by Jane Kindred
“I haven’t asked this of you, Merit.”
“I don’t need you to.” Merit stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back. “It’s my decision.”
“As it’s your decision to keep me prisoner?”
He turned, shaking his head. “You’re not a prisoner, meneut. I’m trying to protect you.”
“From the Court of Rhyman or from myself?”
“Do you need protection from yourself?” Merit glanced at the uneaten tray of food on the bureau. “You eat nothing, and it’s clear you have been refusing food for some time.” He raised his eyes from the tray and met her gaze in the mirror. “Look at yourself.” His voice trembled. “You’re a wraith.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Meerrá!” He’d never used Ra’s name as an oath in her presence before. His eyes were hard with anger. “Have you come back as a haunt after all? To torment me for my failure to protect you? To force me to watch you wither and die because I wasn’t there when they—?” His voice broke, and his face twisted with anguish.
“Merit—”
“When Ahr and I put you in the ground, I thought I could say good-bye to you. But this…this end you are intent upon, sire—I am sworn to uphold you till my death, and if you must quit this life, then so must I. It is my right to lay my ashes in your crypt when you are finally cremated. Forgive me, meneut, but it is the only thing I have ever asked of you.”
Ra’s weakened heart skipped a beat. “You and Ahr?” She swayed on her feet, and Merit swept forward and caught her, as always anticipating her needs. She locked her hand and arm on his. “You and Ahr buried me? And…and RaNa?”
Merit looked ill. “I couldn’t watch your degradation, my liege. We stole your bodies in the night.”
“You and Ahr,” repeated Ra, incredulous. This was more surprising than Ahr’s betrayal. More surprising than Ahr’s refusal to let her escape this life. “And yet I burned, Merit. Was that your doing also?”
Merit paled. “No, my liege. I believe it was your own.”
A memory surfaced, pain and heat rising from her core like a mournful cry. Ra closed her eyes, suppressing a shudder. “I need to see Ahr.”
The Meer had summoned him. Ahr’s stomach sank into his boots as he mounted the stairs to her room. He paused at the top outside the arch, his mouth suddenly dry as cotton.
She lay curled against her luxurious linens, eyes closed, her expression of repose giving her the illusion of her original form. MeerRa had taken Ahr here as well, more gently than her deflowering, draped against the silks and feathers. Ahr steeled himself against the useless reverie, the perfume of Ra’s power reaching across death and a dozen years, and made himself remember the bodies on the steps, shattering the scene that played in his head.
“MeerRa.” He spoke sharply, without the deference that seemed natural in this setting. The dark eyes opened, and she sat up, the ebony of her dress nearly absorbed by bedding of the blackest blue. “You sent for me.”
She looked him over as if she’d never seen him before. “You pulled me from the river.”
“I would have pulled a drowning dog from the river.”
“Even a dog you hated?” When he said nothing, she changed the subject. “Geffn told me you and Jak had taken comfort with each other.”
Ahr swallowed against the cotton in the back of his throat. “Not that it’s any of your business—or Geffn’s—but Jak had a momentary lapse of reason.” There was a bitter pun in this, as “reason” in Deltan was ra.
“I would like you to take care of Jak for me.”
His brow wrinkled at this odd request, and he stepped unconsciously closer. “How do you mean?”
“When you return to Haethfalt.”
Ahr bristled. “What makes you think I’m returning to Haethfalt?” He narrowed his gaze at her calm expression, all coal eyes in a gaunt face. She looked like a victim of famine. “Aren’t you returning to Haethfalt?”
“I’m dying, Ahr. Perhaps more slowly than I might have, thanks to you, but I imagine the Court of Rhyman will do their best to accelerate the process.”
Defiance sparked in his veins as he bridged the gap between them. She was trying to manipulate him, using her Meeric influence to bend him to her will. “Is that how you mean to punish me? To put your death once more on my head? To make me the villain of Jak’s misery?”
“Punish you?” Ra shook her head. “I meant to pay my debt to you, to Mila.”
“Mila.” Ahr’s knees nearly buckled. “What do you know of Mila?”
“Mené Mi La.” The inflection was clear.
He steadied himself against the bedpost. “You’ve been to the grave.”
“You buried her. You and Merit laid us to rest. In death, you loved her—the babe I took from you.” Her voice faltered, and he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t genuine emotion that shook it.
For more than a quarter of a century, he’d devoted his energy toward hating Ra to keep from feeling the loss of Mila, and now the memory threatened to drown him as surely as the dark Anamnesis had pulled at him as he’d swum for the shore with Ra’s hair in his fist. He couldn’t take Ra’s remorse. He didn’t want her remorse. Because it left him bare to his own.
But Ra was merciless. “I understand, finally, what I did to you, Ahr. And it’s more than I can bear.” Her breath hitched on the words. “I can’t forgive myself.”
Ahr slumped beside the bed, on his knees before the object of his life’s hatred. Her words destroyed him. Left him nothing. He wasn’t a righteous revolutionary but a mother who’d committed infanticide rather than suffer her own child’s father to love her. “Then I forgive you,” he choked out. It was absurd—that he should forgive Ra, when it was Ahr who’d done the unforgivable. He dropped his head. “It’s all I have.” The words moaned out of him in misery. “My hatred for you. But you must have that also.”
Ra put her hand over his where he clutched the bedpost, and he tried to pull away, but she invoked her Meeric strength despite her apparent frailty. “Then there is no debt between us. It is over.” She closed her fist around his knuckles, and a terrible heat built within them.
He lifted his head, crying out as the burning sensation became an unbearable pain, but Ra held on. It swelled until he thought he’d lose consciousness, making him shudder and retch as he tried to resist the wave of blackness engulfing him. And then in an instant, it was gone. He jerked his fist away from her now-ordinary hand, his arm quivering as though struck by a small bolt of lightning, and glared at her. He felt peculiar. Light.
“What have you done?” he demanded.
Ra closed her eyes and leaned back against the pillows. “I have spoken.”
Though she refused any visitors for the rest of the day, when Jak returned to Ra’s room with breakfast the following morning, the guard stepped aside without comment and let Jak pass. Ra stood at the window with her back to the doorway, her long limbs sheathed in a slim sweater and a slender pair of pants that hugged her ankles. Plain brown wool knit rose gently up the slope of her neck, traced down the spine again with her loose sling of braided black. The fabric hugged the brutal contours of her emaciated body, outlining her in the cool dawn so there was no mistaking her privation. It gave her a terrible kind of beauty.
Jak set the tray on the bureau and went to the arch, dismayed that Ra had obviously wasted her strength on conjuring, for these were garments unique to her imagination. She turned her head at the hand on her shoulder, and Jak was startled by the flush of rose in her skin, an almost robust glow beneath the terrible marks of MeerShiva.
She smiled fondly and lifted her opposite hand to Jak’s. “Are you ready to go home?”
“Home?”
“To Haethfalt. My presence here puts Merit in danger. He means to keep me like a virgin princess in a tower as if he can protect my virtue with brute strength. It’s better t
hat I go before he’s forced to choose between me and Rhyman.”
Jak hadn’t even dared to hope that Ra would come back to Haethfalt—hadn’t even been sure she would come back to herself. But she was different this morning. She was the Ra Jak knew. Except she was thin as a rail. “Are you up to the trip?”
Ra took Jak’s hand and led the way through another arch onto a balcony over the river. A table had been prepared on the stone terrace. Winter fruits of the mild Delta were split and sliced in curious hemispheres on plates of crystal: more of Ra’s artistry. Jak sat at her bidding, speechless.
“Fruit for now.” Ra placed one of the moist slices into her mouth. She’d taken the piece without first cutting it into infinitesimal portions as Geffn had said she’d done whenever he’d urged her to eat on their trip from In’La. “I promise, more later.”
She held out a slice as if to feed it to Jak. Cheeks flushed, Jak leaned forward to take it, but just as Ra slid it sensuously into Jak’s open mouth, Merit appeared in the bedroom. Jak swallowed abruptly and nearly choked on the fruit.
“Meneut.” Merit’s expression was grim as he addressed her. Jak didn’t need to understand Deltan to realize the worst had come to pass.
When he’d finished speaking, Ra confirmed it. “Rhyman is uprising.”
Twenty-Two: Exhumation
Ume propped herself on her elbow and peered gingerly down at Nesre to ascertain whether he was really asleep. He wore the same trim tuft of beard on his chin she remembered, though it was grayer now, and he’d grown softer in the years since the Expurgation. Not that he’d ever been a paragon of masculinity. His strength had been his calculating mind and his willingness to use anyone to get what he wanted. She had foolishly underestimated her patron, and it had nearly cost Ume her life—and had taken Alya’s.
It wasn’t his custom to keep her in his bed, but Ume had made it her business to exhaust him this evening so that he’d practically passed out beside her when she’d finished. Though he wasn’t one for intimate contact, the prelate had been surprised and delighted when Ume had straddled him, balanced on her knees, and penetrated herself with a crystal phallus she’d found among his keepsakes on the gilded vanity that had once been Alya’s.
It was a relic of the sacred Meeric tradition of Soth In’La that had honored coitus as a rite of the divine: the generative power of the Meeric seed as the ultimate sacrament, represented in the rites performed by the temple courtesans. She’d pretended that his gloating admission of having castrated Alya as he lay dying and used his seed to create a Meerchild for his own twisted devices had aroused her rather than sickened her to her core.
She’d found the phallus while Nesre reclined against the pillows watching her pleasure herself in the mirror, her robe gathered in her arms above her waist as she bent over the back of the vanity chair and pressed her cock between the coiling ironwork. Ume had taken the crystal in her mouth, watching Nesre’s reaction in the mirror, and noted his enthusiastic response.
Extricating herself from the chair, she’d let her robes fall and brought the phallus to the bed, crawling over the mattress to straddle him and bathe the crystal with her tongue. Nesre’s eyes had fairly bulged in their sockets, but he’d said nothing to stop her, stroking himself with obvious excitement as she drew the glistening phallus from her mouth, rose onto her knees and pressed it between her legs, letting it slide inside of her and disappear except for the crystal scrotum at its base hugging her own.
She could control Nesre’s fervor without touch just by tempering the speed with which she pleasured herself, and she took her time, moaning and writhing as she drew the phallus slowly out and buried it repeatedly inside her. She whispered to him to unbutton his robes and lay them open, and let his hands lie at his sides to watch until he was mad with desire. Usually far more reserved and in control, he obeyed as if mesmerized by her. When he eagerly went at himself, unable to resist any longer, she’d arched back with the phallus lodged deeply within her and brought herself to completion with a swiftly pumping fist.
The wail of mourning that wanted out as she remembered beautiful MeerAlya penetrating her instead, she channeled into a howl of sexual release, the pearly drops of semen raining over her bared midriff as she stretched backward with her head hanging upside down.
Nesre had come so hard that he’d shot his own ejaculate against her thighs with a loud shout, as though his orgasm had taken him by surprise. As he fell back onto the pillows with a groan and closed his eyes, Ume straightened languidly and climbed over him, collapsing facedown against the pillows beside him—the phallus still inside her so he could admire it as she moaned softly against her veil and pretended to drift off.
Ume watched him now, satisfied that he was fast asleep. He’d grown a bit fatter in his middle years, and lying on his back, his mouth went slack, a bit of saliva pooling at the corner of his beard, as he breathed out in a soft snore. She’d thought him somewhat attractive when he was younger, but though he wasn’t significantly changed, all she saw now was ugliness, the vile, putrescent core of him eclipsing his outward appearance. She stifled the urge to smother him with a pillow. He’d wake before she accomplished it, and he was still strong, physically; it was only morally that he was a weak, repugnant wretch.
She worked the phallus carefully out of her and set it aside, retying her robe in a nod to modesty—though if luck remained on her side, no one but the child would see her—before delicately lifting from his rising and falling chest the chain that held the key. He didn’t stir.
Ume avoided the other pendant, and by excruciating degrees, managed to work the chain over his head without waking him. She slipped out of bed with the key clutched in her hand and hurried through the temple. Though heavily guarded in the outer chambers, there were no guards in the interior of the former Meeric quarters. Ume planned to sneak the child out through a river-facing window. The temple grounds above the bank would be nothing but marsh this time of year, and they could slip through the reeds into the Anamnesis itself and disappear into the darkness. And after that, she’d worry about how to find Cree.
Without direct light, it was difficult to find the opening on the panel of the cage, and Ume felt nearly all the way around the box before her fingers at last tripped over the lock facing the back of the room. There was even a window along this wall that a child would certainly be able to crawl through, and Ume was petite and limber enough that she thought she could manage it too.
Her fingers shook as she seated the key in the lock and turned it, afraid the little snick as it opened must be heard throughout the temple, though it was only the silence of the night that made it seem that way. For a moment as she creaked the door open, she saw the child, disoriented with sleep, as it raised its head, and then a firm hand closed over her mouth from behind, pulling her back against her apprehender with a jerk, and the door was slammed in her face.
Ume struggled and turned her head to see Nesre glaring down at her with fury in his eyes. He turned the key in the lock and slipped his hand from her mouth to her arm, squeezing her biceps in his grip.
“I should have known. Once a Meerist whore, always a Meerist whore.”
Ra sat patiently on the bed while Merit and Ahr argued over the best way to defend a temple designed to be defenseless. It was as if they’d forgotten she herself had designed it. Ludtaht Ra had needed no defense in the time of Ra because Ra was invincible. To step through its wide, open arches was to be in the presence of a god. And even without Merit and the Temple Guard, no one would have dared to raise a hand to MeerRa, knowing he had only to speak and his words would go forth to strike his enemies down.
That is, until the templars had devised the simple plan of setting upon him while he was weakened by his own gluttony. How ironic that it was now Ra’s failure to eat that weakened her, when gluttony had once been the Meer’s undoing.
“They’re all talk,” Merit insisted for the dozen
th time. “They haven’t the balls to storm the temple.”
“We were all talk once before,” Ahr reminded him. “Talk becomes bravado when enough fools are engaged in it. Sooner or later, someone will act instead of only hurling words—and the rest will feel emboldened.”
“To speak is to create,” Ra agreed.
Merit threw her a stern look. “Which is why you must remain here under my protection, my liege. More Meericry would only incense them further.”
She smiled sadly. “And how long can you keep me like a beast in a cage, dear Merit, before they demand to see the monster for themselves?”
“This isn’t just about you,” said Ahr. “They want Merit’s head as well.”
“Because they believe him to be harboring a Meer. Which he is.”
“They believe,” said Merit, “that you are a reanimated corpse seeking retribution.” He swallowed. “And if they see you, they’ll see they’re not far wrong. Promise me you will stay out of sight.”
Ra sighed. “I give you my word.” It was as good as binding herself in this room. She’d spoken.
Leaning against the frame of the arch, Jak fidgeted restlessly, long fingers combing through the birch-bark hair. “So what’s the plan?”
Ahr glanced at Jak. “Sorry. I keep forgetting you don’t speak Deltan. Merit believes we have enough loyal men among the Temple Guard to keep the perimeter secure. But if we have to defend against a direct assault, I’m not sure that’s going to be enough.”
“Wouldn’t it make sense to get Ra out of here, then? They’re going to egg each other on eventually.”
Ahr nodded. “That’s precisely what I said. But Merit thinks her presence here is irrelevant. This is more a challenge to his authority, and the longer he can hold them off, the more solidified his claim will become.”
Jak’s head shook in consternation. “Why does he even want it? Why don’t we all just get out of here? Let them have the temple.”
“Because it’s mine.” Ra’s voice seemed to startle them all. “Rhyman is mine, and she deserves better than the parasitic templars in solicitors’ clothing strangling the life out of her. I have given her to Merit.”
