Idol of Bone

by Jane Kindred

  “Yes, meneut.” Merit didn’t bother to correct her use of the feminine pronoun. He found it difficult enough to remember. And now here was Ra, his lord, in the form of a woman. It was peculiar how little it mattered.

  Jak sat up, blinking in the darkness, and tried to make sense of what was happening. A sound like thunder inside the jail cell had interrupted a fitful sleep. The door of the cell stood open—or rather, was held open—held aloft by someone, torn from its hinges. The dark, dreadful figure holding the door by its iron bars was Ra.

  “Mené Jak.” She shook her head at the costume Jak had been forced to wear. “Poor Jak. What have they done to you?” She set the door aside as if it were made of paper and stepped into the cell.

  Jak’s face was covered by the virgin’s veil. It had been easier to leave it in place than to fight over it every time the guards made their rounds, and it made less trouble for Ahr’s friend Merit.

  Ra drew Jak from the stone cot and unwound the cloth of the veil and head covering. Her hand lingered at Jak’s cheek in a gesture so tender that Jak nearly blushed like the virgin for whom the cloth was intended. Something had happened to Ra. She had a peculiar look in her eyes, and her face was scored with Meeric tears, but beneath the stains were vicious marks as if a wild animal had attacked her.

  “Ra,” breathed Jak at last, fighting a preposterous urge to kneel before her. She had the look of a god. Jak could think of nothing else to say.

  Ra pulled the veil away with a sudden jerk that burned Jak’s skin. “No more of these!” she shouted. “I want to see their faces!” She turned to the other cell where Ahr stood watching and stroked her fingers slowly over the bars as she moved along the length of it.

  Merit hovered behind her, and Jak drew close to him, rubbing at the chafed flesh, and, forgetting the minister didn’t speak Mole, whispered, “Is she mad?”

  “All the Meer are mad,” said Ahr from his cell.

  Ra tore away Ahr’s door and stood staring at him with the twisted metal in her hand. Tension filled the small jail like the static charge in the air before a strike of lightning. Neither spoke.

  Shouts came from the halls above. Ra turned away from Ahr and ascended, taking the door with her, clanging against the stairs. Merit hurried after her and Jak exchanged a brief look of silent communion with Ahr before following in their wake. As adamant as Ahr had been that he would have nothing to do with Ra, it was clear he wasn’t going anywhere. He’d seen what Jak had in Ra’s eyes.

  In the domed greatroom above, the Prelate of Rhyman, flanked by two of his court solicitors, swept over the tiles in his majestic robes as Merit overtook Ra and stepped before her. Merit had failed Ra once, but he would serve her now unerringly, no matter the consequence.

  “Lord Minister!” The prelate was red-faced with outrage. “What is the meaning of this? You are expected to keep the security of Our Court!”

  “I am sworn to my duty,” said Merit.

  Ra moved Merit aside, still holding the iron door as if it were nothing, and the prelate faltered, aghast. “Templar Vithius. By what right do you claim this as your court?”

  Vithius rounded on Merit. “Lord Minister, who is this person?”

  “Do you not know me?” asked Ra before Merit could answer.

  “Know you? Of course I don’t know you, woman.” He gave her a look of contempt. “Get her out of here, Merit, before I have you removed from your post.”

  “Merit is not your servant. He is mine.” Ra took a step toward him. “I did your bidding, templar, for time out of mind. I followed your precepts, but for one indiscretion. And you repaid me with treachery.”

  The prelate took a step back as she advanced. From the perimeter of the court, scattered members of the Guard were hovering, looking to Merit for instruction. He shook his head in warning.

  Vithius jerked his head at a pair of them. “Arrest this woman. Arrest them both. Lord Minister Merit is relieved of duty.”

  Merit unsheathed his sword as they approached Ra, but she held her hand against the flat of the blade and pushed it away. The guardsmen hesitated.

  “You do not know me?” she asked the prelate once more.

  The prelate’s face was pale, but he stood his ground. “What are you waiting for? Arrest her!”

  Merit’s men stepped in and drew their short swords. “Put down your weapon, sir.” The guardsman before him was apologetic. Several more were advancing. Merit glanced at Ra.

  She touched his arm in reassurance. “Stand down, Merit.” But her eyes were still on the prelate.

  His desire to obey her won out over his desire to protect her, and he set his sword on the deep blue sea of the tile, despondent. The men of his former command took hold of him, but still they hesitated at the sight of Ra.

  “You do not know me?” Ra’s terrible visage darkened as she advanced again. “I filled your belly, as I see, until it was swollen on Rhyman’s bread.”

  “You’re a madwoman.” Vithius backed away. “Take her!”

  “I filled your purse with gold taken from the mouths of starving infants.”

  “Guards!”

  Ra released the door as if only just remembering she held it in her hand, and it clattered against the polished tile with a deafening reverberation as she came close to him. When the noise died down, she spoke again in a voice that was nearly a whisper, and yet in the stillness of the court, it carried clearly. “My daughter’s braid was in your hand before you dashed her skull against the steps.”

  His eyes grew wild with fear.

  Ra grasped the prelate by the ruff of his ceremonial collar and lifted his feet off the ground. “Do you know me, Prelate Vithius?”

  “MeerRa?” The word was torn from his throat in a shriek of hysteria. A dark stain spread over the noble gown of office at his thighs.

  “Ah, you know me after all. At least I’ve given you the honor of knowing who it is that strikes you down.” She looked into his eyes, and he screamed like a terrified child, his legs kicking in the air. “Destroy.” The word was quiet and simple. It belied the power in it.

  A tremor shunted through Merit’s insides, threatening to release like the prelate’s incontinence in a violent expulsion as his men forgot him and let go of his arms. The air in the temple had gone still.

  A ripple of something terrible swept through the court, a tearing of the elemental fabric of matter. It was as if the world were nothing but a great pond into which Ra had thrown a tremendous stone of sound. It was a sound nearly too deep for the human ear to process, a sound that no one could describe later, that no one wanted to describe—the monster’s growl of a great cyclone, the rumble before a decimating quake, the shudder of a volcano as it vomited up an explosive eruption of molten earth. But it was worse than that. Much worse. It was obscene.

  Within the deep bass of the resonance, another sound emerged like a keening whine that seemed to be emanating from the horrified prelate—not from his mouth, but from every atom of his body. The sharp whine rose to a pitch that nearly split Merit’s eardrums and would have shattered the windows had they been filled with glass. The prelate struggled within Ra’s grasp, clutching at her fingers at his throat—or perhaps convulsed involuntarily—and began to foam at the mouth, a thick, black bile bubbling over his lips in a steady pulse as if he were boiling. His eyes were fixed on the madness in Ra’s.

  Merit tried to look away, fighting the natural urge of his body to run, but Ra’s word seemed to hold them all there, transfixed, while the prelate’s matter came apart in impossibly slow motion. For that horrible instant, it seemed that every solid thing had undergone a catastrophic liquefaction, sundered by the sound. Only the sudden ceasing of time and gravity kept their substance from pouring to the ground.

  And then time resumed once more and the room was spattered with a terrible spray of wet matter, its parts minute and unidentifiable
. The prelate was no more.

  No one moved. The two solicitors who’d edged away while Ra advanced on the prelate were backed against the wooden stall. She turned her face toward them, covered in flecks of the prelate’s debris.

  “Rhyman is no longer yours. Flee while I am tired.”

  They gave her no argument, running in abject terror from the temple grounds with the remainder of the Guard. The rest had already slunk away.

  Merit picked up his sword and cleaned it on his coat, though the coat too was spattered, keeping his eyes averted from her. He’d seen Ra grant vetmas, seen him conjure matter where none had been before, but he’d never witnessed anything like this. He never wished to again.

  He approached her with his sword sheathed, his stomach roiling. She might destroy him next, but he would serve her to the end.

  “Have you come to take your throne again, my liege?” His voice echoed against the tiled walls in the petrified silence.

  Ra’s eyes, so terrifying a moment before, softened into a heartbreaking fondness. “The Meer are no more, Merit.” She placed her hand on his cheek and shook her head. “I have come to give it to you.”

  “To me?” He felt his face blanch beneath its coating of grume. “Meneut—”

  Ra’s countenance swiftly changed yet again. “Katísch Ahr?” She turned and scanned the bloodstained court.

  Just inside the corridor from the jail, Ahr’s friend Jak stood pressed against the column near the stairs, eyes shut tight. Ahr had vanished. For a terrified moment, Merit thought Ra’s word had destroyed him also.

  At the anterior courtyard arch, another falender stood watching them, weary and stunned. Like Ra’s, his clothes were soaked, as though he’d climbed with her from the Anamnesis.

  “Geffn,” said Ra. “Katísch Ahr?”

  The young falender jumped, as if a statue had addressed him. Ra repeated her question in his language, and he jerked his eyes toward the darkness behind him.

  She swept past the young man, dropping her hand in reassurance on his head as her terrible form passed by. Ra descended the column of steps that led to the Anamnesis, where once the Meer had walked hand in hand with his daughter to persuade her to swim.

  Ahr waited at the bottom of the steps, watching the flow of the river. He didn’t turn at the sound of Ra’s bare footsteps on the stone.

  She spoke behind him. “Remember Ahr.” His arteries constricted with apprehension. Ra had come to kill him as well. “Only then did you let me see you.” She grasped Ahr’s wrist, sending a wave of shock through him, and held his fingers splayed before her so the ring he wore glistened in the moonlight. “Did you, afterward, take this from her body? Was it difficult to wrest her hand from under me?”

  Ahr met her eyes without flinching. “Your man Merit gave me the ring. He too wanted what I’d done to be remembered. And so you have, haven’t you, Ra? Your memory is whole.”

  “Yes,” said Ra, and then she struck Ahr across the face with a blow that would have sent him flying had she not held him captive by the wrist.

  Ahr hung from her grip, looking up at her through a blinding corona of pain, waiting for her to finish him.

  “That was for RaNa. And this,” Ra said, “is for Mila.” She released him, and Ahr slumped to the ground, stunned. Ra had stepped down into the river and submerged herself beneath the water. Ahr watched, waiting for her to resurface, trying to understand what this meant. How had she known of Mila’s name? Another thing taken from his head.

  The blackness of the river remained undisturbed.

  “Ra,” said Ahr, as though she still stood beside him, and then cried out, “Ra!” He reeled as he tried to stand. Ra’s death could not be on his conscience twice. Dizzy from the force of her rebuke, he fell into the water and dove beneath its darkness, searching for her with his hands. He was ineffectual, dragged downstream by the current, struggling already with the need for air.

  Something brushed his arm beneath the water, recalling the touch of fingers from beneath the silk of a golden litter. He grabbed for the fleeting image as young Ahr had once grabbed for the hand of a Meer to alter their fates forever.

  His fingers closed on something slippery, like an underwater snake, which instinct nearly caused him to release in horror until he recognized it as Ra’s hair. He wrapped his fingers in it and surged toward the surface against the desperate mutiny in his lungs that were threatening to inspire water, confused and terrified that he didn’t know which way was up, but propelled there at last by the buoyancy of his body.

  He drank in great draughts of air as he came up, dragging the clutch of hair toward the surface. The lengths of it seemed endless, and he plumbed its depths frantically until at last Ra’s head broke the dark surface of the river, still and unresponsive.

  Ahr swam for the bank with Ra’s chin held above water in the crook of his arm, fighting not only the pull and cold of the river, but the disorientation of his reeling head and the blurring of his vision. Exhausted, he reached the bank and hauled Ra’s body with him. She was motionless and limp, and Ahr was startled by her insubstantiality. He turned her head and cleared her airway with his fingers. A stream of river water poured out of her, but her chest neither rose nor fell.

  “Damn you, Ra!” he shouted. “I will not be responsible for this!” He lowered his mouth to her cold lips and forced air into her. She would live. She must live. He breathed this way for her again and again, heedless of the passing time.

  With a heave and an expulsion of a great lungful of water, Ra breathed at last, coughing and gasping in the cold night air. Another renaissance.

  She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “Ahr,” she murmured, touching him as though he were an image in a dream. “How I loved you, Ahr.” Her eyes fell shut once more.

  This was the cruelest blow of all.

  He lifted her, nearly nothing in his arms, and climbed the bank toward the glowing arches of the temple. Jak, in the absurd dress, stood in the courtyard, and Ahr placed his burden in Jak’s arms, passing without a word into the gore-stained atrium.

  The Meerchild shook with fear as it stroked the colored sticks across the leaves of paper. It had only ever drawn in shades of black, juxtaposing darkness against light to illuminate the images it saw. Now it had a palette of vivid reds and oranges to convey the horror of the disintegration of Prelate Vithius. It used them liberally, marking every surface of the glittering tile of Ludtaht Ra with tiny specks of color, streaks that dripped in smudges of pigment as it ran from the walls.

  Beneath this violent palette, it had lavished blues and aquamarines and burnished golds, delicately sketching out the court of Temple Ra with the same earnestness with which the ancient Ra had raised it from the ground with his own words. When it drew, the Meerchild felt its blood humming with the collective knowledge of the Meer and forgot all else. The Meeric river of memory and madness was the child’s to swim in as long as its fingers moved over the paper canvas. The dark mirror surrounded it. The stories danced. The child drew.

  When the glory and horror of Ludtaht Ra were complete, the Meerchild began another set of drawings. Once again, it brought the dark goddess’s face to life in dark colors and light. It sketched her dripping from the Anamnesis as she prowled over the white marble steps. It sketched her tearing the great iron doors from the prison cells in the temple’s belly. It sketched her advancing upon the terrified Rhymanic prelate, and raising him off his feet before she spoke the word.

  The Meerchild hardly noticed that, like the terrified prelate, it had wet itself as it drew the terrible face of Ra’s destructive power, until the liquid pooled toward its pictures and it had to move them to the other side of the dark room. It was only a momentary disturbance, though in the back of its mind, the child knew it would be punished. But no punishment could matter while it drew.

  The child was so engrossed in its creation that the Master�
��s entrance took it by surprise. It looked up at Prelate Nesre, the wet cotton tangled at its thighs and the room piled with the brilliant shades of the new pastels on the dozens of pictures it had drawn. It was too late to hide the ones in which Ra’s form was depicted in such detail. It was too late to obliterate the images and stuff them beneath the pallet with the others that had revealed her surroundings and shown more than her face.

  The Meerchild scooted back toward the soiled pallet, and its foot slipped against the edge, pushing it back just enough that the soggy remains of the sundered drawings beneath it were revealed. The Master advanced upon it with quiet rage. He struck the child aside and lifted up the pallet, his eyes widening as he saw how much had been kept from him.

  “You son of a bitch!” he snarled, forgetting himself and using words. “You filthy mongrel bastard!” He reached for the Meerchild, murder in his eyes as he took hold of it by the throat, and then the new images of Ra caught his attention. He forgot the child and picked up the drawings, perusing them with a look of dawning shock at what they depicted.

  After studying them carefully, he took them all up, took the Meerchild’s pastels and charcoal and the lovely box of drawing paper, and closed them all into the tin. A slight and tentative smile was growing on his face, and the child could sense his pleasure, triumphant that he now knew exactly whom to look for and where to do it.

  He left the child alone in the dark room that reeked of its shameful accident, forgetting that, for a moment, he’d intended to kill it. He’d even forgotten he’d spoken words in the child’s presence.

  The Meerchild stared at the locked door as the Master disappeared into the halls of the temple it had never seen outside its cage.

  “Not a mongrel bastard!” It whispered the shout when the Master was out of earshot. “Not a mongrel bastard! Pearl!” As if to prove it, two perfect, glistening, golden-white orbs slipped out of the blood that ran from Pearl’s eyes and scattered on the ground.

  “What is it you keep in that box of yours?” Ume lounged on Nesre’s bed in the red silk robe he’d given her that she suspected had belonged to a solicitor, but which she’d managed to dress up with a cream chiffon scarf worn like a cummerbund in front and tied in a large bow at the back. Nesre had given the scarf to her for a veil, and she’d cut off the end of it for that purpose, fixing the top corners in her hair with a pair of amber- and amethyst-encrusted combs he’d also provided—a memento, he said, of the dead RaNa. She whispered a prayer to the Meeress before she put them on.