Guardian of the Dead (41 page)

My own breath stuck in my throat.

She was sleeping against the wall, her knees tucked firmly against her chest. Her black hair fell over her shoulders and coiled on the cavern floor in thick strands, gleaming like kelp. Her skin was the dark brown of sooty totara wood, her fingernails and toenails iridescent with the pink sheen of mussel shells. She was the largest living thing I'd ever seen, and so beautiful it made me ache.

Stones scattered behind me as the patupaiarehe woman leapt from her hiding place.

I wasn't the only one who had considered ambush.

She was unarmed and as naked as I was, but her bony elbow came up in a hammering blow to my diaphragm. My lungs emptied, and I barely got a hand down to break my fall. The pain in my shoulder told me I'd sprained it as I rolled. A dainty foot crashed down where my face had been.

Make her stop
, the mask said frantically. But I had no breath to shout orders, and only enough momentum to roll, and roll again, heedless of my bare flesh scraping on stone. I tumbled into something warm and unyielding, and could retreat no further. I was going to die at the feet of a goddess. A useless, desperate fury filled me as the patupaiarehe woman raised her clawed hand.

It wasn't much of a shout; only a sputtering, wordless wheeze as I forced my rage into voice.

But it was enough.

Hine-nui-te-p
, guardian of the dead, once Hine-titama, the maiden of the dawn, first woman born of woman, and the mother of humanity, opened her green–stone-dark eyes and roared.

The sheer force of her voice tossed me up and halfway across the cave. The mask ripped clear from my face as I fell, a house-height or more from the floor. Inconveniently, I recovered my breath just in time to scream.

She held up a massive hand and the wind of her will caught me, setting me none-too-gently on my bleeding feet. The mask clattered to the ground a few steps away, but there was no question of my diving for it. The goddess was speaking.

‘Women,' she said, through a mouth filled with sharp obsidian teeth. ‘Why do you disturb me?'

It wasn't English. I wasn't sure it was M
ori either, or any language ever spoken by human voices. But I understood it. This was the beginning tongue that created what it communicated, the language of conception.

I was incapable of response.

But the patupaiarehe was better prepared. Her voice was as beautiful as the rest of her and all the power of her people's music was behind it.

I listened, dazed by the somnolent rhythm of the silver-haired woman's chant. I didn't understand the words, but I could easily guess at the meaning. She was pleading her case, pointing out the great wrongs done her people by M
ui, the diminishment of her race with the coming of humans to the cloud-covered islands. Was it not unjust that they should pay for M
ui's crime? Was it not right that Hine-nui-te-p
release the patupaiarehe from their grievous mortality?

The goddess's eyes glazed as the woman's voice went on, smooth eyelids drooping over her enormous eyes. Her knees relaxed, legs as long as kauri trunks spreading in her slumber. There was another cave between her thighs, filled with a second set of obsidian teeth.

The patupaiarehe woman sang her lullaby, sweet and soft, and walked easily toward that toothy opening.

In the backwash of that seduction, my own eyelids fluttered. I folded gently onto the floor, stretching my arms in the prelude to sleep.

The fingertips of one hand touched the mask.

The fog in my brain cleared at once, and was immediately replaced by an awareness of just how much I hurt. I felt like one huge, raw bruise as I yanked the mask onto my face and sat up.

Help me
, I pleaded and the mask, exultant, poured power into me like a waterfall into a paper cup. My skin wasn't enough to hold it all, I thought dimly, and waited to tear under the force of it. But I expanded instead, to the limits of myself and beyond, until I trembled on the brink of losing everything I was in the glory of that flow. It was Reka's eyes that stabbed me, strong and fierce, with the knowledge of my task and the will to perform it.

It had taken seconds. Still singing, the patupaiarehe was just ducking her head to crawl between the thighs of Hine-nui-te-p
.

‘Hey,' I said, my voice cracked and small.

The woman whirled, her hair flaring around her like Christmas tinsel, her mouth open to unleash some withering curse.

‘Love me,' I told her, and felt the stony strength of her will crumble like a clump of dry dirt. ‘Stop singing.'

Her dissolution was terrible to watch, the more so because I knew she hated me. Her eyes alive with silent adoration, she sank to her knees, clawed hands lolling against the walls of the goddess's thighs.

The last echo of the lullaby faded. Hine-nui-te-p
opened her eyes to stare, horrified, at the woman between her legs. Lips twisting over those nightmarish teeth, she smashed her knees together three times.