I leaped to my feet again and raced to my left, nearer the edge of a ravine we had been tumbled into. The black stone ahead of me was menacing, and I had the mad feeling that the smooth rock face had anticipated a future as an anonymous grave marker, rather than the site of a miraculous rescue. There was nothing in the snow to indicate where he was, but I felt him and would’ve snapped my fingers into pieces, carving him free. It was his hands I saw first, buried nearly the length of my legs beneath the snow, and I worked faster, exposing the gold hair plastered against his brow, then the mask and his eyes squeezed shut behind it. He was unconscious. I made quick work of his mouth and nose, and I nearly stopped for weeping when I felt his irregular breath on my fingers. He was alive, but the cold was reluctant to give him up.
When I had finally dragged him to the surface of the snow, I clutched at his shoulders and his head, shed hot tears on his face, and bent to share my breath.
You can’t have him. It was the mountain toward whom I flung my refusal, though I didn’t look up from his face. He’s mine. Mine.
There was an answering call, but it was not Zhaeha who rose to my challenge.
He’s ours. Ours.
I wouldn’t fight her, not now. If I wanted to fight her ever again, I had to live first, which involved getting off the ice and seeking shelter, building a fire. The sun had well and truly set now, and I conjured my dark sight with some difficulty, seeing in the many shades of gray between snow and rock a slight incline that might mean a slope toward soil and kindling.
But I couldn’t lift Gannet. Whatever supernatural strength I had possessed, I had, for the moment, spent it, and even his lean frame was too much for me.
“I need you to wake up, Gannet. I need your help.” I put my hands on his face again, disturbed by the faint heat there.
Wake up, please. I reached out to him, reached beyond the mountain he had once shown me within himself. There were hiding places in his mind, sanctuaries where he could retreat in times of fear and uncertainty. I sped through darkness and flashes of memory, called to him as only one heart can call to another. Gannet, I need you to wake. I need you.
Like an eye pressed to a crack of light in a door, I saw him, roused him. The body I held in my arms began to cough violently, shuddering, spittle flying to sparkle on the snow. When he finally stopped coughing, his breath, though ragged, steadied, and the eyes behind the mask sharpened on my face. I was smiling and sobbing and realized rather belatedly that I clutched his head against my breast.
“We need to get off the ice,” I said hurriedly, not shifting him, and increasingly aware that even under different circumstances, I might not readily have done so. “Can you walk?”
“Possibly,” he wheezed, though he made an immediate effort to rise. I hooked my hands underneath his arms, offering what help I could until we both stood, wary but firm.
“I think there’s a path over there,” I indicated with a slight jerk of my head in the direction of the rock face.
“Or there’s a sheer drop to certain death,” he managed, each word reluctant with exhaustion, a miser paying out coins from his treasury.
“If you’ve spirit enough for spiteful remarks, then I’m not sure you need to be putting quite so much of your weight on me.” I was sure I supported him only a little, but it was enough for me to feel the strain in my already weakened legs. When he attempted to stand on his own, he wobbled, and I clutched him firmly again. “Come on.”
It was a slow crossing, and I didn’t gloat when it turned out that I was right and there was a way down off the ice, stepping from rock to crusted snow to rock again. The stones had been transported by the avalanche, as well, and we were lucky we hadn’t been struck by one of them. It was only when we both had our feet on the ground again that I was able to find some spark of warmth to draw from and coax a careful blaze into my hand. I considered the laugh we had heard just before the wave that had buried us both. Was it one of the shadows from Gannet’s telling? Had it been Zhaeha herself, if she had some form and voice to conjure up?
Had it been Theba, exerting some force beyond me?
Gannet shrugged me off when we drew near an overhang, lowering himself to the ground with a labored breath. I spared him a worried look, but I could see little of his face, his features muted. I cast about instead for any sticks that I could transfer my small fire to, but there were very few. It would do no good to survive the avalanche only to freeze to death.
“Eiren,” Gannet called, and I looked up from my scavenging to see him pointing. There was a break in the rock face and from it issued a light, flickering briefly, blue-white as a phantom. An invitation.
“I see it,” I whispered, abandoning the clutch of sticks and crossing to where he sat, legs drawn wearily close. I let go of the tenuous hold I had on the fire in my hand. We needed a proper fire anyway, and we weren’t going to find the makings of one out here. Gannet met my eyes when I looked away, and I realized he’d been looking at me since I’d drawn up beside him, waiting to see what course I chose. He’d already made up his mind.
There hadn’t been time enough for him to recover his strength, but he got to his feet without my assistance, steadying himself with a light touch to my arm and letting go. We strode forward, solemn as mourners. The light continued to flicker like a torch, only the color was all wrong. The fissure in the rock face proved wide enough for us to pass through, one in front of the other, and Gannet made no comment when I slipped through first, nor when I took his hand in mine. If Zhaeha hoped to separate us, I wasn’t going to make it easy.
The path was narrow, a natural shifting in the stone that provided uneven footing. What had I expected? Fairy lights? Ghosts with blue flames for eyes? It was nothing so easily named. The light coaxed us deeper into the mountain, always around another sharp corner or a vague distance. With my own curiosity before me and Gannet’s trust behind, I ignored the cold, the very reasonable sense of danger, the growing weight of the rock above me. Deeper and deeper in we went, farther and farther down, until I had no notion of how much time had passed. The teasing light was constant until it flared to certain brilliance, bounding and rebounding against glittering stone. I winced, pressing my face back into Gannet’s dark shoulder, opening my eyes again only when I felt his hand on my hair.
Look, Eiren.
We had taken the first steps from narrow path to vaulted chamber, a natural cavern illuminated by the glow that had taunted us below, or rather, the creatures who emitted the glow.
Their features were feline but hairless, eyes tilted away from small, flat noses. There was the suggestion of fangs pricking at their ink-dark lips. I thought for a moment their skin was flaked with gems, as the stone here seemed to be, but then I took in their whole form, the sinuous arms, the thick, strong tail. Scales. They were covered in scales.
The kr’oumae.
He had used that word once before, after the storm in Cascar. I had nearly drowned. They had saved me.
They stared at us, a dozen at least, arranged like the petals of a flower around a depression in the center of the cavern. Before I heard the hiss that met between their sharp teeth and their tongues, I felt it, a reverberation that was as familiar to me as the touch of Gannet’s mind. They slithered, as much snake as siren, surging forward like a wave.
“The icon of Theba has been here before. She is no more welcome now than she was then.”
I cast my eyes from face to alien face, but I didn’t know who had spoken, or even how I had understood the words. It was as though in hearing them, I rearranged them to sense in my mind. I clutched Gannet’s hand even harder, pressing my back into his chest. We stood as one against the storm of their eyes.
“I am Eiren. Theba is no more welcome in me, I assure you. I came, we came, because we need help.” I felt as tossed by their collective gaze as I had that fateful day at sea, and I felt the resentful churning of Theba in my gut. I would not have survived the avalanche without her, but now I would rather be ungrateful
than dead.
“Humans don’t help us. We don’t help humans.”
Their tails whipped as one, an exclamation. I refused to panic, looking around them, between them, as though a weapon or a way out might present itself. They were close enough for me to smell the sea on them, tangy, dangerous. How had they come by that scent here?
And then I saw where they had been gathered moments before, the gentle slope of stone that terminated in a glistening, still pool. I recognized it and seized upon the only thing I could think of saying that might stand between their savage hands, suddenly reaching, and our throats.
“I have been here before. Zhaeha called me, and my mother, too. I am not your enemy. You have helped me before.”
I opened my mind to them, the faint, breathless visions that were all I had of the world beneath the waves of the Cascari sea. The gleaming eyes, the small, slick hands that were gentler sisters of the ones before me now. I shared what it felt like to be buoyed to the surface, for my face to break open in a desperate gulp of air. With these creatures so near, I remembered now more than I had then, how the youngest of their kind had flipped underneath my arms and legs, propelling me forward until I beached against the sand. I recalled a feral, merry grin, and a flick of sand in my face from a departing tail.
“I just want to go home.”
I sensed nothing from them, and no leader thrust her head and shoulders above the others. But they had ceased their advancing, merely watching us both. Only the rise and fall of Gannet’s chest behind my back assured me that he was still breathing.
“Then go.”
No riddles, no challenges. They broke apart as though by a blade, creating a narrow passage between their bodies to pool beyond. As eager as I had been a moment ago for any way out of the cavern, I hesitated.
“How do I know where it will take us?”
“It takes you where you need to go.”
“That’s not a guarantee.” The thrill of fear lingered, creeping down my spine, hips twitching with the desire to run.
“Nothing in life is guaranteed, little sister.”
Their strange employ of the endearment chilled me even more. Before I could decide how to respond, Gannet broke in from behind me.
“In stories, the kr’oumae always exact a price. We would rather know it, before it is paid.”
“We?” It was more hiss than word. Despite my resolve, my knees began to quiver. I was grateful for Gannet’s steadying bulk. “It isn’t a price she can pay. Are you willing?”
I turned my head to look at Gannet. I could see the muscles of his jaw working, the eyes behind the mask flickering in acknowledgment. He read more into their words than I did, or they spoke at greater length to him in a language I did not understand.
“I’ll pay it.”
That was enough. There was not even a choice in moving forward or attempting retreat, and they swept us toward the pool now. I teetered on the edge only for an instant, a vain hope that I might see my mother opposite me again, studying me across the water. With any luck, I would have more than her shade to comfort me soon.
Gannet held onto my hand so tightly I could feel my smallest fingers bruising, and we dove in together.
For a moment, there was only darkness, quiet. The unmade.
And then I was everywhere, every time, every self that I had been. I was a child again before the war, driven even deeper back to the true beginning of my troubles: my birth, the squall of my first breath carrying a note of Theba’s fury. I echoed my sisters’ footsteps as soon as I could, my brother’s playful crowing before I had learned to speak. I was taking those first steps after Gannet onto the barge, trailing sand and little knowing how dear to me the shape and hem of his person would become. The heat of my outrage in the opera house touched me again, and I felt and smelled and tasted all that the fire had that day. I was reduced to ash only to rise again, newly bright.
My skin tingled as if my flesh were flaking away, and my lungs burned. But it wasn’t fire that deprived them, but water.
I burst, gasping, into air, heat, and light. The weight of my heavy clothes threatened to drag me back below the surface, my feet kicking wildly in search of purchase, but Gannet had released my hand only to loop two strong arms around me. I couldn’t seem to focus, my eyes blinking away water and the visions the pool had induced. But I felt heat on my face and smelled the sharp, bitter spice of desert air beyond the sodden wool of Gannet’s clothing.
“Are we here? Did it work?” I paddled weakly with my arms, but even the slightest movement made my head spin all the more madly.
“We’re somewhere.” Gannet’s response was stiff, and then he was pulling me to a smooth ledge of stone. “Sit. If you fall in again, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get you out.”
I sat and felt him sit beside me. The room we were in began after a moment to take shape, blurred by the steam rising from our clothing, rather than whatever had gripped me during the passage.
We sat on the edge of a great well in a mason-worked floor. It had been carved, the sides sloping gently down to a depth nearly the height of a man. The light here was low, angled in from the ceiling as it was closed in on all sides but for an entrance opposite where we sat, and only rubble was visible beyond. All around us were images in relief on solid stone, men and women whose state of undress would’ve made me blush if my body wasn’t still running wild with terror. They were artfully posed so as not to expose themselves, but their limbs were suggestive all the same. The confident slope of the women’s noses, their slim arms draped over their breasts, broad hips making a focus of their middles, could have seduced even the most noble-minded. They reminded me of the images in Adah’s sanctuary, but these were far, far older.
“Somewhere,” I echoed in awe. I attempted to withdraw my feet from the water, but it was already retreating, sucked down to the well’s center until it had completely disappeared beyond an ancient, blackened grate. The stone wasn’t even wet anymore. I cast a sidelong look at Gannet, meeting his shielded eyes with my own, dark with worry. “What did they want?”
He didn’t answer straightaway, and when he did, he looked toward the center of the well, as though he expected the water to rise up again and claim him if he answered untruthfully.
“There is no male of the species.”
I choked, coughed, and the heat that had been absent from my cheeks a moment before flooded them now.
“I see,” I squeaked, desperate to recover myself. I wanted to know exactly how Gannet had paid this particular price and also fervently wanted not to know. He spared me from asking with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“Whatever they needed from me they took it through the water. My mind was—elsewhere.”
A laugh burst out of me like a spark shot from a popping log in a fire.
“You must know how that sounds,” I insisted when he met my eyes, his own blazing with irritation. For a moment, I thought he might carry on being sour, but the corners of his mouth shifted slightly until he was laughing, too. I was warmed all the way through by the sound, becoming aware of the press of his thigh against mine through our wet clothes. When he stopped laughing, I wasn’t laughing anymore, and I caught my lip between my teeth to keep from speaking.
Thank you, I thought, at last, holding his eyes.
I said I would fight for you.
His lips below the mask twitched, all the explanation he was likely to give for what he had done in the cavern to see us through to the other side. I wanted to take his hand, wanted to do more than just that, but I pushed myself up from the ledge, instead.
“I want to know where we are.”
Gannet nodded his agreement and rose, too. I carefully averted my eyes from the figures in relief on the walls, though they seemed to take on life in my peripheral vision, the stone brightening, their limbs shining as though with sweat or light. The doorway I had noted when we first arrived was partially collapsed, but I was able to slip through and Gannet, too, with a bit more
effort. There was a thick layer of sand here, and our steps cleared a path to a mosaic floor that might have been obscured for ages. The pattern was reminiscent of the ones that had spiraled out beneath my feet when I was a very young child in the palace at Jarl. My heart quickened.
The corridor we walked into was close but intact, and at its end I saw a stark square of hot, white sunlight. We approached cautiously, but rather than the elation I expected to feel at being home, dread coiled in my gut like a hungry snake. Wherever we were, Theba was not happy to be here.
I braced my hands against the crumbling frame of what must once have been a narrow servants’ entrance, gazing out on the ruins of a square. The buildings opposite the one we emerged from were in complete ruin, the crumbled facades like so many broken brushstrokes, their foundations laid bare. Beyond them were more structures in various states of decay, and looming over it all was a massive edifice, circled by towers crooked as teeth. On the horizon, the mountains were a featureless canvas, the sun a blazing thumbprint of light. I felt the hum of recognition in my bones. My heart began to pound with the enormity of what we had done, how far we had come, and where.
“Re’Kether,” I murmured, stepping out into the square into deeper drifts of sand, undisturbed by human traffic for millennia.
Or perhaps not. As I cast about for an alley that might lead in the direction of the palace, I noted the deliberate clearing of debris blocking an entrance to the square on our left, and that two others appeared to have been purposefully blockaded. The isolation I had felt moments before when we passed between worlds, that Gannet and I were the only two in the known world, evaporated, and I sensed many presences, all of them bent toward violence.
“Gannet, I think we’re too late,” I whispered, wheeling around to meet his eyes.
But he wasn’t looking at me. He was held by a man, a head and shoulders taller and broader than he was. His eyes darted between what he could see of his captor’s cloth-wrapped face and the wicked knife pressed to his throat.
The Dread Goddess--Book of Icons--Volume Two Page 8
