Idol of Glass (19 page)

Pike took the pad and pencil and smiled as he tucked them away. “I'm well aware of the paradox of my request. If you're powerless as Naiahn says, the words you write are powerless. But if you were able to do me harm, your writing that would prevent you. So you either truly intend to do as I say, or you're lying, but it's irrelevant. Either way, I'm covered.” He unstrapped the leather thong behind her head and worked the strap from her mouth. “Wouldn't you agree, MeerRa?”

She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “It seems you've thought of everything. Except how to get what you want from me.”

Pike circled his chair. “That is the problem, isn't it?”

“And what is it you want?”

He stopped and turned to face her. “I want what I've earned. For fourteen years, I've been hunting fugitives for the solicitors and prelates of the Deltan
soths
, because in the post-Expurgation Delta, there are precious few jobs for people of my stature that are within the law.”

“Your stature?”

“Like your man Merit, I was once a litter bearer—for MeerAlya.” Pike folded his arms at her appraising look, as if challenging her. She wouldn't have guessed he'd served in such a capacity. He was tall enough, and muscular enough, but he lacked the social graces of what had been known as “templar families”, cultivated over centuries, from which such servants were chosen.

As if to prove her point, Pike twitched his jaw and spat another wad of tobacco juice onto the floor. “After the Expurgation, most in my position lost everything—our family homes, our pensions—and most definitely the respect we'd once commanded. I'm not complaining about that. I was still young. I'd only served for half a dozen years. I saw an opportunity in the new Delta, and I thrived at it. As a matter of fact, I'm the only Meerhunter to have successfully brought one in. MeerPalu of
Soth
Rez'a.”

Ra remembered Palu only as a name. She couldn't even recall whether the Meer had been male or female. As with most other Meer, Palu's resonance within the flow had seemed dim and distant, and of little consequence to MeerRa on his throne. The voices of the
vetma
seekers, both common and of the templar class, had occupied his mind.

Pike seemed disappointed that the name had elicited neither surprise nor shock. “The Meer was warned of the Expurgation on the night of the last feast by someone in his inner circle at
Ludtaht
Palu. He abandoned his duty and fled to the north. It took me two years to track him down, and I came this close to being cursed, but I earned my name with his head. And I've done quite well for myself ever since, tracking human fugitives—dissenters and Meerist sympathizers trying to overthrow the courts.” The Meerhunter sat once more, cleaning the point of his knife on his knee. “When I bring in your head, I'll receive a sizeable bounty. What I want is insurance that no matter who rises to power because of it, whichever of these fat, self-indulgent templars-turned-solicitors manages to scrabble his way over the heads of his fellow conspirators to rule over the
soths
, I won't end up as collateral damage.”

Pike pointed the knife at her. “I want to retire, and I want you to see to it that I can do so in comfort, without fear of reprisals from some new hothead in government who decides Meerhunters are another remnant of the Old Delta that need to be wiped out. And the way you're going to do that is to grant me a
vetma
. Once you've done so, I promise to make your death swift, without unnecessary suffering. I've thought it out quite carefully. I have all the words written down for you to say. But in order for it to matter, your words have to have power, don't they? So what you and I are going to figure out before I take your head is how to get your power back.” Pike flipped the knife casually in his hand. “So. Exactly how did you lose it?”

That, of course, was something Ra couldn't answer truthfully. And for once, she didn't have to, since her powerless words wouldn't create a paradox. But after two lifetimes of never telling an outright lie, she found it difficult to invent one.

“Madness,” she answered. Ultimately, it was the cause of it. Had she not allowed herself to become so ill through her reckless conjuring, Shiva wouldn't have needed to step in and override her word. “You know of Pearl's visions.”

“That you conjured the ancient
soth
of AhlZel back to life? Of course.” Pike regarded her. “What are you trying to say? That you're ‘conjured out'?”

“Something like that.”

His eyes darkened. “Preposterous. On the throne of Rhyman, you conjured for the templars daily, along with annual benedictions for the people, for nearly four hundred years. You expect me to believe that a few weeks of conjuring in a fit of madness tapped out your stores? I'm not buying it.” Ra didn't try to convince him, and he turned the point of the knife against his knee while he thought. “It seems the only option I have is to induce spontaneous conjury.”

Ra raised her brow. “And how will you do that?”

“I'm afraid you aren't going to like the answer.” Pike rose and chained her arm to the chair once more, then stepped in front of her. “Take a deep breath.”

“Why?” She'd wasted the breath on speaking the word, and when his knife plunged into her gut, the rest of Ra's air was expelled on a burst of agony. Chained in position, she couldn't even double over. Her muscles cramped, and Ra sucked in air in painful gasps.

“Because now you won't be able to.” Pike drew the blade out while Ra shuddered, bumps rising on her skin from the shock as though she were naked in the snow. Ahr was right. She should have worn a coat.

Twenty-six: Obduracy

“What do you mean, ‘what's she done'?” Jak had encircled Ahr once more in protective arms. Ahr stared up into Jak's questioning face, blood tears now inevitably streaming from her eyes. “What is it? What's wrong?”

“I—” Ahr burst into incoherent sobs and went limp in Jak's arms. She'd never felt more like a child, and if she was a child, she'd been a very wicked one. Jak tried to catch her as she slipped to the floor onto her knees, but Ahr let her arms dangle listless in Jak's tightening fists. “
Ra
,” she sobbed. “I—”

“What of Ra?” Jak demanded. “You said she was in her room. She isn't, is she?”

Blood was pouring from Ahr's eyes. Perhaps she'd be exsanguinated by her own weeping. Ahr began to laugh, and Jak shook her like the child she parodied, rattling her skull.

“Where is she? Where is Ra?”

Shiva grasped Ahr's cropped hair from behind, forcing the younger Meer around to face her. Ahr looked up, suppliant, silently pleading for mercy or punishment. The slap spun her head wildly and knocked her out of Jak's grip, sending her flying across the gathering room against the far wall. Pain burst like a shower of stars in her skull. Ahr slipped against the stone, hands grasping feebly at it. Blood was pouring from her face now, but it wasn't her tears. The blow had silenced those.

“No!” Jak's cry was something between a scream and a command.

Ahr looked up from the one eye that still had vision. Jak had stepped before Shiva's advance, arms held up to ward her off, as if anything on earth could do so, looking Shiva in the eye. Brave Jak.

“
Vetmaaimeershiva.
” Jak's voice trembled on the formal plea.

Only the corner of Shiva's mouth twitched from within her stony expression. “She has my blood.” The tenor of the great Meer's voice made Ahr's organs shudder. “She can bear it. You know well, Jak na Fyn.”

“Please, MeerShiva.”

Shiva moved Jak aside like a straw doll. “Stand up, MeerAhr.”

Ahr used the bloodied wall to drag herself to her feet. Shiva regarded her, and Ahr wished she could will herself dead.

“For Jak's sake, I won't cripple you. You'd recover; you have superior blood. But Jak is tenderhearted.” She moved forward, green eyes nearly white with rage. “But you will stop this display of pathetic, blubbering self-pity and tell me what you've done.”

“The Meerhunter,” she blurted, flinching from Shiva as the Meer closed a cold hand around her throat.

Shiva's eyes narrowed, and the hand tightened. “What?”

Ahr's answer was almost inaudible. “I turned her over to an Expurgist bounty hunter.”

Jak took a step toward her. “Don't kill her, MeerShiva.”

Ahr looked to Jak, grateful for the intercession, and grateful she hadn't lost Jak's faith, but the look Jak gave her in return made her shrink into herself.

Jak's gray eyes were like flint. “I may just do it myself.”

Hraethe spent hours studying Pearl's drawing of
Soth
Szofl. The flourishes and strokes of ink among the charcoal had a pulsing effect on one's vision that made it seem the drawing was moving. He'd taken to carrying a slate about with him to communicate, and when he remarked to Ume on the optical illusion, she regarded him with a peculiar expression.

“The pastel drawing in the Peony Room,” she said. “Where I stayed the last time I was at
Ludtaht
Ra. “It moved.”

Moved?
Hraethe scrawled.
It isn't there now?

“No,
it
moved. The drawing itself. While I stared at it. That's how I found Pearl. The drawing showed him and Pike on a ship at the port of
Soth
Bessaht.” Ume rose from her seat on the couch in the solarium where they'd retired after breakfast, and sat beside Hraethe on the arm of his chair to look at the drawing. “Some of his drawings in Szofl seemed to do it, too. It's not your imagination. This is moving.”

Hraethe had never heard of such a thing, even among Meer. And Pearl's drawings, to his knowledge, had never done this before. Could it be some quality of Pearl's unique heritage? Young RaNa, too, had been an exceptional conjurer with an understanding of the flow beyond her years.

Hraethe suffered a pang in his gut as though a knife had been driven into it as the memory of RaNa's death sprang up as fresh as the day they'd lost her and Ra to the Expurgation. He'd been Merit then, and he'd loved RaNa as he'd loved his lord, never knowing he watched over his own grandchild.

“Perhaps it's Alya,” said Ume. “He once told me that magic, art and science were facets of the same stone. He dabbled in all three, and it's Alya's talent Nesre exploited in Pearl by teaching him to draw his visions. Maybe Pearl's talent has somehow combined the nature of each.”

When Hraethe touched his fingers to the moving swirls of pigment, they ceased to move, yet now they seemed to vibrate against his skin, as though they wanted to move, and to move him with them. He had the feeling that if he willed it, he could join the drawing itself and find himself in
Soth
Szofl. But there was too much grief and pain for him in Szofl—the Szofl of Pearl's drawing—to even think of trying such a thing. But the logical extension of the thought was intriguing. If Pearl had drawn what he'd seen in the Meeric flow of energy and memory by scrying in his mirrors, perhaps Hraethe could find him in one.

Shiva stood before the mirror in Ra's room. Ra's resonance within the circulating ebb and flow of Meeric blood within her was silent. Death could silence it, but Shiva had felt nothing, no cataclysmic event or trauma, and they were bound too tightly now through the shared blood for Shiva not to have felt it. The only explanation was that Ra's emanation was being blocked—or she was not in this realm.

Shiva placed her hand against the glass, trying to sense what might lie beyond it. As the old adage went, seeing in this direction through a glass was always darkly, as if the other side were the depths of the ocean. She sensed activity, movement that she shouldn't, but it wasn't Ra's. The taste of the blood on the tip of her tongue was Pearl's.

What in the name of madness was Pearl doing in the hidden realm? She'd sensed his concealing magic at
Ludtaht
Ra and knew he'd left those at the temple without memory of him for some purpose of his own. It didn't concern her, so she hadn't bothered to look for him in the flow. He was old enough by templar tradition to be considered an adult, and Shiva, as a rule, did not meddle with the plans of other Meer. Ra would retrieve the memory of him in time, and could do what she liked about the knowledge. But Pearl's presence in the hidden realm was troubling.

The other resonance Shiva felt was Hraethe's. He'd woken, which meant more trouble for her sooner or later. Shiva sighed. She'd never been so enmeshed in the lives of other Meer.

Ahr submitted to the sting of antiseptic spirits without protest as Jak silently cleaned her battered face and fashioned a poultice for her eye. She deserved to lose the eye. If Shiva found Ra alive, Ahr would take what she had coming from her as well.

She focused on the far wall of the privy chamber while Jak fixed a patch over the poultice. “I didn't do it to hurt you.”

Jak paused, barely controlled fury in the stillness of the wiry limbs. “Why in sooth did you do it, then?”

“I don't know.”

“
Ahr.
”

“I don't. I only knew I hated her, but I don't know why I did it. I didn't plan it. I confronted her and she made me remember…everything. I couldn't breathe. I ran. I left you.” Ahr didn't dare look at Jak now. “I found myself at the tavern in Mole Downs and I saw the Meerhunter. It was an impulse.”

“An impulse?”

“She has my impetuosity.” Shiva spoke from the open door at Ahr's back and a shudder went up Ahr's spine. “I gave her madness, and she is far too new to control it.”

Jak's storm-cloud eyes were incredulous, staring past Ahr at Shiva. “You're excusing her?”

“Excusing her?” Shiva's laughter was humorless. “I'd like to put her over my knee—perhaps I will once I've taken care of these Expurgists. I am not excusing her, FynNa, merely stating a fact.”

“And what about Ra? Can't you tell where she is? Aren't you going to do something?” Jak's ordinary self-assurance in the face of the most powerful Meer in history made Ahr feel inadequate in her Meerity. Shiva was like a tiger at her back. She wanted to hide. There was nowhere to go.

“I've returned her power,” Shiva replied. “She can take care of herself, if she realizes it. If she hasn't dealt with this bounty hunter, I will deal with him myself. But Ra's presence has been hidden from me somehow. Ahr must take me to the place where she encountered this man.”

“Can't I just tell you?” Ahr turned as she spoke, and then cringed at the dark threat in Shiva's emerald eyes.

“Get up, and get your coat.” Shiva's voice held a warning Ahr didn't dare ignore.

Ra's clothing was thick with blood. Pike had slashed her and driven the blade into her a dozen times or more—into her arms, her legs, her chest, her stomach—to no avail. Screams he'd been able to draw from her, but conjuring remained elusive.

Pike lifted her hanging head by the damp hair above her brow and pressed the knife to her temple. “I suppose the scars should have tipped me off. Even without your Meeric power, you have a remarkable tolerance for pain.” He shook his head as she tried to focus on him, making her own head swim. “Meer or not, you'll bleed to death soon if you don't start regenerating what you've lost. I read a great deal about the process in Nesre's journal. This ought to work.”

Nesre's journal. Nesre had done this to Pearl, experimenting on him to see what Meer could do. Ra wished the piece of filth had died more slowly.

Pike sighed and crouched to look into her eyes. “I'm not enjoying this, you know. Other men might. I just want my
vetma
. Do you have any hint at all as to what might do the trick before I have to resort to cutting things off you?”

Ra was dizzy from blood loss and pain. She could tell him it was Shiva who had the power, but that would put Shiva in his sights. Of course, Shiva
was
Shiva. Pike would be nothing to her. Still, it went against Ra's every instinct.

Without warning, the handle of Pike's blade came down on her collarbone. The snap was audible, and Ra nearly blacked out from the pain, hardly aware the loud screaming in the distance was her own until it managed to bring her back.

Pike held her jaw between his fingers until her vision cleared, and the pain spiked higher. “We can do this as long you like. Plenty of bones to break. Unless you have some other suggestion.”

“Pearl,” she gasped.

Pike tilted his head. “Come again?”

“Why didn't you—get it from him?” She winced against the ache in her ribs where his blade had struck. “Your
vetma
.” Perhaps if she got him talking, she'd have a reprieve, even if only for a short while. Pike's expression said he knew precisely what she was up to, but he straightened and took a step back. Maybe he thought what Ra's power needed was time.

“As I told you, the boy doesn't speak. Unless you know differently?”

Ra shook her head, not sure it was convincing, but too distracted by the pain of the motion to dwell on it.

“Pearl's
vetmas
were limited to what he could conjure with his drawings. Gold coin depicted on his canvas turned into a sort of textile made of pure gold threads. We had his creations spun into valuables.” As Pike spoke, Ra seemed to see a hazy vision of Pearl in the glass behind him. Pearl was drawing, his head down as he worked intently. Little golden lights floated around him and seemed to float off the paper itself.

Ra shook her head, and the illusion dissipated. “He could have written the words you wanted.”

“Could have.” Pike nodded thoughtfully. “I thought your word would be more valuable. And I intended to hunt you down before I retired. A matter of principle.”

“Why principle?”

“You were executed once, but you foiled the aims of the Expurgation and found a way to return. Loyalists stole your body in the night and buried it, and you managed to burn, releasing your elements into the ether. Doesn't really seem fair, now, does it?”

“How do you know I was buried?”

Pike smiled. “Oh, didn't I mention? I've been there. Used Meeric relics to find the bones. Not yours, of course, since they'd burned.”

Every knife wound in her gut seemed to twist. “RaNa.”

A bag of supplies lay beneath Pike's chair, and he picked it up and shook it, rattling something inside. “That's what was needed to mix with your blood and prove your identity. I've got what's left of her right here.”