Idol of Glass (7 page)

Ra had won over her servant. Awaiting her on the curved seat in the window niche in the master's chambers, Shiva saw it in Ra's relieved mien, though she still carried the burden of worry. There was no need for words about what had transpired, or of what was still to come for Ra. She offered Ra her hand, and they settled together onto the high, peacock bed, traveling garments shifting to embroidered robes in their sacred colors at Shiva's orchestration. She placed Ra's head against her bosom and produced a silver hairbrush with which she soothed Ra to sleep, drawing it hypnotically over the great obsidian lengths.

She'd never seen Ra's temple before. It was an impressive, if modest, creation. Her own temple at AhlZel had been vast and opulent, but contained none of the touches of warmth and comfort
Ludtaht
Ra possessed. She found herself suffering a touch of envy. It was clear from the care with which the temple had been maintained over the centuries that Ra had been, at least at one time, beloved by his subjects.

Only after the Deltan Expurgation had Shiva considered her reign and how she'd been regarded. Choosing to live a meager existence, she'd put on the guise of the crone—in part, to keep from being found out, but also as her own form of penance.

She hadn't seen the Expurgation coming. It had woken her from a long numbness when her servants had dragged her from her bed during her depleted state after the Autumn Boon. They'd nearly succeeded in destroying her with the advantage of their ignorance.

After AhlZel's end, long after her name had been forgotten, she'd taken another temple in the Delta, and her subjects knew nothing of whom they possessed, daring to grip her by the hair and plunge her skull toward the sharp stone table beside her bed. She'd struck it once, split down the center of her face, before summoning her resistance. The blood and wreckage of her ruined countenance had blinded her, but Shiva had lashed out, the pearls from her throat leaping forth with the heads of asps to strike each of her mutinous templars down. They died instantly, and she fled her temple without looking back.

In the days of
Soth
AhlZel, she would have struck them all down, every citizen of her
soth,
of the Delta itself. She would have destroyed with a wrath from which none would have escaped. But in her pain and blindness, she'd stumbled on the steps of her temple, tumbling down them to the courtyard below, and in that moment realized she was no longer what she'd come to define as Meer. She was a woman, frightened, at the hands of a mob that hated her. Despite the vulnerability of the naked, half-dead Meer, no one had dared to try to take her then, and she'd crawled to her feet and disappeared in a Meeric camouflage among the crowd.

Shiva had slept among refuse at the river's edge, through her influence remaining unnoticed by any who happened by, until the gash in her face had mended. It had aggravated her madness, and she'd lived for a time like a river rat among the rushes, eating grubs and insects. Once recovered, she'd chosen to remain among the Deltan society that despised the Meer, an old woman in whom no one took interest.

Ahr's appearance in
Soth
In'La, where Shiva had taken up residence, had shocked her. Shiva had conjured nothing since the Expurgation, and had used no Meeric knowledge to divine who Ahr was when she'd seen her in the market, only recognizing her by the ring from the House of Ra. Ahr was ordinary, and yet extraordinary, for she'd seen what no one in In'La had. She'd managed to unveil a fugitive Meer without Meeric blood of her own. Shiva had felt the thunderous desire and love of her son surrounding this woman, and its potency had stunned her. She hadn't imagined that Meer could feel.

Ahr was a mystery. She intrigued Shiva—enough that Shiva had agreed to grant Ahr's
vetma
and transform her into a man.

Later had come Ra herself, reborn into a breathtaking demoness of retribution. Again Shiva had been startled in the market. She'd underestimated her son while he lived, dismissing him as weak, only a mediocre power. But while ordinary women and men seemed to reincarnate with an almost casual simplicity, it took great power to return as Meer. She knew Ra had not only managed to return without the tedium of birth and gradual maturing, but had effected his own distillation by fire from the grave to allow it. Shiva had never heard of such a thing.

This potent Ra had stirred her, bringing color and dimension to a world that had been dull and flat. Shiva had awakened from the apathy of her self-punitive existence, renaissanced herself by the unpredictability of this delicate and deadly creature.

She'd determined to remain at a distance from Ra after releasing her to finish her quest for retribution. Shiva didn't need the complication—and Ra was entangled in a skein of lives by the intensity of her own love. But from the primal beat within the Meeric flow had come the knowledge of the resurrecting of
Soth
AhlZel
,
and Shiva had known this meant catastrophe for the one who'd raised it. Ra's blood had beckoned her. And so Shiva had gone.

She watched Ra beside her, breath rising and falling beneath the gold threads of her robe. Perhaps it would have been better not to break the eternity of emptiness with this brief communion. But Ra had grown too dependent on her. It was time to let her stand on her own. Shiva went out and left her sleeping.

At the top of the stairs, she paused, even the beat of her heart for the moment stilled. Ra's man was asleep below. Blood rushed to the capillaries at the surface of her skin with a flood of unbidden memory.

Eleven: Anamnesis

Rousing at the presence of another on the stairs, Merit clutched his sword automatically, his protective duty to his Meer encoded in him from years of service. He looked up at the majestic being, the mother of his liege poised like a marble statue on the step, and was swept into a deafening storm. He stood and opened his mouth, but couldn't utter the thousand impossible words that had rushed to his tongue. He was snared and trapped in the emerald swamp of MeerShiva's eyes.

Shiva nodded, cool and polite, as if unaware or unconcerned with the cataclysm ensuing inside him. “MeerHraethe.”

MeerHraethe?

The world threatened to careen into an axis-less spin. A cataract of fluid had burst somewhere deep within, and he gripped the baluster and gasped, a flood of tears engulfing him as though he'd never wept before. Merit looked down. A torrent of blood was streaming over his cheeks.

“
Meerrá!
” The sword dropped from his fingers with a clatter and tumbled down the steps.

MeerShiva had descended unperturbed, and she stopped before him, holding her hand against the crimson flood and watching it cover her fingers. “You've been vagrant.” She uttered the strange term as a cool curiosity. “You haven't known.”

Merit focused on the ivory fingers before his face, now trickling with a deep red. He'd touched those fingers before. He'd been summoned by them.
He had been someone else. It struck him like a blast of sound, assaulting and receding in a cycle of chaos: Rapture. Terror. Power. Desire. A past of a self he'd forgotten.

Merit had been humbly but respectably born, the son of a servant to the House of Ra, who was the son of a servant to the House of Ra—a line of devotion to the Meer receding into the dizziness of history. His childhood had been ordinary, his mother and father and his siblings loving and kind, but not divine. He'd never heard peculiar thoughts not belonging to him, nor spoken idly and found the thing he spoke of resting in his hand. He had never, before today, wept blood. He aged.

But there was his other self, ancient days forgotten wherein he'd lived in a city so distant one had to cross a sea to reach it, in a temple such as this—but was no servant. Long ago, so desperately long ago that it was agony to try to recall, he'd been another. He had been Meer.

Unable to reconcile these two truths, he shook his head at MeerShiva as though she'd made this so. He couldn't be Meer. These pictures and certainties of himself made no sense, but he could no more send them away than believe. What anchored him wasn't the bloody outpouring of his tears, nor his ancient name damningly expressed on the lips of this queen, but the lady herself.
Shiva.
He had touched her. He knew her. He had belonged to her.

He had crossed the ocean, yes. It was a trip of great anticipation and fear. She'd chosen him, divining him from the Meeric flow, to give her his seed. He had no idea what had directed her to him. He'd merely received the summons, and there was no one then who didn't know her name. Hraethe had gone with a terror that was close to frenzy. What could this mighty MeerShiva want with
his
seed? The thought of what he went to do was dizzying.

His chariot brought him through the pass at Munt Zelfaal and into the fantastic bronze and green-glazed gates that admitted the fortunate to
Soth
AhlZel
.
The knowledge that this savage and erotic architecture had come from his intended's head made him tremble. He was driven in and presented at the magnificent arch of the great
Ludtaht
Shiva
,
a temple that was like no other.

And Shiva had refused him.

Hraethe had returned as he'd come, confounded, spending the entire journey over mountain road, desert, river and sea in a state of pained bewilderment. Had she somehow seen him from a window in the temple before he arrived and found him lacking? He himself had seen nothing of her. He'd waited at the arch on the shoulders of his servants, not permitted to enter another Meer's house without leave. Hours had passed. The autumn sun had fallen beneath the mountain, and he'd waited in the wavering blue-black. She'd sent her answer out at last in the dead of night without receiving him at all.

A year passed, and he was once again summoned, and Hraethe went, again driven by anxious frenzy. He conjured endless garments in which to make his presentation, dipped his yellow hair in oil of silver and had it twisted down the back of his ruby-encrusted vest like a heavy funnel cloud dipping to the ground. She had called him twice; he could not fail.

Again he waited for her word outside the arch while the curious upper castes gathered less than subtly outside the courtyard to see what their Meer would do. This time there was no long silence from within. A servant came from the temple, almost stumbling over himself in his haste, and brought a piece of gold parchment to MeerHraethe. One word was scrawled in a furious hand in red ink, or perhaps blood:
Never!

Hraethe didn't understand. Why would she command him to come and then refuse him with such vehemence? He began to suspect some templar connivance, a plot to taint him in MeerShiva's eyes that was costing him these refusals.

He wandered his own temple with wariness on his return, probing the thoughts of all who surrounded him. Finding nothing, he dismissed them anyway and appointed strangers with no connection to the temple to their posts.

Another year passed, and Hraethe once again received a summons. He brought it before a divining fire and held it in trance, trying to ferret out the deception. The words were Shiva's. He stormed through
Ludtaht
Hraethe
in a rage, destroying things he'd spent years in making, raving aloud in a mad spray of denial that he would not go. But they were MeerShiva's words, and he couldn't repudiate them. Inevitably, he went.

This time, he stood scowling on the deck as his ship made the crossing and gave no thought to his presentation, only watching the waves. He was tiring of this game and resented being at this mysterious Meer's bidding. Who was she, anyway, to command such unquestioned obedience? She was old, he knew, and probably desperately insane. Her time was over. Surely even the Meer couldn't live forever? It was merely her decrepit age that inspired such awe, when it probably meant feebleness, in all truth. He was youthful still, and had yet to demonstrate his power. How did she know he wasn't a greater Meer than she?

He made no attempt to impress her this time or show her favor in his dress. He arrived in a plain black kaftan, without jewels, without metal, his hair tied behind his head unadorned. Only his face was embellished in any way, unconsciously reflecting his antipathy with a darkened hue to his lips and a rim of angry black around his eyes that boded warning.

He dismissed the upright litter offered by his servants as he stepped from his chariot. If this arrogant woman meant to make them stand here once more like fools, she could go without ceremony in the doing of it. He waited with arms folded, all fear of her gone, and only irritation at the mad queen in its place. He would give her an hour, no more.

At the end of the fruitless hour, Hraethe turned to descend the steps, satisfied that this pompous MeerShiva was nothing but stories. This was the last time he would jump at her orders.

A tap on his shoulder gave him pause, and he turned to see a girl-child above him on the steps. She bowed before him, trembling, a white diaphanous gown her only covering and her feet bare. It seemed she was a waiting-slave, direct from her mistress's attentions. Hraethe paused, one eyebrow lifted at her in question.

“
Vetmaaimeerhraethe
,” she quavered. “The MeerShiva summons you.”

The
MeerShiva. What egotism. Hraethe considered refusing. Let her have a taste of it. But this child would likely bear the brunt of her mistress's fury, and he didn't care to be responsible for that. He gave her a curt nod and followed her into the House, his own servants waiting on the steps as was demanded of Meer to Meer.

The child led him through a dark maze of passageways. All candles had been extinguished, and there were no windows in the places she led him. More games. Hraethe felt his mouth curling into a snarl. The waiting-slave stopped, bowed once more before an indeterminate arch and left him.

So “the” MeerShiva was here, in this cold, unlit room. He nearly laughed at her histrionics.

“Come.”

Despite himself, the voice from within made Hraethe's blood run cold.

He stepped into the darkness and paused a moment to let his eyes adjust. The shape of a woman rose before him, and Hraethe felt himself quicken at the bare suggestion of her beauty the gloom allowed. She stood motionless and tall, her eyes bright green darts in the darkness. They narrowed on him. She lifted her chin, exquisitely chiseled from the dark, and bent to the hem of her dress, which appeared to be white and covered with tiny pearls. As she straightened, she drew up the many layers of the skirt and held it above her waist, exposing the dusk of her genitals.

Hraethe laughed involuntarily and immediately regretted it. A palpable rage flowed toward him. He tried to ignore it. “Like this?” he asked, disbelieving.

“You are not here to play at domestic bliss.” The snarled words made her sound like a dangerous great cat. “Give me what you came for, or get out.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Do not try my patience.” Her voice was a low warning.

Hraethe was dumbfounded. “
Your
patience?” He closed his mouth, speechless with ire, and tore open his kaftan to release his undeniable erection. “I'll give you what you ask for,” he promised, and gripping her by the strong rope of enmeshed hair behind her head, he thrust his livid cock toward the part in her thighs. He drove himself up and into her, intentionally harsh, and was startled to meet a ridge of resistance. It couldn't have been what it seemed to be.

He had no time to dwell on this, for it was as though his skin was covered in an intoxicant that seeped in past the delicate membrane and went straight to the core. He groaned in reluctant pleasure and moved in a series of sudden thrusts. With each rough movement he repeated the irrepressible sound, lost for a moment in the bliss of this unprecedented sensation.

Hraethe had closed his eyes against her, and he opened them at the curious impression of something wet flowing over him. A copious amount of blood was baptizing Shiva's thighs. He had, after all, deflowered her, and this was the Meeric result. It was impossible. Her reign went back before recorded time. She'd lived centuries, perhaps millennia. He couldn't have been the first man to penetrate her.

He stared at her, astonished, pulling away, but Shiva, her eyes dark, closed her thighs and held him tight. She would have what Hraethe had come to give her. Her face, except for the ferocious eyes, was expressionless, no sign betraying that she felt him at all. Infuriated by her coldness, he resumed his motion.

Her face dared him to elicit a response from her, and he threw his whole body into the act, becoming once more distractedly intoxicated. He'd known many women through his privilege—though it was proscribed by Meeric law, his templars had looked the other way—but never another of his kind. And this—this was astounding. Shiva's eyes derided him as though she were not even present in the act, standing motionless with the skirt held in each hand while he rocked and groaned and thrust, her mouth curiously passive.

He lunged into a convulsive climax, ejaculating with another startled explosion of sound. He could feel his semen shooting against her, perhaps at her doing propelled with a violent intensity. She gave no sign of acknowledgment. Her body hadn't moved at all during this dubious copulation except the brief contraction to prevent his escape.

Hraethe, appalled, pulled out at last and staggered back, letting go of the rope of hair. She had his seed now. She'd taken what she wanted. Despite the apparent contradiction, he felt almost as though he'd been assaulted.

Shiva was regarding him as before, the dress still held high. His gaze fell once more to the red strokes that covered her legs, and he felt a twinge of dismay.

“Have you never—?” He faltered.

Shiva breathed in as though she hadn't since he'd entered her, her lip curled with disdain. “Why should I?”

She was impossible, a statue of ice. He straightened his clothes and turned to leave her. She wouldn't want him to linger, and he had no desire to.

As he stepped into the dimness of the corridor, he heard a slight murmur behind him. She had spoken, so low that he couldn't hear. He paused, and the word came again: “Stay.”

Hraethe looked back into the room, disbelieving. MeerShiva still stood motionless, a statue he'd fucked. Surely she didn't expect him to service her in the same fashion twice. Even if it weren't preposterous, there was no need. She was Meer. If she wished to conceive, she had already done so.

Hraethe frowned. “What did you say?” His mind had to be playing tricks on him.

Shiva breathed sharply, the moon-like curves of her breasts rising above the bodice of the dress. He'd been deceived by her bewitchment of indifference. Her hands were whiter than the gown where they still held it, containing the tremendous restraint of her response in their single gesture. She
had
been affected. Perhaps he'd even hurt her in his spite. She wouldn't say again what he was certain now he'd heard.

Hraethe took a tentative step toward her, and saw her truly for the first time. She was breathtaking, a series of elucidative lines that couldn't have been rendered by even the greatest of sculptors. The idea that he might have caused her pain destroyed him, and he dared to approach her and touch her tight-fisted hands. She made no move to stop him, allowing him to pry the iron fingers from the gown. The ivory fabric tumbled over the bloodstained limbs, and Hraethe, the curled fingers held in his hands, lowered his head to the slopes of her breasts and kissed the breach between them.