Idol of Glass

by Jane Kindred

  Jak’s hands slipped from the coat pockets. “Cree and Ume were Expurgists?”

  Ahr pulled her own coat tighter, as if that would keep out the coldness emanating from Jak. “Cree was. Ume…Ume got caught up in it because of her involvement with MeerAlya.”

  Shiva cleared her throat with irritation and drew the hood of her coat in tighter, turning toward the open tavern. “Enough reminiscing. Let us find this ‘Pike’.”

  All eyes turned toward Shiva as she pushed open the door. Even shrouded within her fur-trimmed hood, her visage was commanding. She moved through the tavern—almost floating like a disembodied spirit—taking its inventory, and then turned at the opposite end, a narrow sliver of the sun’s remaining rays from the window behind her illuminating the hood on one side.

  “Which of you is Pike?” When no one spoke, Shiva threw back her hood. “I said, which of you is PIKE?”

  A glass fell from the barmaid’s hand and shattered behind the bar. There was no mistaking Shiva for ordinary.

  A patron at the table nearest Shiva spoke up with a stammer. “He—he’s not here. But one of the other river rats was in here a minute ago—fellow named Smalls. Said Pike was onto a—a big catch.”

  Shiva raised an impossibly ruby eyebrow. “River rats?”

  “Bounty hunters.” The man seemed to know instinctively that the term “Meerhunters” would be in bad form. “From the Delta.”

  The corner of Shiva’s mouth turned up in something that couldn’t quite be termed a smile, and the one volunteering the information swallowed audibly. “And where is this ‘rat’ now?”

  Her “helper” turned to the others around him, but his friends were steadfastly avoiding his eye, and a few at nearby tables had even moved a seat or two away. “I—I couldn’t say. Ma’am.”

  “I see.” Shiva moved slowly back through the tavern, eyeing the poor souls who had the misfortune to be seated out in the open on the stools at the bar. “Anyone else have anything they’d like to offer?” She drew a long, slender finger along the bar top as she moved past a trio of empty stools toward the next group of patrons, stopping as she reached an occupied stool. Her nail, sharp as a stiletto, had left a razor-thin groove in the wood. “You, perhaps?”

  The patron shook his head, staring down at the fingernail that appeared to be ordinary but clearly wasn’t.

  The bartender set down the glass he’d been cleaning studiously since Shiva’s entrance. “Anything in it for someone who has information? Just in case anyone comes by later happens to know something.”

  Shiva turned her gaze on him, and his confidence faltered. “Supposing I offer not to tear out this hypothetical informant’s throat. How would that be?”

  The bartender’s voice came out as thin as the spirits he poured. “Sounds fair. Think I did hear Smalls mention something about seeing Pike doing business with the glazier up the street.”

  “I know the place,” said Jak.

  Shiva smiled at the bartender. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.” Her brow flickered in the opposite of a wink. “You can keep your throat.”

  Following in Shiva’s wake, Jak turned to Ahr as they headed out. “What would he be doing at the glazier’s?”

  “Mirrors,” said Shiva, and didn’t elaborate.

  The glazier, as nervous as the bar patrons had been at Shiva’s presence, confirmed that he’d sold Pike several large sheets of glass and a can of silver paint, and had helped him load it into a rented haywain.

  Shiva stood before the proprietor, towering over his six-foot frame. “And where would one best make use of such equipment?”

  “If I had to make a guess,” the glazier offered, “I’d say the sugar mill, about a mile or so north of town. No one’s out there this time of year, with the place closed up for winter. It’s quiet, enclosed. Plenty of space for…whatever.”

  Shiva nodded and turned to the door. “We will see this sugar mill.” When Jak and Ahr fell into step behind her, she turned and shook her head at Jak. “This is not for you.”

  “No,” Jak protested. “Ra—I have to help—”

  “Jak na Fyn. How can you help? Ahr and I will take care of these rats.” Coin materialized in Shiva’s hand, and she placed the silver discs in Jak’s. “Take rooms for us at the inn. We will return with Ra.”

  Hraethe sat on the tile beside the bath in the meditative pose, the first time he’d sought the trance state in nearly four hundred years. A coven of candles circled the room, tall pillars of various sizes, with more floating on the surface of the water—buoyant, made from rounded molds like little boats. The looking glass he’d taken from the marble vanity, and the water itself, would have to serve as his scrying medium. He wasn’t prepared to attempt this in Ra’s ceremonial room. Meer or not, father of Ra or not, he still revered his lord and couldn’t bring himself to usurp his memory.

  As the sun dropped below the golden-tiled dome of Ludtaht Ra and lowered toward the Anamnesis, Hraethe’s eyes closed, and he let himself float in the void of Meeric vision. The first thing that flowed toward him was a vision of Shiva, prowling through a snowy landscape in the falend highlands. The musty oaken wine barrel scent of her surrounded him like a curling fog, drawing him toward her opalescent skin and the ruby wine of her lips.

  Hraethe yanked himself out of the vision, knocking over the candles nearest him with an angry, whispered oath of “meershivá!” He was like a child playing at visions, an eternal adolescent when it came to her. He mustn’t allow himself to think in that direction. But she was loud, and Pearl’s emanations from the realm of the Permanence were hazy and hard to grasp hold of. He needed an anchor.

  Ume had mentioned the drawing in the Peony Room of the ship at sea that had mysteriously contained an image of Pearl crossing the ocean to Gundoumu Arazi. Hraethe rose to fetch it and almost forgot he was nude, realizing it at the last moment as he started through the arch into the passageway. He glanced down, annoyed to realize he was also sporting a healthy erection, thanks to his errant vision. With a sigh, he grabbed a thick robe to cover himself before stepping out.

  As he flung the robe around himself, he ran straight into Cree coming from the other direction. Her eyes widened and her face flushed red as she apologized. Apparently, he hadn’t covered himself quite quickly enough. Before he could say the fault was his own, she’d scuttled past him and disappeared into the room she shared with Ume. Cree barely spoke to him under normal conditions; he was sure she would never speak to him after this.

  The drawing still hung where Ume had said, a lovely pastel in brilliant hues of blue and gold, almost matching the colors of the House of Ra. The figures on the deck of the ship were hard to make out, and they faced away. Nothing in the image seemed to move. He wondered if Ume hadn’t imagined it, but he took the picture back with him and set it on the easel meant to hold the mirror, putting it beside the glass where it lay among the candles on the floor.

  The drawing looked the same as it had, but when he glanced at its reflection in the mirror, the figures on the deck were facing the viewer—the entire painting had turned about—and Pearl stared back at him.

  Pearl’s drawing was working. He’d taken the pastels to the hall where the mirrors reflected the numinous points of light—the origin of which Pearl had yet to discover—and created his art directly on the surface of the glass. As he sketched the vision, Ra came to life within the depths of the mirror. He used the darkest coal for her hair, hanging damp in her equally dark eyes, as well as for the iron chair she was chained to, and a rich crimson for the blood she dripped onto the floor, her skin a combination of pale pinks and white with a touch of blue. A lilac knitted scarf circled her neck, thick with blood.

  Pearl spent a good deal of time on the details of this fabric, which had the Meeric resonance of Ahr. When the visions came, no matter the urgency behind them, his art required this. But each painstakingly cre
ated detail made the world on the other side of the mirror more real and brought him closer to his goal. The glass was thinning and becoming pliant.

  Another image tugged at him, and Pearl turned aside in exasperation to a second glass panel, drawing the gentle glint of candles on water, enveloped in steam, the serene still life a stark contrast to the picture of Ra. Why was he drawing this? Pearl tried to do it swiftly, but the shades of pale blue and green in the bath and the golden white flame reflected on it demanded precision. And then another wavering reflection in the water began to emerge—MeerHraethe was summoning him.

  Pearl glared at the image of Hraethe beginning to form beneath his crayon. He didn’t have time for this. Why would Hraethe be summoning him from under the hill? How would he even know Pearl was here? He would have been thrilled to have this vision sometime earlier. But not now. “Not now.” He found he’d said it aloud. And in the silence after, the vision of the bathing pool and candles dissipated.

  Pearl returned to the drawing of Ra. He had to start a new panel, for she’d moved. Pearl teased out the scene beneath his fingers, the chair now tipped on its side. Pike became important, and Pearl had to draw him too. The Meerhunter crouched over the chair, struggling with Ra. Had she gotten her hands loose? Pearl moved from foot to foot, tilting his head, trying to see beyond Pike in the vision, but it was impossible. He might as well be trying to look past his own reflection.

  He crouched low and got the details of Ra’s bloodied bare feet. Pike had taken off her boots to do more cutting and breaking bones. Pearl snapped his pastel crayon in two against the glass, furious and frustrated. On the other panel, MeerHraethe was trying again.

  Ra breathed against the screaming pain in her hand. She’d dislocated the bones to work it out of the chain, and now she had to force them back into place before she could use it. She’d lunged at Pike in a rage when he’d boasted of having RaNa’s bones, knocking herself and the chair into him and onto the ground, and in the distraction this caused Pike, she’d managed the slip. Merit’s knife was still in the sheath at her back, if she could just get to it.

  Pike got to his feet and hauled the chair back onto its legs, swearing at the bruises she’d caused him. “I see I’ll have to be more specific in what I want you to obey.” He sucked on the end of his thumb, where the tip had been slashed clean off by the heavy chair leg when they fell. “No more lunging with the chair, and no more kicking. You’re to stay put. And I want to hear you say it: I will do as you say.”

  Ra glared daggers at him, keeping her throbbing hand hidden behind the chair. “I will do as you say.” She’d have to find a way to get to the knife and stab him without moving from her spot—assuming her word had any weight at all. She supposed she’d find out when push came to shove.

  Pike nodded, satisfied. “I suppose I should have realized you’d be sentimental about the bones. To me, they’re only tools.” He raised his hand in a pacifying gesture as Ra’s rage surged again. “There’s nothing of the child in the bones, you realize. With the flesh gone, she’s been released into the elements.”

  Ra gritted her teeth. “Not all of her.”

  “Well, that’s your Meeric belief. I don’t ascribe to it. But if you’ll cooperate with me, I promise to rebury the remains. I only needed a bit of bone powder for our purposes.” Oddly enough, she sensed he was a man of his word. It was moderately mollifying.

  “How can I cooperate?” It was an effort to breathe. She was becoming light-headed from blood loss. “Your methods are clearly inadequate.” Ra edged her fingers toward the waistband of her skirt beneath the long sweater as she spoke. Just a few more inches, and she’d have the clasp of the sheath.

  Pike’s pride seemed to be wounded. “It’s not my methods. Nesre was quite clear on the amount of trauma that induced spontaneous conjury. And there’s no point in getting outraged at me about it, it was Nesre who took it upon himself to cultivate his little pearl and treat him as an experiment. I find the whole thing distasteful myself, but I’m not above using what he acquired, whether artifact or knowledge.”

  He took the little leather book from his coat and unwound the thong that bound it to flip through the pages, no doubt looking for something else that might trigger Ra’s magic. Ra’s fingers breached the clasp, and she curled her grip around the handle of the knife and waited for her opportunity.

  Pearl drew with large, sweeping strokes, trying to dispense with the image of Hraethe and his bath as swiftly as he could. Hraethe’s eyes were on him in the watery reflection, bright golden eyes like a tiger’s, rimmed in black, his golden hair tied back high at his crown in a queue, a robe of equally golden silk wrapped around him and tied at the waist with a heavy black sash. The glass was thinning here, as it had when he’d been drawing Ra. Which was all well and good, but he needed to be working on her drawing.

  Hraethe reached out his hand, and Pearl could feel its vibration just inches away on the other side. Perhaps if he brought Hraethe through, he could get back to the urgent matter of Ra. He set down the smoky blue crayon and stretched out his own hand, fingers against the glass. The surface gave like mud against his fingertips.

  Hraethe mouthed a word: Come. Why didn’t he speak aloud? Pearl would have heard him if he had, and the word would have had power. He shook his head. His hand passed through the thick, muddy substance he’d made of the glass, and Hraethe grasped for it.

  “You come,” said Pearl, and yanked his hand back without letting go. Hraethe leapt to his feet, stumbling forward through the steam. In an instant, he’d breached the barrier between the realms. He was under the hill. Pearl pulled his hand free and pointed at the opposite panel. “Ra,” he said brusquely, and turned back to his painting.

  Cree gaped from the arch of the bath chamber as MeerHraethe seemed to step into the looking glass on the floor and disappear. She’d come back to check on him, suddenly gripped with the conviction that he was trying something mad. She was haunted by the image of Pearl in the bath where she and Ume had found him at Soth Szofl bleeding clouds of red into the water. They’d reached him just in time. What if Hraethe meant to reach the realm under the hill just as Pearl had? What if Ume’s tale had given him the idea?

  But there was no gilded razor beside this bath, no blood curling among the candles and steam. Hraethe had simply disappeared.

  She glanced back into the hall, about to call for Ume, but Ume had gone out to the garden for a walk. There wasn’t time to track her down. There was no telling where Hraethe might end up if she waited. The realm under the hill might simply move and trap him there with Pearl.

  Cree entered the bath chamber and approached the large oval of glass that lay among the candles on the tile beside the steaming water. The scent of a fragrant oil curled around her in the mist from the bath. She had no idea whether it would work, but she’d been under the hill before. If anyone could follow Hraethe, it was Cree. She took a deep breath, as if preparing to dive into a pool of water instead of a pool of glass, and stepped onto the mirror. It felt like she’d descended into a shallow pool, and Cree thought she’d been mistaken, turning to step out again, but the arch to the bath chamber had disappeared in the mist.

  The cold seeped in despite Ahr’s warm coat as she followed Shiva through the white-shrouded woods. She’d given Ra her scarf, of course. Meershivá, what was wrong with her? Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes—though the shattered one hurt like fire—but before the tears could fall, Shiva spoke ahead of her on the snow-covered road.

  “Your self-pity, young Meer, is entirely unbecoming.”

  “What would you know about self-pity?” Ahr regretted the bitter outburst as soon as she’d spoken. Misery had gotten the best of her and she’d forgotten what kind of creature she was dealing with. As if the eye should have let her forget.

  Instead of anger, Shiva laughed. “I invented it, my dear. Now stop sulking. We have work to do.”

 
“What work?” Ahr bit her lip. Her mouth seemed to have a mind of its own. Renaissance had truly wreaked havoc on her emotions. It was like being in the grip of puberty.

  Shiva didn’t seem to care. “If my suspicion is correct, this Pike will have fashioned an enclosed chamber of the glass he purchased, erected inside the mill, and he’ll have used a Meeric relic either to conceal it or to prevent it from being opened, except by him. You and I will have to combine our resonance to shatter it.”

  “Our resonance?” Ahr moved faster to keep in step with her, her curiosity getting the better of her.

  “The essence of your Meeric power has a unique signature, a vibration within the Meeric flow, like a wave of sound dropped into a pool of water. Pitched just so, it will cause the elements around it to vibrate at the same frequency.”

  “And how do we make it…resonate?”

  Shiva paused and turned her head, her expression exasperated and incredulous, as if she’d never encountered anyone so stupid in her entire improbably long existence. “By opening your mouth, of course. To speak is to create. Haven’t you been paying attention?” She shook her head and plunged onward through the packed snow.

  Ahead on the moonlit bank, the frozen Filial River that wound beside the road turned inward toward a dark structure. They approached in utter silence, moving like part of the landscape around them, as only the Meer could. Despite herself, Ahr felt a little thrill of excitement. But there was no sign of a haywain, and no visible lights inside the mill. Ahr wondered if Shiva’s intuition had been wrong.

  Whatever Pike had been looking for, he’d apparently found it. Tucking the book away once more, he dug about in his bag, brought out a small pouch and shook something into his hand.

  Ra eyed him warily. “What is that?”

  Pike held up a muddy gray pill the size of a small grape. “Something Nesre gave the boy when he needed him to draw. Seemed to increase his visions. Perhaps it will open your connection to the magic.” He approached Ra. “Open your mouth.”