by Jane Kindred
The room where he’d woken had been a tiny part of the domain of the Permanence—this, of course, was not precisely the name by which they called themselves. It was more a translation of how it sounded in his head. And the name they gave themselves wasn’t a name they spoke. Their thoughts came to him in a manner reminiscent of the Meeric flow, but was something else, as though they didn’t use words in their heads, but pictures. And Pearl was quite good at pictures.
Where he’d woken had been a quiet chamber designed to facilitate his healing, as his sleep had also been designed to achieve. Once he’d awakened, they gave him another, grander room where he was free to pursue what he liked. Like the room where he’d lain sleeping, lights seemed to float there like fireflies, sparkling bits of pink instead of gold illuminating the vaulted chamber.
Anything that came into his head was provided here, as if they’d anticipated every whim that might ever come to him—drawing utensils and fine silk paper by the ream, three-dimensional puzzles made of pure gemstones, scrying crystals…and books.
Pearl had never imagined there could be so many books. He’d never read one before, but after discovering what written words looked like when he’d spoken them onto his paper at Ludtaht Ra, he’d longed to read one. And here in Pearl’s hall was an endless library. Though things seemed to appear in this room as if conjured from his thoughts without him having to actually expend the energy of conjuring, they were not new books. The ancient texts bound in thick leather and embossed in real gold smelled of must and age, and of the chemical breakdown of ink and paper over time that Pearl recognized as the same sort of decay that would one day lead these elements to their own renaissance, like any living creature.
Each book he touched brought with it more than just the words within, which were marvelous in and of themselves, but also spoke to him of those who’d read them before, of the times in which they were written, and of the ephemeral lives of their authors. Some he recognized had been written by Meeric hands—or Meeric tongues—and there were treatises from both Meer and men on the nature of Meerity and divinity, speculations on the origins of each, and numerous Meeric histories. Some grand and noble, others so dark and reprehensible they filled him with dismay. He had to put these aside, afraid the words would get into his head as Ra’s madness had.
The Permanence seemed to have no particular preference as to what he did with his time, insisting they sought only his wellbeing, but Pearl had experience enough with various kinds of folk to know that no one gave anything to him without wanting something in return. He managed, however, to keep such thoughts to himself once he’d determined how they read him. It was the meandering thoughts that rose to the surface they divined, the same way he’d picked a vetma from the chaos of petitioners’ loud thoughts as they’d bubbled upward, and the same way the Meeric flow itself carried the images from the blood of other Meer. Currents and obstructions in the stream of knowledge pushed things temporarily out of the greater flow and into the conscious path of the one meditating upon it.
Through the same method, he determined that not everything the Permanence told him was entirely true. The woman he’d met first had called herself the Caretaker, and he’d since met the Host, the Recordkeeper, the Chamberlain and a number of others all identified by their roles within the hidden realm. These roles, however, were only what they wished to convey—roles, in essence, at which they were playing, like pantomimes on a stage. He hadn’t guessed why they wished to convince him these roles were their true selves, but the roles weren’t exactly lies, either.
The Caretaker, he soon divined, was not a caretaker in the sense of a nurse or one who tended to the needs of the realm and its inhabitants as she’d implied; rather, she was a sentinel whose duty it was to keep Pearl in her sights. He didn’t wish to go so far as to imagine she was a guard over him and that he was her prisoner, but the implication was decidedly there. As long as he harbored no thoughts of attempting to leave, she seemed content to leave him to his own devices.
When he asked after Ume, though, he got the definite impression this was dangerous territory, and he left off asking after the first few times. He had to be content with the Caretaker’s thin-lipped assurances that Ume hadn’t been harmed and that she’d left Pearl here of her own choosing. The fact that Ume had brought him here herself and abandoned him under the hill made him melancholy, and he put her out of his head. It had been a lovely dream to believe someone in the world cared for him as a mother would, but Pearl had long known that such a life was not to be his.
He focused instead on the knowledge he was absorbing from his books and mathematical puzzles. This seemed to please his keepers, and that, it seemed, was all Pearl was meant for. But for the time being, he stayed away from his drawings, despite the whisperings of images that tugged at him like tentacles of sticky mist. He had no wish to see what had become of MeerRa.
Four: Penitence
With the comforting scent of heather beneath her cheek, Ra’s sleep passed out of hours and into days, time needed to knit the broken threads of her fragile memory. In restorative sleep, synapses reconnected; mental pathways twined together like the green shoots of morning glories climbing toward daylight; memory knitted like fusing fissures of bone.
Hazy pictures coalesced within the tonic of Shiva’s blood now running in Ra’s veins, paintings not quite formed: Ra, seated in her temple at AhlZel atop Munt Zelfaal, holding the corpse of a long-dead child like an obscene doll; Ra pressing her heel against the cheek of her beloved sprawled on the jade tile before her, hurling obscenities from a place of deep betrayal.
Ra’s mental landscape shuddered ominously. She tried to stop her ears with her hands to shut out the words she couldn’t have uttered, but sleep paralysis held her still, at the mercy of memory. The words raged out across the tile and echoed back to her, smarting painfully with each return like vicious slaps against her cheeks.
Onto the jade tile, Ra’s fingernails dripped blood. There was something at her feet she dared not see. Not now. Not yet. Not yet.
The sound of clay pots breaking against marble steps rocked through her skull like an electrical tremor. Ra’s dream-self stumbled, blind, staggering toward the sound of screams. A dark-eyed child blinked at Ra from the bank of a river, trusting, waiting, eyes of liquid induline wide with fear as Ra beckoned to her from the water, waist deep. The child stepped into the flow toward Ra’s outstretched arms and was pulled beneath the river’s surface by the unexpected strength of the current. Screams against a backdrop of shattering clay shards erased the image like a damp brush against a canvas freshly touched with watercolors.
On the dusty streets of Soth Rhyman stood a woman, just past the cusp of girlhood, eyes like bits of starry sky—a profound blue, approaching black—indigo ink above a virgin’s veil. Carried on the shoulders of bronze statues of men, MeerRa watched the inky eyes from his silk-lined box, the song of vetma supplication rising fragrant in the summer heat beside the languid Anamnesis. He dared to reach out beneath the silks, fingers brushing in a fleeting touch against the skin of the night-eyed one who saw the man inside the god, but when the curtain opened, it was no longer the woman within the veil.
Regarding Ra instead was a handsome man—beyond his youth, though not yet middle aged. Eyes like liquid sapphires stared out of the warm olive complexion. They impaled Ra with their unrelenting gaze. Below the dark walnut hair streaked with gray that brushed the man’s shoulders, something was wrong. Something Ra dared not see.
Ra moaned and tried to turn away. Not that. Not now. Not yet.
The paralysis of her sleeping form took hold of the dream, merciless. There was no turning away. The time was now. Below the dark walnut hair that brushed his shoulders, the torso was torn open. Blood, dark as his eyes, flowed into the street.
The sound of her own screaming woke her, echoing through the circular chamber in revolving denial. Ra had done it. It could not be taken bac
k. Shiva’s temple atop Munt Zelfaal was stained with the blood of Ahr, and Ra had killed him. She had killed him for protecting Jak. Her heart hurt, full of knives.
“Enough!” Shiva’s voice brought instant silence.
From the doorway of the tower, MeerShiva regarded her, dressed in a leather skin of black, her hair drawn back so tightly that at first Ra thought she must have cut it off. The arctic, unnatural pale of Shiva’s complexion and the complete impassivity of her emerald gaze filled Ra with fear.
“This indulgence will breed madness.” There was no emotion in her voice, though the timbre of it seemed to shunt through Ra’s veins like liquid colder than ice—the liquid of Shiva’s divining pool at AhlZel that Ra had resurrected with the ancient ruins.
Curling onto her side, Ra gazed up at her. “Help me, MeerShiva.”
Shiva’s head tilted slightly, a nearly imperceptible sign of interest. “Vetma, ai MeerShiva. You ask for a blessing, as though I’ve not given enough.”
Ra lowered her eyes. “Forgive me—”
“It is not I from whom you must seek this vetma.” Shiva approached her, appraising her thoughtfully. “I have given you my blood—a stronger strain of madness than that which I took from you. Perhaps it would be best if I teach you to manage it.” She nodded, as if in agreement with herself. “But first you must rid yourself of the burden of guilt.”
“But I am guilty.”
Shiva responded to this with a short, high-pitched laugh, though it wasn’t a sound of amusement. “Of course you are. You cannot rid yourself of the guilt itself, of culpability. You can only accept it and atone.” Shiva seemed to be reading Ra as her eyes traveled over her. “Your concept of atonement is steeped in the traditions of mortality. Very well. If it’s punishment you seek, I will give it to you.”
Ra’s skin rippled with a jolt of surprise as a length of sharp wire coiled over her, burning her flesh like a snake’s toxic skin as it wrapped about her arms and drew them back, forcing them high and tight behind her until the blades of her shoulders were nearly touching.
“Stand.”
She rolled onto her side and struggled to rise without the use of her arms, while Shiva stalked toward her on tall, stiletto-heeled boots with the cold deliberateness of a predatory cat. From Shiva’s side, a thin switch appeared in her black-gloved hand—the length of a quill and the thickness of a blade of grass.
One corner of Shiva’s mouth pulled up in an unnerving smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “You wonder at details. I merely reflect your conceit of punishment.” Shiva circled her, the reed-like metal instrument bowed for a moment between her hands, taking her time, letting Ra wait, the prickle of anxiety tightening Ra’s flesh by the time Shiva’s instrument lashed out like a red-hot whip through the air. It struck Ra with a sharp, swift sting that cut across her mouth and spattered the air between them with her blood. The fine, supple fabric of the switch curled around the skin in a brutal caress as it made contact, like pliant razor wire.
Ra’s lips parted with shock, slack for a moment before she steeled herself, the rush of pain giving her undivided focus, and straightened to accept the vetma she’d asked for. Blood trickled from the corners of her mouth.
“State the transgressions you committed in madness, beginning with the first.”
Ra dragged the painful memory of her disintegration at Mound Ahr to the fore. “I struck Jak.”
The wire-thin switch sang through the air, reopening one of the scars on Ra’s cheek earned from Shiva in the time before the madness. Ra struggled to keep still. It had been less than coincidental that Ra had revisited those marks upon Jak. But Jak didn’t have the defenses of the Meer, and it had been a shameful act. The first of many far worse.
“Continue.”
Ra sucked in a ragged breath. “I held Jak’s throat between my fingers until Jak nearly lost consciousness.”
“Jak, whom you love.”
“Jak, whom I love.”
Shiva struck again, this time the switch wrapping about Ra’s throat. Ra bit back a cry but stood fast. Threads of blood trickled downward from the stripe like jewels from a delicate choker.
“What else?” Shiva paced before her. “What at AhlZel?”
Ra’s voice shook. “I insulted Jak’s sex.”
A sigh of displeasure hissed through Shiva’s teeth. “No.” Her voice was tinged with impatience and a barely controlled anger. “You spare words to spare your conscience. You will enumerate your transgressions just as they were committed, leaving out nothing.”
Ra nodded and swallowed, taking a tremulous breath. “I said to Jak, ‘You have breasts and a womb. You are female.’”
Shiva bent the switch in the middle, now observing Ra with a sort of passionless curiosity. “And how was this a transgression?”
“Jak chooses to be neither male nor female. I meant to demean Jak’s body.”
Ra couldn’t refrain from flinching as Shiva came close. Instead of striking again, however, the Meer clutched the switch in her mouth and took hold of the collar of Ra’s kaftan in both fists. As Shiva’s gloved fingers yanked the collar open, the fabric tore and exposed Ra’s breasts. Shiva took the switch from between her teeth and trailed it over Ra’s bare skin, raising gooseflesh. The switch stroked her intimately while scraping against her flesh, and Ra squirmed.
Shiva kept her cold eyes on Ra’s, her expression derisive. “Is this how you meant to make Jak feel?”
Ra nodded and lowered her eyes, but Shiva struck the flat of the switch beneath Ra’s chin to force her to keep her head steady. The stripes she’d cut in Ra’s flash were beginning to burn like acidic fire.
Shiva stared at her a moment in silence, and then pressed the tip of the switch to Ra’s collarbone. “Continue.”
Ra’s stomach roiled with uneasiness, bile rising into the back of her throat, but she pressed on. There was no turning back now. “I ordered Ahr to impregnate Jak.”
Shiva raised a dark eyebrow. “Ahr, whom you love?”
“Ahr, whom I love.”
Shiva seemed to ponder this. “And this Ahr also loves Jak but no longer loves you. Isn’t that so?” The cruel half smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “And you, pathetic Meer, envied them both.”
Ra nodded without meeting Shiva’s eyes. There was nothing she could hide from her, though centuries and distance had separated them.
“And how was this to be accomplished?” Shiva idly stroked one leather glove against Ra’s breast.
Ra swallowed bile, clammy sweat breaking out on her forehead. “I struck Jak to the ground, and Ahr also, to impregnate Jak.”
Shiva moved swiftly, slapping Ra across her bleeding cheek with the sting of leather, green eyes dark with disapproval. “You begin to anger me. Must I make you clarify every detail?”
“I willed him…” Ra squeezed her eyes shut, muscles clenching, afraid she was about to be ill. She had to say the words, though they destroyed her. “I willed him…to rape Jak.”
The blow came without warning, cutting a diagonal stripe across Ra’s breast. This time she couldn’t contain the cry. Before the sound had fully formed, Shiva struck again, crossing this mark with its opposite. With a gasp, Ra opened her eyes and met the judgment in Shiva’s, making no more attempts to prevaricate.
Shiva’s skin seemed translucent and hard as glass. “And you knew Jak’s pain. You knew what Jak had suffered as a child.”
Ra had no idea how Shiva had divined what Jak had suffered. It didn’t matter. “I knew.”
Shaking her head, Shiva repeated the stinging blows to the breasts, sharper than the first, eliciting another unbidden cry from Ra. Red streamed from the pair of crosses like Meeric tears. Ra struggled to steady her breathing.
“And what did you do then?”
Ra swayed on her feet. “Ahr resisted me, and I was angry at his power, and Jak
—Jak was already defeated.”
“So you left Jak alone.” Shiva slowly circled her, bending and unbending the switch.
“No.” Ra’s face was hot with shame. “I chose to inflict more cruelty on Jak because I feared Ahr. I said the name to Jak that I knew was of itself an assault.” Ra couldn’t contain a cry of fear as Shiva gripped her by the shoulders and spun her about. The Meer slipped her instrument of punishment between the sharp wire bindings, and they fell away like melted wax.
Shiva spun Ra to face her once more, striking at Ra’s insteps with the sides of her boot to widen Ra’s stance and plant Ra firmly before her. “Pull up your vestments.”
Ra obeyed, drawing the hem of the garment to her waist with stiff fingers. Shiva’s switch struck her across the hips, adding another filament of blood.
Ra continued her confession without prompting, weeping, and eager for the pain. “I said to Jak, ‘Does the chivalrous Ahr know what you have had inside you?’” With a hiss of air as it fell, the switch cut a stripe through the soft hair between her legs, and Ra’s knees buckled at the sting. “‘You received his seed repeatedly.’” This time, the switch struck between Ra’s thighs and she couldn’t withhold her cry, her stance wavering as her legs nearly gave way. “‘Yet you seem to think your cunt is too good,’” she managed, and again, the switch struck between her legs. Blood, like menses, trickled down her thighs as she finished the phrase on a helpless wail. “‘For anyone else to penetrate.’”
This time Shiva struck her repeatedly between the folds of her sex, and Ra screamed against the fiery pain, her entire body convulsing as she fought to stand still for this just punishment. As Shiva struck her for the last time, a blow far harsher than any that had come before, the pain undid her and a rivulet of urine joined the blood.
Shiva regarded her with disdain, shaking her head. “How shameful.” Without pause, she struck Ra’s thighs, the switch cutting in deep. “Kneel.”
As Ra fell to her knees, the wire binding trapped her wrists behind her once more. At the limit of her endurance, and the limit of her shame, she could no longer hold up her head.
