“This is a trick. You want something. You want to gain our trust, then use us, and leave us.”
Two-face screamed in Nora’s face while the whispers roared like a stormwind in the tree tops. Nora spread her hands to calm them.
“This is no trick. This is an offer,” she said firmly. Then softened. “The world out there is broken. The balance is disrupted. Come with me, and try to make things right. You know what I’m talking of, don’t you?”
“The black hole?”
Nora nodded. “It’s an amassing of power. More relics from the gods. We can either tip the balance over completely and send the world into a brand new cycle of suffering … or perhaps set the world straight and see what happens after. Together. I don’t know what will happen. I won’t make you any promises I don’t know that I can keep. Only please, don’t try to trap me in my mind. Don’t try to control me. And you can come with me into the light.”
Nora hoisted herself up onto the table and crouched in front of the mirror. It grew before her, until it was large enough for her to walk through. Peering into the blinding white light, she thought she could make out shadows moving beyond, like clouds passing over a brown country. A pale blue sky above. She turned back and offered the Blade her hand.
Two-Face hesitated.
“It’s a chance to change.” Nora smiled. “I’m scared, too.”
“What if we fail?” Two-Face took hold of Nora’s hand.
“What if we don’t?”
Nora hooked her arm around Two-Face’s waist, and making sure the Blade held onto her, she let herself fall into the light.
Chapter 31
Diaz heaved himself ashore in the early morning hours, skin wrinkled, teeth chattering, muscles trembling, while the gjalp languidly swam in the shallow waters behind him.
The three Ladies were waiting for him, and to judge by Mari’s expression, they weren’t there to congratulate him on fighting his way out of self-pity and becoming active again.
“So you really do go swimming with the gjalp.” Lin looked stern, but her tone hinted at a wry amusement.
He nodded and coughed up more water before pushing himself upright to a sitting position on the smooth stone.
“You were told to ready a meal for when we came back,” Mari growled. “We are back and there is no meal. The first time we offer you a measure of responsibility, and you fail even that simple task.”
“What were you doing with the mermaids?” Jeska asked curiously eyeing the gjalp in the water.
“I was … they sang … it’s complicated,” he finished, exhausted. He really wanted to lie down and rest now, the waves still tugging at him although he was on dry land.
Lin’s lips twitched as though she were about to smile.
Mari, though, was indignant.
“You should be punished,” she scolded. “It is not your place to go near them, to distract them from their duties as guardians of this holy site. What if someone with ill intent had come while we were out? There are many precious things in this temple, and they belong to the Goddess! I say we drag him back to the Wards, wipe his mind, and command him never to return here.”
“You’d set him under a compulsion, Mari?” Lin frowned. “He did nothing wrong.”
“He shouldn’t even be here!” Mari contended. “If the Daughters did not kill him, perhaps you’re right, and he isn’t meant to die by our hand. But he cannot stay here. He doesn’t belong here.”
“And you do?” Lin snapped.
Mari and Jeska gasped.
“How dare you, Lin!” the middle-aged woman hissed. “How dare you!”
“You forget who welcomed you here, Mari. Who taught you all you know.”
“You’d turn on me because of some …” Mari sought for an insult, gesturing at Diaz. “Some man? He’s not even human!”
“I’m not turning on you, Mari,” Lin said calmly, though her agitation whipped the hem of her robes around her ankles in a surge of power. The gjalp seemed to sense Lin’s distress and sank into the waters until only her eyes and forehead were showing. “I’m questioning your sense of justice. And not because of some man, but out of principle. Every life has value, and if we lose sight of that truth, we lose everything and give ourselves over to the darkness. You have much to learn still.”
“If I have much to learn it’s because you have been holding me back,” Mari seethed. “You have been keeping secrets from me all this time. Secrets about this temple, about our worship. I will not stand for it much longer! Come, Jeska! We will not pollute ourselves by associating any longer with this half-breed male and his protector.”
Jeska twitched at her name.
“Oh. But I—” she started.
“Come now!”
Jeska gave Lin an imploring look. The older woman bowed her head, and Jeska followed Mari, trying to catch up with the woman’s fierce march towards the door.
Lin watched, stone-faced, as the two other Ladies’ closed the double doors on her.
“I’m sorry,” Diaz rasped, water still burning in his lungs. “I did not mean to disrupt the unity between you and yours. If you bring me to the Wards, I will go elsewhere.”
Lin sighed and let her shoulders slouch.
“I feel like this conversation would have gone much more smoothly if we all had had something to eat.” She gave him a sidelong smile. “It’s not just you. There have been tensions before, but we mostly pretended to ignore them.”
“I just brought them to the fore, you mean?”
She nodded, and walked the last few paces to the stone steps to sit down with an exaggerated groan. Her feet dangled in the water and the gjalp swam closer, eyeing her gentle paddling motions.
“It’s true, what she said. I have been keeping secrets from her. From Jeska.” Lin said. “I grew up here. This temple was all I knew, and I never questioned our teachings, our way of life. I thought it was the only way, and I remember being very angry about not being the perfect acolyte all my friends seemed to be. But then I followed the mermaid’s song, and I saw the black truth.”
She fell silent, staring into the morning sky breaking in soft rose colors above the dark blue night sea. Diaz was still exhausted but he managed to cross his legs before him, as though in meditation. He closed his eyes and felt the waves deep in his bones.
After a while, Lin spoke. “Do you believe that life goes round in circles, Telen? That you start running in one direction as though to flee your fate, and yet end up exactly there again?”
He opened his eyes and he was surprised to see the gjalp lay her head on Lin’s lap. The grey-haired woman looked drawn out and tired. She stroked the seaweed-like tressles of gjalp hair as absentmindedly as though the maid were a cat. A docile pet. Not a monster with nightmare teeth. The gjalp’s eyes were open even while she rested, maybe even slept, though her nictitating membrane protected the dark orbs from drying out in the sun, giving them an unusual opaqueness like the rounded pebbles of sea glass.
Diaz thought about Lin’s question. He looked back on his own life, leaving home, returning home, leaving Suranna, going back to her only to leave again, being broken and pulling himself together again only to be broken in another way. Cycles and cycles and cycles wherever he looked. The return of Living Blade. The rise and fall of empires tied to its power. The natural fertility cycle of his father’s kin. The endless ebb and flow. He thought of the empty chasm leading into the dark as the swarm revolved around him deep below the temple.
He stretched out his hand before him to study the lines on his palm, as if seeking an answer hidden there, then let it drop onto his leg again.
“It seems that the whole world is made to run in circles,” he answered finally.
Lin grunted.
“The truth is,” she said, “the way of life that went on here at the temple deserved to be destroyed. Some evil you cannot politely step around. You have to fight it. Purge it. The worship of Neeze was founded in blood, and when I woke up among the ruins of t
he aftermath, my legs shattered into several pieces, my friends dead, I was lonely, yes, but also glad to see it gone.
“The truth is when Mari came here able to push and pull the water, looking for guidance, I was overwhelmed. I wasn’t ready to teach her what I had been taught because it was all lies. I had been lied to, Telen. There is no sleeping Goddess beneath this temple. The gods are dead and gone if they ever existed outside the stories told by their so-called devotees, the priests. But I couldn’t tell her that.
“Mari … believes. She believes so strongly that she is willing to die for her goddess, and who am I to take that security from her? So I hid the truth about the watermages, and told her the history as I would have liked it. I renounced the blood magic, but kept the care and healing aspect. An idealized version of what this temple could have meant, based on balance and love for our fellow creatures. Maybe that’s where I went wrong. I created a disconnect. Maybe I should have just led her into the Most Holy on that first day and shown her the truth.”
Lin sounded bitter.
“The stairwell with the pool of black water?” Diaz prompted.
Her eyes widened in shock.
“You’ve seen it? How?”
He cleared his throat, wincing at the rawness the saltwater had left.
“The gjalp led me. There’s a path into the stairwell from below the water level, a crack in the stone.”
“The day you went missing?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I had sealed that passage a long time ago.” She gazed up at the volcano, her brows knitted together. “We all believed that in the deep places there was fire, and yet I have been there, and I saw only water. Did you see the prison pools they made for the merfolk?”
“I did.”
Lin shook her head in disgust. “They bled them. Every month, the priestesses captured the mermaids and opened their veins into the dark pool to nourish its power, to drink it and strengthen themselves. I saw them do it, hang them over the altar stone, and slit their throats while they still squirmed, and my first instinct was to run. Run far away. But I couldn’t even manage that.”
She snorted.
“Did the priestesses catch you?”
“Not at first. But I couldn’t leave because I was being watched, being controlled, and yet I heard the trapped mermaid’s song and I knew I had to do something about it. I made it out with the maid by forcing my way through the crack you mentioned. But in the end, it didn’t matter. They found us quickly enough.”
She pressed her lips together tightly.
“And now Mari will open the way to that dark pool. She’ll believe whatever she wants to believe about it, and it will all start over again, the desire to control, the lust for more power, the slaughter. So you see, you and me are quite alike in our desperation. You say your confidence has been stripped from you; well, my lifetime is nearly spent with no hope for resetting the course the world seems intent on taking. Another circle. Round and round we go. What a couple we make.”
She laughed without mirth, and he didn’t know what to say in response.
They sat together for a long time, each alone with their dark thoughts, taking in the gentle lapping of the waves against the stone, the rise of the sun in the sky. His gjalp stirred from her short slumber and slid back into the water, swimming far out, nearly out into the sea before coming back.
“Only the young are left now,” Lin spoke softly, watching the gjalp tumble among the waves. “The priestesses killed many. So many that the merfolk hated us and would wage war on us if we ventured forth from this chain of rocks. And the fisherfolk here have always caught the mermaids as lucky charms no matter what I stories I made up, and now they catch them as ingredients to make healing potions with, to become rich by. One maiden brings them a profit that fishing would take them a month to make. They’ve caught the old ones, the large ones, and now only the young remain. At least you’ve found your thing to do here that only you can do.”
“What?”
She gave him a sly smile that was interrupted by a yawn. “You swam among the swarm, and still don’t know?”
“How did you know I was out with the swarm?” He looked out at the gjalp who had not swum back with her kind but had stayed by his side all night, and led him back to the bay. Had she communicated something to Lin while she had rested her head on her knees? He hadn’t heard a tone slip past those jaws.
This time Lin laughed at him, tossing her head back.
“Oh my dear child, you look so puzzled. The swarm meets every full moon at the same hour at the same spot. They dance their eternal dance and sing their love songs.” She hummed the exact tune he had heard the night before, and he was astounded. “Why do you think I set up this whole Ladies-go-out-healing-on-full-moon-nights thing? Sooner or later, I said to myself, Mari or Jeska or someone else who has not yet arrived or the fishermen out on the sea will noticed that behavior and exploit it. But now everyone is distracted, doing something else. Strange to think that my legacy will be having installed a fake tradition to enable the mating ritual of mermaids.”
“The mating—excuse me?”
She gave him a pointed look as though he were being particularly obstinate about something.
“I didn’t—it’s not like that. I think we share an ancient heritage—” Whatever he said only made her chuckle even harder. He felt hot. It was probably time to get out of the sun. “What has that got to do with me?”
“Don’t you know?” She yawned again, and stretched. “All merfolk are born as females, and when their milter dies, one of the oldest among them will start to change into a male to ensure more offspring. But then the troubles began two years ago, and there was an influx of people, refugees from lands all around the Nessan Sea, to the Wards. More people in such cramped space means more sickness. More disease. That means more cures become necessary, become more profitable. And so the pressure to deliver more mermaid ingredients for the quacks on the Wards rises, and the oldest were killed. Now only the young females remain.”
He pondered this revelation for a moment, watching the gjalp twist and turn, her long tentacles floating behind her like a mass of skirts.
“You’re saying she didn’t kill me when I arrived because she thinks we might be … compatible enough to produce offspring?”
Lin shrugged. “That’s my guess. But first, I’m going to sleep.”
“And then?” Diaz demanded to know indignantly. “You’re going to officiate our nuptials?”
Lin rose with a groan, one hand on her hip, and hobbled over to his makeshift tent. She barked a guffaw.
“Only if you want me to. No. I’m going to sleep off the night’s exhaustion while it’s still early enough to do so. Then, I’m going to eat. And when the night falls, I will show Mari that I am not so easily locked out of my own home. What you do is your decision.”
Chapter 32
Tired to the bone, Diaz followed Lin into his tent and lay down beside her to rest, thoughts racing. But the old woman had spent decades sleeping alone, never subject to the friendly buffs or sharp reprimands that cut through the snores. She was loud. Very loud.
She snored so loud that even after he rose weary and hungry to search for mussels among the rocks at the other end of the wide bay, he still heard her clearly. He found a few and took them back to the little fire ring he had lined with bigger stones. There was little driftwood to be found nearby, but he had a small stash of logs Jeska had kindly provided him with a few days ago. So he cooked the mussels in seawater over the fire, and looked on while his gjalp crushed scuttling crabs with a rock and popped the stunned creatures into her maw to crunch them whole. White crabmeat shone between her broken-glass teeth. Pieces of shell were stuck between them as she came up from her underwater meal, and she spent an hour or so cleaning them with her claws.
He did not shudder, not openly. He had never felt safer than when she was at his side. She had always tried to help him and supported him in his weakness. She h
ad saved his life. Perhaps she had done all these things because of a simple need to find a mate to procreate, but he didn’t think so. Hadn’t gotten to know her and her sisters to be so cold and calculating. She wasn’t Suranna, he told himself when the panic rose like bile at the back of his throat.
On the contrary, he had seen her curiosity and playfulness, her fear and her sadness, and she had included him in a ritual of her kind that celebrated life and love and togetherness. He felt a connection with her, and thought he could perceive a connection at work in her, too.
Now that he understood what she wanted, why she stuck by his side, did it change anything? No, he found when he scrutinized his feelings. He still felt the same way. But was it enough to do what she wanted? Could he be that person for her?
He deliberated on that question for some time, and while he sat on the stone steps, turning the question this way and that in his mind, he stared at his rippled reflection on the water.
The Diaz in the water broke apart with the movement of the waves, but was also put back together again. He was distorted in one moment, one arm missing, then a shimmer, a sweeping motion, and he sat there with both arms. Ebb and flow. Taking him apart and connecting the pieces again and again.
A sliver of searing hot recognition blazed through his mind. The gjalp did not care about the warrior monk he had been. She did not know that man. Her connection to him had little to do with all the ideas he had carried about himself like armor. That armor had been torn away from him along with his right arm, and yet she saw and valued what remained.
This was about connection.
This was about finding a connection to something that was bigger than him. Reconnecting.
He felt winded as the thoughts rushed in on him.
Deep down he realized he had accepted the change that had been inflicted on him. Whenever he had been depressed about his lack of progress in regaining what he had lost, he had been chasing after an ideal of who he should be, and ignoring who he was. Circles and circles.
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