Idol of Glass (21 page)

Ra gritted her teeth. “Not all of her.”

“Well, that's your Meeric belief. I don't ascribe to it. But if you'll cooperate with me, I promise to rebury the remains. I only needed a bit of bone powder for our purposes.” Oddly enough, she sensed he was a man of his word. It was moderately mollifying.

“How can I cooperate?” It was an effort to breathe. She was becoming light-headed from blood loss. “Your methods are clearly inadequate.” Ra edged her fingers toward the waistband of her skirt beneath the long sweater as she spoke. Just a few more inches, and she'd have the clasp of the sheath.

Pike's pride seemed to be wounded. “It's not my methods. Nesre was quite clear on the amount of trauma that induced spontaneous conjury. And there's no point in getting outraged at me about it, it was Nesre who took it upon himself to cultivate his little pearl and treat him as an experiment. I find the whole thing distasteful myself, but I'm not above using what he acquired, whether artifact or knowledge.”

He took the little leather book from his coat and unwound the thong that bound it to flip through the pages, no doubt looking for something else that might trigger Ra's magic. Ra's fingers breached the clasp, and she curled her grip around the handle of the knife and waited for her opportunity.

Pearl drew with large, sweeping strokes, trying to dispense with the image of Hraethe and his bath as swiftly as he could. Hraethe's eyes were on him in the watery reflection, bright golden eyes like a tiger's, rimmed in black, his golden hair tied back high at his crown in a queue, a robe of equally golden silk wrapped around him and tied at the waist with a heavy black sash. The glass was thinning here, as it had when he'd been drawing Ra. Which was all well and good, but he needed to be working on
her
drawing.

Hraethe reached out his hand, and Pearl could feel its vibration just inches away on the other side. Perhaps if he brought Hraethe through, he could get back to the urgent matter of Ra. He set down the smoky blue crayon and stretched out his own hand, fingers against the glass. The surface gave like mud against his fingertips.

Hraethe mouthed a word:
Come.
Why didn't he speak aloud? Pearl would have heard him if he had, and the word would have had power. He shook his head. His hand passed through the thick, muddy substance he'd made of the glass, and Hraethe grasped for it.

“
You
come,” said Pearl, and yanked his hand back without letting go. Hraethe leapt to his feet, stumbling forward through the steam. In an instant, he'd breached the barrier between the realms. He was under the hill. Pearl pulled his hand free and pointed at the opposite panel. “Ra,” he said brusquely, and turned back to his painting.

Cree gaped from the arch of the bath chamber as MeerHraethe seemed to step into the looking glass on the floor and disappear. She'd come back to check on him, suddenly gripped with the conviction that he was trying something mad. She was haunted by the image of Pearl in the bath where she and Ume had found him at
Soth
Szofl bleeding clouds of red into the water. They'd reached him just in time. What if Hraethe meant to reach the realm under the hill just as Pearl had? What if Ume's tale had given him the idea?

But there was no gilded razor beside this bath, no blood curling among the candles and steam. Hraethe had simply disappeared.

She glanced back into the hall, about to call for Ume, but Ume had gone out to the garden for a walk. There wasn't time to track her down. There was no telling where Hraethe might end up if she waited. The realm under the hill might simply move and trap him there with Pearl.

Cree entered the bath chamber and approached the large oval of glass that lay among the candles on the tile beside the steaming water. The scent of a fragrant oil curled around her in the mist from the bath. She had no idea whether it would work, but she'd been under the hill before. If anyone could follow Hraethe, it was Cree. She took a deep breath, as if preparing to dive into a pool of water instead of a pool of glass, and stepped onto the mirror. It felt like she'd descended into a shallow pool, and Cree thought she'd been mistaken, turning to step out again, but the arch to the bath chamber had disappeared in the mist.

The cold seeped in despite Ahr's warm coat as she followed Shiva through the white-shrouded woods. She'd given Ra her scarf, of course.
Meershivá
, what was wrong with her? Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes—though the shattered one hurt like fire—but before the tears could fall, Shiva spoke ahead of her on the snow-covered road.

“Your self-pity, young Meer, is entirely unbecoming.”

“What would you know about self-pity?” Ahr regretted the bitter outburst as soon as she'd spoken. Misery had gotten the best of her and she'd forgotten what kind of creature she was dealing with. As if the eye should have let her forget.

Instead of anger, Shiva laughed. “I invented it, my dear. Now stop sulking. We have work to do.”

“What work?” Ahr bit her lip. Her mouth seemed to have a mind of its own. Renaissance had truly wreaked havoc on her emotions. It was like being in the grip of puberty.

Shiva didn't seem to care. “If my suspicion is correct, this Pike will have fashioned an enclosed chamber of the glass he purchased, erected inside the mill, and he'll have used a Meeric relic either to conceal it or to prevent it from being opened, except by him. You and I will have to combine our resonance to shatter it.”

“Our resonance?” Ahr moved faster to keep in step with her, her curiosity getting the better of her.

“The essence of your Meeric power has a unique signature, a vibration within the Meeric flow, like a wave of sound dropped into a pool of water. Pitched just so, it will cause the elements around it to vibrate at the same frequency.”

“And how do we make it…resonate?”

Shiva paused and turned her head, her expression exasperated and incredulous, as if she'd never encountered anyone so stupid in her entire improbably long existence. “By opening your mouth, of course. To speak is to create. Haven't you been paying attention?” She shook her head and plunged onward through the packed snow.

Ahead on the moonlit bank, the frozen Filial River that wound beside the road turned inward toward a dark structure. They approached in utter silence, moving like part of the landscape around them, as only the Meer could. Despite herself, Ahr felt a little thrill of excitement. But there was no sign of a haywain, and no visible lights inside the mill. Ahr wondered if Shiva's intuition had been wrong.

Whatever Pike had been looking for, he'd apparently found it. Tucking the book away once more, he dug about in his bag, brought out a small pouch and shook something into his hand.

Ra eyed him warily. “What is that?”

Pike held up a muddy gray pill the size of a small grape. “Something Nesre gave the boy when he needed him to draw. Seemed to increase his visions. Perhaps it will open your connection to the magic.” He approached Ra. “Open your mouth.”

She'd given her word that she would obey. Whether her word had power after all or not, she opened her mouth obediently, not wanting to alert him that anything might be amiss. Pike placed it on her tongue, but he stood too far back for her to make the attempt with the knife. She would have only one opportunity. The pill was bitter and powdery, disintegrating on her tongue before she swallowed it, leaving an iron-like tang in her mouth.

Ra grimaced as she swallowed. “What's in it? I need water.”

Pike dropped the pouch back into his bag. “It's ground Meerheart.”

Ra's stomach lurched, and she nearly expelled the pill, but couldn't quite. The Meeric histories told stories of hunting Meer for sport, exacting a
vetma
and then consuming the Meer's flesh to ensure the fulfillment of the “petitioner's” desire. Meeric relics, made from the parts that weren't eaten, had remained as a vile, black-market trade even during the Meeric Age when the Deltans had revered their gods. And Nesre had given parts of a long-dead Meer to Pearl to consume for his vile experiments.

Rage was building in her once more, but before she could do something foolish, Pike obliged her by taking a canteen of water from his bag and coming close to hold it for her while she drank. Ra tilted her head back, let him pour the water into her mouth and brought the knife swiftly out of its sheath. Pike was baffled, not comprehending what she'd done to him until he staggered back and stumbled off the blade.

He looked down in disbelief at the bloodstain spreading over his abdomen. She'd gotten him high, just under the ribs.

“You unbelievable bitch,” he wheezed, and collapsed on the ground, crumpling like an empty suit.

With Pike no longer a threat, the adrenaline that had been keeping Ra alert was vastly diminished. She needed to get to his key somehow and unlock her other wrist—or she could dislocate it as well, but she'd rather not.

Behind her, the glass began to shudder with a strange vibration, the sound of voices, but raised to such a pitch it was unrecognizable as language. Fractures formed in the glass, tiny cracks and little holes rattling out of it, until the panel disintegrated completely into pieces that, like Nesre's cage when Pearl had shattered it, rained down in a single, tidy sheet like falling stardust. At the same moment, the glass in front of her rippled like a viscous fluid, revealing what lurked in the depths of the mirror, which was not her reflection at all. Pearl stood on the other side of it, his drawing implement in his hand. And beside him stood a broad-shouldered, bronze-skinned man with a golden queue of obviously Meeric hair. He seemed familiar, but she couldn't place him. His open mouth soundlessly formed a word she couldn't make out.

“I told you she would have everything under control.” The voice swam toward her as though from a dream as Ra began to relinquish her grip on consciousness. She turned her head, making the swimming worse. Shiva stood in the darkened room beyond the shattered glass, with Ahr beside her.

“
Meerrá
!” With the whispered imprecation, Ahr ran to Ra's side and dropped to her knees. “What has he done to you?”

Ra looked down at the blood and cuts, and the torn fabric of her clothes. “Just having a little game of cat and mouse,” she managed as the room went fuzzy. “Cat won.”

Twenty-eight: Impermanence

The veil between the mirror worlds was open, leaving this one once more vulnerable to the tricks and machinations of the Permanence. Shiva had to put a stop to Pearl's magic at once.

“Take Ra to the inn,” she ordered Ahr, her eyes fixed on the hole in the veil.

“To the inn?” Ahr rose, indignant. “Can't you see what he's done to her? You have to help her!”

Shiva turned and gave Ahr an icy stare that shut her up. “You are not a child, you are Meer. You deal with her. I have other business to attend to.”

“Business? What business? Where?”

“Under the hill.” Without another word, Shiva walked through the mirror. Like gelatin, it gave with a thick wobble against her shape, snapping in around her as she came through on the other side. Beside the boy stood Hraethe, his eyes on her with fury and desire. He could say nothing to her. She ignored him. The other standing in the dancing light and shadow of Pearl's glittery emanations was one she knew.

The woman smiled, with too much of a look of triumph to it for Shiva's taste. “MeerShiva. How kind of you to come to see us after all these centuries.”

Shiva inclined her head as though they were polite acquaintances. “Mnemosyne. How did you manage to lure this boy here to do your dirty work? I suppose you induced someone to bring him to the brink of death.”

Mnemosyne's smile dripped with disdain. “You might have felt the jeopardy he was in were you not preoccupied with your own narcissism. But when Pearl attempted to connect with your emanations in the flow, you cut him out. Who else did he have but us? The ones, after all, to whom you ought to be grateful for giving you our gift.”

“Your
gift
.” Shiva nearly spat the word at her. “You mean your game. You're no better than the ordinary man who gave Pearl life for a game of his own. Stepping through the glass to spread your seed and then retreating to your safe little kingdom to watch and entertain yourselves as the ones you bred were hunted and slaughtered like animals.”

“It wasn't our place to interfere. It was not our world.”

Shiva laughed with a pitch that threatened the mirrored walls around them. “Not your place. And yet you did nothing but interfere. Gifting humble peasants with magical children because it amused you. But it isn't your world. You're right about that. And you have no business trying to enter it.”

At Pearl's side, Mnemosyne stroked the glossy lengths of the boy's silvery hair, but he moved away from her, shuddering slightly at the touch. Little wonder, given touch was something the boy had never learned. Mnemosyne came closer to the glass where Shiva stood, the fabric of her flowing, tunic-like garment glittering with a multitude of glass sequins no larger than the head of a pin, as though she were a mirror herself.

She stretched her fingers past Shiva and wriggled them in the pliant substance through which Shiva had come. “As you see, our Pearl has rendered your vindictive curse null and void. His talents are unique, and they've come along nicely. We're quite pleased.” She drew back her hand and held it up, as if to show that it was whole. “The mirror roads are once more passable. The Permanence can come and go as we please.”

Shiva casually widened her stance, resting a hand on her hip. “I think you're mistaken.”

Mnemosyne laughed. “Your words no longer hold us. Do you think you can keep us in with a curse now that we have Pearl? His will shapes matter. His magic exceeds your word. The mirrors are permeable, and there is nothing you can do to seal us behind them.

Shiva tilted her head. “Where
is
your little trinket?”

Mnemosyne turned about, her feathery flaxen eyebrows drawing together in irritation as she came full circle. “Where's he gone?” She paced toward the center of the mirrored hall, noticing at last that the other three walls were no longer glass, but instead ornately carved marble. Her demeanor was no longer amused. “Caretaker!” Her compatriot came hurrying at her call. “Where is Pearl?”

The Caretaker gaped at the solid walls. “But how
can
he have? I didn't hear a thing.” She turned back, eyeing Shiva with outrage. “You! What have you done with him?”

“It is
your
job to know that,” Mnemosyne snapped at her, fuming.

Shiva shrugged. “I've done nothing at all. I believe he must have grown tired of you and has simply gone home. Which is what I intend to do.”

Mnemosyne's colorless eyes were hard. “You can't stop us using
this
mirror. Pearl has left it open.”

Shiva turned her attention at last to Hraethe, glaring daggers at her since her dismissive glance. He was truly a god of a man, just as hard and lovely as he'd been the first time she laid eyes on him. She grabbed him by the lapels of his robe and swung him with her in a parody of dance, hurtling through the mirror.

“Impermeable!” She flung the word out as they tumbled onto the snow outside the mill, and heard one last furious shriek from Mnemosyne before the glass solidified and then shattered around them, taking the portal with it.

Hraethe was on his hands and knees above her when they landed, fists digging into the shards of glass littering the hard packed snow beside the frozen river. Impotent rage boiled in the molten bronze of his eyes.

“Speak,” she said, and loosed his tongue.

“I ought to kill you,” he snarled, and kissed her instead, and she fell, tumbling, into the indescribable infinity of the Meeric embrace.