She inhaled the pungent scent of fertile farm soil and pretended she was an earthworm as Mikhail flew directly overhead, the wind whistling through his feathers as he coasted the air currents like a raptor. The first few times they'd played he had let her win, but the Abmáthair had scolded him, explaining this game, like all things the Seraphim did, had a purpose. Once he demonstrated he could find her no matter -how- well she hid, his family had been summoned and the ceremony of Chéad Phósadh had been performed.
Her dark mood lifted, brightened by the memory of how solemn he had looked as the Abmáthair had bound their hands together and made them recite the vow of betrothal. It would be many years until they were old enough for the ceremony of Grá Síoraí, but until then, all they needed to do was play. For it was only through play, Abmáthair said, or unbelievable adversity that two spirits could get to know one another well enough to merge.
'I'm going to find you, Chol Beag!' Mikhail called from directly overhead. 'And when I do, I shall tickle you until you pee your pants!'
Amhrán pressed herself further into the rocks, determined not to give away her hiding spot by giggling. She unfurled her long, slender tail and snaked it into the rocks, and then shifted her wings so they appeared uneven and lumpy as if they were shadows of the wall. Mikhail flew off, unable to see her. Amhrán waited, listening to the sound of the wind as the countryside grew quiet, the rustle of a snake through the leaves, and the occasional bird. She began to worry. Had she hidden so well that even -he- could not find her this time?
Tears welled in her eyes as that old, familiar hunger gripped her psyche, the one she'd felt ever since the day that ... NO! She would not think about such things! A cough forced her to look up. Mikhail sat on a log, his enormous wings tucked neatly against his tall, lanky frame, wearing an enormous smirk.
'How long have you been there?' Amhrán asked.
'A while,' Mikhail laughed. 'I just wanted to see how long it would take for you to stop pretending you could hide from me.'
Amhrán dusted the leaves off of her dress, and then skipped over, stopping to pick a flower. It was blue, the color of his eyes, so different from her own solid-black ones. He tucked it into the buttonhole of his left shirt-pocket, right over his heart, and then reached into that pocket to pull out a small, carved figurine. He handed it to her, his expression suddenly shy.
Amhrán turned it over in her hand, the wood still warm from his body.
'What is it?'
Mikhail's face fell.
'Can't you tell?'
Amhrán scrutinized the tiny wooden figurine. The carving was crude, crafted by a boy who was not much older than she was, but she recognized a head, a torso, two wings, and a ... what? She ran her finger along the lump that was supposed to represent a tail.
'It's me!" Amhrán exclaimed.
Mikhail's face lit up. 'Yes.'
'Did you carve this yourself?'
'I did,' he said. 'Do you like it?'
'I love it!' Amhrán said. She threw her arms around his neck. 'You carved me as I really am, not as the Abmáthair says I should appear."
They played with her new figurine and other creatures they manufactured out of sticks and rocks until the shadows grew long and the wind picked up from the west, causing Amhrán to shiver. Mikhail pressed his back against the tree. She crawled up next to him and nestled into the warmth of his brown-black wings, laying her carved wooden figurine and the stick-creatures they'd bound together with grass to represent their future children beside them, tucked neatly into imaginary beds made of leaves. They stared into the setting sun until the stars appeared, lighting up the sky like millions of tiny fireflies.
'Amhrán,' Mikhail asked. 'What does your name mean?'
'Song,' Amhrán said. 'My name means Song.'
'That's a pretty name,' Mikhail said. 'How come I've never heard you sing?'
The Abmáthair had said she must never sing unless her heart was filled with joy, for in her song there was vast, untapped power, but at the moment she felt so happy it felt as though her heart might burst, so she risked it. She sang for him; and when she was done, he wept.
'When you sang,' he said. 'I had memories I knew you before. We were both different people then, but we knew each other, and then somehow we became lost.'
Amhrán lowered her gaze. 'I know. I saw it too.'
They pressed their heads together and looked up into the stars, contemplating the enormity of All-That-Is.
'I will always find you,' Mikhail promised. 'And -this- time we will be together. No matter how well you hide.'
Gita shifted in her warm cocoon and relished the soft, downy slipperiness of his feathers. Something sticky and dry itched her skin, but she did not care. She was warm; and she was with him. In her mind she continued to sing, and she could feel him drink it up like a thirsty man desperate for water. This was what he needed; for when they were like this, she could remember what she was.
Voices disturbed her sleep, but she pushed it out of her mind, refusing to acknowledge the waking world, the one they lived in now. The voices grew louder, followed by the heavy thud of feet.
Go away! Leave us alone! Can't you see this is what he needs to heal?
"Get away from him, you whore!"
Someone gripped her hair and dragged her out of the bed. Gita cried out with surprise. Where was she? What had happened. And why had she allowed herself to fall asleep where the Tokoloshe could eat her?
"Let me go!" she cried out, still disoriented from the dream.
"How dare you defile my daughter's husband!"
Feet began to kick her. She writhed, still confused. How had she gone from safe to under attack? Her vision cleared as the dream faded away. It was not a monster who beat her, but her uncle, his eyes copper with fury.
"Uncle! What have I done?"
"You ... killed ... her ... you ... killed ... her ... you ... killed ... her!" Immanu screamed between kicks.
Gita curled up into a ball, arms over her head and knees pulled up to her chest to protect her vital organs. She'd survived such beatings before ... from her father. Why her uncle beat her, she did not understand. All that mattered was to protect herself until she could escape.
A woman screamed.
"Good god, Immanu! What are you doing!"
"Ninsianna is dead!" Immanu screamed. "And I come home to find out you have let her killer lay down with her husband!"
"Gita saved his life!"
"This viper is responsible for our daughter's death!"
"Ninsianna is still alive!"
"She is NOT alive!" Immanu shrieked. "Every shaman in Ubaid territory gathered with me in Nineveh last night to perform a summoning! We sacrificed ten rams, sixteen goats, an auroch and a criminal who'd been condemned to die. Not one of them could tell me where she was! Her spirit has been consumed!"
Needa began to weep.
"It can't be true! I can still feel her. It feels as though she is still alive!"
Immanu kicked Gita again for good measure. Gita stifled her cries. She'd learned long ago that the more she cried, the longer her father would beat her. Her esteemed uncle, it appeared, carried the same sadistic streak.
"This time, I shall make a sacrifice of her," Immanu jabbed a finger in her face. "It is my right, as the father of a murdered daughter, to demand recompense for her death, and so I do. I demand this viper be sacrificed by the ritual of fire so that She-who-is will free our daughter's spirit from whatever hell the Evil One has sent her to!"
Immanu began to kick her again. Gita glanced frantically around the room, searching for Mikhail's sword. They must have taken it from her last night, after she'd fallen to her knees. The bodies were gone, but the stain of blood still marred the floor, still stained her where she'd slain the assassins.
"I did nothing wrong," Gita cried out. "I defended him, that was all!"
The rustle of feathers shifted on the sleeping pallet.
'Chol beag?'
Mikhail's voice w
as little more than a whisper, but it was enough to prompt Needa to leap to her defense.
"Don't you dare beat that child for something she did not do!" Needa screeched at him. "Do you have any idea what happened last night, while you were off gallavanting around the dreamtime with your shaman friends? We were attacked, Immanu. Attacked! And almost killed! And you were not here to protect us!"
"It was a trick!" Immanu shouted. "All along she's been in league with Jamin!"
"You are both blind and a fool!"
Needa slapped her husband.
Immanu knocked his wife onto the floor. Needa cried out, unaccustomed to this rough treatment. Immanu stood in shocked silence, realizing what he'd just done, and then turned to take out his anger on Gita. Needa threw her body over Gita's, preventing her husband from kicking her again.
"Get out of this house," Needa hissed. "Get out of this house, and don't come back until we are gone."
Immanu jabbed a finger into his wife's face.
"It is my house, woman," Immanu said. "And it's about time you learned your place, that -I- am the one who wears the kilt!"
Needa rose, beautiful, graceful, and strong. Even pale and shaken from the poison she'd consumed and six weeks of grief since Ninsianna had been taken, her aunt was the strongest woman whom Gita had ever met.
"My place is in Gasur," Needa said softly, "with the parents who love me, and the man who should have been my husband had you not tricked me into believing that marrying you was the will of She-who-is. I only realized after I'd succumbed to your seduction that you'd tricked me, that you'd manipulated my mind into desiring you and believing you were the one. Had we not concieved a child that day, I would have returned to Jiljab and told him I was sorry. All these years I've stayed with you because Ninsianna needed you, but if Ninsianna is dead, there is nothing to bind us together! As soon as Mikhail dies, as soon as all hope dies that her husband will arise from his deathbed and return to me my daughter, I shall be gone from this place, and then you can have your house and live in it alone!"
Immanu stepped back as though he'd just been punched in the stomach. Gita trembled, but she knew to keep her mouth shut. Whatever marital difficulties had just erupted between her esteemed blood-uncle and the aunt who was only related to her by marriage, it had been long-simmering. If she spoke up, their anger would be redirected towards her.
"She is guilty," Immanu said. "She-who-is has shown me this is true."
"Then let She-who-is convince the Tribunal," Needa said. "Let the goddess who allowed our daughter to be taken come into this house and convince three elders that you are right and I am wrong. Because I don't believe in HER anymore! Any more than I believe in you!"
Needa pointed at the door.
Immanu backed up to the curtain. He met Gita's gaze.
"I go now to summon the Tribunal," Immanu said. "And when I am done, I shall invoke my right under the ancient decree. A life ... for a life." He pointed down at her in judgment. "You shall end your life, traitor, upon a sacrificial bonfire the moment Ninsianna's husband dies."
He stormed out of the house, slamming the outer door behind him as he ran off to implement his threat.
Gita stared up at her aunt with tears in her eyes. Needa was not her friend, but she was not her enemy, either. Immanu had cast enough doubt of her guilt that Needa had taken a 'wait and see' attitude.
'Mo chol beag, cén fáth a bhfuil tú ag gol amach i bpian?'
Mikhail cried out, his breathing frantic. Every ounce of love she'd just sung into him, the entire benefit of the brief time she'd allowed him to share her warmth evaporated as that one sentence cost him his life's energy.
Needa glanced at her son-in-law, her expression softening into one of genuine distress. Needa might not care about her, but her affection for Ninsianna's husband was real.
"Save him." Needa said. "Save his life, I don't care what you have to do, and all shall be forgiven. For as long as he lives, I have hope that somewhere, somehow, Ninsianna is still alive."
"I don't know what to do," Gita said. "I am not a healer like you!"
Tears streaked down Needa's cheeks.
"Then perhaps my daughter is lost, for real?"
Needa gathered her shawl and limped out of the room, still graceful in her grief as she no doubt considered her husband's words that her only child was dead?
Gita crept back to Mikhail's bedside, cognizant of the fact she was still covered in blood from last night's raid. His expression grew peaceful the moment her hand grasped his, but what little improvement in coloring he had gained, he had lost by mere virtue of being forced to utter a single sentence in her defense. She rested her cheek upon his forearm, no longer muscular, no longer strong, and picked dried blood out of his feathers.
Once she was done, she began to sing the song she remembered from the dream.
~ * ~ * ~
Chapter 50
Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.12 AE
Hades-6
Emperor Shay'tan
Shay'tan
The Eternal Emperor Hashem wasn't the only person who kept a laboratory in the bowels of his palace, although in Shay'tan's case, the old dragon's curiosities ran more to what effects could be achieved when a mortal species encountered social engineering than with any real interest in what happened when you started mucking around with their DNA. Nature vs. Nurture. The debate had existed for as long as the universe, but it had been she who'd piqued his interest in the subject, she and her dreams of an empire which would be perfect.
Shay'tan had built it for her … and then the Evil One had come and snatched her away from him…
"When are you going to get that computer back online?" Shay'tan paced back and forth across the floor.
"They won't get it done any faster, Your Eminence," his elderly scribe stated calmly, "if you burst into flames or keep knocking over their equipment with your tail."
Shay'tan bared his fangs and growled at the man, but truth be told, after having disemboweled the statue, he felt better, much better. The fact he had finally killed The Destroyer in the process, well…
His fangs disappeared. He sat down and curled his tail around his legs, twirling it thoughtfully as he rued his loss of temper. He'd gone there to enlist The Destroyer's aid, after subduing his fleet, of course … he couldn't very well have a fleet that massive undermining Sata'anic rule … not to kill the man.
He stared at the scorched parts he had teleported out of the cave before it had collapsed. It was nothing but a robot, not the deity he had at first mistaken it to be. The protective outer skin had been burned off, but the chassis underneath was fireproof, a metal so hard that even he would have a hard time melting it unless he worked himself up into a frenzy.
He began to pace again, back and forth along the meticulously laid out workstations. This creature had been built to take on him. Why then, such a wimpy operating system? He stared at the skinless bovine head which he'd severed from the body. He'd defeated the robot, not because he had won, but because there'd been nothing but a limited computer program to ask supplicants to feed it a meal of fresh, live-roasted consciousness, medium rare and still screaming as it died.
Revulsion shuddered down Shay'tan's dorsal ridge, thankfully solid at the moment and no longer comprised of fire. Abaddon, unfortunately, had been that meal. He'd had no idea the robot was still even operational until it had moved. Thank-the-goddess he'd plucked The Destroyer out of the brazier before his death-energy had fed whatever mechanism was in place to alert the Devourer of Children that dinner was about to be served. Not that Shay'tan wasn't above roasting his enemies alive. He was, after all, a dragon. But Shay'tan only toasted enemies who deserved it.
Mostly deserved it…
Okay, maybe once in a while he still inadvertently lost his temper and took out a planet or two, but those didn't count. It wasn't like he fed off their anguish or anything. Not in the way that Moloch did…
He realized his scientists had all drawn back, f
earful he'd erupt again into flames. His elderly scribe stood at attention, tail tucked up tightly along his right side, waiting for Shay'tan to acknowledge he had permission to speak.
"What is it, Budayl?" Shay'tan asked.
The scribe's long, forked tongue darted out of his mouth to taste his emperor and god's mood.
"We've just received a subspace message from Admiral Musab," the scribe said. "An Alliance shuttle just breached hyperspace around the ice-planet where you found that thing and hailed them."
"What do they want?"
"They want access to the planet, Sir," the scribe said. "They claim to wish to secure their dead."
Shay'tan glanced over at the chassis where the scientists had just cracked the ribcage and were pulling zealously at some wires. There was still a lot of equipment down there, buried beneath the avalanche he'd inadvertently triggered. The last thing he wanted was the Alliance gleaning the location of Earth from some clue his scientists had missed before he'd collapsed the cave.
"Tell them permission is denied," Shay'tan said. "When we get around to excavating the cave, we'll tag the bodies and ship them back to Hashem on a Sata'anic cargo vessel."
"Yes, Sir," the scribe said. The lizard-man disappeared, his tail bobbing behind him as he hurried off to carry out Shay'tan's will. Good man, the scribe was. Stoic. Reliable. He turned his attention back to whatever had his scientists so excited.
"What do you have there?" Shay'tan craned his long, serpentine neck, his curiosity piqued.
"We found some sort of secondary programming nexus," the scientists spoke together like a nest full of eager, peeping hatchlings.
"Have you been able to access the central processing unit?"
"Not yet. It's a chamber of some sort, attached to its own miniature fusion reactor. We suspect that's why the statue still had power.
He stared at the wires his scientists pulled out of the innards of the robot. Oh! If only Ki had left Moloch corporeal enough that he could disembowel him again. It had been fun until Ki had stripped her husband of the ability to assume corporeal form. He'd been much less sentient back then, little more than a fire-demon. Ahh! Those had been the days!
Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 52
