Emissary

by Melissa McShane

  Mildly antagonistic she might be, but stupid she was not. “That’s correct, Marathelis,” Zerafine said. “But my understanding of how a divine healing works is limited. I depend on you to tell me if such an attempt is even possible.”

  “Have you—but of course, you received healing yourself. Lenara, the thelis who healed you, brought me the information,” she added, when Zerafine looked puzzled. “Then you know that there are two ways we accomplish a healing. The first is to use the patient’s own vital energy to fuel Kalindi’s touch. The second is for the healer to use his or her own energy to do the same.”

  “I think the second way would be suicidal. This creature is huge. I don’t think there are enough divine healers in the world to accomplish it.”

  “Perhaps.” Yelenita’s face twitched in a slight smile. “But I have my doubts about the first method as well.” She leaned forward just a little, as if inviting Zerafine to share a secret. “You see, Kalindi’s gift only works on creatures with self-awareness on a human level. Trees, insects, fish are all living creatures, but we cannot manipulate their vital energy. Suppose this creature has only enough awareness to respond to stimuli? It’s possibly you may have jumped to conclusions too quickly.”

  Zerafine was determined not to lose her temper. Besides, Yelenita had a good point. Even so, she wished she could have walked into this room and met someone who would just do as she asked for once. “You’re right. I have no way of knowing what kind of consciousness it has. But wouldn’t it be worth finding out? Whatever it is, it’s creating apparitions that now have the ability to kill, and it is clear that those apparitions come from the fractures in its...whatever it has instead of a body. If my guess is right, your healers are the solution.”

  Yelenita tilted her head and looked at Zerafine for a long moment. “All right,” she said. “You will take one of my theloi and show them the creature. They will be able to tell me if your plan is worth trying.” She stood up and went to the door. “If so, I will be happy to assist you.”

  “Happy” isn’t the word for it, madama. “Thank you,” Zerafine said, and followed the Marathelis down the long hallway and into the offertory chamber. If their initial passage had caused a stir, Yelenita’s appearance caused all activity to come to a complete stop. The Marathelis didn’t seem to notice or care. She glanced around the room, said, “Dianya,” and beckoned to the young thelis who had brought them to see the Marathelis. Dianya came over at a nearly running gait.

  “Dianya, please give the thelis of Atenas whatever she requires,” she said, and left without another word. Dianya looked stunned and fearful. She made a hasty salute, which Zerafine returned.

  “Let’s walk,” said Zerafine, “and I’ll explain what we’re going to do.”

  Dianya listened in silence, round-eyed, as Zerafine for the second time related the story of her investigation. “What you’ll do is examine the creature and decide whether a divine healing would be able to affect it,” she finished.

  A gust of wind tugged at Dianya’s tunic; she smoothed it automatically. “I’ll do what I can,” she said, “but I’m not a very experienced healer.”

  “I think just having the ability will be enough,” Zerafine said. The same gust of wind, or its brother, blew the skirts of her robe so it billowed behind her.

  Nacalia led them to the closest location where many apparitions had been seen, a crossroads just off the plaza. Gerrard fended off traffic so that Zerafine and Dianya could work. Zerafine centered herself and looked for the creature. The last time she’d been here, they had been looking for apparitions, so she had never looked at the place with her heart’s eye. Now she could see the increasingly familiar tangle of threads glowing with white light, apparently rearing about a foot into the air from the center of the crossroads. It was invisible to the material eye, but traffic passed around it rather than through it, people even bumping into each other to avoid it.

  “Can you see it?” Zerafine asked. Dianya shook her head. Zerafine took the young woman’s hand and led her to the creature. People parted for her as readily as they did for it. Zerafine reached down her hand and brought it as close to the creature as she dared. It made her skin tingle. “Look where my hand is,” she said.

  Dianya clapped her hands palm-to-palm in front of her and threw her head back to face the sun, currently hidden behind clouds that increasingly looked like rain. “I can’t see it,” she said after a while. “I can see...something...but it’s like a residue.”

  “Look again,” Zerafine said, her heart dropping. “Right here.” Rain started to patter down on the pavement, on her bare head. The air smelled of lightning.

  Dianya knelt on the ground and bowed her head. “It looks like...dust...or maybe flakes of gold,” she said. “There’s nothing there I could heal, even if I used my own energy.”

  “You’re sure?” Zerafine said, biting back You said you weren’t very experienced; maybe you’re just wrong.

  The young woman nodded. “There just isn’t anything there.”

  Zerafine sighed. “Thank you for your help. Would you give my respects to the Marathelis?”

  As Dianya made her way through the crowds, Zerafine walked back to the curb, slowly, scuffing her sandals along the concrete pavers. “And we’re left with nothing again,” she said.

  “Not nothing,” Gerrard said. “You now know it has no vital energy.” He got a funny look on his face. “It has no vital energy,” he repeated.

  “That means it’s not alive,” Zerafine said. She was pretty sure she had the same funny look on her face. “It’s dead. It’s a ghost.”

  “It’s the biggest ghost ever,” Gerrard said.

  “But what kind of creature could be that big,” Zerafine began, then felt everything she’d learned start to fall into place. The apparitions. The moving streets. The fractures on the creature’s surface. “Sweet goddess of light,” she breathed. “I have to talk to Berenica right now.” No more jumping to conclusions. There was just one more thing she had to know.

  She kept getting ahead of Nacalia until Gerrard scooped the child up and ran with her, Nacalia pointing the way. Now Zerafine could see it when the streets rearranged themselves. This was very bad. The rain no longer fell vertically, but was blown nearly horizontal by the wind at their backs. Zerafine welcomed how it propelled them along. It took less than ten minutes for them to fetch up against Berenica’s gate. Zerafine flung it open and hammered on the front door until Berenica’s silent servant opened it; she nearly knocked him down in her haste to get inside.

  Berenica sat in her front room reading a book. “Can I help you with something?” she asked, irritable but trying to be polite.

  “You wrote that the gods tamed the powers of heaven and earth,” she panted. “Was that literal or metaphorical?”

  Berenica laid down her book. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “I had all my information from the records. Would you like to see them?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  They went next door to the shrine. The rain was falling more heavily now, drenching them in the few minutes it took to get inside. Berenica went into the sanctuary and opened a drawer in the base of the altar. She drew out a book bound in tattered black leather. “It’s been rebound, but it’s still very old, and the pages are very fragile,” she said, and laid it on the altar.

  Even in her excited state, Zerafine opened the cover carefully. There was no title page. The first page was covered with neat and surprisingly legible printing in three columns. Zerafine ran her finger down the columns until, at the top of the third, she found what she was looking for.

  “‘The gods found a world ready for them,’” she read aloud, “‘its people crying out in fear of Water and Earth, Wind and Sun. They broke them, bound them to their will, and took them from the world that men and women might have peace. Upon this place did Kalindi build her temple, and the whole world looked to her.’ There has always been a temple to Kalindi in Portena. And Portena is the olde
st city in the known world. This isn’t about some mythic battle against the abstract forces of nature. The gods—the new gods—overthrew old ones to make a place for themselves.” It was so obvious to her that she couldn’t understand why they stared at her with incomprehension. “Don’t you see?” she continued. “One of them is right here in Portena. It’s not just a dead creature. It’s a dead god.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “That’s—” Gerrard began. He tried out several words in his mouth, rejected them all.

  “Not just random capitals, but proper nouns. Names,” mused Berenica. “I wouldn’t have read it that way. Well, I obviously didn’t.”

  “I was looking at it all wrong,” Zerafine said. “I knew it was spirit because I could see it with my heart’s eye, but I wasn’t thinking. I was so caught up in the idea of a living creature with a body of spirit that I didn’t think to wonder why I could see it so clearly. A spirit inside a body is a dim glow. A spirit without a body is bright. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  “But—a god?” Gerrard exclaimed, but Zerafine overrode him.

  “Everything fits. Alita and Morica must have killed it in their first experiment. It wasn’t fractured, it was fragmented. The gods—oh, I can’t think straight, there’s too much—”

  “I understand,” said Berenica. She tapped the page, then snatched her hand away as if remembering how fragile the book was. “The old gods were the embodiment of nature. We still have storms and mountains, but they clearly aren’t sentient. I think the Pantheon took the old ones out of their ‘bodies’ and put them...where?”

  “Into the cities,” Zerafine continued. “The cities became their bodies.” She began to pace from one end of the altar to the other. It was all coming together. “The streets moving, reconnecting, that was the ghost trying to get back into the only body it ever knew. And—oh, Atenas take me for a fool, the apparitions, they’re its memories. They’re leaking out of it like water from a rusted pipe.”

  “Zerafine, slow down,” said Gerrard, grabbing her arm and interrupting her pacing. She looked up at him as though she’d forgotten who he was. “This old story, it’s a pretty thin thread to hang all this supposition on.”

  “But she’s right,” said Berenica, her beautiful voice faint. “I have studied these records for years. Look at them in the right way, and they all point to the existence of older gods. Atenas Himself is supposed to be older than Kalindi; we take that to mean that He was the first of the Pantheon, but suppose He’s even older than that?”

  Gerrard shook his head. “I can’t argue with you. It just seems impossible.”

  “But it’s true,” said Zerafine. Her excitement drained away, leaving her feeling empty and cold. No, the cold was coming from outside. A powerful gust of wind blew through the sanctuary, ripping through the book’s pages as if reading them at high speed. Berenica gave an uncharacteristic squeak and threw herself over the book, protecting it with her body.

  Zerafine pointed. “You think that’s natural?” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the wind. “The ghost has grown in strength every day. I think it’s finally strong enough to start pulling in the forces of nature to make itself a new body. That’s where it came from, after all.”

  Berenica shut the book and put it away. When she stood up, her face was white and trembling. “I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t—I haven’t performed a consolation in over a year. Someone died, and...I can’t get past the fear. Ricenz and Darlen do the consolations now, but—”

  “They’re barely more than acolytes,” Zerafine finished the sentence. She took Berenica’s hand. “It’s all right,” she said. “I think it was always going to be me. I think it’s what I came here for.” She released Berenica’s hand and turned to leave, then looked over her shoulder at the tokthelis. “You might pray for me,” she said. Gerrard followed her.

  Outside, the wind had abated enough that their words wouldn’t blow away. Gerrard stood with his back to the wind so Zerafine could stand in the shelter of his body. Nacalia crouched behind her. “You can’t do this,” Gerrard said.

  “I have to,” said Zerafine.

  Gerrard shook his head. “No, I mean it’s not possible. You’re not even big enough to get its attention. And all that spirit lashing around...it will kill you and not even notice.”

  “I don’t think that’s inevitable. Genedirou died because he didn’t know what he was doing. I’ve faced spirits almost every day for the last six years.”

  “Small spirits. Ghosts. Not an out of control god who’s probably been driven insane by Morica Akennos.”

  She put her hand on his arm. “If I do nothing, the city will be destroyed, and us with it. If I try, there’s a chance I’ll succeed. You know me too well to think I’d stand by and do nothing.”

  His eyes closed. “I can’t protect you from this,” he said, his voice wooden.

  She reached out and drew him close. “No.”

  “And I can’t stop you.”

  “Not without making me something other than I am.”

  “So what can I do?” He put his arms around her and hugged her back.

  She smiled. “I may need you to hold me up.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “That, I think I’m good at.”

  Nacalia said, in a small voice, “What can I do, thelis?”

  Zerafine took a deep breath. “You can take us to the plaza. I think, on this day especially, we won’t get there without your help.”

  They had the street to themselves. People took refuge anywhere they could, huddled together against the rain and the freezing wind. Zerafine looked straight ahead, but she knew that hundreds of eyes were on her as they passed, unwavering. She had no attention to spare. She was fighting her fears: fear of inadequacy, fear of failure, fear of—no. Fear of death was unacceptable in a thelis of Atenas. But she knew that even two hundred and twenty-seven—no, make that twenty-eight—consolations of human ghosts were no preparation for what she was about to attempt.

  The plaza, like the street, was empty. Scraps of paper and roofing tiles flew through the air like harbingers of worse to come, as though the wind would soon be wild and strong enough to tear people from their hiding places and cast them in all directions. Zerafine knelt in front of Nacalia and put her hands on the girl’s shoulders. “It’s time for you to take shelter. I know the rest of the way.”

  Nacalia’s tears were real ones. Zerafine had no idea how much she understood about what was about to happen, but she said, “Don’t die, thelis,” and Zerafine realized she understood all too well.

  “I will try to come back,” she promised, and hugged Nacalia, then gave her a little push in the direction of one of the temples. The temple of Ormus, she saw, and was inspired to tell Gerrard, “See that you buy out her contract and apprentice her there. If anyone was born to serve the god of travel, it’s her.”

  “See to it yourself,” Gerrard said. “I don’t want to deal with that Karra woman again.” His words were teasing, but his voice sounded hollow.

  They proceeded to Kalindi’s temple against a wind that seemed determined to prevent their arrival. Gerrard ultimately had to put his arm around Zerafine’s shoulders to keep her from falling over. They climbed the one hundred and sixteen steps slowly and with great effort, the wind snatching at their breath as though alive and mischievous—or malevolent. It might actually be alive, or at least possessed of consciousness, at this point, Zerafine thought. At the top of the stairs, at the center of the paved semicircle laid out in front of the temple, Zerafine stopped to catch her breath. She looked out over the city with watering eyes, feeling almost as if she could see the wind outlined against the roofs. A brief shower caught her in the face, and she wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her robe.

  “Here,” she told Gerrard, and, “Don’t let me fall.” Gerrard moved behind her and grasped her firmly about the waist. His presence was a comfort, but not one she could indulge herself in reflecting on. “Wait,” she sai
d, and turned around and kissed him. His hands slid around her waist further and he kissed her back, lightly, then hard and insistent. She felt more water slide down her cheek. “Don’t go saying goodbye just yet,” she teased him through her tears. “And don’t forget that I love you.”

  He kissed her once more, and said, “Never.”

  She again turned her back on him and began to relax, breathing deeply and feeling the tension slide from her shoulders, her back, her legs. She opened her heart’s eye and began to search the city. She could see, from this height, tiny sparks that marked the apparitions, the old god’s memories—no longer stationary, but flying wildly through the streets leaving streaks of light. There was, however, a pattern to their movement. As she drew further back and broadened her gaze, something began to take shape below her.

  It was only barely humanoid. Its limbs—too many limbs--draped the streets and cradled the hills. She looked for the Talarannos estate and saw a brighter spark there, looked further and found the four sparks of the other estates. She blinked her heart’s eye and the pattern came into focus: eyes, shoulders, navel. Down in the city, four sparks marked knees, toes, a hip. Very little of its spirit body remained intact, and even the face was the merest suggestion of an outline of a distorted head. The winds surrounded it, dove into it and raced out again screaming, a sound Zerafine realized she was hearing with her own ears as well as in her entranced state. She could see it move, see the streets shift as it tried to force its way back into the only body it had known for almost a thousand years.

  Uncertainly, Zerafine drew a symbol and let it float away. It went only a few feet before disintegrating. She needed to be more confident, and, she thought, more daring. From deep within her belly she drew on reserves she had always suspected she had but had never needed to use. A single shape, golden like the sun—how fitting—emerged from her body and danced away toward the old god’s head. A golden circle. Kalindi’s circle.