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

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  It was rescue.

  The robed figure was considerably smaller than those who had laid hands upon her, and when she reached where Mara stood and was turned to face the crowd, I could see that she was very young, perhaps fifteen, and likely eight months gone with child. My heart threatened to rattle right out of my chest, and my nails bit into the soft flesh of my palms when I clenched them under my veil. I had a very good view of the girl, the best, as did all of those without the coin and influence to pay for distance from this unpleasant spectacle.

  “Before you stands one of the First Blood, the youngest daughter of House Frai,” Mara intoned. “Her child was got on her by her family’s horse handler.”

  At this a second figure was thrust forward, more roughly, and with far less ceremony. The boy was still just that, despite having a few years on the girl, and his surly look was tempered only slightly by the bristling soldiers who stood close.

  “They are not wed. They were given no blessing by this temple to be married and will never have it.”

  I couldn’t even tell from looking at them if this was what they wanted. Were they in love? Had she willingly bedded the boy or had he raped her? I wanted it to matter but knew that it didn’t—we would save the girl, if we could, but could do nothing for the boy.

  “If the child favors the mother, she will be wed as the temple wills, and the infant given to her family to raise,” Mara said, steady voice rising. Dalliances were handled always the same. But the next part I knew held special significance for Mara, and though I saw none of it in her face, my own heart pinched in grief for her. “If the infant takes after the father, the babe will be given in service to the temple, and the mother bled.”

  That infant, in another time, had been Mara. Her mother had been laid upon the guttered table and sliced open.

  The girl began to weep openly at this, and the boy struggled, pleading, screeches unintelligible. Perhaps it was love. It didn’t change anything.

  Mara took a knife, a clean one, the ornamented handle steady in her hands, not even a tremble in her delicate wrist as she approached the young woman. I couldn’t help but admire her craft, her pretense of devotion, even as my heart began to pound. The temple wouldn’t wait for the babe to be born. If it was of the First Blood, it would survive. If it wasn’t, it would have to be strong to live beyond infancy anyway. Gods didn’t wait. The poor around me stirred, some riveted, others looking away and hoping that no one would notice their aversion. One elderly woman even retched, the sweet, sickly tang of bile competing with the temple’s persistent reek of blood. There were murmurs of discontent even from those of the First Blood who were boxed nearest to us, several still clutching their bandaged arms. Most would not act—even to make a sound of protest was perilous. But I was bolstered by their discomfort, so much that when my cue to throw off the dusted veil came, I did not hesitate.

  Rather than plunge the knife into the young girl, Mara lashed out at the soldier nearest to her. She had all the precision of a surgeon when she severed the critical flow of blood between his head and chest, and she leaped over him as he collapsed to take down the next soldier, and the next. She would never be able to return to the temple, but the sacrifice of her place was a strategic one. We had to make a statement. We had to show them that we would not do as they willed, not always and someday, never again.

  Sympathizers in the crowd swelled toward the head of the temple, hoping to join the fight against the faithful acolytes and the armed guards, pushing against the tide of those who fought toward the exits. I slipped between the crush of bodies toward the girl and her lover. Even as they struggled to reach each other, one of the soldiers who remained used one of her last acts of life to put an end to his, a lurid spray of blood painting her cheeks before her own throat was cut. I kicked the lifeless body of the soldier, enraged, but met Mara’s eyes before we both turned to the girl. She gaped, wordless, one hand reaching for the boy’s broken body, the other cradling the swell of their child.

  “If you’d see his son or daughter raised in peace, you’ll come with us,” I said.

  I held out my hand. She took it.

  The touch of the girl’s hand drove me like a strong wind out of the vision and back into Gannet’s arm. Or had he been holding me the entire time? We were at the bottom of the corridor, down a slope that ended in rubble and darkness.

  “Did you see it? Did you see?”

  I was frantic for air, the echoes of terror in my ears akin to those of the opera.

  “I didn’t see anything, Eiren,” Gannet answered, stroking my hair. “You walked down here and you just collapsed.”

  I tried desperately to hang on to the details of the vision, but again the harder that I tried to hold onto them, the more slippery they became. The stench of blood faded from my nostrils and with it Ji’s conviction, the intricacies of the world she knew and lived in, the face of the pregnant girl, the boy, of Mara. Like a dream out of sequence, the narrative of what I had seen lost all sense.

  Gannet’s mind brushed against mine, and I tried to share with him what I remembered, but there was little more than feeling left, sorrow, rage, the struggle against forces beyond our control. I closed my eyes, pressing my face into his shoulder. I had sought the vision, this time, and I wanted more. But I had to find a way to see, really see, the world before. There were answers there, perhaps more important even than the relic we sought.

  I looked up at him and then beyond him. We had reached the bottom of the corridor.

  “I don’t think there’s anything else here for us,” I said, once I was sure I could speak without a tremor in my voice. “And I need to know more about Re’Kether as it was before. I need to know everything that you know, every story.”

  “It would take a long time to tell you every story, Eiren.”

  “Then you’ll have to show me.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Gannet stared at me, lips parted slightly as he sought for words.

  “I don’t think you know what you’re asking, Eiren,” he replied, at last, lowering me to the ground and squatting in the sand before me.

  “The icons share memories, don’t they? That’s part of how your histories are kept.” It was a gamble, a guess, but his sudden intake of breath confirmed my suspicions.

  “When one icon dies, those who knew them will share their experiences, their knowledge, with the new icon, when they are old enough. I have only ever been the receiver of memories, Eiren. Never the giver.”

  “But you’ve shown me things before. I just need to know what you know.”

  “I don’t know how to choose what I share with you,” he insisted, and I felt his discomfort growing despite the barriers he usually had in place against me, against the world. “I don’t know what you’ll see.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “And what if I am?”

  He leaped to his feet and I remained at a crouch, limbs beginning to protest. But I didn’t move.

  “This has always set me apart,” he said, his eyes a storm when he gestured to the mask, though his hand was steady. “Adah knew me, but only Adah. In every life, I am sentenced without even knowing the crime. I don’t want you to see how much that once…troubled me.”

  “Do you really think that I could judge anyone for being unwilling to accept a punishment?” I asked, drawing slowly to my feet but not touching him, not yet. “Theba would burn up everything soft in me, every sentiment, every gentle thought. I hate it and my hate feeds her.”

  “And she would have that same opportunity in me,” he said, low as the groan of thunder. “We would be that close. Could you control her?”

  Would you control her?

  It was a thought we shared, bred of the desire we felt for each other, the uncertainty of what it might mean to give in.

  I laid a hand upon his arm, against the skin between his wrist and where he had rolled his sleeves against the heat. But he was cool, and the touch hummed up through my fingers into my arm, m
y shoulder, to my heart.

  “I am stronger than she is.” Even as I said it, I knew that to win against Theba I would have to lose. She had tempted me with revenge, with secrets, with the power to have and hold what I wanted, and I had given in to her every time and cursed her for it afterward. If Gannet opened his mind to me, I knew that I would want everything and she could give it to me, if I let her.

  But I didn’t want to take from him.

  “Please, Gannet,” I continued, taking two steps forward and willing his arms to open, to embrace me. “I saw something terrible, I think, and I feel like I am playing a game of dice without etchings. Like there’s a score being kept and I don’t know what it is.”

  He hesitated, his anxiety stirring the air around us. The burn of rejection had just begun to heat my core when he laid a hand against my neck, pulling my face to his in a fierce kiss, our teeth knocking against each other in a rattle that shook its way down my body. And then his cheek was against mine, the prickling of a hastily shaved face paired with a sensation of another kind: falling, weightless, cradled in his hands, buoyed by the murmur of his words against my cheek and the tidal swell of his thoughts.

  Every story of every icon that had come before, generations of lore cataloged as only a man like Gannet might organize memories that were not of his own making. I sensed only Adah’s touch in this record, the Adah that we knew and the Adahs that had come before him, each, apparently, the sole carrier of Gannet’s icon’s experiences. He was the only one who knew who he was, the only one who could see justice done. Each of them had possessed a scholarly interest in the past, and I recognized the details that Gannet had shared with me in his story of the icon of Adah, who had united the Ambarians. I peeled away these layers of memory, searching for what they knew that had come before, of the exodus from Re’Kether, of the city’s fall.

  Many of the stories that I knew professed that the gods had walked among us, meddled with us, made demands and handed down punishments. I was overwhelmed by the number of histories recorded in his mind, the ledgers of past sins, variations on tales that I knew that were too dark to retell. I needed to focus, and I felt my grip on Gannet’s neck tighten as I prowled about in his mind.

  I needed to know more about the gods as they had been. They had favored the First People, Shran and Jemae among them, because they were special. The First People had created the gods, and their descendants were both servants and councilors. But how had the gods been driven away? And why did their departure coincide with the collapse of the kingdom we had once shared? For I could see now the great gaps in what Gannet could share with me, the kingdom as it had been, the terror and chaos of living under immortal rule, Shran and his kind merely puppets. The gods had fallen, and when they did the blood of the First People had failed, too. What Gannet knew amounted to little more than lengthy records of births, marriages, deaths, the proceedings of justice, lines of succession, ritual and tradition, but it was enough to provide a frame on which to hang the things that I had seen in my visions. Details from Ji’s world glittered like the facets of a jewel passed from hand to hand under a light; with the skeleton of Gannet’s knowledge, I saw things I hadn’t been able to hold onto before. The visions were of a rebellion, and of Ji’s part in it. I felt Ji’s hatred for them even now, nearer to the purity of Theba’s rage than it was to my own. With Mara, she had fought them, had been party to some scheme against them. Their culture, the central function of the temples of the gods to dispense justice, fortune, food. The children of the First People given over to the temples, their blood a prize, a commodity. But there was nothing in my visions to explain the departure of gods from our world, and nothing in Gannet’s mind, either, the fact that they went on to live as icons a mysterious burden.

  Icon.

  It was a whisper, and the catalog of memory around me dimmed, light from another corner of Gannet’s mind pulsing the potent red of a fire waiting to be stoked. I didn’t have time to wonder if this was something he didn’t want to show me, if this was something he feared, because I felt an umbilical tug drawing me near to that light, that sound.

  Icon.

  “She is an icon. You must trust me.” I saw Gannet in the dark cloak and impractical garb he had worn when I had first met him, standing on the terrace in Jarl with his sister. Though the edges of this Gannet blurred, around him I recognized another chamber in the palace I had lived in as a child. Days before we’d met, then. “We will have to take her with us.”

  “Is that why you were sent with us? To find this icon?” It was Morainn, and I felt my heart squeezed by the fists she clenched in her skirt. Sweat stood out on her brow. “Did Adah tell you that she would be here?”

  “Maybe he knew, I don’t know,” Gannet’s tone was impassive despite his words. “But I don’t think so. I can sense her, her every breath, every thought, every gesture. They’re getting close. I’ve never felt anything like this.”

  Morainn’s face clouded, and I realized Gannet hadn’t recognized the emotion on her face, did not remember this as accurately as I might have done.

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “You have no idea.” I drew near to Gannet, studying him, looking for the twitch of alarm or longing in his pursed lips. I could still feel his true lips against my cheek, the soft, meditative breath, as though he slept.

  “What happens when we take her back?” Morainn’s question was a practical one, but her tone demanded many answers.

  “The world ends. Or it begins.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “We have to,” Gannet insisted, looking away from Morainn, one hand brushing the lip of the mask above his brow. “I have to. It’s the only thing I’ve ever felt I had to do.”

  Now Morainn seemed truly shaken.

  “Which icon is she?”

  He looked at her, and when he opened his mouth to speak, a cruel mockery of my own voice emerged.

  “Theba.”

  My voice, first, and then my face, pushing forward through his, shredding skin and breaking bone. I was screaming, scrambling back as though I could escape this memory and Theba’s invasion of it. He reached out for me, the fine points of my own fingers twined before me as they burst through his, spraying blood. I heard her laugh, high and cold, like the strike of a blade against stone. I felt it shaking me out of the memory, rattling my teeth and tongue as I was returned to myself, when I captured Gannet’s mouth with mine in the corridor of the temple where our bodies crouched still.

  “The only thing you’ve ever felt you had to do?” She spat his words back out at him in between the fevered press of my lips against his. She made me bite his lip so hard I tasted blood, and worse, I felt his hands slide down to my hips, pulling me against him. I felt his need and though I wanted to cry out that it wasn’t me, I remembered the night before, when he had left me wanting.

  I had promised I would control her. Even if she offered me what I wanted.

  “Gannet, no,” I ground out the words between my teeth, my arms leaden as I tried to draw away from him. Theba made my blood sluggish, my muscles weak.

  Gannet’s eyes were closed behind the mask and still he held me, so tightly now I thought he might bruise me. When he spoke, it was as though he wasn’t even with me, was lost in a memory of his own. “Adah said I can’t hide from her. The mask hides me from everyone, but I can’t hide from her.”

  Theba’s words were wine on my tongue, a sip taken but not yet swallowed. “And why would you want to hide from me?”

  She was easing me against him and even through our clothes I felt dizzy at the contact, the pressure of my own need, of his, of hers. I didn’t want it to be like this.

  But if we couldn’t have each other any other way?

  I had promised him control and I was losing it. A shout and a crash of stone and sand drove us apart as the ceiling above us shuddered perilously. Gannet’s eyes snapped open, but they were unfocused.

  “We need to get out of here!” I hissed, grabbi
ng for his hand and attempting to haul him to his feet. But he was far heavier than I was, and I nearly fell over, scrambling as the ceiling’s rattling was joined by unsteady stone beneath us. Whether it was my family’s forces or the enemy outside, we would be buried alive if we remained here.

  Gannet pressed a hand against his face and though it was only a few seconds, it felt unbearably long before he rose. We raced back up the corridor toward the light, but another explosive crash sent us sprawling. The Ambarians were launching stones from somewhere behind the ruined temple. I could see a small force ahead, my family’s soldiers, attempting to maneuver between the stone missiles and the lethal whirring of arrows. They were being driven back.

  And there was no way we could safely reach them.

  “Eiren, here,” Gannet hissed, pulling me into one of the small chambers we had explored previously. The earlier impact had shifted the thick stones in the wall here, revealing an opening. He bent down and I joined him, noting the ancient plate that we had missed before that, when pushed, revealed the false floor.

  “We don’t even know what’s down there,” I said, wary.

  “But we do know what’s out there,” Gannet returned, looking back over his shoulder. We heard shouts now, the clang of weapons in close combat. I could’ve called upon Theba, perhaps driven them all off, but her fire was not merciful, and I’d already proven today that I couldn’t control her. I ducked into the opening, choking on the dust and the stale air, and he was quick to drop in behind me.

  I was relieved to learn that it was no cellar we had discovered but another path that wound toward the temple, a deep, secret way that went beneath the collapsed street we had entered this building to avoid. They had stopped launching the stones above us, no doubt because they didn’t want to endanger their own forces, and I was grateful: my dark sight illuminated for me every stirring mote of dust, every crack in the tunnel’s ceiling. Gannet strode ahead and as the path widened, I moved to walk beside him. I wanted to apologize for losing control of Theba before, of perhaps seeing something he hadn’t meant for me to see, but he began speaking first.