The pool before her was dark and still. That was all. There was nothing terrible about it, and yet the longer she stared at it, the more uneasy she felt. If souls really did sink into the water and not return, then this was the hole in the world. This was the gap through which she would inevitably fall, the final darkness from which there was no escape.
Runajo’s hands clenched. She felt the warm, living skin of her fingers and palms; she felt the solid bones. She felt the breath in her throat. But all of that was no comfort, because she could see the waiting darkness, and when she looked straight at the dark water, her vision began to swim. It felt as if she were hurtling toward the Mouth of Death.
Toward nothing.
She scrambled to her feet in quick, jerky movements and turned to look in the other direction, at the gold-rimmed doorway into the tunnel that led away down the mountain.
It didn’t help. Runajo closed her eyes.
I can pay any price, she told herself. I can renounce any love. I can bear any terror. But I will not be helpless and silent again. I will know the nature of the world. And I will prove I was right.
The familiar words steadied her. She could bear the loss of her mother and father. She could bear this vigil.
She opened her eyes. She turned back to face the Mouth of Death, and knelt, and stared it down.
And then the water sang to her.
It was the cold and inhuman and many-voiced song that the dying all heard. That her mother had heard as Runajo watched her die. That would be the last thing Runajo herself ever heard.
She didn’t feel brave or stubborn anymore. She felt like a tiny frightened animal, like a flickering candle that the wind would any moment snuff out.
The stone walls were gone. So were the stars in the sky. So was the pool. She knelt on a little round island in the middle of a vast, flat black ocean. She knew the darkness surrounding her was water only because the glowing marks from the walls still remained, floating in a circle around her, and she could see their reflection gleaming.
The song was louder now.
Runajo slammed her fist against the stone. The pain brought tears to her eyes, but it also steadied her a little.
And then the dead came.
They were pale, translucent, like faded memories. They stepped from the space just behind her, and calmly walked the five steps to the edge of the little island. Then they stepped out onto the water, and sank down with each step, until they were gone from her sight.
A child. An old woman. A young man. They walked past her, eyes low-lidded and peaceful, and sank into darkness. Runajo’s body shook, and she wasn’t sure if it was from fear or from desire to follow them.
She clenched her fists. She thought, I must live. I will live.
Runajo didn’t know how much time had passed. She didn’t know how many dead souls had walked past her. She could not keep a prayerful vigil for them; she could only dig her fingers into her arms and think, I will not go. I will not go. It felt like forever, and also no time at all.
And then she heard a quiet breath behind her.
None of the dead had made the slightest sound.
Runajo looked back. Behind her was a girl wearing a red dress in the Catresou style, with a laced bodice and slashed sleeves, but no mask. She looked as solid and real as Runajo, but she walked forward with the same gentle, inevitable steps as the other dead souls.
She looked down at Runajo. Their eyes met, and the Catresou girl’s face was alive with helpless fury. As if she knew, like Runajo, how unjust death was—and as if, like Runajo, she could not stop it.
She is not dead, thought Runajo, in baffled wonder. She can’t be dead.
The girl let out a little huff of angry breath. She turned away, her whole body shifting, as if drawn by strings. She stepped toward the water, leaving Runajo behind. As everyone always left, while Runajo knelt silent and still.
In that moment, nothing she had learned about how to survive the vigil mattered. That moment was every moment she had ever been helpless, and Runajo only knew that she could not bear to be still for even one more heartbeat.
She lunged forward and seized the girl’s wrist.
For one moment, her fingers seemed to be closing on cold air. Then she felt warm skin and solid bone, and she threw herself backward, tugging the girl away from the water.
The warmth of the girl’s hand turned to fire. It felt like she was grasping a hot coal, and Runajo nearly let go—but the girl had toppled over against Runajo, and her breath was warm and alive against her neck, and all Runajo knew was that she would not let go. This girl was a mystery she had yet to decipher, and was alive and should not be dead.
Nobody who was alive ought to be dead. And just this once, Runajo would spit at inkaad and drag someone back from the teeth of Death, no matter the cost.
I will not let go, thought Runajo, and screamed as the fire burned against her palm.
Then there was darkness.
These Violent Delights
THEY ARE SITTING ON THE edge of a roof, overlooking the marketplace. The grimy crowds of the Lower City swirl beneath them, and nobody pays any attention to a heedless girl and boy who want to risk their necks.
They are reciting poetry—the poetry of his people, because hers have little use for it. But the Mahyanai have preserved one hundred and eight poems from the time before the Ruining, and this collection is one of their greatest treasures. With every line he teaches her, the world grows a little wider. She had never known before how words could sing, how a turn of phrase could unlock a window in her mind.
There are six days left until the ceremony. Once she has a Guardian, she will not be allowed near him again. Whatever poems she has not learned by then, she will never know.
He stares out over the city as he says dreamily:
“The moon is alone, and so am I;
My sleeves are wet with tears.”
“I don’t know that one,” she says.
“It does not yet exist,” he says, turning to her, “but I will write it for you. Let me write you a thousand and eight poems, one for every morning I wake up beside you. Let me cover the whole world in words, and drown in oceans of ink.”
She cannot help laughing, though her heart is breaking. She knows what he is asking. She knows the answer.
“My father will never set my hand in yours,” she says.
She has never had to tell him, I will not desert my people. It is part of why she loves him.
He smiles. “You won’t have to. You only have to marry me in secret, before your father can forbid it.”
“That is not a marriage.”
“It is for my people,” he says. “We have an ancient custom: if we spend three nights together, and declare ourselves to your parents on the third morning, then we are married.”
Her face heats. “I will not dishonor myself to force my father to marry me.”
“You won’t,” he says. “You will already be married. The first night is the wedding night. And the second, and the third.”
Her whole body feels like it is blushing now, and she cannot look in his eyes. She knows what he is asking. She knows what her family would call it.
She knows what she wants.
If they announced themselves in public, before the whole clan, there would be no way to stop the news from spreading. And her lord father would suffer a very great deal, before he allowed it to be known that his daughter had been dishonored. He might even be willing to acknowledge a marriage to a Mahyanai.
She would still receive a Guardian to govern her. She would still be obedient to her duty and her family, and she would still be no more than a sword in the eyes of all who saw her. But she would be his.
He knows what she is thinking. He takes her hands, and oh, his smile has all the spark and gleam that she has loved since she met him. “Lady of loveliness surpassing all the stars,” he says, “star of the night that until you requite me will darken my heart, and heart that moves the blood in my br
east—will you take pity on a pilgrim, and marry him?”
She laughs, and kisses him in reply.
But that night, as she waits for him in her room, wearing nothing but a loosely belted robe, she is afraid. He is kind and he wants to understand, but he is Mahyanai. His mother was a concubine, and it is no shame for him. She does not think he truly realizes what it means for her, to risk her honor.
The Catresou have little use for poetry, but they do have songs for amusement. She remembers one, about a girl seduced with promises of marriage and then betrayed:
He heard her voice, and up he rose
And opened wide the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
She has locked her bedroom door. She will not leave this room, she will not unbolt that door while still a virgin. But she will not be fully a wife either, not until the three nights are passed. Not until he has declared their marriage to her father. Not unless he is telling her the truth.
He knocks at the window. She is shaking as she goes to the casement, as she opens it wide.
He climbs inside, but he doesn’t take her in his arms. His hand clings to the window frame. He licks his lips, and then he says quietly, “Juliet. Do you want this?”
She wants to make him promise again that this is a real marriage. She wants to beg and demand and threaten, again and again, just so she can be sure.
She remembers the end of the song:
“Good sir, before you tumbled me
You promised me to wed.”
“So would I have done, by yonder sun,
Had you not come to my bed.”
But she looks at his wide eyes, and his white knuckles gripping the casement, and she realizes that he is afraid as well. He may not be risking his honor, but he is surely risking his heart.
She says to him, “I trust you.”
He whispers, “I love you.”
It’s barely a kiss that she presses to his lips, the movement is so soft and shy. It’s barely a kiss that he presses back. But then she kisses him again, and again, and she knows this: the shape of his mouth, the push of his breath. She knows the way his hands shift across her back, cup her shoulder blades, and dig in.
She is not afraid anymore.
The next time he releases her lips, she says to him, “Sooner or later you will have to undress me.”
He laughs and gently slides the edge of the robe off her shoulder, then presses a kiss to the newly bare skin.
Breathless, she says, “I would advise sooner,” and then they are both busy pulling at sashes and laces and buckles. They say nothing, but each movement feels like a ceremony, like a vow: I trust you. I love you. I trust you.
Until they are both naked, and there is nothing to protect them from each other, and she is not afraid. She is laughing as he picks her up and carries her to the bed.
9
WHEN RUNAJO WOKE, SHE COULD see the pale sky of dawn through the transparent dome. It took her a few sleepy moments to realize that she had fallen asleep by the Mouth of Death. That she had survived the vigil. Then the dazzling rush of relief swept her awake. She sat up—and noticed the girl sleeping next to her.
More memories rushed back: the dead souls, and the girl who was not entirely dead—
But still dead enough to walk into the Mouth, Runajo thought, looking down at her with mounting horror. And I stopped her. I brought her back.
Necromancy was the unforgivable sin, the deed most despised by gods and men. It was worse than the Ruining. For the Ruining had only made the bodies of the dead rise again as mindless, hungry things. But to summon a soul back into its body—to rob Death, to whom the gods themselves had submitted—that was blasphemy against inkaad itself, and a knife to the heart of the world. Whoever summoned back the dead must die.
So said the Sisters of Thorn. Runajo had never much cared, because she didn’t believe necromancers existed. There were legends that the Ancients had doomed themselves through necromancy. And there were always rumors of unspeakable crimes in the Lower City. But there had never been any clear historical record of necromancy. Nobody had ever been brought before the Exalted or the High Priestess to be tried for it. Runajo had thought that was because necromancy was impossible; that the dead could not be summoned back because they no longer existed.
But she’d also thought that souls didn’t walk into the Mouth of Death.
The girl did not look like an abomination that could unbalance the world. But if she had been truly dead, and was now truly alive, then by definition, necromancy had been performed. She must die, and Runajo must die beside her. They would cut her throat open like the man at the Great Offering—
One clear, icy thought cut through her rising panic: If I die, I cannot see the Sunken Library.
Runajo took a deep breath and forced herself to think calmly of the consequences. If I do not go to the library, nobody will. If nobody goes to the library, we will never learn the secrets of the walls, and Viyara will fall in thirty years. And when Viyara falls, it matters not how much we have or have not offended Death. All of us will die.
From that perspective, everything was very simple. If Runajo wanted the city to live, she must conceal what she had done.
For one moment, she thought about pushing the girl into the black waters of the Mouth. She wouldn’t fight. The water would devour her, hide her. No one would ever know. Not even the nameless girl who had looked at her with such fury.
I can sacrifice anything, thought Runajo, but this would be no sacrifice: it would be murder. She couldn’t do it.
So she must find a way to deceive the entire Sisterhood instead.
Runajo stood up and looked at the gold-rimmed doorway. There was no lock and no guard . . . but some of the Sisters would already be awake and walking the halls below. Runajo would never be able to drag the girl all the way down to her cell undetected.
But that wasn’t the only place she could hide something.
It was a wild idea that had just come to her, but it was better than nothing. She didn’t have time for anything else.
Trying to shake the girl awake produced no effect. So Runajo knelt down, grasped her under the arms, and slung her over her shoulder. Though the girl was short and slender, Runajo still staggered under her weight.
She was not going to enjoy this, but she didn’t have a choice.
Slowly, Runajo dragged the girl down the tunnel. Her gasps for breath sounded terribly loud in her ears, but she knew there was no one in the tunnels to hear her. She hoped.
The tunnel was made of dead gray stone, the same as the walls of the little valley around the Mouth. But then she turned a final corner, and a neat seam ran around the walls, ceiling, and floor, where the dull gray rock met the white stone that made up all the Cloister and most of the Upper City.
Runajo staggered the final two steps to the white stone. She lowered the Catresou girl to the ground and sank down beside her, gasping for breath.
In a moment she was up again. There wasn’t time for rest. She pressed her palm to the wall.
In theory, all the white stone of the city was “alive,” able to receive and be molded by the power of the Sisters’ spells. But how well it actually responded varied hugely. Down in the city, it would take long hours of work and engraved glyphs to mold a door into a rock surface.
Here in the Cloister, though, where the Sisters had woven their power over and over for three thousand years? The wall practically hummed beneath her touch.
A little silver knife hung at her waist. Even when she was imprisoned, nobody had taken it from her—because to take the sacrificial knife from a Sister was to cast her out.
Runajo drew the knife. As part of her training, she had calculated many blood prices; she had been the best of all the novices at the sacred mathematics. So she knew that even a little blood from her would be enough to create the door.
She was used to sacrifice now. She only needed a quick moment to br
ace herself before she sliced a neat little line across her forearm, avoiding all the veins, so that blood welled up but did not gush.
Then she pressed her bloody forearm against the door and whispered, “Open.”
It was not the proper ceremony. But blood was blood. Elaborate filigree lines of light grew up the wall into an archway, flared, and turned into the cracks, forming what looked like a door.
Then the door opened.
On the other side was a room. It was no more than a cube, with a glowing lamp hung from the ceiling. Not the most friendly place to wake up, alone and confused about no longer being dead, but it was better than being destroyed as the fruits of necromancy.
Carefully, Runajo lowered the girl to the ground. For a moment she stared—the girl looked terribly small and fragile, crumpled on her side—then she rolled the girl onto her back, straightened out her limbs, and left.
“Close,” she whispered, and perhaps because her blood was already in it, the door did not demand a second price. In a moment, there was no trace that the door into the room had ever been there.
She spun around and started running—despite the exhaustion dragging at her legs—because she had to be back beside the Mouth before the High Priestess got there.
She barely made it in time. Runajo had just knelt down when the High Priestess, Miryo, and Vima all arrived together.
Miryo looked furious, Vima looked amused. The High Priestess just looked thoughtful.
“What is the wound on your arm?” she asked.
“A sacrifice,” said Runajo, trying to keep her breathing steady.
“And what is the sign on your hand?”
Runajo’s heart lurched, and she looked down. On her right palm was a strange little design of twisting black lines.
She remembered how holding on to the Catresou girl had hurt like a brand.
“It must have grown as I sat vigil,” she said. “Perhaps the gods sent it.”
“Because you have loved them so much,” Miryo said sarcastically, which was a bit hypocritical, given that she was Mahyanai herself.
Vima grasped Runajo’s hand. “It is a little like the glyphs on the wall, but I have never seen this symbol before.”
Bright Smoke, Cold Fire Page 7