by Matt Larkin
“Release her, I will do anything you ask. I will swear the oath, I will bind myself to you.”
What love. The thought paralyzed Nyi Rara, left her in awe, until, at last, her hand slipped away from Taema, and the other mermaid raced to her sister, embraced her.
After patting Taema on the back, Tilafaiga pushed her away. Then she drew a clawed finger along her own sternum, tracing a line of blood. “On my soul, I swear myself to obedience to Nyi Rara.” The next words she spoke were Supernal, a reiteration and reinforcement of the oath, a binding that tore down through the Veil and reverberated through the whole of existence.
Nyi Rara’s arm burned, a sizzle of bubbles rising up, obscuring the water for an instant. Though she did not need to see to know what had happened. The glyph of Taema’s very soul had branded itself into her flesh, a living tattoo tying the other mermaid to her.
“I …” Taema stammered. “I’ll come with you …”
“No!” Tilafaiga snapped. “I’ve no doubt Nyi Rara is leading us both into danger and I’ll not have you at risk.”
“But—”
“I did not just make such an oath so that you might be drawn away just the same!”
Nyi Rara inspected the brand on her, the elegant swirls and flourishes of an intricate glyph, a Supernal representation of a soul now bent to her Will.
She was going to need all the help she could get to save Mu.
“She comes with us,” Nyi Rara said.
“What?” Tilafaiga demanded. “You cannot be serious. After what I just—”
“Your bond with your sister means so very much to you, yes? So, bring her. And show us the way out.”
17
She fell.
She remembered screaming, wind stripping her words. Whipping her hair over her face, tearing at her skirt. Remembered trying to call upon Waiau’s power and finding it out of reach. Remembered wondering if the snow sister denied her out of petulance or whether Pahulu blocked her from reaching her bond spirit.
Remembered … snaring in gossamer webs of shadow that arrested her descent even as they engulfed her in their oily embrace and dragged her beneath umbral waves. Choking, as bits of nether unreality forced its cloying essence down her throat, suffusing her soul with the Dark.
And now—wandering.
An endless expanse of nothing, the ground heaving beneath her like passionate flesh as she plodded upon manifest non-physical realms.
“Aloha?” Poli‘ahu called, over and over.
Silence. Silence so thick it had weight, had substance. The silence answered her, dragged upon her limbs until every step became an extreme effort. Until her soul screamed to surrender and meld with the surrounding murk.
Where was Waiau? Had she somehow lost her spirit in this place? Or … died? If her body had perished, the Mist spirit would have been forced back into Pō, probably dragged into the Roil, even.
Ah … Pahulu had cast her into a pit who knew how deep. Of course she had died. That would explain everything. So now, was she herself enmeshed in the Astral Roil? Was her bemusement a sign of the consumptive forces devouring her thoughts and memories?
The Lethe, spirits named it. The slow devouring of the soul.
As if in answer, the shadows formed up into a wall before her, somehow darker than the surrounding blackness, and yet glimmering enough that when she looked into it, she could see. A procession winking in and out in the night. Seven radiant stars.
Seven Sorceress Queens ruling the expansive empire of Old Mu.
She saw towering spires unlike anything men could now build. A kingdom connected by roads of stone, pathways marked by rock-hewn ki‘i masks taller than a person. A wonder that beckoned her ever deeper, up fine-carved stone stairs into a palace of such opulence she imagined it could only manifest in a spirit world. Yet this … this was the glory of Old Mu.
Its wonder before the Deluge.
The vantage broke, shifted, and she found herself drawn deeper, into some vast underground chamber nestled around a pool at least fifty feet across. In a ring, the seven queens stood, naked and covered in tattoos, incanting as the blood of a thousand sacrifices ran in mighty rivers and stained the pool crimson.
And though the faces changed, through the mirror of the Dark, she knew those standing before her, or some of them, at least. There, Pahulu herself, whose Art perhaps always touched this shadowy mana. And there … among the others …
Lilinoe.
The first of the snow sisters, the most knowledgeable, perhaps—now certainly—the first Snow Queen in Sawaiki. A Sorceress Queen of Old Mu.
Again, a turbulent restructuring of reality. Lilinoe and her man fleeing on an outrigger canoe, even as a mountain of water rose in the distance. As a behemoth that made an island turtle seem a pebble surfaced from an abyss so far below the world as to know no bounds.
Flashes of great heaving limbs, of tentacles stretching across entire kingdoms and sweeping them clean.
The screaming, breaking, shattering ruination of the world.
The Deluge that sank the continents and left behind the Worldsea.
Unfathomable in its immensity. The death of more people than Poli‘ahu had imagined could ever live.
And Lilinoe and her husband … Nu‘u … escaping it, if only just, while her sister queens sank beneath the waves or were crushed under the rampage of an Elder God.
“You did this …” Poli‘ahu rasped. “The two of you, Lilinoe and Pahulu, and the others. You called up the Elder God of the World of Water.”
War …
Always the answer.
The justification for any extreme if it but preserved that held most precious. A way of life, clung to so very desperately. For war, they had destroyed the whole of the world.
Pahulu’s hatred must have been so strong she held on, became … a lapu first, perhaps, and now this Dark spirit. Poli‘ahu supposed the details of her transmogrification mattered little compared to the result.
“The others … the other five queens?” she found herself asking. Because she had known two more faces amid the Sorceress Queens, though she wanted to deny it. Though it seemed impossible, sickening even in implication.
Pele and Kapo.
They had been, in another guise, two of the Queens of Mu.
“But how? How was Pele there?”
Souls conjured, forced into defined rebirth outside the normal flow of the Wheel. Compelled by the Art of one who would create the perfect servants. Compelled into reincarnation as children of dragons …
Children of dragons? Mo‘o?
Kapo and Pele were siblings. They had other sisters, as well.
Poli‘ahu staggered, collapsing onto her arse, heedless of the clinging shadows that tugged at her arms and legs while she sat there trembling. Was it possible? Someone had called up the souls of five of the Queens of Mu. Purposefully recreated them as god-queens here, in the Worldsea.
Her foes were Lilinoe’s former sisters.
And who would have such power?
The Dark seemed to hold the answers, but every truth was a lance through her brain. It stabbed her, sucked at her mind and soul, until she felt a shell. She lacked even the strength to weep, so instead sat there, arms around her knees, rocking in limitless despair.
Pahulu was said to haunt the dreams of men and women across Sawaiki. The Queen of Nightmares.
So, could it all be lies? Perhaps, but somehow she imagined the truth itself the greater torment.
The weight of history had engulfed her. Crushing eternities, a circle of ages, on and on, the whole of human civilization rendered in the play of shadows down in this void, a funnel of souls to feed the darkness.
Was this what Pahulu wanted of her? Madness? Despair?
If so, she had achieved it.
There was, she thought, something more to absolute darkness than simple absence of light. Something primordial, as if light itself were the intrusion upon the natural state. What better explanation for the shadowy Pō
underlying the Mortal Realm? For the yet more fathomless darkness beyond it?
“Lilinoe …” she cried out once more, perhaps for the hundredth time …
But the Mist spirit did not answer.
Nor Waiau, nor Kahoupokane. Perhaps they had grown so wroth with her as to have abandoned her to this all-consuming despair.
For how could she but despair, given she could see nothing in any direction? A void stretching on forever, the only sound her own voice and a pervasive, sibilant whisper that she could not make out no matter how hard she concentrated.
“Waiau?” she asked again, later, after immeasurable time had passed.
Near silence punctuated by malice.
The Nightmare Queen wanted her broken, pliant, perhaps? Thus she cast her into this place without senses or time, where thoughts feasted upon themselves in sickening circles, the soul slowly crumbling to dust.
“Lilinoe …?” Her voice broke, thick with tears she wanted to shed but couldn’t. “Lilinoe … please …”
The space between slumber and wakening had blurred. It felt—sometimes—as if gargantuan forms stalked through the perennial darkness. Silent, invisible, yet possessing a presence that made her feel a frightened child once more.
Then there was slurping. Sporadic, faint, always in some other direction from where she turned. A sound like something smacking tongue and lips. Just when she began to doubt she had ever heard it, she would catch it again. An intermittent torment …
Perhaps one concocted by her own broken mind for all she knew.
But that mind—the eye of her tattered soul—imagined a roil of flesh and limbs lurking just beyond sight, as though blasphemous amalgamations lurched ever closer to her prison. She envisioned eyes and claws and tentacles as the Roil struggled to manifest anything resembling life.
She tormented herself.
The snow spirits could not or would not hear her pleas here. And upon who else could she call? No mortal could pierce this darkness, even could they have heard her. Her sole allies from beyond the Veil failed her, leaving her bereft.
A fool, for ever having thought she could depend on etheric beings who, by their own admission, were no friends to the living.
Friends … bah.
Poli‘ahu had no friends, save perhaps Nalani. Who was probably dead now, buried in a torrent of lava that had taken Hilo. Even Poli‘ahu’s attempts to avenge her by destroying the invaders with the island turtle had …
Had …
A glyph remained precise in her mind, for having just painstakingly inked it upon Kaupeepee’s flesh. A symbol for another spirit, one that Pahulu might not have warded against.
She could not draw or carve the glyph in utter darkness, so she held the mental picture of it, hoping her own thoughts might cast it with enough resonance to draw him. In this place that was no place, where thoughtforms could hold substance, she had hope she held it true.
“Saveasi‘uleo,” she chanted, imploring over and over, concentrating on his glyph until her mind threatened to collapse from the strain of holding so much detail in its forefront. “Saveasi‘uleo,” she begged.
Until thought bled away from the lack of time.
Webbed fingers grasped her cheeks, claws pricking her skin as she was hefted up by her face to look into the eyes of Kaupeepee. His eyes, though he was not the one lurking behind them.
A sudden shock of cold struck her, and she realized he held her up in the shallows, even as waves lapped against her face. Even as brine washed over her and left her gasping.
The mer-possessed man stared at her, the moon behind him casting his features in silhouette, making him even harder to read.
“I pulled you out of the Dark,” he said, exposing shark-like teeth and a too-wide mouth.
“Mahalo.”
The mer uttered something between a hiss and a growl. “You think my kind seeks the gratitude of yours? You think immortals concerned with paltry mortal conceptions of relationships?” He leaned in close enough for her to catch the reek of rotting fish from between his teeth. “You will give to me an exchange.”
Considering the mer had come for her when no one else could or would, Poli‘ahu would have agreed to most anything. “You want my flesh.”
A snort. “I pleasured myself upon you while you lay trapped in the nightmare of the Dark. That granted you the mana to break free, and thus we come back to you owing me.”
Suddenly aware of the faint soreness between her legs, Poli‘ahu gaped at him, at the utter casualness with which he admitted to having raped her. She knew she ought to feel absolute fury at the admission, but—whether as a result of the nightmare or the price she had paid for sorcery over and over—that part of her seemed shredded now. Unable to manage outrage, all she could muster was a disgusted glower cast his way.
This was … a reminder that spirits and ghosts were … utterly devoid of human compunctions. Were gods and thus considered themselves beyond the bounds of tabus or any conception of morality. Unbounded in their power, and thus their deeds.
“What more would you have of me?” she fairly spat at the mer.
Once more, he bared his shark teeth. “A threat to Hiyoya rises. One a sufficiently powerful mortal sorceress might help us curtail. A power come to Mu in kupua form.”
Poli‘ahu folded her arms. Because she knew of this. Because, despite his reprehensible actions, still she might find common cause with Hiyoya if it meant breaking the Kahikian sisters. “Tell me.”
18
Days Gone
Four years had passed since Poli‘ahu made herself Queen of Hilo, and she had finally decided what to do with Waiau’s empty chamber. Within now lay a pool, unfrozen despite the cold, though only because Poli‘ahu kept it so. At first, when she had discovered the great hollow boring into the mountain beneath the chamber, she had wondered at it. Perhaps, in ages past, this mountain had been volcanic, and the pit a crater. Filling it with snow had taken little effort, but forcing that snow to melt and remain liquid had been one of her great accomplishments.
The waters in the pool were so still they reflected the icicles in the cavern above, like a mirror so perfect one might think stalagmites lurked beneath the surface. After doffing her clothes, Poli‘ahu slipped into the waters, sending endless ripples through the pool. Her whole body, her soul even, ached from her sorcery. Ached from it, and ached for more, a desperate need begging her to try something else. The sisters had often cautioned against overuse of the Art. They warned her she could become seduced by it, dependent on it even as it ate away her mind and body and weakened her soul. The ever-present threat was always becoming possessed by a spirit. Those beyond constantly sought after some way to walk upon the Earth, to work their Wills on the Mortal Realm. And the weaker her soul became, the easier it would be for that to happen.
Every time she bound a spirit to her, she too was bound to it. And now, finally, at Lilinoe’s behest, Poli‘ahu had bound a ghost to herself permanently.
A kind of inverse possession, binding trapped the entity inside her own flesh, where she could call upon its powers. She could feel the thing shifting around beneath her skin, worming its way through the back of her mind. Whispering of days long ago, when the first dynasty had come to Sawaiki along with Maui and Manua.
Compared to other prices, a brand cost her little. In her casting today, the ghost had siphoned something from her mind. A memory, or several. The nature of such a price meant she knew she had lost something, but she’d never know what. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Memories of her life, of her past, they were fleeting distractions from her purpose.
Still, a binding was by far enough for one day. She needed to back away from the Art, at least for a little while.
With a deep breath she dove beneath the surface of her crystal pool, kicking downward. Always trying to reach the bottom and never succeeding. On and on she pushed until her lungs felt ready to explode, until, in rising panic, she began clawing her way back to the surface. She burst into t
he air, gasping, coughing. Foolish to try this with her body already weak but … she’d always wanted to touch the bottom. To prove she could do so.
When she was a child, she’d tried to see how deep she could dive. Her father had been a master diver. She’d thought he would teach her the tricks, help her become as good as him. That was before. Before her mother had thrown her out, given her to Lilinoe.
Suddenly, diving didn’t matter. Home, fishing, stories, and laughter became luxuries. No.
Even back then, Lilinoe had sensed her mana, felt her latent power washing over the wind and seeping into the mist.
Her father. He had said … something about diving. Had he taken her to the sea, tried to teach her? She couldn’t remember.
Her breath came out as a cloud of mist fogging the chamber around the pool.
Damn it. Why was she even thinking of them at all? Why had those people—they were no longer her parents, if they had ever been—even tried to climb Mauna Kea those years ago? Maybe they too had come as supplicants, wanting her to work some spell for long life or prosperity or great sex. A couple had come to her for that once. She’d explained it would cost them some of their own mana, permanently drain away part of their life. And still the lust-ridden fools had begged her to do it. Those who understood nothing of the Art were quick to think it a solution to their problems, rarely able to grasp that the price would almost always exceed whatever they sought to correct.
Four years since she proclaimed herself queen, and ever the supplicants came. Sometimes she held court in Hilo, but often, she retreated here, to her sanctuary and her studies.
Though her mountain proved nearly inaccessible to ordinary humans, some still braved the slopes in supplication. They sought the blessings of their queen or hoped to bed her and draw forth her mana. Half those who tried the journey gave up or died—and she had been known to send out a fresh cloud of mist or a snow flurry to add an extra challenge—but she did generally accede to the requests of those who made the climb.
