by Jane Kindred
“I thought you wanted me dead. A trophy for your wall.”
“Oh, I do,” said Nesre. “But all in good time.”
He stabbed her again, this time through the back of her hand where it rested on the floor. Ra hissed in pain and frustration. She hadn’t expected to be caged. She’d meant to burn Ludtaht Alya, but it seemed her will couldn’t extend outside the dark glass. It somehow held the Meeric flow at bay, reflecting it back. This was how he’d kept Pearl so tamed. And because she’d vowed not to speak harm against Prelate Nesre, she couldn’t simply say “burn” within the small space while he was in it and destroy him with her incidentally as she’d planned. It would be too deliberate an act. She would have to wait for an opportunity to escape the cage to take him down with her.
The situation outside Temple Ra was grim. Ahr had helped Merit take a census of the members of the Guard remaining loyal to him and found that fully half had fled Rhyman after Ra’s return and another quarter at least were now among the dissenters demanding his ouster. Though it was a testament to the loyalty he inspired that any had stayed on in his command at all after the destruction of Prelate Vithius. To hold off the mob now filling the courtyard and the square beyond, and spilling into the streets, they had fewer than three hundred men.
Temple Ra had no gates to storm and no reasonable way of keeping the people out of it once their rallying cries reached the fever pitch that would overcome their fear of a vengeful Meeric spirit, but for the past three days, Merit’s men had managed to keep them at bay. Protestors stood on the steps and on the marble benches in the garden shouting to the crowds about the danger of placing power in the hands of a man with known ties to the former despot Ra of Rhyman. Ahr shook his head, watching the same fools utter the same nonsense they’d spoken thirteen years ago in fomenting revolution against MeerRa. He’d been one of them.
Jak joined him at the front of the atrium, keeping a wary eye on the shouting and fist-pumping. “How long are the guards going to be able to hold them off?”
“I don’t think holding them off is really what they’re doing,” Ahr replied. “When this mob decides to move against us, it will move. It hasn’t worked up the courage.” He looked at Jak observing him with new eyes, probably trying to picture him as the dissident girl he’d been. “When they do move, I want you to leave. Merit will have an escort ready to take you out through the servants’ quarters in the rear of the temple.”
Jak glared hotly at him. “I am not leaving you here and running away like some coward.”
“This isn’t your fight, Jak.”
“And how is it yours, then?”
Ahr shrugged and looked back at the crowd. “I helped create them. I helped them destroy a man.” He swallowed. “And a child. I suppose it’s fitting now that I should be on the other side of their wrath.” For once, Jak said nothing to contradict him. “And I am Merit’s man,” he added. “I am loyal to him to the end.”
Jak nodded, hands in the roomy pockets of the dungarees, at last seeming to understand something about him. “Were you lovers? Before…”
Ahr nearly choked on his laughter. “Lovers? Merit and I? Sorry, I’m not laughing at you, just the idea. Merit was… He was my protector. And he was Ra’s. He loved us both. But not like that, I assure you.”
A memory struck Ahr of looking up from where Ra was working his way down her body as she lay naked before him on his own altar, and seeing Merit watching. It was his job to watch over Ra. He watched in all directions; it was necessary in an open-air temple, and he couldn’t afford to turn his back out of modesty. He’d blushed and looked away, but she hadn’t. It seemed natural that he was a part of their lovemaking. She’d felt beautiful, transcendent, like a piece of art.
The unrest grew louder in the courtyard, coordinated groups shouting that Merit had no authority over Rhyman. The organized escalation couldn’t mean anything good. The crowd surged toward the steps, demanding Merit’s abdication.
Merit came forward through the ranks of his men, raising his arm for quiet, and was met by a chorus of jeers. He spoke anyway, in a voice that commanded attention. “In the absence of the prelate and his solicitors, I have the authority and duty of my office as Lord Minister of Security to serve as ruler of Rhyman.” The voices grew louder, trying to shout him down. “Unless there are solicitors of the Court of Rhyman in the crowd now!” It had the desired effect. The cacophony abated for a moment. “Perhaps they would like to come forward instead of hiding in anonymity and explain why they have abandoned their duties.”
“Perhaps you’d like to explain why you’re giving sanctuary to a Meer in the Court of Rhyman!” The speaker hid his face when the protesters looked around amid murmurs and gasps.
“There are no Meer in Rhyman,” Merit said with a look of amusement on his face. “Who’s told you such a fiction?”
“I saw it with my own eyes!” the challenger shot back.
“Solicitor Khalus.” Merit identified him shrewdly. “Come forward and tell us about this Meer you believe you’ve seen. I’m sure everyone would love to hear your evidence.”
Khalus lowered his hood. “I’ll stay where I am, thank you. I have no interest in being torn to shreds like Prelate Vithius!”
“Torn to shreds?” Merit scoffed. “Or could it be you’re simply repeating tales and were not even here on the night Vithius abdicated and abandoned Rhyman?”
A murmur of doubt ran through the crowd, and Khalus looked around in alarm at the numbers surrounding him.
“Who here claims like Khalus to have been a witness to this alleged Meericry?” Merit demanded. “I dare you to challenge me to my face.” He waited. “What, no one?”
“We don’t need evidence to see that the prelate has disappeared!” someone else shouted. “Restore the solicitors and let Merit be judged in the court!” Shouts of assent followed, but Merit persisted.
“I ask again, where are the solicitors?” He looked about. “Let them come. I could certainly use their assistance in running the government of Rhyman!”
“Out with the Meerists!” The shouts and agitating began again, drowning out anything else Merit might have planned to say. The anger of the crowd had reached a point of no return. Ahr had seen it before, and he felt green at the memory of it. They swelled against the barrier of Merit’s men, and as the Guard defended itself with force, cries of brutality rang out.
Ahr grabbed Jak’s arm. “Get inside.”
Pearl huddled on the stool, not daring to move. Even if MeerShiva hadn’t kept him there with her word, he wouldn’t have dared to disobey. There was something dark and terrible in her eyes. He closed his and concentrated on the temple, trying to see what had become of Ra. She had come for him, as he’d hardly dared dream. If the Master were to hurt her, it would be Pearl’s fault. He’d seen in the Master’s head that he wanted very much to hurt her, and yet not because he felt strongly about her, but because she stood in his way. Surely, the prelate couldn’t harm such a powerful Meer, but Pearl looked, just the same.
What he saw was the inside of his cage, and for a moment his heart twisted with dismay, thinking he’d only been having a vision and was now once more inside it. But Ra was there. She was sitting on his pallet, looking at his drawings on the floor. She was wounded. Pearl’s heart began to race. No, this was wrong. It was wrong of the Master to cage Ra. Very wrong. Pearl might belong there for being a mongrel bastard, but Ra was good. He felt it emanate from her in rays, a warmth that encompassed everything around her. Even though she’d destroyed the prelate of Rhyman, she was kind at heart. And that prelate had done a very bad thing to the other Meerchild. Pearl had seen that too. Ra’s grief had driven her to punish him.
Pearl moved his Meeric eye beyond the glass walls of the cage, and for the first time, he realized it was only glass on this side. The Master had seen everything he did. He couldn’t think of anything bad he’d done except h
iding the drawings, but it made him feel dirty to think of being watched. And now the Master could see Ra. But he wasn’t watching now.
Pearl scanned the temple and found him reclining in a dining nook, enjoying a meal of roast duck and candied parsnips. Seeing this made Pearl remember how hungry he was. One of the ways the Master punished him was by denying him food, and since finding the hidden paintings, he’d given Pearl nothing to eat. He’d discovered Pearl could go many days without sustenance, though he hungered the same as anyone else. The food the Master was eating was never what Pearl got, but he hadn’t minded much. The Master brought him plums and cherries when he was good.
He realized he was dwelling on the food, experiencing the smell of sage butter and cinnamon, and the taste of the sweet bread and hot spices of the relish the Master dipped it in. Pearl swallowed and pushed the hunger down and returned his vision to the cage. He didn’t like watching Ra through the glass. Seeing her in the pictures that came to him didn’t seem wrong somehow, but on the other side of the glass, it gave him as bad a feeling as knowing he’d been watched himself.
Pearl grew agitated. Ra couldn’t stay there. He couldn’t let the Master hurt her as he planned. He had to let her out.
Pearl held out his hands until he could feel the coldness and the smoothness of the glass against his palms. “No,” he whispered. It wasn’t easy to say words, though he heard them often enough in his head. His training had been thorough, and it hurt his throat and stomach to let sound come through his mouth. And there were many words he simply knew his tongue couldn’t form.
He breathed in deeply, letting his mind swim in the Meeric river, letting his will exhale into the world with his breath. “Bad glass. No glass.”
It shook in his vision beneath his fingers, heat building in it. Ra looked up.
“No glass,” he whispered again.
The walls of the cage shuddered, bowing outward as if made of something pliant, and then snapped back. Pearl felt faint and flushed, as if he were about to be very ill, and his eyes burned as if he’d touched them with pepper oil. He pushed against the glass once more, shoving forward, feeling its matter shift through his fingers. “No glass!”
And then it shattered outward, from the top down, into a thousand glistening splinters, raining from the temple dome like a shower of stars. He could feel the splinters in his hands, and when he opened his eyes at last, he saw his palms were bleeding.
Ra sat cross-legged, surrounded by the delicate musical notes of the cage’s falling debris. She’d felt a ripple in the Meeric flow, a vibration that had the signature of Pearl, just as the glass began to fall. If he’d reached Shiva, he was miles across town, and yet he’d focused his will on something he neither saw nor touched. Astounded by his skill, she forgot for a moment the significance of the event—that she was free of the binding cage. She relaxed into a meditative state, using the points of light sparkling from the carpet of glass as her focus, and waited for Prelate Nesre.
In a moment, he came running from the open chambers beyond, outrage and disbelief nearly choking him. She allowed him into the narrow field of her consciousness. Nesre stopped and stared at her in astonishment amid the debris. He’d expected her to run.
His shoes crunched over the shards as he approached her slowly. Ra smiled and let him come to her.
“MeerRa. What—?”
Ra spoke a single, quiet word. “Fire.” It began in the gold-painted wainscoting from sparks in the wiring of the electric lights hidden behind panels of oak.
Nesre looked baffled as he stood before her. “What?”
“Ludtaht Alya,” said Ra, “is on fire.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Nesre looked about, seeing nothing. He hadn’t the Meeric eye.
Before he could question her further, shouts came from every direction of the temple, servants and guards calling out at once in a panic: “Fire!”
Nesre whirled about. “Damn you! What have you done? What’s going on?”
“Purification. Making us one with the elements, to return to that from which we all flow, Meer and ordinary men alike.”
The smell of smoke had at last reached the small alcove where Nesre had stored his pet Meer. There was only one entrance to this alcove, and as Nesre turned toward it, a wall of flame leapt up the tapestries on either side of the arch like crouching mountain cats and engulfed the passage in heat and acrid fumes.
Nesre stepped into the circle of glass and grabbed Ra by the arm, pulling her to her feet. “Put it out! You gave your word to speak no harm against me!”
“I spoke no harm against you, Prelate Nesre. Your presence here is of your own accord.”
He pulled his stiletto from the sheath at his belt and held it to her breast, his fingers digging into her flesh as he shook her with fury and mounting fear. “Put it out, or I swear I will hold you here to die with me! The only way you can escape is by harming me, and you are bound to your word!”
“I have no intention of leaving.”
“But you’ll die!” His voice rose in a pitch of hysteria.
“Yes, Prelate Nesre. I have done that before.”
Nesre began to cough into his sleeve, his eyes watering. “Why?” he demanded. “Why not just leave? You’d have won, dammit! I don’t know how you destroyed the cage, but you would have been free. You could have gone your own way and left me alone!”
She stared at him serenely. “As you said, I am a woman, and softhearted. You kept a child here caged like an animal, but with less respect. You need to die.” The fumes of burning fibers and metallic pigments were making her lightheaded.
Nesre made a wild attempt to flee through the wall of flame, but it leapt to his robes, and he fell screaming to the ground, trying to roll the flames out in the layers of crushed glass. Ra sat down once more on little Pearl’s pallet, watching him dispassionately. Her lungs were burning with the smoke, but she would wait to be certain Nesre perished before she succumbed to it. Sweat poured down her back and fluid ran from her eyes that, for once, was only water. The prelate’s moaning quieted, and his shuddering body stilled, and she expelled her last breath and closed her eyes.
The first time Ra had died, his last thoughts had been of Ahr. That desperate need to see her again, to make things right, had brought Ra back despite all odds, though the pain of his death had left the new Ra nearly as vulnerable and empty-headed as a child. And she’d made nothing right. She thought of Ahr now, and of Jak—unexpected, sweet Jak. She’d only just begun to know the depths of passion that hid beneath that quiet exterior. Would it be wrong to return again? Should she have returned at all?
She let the light, clear liquid of her watering eyes trail down her cheeks like tears. Her selfishness in returning had caused others pain. She ought to let the winds of the elements take her where they would, returning in the ordinary manner if she was meant to. It was so hard to leave fate to its own devices.
She was drifting toward the weightlessness of death when a deafening crack reverberated through the temple. Timbers falling in the entry hall, perhaps. But the air around her seemed to be drawn past in a rush toward the arch, and she opened her eyes as the flames were sucked through the doorway with it. They billowed outward and then dissipated as if a blanket had been thrown over them.
Shiva stood in the void they left, a brilliant indigo cloak fluttering in the breeze as the air returned as mysteriously as it had gone. She took one look at Prelate Nesre, badly burned but his chest still rising shallowly, and bent down and snapped his neck with a quick twist. She shook her head at Ra.
“Thick-headed child. Must you always do everything the hard way?”
Twenty-Five: Sublimation
Thick black smoke rose into the air from the direction of the temple. Cree had been purchasing breakfast in the market when the breeze from the Anamnesis carried the scent of smoke eastward. People were gath
ering to speculate on what could be burning, and able-bodied men had begun to hurry toward the district known as the Garden, an arc of flowering vine-covered streets fanning out from Ludtaht Alya, in which the temple courtesans had once flourished.
Cree dropped her basket of fruit and bread and ran with them, heedless of the danger of being recognized. The temple was on fire, and Ume was at the temple.
She fought her way through the crowds gathered in the square and tried to get close as the billowing smoke rose unmistakably from the golden domes. Where the Garden gave way to the open lawn before the temple, a row of guardsmen barred entrance to the grounds.
“I want to help,” said Cree as one of the guards stopped her. “Don’t you need a bucket brigade?”
“The fire is under control, sir. Everyone needs to stand back.” Behind him in the courtyard, a group of red-robed solicitors stood solemnly conferring amongst themselves. Among them, dressed in a similar garment, was a courtesan, a wide cream sash tied in a bow about her waist. She turned, and Cree drew in a sharp breath at the sight of the beaded veil below her eyes. It was Ume, as she’d looked years ago, as though she’d never left here.
After a moment of frantic waving, she caught Ume’s eye. Ume slipped away from the solicitors and hurried toward her, but the same guard who’d barred Cree entrance stepped back and blocked her egress.
“Prelate Nesre has ordered us to keep an eye on you, Maiden Sky.”
“Prelate Nesre is dead,” said Ume, managing to sound heartbroken. Tears were even streaming from her eyes, kohl smudged about them—or perhaps soot from the fire. “Let me pass, sir, that I may mourn with my friends.” When he hesitated, she gave him a smile beneath the sheer fabric of the veil that managed to be both sad and seductive. “Your kindness to me will be remembered when I return to the Garden after the period of mourning.”