“What’s wrong?” He looked at her, forehead furrowing in unwanted concern.
She fought the panic, fought down any signs that would let him know. No, it can’t be true, I can’t face it. I can’t.
“I need water.” She forced her voice to flat hostility. She didn’t—he’d been, if anything, overgenerous about sharing his water bottle with her—but she’d seen enough of him to tell he was all but unable to refuse a plea of that kind.
He passed the bottle to her, and she tipped the water down her panic-closed throat, made herself swallow it.
“Are you all right now? We’re on the route to an oasis—we can rest there for a little.”
There was concern in his voice, but he had the rope still tied tight round his wrist and his hand clamped over the piece that led to her bound hands. His kindness might be a weakness she would be able to use, but not yet. He was still wary, still afraid of her.
If he knew he would no longer be afraid…
No. It’s not true. Don’t think it. Don’t. Don’t!
She didn’t answer him. Let him worry about her, let him think he was being too harsh. Maybe he’d get careless enough that she could make use of it.
“Are you all right? Can you walk?” He waited a moment, hesitant—hardly a man at all, shameful that I should be in his power—then moved on, leading her, and she had to follow.
For a moment, the thought crossed her mind that she could refuse to walk, lie still and make him drag her. He’s not so strong that he could manage that, damn him. But it would hardly do her any good. He was kind—too kind—but he was stubborn as well. Even if she refused to walk he wasn’t going to let her go, and she could not bear to humiliate herself by trying it.
As the sun climbed to its highest point in the dazzling, liquid heat of the sky, they came to the oasis—a tiny one, no more than a couple of trees and a spring dribbling water out into a shallow rocky pool, scarcely deep enough to cover her hands when she dipped them into it.
The trees provided hardly any shade, but the spring came from a crack in a high tumble of rocks next to the trees. Its shadow pooled around it, an edge of dimness in the white-hot desert, and within that shadow the rocks were cool to the skin.
For a few moments, the oasis held comfort. Her frantic thoughts seemed to stop, like water trapped behind a dam. She drank and drank, and when the criminal offered her a handful of battered-looking dates, clumped and sticky, she could not bring herself to cast them back at him.
They knelt in the scant patch of shade, silent, side by side, the rope slack between them, and, like the shade, peace seemed to spread around them, an empty space filled with nothing but coolness and the quiet trickle of water.
She tried to hold on to the peace, tried to keep her thoughts blocked behind their dam, but as her hunger and thirst eased, as her mind lost its merciful haze of fatigue, the thoughts built and built, pressing against their barrier, pushing to get through. Her body, which had for a few moments slackened like the rope, wound itself tight, muscles clenching, stomach contracting on the too-sweet fruit.
She felt the criminal glance at her.
“Listen,” he said. “You don’t need to be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She let her eyes slide sideways at him, contempt in her gaze, anger—for a moment—overlaying the fear. Fool. As if I would be afraid of you.
He looked away, then got up. “I’m going to get my bearings. If I climb to the top of the rock pile I can track which way we’ll follow. Have you drunk enough?”
She said nothing.
He sighed. “Very well. Give me your hands.”
He didn’t gag her this time, but he was thorough nonetheless. He tied her wrists to her ankles, bound her to the trunk of the palm tree behind her. And as far as he knew, the precautions were none too many. If she were in her fully maenad form, it would take all and more of these bonds to hold her.
But as it was… She bent her head, hearing him climb the rocks behind her, trying to fight the thoughts. But they came pouring through, breaking the dam, flooding her head with cold, choking knowledge.
As it is, he need do nothing. The madness has left me, the change is over. And I, out of reach of the temple and the ritual, I cannot get it back. Whether it’s punishment or consequences alone, I have lost my power. I am no longer a maenad.
He didn’t know that, of course. He must have been shocked enough when the maenad state left her—outside the temple, everyone believed the change was once only, a permanent stamping of the god’s mark—but, as cautious as he was, he must think she was like the fire-callers, the lava-shifters, who lost their gifts when they were tired or hungry, and only had to rest to get them back.
If only I were.
She bowed her head lower, drowning in rising pain. Away from the temple, the change gone, the last traces vomited out of me, I’m nothing. Everything’s gone. I’m not a maenad. If I can’t get back I’ll never be a maenad again.
“Oh God.” She spoke aloud this time, and her voice cracked on the words. “Change me back. Don’t leave me like this, don’t, don’t take the power away.” It was his power, she knew it, they all knew it—he could choose to give it and choose to take it away. He chose to do it through the ritual and the volcano’s blood, but he didn’t need to. If he wanted, he could send it on her now, like a lightning bolt, like the way the fire-gifts came on those who wielded them, springing from nothing as if they’d snatched heat from the air around their fingers.
“You do it for them. Do it for me. God, please. Don’t—” She choked, struggling to speak clearly enough that he’d hear her. He must hear her. His holiest place was the volcano, but his power went everywhere, he must know she was here, praying, only wanting to do what he’d created her for. “Don’t leave me powerless. Don’t take the power from me. Don’t leave me—” Her voice cracked again, and she had to stop, terrified that she’d weep, betray weakness, reveal herself as unworthy to have ever been given the power.
Sacrifice. He demands sacrifice. You’ve not given enough, took it for granted, took too much pride in his power, his power that you had begun to see as yours.
“I’m sorry,” she said, whispering, the ties biting into her wrists and ankles. “I sinned. Give me the power back and I’ll use it properly. I swear. I don’t care—you can take my life. Have him kill me, let me die when the change comes, let it tear through my body and leave me dead. I don’t care. Just—” her voice squeaked, shameful, like a child, “—don’t let me die like this. Don’t let me die powerless. God, oh God, give me the power back—I don’t care what happens afterwards.”
And then she had to stop, because the words all stuck together in her throat and she was afraid if she continued she would not be able to keep herself from crying.
She put her head down on her knees, her breath warm and clammy on her bare skin, willing the god to hear her, willing her body to feel the beginning of the change.
But there was nothing. Just the trickle of the water, the sound of her heart beating, her skin sticky with sweat and rough with sand, the cloth biting into her wrists and ankles. Nothing more. Nothing more at all.
A few minutes later stones crunched above her, and she swallowed, clenching her teeth to force her face to expressionlessness. At least she could keep it from him. To him, she could stay the maenad who’d pursued him into the ravine, stalked him, smelled him out, torn his skin and shed his blood and nearly killed him. To him, she was still dangerous enough—terrifying enough—to need tying up.
I’ll stay that way. She clung to the thought. You’re not to know anything has changed. Then, defiantly, I may not have the power, but I am still maenad, still the god’s chosen, still dangerous. I’ll get it back, he’ll give it back. You’ll see my maenad self again—you’re afraid, and you should be.
Philos had thought he’d hated the priests before, hated them for the power they wielded over life and death, hated them for the people—my people—they’d given to the maenad
s or cast into the fire.
But, halted in the middle of his instinctively soft-footed approach, looking down at her—this broken, dirty girl with bleeding fingernails—as she begged the god to let her die rather than make her live without her power… Hate rose like scalding liquid though him. What the priests had done to him, to all shifters, mind-whisperers, water-workers, was bad enough. But this girl—they’d taken away herself, hollowed her out till she was nothing but a vessel, made her into a weapon, no more human than if she were made of steel.
And abandoned her. He’d thought her power, like his, was something innate. He’d taken all these precautions—he looked now at all the ways he’d tied her up, sudden distaste tightening his throat—out of fear of that returning power, the reappearance of the vicious, shrieking, supernaturally strong instrument of the god’s destruction. But here she was, trapped and human and sobbing, pleading with the god to give it back.
If all she needed was rest, or sleep, like every other shifter, this impatience made no sense.
He looked at her again, the bent figure, the shaking shoulders. This wasn’t impatience. It was desperation. When she lost consciousness, her power had started to drain from her. It was gone entirely now, and she knew it wasn’t coming back.
That was where her earlier frantic need to return had come from. It wasn’t just that she wanted to escape him, get back to where she belonged. As long as she stayed out here—away from the temple? The priests?—she was not only without her home and people and everything she knew, she was without her power too. She could not even call herself a maenad anymore.
Is it not enough to kill us and control us and make us believe we’re paying the price for sins that don’t exist?
When he’d escaped from the city the first time, a terrified adolescent fighting fear and loneliness and the guilt that told him he must go back, he’d left everything behind him. He’d felt stripped naked, alone in a world that howled with emptiness.
But if I’d not had my power, if I’d escaped to find I’d lost not only parents and friends and home and god…
He found that he was cold, deep down, like a stone in his belly.
Could I have run, even to escape from death, when it meant losing myself?
Below him, she put up her bound hands to scrub across her eyes, and pity stabbed through him, a pang of grief not his own. He could not let her escape to bring the others after him, but if he was going to make her walk across the desert, he could at least untie some of her bonds.
But then she’ll see I no longer fear her—she’ll realise I heard.
He couldn’t do that to her. Bereft, clinging to her pretence of power—he could not humiliate her by letting her know he knew how naked and alone she was.
He moved, deliberately clumsy, to go down the slope to her, letting stones roll and crunch under his feet. She looked up straight away, her expression hard, her face unstained by tears, betraying nothing.
He untied her from the tree, but did not loosen any other of her bonds as they set out onto the sands. And the thought struck him: If this is kindness I’m showing her, it’s a strange form of it indeed.
Chapter Five
That evening, as the light slid away into the west, they came to the rising heaps of sand dunes, then slabs of stone shouldering through the sand, then the edge of the mountains’ slanting shadow. Maya was limping, her heels red and sore. Stupid, soft human skin.
The criminal, despite his sturdy sandals, looked as exhausted as she felt. His face had a grey tinge and he moved as if it hurt him.
Oh, of course. I wounded him—his chest, I think, and his arm? His gift—whatever it is—it didn’t protect him from that, and it can’t help him now.
And that was why it was no good staying human, why everyone prayed and waited for the god to make them into something more. It was why the god in his mercy had granted them the holy gifts, to give them something greater than their own feeble flesh, to let them attain value in his eyes. Staying nothing but wholly human…it made you weak, worthless. It always had.
And now I am worthless too.
She crushed the thought. He would sleep deeply tonight—for hours, probably. And she, tied up though she’d be, would have more than enough time to find a way to free herself.
She would find water and food—they were out of the desert and he planned to camp here tonight, there must be something she could take—then she’d get back across the desert. She knew the stars well enough to guide her, though they’d be blurred to her non-maenad eyes.
She would not make it back as far as the oasis without rest herself. But he was no hunter, once she got an hour’s walk away he’d not find her.
It would be bad, returning in the shadow of failure, of a hunt that had ended with no prey.
But at that thought her mind seemed to falter. There can be prey. What am I doing, thinking of getting free and leaving, when I intended to kill?
The criminal was bigger than her, and stronger too.
But there are ways, all the same. If he’s sleeping… I have no weapon, but if I can get hold of a loose stone…
The thoughts came slowly, though, like the reluctant ooze of water through the warped seal of a cask. She had never killed outside the madness. It felt somehow…unseemly, repugnant, as if she contemplated washing herself in sewage or drinking stagnant water.
But it’s justified. It’s a clean kill, like one in battle. I owe it to the pack and to the god. I’ll get it done and go home in honour, no longer ashamed and disgraced.
And she would remember it.
There would be no blurring of that kill, no washing away the dreamlike memories. She would know every second what she did, while she was doing it and afterwards, for hours and days and longer, all the way until she died.
The memories of what I do in the madness are bad enough.
So, she was a coward, was she? She’d lost her courage with her powers? The kill would be justified, that was all she needed to know. She need not remember it. It was her memory, after all—she need remember nothing she did not want to.
I will kill him, and it will be done. And then I will go home.
They came into the shadow between two huge cliffs that marked the beginning of the mountains. The coolness slid over Philos’s skin as if he’d plunged into deep water.
He paused a moment, resting his free hand on the chill rock wall that rose to his left. Only at midday could the sunlight fall into this path between the cliffs. The rest of the day it stayed protected in shadow, and the very stone seemed to breathe cold into the air.
Ahead of him somewhere, invisible water trickled. There was a cave a little farther on, above the stream, which ten years ago had held a makeshift shelter but that years of passing refugees had turned into something like a permanent camp. There would be food there, and other supplies.
He dragged together what felt like the very last reserves of his strength—if today throws anything else at me, I cannot handle it—and led the silent maenad-girl up the narrow, sand-covered path between the cliff faces.
She was pale, her hair straggling over her forehead and sticking to her neck. When she looked at him, her eyes were hazy. He felt a gust of emotion not his—a choking mixture of guilt, grief and confusion—and clamped down what was left of his fatigue-weakened barriers. Watch yourself, boy.
“There’s shelter ahead.” He kept his voice distant—one of the many tricks that, over the years, he’d had to teach himself. She was a killer—still a killer, even with the shocking physical change she’d gone through—and despite the pull of empathy, he could not afford to think of her as how she looked: small-boned, fragile, no more dangerous than a songbird storm-battered into exhaustion.
She didn’t respond, shutting her mouth tight as she followed him around the crook of the path. It forked, one branch continuing to climb up to where it would become a shale slope leading to the first shoulder of the true mountains.
The other branch threaded through a narrow
crack in the right-hand cliff then widened into a gully, steep-sided and hidden—the refugee camp.
At its widest point, its floor was smooth stone, and on the right, a lip of rock came over to form a small cave in which stood a couple of light wooden chests, hooked firmly shut.
The water came through the back wall of the cave. It forced its way out from between a pile of stones, trembling and transparent like a glass pebble, before spilling to run, a wrist-slim rivulet along the side of the gully, vanishing into the rock before it reached the route from which they’d come.
Farther along, at the head of the gully, a scrub of bushes hid where the rock fell away to a sheer drop.
As they came into the gully, the girl jerked on his arm, sending pain searing through his bruised chest. He turned on her, all patience struck away by pain and exhaustion—
“Damn you, I should have left you in the caves to die.”
—then saw her knees folding under her, pallor sweeping beneath her skin, her eyes going not just blurry but blank.
Neither fear nor pity but unthinking instinct made him catch her as she crumpled. Then, hampered by the rope binding them as much as by his own fatigue, he almost let her drop again, scant weight though she was.
He couldn’t carry her, but he managed to lower her to the ground, the movement jerking the rope taut between their bodies, dragging at every scraped-raw nerve, every bruised muscle around his wounds. He had to pick the knot undone with teeth and nails, cursing the loss of his knife. There’d be some kind of knife in the chests, but he couldn’t reach them without lugging her dead weight across with him.
The sand-crusted, dried-tight ends of cloth finally came apart. He untangled himself and left her lying, limp and broken-looking, on the ground. If she didn’t wake soon, what would he do? He had only the barest knowledge of medicine, and the chests were likely to hold nothing but the most basic remedies—for wounds, infection and snakebite.
Blood of the Volcano: Sequel to Heart of the Volcano Page 5
