Idol of Blood (7 page)

“You mean let
them
vote,” said Merit. “You said ‘us'.”

“Us! Them! I tell you, Merit, sometimes I don't know what I am—and I don't care. But I am very serious about this, and I insist you treat it with the same respect. And treat
me
with respect,” he added. “Whether you think of me as woman or man. There should be no difference.”

Merit was sober. “I respect you more than anyone else I know. Save one. I'll give your proposal some thought—and I mean serious examination. You have my word.” Ahr's stance relaxed, and Merit surveyed the table. They'd done all they could to this meal. Merit sighed, not unhappily.

As they stood and retreated through the arch, a servant materializing to clear their leavings as though conjured, he sighed again with more regret. “You know, it would be lovely to have a woman again when it comes to that,” he mused as their footsteps resounded across the great hall against the gemstone tile. He stopped for a moment. “Am I insulting you?”

Ahr laughed. “I can't take exception to your human needs,
meneut
.” He paused in the archway toward his quarters, studying Merit with curiosity. “When was the last?”

Merit attempted a smile, unable to keep the sorrow out of it. “It was my wife.”

“Oh…Merit. I never even thought—”

Merit waved away Ahr's concern. “I didn't see her often. But Ra provided for her well, and she wasn't unhappy. I think, in fact, she may have taken other lovers. I didn't question her. I had my own more devoted love.” He managed a more wistful smile. “But I did love her. She died six years ago as a result of a virulent fever. I'd given it to her when I fell ill that autumn—you remember—and it had weakened her heart.”

“I'm sorry.” Ahr squeezed Merit's shoulder, and then paused before turning away. “That autumn?” he reflected. “I don't remember what you mean. When were you ill?”

“Well, of course you remember,” Merit reproached him. “After all, it was why—” Merit stopped abruptly, his face draining of blood as he saw that Ahr was staring at him, not understanding.

Ahr frowned at Merit's sudden halt. “It was why, what?”

“Did you really not know?” Merit's heart battered his chest. “
Ai
, Ahr, I don't think I should speak of this to you. I don't want to burden you more.”

“What do you mean?” Ahr demanded. “How would this burden me?” Though Merit shook his head, Ahr was adamant. “Don't keep things from me, Merit. I insist that you explain.”

Merit swallowed, not wanting to speak. “That autumn,” he said at last. “When you were pregnant with Ra's child—before we knew.”

“When he—” Ahr faltered. “When he stopped asking for me.” Merit nodded, letting Ahr make the connection for himself. “It was because you were ill.”

“Yes.” They were both quiet a moment, the air of the temple stifling with the brooding weight of the past, until Merit felt he must try to make Ahr understand. “He trusted no one else. I was unwell for several weeks. At the beginning, near death. I think he blamed himself. When I returned, he wouldn't let me bring you to him again. It tore at his conscience.”

“Then he didn't stop…desiring me.”

“No.
Ai
, no, dear girl.”

Ahr reached for the column that anchored the arch beneath the vaults of the dome. He looked as though he would be sick. Merit put a hand on his shoulder, and Ahr pushed it away in horror.

“I murdered him,” Ahr gasped. “I stirred up the hatred of Rhyman against him, because of vanity.” Ahr leaned back against the pillar, his face drained of animation. “He told me—
she
, the renaissant—he had loved me. That was unbearable, but past tense. Do you see what I mean? I thought he meant he had
once
, and then had stopped. Or I wanted to think that. I wanted it to make sense. I wanted to believe he'd loved and it had faded—something I'd done—my sin of pregnancy—there was no explanation.” He took a ragged breath, wincing as though it hurt to do so. “I murdered him because he scorned me. Because he hurt me so.
And it never happened
.”

“He stole your child,” said Merit softly, as though he could give Ahr some excuse.

“He loved my child! He loved her as I never did. I barely knew her. And I killed her also out of jealousy.”

“No, Ahr. It's not as simple as that. I beg you to stop tormenting yourself. You see why I didn't want to tell you?” He tried once more to comfort, and Ahr whirled away from him.

“Stop protecting me. You can't protect me from myself. I'm the one who's unforgivable.”

“No, Ahr.” Merit shook his head, swallowing against a painful lump. “It was the darkest time of my life. The darkest time the Delta has ever known. But you cannot claim responsibility for it. The winds of Rhyman had changed.
Meerrá
, the winds of the Delta itself. It was the end of the Meeric Age, and you did not create it. You did not dash his head against the steps.” He choked on the words but he had to go on. “You did not hurl RaNa from the portal. Those were the cancers of Rhyman, and I understood it after time and healing had worked their way. I have never blamed you. For your part, I've forgiven you. It is past.”

Ahr's face blazed red with outrage. “Don't you dare! Don't you dare forgive me!” The former consort of the Meer of Rhyman staggered from the arch and fled.

Six: Constraint

No one questioned a man walking a boy, bound and gagged, on a leash through the fog-shrouded streets straggling away from the ruins of
Ludtaht
Izis.
Soth
Bessaht, city of possibilities though it might once have been, was replete with slaves and slave owners in the post-Expurgation years. Pearl read this in the faces of those who looked through him without acknowledging his existence as one might a pack animal, and in the faces of others whose gazes slid away from his swiftly with shame, knowing there but for the grace of their masters, went they themselves.

So he'd gone from being the property of one master to the spoils of another. Had he been less tired and defeated, he might have wept, but there seemed little point in exposing himself for what he was just to indulge his misery.

Pike the Meerhunter—a vocation Pearl hadn't known existed until his captor spoke the word—took him to his dank quarters in a rooming house and made him kneel on the floor while he enjoyed a meal of cold lamb and minted potatoes without offering any to Pearl. Of course, he couldn't without removing the gag and bit, which he wisely knew better than to do with a Meer. Like Prelate Nesre who'd been Pearl's master before him, he likely knew Pearl could subsist without food for some time. But even a Meer couldn't go without water, and Pearl was sorely in need of some and had no way to communicate it.

When Pike turned in for the night, he chained Pearl's collar to a bolt in the wall and took the narrow cot for himself, sparing Pearl not even a word before he was snoring in deep slumber. Pearl had to stand on the balls of his feet to keep the collar from cutting into his throat. Every time exhaustion won out against his struggle to stay upright, the sudden, choking pain jerked him back from the brink of sleep.

Before dawn, after interminable hours of this, his new master woke apparently quite refreshed and ate a breakfast of smoked fish and stewed figs that would have made Pearl's mouth water if he'd had any fluid left in him. After tormenting Pearl with downing most of a jug of water, Pike washed with the rest of it and then pissed into the chamber pot in the corner as if to say he had so much excess liquid inside him he needed to eliminate some.

“Now, then,” he said as he buttoned up. “You're going to become useful.” He unchained Pearl from the bolt and sat him roughly at his small, warped table. “I know better than to remove your gag to let you tell me what I want to hear.” Pike took some scrap parchment from a cupboard and set a graphite pencil in Pearl's half-numb fingers. “Draw.” Pearl looked up at him mutely, a blank expression professing his ignorance, and Pike struck him without warning, nearly knocking him off balance. “Don't play games with me, boy. My patience is limited.”

Eyes smarting, Pearl put the pencil to the parchment, trying to think what he could draw that wouldn't give away Ra's location, which was obviously what Pike wanted. He couldn't draw an outright lie, as his pictures were as good as words, but he could draw a record of what had been without implying with the depiction that it regarded a present condition.

Though it took some awkward manipulation to draw with one hand while dragging about the other chained to it, Pearl managed to sketch a fair likeness of the altar room at
Ludtaht
Ra as it had been in Ra's time. Pike watched with eagle eyes but without comment as Pearl filled in the dark lapis and obsidian tiles, pressing hard with repeated strokes of the side of the pencil to make a heavy sheen on the parchment.

He added the altar and drew the Maiden Ahr draped upon it—though he knew she'd been no maiden then, it was the name he heard in the flow—paying great attention to the veil that hid her features. The flowing fabric tangled with the lengths of her dark hair and billowed across her naked body, except between her legs where the Meer knelt with his back to the viewer, his head bowed reverently over his love.

As Pearl started on the columns sweeping toward the dome, Pike became impatient and began to tap his foot, spitting his habitual tobacco juice into a bowl on the floor beside him. “Do you think this is useful to me, boy? What have you drawn here?” He yanked the parchment toward him and stabbed at the central figure. “Who is this?”

Pearl merely stared at him. It wasn't as if he could answer.

Pike let out a slow sigh of irritation. “Is this MeerRa?”

Pearl nodded sullenly, and found himself being yanked forward by the collar so swiftly that he couldn't brace for it and floundered half off the seat, banging his shins against the leg of the table as Pike brought him close to his face.

“Perhaps you don't understand who I am,” said Pike calmly. “My job is to obtain information for those with coin to pay for it, and the way I obtain information is generally not agreeable to the one giving it to me. You, however, present a unique predicament. You are a Meer, and thus to be dealt with as one would a dangerous, feral beast. But you are also a child, and I am not in the habit of cutting children to bits to get what I want.” He met Pearl's eyes with a frank, appraising stare. “It's up to you whether I find it necessary to take that unpleasant path. If you force me in that direction, I'm likely to be angry about it, which most certainly means you will suffer the more. Let's not find out what that looks like, shall we?”

Pike released Pearl and let him fall back onto the seat. Pearl considered. He was accustomed to taking beatings, and he knew that however severe they might be, they were finite and he would heal. But he'd never had pieces of himself cut off slowly to maximize his suffering and prolong his torment, which he saw in Pike's mind was the Meerhunter's usual method. But it was unthinkable that he betray Ra.

Pearl took up his pencil once more, turning the parchment over to begin a new drawing. He conjured up the dark city in ruins he'd done for Merit. It was his last work, and thus fresh in his mind. It was also a destination Pike had never seen, and one that was likely to intrigue him. Pearl needed to intrigue enough that Pike would make his own assumptions about the significance of the place without Pearl having to specify the reason he'd drawn it.

Pearl's pencil found new vistas in the same image that had come to him before, as though the place he'd drawn was ancient and he now saw it as it existed in the present. It still had the look of a
soth
that had suffered some cataclysm in the distant past, but its ruins had been built upon slowly over time, the new
soth
juxtaposed over the old. There was a hint of the innovation of MeerAlya in it now, though nothing so modern as In'La.

People rode on mechanical bi-wheeled contraptions alongside drays drawn by horseback, and on the covered wooden walkways beside cobblestone streets, clockwork machines cranked out fruit ices and bubbling soda waters and roasted nuts, all operated by the drop of a coin and the turn of a handle. Clockwork poppets performed on little stages, and musical instruments played of their own accord, all through the workings of a wind-up spring.

Conjuring in graphite the visions in his head, he forgot he was drawing for Pike, eagerly sketching the lingering Meeric architecture among these oddities about the former temple square. Each surface he rendered yielded more detail, and he thought he might understand the ancient influence on this place if he could only see just a little bit farther; if he could draw just a little piece more.

Caught up in the Meeric trance, Pearl was startled when Pike pulled the drawing away from him once more to peruse it. “That's more like it. Where is this?” When Pearl gave him a look of disdain, or tried to, the Meerhunter chuckled. “Yes, I realize you can't speak. But you can write. Show me the name of this place.” Pike's hand closed over Pearl's in a hard grip of warning before Pearl set the pencil to the paper once more. “No attempting to write curses, or I'll break your fingers.”

Heaving a sigh through his nose that made his throat feel even more parched, Pearl wrote the name in block letters, giving each shape the substance of his will to keep Pike from asking any questions Pearl couldn't answer, the dark strokes designed to mesmerize.

“
Soth
Szofl,” Pike mused, reading as Pearl's pencil spelled it out. “Across the Southern Sea?” It was a question, but he didn't seem to need an answer. He murmured to himself, studying the drawing. “Should have known she'd try to slip away there, where no one would recognize one of her kind. All those seaside performers and magic shows. It's the perfect camouflage.”

The Meerhunter took the parchment and rolled it up, slipping a band of string around it to hold it in place. “A sea crossing, though. That'll be a bit of a journey. Question is, what to do with you in the meantime?” He studied Pearl as he tucked the scroll into his vest, and seemed to see him for the first time as something other than a meal ticket. “You're looking a bit paler than normal, boy. Thought you could go without food longer than ordinary folk.” Pike rubbed his thumb against Pearl's palm as he removed the pencil from his hand. “Dry as parchment. Are you thirsty?”

Pearl nodded, unable to hide his eagerness at the thought of having something to drink.

“That's a problem, isn't it? It might be better to take your head off after all. Easier to transport, and worth more to me. But I don't relish it.” Pike drew a second sheaf of parchment from the cupboard beside him and slid it toward Pearl, holding out the pencil once more. “Will you make me a promise? Write the words I say, and they'll bind you, yes? Don't bother lying, as I can slit your throat quicker than you can speak should I decide to remove the gag and you attempt to betray me.”

Pearl nodded, too exhausted and thirsty to put up even the pretense of a fight.

“Good, then. Write this down: ‘I will do as you say.'”

Pearl thought about it only a moment. He couldn't bear the rough cotton of the gag or the dryness of his throat another instant. What difference did it make? He wrote the words obediently.

Pike put the piece of parchment with the other in his vest pocket. “Very well, boy.” He rose and stepped behind Pearl's chair to unlock the tether on the bit, but held it in place a moment longer. “I want to hear you say the words you just wrote when I remove this. That's your first command. The second is that you will not speak at all unless I bid you to, and then only the words I provide. Are we clear?”

Pearl nodded emphatically, desperate now that relief was near. Pike took a knife from his belt and pressed it tight against Pearl's throat as he let the bit drop into his other hand and pulled on the rag. It had stuck to the insides of Pearl's mouth and it burned as it came away. Pearl gagged involuntarily and coughed, which proved to be more painful than helpful. Pike pressed the blade deeper. Pearl had to say the words. Under the best of circumstances, they were many for him, though at least not long ones.

He opened his mouth, but a fit of coughing seized him and pain shot through his throat at the air forced through it. What voice he had, he'd temporarily lost. He looked helplessly at Pike, trying to convey without words that he had no words.

The knife jerked up hard beneath his jaw and temple. One movement from Pike and Pearl's blood would be pouring onto the ground. “You'd best not be fucking with me,” Pike growled in warning. “Can't you speak?”

Wishing he could weep but knowing there wasn't enough fluid in him to do it, Pearl swallowed and tried again, to no avail. He shook his head, as much as he was able to in Pike's grip.

Pike studied him intently. “Nesre claimed you couldn't, but I thought it best not to take chances. But I'm well aware you can't lie to me, spoken or not.” He nodded, satisfied, and took the knife away and sheathed it.

Before Pearl could have the precious water he needed, he collapsed onto the ground, his head full of nothing but gray.