Bad Gods, page 30
“I shouldn’t imagine so. We’d be up to our knees in gods.”
“Oh, it would be very unlikely to work on Scalentine. There are certain safeguards, you know.”
I hadn’t been on Scalentine all this time, though. I’d passed through a dozen planes or more.
“I told them,” she said, “that anything proclaimed to be a deifact is more likely to be the province of fraudsters. They left. Why people think such a thing is worth having I will never understand,” she said.
“Er... no?”
“I seek to understand how the universe works,” she said. “Attaining godhead, by comparison, lacks ambition.” She smiled, at herself, or at others’ folly, I couldn’t really tell.
“I wonder,” I said. “Would you look at something for me?”
“Certainly.”
I took off my ring, and handed it to her. She stared at it, lit up the witchlight again, and stared some more. Then she sighed.
“An object of power, no doubt, but not my field. You might find it worth talking to Mokraine.”
I walked out of the shop feeling as though my head were full of wool, and wrapped up in the middle of it were a lot of people, all shouting.
Tiresana
One evening, I had had more of a chance to heal than usual, because it was the dark of the moon, and Shakanti’s powers were weak. She retired to her rooms, and didn’t have the energy for torture. Perhaps, too, she was simply losing interest.
I struggled to the surface of a dream of swimming in river water, cool and sweet; reluctant, as always by then, to wake at all. I saw Kyrl, heavier than I remembered. Sesh. Lanky Sesh, who’d punched any man who looked at me funny.
I thought they were hallucinations – I was having them quite a lot by then. I babbled at them, saying that if they were real, I’d ask them to kill me. Because Shakanti would be back, eventually. “They say you can’t kill an Avatar,” I said, “but you just need to find out how. It’s in the scrolls, somewhere. Ranay could have found it. It was easy to kill Ranay, he wasn’t an Avatar. Hap-Canae said he loved me but he burned my love all away.”
“Shh, please, hush,” Kyrl said. She was red with shock and anger.
Sesh was crying. Somehow the sight of that brought me more to myself. I’d never seen him cry, not ever.
“Sesh.”
“It’s me, honey cake.”
“Sesh, are you really here?”
“Hush, Ebi. It is you? It really is our Ebi?”
“Please kill me.”
They looked at each other. Then Sesh got a vial from his pouch, and tilted it to my lips. “Hush, Ebi. Sssh. It’s all over now.”
Then there was blissful, painless nothing.
I woke in darkness, and realised that I was cold, but not in pain. I could feel rough cloth against my skin, binding my arms to my sides. I pulled free – my strength had come back – and felt about with my hands, realised I was not chained, but trapped; walls of stone enclosed me, no more than four inches from me in any direction.
It took me a few minutes to realise I was in a sarcophagus. I pushed against the lid, but I’d used up my strength ripping my way out of the bandages, and couldn’t shift it.
And trapped in here, I was only going to get weaker.
Was this the final punishment they had decided to visit on me? To bury me alive? I knew Avatars were hard to kill, but without water, without food, surely even an Avatar would die eventually. Just very, very slowly.
I thought of Sesh and Kyrl, and realised they must have been a dream.
Perhaps I should have been panicking, screaming, clawing at the stone, but I wasn’t. Partly it was just being out of pain; the wonderful, blissful blankness of it. What numbing pleasure it was to have only the small discomfort of chilly stone beneath me, instead of unremitting agony that paused only to be renewed.
I stopped pushing at the lid. I realised I didn’t even want to escape. I just wanted to be left there, to die in peace.
But it wasn’t to be. I heard a scraping noise, and there was a flickering line of yellow light that stung my eyes.
“Ebi. Ebi!”
“Sesh?”
“You’re alive... Praise be, you’re alive. We weren’t sure; we had to believe...”
He and Kyrl helped me out of the sarcophagus. I recognised the room.
“You’re real,” I said.
“Yes, Ebi.” Kyrl said. “We saw... oh, if I ever get the chance! What was done to you, they should die. They should all die for it.”
“You’re better,” Sesh said.
“Yes. Apart from this.” I touched the scar on my face. “That never goes. Everything else... heals. What did you do?” I said.
“A potion. It mimics death. We didn’t even know if it would work, you being... you know. An Avatar. Before we knew what they’d turned you into, we were going to use it to get you away, if we needed to. The state you were in, we were half afraid it really would kill you, but...”
“Death I’d still have thanked you for,” I said.
Sesh was looking at me with a strange, almost greedy wonder, as though I was some rare thing that might disappear any moment. “It’s true, then.”
“What is?”
“The Avatars are human. All of them, not just you?”
“Yes. And knowing it got Ranay killed. We have to get away.”
“I know.” He nodded to Kyrl, who heaved into the coffin a cloth-wrapped form.
I stared at it.
“Just in case,” Kyrl said. “I don’t know why they should ever look, but if they do, they’ll find a body here. Summer fever, poor child, and no-one to bury her. Come.”
“No,” I said. “If I leave and I’m still an Avatar, they’ll find me. We need to get to the altar-stone.”
I wasn’t sure it would work. But I knew that if they found me, we were all dead, or worse.
And almost more than escape, I wanted to rid myself of this sick, stolen power.
We crept through the corridors, keeping to the back ways, but still, we had to pass Hap-Canae’s rooms.
As it was night, we were probably safe, but nonetheless I was paralysed for precious moments, unable to go past the door, in case he should realise, somehow, even in his sleep, that I was there.
In the end they lifted me off my feet, and scurried past with me. I wondered if he had someone else in there, some other young girl, wrapped in silk, stunned with love.
She wouldn’t end up as Babaska’s Avatar, at least.
We made it to the ancient corridor. And here the obsessive secrecy of the Avatars worked for us; there were, still, no guards.
The dust rose up around us like a convocation of ghosts. I thought I could see in it the faces of all the other girls: of Velance and Jonat and Renavir, of Adissi, pleading in stone. All the soldiers who’d died for nothing. And the poor girl in the tent, whose name I couldn’t even remember.
But the words, yes, the words I could remember. I whispered them.
Insiteth
Abea
Iatenteth
Hai ena
The floor hummed against my bare feet, but for a long, dreadful moment, nothing happened. It was long enough for me to think it had all been for nothing, to think we would still be standing there when they found us. Then, the doors swung open.
The altar sat within, looking like nothing but an ancient chunk of rock.
“Give me a knife,” I said.
They looked at each other. “What do you think I’m going to do?” I said. “I need to spill some blood – my blood – on the altar-stone, to give the power back. Give me a knife, or cut me yourself, I don’t care, just hurry!”
Sesh gave me his knife and I cut my left hand, then, holding the knife awkwardly, my right. After everything the pain hardly registered. I was shaking, though, and cut a little deeper than I meant. Quickly, before the wounds could heal, I slapped my bleeding hands into the cupped dents.
It hurt so much I couldn’t even scream. My back bent like a bow, but my hands stayed on the stone as if welded there. The ring I still wore burned against my finger until I thought it would scorch the bone itself. I thought I was, finally, dying.
I felt that gaze inside my head for the last time, assessing. Go away, I thought at it. You didn’t help me. You didn’t save Ranay. You let all your worshippers suffer and you did nothing, so leave me alone!
Was it even Babaska at all, had it ever been anything but my own bewildered mind? I had no way to know, and hurt too much to care.
There was a horrible, tearing feeling inside me, as though something that had been fastened to me with a thousand threads of my own flesh and soul were being ripped away. My hands slipped from the stone and I collapsed back onto the floor.
I hurt. But I could feel all through me that I was, once again, human.
They hauled me up and we ran, me still in my bloodied burial robe, on my bruised human feet. We made it out of the temple. How many people they’d bribed to look the other way, I dread to think; it must have cost them a year’s wages and a lifetime of favours. Luckily the post of temple guard was little more than a sinecure; it meant a great deal of standing about, and polishing one’s kit, and a good pension, but no-one had attacked the temples in a hundred years. Who would dare?
We travelled through the night, under the bright, distant stars; Babaska wielding her sword against nothing; the crouched Leopard, the turning Wheel. They told me that they’d had help – from ex-priestesses of Babaska, who’d gone into hiding. From soldiers, and from whores. All of them terrified, all of them worshipping in secret, all of them risking death to save a symbol – who couldn’t save a single one of them.
I asked after Radan, and they told me he’d died, in his sleep, one night on the road. “He was worried about you, too,” Sesh said. “We told him we’d check up on you, see that all was well, and that seemed to make him happy, and next morning...”
I wanted to cry, but I didn’t seem to have any tears left in me.
We stopped at an abandoned inn on the road out of town. Sesh had stored some supplies there: food, clothes, sandmules, and a sword. It felt good to have one again, but it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.
“I’m going to Mantek,” I said. “The portal.”
They looked at each other.
“If you stay,” Sesh said, “we can tell people. Maybe we can change things.”
“I can’t. Sesh...”
“Sesh, shut up. You saw how it was. How can you ask her?” Kyrl said. “It isn’t fair.”
“No.” Sesh smiled at me, but there was regret in it. “I’m sorry, Ebi. I am.”
“You can’t fight them, Sesh. They... I tried.”
“But what will you do?” Kyrl said. “How will you survive?”
“I’m a good fighter, now. Even without being... what I was, I’m good. I can earn with that. I...” I didn’t say I could earn my living whoring, too. Sesh was always oddly prissy about such things, especially where I was concerned. “You’d be safer if you came with me.”
“Through the portal.” Kyrl frowned and fiddled with her knife. “I’ll –” she swallowed. “I’ll come with you, if you want.”
She’d risked the wrath of the Avatars for me, but the thought of leaving horrified her. A true Tiresan, Kyrl. Tiresans don’t leave.
“No,” I said. “No. Better this way; then, if they do come after me, they won’t find you. I wish I could give you something.” All the jewels and weapons and fine robes that had been hung on me, and here I was, with nothing to my name but a second-hand sword and an old ring. I kept thinking I should take the ring off, in case someone recognised it, but somehow I always forgot.
“You did give us something,” Sesh said. “We know how the Avatars were made. And we know they can be unmade.”
I gripped his hands. “Sesh. You saw what was done to me. You think they’d hesitate a moment to do the same to you if they even suspect that you know? You know what they did to Ranay. I loved him. Do you want to know how many times I cursed his name? How much I envied him his quick death? Let it go. They can’t be fought.”
Gently, he unclasped my hands. My nails had left red crescents in his flesh. “Anything can be fought.”
“You can fight a tidal wave, but it doesn’t mean you can win. Kyrl, tell him. Please.”
“He knows, lass. So do I. You get yourself away and keep safe. We’ll look after ourselves.”
We hugged, and then they rode away, and I headed to Mantek alone, feeling as hollow as a dried gourd.
Chapter Thirty
I finally ran down Mokraine outside the Blue Griffon theatre, just around the corner from Gallock’s, waiting for the actors to come out. There’s nothing like a failed audition for generating emotion.
“Mokraine.”
“Babylon, my enchantress...” His eyes were veined and wandering, his hands shaking. The familiar leaned against his leg, watching me with its three blood-drop eyes.
“Meet me in Gallock’s when you’re done here?” I said. “I’ll buy you lunch.”
He didn’t ask why, just nodded, his eyes already back on the doorway, where the sound of voices was growing louder.
I didn’t want to watch him feed. I went into Gallock’s and sat nursing a cup of thick dark coffee until he showed up, flushed and glassy. Gallock glared at the familiar, but said nothing, just banged crockery about in a pointed way.
Mokraine ate little of a good meal, his mind on other flavours. When I thought he had come down enough to pay attention, I said, “Can you tell me anything about this?” I held out my ring.
“Your ring? What do you plan to give me next? A shoe, perhaps? A feather?”
“Mokraine. It’s important. Please. I need to know what it is.”
With a shrug, he took it.
“Oh,” he said softly. “Now this... this is interesting.” Without taking his eyes off the ring, he started to poke about in his pockets with his free hand.
“What do you need?” I said.
“I used to have an eyeglass... never mind. May I put it on?”
I hesitated. It had never done anything to me that I knew of, but...
Mokraine saw the look on my face and his own, just for a moment, changed. I caught a glimpse of the man he’d been; not a good one, but a great one, with all the arrogance of someone who was the best at what he did.
He looked away. “No matter. I think the wearing of it is only part of what it is intended for.”
“Is it a... deifact?”
He gave a small cough of laughter. “A deifact! No. Almost the reverse.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wish I had my books,” he said.
“We can go to your place,” I said.
“Oh, no. I don’t have them anymore.”
“What happened to them?”
He stared into the distance. “I sold them, I think. Probably, yes. But even without them, I can tell you, this... is an object of power, but it does not contain power; it has no magic within it. It is more like a portal.”
“I’ve been wearing a portal?”
“Not precisely,” he said. “But it links to something. And whatever it links to is stronger now, or I might have noticed it before. The alignment.”
“The what?”
“The alignment. The syzygy. Here, it manifests as Twomoon. On other planes, in different ways. It is a time when things move into place, when places and powers not otherwise conjoined link like a necklace on the breast of the All. But this one, this is a Greater Syzygy. More aligns, now. More doorways open. This happens once in seven years, Babylon. It was a Greater Syzygy when I made my experiment.”
“Oh.”
“Where did it come from, this ring?” Mokraine said.
I told him what I thought he needed to know, as briefly and sharply as I could. He nodded, now and then, his gaze wandering from the ring, to my face, to somewhere far. “I don’t know why I kept it,” I said. “I didn’t wear it for a long time. I thought about selling it, sometimes, but somehow I always managed to get some food, or money, or a job, and I’d forget.”
And then, when I settled in Scalentine, I actually started using it as my seal. I suppose it had been a kind of defiance. A statement, that I was safe, and wasn’t going to run anymore.
Hah.
“Perhaps it did not want to be sold,” Mokraine said.
“How can it want anything?”
“It was created to do a certain job. It is trying to make sure that job is done.”
I was somewhat disturbed by the idea that this thing, this lump of metal and stone, had been having a hand in its own destiny. And mine, come to that.
“What is its job?”
“I believe that as a glass focuses sunlight, turning it intense and powerful, to blacken and burn, so this diffuses, radiates.”
“Diffuses what?”
“Whatever power is passed through it, of course. It is meant to take a concentrated power, and flow it out, into...” he stared at the wall. “Earth. Earth and sky.”
“Not people?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Not entirely.”
I tried to think, sipping the cooling coffee.
The ring diffused power. The power stored in the altar? Diffused it to where, and to what purpose?
But the scrolls said that the jewel created godhead. And yet, at least one of those paragraphs had been written in a different hand. And marked. The marks left behind, the marks left by, perhaps, previous Avatars of Babaska. Warning marks.
Upside down.
I looked at Mokraine. He was awake, this time, at least. In the Break of Dawn he’d been comatose. I remembered the cloaked figures at the next table, long, pale fingers tapping a card.
The High King, reversed.
The tarot. The tarot turns up everywhere.
“If you find this, heed my sign!” I said. “That’s what it said. Not my words, my sign. And the symbols were reversed!”
Mokraine looked bemused, but I felt suddenly clear. The sword and lotus, upside down. This means the reverse of what it says.
