“MeerHraethe,” said Shiva once more, his blood falling unheeded through her fingers. It was the same she’d said from beneath her veil at the entrance of the temple with Ra the night before. He’d heard “Merit”, a name so like his other that it had seemed only an insignificant difference of inflection. “You must sit down.” She took Merit by the arm, her touch sending an electric jolt through him, and led him through the temple to the dark Sapphire Room the staff had prepared for her, which she hadn’t used. He couldn’t speak, could only follow her and weep this cataract of blood.
She directed him to the bed, its velvet cover, as everything in this room, the shade of the room’s namesake. Merit sat and gazed up at her. She’d brought his sword, and she laid it beside him on the bed, but it was meaningless to him.
Shiva observed him, hands and robe now stained with his tears. “This is dangerous—to remember a life with such suddenness when one has been vagrant. You must stop the weeping, or you will be ill.”
He could no more stop the flow of unearthed Meersblood than take back the long-ago day he’d spent in thrall to her.
“You returned to a common family.” She was attempting to piece together his details, attempting to distract him. “There was no blood in your line?”
“Blood?” His mouth trickled with it as it opened.
“Our blood. The same that you are now pouring onto the ground.”
He felt the current of it, pulled into him from somewhere and leaving him rapidly. It was a peculiar sensation of loss, as though the edges of his soul unraveled and dripped with the tears into the space outside himself. But how could he lose what he hadn’t known was part of him?
Shiva was studying him as though he were an interesting stranger. She’d perfected her avatar of ice.
“Do you expect it all to drain from you?” She rubbed her thumb and fingers together, slick with his blood. “That will not make you common again. It will kill you. An act of suicide.”
“I have done that before,” he mused, recalling that he had. He remembered now the time after. He’d fallen on the post of something, impaling him swiftly before he’d even been crushed and rent against the stone. And then he’d lain there, surrounded by the smell of his dead. Neither the fall nor the spearing had killed him. Death hadn’t come until outsiders had set the city itself on fire to eradicate the poison that had infected its citizens.
The blood was slowing, and he staggered to rise, but Shiva caught him and propelled him back onto the bed.
“You must replenish yourself.” She sighed as he looked at her without understanding. “Ai. You are still so new.”
He didn’t feel new. He felt old, destroyed. He had the body of a fifty-five-year-old ordinary man, and a host of aches from his years of bearing the weight of his Meer.
“You must sleep,” Shiva clarified, speaking slowly, as though to a child. Her eyes penetrated him.
He realized too late she was bending his will to hers, and his body was drifting into a deep state of relaxation. Merit slipped down to the pillows, and Shiva, satisfied, turned to go. He wanted to punish her for what she’d done, yet he was once more helplessly intoxicated by her. If she left, and he slept, what reality might he wake to? He might lose again the memory of their tryst, and though it was an unbearable sword in his side, he wanted it now that he’d found it.
He tried to open his mouth, to speak, to stop her. He managed one bare word: “Stay.” Shiva’s back stiffened in the corridor as she halted, and Merit succumbed to the irresistible pull of sleep.
“Stay,” he’d said. She couldn’t deny his request. He was Meer, after all, and he had spoken.
Shiva sat on the bed beside him and watched the rise and fall of his chest beneath garments heavy with red, noting the signs of age: his hair was silver instead of bronze, and his face was lined. Having hidden himself so completely in the vagrancy of this changeling incarnation, he’d believed he was ordinary, and had appropriately deteriorated.
She brushed her fingers through the hair at his forehead, resisting the memories the touch evoked, though the sound of her own pleasure echoed through the halls of Ludtaht Shiva in her head. As then, he was a danger to her.
Shiva leaned over him and slipped her hand behind his head, her mouth against his ear. “Young god.” He stirred, half waking from the hypnotic sleep, and blinked up at her. “Drink from me,” she whispered. His lips parted obediently, and she offered her mouth to his. He made soft moans against her, closer to sorrow than pleasure. Closing her eyes tightly against desire, she let her tongue slide over his, then bit down until she’d pierced them both. A sharp cry of surprise escaped him as her blood flowed into his mouth and mingled with his own, but as he swallowed, the sound was swiftly truncated.
She withdrew, and placed a kiss on his forehead, and his puzzled eyes fluttered closed.
Blood rolled down Pearl’s cheeks in a steady stream as his hand looped and scrolled over his parchment in the dark billowing strokes of the ruins of Soth Szofl. He hadn’t known why he’d sketched the ruins for Merit the first time. The images had come to him when he’d meditated on what to draw to make Merit forget him. He’d created one drawing for Merit and another for Ahr, not wanting them to trouble over his departure when he went in search of the captive Meerchild who’d contacted him—a child that turned out to be nothing more than a cruel trick designed by the Meerhunter, Pike, to lure him away.
Remember Pearl, he’d inscribed Merit’s drawing, as you remember this—knowing the words would erase him from Merit’s conscious mind, though he hadn’t known precisely what those words had meant when he’d put them on the paper.
As he drew Soth Szofl again, the memories Merit had hidden inside himself came pouring through the Meeric flow. Merit had been the golden-haired Meer whom Pearl had seen in his visions, but Pearl hadn’t recognized him.
Pearl was weeping now for a multitude of reasons—because he missed Merit and Ahr; because he’d been a fool to leave them; because Ahr was gone; because Merit’s heart had broken so many times, not least before he’d taken his own life as MeerHraethe; because he couldn’t help it when the visions took hold of him so strongly; and because Pearl knew now that he had to be mad.
It wasn’t that anything he saw was untrue, but that he now clearly understood what flowed within his veins, what it meant to be Meer. It was a sickness that couldn’t be stopped. It was just as well he was under the hill where he could do no harm. Somehow, he had the worst of all their blood. He could hear and see the darkest places inside them. Nesre had bred him that way, he supposed, training him to look into the darkness of his mirrored glass and see what even the Meer hid from themselves.
He paused in his drawing, realizing he’d spattered it with his tears. The result was shocking, but fitting. He’d drawn MeerHraethe speared on his pike at the base of the temple tower, and Pearl’s own blood seemed to flow from the wound.
Pearl fingered the ribbon that was now part of his wrist, remembering how the blood had curled from it into the warm water as he’d lain in the tub in Szofl, waiting, as MeerHraethe waited in the drawing, for the end to come. Pearl’s confinement under the hill was only just. The Permanence were right to think he was dangerous. Under the hill, he couldn’t speak and destroy an entire population because of a whim in his blood.