The Dread Goddess--Book of Icons--Volume Two

by Jillian Kuhlmann

It was an uncanny sensation, to panic at what I did and revel in it in the same instant. I could not cry out or clutch at the little furniture to slow my progress toward him, and though my throat grew dry, it did not tighten against speech as it should have done. It was not like any possession of Theba that I had felt before, for there was none of my will in it, none of my wanting, and all of hers.

  If Antares noticed the change in me, he gave no outward sign. With the control Theba had seized, my gifts had diminished, and I could read nothing behind the surface of Antares’s features. Like a yoked creature, Antares hung upon the thread of the conversation he understood and did not take Theba’s bait. Still I noted without wanting to the sculpture of his shoulders and his arms, unarmored now, in contrast with how I had always seen them in the caravan. He did not sweat, but the braziers that had cast their eerie glow on Emine’s face touched his in strange colors, a supernatural sheen. Theba wanted to take him, and so she compelled me to.

  “Adah commands me in her stead, Eiren,” he returned, and I knew he did not speak of the mistress he had left sleeping in Jhosch. Theba did not even give me room to grieve the thought of Morainn, and if I would fight her, it would not be on that. The steps between Antares and me were every moment fewer. “If you would have me call you Theba, then I will.”

  Theba parted my lips, but I bit my tongue, hard, relishing the sharp pain, the coppery taste of blood. I thought of the story that I had only just shared with Emine, of the boy Shran who had defied a god with the ingenuity of mortality. It did not matter that I knew now he was numbered among the First People. Did I not descend from them myself? I was not Theba’s plaything, though I had become her vessel.

  I felt Theba then turn her attentions to me, abandoning her game with Antares in favor of eclipsing my will completely. It was like being shrouded, buried underneath many carts of stone and earth. I could not imagine how I must look to Antares, a woman at war with herself, still as the grave. From the tips of my fingers and toes to the crown of my head I felt her, pushing me down, pushing me inside, like acid rained down on intruders. Our armies had resorted to such tactics in the desert to protect us, carving out discreet clefts in the stone to surprise the Ambarians with their death. I had not seen it and was glad, for my imaginings now were less painful for my ignorance.

  Without a name to call me by, Antares said nothing but closed the space I had prevented Theba from crossing and put a hand on each of my shoulders as though to shake or steady me. The touch subdued us both for an instant, and when my eyes focused on him, they were in my control completely.

  “When do we leave?” I asked hoarsely, shaking like a stringed toy.

  Antares seemed surprised by the question, though his thoughts were quick to turn to the charge he had been given from Adah, wherever they had been when Theba had been in control.

  “Within days, if you wish it.”

  I looked past him to the doorway, surprised to see the quick retreating heel of a small foot. What had Emine observed that I had not?

  “I wish it.”

  True to his word, Antares moved to do my bidding and ensure our hasty departure.

  Chapter Four

  Emine wanted to come with us. She begged me when she came to me again in the night and even when I ushered her out again in the morning. The pattern repeated itself the following night and day, though she paused in her pleading for stories to share her meals with me, her playthings, little details of her life in Adah’s refuge. There were no other children here, and her loneliness was palpable.

  But she couldn’t come with us, though it hurt me to tell her no. I felt a kinship with her, her reluctance and uncertainty at her lot in life. But once we had passed out of the refuge, I had more to occupy my mind.

  I marveled at the trees now more than I could have when I had wandered madly from Jhosch. I wondered over their variety and their profusion, their surfaces peeling parchment, veined and vainly colored, filtering light in wild patterns my feet could not follow. When we had traveled across Ambar to Jhosch, there had not been trees like these. What forests we had encountered had been well-tended or mere groves, thinned over time with the industry of the Ambarian citizens. Adah had chosen for his domain a wild place, and it was wildest of all to me, who had known nothing like it in the deserts of Aleyn. The deeper into the wood we went, the more I grew used to the tangled spread of bare, crooked branches. They reminded me of the lacework stone in Jhosch, and I wondered if the spaces there had not been made to reflect the strange chaos here.

  Antares was no more at home in the woods than I, though he was unburdened by my whimsy and idled without appreciating the beauty of his surroundings as I set our lazy pace. I wondered that Theba did not attempt to seize me again as we spent first one and then night after night by firesides reminiscent of the one I had shared with Kurdan and Gannet in the Rogue’s Ear. There was no intimacy in our dealings, however, and the Dread Goddess staked no claim when the cold light and rustling leaves distracted me.

  When I heard singing on the fifth day, I knew it was not Antares. The voice was neither male nor female, nor did it sound even like one voice. Like precious stones tumbled in a barrel, it promised sweetness and grit in the same note, and Antares met my eyes in shared alarm. He raised a hand as though to stop me, but I strode ahead.

  The trees thinned ahead but only just, finger-thin branches shearing the sky into pale scraps. The clearing, if it could be called that, looked as though a great beast had come tunneling through, disturbing the soil and the sparse moss that prospered on the forest floor. I saw no one, but I hadn’t imagined the singing and was rewarded after a moment’s patience with the dull blade of a shovel breaking above the surface of the soil, loosening a great cascade of moist earth, and dipping down again. My unpracticed steps, loud in the wood, caused a furrowed brow to surface next, smeared with dirt and boasting eyes sharper than the shovel’s blade. Two more brows and pairs of eyes followed, the three figures like a many-headed creature emerging from its warren.

  “Linger here too long and if you are not dead, you will be soon.”

  It was an uncanny voice, one of the singers, with many depths even alone. I did not know if he threatened me or posed a riddle, though if the latter, I was sure some threat would follow a wrong answer. It was Antares who was roused to action by the speech, having followed me into the clearing despite his reluctance.

  “We serve as you do,” he said with a soldier’s caution. The three in the pit observed him openly, though he tried pointedly not to look upon them, and I sensed some knowledge between them that I was not privy to. Antares knew their business here, and they guessed at his. Only when the smallest of them braced one hand against the lip of the pit and steadied another on a bronze urn balanced at its edge, did I know, too.

  Four graves there were, and dozens were dead in Jhosch. Who else but icons would be buried in this secret place? Paivi. Jaken and Shasa. And who was the fourth?

  “Who is it you bury here?” I asked, wondering if a daughter of the royal court would earn such a privilege in death.

  “Erutal we have buried,” said one, rising fluidly as a pillar of fleshy smoke.

  “And Alber to either side of him, divided in rest as he was in life,” said another, angling his way out of the grave with the shovel he gripped still. These I knew, but who was the last? I held my breath as the first man opened his mouth to speak again, his eyes locked with mine. He might not have recognized me, but he recognized in me some power he must submit to. And so, he did.

  “Dsimah we return last to the world that she loved, for she was the last to leave it.”

  Dsimah should not have been there, either. Not at the opera, and not in this grave. Still, I was relieved it wasn’t Morainn.

  “What business can a deserter and a childless woman have here?” the first man asked, looking from Antares to me. Antares was insulted, but he struggled to keep it from me, and there was no sign that the men could see. “You have no armor, but your clothes and
body show the signs of its wear. And as for you”—the man fixed his attention full upon me, his eyes joined with those of the other two men in the same eerie motion—“only mothers come here to be rid of their children, and many years later we bury them.”

  “Sometimes not so many,” said the second man, the quietest of the three with a voice deep as a drum.

  “I am no deserter,” Antares said, at last. There was contempt in his voice, and contempt in the three before us. They didn’t feel right, though, not completely real. I found myself picking at their thoughts, drawing them out one by one like threads in a tale.

  “They do more than bury the dead,” I reasoned, seeing the little span of each man’s life as bland and colorless as undyed wool. “They cannot leave this place, this garden of the dead. They will die here, too, and there will be no one left to bury them.”

  The first man stepped forward, lips pulled nearly to his ears in a grimace. The other two advanced, as well, and as their eyes and heads had seemed before to move as one, their legs did, too.

  “It is said that every tree in this wood has its roots in the body of a dead icon,” he recited, but his was not a voice for telling stories. “When we take them, they have already been carried a great distance by those who would blind themselves before looking upon us. Our gaze is said to weave the first stitches of a burial shroud on all who see us.”

  “I wish I had found you when I still wanted to die,” I replied, my voice braided with Theba’s will, and my own. “But now you threaten me at your peril.”

  Antares might have longed for a spear, but I had no need of such implements to defend myself. The three had stopped moving, but they stood close together now, behind them the soft, fresh graves of men and women whose lives had been only half-lived. What sorts of ghosts would Jaken and Shasa be, twinned in life but separated in death? If the essence of the icon traveled on, what of the man or woman who had been only vessel to it?

  “More are coming,” said the second, following my eyes to the graves. “And we are behind in our work.”

  “We are at war,” said the third, looking down. The second man looked up, and the first looked right at me. “There are some who follow Theba, others who will be struck down by her. Many we will see here again, and soon. The faithless who remained behind will never find rest here.”

  “There is no such thing as rest here,” I said, feeling again the anger building in me that another presumed to do what I could not do, what I would not do. I refused to acknowledge the insanity of it. The imposter incensed Theba, and her outrage threatened to overwhelm me.

  “Not for you,” they said together, each man’s voice ringing a little in my ears, words reverberating. Their next words sounded again like a recitation, like some formal charge. Two of the three held out their shovels, high as torches. “And not for her.”

  They wrenched the struggling form of a small girl from the pit. I had thought she seemed small in the nursery, but she was infinitely smaller now, gagged and bound, though she fought the creature that held her. Had she followed us? Or had they produced her to torture me?

  “Those touched by the gods can only serve or perish.”

  The one who held Emine put a hand over her face and she went still. I no longer sensed her terror. Where their eyes had been were shadows now, their hair parting to reveal spiders spinning the cottony lines of their aged faces. They were not men, and neither did I recognize them from some horrible tale told in the dark to scare children. I believed the three terrible creatures before us had more root in Ambarian lore than anything Aleyn would record and retell.

  “I am already bound against my will,” I said quietly. “And she would no more serve here than I would, I think.”

  It was not Emine whom I meant, but they could not know that. I did not want to touch that place again, the hot dark inside me where flames licked forever at memory, heart, and mind. But I knew there was no alternative. My body was weak, and Antares’s was not made to combat such creatures. The winter litter of loose soil and snapped branches at my feet began first to smoke and then to shrivel, while orange tongues of fire forked as they raced away from me and toward the three figures.

  They could not show surprise or horror of their own, but all three withdrew several paces, and I struggled to keep the fire from pursuing them to whatever end such creatures could have. I did not want to hurt Emine, only to drive them off, compel them to leave the girl and save themselves. Even as I felt I must lose the battle, Theba’s passion as inevitable as water to a boil, one of the creatures ignored his fellows and stepped forward into the fire.

  I was transported. I felt him burning up, so dry and thin as kindling that flares before a true fire can be built on its eagerness. I saw him as he was now, no more human than so many twists of paper, and I saw him as he had been: a young man, not handsome but strongly built, with good teeth and deep-set eyes. They were blue, and I saw them fill with tears too many for his years as this punishment had been laid upon him. This was his past, the foul deed that had secured this unnatural future. For the murder of an icon, he would toil until the world was new, serving the dead, hardly more than dead himself. Adah had laid this sentence, but he was not the Adah that I knew. So many hundreds of years had passed that this creature did not remember how it had come to be, or he would never have dared to speak to us.

  The fire alone would not be enough to consume him, but I sensed that I had the power to release him, to give him his final rest. I hesitated, but when I felt no urge from Theba to return him to the world or let him go, I did what I would have done well before I had been touched by her influence.

  I showed compassion.

  There was nothing left of his body but ash, and the two creatures who remained kicked it up in their haste to retreat, dropping Emine as carelessly as a bundle of sticks. The fire retreated, too, and I raced to Emine’s side.

  Her skin was slick and cold, but I felt the fine mist of her breath on my fingers when I held them beneath her nose. The beat of her heart was slow but steady. She did not rouse, not even when Antares lifted her from the ground, but at least she lived.

  “What was she doing out here?” I asked, irritated at what was easy: a child found where she was not meant to be.

  “Emine is headstrong,” Antares replied after a moment, his mind reeling still, his eyes darting from here to there as though he expected the men to appear again. He did not look at the ash, though his boots tracked it away when he began to walk with Emine in his arms. It was my turn to follow. Though I was hardly eager to linger, I didn’t know what was ahead, what else to expect in the wood. I watched the limp bob of Emine’s head against Antares’s arm and concealed my shaking hands in my skirt.

  “I didn’t believe the stories,” Antares said after a moment, his words expelled on a breath I imagined he had been holding since the first tendrils of smoke escaped the hem of my skirt. “In all my years traveling here, I have never seen the widow makers.”

  I shook a trail of ash from my skirt, leaving the cold marks upon the leaves like snow.

  “Why are they called that?”

  “They are the fathers of icons,” Antares said. “Rather than have their children taken from them, they kill them, or hide them, or whatever desperate fancy strikes them.”

  It was clear Antares had thought this no more than a story, or, at the very least, he had thought of it in the way I had done about many of the stories I had told throughout my life: this was the way of the world long ago, when great, impossible miracles and tragedies alike were possible.

  “I am surprised that there are only three,” I whispered, and Antares shot me a dark look.

  “It’s a big forest.”

  I looked back over my shoulder on the graves, not afraid, now, but hollowed out by sadness.

  “For people who worship as you claim to, it seems there are a great many of you who prefer your gods in stories and not in life,” I said.

  “There has always been unrest,” Antares ex
plained, beginning to walk the perimeter of the grove. There was no sign of the other two creatures, but his posture remained guarded. Emine was hardly a burden to him—no doubt that would change when she woke up. “But there is no point to it anymore, now that you are here.”

  “Whom do you think they spoke of, when they spoke of the faithless?” I asked as we exited the grove and the trees closed around us again.

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted, and I glanced at his face, confirming what I heard in his tone. The climate in the city when he had left had been one of turmoil, and he could not predict what course things had taken without leadership, with icons dead and the imposter heralding war. As though he could read my thoughts in turn, Antares continued, “I suppose there are some who imagined that these days would never come, or they would not live to see them. If they resist the tide of the world as it is written, they will have to abandon their faith.”

  When he spoke of resistance, he was not thinking of those who had taken us all by surprise at the opera. The rebellious murderers had never claimed to believe, but perhaps there were icons, like the gentle Dsimah, were she not already dead, who would not have wished to carry Theba’s banner.

  “I don’t want to be buried here anyway,” I insisted. I had never imagined much of my life beyond the bosom of my family, and though I had already traveled far and forgotten many of the comforts I had once believed I could not live without, the idea of even my place of final rest being decided for me was unbearable. I wanted the desert to reduce my bones to sand, my blood to pool for birds and dune mice to drink.

  “It is an honor,” Antares began, but I did not let him continue. Battling Theba had left me little patience for anything else.

  “What, to be remembered only as one in a long line of many? To lie forever where no one can mourn you? I have never wanted this. Or didn’t they tell you that?”

  It was growing dark. With the fading light went my energy and so too a measure of the control I had over Theba. I was sure that she would take me in the night and direct me as though I were a sleepwalker. Perhaps she would distract me with some pleasant dream, or perhaps the dream would be of her deeds, and I would be forced to watch.