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

by Jillian Kuhlmann

“I do not go by that name anymore,” she hissed. “Not since I was chosen. Since she touched me. Theba.”

  She was in a reverie, lifting my hand to sweep it down her ruined brow, over one opaque, sightless eye. I shuddered. I had robbed Morainn of her sight, but Imke, of her sanity.

  “So you wage a war in her name,” I said, struggling to retain control enough to search her mind. “Why?”

  I felt the warm glow of contentment in my belly, Theba’s anger at Imke’s masquerade dissolving as it became clear that this was yet one more bloodbath in the Dread Goddess’s name. In her honor.

  “Because you won’t. You’re weak. Unworthy. I see that now.”

  How many of her friends had she slaughtered? What else had my touch, Theba’s fury, caused her to betray?

  “But you need me.”

  “I need what’s within you. When Theba sees how I have served her, what I can offer her, perhaps she’ll bury you in that coward’s heart of yours once and for all.”

  I didn’t know if this was something that Theba could do, take me over completely, permanently. But I felt a surge of strength at Imke’s touch, as though her devotion powered the monster within me. I fought it, fought them both, thinking of what I wanted, why I was here.

  “Where is it, Imke? Where is the weapon?”

  She smiled, lips wrinkling her savaged cheeks like paper, squeezing my wrists until I thought my bones might snap.

  “It’s here.”

  Imke seemed to feed on my struggle, and a flame was pulled from me, an unwilling thing that began in my fingers, licked at skin puckered already by its touch. Theba’s will was like a scorpion under sand, waiting to strike, to shake free and feast. I would be discarded. I stomped, I shook, I twisted to lay my hands, now consumed in fire, on Imke’s forearms, but she was changing.

  We weren’t alone, around us the blur of gold limbs, bodies realized from the air, ancient faces lined with sorrow. They laid their hands upon me, through me.

  Imke’s face darkened unnaturally, an invisible hand drawing the hood over it again. Her leer became a shadow and my fear, my fight, a distant dream. Suddenly Ji’s needs eclipsed my own. I was pulled under into another vision.

  “So what are we looking for?”

  I couldn’t see the hooded woman’s face, but her posture tensed, and she stopped midstride.

  “I assumed you knew.”

  It was my turn to feel shocked. The keening of whatever watch we had roused in the subterranean temple was reaching a crescendo, and I almost wanted to be caught just to silence the dozens of voices crying out in fear, or pain, or the pleasure that the wicked take in such things.

  “Do you mean to tell me that we’ve been sent here to find a weapon and we don’t even know what it looks like?”

  The woman didn’t respond, and my belly constricted in rage. We’d been betrayed by those who’d posed as our allies, by gods I should have known that I could not trust.

  “Perhaps Mara knew,” she began, but she didn’t sound as though she believed it. I also did not like the way she had given up on my friend, speaking as though Mara had no future.

  Even if it was beginning to seem that we might not.

  I charged ahead, brushing past her, sandals squelching.

  “We’ll find the sanctum. It’s bound to be there. I’ve been in dozens of temples. They’re not exactly hidden,” I insisted, tone more confident than the panic in my erratic heart. “Gods do not believe us capable of penetrating their secrets, and so I haven’t known them to keep any.”

  She didn’t argue, and I would’ve left her behind if she had. We were running out of time, perhaps spending some that did not belong to us, and I wasn’t going to waste it trading bad ideas with an uppity courtier, no matter her allegiance.

  The walls were slick with growth, glossy fibers that hung together as the weave of a tapestry might, giving off a starlight glow. Here there were no torches, no touch of the sun, only the ancient sigils pulsing with light, the strange vegetation glowing dully. The passage was uncomfortably narrow. In the city our temples were made for great throngs to worship at once. Here the hooded woman and I could barely walk abreast, and had to, at last, approach single file, sharing a begrudging moment where she condescended to let me go first.

  Or perhaps she hoped that I would be eaten and sate the hunger of whatever waited for us at the corridor’s end.

  But no beast waited, and no gods, either. The careful stone underfoot gave way to slick rock, the temple turned to a natural cave that was never truly dry. The flow of the water was evident here, a sluggish path winding beneath our city. The lichen-green lights twinkled here, as though countless unnaturally bright eyes winked at us. I wondered if we were even under the city anymore.

  If we were even in the same world.

  “Here or nowhere,” the hooded woman said almost to herself, striding forward hurriedly, but failing to register the change in terrain in her eagerness. She lost her footing in a shallow, slippery dip of stone. I reached out a hand to steady her but wasn’t quick enough.

  And then there was more to wonder at.

  As she crashed, a tangle of limbs and unsteady trunk, the hood slipped back. She was devoid of all that made her as she was in my mind: no longer hooded and never, apparently, a woman.

  What was more, I knew the man whose eyes met mine.

  The crown prince looked up at me from where he had fallen, sodden clothes newly soaked, expression grim. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, but I knew what to do.

  I drew one of my knives from the belt I wore under my clothes, quick as an oil flare.

  “Don’t move.”

  My head was spinning. I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t trust him, though my instinct was immediately not to. While I had betrayed duties and a heritage of my own to support the rebellion, who I was and what I was responsible for were nothing compared to what someone from the royal family risked.

  “I won’t explain myself. There isn’t time,” he said, expression as unapologetic as his voice, pitched lower, now. It seemed ludicrous to me that I had ever believed him a woman. We held each other’s gaze, and I noted the color of his eyes in the strange light, brown touched with the green of new growth, warm and alive with knowing. I cursed the knife that began to shake in my hand.

  “You just have to trust me,” he said.

  “Why must she do that?” This was another voice, hard as a diamond, as bright and loud in our ears as a thunderclap. Where a moment ago it had just been the pair of us, my shock at the hooded woman’s identity turned to realization of another kind: the feeling that we were being watched from all sides, that we had been, this whole time.

  “I am very curious why a thief and a faker, a consummate anarchist, should trust one whose loyalty was assured at birth,” the voice continued.

  I turned, sure my curiosity would be the death of me but incapable of keeping still. Behind us, not so close as his voice made him seem, Adah emerged from the deeper darkness of the cavern. He was flanked by bright figures, human-shaped but featureless, their limbs made of golden, glowing light. Adah had only to incline his head the slightest degree and I was seized, my skin burning where they touched me, just enough to scald the flesh but not to scar. Shran they left alone, even as he scrambled to his feet, and my heart hardened completely against him. Whatever his part in this, he’d been in it for himself.

  “Traitor,” I spat, but he wasn’t looking at me, regarding Adah with a stillness I couldn’t read.

  When he spoke, his gaze didn’t shift from the god. “That’s hardly an insult, coming from you.”

  I laughed. What did I have to lose? I was within moments of execution.

  “I’m not afraid to die,” I insisted, but my heart betrayed me, returning to thoughts of Mara, senseless and all but entombed, of others we had lost. Fleetingly I thought of my family, none of whom I had spoken to in more than two years, and was sorry that they would not know how I had died. I did not think Adah would make my p
unishment public. He would not want me to be a martyr.

  As if he sensed my thoughts, he drew from behind his back, though I was sure it had not been there a moment before, a gleaming spear. It was unadorned but the edge was potent, the metal there discolored with age and much use. I trembled at the sight of it.

  I had seen it before. Just once.

  “What surprises me most about your kind,” Adah mused, as though we were sitting together over tea, discussing philosophy, “is that you hate us so much for being just as you imagined us. You created gods with your dreaming, your wild needs, your raw feelings, and yet you blame us.”

  “If we created you, we can kill you,” I said, struggling against the bright ones who held me. Their grip only strengthened, beyond any human capacity, and I gritted my teeth against the pain and the realization that we had been sent here for nothing. I saw Shran edging away from us, and refused to allow myself to hope that he might want to help me.

  “No, not you,” Adah said, nodding, and there was a touch of resignation in his voice, slight as a sigh. “But someone yet may.”

  I blinked back tears of rage and he was before me in as much time, the bright ones forcing me to my knees. The cool water lapped against my thighs and I wondered for an instant at the contrast between the water’s icy touch and the fiery touches on my arms, my shoulders, my back. In my heart the struggle was the same: the furious heat of many centuries oppressed, the blistering cold of regret that I had failed, that I was just one among many who would die with the world unchanged. I pitched and howled, but the golden forms only pressed closer. There were so many, and only me.

  “Shran.”

  Adah was holding out the spear to him and I felt myself go cold over. I wouldn’t beg, not Shran, not Adah. I didn’t think Adah felt satisfaction at such things as a mortal man might, but it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t give it to him. I’d never given anything to any man or woman I hadn’t wanted to, and I would die as I had lived: as though everything that had ever happened to me had been of my own choosing.

  The wide head of the spear threw a shadow over Shran’s face, obscuring his nose and brow, though his eyes glowed like coals with the light shed from the bodies of the bright ones. He’d been a choice, a lifetime ago, meant for me. Our blood was the same; even now I felt it singing in my veins and knew his must be, too.

  My blood remembered the spear, too. It has been in the hands of a priestess, then. At fourteen years old my parents brought me to the temple, where they opened my veins and murmured to each other over some quality of my blood they didn’t bother articulating to me. I had heard stories, we’d all heard stories, of young men and women cut too deeply, wrongly, never returning. But it didn’t hurt so much and I thought it was over.

  But then they had banished my parents and brought me to the table. One priestess brought forward the spear, another a book, and they stripped my clothes from me, anointed my heart, belly, and sex with pungent oil. I was a gift, they said. I was special, they said.

  Jemae, Jemae! How lucky you are.

  One of the priestesses readied the spear while another took my hands, my feet, beginning to anchor me to the table with bleached linen. There wasn’t room for anything but terror. They meant to kill me. I had been spoiled. But I would never be spared.

  Jemae, Jemae! Your luck is ours.

  I had thrown my full weight against the priestess nearest me, rushed to a smoking brazier in the corner of the room and thrown the coals at the next who advanced upon me. I ran, I hid, I wept. I knew if they found me they would try again. I had to leave my life, my name, never to be chosen by the one who stood before me now, who took the spear after only a moment’s hesitation.

  Jemae, Jemae! Your luck’s run out.

  The memory cleaved my heart open, and the spear in Shran’s hands tore through me to finish the work begun years before.

  My chest was heaving, whole and mine, a body I recognized though the light was different. Was I with Ji, still—Jemae, it had been Jemae all along—or had her world rushed to fill the void in mine? I felt like my head would burst open. How could she have died, and at Shran’s hand? Were none of the stories true? Had there been no Salarahan, no gentle father to our people?

  The gold glow, the shining limbs, I could see them, could feel their heat. The ghosts of the First People surrounded me now, and I held Imke, still, and she held me. The fire where we touched was pure white, the kind that burns so fast and so hot there’s hardly ash to mourn.

  And there was someone else.

  “Do you understand now?”

  Emine stood where Adah had stood in the vision, though I didn’t need the correlation to see it, to see her, truly. The child who hadn’t died. The child who had never been a child at all. There had never been any Emine, only Adah. Antares had told me the icon could appear as he wished, could manipulate the way that he was seen in the mind of the seer. I had seen him, but I had never seen her. Could I even trust that Adah was here now, or did she project herself to this place, a witness?

  I released Imke. It was Adah at whom I looked, Adah who demanded my attention. I felt as though I were at the end of all things.

  “Why did you lie to me?” I asked, even though I knew she would not believe it a lie. I had taken comfort in the child Emine, prized her attention, grieved her death.

  “Paivi told me you would be difficult. If you’d seen me like this first, you would have trusted me even less. You needed the man to make you wary so that the girl could disarm you. I can be both. I can be all.”

  I thought my heart might burst as Ji’s heart had at the spear’s thrust. Adah, Imke, Esbat, Jemae, Gannet. I could not trust a face, could not trust my own heart. The mask Gannet wore seemed suddenly a warning for me: not just that I could not know him, but that I could never know anyone again. Not in this world, not in the world of stories. I did not think I could trust even death.

  My breathing was shallow.

  “Jemae died. How can she have died? How are we even here, if she never lived to bear four sons?”

  Adah’s smile was like that of a snarling dog, a mountain predator. A mouth made only for killing.

  “Did she? Think, Theba. Why did you really come here? Aren’t you ready to end it?”

  Theba’s presence was a greater pressure than it had ever been, summoned by Adah’s words. I felt suffocated, as I had been, underwater after the storm in Cascar. I felt I would die waiting just behind my eyes, my lips, the joints of my fingers and limbs.

  Theba took control.

  “Not for this reunion,” Theba hissed with my lips. “And you know it will never end, not while Salarahan still lives.”

  “That depends on how you define life,” Adah intoned, smile coy, “and circumstances may change. Salarahan will kill you. Or you will kill him. That is the only way.”

  Adah’s eyes seemed cut from crystal glass, ageless, remote as stars, so haunting in her young face that I thought they must have been carved from a crone and placed there.

  “I won’t,” Theba managed to say. I felt, for the first time, her giving in to me. Like veils parting and lifting, retreating and assembling, I perceived the shape of things, the boundaries of the stage and the players within.

  “When the time comes, you won’t have a choice.” Adah was as cold as a shadow, as dark as I imagined the first moonless night in the world must have seemed. “Take what you came here for, Theba.”

  We moved together, Theba and I, past Imke’s stooped form to the altar where she had been praying only moments, an age, before. I bent my knees, and Theba used my hands to trace around the edges of broken stone, reaching around, below, finding a secret hollow that just fit the shape of my hand. The great, flat stone where Imke had kneeled groaned, retreating to reveal a shallow cavity.

  Empty.

  “How?” I seethed, I shook. Theba had believed it to be here and so I had believed it. But the spear was gone.

  “I suppose Salarahan will have to wait,” Adah observed, the slig
htest edge in her voice, like a drop of blood in a bucket of water. She was surprised, too, to find it gone. “He is very good at waiting.”

  Adah withdrew and the gold ones circled her, blinding me as they gathered, concentrating their light so that Adah’s features were all but obscured. She was a faceless girl. She had always been.

  “You should attend to this mess, Theba, before you go. It’s entirely of your making.”

  “My name is Eiren.”

  I felt Theba rattling behind my ribs like a crazed bird, retreating in an agony I was only beginning to understand. There was a love in her so fierce it had teeth, tearing a hole where my heart had been. But I wasn’t empty, my heart wasn’t gone. Only swallowed up, sunk deep, changed.

  I was no longer afraid of her.

  I wondered at the weapon that wasn’t, the stories that weren’t as I’d always been told them. Adah had challenged me, when I said that Jemae was dead. There was something that I was missing, a story left untold, or changed to suit the teller. The ghosts of the First People retreated, and Adah with them, their hands passing through me but offering no more visions now. They had shown me everything that I needed to know: I was the icon of Theba, but I was descended from Jemae. I shared in the passions and the secrets of both. I had seen her because I was her, as certainly as I was my mother’s daughter, as much as I was the icon of Theba.

  And now we were alone, Theba and Jemae and I, with the imposter. Imke was at least one woman that I could truly free. I crouched beside her, waited for her to do what I already knew she was going to try to do. She had the little knife tucked against a wrist that looked more like wax than flesh, and I caught her in the moment of driving it toward my throat and turned it gently back against her.

  “Rest, Imke. Be glad you won’t come back.”

  Blood gushed thick and slippery against my hands, my arms, my clothes. It wasn’t Theba that had killed her, but me. There was none of Theba’s rage in the act, only mercy of the kind that Theba and I might never earn. I lowered Imke’s body gently to the ground and stood again, observing the temple as it was, peopled with new regrets. The battle raged still in the city above, and a new one, within me. I felt Gannet descending the tunnel first and then saw him, dark cloak whipping like the hangings of a funeral barge bearing the dead into the desert to be forgotten. But we would live to fight another day. The visions had led me here but I had the feeling that they were only the beginning, that I’d been wrong about so much. There was another ending for me ahead, a lost truth. The weapon was out there, and Salarahan, too.