen one of these before.”

  Ra nodded, though she couldn’t quite recall the details of when she’d last been inside such a cage. It hardly mattered. She could conjure nothing without Shiva’s word. He needn’t have bothered.

  “I obtained the plans for it from Prelate Nesre of Soth In’La.” Pike drew a small leather-bound volume from his coat pocket, curious symbols carved upon it like a book of magic. “Not all of his secrets burned with him.” Ra’s shrug seemed to disappoint him, and he tucked the book away. “Naiahn’s daughter says you killed her father. Is that so?”

  So that was who Ahr had claimed to be. And Pike, the boastful Meerhunter so named for the implement upon which he was rumored to bring in his bounties’ heads, hadn’t recognized Ahr’s Meerity.

  He was waiting for her answer. Ra nodded and looked away.

  “Everyone in the Delta knows Naiahn sheltered you in Rhyman after you spattered the walls of the temple with Prelate Vithius’s remains. Naiahn was fool enough to harbor you in the falend, and then set up your puppet regime with Lord Minister Merit. And yet what did he get as thanks?” Pike paused to spit through his teeth. “I warned him about your kind, but he didn’t take heed. His daughter, though—she’s a smart one. Cozened you into believing she’d keep your secret without tipping you off that she’d betrayed you. The girl didn’t even want a share of the bounty. Just justice for her father.”

  If Pike had hoped to shock her with this, he would remain disappointed. There was no one in the world with more cause than Ahr to want Ra’s head. She’d been within her rights to turn Ra in. Ra had been a fool to hope for anything else.

  Pike tried a different tack. “Naiahn’s daughter was a godsend, if you’ll pardon the expression. But it was another mutual friend who led me to you.” His expression was pleased when Ra glanced up. He’d gotten her interest at last. “Calls himself Pearl.”

  The sound of the name released the memory inside her as though a dam had burst. Ra sprang to her feet, pulling the heavy chair with her, and Pike rose likewise, stumbling back a bit against his chair in fear, though he had her bound as surely as Shiva did. Pearl. Where had the boy been when she’d returned to Rhyman? Why hadn’t Merit spoken of him? How had she forgotten him?

  Pike kept a few feet’s distance between them. “Thought that might pique your interest. Little Pearl and I traveled together for a bit. He was perversely loyal to you for weeks, sent me on a wild goose chase all the way to the Eastern Continent. I made good use of him there—nothing untoward, don’t waste that look on me. He spun gold for me with his art, and developed such a following, the locals made him their own Meer—throne, vetmas and all. Eventually, though, he started having visions of you on Munt Zelfaal. Damn near drove him mad.”

  Ra sank slowly back against the chair, letting the legs drop onto the floor. This was why she’d forgotten him. She could see it now in the Meeric flow, the poison she’d spilled into it, and into Pearl, like a toxic spill on the Anamnesis. He’d seen her raving. Shiva had allowed her to suppress Pearl’s memory because Ra would have given up seeking atonement in despair.

  She was on the verge of it now, sick at heart at what Pearl had been subjected to because of her. There seemed to be no end to the consequences of her madness, no one she had not irreparably harmed. Pearl was an innocent soul who had suffered too much in his brief life. She’d wanted to spare him any more, and now she’d become the cause of further suffering. He’d trusted her implicitly as he’d trusted no one else. And she’d betrayed him.

  Pike studied her warily, and apparently satisfied that she posed no imminent danger to him, he sat once more before her, though slightly farther back than he’d been. “I imagine you’re wondering what became of the little Meer. I’d like to know myself. But I’d made a deal with him that if he ever gave you up to me, I’d set him free. And so I did. I’ll probably regret my softheartedness later, but as long as he doesn’t speak, I’ve promised to leave him in peace. Even a hardened hunter like myself doesn’t relish beheading a boy. All bets are off, though, if he finds his voice. Or when he’s grown. Whichever comes first.”

  Pearl had let Pike believe Nesre had succeeded in silencing him. Smart boy. Ra hoped he was somewhere safe, and far away from them all.

  Pike fiddled with a clasp at the back of his hip and drew out a blade. “Which brings me to you. As much as your present handicap suits me, I don’t trust it. And further, I need a vetma from you. So we find ourselves in a bit of a quandary.” He rested the knife casually across his knees. “How do I get what I want out of you when you’re apparently unable to give it?”

  Curled up with Jak by the fire after they’d done the breakfast dishes together, Ahr steadfastly avoided her conscience. Breakfast had been quiet, with both Shiva and Ra absent—Jak had accepted Ahr’s claim that Ra wanted to be alone, and Shiva had announced in no uncertain terms that anyone waking her again to eat “flesh” would be the meal.

  When Shiva emerged, the others found excuses to be elsewhere, leaving Ahr and Jak alone with her in the cozy gathering room. Ahr moved closer to Jak, afraid to let the Meer see her eyes lest her secrets spill out of them. Shiva’s height was daunting from this angle, long limbs sheathed in a pair of slim black pants, the deep ruby wine of her hair offset by a blood-red blouse.

  “So here you are.” Shiva took one of the chairs by the fire. “The mortal girl
who brought down the Meer.” She crossed her legs elegantly. “I see my blood agrees with you.”

  “Your blood?” Ahr stared up at her after all, unable to look away. “It’s your blood in me?”

  “It was an incidental consequence. One I didn’t foresee.”

  “You brought her back,” said Jak.

  Shiva shrugged in a manner that managed to be the opposite of self-effacing. “I completed her consignment to the elements.”

  Ahr shivered, and Jak drew her close, kissing the top of her head in reassurance.

  Shiva observed Ahr, the unnerving green of her eyes a sign of danger. “Jak required something tangible to believe in Ra once more. I provided that. What is it you require?”

  Ahr managed not to flinch under her gaze. “I don’t require anything. I believe in her. I just don’t happen to like her.”

  “You’re a self-absorbed little chit. I don’t like you very much at the moment either. Must you have tit for tat? Shall I bring her out and whip her in front of you, counting precisely so that you get just as much as Jak? Or shall I spear her on the points of my nails and make things even between you?”

  “We are even. I crushed her skull; she opened my gut. An eye for an eye.”

  Shiva laughed humorlessly. “Self-important fool. You never crushed her skull. You haven’t the power. A mob of thousands did that. You merely stood by and enjoyed it.”

  “I did not enjoy it!”

  Shiva rose and took Ahr by the arm, pulling her to her feet with a grip of steel that not even the matching challenge of her breed could resist. “You hate Ra because he failed to read your mind.” Ahr tried to protest, but Shiva wouldn’t allow her the indulgence of denial. “He couldn’t, or wouldn’t. But I have no such conscience.” Her dark Meeric gaze held Ahr more surely than her hand. Instinct told Ahr how Shiva’s mind searched for what she wanted. Ahr steered her there to keep the darker truth hidden.

  “The virgin’s veil!” Shiva laughed, and Ahr turned her head away, as if that could stop the Meer from penetrating her secrets. “Is all this nonsense really just about your pride? That he left you in the veil while he fucked you?” Shiva held Ahr by the jaw and forced her to look the greater Meer in the eye. “It wasn’t any failing in his Meeric conceit, you precious simpleton. It was the simple failing of sex. Ra was a man. What did you expect?”

  Ahr pulled against her grip, but Shiva twisted her arm and brought her up close.

  “Despite the disparity of gender, Ra is still accountable for being ignorant and cruel. But you didn’t have the luxury of ignorance. Did it never occur to you to simply ask Ra to remove it? No. Instead, you asked him for the most selfish vetma before the soth of Rhyman, and in his sacred duty, he gave it to you. And your gratitude was to plot his death.”

  “What vetma?” Despite herself, Ahr was distracted from her resolve. “He gave me nothing.”

  “You asked him to say the child was his.”

  Shiva’s blood was pounding in Ahr’s head. “He refused my vetma. He made me an object of ridicule before the whole of Rhyman.”

  The Meer’s grip tightened around her arm, and Ahr cried out. “If Ra had never acknowledged her, the child wouldn’t have been taken from you. For you, Ra uttered the words. Yours was the vetma he granted that evening. Ra is Meer. His words went forth and became the semen of greed in the hearts of the templars. His word created the Expurgation.”

  Ahr shook her head, bewildered and frightened. He hadn’t answered her vetma. It was impossible. And how could it have been the cause of the Expurgation?

  The blood pounded harder. It was the templars who’d stolen Mila. They’d wanted her, no matter how they’d learned of her. But the templars had also legitimized the Expurgist movement. The child, they said, was the cause. The child was the proof of the moral decay of the Meer. Rhyman had begun to change, they insisted, when MeerRa had acknowledged the child.

  “His words, fêt. ‘The child is mine.’ That was your vetma. I heard it from my temple.”

  Her vetma. Ra had spoken and brought down all of Meerdom. And he’d done it for Ahr. Choking on tears she didn’t dare allow herself to shed in front of Shiva, she stared up at the Meer in misery. What she’d been struggling to keep hidden was now a torrent of guilt and shame, an open book in her head. There was no way to keep it from MeerShiva.

  The dawning knowledge on Shiva’s face was more quiet and terrible than any violence Ahr had imagined.

  Shiva’s arms dropped to her sides. “What have you done?”

  The Meerhunter rose without warning and stepped in with his knife, grasping Ra’s hair at the scalp and turning her head aside. A flash of steel preceded the sting of a sharp blade against her cheek. Pike let go and stepped back, examining the dripping blade. The trickle of blood down the side of her face was a maddening itch she couldn’t scratch.

  “If you are who you say you are, this blood will tell. Just a formality. I’ve no doubt of your identity, but those who commissioned me will need proof before I get my bounty when I bring you in.” Pike uncorked a glass vial he’d taken from his pocket and let the blood drip into it from the end of his blade before replacing the stopper. “Now, before we proceed, one question remains: have you really lost the power to conjure? In case Naiahn’s daughter was lying about that, I’ll need your word, just as I exacted it from the boy.”

  Producing a notepad and a blunt graphite pencil from his coat, he set them on Ra’s lap and then moved behind her chair.

  “Right-handed or left?” He paused with the key in his hand. Each wrist was chained separately. “Just wiggle your fingers to indicate the dominant one.”

  Wearily, Ra moved the fingers on her right hand, and Pike turned the lock to release the chain, but held the knife to her throat as soon as she moved.

  “One wrong move, and I’ll take your head now, though I’d prefer to conclude our business properly first.” He tightened the steel against her. “Do we have an understanding?”

  Ra nodded, causing the blade to cut into her flesh, though not deep enough this time to draw much blood.

  “Good.” Pike put her hand on the pad and pencil in her lap. “Now, write for me: I will do as you say.”

  There hardly seemed any reason not to. He had her where he wanted her. With Shiva’s word preventing Ra from conjuring, she could do nothing to Pike within the cage, even if her tongue were loosed, while the cage itself kept Shiva from finding her, as it had kept Pearl from detection for the first twelve years of his life. On the other hand, since her words held no power, what she promised him was meaningless. She wrote the words.

  Pike took the pad and pencil and smiled as he tucked them away. “I’m well aware of the paradox of my request. If you’re powerless as Naiahn says, the words you write are powerless. But if you were able to do me harm, your writing that would prevent you. So you either truly intend to do as I say, or you’re lying, but it’s irrelevant. Either way, I’m covered.” He unstrapped the leather thong behind her head and worked the strap from her mouth. “Wouldn’t you agree, MeerRa?”

  She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “It seems you’ve thought of everything. Except how to get what you want from me.”

  Pike circled his chair. “That is the problem, isn’t it?”

  “And what is it you want?”

  He stopped and turned to face her. “I want what I’ve earned. For fourteen years, I’ve been hunting fugitives for the solicitors and prelates of the Deltan soths, because in the post-Expurgation Delta, there are precious few jobs for people of my stature that are within the law.”

  “Your stature?”

  “Like your man Merit, I was once a litter bearer—for MeerAlya.” Pike folded his arms at her appraising look, as if challenging her. She wouldn’t have guessed he’d served in such a capacity. He was tall enough, and muscular enough, but he lacked the social graces of what had
been known as “templar families”, cultivated over centuries, from which such servants were chosen.

  As if to prove her point, Pike twitched his jaw and spat another wad of tobacco juice onto the floor. “After the Expurgation, most in my position lost everything—our family homes, our pensions—and most definitely the respect we’d once commanded. I’m not complaining about that. I was still young. I’d only served for half a dozen years. I saw an opportunity in the new Delta, and I thrived at it. As a matter of fact, I’m the only Meerhunter to have successfully brought one in. MeerPalu of Soth Rez’a.”

  Ra remembered Palu only as a name. She couldn’t even recall whether the Meer had been male or female. As with most other Meer, Palu’s resonance within the flow had seemed dim and distant, and of little consequence to MeerRa on his throne. The voices of the vetma seekers, both common and of the templar class, had occupied his mind.

  Pike seemed disappointed that the name had elicited neither surprise nor shock. “The Meer was warned of the Expurgation on the night of the last feast by someone in his inner circle at Ludtaht Palu. He abandoned his duty and fled to the north. It took me two years to track him down, and I came this close to being cursed, but I earned my name with his head. And I’ve done quite well for myself ever since, tracking human fugitives—dissenters and Meerist sympathizers trying to overthrow the courts.” The Meerhunter sat once more, cleaning the point of his knife on his knee. “When I bring in your head, I’ll receive a sizeable bounty. What I want is insurance that no matter who rises to power because of it, whichever of these fat, self-indulgent templars-turned-solicitors manages to scrabble his way over the heads of his fellow conspirators to rule over the soths, I won’t end up as collateral damage.”

  Pike pointed the knife at her. “I want to retire, and I want you to see to it that I can do so in comfort, without fear of reprisals from some new hothead in government who decides Meerhunters are another remnant of the Old Delta that need to be wiped out. And the way you’re going to do that is to grant me a vetma. Once you’ve done so, I promise to make your death swift, without unnecessary suffering. I’ve thought it out quite carefully. I have all the words written down for you to say. But in order for it to matter, your words have to have power, don’t they? So what you and I are going to figure out before I take your head is how to get your power back.” Pike flipped the knife casually in his hand. “So. Exactly how did you lose it?”