CSORWE WOKE, WITH the floating disoriented sense that you got from napping too long in the afternoon. She had been asleep for a long time. She had no idea where she was.
She had the vague sense that she was being carried by a gigantic bird. Something huge and dark which had swooped down and picked her up. That made about as much sense as anything.
It didn’t usually take so long to remember where she was. She might have been hit on the head. It was hard to feel very worried about that when she was held so securely. She had the feeling of travelling by night as a passenger in an open boat: the cold wind nipping at her face, the rest of her wrapped in a warm blanket, the sense of the dark landscape passing away below in a sleepy, distant blur.
Her limbs felt mainly numb, but her cheek was buried in something soft and feathery.
“What time is it?” she murmured, nuzzling against it.
“Late,” said a rather distant voice, after a long pause.
Well then, thought Csorwe. She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
The next time she woke, she was lying on the shore of a still green sea. The beach was coarse white sand, like flakes of salt, and the light was clear but distorted, as if it had filtered down through crystal. She was very cold. The cold had woken her. She felt something brush against her neck, like a loose and prickly scarf. She pulled at it and winced. She didn’t remember growing her hair so long.
Uneasiness crept in with the cold. She was alone. Something bad had happened. The sand shifted under the press of her hand, and she felt the particles of grit under her fingernails, much too real for this to be a hallucination. The last thing she remembered—but no, trying to remember anything came with a soft, fuzzy sense of warning.
“Better for you to remain asleep,” said the same distant voice.
She sat up and looked around. Further down the beach, looking out at the sea, was a small dark figure. The figure was oddly familiar. Something about the slim build, the focused composure, the sense of force controlled by tremendous self-discipline. Something kept her from calling out at once. Not just the fact that this woman was wearing armour in a style Csorwe had never seen before—dark overlapping lamellae with a sheen that looked more like carapace than metal—but something else too, a warning beacon which flickered hot across all the disconnected fragments of her memory.
“Who are you?” said Csorwe, when she realised she had to say something, or the stranger might look out to sea forever.
The woman turned, her armoured feet crunching on the sand, but before Csorwe saw her face, she raised a hand and Csorwe slumped backward, dropping instantly into sleep.
She woke for a third time, hungry and terribly thirsty, seated upright in a hard white chair, in a grand shadowy room whose exact bounds were hard to gauge. The same cold, crystalline light came in through a row of high windows that reminded her of a chapel. It felt desolate, wind-scoured, as though moss ought to have grown between the flagstones—except that there were no flagstones, and whenever she looked at any one surface, her eyes seemed to slide away.
There was a monumental table before her, banded white in the light from the windows and stretching away into the indeterminate darkness beyond. On the table was a goblet of thick clear glass, bulbous and misshapen, as if viewed through flowing water. Beside it was a black stone bowl of what looked like broken eggs, though to judge from the salt-water smell, they were actually shellfish, cracked raw into the bowl.
“It has been many hours,” said the cold voice from before. “You must eat and drink.”
Csorwe’s hunger wasn’t up to the shellfish, but she picked up the goblet, finding it too large and heavy for comfort, and sipped. It was brine, bitter and sharp.
“I can’t,” she said, spitting it back into the goblet.
The dark figure swam into view and stood over the table, some distance from Csorwe. “I am bound to keep you from harm,” it said. “But your dignity is of no concern. Drink or I will find other methods.”
“It’s seawater,” said Csorwe, her dry lips stinging from the salt.
The stranger passed her hand across the goblet, palm up, and tipped a meagre handful of salt flakes onto the table. “Drink.”
Csorwe sipped from the goblet and found it more or less fresh, though now the temperature of blood. She was too thirsty to object. She drank, and found that however much she drank, there was enough in the glass to quench her thirst.
“You must eat, also,” said the stranger. The light did not fall on her face.
Csorwe looked down at the bowl of raw mussels. Now she had drunk, she felt the gnawing of a long-term hunger. She had certainly eaten worse, but there was no cutlery.
“What do you want me to do, sip it?” she muttered. She scooped up a handful of shellfish and slapped them into her mouth before they could escape between her fingers. They were cold and powerfully salty, like drinking directly from a rock pool, but they weren’t too bad as long as you didn’t dwell on the texture.
The stranger waited, silently. Her expression was not visible, but it was clear there was nothing to talk about until Csorwe had finished the bowl. There were some strands of green and brown seaweed mixed in, which made for a difference in chewiness if not in taste.
“These are from outside,” said Csorwe. She had the sense that it hadn’t been so long since the beach. “You pick them just for me?”
“Return to sleep,” said the stranger. She raised her hand into the sunbeam, and dropped Csorwe back into sleep with the attitude of one heaving a corpse into a river.
The next time, Csorwe was ready. As soon as she was awake, she kicked the chair back and rose to her feet, grabbing the heavy goblet; never a bad idea to have a blunt instrument ready.
“What the fuck is happening?” she said, but the stranger rose with her, and her face came into the light, and it was Shuthmili.
She looked thin and ill in a way that made Csorwe think hopelessly of blankets and soup. There were dark shadows under her dark eyes, new lines of age and tiredness. These would have worried her in themselves, but the expression was worse: wearily bland, bleak, corpselike. Even in the worst times, she had never looked like this, never looked at Csorwe with such a complete lack of interest or tenderness.
“Shuthmili?” she said.
“No,” said the stranger. “No longer.”
It was like a dream, seeing the face of someone you loved and knowing it to be a mask—but Csorwe looked down at her hand, her own familiar tendons and knuckles, resting on the table beside the bowl of glutinous yellow shellfish, and knew this was no dream.
Her memory cleared, as though she had been looking without knowing it through smeared glass. She knew who she was. She remembered the House of Silence, and Sethennai, and Tal, and the temple in the deepwood. She remembered the Mantle, the powerless terror, the obliterating darkness. Forgive me, but I will never leave you.
“Where is she?” said Csorwe. Cold terror pierced through her confusion like a needle going in.
“Gone,” said the stranger. She sounded almost exactly like Shuthmili—like Shuthmili when Csorwe had first met her and mistaken her reserve for haughtiness.
“What happened?” said Csorwe. The stranger moved to put her back to sleep, but Csorwe had already lunged forward to grab her arm. “No! Tell me what happened!” The plates of her armour weren’t metal or leather but part of her body—something like horn or bone, rough and warm to the touch.
The stranger made a disgusted noise and twitched Csorwe instantly into unconsciousness.
Csorwe came awake feebly, with a pounding headache and a thick, stupid feeling. She realised distantly that she was severely dehydrated.
“What happened?” she said again. “Let me go! What happened to Shuthmili?”
“I have no obligation to keep you in comfort,” said the stranger, who was sitting on the edge of the table. To Csorwe’s distaste, she was holding a bowl of seaweed in one hand and the goblet in the other. “Compliance is rewarded.”
Csorwe was too thirsty to tell her to fuck off, as this clearly merited. She drank from the goblet held to her lips, lukewarm water slopping down her chin, and she ate bundles of seaweed from the stranger’s clawed fingertips.
“I complied,” she said, when the stranger stepped back. “What happened? Who are you, if you’re not her?”
She didn’t want the stranger to answer. Every word made it clearer that it had really happened, that Shuthmili was really gone.
The stranger shrugged. Her face didn’t change—Shuthmili’s eyes were dead behind lowered lashes—but there was a visible impatience in her posture. “I am Zinandour. It is by my grace that you live, and the next time you touch me, I will put out your eyes. I must go away for a time. Chambers are prepared for you. You will feed yourself. You will not leave those chambers. You will not harm yourself.”
“Sure,” said Csorwe, privately deciding that she would throw herself out of the first window she saw.
“Do not lie to me,” said Zinandour. She pressed the tip of one claw under Csorwe’s chin and looked into her face.
“Don’t touch me,” Csorwe snarled, jerking her head back. The look of routine displeasure was very like Shuthmili’s expression when confronting a poorly indexed reference work, and she couldn’t bear it.
Zinandour clicked her tongue and then frowned, as if it hadn’t come naturally to her. “It was sentiment to spare you,” she said. “If you attempt to escape or to harm yourself—”
“What?” said Csorwe. “What can you possibly do to me?”
The goddess hissed, reaching for her throat again, and Csorwe sprang out of the chair. Or rather, she tried to spring, but weeks of Zinandour’s ministrations had left her with the muscle tone of boiled carrots, and she tripped to one side, scraping her calf against the leg of the bony chair with a stinging pain.
“Fuck off,” said Csorwe. She was aware that she’d become pathetic, but at this point she was out of other options.
“Stand,” said Zinandour, looming over her.
Csorwe struggled to her feet, light-headed, but before she could get her balance again, Zinandour had pinned her to the wall, one hand holding her shoulder, one barbed forearm pressed loosely across her throat.
“Wiser not to contemplate what I can possibly do to you,” said Zinandour.
“Wow,” said Csorwe, the words burbling out of their own sweet accord, with no regard for the thorns of chitin poised close to her jugular. “I hate contemplating, you’d better tell me.”
Zinandour made a sound of profound disgust and dropped her. Csorwe sat down heavily and stayed there, a dull blush crawling up her cheeks. She’d forgotten for a second where she was and what had happened. It was a miserable insult that it was possible to forget. It was extremely unfair that Zinandour had never looked more like Shuthmili than when she’d had Csorwe pushed up against a hard surface. It was a whole new territory of bleakness and guilt that she was going to have to trudge across.
“Coming on a bit strong,” she muttered eventually.
Zinandour was swishing around somewhere in the middle distance. “Silence,” she said. “Fifteen years was superfluous for me to learn of your relations with the vessel. I have no desire to—”
“Fifteen years?” said Csorwe, startled out of misery. Zinandour started saying something, but Csorwe could not let this go. Certain things clicked into place, such as why Shuthmili looked so very tired. “Fifteen years?”
“As I said,” said Zinandour, returning to look down at her. “I am leaving. You will—”
“I won’t do shit,” said Csorwe. “You want me to behave, I want information.”
“No,” said Zinandour. “It is tedious, and I have other tasks to accomplish.”
“Yeah, I bet, and one of them’s going to be fishing my mangled corpse out of the sea unless you tell me what the hell is going on.”
Zinandour sat down at the table, weariness creeping across her features like a drift of cobweb. “Even the threat of self-annihilation loses its potency,” she said, propping her cheek on her gauntleted hand.
“I’m working with what I’ve got. If you give me a sword, I can do other threats.”
Zinandour rubbed her forehead between her eyes and exhaled; the gesture was so mortally familiar that Csorwe almost wanted to apologise. “Very well,” she said. “Obey my edicts when I am gone, and when I return, I will tell you the truth.”
The earthly mansion of Zinandour, the Flame That Devours, hung suspended in the Maze like a jewel in the throat of a giant, high above the sea below. It was called the Pearl of Oblivion, and there was no way out.
The walls of Csorwe’s chambers were curved, made of some hard, smooth pearl-stuff. The windows on one side of the bedroom looked out on an unpeopled and alien palace, all apparently wrought from the same shell-like matter, whose keeps and towers and domes all had a soft organic curvature, like wax or petals. Every time she looked out at it, her brain threw up some other idiot comparison, such as meringue. On the other side of the bedroom was a balcony which looked out over the ocean, a deep and uncanny green, so still and so clear that Csorwe could have seen a long way down into it if there had been anything to see.
Her quarters had a bathroom, an apparently well-stocked pantry, a rudimentary kitchen, and nothing resembling a door. She couldn’t remember quite how Zinandour had brought her in here; she seemed to remember that the goddess had drawn aside the wall like a curtain and pushed her inside. There was of course the balcony. She wondered if Zinandour had left it there on purpose.
A shifting light reflected up from the waters below and glowed through the shell stuff from within. The next-door bath was a cup of shell grown up from the floor, and so was the bed, except that it had been filled to the brim with soft pelts. The rest of the furnishings suggested that Zinandour’s idea of mortal tastes had been shaped by a very singular source. The bedroom was lined almost wall to wall with books. There were three different jars of pickled vegetables on the desk, and a tin of watercolour paints, and the wardrobe contained a wide selection of drifty robes, half of them embroidered with pearls. Csorwe’s heart ached.
The labels on the pickle jars were faded and peeling. Everything else was washed out and battered as if it had been recovered from a shipwreck.
While Zinandour was gone, Csorwe returned to her old training regimen gradually, with the suspicion that she’d been absent from her body for a long time and that she’d better treat it gently.
She’d always been good at dealing with boredom. She could thank the House of Silence for that much. She could operate pretty much all day not thinking about anything. Not thinking, for instance, about how goddamn unfair it was, about how little time they’d really had, about her creeping doubt that there was really any point in doing anything now.
One evening as she was about to go to bed, something plummeted from the sky in a steep arc and crashed into the balcony.
At first she took it for a gigantic seabird, which would have been a smarter guess if she’d seen anything flapping about with a six-foot wingspan. It battered against the doors and fell still. The impression of wings subsided, and instead what she clearly saw was Zinandour, curled over on her face in a pool of blue-black feathers.
Csorwe opened the door, and the goddess fell inside. As she struggled to her feet, shadows poured off her like water, and her dark hair fell over her scaled exoskeleton like a veil.
“Csorwe,” she said, reaching vaguely for her as though blind, and stumbled to sit on the edge of the bed.
“What happened?” said Csorwe.
“Always the same question,” said Zinandour. Her voice was strained, which made it curiously softer, weathered to gentleness.
“Are you injured?” said Csorwe. Zinandour’s robe was shredded, and underneath it she was shedding tarry ichor from between the plates of her armour. Could a goddess be injured?
“Belthandros is—so depressingly eager,” said Zinandour, pressing a hand to her rib cage. “To enlist me.”
“You mean—” said Csorwe, hardly knowing how to react to this. “He’s here?”
Zinandour shook her head. “He is uncounted worlds away. I killed a dozen of his Thousand Eyes at the far boundary.”
Csorwe stared at her.
“I told you I would explain,” said Zinandour. She lay back on Csorwe’s bed, heedless of the trails of ichor still trickling from her abdomen, and she explained.
The story was in some ways very complicated and in others very simple. As far as Csorwe was concerned, the significant thing was that Shuthmili had meant at least some of this to happen, somehow, that it had all been part of a plan which had kept her going for more than ten years. And the rest of it was all Belthandros Sethennai.
“You knew him,” said Zinandour.
“Uh,” said Csorwe. “Yes.”
“Then you know his dreadful persistence. I must rest,” said Zinandour. She closed her eyes, and her clawed hands went slack on the wolfskin comforter.
Csorwe realised she was not going to get her bed back any time soon. Well, no matter. She had too much to think about. If Shuthmili had done this on purpose, perhaps there was a loophole. It might be something that could be taken back.
Zinandour fell silent, and after a while, she appeared to fall asleep. Csorwe didn’t know whether she was really unconscious, whether she could sleep, but she wasn’t going to interfere. Instead she went to the wardrobe to find something warm, so she could go out on the balcony.
At the back of the wardrobe was a single dark and ragged object which looked more battered than the rest. Csorwe shook it out and recognised it, almost beyond belief, as her own old leather coat, the same one she had owned since she was a teenager. It had been patched and mended, let out and taken in, and the mark of the Grey Hook tailor stamped inside the collar was now as unrecognisable as the pattern on the lining. There was no other coat like it. It was unmistakably the same.
She pulled on the coat over the loose nightshirt she was wearing and stretched her shoulders. It still fit. She almost relaxed into it, before feeling something in one of the inner pockets. There was a crumpled piece of paper shoved inside it. She unfolded it and saw a familiar scrawl:
Darling girl,
Don’t hate me for this
There was nothing else written there. She stood for a long time, looking down at Shuthmili’s handwriting.
“Wish I could,” she muttered.
The next morning Csorwe found a new door leading out of her quarters, and took this for permission to explore.
Most of Zinandour’s palace was empty, but before long she found a row of storerooms, filled with heaps of shipwreck goods. Mostly junk, but among the broken timbers and rotten barrels, Csorwe found cases of lost apricot wine from the orchards of Qarsazh, a Gate-compass which still worked despite its cracked and misted face, and a box of loose assorted teeth. When she found a way outside, she discovered a series of walled and terraced gardens. She recognised at least some of the plants, and the promise of fresh food occupied her for long hours, picking fruit and wondering whether she might find a trowel in one of the storerooms.
When she caught herself having hopes such as these, she felt like the world’s greatest traitor. Surely after losing what she had lost she shouldn’t be able to think about anything else, she should lie down and refuse to eat and waste away—but then, she could hardly think about the loss directly, either, and she’d never been dramatic like that.
She never saw Zinandour in all this time. This was for the best. Seeing Zinandour vulnerable had not made anything better. Until now she had almost managed not to dwell on the fact that her jailor was not only occupying Shuthmili’s body but had taken it, deliberately, intentionally. A spark of sympathy for the goddess burnt like a drop of acid.
Still: no dark silhouette drifting up a distant walkway, no spectre brooding on the loggia. The goddess was absent, or avoiding her, or the palace was just so vast that they kept missing each other. Csorwe had looked for Zinandour’s living quarters without really admitting to herself that she was looking, and found nothing, until one afternoon the goddess fell from the sky again, with a hiss like a blade in the wind, and landed on the next terrace over.
Csorwe’s reaction startled her, in that she dropped her basket into the rosemary bush, vaulted over the low terrace wall, and sprinted toward the small crater the goddess had made in the onion bed.
Zinandour’s armour was partially retracted, drawn up to expose one bare brown arm and most of a shoulder, which would certainly have made Csorwe’s heart seize even if it hadn’t been splashed red to the elbow with blood. Csorwe picked her up with only a little difficulty, and thanked the Unspoken wildly that she’d coaxed her muscles back into form.
“What,” said Zinandour, “are you doing.”
“You’re hurt,” said Csorwe.
“It is the blood of the foe, you unpitiable wretch. Put me down.”
Reflecting that it was probably a win that Zinandour had not simply dissolved her kneecaps, Csorwe did so. The goddess immediately crumpled to the ground again, puddled in the black rags of her cloak. She tried to close up her armour again. There was a soft rattling, like a pinwheel in the breeze, but her arm remained bare and bloody. A bitten-off snarl of frustration escaped between her teeth.
“Sure you’re not hurt?” said Csorwe.
“Not in any way you can fix,” said Zinandour, wrestling her bare hand with her gauntleted one, making an awful smearing of blood. The pungent smell of crushed onion leaves wafted around her, not something Csorwe had ever expected to associate with a malfunctioning divinity. “A failure of—ugh!—conjunction. Will you remember me? Easier to forget a leech, you sawtoothed little parasite—”
She went on like this for some time, thrashing around among the broken stems, and Csorwe stood there, startled to attention by little parasite and the first spark of true hope she had experienced in this lifetime. Hope was like trying to keep a hot coal alive between her palms. Not to put too fine a point on it, it hurt like fuck, but she didn’t want it gone.
At last Zinandour struggled to a sort of half crouch, re-formed her cloak around her, drawing up shadows from the garden as if soaking up water with a sponge, and stumbled toward the nearest wall of the palace. She raised her gauntleted hand with the weary finality of one falling into bed, and a roughly door-shaped opening dilated into the shell stuff. Zinandour stumbled through the door, her cloak floating out behind her, and disappeared down the staircase beyond.
Csorwe followed.
If these were Zinandour’s living quarters, they weren’t what she’d expected. It was a small room with high windows. A tiled pit was sunk into the ground at the centre, filled with fine black dust. Candles burnt in sconces, lending the room a multitude of shadows. Zinandour had fully retracted her exoskeleton and had burrowed to the shoulders into the dust. Her hair spread out in a dark flame behind her. The sight of her naked collarbones did renewed murder to Csorwe’s heart.
Csorwe sat down on the edge of the pit, keeping her eyes firmly on her lap. She had not forgotten the whole pinned-to-the-wall episode. There were clearly parts of her which hadn’t got to grips with the new state of affairs, and looking at Shuthmili’s bare shoulders made her whole brain remember how they had felt in her hands, and other things too, all of which was like pressing on a bruise. All the more so after what Zinandour had said on the terrace. Little parasite. If Shuthmili wasn’t all gone after all—
“Another incursion of Thousand Eyes,” Zinandour said, interrupting this train of thought, thank god. The goddess seemed to have taken in Csorwe’s presence with equanimity. She was scrubbing her nails in the dust to get rid of the blood. “This time they reached the second boundary. Belthandros is determined, and they are warded against me.”
“If he wants to recruit you, he’s going about it a weird way,” said Csorwe. “Would have thought he’d have other options.”
“Oh, they come bearing gifts and promises,” said Zinandour. “Belthandros seeks his offspring, and it seems the Thousand Eyes do not live up to their name. He needs my help.”
“His offspring?” said Csorwe. Now, there was an idea that was hard to reconcile. Zinandour leant back to rinse her hair in the dust, and Csorwe was so arrested by the idea of Belthandros’ offspring that she could almost avoid noticing the shallow curve of hip this brought closer to the surface of the dust-bath.
“Yes,” said Zinandour. “Either that, or he believes I am concealing the child here. In any case, the implicit choice is fealty or death. What he cannot assimilate he destroys. There is no margin of safety, though I had hoped for more time than this. When the time comes that they reach the third bound, we must leave this place.” She sank lower in the dust, as if the idea wearied her, and her waxen face twisted briefly in what was unmistakably frustration with herself. Not an especially divine expression, but one which her features were used to. Shuthmili had never liked to make a mistake.
“Can I help?” said Csorwe.
“Help?”
“Let me fight. Maybe we can keep them off for a bit.”
“You are a mortal swordswoman. Do you truly believe you can fight alongside a divinity?” said Zinandour. She didn’t sound scornful, but Csorwe suspected she was being humoured.
“I’m not bad for a mortal,” said Csorwe. “Didn’t the vessel ever reflect on that? Would have thought she’d give me some credit.”
Zinandour appeared to search her memory, and a curious avarice flickered on her face in the candlelight: unmistakably Shuthmili’s expression on learning of a new type of cake.
“No,” said Zinandour. “You are not to be harmed.”
“If you won’t let me fight, let me be useful,” said Csorwe. “Come to dinner with me. I know you need to eat.” She had witnessed the goddess gnawing through a packet of ship biscuit as though it was a hated chore.
“The weakness of the vessel is not your concern,” said Zinandour. “But very well. If it will quiet you.”
Csorwe gathered what she needed from the gardens and around the palace storerooms. She still yearned for eggs and cheese and butter, and a proper oven to make bread, but there was plenty you could do with just a fire and a mysterious bottle of Salqanyese seed oil. She bound potato dumplings with flour and fried them into chewy little clouds. She didn’t recognise most of the herbs in the garden, but she had tested them by trial and error in the mortar, and now had a pleasantly sharp green sauce to accompany the dumplings.
She set the table in her room, and began to wait. Quite soon she found that she couldn’t bear to sit and wait, or stand and wait, or read a book and wait; her usual reserve of calm had run dry. She had to go and stand on the balcony with her back to the door to still the jitters that simmered in every nerve.
When Zinandour actually turned up, Csorwe managed to tell herself that she had known this would happen and hadn’t been worried about it, and that there was absolutely nothing strange or upsetting about spending all day cooking an elaborate meal for Shuthmili’s animated corpse. As she served up dinner, the dishes did not at all tremble in her hands.
Zinandour sat very upright, unspeaking, and held her cutlery like surgical instruments.
“Eat,” said Csorwe. “It’s better than biscuits.” She poured a glass of wine for herself and one for Zinandour, interested to see the effect of alcohol on a divinity.
“What is the purpose of this charade?” said Zinandour. She picked up a single, unseasoned dumpling and regarded it with great weariness.
“You don’t like food?” said Csorwe.
“The demands of the flesh are dismal and unending,” said Zinandour. “The Lady of the Thousand Eyes finds something entertaining about aping mortal fashions. I do not.”
“Shuthmili liked this,” said Csorwe, and felt at once like a sulky child.
“I do not recall Shuthmili liking anything very much,” said Zinandour.
“Why did you bother to be alive, then?” said Csorwe, with a flash of anger that startled her. “Why did you have to—if you didn’t want to—couldn’t you have left her alone?”
“It was the only way out,” she said. “For both of us. I assure you. I did not want to go insane. I bore four millennia of imprisonment, I could not bear another, and Shuthmili—”
“What?” said Csorwe.
“She wanted to save you very badly.”
Csorwe had not thought her soul could put forth any more hateful emotions at this whole scenario, and yet there it was, a deep and miserable flush of shame.
She stalked back to the kitchen, ostensibly to fetch a jug of water, in fact to calm down. This had been the worst plan of all time. As though she was so special and so desperate that she could call Shuthmili back from wherever she was gone. Now she’d have to finish this parody of a dinner while looking at Shuthmili’s face and then go to bed with no plan at all.
Don’t hate me for this. She couldn’t even be annoyed with her for it. How could she blame Shuthmili for doing anything when the idea of getting through the day without some scheme was unbearable?
She returned to the table to find that Zinandour had almost finished her plate.
At the sight of this chitinous undead monster sitting at the dining table and meekly sipping a spoonful of broth, Csorwe’s anger slipped away, replaced with a bubble of weird, hopeless laughter, that got stuck in her throat and refused to escape. “Pleasant in its way,” said Zinandour.
Csorwe hadn’t realised until this point that Zinandour was trying very hard with her even though it did not come naturally. Now she really started laughing, great miserable sobs of laughter that doubled her up, so that she had to lean on the back of her chair, water spilling from the jug she was holding.
The goddess did not hiss at this. She simply said, quite mildly, “I do not understand. This was your plan? To feed me and talk to me?” Csorwe nodded, still choking, and then Zinandour too started to laugh.
The laugh was a hoarse rattle, completely at odds with her lovely face, completely unlike Shuthmili’s laugh as Csorwe remembered it. She sounded as though she was choking to death in a bed of dry reeds.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Csorwe. My—” She paused, blinked, frowned hard, her claws scraping pale traces in the tabletop. “So valiant and so futile. This would never have worked.”
“No!” said Csorwe, her heart pounding against her ribs. She felt as if her chest was no more substantial than a paper bag. “Please, it did work! Come back—bring her back!”
Zinandour dug her claws deeper into the surface of the table. “I thought you meant to poison me.” Now she hissed, a cry of pain that boiled off like water on a hot stove, and Csorwe was torn between running to comfort her and running for the door.
“No, I—” she said. “With Belthandros—he was still himself, right? There was a fragment of Iriskavaal in him, but they kind of merged. I thought … with you and Shuthmili, maybe it could happen like that again.”
“You cannot imagine how it hurts,” said the goddess. “To find your infantile schemes so—to sit and eat with you as if—”
“I didn’t know,” said Csorwe.
“I should eat you alive. This place is not for mortal habitation—your presence is a defilement—” said the goddess, doubled over in her chair, her face buried in her hands. “I should flay you. I should dissolve you. Why won’t you be quiet?”
“I’m sorry,” said Csorwe, although Zinandour no longer seemed to be talking to her. At last she looked up at Csorwe through her claws, eyes wide with alien pain.
“The flesh is an unbearable burden,” she said. “All I wanted was to be free, but this is an imprisonment worse than the void.” She drew her claws thoughtlessly down her own cheek, leaving a trail of four thin cuts, weeping ichor.
“Stop that,” said Csorwe, and grabbed her arm. Zinandour blinked in what could have been fury or spasm, rose up from her chair and kissed Csorwe hard on the mouth.
Csorwe recoiled from pure shock—it had been a bruising thing, all teeth—and the goddess stood staring at her with bleak horror.
“Vile,” said Zinandour. She opened a new door in the nearest wall, and left. This time it closed sharply after her.
Csorwe stood there for some time, hand pressed lightly to her mouth, gazing unfocused at the empty patch of wall where the door had been.
Then, because practicalities outlive all else, she cleared the table and washed the dishes, and tried not to think too hard about the feeling or implications of being kissed. Salt, burnt and bitter like an olive with a stone in it. And yet if Shuthmili was still there, even just a trace, still fighting for control, there was no end to the bitterness she could swallow.