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

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  “Do you see?” I said softly, a wild hope occurring to me. “You could help me, Dreamer. Show me how to return from sleep with every memory intact.”

  “Are you sure you know what you want?” Najat whispered, but even as she did her hand snaked out of her sleeve to clasp my wrist. “And that you are the one who truly wants it?”

  A whisper of something passed into my blood, sped to my heart. In the same instant an arrow whistled through the air, piercing the armor of the soldier whose body partially shielded Najat’s. The second arrow reached its intended target, burying itself in her chest from behind. She looked down, for a moment only shock triumphing over pain on her features. We’d been seen after all.

  “In!” the wounded soldier called as he pushed Najat ahead of him, taking little care with the feathered protrusion that emerged from her chest. I dropped my hand to her arm, steadying her as he urged us deeper within and down a narrow entry, remembering the moon-eyed woman she had been in Jhosch, a woman who had been a listener, not a teller. A woman I might have befriended, in time.

  As I thought of Najat as she had been, she was fading swiftly before me now. My eyes cut to Gannet. He was still unconscious.

  “Najat.” My fingers closed on her wrist, fine-boned beneath her weathered sleeve. “Will he wake? Will he live?”

  She met my eyes, but if a cloud passed over hers, I couldn’t see it. There was another figure in the ruin where we crouched, gold-edged, hooded, leaning into me. I was not seeing the world as it was, and the darkness that crept over my own vision had only a little to do with our descent into a deep, secret place beneath the ruins. Najat was going to die, and Gannet, too. A strangled panic warred for words in my throat, my fear robbing me of breath.

  But it was because Ji wasn’t breathing.

  Mara was touching the wall. She was not supposed to touch the wall.

  It was dark and we were underwater, but still I whipped my head back to throw a worried glance at the woman from the temple. Her figure and face were obscured by the water and the darkness both, but she had not drifted as Mara had. There was something wrong about her face, though, the features bulky and blurred in the rune glow.

  I thought my heart would create waves, pounding as it did against my chest. Mara’s fingers were tracing the sigils now as she passed, too precise, too quickly, and where they had only halfheartedly shed their light, now they blazed. She should’ve known not to do that. Something was wrong with her. When Dsimah, Tirce, and Najat had charged us with this mission, they had said we would need someone from the temple, but I hadn’t told Mara the identities of our leaders. But now, watching her strange behavior, I wondered if there was something she hadn’t told me, too.

  Mara didn’t dart up for air when we came to the fourth and final breathing place, but I did, taking a quick, desperate gulp before ducking below again to peer downward, not wanting to let either of them out of my sight now.

  The woman from the temple was struggling with Mara. She was trying to force her to come up for air, but Mara was fighting forward. Their bodies writhed in the water, Mara kicking, the woman from the temple attempting to lift her toward the ceiling, toward me. The muscles in my chest tightened in sympathy. I considered diving down, assisting the woman, but I wasn’t sure I could trust her, either. The hood drifted in a lazy pattern behind her head, bare for the first time, and something just seemed wrong about her. I could have gone on, but the task that lay ahead was not made for one. It was daunting even for three.

  Finally, Mara relented, and the hooded woman was pumping her legs and one free arm, the other fast around Mara’s chest, but not toward me, and the air I knew they both desperately needed. She was forging ahead.

  Reckless. I couldn’t stay where I was, and if I didn’t follow I would quickly lose them both. With a curse, I dove down and after the pair.

  The woman clearly intended to force Mara to finish what we’d come here to do. Her skills were needed, and mine, and whatever it was the hooded woman could do for us, too. That was why we had been chosen. That was why we all needed to be here, and with our wits about us.

  It was clear from Mara’s behavior, however, that hers had fled, and mine were soon to follow if this wretched place had seized her.

  I ached for lack of air and didn’t know how the hooded woman had the strength to propel herself and Mara both, but then she was rising and I was behind her. We emerged from the water mere seconds apart. She’d thrust Mara forward into the shallows, a sweep of her bent head slogging the sodden hood back into place. She was quick to take hold of Mara again, however, for no sooner than my friend had been freed did Mara begin to advance, eyes blazing. Mara’s face was ashen, jaw slack, and I felt mine loosen, teeth chattering from fear and from the cold.

  “What’s happened to her?”

  “She’ll live, but we might not,” the hooded woman said testily after she’d taken several gulping breaths. Mara’s jerking form and the temple’s many sigils beginning to glow about us should have encouraged me to hold my tongue, but my head was reeling.

  “Tie her up,” the woman said.

  She struggled to maintain a hold on Mara while also loosening a length of rope from under the sodden cloak she still wore. Mara began to wail, a keening song that caused the already glowing runes to blaze brighter still.

  “And gag her.”

  I didn’t hesitate. Mara was my friend, my ally, but the wild, distant look in her eyes was not one that I recognized. She’d been corrupted. I refused to believe that she had betrayed me. It was said there were some among the gods who could commandeer the minds of mortals—it had to be that. I needed it to be that.

  Even if it meant both the hooded woman and I were going to die down here.

  Mara snapped at my hands when I drew near her mouth, her loose, snapping jaw slick with subterranean water and spittle. When I swooped around behind her to bind her arms, the hooded woman edged out of my way.

  I felt my skin grow hot as I bent to strap Mara’s legs together and we lifted her between us. The hooded woman and I were nearly the same height, which was a surprise and a boon. Not many women were as tall as I was, and it made the work of carrying my struggling friend deeper into the temple at least less physically taxing.

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” the woman insisted as I scouted around for a dry place to secure Mara.

  “I’m not just going to dump her somewhere she might drown. If we get what we came for, it won’t matter.”

  There were crooked stairs angling toward what I hoped was the temple’s sanctuary, and every few steps, deep, carved openings intended for housing artifacts long since stolen. With a grunt, I hefted Mara into a hollow I deemed safe from whatever tides touched this place. The hooded woman secured Mara’s feet while I turned her face to the wall. She wasn’t moving now, but her eyes were open, distant. It was as though she wasn’t with us anymore.

  “We should hurry,” said the woman, but her voice was uncharacteristically patient. Perhaps she realized how hard it was for me to leave a friend behind. Or perhaps she rightly guessed that I was as predictable as a mule when pushed to act outside my own wants and time.

  We pressed forward, the stairs widening, and I didn’t allow myself to look back at where Mara was all but entombed. I couldn’t help her. I could only do what we had come here to do. When we reached the stone doors, they were thick as three men and twice as tall. Blind faces were carved at eye level, bodies hung without arms or legs and swaddled as babes, level with our own. It was as the hooded woman suspected. This was an ancient place of Adah, whose followers were as inhumanly cruel as their divine master. When one served justice, one was privileged to define it.

  Blood would be needed to pass here. Skilled though I was, my blood had been my entry into the rebellion, this had been why I was so desirable. Only the First People could get close enough to the gods to be useful.

  I loosened one of the daggers I wore in a belt at my waist. The faces before us suddenly blazed as
though they could sense the coming offering, eyes now appearing white and searching where there had been none before.

  I sliced open my palm and blinded the figure in the stone before me once more.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Clutching my hands together against the dull stroke of pain, I didn’t feel the warmth of newly spilled blood that I expected to feel. My palms were dry, sand-dusted, and I looked wildly around at the temple-that-wasn’t as I came to my senses. Mine. I was Eiren again.

  My heart hammered a rhythm not unlike Ji’s. I wasn’t sure how they’d done it, but the imposter’s soldiers had managed to drag both Gannet and me into a chamber so deep beneath Re’Kether that there was a chill in the air. I half-expected to see my breath before me, my next words captured in a false fog.

  “Were we followed?” I wanted to ask if they had killed anyone to secure us, for I saw no signs of a struggle here. Najat was clutching at her wound, the shallow shuddering of her shoulders alarming. Gannet was crumpled next to me, his head upon my ankles, the cold metal of the mask smooth and foul-feeling against my skin. I saw all of this by dark sight, though one of the soldiers, stationed well away with his back to us near the chamber’s mouth, held a small, dim torch. I didn’t wait for a response but seized upon the arm of the nearest soldier, amplifying my capacity to read her thoughts. She drew her weapon but dropped it when I squeezed.

  We had been seen. We weren’t going to be alone down here for long.

  Maintaining my hold on the soldier, whose face was frozen in a look of terror that mirrored what I felt in her mind, I rose to my feet, an otherworldly grace in my movements.

  “Najat,” I said carefully, for it wasn’t just the soldier I held. Theba, too, was plucking at my limbs, teasing my heart. But I would take only just enough to do what I wanted, what I needed to do. I wouldn’t allow her to control again. “You’re dying. I can’t help you. You should remember me well enough to know that I would, if I could. Please wake Gannet. Undo whatever you’ve done.”

  Her shoulders shook with sound of another kind, a rattling chuckle that sounded as though it began in her bones.

  “Know you? I know you,” she managed, her voice a wheeze. “Everyone knows you but you, child.”

  I could feel her slipping away. I’d been near enough of the dead now, enough of the dying, that I fancied I could even see her spirit begin to free itself from her flesh. I wanted to weep. Theba hungered for the fleeing wisp of life, bravery, deep feeling, confidence and regret. There was a clattering of weapons and a shout, and I heard rather than saw the first of Najat’s soldiers fall. I thrust the one that I’d held away from me, then dropped to my knees before Najat.

  “Please, I’m begging you,” I began, but she was lifting her hand, touching it with a firm finality against my brow.

  “Theba doesn’t beg.”

  And she used the last of her strength to push me away.

  Najat fell back against the rocky floor of the chamber. Neither she nor Gannet stirred, and I howled. I did not see but sensed the bristling of spears at my back. My scream deepened, melting them in their shafts. I couldn’t see anything but the pulse of my own blood purpling my eyes, tears streaming hotly as my trembling hands sought Gannet’s slumped form. He didn’t move. My fingers fumbled at his chest, shaking but sensing nothing. No heart, no breath.

  More soldiers swarmed at my back, and I felt a cruel tightness in my chest. Taking, always. The world was always taking from me.

  I rounded on the faceless followers who crowded behind me. Najat’s forces fought with those of my family, one group sought to secure me, the other to kill me, and it didn’t matter. It was all the same, to contain what I was in death, or in a mortal cage, with words or false, familiar feelings.

  There was a pulse in the soil beneath my feet, and the fighting, for a moment, paused. I felt the ground splintering and shaking. I seized the soldier nearest to me, no notion of his alliance, and no interest in it. Weapons flashed like lanterns around us, but between him and me, time seemed to stop. I moved my hands down the plane of his chest, parting the dark layers of fabric there, the armor plates, inexplicably dry despite the heat of the air, of the skin beneath. There was hot blood there. I thought of drinking it, bathing in it, or sipping, only, like little kisses planted between lovers. But I could only destroy, never create.

  I felt the soldier’s heart, powerful, beating hotly with fear and strength in equal parts.

  And I turned it to ash in his chest.

  Another came, and another, all of them silenced, my will thrust into their bodies like one might a gag into the mouth of an unwilling hostage.

  “Eiren.”

  Gannet. How could he be speaking to me now? From death? I would join him. I would break open my own mind and pour it into someone else. My struggle began and ended in a cloud of stone dust, the smell of smoke, eyes unmasked. I couldn’t see him. I would never see him again.

  My hands clasped like irons around another throat, choking words, cries, breath, all.

  Eiren, no.

  Shrieking, I felt hands upon me, pulling me free of the stumbling figure before me. The soldier was doubled over but drawing ragged breaths, resolved to live. A muscled arm fell into the light of many torches, a tangled head of dark hair.

  It was Jurnus.

  I screamed again, fighting the one who held me, but their arms were strong, steady. Even as I saw Jurnus straightening, his breath reclaiming evenness with each gulp, time seemed to slow as my eyes crossed from one end of the chamber to the other, neck craning as though inviting a blade. I wanted to see the face of the one that restrained me. I knew his touch, but I needed to see.

  I wept then against Gannet’s shoulder, the dark fabric cool despite the living warmth of the body underneath. His hands tightened around me. I didn’t have a thought for Jurnus, who was bleeding above one eye. Neither did I care for those who staggered behind him, shaken, my sister, Lista, my father, among them, nor a thought even for the wet, sticky substance that met my sandaled feet: blood from the soldiers I had slain. I kept opening and closing my mouth against Gannet’s chest, trying to speak, but what could I say that he could not sense?

  Jurnus stepped forward, his face lit by more than torchlight. Twilight streamed in from behind us where before there had been only darkness. Gannet’s arms tightened around me protectively when I peered around him to look.

  It was as though a great scythe had bisected the ceiling, a scar wide enough to allow twelve men across to penetrate the chamber. I could think of nothing that possessed the power to destroy so completely; no weapon, no construct of war.

  Nothing but me.

  “You attacked me, Eiren.” Jurnus’s voice was ragged, wary, as though he were not sure whom he addressed. And he had every reason to fear. There was a madness in his eyes that quickened my blood, the flood of it that responded to Theba, that belonged to her will. “Why? What happened here?”

  I felt Theba pulling me away from Gannet, toward my brother.

  “You have eyes,” Theba said in a hiss, gesturing with my hands at the carnage. “I killed here. I’ll kill here again.”

  I was drifting, strangely calm, but knew it to be the sort of stillness we saw in the sand-sick: those who wandered so far and so long in the desert that they surrendered to the elements, to the death that exposure swiftly delivered. Theba seized greater control of my limbs until I felt hardly anything at all. Gannet reached for me again but she stepped away from him, hungering for violence.

  “You are my sister,” Jurnus screamed, shrill terror in his words, his eyes. He gestured at Najat’s corpse, and I saw the suspicion spiraling out of control in his mind. This seemed a surreptitious meeting to him, a gathering of spies. “Have you been acting against us this whole time?”

  Theba leered, and I struggled to return to myself. But I felt deep, drowned.

  “Now is the time to remember who our true enemies are,” Gannet cautioned.

  Jurnus shook his blade in a blood
y fist.

  “There was never any question who the true enemy was until you showed up,” he spat.

  His sword was steady, and his intentions were as clear to Gannet as they were to me. Gannet sprang past me, swift to knock the sword from Jurnus’s hand. Time slowed and my brother’s surprise dulled his reflexes for only a moment before his fist connected with a sickening slap against the broad side of Gannet’s jaw. And then things moved very fast. The two men were locked together as Jurnus struck again and again, making no attempt to recover his sword. Gannet evaded him with forearms and elbows, refusing to engage. I began to laugh, manic, as the violence before me escalated, a wicked, tangled shadow of struggle cast into the sand by the flicking torchlight. More soldiers gathered around them, frantic at the sound, my father and sisters among them, trying to tear them apart. I jerked and hiccupped a scream, a cackle, bit my tongue and tasted blood. Theba wanted this, wanted me to want it, and I fought to return her to the dark, to the quiet. She would break the walls, splinter the swords, but her real work was in hearts and bones. Our doubts would be our undoing.

  My father fought to get to his only son, shouting for caution. Lista’s scream was senseless, the flash of her blade wild. Now Jurnus bent to his own weapon. His face blazed with pride and vengeance. I felt lifted onto my toes with anticipation, the acid touch of rising bile in my throat. My presence, Theba’s presence, fed this corruption. I knew that she worked in him as she had other brothers, long ago, brothers whose blood we shared. Jurnus, whose tender heart had always been foolish but never murderous. Never that.

  “Enough.” Though my whisper was quieter even than the hush of a blade slicing through the air, they heard me, everyone. Jurnus dropped his sword, shaking his head as though to clear it, and Gannet slowly lowered his arms. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, and with it a tremor chased from my chin to my feet. I needed to be away from them, all of them; I needed to run. But fleeing spoke too much of guilt and blame, for all I shared the responsibility for the ill my hands had wrought.