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

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  I couldn’t hear the scream over the sound of my brother’s thoughts, his thrill, his horror.

  At last, we ducked into a familiar ruin, and our own soldiers leaped out of the shadows, swords raised, waiting for Jurnus’s confirmation before lowering them.

  Everyone waited inside. My mother, my father. My sisters with tall, pale Morainn among them, like an accidental arrangement of desert blooms. She met my eyes, and I wanted more than anything to speak to her, to offer her an explanation for every question that crossed her features. Even her sightless eye seemed to penetrate me.

  My brother was immediately tended to, and I noted that Lista was wounded, as well, leaning on Anise for support. My father seemed relieved to see me, but there was a new darkness there, after what he had seen where Najat had died.

  “I am more afraid for the Ambarians than I am for you. But we weren’t going to leave you behind,” he said, looking me over. His pause was weighty. “Gannet wasn’t with you?”

  “He is still looking for the golems.”

  “It’s a little late for that,” Lista hissed, her words ending in a whimper as she lowered herself to the floor. Anise laid a worried hand against the bandages that bound Lista’s thigh, even the slight pressure causing them to blossom with fresh blood. “There are too many for even mythical creatures to fight. More than we counted. How did they get more siege weaponry into the city?”

  Morainn’s laugh was hollow and hard, like a stone rattling in a cup.

  “They didn’t.” She met my eyes. “It is Tirce who launches these stones.”

  I released a breath I hadn’t meant to hold, feeling light. Of course it was Tirce. How many more icons had the imposter wooed with promises of freedom in permanent death?

  “We have a weapon, too,” Jurnus began, and I wasn’t the only one to raise my hand in objection. Their voices, their thoughts, were crowded, manic, senseless.

  “Your sister isn’t a weapon.”

  “Your sister’s life isn’t worth the risk.”

  “Your sister isn’t stable.”

  Your sister can’t be trusted.

  Your sister is an enemy, too.

  Where Gannet had lit a fire in me there was a coal only, now. But I had not cooled.

  “It’s me the imposter wants,” I said quietly, but they were arguing now. The only person who wasn’t talking, who still looked on me as though she waited for something, was Morainn. She knew, of course. And she knew me, too.

  Don’t.

  She couldn’t project into my mind, not as her brother did, but she knew that I could read her thoughts. They were plain enough on her face, too, if my family had bothered to see. As were mine, no doubt, when I made up my mind.

  “We need to take one of the secret ways, one that hasn’t been compromised yet. Retreat and regroup,” my father was saying. “We may lose this city, but we will not be captured again.”

  He sounded more certain than I knew he felt, but even my mother, who knew his true heart from their years together, only nodded. Jurnus seemed for a moment like he might protest, but Lista was already struggling to her feet with Anise’s aid.

  “I can’t leave. I have to find what the imposter seeks, and then I must seek her. Gannet and I were nearly there, at the river.”

  Esbat regarded me, eyes sharp, but looked away before speaking. “There is a passage through the sewer that will get you close to that part of the city. I can show you,” she began, a tremor in her voice that quickly vanished when my family began to protest against her offer to help me. “We shouldn’t go together, anyway, or all in the same direction. We’ll attract more attention that way.”

  “She’s right. I’ll send word to the captains and go with Anise and Lista,” Jurnus hastened to agree, and I could see already how he plotted to part from them, to fight. “Esbat, you’ll be safe with Eiren, and Morainn, too. Mother, father, you must go with Visash and Hale.” He indicated the two soldiers who had accompanied us this far. “Make for Cascar, once you’re clear of the ruins.”

  I saw the deep, ancient way that Esbat intended for us, and felt the chill of the Rogue’s Ear about me, the snatches of dream that slithered between what was real and what was imagined, like oil on the watery surface of our reality. I had a momentary crystalline thought from the vision, of Ji feeling she had walked into another world.

  My mother drew me fiercely to her when the moment of parting came, and it was as though she reached for me in every year of my life, hugging to her the pensive babe, the cautious child, the curious girl. For her, I was still all those things. She did not recognize the monster, or chose not to.

  “You are still my daughter,” she said into my ear. She didn’t need my gifts to know my heart, only those gifts that are the burden of every mother of a living child. “And I will see you again when this is over.”

  There was the chime of a funeral procession in her words. I pulled back and searched her face. Hers was still and certain where mine was wet now with tears.

  And then I was touching hands and faces with each of them, drawn away toward the end of everything.

  Chapter Twenty

  Esbat scouted a fair distance ahead of Morainn and me. She was smaller than Morainn, and less likely to draw notice, she insisted. I didn’t argue with her, though I was as wary of being alone with Morainn as I was desperate to talk with her again. Our path took us away from the fighting, provided the illusion of safety and secrecy. I stretched my mind outward all the same, hoping to sense an ambush before it was upon us, a small part of me monitoring what felt like every quarter of the city, and leaving little to probe my friend’s mind.

  It was better she speak her mind to me, anyway, than have it taken from her.

  “I feel like we’ve just been reunited and are parting again,” she said quietly. “I can’t even ask you to tell me what’s happened with my brother.”

  “It’s as I said,” I whispered, skin prickling. “He’s looking for the golems.”

  But I knew what she asked, and she knew that I knew.

  “Eiren,” she said, laying a hand on my arm. We couldn’t stop, couldn’t even slow, but I met her eyes in the dark, one shining with concern, the other milky with secrets. “Do you know what you’re doing? With him? With this weapon?”

  My smile was all edges. “As much as I ever have.”

  Morainn looked ahead and I followed her gaze, noting Esbat’s quick wave for us to hurry, her movements growing more visible as dawn approached. I didn’t know how it could be a new day. It felt to me as though I’d lived a dozen lives in the last twelve hours.

  “He loves you, you know,” she said, circling a crater that had once been a fountain. We crossed here, where Tirce’s efforts were visible. “And so do I. No matter what happens.”

  I stood opposite her, exposed as a star, wishing for more time and better words. I wanted a story that I could tell in an instant, a moment of connection to rival the fear that gripped us both.

  But even as I opened my mouth to speak, there was a rumbling, a whistling, and the world shattered. Flurries of sand and shattered stone from the last enormous stone projectile made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead of me. My dark sight was of no use, for it was debris that challenged my senses. I tripped madly along a dark slope as the grumble and roar of crashing stone grew more distant. I felt forward with my feet, uncertain of the damage and not wanting to fall. When my toes butted up against something soft, I bent to trace my hands up and down the frame of a body: Morainn’s.

  Her breath was steady, only unconscious from the blast. I struggled to lift her, cursing Theba’s selective aid.

  I sucked in a cluttered breath, coughing and stumbling. I tried to speak her name, to rouse her, but I seemed only to hack dust. My lungs were choked with it. I lost my balance again as the world shifted, shuddering, and I only just kept from sliding into what felt like the deepest center of the world. I held fast to Morainn, doing my best to drag her away toward what I thought might be the
square’s edge.

  “Eiren?” Esbat’s familiar face emerged from the dust, and I gasped relief.

  “Esbat! I need help. Morainn is hurt, I think.”

  Esbat’s expression was unreadable, and when she moved, it was to take a step away from me, rather than nearer. I felt as though I had swallowed a lump of ice, a sudden cold stealing down my throat, frosting my heart and belly.

  “Esbat, we need your help. Please.”

  It was then, only then, that she shook her head, a movement so slight I might have missed it if it weren’t for the torrent of emotion that I sensed within her. The haze shifted around her hand’s sudden movement, the readied blade within it. My own mind exploded in the colors of revelation, the blood red of betrayal. I felt Theba’s temper surge in me, and I bit into my cheek until it bled, trying to hold her back. To hold myself back. I could be wrong.

  “Esbat!” There was a tremor in my voice, answered by a tremor beneath our feet. “What are you doing?”

  She froze. The ground where we stood was crumbling bit by bit, my shaking limbs setting the stone to shake, too.

  “Why didn’t you die?” Though her face remained still, it was ashen, and her voice had the cracked quality of someone who should have been weeping. I gaped at her even as we were knocked to the ground by a great crashing from below, all around. Whole sheets of earth were being swallowed up. We scrambled to our feet, she still holding the knife, and me holding an unconscious Morainn, barely avoiding sliding into a growing chasm where the square had been. “I wasn’t supposed to see you again. I can’t see you. My sister is dead,” she continued, voice hollow, high and desperate, her feet exploring as she spoke, grappling for safety. “I read the old texts. I know what happened here. They won’t leave until they get what they’ve come for, and we’ll never know peace while we shelter Theba. We’ll never deserve it.”

  Her thoughts skittered like spiders, crazed, furtive. My skin crawled with them. How long had she been working against our family, against me, against hope? I wasn’t sure that it mattered. Even if she had betrayed them before I had arrived, I didn’t want war any more than she did. My arrival only heralded its bloody end.

  “You’re right.”

  Fury billowed off me like steam. Esbat launched herself at me, and I released Morainn to grapple with my sister. I wept as the skin of her wrist bubbled beneath my hand, Theba’s fire inching toward her elbow. I didn’t want to do this. I wouldn’t do this. I let go, arresting the black progress of the flames on her skin. She roared and came at me again, eyes burning with tears of her own.

  And then Esbat stopped, stumbling away from me in shock. A small, black-feathered dart stuck out of her neck. I saw her mouth gape open and close, like a fish for water, her hand reaching to pry the dart free. She thrashed about, struggling for air. Her terror lanced through me and I dove after her, tried to hold her. There was a rhythmic quality to the quakes of the ground now, and she lost her footing only an arm’s length from me, falling, her hand waving a faint plea before she disappeared into the abyss.

  I howled. I had the power to reduce a score of women to smudges, the stink of grease, but could not save even one. I felt wild, a weapon that would not be tempered no matter how skillful the smith. Arms locked around me, drawing me away from the edge, and Morainn’s gray face came into focus, a little pipe used for projecting poisoned darts falling from her lips.

  “She’s dead!” I screeched, not caring if the enemy was near enough to hear. “You killed her!”

  “I had to. I had to,” Morainn murmured, cold shock pouring from her body into mine, dulling my fevered panic.

  There was a blaze of light and I thought the world might fracture in two as yet more fragments of ancient street clattered into the chasm.

  Eiren.

  Gannet.

  I wheeled around, my eyes struggling to adjust to the abrupt change in light, from twilight to dawn’s fury diffused in a haze of stone dust. Gannet’s narrow form was dark, his pale face slashed with the unmistakable bruise-black of his mask as he came into focus. And behind him, rows upon rows of silent watchers, eyes glowing, twice as tall as he was, and considerably more than twice wide. Their expressions became clear to me as though through water or memory, vision or dream.

  I felt weak everywhere, my mouth falling open in bald disbelief. Each golem wore the same stoic expression, eyes hooded, nose rather too long and sharp, mouth etched in a line that was not made for smiling, even though I knew that smile, knew it formed a handsome one when coaxed. Each had been made in the guise of the man they had served both in life and in death, Shran’s visage remembered in the chiseled contours of their faces. They all looked exactly alike.

  They all looked exactly like Gannet.

  I thought I heard a laugh. Theba’s, surely, but the charging of the golems drowned out everything. My mind felt shattered by Esbat’s betrayal, by the revelation of Gannet’s identity. Not a god, but a man. The best of men. How was it even possible?

  The golems were advancing around Gannet, converging on us. Morainn and I nearly lost our footing with their thundering, sliding near the edge of the chasm once more.

  “Gannet, tell them to stop!”

  He was the icon of Shran, and so must be their master, but he couldn’t stop them, even if they would have heeded him. There were Ambarian soldiers filling what was left of the street. The golems lowered spears, pikes, and wicked, curved swords, meeting the enemy in a flurry of weapons. They’d kill us and the Ambarians, too.

  I looked wildly about for some means of escape, but there was only the charging of men and golems, the pit and the broken body of my sister somewhere deep below. And then my eyes set upon a glowing sigil in the stone beneath where the fountain had been, the shock of recognition settling in me dark and deep. I had seen it before, though the eyes had not been mine. One of the golems, felled by one of Tirce’s missiles, toppled into the pit, the last flash of his eyes exposing a tunnel, an intact darkness, pointing away from the ruined square.

  Protect her.

  I had to trust that Gannet heard me, could heed me. I used Theba’s strength to charge across the chasm to the sigil and what it promised, leaving Morainn behind. When I laid a hand upon it, the sigil lit another and another, driving deeper below the city, a blazing path for me, and me alone, to follow. I had been here before, with Ji.

  I walked in a daze, touching the sigils as Mara had in the vision, mind cloudy with regret, with revelation, with resolve. There was no water underneath the city now, not as it had been in Ji’s time. Still, the ghost of a current snaked between my toes, whipped my bare legs as I slowed, as the tunnel narrowed and then, after a time, widened again. I had been here, too. It was different with the many ages between Ji and me, but the heavy feeling of old power and ancient privilege was the same. If I found the weapon, would it make up for my sister’s betrayal? Would it make her right about me, and my monstrous will?

  Mine, yes. Theba unfolded like a flower in spring, her will like deadly perfume clouding my senses.

  The tunnel’s opening was lurid as a mouth, and I saw nothing but shadows in the chamber beyond. I sensed her suddenly, the imposter, alone, watchful, smug in the cloud of some pain-numbing opiate. She was close, she had known the way. If I killed her, would it stop this? Would it stop me? I could almost taste the tremble of sweat on the imposter’s lip, and then I saw her. The cadence of her fevered whispers stirred the ragged hem of my gown; my nose and brow felt, too, the ritual touches of her fingers. The imposter was bent in prayer. It did not amuse me that she would die in penitent repose, but a laugh raked through my throat all the same.

  I stepped forward.

  When I drew near to her, there was a medicinal odor mixed with the rank of refuse, unwashed hair and skin, illness. I could see from the crooked slope of her back as she bent that she was not well, and the slowness with which she moved to meet my dark gaze was that of a crone, or a cripple. Her mind was churning, a storm of senseless anger.


  She was pitiable, but I was pitiless.

  “I knew you’d come.” Her voice was raw, and I caught snatches of a twisted expression beneath the folds of a wintry hood. Much more of her face I couldn’t see, but what flesh was exposed was shiny, tight, warped as though someone had taken a sculptor’s knife to it.

  Or a flame.

  She couldn’t see me, but she knew me. There was a flash of hollow, milk-white eyes in sunken sockets before her hands shot out, grabbing me by the wrists. There was a fever in her, and I felt the weak pulse in her hands. It called to me.

  Theba, Theba, Theba.

  Was it a warning? A conviction?

  She held me more tightly, and I recognized something of Theba in her, crazed and indomitable. I felt the Dread Goddess rising in me to answer this madness.

  I would get the weapon.

  And then I would kill her.

  “You will answer for what you’ve done,” I hissed, my words edged as a blade.

  The sound of my voice changed her. The thoughts that raced like blind horses in her mind slowed, gathered. The drift of her head ceased and she jerked chin-first, as though led by a line, to face me. She threw back her hood and I knew why she didn’t fear me. She knew the fury of Theba. She’d felt it firsthand.

  “Imke?”

  Much of her bright hair was gone, twisted folds of flesh streaming down her scalp in a mockery of the pale locks that had once lain there. Her face retained only the smug twist of her mouth, full, fleshy lips too gruesome and strange in an otherwise savage visage.