She had not seen either of them for three days. They were obviously fully occupied.
Nora rubbed her temple. Uliverat was still talking.
“—he must apologize to our blessed High Priestess, may she glorify the goddess forever!”
“May she glorify the goddess forever,” Oasme repeated. Nora realized she hadn’t heard that particular formula before, just as Lemoes and Yaioni echoed the same words. It took a moment to sink in: they were talking about her.
“You don’t have to say that,” Nora said sharply.
Uliverat played dumb. Or perhaps, Nora thought, she just was dumb. “Say what, Blessed Lady?”
“What you just said about me. ‘May she glorify the goddess forever.’ ”
A look of disquiet passed over Uliverat’s soft-fleshed face. “It is what we all want, Blessed Lady.”
“Is it, really?”
Uliverat’s discomfiture only seemed to deepen. Nora felt some regret for the sarcasm in her tone. At the same time she could not stop herself from wondering if she could find a spell that would render Uliverat mute. Too bad she knew almost nothing about transformations; Uliverat would be so much more attractive as a rabbit than a human.
Maybe, Nora thought, this is why everyone is afraid of me.
Nora could not stop thinking of dark, cruel magic, all the different spells—some of them very ordinary—that could be used to torment everyone around her. A repulsion spell that would keep a person’s dinner—or anything else he wanted to pick up—just out of his reach. An analgesic spell that, if not performed just right, would cause pain instead of soothing it. Any of Vlonicl’s more gruesome war spells. Nora kept coming back to the one that would roast your enemy’s liver inside his body. It could work for any organ, really, but the liver was a nice big target, easy to find.
She didn’t think that she would do that spell, or any of them, but there was evil joy in contemplating the prospect, which made the dull, hot weight in her head easier to bear. It was not really a full-fledged headache, nowhere near as bad as the one she’d had the day the Kavareen came, but it never quite went away, except when she worked magic.
So she worked magic as often she could. The stronger the spell, the better. Fortunately, the festival was still going on and plenty of pilgrims needed attention.
Nora looked up to see Oasme leaning toward her. “When you have finished your dinner, we should go over the order for tonight’s service.”
She groaned inwardly. For an instant, she imagined Oasme encased in a coffin of ice, eyes glazed over, his mouth frozen open in the act of telling her what she had to do next. It was another Vlonicl spell, slightly modified. “I’m finished now, Oasme, but I’m going back to the hospital. Is this service another long one?”
“Not like some, Blessed Lady.” Oasme allowed himself a restrained smile. “This is Falis Woana, the Night of Holy Justice. You will appear for only a few minutes, at the end.”
Nora considered this. “Can I just sneak in before it ends?”
“That is exactly what I would advise,” Oasme surprised her by saying. “The first part of the ceremony is all about the Ghaki king’s justice, a lot of dreary legal business, and it is better that you do not appear at all for that. You come in at the end to represent the divine mercy of Sisoaneer.”
“And how will I do that?”
“You will pardon a prisoner.”
“All right, I can do that.” Nora rose from the table, contorting herself slightly to extricate herself from the heavy High Priestess’s chair. “What time should I come?”
Oasme seemed not to have heard her. He was looking at her hands as they rested on the tabletop.
Nora felt her face grow warm as Yaioni followed his gaze, then Lemoes. Uliverat allowed herself a discreet sideways glance. Then another, not quite as discreet. They were all looking at her left hand, probably trying to make up their minds about what they saw.
“Oasme, I’ll be there an hour after sunset,” Nora said, curling her hand into a fist. The accustomed gesture felt odd, awkward.
Oasme had recollected himself. He straightened. “That should be plenty of time, Blessed Lady.”
The hospital was quiet tonight. Most of the pilgrims were sleeping. Nora stopped beside the few who were awake to see if they needed anything. She did some pain-relieving spells and felt the tightness in her own head ease.
At the end of the row of beds, Lemoes squatted next to a pilgrim whom Nora had treated the day before, a middle-aged man with pain in his belly that Oasme had diagnosed as an ulcer. Now he was talking to Lemoes in his own language in short, soft bursts of words. As Nora passed, Lemoes caught her eye and stood up.
“How is he doing?” she asked, tucking her left hand into a fold of her maran as unobtrusively as she could.
“He needs a spell to make the blood flow more freely.”
Nora frowned. “No, he doesn’t. That’s exactly what he doesn’t need. He had bleeding in his stomach.”
“This is different,” Lemoes said, irritatingly tall and earnest. It was annoying to have to look up at him to explain a perfectly simple point.
“He already lost a lot of blood. I don’t want him bleeding to death.”
“No, something else is wrong with him. Not what Oasme said.” Lemoes stepped away from the pallet, so that she had to trail after him. “If his blood doesn’t flow more smoothly, he’ll have a paralytic attack.”
It was what they called a stroke. Nora wanted very much to tell Lemoes that he was wrong. She took another look at the pilgrim sitting up on the pallet. A merchant from Nenaveii with a soft, narrow-eyed, agreeably cynical face. Under his stubble of beard, he looked pale but alert. She had done a spell to stop the bleeding in his stomach; his stool had been black with blood for months. It was a pretty strong spell.
“How do you know?” she asked Lemoes.
Lemoes said nothing. She looked hard at him. “Did the goddess tell you?” She couldn’t quite keep the pique out of her voice. Lemoes nodded matter-of-factly.
“All right. All right,” Nora said. “This is the third time in three days she’s given you directions about the pilgrims. It’s good that she’s talking to someone, I guess. When does she tell you this stuff?”
Lemoes looked at the stones of the floor, his mouth set gravely. “She comes to me at night.”
“She comes to you,” Nora repeated. “At night.” She let her eyes follow the rich curve of Lemoes’s lips, the composed symmetry of his strong brows, the deep warm color of his skin. Not just Aruendiel, but also Lemoes? “When at night?” she asked sharply. “You mean, when you’re in your bed?”
Lemoes bobbed his head, still looking away.
“And she—talks with you?”
“She doesn’t talk, exactly. I mean, she does, but—”
“I don’t see how she finds the time,” Nora snapped.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Lemoes said.
“I don’t think about anything anymore,” Nora said. “It makes my head hurt.”
Lemoes looked even more solemn. “She had a message for you, too. She says she is pleased with you, that you serve her well.”
It would be a joy to blow the roof off the hospital, to shake the mountain off its foundation, to make the lake rise up and wash away all trace of Erchkaii and its inhabitants, divine and human. “Great,” said Nora. “Thanks for letting me know.”
Outside, it was already getting dark. A single bright star shone in the west, just visible over the wall of the gorge. Nora calculated that she was not yet late to Falis Woana. Still, she would have to stop at her chambers to wash and to change into her more elaborate ceremonial maran, so she’d have to hurry to get to the temple in time. For the second time that day, she wished that she knew more about transformations. It would be nice to be able to fly straight to the ceremony.
; As she passed through the main courtyard, to her right she made out the dim shapes of horses and men and the gleam of torchlight on armor, which puzzled her at first. It wasn’t unusual for pilgrims and their parties to arrive with horses or donkeys, but normally the animals were stabled at the far end of the complex, near the path to the lake. Then she recalled what Oasme had said about the Ghaki king’s justice, and she guessed that the horsemen in mail had something to do with that.
Nora went up the Stairs of Healing—deserted, was everyone at the temple already?—and followed the streamside path. She climbed the steps to her sleeping quarters, where a single oil lamp had been lit for her. By its light, she stripped off her maran and saw that there were bloodstains on the gown that she hadn’t noticed before, probably from the man with the leg wound she had treated in the afternoon. She felt tired and grimy for reasons that had nothing to do with the bloodstains. Splashing her face with water, she rubbed her hands vigorously in the basin without feeling any cleaner.
She was adjusting the fresh maran, stiff and resplendent with gilt embroidery, when Uliverat called her from outside: “Blessed Lady! I only wish to let you know that Falis Woana is going splendidly, and only requires your presence.”
Nora pushed the outer door open to see Uliverat standing in the path below. “How late am I?” she asked.
“Not late at all!” Uliverat said anxiously.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Nora said, descending the stairs. The slightly dank smell of the stream filled her nose as she stepped onto the path. Something splashed into the stream, probably a frog.
Uliverat took Nora’s elbow to steer her toward the temple, then let go as though she had thought better of it. As they went along, she began to tell Nora about some mishap that evening involving a Ghaki prince—evidently the Falis Woana ceremony was not going quite as splendidly as she had said—but Nora found it difficult to concentrate on the details.
Her head was throbbing again. She would have liked to dunk it in the cool, murmuring water beside the path. Absently she slapped at an unseen mosquito. Mocking, shadowy faces appeared and disappeared on the sculpted walls of the ravine, caught in the glancing beam of Uliverat’s lantern. A large gray moth floated in the nimbus of light.
Not a moth. A feather. A silky scrap of down.
Nora stared at the gray feather with rising interest as Uliverat droned on. The feather rose in a slow spiral, orbiting the lantern, keeping pace effortlessly with the two women as they walked. Then, as though blown by a sudden gush of wind—although Nora felt nothing—the feather flew over Nora’s shoulder and into the darkness behind them.
“Just a moment,” Nora said to Uliverat, turning. “I’ll be right back.”
She had only gone about ten paces down the path when someone grabbed her arm.
“Quiet,” Aruendiel breathed in her ear. “Stand still.”
“Blessed Lady?” Behind her, Uliverat’s voice wavered uncertainly. “Did you forget something?”
With an impatient murmur, Aruendiel let go of Nora’s arm. She heard the rustle of his clothes as he knelt, and then came a long scraping, squeaking noise, like chalk on a blackboard. “Blessed La—” Uliverat’s voice broke off in mid-syllable. In the sudden silence, a burst of warm yellow illumination showed the rough lines of Aruendiel’s face. He rose awkwardly to his feet.
“That will steal some time, perhaps half an hour,” he said, slipping something inside his tunic.
Nora looked down to see a thin pale-colored line sketched on the stone path, encircling them both. “What did you just do?”
“First things first,” Aruendiel said briskly. “Show me your hand.”
Surprised, she started to pull her hand back, but his fingers had already closed around hers. He forced her left hand into the light and clicked his tongue softly as he regarded it.
Nora made herself look at the hand. Worse than she remembered. “You knew about this?”
“I had a suspicion. Not certainty. I didn’t wish to alarm you without reason.”
“Oh, thank you. I got to worry about it all on my own,” Nora said. “Is it ever going to stop growing?”
Her little finger no longer merited that description. It was approximately as long as her middle finger. A casual observer might not notice the disproportionality at first, and then would not be able to stop noticing it. Nora herself had taken a day or so to realize why her left hand looked so subtly wrong—bigger, clumsier, spidery.
“I perceive you’ve tried to cure it yourself,” Aruendiel said.
“I’ve tried every spell that I could think of—to stop swelling, to heal wounds—everything.” Even, in desperation, a spell for ingrown toenails. “It just keeps growing.”
Aruendiel snorted. “She used too much magic, and she didn’t control it properly. In some months, perhaps, it will stop.”
By then, Nora calculated, her little finger might be as long as her arm. “Is there a way to fix this?” she asked, trying to make her voice sound neutral and calm.
Reaching into his tunic, Aruendiel brought out a knife with a short, curved blade of blackish steel and gave it to her, handle first.
“I was afraid of that,” she said, regarding the knife bleakly.
He removed a second object from inside his tunic: the blue glass bottle he had shown her once before. She recognized her severed finger inside, slightly distorted by the curve of the glass, as though she were looking at it deep underwater.
“It’s been weeks since that finger was cut off, Aruendiel,” she said. “It can’t be very fresh by now.”
Aruendiel, unperturbed, removed the stopper from the bottle and handed it to her. It was an oval gray pebble about the size of an acorn, lighter than it looked, like pumice.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked. “I used it to draw the circle just now.”
Nora rubbed the gritty, pitted surface with a probing finger. She was about to say that she had no idea, but what Aruendiel had just said about stealing time snagged a memory of a conversation they’d had, months ago, when she was just starting to learn about magic. He had been talking about resurrection spells and a wizard named Foursheep or Fivesheep who’d brought his brother back from the dead.
“Is it—a timestone?” The word yanked other details to the surface. “It’s used to go back in time, right?”
Aruendiel gave her a quick, appreciative glance. “It can be used for that, yes. A timestone is a crystallization of accreted time. Nansis Abora has been experimenting with them for preserving fruit, with some success.
“This is one of his timestones. It’s not the best quality, but it absorbs enough time to keep fruit, or fingers, from spoiling. Using it to draw a circle”—he indicated the markings on the path with a gesture—“is a way to release some of that stored time, affording us more leisure for this interview.
“And privacy, as well,” he added. “While we are inside this enclosure of secret time, your goddess cannot spy upon us.”
Nora gave him a sideways glance, wondering how to unpick what was knotted into his last sentence. Nora’s goddess. Also his mistress, Nora felt like pointing out. And why was he so eager for privacy?
“That fruit. Did you ever eat any?” she asked.
“The fruit?”
“Nansis Abora’s fruit.”
“Oh, the cherries. I did.”
“And they were edible?”
“Perfectly edible, three seasons after they were harvested. Nansis believes that he can sell such fruits in Semr in winter for four or five times what they would bring in summer. Well? What is your wish, Mistress Nora?”
Nora would have been pleased to spend a few more minutes discussing timestones before returning to her rebelliously burgeoning finger. She hesitated, remembering the crunch of the ax blade on bone. She thought also of the horrified look on Aruendiel’s face when she told h
im that she loved him. He had already stabbed her in the heart, figuratively; was it really wise to let him cut off her finger, too?
But when she glanced up at him again, his face looked creased and somber, as though he dreaded what the knife would do as much as she did.
Before she could change her mind, she held the handle toward him. “Be quick.”
Now it was Aruendiel’s turn to hesitate, lifting the knife and then lowering it before touching it to the base of Nora’s little finger. She bit her lip, her whole frame tensing, as the blade moved into her flesh, but she felt only a slight tugging sensation as the finger dropped away. She looked at Aruendiel with some surprise.
“It hurt a lot more when I did it,” she said.
With a swift motion, he clapped the lost finger back in its old place. “Do I understand that you cut off this finger?”
“I couldn’t figure out what else to do,” Nora said. “Raclin made my hand attack me. So I took the ax and—” She gasped as lightning bolts of pain raced the length of the reattached finger. “Oh, now it hurts. Ooh. Is it supposed to hurt this much?”
“The sisterfucker son of an ulcerated whore,” Aruendiel said, glowering, “the miserable vomit-eater, the conniving, shit-tongued, pus-blooded bastard. That ring should never have stayed on your finger as long as it did, Nora. I should have freed you, I should have torn Raclin a dozen dozen ways, into wretched bloody shreds of rotten meat and bone.”
His hand was locked on hers with a steady pressure. Just to keep the finger in place, no doubt. In a different, more clotted tone, he added: “I am sorry for this pain. It means that the spell is working. Tinl the Mute’s annealing spell. More reliable than Drosca’s. It will cure a beheading if not too much blood has been lost.”
“Those were really good words, what you said just now,” Nora said, wincing. “Shit-tongued, pus-blooded. Ouch. Ouch. That spell, it’s really strong.”
“Not as strong as the one she used on your finger. She uses too much power for healing spells. As do you, although you are more careful than she is.”
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 30
