Idol of Bone

by Jane Kindred

  Near sundown, he counted the Deltan money in his pockets. He’d have to find an inn and try again in the morning. Perhaps he could try to ask the innkeeper where to purchase coal, find some way of conveying it to him, even if he had to draw him a picture. As he dragged himself toward the row of storefronts and places of commerce, a figure shuffled past him: an old woman, bent and dirty, and carrying a bucket of black stone.

  Geffn couldn’t believe his luck. He turned to follow her, but somehow she’d gotten far ahead of him, disappearing into the crowd retreating from the industrial district toward town. He pursued her and saw her again, emerging on the far side of the road beneath the shadow of an overgrown tangle of trees scraping the paved path. She disappeared into the recesses of an indistinct building, and he ran across the street and grasped the grate where she entered. It was unlocked. He jumped down into the basement, wondering how the old woman could manage the descent. A dim light glowed within the interior cell, and a door was standing open, as if she were waiting for him.

  In the smoky haze from the coal woman’s fire as he entered cautiously, he saw two women seated in the corner. He stared at the first, unable to take his eyes away. She was a majestic creature, long-limbed, bare-armed, and nearly brutal in her beauty, with hair of a curious hue between sable and red wine. The gleaming tresses surrounded both her and the body of the woman who sat before her: Ra. Or—perhaps not. This woman was naked and rested her head on the other’s bosom, her own mane of black subsumed by the hair of the other. Only the ripe-olive eyes made him certain it was Ra. Her face was unrecognizable. Even without the dark stripes of some terrible attack marring her cheeks, she was different, older—or younger—he wasn’t sure.

  “My…god,” he managed.

  The majestic woman spoke. “This man is known to you?”

  Geffn wasn’t sure if she spoke in Mole, or if he suddenly understood this bit of cadent Deltan.

  Ra stirred and looked at him. “Yes, MeerShiva. He is one of the mound dwellers of Haethfalt.”

  “Time to go home, then.”

  Ra climbed up from the protection of abundant hair. When she stood, he saw that she was drawn and thin, on the verge of starvation.

  MeerShiva read his dismay. “She will not eat. Only a little milk. It may sustain her for a time.” She rose and touched Ra’s shoulders, and a dark skein of wool seemed to unroll from her fingertips, clothing Ra in a long, straight dress like the one she’d sewn herself—but this dress lay against her form to reveal the lack of it, a funeral shroud.

  His insides twisted. She came close to him, and he put his fingertips lightly on the gashes at her cheek. “What happened to your face?”

  “I struck her,” said MeerShiva, and he didn’t dare ask more.

  Ra lowered her head, and Geffn thought she was trying to hide the wounds, but she was bowing to the Meer.

  “That part of your quest is ended, child,” said the Meer. “Leave expurgation to the past.”

  “Yes, MeerShiva.” Ra didn’t lift her head until the splendid woman came to her.

  “And as for the remainder of your quest, there is something I can give you. In the beggars’ graveyard outside Rhyman, you will find what you seek.”

  Ra looked up at her, the gaunt face twisting with emotion. Whatever the Meer had given her with this information, it clearly meant something vital to Ra.

  “I’ll take care of her,” Geffn promised. “We’ll go to the graveyard if you like, Ra, on our way home.”

  “Yes,” said MeerShiva. “Take care. But you will not take care of Ra. This woman has the power to crush your skull between her fingers—or bring down the whole of Rhyman should she choose to believe it.”

  They stayed the night at the inn he’d seen earlier. Ra didn’t speak as they lay together of necessity in the overstuffed bed. He dared to wrap his arms around her while they slept, aching at the slight feel of her body. In the morning, she permitted him to hold her, his arms crossed over her chest and hugging her spooned to his body while she stared at the white square of the window. He bowed his head to her hair while she lay shrouded in thought.

  “I was worried,” he said after a bit. “I thought you’d perished in the storm. When it cleared, I went looking for you. I found Jak at Mound Ahr. They were together…comforting one another.”

  “Yes, Ahr needs comfort.”

  “They were lovers, Ra. They didn’t notice or care that you were out in the storm.”

  She turned halfway and looked up at him. “Jak and Ahr?” She seemed to contemplate it with curiosity. “That will be good for Ahr.” She breathed slowly in his arms as if coming to life. “Do you know who I am?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Ah, Geffn.” She shook her head. “You cannot know.”

  In’La was the last place in the world Cree had ever wanted to see. Alya’s “magic” was everywhere—in the steam-driven coaches and bi-wheeled conveyances that clogged the streets, in the glass lamps burning invisible gases that lit the street corners after dark, and in dozens of odd little clockwork gadgets being sold in the Market. Novelties, mostly, it seemed, but a few looked to have practical uses. The Meer’s legacy lived on, though his people had despised him.

  Cree tried to shut out the memory of Alya being struck across the face by an iron bar in the hand of a templar, and Ume, dragged naked onto the temple steps, splattered in his blood and brain matter. Cree’s part in the Expurgation sickened her, but that her own misguided hatred had nearly gotten Ume killed was something she’d never quite forgiven herself for.

  Ume had tried to tell her that the templars were using them, Nesre chief among them. But because of her bitterness toward the ruling class and her arrogance in the wisdom of her own beliefs, Cree had refused to listen. She’d said terrible things to Ume in the days before the uprising. And somehow, Ume had forgiven her and come back to her, after everything.

  It had taken all Cree had in her not to pull the trigger while she waited in the brush to let Pike capture Ume on the road to Soth Rhyman. She knew Ume was right. It was the only way. But it was killing her to think of Ume being returned to the temple. Cree barely remembered the time she’d spent there; Nesre had kept her drugged much of the time in his hospital wing, prescribing odd tinctures and remedies to “cure” her of her “mental illness”. But she knew it had been months. Long enough, after all, for her to realize she was carrying a child…and to lose it.

  Cree shivered, pulling up the collar of her coat against the wind, though the breeze was fairly mild, as she wove through the crowds to an inn on Lower Bank Street. She’d chosen an area she hadn’t frequented when she lived here, but she wasn’t taking any chances on someone recognizing her. Tipping the bill of her hat lower over her eyes, she ducked her head and entered the inn, nearly stumbling into a couple coming out.

  “Sorry,” she said gruffly, eyes averted, but something made her turn as the woman passed her, and she gasped at the appearance of vicious marks on her cheeks beneath a dark hood. Both of them eyed each other with a kind of panic, and then the couple slipped away. Apparently, Cree wasn’t the only one who’d come to hide out in the southbank.

  The Meerchild still produced nothing. Nesre was growing tired of its petulance. He’d brought the child extra treats—berries and cream poured over the usual porridge, and a bag of pistachio nuts—but changed his mind when the child steadfastly ignored his efforts to coax it out of its melancholy. He took both the bowl of porridge and the little cloth bag away with him, leaving the child staring after him with a forlorn expression. The child would eat when it drew again.

  As he walked swiftly back toward his private office, a messenger approached announcing the Meerhunter, Pike. Nesre scowled. He’d heard nothing from Pike since he’d let Ume Sky slip from his clutches. He had a great deal of nerve showing his face in In’La.

  “Send him in.” Nesre entered the receiving room and
dropped heavily into his throne, his mood already spoiled by the difficult child now doubly so at the reminder of Pike’s failure. Short of arriving with Ra’s head in his fist, the Meerhunter had become worse than useless to him.

  “Your Excellency.” Pike bowed with an artful flourish as he entered, as though he were cock of the walk.

  “You have sixty seconds to explain why I shouldn’t have you whipped and pilloried.”

  Pike straightened with an amused smile and gestured behind him. Two of his hired men entered—with a peasant between them, some boy Pike had inexplicably brought to Nesre’s receiving room. The peasant gave him a hard stare out of a pair of amber eyes that could belong to none other than the wayward Ume Sky. Nesre straightened, his mood considerably improved.

  “Cillian Rede.” His lip twitched with amusement, knowing how Ume hated to be addressed by the name she was born to. “As I live and breathe.”

  “For the moment,” sneered Ume, as if she could ever be in a position to threaten him.

  Pike was waiting expectantly.

  “Well done, Pike. You’ve managed to complete at least one small task I gave you.” Nesre nodded to the steward. “Pay him the bounty.” He rose and gestured to Ume as he turned toward his quarters. “Follow me, Mr. Rede.” The Court of In’La was well guarded. There was no chance that Ume would escape.

  Nesre unhooked the tie on the heavy curtain at the arch of his private rooms and let it fall as Ume entered. It had seemed blasphemous, despite the just destruction of the Meer, to add doors to the priceless structures built of Meeric imagining, but privacy was a greater consideration for a real man, so he’d installed the curtain as a concession to modesty.

  He circled the former courtesan slowly, taking in her rough appearance from weeks on the run and measuring the toll the years had taken on her. He had to conclude she’d hardly changed at all, only grown more elegant, truly a woman despite the misfortune of birth. Nesre pulled off her knit cap and let the infamous tawny hair tumble down about her shoulders—a bit the worse for travel, but still stunning. The palms of her hands bore faint marks of reddish brown flourishes, as though she still painted on the henna tattoos of the courtesan after all this time.

  “So I hear you’ve found yourself another sacred patron.”

  “As I told your man Pike repeatedly—while he was burning me with the tip of a red-hot knife and trying to drown me—I’ve done no such thing. This Meer you imagine to be haunting the highland waste is, if he exists, unknown to me.”

  “And yet you just happen to show up in the same part of the world as this renaissanced Meer.”

  “Renaissanced?” She actually looked surprised. “Is that even possible?”

  Nesre regarded her. “With the Meer, apparently, anything is possible.” He shook his head, bemused. “You really have no idea. The fugitive is MeerRa of Rhyman.”

  Ume’s eyes widened. “Oh.” She exhaled the word as if something had clicked in her head that had been eluding her.

  “Oh?”

  She pressed the fingers of one graceful hand against her lips a moment, as if to stop the word belatedly from escaping, and then sighed with resignation. “We saw Azhra in Mole Downs.”

  Nesre’s brow furrowed. “Azhra?”

  “The former consort of MeerRa.”

  “Ah. The mother of MeerRaNa: the ‘Maiden’ Ahr.” He lifted Ume’s chin, his fingers resting intimately beneath it. “Another who used the title liberally.” Nesre smiled. “Curious, indeed.”

  They traveled upriver toward Rhyman on foot along the far bank of the Anamnesis to avoid curious eyes and slept among the yellow reeds, but Geffn couldn’t persuade Ra to eat. Though he attempted it each time they rested, offering her the fruit and bread he carried with him, she regarded him sadly, as though she were sorry for him.

  It took them eight days to reach the traffic of the capital. Ra was a wraith when they arrived at the sprawling edges of its splendor. He pleaded with her to eat, and she appeased him with swallowing half a crust of bread. The beggars’ graveyard was here on the far bank also—symbolically as well as physically separated from the hallowed ground of Rhyman. They waited until sunset to climb the bank to the humble portal formed of iron and reed, too unprotected to risk during daylight.

  Ra moved among the rows of unmarked graves and others marked with crude wooden posts, the holding place for those Deltans who had either no faith in reincarnation or no money for proper cinerary rites. From the portal, he watched her, a ghost that might have risen from the mist among them. She studied each marker not so weatherworn it couldn’t be read.

  Beneath a lightning-scarred tree, she stopped and bent down to clear away the moss from a grave that held a stone instead of the painted beggar’s post. He could see her wounded face in the moonlight, her lips moving as she read the name. Then she sank down and stretched her body across the grave, putting her head upon the stone. He held himself back.

  With a sickening lurch, the earth seemed to move, and Geffn stumbled against the portal in horror as he saw Ra had somehow plunged her arms into the solid earth and was reaching into the domain of the dead. He picked himself up and ran over the graves to her, but already, through some Meeric magic, she’d laid open the plot. He covered his mouth, holding back his gorge as she exposed the remains that lay there. It was mostly skeleton and dust, a small body of a child with a terrible cleft in its skull. Ra traced the contours of the broken face with her fingers.

  “Not enough of her to burn,” she said. “Gone.”

  Geffn looked away from the corpse and read the inscription on the stone: Mene Mi La; Mila na Ahr.

  “My wonder.” Ra read for him. “Mila, daughter of Ahr.” She paused. “No, not my wonder—my horror.”

  “Daughter of Ahr.” He studied her ravaged face. “Yours also?”

  “Yes.” Ra turned back to the small body. So that had been their connection. He felt a pang of jealousy toward Ahr, for whom he already harbored an enormous debt of it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not knowing what else to say. Ra was turning the dry fingers in her hands. “Please, Ra. Let her rest.” He was alarmed at her morbidness. “Put the earth back.”

  “Her ring,” said Ra. “Someone’s taken her ring.”

  Eighteen: Catalysis

  Ahr turned the ring on his finger, unable to look at Jak. They’d been detained now for a fortnight. Despite his fluent understanding of their tongue, spoken in a native accent, Ahr was unable to produce satisfactory proof of his birth in the Delta. He could have told them who his parents were—presumably, they lived in Rhyman still—but the awkward fact of his sex prevented him. Without that proof, his blood was suspect. Perhaps he could cry for them to demonstrate his bloodless tears, he thought, and bit back hysterical laughter.

  Jak was the worse for it, removed from his cell after that first day to keep the sexes separate. That would have been laughable too, if it weren’t so depressing.

  Curled on the bunk in an awkward Deltan dress, Jak wasn’t speaking to him. They’d taken away the sexless clothes as evidence of “criminal impersonation”, and Ahr had been responsible for further humiliation. He’d told their jailers Jak was unmarried, hoping the presumption of virginity would protect Jak from the threat of assault. They had ultimately coerced Jak to wear the veil through the less personal violence of a slap in the face.

  Dinner arrived, the usual beans and mash, and with it, the Minister of Security for a monthly inspection of the jail. Ahr had seen him among the prelate’s entourage during their interrogation, but his presence hadn’t seemed significant. Now as he passed by, Ahr glanced up and realized with a start that the white-haired man was Merit, young Ahr’s silent protector.

  It was Merit who’d taken Ahr from the beggars’ encampment behind the teahouse and installed her in a humble but warm cottage when her pregnancy was discovered. She suspected the cottage had been
his home before his appointment to permanent attendance on the Meer. It should have remained so—his keep for his belongings, a place to which he might retire when he was too old to serve his master—but she’d seen no sign of personal effects, nor had he ever intruded on her in the years following the theft of Mila. Never, until the Expurgation.

  Drugged on that final feast eve to prevent him from his duty, Merit had come to the cottage in anguish the following day after the terrible discovery that met him on waking. He knew of her participation in the rebellion that had led to the Expurgation, but he offered no words of condemnation. Ahr let him in, and Merit stood in the center of the cottage, unable to speak, unable to move.

  “Let me get you some water, my liege.” Her words released him from his paralysis.

  “My liege?” His face had drained of color as he turned toward her. “I deserve no obeisance. I was sworn to protect him!” His eyes were terrible, hollow.

  She’d felt nothing but nausea since the deed was done, and now she turned to the basin and tried to vomit. In his wretchedness, he came to her and held her hair, comforting her, the assassin of his lord.

  “Oh gods, Merit,” she gasped over the basin. “How can you? How can you even look at me?”

  “He bade me to protect you also.” His words turned her insides to ash. “And I have come to ask something of you.” He stroked her hair. “Something terrible.” She waited, her knuckles white where she gripped the basin. “Help me bury him.”

  “Ai, no,” she moaned. “Please, Merit. Ask anything but that.”

  “I cannot watch them lie there, rotting like garbage in the street. I’ll drag the bodies to the graveyard myself whether you are with me or not. It will take longer. I may be caught.”

  “Merit,” she whispered. Her eyes pleaded for him not to ask this of her. But it was just. It was what she owed him.