“I see.” I turned to Wilder. “Have you done this before?”
He nodded. “Mildred will be the third.”
“Such a wonderful promise. Why don’t you walk into the ocean yourself?”
“Oh, I shall—when I have trained a successor who can carry on in my place.” And he looked at me with such confidence that I realized whom he must have chosen for that role.
Mildred Bergman—convinced that life could be hoarded like a fortune—would never believe me if I simply told her the truth. I held up my hand to forestall anything else the priest might have to say. “Wilder, get out of here. I’ll speak with you later.”
He went. If he had convinced himself I would be his priestess, I suppose he had to treat me as one.
I sat down, cross-legged, trying to clear the hissing tension that had grown between us. After a moment she also sat, cautiously and with wincing stiffness.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It doesn’t work like that. We go into the water, and live long there, because we have the blood of the deep in us. The love of the gods is not so powerful. I wish I had more to offer you. There are magics that can heal, that can ease the pains of age, that can even extend life for a few decades. I will gladly teach them to you.” And I would, too. She had been vile to me, but I could invite her to Charlie’s back room to study with us, and learn the arts that would give her both time and acceptance. All but one spell, that I would not teach, and did not plan to ever learn.
“You’re lying.” Her voice was calm and even.
“I’m not. You’re going to drown yourself—” I swallowed. “I’m trying to save your life. You haven’t done a speck of real magic in this room, you don’t know what it’s like, how it’s different.”
She started to say something, and I raised a hand. “No. I know you won’t listen to what I have to say. Please, let me show you.”
“Show me.” Not a demand—only an echo, full of doubt.
“Magic.” I looked at her, with my bulging eyes and thick bones, willing her, if she couldn’t yet believe, at least to look at me.
“What’s involved in this … demonstration?” she finally asked, and I released a held breath.
“Not much. Chalk, a pair of bowls, and a drop of blood.”
Between my purse and the altar, we managed to procure what was needed—fortunate, as I would have hated to go up and ask Wilder to borrow them. Having practiced this with Charlie, I still had the most basic of seals settled in my mind, at least clearly enough for this simple spell. I moved us away from the carefully laid tile to the raw flagstone behind the stairs. There was no reason to vandalize Wilder’s stage.
Bergman did not know the Litany, nor the cosmic humility that was the core of Sharhlyda practice. And yet, in some ways, she was easier to work with than Charlie. I could tell her to feel her blood as a river, without worrying what she might guess of my nature.
As I guided her through the opening meditation, Bergman’s expression relaxed into something calmer, more introspective. She had some potential for the art, I thought. More than Wilder, certainly, who was so focused on the theater of the thing, and on the idea of power. Bergman’s shoulders loosened, and her breath evened, but she kept her eyes open, waiting.
I pricked my finger and let the blood fall into the bowl, holding myself back from the spell long enough to wipe the blade and pass it to Bergman. Then I let the current pull me down …
Submerging only briefly before forcing myself upward, out of the cool ocean and into the harsh dry air. I took a painful breath, and laid my hand on Bergman’s arm.
A thin stream moved through a great ravine, slow and emaciated. Rivulets trickled past great sandy patches. And yet, where they ran, they ran sweet and cool. The lines they etched, the bars and branches, made a fine and delicate pattern. In it I saw not only the inevitable decay that she strove against, but the stronger shape that was once hers—and the subtler strength in the shape she wore now.
“You are one of them.”
I returned, gasping, all my instincts clamoring for moisture. I wanted to race upstairs and throw the windows open to the evening fog. Instead I leaned forward.
“Then you must also see—”
She sniffed, half a laugh. “I see that at least some of the books Wilder found can be trusted. And none of them have claimed that the Deep Ones are a more honest race than we. They do claim that you know more of the ancient lore than most humans have access to. So no, I don’t believe that your immortality is a mere accident of birth. It can be ours as well—if we don’t let you frighten us away from it.”
We argued long and late, and still I could not move her. That night I argued with myself, sleepless, over whether it was my place to do more.
* * *
Of course Charlie asks, inevitably.
I have been teaching him the first, simplest healing spells. Even a mortal, familiar with his own blood, can heal small wounds, speed the passage of trivial illnesses and slow the terrible ones.
“How long can I live, if I practice this?” He looks at me thoughtfully.
“Longer. Perhaps an extra decade or three. Our natures catch up with us all, in the end.” I cringe inwardly, imagining his resentment if he knew. And I am beginning to see that he must know, eventually, if I continue with these lessons.
“Except for the Yith?”
“Yes.” I hesitate. Even were I ready to share my nature, this would be an unpleasant conversation, full of temptation and old shame. “What the Yith do … there are spells for that, or something similar. No one else has ever found the trick of moving through time, but to take a young body for your own … You would not find it in any of these books, but it wouldn’t be hard to track down. I haven’t, and I won’t. It’s not difficult, from what I’ve heard, just wrong.”
Charlie swallows and looks away. I let him think about it a moment.
“We forgive the Yith for what they do, though they leave whole races abandoned around fading stars. Because their presence means that Earth is remembered, and our memory and our stories will last for as long as they can find younger stars and younger bodies to carry them to. They’re as selfish as an old scholar wanting eighty more years to study and love and breathe the air. But we honor the Yith for sacrificing billions, and track down and destroy those who steal one life to preserve themselves.”
He narrows his eyes. “That’s very … practical of you.”
I nod, but look away. “Yes. We say that they do more to hold back darkness and chaos than any other race, and it is worth the cost. And of course, we know that we aren’t the ones to pay it.”
“I wonder if the … what were they called, the Leng … had a Nuremberg.”
I start to say that it’s not the same—the Yith hate nobody, torture nothing. But I cannot find it in me to claim it makes a difference. Oblivion, after all, is oblivion, however it is forced on you.
* * *
The day after my fourth meeting with Spector, I did not go to work. I walked, in the rain and the chill, in the open air, until my feet hurt, and then I kept walking, because I could. And eventually, because I could, I went home.
Mama Rei was mending, Kevin on the floor playing with fabric scraps. The Chronicle lay open on the table to page seven, where a single column reported the previous night’s police raid on a few wealthy homes. No reason was given for the arrests, but I knew that if I read down far enough, there would be some tittering implication of debauchery. Mama Rei smiled at me sadly, and flicked her needle through a stocking. The seam would not look new, but would last a little longer with her careful stitching.
“You told him,” she said. “And he listened.”
“He promised me there would be no camps.” Aloud, now, it sounded like a slender promise by which to decide a woman’s fate.
Flick. “Does he seem like an honorable man?”
“I don’t know. I think so. He says that the ones they can’t just let go, they’ll send to a sanitarium.” Someplace clean, where their need
s would be attended to, and where they would be well fed. “He says Wilder really does belong there. He believed what he was telling the others. What he was telling Bergman.”
And she believed what he told her—but that faith would not have been enough to save her.
No one’s faith ever was.
Flick. Flick. The needle did a little dance down and around, tying off one of her perfect tiny knots. Little copper scissors, a gift purchased with my earnings and Anna’s, cut the dangling thread. “You should check on her.”
“I don’t think she’ll want to see me.”
Mama Rei looked at me. “Aphra-chan.”
I ducked my head. “You’re right. I’ll make sure they’re treating her well.”
But they would, I knew. She would be confined in the best rooms and gardens that her money could pay for, all her physical needs attended to. Kind men would try to talk her back from the precipice where I had found her. And they would keep her from drowning herself until her blood, like that of all mortals, ran dry.
I wondered if, as she neared the end, she would still pray.
If she did, I would pray with her. If it was good for nothing else, at least the effort would be real.
Copyright (C) 2014 by Ruthanna Emrys
Art copyright (C) 2014 by Allen Williams
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The Litany of Earth Page 4